Taking a Tour on the Blogosphere Bus

I met the fabulous Lisa Petty, of Petty Thoughts, at Blog U, dancing like a maniac. Or maybe it was me dancing like a maniac. At any rate, she's fantastic. And she invited me to be part of an ongoing blog tour! I've had a ton of fun at every stop, getting to know different bloggers and their writing styles and processes. It's a been a helluva digital vacation! And now the planes, trains, and automobiles have brought us here- to my stop. So while you take in the lovely Chicago scenery, maybe visit the Field Museum and eat a veggie dog on the back steps, I'll tell you all about what I do.



What Am I Working On?
I'm still fiddling with my memoir (excerpt here), and increasingly desperately trying to get a literary agent. The fact is, selling a memoir is hard, unless you're a celebrity. And sadly, having a few enormously viral blog posts does not a celebrity make. Aside from that, I'm writing here, on the blog, and I'm working on a super secret project I can't talk about right now, but that will no doubt make me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

How Does My Work Differ From Others Of Its Genre?
The memoir? It differs from others of its genres by somewhat defying genres. It's a story of the many ways our brains can try to destroy themselves, with tumors or poisons or chemical imbalances. But more, it's a true story about the power of love bold enough to stand defiant in the face of death. It's a love story, and an offer of comfort to anyone suffering from mental illness who ignores their own pain as immaterial or unreal. It's about surviving a death sentence, and collapsing under the weight of freedom. I'm not sure I've ever read a memoir with those particular themes.


Why Do I Write/Create What I Do?
I can't not write. I moved to Chicago for art school twelve years ago. And when the dean of the Art Institute welcomed us to the school, he said most of us would never work making art. Very nearly none. "So if you can do anything else, do that," he said. And it stuck with me, because I could. I dropped out of the Art Institute because I knew I could do something else. But there is one thing I can't stop doing. Since I wrote my first poem at age five, I cannot stop writing. Haiku, novellas, short stories, slam poems, fiction, and nonfiction... whatever is happening in my life, I am compelled to continue writing. Lucky me, the blogosphere is welcoming to folks with my particular writing handicap- namely, an addiction to an audience.

How Does Your Writing Process Work?
I'm a follower of Earnest Hemingway's methodology. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." I sit down to write, and I write until it's done. I ignore my children, I don't eat, I don't get up to use the bathroom. I just sit and write and write and write. Sometimes, I get an idea for a post or a chapter or a poem when I'm not at my computer. I turn it over in my head a while, coming up with phrases I like, examining the sides of the issue, or my perspectives on it, and then when I sit down to write I jump around a bit, make sure I hit all the salient points. But for the most part, I just sit and write.


...and that was the Becoming SuperMommy stop on the Blogosphere Express!



Let me introduce you to your next stops!

Celeste McLean is the writer behind the widely unread blog Running Nekkid, where she writes about grief, mental health, and her Pacific Islander ancestry. She left her tropical paradise island home twenty years ago and has been trying to figure out how to go back ever since. She currently lives in Seattle with her husband where they raise two children and tolerate one very demanding cat.

Get a feel for her by reading a few posts before you get to her station. Big Hair No Pants is a heartbreaking and beautiful tribute to her father. Then read For Ian, a Memory, which is an equally beautiful love letter written back before her husband was her husband. They are utterly marvelous posts, and your day will be inexpressibly richer for having read them.

Tamara Woods was raised (fairly happily) in West Virginia, where she began writing poetry at the age of 12. Her first poetry collection is available at Sakura Publishing and Amazon. She has previous experience as a newspaper journalist, an event organizer, volunteer with AmeriCorps and VISTA, in addition to work with people with disabilities. She has used her writing background to capture emotions and moments in time for anthologies such as Empirical Magazine, her blog PenPaperPad, as a contributing writer for the online ‘zine Lefty Pop, and writing articles as a full-time freelance writer. She is a hillbilly hermit in Honolulu living with her Mathmagician.

Get acquainted with her by reading her dystopian fiction, and watch her read a poem from her book- Hot Comb Self-Deception. It's wonderful.

Melanie is a recovering nerd who has always considered herself a writer, but barely considers herself at all anymore because three kids. She is mom to Moo, Slim and The Geel and is proud to say that so far the kids have fared much better in her house than the houseplants have. The NotsoSuper blog was born out of frustration and the not-so-thrilled feeling she got when she found out she was pregnant with The Geel.

She calls herself the NotsoSuperMom because she does not want to give anyone the false impression that she is trying to "do it all." She's not even trying to do it right. She'd just like to get something--ANYTHING--done. She writes to escape the laundry and to pretend that someone is listening to her. She was recently featured on In The Powder Room and you can find her on facebook and the twitter.

Get to know her delightfully self-depreciating humor in her post, Annie Get Your Gun (or the Night I Almost Shot My Yoga Pants). Then read her beautifully vulnerably post about the day she lost her first grader, Little Moo Lost.

Karyn is a lapsed social worker, work-at-home mom, and one-quarter of Team Pickles. Along with Ben (the thinker), Molly (the doer), and Ian (the Brit), she battles for truth, justice, and the Canadian way in a world where parenting and puns go hand-in-hand. Follow their adventures at PicklesINK and get short bursts of funny on Facebook and Twitter.

To give you an idea of why I'm crazy about Karyn (and it's not just her rock awesome moves to the Spice Girls), start out with her brilliant post- Are You Elsa or Anna? What Frozen Says About Depression. It's beyond insightful. Then for some more parenting depth and conversation on kindness, check out A Passion for Compassion.

The Four Year Old's Bedtime Lament

I cannot go to sleep tonight
The sun is still up in the sky
My sister had more pie than I
My fingernail is scratchy.

I have to pee.
I have to sneeze.
May I have a cup of water please?
I need a bandaid on my knee!
I heard a doggy barking!

I don't care that I didn't nap,
Or screamed when I took off my hat
I've yawned for an hour and a half
But I PROMISE I'm not sleepy!

Another song? Another book?
One with pictures! Let me look!
Not THAT one, the one that I took
and left at Grandma's house!

I hit my head! I hit my butt!
Look! My thumb has got a cut!
The door made a sound when it shut!
Don't leave the room! Don't leave me!

I see a bug!
I see the sky!
I have an eyelash in my eye!
If you don't sit right there I'll cry!
Just look at me- I'm weepy!

Don't lean on that,
Don't sing THAT song!
You're doing all the voices wrong!
My parts are short! Now make them long!
I don't want you to be angry.

Just one more hug,
one more big kiss.
Here on my nose- that time you missed.
Teddy goes right here, like this,
Goodnight, sleepy mommy.

I'll hum a song,
I'll whisper, "hush,"
I won't open my eyes up, much.
My teddy bear I'll gently touch
and nestle in my pillow.

The sun is gone,
the fan blades whirr
Here in my bed I gently purr
With little hands and growing feet
At last, your three year old's asleep.

A little trip in the Way Back Machine...

Me and M, Halloween '06
(I'm Countess Elisabeth Bathory, he's Col. Mustard)

I've been doing a lot of digging around my old stuff... old writing, old photos...

At any rate, I found this little gem of ancient history. It's a poem.

I wrote it for M, and never told him that I wrote it for him. It was before we started dating, when we were emailing each other constantly, in that state of nervous excitement that comes before you actually make a move,but you know that when you do it's going to go well.

I think you probably know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, this was a love poem I wrote for my husband, eight and a half years ago.

Radical Honesty

I want convention.
Tattooed, homemade, anarchic, paint splattered,
tattered, shredded and stained,
I want stereotypicy.
I want a house in the woods
two point five kids and a dog,
Hubby off to win bread by day
while I sew buttons and mend shirts
I want a garden and stained glass
Family trips to my inlaws
Bedtime stories and lullabies
PTA and car pools
Apple slices after school
and gingerbread at Thanksgiving.
In my inky skinned rebellion
In my determined questioning of authority,
In my polyamorous promiscuity,
I long for the normalcy of the American Dream.

Who could have known I would get what I wanted?

<3 div="">

March of Summer (in haiku)

They might in fact actually be fairies.

While there were tornadoes ripping past my hometown and through the southern parts of my current state (Illinois, not blind panic), here in Chicago we had... summer.

That's right.  For the first half of March, it was downright balmy in the windy city.  We had eight straight days of record breaking highs.  And not just record breaking, record SHATTERING.  A week ago, it was ninety degrees.  In Chicago.  In March.

So what did I do with my kids?  I took them outside.

I kept wanting to turn on the sprinkler in the back yard, but... who knew how long it would last?  What if it froze again?  Not worth the trouble.  So the girls had to be satisfied with playing in the grass and the sun.

Oh, the horrors.

At any rate, I don't consider myself a particularly good photographer.  But I do love taking pictures of my children.  And they certainly make it easy.  So here, for your enjoyment, is my photo spam.  Captioned in haiku.

Because deficient though I usually am in the realm of photographing my children, I am a master of poetical brevity.

glowing in the dusk

my sweet queen of the back yard

surveying her realm

knows what I'm doing

forgetting about the fit

she threw over lunch

two angels in white

dirty knees, chestnut ringlets

sand between their toes

sunlight in her hair

she tires of me watching her

"mommy, I coming..."

always mommy's hats

too large, too great, too heavy

always mommy's heart

Not Tiny Anymore

Apparently, they're dressed up as me.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been surprised enough by the simple fact to say this aloud... I have children.

Not babies.  Little girls.  Children.

Something in their brains has switched- they don't act like babies trying to get good at being little kids... they act like little kids.

They have tea parties.  They play pretend games, with stories that they act out.  Their functional vocabularies are staggering to somebody who can remember when it was a huge deal that they said "mama" or "dada."  When one of them stammers a bit, trying to find the right word, they know that it's there somewhere... and it is.

Their memories of recent events, and not so recent events, blows my mind.

If I mention snow, they tell me all about when Daddy made a snow ball and threw it "way up high in the air!"  That was months ago.

DD actually corrects me if I make a silly statement, like "You're a monkey!"  "I not a monkey, "she says, "I a little girl!"

And it's true.

Only robots and R2 units are invited to the tea party.

I'm having a hard time coping with that, honestly.

I think part of it is that I always get nostalgic when it comes time to switch them into the next size of clothes.  They're pretty much too big for their 2T stuff now, and for the first time I don't actually have a full wardrobe waiting for them once they're out of the current set of pajamas.  I go through all the new clothes and I think, "That can't be right, that shirt is huge."  But then, so are my girls.  I go through their closet and their drawers, pulling out everything that is simply too small now; the dresses that hardly go past their bottoms, the pants that show every millimeter of their ankles, the shirts that they keep tugging past their belly buttons, the sweaters with sleeves that don't reach their wrists...

It's been almost a year since I switched their clothes.  Almost a year since I swapped out their 18 month stuff for the improbably large 2T wardrobe.

And this time, we're also getting ready to bring home a new baby.

Instead of putting away the clothes into storage and donation boxes, I'm putting clothes into boxes to donate or for Baby X.  "When Baby X is wearing this shirt, my little monkeys are going to be in kindergarten," I keep muttering to myself.

They have some 3T pajamas that are identical to their 12 month pajamas.  If Baby X is a big baby, there's a slim chance that I might have them in matching PJs for a week or two.

In the last year, those owls have been loved to death.

Those purple starred PJs... I'll get used to them all over again on my big, big girls.  And shortly after they've outgrown them, Baby X will inherit the old pairs.

Baby X, still snug in my womb, who will be walking around the same time she gets pajamas to match her big sisters'.

SI likes to joke with me about the baby.  "There is no baby in mommy's tummy!  Baby in mommy's nose!  Baby in mommy's hair!  Baby in mommy's knee!"

DD likes to talk to the baby.  "Hello, little sister!  Hello baby!" she says, sitting on my lap and waving at my belly button.  She seems sure that the baby is actually in my belly button, and not inside my big round belly.

I get to have conversations with my daughters.  They tell me about their day, about their week, about the people they like, about their favorite colors and animals and foods...  They sing songs, they play games, they express themselves remarkably.

Today, as SI began to have her regular mid-day meltdown, DD looked at me and said, "It naptime, mommy!" and scampered off to her room to climb into her bed, while SI wailed, "I don't want get in my bed! I want sleep in mommy daddy bed!"

As DD collected the ever important frog lovies for herself and her sister, she explained to me, "SI very sad, mommy.  She don't want to take a nap."  "Do you want to take a nap?"  "Yes mommy!  It naptime!"

Cooking is very important business.

They actually *get* Skype now.  And ask for it by name.  "Want Skype with Aunt [Genocide]!  Want Skype with Poppa!  Want Skype with Grandmommy!"

Today, they sang Aunt Genocide a very impressive rendition of "Bingo."

I know, none of this is exactly earth shattering.  None of this is unexpected.  But at the same time, it is.  They keep growing, and learning, and while it's happening you're too busy helping them to learn, too busy being so proud of each individual accomplishment, that you don't realize the whole of what's going on.  You don't see that each of those little victories is accumulating, tipping the scale until suddenly you just don't have babies anymore.  You're missing the forest for the trees.

And then suddenly, something as simple as your daughter, wearing pigtails and looking like a mid-80s child TV star in her legwarmers and dayglo green dress, takes off her shoes all by herself and tells you that she saw a jellyfish and it was upside down, and now she's going to play 'So Big,' okay mommy?  See- I took off my shoes!

And then both of them stand up on the living room chairs, chairs that it seems like only yesterday (it must have been only yesterday) they could barely scramble onto, and they throw their arms in the air and shout out, "I so big!"

Then they climb down, crouch on the floor and whisper, "Now I tiny!"

And then back onto the chairs, proclaiming, "I so big!" as they laugh and laugh and laugh.  "I not tiny anymore!"

Two years ago, they were tiny

"No," I say, trying not to choke up.  "You're NOT tiny anymore."

And DD proclaims, "I want to jump on you!"

And SI joins in, "I want to hug you!"

And you throw your arms wide open for your big, big girls to run in and hug you as tightly as they can, because they're not tiny anymore.  And you have no idea how long you have left before jumping on you, giving you hugs and kisses and nuzzles and snuggles, before all of that is something that only babies do to their mommies and daddies.  You have no idea how long you have before you're switching their wardrobes out again, but this time with two little girls trailing you in the store, demanding clothes covered in characters you don't recognize and bearing slogans you find offensive.  You don't know how long you have before switching out their wardrobes means giving them each some money and dropping them off at the mall.

You don't know how long you have left for any of it.

Last week, whenever DD demanded, "I do it myself!" I glowed a little inside.  So proud.

This week, when she casually takes off her own clothes for bed, I can't stop myself from being shocked.

Who taught her that? I wonder.   Who taught her how to be a little girl?

DD's goofy grin

When SI wakes up after a nightmare and calls out, "I want my mommy!" knowing that I can hear her, and that I will come...

When she greets me after my morning on campus with, "You not at school anymore!  You came home!  I love you!"

When DD says, "I don't want to eat my noodles.  I want ice cream!"

When SI proclaims, "I a goof ball!"  And DD chimes in, "I a goof ball too, mommy!"

I put my hands on my stomach to keep myself from crying a little.  Because it's not over.  I have another one on the way.  Another one who will be here soon.  Another baby I can teach and watch and try desperately to protect from ever growing up, while desperately helping to grow up the best that she can.

But it will be so different.  Because DD and SI... they look up to me.  I am their hero, their example, their ideal.

But for Baby X?  It will be DD and SI.  I will always come second to them when it comes to being the coolest person around.  And DD and SI will love their new baby.  They'll love to teach her, to show her their books, to help her learn.  She'll want to dress like them, not me.  She'll want to play games with them, not me.  And by the time she's their age, and she wants to show them how big she is and how many things she can do, they'll be bored by her and think that it's annoying that I make them pretend they think it's the most amazing thing ever.

SI's faraway stare

But it is.  It is the most amazing thing ever.

My heart breaks with all the things I know I've forgotten about my children, about their babyhood.  I can remember in my fingers how soft the skin on their necks was as they slept in my arms.  I can remember in my shoulder the slimy wet spots from where they would latch on and giggle, drooling furiously.  I remember deep in my gut the way I felt when they would laugh their tiny baby laughs.

But I can't describe it.  Most of my memories are replaced by memories of photographs, of home movies.

Instead, I could tell you every detail about them now.  About the beauty mark that has appeared on DD's cheek.  About how incredibly blue SI's eyes are when she's daydreaming.  About how much I love them.

I love them so much.

No child could ever replace them, replace their babyhood.  Baby X can't take their first two years away, ever.  She will have her own infancy, her own toddlerdom.  I'll love her as much as any mother could ever love their child.  Just as I love SI and DD.

Tiny- two and a half years ago

But it will be different.  The whole experience of raising Baby X is going to be different.

My children, they were tiny last month.  Or maybe it was last year.  Or maybe it was longer ago than that.

But they're not tiny anymore.

Now it's Baby X's turn to be tiny.

And then it will be time for my heart to begin breaking anew, all over again, as she also becomes big.

And all that will be left of my babies will be those gigantic, goofy monsters, with their dress up clothes and their robot tea parties, singing songs of their own invention, and needing me only to reach the snacks on the high shelves in the kitchen.  Moving farther and farther away from me into the horizon.  Growing each day, while to them I remain eternally their mother... unchanged in my role for their life.

In the end, I think I might be the tiny one.  One day relearning what I actually do with my own time, what I'm actually like when I'm not dangling children upside down for the pleasure of the cacophony of laughter.  What I'm like when I'm not constantly keeping an ear out for my name, which used to be Lea but now is "mommy."

I miss my babies.  I am terrified and anxious to meet my new baby.

Only 8 months ago

And incredibly, I miss my toddlers.  But I love the little girls who outgrew them in the night to take their places.  I love holding SI's hand in line at Chipotle and seeing her face beam with pride as she announces to other customers, "This is my mommy!"  I love when DD brings me a paper full of scribbles and announces, "This present for you, mommy!"

I wish they would slow down for just a minute.  Just let me hold them and kiss them and smell them and memorize every single inch of them.  But they don't.  And no matter how I tried when they were different, when they were smaller and there was somehow more and less to forget, I did forget.

I wish I could freeze time for a week, for a day, and do nothing but count their toes and run my fingers through their incredibly soft curls.  I wish I could hug them, and just hold onto them for a few hours and remember.

I wish I could explain to them how much they mean to me.  But it would be pointless.  They know how much I adore them...

I'm their mommy.

It's the only explanation that they need.

Mommy and daughter, exit stage right

Edit:
Or, to sum up this whole experience in somebody else's words...

Mother, oh Mother,

come shake out your cloth,

empty the dustpan,

poison the moth,

hang out the washing

and butter the bread,

sew on a button and make up a bed.

Where is the mother whose house

is so shocking?

She's up in the nursery,

blissfully rocking.

Oh, I've grown shiftless as Little

Boy Blue (lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

Dishes are waiting and bills are past due

(pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).

The shopping's not done

and there's nothing for stew

and out in the yard there's a hullabaloo

but I'm playing Kanga and this is my Roo.

Look! Aren't her eyes the most wonderful hue?

(lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

The cleaning and scrubbing

will wait till tomorrow,

for Children grow up,

as I've learned to my sorrow.

So quiet down, cobwebs.

Dust go to sleep.

I'm rocking my baby, 

and babies don't keep.

A Glimpse Of SuperMommy's Journalling (NaBloPoMo)

Truth be told, I don't treat this blog like creative writing.

Which is odd, because I've always treated my journaling like creative writing.  Which is to say, like a sacrament.  Like an art form.  My paper journals are stunning.

I don't necessarily mean stunning in that they're pretty.  I can't claim that- my handwriting is utterly atrocious.  I mean stunning as in looking at or through them can actually sort of stun you.  It's jarring.  Occasionally beautiful.  Sometimes chaotic.  Some journals can't close for all the stuff taped in.  Some had to be rebuilt as I wrote them.  Some have completely fallen apart.

I tend to rotate my paper surfaces.  To experiment with colors and media even in such simple things as describing a weird guy on the bus.  Writing and sketches and pasted in random stuff all mix together without much of a sense of reason.

And then there's the code.

I made up a secret code in which I write, sometimes.  Developed, modified, and pretty much perfected over seven years- even once transcribed into a separate written language.  It's even got its own integrated forms of punctuation.  It has a 40 character alphabet.  When I'm somewhere public and I don't want anyone to know what I'm saying.  Or when I don't want anyone leafing through my journal (not that anyone does) to know what it says.  So whole stretches are utterly incomprehensible.

I don't treat this blog that way.  I treat it like an organized space, almost like a public space.  Because it is very much a public space, and my paper journals never were.

Is this a creative outlet?  I think so.  but my emotional connection to it is completely different.

My children have seen me write here more times than I can possibly count.

They have almost never seen me write in my paper journals.  My paper journals are truly private, even from them.

I like the idea that someday, they'll discover that I have all of them.  Yes, ALL of them.  That they have a personal history of their mother, straight from her own mind, stored in shelves, every book dated.  And they will discover the rich emotional and intellectual life I have always lived privately, and they will marvel at the depth of the character of their marvel.

Depth in that they will discover that I am not actually so easily described as, "Mom."  Depth in that I had a youth filled with emotional angst, that I went through my battles with depression, with self loathing, with hormonal rages.  That I suffered the unfathomable optimism of youth, and that I grew, slowly, from a child with illegible scrawl to an adult with equally illegible scrawl, and that the entire journey is there.  From 1993 (the year I turned 9) until the present.  On stunning page after stunning page.

Complete with set lists and ticket stubs, candy wrappers and love letters, wrist bands and locks of hair.  Poetry, words of the week, phone numbers, the mundane details of my days...

All about the mysteries and inanities of my life.  In every humiliating detail.  Because those journals are for me.

And this blog is also for me, but it is not the same.  This is for me as a public entity- as a mother and a wife and a writer.

And this blog is for them, for my children who I adore and who will love reading the stories of their own childhood.

And this blog is for my readers, who enjoy my rants and my jokes and my stories and my effervescent style.

But my catalog of journals... those are for me.  And they are always written by hand.

Books

A note:  This post will be liberally filled with links to poems, as this is National Poetry Month.


As you might recall, I have been having some trouble when it comes to getting my children to go to sleep recently.

That said, they're sleeping right now.  We've got a new bedtime routine.  Baths happen EVERY NIGHT, this winds them down and mellows them out... sort of.  Then we play in our pajamas for a while.  Then we read a story.  Then, while I tuck them into bed, turn out lights, and generally take care of the end-of-day things around their room, I sing a lullabye.  SI will lay down and listen to the whole thing, and as a result she passes out as soon as I leave the room- turning on the lullabye CD on my way out.  DD doesn't have anyone to play with if SI is asleep, so she goes to sleep as well.  And I get to drink a cup of tea/eat dinner/do homework/write/pass out in peace.  I feel like order has returned to the universe.

So tonight was nice and simple.  In fact, we had a remarkably lovely evening.  But SI decided that, after many months of complete neglect, it was time to go and test all of my toddler-proofing theories.

As you may or may not be aware, my home is full of books.  I mean, seriously full of books.  There are books in every single room, except the kitchen.  And the only reason there are no books in the kitchen is that our kitchen is shaped really strangely and has no storage space.  But someday, I'll be mounting a shelf somewhere... somehow... and it will be covered in books.

Our books are fairly well organized.  The literature, comic books, Engineering reference material (technically in M's office), and  oversized coffee table books are in the living room, the non-fiction, poetry, drama, reference, and sheet music is in the dining room, the costuming/pattern drafting materials are in the guest room/sewing room, the art books and old journals are in the studio, the "currently reading" and parenting sections are in the Master bedroom, the children's books (of which there are too many to fit on the shelves) are in the nursery, and the cookbooks are in the dining room as close as possible to the kitchen.  Even the bathrooms have books in them.

Got all that down?

So that's a lot of books.  Our friends DREAD helping us move our three crates of dictionaries.

This leads me to the million dollar question... How do you keep your toddlers from pulling all the books off the shelves and destroying them?

The good news?  Our kids don't seem interested in destroying books.  They want to read them.  Sure, they get disappointed when they realize that almost the entire Vonnegut collection is un-illustrated, but they don't tear out pages in frustration.  They just grab another.  And another.

Up until today, my plan for babyproofing the bookshelves had worked really well.  It was very simple- CRAM the books onto the shelf so tightly that it's difficult for an adult, let alone a toddler, to extract one.

This is easier said than done.  What's more, this is not good for the books.  But it had been working.

Unfortunately, it seems that SI has discovered that this method leads to an extremely fun game.  Yank as hard as you can on a book for as long as it takes, and then when it finally comes FLYING out of the shelf, it takes the neighboring six books with it.  The rewards on the book-extracting investments are extremely high.  This is a worthwhile enterprise.

What this is, frankly, is a problem.  In one hour alone, I rescued everything in the Literature section from Tyler to Welsh about four times.  I rescued everything from Hamilton to Harrison another two times.  And then once we moved into the dining room, I had to save about a quarter of the biography/memoir section.  Twice.

And SI just wants to sit down with a book and flip through the pages.  She wants to sit down with an old, dog-eared copy of Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and just smell the pages.

I can't argue with her. I love the smell of old books.  But I can't have her just pulling books off of shelves.  This is a bad game.  And in this house, it's a game that could go on forever.

And I LIKE my books.  I might trust her not to demolish them on purpose... but that doesn't mean I'm going to give her the chance.

So I'm at a loss.  How does one protect a small library when it lives with two toddlers?

Especially a super-villain in training like SI.  M seems to think the only solution is to pack up all of our books into boxes.

This is going to require a little bit of... thought.  Too bad that's where SI excels.  She's a champion thinker.  She's going to find a way.  All she needs is a little time.

I am extremely proud that my daughters are so enamored of books.  They absolutely LOVE books.  Books are their favorite things around- next to Mommy and Daddy and their stuffed frogs.  But they would always rather read a book than play with a toy, watch TV, or eat.

I just know that for the rest of their childhoods, their noses are going to be buried in books.  And I'm very happy about that.  We're always reading together, when they're a bit bigger we'll move on to picture-free story books, and chapter books.

And when they're old enough to really understand or enjoy digging into my "grown-up" books, they will be more than welcome to them.  I'll hook them up with some Atwood and some Rushdie and some some Hesse as soon as I think they'd be into it.  But not today.  Probably in more like a decade.

...so long as the books can survive until then.

Being Weird

unt G

My Grandpa Stan

Olah Momma! prompts, and I answer...

For me, strangeness is a proud family tradition that has been passed down through generations.  My father's family, for example.  There were some weirdos.  My late grandfather was a man of epic bizarrity, he was known to carry around a rubber change purse that looked like a vagina.  His eyebrows melded seamlessly with his hair.  He was sure that he had a perfect solution to create peace in the Middle East- just open up an amusement park on the west bank.  My father joked that you could call it "Jihad Land."  And that just scratches the surface of his oddness.



I have some of his voicemail messages saved on my computer.  His messages were epic.  This one was odd, in that he didn't repeat, "This is Stan," at lest twice.

  PinkPussy by leargrover

My father graduating... in antennae.

My father and his brothers all went on to be very strange people.  My father in particular prided himself on it.

Then there's my mother's family.  To be frank, my father's family was out-weirded without even putting up a fight.  The joke is that my mother's family was the Addams Family, complete with a Lurch and a cousin It.  And they all had a bit of a knack for the macabre and unusual.  One of the things my parents bonded on when they met was that they had both convinced their classmates that they were actually aliens from another planet.  They were both vegetarians, and I believe that they met because my mother stood up for homosexual equality when another boy accused him of being gay.

My mother and her siblings

My granddaddy would have been an Olympic gymnast, if that had been a lucrative career in the 50's and 60's.  Instead, he got dual Ph.D.s in physics and math.  He had a grad student who would hang around, a tiny guy with a high pitched voice that nobody could get rid of.  He was cousin It.  One of her brothers went bald at 16, started wearing a cloak, and made a bit of a side business selling amulets to the other boys at his boarding school.  He was very much Lurch.  My aunt joined a band in Hawaii and followed the Grateful Dead.  She also painted some lovely (and fairly trippy) paintings that I had hanging in my bedroom for a while.  My favorite was a landscape of a hillside, overlooking the planet earth.  My granny is a fabulous lady.  I love her like crazy.  And she is a little bit mad.  She has no sense of modesty or awkwardness, spins a marvelous yarn.  My other uncle is a Filker.  His big hit is a lullabye called, "The Demons Underneath Your Bed."  Then there's my mother.  My mother who kept a tub full of pet worms named "Squiggly," who collects rocks and lizards, who we would give millipedes and tarantulas for Mother's Day.  My mother, who has filled her living room with mounted stuffed animal heads (moose, lion, walrus, hunter...) of her own creation.  My mother is a weird lady.

So it's no wonder that their kids turned out to be just plain weird.

Aunt Something Funny and Aunt Genocide as teenagers

First, there's my older sister.  While she was in jail (for walking in front of a police station in the nude on a bet) she would write me from jail about harnessing methane from cows to power my grandfather's amusement park.  Her letters were filled with sentiments that she was, "the only one in here for something funny."  When we were little, she created a Barbie sized guillotine to teach my younger sister and I about the French Revolution.  Several dolls were lost to The Terror.

My younger sister, well, she's a Master of Genocide.  She's a die-hard comic geek.  She knows every single word of Harry Potter (read by Jim Dale) backwards and forwards.  As a teenager, she covered her walls in polka dot fleece fabric and photographed protests for a local gay newspaper.

Yours truly at age 7

Then there's me.  I'm not even sure where to begin.  First of all, just being a vegetarian with gigantic glasses and big hair in suburban New Jersey made me pretty weird as a little kid.  I started writing horror stories in elementary school- while I was in third and fourth grade I spent a lot of my free time working on a novel called, "The Globe," about an eeeevil high school teacher who used a gigantic, ornate globe in his classroom to incite horrific natural disasters.  It had a lot of the teen-gore genre failings, including the murder of all characters who got too hormonal and sexual.  I printed a book of one ghost story about my classmates being haunted by a ghost Trick-Or-Treater on Halloween.  My horror poems started getting published when I was in 5th grade (although generally only locally) and I begin writing short horror stories (much better than "The Globe," I'm happy to say) when I was in middle school.  At the same time, I began covering my bedroom wall with eyes cut out of magazines.  This continued for five years, until the entire thing was one massive collage.

My Eye Wall (me age 16)

I was a goth teenager, but I didn't really know that at the time.  I had eschewed all color in my wardrobe, and would wear layer upon layer of black and white skirts, slips, and other assorted lacy garments.  I dyed my hair black, wore heavy black eyeliner, and would occasionally tell my classmates that if they kept pestering me, "The halls of the school would run with the blood of the wicked and the obnoxious."  I had up to eight rescued ferrets at a time, living in my increasingly schizophrenic bedroom with me.  For a year or so I made my bed on a big pile of pillows on the floor, before my mother helped me construct a loft bed with a hidden reading nook on the inside.  It was awesome.

My brands of weirdness changed drastically when I started going to college, which I did at 14.  I learned to embrace colors, ALL of them.  When I was 18, I transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the only transfer student on my floor, and definitely the only one my age.

I took a few master's level writing classes, and spent much of my tenure in the role of Kramer to a friend and neighbor's Seinfeld.  I even had my own Newman.

"Dream Interpretation" 2003

I started making both close friends and bitter enemies of my art teachers.  I was intentionally antagonistic at times.  When my collage professor insisted that a good collage was small by definition, I would turn in mural sized assignments.  I got in shouting matches with my portraiture professor for making all the model's breasts green (which I still insist is the best color for breasts).  I alienated other students by taking assignments far too literally- in a mixed media class we had the homework of creating a box that visually represented what was inside.  People brought in shoeboxes covered in shells (with shells inside) and ceramic boxes in the shape of a butterfly (with a dead butterfly inside).  I made a vaguely boat-shaped contraption out of broken guitar strings, blank manuscript paper, and a shattered violin.  It was filled with silence.  Nobody but the professor got it

Now I'm essentially an adult.  Once again, I find that I'm weird by different definitions.  I'm a new mom in my mid-20s who's working on their degree.  I don't meet very many of those.  I'm pretty much a crunchy mama, but I vaccinate and I don't do the family bed thing.  I try to recycle and garden and use cloth diapers, but throw away a full trash bag nearly every day.  I'm a vegetarian chef, but I cook meat (very well, I'm told) for my husband and guests.  I sew as much of my own clothes as I can, but I'm a total fashion snob.  I'm an artist and a free thinker, and I'm in school to become a career bureaucrat.  I cultivate a love of horror films and musicals, that somehow manage to come together in such works of genius as, "Cannibal! The Musical."

I have a neurological disorder that causes synesthesia and phantom sensations.  My favorite foods are kik alicha and marzipan.  I'm Jewish and married to a Lutheran.  I often fantasize about cutting off my toes (even bought the tools once) but cultivate my toe hair.  I hate most things that might be considered girly, but I never wear pants.

I sometimes muse that the thing that I like least about being a mom is that I won't get to ride on any roller coasters for a few years.

I'm allergic to Swiss cheese and pretty much nothing else.

I'm afraid of butterflies.  Seriously.

My Droogies on their first Halloween

And M is pretty much weird, too.  He's a sci-fi and fantasy geek, he's a brain cancer survivor, and he's got a crazy sense of humor.  His family also has their share of weirdness in it, but that's not my story to tell.

Suffice to say, my daughters stand to inherit the family tradition of being strange.  Good thing, too.  I'm not sure I'd know how to relate to them if they weren't weirdos.

So there you have it.  That's my weirdness, mostly laid out for you.

Take it as you will.