Fun with Cheese

If you haven’t yet discovered the unmitigated laff to be had at I Can Has Cheezburger.  Check it out!!

Let’s Start a Club

For people who get to call themselves “artists” and who are never required to cook or clean or discipline children… People who are free to just hang out and be.

I’ve started this hysterically funny running gag email with B whereby I warn him of the various states of health department code violation he’ll find the house when he returns from work. When he walks in and sees the grossness, you should just hear him laugh and laugh and laugh.

I tell him I was going to clean, but the Artist said, “No. Just leave it.”

***

Reason 8,000,002 that the Bush Administration can suck my sweet mammaries

I Can Haz Baybee?

I want a baby.

There I said it.

So this is love…

P and I have been going to meetings together since last Fall. He’s a self-proclaimed redneck intellectual with a long overgrown beard and ice blue eyes I didn’t look into until we’d known each other nearly 3 months. He’s gruff and sweary and likes to tell dirty jokes. He emails me pictures of birds and flowers and when we get coins for our sobriety time, we pass them first to each other for a blessing and a wish. In February, he stopped coming to our meeting ( “our” meeting, like it’s just his and mine), and I began to panic. I craned my neck around and would ask the others: “Have you seen P?” Where could he be?

But I knew. He was drinking again.

When he came back through the door a few weeks later, he had his hat pulled back down over his face and dark glasses covering his eyes. He sat next to me in his chair and I rested my hand on his knee. When they called on me to speak, I started sobbing like someone who has just been told she is missing a limb, but OH WAIT!! Here it is again!! — a strange combination of relief and sorrow and grief at how fragile this life is. How much I depend on the others, my sweet friends like P., to get me through. Am I really this weak and dependent? Yes. Absolutely yes.

P will have 6 months this Saturday and yesterday he told me, eyes lowered, that he is moving away. I felt the lump in my throat and looked away long enough to swallow my fake good wishes. “It will be ok, sweetie, we can still email,” he tells me, but I’m not so sure.

I turn to him and pretend to joke, “You know, P, I find this move of yours incredibly selfish. What about me? We were supposed to keep taking our time together!!”

He knows I mean it. He puts his hand on my knee. I put my head on his shoulder and breathe, fingers crossed, prayers sent to God or whoever, Please keep him safe. Keep both of us sober.

***

I had the great honor to be included in a wonderful dinner the other evening in Seattle. L and I have known each other through emails and stories from our partners (who are good friends), but I wasn’t prepared for how sweet, kind, funny, and completely adorable he is in person. The dinner was a farewell of sorts*** and I had to excuse myself part way through because I couldn’t keep my composure. No greater buzz kill than a sober person at a goodbye dinner who is crying into her Diet Coke.

***Message from L. who has Terminal Cancer***

Please get your skin checked by a dermatologist for a baseline and then regularly after that. Please do what you love NOW and don’t put it off.

We love you J & L!!

Small Not Simple

“I really like rowdy kids” – Violet, age 3

Over Babble Yonder:

Stuff White Parents Like

Sober BlogHer

I’m in beautiful fresh-air San Francisco this week with a gajillion other women for BlogHer. I was somewhat nervous about coming to such a potentially alcohol-centric event again, but it has been completely lovely.

I’ve caught up with some of my lovely on-line writer pals and will meet some more of them this evening.

Kid-free vacations are so relaxing.. which is perhaps obvious to most thinking people but hasn’t always been so obvious to me.

I just returned from the Frida Kahlo Exhibit at the SF Museum of Modern Art and was blown away by the beautiful lengths many of us go to kill ourselves off for love. Here is a woman who suffered, transformed physically and emotionally and transformed her suffering into art. But her sorrow in many of the paintings is palpable. It jumped out and grabbed me by the throat until I had to swallow and breathe.

On Turning 40…

I turn 40 this week. It is something I’ve dreaded for over a year now. 40 seems so auspicious, so significant. At 30, I was newly divorced and childless, sad but carefree. At 40 life is so much complicated, more rich, more varied than I ever imagined. So this is it. The gateway to another decade.

What will happen?

That question used to have this answer: something better will happen. Something someone somewhere better than this will happen.

And now, for the first time, I feel down to my bones that the real answer is this: I don’t know. I never ever did know really… but a combination of wishful thinking and a very rich internal life kept me imagining other scenarios.. grander vistas than just this moment.

One year ago today I was still drinking more than ever, miserably unhappy in my marriage and with my life. I’d just ended an affair and felt like giving up, like all my life was good for was raising the kids and trying not to die. It was a grim and terrible secret.

Sobriety has given me my life back, has opened up new possibilities for work, family, love, that I honestly could never have imagined, but that is all so trite compared to this simple fact: I am happy now. Not always, not forever, but in this moment.

I do not drink anymore, one day at a time. I have a place to go every day, a fellowship of people who are also trying not to drink so that they can be better stronger more loving people. In their brokenness and hope, I see something majestic and lovely.

This week I am 40. This week I have 9 months of sobriety.

I am grateful beyond words…

***

On more life happens notes:

1. The book is tooling along – 1/2 the manuscript is due this Friday… Thank you to everyone willing to slog through this first draft.

2. My parents are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary tomorrow – congratulations folks!

3. Looking forward to attending BlogHer next week sober… I’m sure it will be an entirely different experience this year

4. At Babble: 10 Signs that Daddy Isn’t Slacking Anymore…

Ah Summer

My Name is Rachael and I’m a Stay at Home Mom

Since January, I’ve not worked in an office. I’ve been writing and getting out to meetings, but mostly I’ve been home with the kids. We don’t do crafts or bake pies, but we do hang around and read books and are good pals. The girls are old enough now that they play made up games and keep each other company. Even though I’m a slave waitress (thanks to Mrs. Chicken for this perfect term), fight breaker-upper, and laundry ignorer, I still find minutes here and there to write.

I’ve tried at various junctures to stay home full-time with the kids and it has never worked very well. I would get bored, or resentful, or think it was impossible, but this time it’s working. Does practice makes perfect in this case? Plenty of other mothers and fathers ruminate on the pros and cons of staying home versus working, and most folks don’t have a choice. But once you have more than two children, the cost of childcare becomes prohibitive, and staying home more viable.

When I introduce myself to people now, I say I’m a writer and a mother and for the first time neither title makes me hunch up my shoulders, or launch into an unnecessary explanation of how I spend my time.

I credit sobriety with this change in attitude, as well as AA. Without the help of both, I’d still be the cat in a wool suit on a hot summer day.

****

- Many thanks to Karen (again) for fixing my broken down old blog.

-Today at Babble: Top 5 Worst Sweet-to-Sexy Toy Makeovers (Even Holly Hobbie is a tart!!)

- My book is up to 17000 words (many of them needing massive re-writes, but still)

- I’m going to BlogHer and I’m sharing a room with her.. I can’t wait!

Modern Family Threesome

The concept of threesomes has been employed by unhappy spouses (or marriage partners with superior imaginations, depending on your view) since time immemorial.  As an antidote to the occasional doldrums of monogamy, it seems perfectly wise and preferable to adultery. Why then can’t we imagine a similar relief from the monotonous isolation of modern-day nuclear families? My husband and I could both really use a helper sort of person around the house. Someone like Donna Reed, pretty and cheerful and wearing gowns of one kind or another, who fetches our slippers when we get home after a long day so we can lounge around and read the paper. Just the thought of this evokes deep feelings of peace and love, similar to how I feel watching Daniel Craig emerge from the blue ocean in “Casino Royale,” like all is right exactly where it should be.

Who wouldn’t want another adult around? I think kids need an adult-child ratio of at least 1:1. When you’re tired or they’re sick, 2:1 is probably more like it. Grandparents can provide some of this type of assistance, especially if your crew is as divorced and remarried as mine, but grandparents usually come with strings attached, and much less energy than they need to wrangle little people. When we have a babysitter around (every other year or so) to help with bath-time or cooking or cleaning up, it is astounding how much easier childrearing becomes. I think some of the wisdom of days gone by (boarding schools and governesses and “children should be seen and not heard”) is not fully appreciated by modern parents. We are so hands-on much of the time. Even when we work full-time, we’re full-throttle with the child psychology books and the guilt and the creeping belief that every little thing we do will land our kids in years of therapy.

Read more today at Imperfect Parent…