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Mother, Iconoclast

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006

This is how sad my life is. . .

I was unloading the dishwasher for the second time yesterday, and I started putting away Rollie’s sippy cups in their designated drawer. Most of his cups are made by Gerber. They have interchangeable lids, meaning you can put the lid from any Gerber cup on any other Gerber cup and it will fit. This is excellent, because you regularly lose these cups. As I was mindlessly screwing lids onto cups, I looked down and realized i was putting an orange lid on a pink cup, and I thought to myself: “What an unconventional color combination!”

Happy Birthday

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
To our favorite fishin’ buddy.

I love you, Daddy!

Weekend in Auburn

Monday, March 20th, 2006

Todd, my rapidly vanishing husband (left) and I took the kids to Auburn for the weekend. His parents live outside of Auburn in the metropolis known as Dadeville. We got in late friday night, and then Saturday afternoon, we left the kids with Grandma, Papaw, and MeeMaw (their great-grandmother), and headed into Auburn for A NIGHT TO OURSELVES! First, we went and bought coffees downtown, then walked around, looking leisurely, as opposed to the drive-by window shopping done with kids in tow, at Auburn University crap clothing, and even browsed a local jewelry store owned and operated by a friend of the family. Todd said I could have anything i wanted out of the orange and blue jewelry section. I am not kidding; in Auburn, you can buy a ring made out of a silver tiger’s head with a diamond in its’ mouth. No thank you, dear.

After that, we dropped by to see friends, and then checked into the fabulous Best Western Auburn. We bought a six-pack and whiled the afternoon away watching War Games, Spike’s Amazing Videos, and Cops (only because the episode was filmed in Atlanta – we do have some standards.) After that, we got dressed and headed out to Auburn’s finest (and most over-priced) restaurant, Hamilton’s. I had crab cakes and a salad, Todd had stuffed mushrooms and the chicken caesar. Everything was good, but the crab cakes were possibly the best we have ever had. Thick, not too greasy, and mostly crab, rather than breading.

We ate leisurely, then went to a local bar to meet our friends Iain and Noelle (left) before heading to a party. We were easily the oldest people there. Todd and I played three really bad games of pool.We went over to the party and again, we were easily the oldest people there, but it was very fun to hang out at someone’s house and drink beer with strangers.

The couple who had the party, Sam and Kelly (above), also have a kid – Luke, 18 mos. He had been shipped off to Grandma’s in Montgomery for the evening.

We had lots of fun, hanging out with Iain and Noelle, Iain’s brother Matt, another friend, Shannon (who had ditched his kids this evening, too), and Ned and Vanessa, who had dropped their daughter, Scarlett, off with Ned’s mom, who also lives in Auburn. Such a small town, so many temporarily-orphaned children! Todd and I stayed out until almost 3 am (4 am Atlanta time!) and our favorite designated driver, Ned, took us home.

We woke about 9 am, showered, packed, took a cab to get the car we left at Sam and Kelly’s, and then ate Waffle House with the college hangover crowd. Then, we drove around and looked at houses, went by the city cemetery, and then drove back out to the lake to take a nap before the kids and Grandma and Papaw returned from church.

Either my camera was dirty, or i was drunk. Here are some more pics:



Iain and todd, hanging on the porch. When Todd wears this shirt, I am Hot Lips and he is Hawkeye.


Shannon and me talking breast pumps and breast reductions, and generally, just anything involving breasts.


Vanessa and Ned, our favorite designated driver. If he ever decides to become a drunk like the rest of us, we are in serious trouble. Payback is hell!


How does Todd mix this with beer and not have a hangover? Amazing constitution!


Here’s a picture of me in Auburn’s Pine Hill cemetery, where my Grandma’s grandma is buried.

And this is a picture of the spot in the same cemetery where Todd and his friends used to smoke pot in high school. Funny coincidence, no?

All good things must come to an end, however. We arrived back in Atlanta about five, proceeded to cook dinner, put it on the table, and Rollie refused to eat. Veteran moms of Rollie know this is not a good sign. Sure enough, he skipped dinner and then went up for his bath and began vomiting within the hour. This continued till about midnight last night, but he seems to feel better this morning. Here’s hoping that lunch stays where it’s supposed to!

It Was Only Beer, I Swear!!!

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

I recently spent four days at the beach with my sister and a couple of girlfriends. This was the first time I had been away from Matilda for more than a night, and it was quite an adjustment. Okay, who am i kidding? It was fucking wonderful.

There is a weird feeling that you get after having kids for a few months, where you start to feel them as an appendage to your body. I read somewhere that having a child is like having your heart walk around outside of your body, unprotected. Truer words were never written. To see them injured makes you feel physically uncomfortable. When you have children, any time you are not with them, there is a constant feeling of having lost your purse or keys or sunglasses. You pat at your pockets, and on top of your head where your sunglasses might be propped, and then you suddenly realize that what you are missing is your children, who are safely at home, tucked in bed by Daddy, or Aunt Lisa, or Grandma or Papaw.

The flip side to this constant feeling of absence, is that when you experience fun or relaxing things after having kids, you really experience them. Children make your life more full, and they make the moments that you are not with them almost hypersensual. You are so used to being attuned to what they are doing at every moment – Are they near the fire? Are they near water? Don’t walk out of the bathroom while they are in the tub. Is that ice cream spilling on the couch? Is he messing with the dog? Don’t let the toddler step on the infant on the playmat. Don’t let the toddler chase the dog, who might then step on the baby on the floor. . . blahblahblah, ad nauseum.

Sure, margaritas tasted damn good before, but now? Drinking your first margarita of the day, lingered over with friends, with the possibility of having one or two more, with no responsibility for getting up with children the next morning? That is something that can only be truly appreciated by the parents of the world. A leisurely walk on the beach, no handholding or leg clinging? Pure bliss. You decide you must run to the liquor store for more tequila? An absolutely exhilarating thing to realize you can grab your keys, flip flops, wallet, and ID and that is ALL YOU NEED. No diaper bags, pacis, diapers, extra change of clothes, sippy cups, cheerios. . . .

My recent trip to the beach included two periods of time when I was entirely alone on the beach. For one afternoon, there were other sunbathers there, but i had an umbrella, a cooler, a sheet, and an IPod to myself. I laid on my tummy in the sun, watching the waves crash to The Shin’s “New Slang,” The Stone Roses “Waterfall,” and The Cure’s “Plainsong,” and drinking cold beer out of a “Different Day, Same Hangover” coozie. The seagulls on the sand next to me seemed fluffier than I’d ever seen. I had the urge to touch everything. (Beer only, i swear!!!) My toes wiggled in the cool sand as if they could ground me. The wind in my hair was a caress from the hand of God, and I felt like i was floating. Everything was just . . . more than i remembered it ever being before.

It was a beautiful, memorable thing. It was one of the best moments of my life. I love Rollie and Matilda. I love being with them, and cannot imagine not being able to return to them. But children make everything in your life sweeter, even the times when you are without them. Especially the times when you are without them.

My New Favorite Word

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

uxorious \uk-SOR-ee-us; ug-ZOR-\, adjective:
Excessively fond of or submissive to a wife.

It is batty to suppose that the most uxorious of husbands will stop his wife’s excessive shopping if an excessive shopper she has always been.
— Angela Huth, “All you need is love,” Daily Telegraph, April 24, 1998

Flagler seems to have been an uxorious, domestic man, who liked the comfort and companionship of a wife at his side.
— Michael Browning, “Whitehall at 100,” Palm Beach Post, February 22, 2002

Fuller is as uxorious a poet as they come: hiatuses in the couple’s mutual understanding are overcome with such rapidity as to be hardly worth mentioning in the first place (“How easy, this ability / To lose whatever we possess / By ceasing to believe that we / Deserve such brilliant success”).
— David Wheatley, “Round and round we go,” The Guardian, October 5, 2002

Uxorious is from Latin uxorius, from uxor, wife.

Thanks to Dictionary.com for the definition.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

I finished reading Ecology of a Cracker Childhood a couple of weeks ago, but it is one of those reads that really sticks with you, that you keep referencing in your daily life, that seeps into your thoughts and makes you see things in a different light than you would have before reading it. It really took me that long to digest it. I knew immediately, even while reading it, that it was one of the best books I have ever read. But it becomes even more so when it sticks with you for weeks after reading it.

I can’t say that this would universally be a book that people would find as amazing as I did. I told Todd that I felt like it was right up my alley. Almost as if it had been written just for me. Or at least for other readers who have an interest in the history and ecology of southeastern Georgia, or the environment at large, or plants and animals, or in families that in print seem completely dysfunctional, but in real life seem like, well, my family. And that truly are like my family in that the area this author writes about is where much of my family has lived for over 200 years.

This book put into words so many things that I think and yearn for daily. The beauty of the southern (and more specifically in this book, the longleaf) pine tree. I can’t drive past any of the new McMansion developments without thinking about how the developers simply cleared the property of every pine tree, leaving only the hardwoods as sentinels to look over what remains. I think that people who have not grown up here do not appreciate the beauty of the pine tree; they find it sparse and ugly.

I know what it is to be innocent and fearless, to climb those trees and have the brown bark skin my knees and ankles. I know the sound my sneakers make as they slide down the trunk. I know what it feels like to feel a pine cone whip past me, skimming face, or arm, in a pine cone war. I remember the smell of the pine needles when they are green, and still in a tassel like a broom, and I know the stickiness of the pine sap. To me, it is the landscape of my childhood play, and the landscape of my heart. I yearn to be carefree, without the boundaries of time and schedule and responsibility, and to sit in the pines, and just . . . touch them.

Janisse Ray, the author, describes the very longing to be more at one with the world around her that I feel every day. There is a sense of nature-starved longing that I feel whenever I get out of the city, driving through the more rural areas of the Southeast, or at the Lake, or hiking or camping, or lying on the beach with my feet in the sand. Like her, I almost feel that i have been robbed of some sort of southern inheritance, something that was yanked out of my life prematurely and unnaturally by computer companies, and transfers, and suburban developments, and strip malls, and clear-cutting. I am not oblivious to the irony that without having been removed to the city, I would never have read this book, or been to college, or have the worldview that i have, the one that allows me to know what I have lost.

This is a book about Place, and how it figures in the shaping of us as Southerners. It speaks with a resigned sense of loss about family history and inheritance, about the story of who our people were, about where they came from, and where they settled, about the people and the landscape and how the two came together to make us who we are today: The modern day Southerner, a cousin once or twice removed from those whose feet were so deeply entrenched in their place.

I am a part of these people – A girl longing to belong to something that is part of her, but which is lost to her forever.

Why is it?

Monday, March 13th, 2006

That when Rollie has diarrhea, the dog decides to start vomiting all over the house?

The Littlest Literalist

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Rollie is learning to brush his teeth. This involves his new tooth brush, and his starter toothpaste, which is more of a clear gel, than a paste. His particular toothpaste is “Little Bear” style. For those of you not in the know, Little Bear is a PBS cartoon character. So now, Rollie refers to toothpaste as “bear.” Funny how kids are literalists that way. A perfect example of this literalism: Rollie was brushing tonight. He pulls his stool over to the sink, climbs up on it, naked after his bath. He holds the toothbrush while i put the “bear” on the brush for him. He begins to brush under my supervision.

“Rollie, brush your top teeth. That’s right. Round and round. Okay, now do your bottom.”

Rollie proceeds to take his toothbrush and brush his scrotum with it. That’s right, to Rollie, his bottom is the general area “down there,” and when I said “brush your bottom,” that’s where he went.

We are experiencing technical difficulties. . . .

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

Selling this damn house is really impacting my blogging time. How am i supposed to blog eloquently, when I am unable to be in my house during daylight hours? Sure, i could stay here for a while, but the longer we are here, the longer Rollie is leaving his footprint on the house, a big, huge, Abominable Snowman of a footprint: Thirty minutes of Rollie playing in the den takes about an hour to clean up before leaving.

Damn kids – Once again, they ruin everything.

Dispatches from Destin, or GERD Gone Wild!

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

Signs we’re not as young as we used to be: Each of the four of us has a “Golden Girls” familiar – I’m obviously Dorothy, Lisa is Blanche, Robin is Rose, and Vanessa is a cross between Rose and Blanche. It is kind of frightening. Okay, to be honest, I probably have a little Sophia in me, too. A Bluehair told me I was being “a good Mom” to Lisa. Two different college students called us, “m’am.” (Those little pricks.) Our dinner table conversations are monopolized by discussions of lactation, menstruation, hemmorhoids, and gastroesophageal relux disease (known to common sufferers as GERD, as in “this fried shit is going to make my GERD go wild.”)

Zen moments of the day: Robin and I jumping fearlessly in the freezing water to the amazement of hundreds of people on the beach, from five to eighty-five. Watching the really old guy in his flippers and bitchin’ cap swim farther out in the ocean than anyone I had ever seen. You go, grandpa! Sitting on the beach, warm sun on the skin, breeze blowing gently, watching the waves and the gulls while listening to “New Slang” and “Plainsong.”

p.s. Yes, Robin and Vanessa and Lisa, I love you very, very , very, very, very . . . much.