savagemama

I’m a lucky girl for many reasons but one of them is because I have a few besties. There’s my wife, my mistress and a host of sister wives that make up my A-list. Then there’s the one no one in my friend circle has ever met but he’s the one I talk to most. And by most I mean almost all day, every day.

He’s my office mate and I’m sure he had no idea what was about to befall him when my boss walked me into our shared office last June. And share I have. Over shared, in fact, most days. Everything that goes through my head comes out of my mouth and there is only one thin cubicle wall between me and him. He hears it all.

My office mate hears about Eliza’s tangley hair, Seth’s pant size, Lucille’s boyfriend. He hears about it when we are broke, he hears about my daily schemes to move to Mexico or California or back to the South. He hears about my grandmother’s cooking, my mother’s mildly off color sayings, my sister’s college dorm room. He hears my phone vibrate every time I get a text, which, as you might imagine, is a lot. He hears me arrange play dates, doctor’s appointments and pretty much run my life from where I stand in the space we share. He knows what I ate for breakfast and lunch. He knows what I’ll eat for dinner because I usually search for dinner recipes and I tell him about everything I run across. He knows I want coffee at 3 p.m. and that I have to take walkabouts around campus to think. We are not friends on Facebook because, really, what’s the point? He’s heard it all before. <Read more.>

A few weeks ago we took a break.

We headed east then south in search of the sun. I needed to remember what it feels like to have the sun on my face, what it feels like to remove a few layers and feel the breeze on my skin. On my skin. Not on my sweater or my jacket. On the skin of my shoulders, my ankles, even, my belly. Like an animal I put my soft belly to the desert sun in one part playful unveiling, one part surrender.

Around this time of the year, I deeply miss the light. I grew up in South Carolina. In April, in South Carolina, it is warm. It is lovely. The flowers bloom, the air is tender and you can wear your Easter dress with sandals. In Montana, well, April is not warm. I suppose, by some calculation, it is spring but it usually involves at least one day like we had last Sunday where we kept looking out the window wondering if it was going to stop snowing. We went from, oh-look-it’s-snowing to it-looks-like-a few-inches to I-think-we-should-dig-out-the-car all in a matter of hours. We awoke to shoveling a path under the budding lilac and constant eye rolling on my part as I muttered, “This isn’t spring!”

And to my Southern soul, snow will never be springlike. So in late March we will probably continue to drive south looking for it. This year we found it by a tiny creek in Utah. We found it on slick rock in a twisty canyon where the walls rose high and red and the floor bloomed green. <Read more.>

Betrayal isn’t pretty.

Like Carl Sandburg’s fog, it comes on little cat feet and sits on silent haunches.

It’s beguiling, it’s oddly seductive. It’s always a slap in the face.

The worst kind comes from people we trust, people we’ve pulled into the inner circle. They give us reason to trust them. Then, they don’t.

I have a friendship in which betrayal has become a big component. Incrementally, and over the years, it has become the dark cloud under which the threads of our friendship twist in a gentle wind.

Over the course of this friendship I have created distance, I have drawn boundaries but it seems to have done little to ebb the tide of mistrust. It’s uninvited here, a sly conversation there that have added up to an undoing.

I think about what I would say if this were my daughter’s friendship and she was deciding what to do. Stand up for yourself I’d tell her. Be kind but be firm. Focus on the good friends in your life. Let this friendship fall way.<Read more.>

Over the years I have made it pretty clear that my little Lucille is no push over. She’s a tiny, fierce package who comes out swinging, shouting and stomping. She responds to perceived injustice, like a toy snatched from her grips by her sister, with explosive indignation. Eliza will poke Lucille metaphorically knowing what will come next. A small knotted fist held high in the air and a chase. Eliza will run around the kitchen table, past the stairs barely missing the pellet stove with her sister fast on her heels. They are both usually laughing and Lucille is gaining ground.

My first reaction when someone asks about my younger daughter is that Lucille is “spirited,” she’s “something,” she’s “well…” and I’m a little lost for words to describe her. Sometimes these descriptions come off a little negative. Even worse, sometimes they feel a little negative and I don’t like feeling that way about my own kid. Like fear, she’ll sniff it out of me eventually and, if that happens, I don’t foresee the path before us to be a smooth one.

So I’ve decided to change the game. Lucille is a light and it’s time to let it shine. <Read more.>

Today I got a message from my naturopath’s office. Just checking in, the receptionist said.

“It’s March,” she said. “And it looks like we always check in with you in March.”

Am I that predictable, I thought.

The answer is yes. March can be a rough month here in the Northwest. We all so desperately want spring and blue skies but what we get is two-day blizzards that melt into a muddy, gray-brown world.

Last year as I was unloading a winter’s worth of woes on my naturopath as she flipped through her clipboard noting dates I’d come to see her.

“Did you know you’ve been here every March for as long as I’ve seen you?” It must be my seasonal breaking point, where something must change immediately and I get myself to my doctor’s office hoping she has a cure all pill for job challenges, family stress and child rearing growing pains. She doesn’t but she comes pretty close. <Read more.>

Do you remember having just one child? I had only one for such a short, sleepless time that I barely do. When Eliza was fourteen months old I found out I had another on the way. So her solo time was limited because, really, once you know about the bun in the oven your heart is beginning to create another tether, another life line. As my belly grew, Lucille inside, I wondered how I would drive to town with two babies in the back seat. How would I go to the grocery store, I wondered. Target? The bathroom?

I have a friend who must have been on the same celestial clock. Her first daughter was born hours after Eliza and in the same room. Those two have been like soul sisters since. Like twins separated at birth, their actions, reactions and general moving through the world mirror each other even though they don’t see each other every day. When this friend had her second child, I was eight month pregnant with Lucille. We ran into each other once at a mother’s day party and shared the names we were thinking of for our second children, our bellies well into our laps as we perched ourselves on the lip of a hot tub.

She went first. <Read more.>

I was talking the other night to a few other mamas about getting a little, um, older. Things on our bodies don’t always seem to be in the right places anymore, we agreed. Gravity seems to be taking a toll and the sun, that lovely orb that used to bring us nothing but unmitigated joy, is causing us to have wrinkles.

I have noticed being a little more tired the last year or so with a little less bounce back on those mornings when I’ve stayed up too late the night before. Me and my four-year-old are alike in lots of ways but especially in that if we don’t get enough sleep it’s not fun for anyone the next day. She can writhe around on the floor and scream. I just have to settle for wanting to.

This getting-on-up-there conversation came a month or so after I’d gotten my cholesterol tested. It was a little high. Weight, fine. Body Mass Index, fine. Thyroid, fine. Cholesterol, not so fine. My grandmother had her first heart attack at 51 so I called my dad, who also has high cholesterol, to commiserate hoping he’d reassure me that I’m not on the same path as my grandmother.

“Yeah, mine got up to 190 before my doctor put me on medication,” he said.

“190,” I said. “Mine is 226!” <Read more.>

I like to believe I’m a fairly well-put-together person. I like to believe I can roll with a lot, that I don’t sweat the small stuff too much, that I can, in the face of bumps in the road, put on my big-girl britches and deal.

Like I said, these are the things I like to believe about myself. I didn’t say they were necessarily true. Then I realize it’s the little things that actually make me come off the rails. I can handle too kids with the flu for a week, I can handle $52.47 until payday and I can handle school forms, applications and deadlines. Oh, the deadlines. But one thing I cannot handle is a morning like this one when I discover, towel wrapped around my wet hair, that I’m out of hair product.

You are probably thinking to yourself, “Is this woman actually going to spend the next 600 words talking about hair?”

Well, yes. Yes I am. Among the many valuable lessons I learned in graduate school with five other women is a lesson that has stuck with me all these years since we had the grand luxury of sitting in classrooms, living rooms and barrooms together. You get enough women together and eventually two things will come up: hair and shoes. (Incidentally, I’m wearing a pair of black Frye boots that I’ve coveted since I saw an identical pair on a beautiful boy my senior year in college. He was beautiful, I tell you. I mention them here only because we are, after all, talking about hair and shoes, and because they are so rad that I can only hope for coolness by proximity). <Read more.>

I need a poker face.

You know the one. When one of my girls comes home to regale some wrong done to her on the playground I want to seem positive, unflappable, like there is no other option than to believe that it’s just how kids are, how they communicate, how they jockey for position in their worlds. I want to exude it will all be okay. You are awesome. If someone doesn’t want to play with you, move on and find another friend to play with. You have many. You are the kind of girl that has good friends, that draws good people to you. 

Instead, I ache over it.

I wonder how to say all of this and hide the anguish on my face. In this whole bringing-up-baby experience I don’t think I totally suck at too many things but putting on the “mom” face is one of them. I just want to crumple into a ball holding my ill-affected child and close the doors to the world outside.

Really, I know I need to get a grip. But I cling on every word, I wonder what this other child really meant by excluding my daughter and I think about the social web of my child’s life as I know it to be and I wonder how often this happens. What don’t I know? What other playground side stepping do I not hear about at home?

I take deep breaths. It doesn’t help. <Read more>

The other day I found myself in Target for the list of random things. You know the list. Knee socks. Ballet leotard. Tampons. Valentine candy. Deodorant. Granola bars. Kid underwear.

Lucille had been in ballet class in a too-small get up that looked like no one cared about her for a few too many weeks so I took my list and headed over on my lunch hour.

Usually it’s the kid crescendo of begging that sends me to the brink of an anxiety attack in Target. The whining for Dora Rocks! stickers or Tic Tacs on the home stretch passing the shampoo, the curling irons or the collectable cards on the way to the cash registers is usually enough to make me have a good old fashioned mama hissy fit and say no way too many times in a row. But on this day I was alone and my angst lay somewhere else. Namely, the little boys department.

I announced that morning that I was going to Target to remedy the ballet outfit situation so Lucille could stop pulling her current pink, sparkly uniform out of her pink, sparkly behind during class and Eliza stopped me at the refrigerator. I closed the door to find her standing right beside me. She put her hands together in front of her heart as she spoke slowly like I might miss something. <Read more.>