Dear Dad

Dear Dad.

Things are moving fast now.  I've been running away, trying to ignore this darkness looming ever closer, even as I hear the footfalls louder behind me.  Now I turn around, ready to face it and it's already passing me by, slipping through my fingers faster than I can grab hold.  It shouldn't be this fast, all of this life and all of this death.  I need a minute to catch my breath, to gather my thoughts, but it's all going too damn fast.

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Dear Dad.

Did I ever tell you that my favorite picture of you is one from when you were in the army?  You're sitting on the ground, so young, with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and this cocky look on your face.  You look like you know everything.  You look like you are sure you're right.

You look like a pain in the ass.

It's my favorite.

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Dear Dad.

I will be okay.  The fire you say you see in me, it will keep going and I will keep writing and I will stay true to all of these things I believe in.  And I will be okay.

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Dear Dad.

I remember being very small and sitting in the bathroom with you, watching you shave.  I remember the smell of your neck when I would hug you.  I remember walking with you into Fenway Park for the very first time.  I remember that you can whistle louder than anyone I've ever met.  I remember that I couldn't wait to call you after First Born arrived, that it was 3 in the morning in Seattle and 6 in the morning here and I was aching and exhausted and thrilled and I couldn't wait to tell you.  I remember the look on your face when you first held him.

I remember.

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Dear Dad.

All is right between us.  There is no distance, there are no miles, there is no time lost.  There is only us now, where we find ourselves now, and that's a damned good place.

I know you would agree.

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Dear Dad.

Thank you for ordering me lasagna when I was 5 and making me try it.  That's good stuff.

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Dear Dad.

I am proud to be your daughter.

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Dear Dad.

When I was visiting when I was 15 or so and you let me go out with that boy who lived across the street (the paperboy), I'm pretty sure I lied to you and said that mom let me date.  She didn't yet.

Sorry.

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Dear Dad.

I want to tell you not to be afraid.

Except that I *am* afraid.  So, rather, I will say that I will be there, with you, even if my body is not.

I will be there.  

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Dear Dad.

Thank you.

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Dear Dad.

I love you.  

Candygasm

Today is the day after the day after Halloween.  This means I've gained 17 lbs in a day and a half because I've been eating Milky Ways for breakfast.

Also for lunch. 

And possibly dinner (which I do in secret so that my kids don't know I'm eating chocolate while they're eating green beans...sometimes being the parent is actually AWESOME.)
As this week goes on, the supply of good candy is going to start to dwindle, and no matter how many times I dig through the Big Bowl O'Sugar, the inferior candy will be all that remains.  Who am I talking about?

Does anyone ever choose Junior Mints over other forms of chocolate?  Have you ever met a kid who actually LIKED Junior Mints?  When my youngest was about 3, he insisted on trying one because he was certain it was an M&M, no matter how vehemently I tried to warn him otherwise.  He popped one into his mouth, immediately spit it out, and said to me, "Mama, this M-a-M yucky."  

Yes.  Yes, it is. 

There's an unspoken understanding that exists in our society about candy:  that it will taste good.  DOTS blatantly disregard that understanding, opting to go with a plasticy-chemically taste rather than any sort of deliciousness.  Why do Americans continue to buy DOTS when they so clearly violate the standards of candy decency?  We should be ashamed.

Oh, Tootsie Roll.  I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you're the candy we eat when all other candy options have been exhausted.  You're the candy we turn to because it's late and we're craving sugar, but we're too ashamed to admit to our friends that, yeah, I hit the Tootsie Roll last night.  We feel dirty and ashamed afterwards because you're never worth the calories, you're never actually a satisfying candy experience, and yet we inevitably find ourselves reaching for you in the middle of a cold, lonely night. 

But, chin up, Tootsie Roll, because it could be worse.  You could be your unfortunate cousins:

No one eats those ever.  They go right in the trash.  Feel better, regular Tootsie Roll?  Thought so.

A final word on candy, specifically, the misnomer that is 'Fun-Size'. 

I ask you this:  WHICH OF THESE LOOKS MORE FUN?

Dear Candy Manufactures:

Whoever told you that smaller = more fun has been lying to you.

Hopefully it wasn't your wife.

Sincerely,

Jenn

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Last night I sent my 7 year old son to take a shower.

Which he did.  For approximately a minute and a half. 

That would be roughly 24 minutes less than I spend in the shower.  I immediately stuck my head into the bathroom and asked him what was wrong.

He was already out of the shower and wrapped up in a towel, wet hair plastered to his head and dripping all over the bathroom floor.

"I'm done," he said.  Duh.

"Done?  Already?"

"Uh-huh."

"You washed your hair?"

"Uh-huh."

"And your body?"

"Uh-huh."

"Your whole body?"

"Uh-huh."

"With SOAP?"

This was apparently his breaking point because he yelled, "Yes!" in that tone that says, "Jesus Christ, woman, enough with the inquisition already!"  He may or may not have rolled his eyes, which normally would make me crazy but I was too tired to deal and wanted to hurry up to the part of bedtime that actually involves sleep, so we'll say that he did not roll his eyes.

(even though he totally did)

The idea that someone can adequately clean his entire body AND wash his hair in less time than it takes me to decide what I want on my pizza was baffling to me.  Until I compared our routines.

Here's how the 7 year old showers:

1)Wash hair with shampoo.  Rinse.
2)Wash body with soap.  Rinse.

Here's how MY shower goes:

1)Shampoo hair.  While shampoo does it's thing, shave one leg. 

2)Thoroughly rinse shampoo.  Thoroughly rinse leg.  Start singing.

3)Shampoo again (this would be the 'repeat' phase of the lather-rinse-repeat cycle).  Shave other leg.

4)Thoroughly rinse shampoo.  Thoroughly rinse leg.  Think about how awesome my voice sounds in my shower. 

5)Apply conditioner.***

***I feel it necessary to point out here that one is supposed to leave conditioner on for a bit so that it can properly condition.  This is the difference between easily being able to brush out my hair vs. spending twenty minutes trying to extricate said brush from aforementioned hair. 

In other words, this block of time is definitely not my fault.  IT SAYS SO ON THE BOTTLE.

6)While conditioner is conditioning, wash body with soap.  Shave some more (sorry, Paula Cole and Julia Roberts, I don't endorse your hairy-pit tendencies).

7)Rinse conditioner from hair.  (This takes a while.  You really don't want to do a half-ass job here, or else you're going to need to do this all again in about six hours because your hair will be greasy and gross.)  Forget what step I'm on, pick up shampoo, then realize my legs are both smooth, meaning I've already shaved them and therefore shampooed.  Congratulate myself on my awesome deductive reasoning skills and consider a career as a detective.

8)Wash body with yummy smelling body wash and poufy thingy.  Pretend not to hear sons yelling at each other on other side of bathroom door.

9)Wash face with facial scrub infused with small shards of glass (this is called exfoliation).

10)Rinse hair again to be really, REALLY sure all conditioner is out of hair.  Stand under hot water for two more minutes and analyze last night's dream.  Turn water off when son starts banging on door.  Grab towel quickly.

I should be glad that I have sons instead of daughters.  So long as he's clean, I can get behind this whole 2 minute shower business.

Because it leaves me with all the hot water.

Quicksand

When I was a little girl, I was terrified by the idea of quicksand (too many hours spent playing Pitfall, I suppose).  The very idea that one minute the ground would be solid beneath your feet and the next it could give way, crumbling beneath you, sucking you in, and then collapsing over your head, consuming you until the ground sealed back up and there was no evidence that you had ever been there at all...

Scared the shit out of me.

It would seem my fear was warranted.

Only now, as an adult, it's not just the notion of the ground giving way.  It's the very foundation of my life.

Marriage.  House.  Love.  Career. 

These things crumble beneath my feet with a speed so dizzying that I'm left breathless, jerked below the surface and crushed under the weight before there is even time to look for something to grab on to.  There is the whooshing sound of a vacuum I myself turned on, and the sudden disappearance of everything I once held certain.  It happens fast, this crumbling.

And I'm left in the dark, with the weight heavy on my chest, desperate for a breath of air, just a quick reprieve for a moment before trying to dig my way out. 

Perhaps I should take a moment and apologize to any reader who follows this blog for the funny posts.  I promise they will return at some point. 

But I began this blog with an interest in putting something genuine out into the world, a real experience in a world where very little feels real, very little feels authentic or like a true connection despite the supposed increased connectivity among us. 

Sometimes those experiences are funny.

And sometimes, they have very sharp, pointy edges that you cannot hide from. 

So bear with me while I look around for something to dig with.  Right now, I've got nothing.  But I'm fumbling around the dark for a shovel or a spoon. 

And there are always my own bare hands.




(okay, I feel like there should be some sort of grand ending to this.  I've got nothing, so I'll steal someone else's grand ending...)

With liberty and justice for all.

or...

A merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

or...

Play ball!

Yeah, any one of those will do.

Reading of the Names

Names are important. 

We spend months choosing just the right ones for our children.  We long to hear our own names whispered from those who love us.  We look the ones we ourselves love in the eye and speak their names so that they may hear it.  These names feel so at home in our mouths, on our tongues, our lips.  This is more than saying, "I love you."  It is saying, I love YOU.  Specifically, you. 

Today, more than 3,000 names will be spoken. 

Each name will spill forth from a living soul, sent out into the world on a breath of life borrowed from another.

Each name, so much more than a name. 

Each name representing a man, a woman, a child, the loved ones left behind, the holes left in hearts and lives.

Each name representing a life. 

We say, "Never forget."  We say, "I remember where I was..."

Speak the names. 

Speak the names of those lost.  Speak the names of those you love. 

Yell them, spill them out with a laugh, whisper them, call them, cry them.

But don't stop saying their names.

Mowing The Lawn (And Other Formerly Penilarily Held Jobs)

Let me start by saying, in order to alleviate any false hopes/fears about the topic of this post, that the mowing of the lawn referenced in the title refers to ACTUAL lawn mowing. 

It's NOT a euphemism for anything else (although I'll probably tackle that topic in a future post titled something like, "Holy Fuck In A Truck, I'm Single Again"). 

(also, making up the word 'penilarily' was way more fun than it probably should be for someone over the age of 17)

But for now, I'm talking about the literal mowing of the lawn.  Which is something that, in my thirty-coughcough*ahem*cough years, I've never actually done before. 

I'm not sure how it is that I've never had to do this before.  Maybe it's because I lived at home (yay, stepdad!), then lived in apartments (yay, landlords!), and then my house (yay, husband!) so it was just always...done.

However, now that I'm separated, it would appear that this job now falls to me.

Because there's all this grass in my yard.  And, well...

It keeps growing.

I keep hoping it will stop, or that maybe one morning I'll wake up and it'll just be, I don't know, shorter or dead (seriously, it was like 900 degrees last week, how it's not burned to a Shredded-Wheat crisp is beyond me) or something like that where I won't have to actually DEAL with it. 

This is generally my go-to method for coping with such things.  I also use this for problems including (but not limited to):  That Weird Noise My Car Is Making, That Weird Smell In the Basement, and My Mom.

It pretty much works about as well in those situations as it does with the Grass Growing Dilemma.

Lawn mowing is not the only formerly penilarily held job that now rests in my hands. 

*beat*

FOR INSTANCE:  I'm now the primary bug killer in the house.  I'm okay with this when it comes to things like tiny little ants (I'm talking about a few here.  Like, less than 10.  Any number higher than that makes me think of scary movies my stepdad used to watch involving thousands and thousands and thousands of bugs or other creepy-crawly things swarming on people's faces in places like the shower.) 

Holy crap am I itchy now. 

Also, I'm down with spiders of the itsy-bitsy variety. 

But anything with a stinger, pincher, biter, more legs than I have dollars in my wallet right now (which would be about TEN, oh ye Muggers and Robbers of the world), or larger than a baby's fingernail, and we've got a problem. 

Also.

We get mice.

It's not that my house isn't clean.  It's simply that it's older and located outside, and so...

Mice Happen.

Perhaps, if I were a cat or an owl or a snake or anything else but a female human, I would enjoy this whole mouse-hunting business far more than I do.  But the whole reason I live in a house as opposed to, say, a wigwam or a Swiss-Family-Robinsonesque Tree House, is to put a little distance between myself and all Creatures That Roam The Earth. 

Really, the only mice I want to interact with are the ones who run around making pretty dresses at night singing "Cinderelly". 

However, I've yet to wake in the morning to a new dress. 

Mouse poop?  Yes. 

Fitted A-line ball gown?  Not so much.

And then, finally there is the tra-

OH SHIT.

I FORGOT TO PUT OUT THE TRASH. 




(Author's Note:  Twenty bucks says that someone will land on this post because they Googled the words 'mice' and 'fuck'.  People are MESSED. UP. YO.)

These Little Earthquakes

It’s funny, the things you hold on to; the things you save because they remind you of a particular time, a particular place, a particular person.

Or, maybe, a particular version of yourself.

Trinkets. Tickets. Trifles. Things that would be meaningless to anyone else, but that hold so much weight in your own hand, you can barely stand to touch them.

I once had a plain wooden box, chosen specifically to belie the importance of its contents. I filled it with a thousand different words, as much of my soul as I could spill on to paper.

I filled it with things.

Into this box went a dried flower, a tiny key on a blue string, a thin silver key ring, the pink empty shell of what was once a balloon, a seashell, a napkin with quick, hasty words scribbled across it. Things that would look like trash to anyone else.

But to me, they were things to hold on to, to touch, to open up and remove and say, “Remember when?”

Now I am grown.

Now I sit, alone, on the edge of my bed.

In my hand lies a tiny pink heart-shaped box, made for me by my 7 year old for Mother’s Day, with the word MOM written in blue marker.

I run my fingers across the top, skipping along the tiny beads so meticulously glued on.

There is no box large enough to hold what I’m trying to put away this time.  There is only the physical evidence we have left behind: this house, these children, this life.

These rings.

I'm surprised by the sound they make, the reality of their weight, as I plunk first one (my hand is stretched out against the steering wheel, the sun bouncing off of this new diamond ring, throwing light in a thousand different directions, a thousand different possibilities for this life we're about to start), and then the other (take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity) into the tiny box. I put the top on quickly, afraid they might jump back out at me, grow teeth, and sink themselves deep into my flesh, cutting so deep as to never stop bleeding, never scar over, never heal.

And then I push the box into the back of my drawer, buried under bathing suits and sports bras.

As if they can be hidden.

As if I will forget that they are there. As if, every time I open that drawer, I won’t feel my heart race just knowing they exist, knowing that I could reach my hand in and pull the box out and open the lid and face the sadness that threatens to swallow me whole, face it straight on.

Look it in the eyes. Stare it down. Break under it. Conquer it.

But I will do none of these things.

Instead, I will leave the box buried beneath the bathing suits and sports bras.

I will walk out of my empty bedroom.


And then, quietly, I will close the door behind me.