Bad Mother

Postscript 2009

2009-04-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

The blog has moved to ayeletwaldman.com. Follow my Bad Mother posts there!

The End

2005-02-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

Over the past few months I have found myself enjoying more and more the process of blogging. I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

By far the best part has been meeting people in the comments section and through emails. The only problem with blogging is that it is all-consuming. For a while there I was posting a few times a day. For the past week or so I've put the breaks on a bit (in part due to a book that needed copy-editing, in part due to a catastrophic depression). Then, this week I was offered a column on Salon. Okay, to be perfectly accurate, I browbeat the fine editors of that inspired on line magazine into letting me have a column. I thought for a while I could do both the column and the blog, but I'm afraid that if I tried that, I wouldn't have enough time and energy left over to write my novels or drive carpool.

So I'm going to end the blog. I'll still be bitching about the same kind of thing over at Salon. Please log on to read me over there. You need not be a member -- you can watch the little commercial instead. Please continue to email me with your comments, etc. And I'll be reading your blogs.

April? April? Really? April?

2005-02-09T08:35:00.000-08:00

I know they're busy rebuilding the country, but would it kill the court to meet again before April to decide this baby's fate? They are going to have his DNA results back next week, the child has come to represent a ray of both hope and desperation in the cataclysmic horror of Sri Lanka post-Tsunami, would it kill them to hold a quickie hearing a couple of months early? Get their robed and wigged asses into court say, NOW, rather than in two months? I know that tens of thousands of parents have lost babies, that these parents are not unique, that the countries surrounding the Indian sea are awash in tragedy. I know Baby 81 is little more than a symbol, one that has caught the eye of the international press. I don't care. His parents (if they are his parents) are in agony. The results of the DNA test will be dispositive. Hold the goddamn hearing, you sons of bitches.

I'm tempted to take up mountain climbing.

2005-02-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

People with bipolar disorder have a suicide risk ranging between 19% and 24%. Of all mental illnesses, bipolar disorder is associated with the highest risk of suicide, higher even than depression. Somewhere around .31% of bipolar patients kill themselves every year.

For those of you who need a few terms defined:

Bipolar disorder is what we now call the disease once known as Manic-Depression. Those of us with bipolar II enjoy depression and hypomania rather than depression and out and out mania, as is experienced by those with bipolar I.

The OED defines hypomania thusly "A minor form of mania, often part of the manic-depressive cycle, characterized by elation and a feeling of well-being together with quickness of thought." Mania is defined as "...one of the aspects of bipolar (manic-depressive) mood disorder, characterized particularly by euphoria, grandiose thought, rapid speech expressing loosely connected thoughts (flight of ideas), decreased need for sleep, increased physical activity, and sometimes delusions or hallucinations." Those are fine definitions, but they don't much assist the layman in comprehending the difference. So let me see if I can be more instructive.

This is hypomania: You wake up in the morning; make four lunches, preparing three individual sandwiches (one peanut butter, no jelly. One turkey with mayo, one turkey without mayo but with tomato, blotted dry so it doesn't make the bread soggy) and a thermos of soup. Each lunch gets a drink, two snacks, and a piece of fruit. You wake, dress, and feed four children, reminding everyone to take vitamins, and Omega III. You sign permission slips, and load up carpool. Then you go to the gym, do email, make plane reservations for family vacation, copy-edit essay, put finishing touches on novel, revise short story for submission to anthology, drop off meal for family with new baby at preschool, and order new bathing suits for everybody because, suddenly, despite the fact that it is February you decide that everyone needs new bathing suits and that if a single day passes without each and every member of the family having a new bathing suit the well-being of the family will collapse. Then you reorganize the kitchen hell drawer, go online and order nine superpacks of size 4 diapers (and swim diapers for the baby, too, because, after all, what's a bathing suit for a baby without a swim diaper underneath it?). Then you pick up the children from school. You never, never, do anything without talking on the phone at the same time. Most of these phone conversations should involve volunteering for things you don't actually want to do but feel you should. That is a day in the life of the average hypomanic.

Mania. Well, hmm. I've never actually suffered from a manic episode, but here's one I've seen fairly close-at-hand. Imagine if you will, Bloomingdales, circa 1982. 10,000 dollars is spent in approximately 11 minutes. Think grandiosity, agitation, inability to focus, hostility, and complete and total lack of control.

All in all, hypomanic is what you want to be. Hypomania is why I can do things like write three books in seven months. Hypomania is, in fact, the bomb. Hypomania is also linked to a 24% suicide risk. You heard me. Us bipolar II folks have an even higher risk of suicide than those with bipolar I.

Twenty-four percent. That's almost a quarter. A one in four chance, if you'll permit me the indulgence of rounding up. Let's put that number in perspective. The chances of dying while attempting an ascent of K2 are approximately 5%.

Awareness of the suicide risk, awareness of the subtleties of the disease and its chemical nature, do nothing to alleviate the risk of death. It does not help to know that one's mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is tallying the contents of the medicine cabinet and evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, topomax, SRRI and ambien cocktail.

All in all, as heritable diseases go, I think I would have preferred something else. Diabetes, say, or color-blindness. Wait, I forgot, we've got both of those. The former is on my husband's side of the family, and Zeke can't tell his reds from his greens.

This is what happens when you insist on marrying people from the same few square miles of Jewish Pale. Michael and I might as well be cousins for all the genetic diversity we've got going on. I'm going to force my children to travel to the far reaches of the globe when it's time for them to marry. We need to shake up this gene pool a little.

One of Us, One of Us

2005-02-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

Milagros, the Mermaid Baby, is going to have surgery to have her legs split. I read this article and spent God only know how many hours googling Milagros and Sirenomelia in general, for the same reason that I read everything I can about conjoined twins, gigantism, and any other condition you might have seen on exhibit in a 1930s sideshow. I'm obsessed with that kind of thing, and I'm not willing to engage in the elaborate psychoanalysis necessary to figure out why. I also like photographs of horrible disfigurements and diseases. My current favorite is a book called The Dr. Ikkaku Ochi Collection, which is a collection of Japanese medical photographs from the late nineteenth century. It's got some serious doozies in it, tumors that defy the traditional fruit and vegetable taxonomy.

Another grotesque obsession I have is for photographs of dead children. I don't mean those horrifying pictures in the newspaper after the tsunami. I'm not a ghoul. Okay, I am a ghoul, but I'm not a monster. What I like are a very specific type of photograph. During the Victorian Era it was common to photograph children after they died, as a way of remembering and memorializing them. I saw my first collection of these at the Diego Rivera house in Guanajuato, Mexico and while I remember nothing about the art in the house, I can remember almost every dead child.

As I begin to write about this, I realize that I was equally obsessed with those photographs in the newspaper of the children who died in the tsunami. I stared at those photographs for far longer than I should have, allowing myself to linger in a way that felt prurient. This kind of creepy grief mongering feels much more acceptable when it takes place at a hundred to hundred and fifty year remove. Better to stop thinking about this and go back to the circus freaks...

My children would be disgusted with me. "There is no such thing as a freak," they would say. "People are just differently-abled." And I would agree, shame-facedly, while secretly programming TIVO to catch Freaks (1932). (Who can resist a movie with the tagline "Can a fully grown woman truly love a MIDGET?") It's terrible, it really is, this shameful curiosity. But don't worry. I suffer for it. I have to sit through Carnivale on HBO every week.

The C Word

2005-02-01T17:51:00.000-08:00

Ivan Noble died yesterday, at the age of 37. This was the writer who kept the BBC online tumor diary (or tumour, because he was British). I only read it once or twice, because I'm Jewish and, thus, much too scared of cancer even to read an inspiring, brave and honest diary on the subject.

He died yesterday, and today I decided not to get a mammogram. Those two things have nothing to do with one another, but they strike me, sitting here at my computer, as interesting nonetheless. I'm not a scientist, God knows, only a hypochondriac, and I am thus not qualified to evaluate the mountains of data on mammograms, pro and con. I know I'll get one when I'm fifty. I know the recommendation is to have one every other year at forty. I'm just not sure it makes any sense to do so. Let's say the mammogram actually finds DCIS (Ductal Carcinoma In Situ). I have four children, so I'm going to treat the hell out of that son of a bitch. I'm going to slash and burn, despite the evidence indicating that only 30% of DCIS cases go on to develop into cancer. As a mother, how could I risk being in that 30%? The chances are good that I would end up traumatizing my body and my mind for no very good reason but I would feel like I had no other option but to make that choice.

I would likely make a very different decision about the mammogram if I had cancer in my family. As far as I know, none of my female relatives have ever had cancer, other than my Auntie Helen, a smoker, who died of lung cancer. I have the luxury of batting around probabilities and statistics. So far I've been very lucky. Ask me next year, at my annual appointment, and I may have another opinion entirely.

But the Pot's so Much Stronger Nowadays!

2005-01-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times has a long article about crank in the suburbs. Guess what, America? Those of you who have been busy watching American Idol or charting the course of Brad and Jen's breakup (of course he was boinking Angelina) are probably stunned to discover that methamphetamine use is at "epidemic" proportions among our "suburban" youth. By suburban, by the way, we mean white. Those black and brown kids can snort, smoke and shoot themselves into a collective stupor for all we care. It's only when white young people start in that we get worked up. The crack "epidemic" freaked us out not because black people were using crack, but because black people on crack were encroaching on white golf courses. You think I'm kidding? Those actual words are in the Congressional record. Golf courses. I kid you not.

I don't know about you, but I'm a little tired of all this brouhaha about the latest drug epidemic. Don't get me wrong, it seriously sucks when your kid becomes a crank-freak. Meth is a bad drug. It has all kinds of serious side effects, from messing with your dopamine levels to causing long-term heart and arterial damage. Like any addiction, it's a hard one to shake. What bothers me is that we wring our hands about this latest drug and refuse to confront over one hundred years of failed prohibition policies.

We spend 50 billion dollars a year fighting this "War on Drugs," a war that makes the battle of Falluja look like an unmitigated US victory. Worse, the hypocrisy inherent here is even more obvious. We have a president who has a long history with cocaine. (And yes he found God. Blah blah blah.) Adolescence (which, for our fearless leader lasted well into his fifth decade) is a time that is meant to be devoted to making poor choices. Risking-taking during this period is developmentally appropriate. How many of you took foolish risks? I know my Israeli boyfriend and I climbed to the Annapurna base camp in cloth boots with insufficient equipment on a sunny day, despite warnings that the snow was melting in the crevasses and we were in danger of plummeting to our deaths. It was the most beautiful trip of my life.

I'm not going to list the drugs I used back then, but let's just say that if Meth were out there, I probably would have tried it.

But, you say, in 1986 a nickel bag of pot gave you twenty-five joints and you had to smoke all of them just to get a buzz on. Nowadays, two tokes gets a person stoned for a month. It's a much stronger drug. So what? What difference does that make? I have news for you. Your kids are going to do drugs. They are going to experiment. They are going to smoke pot, take E (or X, whatever they call it in your neck of the woods), snort some coke, and maybe do some Meth. The only thing you can control is your response, and what happens to them.

Conservative estimates say that 54% of high school seniors have used drugs. That's lowballing it in my opinion. If you want to reduce the harm associated with drug use, if you want to avoid the situation in the Times where the 13-year-old "suburban" girl was turning tricks in her nice suburban house after school to get the money for her crank, what you need to do is adopt a policy of harm reduction. You have to confront the issue head-on. You have to talk to your kids. You have to know more than your kids do about drugs, teach them what they are dealing with, and teach them how to stay safe. You tell them which drugs are relatively benign. Marijuana, even the stuff they have nowadays, is one of the safest drugs known to humans. You cannot overdose on pot. Nobody -- NOBODY -- dies from ingesting marijuana. There is no known quantity of marijuana that can result in a fatal dose. (That's not true of Tylenol, by the way.) You have to teach them which drugs are particularly dangerous, which drugs are dangerous to mix.

They need to be armed. When Sophie goes out to a rave, I want her to know that MDMA (ecstasy), despite its absurd placement in the DEA's Schedule I, is a relatively safe drug. (BTW - that spinal fluid study is the scientific equivalent of an urban myth. I'm not even going to waste space on it. Email me if you need the info.) But I want her to understand three things. 1. There is a risk of dehydration that can be fatal, especially if she's going to be dancing. 2. Dealers often try to pass off other, more dangerous drugs as E. and 3. MDMA's potency diminishes substantially with repeated use so that it would be a shame to 'waste' it on a lousy party, or a stupid boyfriend.

I want to surprise my kids continually by knowing more than they do about drugs. I want them to shock and frighten me with their questions. Think about it, if they shock me, that means they trust me enough to come to me with the frightening problems. If they didn't trust me, that wouldn't mean that the scary stuff wasn't happening. It would just mean that I wasn't hearing about it.

For more about this, check out this URL.

Ayelet Waldman | Booklog

2005-01-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

The new booklog is finally up, and it's not in Chinese! I know you probably don't think that's much of an accomplishment, but for days it was in Chinese, for some reason known only to the Gods of Mozilla.

Where Have All the Republicans Gone?

2005-01-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

I used to like Republicans. Okay, let me rephrase that. There was a certain kind of Republican I admired. Hell, I even wanted to be one of them. Part of me wished I had a father who wore green golf pants and knew how to mix a perfect martini. I longed for a tumbledown beach house in Maine, one that our family had been going to for years, right down the dirt road from Binky and Skitter Britteridge. (Pop went to Yale with Skitter, and Mom and Binky were at Bryn Mawr together, way back when.) You know what I'm talking about, Republicans in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller -- let's ignore the Rockefeller drug laws for the moment. Tall, patrician white people who considered themselves social liberals and fiscal conservatives. Remember them? Proud heirs to Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Fiorella La Guardia. What the hell happened to those folks? Christine Todd Whitman's got a manifesto coming out about the death of the moderate wing of the party, and at the same time, that wing nut, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, has her knickers in a twist about Buster Baxter. What's ol' Buster's crime? He's hanging with the homos.

Wait. Roll that back a minute. He's visiting American families. Mormons. Hmong. Families in trailer parks. And the children of a lesbian couple in Vermont.

Well that just won't do. Our fearless leader responds by holding a press conference quoted on the front page of the New York Times. He cites studies describing children who grow up in heterosexual families as better off. Except that's not true. The studies don't, in fact, show that. The studies show no difference. Not to mention my non-empirical data. Which shows no difference, either. In fact, the children of my gay friends are all way smarter and less neurotic than my own children. My friends Alison and Judy’s daughter Talia was cheerfully talking in complete sentences and planting kisses on her older brother’s cheeks while Rosie was still staring blankly at the ceiling and smacking her brother on the head with a mega block. So go smoke that, Ms. Spellings.

Potty Mouth

2005-01-29T09:48:00.000-08:00

Michael and I had a little, er, altercation this morning. It's too stupid to recount, other than to say that I did not hide the phone, I was not on the phone, I had nothing to do with the phone, and being unjustly accused of phone-antics would have made any of you pissed off, too.

Zeke, age seven says to me, "Daddy is not a dick, mommy. If Daddy is a dick, then you are a bush."

I stared at him and said, "What? What did you say? How do you even know that word?"

He replied, "What word? You know, Dick Cheney and George Bush."

Meta-Narcisism

2005-01-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

In an article (that I participated in because I am self-absorbed and narcissistic) about blogging (the world's most narcissistic activity) in the Sunday Styles section (the most narcissistic and vacuous section of the New York Times, and, incidentally, my favorite), I am quoted. But only on the second page. Something that is causing me a little bit of narcissistic angst. I mean, I know Heather B. is much more blog-portant than I am, but who's this fussy person and why is she so interesting?

Oh my GOD. I have got to get back to work. I have books to write, for Christ's sake.

Dr. Von Ferber Can Kiss My Ass

2005-01-28T21:42:00.000-08:00

I am the quintessential sleep Nazi. All my children have been Ferberized in one way or another, usually with the minimum of crying. In fact, I was one of those loathsome women who very sanctimoniously shook her head at you and said, "Really, it never takes more than ten to twenty minutes. And it's much, much better for the baby." And then I met Abraham Chabon, aka, Vomit-Kid. Tonight his father decided that enough was enough, the little rotter was going to go to sleep at a decent hour. This is a house where the children are normally all in their beds by 7:30, 8 at the latest. That’s the only way it works with four kids. And this little bugger had no nap today. NO NAP. He's not even two.

It's now 9:45 at night. By my last count Abe has vomited 6 times. That is, he has cried hysterically, until he’s made himself throw up, six times. He's made a slow circuit around his crib, vomiting as he goes. For the first two hours he wailed, "Daddy, Daddy, no, no." Then he cried, "Mommy." Twice. And that’s all she wrote. One second of Mommy and I sent Michael in with a bottle. I couldn't hack it because I’m a big wus.

I don't know what's wrong with me nowadays. Back in the day, I probably would have let Sophie sleep in a pool of her own dried vomit. I think I'm just worn out, ground down. They've emerged victorious, those children of mine. I'm raising the white flag. I quit. Abe can just sleep with us in our bed. Presumably he'll move out at some point, right? Like in high school, when he wants to start getting laid? He's not going to be bringing chicks home to his mom and dad's bed.

I think that might be too gross to be funny.

Cut me some slack. I have a smear of white vomit on my black T-shirt, and I spent the last two hours hysterically cleaning out my medicine cabinet in order to drown out the wailing. Who knew I had so much Vicodin?

Kate, Prettier

2005-01-27T16:51:00.000-08:00

Kate, Prettier
Originally uploaded by Ayeletw.

You see here? Her face is fuller. I didn't post the naked pictures (of which there are many, trust me) but she looks so much more beautiful. I guess it's not her fault that she has fallen victim to the slenderness craziness, and to her credit she does seem to have put on a tiny bit of weight since her all time low a few months ago, but she was so damn gorgeous in that naked scene in Iris. So hot. So exactly what I wanted to look like.

Kate Winslet

2005-01-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

Kate Winslet
Originally uploaded by Ayeletw.

Is it me, or did she look better with more meat on her bones? Now that Kate Winslet's lost weight, her face looks kind of harsh to me, sort of Sarah Jessica Parkerish. I wish she'd get a little more voluptuous. Like she used to be.

A Night Away

2005-01-27T16:23:00.000-08:00

We are in Los Angeles at my favorite hotel of all time, the Chateau Marmont. Everything here is just perfect, from the stupendous linens, to the incredibly good-humored service, to the terrific food. God, I love this place. I wish I could move in here. Plus, there's a build-up of some incredible Hollywood movie romance vibe and Michael and I can't help but tear each other's clothes off as soon as we walk through the doors of our room. Thank god for the little "intimacy kit" they provide, because I'd probably be pregnant, again, god forbid, because who can remember to travel with birth control? It's all I can do to pack a toothbrush.

I have some issues I'd like to address, however. It's one thing to spew your guts on a blog. I admit it's inappropriate, and that I'm part of the cheapening of privacy in contemporary society. But when did it become okay to take care of bathroom tasks in public? When did it become okay to floss your goddamn teeth in the goddamn airport? I mean, WHAT THE HELL? I'm sitting at the Oakland airport, minding my own business and reading my Entertainment Weekly, when some woman sits down next to me. At first I thought she had Tourette's Syndrome, but I soon realized she was just sucking on her teeth. Then she pulled out the dental floss. There she sat, next to me, working up the world's smelliest case of floss fingers. Gag.

Stephen King is God

2005-01-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

Of all the amazing things being married to Michael has brought me, the opportunity to meet famous writers is really the most minor, I swear to God. Still, it's pretty cool. Last night, I met someone who has been scaring me senseless for most of my life. I remember when I was in high school and I read Night Shift, his marvelously creepy short story collection. The title story is about mutant rats, and thus began a rat phobia (wait! I forgot that one!) that persists to this day. I can't even see a rat on TV without freaking out. I cover my eyes and shriek until Michael tells me it's off the screen. Remember that scene in El Norte when the rats run over their bodies as they are going through the tunnels to the US? I nearly had an apoplectic seizure. And it was all Stephen King's fault.

And I got to meet him. Not only to meet him, but I got to appreciate what an amazingly generous guy he is. A while ago I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how this lame ass "university" (actually a diploma mill/real estate scam) in the city had expelled a student for writing a violent short story. Not only did they expel him, but they fired his instructor on the grounds that she had assigned a reading by some unknown writer -- that unknown writer was, according to the Dean of the English faculty, "George Foster Wallace." Um. George?

Anyway, a lot of people got up in arms about this. Daniel Handler ended up leading a huge protest, which resulted in him being tossed out of the school building. Michael wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York Times (I know, but he's a brilliant writer type, not a fiery protestor lay-your-body-down type.) Stephen King sent a message to the protestors.

It turns out that all over the country in response to Columbine kids are being prosecuted ... yes PROSECUTED ... for writing fiction. Now, I understand the fear. I understand the horror of the shoot out. What I don't get is the response. My response to Columbine is to wonder what is wrong with a culture that so ostracizes and alienates a child that he ends up so crazy. What is wrong with the mentality of a high school where kids are made to feel so bitterly freakish and outlawed? Instead, we fixate on the kid writing the fiction. Instead of worrying about what's going on in his head, instead of feeling his pain and wondering at its source, we arrest him. Instead of stopping the bullying, we target the bullied.

Michael had a brilliant response to this. He decided to teach a class at 826 Valencia in horror and dark fantasy writing...for teenagers. He told Stephen King about it, and this incredibly famous man, this man with a million things to do, a million commitments, a million demands on his time, said, "Dude, you teach that class, and I'll be there."

On the last day of class, he was there. As a surprise guest. You should have seen the kids' faces. They were out of their minds. When he told them that he was an amateur, just like them, they scribbled in their notebooks. When he asked them what they wrote, what their techniques were, you could see their self-confidence expand before your eyes. It was amazing.

I've met some incredibly generous people in my life, but honestly, he's something special. This guy flew across the country (obviously at his own expense -- 826 doesn't have a pot to piss in) just to inspire a dozen kids. Now that's a mensch.

Another Med Roller Coaster

2005-01-26T11:31:00.000-08:00

When I went to my shrink for the first time I told him that my problem was that I had a wonderful life, Kenehora poo poo poo, and something was keeping me from appreciating it. I was worried about my daughter, and about how mean I was to her. For some reason, all my craziness channeled itself in her direction. I couldn't bear the idea that I would damage her. I have a little marker that tells me when my meds aren't working. When I lose it with Sophie, when I scream at her, when I grab her and drag her up the stairs, when I toss her into her room, when I slam her door, I know that things are bad and I need to get my ass into the doctor's office for an adjustment.

I always tell her that it's not her fault, that it's mommy's fault. That I'm sick, that my pills are screwing up, but how often does she have to deal with this crap? Those shoulders are awfully skinny for such a heavy burden.

I'm on a new regime again. Lucky for me I'm back on the skinny pills (Topomax). The Trileptal wasn't supposed to make me fat, but it did. It also wasn't supposed to make me as stupid as the Topomax, but it made me stupider. These meds all make you lose words, proper nouns in particular. Terrific side effect for a writer. I spend a lot of time leafing through the thesaurus looking for words like "individual" or "omelet." Those are two words that I actually found myself unable to remember within the past few weeks. Egg-thingy doesn't cut it when you're writing a novel.

But what can you do. It's either stupid or evil. I'd probably choose evil if I lived alone, but with four kids, I've got no choice but to spend my life in a little bit of a medication haze.

Solomon In Sri Lanka

2005-01-26T08:43:00.000-08:00

Do they all really think this little baby is theirs?

His identity is unknown. His age, according to hospital staff, is somewhere between 4 and 5 months. He is simply and famously known as Baby No. 81, the 81st admission to the ward this year.

Baby No. 81's awful burden is not in being unwanted, but in being wanted too much.

So far, nine couples have claimed him as their own son. Some among them have threatened suicide if the baby is not delivered into their arms.

Is it that their PTSD has twisted the memories of their own infants' features into the lovely ones of this child? Does desperation and pain make us all insane? Or is there perhaps a conscious decision not to care, to compete for this child because in the absence of the lost one, any will do?

It's so achingly sad.

ABBA

2005-01-25T18:41:00.000-08:00

It's taken me ten years of parenting, but I've finally found it. The best way to pass the time with small children. ABBA.

We danced for forty minutes, until we were all sweaty and exhausted. I am a Dancing Queen, goddamn it!

Could This Book Be Good, or is it Just My New Meds?

2005-01-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

I'm going over the copy-edited manuscript of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits now, and I'm having this amazing sensation...I think it's...good! This has NEVER happened to me. Every other novel I've written I've hated so much by this stage that I've barely been able to read it (hence the horrible typos in all my books). But this one I'm actually sitting and reading aloud (to catch all aforementioned typos) and I'm sort of loving it. I'm getting all teary in the right places, I'm getting all steamy in the right places. I'm laughing in the right places.

Might this book actually not suck?

"You Like Being Mean to Us. You're Nothing But a Hatred Machine."

2005-01-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

Thus sayeth Sophie, age 10. Thank God those words were directed to her father, and not to me.

That would make a great book title. "You're nothing but a hatred machine." She's a damn fine writer, that girl. She's got a terrific sense of language and a good eye for detail.

This terrifies me.

I can see it now. The tell-all memoir in which she writes about the miseries of growing up with a mother who wrote chatty little mystery novels about being a mommy, but was secretly an evil wretch, locking her daughter in closets and denying her food and clothing. Well, denying her chocolate bars for breakfast and midriff-baring tops from Limited Too, but you get the point. She'll describe how she awoke at age six months to witness the primal scene and has never recovered. She'll list the various drugs her mother ingested, both legal and less so.

Her memoir will be titled something like "Co-Dependent No More." Or, "In Your Face, You Bitch."

I wish she had the remotest talent in something else, so I could channel her energies to something that wouldn't come back to bite me in the butt. Sadly, her violin playing is, well, let's just say that it is at the precise pitch and tone of the whistle on my tea kettle and whenever she practices I come tearing into the kitchen to turn off the burner on the stove. She loves musical theater, but she sings as well as I do, and I was one of the people required to mouth the words to the Christmas carols in chorus.

Math. She's really good at math. Maybe I'll enroll her in some upper level math programs. Great mathematicians rarely turn to memoir.

New URL Soon

2005-01-24T17:23:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be switching to Moveable Type and to a new URL in a week or so. I'll put a post up with the new address and will give plenty of notice. It won't be until later in the week, at the very earliest. I am too much of a Luddite to make this transition with ease.

Jesus Fish

2005-01-24T11:33:00.000-08:00

I saw a bumper sticker today that freaked me out. Actually, it was more like a bumper banner. It was a large American flag, with a Jesus fish in the middle of it.

Now, what is that supposed to mean? That America is and should be a Christian nation? That the driver of that car is advertising his/her devotion to that idea? Surely it cannot be intended as with as much hostility as it comes across to a Jewish women driving along behind that car.

Phobias and Fears

2005-01-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

I told you I'd need to update this.

Mad Cow Disease -- How could I have forgotten this? I'm convinced we're all going to be dead of Spongiform Encephalopathy in about twenty-years. But does that stop me from eating burgers at In 'n Out? I wish.

My friend Peggy gave me this fabulous Pop-Up
Book of Phobias for my birthday this year. It was very gratifying to realize that we shared all the same ones, more evidence for my conviction that Peggy and I will be perfect roommates when we are ancient crones spending our days sitting in our wheelchairs next to the elevator in the Jewish Home For The Aged.

My shark fear, and the realization that I'm not alone, has inspired me to try to produce a comprehensive list of my crazy, neurotic fears.

1. Sharks. We talked about that already.

2. Cancer. Again, I'm a Jewish girl, from a long line of women who whisper, "The C-Word" with nearly titillated horror. I'm afraid I'll get breast cancer and leave my children motherless. I'm afraid I'll get pancreatic cancer (that's a really bad one) and die when my husband is still young and sexy enough to remarry some hot little thirty-year-old who still has the energy to be acrobatic in bed and give constant head. I've made him promise that all pictures of me will remain hanging on the walls of the house, so that my usurper will have to live with my beloved image staring down on her, cursing her every move. I've also reminded him that it's very rare for a stepmother to truly love her stepchildren, and that if he does remarry he is likely to jeopardize his relationship with his children and make them miserable neurotics who soothe their grief-stricken selves with black tar heroin and labia pierces.

3. That my oldest daughter will hate me. I'm afraid that all my unmedicated years taking out my bipolar disorder on Sophie will cause her to write me off and make disparaging comments about me on her blog.

4. Hotel Bedspreads. Fecal matter. Semen. Need I say more?

5. Getting permanently ugly. This has subcategories.

a. Fat. I'm afraid that I will forget to get on the scale for six months, only to find out that I've gained sixty pounds. I'm afraid that I will have to shop for shirts that are cut loosely in the upper arm area and that I will need to do even more than the usual origami with my crêpey and loose-skinned belly in order to cram it into my pants.

b. Aging. I'm afraid that one day I will take off my bra and my breasts will tumble down and brush the tops of my shoes. I'm afraid that my nose and ears will continue to grow and that I will one day look like Abe Vigoda.

6. That my husband will leave me. I'm afraid that one day, when Michael is sixty, and I'm fifty-nine, some sexy young wanna-be writer will throw herself and her perky breasts at him and he will have a Philip Roth moment and tumble into her bed, where he will discover that the joys of sharing your life with a soul mate are significantly less than the pleasures of supple skin and the above-mentioned acrobatic sex.

7. That there will never be a progressive movement of any real strength in this country, and that the Christian majority will slowly and inexorable rise to even more prominence, until they manage to amend the Constitution to ban homosexuality altogether, to rescind the First and Fourth Amendments and to deport all Jews to Israel, the better to implement their plans to assert world domination and bring about the coming of the Messiah.

8. Poverty. I’m afraid that my next book and my husband’s next book will not sell, and we will be faced with an uncertain future and be forced to sell our house at a substantial loss (We’ve done too much weird stuff to it. Nobody would want such a rabbit warren of bedrooms and offices.) and move to Nebraska, the only place where we will be able to afford to live on the tiny royalty checks we receive from the sales of Kavalier & Clay.

9. That one of my children will get sick. I’m terrified that one of children will come down with some mysterious and horrific disease – a virus that destroys their hearts, a broken leg that results in a blood clot that kills them. I’m afraid that all the jokes I’ve made about bad mothering will come back to haunt me and I will lose one of them forever.

There must be more...I fear I will need to update this entry.

Ugh

2005-01-23T20:55:00.000-08:00

I must cancel plans to shoot my author photo anytime in the next two weeks. Apparently, my skin has decided it does not accept my recent fortieth birthday. It has decided to behave like a sixteen-year-old. Wasn't there supposed to be some perfect moment between the onset of wrinkles and the presence of hideous, suppurating zits? And yet, now I have an oozing pustule smack dab in the middle of one of my many wrinkles.

Can I really be blogging about this? Johnny Carson is dead, much of the country is hiding under twenty-five feet of snow, Abbas is talking ceasefire, and Ayelet is blogging about her pimples.

Sigh.

Blurbs

2005-01-23T17:35:00.000-08:00

I just wrote a blurb for a book I truly loved, by a writer whom I not only admire but also really like, and it damn near paralyzed me. I'm such an incompetent blurb writer. First of all, it seems so absurd for me to be blurbing anyone. If every single one of the people who buy my books rushed out to buy the book I blurbed, my friend would still have to be sweating his sales. But that's not the real problem. I'm flattered to be asked, and I genuinely like doing it. Not least because it means that someone out there might associate my name with a really terrific book. I.e., they buy the book, love it, and then flip it over. "This Ayelet Waldman person has such good taste," they say. "Let's go buy her books, too!"

The problem is that I suck at it. Michael effortlessly writes these pithy blurbs. They take him thirty seconds to compose and sound not only erudite, but also inspiring. The person he blurbs invariably ends up all choked up with emotion. Me? I sit sputtering at my computer, eking out things like, "Wow. This book rocks." Or "I really loved this book." Or "This book is much better than you might imagine given the subject matter -- I found that I possessed a genuine fascination for the history of orthodontic research, and so might you."

I have to get better at this, because it's all part of the give and take of literary life. Every time you publish a book you find yourself in the hideous position of having to grovel for blurbs. And if you're asking for them, then it's only fair to give them, too. Some writers have a "no blurb" policy, but I've noticed that most of those writers are themselves happy to accept blurbs. Maybe that's not fair. Their books are most likely festooned with blurbs because their editors insist on it. Still, unless you are a professor and thus besieged by students demanding blurbs, I think the only reasonable thing is to reciprocate. Plus, it's a kind thing to do. It's a nice thing to do.

Direct reciprocation, however, could result in ridicule. Remember that Spy Magazine column, "Log Rolling?"

Author I: Author's II's book is the best book in history.
Author II: Never have I read anything as marvelous as Author I's book.

Humiliating.

What you really want to know is if blurbs are real, right? OK, so here's the thing. We get dozens of books coming into this house for blurbs every week and we could never read all of them. Actually, it's more relevant that Michael could never read all of them, because they are for him, 99% of the time. The sad truth is that most of the time a writer blurbs because the other author is his friend, or shares his editor, or is a client of his agent. Or is his wife's friend. That doesn't mean that he doesn't like the book -- not at all. It just means that he would never have picked it up absent that connection. Authors almost never "cold-blurb." That's not to say that it's impossible, but just unlikely.

Still, even knowing that, I find myself swayed by blurbs. There is something genuinely enticing about them. Wow, I say to myself, I love Jane Smiley, and she liked this book. So I'm bound to like it, too.

"Will They Have People In Carmel?"

2005-01-22T22:17:00.000-08:00

You have to wonder what small children are thinking. They have no idea at any given moment where they are going, or what they are doing. How many times have I just loaded the kids into the car (the little ones) and shlepped them off to run errands. They kind of just go with the flow, and then every once in a while they say something that highlights the extent of their true cluelessness. On our way down to Carmel this weekend, Rosie asked, "Will they have people in Carmel?" Excuse me, what? What did she even think Carmel was? For all she knew, we could have been heading off to spend the weekend in prison. Turns out I had even bothered to explain we were spending the night there. She thought we'd moved.

Obviously, we went on that roadtrip -- and I emerged victorious in the DVD battle! Michael set up his laptop for the kids to watch movies on. We drove all the way to Carmel accompanied by The Country Bears. Unfortunately, Michael and I had to listen to it, too, and couldn't even put on music of our own. I only mentioned once during the whole ride that the built-in minivan DVD comes with headphones for every kid. I thought that was very restrained of me. And I probably wouldn't have said anything at all if the profound sadness of Bonnie Raitt's presence in that movie hadn't overwhelmed me with a deep and abiding despair at the transience of success.

I never expect vacations to be anything but horrible, probably because as a kid all we ever did for "vacation" was go visit my dad's family in Montreal. Not that that was necessarily horrible, but it was no Disneyland, let me tell you. Tea with the Aunties is all well and good, but when you're seven, the Yiddish jokes wear thin.

I'm always surprised when trips turn out to be actually fun, which this weekend has been. Don't get me wrong, Sophie and Zeke are at each other's throats ("He's making that sound again." "She called me butthead."), but despite that, and despite the fact that this evening Abie was possessed by a Dybbuk (no other explanation for his twenty minutes of hysterical screaming makes sense), we're having a lovely time.

Everyone loved the Aquarium (Monterey), but I won't bore you with details. I will say one thing, however. Forgive me, but I just can't get myself worked up about the potential extinction of the Great White Shark. I know I'm being terribly shortsighted, I know how important predators are to ecosystems, blah blah blah. But my mother took me to see Jaws when I was a kid, and then to see Jaws II when I had only just recovered from the first one, and I haven't been able to swim in the ocean since. I'm in a constant state of Great White panic. Frankly, I don't even like swimming in lakes and ponds. If I can't see the bottom, there's always the chance of shark attack. I swear to God I read once about a freshwater shark. Or not. Still. It's a phobia, it doesn't need to make sense.

We go to Hawaii every year, and I spend almost no time in the ocean. The kids are like little sea lions, splashing around, swimming out to the diving platform. Every afternoon I wade majestically out a few yards -- wearing my sunhat and with my UV protective coverup trailing in the waves. I flick my hands at the water once or twice and say, "Oy, what a machieh." Then I hightail it back to the beach where the chances of having my limbs gnawed off by an eight-foot-long beast are slightly lower. Yes, I'm your seventy-six-year-old Tante Sadie. What can I say. And this year I get to add a whole other anxiety to my Great White phobia (which, I must add, is pretty reasonable, as phobias go, given that the Big Island is on the Great White migration route, and don't forget that surfer kid who got her arm bitten off just two years ago. But I digress.) I'm planning on adding tsunamis to my list of vacation-related anxieties. A neurotic Jewish girl can figure out a way to make any tragedy feed her own craziness, no matter how distant and unlikely. It's a special talent we have.

Oh, and one other note from the field. In case you're wondering if Shout wipes take out strawberry jello, the answer is no.

Fashion Victim

2005-01-20T14:17:00.000-08:00

All I wear nowadays are long-sleeve shirts with short-sleeve shirts layered on top of them. Every day. Some days it's a gray shirt with a black Believer baby-doll T on top of it. Some days it's a pink shirt with a Free Piper T. Today it's a long white V-neck with a pink shirt.

My children have all adopted this style, too. The three older ones wear it, and when they dress the baby, they put him in a little turtleneck with a polo over it, like some kind of tiny, floppy-eared escapee from Andover. When we go out together we look like those couples you see on vacation wearing matching Hawaiian shirts. In other words, stupid. We look stupid.

I'm trying to figure out why I've suddenly decided that this style, one that highlights the fleshiness of the upper arm is so compelling that I must adopt it despite its obvious unsuitability. Why am I dressing like a sixteen-year old? Why do my jeans rest at my hips, the better to force my four-caesarian-sectioned belly to ooze out over the top? What's the deal?

So many of the women I admire have innate senses of style. They know what looks good on them, they wear it, and that's it. I used to have, for better or worse, one fashion rule. Black. Only black. Everything I owned was black, everything I wore was black, everything I allowed near my body was black, with the exception of my lipstick and nail polish. This was an easy rule to follow. It brooked no compromise, and allowed for little flash, but it was hard to make too obvious an error. Now, I'm all about the colors (pink, green, etc.) and I fear I have become one loud fashion faux pas, wandering in search of a Queer eye. I am a fashion weather vane, pointy-shod when told to be, rounded-toed when told to be. All in the service of what? I always look more or less the same - fine. Except when I make some kind of terrible mistake. Then I look, well, ridiculous. Like, what was I thinking, a purple dress. Redheads should never wear purple, even when they become old ladies. Especially when they become old ladies. And that gold top with the ruffled tail? Gevalt.

The person I'd like to be has a small closet with just a few really "good" pieces. You know that woman. She oozes class, even when she's wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Maybe she tosses an ancient cashmere sweater over the ensemble, adding a little dash of expensive chic. Instead, I'm the woman with the bulging closet full of things purchased on sale, just a half-size too small (I'll shrink into them), in the color of the moment that just happens to lend my face a greenish hue.

What secret do those women know that I don’t? Sofia Coppola doesn't read "What Not To Wear," so how do she and her ilk just know this stuff? Is there a gene that I'm missing? Probably. You should see the pictures of my wedding. The only things more terrifying than my mom and grandmother in dueling knock-off Pucci prints was me in my wedding dress. I look like I dropped headfirst into a jar of marshmallow fluff.

Welcome to My Fantasy World

2005-01-19T20:51:00.000-08:00

I'm already adding to my cabinet. Terrific suggestions, folks!

Do we have to even notice tomorrow's festivities? Can we just pretend it's not happening? I know...let's play ROTISSERIE politics. This is a game I invented after the last election. It's like that fantasy baseball game the weird guy in the next office (or the weird guy next to you in the bed) plays. You pick independent players to be on your team. You aren't bound by anything other than you have to have a complete cabinet. Then, for the next four years, skip all political news. Just put your fingers in your ears and sing, "Na na na." Tell yourself pretty little stories about what your rotisserie team is doing.

I'll start. I warn you, I'm just doing this off the top of my head, with a little help from the web. I'll need to change my picks if I come up with a bunch of losers.

President: Barbara Boxer (it's fantasy politics, people)

VP: Barack Obama (Young, inexperienced, I know. But we went to law school together, and if he remembers me it can only increase my chances of getting invited to the White House.)

Secretary of State: George Soros

Secretary of the Treasury: George Akerloff (UC Berkeley Nobel Laureate in Economics)

Attorney General: Kathleen Sullivan (one-time dean of Stanford Law School. Out lesbian. Very smart.)

Secretary of the Interior: John H. Adams, president of the Natural Resources Defense Counsel

Secretary of Agriculture: Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire)

Secretary of Commerce: Nancy Folbre (an expert on time, money, and family values.)

Secretary of Labor: Sara Horowitz

Secretary of Defense: Daniel Berrigan. Priest and Peace activist.

Secretary of H.U.D.: Julian Bond of the NAACP

Secretary of Transportation: Matt Gonzalez (our own SF dude.)

Secretary of Energy: Carl Pope (Sierra Club president.)

Secretary of Education: Dave Eggers. Seriously. Check out 826 Valencia. The guy is an idea machine.

Secretary of H.H.S.: Katherine Gottlieb, MacArthur genius.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Max Cleland

Department of Homeland Security: Richard Clarke (brilliant idea, here, Fred. Thanks.)

EPA: Pam Matson (She knows about greenhouse gases and what they do.)

Chief of Staff: Ideas?

US Trade Rep: HELP!

Office of Management and Budget Director: Would Byron Dorgan work in this slot?

Drug Czar: Ethan Nadelman, director of the Drug Policy Institute

Blogger Ethics

2005-01-19T18:08:00.000-08:00

Am I'm doing something I shouldn't? Or not doing something I should? I know approximately 500 of you visit every day, so here's my question...why so few comments? Is it because I don't reply to each individually? Should I post more about the size of my butt (note plethora of comments on that day)?

By the way -- huge. Just in case you were wondering. But as Michael grew up in a truly integrated neighborhood, and had most of his first crushes on the girls he knew from school, he is not real interested in skinny white girl butts. Lucky me, because God knows I've got back.

How did I end up talking about that when I was supposed to be asking blogging etiquette questions?

I'm BA-ACK

2005-01-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

Lordy, I love working. I'm just a churlish bitch when I'm not writing. I'm still a bitch, but much less churlish, when I accomplish my daily word count. I've started the novel...not the kids' book yet. I have to talk to someone who knows the market before I launch into that. And this book is beginning. It's all a matter of catching the voice, and I think I am. I think so. Kenehora, poo poo poo.

Michael and I work in the same office. I sprawl on the couch, my laptop in my lap, and he works at his desk. This way if he desperately needs a bit of information he can ask me to do a quickie web search, and if I desperately need a word I can ask Dr. Thesaurus to cough one up. It's a complementary relationship. He's not allowed on the web when he works because he gets far too sucked up into it and would waste the whole day, and I have a sieve for a brain and can never remember the word I'm looking for. The only debate we have is over music. For instance, he just put on Jeff Beck, and if it weren't for the fact that I was finished for the day, I'd make him switch it. I like to listen to minimalist classical music when I work -- Steve Reich's my favorite. Either Reich and his cronies or weird world music crap that I'd never listen to in my non-working life. I'm not hugely into gypsy music, for example, but it puts me into a good frame of mind for writing. Go figure.

So, a good day, despite Sophie's moods. I swear that girl is having phantom PMS. She's got the S, without a doubt, and a healthy does of the P, but no M as yet (thank God). Every month, before I get my period, she goes through two days of intense moodiness. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking it's MY mood that's the issue, but I swear it isn't. The girl wakes up with her own little black cloud hovering over the top of her head. I will acknowledge that it doesn't help matters that my thunderous cloud makes hers look like a puff of smoke.

Poor Michael. When she does finally get the M to match the P and the S, and we're in synch, he's going to have to retreat to a pup tent in the yard with Zeke and Abe. They can roast weenies over an open fire, beat some drums, and wait it out.

HAHAHAHA

2005-01-18T15:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Maud Newton, I bring you the first line of a review by Kinky Friedman of Jimmy Buffet's new novel.

THERE is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.

Road Trip!

2005-01-18T13:59:00.000-08:00

A good mother will not have a DVD player in her minivan. A good mother loathes the idea of her children bickering over whether to watch fifteen minutes of Castle in the Sky or fifteen minutes of Finding Nemo on their way to school. A good mother makes play lists of fun and funky Power Pop music and plays them for her children, in order for facilitate their appreciation for good music and the life of Alex Chilton.

But what's the name of this blog? All together now...

I am so bummed that I caved in to Michael's refusal to get the DVD player option on the minivan. On Friday we're supposed to drive all the way to Carmel - that's, what, three hours? My kids are going to be at each other's throats the whole way. Instead of popping in 88 minutes of mindless entertainment (the exact length of the Lion King), I'm going to be desperately searching for music that they all like -- something sufficiently raucous for Zeke and Abraham, with a female vocalist for Sophie aka Betty Freidan, and easy to understand lyrics for Rosie ("What did he say, mommy?" "What did he say?" "What did he say?"). Fun. Oh so fun.

The very words "road trip" make my skin crawl. Remember when road trips meant a 2-liter bottle of diet coke, bags of Doritos and ruffles, a couple of extra-long Slim Jims, and your entire tape collection? Not to mention the occasional not-so legal recreational substances.

(FYI, researchers in the Netherlands have proven conclusively that marijuana does not significantly impair driving. In fact, it might actually make drivers more attentive. What with all the paranoia.)

Now road trips are all about whining, punctuated with a few episodes of vomit.

And don't suggest a book on tape. Try finding something that can be enjoyed by a 10-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 3-year-old with a four minute attention span, and a baby.

This is going to be about as much fun as the time Michael and I went to Staten Island to visit his aunt with the noise phobia. Every surface in the house was littered with little pink clotted earplugs, decorated with a bit of green earwax, just to make it all that much more appetizing.

What You Gonna Do When They Come For You?

2005-01-17T14:23:00.000-08:00

It was a scene from cops out in front of our house last night. At about 2:30 in the morning we were woken up by shouts of "put your hands up," and the sounds of heavy-footed men thundering up and down the block. We peeked out the window to see no less than three cop cars and six officers tearing around with flashlights. They had apparently caught a couple of car thieves in the act of breaking into our neighbor's car. As a property and car owner, I would be all very pleased with these efforts on the part of my local law enforcement agency if it weren't for what had happened a couple of years ago when my own car got stolen.

I was hugely pregnant with Abie, and Michael was out of town. I was hustling the three kids out the door to go the grocery store and I had Rosie in my arms, a diaper bag draped over my shoulder, and the two big kids weaving in and out between my legs. I looked out in front of my house at the spot where I always park. No car. I looked up and down the block. No car. Then, I did something really stupid. I took my car alarm control and pushed the button a few times, as if that would make the car suddenly reappear. Didn't work.

Someone had stolen my minivan. Truth was, while I was mightily inconvenienced, I wasn't particularly bummed. The minivan wasn't old, not more than a year or two, but it had already started to smell. You know, that noxious combination of old bottle, half-empty gogurt tube, old soccer cleats? You can have the damn thing washed two hundred times, and the smell of children will never disappear.

I had four days before the insurance company would give me the go-ahead to buy a new minivan. Four short days. And of course, on the morning of the fourth day, the cops found the goddamn car. It was trashed, cracked up, in Hayward, a town a few exits down the freeway. Worse luck, the thing wasn't totaled. The insurance company decided to repair it for me.

When I got over my despair and picked up the phone to call the guy at the body shop, he said the damage wasn't too bad, but he did have some bad news. "The van is totally disgusting," he said. "It looks like a homeless family has been living in it for a month."

Terrific. Not only had some psycho stolen my car (who goes joyriding in a minivan?) but he had also skanked up the inside. Yuck. I couldn't even bear to see the thing. I sent Michael's assistant down to the body shop with instructions to get the car seats and anything else that could be salvaged. She called from the lot. With worse news.

"Um, Ayelet," she says. "I don't know how to tell you this, but, um."
"What?!"
"This is all your mess."

No, no homeless family. Just Ayelet and her disgusting mess. Sigh.

But all was not lost. At least I would have the satisfaction of getting my revenge. The thief had left a Grateful Dead CD (!!), his leather jacket and...his cell phone behind him. I called the cops all atwitter. Crime solved! Trace the phone, I tell them, and we've got our criminal! Their reaction? I haven't confronted such a lack of interest since the time I suggested we spend Christmas break at Club Med. (Unfortunately, I was more persuasive that time. A Club Med vacation, the antidote for anything good in your life. More about that another day.) The cops didn't care. They didn't want the phone, they weren't interested in finding out who stole the car. They were shocked, in fact, that I was bothering them about this at all. I tried going up the ranks. Nothing. I even called the mayor's office. No response.

Yet, last night, they were all over solving the exact same crime. Maybe it's just me they don't like. Anyway, as the middle-of-the-night action wound down, I heard the cops ask the kid they had nabbed what his name was. The name sounded Cambodian, I thought. As soon as they began talking to him, the kid began insisting that it was all his fault. The other guy was innocent. Please let him go, etc. etc. So immediately I created this scenario in my head about T and his young cousin, a recent immigrant whose father had been killed by the Khmer. The cousin and his mother were lucky enough to be allowed to come to the US to be with her sister, and now they live in a studio apartment in the same complex as T's family. T's mother, awash with guilt over not having been able to save her own sister, has made this young cousin T's responsibility. And now T's gone and gotten him arrested.

I've been worried about T and his cousin all day.

Formatting Horror

2005-01-16T13:38:00.000-08:00

Anyone know how to fix the formatting on the next post?

David Brooks Discovers the Wheel!

2005-01-16T11:47:00.000-08:00

Look what I found! It's round! It can make vehicles move!

Okay, maybe I'm being a little snide. And maybe I should just be grateful that any male commentator is discussing the challenges inherent in raising a family and having a career. (After all, we could be treated to another of Caitlin Flanagan's "I'm a wife and mommy and I've never wanted a career -- except for that gig at the New Yorker and please don't talk about my full-time nanny" diatribes.) But still, I couldn't help but greet Brook's column with a great big DUH. Allison does a terrific job of taking on the various implications of his fundamental point, so I'm not going to bother replicating her analysis.

Here's the thing. Let's say I had done what Mr. Brooks suggests. Let's say I had taken the following advice:

it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

What would my life be like now? Well, I'd be married to a very pleasant albeit, er, simple Israeli who, like my father, is missing the communication gene. I'd be wretchedly unhappy, as would he. I'd not only be wearing my bathrobe at noon on Sunday, I'd be living in the goddamn thing, because I would never be able to motivate myself to dress for the misery that my life had become. See, the big ol' problem with Mr. Brooks argument is that for the vast majority of us, marrying the person we are stupid enough to be dating at, say 23 (because shouldn't we be married for at least a year before getting knocked up?), would be a catastrophic mistake. And let's not even talk about your average 23-year-old American man, and how ready he is for marriage at that age. The whole idea makes me shudder. But wait, is Mr. Brooks saying that 23-year-old women should marry 40-year-old men? Is that the whole point of this column?

The truth is I actually do think we need to rethink the way we sequence careers. I always say that your profession can't be like a train that you get on at the bottom of the hill, ride for 40 years, and then get off at the top. We need to make room in our understanding of what constitutes a career for stopping and starting, changing trains, etc. Many women (and some men) are doing that. It's just that the employment world forces each individual to (if you will) reinvent the wheel. And they are almost always penalized for their choices.

A Menthol Cigarette

2005-01-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

It's 11:39 on Sunday morning, and I'm still in my robe. Abie was up again and again last night, which is not really my problem, since all he ever wants is his father, but it did wake me. I ended up awake once and for all at 7, and have been reading the paper and wafting around the house ever since. My hair is standing on end, something I didn't even bother to do anything about when each of the kids' playdates were dropped off. The carefully coifed moms were a tad on the shocked side.

Michael just told me to go take a shower. "You're kind of turning into that mother," he said. "You know, the one who spends her day in her bathrobe shrieking at her children?" In response to my expression of disbelief he said, "Seriously, I was just about to go get you a menthol cigarette."

What, no Pabst Blue Ribbon to go with it?

What to Begin Now?

2005-01-15T15:08:00.000-08:00

It's time to start a new project. I'm finished with the rewrite of The Cradlerobbers, I'm expecting the copy-edit of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, but that won't take more than a week. Now what? I have an idea for an adult novel. I have an idea for a screenplay, and I have an idea for a children's series. I can't decide which to do. I've never written a screenplay, and it's entirely possible I'll suck at it. It could be a complete waste of time. On the other hand, I bet I could pound out a first draft in a month. The children's novel is also another long shot, but the idea is pretty cool, and who knows. It might sell. Stranger things have happened. I suppose I should begin the adult novel. It's scary though. The idea I have is bound to hurt people I'm close to (just like Impossible Pursuits, frankly). Starting a novel is also like setting off on a trip with no itinerary or return ticket. It could be a short trip, or you could find yourself stuck in Burkina Faso for years.

What to do, what to do?

Poor Grrl

2005-01-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you all know by now, Chez Mis has bad news to report. I wish that woman could just get a break. Would it turn the heavens up for down for her to catch a single goddamn break?

The Nag Gets Hers

2005-01-14T15:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, one more tidbit about last night. I went into the city before Michael did, and I made a big deal out of him forgetting his ticket. He's a bit of a luftmensch (head in the clouds) and I got all pissy.

"Do you need me to staple this to your collar?"
"Don't forget."
"Don't forget."
"Seriously, don't forget."

So what happened? I forgot my ticket. I am so bummed, because now I've not only lost all credibility, but I've lost all snide-rights. It will be months before I can bitch at him for being absent-minded.

I hate that.

So Much Money For Diamonds, Such Bad Plastic Surgery

2005-01-14T11:38:00.000-08:00

Last night Michael and I went to the San Francisco Symphony's 60th Birthday party for the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas. We had no idea it was going to be such a scene. In fact, I somehow didn't notice the "black tie optional" notation on our invitation. Man, was I underdressed.

Michael was wearing a very dapper suit, and coincidentally, a nice black, white and silver tie. Sophie picked it out for him, and I swear to God the kid has some kind of fashion radar. At least he was appropriately dressed. Most of the men were in tuxes, but he looked stylish, and since the average age was about nine zillion, you could make an argument that that's what "the youth" considers to be black tie.

I, on the other hand, was wearing a fine and dandy little cocktail dress, which had I worn one of my dozens of pairs of high heels, would have been innocuous enough. Instead, I chose a pair of funky, casual John Fluevog boots. I felt like I had a sign on my head that read "tacky bitch." Although, why was the neon blinking over me? Why wasn't it blinking over the woman whose ball gown was decorated with little patches of rabbit fur shot through with sequins? I'm betting Easter is going to be a sad holiday around the Bay Area this year. I doubt she left a bunny unskinned.

That wasn't the most ludicrous outfit, though. That award goes to the ancient crone in the fuchsia ribboned and ruffled gown with the six-foot train. Rosie has a swath of fuchsia tulle she uses for dress up, and I swear to God that old broad was peeking through our windows and taking notes.

Michael and I felt like two guppies in a dry pond, gulping for air. When we saw two actual friends of ours, we fell on them, we were so relieved to see someone we had anything even remotely in common with.

The music was gorgeous. Really beautiful, and fun. FUN. MTT had his usual delicate touch last night, and he was genuinely having a great time. I know nothing about classical music. Bizarrely (and luckily for me) everything I know I've learned from hearing him conduct and getting mini-lessons either before or afterwards. Michael makes up for my ignorance, however.

But since I'm about as deep as a goldfish bowl, what I really want to talk about is the plastic surgery on display. What is with the bad plastic surgery? I mean, these women are dripping in diamonds, and their faces look like Easter Island statues. You know, that horrible stretched look, with the huge cheekbones and the weird lips? There are a few women I know who have had good plastic surgery -- one of them was sitting next to me last night. Obviously, it's possible to get a face-lift or an eye-whatever without ending up looking like you're standing in a wind tunnel. These broads have all the money in the world, and man, oh man, are they SCARY. Way to push all thoughts of a tummy tuck from my mind. I'll live with my flaws, thank you. I'd rather not end up looking like a Barbie doll that's been hanging out in a microwave oven.

So Much To Say

2005-01-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

There are so many serious things I should be blogging about today. For example:

1. Two cases, Booker and Fanfan, have been decided, and the Supreme Court has radically changed the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Some of you who know me from my life outside of this blog (is there life outside of the blogosphere?) will recall that I take a serious interest in sentencing, especially in the way the Guidelines are constructed and used. In brief (very brief), the Sentecing Guidelines are a series of rules requiring federal judges to give specific sentences to defendants. Judges were constrained by the guidelines; they could not use their discretion to decrease a sentence if, say, a man filed an incorrect mortgage application in order to get refinancing to pay for alterations to his home made necessary by the fact that his profoundly retarded daughter had to leave the rehabilition facility that had been caring for her. That, by the way, was an actual case of mine.

In Booker/Fanfan the Court has ruled, essentially, that the Guidelines should be just that, guidelines, not hard and fast regulations. (For more information on this, in a readable format, go to your local library and pick up a copy of my novel, Daughter's Keeper.)

I think this is without a doubt the correct resolution of the case, and I'm terrified of it. Now, with an entrenched and emboldened Republican majority in Congress, I fear that their reaction to this case will be to make life even harder for defendants and judges.

Keep your fingers crossed.

2. Prince Harry has proved, once and for all, the importance of genetic diversity in the breeding of human beings. I, for one, am responding to the latest proof of his blithering idiocy by requiring my children to marry outside our genetic cohort.

3. Human Rights Watch has just issued a report condemning US actions in Iraq and elsewhere. Surprise Surprise. Thank you, Militiary Intelligence, Rumsfeld and cronies. Next time a US soldier is tortured you can congratulate yourself on doing your bit to decimate the Geneva Convention.

But I don't want to blog about any of that. I want to blog about something else. I want to blog about The Person With Whom I Live and how goddamn irritating he can be sometimes. I want to blog about how maddening it is to live with someone who immediately gets to his feet when dinner is over and rushes to the computer in the kitchen to choose music by which to clean up. This decision invariably takes precisely the same amount of time as it takes me to actually clean up the kitchen. So I load the dishwasher, while The Person With Whom I Live waffles over whether Keren Ann or Fountains of Wayne provides the best clean up music. The Person With Whom I Live hovers over the keyboard, scrolling through itunes, and invariably decides that he must purchase something new, something especially composed to assist with the cleanup. By then I have swept the floor and wiped off the counters. The Person With Whom I Live finally chooses a Shonen Knife cover of a Carpenters' song, just as I am squeezing out the sponge and turning on the dishwasher. When The Person With Whom I Live is confronted about this incredibly aggravating behavior of his, he replies, "Just give me a walk on this one." Thus, a situation is set up by which I am the unreasonable bitch for not "giving him a walk," and he is the reasonable, sensitive soul. I am seriously considered smacking The Person With Whom I Live upside the head with a frying pan.

This, by the way, is the same person who decided that it would be fun to give Zeke a buzz cut ... with his beard-trimmer. I came home from the gym one day to find Zeke sitting on a chair, hanks of hair at his feet, gaping bald spots on his head, and The Person With Whom I Live mumbling, "Don't cry. When Mommy comes home she'll tell us how to fix it."

Safe, Legal and Rare

2005-01-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

The pro-choice and anti-choice world is abuzz with debate and discussion about Frances Kissling's 7500 word essay entitled Is There Life After Roe: How to Think About the Fetus. . (I suggest you go to the cached version of this article, as everyone and her aunt is trying to load the site, and they've effectively shut it down.) I found the article fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least because it is aligned in many ways with my current thinking about abortion.

As readers of this blog know, I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More importantly, I could feel the baby move. We had seen him on the ultrasound; I have a very clear memory of his two tiny feet, perfect pearl toes, footprint arches, round heels. This was, for me, a baby, not a "clump of cells" as an older woman, steeped in the arcane language of the early feminist movement, called him. He was my baby, and I chose to end his life.

Let me be very clear here. I support absolutely the right to abortion. I give financial support to Planned Parenthood, to NARAL. I am fanatical on this issue. I believe that every woman is entitled to choose when and if to end a pregnancy. I also believe that to end a pregnancy like mine is to kill a fetus. Kill. I use that word very consciously and specifically.

I have no regrets.

I made a choice based on my own and my family’s needs and limitations. I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died. I wanted a genetically perfect baby, and because that was something I could control, I chose to end his life.

This decision was not without its terrible costs. I mourned this baby's death. The night before the termination I lay awake, feeling him roll and spin within my body. I wept for the death of the baby inside me, and I also wept for the death of the "fantasy baby," the perfect baby I lost when the amnio results came back. I was catapulted into a six-month depression after the abortion, a depression that ended only when I got pregnant again. On Yom Kippur I wrote an essay about what I had done and read it before my congregation. One of the lines in that essay asked how I could apologize for being so inadequate a mother that I would not accept an inadequate child.

Everyone knows now how early a fetus becomes a baby. Women who have been pregnant have seen their babies on ultrasounds. They know that there is a terrible truth to those horrific pictures the anti-choice fanatics hold up in front of abortion clinics. When I was wheeled into the operating room, I begged my doctor to make sure my baby felt no pain before he was torn out of my womb. I knew the grim truth of a D&E -- I knew he would be dismembered -- and I wanted him dead before this happened. My doctor told me that he would make sure my baby felt no pain. You see, all this is horrible, and grim, and terrible to think about. But contemporary women know the truth about abortion, and those of us who remain firmly committed to a woman's right to choose need to accept and acknowledge that truth, or we risk losing our right completely.

I talked yesterday to my brilliant friend and role model, Lynn Paltrow, a woman who has devoted her life and career to pregnant women and their rights. Lynn represents women who have been charged with various offenses because of drug use when pregnant. Lynn said something truly brilliant, I thought. To be relevant to the contemporary world, to be valid, the pro-choice movement must listen to pregnant women. We must listen to the woman and value her words. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant, whose pregnancy at, say, 10 weeks, is nothing more than a source of desperation, of misery, knows one truth and we must respect it and honor it. A pregnant woman whose 4 month-old fetus has Down’s Syndrome knows another truth, and we must respect that, too. A pregnant woman whose batterer kicks her in the stomach, trying to end her baby's life, knows another truth. Respecting the truths of these pregnant women allows us to deal in shades of grey, to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of the black and white.

I know why the feminist movement (of whom I am a proud member) has been so wary of using the language of fetal life. A Senator who uses the phrase "partial birth abortion" is exploiting a rare procedure to attack our broader right. I also know a woman who had two "partial-birth abortions," or D&Xs as they are more accurately called. My friend Tiffany is a carrier of a terrible genetic abnormality. In addition to other defects, her babies developed with no faces, with no way to eat or breathe. They were doomed. The only way to extract them without hurting her chances of ever having another baby was through a D&X.

Tiffany named her children. She mourned and mourns their deaths. She is the face of the "partial-birth abortion." If we listened to women like Tiffany, we could acknowledge the value of the babies they lost, and defend absolutely their right not to carry them full term, not to force themselves and their babies to undergo the trauma of a doomed birth.

Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion.

Hanna Andersson, Do I Get a Discount?

2005-01-11T19:26:00.000-08:00

Hanna Andersson, Do I Get a Discount?
Originally uploaded by Ayeletw.

So the others won't feel bad, and I promise no more pictures. It's a terrible one of Sophie, and Zeke is making a face, sort of, but it gives you an idea. I'm not even supposed to put their pictures up. It violates all sorts of "children of writer" rules. But screw it.

Abe, In Costume

2005-01-11T19:06:00.000-08:00

Abe, In Costume
Originally uploaded by Ayeletw.

By popular demand, Abraham Wolf Waldman Chabon. Yes, that's his name. It's a lot easier to deal with than his brother's -- Ezekiel Napoleon Waldman Chabon.

Israel Courts Get it Right

2005-01-11T14:07:00.000-08:00

In the same day, the U.S. Supreme Court left standing a Florida law that bars gay couples from adopting children, and the Israeli Supreme Court decided that gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to adopt one another's children

Now, obviously these two laws are not the same. In California, at least, gay couples have long been allowed to adopt under these circumstances (albeit with the caveat that a conservative judge could simply turn them down). Florida's law is about adoption of children unrelated to the spouse, although I imagine it would have ramifications for adoption under the circumstances that the Israel Supreme Court dealt with.

So let's ponder this for a moment.

In Israel, they respect the rights of gay families.

In Florida, if you've been convicted of Domestic Violence, ie., if you've beaten your wife to a bloody pulp, we're happy to let you adopt. Take two, they're small! But if you are a gay man who has fostered, for example, 8 children with AIDS and HIV (one of the actual plaintiffs in the case), we'd rather find some abusive son of a bitch to adopt the children. As long as he puts his schlong in the right place, we don't care what else he does.

Poor Abie

2005-01-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

Someone (anonymous) just took me to task for constantly posting about how homely Abie is. You're right, anonymous one, I do talk far too much about the boy's looks. In thinking about it, I realize that I always pick one flaw about my children to talk about with other people. We used to call Rosie, "The pretty one." I.e., maybe not so bright. And Sophie's got, well, attitude in spades. Zeke wouldn't recognize the truth if it beat him about the head and shoulders. What a horrible mother...

Actually, I think this is about the evil eye. I want to make sure that the Angel of Death knows that these kids are just not worth snatching. They're homely, stupid, crabby and dishonest. You don't want them. Leave them here with me.

It's also probably a reaction to hearing people talk about their kids as if they were the second coming of the Messiah. Or the first, if you're one of us. Or the second, if you're a Lubavitche.

Here's another essay about this very topic. From Child Magazine.

At every parents' night I've ever attended -- and with four children I've been to more than my share -- I have waited for the inevitable question.

"Excuse me," someone asks. "What accommodation do you make for the exceptionally gifted child?" We all look around to see who the lucky speaker is; who is the parent of this future Bobby Fischer, this Stephen Hawking of the second grade?

For the vast majority of us, the question serves only to make us feel bad. We all wish we were the parents of the gifted child. I should know. My husband and I still swear to this day that our oldest daughter said the word duck when she was only 6 months old.

It was this same daughter, Sophie, who taught me the folly of these expectations. When she was in preschool, I began buying her First Readers, convinced that it was only a matter of months before she'd be whipping through The Chronicles of Narnia. So when Sophie was still painstakingly sounding out words at age 7, I ended up calling my mother, completely distraught.

"She's only reading at a first-grade level!" I wailed.

There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments. Finally my mother said, "Honey, she's in first grade."

More hysteria. "But Michael was reading by age 4! And I was such an early reader!"

"What are you talking about?" she said. "You took forever to learn to read. You were the last in your class."

I am a Bitch and Catherine is a Mensch

2005-01-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

Today I got the loveliest email from someone to whom I behaved hideously on this blog. I posted a sour and bitchy comment about Catherine Newman's column, based on having read a single one. I criticized her for being something that she isn't -- cloying. She sent me this email basically saying that I hurt her feelings, but she thought we had a lot in common. We might have a lot in commom, but she is much more generous and much nicer than me.

I then went to read her archived column, and it's great and does not deserve my snarkiness.

I owe an apology to Catherine, and to her fans. I am so so sorry.

People, go ahead and blast me when I behave badly. I promise I'll learn from my mistakes.

Pump Moms Do It In a Vacuum

2005-01-10T21:38:00.000-08:00

I heard from one of my old pumping compatriots today. We were united in the secret netherworld of the Symphony and the Pump-In-Style. It was lovely to hear from her, although it did bring back the horror of the six months I spent pumping breastmilk (40 ounces a day) for Abraham. You see, Abie was born with a recessive chin. So recessive, in fact, that he could never latch on. Poor guy. He also has a unibrow and a moustache (Seriously. A black one). Now it turns out this kid has a gimpy hip. His little foot turns out. It's supposed to pass with time, but with the one eyebrow, the no chin, the moustache and the limp, he looks like a ninety-seven year old Armenian. Not that that's bad. Some of my best friends are Armenian. Come to think of it, their children are way better looking then he is.

So here's an article I wrote for Parenting Magazine about Abe and his nursing problem.

Baby Abraham won’t nurse. Despite the fact that I’ve successfully breastfed his three siblings, despite the efforts of his pediatrician and not one, but two lactation consultants, this baby will not suck. Were he a tiny Stone Age baby, born to a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe, he would have long since been left out for the saber-tooth tigers and prehistoric dire wolves. He’s lucky he was born to a 21st century soccer mom who refuses to give up.

Or is he? Might four-month-old Abraham be more content were I just to give up, and stop the daily battles over the breast? Wouldn’t I be? I’ve been mulling this over lately, as I sit in an exhausted fog at three in the morning, strapped to my breast pump. While I enjoyed nursing Abe’s sisters and brother well enough, I never found it to be the glorious exemplification of all things maternal that some women feel it to be. And although I understand that breast milk is the best food for my baby, I’m not one of those moms who considers formula a bare step away from strychnine. Anyway, I can certainly pump milk for him, even if he drinks only from a bottle. So why is it that I can’t seem to stop this nursing business?

It’s all my husband’s fault.

The reason I refuse to give up on the possibility of nursing baby Abe, is that breastfeeding is the only thing I can do that his father can’t. My husband is the feminist’s fantasy father. He changes diapers, does middle-of-the-night feedings, cleans the house, constructs elaborate Lego structures, pitches baseballs, and plays a mean game of Uno. About the only thing he doesn’t do is laundry. And he’d do that, too, if I didn’t feel like something in this house had to be my responsibility.

Are you jealous yet? Are you ready to beat your husband about the head and shoulders next time you find him spending three and half hours reprogramming TIVO while you juggle carpool, homework assignments, and birthday present shopping? (The last of those, incidentally, is my job. The first two are not.) Put that remote back in his hand, because this ideal of egalitarian parenting is not the bliss it seems.

When your husband is the best mom around, what is left for you to be? I’ll tell you what. Second best. And sometimes that just doesn’t seem like enough. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t miss having to do all the work myself. We all know how tedious and miserable many of the mundane tasks of parenting can be. I’m thrilled to have someone else scrub out the Diaper Genie and pack the lunch boxes. I certainly don’t begrudge my husband his relationship with the children. I’m glad both for him and for them that they share this unique bond. It’s just that I find myself longing for something absolutely selfish and absurd: I want the primacy that defines the traditional role of mother, without having to earn it.

With a few exceptions, my mommy friends all possess a decidedly paramount place in their children’s hearts. I envy them. When Rosie, age two, wants someone to teach her how to ride her tricycle, she’s much more likely to call for daddy than for mommy, and every time I hear that little voice, I get a pang. Okay, not a big enough pang to haul myself off the couch – heck, I might as well put my feet up since I’m not the one she wants – but a pang nonetheless. When six-year-old Zeke crawls onto his father’s lap, a newly constructed Bionicle in hand, full of questions and stories about his day at school, about which would win in a fight, the Thing or the Hulk, about whether your eyeball is really a ball, I sit, empty-lapped, longing to be the one cuddling those knobby little-boy knees. Even Sophie, age eight, would rather go clothes shopping with her father, although that probably has more to do with the fact that, unlike her price-conscious mother, daddy never bothers looking through the sale rack.

Yesterday, I had begun to feel really sorry for myself. Abe was turning from the breast, screaming for his bottle (and probably for his daddy), when suddenly I heard a terrible wail. I ran downstairs. Zeke had not, in fact, fallen from a dizzying height, or broken a limb. Something far worse had happened. His sister had refused to allow him to join her at her lemonade stand. Daddy was trying to comfort him, but it was Mommy he wanted. As he sat, his damp face buried in my neck, his fingers tangled in my hair, I finally realized that while I may not be the only one who matters, I am worth something around here. Sophie comes home from gymnastics weeping over her best friend’s elevation to the next-level class while she’s been forced to stay in Girls Beginner I (daddy’s suggestion that she work harder on her cartwheels misses the point entirely. It’s about how it makes her feel, not what you can do to fix the problem), or Rosie shows up, chin atremble, because of some complicated preschool social slight. That’s when they come to me, and that’s what I do best. There is, I think, something unique about the comfort a mother provides. Or at least the comfort this mother provides. Daddy may be the better cook. He may be more fun at story time, he may even be less liable to get frazzled when everyone is throwing a tantrum at the same time. But it’s usually Mommy’s lap they go for when the going gets tough, but the tough are crying too hard to get going.

Does understanding how important I am to them make me any less envious of my husband’s centrality to my children’s lives? Probably not. But I think it may make it possible to give up the breastfeeding struggle. We’ve been at it for four months now, and it’s time to acknowledge defeat. Abe will love and need me even if he never nurses, just like Sophie, Zeke and Rosie do, and just like I love and need them. And that’s really what it’s all about.

Hypocrite?

2005-01-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

I was a public defender. Not for that long, only a few years, but for long enough to have developed a sense of outrage at the costs imposed by the system on offenders.

Morally and legally, I believe Megan's Law is seriously problematic. I think our criminal justice system depends on a defendant being able to serve his sentence and then be released. I am aware of the frequency of unjust convictions. I am horrified by the routine violations of civil rights that plague our court and penal systems.

But I checked the Megan's Law webiste anyway.

I'm a mother of four. As most of you know, my children are 10, 7, 3, and 1.5 years old. I am as susceptible as anyone to the fears that accompany contemporary parenthood. I am terrified that my children will be harmed. My fears run the gamut from tsunamis to pedophiles to car accidents and plane crashes.

In my zip code there are 11 registered offenders. Some of these men likely fall into the category of offenses I would not concern myself with. For example, if an eighteen-year-old boy has sex with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, he can be convicted for statutory rape. When I was fifteen I had boyfriends who were in the Israeli army. One coerced me into losing my virginity. The others were just boyfriends. I would even say I had the upper hand in at least one of those relationships. These guys were all between 18 and 22.

Some of the other 11 men listed on the website scare the shit out of me. There are two who were committed to long-term psychiatric care due to their sexual offenses against children. There are a couple who were convicted of "sexual penetration with a foreign object."

I tried out some other random towns. Mill Valley's got 8 offenders, Pasadena has 119. Ross doesn't have any. Just for the information of those not from the Bay Area, Ross is our little Marin enclave of fabulous wealth. Sean Penn lives there. And a bunch of other really rich people.

So what's a mama to do? Do we sell our house in Berkeley and buy a place in Ross for the same money? Not an option. While it's possible that a family of 6 can fit into a double wide, I'm not sure they'd let us park under the underpass for long enough to get the kids into the Ross school system. Do I stop letting my kids walk around the corner to the market where they can sign for an ice cream? Do I stop letting them have lemonade stands out in front of our house, complete with a tin marked "Tsunami Relief?" (Why else would someone pay a buck for a half a cup of cloyingly sweet lemonade made from the Meyer lemons on our tree and the entire contents of the sugar canister?)

No. I value my children’s independence too much. Moreover, it already makes me so sad that when my kids go out and play there's no one for them to play with, even on our street where kids live in almost every house. When I was a kid, we roamed the neighborhood, getting tootsie rolls from the lovely young woman in the wheel chair, playing war on the dirt hills above the busy main street, making faces at the mean dogs behind their fences and petting the nice dogs that ran along with us. These languid child-centered afternoons and evenings are the sources of some of my most important memories. I can still remember the feel of the wind in my hair as I rode my bike down to the Kentucky Fried Chicken to get 1/4 regular and a biscuit. (I was an suburban kid with a taste for junk food, what can I say.) The idea of Sophie saddling up her bike and riding down to College Avenue for a donut strikes me as absurd, but she's the same age as I was back then. I can't deny my children the independence and fun of my own childhood. I can't constrict their lives because of my fear. There are statistically no more child abductions now then there were in the 1970s. The difference is that now I can plug my zip code into the Megan's Law website and confirm my worst fears and anxieties.

I won't do it anymore. I will teach my kids to holler, "Mama" as loud as they can, never to get into anyone's car, even if invited by a man who says he needs them to help take care of his sick puppy. But I won't hem their lives in so much so that they have no idea what to do with an empty Sunday afternoon when I've forgotten to book a playdate.

Zeke and his friend Jack are out in the yard, in bathing suits, having a Super Soaker fight. It is 53 degrees out there, and only an insane person would prance around in a wet bathing suit. An insane person or a seven-year-old boy. Any minute one of those 11 pedophiles (as defined by the statute) could walk by my house and snatch the boys. (If Fanny, our huge Bernese Mountain dog, would let him). But I can hear them laughing hysterically, screaming with feigned rage and hysterical glee. I remind myself (again) that they are safe, that they are having fun, that the risk of danger to them is the same as it was to me when I rode my bike around my neighborhood, pigtails flying, leaving a trail of KFC grease in my wake.

North Korea

2005-01-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

I cannot Ferberize Abraham because, like North Korea, he retains the nuclear option. He cries so hard he throws up. Only Michael can put him down. And Michael is gone.

Oh help me, Lord.

Lying Murderers

2005-01-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

What do you call someone who tells a lie in order to get someone else killed? I'd call him a murderer, and so would the law. At the very least, he'd be an accessory to murder. The government calls him an expert witness.

Dr. Dietz testified in 2002 that an episode of "Law & Order" depicting a mother who drowned her children in a bathtub and was found not guilty by reason of insanity had been broadcast shortly before the Yates children were murdered.

There was no such show.

I am absolutely horrified by this. I'm stunned that charges are not being pressed against this man. Let's review. HE LIED on the stand, in order to support a first-degree murder conviction.

It's also typical that the show he's talking about is Law & Order. I have long hated that show, despite it's seductive watch-ability, and I'll tell you why. It is a terribly pro-prosecution show. It portrays a world that does not exist. Over and over again, counsel for defendants convince judges to exclude evidence. Over and over again guilty people almost go free, or do go free, by playing the system. Well, guess what? OJ Simpson notwithstanding, that doesn't happen. Judges almost never rule in favor of defendants, even when there have been egregious cases of prosecutorial and police misconduct. It's maddening, as an ex-public defender, to see this kind of nonsense on TV. It just feeds into the misperception that the system is playable. It ignores the fact that when mistakes are made, there are almost invariably at the expense of the criminal defendant.

We've got two million people incarcerated in this country, a percentage higher than any other Western nation. That's a shameful statistic.

A Hassid and A Heretic

2005-01-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

So this is interesting. A Hassid and A Heretic is one of many blogs kept by outwardly Hassidic (ultra-Orthodox) Jews who are harboring doubts about their faith. Next time someone asks me about the benefits of the Internet, remind me to mention this. Finally, instead of struggling alone, people like this man have an outlet for their feelings, their questions. More importantly, they have a community of similarly struggling folks.

Cool.

My father once told me that if I ever became an Orthodox Jew, he would sit Shiva for me. (OK, for those of you who don't get the joke, he would treat me as if I'd died. When that comment is made it's usually about marrying a non-Jew.) The idea of me donning a wig and refusing to eat at his house horrified him. Frankly, I feel the same way about the prospect of my children becoming Orthodox, although I am "tolerant" and "open-minded" and would thus have to chew on my tongue and crochet Yarmulkes for my grandchildren. I abhor fanaticism of any kind, except fanatical support for progressive politics. That I'm all in favor of. Unless you're trying to bitch me out about buying disposable diapers. Which happened once in the grocery store. I was picking up disposable swim diapers for a trip to Hawaii and some woman looked at me disapprovingly and said, "You know, you can get those in a reusable form." To which I replied, "Really? Because I was hoping to spend my vacation rinsing shit out of my baby's diaper. Thanks for the tip."

I digress. Where was I? Oh, right. The Orthodox. When I was in college in Jerusalem (junior year abroad) I worked in a Laundromat. We did the wash for a couple of yeshivas. Twice a week the boys' clothes would arrive. Clothes they'd worn under wool suits in the blazing Middle Eastern sun. Fragrant. Delightful. I used tongs to empty the laundry bags. I might have developed my aversion then. I know there's a lot to admire in the Hassidic community -- support, companionship, etc. I even wrote a novel about it. But still. I'd rather the kids married in the faith. My faith. Doubt, perversity and self-loathing. Now that's a religion I can get behind.

Maybe Virginia is Trying to Beat Out Texas

2005-01-07T11:13:00.000-08:00

Oh for God's sake. Is this crazy or what?

Fun New Words

2005-01-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

I learned some new words at the gym today. They're so much fun.

Hoggin': When a group of men gather together and compete for who takes home the fattest girl.

Cougars (also known as Nolan Ryans): Older married women on the prowl for young men. Why Nolan Ryans, you ask? Because he's an old guy who's still in the game.

Sigh.

Inevitably this leads me back to the conclusion that there is just something sad and dreadful about large groups of men and about the sexual politics of contemporary American society. I was recently talking to a friend, an artist, whose studio-mate makes her money doing Full Body Sensual Massage. Full body. From "prostate massage" to "sensual release." Perhaps there's a little reflexology in there, too. I don't know. Her clients, my friend insists, are all married men, young men in their thirties and forties whose marriages are centered around child-rearing. So they say. This may simply be a "blame the victim" -- or, rather, blame the cuckold -- situation, but the men insist that their wives have lost interest in sex, and that they are actually saving their marriages by visiting these FBSM practitioners. They don't want to "cheat," so instead they pay for a "release."

There's an entire website in San Francisco that rates these experiences. You can find spreadsheets comparing various practitioners, complete with elaborate numerical scoring systems. Some guys, they just like to work those numbers.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. I am confident, absolutely, that my own husband is faithful. I also know he suffers from a surfeit of whatever gene leads to commitment. He is a prairie vole, he mates for life. My artist/FBSM lady is of the impression, however, that most men are meadow voles, and without a genetic transplant they stay that way.

Are the husbands of my friends out in the meadow getting their sensual massages? Should it make any difference to their relationships if they are? Is a meadow vole likely to turn his wife into a cougar?

Meanwhile I slept with someone other than my husband last night.

Michael is away and Rosie made her customary migration into my bed. Her brother Zeke soon followed. I spent the night with a set of 7-year-old feet pressed up against my legs and a little 3-year-old hand stroking my shoulder blade. All very sweet, but I miss their father. He's a lot easier to sleep with.

Fat is a Feminist Issue. Sort of.

2005-01-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Allison, I've been thinking about fat. Slate asks us this question: "Can you be a fat female and also an object of desire? "

Sigh. This is such an issue for me. I am in a constant state of weight anxiety, and have been all my life. When I think of the skinny years I wasted being convinced I was grotesquely obese, I just want to scream. In college, I weighed 100 pounds. And all I wanted in the world was to lose the five pounds that stood between me and eternal loveliness. I was convinced that if I could just peel off that layer of hideous blubber, I would be thin and beautiful. Did I mention that at the time I weighed 100 pounds? By the end of law school, I weighed 107 pounds. I obsessed over my weight. I thought about it constantly. I ate bagels "Jewish girl stye." (What? You don't know what that is? You cut the bagel in half, scrape out the inside, and eat a shell of a bagel. Mmm. Not.) I bought clothes in a size two, whether or not they fit, because the idea of being a size four made me weep. Let me repeat that -- I was upset about being a size 4.

When I married Michael the first thing he did was put some weight on me. He grew up in a completely integrated neighborhood, and all the first objects of his desire were African-American girls. If a baby don't got back, he's not interested. I've always had me some back, but he wanted more. By the time I got pregnant with Sophie, I was up to 112 (horrors.) Is anyone noticing that while I cannot remember my children's names, how old they were when they took their first steps, or what I ate for breakfast, I can recite my weights through the years with precision? I put on over 50 pounds when I was pregnant. Yes I did. For the first time in my life I ate whatever I wanted. Ice cream sundaes every night? Bring it on! Whipped cream on my pancakes? Bring it on! Butter on that croissant? Oh yeah. How about butter on my steak? That too. You know what? Five months after Sophie was born, I was down to 115. I had a trainer who was a methamphetamine addict, something that every overweight person with adequate resources should consider. He couldn't stop moving, and so I got thin. Objectively thin. But I thought I was fat. Huge. Obese.

Then Zeke. Up another 55 pounds, and then down to 114! Then up to 117. Where I hovered, despite my feelings of self-loathing. Then the baby that wasn't. That pushed me to 120. Another fifty pounds with Rosie. And down again, but only to 120, again. Never to that beloved 117 which I am convinced is the key to slenderness. Then Abraham. Sixty pounds. Yes. Sixty. Shut up. I had to have a root beer float every night. EVERY NIGHT. Because I did. Just because.

OK, so this is getting boring. Let me just say that I now weigh 122 pounds and I'm in a state of panic. I hate my body. I hate the flap of skin and fat that hangs over the waistband of my underpants and pooches out my slacks. I hate the saddlebags of crumpled and dotted skin on my thighs. I hate the way the flesh on the underside of my arms sway in the wind.

And you know what? If you saw me, you'd think I was a normal human being. You might even say I was in decent shape. More importantly, my husband thinks I'm hot. He loves my flap of a stomach. He loves my huge ass. So what gives? Why am I so tortured by this? Why aren't I just happy and grateful for him? Why do I evaluate my bipolar medication based on whether or not it makes me gain weight, instead of how well it controls my mood swings? Why am I such a moron?

Never Mind the Diarrhea

2005-01-06T15:42:00.000-08:00

Am I the only person who will admit to loving a food so much that I am willing to suffer through unholy diarrhea to gorge myself on it? My entire afternoon has been sucked up by reading blogs, and running back and forth to the bathroom. Lord, the perils of dim sum.

On to other news, Jude Law is marrying the young starlet for whom he left his wife and the mother of his three children.

"Both their families and friends are thrilled and of course Jude's children are, too," Parkes said.

Yes, of course his children are thrilled. There's nothing like your parents getting divorced and your father getting remarried to thrill a child. Really. Kids just love their step-mothers. They particularly love it because a remarriage makes it absolutely certain that their parents will never get together again, an eventuality most children hope for with a desperation greater than my hope that Kerry would beat Bush. Yup. Thrilled. That's what they are.

Join Me In Mourning

2005-01-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

The inventor of the Bundt pan, H. David Dalquist, who died today at the age of 86. Jewish women who have not the skills to frost will be ever grateful to this genius, as will lovers of sour cream coffee cake the world over. (Thanks, Cathy.)

Texas is the Worst State in the Union

2005-01-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

If you needed any more evidence that the state of Texas is a cesspool of dishonesty, corruption, and vileness, look at this. A Texas appeals court has redeemed itself and it's entire state after the prosecutors in the Yates trial presented perjured testimony. The shrink testifying against Yates (remember Yates, she drowned her children after years of post-partum psychosis?) lied about a Law & Order episode he claimed she must have seen. He was a "consultant" for Law & Order and claimed that there was an episode about a woman who drowned her children and was found not guilty by reasons of insanity. Turns out, no such episode aired. Now, maybe the asshole actually consulted on such an episode, and maybe it was in the pipeline but just hadn't aired yet. Or maybe he's a scum-sucking pig who perjured himself on the stand. You choose.

This whole case enrages me. The woman has one of the most remarkable histories of post-partum depression/psychosis I've ever heard of, and her husband decides that the best thing to do in those circumstances is 1. to continue having children and 2. to have her homeschool them. In a bus.

I'd have drowned the husband, in addition to the kids.

Cozy

2005-01-05T13:05:00.000-08:00

Michael thinks I'm writing. We're sitting side by side on the couch while he prepares for his class tonight, and I'm making busy novelist noises. Grunting and mumbling for dialogue, sighing when my fingers stop tap-tapping on the keyboard. All in the cause of pretending that I'm not just sitting here blogging, but am actually hard at work on the rewrite of The Cradlerobbers. Which I think Berkley has accidentally retitled "The Cradle Robbers." Do I care? Should I point out the mistake and risk them having to redo the cover? There were so many typos in Murder Plays House that people on Amazon actually commented on it. Sigh. I wish I could send out a mailer that says, "Dudes, I totally know the difference between who's and whose, and there and their." I also know the difference between Lie and Lay, something the vast majority of newscasters can't decipher.

Here's how it works -- you lie on the bed, you lay something on the bed. So you were not "laying around," you were "lying around." It's only confusing because the past tense of lie is lay. As in, "I lay on the bed for hours." But if you say, "I'm laying" that does not mean you are lying on the bed. It means you are having sex. And there should be an object. As in, "I'm laying Topher Grace because he was so damn cute in P.S. that I felt an insatiable urge to knock him on his back and climb up on him. After I finish laying him, I will lie next to him and look into those sleepy, sexy eyes of his." For instance.

Million Dollar Baby

2005-01-05T11:51:00.000-08:00

Saw it last night. I thought it was pretty terrific, if incredibly schmaltzy. I like a good weeper. In fact, Michael bought me a dvd of Afterschool Specials and I can't wait to watch them with Sophie, my ten-year-old. We plan to settle in with a bowl of popcorn, a couple of chocolate bars, and three boxes of Kleenex.

Michael and Will

2005-01-05T11:48:00.000-08:00

Michael and Will
Originally uploaded by Ayeletw.

Here's a photo of my husband with Will Eisner. Note the Badfinger T-shirt. And the huge smiles.

Blogging. Is. Death. To. My. Career.

2005-01-04T13:06:00.000-08:00

So yesterday was the Big Day Back At Work. I'm supposed to write 1500 words a day. That's my goal. That's what I've got to do in order to feel like I'm not just paying a nanny so I can pick my toenails. Okay, so I had to finish Joyce Carol Oates's new book, because I was almost done. I somehow managed to convince myself that it was critical to my future as a novelist to see how she wound things up. Yeah. Not so much. By the time I was done, I had time for only 650 words before my friend Peggy showed up with her darling daughter.

While on the subject of the breathlessly beautiful Daisy, I must digress. Why is Abie such a freak? Every time he sees Daisy he goes into paroxysms of baby love. He grabs her, wrestles her to the ground, and hugs her as hard as he possibly can. She weeps, and I pry him off, and all the while he's trying to press little parts of his body into her. His feet, his elbow. He's just desperate for contact. He behaves like some twenty-one-month old stalker. It's creepy. It really is. And poor Daisy is just so beleaguered by him. This is really putty a cramp in my playdate/socializing. Doesn't the kid realize how much I like Peggy? If he doesn't lay off her daughter, I'm going to be reduced to spending the afternoons playing trucks instead of lying on my back on the carpet, whining to Peggy, while our children amuse themselves on the other side of the room.

Where was I? Oh right. Today I swore I'd get in a decent day's work. I have plenty to do, damn it. I've got to rewrite The Cradlerobbers, the 7th Mommy-Track mystery series. By the way (another digression here) this book could spell the end of my mystery-novelist career. They say it takes seven books to hit, and if you don't by then, you're not going to. My books have sold okay (though not in hardcover, God knows. Only my mother buys them in hardcover. My mother, and those of her employees who try to suck up to her by buying my books.) but I am about as far from hitting as Abraham is from getting Daisy to fall in love with him. That is to say, really really far. I've got a contract for one more after Cradlerobbers, and then Penguin will stop taking my phonecalls. Ah well. Whatever. It was good while it lasted.

Where was I? Right. The word count thing. So today, I'm all set to get to work, when I get sucked into blog hell. I find the BOB website and begin clicking. Clicking clicking clicking. Now, it's almost 1:30 and Rosie will be home from preschool any minute. So much for my workday.

I wonder if I can count words posted on my blog in my daily wordcount?

Will Eisner

2005-01-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

I will admit to having never heard of this comic book great before I met my husband. Still, I know about him now, and am so sad to hear that he died yesterday. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery and died a little while later.

Because Infertile Couples Don't Deserve a Baby

2005-01-03T10:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Atrios, I saw this article. Turns out that the blithering idiots whose "research" indicated that the problem with couples dealing with infertility was that they didn't pray enough were full of it.

What a shock. Why is a certain kind of person so invested in 1. blaming women for their fertility problems and 2. proselytizing?

Glory Halleluiah School Is Back In Session!

2005-01-03T10:25:00.000-08:00

Last night, at 10 PM, my husband and I kissed each other with a passion and excitement unlike any other. Why? Because vacation is over and the kids go back to school! We were both so happy, we nearly wept.

I love my kids, blah blah blah. But this vacation thing is going to kill me one day. Especially at private schools. There seems to be some corollary between how much tuition you pay and the number of vacation, holiday, and teacher development days there are scheduled into the calendar. At the snootiest prep schools in Manhattan it must work out to be $1500 bucks per in-school day.

What is it About a Fire in the Fireplace?

2005-01-02T18:56:00.000-08:00

For about an hour today I was curled up on the couch in front of a crackling fire, reading Joyce Carol Oates's new novel, with Michael's head in my lap, and the kids quietly playing a game that involved packing lunchboxes with toys, saying "goodbye" and wandering around the house. It was bliss. BLISS, I tell you. It was like some kind of ad from Parenting magazine. "Casual Sundays at Home: 15 ways to pass a lazy afternoon."

After a while, of course, there were tantrums, and poopy diapers, etc., but that hour filled up my tank for a very long ride.

I couldn't help but think of this soldier. He was a father of four, just like Michael. He was a 6 foot 5 inch giant of a man, who approached his wretched job in Iraq with grace, doing his best to afford all people, be they Iraqi, American, Kurd, whatever, with dignity. He was killed in the bombing of the mess tent in Mosul.

He was also a Mormon, this guy. I find the whole Mormon thing very puzzling. Almost without exception, the Mormons I've met have been remarkably decent people. Kind and generous, willing to put themselves on the line. The Mormons I've met have actually believed in helping the downtrodden, as opposed to so many other religious people, whose notion of Christian charity begins and ends with charitably and generously imposing their views on everyone else. And yet.

And yet. And yet. There's the homophobia, for one. There's the racism, for another. But still, those Mormons. They can be such nice people. (And don't even think of blaming them for the poligamy thing. That went out, years ago, and it's only the fanatical nuts who engage in it today.)

And yet.

Another wonderful tidbit. It seems my darling husband must be related to the owner of the club that was the scene of the horrific fire in Argentina.

The club's owner, Omar Chaban, was being held by authorities pending an investigation into Thursday's inferno.

All Chabons and Chabans are related, they say. Lucky Michael!

Another Fabulous New Yorker Moment.

2005-01-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

Anthony Lane is a riot, especially when he's bitchy. This week he takes aim at The Phantom of the Opera.

His review starts with this delightfully snarky paragraph:

What does it take to shake a movie fan? Whether we are critics or bug-eyed buffs, so many of our evenings are spent in the company of crimes and misdemeanors that we can hardly be blamed for developing the hide of a pachyderm. Just occasionally, something slips through—a thin shudder of monstrosity, enough to remind us of what it means to be afraid. And so it came about, this week, that I gazed at a black screen and saw words so calamitous that they might have been written in my own blood: “Screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher.”

I know I'm not supposed to delight in snark. The Believer has taught me better, and I really hate being snarked. But at heart I remain a callow hypocrite.

Roz Chast

2005-01-01T19:35:00.000-08:00

Check out this hysterical Roz Chast cartoon that was in this week's New Yorker. Recipes From Second-Rate Mom Magazine.

My favorite is Remorse Chip Cookies. "Combine the usual ingredients in the usual way. Oh, that's right. You don't have time to bake. Never mind."

Zooming

2004-12-31T22:35:00.000-08:00

My plan to be asleep by 11 tonight, and thus to miss the dreaded New Year's moment, is foiled. Drat. I'm all hopped up -- some new drug my shrink added to my cocktail -- and there's no hope for sleep without an Ambien. I've finally managed to wean myself off the damn drug (don't believe the package where it says it's not addictive) and I'm loath to start the whole process anew. Plus, I've got a ten-year-old desperate to see in the New Year. I remember what it was like to want to witness that magic moment. Unfortunately, my daughter seems to be having some kind of phantom pre-PMS and the last thing I want is to have her sleep-deprived.

What to do?

Plus, I have to prepare a talk on, get this, keeping your kids off drugs. Now that makes sense. First of all, I support total decriminaliztion. Second of all, while my drug experiences in my long-ago youth were not vast, they were certainly substantial. Third of all, I'm currently taking so many drugs that I had to order a pill case from a website humiliatingly called productsforseniors.com. I'm going to talk harm reduction, and I'm going to talk mandatory minimum drug laws, and I'm going to talk drug policy reform, and if they boo me off the stage, so be it.

Taking A Page Out of Chez Mis's Book

2004-12-30T09:59:00.000-08:00

The darling, delightful Grrl today posted a list of things she is angry about. So, because I admire her blogging above all else, I've decided to do the same.

1. Funding inequities. Close your ears, Bush-dudes, because I'm pissed about it. Sorry. It just maddens me that we can spend 400 billion dollars on this war, 50 billion a year on the war on drugs, 185 billion to clean up Florida in an election year, and have not immediately commited even a tenth of the Iraq War budget to help the millions of people devastated by the tsunamis. 40 billion, right off the bat. Is that too much to ask? And don't give me any of this, 35 million is only the beginning crap. Spain, a county with significantly fewer resources than us, already pledged 68 million. We are the only superpower around. We should be in front of all others in funding the clean up and providing for the multitudes. If our priorities were more obviously altruistic we would find ourselves less loathed in the world.

2. Pharmaceutical Companies. Why can't they invent a mood stabilizer that doesn't make you both fat and stupid? I'm actually not so much mad at them as I am at the body chemistry that makes me need a mood stabilizer in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I actually think there is a certain benefit to having bipolar disorder. Hell, I wrote three novels in the past year. Try doing that without hypomania. Still, I'm dragging around at least ten extra pounds that I lay squarely at the feet of my drugs.

3. Winter vacation. God I hate school vacations. They are the worst time of year. If I have to scream, "So go read a book" one more time, I'm going to go drown myself in a bathtub. They've gone to the science museum, they've gone to the Exploratorium, they've seen every remotely appropriate movie, they've had playdates. It's pouring rain, there's nothing left for them to do, and I've reached not only the end of my rope, but the end of every ball of string, twine and thread in the house.

4. Bjartur of Summerhouses. They're just sheep, for Christ's sake!

How Bad Does It Have To Get?

2004-12-29T19:16:00.000-08:00

Another massacre in Iraq today today. Which leads me to wonder, what magnitude of catastrophe would cause people to stop? Any? At what point does a natural disaster become so catastrophic that your average suicide bomber thinks to himself, "You know what, maybe my piece of this world is so tiny, compared to the horror, and my issue so tiny compared to what's going on, that I'm going to take a little break, here." Would a huge asteroid careening toward earth be enough or would he try to get in just one more explosion before the big one?

I've been letting my kids listen to the news on NPR. It's pretty awful, but I feel like they need to hear this. This is one of the worst things that will happen to the world in their lifetimes (I mean, I hope so, kenehora poo poo poo) and I want them to understand how lucky we are to be here, eating our dinner of Swedish meatballs and parsley noodles.

We should also be eating a cake. The Tunnel of Fudge from Sunday's New York Times. Michael made it yesterday, and it looked amazing. Truly fabulous, all gooey in the middle. I only like milk chocolate (lay off, I already know how lame it is. Michael says he never would have married me if he'd known.) so I didn't eat any, but Michael and Zeke each had a piece and nearly expired from delight. They were all excited to dig into the rest of it.

The goddamn dog ate the cake. The whole cake. Isn't chocolate supposed to be poison for dogs? She doesn't look sick at all. She just looks smug.

Presidential Navel Gazing

2004-12-28T21:46:00.000-08:00

I will admit (and how could I do otherwise given my endless blogging) that it has taken me two days to figure out the magnitude of the tragedy in the Indian ocean, and to realize just how devastating and horrific it all is. I admit to having finally been roused out of my self-indulgent torpor when I realized that tourists (people like me!) in Thailand (places I've visited!) were killed. I admit to thinking as much about alopecia and the bruise on my knee (why do I bruise so easily? Could I have leukemia?) as about the massive death toll.

But I'm not the president, goddamn it. Guess what, you blithering idiot. When you're president of the only remaining superpower and 68,000 people are killed in a matter of moments, your vacation is over. You don't keep clearing brush while the heads of the rest of the world's nations are doing their best to figure out how best to provide aide.

Wow. 35,000,000 dollars in US aide. What is that? Half the athlete's foot powder budget for the Iraq war? A day's pay for your basic Halliburton subsidiary? Oh, no, wait. It's the Christmas bonus for a Goldman Sachs partner.

All Those Children

2004-12-28T16:29:00.000-08:00

I'm just beginning to assimilate this. All those children. 60,000 people is what BBC News just said was the number of people lost, at least 1/3 of those children.

Koh Phi Phi

2004-12-28T14:53:00.000-08:00

Right after I graduated from college, my Israeli boyfriend and I went to the far east for a year. We spent four months of that in Thailand, much of it on Kho Phan Gan. It was almost deserted then, very small villages and only two guesthouses. We slept on the beach in huts that were no more than a wooden platform and a straw roof.

People were just starting to go to Koh Phi Phi around that time. We never made it, and since then it has become a huge tourist attraction complete with posh hotels, and a Holiday Inn. I keep thinking of the people dead there. The websites have forlorn messages from parents looking for small children, wives looking for husbands.

And then from Aceh there's this aerial photograph of an entire town, showing little sign life.

It's just so incredibly sad.

Complicated Slut

2004-12-28T13:24:00.000-08:00

Sigh. I really do like that bookslut blog. The blog is funny, it keeps me up to date on what's coming out, it has a healthy regard for genre.

But what is with the loathing for the marvelous Dave Eggers? Like his writing or not, the guy is a goddamn saint. He founded and funds a writing-center/pirate store that does amazing work with children all over the city. It gives college scholarships and awards for teachers. His exoneree project works with people who have been exonerated of death penalty crimes, writing their stories. McSweeney’s publishes people that no one would ever consider putting into print. He does countless events for children's charities.

What can she possibly take issue with?

The World's Most Shallow Person

2004-12-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

There are two reasons why I'm desperately shallow and should have no friends.

1. Reading today's New York Times about the horror resulting from the tsunami moved me, especially the picture of the dead children and the weeping mother, but the true tragedy of it all didn't hit me until I saw the photograph of the white father kissing his baby's head. Sure, I'm sad for all those brown folks, but I only really empathize with people who look like me.

God, I suck.

2. What has really obsessed me about today's paper, what lingers in my mind with a perverse tenacity, is this. Because, really, what's wholesale destruction compared to the cataclysm of losing my hair?

What the hell is wrong with me?

Photos, Finally

2004-12-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

Messy Room2
Originally uploaded by Ayeletw.

I finally got myself a flikr account. For my first photo, I'd like to present...Rosie's room. This is what she accomplished in the short time we were reading the Sunday paper.

Never Cool Enough...Or At All

2004-12-26T09:36:00.000-08:00

My friend Amanda Davis, who died almost two years ago in the world's stupidest plane crash, was the most exciting, warm-hearted, delightfully bitchy person I know. When she was killed, there was a massive outpouring of agony and love. People from all over the country, most of them writers, posted letters about her, about how amazing she was, how funny, how quirky, how she was their best friend.

One of the things I loved most about Amanda was the ribbon of insecurity that ran through her personality -- so similar to my own. She was always suspicious that there was a party out there that she wasn't invited to. When she died and became the party, with people actually mourning the fact that they hadn't come to know her well enough to write one of those painful, funny, longing posts, it was a beautiful irony. The geeky girl makes good. Well, except for the going down in a ball of fire part.

I thought of Amanda today, when I read the Sunday Styles section of the Times. That part of the paper exists to make me feel out of it, and at the same time to make me feel disgusted with myself for wanted be part of it. I mean, why in God's name would anyone want to spend Christmas in St. Bart's with a load of Manhattan social Xrays? Can you imagine the conversation? "Oh, I'd only ever allow Svetlana to do my Brazilians. She's just so much more interesting than any of the other women who've made their livings yanking pubic hairs from around my anus. And I hear she does Paris Hilton, too." Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they spend their beach hours discussing Vladimir Nabokov's lectures on Russian literature and arguing about his analysis of Gogol's Dead Souls.

And let's not even discuss the wedding announcements.

In today's paper there's a piece about the National Arts Club, and the Boho Hip crowd hanging at the Accompanied Library. I'm reading about the gatherings to fete LFL, Jhumpa Lahiri and Waris (Chelsea art gallery, Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer, and "actor/jeweler" who appears in Wes Anderson's new movie. And don't worry, I had no idea who the first and third in the list were, either) and I'm feeling this intense sense of "why am I so uncool?" It's the same feeling I got when Dierdre Brown and Ginny Scott told me I couldn't sit at their lunch table anymore, because I was such a loser that I was ruining their precarious reputations. That, by the way, was in 7th Grade. Yeah, I remember it like it was yesterday, so sue me.

The thing is, if I actually were invited to one of those events, or to Dierdre and Ginny's lunch table, for that matter, I'd probably end up at such a loss that I'd spend the whole time trolling for the perfect hors d'oeuvre. I suck at parties, and what in God's name would I talk to a 26 year-old socially adept socialite about? Literature? Kids? Um. Probably not. In situations like that -- cocktail parties -- I somehow always end up turning the conversation to obscure medical conditions. You and I may have nothing in common, but your recent gynecological surgery is bound to make me perk up my ears. When Michael and I are doing our party-post-mortem he says things like, "He was the youngest conductor in the Boston Symphony's history" and I say things like, "By the time they took it out of her, it was the size of a canteloupe!"

I really suck at parties.

Every once in a while someone fabulous tries to make Michael's acquaintance. Usually it's a fascinating gay man, some hot young playwright or grafitti artist. They swoop us into their social orbit for a few days or months. I get all excited. Now! Now I will finally be cool. It never lasts for long. Because at some point they realize that this long-haired dude is not only straight,but he's married not to someone like Sofia Coppola, but to me.

The Best Baby Toy Ever

2004-12-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

Flashlight with a handle. For half an hour Abie ran around holding the flashlight and chasing the beam, all the while laughing hysterically.

Man, that boy is cute. He's definitely the sweetest of the bunch. Lucky for him, because he's so homely. People are always commenting on how gorgeous his siblings are, but nobody ever says anything about him. I think it's the eyebrow. Singular.

Would it be child abuse to have it waxed?

I'm kidding, for Christ's sake.

What's the Point?

2004-12-24T01:11:00.000-08:00

I just spent the past two hours reading Chez Miscarriage. All of it. Every last post. I'm completely jealous of a friend of mine who was actually quoted in the blog, because I'm obsessed with the blog. I love the blog. I am a ninteenth century matron waiting for the next monthly installment of Bleak House or Great Expectations. Inevitably, the marvelous Chez Miscarriage makes me wonder what is the point of a blog that doesn't have a real narrative arc. There is a compelling trajectory in Chez Miscarriage, a reason to keep reading. And it's not just that the author is so appealing (although she certainly is). It's not just that it makes me laugh so hard I cry, and then cry so hard I disturb the pleasant man sleeping next to me. It's the structure of the story, the propulsive plot. What's the point of a blog that has no similar plot, that is just a meandering recounting of someone's day, with a dollop of neurosis and a good measure of fluctuating mood? I mean, why would I read my own damn blog?

Do NOT reply to this. Seriously. This isn't one of those "Do you love me" posts. I'm just pondering, at midnight, my reason for blogging. Other than a fundamental narcissism.

Heckler Mom

2004-12-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

That's what the ER triage nurse called me. Perhaps it was because I chose the moment she was looking at the monster gash on Sophie's knee to say to my poor daughter, "Once, when you were a baby, you had to get stitches and they taped you to the table because you were wiggling and crying so hard." The nurse looked up at me like I was crazy. Then she said, "Good job, mom. Freak the kid out." For some reason I replied with some comment about being in labor for forty-four hours. And then I asked if there were any really horrible traumas going on. By the time I was done, the woman was ready to toss me right through the double doors.

I guess I was a little nervous.

I think the reason they make you wait so long in the ER is that they know that after five hours, even a terrified ten-year-old's fear will just sort of trickle away. Yes, five hours. When we arrived, they told us that there was only one person ahead of us. Four hours later, they told us that we were in luck, because there was only one person ahead of us.

Poor Sophie. She didn't even feel it when her uncle skated over her knee (they were executing some elaborate triple lutz that involved tumbling ass over elbow, whacking their heads on the ice, and stabbing one another with the points of their skates). What got her all upset was the prospect of stitches. But they did a nice job of numbing her, and I spent the whole time distracting her by crossing my eyes and making faces, and describing the plot of the children's novel I am planning to write.

So that was fun. If it hadn't been for Michael's brother (or "the perpetrator," as the resident insisted on calling him) telling me stories about his in-laws and his job, I would really have lost it. Did I mention we waited for five hours? But what are you going to say? “Stop treating that gun shot wound and the child seizing due to head injuries. We’ve got a sore knee here!”

Creepy People

2004-12-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

Following a link on my friend Allison's blog, I came across this delightful blog. Wow, are those people bitter, or what? This particular post was my favorite:

I had an experience that I will remember for the rest of my life yesterday. I am an ultrasound student and an currently doing a rotation at NYU Hospital. Yesterday we were ordered to do a gallbladder scan on a woman in labor. We went up to her room and the first thing I see is her hairy twat sticking out of the covers with a catheter coming out of it-GROSS. She was in the early stages of labor and her stomach looked like there were like 7 fleshloaves in there. She mentioned that she was having identical twins-whoop-de-fucking-doo, like I give a shit, lady. While we scanned her, she was crying and screaming for God to help her and squirming all over the fucking place. It was very traumatic for me to watch. I couldn't wait to get out of there! As soon as we left, I said to my instructor Denise-who is CF herself, (yay!)"Why the fuck would anyone want to do that to themselves??!!! She should've used one of these" and pulled out a condom-like device used to cover ultrasound probes which are inserted into the vagina and put it over three of my fingers. She cracked up laughing and said "Really!!" I want my tubal NOW!!

-CF Julie

I'm just speechless. Can you imagine this "ultrasound student" caring for anyone? Especially a pregnant woman? What exactly did she think she would be doing as an ultrasound technician? The very idea of this person being a health-care provider of any kind gives me a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

I keep thinking back to what happened when I was pregnant a couple of years ago. On the day I went for my CVS (genetic diagnostic test) I was supposed to be 10 weeks pregnant. The technician began the ultrasound, and then her face got very still.
"How far along are you?" she asked.
"Ten and a half weeks," I said.
"Hmm."
"What's wrong?"
"I'm going to go get the doctor."
And you can imagine what I did next. Two years or so before, Michael and I ended a pregnancy due to a genetic abnormality, and I was convinced it was happening again. What our baby had was not something heritable, so I lay in the bed crying and raging at what felt like miserable luck. When the doctor came in he told us, gently, that the baby was only sizing at 9 weeks. I insisted that that wasn't possible. I knew the date of my last menstrual period, and moreover, we had had an ultrasound more than two weeks before that had showed an 8.5-week-old fetus. That, apparently, was the problem. No growth between the two ultrasounds. Or very little growth. I browbeat the doctor into telling me what he suspected -- trisomy 18 or 13, the really ugly ones. Fatal. Horrible. I browbeat him into giving me a number. How sure was he? 99%.
We scheduled another ultrasound for a week later, and an abortion for the day after that with the same doctor who had cared for us two years before (a prince among men who should be deified). And then we went home to cry.

It was like reliving a nightmare, but at least this time I couldn't feel the baby kick.

It was Rosh HaShana a few days later. I'm not a religious person, but after I married Michael I started accompanying him to High Holiday services. We go now to this lovely congregation called Chochmat HaLev. Very alternative, lots of singing, etc. We were holding hands, crying in shul, when I suddenly felt the most amazing thing. I felt warm, confident, sure. I knew the baby was fine. I whispered to Michael, "The baby is okay." He gave me a pitying glance and squeezed my hand. "Honey," he said, "Don't do this to yourself. We need to accept what’s happening." I shook my head, and smiled one of those scary, beatific smiles that the Jehovah's Witnesses always give you when you turn them away from your door. "No," I said. "I know the baby is okay. I know."

For the rest of the day we had this conversation again and again. And let me make something really clear. I am the pessimist in this relationship. I'm the one who knows for sure that everything sucks, that everything will continue to suck, and that we just need to deal with the horror, the horror. Michael is the optimist. He's always singing a happy song, counting his blessings, tra la la. Finally, at the end of the day, he looked at me and said, "Well, if the eternal pessimist finally has an optimistic moment, she should be trusted." Then he went on the web and input the words "delayed ovulation" and jetlag. You see, we'd traveled home from Italy that month. Low and behold, he got thousands of hits.

I called the woman who had done the first ultrasound, the lovely and warmhearted nurse practitioner at my doctor's office. I asked if that first test could have sized the baby too big. If it was possible that when I'd gone to see her I was only 7 weeks pregnant, instead of 8.5. "Sure," she said. "That machine is often off. I usually don't even use it to measure, but since it agreed with the date of your last menstrual period, I figured it was probably right."

"Okay, " I said. "Is this scenario just too unlikely? Maybe I ovulated late because I had jetlag, and then your machine sized me too big? So the baby is fine, he's just younger than we all thought?"
"Anything is possible," she said.

For the next few days I was content. Happy. When we went back to the genetic diagnostician, they greeted us with the special sad faces they reserve for people whose babies are doomed, but we just smiled. I was all chirpy and sweet, laughing even. The ultrasound tech said, "Don't even take off your clothes, just get up on this table right now so we can see what's going on with this baby."

Perfect growth. And we found out a week later, that he had perfect genes to go with that perfect growth. That was Abraham. He's got a weak chin, and one eyebrow, but as far as I know they didn't test for that. He’s adorable, and sharp as a tack, and just the most perfect child ever. In my unbiased opinion.

If the ultrasound technician had been that Julie, I can only imagine how her cold and miserable demeanor would have made me feel. But I had a warm and lovely woman, instead. Thank God.

Boom!

2004-12-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

If I don't post tomorrow you will know it's because my water heater exploded. Today I awoke to this odd hissing noise, like a hiss and a ring combined. Actually, I awoke to Abe calling for me (he yelled Mama! Not daddy! Oh joy!), and then when I got him out of bed I heard the ringing thing. Abie, Rosie and I explored the whole upstairs looking for the noise, and then finally tracked it to the attic. The GAS VALVE of the water heater.

I promptly woke up my Israeli plumber. I love this guy. You call to tell him you have a leak and he says, "So? Get a bucket." Anyway, he comes by and whacks at a few things and then tells me that except for the fact that everything is wrong with the water heater, there's nothing wrong with the water heater.

You see, we live in a house that was built in 1907, and then untouched for the next ninety years. Seriously. One family lived here, and they gradually let it fall in around their shoulders. They were busy with other things, including sexually abusing teenage boys (a friend who is a prosecutor told me that. "Oh, wow, you live in the house where that notorious pedophile lived in the seventies." Great. And I thought the house had such good joo joo. Shows what a sensitive and psychic person I am.)

When the last creepy relative died, the guy across the street bought the house and had the brilliant idea of being his own general contractor. He made fabulous decisions like putting in a new heating system, and then scraping all the lead paint off the walls and windows so that the brand-new, never-used ducts would be completely covered in lead dust. That was fun. He also chose to laboriously restore the old windows, instead of putting in new ones. Nice, right? Wonderful attention to period detail. Except they rattle like there's an earthquake every time the wind blows. We're keeping the shim business alive. Now it turns out that he put in a brand new water heater with too-small valves. And schlepped it up to the attic where it can do maximum damage if it leaks or...um...EXPLODES. If he weren't such a sweet guy with the nicest girlfriend and kid I'd t-p his house.

The Israeli plumber insists all will be fine. He also told me he can't believe I have enough hot water with such small valves. Really? And I thought all families were compelled to bathe together because there was only enough water to fill one tub. Actually, the truth is that I just assumed that was normal, because that's what it was like in my parents' house (we didn't bathe together, God forbid. We just took cold showers).

Meanwhile, there's this festive ringing throughout my home. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.

A Troll of One's Own

2004-12-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

Oh joy! I finally have a troll!

I was just complaining about my lack of trolls. Since I can't get my site meter to work, I have no idea if three people are checking the blog, or 300. But the fact that I have my very own troll makes me feel so great. It's like when I got all those horrible Amazon reviews. Someone actually cared enough to go after me!

Awesome.

I was whining about my lack of trolls to Michael when I saw him this morning. He felt like he absolutely had to see House of Flying Daggers, so I went into San Francisco and met him for a 10:30 AM movie. It was sort of romantic – a quick movie in the morning. I felt like his mistress and we were cheating on Ayelet.

I know I'm not supposed to respond to the troll, but I'm going to, because he/she makes a valid point. If I bitch so much about the kids, why the hell do I have so many of them?

So, first of all, of course I love my children. I feel the same gut-clutching bliss when I see Abie wobbling across the floor, his arms open and his little toes peeking out from his too-long pants, that most mothers feel. I let Rosie sleep with me, despite her constant (and I do mean constant) kicking, because there’s something delightful about her chubby arms wrapped around my neck in the middle of the night. She’s yummy, even if sleeping with her is like trying to bed down with a weasel.

I'm a sour, bitter bitch for a couple of reasons. 1. Because, well, I'm a sour, bitter bitch. 2. It's funnier. And 3. As an antidote to the aggressive marketing of the perfect-mother myth that we are subject to, and have always been subject to. The 1950s image of June Cleaver in her perfectly pressed apron has morphed into Gwyneth Paltrow all aglow, commenting on how being Apple's mommy is just the hardest and most amazing job in the world. What? You don't have a similar glow? Maybe it's because you don't have the emotional capacity of a true mother. It has nothing to do with the other things you lack. Nothing to do with, for example, the team of nannies, the personal chef, the full-time housekeeper, the private yoga instructor. (Let's not even bring up the 20 million dollars.) I talk about my negative feelings about parenting because if you do this parenting thing with any kind of focus, you're going to feel shitty sometimes. And the fact of most mothers' lives is that the burden falls most heavily on them. So I see it as my job to validate the nasty shrew in all of us.

Because, hey, someone's got to do it, and I'm so well-suited for the job.

It's Amazing How Much You Can Care

2004-12-21T15:06:00.000-08:00

I've been compulsively checking Chez Miscarriage for days, waiting to see if her surrogate lost the baby. It's odd, this storytelling over blogs. It's like a novel in many many parts, but the main character is someone who is real, and who just might email back if she has a moment, and doesn't get too many hits. I followed this delightfully acidic and charming woman's story for a while, and now I feel like I'm getting the happy ending I deserve (knock wood, kenehora, poo poo poo). Note that I said "I deserve" not "she deserves." Of course she's the one who needs the happy ending, but I'm so involved, the way one gets involved in a good book, that I feel like I'm personally invested.

Oh God, How Insanely BORING

2004-12-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

Is it me, or could this column drop you head first into a coma? I'll admit to only reading parts of a few entries, so maybe the rest of them drip with the kind of biting cynicism that makes essays about parenting even remotely tolerable, but right now I can't keep reading because I have that ache in the back of your throat that you get when you've eaten an entire package of Starburst in three minutes or swallowed a teaspoon full of sugar just to see if it really would make the medicine go down.

Blech.

Maybe the problem is me. After all, this blog is called Bad Mother, not "Bringing Up The Charming and Adorable Waldman-Chabon Children." That's because they're not charming and adorable, especially not at 2 AM when they're wailing, "Daddy! Daddy! Mommy, no! Mommy, no!" Or at 3:30 AM when they are still awake and practicing different ways of saying the word, "No," using tonal language as if they are little Chinese babies practicing their Mandarin. No? Nooo. NO! Naoo. Nuh! Etc. Neither are they charming and adorable when I dump them in their beds at 3:30 and lie to them, actually saying, "Abie, I'm just leaving you here for a minute. Don't worry, I'll be right back," when I have not the slightest intention of opening that door again until the little wretch’s sixteenth birthday. Nor are they charming and adorable when they wake up (a different one this time) just as I have collapsed into bed at 3:32, having deceived their brothers into going back into their cribs. Charming and adorable? Right. The better question is how can a three-year-old have such sharp little toenails, and was she awake or sleeping when she dug them into my back for the rest of the night, until I finally shoved her into her own room with strict instructions to play quietly with her Hamtaros and give me five minutes to rest. Just five minutes. Would that be so hard?

Then, of course, tonight I took the littles (as opposed to the bigs, who are in Kansas City with their grandfather, because having seen them like six times in their entire lives the logical next step was to invite them to stay for five days) out for dinner and as Abie ate one bean at a time with a very large spoon, he smiled his dopey little grin at me, with his one eyebrow, and I wanted to put him on the spoon and gobble him up, he was so damn sweet.

"Womb theft woman' faces charges

2004-12-20T14:25:00.000-08:00

Lord, this freaks me out. Isn't it just the most horrible thing? Perhaps because I've had four c-sections, perhaps because it's so viscerally vile, but I can't stop thinking about this. I imagine it in my head. How did she keep from harming the baby?

Vacation Blues

2004-12-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

Michael's gone again -- this time to a hotel in San Francisco to try to pound out a good portion of his movie script. Because for some reason he's having a hard time concentrating what with me wandering into the office and asking critical questions like, "Is it worse to wear pants with an unfashionably high waist or to let my belly hang out like this." That, by the way, is just a contemporary version of the ever-popular question, "Do I look fat in this?"

It's not my fault I'm on vacation and he's on deadline.

I think I'll go to the movies this morning. That's what vacation is supposed to be about, right? I'll eat raisinettes and popcorn for lunch (adding to the seven pounds I've gained in two weeks) and sit among the lonely widows and crazy nose-picking men in the early show.

Oh the Horror

2004-12-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I was fine with turning forty. Fine with it. Downright cheerful in fact. So why is my body smacking me in the head? It's like the little misery-maid who lives inside of me woke up and said, "Wow, she seems actually happy. Must do something about that."

See, I'm okay with the forty thing, because I look a couple of years younger. But if I'm going to go into goddamn menopause, that is just so not okay with me.

The Most Amazing Evening

2004-12-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw the most incredible thing. I was part of the most incredible thing. My lovely friend Sylvia turned forty, too. Her gift from her husband was ... (get this)...

Ricki Lee Jones.

Seriously.

Sylvia had a party at her house -- you know, the usual. Family, friends, good food. Good wine. And then, in the early evening, Ricki Lee Jones walked in with her guitar. And played in Sylvia's living room.

She started out by explaining why she was there -- she said she'd been watching Turner Classic Movies and noticing how in the 1930s people used to have concerts in their houses, real musicians playing in the living room. She wondered what it would be like to play in someone's living room. And then Sylvia's husband called.

It was incredible to hear her. She was so...well...Ricki Lee Jones. You know what I mean? She sounded exactly like herself. She played my favorites, Weasel and The White Boys, We Belong Together -- and also Christmas carols. Which was lovely, but what do I know from Christmas carols?

I was sitting right up in front. I mean, like, a foot away from her. And she was gorgeous. She was wearing red kilt with lace underneath, slit up on either side. It managed to be sexy and retro-demure at the same time (sorry boys, but the ladies are interested in these details). She had on little black ankle motorcycle boots, and I immediately wondered where I could pick up a pair. Perfect for those events where you want to dress up, but still seem ultra cas and cool. Perfect, for instance, for playing in someone's living room.

The only song she wouldn't play was Chuck E, and you can probably understand why. I mean, how many times has she been forced to play that? Every single time she's ever appeared?

Anyway, I was out of my mind. My friend Peggy said she felt like she was at a Beetles concert in 1968 and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. Which would have been a little bizarre in Sylvia's living room.

What an AWESOME birthday present. I felt like it was for me, too, because I'm still celebrating my own birthday. Don't worry about this forty thing, guys. It rocks.

Warms a Jewish Mother's Heart

2004-12-16T21:53:00.000-08:00

Nothing makes this particular Jewish Mother happier than seeing her little boy playing one of the three wise men in the Nativity play. He was adorable, and gave his box of gold to the baby Jesus with all the appropriate pomp and circumstance.

Why, you ask, is my Jewish son in a Nativity pageant? Because my kids go to St. Paul's Episcopal School in Oakland. The school is amazing -- fabulous academic program, a true service learning curriculum, and real diversity. Actual real diversity. Unlike every other private school around here with their claims of 40% minority student body, all of whom just happen to be Asian. Have you ever seen the brochures for these private schools? There are like two black kids whose images are sprinkled throughout the brochure, conspicuously arrayed at the forefront of every photograph. Seriously, their parents must be under extraordinary pressure to keep them well-dressed every day, what with the constant demands of the publicity departments. St. Paul's has true diversity, and not just racial. They have a fabulous financial aid program, so there's actual economic diversity, instead of just rich people of every color. If I've got to pay for that with a few Christmas carols, I'm fine with it.

And it makes my parents crazy. So that's fun. (Just kidding mom. Sort of.)

The Heartland Has None

2004-12-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

In today's New York Times some moron by the name of John D. Morris, who calls himself a "retail analyst ... who [leads] 'shop-alongs,'” announced that the reason stores are hawking Live Strong bracelets and Teddy Bears for charity is because "This is a born-again Christmas" with "echoes of the Heartland."

Where do I even begin?

First of all, I'm willing to bet that average giving for born-again Christians is a fraction of what it is for us selfish and evil liberals. I'm willing to bet that the only thing the vast majority of born-again Christians give to is their local televangelist to help him buy his-and-her matching jets. I don't know for sure, but if someone tracked charitable donations, I'm willing to bet that the blue states would leave the red in the dust. After all, us liberals are the ones voting against our interests. Us liberals are the ones all tied up in knots about things like the family farm. Us liberals are the ones who tax ourselves to death to support the crackers riding around in their pickups in Arkansas.

But I'm sure they buy more Live Strong bracelets then we do. Maybe that's because on average we give more than a dollar to charity. And maybe it's because we don't need to make a fashion statement advertising our generosity. You know who wears those bracelets in my house? My kids. And you know why? Because other kids do.

Think before you pink!

Joshua Micah Marshall exposes Nannygate

2004-12-15T23:52:00.000-08:00

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall has a terrific series on the whole Kerik fake nanny thing. Turns out there's a roiling sea of possible criminal conduct, and the nanny thing was just a sham.

Lemony Snicket

2004-12-15T23:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight we saw the new Lemony Snicket movie. It was a screening to benefit 826 Valencia, one of my favorite places on earth. The movie was visually stunning, and the lead actress (Violet) was very very good. I thought Jim Carey was excellent, too. But overall the movie was disappointing. The thing is, Daniel Handler is such a genius, so perfect in his tone, hovering between humor and despair, archness and pathos, that I suppose it's hard to imagine a director getting this right. Or a screenwriter for that matter. Also, my daughter was pissed off because the heroine does not save the day, like in the books, but rather her brother Klaus is the ultimate savior of his sisters. That irritated Sophie to no end. She felt betrayed since one of the things she loves about the book is the kick-ass female main character.

Still I'm sure it will be monstrously successful, and make everyone involved buckets of money. Since I love very much one of those involved, I'll be happy to see it succeed.

We came home to find our dog gone. It was only after Michael ran frantically out to the street that we realized that she had not run away. No. Fanny the Bernese Mountain Dog was not dog-napped.

I forgot her at the groomer.

I dropped her off this morning and never bothered to pick her up. Michael is convinced that the Department of Social Services (Canine Services?) is now going to put her into foster care and seek to terminate our doggie rights for neglect. I can't believe I did this. What kind of an awful person forgets a dog? I wish I could say I was just too busy, but in all honesty all I did today was story conference with Michael for three hours (working on the plot of his Kung Fu movie, Snow and the Seven) and play with Rosie and Abie. Oh, and I went to pick up my glasses, which were made with the wrong prescription, and took Rosie out for gummy cherries. And Heimliched her. Because you see, three-year-olds choke on gummy cherries. Actually, she choked, turned beet red, I smacked her between the shoulders, and she vomited saliva and gummy into my cupped hand. Not a drop spilled. How 'bout that for competent parenting? I can catch your vomit kids, that's how much I love you. Please don't take my dog away, I forgot to pick her up from the groomer because I was so busy carrying around handfuls of vomit.

Family Drama

2004-12-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

There's been so much drama in my family today that I feel like a wet sponge slapping at the keyboard. I'm totally exhausted, and I've got one of those creeping headaches that make you feel like you're having dental work in your eye. Also, who the hell invented the whole eight nights of Hanukah thing? I am so goddamn sick of Hanukah. So sick of the "Just let me open one more present," so sick of the "It's my turn to light the candles," so sick of knocking down boxes for the recycling and digging packing peanuts out of the couch. Enough with this mercantile hell! I want to get back to ignoring my children!

I am pretty pleased, as many of you must be, by the Homeland Security fiasco. Mostly because I like the idea of a man's career being tanked by a childcare situation. And I like anything that makes Bush look bad. However, when is this country going to wake up to the ludicrous...

ugh. Wait. SKUNK!!! SKUNK OUTSIDE MY OFFICE WINDOW!!!! GAG. COUGH. RETCH.

Man, that's nasty. Where was I?

Right. Nannygate, part III. Look, here's the thing. It's really really hard to find a nanny. Even for us, and I pay twenty bucks an hour, plus healthcare (full healthcare benefits, Kaiser, not the crappy insurance we get from the Writer's Guild), a cell phone, two weeks vacation plus holidays and a Christmas bonus. Even so, it's incredibly hard for us to find someone who wants to do this job. It's no fun taking care of other people's children. Children are boring, they move their bowels thoughtlessly, and they don't wipe their noses except on your shirt. So it's seriously challenging to find childcare. I'm not going to take on that whole Caitlin Flannagan, Atlantic Monthly article. Read it if you want to. All I want to say is that if so many people are compelled to break the law, the answer should be that the law is wrong, not that we need to imprison every one of them. This goes for the upwards of 75 million Americans who smoke pot (Do you need to hear that number again? 75 Million.) and it goes for the who-knows-how-many millions of families who hire nannies with no papers. And let's not even talk about the women who are desperate for work, need these jobs, and do them well, responsibly, and with love. All the while getting puked on by my little vermin.

The Buddha is Here!

2004-12-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

Oh glory days, the Buddha arrived. Not the actual Buddha (although if he were to check out of Nirvana I'm sure my house would be his first stop) but the Buddha Michael bought in China. A fat stone Buddha sitting on a huge pile of coins. It goes near the front door of the house and is supposed to ensure fabulous riches. That's what I love about traditional Chinese culture. We're all greedy and covet wealth, but they don't try to pretend otherwise.

Speaking of wealth and greed, I sit on the board of three different charitable organizations, and I have to say what blows my mind is how little most people give to charity. There are individuals who seem to genuinely enjoy donating to things they care about, and then there are those who just don't want to part with a nickel. I've often found that the wealthier the person, they less inclined they are to donate. Someone for whom I know 100 dollars presents a huge portion of their disposable cash will gladly and proudly donate it, and another person who wouldn't even notice if they misplaced ten thousand holds onto it with his teeth. I wish I could explain to them that donation is the supremely selfish gesture. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel needed, even powerful. With the simple scrawling of your name on a check, you can become a superstar to someone, or some organization. I always know my mania is in full swing when I start writing those big checks. It's a tremendously fun thing to do.

My kids get two allowances every week, one for their greedy little selves, and one for their tzedaka boxes (their fund for charity). Every Hanukkah they get to decide what to give money to. This year Sophie and Zeke made a $101.81 donation to the World Wildlife Fund. They're so impressed with themselves that if their gesture doesn't result in a dramatic increase in the worldwide panda population, they are going to be pretty stunned. They also made a lunch for a "poor person." (Look, I don't censor the wording on their 8-point Hanukah good deed list.) They packed a bunch of sandwiches, milk, cookies, a chocolate pudding, two apples, a bottle of water and a spoon and we gave it to the guy who sells the Street Spirit outside our market. I put a couple of bucks in the bag, too, so he wouldn't be disappointed. Now they've got to do their Toys for Tots delivery, and somehow I've got to browbeat some elderly shut-in into letting them clean up her yard.

Today is My Fortieth Birthday

2004-12-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

And you know what? I feel kind of fabulous (Kenehora, poo, poo, poo). I woke up this morning to the most amazing pile of gifts. A T-shirt over a long-sleeve shirt from Zeke on Sophie's advice ("I've noticed Mama's wearing this style nowadays."), lovely earrings from my parents, and...an opera-length string of the most beautiful Akoya pearls any oyster has ever vomited up. Salt water, Japanese, faintly blushed pink, and just about the sexiest thing I've ever known. Why are pearls so luscious? It's something about the weight of them, and the smoothness. I wanted to strip naked as soon as I put them around my neck.

My husband is a dream when it comes to gifts (really in all ways, but I don't want you to send me hate mail). He's got an amazing, innate sense of what I'm going to love. And he knows I'm the kind of person who needs to see things wrapped in boxes.

This whole forty thing is not so bad. Skip the next part if you can't deal with birthday-smugness. In this past decade I've produce four children, transformed myself from a lawyer into a writer, published six books and written three more that will be published over the course of the next year, bought a house, and, most importantly, made friends. A whole pile of wonderful friends. At my thirtieth birthday Michael made a tea party for my girlfriends and me. He rented linens, a silver tea service, dishes etc. He made cakes, tea sandwiches and scones. He dressed himself in a tuxedo (all but the jacket) and served. It was fabulous, but the sad part was that none of the women there were really good friends. They were what passed for friends in my life then. Now, he's making a little dinner party, and I love everyone who is coming. Each one is a tremendously important part of my life.

I'm a little fatter now than I was at thirty (OK, about ten pounds heavier) and my boobs sag. I've got a little flap of loose skin at my belly, courtesy of four C-Sections. I've got some crows feet, my jaw line sags, and there are a few lines showing up on my upper lip. But my husband thinks I'm more beautiful than I've ever been, and part of me thinks he's right. I'm certainly happier than I've ever been. Thanks to my shrink and the glories of psychopharmacology, I'm finally able to enjoy the good things in life.

So all is good. (Kenehora, poo poo poo.) Knock wood. All is good.

The Worst Mother in Preschool

2004-12-10T13:31:00.000-08:00

I know just what they're thinking when the give me that look. Who do I think I am, showing up at the preschool Hanukkah party when I've been entirely absent all year? "She doesn't even know our names," they probably whisper to one another. OK, maybe that's giving in to delusions of grandeur, maybe they have no idea that I not only don't know who they are, but I don't even recognize their children. Why? Because I never go to the school. I don't drop Rosie off, I don't pick her up. You know who does? My nanny. Yes, I'm one of those mothers. The mothers who opt out of the whole nursery school experience. When Sophie (now ten) was in preschool, we had one of those mothers in the class. I know what the moms think of me, because it's exactly what I thought of her. What a crappy parent! What an uncaring wretch! It's Mommy Dearest in that house.

That mom had two older children. Just like I do. What the mommies don't understand is that before Rosie stepped a foot into preschool, I'd already done five years of it. FIVE YEARS. Two with Sophie and three with Zeke. Five years of fingerpainting. Five years of pasta collages, five years of Playdoh menorahs, five years of clean mud (that stuff they make with grated soap flakes), five years of the water table. FIVE YEARS. A person could go crazy. Is it any wonder that I have to buy out my volunteer hours?

Bonobos are Being Eaten!

2004-12-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

As if there weren't enough reasons to be horrified by the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, now it looks like people are eating bonobos. Bonobos are my very favorite animal, which is not the only reason to be devastated by the fact that they may be down to 2% of previous levels. TWO PERCENT. This is appalling. It's appalling that people are hungry enough to engage in what has to seem almost like cannibalism. It's appalling that the people in this country are engaged in a war so brutal. It's appalling that all of Africa seems to be fast approaching an order of hell as yet unimagined. It's appalling that we in the west are so unwilling to get involved.

And it's pretty goddamn appalling that I'm only blogging about this because of the pending extinction of these sweet little Bonobos. These poor little peaceful, matriarchal, sex-obsessed creatures have inspired me to all sorts of outrage, when the horros of Africa inspire me to little other than despair. I'm disgusted with myself.