Insomnia's only a problem if you have a bed to sleep in.

I couldn't sleep last night.
It happens sometimes. And when I can't sleep, my normally pragmatic mind runs to some otherworldly weird and violent scenarios - like my children being hit by cars or a bear attacking them in the yard while they're doing their chores - that make my actually falling asleep even less of a possibility. Last night, I couldn't stop creating scenarios involving the death or grave injury of my youngest son, Willoughby.
It's a strange state to be in. Not asleep. Not awake. And not entirely in control of my thought processes. But in the middle of one of these horrible visions, Willoughby, who sleeps with us, rolled over, putting his feet against my belly and throwing out his arm straight across my face. A gentle rebuke, I guess, but an effective one. It woke me up enough to remember not to fear the millions of horrific possibilities the world has to offer, that will probably never happen and certainly couldn't be prevented due to their randomness and sheer improbability.
I removed his hand from my face, causing him to shift his position again, lining his back up against me so I could feel his every breath.
And this is how I eventually dropped off to sleep, his every breath reminding me he was there and safe and I had nothing to fear.
Now imagine our house falling down and my sweet-cheeked, breathing consolation Willoughby stuck under it and me running back and forth helplessly there trying, desperately to get him out.
Which is rather like what is happening in Haiti.
Where for many mothers, day-to-day survival is more of an actual battle than it is here. You know, my pantry is rarely bare. I mean, there's always something. Even when we are at our lowest moments financially, I can't think of a time we've actually been out of food. Maybe we don't have exactly what we want...or maybe I can't make what I usually do, but we've never gone to be hungry due to an empty cupboard.
In Haiti, mothers don't love their children any less than I love mine. And I can hardly bear to think of the desperation, the horror, the helplessness swirling about in the air there today. What can you do when the ground gives up and quivers all around you? You can't hold anyone close enough. You can't protect your kids from that. As hard as you work. As rich or poor as you may be. It's a great leveler, in more ways than one.
One of the things I love the most about Christianity is the idea that regardless of our individual circumstances, I am no more or less in God's eyes than anyone else. So my children, though they mean the world to me, are no more valuable than any other children on the planet. I have taught them this from very early on. Before the Jesus-Me. It's fundamental, isn't it? Not to bring everyone else up to our level, but more to bring us down a few notches.
Many is the time, I've looked around me and felt a little smug. I take good care of my family. We have a comfortable house we're not in danger of losing, largely because of my insistence, initiative and creativity. My marriage is loving, stable and secure. There are moments when I am dangerously close to falling into the trap of thinking myself somehow "better" than someone else who does not share my good fortune.
But how different am I than the alcoholic when I eat more than I should, to the detriment of my health? Not to mention my kids who may not have a mother drunk off her ass on the sofa, but still have one who spends way too much time there.
How different am I than the person with thousands of dollars in credit card debt when I spend too much at second-hand stores? Both of us are spending money we don't have, just in different venues. And both of our families are suffering from it.
How different am I than the mother who does everything she can for her children - feeding, clothing, sheltering her kids the best she can in whatever environment she was born into? I'm not different at all. We're exactly the same. We're all the same. Me and you and people half the world away. We're all the same, one for the other.
National and cultural boundaries, they are all man-made. Even religious boundaries, they're bunk too. If my children were buried under the rubble of our home, I wouldn't care who the rescuer prayed to. Neither would you. And we live in a world where oceans of water no longer profoundly impede us. Mountain ranges, either. And my brothers and sisters in Christ, they are crying. Especially in Haiti today.
And since we're no different, don't we have a responsibility to help them, like we'd help any other neighbor? Because I'm pretty sure they'd help us, regardless of our skin color, our country of origin, our financial status.
NPR has set up a page telling us how. Please go and consider making a donation. Because unless you're chartering a hospital boat full of food, water, and heavy equipment, it's the least you could do.

Well, you asked.

Forgiveness. It's perhaps the hardest thing a Christian is asked to do.
I can feed people. I can clothe people. I can give physical things quite easily. I have a surplus of them, as most of those in the U.S. do. And I'm considered among the decidedly un-wealthy. What I can't always give is that place in my heart, reserved for honored guests and confidantes. I can forgive a lot. You just may not get a chance to do it all over again.
Recently, I was talking with my children about "extraordinary forgiveness", which is precisely the kind being a follower of Christ demands. Extraordinary forgiveness is the kind that confounds nearly everybody other than the one giving it away. Usually, it is the one requiring it that is the most confounded. And out of that startling relief, a new understanding should emerge. A humbling understanding. An uplifting understanding.
We see examples of this in grand, sweeping ways - the Amish community forgiving the man who murdered their children, extending a loving hand to his widow or the parents of a murdered child lobbying against the execution of the murderer - but it exists in smaller ways as well. We just generally overlook it or it exists in matters so personal, unless directly involved, its sounds go unheard over the greater thrum of the world.
There are lots of things I can't imagine forgiving anyone for. To see someone forgive what seems to me to be unforgivable is evidence of what a human can do, when tested.
Recently, a certain famous athlete was revealed to be a philanderer. That particular issue is not really of importance here. Rather, it's the reaction to that issue. There are a lot of opinions out there about what his wife should do in this situation. I couldn't say, myself. I am not privy to the complexities of anyone's marriage other than my own. And even on familiar territory, I am often lost.
No, more to the point here is the public reaction to what this one wife will or won't do re: her husband's transgression(s).
I really shouldn't read any public commentary on the Internet. It just raises too many issues for me. Truthfully, I am a much happier when I don't know what [insert on-line moniker here] thinks about every.single.thing on the Internet. But like the tongue in a cavity, I often find myself poking around, even though I know I should just leave it alone.
Once you get beyond the idea that I shouldn't have even been reading the story to begin with, much less the comments and then, forgive me my trespasses, I ask you to ponder along with me about a much larger issue. Why would anyone believe that a spouse who forgives is a "stupid", "ignorant", "self-loathing", "just in it for the money anyway", "half-wit"? How could anyone *not* see the inherent strength required to forgive an unforgivable thing?
It's such an outrageous and super-human feat that, truthfully, it requires somebody big - like God - to back it up. To forgive someone is not just to nod your head in their general direction and go on with your life. To forgive is to invite them back to your table, even if they don't deserve it. Ever. It's to acknowledge that, "Hey, you've done something so bad, I should kick you out of the box seats in my heart, but I'm not."
Or...is it?
The truth of the matter is that I am as confused about forgiveness as pretty much everybody else. Alongside the above statements, which I truly believe, I also think there's a limit to how much someone can possibly take. Let's say you forgive the unforgivable once or twice or 23 times, and then are asked to forgive it again. Do you? Can you? My grandmother used to say, "Jesus said to turn the other cheek, not to lie down and let them wipe their feet on you." And I agree with her. At a certain point, it becomes a destructive cycle, doesn't it? Let's set it up like this:
I trespass - mightily.
You forgive.
I do it again.
You forgive.
I do it again.
You forgive...again.
And, once again, there's me breaking your heart.
And you're coming back with all the love you've got.
And I chuck it in the bin.
You pull it out.
I toss it back.
And on and on, ad infinitum.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that's what forgiveness is all about. It's not the only part of God's bargain. Forgiveness, when taken seriously by the forgiven is a transformational act. When you hurt someone, when you misstep, when you falter, being extended grace is the moment you should experience some fundamental shift in yourself. It's an exchange. It's the restoration of trust, more than the mere absolution of guilt.
It takes work to forgive. You have to reach out beyond yourself and grasp at a new future, close your eyes and jump. Being forgiven, that takes work to. Maybe more. Because you have to reach out beyond yourself and be better than you've been. You have to realize the power you wield over others, pledging great awareness and care in the future.
And if the forgiven takes that forgiveness for granted, what then?
Because there are people in my life that I have forgiven, but on whom I have also closed a door that is not likely to be reopened. And I am just fine with that. In fact, I am better for it.
Parents are tough people to forgive, but believe it or not, I've forgiven mine. And not just for not letting me have what I wanted when I wanted it. I've forgiven abandonment, a little face beaten far too swollen to be seen in public for a few days, and well, lots, lots more. Just trust me.
Forgiveness, I think, is a two part process. To have a relationship with anyone, it has to be an exchange, even among parents and children. My son may say something really hurtful or disappoint me in some huge way, but when I forgive him, I expect him to keep up his end of the deal. And his end of the deal is to not do the same thing again, at least not immediately. He is 10.
See, a long time ago, when I forgave my parents for really committing the biggest wrongs ever experienced in my life, it was a quiet and private process. I didn't seek my father out to let him know I'd absolved him of all his wrongdoing. And I didn't tell my mother, either. I just let it all go and the walls I'd erected in my heart, I took them down. No one knew they were there. There was no reason to broadcast their absence.
Now, my father, I guess he gets a pass. I don't know him. He really couldn't be more absent than he already is. I guess he could be dead and therefore there'd be no potential for change in the future. But then, not really because that's just not going to happen.
But my mother, she broke my heart. Not just once. But over and over and over again. And every time, from a very young age, I just forgave it. People want me to forgive. I say, "I have forgiven." And my forgiveness, which cost me dearly, was disregarded and I was hurt again and again. And at a certain point, you just have to put your hands and shout, "Stop!" Don't you? Or do you?
Forgiveness is the most beautiful thing in the world. I struggle with it. Unquestionably.
And poor Tiger Woods' wife. I wish her luck. I do.

The Stars Are Making Pictures In My Mind That Look Like Me

Okay, okay. So, I've been using this whole blog thing as a kind of ad hoc talk-through-it therapy and a chance to write again and as a way of setting all my aging demons adrift on ice floes of their own so my little mental ice age can ease a bit.

Even the arctic has flowers. Or at least is has moss. Moss is nice.

So...so...so. The summer came and I was sandblasted by 24/7 children and my once pock marked and rusted exterior is slightly thinner, but markedly smoother and the time for self-reflection is again upon us. Hoorah!

Gentle reader, I am one tangled up string. I think I get one thing settled only to find that there are knots upon knots upon knots revealed in its place. I'm an observer, really. With everything. Happy things. Troubling things. I am over here. You are over there.

I pick events up in my mind and turn them over, regard them, and then set them aside. That's how I process what I process when I process.

Mostly, I don't process. I plough.

I plough straight through to the end and I'm done and I move to the next and plough through that too. But I don't want to plough every minute. I don't want to end up having charged through my life, like it was long endurance contest.

Sometimes, I think if I just stopped for a minute (see me through this trite moment, please) and let myself be overwhelmed by life for just a second, if I stopped resisting it, I'd get washed away. On some days, that's liberating. On others, terrifying. Life, I think, is like this puppy at our feet and it's always there. It's always lolling about all tongue and tail and tummy, feet in the air, just begging us to reach down and touch it a little. Always undaunted at how inattentive we can be and always ready for us to finally cast our gaze its way. No matter how full our arms are, how full our heads, life is always there.

Until it isn't. And by then it's too late. Because when life dies, you go with it.

All of this because I have been thinking too much today about friendship. Truly. I am very fortunate to have a few good friends, found later in my life, that I know I can count on. They mean the world to me. But I had friends before them. And it's the before friends that have been making me so damn sad.

You know how some people have a great many romantic relationships and then later miss the people they once loved, but who they haven't see in years? I never had a great many romantic relationships. I never had the chance. I met my husband - thank the Maker - when I was really quite young - 13 - and from the first moment I saw him, he was the only him I saw. That is one of the great miracles of my life because he's still the only him I see and it's been 24 years.

In lieu of having lost loves, I have lost friends. There are people from the past that I would gladly have given my life for about whom I know nothing today. Some of that is by choice. More of that will soon be by choice. It is better for me when people from the past reside on a planet far, far away. Because otherwise, I get mired down in their glittering lives and start wondering why it is we grew apart when I felt as I did about them so sincerely.

Finding people on Facebook, the high school reunion that is never merciful enough to end, is no good for me. It starts a nostalgia train that can't even begin to get out of the station because it's got no wheels. A seriously flawed arrangement.

Acquaintances, fine. I probably like you better now. But if you were ever my "best" friend and somehow you're still alive and don't know the names of my children or that I have children or that I have three children, yeah, don't really bother. Because what did it mean? My listening to you?My loving you? My helping you through all your break-ups and fuck-ups?

It certainly didn't get me anywhere. I swear I have lived my life as upright and unbending as the Washington Monument. Not because I didn't need help ever, but because I'm not programmed to show it. Even with my husband, I am not always very forthcoming until I can't be any other way. In my young life, to waver was to fall. And falling was not an option.

I don't blame anyone for this. It's not any one's fault or responsibility. I am just realizing how one-sided I made all those relationships. I guess I was somehow waiting for them to come into the vast hall I was hiding in to search me out. But how could they really? When I was playing the vacuum and they were filling the void?

So, no hard feelings. No tears and recriminations. I doubt you'll even know it. I've done been gone so long. These are my own stars constellating. In your mind's sky, the pictures are different, ever-changing. Or they would be, if you'd look up.

With my friends now, I am trying to be more open. I am trying to share more. I am trying to lean, even if ever-so-slightly. I am trying to be humble and know that everyone must depend upon someone, even the unassailable me. I am trying to show my loves, lusts and failures. And remember that I am loved. Because, and there are four of you I am speaking to, I loved you once and you took it and gave very little in return, until you grew to expect it. And your lives when I look now, are a little less gleaming because you are over there. And I am over here.

Supernova.

*** I haven't written fiction (and shown it to anyone) for a really, really, really, really long time. This is a bit of a leap for me. The Unsinkable Jennifer. ***

Last year, when the Clatterbuck boy broke his neck playing football up at the high school, a group of neighbors clustered like grapes at the end of the sidewalk up to his house. They stayed there long after word had come that he’d reached the hospital and was in stable enough condition. They stayed after dark, long past supper time. The houses all along both sides of the street dark, as if everyone had gone on vacation at the same time. The whole neighborhood looked vacant. Except the Clatterbuck’s yard.

Children, too far past hunger to care, too close to bedtime to alert their parents to they’d missed dinner, whooped and whirled across the grass, jumping the landscaping and making a mess of Mandy Clatterbuck’s carefully sculpted boxwood borders. Every once in awhile, a reeling child would pierce the din of parental concern and the trespasser would be chastised before rejoining the melee.

The next morning, it looked like a miniature cyclone, not four feet tall, had gone through Mandy’s yard and her yard only. God’s eye is sharp, his aim precise.

I don’t imagine she cared. She was scarcely there for months, while Kyle recovered. It was slow going. There was lots of therapy, but Mandy is one of those people who manages life with grace no matter what is tossed at her. Be it poison ivy or personal catastrophe, she’d breeze through with a picnic and a remedy in her pocket she just happened to pick up the other day somewhere or other. Her mother was like that too. Stalwart. Dependable. As if they were goods ordered from the L.L. Bean catalogue. It was her mother that took over her house and straightened her hedges while Mandy was away. She held birthday parties for the youngers and school-shopped for the elders. One Saturday, she reglazed all the windows on the front of the house. I imagine she did the others, as well, but I can’t say. For the rest of it, my view was obstructed.

I never will forget that night, when catastrophe turned convivial in the Clatterbuck’s driveway. My daughter wanted to go out and play with the other children, but I wouldn’t let her. I found it ghoulish. I couldn’t imagine an event more suited for quiet. Here a child had been horribly injured, helicoptered to a hospital 100 miles away, and it was time for a weenie roast in absentia in the child’s driveway. We didn’t know yet if the child lived or died. It was like the accident was a light bulb, suddenly illuminating the darkness, and the neighbors, like moths, just caught the glint of it in the distance and rushed, in plaid shorts and halter dresses, to jump in the fray.

My husband rolled his eyes at my refusal and scooped our daughter up, all sticky with popsicle, and piggybacked her over there. He didn’t see the problem. But he grew up here. In this very house. My son, he stayed with me and watched from the window.

But I’m alone here now, watching. And this time the gathering is assembled at the terminus of my own driveway. And my husband and daughter are out among them again. My daughter has lost one of her pigtails, so she looks quite wild. Somewhere, I have an impulse to try to catch her to fix it. Somewhere, I see it as beautiful and begin to smile. Somewhere, I am irritated she always manages to lose one of each matching pair of everything. Sandals. Hair bows. Socks. Somewhere, I know I stashed another pack of cigarettes back before I pretended to quit and I want to go search them out between the towels or among the sheets, but I can’t go just now.

When I was a child, my grandmother’s linen cabinet was my favorite place in the world. I don’t remember how I figured out I fit in there, probably playing hide and seek, but once I found it, I never left my grandmother’s house without stealing away to hide in there. The cool cotton beneath my cheek. The smell of laundry soap and lavender and sun. One time, I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was gone. But I woke up to an empty house and the far-off sound of someone calling my name.

It was my mother. And then my father. And then farther still, my grandparents. All from different directions and I didn’t know which way to go. It was evening and the barn swallows were cutting their precise paths through the air, grabbing up mosquitoes. And the bats appeared, with their leather wings trailing the surface of the pond down past the barn.

I was sitting on the porch when my uncle’s truck pulled up and my mother, whose face was quite wide, but whose features were arranged right in the very center of it, looked stricken, much more so than usual. I often wondered what happened, with such a large canvas, why God would choose to paint her features so close together they almost seemed to lay one atop the other.

But it was all okay because I was there. And quickly she smiled and grabbed me far too tightly and took me in the kitchen and made me cinnamon toast and told me all about how they thought I was missing, how I’d been gone such a long, long time. How Uncle Johnny was sure I’d gone down to see about the rabbits and how they waited on the porch for more than an hour and she kept saying, “Johnny, we’ve got to go see about her. She’s been gone too long.” But how nobody really got worried until Mamaw got worried. And then everybody set about to look.

But I have looked now in every cabinet and every drawer and under every bed and I cannot find my son. He is not in the basement or the attic and darkness is hanging around the corners of the doors and I still cannot find him. No one has seen him, anywhere. And my husband, travelling the neighborhood, calling his name, has acted as the beacon to the end of my driveway. And as every new gadfly appears, I know that is one more place my son is not.

We have summoned the police. We have given them recent photographs. We have watched their cars, sleek as sharks, slide through the streets on either side of our house. And I am not Mandy Clatterbuck. I have no magic picnic baskets or mail-order potions. I am horribly irregular. I’m not even sure why I am here. And my son, that strange little duck, who just seemed to appear fully formed, a grown man, in the body of an infant, is not broken. He is not waiting to be mended. There is no team of surgeons to reassure me. He is gone. There is just absence.

And I cannot lay my hand to his forehead and tell him everything is alright. And I cannot even give in to a full fit of worry because I keep just expecting him to pop up somewhere. I just keep looking at the bend in the road. I just keep watching the doors of the neighbor’s houses, waiting for them to open and him to appear. And I can laugh when he says he was only hiding somewhere and tell him that happened to me too once, when I was a child.

And telling him that story would be like a watershed for me. And we would move forward from this moment and I would be a better mother. And I would try to be what they needed more. I would comfort more. I would connect. Or at least I would try. I would try to wake up and not drift off out the window, awash in my own thoughts for an hour or more while the children wait for breakfast. I would hug them to me and ball them up tight. I would feel everything a mother should feel as it should be felt, when I should feel it. If only, just one of those doors would open, and out he would come. I would see his little round face, still sleepy, and realize he had his green shorts on, because when the police were here, I really couldn’t say.

Dear God. I would forgive everything. I would forgive every horrible thing. I would make myself supple and pliant. I would bend and find grace. I would venture out of my house to survey another’s tragedy on a mild summer evening if only it would just magically be another’s tragedy and not my own. I can’t have this kind of moment. I can’t have this happen to me.

What will I do? How can I go on from this?

I watch my husband. I have heard him explaining I am by the telephone, waiting for word. And ladies I don’t know offer to sit with me, worry I’m alone, but he reassures them I am where I need to be. But I am not. Even with today’s portability, I am a good three rings from the telephone. Maybe four. I figure kidnappers and hospitals and police detectives will allow me a few rings to answer.

And I punish myself for thinking these thoughts. He is not gone. And I am so selfish. I am so selfish. My son could be dead. He could by dying this moment and I am thinking wry thoughts about ransom and telephone etiquette. But then I say that it is only my surety that he is fine, soon to return, that allows for my sarcasm. This is what I do, constantly both berate and defend myself. And who can even answer a phone when one’s hands tremble like this?

And is this all real? All this emotion? Or am I only doing what I think I should? Am I only emulating other mothers I’ve seen on television movies about children who disappear never to return? It’s as if I’ve been humming along my whole life waiting for something to happen. And now it’s happening. And I want to go back to renegotiate the situation. But I can’t. Because God’s eye is sharp, his aim precise. And this whole plan has been planned so far in advance, without my knowing and the whole bitter lot of it has just been converging down to this moment, this wretched moment, ratcheting down and tightening until I am so very small and smaller and smaller, until I am the very universe just moments before exploding and I’ve only just realized all of this has been happening. And it all makes sense now, suddenly. And it’s clear. And here I am. I am the target, dead-center, the bullseye. And enjoy it because in the future, like stars, you’ll be finding bits of me in everything.

On the radio.

I can remember being a kid sitting by the window in my room, radio on, finger poised on the duo record/play button on my cassette recorder, waiting for one of my many favorite songs to come on so I could record them, capture lightning in a boom box, and play it back whenever I wanted. I could never quite get the whole song. My method was flawed, but it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for the task. I spent the majority of one summer (I think between 5th and 6th grades) honing my skills before ultimately settling on simply recording the end of every song and station break ready for what might be next.

I spent a lot of baby sitting money on blank tapes. So much that I probably could have just bought the majority of music I wanted, but that idea never occurred to me. Don't know whether I'm dense or just naturally thrifty. I lean toward density because despite the amount of recording I did and the number of songs I captured (Chaka...Chaka Khan...) I rarely, if ever, played back anything I taped.

Frankly, I think I just loved the radio. I loved the serendipity of it, the singular joy it brought when one of my favorite songs was played at the very moment I happened to be listening; when you had no choice, but to stop what you were doing, turn up the sound and sing really loudly because who knew when you were going to hear it again?

I still love the radio. I love NPR because I'm in my 30's and I'm supposed to, but for music, despite the proliferation of ipods and satellite and on-line on-demand music services, nothing beats a good radio station.

And good radio is really hard to find. Most radio stations gave up the love of music so necessary to ceaselessly put it on 24-hours-a-day in favor of airing a jangled auditory gee-gaw of gossip, traffic, sports and doofishness (trademark!). Nearly all radio is "talk" radio whether they embrace the moniker or not. What used to be bastions of local identity, culture, music and flair are now mostly all the products of marketeering and playlists generated based not on what people genuinely adore, but on what corporate record companies (teamed with whatever other merchandising/product tie-in/tatertot making groups) want us to buy. And well, that's just messed up.

When I was in middle school, the coolest DJ at the coolest radio station in town was my BFF's dad. He played what we liked. And I know that there were plenty of shenanigans going on (in the radio business. Would never dream of besmirching the rep of the awesome Wayne Fanning), but it was at least a bit more organic, more local, more about the listener, more human.

Satellite radio, although still made by people at some point, just seems to sterile for me to get into. When we had satellite television, we also got satellite radio by proxy. Even though I couldn't find a good radio station to save my life, I couldn't fall in love with radio on the TV. Very surgical and precise, neatly packaged in specific increment, I would never be surprised by a pea in my carrots. So specific were the genres, it would be nearly impossible to be surprised by anything beamed to my ears from on-high. And I'm the kind of girl that likes the random weed that pops up in the garden. That's where I find inspiration and why I've got wood sorrel in a pot on my porch. I'm willing to wager more imaginations are being dulled by satellite radio at this very moment than Nickelodeon.

Why aren't we willing to take any kinds of risks anymore? Why are so many of us so complacent, eating the same Lean Cuisine we could find in Terra Haute, Toronto, Texarkanna, or Taiwan, listening to the same songs we could hear broadcast in the same way worldwide as well?

There's so much to hear out there. Shouldn't we all begin by listening to as much as possible?

The good news is that some people out there are thinking and doing, not just bitching and grousing like me. In my neck of the woods, you can get local, excellent radio via WNRN. You can also listen on-line if you don't live in range. It's community supported, meaning that the listeners donate money (about that, it's coming, I swear, I'm just so poor right now, dude, for real...)to keep the station afloat, and while there are businesses that underwrite programming who get plugs every now and again, there are no commercials.

The best part of WNRN though isn't the lack of commercials or the wicked fund raiser t-shirts, it's the true love for music - all music - that pours right through the speakers and out the rolled-down windows of the car. Though primarily a modern rock station, you can hear pretty much anything a pretty much anytime. If you want a dedicated hour of bluegrass, you can hear just that at the appointed hour, but you're just as likely to hear an Old Crow Medicine Show song smushed between old-school Depeche Mode and something so new you never even heard anything like it ever before.

And the best part of all about WNRN is the responsiveness of the on-air crew. Hear something you like, but miss the station break, just give them a call. They'll tell you what it was, the album it came off of, give you a personal critique of the rest of it and wish you a heartfelt "good day!" all in about 17 seconds. And best of the best of all, if you're hearing just a little bit too much of something, say Aimee Mann whinging endlessly on about your having a lot of money, but not being able to afford the freeway, you can give them a call explaining that you will have to go find a puppy with cancer to kick if you happen to hear it one more time in a given day, and they'll take a wee break from playing it. Just for you. And just because you asked them to.

Not that I would ever have done such a thing. I personally love Aimee Mann. Really. Can't you tell? No irony there. At. All. Uh-uh. 'Til Tuesday was boss. Oh, shush. Keep it down now. Voices carry...even that shower-curtain-hook earring, dating an asshole at the opera video was right on. Who hasn't lived through that? Dude, if I could sing one to three notes max without ever moving my jaw, I'd *be* Aimee Mann myself...and gladly.

Life is bigger with real radio. Life is better, too. Why would we accept anything less? Even if we don't always like what we're hearing, it still gives us something, even if it's just the motivation to cross the room to turn it off for give or take three-and-a-half minutes. Come and join me in the magnificent joy of hearing the best song ever at 1:13 pm on a random afternoon when the mundanity of everyday tasks had gotten overwhelming and for a brief moment, the Universe turns her shining face to you, and you just have to stop what you're doing, turn up the radio and dance. Because who knows when it will come around again.

Wee peeps

Children. What good are they?

Always at your back, mouths full of something, usually fingers. Theirs or someone else's.

And what are their fingers full of?

Is it something intentional like snot or peanut butter?

Or is it an unplanned menagerie of dirt and sweat and hand sanitizer?

It's really impossible to say, isn't it? And which is better? Fingers slurped free of snot are better than fingers full of snot, right? At least marginally? Maybe?

No. I know. None are better.

There are a great many people who think the answer to Global Everything is negative population growth. Me, with my three children, I've had the word "Breeder" snarled about me by people with far too many pets.

I have.

I try to get angry about it, like David, but I can't really.

Some of us are meant to raise impossibly small dogs that run counter to any evolutionary imperative and some of us are meant to raise children (who, funnily enough, will grow up to comfort those who spent their lives raising anything small enough to fit in a teacup and also walked on a leash by running geriatric facilities with names like Papillion Acres and slogans like "You're Shit-zu can't wipe your ass, but we can!").

Maybe this isn't an appropriate topic for Father's Day. Maybe it's the most appropriate topic. Parenting is the devil's business, even God left it to someone else when it came to his own Son. So, for someone like me, who is spending the greater part of her life doing nothing other than parenting, sometimes, I get a little punchy.

Sometimes, I refuse to help my son get his arms out of his sweater. Even though he's all sweaty and as close to swearing as is possible for an eight-year-old who knows all the words, but has sense enough not to say them. Sometimes , I make him go in the grocery store with one arm going this-away and the other going that-away with a sweater holding him hostage because, well, an eight-year-old should not be befuddled by a sweater at all, should he?

And despite the looks I get from other, kinder parents, yes I do insist he help get the groceries, even if he is mostly strait-jacketed and ends up trying to kick a box of Ritz crackers into the cart because he can't use his hands.

I parent with ginger and lemon zest. Don't get caught by me doing something stupid. I will cancel a birthday party. But that's not as bad as David who threatened to cancel Christmas one year. Not the Jesus part, just the presents. I would never do that. That'd be like punishing myself.

At school once, in the lunch-line when Schuyler was in Kindergarten, I politely reminded one of her classmates not to spit on another person - me. He didn't listen and proceeded to do it again and again. Now, I am good humored and understand that children are, in fact, children and don't expect more of them than they can deliver, but only up to a point. Just as I was about to get pretty stern with the child, Schuyler popped in with, "You better listen to my mama. She won't hit you, but she will talk you down to the ground!" Never a truer thing spoken of me and how I raise my children.

I love them dearly, but daggone, it's a lot of work. A lot of thankless, repetitive, mind-numbing work. Perhaps not as much as raising show dogs, but I don't get a clicker or the benefit of hiding an old piece of chicken between my teeth for coercion. And I can't tuck my kids into a crate at night or lock them up in one in an outbuilding when I need to accomplish something or get some sleep. This now, is being written with a one-year-old playing base jumper from my shoulder over and over.

So, why now am I contemplating homeschooling the same child who can't escape a sweater instead of sending him off to fifth grade?

I dunno.

I love him?

I think he's neat?

I see him growing up into this young man and I want him to have the kind of childhood that launches one into greatness?

Even in a life free from the wardrobe-wonders that are the pull-over sweater and vest?

He's really a wonder, my Eli. He's so much like my husband and myself. And not in all the good ways, either. Even though he's still so young, I see emerging some of the same self-limiting idiosyncrasies I see in myself. I didn't realize, when he was younger, how important it was to my children to always try to be better than myself. And Eli's got a lot of self-doubt and also has my nasty habit of finding the coldest corner in the room and sitting there, so no one else has to. Like he doesn't deserve better.

I'm not really sure how homeschooling will help with that. And I'm not sure I'm not being selfish and just trying to grab at the trailing remains of his childhood and keep them for myself.

I love school. I think it's important. But frequently, with Eli, I wonder why he's having to jump through so many hoops he clearly doesn't need to. When you are spelling "Anachronistic" in 4th grade without having to look, you already know how to spell. Why spend more time on spelling? Why not do something else with that time?

Eli aced his 4th grade SOL tests, two with an emerging abcessed teeth requiring emergency surgery, and one the day after that surgery. If you can manage that, how truly challenged have you been?

But the school is still a school and has to function for the greater good of everybody. That isn't a bad thing, but for Eli, I want to try something different. Instead of always reigning him in, I want to let his throttle run wide open and see what happens.

How many people who have truly changed the world trace their different points of view back to time spent doing something different than their peers? I mean, there's Einstein and Twain and Roosevelt and Kahlo....and hundreds upon hundreds of others. It could be that their stories just haven't been written, but I've yet to hear story upon story about inmates who attributed their lives of crime to a year spent being home schooled or bedridden.

I want Eli to have the kind of break you can only get when you're a kid. I want him to dawdle and stare. I want to allow him to have the mind space to think and learn and create without limits or interruptions. I want to help him wrestle with and pin down those dogging demons I unwittingly sat on his shoulder now before they're dug in tight.

I want to give him the world. But I can't. I can only give him the opportunity to reach out and take it for himself; show him that he's worth it and worthy of it. And I'm just the person for that job, I think.

addendum.

Sitting here this morning, listening to The Pretenders, I realize I have not been entirely fair. David will argue with me about this, but I think that I do owe my father one very important thanks. Probably a great deal more, but right now, I am thinking of his record collection.
He didn't leave it for me. Rather, when he moved to NYC, he left it at my grandparents' house. There, it sat in a cabinet in the basement until I rediscovered it one day.
One of the few interactions I can remember having with my father was about Heart of Glass by Blondie. He was a big music fan and fancied himself a musician. Still does, apparently. It's not that he was any good, but he did have good taste in music. I think he had good taste in lifestyle as well. He was a young man in the early 80s, when there was so much good music, and New York City looked as glossy as it did gritty - just the right mix. And who exemplified this more than Debbie Harry? I think no one.
I don't remember how old I was, but I do remember him listening to the record in my grandparents' living room. And I remember standing in the doorway, listening. I really liked Blondie, the way a young child likes music. Like my daughter loves The Scissor Sisters, Weezer and Vampire Weekend. The lyrics of songs do not inform her life as much as they are informed by it. There are a great many things about which my 7-year-old has no idea. And those things are the topics of a great many good songs. She makes up pictures in her head to make sense of the words. I did the same thing.
I guess I was singing or something. I don't recall how it happened, but for just a moment, my father spoke to me like I was really there and like I mattered. He seemed slightly impressed. Maybe he thought I was something like him after all. I don't know. Maybe he realized we were actually related for a second and I just didn't appear from nothing to send his life skittering off track. I really can't say.
But he gave me his two Blondie albums. Maybe it's because, like any little girl trying to stand out to her father, I seemed awed a bit by him. If anything, that is probably what he liked best. Little children can make small grown people feel mightily important.
When he left for NYC, he didn't take a lot with him. There'd been this incident a few years before in which he threatened to kidnap me and never let his parents see me again if they didn't give him some money. It didn't go well for him. His parental rights were taken away, according to my mother, and I wasn't allowed to be alone in a room with him. Before that, he'd sometimes come take me to a movie. I can remember the previews of a movie I saw with him. A huge paper cup emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo spun slowly on the screen, condensation pouring down the sides. That's what I remember, Coke. More often than not, he'd not show up and I'd sit at the end of the sidewalk of our house on Fairmont Ave. and wait.
After the "threat", though, even that didn't happen anymore. It's hard to sit now and piece all of that together. It was so long ago and I was a kid. I guess I was somewhat protected from the truth, but then, my mother wields her personal truth like a cudgel and no one is immune from its blows. Probably I knew more than I should have. Probably I struggled to make sense of it. At any rate, I didn't really see him anymore after that. Except that one time in my grandparents' living room, even though he lived in an apartment in their basement, until he left for good.
I don't know why he didn't take his albums with him. He left most everything behind. Breaking free, I think. Starting completely over. Reinventing himself into a person more to his liking. There were hundreds of albums left in the basement. My grandparents' kept them forever, because they were his and one day, he might come back for them. I knew that wasn't going to happen, but I was glad they were there.
I was like a mini-archeologist, in search of some previously unknown, forgotten people, sorting through all the albums, meticulously scrutinizing every inch of cover art. The Tom Tom Club. Talking Heads. The Clash. Elvis Costello. The Pretenders. The Police. It was years before I actually took one home and listened to it. For the longest time, the records, stacked in the cabinet smelling of cardboard and Ivory Snow, existed for me in every way except the one in which they were most intended.
The music became my father to me. Although I could not picture him or hear is voice (and still can't), I could hear the voices and sounds he chose to surround himself with.
And they were good. Any port in a storm. I took what I could get.