Honest, I’m not out of ideas. I just needed to wash the filters on my Dyson. Washable filters sound like such a great idea, but they need 24 hours to dry, which means my ‘cuum is out of commission until tomorrow at 3:01 pm.

Shit. It’s only been 15 minutes since I cleaned the filters, and I feel a desperate need to vacuum. I spied the glitter Jesse spilled in the basement, and a thousand dried play doh crumbs are all over the carpet in the same region.

If the Dyson were functional, I’d be ignoring the glitter and play doh brazenly. I’d walk right by it and think things like, “huh, I should probably do something about that.” On tough days I might stop to stare dumbly for a second, and then continue on while reassuring myself that I DID remember to restock the liquor cupboard. That sort of procrastination can go on for weeks in my world.

But now I’ll be thinking constantly about that mess, and waiting for the chance to suck it up, for the next 23-and-a-quarter hours.

I use a lot of irony, mostly in the form of feigned ignorance, to help me stay calm with the kids. It’s my private joke, a place inside me that’s mocking my children, and they don’t seem to get it. I know I’m being mean, like teasing a dog, but it’s so much better than screaming at them.

Kids are so literal, despite their wide-open imaginations. Kids love “opposites” games, but my sense is that they don’t really understand the humor of irony. It’s the silliness of imagining daddy with his underwear on his head instead of his butt that gets them rolling on the floor. Or it’s a fun oppositional thing to do things like smile after mom yells “I DON’T WANT TO SEE A SINGLE SMILE ON YOUR FACE TODAY!” I can’t wrap my head around it quite right, but I feel like there’s a difference between that and irony.

I rely on feigned ignorance — I love the sound of those two words together — in situations where I used to get really frustrated, sometimes enraged (always inappropriately), by Jesse or Nick heckling me with repeated questions. When I use irony, they’re the ones who get pissed off instead. That makes me feel good all over.

Nick hates it. If he asks me for the hundredth time in an hour if he can play with the iPad, I might answer, “oh. I didn’t know you wanted to play with the iPad.” I work on acting a little surprised, slightly out of touch.
“YES YOU DID, MOMMY!” He’ll yell back.
“No I didn’t.”
“YES YOU DID! I aaaaasked you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I DIIIIID, mommy!!!”
“Really? I don’t remember that.”
“YES YOU DO! WAAAAAAH.”

Whatever. Score one for mom.

This morning before the drowsies had all worn off, I was rolling around in bed with—

I wish I was about to say “Anthony.” Sometimes it feels hopeless. I met a delightful woman from Virginia some years ago when Jesse was about 2. This mom had shared a family bed with her kids, who were now adults. We chatted about nursing and co-sleeping, and the pressure our culture applies to end those practices much sooner than I wanted to. She encouraged me to stay the course and ignore everything but my own heart, to treasure this and be patient (apply your best southern accent): “I guarantee you, when Jesse is 21, she will NOT be breastfeeding and she will NOT be sleeping in your bed.” She had a healthy long view of things.

Right. What? Oh, so I was rolling around in bed with Jesse and Nick. You know the drill — snuggle, tickle, hug, jump on mommy and crack her spine, etc. Jesse flopped on her back, relaxed and said, “So mommy. I really want to go back to little Grandma’s house.”

GGGGAAAH I’ve had to listen to some version of that every fracking day since before we even left California. It’s literally the first thing Jesse brings up with me every morning (until today), and then all day long until she closes her eyes to sleep. I’m hearing about this at least 30 times a day, no exaggeration, and lots of different versions, including proposals for travel dates. Jesse has been using her full emotional range as well. I’m being heckled.

Today I felt the demons awaken inside me. I fought them down. I took a breath and I answered Jesse sleepily, trying to sound as earnest as possible. “Really? I didn’t know that.” I prepared myself for irritability, whining, a challenge to my memory, all the things that empower me instead of her in these strange battles.

There was a moment of silence as I stared out the window at the rising sun, and then from next to me I heard an easy-going, grown-up chuckle. Jesse was laughing WITH me at my private joke. She got it. We murmured about it as we smiled. I didn’t know an 8 year old could grasp irony. Awesome.

But now I’m having mixed feelings about this. Watching children mature is a magical thing, and I love it. But Jesse has just taken away a really important device in my quest for sanity. It won’t be as fun anymore, since she gets it. Now what am I going to do when she drives me crazy?

I have an irrational fear of flying, which I manage these days by flying with the kids. Don’t all good parents cope by exposing their children to the things they fear most?

Um, anyway, flying with my spawn is very therapeutic. One, the rational part of me knows (or at least hopes) that I wouldn’t expose my children to situations that actually endanger them for no good reason, so this helps me remember that flying isn’t actually that dangerous.

Two, I can’t act anxious because of Jesse’s unerring anxiety radar. Once she senses my anxiety, she turns it on me and the world around her like a toxic mushroom cloud. Bad, very bad. Also I can’t just act not-anxious superficially, because Jesse sees through that sort of thing. So I have to dig deep and make the pretending as real as I can, calling on distant memories of Stanislofski. A mommy prepares. Pretending hard makes it more real, and I find I’m just not as anxious anymore. Ta-dah. Behavior modification therapy 101.

Three, explaining all the strange noises and bumps to curious kids takes the edge off my own out-of-control feeling. It gets me out of armrest-gripping mode and moves me closer to reality mode.

Four, I think I experience some sort of emotional transference, but I can’t decide if it’s a push or a pull. My kids exasperate me so completely. They don’t listen well and they run around like monkeys. They’re often loud. So that’s the pull option: I’m so anxious about them that I don’t have any anxiety left for flying fear. They’ve used it all up, sucking it out of me like leeches.

The push option is that I’ve simply transferred my pre-existing anxiety about flying onto my poor hapless children, who actually behave as well as other kids during air travel. In this scenario, I’m obviously the problem, overreacting to completely tolerable behavior and unfairly maligning Nick and Jesse, who deserve more tolerance and patience of me. I’m giving this some thought…

Nah. I think I’ll keep blaming the kids for now. I’m not mature enough yet to face emotional reality on this one.

Saying my parents had a “rocky” relationship doesn’t get it quite right. It’s more like they stood tethered together on cliff’s edge, never able to decide whether they should push each other off or jump together.

When I was in high school, they went through an especially bad spell after a massive fight, probably about finances. It was intolerable. For weeks they wouldn’t even look at each other. I don’t remember a single word passing between them. Dad slept on the living room sofa. One day during this episode, I asked Mom point blank why she didn’t just divorce Dad. Mom told me melodramatically that they were only staying together “for the children.” I was so miserable that I replied, please don’t do me any favors. If you love me, get a divorce NOW, because I can’t live like this.

No one ever listens to me. They stayed together. They patched up that rent in the fabric of their relationship, and they kept the fight/get-along loop going until Dad died, about 40 years into their marriage.

Some time in my 20’s or early 30’s, while Anthony and I were visiting my parents (probably for Christmas), we suffered through the fight half of the loop. During this part of the cycle, each of my parents typically came to me with their complaints. I suppose I’m glad they were open with me, but I really hated listening to them bitch about each other. As Anthony and I were debriefing on it in private, I wondered aloud why they even stayed married when they were always so unhappy together. Wasn’t divorce the only sensible option?

Anthony looked at me with that special bemused look that tells me he’s thinking, how can someone as smart as you be so stupid?

“Don’t you know why, Carla?” he asked me. NO, I replied emphatically, I have no idea why! Anthony responded with a gentle sweetness in his voice I didn’t expect. “Isn’t it obvious they love each other?”

(Have I mentioned yet that Anthony is a perfect human being? Okay, I take that back, but look. My friend Phyllis told me recently that I’m among the approximately 5 percent of women who DON’T think their husbands are assholes. Damn.)

Anthony’s astonishing insight rocked my world. He was right, of course. I never saw my parents – or their fights – the same way again. Mom and Dad were grumpy in love. Instead of only seeing the grousing and bitching anymore, I also started noticing the little giggles and the big laughs. I watched them hang out together like old comfortable dogs, and also exchange sweet little kisses like prepubescent teenagers. I peeked around corners to catch these moments. Thanks to Anthony, I had a chance to spy on their grumpy love affair in its twilight years. It was anything but perfect, but it was enough.

I hope I’ll write someday soon about how they met in Korea, the sweet and curious stories they told me — never talking together, but only in separate and very private conversations with me — about how they wooed one another. Those stories, most of which I heard even as I advocated for divorce, never took root in my heart.  I guess I thought of them as fairytales. It didn’t occur to me that my parents were sharing them not so much to inform me of something lost, but to remind themselves of the deep, unbroken roots in their own hearts. Maybe they were also asking me, in some inchoate way, to stop being so cynical about them.

My mom was stoic at Dad’s funeral. I don’t think she shed a single tear. We muddled through, and she even made a few jokes with me. A man came through the receiving line, weeping. I held and comforted him, which was strange in itself. He moved on and I asked Mom who he was to be so upset. Mom leaned over to whisper in my ear with a twinkle in her eye, “He’s just crying like that because he’s having a quadruple bypass next week.”  (Dad had the same a few weeks before he died.)

I remember Mom standing next to Dad’s coffin as they prepared to close it. I couldn’t go near his body. I should have been beside her, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage to feel his cold body; I didn’t think I could stay on my feet. I was weak, but not Mom. She stood firm, silent, still, looking down at Dad’s face for an unendurable length of time. Her hands rested quietly and peacefully on the edge of the coffin. I have no idea what she was thinking.

But my guess is, she was saying goodbye to her devoted lover and best friend of half a century. Simple as that.

I never went to daycare or had an official nanny. In Korea I had grandma, and also we had a live-in housemaid who did de facto duty as my nanny. We were taught to call the maid “ohn-nee,” which means big sister. The first maid I remember, Song-Ja, was someone I truly loved, and I was heartbroken when she left us to go have her own life, never to be seen again. Among other things, like reading and two-wheeling, she taught me to skip properly. I must have complained to her about my one-sided half limp-skip, so she held my two hands in hers and let me mirror-image her until I got it right. We giggled and giggled, and we romped around the yard skipping triumphantly when I got it right.

For some reason, that’s an important moment in my life — perhaps a spot of kindness and attention that lifted me up — and I got to relive it a couple years ago when Jesse developed the same gimpy-skip. It felt like a call of love and thanks to Song-Ja, over time and space, when I grabbed Jesse’s hands and we cheerfully skipped together until she got it right, girly giggles and all.

I’ve been both mom and nanny to my children, which is a bit of a surprise. I quit working only a month or two before I got knocked up with Jesse. After 12 committed years of lawyering, no one really knew how parenthood would suit me. My mom and Anthony placed bets that I would be back to work within 6 months (Anthony) or 3-months-I-guarantee-it (Mom). I thought they were in the right ballpark, but in my heart I was committed to about 9 months before I thankfully delegated parenting to a well-paid third party bearing the title “nanny.”

But then (doom-and-monster music overlay): Jesse happened. I got Jesse’ed. Everything about her was a challenge. She nursed constantly and she pooped even more. She had reflux, and she acted colicky. She needed constant human touch, CONSTANT. She was covered in painful rashes from head to toe; she had repeated ear infections; she had clogged tear ducts. She was late to solids, well over a year. She refused anything but breast, fresh. No pumped milk would do. At 7 months, I tried joining a gym so I could at least work out. Each of the 4 times I went, Jesse screamed at the gym daycare staff without pause for 20 minutes until they came to get me, and then she spent the following week recovering from some sort of illness.

Knowing now what we do about Jesse’s food allergies, severe anxiety, and behavioral quirks, it seems clear that Anthony and I did the right thing when we quickly conceded defeat and became enslaved by parenthood. 8 years and 8 months after Jesse was born, I’m still an unemployed housewife.

I admit that the control-freak in me would probably have had trouble letting go to nannies. Also I do love being as connected to my kids as I am. All parents should be as lucky as me, to be spending so much hypothetically-quality time with their beloved children. But damn, there’s a big part of me that wishes I popped spawn that just couldn’t wait for the nanny to show up. I would have hired the best nanny I could buy — someone who reminded me most of Song-Ja — and said goodbye cheerfully Monday through Friday, looking forward to delightful weekends and never even knowing what I was missing.

I wrote a post about a week ago and made a big typo. I wrote “complement” instead of “compliment”, over and over again. I do know the difference. I was tired and rushed, and I just spelled it wrong. In context, any reasonable reader would have known what I meant. Still, it was kind of embarrassing. I’ve fixed it, but it got me stewing helplessly about a mindset that I find fantastically, roll-my-eyes-and-make-gag-me-fingers irritating: the smug, I’m-smarter-than-you, finger-wagging grammar nazi. I can’t get it out of my head, so I must lance this boil. Please forgive me as I vent.

I’m not talking about people who kindly correct others, like my friend Steph who pointed out my mistake. (thank you, Steph.) I’m talking about the smug assholes who circulate smug memes about “grammar” and make smug generalized fun of folks who can’t get it right. George Takei went through a phaser of doing this, for instance, and I stopped being as interested in his ever-so-popular Facebook posts. There, I’ve said it.

I’m a recovering grammar nazi myself. As a lawyer I was a ruthless editor, especially of my own work. I felt (still do) that if your audience has power over you AND may include grammar nazis, then you ought to write to their rules so they don’t get distracted from what you’re trying to convey by something silly like a misplaced comma. But at some point it dawned on me that people who get distracted by that sort of thing are looking for excuses to be distracted, because frankly, most common grammar errors don’t really cause readers or listeners to become confused.

Here are some of the reasons I think it’s incredibly lame to be a grammar nazi:

1. A lot of the jive talk I see from so-called grammarians is actually about spelling. Saying you’re a grammar smartypants because you know the difference between their and there is like saying you’re an astrophysicist because you know the order of the planets in our solar system. Grammar is commonly defined as having to do with how words are put together in sentences. That’s a matter of syntax, structure, and linguistics, not the collection of letters one writes down to help a reader identify a word. If you focus heavily on the morphology angle, one could argue that spelling is part of the study of grammar, but they’re called spelling bees, not grammar bees. I personally wouldn’t conflate spelling and the linguistic structure of a language. Yes, I tried to use fancy words and sound extra smart in this paragraph. Right now, do you share my feeling that I sound like a smug, trying-to-sound-smarter-than-I-am wanker who’s actually full of shit?

2. If indeed your grammar nazi’ing is about spelling, odds are pretty good you’re just making fun of a dyslexic. I’m married to one, and I gave birth to at least one (jury’s still out on Nick). The dyslexic has trouble hearing the separate sounds in a word, so the phonetics of a written word make little sense without hard, ongoing training. The reading disability is also frequently accompanied by word retrieval issues and, understandably, anxiety. A dyslexic who trains her brain to sound things out feels REALLY GOOD about being able to spell a word phonetically, even if it’s spelled wrong. Then she has to wrap her head around the idea that the same-sounding word might be spelled two different ways, like too and two or it’s and its or their and there or then and than, which creates significant word retrieval problems. And also if she’s on social media she knows there’s a healthy cohort of peeps taking pleasure in putting her down. Well goody for you, grammar nazi. I hope you feel good about making fun of someone with a hard-wired reading disability.

3. Even if you’re picking on actual grammar, odds are still good you’re making fun of someone who has a legitimate reason for not being grammatically correct all the time. Maybe an immigrant, for instance. There’s interesting research on how difficult it is to “get” the linguistic structure of a language after the youthful years. As an adult you can memorize a kabillion words in a foreign language, but it’s almost impossible to gain true grammatical fluency. So if you want to pick a grammar fight, maybe you’d be well-served by trying to, say, go to China and speak Mandarin for a while, and see how it feels to have a Chinese grammar nazi call you down for being an idiot, when the actual problem is you’re from somewhere else. The grammar nazi and the xenophobe, joined as one.

Or maybe you’re making fun of someone who hasn’t grown up in circumstances where he was exposed to standard, uppity, proper English. Poverty is a powerful force, especially when it lands you in crappy schools. Making fun of people for having poor grammar, when they haven’t had an adequate opportunity to learn good grammar, is an asshole move.

Worse yet, the grammar nazi might just be making fun of someone who has an intellectual deficit, what we used to call IQ deficit or mental retardation. Not. Nice.

4. Everyone makes mistakes. Hence, hard core grammar nazis might as well lie down on their backs and spit. I have a neighbor who’s a self-professed grammar nazi. She regularly bad-mouths other people’s grammar errors. Last year she posted something on Facebook making fun of a published author for writing in bad English. In that very post, she constructed a sentence so convoluted that she had to put a comma exactly between the subject and verb for it to make sense. There was no irony or humor. It made her look like a self-righteous, hypocritical, smug boob. To me, at least.

5. If I can figure out what the person is saying to me, then in most settings I should be satisfied, because the purpose of language is to convey a message of some kind. Sure, I prefer standard English, but could Faulkner have written The Sound and the Fury in proper English without losing something?

6. It was not uncommon in my experience for some lawyers to poke fun at opposing counsel’s English in written submissions to courts. Usually, it meant the poker didn’t have enough substantive arguments to make. And most judges readily overlooked writing errors and focused instead on substance and merit. They were substance nazis. I too find that I’m more impressed by badly stated substance than well-written fluff.

I could go on, but my boil has been lanced. That’s a relief.

Listen, if you ever catch me grammar nazi’ing, you know what to do: mock me, head slap me, give me a laxative, tell me to f** off. Whatever it takes.

Solo parenting alert: my children are still breathing and I’m still functional. Right now my salvation comes in the form of Dragon Riders of Berk, season 2. Jesse and Nick even smothered me with kisses in exchange for the season purchase on Amazon. It seemed like a good barter to me, about a dollar a kiss.

I ate a delicious salad for dinner, with things like avocados and a grated carrot and mushrooms. Nick had a grilled cheese and Jesse had baked apples, and also she tasted one piece of lettuce from my salad. I’m a classy mom.

Nick became very noisy as our 3-minute sit-down-together meal winded down, subjecting me to all manner of screeching as he careened happily about our tiny kitchen. I was getting increasingly upset until Jesse giggled and rebuked me mildly. “You should just laugh, mommy. We can’t understand anything he’s saying anyway, and he’s actually really funny.”

I hate it when my kids are right. I’m not sure how I’m going to survive 3 more days of this sickening cuteness without Anthony.

I got nothing. I’m not really grumpy about anything tonight. It’s New Year’s eve and the year 2013 in review looks really good for pretty much everyone in my family and my acquaintance. Also I found out this morning I don’t have breast cancer, and that’s brightened my outlook measurably.

Although, about that.

I suppose I’m annoyed it took so long to obtain this cheerful news — almost 2 full months from the initial mammogram. That seems like too long.

And I’m experiencing some feelings I can’t find words for at all, though I’m sure someone somewhere has done so. I’m thankful and relieved about my own good news, but what of the 20% of biopsied women who got bad news today?  They matter just as much as me; as many prayers were spoken for them as for me; and I feel like I’m gloating at them if I get overly happy about this.  I remember what it’s called–survivor’s guilt, right?  I’m experiencing some lesser version of survivor’s guilt, like…  I-don’t-have-cancer embarrassment.  (I know, I have a gift for words.)

My guess is that this runs deeper in my soul than just this episode. I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in my 20’s, which is a story for another day, and everything turned out fine. It was an easy fix, a scope surgery and nothing more, a very low grade cancer. For what I had, there’s probably a higher risk of death from catching influenza.  But the word “cancer” always seems to gain me a special respect, like I’m a SURVIVOR.  It doesn’t seem fair I get such a back pat over it whenever it comes up.  It’s embarrassing.

I addressed my uncomfortable feeling pronto this morning.  As soon as I learned about the negative biopsy results, I rounded up the kids and went shopping. Almost nothing takes the edges off my happy place as much as shopping with Jesse and Nick. We landed at Target and didn’t even make it past the checkout area before I stopped, bent over in exasperation with my head resting on the shopping cart, taking deep breaths to stop myself from yelling at them.  Shortly after that, when I managed to gather them in one place for long enough, I explained that mommy was going to keep moving, and if they lost me they should look for anyone in a red shirt with a name tag and request that mommy be paged.  Next stop was Trader Joes, which went about as well as Target.  In all, it was a long two hours. 

But I have to admit, it still wasn’t enough to make me grumpy for longer than a few moments at a time. Today I’m happy for no reason, and it looks like nothing is going to bring me down.  Happy New Year, my friends!

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. If I’m going to pine for unrealistic changes in my life, I prefer to do it at times I’m feeling down, and not on cheerful, celebratory occasions. Plus resolutions are such a bitter reminder that there is nothing new under the sun, and not one stinking fresh idea in my brain, because how many different ways can human beings say lose-weight-eat-better-exercise-more-be-happier-be-nicer-read-more-books?

My childhood memories of the New Year involve no resolutions. On New Year’s Day my mom liked to play yut (sort of rhymes with loot, but Korean-style vowel). There’s a board and some counters and four sticks you toss in the air, and in the right circumstances you yell “YUT!!” and cavort. I was going to explain the game here a little, but I’m pleasantly surprised to find that there’s a lucid Wikipedia entry about the subject where you can learn all about yut. Who knew? The important thing for me was I got to play an actual game with my mom, which was rare, and she was very silly and happy about it, which was equally rare.

Instead of food reduction resolutions, in my home there was great Korean party food on the New Year, like chap chae, mandu, dok, and bulgogi.

The last item is a wonderful marinated beef, and decidedly not the existential “bulging I” that autocorrect just suggested. Why would autocorrect do that? in what iteration of the English language would anyone put the two words, “bulging I”, together like that? Is autocorrect saying something rude about my weight? Or making a snide pun about the size of my irises? Is autocorrect watching me through the little camera lens on this device I’m typing on? I can tell from the number of questions I’m asking that I’m indeed having an existential crisis, my mind bulging as I try to wrap it around the bulging I.

Best set that aside for now. So we played games and ate good food, and when I was really little and we were still in Korea, there was the kowtow tour. We visited all the available elders — grandparents, uncles and aunts — and got down on our knees and made deep bows, and then they gave us money. That. Was. AWESOME. We got money! Also we received important blessings for happiness and success in the coming year, but as I recall that was all in fuddy-duddy talk I couldn’t really understand.

Did I mention that the grown ups gave us MONEY just for bowing??

On New Year’s Day 2014 I plan to wallow in gratitude for making it to another year in one piece. I’ll try to make some food. I’ll call family. I’m going to do the kowtow/blessing/money thing with the kids. And I hope I don’t waste a single moment setting myself up for failure by imposing any obligations of any kind on myself. No New Year’s resolutions for me, thank you very much.

The day after Christmas is Boxing Day for my in-laws, but for me it’s simply the day I face a bitter truth: I haven’t done laundry for at least a week because I’ve been busy pretending I’m Santa. We’re still okay because my kids each have at least 25 pairs of underwear, which I hope to teach them should never, ever be recycled out of the dirty laundry. But I need to bear down.

Last week Anthony showed me an ad. Costco sells emergency food supplies. I didn’t know! I can buy an Emergency Cube that provides a year of total nutrition for 4 people. 30,144 total servings of delicious freeze-dried food — brownies too — for less than 4000 dollars ($3,999.99 in case you’re wondering). Just add water.

Tempting.

But then, not really. I do believe if I ever needed that Emergency Cube, I’d be facing a pretty grim reality that not even mouth-watering rehydrated brownies could fix, assuming I could find a water supply that’s not poisoned or radioactive. What WOULD make me reach for my debit card today is an emergency cube containing a 365-day supply of freeze-dried clothing, total coverage for all seasons and extra kids’ underwear for their messy days. Until Costco decides to sell a useful bulk product like that, I guess I’m stuck doing laundry. I better get started. Happy Boxing Day!