Sundays with Stretchy Pants

We switched the bedrooms around so all 3 girls have their very own room for the first time ever. Lena and Liberty have always shared a room and when Maya started beginning the night in a bed other than mine, it was Liberty’s bed she wanted to be in. Recently, though, their accumulation of stuff and clothes has made me very annoyed with the closet/bookshelf/toybox situation so I broached the subject of splitting them all up into their own rooms with their very own closets. Everybody was on board, so we went for it.

Yesterday was the first full day of lone bedroomdom and Lena used most of the day to lounge on her bed listening to her mp3 player with headphones on, singing right out loud to all manner of tween songs, both local and foreign. It was just as adorable as you’d think, but it also brought back one of my most awful childhood memories: When my brother was a teenager, he would put on his headphones and sing RATT and W.A.S.P. and Black Sabbath very badly and very loudly. Constantly. He wasn’t adorable. And he wouldn’t shut up. I at least had to good sense to turn my portable tape player up really loud in order to try to drown out my own voice when I was singing in my room. Not my brother. And, though he can sing very well now, back then, with his headphones on, singing his devil music, it was just painful to hear. Also, my portable tape player didn’t have a very high volume, so sometimes his voice drowned out my Cyndi Lauper. Not cool. Even if I didn’t know what She Bop was talking about, I still thought it was a kick-ass song and I wanted to hear it without some dumb boy singing “Round and round, what comes around goes around, I’ll tell you whyyy!”

It makes me shudder and it occurs to me that I’ve never addressed this deeply repressed childhood memory in therapy. Excuse me while I make a phone call.

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Like most of the other Columbus bloggers I know (and some I don’t know), I spent part of my weekend at Comfest listening to good music, admiring painted breasts, and drinking giant cups of beer. I had a moms-only night on Friday with Dawn and Kristen, and every time a young lady walked by with pair of uncovered breasts that were sitting up high where God put them, without the aid of any industrial-strength materials, the 3 of us couldn’t help but shake our heads and say, “Enjoy them while you can! They won’t always be like that,” and then we’d lament the fact that we didn’t appreciate our bodies back when we were young and perky, and now we’re stuck having to appreciate them for stupid reasons, like creating life and sustaining life and all that bullshit. Bitter.

We also found a perfect spot to sit and eat, and then we just couldn’t bring ourselves to leave the table because it was such a great spot for people watching. It was fun for me to see people that we see at the library, the pool, the grocery store, the farmer’s market, and everywhere else we go around here. It made this big (to me) city feel like such a small town. That might be why I like the Clintonville area of Columbus so much. It has big-city convenience with a small-town feel. A small town where people don’t freak out if you carry your baby in a sling or homeschool or homebirth or breastfeed a toddler. I love that about this place.

On Saturday, we went back to Comfest as a family just in time to see Kristen’s kids do their Grimaldi circus performance for 2 minutes until it got cut short because of the major thunderstorm that was on its way. It wasn’t raining when we took off, but by the time we were about 300 yards away from our van, the downpour was heavy, the wind was pushing us around and we dove for cover in a food tent near the North Market. The wind was rocking that tent back and forth in a very menacing way. I realized then that I only think thunderstorms are cool when I’m safely indoors. I was extremely uncomfortable with the amount of lightening, rain, and wind. My kids and my niece were all scared shitless, but they were playing it cool in front of each other. I was grateful for that because the cherry on top would have been desperate, “I wanna go hooome!” whining and that would have sent me over the edge. Bryan kept saying, “Let’s just run for the van!” But I wasn’t about to listen to him because he drove through Chesaning’s great tornado of ‘98 (Or was it ‘97?) all the while thinking, “Hm, that’s quite a lot of horizontal rain.” He didn’t know there was a tornado going on, but he was about a mile away from a barn that got destroyed by it. I didn’t think he could get that lucky twice, so we stayed put. Until the short man in the official uniform poked his head in the tent and told us there was now a tornado warning and that we all needed to find a building to get into. At that point, I looked at the kids with an isn’t-this-quite-an-adventure smile plastered across my face and told them, “Don’t worry, the North Market is right there and it’s a huge brick building. We’ll be fine. Isn’t this exciting? RUN!!!!” We ran into the North Market (It’s important to note here that Riley and Liberty almost got backed over by a police cruiser during this run. I had to verbally assault the cop. It’s not like he had his sirens on. I totally would have sued.) So we ran again with Bryan still saying, “I think we should just drive home,” and me saying, “You are a retard and if you keep it up I’m going to get all hysterical in front of the children. I’m trying to act like it’s an adventure, but I’ve already peed my pants from fear. You don’t know that, though, because we’re in the middle of a raining-ass tornado that has washed my pee away so shut up about driving home. We’re never going to get home. We’re all going to die and our home has probably already been destroyed by the tornado anyway!”

We waited inside the North Market for a bit and then people were saying, “I didn’t hear the sirens,” but my niece and I thought we did hear the sirens. I didn’t care one way or another because those stupid sirens were broken last week and they wouldn’t shut off after our tornado warnings were over, so how did I know they weren’t broken and wouldn’t turn on this week? You can’t trust technology! Except when it’s Dawn using her handy-dandy computer to tell us the weather. Yes, it finally occurred to us that we could call Dawn and she would tell us what to do. She told us that Short Guy was lying to us and told us we were safe to get the f*ck out of there, so we did. And then it turned out to be fun. We had our own little community festival with cozy, dry jammies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, candy, chips, and card games. Best. Comfest. Ever.

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I’m not the mom that you think I am if you think that post about Lena is the kind of mom I always am. If it were Liberty who had the trade remorse that Lena suffered through the other night, I would not have had the same compassion. Liberty is very susceptible to advertising and slick packaging. Her middle name is “impulse buy” (it’s a family name) and if she would have been in the same situation, I would have said, “That sucks. Go to bed,” because I would have felt like, yes, this is a lesson you needed to learn. Goodbye. By the same token, if Lena missed out on purchasing something because she waited and wondered and waited and wondered so long that it went out of stock, I would say, “That sucks. Go to bed,” because it might be helpful for her to learn that sometimes you just have to jump in and do it.

This is how money works with Liberty: She gets some and she spends it within 5 minutes. Usually she buys Another Effin’ W3bkinz. She always says she wants to save for 2 allowance days in order to get a DS game or something like that, but that would take “4 whole weeeeeeks!” So she, without fail, opts for spending over saving. Last allowance day, she decided she was going to spend some gift money and save her allowance money to pool it with Lena’s so they could buy a used Gamecube together. This was established before we went to the store to spend her gift money. While we were at the store, Liberty decided she didn’t want to pool the rest of her money with Lena. Instead, she wanted to spend every last penny buying several W3bkinz, which meant that Lena wouldn’t have had enough money on her own to get the Gamecube, which we were planning to get that night. We try to not be controlling when it comes to their very own money (as evidenced by the number of Effin’ W3bkinz in this house), but we felt that it was unfair of Liberty to renege on her deal with Lena and we told her so. She responded by very calmly paying for her solitary W3bkinz and then as soon as we walked out into the parking lot, she crumbled into a quivering mess of hysterics and screamed in a pitch that was so painful to hear that it could be used to question suspects at Guantanamo Bay, “IT’S NOT FAIR! YOU’RE MEAN! IT’S MY MONEY!” over and over with a red face and tears and flailing to boot. So I yelled back with my mean mommy tone, “I’ll tell you what’s not fair: promising to pool your money with your sister and then deciding not to and leaving her hanging. I’ll tell you what else isn’t fair: how about if Maya and Lena continue to get allowance money and you get NOTHING? How about that? That sounds fun to me! Yup, let’s do that. Now quit yer cryin’ and suck it up! You made a deal.”

Ahem.

They’re different kids, that’s all. I know it’s confusing, what with them being identical twins and all, but as much as I try to make them the same, it doesn’t work. My different reaction to them all comes down to my different fears for them. I don’t worry about Liberty over-analyzing everything to death and missing out on life. I worry about her leaping before she looks and getting seriously hurt in the process. Writing that, it seems like these girls just can’t win with me and that’s probably true. I am, after all, the mom. There’s just no pleasing the mom. I’m just looking for a bit of middle ground. I don’t constantly harangue Liberty about the fact that she will be bored with her W3bkinz within minutes of getting it home. It’s her money. That’s her lesson to learn and she’s not going to learn it with me rolling my eyes at her every time she buys something. I will step in, though, if her spending habits hurt another person.

Now I have to go because today is allowance day and Liberty is already at the other computer looking at “exclusive items” she can buy on the W3bkinz website. Commercials were made for kids like her.

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She’s addicted to the self-scan checkout thing at the library, which is fine, but I don’t have a truck with which to haul her freshly-scanned books home. She walks into the library, card in hand, and randomly grabs and tosses books at me to shove in the library bag as if the bag is like a magic, bottomless bag that can never be filled to capacity. There are usually 3-4 other people who need to shove books into the bag, too, but she hogs it up all for herself. And then I strain my shoulder trying to carry it. And then I take her home and force her to listen to every single book over and over until she cries. I’m passive-aggressive that way.

Maya isn’t the only one who got a new card; all of the girls updated their cards to the fancy new color ones and we got my niece all signed up with one of her very own, too. I really don’t mind lugging home a giant bag of books. I do mind the fact that each child has her very own library bag, but they all claim their bags are “toooooo heeeeaaavvvvyyyyy” *whine, stomp* and when I make them carry their own, they check out books based on weight and ease of carrying. Not cool.

You might have noticed by how rarely I update my sidebar that It takes me forever to finish a book, but that doesn’t stop me from adding books to my pile. I’m a fast reader, but I really only have time to read my own stuff at bedtime. If I’m reading during the day, it’s kid stuff. You know, to the kids. Or toilet stuff, like magazines. You know, on the toilet. (What? Is that TMI? But Everyone Poops. It’s no big deal.)

We usually have a family book going at all times and I used to let Lena and Liberty read ahead if they wanted to, but that got too annoying and hard to keep track of and then they would fight over who got to read it first and I like to have them not fighting and not annoying me at all times, so now they can’t read ahead in the family book, which makes them a little desperate. If I sit down on my own bed, behind closed doors and start to read my own book, it’s only a matter of a few minutes before somebody comes in and says, “Oh, you’re reading? Then you won’t mind reading this to us,” as if my piteous life has no purpose unless I’m serving them in some capacity. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

I long for the days when I had a breastfeeding infant/toddler/pre-schooler and I could retire to my bed with just that wee little one and, under the guise of trying to get the baby to sleep, just read and read and read to my heart’s content, only to emerge from the bedroom hours later with a shrug for Bryan that said, “Whaddya gonna do? Darn baby didn’t wanna sleep. What’s for dinner?” Now the darn baby has her own library card and, even worse, if I tried to take her to bed and put her down for a nap, her mouth wouldn’t stop running long enough for me to read a sentence. Darn baby with her fancy new library card.

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Watching Bryan become a father has been one of the highlights of my life. The first time he changed a diaper was when Lena passed some meconium in the NICU within her first hours of life and the nurse just handed her to him and walked away. It was fricking sticky meconium and the man just figured it out on the fly. Sink or swim. I remember when my now 10-year-old niece was born and we visited her together for the first time. We had been married for almost 2 years and we were on our way to being ready to start trying to have a baby. I thrust that 3-day-old baby at him despite his desperate protests of, “I’ll practice holding my own kid!” With my sister videotaping the scene, Bryan just kind of let the baby flop around on his chest and, if you watch that video, you can hear me saying shrieking, “She’s gonna cry, Bryan! Hold her up, Bryan! Get her comfortable, Bryan! Watch her neck, Bryan!” Sure enough, the baby wailed and Bryan failed the test. It was a silly test, but I couldn’t help but wonder.

If I knew then what I know now, I never would have had a doubt. Those first days and weeks and months he was thrown into the thick of things and he picked up all of the essential skills with ease and grace. Those skills that we can measure are one thing, but seeing him develop all of those intangible good-father skills has been the most amazing thing. And he treats me pretty well, too. I’m sure treating the mom right is an essential component of fatherhood that will come in so handy for these girls when they’re older.

Happy father’s day, Bryan. You have truly mastered this gig. I couldn’t be prouder to call you my husband, and I couldn’t be happier for the girls who get to call you daddy.

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You would think the abundant sunshine would allow me extra time to get everything done, but all it does is allow extra time for goofing around. It’s a seductress, that sun. It’s a tease, too. Did I get to have my iced java chip at Java Central on Tuesday? No, I didn’t because it was cold and rainy at the coffee shop, so I had to have my same ol’ chai because me old bones can’t handle the cold outside of me combined with some cold inside of me. Cold and rainy calls for hot drinks with an afghan. Preferably an afghan made lovingly by Bryan’s grandmother. She makes the warmest, cuddliest afghans and, to this day, Bryan’s favorite cuddle-up blanket is one that was made by her more than 30 years ago, with all of the colors that defined the 70s: Orange, brown, green, and gold. It’s a beauty. We have other ones that aren’t so offensive to the eyes, but there is something special about that hideous blanket. It’s the best.

Anyway, Lena and Liberty have been hogging up the computer because they figured out that they could make me upload videos to Youtube for them. They’re bossy. I’m working on teaching them how to do it on their own because, well, I’m lazy and easily frustrated. Plus, the laundry doesn’t wash itself, much to my dismay.

So even though we’ve been enjoying some nice weather, Lena and Liberty have been inside making movies and watching other people’s movies to steal ideas get inspiration. I know some of you might think I should feel bad about that, but I don’t. I do have a very unschooly side, even though I’m not creative and they do math papers. (The secret to the math, though, is that I want them to be good at it is so they can be good at gambling.) It’s hard to see the value in something like this Youtube thing, especially when it goes on for days, but it’s there. (This vid is from Lena’s Youtube channel. If your kids know my kids and you want links to the rest of their videos, just ask.)

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Today is Liberty’s last homeschool art class until fall. And since gas costs a billion dollars and the class is not within walking distance, I have to say goodbye to Java Central. *sigh* It really is the most beautiful coffee shop in the world. And now that they’re carrying AmyD stuff, they’re even beautifuller. If you’re local, and so rich that you can afford to put gas in your mini-van, you should go there and buy stuff. While I’m there today, I will be weeping into my iced java chip and drying my eyes with one of AmyD’s gorgeous aprons. *sniffle* I’ll buy it if I get it too snotty.

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Dawn tagged everybody with this meme about 3 things we do well as mothers, and then she verbally assaulted me at the park yesterday and threatened my life if I didn’t do it. (Not really, she just asked me to do it and so I am. Because she’s the boss of me. But you can totally see her verbally assaulting me, right?)

1. I take an interest in what they find interesting even if I find it horrendous. You know, so we can talk about it and I can be excited about it with them. I think they like that.

2. I cuddle with them endlessly.

3. I’m teaching them that their feelings matter and that they don’t have to go along with something just to avoid hurting a friend’s feelings.

Number 3 has been more uncomfortable for me than anything I’ve ever done as a parent. And that includes saying the word vulva. This seems to come naturally to Maya so far, but for the rest of us, it is hard to say no to people we like. It is hard for me to allow my kids to say no to playdates or birthday parties, but if they don’t want to go, I’m not making them go, despite my extreme discomfort. It literally goes against my make-up as a precious pleaser to do this (right now, my Ohio friends are saying, “What? You’re the biggest bitch I know!” and I’ll take that as a compliment, thankyouverymuch.) In the past, Lena and Liberty have asked, “What if so-and-so gets mad at me because I don’t want to go to his birthday party?” And, while my instinct is to say, “You’re right! We don’t want people to get mad at us. What will we do if somebody gets mad at us? I guess we better just ignore your feelings for the sake of somebody else’s feelings. Get in the car,” I have choked down that sentiment, broke out in a cold sweat and said, “Well, darlings, it’s like this: Your feelings matter. If your friend gets mad at you just because you’re not comfortable going to his birthday party, that is your friend’s issue, not yours. You aren’t in charge of other people’s feelings. Chances are, your friend will come to understand and respect your feelings. If he doesn’t, then he’s not a true friend.” And then I passed out from the effort of conveying this most basic truth of humanity. Our own feelings matter? WTF?

This trip is hard. Dawn is right when she says other parents make all the difference in the world. We need other parents who can be open and honest about the struggles in their parenting, the struggles in their marriage, the struggles in their lives. And you know what? We need to be able to talkabout the good things without setting off a competition. If it comes up in conversation that I cuddled with Lena while she talked about her Pokemon DS game for ten minutes, it makes me uncomfortable when another mom comes back with, “Well, I cuddled with my precious for even longer while she was talking about something even more boring to me.” It makes me feel like I made her insecure with my very small good thing and I didn’t mean to do that. And then it makes me feel like I’m in a competition that I didn’t know I was in. I usually get a free t-shirt whenever I sign up for a competition. I don’t have one, so I didn’t sign up. Stop it.

This is not a new idea, but we really, really do just need to be able to share and not be judged or fixed or competed with. It’s amazing how many of the posts for this meme start off with something to the effect of, “I’m supposed to say what I do right as a mother, but there are so many things I do wrong,” even though the instructions clearly say we’re not supposed to say that. We can’t help it. We’ve been burned too many times by the mommy olympics and we’re afraid that if we say we’re doing three whole things right, 800 other mommies are going to feel insecure and point out exactly what we’re doing wrong, or what they’re doing better. Stop it. We don’t need that shit. Let’s celebrate ourselves because, no matter what we do, our kids are going to be pissed at us. Let’s just be there for each other when it happens.

Oh, I’m tagging Mechelle, TooTightPonytailGirl, Sharon, Alissa, and Kristen. Five chicks who are ever so hard on themselves and deserve to talk about what they do right because there is a lot. A whole effin’ lot.

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It could be guacamole. God bless avocado season. I regularly pay $1.50 for avocadoes, so I’m in heaven when they’re 66 cents! Or it could be frosting from my birthday cake yesterday. My lovely husband and children baked me a white cake with chocolate frosting. My favorite. I’m special. I’m 33 now, which is how old Jesus was when he died, in case you were wondering. I could be at risk for crucifixion. I could be. You don’t know. I’m definitely at risk for leaving the house with frosting or guacamole on my face. That’s a given.

I had a good birthday until my stupid van started smoking. Effin’ machinery. Pontiac piece of crap. We’re supposed to go to West Virginia this weekend to visit my brother and his family and see The Weber Brothers
play. For free. They played at my brother’s wedding. I have a picture of them, but I can’t make it show up in my stupid blog. Effin’ blog. Do you hear me, Dawn? I say, I can’t get a picture to upload. I was yelling that, but I didn’t put it in all caps. Just trust me. So, we assume the mechanic will want to be paid for fixing the stupid van, which might mean no free Weber Brothers for us since we’ll have to spend the billion dollars of gas money that we were saving for the trip on fixing the stupid van. I hate budgets. Except for the part where they help us be debt-free, budgets suck. And they’re lame.

Now I want more guacamole and I’m going to have some because our budget allows for unlimited avocadoes when they’re 66 cents each.

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This morning as cd 101.1 was playing Yellow Ledbetter as the soundtrack to Maya’s snack time, I listened from the kitchen as she sang along. *sniffle* A little tear ran down my cheek as I whispered, “That’s my girl. That is my girl.” Though, I don’t really know what she was singing since the lyrics are famously indecipherable.

I spent much of the 90s trying to find the lyrics to this song. You know, before the internet and before Eddie Vedder would ever talk about any song. Ever! What does it mean? What is he saying? It was tough to sleep at night. I was certain the lyrics would give me a peek into the pain that made Eddie Vedder so damn irresistible. See, he mumbles because of the pain. The pain that could be healed by me, if only he’d let me. Left unsatisfied, I decided to get a tattoo of that little guy from the Alive single in order to experience physical pain that would match Eddie’s emotional pain.

I’m sure Maya knows on some child-like enlightenment-type level what that song is all about because she was actually at a Pearl Jam concert in utero. It was July 2003. I was 8 months pregnant and after 11 years of trying and failing to get tickets to a Pearl Jam concert, Bryan and I finally got some tickets. General admission lawn tickets, but still. I didn’t care that it was going to be outdoors in the sweltering Michigan humidity, with a bunch of sweaty, smelly idiots who were all so young that they didn’t even have one single piece of flannel hiding in their closets, and were only going to the concert to be all retro and stuff. Their favorite PJ songs were probably Alive and Jeremy and Black. Ugh. I hate those songs, like any true fan would. If it’s been played on the radio, then we don’t like it. We don’t. Because we’re better than the radio. Just ask us, we’ll tell you.

No, I didn’t care that I would have to share the hill with pseudo-fans. Well, I didn’t care until we actually got there and they took our blankets at the door because, “Pearl Jam concert goers tend to start fires so we don’t want blankets in there being piled on the fires,” and I looked at the huge, smelly crowd of people standing on the very steep, very muddy hill and said, “Huh.” I couldn’t imagine any scenario in which I would be able to lug my giant belly up that very crowded hill. I could, however, imagine that once I got up there it would only take the wind from a pothead’s exhale to send me tumbling through the crowd to the bottom of the hill, with my considerable girth leading the way. I said, “I’m not doing that. No.” And then we found a bouncer and told him that I was told on the phone that I’d be able to sit in the handicapped section. They slapped a handicapped bracelet on our wrists so fast, we didn’t even miss a single opening mumble. Eddie came out on stage and said, “Hey, mmbl fuble phrmbl DETROIT!” and we were there, in the comfort of folding chairs on level ground, in the very last row of real seating, 20 yards in front of the stupid hill! It was awesome! I felt like such a rebel and I decided that it was just as exciting to dupe the bouncers as it would have been to be in the mosh pit with a bunch of flannelless teenagers.

If you weren’t given the gift of lyric deciphering in utero by the gods of grunge, please enjoy this person’s guess. I think they’re as close as anybody can get:

Now watch this one and tell me you don’t want to lick the sweat off of his face. Ok, now I’m walking away from the computer because I just spent 2 hours going, “Watch this one you guys!” and Lena and Liberty are going to kill me. I’m going to go find my copy of Singles on VHS and rewind the scene with Eddie, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament in it over and over and over again.

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