~my life as i see it~

75

2012-01-30T23:25:00.000-08:00

my dad turned 75 this weekend. although that's not technically true. because his birthday is tomorrow. there was a huge party and lots of food and the largest number of retired detectives i've ever seen in one place. i heard vague references about my dad's life as a cop and i forget sometimes that he wasn't always closer to the end than the beginning and i think that maybe there was a moment that afternoon where he forgot why he was there and i can only imagine him looking out at this sea of old, familiar faces and wondering where the time went. was it in the yellow ballon? or did the blue one hold the years, weighted down. he held my kids, his two youngest grandchildren and i felt eighteen for a minute. a feather of an adult, preening for him.
he has parkinson's. it is aging him faster than normal wear and tear.
i am my father's youngest child. by years. he still calls me his 'baby' and i still soak it in when he says it and smile. and i float in the sunlight near the ceiling.

the words. they are restless.

2012-01-22T22:46:00.000-08:00

my words are all restless right now. i feel them, dancing around issues and knocking over glasses but i can't seem to get them to explain to me why they are here in the first place and why they won't just sit down. in alphabetical order. i feel that if i pluck one of them from the back of my head, a story might sprout. but i just tried it and all of these other words were attached to the space between and i couldn't untangle them so i put them in the pile of christmas tree lights that haven't quite made it to their proper storage space.i have observations about my daughter's new habit of throwing a fit at bedtime, my son's newly developed ability to eat mashed bananas and avocado. the fact that i have a daughter and a son in the first place makes me feel like writing letters to strangers. but these words. they just won't stop circling around. they will not gather themselves together. so i'll just let them rest.less.

boundaries

2012-01-17T00:07:00.000-08:00

it's in the seventies during the day. finn is learning about the seasons at school and she sees pictures of snow and talks about ice skating. she asks if it will be snowing when she wakes up tomorrow. how about after? what about after that? i tell her that no, it won't snow here. we could drive to snow and bryan shakes his head with his eyebrows scrunched and i smile because i know we are the people who want to have the family excursion of driving to the snow to watch her play in frozen dirt and mud for ten minutes before deciding she is too cold and wants to go home. but we aren't really those people, if we're being completely honest. i am in my pajamas. i have been in my pajamas all day. this is the type of people we are. the type of people who think 'oh crap' if there is a knock at the door because what if we won publisher's clearinghouse and i answered the door with my breast milk stained tshirt and camera bulbs flashed. do they even have publisher's clearinghouse anymore? i would still enter except for the fact that someone read my palm once and told me i thought i was luckier than i actually am.
we learn a lot about ourselves when we have children, yes? like my flash of bright white overreaction when finn denies something i know she just did. looks me right in the eye and says 'no.' bryan's bubbling over when she ignores him when he's talking to her. we both know these are our issues, not hers. that we teach her more about herself by the way we react to the worst parts than by the praise she gets for using her kind words. that our broad, sweeping generalizations about her being in 'big trouble' fall into her palms with the same weight of not being allowed to have one more juice box. we all have our boundaries.yesterday she walked into the bathroom while i was in the shower. and she said 'mommy i love all of your parts. i love your heart. i love my heart.' and i remember that she isn't even four yet. her boundaries are paved with juice boxes and markers on furniture. mine are paved with the intention of prevention. and trying to explain that even though it doesn't snow in los angeles, it still snows. in winter. and that, yes, we can go there. 'after this day? how about after that?

socially awkward butterfly

2012-01-11T22:46:00.000-08:00

last weekend i drove two hours to attend a surprise party for a friend i've known since junior high. strapped the baby to my chest when i got there and stood, rocking, talking to people i hadn't seen in years. people who got babysitters for their kids and who weren't nursing. i felt misshapen, stretched out. i couldn't remember how to have a conversation that didn't include talking about children. yet i cursed like a sailor and waved the sarcastic banter flag because i felt awkward and postpartum wearing my one pair of jeans that fit. the baby's flailing arm connected with a friend's glass of wine and left her soaked and it wasn't funny like when you're young and drunk and stumbling. i was the lady with the baby at the party knocking over drinks. i didn't stay very long.

driving home, i was struck by something. it wasn't melancholy. it wasn't regret. it was something liquid, metallic. it shined and it smudged and lay on the passenger seat the entire two hours home.
and the thing is this:
i haven't yet reconciled being a mother and being me.
i mean, i know how to be myself around my kids. and i have never been more myself in a relationship while still having room to change and grow. and yet. i'm a bit in flux, i think. as a person. my body is somewhat hijacked because bearing children is amazing, yes. but it is also somewhat traumatic. it takes time to recognize yourself. i never quite got there after finn and then i got pregnant again. i didn't last this long nursing with finn. this time around, it's amazing and beautiful and awesome and yet i feel in limbo. like my body is on loan and i've never been a fan of living out of boxes.
this unsettled feeling is strangely comforting and humbling and i'm not sure how to wear my newly stretched out skin just yet. i'm not sure what i will look like when this is all over and i am at a point in my biological timeline where my skin and my hair and my nails need to be tended to. not expected to take care of themselves anymore.
i document the tiny moments in my life and i lose friends on facebook because all i post pictures of is my kids. but i can't help it.
right now? my life?
this is what i DO.
THIS is who i am.
there is more to me than the things my children say and clogged milk ducts and grey hairs. but the more is somehow less than. at least for right now.
i can't help it.
so, if you happen to see me out. at a party. somewhere.
i apologize if you ask me how i am and i tell you a story about my kids.
this is what i DO.
THIS is who i am.

this is the year

2012-01-05T23:50:00.000-08:00

this is the year. not because of anything that might make sense to a scientist. not because of the mayan calendar or preconceived notions or new year's resolutions. it's just...the year.
two kids and done. tubes are tied. i turned a corner and the year changed and all of a sudden i'm swinging from the rafters toward forty and realizing that perhaps i should harness up all that i know in case i need to use it one day. then again, i just had to google 'toward vs. towards' because i found myself with mouth pursed and brow furrowed, left ring finger hovering over the 's' key longer than necessary and i got sidetracked into wondering what i would have done without google and if the dawn of all of this technology has made me more or less intelligent.
this is the year where i start to see my daughter as someone. not just as some mysterious creature taking shape but as the little girl who will become a young woman who will start remembering most of her childhood from here on out. this is the year i have to get it right so that all of the other years will balloon out in the right direction.
this is the year my tiny baby boy will walk and talk and become a toddler. and while he toddles i will slow down and cry at each milestone because (a) it will be the last milestone of that kind for me and (b) i am such a fucking cliche.
this is the year i will make soap by hand. because pinterest showed me how. i will close certain chapters and maybe write new ones and i will continue to unload a verbal barrage upon bryan when he walks in the door at the end of the day because i've been dying to unload the nonsensical garbage i've read online while the kids are resting. i will plan more art projects than i have time to do, i will photograph even the most mundane of moments with obsession. i will continue to make grand plans for the future that include vacations and potential tattoos and new gadgets for the kitchen. i will make pasta or butter from scratch and then wonder why i ever felt the need to do so.
this is the year i will make good on my promise to bryan to write.
this is the year i will write.
this is the year i will write.
this is the year i will write.
this is the year i will remember that i always said life would begin in my thirties and realize i was wrong.
it's forty.
this is the year.

so this is the new year

2012-01-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

i couldn't remember what day it was this morning. i thought maybe monday. i dreamt of dogs and kidnapping and cameras and wet sand and i spent a solid 1/4 of my dreaming trying to find a lost baby. my mind snapping like a flashbulb trying to remember where i put him. who had him last. trying to rewind the tape and i woke up with the baby right next to me and when i nursed him he bit me.
if i hadn't checked facebook last night i could have easily overlooked the fact that it was new year's eve. i watched a documentary about the salton sea and thought about when my dad and step-mom took me fishing there and we camped in the middle of the desert and i coudn't stay in my tent because of the sand storm. i spent one whole afternoon dipping myself in the water like an ice cream cone and watching the rings of salt dry on my bathing suit. i was still so young, round belly and spindly arms. i have pictures of myself holding fish and i remember how desolate and brown the water felt. how warm. i never knew the desert could smell so wet. there were no waves, just water and sand. and wind. and heat. we cooked the fish we ate and i didn't enjoy it as much as i enjoy the memory. then again, i'm not a desert girl. with or without an oasis.
funny how the perfect spot to create a desert oasis turned into a mirage after all.
we made family goals this year. well, individual goals. as a family. because we are the sum of our parts. and our parts are full of possibility and we know that the only way to keep ourselves afloat amid all the chaos and runoff is to each have our own dock. our one combined goal is to make/craft something together as a family once a month. i already have art projects bookmarked and yet i'm thinking that there might be months when we need to craft hope or love or patience. and that the tangible result of these things might look less like art.
but more like home.

tis the season

2011-12-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

the day after the day after christmas and we are in pajamas still. i am drinking my body weight in eggnog and finn is dancing. dash is laying on me fighting a nap, smiling. i am typing with nine fingers.
the day before the day before christmas i was chopping cilantro with a mediocre knife. i am now missing a portion of the nail on my left pointer finger. wow, your knives must be so sharp, i was told.
no. they are dull. but at least i have a good example of irony to add to my arsenal.
in a serendipitous stroke of christmas magic, my in-laws gifted us a set of fancy knives this year. we laughed in the warm pocket of want meeting need.

christmas this year was small, intimate. up close. spread over three days with pockets of family and friends sprinkled throughout. gifts were a hybrid of bought and handmade and the kids and i shared a cold. we ate chicken enchildada soup (the scene of the finger hacking crime) and brussel sprouts. italian sub sandwiches on christmas eve and homemade sourdough bread. christmas morning was strata (made by bryan's stepmom and seriously. make this now. you can thank me later.) and fruit salad. an italian feast on christmas night. we stayed up too late on christmas eve and stretched out of bed like taffy when finn yelled I GOT A BIKE! at early o'hundred.

we spent our first christmas as THIS family. and i took pictures. of the moments big and small. to try and have something tangible to go along with the feathery movements that are stuffed in my ribcage. to have something to hold as evidence. so that when i grow fragile and childlike again in my twilight years, i will notice the colors painted in between the breaths and i will think to myself that this year was the best christmas yet.
until the next one.

love. thumbs up.

2011-12-19T23:11:00.000-08:00

driving in the car, listening to the radio. or music. whatever. she will pick words out of the air and ask me how to spell it. i sound out the syllables, ask her what letter makes that sound. slowly make our way through word after word. i hear myself explaining how the 'c' and the 'k' sometimes make the same sound.
yes, mommy. but sometimes they don't.
she likes to practice her letters. she will ask us to dictate the spelling of words to her and she will write them out, noticing how the certain letters strung together make a garland of words that mean one thing and sometimes another. she is a gust of wind away from reading. i can see it rounding the corner. like a large bristled broom moving letters haphazardly into a pile. pretty soon she'll be able to look at that pile, leaves in the bottom of a cup, and see stories.
until then, i will always answer when she asks me how to spell love.

and thumbs up.

why i should always make a list

2011-12-12T22:09:00.000-08:00

i wish my checking account was a game on the price is right. i would stand on stage and move the numbers around until, intuitively, i feel they're right. and then i win a car.
in related news, we are out of butter and parmesan. toilet paper. wipes.

i left the house today with the kids. bribed finn with a carousel ride for her best behavior in target. it mostly worked. carried a 15 lb baby on my chest and let finn walk next to the cart. now i know why those moms have that look on their faces. i gave in to the bag of goldfish crackers. i circled the two story target three times, trying to remember why i was there in the first place.
i bought eggnog.
i forgot the butter.

finn asked me about heaven and dead people this morning. while eating her life cereal. i thought for a moment about commenting on the irony because i figured that would be easier to explain than the real issues. that i can't promise her i won't die tomorrow. that i can't promise her anything that has to do with life or death because those aren't the rules. she doesn't know that yet. on this thursday in december. 2011. that sometimes life makes no sense and hurts like a motherfucker and santa can't make that go away. she doesn't know that. not yet. i begin to formulate an age appropriate way to have this conversation when she switches to bodily functions and where and how they come out.

on the way home from the store we got caught in a hailstorm. i was so excited. i mean, it's los angeles. we never see ice. then i heard sirens and flashing lights and finn waved at the firetruck as it passed. dash looked out the back window, his eyes blinking with the pummeling of water and ice on the roof. i held the steering wheel like a glass flower and thoughts of freezing oceans and crashing metal curled up on the dashboard.

that's right about the time i realized i forgot the damn butter.

twenty years

2011-12-10T08:06:00.001-08:00

twenty years. he has been gone for twenty years.
a blink, a wrinkle. and yet, forever.
when i was little, my dad always had a camera with him. or the large camcorder that looked like a boombox with a lens. he used to record random things, like hanging out and eating lunch.
we used to mock him at the time.
recently, we watched some of them at my dad's house. my sister and her family and my little family. there he was. smiling at the camera, laughing, just being himself. he had long curly hair, jeans, tshirts. bare feet most times. at one point, i am standing on a sidewalk with him. i am about 12. my dad makes a comment about his unruly hair, about cutting it. a running joke between my conservative police officer father and my hippie of a brother. i rush to his defense leave him alone. he looks great. no one, not even my father, was allowed to criticize him.
he was my hero.
he was everyone's favorite.
i can still hear his laugh, i can smell him.
i was around four when this picture was taken.
my daughter is nearing four right now.
there are times when i think...
she sure would have loved him.

updated to say: i suppose i should have been more clear. i'm talking about my brother. dad is still alive and well. xo

training wheels

2011-11-30T22:28:00.001-08:00

i had forgotten. the click. the flash. the edison bulb moment.

different family members lent me their afternoons when i was young, attempting to teach me how to ride a bike. i did not learn well. patience was short on my end. i frustrated easily. if i couldn't master it the first time, i didn't even want to try again. i may have told you this before. the quilt of my childhood stories borrows from the same fabric in a new corner.
i cried. and screamed. and threw tantrums all over the oval of concrete that wrapped the island of cars in our condominium complex. i fell. and didn't want to keep trying. my ego was my saving grace as well as my downfall. because i was ashamed of failing. and yet i could not live with the idea that my best friend learned before i did. i was comfortable knowing that we were both incompetent. the first time i saw her ride in a circle around our building, i walked up to her mom and asked for the other bike. i got on. and i rode. and rode. and rode. and we screamed and clapped and i remember how i felt so proud of myself. because it clicked.

she has been playing with scissors. does not want help or instructions. yet her fingers would put the scissors on backwards, upside down. the paper would catch. it wouldn't cut. i would guide my hand and show her the snapping face of thumb and fingers, paper eating ~~monster~~ princess. the minute i tried to help her she would shake her hands free and tilt her head to the side. i don't wanna do it. no, no. i don't wanna do it. and she would walk away and find something else to occupy herself with. occupy drawing. occupy blocks. occupy anything but being told how to do something by one of us. so we offered help but let her walk away when she wanted. two days ago, the edison bulb lit itself. there are scraps of paper all over the floor. and she went from cutting jagged edges in the morning to this one is rectangle and this one is giraffe. look, mommy! i cut out a nose for the princess. and her hair. no, not that. that's just a square.

the edison bulb.

the best laid plans

2011-11-24T08:34:00.001-08:00

we spent the holiday at home. just the four of us. bryan and i cooked all day long. everything from scratch. from start to finish. spending the morning at the beach put us a little behind schedule.

i had grand plans for dinner. one by one talking about what we are thankful for. candles and holding hands and taking a moment to pause for thanks before eating. but we don't have any candles in the house and i couldn't get finn to even sit in her seat like a normal human being much less pose for a kind and gentle photo.

it was less of an event and more like a weeknight dinner that took too long to make.

tonight, we finished the leftovers. smiled and gave thanks and laughed and talked. it felt more like thanksgiving than thanksgiving itself. i didn't take any photos of dinner tonight.

but i will remember it. and i am thankful.

exhale

2011-11-15T22:49:00.001-08:00

everyone in the house is sleeping and i'm on my way to bed. but cheeto starts crying because she's hungry. so i pad downstairs and all of a sudden, i'm overwhelmed. with love. and gratitude. and the absolute conviction that i am so glad i get to be me.
wearing my hospital socks, given to me right before i gave birth. they are lightweight enough to not make me crazy and have grippers on the bottom. your toddler socks, as bryan calls them. exactly.
my cat is old and starting to look frail and grey. i watch her move and picture the natural history museum and talking notes about dinosaurs. around the corner is extinction and the natural order of things but she is here and opening every cupboard she can find in the middle of the night to get my attention. she picks books off the bookshelves in the middle of the night and i talk to her in the morning when i put them back. how did you like that one? science fiction, really? be careful, that one has cats in it. but they are just metaphors.
i made a delicious dinner the other night. totally redeemed myself after the burnt crock pot fiasco. and we found the best mexican food in the valley. i can't get away from the carnitas. my delicious dinner was also a slow cooked pork. maybe there is something to that.
i watched my children tonight and took a deep breath. looked at them. and tried to memorize the smallest details so that i could tell them later that in november of that year, finn had a propensity for making up her own words and she surpassed my drawing skills by miles. dash was awake more than he was asleep and he still preferred listening to his sister talk to him above anything else. i spent those moments realizing that they are here and they are healthy and their scars are still small. formed by putting away art supplies and not enough treats (for her) and dirty diapers and not being held (for him.) and i am so full of gratitude it feels like a sunburn, blistered and peeling and turning colors.

the middle

2011-11-09T21:47:00.000-08:00

last night i was commenting on a couple blogs. a rarity these days. i tend to read and not say much. it happens.
part way through a comment, i realized something was amiss. i couldn't leave a comment.
i clicked over to my blog.
deleted.
my blog was deleted.
a minor setback. i mean, it's not a pulitzer prize winning novel or a stunning dissertation on the effects of modern media on young men and women and the ways in which they conduct themselves in relationships. it's not even worth the cost of printing, really. but still, it's mine. my little corner where i sit and type and never edit and use improper punctuation. on purpose. without shame.
but it could be replaced.
then.
my gmail account. disabled.
no email. no contacts. nothing. and just a robot to email to figure shit out.
i felt like someone cut off my thumb and then told me to snap.
clearly, it all worked out.
best guess? i was hacked. because i was able to go in and retrieve my password (which hadn't been working) and change it before i lost everything. as soon as i did that, my blog (attached to my account via google) was back. and i spent the rest of the night changing passwords and compartmentalizing. ~might i suggest using google's new(ish) two-step authentication service? it might come in helpful one day.~

but it got me thinking.

about the way i take things for granted. about the level of control i think i have at any given moment. about the moments right before someone tells you really bad news that changes everything.
things like losing my email make me think about my children. because i assume i should have known better than to trust the internet. and if i forget, how easily will they?

it's no wonder i burned dinner tonight. dinner i was making in a crock pot. i'm the fool. proving wrong.

but the middle. there is always the middle.
between the drama of technology and charred food, we spent the afternoon in the park.
and before we left, finn says 'i like it here. i love my family.'
me. too.

what bubbles to the surface

2011-11-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

these faces, these many faces. i know them well. and yet each time i see them, i find myself surprised. i read them and note how the raise of an eyebrow or the glint of a smile means one thing. and not the other. i play them like stop-motion before i sleep and categorize them by color. purple ones have short bursts of questions, sentences lilted. blue are muffled. yet warm. maybe my colors are not the same as yours.

dash is a filter for synapse. his brain, his face. bundles of nerve endings with no inhibition. he laughs and cries at the same time and doesn't apologize for it.
one of the greatest games we play is watching what bubbles to the surface.

finn is a performer. she writes her own songs, gives new meaning to spoken word. her dancing is inspired and her imagination is paved with multi-faceted stones and newly minted words. point a camera at her and she will move with each click of the shutter.
one of the greatest games we play is watching what bubbles to the surface.

i look at pictures of myself before i had children and i see different faces entirely. this has less to do with age and weight fluctuation than with expressions, windows. depths of pools. i used to wear the burdens of my past mistakes and regrets like a badge, i wore my childhood like a silk sash on windy days. i could not possibly see what i would look like after children of my own. the scars on my body and the warrior wearing thunder like a bracelet. my face is less at peace than before, yet more peaceful. i am rippled with the honor of too much love. it doesn't always suit me well. sometimes, in fact, i think i twist it too hard trying to wring it dry and it wrinkles and needs washing. i am constantly shocked by how much fear and love and frustration and joy can simmer under the top layer of my skin at any given time. this is the armor we wear as parents, yes? we hold it all in behind a hammered shield.
one of the greatest games we play is watching what bubbles to the surface.

~just write~

tuesday morning - just write

2011-11-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

the candy fairy stopped by last night. took a look at finn's basket of halloween loot and decided it warranted a very special present. a strawberry shortcake doll, to be precise. because my little princess loving girly girl is newly obsessed with strawberry shortcake. perhaps i encourage it because i smell that artificial strawberry scent wafting off the plastic doll parts and i feel like i am a little girl with op shorts and stacked multi-colored sandals riding my bike in circles around the parked cars in the cul de sac we used to live in. i am knocking door to door selling girl scout cookies, enough to win the regional contest and they take my picture for the paper but i'm mostly excited about the ginormous chocolate easter bunny they gave me. less excited about the lily that stands taller than my head when i hold it. but i remember my mom exclaiming how beautiful it was.
finn got the hang of trick or treating this year. would stand and sift through the baskets of candy at each door and choose one piece that she loved. they would tell her she could take one more. how about two more? they would giggle and tell her she was adorable. thank you, she said, her hands full of chocolate. she ended up with a bucket that weighed about 10 pounds and would have kept going if we hadn't called it quits. the next morning we carefully laid out her loot and organized it and she picked out her favorite pieces. all non-chocolate pieces were cut in the first round. i learned two things from this exchange:
she trusts us when we tell her things.
she is a malicious negotiator.
whoever said that taking candy from a baby was easy didn't have a three year old with a sweet tooth.

~just write~

coffee and avocados

2011-10-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

i've been dreaming. airplanes with bedrooms. laying in bed with a nursing baby and we hit turbulence and i think oh, crap. we aren't strapped in. my subconscious got into a fight with john mayer at dusk. he yelled at me because i didn't like his music and he thought we were supposed to be friends. i told him if he wanted a groupie, he should look in the alley. as his friend, i wouldn't mind some blues now and then but if anybody's body was going to be a wonderland...and i can't remember how i ended that sentence but i know it was witty and worthwhile. and i wonder why i can't even document the perfect comeback. even though it sits in my memory. my barbs. they are fly fishing and don't usually catch anything. but it's not about the end result, is it?
is it cliche to ask you if you've ever thought of the right thing to say but the right moment already passed? is it cliche to ask you questions when i don't even know who is reading this? (except mom. hi mom.) it's a bit passive aggressive, yes? or expected. at the very least it is unoriginal.
i write emails to a dead friend on facebook. whenever he pops into my head. sometimes they are angry emails. sometimes not. a part of me wonders if he is reading them. like maybe there is an internet cafe somewhere between here and where your lungs explode if you're not wearing a suit and he is sitting there, smelling like roses and smoking a cigar. i wonder if he gets to drink coffee while he reads. this sounds crazy, i know. but i grew two human beings inside myself and i am supposed to accept that without worry.
my daughter fell asleep in the car on the way home from school yesterday. when we got home, i undid her carseat buckle and her head rolled over my way. mommy? my shoes are just fine. have a good weekend.
it's saturday and i'm going to eat avocado. i am going to drink coffee. i am going to dream about people i don't know or ever think about in real life and i'm going to email a few dead people.
i'm going to have a good weekend.
because my shoes are just fine.

tuesday morning - just write

2011-10-25T09:29:00.000-07:00

she always asks for cereal and doesn't eat it. but she says she will. so i offer scrambled eggs and she says yes. but they sit on her plate and she smiles when i ask her why she's not eating them. they're cold, she says. i have tried to bribe her and threaten her and she's three years old and she tells me um, um, mommy? do you know why this sticker is orange? her brain lights up like sparklers and chinese new year and her mouth spits out words with shocking clarity, syllables and synapses dancing together and i wonder when exactly she learned how to correct her own grammar. we have dance parties at night and right now it is adele's new album and track number two is her favorite. boomer has it, she sings. rumor has it, i say. but WHY, mommy? why is it roo-mer? and i take a deep breath because we have reached a point now where i have to actually give her the correct answer to questions because she is silly putty. she will later stretch herself out and show what she learned and if i am not careful the words will get mixed up and she will tell her teacher how she drove to target with mommy and teacher? what's a douchebag? she picks out her own clothes and gives us a running update in the car of what her baby brother is up to. he's sleeping, mommy. daddy? the baby is sleeping. she kisses him over and over and over and he still lights up like the fourth of july when she walks in the room.

~just write~

pea. meet pod.

2011-10-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

he started smiling two weeks ago. but only for her. we didn't get ours until a few days ago.
she has this ability to stop his screaming and crying just by whispering in his ear. or she will sing and dance in front of him, making up songs and stories and he coos and giggles and i just know.
he didn't choose us.
i am pretty sure he chose her.

tuesday morning

2011-10-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

i'm sitting here drinking lukewarm day old decaf coffee and it's not bad. i mean, i should know better. i've been taught about the differences between subtle flavors and grades and yet i still cannot distinguish between the good and the bad. it's as though i am looking at a thomas guide but i don't know what page to turn to because the next page over is in another county and that just doesn't make any fucking sense. why is the map in book form? and why am i the only one who doesn't get it?
it's exhausting. this trying to understand the world the way that others see it. because sometimes i see things in the clouds and i don't think anyone else gets them. i can't seem to pull anyone into my hallucination and it makes me feel utterly alone. and i know that i am not alone. not like my friend who is fighting for her relationship. not like my friend who just lost her husband. not like my friend who just watched her boyfriend die. not like...not like...not like...there are so may ellipses to fill out and i wonder how three little dots can hold so much weight. how they can be so positive with their implied meaning of on and on and on and yet sometimes it just means that the shit keeps piling up on itself and there is no one there with a shovel. just someone taking pictures to sell to a magazine to show the state of the world we're in.
but all i really want to do today is paint my nails. with glitter.
and finish my coffee before it gets too cold.

~just write~

this week.

2011-10-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

it rained today.

2011-10-05T23:55:00.000-07:00

i am sometimes too honest. too open of a book, the spine cracked and flat. the skin on my forearms pinned open, exposed. but that doesn't tell the story, does it? you cannot look at my veins and know what the blood tastes like unless you stick your lips to the wound.
i am sometimes full of secrets. tattooed in white ink. you would miss them if you weren't paying attention. or you might think they are just scars. beautiful, handwritten scars. occasionally, i will allow a secret some air. for a moment. but then i will tuck her back away and she will ferment. she will turn into something else entirely. she will age.

i learned of a friend's passing through social networking. the new game of telephone is a laptop and a wireless internet connection. and i was punched in the gut. shocked. we were co-workers. friends. years and years ago. we met back up for a bbq about four years ago (if not more) and yet it seems like not so long ago, you know? four years or four months. i'm sure when i am in my last days i will not be able to understand how time winds itself like a fishing rod. it will be slack, in the wind, touching water and i will think we are only an afternoon away from talking when really we're all one open window away from falling. it is not only sad and tragic that he has passed. so young. and so sudden. with a wife and kids and so much left to do. but i say that and think about things like seizing the day and making shit happen and instead i find myself driving for four hours in the rain today and getting lost and getting nothing accomplished except making it home safe. which is something, considering i witnessed one accident and drove past four others in the course of one morning. los angeles panics when it rains.

i believe in extenuating circumstances. in the exception to the rule. i before e except after c makes sense. doesn't it? but then i got lost on the freeway this morning because seeing all of those accidents threw me off my game and i gripped the steering wheel like a witness to a crime, focused ahead and breathing slowly. until i realized i was headed downtown. and i needed to be going the opposite direction. my sense of what is true and what i know sometimes slips right under me and i can focus on the common laws of good driving but my grasp of direction becomes tenuous and then i realize i have my two children in the car and somewhere out there, in the hundreds of cars riding bumper to bumper there are people fighting and people making up and people having the absolute worst day of their life. there are tears at stoplights and horns with fists and i let go of the fact that my daughter will not make it to preschool on time and that we will be late for my son's doctor's appointment and we end up getting chocolate chip pancakes in the pouring rain and i listen to coldplay's second album and it reminds me of a time when i did not have little people to take care of and for some reason this calms me.

i thought about dead people a lot today and listened to a medium on the morning radio show talk about how she was feeling the energy from a brother and he told her the person was in a car. and although she was telling this to someone else, i pretended for a minute it was me. and i felt better. i hydroplaned a bit but didn't leave my lane. i made it home. the rain stopped. and i went to the grocery store like a normal person. and while i fondled an eggplant i said a little silent prayer for my friend that died. and i thought about all of my secrets, all of my honesty, all of my extenuating circumstances.
i thought about being the exception to the rule.

almost forty

2011-10-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

i still do it. start. and then stop. and think fuck, i'm almost forty.

yesterday, i ventured out of the house and went to a department store with my mom and two kids. wandered through the aisles of clothes, trying to find something i liked and that would fit my postpartum body. the one that still sort of looks pregnant. couldn't find any styles i liked. wandered into the junior section. saw some cute shirts but they were so damn small. and i realized. fuck, i'm almost forty. get out of the damn junior section.

i used to know phone numbers by heart. carried actual coins around in case i needed to make an emergency phone call. remember being in one room to have a conversation on the phone, laying on the carpet and wrapping the cord around my fingers while i talked. and that's it. just talked. didn't walk around the house or mall or grocery store. didn't drive or sit outside or go to the laundromat. i didn't accomplish anything while talking on the phone other than talking on the phone. unless i did my nails. because didn't every girl of the eighties do her nails while on the phone? my kids will never know what it's like to stand on one leg in the middle of the kitchen/dining room while talking in code to your friends because your parents are watching tv and although you're really not saying anything that needs to be kept secret, the need to have secrets from them is undeniable and is the mark of becoming a young adult. my kids will deal with texts and emails and all sorts of communication that i will not have control over. they will master keeping secrets in a way i can't even imagine. and i think. i'm old. i mean, fuck, i'm almost forty. immobile phones are the new walking to school in the snow.

i used to want to be an actress. probably still do, really. but i used to half-heartedly pursue it. which i no longer do. i used to think i had all the time in the world. graduated college at 24 and moved to maui for six years. moved back to los angeles at the age of thirty feeling like a teenager. there is something in the water on the shores of hawaii that pickles you. preserves you at the mid-twenties range so that you feel that you will always have years ahead of you to accomplish anything you want. you forget that one day, you will wake up and look in the mirror with the startling realization that fuck, i'm almost forty. there is no way i'm wearing a bikini. or going on an audition for a music video.

you'll remember how you used to sleep with the wrong men, drink too much when you had shit to do the next day, hurt friends because you weren't taking the time to really think before you opened your mouth, relied too much on the idea that tomorrow would somehow take care of itself and spent too much money on crap that wouldn't last. you chalked it up to your youth because you could always be an adult later. you spent your thirties living your life much like a teenager but with the ability to order a cocktail and smoke cigarettes in public. now, you wake up and look at your kids and your man and think to yourself fuck, YES, i'm almost forty. i'm too old now for cigarettes and bad last call decisions. almost forty ain't so bad after all.

sugar high

2011-09-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

and like that, we're in. new space, new neighborhood. they gypsy blood in me is so happy to change environments. but let's be honest. gypsy blood only runs in one vein in my body. the one they can never find when they do blood tests. bruised from the searching, poking, cutting off circulation. the rest of me craves familiarity and i am humbled at the plight of a refugee. i know that i can never understand that type of displacement and i berate myself for crying through my anxiety when there is so much more i could be crying about. like this, for example.

i watch my daughter deal with new situations and i marvel at the ways in which we adapt. as humans. as a child. versus as an adult. it takes a clear and concerted effort on my part to not wallow in the negative space between everything i want for us and everything we have and yet she just deals with it and really only throws fits over food. she's not a great eater.
but the rest of life seems to swim by her and she watches it and floats along and sometimes tries to swim the other way but mostly kicks her legs in order to move faster. children amaze me. simultaneously uninhibited and utterly themselves and yet completely able to conform at a moment's notice. it's liberating and terrifying to think that i have so much influence. because i think about things like death and taxes and if i'm not careful i find myself spiraling down and losing my grip and i start to focus on the dirt and the trash and i forget that sometimes all she really needs is to get the hell out of the house and spend some time on the sidewalk with chalk. that sometimes all i need is to sit on a blanket in the grass and drink my coffee outdoors.

this always happens when i move. i am unable to relax and enjoy myself until the boxes are unpacked. the stuff is put away. our new life is organized. because otherwise, i'm cursing at myself in the garage searching for the nursing pads and a pair of pants that will fit because we still haven't been able to fix what needs to be fixed and unpack everything. i rest on the couch much of the day, nursing and recovering and lamenting all that i'm not getting done. instead i delve into pinterest to give myself something to do while dash eats.
and i eat ice cream like it is my motherfucking job.

day two

2011-09-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

i always have such great plans. ideas. intentions. holiday parties and decorations and celebrations of firsts and milestones and the like. instead, the first day of school comes and i forget to take pictures. i remembered her lunch. so that's good.

on the days she is home i notice myself telling her i 'can't' more often than not. i'm recovering from surgery still so it makes doing anything active a bit of a challenge. i went to trader joe's by myself a couple of days ago because i really needed to get out of the house and by the time i got home i needed pain medication. except i'm not taking any. so i sat down and tried not to cry.

we're trying to pack and move this week. basically, bryan is doing it all himself and there is so. damn. much. going on right now. i feel like we are sitting in a large hole dug out in the backyard and the shovel in front of us keeps shoveling so hard and so fast that we are getting hit with dirt from every angle and although we are in the hole, we are simultaneously sinking and climbing and i feel like maybe we could grow something here if only we knew how to add the right nutrients.

i let finn pick out her outfit for school and stopped her only at trying to add long sleeves and a sweater because it is still summer. (grr. september in los angeles.) she would wear purple long sleeves everyday if given the go ahead. she would also eat chocolate and buy every single thing in the princess aisle in target. and i think that somehow i'm not doing something right because i hear parents talk about how they would never let their daughters grow up in the 'princess culture' or watch cartoons and yet finn has recently been introduced to old school tom and jerry and the flintstones. i tell her those were the same cartoons that i used to watch when i was little and she says 'yeah, you watched that yesterday.'

yesterday. and forever ago.

so i took pictures on day two.

happy second day of school.

you are my favorite girl in the world.

grey eyeshadow

2011-09-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

a friend of mine had a birthday and i left her a facebook message. and i did the math. we have been friends for 27 years. we were 12, junior high. and i remember exactly what i looked like in the mirror, applying grey eyeshadow and pink lip gloss to my olive skin. i chose grey because my mom told me it looked good with my skin. i wasn't allowed to wear mascara yet. only eyeshadow. i used to spend at least a half an hour getting ready in the morning and now i am lucky if i shower. otherwise, i just throw on a hat. since i've been pregnant and/or exhausted from nurturing a newborn i do not wear makeup, i do not do my hair. and i wonder why i care less at 39 than i did at 12 when i didn't even have the common sense to not wear pink lip gloss and grey eyeshadow.

i cannot keep plants alive and yet there are two tiny plants from ikea in my house that are thriving. i want to buy up the lot of them, pot them and display them all over. prove to myself that i can do something as simple as taking care of a plant. they say addicts have to start with plants before getting into a relationship and i think about the fact that every other plant in my house has short shelf life and yet i've got two humans that need watering. i think my fears are well-founded. i think i will never sleep again.

my cat is getting old. 12. she is starting to look grey and wrinkled and her digestive system is not what it once was. i do not want to deal with her getting old and yet the greatest gift we can give those we love is the assurance that we will take care of them at the end, yes? i think about when i get old and grey and i wonder if i will have someone there to make sure the room is cool enough for my comfort, if they will play my favorite ben harper song on repeat when i want to hear it because it makes my blood run smooth, if they will sit and tell me stories or listen to mine. or if i will end up in a room with tubes and hotel linens, attended to by people who get paid to do so but don't really know me. i want to go outside to die, like a cat. curl up under a bush and wait it out. not be fed jello and powdered eggs every morning, waiting for someone to help me to the restroom. and i wonder why sitting here at the age of 39, drinking decaf iced coffee with a tiny babe sleeping next to me and a feisty toddler singing to herself and asking for more fruit calls to mind the way my things will end. i think about how i spent the night in bed, tossing and turning because it seems life is full of instability and i crave stability. when really there is no such thing.

27 years ago i believed in my ability to stabilize. that age would somehow take away the dead plants and reality of getting too old and animals on the down slope of their lives. 27 years ago i felt as though i had everything figured out. but no one wearing grey eyeshadow sans mascara has the ability to see past the eighties.

15 days

2011-09-05T05:18:00.000-07:00

15 days.
cut off and wrapped in butcher paper like a roast. it's heavy, 15 days. a large chunk of time that would take hours to cook properly.
a long vacation, a trip to a far away place. two weeks, give or take a day. enough time to get into the groove of really forgetting about counting the days, until they start counting down to the end.
i spent two weeks at a dramatic arts camp when visiting my dad one summer. we sang songs from fame. i can't sing. we ended with a bbq at the park near my dad's house and i don't remember even one name from anyone i met there. i don't think they remember me either.
the first 15 days of my relationship with bryan were like taffy spun over and over, on rotation. it was mesmerizing and we walked in circles around each other, not even noticing the sun and the moon. sometimes i think those first 15 days are the glue that keep us attached at the foundation, no matter how far we might drift in the currents. like seaweed, our pods floating on the surface miles apart, our roots entangled and unable to separate.
my first "boyfriend" was in eighth grade. his name was tony and we "went together" for two weeks. we talked on the phone twice in that time, my preteen phone with the locking phone book compartment that didn't really lock. it looked like the kind of phone that you would find in an office building and i imagined myself driving a jaguar and working in san francisco with a fancy job and boyfriend. i broke up with him at the end of two weeks. we had kissed once and never spent time together outside lunch. he was in seventh grade, apparently fueling my pattern of dating men slightly younger than me.
dash is 15 days old. we are getting to know each other a bit and in that time i have noticed that the sound of his breathing is a collage under my skin. overlapping the bits and pieces of the other parts of me and i can't remember what my skin looked like before i compared it to his. his little high-pitched scream when he wants to feed and the last 15 (or so) hours of him wanting to nurse pretty much nonstop, if for no other reason than to have my undivided attention. i remember thinking the biggest accomplishment of my life when i first had finn was that i was able to keep her alive and fed for the first two weeks. because i wasn't sure why they let me take her home and i was completely unoriginal in feeling that way. this time around, i had my mom here for a week, sadie is here now and bryan gives finn as much one on one attention as he can since i tend to have a baby attached to my body the majority of the day. except for these moments, four to five in the morning, where finn screams because she was dreaming about witches and she doesn't want to go back to sleep. dash is asleep and finn is next to me on the couch, telling me she loves me. in 15 days i will have a child that is one month old and we will be moving. change the only constant, the familiar feeling of the seaweed pods bobbing at the surface, crushed under my feet at low tide.
15 days.

the same river twice

2011-08-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

even the familiar is sometimes the opposite of what you know to be true.
there are so many similarities. so many differences. three and a half years between births and my body forgets and then remembers with striking clarity what it means to be a woman giving birth, what it means to do something that feels so natural and foreign at the same time.
as they walked me into the operating room and inserted a tremendously long needle into my spine, i curled over myself like a fern and talked to my dead brother. i asked him to stay in the room with me. he was a surgical nurse, after all, and i thought he might somehow keep an eye on things for me. keep me safe.
he agreed.
and my son came out looking exactly like him.

we are moving in a couple of weeks. were told that we had to leave because we were having a baby. and i think who does that? who says to a family two days before they are having a baby that they have to find a new place to live? we spent the two nights before going to the hospital awake, comforting each other that everything was going to be alright, courting schadenfreude and self-medicating with chocolate and deep breathing. as bryan says: we might be fucking broke and struggling but at least we have each other.

there is grace. in the darkest of situations. friends and family who come through with trader joes gift cards and diapers and baby stuff and time and energy and enough love to blow this toxic apartment building to the moon and back. love like helium. suspended in midair, carrying color and congratulations into the sky, squeaky voiced and high-pitched when you inhale for too long. we are moving into a friend's house while she is out of town for the next year. we will have a yard. and we will finally be allowed to bbq. we will be allowed to have our windows open when the kids are home.
i don't know about you. but i don't believe in the shortage of helium. not at all.

i've been here before, recovering from surgery and struggling with breastfeeding. i have looked over the tiny body of a newborn at bryan and realized that there is something more to us than just two people who like each other's bodies and opinions and idiosyncrasies. that being in love while raising children is like winning the lottery without even playing. it's like looking back and realizing i love every mistake i've ever made because they made me end up here.
it's the same river alright. but it's different. because we're different. but it's still my river and i'm still going to swim.

*ah, to answer jenny b's question...
we came to agree upon the baby's name somewhat late in the game. it was bryan's favorite name. i wasn't sold. my favorites were samuel and oliver. as soon as he was born, i looked at his face and knew he wasn't a samuel. and dashiel oliver just sounded right. he's my dash. my little buddy.
and he looks so much like my brother, mike, that i've started to believe in miracles.

2011-08-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

hi blogosphere,

this is bryan, krista's 'significant other'. she's been pretty busy the last few days and asked me to write a little something to keep everyone updated on the happenings in our cozy little family unit but i'm a terrible, slow writer (this is already the third iteration of this cop out) so instead i'm just going to introduce the star of the show...

everyone say hello to dashiel oliver

ok dash. you are officially real now that you're on the internet.
a few words of wisdom.
anything you do or say on the internet will always be on the internet, so make what you do or say on the internet something you wouldn't mind your mom or mimi or poppy seeing.
your sister is super friggin awesome and she's going to love you like 'whoa' but don't forget, she's a princess and she will tell you this repeatedly. while drawing on you with a purple marker
your brother nathan (not nate) is a bit older than you and you couldn't possibly ask for a greater older brother. he's smart and funny and goofy and talented and nice. all things you should aspire to be
your mom, okay, your mom. one thing, just be honest. tell her and show her and love her and listen to her and understand if you ever need to bury a body at 3 a.m. just call her up, she'll always have your back
me, your pops, i'm easy, just watch football with me and let me sleep in sometimes and i'll drive the van while we go to bury that body of that sumbitch that surely deserved it.

we love you of course and we always will, even if you do end up on hoarders. but don't okay. or atleast be a hoarder that hoardes stuff and not garbage...actually...yeah, no. okay, i love you

-bryan

go bucs!

so close

2011-08-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

the forest for the trees. even though when i look at the forest, i think of the dark and soft spots of humans that thrive on depravity and shadows that pierce and stab. i simply cannot enjoy the peacefulness of nature without thinking of it as a hiding place, a stomping ground for scars.
too many episodes of intervention, perhaps. too much crime drama on television. the entertainment of depravity and gore. i never minded horror films as a child but was terrified of remote locations.
it's crazy to think we can raise children in this world. it's crazy to think we could raise a child in utopian society. there are turning points for all of us that push us off the edge into the jagged cracks between things. i have mine. you have yours. this is the only truth i know. i cannot think of one person in my life who has a fairy tale childhood. or, if they do, they are unprepared for the evils of the world and unable to accept challenges and defeat. they are unaware of how good the small things can be. and yet...
as parents, don't we want to protect our children from the reality?
i do. and i don't. because i know that the real world will not help them stay pure. i know that one day soon, they will be tempted and they will be lured and they will be betrayed and i want them to hold their samurai swords at an angle over their hearts and dare someone to touch it with dirty hands. i want them to protect themselves without collateral damage. i want them to take no prisoners and yet keep themselves free. i want them to live with integrity and pride and just enough courage to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. i want them to love each other so much that they will stand up in the face of the wrong choice and dare it to wrap its tentacles around them. i want them to roar.
perhaps it's this last stretch of pregnancy. when i'm focused on housecleaning and organization because i think that somehow this will make my life easier once i have to navigate the space between us orbiting finn as the sun and tell her she has to share our universe with the moon.
i am taking these tiny moments, me sitting here writing, bryan working on his computer (but, really, he's reading about football. i just know it.) and finn is eating her sandwich in her underwear. the last few days of being an only child in our world. her dynamic is already changing beyond her control and i'm hoping she sees the love that starts to etch itself into our walls with this new baby and that her ribcage expands when she first sees her little brother or sister. i'm am hopeful for the forest. and the trees.

let my fingers do the talking

2011-08-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

i've done things. and nothing. in between the spaces of things.
baby shower, weddings, making to-do list after list so that everything gets done in time for the new baby.
i've seen old friends and the doctor and i've looked at myself in the mirror after feeling as though nothing is going the way we wanted it to.
i've eaten more ice cream than i should have, allowed finn to have chocolate when she didn't finish her dinner.
my niece got married and i fell in love with bryan all over again because we go to family functions and when we drive home, he tells me how much he loves my family. and after we get home to relieve his cousin who is babysitting, i sit and think about how adult we really are to even have a babysitter in the first place when i'm wearing red lipstick and carrying a vintage gold clutch.
he sleeps on the couch because i am the most restless sleeper EVER right now and it's like sleeping on a waterbed, all movement and ripple effect. he pushes on my hips because they hurt right now and rubs my feet even when he doesn't feel like it.
finn kisses the baby and tells my stomach she can't wait to be a big sister. and i take it for now because i know she will change her mind when this big belly turns into a crying baby that takes attention away from her and i'm still wondering if it is a boy or a girl and i can't say i have a preference. two sides. same coin.
my to-do list is full of self-imposed obligations, as well as some real ones and i can't sometimes remember which ones are which but then a friend emails me to ask if i want her to bring some food over after the baby is born and i want to cry because YES i do want that.
today, we had to run errands and during our stop at the mall, finn sat and watched the kiddie train go in circles, waving at the kids passing by. bryan looks at me and says you know what i'm not looking forward to? peer pressure and kids being mean to her.
and i think about words and social networking sites and kids in room with shut doors and i want to crawl inside my new ikea catalog and create the perfect interior because then maybe, just maybe, i'll be able to make the world seem less like the shithole it sometimes is and that if i just choose the right fabric for her curtains, then i will keep the dark shadows where they belong. on the other side.
instead, i end up passing out on the couch after a trip to the grocery store because i just can't seem to finish the simplest of tasks at this point.
twelve days and counting.

nesting

2011-08-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

it was time to switch out finn's clothes. finally get rid of most of the 2T clothes that are just now too short and too tight and replace them with the *almost* too big 3T clothes. i realized she's sort of small for her age.

my clothes fit but i'm small for my age these days as well.

finn's favorite new piece of clothing is a hand-me-down ruffled purple skirt from mollie and shank. a favorite from some of our favorites. and she put it on and i started crying in her room. because she was so happy. and i remember when mollie gave me that skirt saying it was penny's favorite and i thought i would take forever for finn to fit into it and it seemed like years away and then all of a sudden years away turned into this morning and it's so hot out today that i can't breathe when we walk to grab the laundry and i think purple is the color of the bruises on my dad's body after all these hospital visits and finn adds some red rainboots with yellow flowers painted on them to her ensemble and decides that she looks bootiful. no mommy, BE-oootiful.

and although there is so much talk about not emphasizing looks with our little girls and that we should talk about books and other things i watch her twirl in the mirror and tell herself how beautiful she looks and she walks over to her bookshelves and she pulls out four books and sits in a puddle of purple ruffles and reads to herself.

36 weeks

2011-07-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

day two of being an official stay at home mom. nine months pregnant and wobbling around the nest , picking up twigs and sticks and stuffing found objects into corners. three and half weeks-ish to go before baby number two. this baby that we can't quite picture because we don't even know the gender. it still seems a bit like an idea we had one winter night and not the future direction of our household dynamic.
yesterday i sewed myself a shirt, covered two lampshades with fabric, created an art piece to take up the huge wall in the bathroom and organized the baby's stuff in our bedroom. in between these things, finn and i played with foam shapes, felt boards, beads and pipe cleaners. the marathon of last year's 'project runway' played in the background and for dinner we ate leftover pasta shells with eggplant and sausage that bryan made and finn told me 'you made the best dinner, mommy.' i totally took credit for it and said thank you so much.

i'm a little numb right now. not physically, although that would be fabulous since everything physical feels multiplied by elevenhundred and i can't even sleep at night because turning over on my side takes all the breath out of me and i lay there, restless leg syndrome and all and i think about bank accounts and mismatched paint and curtains. i am overwhelmed by everything i want to get done before this baby comes and i feel like drowning and lamenting the fact that i have WEEKS to go and i feel like i'm being swallowed by my swollen body and i know enough to know this time that giving birth is not going to make me feel better. that feeling better won't come for months and i will be tethered to this body i don't recognize and inside myself and outside myself at the same time and i will complain about how clean the floors are because i can't control anything else. some people make it look so easy. so i'm numb. and i fall asleep and think about past relationships and who i would be if i had stayed in certain situations or if certain situations had stayed in me.

twice before i thought i found 'the one.' one was my first real love and the other was never even a boyfriend, never really mine to begin with. somewhere between young love and ill timing i walked through the landmine that is another person's heart and tried to bury myself somewhere along the walls, etching my name with sharp fingernails to prove i was there. i wonder sometimes if the tag is still there or if it was painted over, remodeled. i suppose it doesn't really matter but one can't help but wonder. i don't look back at any of my entanglements with the romantic comedy fueled regret of missed chances or mistakes made. it's more of a killing the cat kind of thinking, tiny babies grabbing ribs and grazing parts of my heart that got me from here to there. to 'the one' i chose out of all the others. the one that chose me back. the one who agrees with me that there is more than 'the one' that makes us able to bear this life together because we are never enough for just one of anything. it takes a lifetime of mistakes to know the difference sometimes.

first date

2011-07-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

bryan and finn are on a date tonight. shrek, the musical. finn's first play. i dressed her in a pretty flowered dress and did her hair and when bryan walked in the house he handed finn a bouquet of bougainvillea from across the street. finn screamed at the top of her lungs and said daddy! you brought me flowers! why??
he told her that your date should always bring you flowers when they pick you up. oh, daddy. i love flowers so much. i love you. you brought me flowers!
just like that. she was smitten. in a way that exists only in watercolors dripping wet on homemade paper. in love in a way that puts every fairy tale to shame. she is one hundred percent sure that men are wonderfully bespectacled creatures that bring flowers to you before they take you on a special date and they will read you stories before you fall asleep and they will always watch you from the hallway as you brave turning the light on in your room after dusk hits and the shadows look like they're stalking you, saying i am right here, baby. i won't let anything happen to you.
they will take you to a musical in hollywood even though they would rather sit in a dentist's chair for six hours than endure live singing and dancing with creatures and costumes. they will bring you purple flowers because it is your favorite color and tell you how beautiful you look as they hold open your door.

i look at her and i see her look at him. and i feel so very full. he is quite possibly the best gift i could have ever given her.

*another photo from the amazing cathryn farnsworth. are you in the la area? hire her. and not just because she's my friend.*

~a special thanks to moira and monica and efren for the shrek tickets. we were gifted them after other people's plans fell through and we do not take such blessings for granted. our friends are pretty fantastic.~

empty trays of ice

2011-07-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

i'm a bit of an organization freak. i hate clutter, dirty dishes lingering, things left out for no reason.
if bryan folds the sheets, i will refold them.
when sharing a computer, i will take anything he has saved on the desktop and drag it into a folder with his name on it. he leaves the groceries on the counter for me after shopping because he knows i will just reorganize everything he put away anyway.
and, yet, i seem to be unable to fill the brita water filter after i empty it. i will leave it on the counter. along with the empty ice cube trays (which really upsets me because i'm the only person in the house who likes ice and i seem to run out. i will even open the freezer and get irritated that no one bothered to fill the trays, even though i'm the one who left them in there with only one ice cube.)

i turned 39 last week. decided to sit down and write out a list of 40 things i would like to do before i turn 40 and it slowly morphed into a chore list of things i want done around the house. the bigger picture crumpled at the bottom of the laundry basket and i would rather make sure the baseboards get repainted sometime soon than think of grand gestures to make me feel like i'm living my life. one of the women i like most in the world put up a fanfuckingtastic picture of herself her freshman year in high school and it inspired me to find my high school yearbooks to look at my freshman photo. (okay, it inspired me to make bryan find my yearbooks and get them for me.) i was standing there in the hallway, directing him where to look and heard myself say 'grab the one that says 1986-1987' and i paused and started laughing. bryan looked at me and said 'yeah, baby, you're old.'

finn has started going in her room and shutting the door to spend time by herself. i'll open the door to see her on her bed, reading. 'i'm reading, mommy. can you please shut the door?' bryan says 'well, we always tell her she can go play in her room if she wants' and i pause, leaving the door cracked open. she gets up and shuts it for me and i turn around and walk into the kitchen and fill the ice cube trays.

cathryn farnsworth photography

2011-07-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

cathryn farnsworth photography.

i couldn't write the way it feels to look at this photo if i tried. my friend, cathryn, captures them for me.

the water in my brain

2011-07-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

i dreamt last night of water.

i was walking through the neighborhood i lived in while in high school. but i was with bryan and finn at the age of one. each section of my neighborhood was connected by swimming pools, much like a vegas resort but without the 96 oz cocktails and cliched bikini clad hipsters. in one pool, i passed by maggie may and sweet little miss ee and introduced myself. we hugged as we recognized each other and passed our babes into each other's arms and i woke up thirsty and walked in the dark of the house to get a glass of water, stood at the sink and drank the whole thing.

my brain holds these stories of places i've been and i lull myself to sleep by curling into the memories of the way my skin felt at a certain age. at fifteen i wore la gear high tops with two colored laces and sprayed infusium leave in conditioner into my hair. i used to put on my bathing suit and lay down in front of my mirror, trying to figure out the best way to lay on my beach towel so that i hid all the flaws. i can see where my bed meets the carpet in that room and i want to go back to that fifteen year old reflection and tell her to get her ass up off the bed and not worry so much about the funhouse mirror. as i walked back to bed last night, i heard depeche mode coming out of a bright yellow portable cassette player looping around my pillow and i sat looking at the ocean of 1986, writing bad poetry that rhymed.

i fell back asleep and dreamt that my water broke all over my favorite dress.

apple pie

2011-07-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

i am waiting for apple pie. my legs are full of cramps and cankles and the air conditioning blows right on me at night so that i can sleep. my doctor tells me i am carrying a large baby so we bought a maternity belt and i feel a bit like a body builder or warehouse worker while i walk around the toy store. bryan's son is visiting us for two weeks and i am understanding more and more how much two lives affects the parents more than the kids sometimes. i see it from a new perspective, twelve years old with a packed bag and he is unable to get a moment's peace from finn because she worships him so. my own pre-teen packed bags used to sit in the guest room of my dad's house and i remember sitting in foreign restaurants and asking permission to get something from the kitchen, at home and yet not.
i am waiting for apple pie because i have eaten all of the chocolate and ice cream in the house and dessert makes me happy. i look forward to it, after struggling through the day just to walk from here to there, taking a nap after a trip to the store because i simply can't stay awake a moment longer. somehow this baby seems abstract still, not knowing whether we have a boy or girl. our girl's name is pretty well agreed upon, barring any unforeseen changes of mind. the boy's name is a different matter entirely. i think about the roll of the dice we take with genetics at times and wonder if we are going to have children that look nothing like each other, their own faces entirely. bryan's son looks just like him, freaking out our friends.
bryan told me i was 'on point' today and he meant my mood. that i was a bit on edge and i'm thinking it's this lack of control, this struggle with financial freedom, this idea that we are crazy enough to think we can be good parents to all of our children in this kind of world. i watch episodic television that deals with unsavory and unsettling storylines because i cannot handle the real things people do to each other, sometimes unsolved and barbs of blame stuck inside the skin of each other. i shouldn't read the news while pregnant.
i think about how i wish we had a fancy backyard, a few years' worth of savings, a perfect nursery that would be photographed for style blogs and i realize my first world concerns are born of such ridiculous notions that i cannot help but get irritated and wait.
for apple pie.

life according to my phone

2011-06-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

curled up on the floor

2011-06-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

those tiny metallic moments in between awake and sleeping.
last night, curled up on finn's rug next to her bed in the middle of the night, i felt myself swaying on the silk strings of almost asleep and i would hear her cry out 'mommy!' and my body would jolt awake with a bit of misunderstanding. the unintentional martrydom of sleeping on a floor in my daughter's room vibrating in my belly.
'i'm right here, baby. shhhh.'

every night before i head to bed, i sneak into her dimly lit room and watch her breathe. i arrange the blankets, move hair off her face, inhale. i can't go to sleep unless i do it.
last night, i open the door and her eyes glance over to me. 'mommy,' she whispers. it's the tone of her voice. her body is on fire, feverish, glazed. she whimpers a bit when she sees me because that's what we do when we see our parents, our protectors, yes? we break down and we let ourselves feel the full weight of how bad we really feel. we let it swallow us whole.

she didn't want to sleep in our bed. she didn't want to stay on the couch. (not at rest, anyway.) so i put her back in bed and i curled up on the floor. so that when she cried out, i was there. she finally fell asleep at four am. and i wondered about parents in the wings of hospitals and why they are called wings when they are clipped by sick children and the inability to make it better. i go to extremes, it seems. a fever to hospital wing and that part of me will never be dormant. i will never be the type of girl who doesn't look four steps forward, trying to prevent the worst possible scenario.

perhaps my greatest fear is failing in the face of prevention. of letting the worst case scenario play out before me, without a fight. perhaps i am just unable to admit that i can't control everything. that someday i will have to teach my daughter that sexting is more permanent that a regrettable tattoo and i obsess over the moments when i am too exhausted to read her another story and i think what if this is the impetus for her not feeling good enough, listened to, less than? yes, my head is a loud and soft mat spotted with blood and sweat, wrapped in extremes tossed against the ropes over and over again.

moments

2011-06-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

there are moments.

these formative years, where relationships are established and we spend our time constantly marking boundaries in sand, moving them further and further out, the ripples widening and growing. bryan sits with finn on the couch and they read books together, him teaching her how to string letters and sounds together to make words and we hear the connections rolling all over each other and she starts to grasp that which seems impossible. she is holding his arm, occasionally looking up at him and smiling and saying 'i love you, daddy.' he looks over at me. 'i wonder if she'll even remember this.'

he spends every day with her while i'm at work. the primary caregiver. (truth be told, he's the primary caregiver all day considering i am such a hot mess when i'm pregnant.) they wrestle, they cook dinner, they read together for 20 minutes at bedtime. he teaches her how to brush her teeth properly, to wash her hands before and after every meal, every bathroom visit and reinforces that asking for something the kind and proper way will get you further than demands. he covered the floor in a dropcloth recently and gave her a giant canvas and his very own tubes of acrylic paint and she spent an entire afternoon creating a masterpiece as he showed her how different colors blend and the differences between using a brush, a sponge, your hand. her favorite thing to do with him is to go get coffee.

will she remember doing any of these things? at the tender age of three?

we have these moments.

we sit in a hammock together in the backyard of my in-laws. she lays down with me and rubs my leg. you're the best, mommy. i hold my breath as she swings with me and notice the way every single hair on my arms moves with the breeze, smelling the different plants and flowers and drinking iced decaf coffee while finn rubs my leg. i know this moment is fleeting, that her three year old grasp of time and relaxation is tenuous at best, a bit like the end of a yo yo string, always a reaction to any action. she swings for a full ten minutes with me and i feel like i've won the lottery.

these moments.

i capture them for her, hold them under my skin, just beneath the surface. they rest under my eyelids and when she sleeps i run my finger down the bridge of her nose and leave traces of some of the best moments of my life right under her eyes.

five

2011-05-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

we fell in love on a friday afternoon. at a park frequented by pregnant women walking with strollers, overachievers exercising and tribes of homeless relaxing across the street near the side of the library. we were supposed to meet friends at the park and hang out, play bocce ball, drink coffee. no one else showed up except us.
eleven am to four pm. we sat on a big spread out sleeping bag, sandwiches untouched. he drew. i wrote. (i think i wrote the same sentence over and over to look busy.) he found songs on his ipod and played them for me, one by one. to tell you the truth, i think we barely spoke. just sat there. together. i left the park walking in stop motion, made out of metal shavings, shifting with each breath of air.

we didn't kiss until the next day, a sweet first kiss next to my car before we headed out to a friend's house to drink wine and smoke cigarettes. when i closed my eyes, i saw sunflares.

we said 'i love you' on day three. both of us not quite acting like ourselves, all in with one heavy push of the hand, the pot in the middle filled with promises to make the absolute best of what we found sitting under the tree in the park that afternoon.

shortly after i found out i was pregnant the first time, we almost broke up. it was serious. we cracked in tiny pieces and i sat looking at the shards of us spilling all over the linoleum thinking there is no way to glue this back together. i tried and tried to put the pieces back in their right spots and all i saw were the cracks. i blamed him for ruining my fairy tale. and then i remembered: i never (even as a child) wanted to be a damsel in distress, rescued by a prince with a foot fetish. so we slowly collected the pieces and put them in a jar for safe keeping. for months, we would find tiny shards stuck in corners, hidden near baseboards. with each new piece found, bryan would hand it to me and i would put it in the jar, safe and visible.
we became two different people entirely, stripped of all of our preconceived notions about love and lust and relationships and the truth. we learned how to be ourselves with each other without leaving scars. we are still learning that, i think. and i'm not sure it's something you ever really stop learning. because with each new ring of the tree under our belts, there are scratches on the walls and marks on the floor. there is a mess left behind.

i will never forget the way the afternoon smelled the day bryan and i sat in our living room, angles askew, the fork in the road stuck in our thighs. we chose to stay. we chose to move on. we chose to rebuild what we had destroyed and create something entirely new.
we chose each other.
five years.
i have not regretted my choice. not once.

and i left the shards of our broken past in our old apartment in the crime-filled neighborhood where we learned what we were worth to each other.
we're worth more than the silly preconceived notions.
so much more.

i remember the afternoon in the park like it was yesterday. because i unlocked the part of my ribcage that was previously walled in steel. i opened the door and silently invited him in.
and he came in.

hey jack kerouac

2011-05-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

a very dear friend of mine and his boyfriend were in a spot. trying to mesh their lives into one cohesive unit, the truth about cats and dogs. for months, they worked on integration. oddly enough, it wasn't the large dog. it was the young orange tabby who refused to give in. attacked, felt the need to protect, could not get along. one of them had to go.
we got the phone call a couple months ago.
***
right before bryan and i moved in together, we went to the pub for some food and beers, a lazy afternoon spent at a bar with no real worries at hand. 'i don't want to have any more kids,' he says . (his son was eight at the time.) 'ever. and i think this will become a problem. i'm sure you'll want kids at some point and you'll want to leave me. i'm going to go smoke.' he got up to go outside and i sat with my guinness, thinking about the lease we just signed. i wasn't even thinking about kids. not until that moment at least.
a little over one month later, newly moved in and i find out i'm pregnant and i will admit that the first thought that enters my mind is he's going to leave me and i'm going to have to do this by myself.
three days before christmas this past year, i walk out of the bathroom with a stick in my hand asking bryan how many lines he sees. when we realize i'm pregnant on birth control for the second time, he throws his head back and laughs. hugs my belly and gives me a kiss. here we go again, he says smiling.
***
my cat is an orange tabby. she is 12 and her name is cheeto. she is loud and she drools and she has never forgiven me for bringing her to los angeles from maui and turning her into an inside cat. she pulls books off the bookshelves and is pretty good about letting finn 'love' on her. mostly.
jason and marc's cat is an orange tabby. he is 2 and his name is cheeto. when we were told he needed a home, we couldn't say no. they worked on trying to integrate their family together for the last few months and jason finally called to say 'can you take him? can you give him a home?'
cheeto redux spent the night in our room, huddled under our bed. he let me pet him this morning and i realized how stunningly handsome he is. he looks just like a mountain lion, yellow eyes and muscular. he is terrified and finn sticks her face up to him, wanting to kiss him. cheeto #1 hissed at the door this morning and i tried to talk to her about integration but she walked away from me, ears back.
***
strange to think that next year at this time there will be yet another baby. that we will be a family of four inside this house, with a wedding to plan and a stepson to introduce to yet another younger sibling. i love the way our family grows, the way we integrate into this mix of what we think we want, until we find ourselves sitting at the table of what came to actually be and we leave the preconceived notions on the plate like chicken bones, scraped clean.
last night, at our mother's day dinner, i reminded bryan about that conversation we had at the pub four years ago. 'what if i would have told you then that in four years, you would be sitting at mother's day dinner with me, with baby number two with me on the way (three kids altogether) and two cats named cheeto?'
he mimed shaking my hand and said 'peace out.'
i laughed so hard it made my stomach hurt.
***
we're going to call him jack kerouac. the mountain lion. and he will do just fine here.

happy mother's day, indeed.

parenting in the first world

2011-05-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

we have so many things we are going to have to explain.

in the car this morning, bryan tells me that when he came to bed last night i was sound asleep and he lay down and put his hand on my belly and felt the baby kicking.
why was the baby kicking you? we hear from the back seat.
the baby was just moving. saying hi, he says. not really kicking me.
finn is fresh off a few week long stretch of time outs based solely around her hitting or kicking when she is frustrated with us. the first time she kicked me in the shin with a look of utter intensity, i actually had to suppress a laugh. because she really wanted that candy. and i said no. so she kicked my shin. it's adorable, really. the sheer justification in her eyes that says i will hurt you for making me sad. and then we remind her, yet again, that we do not use our bodies to hurt people when we are upset. that we don't ever hurt another person's body on purpose.
---
i understand the need for celebration, for the patriotism. and yet i don't. i respect that there are things that happen in this world that i am going to have to explain to my children and that i won't know how. that black and white is something that really only starts to scratch the surface of the layers and layers of paint underneath how we got from here to there and that even a quote from one of the greatest peaceful leaders of our time can be bastardized with the best of intentions. i am in love with and planning to marry a man who spent time in bosnia while in the army and i come from a military family, full of men who have served with pride and hope for protecting all that they love about this country. i also know that our country tends to have a somewhat myopic view of the world that lends itself to intolerance and a gluttonous revelry when celebrating victory of any kind. (do we not consider peoples of other cultures a tad barbaric and animalistic when we see them celebrating the outcome of violence against us?) i appreciate that i have the ability to sit here and type out the whirlpool of confusion swirling down my spine and i am not ungrateful.
i'm just not excited that murder is the answer.
no matter the necessity.
because, fundamentally, i am still trying to figure out how to explain to my children that sometimes it is more complicated than saying we don't use our bodies to hurt people. because sometimes we do. but that it doesn't always require celebration.
---
she hits me on the leg with open palms. then cries and puts herself on a time out. she is getting closer and closer to minding the gap between her need to react and her follow-through. she is starting to understand that every action she takes has consequence and we are slowly getting to the point where she is able to weigh the checks and balances herself and see if the price is really worth the cost. our goal is to have her be able to take stock with as little collateral damage as possible. you know, as a general rule.

this little one inside me is another story altogether. because, right now, i count the kicks and the jabs inside me and i pray they do not cease. the kicking means all is well. the fight to live in spite of it all. the will to survive. the weight of love resting on top of my bladder. i'll take it all. and i will look back a few years from now when i am on the other side of the pendulum, time outs for kicking and explanations of how we don't use our bodies to hurt people.

"We should never gloat in death or praise ourselves in murder. Even when it seems like the only option, we should have heavy hearts that such is the case." (thank you, mud mama, for the quote that speaks what is in my heart.)

the night sky

2011-04-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

she sleeps with books tucked around her. and i hear her telling stories to herself after we lay her down for the night, singing and talking to the stars on her ceiling. (her "stars from nova and iku" as she calls them. because they gave her the sky.) a solid hour sometimes. i try to listen and hear where her heart takes her. where her dreams start. and i sneak in every night before i lay down to turn off her stars. because i don't want them to catch fire. sometimes burning out is not better than fading away. it's all about context, don't you think?

do you ever sit sometimes in that little spot between everything you have and everything you want? where you think you would be so happy 'if only...' and you fill in the blanks with so many things and then the things change and you realize you might never be happy at all, once you've been honest with yourself. and then the earth shakes and the waters move and you think 'if only...'

i wonder sometimes about living on one side of a parallel universe. and i wonder if the forks in the road where i stood and turned around would have merely led to the same couch but in a different living room or if perhaps i would have joined the peace corps or started an organic farm had i followed the footprints of anyone else. i wonder about the way time passes and how much control i really have over where i end up. i think about the fact that perhaps i am not an old soul, after all. that i am still new because i always seem to be a few steps behind, trying on the footprints of others and realizing a half a beat too late that they don't fit just right. as i get older, i start to fully understand who exactly i am but then i realize i am closer and closer to becoming merely the person i used to want to be because so much time has passed that certain windows have been covered, replaced with walls.

miracle whip

2011-04-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

when i think of summer, i think of my grandfather on my mother's side. kingsburg, a suburb of fresno. butted up against fields of drying grapes. the smell of sunshine, raisins, wine. the backyard was mostly shaded, save the swimming pool meticulously cared for by my water baby of a grandpa. he was a lifeguard, an avid swimmer, a boy of the sun. the concrete was so hot it would burn my feet and i sat under the shaded awning, swinging back and forth on a vinyl cushioned sofa with giant blue and green flowers watching chico, the feisty dachsund run in circles in the sun before demanding to be let back inside. my legs would sweat, skin sticking in the warbled heat and you could see waves in the air, silver and mirrored. inside, my grandmother would make lunch, no small people allowed in the kitchen, ever. there was a crystal lazy susan in the middle of the dining room table and lunch would find it stocked with baby pickles, miracle whip, other things i couldn't stomach but pretended to like so that i could turn it round and round as many times as possible without her noticing. we ate a lot of tuna salad.
my grandfather taught me how to play blackjack at that table. smooth, polished wood and quiet slips of his hands to show me his cards before acting as though i could win by myself. i learned the hierarchy of poker but never really cared to understand the game.
the guest bathroom looked like a hotel. fancy soaps and gilded dishes, air conditioned and double sinks. i worried my grandparents with the amount of time i spent in there, feeling like a queen, fondling antique mirrored trays.
i spent a lot of time entertaining myself with games and books and the typewriter and the contraption in the guest room where you could strap yourself in and hang upside down, good for your alignment i overheard.

i was the princess of kingsburg. drying grapes and chlorine and lazy susans.

arrangements

2011-04-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

i spent the weekend in portland, oregon. and i realized something.
going back is never the right way to look at it.

old friends. the kind that are more like family than not. what starts as a semi-facetious comment on facebook about going to see lauryn hill. the soundtrack of our entire friendship is set to 'the miseducation of lauryn hill' and to see her live ten years later, together, is the kind of thing you don't pass up on. even though lauryn hill is not the same. and we are not the same. and the music is not the same. and even though you didn't think you expected it to be, you somehow feel foolish. like you were trying to capture something from ten years ago, when you loved with reckless abandon and truly felt as though she sang your heart for you and you were young and living on an island in the middle of the pacific ocean where your feet hit warm water every day and the tradewinds moved through your room. you were trying to go back to bottle a bit of that air and you didn't even realize it.

bryan and i have been toying with the idea of moving to portland. it's just hard to get ahead here in la, you know? although i'm sure it's hard everywhere at any given time and i think sometimes i subscribe too much to the idea that things will be better if i make a change. if perhaps we find the perfect house with a yard and we start a garden, then our children will be happy and we will keep them safe. i'm not sure geography has anything to do with that but i'm sure not counting it out.

life doesn't go back. i am halfway through my pregnancy. and time is going by much faster this time than last. i started to feel bad because i realize i haven't been documenting this pregnancy like the last, merely noticing flutters and taking my vitamins and sitting down more frequently. finn morphed into a one hundred percent little girl in the two days i was gone and i carried on a phone conversation with her that was full of complete sentences. this was the first time i had been away from her, ever. i felt a bit guilty because i didn't actually feel guilty. instead, i slept in until ten am saturday and sunday. i ate brunch at restaurants with a long wait and sat, smiling, while drinking decaf coffee and talking with my sister friend without having to say 'mommy, is talking right now.'

there is no going back. that's why i take these weekends and i brave the airplanes (because i have, in recent years, started to abhor flight travel) and i don't apologize for any of it. i think about moving because that's what it's all about. moving forward, up, out, in. it's about change, always. and finding the middle ground where you can lay your head in between.

it's about realizing that sometimes your soundtrack was fine just the way it was.

slapping the boat

2011-04-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

i felt the baby move today. flutters i probably wouldn't have noticed had i not been here before. wearing flattering and comfortable and stylish maternity clothes courtesy of my mother and enjoying food for the first time in five months, today was a first bloom. full of plans for the future and cheeseburgers and a mid afternoon nap.

three. sigh.
why is three so hard? i find myself snapping at her because she is like a walking remix of herself, perpetually echoing her questions which do NOT go unanswered. she pushes every single boundary put in front of her and i find myself getting angry in a crowded shopping center because she tries to run away and i hear my mom's voice echoed in my own while my own mom is standing right next to me with the exasperated smile of someone who knows exactly where her granddaughter gets this behavior.

she has taken to hitting. not hard. just enough to make her point. but with the same look in her eyes that nemo gives his father when he slaps his lucky fin on the bottom of the boat. she will do it, knowing the consequences, just to see if we will follow through. it's exhausting, knowing she is keeping track. impressive, but exhausting.

but i won't remember that, will i? instead i will remember how we went to carney's for lunch and while we were waiting for our cheeseburgers, she grabbed the sides of my face and gave me a big kiss. 'i love you, mommy. and i love the baby.'

close calls and hot fudge

2011-04-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

and it all almost went up in flames.

i was sick again. i spent the week as a ninety year old incontinent woman, sleeping with a humidifier next to the bed and occasionally coughing so hard i ended up with lunch in my hands. so that happened.
my doctor told me i was at war. against germs. and i needed to act as such. disinfect everything i touched at the end of the day. i felt like i was cleaning a perpetual crime scene, trying so hard to erase the remnants of my ever being there. only to be reminded at six am with another fever and racking cough and inability to keep food down. i woke up the first day of warm weather feeling like sleeping beauty, well rested and unfolded.

the exact day i feel like a functioning human being again, bryan wakes up with a fever and a throat the size of a pinhole. he takes finn to school and spends the day sleeping. comes to get me from work, gone from the house for 15 minutes tops. as we walk back in the door, smoke and smell. the vintage coil heater in the bathroom wall turned on and wouldn't turn off and burned fabric and the wall and had we decided to get dinner, go to the park, stop at the store....the house would have been in flames. no doubt about it.
that same night, bryan's fever reaches almost 103 so he heads to the emergency room.

fire scares and waiting rooms and the lasting smell of smoke seeping through the walls. everything was fine. we came home in time. we are almost rid of the viruses. we even celebrated the end of these rough few weeks with a family date night including hot fudge sundaes and a stroll through the bookstore. sans the meltdown from the three year old over cookie in her ice cream and my dry heaving in the parking lot, the night would have been a raging success. but it's hard to forget:

it all almost went up in flames.

the ebb and flow

2011-03-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

i felt myself in my feet the other day. grounded and steady. much like the first time i ever stood up on a surfboard without falling off. i felt as though the earth and i understood each other and i could handle just about anything.
then water engulfs coastline and i realize that i know absolutely nothing about real balance.

everyday life is one thing. the long haul is an ebb and flow. occasionally, the surges are more than i can bear and i spend the day ill and irritable and lamenting all of the things that are off kilter, forgetting that in some parts of the world, the idea of a bad day like mine would be a vacation. i feel sorry for myself over the stupidest shit and i cry because i cannot think of anything i want to eat for dinner that will actually stay in my stomach and i whine until bryan takes me to the store so i can pick out some dessert. and i curl up in a ball on the bed and realize that my skin is marked with the ink of privilege because my bad days are just part of my everyday life. that the ebb and flow of my long haul is really just a sandy white shore with ankle high waves and that the worst case scenario is still not that bad. that it has been worse and that there will come time when tragedy is real and i will wish my greatest travesty of the day was that i threw up four times at work that day.

living with a three year old is like stepping off a tree branch without realizing you don't have wings. you feel the wind rush past you and you understand that something natural is taking course as you fall and sink and yet you wonder how exactly you started up there and landed down here and you hurt and you feel heavy and you think you must not understand gravity and flying at all and that perhaps you should have been born a lion, all roar and matted fur and gnashing teeth.
and then she will walk up to you hours later, after you have both spent time away from the wounds and she will ask you not to touch her and she will wrap her arms around your belly and lay her head at your sternum and she will say, 'i'm hugging the baby.'

your heart. it will ebb and flow and you will feel sick and you will cry and you will smile and you will sit with your feet on the floor and you will feel your toes on the clean and dry hardwood floor and you will be thankful for your couch and your fear and your waves of hormones. and you will hug without arms and fly.

up and down

2011-02-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

yesterday was not my finest hour. being pregnant brings with it waves of moodiness that are attached to every nerve ending. i feel myself boiling. angry. self-righteous. i feel myself snapping. over and over like a rubber band on a sunburn. i wonder sometimes what i would take it out on were bryan not here. granted, i feel justified when i get irritated. and sometimes, i'm sure, the irritation is warranted but it doesn't go away. it feeds on itself like a centipede regenerating. bryan took finn to dance class so i could take a nap and four hours later i woke up in a much better mood, craving french toast.

i lay awake in bed for three hours the other night tallying up all the things i've done to hurt people. whether intentional or not. perhaps it was the reminiscing about the teenage me, the bad decisions and lack of emotional competence to see the bigger picture. maybe i keep them tallied up in my brain so that when my children are smack in the middle of making mistakes and following the wrong instincts i will remember how easy it is to run towards the knife in the road, the fork all but forgotten.

arm full of bangles

2011-02-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

my dreams of late are full of hills and stairs. mansions stuck on the side of a canyon, walking uphill in stilettos. i remember looking at my arm and seeing an entire forearm full of gold bangles that i recognized as important and expensive and yet i had no idea how i got there. we walked into a store and the woman told me the only reason my friends were allowed in was because they were with me and i remember laughing and kicking off my stilettos so i could walk around on the marble barefoot. i passed my a mirror and i was tall, long legged. and blonde.

i've started thinking about what i'm going to say when finn asks what i was like in high school. what kind of girl i was. i tried out for softball but hadn't played in seven years. it didn't go well. i tried out for cheerleading one year but failed to practice enough to remember the cheer i was supposed to choreograph so i didn't do that part of the tryout. and didn't make it. i even tried out for student council one year but ran against two of my closest friends who were incredibly popular. it's like i was asking to fail. i was on the yearbook staff. so there's that. my friends were popular but i don't think i was. i did well academically and partied a lot. a lot. truth be told, i loved high school. but i was not tall, long legged. or blonde.

bubble tree

2011-02-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

after a week of housebound illnesses all around, we finally spent some time in the sun last weekend.
and it made me realize how much i wish i had a nice camera considering my point and shoot has a clouded lens and my phone is my only camera these days.
oh, to dream.
until then, i'm stuck with phone apps to make me feel better.

congested

2011-02-07T20:49:00.000-08:00

i hold truths in my mouth as if storing them for later. some of them trickle out and some of them get stuck in the cavities between cheek and gum. my three year old takes bites of food and then hides the food in her cheeks thinking we won't know it is there. i get upset because i'm worried she's going to choke and also because i don't want her to hold onto all of the things she doesn't want. i want her to spit them out. rinse away the remnants and smile freely. and wide. perhaps she sees my little truths, half hidden behind polite smiles and cloudy eyes and is merely reflecting them back to me.

i'm all wrapped up in myself these past few weeks. i'm sick again. so congested i can't breathe. at all. and then i feel like i'm about to be buried alive and i start to panic so i have to sit up and walk around the house to distract myself. i feel like i'm failing finn because i promise her i will take her to the store but then i don't even have the energy to get off the couch unless i'm going to throw up. bryan says i need to be nicer to myself. that pregnancy and i do not really get along and i have to ride it out.

i am missing deadlines for rsvp-ing, letting the remnants of neglect sit in the shower grout. i wear a uniform at home and just noticed that my hair is in a sad state these days. so many things in my life need some love and i am pushing them to the back burners and running out of pans.

i would like a vacation, a manicure, a massage, a spa day, a windfall, a swim in the warm ocean. i would like to pretend that any one of these things will make me feel like my young self again, full of promise and the absolute conviction that tomorrow will somehow feel better. that the best is yet to come. i want to stop feeling like i am fighting my body at all times. i would like to feel grateful more often than i feel like throwing up or giving in.

i had to leave work early today. bryan took finn to the park and when they came home, she handed me a bag. inside were breath right strips (the one thing i haven't tried yet to be able to breathe) and she sat with me while i put it on. thirty seconds later, she walked up to me, placed both hands on my cheeks and said do you feel better now, mommy? can you breathe better? can i have some juice?

we read a story together before bed and she sat next to me, her hand on my leg. at one point, i looked down at her and she looked up and smiled. patted my leg.
does your body feel better, mommy?

and i said yes.
because my heart has never felt better.

i would like a do-over

2011-02-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

this past week was an all out fail.
there was the night i threw up so violently that i broke a ton of blood vessels in my face .
then when had to cancel finn's third birthday party at the last minute because of rain. yes, i know, those of you not in southern california do not care about my whining that it has rained one day this entire month. but SERIOUSLY...it has been 75 degrees and sunny since new year's day and it decided to pour rain for the entire day i planned an outdoor party at the park for my three year old? the day after, it was sunny again. and i didn't have a backup plan because our house is not conducive to having a ton of people over. (issues with neighbors who don't like noise.)
i made rainbow cupcakes for her party. spent almost an hour piping different layers into the cupcake liners so that it would be a "rainbow cupcake" and not a nasty tie-dye cupcake. (yes, i understand fully the irony of worrying about nastiness while making cupcakes full of food coloring.) after baking, it looked like a hippie convention exploded in my oven. layered cupcake fail. although i brought them to my coworkers and was told they were delicious. silver lining.
finn is super sick. borderline "going to the er" sick for a couple of days there. her doctor says she does not have meningitis or pneumonia which i assume was said to assuage our fears but did not help when i was sleeping in her toddler bed with her because she was crying and screaming in her sleep.
(fyi- toddler beds are small.)
at one point, she sat up in bed while i rubbed her back and she pointed at my stomach. in between her crying and fever moaning, she said:
i have a baby brother or sister in there.
yes, you do.
yeah, because you have a baby in your belly.

perhaps not so much of a fail after all.

99.9 percent effective

2011-01-22T13:33:00.000-08:00

i'm eating toast with butter and nutella with vivid dreams from last night keeping me from napping. my sense memory has been hijacked by hormones and i'm remembering the way the ocean feels just off the coast of south maui when i dove underneath at eight thirty in the morning. i woke up underwater with salt drying on my skin and i felt warm and tan. then i remembered i haven't felt that ocean in 9 years and it evaporated, the sea air vanishing between windowpanes.
laying in bed last night, i found myself wrapped in a quilt of regret, patch-worked and worn. do you ever have those moments? when you find yourself in the middle of a masquerade ball and you slowly start to realize that the glimpses behind the masks are video loops of every mistake you've ever made. every bad decision dressed up in borrowed clothes and stilettos and you think i would probably do that differently now that you mention it.

finn gave herself a tattoo the other day with a pen when we weren't looking. it was inspired, creative. bryan and i both have multiple tattoos and i realize she mimics us in so many ways. she talks about her boyfriend at preschool and she says she likes him because he says 'yes' and 'no' for her and i bryan and i look at each other and he says 'baby, you need to use your words at school. you need to tell the teachers your words.' and i say (slightly under my breath but yet not) 'besides, your boyfriend should never speak for you.'

i am approximately 11 weeks pregnant with baby number two. i am really sick and the battle to not throw up in public is ongoing. i have a nasty sinus infection left over from the christmas flu (which i had to battle sans medicine since i found out i was pregnant two days before christmas) and i cannot sleep through the night. pregnancy and i do not get along very well and i cannot believe how easy i had it the first time considering i did not have a toddler in the mix. we are blessed and lucky and grateful. full disclosure: this is baby number two on birth control. we had already decided we were not going to have any more children for financial and safety reasons. we are not where we need to be financially to have another baby and i am no spring chicken. i will be 39 this year. apparently my ovaries heard our conversation and figured it was last call and decided to go big or go home.

i am not ungrateful. we are over the moon about this baby and i know how hard some people try to conceive and i have no idea why the combination of bryan and i together defies birth control. i do not question it. i say thank you and i look forward. and i think that there is no other man that exists that i could ever imagine having a family with and i gather them close to me and say a silent thank you to the powers that be and to my body for ignoring me. then i throw up again and cry a bit and crawl back onto the couch on my left side and try to take a nap and ask bryan to make me more toast. and even though he has the flu, he does.

in progress

2011-01-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

i have stacks of books next to my bed, mocking me. i fall under the covers and grab one, lay on my side. minutes later, i will invariably roll over and turn off the light.
i haven't read anything tangible in two weeks.

there are maps all over our house. because we love the way they look. our shower curtain is, in fact, a world map. and yet i have no idea where places are and i get lost in cities in know well. do not ask me for directions. ever.

there is so much going on in my life and i am failing to document it. and i wonder if that means something. other than the fact that i am a tad preoccupied with the very task of living.

visions of sugarplums

2010-12-26T23:33:00.000-08:00

the worst flu you've had in years comes knocking two days before christmas and decides to bear down, kick up its feet and stay awhile. and what do you do but nurture her when she comes? if you fight her, she will knock you down, from the chest. guaranteed. so you wrap yourself around her and you drink warm tea and you complain and you cry and you miss christmas eve and christmas day and all of the family you planned on seeing.
you do not miss out on helping your daughter leave treats for santa and the reindeer. you do, however, burn the cookies and turn off the oven and collapse back into your comforter covered couch and wait for your man and your baby to come home from the festivities and take over. because even the simplest of tasks have become too much. you watch television, you sleep. and you stay awake on christmas eve unintentionally because you simply. cannot. breath.
come sunday, you eat your first real meal in days. you realize you lost four pounds this weekend. and you are less happy about this than you thought you would be.
you wake up your almost three year old on christmas morning and you tell her that santa came. you ask if she heard the bells ringing as he passed the house and she says yes, mommy, i heard them.
you ask her what she told santa she wanted. a kitchen. which sounds a whole lot like chitch-in and you smile as she turns the corner and sees her brand new play kitchen standing in the room. you marvel at how she doesn't seem as surprised as you thought she would and you realize. she believes. and she knows she is good. she does not doubt that santa would hear her.
(she is, however, quite impressed that santa left her some pieces of cookie for her because she really wanted him to.)
you tell your daughter far too many times in one four day period that you cannot play with her because you are too sick. and she puts her hand to your head and says oh, ack-a-tually, you're warm. you're sick, mommy. and you watch your man be both parents for the holidays so that you can phone it in.
you are grateful and irritable and sick and tired and happy and hungry and too full and you simply feel the most human you can possibly feel.
you think about sesame seeds and you sleep through christmas.
because it is almost the new year.
and a change is gonna come.

bambi and the eyes of the forest

2010-12-19T13:26:00.000-08:00

she cried out last night, not long after being put to bed.
her eyes are scary, mommy.
whose eyes? bambi?
yes.
i remind her that her room is safe. that bambi is friendly. that the shadows are not scary, they are hers. she owns them. i remind her that bambi has been on her closet door, above the rack of dress up clothes since we've lived in this house. she knows bambi.
...
as a child, i used to spend weekends at my dad's house. i would sleep completely covered under the blankets, convinced that if no part of myself showed, i was safe. i was a tad claustrophobic, however, and rigged a way to peek my nose and mouth out of a covered tunnel so that fresh air would keep me sane, a cloak of fabric safe. i would obsess over the curtains, making sure no speck of window was visible because i was convinced there were eyes outside. scary eyes.
...
the second time she cried, she saw eyes growing out of the dress up clothes. lots of them. so many that her nightlight was not bright enough to shrink the glare from her imagination. i plugged in the too-bright-for-a-nightlight string of christmas lights in her room and taped a piece of paper over bambi.
there is no reason to be scared, mommy. this is my room.
...
i cannot stand the forest. it's not the trees or the solitude or even the dark. it is the gateway to the multiplication of every bad thought i have ever stored, filed, began as it festers and comes to life. i can scare myself shitless in no time. i am the perfect case study for the type of brain that does not respond well to hallucinogens. i believe in the possibility of anything. and, for some reason, i believe more in the possibility of evil than i do of good in most situations. i work to keep this at bay. paper taped over corners of my mind at any time. if you walked through the uneven hallways of my imagination, you will find carpet and stone and marble and blood and balloons and the ocean and the darkest part of yourself. i will show it to you, my makeup smeared and music a tad too loud.
...
i tell my daughter that bambi is friendly. that there are no eyes growing in dress up clothes. i tell her she is safe.
we talk about her fancy gold shoes that are magic. we marvel over her first performance in her very first christmas pageant at school. how she sang so loud and so pretty and she made me cry, my eyes full like ripe grapes. we made plans to make the gingerbread house that has been sitting on the counter for a week. we will stare at the boo-tiful christmas tree, mommy that we finally decorated last night. and i remind her that mommy and daddy are here.
she is safe.

and i crawl back into bed and pull the blankets up over my face, leaving a small space to breath.

in memoriam

2010-12-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

we spent the day yesterday at a memorial for one of our closest friend's mom. a lot of love in that house. among the folded legs and memories tucked into corners. on one table, photos. in one, she was young and on the beach, eyes focused on something in the distance. she was young and it's not always about age, is it? going through a box today, i found an old cd, unlabeled. i found photos. of another parent of a friend who has since passed. and he was not so young in this picture, it was only a few years ago. but he was young, you know? even if he didn't feel it.

driving home from west hills last night, we took ventura blvd. all the way home. we passed a chain restaurant we had once visited back in our first year of dating and i pointed at it. 'i remember eating there...' my voice trailing off as i think back to the chip and pepper jeans i wore nonstop during that time of my life, margaritas with dinner, coffee for dessert. we went back to bryan's apartment that night and played poker with one of our friends. it was my first time playing poker and i drank too much wine and talked the whole time. wiped the floor with them. beginner's luck. or verbal distraction. regardless, i stayed up later than usual that night, smoked too many cigarettes and we went to breakfast late, closer to lunch than not. we were so young, even though we weren't.
a few minutes after passing the restaurant last night, finn says 'yeah, we ate there,' with the taffy-like conviction that only exists between the ages of two and three. 'no, you weren't born yet,' bryan says. and she is silent. and i think she is so young.

not a baby

2010-12-05T23:02:00.000-08:00

in the bath i noticed the curve of her arm, where the freckle rests in the shadow of muscle. she used to be more like a plushie doll, all spindly arms and round torso. she's growing and her pants are shrinking. the certainty with which i used to organize her laundry is wavering. but that freckle. i stared at it tonight, wondering what it would look like when she puts on a prom dress. wondered how many times i will stare at that exact freckle, the first she grew, in the years to come. a ring on her tree, so to speak.
i know where other freckles hide as they peek out to see if it is safe to show themselves and sometimes i hate that i know these secret markers on her body because i worry that the very knowledge of them will force fate's hand so that i might have to use them. armed with the knowledge that the sirens we hear on the road outside are all headed to some sort of emergency, we tell finn there is nothing to be afraid of we know we are really only telling her that right now, right this very moment things are okay for us but for someone else, life will never be the same.
tonight, after her bath, she asked me to hold her like a baby. i wrapped her up in a towel and cradled her and sang her a lullaby. she closed her eyes tightly and pretended to snore and i realized.
she's not a baby anymore.

last week she wrote her name by herself. bryan helped her with the 'n' but that doesn't really matter, does it?. she peed in her frog toilet for the first time, after telling bryan she needed to use the bathroom. shopping with me in the book section of the thrift store, she was digging through a box of christmas books on the ground and a grimacing woman wanted to push her cart through. 'oh, i'm sorry,' finn said and moved her books. 'i like books,' as she passed.
not a baby. anymore.

in the past seven days she has fallen down, bit her lip, vomited on me in public, been afraid of the dark. she has laughed and sung and made up words and been afraid of the boy with the truck at the playground. she threw a fit when i told her she could eat her carrots if she was hungry, drink water if she was thirsty. she wrote her name, she floated on her back in the tub, stood under shower water without fear. she had nightmares, decided she didn't like the nightlight we were using, told me that she thinks i'm the best. she has asked 'why' more times than i can count and seems to accept (so far) that my last answer in the string of WHY is 'because roosters are male.' she has made it clear, crystal clear.
not. a baby.

anymore.

what's left over

2010-12-01T12:24:00.000-08:00

we're not really the same as we were, are we? i mean, i'm still me. but i'm not. ask me about my decision making skills at 25 and i will show you a sad girl who thought she knew what she wanted and how to get there. i will bleed out if i try to open up and show you lessons learned.
i'm in the process of performing autopsies on my old journals. not because they hold any secrets. mostly because they don't. as valuable as i thought they were, they don't seem to hold much of anything. i've never seen so many words that don't mean anything all together like that.

a woman walked into my work recently and we recognized each other but we couldn't place it. and then we did. we were in a movie together years ago. back when i fancied myself an actress. she's still working. probably spends her days reading sides and preparing for auditions, the work of chasing work.
we smiled and chit-chatted a bit after we remembered each other and i saw myself talking to her years back at the wardrobe fittings and realized i wouldn't be able to walk in my old shoes if i tried.
i mean, i'm still me but i'm not. you know?

there was a tiny moment, standing in the middle of a coffee roasting facility, talking to this woman's boyfriend about the subtle differences in certain espressos where i thought to myself funny how we both ended up here.

i look at snapshots of my life, images riding on the crest of whitewater while i stand on the bank. fragments of the girls i used to be drift by bobbing up and down but i can seem to catch them. my eye is focused on the shimmering from below. play-doh and senior citizen felines. tiny pianos and mary-janed feet. the way it feels to watch my not quite three year old daughter write her name for the first time, all by herself. i used to be me. and now i'm me all over again. with the dirt and pebbles sifted out. i am what's left over.

the gold in the pan.

orange you glad

2010-11-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

i recently wondered if i would ever stop marveling at every single thing she does.
the answer is no.
that much i know.

she told her first joke. and i'm pretty sure the answer to all of the hatred in the world lies somewhere in the little pockets of air between her words and my grating sing-songy voice in this video.

thanksgiving morning

2010-11-26T13:29:00.000-08:00

i needed some ocean air. the marrow of who i am is somehow wrapped up in that place where water meets land and where your feet will sink and root themselves if you stand there long enough, let the waves do their work.
i am a beach person. that's the truth of it.
thanksgiving morning, we drove over. so that i could get some ocean air. and i'll forget about how both bryan and i thought we knew where the other was going and we spilled some irritability on the seats as we drove.
i'll forget how he was right, that the spot he chose was perfect. (okay, i won't forget that.)
i'll remember the feel of the sand and how my feet exhaled as soon as i took my shoes off. i'll remember the clean briskness of the ocean at my ankles.
i will never forget the look on finn's face as she stared at the ocean, both terrified and enamored all at once.
i suppose there is something frightening about all that beauty, yes?
i'll remember that i am thankful. grateful. that my life is good and full and that sipping a gingerbread latte next to the ocean on a sunny thanksgiving morning is pretty much perfection.

his name is ben

2010-11-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

i wrote the following for my friend, ben. it's the bio on his website.
and everytime i encounter another one of his stories i am more and more moved and inspired and in awe.
this man knows how to tell a story.

do you know him?
he was born. he spent his youth in alaska. in a cabin. without television.
he moved. he lived there. he lived here. he fell in and out of love along the way.
lost and found, so to speak.
his daughter steals his breath.
he picks up the pieces of her shedding skin here and there.
pieces he will never let you see.
does he sound familiar?
how much do you think you know?

let me tell you what i know.

that place between awake and dreaming.
he's from there.
the tufted cushions of silence between strangers.
he sits upon them, cross-legged and smiling.
the words tattooed on the back of your eyelids when you bite your tongue.
he can read them.
he grew up alongside the flicker of light and he'll walk barefoot through the pitch black of night to bring you a match.
his vision is six dimensional and he feels what images taste like.
his fingertips have eyes.
if he moves his hands when talking to you he is memorizing the room.
his fear is never of failure.
it is of the inability to adequately express himself.
it is of the story left untold.
let me put it this way:
he is an artist.
without boundaries.
sit for awhile and listen.
let him tell you a story.

give yourself an early holiday treat.
go read his latest post.

Memoirs of an Alaskan - IV

and then try to tell me you wouldn't buy a whole book of this.

(oh, and also send him some congratulatory love, would you? he and my wonderful and amazingly talented friend, danielle, just recently got engaged. there's something in the water i tell you...)

to be thankful

2010-11-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

occasionally i get wrapped up in the small things. fingering the jelly packet at our traditional sunday morning breakfast and wondering about who has touched it before me. where it has traveled. someone works in a factory and watches as it drops into a cardboard box. or they don't notice it at all. but it has been there just the same.
somehow it ends up in a metal tower of stacked jelly and my daughter stacks it atop the table, runs her toy car around it and we put it back where we found it and i hold it or a second, noticing that the peel off top is bent and i wonder about the hands that found it before me and where they went after breakfast and if they love or if they hurt.

i have a photo album handed down to me from my uncle. black and white and sepia portraits from the 1800's, steely eyes and serious faces. they are my family. on my grandfather's side. i stare at them and wonder. which of them did i get my laugh from? how many of them believed in dreaming big? how much loss were they able to hold under the skirts without showing too much leg? these women, their stoic faces, betraying nothing. is that a family trait?

i rearrange finn's room constantly. curate. move things around until they feel right. i do the same thing throughout the house on a pretty consistent basis but its as though i know there is a ticking clock under the floorboard right inside her doorway that will sound at some point, warning me away. an alarm of sorts, acknowledging the end of my reign. so i move books and organize them at will. i move toy chests and arrange pillows and stuffed animals and fold (and refold) clothes.

my mind jumps from here to there and i'm still here, on the couch, drinking coffee. wondering who has touched all the little things in my life before me.

happy meals and alligator teeth

2010-11-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

finn's head was full of nightmares last night and apparently they are contagious. after crawling back into the space between bryan's back and cheeto's face i curled into the dark spongy of my mind that allows me to be chewed upon by an alligator. it didn't hurt as bad as i thought it would. but did you know they can open doors? if you find yourself caught in a bathroom bleeding from teethmarks on your abdomen from their jaws, know that there stubby clawed legs can turn doorknobs. and they bark when they're mad. and, yes, i do know that alligators don't bark. but there it is.

sometimes i am not the perfect model of parenthood. i have allowed our daughter to enjoy a bowl of chocolate ice cream, a chocolate croissant, chocolate milk. not at the same time, but there it is. we have taught her that french fries taste good in ranch dressing and we sometimes coat her peas in butter and cheese just to get her to eat one. yes, she has been given a happy meal. we've since opted out of fast food as an option. but there it is.

she has watched television and listened to music not geared towards children. she has jumped on the couch with her shoes on and i know, for a fact, that last night i gave her a warning to stop doing so and then didn't follow through when she continued. i have told her to hold on while i finish typing an email and to go find a toy to play with so that i can finish dinner. i do not always buy organic vegetables and sometimes leave lights on in other rooms of the house when bryan is not home because i get scared of dark shadows and my imagination. and there it is.

it is somewhat conceited to have children, yes? to think that, of course, we'll be able to take care of them with smiling faces and perfect precision. that we won't sometimes want to drive through taco bell justified because it is at least the healthiest option out there. that we won't ever tell them to find something to play with so we can buy a few minutes of nothing. that we'll be able to cut the smoke in the middle of the night with the precision of soft words and forehead kisses. until we crawl back into our own heads and find ourselves trapped in bathroom, bleeding from alligator bites.

so there it is.

last week.

2010-11-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

pretty

2010-11-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

dress up

2010-10-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

i have slept away 80 percent of the last two days. i woke up this morning with the achy backbone of a body prone, heard the cobwebs rattling between muscles and bone. it's amazing how quickly the body learns to lay dormant. it seems my body's first instinct is to stop and curl into itself, arms wrapped around and around until cocooned. today, i woke up soft and sore and edges dried out, like fresh baked bread left ignored on the counter. the aftermath of a 48 hour illness. i feel stale.

yesterday, i am on the couch when he comes back from picking finn up at school. i am wearing ill-fitting pajamas that are beyond comfortable and i am glazed over with sick. he fixes finn a snack and sits down next to me on the couch. 'you're real pretty.' not a trace of sarcasm. finn looks up. 'yeah, mommy, you're real pretty.' and she means it. because he means it.
in his next breath, he says 'she's starting to look more and more like you.' and then to finn 'you look like mommy.'
which she learns, at the age of two, is a compliment. because she says 'thank you.'

recently, as we're going to bed, i remark that finn is, by far, the funniest person i know. she already has a wicked sense of humor and she's not even three.
'she has your sense of humor,' he tells me.

one of my goals in life was to never have to watch my daughter learn about love the hard way. i want her to know that love is a verb and that all the flowers and chocolate in the world do not mean shit when you're sick on the couch and need a couple days off from life to curl into your cocoon. that grand gestures are generally done for the crowd and the applause. that it's the quiet moments, when your guard is down, that matter. that knowing your partner thinks that the best parts of your children come from you is worth the surrendering of the fantasy. that fairy tales are great stories, but they are nothing compared to the real thing.

we spy on her when she plays alone in her room. perhaps it is because we both enjoy spending time alone, crave it. so when we find her playing in her room, talking to herself or giving a tour of her 'cool stuff' to whatever imaginary friend happens to be tagging along, we sit as quiet as possible watching her, marveling. i wish i could transform myself into a tiny ladybug, atop her dollhouse. recording the mumblings that are just low enough that i can't make them out. writing down her songs so that they can be played back for her when she is an old woman and needs to remember how to feel like herself again. there may come a time when she wishes she could choose other parents (because don't we all, at some point, rage against that which we can't control?) but i don't ever want to give her a reason worth holding onto.
i want her to always feel safe enough to dress herself up however she wants, to know that her core is rooted in myself and in bryan and that we will always see the magic. we will always spy on her from the corner, unable to look away. that we will always be just beyond the reach of her imagination. that she is never alone.

yes.

2010-10-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

there is a rope. in relationships. sometimes its an anchor, other times it floats back and forth, keeping time. but it's always there. the tie that keeps you tethered to each other. occasionally, i am much like an acrobat soaring without a net, never even looking down, balanced perfectly in the middle of my core, toes wrapped around. other times, i'm holding on, the end circled around my wrists, slack and taut all at the same time. regardless, i am attached. years ago, i chose this rope. out of all the fiber in the entire world, this one was strong enough for me.

the last few days have been especially focused, up close. bryan and i have been having conversations that remind me of the first weeks we were together, so connected and so happy to have found each other. we laughed the other morning in bed, stealing a couple of moments to snuggle next to each other before the baby jumped on top of us and reflected. remember when our biggest decision of the day was whether to sleep in or go get breakfast?

we talk about moving to a place where we can have some land. we talk about the lessons we learned in our past relationships and how thankful we are we experienced those things so that we could be these people to each other. we talk about the struggles we sometimes experience as two strong-willed independents who don't always know how to bend and we do our best to always talk it out. sometimes we go to bed angry because we both agree it's better than saying things we will later regret. we see eye to eye, hand to hand, and when we don't...well, we deal with that, too. we know it's not always going to be easy. but we know that nothing good ever is.
and we don't let the silly idea that we don't deserve each other pickle the fact that we are perfect for each other in every way.

the ring has been sitting in the house for months. i knew it was there, i just didn't know where. i could feel it, though. have you ever noticed that the promise of i will love you forever can warm a house? it lights the dark midnight hallways when you need a glass of water for the baby. and it guarantees the pillow will always have a cool side when you need it.

this morning, half naked and running a bit late for work, i hear bryan and finn talking. the door creaks open and finn walks up to me, arm outstretched. here, mommy.
in her tiny fingers, the ring.
wet hair and undergarments and i am aflutter.
will you marry me? he says.
i think i said yes.
(i made sure to say yes.) he puts the ring on my finger and i lean down to kiss finn.
mommy and daddy are getting married! yay!
she claps.
i turn back to bryan, my toes bubbling and my eyes glittering and my heart and mind throwing peace signs and high-fives and beads.

yes, i made sure to say yes.

what i learned

2010-10-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

char sent out a request for us to share 'what i learned.' a life lesson, something gained. char is quite the inspiration, her words and photos. (my goodness, her photos.) i am honored to participate.

two weeks into sixth grade, we moved. i was made fun of the first day in class and shrank into my eleven year old skeleton, hung back in the marrow, away from the surface. one girl, 'em', was nice to me after that. she became my first friend. for awhile, my only friend.
i missed my best friend from elementary school so much i cried daily for the first few months. i was not myself.
it started small. we spent time at em's house, not much at mine. she liked her house better. we played the games she liked to play. we did the things she wanted to do. she would tell me when i looked stupid in an outfit and she would laugh when i mentioned a crush on one of the popular boys. i fed off her negative image of me, it made sense. almost immediately, we were inseparable. co-dependency feels good when you're lost in the unknown.
her house was filthy. so bad that my mom used to make me take a shower whenever i would come back from spending the night there. i remember my mom and step-dad taking em and i to disneyland and i thought they were so awesome because they immediately shelled out big bucks buying us the sweatshirts we wanted right when we got there. my mom told me years later it was because em's clothes were so dirty and smelled so horrible they felt bad for her. i never took my shoes off in her house. there was animal feces on the floor. i brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink because the bathrooms were unsanitary. no one in the house seemed concerned with the issues, however, so i ignored them too.
it's amazing what you can adapt to.
i know we had fun together. i remember going with her to her dad's house in san diego for the weekend on numerous occasions the summer between sixth and seventh grade. we lived at the beach, barbecued and ate ice cream. we read books and watched movies. we talked about our dreams and it felt like what having a best friend should feel like. until we got back to school, seventh grade.
all of a sudden, we weren't in the same class all day. in fact, we didn't have any classes together. our circle of friends grew to include a handful of other girls and tensions started to rise. one of the girls invited me to her house after school one day without em. and i was told i wasn't allowed to go. that if i did, it would mean i wasn't loyal. that i wasn't a good friend. i didn't go.
the "popular" kids started being nice to me. inviting me to things. one girl in particular was hosting a beach party the last week of school and wanted me there. i asked if i could bring em. NO. NO WAY. i didn't go.
our circle of friends shrunk. em had a way of driving away everyone, until it was just me and her. i used to watch these other friends go and i wanted to turn to em, blame her, tell her to just BE NICE TO PEOPLE but i was terrified of her. she had a horrible temper and, after two years, i was really good at keeping it deflected away from me.
finally, the summer before eighth grade, one of the few girls that still talked to em convinced me to end my friendship with her. she sat me down one afternoon while at her house. i had lied to em about going to this girl's house and was making her promise she wouldn't mention anything to em about me being there because i was so terrified of what she would do if she knew i lied. this girl said no, she wouldn't lie. and then she took me outside in the fresh air and held my hands as she said: you need to not be friends with her anymore. she is mean to you. she makes fun of you in front of other people. she puts you down and friends don't do that to each other. if she loved you, she wouldn't want you to feel bad. i know you're scared, but i love you. and i will be there with you if you want. she's not your only friend. i'm your friend, too.
who knows what her exact words were. i just remember her hands, forcing me to listen and that's what i heard.
i broke up with em the next week.
and i started to breathe again.
eighth grade was, quite possibly, the best year of my teenage experience.
thank you, becky carter, for teaching me that i'm worth it.
for teaching me how friendship really works.
for chasing after me when i started walking down the road paved with abuse and manipulation. and for walking back with me until i found my feet again.
you saved my life.

**in response to char's request for 'what i learned' i found myself completely stumped. until i thought about what it's like to be a pre-teen and how we start to become the adults we are. and i remembered, so vividly, the fork in the road where i stood at the tender ages of 11-13. how easily we bend to others' views of us and how easy it is to believe you are unworthy of love. and i felt myself so overwhelmed with gratitude for having becky in my life right when i needed her. and wherever she is today, i hope her life is full and happy.**

the saturday before halloween

2010-10-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

finn's very first school-related holiday function.
hoo hoo.

diy owl costume found here.

owning the room

2010-10-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

i feel a strange sort of proprietorship towards my name. if there is someone else around with the same name and another person says 'krista' and is not addressing me, i feel like a three year old holding a toy while some adult somewhere tells me to share. my grip tightens and there is a moment of just plain not understanding why i have to.
in grade school, there was this sense of unique, of never wondering who the teacher was referring to. i owned the room.

finn's hero worship has turned her brother into a boy who flies airplanes, builds houses and is her favorite friend at school. trying to tell her that he doesn't go to her school merely causes her to look at me with a seemingly well-rehearsed roll of the eyes. no mommy. he's my favorite friend. at school. this level of seeing the world through finn colored glasses is inspired, to say the least.

she spent her very first night in an actual bed last night, a bit excited and only slightly anxious. that is, until the lights went out and she saw the walls of her room without the familiar bars of containment. it took awhile for her father to slay some dragons last night. i sat with her in the middle of the night and reminded her that the furniture and toys and artwork were still hers, that even if the view was different she still owned the room.

snapshot

2010-10-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

i took the most amazing photo this afternoon of finn chasing bubbles and the rays of sun dancing on the outlines of bryan and his son in the background. i ran around the lawn showing the photo off to everyone. and then didn't save it on my phone. and lost it. my heart sank.

bryan's son is staying with us for the first time. since he lives out of state, we generally go there. more often than not, bryan goes without finn and i so that he can spend some time with him without having to schedule everything around a toddler. but this time? flew out here by himself, finally 12. i expected it to feel different. for it to be a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces upside down, without a guide. placing pieces over and over until one of them fits, hundreds of times. i expected to have to concentrate harder. instead, he sits on the couch and finn walks around him nonstop, circling his feet like a puppy. she calls his name over and over and looks at him with the same eyes i used to make at my older brothers.

hero worship.

as i've mentioned before, when we've gone to see him, i don't post pictures here because he's not my son and it's not my place. but can you feel him? just out of frame, about to take finn's attention away completely and make her laugh in a way i have never heard? a way that she reserves just for him?
here, i'll prove it to you:

i lost what is quite possibly one of the best pictures i've ever taken. it was too perfect. and maybe i wasn't supposed to share it. maybe it was just for us.

pretzel pies

2010-10-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

in my struggle to tie a comfortable knot in the end of the rope of my day, i decided to mix things up this evening. (my abuse of prepositional phrases aside.)
rather than draw, eat, clean up, read, bed i opted for:
draw, eat, clean up, read, BAKING, bed.
i'm pretty sure we made individual apple pies but finn insisted on calling them 'pretzel pies, full of pretzels. and pies. pretzels.' although, coming from her it sounds like 'pah-ret-sels.'
with the accent on the 'ret.'
i was also able to keep her from adding cherry tomatoes to the pie mix, which is a coup in and of itself.

card catalog

2010-10-06T21:46:00.000-07:00

i believe in the value of other people's things. i use vintage silverware my uncle sent me and i wonder if the people who initially used it cared enough to actually polish it or if they let it tarnish like me, day after day. i live in a building constructed in the 1940s to house actors under contract with the studios. and i look at walls and doorways and the too large cabinets that modern day refrigerators don't fit under and try to imagine who lived here. that creaking floorboard in the tiny hallway. sometimes i will lean back and forth on it and wonder how many toes touched the same spot before it started touching back.
i'm sure most people don't think about these things.

i attribute emotions to books and jewelry and toys. statues and pictures and dishes. globes don't hold emotion, they just showcase possibility and the way we change our documentation of the world as we chip away at it. we find new planets and declare others obsolete and we run our fingers around the grooves of raised countries bordered with water that are dying of thirst.
clothes do not hold emotion. except maybe fur. but that depends on who is wearing it and when.

i spend a good portion of my life curating. one day, when i am an old woman, i envision a card catalog across one wall. in each drawer, a perfectly organized library of memories. cross-referenced and tangible. corresponding photos and small multi-colored dots indicating the vault to which you must descend to reach the highest shelf in the fine art section. if you skim them quickly enough, you will notice small pencil drawings in the corner. a flip book of me, small to large, there to here.

i love maps and globes and yet i am directionally impaired. if someone tells me the taco stand is on the southeast corner i look at them blankly. left or right? because the 'L' is my left thumb and pointer finger and that will never change. i never know if i am facing north or south unless i'm standing next to the ocean but i guarantee if you put me on the east coast, i would get it wrong. and here i am, in charge of teaching finn how the world works. sometimes i'm just passing along information that was passed along to me, unfiltered.

i was in my fourth year of college. my first week in 'images in film' i was required to write an essay discussing culture and society, ethnicity and class. i was an english major. i wrote papers in my sleep and my editing consisted mainly of correcting typing/spelling errors. remember typewriters? painstaking pounding of keys, attention to detail. first drafts always written by hand. i bought a super ugly electric typewriter/word processor that showed the line before it printed on a ticker above the keys and i felt a step above, streamlined. i finished the paper an hour before class and turned it in, smiling at my professor with the ignorance of a middle class woman who has always risen to the academic top. forgetting that the fat that rises up first generally gets skimmed off and discarded. the next class, a warning lecture to students. there is no excuse for failing to think critically. i half listened. i got an A in my critical analysis in literature class. these are skills i was born with. my paper gets handed back to me and he smiles as i take it. i smile back. on the top of the page, a note. 'well written with a complete disregard for critical thinking. must be an english major.' next to that a huge 'R' - you know, for REWRITE.
a simple two page essay. i rewrote it three times before it was accepted. i added american multicultural studies as a second major and dr. gray became my mentor and i, his assistant for the 'images in film' class. i critiqued and graded these weekly essays, he critiqued and graded my assessments. sometimes we disagreed, which led to some of the most stimulating discussions i have ever had about what it means to be human and why we do the things we do given certain parameters. all of a sudden, the map of my hands, left and right made sense because i realized that i have taken my sense of direction for granted.

i have accepted that my sense of direction is impaired. that i don't always know where i am, where i am going. that you can give me the ocean, but if you don't tell me what side of the world i am on (or if you stick me on an island) i will still not know if i am facing north or south. i will question the possibility of everything and i will watch my daughter learn to fill a bottle with water in the bathtub with awe and restraint. i will want to tell her to keep the opening submerged, at a slight angle, to watch for the bubbles rising to the surface, the air being replaced by water. but i won't. i will hold my words on the back of my tongue, a silent 'R.' and i will sit, silent and aware of how much i really don't know when i see her realize after a very short amount of time the correct way it works. that perhaps her sense of direction is something i don't have control over. i am merely the 'you are here' sticker on the map of her life. the place she starts from so that she knows where she is.

tis the season

2010-09-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

this happens every year.
september brings pumpkin spice lattes, tights, christmas decorations procreating in the corners of shopping malls.
fall is here, i think and my heart eases up a bit and i start to look forward to things. not just wait for time to pass.
every september i am disappointed. because i live in southern california and we do not have a normal operating system. temperate climate be damned, september is generally warmer and more unbearable than the rest of the summer.
yet, for some reason i always think things will be different. that my idea of how things will be somehow means something. that the world will fit into the square frame of my reference.
it's 110 degrees today where i live, work, sleep, dream. it's the end of september.

she's so little, so small. i want to wrap her in cotton and armor, i want her to be brave without getting hurt.
i want can and preserve moments from her day. store them in my spice rack so that when i'm cooking dinner and i tell her to find somewhere else to play so that she doesn't get hurt in our small kitchen and she cries at me because she really wants to put the heirloom cherry tomatoes in a bowl of water and smash them around and then dump the entire thing in the trash while i'm wrangling hot stoves and scalding water full of minced patience she will only remember how it tastes to carry her very own lunchbox to school.

over the weekend, i take finn with me to michaels so that i can buy components for her handmade christmas presents, knowing full well that there will come a time when i can't do these things with her. i distract her with dollar crafts in the kid's section and pass by an aisle full of hundreds of christmas ornaments and mutter under my breath, so i think.
oh, man, christmas ornaments already.
the next aisle over, a variety of pumpkin figurines. glittered and glass and electronic and painted ceramic.
oh, man, says finn. pumpkins already.

a little science on television and some work. (also known as sweet holy heat wave of los angeles i love air conditioning)

2010-09-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

playlists

2010-09-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

music is huge in our house.
and then sometimes it isn't.
but when it is, it really is.
introducing finn to music feels a bit like a job i'm not qualified for. i play things i like, watch and see what she responds to and make a point to never say that anything she likes is bad. (even when it is.)
we have a record player and i buy albums at the thrift store, playing classical christmas music and the go-gos interspersed with vintage children's albums. bryan has a whole lot of indie music by bands i've never heard of and he plays the oldies for finn, giving her history as she listens and dances.
she takes music seriously. she plays her harmonica, her drums, her guitar, her keyboard. she can remember the pitch of a song the next day. she dances to her own drum and she is picky about what she likes.
finn has favorites. and truth be told, i find myself listening to them when she's not even around.
on current rotation?
yo gabba gabba - music is awesome
they might be giants - here comes science
and now, a new favorite.

do fun stuff - vol 1
go read how a great idea manifested into reality here.
(besides, if you're not already reading pacing the panic room, you should.)

late saturday morning. finn and i are still in our pajamas and she asked for music.
'fun stuff! fun stuff!'

that smile? the way she listens and tilts her head?
thank you, do fun stuff.
you made my day.

(just so you know, all proceeds from the album sales are going directly to a good cause so you're giving and getting at the same time. not a bad way to shop, yes?)

the last of you

2010-09-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

i found you in a box today. a picture of you as a child. and i remember when you gave me that picture. so that i would always remember you. some sort of token that, yes, indeed, our paths crossed. that it meant something more than a chemical reaction, spontaneous combustion. i remember our first kiss, that moment right before. i remember what the air smelled like and how nervous i was that maybe it would be a disappointment. later, the regret that it wasn't. you know what i mean.

i remember thinking you were the one. back when i believed that feelings meant everything. rules didn't apply. that the idea of 'the one' was something to strive for, whatever the cost. i made bad decisions with you, for you, to spite you. i hurt your feelings on purpose and i pretended not to care. i saved every single piece of paper you wrote something on, proof. i filed away little tokens, romantic notions of past lives and crossed paths and broken hearts fueled by the idea that no one could possibly understand the way my breath held itself upside down when you walked across the room.

it took lifetimes to rid myself of you. to not physically feel pain when i found you creeping around the corners of my subconscious while i slept. i knew you had the same dreams. i also knew you wished you hadn't. that you forced yourself to stop doing it. you moved on. long before i did. just so you know, i felt it when you did it. i knew.

long ago, i let you go, too. i wonder sometimes if you felt it, too. that moment when i did it. it was freeing. to let go of something i never really had in the first place. to surrender the screenplay of the type of love story that only really works on paper, where real people don't live. because the flawed characters like us? there's really nothing romantic about it.

i fell in love, completely, with another man. something i never thought i would do when i used to think about you. and i kept the box of you filed away still. i did not keep it because i wanted to hold onto you. truth be told, i wanted to remember the girl i once was with you. that silly naive girl. because i had to be her to get to here. i honor her. she made all my mistakes for me so that i could finally be this girl, the one who finds a box in the back of the hall closet and doesn't feel the need to keep it anymore. the one who thanks you for telling her you loved her without following through. the one who thanks you for not choosing her.

because i wouldn't be me without you. and i wouldn't be me with you.

reflection

2010-09-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

clip on earrings and french braids. i remember when she didn't even have enough hair to put in a clip and now bryan and i argue about her bangs. he wants her hair to be long, all long, and i want her to have the cute bangs again. we've compromised. sort of. last time i told him i would think about letting them grow out and the very next morning i cut them to just above the eyebrows in a ridiculous fit of not being able to get the barette to stay in her hair. this time i kept my word.
she has an entire wardrobe of dress up clothes at her disposal and a back up supply of costumes that rivals the best closet in community theater (mostly thanks to carrie for being my very generous friend) and we encourage her to pick out her outfits every day. tell her to look in the mirror at how pretty she looks when she's ready for the day. i want her to always smile when she looks in the mirror. she dances in front of the mirror sometimes and says i love you and i wonder when the criticism will start talking back and how long i can keep it at bay, swept under the rug, her room a 'no self-criticism' zone. how long i'll be able to see this expression on her face when she looks in the mirror with fancy clip-on earrings and french braids.

hello android

2010-09-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

someone got a new phone.

someone doesn't really know how to do much else with it besides take pictures.

it's kind of nice to not have to carry a phone and a camera around. just sayin.

this weekend was full of lots of one on one finn time. a little bit of thrifting. and sunday morning at the melrose trading post. (bryan had to scout some stuff for a film he's working on and of course finn and i had to tag along...i love that place.)

all the way across the sky

it's an owl monacle. best five dollars ever.

thrifted goodness

old school chairs. literally. they're old and they're school chairs. i love them.

the folds of my day

2010-09-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

i have been under the impression that my daughter is predisposed to certain childhood traits i believed firmly to be mine. to watch them played out before me, her interpretation of them shining bright on pink bathroom tiles, i realize that perhaps maybe these traits are not mine in the first place. perhaps my great-grandmother refused to get her face wet when she bathed. perhaps she was afraid of water falling from above her and splashing onto her delicate skin. perhaps the irrational idea that lukewarm water was as dangerous as a rolling boil merely came from fairy tales and catholocism. whatever the origin, i found myself in awe of my daughter and her adamant refusal to stand under shower water or get her hair washed without a fight.

she started preschool yesterday. i wore every cliche on my sleeve yesterday and even found myself in the middle of a tunnel, echoes of time standing still and rushing past orbed around me. i wondered who she sat with at lunch and if anyone hurt her feelings. i thought about her laying down for naptime and worried she felt abandoned that i did not get to sing her 'i am your sunshine' before realizing i hold onto these moments more than she. she takes change a lot better than i do.

in her bath last night, she talked and talked and talked and then asked me for a shower. she pointed at the showerhead.
'water? shower? for me?'
i turned it on and she scooted all the way to the edge of the tub, her toes barely getting wet.
minutes later, with only a tiny suggestion from me, she stood, head up and backed into the downpour of water. drops landed on her cheeks, her eyes, the top of her head. i called bryan in and he looked at her and then at me.
'how did you do that?'
'i didn't," i said. 'she did.'

the county fair

2010-09-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

the idea is, often, better than the real deal.
let's go to the fair! only $1 to get in labor day weekend! fried food, the enchanted forest!
it was over 100 degrees. it was crowded. overflowing with poorly disciplined adults and their offspring. the lack of shade did not stop us from trying.
i was so looking forward to fried food, my inner glutton rattling cages and screaming obscenities.
deep fried white castle burger.
fried chicken sandwiched between a krispy kreme doughnut.
deep fried twinkie with chocolate sauce.
you may as well throw your $20 in the deep fryer and call it a day.
i cannot tell you how disappointed i was, my balloon popping midair. i really expected it to be the height of ravenous gluttony. i really expected to revel in the natural disaster that is fatty fried food and indulge myself like a teenager sneaking out of the house.
instead, i found myself throwing away the expensive remnants of a bad idea.
the real deal sometimes sucks.

i have friends dealing with unhappy marriages, new pregnancies, death and last minute miracles. the ebb and flow of the messes we create, small tentacles of the past sometimes stinging passersby without intention. i bookmark these ideas and never really figure out how to fit them into my schedule. they pile up, as do the pints of ice cream and i remember so many nights spent pining over men who never really loved me back and think the real deal is sometimes better than you ever imagined.

happy birthday

2010-08-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

if i could go back in time, i would babysit my mom as a child. i would braid her hair and i would take her to the ocean, the mountains, the drive in. i would hug her tight when she skinned her knees and i would laugh when she jumped in the mud, splattering designs all over the canvas of her world.
i would introduce her to music and i would read books with her and i would make her toast and ginger ale when she is sick. i would tell her i love her every single day and i would stop everything i was doing to listen to her stories. (except, of course, when i'm on the phone. because we all know we don't interrupt our parents when they're on the phone.)
i would stretch my arms out as wide as possible and tell her:
i love you thhhiiiiiiiiiiiiisss much. and she would try her hardest to hold her arms wider and wider and i would let her win.
i would treat her as a child much the same as she treated me.
because she sure knew how to do it right.

happy birthday to the little girl who grew up to become my mother.

i think she's pretty amazing.

summer weekends

2010-08-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

some weekends are more full than others.
this weekend was full of the following:

reconnecting with old friends
homemade banh mi courtesy of bryan * eggs benedict, croque madame and waffles (not homemade, but delicious all the same) * movies both good and bad (good = babies, bad = kick ass) * sunday afternoon at the getty * chivalry * fancy hairdos * ray lamontagne's new album * thrift store shopping * pedicures * a whole lot of love

this weekend was a keeper.

beauty shop.

2010-08-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

and reason 532 i love him so much.

signs of life

2010-08-19T21:55:00.000-07:00

i used to have such nice skin. i took it for granted. expected it to stay that way. i was so unimaginative.

do you ever find yourself, in those moments right before sleep, head tilted and eyes closed, back in a place you had forgotten you had been? back when you were friends with her, crying over him, wanting nothing but to stay there. you roll over, new cheek on fresh pillow and you realize you might still be the same person but you will never be the same person again. and then you fall asleep.

do you know what it feels like to be in love? with yourself, your partner, your life? it feels like less like falling and more like jumping. it feels like knowing you will land. soft. it feels weightless and full of gravity and it feels like barefeet on hardwood floors in the middle of the night. it feels like home.
it feels like the memory of clear skin mottled with age.

profile

2010-08-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

sometimes i wonder if the last two and a half years have provided a blueprint for the rest of her development or if i'm just a bystander painting lines in the road so she knows where she should and should not be. imagine never being taught what those white and yellow lines mean. imagine the catastrophe of not being told the history of where you stand. we at least want her to know her context.
we make decisions for her everyday. we tell her to 'stop. be careful. no touching. be gentle.' there are also loud claps and exclamations of 'hoo-ray!!' along the side of the road, but for the most part it seems this leg of her journey primarily consists of caution signs.
i'm learning things about her everyday, all while explaining certain truths about her to others as though i'm really privy to such knowledge. truth be told, it changes every day.

it hurts to love this much.

the last time i saw her

2010-08-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

i was around 20 when i met her. she was 18. at college. my own world, finally.
i really wanted to be friends with her. so badly. spun webs from my fingers full of forced nonchalance, not wanting to look like i'm trying too hard. sometimes it's more humiliating to throw yourself at platonic friends.
she was friends with a boy i had a raging, unrequited crush on. i think she assumed i used her to get to him. really, i used my crush on him as a reason to hang out with her. it gave me something to talk about.
my emotional development at age twenty would have seriously debated team edward vs. team whateverthehelltheotherguy'snameis. she would have written a paper about it.

she and i never really became friends outside of the few parties we ended up at together. we left each other random messages here and there but that was it. one day, we ran into each other on campus. we made brief eye contact and she looked away. she looked back and i looked away. it had been almost a year since i had seen her last and i wanted her to make the first move. jilted looks like a warm afternoon in northern california, doc marten boots and a long flowing skirt. she kept walking and my heart broke a little.
i really wanted to be friends with her.

i'm not sure why exactly we spend time becoming acquaintances with people only to treat them like complete strangers. i'm not sure why i didn't try to talk to her that afternoon. i'm not sure she even remembers me. but i sometimes wonder if we're walking around, bumping into the same people, missing out on something.

do you have friends that could have been? friends you wish had been? friends you cut loose?

in my brain

2010-08-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

"It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or property."

Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman

checks and balances

2010-07-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

do you ever pay self-imposed taxes? a pound of flesh sitting on the scales of checks and balances?
even as a little girl, i believed that all good things come with a price. that there is a universal karmic balance, so to speak. if i did something wrong, if i lied or intentionally hurt someones feelings, i would mentally make a red check in the debit ledger. the next bad thing that happened to me? i drew a line through that check. a mental tally, so to speak.

bryan tells me i'm impossible to surprise. i will probe and ask pointed questions, i will work the situation over and over in my head until i reach some kind of conclusion. perhaps it's learned. there were aspects of my childhood that were so well hidden from public view, i learned never to trust the surface. people are only as good as their word when they're telling the truth. the result, however, is that even the good surprises are hard to hide from me. it's one of my weaker qualities.

have you ever watched a human being develop cognitive thinking skills right in front of you? there you are, eating what most definitely falls into the top five of all sandwiches you've ever eaten, as your man explains to your two and a half year old that showing each other the chewed up food in our mouths (while gross and hilarious) is bad manners. fifteen minutes later she attempts to wipe her yogurt smeared face on the curtains and you stop her. you explain she will get food on the curtains.
she giggles.
bad manners, mommy. bad manners, daddy.
you and the man you created this human with look across the table at each other.
because you realize she just put two and two together and for some reason she knew it was four.
i suppose i'm not that hard to surprise after all.
flesh and balance and bad manners lined up all in a row.

renegade craft fair

2010-07-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

saturday.
renegade craft fair.

my mom babysat so bryan and i could actually go for longer than 45 minutes. finn was so excited to spend the day with mimi she barely waved us off as we left.
no baby means no diaper bag.
means no sunscreen.
not so wise.

hey little owl

where's your sunscreen?

we met up with iku and nova, sweated more than should be allowed at an indie craft fair and bought a lot of art.
i embarrassed myself in front of nan lawson with my awkward adoration and i'm pretty sure she thinks i'm nuts.
we scooped up a lot of dan bob thompson's art and it is now hanging throughout the house.
bryan even surprised me with a much coveted necklace when i wasn't looking.
we finished up with lunch at philippe's.
aside from the second degree sun marks, saturday was a pretty awesome day.
true story.

you don't have to tell me twice.

i sort of adore her and now own the artwork to prove it.

dan bob thompson

my surprise necklace from the weekend store.

photobooth fun with iku.

our loot.

lunch.

i just realized i don't have a photo of nova here. let it be known he was sitting directly to my left in the above photo.

sunday morning, finn and i are hanging out.

finn: mimi? she at work?
me: i think she's at home.
finn: mimi home? i see her?
me: no, baby, not today...i'm sorry.
finn: i'm sorry, too, mommy.

happily ever after

2010-07-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

a conversation this morning with someone i love dearly who is getting divorced. years and life and children and boundaries and expectations and moving on. there are no guarantees, are there? i have been very clear with bryan that i will love him for the rest of my life but that doesn't mean i'll stay with him no matter what. i can think of five things right off the top of my head that would make me walk away immediately. there is a level of accountability, yes?
we all have our boundaries. he knows mine.

love.

it's always tricky when the noun should be a verb.

i read a post today that moved me in such a way that i found myself saving it to read to my daughter later when she asks me what love is and needs more than my own myopic perspective.
head on over to read flutter's version of the fairytale.

yes.

everyday conversation

2010-07-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

the question begs. someone asks and i sometimes don't know how to answer.
what's new?
nothing. but not really nothing. i mean there are things.
and i wonder what we talk about and what we pretend to care about in the words of others and in between the few moments we have to ourselves.
i mean, i've got things.

according to this, i write like cory doctorow. i am burning through some neil gaiman right now and two things come to mind: (1) the fact that i even know who cory doctorow and neil gaiman are is mindboggling considering my usual choice of genre and probably has more to do with my choice in life partner than anything else. and (2) i lied. i'm not burning through anything. i read at night. before bed. for about a half hour to forty five minutes. i reinforce delusions about my current self when i stack extra books next to the bed, as though i will suddenly start tearing through pages at warp speed. i used to read a lot more.
i used to do a lot of things.

do you ever wonder if you're original? or if you're just repeating the same things everyone else has repeated over and over and over and you wonder how people make new and write new and do new.
then you read about a politician using fake words and comparing herself to shakespeare and you think
she kind of has a point.
i want to make up my own words. i want them to have my own meaning. i want something new that was not there before me.

when i am feeling a bit misaligned, i organize things. i reorganize. i file papers and label things and line things up properly. i feel safe and secure when things are in order. when objects are placed with intention.

sometimes all i have to do is put my feet forward to see that the exact thing i need is waiting for me.

and that my things, well...
i will always have things.

{nothing. what's new with you?}

glove shoes

2010-07-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

we spent saturday at the aquarium of the pacific with my mom and her boyfriend and bryan could not stop staring at this dude with a long curly ponytail. 'look at his shoes. NO. LOOK AT HIS SHOES.'
finally, the guy stood next to me at the sea otter exhibit, his ponytail in my peripheral vision. i leaned the camera down ever so carefully and snapped.
this guy clearly thought the aquarium was a much more interactive place. and i wondered about the lives of others and the ways in which we live parallel yet utterly distant lives.
i mean, i wouldn't even know where to find glove shoes.

we all have our things, don't we? those that we illuminate behind a magnifying glass, those things we let each other learn. every day the ebb and flow of my heart creates movement in my family and sometimes we hold on to the ocean floor with everything we have to not get swept away and sometimes we float, effortless and eyes closed. we teach our daughter to not tap too hard on the glass of others, to respect the space around her body enough to protect it, to be kind to strangers and yet hold up a magnifying glass to their faces so that she might read them better.
we do this without knowing if its right. or if its working.

we sit on the opposite side of a wall one thousand gallons of water deep and we point at the beauty of something we'll never fully understand. finn asks where santa is in july and she points at every orange fish she sees and yells 'NEMO!!!" she's never even seen 'finding nemo' and i think she's probably just repeating the boy next to her but it's mind blowing all the same.

all the way across the sky

2010-07-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

if you haven't yet set your eyes and ears upon the magic that is 'double rainbow guy'...go here and watch the original video.
and then there's this:

(just a sidenote: bryan made me promise to put this on the blog. PROMISE. with super serious face. we get each other.)
(oh, another sidenote: finn now walks around singing 'double rainbow.' as if it couldn't get better.)

there will definitely be more cake

2010-07-10T14:44:00.000-07:00

so far, my birthday weekend has consisted of the following:

~a surprise red velvet cake from my co-workers
~my first visit with a kogi taco truck (oh me, oh my.)

~witnessing a car accident at said kogi truck location and hating myself for only catching the first three characters of the license plate of the man who sent four people to the hospital and then drove off. i'm hoping those characters will help the police find the (insert choice language here.)
~wondering why no one else saw the license
~sharing strawberry nutella french toast with the baby for breakfast
~art installations at restaurants

~red velvet cake for lunch (it's my birthday, don't judge me)
~neil gaiman
~last week's episode of top chef

so far, so good.
hello, 38.
it's nice to meet you.