Bike Widow

I’m a bike widow.  Perhaps widow is too strong a word as Ben is, thankfully, alive.  Let me put it this way, Ben is involved in a long-standing affair with a two-wheeled contraption.  It started before he and I ever knew each other.  They are very much in love.  It’s a little like Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.  Which puts me, not unflatteringly, in the role of Diana.  I’m working on my shy smile.

He escapes the house, he occasionally escapes the state, even the country, to spend quality time with his gal.  They scale mountains, take in glorious views that can’t be seen by car, sustain dramatic, bonding injuries when they mistakenly fly into trees.   They go where he can’t go with me.  He is king of the mountain and she his trusty mount.

As we eat breakfast he covertly checks Strava on his computer, an ingenius website designed for cyclists to compete with each other without actually riding together - a cyber war of the egos, a high-tech pissing contest.  I awaken to the sound of the Tour playing on his phone.  “It’s the final mountain stage,” he’ll solemnly confide to my half-opened eyes.

Cyclist friends of his can’t get over that I do not ride a bike.  Okay, I do, occasionally, for transportation, but – and this is stunning - I’ve never been on a mountain bike ride.  For these friends, who know him as a U.S. Cup winner, a World Cup champion, this is a little like finding out that Netanyahu is in a raunchy liaison with the Pope.

He has his bike, his one pure passion, his one sure-fire happy pill.  I have my children, my writing, my deep friendships, him.  I run, I do yoga, I sew, all happily.  But is there one thing that totally lights my fire the way the bike does his?  Why, no.

I’ve been grappling lately with this question: How deeply am I living?  It’s no doubt spurred by my mother’s recent death – life is short, blah, blah, blah.  Probably also by my age – who doesn’t think these things in their forties?  Menopause is somewhere on the horizon, a death of sorts.  A friend made me a mixed tape (okay, CD) for my birthday and a song came on the other day that made me happy.  I was singing, I was doing a little car dance, I was, for the moment, fully in the present, feeling my body in the world.  I know that’s how Ben feels on the trail.

Ben has his bike, he has his work.  He has things beyond the sometimes mind-numbing sameness of caring for children and house.  My mother devoted herself to her husband and her children.  When my father died and we kids were gone she didn’t have much left.  The story is more complicated than that, of course, muddied by depression and eventual dementia, by extreme introversion and mortal psychic wounds.  But I can see some parallels.  I pour myself into these people.  I have a very fine mind, well-educated and thirsty, chemically unreliable yes, but intellectually sound.  I am extremely capable in all sorts of settings but in my dark moments it seems like all I do is plump pillows.

It doesn’t help that virtually every message I get from the outside world belittles the work I do. In the novel I'm currently reading, one of the protagonists, a forty-two-year-old, well-educated, deep-thinking housewife is termed (by another – jealous - mother) as “not a feminist” because she doesn’t have a job beyond raising her kids.  Reading this, I felt like I had stepped off a cliff while picking wildflowers.  Really?  I’m categorically denied feminist credentials because I don’t get a paycheck?  Because I don’t “work outside the home” (I guess in that definition carpooling and grocery shopping don’t qualify as work)?   I’d really mean more to the world at large if I dropped the kids at the Y and spent my day at an office?

A fellow parent, a dad, recently asked me, so well-meaning, simply wanting to know me better, what I do while the kids are at school.  I was completely stumped.  I fucking run around is the answer, picking up the four pair of underwear Lana discarded on her floor that morning, filling the fridge with food that the children just might eat, volunteering in loud and sticky classrooms, getting out for a run or a yoga class, shifting the laundry from basket to washer to dryer to basket, scrambling to catch up before I have to fetch the three-ring circus from school.  It’s all so boring, though, as a response, as an encapsulation of my life.  So sad.  Finally, at a loss, he managed, “Well, it’s good you have yoga,” which made us both laugh for its earnest hopelessness.

I love that Ben has something in his life that he loves, something beyond me and the kids.  I love that he’s fit; his body is beautiful.  Our prospects of a long and healthy life together are good.  But I’m jealous.  Maybe, though, I’m not jealous of the bike, that bitch on wheels.  Maybe I’m jealous of him.  Maybe I need to make room for something – or things – that make me feel alive, vital, that I’m living this day like it’s my last.  Something that is just mine, that has nothing to do with my roles as mother and wife.  Something that sets me free.

But in the meantime, maybe less NPR and more music, less Facebook and more writing, less talking and more singing, less running and more dancing, less indoors and more outdoors, less routine and more surprise.

Teddy

My kids have never really been stuffed animal people.  Oh sure, the girls would go wild for some cute and cuddly chipmunk or lemur they’d spot at the gift shop at the zoo, beg and plead and carefully carry their new baby to the car.  They’d name it Sarah, snuggle it for the majority of the ride home and then it would join the legions of Sarahs that had come before in the many stuffed-animal-laden wicker baskets in the playroom.

Mae, largely unsentimental, does have Doggie, a small beagle-like creature that she received before she was even born.  That dog has traveled to Ethiopia, Alaska and New York City - where he was mauled by an overly playful Great Dane.  Panicking, I swiftly sewed the pieces of Doggie back together, frantically assuring Mae – and myself - “He’ll be fine, this will be fine.”  Somehow, through great will and fine sewing, he lived to see another day.  His ears are crooked and his nose is in a different place but he’s the more adorable – and adored - for it.

A couple of months ago, shortly after Mihiretu got his cast off his very broken leg, he took up with a large white teddy bear.  This bear had sat on the bunk above him for well over a year, it had been in our family for ten, but it wasn’t until recently that it was deemed important.

Shortly after he began toting the bear around the house, Ben asked Mihiretu if he had a name.  Mihiretu gazed at Ben like he couldn’t quite believe his stupidity and replied, “Teddy.”  The “duh” went unsaid.

Teddy is now a must at bedtime hours.  He is tucked in alongside Mihiretu, he must be retucked if Mihiretu (and Teddy) wake in the night, he journeys in the crook of Mihiretu’s arm into our bed in the morning, where he must be tucked once more.  If there’s a cuter thing than a sleepy, leggy, Ethiopian child hauling around a white fluffy teddy bear, I’d like to see it.

On a recent morning, Mihiretu, breakfasted and dressed, and Teddy, a captive witness to breakfast and dressing, ran into our bedroom at full speed.  They wiped out dramatically.  I dropped the mascara I was applying and ran to Mihiretu’s aid but he had bounced back up before I could reach him.  Teddy, however, was still man-down.

“Oh, Teddy,” Mihiretu squeaked in an even higher voice than usual.  “Are you okay?”

I returned to my eyelash grooming as Mihiretu cradled Teddy, crooning, “Teddy, did you bake yo’ weg?  Oh, Teddy, it gonna be okay.  Here come the ambu-ance –“ lots of Mihiretu-siren wail – “We gonna go ‘ospitle, Teddy.  Don’ worry, Teddy, don’ worry.”

Now this is not unusual behavior for a child I realize, but it is unusual behavior for this child.  This child who spent his first year with us angry and aggressive, a permanent scowl on his gorgeous face, swinging his fists at any opportunity, and his second year slightly less angry and slightly less aggressive, scowling and hitting perhaps only seventy-five percent of his waking hours.   To see him, at the beginning of his fourth year here, show any form of empathy, to a fantasy creature no less, to see him have some understanding of his own trauma around his own broken leg and our parental reaction to it, well, that was really something.

By tending to Teddy as his does, Mihiretu is finally admitting how he wants to be cared for, admitting that he likes the cuddles, the kindness, the nurturing, that perhaps he even needs them.  He is telling us that he is finally, fully, ready to love and be loved.  He’s so filled up he’s got some to give.  For now that love is being spent on a big ball of cotton batting and polyester fur but, hey, first Teddy and then the world.

Good Friends

Mae and I flew to New York City last week for a few days with my friend, Megan.  Megan, as I’ve said here before, is one of my oldest and closest friends.  She and Evany, who completed our threesome in high school, are more sisters than friends.  We grew to the same height, all wear size 9 shoes, have dirty blonde hair (though I’m currently bleached, Megan is red and Evany is a sun-kissed Clairol).  We talk over each other, we bend over with giggles, we can be careless with feelings, we weep on a dime; we behave like the fourteen-year-olds we were when we met.  We are present at births and deaths, unions and break-ups.  We show up and we hold each other’s hands.

I’ve taken many trips to see Megan by myself.  These are girl holidays; marathons of chatting, shopping and downing red wine.  This last time was the first I’ve brought a child.  But let it be said that this is my ten-year-old.  This is Mae who I do believe might be further down the emotional evolutionary chain than yours truly.  She, like her sister, is a good girlfriend.  She knows how to listen, how to gossip and most of all, how to accessorize.

The trip had many highlights (earring hunting on the streets of Soho, two visits to Dylan’s Candy Bar, the careful selection of outfits each morning) but the moment that really stands out, uncharacteristically for me, is when we went to see “Wicked”.

I’m an old actress remember (older by the minute) and, like my grungy, starving, die-hard artistic peers, the Broadway musical has always struck me as, well, too broad.  The constant jazz-hands, the Sondheim minor keys, the big themes and moralistic bents; it can be too much for a girl who has a love affair with subtlety.

That said, “Wicked” is a bit different.  Yes, jazz hands and minor keys, but instead of romance being the central theme, as it often is in these productions, this play instead focuses on a friendship between two women.  The friendship, to be specific, between the Wicked Witch of the West (Elphaba) and Glinda the Good.  Elphaba, in this telling, is dark, heroic and true.  Glinda, while her heart is good, just wants to be popular.  They are opposites but they form a bond early and deep.  In high school, as a matter of fact.

There’s a scene at the end when the two women are taking leave of each other for the last time.  Elphaba says, “You were my only friend.”  Glinda, with a wail of anguish says, “I’ve had so many friends.”  Megan and I howled with laughter because we both have had so many friends.  But Glinda went on and said, “But you were the only one that mattered.”

I have many, many friends that matter.  I love easily and deeply and fervently, in all categories – romantic, platonic and familial.  There is no greater thrill for me than holding the key that unlocks a heart and opening my own in return.  But of all these loves, there are a few that go even deeper.  There are a few people that have seen all sides of me; when I’m green with the stomach flu, when I’m bloated with pregnancy, when I’m near catatonic with depression, when I’m sparkling in my new dress from the Anthropologie sale room.

The lights came up after “Wicked” and the three of us moved with the crowd towards the street.  I was still a bit lost in the story, contemplating my friendships, particularly my bond with Megan, fighting back tears in the crush of humanity that is Manhattan.  Megan and Mae were chatting and then fell silent.  Megan sighed, “Good friends.”  That’s all it took.  I was flapping my hand before my eyes, blinking furiously, trying to swallow the sudden obstruction in my throat.

Good friends.  I am so lucky.  To find these friends, to find them in my daughters, even.  I’ve got jazz hands just thinking about it.

Qualities of Love

Mihiretu’s cast is now off.  He walks with a limp but in time that will go away; there should be no lasting physical effects of his injury.  What will stay, I think, is his newfound softness, his willingness to be vulnerable, his trust in us.

He asks me many times a day, “Mama, do you yuv me?”

Every time I answer, “I love you so much, buddy.  More than I can say.”

“You yuv me mo’ than Lana? Mo’ than Mae?  Mo’ than Daddy?”

Here I explain that I can’t love one of my children more than the other.  That these five people in our immediate family (like any self-respecting New-Age woman, I include myself in that number), that these five are more precious to me than anything in the world.  I love them, I love him, as much as I can possibly love.  From the bottom of my heart, as my parents would say.

In his newly unlocked passion for me, he is jealous of every person that I talk to.  When we go to pick up the girls from school, he watches carefully for my friend, Ann, in the distance.  When he spots her, he yells, “Don’ talk to Ann!  Don’ talk to Ann!”  If I am daring enough to approach her, for a fix of girlfriend to get me through the rest of the day, he pulls on me and pokes at me, wraps his arms around my head and screams in my ear.  It’s not attractive behavior, but I see where it’s coming from.

“How long w’you yuv me, Mama?” he’ll ask.

“Always,” I tell him resolutely.

“Not when yo’ dead,” he’ll say, peeking at me from the corner of his eyes, hoping that he’s wrong.

“I’ll love you after I’m dead,” I say.  “My dad is dead and my mom is dead but I still feel their love.  I’ll keep loving you forever.”

“To ‘finity and be-ond?”  He’s a fan of Toy Story.

“To infinity and beyond,” I assure.

“You yuv me mo’ than yo’ mama?” he’ll ask.

“I love you differently,” I tell him, brushing his curls from his forehead with my palm.  “You know how you feel about me?  That’s how I feel about my mama.  But when you have a kid you’ll know how I feel about you.”

Pacified, he’ll nod his head, skipping ahead to scout for more of my girlfriends, preparing his karate chops to ward them off.

It was my mother’s birthday yesterday, the first one since she died.  I thought of her all day, of how she loved me, of how I loved her, about how that love keeps on going even though she’s not here anymore.

I think, too, about Mihiretu’s birth mother, about how she must have loved him, about how that love must translate, must travel, from whatever world is next.  He’s got to feel it.  That mama’s love and this mama’s love, my mama’s love, all of it whirling around us in the breeze, holding us up.

Blonde

A couple weeks ago, in the gloom of a rainy Spring Break, with one child recovering from a adenoid/tonsillectomy (Lana), another refusing to walk on his walking cast (Mihiretu) and a third grumping around the house because she was “wasting her vacation” (that’d be Mae), I bleached my hair blonde.

 I say I bleached my hair blonde when in fact I hired a professional. I had fully intended to do it myself (you should have seen my “DIY blonde” google searches) but my sheer-master/hair-management guru, Sloan, made me see the light (Me: “I’m going to fuck myself up, aren’t I?” Sloan, nodding sagely: “You’re going to fuck yourself up.”)

I was blonde as a kid and then, with the help of highlights, had acres of blonde hair in my twenties. When I quit acting at thirty and simultaneously became a mother, I simplified by going brown and short. I never, though, in all those years of real and fake blondeness, have been this blonde. I’m Annie Lennox, Blondie, Billy Idol blonde (I’ve had “Eyes Without a Face” running through my head for days).

Okay, prepare yourself for some generalizations – I’m really good at these. Men, largely, don’t like short hair. I think they find it threatening. Find me a man who genuinely appreciates a pixie cut and I can virtually guarantee that he’s either very cool and sophisticated (like my beloved husband, who, okay, is maybe just humoring me) or, well, gay (and cool and sophisticated).

Women, on the other hand, tend to love short hair. I can’t tell you the number of times – a day – an unknown woman compliments me on my hair and confides that she’d cut hers like that – “but there’s no way I could pull it off”. I think these women are earnest. I think that women also know that men don’t like short hair and it’s nice to have the field narrowed – my short hair makes me less of a threat. 

Men, generally speaking, love blonde hair. There’s almost a Pavlovian aspect to their response. I remember walking down the street in LA and men shouting at me from behind. My ass isn’t J. Lo territory – they were responding to that swinging blondeness. Since dyeing my hair this time, I’ve coincidentally been on a kick to fix everything that’s broken in and around the house (dimmer switches, leaky faucets, peeling paint, cracked windshields). The plumber, the mechanic, even the skylight-guy have been particularly solicitous. I swear I’ve saved money.

Women, on the other hand, can find the blonde a little threatening. If the short hair makes me less appealing to the male species, the blonde makes me more, and the ladies are well aware. For the most part my loving community of women has been enthusiastic about the change but I knew I was really onto something when an acquaintance, someone who refuses to meet my eye though we’ve been at the same school functions for years, said, when introduced to me (again), “Your hair is different,” her nose wrinkling delicately, her sneer barely masked.

I probably sound pretty vain (which I am) and competitive (which I can be) and a slut for attention (why, yes) but I don’t think that’s wholly what this is about. To be honest, my main motivator for changing hair colors was that a lighter shade would hide the silver at my temples more effectively. I’m aging; my blonde bombshell days are behind me. BUT. It’s comforting to add a bit of the terrain of my twenties to the flat (if infinitely more tranquil) landscape of my forties. There’s a woman underneath all these children, I swear there is.

The Lover

Mihiretu has been in a cast for close to a month. And while this period has had its inconveniences (don’t even get me started about the wheelchair in the rain, let alone trying to catch his pee in a disposable coffee cup in the wheelchair in the rain), it’s largely been excellent.

Mihiretu is, confoundingly, perfectly happy laying around, soaking up our attention. While I get plenty of sympathy from people imagining that he’d be going crazy with restlessness, given how active he is, the truth is he’s more peaceful than I’ve ever seen him. I’m always up for a pity party but in this case it’s not party time.

I wrote here a while back that this injury has contained him, something we’ve never experienced. We didn’t know him as a baby, only as a terrible two. This time is giving us the opportunity to make up for that. We carry him from room to room, from house to car, from car to wheelchair. We hold him over the toilet when he needs to poop. We spoon cereal in his mouth as he watches Avatar on the IPad. We take him on long, meandering, treat-fueled walks in the jogger stroller. We sleep next to him. We wake up, uncomplaining, in a puddle of his urine. We sponge him clean. We brush his teeth. We meet his every need and he is delighted.

The other night Ben and the girls went out to a friend’s. I stayed home with Mihiretu. At first he was very upset that his dad was leaving without him, that he was missing the party. But when I told him that I really wanted special time with him, the tears stopped on a dime.

I was lying with my head at the opposite end of his bed so that my feet were near his face. He reached out and poked my bare calf, making the lax muscle waggle.

“What is dis fat fing?” he asked. To which, of course, I laughed, my calf being one of the lone bodies parts on which I don’t obsess.

Egged on, he continued, caressing my leg. “I yuv you, you fat fing.”

I put “Toy Story” in the DVD player and snuggled up next to him, “Downton Abbey” playing on my laptop. He held my hand, every once in a while leaned in and whispered, “I yuv you, Mama.” He even told me, offhandedly, that his penis was hard. All in all, it was an excellent date. Just Mihiretu, me and the good Dr. Freud.

Mihiretu, for his out-sized personality, doesn’t want to look different. I guess we brought him home to the wrong county – sorry, kid. But for now it’s not his skin color he’s noticing. It’s his giant orange cast. Whenever we’re out and about, he requires that a blanket cover his lap in the wheelchair, completely hiding his leg. If we weren’t conspicuous before - white mom, loud brown child - now with me hunched over his teeny wheelchair, we make quite an impression. It was weeks before I realized that people were imagining him to be permanently disabled. When my friend, Elizabeth, walked him and the girls down the street for ice cream, she felt impelled to break the tension. “Broken leg, coming through,” she sang cheerfully and watched people sigh with relief. Maybe it’s all these years of people not knowing what to make of our family, but I’m not letting anyone off the hook. There’s a certain passive aggression in me, something that makes me think “I’m not going to put you at ease. I’m tired of putting you at ease.” Mostly, really, I’m just too busy trying to get from Point A to Point B. And so strangers think me some kind of surly saint. Not only do I adopt a black child, but a handicapped one at that. You can almost see my halo if you squint.

And so we wheel on, me and my gorgeous, slightly broken son, him saying, karate hands flying “You wanna piece o’ me?” And more mysteriously, “You wanna piece o’ uncle?”

And: “Mama, I wanna tell you sum-tin. Mama? Mama?”

“Yes, Mihiretu?”

“When yo’ buthday comin’ up?” This is his big pick-up line, when he wants to demonstrate that he’s thinking of me, that he’s fond.

“June, honey.”

Then, reliably, “I yuv you, Mama.” If you had told me three years ago that this boy would be so devoted, this small tornado who glared at me and called me “Poopoomama”, I would have been shocked. And relieved beyond words.

“I love you, too, buddy,” I say, nesting one hand in his curls. “ Like crazy.”

All Apologies

I published something here a few weeks ago (that I’ve since unpublished) in which, I’m now realizing, I made a blunder.

As I grow older, and as I write here, I feel closer to my authentic self. I feel less interested in fitting in, less afraid of what others may make of me. I feel braver, more willing to expose my secrets, my shame, my thumping heart. It is liberating, it connects me with people I never imagined connecting with so intimately. But as I grow bolder, more confident, I’m ever more aware that I need to watch those broad strokes. I can speak my truth, the more the better, but I should only speak for me and, unless I have permission, about me.

The post I wrote a few weeks ago was about how I, probably like most people, can silently judge people. In an effort to speak to my own occasional small-mindedness, my covert bitchiness (the irony, the IRONY!) I used as an example a person I had misjudged and in doing so, depicted her in a less than positive light in a public forum. I didn’t name her but frankly, that’s not the point. The point is that I used this woman for my own purposes, never good, and without checking with her, a cardinal rule for me when I mention someone in these pages.

For this transgression, my deepest apologies. I feel pretty terrible about it, truth be told. I’ve written this current post three different times trying to find the right words. The last thing I want to do, for all my sass and bluster, is to hurt feelings. The true irony is that after writing the piece in question I ended up spending an afternoon with the woman whom I had criticized and found her, of course, to be kind and funny. That sound you just heard was my own foot kicking me in the ass. It was tired of being in my mouth, you see.