now I remember laughter

I wanted to wait to post till I was sure I was giddy with joy, because I tell you Reader, the winter has been a suckfest. I was waiting for the third boot to drop, you know how bad news comes in threes. But Stella's teacher who spoils me rotten with her adoration for my kids, told me I could use her brother for my third thing. He's battling cancer. So thank you Miss K. I am done now. And I will pray for your brother even though I'm a budding atheist. And with the melting snow, let's just say I should give myself the gift of one of those light hats for next winter. The sun makes everything so much better. So does a doofy Adam Sandler movie. So yes, laughter made a comeback this evening. Praise be.

awed and humbled

My mom says she can see that the left side of her lower lip droops just a little bit when she studies herself in the mirror, but I couldn't tell when I saw her Sunday evening. In fact she looked better than I'd seen her in ages. She wasn't even annoying. Bryan and I think she's awed and humbled, both by the surprise attack—it was plaque in her blood that stroked her—and by the fact that she's doing so well after waiting to long to get her ass to the hospital. She admitted that she won't do that again. Hopefully she won't get the opportunity.

xo

when it rains it shits (and other tales from the front lines of suburbia)

Aaaaand my mother had a stroke.

Ba dum bum!

Seriously folks, is this any way to follow up the last three posts I wrote?

Did I mention the lice is back?

Oh she's killing them. Killing the lice that is!

So Sunday morning, I'm standing around the kitchen counter fretting over the looming day. I've got the green light to take myself to a cafe with my laptop and work on the novel, which, and I thank thee o lord, is still in progress, ten pages away from 200 (can she make it?) when the phone rings.
I answer.
"Elishe?" says my mother, who sounds suspiciously drunk on a Sunday morning.
"Yes?"
"I think I had a little shtroke," she says.

soup and cards and warm hearts and cookies

There has been an outpouring of love and sympathy from readers and friends and family since Stuart died January 3. Bryan and I are very grateful to have such wonderful support. To those who have shared their hearts, thank you.

Here's what I have learned from this event, about myself and about grief and about Stuart and family—

1. It's better to express what's in your heart than to suppress it for fear that it will sound trite or wrong or inappropriate. If it's heartfelt, it will be the perfect thing to say.

the day after the funeral

I woke up yesterday morning after the funeral at my in-laws' apartment in Brooklyn with a couple verses vying for my attention. Something about the combination of a childish rhyme and a teenage suicide wouldn't let me go until I gave it whatever life I could. Life. Ha. I scribbled it down in the back of the memoir I'm reading.

Writing helps me maneuver through this death. Okay okay, it helps me maneuver through life. I am thankful for my writing habit—it's here when I need it, now more than ever.

surviving stuart

The phone call came at one this morning. Hours later, surfing the sheets with a bone-weary body and a busted mind I was composing this post. The last time I looked at the clock it was 5:28. I finally fell asleep only to have a nightmare about raccoons on my front stoop, five or six of them digging in my garbage. One of them lunged at me and I awoke with a start and remembered. Stuart's dead.

happy new year very much

I actually have some resolutions this year. Two resolutions.

1. To please stop saying 'awesome' unless something is truly awesome. I have this thing about being in my forties and saying, "awesome!" like I did when I was eighteen. Or maybe back then I said "tubular." I'm after more grown-up words. Maybe it's part of my mid-life crisis. Whatever it is, I am on high alert. In the past four days at yoga I have witnessed two students say "awesome" when another student or teacher helped them squeeze their mat into a packed class. That it's not just me is reassuring but increases my chances of failure. I am impressionable and must work hard for this one. Makes me wonder, do we say awesome instead of thank you? I will be on the lookout.

a very bakugan christmas

I was so smug. I was sure this would be the holiday we looked back upon and remembered as the year Bakugans hijacked Christmas. If you don't know what Bakugans are it doesn't matter. They are plastic toy balls that spring open into battling dragons and things when they contact a magnet. There are tons of them and Hamish wants every one and the "battle gear" that accompanies them. Sold separately of course.

But it's not to be. Instead, this will be the holiday everyone remembers as the Christmas we all had lice.

backtrack

My brother-in-law (one of five brothers-in-law—I hope I'm not leaving anyone out) has an iPhone. I do not have an iPhone. I should never have an iPhone. In my less sane moments I think an iPhone will complete me, shore up my worth. Give me the appearance of possessing a dazzling life when I whip it out in front of my peers. Yadda yadda. The truth is that I will never finish the novel (yes I'm still plugging away) if I had such a sleek gadget. It would do me in. 

Enter the Hipstamatic, a cheap app (no I'm not receiving a commission) that turns an ordinary photo into a work of art.

Below, if you will. Rewind to Thanksgiving. Fun with a borrowed iPhone. Pics by me and Chuck. The light. The color. The framing options. I drooled. And it wasn't just over the giant bird.

My niece (one of ten, above) just became a bat mitzvah. Mazel tov darling! 

50 hours down

Tonight was the last night of my Anusara teacher's training with Justicia Friese DeClue, who, if I haven't already said this, is brilliant, not just because she's a gifted yogi, not because her head holds a thousand tons of information—anatomy, philosophy, possibly every page of the Anusara teaching syllabus...but also because she knows how to disseminate her knowledge and provide the safe space for her students to feel deserving, welcome and full of potential to soar. Plus, although she's steadfast in her belief in Shiva-Shakti Tantra, she's not at all gooey, and that suits me.

I am gushing, it's true. Maybe I am gooey.

enduring the assault

I don't know how it happens. Or maybe I do. My childhood. My early training in dysfunctional stress management. The subsequent addictive behaviors and their inevitable withdrawal symptoms. The melt-downs upon which this blog is named after.

My whole life has been punctuated and punctured with spectacular displays of grueling self-hatred that sometimes I share with you, like now, since I've been blind-sided again, and feel desperate for the reassurance that I am not alone, desperate to make something productive of my pain.

Hope has given way to hopelessness. Happy delusion has disintegrated into what? Panic. A yearning to check out, to hide under the covers for the rest of winter until I feel safe to show my face again.

toast

My bedroom reeks of pot but I swear I haven't been smoking, even if you don't believe me. Seriously, you don't want to see me high. It isn't pretty. Did you know all the Main Line moms toke up after they put the kids to bed? It was the cover story in Philadelphia Magazine. I saw it in Whole Foods the other month. But I've always been a black sheep, despite my adolescent yearnings to fit in, so I do not partake. Is it even pot anymore? I think it would kill me.

a whole lot of crunching going on

Being the nutrition committee liaison may never result in removing Trix from the lunch menu at Hamish's school. It did however result in my being coordinator of the Pennsylvania-wide event called Apple Crunch. This morning was the big day. After dozens of emails and phone calls with the cafeteria manager, my co-liaison, the parents' association, the Nutritional Services secretary and the principal, there were tables stacked with hundreds of local-ish washed apples in the atrium, and a whole lot of crunching going on.

respite

Dinner with the family is so... familial. Hamish tells Stella that she should be friends with girls and boys but not with robbers or hogs. Bryan wants to know why Stella shouldn't be friends with hogs. After all, she loves pigs. At least she used to, back when she was four and not four and a half. Hamish says, no Dad, not pig-hogs. The kind of kid who hogs everything. Then he reaches for the air above his plate of chicken and pasta and green beans, and pulls fistfuls of it toward his snorting face to demonstrate the kind of kid Stella should stay away from. Bryan smiles his understanding, but I know his smile also reveals his adoration and wonder at his six year-old son. Dinner has become a time of revelation, of getting to know our kids on a more relaxed level, of witnessing their growth from feral bunnies to coordinated humans capable of using forks and finishing sentences and laughing at PG-rated jokes. There's still discipline and frustration but there's fun at the table too these past few days, the kind of fun that reminds you why you had kids in the first place, the kind of fun that reassures you your life is not over. Now Stella demands that Daddy watch as she counts her fingers. She begins counting. She starts over. And over. And over. There's no hurry. She's already eaten her chicken. Finally she gets it right. Counts those fingers the way she must have imagined it. The luxury of not rushing her to finish already is blossom-sweet. Stella, it turns out, has ten fingers. It's quite a discovery.

exhaustion is the cheapest drug

Stella's going for the world record in the three A.M. nosebleeds category. Three nights and counting. Parenting in a stupor can be fun. With ample TV time.

One of the cafeteria managers on the nutrition committee thinks she has my number. Cocked her jaded head to one side and accused me of owning chickens. Almost, I said. I'm thinking about it. She implied I'm wasting my time if I think I can rid the school of hot pink Trix and milk and cream cheese. I should see the kids loading up on snacks after school at 7-Eleven, she told me, crossing her large freckly arms across her chest. Or watch the middle school kids at Starbucks. She was certain the kids would not go for it, and was there when they raised hell the day the soda machines were removed. It was one of those moments where I couldn't quite register that she was not playing for the same side, so I just nodded vigorously and agreed that of course the kids would do everything she described. I did not remind her in not-so-subtle tones that 7-Eleven and Starbucks are not accountable for educating the children of our community. I did not ask her why the inmates are in charge of the prison. I did not ask her if she would think about a crackhead in place of a junk-food-addicted child. Would she care that the addict wouldn't like it if she took away his pipe? But in my car driving away from the meeting, oh you know I gave her hell. I did. The next meeting is not until January. I'm too tired to start a petition, but maybe one day...

And now I can't concentrate any longer, my head is about to explode because Hamish is whining for something exciting to do, with a half hour left till dinner, which I still have to cook. Help me in the kitchen. How about that, kid?

heal my neuroses (dot) com

Okay here's my million dollar marketing idea.

This is for the neurotic parent, the kind of mom (or dad) who's sure she (or he) didn't get the memo or the proper genetic code, the one who is frequently convinced that she (or he) is the shittiest mom (or dad) ever.

Say you're a mom who's finally made an appointment to take her four year-old daughter to get her hair trimmed, because you just can't take the jaw-clenching insanity anymore. Every day you look at your daughter's hair, a snaggled, tangled mess, your whole face tightens into a stressy mask of agony. You don't know how to tame her hair or your anxiety over her hair.

Jewy Jewenstein

Tonight we're going to try our hand at being Jewish. There's a pizza party and bonfire to celebrate the uh, Simchat Torah, given by a local liberal ultra-reform Jewish community group, of which a friend of mine is currently president and sneakily persuasive in recruiting members. Plus I am a sucker. A curious sucker who would like to see if I can find the right communal fit for my Jewish ass because I've always wondered if there's a place in Jewish life for me. I am dragging myself and Bryan and the kids there despite my Teflon-like reaction to pretty much all organized religions.

As a Hebrew school drop-out (no Bat Mitzvah day, for me, ba da da da...) I flinch around practicing Jews. I flinch out of guilt. Jewish guilt. I used to hit the high holies with my parents when I was little but my Jewish education ended with my parents' divorce. Even though I was dragged to temple a few times in my youth, my parents did not love worshipping God. There was no passion to pass down to the next generation. It just didn't happen for me.

swoon

You know how when you're infatuated with someone you have this fantasy of spending an entire day in bed with them? Maybe you fantasize about this person spying on you in the night, even though your rational self knows that's stalky and creepy and they should totally get a life.

When I was thirteen, living in Chicago with my mom and her boyfriend, I used to picture Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran perched on my fire escape like a cat, taking time out of his hectic world tour to stare into my window and watch the rise and fall of my torso, gazing in wonderment with his green British eyes at the sheer miracle of my existence. I walked the halls of Sacred Heart High School, my kilt swinging slowly around my kneecaps, picturing him always there, always fascinated, pining for me the same way I pined for him. (Did you know I went to Catholic school?)

Fear and Self-Loathing in Lower Merion

So that's the title of my memoir, above. I haven't started it yet. That's the fear part. Perhaps telling you about it before it's been begun is the self-loathing part. Whatever the case it will be self-reflexive. An investigated life, as told by an unreliable narrator. Bingo.

The title for my future novel? "Love in the Time of Suburbia." I've already bought the domain. This is the thing, to not compare this writing experience to the Star Craving experience, which was mapped out, outlined and workshopped on a regular basis. I gotta work with what I got. I ain't getting any younger and my bio is collecting dust. Anyway it would be like comparing childbirth experiences. Hamish was a battle to the bloody death. I wanted to die. Stella? A dream. I ate an entire chopped liver sandwich while eight centimeters dilated. Does it get better than that? It does! My midwife was sure I'd throw it up, and Reader I tell you, I kept it down.

the judge

My friend Danielle came to visit us this weekend. Danielle is a creative type much like myself who I met in a writing workshop a decade ago. We discovered over the weekend that we fuck ourselves over in life by wanting to impress an entity we christened “The Cocktail Party Judge,” or CPJ. Do you know her? You might not ever drink cocktails or go to cocktail parties, but you don't need to. She lives in your head and she thinks very little of that blog of yours. She wonders why you're not writing something real, something marketable, something that would impress her. She wonders what's taking you so long, and by the way she thinks your yoga is silly and your spiritual quest a waste of time because you’re just using it as a cover for not being more successful at pursuits that would impress her, like being a bestselling novelist. You want to show her that you're worth something even without her seal of approval but really you want to show her how little she means to you in order to impress her since her validation means you get to keep on existing. Whether you meet her at the front door or in the backyard, she’s going to make sure you feel like shit.