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.
motherhood

A Mother’s Day Even Anne Lamott Could Love (from the Momplex Blog archive)

Jenny3 Comments

Every year my Facebook feed is fed with a piece of writing from Anne Lamott about Mother’s Day and why she hates it. The essay, uncharacteristically bitter, was  originally published in Salon in 2010. I’m a fan of Lamott and always read the piece when it turns up, even though she sounds like Lewis Black instead of herself. In truth, I agree with most of the essay, but her vitriol is off-putting, and I disagree passionately with parts. By the end, I feel like I’ve been served what might have been a lovely soup were it not peppered with flies. It almost makes me want to throw out my dog-eared copy of her wonderful book Bird by Bird. 

How can I explain? Let me try an anecdote. When I was in high school, I was nominated to be homecoming queen. (Please don’t hold this against me. That was nearly 25 years ago, and this will be the first and last you hear of it.) Anyway, when I ended up “winning,” for lack of a better word, I didn’t think I was better than everyone, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good. The first thing my boyfriend at the time said to me when I walked off the football field was, “You can take that crown off your head now.” He looked disgusted.

That boyfriend made me feel foolish. I’m sure that was precisely the intent, to knock me off my high horse even though I wasn’t trying to ride one. Anne Lamott’s essay has that same feel. Don’t get me wrong: That’s not the only thing that bugs me about it. There’s something very modern-age playground about her message that rubs me wrong, too. I see an aspiration of equality that borders on dystopia.

And yet…

I can’t NOT read the piece every year when I see it. I love giant chunks of it, enough that I want to overlook the rest. Why throw out the baby with the bathwater? Here is the part that reads like gospel to me:

“I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, ‘Happy Mother’s Day!’ You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.”

Sing it, sister. Amen.

The thing is, I don’t believe that the answer is to lay waste to Mother’s Day. Trust me, I’m not just saying this because I can’t let go of a designated day to be woken up extra early by elated kids stomping on my full bladder, bearing undercooked scrambled eggs and wildly inflated expectations for all the fun I’m going to have with them from dawn to dusk. Nor is it because I enjoy figuring out the logistics of both having and being a mother that day. It’s because of precisely what Lamott says: It CAN be done a better way. Why not try?

Motherhood is big, complex, and many-tentacled. It comes in many shapes. It does have dark sides. It can cause grief. But in honoring those who have experienced that darkness and grief, I don’t think we need to diminish anyone else’s light and joy.

This all leads me to the show I’ll be participating in this Mother’s Day. The Listen to Your Mother Show bills itself as “giving motherhood a microphone.” Reading Lamott’s piece, I wonder what preconceived notions people might have about this show. Will they be surprised that at least two of the thirteen cast members don’t have kids? How could they anticipate the anything-but-sappy piece about one cast member’s complex and disconnected relationship with her mother? Lord knows I never anticipated so much of what I heard when I sat in the audience in the past, stories of miscarriage, infidelity, sexuality, faith, travel, hilarity, and all sorts of things that don’t neatly fit into any category or onto a Hallmark greeting card.

I’m happy to be part of such an inclusive Mother’s Day experience. I think it at least begins to answer Lamott’s call for a different way to do this thing (in ways that I agree have merit): It does not pretend motherhood is all one way or another. It does not pretend that those with kids are more important than those without. It shines light on the great mess of paths leading into and out of this THING that is so tangled up in our identities. I don’t know how anyone could feel left out. And that’s the kind of Mother’s Day I can be proud to celebrate.

babies · daughters · education · marriage · motherhood · preschoolers · sexuality

Nothing a Little Lube Can’t Fix! (from the Momplex Blog archive)

Jenny2 Comments

Even the happiest and best-paired of husbands and wives sometimes have drastic disconnects. My husband and I are generally two peas in a pod. We’re a nice mix of similarity and complement, and this generally keeps our boat floating, even in the worst of circumstances — like when he was deployed to the Middle East while our daughter was a toddler. Sometimes, though, like with any other marriage, we can have the most ridiculous disconnects. Case in point:

Our daughter is set to be the Child of the Week this week at her preschool. This dubious honor roughly translates into Make More Work for Mom Week. While our daughter gets to revel in such rapturous treats as being at the front of the line all week, having control over the classroom light switch during recess, and sitting up front with the teachers during circle time, for me, it means making a “special snack” for the whole class, orchestrating a surprise drop-in from a “special visitor” for her before the week’s end, and helping her create a “special poster” to share with the class that tells them more about her life. Aside from their obvious abuse of the word “special,” the preschool really can’t be held responsible for the grief this event is causing my family. How were they to know that it would coincide with our 11-week-old getting a ruptured eardrum?

After many days of crying, difficult bedtimes, fussy daytimes, and bobbing on and off the breast, my son managed to get through to the mother intuition that I didn’t even think I possessed. (Who can blame me? Our firstborn was an equal-opportunity crybaby, with a scream as shrill for I Don’t Like the View from this Carseat as it was for I Just Rolled Off the Bed and Onto My Face on the Wood Floor.) At any rate, I just got to thinking yesterday that the baby might be coming down with something. My husband confirmed my hunch with his otoscope, glimpsing blood and what appeared to be a rupture in my son’s right eardrum. Probably from our airplane descent last week.

As I was trying to deal with the fussy baby yesterday, I was also trying to help our four-year-old create her “special poster” for school. Being the Child of the Week is an event that comes only once a year for each student, so it’s a big deal. But I had no intention of trying to best any of the other mom’s gratuitious attempts to make their children look like professional archivers with an uncanny mastery of calligraphy. Seriously, I had the notion to just plop our daughter down with some paper, glue, pictures, and crayons, and let her have at it. But I knew it was important to her that I help, and the kid can’t exactly choose pictures off our computer to print, so she and I sat down together for an hour yesterday and carefully went through our digital photos. She meticulously picked which ones she wanted to include — a photo of her first day holding her brother, one of her cat that died this past summer, one of her climbing a tree with her Grandma, etc. Every picture had a “special” story to tell. When all was said and done, she had about 35 pictures selected. I hit print, and then learned that our printer was out of red ink.

At this point, the baby was crying for the umpteenth time, and because I’d been up much of the prior night nursing and comforting him, my energy was wearing out. But my husband had done all the holding that could help, so I had to take back the baby while my husband ran out to Walgreen’s to buy an ink cartridge. He took our memory stick with him, loading onto it the pictures we needed, just in case the store didn’t have the cartridge.

While he was out, my daughter went to a cookie-decorating party next door. She returned from the party high — absolutely HIGH — on sugar cookies with icing and M&Ms and candy corn. She was the epitome of a whirling dervish. I tried to settle her into working on her poster as her dad began whipping together dinner for us all. The baby was crying again, and I tried to nurse him in a sling as I pulled together the art supplies. “Just have to make it to the end of the day,” I told my heavy eyelids and tired arms, as I opened the Walgreen’s bag and discovered that my husband had printed only about 10 photos.

“Where are the rest of the pictures?” I asked.

“It seemed like too many,” he said, “So, I just printed some of them.”

I think fire shot out of my eyes. It was not that big of a deal, but it was, for some reason, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“You mean we spent ALL that time this afternoon going through those photos for no reason!?” I snarled. “I could kill you!”

Yes, I am that ridiculous right now.

I stomped upstairs and downstairs and through hallways, collecting up the goods for the poster and then remembering that he’d also stopped to buy an ink cartridge somewhere else after all. I went to the bag where I thought the ink cartridge would be, and found instead a shiny new bottle of AstroGlide. Um, yeah. Snowball’s chance in hell.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “You’re out of your mind.”

My husband looked up and saw me holding the bottle, that precious little bottle of hope, and said with a smirk, “What?”

“Do you know what I’m thinking when I see this?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said. “You want to tell me I can go f— myself with it?”

I laughed. That wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking how much that bottle shouted about the disconnect men and women often experience when a new baby arrives. No, I think it says a lot about the disconnect between men and women, period. Her very sanity is hanging by a thread, and he’s stopping off to buy lube? Did he really think that whole business about breastfeeding drying up cervical mucous was all that stood between us and a night of great sex?

When all was said and done, we had a good laugh about it. My daughter’s poster got finished and had her beaming with pride. My son eventually went to sleep. And my husband and I ended up with a little extra oil to burn. I intend to put it right in the kitchen next to our olive and canola oils, where it has a better chance of being put to some use.

Originally published 2009 JLF and the Momplex Blog.
humor · phobias

How to Control Your Hygienist’s Uterus (from the Momplex Blog archive)

Jenny6 Comments

A gal walks into a dentist’s office. It’s the day of her child’s first-ever filling. This is a child who’s uncontrollably afraid of shots–so afraid she can’t even say the word shot. The child has tried, but before she can get it out, her face goes white as a sheet and she looks like she’s going to pass out. So, this gal who walks into a dentist’s office? She’s a little nervous about the Novacaine shot that’s going to precede her daughter’s fillings. She comforts herself with the signs that remind her it’s a children’s dental center. Of course, children’s dentists are trained to create a magical experience, calling their instruments of torture things like Mr. Thirsty and Little Tickler, words that sound dirty and sexy to adults but like a bucket off mewling kittens to kids.

Still, the gal is anxious that someone’s going to slip and use the word shot. If they do, all hell will break loose. There will be whistle-register shrieking and gnashing (instead of fixing) of the teeth. She watches as the hygienist straps the laughing-gas mask on the child. The gal bites her lip as the hygienest begins detailing for the child what she’s up to, showing off the parts of the machinery and such. Here it comes, the gal thinks. She’s going to say That Word. A thin line of sweat comes trickling over the gal’s eyebrow and into her eye. She’s filled with the dread and with the regret of not having properly warned the staff. Oh, sure they’ve seen “afraid of shots” before, but they’ve never seen it quite like this. Eardrums will be ruptured. The windows will shatter.

Panicked as the hygienist continues explaining the steps to come, the gal grabs a large piece of scrap paper from her purse, rummages out a pen, and quickly scribbles a request. She casually walks over to the hygienist and clears her throat.

“I need you to just take a quick look at this,” the gal says. She shoves the scrap of paper under the hygienist’s nose. The hygienist looks confused, affronted. Is this really so much to ask? the gal wonders. She can already feel the brush-off, the certainty of being dismissed. More aggressively now, she sort of shakes the paper at the hygienist. And with her eyes, not her mouth, she says, Look, honey, register what I’m telling you and heed me before you do something you regret.

Then the gal realizes what she’s used for scrap paper, and that she needs to rotate it counter-clockwise to reveal her handwritten secret message:

At least there was a smiley face on it.

“Ahhh,” says the hygienist to the gal, laughing a little. “We never do that here, not even with the older patients.”

And yes, that gal was me.

Originally posted 2009
Copyright 2009 JLF and the Momplex Blog.