Mitt or Mitt-out

Well that explains it.


Oh this is no political blog but I was just going to have to rip Willard (Mitt) Romney for being such a vapid Ken doll who refuses to declare defeat because he is on auto (there is a button between his shoulder blades, flesh colored of course, and it seems to be stuck in the “run for office” position) but then an “examination” of Willard was done bigger and better than I ever could do

http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=Mitt_Romney

I’ve despised him since his defeat of the brilliant Robert Reich for governorship of Massachusetts. Willard won for only one reason I can find: he is tall. Robert Reich barely reaches 5 feet. I am convinced people just cannot vote for an extremely short man over a tall one. To give my species the benefit of the doubt, there must be an evolutionary drive that compels us to honor tall over short.

Yet short people (like myself) have not been bred out of existence. I leave it to the evolutionary biologists to figure out. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Like American Girl Doll Books. Dare I admit, they’re not bad.

And birthday parties: this is absolutely the last time we host a party for more than five children. The goodie bags alone are costing more than I spend on shoes.

Hi-5: I kind of have a gay girl/gay boy crush on Curtis.

The School Nurse: Betsy has been visiting the school nurse approximately three times a week. She tells the nurse she has a sore throat and needs an ice pack to hold on her neck. The nurse takes her temperature and gives her ice and off Betsy goes. I feel it’s a way for her to manage being in kindergarten, being just six years out of my womb and off on her own all day to navigate social and academic challenges and having to ask to go to the bathroom.

The Headmaster: This evening Faith and I are having dinner at the home of the headmaster of Betsy’s school. He’s a kind and gentle man who invites groups of parents to his home once during the year until we all have had the honor and he has had a chance to meet and greet each of us. If there is a nurse there I definitely will say I have a sore throat and go visit her for ice and a moment of patting down.

Another thing about Willard: He’s not nice. Friends involved in the gay marriage excitement here in Massachusetts met with Willard at his Beacon Hill office and said he made some snide remark about same-sex couples.

My mother: Still dead. Though I find myself thinking one day there will be a knock on my door. I’ll look out my window and see news cameras and balloons and smiling anchormen and women. At the door will be my mother. “Honey, it was a joke! But we’re rich.” And then Ed McMahon would tell me and the millions of at-home viewers that my mother feigning her death by ovarian cancer won her 10 million dollars. “So don’t be mad,” my mother would say. But I’d be so freaking mad anyway. Just fantasizing my mother would assume I’d want money more than her makes me mad, which forces me to realize I’m just mad at her for dying but had to go and concoct a whole story about Ed McMahon to get to it.

Willard: If you were named Willard and you were going to choose a new name because Willard is such a duck-ish name, would you choose Mitt?

Imagine My Shame

If you’re a reader from the days when Are You My Mothers was hosted by Parents.com you’ll remember a story about a classmate of Betsy’s who Bets wanted to have over for a play date. After meeting Faith and I the girl’s mom responded to our play date proposal with an email explaining she doesn’t allow her daughter to have play dates during the school year.

It reeked of homophobia to me and to most of my readers. If it smells like poop, tastes like poop…

This mom had initially been friendly to me and Faith individually and it wasn’t until after she met us together that her tune changed, or so we thought. The seemingly unlikely possibility that her rejection had nothing to do with us being two moms arose weeks later when another mom (straight) in the class acted the spy and invited the girl to her house to see what response she got.

She got the same story.

Well we met the other day, the sorry-no-play-date-mom and I. Our daughters have since become even closer. They wait for each other at the school door each morning, they trade jewelry, and fantasize about getting together. I saw the mom from afar, saw that she was in a room I was about to enter and realized I had no idea what I was in for – a cold shoulder, a forced smile. I gave her wide berth. I didn’t want to call too much attention to myself, to her, to our past interaction.

But she saw me.

And as soon as she did she came rushing over and gave me a big hug.

We had the friendliest chat during which she offered a fuller explanation about why they don’t do play-dates, one that had nothing whatsoever to do with Betsy having two moms and everything to do with some compulsive painstaking effort to prevent any children from feeling bad if they can’t accept a play-date (so they have decided to do none at all until the summer when the children aren’t around each other to compare social lives). I can’t say I understand - hurt feelings are an unavoidable part of growing up. Still I am much relieved, and chagrined.

As we talked our daughters sat squished next to each other on a single chair. The mom insisted we have a play-date the moment school lets out for the summer. Betsy and her friend want it to be a sleepover.

Betsy also showed me today how she and this friend pretend to kiss each other on the lips.

If there’s anything that will bring out the lovelorn obsessions of two 6-year old girls it’s not letting them see each other after school.

I’m thrilled and happily wiser for having been so wrong. One woman thinks she’s protecting children from hurt. Another thinks everyone’s a homophobe. We each have our issues.

Meanwhile, I need to keep an eye on my daughter, lover-lips. No, not because the daughter of lesbians shouldn’t be kissing other girls, but because strep throat is going around the class room. Geez. Don’t go jumping to conclusions.

The Ides of February

We are just 10 days away from Betsy turning 6 and it's all so unbelievable, to think I spent most of my life without a child - life before Betsy lasted 40 years - but now I have absolutely no memory of what that life was like, well almost none.

In honor of the occasion I had the strangest dream. I dreamed a giant white bird lie dying in front of me, giant as in bigger than a sea turtle, bigger than the base of a huge snowman (or woman), all feathers and white but when I looked more closely it was my dying mother (of course) and she was struggling and uncomfortable as she had been during the last week of her life. She mouthed something to me I couldn't understand at first but then saw to be "I'm thirsty" or "I want water" so I offered her a drink but she could no longer swallow and so the water dribbled down her mouth and onto her chest making her even more upset. I felt terrible. Look what I'd done.

This scene is in no way foreign. I'd say it happened with both my mother and grandmother in the weeks prior to their death at least once a day - and worse things, harder things, bizarre things. Like when my mother suddenly opened her eyes and said to me "Bye" in what sounded like the rudest of ways.

"It probably took her the whole day to be able to do that," Lucy said by way of comfort when I told her that 5 years later I still wonder if my mother was being sarcastic. "Byeee."

Or when I raced to her side thinking she was bleeding from her mouth, only to find it was strawberry Jell-o.

Oh I've got a million of them. The ambulance ride from NJ to MA with my newly stroked grandmother.

It's my daughter's birthday and I'm all awash in visions of death and dying. But life is all birth and death, birth and death. Sometimes it just hits you hard over the head like the racquetball I inadvertently nailed my lover with on her chin, that we are young and then old over and over again. And when you're middle-aged like myself you get a good view of both sides of life.

And a dog friend of ours just died.

And wouldn't it be nice to have my mother and grandmother (she'd be 102) here to help prepare Betsy's party?

But the sun she is rising outside my window and there is much life to be lived. Not to mention deciding between Barack and Hillary to be done. All in a day's work.

Priscilla King of the Kindergarten

See what happens when lesbians raise children...

So there we were Bets and I at a fairy princess birthday party in the enormous home of a school friend of Betsy's. We arrived late thanks to an earlier party at an ice-skating rink. The ice-skating party was a funky affair at an outdoor rink where Fat Boy Slim was blasting through speakers and kids and parents were falling all over themselves on the ice.

Walking into the fairy party was like stepping into another world. Middle-aged women dressed as fairy princesses were leading a parade of no less than 30 little girls each - with a musical instrument - around the house. A sweet friend of Betsy's took her hand and wove her into the parade. That left me alone in the manse with nothing to do but attempt to mingle with the other parents.

For me mingling with other parents is one of the hardest parts of parenting, harder even than sleep deprivation, diarrhea and snow days. I swallowed hard and headed for the kitchen.

There they were. Suffice to say it's a multi-million dollar crowd. No joke, our entire condo is the square footage of several of these family's foyers. It's just like that. Because it was an all-girl party none of the other lesbian moms were there. Even though there are six lesbian families in Betsy's class, they're all moms of boys. So there I was, the lone poor white lezzie in a crowd of heterosexual$. And my pants were damp and stained from skating all morning.

Hi everyone.

A dad approached me. The dads are frequently more forthcoming than the moms. Could be the moms are freaked by a lesbo, could be the dads are titillated. I'd seen the dad in question before, he's a short and serious fellow, goatee, crew cut. We got to talking. As we talked about carpool and sleep schedules I couldn't help but notice this man was even shorter than me (and I'm no tall drink of water at only 5'3"), that his voice was, well, high-ish. He looked at me with such an unblinking penetrating stare, I found myself squinting as if to read between the lines.

Blah blah blah about homework and camp.

What's different about this man?

Blah blah blah about after school.

There's something familiar about him.

Blah blah blah about language arts.

Something small and slight and wait a minute!

Blah blah about wood shop.

This man is a woman or was a woman! And I thought I was the odd girl out.

Around us were the straightest, most mainstream gazillionaires. Did they know? We finished our conversation. Our daughters came in for cake and raced away again. We each mingled with other parents and then everyone said their good-byes.

You never know is the moral of this day. The ice skaters with their funky Peruvian hats and beat-up Hondas in fact were all straight and blue-blood. While among the nouveau riche there was a transsexual.

You'd think that'd make mingling fun. But I still shudder at the thought of it. Maybe next time I'll go as a guy.

No Country For Old Lesbians

37 birthday parties later...

So I decided to chill out by going to the movies. Lucy and I, with a rare night to ourselves - each of our daughters were with their other moms (a perk of separation is you never need a babysitter) - decided to go see No Country For Old Men.

If you're looking to chill out, if people are worried that you're angry and unsympathetic to people who are in psychic distress, if you have a night alone with another adult and you want to relax, if you're two violence-averse lesbians over 40, I highly recommend avoiding No Country For Old Men.

Within the first five minutes at least five people had been brutally murdered and a sad-eyed dog was shot in the stomach.

Lucy looked at me and said, "Let's go buy fuzzy socks."

That was what Betsy said to Lucy 20 minutes into Betsy's first feature length film. "Let's go buy fuzzy socks."

I'd only ever left a movie once in my entire life and that was when I was 16 (some long Monty Python I was too young and American to understand). I had a mouthful of popcorn. Just then someone else was killed with a hose or something.

I started to laugh. Lucy started to laugh.

"This is hell."

Life is short and brutal enough, why spend 110 minutes watching murder.

So off we went. We dodged 20 minutes late into Savages - another form of torture, and yes, I have sat for many many hours in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers with dying loved ones, but how many times can you hear Phillip Seymour Hoffman say, "Wen, he's got dementia. Wen, he's got dementia. Wen, he's got dementia."

Dear me, I've got dementia. I'd spent the day at not one but two birthday parties for six year old girls, negotiated a battle between Betsy and her seven-year old friend Zoe that rivaled the mayhem of No Country for Old Men, and then on this a precious evening out was subject to images of blood and gore that will forever be emblazoned upon my neurons.

"Wen, he's got dementia."

Sheesh.

The two movies always will be entwined for us: men and a dog are murdered in a desert and then siblings have to put their father in a nursing home.

Life is like that of course, non sequitirs left and right, propelling you from an ice-skating party to a fairy princess party, from tuna sandwiches with a five-year old to a margarita with another adult.

Today it snows, lightly and beautifully, all quiet and All is well on this western front.

Why the Maybe Suicide of Heath Ledger Pisses Me Off

Warning: this post has very little to do with parenting. That’s because I woke up thinking about suicide, not my own, but suicide in general and found myself getting all pissed off as the concept of suicide is known to do to me; it infuriates me. So a second warning, this post is in no way sympathetic to those who want to kill themselves. I find them enraging.

Unless of course they are plagued by torturous hallucinations as one man I knew was. He had been resident of a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life thanks to delusions so sadistic and vile he had tried to cut off his own penis. Twenty years worth of psychotropic medication couldn’t quiet his hallucinations or dampen his delusions. Eventually he took his own life. I felt a pang of sympathy. But mostly I don’t.

And unless of course someone is in excruciating incurable physical pain. But those with working arms and legs and careers who want to knock themselves off each time someone breaks up with them, best stay away from me. I’m definitely not the one to call in the middle of the night.

Or maybe I am.

Once a friend called to announce she was going to kill herself because her partner broke up with her. “Where are you?” I asked.

“At home. Are you coming over?”

“No, I’m sending an ambulance and going back to bed.”

She’s still alive. Nothing like telling the whining semi-well you’re sending an ambulance to their home to perk them up.

So now here’s a young man who is father of a two year old, rich, famous and not insignificantly best known for playing a gay man in a highly acclaimed film who maybe killed himself and maybe did not. Of course being young and rich doesn’t mean you’re not in psychic pain. But rich fathers of two year olds have options aside from porking on pills. Not to mention the contribution to our culture’s continual equating of gay and suicide that his death provides.

Thanks depressed dude.

How did I get like this? Instant rage! Just add water or air to news of a suicide. You don’t even need to stir!

Maybe twenty years working in psychiatry hearing the suicidal woes of hundreds of adults. Maybe having watched too many life-embracing loved ones die long before they were ready, people contributing to others, giving gifts of love and kindness to the world. Their lives were ripped from them by cancer or accidents or strokes.

And here is some young ass who just can’t take it? Go kill yourself then. You’ll leave more room for the rest of us we who know life is not always fun, not always easy, sometimes unbearable. Thank you for the shorter lines at movies and the supermarket, fewer death-happy drunk drivers on the road, less crowded beaches.

Oh, and one more thing. There’s a dirty little secret you might want to know: after you’re dead, life goes merrily on without you.


Red Anger by A.D. McCowen

Why I Oughta...

My peaceful little urban enclave is getting scary, murders, mayhem and the oddest recurring prank involving Sprite. We’re technically a part of the city of Boston, my neighborhood and I, but resemble a suburb in that we’re all houses and narrow streets, independent pharmacies and small grocers. There’s been almost no violent crime in the last few years but suddenly in just the last week there have been two shoot-outs.

It makes me want to buy a gun and wear it visibly in a holster as I shovel snow or take out the garbage. Just you try to fuck with me and the home in which I’m raising my child.

Some locals suggest it’s a chance for the community to band together, to become stronger. I just want to declare war.

And then there’s the dumbest act of vandalism I’ve ever encountered. At night, under cover of darkness, people (come on, we know they’re guys) throw Sprite on all the cars parked on my street.

Well there’s a good time.

Let’s see, it’s evening in Boston, we’re alive and well. We could read, see a movie, learn something, lift weights, write an email, anything. No! I know what we can do. Dude, let’s drive around and pour soda on cars.

Now there’s smart and cool all rolled up into one pretty little package.

I’d like to lie in wait not to catch and report the dim bulbs but to shout at them, Yo Bozo the clowns! What excellent lives you are living! Driving around all night with your soda.

But where would that put me? A sleep-deprived gay mother hiding behind the curtains with a megaphone hurling sarcasm. At least my car is clean. A little Sprite is always a good excuse to get a car wash.

So I buy no gun and hurl no sass. I feel mildly relieved none of it is the result of homophobia. Straight people are getting killed and no car is spared. It’s equal opportunity delinquency, which as far as I’m concerned is second cousin once removed to gays in the military. Oh goodie, we’ve been invited to the party.

Meanwhile, I’d like to buy my daughter armor. I’d like to move to the real suburbs where come to think of it, such things likely would be fueled by homophobia. Oy vey, where’s a little gay family to go?