1. This week I spent my time doing what I always do the week before Christmas: I bought shit I can barely afford, ran around trying to get every gift on The Ubiquitous List, and tried really hard not to lock my kids in the backyard all day.
2. Since it was raining, I felt like somebody may call CPS, so I didn’t.
3. BUT HOLY SHIT I WANTED TO. (What? What’s that you say? Where’s my Christmas spirit? Um, my Christmas spirit left when my kids lost their freaking minds, about five days after they got out of school and it started raining like FOREVER and there’s nothing to do but run around our too-small house and scream and yell and piss each other off until I rather suddenly boil the fuck over in a fiery cauldron of Christmas spirit). I’m serious. They are really annoying.
4. Speaking of annoying, I’ve decided Christmas music would suck way less if there weren’t so many damn bells involved. All that jingling. Damn.
5. In my own personal quest to annoy people, I’ve been saying “Merry Christmas” on a regular basis to pretty much everybody, mostly because “happy holidays” is a P.C. term. And we all know how I feel about P.C. terms.
6. Also, I don’t think saying “Merry Christmas” means “I wish you a happy day celebrating the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ because I’m assuming everybody is a Christian and if you’re not, well I think you should be.” Rather, I believe it means something more like “I wish you a happy Christmas holiday.” And since it’s a national holiday, presumably a large portion of the population (sans Walmart workers, of course) – whether or not they celebrate Christmas – will have that holiday off work, and may, therefore, deserve to be wished a happy one.
7. Plus, if somebody wishes me a “Happy Chanukah,” I’m not going to be offended – I’m going to think something along the lines of “That person just said something nice to me. That’s nice.” And I’d probably respond “Thanks.” But I really don’t think I’d say to myself “How dare you cast your Jewishness on me!”
8. But of course, I could be wrong. I’ve never actually been the non-Christmas-celebrator having to deal with the onslaught of Christmas each year. Or maybe I just don’t get it. I don’t know; basically when I say “Merry Christmas” I feel like I’m saying something meaningful and authentic. When I say “happy holidays” I feel like I’m saying something meaningless and hollow because I’m afraid I’ll offend somebody. Not that I have anything against “happy holidays.” I mean really, does it fucking matter what we say? The bottom line is that we’re saying something pleasant. Does anybody feel me on this one or am I just an asshole?
9. At risk of losing all street cred, I got inspired by my friend Jo and started making body products (from recipes I found on Pinterest), and, um, well, ahem…I think I’ve found my calling. I made lavender sea salt body scrub, peppermint sugar scrub, peppermint lip balm (!!), healing hand salve, hand lotion, and even SOAPS (Do you know easy it is to buy the goatsmilk soap bars, melt them down, add stuff and feel like freaking SouleMama?). We started out doing it because we were making homemade gifts for people due to money shortages, but now I’m hooked and I think I’ll be doing this forever, until I enter DIY Body Product Rehab. Don’t knock it; it exists.
10. So Mac made applesauce and chutney, and we rolled beeswax candles and stuck it in a basket with the body products and a napkin and a sprig of tree (I copied it entirely off this blog (which also has some of the recipes I used) because I have no crafty ideas of my own (mean that)), and the result was pretty rad, if I may say so myself. Photographic evidence below.

What’s that they say about mothers and need and invention?

Yeah, well, wait til I tell you what we made Rocket for Christmas. I may lose half my readers.

But until then, Merry freaking Christmas!

This week…well, it’s all about Friday, right?

I haven’t been able to write my “week in review” posts for the past two weeks. My first reason involved final exams. My second, most recent reason involved a distinct feeling of having nothing to say.

I read about the tragedy in Connecticut right before leaving for work Friday morning, around 10am. I cried for most of the 20-minute drive. When I arrived, my phone rang and it was my mom, and I knew what she wanted to talk about, and we both cried and she said she wanted to pick the kids up, RIGHT NOW, from school. I was already thinking it, but comforted both of us by telling her it was an early release day, meaning they would be home within two hours.

They would be home within two hours.

Probably the most beautiful words I’ve ever written.

And when these tragedies hit I’m always a little surprised by the way people fly into action. People start announcing and declaring and standing for something. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – just that I can’t relate.

Like gun control. “We need gun control.” Truthfully I don’t know anything about gun control. I know I lived in a country for a year that didn’t have guns (well, you could have a gun if you lived in the boonies and hunted but it had to be visible in your car and you had to be on your way hunting or home and it the whole thing was tightly regulated), and I know I felt safer there, walking through the “bad” areas of Barcelona, worrying (sort of) about getting robbed, maybe at knife-point, but not about getting shot.

A couple times my Spanish friends asked me “Why do children shoot children in schools in America?”

And I recall having no answer.

But guns were never allowed in Spain. I don’t know if it would work here, with all the guns already in existence. It sounds nice in theory, but could we pull it off? I don’t fucking know. These questions feel too big for me, for little old me out here in northern California, trying hard just to grasp my little life, let alone national problems.

And then there’s the mental health people. “We need better services.” This morning, on NPR: “We have a mental health crisis in America.” I’m sure that’s true too. But I don’t know anything about that either. That feels equally huge.

Morgan Freeman was quoted saying that these disturbed people who are going to kill themselves anyway do it in these horrific ways due to the guaranteed media blitz. They become household names. They become that monster who killed rather than some nobody who died in a basement. I’m paraphrasing, but his words made sense, and I believed them, and his argument resonated with me as the most. They want to stick it to the world. They want to show the world that’s “hurt” them, ignored them, wounded them. They want to go out with a bang.

Bang.

You win, you fucking asshole.

But mostly I’ve got no opinions on these big issues, particularly in the immediate wake of these tragedies. Maybe I’m an uneducated American. Maybe I’m lazy. Or maybe I’m just tired.

I’m equally struck by these parents who immediately announce these defined “approaches” regarding how they’ll handle the tragedy with their children: they absolutely will not tell their children (to preserve their innocence) or they WILL tell their children (to teach them about whatever issue they feel is important).

As you may have noticed, I don’t really have a clearly defined approach to parenting. I like manners. I dislike whining. I will not tolerate racism, bigotry or hatred. I think gay marriage should be legal.

But aside from that, I pretty much never know “just what to do.” I don’t have some over-arching parenting methodology that governs my decisions. And I never have.

By the time I saw my kids on Friday they already knew. Mac had told them. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, I just know that they knew, and we talked about it a lttle. I kept looking at Rocket because he’s seven, and in first grade, like the babies who died. He said he knew he was safe at his school. I shook my head to cast out the thought of anything less than agreement of his innocent conclusion, and thanked God it’s winter break, so my kids won’t have to go back to school for three weeks.

Then we watched The Hobbit.

On Saturday we drove to my family’s Christmas celebration and on the way we listened to the President’s speech and watched him wipe away tears, and I cried and so did Mac and when I looked back at Ava she had tears streaming down her face.

And I guess I’m glad she knew.

But as usual I had no words of wisdom, no deep insights, no “take-away.” We all just cried, and kept on living our lives, as we must, I suppose.

But Friday night I brought Georgie in our bed and she didn’t go back into hers.

And when I saw this I felt like there would never be another complaint exiting my lips as long as I live, though I know that ain’t true.

And then there was this moment, and I wondered if the mothers of the children who died had already bought their kids’ special holiday outfits.

And when Georgie sat alongside her grandma to sing Christmas carols and Rocket was dancing and Ava singing, I thought “I’ve got the best deal of anybody in the world.” And maybe my heart exploded.

When I was fourteen years old I saw “Shindler’s List” in the movie theater with a couple friends. Afterwards, when I got in the car with my mom, I began weeping. I remember like it was yesterday, trying to wrap my head around the gas chambers, the children and mothers and fathers scratching at the walls and screaming in those rooms, falling into oblivion because, because why? Because they were Jewish. I was in mental turmoil and physically disturbed: I didn’t sleep for days. I felt stripped, abused, violated. My brain refused to process it. It simply could not do it.

I remember the agony of the realization that such a horror occurred. It was real.

But it couldn’t be real.

But it was.

Maybe I wasn’t ready for that truth. Clearly I didn’t have the “tools” to make sense of it.

Then again, maybe that’s right where we’re supposed to be: in the dark grey murk. In the chaos in the hell in the despair, in the place that cries for meaning, for purpose, for just one moment of logic, reason, sanity.

Maybe it’s best that we refuse to turn it into some neatly wrapped package, some approach or theory or “stance;” that we refuse to distill it into a sentence: We need this. We need that.

Not that we lie down and forget it, figuring “what the hell, nothin’ we can do,” but that we face it with the bravery of everything we’ve got, even though we’ve got nothing, fighting until our last breath to find something like an answer. So when it comes, we’ll be ready.

Ready for what? I don’t know.

Change, I guess.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

I’m trying, somebody please tell me how.

All I know is my love, for the ones that came home within two hours, and the pain in my soul, the aching truth of our existence, the place where there are no answers, where the Jews died and the children died and there’s me, little old me, hungry for a place to settle my feet, and my mind.

Sure that if I hold on, it will come, and it won’t all be for nothing.

Before I had kids, I used to look at other people’s offspring and think to myself “Why is that kid so annoying? Why don’t they do something to fix it (and by “it,” of course, I was referring to the child in question).

And then I had my first kid, and knew she wasn’t going to be one of the annoying models, because I would nip that shit in the bud and mold her into a well-behaved non-irritating version.

And to be honest, it kind of worked (well, I thought it did. Now I realize kids are who they are and parental guidance is probably not the ultimate determinate of a kid’s behavior. It turns out THEY HAVE PERSONALITIES! (who woulda thunk it?)). At any rate, my oldest kid has always been a level-headed, engaged, poised child. She sits in restaurants, chatting with adults. She generally obeys the first time you ask her to do something. She’s independent, self-motivated, focused , and driven. She does well in school. She remembers to brush her teeth and floss, and write in her journal and write thank-you notes, and she does her homework without being asked, and knows how to keep calm when necessary, hanging out with adults with a grace and confidence we all find immensely appealing. She is the quintessentially not-annoying child. Damn, she makes me look good. She blows my mind on a daily basis.

Ah, but then I had Rocket.

And let’s be honest: Rocket is, on a regular basis, really freaking annoying.

Why lie? He is.

He’s loud, intense, and constantly moving. He’s like a tornado that makes noise. Most of the time, if Rocket is awake, he’s knocking things down and pissing his sisters off. He’s tying things together and rigging up traps and filling the sink with water and forgetting about it. He’s making the most irritating heart-stopping nails-on-chalkboard screeches you’ve ever heard in your life. He’s making sounds no human has ever made before, and should never make again.

He’s banging toys and accidentally breaking things, often.

He’s not brushing his teeth.

He’s ignoring your orders.

He’s drawing on the door of the car rather than opening it.

He’s forgetting his backpack in the backseat, and his lunch on the counter, again.

His shoes are in the bathroom but he can’t find them because by the time he gets down the hall he forgets what he was looking for.

He’s poking and prodding and flailing and flinging himself off the couch. He’s “hi-ya”-ing the folded laundry pile with a stick he brought in from the backyard.

He’s up in your business. He’s right against your body. He doesn’t always know when to quit.

He’s playing too hard, a little too long (and you find yourself saying “Rocket, please stop!” ALL.DAY.LONG.)

It’s a strange moment when you realize you have a kid that irritates people. It’s a piercing reality when you see the look in people’s eyes, saying “This boy, he’s too much.” And you see that The Excessively Uptight pretty much can’t stand being in the presence of your son. Sometimes, they’re mean to him, and you want to break their faces with blunt objects, and grab your boy and fold him up back into your belly, where the assholes don’t exist and he’s safe.

But you know what’s the most amazing feeling in the world? When you realize you don’t give a shit what they think, and you’re set free from the insane notion that your kids should all fit perfectly all the time into society’s idea of a “well-behaved” child.

I have a boy who doesn’t fit. He doesn’t fit in school. (He “makes up Kung-Fu movies in his head” during class.) He’s seven years old and not reading yet. He gets “below basic” marks in every area on his report card.

And you know what? I don’t care. And I’ll tell you why:

The other day he was playing with 9 cubes and he all the sudden said “If I had four groups of these cubes I’d have 36.” And I asked him “Dude, Rocket, how’d you know that?” and he said “I don’t know. I saw it in my head.”

And he’s fascinated with planets and cranes and mechanical devices (he’ll stare at a gadget forever, until he can explain how it works). He builds complex Lego systems and memorizes how to get to places in other cities even though we’ve only been there once.

(He told me when he was five he was “born with maps in his brain.”)

He’ll listen to Jimi Hendrix for hours and after hearing Miles Davis he said “This music seems simple, but it’s actually really complicated. Will you get me some more jazz music?”

His heart’s so big it’s like a constantly exploding star. When he gets upset he looks at me and says “Mama, I LOVE YOU,” as if that’s what’s going to fix it, that’s where his strength comes from, from loving others, and hearing that they love him back.

And I do.

I love him so much my heart breaks sometimes just looking at him, my little son, because I can’t believe I could cherish anything as much as I do that little boy.

And his teachers say he’s doing just fine, when I get worked up and want some answers, about why he isn’t reading yet, and why he just won’t quite fit. They say he’s a natural leader and a joy in class and they love him as much as I do, well, almost.

If I were honest, I’d say “why isn’t he meeting my expectations? Why isn’t he fulfilling MY VISION?”

Because he’s somebody else, doing something else, that maybe I don’t understand.

And yeah, sometimes it’s fucking annoying.

But the rest of the time, I listen for his music, and hear the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard, and I feel more alive myself, watching this kid dance moves I’ve never seen before, feeling my feet start moving right alongside him, knowing if I practice long enough, we’ll be dancing together.

Four days ago Georgia decided she was no longer interested in “self-soothing.”

What do I mean by that? Well, she stopped going to sleep by herself in her crib.

Maybe it’s because she was sick. Maybe it’s because she’s 2 years, 3 months and 28 days, when that One Developmental Thing happens that causes that one behavior we’re all terrified of, when, rather than passing out on her own, the baby demands YOU.

She was crying in her crib. She was launching herself out of her crib. She was screaming “MAMA!”

My keen deductive reasoning skills lead me to the profound conclusion that what she wanted was ME. And so, as I’ve done with all my kids, I picked her up, brought her into bed with me, and fell asleep.

But as I was doing this seemingly benign task, the voices came, as they ALWAYS DO in moments like this:

“But, she’ll NEVER sleep in her crib again!”

“She’ll NEVER go to sleep alone again!”

“She’ll forget how to get herself to sleep and she’ll always need me every single night and I’ll never sleep again or have sex or enjoy my life until eventually I stick my head in an oven Sylvia-Plath style because I can’t face the misery of my own existence!”

“MY GOD she’ll forget to SELF-SOOTHE!!!”

But, as I’ve also always done (though I do it better now and with more confidence), I joyfully tell the voices to go fuck themselves then go about my business. I do whatever the hell I want, with my baby, in the manner that feels right to me. And in this instance, it felt right to pick up the baby crying in her crib, the baby who has put herself to sleep for months now (in a glorious, simplified process she established herself (she’s my only kid to do that, FYI)) – it felt right to “risk” obliterating our ethereal bedtime routine, and curl up beside her in my bed, where we kissed each other and said “I love you” about nine thousand times, between my “firm declarations” that it really is time for “nigh-nigh.”

Why? Because WHY THE HELL NOT? I felt like it.

A reader of this blog, Mel, sent me an email describing “self-soothing” as the “holy grail of parenthood.” (Someday I shall travel to Australia and she and I will meet and be friends.) And indeed it is. Like if you attain Full Self-soothing Status, you have reached the pinnacle of maternal existence, the Promised Land – the Eden of parenthood, where each night is joy, and each morning a radiant sunrise.

But if you don’t reach that place, if your kid is one of the hundreds of freaking thousands, like my first and second, and Georgia for the past 4 days, who needs boob to sleep, or rocking, or bouncing, or some delicately balanced, insane combination of all those things…

YOU HAVE FAILED.

You didn’t teach them to soothe themselves. You lose.

You could have done it when they were younger, but you didn’t, and now that ship has sailed, so – it sucks to be you.

Basically, you’re fucked. Throw in the parenting towel, homie, cause it’s over for you.

What you should do is get online and read the gloating stories of the women who established perfect sleep routines with their baby right outta the gate! (resulting in a toddler who now puts himself to sleep every night, blissfully soothing himself into slumber, with nary a squeak!)

And compare their experiences to your own, the hour-long bedtime rocking routine, the co-sleeping, the marathon nursing, the midnight soothing sessions. The toddler, in your bed, again, with a foot in your mouth.

And beat the hell out of yourself. Just really go at it. Your failures. Your inadequacy for having “created” one of the those “clingy” dependent models.

Or, you can tell the voices to go fuck themselves and go about your business, realizing the Worst Possible Outcome of a baby who won’t self-soothe is that you will be doing the soothing, possibly for 2 years or so, but really? Here’s the thing:

Why is that such a big deal?

I’ve never fully understood it, why we’re all so desperate to not soothe our kids.

Sleep deprivation? Um, yeah. Sleep deprivation comes whether or not your baby “self-soothes.”

Irritating bedtime routines? ARE THERE ANY OTHERS?

Teaching independence? Bullshit. You can read my feelings on that Dr. Spock drivel HERE.

Because my child is trying to control me and I must make it clear that I’m boss! Double bullshit. See above re: Spock.

Because if I put the work in NOW, I’ll never have a tough night again? Wrong. Just when you think you know you’re kid’s routine, he’ll change it.

Private time in the evenings? Sorry, but that particular ship really has sailed. Or it will, once you have more than one kid (and that will be why you stay up until 2am every night, which will in effect render your baby’s “self-soothing” useless, since you aren’t sleeping anyway.)

It’s going to go on forever, because once I establish this dynamic my kid will NEVER EVER go to bed on their own, which will leave me in the awkward situation of trying to rock a 15-year-old girl in the rocking chair. I mean, how will she even FIT?

Oh, right. That’s it. That’s the clincher. They don’t do this forever.

They won’t need it forever.

They need it for a year or two. Maybe three?

And yeah, we’ll be tired. And yeah, we’ll look at them some nights and just beg them to go the fuck to sleep. And yeah, some nights we’ll go SCREW THIS and we’ll put the toddler in the crib and let her wail, because seriously, what the hell kid?

I can’t take it anymore.

And we’ll curse the day we ever had kids, and we’ll wish this shit would end, and we’ll feel like it will never end.

Until one day you wake up and your baby is 11 years old, standing by your bedside whispering “Mama, I know Santa isn’t real,” and you think back to her little foot in your mouth and the way she used to reach her arm across the bed to touch your skin, or toss herself against you to nurse, when she was too old for that kind of thing, and should have been “self-soothing.”

And the next night, when your two-year-old “perfect sleeper” suddenly yearns for her mama’s bed, to have her face against her mom’s bare chest, you’ll feel a little relieved, to have a couple more days, a couple more days with a baby who just won’t self-soothe.

absolutely no self-soothing up in here…

1. You know what’s weird? Practically every time I go anywhere with a group of mothers I don’t know (GOD HELP US ALL), I end up saying something that offends somebody, at least once. It’s like a disease. The worst part is I think I’m being funny, and yet I get this look like “somebody should kill you in your sleep and give your kids to anybody else in the world.”
2. On a similar note, yesterday at a friend’s baby shower Ava asked me if I would please stop flailing my arms in a particular manner she found offensive. So I ask “Why? Am I embarrassing you?” She responds with a smirk “No, you’re embarrassing yourself.” And she kinda raises her eyebrows like “whatcha gonna say to that?” And of course I had nothing.
3. She’s my best shit-talking student. I’m so proud. Her sarcasm skills are developing so nicely.
4. The bad news is we’re super broke this Christmas. The good news is we’re super broke this Christmas. Allow me to explain: first, it sucks because we can barely afford gifts for our kids. Second, it rocks because we can only afford gifts for our kids. You know what being broke brings: SIMPLICITY. (And, apparently, alliteration. OMG make it stop.)
5. I’m serious. At first I was pretty upset about our bleak financial situation but now I’m kind of okay with it. My friend told me about making body scrubs for people, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t actually do it! (So easy, and so nice. I pinned a bunch of recipes on Pinterest if you’re interested). And there you go. Boom. Everybody’s getting that from me. Simple, people. SIMPLE.
6. That’s the plus side, but I can’t bullshit you. I feel pretty broken down right now.  I was doing okay after I found out the university cut my financial aid (entirely), but when I found out I have to retake a class next semester because it’s “expired,” I pretty much hit a wall of “fuck this” and “get me outta here.” We’re barely making it and I am so tired of cutting it so close, every single month. Ah, whatever. This is such in inane topic I’m boring myself. I made this decision and now I’ve got to finish, but shit. Part of me just wants to drop out of school and get a job, anywhere doing anything, to end this paycheck-to-paycheck thing. I won’t do it, but my LORD, sometimes it’s hard.
7. Do you ever wonder if maybe you’re on the wrong path, because it’s just so hard? Like the “right” path would be easier, or something? Damn. I probably have that exactly wrong.
8. Alright. That’s enough. Enough whining.
9. On Friday night we heard one of the loves of my life, a beautiful friend named Cara Lyn, a cellist, playing chamber music in a quartet in the Bay Area. We were sitting in the very back row (duh, all three kids were with us), and Georgia was standing on my lap. After the first movement, Georgia yells out, in a very clear, audible voice: “AGAIN!” Everybody erupted in smiles and laughs and clapping. It was one of those moments when babies just fix everything.
10. Alright people, tell me I can do this. I can, right?

In the mean time, here’s some pictures from our week. It rained. And since we’re in California, everybody was like “Wait. WHAT IS THIS? It’s as if there’s water, and it’s falling from the SKY?!!”

And they all started driving like drunk ninety-year-olds.

On that happy note, have a great week, all.

xoxo

as Georgie says: “It’s rainings!”

Ava being a very serious baker in her nana’s glasses…

Georgie getting folded up in her chair at the concert.