Still Growing Up

“If you think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.”
-Ram Dass

Last week my 5-year-old son was diagnosed with a physical problem that will require physical therapy twice a day for some time. As the therapist explained to me the details of his home program, I listened with interest and asked insightful questions about muscles, bones, and the forms of the exercises.

“This is great,” I thought. “I study yoga. I totally get this. I can do this with him and it’ll be a fun, yoga-like thing. He’ll love spending the special time with me.”

I’m so dumb sometimes. Ten minutes into our first session of “yoga stretches” I realized I was close to actually smacking him and his sister, who wouldn’t allow me to focus on Jonah for more than five seconds at a time. She jumped on my back, giggling maniacally, demanding that I observe her special yoga poses. She threw things at Jonah, and she harassed the dog (who insisted on being a part of the action, too). For his part, Jonah was claiming thirst, bathroom urgency, and unexplained itchiness all over his body.

(“Keep it light,” the therapist had stressed to me. “It has to be fun.”)

“Why are you acting like such a silly-billy?” I hissed to Jonah during this session. I didn’t call him a dumb-ass, but I thought it.

“It’s just that I’m sooooo itchy,” Jonah explained, falling out of his supine groin stretch in order to rub his knobby ankles together and scratch his legs. His falling out of the posture was complete, as he is built like a noodle and behaves like one that is hanging from a fork. I literally had to re-form him back into the shape.

This new routine in our lives happened to fall in the same week that I taught my first yoga class. I went into the studio thinking I totally understood what these postnatal women needed, simply because I had been there myself, twice. And plus I knew a few things about yoga.

The students barely restrained their irritation throughout the class. They looked at me as if to say, “Why are you asking me to hold this pose for so long? I don’t want to pay close attention to the position of my tailbone right now. Would you please bring back our real teacher?” I noticed that many of my instructions were not followed. I found this strange and disheartening.

It is the same way I have been feeling with Jonah as we struggle through our twice-daily “yoga stretches.” Only the difference is, I have power over him. Because he is completely dependent on me, I can snap at him and he’s not going to take his yoga mat to another studio.

Where is the love and compassion? I approached this physical therapy thing not with concern for Jonah, but a desire to see myself succeed at helping him. It is the same with my yoga students. I say want to be useful to them, but when I enter the room, I really want to be GOOD.

My ego is at the forefront, not my heart.

I have watched my yoga teachers make compassion look easy for years. Yet they have always said that showing true compassion for our loved ones is one of the most advanced spiritual practices we can undertake.

Don’t I know it.

Living on the Right Side of the Brain

This just in: engaging in only left-brain activities inhibits happiness, peacefulness, and well-being.

So concludes Jill Bolte Taylor, MD, a brain researcher at Harvard. And she would know: she had a stroke, lost the use of her left brain, and experienced nirvana. She discovered that when she left behind logic, sense of time, analysis, and story-making, all functions of the left brain, she could contact what she calls "the deep, inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres."

While I stood in my kitchen and read the article about Dr. Taylor, I continually pounded the counter and said, "Yes. Yes. YES." The yogis and the Buddhists have been patiently explaining this for thousands of years! I find it very gratifying to see another soul on this earth giving up exclusive worship of the left brain. To boot, she's a scientist!

Being unable to release the left brain is a problem. In mothers, I see a particular frustration that the list-making, multi-tasking part of our brains (left) can't shut up long enough for us to give our attention to anything else. Like, our own peace of mind, the beauty of our children's souls, or perhaps what's in our partner's underpants.

In addition to having amassed a lifetime of training mostly in the skills of the left brain, on top of really needing those tools to manage family life, the intense feeling of protection and danger that many women feel when we have babies can cause us to plunge into a constant fight-or-flight readiness. So we're secreting all kinds of danger-hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which tax our bodies and literally burn us out. (The authors of Women's Moods, a fantastic book on the subject, call this "brain drain.")

And we wonder why we can't find calm or restoration in our lives.

Before I go further on this tangent, let me bring my thoughts back around to left brain-right brain and Jill Bolte Taylor. For a couple years I've been fixated on the influence hormonal fluctuations have on a mother's mental health. Reading about Dr. Taylor's research lends another facet to my inquiry into this and other subjects, such as the effects of meditation and yoga for moms.

While the right side of the brain is linked with intuition, seeing relationships among various things, and "non rational" thought (i.e., thought not requiring fact or reason), which are typically typed as feminine qualities, I believe that many mothers spend their days smack in the middle of their left brains. Scheduling, talking, planning, and organizing are all left brain functions. For myself, when I spend too much time there and only there, I get overwhelmed and undernourished. I need some relief, some softness, some largeness. This is when my head feels like concrete. My brain needs the other side to fire and liquefy some of that rock.

It's that overwhelming sense of depletion that I experience and observe in other mothers. Now I'm thinking about it in terms of our brain hemispheres.

What is one thing you can do to play on the curvy, holistic, nonverbal side of your brain? What gives you a great sense of relief and openness when you think of it? How would you like to leave your task-master behind for some part of the day?

Does My Mind Look Fat in This?

Today I am aware of my failures as a mother. And a wife. And a friend, a daughter, and a person in general. You could say that I have been meditating upon these failures all day. That's what it is when we focus so completely on one thing; it's a meditation.

So I am meditating in this way as I drive my car when a message that someone told me once runs through my mind. Who was the messenger? The writer Anne Lamott? The Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn? My mom? Who knows? But it comes, as if by magic. Here it is:


Listen to me.
I want to tell you a secret.
There is nothing wrong with you.
There never was anything wrong with you.

But I looked so fat in all the swimsuits I tried on today. And I should've been at home with my little girl, who needs me so much. Is it worth it for me to leave her with the sitter just so I can burn fossil fuels to drive to a department store and try on synthetic swimsuits that make me look fat?

There is nothing wrong with you.


It's all well and good when I have my clothes on. I can fool everyone, even myself, that I'm not gaining weight, as long as I'm not standing naked in front of a 3-way mirror under flourescent lights. When am I going to get myself in order?

There is nothing wrong with you.

Let's just say for a moment that I'm not fat. Then why am I having all these deflating thoughts? Is this depression talking? Are my hormones fluctuating again? Is my mind stuck, for no reason at all, on the negative self-talk radio station Anne Lamott so accurately calls KFKD?

Let's say it is. I decide to let my brain go on with its prattle, minus my attention. I pop in a meditation CD. I am driving across the floating bridge. I am turning my attention to the sound of Thich Nhat Hahn's voice.

"Breathing in, I am aware that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I am aware that I am breathing out." BONNNG goes the bell.

There never was anything wrong with you.

This is so much more pleasant. I am enjoying the feel of my breath between sounds of the bell. I am feeling a nice warm feeling spread through my body.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with me.

Knocking Boots; the Married Version

I stood in the kitchen slapping together PB&J's while my husband, at the kitchen table, scrounged through a pile of my son's laundry to find matching socks.

The sock situation frustrated him.

"Jonah has fewer socks every day," he complained.

I shrugged. Matt worries about some things, I worry about others.

"We should just throw this one away," he said. I happened to have the gargbage drawer opened at the moment, so I stood back and pointed into it while making meaningful eye contact with Matt. He lobbed the white sock across the kitchen. It flopped over the edge of the garbage bin. I picked it up and inspected it.

"This is a perfectly good sock," I said. "Let's just save it. The other one might be in the wash."

"I guess so," he said. He held out his hand for me to toss the sock back across the kitchen.

"Are you guys flopping socks?" Audrey asked. She was at the counter pretending to spread jam on a piece of bread, but really licking the knife.

I smirked. "Is that like knocking boots?" I asked Matt.

"Is that what I think it is?" he asked.

I smiled. "Yup. And I guess flopping socks is what married people do."

Jesus and the Red Dress

One Easter, when I was nine or so, I spent the morning with my parents eating chocolate and our typcal holiday breakfast of eggs and bacon. Then I settled onto the sofa with a copy of the Bible.

There was a pause while my parents digested this heretofore unwitnessed Bible-reading scene.

"What are you doing?" my mom asked.

"Looking for Easter," I said, flipping through the fine pages. Would there be a chapter heading entitled "Easter: What it All Means"?

"Well, hurry it up, because we have to get ready to go to Aunt Rhonda's," she said.

This led to a Q & A about why we got together at Aunt Rhonda's for Easter, and why we brought chocolate eggs and Peeps in little baskets for the cousins, and what any of it had to do with this book I was holding.

"Well," she said, pausing at the edge of the living room in her nightgown and bathrobe. "This is the day that Jesus rose from the dead."

She obviously didn't know.I turned my attention back to the Bible. I wanted the story. I wanted the back story. I wanted the spiritual signifiance.

I still want the spiritual significance of most things (though Christian holidays in America no longer rank high on my list). I want my children to know the spiritual significance of things, too. When they begin to wonder what it all means, I want them to have some tools, some steps to take, so they don't have to scramble through impenetrable books when they're supposed to be getting dressed for Aunt Rhonda's. In fact, Matt and I have been knocking around the idea of finding a church we could tolerate for, oh, eight years or so. Since he was raised a Unitarian, we thought we might check that out. Since Unitarians tend not to be connected with witch burnings, gropes for political power or abortion-clinic bombings, I figured I could probably stomach it.

Reader, I figured wrong.

When the day finally came that we had agreed to meet my mother-in-law at her Unitarian church here in Seattle, with the kids, I was gripped with the realization that I would much rather stay home and stick my hand down the garbage disposal. I flung my clothes on the bed. I sighed heavily and stomped around the room. I wanted to wear serious lingerie. I wanted stiletto heels. I wanted something that said, "I don't belong in church."

In the car ride over, my husband and I didn't say a word. The children filled the silence with their own arguments about whose turn it was to hold the Red Robin balloon that we'd left in the car the day before. Finally, I spat, "Remind me why we are doing this? To make your mother happy?"

"Because we agreed that we wanted to do this, a long time ago. Remember? Remember how we talked about wanting to find a place we like for the kids?"

"Yeah," I admitted with great bitterness. I couldn't remember what that felt like, to want to find a church for the kids. I couldn't remember what it felt like to want that for myself. I had yoga now, I had Tantra to delve into, I had meditation and my yoga community. What could I possibly want with nice white people dressed in ironed clothing sitting with pleasant smiles on their faces?

"You obviously don't want to go," he said.

"That doesn't matter," I snapped. "I'm going." The children, previously riotous in the back seat, went quiet.

By the time we pulled into the parking lot, he was telling me that I had a problem with church and was acting like a brat and was going to ruin it for everyone else.

I denied everything except acting like a brat. And I pressed on with my commitment by rising from the car and unbuckling the kids.

We filed into the entry and began searching for Matt's mother. I looked away when nice ladies wearing big "WELCOME NEWCOMERS" badges on their bosoms caught my eye. I stalked over to the tea and coffee table. I had put on my most masculine, clunky boots, the heels of which now pounded the scrubbed wooden floor. I wondered, while pouring apple juice into paper cups for the children, why the idea of going to church always makes me want to show up in a red cocktail dress, smoking.

Inside the sanctuary, I looked around at the other families. I paid close attention to the expressions of the men. Were they dragged here by their wives? Was this their choice? Why did I think it might not be?

During the service, a storyteller came to the front and asked all the children to gather round. She was clever, and warm, and amusing, and the children responded to her with laughter and rapt attention. When she sent them back to the pews, I stood to be sure Jonah and Audrey were finding their way. I saw Jonah holding Audrey's hand, leading her confidently back to us. She followed mutely, her blue eyes wide and vulnerable. For a moment, I was swept up in the feeling of belonging, of goodness. "Those are my kids," I wanted to tell someone.

But then the singing started, and I stood silently while on either side of me Matt and his mother sang reedily into their hymn books.

The service drew its content from the Gospel of Recycling. I kid you not. They talked about green living. I was deeply unmoved. I couldn't get into the mediocre art hanging on the walls. I couldn't feel any power in the dull hymns. I felt exasperated by the relentless, nice humanism of the place. It felt like being in a public school, only everyone was better behaved and a lot older. My kids liked the place and my mother-in-law was clearly pleased that we were there, but I just couldn't feel anything there but a great urge to bolt.

I don't know how we are going to bring a formal spiritual lfe to our children. When my mother-in-law is here on her long visits, she can take them to church. I have no problem whatsoever with anything they are going to learn at a Unitarian church.

I just don't want to go.

How to Tell When It's Time to Get Laid

1. While watching the PBS show "Zoboomofoo" with the children, your mind wanders to what the fit, handsome Kratt brothers might look like out of their adventure-wear shorts. In the duck pond. With you.

2. While flipping through the Sunday New York Times Men's Fashion issue, you begin to sweat a little bit. You think you have never seen so much luscious man-skin, so many firm torsos and pouty mouths in one place. Not to mention the photo of Posh Spice's husband modeling a pair of underwear between muscular, spread thighs. What a magnificent pack-

"Mommy? Can you get me a snack?"

-age! My, it really is gettin' warm in here.

"In a minute!" Flip.

3. Again, while in front of the TV (it's been a long, cold winter), Handy Manny's toolbelt holds your fascination for longer than necessary. Handy Manny is a computer-animated character. But he's a grown man. And he's in your living room.

4. You count the minutes until your husband is due home, and not just so that he can take the critters off your hands.

5. You suddenly understand what your husband may have felt during all those nights when he begged you for sex. You were breastfeeding or postpartum or exhausted by too many fights about apple juice with the toddler, so you more or less told him to go in the bathroom with a bottle of lotion. Suddenly you want to make it up to him.

6. After a quick calculation that takes into account the flu that recently ravaged the household, the business trip, the weekend away with your best friend, your period and the long night your wee one spent wired on pediatric cold meds, you realize: it's been awhile.

Then again, maybe you're just ovulating.

There's Nothin' Wrong With Her That A Hundred Dollars Won't Fix

The sun comes out around here and we soggy Seattlites take our socks off on our front porches to air out the webbing between our toes. Everyone's happy. Everyone except me.

On me, the unseasonably long stretch of sunny days had a deranging affect. It was as if the bright light illuminated the dirt and disorder of my kingdom. My grip on sanity began to loosen. I was alerted and put on standby for depression by these warning signs:

1. I wrote a post about how unambitious I am.
2. I started getting anxious about teaching yoga. I started to doubt that I really wanted to do that. This lead to feeling like a loser.
3. I stopped answering the phone and picking up the mail.
4. When friends invited me out, I didn't want to go.
5. I decided that once and for all, I am not all that cute and I should just get used to it.
6. I fell into deep naps during Audrey's afternoon "rest time."
7. I burst into tears while talking to a sweet friend over green tea at the Madison Park Starbucks.
8. I began to feel that my children were making me sick.
9. I began to feel jealous of other writers.
10. I became paralyzed by the piles of CRAP around my house. I mean the papers, the kid artwork, the wrappers, the empty boxes, the broken crayons, the drawers that won't open because they are stuffed indelicately and haphazardly with CRAP, the drifts of pine needles and dirt that are collected in the corners of my porches and deck, the rotting front steps, the peeling paint of the south side of the house, the yoga teacher homework waiting to be done, the field of dog poop that is my backyard, the unanswered pleas for prenatal yoga subs from various members of my yoga community, the unpaid bills, the dog-eared catalogs, shall I go on?
11. I lost myself in fantasies about getting a studio apartment or office space or a room somewhere OFF-SITE so I could read and write and meditate alone and leave my own stuff around and not be disturbed by anyone. I began to think this was the answer to all my problems. If I could JUST have that, everything else would fall into place.

The sun is only partly to blame. More significantly, our beloved sitter who has been keeping me rational for a year and a half now has gone on to better her life in graduate school. She can only come a few hours a week.

FUCK ME.

For about two weeks, all I did was cry, obsess over all the stuff that needs to be done, drive my children to and from their schools, arrange playdates, cook 3 meals a day, tidy the house, do load after load of laundry, manage The Master Calendar that runs our lives, and ask myself, in the words of the Talking Heads, Well, how did I get here?

This isn't really my life. Oh, God, is this really my life?

Then, my mother-in-law took pity upon me (or had a sudden surge of desire to be with her grandchildren every day)and took the kids off my hands unexpectedly a few times.

Suddenly, the sun feels good. I made some appointments, I hired someone to fix the gutters, I bought some more clothes for the children, and I ate about a half a loaf of cinnamon swirl bread.

I'm smiling again and I can sleep without first going through a huge list of stuff that has to be done and despairing that there is no bloody hope of it ever happening.

See, I'm NOT getting depressed, but I probably WOULD if I didn't have some help. There's nothin' wrong with me that a babysitter won't fix.

Sometimes the answer is so simple.

*title quote by Tom Waits

March Blues

Today I listened to the entirety of Simon and Garfunkel's Collected Works.

Tomorrow it's going to be Bob Dylan.

My state of mind isn't going anywhere good, anytime soon.

Do Your Yoga and All is Coming

“Do not think you must have something extraordinary to show people. [The fruit of your yoga practice] has to come naturally, not artificially. So work, and let it come or let it not come, but continue your practice. Then, even if you have a family life and family commitments, there are no problems.”
-B.K.S. Iyengar, from the Tree of Yoga

So work, and let it come or not come.

This idea is a balm to my mind. My crazy mind usually can’t forget about all the things I have not achieved. It reminds me almost every day of the job titles I have not held, or the people I’ve met who didn’t respect me, how I haven’t earned the right to call myself anything but a female human, aged 36, sucking resources and stinking up the planet like every other ordinary person. It asks me what I have got to show for myself.

It’s ironic that my mind offers me this thought so often, because at the same time, I really am not an ambitious person. I have been reckless when attempting to write novels that had no purpose, foolhardy when I took jobs for which I was woefully unqualified, and arrogant when I overtook projects because I didn’t like the way someone else was doing them and thought I could do better. But really, truly, ambitious in the way we think of it? No.

I am playing with yoga very carefully now as I tread the teacher’s path. I do not want to become ambitious with yoga. I do not want to become greedy with yoga. Ambitions, when they come to me, tend to be short-lived. Then I become so disappointed with myself. At the same time, not having enduring ambitions to, say, become a famous writer before I hit forty, saves me from so much grief! With ambition comes attachment to outcome. If there is one place in my life that I do not want to be attached to outcome, it’s in yoga.

Once my best friend asked me, if I loved yoga so much, why didn’t I become a teacher? I made a face. “I don’t want to have too many goals in yoga,” I said. “I don’t want to worry too much about getting my heels to the floor in downward-facing dog by next month, for example. I enjoy the way my practice serves me right now.”
Then I went crazy and found a new purpose in life, which is to support the mommies of the world. One way I want to do this is through teaching yoga to pregnant ladies. Now that I am training to be a teacher, people ask me, “So you want to open your own studio?”

We’re funny creatures. We’re always thinking of the next step. Anne Lamott, in her great book Bird by Bird, says she writes only as far as the headlights shine, which is to say, she goes a little, looks, goes a little farther, looks, goes a little farther. She doesn’t run ahead where there is nothing. I like this approach in general, and especially in what I’m doing with yoga and my “supporting mommies” vision.

As to the “family life” part of the above quote, I must admit it’s comforting to hear the father of yoga in the West, also a father of six children, believed that one could have a meaningful spiritual practice even in the midst of family life. I have often wondered about this. Often I have wondered about this while doing yoga poses in my living room with my children crawling all over me. But, says Mr. Iyengar: “The yogis of ancient India were householders, and reached the zenith of yoga while living amidst household activities.” Here I must respectfully point out that the yogis of ancient India were not personally bearing children. They were all men. Even so, this doesn’t discredit Mr. Iyengar’s following statement: “You have to find out your own limitations. This is what yoga teaches: first, to know your limitations, then to build from them.”

Oh. So what I’m doing with my struggle to balance my responsibilities to myself and my family is exactly what I am supposed to be doing. Maybe there’s not some other, better, easier way to do it.

What do you think, readers? Do you ever feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing?

Can I Get an Early Dismissal?

“Go away.

No, really.”

This is what I’ve been telling my children all day. I woke up mean. The meanness was inspired by my daughter’s every-15-minute disruptions last night, between the hours of 9:30 and midnight. “Mommy, I have a tummy ache. Mommy, I need to be tucked in. Mommy, I want the light on. Mommy, I need some medicine. Mommy, I want you to sleep with me.” Worse were the moments when I was ripped from dreamland by Audrey’s raspy breath at my ear. She just came in to breathe and stare at me.

To be fair, her behavior was probably induced by the cold medicine I gave her at bedtime. Decongestant reacts with Audrey’s blood roughly in the same manner as a stimulating street drug might; such as, say, cocaine. Even though it wasn’t her fault, technically, I fell asleep so full of unexpressed rage that when morning came, I rose from bed with a great urge to kick the shit out of something.

On top of it I feel absolutely no creativity or interest toward my little wards today. I look at them and my mind offers nothing.

There must be something.

Is it too early for a drink? I thought, at nine a.m.

Later, an idea came. I will finally send out thank you cards for Christmas presents. Audrey can put stickers on the envelopes. Yes. Expressing gratitude is exactly the antidote for my foul disposition today. But the “Curious George” movie was on TV, and setting Audrey in front of it afforded me the opportunity to clean the entire house. For that time at least, I wasn’t growling at my daughter.

Here is the central problem of parenthood for me today: I’m in a crappy mood and I don’t have any patience for anyone’s nonsense. Yet my daughter is also in a crappy mood. She’s been in a crappy mood for about three months. She looks at me having difficulties and says, in so many words, “Like I care! Get my freakin’ juice.” Absent of motherly love, I perform my motherly duties with all the enthusiasm of a hungover 7-11 employee with irritated facial piercings.

There’s a great line in the book, “The Big Rumpus” that describes parenthood perfectly. It’s something like, “Being a parent is like getting off your job at Burger King just in time to start your shift at the coal mine.” When approached with the right attitude, such a life doesn’t necessarily have to be miserable, but there are days when I just want to be a three-year-old. When I want someone else to put up with my nonsense.

After the office lady at Jonah's school called to ask me sweetly if I had forgotten that today was an early dismissal, I pretty much gave up. I took the kids to Vios, set them loose in the play area, and ate a hummus plate I didn’t want. I kicked back with a weekly newspaper and read about all the upcoming shows I won’t be going to. It wasn’t exactly grace. And on the way home, Audrey threw a tantrum about some bullshit, and then she knocked Jonah over on the sidewalk.

There are two more hours until dinner and Audrey keeps trying to touch the keyboard.

Now is it too early for a drink?

Brokeback Soul

Two years ago, around this time, I went with my husband to see "Brokeback Mountain." I was in love with Jake Gyllenhall because he's so damn cute and has a special place in my heart because I watched "Bubble Boy" while in the first stages of labor with Jonah. I still haven't gotten over him.

Heath Ledger's character, Ennis, devastated me completely. He reminded me of my grandfather. All the people in that movie reminded me of my grandfather's people. Not too many of them are left on this earth, including my grandfather, and for the first time in awhile I felt their absence in my bones. I missed their speech and their smell (cornbread, bacon and coffee). Ennis captured some essence of my grandfather that I have not been able to catch in my own writing. I felt that Grandpa and his whole generation were wiped out or close to it, and the world was poorer for it. I sure was.

And then the story, well, the story I had read years ago when I was in love with E. Annie Prouxl's writing. It blew me away because she matter-of-factly portrayed two Montana tough guys as lovers, though lovers in the most animal sense. More accurate would be to call them fuckers, because in the story, that's what they did, on hard floors and in the dirt. It was violent and they hated each other for it.

"Brokeback Mountain" director, Ang Lee, kept this essence and added so much more to create a decades-long love/hate story, and told of the destruction of all the lives caught in its orbit. That tragedy, all the tragedies strung together, churned up more longing, regret, and sadness my body.

And then there was the wife of Ennis, who did her laundry by hand in the kitchen sink while the kids cried in their cribs. This was the life my grandmother had when she was sixteen, eighteen, twenty. This is the life so many women have, in fact, most of us mothers have, one way or another. At the time I saw the movie, my second baby was a year old, and I was unable to assimilate to the life of mothering two toddlers. I didn't have to wash my clothes on a washboard in the sink, and I didn't live on a ground floor apartment around the corner from my grocery store job on a Texas plain, but for some reason I couldn't shake that image of Michelle Williams scrubbing clothes and yelling at Heath Ledger to please pick up one of the dirty babies.

Plus there was the painful, devastating love between the two men that was never fully realized and never calmed. That terrible love that made them sick and crazy.

AFter the movie, my husband and I went home and went to bed. I didn't get up again for about two weeks. It wasn't the movie that did it to me, really; I was primed for a breakdown. I'd been yelling and crying for weeks. Something about my life had gotten out of control. But the spirit of that movie, and Heath Ledger's performance in particular, opened a gate to my own inner drama and my own pain.

There was no question of fighting what came. It was as if the ocean decided to roll over me, take me out, fill me with its salt and force me down to the muddy floor where the mutated, one-eyed creatures live.

I'll never get over Heath.

Which of My Darlings Shall I Murder Today?

I've neglected to tell you that I'm operating on half-doses of medication these days. My life is stuffed to capacity and sometimes I even have to schedule pee breaks, so it seemed like a choice time to introduce a new health regimen and take away one of the pillars of sanity in my life.

It's not like I'm doing anything else right now.

I'm not, like, training to be a yoga teacher. Or raising two little kids. Or writing. Or maintaining friendships and family relationships, or a marriage. Or performing most of the household duties, planning, driving, phoning, and organizing for my wittle nuclear family. (I don't know who is going to start sweeping the porches, taking the dog to the park every day or cleaning the bugs out of the light fixtures, but they better do it soon, 'cause...DAMN.) Not to mention the bleeding grand jury I'm still on. And I'm learning Italian.

I'm also trying to eat better and, dare I say it, work out. (I don't want to go into detail, but I'll just say that I am not, and have never been, a gym girl, and I really hope that my lame fumblings on the treadmill at the Y are amusing to someone.)The main purpose of my "get healthy" plan is to pave the way for going off meds altogether. I'ts about stabilizing blood sugar and increasing opportunities for natural seratonin production and absorption. But the thing is,

I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT.

What I consider "this shit" will change from week to week, but I really don't have the capacity to entertain all of it all the time. I know that, yet wince at the thought of stopping anything I do. (Except maybe housework and planning. Sadly, my maid and secretary have banded together to start their own company, and they didn't invite me to stay on as a client. Oh wait, I never had a maid or secretary...)

So whom do I ignore today? My friends? Do I let those phone messages and e-mails gather dust for awhile? How about one of my children? Audrey clearly needs a lot of attnetion right now, but just because Jonah is so easy to ignore, doesn't mean he should be ignored. How about my husband? Oh, wait, he's already being ignored! Maybe it will have to be my family. I don't really want to talk to them anyway. My son's school? My daughter's school? I get a lot of notices about ways I can better participate in my child's learning experience.

And which of the other things in my life that I hold precious shall I ignore or let go of? My yoga? My yoga training, now that I've finally figured out my next possible voaction in life? My writing? Books?

What will it be?

I Want My F***ing Meditation

On our last full day in Hawaii, I got up early on a grey, wet morning to do a teacher-led walking meditation with some other people at the resort. I was a wee bit hungover and feeling the effects of not enough citalopram coursing through my veins. (Since deciding to stay in Hawaii an extra three days, I'd been rationing fractions of those pills to keep from going into full withdrawal.)A meditation class with like-minded people was just what I needed.

I stood in line at the coffee stand at the foot of our tower. I kept standing in line at the coffee stand at the foot of our tower. Ok, everything in Hawaii takes twice as long because nobody is in a hurry, and that's a good thing, because in real life we're always in a hurry as a matter of habit. Which is unnecessary most of the time.

So breathe and quit yer bitchin'. Right?

At T-minus 15 minutes, I departed the line and walked on down to the breakfast restaurant where it had taken us an hour to get served the day before. I sat at the bar. I kept sitting at the bar. If anyone had looked at me, I would have croaked, "just a cuppa coffee," but no one did, so after awhile I got up and and walked down to the very last outpost of the resort.

Things were not looking good for my well-being at that point. A drug-withrawal headache was definitely settling into my frontal lobes. My stomach felt unhappy with the number of mai tais it had been forced to digest the night before. Worst of all, I was going to be late for the class. I stood in line at this coffee stand, got served in under ten minutes, and then walked carefully along what I thought was a path to Buddha Point, cradling my hot paper cup, desperate to drink from it but knowing the coffee would singe my lips off.

At some point I looked up from the path to realize that I was not where I thought I was, and backtracked through the pools and the tropical plantings and the coconut trees to where I had begun my hand-burning journey with the cup of coffee. Tears smarted. I just needed to get to that class. I turned onto the real path to Buddha Point.

Buddha Point was one of the best things about the property. The little hill overlooked the sea and was anchored by a huge statue of a Thai version of the Buddha. It was one of the few places one could feel a sense of calm in that circus of a hotel resort. So I told myself I didn't mind waiting there for the teacher, who was also late but would surely be along any minute. I eyed a woman lingering at the edge of the grassy point who looked to be about my age. Longish hair. Glasses. A cloth bag strapped across her torso. She could be a meditator. Hell, she could be from Seattle. I smiled at her. She looked away.

I waited twenty minutes. The teacher never came.

Reader, I cried. I found an unused cabana lounge at the foot of the hill, turned its cushions upside down to the dry side, pulled the pram-like top over my head, and boo-hooed. There had been so much tension and pressure on this trip with my family. A lot of major business was happening between me and my man. My daughter had been nothing but awful. I was no longer to hold it together. I really needed a kind teacher to remind me how to find a modicum of peacefulness.

I wasn't going to get it. I cried and drank my four-dollar coffee.

After awhile I noticed a brown gecko, about the size of my thumb, wedged into a tiny crevice of the wooden frame of the lounge chair. It was completely still, and looked terrified. Or dead. It's dead, I thought, feeling sicker. The poor bastard. I'm sitting here crying over some bullshit and this precious creature has died in a fucking lounge chair.

Just to be sure, I touched the thing. It moved!

"Hah ha!" I laughed out loud.

And then I just had to laugh at myself, at my desperation. What normal person would make such a shaky pilgrimage just for the chance, for a few minutes, to go deep? Ah, well. It didn't matter. I wasn't a normal person.

I settled into the cabana cushion and gave myelf the permission to go it alone. Just for a moment. To drop into the sound of the ocean and of the maintenance guy squeegee-ing pools of rainwater off the path behind me.

I stayed in my meditation posture until I started to feel calm again. I can heal myself, I thought, getting up and looking around me.

Or maybe it was just the coffee.

What a Mess

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I cannot seem to control the flow of objects in my house. There are too many of them, and they all need to find a place to live, and it is too big a job for one person who spends time doing things other than putting things away.

Like this morning, for instance. It's the last day of winter break for the kids. We slept late. I am allowing them to wander and play and fight and get into mischief because I am trying to write and read for awhile this morning. Having been on vacation for ten days, there wasn't much of a chance for me to do those things. I am surveying the premises from my seat at the breakfast table and things don't look good: There are still empty boxes and wrapping paper on the living room floor from the last blast of present-opening two nights ago. The mail, about two weeks' worth, is lying in heaps on the kitchen island. Also there are stacks of books piled there, as well as the travel-related contents of my giant mama-purse, which I hastily dumped out before dashing off to jury duty yesterday morning.

There is so much Christmas Crap to clean up and dispose of. All the clothes from our trip are still wadded in our suitcase. I have no clean underwear. You know, the usual post-vacation duties lie in wait. Now that my husband is gainfully employed, I do all of this myself, and it reminds me what I didn't like about SAHM-hood and housewifery in the past years when I, like, lost my mind.

One of the ways I regained sanity was by retraining my mind to see the mess around me as a part of the scenery and not something I had to clean up. I had to stop trying to correct things. I noticed that my regular mental habit was to fix my eye on something - my house, a book I was reading, other people - and decide how it should be improved. I noticed this caused mostly anguish. It gave me a permanent worry line between my eyebrows.

I am grateful to report that this mind-state wasn't permanent after all. I'm not doing it, as a habit, these days. I think the meds help a lot, and so does my yoga practice. I remember to laugh at the absurd, unstoppable fecundity of daily existence in all its servings of peanut butter toast, orange peels, plastic toys from Wal-Mart, shopping bags, dog hair, water stains, sippy cups with gnaw-marks on the spout, discarded band aids, phone calls, beeping appliances, doctor appointments, new friendships, dentist appointments, dog walks, e-mail conversations, computers, newspapers, dying plants, flaking paint, birth control, scratched floors, medications, yoga classes, malfunctioning automobiles, and the other ten thousand things that make up my home life. I can't control it, and I can't put it all in order. I can push the breakfast dishes aside and clear a space on the table to write.

And I can remember, as my teacher likes to repeat (in a the chirpy Indian accent of the teacher from who she heard this): "Do your yoga and all is coming."

Found Conversations

Things I have said and overheard on Christmas Hawaii trip:

“Look, I’m just trying to understand what everyone wants to do, so there’s no reason to be bitchy with me.” [me, on cell phone, from the beach, to my mother]

“Finish your hamburger or I’ll take away your French fries.” [me, to Jonah at a restaurant]

“Please leave your penis alone.” [me, to Jonah, in airport]

“Do you have any nonalcoholic beer?” [me, to bartender at lu’au]

“I’ve always wanted to do that.” [me, to my brother, at the lu’au, after downing my dad’s beer behind his back and replacing it with a pint of O’Doul’s]

“Awesome.” [my brother to me at lu’au]

“So begins another starch-filled day.” [fit, good-looking dad to his wife in line for a breakfast buffet at the Hilton]

“I’m hot! I’m cold! I’m hungry! I don’t want to eat! I need something to drink! I’m not thirsty! No. No! NOOOOOOOOO!.” [Audrey, every day, in every location]

“Something I’ve noticed about Hawai’i is that it really dehydrates you.” [Jonah, on taxi ride to Kona airport.]

“Your dad says he’s sick today.”
“What kind of sick?”
“Says he’s dizzy, headachey, nauseous.”
“Could it be those 14 beers he drank last night?” [me and my mom to each other, on aforementioned cell phone conversation]

“They’ll split a PB&J. I’ll have whatever you’ve got that’s frosty and alcoholic.” [me, to waitress at Lagoon Grill at the Hilton.]

“You’ve been the most beautiful person everywhere we’ve gone on this trip.” [my husband, to me]

“There’a local bar called Sharkey’s up at Waikoloa Village. But I don’t recommend it because you’ll probably get beat up by some Hawaiians.” [taxi driver to my brother as we set out for a night of drinking]

“Sharkey’s? Nah, you won’t get beat up there. Well, you probably would if it was a Friday. But it’s Christmas Eve. Don’t worry about it.” [bartender at Mariott lounge, who subsequently drove us to Sharkey’s, where my brother did not get beat up.]

“Hawaii is good for Japanese people.” [Japanese fellow on Hilton tram, to our friend Ashwani, after being asked why Hawaii is so popular to people from Japan.]

How To Plan a Family Vacation in 10 Easy Steps!

1. Invite alcoholic parents to stay with you, your spouse, and your two small children in a suburban-style townhouse on the edge of a lava field on the Kona coast of Hawai'i at Christmas.

2. Forget to reserve a minivan for your party of six. By divine luck, secure a 4-door sedan one week before leaving. Be sure this is the very last car available on the island, and that it is not large enough to accommodate your entire party.

3. What the hell, invite your brother.

4. Do no research before leaving. Reserve nothing, plan nothing, and laugh that "winging it" is what vacations are all about. Somehow forget that "winging it" with a 3-year-old, a 5-year-old, and two alcoholics in tow is wild and dangerous.

5. Bring along all mental and emotional baggage.

6. Once in Hawai'i, communicate with members of your party by cellphone, no less than 27 times per day. Wish desperately you could throw all the cell phones into the ocean.

7. Toward the end of your stay, become seduced by the notion of staying a few days longer in the warmth and beauty of the island. Don't worry that you're out of antidepressants. Wave off the reality that your change in plans will require dozens more frenzied calls on your motherfucking cell phone.

8. Send parents and brother home. Move into the Hilton at Waikoloa Village. This will cause a surprising amount of inconvenience and irritation among many people close to you, with whom you have plans, appointments, and commitments. Feel only mildly guilty. You're just starting to relax. This could have something to do with being away from your parents again.

9. Plant ass on ridiculous man-made beach at Hilton lagoon. Rent whatever boats and toys the kids want. Watch them have a smashing time.

10. Pretend that money is just a concept.

Bon voyage!

R.I.P., Crocodile Cafe

Warning: In this post, I will be strolling down memory lane. If you are over 45 or under 30, or don't listen to music or don't live in Seattle, you may find no relevance here. Unless you are a younger parent still wondering how not to become culturally pointless. Then you might relate.

Last night I met my friends Sara, Maria and Sharon for drinks at a new restaurant on Pike Street called Quinn. The surrounding blocks have changed considerably over the past few years. In fact, the place that Quinn now occupies used to be a crappy Mexican restaurant, which has always been rumoured to be so bad that I never felt the urge to eat there, no matter how young, drunk or hungry I was. Quinn is a huge improvement. In fact, most of the changes in that area are an improvement.



Sharon and I continued our quest for more whiskey at the Moe Bar down the block. Moe is part of the music club Neumo's, which first opened in 1994 as Moe. (Between now and then it had a run as an electronic-focused gay boy bar, outside of which I met a sweet cross-dresser named Greg who took me to a drag show at another place that no longer exists.) Sharon and I sat in the bar and recounted the shows we had seen in the club when it was Moe: Pavement. Tricky. Mercury Rev. Modest Mouse. Spiritualized. Superchunk. Will Oldham. Silkworm. The Folk Implosion. 5ive Style. Blues Explosion. Mike Watt.



"I must have seen fifty shows here," Sharon said. Or maybe I said. As I mentioned, there was whiskey.



So it was apropos to open the newspaper today and read that the Crocodile Cafe, Seattle music scene institution for fifteen years, abruptly shut down on Monday. No warning, no reasons given, just shut.

As if I didn't already feel a hundred years old. Now the Crocodile is gone. Like the old Moe, it'll be a memory in the minds of oldsters like me.

Here are some memories I have from the Crocodile: The owners of a coffee house where I worked in 1994 had started their business out of the Crocodile when it first opened, with an espresso cart in the little tiki hut by the front entrance. They were insane. I worked under them for a year in their crappy Queen Anne coffee house with commercial carpeting and lawn furniture and some friend's stuffed animal collection as decoration. They had a newborn and while he was cute and all, I did not have the slightest sympathy for the mother and nothing but disdain for the father. (He slept in a van outside the shop. One of my duties was to rap on the van door at 6:30 after I opened the shop up for the day. Then he would climb out, come in, sit at the bar, and wait for me to make his doppio macchiato.)


I also remember taking my dad, step mom, and cousin to the Crocodile. My cousin was in town and wanted to check out the music scene. Where else would I take him? We saw Mavis Piggot and Modest Mouse. Modest Mouse were just starting to get good shows around town then. They were fresh as daisies, cute as buttons. They rocked us hard. At one point I looked over at my dad, who was leaning sideways from the waist, head cocked, beer bottle aloft, trying to stay upright. My boyfriend and I put him and my step mom into a taxi and said goodbye. We stayed for the rest of the show.

One of my first dates with my husband was at the Crocodile. We saw Lois, an old favorite of mine from Olympia, and Beth Orton. We waited for an hour between sets but it was worth it. Beth Orton and her band squeezed themselves and their instruments onto the smallish stage and blew us away with their beauty.

I saw: Low, G Love and Special Sauce, Unrest, The Band that Made Milwaukee Famous, Joel RL Phelps, Laika, Juno, Smog, Sleater-Kinney, Stereolab. I saw terrible shows that I had to wait too long for, standing in a stuffy, smoky room holding a plastic beer cup. Once, I was hit on, in a very nice way, by two men visiting from Scotland. I was introduced to the writer Rebecca Brown there. I talked to the drummer from Juno there. I saw magic happen onstage there.

I never actually liked being there, though. Something about the feng shui, or the vibe, or the confusing Habitrail-like layout, put me off. If I wanted to drink or eat, I'd go somewhere else.

So I don't actually despair at the closing of the Crocodile. Especially now the the Showbox is hosting such great bands, and Moe is reopened as Neumo's. My life is full of other things now besides hanging out and watching bands, but I am glad there are still good places to see non-mainstream music that aren't total dumps. (Anyone remember The Off Ramp? RCKNDY? Enough said.)

My last memory of the Crocodile: Driving my son's hipster babysitter down there one night after she finished her shift at my house.

"Do you know where it is?" she asked. I shot her a look. "OK," she said as we approached Blanchard on Third. "You can just drop me here."

"It's ok, I don't mind taking you all the way there," I chirped. It was late. She was alone. It was Belltown.

"No, really," she said. "Here is fine."

You embarrassing old person with baby seats in the back of your Saab.

The Purple Lady

As I rode the bus through Capitol Hill to downtown for my jury duty the other day, I felt a sense of joy and calm. I don't know why; maybe it had to do with the divine wisdom of my iPod, which shuffled through fabulous song after fabulous song. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I was getting out of the house and away from regular life for a whole day. Maybe it was because I was bobbing my head to the music and closing my eyes and smiling when a particularly good crash of guitars filled my ears. Whatever. I rode the feeling.


That day people seemed especially irritated to be awake and pushing past other people to find a seat on the crowded, steamy bus. I felt for them. Some of them were probably running late. A few might have been hungover, or wrestling with sadness. You just never know with people. In any case, I turned my attention to my music and folks walking down the street. The bus stopped in front of Seattle Central Community College and I looked across Pine to the loose congregation standing in front of the Egyptian Theater.



People were looking down the hill, toward the bus that may be coming any second. Many wore black. They clutched umbrellas and laptop cases. They looked worried and annoyed. One lady, a middle aged woman with dark brown hair stood out for me. She was wrapped in a big purple sweater/shawl thing, and her expression said that she was glad to be here. She looked peaceful. She looked happy.


She looked so peaceful and happy that I smiled. I continued to look at her, drink her in. Then I beamed her a bunch of love.

Then another good song came on.

It was a good morning.

I told my husband about the Purple Lady over dinner that night and he smirked. To illustrate my feeling further, hoping he might believe these kinds of moments are more than hormonal surges, I recounted a story my teacher has told about such a moment. As she tells it, she drove past a garbage truck one morning and was inexplicably overcome with gratitude. He laughed.

I guess not everyone experiences these moments of unaccounted-for grace.

Try it today. See what happens.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

This week, the noise of full-time parenting is getting to me. I don't mean the cartoons on TV or the clomping of shoes throughout the house, or even the banging of utensils on the kitchen table.
I mean the talking. The incessant, inane talking. I got to the point today where I actually asked my daughter, "Will you please stop talking to me for a minute?" She wants us to be in conversation all the time. My end of the conversation would seem to be unstimulating, as it consists mainly of such bon mots as "Mmm," "Oh, yeah?" and "I see." Yet Audrey laps up even this minimal attention as if it were mother's milk. Which, I suppose, it kind of is. But giving her actual mother's milk, way back when, was just so much...quieter.

Once I read, in some other magazine, a deconstruction of what makes Martha Stewart Living such an attractive magazine to women. It's not just the hearkening back to a simpler time when all housewives knew how to bake bread, blah, blah, blah. Mainly it is the photographs. The photographs feature lovely objects bathed in calming natural light, and they tend to be free of people. The scenes look cool and inviting, like one could just sit down at that white linen-dressed table, sniff the fresh lilacs spilling out of the pewter jug, and enjoy one's hot beverage from a vintage coffee mug. In silence.

That's SAHM porn, right there.

In this month's Esquire, Tom Chiarella writes an article about what happens when he stops chatting to everyone he meets during the day. (See the entire article here.) His conclusion is that silence affords him more power. Silence not only allows him to contain his own personal power rather than letting it leak out through his mouth all the time, but the people he encounters cede him a little something extra. By being quiet, he gains the upper hand.

This may be the case with valets at restaurants in LA, as Chiarella illustrates, but it for sure doesn't work around my house. Here's what my silence provokes: "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy did you hear me?" Alternatively, my darlings may choose to just repeat their question or comment more loudly. As if I were deaf. It makes a lot more noise.

Still, I appreciated reading a man's point of view on this subject. Had this been an article in, say, Cosmo or Allure, the title would have been something like, "His Silence: What it Means." There would be a photo above the article showing a hot man wrapped in a bathrobe, sitting on a sofa, staring at his laptop screen. On the opposite end of the sofa would be a woman in pajamas, leaning toward the man and furrowing her beautiful brow. (Obviously this woman has no children. In a parenting magazine, this article would be called, "Silence: How to Get Some.")

Sometimes when I seem particularly irritated at the end of a day, my husband will ask me if it's been a hard day with the kids. Today, no, it hasn't been hard.

Just noisy.

What Passes for Grace

It's a holiday, we're traveling, and we're staying with family. I'm having difficulty loving and accepting those closest to me.

No, really.

I tried a couple of little "grace" exercises over the last couple of days. I didn't know what else to do. At one point, it was either that, or swill a Bloody Mary at 9 a.m. on the airplane and fall asleep later at a critical juncture.

My husband tries his best to make everything orderly and safe for us when we travel, which is lovely, but I respond to his Travel Personality with disproportionate irritation and eye-rolling. (Yep, he loves that.) On the plane from Seattle to Boston, we were seated a row away from each other, me across and behind him. (He had both the kids, I had a sweet young couple beside me.) At a moment when I was really getting into my inner rant about Matt's Travel Personality, I experienced a crossroads. I thought, hmm, I can continue to sit here and feel tense abou how tense I think my husband is, or I can do something else. What happens if I try a little metta meditation* on him? So I stared at his broad shoulder wrapped in an olive green cotton sweater I bought for him five years ago, and I breathed in the suffering he might have been feeling then (tension, anxiety, annoyance at bitchy wife), and breathed back goodness and peace. I did this until a flight attendant began squawking over the loudspeaker.

Then, you'll never guess what happened: Matt got up and started dancing in the aisle!

Ok, not really. Since we didn't interact for awhile, I've no idea if he actually calmed down then. But I sure calmed down. And that made me nicer. So I was one less person on that plane thinking bilious, vile thoughts. I was one more person in the world meditating, which meant I was causing no suffering at that moment. And this was all practice for me in contacting compassion for someone else when I really didn't feel like it.


And then later, when I really felt compassion for him, I offered to trade seats.




*metta is a Buddhist technique of meditation in which the practitioner breathes in the suffering of another person and sends back something positive, like liberation. It's also called "loving-kindness" meditation. This is my primitive understanding.