Got Power?

In the middle of submitting a lengthy employment application, my system went *blink*.  Damn, I thought, in spite of my best efforts, I got the bloody MSBlaster worm virus.  The system reboots, but then crashes again, hard.  All that effort into that application, gone into the vapor.

Then it dawns on me that nothing else is on, that the house is completely quiet.

I can’t call my husband – my cell phone battery ran down, forgot to recharge it.  The other phones are all digital.  Grrr…technology overload!!!

I grab the flashlight on the stairs and grope around in the basement for an old analog phone.  Found it.  Call the spouse; he says they only had a blip, that the power was still on.  Nuts – is it just our house and the master fuse is tripped?

I run next door and check with the neighbor – nope, no power there, either.

Oh well, means dinner out; hubby splits work early, using the power outage as a convenient cue to exit.

En route to dinner, we listen to NPR.  Damn!  This isn’t a little thing!  Half the state’s population is affected!  The airlines have shut down flights in and out of Detroit.  Big cities on the east coast, including Manhattan, are impacted.

It’s then I think of our poor Julie, stuck in her godforsaken soul-sucking job in Manhattan.  Omigod, that poor thing.  She’ll be fit to be tied; she can’t get home, she’ll be hot-sweaty-nasty in a pressing crowd of ugly-sweaty-nasty New Yorkers; if Long Island is affected as well, she can’t cook, she’ll probably lose the contents of her fridge and freezer, she can’t even play Sims or blog a screaming “cookie” about this disaster.  Worse, she was in a pecuniary way, already tight on cash with the end of her project looming and demanding money.

Poor, poor Julie.  Her project is delayed by forces beyond her control.

If you pity her at all, send her a donation through her site.  There’s a button on the right side of her blog.

Really, I’ve got nothing at all to complain about.  Not now.  It could be far worse.

I could be stuck in Manhattan.

8:46:31 PM    comment []

In denial

I still think of these two little people in my house as my babies.  There’s still the odd toddler toy here and there that we haven’t jettisoned; perhaps it’s because I’m not the kind of mom that will force my kids to part with their early childhood if they’re not ready to do so.  Sure, go ahead, keep the teddy bear or the Sesame Street trucks.  What could it hurt to allow them such innocent pleasures, to allow them to hang on to childhood for as long as they can?

Push has come to shove, though; time to check in with reality.  It’s not just them hanging on to simple, easy sweetness.  It’s me hanging on, tooth and nail.  I’m just not ready to let the time pass and I don’t know why.

My husband is hanging on, too; sometimes I think it’s because he’s away from home so much that he relies on the children to be a touchstone, something that helps him reorient after time away.  If the kids are growing up, moving, shifting, then there is no touchstone, nothing on which to ground himself.  It’s not obvious that this grounding is difficult, until we laugh together over something small that the youngest is done.  Checked up short by the moment, my husband says, Wow, we should have started sooner, we could have had another baby.

Ouch.  Baby hunger.  Palpable, like a craving.

I remember a woman with whom I once worked; she was fourteen years my senior.  In my late twenties, as yet unmarried, I could not understand why she pondered having another baby.  Damn, she’s so old, I thought..  That’s just not right, some old woman wanting another baby.

What the hell did I know?  Diddley-squat, as if turns out.

Fortunately for this co-worker, grandbabies came along in the nick of time.  She was spared having to debate about it too long; she had babies she could spoil and send home.  Better than having to have another one of her own, she said.  She embraced being a grandmother, dove in head first, buoyed along by new and regenerating waters.

But I’m not there yet.  I have these little people here, now; my own grandbabies are more than fifteen years away.  There’s this growing divide between the babies we had and the babies to be.  I don’t know how to traverse it, how to tread through these rougher waters.

Perhaps this eddied gulf is the real reason why some mothers and fathers immerse themselves in their children’s activities, sometimes to the point of excess.  They hang onto every little event; they milk the goodness out of it until it becomes a noisome thing.  The soccer mom thing – you know, the mom who’s always crowing about her little Bobby did this and her little Buffy did that, to point of making bystanders ill.  Yeah, her – she’s desperately hanging on.  Or the baseball dad, the one that’s too tightly wrapped up into a kids’ game, as if it were life and death.  Perhaps it is; perhaps he’s hanging on too tightly, too, fearing that space between the babies coming and the babies going.  He’s the dad that will fight to the death for whatever that brief moment is on the field, the fleeting event that will fill the void.

I feel detached, removed from that grasping, unable to comprehend the need to grip something in a chokehold.  And yet I know I’m guilty of hanging on in my own way, unwilling to move forward, leaden of heart and mind.

My daughter isn’t just having a few little symptoms.  It’s pretty obvious she’s started on that grand trek towards womanhood.  She’s asked me if we can have one of those “big girl talks” this week; she needs some validation that what she’s experiencing is entirely normal, common to all of female humankind.  I can see it in her eyes even though she’s not laid out all the issues she’s got: quizzical yet concerned, eager yet anxious.  Ah, too soon; I didn’t think we would HAVE to have that series of chats for a long time in the nebulous future.

The baby isn’t that any longer, either.  He’s already making plans for the start of school, told me what he will pack for lunch every day.   Willfully he’s mastering tasks that I never thought I’d ever see him tackle – even household chores like putting away the silverware or setting the table, the things that only older children handled.  Other signs tell me he’s ready for the next step, that he’s left the little fluffy-chick-fuzzy-bunny stage and will depart soon for a place where a mother’s caress will be unwelcome.  My little dinosaur hunter has already started packing for the same long road trip that his much older step-brother traversed seventeen years ago.

Has it been that long?  Were these two little people really the babies that came to fill that void?

I am so in denial.

1:36:30 PM    comment []

The claws are out today!

Yeah, Tina, rip ‘em up, babe!  She’s in rare form today in Salon as she takes apart the leading candidate for “Guffner uff de grade stade of Cullifornia”.  HA!

But she makes a subtle push for Gore to do something more to promote himself as a potential candidate for the Presidency.  She must have a soft spot for the man since she all but spells out what thinks would be curative for Gore.

There’s an idea, though; Gore loosened up a bit with SNL post-election.  He could still use a bit more jiggle, being too intelligent and stiffly wordy for the average American.  His kick-ass-take-names speech last week didn’t get play just because it came amid the hubbub of Ahnold’s announcement.  It was still not direct enough for the “fair and balanced” mouth-breathers-who-move-their-lips-when-they-read. 

But hey, there might yet be a way to capture their attention.

What if the Fab Five did him over, deconstructed and reassembled Al Gore?

12:03:07 PM    comment []