Life

It was, as predicted, a tense, unhappy experience. Three hours of a Saturday afternoon standing in Party City with M, trying every strategy in the book to help her choose--including not helping her choose. (L found his pink princess dress in about ten seconds, accessorized with a blonde Hannah Montana wig and a furry crown, and was ready to leave.) She reduced the picks to two costumes--both of them short pirate dresses (which I will make her wear with leggings)--and when we got to the front to pay for the one she'd picked, she wobbled again, in tears, uncertain this was the right choice.

In the car, later--after I'd cooled down--I tried to get at what was so hard for her. "I know you don't like it!" she cried. "Honey, I'd have you in princess dresses until you're 30--it's not about what I like. It's about what YOU like," I said. "I like princess dresses, too," she wailed. "I'd LOVE to wear a princess dress, but the kids at school would laugh at me."

Ah.

"Honey," I tell her, "somebody's going to laugh at you no matter what you choose. Kids laugh--it's part of the wiring at this age. So you may as well choose something that YOU really feel good about--not something that you think everyone else wants you to wear."

(It contrasts with Liam's gleeful attitude: he can't wait to put on that pink dress--can't wait to make the villagers laugh. He's been blessed with that hard wiring.)

She gets home, tries it on, feels better about it. Gets excited about it, even. Calls her Dad this morning to tell him about it, he puts his girlfriend on the phone, and girlfriend laughs at the costume.

Jay-sus.

Fall

Fall is here; the edges of the trees are turning orange, and we turned the heat on this morning for the first time this year. (And will turn it off again, as soon as I dig out all the sweaters and thick socks from the attic.) And so, all minds turn to the critical matter of Halloween.

We're tackling the great Halloween costume debate this weekend. M wants to make her own. Which I love in principle, except that her ambitions have been molded by the prefab costumes--the wenches with the laced bodices; the princesses with the hooped skirts--and they (her ambitions) are not remotely matched by my sewing skills or patience. Last year was a complete debacle; that wood nymph (my idea--an after-the-fact identity for the frothy confection of brown and gold gauze that was supposed to be a Great Lady) required a real leap of imagination, and that (in case you wonder) is bad. I forced her to wear it; I wouldn't spend the money on fabric AND spend on some prefab costume. It's this, I told her, or you can throw a sheet over your head and call it a day. And so here we are again, and she has no memory of last year's fun, and I'm determined not to spend more than today--this one day--dealing with the costume drama. And it's already 12:45.

L's ambitions are simple. L's going as a girl. I am so profoundly grateful, I can't even tell you.

I've had the strangest feeling all week; all week I've sensed that a friend of mine who died 15 years ago has been right next to me, or behind me. I could almost swear I smell his cologne. I've been trying to think what the subconscious issue is: it's not his birthday; not the anniversary of his death. Lying awake at 2am, I sensed him again. Turned on the radio to hear that OJ is finally going to jail, and realized that Jim died before the Bronco chase on the freeway. He died before the Berlin Wall went down. Man, he would've enjoyed these years. The letters we would've written!

Bought myself a bike. Envisioning myself moving fast--deep, clear breaths, strong muscles, every one of them a fat-burning maching. The world is my oyster.

Beasts

I am absolutely defeated--not forever, but today--by how hateful the kids are to each other sometimes. I catch the unfiltered reality now and then--when they're talking to me on the phone at work, and one of them forgets to hang it up after we've said goodbye; or when I'm napping. They're young enough still to prefer to be next to me if they can; nobody wants to disappear to her room or go outside by himself. And so I can witness, when they haven't noticed I'm not really asleep. It's the kind of nasty we would never commit upon another person as adults--sneery, clear-eyed, direct hits, aimed squarely at the vulnerable spots mapped only for family. He stays calmer than she, delivering hit after hit, and she quickly becomes emotional, at which point she's lost and knows it. So she slugs him, and he cries the kind of canny cry he knows will deliver the ultimate final word from Granny or Poppop, and when confronted by one of them, she lies about having hit him because she doesn't have the words to express the wounds he's just delivered, and because the behavior is all so patterned now that G & P have decided she's guilty before she opens her mouth. Which--guilty--she is. But so is he. The little prince. It is the same dynamic I had with my younger brother, who could engineer a stern punishment for me and then grin at me when the adult left the room. A child's sense of justice is so big.

Suppose I have to buy a book and engage this. I want to shake them and tell them how hard it is to find a safe port as an adult--how lucky they are to have each other, how they're going to need each other again and again in their lives. Note that my brother and I never rely on each other. Not ever. But I have five siblings.

Hence my despair. Which will pass.

The carnival's in town. Poor schmucks--setting the thing up for three days, and the day it opens, the skies open up and stay opened for all but four hours on Saturday. Rough biz.

Deep Thoughts

He loves them, so far. Turns to me and talks about the "cool things" about glasses--like how the world looks blurry if you peek above or below them, and how sometimes you forget you're even wearing them. He marvels at the color of grass and the cutting details of light. He sits in the back seat and stares up at the passing tree line, mouth open. "Wow...."

Did you notice McCain's sideburns last night--one of them an inch longer than the other? He looked like somebody's distracted grandpa. His staff didn't serve him well.

My 16-year-old niece is visiting for three weeks--sister to the boys who were here a week ago. She has matured through a kind of sexual precociousness that alarmed me a few years ago, and has turned out to be a beautiful, smart, interesting kid. An eye opener for me, and a relief.

I finished another quilt last night. Am getting better at it, I have to say. I've made ten now--mostly for children. There's such unexpected pleasure in piecing something together for someone--in imaging their personalities, and picking the patterns, and sitting up close with it--with them--for a period. Having started at a place in time, there's a backlog of siblings who need quilts, too, because if getting a quilt is an act of love, not getting one is not an act of love. Next up: my sister's other daughter. Then my brother's two boys. And then my own two, who have sat patiently, watching.

A guest stopped by the house just before dinner the other night. My father had done the cooking. "You're welcome to stay," he said to them, "but we don't have enough food to feed you." The guest left. Dad recounted this to us later at the dinner table. He was identifying his invitation to stay as a point of generosity, but was frustrated that this person always seems to show up before meal time. I didn't comment until L asked me, "What would you have done?" This person is unemployed. She's a single parent. "I'd have invited her to stay for dinner," I said. "But there's not enough food," L said. "I'd have given her my food," I said. My mother finds her voice then and remembers life as a child in Ireland. "My grandmother would feed anyone who showed up at the door," she said. "And she'd whisper to us children, 'Go away with you, now--we'll find you something to eat later.'" My father, alarmed to find he missed the mark on this one, remembers, "When I was small bums from the road would stop by all the time looking for food. Mamma had ten children to feed. She couldn't feed bums." My mother's family had money. My father's family were poor. Nothing is simple.

School starts in a week. The bus drivers have been practicing the routes, up and down the hill for a week now. It's been a fun summer.

Girls

M asks me this morning whether a breast gets droopy after breastfeeding. (Not, I swear, to connect all body dots to her father, but invariably these sorts of questions follow prolonged time in Baltimore.) "Breasts get droopy for all kinds of reasons, most of all growing older," I tell her. "Yes, breastfeeding can change the way a breast looks." She tells me that her older sister--her Dad's other daughter--had breast surgery to repair droopy breasts after breastfeeding her three children.

I am dumbfounded by this information. This woman is only in her 30s, and has spent the majority of her adult life unemployed or barely employed. (She's also, incidentally, drop-dead gorgeous.) For her to fund plastic surgery--well, it strikes me a bizarre ordering of priorities in a life. Must've been a whole lot of unhappiness about those boobs, I guess.

I tell M, "Your body is a roadmap of your life. As you get older, you carry more history on your body." I'm panicked by her fear of wrinkles, of fat, of freckles--by her criticisms of me, masked in something else. "It's something to celebrate--not hide. I'd never want to erase the signs that I was able to use my own body to feed you." Body not as temple, but tapestry.

It's a whole lot of politics, I know, and I'm not always opposed to plastic surgery. And I heartily approve of waxed brows and flattering bras, and I would love to slim down to slink, like in the old days. But God, it's a brutal landscape for raising well-adjusted girls--girls who like themselves and their bodies. Especially when we, ourselves, are so ambivalent about ourselves, so fucking weary of our own bodies.

"That dress looks awful on her," M notes just now, looking at Jennifer Lopez in a fairly classic evening gown in some movie. If Jennifer Lopez looks awful in a classic evening gown, the battle's lost.