12 Step Mama

Step 8 is online now at www.literarymama.com…

My goal is to not be offended, to not have to forgive. Not to be numb, like when drunk, but selfless enough. It’s a step up from drunk to feel anything, to feel pain and joy, to be affected by people, not as invisible and invincible as I once thought I was. But to not have to drink over any of it, that’s the miracle. I’d love to be self-less enough to not get hurt. I guess we’re not made that way…

Here’s the stuff that was edited out of my column:
I need to change my attitude toward my neighbor, the one who yelled, “Don’t let your dog piss on my boat!” last week at the bus stop. I meant to tell him that a boat is just a big hole to pour money or piss into anyway, but didn’t. I felt threatened, shocked, wronged, and justifiably angry, something that recovering alcoholics can’t afford. I felt like throwing a fit. Instead I replied, “I didn’t!” (Because I didn’t—my dog watered the “Dead End” sign in front of the boat.) Then we crossed the street to finish our wait, sitting like ducks, my dog watering the Stop sign.

What’s your new $40,000 boat doing parked by the road, dude? I thought. Then I thought of calling the cops. It’s public right-of-way anyway, not your property. Hell, my dog’s doing you a favor pissing over there, keeping the wild grasses down. I’ll let my dog piss on your boat for sure tomorrow. Eventually God turned my mind. Maybe he just had a bad day. Maybe my dog has offended him in the past. It took some time to come back around to checking my own capacity for harm.

That night my husband said he’d be worried too if his new boat was parked on the street for anyone to steal. “It’s keeping the guy up at night,” he said. “Probably every dog in the neighborhood has pissed on it.” I’ll try to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. I guess I need a job to get out of the house and stop focusing on the neighbors. My dog and I now wait on the other side of the road for the bus, hoping that Daniel will let us walk home with him.

Filed under: neighbors, step on March 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Step 7 is available now at

Filed under: step on March 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »

On our spontaneous beach trip to Florida, or rather the extreme burbs of southern Florida, we had to rent a car to level the playing field, the traffic was so bad. Two days out of six were sunny, so I lay in the sand and told D to dig a moat around me. And he did. After being intrigued by the “metal detectives” scouring the sand, he found a stick which he used as a divining rod for treasure. He found 147 shells, half a lighter, some rope, and a chain with roach clips on each end. He tripped over himself staring at some teens in their bikinis. I asked him what he was looking at. “I just like to look sometimes.” Straight out of his Daddy’s mouth. I heard that so many times in my twenties that it almost did us in.

Then he started climbing palm trees. With a cast on. By the end of the week he sounded like a little blueblood: “Where’s my mahi mahi! I want my mahi mahi and I want it now!” The lizard made it home intact as did the coconuts.
The Everglades airboat ride was a hit, especially the alligator wrestler afterward, and the water taxi, but the city bus ride for all of $1.25 was too cool for him. The simple city pleasures that we could get around the corner.

Filed under: beach on February 28th, 2008 | No Comments »

FYI–My 12-step mama column at Literary Mama is updated…step 6 now available. How do you become ready? Let me know…

Filed under: Uncategorized on February 5th, 2008 | No Comments »

The ATV we weren’t supposed to get got got, a day before hubby went to the island for a week’s work. Coincidence? They called to deliver it during our snowstorm here, while hubby was basking in the sunshine over there. “It’ll be a cold day in hell” ran through my mind. Hubby was experiencing the cold day in hell–the Third World disparity of the working class met the disposable incoming on cruise ships and beach hotels (from what he later recalled–it turned my appetite away from ever wanting to visit an island). Daniel and Daddy took a spin on the ATV when he got home.
A week later it took Daniel for a spin and he broke his arm. My baby broke his arm. Thank God I wasn’t there. Turns out he has a high threshold for pain–he cried for 5 minutes and was done. He walked into the ER and lay quietly on the hospital bed for 2 hours, with no pain meds and little attention. The X-ray surprised us all, to see the two bones in the forearm broken. Daniel says he’ll wait till he’s 20 to get back on it. My hubby, who had to deal with the terror, says he’ll discuss things with me first before he buys them. I say, whew. We were lucky this time. I never want to answer that kind of phone call: “I’m taking Daniel to the hospital…”. On the drive there, all I could pray was, “Please God, don’t let him feel pain.”
Oh my God, we can’t protect our children from pain. What our parents went through was too much.
So he has a high pain threshold. Is this a good thing? A prayer answered, a lesson learned. We hope.

Filed under: ATV, boy toys, broken bones on January 30th, 2008 | No Comments »

I’m just back from the surreal world of writing–a week’s residency at my MFA program. I’m having the conference comedown, after inspiring and not-so conversations and seminars and workshops, thrust back into the reality of the carpool line, lunch making, and laundry. I always feel a bit disconnected when on campus because I’m not really on-campus; the college is close enough for me to commute. I drop off Daniel at 8 and head into the city, stay all day, then head home at dinner time. So I voluntarily miss the night readings and bar crawl, where all the interesting stuff goes on, the gossip, and the underbelly. I miss the underworld, the meeting after the meeting, as we say in AA. This bothers me in a way–I’m not fully a part of, don’t get to know anyone well, and miss the subtext and backstory of the drama and the comedy. (But I get to see my son!)
But I also don’t have to be a character in it. A few writing colleagues know my story and fill me in on the after-hour proceedings, and that’s as close as I need to get. I get the Access Hollywood version, the juicy gossip without the residue, the highlights without the hangover.
I was in shock that I’m to graduate next January. I don’t keep a watch or a calendar, so I’m always surprised by life. That was the climax of the week for me. I’m still digesting it.
Lots of friends and neighbors took care of Daniel afterschool, so I don’t think he missed me and I tried not to worry about him. Friday morning in seminar, my phone rang, and it was my husband trying to get me. His boss had just asked him to go to the Cayman Islands on a job. I turned my phone off, so he had to answer without discussion. Of course he said yes, and of course I was happy for him. Then he asked me and Daniel to come with. I was all ready to say yes, what the heck, when he discovered Daniel needed a passport for the trip. And he doesn’t have one.
So, I’m off on another week of single motherhood, visualizing my husband on the beach (which of course he isn’t). Reality will set in a little slower with the man gone, so that’s good. I have a lot to do, to take my writing more seriously, and there is hope. Life’s not a beach, but sometimes you get to go there. But not without a passport.

Filed under: MFA, passport, single motherhood on January 14th, 2008 | No Comments »

So the week before Christmas my husband had to travel. I used to react to this with groans, until I met a friend whose husband travels constantly. She turned me on to the liberating effect of the temporary single momdom. Once you get in the mindset, it’s fun. Me and my son go on dates, we don’t cook real food, and there are few rules. It’s kind of like giving up, surrendering to life on life’s terms. But I did miss my meetings. (I still have no babysitter, and that’s a problem.) The second day into our single life, Daniel had the sniffles and felt a bit puny. This was the first day of Christmas break, so we cuddled on the couch most of the day, which is to die for (when you’re not really sick). I had little food in the house, which was okay, because we can eat plain spaghetti and soup all day long. At the last minute before Daddy got home we actually made some Christmas cookies, as if we’d been working all along. That reminded me of a writing instructor who was a stay-at-homer; she advised us to write all day, skip housework, and throw some onions in a pan to saute a few minutes before the breadwinner comes in. It smells like something respectable is going on. On these nights alone, I holed up in my room, alone, hogging the bed and the remote. Me and the dog and the TV, the son asleep, indulging in Notting Hill and The Next Great American Band (yay, the Clark Bros. won!) things I never watch because Daddy loves The History Channel, or Mega Disasters, or The Weather Channel. It felt like vacation, but he’ll never know that.

Filed under: Uncategorized on January 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

I thought Daniel wanted a trampoline for Christmas. Or an ATV. Or a skateboard ramp. I fear that only on the lesser of these body-splitting things, the trampoline, will he not kill himself. This is the huge leap we must jump across mothering a babe turned five-year-old boy. (Last year it was a real drum set, for his birthday a real electric guitar. It’s loud over here.) I wonder how he got interested in all these weapons of destruction–one from a neighbor, one from an Extreme sports video he picked up at Goodwill, one from window shopping. I still believe that, apart from cultural influences, boys are born with a gene for danger, climbing, and aversion to calm. He still refuses to watch most movies and cartoons with violence or superheroes–we still have Pooh, thank god. Yet he can pick up a stick and call it a gun.
He taught himself how to in-line skate. Not only that, he practices jumping and doing tricks in them. We took him to a roller skating rink, and he skated to the middle where a throwback-disco teen was breakdancing on blades. Daniel watched him for a minute then starting doing 360s himself, jumping and showing off. This is my usually shy boy. Doing something well has given him confidence. Forget the ATV and the ramp. He’s getting a trampoline with the safety enclosure, to add to the zip line, play fort, sandbox and pool in the backyard. I’ll start charging admission to recoup costs.
Then Daniel brings home his letter to Santa, which he wrote in school. It reads: I’ve ben good. I want a bune and bune cage.
Good lord. My baby’s back. I need to find Frosty’s magic hat.

Filed under: Christmas, boy toys on December 16th, 2007 | No Comments »

If anyone is out there, my column at Literary Mama will post a week late–probably next Monday, 12/17. And for good reason, too. I forgot to write it. Luckily my fabulous editor at LM, Maria Scala, remembered. I hastily rag-tagged together some curious Daniel events around a fourth step discussion, to which she diplomatically responded, “Hmm….” Well maybe she didn’t say that, but I swear I could hear it. What she actually wrote was something like, “Let’s spend some more time on this and post later.” I don’t blame her one bit. I was wrong once again, a fitting lesson to re-learn as I wrote about inventorying the naughty self. Add procrastination, and laziness, and sloth, and hitting the send button too soon, and the inability to write an inspiring column in a day, or even a readable one, to my hit list.
I can always blog though.
If they kick me out of the blogosphere, I can always write to-do lists, or write column due dates on the calendar (for once), or scribble in the margins of great books, which takes me back to the beginning where my child writer first got my kicks–back to Harriett the Spy, a fine inventory writer herself, huddled under the covers with a flashlight. In the dark. Alone. Laughing to myself.

Filed under: inventory on December 10th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

The holiday whirlwinds have come, and I’m trying to be the center, the eye of the storm, not the wind. My niece, her husband, and their new baby came from England for a few days. I got my baby fix and had long talks with my niece, whom I did not know until five years ago. At 16 my sister had given birth in secret and given her up for adoption. Twenty-three years later, my niece found us. We strolled the neighborhood and shopped American style; everything was half price to them, so American Eagle and baby boutiques excited them. My niece J. sought baby books, the Golden Books she recalled from childhood. I turned her on to my favorites–Good Night Moon, Jesse Bear, and Each Peach Pear Plum. I shared family recipes, banana bread, cookies, and deviled eggs.
After they left, we left for our across-three-states trip to my husband’s family for Thanksgiving, where we holed up for days from the cold around the kitchen table eating and playing Scrabble. Daniel got to wrestle with his 8-year-old cousin, the one he looks like, and call him his brother. I’ve been part of his family for 20 years now, watched our nieces grow up and have babies, watched us all get older, my mother-in-law die slowly of Alzheimers, watched my husband continue her family recipe of homemade cranberries. We’ve seen the deaths replaced by births–the whole cycle makes me long for and savor my mother’s family, Nana B. and her homemade cake donuts, cookies, and rolls, which I will bake in December. I was grateful for the break from routine and its return. These people have never seen me drink, but my husband’s Dad and sisters still recall his days. There was talk of my husband’s mom and his Dad’s new crazy religious girlfriend, but luckily she did not make an appearance. We secretly wonder how Grampa can stand not to be around his kids and grandkids, especially my sister-in-law’s who live in the same town–the baby, the four-year-old who survived heart surgery, the boy who looks like him, the equestrian girl, the older girls who are engaged. We keep showing him our son every few years hoping he’ll recognize himself in him.
Daniel couldn’t wait to come home to decorate for Christmas–we will have the crazy colored blinking fun house for a month. I haven’t had a moment to myself in ten days, just spinning ADD-like engaged in conversation or listening. So I’m happy to be back in my quiet home, alone, sitting here doodling on the page. I have four books to read and papers to write for January residency. This excites me now.
My British niece grounds this holiday season. She takes pleasure in family. All she wanted all her life was to know where she came from, who she looks like. She is one of us now. She looks just like her mother, my sister. Even though she was raised by an abusive adoptive mother, which made her craving for her birth family greater, she turned out beautifully. She does not complain about us, her blood relatives; she will not wish for something else even if we are not what she might have dreamed about. She is gratitude personified, in action. She is healed by her own experience of motherhood. She shows me what family is, that the dream of us is enough, just to be bound by blood, to have some flesh like your own to sit among and say, “I look like you. I laugh like you.” We are one. We all have more family than we ever dreamt of.

Filed under: Thanksgiving, adoption on November 27th, 2007 | No Comments »