Poetry Thursday - Doors

Doors


The carpenter came
this week.
She finished the two small jobs
we had asked of her.
She told me the solid wooden door
I had found on the street
for my room
would fit just fine –
and it did.

Downstairs
she took the back door
from its hinges
planed the edges and
aligned it right,
hung it plumb
so the bolts slide
into the strike plate,
flush.
Now the lock turns
easily.

I can go out to the garden, now.
Sweet smelling curls of wood
have fallen among the purple violets.
I can close the door to my room
lie in the patch of east sun
that laps across the floor.

And I wonder,
that I never thought how all the while
what I needed was so simply
this:
a door, to the outside
that opens
a door, to the inside
that shuts.

~ Becky Birtha

This poem by my friend Becky Birtha is one that I come back to again and again. I hope you find something in it for you as well.

Comfort

When I was a kid, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for dinner was something of an event. It was participatory. Someone was going to get to cut the pats of butter in. Someone was going to get to pour the milk. Then the cheese. And then we'd all take turns stirring. It was my original comfort food.

I also clearly remember the feeling of abundance that went with that meal. I don't know how old we were when we finally finished an entire box in one sitting, but it was a long time coming. Leftovers were the norm for many years.

Now it's a new generation. My son is growing up on Annie's Shells and White Cheddar, which we try to make mostly when my lactose-intolerant partner is on a business trip or off in a field working on her chip shot. He likes to use a spoon. I like to use a fork. We both like it on the dry side. And much to my surprise, we've already had a night with no leftovers.

I can't help wondering if maybe someday I'll be mailing him a care package with a couple of purple boxes tucked inside. It's wild to be on both the giving and receiving sides of comfort.

(See what Krista, Amy, WAYA, and the other Mama Says Om gals have to say on the subject.)

A Great Race

Good afternoon, and welcome to another episode of Proud Mommy. Yesterday was the Princeton Fete, a community fair that serves as a fundraiser for our local heathcare system. After cheering on some of the 10K runners (the course runs right past our house!), we headed off to Princeton Stadium to check out the action at the track. D immediately wanted to know "what those big sand pits are for." A few seconds after my explanation of broadjumping, he was gleefully sprinting down the track and launching himself into the air. But that was just the warm up.

The big event was the one mile "Fun Run," which he participated in last year and was looking forward to signing up for this year as well. Last year, as an almost four year-old, he mostly walked. This year, he was ready. Long jump warmups were followed by stretches. Serious determination at the starting line was accompanied by stern requests: Could he just have his number on his back, because he saw that some of the grownups had it that way? And please could I let him just run, without tagging along? Since the course for the race includes sections on the track and an overland trek across some practice fields, we compromised: I wouldn't run with him, but was allowed to move around so as to keep him in sight. All through the race, I could see people looking at him and wondering where his parents were; a common experience for me as a parent of a determinedly independent child.

He understood that the big goal of the race was achieving a personal best, but his competitive spirit sometimes got the best of him, and he couldn't help stealing occasional looks over his shoulder to reassure himself that he was beating some people. ("Even some grownups, Mommy!")

When he felt himself running out of steam, he walked for a little bit, just as we had talked about, but I think he ran at least three-quarters of the time. And when he crossed the finish line, I thought, "Guess we'll have to pretty much plan on being around this weekend next year."

This Just In

Since becoming a parent, I've fallen off the wagon when it comes to making lunches. My poor partner, who used to be able to count on a lovingly assembled homemade lunch on a daily basis, now routinely finds herself scrounging for sustenance in town with the rest of the midday crowd.

Luckily, Princeton is crazy with restaurants.

But would you believe, that out of the 10 or so restaurants within easy walking distance of her office, the only one that offers an egg salad sandwich sans onion is... wait for it... The Red Onion?

You can't make this stuff up.

Great pictures and stories from today's Fete soon...

Thursday Thirteen: Tomorrow Will Be Better

So it started off bad and then just stayed in the groove. My Thursday, that is.

1) Lousy night's sleep because I bought cough medicine on the way home which I then could not find at bedtime (NOT Wednesday, late enough that it was actually Thursday), which sent me on an obsessive recursive tear through our not very large house, how can I lose something that I JUST got, I've checked everywhere, maybe set it down in the bathroom, or the kid's room, or...? What the *!@$?!! (Finally found it in the car. About half an hour later. My poor partner.)

2) I absentmindedly let the kid use a Sharpie marker in the kitchen.

3) Nothing gets Sharpie marker off the kitchen table.

4) Kept feeling like the newscasters were trying to get me to do a little rah-rah cheer over the death of al-Zarqawi. Not my style.

5) Used up my emergency stash of OB's. 'Nuff said.

6) Database into which colleagues will be putting essential end-of-year comments acting glitchy. Discovered at the last minute because that's when people do things.

7) My kid started and ended his day by being taunted by some little mini-creep at his school.

8) My allergy-induced non-productive cough continues to drive me (and everyone around me, I'm sure) insane. Can't possibly be TB, right?

9) Productivity at work pretty much went down to zero, what with the sleep deprivation, database issues, and constant coughing laced with fevered hypochondriacal worst-case-scenario imaginings.

10) Heartsick about Sassafras Mama and her family.

11) Second day of not hearing back from the one person I DID remember to call at work.

12) Left my housekeys in the car while accompanying D home from school on foot, so had to pathetically hang out on the front lawns of neighbors until I could be rescued.

13) More rain. Coat's in the car, too.

Foolproof prediction: tomorrow will be better!

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The Mouth of My Babe

D and I went to a victory party for Chad Goerner tonight at Conte's. Since D's birth, I have been much more politically involved than I was before he arrived on the scene, and one of the results has been that I am now the mother of an unusually politically aware 4.75 yr. old. (During the last Presidential campaign, during a long string of Dean for America Meetups, D turned to me and said, with apparently mounting exasperation, "Is How'Dean gonna be dere?")

One of the other revelers tonight asked D wasn't it fun to win for a change, and on the car ride home he asked me why we don't usually win. I explained that part of the reason it feels like we don't win that much is that George Bush has been the President for D's whole life (!), and he has one of the most important jobs in our country, so he has a lot of power.

D: Why does he have so much power?
Me: Well, for one thing, everything he does is news. If you or I say something, we're just talking to each other, but if the President says something, there are a bunch of reporters there all the time, and they make a news story out of it and put it in the newspapers or on the television or radio. Yesterday he was saying that he didn't think girls should marry girls or boys marry boys, and even though lots of other people think that's ridiculous, it made the news. So that's some of his power.
D: And he has his own airplane, right?
Me: That's right.
D: Then he should have flown right home when the hurricane came!* He should not have stayed on his vacation. I wish George Bush was a two year old. I wish George Bush was a baby. Then nobody would listen to him, and nobody would vote for him. Or if he didn't have a name, then how could he tell people how to vote for him, that would be good. Or I wish he was on Pluto. Then he would freeze to death. No, that would kill him, that would be too mean. He's pretty bad, though. He's like, only 1 good, and Mr. Chad is infinity good. Maybe send him to the North Pole, or Antarctica. Which one is further away?
Me: Well, we're in the Northern Hemisphere, so Antarctica is further away.
D: Okay, send him to Antarctica, then. I'm going to marry a boy when I grow up if I want to, because George Bush is just wrong."

* Note: D's class at U-League this year had several late-addition children of displaced professors from New Orleans, so he really "gets" Katrina.

The Beast

Today is 6-6-06. My very first car was nicknamed, "The Beast," and I'm well-aquainted with the "number of the beast" hoopla (ref. Revelations 13:18). When I went to get that car registered, finally making it up to the counter after waiting in the switchback DMV line for approximately two years, the following exchange ensued:

DMV clerk: Do you care what license plate you get?
Me, confused: Do I get a choice? (I had already scoped out the vanity plate options and decided they weren't for me.)
DMV clerk: No, not really.
Me: So, um, if I don't have a choice, why are you asking me if I care?
DMV clerk: [in a whisper] Because this is supposed to be the next one. (Holds up plate emblazoned with the license number CMG-666.)

Me: I'll take it! [Insert sound of the long snaky line of God-fearing Chemung County people behind me gasping in horror.]

Apparently the clerk had tried multiple times to assign that plate, but kept having folks flat-out refuse. Contrarian that I am, I thought, "Well, maybe this will lessen the chances that someone will steal it."

Not that theft was likely to be on anyone's mind. The Beast was a 1972 Buick Skylark, w/ a massive V8 engine that cranked out horsepower a-gogo. It also guzzled gas like nobody's business; if you went up a steep enough incline at a sufficiently aggressive pace, you could visually observe the gas gauge needle going down.


That's a fully restored and slightly souped up '72 Skylark, probably pretty close to what designers who had trained with Harley Earl had in mind... a thing of beauty, n'cest pas? If only I'd held onto her a few more years. But because of The Beast's strength and power, I tended to drive her like this:


So my car wasn't showroom material, but well-loved nonetheless. Eventually I moved to New Jersey; with new plates, the Beast no longer wore "the mark of the Beast." Still, everyone who ever rode in her called her that. And when the time came -- no functioning heat, scary knocking noises in the engine, etc. etc. I put an ad in the paper saying that she was free to a good home. (Since my chauffeur grandfather had given her to me, it somehow didn't seem right to make a profit on her.) I made sure to hand the Beast along to a mechanically-minded young man with a gleam in his eye, and for several years afterwards I was inordinately cheered by a few scattered sightings of her still out there on the road terrorizing the cars with some book value left in 'em.

So I'm not afraid of days or license plates numbered "666." How 'bout you?

Push Back

Now that the bloom is finally off the Republican rose, Bush is trying to rally the conservative troops by waving the dead-in-the-water Federal Marriage Amendment flag.

The only other time we've considered a Constitutional amendment that was exclusive rather than inclusive in nature was the eighteenth (Prohibition). And we all know how that worked out.

Feel like screaming? Go ahead. Then take a deep breath and call your elected representatives. Find them here.

Take 30 seconds to tell or remind them you're against the Federal Marriage Amendment and against amending our constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Tell 'em I sent you.

About Warmth

It wasn’t really a lie. Or was it? In the moment, coming out of nowhere because that’s inevitably how these things work, it felt like a lie. D and I were complimenting each other on our outfits one recent morning – a happy consequence of owning only one full-length mirror is that preening is a communal activity in our home – and he was particularly taken with my silky rayon pants. (Texture counts with this boy.) “Those are really fancy, Mommy. That’s probably like what you wore when you and Tama got married, right Mommy?”

And I said, “Well, yes, a little bit. Thank you, buddy!” It just came out.

He’s four and three-quarters years old, and I found, in that moment, that I am not ready. I don’t even know where to begin. He knows about prejudice and discrimination, and loves the story of Rosa Parks standing up for herself by keeping her seat. He knows that in our family we believe that who a person is matters more than what he or she looks like. He knows that different people belong to different faith communities and are differently abled. He knows that families with two moms or two dads are somewhat unusual. (The other day he quite confidently turned to a friend from school in the middle of a conversation about grownup life and said, “Boys can marry boys, it just doesn’t happen that often.”)

But I don’t think our son has any idea that many people in this country cling to a “conjugal conception of marriage as the exclusive monogamous union of sexually complementary spouses,” as Princeton Professor Robert George, who helped draft the dead-in-the-water Federal Marriage Amendment, has framed it. How would I explain to our son the existence of strangers who persist in the belief that our family is somehow a threat to them and their way of life? That people are fighting tooth and nail to prevent our family obtaining full rights under the law, as if that would somehow undercut their rights, as if there’s only but so much justice to go around. Our little man has no idea that every year for the last 13 years, as I complete my tax return, I check a box labeled “single” with a wrenching feeling of betrayal in my heart.

I don’t think he needs to know.

The laws are the laws, but they don’t need to intrude on my son’s happy life just yet. He knows that my partner adopted him – every spring we celebrate “Forever Family” day – and that we had to stand before a judge and promise to take care of him forever, and I think he likes that idea. (In fact, these days if you ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll say, “A judge. Or maybe a wrestler.”) He doesn’t know that without that adoption our state and federal governments would consider my partner and my son to be unrelated. He doesn’t know that we had to pay hundreds of dollars for a “home study,” in which a total stranger came to our home and asked a slew of invasive questions in an effort to determine our fitness to parent.

What D does know is that he is loved, and that his parents love both him and each other. He knows that snuggles are good for all kinds of hurts, that apologies and forgiveness help your heart feel better, and that if you hear a little voice telling you that something’s not right, you should take a moment to think about that. What he knows about marriage is that it is for people who love each other and want to stay together and be a forever family. For us and for our son, marriage is about commitment and warmth.

Did I lie?

The laws are the laws. But yesterday, New York's Court of Appeals (the highest court in that state), heard more than two hours of oral arguments on four marriage-equality cases. The New Jersey Supreme Court heard similar arguments in February. A decision in either case could presumably come before D’s next birthday. Our son has been to one same-sex wedding (in Massachusetts, of course), so he knows it’s possible. Maybe the next time he asks me about marriage, I’ll be able to give him an answer that reflects our family’s definition, one that I’m not afraid will hurt his heart. An answer that will enable me to buffer the discrimination by locating more of it in the past. An answer that is less about exclusion, and more about warmth.

(Thanks to Mama Says Om for the loving nudge.)