Bettie Bookish

And another thing...

Oooh, I forgot to put barium enemas in the cooker. Barium enemas and, just to be safe, all ass-related medical procedures.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

In the cooker

Recently while visiting our New York relations, we were watching television when an ad for a personal injury attorney came on. In the ad, a gentleman is standing in his yard in front of a barbecue grill talking about how he was glad he called this lawyer, or maybe about how she SHOULD have called this lawyer... I'm not sure exactly what he said, because Big Joe started railing from the sofa while searching for the Mute button: Ugh! I hate this guy. I HATE this guy. Get him off! I'm gonna put him in that cooker!

And so it has become that the ultimate insult, the greatest threat, and the supreme dismissal is to put someone or something In the Cooker.

This time of year, before we have to start counting our blessings, I think I need to put some things in the cooker. Clean house, so to speak, so I can be truly grateful.

Today's list of things I'm putting in the cooker:
- My HP Deskjet 3820.
- The nickname TomKat, when used without irony.
- Cancer.
- bleeding varices
- My ex-husband, who hasn't seen my son in 10 years, never made any acknowledgement of birthdays or other holidays, paid approximately $800 child support total over the past 17 years, and suddenly decided to show up yesterday for a fishing trip.
- Edy's Slow Churned Rich & Creamy Light French Silk ice cream. Damn you Edy! You're an ice cream witch, that's what you are.
- The 4,500 other houses on the market in our city that are apparently more appealing than the one I'm trying to sell.

I could go on, but I'll save it for another time.

What would you put in the cooker?

A letter to you, dear daughter

Last night, for the first time since you became our daughter, you spent the night away from both of us.

You had a sleep-over with Mima, which allowed your Papa and me to put on decent clothes, leave the house for a supper served later than 6 p.m. and - oh, here is the really lovely part - get just a little bit drunk over our pasta. Drunk with freedom!

This may have been your first sleep-over, but it will not be your last.

And you had a lovely time, from all reports. You slept easily and well through the night.

And this morning when I saw you, I gasped because you grew five inches in the 15 hours you were out of my sight. You have grown right up.

You stand in front of my mirror and tell me that, when you get big, you'll use makeups. Wonderful. Your Papa reminds you that when you get big, you'll have a world full of options. You can be a doctor or a legislator or a pilot, he tells you.

"I could be a pilot," you say with conviction.
"Do you know what a pilot does?" I ask you.

You smile and nod. "Arrrrrr!"

Oh! you say to everything, as if everything were a wonderful surprise.

"Come on - it's time to go to school," I say.
"Oh! I don't want to go to school."

And then, of course, there is "because." You have discovered the power of bolstering your demands with "because." In particular, you love "because I'm cold."

"Mama, I need that candy up there because I'm cold."
"I need to play outside because I'm cold."
"I need another story because I'm cold."

When you do not get what you want, or you get it in some compromised fashion that doesn't suit your specifications - a broken slice of cheese, for example - your heartbreak is unbearable. And it is the loudest thing I have ever encountered.

Sometimes, when you are truly inconsolable and sleepy, we walk onto the front sidewalk and look for the moon. We talk about how the moon is peeking down on you in all her silvery light. I tell you that, when you lived in China and I lived here, I used to look up at the moon every night and tell her to bring my love to you, look in on where you were sleeping and kiss your forehead.

Now, we talk about how the moon will visit your sister, and tell her we're waiting and we'll be there as soon as we can.

You say you want to bake your sister a cake, because it will be her birthday. We straighten up your room, and I say I need to make room for a bookshelf. You say we need to make room for your sister. But that she cannot have your old baby bed. We have to buy her her own.

It's a deal, my big girl. My dancer, my clown, my pilot.

Over-extensionated

When my son was little, I worked at least one job all the time and went to school.

He attended a chi-chi day school, where he was always the poorest kid in class with the youngest mother and the crappiest car in the afternoon car line. I would show up for school parties, rushing and breathless from literally running from the car to get there on time, and I would step into the classroom and then remember that I was supposed to have brought napkins or something. Something I hadn't brought, anyway.

And there would always be these other mothers who had personalized old cigar boxes for each child or baked minimuffins with each kid's initials on them or brought a pony for every kid in the class.

It wasn't just that they were rich. Although they were. They just seemed to manage better all the way around. Their houses and cars were clean all the time. They didn't forget to bring napkins.

I thought that, being older and generally more together as a human being this time around, I would be more like those mothers I so envied back then. I'm not.

Although I had intended to keep regular letters to my daughter, I haven't.

I haven't even compiled her lifebook yet, and now we're on our way to another daughter whose photos and mementoes likely will be stored in a box instead of an album where they could do her some good.

I haven't published a book, or even worked on that goal seriously.

And my house is never clean, EVER. I mean, it's not health-department dirty or anything. It's not like my mom's house. But everyone in our family seems completely incapable of regular daily maintenance.

Am I just missing some DNA fragment that other people take for granted?

I know I've had a lot on my plate these last 18 months or so, what with the cancer and the mom dying and the chemotherapy and the traveling to China to adopt my daughter and the hurricane and the home destruction and the other hurricanes and...

It's easy to tell myself that falling short of my own expectations (or, more accurately at this point, fantasies) is just a byproduct of some seriously bad and demanding circumstances. But that's just not true. The bad circumstances have just highlighted what a really tentative clutch I had on everything to begin with.

Now, I'm going to go wash my hair for the first time in four days.

Halloween

The dog

The daughter dressed as the dog

I hope your Halloween was half as much fun as my daughter's. She has found her favorite holiday.

Just wait 'til she learns about Christmas.