Four

I.
You were born on September 23^rd, 2004 at 9:50 PM mountain time. “Hey, it’s Bruce Springsteen’s birthday too,” we said, laughing and singing "Born to Run" in the delivery room. You are four today, and I’m already doing that thing that parents do when they realize that in the blink of an eye, you’re going to pack up your 2017 vegetable oil-powered Subaru and speed away into your future because you’re THAT excited about what’s next. I’m a little misty, I’m a little verklempt. I realized on your 2^nd birthday, the only one in which you would double your age in one year, that you weren’t going to stay little for very long. At the time, this was really good news. Today you’re twice the person you were last year, even if you’re only one year older, and I find myself trying to slam on the breaks. (See also: Good luck with all that.)

II.
I couldn’t be prouder of you. You’re already the kindest person I know, with a self-awareness that I didn’t possess…ever, maybe. My friend Carol calls you “the future president of the United States” and says you’re the oldest soul she’s ever known. This is what friends are for, to tell you that you’ve managed to produce the finest person since Thomas Jefferson (who was born on my birthday, by the by.) But these are the things that stick with me: You can make friends anywhere, even if it’s a dog, or a bug, or a kid who doesn’t speak English. And you are able to give an unapologetic voice to your needs. As a woman who is guilty too often of torturing herself for needing anything at all, I can’t tell you what a relief it is that you’ve always been able to tell me what you need, and ask for what you want. I’m trying not to mess that up.

III.
That day I was trying to hurry you into your car seat, and you looked at me, tearful, and said, “I’m fragile today” made me grateful beyond measure for your way with words. What a relief that you can at least tell me what’s wrong, or what’s right, even if I fail to listen right away. The night I was trying to get dinner made, despite your whiny requests for milk, for a snack, for some paper and markers, you finally said, “I need attention.” Dinner waited that night, our schedule got all messed up, and nobody died; in fact, we were all better off for it.

IV.
You’ve decided lately that your old man is OK. In fact, you’re pretty sure he’s cooler and funner than the rest of us. I knew this day would come; it doesn’t make it any easier, though. After four years of your unabashed worship, it’s downright painful to pass on the baton, even if it does make bathtime, bedtime, and life in general a little easier. I have my own plans, that’s true, but the day you decided to join “Boy Team” as you call it, I considered setting them on fire. You are joining the legions of all the other creatures I’ve brought home who have adopted the habit of ignoring me until sick or hurt, at which point you all come limping back to me. That’s OK. Let the record show that, no matter what, I will be your Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. I will be the president of your fan club. I will be your teacher, your student, your sidekick. And I will continue to uphold the doctrine your father and I carved into stone the day we learned of your existence: We will love you, whoever you are.

When Day Planners Go Bad

Since I've successfully ignored my to-do list for a solid two weeks, I'm going with a new approach: The To-Don't List. Make your own! Franklin Covey, call me!

Don't:
1. Talk about Fight Club.*
2. Take candy from strangers--or babies.
3. Sell anything, buy anything, or process anything.*
4. Bring a knife to a gunfight.*
5. Take the gun in favor of the cannoli.*
6. Take a cannoli to any kind of fight. Unless it's a food fight.
7. Talk about Foodfight Club.
8. Trust a dog to watch your food.
9. Let any bulls into your china shop.
10. Let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

*Extra credit for naming the movie referenced in this item.

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.

Thanksgiving is Going to the Dogs

"Lou, you've known me ten years now, just a few months short of your whole life," I told my dog, "I'm probably not going to kill you with the vacuum cleaner." Lou hates it when I vacuum. He hates it when the washer begins its spin cycle. He hates it when the dishwasher door swings open. In fact, about the only thing he doesn't hate is when I accidentally leave the room with dirty dishes on the coffee table, but hates it once I re-enter the room, to find him with his little spotted snout all but impaling a plastic container, his tongue dislodging every last molecule of flavor from it. He cowers under the dining room table when Sophie digs her play broom and mop out of her toy box and pretends to clean house. And there's something especially frightening about living entities inhaling or exhaling or opening the mail anywhere within a four mile radius of him while he's drinking from his water dish.

But don't let Lou's fragility fool you. Woe is the well-meaning fundraiser who comes to the front door to sell candy bars or memberships to one environmental organization or another. You Girl Scouts and your cookies better look out. And all you deer out there who think you can just walk up to one of the trees and start munching without having your eardrums burst wide open from the most ferocious bark in three states can think again. Losers. And just after I adopted him TEN years ago, he was pretty sure that performing stealth attacks to my head while I slept was the very best possible way to spend an early Saturday morning. "If I were going to kill you, Lou," I ducked down under the table to explain, "it would have been then, and by the way, I wouldn't use a Swiffer to do it." It's also for this reason that I don't usually reprimand Sophie for her propensity to body tackle Lou once he's sound asleep in his chair.

We've included in our last three moves a big, old, and now very gross and beat-up stuffed chair, simply because it's Lou's Chair(TM), and I swear that if we ever buy land, I'm putting at least one sheep on it so that Lou finally has a proper way to unleash his desperate instincts to herd things. He's Lou, a forty pound cattle dog-mutt and the exact behavioral replica of Alex, only in dog form. He's the little guy I found in a poor, drug-addled town on the Colorado-New Mexico border, trembling and growling in equal measure at anyone who might harm him. And from the looks of it, pretty much everyone did.

I was not prepared to take a four month old puppy with substantial mental and physical difficulties home. I had already stuffed a dog--a big one--into my tiny townhome, and was working all the time. But there was something about Lou that was ornery and sweet in all the right places, and that convinced me to ply him with hot dogs until he allowed me to put him in my lap and give him the petting of his life. (What no one would have guessed about Lou is that he's one big tickle spot.) He fell asleep there, much to the wonderment of people who never got the memo about how holding down a puppy and docking his tail with an ax pretty much puts the kibosh on a dog/human relationship based on love and trust. So there's that.

I took Lou home, where I promptly paid my vet's student loan every month trying to figure out what was the deal with the daily torrent of bloody diarrhea. I spent the rest of my cash undoing what I came to call Lou's little home improvement projects: The trench he dug down the middle of the living room carpet had to have been my favorite. A few months later, I met Alex, who I think actually married me to get to Lou. They are high-strung, skittish males who are annoying and lovable at the same time, and live to run and play. They are intent on rolling in dead stuff, passing gas in close quarters, messing up the house on a constant basis, and can't be bothered with listening to anything I have to say. Whenever I take either one of them out, I use a short leash that I abandon the second I catch a glimpse of a certain sad face...and a whiff of something that can trigger a coroner's gag reflex.

A few years ago, we added "cancer survivor" to Lou's resume, an impressive record that also includes "porcupine survivor" and "prairie dog catcher." And come to think of it, Lou has outlasted and survived just about every thing that was in my life the day he walked into my house and promptly peed all over it. The job, most of the people, the house, the cars, the late, great, incredibly soft Bobo Reale. He's seen a chunk of my adulthood that made me want to cower under my dining room table, and I'm thankful to have had his little furry body next to me for it, the nervous, ungrateful bastard that he is. He's our dog, Lou, the only one of his kind. Lucky us.

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.

In My Next Life I'd Like to Have Better Time Management Skills

Maybe then I'll find a way to mention in plenty of time that you can order something from this very special line of tee shirts, mugs and cards. It's perfect for Mother's Day. (Depending on the mother, as you'll see.)

Until my next reincarnation, have a happy day, mothers!