For Cathy

Women will always be defined
by the people they surround themselves with.

It's always been this way.

From the first cave chick who scrambled
vulture eggs

to the next Prime Minister of Country So-And-So
to wear heels.

The only difference between then and now
is that we have a choice.

Imagine three paths:

Path One: You don't get married, you don't have kids,
you surround yourself with intellectual coworkers
and young urban friends. You drink every Friday and Saturday
night, and you read. And because you read so many interesting
articles and blogs and books, you know everything. Including
how to parent.
(You are a career woman.)

Path Two: You have a husband for a while. Maybe he dies. Maybe you
don't like his sorry ass, and you leave him. Maybe you realize you're
a sista. You travel. A lot. You know where the best restaurants are and
the bookstores with the biggest self-help sections.
(You are a spinster.)

Path Three: You go to college and major in something incredibly impressive,
like biology or computer science or engineering. You get married. You have a kid.
You are stripped of your dignity the first time your kid pounds on the door
and screams while you try to go the bathroom alone. You do not keep long hours
at work, which clearly exhibits a lack of commitment to the older folks. It amuses you to pick fights with your husband, just to keep life interesting.
(You are a mother.)

(If a salesman came up to you
and told you that he had a
once in a lifetime
experience
to sell you, and that this experience
would provide a concrete moral compass
for your life
so that deep in your bones
you would know
what is right
and what is wrong
what matters
and what is fluff...
and that this experience
would provide periodic waves of euphoria
and unbelievable feelings of gratitude,
but that in exchange,
you would question your very identity,
your energy would drain from your body
as if a vampire was sucking your blood
constantly
and that you may not ever again have
time to pluck your eyebrows -

would you buy it?)

So what's it gonna be?

Path One, Path Two, Path Three?

We chose Path Three. We bought motherhood, and maybe because our kids are small and helpless and need us for every basic human function, we have no other identity.

We'll raise our daughters. And one day our daughters will choose.

So what's it gonna be?

Path One, Path Two, Path Three?

Bedtime

dark, quiet, peaceful
i watched them
my four year old
putting my baby to sleep
they held hands
he smiled

a neon sign was above their heads
green and pink
blinking the message
"Duh, this is life's most important thing. Right here. Duh."
with a neon arrow pointing down
to my kids

she reached up to his nose
hooked a finger in his nostril
and yanked
he said ouch
she smiled
giggled a sleepy laugh
they're fighting already

Detour

Does God care more about the piss-ant town in the desert or the city, where the full-on press of people touch shoulders while their eyes bore into the sidewalk?

Fran wondered. Her husband's mind was closed to her. If she had to say whose mind she knew better, Oliver's or God's, she would say God's. She couldn't imagine Him up in the sky inhabiting every mind at once, shifting from Japan to China to Utah, and then deciding after weighing all the options to settle His gaze on her.

She sat on a cliff above the town, shoes off, toes in the grit and pebbles. It was noisy, but it wasn't. She thought she heard the highway twenty miles north, maybe a jake brake every once in a while. Western Kingbirds rushed the sun and lingered in the shade.

She smelled sage and sneezed.

If she were a betting woman, she'd put money on Him checking in on New York City, or at least somewhere on the East coast. She pondered the things all women ponder when they have a free moment:

apples
bananas
spaghetti (if she were back in New York the Italian deli would have the fresh pasta and marinara and she'd pick up some bread to go along with it)
but canned is fine, just fine
iron that shirt (and why Oliver started wearing plaid is beyond her)
organize the cupboard above the stove
send her daughter a birthday card (thirty two years already?)
psyche herself up for time with Oliver on the sofa tonight (she'd try not to be obvious about the fact that she'd rather be in the den reading a book)
butter
lemon
coffee cake
provolone
rye bread
batteries.

She traced a message for God in the sand, in case He happened to look there, then slipped her shoes on and walked to the grocery store.

Grumpy Monsters Bubbling Snot

If I were single, I'd be at my sister's house right now, a five hour drive away. But the reality is I have two sick kids and chose not to endure the long car ride with grump monsters bubbling snot in the backseat.

Kids are kids. They inspire love, panic, boredom, anger, amusement, resentment. The panic comes in two forms. When I've been away from them for too long - as I was on my business trip this week - I need to hold them, feel their physical presence, their breath, their heartbeats, touch a flesh-and-bone reminder that they are healthy and alive and I haven't through some long absence neglected my offspring.

The second sort of panic comes from constant care for them from sunrise to sunset and then again from midnight to three in the morning. And then again, from sunrise, with forty eight hours more stretched in front of me. My husband works long hours on the weekends, so Saturdays and Sundays my hands are full and my brain cannot disengage. Every waking moment I am responsible for two human lives. Taking a shower and exercising and plucking my eyebrows and spending more than four minutes on the toilet and reading a magazine and cooking a hot healthy meal and having the freedom to drive to the fucking liquor store and back are far off dreams of a time long before and a time that surely will not come again for at least five years.

I've experienced both kinds of panic this week. I've rushed home to crawl into the cage and hold my children and I've mentally bruised and bloodied my fingertips clawing at the iron bars.