The Total Femme

Today it is pissing down rain. Our relatively-newly-acquired Cairn terrier has never had to take his walk in such a deluge, but he was a brave little guy, wearing his soon-sodden red fleece coat, and after a little while, he began to discover the joys of walking in the rain, even if you have to stop and shake yourself wildly and frequently. You can chase the water rushing down to the storm drains, and have a little sip of the foamy stuff. You can still sniff things, and the rain has melted a lot of the snow, so there’re plenty of uncovered things to sniff. We walked along, pretty happy, getting wetter and wetter. I found some nice wooden animals and a very large penny (about 4 inches across) that must have dropped out of someone’s trash. And the dog, frisking up onto someone’s lawn, found the snowman’s nose. The snowman himself was pretty sad looking, but the nose was a gorgeous glowing orange, washed fresh by the rain, lurking in the sodden grass. Mister Dog  immediately sat down and ate the whole thing.

Isn’t it funny what a little context will do? He’s been completely ptui-ing any carrot I give him for dinner lately, but this was an exotic wild carrot that he’d hunted himself, people. Not some tame variety from the fridge, all cut up into little nubbins rolling around insipidly in his dish. I think I’ll invent a new saying: instead of “the bees knees,” I’m going to start saying “the snowman’s nose.”

Now we’re home, and he’s larking about in the living room, completely invigorated and refreshed. I’m feeling pretty good, too, because I got a nice piece of work done this morning, pre-walk, and I’m looking forward to lunch and more work. Then both boys will come here after school (usually Seth goes to Anne’s on Wednesdays) and we will all be cozy, with the rain pelting down. It’s the nose! (You know whose.)

Because Owen was put in a lower skill group than Seth (the one made up of him and me) and this precipitated a big meltdown starting with “Just once, just once, I want to be better than Seth at a sport,” moving through, “I don’t have any friends,” and sputtering to a stop only because he was in bed and falling asleep with, “I’m just a math nerd and a computer geek.” Didn’t matter that I reminded him of his awesome pitching arm, the fact that his buddy the Greek God had been over just that afternoon for a few hours of chummy togetherness, nor that being good at math and computers is a serious plus.

The saddest thing was hearing Seth’s taunts come out of Owen’s mouth: you suck, no one likes you, you’re a nerd. Which, of course, are Seth’s own fears about himself. Sigh. Today is Seth’s guitar lesson, which means I have him alone in the car which means I can (for the millionth time) have a talk with him about not being such a bully to Owen, who loves him and has his back, that when he’s mean to Owen, it affects the whole family, which loves him and has his back, and that he’s teaching Owen to find fault with himself where there is no fault, and that that kind of behavior does nothing at all for Seth’s soul or karma. Etc. I mentioned that this is for the millionth time, I know I did.

I had wanted to write about how having two houses is hard on the boys and on us in so many ways, and here’s one: I get Seth alone in the car today and I can talk with him about being shitty to Owen, which always makes him sad and defensive. Then he sleeps here and wakes up grumpy, usually, then he goes to school and then I don’t see him again until Monday (today is Tuesday). So there’s no real follow through and I can’t check up on his promise (he’s sure to promise) that he’s going to lay off. Ok, I can write to Anne about it, but there’s no guarantee that she’ll do anything about it, and it’s tricky – I try to stay out of her business when she has the boys. Her parenting style, as I may have mentioned, is very, very, very different from mine.

Well, it’s doing some kind of mixed precip out there and I’m on my way to read to Owen’s class, which I try to do once a week or so, along with volunteering at the library. I’m going to miss the elementary school! But check it out: tears or no tears, accompanied by my devil spawn or no, I’m going to keep going to badminton and learn how to boing that birdie, you just watch.

Right now, Owen and my Beau are in the kitchen doing the dishes and going crazy with their version of “Bohemian Rapsody” and totally cracking themselves up and making the dog do SERIOUS tilty head. Seth has fled upstairs and is practicing “Layla”. Now Owen has come over and is doing a Wayne dance (we love “Wayne’s World” in the Femmedom), and my Beau is playing air dishtowel guitar and “Layla” just went up a notch. They are making me laugh, which is good because I’ve been a complete terror all day and biting people’s heads off maybe because I haven’t gotten my period in about 2 months despite constantly feeling like I’m going to (periomenopause in the Femmedom). Now we’re going to a badminton thing at a local grade school sponsored by the rec department. Can you do the fandango???

Today was the first real day of school vacation for the boys, I mean the first real day at home (they’d been away at a farm over the weekend), and of course they got in a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Which happened while I was on the phone with my friend Natalie who is my Wedding Coordinator, and who was very professional and kind about ignoring the escalating sound of battle in the background as we discussed guest lists, budget, flowers, and cake. After I hung up, I blew those boys’ hair back so far it’s a wonder the little brats aren’t shiny bald. Then we had a group hug. Then everybody ate lunch and got ready to go to their camp, as today is the first day (Seth is taking basketball and Owen is doing baking). As I was looking up the directions, Seth came trailing in and said, out of the blue, “Mom, sometimes when kids at school want to call other kids retarded or something, they say ‘Jew’.”

A piece of news which makes me sad, but how blessed I feel that Seth brought it up. His manner indicated that he knows that that’s not a good thing to say but maybe doesn’t exactly know why. Well, we made a start on it in the car to camp. I talked about how Jews have been oppressed by Christians from day one, about how using “Jew” like that is a hurtful slur, I guessed that often kids use that word in connection with money (I was right), and then talked about how Jews were forced to do jobs Christians considered dirty, including lend money, and then castigated them even more for doing dirty work, and how that hurtful stereotype has lasted all these hundreds of years, and that it will last until non-Jews break the cycle by educating themselves or having Jewish friends, or comes to their senses in any of the many ways that can happen.  I was about to tell them about pogroms but we got to the camp. “I’m only just getting started!” I cautioned them as we got out of the car, and both of them had that sort of I-love-you-but-you’re-really-weird smile on their faces. But I know they were listening. And I know my rants (which are really just my impassioned and compassionate observations on humans) contain good and useful and true information, the kind of information they can use as they carry on into adulthood. Pre-rant, I had just gotten through telling them how proud I was of them for coming around, apologizing, and getting right with each other and me after acting so poorly. “I know you boys are kind and smart and loving and funny and wonderful even though you sometimes act like buttheads,” I’d said.

I am so proud of them. I am so proud of them for deciding to notice injustice: these are the boys who came out of a gas station restroom a couple years ago, around this same time since we were on vacation, and asked for a sharpie so they could go back in and cross out the n-word that someone had written on the wall, and these are the boys who were as shocked and incensed as I was that our UU church didn’t even mention Martin Luther King in the sermon given on the MLK holiday weekend and so we wrote a letter together as a family, and the minister responded incredibly positively and read the letter in church the next Sunday and promised that next MLK day would be different. This is my eldest who just read Warriors Don’t Cry:A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High by Melba Pattillo Beals, and himself almost cried a few times. And this is my youngest to whom all human variation seems to be just a normal part of the mix instead of scary or weird or wrong. These are my boys – not buttheads. Not in the least.

Monday, Anne went behind my back and got Owen the H1N1 flu mist at the clinic at school. Not only does this breach the terms of the parenting agreement we only recently filed with the court, it was a complete breach of faith between the two of us, since I had explicitly told her I didn’t want to boys vaccinated at this time.

Poor Owen – the look on my face when he told me he’d been vaccinated must have been pretty alarming. Seth immediately went for the jugular, “Didn’t you and Mommy agree?” For the first time, I let them in on more than what I usually do when it comes to talking about me and Anne: I told them that I hadn’t known Mommy was going to do that, that we didn’t agree on Owen getting vaccinated, and that I’m really shocked that it happened. Owen kind of shrugged it off, in his Dr. Love fashion – yesterday when I sent him off to school, I said, “Honey, I want to apologize again for the mix-up with the vaccine,” and he patted me on the arm and said cheerfully, “No need!” and went skipping on his merry way. Seth, on the other hand, is obviously freaked out: if me and Anne aren’t going to get back together, we’re at least supposed to be a solid unit taking care of them.

After a night from hell Monday (on the couch, crying, up at 3am watching Season 2 of “Big Love”, filled with rage against Anne and her insanity, etc.), I got up, got the boys off to school, and called my lawyer. In his mild, don’t-be-asking-me-to-hold-your-hand-honey way, he told me that I could file for contempt but it might or might not go my way, or he could write a stern letter to Anne’s lawyer. I chose stern letter, and that was sent, and thanks to modern technology, she got it the very same day. Much later in the day, I remembered my lawyer had said, too, that it often takes about a year to get agreements like this running smoothly.

With much deep breathing and concentrating on the blessings of my family, I managed to let the rage dissipate, and me, my Beau, Seth and Owen had a gorgeous day yesterday, celebrating Thanksgiving early (they’re at Anne’s for the actual day this year), and enjoying being together. A fire, the puppy, a few rounds of Boggle after a simply amazing meal if I do say so myself, and bedtime stories. When they went to Anne’s today, I was able to let them go without tears, with joy, because they have another family, and that family is also incredibly important to them and that is ok. Gorgeous days like the one we had yesterday are like an inoculation against separation. We connect and love each other so deeply, that it’s ok to be apart for a while. Won’t be no skin off our noses.

Today, I am even calmer. I am so grateful to have this agreement in place – hey! we swore in front of the very grumpy judge that we would abide by it! – and to have recourse when Anne goes cracker jack after reading yet one more incendiary news article about how we’d better all panic to the nth degree about this flu. As unforgivable and crazy as it was for her to lie, go behind my back, undermine my credibility with the boys, and expose Owen’s precious body to god knows what in that stupid vaccine, at least this agreement has my back and I can come down on her with my lawyer’s help to give her a reality check. “Agreement” doesn’t mean whatever Anne wants. “Agreement” means we have to agree, and if one person says no, then we don’t agree and it doesn’t happen, whatever it is. And if she keeps acting like she can do whatever she wants, then she will be in contempt, and I will definitely take her back to court. There are two of us parenting here, and we are very different from each other and that is one reason why we got a divorce and that is why we hammered out this parenting agreement.

She wrote me an email yesterday saying she knows we’re having “significant vaccine issues” and she would like to “discuss what happened” with me after she talks to her lawyer again. Here’s the beauty of my post-agreement world: I don’t have to discuss shit with her. No means no.

Owen may or may not be immune to the swine flu now, but I feel pretty confident that my Beau and I are doing our job giving him and his brother the biggest and best dose of love that we possibly can, and that that will set them up for a life in which people are loose cannons, even people close to them like their other mom, and where there is a lot of disappointment, transition, loss, and confusion to navigate. There are also hugs, puppies splayed out in front of the fire, purple cauliflower and homemade gravy, raucous games of Boggle, and bedtime stories. Now that is a shot in the arm.

Recently, due perhaps to some kind of deep, personal flaw, I have been watching a lot of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” I didn’t catch it the first time around, but I am certainly enjoying it now. I’m a little more than halfway through the second season, and if you haven’t seen it and think you might, then stop reading now because I’m going to be talking plot.

I read somewhere that Willow discovers she’s a lesbian, and it’s just so exciting waiting to see how that’s going to go down. Right now, she just caught Xander kissing Cordelia and she’s super upset. She’s also been flirting with that Oz guy. It got me thinking about how complicated the coming out process is, how long it can take, how confusing it is. In her book, My Dangerous Desires; A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, Amber Hollibaugh discusses a propensity she had before she knew she was queer:

After high school and still straight, I nurtured my addiction to jealous dramas. I was bored with heterosexuality; heartbreak and jealous betrayal made it a hell of a lot more impressive [and Willow has the extra added impressiveness of getting to watch her good friend make it with a vampire! ttf]. It also kept alive my hope that there was still a chance for me; I wasn’t quite the freak I thought myself to be. My explosive emotional life covered the genuine drama I was avoiding.

This propensity, I also had. In college, (still straight), I was also nurturing my addiction to jealous dramas with a long, drawn out saga involving 2 of my best friends who eventually got together, leaving me to play the role of mascot, unable to face my own genuine drama. I suppose any queer girl could get caught up in this crazy stuff, but I think femmes in particular are susceptible because with guys, I mean, there’s something there that’s interesting. The masculinity part is good, it’s just not the right packaging.

I don’t know if Willow is really a lesbian and she’s probably not going to be a femme (although she would make a totally adorable geeky one, for sure), but I’m rooting for her. I also don’t know if the main character of Haven Kimmel’s novel, Something Rising (Light and Swift) is queer because she’s pretty secretive about herself (a clue, perhaps), but she sure acts like a butch. (Stop now if you don’t want to hear about the story!) From the time she’s ten and working hard to improve a shack out by the river to right now in the book (I’m a little over halfway through) when she’s consumed with anger, not hooked up with anyone, taking care of her agoraphobic and anorexic older sister after having had to be the breadwinner and caretaker of all the rest of her family as well, she acts like a butch who has to shore up the world because no one else is stepping up. She’s also a carpenter and most of all, an extremely gifted pool player. She appears to have no sexuality at all, and when someone asks her if she’s gay, she says, “Are you trying to piss me off?” Mm hm.

In “Innocence” (Season 2, Episode 14), Cordelia asks Xander if looking at guns really makes people think about sex,  and do they make Xander think about sex? Xander says, “Cordelia, I’m 17 – looking at linoleum makes me think about sex!” Good one! And so true. But what about those of us who, also 17 or however old we were, also with hormones in overdrive, didn’t get turned on by thinking about sex with the proscribed gender and were, for whatever reason, unable to realize what gender or what gender flavor, would turn us on? All our thoughts about sex got turned elsewhere, often in incredibly destructive directions. The other day, I was just remembering when I lived in Tokyo in my early 20s and the object of my delusional affection came to visit, still not in love with me, still only in love with my friend, but I hung out with him anyway, gave him my all. I wrote a song about being his dogsbody, I would ride back to my lonely apartment at rush hour after having seen him, tears running down my face, anguish personified, for all the tired salary men and office ladies going home to admire and wonder over.

Joel, the main character in Mark Merlis’s novel Man About Town realizes at midlife that “[b]eing gay had taken up his whole life. He had devoted the whole of his youth to it, had studied it year after year as intensively as if he had been training to be a neurosurgeon. There hadn’t been time for anything else.” Part of his being gay (and mine) was first not to know or to deny that he was gay – that took a long time. Then it took a long time and a lot of devotion to being gay, and then – for me, for many femmes – a long time figuring out that I wasn’t a regulah lesbian. And here we are, me and Joel, heading rapidly towards fifty and just coming into ourselves – who we really are, with a sexuality integrated into our whole selves.

No wonder I’ve been sitting around watching Buffy!

The good news is that Seth joined the rest of us for a few rounds of Boggle this evening, completely uncomplainingly and with  gusto — pretty good for Mr. “I Don’t Want To” 13-year old.

The bad news is that he was completely amped and sang (with gusto) snippets of “White Wedding” the entire time. Loudly.

I don’t speak Spanish, but I speak another romance language (French), have been around the block a lot and even have two fabulous bilingual nephews, so I know a few words and phrases. When I listen to songs sung in Spanish, what I understand goes something like this:

“I know….here….blood….I don’t know….eat….no more….if….I don’t know….bad….pain….I’m sorry.”

In the past week or so, I’ve had serious conversations with both my sons. With Seth, it started because he accused me of meddling in his social life. Apparently, some garbled version of my visit to the guidance counselor last spring got back to him via the loose lips of a fellow parent to whom an abbreviated version had been told in confidence. Said parent told his son, who told Seth, and things got more and more telephone gamed out along the way.

What really happened was I alerted the guidance counselor to the goings-on of this group of girls who’d been texting Seth to death and requested that, if possible, they not all be in the same cluster this year, and plus, please put Seth in a 7th-grade cluster where academics, as opposed to “shut up and sit down,” are the main focus. I did not, as Seth dramatically accused, tell them to keep him away from all his friends forever and ever.

I addressed his concerns as best I could, stressing that my job as his mom is to get his back and look at the bigger picture, that I’m walking the middle ground of giving him as much privacy as I can but also keeping an eye on things.

With Owen, I held forth – passionately and eloquently, having been granted one of those transcendent parenting moments that come about now and again – on the far-reaching value and joy of learning to play the piano. Owen is good at the piano and has really big hands – he can already reach a ninth – but he gets growly about practicing and going to lessons, even though he enjoys them when he gets there and he loves sitting down and playing with me.

Again, I referenced the bigger picture, and how having learned to play the piano at his age (10) will stand him in good stead as he gets older and wants to do anything from being a techie for a musical to sing in a chorus. It’s like having a job doing something you like: even though you mostly enjoy it, there are always going to be tedious aspects. In the case of the piano, for Owen, these are reading music and doing the correct fingering. For me, it was the sinister circle of fifths, which Owen, incidentally, eats up with a spoon.

When I speak with such intensity about such important topics to my sons, I have to believe they’re listening. Or rather, that they hear me.

“….my heart….dance….sing….but….sadness….I love you.”

What they retain and what it means to them? I don’t exactly know and can only hope for the best. Perhaps it’s like what I hear in those Spanish songs that speak to me so soulfully: a few key words, and a vast and earnest outpouring of true, pure emotion. Heart to heart. Down to the most basic, human elements.  La vida.

When the boys are at their other mom’s like they are now  (we share custody), I am always sad. Sometimes sobbing sad, sometimes weepy sad, and sometimes just sad behind my eyes and in my heart.

Just now I was upstairs making Seth’s bed, and I realized how much it helps to be in his room, smoothing wrinkles out of his sheets and making sure his bed is cozy and inviting for when he gets into it tomorrow night. Neatening up in his room also helps, but I try not to go crazy, because he likes things to stay kind of messy and friendly. Owen, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to mind if I neaten up, and that helps feel me better (as baby Seth used to say) when they’re at Anne’s (my ex and their other mom).

Making a menu with my Beau and laying in supplies for the time the boys are with us also helps – it cements into place the fact that they will be here soon, under our care.

Researching summer camps (even though it’s a time suck) keeps me connected to them.

Making appointments with guidance counselors and teachers, keeping track of sports games, even if we’re not going – all of that helps.

But the bottom line is that the boys are elsewhere just about half of the time, and that is always going to be a heartbreak. Is one of these chicken soup things supposed to end on a cheery note? If so, too bad. Divorce is not cheery, at least not when it comes to the kids involved (it’s cheery that I no longer have to live with Anne, very cheery indeed!). It sucks. Divorce really, really sucks. And I miss my babies. Damn it.

*#1, New York Times Best Seller List for 15 months straight

I just got back from a ceremony in the elementary school gym swearing in the 9 or so 5th graders who have volunteered to be bankers for the school bank, sponsored, of course, by a local bank here in town. Owen, coming from my ex’s house, was wearing a suitably banker-ish blue striped button down shirt over sports pants – very natty. The banker guy had them stand up and swear a mighty swear, “I promise to do my duty for the school bank and obey the rules,” something like that. Then they all got caps with the bank logo on them and got their pictures taken. Before the ceremony started, I had been looking around the school gym, thinking about how this is our last year here, and feeling a bit choked up.

I’ve gone from homeschooling to being pretty active in the school community. I hadn’t thought I’d ever put my guys in school. Divorce and many other complicating factors have dictated otherwise.

I am a bit more humble than I once was about parenting. When it comes to just being a human trying to get along. So I am happy to report that, although I felt incipient cynical rumblings about 5 bankers being in my baby’s elementary school with their predatory claws extended and a money-eating gleam in their eye, I shoved it down and allowed Owen his glorious moment, a huge proud grin on my face. He got sworn in, then rejoined his class, where his two buddies (Ms. Tomboy and Mr. Greek God) shoved and joshed him around.

I’m still grinning.