Since Jesse was about 5, I’ve dreamed of a time when she could handle after-school activities without degenerating into a strange, writhing, noisy mass of anxiety, panic, and tics. We tried a few different things when she was really little – ballet, soccer, music class, violin, gymnastics, ee tee see – and we consistently failed. I used to listen enviously to parents talking about sports leagues, gymnastics tournaments, regular play dates, horse riding lessons. None of it was for us.

Jesse broke me completely, leaving me ripe to catch an extreme case of second-child syndrome. I never signed Nick up for anything except private swim lessons. But this fall everything changed. We’re IN. Jesse joined the kids’ swim team at our gym and she takes diving lessons. She and Nick take private swim lessons and do tae kwon do.

This is a light load by a lot of modern parents’ reckonings, but I’m sub-standard. I think it’s insanity. Extracurriculars take up four weeknights for Jesse, two overlapping weeknights for Nick, Saturday mornings for both. The fifth weekday afternoon in Jesse’s schedule is reserved for the shrink. Then there are the little extras – belt testing, weekend tournaments, meets, random events. And the time I spend putting together bags and making sure everyone has their gear and snacks and so on. And also there’s the laundry, a solid 4 extra loads a week, which is like four straws on the broken laundry camel’s back.

Have I ever bothered to tell you just how MUCH laundry Jesse’s OCD generates? Some days I go into the laundry room in the basement, open the door of the laundry chute, and brace myself in numb horror as an avalanche of clothing quite literally crashes over me. My only wish in those moments is for no stanky underwear to touch my face.

And of course there’s the expense of all these activities. I’m spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month on basic fees, plus extras. I had to on-line-order the swim team uniform for Jesse. It cost FIFTY FOUR dollars (plus tax and shipping), but the European sizing is totally off the wall so the first suit I got her comes down to practically her mid-thigh. She tried to wear it anyway to a swim practice. She reported back that her boobs came out (she’s 9, it’s not a big deal yet) and the sag on her butt made it look like she pooped her pants (now that was untenable). So I had to order her another suit that’s smaller, and I can no longer return the giganto-suit, and that’s a lot of money down the drain.

Maybe I’ll just give Jesse the smaller swimsuit for Christmas.

Tae kwon do is even more of a budget sucker. Each time we do a belt test, it’s fifty bucks a pop. Tournament was seventy a pop. Now that we’re out of the virgin phase, we have to start sparring. That means sparring equipment times three (for me too). I ordered it last week during the studio’s 2-day sale. A whopping fifteen percent discount, so I only spent $580-something! Woo hoo!!

I think that shit is going under the tree too. The kids have been asking me to get them the sparring gear. I’ll just tell them we can’t afford it, and then they’ll be so happy on 12/25. I finally understand why parents give their kids socks and underwear for Christmas.

Why did I ever dream of extracurriculars? It’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for the days when Jesse was a complete lunatic. My Christmas shopping budget is feeling as cramped as my schedule.

This is it, December 1 and I have just 24 days until the Big Scary Red Man breaks into my home and fills it with useless crap, much to the short term delight of my kids.

But first BSRM will threaten and intimidate the kids for several weeks, demanding that they not pout, cry, shout, or be naughty — that they stop acting like kids — or else they face the doom of NO TOYS. Instead, they must pretend they’re lobotomized drones, tucking their self-esteem issues and imperfections away in the dark corners of their hearts to fester into adulthood; and they must write a beggar’s letter to BSRM asking for trinkets and baubles, because they can’t ask for really amazing and important things like world peace or an effective ebola vaccine or an end to religious hostility or world-wide equality for women or food for all the hungry kids. BSRM is just a toy-making elf, after all, whose once-a-year delivery service has somehow come to be conflated with all that is goodness and kindness in human nature.

Still, how come BSRM gets all the credit? Why not me? I’d like to have Jesse and Nick fawn all over me, with my huge gut popping and hair all over my face and a PIPE to smoke, for god’s sake.

The kids would blow several gaskets if they had to connect all that unbounded and whimsical generosity with me. I’m just the bitch who makes the food, does the laundry, cleans the house, wipes the asses, helps with the homework, provides taxi service, schedules life, and disciplines the little shits to make sure they’re ship-shape for BSRM’s Christmas Coming, grumbling all the while about the marginal levels of intellectual stimulation I extract from these activities.

I don’t even want to say BSRM’s name out loud. I’m tired of being used by The Man. Like the peeps who basked in the auras of Mia Hamm and Tiger Woods, I want to own the cultural consciousness that has been filtered and concentrated into the shape of BSRM. I want to stand up and speak — in a voice that rings across the tiny wannabe mountains of Wisconsin — the words that will empower me and join me to the gestalt of happy little children reveling in the magic of Christmas:

I AM SANTA CLAUS.

I. Am. Santa Claus.

i am santa claus

* * * *

Oh fu^* it. That’s not doing anything for me. I can make it through another 24 days of secrets and lies. I don’t look good in fire-engine red and a beard anyway. I’m good.

What’s up with “life hacks?” That turn of phrase makes me grumpy in a split second. All you have to say to me is “LIFE HA–” and my eyes are rolling and I’m making you-smell-like-kimchi-fart faces. You don’t even have to get to the “CK” for me to lose my shit, which means I’ve given you a life hack. You can just drop the “CK” and save your mouth an extra sound, and still make me lose my shit. Efficiency with a cap-E.

When I first started hearing the phrase, I thought it was a new way to refer to identity theft, or maybe it meant robbing someone of part of their life, like by stalking them. “That guy hacked my life after I broke up with him. He got a key to my apartment and put kitty litter in my underwear drawer and stole my cat.”

Eventually I deduced that “life hack” actually refers to some cool trick that makes a mundane task easy and fast, or a simple process that solves an intractable but common problem. Internet osmosis brought me to this understanding, but I don’t know how. Very mystifying.

After seeing some really stupid “life hack” posts on facebook recently, I decided to do some research and bring closure to this question of definition. I went to the source of all knowledge and wisdom, my guru, my sage. I started with the basics and engaged in four iterations of expanding awareness, as I tried to come to grips with LIFE HA–.

In other words, I googled four times and lo, I partook of the tree of knowledge:

“What is a hack.”
“What is a life hack.”
“Life hacks.”
“Best life hacks.”

Brilliant, I know. Three suffocating years of law school and 12 years as a litigator gave me the skills to carefully craft this small array of sophisticated google inquiries. And in case you’re wondering, yes, each question netted different (albeit overlapping) results. I browsed and read and browsed and read. More osmosis occurred. Then I sat back and realized that the banal world has hacked what used to be a nice turn of phrase.

“Life hack” apparently was first used in the computer nerd community to refer to a clever or ingenious, quick-and-dirty solution to some everyday problem, originally in the programming context and eventually in all of life. So my understanding was pretty close.

But people will call ANYTHING a life hack these days.

There are obvious and much-used ideas that float about, like sticking a fork in citrus to juice it. Can you call it a life hack if a ton of people already do it? That doesn’t seem right.

There are the silly tricks that look like cool ideas but couldn’t possibly add value to my life in a pinch. Jam a potato onto a power drill so it spins while you peel it. Awesome, if the potato is a perfect ovoid shape with no dimples, which none of mine ever are, because I buy local and organic and everyone knows local, organic produce is funny-looking. Just look at this massive (alleged) parsnip that came in my farmshare box last week:

Try sticking that on a power drill. Maybe organic farmers need a life hack to help them grow less scary vegetables.

What was I talking about… Oh, power drill, potato. Right, great idea except I’d be bringing my greasy, industrial power drill into the kitchen and applying it to ingestible food. And also if I need to peel a hundred potatoes. I guess I could spend an hour at the grocery store sorting over the potatoes for the perfect shaped ones to impale on my drill, and I could carefully clean the drill, but that would defeat the purpose of saving time, wouldn’t it. Anyway, I have a better hack for the potato-peeling-takes-too-long problem: don’t peel your potatoes. BAM. Cap-E.

How about the trick of putting cherry tomatoes between two plates and running a knife between the plates to cut them all in half at once. I saw the video. I wonder how many takes they filmed to get it right. Out of curiosity, I tried it. It took me a really long time to arrange the tomatoes properly, and also I had to sort them by size because just one oversized tomato could blow the whole thing off balance, and then anyway none of the plates I tried had the right amount of convexity or concavity (are those words?) to work right. Also my knife wasn’t sharp enough, so I tried to sharpen it on my little honing thingy but it didn’t help. Fail.

I bet I could find a cherry-tomato-life-hack-cutting-plate-and-knife-set on Amazon, but I don’t think anything that requires special equipment and has limited application should count as a life hack. I have a better hack for the cherry tomatoes: eat them whole. BAM.

I was angry about the tomato episode, because it turned out to be a life hack in my original sense of the phrase. I went through a whole pint of tomatoes, dirtied a bunch of dishes, and wasted a good hour of my precious spare time. Whoever came up with that lame idea hacked an hour of my life. Cap-A-hole.

My friend Erin texted me a couple days ago. She was watching the local news and saw this idea presented as a “life hack”: when cutting a  loaf of bread that isn’t already sliced, use a bread knife.

Oh COME ON. That’s consumerism, not a hack. Wait, no. It’s a WALLET HACK.

I checked out a variety of life hack sites. 100 life hacks that make life easier.  Life Tricks. 40 Clever Life Hacks to Simplify Your World. The 30 Best, Most Genius Life Hacks EVER. (ever, seriously. EVER.)

And so on. Sifting through web sites that offer life hacks is just exactly like waking up in a Martha Stewart nightmare. Make crumbling blacktop into Christmas tree ornaments! Collect dryer lint and use it to insulate your leaky windows! Mount your blow dryer on your camera tripod for hands-free hair styling! Some cute ideas, but very little that will actually speed up my life, solve intractable problems quickly, or otherwise make my day. And a lot of the so-called hacks aren’t even clever; they’re just common-sense ways most of us get through life already, like putting your shoes on shelves, or organizing your stuff in boxes.

Well if that’s all it’s about, here’s my critical list of the FIVE BEST LIFE HACKS EVER, which I magnanimously share with you, in the hopes that your life, like mine, will be filled with chirping little birds and smell like ripe mangos:

1. Wipe your butt with wet wipes when you poop.  Every. Time. You will smell better, and your laundry won’t be contaminated with unholy PPMs of fecal matter. Skid marks will be a thing of the past. Same goes for the kids. Until you’re sure they can keep at it until they see a clean wipe, wipe their butts for them. With wet wipes. Back in the early 90’s, at a time when I was unaware of any wet-wipe products marketed or sold for adult usage, I started buying Tidy Tykes butt wipes for my household. It really improved the funk factor in our home. Now I can buy butt wipes at Costco in bulk quantities, and the world is a better place.

2. This is for the moms with little ones: unless your kid smells bad (pull that underwear waistband out and take a sniff) or her hair is visibly greasy or she’s getting rashes, don’t bother with a bath or shower. Visible dirt can be removed with a wet washcloth or paper towel in seconds. You’ll save lots of time and water, and no one will notice.  Kids don’t sweat and smell the same way adolescents and adults do. Nb: this life ha– works best in conjunction with hack #1.

3. Just don’t do that shit. Whatever it is you think you’re supposed to do, don’t do it. You will save SO MUCH TIME, and your life really won’t be much more fu**ed up than it already is.

4. Another one for moms: smack your kids once in a while. It takes all the edges off the guilt you feel about more trivial things, like putting dirty athletic gear on them because you didn’t do laundry (see #3 above), or forgetting to send lunch to school. The head slap is stress-relieving and cheaper than therapy, and you save on commuting time to your shrink’s office. Your children can take care of their own therapy when they grow up and leave.

5. Disregard # 4. I was just kidding. The actual hack I try to implement, but it’s really hard, is to HUG my kids when they’re being little monsters. It also takes the edges off all the guilt, and it’s also cheaper than therapy. In fact, you may be able to avoid therapy altogether if you go this route. But it takes a bit of thought, planning ahead, and self control. So it’s not really a hack. Damn. But it’s still a nice idea so I’m calling it a life hack. Sue me.

Okay I admit it. I’m making this shit up. Just like all the other people who are posting up so-called life hacks.

When I get to meditating on this, I realize that the real issue I have with “life hacking” is that it suggests organic life is analogous to whatever happens in a bunch of tiny metallic circuits driven by binary code. I don’t like AI analogies for life. It gets me all metaphysical and shivery, and I don’t go in for deep thoughts. It’s not one of my strengths. I’m not well-read and it reminds me of how superfluous and shallow and redundant my soul really is.

Because what if we really are just part of a computer simulation operated by some unimaginable being, watching us unroll this scenario out to its bitter and inevitable end? Or even worse, what if we’re just background characters in a computer game, like humans who lived in the time of the Greek gods, catastrophes tumbling down on our heads as the game advances through harder and harder levels, over-sized historical characters like Hitler and Joan of Arc actually being the avatars of the players in the game, until the inevitable GAME OVER, each Big Bang nothing more than a tap of the “REPLAY” button. If that’s true, then maybe we SHOULD be trying to hack our way out of this shit hole, in which case putting swimming pool noodles in our cowboy boots to keep them from flopping or folding our sweaters correctly over hangers so the armpits don’t sag all weird is stuff that’s so trivially trivial that it’s madness to waste any attention on it. The life hacks we should be concerned with are things like stopping large asteroids before they hit earth, or turning back global warming, or solving cancer. You know, things that’ll keep the game going a while longer for Player Number 1, so that we can keep going too.

I sound like the guys who wrote The Matrix, and we all know how that spun itself down the toilet by movie three. Somebody slap me and tell me to shut the f*&# up.

Jesse’s math homework last night included the following problem:

Jesse was stumped. So was I. How can it be that knowing the length of only one side of a shape, you can know its area? So Jesse and I talked, and it was a complicated affair for a 9-year-old. Unless I’m missing something, you have to make significant assumptions about the number of sides and the angles involved for Aiden’s assertion to be true. But if you’re working on the principle of right-angle four-sided arrays, which is what the kids have been doing for two months as they learn multiplication, Aiden doesn’t seem to have enough information at all with only the length of one side. I think he needs to know a width as well as a length. And there’s something goofy about answering “it can be true if it’s a square,” because then of course Aiden “knows” the length of all four sides of his garden. Or I suppose you could argue that if the adjoining sides of the rectangle are some factor of the one known side, like they’re exactly twice as long, then Aiden can use the one known length to measure the other sides and so on. It doesn’t feel right.

I asked Jesse to stretch her thinking by leaving straight lines in the dust. Boring. What if there were a shape with only one side… The only thing you have to assume then is the shape: it’s a circle garden. Then Aiden knows the “length” of the one “side” – the circumference – and then he can calculate the radius, and from that he can calculate the area. I think I remember these basic equations right, so I wrote them down for Jesse and suggested she stretch her third-grade teacher’s thinking.

Jesse officially thinks I’m crazy now, just a complete lunatic. I feel like I must be missing something really obvious, and it’s making me feel stupid today. What do you think?

Why is ketchup still red? How come no one is trying to fix this vexing issue?

Someone invented Color Wonder pens, thus illustrating the amazing things corporations can accomplish when left alone to express their first amendment rights fully. Toddlers can now trash mama’s living room walls without leaving a single visible mark. That sort of anti-authoritarian behavior is incredibly liberating, just the sort of untrammeled individual expression that will help build the next generation of hard-working capitalists — and at no cost to the family’s interior paint budget.

Last month Anthony and I were relaxing at a local bar when we discovered clear bourbon. Yes, I said that: clear bourbon. Fact is, it tasted like something I’d use to strip a finish off wood, but it was clear bourbon. They should do that to ketchup. Everyone always says kids don’t care about what food looks or tastes like as long as it’s salty and sweet, so just make that condiment clear and add some sodium and sugar and call it ketchup. You can rest assured moms will buy it. Because ketchup stains.

I find the problem especially nettlesome when we reach the dregs of a bottle of ketchup. Jesse gives that bottle a mighty squeeze and the ensuing squirt practically aerosolizes the ketchup, spraying little droplets all over the table and wall and Jesse, like a blood spatter pattern from a head shot. It takes weeks before I find all the marks, and frequently her clothes are permanently stained. I wish she liked to wear red as much as she loves ketchup.

Ronald Reagan made ketchup into a vegetable. I think Heinz can usher in the next evolution by making ketchup into an invisible, non-staining vegetable. If they’re worried that people will freak out, they can offer two different products. There are already two ways to spell ketchup, so it’s just a matter of rebranding. Ketchup is clear, catsup is red. Easy peezy.

It’s easy to blame the tomatoes for the red, staining quality of ketchup, but that would be a feint. Earth-grown inputs don’t really matter that much in highly processed food-like products. Pure white marshmallows have food dyes in them. Why can’t manufacturers add some food dyes and make ketchup white too, or better yet, invisible? Just leave the tomatoes out, if that’s what it takes. After all, they make fruit snacks and fruit roll-ups without using any fruit. “Ketchup” doesn’t even have the word tomato in it, so who would miss the tomatoes?

I once had a Paleo neighbor who would go off on me about how she can make ketchup that’s consistent with the Paleo diet. It was apparently life-changing. She told me about it at least 6 different times, probably more. It was one of the things that really set me off about the Paleo craze. Why was this woman going on and on about KETCHUP? But now I see it a new way: if Paleo-phyles can make ketchup – which means they made it out of what, eggs, grass-fed beef, kale, and avocado – then surely Heinz can make clear ketchup.

Check out Heinz’s Innovation page. Whoa! There is some serious shit going down at Heinz. “Turning packaging expectations upside down—as we did literally with our Top-Down™ ketchup bottle—is a Heinz tradition. But dreaming up new ideas to make it easier to enjoy our products is just the beginning.”

I’ll tell you what, Heinz. If you could turn a bottle upside down — literally — you can make ketchup that doesn’t stain! Go for it, large corporate entity! GMO and blue dye #1 that shit. Give me ketchup that doesn’t stain my kids’ ETSY-purchased fair trade organic locally grown sustainable natural bamboo fiber wardrobe.

This time of year, the streets in our neighborhood are lined with leaves. People rake them into long piles roadside, and then a big vacuum cleaner truck trundles by every couple of weeks to hose them up. Of course, if you do the piling prematurely, and if a big wind comes before the big truck, the leaves mostly re-scatter. In the case of the home across the street, every year they re-scatter all over my front yard. Because the universe is what it is, this invariably happens after Anthony and I have already raked our yard clean. So we get to do it again.

I’ve never understood giving leaves away to the city. We pile all our raking leaves into one big heap in the back yard for the kids to play in. You should see Madeline — our six-pound, 10-inch-tall poodle — leap into a big leaf pile. She sprints down the slope of our yard like a tiny cheetah and catapults herself into the air, legs stretched out to infinity, reaching heights of at least 4 feet and flying 6 feet forward before she dives into the leaves. It’s an amazing display of both the physical power and the playful spirit of dogs. In shrink-a-dink miniature. One of the kids is usually flying along beside Madeline, and the amount of simple joy oozing from their little bodies is enough to make even grumpy Carla laugh and laugh for sheer pleasure. At some point before snow covers everything we move all the leaves into the woods, onto a random low spot where they compost and become rich leaf mold. We let it lie to soak up rains and enrich the woods, and sometimes we dig some out to use in our gardening.

I suppose I’m not grumpy about the extra leaves blowing over from our neighbor’s yard. It just always seems to be ill-timed. Why can’t the neighbor’s leaves just get about the business of falling and getting cleaned up and then blown over to our yard before Anthony and I do our own raking? Her trees are very thoughtless.

This morning I took Madeline for a walk first thing in the morning. It was frigid and still, without a lick of wind, and frost was still decorating the world. I wandered down to the end of the street and looked up to find a magnificent, giant maple tree still wearing its foliage. The houses and road were in the shadows of early morning, but the sun had risen just high enough to light the tree’s tall limbs; its golden leaves sparkled like a queen’s crown. As I stared, I noticed leaves were falling. Falling falling falling like golden snow, without any cause except that it was their time. The yard under the tree was covered in a golden carpet of leaves. I walked over and stood on the carpet, and I looked up for a few moments to watch the leaves fall around me, trying (unsuccessfully) to catch with my eye the moment when a single leaf let go of its branch to drift down to its ending. It was magic.

But after the initial shock of beauty, I pictured the owner raking those leaves curbside so they could blow all over the neighborhood. Or better yet, the owner might hire a landscaper to use a leaf blower and triple-wide mower, polluting the air with the stench of gas and the noise of motors. That’s how they roll in my neighborhood.

Having my mind move in this grumpy direction made me feel a little irritated with myself. Good thing our neighbor Pete came by just then, walking his own dog. We chattered a bit about the beautiful leaves, and before I piped up with my own cynicism, Pete pointed out that pretty soon the owner would come out and see those leaves and just be pissed off about all the raking he needs to do now.

I felt so much better. Nobody really wants to be alone in their grumpy.

Nick asked me a simple question this morning. We were pulling out of the parking lot at the Jewish Community Center where we swim and work out. There are several flagpoles out front. I never pay any attention to them.

“What are flags for?”

It was a stumper. I thought a bit as I looked up at the flags flapping in the wind.

“They’re symbols,” I answered.

“What’s a symbol?”

Down the rabbit hole I went, starting with the usual “uuuuh…” Flags used to be rallying points in battles and of course they let us identify American stuff and people… But really I think they’re mostly propaganda tools, something fancy and bright for folks in a collective to look up to, fluttering in the sky or clinging to a wall, a fetish to hang their collective prejudices upon, a rallying point for nationalism or gangism or whatever your ‘ism is.

Reboot. I thought all that but I didn’t say it out loud, okay? So don’t get all huffy now. What I actually said was, “flags are a thing that you look at and it makes you think about some thing.”

“Thing” is a word that a five-year-old generally gets without the need for follow-up, so I try to stick to that whenever possible. I continued. “Like the flag with the stripes and stars reminds you that you’re an American and part of America. The blue Star-of-David flag is a symbol for the Jewish community, so they fly that outside the JCC because it’s a Jewish sort of thing.”

I think Nick had stopped listening at “flags are a thing.” He stared out the car window for a few seconds after I shut up. “At school, there is one on the wall, and we do this with our hand” — he stretched out his right arm in a strange salute and then placed his hand on his stomach — “and then they say a bunch of things.”

EXACTLY, Nick. You say a bunch of things. That’s the next piece of the propaganda puzzle, the chanting of random words that inculcate you into the American nationalistic mindset, the beginning of your formal brainwashing, words that come to have no real meaning for most people but are used as political weaponry by hypocrites and snake oil sellers.

No no no, of course I didn’t say that to Nick. I said the pledge of allegiance instead, while reminding myself that despite the religious fervor of our times, “under God” wasn’t added to the pledge until 1954, more than 150 years after our nation was founded. I set that aside in my mind and focused on the last words, “justice and liberty for all.” Emphasis on FOR ALL.

“What does it mean?”

Ugh… By now I was imploding with my effort to suppress all the cynical and frustrated thoughts that were bubbling up in my head. What DOES it mean? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to a FLAG? Shouldn’t we pledge allegiance to the nation — aka our community — first? Why a fetish, a flapping piece of fabric, first? How come the same people who want to keep GOD in the pledge are okay with the idolatry built right into it? Isn’t the flag a false idol? On and on I went down the hole, pondering a random assortment of hypocrisies and lies I associate with the tide of religious nationalism taking over the world, and with the incredible anti-government sentiment that drives people to run for political office. So they can work in government, on the public tap.

“Mommy?”

Apparently Nick was struck by the sudden and inappropriately long silence in the car, or maybe my face was going off kilter.

Now that he had my attention again, he went on. “We bow to things at tae kwon do.”

We do indeed bow to the tae kwon do and American flags hanging on the wall before and after each class. Nick’s comment had the feel of a question.

“Yeah. It’s all just to show respect.”

I guess we could have talked about flags as an expression of pride and identity. We could have talked about how flags can inspire people — Olympic athletes, soldiers, immigrants dreaming of a better life in a better land. I could have told Nick a story about the wee bag of ashes I got to take home from a girl scout camp in Korea after we participated in a very moving ritual of burning a tattered old American flag to lay it to rest (I still have that baggie somewhere), or about the days when I was one of the few 5th grade dorks who volunteered to take down the school’s American flag every day because I know how to fold a flag into a proper triangle without letting it touch the ground.

American propaganda runs deep in my veins. I spent my first decade running around a military base. I’m thankful to be an American citizen. I’m proud of much of what our country has done in the course of its short history.  But I just don’t have it in me these days to rally my kids to the propaganda. I’m disgusted by our polarized society, I’m turned off completely by our leadership in Congress, I’m enraged by the Supreme Court’s anti-citizen decision in Citizens United. Bleah.

It must be election season.

I haven’t dropped a post in a while. I’ve been in a funk. Things are heading sour for Jesse at school and I’m depressed about having to push my head through her teacher’s disfunction in dealing with her. I’m emotionally raw about it and unprepared for the quasi-adversarial battle that seems to be required to get a well-seasoned elementary school teacher to sing a different tune. Plus the school nurse called about updating Jesse’s health plan to include stuff about anxiety, because the teacher had called her instead of me to ask about strategies. This set me off, since I thought I had a good informal working relationship with the teacher so it surprised me that she back-channeled me. Then the nurse called back advocating for NOT including anxiety and dealing directly with the teacher (which is what I was doing in the first place), but only after I already met with Jesse’s therapist about it, incurring cost and wasting a session that Jesse desperately could have used with him.

I hate that school staff think they know my daughter better than me. Nonsense. It’s incredibly dismissive and disrespectful. They should listen to me more and lecture me less. It just gets me all worked up. I’m strung out by Jesse’s strung out behavior about school. I feel unappreciated. I accomplish nothing to be proud of. I screamed at the kids and Anthony yesterday morning and then I went to the basement and sulked for a good hour. I peed my pants (just a little) when I demo’ed a flying front snap kick into the leaf pile in the afternoon. My life sucks. (Except for all the parts of it that don’t, but please don’t interrupt because I’m busy feeling sorry for myself here, okay?)

Still, I think what grinds me down most some days is the relentless string of bizarre comments and questions that issue from Nick’s mouth. It’s so irritating and yet too cute to get mad about, which creates a strange dissonance in my mind. Some days, it’s crushing. The following were lifted verbatim from just one morning – merely a sampler of the constant tittle tattle:

Mommy, what if all the people were gone? Then what if you were born and there was nobody to teach you? How would you learn reading? Or manners… What if there was no tae kwon do?

What if you fell in love with an apple. Can people fall in love with apples? That is silly.

What if Madeline had only wings? No, what if she was ONLY wings? That would be weird.

What if after 1000 days? Would it be winter? [sweetie, it’ll feel like winter in about 45 to 60 days.] Then we will have a new number like four or three?

How much HALLOWEEN will I have at my school? [not sure what you mean, buddy.] How many halloweens will pass? [5 before you’re done with elementary school.] FIVE?? Today??

Madeline is gonna fall in love with her foot. Then she will have baby feet.

Remember when a sister and a sister fell in love with a sister and a sister?

Are you married to poop?

You are never alone mommy. There is always the spirits.

* * * *

Gaining deep insights, one nonsensical moment at a time.

My kids go to the FUN KIDS DENTIST. That’s what they’re called. They have a palm tree on their sign and fish in the waiting room. They deal really well with Jesse’s anxiety and Nick’s crazy. They have a dentist who’s also an orthodontist, which is really awesome because one-stop-shop.

They also embody everything that stinks about medical billing. The first time I went there with Jesse last year, the receptionist who checked me out told me that they had contacted my insurer already and there would be no coverage for her cleaning because we were having it done 2 weeks earlier than insurance allowed. It was a couple hundred bucks, which wouldn’t break my budget that month, so I shrugged and paid it.  But to put it in perspective, that’s enough money to feed my family for a week.

A few weeks later I got a notice from our dental insurer. It had paid the bill two weeks earlier. That was news to me. I called The Fun People. Among other things, I said, did your office staff lie to me about checking with our insurer?

I admit that I was adversarial and combative. But I was irritated. I don’t like being dicked with. The nice lady on the phone said so-sorry and quickly (as in, didn’t skip a nano-second beat) told me that no-no-no-insurer-said-no-coverage.

Ri-i-i-ight. Because she would remember that off the top of her head. She assured me I would get a refund.

A few weeks later I thought about it. No refund yet. I called them back. So-sorry-so-sorry, our accountant was on vacation back when you called and we surely left her a message, but she must have forgotten. I asked if I needed to inform the insurer that they had double-billed me and lied to me about the lack of coverage. I received a refund check in the mail two days later.

* * *

Jesse had some orthodontic work done over the summer. As with all things Jesse, there’s nothing terribly wrong, but her teeth just aren’t exactly plumb-square-level and her baby teeth seem to be rotting out. We’re on it. I got a call from a Fun Lady some time in August. “I’m calling to remind you that you have a bill due in the amount of $—.” It was somewhere in the couple-hundred dollar range. I was surprised to be getting a dunning call. I like my excellent credit rating, and I act accordingly. I felt a little bad, but it was summer and our life gets a little out of control.

“Have you sent me a bill?” I asked. “I don’t remember getting one.”

“Yes,” she answered briskly, still talking in a tone that informed me I was a hose-bag deadbeat.

“When did you send it?”

There was a brief pause and then a confident, cheerful response. “We did mail it to you… It should be arriving in your mail today. Would you like to pay with a credit card today?”

WTF.

Four years of behavior modification therapy with Jesse kicked in, like magic. In a past life, I would have had a very significant, very long hissy fit all over The Fun Billing Lady. I would have done everything in my power to ruin her day, or even better her week, at extremely high volume. But in this story, I was calm, on the outside at least. I took several deep breaths. I spoke slowly, using every last bit of self-control to not rage out at this voice on the phone. “When I actually receive a bill, I will review it and decide if it’s accurate, and also if I determine that you’re not double-billing me, I’ll pay it. But no, I won’t pay you with a credit card before I actually see an actual bill.”

There was another brief pause, followed by a chirpy “thank you” and a figurative la la la as The Fun Lady ended the call.

* * *

Today I received a bill for a cleaning last month. Look at what they’ve done.

The bill shows $148 in charges for services. The last line on the itemized list says “Claim to [DT15] for 148.00.” I don’t actually know what “DT15″ is, but I can guess that it’s my insurer. Then look at the bottom. It shows my ‘PLEASE PAY” balance due as $148. Notably absent is a number in the row called “INSURANCE OUTSTANDING.” It should say “148.00.” As in, I don’t owe the dentist a penny.

That’s not a small omission. In my opinion, its only purpose is to obtain a double payment, from both me and the insurer. And then, as happened before, they’ll forget to refund me.

I hate this sort of shit. It takes me right past grumpy to irate. Good thing therapy is still working for me. I took a few deep breaths and shook my head, and then I threw the bill away.

The kids and I have been doing tae kwon do for more than a month now. Tomorrow we’re all taking the gold belt test; if we pass, we won’t be white-belted tae kwon do virgins anymore. We’ll be GOLD BELTS, and then we just have to get through about 9 more belts and maybe 4 to 5 years of effort to be black belts. I’m in. It’s been a strange delight so far. The workouts are good, the instructors are terrific, my kids seem to really enjoy it. There’s a heavy focus in the kid classes on self-respect and self-control, which I really like.

The only major down side so far is the Korean-speaking that goes on. I’m not sure I can survive 5 years of it. They count in Korean, over and over again. They use Korean commands and directions. All the instructors appear to have been taught the words by the same person, and all the students have been taught in turn. They all sound the same.

Whoever the source is, he or she has the worst Korean ever. If I counted to 10 in English with the same level of disfunction, my numbers would sound like this: wan, toot, threat, fur, five, sex, sef-heh, oat, neen, teen. Jesse was very anxious about learning the numbers so she could comply with orders to count. I begged her and Nick not to count with the class for a while. “Learn the numbers from me, not the studio,” I ordered. “They don’t know how to say them right.”

I started to wonder if the instructors weren’t speaking Korean at all. The teacher kept saying “chariot” over and over, and also “COON-yay!” What could these words mean?

I called my mom. “Mom, what does “coon-yay” mean?”

“What?”

“COON-YAY.”

“Whaaat? I don’t know.” I couldn’t blame her stroke for her confused reaction this time.

“The teacher keeps saying it right before everyone bows.”

“Oh. Kyong-nyeh. That’s how we say bow.”

Huh. Right. Not even close.

I tried “chariot” on mom, but we couldn’t figure that one out together. Eventually I noodled in my head and remembered something my uncles used to yell at us in Korea when we were screwing up. “Jong-sheen cha-ryo!” I understood it to mean something along the lines of “get your head out of your a^%!” Or maybe, “Get your act together.” In tae kwon do, “Chariot” seemed to mean something like “pay attention.” Aha. “Cha-ryot.” Mmm. Almost.

I also noticed class leaders and instructors kept saying Dora. It couldn’t be. What did she have to do with martial arts? More thinking. Korean for “turn” is something like “To-rha.” I guess that’s what they mean.

It’s all so confusing. I grew up with my Korean family speaking English with a strong accent and bearing up to the mockery. But I’ve never been in a position to look down on white people speaking Korean with a bad accent. Really bad. It’s just awful to hear.

It didn’t take me long to see the up side of the situation. I started to passive-aggressively assert my better accent at every opportunity, working hard to embrace an unfamiliar feeling of ethnic and cultural superiority.

I would stand in the back of the class and yell the numbers loud enough that I didn’t have to hear anyone else’s pidgin Korean. I swear, for a couple weeks people would look back at me like I was an idiot. After all, I was the ONLY PERSON in the room saying the numbers the way I did. Moron white belt, I imagined them thinking. I should keep my mouth quiet until I learn to say Korean numbers real good, like everyone else.

Or maybe I was just annoyingly loud. Whatever.

When we entered the studio and bowed to the instructors, I would greet them in formal Korean. “An-yong-ha-shum-nee-ka, sah-bum-nim.” Startled eyes. I would say good bye and thank you in proper formal Korean. I would make my kids do it too.

Students and instructors eventually figured out I’m Korean, at least by half. And, despite my shitty, unkind attitude about their crappy accents, they were really warm and nice about my ethnicity. Respectful even, and sheepish. Then I felt bad. It’s not like I speak perfect Korean anymore; my tongue is lazy with lack of use, and I have the fluent vocabulary of a toddler. These students are doing their best in an alien setting with an alien language and an alien cultural model. I was acting just like all the people over the years who made fun of my family’s accents, who put them down and tried to make them feel small for talking and looking funny, who pissed me off a million ways with their stupid American superiority.

What a jerk. Me, that is.

Last week a green belt led the class in stretches and warm ups. He announced, “We’ll finish up with 40 jumping jacks.”

Then he looked over at another green belt. “Oh, maybe not. I can’t count to forty.”

The other man replied, “How about two sets of 20?” They hesitated in mild confusion, with no instructor around to help them decide what to do.

I yelled from the back of the class. “I can count to 40 for you, sir!” (I know. Weird. That’s how we talk to each other in tae kwon do.)

He didn’t look anything but relieved. “You can count to 40?? Thank you ma’am! Please lead us!”

I barked the count through 40 jumping jacks. Everyone was happy. And just because I counted to 40 in one of my native languages — the language of my birthplace, the first language I spoke as an infant, the language I’ve almost forgotten for lack of use — 20 near-strangers bowed to me and applauded.

I noticed Jesse looking over at me from the kid side of the classroom with her mouth hanging open. Yeah, that’s right baby girl. Mama’s got game. I can count to 40. BAM.