To Hell and Back For A Poodle

We have our dog and now I am mother to three creatures: child, kitty and a 12 1/2 pound mixed breed stray from Georgia with fleas and a gastrointestinal parasite. Our puppy's name is Lambchop and she came to New England via the freedom train, i.e., a farkakta van ride that lasted close to 30 hours.

Lambchop was supposed to be a fully vetted 2-year old Cockapoo who is sweeter than life. Well, she's the most important one out of three. She is most definitely one of the sweetest dogs I have ever met. But she's got fleas and parasites and is 5 years old according to our vet.

Lambchop, let's call her Chop for short, is sadly confined to a crate in my dining room until she is flea-free. The last flea and its offspring should be kicking the bucket on Friday morning. We were going to have an uncrating celebration until we learned of the parasite which according to veterinary assistant "Margaret" is contagious to humans via poop and saliva. I almost shat a parasite right then and there.

I've got a 6 year old I said. The dog has kissed me on the face I said. She licks her self and then will want to sit on the sofa I said. When will this parasite be gone?

Two weeks.

I'm thinking of course I was nuts to adopt a rescue dog sight unseen except that she is the perfect dog. She is house-trained and crate-trained and loves people and could care less about the cat. What's two weeks in a crate in the dining room?

Betsy is a mess. She is so happy to have a dog and wants to hug her and hold her and put her in a baby carriage and tie ribbons in her fur, but she can't and mom is vacuuming like a lunatic and washing her hands like an obsessive compulsive and the dog is skin and bones and there is all this talk about bugs and pills. Bets just lay on the floor this evening and sobbed.

Of course she doesn't quite know why she is so upset. "I never get to see you," is what she said to me mostly because it gets the biggest reaction out of guilt-ridden me who is juggling work and dog and freelance writing and laundry and my little bottle of apple cider vinegar and water which I spray all over the furniture because apparently fleas don't like apple cider vinegar. Who knew?

And kindergarten is ending and that has Bets in a state. All we wanted was a dog to ride with us in the car for school drop-offs and pick-ups and to hug and to hold and instead we have - for the time being - pitiful Pearl.

I'm sure she will be perfect. I'm sure she and Betsy will love each other like nothing else. Soon. Soon. Until then we have 9 days of pills, two more days of flea quarantine, and two weeks of poop-panic to go. Oh and did I mention Lambchop only eats ground beef and rice, sauteed in Canola oil and sprinkled with kosher salt?

Thank goodness for those sweet brown eyes.

Oops, gotta run. I'm pretty sure I feel a parasite in my arse.

Who's Your Mama?

You’d think Mother’s Day among lesbian moms would be an awesome, Doublemint occasion – double your pleasure, double your fun. After all, Mother’s Day is not even a Judeo-Christian/Hallmark creation. It actually was birthed in the US some 150 years ago by Appalachian mom Ann Jarvis, who wanted to raise awareness of the poor health conditions in her community. She called it “Mother’s Work Day.” So for those vernal equinox lesbians more inclined to celebrate the cycles of the moon than the Old or New Testament, Mother’s Day is perfect. It’s pro-mom, pro-woman, pro-justice.

Then why the angst? Why does this lesbian mom secretly dread Mother’s Day? Why do I sadden rather than rejoice when approaching this women fest (an event even bigger and more far-reaching than the Michigan’s Women’s Festival?)

Because in addition to amplifying the joy, Mother’s Day in two-mom households also can shed light on just how complicated it is to share the role of “mother.”

Never mind who gets to be called “mom”, who gets to sleep in?

Who takes care of dinner and makes a cake?

Who gets the card made from glue and glitter in kindergarten?

Judeo-Christian/Hallmark marketing has co-opted Mother’s Day and turned it into yet another celebration of the hetero-nuclear paradigm. Any and all advertisements for Mother’s Day hoo-ha consist of precisely one woman receiving one bouquet of flowers or one diamond necklace or one tray of coffee and toast in bed from her one husband and two children.

It’s enough to make you feel like you’re faking it. Yes, despite it all (birthing, nursing, carpooling, making lunches, tushy wiping, comforting, band-aiding and singing to sleep), a lot of times I feel I’m faking it in the parental department, playing at a game I’m not really at liberty to participate in.

Even though after Ms. Jarvis there was Julia Ward Howe, Boston poet and suffragist (her best known work: the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”) who believed mothers “bore the loss of human life more harshly than anyone else,” and so called for a day during which mothers rallied for peace.

That’s no diamond ad. That’s no perfectly made up mom in bed while her husband balances coffee on a silver tray.

In the early years, before I had regained enough consciousness to feel like an imposter, when my c-section scar still tingled on rainy days, the post-partum skin on my stomach had not yet figured out what to do with itself, and I was up three times a night nursing our daughter, I wanted Mother’s Day all to myself. I didn’t even want to consider my partner (we since have split) a mother. I could as much imagine treating her to breakfast in bed as I could picture myself replacing the brakes on my car. I wanted to be the one who was taken care of and indulged à la Hallmark. Hadn’t I earned it in that Hallmark way?

If you stick to the Hallmark scenario, there’s only room for one mother, and it’s a fight to the death to determine who that will is. Anything different from that is not real motherhood. Hence my conflict.

In 1905, after Ann Jarvis died, her daughter, Anna, sought to honor her mother’s work and lobbied businessmen and politicians to assist her in the creation of a special day to honor mothers. Said Anna Jarvis, “There are many days for men, but none for mothers.” After years of Anna. determinedly distributing white carnations each makeshift mother’s day to the boys in Washington, Woodrow Wilson signed a bill declaring Mother’s Day a national holiday. This was 1914. It wasn’t long before religion and marketing got involved and turned Mother’s Day into the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be: a day that causes me to doubt my credibility as a mother.

The Jarvises would roll over in their graves.

Of course, no mother is faking it. The problem, I remind myself, is not being a lesbian mom on Mother’s Day. It’s being a lesbian mom in a culture that crams a narrow and ridiculous image of motherhood down your throat: one mom per household, with hair highlighted and makeup on.

How then to embrace the day, to do justice to the Jarvis’ vision and to our family, to reclaim my role as mother rather than deny it?

Some lesbians divide Mother’s Day: you get from 7 a.m. to noon, I get from noon to 7 p.m. Some divide the years: 2008 for me, 2009 for you. Some offer up Father’s Day as Mom Day #2. In our family we ad-lib. One of us races off with our daughter to make something for the other, while the other makes plans to do the same.

It still would be great to have a day all to myself. But I’ve learned that this has less to do with me being more of a mother than my ex, and everything to do with me being exhausted.

Anna was so pissed at what happened to the Mother’s Day of her dreams that in 1923 she filed a lawsuit to prevent a festival she believed was endorsing greed and profit over the memorialization of motherhood. She even got herself arrested once for disturbing the peace. Just before she died in 1948, she admitted to regretting having started Mother’s Day.

Well, I say it’s time to take back Mother’s Day. Lesbians moms, straight moms, caregiving grandmothers, aunts and sisters, in honor of the Annas, may we all sleep in.

Pussy Montana

Our room with a view.

This is the corner of Cape Cod I have known since 1964. In the distance is the Provincetown Inn where my grandmother would stay each summer when she came to visit us. My mother the mixed media artist would insist we spend every August in Provincetown so she could paint and study with a local artist. It was a luxury I didn't appreciate until much later. In fact, for most of my Provincetown childhood I kept a calendar over my bed on which I would cross out the days each night before I went to sleep. Only 29 more.

Anyway my grandmother would fly from Newark to Boston and then brave the tiny Ptown-Boston plane to land in the dunes. We'd settle her in to a musty room at the Provincetown Inn and visit her each morning for breakfast. This was back when the Inn served breakfast in a beautiful sun-room, pancakes and waffles and french toast. We'd swim in the indoor pool alongside Marvin Hagler's boxing ring (now what was he doing spending all those summer in Ptown?). On rainy days we'd run from one end of the Inn to the other, back and forth all day long. There was a sauna and a spa and dinner theater.

To the right of the Provincetown Inn is the Red Inn. I always promised my mother I would get married at the Red Inn. Oops. Of course, it was she who wished to be married there. Drinks and dinner work well too, and involve far less planning.

To the right of the Red Inn, in weathered gray shingles, is the house my parents tried to buy sometime in the 1980's. It's a great sprawling beach house with a painter's studio and two floors each with walls of windows over looking the bay. They could have had it for $300k but someone got upset about a septic system and that was that.

To the right of the house-that-almost-was is a sliver of Marc Jacobs new massive expanse of private property. That's what's happening to Provincetown; beachfront property is being bought up by private parties who turn the entirety of a three, four or seven unit property into their own private compound.

The hill my mother used to take us to to pick blueberries is now peppered with condominiums. The Dairy Queen is an apartment complex. The aquarium to which I once delivered a hermit crab the size of a basketball is now a mall. There is a store called "Wa" that sells $650 wind-chimes and $1200 Buddhas.

Om.

Norman Mailer is gone.

Robert Motherwell is gone.

Stanley Kunitz is gone.

Still. There is land even a rich homo cannot develop. And Lucy and I saw whales off the shore at Herring Cove Beach and then in the harbor from our bedroom window. And Mary Oliver and her dog Percy remain.

We picked mussels off the breakwater. Rode bikes through town and bought presents for the children we left behind for 48 hours. Wondered endlessly how it is that some mammals remain in the water and others of us walk on dry land.

Back in the real world, children are being ripped from their mothers in Texas because of teen pregnancy? Because men have married more than one woman? Maybe there is something more sordid going on, but I can't help but recoil. If you can steal children from one group, why not another?

And poor old Miley Cyrus, sexualized by an entire industry and then punished for it.

Lucy says it's a slow news week, that's why Miley is big business. I say, just don't tell Betsy her 15 year old idol was photographed in a sheet with her parents blessing.

I suppose a parent's got to make a buck. But look out Billy Ray, there's a new girl in town and she's not wearing a sheet.

Cat Got Your Tongue?

I'm taking this antacid for my stomach woes and it's left me with nothing to say. I catch myself at times totally silent - sitting at dinner with Betsy, on the phone with a friend - and realize I'm not speaking. I'm not depressed. And actually it's not simply that I have absolutely nothing to say. It's that I forget to speak. I just sit and think.

I have to remind myself, "You should be talking. People talk."

And then I think of something to say but soon drift off again. Bye bye.

It's kind of nice in other ways. My stomach feels better and I'm less anxious and can get things done. Probably because I'm not talking to anyone. What a perfect time to go on a silent meditation retreat.

Instead Lucy and I are heading to Provincetown for a couple of nights. It's an annual tradition. Every April we stay on the beach, pick mussels from the breakwater, jog alongside the ocean, shop, and eat, eat and shop. Leaving Betsy is complicated and hard but she is steeling herself in incredible ways. Choosing to take advantage of my absence to grow herself some more.

She's only once chosen to go on a play date without me - the homes of friends and family not included - but sure enough she wants to go home with a girl from her class one of the days I'm gone. If I were here I'm sure she would have wanted me to join her. So off we both will be on our separate adventures, me and the baby who just left my body.

When Bets made her announcement I was reminded that when I was her age my mother used to force solo play dates, send me off sobbing to the homes of friends. No surprise I was so traumatized I wound up in therapy by the ripe old age of 7. If it's not one thing, it's your mother. If Bets needs more time she can have it. I've always known I never would repeat my mother's mistake. Not that one anyway. I've got enough of my own to make.

Lucy and I planned to return on Saturday with just enough time to get to the airport and greet a dachshund corgi mix from Puerto Rico but lo and behold our furry friend couldn't get a flight out of San Juan. It's come to this: searching the Caribbean for a dog.

Betsy almost had me convinced we should get a rat instead. We were at the animal shelter for the 78th time and the only available dogs were an 8-year old poodle with epilepsy and the loudest hound I'd ever heard. So off we went off to look at the rodents. Rats are fine until you see their tails. It's that bald, ringed tail that makes a rat a rat. But she almost had me.

At least I found the words in me to say "no" to the rat. Then she wanted a bunny but we agreed we couldn't tell bunny poop from bunny food and that would be so confusing that maybe a bunny wouldn't be a good pet either, besides the kitty would kill and eat a bunny.

Until a dog comes our way we are going to break the law and steal some tadpoles from a pond in the Arnold Arboretum. If you are from Boston and find this reprehensible just take a Prilosec and shush yourself. It's a science experiment. We want to see if we can keep them alive long enough to watch their metamorphosis into frogs. It's unlikely we will succeed. But that's not enough to stop this research team.

A friend of mine who works for PETA says real animal activists believe there should be no domesticated animals, no pets. I cannot imagine they would like our tadpole caper. But why they would have a problem with the cat who is snoring next to me in bed I don't understand.

And that's enough talking for one night.

Feeling Groovy

Adopting a dog is proving to be harder than getting pregnant as a 40 year old lesbian. Here in Boston people will cut you down in order to beat you to the small dog that's up for adoption. They'll run you off the road, force your car into a ditch, elbow you in the ribs.

"It's my bichon poodle mix, mine!"

I'm just trying to rescue a damn dog. Trying to avoid a puppy mill. But it's like the vitamin aisle at Whole Foods where a woman once literally shoved me out of the way to get to the wheat-free/soy-free/dairy-free/all vegan multi-vitamins: do-gooders out for bear, or dog, as the case may be.

A friend of mine used the phrase "fascist hippies" to describe a family we knew who lived in this huge rambling Victorian house in a funkadelic part of town. One was an artist, the other some kind of world-saver. Their two kids ran naked around the house, pooped in the back yard, nursed until they were seventeen. But dinners were communal damnit and if you weren't there on time or didn't take your clothes off in the hot tub you were berated.

These are the vegetarians we are up against in this dog rescue mission, well-meaning liberals in tattered old Volvos who opted out of the rat race but are still racing. Granted every day we don't find a dog is one more day without one which is fine by me.

Meanwhile, Bets has been practicing her lines for the kindergarten play which is about the cutest thing in the world. She's as excited by the prospect of being on stage in a costume as she is about walking around the house saying, "I have to practice my lines."

She's invited Faith and I of course and Lucy and Phoebe. We all went to the circus together yesterday. What is more unlikely: a man on stilts being catapulted into the air onto the shoulders of another man, or a woman and her ex-partner, her girlfriend, and all their children sharing cotton candy?

The fascist hippies would have approved. They would have insisted we embrace and then take our clothes off and jump in a hot tub. Damnit.

The dog of my dreams likely lives in Arkansas. There's a freedom train (no offense, no offense) carrying stray dogs from Arkansas to New England. Actually it's a bus. And it's our only hope. You pick a dog online from just a few questions asked of its foster family and then it's put in a crate to journey several days to New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, or New Hampshire. At each stop someone who has been trying to adopt a dog in the northeast but has not been able to because every time they get to the shelter all that's left are ferrets, rats, and pit bulls that bark loudly enough to rattle the fillings in their teeth, stand waiting, groovy leather-free leashes in hand. Dog is released and hopefully not too traumatized by its journey. Family takes dog home. And then everyone takes off their clothes and jumps into a hot tub.

Something about the whole process makes me want to eat red meat, let the water run while I brush, ask for plastic instead of paper or a reusable bag. It makes me want to drop cash at a breeder so I can bring a puppy home for my child already.

Oh but I won't.

I'll adopt a dog for crying out loud. Not because I'm a fascist hippy. But because I need a dog who is housebroken.

But I'll take the kudos. A girl's got to wrap herself in something when she's naked in a hot tub.

The Bike and The Breast Exam

Bets woke up yesterday morning and said she's had her training wheels for long enough would I please take them off her bike, which I did. Two hours of practicing later she was riding a two-wheeler. Next stop college. She did this with her pacifier too, crawled into bed one night and said she was done with it and that was that.

Waiting in a blue johnnie for my annual physical today I of course sat contemplating life and death. Johnnies do that. Put them on, open in either the back or front, and instantly you're sifting through your life insurance policies, your social security benefits, the pros and cons of cremation over burial.

I've been feeling lately that we are all just insects in a huge ant farm. Working in a hospital is a lot like being an ant in an ant hill, a bee in a beehive. There're lots of critters walking purposefully from one place to another. Going going going. That's what the hospital is like. We're all always going from one place to another with our cell phones and pagers. It wouldn't surprise me if one day a giant foot came down and squashed us all.

Oops.

A nine year old medical student saw me first. The good thing about having a nine year old medical student evaluate you is that they spend an awful lot of time deliberating and probing and discussing. They are just so earnest. My physical lasted 45 minutes, what with my actual doctor having to come in and listen to the nine year old's report of my corporeal life. Had I rejected the medical student experience, I would have been in and out of there in 15 minutes.

The most baffling and annoying piece of my physical existence is my stomach. I was unexpected hostess of a stomach ulcer last year and once you get one you're prone prone prone. So these days I can ingest no caffeine, no alcohol, no citrus (couple this with my having both a partner and a woman I co-parent a child with and I'd say I'm a stone's throw from becoming a full-fledged mormon). The nine year old had quite a time with all this: a lesbian with a stomach ulcer and a child. She reviewed with me the results of the tests I've had done in the last year: two endoscopies, a colonoscopy, a CT scan, an abdominal ultrasound, a pelvic ultrasound - all negative. No h. pylori. No celiac disease. No real reason why I should suddenly host a stomach ulcer. But there you go. The nine year old furrowed her brow.

Acupuncture.

Homeopathy.

No more dairy.

No more soy.

I've tried them all. What worked was the milky stuff I had to drink before the CT scan. For some reason after two bottles of that my stomach was great for three months.

Go figure.

Anyway, thinking about death always gets me thinking about my mother. As if death were a state somewhere in the midwest, a vague place I've heard of all my life but only have flown over and never visited. And then my mom moved there and provided us with no forwarding address or telephone number. Death? Oh, I wonder how mom is.

There was a woman in the waiting room who was so thin my legs quivered to look at her. I heard her tell her husband she lost two more pounds, "I weigh 96 now."

Oy vey.

My mother was deathly thin in the end. Literally.

I'm a firm believer that anyone over 50 should carry an extra 10 pounds on them just in case they get sick. You need weight to lose.

So there are sick people and dying people and you have to go in and have your own body evaluated to see if it is sick and dying and meanwhile you have a 6-year old entirely dependent upon you and it's all almost too much to bear. Living in a body is sometimes like a bad joke. Our minds are housed in these temporary flesh sacks. Geez. It's incredible we accomplish anything given we're all going to die one day.

And so we go about our business, back and forth, back and forth, busy little bees.

My doctor gave me a prescription for a low dose antacid she thinks I might need to take for the rest of my life (i.e., until I move to that town in the midwest). The nine year old and I bid each other good-bye and good luck.

When I got home Lucy and Bets were practicing the 2-wheeler. Moments later, Bets was off and running. It was 70 degrees. We had the first barbecue of the season. I got to sleep in my own bed. I got another day. I hope the days are as sweet in that town my mom moved to, the place where we all are going.

Until then, I will sip my ginger tea. Tell myself it's wonderful to never have to worry about a hangover, or to have to choose between pink and yellow lemonade. My daughter will continue to be the most determined person I know. Next week we meet a cocker spaniel named Cricket.

Life goes ever on in such a sad sweet and tender way.

Roses are Red Or Yellow Or Pink Or White Or...

It's national poetry month. This I know because I receive daily poems from Knopf thanks to their Borzoi Reader or a poem-a-day series each April (http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry), which is national poetry month, but this you know because I just told you.

The poem-a-day email used to be torture for me. I could barely manage receiving, reading and then figuring out what to do with a piece of writing someone spent hours or days or weeks toiling over. I need a quiet space in which to read poetry. I need time to digest a poem. Time to think. Time to cry. Time to write. Then I need to know what to do with the poem. If it's a poem in a book or a magazine I can save it - put the book on a shelf, put the magazine in the rack by the toilet.

But email poetry blew my mind. Do I print it out? Do I delete it? It left me breathless.

And that is because I have a significant touch of OCD. It's not like I ever held a mint gently on my tongue without sucking it for the entire 30 minute ride from work to home lest it dissolve and a loved one receive poor results from her oncologist like someone I know and love once did, but I do engage in various other acts of magical thinking on a daily basis. When Faith and I lived together (for over 12 years) I was aware at all times which items (clothing, books, CD's, towels) were hers and which were mine and which we had purchased together. I can tell you the make and model of almost any car from only a glance at its headlights. (I thought this freakish until a friend of mine simply smiled and said, "I can do it from the door handles.")

Such a relief.

And of course I'm frequent host to any one of an infinite number of inappropriate and intrusive thoughts during the most mundane moments like while driving behind a green truck I might suddenly think: imagine a terrible infection that scarred and mamed a face in an instant you could contract it it could begin with a headache Betsy had a headache yesterday i hope it wasn't meningitis today seems good but anything could happen.

"Stop," I tell myself. To my brain at least once I day I have to say, "Ssh." On other days it takes, "Would you please shut the fuck up."

Anyway, with poems from last year still saved in my in-box. I'm trying something new this year. This year I am reading the poems immediately - no matter where I am - and then deleting them. This is huge and radical for a girl like me but what it means is that I am reading poetry, not hoarding poetry. And this is part of my new life mission: to live rather than to think about living.

I say this in light of lesbian divorce and upcoming dogs and imminent presidential elections and the price of gas and Eliot Spitzer and hypochondria (many of OCD'ers are also hypochondriacs which makes us even more fun to be around). Life for an OCD club member is like a Medusa's head of options, infinite avenues we can go down ad nauseum and ponder and analyze until the cows come home.

Moo.

So much goes on inside while all the while we simply are standing still.

So I'm trying to act a bit more, not obsess over every last nuance of every little thing, just jump. The writer Elaine Soloway (http://thedivisionstreetprincess.blogspot.com) once wrote an essay entitled "Leap Before You Look." It's true, when leaping doesn't cause you to be killed or mortified or destitute, it actually can get you places.

Relationships might end, Hillary or Barack or Johnny Jet Plane might be president, the righteous will fall (come on where's the surprise in that?), a dog might poop or pee or chew up the house, and one day an ache or pain is going to be the last, and still it's okay to act, to make a mistake, waste money, or delete a poem, to be happy.

This actually all began last year when I made the conscious decision to stop thinking about which way to hang the toilet paper and paper towel rolls. One day I decided to just put them on whichever way they were facing at the moment and use that mental energy for something better like memorizing the headlights of the new hybrids.

I'm lucky, I can turn my brain off without the help of pharmaceuticals.

"Enough, brain."

What I'm trying to get at is, Happy poetry month. Geez. I always take the long way.