Pokemon: The Nightmare

So, they are these little dragon demon things that get injured a lot, and some of them can't breathe right and get migraines frequently? Maybe UTI's, too? And there are human keepers who have to, like, take them to the vet all the time? And each dragon demon thing has a certain number of assigned points, see, and they battle each other, and whichever one has more points is preordained to win over the one with fewer points (it might be a metaphor on society) and then, I guess, the one with the more points gets to keep the points of the one it beat, too? Real kick in the dragon demon pants, if you ask me. Then after they battle the human keepers talk in really high-pitched, breathy voices for a while, and it starts all over again.

If you can't keep up when you're attempting to play, don't worry, whichever child is closest will tell you you're wrong.

It's impossible to predict which dragon demon things are more powerful based on how they look.  Some have 4 arms and some are just a wad of chewed bubble gum. You'd think the 4-armed one would be a more powerful adversary, but you'd be wrong. You just have to wait for your kid to laugh at the one you chose and say, THIS SHOULD BE REALLY EASY every time you go into battle with him and the, apparently, way more powerful one that he chose.

They have ridiculous names like Sneezy and Emphysema and Blartbat and Kermudgeonator, but if you laugh or accuse your kid of making them up, you're wrong.

What else? Let's see. There are trading cards and posters and movies and TV shows and any merchandise you can think of.

Oh, they travel in balls, or something? They make a lot of noise and they are very brightly colored.

Nothing makes sense anymore and you just want to wear a big sweater and sit in a comfortable chair and feel safe again.

But you can't.

And you're wrong.

My Son's Father Threw Him a Birthday Party, and I was On the Guest List

How's that title for clickbait? Eh? That's the first time I've tried it. How did it go?

I read essays ALL.THE. TIME. that use gimmicks to get me to read them because I am a sucker and the gimmicks are working. They promote the material like something scandalous has happened or they've invented a new way to human, and really, it's pretty basic, simple stuff. I always feel ripped off by the end of them. Case in point, I recently read an article where someone tried to posit that her travel companion is her "away from home wife" and they're doing a polygamy kind of thing. But the more I read and understood, she was describing a non-romantic, non-sexual person she spends time with...someone we historically would have referred to as a "friend." But now we fancy, so it has to be her "away from home wife." K. You win. You got your dumb thoughts published nationally. Brava.

(Geez. Snark, much?) Anywho.

Here's what actually happened: Robb planned and executed Henry's entire sixth birthday party, from invitations through booking and paying for the event and receiving the RSVPs and forcing him to write thank-you notes. All of it. And I did NOTHING. And it was as great as it sounds! I showed up and watched the kids bounce around across the warehouse of trampolines and it was so fun and relaxing and I DID NOTHING. Robb built the cake. He made these great little goody bags.  He dealt with the kids' parents (scary). I hate socializing with people I only have my kid in common with. It freaks me the fuck out. He handles it like a social ninja. I just lurked in the back, laughing with Henry and his awesome friends. AND DOING NOTHING.

I told him recently that I feel like over the last year, he stopped being lazy so I could start being lazy. That's a gross exaggeration of what he didn't do and what I did in our previous arrangement, but really, since he stopped working full-time, he's done a bazillion times more work on the family/house/life stuff, and somehow over this year I've relinquished control and just sort of learned to DO NOTHING. I mean, there's a balance we're striking. His business is going well and he's working part-time now, and I can't reasonably be a bullshit of a spouse all the time, but I'ma read in the hammock sometimes now and not feel a lick of guilt. That's new. I'ma be grateful he planned a birthday party without me and not fuss over every potentially neglected detail. We're good. It's all good enough. It's all really good.

(It does occur to me, as a quick side note, that while I'm floored by his willingness and ability to plan and execute a social event like this, moms (and me, previously) do it all the time and I'm not sure that the dads always recognize enough what it took or are properly grateful. Let it be said and heard.)

Anyway. Thanks for the invite, dude. Great party. Invite me next year, too.

Dear Henry.

You're 6 years old now. I think it's time you learn the proper way to be a man.  I'm a woman, not a man, but I feel I'm equipped to teach you anyway, because they're pretty much the same.

You'll already know some of these things, because we've been talking about them since forever, so you can skip those parts. Just kidding. Read every word. I'm your mom. My words matter.

1. Take your shoes off. Go on barefooted adventures. Get filthy. Just be courteous and wash your hands before you touch anyone else with them. Climb trees. You'll fall sometimes. Climb them anyway. We have plenty of Bandaids.

2. Be a hero by showing kindness to all critters, at all times. It's the right thing to do. All the critters won't always be nice to you, but you show them kindness anyway. Remember that often people hurt others if they themselves have been hurt, so, show kindness and see what happens.

3. Be gentle. Be loving. Be honest. Be brave. All those things make you "honorable." If you're honorable, you are doing right for yourself and the world.

4. Make the next right choice. One at a time. That's all you can do.

5. Be weird. The secret is, we're all weird in our heads. Try not to let other people make you feel bad for your weirdness, or the ways that you are "different." They're just afraid that their own weirdness will be spotted. Help them celebrate their weirdness and be bold and celebrate yours.

6. The most important things you do in your life are going to take FOREVER to accomplish, and will be a TON of work. You'll probably be afraid and embarrassed and annoyed in the process. Possibly hungry and tired and worn out, too. There's no way to cheat the system, you just have to put in the time and work and hurt and sacrifice. It's a drag. Do it anyway.

7. You're going to keep learning until you're an extremely old man. Be on the lookout for new experiences and new information. Get used to not knowing everything. Sometimes our brains tell us we are important and complete and we resent finding out there are things we don't know. The wisest among us turn that part of themselves off and just say, "tell me more." There is so much to learn. Do it.

8. Read. People have been putting all kinds of ideas and information and stories in books since the beginning of people. You can always go on an adventure and grow yourself, if you have a book.

9. Take care of your teeth. And your body. Be wise and reasonable about your hygiene and fitness. You want to be able to run and climb trees into old age. But keep perspective. Your body is the way you get around the world, but your heart for love and your brain for learning and your mouth for telling jokes and stories are way more important than any other part of your body.

10. Be mindful of who is telling you who you are and what they are trying to sell you. Remember how you're supposed to be kind and weird and honest and brave? Those are hard things to be, so people will try to sell you other things that seem easier, more attainable. They'll try to tell you to be more fun, more relaxed, more muscular, thin, attractive, more or less hairy, whatever else is "new" and "in style." You should stand back and assess them before you decide if you want to take them on as your goals for you.

11. There are going to be hard days. Take care of your heart. When it gets really hard to be you, and you're feeling doubtful and scared and uncertain and alone, which will happen sometimes, you might find recommendations to step away from yourself and your goals, using things to dull the hard feelings. It's not going to work. Not for long. You have to come back to being you eventually. You just have to do the hard things. We'll help you. Find others who will also help you take good care of your heart.

12. You get to make the rules for you. We'll help you, because we love you and its happily our job as your parents, but you decide who you are and where you're going. Just do it one day at a time, one decision at a time. You can do it.

13. I think, if you follow these rules, you'll be OK in friendship, romance, school, work, art, sports, tree climbing, and travel. I'm sure I've forgotten some things. You can remind me when you come across them. Oh, keep eating your boogers. Studies have shown it's good for your immune system. You're going to have one hell of an immune system.

I love you,

Mom

I Want to Grow Old Together...Like, Today.

They do not stop me from falling down the hole on my bad days, these new insights. They don't entirely chase out the loneliness and embarrassment and doubt and FOMO and fear of everything else, but they do at least offer me some perspective on it.

Here's what I've decided about life and living. Are you ready? It's actually not about cake, so this is kind of a big step for me.

I think that over the course of a lifetime, we learn about our ego and how to control it. We learn that we're small, but just as small as everyone else. We're big, but just as big as everyone else. And we're temporary, just as everyone else is temporary. It does't matter if you owned a company or squatted in the basement of the building, you're just as much and just as little as the next person. And every generation figures that out, eventually, but I think not until old age. You realize, in time, that competing for the *most* of anything was an impossible, frustrating, soul-stealing (or, stifling, anyway) mission. You can just be. Who you are. Not on a pedestal, not under one. Not in front of a camera, not in the mirror, not trying to find a better version of you in a magazine or on TV. Just quietly, genuinely, you. You felt like you were "trying to prove" something your whole life, but eventually you're able to stand back and assess it and realize you never really new what "it" was you were proving, or "to whom."

We humans make these really goofy rules to live by and then assume everyone will follow them. Competing to win at the rules is how we keep things organized, I think.  If you really examine these rules- from caring about what clothes look like or what our bodies look like, or how stylish/fresh a piece of art is, all the way up to the caste systems we've designed to assign value to sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, culture...it's all made up.  It doesn't improve our survival or contentment, and most of it is unnecessary, so, can we opt out?

I think in old age, you realize you can, and you start to. What if we can do that sooner? What if our eyes are opened earlier in life? Cuz if a generation just becomes wise and woke right before they're folding into the ground, doesn't the next generation just rise and do the same thing over again, over and over into eternity like little neurotic nesting dolls? Is there anyway around this?

For me, the idea of God helps. A huge, eternal spirit who made me exactly as I am and doesn't regret it, loves me for me, is there, has always been, will always be. That's encouraging and helps me see myself as a speck in a speck storm on a timeless scale. If something happens that makes me feel badly about myself, in theiry, I don't have to choose to be mortified by it, because there is a big picture, and I am a cherished small part of it.

I'm trying really, really hard to examine the doubts and criticisms, as I experience them, and see if I agree with them before applying them to myself or refusing them. I'm reading the wonderful, "Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls," by Jes Baker, and it basically concludes that if we could shrug off the pressure on physical appearance, and the pursuit of some contrived beauty standard, we would be a more peaceful, fulfilled, successful, kind, interesting, giving, whole people. It would improve the planet.

So, the things that crush us, that make us worry, are maybe actually largely ignorable. Especially, if we can get control of our egos, the itty bitty ups and downs of our self-esteem bouncing around inside us, maybe we could be so much more. We don't actually have to care about clothes, or house size or décor, or the number on the scale. We are more than any of those things.  They are just the arbitrary proof we've settled on that we matter, or how we measure how well we square up against each other.

Let's let that go. We don't have to own it, have it own us. Let's be wise old birds, but youngish.

I'M TRYING. Like I said, this 'ah-hah!' doesn't necessarily chase away my blehs, but I do feel like it's helping my strength and courage.

Our Neighborhood Urgent Care Specializes in Childhood Woo-Woo Problems.

And so, after we'd played happily all night at the park adjacent to the baseball diamond where Henry was having T-ball practice, we got home and out of nowhere, Anna started screaming about her lady bits. 'MY VULVA HURTS. IT BUUUUUURNS.'  My kids know proper terminology because I just can't with the "front bottom" or whatever people tell their kids to call their parts.

I did a cursory evaluation and saw no visible problems, and so plunked her in the bathtub, because that's the cure to everything, but it just made it worse. I then applied topical anti fungal cream (diaper rash stuff), because that's the cure to everything else, but that didn't help, either. I bribed her with a snack and gave her some Tylenol and assumed all would be fine, but it wasn't.

She couldn't sit for the pain. She couldn't walk for the pain. She wasn't being dramatic and irate about it, as she is with most things that bother her, she was being pitiful about it. That worried me.

I racked my brain for what might be happening. I asked her multiple times, in multiple ways, if she had put something in her vagina (and if she had been hurt or touched, etc- thank God, no). I didn't love the idea of introducing her to the fact that she has a tiny pocket inside her in which she might put things she doesn't want us to find, but her confusion that there was "an inside" seemed authentic. I counted Barbie shoes anyway. We weren't missing any. Henry, helpfully, suggested it might be a wood chip from the playground, or a pineapple. I think he meant pinecone. We'll never know.

I wondered if she'd been exposed to something like poison ivy when I helped her squat in the bushes to pee outside the park (BECAUSE THERE ARE NO PUBLIC TOILETS AT T-BALL FOR 5 YEAR-OLDS) and if I had just caused my baby girl child's nethers to light on fire from a poisonous plant because I was too dumb to pay attention at the wilderness lecture at camp.

I waffled. I looked again, with a flashlight. I asked her to jump up and down to see if anything fell out. I'm a medical professional, after all.

She became more upset, and more specific that the pain was higher up, like bladder region. Her exam didn't act like appendicitis, but I thought maybe it was a urinary tract infection. It seemed like a really severe, sudden onset, with no preceding symptoms, but I don't do pediatrics. I imagine that tiny girl children's bodies work a little bit differently than adult women's bodies.

So, I took her to the urgent care. When we got there, there were, maybe half a dozen other people in the waiting room...so there was a decent crowd to hear Henry proudly announce to the receptionist, MY SISTER'S VAGINA HURTS HER BAD. A few minutes later, Anna was curled up in my lap, picking her nose, as one does in one's mother's arms, and I asked her about her bogie (Harry Potter talk for 'booger') hunting and Henry was mortified that I used that word out loud. If he only knew how people freak the fuck out over the world 'vagina.' I guess he'll learn. But, really, would it have been any less awkward if he had marched up to the desk shouting that his sister's "meow meow" or "tootsie" was hurting her? I think not.

Testing isn't complete, but it's looking like a UTI, and we'll hit it with some antibiotics. Hopefully she reacts quickly and feels 1,000x better tomorrow, because it was pretty miserable. This is the first of its kind, and I'm again feeling blessed for how healthy the kids are, and have been. Henry reminded me, in a loud whisper, so the nice PA could definitely, totally, not hear him, because geez, how embarrassing, that the last time we were there it was because he had what we thought might be a spider bite on his scrotum.

There, now this blog post contains embarrassing details about both my children's underwear areas, so they can both equally resent me.

I Don't Want to Be Your Mom, Dude/Good, I Don't Want You to Be My Mom,But You Could Be My Mamacita/ Too Soon.

The other day I was being a fancy lady and getting my nails done before vacation. The manicurist was several flavors of bonkers, which I usually love in a person, but she kind of lost me during a really long, drawn out story about her dog's false pregnancy. Anyway. Robb came to pick up a kid from me and the manicurist said something about what an involved dad he is and how I'm so lucky he helps.

It took 3 days and all the acetone she had to get the gel nail polish off my forehead when my head hit her nail table over and over and over.

Stop telling me I should be falling all over myself for a husband who does half the work. That's how it is supposed to fucking work. You have no idea how many people (mostly older women) have told me he's a miracle for doing laundry, cooking, managing the kids.

Screw them all. He's a good person, spouse and parent. I am fortunate to have him, but because he's him, not because he does the work that needs to be done. And instead of doing this life with his family, he's expected to be doing...what? Drinking with buddies, playing video games, sport balling, hunting, other recreational non-essential life things?

If me, the woman, the mom, didn't automagically do housework and childcare work and management of our social calendar and budget and all the other things, I'd be seen as inadequate, and depending how uninvolved I was in it, possibly negligent or even mentally unbalanced.

It makes me rage-y.

So, we're over a year into Robb starting his small business and working part time. I'm still working full-time in my same job. The kids go to school/daycare full-time. One of the countless painful things we've had to dissect our way through this year is how we distribute home/child/budget responsibilities. What are each of our priorities and when is it reasonable to expect tasks to be completed? What are our ingrained expectations of which partner does what and why are we living by them?

Ugh. Horrible. It's so boring and unromantic, fighting about the dumb toilet. I mean, the toilet isn't especially dumb, it's a normal, mid-range model, I think. It does its duty well. (Duty). But the topic is a dumb one for a fight. I want to talk about juicy, big, interesting things with this person whose brain I chose above all the other brains, but here we are fighting about toilets and kitchen sponges.

I also don't want to be the one to always clean the toilet, so we have to fight it out. Really, though, if a sitcom wanted to ever portray a real couple fighting about the real things couples fight about, it would be the dumb toilet and the dumb dishes in the dumb sink.

There's been some looped 'stop bossing me around/stop making me boss you around' stuff, but it's getting better. We divvy up responsibilities way more equitably than we ever did, and it feels less to both of us like I'm delegating to him and more like we both get it and are sharing the burdens, and are on the same side.

I like it. I had no idea how much I hated doing all the things that fell on my list until I stopped having to do them and had a partner I could trust to do them for us. Having a little extra time in one of our schedules has been beautiful, even though it means a lotta less money. And this transition have forced some much needed reflections and conversation.

So, when the crazy nail lady or the other old ladies I know crow about how helpful my husband is when he takes care of his own damn kids, like he's a dog who learned a trick, I'm going to tell them, Don Draper is dead, sorry to be the one to tell you. (If you miss Jon Hamm, just watch "30 Rock" on repeat, like I do at all times).

Real Life Events of Toddlers as Portrayed by Their Parents, Not to Scale: The Nap Time

We adults were hiding in our bedroom and bitching about the antics of the 3 year-old person,  planning our next phase of battle, when Robb started demonstrating what it's like putting her down for a nap.

This giant bearded man flopping around made me laugh so hard, I had to hide the bedside lube and film him to share it with all of you.

Please to enjoy.