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.

swirl

We were so excited to start dance class. Okay. I was so excited for Stella to start dance class. Stella's just excited to dance around the living room, usually to the tinny tunes that bleat from one of our many battery-operated plastic keyboards. It's enough for her.

desperado

Just spent a masturbatory hour reading my first blog posts from four years ago. And I've discovered a third reason why I blog, along with (1) exercising my writing muscle, and (2) working to bridge the gap between us by honestly depicting the human condition. Number three would be to survey the distance I've traveled on this path, a path that at the beginning was so fraught with sleeplessness, diapers and self-loathing I doubted I would emerge from it alive.

Hamish is starting first grade tomorrow. Since he and Stella were born I have said, when they're in school full-time, my life can begin again. Well guess what? It's been going on without me all this time. All the Pema Chodron podcasts in the world cannot jar me from living in the past or the future. Eckhart Tolle, come bitch-slap me, please.

yoga of the bone

So there's this really amazing beautiful yogi friend I have. I admit I don't know her all that well, haven't known her for too long, maybe a couple of intermittent years, but from the few times we've shared mat space at the neighborhood yoga studio and talked in the few minutes before practice, about yoga clothes or classes or whatever, she's always been super rocking cool and sweet, one of those people you meet whose inner light glows steady and bright and true.

Her name is Laura and it turns out she has cancer. Laura is twenty-five. At my advanced age of forty-one, twenty-five is but a wee babe even though it feels like anything but to the twenty-five year old. I get that. Still, there's an extra layer of heavy about it, as if an extra layer was necessary. But. Laura is anything but heavy about cancer. In fact, she nearly flies. Her take on living with cancer is gravity-defying, heroic and inspires awe in my heart. If she wore a cape it would make total sense. But instead of a cape she wears an Hermes silk scarf on her recently shaved head. Laura blogs about her leukemia here, in gruesome, hilarious, rebellious detail that seems therapeutic not only for her but for those hanging on her every word in various corners of cyberspace. It's a perilous ride and she's generous enough to share the thrills and the descents.

I'm posting this today because today is Laura's bone-marrow transplant, so love, prayers, strengthy-vibes, good juju, whatever you've got, take a moment and send it her way, send it to Houston. To Laura.

what can I do?

My dear Hamish, my miracle of a human, my child. Is. Such. A. Fucking. Nag. I have no idea where he gets it from. 

His new thing is upon waking, he says, "I hate to bring this to you Mommy, but what can I do?" I tell him to get dressed and brush his teeth. No. That's too boring. He screeches, twists, writhes on the sofa that used to look so stately and clean before two years went by in a flash. I tell him to feed Don Pepe, the blood-clot of a fish we're fish-sitting for our neighbors who are abroad. 

super hero pose

This is the kids in supta virasana, a pose that escapes me in my current spinal state. It doesn't say in the manual to stick your tongue out while doing this pose. But. It's summer, and we forgot to sign the kids up for camp. We thought, hey our kids sleep late, which is true. Like until nine on some quiet reverent mornings. So why would we pay money to wake them up and schlep them somewhere when we don't have to? Of course now they wake up at the crack of ass, decline to say good morning in favor of: Do we have any plans today? And then groan as Daddy and Mommy blink and stutter. Next year my babies. Next year.

Meanwhile, will I ever be able to get supta virasana back? 

hide the lucky

The only thing that is certain is that I will always figure out a way to spend money.

My new life, okay it's maybe four months old now, just cutting its first teeth, has found me in the atypical spot of not jonesing for new clothes and shoes all the time the way I used to. And if it wasn't shoes it was flim-flam for the house. Decor. Design. A table shaped like a tree stump perhaps. I still like all that seductive stuff but I don't think about it, I don't read about it, I don't care as much about it. Maybe it's all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals satiating me the way I thought the perfect pair of boots would. Of course as I type the words I fear that I am jinxing myself to high holy hell over here. I'd better hide the back issues of Lucky.

You'd think I'd be saving money, not buying all the do-dads and gewgaws I used to obsess over. But no. My grocery bill, see, has nearly doubled. Beef ain't free. And my thirst for information is insatiable. Even though I have been haunting the neighborhood libraries and downloading all the free podcasts I can get my grass-fed fingers on, Amazon is getting its fair share of Miller earnings. As are the places that sell the vitamins I just gotta have.

I never in a million jillion years thought that I, Elise Miller, would be choosing cod liver oil over a closetful of cute tops.

spur

This isn't what it looks like. Unless it looks like yoga. A pro-active friend invited me and a bunch of other yogi pals to join her and a thousand others on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art a couple weeks ago to practice for an hour to raise money and awareness for an organization called Yoga Unites for Living Beyond Breast Cancer. I had fun and made new friends. Well, obviously.

So what the hell is that up there? It's an assisted upavistha konasana of course. My partner helped me bend deeper. It's important to open your hips.

smack-heady persuasion

In my last life as a childless struggling artist living in Brooklyn, I'd go apartment hunting roughly every four years. I'd walk from room to room, my imagination already planting myself in the space, picturing the walk to the subway, the soapy electric smell of the laundry room, the clicking of kitchen cabinets, the feel of the air while I laid in bed and considered my new dust motes. This was an uplifting experience if the apartment boasted period detail, hardwood floors and was situated on a beautiful block. More often the apartment smelled like mold, had drop-ceilings, fake paneled walls and the only bodega around sold three year-old Bisquick. It would take me days sometimes to rid myself of the feeling that my life had buckled in on itself in an oppressive particle-board heap, even as I knew I hadn't signed a lease, and wouldn't in a jillion years.

radish

Bryan continues to toil in the garden. Here is our first crop. Radishes. Mmm.

I'm less in the dirt, more at the stove, even though I really want to know how to garden. I'll get there eventually. When the fossil fuel runs out in a few years, say.

fairy town

This is what I get for spending more time in the kitchen and turning off the TV on a lovely spring evening. I was feeling all smug with my meat sauce and brown rice fusilli. Little did I know that while my ragu blipped away my angels were behind the garage hurling river rocks through our lawn chairs. 

Maybe they weren't happy with the color? The aesthetic got on their nerves? Their language is still too coarse to articulate such grievances, such attacks on their sophisticated senses of design, so when grilled, they looked stunned. 

what's for dinner, kids?

Dreams do come true, Reader. They do.

Because Hamish’s teacher let me into the classroom to teach the kids a nutrition lesson. And I actually went. This is kindergarten, folks. I thought I could handle it. And I did with some help. Meanwhile I remembered to pack the camera but did I remember to take pictures for the blog post? Of course not. So here is one instead of our new kitchen faucet that Bryan installed. YES.

kefir krazy

I keep waiting for this new...tritional... thing... of mine to blow over, but I keep coming back for more. Bryan remains supportive but hesitant to jump into my new cult, as we affectionately call it, but he allowed me to drag him and the kids to Hendricks Farm to show them real food (moo) and start brainwashing them early. Cause Mommy has PLANS now. With a capital A for Agenda. I've never had an agenda before, not one that wasn't all about me anyway. I care about others now, and feeding them well so they will be pleasant to spend time with. Oh wait, I guess it's still about me. 

jamie oliver wants to nourish america. and I want to help.

I'm so moved by this video in my current state of nutritional zeal. It coincided nicely with Hamish's parent-teacher-child conference this morning, where I got the opportunity to bring it up with his teacher Miss H., who feels the same way about whole wheat Pop-Tarts as I do. I was so super-psyched that she is on the same page with this business, I almost high-fived Bryan right there.

Miss H. is all for a change in what the kids are being offered for snack and brought up another relevant point, that the kids are being fed snacks all the gosh darn day, in addition to their three meals, and that some parents bring in two trays of birthday cupcakes, one for their child's classroom and another for their kid's aftercare session.

LK day

We had a playdate with a pair of twins and their mom, new friends from Stella's class. The KPs, I call the twins, as those are their initials. The KP's mom is a nurse. That's her, above. Her name is AC. Her initials stand for a Russian literary heroine. Her dad was into that sort of stuff. AC works the graveyard shift at the hospital on weekends. She has two older boys as well. That's four kids if you're counting at home. And the career. And she is so upbeat. This put me to shame when I first met her. A little. For most of my mom career, I've been getting my ass kicked with just two measly kids. I've been broigus. I've kvetched. Vented. Thrown tantrums. Curled up on my bedroom floor. Not every day mind you. But on and off for the past six years. Kind of like living with PTSD.

an unexpected gift

I hugged my mother the other night. 

You might not think this is a big deal or worth blogging about. But. If you know me, or more to the point if you know my mother you know she is a hard woman to hug, and it’s been years since we’ve embraced. For one thing, I usually hate my mother. She is a powerful force in my life, though not in the way she might like to be. My relationship with her sends me back to my psycho-spiritual tool box over and over, yearning to find a way to forgive us both and be kind-ish. 

But hug-wise, honestly, it’s the Vaseline. Have I mentioned this before? My mom has been moisturizing with petroleum jelly for as long as I can remember. Really it’s more like shellack. Or lube. And lube and my mother in the same sentence? Egads. If you're like me, you don't want to know when it comes to your parents’ sex life, as in, Please Lord let me have been an immaculate conception. The white-knuckled prayer. 

Dear Heidi,

Dear Heidi Montag,

I feel a little weird writing you like this. I just wanted to talk. We don't know each other obviously. I'm a suburban mom. Two kids, a house, a mini-van, a dead cat buried in the backyard. The whole enchilada.

day of service

I'm glad I finally get that Martin Luther King Day is a day of service.

Bryan and I were happy to head to a local school and help in whatever ways we could and bring the kids along to teach them that helping people in need is not only important, but it feels good too. The kids were excited to write their names on name tags they got to keep forever and to get T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of Martin Luther King and Barack Obama even though Stella refused to wear hers.