Not as Old as My Caftan Implies (from the Momplex Blog archives)

November 7, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny6 Comments

I’ve been feeling old lately. I don’t need a Boy Scout to help me cross roads or anything. And I don’t sport giant, black fit-over sunglasses while navigating my town car to Jo-Ann Fabric. In truth, I’m 20+ years from Social Security, and women much older than I am compete in marathons. So, it’s not that I actually am old. It’s just that I’m not young either. I know this to be true because I own a leopard-print caftan, use a pill box, and resent all my tattoos. Take heed, young folks. These are the signs.

Last month I had my husband and the doctor he works with repair my earring holes. By repair, I mean carve with a scalpel and stitch shut.

You could have stuck a pencil in those holes before the repair. Kids these days call them gauged ears, but my contemporaries and I blazed that particular fashion trail. I call them ‘80s ears: stretched-out lobes from wearing giant earrings to complement giant perms. Those holes are ugly, whatever your age, and they look particularly bad on a 41-year-old woman. They had to go.

As if that wasn’t enough, I then tried to have my ankle tattoo lased. I got part one of this tattoo (the flower) while avoiding studying for my final exams in college. I got part two of the tattoo (my signature) during the presidential debate between Clinton and George H.W. Bush. It was inked by an artist who did some of Billy Baldwin’s tattoos. I know this because, while she was giving me the tattoo, I was staring at pics of her with Billy and the tattoos she’d given him. She, on the other hand, was staring at the debate on her portable TV. I think my sloppy tattoo bears evidence of that.

Before laser treatment:

After laser treatment:

So much for that little enterprise.

And then I realized: This is something old ladies do. Try to fix wee little aesthetic details on parts of their bodies to counteract the giant hoof-print Father Time is leaving over every inch of them. Oh, my ass has dropped five inches and I’m developing a chin wattle. Better get that mole on my arm removed and buy a new pair of earrings! When I was 22 and could walk around wearing wooden stilettos like Bad Sandy from Grease, any given Friday night, I didn’t even notice that mole. For sure nobody was looking at my earring holes.

Last weekend I went to Denver to visit my aunt, a woman who may or may not have giant earring holes. I don’t know, because she’s got giant boobs, and those magically turn everything else into minutiae. While I was there, she and I drove out to SkyVenture Colorado. This is an indoor skydiving facility, and since I’m writing a book about the guy who engineered the thing, I wanted to give it a whirl. I thought it would be scary for me, since I’m afraid of heights. But no heights were involved. In fact, it was deliriously fun. You pretty much step into a column of wind and fly, with the floor not all that far beneath you. You learn how to master the wind with tiny movements of your body and the help of a skydiving guru.

When I stepped out onto the wind column, I felt young. I wanted to yell some happy expletives. Because even though my pastor doesn’t know it, even though my kids don’t know it, I do that. I like to do that. I’m a tattooed girl who used to wear Bad Sandy heels and rock a perm Felix Baumgartner could’ve spotted from his space dive. I felt alive, happy, wild, even sexy. And then I got home and watched the video of my flight:

Yes, that’s me sporting a pink, nylon fat-suit, my arms palsy-shaking like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. That’s me not looking nearly as vivacious as I felt. I think I even have a mullet.

What’s that thing Forrest Gump says? Stupid is as stupid does? I’m wondering if maybe sexy is as sexy does, too. Youthful is as youthful does. Fun is as fun does. Happy is as happy does. It’s not about the big earring holes or the faded tattoo or the pregnancy stretch-marks. (Did I fail to mention those?) It’s about joy, which has no age. And in a funny way, that means it is about the earring holes, the tattoo, the stretch marks, for all of them are talismans from great times in my life. And reminders of more to come. I’m not sorry I closed up those earring holes. I’m not sorry about the stretch marks. I’ll make new talismans. There’s more to come. Until I’m dead, I’ll keep making them.

Old is as old does.
(But I’m still going to color my roots.)

babies · daughters · motherhood · sons

Second-Born (from the Momplex Blog archives)

June 11, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny1 Comment

She wasn’t here before.

I came first.

What happened in the world, happened to me.

There was a long stretch before her.

Then suddenly she was everything.

I became the sea to her boat, and she the sea to mine.

That’s how it is, you know.

One day you just become a parent,

Then whatever happens in the world, happens to your child.

But you? You definitely weren’t here before.

You happened to both of us.

You turned my baby into a big kid, and me into a juggler.

Like a mirror reflecting a mirror,

My baby holds my baby,

And I can see love for an eternity.

Originally posted March 2011

motherhood

I Am Not a Search Engine…But I Let My Kids Think I Am (from the Momplex Blog archives)

May 30, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

Butterflies pee blood. That’s what my kids learned today from the Grow-a-Butterfly Kit I bought for them. Actually, since I’m the one who shouted this information while witnessing blood spraying from a newly emerged butterfly’s lady parts (they’re all girls in my mind), it’s probably more accurate to say they learned it from me.

My children learn most of their erroneous facts about science, nature, history, and the cosmos from me. Turns out I shine only with the basics, like answering whether apples grow on trees or underground like potatoes. Though I absolutely have tried, I cannot explain why we don’t have watermelons growing all over our yard after we’ve spat so many melon seeds there over the years. It’s also proven difficult for me to explain how a photo travels from my smartphone to my computer, and the reasons I never wet the bed. This is because (1) I am not a walking encyclopedia and (2) never seem to realize how full of shit I am until I’m knee deep in what’s come out of my own mouth.

If you have a young child, I hope you’re in the same boat. Because it’s not just misery that loves company; it’s ignorance and ineptitude, too. I don’t want to be the only mom who’s a walking, weekly confirmation of her children’s suspicion that, yes, we really do forget most of what we learn. But, come on, how the hell am I supposed to remember what a scalene triangle is? And why? Oh, wait. I know why: Because some evening, my third-grade daughter is going to flop down next to me at the kitchen table with a geometry worksheet, and ask me to remind her. That’s when I will excuse myself to use the bathroom, sneak a peak at our American Heritage dictionary, and come out acting like I totally knew.

So help me, if you’re able to explain on demand to a child how wind is made, why conifers don’t go bald in the winter, or how worms survive after being chopped with a garden spade, I hate you. It only means you’ve got a better memory than most and/or spend too much time on the Internet. And it’s making the rest of us look bad.

As it turns out, butterflies don’t actually pee blood. Some online almanac tells me it’s meconium. (That’s newborn caca, to the layperson.) Sometime later today, probably while putting the kids to bed, I will issue the retraction of my misinformation from this morning. I will swallow my pride and be honest, confessing I had to look it up on the Internet, slowly but surely handing over my authority to Google, slowly but surely revealing I’m not as brilliant as they used to think I was. That’s okay: My preschooler, who witnessed the caterpillars quadrupling their size, saw them climb to the ceiling of their tent, watched them sealing up as chrysalises, and finally saw them emerge a week later as butterflies — he told me today that it wasn’t that interesting watching them come out, that he’d rather have seen them going in.