This picture isn’t awful. I should have chosen awful for this blog entry, but I couldn’t quite make myself. Still, I’m stirring raw hamburger, my gaze is askance and rueful, and notice how my Colossal Cupcake Flop has edged its way into the scene (can you see that the cupcakes are in fact craters? I tweaked the recipe with buttermilk). Nevertheless. I held my breath, flared my nostrils, and went for it. Click, drag. Edgy living, totally. I was resolved to take measures (if not extreme, at least salutory). An email from a dear but distanced-over-the-years friend convinced me that I needed to adjust the tone of my blog, possibly even my entire website, if only with disclaimers. Disclaimers with a less-than-flattering picture.
“How do you do it all?” my friend asked. And she recited a list of things that she’d read about on my website, and added a few glowing attributes she had imagined on her own. My heart sank a little. I so wanted my website and this blog to be about hope and humor as I shared my journey through trial and error, frustration and success. I didn’t want a bragging forum.
I do not “do it all”. I am miserable when I try, or even when I wish I could (which means that like most women, I am sometimes miserable). When I focus on a big project, I have to make peace with the fact that everything else shifts and begins to lapse into its natural, disorganized state. Even me. Still, if I am honest with myself, I acknowledge that I would much rather publish my well-lit, high toned moments than my personal disasters (unless they’re funny—I love sharing funny). And there are some things, painful facts and feelings that cast long shadows in my world, that I simply won’t share because they are too intimate for publication. Anyway, I can see where my friend might have gotten the wrong idea.
So here are some disclaimers, to ease the rosy pink tints out of the view I offer.
I am often in a mess. Often late, often indecisive, often forgetful (why do I resist lists and calendars so much? Self destructive tendencies? Character flaws? Or Really Bad Psychology?). I have been threatened by the Post Office (for forgetting to pick up my mail for over a week, twice) and the orthodontist’s office (for not keeping my ten year old’s teeth clean). I hate making phone calls. I hate official errands. Updating my children’s immunizations and registering them for school when we moved from Washington to Utah was an exhausting nightmare for me. Finding contractors to help us build our house was also emotionally taxing (but way more rewarding than chasing immunization details).
While it is true that I almost never go out in public without my hair done and lashes mascara’d, this actually is nothing to brag about, for two reasons (there may be more, but these two are what occur to me). A) Motives: I have deep-seated insecurities about my appearance, having feared all of my life, as the oldest daughter with green rather than blue eyes, that I fit the stereotype of mean (or at least boring) ugly big sister. My dad coined the term “sisty-ugler” long ago as a general joke, not aimed at me of course, but… still. So my grooming motives are shallow, shaped at least in part by birth order and socialization (which for me is just a fancy word for the Brothers Grimm). B) as a result of my penchant for heels and my ritualistic toilette, I’m hailed by at least one relative as “June Cleaver”. Not complimentary, in this era of liberated, proactive, ambitious, thinking-savvy women. At all.
And grocery shopping. I’m a terrible grocery shopper. My son Ezra is always lamenting the essentials I forget (though he and I define essentials differently). Lists would help, I know. Not shopping in heels might help also.
If the June Cleaver appellation didn’t already give it away, I am very, very Not Cool. In high school one of my annual staff peers (in the 80‘s, though annual staff was great, it was not cool) called me Pollyanna and Wheat Germ Woman. Who wants to be Pollyanna on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when nothing can get between Brooke Shields and her Calvin Kleins and Tom Cruise is dancing with his guitar in his BVD’s (oh, says the Pollyanna in me, if only Marc Chagall had seen that!)?
More: according to the IRS , I haven’t been employed since I gave birth to my first daughter nineteen years ago. If I were to compete for a ‘real’ job right now, I would have to do some intense self-talk just to get through the moment (and here’s Pollyanna again—will I never escape her?). I only have one year of college education. I quit college to marry and work at nineteen. And this brings us smack! right into another sobering fact: I missed the crucial developmental opportunities of launching AND college level math. I’m really most qualified (because amateur artists and writers starve until they paint a masterpiece or write a best-seller) to work in construction, and who would believe me when I touted my abilities? Who would believe that June Cleaver/Pollyanna was handy with a nail gun and could run an auger? Even if they did believe me, I’d be deported before I got the job. I don’t know where I’d be deported to, but I’m sure it would happen. I’ve lost my social security card so many times the social security administration may never issue me another one. And even the Wheat Germ Women among us know that you have to have a social security card both to get a job, and to be for real in America. Fair or not.
Which reminds me of a line from the “Princess Bride”. Vizzini is threatening Fezzik, who has voiced concern abut his corporate strategies: “And You! Friendless! Brainless! Helpless! Hopeless! Do you want me to send you back to where I found you? Unemployed? in GREENLAND?” Fezzik and I are kindred spirits. Like the giant, I am both unemployed, and I don’t make friends easily. Thankfully, Fezzik eventually finds a compadre in Inigo, who is willing to parry rhymes with him. My main compadre, Frank, has an aversion to poetry (and when I say poetry, I speak figuratively, as all poets must). Our friendship is built on other more common ground, and that’s ok. The gift of rhyme-parrying is rare, and, I suspect, sorely over-rated (by the Fezziks and Lynaeas of this world). Much more laudable is the art of conviviality. The winning-ness and genial graciousness of easy-breezy small talk. Which I haven’t mastered. I suspect that in conversation with new acquaintance, I may actually be awkward—possibly even offensive (“Be quiet– I mean it!” “Anybody want a peanut?”*). A painful thought. And my cooking is so sketchy that making friends by entertaining them with supper doesn’t necessarily work for me either. I’m grateful for the few close friends I have made (or who have made me). Grateful grateful. There are not many; they are precious to me.
At this point in my list of disclaimers, the reader may also have noticed another trivial (or serious) flaw: I overuse paretheses (and apparently, I don’t know how to spell parentheses).
Here’s another one: Though I really, really like animals (sometimes I even love them), I can not claim to be a bona fide animal lover. A disappointment to my children and husband. I’m too selfish; I too reluctantly share space. I used to fantasize that I would keep dog-pets, that they would rest their chin on my knee and gaze up at me with adoring eyes. But I resented Hannah and Ginger for damaging my gardens and chewing our underwear, and especially for escaping and skinny dipping in the neighbor’s horse trough. I just couldn’t hack being a dog owner. I showed signs of neurosis above and beyond my usual as a dog owner. And my relationship with my cats (Larry and Alice) is distant and cool: they sleep in the garage and spend all their waking hours killing neighborhood mice outside, a fact I hope my neighbors remember when they discover Larry using their flowerbeds as a litterbox yet again. I get cranky when the cats bolt past our legs and through the door whenever we open it (and here, dear reader, is why so many cats have crooked tails..they don’t always make it).
And now for the last disclaimer (though it really isn’t the last after all–perhaps I will just periodically publish disclaimers; the list is that endless). I am one of two responsible adults in the crazy house on the street. But the other adult is usually gone, so really, I’m the only responsible adult (and we’ve just established the difficulties I have with responsibility). The indictment is official, signed, sealed, and notarized (it comes from the mouth of one of my daughter’s friends, a reliable, steady young man with roots he can trace back to royalty in Polynesia). While he and Maurya were absorbed in conversation (hopefully small talk), Ezra slipped outside and messed around with his car. The steering wheel locked up. While the friend tried to start his car (impossible when the steering wheel is locked), Ezra pressed his nose against the window and made faces. I was probably upstairs painting (or had gone grocery shopping in heels). Alice was chasing her tail (which thankfully is still beautifully straight), with Larry poised in the shadows for a chance to pounce on her (eventually she got dizzy and flopped over mid chase, and Larry, disgusted with his ditzy would-be quarry, left his ambush spot and ambled off to the neighbor’s flower bed). Nora ran shrieking down the sidewalk in a princess dress. I’m not sure what Meisha and Michaelyn were doing. Probably quoting Tolkien. Anyway, the friend could no longer contain himself. “Your guys are like the crazy family on the street! I wonder if there’s a gas leak, because even your cats are crazy!” he told Maurya. Of course, he was under duress. But it might be true.
The end.
Note: There’s a lot of cultural references here. In case you didn’t know, Pollyanna was an ingenuous, somewhat naive positive thinker, who turned a cranky town around with her sunshiny little girl platitudes. Hayley Mills portrayed her in a movie by the same name. The irony here is that my dad had made the connection between me and Pollyanna long before the annual staff did. Bursting with pride (or maybe just in a humorous mood), he once said that my sister Leah was Farrah Fawcett, Mara Lee was Brooke Shields, and I was Hayley Mills. I was crushed at the comparison; Farrah and Brooke were obviously beautiful, but Hayley? Of The Parent Trap? The prim, prudish girl with weird hair and no eyebrows? Even as Pollyanna her hair was weird.
Ferris Bueller was an 80’s high school hero, debonaire, clever, cool. I think we all know who Tom Cruise is. And June Cleaver (the perfect mother with pearls and heels and supper ready for Beaver). But some may not recognize Marc Chagall, the Post-Impressionist maybe Expressionist (maybe not) painter of colorful serene night scenes containing snuggling lovers, goats, and sometimes guitars.
Last, the lines quoted from “The Princess Bride” may not be exact. Michaelyn and I worked on remembering them together, without actually consulting the movie.
