The Magic of (Redacted)

Dear Mommies and Daddies (in whatever combination you are),

I was reading a blog by a seemingly perfect woman, who is raising her children perfectly with perfect manners, perfect grades, perfect posture, and, I am sure, perfect punctuation.

Already cringing, I was captivated by this unexpected line in her blog:

We (because she is pat of a perfect couple raising her perfect children) have decided to tell our children there is no Santa Claus.

GASP! SHUDDER! WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE WORLD????

She backed up her reasoning by saying she does not want to "lie to her children thus creating an atmosphere where they will lie to her (or them) in return."

Ooooookay.   So kid turns 16, lies about its gender nuetral whereabouts and when questioned will not be able to say, "Oh yeah? Well YOU said there was a Santa Claus!"

Mommy Blogger also said "They would be telling the children the gifts came from them."

Do they want the temporary gratitude of gifts received?

My children were raised with a Santa Claus, an Easter Bunny, and a Tooth Fairy.  As was I.

Sure as I grew up I did the math and figured out there was no possible way Jolly Ole Saint Nick could make it to all the children in all the world in one night.  (I was under the belief that everyone had Santa and did not know Santa was only for some religiously based families).

I watched all the claymation shows I still love and adore.  I would lie under the tree and look up at the lights. I had a favorite ornament that I got to put on the tree every year. (I still have it).

As I grew up, my friends and I would talk about Santa, about how each of us in our own way waited for him, tried to sleep, tried to stay awake to hear him, worried about the fire in the fire place.  It was magical.

I believe in a magical childhood where children can believe anything they want to believe.

Okay so that ended up with one trip to the ER when my daughter believed she could fly and leapt wholeheartedly off the front steps.  To be fair she DID fly, she just also landed.

For one of my daughters, we used to put tea cups filled with sugar water out on her windowsill for the fairies to drink.  Her bleary eyes trying to see them as she fell asleep.

Years later when I hung sugar water for hummingbirds, she watched and said it reminded her of the fairies and thought it was beautiful.  She did not go into a fit about why I lied and told her about fairies to begin with, much less set out water that only attracted ants.

My grown children all tell stories of how I was able to get them to do chores without fighting because "Santa was watching."

I often heard them say it to each other.

On Christmas morning as a parent I loved to watch as each child rushed up to me to show me what Santa had brought them.  I did not expect a thank you -- seeing them so excited was enough.

Maybe I am just Saturday Evening Post and Radio Flyer optimistic.  But if you are going to tell your children there is no Santa, be sure to get all the facts right and tell them, the tree is Pagan, it is the celebration of the Winter Solstice, and Jesus was born on or about April 17th.  A Pope decided to set His birthday closer to the solstice to get the heathens in line and stop with their Pagan nonsense.

(You can bring that up again for Easter.)

My children dreamt not of sugarplums, but something very similar -- Hershey's Kisses and Chanukka gelt.  So as you stuff your stockings with Fair Trade gifts, and candy bars that taste like cardboard, look back to your own childhood.

Did you believe in a Santa Claus?  Was your heart so broken when you realized there wasn't one that you decided to take away any magic from your own child?

I hope my children take all of our traditions and pass them down to their own children, so they can experience the joy of remembering and the joy of watching it again with their children.

As for Perfect Mommy Blogger out there, enjoy telling your children you had to stand in line and wait two hours for that perfect toy that they will have forgotten by next Christmas.  What memories are you making with them?

Happy Festivus.

My Mother's Eulogy

There comes an age when the natural order of death takes place.  We lose our parents, friends, relatives.  For some of us that age has come too soon, when we were too young to understand or even fully know who the person was that we lost.

 The word Eulogy means, A piece of writing that praises someone highly.

We mostly associate the word to those that have died.  Had I known the meaning of the word before, I would have written this while my mother was alive and we would have celebrated her life with her.  Let’s face it who else but my mother would enjoy an evening of compliments bestowed upon her? 

She was a woman who never grew tired of hearing how beautiful she was.  And she was.  But it was not her outer beauty that defined her.  It was her actions in life that  made her beautiful.

 The way she loved our father and was able to remain friends with him until his own death.

The way she found the true love of her life, Morty and blended a family of wild teenagers.

 Her beauty came from the beauty she saw in life, the art she admired and collected.  The way she looked through a camera lense and could see things others didn’t.

On one vacation I swear she took an entire roll of film on a piece of driftwood.

Ann Marie Jonas taught everyone here how to celebrate, how to live, and let people make mistakes.  She raised her children in what some would call an unconventional way.  We had freedom to succeed and to fail.  No matter what the outcome, she was there to love and inspire.

She was a woman who had no fears in speaking her mind, or offering her advice.   I asked her once what the happiest time of her life was.  She said when we all lived in Mountain Lakes.  She told me she  loved the activity and chaos of the house.  Many people will tell stories about her that all begin with, “Well I was sitting in the kitchen with your mom…”

She loved that time I realize now because it was so full of life and adventure.  She never knew what she would be coming home to after a day at the gallery.

If you walked in the house, you were family.

She welcomed everyone in to her house, and in to her heart.

Having raised five children, there were a few times when I would call her for parenting advice, and more often than not she would listen quietly and then pause before saying, “You wanted to have all these children.'

Mom was a Jonas woman.  To be a Jonas is to be loving, accepting, always getting their way and having a laugh that is unlike any other.

My mother had many pieces of advice that the family called “momisms”  If you do whats right, you never go wrong” was probably the most often stated.

She also called her Evers children, Evers Achievers.  She believed in us, she believed we would all find our paths.  She believed that of everyone.

Earlier yesterday I was laying down and I could hear my cousins laughing.  It sounded just like my mother’s laugh and it made me smile. 

So rhetorically I ask how do you say goodbye to a woman who was a mother, sister, aunt, grandmother, daughter, lover?

The answer is simple.  You don’t.  You do not need to say goodbye to someone who lives on in all of us.

In the faces and mannerisms of our children, in the love that last almost 40 years with Morty.

In the laugh heard by cousins. 

Ann Evers truly was a beautiful woman, but it was her heart that she gave willingly to all of us.  It was the time she spent listening, observing, loving.

She would not want you to stand here and eulogize her.  She would want you to eulogize and celebrate your own lives.

There was another thing my mother always asked everyone.  She would say, “So tell me, are you happy?”

That was what she wanted most.  For everyone to be happy.

Be sad now because it is right to feel the loss of someone so larger than life.

But after this, to truly celebrate the life we now mourn, do what is right, and be happy.

 

Do that for her.

Meow

Writers tend to be readers.  One of the most annoying and delightful things is when a writer finds another writer who is brilliant.

Oh the jealousy and delight of reading something and thinking, "why didn't I write that?! She is so brilliant.  I love her.  I hate her.  I am funny too.  I have depression too!"

Do I start writing about my my struggle to lessen my under arm flap to maybe the side of a large ferret?

Do I write about the insanity I feel when invited to go somewhere outside of my comfort zone (my house, or possibly even my bed)?

No.  I will be writing for a magazine about fashion and music.

Believe me any writer is happy to get a gig.  See? Already using musical terminology!

I am excited about this new venture.  It not only means writing, but also immersing myself, and interviewing people.  I love getting people to talk about themselves.

I will go to fashion events, of which my not so small city has an abundance of.

My normal self doubt comes in.  That evil little monster who thinks I deserve jiggly underarms and thighs permanently connected is laughing its little head off.

"YOU? Write about fashion?  You own 20 tank tops and 10 long skirts! You wear a pair of maternity pants and your baby is sixteen."

Okay so my evil creature has a point, but maternity pants are comfortable.  Oh God, the word no designer wants to hear!

Fashion is not comfort!  It is being fabulous and miserable at the same time!

I do own some high end pieces in my closet.  But because of my aforementioned love of my bed, I would only be wearing them for them for my cat.  Who would climb on me and make biscuits thus ruining the item.

Sorry kitty, I love you, but DO NOT TOUH ME!

Me? The currently (I still say currently even tho this has been my body figure for well over ten years now) plus size girl write about fashion?

You know that garment would not fit over your cankle.

But here is the thing about both writing and fashion.  Both are to be admired.  Both are pieces of art.

Both can elicit the same, "Damn I wish I wrote/wore that!" reaction.

I know a lot about fashion.  Not just because I was a Sex and the City fangirl, or wish Tim Gunn was my Uncle.

I have worked in it, styled it, bought it, drooled over it, obsessed over it, and even dream of it.

I am going to dress my evil voice in Gaultier to distract it.

 I don't really have cankles.

But I do have a killer Chanel bag, and yes I can spot a fake from a mile away.

I will get out more, I will say hello to familiar faces that I have stepped away from for a few years respite.  I will say, "Oh no I am not doing the hair and makeup for this show, I am writing about it."

I will hear, "I love what you are wearing! What is that?"

"Oh this? It's cat hair."

Does God Do Windows?

Next to sympathy the thing I am worst at is asking for help.

There have been a few times in my life when I have been forced to ask for help because I just simply could not handle things.

I remember every time I have ever asked for help, because it was so hard for me to do.

When my husband was sick I got better at asking for help.  After he died I reverted back to my own ways, and made some major mistakes by not asking for help.

Now that my mother is in the hospital and I am trying my best to be in three or four different places at the same time, I am still not able to ask for help beyond that of my partner.

People are sweet and offer help.  I never know if someone is serious when they say, "Can I do anything for you?"

If I am asked this my brain starts screaming, "YES!  I need someone to clean my house, go grocery shopping, I would love a home cooked meal. My child has not seen a vegetable in a month!"  My mouth says, "That is sweet of you thank you, but I think we got this."

No.  We don't "got this"

My idea of good parenting has turned into getting a Cliff Bar and some Naked Mango juice for my daughter.

Our refrigerator has empty pizza boxes and various rotting delivery cartons.  My pantry has a few cans of beans. and maybe some rice.

No.  We don't got this.

Meredith sits at the hospital while I drive around my daughter around, or vice versa.

We pass by the grocery store but instead turn into todays choice of fast food.

There is dog shit in the dinning room again, because no one was here to let them out.

Yet for some reason I can not ask for help.

A few days ago I sat in my car at the hospital and spoke out loud.  I said, "I do not know who to talk to...God?...Peggy?"  That made me laugh. Peggy is my mother in law and I think she would like to know that I spoke her name knowing that she would answer.  Still I did not pick up the phone to call her.

I have my brother coming in this weekend to help with mom.  Maybe we will be able to at least get groceries while he is here.

Why is it so hard to ask for help?

For appearances?  Not wanting to show weakness?

I would tell anyone else saying this to get over it.  I would reassure them that we all need help at times and we have to suck it up and ask.

I have always been terrible at following my own advice.

So if you see me and I have a dust cloud of Pigpen dirt around me, know I have not yet asked for time to shower.  

Chances are good that you won't see me.  Unless you are working at the hospital, or drive up next to me at a red light.  I will smile and wave, wanting to reassure you that I Got This Damnit!

I have baby wipes and deodorant in my purse, I can take on anything.

Only, I can't.

Now I fear this blog will elicit sympathy.

Be a Good Girl and Do as I Say

My life has become an informercial in my head.  You know the one with the plastic bags that you can fit a swimming pool in, turn on the vacuum and voilá! You have an ice cubed sized container.  You can nearty store it under your bed, and next year wipe off the cat pee, unzip the zipper and again, voilá!  Swimming pool, cabana boy and a floaties all ready for you.

I am a inside that bag and someone has turned on the vacuum.  Only at an excruciatingly slow level.

Each day I feel my world shrinking.

Normally I would prefer this, being the anti social-socialite that I am.  

Normally I would be in control of the vacuum and at what speed, and what I will or will not bring with me inside my clear (yet durable) bag.

Now I feel like I have been shoved in the bag and as I desperately cling to the things I want with me, they are being grabbed out of my hand.  Like a cruel parent taking away a baby blanket.

I have also been eating my feelings, trying to stuff them down even further, with  half a gallon of cookie dough ice cream on top.  Surely if I cover those feelings with enough food they will stay down?

Sadly, all this has gotten me so far is ten extra pounds and a lot of silence and anger building up inside of me.

A fellow writer friend of mine warned me years ago to be honest, but know that I will piss someone off with my writing.  Mostly that has been my family.

Not always pissed off, okay maybe once or twice, but usually a phone call saying I got the facts wrong, or the dates wrong. Or not owning up to my mistakes and being a sympathy seeker.  If only they knew how much a hate sympathy.  I am not good at receiving or dolling out sympathy.  It does not mean I am unsympathetic, I just feel awkward with it.

If they are my facts as I knew them, they remain.  I can't do anything about the timeline.  Too much partying in high school has taken away exact dates.

Today living with Mom is a challenge would be an understatement.  My brother had it right when he said "Brutal".  That was after a quick two day visit.  His take away was one word, "brutal."

Oh how right he is.

One family member suggested I watch I documentary about a person with dementia, which I will but do not want to.

To me that is akin to telling someone in the throws of labor pains during natural childbirth to watch a movie on natural childbirth.

I will eventually watch it.  Maybe during one of the long hours I sit with Mom.  Not during my precious little free time.

People have the best intentions for me, which makes everything even harder to swallow.  I feel an obligation to read the book, or see the oscar award wining movie about alzheimers, which has absolutely no baring on my life.  My life is not nearly as neat and tidy as the book (or movie).  The only resemblance is the person with the disease had her partner leave her, (conveniently glossed over in the movie.)

"Wasn't is great?  So sad right?"

"Umm yeah." Thinking I wish it was that easy for me.

To make matters in my life more shrinking into the durable life sucking bag I am in, I have had a multitude of suggestions of what I can do, as a caretaker, as a person, as a friend, as a "daughter".

As if people collectively got together and said, "Hey! wouldn't it be awesome if we took away any last thing that gave Amy any pleasure at all?  Oh and on top of that let's tell her she needs to go to confession for having an abortion when she was not yet fifteen, because "You were not properly punished for it."

Oy.  This person also wants me to take Mom to mass while I go to confession.  I understand the meaning behind him wanting her to go to mass; to try and stir up any memories.

It was a bit much to tell me I have failed at ever endeavor in my life because I was not punished for something that happened when I was 14.

My entire life has been failure because of that?

I feel the bag getting tighter now.

Being the pleaser that I am, I will take Mom to Mass, I will not go to confession.  Not because the church does not want a lesbian, divorced, pro choice woman in its pews (which it doesn't), but because people think Catholics get a free "do not go to Hell card" when they go to confession.  They forget that one must be "heartily sorry for having offended thee and detest all my sins,"

I do not feel that.  I am not sorry, much less detest myself.  I am sorry for the little girl that chose a fast life and had to deal with some tough issues.  I have mothered that little girl for years.  So no, I will not ask for forgiveness, and no I have not failed at everything I have done in my life.

The bag is getting smaller now, like a little black dress that clings to everywhere, including my head.

Wait! before we zip up the bag, let's take away any free will.  Grab her cigarettes, grab her diet coke, grab her intellect and reasoning to choose for herself!

There, all zipped up.

What remains?  

Everybody is the Guru

"A woman on the radio talks about revolution
When it's already passed her by."

I often daydream about what it would be like to buy a gigantic ancient house in Italy or Spain.  You would be surprised how many of these there are available.

I would bring over my family and their partners or friends, and hopefully grandchildren and we would all live together.  There would be plenty of space for everyone to wander, to be and do as they please.

Everyone would bring their own talents to the mix.  There would be a garden, and large feasts set outside on a long wooden table.  No dishes or chairs matching, tapestries hanging in the trees.  The grandchildren would run naked, not afraid to pick up the errant lizard or paint themselves with mud.

A midwife would come for each new birth and we would light candles and all silently wait, or cook, or wrap our hands around beads to give them something to do until we heard the new cry of life echo through the walls of the tired house.

A tired house brought back to life stone by stone.  Laundry would hang on a line and let the Mediterranean air dry it with a smell of adventure.

My mother could let the dogs out the front door all she wanted because the grounds are safely protected by more stone rocks, once put in place to keep out intruders from wars, or famine, or plagues.  Now the old walls sit and relax into themselves not having to stand at attention.  They relax and witness an odd family that takes naps in the afternoon sunlight.  On the grass, in hammocks, in beds nursing their babies.

We have among our many chickens one named Lasagna, a nod to the fact that the chicken will never become its name.

"I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this."

I was born too late.  These completely run down yet venerable and dignified estates sell now for millions.  Many are up for auction.  I cringe to think of the buyer who will tear them down all to have marble countertops.

I was born too late.  I want to wear flowers in my hair, and often do, but still I was born beyond the revolution of peace.

I can not even say this was some past life of mine, since I was alive, born just after the Summer of Love.
We lived in Los Angeles, during the time of the Manson era.  We lived just over the hill from the Manson house.  A few doors down was the Source Family house.

I can not say I blame my mother for packing up what she could after a particularly large earthquake and driving us across country where my father would eventually meet us.

I am aware that people aggrandize that certain time.  I know that if asked more people claim to have been at Woodstock than were actually there.  I know there was a war and it seemed to be a country divided. It was not an idyllic time.

But it could have been.  For the hermits, like myself, that in their twenties dove into books by Ram Dass, Krishnamurti, Timothy Leary.  I read about Buddhism, Mysticism, Hinduism.

I thought "YES!"

I raised my children with art and music and mud puddles.  But they were raised with the soundtrack to RENT.  They were raised in an era of the fading of AIDS being the biggest threat.  They took comfort from the Japanese and Pikachu, Charmander, Squirtle, Meowth.

"Bob Dylan didn't have to sing about
you know it feels good to be alive"

I am on a quest to find a feeling.  An elusive emotion that lives in an abandoned mansion in some distant country.

When I find it, when I feel it, when I live it, I will feel in place.  Was I born too late?

"I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this"

The Filling

Watch any movie or TV show that has a woman giving birth and you will see: screaming, yelling, hurling obscenities towards the husband, swearing to never have sex again.  I assume this is always supposed to be humorous.  Or at very least some sort of abstinence lesson for people.

These scenes annoy me.

I have given birth a time or two, and I can tell you what you see depicted is not the norm.

I have been a birth partner for a friend and I witnessed her silently go to a place where she breathed and rocked through each contraction.

Watch any movie or TV show where someone is dying and you will see a loving family surrounded at just the right moment to hear the words of wisdom said in a pained whisper of the dying person, just before he closes his eyes an the machine goes flatline.  A nurse magically appears and shuts off the monitors, as the closest family member shuts the eyes of the departed.

Death is not like this.

Unless it is an opera, then the dying person has enough time for one last aria before collapsing of consumption.

Like birth, death is messy.

Birth and death can be slow or fast, never knowing the exact date or time of either.

People, including myself,  have put a lot of emphasis on both events.  One of joy, one of sorrow.

But what about the in between?

Do we not measure the myriad of events in our lifetime as eventful as a birth or a death? Are they not as compelling to make note of?

Sitting next to me my mother has read the Sunday paper three times already.  Fixating on folding the paper in just the right way to make her happy.  A simple repetitive act that brings her both frustration and joy.

No, it isn't a birth, or a death.  It is just an act.  Probably muscle memory, and yet she does it with so much emotion it must count for something.

When I lay in bed in the morning I can feel that the bed is so much more comfortable in the morning than it was a few hours previously when I crawled inside the sheets.  I wonder how the sheets became softer, the pillows more supportive, the blanket placed in just the perfect way to make me happy.  Complete joy.

Knowing I have to leave my cocoon is a dreaded task, I linger in joy as long as I can.

Will this be written about in my obituary?

"She loved her bed, especially in the cool crisp mornings of fall..."

Not very noteworthy is it?  But to me it is.

My mother has now moved on to removing leaves from my deck where we are sitting.  She beds and picks them up one at a time and gently throws them off the deck.  The leaves bother her now.

I want to go back to a time where leaves were raked pile high and  I would run and jump in them creating chaos and laughter.  My mother wants to organize them.

Between birth and death are so many small trivial moments that are often not even shared with others, and possibly not even noticed by the people doing them.  They are forgotten, discarded.

I was once told that my father fought his death to the very end.  I was not there.  The image of him boxing a figure in black always came to mind.  A match to the Death.

But what of his life?  I do not mean the items listed on a resume, or in an obituary.  He loved to sit with his mother on her front porch.  Much as I now sit with my mother.

What did he think about during those times?

Are our personal thoughts just as important as our actions that occur between birth and death?

I have been accused of "living in my head".  Maybe.  Does it matter if I stop what I am doing when a cool breeze passes?  Isn't it enough that I stopped and noticed it and maybe even recalled a time in my past when I felt a similar breeze?  Or do I need to document my thoughts so they take form and and matter and therefore my obituary can also say, "She used to stop to feel every cool breeze."

I had a friend who lived on a farm.  You could tell that her joy came from her animals, and the harvests she produced.  Physical actions that made up her life.  What was she thinking when she took from the earth what she planted?

I do not know what  I thought when I was born.  I do not know what I will think when I die.

I know that right now there is a breeze, a respite from the heat, albeit brief.  My mother and partner are laughing, I crack my knuckles.

We three sitting here, often in silence, or in convoluted conversations that make no sense at all.

This is life.  My actions, my thoughts, my bed, breezes, the babies I raised, the books I stopped reading because they bored me, the cigarettes consumed, the lovers I took and left, the trips to the emergency rooms, the muddy dogs I cursed at.

I do not think about the fashion shows I did, or the magazines I have worked for, or any of the things that would impress on the page of a resume.

I think about now.  Now is all I have.