To know enough's enough is enough to know...

I'm getting to the point now where I'm realizing that I don't have an "off" switch, especially when it comes to disgusting humor and practical jokes. My victims have the "off" switch for sure, but I seem to miss the cues sometimes...or most of the time. Even Anna has a stern face reserved just for me. And she's not afraid to use it.

"Mom, why do you let us say 'crap' and 'hell' and 'friggin' and stuff?" Lucian says between bites of cereal, most of which end up in his lap, half-chewed and soggy.

"I don't know, Luca. 'Cause they're fun to say and they're not swears really and you can get them out of your system." Mind you, I barely have three sips of coffee in my body.

This is the precise moment at which Anna, her hair wild from sleep, gives me a steady, cool glare and speaks, slowly, as if she is the final word on the matter.

"I think it's because you don't even know you're saying them," she says. "Dad doesn't let us say crap or the other words. He says they're inappropriate."

That's when I pull the writer card. Otherwise I'd pull the go-f*ck-yourself-you-f*cking prude card.

"Well, Anna, as a writer I need to use all the words in the English language because each word expresses a very important idea." I was proud of my thesis for it being so early in the morning.

"I friggin' hate school," Lucian sighed, brushing the cereal blobs off of his shirt.

Who can argue with that?

Even the supposed grown-ups can only take so much. Yesterday I was eating a little cup of Italian ice watching the Godfather trilogy with the Sisco kid. Of course, what normal human being can resist putting the cup on the flesh of another, especially the stomach or the neck, just for a little laugh and to watch them jump about 50 feet into the air. After about 3 attacks Sisco turned to me, his face flushed and unblinking.

"I'm gonna kick you in the d*ck if you do that again."

"No one's ever said that to me before."

"No one's ever tortured me this much before."

Duly noted. I will refrain and/or wear an athletic cup for the next joke.

The mind is a terrible thing to waste

Lucian has not blinked in 45 minutes. Upon literally jumping out of the shower (in which he whistled, screamed and sprayed nearly all of my shaving cream on the walls) he shook his wet head like a dog and spoke...wildly, of course.

"My mind feels like it's going to blow up!" Shake, shake, jump.
"Um, well, what did you have for dinner?"
"Just pizza." Shake, shiver, shake, dum-dee-dum.
"What did you have to drink with your pizza?"

His eyes lit up like an Iraqi oil well.

"Oooh. I had root beer."
"I thought so." He darted off naked into his room where he then emptied the contents of his dresser, throwing each and every pair of boxers into the air.

Thank you, daddy-o, for giving them root beer. The last time he took them out Lucian came home holding his guts, greener than the Hulk. Guess what. Two cans of Coke. Again, thanks. I want to exact a sweet revenge but I feel like it would be cruel to the children. He doesn't have the patience to deal with the fall out if I did finally decide to give the kids that giant slab of flourless chocolate cake.
At least I have a sense of humor...sort of.

Even Anna was being defiant about the shower, which is alarming because the child gives off a pretty strong scent, even for being nine.

"Anna, if you don't go take a shower now, I swear, I will beat you senseless."

Long, contemplative pause.

"Well, you can beat me, but you still have to pay your taxes."

Thanks for reminding me, babe.

Oop, gotta run, I just heard a chair being dragged across the kitchen floor. Lucian must've spotted the cider donuts on top of the fridge.

Aaaaah yeah

I am done pretending, even for a minute, that human beings aren't total animals. We are driven by instinct and survival, the rest (like writing, music, technology) is just a thin cover that barely conceals our horns and tails. We tried, with various gigantic religious texts and talk about sin and hell and enlightenment, to deny the beast within because it's embarrassing, especially to the intellectual set. But in the end, we are all, in some way, cave men.

Here's how I know.

Last week, I went to a dignified theater because of my dignified appreciation for world music. I wore make-up and heels and sat in a plush velvet seat and tapped my foot and snapped my fingers to the music. But then, about 15 minutes into the show, my intellect crumbled like the Soviet bloc. Why, you ask? What was it that snapped the Yale graduate and compelled her to jump on stage with a bunch of other women and to dance in front of the WHOLE audience, including her son's pediatrician?

Hips, people, hips. And not just any hips but the mad, gyrating, dancing hips of a lean Cuban singer who must have known, very early in life, that it's pointless to fight against the animal, against lust. The back of his blue shirt was dark with sweat and every woman dancing on the stage was watching the slight movement of muscle under the drenched material, as well as the way his pants stretched, ever so slightly, revealing an ass that was as close to perfect as I've ever seen.

So, yeah, you think you're smart, but lust is smarter, I assure you. Even my most professional, intelligent moments, where I am deep in thought and writing/contemplating are easily broken by lust and its design. There is fire everywhere! Look around you!

Not too long ago my "gentleman friend" as my therapist calls him, looked at me through very sleepy eyes and just shook his head, I couldn't tell if it was disbelief or disgust.
"What," I said, defensive, "Do I scare you?"
"No, you don't scare me," he said. "But that look does. That's the look of a wolf right before it sinks its teeth in."

We cannot rationalize it, we cannot give in fully to it, so, we call it love, which it is. And love, contrary to popular belief, is not civil, nor is it patient, nor is it kind. At least not the love of animals. I was watching "Closer" the other day and Jude Law, who plays Dan, an overly intellectual writer is trying to explain that Larry, a brutish doctor, knows nothing about love. "You don't understand the heart," he says to the doctor.
"Have you ever seen a human heart?" Larry roars. "It looks like a human fist wrapped in blood."

There you have it. We're not fooling anyone.

Vignettes of a different sort

Time will, if you are good to it, stand still long enough so that you can take a deep, penetrating look into some of the moments which happen to make up the weird mosaic of your life (of course, in this case I have a sneaking suspicion that my mosaic is comprised mostly of porcelain from broken toilets, but I can't prove that yet).

For instance, at a stop light, while rocking out to "Lady Marmalade" with the kids, I happened to glance in the rear view mirror. Anna was slumped in the backseat reading a battered copy of the New Yorker and Lucian was struggling to remove something from the tips of his fingers.

"Hey, Luca, what's on your hands?"

Dead silence.

"I said, what's on your hands, buddy?" He could hear the threatening venom in my voice; it's not hard to detect even for a grown man.

"Um, plastic grapes."

So that's where he disappeared when Anna and I were mulling over what kind of spinach to buy.

His first shoplifting; display grapes. What do you even say? Of course, I told him it was stealing, but then, how many times have I absent-mindedly started gnawing on a green bean or a REAL grape while in the drone of the grocery store?

Fake grapes. Of course, the next question begs to be asked. What'd Anna think of the New Yorker?

She loves it, by the way, especially the poems and the illustrations for the movie reviews. She is also starting to read the "About Town" section with almost a sense of longing. She did tell her therapist that she was going to get a job in the city and ride her motorcycle to work and get a tattoo that's bigger than mine...

These are odd children, I know it, you don't have to tell me twice. Or once even. One likes to eat frozen brussel sprouts the other wears one fingerless glove to school everyday with a white pimp fedora. Thinks nothing of it. I wince when she gets off the bus, but what the hell, the kid is very comfortable with her style.

I can't tell you how many mornings in a row she asks, "Hey, Ma, are my skinny jeans clean yet?"

As strange as this may seem "on the outside" I prefer it to the life that I have tried overly long to strive for. I was having coffee with a very down-to-earth friend of mine the other day and we both revealed a few of the dark truths of our lives over the past few years. Truths about abuse and infidelity and depression and suicide. It was a relief to let go of the farce for both of us.

"I just wanted to have the perfect life," she said, pulling her coat around her even though it was 75 degrees outside.

"Yeah, me, too," I said. But it doesn't exist. That life doesn't exist." At least, not for me. Not in the way that it was presented to me for so many years.

Yes, I owe my children my love and my protection and my undying loyalty. But above all they are, for the sake of their happiness and confidence in their own skin, I owe them the truth. Always. Even if it is painful.

They know a few things now. About friends I've buried, about wars that are unwinnable, about love that fades, and yet, somehow, because they are children and because they are resilient, their innocence remains. Better to gradually understand life's raw material than to be hit by its slag as you approach thirty...

I have to...

Again with the Facebook status updates. This time in reference to motherhood. I have seen several over the last few weeks that come just shy of gushing over being a parent. Gushing and oozing the kind of bullsh*t that not even a dumb puppy would fall for. Or a middle school blonde for that matter.

To be clear, I can understand the moments of pure insane love that come over a mother, even when her children are grown. I've seen it in my own mother who once said, "You know, whenever you guys come to visit it's like a movie star is here." At the time, I thought she was insane, but I know the feeling now. When Anna gets off the bus with her white fedora tipped rakishly on her head, her backpack slung carelessly on one shoulder, yeah, it feels like I'm watching a movie and loving every minute of it because the star is mine and mine alone. The same can be said for Lucian, when I hear him in the EARLY hours of the morning talking to himself and quietly setting up elaborate war games with Matchboxes, I can almost see the evil genius he will be.

But back to the gushing. When I read things like, "I love my little man," or "Haven't slept in weeks but my baby is my world" or "At home with a sick kiddo" my stomach ties up in an uncomfortable knot. I know what's behind those updates because I read the previous five from the days before. "Need a night on the town," or "I don't think I can do this much longer" or "is exhausted and blah today."

I can put two and two together. So that by the time the "happy mommy" update hits, it's already out there. You're trying to convince yourself that you've got the best job in the world, but we all know it's a sh*tfest, so there's no need to put on a show. Yes, we know you love your little man, but we also know that you posted that because you think you might sell him to itinerant workers by the end of the week.

And yes, it's ok to be totally f*cking enraged that you haven't gotten any sleep for the last three months because a being the size of a bag of sugar eats, sh*ts and cries his way through your life and there's nothing you can do to stop it. It's cool, ladies, we get it. You don't gotta tell us you love your kids, but who do you think you're kidding with the 1950's Good Mother updates. They're downright scary. Just tell it like it is, you'll feel better: "If this kid doesn't f*cking sleep tonite I'm feeding him to the coyotes" or "My 9-year-old is being a royal biatch today" or "Praise god, I just found the holiday clonapin."

Do it.

Just to solidify this point, I saw a woman in a cafe yesterday with her two young kids, maybe 6 and 3. It was about 4 o'clock in the afternoon and she was there alone at first and then a friend showed up with another kid. I thought how chill the kids were, keeping themselves amused and chatting as their mother pounded back a few beers (it was a cafe, btw, where coffee is the main beverage) and gossiped with the friend. The kids got antsy (hell, I get antsy after 35 minutes) and as she was taking a huge gulp from her beer, the cross-eyed angry look she gave them gave me chills. Like she might've killed them, and there she was and there they were in their perfect clothes, with their designer rain boots, and their organic snacks and she hated them to the core.

Update your status, moms.

Tangled up in blue and pink

I'm not sure if it's because of the bipolar weather we've been having, or the blob/tumor enacting its dark magic on my hormones, or the imminent arrival of the full moon this week, but I am almost getting the impression that I'm acting like...a girl.

Dun-duh

Or someone who is so fearful of winter and its environs that she now feels even more like a rabid squirrel in a garbage can.

This morning, early, as the sun warmed my groggy face, the Sisco kid and I sat on the back steps and enjoyed our last moments as humans before the anvil of Monday came down on us. He sipped at the coffee we were sharing and looked down at my bare feet.

"Um, you know, that ankle bracelet is starting to make me think you're turning into a girl or something." He smiled over the rim of the cup. "Ya know, when we first met you carried an axe and wore wife beaters." Still smiling, he looked triumphant, like he might be responsible for my femininity or something.

I glanced down at the silver anklet adorned with pink shells remembering that after I put the thing on (sometime on Friday) I actually contemplated painting my toenails as well. I resisted the urge in favor of some mascara and lip gloss.

"Don't worry," I said, trying to sound cool; I think I might have even spit off the steps, "It's still there, tied to my knee."

He shook his head and smiled.

But, my god, what if he's right? What if I am losing my edge? The other night I started babbling about how we could get a tiny apartment in Rome and live out the rest of our days there after the kids were grown. I could blame the pain meds, but I hadn't taken any. What's next? Joint grocery trips, I'll-wash-you-dry dishes, decorating each other's rooms, imaginary house hunting?!

Apparently I need a little ride back into reality, and thank you to Lucian and Anna for providing just such a ride. Lucian wasn't off the bus more than 5 minutes before I had to threaten his mortal existence if he didn't leave his sister alone. And Anna wasn't off the bus more than 5 hours before she came clean about why she had to stay in for recess (I'm still working out the details of that punishment).

And, of course, she arrived with a booger clogged nose and the announcement that her dad might let her ride her bike BY HERSELF to a friend's house next week.

Over my dead f*cking body, man.

Did I mention that Lucian's nosebleeds are back in season. Fortunately, though, I've wised up to their patterns so that there won't be any more hysterical CAT scans and Google MD research. Now it's just an ice pack and me pinching the top of his nose until the thing clots up.

"Wow, mom, you pinch harder than Dad, and you can even hold the ice pack on my neck at the same time."

Amazing, isn't it? I think I'll clean my Leatherman and read some John Irving tonight to get my mind right.

Thick blooded

I nearly went off the road last night listening to an NPR interview with the author of "Achoo." Yes, it is a book about the common cold and myths and solutions surrounding the common cold.
Guess what, Airborne is horsesh*t, but you already knew that. Did you really think an Alka-Seltzer tab with a brilliant marketing machine behind it would save you from this misery?

I hope not.

Chicken soup, also a load of crap. Although, she did say that the soup may speed up the healing process, not because it's chicken soup but because someone made it for you and knowing that others have empathy for you makes you feel better faster.

Imagine that. Empathy...could be the name of a lesser Norse god, probably one that tried to save a drowning puppy and got his hand bit off by it's rabid bitch mother. 'Cause that's how rare empathy feels. Poor empathy.

So, empathy is the cure. But here's what made me laugh...hard. She said in the interview that sleep deprivation and chronic stress are the two key components to contracting a cold.
"Normally people who sleep less than 7 hours are more susceptible. As well as people who are under a lot of stress."

Of course, I went over in my mind how many hours of sleep I've gotten in the past, oh, let's say 5 days. It might add up to 7 if I round up. And stress, well, stress is like beef jerky for me. I gnaw on it, its salty juices release in my mouth, but yet, it provides no sustenance whatsoever.

I coughed a little after the interview was over. When I got home I was sure I had swine flu, and by the time I got to bed, loaded up with Zyrtec and contemplating mixing Thera-Flu with rum (my famous 'hot toddy') I was sure that by morning the snot army would come and take my dignity.

Nope. Still here, nasal passages are dry as the Gobi. But I'm still contemplating the Thera-Flu for sh*ts and giggles. It may help with the whole sleep-deprivation thing. Or the whole having thoughts after 10 p.m. thing...