She started kindergarten today. I’ll admit there was an attempt on my part to buy back her love with some new pink size 11.5 Hello Kitty Mary Janes, and some very exciting new surprise school supplies tucked away in a pink-and-purple pencil case. I took blurry pictures of her doing her maddening praying-hands pose under one side of her face (”because it looks pretty”). I let her have two muffins and two donuts at the Welcome Back breakfast at school. I told her I was very proud.
But she looks through me. I am starting to question my existence.
Continue Reading September 8th, 2006
At this very moment, several sweaty, strapping young men are loading boxes and furniture into a van in Philadelphia while my mother stands at the kitchen counter hyperventilating beside her cellphone and counting her cash several more times. If she doesn’t have a list on paper, she is definitely going over one in her head. By now, she will already have convinced herself that she’s lost her purse—and her apartment key—at least three times. By dinnertime today, if all goes well, she and her purse and her well-thumbed cash for the movers will be here, and she will have a new apartment key she’ll worry about misplacing.
Continue Reading August 14th, 2006
Panic from the kitchen. “SOMETHING’S GOING ON IN HERE! JENN? THERE’S…IT’S…DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING IN HERE?”
“Yes,” I say. “The oven is on. And the stove is on.”
Pause from the kitchen. Then: “And you…I mean…?”
“Yes,” I say. “I know. I turned them on.”
Continue Reading July 27th, 2006
I have ruined my daughter completely. If she wasn’t doomed to a life of neurosis and germ-phobia before, oh, she is now. We had a few Kodachrome-worthy mother-daughter moments in NYC, sure, but overall? Not so much. I could not relax, because the child was touching everything. Within an hour of our arrival at Penn Station, I could no longer see my child’s hands. In their place were two glowing petri dishes crawling with urban wretchedness.
Continue Reading July 5th, 2006
Look at my blue Swedish mailbox! I am not even Swedish and I love this mailbox! I have yet to find a Polish mailbox that looks this good!
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2006
Thirty-six years ago this morning, my mom was heard exclaiming, “It’s a girl? What am I going to do with her hair?”
Continue Reading June 22nd, 2006
Today, doing laundry, I was thinking about how it all started. For him. Maybe I am just guessing. Maybe I am being presumptuous, thinking I could know.
I can supply the date. October 1st, 2000.
Continue Reading June 18th, 2006
The Mater has been visiting, and our week together has been full of quotables like, Get the steak. I miss seeing you eat steak. Which is charming and baffling and eating-disorder-triggering and back to charming again all in the span of two microseconds. Life with my mother is a constant temptation to put up one of those quoteboards you find in the hallways of dorms inhabited by lots of drunk freshmen. This is a cute lady! You would love this lady! You see why I want her to move up here. Then we really would have to give in and put up a quoteboard.
Anyway, of course Mom and I watched David Blaine try to hold his breath for nine minutes tonight live on ABC in the Lincoln Center fishbowl. Live on ABC! LIVE! BUT NEARLY DEAD! Laughing it up over here! Seriously, we may use decent grammar, and she may say adorable things, but Mom and I have just as much schadenfreude coursing through our veins as anybody else. But we wouldn’t eat our young or anything. Well, Ma ate four of us but spared me and my one brother so I could write a blog someday and he could deliver babies and save people’s lives and have a really photogenic family.
But back to everybody’s favorite dumb-tushie, Mr. Blaine. The cameramen got a few up-close shots of Blaine’s now-corpse-like hands, which at this point had been submerged for like, six dumb days of total and complete watery dumbness.
My mother: I bet his little twinkie doesn’t look too great right now. [crying]
Me: [crying]
My mother and me: [more twinkie talk, more crying]
At this point, David was having considerable trouble marking papers in the adjoining room, the Den That Is Not A Den. So he gave in and joined the cacklers. And the conversation.
David: [skeptical] Are you sure he doesn’t have some tube going up his leg with oxygen?
My mother: I never heard of a tube blowing oxygen up your froufyhooha. [pause] It gives new meaning to the word ‘bl*wjob.’ [more crying]
Me: [more crying]
David: [staring at floor] Oh my. Just. Oh my.
We settled down a bit as David Blaine’s eyebrows started twitching and The Grim Reaper popped his head into the frame and did the heavy metal I-LOVE-YOU hands and yelled “WOOOOO F*CKIN’ A!” into the camera. My David didn’t see it but Mom and I totally did.
But David Blaine was just getting settled in for the long, dumb haul. Bor-ing.
Me: [disgusted] Oh, please. Now they’re playing freakshow angel music.
My mother: [nodding]
David: Uh, that’s Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. [pause] Oh. No, it isn’t. It’s the requiem they used in Platoon.
My mother: A requiem. They use them for DEATH.
Me: [silent]
David: [silent]
My mother: [nodding]
Now Mr. Blaine is wasting precious energy and brain cells trying to figure out why he added dumb handcuffs to his dumb underwater donkey show. We are also wasting precious energy and brain cells trying to figure out why he added dumb handcuffs to his dumb underwater donkey show. We are one.
My mother: See, I don’t know why you wouldn’t just do one or the other. He’s got to multitask. Too much multitasking.
Me: How will he get out of the dumb handcuffs? I hate that I am even asking that because HE WANTS ME TO ASK THAT.
David: It’s all about being double-jointed. [pause] No, he has keys.
Me: [coughing and wheezing from psychosomatic drowning episode as David Blaine starts inhaling water and bits of his own imploding lungs]
My mother: [worried] Don’t forget to take your Cingular tonight.
May 8th, 2006
