Author: Jenny

Like a magpie, I've always been drawn to things that have sparkle, from rhinestone-embellished housewares to gold lamé get-ups in second-hand stores or beetles whose metallic armors reflect in the sun. But in my interactions with the world, oh, how I can fixate on the not-sparkly stuff: ill-timed traffic lights, a web page that won't load, the impolite server. Post-pandemic, I took to saying, "Everything's broken, and nothing works." It's not good for the soul, and as a lifelong writer, I've noticed it's also not good for creativity. This blog is about redirecting my attention to what's good in the world -- seeking and finding joy in the same way I notice sparkly objects around me -- and writing about it. There is an old nursery rhyme about magpies, "One for Sorrow," which tells us a solitary magpie symbolizes sorrow, but two magpies symbolize joy. This blog is about looking harder for the good stuff. Here's to finding those second magpies.

Blurred Lines (from the Momplexl Blog archives)

March 18, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny5 Comments

“It’ll be fun,” she said. “All different ages,” she said. “You won’t be the oldest.”

So I unclicked the MAYBE box and changed my RSVP to YES. I’d never been to one of these home parties. Sure, I’d attended ones where you buy jewelry, cooking gadgets, even couture clothing. But never one with dildos and lubricants.

It was nice of her to ask me and the other moms from work. Oh, sure, she and I are more than just co-workers. We’ve been for drinks together. We joke about who stunk up the first-floor bathroom. We exchange off-color stories. (Mine are from 20 years ago. Hers are from last year.) But it’s one thing to get along well with a much younger co-worker and quite another to peruse vibrators in her living room.

Still, it wasn’t a pity invite. And I do appreciate the occasional night away from helping with homework, doing kids’ bedtimes, and retiring on the couch with my lovely husband. So, I drove the fifteen minutes away from my cornfield suburbs, through the autumn night and off to her downtown apartment, which was decked with strings of pretty white lights. Ah, the city life. Oh, to be twenty-something again. And she was right: There were women of many ages, all sipping on beer or wine, nibbling on chips and wraps, and seated in a ring around some professional party hostess that was older than I am.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you. There were some big vibrators there. A few looked like miniature submarines. Others had tips fashioned to resemble, I think, tiny woodland creatures. But it wasn’t all vibrators. There were pretty lingerie pieces, too, and pretty sparkling lotions you could rub on your décolletage. Or your vagina. (The paid hostess assured us that this is a great trick to play on a partner just before heading out for a dinner date, just a quick little seduction to leave him with proverbial egg on his face—or glitter, as it were. Heh, heh, heh. Look who doesn’t know he’s got a sparkling moustache!)

At one point, I let said hostess smear scented lube on the back of my hand. I rubbed it in and sniffed at it like the other ladies in the room. “Mmmn!” I agreed. “That does smell good!” I did this on the tail end of her most embarrassing sales pitch of the night:

“Let’s face it, we’ve all had dolphin sex, right?” She was miming a bedroom scenario in which there was a last-second mix-up in entryways. Lurching slightly forward with a dreamy expression, then suddenly snapping her eyes open wide, she flapped her arms and screeched like Flipper. If I’d been given a safe word when I got to the party, I would have shouted it right about then.

Don’t get me wrong. I did have fun, partly because it was interesting to listen to how the younger women talked about sex. Whereas they were intrigued with a magic spray that instantly spirits away wet spots on the sheets, I was fascinated by a sweet little, gel-filled, heart-shaped massager that warms and firms up when you bend a metal disc inside of it:

Dear 20-somethings: This gel-filled heart will make you yawn ALL NIGHT LONG.

So, I bought one. It promptly went to live in a drawer.

Fast forward a few weeks, when my son came down with explosive diarrhea and violent vomiting. This wasn’t just any stomach bug. It was third-world. He spiked a wildly high fever. He had to sit on the toilet with a bucket at his tiny ankles so that he could unleash the curse of the damned from both ends of his body at one time. “I’m so cold,” he said, shivering in his bed in his fourth pair of underwear for the evening. “My skin hurts.” I couldn’t find the heating pad. We don’t own an electric blanket. And then I remembered THE HEART. Boom! Magic! He slept with it against his belly. He cuddled it to his face. We boiled, cooled, and activated the thing over and over.

The next evening, it was my turn to battle the bug. It never fails that I get these stomach viruses more violently than any one else in the family. Every time, I think I might die. I lose four or five pounds. I can barely walk. At one point, I was on all fours, crawling across our cold tile from the bathroom, dizzy and thinking of cholera. “Stay away from me,” I moaned at my husband, who was shouting out offers of help from the next room. “I don’t want you to get this thing.”

As I tried to catnap on the kitchen floor, I started thinking about the heart. I really wanted that thing. But it was all the way up on the counter. I bargained with God. My skin was so freaking cold. My belly was cramping in agony. Dragging myself up to standing, I grabbed the heart, pressed the metal disk in it, and watched it warm up. Then I rubbed it’s silky-soft warmth all over my aching, green-tinged skin. Oh, yeah, baby. I could do this all night long. Mmmmmnn.

Right around midnight, my condition started to improve. I was about to go to sleep when I heard low, miserable groaning upstairs. “Mommmmm, my belly huuuurts.” Now it was my daughter’s turn to dance with the devil. She spent most of the next six hours with the toilet and a bucket. At this point, I was still holding out hope that my husband would be spared, so I soldiered on, playing the part of nurse, rinsing buckets, wiping away tears, cleaning up towels, and heating and reheating that heart.

By morning, my husband was hit. He’s got a powerful immune system, rarely gets sick, so I figured it would be a mild case. Even when he had H1N1 several years ago, he seemed to be enjoying his time off. Not today. He was literally moaning in pain. I couldn’t believe it when I saw my poor, strong man boiling that pink heart. Ahhhh, he said when I rubbed it on his skin. Mmmmmmn.

You want to talk about intimacy? The Norovirus can make anyone sound like a 500-pound man straining to lift a 1,00o-pound barbell. And no amount of Poopourri is going to cover things up. Try this: Try having gut-wrenching dry heaves and explosive diarrhea within earshot of that special someone. It doesn’t get more intimate than that.

So, yeah. Against my first instinct, I went to one of those parties. I let a stranger rub something called Coochy cream on my forearm while I pretended it wasn’t weird. I handled all manner of so-called adult toys. I even bought one. And I can tell you, it was worth every single penny. Talk about blurred lines.

Was that good for you? Get more true stories of beauty, shame, and horror, in my book, After Birth: Unconventional Writing from the Mommylands (Possibilities Publishing, 2013), available in both Kindle ($4.99) and paperback ($8.95) formats. During the month of March, 80 percent of profits go to the Restoring Hope Transplant House, a home away from home for transplant patients and their families.

advice · education · husbands · motherhood · preschoolers · schools · speed-posts · transplant

School Matters: Who Knew the Earth Had a Foreskin? (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 12, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

I am a writer, so people are often surprised to learn I skipped a grade in math. Maybe it’s not because I’m a writer that they’re surprised. Maybe it’s because I seem kind of dumb with numbers. In truth, I sort of am. It’s not so much that I’m naturally, intrinsically dumb with them. It’s just that muscles atrophy when you don’t use them. (I know my brain isn’t a muscle, but just go with it.) After two decades of me writing and editing for a living, the math part of my brain looks like this:

Just for reference, here is the writer side of my brain:

So, just to be clear, here is the whole thing:

(Guess where the art center in my brain is located?)

I have not needed my full gamut of math education nearly as much as my math teachers threatened I would—until now. But because of recent experiences in my life, I just want to warn all the little kids out there: YOUR MATH TEACHER IS NOT LYING. YOU REALLY DO NEED TO PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASS, BECAUSE YOU REALLY ARE GOING TO NEED IT ALL.

The most important reason to retain it–the teachers don’t tell you this–is so that you will not look stupid when, later in life, your child asks you for homework help. I mean, what are you going to do when your fourth-grader is coming at you with questions like, “Which one of these is a rhombus?” and “Did I get the area of this triangle right?” And there you’ll be, hanging onto your shred of dignity, squinting over a Stove Top Stuffing box as you and your grade-skipping self struggle with mental math to make one-and-a-half times the suggested amount. What? You’re going to sneak over to the iPad and whisper, “OK, Google…how to calculate the area of a triangle” right in front of her? No! You’ve got to prove your salt by knowing as much as she thinks you do. Don’t you know a 10-year-old girl is just one hormone-surge shy of deciding you’re the world’s biggest idiot?

If the math doesn’t kill you, the science will. Because someday, as God is my witness, your 5-year-old is going to demand answers. Like, is Pluto a planet or isn’t it? WELL, IS IT? And when you answer incorrectly, your daughter’s friend from the fourth grade is going to survey you with shriveled brow and an Elvis lip and say, “Um, Pluto used to be a planet.” (I wasn’t sure if she was correcting me or wiping me off her shoe.) God, I actually knew that one! I did! But she caught me off-guard!

But therein lies my point: As a parent, you’ve got to be ready to do things like name the planets, spell Potomac, and define a hypotenuse off the top of your head and even while cleaning pee off the base of the toilet. (Which is what I was doing during the Pluto debacle.) Your teachers are telling you that you need to remember this stuff because you DO. Total recall, people, or you’re going to screw up your children.

Tonight as I was getting my daughter ready for bed, I told her how embarrassed I was at her younger brother’s parent-teacher conference this morning:

“Out of the blue, do you know what he blurted? He said, ‘Someone in my family—I think my mom—said you were wrong about something even though you think you’re right.’”

I told her how I’d explained that he must have overheard a conversation about my daughter’s teacher. I mean, that teacher is the one who changed my daughter’s spelling of blond to blonde, which technically wasn’t correct, given the context and this one weird spelling rule that most people don’t know.

“But, geez, I just sounded ridiculous,” I told my daughter. “Because your brother then pointed at his teacher and said, ‘No, Mom, someone in our family said that about HER.'”

Turns out, it was my daughter. “Sorry, Mom,” she said, “but his teacher had taught him that at the end of the earth there’s something like lava.”

“Honey, she must have meant the center of the earth, which is pretty much like lava,” I said.

“I know, Mom, but she said end of the earth, and anyway, it’s not lava.”

Do you know what I said? I said, “Well, that’s just an easier way for a preschool teacher to explain that stuff to little kids. And I know it’s not lava, but it’s similar. It’s smegma.”

Yes, I seriously said smegma, as if the Earth is one big foreskin. No, I did not realize my mistake right away, not even within a minute. My excuse? This:

On a more serious note: Remember that I’m donating 80 percent of the profits from March sales of my book to the Restoring Hope Transplant House–a home away from home for transplant recipients and their families. Already own one? Recommend it to a friend, or better yet, buy some copies as gifts.

daughters · death · grandparents · Grief

A Good Death (from the Momplex Blog archives)

February 24, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny9 Comments

It’s, what, maybe our fifth night at my grandpa’s apartment? I’m losing count now. We’ve been holding bedside vigil with him, all the women in the family, which is not a lot of women and yet nearly all of the family. My mom and her sister. My sister and me. Tonight there’s also my daughter. She’s only 10, but she asked to come. I wasn’t expecting this.

He doesn’t look like himself, I tell her. His mouth is open really wide—like this—and he’s gotten even thinner since you saw him on Thursday. She says she knows. She says okay. He’s gasping, and it sounds like he’s choking, I say. She just wants to give him a card she’s made. He won’t be able to see it, I say. You can tell I’m really scared. She has no idea what dying looks like. I’m just learning myself.

Of course, my dad has been coming and going. It’s “just” his father-in-law, but being that my dad’s own parents were killed in a car crash some 17 years ago, there’s a surrogate thing my grandpa wanted to do. Call me dad, Grandpa asked one day. And my dad obliged the man. This old man. This deaf old man. This man with finger joints thick as walnuts. This no-longer-towering man whose shoes I used to stand on to dance. Walk like a man, fast as I can, sang Frankie Valli. I can still see the hem of my grandpa’s pants swishing over his big Frankenstein shoes. I was so small. He was a giant.

As the giant shrinks, so does his world. Sure, he was always happy to see us, always greeted me with joy when his hunched-over body slowly climbed into my car. He always seemed tickled when he noticed, ten minutes into the drive, that the kids were in the backseat. “Oh, ho, ho!” he’d laugh. “Hello, little snipes!” But mostly he was staying home. Because it was hard to get to the bathroom. Because there were too many steps up to the restaurant. Because scooters don’t go over grass. Because it was too loud to hear. Because it was embarrassing. Because he was kind of tired.

“I’ve been sleeping all the time,” he told me just two weeks ago, when he happily agreed to go for coffee. It was the last time I saw him before he began this slow death. “Every chair I see looks comfortable, and then I sit in it, and it is.”

He’s gasping loudly in the bedroom, like he’s been doing for days. For the umpteenth time, I’m both surprised and secretly relieved he’s still alive when I walk into the apartment. My mom and aunt are playing cards in the front room, and the smell hits me in the face. It’s powerful, thick, and musky, a smell you stop noticing after just a few minutes, as I’m learning. I know it’s a smell that happens when old people want to live independently but barely can. But now I think it’s the smell of dying. I hate thinking that.

“Are you okay?” I ask my daughter. She nods, and we walk back to the bedroom. Great Grandpa doesn’t look like Great Grandpa anymore. I think it’s worse than she thought. But she’s okay. She wants to look, but she doesn’t want to look. She looks and looks away. I don’t know which one of us gives him her card. On the front she’s scrawled, “Get well soon!” But on the inside she’s written, “You’ve had a long life. I hope you enjoyed it!”

During the day, I’ll tell you we haven’t been sitting around crying and wiping our noses constantly. You can’t do that 24/7. Yes, we cry. But we also play card games and board games. We laugh and tell stories. Today my sister takes my daughter for a ride around the complex in his scooter. We time each other to see who can get from living room to fridge and back in the scooter in the shortest time. We eat junk food. But my favorite part is the singing. It’s my favorite because I think the rest might confuse my daughter, or maybe me. Of course, I want her to know it’s okay to be okay. I don’t want her to be devastated—and she isn’t—but I don’t want her to get too silly either. I’m not sure it’s the coping mechanism I want to model. That’s why I love the singing.

We gather around my grandpa’s bed, and we sing songs he loves, including “Me and Bobby McGee,” which sounds a lot different when you sing it to an old man who loved it, an old man who’s actively dying. My mom and aunt can sing in harmony. My daughter has a pretty little voice, and it’s coming at me from over my shoulder. I want to cry. We try to sing my grandpa’s favorite hymn, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” but we don’t know all the words. My sister looks them up on her iPod so we can sing along, and we do, but the last verse is missing. So, we try a different version, and when we sing the last verse, I see my grandpa’s face clench up a little:

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

The hospice nurses keep telling us it won’t be much longer, maybe today, maybe tonight. He hasn’t had any fluids or food for nearly a week. This is imminent, they say. But it never is. “It’s inhumane,” I told my mom when she asked me yesterday what I was thinking. “This is inhumane.” But now I know that every day has been for something. Every painfully long day that his tired old body has clung to life, has allowed us to do one more sacred thing before he goes. And another. And another. Today it was hearing my daughter sing to her dying great grandfather, to experience the beauty of all these strong women—I’ll count my little girl among them—carrying along a strong, sweet man through the tough work of dying.

After a week, my grandpa finally passed one evening with my mom and aunt at his side. He died with my daughter’s card in his hand, and after we washed his body and prepared it to go, my aunt returned the card to the same place. That’s an image I’ll never forget.