Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  Yes, it is these pockmarked, white polo–shirted young people who now laconically thread, without any particular plan or focus, their faces entirely relaxed and unconcerned, each holding what appears to be a tiny, Mousical-sized mike, through the vast valley beyond the giant tree that is blocking our view of the Julie Andrews stage.

  Yea, they are picking their way only through the close-to-the-stage families—! The organized ones, camped splendidly out in their matching beach chairs, with their coordinated visors, tennies, and water bottles—

  As if to say, “Ooh, look at US! We arrived at the Target Children’s stage at dawn! We breakfasted on power bars, then all together, in perfect tandem, legs pumping in unison, we had a family run!”

  How helpless I am, in the wide sea of this world, to help my family, my tiny, bobbing lifeboat of a family!

  “Hannah,” I hiss. “Put your hand down.”

  She ignores me. The hand goes higher, held aloft in the purity of her perfect faith.

  Because, you see, Hannah knows she is…a child. Mary Poppins has asked for questions from…the children. So Hannah is absolutely confident that if she quietly waits her turn, Mary Poppins will soon get to her, because that is the way things worked in Mary Poppins’s perfectly ordered universe.

  “Honey—!” I plead.

  “I want to ASK Mary Poppins,” she says simply, “how do you do your magic?”

  Ai. My own late mother was a woman who would have tucked her daughter under her arm like a football, scissor-kicked over the fence, trampled ten, twenty, fifty families if needed, grabbed the Mousical-sized mike from one of the expressionless Target employees—the Nobodies—and she would have torn an answer from Julie Andrews if it was the last thing she did. Such was the incredible power my mother sucked, at the end of the day, from her one illicit cigarette.

  But, a nonsmoker, I feel helpless, rooted to the ground. There would only be futility, only embarrassment…Which I could well soldier through except that then at the end Hannah would be sitting there, her face frozen in a silent, disbelieving wail.

  “Put your hand down,” I hiss.

  Hannah knits her brow together, sticks her hand higher.

  “No.”

  I read her like I read myself. I know she thinks her mother is getting in the way. Her mother doesn’t believe in Mary Poppins’s magic, very much like how parents were in the movie. Her mother doesn’t understand! Her mother is wrong.

  Because, of course, Mary Poppins has also sung to the bird and looked back at herself in the mirror and then turned to Hannah and given her the special Mary Poppins look that is Hannah’s alone, a look that has nothing to do with her mother or any of these people…

  And I do have to honor at least that idea, I suppose.

  So I whisper to Hannah that another way for her to ask Mary Poppins her question is after the reading, at the official Julie Andrews “signing tent.” To beat the system, we leave the reading right then and there, we leave while the tiny Tic Tac–sized head of Julie Andrews is still talking.

  But I instantly see that there is another five hundred-person throng already waiting in line, snaking out over two city blocks, before the Julie Andrews signing tent… One mother, she and her two daughters in matching Costco sunbrella hats, says the three of them have been waiting in line already for four hours. The security guard dispassionately estimates that Julie Andrews will barely get through signing the first one hundred books, then they will cut the signing off and we will have waited, ninety minutes, for nothing.

  Plus…

  Five-year-olds do ask for many things, in a day. Candy, an ice cream…a thousand dollars’ worth of American Girl dolls, complete with matching outfits and cutlery sets and jewelry.

  (Indeed, after all that American Girl begging, a relative did finally take pity and send us two American Girl dolls. The day they arrived, I read my two daughters the elaborate, several-page-long care instructions, which sadly we could never find again. Swept away by the romance of it, Hannah gave her American Girl what she imagined was the fancy otherworldly name of “Sheisana,” or sometimes “Sheislana.” Which she may have come up with due to her mother’s bad habit of yelling the poop-based Germanic “Sheise!” in traffic. Nor was it a good sign when Sheislana’s historically accurate jacket appeared on the back of a Chuck E. Cheese monkey. But probably the nadir came when The Squid drew an indelible blue Bic pen mustache on the upper lip of Sheislana…the family heirloom we were planning to pawn for her college education. I’m pretty sure there will soon be a new American Girl doll who comes with a tiny scroll containing a moving narrative of her heroic and urgent campaign to escape from the clutches of our family—“Sheislana” starring in Escape from Van Nuys!)

  I tell Hannah, “We will wait, but there is almost no chance we will get to meet…Mary Poppins.”

  “I want to wait, anyway,” Hannah repeats, in the calm knowledge that she is standing with an unmagical idiot.

  And I suppose one must forge forward, I don’t even remember why anymore. That is the metaphor for what mothers do. Although it is HOPELESS, I will wait in line, for ninety minutes of poor-quality time, with my daughter.

  Failure is probable, death certain.

  So at the Barnes & Noble tent, among the Gifted Children’s books and the Learn by Numbers and all the other crap…I purchase the only Julie Andrews book we could find in the clawed-over Target inventory…The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles.

  We take our place behind the Dr. Zhivago–style refugee mob.

  We wait.

  After five minutes, we move two inches forward. We wait again. In another twenty minutes, we may be able to enjoy the shade of a tree.

  Hannah says nothing, her pert nose tilted optimistically ahead, toward Mary Poppins.

  After another two minutes, she fidgets—just a tad.

  I look down at our Whangdoodles book.

  “Hannah, to pass the time, should I read this book…AS Julie Andrews?”

  And it is a testament to her masked—if clearly slowly growing desperation—that Hannah curtly and unhappily nods. She absolutely LOATHES my doing an English accent, which I absolutely LOVE. One of the greatest pleasures of being a parent is having an audience for my English accent while reading Captain Hook’s lines in Peter Pan, which my children screamingly forbid, in the rare instances that they are awake when this moment occurs.

  I open the book and begin, in my bad Julie Andrews accent.

  “‘It was a crisp, sunny October afternoon and Benjamin, Thomas and Melinda Potter were visiting the Bramblewood Zoo…’”

  And it is a testament to Julie Andrews’s power that even though I am bent over my responseless daughter practically whispering and my Julie Andrews imitation is horrible—like secondhand Julie Andrews smoke—I’m actually starting to accumulate other children. They crowd forward in line and gather around us, glazed-eyed, practically shoving at one another. These five-year-olds are wordless and big-eyed, like Children of the Corn. Children of the Julie Andrews Corn.

  And I realize I simply can’t keep this up for ninety minutes.

  Mike, who passes by, carrying Number Two over to the Barney tent, cheerfully tosses out the info that on the other end of the quad, through the trees, you can see two black town cars, and what do you know? A giant stretch limo. With a big TARGET logo on it. Target logo? Target stage? Julie Andrews? Oh yes…

  Mike has a sixth sense for these things, having now toured copiously with Bette Midler. He knows where the divas are kept.

  I murmur to Hannah that we are going to take “the shortcut.” I take her by the arm and drag her out of line. By now she willingly complies. Her small body, in her coordinated blue-and-white pleated faux–Jane Banks outfit, is starting to droop in the sun.

  We settle against the wall that’s about twelve feet from the Target stretch limo, where two security men are waiting, on walkie-talkies.

  “Well!” I exclaim loudly and airily, for their benefit. “Let’s just rest HER
E, honey, and look at our map!” Then I turn to Hannah and whisper, right into her ear, that “Mary Poppins may soon be getting into that car.”

  Yes, we are going to waylay Julie Andrews at her limo!

  After Julie Andrews has appeared before a gladiator-stadium-sized crowd, signed more than a hundred books for over an hour, and now, approaching the final blessed moment of escaping into her air-conditioned limo…

  One more sweaty mother and child will startlingly pop out of the bushes!

  Although…

  Hm…

  While I do not brook anything bad ever being said about Julie Andrews…If truth be told, a Book Festival worker had let slip that, what with five hundred people in line, Julie Andrews had very possibly been feeling…just a little cranky.

  And now I’m thinking, that’s all we need for the end of a magical afternoon—to waylay Mary Poppins at her escape car, causing her to lash out…

  And then bend over double clutching her hamstring, David Hasselhoff–like…

  “Do I barbecue over the weekend? Fuck you! Leave me alone! And for your family, a spoonful of shit!”

  “Hannah,” I say, “there is a good possibility we…won’t get to meet Mary Poppins. Today.”

  Hannah repeats, with slightly less conviction, but still very stubbornly: “I just want to know how she does her magic.”

  I take a deep breath.

  And I tear off the Band-Aid.

  I tell her that Mary Poppins is just a movie. Julie Andrews is just an actress. An actress who may be kind of tired. “You know when I yell ‘Sheise!’ or “Dmitri Sheistakovich!’ in traffic and you say, ‘Mommy, I’m sorry you’re having a bad-traffic day’? It’s like that.”

  At the juxtaposition of Mary Poppins and traffic…Suddenly Hannah’s face changes into an expression that’s less half sickened puppy love and slightly more thoughtful, and knowing.

  Mary Poppins and traffic—Hannah can tell that L.A. traffic may well be the one thing that throws Mary Poppins.

  What a poor mother I am—essentially powerless, negotiating, apologizing, vacillating…

  “And the magic Mary Poppins does isn’t real. They do it…using a movie camera—Hey! Maybe we can have you do her magic on film, with your dad’s video camera!”

  Hannah’s face goes into a subtle “Aha”…

  And to seal the deal I throw in a three-dollar frozen lemonade and a five-dollar chocolate Popsicle.

  She immediately accepts, with surprisingly little fanfair.

  Perfectly content with the sugar. Just a bucketful of sugar.

  And I realize…

  We have to make our own inner Julie Andrews. We have to be our own Julie Andrews. Because there’s simply not enough Julie to go around.

  As we enjoy our treasure trove of frozen sugar, licking delicious ice crystals of lemon off our lips on a hot spring day, I do remember that Hannah later told her school bus story to her little sister, as a tale of grand triumph. In the revisionist history of it, facing the rows of big kids, she was incredibly bold, brave, even cocky!

  I remember that when “Pilly” the pill bug died, Hannah cried for about a minute…and then excitedly set herself to the task of planning Pilly’s funeral. Kids love a pet burial. Complete with the moldy period shoe of an American Girl doll.

  And at home, in our tattered bungalow, we do make a Mary Poppins–like video where, when we play it in reverse, all the toys magically jump into Hannah’s lap.

  The video shows my daughter, in spite of all universal forces to the contrary, irrepressibly hopeful and toothsome and plucky.

  She didn’t see the research. She didn’t peruse the statistics.

  She didn’t get the memo about giving up, as the world is hopeless.

  She still dwells in the neighborhood of Mr. Rogers. She still believes in her dirty pink unicorn, and that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met. Rather than, well, a permanent and eternally unreachable stranger.

  I realize I won’t be able to protect her from all the world’s hurts and disappointments.

  But there is a chance she may survive them, anyway.

  Like her mother before her, she will do what she will, however I try to control her destiny.

  And then Hannah goes into the backyard, in her necklace and in her underpants, covered with mud and marker. In an activity that will definitely not get her into Harvard, she makes herself bracelets out of the golden rings that go around the tops of the Mason jars her father uses for canning tomatoes. And then, grinning like a small demon, she does a wild dance in the garden, her gold bracelets catching fire in the heat of the sun.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to express thanks for the luxurious and prestigious writer’s retreat in which most of this book was written: my brother Eugene’s tiny laundry room. I’d like to thank Eugene’s sticky-fingered, frequently-dropping-in children for their very interesting literary suggestions, and Elizabeth McCloud for her helpful ones.

  Aside from thanking Sloan Harris (ICM) and Kristin Kiser (Crown), who deftly co-merchanted this tome, I believe it is always wise to thank one’s friends in journalism up near the top, where they can be readily seen. Pen-wielders who added particular verve during the writing—and even living out—of this book included Caitlin “Stock Liquidatin’” Flanagan, Paul “The Velvet Hammer” Glickman, Al “Very Dry Martinis” Martinez, Allan “Prince Machiavelli” Mayer, Ben “The Puppetmaster” Schwarz, Tina (stet! stet!) Schwarz, Mindy “Getting onto the Next Page” Steinman, Liza Tucker (who has been bookmarked), fellow Hollywood Boulevard slacker Matt Welch, and motorcycle-booted sisters in time of f&*(&*@#$! Amy Alkon and Emmanuelle Richard. Speaking of f&()@#$@#, those who provided laughs in times of trouble included Leonard Nimoy–angsting Susan Marder and Rich Ruttenberg, the very obscene Neil Gieleghem, the very frank Joe Frank, and KCRW’s own (highly nontoxic) Harry Shearer, Wendy Mogel, and Michael Tolkin.

  Speaking of possible lawsuits, for the record, apologies to any and all L.A. Times editors who have ever edited any Weekend sections involving Matthew McConaughey; Disney Hall does, in fact, offer some reasonably priced tickets; and, while I have not spoken to him recently, I am quite sure Ira Glass is NOT available to fly across the country and give foot baths for one’s private-school silent auction. Too, the older I get, the more I become honestly appreciative of real-life figures who are a ready source of narrative color. These include Clive Barnes, Ruth Seymour, and my father and his wife, Alice, Dumpster divers extraordinaire. Good times, people—when all is said and done, good times!

  And hey, before any of you crazy-ass type A parents go trying to Google “child development guru Baz Ligiero,” know he is an invention, whose marvelous teach-a-five-year-old-square-root technique comes courtesy of CalTech alum Joe Cheng, and his (rights reserved!) “EZ Math.” Shout-out too to 9DD Mark Afifi!

  But these acknowledgments aren’t long enough…let me wax on! (I think there are pages that would just otherwise sit blank here at the end of the book!) Anyway—! In all the marvelous wisdom I’ve accrued by this golden age I call the “back forties,” I’ve come to see the importance—nay, the necessity—of jolly companions. Let me cite them now, so as to secure dinner reservations for the future. On the theatrical journey that was the Mother on Fire solo show, hearty pals included Deb Devine and (f&*(&(*kin!) Jay McAdams of 24th St. Theatre; flamboyantly bicoastal directors Bart DeLorenzo and David Schweizer; Frier McCollister (mixologist); Joe Witt (theatrical scarves); Modern Spirits Vodka (inventors of the wonderfully hallucinatory “Mother on Fire” cocktail); flamin’ Ann Niemack; for theatrical conviviality in the past, Second Stage in New York and Woolly Mammoth in Washington D.C.; personal-crack-dealer-of-last-minute-house-seats-for-my-dad Ken Werther; Tatjana Loh and the Women’s Building (madres inflamar?); and tireless public school mavens in pearls, those I call “the Joans of Pasadena” (Fauvre and Palmer).

  Feel free to get up and make yourself a sandwich, if you need to. In the meantime, I will be person
ally going on to thank the very therapeutic Barbara Ponse, Barbara Campbell (COV), Ronda Berkley and Mel Green for the “stay ’n’ dart,” the No More Mr. Darcy contingent of Scripps College, Julian “Two Hands” Fleischer, Dan Akst for being himself, Marla Benjamin for pot roast and laughs, Donna Dees for her literary haircut, Vicki Wood for trueness in friendship, Cassandra Clark and Sam Dunn just because, Adrienne Sharp—who has the rare distinction of having given me useful tips on both writing AND breast-feeding, and Beverly and Marc Olevin, who, while they have never provided actual breast-feeding help, have supplied so many other kinds. (PS: Rock on, Suzie Kane.)

  And hey—how ’bout a fond shout to friends in public school and Bohemian income Cloggin’ Kiffin Lunsford and Kerry Madden, and to friends in Third World humor and Title One glamour (not to mention carpooling): Moira Quirk and Michael Rayner. I must be pretty tired to require all this help, but I do.

  Just to cover my bases, I always enjoy thanking Henry Alford. And I think it’s never karmically wise not to thank John Rechy.

  I know there may be readers now experiencing a sudden, gnawing anxiety that they won’t be thanked when everyone else on the planet clearly has. Sadly, though, we are winding to our conclusion, citing friends met in the wild and woolly world of the Los Angeles public schools. Adding, to the fire, their own unique styles of Dura-flame Colorlogs have been Steve (“icy beverages”) Barr and David Tokovsky, Jefferson Crain, Candy Fernandez-Ghoneim, Suzanne Blake, and Rebecca Kick-Ass Constantino. Those wishing for a true vision of grace should visit the West Valley Special Education School in Van Nuys, and I always light a loving candle for Saturn Elementary. Honorary Mothers on Fire (we forgive them for being men) include Scott Folsom, Bill Ring, Bob Sipchen, and Hylan “Tee” Hubbard (Mother on Fire of color). Hey, even the folks of greatschools.net turned out less scary than feared: a gracious tip of the hat to Marion Wilde, and to greatschools.net founder Bill Jackson, who gamely agreed (in the moment) to come onstage to help me perform Mother on Fire in San Francisco.