4th Grade Teacher Crush

I met with Penelope's teacher this morning after a failed Halloween afternoon appointment with her. What was I thinking not canceling that shit anyway? Anyway. We got together today and I am still reeling.

She is every bit as wonderful as Penelope says she is. She is strong and blond and beautiful and engaging and willing to do whatever she can to help my kid.

She didn't flinch when I told her we don't expect Penelope to be an academic. That instead we expect her to be happy and successful. She didn't flinch when I told her that my kid's incredible reading ability is for function only, that reading for story and pleasure couldn't appeal less to her.

She actually read all of the information I sent to her on girls with Fragile X. She wrote down everything. We made a plan so PJ doesn't have to see her pretty shitty grades on math tests and reading comprehension tests. The plan will give my girl confidence and not break her stride.

We made coordinated gagging sounds over the motherfucking Common Core.

She told me Penelope is gentle. That she doesn't raise her voice. That she is polite and helpful and raises her hand to answer every single question that gets asked in class. She also told me that if she needs to know what went down during the many, many drama-fueled 4th grade outbursts in class, she asks PJ for the truth. Ever watchful, observant student of human nature, PJ.

And she also agreed to come to speak to the class about Fragile X (Penelope's idea). She asked if I would do it for the whole grade so all the kids and all the teachers can benefit.

I'm gonna be smitten for a while with this one.

Secret Weapon

I am who I am because I am the mother to Lincoln. I did not know what I was capable of until he revealed himself to me.

This is important. This is special and unique and rare and I do not take it lightly. I am lucky. My gift was given from within and is impossible to ignore and every single day I am telling you that I feel joy and love and peace that can not be named when that boy wakes up and says "hi, mama" to me.

He is why I can keep on loving and not give in and change and move and grow.

He is why I can't be bitter. Why I am calm. He is the reason I don't yell at my kids. The reason I understand that they, like me, aren't perfect and really just need a little bit more time to adjust…

That my father never met Lincoln is a tragedy because everyone who meets him knows he is magic. That he is a prince. That he is here to be good and to let you be good with him. Russell could have used a little Link in his life.  We all can.

RUSSELL J. O’BRIEN, of Grawn passed away Oct. 26, 2013, at the age of 71. Private family services will be held at a later date.

My father died. He lived in Michigan near his people. Michigan was a place the Quincy, MA O'Brien's migrated to many decades ago and when he and my mother divorced, I think it was the only place he felt was his. His mother lived there and she took care of him, protected him. Me and Lillian O'Brien may have been the only two people who loved him after the divorce and when she died and I grew up thousands of miles away in Nebraska, he disappeared into Michigan, made a new life and took his last breaths there.

I've written about Russell before. I've always described him as wholly unremarkable. He embarrassed us as kids with his overreacting and loosy-goosy emotional outbursts. No one liked him. His father hated him. My mother's family treated him badly (except for my cousins, those fuckers are always spreading the love! They are like a coven of good witches, seeing the best and broadcasting the news).

But when I was young, I was in love with my dad. He perpetually reeked of petroleum and I soaked that smell in like %100 oxygen. He had a soft, mushy belly that I would mold into loaves of banana bread as he watched Barney Miller and M.A.S.H in his olive drab naugahyde recliner.

He made my school lunches. He cooked most of my dinners. He was never mean to me and he never yelled at me and he never hit me.

He also disappeared. There was limited contact after he and my mom split I spent a summer with his wretched sister in Charlevoix, MI and he came to my high school graduation. The last time I saw him I was in my early 20's and he and my brother and I went to the movies and the diner just like a little divorced family should.

Then there were sporadic phone calls wherein he asked me for money. Lots of money. And the last real conversation I had with him I invited him to become a part of my family. I was married, had a beautiful daughter and told him that if he wanted in, he needed to call once in a while. Send a card for his granddaughter's birthday, maybe one for Christmas. I said he needed to try.

But he couldn't. And I moved on.

When I told Ruby he died she started to cry and I said No! Don't! I'm not sad, baby! Don't cry. And she said I'm crying because you're not sad and you should be able to be sad when your father dies.

Hot husband said the same exact thing. 

Those two. My loves, my heart. My god! My father died but he has been gone for so long already that I don't know what to do with myself.

He was married and I called his wife to tell her that I'm sorry she lost her love. That I'm sorry if he was in any pain and that I never thought he was a bad person.

She said he'd talk about me all the time. Me and my brother.

Is that enough? That's what I have swirling in my belly: The words of a stranger telling me that for at least the last 15 years, I was on his mind. Is that enough?

You're Getting Very Sleepy...

Sick is weird. Hazy and depressing and self indulgent. Sleep is my favorite cure.
This sick isn't long-term, though. It feels flighty and itching to move out already. But it keeps coming back to the apartment to get that one last thing it forgot...

I slept as much as I could these past 24 hours and now it's all taking care of shit again until I can go back to bed tonight and sleeeeeeep some more.

Lincoln doesn't feel good, either. He's going on like a solid week of a nagging, thoughtless bitch of a cold that couldn't care less how much it is hampering with a small boy who has a hard enough time expressing himself when he's well, forget about when he's under the weather.

He won't knowingly take medication. He can't blow his nose. His gag reflex is nonexistent and he hurls vomit like one of those crazy sprinkler head toys we had when I was a kid... what the hell was that thing called? Anyway, vomit everywhere even if it's just a little bit.

And while I understand that many of your children suffer from these same inadequacies, internet people, I don't give a shit today.

Today I am reminded of all the sleeps I've ever taken to make a sick go away. And it usually works. Usually.

But that time, about 3.5 years ago when we found out Lincoln had Fragile X, sleep was no gift of wellness. Sleep was hell.

Sweet man would cry in his sleep and wake up crying and go to sleep crying. I dreamt. Dreamt of a million sons that weren't mine. Just hell.

Last night during my marathon of get-well-sleep I dreamt of a boy. An amazing magical kid who was so alive! And capable! He was navigating me through an amazing landscape that was part 5Pointz Brooklyn, part Arizona desert, part suburbia, part sic-fi city. And he knew everything! Was telling me whatever there was to know about whatever we walked by and he was confident and surefooted and strong.

Now I know what you're all thinking, you lovely looking on the bright siders. But that's not the feeling I woke up with.

I woke up with dread. And sadness. And anger. And a real big hankering to just go back to sleep.

Daddy Knows Best

After hot husband lit a fire and poured me another glass of wine, he told me what the littlest elf said to him as he tucked her into bed:

"Dad, will I always have Fragile X?"
"Yup. I mean, unless there is a cure for it someday."
"Good." She says. "I like being different."

Ok. Ok, ok, ok.

Up until very, very recently, PJ denied FXS as her reality. And as she's accepted it, she's only spoken to me about it and only to say that yes, she knows she has it, blah, blah, blah.

My sweetie! Opening up! Talking to her dad and telling him how good it feels to not be like everyone else.

How I wish she said it to me! I'm so jealous! I want to crawl into his head and snuggle down with that nugget! Lucky bastard.

What not to wear (or do. or think.)

My newly minted high school freshman came home from her first day of school with so much information crawling out of her that, to be honest, I tuned a bit of it out. Then she started talking about the assembly with the school principal. The all girl assembly wherein they were talked to about being "appropriate".

I bristled. Non-conformists tend to do that so I didn't pay too much attention. I even offered up an explanation as to why the head of her school would be telling 14 year old girls why dressing a certain way can send "the wrong message". I said, "well maybe she's making up for the dumbness of the people who see you? Maybe she's saying they may think a thing you didn't mean by the way you look?".

She stared at me. Pissed. And went on to tell me that the boys get no such talk. That the boys are given a complete pass and aren't asked to absorb any responsibility for the way they act when they see girls just being girls. That it was made patently clear that the girls are responsible for sending the message and the boys are merely the receivers.

Uhm. WHAT?

She also said that the principal specifically called out girls who have large breasts and said those girls should be particularly careful about the clothes they wore so as not to draw too much attention.

Now my kid is 13 years old. She's accelerated a grade and a full year younger than her peers. She's also 5'5", 125 pounds and wears a 36D bra. And the message she gets on her very first day of high school is that she is somehow responsible for the perceptions of everyone who sees her?

I watch some TV,  I read magazines and I am an internet whore. I see the way young women are marketed to but to hear that this was blatantly happening in our schools was a bigger shot to the gut than a Dorito-taco-nacho-supersized-supreme-big-mac.

And it got me thinking about how we deal with the burgeoning sexuality of our middle-school and high-school aged kids. How what my kid heard from her female principal about her being solely responsible for unwanted advances based on the way she's dressed is leashed to the bigger elephant in the room, the still aggressive push to teach abstinence in schools.

Go to school, cover yourself. Don't think about sex. Wait till you're ready. Cover yourself.  Go home. Do your homework. Study. Don't have sex.

The current approach to sex ed is saying "No" as a defensive move.

My vision for my daughter and her friends and every other young, sexual being out there is "No" as offense. "No" because her sexuality and sexual actualization, sexual pleasure should not be tied to another person.

When she goes on a date, I don't want sex to be the only thing on her mind, clouding her away from who she is, who she wants to be to the world, what she wants to learn from other people. I want sex to be wholly and completely in her control.

Telling our kids to abstain but giving them no alternatives is maddening to me! I can't imagine how it feels to the hormone fueled young people it's people preached to.

We are sexual. We are here to breed, to reproduce and propagate the species and we do that with sex and as much evolution we've gone through, our lizard brains hold TIGHT to that mission.

We can't remove sex; we have to re-frame it and hand it back to our daughters a complete package that is theirs to control no matter how they look/dress/are.

More to come.

My eternal +1

This having a kid thing really has its perks. The other night, the delicious oldest daughter let me take her and a friend to a concert. She keeps doing this, by the way. She keeps letting me in, listening to what I have to say, and then saying a whole bunch of brilliant stuff back that opens more and more avenues of connection. Connections thick like her glossy locks and her stares that see to everywhere.

So, with her approval, off we go to see Walk the Moon at Terminal 5 in NYC. Now this is a band I crammed into my head like Play Doh last summer. Is there a superlative for the word 'repeat'? Because I need that word. Because that word is what I did with their album last summer and seeing them live with my daughter dropped me right back in that mobius strip of over and over awesome.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that getting old doesn't really appeal to me (and I mean, losing touch, relevancy, a connection to popular culture). This is so hard to articulate for some reason. I think maybe because when I was Ruby's age I remember looking to everyone else for myself.

But that now that I am who I am I can BE WHO I AM. I can!

This show was my favorite so far. Ruby was familiar with the venue so she staked out our spot. She held her ground and dug in deep and the kid nailed it. Every once in a while I'd move my eyes from the stage and check our crew and we were all up to our eyeballs in the show. All singing and dancing and jumping and fist pumping and smiling and sweating.

That I get to have this now, this revelry in my vessels...

She gives this to me. My child. She listens and opens the door for me and makes a super cozy spot on the couch right next to her so we can be and get our brains blown open with talent and grace and humility and gratitude.

During the show I fell in love with everyone about a thousand times. And every time that girl of mine looked my way or touched me I won the whole world.