Is it morning yet? Now is it morning yet? Mom, when will it be morning?
Max has been waking up at five thirty am for the last three mornings. He crawls into bed with us even though this almost knocks me to the floor because Chick has to get in the act too and our bed is big enough for two people. Then he wiggles, turns, talks (in a loud whisper), pushes and kicks at the dog who then thinks it's time for wrestling, and asks me when it's time to get up every thirty seconds. We end up (in desperation) letting him run off to the office across the hall to play his lego.com video games. I know, we should be getting up with him and engaging in some frightfully gentle play meant to stimulate his brain so that one day he'll be the next Einstein instead of the thirty year old guy that hangs out at the video arcade all day long and delivers pizza in his spare time. All I can say in my defense is: someone's got to deliver pizzas, right?
I am on a campaign to make some useful little items that I have actually been needing myself for quite some time. Needle cases don't seem all that useful unless you happen to sew a lot and you buy needles in those little plastic/paper packages from which all the needles will cascade like a dangerous waterfall into your workbasket where you will impale several fingers before finding them all again. Some packages are better than others, but none of them are good enough to be considered useful.
I used to have this cool little sterling silver needle tube that was my great grandmother's. It got burnt up in our fire along with almost every other little tiny sewing scrap I had of hers. So the need for somewhere to keep needles of the non-syringe type has been around for a long time. I'm guessing since man first made needles.) In the thirties and forties people used paper or cloth envelopes to stick their needles in. That's what these are. I'll photograph them again when the insides are complete.
I'm very happy with my new mushroom key chains. Key chains aren't something people sit around thinking about much, but when you need one, you need one. I need one. Well, OK, no I don't. I need one with pretty decoration though because mine are completely undecorated. Plus and item like this makes a great stocking stuffer or a sweet little gift.
Yesterday I stopped off at Third Street Books to look at cookbooks. This is never truly an idle activity for me. If you knew how many cookbooks I covet but don't have you would admire my incredible self control. If you saw my collection of cookbooks you would think I have a problem. My friend Sharon has about four cookbooks and won't buy any more because she still hasn't made all of the recipes in the ones she has. It absolutely never once in my cooking life occurred to me that anyone ever uses all of the recipes from any one cookbook or that they should. Sharon and I differ on many points, but this is the one that stumps me the most. She has made many little comments on the extravagance of having as many cookbooks as I do. Because she can't see a need for them. Wasted money. Well, the justice in what she says is that she and her husband are never nearly as in debt as Philip and I usually are.I really think she should read more blogs because she is an amazing thrift shopper and always finds what she needs half off. Sometimes I think that she's a little obsessed with the cost of things, but if she were to read half the blogs I do she would feel right at home. There are so many crafty bloggers whose main joy in life (besides their incredible creativity, and did I mention that Sharon is an amazing artist?) is to find things for cheap.
I'm not particularly proud to say this, but here's the truth: I am constantly disappointed in the things I find for cheap. Shopping for sale things is exhausting and depressing, and being constantly bothered by the cost of things takes up brain space I could be using for other activities such as worrying about whether or not my son is going to become a greasy unhygienic adult who doesn't care about anything in life besides playing "Crazy Taxi". Things cost what they do. We aren't in the middle ages any more. Every year things will be more expensive. That's how it goes. I don't have time to resent it.
Ever notice how really old people love to tell you how going to the movie used to cost them a nickel? I'm afraid too many people long for those days and feel a sense of injustice that going to a movie now costs $9.50. Do you know what those old folks were making a month when they were paying a nickel to go to the movies? How does $30.00 a month sound to you? So how far can your money take you if movies cost a nickel but all you're making a month is $30.00? The ratio of income versus cost of living may have changed slightly, but not by much.
My attitude doesn't come from living a life of privilege either. Most of my life has been spent shopping the Good Wills with my parents, wearing hand me downs, and not getting things we wanted because we didn't have enough money. There was a brief few years of affluence when my Dad's business was doing really well, we ate out more often, we had a Mercedes and a Ford van, we had really nice stereo equipment, and we shopped a lot less for second hand stuff. Then my parents divorced and my Dad decided that I should live with my mom because that's what girls should do, except he wanted my sister Tara to live with him. So I went right back to worrying about how my mom was going to pay the rent. It certainly made me responsible for myself earlier than if I had lived with my Dad in Tiburon and always been sure that he would send me to college, that food would be in the fridge, and that if anything went wrong he would be there to catch me.
It's not like he didn't occasionally pay for dental work when I had no money and needed a root canal, he actually did that twice, for which I was very appreciative. He sometimes bought me groceries when I lived in my first apartment in San Francisco when I was eighteen (this was not the one I had on my own, this is a studio apartment I shared with my first room mate Carrie). He had told me he was going to send me to college but in the end he had me get tons of student loans and then told me that since he had to pay for his own college I should do the same. Later, my grandfather actually bailed me out of my overwhelming student loans. So my education was paid for unexpectedly by my Grandpa Tom.
I suppose I sometimes felt bitter that my sister and I ended up living in such different circumstances. Especially because when my parents divorced my mom and I had been estranged for close to nine months. (she moved back to California with my brother months before the divorce). I wanted to keep living with my Dad. At the time it hurt that he didn't want me. I don't think my sister had half a clue what it was like coming home to find out mom had run off to Dallas for the weekend in a fur coat but left no food in the house for my brother and I. Of course she was a lot younger than me. Yet, even now I think she believes that our parents' divorce was harder on her than anyone else.
I thought I had let go of all of the bitterness. In fact, I pride myself on my ability to move on. I think this would be true if my family had also moved on. Lately my whole family has been conjuring up the ghosts of my bitterness past with their apparent inability to move on from things that have happened twenty years ago. When I hear about how hard things were/are for them (which I've been listening to for twenty years now) I find there is a rage building up in me from years of invisibility. There's a part of me that wants to scream at them all for never ever asking me how hard it all was for me. NEVER. Not one of them. What I'm realizing as I'm writing this, preparing to send it out into the ether to be read by anyone who wants to, is that anything I say about my family could easily become an explosive force.
Partly because I'm not the passive person my family chooses to believe I am. I have chosen not to be a voice of contention whenever I can hold it in, because there are already four dissatisfied bitter human beings who are never quite at peace with each other. I have chosen to be the diplomat. No one asked me to do this, so if I have chosen to be quiet about my feelings for the sake of peace, it's my own fault if no one noticed me on the edge of the cliff. How can I expect any of them to see me if I spent so much time trying to ameliorate their anger because I just wanted everyone to love each other and work things out? I spent so much time worried about my family, how hurt everyone was, how they kept on hurting each other that by the time I realized my own feelings mattered, it was too late to be counted by anyone but myself.
I wasn't expecting to walk down this memory lane this morning. I wasn't planning to talk about any of this because I am, in truth, scared shitless to dig up the loose shallow graves our family past lives in. If I talk I will pay. Either my family will all freak out on me for saying such untrue things, or they'll be angry that I mentioned them at all in anything but a flattering light, or they will freeze me out for having surprised them with things I should have said a long time ago. As a writer you have to decide how to handle this kind of stuff. Either you adopt a pen name to be free to tell things how you want to. Or you write fiction, even though eventually you will write your family into the books you write and they will recognize themselves but you will have the ability to claim it isn't based on them. Or you can write what you know, what you feel, and consequences be damned.
All efforts to become a good writer have been stopped right at this point. Right here. This is my cross roads. I can erase what I've written above and start over. That's what I've always done. I can continue to try not to rock the boat. To protect the family I love so much at my own expense. Or I can write what needs to be said and risk having to fight with my family or lose them. If I erase what I've written today I go back to the drawing board with my pen. I will tell myself I'm not a writer, that I can't be because I can never be free to tell the truth. No matter what I'm writing about, at some point, my opinions and actions are informed by my experiences with my family and to not be free to tell how I came to that point robs the writing of authenticity.
Is it possible to write about your family, the grit included, and still let your family know how much you love them and are glad to be a part of them? Can the two co-exist? What I need is to gather some well-known writers around me at a conference table and find out how they manage to write about their families, even the hard things, the unflattering things, and still have their family talking to them. David Sedaris would be my number one pick. He spills it all. Apparently his family and he are still pretty tight. He makes fun of them, he lets darkness spill, but he writes with his sister and his family reads everything he writes.
I don't have any of these answers. My family, so far, hardly ever reads my blog. So maybe there's no need to worry anyway. I guess if they are reading it I will find out after today what kind of family they really are, just like they'll be finding out what kind of person I really am. I'm so tired of not being true to myself just to protect the people I have loved the longest. It's just about the last frontier. With my friends, with new people I meet, it's all out there. I don't hide myself anymore, I haven't for years. The good, the scary, the ugly. Right there in the open. It's been the antidote to having been so quiet, so secretive of the most raw things I felt for so many years. Trying so hard not to rock the boat. Well it's been my god damned boat too so what the hell have I been such a shrinking violet for?
After such weighty talk, perhaps I will end with an appropriate list which I may need to consult very soon. I may have just lit my life on fire.
Things that make me feel good even when Life looks grim: Here are those things I find indispensable, and most of them are not cheap:
It's not like he didn't occasionally pay for dental work when I had no money and needed a root canal, he actually did that twice, for which I was very appreciative. He sometimes bought me groceries when I lived in my first apartment in San Francisco when I was eighteen (this was not the one I had on my own, this is a studio apartment I shared with my first room mate Carrie). He had told me he was going to send me to college but in the end he had me get tons of student loans and then told me that since he had to pay for his own college I should do the same. Later, my grandfather actually bailed me out of my overwhelming student loans. So my education was paid for unexpectedly by my Grandpa Tom.
I suppose I sometimes felt bitter that my sister and I ended up living in such different circumstances. Especially because when my parents divorced my mom and I had been estranged for close to nine months. (she moved back to California with my brother months before the divorce). I wanted to keep living with my Dad. At the time it hurt that he didn't want me. I don't think my sister had half a clue what it was like coming home to find out mom had run off to Dallas for the weekend in a fur coat but left no food in the house for my brother and I. Of course she was a lot younger than me. Yet, even now I think she believes that our parents' divorce was harder on her than anyone else.
I thought I had let go of all of the bitterness. In fact, I pride myself on my ability to move on. I think this would be true if my family had also moved on. Lately my whole family has been conjuring up the ghosts of my bitterness past with their apparent inability to move on from things that have happened twenty years ago. When I hear about how hard things were/are for them (which I've been listening to for twenty years now) I find there is a rage building up in me from years of invisibility. There's a part of me that wants to scream at them all for never ever asking me how hard it all was for me. NEVER. Not one of them. What I'm realizing as I'm writing this, preparing to send it out into the ether to be read by anyone who wants to, is that anything I say about my family could easily become an explosive force.
Partly because I'm not the passive person my family chooses to believe I am. I have chosen not to be a voice of contention whenever I can hold it in, because there are already four dissatisfied bitter human beings who are never quite at peace with each other. I have chosen to be the diplomat. No one asked me to do this, so if I have chosen to be quiet about my feelings for the sake of peace, it's my own fault if no one noticed me on the edge of the cliff. How can I expect any of them to see me if I spent so much time trying to ameliorate their anger because I just wanted everyone to love each other and work things out? I spent so much time worried about my family, how hurt everyone was, how they kept on hurting each other that by the time I realized my own feelings mattered, it was too late to be counted by anyone but myself.
I wasn't expecting to walk down this memory lane this morning. I wasn't planning to talk about any of this because I am, in truth, scared shitless to dig up the loose shallow graves our family past lives in. If I talk I will pay. Either my family will all freak out on me for saying such untrue things, or they'll be angry that I mentioned them at all in anything but a flattering light, or they will freeze me out for having surprised them with things I should have said a long time ago. As a writer you have to decide how to handle this kind of stuff. Either you adopt a pen name to be free to tell things how you want to. Or you write fiction, even though eventually you will write your family into the books you write and they will recognize themselves but you will have the ability to claim it isn't based on them. Or you can write what you know, what you feel, and consequences be damned.
All efforts to become a good writer have been stopped right at this point. Right here. This is my cross roads. I can erase what I've written above and start over. That's what I've always done. I can continue to try not to rock the boat. To protect the family I love so much at my own expense. Or I can write what needs to be said and risk having to fight with my family or lose them. If I erase what I've written today I go back to the drawing board with my pen. I will tell myself I'm not a writer, that I can't be because I can never be free to tell the truth. No matter what I'm writing about, at some point, my opinions and actions are informed by my experiences with my family and to not be free to tell how I came to that point robs the writing of authenticity.
Is it possible to write about your family, the grit included, and still let your family know how much you love them and are glad to be a part of them? Can the two co-exist? What I need is to gather some well-known writers around me at a conference table and find out how they manage to write about their families, even the hard things, the unflattering things, and still have their family talking to them. David Sedaris would be my number one pick. He spills it all. Apparently his family and he are still pretty tight. He makes fun of them, he lets darkness spill, but he writes with his sister and his family reads everything he writes.
I don't have any of these answers. My family, so far, hardly ever reads my blog. So maybe there's no need to worry anyway. I guess if they are reading it I will find out after today what kind of family they really are, just like they'll be finding out what kind of person I really am. I'm so tired of not being true to myself just to protect the people I have loved the longest. It's just about the last frontier. With my friends, with new people I meet, it's all out there. I don't hide myself anymore, I haven't for years. The good, the scary, the ugly. Right there in the open. It's been the antidote to having been so quiet, so secretive of the most raw things I felt for so many years. Trying so hard not to rock the boat. Well it's been my god damned boat too so what the hell have I been such a shrinking violet for?
After such weighty talk, perhaps I will end with an appropriate list which I may need to consult very soon. I may have just lit my life on fire.
Things that make me feel good even when Life looks grim: Here are those things I find indispensable, and most of them are not cheap:
- A full pantry of good quality ingredients for making food. Nothing can make me feel better when I'm down than looking in my food stores and finding the ingredients for a hundred really great meals. It's not surprising since it's the cornerstone of survival. (The whole eating thing.)
- Good quality bedding that isn't a hundred years old. Worn-in sheets, if they are good quality, are nice. However, once there are too many stubborn stains and holes, it's just depressing. Plus, it's depressing to have only one set of sheets. I should know, I've been there. I guess one set is better than no sets. But I value having two or three changes of nice sheets.
- New underwear. I don't buy them very often. (I'm certain you've all been asking yourself about this for months now.) It's hard to find the ones I like without going to Walmart which I despise. However, when things are looking down, the worst thing on earth is to look in your underwear drawer and see that every last pair is dingy and that all the elastic is starting to curl and unravel. Worst of all, however, is to observe holes in them. Don't underestimate the power of new underwear to bolster your courage.
- Cookbooks, lots of cookbooks. A year ago this month I was beginning to realize that we were going to be forced to sell our house and find somewhere less expensive to live. We had almost no reserves left and were so heavily in debt I almost couldn't move under the weight of my obligations. No jobs on the horizon. No prospects. Both of us were looking. We were contemplating being a two income household (which we haven't been since a year before we had Max) and putting our son in constant day care to make our bills so we could stay in our house. I was completely falling apart. Wanna know what made me feel better? My collection of cookbooks. A big collection of cookbooks supports the whole good food thing. When feeling like I might start freaking out, I would peruse my collection for inspiration. I would cook a good meal. Cooking is a beautifully calming activity. Cookbooks spark my kitchen imagination. I often don't even follow the recipes, I just get my ideas from them.
- Alcohol. This one's pretty obvious. Beer, wine, liqueurs...a salve for all that ails you. In this day and age it isn't so popular to admit to drinking lots of alcohol, because if you imbibe more than one drink a night, or if you even admit to drinking every single night, you are practically announcing to the world that you are an alcoholic. You will then receive cautionary tales and people will shake their heads piteously at you. I ask you though: would anyone stage an intervention for someone who drinks a six pack of Pepsi a day? Just because Pepsi can't make you drunk doesn't mean it isn't fully as bad for you as alcohol. The stuff rots your gut for crying out loud! Give me beer instead of soda any day. I'll go hang out with some beer swilling monks for some spiritual revelations.