Charlie and Sally grab the Lush bath bomb box, slide another of Tex’s indie records under it (it’s suddenly nice we have so many of them) and carry the mouse downstairs, with the plan to, as usual, liberate it onto the front porch. But at the bottom porch stair, the baby mouse, who managed to get up twenty-five stairs with absolutely no problem, does a belly flop onto the concrete and stops moving, stone-cold dead. Sally begins wailing. Gawd! It’s like a horror show!
I put my arms around her to comfort her, and . . . what? These are the Parent/Child Conversational Moments where I literally have no idea what to say. My usual route is to immediately go meta-philosophical, changing the topic so entirely that I confuse the child. I follow that up with simple lying.
“It’s just, honey— Don’t be sad! You understand that babies aren’t fully cooked yet, brain development-wise. They need several months to actually become individuals. Think human babies. Mice babies. Kittens. Oh, remember at our other house, when we had those oceans of feral black kittens. Furry, blinking, cute . . .”
And hell-bent on suicide, I now horribly remember. These seemed to be their tiny trains of thought: “Swimming pool? Let’s jump in! Who’s next door? Pitbulls! Yay! Can we run faster than this car? Apparently, no! Splat.”
So I just skipped the talk and pulled out ice cream. Rocky Road and Elephant Tracks. It seemed fitting.
“February”
Rebirthing Shoots of Grass in the Ice
“cheese therapy”
Pema Bollywood/The Goddess Within/Fifty-Sixth Birthday/My Goddess, Myself
MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE every time “Miracle Cure for Belly Fat!” appears on my computer screen, I click on it. Maybe it’s the suite of Pandora stations I’ve created—“jazz flute,” “soothing solo piano,” and yes, no apologies, “James Taylor.”
Fact is, the algorithms have found me—a middle-aged lady with a VISA card! So through every device now I’m being pelted with ads for “Christian singles over 50,” colorful plus-sized “Zulily” clothing, Zoloft, Cedars-Sinai arthroscopic knee surgery (the male announcer is so soothing I’m tempted to just have the surgery), and even . . . promotional e-mails from life coaches eager to help fiftysomething me become both a bold warrioress and a joyful goddess. Recent example:
Hello Beautiful Sandra Loh,
I want to help you break through the things that are holding you back so you can create more of the life you want and less of the life you don’t want, now!
We’ll work together to:
Clarify what you want to change
Foster self care
Honor your inner “no”
Bloom into your True Self
Find joy, joy, joy!
Beautiful Sandra Loh, welcome to Goddesshood!
SURE, WHEN WE were in our thirties, I suggested to my sister that as we got older and our ages became emotionally unwieldy, I could just give her a cake that said, “Happy Goddess Day!” on it. To which she said, “If you ever do that, I will kill you first and then I will kill myself.”
But really. What’s so wrong with the goddess thing? It is my birthday. That’s right.
After everything horrible that’s happened in our country and on our planet, more welcome news. I’m turning fifty-six! I’m now closer to sixty than fifty. Gah! What’s to celebrate?
I mean, by fifty-six, I’ve had career ups and downs. I have kids, a partner, and a house. In the main, I am fine. At this point, no single phone call is going to radically change my life, except for medical tests results, and those are not likely to be fantastic. (“Congratulations! You’re pregnant!” “Our scanner reveals that you have magically lost seventeen pounds!” or “We’ve literally found a million dollars inside of your body!”)
I’m trying to imagine what I’m going to become next. I’ve been a twentysomething ingénue, thirtysomething career girl, fortysomething mom, fiftysomething . . . what? Dame? Matron? Queen Mother? (Bella Abzug?)
Why not goddess?
Why not silvery goddess?
SUNDAY EVENINGS ARE not pretty. First, I think Sally is acting out because at 8:30 sharp I snapped off her TV show—always a traumatic event.
But no, the wailing continues over the fact that—of course—she hates all her pants. I have inadvertently dissed some of her stuffed animals by facing them in the wrong direction. She also misses her dad.
On the phone to him, as I wait just outside her door with her hot chocolate, Sally rails on and on about her miseries, in an escalating pitch, until finally, in real alarm, Ben asks, “Did something happen today?”
And out it comes, her youthful cri de coeur: “I HATE MONDAYS!”
“Well, everyone hates Mondays,” I say afterward, rubbing her skinny shoulders. “In winter, BLUE MONDAY is said to be the most depressing day of the year. It’s part the dark weather, part time elapsed since Christmas, part failing one’s New Year’s resolutions. God, now even I’m getting depressed.”
Her face still in her hands, Sally cracks a little smile.
So she can still be comforted, at least temporarily. But sometimes I worry about these huge storms of feeling that come over her. It’s not just her stuffed animals. She will weep over a seashell broken in a box. Or a snapped bird feather. When she was eight, a toothpaste cap disappeared down the bathroom sink drain. Wailed Sally, “That toothpaste cap was my best friend!”
Hannah, thank God, is the rock.
But the next day during lunch, Hannah texts me from school.
Mom, please pick up. I thought I aced my test in AP World History but I bombed it. I’ve dropped to a low C. I’m so scared and sad. ;(
Until now, Hannah has always sailed through school. But now that it’s sophomore year, she has three AP classes and it’s the first time her GPA actually counts. It’s like her grades are pinging around in a pinball machine, hitting every different letter of the alphabet. Plus her sleep/study habits seem like they were birthed in a jungle. Every morning at 5:30 a.m., when we have to get up, I find Hannah dead asleep, face smashed into her open history book, earphones still blasting (death metal—still even a thing?).
Having apparently missed her, I now call and call and she doesn’t answer. When I pick Hannah up after school, with great purring empathy, I ask whether we should resume EdLine—where parents have online access to their children’s grades. “Hell no!” Hannah says, completely refreshed, and reconfident. It’s like she has forgotten her woes already. “Wallace is allowing me extra credit, and so is Ms. Said in chemistry, which brings my GPA up to a 3.75.”
“Oh!” I exclaim. This is the first I’ve heard a GPA of any number.
“Uh-huh,” Hannah says, more obliquely. With an almost reptilian blink of her yellow-shadowed eyes (yellow? is that some Japanese thing?), the portals close again. It sometimes feels like my fifteen-year-old is auditioning multiple personalities on me. She’s alternately sassy, then vulnerable, then needy, then secretive . . . and I, her mom, am always one wrong step behind in the cycle.
Which is to say, between these two girls, I’m shell-shocked every day. The waves of their emotions batter against me. But I have to be a calm mom. I feel I literally have to not spasm, to keep my body soft.