Max-A-Millions.
That is his name.
I realize it's not the proper "Maximilian", but that's his name, nonetheless. I named him when I was nine, maybe ten years old, after one of my dads gave him to me. I don't know why he was special, I'd had a hundred stuffed bears before, but I immediately knew he was different. And I can't really remember any stuffed bear before him, or since.
He was big, and brown, and naked, but for his red bow tie. His stitched brown mouth sewn into a Mona Lisa-esque smile.
Max-A-Millions has absorbed gallons of tears, buckets of snot, oceans of urine, (my daughter is a bed-wetter. What were you thinking?) even strawberry jam, and still he does not protest.
Within his raveling stitches he has housed love letters, hate mail, pens and pencils, and never once has he said to me, "I hate this about you. Change this."
When I am sick, sad, weak, or pitiful beyond toleration, my beloved Max-A-Millions nestles close, so that I can mumble complaints and grievances into his furry ears, and he never so much as lets free a sigh in frustration or disappointment.
He, at the risk of sounding like the fat girl who loves her stuffy way too much, is the perfect man.
Maybe it's because his mouth is made from stitches and he can't open it to tell me all the things I do wrong...
There is nothing profound to report today, not really.
While out shopping, an old man stopped us in the parking lot, and asked me to return his shopping scooter to the store. He had to show me how to operate it, and it made me laugh. I missed my grandfather profoundly, and thought of him, as I drove that scooter toward the store at mach negative four thousand. Holy shit, could it have gone any slower? It was like the opposite of the Delorian, and I think I went backwards thru time.
A little girl and her mother were buying an enormous bunch of balloons, and my daughter, of course, asked, "can I buy a balloon?"
"No."
Maybe it's not the nicest approach to parenthood, but telling them "no" without discussion is normally the easiest way to avoid tantrums and begging, since they know I do not negotiate after "no."
She didn't whine, or protest, and as a consolation, I offered to color a beautiful balloon bouquet with her the moment we arrived home. This seemed to satisfy.
As we pulled away from our parking space, the mother of the little girl with the balloons waved me down.
"My daughter would like to give your little girl a balloon."
I didn't know what to say. I wanted to cry. The little girl couldn't have been more than eight. We thanked them both until we all might have been made uncomfortable by it.
My daughter chose a pink balloon, (of course) and spent the rest of the day pulling it behind her as if it were the greatest present she'd ever received. "One day I'd like to give someone a present like this."
And then, a dinner that took all four members of our family to prepare, if you count the little one helping me dig potatoes from the garden.
It was nice.
Our youngest small person gets chronic ear infections. So chronic, in fact that she was a lip-reader, and nearly deaf by two years old, because of the constant blockage in her ears. Evidently her pain tolerance is pretty high, because she rarely made a sound, other than crying over a wet diaper or a hungry belly. We had no idea there were issues with her ears until pus began oozing out one day, and she scolded me for covering my mouth when I spoke. Not a Supermom kind of day, to discover your kid is practically deaf, and you've let her head fill up with infection.
Our reactions back then were to rush her to the doctor at the first sign of trouble, pump her full of antibiotics and pain medication, drop mystery liquids into her ears, and wait for magic to happen. And magic did happen. For a while. The infections always returned within a month or two, and we'd repeat the process, each time sort of hoping someone would suggest that magical surgery that would rid her of this problem forever. And sort of not hoping for it at the same time, because who wants to think of their baby, helpless on an operating table, no matter how favorable the end result?
And then, my grandmother filled up with cancer.
It seems she's been at one doctor or another nearly every day since her diagnosis. Scans, and tests, and blood work, and now the treatments...and so many medications. And the medications and treatments themselves seem so very frightening. So many chemicals and foreign things being pumped into her and stuck inside of her. So many not-found-in-nature things being forced into her bloodstream, all with the intent to "cure" the very foreign thing that's taken over her body...
It seems so...
backward.
And I have begun to consider lately, very adamantly, the things happening in our own home.
Our daughter's ears have been one of those considerations, and it hasn't been a great upheaval. Four fairly painful infections have come and gone over the past few months, without the use of antibiotics, and with minimal use of conventional pain medications. Old-fashioned "witchy" medicine has done the trick to cure her, along with a little TLC, and both she and I have been satisfied with the outcome. In the end, it's become much harder to break down and take her to a medical doctor for conventional medicine, when "voodoo" can't cure her. At the moment, she's sitting with a belly full of antibiotics, and an ear full of pus, and it's bothering me. A lot.
And causing me to wonder, what's this like for my husband?
Because the refusal of medicines and the home remedies have not been the end of it. I have become aware of nearly everything around me. Around us. Inside of us.
I've given up shampoo, completely. There are strange concoctions all over the house, and showering is no longer as simple as grabbing a bottle from the closet and lathering up. There are are unlabeled, gritty bars of solid soap, there are blended containers of fruit in the fridge, there are canisters of dry powders, vinegar blends in the window...it's impossible to keep up with what's what, and he can't possibly keep up with what strange brew I have scheming at any given moment, in search of that "perfect" blend.
He's painfully shy, and I wonder if my insistence against plastic bags at the grocery store is more embarrassing to him than I realize. If I've forgotten my cloth bags, I just ask the bagger to toss my items (normally no more than four or five) back into the cart. I swear, it seems to make him uncomfortable. If he's at the store without me, I think they see him coming, and bag those five items in six goddamn bags, to make up for what I didn't take.
So much of this is brand new, and very unlike the person I was just a couple of years ago. I worry about how it affects him. How he handles the fact that his wife stopped wearing commercial deodorant. How he feels about the fact that his wife started making her own cloth menstrual pads. Is he weirded out by baking soda toothpaste? Have I turned into some alien-esque creature to which he no longer relates? Some tree-hugging, hyper-aware, chemical-paranoid conspiracy theorist, when all he wants is to sit down to a pizza and a Dr. Pepper, that he brought home in a plastic bag, and not have to catch shit about it from his wife who hasn't shaved her pits in three months?
He's had more patience than I think I might have, were I in his position. Part of me senses great ambivalence from him. Were there no one else on the planet to judge him, I think he might be absolutely with me. And were I not here to bitch at him for using gasoline to kill weeds in the backyard, I think there would be a hazy green cloud over our house right this very moment.
*sigh*
I don't know if it's a universal thing, or if it's just the guys in my house.
They have specific times of the day when they suck. For the small one, it's pretty much whenever he doesn't get his way. He's a teenager, and when you tell him "no", his teenager-y brain produces some sort of hellish hormone that tells him to make everyone else around him miserable. And he does it. Well.
For the grown-up one, his "suck" is normally all concentrated into one big ball of suck during the morning. I won't mince terms, here...he's an ass. A big, giant ball of suck and ass. A suck-ass. He's grumpy and tired, and everything he says and does is pinned to that excuse, and there's just no getting around it.
About 90% of the time, there will be an apology later in the day, followed by the "you know how I am in the morning" excuse, phrased within some glob of manipulated nouns and adjectives, that's supposed to make "this time" a little different from "the last time."
I hate it.
This morning, I hated it enough to get up out of my chair, put on my jacket, and walk out the front door, away from the huge, suck-ass argument we were having, that would have no resolution, because I wasn't arguing with my husband, but instead, a great big suck that takes his place every goddamn morning. Fuck that guy.
Unbrushed, wild hair in every direction, tears blowing across my cheeks, splattering my glasses, and looking like a crazy person.
I skipped the park next door. It's always populated, and I didn't want people. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to be allowed to be angry, to hate the stupid, suck-ass person who replaces my husband every goddamn morning, and to cry in public like a weirdo without worrying about looking like a weirdo. So I kept walking...
I found funny little secrets that I never would have found, had I not left my house this morning on foot.
I discovered that even tho I'm mildly disheartened at the city's decision to chop down the wild berry bush at the park, there are so many more hiding in unexpected places to take its place.
I found the perfect hidey-hole to make out like a horny teenager with my secret lover...should I ever acquire a secret lover. I also discovered that it's full of trash, and (I very much suspect) the urine of a bunch of teenage boys. (Note to future, hypothetical-secret-lover; we might need to carefully consider said secret make-out spot.)
A little further up the road, two little chihuahuas were signaling my arrival, and warning me of their viciousness as I approached. The furry one took a nip at one of my exposed ankles, while the little squeaky one yapped frantically from the safety of the yard. I stopped and tried to make friends, but neither one of them were having it, and they both disappeared like little furry rockets when they heard the neighbor approaching with a noisy trash can dragging behind her. Weird little things.
My flip flops squeaked under my feet as I walked uphill.
I found myself face to face with a man who appeared from his backyard, and found myself unable to take my eyes off of him as I walked past. No thought to my crazy, wind-blown hair, or the fact that I'd left the house crying, in my yoga pants and pajama shirt. Just an expressionless taking-in of him, without regard to what he might be thinking of me. I wanted to see him, and so, I saw him.
He jumped into his big redneck truck which was at least four-thousand feet from the ground to the driver's seat, and fired up the engine as I rounded the corner.
Walking past his house, I was suddenly smacked square in the nose with the most powerful, fragrant honeysuckle bush I have ever smelled in my 33 years on this planet. I breathed so deeply that I got dizzy, and forced myself to keep walking, rather than stopping to bury my entire head in the bushes.
I was briefly reminded of one of the games I used to play with my weird step-sister. "Feed the Queen," we called it. The Queen wasn't allowed to move. She laid with her head in the other girl's lap, and was fed, usually honeysuckle nectar, by the rest of us...usually my step sister, and her creepy next-door friend. I hated being The Queen. My goddamn nose would itch so bad, and I wasn't allowed to scratch it, because The Queen wasn't allowed to move. Those little bitches would giggle while I squirmed, twitching my nose, and declaring "I'M The Queen, you're supposed to do what I say! Scratch my nose!" They wouldn't. But I never moved...
That four-thousand-foot-tall redneck truck was coming up behind me now.
Yes. Come up and get me. Snatch me up from the street. Yank me up out of my shoes, and stuff me into your giant piece of shit truck. Take me back to your crappy house and throw me into the hole you've dug in your basement, where you'll feed me stale bread and dirty water for weeks, until I'm Stockholm-ed to you. Like a weird, day-blind stinking basement pet. And I promise I will love it. I will love you. That'll teach that husband of mine to act like an asshole...
He drove on. Obviously.
And anyway, my kidnapper doesn't drive a big obnoxious lifted truck, with stupid redneck stickers in the window. My kidnapper doesn't cut the sleeves off of his dirty T-shirts, or wear backwards baseball caps, and say "hey, ya'll, I seen a UFO while I's feedin' the cows."
My kidnapper is much more Hannibal Lector, and his suits are always freshly, and professionally cleaned and pressed. He's polite, with proper diction and grammar. When he does drive, it's certainly not some shitty Larry-The-Cable-Guy truck. And my bread absolutely won't be stale. I mean, the nerve of that kid, offering me stale bread.
On the way home, I passed the house of one of the lovers of my mother's fourth ex husband. I found her driveway littered with garbage, and wondered why that seemed to be such a fitting metaphor for the women in my step-father's wake. What the hell was so special about him, anyway? Egotistical liar on a sociopath level is a *very* kind way to describe him.
Of course, this leads to thoughts of my mother. My least favorite thoughts in the whole world. If thoughts were poop, thoughts of her would be the maggots in the poop. And she's in town right now, which makes me loath her even more. Don't ask me why proximity makes a difference. It just does. The closer she is to me, the more I can feel her DNA writhing and wiggling inside of me, creating this strange, temporary insanity that I can't ever seem to explain. Her genes literally make me crazy...
Then, like a rainbow-colored hug from the universe, I see a sign stuck in the ground advertising lawn service or something, and the owners share the same last name as a friend of mine, to whom I have recently found myself drawing very near, and finding much love and support. Thoughts of my mother sailed away, and thoughts of my friend swooped in and surrounded me, as my squeaky shoes and I plodded up the hill, smile spread across my face.
I rounded the corner to my house, trying to figure out what kind of environment I would walk into when I arrived home. I'd been gone for nearly an hour and a half, and it was good for me. I doubted it had been good for him, and certainly wasn't looking forward to coming home to it.
No car in the driveway. Mr. Grumpy Suck Ass had gone to work. I had four missed calls on my phone. And a voice-mail saying that he'd tried to find me, but couldn't. Big, big happy.
It isn't as tho I have never taken a walk around my own neighborhood before. I have. Lots of times. Normally, however, it's with some destination in mind, or because I feel I "need the exercise." I've never just walked before. Just to walk away.
I had a therapist tell me once just to "walk away" from an argument when it was too heated, and obviously going to get nowhere. It isn't in my nature to do that. I *need* to fix things that are broken in that way. After today, tho, I might just start walking the fuck away from this nastiness the moment it starts in the morning.
At this rate, I will be a waif by summertime.
3-25-11
"You pantomimed a giant "C", rather than speak the word out loud in front of my kids. Maybe you aren't ready for people to know about it yet, or maybe you just didn't want to scare them.
I'm scared. I wonder if you are.
I wonder what will happen next. If you will accept the treatment they offer. If you will just let it happen. Whatever your decision, I won't judge you for either, because honestly, I can't fathom what I would decide.
I wonder if you miss him, and this is the universe, facilitating your way back to him.
Of course you miss him.
I can't help but feel such guilt for the way our relationship has changed. It's dumb. Because you're dying? It doesn't change the fact that you were cruel. It doesn't change anything, really. And truly, you were dying all along. We all are. Now there is just a grotesque, malignant word pinned to it. A foreboding word that promises imminent doom. The pantomimed C.
I hate it. I hate the lump in my throat that the lumps in your belly are creating. I hate the finality of it all, and the sickening sensation I feel tingling in my neck when I think about losing you. I hate the friendly and tolerant way we have begun to accept one another, instead of the complete immersive love it seemed we always had before. And now it seems you are another being completely, because of this foreign thing inside you. It's taking you from me, and there is nothing I can do about it.
The world was insanity when he left. What will happen when you are gone?"
I wrote this the day she told me. Some things are more certain now. And some things have larger question marks attached to them.
I love her. I fear greatly for her. I feel sorrow over the great pain she's in a lot of the time. Guilt for thinking "the universe put the cancer into the wrong belly..." Oh yeah, I go there. It's not pretty.
Scathing hatred for the medical community, and my personal feelings about their "treatments."
Back and forth between thinking she will live on forever like some sort of earthly goddess, and thinking "she will die within the next few months."
I'm a spectrum.
But I don't matter. No amount of wishing will debilitate those tumors. They are there. Housed warm and safe where she once so lovingly cradled her babies. Nurtured and warm. And no amount of my fear and worry for her will cure her. No amount of my fret will ease her pain.
They are there.
Whether we avoid the word, or not.
It all goes forward.
Whether we are actively aware of it, or whether we aren't, it all goes forward. Constantly.
I suppose I didn't pay attention to it before.
My kids grew, but it was in small bursts, small enough that I shrugged it off, made those old stand-by comments (oh, they're growing like weeds! I can't believe it's time for X birthday already! Didn't I just give birth last week?) But truly, even their growth spurts weren't enough to slap me into reality.
No one died, not really. I was briefly shattered when my grandfather died, but he didn't stay gone long, and I moved forward.
No one got sick, not really.
So there was just no reason, I suppose, to digest the fact that things were going forward, every second, every day.
My face even seemed to stay the same.
And then, like a gunshot ripping thru the silence, my son is six feet tall. The summer-time freckles on my face have turned into permanent age-spots. My grandmother is bloated with cancerous tumors. My girlfriend is no longer a "girlfriend." I have barely spoken to one of my best friends in seven months, and I've removed several more from my life completely.
I am 50 pounds heavier than I was two years ago, with greater confidence than I have carried in 33 years.
I am certain of things that I knew were completely untrue, just months ago. And what I knew to be true not long ago, now leaves me scratching my head.
I miss my girlfriend. But, it was lovely.
I miss my friend, terribly. But I know that people grow apart. And it's ok.
I don't miss the people I've dumped. But I wish things were better for them.
I miss my miniature-self. But I know that this fat ass is no better than a skinny one.
And it all keeps going forward, regardless of what I say, or do.
I've got two small people of my own, so I can't really avoid the title, or the few stray people who don't really "know" and who will inevitably toss a well-meaning "happy Mother's Day" in my direction.
I have a general distaste for commercial holidays in general, and Mother's Day is no exception. We can't just instantly deserve praise and presents because we squeeze out babies. It shouldn't work that way, and having expectations attached to a specific day every May simply because we reproduced is kind of crap if you ask me. And I know you didn't, but you're here, and you're reading, so I'm telling you. So there. That kind of praise and recognition should be given when a mother is truly a mother. When she devotes herself to being a mother. When she dives in head first, and wears that word...not because she diddled some stranger in a parking lot in a drunken stupor, and shat out a baby nine months later because she couldn't afford an abortion. There's a difference in being a mother, and making babies.
Aside from that, there's that whole personal "mother issue" thing of mine, nagging in the background. Like one of those wiry hairs that gets stuck in your shirt, and just kind of pokes at you all day, until you're nearly nuts, and ready to strip naked in public to get rid of the fucker.
She's not there. And when she is, I wish she weren't. Ever.
What's left in her place is a big, gaping hole. A stub where a limb should be.
And every year, there is an entire day with her name pinned to it. And I hate it. In my eyes, and in my experience, she was the equivalent of the woman who diddled a stranger in a parking lot. And then, did little else.
I successfully ignore her every year, and have done so since I stopped speaking with her on a regular basis. It's not hard, and I'm not bothered, not really. Just the nagging reminder...
she isn't there. She wasn't there. Just a lot of really weird shit that I have tried to put into the hole she and my father have left.
But, I am a big girl. We will move forward, as always, and ignore this day (as is the unspoken tradition in our house.) Maybe we'll buy a potted plant for our Gran, and make that our new tradition.
And maybe I will sit a moment and be grateful that, for now, she's all alone, and I'm not. :p
Then, maybe I'll grow up a little on Monday.
Maybe.
