Overheard ... and seen

In the Las Vegas airport, waiting at the gate, over the public address system: "Will the Venezuelan aerobics team please report to baggage carousel 1! Venezuelan aerobics team ... baggage carousel 1! Thank you."

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In the San Francisco airport, waiting at the gate, from a early-twenty-something student doing some sort of high-tech internship, on the phone to him mom: "Frankly, Mom, I've learned ... wel, I've learned that Greg is not a very nice person. We're supposed to be sharing a rental car, you know, like you worked out with his mom, but he's always using it and never putting gas in and I don't even get to drive it. You have to call his mom, Mom. I've really changed my mind about him, Mom. I mean, well, I asked him to buy toilet paper because we ran out, and like, just to see what would happen, you know? And, it was like four days and he didn't buy any! What? ... That's not the point, Mom, don't even ask, okay? It was really gross."

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Munchkin, muttering to herself quietly, as she clambered up on a chair outside the C-B-, our weekend brunch spot: "This is the chair you sit in when you are sad. You sit with Mommy. On her knee. With a Kleenex. This is the chair you sit in when you are sad."

[Our brunch was marred by tantrums: when she would lose it, I would take her outside to sit on my lap and calm down, explaining that no one wants to listen to yelling toddlers when they are eating their brunch, and that she can't eat pancakes and cry at the same time, so we were just going to relax for a minute, and I would wipe her tears.]

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I put Munchkin's clothes on the line to dry. It feels good: the sun is warm and the wind is cooling and the grass is soft and damp under my bare feet; I remember my Mom hanging up our clothes when I was little; it's nice to take a little break from all the reading and writing and planning I'm doing, a simple physical task. I love how they look when I'm done:



A little line of shorts and tshirts and dresses, bright summer colours. I can see them from my kitchen, and from my office. It's soothing.

My sweetiepooper, my baby girl

I'm making lists, lists for home and lists for work, lists that keep the demon insomnia at bay, mostly. Lists encourage my daytime productivity: laundry! bibiographic database! call the contractor! pay residential taxes! rework conference paper! locate boarding passes! They also, though, play into my worst type-A perfectionist tendencies--these lists always have more items added to them than can ever be stroked off, they encourage speed-up, they make me think all tasks are equivalent and equally urgent. And so I try to figure how to order coursepaks (urgent task) and strip wallpaper (not at all urgent task) in the same day, at the same time as trying to plot out three floors worth of structural, plumbing, electrical, and cosmetic renovations to my house when trying to figure out if it's worth insulating either the attic or the second floor or the basement in the next twelve months to get my rebate if it blocks me from making changes later.

Wait. Wasn't this supposed to be a post about Munchkin?

And that's how it's been, lately, me caught up in a fog of urgent and not so urgent details, obsessed with trying to keep a tidy house, a clean house, an organized career while wondering how the hell I can't manage to find 30 minutes of quiet a day for tooth whitening strips.

I sat on the porch yesterday, eating my lunch and plowing through some Erma Bombeck (recall that I'm researching parenting memoirs now)--to be frank, it was a quasi-break. She's a light enough read, and her tales of mothering in the 60s and 70s seem remote to me in some ways: there are no toddlers in Bombeck's oeuvre. But then the sucker punch to the gut, right at the end of If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? Demurring at being called a comic writer, she describes her absolute shock and devastation at her own mother's aging and decline, and her children's growth to adulthood. There's a cheesy bit about not getting terrible handmade Christmas gifts anymore and I lost it.

I'm trying so hard to be everything I was when I was single--organized, tidy, ambitious, thin, stylish, perfect. I'm trying so hard to be everything I think I should be in my mid-30s--accomplished, sophisticated, on the upward track at work. What is happening is that to be these things I'm pushing back against what I most wanted all those years--love, a family, a home.

It's so trite but so true that I'm going to have a lot of years in front of me where no one will leave newspapers all over the dining room table, no one will litter every flooring surface with stuffed toys, mash tiny bags of cookies into powder on the front porch, wipe their boogery nose all over my silk wrap. I can be tidy and perfect later, can't I? The career fast track has many onramps, doesn't it? With four walls and a roof, the house is good enough to live in, isn't it?

I pulled myself together and pulled Munchkin out of daycare. God, she's getting so big, straining out of her 3x clothes now, stomping around like a dinosaur, jumping off the couch and narrating everything. We popped in to Daddy's office to tell him our plans: to the park to see the animals! play in the dirt! go to the grocery store!

I took a lot of photos. Some of them are blurry and imperfect, action shots, life whizzing by so fast:




Some have a tighter focus, character studies. This is the way I see her, the texture of her skin, the quality of an expression, the tilt of her chin, an inner silliness:



We had a wonderful time. I was patient and relaxed, and we just hung out. Three hours of mid-week ... time, together. We examined individual blades of grass, took off our sandals to shake the dirt out, climbed onto riding animals, turned our faces up to the blue sky on the vertiginous swingset. "I'm going really higher, Mom! Really higher!" She's giddy with the motion of it. "Wheeeee! I'm on the swing! Wheeee! It's my very favorite!"


Maybe the day was just too exciting. She woke up at midnight, whimpering from her crib. Still feeling somewhat raw and vulnerable myself, I padded into her room before Pynchon could get there. Patting her and soothing her, I couldn't believe the sheer length, the girlness of her, my onetime baby. "Pick me up," she asked, and Pynchon handed me a bottle, quietly, from the doorway, just like we used to do in another time, another house. We rocked in her chair, and she leaned back into my arms in a way she hasn't done for months, limp and compliant. "Drink, Munchkin," I reminded her as she let the bottle drop onto her chest. "No, you," she asked. And I fed her, feeling the shock of a reflexive, automatic posture gone out of use without my noticing.

Without my noticing. One minute she never leaves my side, and the very next, she swings out of view.


The rest can wait, can't it?

Privacy Survey

Shit shit shit.

I made 300 flyers for this, and I had them this morning, and now they're gone.

http://english.uwaterloo.ca/~ahm

Hotel rooms and cocktail parties

There's something soothing, stepping off the elevator into a wide, padded hallway, all the din and the ringing in my ears suddenly hushed and even my footfall disappearing into the silence of busy carpet patternining. Whoosh. The elevator doors close on all the partiers, all the women like me, with nice shoes and fluffed hair and happy smiles and raised voices. Now it's quiet.

I walk down the hallway and the all-encompassing quiet is profound and deeply, deeply calming.

Hooray, hooray, a dinner with my roomates, my absent friends and then a party! A party with giveaway bags and marketing reps but also with more absent friends and buoyed by Redneck and Motherbumper and Amy and Kyla and Bossy and Oh the Joys and Blooming Yaya and Jen and more more more friends I made last year, friends whose happy smiles and hugs of recognition make me comfortable enough to say hello to strangers, to extend my hand to people I've never met, never read, women at the edges of the groupings, clutching their drinks and scanning nametags. Hello. It's nice to meet you. Did you travel far?

I can't do that for long, especially on Pacific time after a mostly-sleepless week in Easter, and I'm tired. As I write this I hear a jazz saxophone echo down Powell street, and I people-watch from our fourth floor room. I let my fatigue settle. I think sleep might come easily to me tonight.

Here's something I'm thinking of: how do we get our selves in that perfect 'between' space, the one between no one is listening and so we don't bother to speak, and the one in which too many people are reading and we take care to moderate our voices? What's the sweet spot, where we are involved enough in a community to feel responsible to be honest and comfortable enough to be real but not so tied up in it that we start to hold back? Because don't we start, mostly, because those hard things, those whispered confidences and confessions, are the things we need to say? Because the social niceties and taboos are killing us?

That's probably not the best lead-out for tonight, but it's what I'm thinking about: how much I have gained from telling my life like it is, how much more I've gained from you all telling your lives as they are, your differences and your samenesses.

It's so nice to be here, here inside my blog and here, here in San Francisco with so many of my favorite bloggers. But the two spaces are different, this here and that here, and I'm trying to figure out how, complementary spaces, neither one the whole story, the full monty.

BlogHer! BlogHer! BlogHer!

Woo!

Tonight, I'm bunking down with Assertagirl in the wilds of Toronto's airport district so that we will each be assured of making our early early flights to San Francisco, where we will be bunking down in the Westin with Kyla. Woo! We'll be on the lookout for Bad and Diva in the deadly dull and never short US Customs and Immigration lineup at Pearson, and I'm sure we'll be collecting bloggers into our gravitational mass as the day proceeds.

Gosh, I'm all riled up!

The bag is packed (although now I think I might pull out one pair of shorts, one pair of pants, and a dress--I have a horror of overpacking, and I have to remember that there is swag to factor into the baggage allowance on the way home). The e-boarding passes are printed out. The confirmation numbers are written down.

Are you going? I'd love to see you there, if we've met already--and I'd love to meet you if I only know you digitally. Or is you are lurker and I don't, technically, know you at all :-)

Leave me your plans in the comments! I'll look for you!

This is what I look like when I'm in a huge crowd of people:



Nervous. And shy. I'll probably be stuck to Kyla and Amy, because, well, I already know them and so they're not scary (although, I didn't know them last year, and still I stuck to them. Let that be a lesson to you: watch out for me, I'm a clinger.)

Wheeeeeee!