parenting and children

grumpy about my child’s art

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Some time ago I admitted that one of the great joys of parenthood is hanging awful art on my living room walls. I usually can find my way to enjoying my kids’ crappy productions, but to my great delight lately Jesse has shown talent — i.e., some of her recent art not only doesn’t suck; it’s actually really good. But she likes to work with pencil these days and she’s stretching her chops, trying new things, exploring different ways to use lines and scribbles to build forms and compositions. Which means she’s back to sort of sucking. Or, from another perspective, she’s gone, uh… abstract.

Last week she came home with an enormous origami fortune teller. I remember making them as a kid out of a piece of 8×11 paper. My friends and I would put numbers on the outside and the inside, and tawdry little messages fit for a fortune cookie on the undersides of the inner flaps. We’d play with them at recess, and much girlie giggling would ensue.

Jesse’s must have been made out of a piece of poster board. I held it up and eyed it.

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What the heck did she draw all over it?? Jesse doesn’t do random scribbles. She’s always trying to draw something. So I took a closer look at each of the four panels.

Panel 1:

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Hmm. Butterflies?

Panel 2:

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What’s that yellow thing? What’s the blue and red coming from off-screen? Maybe… a bunny rabbit being attacked by an arrow…?

Panel 3:

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Huh. That could be a lot of things, like a flower, or a telescope, or, well… a boob?

Panel 4:

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Yup. Definitely boobs.

Jesse drew two boobs, a rabbit about to be stabbed by an arrow, and butterflies.

WTF?

I tried to be nonchalant when I asked Jesse what was up with her fortune teller. She explained it to me, orienting it correctly.

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Those are eyeballs, and it’s a creature.

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It’s opening it’s mouth now. Jesse demonstrated.

The eyeballs still look like boobs to me.

I’m thinking maybe Jesse could do with some art lessons.

grumpy about the construction project (transition time)

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We are still waiting and waiting and waiting for all the technical paperwork and details to be completed for our construction loan. The bank is screwing up things in little ways, like when their “employment verification department” contacted the wrong person at Anthony’s job — i.e., not the person he told them to contact but someone else — and then when he found out, the right person was out for the day, and then it’s the weekend, and shit shit shit more delays.  I’m truly astonished by how long it’s taking, and also on the edge of a nervous breakdown because of it.

The children are also anxious about the situation, which so far has included a dumpster (which we filled ourselves) and now a PODS container sitting on our front lawn. But no wall has come tumbling down yet.

Jesse’s therapist, the able and thoughtful Dr. Abrams, suggested to me that I put together a sort of photo memory book of our house the way it looks now, before our massive renovation begins. He says it will help with Jesse’s transitional anxiety. He says she may miss the old house and the way things were. Sure thing! I said, as I cheerfully jotted in my calendar the free hours when I would do it.

I went home and, that very night, I carefully photographed all of Jesse’s special places and put together a scrap book. I used a variety of decals, ribbons, and pressed flowers to decorate the scrap book, and also I printed out special labels and names to identify places in the house so that 20 years from now, when Jesse is feeling really unsettled, she can turn back to this scrap book and find soothing comfort in deep memories of the home of her early childhood.

* * * * * * * *

I think I just fell asleep and had a bad dream, almost like a nightmare. Or someone else was typing a fantasy about something I did. Where was I? Oh right. Dr. Abrams said make a photo book of the house as it is. Here’s how that conversation went:

Abrams [looking kind and thoughtful]: Blah blah blah you could make a photo book of the house to help Jesse transition blah blah blah.

Jesse [nodding appreciatively while staring unblinking at me, radiating the betrayal she feels because soon we’re expanding the kitchen, adding a bathroom and mudroom, and giving her a bedroom twice as big as Nick’s.]

Me [staring blankly at Abrams and then Jesse as I cop attitude]: Well… Uh… Jesse’s got an iPad mini. She knows how to use it. She can take photos of whatever she wants before demolition starts.

Abrams [practically glaring at me and then speaking verrrry slowly]:  I.  think. you. should make. a book.

Well okay then. It’s not every day that Dr. Abrams is so directive with me.

In the weeks since that encounter, I’ve received two more reminders from Dr. Abrams, but the photo book hasn’t happened yet. Sadly, I have a very strong anti-authoritarian streak. Maybe if and when we finally schedule a closing date, and the Big Trucks are rolling into our driveway, I’ll get around to it. Until then, somebody hand me the Mommy-Fail stamp.

grumpy about school lunches

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I complain a lot about sending lunch to school with Jesse. Next year I have to start doing it with Nick, and I’ll no doubt complain twice as much. I can’t spare myself this hassle by doing hot lunches through school lunch programs, for two reasons. One, Jesse’s got the whole food allergy thing going on (eggs). Two, school lunches kind of suck, and my kids are pretty spoiled and picky eaters. Not picky like they have limited palates (except Nick is struggling with veggies), but picky like they know that a lot of food sucks and fresh homemade is almost always better.

So even if Jesse didn’t have a food allergy, I’d rather pack her lunch and have her actually eat it, than have her sit staring glumly at her school offering and having to choose either to choke that shit down or to be hungry for the next 3.5 hours. That’s why Jesse gets homemade. She’s off the tacos I used to have to send (homemade tortilla cooked in the morning on a cast iron skillet, BAM). Now she’s on to pork barbecue sandwiches. Every few weeks I boil up a pork shoulder with a bunch of herbs and vege until it’s melt-in-your-mouth tender, and I shred and freeze it. I drop a frozen lump into a little container each day and it’s defrosted by lunchtime. I also bake homemade hamburger buns and freeze them. Wrap one in aluminum and it’s defrosted by lunch. A separate little container of barbecue sauce, and usually a side of canned peaches, and lunch is a wrap. Trader Joe is Jesse’s peach brand, and not the little snack cups with extra sugar for kids. She likes the fancy ones that come in halves in a jar and cost four times as much. I can’t really complain about it, because she’s right — they taste better. Or sometimes I’ll cut up some melon or a mango, or if they’re available she loves a handful of cherries. If I’m in an extravagant mood, I bake cupcakes and freeze them, so I can drop one of those in her lunch box too. It takes me a good 15 minutes to put her lunch together, and some mornings it feels like a lot of time that I could be spending in better ways, like lolling on the sofa, checking the weather on my iPhone as I mainline a cup of coffee.

I swear I’m not a food over-achiever. It’s just that I’ve had to pore over so many labels to look for eggs in ingredient lists. After you’ve read a thousand labels on packaged foods, you sort of lose your taste for them. The ingredient lists are usually so long, and most of the items aren’t things I comprehend. What exactly is hydroxylated soy lecithin, or sodium stearoyl lactylate, or calcium propionate, or azodicarbonamide? How do I determine if they’re derived from a chicken egg? Why do they have to be conjoined in bread? Maybe it’s all as innocent as dihydrogen monoxide, but I don’t really want to spend the time finding out. Better to just bake my own bread (flour, salt, yeast, water, sometimes sugar and butter). No mystery in that, unless you want me to wax eloquent about the mystery of how yeasty FARTS can make a bit of flour and salt into such a miraculously tasty and addictive simple carb. (I love that I feed my kids yeast farts. If I use honey, I can say with a lot of pride that I’m feeding them yeast farts and bee barf. All natural.)

I may get grumpy about doing lunch for the kids, but I shouldn’t. I’m grateful that I can afford to make them lunches out of the foods they choose and enjoy, that I have the time to do it, that I’m pulled together enough to do it. Not everyone has these luxuries.

The front office ladies at Jesse’s elementary school have a reputation for being pretty grumpy. A lot of people find them off-putting, stern and even rude. I admit I found them to be aloof and sometimes odd at first, but I’m not one to judge someone else’s grumpy. These women work in an open space through which every human entering and leaving that school building must pass. They also deal with kids ranging in age from 4 to 10.  It cannot be pleasant.

Over the years, I’ve hovered enough to see through the stern facade and observe the abiding kindness they feel for the kids who come through their work space. Once in a  while, I’ve caught pseudonymous Linda feeding kids in the morning. She sits them down near her desk and pulls something out of her drawer. She’s nonchalant, low-key, dry. She would never want a child to feel ashamed of this situation. She’s told me in rare moments of candor that some kids come to school hungry, having eaten nothing for breakfast, and sometimes nothing since their (free) school lunch the day before. There’s no knowing if it’s poverty or neglect. Doesn’t matter. Linda takes care of it, best she can. Her simple kindness breaks my heart, because she takes no pride in it (just the solace of knowing a child is less hungry) and because I wish there were no need of it.

It’s hard to accept that hungry children exist in my neighborhood, in this first-world nation. I can’t think about it too much, else I’d be crying all the time, as I am now. As the school year winds down, I find myself asking what becomes of these children during the summer, when there’s no Linda to look out for them, no one to see their hunger and answer it. And what the hell am I doing about it? Nothing, of course. Shedding tears and little else.

Ten years ago, I would have been filled with a hopeless rage in the face of this, mostly directed at myself and fueled by a stream of negative emotions — self-loathing, disappointment, shame, responsibility. Because everything is my fault. I still have that range of feelings, but I’m less hopeless about it all. Years of therapy with Jesse, who shares these tendencies, have helped. Rationally, I know it’s not my fault, and I know I can’t fix everything, and it would be pathetic indeed if I let my hopelessness stop me from doing one little useful thing. So I’ll try to do that, just a little useful thing for a hungry kid here and there as we wind through summer, just like Linda. I’ll probably be grumpy about it, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

grumpy about potty mouth

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I’m leaving Whole Foods with Nick. He’s been surprisingly well-behaved. He hasn’t broken anything. He hasn’t begged. He hasn’t run off and gotten lost. He hasn’t intentionally smacked or pressed his face into any stranger’s ass. As I pull out of my parking space, German engineering acts up in my nearly-ancient VW and tells me the rear passenger door on Nick’s side is open. I pull over.

“Nick, your car door isn’t closed all the way.”

“Aw shit.”

WTF?

I look in the rear view mirror. “What did you say??”

Nick fusses about with opening the door and re-closing it completely. “Mommy,” he answers, in a didactic tone that tells me he thinks I’m simple or deaf. “I said SHIT.  Shit shit shit.”

“Don’t say that, Nick.”

He giggles. “Shit shit shit shit.”

“Nick, cut it out. You’re not allowed to say that.”

“Why not? You say it.”

“Because only grown-ups and babies are allowed to have potty-mouth. Not five-year-olds.”

Nick responds to this notion concisely, plainly, in a sing-song groan. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaw.  Shit.”

Grumpy about my daughter (Good lord, she’s ten)

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I don’t understand how ten years have passed since Jesse was born. I’ve looked at photos. I’ve aged at least 20 years in that time. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost so much sleep; maybe I’ve been awake during the gone decade as much as normal people are awake in 20 years.

Motherhood has been a challenging, emotionally exhausting journey with Jesse, a climb made tougher by our mutual self-loathing and cynicism, her developmental quirks and tics. Some days it feels hopeless, what with the keening and whining issuing from both our mouths. I wonder sometimes if she’ll ever be happy. 

Jesse struggled through her green belt testing for tae kwon do last night; it was preceded by hours of extreme performance anxiety, expressed in pretty extreme  ways. Anthony reported that after Jesse messed up some moves a little during testing, she started crying. She kept crying, and she kept going. So I was proud. But I wish she could have had more fun, like most other kids, and felt more pride.

When this tae kwon do studio gives a child their new belt, the instructor always asks: now that you’re a higher belt, what do you plan to change and improve in yourself? I asked Jesse to consider this answer for when she receives her green belt and has to announce to the class what she wants to change: “cry less, have more fun, and take things less seriously.” She looked at me sidelong with a  contemplative green eye and said nothing.

On Jesse’s birthday, after she and Nick went to sleep, I pulled out the external hard drive and rummaged through a decade of photographs. They tell a different story of Jesse than I tend to remember, one filled less with sadness and more with joy. Maybe I’m the one who needs to cry less, have more fun, and take things less seriously. (I’m looking at myself sidelong right now, with a contemplative brown eye.) Maybe all the unhappiness Jesse experiences is just on the surface. Maybe under it is something deeper and stronger than the bitter pills of Jesse’s anxiety and miserable self-esteem, something more abiding.

Jesse was born just 5 pounds and 14 ounces, a diminutive doll with porcelain skin, eyes of violet and a passionate temperament that could move her from raw rage to uncontrolled glee in a blink of her enormous puddly eyes.

one hour into life

one hour into life

Dang, she was a cute wee thing.

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Her eyes eventually turned to green

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but not much else has changed.

The photos I looked at showed me a little girl with an abiding love of the outdoors.

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A little girl with loving and connected relationships with her parents.

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A little girl who’s sweet on her baby brother.

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A little girl who’s not afraid of a little magic.

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A little girl comfortable with silliness and individuality.

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A little girl made of strength and sass.

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A little girl who experiences stress, to be sure.

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But who also has courage enough to take risks and partake of triumphs.

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A little girl who knows how to revel in simple happiness.

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And in recent pictures, I can see shadows of the woman she’ll someday be.

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I love so much about Jesse. She has courage without boundaries, and I know this because she soldiers on despite her endless parade of fears and anxieties. She’s passionately altruistic, generous, introspective, intuitive, critical. She has an artist’s eye and soul. She sees what’s beautiful as readily as she sees what’s ugly. She strives. It’s practically trite to say that I’m blessed to have her as my daughter, that she embodies so many qualities that I cherish.

But I can also say this. Even if Jesse was a coward, selfish, shallow, emotionally blind, vapid, unkind, lazy, ugly — even if she was all those things, I would still love her. Because I’m her mother. And that’s good enough for me in this life.

Grumpy about parenting labels

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I’ve mentioned before that I used to read a lot of parenting books. According to one collection of them, I’ve fucked up a handful of parenting practices I’ll call Group A but I’ve done all the things in Group B right. According to another collection, I’ve done everything in Group A correctly, but I’ve fucked up everything in Group B. 

As you can imagine, I’ve been conflicted about this for a long time. As mommy blogger after mommy blogger says, each in her unique, compelling, and totally interesting voice, I’m tired of being judged and labeled. It’s been almost a decade since Jesse was born. It’s time for me to be my own person, to embrace my own labels for myself, and to sing my own song from the top of my own imaginary mountain like that lady in the Swiss Alps with the nuns and Nazis and all those crazy kids. 

After intense and extensive research, reading and meditation, I’ve reached the enlightened conclusion that I am (and will always be) a child-directed anti-authoritarian attachment-helicopter free-range self-directed-discipline parent. (Is there a parenting book for me out there? Well?) 

It took a great deal of mindful mindfulness to get here, but thanks to this epiphany, nothing has changed for me today. 

Grumpy about the bad days 

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It’s been 21 days since I posted up a blog. I’ve been busy with other shit, as you may have guessed if you read my last couple posts. Anthony and I have been ripping out old wall-to-wall carpet in a room, and we sanded the floor and refinished it.

It looks pretty good. Here’s  the progression. What it looked like right after we lifted the carpet:

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Then after we sanded (with a 130-pound buff sander so unhinged that managing it was like dragging an unbalanced washing machine around the room):

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And then this:

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Oh. Wait. That’s the Spam I fried for Jesse that day. Hold on while I find the right photo.

Okay, here’s what it looked like after the first coat of varnish:

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And after two more coats:

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Anyway, there’s been other stuff to do as well the past several weeks, like feeding minions and trying to remember to have them bathe at least once a week. Also school lunches. Also tae kwon do shit. Also finishing pants and shorts that I’m sewing for Jesse and Nick. Also sitting on the sofa slothfully in a mild depression, staring blankly at dust bunnies floating in the sun, which I have to do every day for a little while after I take Nick to school.

Because Jesse has had a few ba-a-a-a-ad weeks and Nick is in the midst of a five-year-old’s equivalent of a mid-life crisis.

So it got under my skin when I saw that there were two new comments today on my most recent blog post and this is what they said:

“When will the next post come?” (Anonymous)

“Really how long do you expect me to wait for your witty and emotionally draning [sic] commentary?” (Anonymous)

I don’t get a lot of comment action on my blog because WordPress’s default is to require commenters to leave their email address and I haven’t figured out yet how to change it. Who has time for that shit? So most of the comments I get are like these — slightly off-kilter, weird things written by what I assume is some sort of translator spam machine, along the lines of “thank you for your insightful insights into the operations of things. I am look forward to reading much more helpful and useful iterations of your creativity.”

Still, it got under my skin. I read the comments and shook my head, thinking, “Listen, joker, it’s not my commentary that’s emotionally draining, it’s my LIFE.”

Nick is totally out of control right now. He’s going through the terrible twos, three years late. (My kids are late bloomers.) He screams frequently and at random moments, throws tantrums and hard toys at me, doesn’t do anything I ask, refuses to share anything with Jesse, beats her up and follows her around the house attacking her with imaginary weapons and then falls into bawling tears when she pokes him with a feather. He’s driving all of us crazy.

But who is Jesse to judge? She’s been throwing her own tantrums, and she’s turning 10 next week. It’s been day after day of horrifying, emotionally numbing outbursts and melt-downs. She’s a tornado when she gets like this, hurling random insults at others and herself, making threats to hurt others and herself, and unable to gather the reins in.

But who am I to judge? I’ve been following Jesse and Nick down the path of crazies. Instead of offering useful, mature parental guidance, I’ve been yelling at the kids every day for all their fighting and insanity. After nearly a decade, I still have limited reserves for dealing with Jesse when she detours into emotional oblivion. And Nick hurts too because I don’t have any reserves left for him. His sister uses them all up. I can’t tolerate his normal five-year-old shit with any equanimity lately. So I yell, I stomp and have hissy fits, and I complain about everything. I hate myself.

Rationally I know there are lots of reasons why Jesse’s negative behavior, which is rooted in her anxiety and self-loathing, is ratcheting up a million notches. Our house is a wreck because of the carpet ripping and floor refinishing; shit is in all the wrong places. We’re trying to get an even bigger renovation project going as well, and this is making Jesse feel very unsettled. Badger tests are next week. These standardized state-wide tests have no meaning to Jesse in terms of her development and potential, but they sure matter to public schools and their teachers, who make a big deal out of them. I keep telling Jesse they don’t matter, but she’s not buying my line; she’s totally stressed out about the testing. Last week we competed in tae kwon do tournaments, and Jesse (and I) sparred for the first time without adequate preparation. Major stressor. Next week is testing to advance to the next belt. Jesse’s birthday is next week, and for some reason she has a lot of anxiety about her birthdays. I think she’s expecting some sort of transmogrification to occur. “I’m ten today, Mommy! Look, I have wings now!” Or maybe she’s wishing, and preparing herself for the emptiness of another ordinary day. A teacher told her class that if it doesn’t rain soon, California is going to run out of water. She came home filled with trepidation about what’s going to happen to Grandma and Uncle Mark and Uncle Ted. Will they have water to drink?

So I get it. I understand why Jesse is emotionally in the red zone. But knowing that with my brain doesn’t make it any easier for my body and emotions to cope. Because Jesse is a terror when she gets like this, and our family is coming unhinged.

This morning Jesse woke up and started right in. She came to my bed and head butted me on the nose. When I told her to go back to her own room, the whining, ululating, and rage bursts started. Before I even made it to the bathroom to pee she had thrown her first real punches at me and screamed at me about (a) what an awful parent I am, and (b) what an awful child she is. She hit a clean emotional blow when she screeched that all I’ve been doing is yelling and screaming at her every day.

“Huh,” I thought to myself as I brushed my teeth. “That’s pretty accurate.” I made myself a promise, one I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of times before. I didn’t yell.

Eventually Jesse made it downstairs in a quieter mood, but instead of coming to breakfast she decided first she needed to finish her homework. I asked her to eat breakfast first, but she settled into her work instead with weird humming and moaning noises, which continued helplessly as Anthony tried to say good bye to her.

I dug deep and kept trying not to yell at the kids as the morning progressed. I snapped to be sure, but I didn’t descend into the crazies. I sent Jesse to her room a couple times for screaming insanely and picking on Nick. I ignored her best I could. And after she cleared her plates from breakfast (assisted by some snapping from me because she was definitely going to break something with all the slamming going on), she disappeared for a good long while.

After washing dishes and pouring another cup of coffee, I settled on the sofa and stared glumly out the window into the spectacularly beautiful woods in our back yard. Nick, who was in pacifist mode, played quietly by himself. A few minutes passed, and then Jesse came tip-toeing down the stairs, dressed and ready for school. She settled silently onto my lap for a snuggle, without a word. There we sat, an emotionally broken woman and her equally lost daughter, holding each other like lifelines. I continued to stare out the window, preparing myself for whatever Jesse might throw at me. But all she threw was a glance up at my face. I could tell out of my peripheral vision that there were question marks and longing in it.

So we sat a moment, and then Nick came over and snuggled in. And there we sat in silence, Jesse on my lap with her head on my left shoulder, and Nick pushed in against me with my right arm wrapped around his still-tiny body.

So we sat a moment, and then our diminutive dog came down the stairs and joined us. Madeline sat her fluffy six-pound self down on my tummy, and still we sat quietly, enjoying our mutual company in silence. Love blossomed up around us. In that moment, it was enough to crowd out those awful weeds of anxiety and self-loathing, the stupid bickering and fighting that inevitably accompany a life shared in minutiae.

If you saw us then, you would have said we were a picture-book family, a vision of joy and happiness. (Unless you had seen us about 45 minutes earlier as well. Whatever.)

So an ordinary day passed, and many good things happened. Anthony decided to come home early to be with Nick while I worked out. I realized later that he was just being excessively nice to me because he gets it — the kids have flayed me. After I picked the kids up from school, I dropped Nick off with Anthony and headed to the gym. Jesse’s swim team worked for an hour and a half and I worked out too. Jesse wanted to have dinner with just me at a park, so we picked up some carry-out and did that, enjoying a quiet meal under some trees without the noisome energy of Nick drowning us. I could tell Jesse was just trying to reconnect with me, trying to show me she deserves my love. I realized I was doing the same thing. It was all good, and we didn’t have to debrief any of the big issues that haunt us.

We got home and the peacefulness continued, except we saw that slightly depraved look in Anthony’s eyes that told us he had been alone with Nick for more than three hours. As we snuggled down in bed to watch an episode of Odd Squad, Anthony spoke out of the blue, with a sly smile on his face. “So Carla… Did you like my comments on your blog today?”

Grumpy about iFart

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Jesse had a tough morning at her new dentist yesterday. They did a full cleaning, took x-rays, painted sealants on her molars (don’t start in on me about toxicity and all that — rotten teeth are toxic too, and she was born with ’em, so we’re in a balancing act here), took out an ineffective space-maintaining appliance (hence new dentist) between some missing molars, and did a mold on her upper teeth (which took two tries, ugh) for  a new orthodontic contraption that will hypothetically work better.

Jesse handled it like a Marine — tough and pretty grim, but also polite and compliant. Afterwards, she was spent. I gave her my iPhone as I drove her to school. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw her staring blankly at the phone as she tapped away. A few seconds later, I started hearing her iFart remix.

In case you’re one of the rare people who don’t yet know what iFart is, I hope you can guess from the name. It’s a smartphone app. You hit a button, it plays a fart. Many fart options are available, and you can repeat and layer them on top of each other to create rich symphonic effects.

Jesse can knock out a dance mix on iFart like the best house DJ you’ve ever met. She lays down thumpers and high descants, embedding them in repeating rhythmic patterns that leave me bouncing my head against all sense. Fart noises shouldn’t make me want to dance. Yesterday Jesse was all business as she laid down her track post-dentist, her face set in a serious mask. You wouldn’t have known she was having fun. Except for the extensive fart noises.

iFart is, sadly, one of the most-favored apps on my iPhone. It says something so sad and juvenile about me, but iFart never lets me down. When we were in California last month, I sat down one day on the big sofa in my mom’s living room. To my left on a neighboring sofa was my brother Eric — a master scatologist, a keeper of the poop flame, never ashamed of his bowel functions. To my right on a neighboring barca-lounger was his wife Wendy, a mild-mannered and modest-souled woman who I imagine excuses herself from a room to go silent-fart in private. Poor Wendy. I wonder if she knew what she was marrying into, this family of free-farting animals passing for human beings.

I don’t know what came over me. I placed my iPhone next to my right hip on high volume and punched up The Wipe Out, a fart option that lasts exactly five seconds. It doesn’t sound like a lot on paper, but trust me: a five-second fart is unholy long.

The Wipe Out sang out.

I looked to my right and smiled. Sweet Wendy, who would never make fun of anyone or call someone out for something embarrassing, looked at me. 1.5 seconds into The Wipe Out, her face screwed up into a mix of horror and revulsion as she cried out in earnest from her barca-lounger, “Oh my God, Carla!”

I looked to my left and smiled. 3 seconds gone. By now Eric was also looking at me in total disgust. “Jeez Carla, what the hell is that??”

5 seconds gone. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. It took just a moment for them to figure out that it was the app and not me, but for that short moment they must have thought my pants were full of crap and I was the most revolting human being in the world.

It set me to wondering. Just how much does it take to fill Eric with a sense of scatological loathing? A lot, really. He’s my brother, after all.

But iFart did it, in just 5 seconds. That’s impressive.

Grumpy about the swim meet (we survived)

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Sooo tired. Migraine imminent. Jesse whining incessantly about whatever comes to mind. It’s easy to KNOW that it’s because she’s emotionally spent, but it’s hard to DEAL with it. 

Because I wish she was proud of herself. She held her head up and looked confident, she showed up for her heats, and she fit right in. She was a little weird during the freestyle — I can’t even explain it, you would have had to see her — but she completed the event with a personal best. Her swimming has come so far. I wish she could enjoy what she’s accomplished. 

We’ll keep working on getting her to a better place in her head. I’m weary of her self-loathing. I loathe it. 

But aside from that, the long day turned out not that bad.  A very pulled-together mom (NOT ME, obviously) corralled other parents to bring stuff.



What you don’t see in this pic is the 4000 various brands of power and protein bars someone sent. There was plenty of food. 

The kids entertained themselves by doing sprints on the indoor track and throwing balls and playing with electronics. It was pretty relaxed. 

Nick and Anthony arrived in time to watch Jesse’s heats. Almost nothing could do a better job of putting a smile on a grumpy face than the sight of Nick cheering for his sister. He chanted “go Jesse! Go Jesse! Go Jesse!” while pumping his fist up and down like peeps used to do on freeways to ask semis to honk their horns. And, as Anthony points out, Nick chanted like this for Jesse in ten consecutive heats until she was actually swimming. (All little girls in swimcaps and goggles look the same from the bleachers.)

It was a shame Jesse was so unhappy at the end of it all, but I hope she’ll learn to feel better about this event by some time in… I don’t know, say her late 20’s? As I always say: that’s what therapy’s for. 

Grumpy at the swim meet (another hour gone and I’m still a moron)

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Yes, it RHYMES. I have TIMES for that. 

I whined to the swim team coach about why Jesse was only in one heat. I determined that fact by poring carefully (no really, I did) through 12 pages that look like this:



Uuuugh. 

Coach said gee let me see if I can get her in a breast stroke heat.

He came back a few minutes later. “She’s already in two heats.” He showed me the line item I missed.

So we only have to wait two more hours until Jesse swims, not three.  Excellent news. 

Now I’m bored AND embarrassed. I hate when I whine for no reason.