Jen Laird White » General

Possibilites

Jen Laird White — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:09:08 +0000

For some bizarre reason many of the young people in my life, and when I say young, I mean YOUNG…my teenaged nieces, my sons middle school pals, my near and dear’s children, have decided to “Friend” me on Facebook. On one hand, I consider this a compliment, a commentary on my accessibility and, no doubt, youthful nature. On the other hand, it’s actually just weird and I should probably be embarrassed. But I use it to full advantage to spy on all of them. Nice “Friend” I am. Thus far, I’ve only tattled once to a parent of my generation. Thankfully, most children I know seem to behave almost too well on Facebook and post nothing even slightly interesting. But last week I came across the most hilarious exchange on a middle schoolers page. The page belonged to a he. A lovely fellow who hasn’t yet turned thirteen. The exchange was between him and a female classmate and it went something like this…

SHE: Do you think I am pretty?

HE: Yes, I do.

SHE: Does it bother you that I don’t have big boobs?

HE: No, I don’t care but the good thing about being twelve is they still might grow.

THE END.

Somehow this sums up life. Doesn’t it? Or at least the life of the young. The endless possibility of increased bra size. The endless possibility of love, of success, of adventure. It is something I have felt slipping from my grasp. At my age, the only possibility is reality. I turned fifty two weeks ago and had written a blog, perfect for the tick, tick, tick toward death. A rant at the indignity of drooping and creasing flesh and slightly softer thighs despite HOURS of exercise. Of commitment to husbands and children and the deprivation that commitment entails from sleep, to sleep in a bed without someone jolting you from sleep and knocking the wind out of you with a hairy arm or leg, to wild affairs with inappropriate men. Commitment = NONE OF THAT. The blog was funny, it was nasty and it was full of swear words. And then something happened. Something so big and so impossible that it took my breath away. I am still having trouble taking in air.

In Massachusetts where we spend our summer there is a spot in front of my parents house called the “drinking rock”….no, not because of some incredible abilility to capture “run off ” but because we have logged many an hour there consuming alcohol as the sun sets over the fields and lights the saltwater river and our faces with it’s unbelievable end of the day glow. In the daytime hours the kids use it as the “thinking” rock…or the place that Nana makes you eat lunch when she doesn’t want the house to get dirty. But at the end of a long hot beach day as the sun starts to dip, the thinking/lunching rock transforms effortlessly into The Drinking Rock. The community we live in all know of the drinking rock and people roll in (only after five o’clock as is the New England WASP way), no invite necessary, to have an end of the day snort and enjoy the last minutes of that days summer sun. It’s a beautiful place to sit. One day this July past, I sat on the rock at five oh five, not a minute sooner or later, a glass of something white in my tan hand. My parents were there along with two young friends who were deeply in love. He was somewhat new to me, having only come into our lives four or so years ago because he fell in love with she, who I have known since she swam in her moms belly. She is beautiful and perfect in that imperfect way. Naughty and terribly, wonderfully nice. She is an artist and someone who laughs with a wicked glint in her eye. ”No wonder he loves her so”, I thought as I sipped, feeling the nice warm glow of pinot grigio and sunlight and admired the tiny dip in the middle of her chin, the way she tilted her head toward his and the perfect return curl of his lips as if in disbelief at his luck . I watched as the golden sun, now low in the sky, bounced off both of their perfect faces and they snuck those small admiring and intimate glances that we all remember as they talked of things in their rich future. Excited, animated, the world was theirs. They are in their twenties and the talk on the rock was of the house they are thinking of building on the land they have bought. And I sat there feeling the gravitational tug of fifty, watching them with deep admiration. And deep envy. It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to have what they have. I have always felt an affinity for her imagining that I was like her when I was her age. Or she like me, only thirty years behind. And now, here she was, there they were, everything ahead of them, houses to build, adventures to go on and children still to have. I remember thinking of how beautiful their kids would be. Beautiful babies. Lucky babies. And I remember the pang, the sense that all was ahead of them and all was behind me. Her art was becoming something, his fishing business was flying, the house, the friends, the laughter in their future. How lucky they were and how wonderful it was that they had all of these things still to happen. Things they could only imagine, firsts they had yet to experience. Wonderful firsts that open your eyes to the amazing magic where people lend you money and let you buy or build house and love creates kids and kids grow to be people, and where life is a party and you learn to cook and clean and balance the checkbook and everything feels bright like a new inspiring penny. The world of the young, ripe with possibility. Those pangs of envy I felt that day, perched on the drinking rock, were not about denying them but trying to remember me. Me, who had once been she. Me who had dragged boyfriend after boyfriend to the drinking rock, letting them gaze at me as he gazed at her, as the sun hit the horizon, none of mine passing the test until the man I married. But the days of gaze were gone. The time of firsts was behind me, my children no longer needed much snuggling, my spouse loved me but no longer longed for me, I cooked well and cleaned poorly and the house we’d live in forever needed a paint job and the mortgage was due every month. And every night on the drinking rock the sun fell below the end of the field and we went to bed, warm with the familiar feel of sunburn and wine. Familiar. Too. It all felt so done. So over. My life. I was going to be fifty. My life was done.

I was so wrong. It was hers that was done. She took my breath away by dying the week before I turned fifty, at the age of 22, on a snowy road in Bangor, Maine in an accident that had nothing to do with anything other than the insane cruelty of fate. The meaness of life. And on that snowy highway, so went those beautiful babies and that happy man so in love, and the house and her father and brother and sister’s hearts and all of the rest of us dying a little bit with her.

So here’s the deal. I am not going to try to find some meaning in her death. There is none. Most pointless waste of a beautiful person I can imagine. But I am going to tell you what it did for me. It fucking smacked the maudlin “I’m Turning Fifty Blues” right out of my pitiful self absorbed head. It spanked me into instant sensible submission and made me realize that, my god, was I lucky to have the chance to turn fifty, that each annoying and depressing fold of flesh was a goddamned gift , that who the hell cares if my thighs jiggle cause they work and that every time my kids make me get up with them at night or throw up all over the chair instead of making it to the toilet, well damn it all, how lucky am I to have had the chance to have kids, to clean up their throw up and to receive their sweaty perfect hugs. I am not kidding. I am not kidding. It made me see that I can still have expectations for life and I can still revel in my friendships and the people I love and that the sun is out today and it snowed yesterday and there’s a pretty darned good chance that spring is about to bust loose. And I can still hope for bigger boobs. And can probably achieve them if I am willing to pack on the twenty pounds that I’m beating back constantly. And that, yes, indeed, I am fifty. And I am so lucky to be fifty.

I don’t know if I’ll ever breathe the same way again. Jack loved Poole. That is her name. She was the first, of what I hope will be many, beautiful woman he loved. I have lots of pictures of her holding him as a baby, she a junior mother and he, plump, happy and content. He grew up and she taught him to sail. The day after she died, Jack turned to me, with begging twelve year old eyes and said “Mom, please, promise me there’s heaven.” I knew what he was asking. I looked at him long and hard and suddenly understood the answer to a question I had never really been clear on. ”Yes”, I said “Jack, YES, until someone can prove me wrong, YES, Jack, there is heaven! There is heaven. ” I am not sure I understood until that moment how much I needed there to be heaven. Talk about possibilities? Even at fifty, the possibilities are endless. Heaven. How the heck is that for a possibility?

Mrs. Claus Busting Loose

Jen Laird White — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:15:29 +0000

So this has been a rather complicated holiday season in the White House. Our beloved twelve year old golden retriever Deedee was diagnosed with metastatic cancer two weeks before Christmas and had to be put to sleep on the 22nd. While that was going on we all(except for spouse) got the seasonal flu for the first time ever. I had to deal with the dying dog, the familial flu which prevented any organized Christmas shopping and telling my kids that the dog could not be fixed, that parents were not superhuman and that life, even of those you love deeply, comes to an end. Fuck. Merry Christmas to all and to Deedee “goodnight”. Because I was so dismayed at losing both our dog and my “Superhero who can solve ANYTHING” status with my children, I opened the flu door to bacteria and spent Christmas morning trying to pretend to be present for presents while battling pneumonia. Now on my second round of increasingly strong antibiotics and longing for an island in the sun, I actually wanted to write one more thing before the year ends. This is partially a reflection of something my spouse said to me as I lay feverishly in bed wondering if Deedee had misinterpreted my true devotion and was actually trying to take me with her to the great doggie park in the sky. ”Deedee…no can do, please, I gotta raise the boys.” I muttered in my fever dream state. Rich, possibly hearing my mutters, came up stairs to report on having cleaned Luke’s bedroom. Luke’s bedroom is always something of a challenge. He’s eight. He has several generations of hand me down legos in giant bins and every broken piece of every plastic toy he’s ever owned. He’s paranoid about throwing anything out, he has not a clue how to actually keep up with the chaos and I am not good at enforcing room cleaning as a chore. Frankly, for me, it doesn’t seem worth it. Spend hours co-cleaning a room I don’t spend ANY time in other than “goodnights”? And cleaning with whiny complaining not really doing any cleaning children who, instead of cleaning, find long lost toys and play while YOU clean a space only THEY use and by the next day, or, if you’re lucky, the day after, have made it unrecognizable from the pre-cleaned version of a few days before? Setting the table, clearing the table, loading the dishwasher, feeding the pets. Now THOSE are chores that help me with MY life. Their rooms, eh, not so much. If they want to live like pigs… As long as I can keep one spot on the rug for him to engage in activities when other kids come over, who gives a shit whether the perimeter is clean. Well, Rich, apparently does. And Rich spent several hours on the 28th making the perimeter spotless. Fine by me. I’ve always been quite clear, in my book, personal hygiene is very important and house cleanliness is, well, NOT. Unless someone else wants to do it. And, in this case, that someone was Rich. So Rich comes upstairs, while I’m lying in bed gasping and gagging, my nose bleeding from blowing, my skin pasty white, my hair slicked to my head from night sweats…and Rich reports that he cleaned Luke’s room. “Oh, great, thank you, sweetheart.”, I murmer from under the quilt and I smile weakly. As he heads back downstairs, clearly having not gotten enough of a back pat he says, “Imagine how clean this house would be if I stayed home with the kids and you worked.”

I am sure you can imagine how happy that comment made me. It was almost as good as the one, oh, roughly a month earlier that he made about why, when he arrived home early from work (at 3pm instead of the expected 7pm) why the breakfast dishes were still in the sink and what, in fact, and I quote “did I DO all day”? I don’t want to share the details because not only would that be boring but you might even be familiar with this theme. Let’s just say that comment required two days of fighting to exorcise it and the many things that I actually do were enumerated OVER AND FUCKING OVER. The “how clean the house would be if you worked” comment, aside from blowing out my sinus’s and my backed up lungs for at least a five minute period, did not elicit a fight because that would have literally killed me but it got me thinking. Yes, thinking which was all that was left for me on December 28th since moving and breathing were out of the question. Among the other exciting parts of my holiday (whoa, you say, can one woman possibly be that lucky…not just a dead dog and seasonal flu and pneumonia in the last two weeks before Christmas…)yes, another exciting part and one of the many obligations they don’t tell you about when you are making the complicated decision to run for local office, is that for one Saturday afternoon,needless to say, the only holiday season Saturday this year that I didn’t yet have a dying dog or pneumonia, I was supposed to dress up as Mrs. Claus, give up my shopping and family afternoon and sit in Village Hall to take local kids requests for Santa. The Mayor was my Mr. Claus, if you will. So we sat in Village Hall, looking like weird Hieironymous Bosch-ian versions of the Kris Kringle story in itchy polyester wigs and bad artificial velvet outfits. Small children came in, glanced in utter horror at the dissolution of their dreams, took a candy cane and ran for their lives. The few small enough to buy our Jewish Mayor as Santa were quickly cured of that notion when Santa removed his beard and announced, “Damn this thing itches”. Christ may have been Jewish, Santa was definitely not. The high point for me was when trying to coax three tiny people to come a little closer by telling them that they didn’t have to sit on Santa’s lap but simply could whisper one present request in our direction their twenty year old mom added to the cajoling by saying “C’mon kids…doesn’t nice Mrs. Claus look just like Nana?”. Really? Just like NANA. Really, bitch? I quickly marked the entire family down for coal on behalf of their idiot mother. But it got me thinking. Mrs. Claus. Mrs. Claus. A life living in the North Pole catering to Santa and five hundred elves. Cooking, cleaning, wearing floor length red velvet and an apron for chrissakes in a place where the snow never melts and no one comes to visit. A place you live forever but you can never leave. Let alone wear a different outfit? Mrs. Claus. An interesting and underexplored character in history. Typical. Eh. Without the Mrs. I don’t think Christmas would happen. But do we ever hear that? Does anyone ever talk about her…the woman behind the myth? Are there ANY books devoted to Mrs. Claus in her bad outfit and her sensible shoes. I can’t think of one. So I had an idea, while sitting in my lesser throne next to my Jewish Santa in Village Hall. An interesting idea. Let’s call it “Mrs. Claus: A Christmas Story”

MRS. CLAUS: A CHRISTMAS STORY.

What if this Christmas, say somewhere around December 28th, Mrs. Claus took a look around the fucking freezing North Pole, gazed out over the miles and miles of snow between her and civilization, gazed back at the five hundred pairs of dirty elf underpants and one giant red velvet suit covered with twenty four hours of present delivery sweat, cookie crumbs, reindeer snot and soot heaped in a pile on the floor waiting for the laundry. What if she peered at the workroom full of discarded wrapping paper that someone, and she knew who that was, was going to have to clean up. She could only imagine Santa’s Workshop and the cleaning in store for her there. Mrs. Claus stared silently out the window at the eight perfect but hungry reindeer clawing at the door. Yeah, Mrs. Claus knew that not one of the five hundred snoring elves and their farting in his sleep fearless leader were going to wake up long enough to actually take care of the pets they claim to love so much. Too tuckered out by their round the world exploits, that’s what they always said when, each year they felt fine about sleeping until New Years Eve? Fucking New Years Eve? And expecting to wake up to a clean house, a warm meal and some happy reindeer? Yeah, all well and fine when they were flying around the earth doing tricks with their reindeer but what about the day to day reindeer love. The reindeer kibble? The reindeer walks? And forget the reindeer…what about the post Christmas laundry that takes five full days to actually finish, forget fold? What about Mrs. Claus who’s spent the last 365 days running the goddamned North Pole so that everyone could spend all their time getting ready for other peoples Christmas? Does Mrs. Claus take so much as a nap? Does it even occur to her to try to catch up on some sleep? And the few times she’s actually dared, snuck off for fifteen minutes of shut eye, the attitude from Mr. Ho Ho Ho and his merry band would make you think they caught her smoking crack. What if, on this crazy December 28th, Mrs. Claus, who used to have an identity all her own before she got taken in by his rosy cheeks, his droll little mouth and and his twinkly eyes, looked in the mirror and realized that, Christ, the velvet gown and the apron made her ass look huge and wasn’t even her color. Who can wear that red and look good? She imagined something in a light blue, square neckline revealing just the teeniest touch of her still good neck instead of swaddling it in endless white fur. That, my god, her hair made her look, well, just like NANA. No one can pull off pure white hair. No one. Something in an ash blonde with a few low lights, maybe? Loose the bun, cut off about a foot of hair and some feathering around the face? Now we’re talking. Mrs. Claus turns this way and that appraising all in the mirror, a slight smile playing at her pink lips. She’d always had good bone structure but living with the pig has put on some pounds. Not as many as him, thank god. No future “Greatest Loser” for her. He was another story. With a little pilates and more salads, she thinks she could still turn a few heads like she did in her day. She remembers how that one elf who got fired used to give her the ole up and down. Which, since he was an elf, was short but still sweet. She sucks in her tummy and curses the red velvet. Squinting in the mirror, Mrs. Claus pauses and realizes that her skin is in pretty good shape especially considering she hasn’t had a facial in at least four hundred years. It’s smooth enough and she has good color. All those years of no drinking and smoking. Yeah, dull as hell never having one naughty day, and it’s not like being on the nice list ever got HER a present from her fat husband, but possibly worth it, in the long run, given the general texture of her thousand year old skin. Perhaps a teeny bit of filler and some Botox at the brow to iron out the one sneaky sign that Mrs. Claus isn’t always jolly, that sometimes, every now and then, Mrs. Claus dares to think that she is fucking sick to death of “Ho, Ho, Ho” and Santa’s enormous belly not to mention the appetite that goes with it. And all the goddamned singing and cheeriness not to mention the sound of hammers and whatever else they use to make all the shit they make, day and night trying to get ready for next Christmas. And can we talk about cooking dinner for five hundred every night of the week? Yeah, sure, they’re small but they can eat. And its all well and fine that they clear their little elf places but with their work ethic, how bout helping a bit with the dishes. But, noooo, they have to get back to making toys. And she has to do the goddamned dishes. Sure, the Mrs Claus deal came with eternal life but what good is eternal life if you have to spend it wearing a red velvet mumu, white hair and cooking for five hundred elves and an enormously overweight husband who often has chocolate in his beard and who’s only response to any complaint is “Ho, ho, ho”. ”You know” thinks Mrs. Claus, “I need a break”. And with that, she takes off her snowy white apron, she undoes the damn bun from her hair and she heads to the barn where she saddles up a very confused but obliging Rudolph making sure to give him some kibble so he has strength for the trip. ”Rudolph, my friend, take me somewhere warm. Can we stop at a drugstore for some “Nice n’Easy” on the way?”

Elections and Plastic Surgery

Jen Laird White — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:55:44 +0000

I am going to do something I rarely do and post a quick series of thoughts. I spend too damn much time deliberating and editing and since time, these days, is something I just don’t have…I’m going to get this off my chest. I just got back from a run. It’s a crystal clear election day morning in New York, the leaves are glowing orange and pink and I could see my breath for the first time this year. I had gone about 3 miles at a good clip when I passed a man I see almost everyday I venture out. He rides a bike and has an American flag attached to his helmet. He’s gregarious, charming and extremely conservative. As we passed going in opposite directions he hollered out with glee and a slightly accusatory finger point from his teetering bike “I’m going to vote”. ”Good for you”, I replied. “Tea Party all the way” he shouted. Through slightly clenched teeth I shouted “Go for it.” and then I added ” It’s a privilege to be able to make that choice.” And off he went. I thought for a second and realized that I actually meant it. I did. And as I ran along giving myself silent pats on the back for my holier than thou attitude I passed a woman I know from my work in our villages lower income community. She’s my age but has been beaten up by a life that never gave her any gifts. Among her lifes tales to tell are felony convictions, near murders, strokes, struggles, poverty perpetually knocking, many children of her own, some who have succeeded against huge odds and an angry persistence in trying to save the kids, who are not her own that struggle in her community. She’s difficult but I admire her as much as I fear her rage and criticism. She was standing with two young black women in a wealthy neighborhood I pass through on my jog, voter registration lists in hand. ”What are you doing?” I asked her when I stopped to catch my breath. ”Making people get their asses out of bed and vote”, she snarled. ”Really?” I said, sounding surprised. ”Hell yes” she muttered, looking at me with disgust. ”It’s a privilege, Jen. It’s a privilege.” She had gotten her ass out of bed and left her “have not” neighborhood and her difficult life and her constant struggles and ventured into the land of the “haves” to convince all to excercise the privilege. While I was simply exercising. So much for the back patting.

So here’s my toast to my friend Mary…and my little part on this election day… Get your asses out of bed today and vote! I truly don’t care who you vote for but I truly care that you make your vote matter. That you vote because you are voting for someone you really believe in, not because you are angry at the world and they are angry too. Vote for someone who really can make a difference not for someone who promises something they can’t deliver. Know what you are voting for. Know what is possible and what is just cockamamie made up political promising. I am a Democrat. I will probably vote for most of the Democrats although I will decline to pull the lever for those I know to be corrupt or lazy. And if your beliefs are different from mine I would expect you to vote the other way. But do it with knowledge. I expect my fellow Democrats to do that too. Don’t be fooled by debates about whether one person understands evolution or has a history that includes wrestling, don’t deny someone a chance to run a state because they ran a corporation or because they are dull or have bad hair. Deny people the chance to be elected because they promise something they can’t deliver. Because they make it seem too easy. Deny people the chance because they only believe in freedom for some. Remember, you are only an outsider until you’re elected. I know. I was an outsider last year on this day. And then I was elected to a small political job in my small community. It’s a small job to the nation but it’s a job that matters to my neighbors and my friends. And I understand now that it’s not as easy as it seemed from my place outside. That those who came before me were not incompetent or stupid(at least most of them) but elected officials bound by realities that go beyond common sense. And changing even our small little world takes unbelievable persistence and perserverance not to mention patience. I think we are all angry. I just don’t think we can allow our anger to make us lazy in our choices. And that we need to exercise our privilege rather than just exercising.

And now….a joke about plastic surgery from a friend in LA. Who should know a little something about plastic surgery. This has nothing to do with voting. At least not in any way that I can invent?

> —A 54 year old woman had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital.
>
> While on the operating table she had a near death experience. Seeing God,
> she asked “Is my time up?”
>
> God said, “No, you have another 43 years, 2 months and 8 days to live.”
>
> Upon recovery, the woman decided to stay in the hospital and have a
> face-lift, liposuction, breast implants and a tummy tuck.
>
> She even had someone come in and change her hair colour and brighten her
> teeth! Since she had so much more time to live, she figured she might as
> well make the most of it.
>
>
> After her last operation, she was released from the hospital. While
> crossing the street on her way home, she was killed by an ambulance.
>
> Arriving in front of God, she demanded, “I thought you said I had another
> 43 years? Why didn’t you pull me from out of the path of the ambulance?”
>
>
>
> God replied: “I didn’t recognize you.”
>

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

Jen Laird White — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:32:23 +0000

What I learned this summer, by Jen Laird White.

First thing…it’s about two weeks too long and when you throw the Jewish holidays in there after TWO DAYS, two measly days, OF SCHOOL….I just don’t think God, whoever he or she is, would do such a thing. Particularly if she is a she. There is not a she on this earth or floating above it that would have mothers do the whole back to school, let’s get on a schedule, get out of bed, make the lunch, do you have your backpack, here are your socks, did you brush your teeth, forget about making your bed well do that next week routine for two days, TWO DAYS and then CANCEL SCHOOL for god related reasons. No god is cruel enough to taunt a mother with the two days of freedom, two days after a summer of running Camp Mommy, two days to do something that actually involves being a human not a mother only to snatch that new found freedom away for the Jewish holidays. And can I point out that it wasn’t even the most solemn of Jewish holidays that we got off. But don’t get me started. Let us just say that this is a decision clearly not made by god but by a schoolboard largely made up of men and those with grown children. And let us just say that nice mommy was really and truly mean mommy by the end of it all. I was even scared of me. But it’s over. And I’m sitting at the computer.

So what did I learn during the seventy three days but who’s counting that make up our summer holiday? Plus the four for the lesser of the serious Jewish holidays. A lot. LOT. I think I’ll just itemize.

1. I learned that there is nothing like people who have known you since you didn’t have boobs. And when you still weighed below one hundred without any sort of eating disorder. Connie. My best friend Connie. Who disappeared into the abyss of life and jobs some six years ago never to be heard from, well, until this summer. And that’s only because I Facebooked her. Best thing I did all summer other than using more sunscreen and drinking slightly less. Connie, it turns out, has moved back within seventy miles of me and was two miles from the VERY BEACH I was sitting on all summer during the very week I Facebooked her. She came over. We laughed at the same things we always laugh at even though she’s a very important sociologist, A DOCTAH, Dr. GAGER, who gets quoted in the Wall Street Journal and on NPR about things as entertaining as division of labor in the home and how it impacts sex lives. She’s gotten tons of press lately with a study she did that indicated that couples who do more housework have more sex. http://www.bottomlinesecrets.com/article.html?article_id=100001457 Now, I completely and foolishly misunderstood this study to say that couples who have a more equal division of household tasks have more sex. Like, if you get off your damn ass and help me pick up and do the laundry or the grocery shopping once in a while, maybe do a little math homework with the kids or take the dog for a walk or, christ, feed the gerbils, well then, I might be motivated to put on something silky, slinky and or expensively wedgie producing, hell, even if I can’t motivate to get out of the sweats and the t shirt, I still might be appreciative enough of your effort with the gerbils to, in fact, engage in some craziness. As my Norwegian sister in law pointed out in a discussion of this study over drinks with my brother, spouse and father, all of whom saw fit to argue the finer points of why this study could not possibly be accurate (merely to avoid having to feed gerbils in exchange for sex…and it does sound demeaning when put that way but no less demeaning than putting on underwear that gives you a wedgie or a nightgown that needs to be handwashed)..so the sister in law, with a pleading look on her face said to my brother…”But couldn’t we try?” Turns out what the study really says is that couples with lots of energy do more housework and THUS have more sex. Doesn’t matter who’s doing the housework, the sex still comes. And it doesn’t even matter if the house gets really clean. I am not going to get into our sex life but all I am going to say is that I have a very, very messy house, so messy that it will never, ever be clean until I am dead. And that will be because someone else will live here. It is so messy that a friend once wrote about it for a story in a Florida paper. NO shit. That said, we clean. A lot. A place this messy needs a lot of cleaning so that you can actually live and eat. The pet hair alone occupies hours. Even though it never gets better than less messy. As I’m typing this I’m suddenly wondering about the sex lives of cleaning ladies. Although I don’t think I’m worried about Rich and Gladys.

SO enough about Connie’s research. And just a little more about Connie. Can I tell you, the minute I saw her face it was as if six years had never happened. Heck, it was as if 35 years had never happened. We were the same as we’ve always been even if both our asses and our problems were bigger and our faces showed, oh, just the tiniest gentle hint of wear and tear as yet untouched by botox and restylyn. We had a bunch of marriages and divorces and jobs and scandals and problems and sicknesses and deaths and failures and successes between us and we sat on that beach and laughed til we cried. So what did I learn? I learned that you don’t let good friends disappear because they will always remind you of who you are.

2. I learned that even if I think it’s funny to bitch about it, my favorite thing in the world is hanging with my kids.

3. I learned that, in an excellent example of Smoke and Mirrors, a blow out can make you look more beautiful but a blow job will only get you jewelry. But you’ll have to wear the wedgie underwear? It’s always a trade off.

4. That I was right last fall when I blogged about doing something that scares you each summer. Nothing clears the pipes like a little terror. So what did I do? Well, I rode the Cyclone on Coney Island. I used to do it all the time when I was young and single. It was a quick pick me up for depression and hangovers. Take the A train to Coney Island, ride the Cyclone twice and go back to Manhattan. You could not stay sad on the Cyclone and the sweating it produced quickly drained left over alcohol. I hadn’t done it in ten years since my stepkids were little. Can I be honest here? I got off and my legs were shaking, partly because, well, yes, I was afraid. But why was I afraid? Well mostly because, for some fucked up reason, I thought that because my eight year old, the worlds TALLEST eight year old, hit the height requirement mark he should be allowed to ride it even though I am certain that there were no other eight year olds within a hundred miles who would have been allowed to ride because, DUH, they were too small and DUH not yet emotionally ready for such terror. His brother and friend convinced him it was the best thing he’d ever do and because he was tall enough, I somehow succumbed to child pressure(more potent than any peer pressure you ever experienced while standing behind the library with Brian Matthews trying to decide whether or not having a puff on that cigarette would ruin your life) and thought…heck let’s let the innocent little boy who rarely stays in his own bed alone for the night and is afraid of everything from having his head under water to any stranger even if, and perhaps rightfully so, they are 107, sure, lets let him have the experience of riding the most terrifying roller coaster ever at the ungodly young age of eight. Excellent idea, MOMMY. Once on it I realized that it was entirely possible that he was going to pop out and fly over Astroland into the crowd on the beach, hundreds of feet below. My god, if the fall didn’t kill him, the exposure to near naked thong clad bottoms the size of a Volkswagon buses, NOT BUGS, surely would. Or at least rightfully cement his fear of strangers forever. When it was all over my legs shook for half an hour and Luke said it was the best thing he’d ever done. And maybe I did feel at least fifteen minutes younger.

The second thing I did was go tubing on Lake Champlain behind the boat of my sisters daredevil boyfriend. My sister and I went together, clinging desperately to an enormous yellow rubber tube traveling over the freezing water at what felt like sixty miles an hour (we were assured it was only fifteen), discs straining, jowls tossing as we bounced on the waves, full wedgies produced by the odd position that no body over twelve should ever attempt, revealing our middle aged butt cheeks to the sky and to the passengers of the afternoon NY to VT ferry which my sisters beau thought we should buzz at really close range, no doubt stunning said passengers into dismayed silence at their ruined sunlit trip across calm waters and culminating in, yes, me wetting my pants, which wasn’t really so dire given that I was wearing not pants but my bathing suit, my bathing suit was already so far up my ass it was as though I was naked and I could leap off the tube into Lake Champlain to rinse off both me and the tube. I felt a bit bad for my sister but I’m certain it wasn’t the first time I’d pissed on her leg.

I recommend something akin to these adventures to all. Although be careful whose leg you piss on.

5. I learned that we are only the product of those who came before us, neither more clever nor more wise. Take a look at this obituary of Barbara Holland who died this week. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/books/14holland.html She was our kind of girl. Barbara Holland actually wrote books and made a name for herself, a big enough name to get a Times obit with a photo, about the joyous benefits of smoking, drinking and bacon. She literally wrote a book titled “The Joy of Drinking”. I don’t mind not eating bacon, I had to give up smoking though I miss it most every day of my life…and I live in fear of having to give up drinking. As my friend Mary says “I never want to be an alcoholic. I’d hate to have to quit drinking.” Mary was serious.

6. I learned that life, like summer, even though it seems like it’s taking forever, comes and goes in a flash. That it wasn’t really just yesterday that you got your first crush or had your first beer or kiss or bought your first bra if you can call that sad pancake like thing they called a training bra a bra that you were pressured to buy because “everyone had them” that made the saleswoman look at your mother as if to say “What the fuck, a bra? For her? Not for a few more years, sister?” You didn’t just finish grade school or middle school or high school or college (although some of us never did complete that step). You are not getting younger, you are getting better only in some ways and A LOT worse in others. Knees hurt, faces sag, sadder still, butts really sag and people you love start to disappear. That, damn it, you probably will never have another cigarette or that giddy head rush that starts a love affair or ever, ever wear a true mini skirt and have construction workers hoot. Yeah, you might wear the skirt but, trust me, baby, the hootings stopped. There are people you wonder about that you really will never see again and people you love who will die. It’s not okay but it is what it is. This is the summer I started to see the end. I am sure it’s because I will hit the half century mark in March. The process of reaching fifty will, I’m sure, make me itchy and moody and full of crisis. It might make me go to a plastic surgeon…you know, just for a consult. Maybe it will make me funnier but either way I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. And like I have a choice? My boys had a great summer. And I had a great summer because they did. They still have the time to turn down that cigarette(yeah, right) and have that first beer and date the most beautiful girl they’ve ever seen. They will drive too fast and drink till they throw up and have their hearts broken and break a few on their own. I hope they don’t want a bra but if they do, well, so be it. Every day they will do something new that amazes them or frightens them or teaches them. They will fail and succeed and they WILL finish college, damn it all. And I’ll watch them do it and turn to my husband or call my friends or my family to laugh about when we did it too. And every now and then I’ll ride the Cyclone. And feel my legs shake. But I don’t think I can take the tubing. In a very few years, I’m sure I won’t need it to pee on my own leg.

New Stripes

Jen Laird White — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:22:00 +0000

So my friend Mary called to see if I had seen the latest Vanity Fair. I had. Or at least the cover with a simply lovely shot of the eternally perfect Grace Kelly. Mary then complained that we weren’t in it. “Why”, I asked. “Well”, she responded, “They have an article on Tiger’s women as well as an, er, amazing photo spread. Check it out and call me.” So I did. The irony of flipping past the flawless Grace Kelly to find Tiger Wood’s women didn’t escape me for a moment and when I found them, the difference could not have been more dramatic or, as some might say, pneumatic. They are quite a bunch. Now, why, you ask, should Mary have wondered about our absence in this particular photo spread. Well, as I sited a few blogs ago, Mary and I have the dubious distinction of writing a piece called “We Slept With Tiger” about two suburban moms meeting the golf superstar while on a elementary school field trip. The piece was actually published by the highly respected “Publishers Weekly ” and received at least one stunned and negative comment from a reader. “Has Publishers Weekly actually come to this?” I believe was the phrase he used. This, having no idea that in the original version, Mar and Jen (we used our real names) actually made love to the guy who can “go all night”, according to one of the Vanity Fair ladies, on a pile of clean socks heaved at my spouse after a bout of criticism and never cleaned up. The published version did feature Tiger polishing off leftover pancakes shaped like dinosaurs and texting us LOL when we proposed a third encounter, which we thought meant Lots of Love. It was an impressive Solzhenitsyn-esque bit of writing, “Cancer Ward” with humor and we were shocked when the New Yorker rejected us outright. After it was published we had to field calls from publishers and literary agents who were interested in giving us a book deal. Seriously. They really did call. I was confused and kept asking them what book they actually saw us writing? “Other Men We Haven’t Slept With”? “My Romances with Osama Bin Laden and Stalin”? “MacCauley Caulkin: Love of My Life”. We are still trying to figure out how to take advantage of the clearly desperate book market and I’ll let you know how we do. In the meantime, here are the Tiger Babe photos and no one even called to inquire whether we’d like to participate. I’ve looked closely at them. They are interesting. One features a naked twenty something lollygagging on a bed of New York Post back issues with Tiger on the cover. Another is a waitress friend of Tiger’s eating, of course, a marraccino cherry at a lunch counter. Then there’s the girl who for some inexplicable reason is wearing her bathing suit while walking down a hall. Actually, there might be an explicable reason. She has the biggest boobs I have EVER seen on something not in the Guiness Book and how else to display them but in a hall in a bathing suit. The final girl I can’t really recall right now but I guarantee she isn’t doing anything that real people do and she isn’t wearing anything that real people would wear and she has extremely good hair. And therein lies the rub. The reason Mar and I are not in the article (other than the fact that we didn’t actually sleep with Tiger) is because we don’t have the right hair, makeup, support underwear, stylist and photographer. And I suppose location is important too. So here’s what I’m proposing. I am going to find us that team. I am going to get us some Tiger babe worthy photos and I am going to make Vanity Fair wish that they had called. I called Mar to tell her as much and she said “Are you out of your fucking mind”. Now granted, Mar was cranky because she has a book coming out and to get her looking her best for the book tour she did what every writer from Styron to Salinger has done prior to book tours and got herself some sort of new fraxel or pixel or something facial peel. She called and asked my opinion about doing it and since I was way to scared to get one myself I thought, heck, sure, let your friend do it first. Well, apparently Styron was not very honest about pre-book tour peels. He, in fact, never said a word. As Mar put it, she found herself lying in the laser experts chair, the smell of her burning flesh in her nose, biting her lips to fight the excruciating pain thinking “I am a fucking vain idiot and I hate myself.” She was still saying this yesterday but maybe if it looks really good in a day or two she’ll change her mind and be more into getting some Tiger photos taken. In the meantime, her face is too pink and sensitive and she wants to lose some weight. Although her cleavage, as I told her, with the proper propping, will be fabulous. So that’s my goal. By weeks end, I will get a team of beauty crafters together and I will turn two women at the half century mark into true Tiger babes and I will make Vanity Fair wish they had called us. I will make the New Yorker sorry they didn’t like our story. And I will make Tiger wish he’d actually had a chance with us. And maybe we’ll find a book deal. Something like “George Clooney Loves My Generous Ass in the Right Light”. Or “When Brad Pitt Said He Prefers Wrinkles Because They Add Character.” I’d like to promise I’m going to turn us into Grace Kelly lookalikes but the truth about Grace is, she actually was beautiful and no team of stylists could take that away from her even if they tried. And, my god, she wouldn’t be caught dead in a hall in a bathing suit. But I might. Particularly if I get a book deal.

Facebook

Jen Laird White — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:35:26 +0000

Okay, I’ve been having a bit of a bout with writers block. It’s not really the blues, per se. It’s more like the blahs, the sags, the not enough coffees in the world. I don’t know why? I have this new political job that takes an inordinate amount of time especially given that, compared to my old life, I’m making about oh, say, eighty two cents an hour doing it, but it’s fun so that should make me happy. Money’s tight, I haven’t bought a new outfit in months and I’m going twelve weeks between colorings and three weeks between pedicures and Rich forgot to pay the Verizon bill so we had no Internet ALL DAY. But MY GOD, I don’t live in Haiti, I don’t even live in the Bronx, I am not part of the Obama administration, I’m not Martha Coakley( really, really not and never would be with that hair cut), I am not Scott Brown and I am not Tiger Woods wife. So what’s my problem? I want to go somewhere fun and I can’t figure out where that is. Whine. I either drink too much or too little but I can’t find moderation. Whine. And I think I’m finally really aging. I feel it and I see it. It’s winter. My tan has fully faded and my age spots are incredibly apparent. The one on my forehead seems to be developing it’s own forehead and I’ve spent enough time on WebMD to know that the dermatologist, when I finally decide to see her, will scold me about not enough sunscreen and lop it off and put it in a jar. And the winter spiritual clincher? A friend just offered me the chance to appear at an enormous press conference for a product she’s marketing for the cosmetic industry and I would be the guinea pig. They’d shoot me full of this new product and drop ten years off my face in front of the press. Now I don’t mind the thought of being a guinea pig. I don’t even mind doing it in public since, in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t mind telling just about anything that has to do with just about any part my life. And I don’t , frankly, mind the idea of having stuff injected into my face to fill, and I quote my friend, my “fine” lines, if it makes me look better. What I mind is the fact that she noticed my “fine lines”. It means they are really there. I actually have “fine lines”. And I thought it was just me. You know what I’m saying? I was pretty sure everyone could see the age spot on the forehead if the light hit it just right and the coverup was waning but the fine lines? Those I thought were between me and the mirror. My fine lines, not the worlds. The fact that EVERYONE can see them did not help the winter blues. Then, to top it off, I get Facebook “friended” by a guy I knew when I was in my earliest of twenties who basically says that he has read my blog and that he thinks I am possibly way more interesting that he thought then. That’s the kind of “friend” we all need. Someone who you barely knew because they thought you were an idiot when you were young, looking you up and for god knows what reason, trying to be pals with you now that the “fine” lines have set in. Because maybe as you were getting those fine lines and aforementioned age spots you were also getting, hey, INTERESTING. Maybe, in fact, those extra bits of upper thigh and upper arm fat, excessive pigmentation and fine facial indentations brought with them, to the Jen Party, some more interesting aspects that were never there when the bikini bod was rocking and the forehead was vacant of anything especially spots with foreheads. Maybe just being a bit uglier and sporting a jiggly butt makes you worthy of “friending”? What the hell am I supposed to do with that. So, of course, I friended him back. That’s the kind of idiot I am.

Facebook is a bizarre land. My new found friend Eric, for instance. We knew each other in high school quite peripherally. He was a year younger than me, he went out with my neighbor for a while, I suppose he came to our house but I can’t really remember. To say we knew each other would be a huge stretch. HUGE. He, too, read the blog and “friended” me. He, too, I suspect, thought I was an idiot in high school. And, after he friended me, he was so nice I decided he might be a stalker. Who else could be so nice? And so different from what I barely remembered of him from High School? Except in Eric’s case, it turns out he IS funny and interesting and much more than I remembered from good old Wachusett Regional High School, although aren’t we all. Unlike all of my physically present friends, we don’t speak on the phone, I don’t have the foggiest idea what he sounds like, or, frankly, even looks like, but every so often, out of the blue, he’ll send me something smart to read or point me in the direction of something that is interesting or new(like a band called The Propellerheads…don’t ask…just listen…and with your kids). I’m glad that I know him now even if I didn’t know him then. And don’t really know him now. Although I worry a bit that while we correspond cleverly by email and Facebook, the person he thinks he’s talking to does not have the age spot with the forehead on their forehead and still has an ass the size of two small but perfect canteloupes. But I sound bitter. And I’m not. The ass has to go for the intelligence to increase. Everyone who’s anyone over forty knows that. You know what I’m saying? And who cares if his image of me is of me at 18. It’s common ground we both share.

But Facebook. What a brilliant idea. Everyone is always wondering what happened to their past, or in some cases, in their past. And Facebook has found a way for those of us muddling around middle age trying to find our glasses to find our past. Or at least a few chuckle worthy little parts of it. I’ve been Facebooked by almost everyone I’ve ever slept with for more than one night and if they didn’t Facebook me, I Facebooked them, just to spy . There are a few I’m missing, like the dim restaurant chef with the mohawk and the tongue piercing from ’86 or the drummer from the rock band who had me hook up with him for a six month period of intermittent tour dates and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Or at least I told myself he’d left the planet. He doesn’t seem to be on Facebook although he gets more Google hits than imaginable. But then again, if he left the face of the earth, his presence on Facebook would be unusual but at least his Google presence indicates that he was real. Facebook works better for people with fine lines as opposed to kids with baby fat who have barely left their past long enough for anyone to be in it. My stepdaughter is Facebooking from a semester in Italy and I love to hear her tales of time in the Alps and cheap Florentine dinners and to spy on her budding long distance romance with a boy on the Indiana border. But when my first NY city roomate, the woman with whom, at 20, I shared a seedy hotel room on 28th street complete with a paranoid schizophrenic neighbor, mice running across our beds while we attempted sleep and the incredible wonder of being grownups (so we thought) in New York, found me this week and it was like finding gold. These great, self proclaimed middle aged, sisters from Texas who have a hilarious blog http://www.themidlifegals.com/ Facebooked me cause they had read my blog and liked it. I was so proud. Friends of mine who have stores send messages to tell you about some cool sale, a friend who’s an opera singer just Facebooked me an amazing event she’s performing in at Lincoln Center. Politicians and politically active friends post good stuff to read to help you figure it all out. My friend Mary posts versions of her “To Kill A Mockingbird” documentary, a work in progress, for everyone to comment on. She even posted the story we wrote about sleeping with Tiger Woods, something I never would have thought of. Oh, you didn’t know we slept with Tiger? He didn’t mind the fine lines.But, then again, he wouldn’t.

Now I’m not saying Facebook is a perfectly oiled machine. Facebook keeps suggesting I friend a fellow I have known for years. What Facebook doesn’t seem to know is that he died eight months ago and so I’m not going to friend him. Doesn’t seem like a good use of time. Facebook also allows people to imagine that you are a little more interested in their lives than you really are. GQ this month has a brilliant piece on this. www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201001/scary-facebook-friends-profiles#slide=1The people who give you the day to day, moment to moment, synopsis on every cup of coffee and bit of exercise they’re indulging in. Now I can see if they were letting you know every time they were getting a blow job, a colonoscopy or if they hit a wild turkey with their car. It’s not that I WANT to know this but at least it’s sort of interesting information. ”I’m getting ready to go ride my bike in the rain” is not interesting. ”I’m having my second latte of the day” is not interesting. ”I’m getting a blow job from a hooker near Times Square.” may be too much information but at least it’s interesting. Particularly since there are no visible hookers in the Times Square neighborhood anymore. Occasionally Rich will leave his Facebook up on the computer and he is Facebook ‘friends” with a huge number of attractive twenty somethings, not cause he’s Tiger-esque even though he might want to be, but that’s who he works with. They update him on cool twenty something activities that they all are indulging in and fab new twenty something songs and their lives don’t ever involve updates on kids school plays, exercise routines or clips from old near obscurity musicians. I point this out as a downside of Facebook NOT for him, but for me. Because, unlike me, they all still do look like what my old but new Facebook friends imagine I look like. Although I would NEVER post about my kids school play.

It’s a new communication world out there. I don’t actually have an ipod but I think I might want an iphone. ipods just get in the way of hearing properly, which seems to be increasingly difficult enough, but that iphone is full of cool things that i still think i can figure out with a good tutorial from my kids. ee cummings would have thought the ipod people rocked. And I love Facebook. How else would I know that a woman I logged more naughty all-night behavior with in my twenties would grow up to own her own mega business and live a respectable Philadelphia life. Last time I’d seen her, her drunk boyfriend was peeing in the sink and she was crying because she never imagined she would work in a bank. Or have a boyfriend who peed in the sink. How else would I know that someone I know now, lived with someone I knew then. Two people from two different worlds who popped up as mutual friends in that weird little Facebook box to the left of your screen. How else would I know that a Canadian boy I once thought was dreamy would move South and marry a Texas girl. Or that my next door neighbor from childhood is still grieving her mother, long gone. Or that my other next door neighbor Pattys uncle still feels guilty about the time he dropped us at the entrance to Dulles for a plane from DC to Boston and we couldn’t have been much more then 12. Dropped us at the door? I guess I had repressed that. The only thing I remember is that we saw the real Colonel Sanders. Who remembers we were all by ourselves. Or that a friend who I’ve thought about often over the years just became a dad for the first time at our VERY advanced age. And twins, no less. Congratulations. Facebook is really fun. Facebook is really great. Whoever invented Facebook deserves all of the millions of dollars that they have surely made and will continue to make. And now a suggestion. If they can figure out Facebook, they can surely figure out a way to deliver at home, do it yourself wrinkle filler that doesn’t involve a press conference. And a little something for the age spot with the forehead?

Ho. Ho. Ho

Jen Laird White — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:05:26 +0000

So it’s that Holiday season again. Everyone overflowing with goodwill and cheer. In my house it’s everywhere. Why, just this morning, I indicated to the spouse that I’d like to start our Christmas shopping a bit earlier than the last week before Christmas this year, to cut down on stress and all, and his response was “Goddamnit, do you have to start so early. Wait until a few people pay me. Fuck.” and then he stomped off. Then I checked the kids carefully written Christmas lists. Oh, they’d been hard at work like little elves. All sorts of special Christmas requests including a pair of $15,000 night vision goggles and a taser, because, as my younger said of my older “Jack needs a taser for Middle School.” Yes, the spirit is overwhelming.

Last week my friend Juliet and her two boys, Chris and Max and my team of children went on a walk. It was a half day of school and we had all had pizza together and were going to play some football. At lunch her eleven year old son had indicated that the top thing on his Christmas list was DJ Hero. As we walked I mentioned this. ”Yeah,” said Juliet. “There’s NO WAY he’s getting that” and she pantomimed spinning a disc on a turntable with a most excellent imitation of a teenage slack jaw while staring into space. All she needed was for me to hoist her pants down to the top of her butt cheeks, utter “my G” and the idiot gangster thing would be complete. I could see her point. Now, unless you are Amish, you probably know what Guitar Hero is and DJ Hero is an off shoot of that, another way for electronics companies to make money. But in case you are Amish and are reading my blog, Guitar Hero is a game that involves holding a fake guitar and pressing different colored frets on the neck to “quell” explosions that appear on the stage on your tv screen, to the beat of a song. ”What?” you say, “That makes no sense at all.” Correct. And it makes even less sense when you realize that, in the case of our home, you are doing this to the tune of a selection of Aerosmith songs as you watch a cartoon Steven Tyler sing. When I was a teenager, Steven Tyler freaked me out. His pants were so tight that his crotch resembled nothing so much as an abandoned breakfast link and his mouth looked like it would eat a human in one quick gulp. I was pretty sure he wasn’t very clean and I couldn’t listen to him because I would inevitably think of his crotch and feel dirty myself. And yet, today, I stand with my boys, fake guitar exploding to the tune of that fine bit of songwriting “Dude Just Like a Lady”, as cartoon Steven dances his breakfast link around the screen with no sign of the drooping jowls, the apparent drug addiction and definite swinging sausage that I know are there today. I am terrible at the game and I think I know why. My utter disdain for things this useless is palpable. I don’t get the glazed look in my eyes or the guitar grimace that my kids and even my spouse seem to get while playing. I don’t for a second think I’m really playing an Aerosmith song. And, thank god, I don’t think I’m in some concert hall with an exploding floor hanging with Steven Tyler. The whole thing seems incredibly silly especially when my kids actually like playing the REAL guitar. And DJ Hero, as Juliet pointed out, is NUTS. I mean, how much skill is there in spinning a record and hitting exploding things. And who are the cartoon DJ’s you would actually aspire to? The only DJ I know is the one who dated Lionel Ritchies daughter and ended up, in a role model move we should certainly be encouraging, od’ing while hosting a show about rehab. So we have a dead DJ, we have Steven Tyler. What are kids to think?

SO Juliet and I came up with an excellent idea. How about reworking the whole “Hero” game model. How about if you really could create a game with excellent role models and challenges. Role models not known for displaying their breakfast links or drug problems, and you made it about practical stuff, stuff that might actually HELP kids in life. Oh, like say, “Bed Making Hero”. Where every time there’s a little explosion you have to cover it with a sheet or a blanket. And you get extra points for smoothing and fluffing your pillow while little explosions happen all around the pillow. And max points when you remember to raise the shades and carry your water glass down on the way to school. Or “Dishwasher Loading Hero”. Now that sounds fun. Instead of a fake guitar, you have a fake plate and every time there’s an explosion, you smother it by pretending to load a dish. If you’re really good, you can use the fake dish and glass, at once. The most dishes in one load, without breaking, while the little explosions happen, and remembering to slightly scrape, wins. I like the sounds of this. What about “Scooping the Dog Poop in the Yard and Feeding the Pets Hero”. You can see how that one works. The guitar replacement is a bit tricker but the object of the game feels very clear. Perhaps the fake pooper scooper becomes the food scooper(gross, I know, but if kids are happy watching Steven Tyler they won’t care) and you lose points for DEAD PETS and DIRTY SHOES. You see where I’m going. I think the “Hero” series can be expanded to include/help spouses since they all look ridiculous doing the guitar face and pretending they are Steven Tyler (which they really should not given the unimpressive exposed link). How about the grownup version of “I Don’t Have to Leave My Underwear on the Floor Hero”. Easy to see how that one would work. Fake undies. Little explosion instantly quelled by the quick flick into, yipeee, the laundry. The cartoon character in this one could clearly be the customized wife, who looks just like YOUR wife and who smiles every time a direct laundry basket score is made and another round of silent seething prior to a fight is averted. How about the very simple “Consideration Hero”. Easily played by everyone. The idea is, say, there’s only one towel in the bathroom and there are two people who need showers and whoever goes first decides to use the only towel, even if the other person has brought it upstairs and kept it on THEIR hook, then the explosions start and must really, truly be smothered by going to the basement and getting another goddamned towel so that the poor second in the shower( because she was getting the kids off to school) person doesn’t have to use the wet towel. Or what about “Kitchen Hero”. Say, just for instance, that there’s a small amount of yogurt or half and half, or coffee and both people like it in the morning and one person rather than eating the last of it himself, say, hits the button to smother the explosion by getting a NEW THING OF YOGURT OR MAKING MORE COFFEE FOR THE OTHER PERSON WHO HAS NOT HAD THEIRS YET. AND BY DECIDING TO LEAVE THE KITCHEN AND GO STAND SOMEWHERE ELSE INSTEAD OF READING THE PAPER AT THE COUNTER WHILE THE OTHER PERSON IS TRYING TO MAKE BREAKFAST FOR BOTH PEOPLES CHILDREN explosionAND GET THEIR LUNCHES READY explosion AND PACK THEIR BACKPACK. explosion. AND OCCASIONALLY explosion explosion explosion OFFERING TO WALK THE PETS AND DRIVE THE KIDS TO SCHOOL WITH A HAPPY GRIN AND A TRUE SENSE OF GOOD NATURE AND JOY. BONUS POINTS FOR ASKING “HONEY, WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU TODAY?” As my friend Christina says..”Now, that’s a Hero”.

Okay, enough about that. Someone paid us so I can go taser shopping.

The Seagull

Jen Laird White — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:39:54 +0000

I’ve been on vacation. And while ON vacation, I couldn’t even think about being interested in anything in the world, let alone vaguely amused by it, when the kids didn’t go to school for six or more hours a day. It’s all about keeping them alive. Or safe from me. Nothing is humorous, not the health care debate, michael jacksons obsessively covered and unsurprising death, not even the woman who blogged endlessly about motherhood and how much drinking helped her deal with it and then announced mid summer that she was quitting drinking. Thank god I picked Middle Age as my blogging topic although I’d certainly quit middle age were it an option. Here’s a summer story. My friend Wendy and I jog every day we can in the summer. We spend our summers at the same place on the ocean and we have boys who are great friends. Wendy and I just like hanging out. Our runs are usually talk marathons with topics ranging from death to divorce (is there anything else other than, perhaps, food although I prefer to eat food rather than talk much about it). We run at just about the same speed although I’m a bit more pitiful since I have six years on her. This summer has been a hard one for both of us. I think we’re both at some sort of mid-life crisis cross roads, happy one day, confused the next. So on one particularly beautiful morning, one of those days, in perfect symphony, we headed out wondering if we should just keep going. The kids would get used to living without us, the husbands would find younger, much more sympathetic wives (at least for that initial fake phase before they showed their true colors and became “demandingshrews” with all sorts of needs that didn’t include giving blow jobs), we could travel and sleep in in the morning, cook breakfast just for ourselves and the only fights we’d have to break up would be in barrooms. We could use the bathroom with no one walking in and earn housekeeping money having sex which is sort of the way it works for me now. We glumly rounded the corner in a glade next to the ocean where the path widened and there was actually a picnic table. Suddenly one or the other of us shouted “What the heck is that”. Up ahead, mid-glade, whatever a GLADE is, was the largest, grey seagull either of us had ever seen. It had to have been thirty five pounds. And not a looker of a bird. Sort of a seagull version of Marty Feldman, for those of you who remember him. Just sitting there looking, shoulders hunched, eye wide (I say “eye” because only one was visible) and head tilted at a bizarre angle as though it had spent the night on a pullout couch…something MY summer vacation included a lot of. We got closer and it didn’t move. We got really close and it stared at us with one terrified Feldmanesque eye and still didn’t move. And that’s when I noticed the clear fishing line wrapped around it’s beak and wing, closing it’s beak and effectively attaching it’s head to it’s wing. Ugh. Big problem. Way bigger than a pull out couch kink. And not a good look. Ugh again. And it was such a nice, well needed run. Suddenly, here we were, mid marital bitch and being faced with one of those real decisions. An ethical, moral, substantive and not superficial dilemma and I was just not in the mood. ”What do we do?” asked Wend. ”Two choices.” said I. ”One. We keep going and have our nice run and continue to hammer our husbands until we feel better. If we choose one, the bird will sit here all day looking unattractive and probably feeling horrible then get ripped to shreds by a coyote or a fox once it gets dark. Two.We saved the goddamned bird.” I looked long and hard at her. She looked back and grimaced. ”You know we have to try to save it, right?” she said. I nodded. We decided that she would stay with the bird, I would run back to the road and try to find a box or a towel and a pair of scissors or, better yet, a vet with a specialty in ornithology. The road was about five hundred yards away and there was a little wildly overgrown cottage just to the left. It had the air of Unibomber residence about it and I paused outside the cottage wondering whether I was going to get shot or spend the rest of my life in captivity if I went to the door. I noticed that the beat up Subaru circa 1979 parked outside had Obama and Save the Organic Farm stickers. In my experience, Subaru owners, Obama lovers and anyone who wants to save a farm, let alone an organic one, is unlikely to own a weapon that they will use to shoot ME. I was a bit more unclear on the captivity part but, feeling the birds terror, I took my chances, made my way through the puckerbrush and knocked at the screen. I could see, peering in, that this was a unique house. So special. A home to make me feel proud. A home that made me feel, well, almost Scandinavian. A place that made me realize that I was not a total failure in the housekeeping department. Because this house was what TOTAL FAILURE looked like. And it was the perfect place for my mission because it’s owner had clearly never thrown ANYTHING away. The woman who came to the door had the sweetest elderly face I’ve ever seen and white hair hanging to her waist. She didn’t seem at all dismayed by her failure as a housekeeper but more confused by my presence. I knew instantly that I would not become her captive because there was no room in her house for me. Phew. I explained my needs and she sprang sprightly into action grabbing a box from a heap of ten thousand box choices(you just never know when you’re going to need a cardboard box or 500), carefully determining perfect seagull size, grabbed the stinkiest towel I’ve ever smelled from a stack of probably equally stinky towels and found a precious pair of sewing scissors that couldn’t have been better matched by the vet specializing in ornithological surgery. She asked if she could join the rescue and I said the more the merrier. On the way down the path she made me sniff two wild yellow primroses perhaps, in a failed attempt to make me think that the fierce stench was coming from them not the towel. I could smell nothing other than urine, pet hair and something that might have been dead emanating from the towel but the gesture was sweet. We returned to the glade to find Wendy looking worried because Ole One Eye had tried a daring escape into the bushes no doubt sensing that someone was about to wrap her in the stinkiest towel ever and thinking perhaps that being torn to shreds by a fox was preferable. So there we were. Standing next to One Eye. Box. scissors and stinky towel. NOW WHAT. This felt a bit beyond us all particularly since none of us were really sure how much shredding power was still in the seagulls un-fishing line fettered feet. I decided I’d do the wrapping and holding, the nurse with a towel, if you will. Wendy could get all the glory as the stench-free surgeon. And our sweet elderly friend could step in where she felt comfortable. I think she might have been the crisis counselor although not the one with the DNR order. Too sweet for that. I grabbed the towel, yelled for the girls to head One Eye off at the pass and we ran around the glade for three or four minutes like something out of the Three Stooges, only stinkier. Finally, I swooped, Wendy held the box, I grabbed, we threw the poor terrified bird into the box and held her down. Wendy, with nerves of steel, started snipping. ”Ooohhh, I’m so frightened.” our friend, the non-housekeeper kept saying. I will admit to some serious heart pounding myself. The bird initially made several attempts to remove my fingers only to be foiled by the fishing line closing her bill. Eventually she settled down, staring calmly at us with her only eye, either suddenly understanding that this might work out better than drawing and quartering by the locals or just overwhelmed by the smell. The smell kept me calm too, trying to control my gag reflex. Wendy kept snipping. A piece of line here, a piece there. A chicken bone came out with one long strand that was securing the wing, a good sign indicating that the bird had probably swooped on a child crabbing which involves no hook just a piece of chicken and a less than bright crab who won’t give up even after he’s lifted out of the water. The hook might have meant serious damage, way beyond our NON expertise. Finally, with a quick snip, Wendy freed the bill, leaving a small bit around the lower bill but the bird able to freely open and close. The bird took a second to catch on. I only understood when the bird did because the bird grabbed me. It didn’t hurt but it got my attention. I leapt, released my hold and the gull hopped out of the box and QUICKLY shook free the towel. In a childs story, now would be the point at which it looked at us with a deep long stare of grattitude. A communication between man and animal. In this case, the bird did stop, the bird did look and I believe the bird glared and silently communicated the following… “I can’t believe you couldn’t find a cleaner towel”. She flapped twice, made some sort of sound and took off. Wendy, our new friend and I hollered with joy, we returned the scissors, the box and, as much as I wanted to keep it, the towel, said goodbye to our new friend with the crazy messy house and returned to our jog, so proud of ourselves. We couldn’t stop talking about the how’s and whats of our rescue effort. Finally we settled into our run again. We’d gone about a mile, flush with success, when I said to Wendy…”So what do you think that was about?”. Wendy got a knowing expression on her face. She said that she looked at the bird and wondered if it was us, bound in invisible thread, struggling with our obligations but needing someone to set us free or even better, that we needed to set ourselves free. I pointed out that the bird might have been an analogy for marriage, our marriages, bound by something invisible and suffocating that needed help and some freedom to return to its former marital bliss. Again, that we needed to free ourselves of whatever it was that was damaging, starving our marriages. We ran a bit farther and finally agreed that the bird was just a sign from god telling us that even goddamned seagulls need our help.

So what’s the point of my summer story. Here’s the point. Life goes along at it’s own pace. Ups, downs, boring periods, fun times. But how often do we get the chance to do something that scares us. Something that we don’t know how to do or something that makes us very, very nervous. Not often. Kids do it every day. They start new schools, play new sports, eat something that freaks them out. And they feel proud when they do it. We grownups just don’t have the opportunities. Or we don’t take them. Figuring out how to help that bird was scary. I’m still a little amazed we did it. I can’t tell you how good I felt for days afterwards. Even now, I’m writing about it, aren’t I. Just a little bit high. And because I’m a sap I like to think there’s a bird out there retelling the tale of the rescue to all the other cawing gulls, partly to explain why she’s become so smelly but also a bit in awe of our kindness and skill. That feeling of succeeding at something that doesn’t come naturally is too good to be passed up. I think we should make it a rule, those of us of a certain age, that at least once a year, we make a choice to do something that scares us to death. That we really don’t want to do because it’s hard. Take a leap. Be afraid. Push yourself somewhere you really don’t want to go. It’s the reason that I jump off the wharf in front of my parents house every summer. The wharf is a big wooden dock that juts into the tidal river that runs by our front door. Kids leap seventeen times a day. Adults do not. It’s high, it’s cold, there might be sharks(not really, but “Jaws” ruined my life), it seems like an injury waiting to happen. But I do it. Early on in the summer. Every summer and I’ll never stop. Just because it reminds me of what it’s like to be young. Nothing is old when you’re young. I stand there. I take a deep breath and I imagine the cold and that feeling of being airborne. I imagine my leg getting ripped off by a shark. I understand that airborne and fifty are not a good combo. Neither are legs and sharks. I get nervous. And being a little nervous can be very exciting. It takes me a while. Then I jump. And you should, too. Because when you sputter back to the surface, just for a minute, you’re eleven. And eleven is a very nice place to be.

the Talk

Jen Laird White — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:30:18 +0000

So I had the talk yesterday with my ten year old. Yes, that talk. We were in the car coming from the pediatrician where he’d just had a tetanus shot after a run in with a rusty nail, en route to the vet with our older cat who’d had a run in with her younger male sibling that left her with a pus oozing wound, an unfortunate need to vomit over the entire house and a bad attitude. As the cat growled and screeched in the carrier, Jack and I rode to our vet, a great guy who unfortunately moved twenty minutes away a couple of years ago but is so nice he’s worth the trek. The ride gave us a chance to chat and it turned out to be substantially more interesting than I could have imagined given the pus-y pissy pussy in the back. So there we are, me and Jack, cruising down the highway, when he says, immediately after a somewhat mundane discussion about why he refuses to wear his yellow raincoat, ”Mom, you know how you tried to tell me where babies come from and I didn’t want to know. Well now I have some questions.” I kept both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road and tried to stop the sudden rush of blood to the head. I had, in fact, about eight months before, tried to have “the TALK.”. Jack was home from school, pseudo sick during a period of malingering that ended when he made the serious misstep of pretending to lose vision in one eye. He lost the fire for faking while sitting in the pediatric neurological opthamologist with numbing drops in his eyes and teary parents, imagining brain tumors. Who knew, in his world of ten year old fakers, that losing vision was ANY different from a belly ache? On the day I decided to talk about where babies come from, he was perched in front of the boob tube, eating a quantity of cereal that would belie the claim of severe gastric distress and I thought, what the heck, if he can eat that much cereal, well, let’s just make something of this day. I got out the book that covered this topic, one that my mother had actually used for me and my siblings. I find it comforting that in a world of endless changes, where babies come from has changed not one iota since caveman days and before, even if the advent of Victorias Secret, transexxuals and deadly STDs has made the whole production somewhat more complicated. So there I am, well worn book in hand proposing a chat about where babies come from. Jack stopped chewing cereal, looked skeptical and, for the first time that day, actually a bit sick. But he nodded. I began with the flowers and their stamens, moved on to pictures of tadpole like sperm and jelly doughnut eggs, followed by wrestling frogs and just prior to the doggie style doggie style, stopped at chickens who looked for all the world like they were playing leapfrog. Even more than the previous page’s frogs. At that point, Jack, eyes now truly feverish, closed the book and said he needed a nap. That’ll teach him. You may not start sick, but I can get you there.

And that was the last time we dealt with that. I had begged Rich to take him into the garage and do the talk. Rich assured me he would, once he got around to it. Which was NEVER. And look, I do think ten is a bit young for this conversation even though the experts recommend eight. I, personally one to often ignore experts, would have delayed oh, say, until he was thirty and getting his own place, but Jack has some very sophisticated pals who have known the nuts and bolts of procreation for a long time. The only fight I’ve ever had with my friend Martha, the mother of Jacks best friend, was when, at four, she told her son EVERYTHING, just because he asked. To me, that’s like dating Claude the local homeless guy, just cause he asked. Sweet, yeah, but not advisable. And, thus, because Henry ASKED, I had dropped sweet Jack in the sweet little nursery school classroom with his sweet pal Henry who swaggered in armed with this potent time bomb of bizarre info. I am unclear on the connection between autism and vaccinations but make no mistake, I think this kind of penis/vagina info at that age could result in permanent catatonia. And I thought the grin on Henry’s face was about Legos. I freaked when, once outside the school, Martha told me that Henry was now the possesor of the penis/vagina info, info that I, at forty eight, still find hard to fathom even though I have, indeed, been an active participant and have the children to prove it. She calmly explained to me that she and George were parents who believed in telling the truth when asked a reasonable question. I shrieked that I was a parent who preferred to elude any less than tidy truth, particularly those involving penis’s and vagina’s, at all costs at least until children could shave and buy their own dinner in four star restaurants. And that there were no reasonable questions involving four year olds and the penis in the vagina thing. It all eventually died down but, six years later, I was reasonably sure that Jack did, in fact, have the info and I feared his version was not accurate.

So here we were, travelling the Parkway at sixty, screeching cat in the back seat, eyes on the road and Jack with some questions. It was as good a time as any. He turned his precious ten year old eyes my direction and said “Okay, mom. First question. Ketchup, pickle, mustard?”. I had no idea what the fuck he meant. And, as I explained before, I have participated in the penis/vagina thing so I was confused. “Huh?” I said articulately. ”You know, mom, ketchup, pickle, mustard.” It became clear that I was screwed because my sex talk dilly dallying had allowed him to move so far beyond the certainly odd penis/vagina connection and into the land of the truly bizarre, although that reference to hamburger companions made me more than curious. And concerned. ”Jack”, I said, “I gotta be honest. I have NO idea what you are talking about.” ”Mom, c’mon. You know. (look of disbelief) What are those?(look of extreme disbelief) What are ketchup, pickle and mustard ” (Look clearly translated to mean: “you idiot, you’re trying to keep me from the smutty truth. But I can take it”). My mouth was now hanging open in dull confusion and I was fantasizing about the enormously expensive vet visit that was, oh, shoot, another eight miles away. I shook my head. ”I don’t know ,sweetie. I don’t know what you mean.” He paused, turned to look seriously at me and said. “You know, Mom. Ketchup, pickle, mustard. Condiments.”

Thank god we had this talk. Condoms. It’s condoms. God, the embarrassment potential at the hands of his male pre-teen pals because of word confusion was enormous. Condiments. Condoms. You can just see the poor little guy standing there nodding knowingly and about to make a fast food reference that would guarantee years of no one to sit with at lunch except for the other children who thought that ketchup, pickle and mustard were part of a romantic experience. Phew. And we’re were off and running on “the Talk”. I explained the “whats”, the “hows” and the “what fors” only touching on STD’s for fear of wounding my boy for life. I think I made a good case of the clap sound almost like a romantic sinus infection. But there was a relief in having this chat. That could have been embarrassing down the road, say, when, my boy, preparing to lose his virginity at thirty six has to stop by the the Grand Union pickle aisle first. And the mustard. My god. Downright painful. The other questions were about Maxi Pads and vasectomies (this one prompted by running in to a friend in the supermarket parking lot, while Jack helped load the car, who was near tears because her husband had gone to the doc for the old snip/snip and had balked at the last minute and come home intact. Don’t get me started on the difference between a tiny nick to the balls and pushing an eight pound moving thing out of a canal half as small as a paper towel tube, attached to your body and surrounded by sensitive nerve endings, over a period of several hours. NO patience. ). This talk with Jack was amazing. I don’t know if I have ever been as proud of myself as a mother (other than, perhaps pushing the moving eight pound thing through the half size paper towel tube). We had a good chat, I stayed calm and was, if I do say so myself, quite articulate about things hard to be articulate about. Jack didn’t turn red or even look confused. He just wanted to know some answers and he knew when he was ready to hear them. He listened and sighed with relief when I think he realized that condiments had no part of romance even if penis/vagina contact did. I’m sort of with him. The thought of pickles in your bed, ohh, and relish?…..anyway. While I was proud of myself, I was even prouder of Jack. Brave boy, calmly taking advantage of some quiet time (save for the screaming cat) to ask something he wondered about. And really listening.

It got me thinking about all of us. Perhaps we all need to ask more questions. When things don’t seem right to us, rather than jumping to judgement in our confusion, or boarding the bandwagon of popular opinion, we need to ask questions. And lots of them. Some big. Some small. Can you leave your kids in the car while you run into the grocery store? If you don’t tell a friend she looks fat, is that lying. Does executing terrible criminals make sense or does it make us worse people? When does life begin and how do you reach a common ground when some people believe that abortion really is killing little babies? Why is Geithners plan the wrong one or the right one? Is Blue really the new Black? Or is Brown? Or, as I suspect, is black always going to be the new black? Why does my hairdresser, after years of fine work, suddenly give me a purple lowlight? What if the one I love isn’t really cold, but I’m just a bitch? Is a romance in cyberspace cheating? How do you take care of your parents when they’re old. Why do I have to wear a yellow raincoat that looks like it’s for babies? You can go on for ever. And I think we should. Talk to each other about all sorts of things, try to see how the other one thinks. See who knows what. Henry knows a lot. And acknowledge that you only know what you feel. And that it may not always be right. Just spend some time asking and answering. Go for a ride with someone you like (I recommend leaving the screeching, pus covered cat at home) and find out something you want to know. And something they want to know. I think we’ll all be better off. And stand less chance of spending large amounts of time in the ketchup aisle before a hot date.

PS. Okay, can we talk about my Pus-y, pissy, pussy line? And here’s some smart people talking about how to tell your kids about sex. Just wing it. You’ll be fine.(something pertinent)

Just a Thought

Jen Laird White — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:06:46 +0000

I ran into my friend Danny at the drugstore the other day. He was buying nosehair clippers. I was buying super strength nighttime anti-aging cream. Pretty much sums it up.

PS. Just a quick product endorsement, I was buying ROC, the strongest amount of retinol you can buy without a prescription. It’s good. and it’s only 19.95. I have no idea what kind of nose hair clippers he settled on but let me know if you want me to pursue that information.