The Taoist Mother

Just when I think there's nothing new for my mom to teach me, she reinforces the fact that, although I'm in my 40s and a mother myself, there are still deceptively simple lessons to be learned and re-learned again.

I come from an all-news-all-the-time upbringing, which might explain the bomb shelter I designed and depicted in a diorama for my sixth grade art fair. (I still believe that the only reason I won is because the other entries were either stolen or pornographic.)  And not only was the news always on, it was on at ear-splitting levels, so that there was never any escaping the crime waves, the plane crashes, the floods, fighting, and financial crises that were sweeping the nation at any given moment.

From the day I moved out of my parents'  house, I decided never to watch the news again. And, as it turned out, I didn't need to. Because the second something big, bad, or baffling happened, my mom would be on the phone, making sure I was informed.  Of course, the Interwebz eventually complicated everything, with its urban myths and chain letters urging recipients to beware the new computer virus that would delete your recipes for potato salad, the killer that was hiding in your back seat, the cockroach that hatched inside a woman's tongue. Mom was calling me daily for several years with one form of bad news or another, until one day, I finally snapped.

"I just thought  you should know," she said on a spring day in 2008, "that there's a man at the hospital who says he has a bomb strapped to his body."

"Why would I need to know that?" I scolded.

"Well, in case you're driving that way, the road might be closed," she said in her defense.

When I asked her when she was going to ever call me with good news, she said she would try to come up with something more cheerful. A few hours later, called again.  "Good news!" she chirped. I could hear the pride in her voice, and so I asked her what she had for me.

"They shot the guy with the bomb."  Determined to turn things around, I said, "Then I guess it's a good thing he was already at the hospital."

It's no story of the Taoist Farmer, but it's true and it's mine, and it's a testament to my mother's wisdom, whether it's intentional, channeled, or accidental. I've been thinking a lot about my family lately, and how it's going to change and move and shift, as families do after the loss of one of its members, and I cling to this memory as proof that we're all going to be fine. Story at 11.

Four is a Magic Number

What I'm noticing about being a first time mom is that every new stage that Sophie reaches in life is better than the one before it. I imagine this stops being the case sometime during the teens, but I'm still holding a half-full cup.

At four and a half, Sophie is real character, with her ability to hold long conversations about her feelings, and short ones about her mini existential crises. "After we die, do we get new families?" But what I love about the age of four is that it's the state line between child and toddler.

Last night, we were talking about the differences between boys and girls, and the "sugar and spice" rhyme came to mind. Sophie thought and said, "I don't like that part." She thought, pacing like a mad scientist, and then stopped. "I like," she said, "Rubies and pearls, diamonds and curls." My jaw dropped and I asked, "Did you just make that up?"
"Yes," she said, finding a Kix ball in the carpet and eating it.
"Wow."

Ten seconds later, she looked at me with panic in her eyes and started peeing on the floor. I guess that phone call I had begun making to the Julliard admissions department can wait a few weeks.

Introducing My Daughter, The Philosopher

On the drive to school this morning, Sophie mentioned the late Mona, our wonderful, nutjobby black Lab who died in July. Sophie's been thinking a lot about her lately, which has included a fair amount of crying, and I guess which is expected when you're figuring out what death is for the first time. And now that it seems most of the grief has passed for young Sophie, she's been contemplating the concept of loss.

"We used to have a different car, right?" Sophie asked, after confirming that Mona was never coming home from the vet. "The black one." It's true. At about the same time we lost Mona to some sort of brain injury or disease, we bought a new car and sold our old car, a black Subaru.

"Right," I said. "And now we have this car."
She was quiet for a few blocks and then said, "We have two things missing. One from our family and one from the garage."
I asked her, "Are you sure you're four?"

Sans Sans-A-Belt: A Blogumentary in 3 Parts

I.
[Cue the Frank Sinatra music to go with the home movie footage of hip white guys hanging at the Sands or the Pink Flamingo or Caesar's, ca. 1971.]

[Imagine a black and white photograph] This is my dad, Frank, a first-generation American born in Colorado of all places, in the mid 1920s. Here he is walking the Vegas Strip with his friends, a bunch of other "goombas" that he's known practically since birth. Although they're of all shapes, sizes, and incomes, they pretty much all have one thing in common besides their Italian-American heritage: Their pants.

[Pan down] Note the multi-colored offering of polyester pants, which by the way, are a real bitch to crease down the front like that. (I ironed my dad's pants once a week from 1991-1993.) They aren't just any polyester pants, however. First off, as my friend and fashion guru, Suzy Ten Bears says, "They're not even really pants. I find myself wanting to call them 'slacks.'" And she's right, they are more like slacks than anything else. They're Sans-a-belt slacks.

II.
Thirty years later, you could still see my dad, and most of his friends, wearing the same pants, by which I mean the exact same pants. Not a new pair of the same style of pants, but the very pants they'd been wearing all along. (For those of you who rage against the half-life of plastic grocery bags, please add Sans-a-Belt pants to your list of Things That Last Four Thousand Years in a Landfill.)

They wear them to the bocce courts, and to lunch, and to card games. They wear them to do all the same stuff they've always done, like stand around telling stories and gambling on...everything. Dad's got grungy pairs he puts aside for doing things like disassembling the sprinkler system in his yard, and digging up the flower beds. Shoveling snow, and what have you. He's probably got nicer pairs that he wears to tournaments and Olive Garden, and in-between pairs that he wears for watching Antiques Roadshow. He's an older guy now, my dad, which means that his favorite slacks are getting old, too.

III.
And here we are: No matter how well you take care of a garment, it's bound to forsake you. It's going to wear out at some point. I think Shakespeare may have been hanging out with my dad and talking about slacks the day he walked home from Ye Olde Olive Garden and wrote, "therein lies the rub."

Dad's been troubled by all this, I hear. I can relate. The expiration of my favorite things is often cause for reflection, and reflection isn't always comfortable. There's the nostalgia. The stories. The history. I imagine dad patting one leg of his trousers and saying, "Before deciding that blankets were more appealing, the government approached me about using these pants to introduce smallpox to the Native Americans, but I would have no part of it."

Mom says that San-a-Belt pants slacks are hard to come by these days, and so Dad is hoarding them, as I probably would. They probably still make them, but unless you're a referee or clergyman, you probably can't get your arthritic, spotted hands on a pair anymore. Not one to make assumptions, though, (you know what happens when you ass u me, right?) I took a look for Sans-a-Belt slacks. Sure enough, there's a "dealer locator" page at the Web site, which is interesting. I've never thought of clothing as being something that required a dealer, but, well, we are talking about an American institution here, an iconic brand that is perhaps made of petroleum products and sheet metal.

My mom, a woman who still has the red hounds tooth polyester pantsuit uniform she wore every day of her career as a reservations agent for Western Airlines (from 1865 until I graduated high school), had finally had enough. She thinks it's time to move on. I kind of agree, although this probably means that Dad's only alternatives are jogging suits or Dockers separates, or cheap jeans from COSTCO. Really, it doesn't matter. Whatever's comfy enough to watch Matlock in while you openly discuss your bowels.

But take heart from physics, friends, because matter is neither created nor destroyed. There is, somewhere in the cosmos, little pieces of Sans-a-Belt pants swirling and mingling with other materials, becoming reincarnated--with divine guidance, no doubt--into something new. Something wonderful. And for those of us who fear change, who deny death its right to a speedy trial, for those of us who would forget that the world is an impermanent place, I say simply this: Dillards. I called, and while the news is not great, "I have only a very few pieces of them," they do exist in the here and now. For now.

So go on, take an opportunity to grab a piece of history. You can someday set a pair next to your piece of the Berlin Wall, your autographed picture taken with the drummer from Def Leppard back when he had both arms. Put them in your time capsule. And wait for it, the dawning of a new age.

When? or, Tuesdays With Mona

If most of my duties as The Lady of the House are unglamorous and menial, there's one that's undeniably important, if difficult: the task of keeping the living things in our home alive and well. And as the prime caregiver to family members of the canine kind, I'm also sometimes burdened with the say-so over the dying part.

Our nine-year-old Lab/husky mutt, Mona, is the victim of something that has taken away the use of the right side of her head. It's moving fast, whatever it is; this morning her right eye is rolling around, her lip is dangling from her jaw, and her head is perpetually tilted. She can still walk, but the right side of her body is visibly atrophied. Plainly, it's all in her head. It's probably a tumor.

Knowing that there are people who put their dogs on life support, I know that veterinary care for one's animals is one of life's deeply personal decisions. We've decided against an MRI, because we've decided that we're not going to opt for brain surgery or chemotherapy. She's sedated, medicated, and for now, comfortable. We call her Sister Morphine. I'm sad to the point of paralysis. I didn't think I'd be this sad. I never do; I'm a procrastinator that way.

I knew something was up when Mona began acting funny a few months ago, slobbering and eating funny. I thought her teeth were bothering her. At least we can say that, when she gets to Dog Heaven, she will have nice, clean teeth.

I'm doing the best I can with this, the strangest of all familial duties, and I know the drill. After what's done is done, I will say something stupid like, "No more dogs. It's too hard when they leave." My friend Dawn, who has had dogs and horses and all kinds of animals for a million years, will tell me what a shame that kind of thinking is, reminding me that the price of being a Dog Person is outliving most of your friends. "But at least we can give them a good life," she would say.

I may have to decide when to say when, which is one of my job's cruelest or merciful decisions. It's a hard one, even if Mona could tell me whether or not she is suffering under pain's harsh rule. I may have to make some distinctions about quality of life, both mine and Mona's. She will forgive me.

Whatever happens, I can enjoy her company now, and remind myself of our time together later. I'm grateful to our Mona: for being our friend, our companion, the gentle and infinitely tolerant introduction she gave our daughter to big, loud dogs. She is proof that I like a big, dopey, old dog more than anything in the world. She has something to do with the feeling of safety I enjoy in our home. I like that she has replaced me as the resident nutjob for the past five years. And I like that she still perks up at the invitation of a walk, and barks with what's left of all her might at whomever dares cross her lop-sided path. She's still eating with the gusto of a pup; I'm happy to feed her steak while she can still eat it. We're sympatico that way.

And when she's unable to act crazy, or look interested in knocking over the trash; when she can't walk, or eat, I'll know that we're there yet.

The "P" Word

Ours is a household with loose rules. We try not to sweat the small stuff, parenting-wise, so that Sophie, Alex and I are together and present, instead of arguing over whether it's OK or not to wear your Crocs to bed. It's not for everyone, but this is the way our family is. Sophie takes great pleasure in picking out her clothes each day before school to create a very unique look that I like to call Boca Raton Bag Lady. Further, the rules are: You can pretty much wear what you want to bed, as long as you sleep; you can pretty much have whatever you want for dinner as long as you eat at least some of it. Wearing seatbelts in the car is non-negotiable, but, hey, you can use any word you want at home, as long as you don't cuss at school.

And then today, the chickens came home to roost.

"Mom," Sophie explained to me today, "you can call big girl underpants 'panties.'" I think I may have lost consciousness for a moment.

You see, for reasons I can't explain, but that probably have to do with a certain series of obscene phone calls that plagued my childhood home in the early '80s, I can't bear to hear the word "panties," much less say it. Even typing the word gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I'm probably going to have to spend the rest of my night with my fingers resting in a bath of sulphuric acid. ("You're soaking in it!")

No one is sadder than I that a new reign of censorship has begun between my daughter and I. Here we are, after three and a half years under my careful tutelage--"These are your underpants"--arguing over the P word in the backyard.

"No, honey, actually you can't call them panties," I said, wincing. "They are underwear or underpants or even undergarments, but that's all." And thus a new rule was born: You can call them panties, as long as you only do so at school. I can't wait for her teenage years; I'm considering getting it over with and taking a pickax to my eardrums now.

Winter Time Warp: How a Virus Turned February Turned Into April Part I

A few months ago, which seems like a few years ago, I was trying my damndest to get Sophie well from some virus that desperately clung to her like one of those creepy boyfriends we’ve all had. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Steve.) She’d been sick with something or other pretty much all winter, which I was trying not to take personally, even though in Boulder, that’s almost impossible. When learning that a family has fallen prey to cold and flu season, it’s not just customary—it’s mandatory—to ask the mother if she’s fed her family anything but organic vegetables, or to blame gluten, sugar, artificial colors, or hand sanitizer. And if the mother had committed to breastfeeding longer, her children wouldn't get sick in the first place. Yes, mea culpa on making sensitive, deeply personal decisions, like weaning Sophie a month, a day, a year longer than someone else thinks I should have. (Like sometime before she started shaving her legs and bringing home calculus homework, for example.)

And while Sophie was entering the third or fourth day of viral symptoms, I slogged inside our nearest drugstore with my clammy, whining toddler draped over my shoulder for an over-the-counter medication we use when things go south. The woman at the counter looked at me as if I had just asked for cyanide. “We don’t carry it,” she eyed me, “people overdose their kids with it.” I’d been fetching juice, laundering the vomit out of everything we own, and watching Blue’s Clues for 48 hours straight, and it took herculean restraint not to overdose that woman’s face with my fist.

This illness, at first, wasn’t anything that I hadn’t endured before, and I had to be grateful that we’d moved away from Vail, where I didn’t know anyone who could help me while Alex was away, and where the physicians were more like EMTs in really expensive shoes. It was during that winter we spent in Vail that I invented a system of helping nurses and doctors triage their pediatric patients in the waiting room just by looking at the kind of shape their mothers were in. When Sophie was on the well side, I looked like a regular mom who could have used some highlights and a breath mint, but was otherwise holding it together OK. When she got really sick, and when her fever rose to 104.5 the minute her medication wore off, I looked a lot like Nick Nolte’s mug shot from 2002.

Living in a real place, where my parents can help me when things get really bad, and the doctors know how to do other things besides treat ski injuries, I felt a little better. Then on the night of February 5th, after we’d seen Sophie’s pediatrician, and were taking a new round of antibiotics, I looked at Sophie and didn't like how she was doing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something told me things were bad, and were going to get worse. With my spidey sense tingling, I paged the on-call doctor, and got a phone triage nurse at Children’s Hospital. “What you’ve just described to me constitutes a 911 call. How does she look?”
“Like shit actually,” I said. I hung up, and packed us all into the car. I didn’t bother changing my clothes; despite the weather, I didn’t even put on a coat. I headed for the emergency room without passing go or collecting two hundred dollars.

Stay tuned for the continuation of Winter Time Warp: How a Virus Turned February Turned Into April, coming soon.

Boxer Shorts and Black Socks: A Love Story

The other day our friend Jim came by to pick something up. It was as lazy of an afternoon as we’re capable of having, and Alex answered the door in his standard post-bike-ride best: A pair of striped boxers and the black dress socks that he’d put on for work at least forty eight hours before. Jim looked at him, scowling, shaking his head. “What are you doing?” Jim asked him, motioning with his hands to Alex’s exposed torso. Alex puffed up his chest, sucked in his belly, then let it all out and farted.

I can’t believe it myself, but this is the very thing that drew me to Alex all those years ago: An unashamed appreciation for life’s simplest, greatest pleasures. I literally fell in love the afternoon I witnessed Alex eating a sandwich over the sink, wearing nothing but his boxer briefs and the twenty dollar Timex Iron Man digital watch that he publicly considers his best purchase in twenty years. It looks like since then, he’s decided to keep his feet warm, too—thus the socks—making me wonder: Is there anything sexier than common sense?

“Tomorrow’s our anniversary,” I told Jim, which elicited a response that Jim’s famous for in our circle of friends. I heard it for the first time eight years ago, the night the three of us crowded into a ski town hotel room for the night; the night that I saw Alex perform for the first time what I guess was standard operating procedure—if you happen to be at summer camp: Reserving the bed he wanted by yanking down the comforter and his pants at the same time, and rubbing his bare bottom on the sheets. “Got dibs on this bed!” he cheered, pulling up his pants. Jim and I looked at each other, slack jawed, before Jim said, “I don’t know how you do it, Jody. I just don’t know.”

We met in the fall of ’98, at a party that he and his friends weren’t even invited to. Because it was the time in my life when I decided working ninety hours a week would be a good idea, it took us about two weeks to speak to each other again and agree to go on our first date. I pressed for lunch, he pressed for dinner and won. Since then, he’s taken me to live in three different cities in four different houses. He has sent me to Italy, and also in a separate turn of events, quite literally over the edge. I saw a therapist once, and as I was explaining why I was in her office sitting on her purple futon, this therapist, a person who is trained to look neutral and serene and blameless while you tell her things that are quite the opposite, smote herself on the head and said, “God! What was he thinking?”

Ever since we were married in Las Vegas of all places, here, during a four-day whirlwind nuptial extravaganza in the company of 90 of our closest friends and family, I’ve heard a lot of “I don’t know how you do it”-type sentiments, including:
You two don’t match
You really keep him grounded
Did he just do what I think he just did?
You’re a saint.

And yet, here we are: October 14, 2007. Alex and I are together for nine years, married for seven. A time when, for reasons that are unknown to me, and that I didn’t bother looking up, a couple’s destiny is ruled by an entity or phenomenon commonly known as the seven year itch.

I may be a lot of things on this day in history. Flaky, tired, overwhelmed, and in dire need of highlights and an all-day moisturizer specially formulated for acne-prone combination skin, but itchy isn’t one of them. It’s true that things have changed in seven years. For one, gray hairs. I’ve found a few in my own head of hair, but not Alex’s, that lucky dog, and have plucked them from my head, knowing that these things are like roaches; for every one you see, there are at least ten you don’t. And for another, I now have collected something like seven different doctors, one for each organ or gland, with a spare, free-range, after-hours-friendly one who is willing to call in a prescription on the fly for acute maladies that present themselves between the hours of midnight and three: Pink eye and ear infections and other delights fresh in from preschool, like SARS and Ebolla.

But Alex is no spring chick either.

In most recent years, he’s earned a secret nickname: Rapunzel, for his long, long locks of hair that also happen to also be his eyebrows. “What’s with the eyebrows?” I’ve been known to say, plucking a few of the more noticeable strays from the pack by twirling them around a doorknob a few times and then slamming the door. “Do you have to tuck your eyebrows behind your ears when they check your eyesight at the DMV?” I asked him once. And then I probably pushed the envelope a few inches too far the day I told him I was starting a grassroots organization called M.A.M.E.: Mothers Against Mammoth Eyebrows.

The difference between us is that he doesn’t know he’s any older. In fact, he’s still pretty sure he’s going to camp next summer, to learn some new tricks, like how to burp the alphabet, or make a bong out of a tennis racquet. He’s got big plans, and they involve first finding his old pair of parachute pants—“They’re around here somewhere”—and then restoring a ’71 GTO in the garage, despite the fact that he’s a man who loves great gas mileage more than Al Gore. More than Bono. I’ll let him figure out that one out on his own; the parachute pants I cannot abide, however, and if it were in the least environmentally safe, I would have burned them in the wood stove several winters ago. I will hide them someplace I know he will never look: With the cleaning supplies, or with the vacuum, a thing he hasn’t touched since the Carter administration, and only then was it a means to torturing his sister.

“How about taking me to dinner for our anniversary, so that I can have a martini for the first time in like twenty seven years?” I asked him after Jim had left the building, still shaking his head and muttering. “You can have a drink, too; don’t worry, your eyebrows said they would drive.”

We went to a nice place while Sophie was at a friend’s house, and laughed and teased each other at the bar, where we like to sit, even when there are perfectly nice tables available in the dining room. I pointed out that he speaks Spanish in a way that sounds like he’s recently sustained a head injury. He remarked that the suitcase I brought home from a trip a month ago is still sitting out in the living room, still fully packed, and he’s starting to tell our guests that it’s sculpture.

Parenthetically, on the compatibility side, we’re both extremely frugal, but for different reasons. His frugality originates with the belief that, no matter what job he has, he’s always ten minutes away from losing it, leaving us all out on the street with a sign that says, “Kidneys, cheap to a good home.” My frugal behavior is inextricably linked to laziness. Bringing another nice thing home means that there’s just one more thing to vacuum/dust/wash/keep the dogs and a sticky toddler away from. And entering a mall makes me want to spin my head around on its axis and throw the nearest clergyman down a flight of stairs.

That’s when we saw Nina, a woman from the tiny town we lived in, whom we know only by first name, which is an upgrade from what we called her for the first two years we knew her: Good Diction Woman. Apart from speaking with balls-on precision no matter what she’s doing, Nina is the real-life version of that sitcom character who works every job in whatever small, funky, fictional town the show’s set in. So in the morning, she’s taking your deposit at the bank, and then your lunch order at the diner, drives the kids home on the school bus that afternoon, and then looks up from her weeding in the community garden to wave at you as you’re driving home from work that night.

Nina, as we learned from our table in the bar, is a bit of a baseball nut, and with the Colorado Rockies going to the World Series, she was beside herself with joy and victorious anticipation. She looked to me to back her up on just what a boon this was to all living creatures in the great state of Colorado, to which I explained, shrugging, “I hate all professional sports, except for the World’s Strongest Man/Woman competitions.”

She looked at Alex like I had sprouted a second head and said the most profound and unprecedented thing anyone has ever said to us, “You’re a very patient and forgiving man. I don’t know how you do it.” Ladies and gentlemen, what a night!

So maybe we’ll chalk this one up to being lucky number seven, instead of the year of the itch. Maybe we won’t have to fight it this year, or maybe we’ll have to gulp down a boxcar full of Benadryl and slip into a Calamine bath. Who knows? Maybe we will complain about and to each other; I about how I envy him. He makes everything—everything—look so easy that it makes me nuts. And he that I have the memory of a whole herd of elephants and boy can I carry a grudge. Maybe we’ll just not even notice the slightest whisper of an itch, and this year will fall away like years do, leaving us at the door of number eight, wondering where the time went. And so on, until Alex is opening the door for Jim in his black socks and Depends.

***

Blogger’s note: A few weeks ago, the lovely and talented Susan Henderson at LitPark wrote about love. If you don’t know Susan, or the Park, please do yourself a favor by getting to know the two of them.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part IV

If you're new to the No Move is Good Move saga, you'll find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Our rental house on the hill was owned by a couple that I’ll call, for the purposes of talking trash about busybody people with too much time on their hands, the Smiths. And because their real-life professions probably had nothing to do with their annoying-as-fuck behavior, let’s say, just for the purposes of my own small-minded entertainment, that Mr. Smith was a stunt body double for Woody Allen, and Mrs. Smith was an amateur wrestler on the GLOW circuit.

It’s true that the Smiths were nice and all, but they weren’t giving their property away. The monthly rent wasn’t even close to a bargain, but all their busybodying was contagious, and so we looked up what they paid for the place. Turns out that what we paid for rent against what they were probably paying for a mortgage meant that they weren’t making a killing either.

The place was textbook Boulder, in that it was a totally random mish-mash of fixer-upper and state of the art. It was a schizophrenic mess, that house, and if the place could talk, it would exclaim, “We’re hippies, man!” one second, and, “We’re yuppies, darling!” the next. Right off the bat, I was incredulous that The Smiths paid about $980,000 for it; that just seems like a lot for no more than 1,000 square feet from the ‘50s and a fenced yard. In the kitchen was a million-dollar stainless steel Viking stove cozying up to crappy formica counters and a butcher block island that was so big that you couldn’t get around the kitchen without sucking everything in. There was also a stainless steel dishwasher with a broken top drawer that required a special tool to keep it shut during loading and unloading: A plastic baby spoon. Whenever someone was kind enough to help me around the house, I would hand them the spoon and train them on how to jam it just right between the rails and the drawer. “Here, you’ll need this or you’ll go crazy trying to unload that thing,” I said. And then there was our crappy old refrigerator—cream colored, not stainless—which we moved from our house in Ned because, well, we were going to need a fridge in the house, and it didn’t come with one already installed.

There was a beautiful, if one can call a furnace beautiful, brand new, industrial grade furnace in the basement. It had blinking lights and a computer inside, and I was wont to call it Kit on the few occasions that the pilot light went out. Because instead of getting down on my hands and knees and taking the thing apart and finding a fireplace match and pressing a button or turning a valve while trying to hold the flame steady in the belly of the beast without setting the whole place on fire, all I practically had to do was ask the nice furnace, in the parlance of everyone’s favorite rapper, to check itself before it wrecked itself. Thank whatever gods are available right now that we had that furnace, too, because there was no insulation to speak of, and most of the windows were bare and of the original, single-paned variety, which would have been fine in a milder climate, but it was the dead of winter and I swear I could feel the wind blowing right through the pores in that old glass.

I’m often reminded how small of a town Boulder is, and one of those reminders came when our babysitter showed up shortly after we’d moved in and said, “Oh, I’ve worked in this house before, but back then, the floor was warped to hell.” Apparently, there’d been some kind of leak all over the hardwoods, which eventually righted itself with time and Colorado’s patently dry conditions. I wondered, though, what kind of mold or mildew was living beneath us, waiting to strangle us come spring.

Our lease came right out and said that we were not allowed to pock the walls with new holes. Fine, we were leaving in six months and left our prints and art in a box in the basement for the next move. “And don’t paint anything,” it told us. No worries there. But what it really, really did not want us to do, under any circumstance was for us to flush tampons down the toilet. To do so was strictly verboten to the point that even Mrs. Smith mentioned it herself a few times. I figured that she’d learned some hard lessons after a few full moons with two daughters in her house. It’s true that calling the Rotor Rooter Man can hurt, but I am a grown woman who’s smart enough to appreciate the necessity of keeping sacred the marriage between aging plumbing and tampon responsibility.

That summer we learned that, in addition to praising the furnace, we were to fall down with gratitude for the central air conditioning. All the windows were painted shut, which we would have been willing to remedy with a crow bar had we failed to notice that there were no screens covering the windows. And so there was no fresh air in the house, ever, a phenomenon that resulted in the daily practice of leaving the backdoor wide open all day. When Alex would come home at night, he’d find me in the kitchen, cooking dinner with a can of Raid in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, and Sophie in a little beekeeper’s suit, remarking that she enjoyed the taste of Deep Woods Off with her green beans.

So, we were moved in to the house with a lot of flaws, but a sick location, and because I would rather give myself a lobotomy than spend my good money on blinds for a house that wasn’t ours, we put tin foil over the windows in Sophie’s room to make it dark and we called it good.

In hindsight, it wasn’t choosing to rent a house with bad mechanics that was “our bad.” In hindsight, we were lucky to find that place. In hindsight, we had some good times and a few bad ones that had to do with being sick all the time to the extent that we took more than one trip to the ever-popular urgent care clinic. (Hello, mold!) In hindsight, I was just more than sick of renting.

Next time in No Move is Good Move, we'll find out why.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part III

If you're new to the No Move is Good Move saga, you'll find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

To add to my mounting panic over our nest-less existence, those were the months that marked the beginning of the end of Sophie’s career as a baby who slept like, well, a baby.

From her second month of life, Sophie sleep in her crib, every night, from 6 PM to 6 AM, and that was the problem: We had it too good. “This is it,” Alex and I said, congratulating ourselves during quiet, unhurried dinners, “we’ve got it made. She’s a sleeper, thanks to our stellar parenting and undeniable good looks.”

We moved to Boulder. Two weeks later, we went to Mexico. Two months after that, Sophie broke her collarbone on the babysitter’s watch, an episode that disturbed us much more than the bout of pneumonia she caught about as soon as her tiny bones mended. I would put her in her crib and stroke her head, either for an hour or until I’d rubbed off a good portion of her hair—whichever came first—and try and make dinner before she was able to figure out that she had accidentally fallen asleep. There would be night terrors sometime between midnight and one, and at least three other teary awakenings on a bad night. She would ask for—demand—milk each time she woke, and by morning, had drunk enough to add up to a volume that justified keeping a cow on the premises. And as if there was something a mere doctor could do about it, Alex and every relative I have implored me ask our pediatrician for ideas.

“You moved?” asked the pediatrician, as if he’d never heard such nonsense, “Oh, well.” He wrote the word “moved” in Sophie’s chart, and said,“That’ll do it.” He told me that a move can mess up a baby’s sleep schedule for as long as six months, and so can an illness, an injury, and a big change in routine, like starting day care, which she did in between bouts of the Bird Flu. Accepting that we’d sent our daughter’s schedule straight to hell in a basket bearing a nice pink bow, I told Alex to buck up. “We’re never sleeping again.”

Of course, I was wrong. We would sleep, but with a child in between us who apparently was dreaming that she was executing a triple axel toe-loop combo. In exasperation one morning, Alex looked down at the two of us in bed, Sophie occupying ¾ of the king-sized bed by lying diagonally, her feet in my face, and said, “This must end.”

We all deal with challenges differently. I usually hide under the covers of whatever bed is available with a box of strawberry Pop Tarts (frosted). Alex threatens to help, usually in the most condescending way possible, which is what he did the night he suggested, “Do you want me to read a book on this stuff or something?”

“Sure, go nuts,” I said. I went to my office and retrieved a half-dozen books with so many bookmarks and wrinkled Post-It Notes thrust between the pages that they resembled little paper porcupines. “Which philosophy do you want to subscribe to?” I asked him. “There’s Ferberizing, there’s the almighty American Academy of Pediatrics.” I tossed them onto the coffee table as I summarized. “On one end of the spectrum, there’s Dr. Weisbluth and his all-cry-all-the-time approach and the Sears clan at the other, who openly come right out and ask you, ‘What’s up your ass? Jesus. Just take the kid to bed with you.’” I shrugged and said, “I’m paraphrasing, of course.”

It was out of the kind of hand-wringing, hair-pulling, crazy-making, all-encompassing desperation that only severe and extended sleep deprivation can cause that I’d turned to the experts in the first place. Knowing that they’re just trying to help while they make a good living, I know that there’s a problem with relying too much on them. The problem with experts is that you can’t really call them up at 3:24 AM to say, “The best thing about not sleeping is that Bosom Buddies is on now.“ The problem with experts is that they may or may not have changed their minds about something they’ve written between having written it and having decided that maybe it would be better just to give the kid a big slug of whiskey.

The problem with experts is that, while I’m listening to the second half of an hour’s worth of screaming and crying that will no doubt escalate to the kind of wailing that eventually culminates in a vomiting jag, the good doctor is probably in his study, deciding what to bring to the next Rotary Club potluck. Just as he’s asking the shadowy figure of his wife in the doorway, “Do you think Swedish meatballs are too salty?” I’m wondering if it would be wrong to just put my head in the oven, next to the dinner that’s four hours late.

And then, of course, the problem with experts is that sometimes I just want to do things my own way. Because sometimes, unlike a certain ’80 sit-com, I like to think I know exactly who the boss is. (Of course, I’m almost always wrong.) Bossing aside, I do believe that ninety percent of the time, we know what to do with the crises in our lives, no matter how big or how small they are. We can trust our instincts, we can trust ourselves. Although she would win any day of the week in a cage match against Major Houlihan from MASH, and although I often wonder if astronauts can see the stick up her ass from space, the pediatrician’s nurse took me aside on Sophie’s fifth day of life, and told me that she had some advice about advice. She poked me square in the chest and said, “Now that the baby’s born, everyone wants to give you advice, but the best advice is already built-in. It’s in you.” She was telling me what I had already concluded after years of near-disastrous dates and relationships and experiences. Those experiments in substituting my judgment with someone else’s have served me well in the form of painful lessons that hold up over time. Nurse Ratchet with the Rave home perm reminded me that there’s hard-won wisdom in me, and damned if I was going to forsake it because I’d spend $24.95 on some yahoo’s thesis.


To be continued, unless you beg me to stop.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part II

If you're new to the No Move is Good Move saga, you'll find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

With just a few days between closing on our house in Ned and not having any place to live at all, I found what seemed like the last house in town with a yard and a short-term lease option. We moved into a pea green shack, the last one that hadn’t been razed or remodeled right in the center of Boulder County’s most expensive zip code.

We liked pretending that we were, like the bumper sticker says, keeping Boulder weird. We liked pretending that we were the bad element on the street that was keeping property values down. We liked pretending that we were representin’, that we were keepin’ it real and sticking it to the man, forgetting that it’s all relative. To some people, we are the man. But it was an easy act, considering that the historical mansions and monolithic homes occupying every square foot of third-acre lots hovered over us in every direction. Across one street sat a ten thousand square foot building that had been converted from an old schoolhouse into a single-family home. It was stunning, yes, but it had no driveway, much less a garage, which meant that after driving your Bentley home, you were parking your rich ass on the street, dahling. On the other corner, a palace that looked like a resort hotel—a dark one, as the family who owned it was rarely there. Not only does money not buy love, it looks like it doesn't buy good sense, either.

We laughed when we realized that were not used to getting fully dressed before going outside to flip the burgers on the grill, but according to our new neighbors, Rick and Kitty, neither were the last people who lived there. “We didn’t care they were naked, and neither did they,” said Rick in the thick Long Island accent that refused to resign even after fifteen years away from the coast. A few months later, Rick was bitten by a raccoon during his evening dog walk, thus ending the lesson that Boulder was already plenty weird without us.

The truth is, that million-dollar Boulder cracker box that we rented was where we reconnected with the old friends who dreaded the winding canyon drive to Ned. It was where we walked to dinner dates on the Pearl Street Mall, and found a preschool for our little girl—a place where she felt loved and appreciated and safe, and where her teachers called her Soaf without us telling them that's what we called her. It’s where we made new friends walking down the street; I guess even multimillionaires take their kids out for some fresh air now and then—on the days when they’re not having it imported on the backs of chinchillas, that is.

And when I wasn't marveling over the neighbor who went to jail for installing the wrong kind of garage door (at least she had a garage), I was looking feverishly for a permanent home for us in Boulder. The sticker shock was unbearable, and eventually, so was our REALTOR. A whole spring season of house hunting later, she was pulling all the stops, using all her powers, to sell us…something, anything to rid herself of clients so demanding that they wanted a house that was actually standing for their three-quarters of a million dollars.

“Well, it’s nice and all,” we practically said on our last outing with her, “but this house is on fire.” And she just about said, “Oh, ALL the houses in this neighborhood are on fire. I live here, and two of my bedrooms are on fire right now. You have to give up something if you want to live in this neighborhood.”

And she was right. We did have to give up something: Her.

Stay tuned for the conclusion, part three of No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, coming next week. Probably.

No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is, Part I

When I was seven or eight years old, I drew a picture in crayon of a tropical island only big enough for one palm tree and me. “I love Hawaii,” I told my dad. I missed being there, and so did he, even though we’d just returned from a vacation on the island of Kauai. “I’m homesick,” I told him.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “We’re home right now.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sick of it.”

Famous last words.

Last week, my dad turned 82. He’s only ever lived in two houses: the one he grew up in, and the one I grew up in. When I left that home for college, I moved once or twice a year; by the time I graduated, one of my life goals was to own things without worrying about whether or not they would fit into the trunk of a Camaro. I was a natural at digging my heels in, growing some roots, and I spent the next five years renting an apartment located in a neighborhood in steady decline. One of my neighbors was one of those high-priced call girls with a full-page ad in one of the weekly alternative newspapers; another was a drug dealer with a full book of business. A stray bullet from a sale gone bad or a psychopathic John with the wrong address might have done me in, but I had furniture. Damned if I was going to strap my second-hand sectional to the roof of my econo-sized Toyota.

After that, it was three years in the first home I’d ever owned, a town home in a better neighborhood with a huge park across the street. I kicked out my boyfriend and adopted a dog. I was set. “Write down my phone number and address,” I said to every friend and relative. “And use a pen.” I was there, and there I was: that kooky dog lady with a Pier 1 credit card and a mountain bike and that’s all I needed. And this lamp. And this paddle ball game. And that’s all I needed. And this remote control. Uh-hem.

When Alex and I married, we bought a home in the mountains, a move I agreed to make without a lot of fuss, considering I never thought I would own a free-standing, single-family home with enough space around it for a few dogs and, judging by our neighbors down the dirt road, two or three llamas. We lived there, in a crunchy little town called Nederland, for six years. The locals called it Ned, and we came to call it that, too, as a term of familiarity, endearment even. Ned was our friend; our flaky, weird friend who was loveably erratic in his behavior and most of all, valued a don’t-tread-on-me lifestyle above all others. As people who wanted to be left alone with their thoughts and dogs and mountain bikes and skis, we loved Ned and his collection of Viet Nam veterans, hippies, hermits, and real estate cheapskates. We loved him even during the winter, when the triple digit wind speeds kept us up nights.

Our first year there, we spent many evenings watching the way the wind would distort our reflections in the double-paned windows as they flexed and strained between the gusts and us. "I wonder what those people up the street who live in that tee-pee are doing right now?" I said to myself. Our second year there, we held contests to see who could make the house hotter with the wood burning stove. (I won with an indoor temperature of 89, despite the minus 25 conditions outdoors.) Our third year there, we survived the hundred-year snow storm by skiing to town for the barbeque the grocery store hosted as a way of kindly disposing of the meat that was going to expire anyway. They wouldn’t have power for their refrigerators for no telling how long, so why not?

It's the place where folks keep their dream-catcher-hammock-kinetic sculpture studios-slash-cannabis-growing-rooms in the front yard, and their dead grandfather on ice in the back. We knew the police chief personally. We watched a semi-organized uprising against those pesky laws that forbid drunk driving. We noticed that Ned is a very active incubator for stupid restaurant ideas. We never locked our doors.

And so on.

During year six it happened: Alex said, “I think I’ll take the baby for a walk to town.” Just like that. He said he was going to have a stroll, get some fresh air, take his time. I had just been diagnosed with Grave’s disease, and remember replying with something like, “I have Grave’s disease,” adding that I was going to curl up with a good goiter and have a nap.

Alex returned looking triumphant. He said that while he was out, he ran into our realtor, Candace, who said the time was right for us to sell our house. Inventory was low, but the market was about to flatten out, so we could make some money if we acted fast. “So,” he said, looking smug, “I listed our house.” Our house was on the market. For sale. Available now. If memory serves, I think I went back to bed. Two months later, we did something I wasn’t prepared to do: we moved downhill to Boulder. Flatlanders again we were, and soon I had to admit that such an act was so crazy that it just might work.

Stay tuned for next week's installment, the continuation of No Move is Good Move: A Primer on What My Problem Is