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I just called Hugh a little prick. I'm no expert, but something tells me that Good Parents do not call their sons pricks. Oh, of course they do, but not out loud and in front of them. One might think it, one might even mutter it, one explodes and says it to friends on a night out over drinks. . . but one does not call one's son a prick to his face.

One does not, but evidently I do.

I've never called him a prick before, but I'll confess I have called him a colossal shit on, well, not numerous occasions, but certainly more than once. But that doesn't seem as bad. I'm of Dutch descent, and in Dutch "shit" is not a swear word. Or so I've been told--I don't know any Dutch. I do, however, know with total certainty that Dutch Americans say "shit" all the time. Even my mother, who to my knowledge has never ever used words such as damn or hell or "God/Jesus/Christ" in any but a sacred sense, and whose lips probably wouldn't even form the sounds for "fuck," even my mom says "shit." Usually in the phrase, "Oh for shit's sake"--with the result that it is not uncommon to hear toddlers in our extended family mutter, "Oh for shit's sake" when they drop a sippy cup or can't get a puzzle piece to stay put.

So anyway. Calling my son a colossal shit (or, for lesser offences, a little shit) never seemed to me to be poor parenting. Just accurate labeling.

But, "you little prick"--definitely more problematic. Accurate, yes, but still, perhaps not the best word choice.

And the really awful thing is just a few hours earlier, with said son being, well, a total prick, I turned to the Countertop Guy (our kitchen redecorating is proceeding, if at a glacial pace) and said, "Um, any chance you'd like a teenager? I'll sell him at a discount price." And he first laughed and said no, no, he'd already done that. He turned away, then suddenly swiveled, hesitated, looked at me, seemed to make a hard decision, and said, "You know, I could tell you something that might help. It's just that, umm, it will make you sad." I thought, oh geez, now even the Countertop Guy is going to point out my complete failure as a parent. But instead, he said, "My 18-year-old son. We lost him. He was killed in a car accident." I stammered out, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." And he smiled and admitted that teenagers were hell, but maybe in the midst of the hellish times, if I could just think about his son, well, maybe that might help, you know, put it into perspective.

And an hour or so later I'm telling my kid he's a little prick.

And now I have to figure out a way to make sure he knows that it doesn't matter. That he can be a little prick, a little shit of a prick, even a fucking colossal prick, and I will still absolutely completely utterly love him. I might not want to be in the same room with him for awhile, but dear God, sweet Jesus, holy Christ, I will always, without condition, without control, love him. The little shit.

Fashion Revolution

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. . . actually, just hats and gloves. And I'm not really the Walrus. I think that was John Lennon.

Anyway. I've been looking at my hands. They are old lady hands. Wrinkly. And there are these spots. They used to be freckles--charming, mischievous, evoking a youth spent dropping from the rope swing into the lake (there was no swing; there was no lake; there wasn't much of a youth-but the freckles didn't know that). Now these insouciant little freckles have morphed into age spots. Just like my mom's. Geez. Just like my Gram's. They (the age spots, not Mom and Gram) look like some amoeba-like aliens planning their conquest of the human race.

And then there are the fingernails. Or lack thereof. I try. I really do. And for a month last spring, I actually did have nails. A brief, shining moment of being good at being female. But then I reverted to my usual ragged, jagged nails bit to the quick, bleeding cuticles, pus-pulsating hangnails. I can't help it. Life is hard. Fingers are close at hand. I bite. I tear. I chew. I pick. I prod. I peel.

So. The solution, obviously, is a grass-roots renaissance of gloves. Not utilitarian winter gloves, which clearly would not catch on here in the Deep South. I mean, ladies' gloves. Gloves for all climates and classes. Elegant, silk-like elbow-caressing gloves. And little lacy white wrist gloves. You know, gloves. The sort of gloves I have some vague, primordial memory of my mother wearing to church. And even me, as a very little girl, in white fake patent-leather shoes and white tights and a pastel blue church dress. And gloves.

And if we're doing gloves, then we must do hats. Again, fuzzy, hazy pictures come swimming up from long ago of my mother and the other Ladies, bedecked and bedazzling up on top. Think of it. No more Bad Hair Days. The ability to put off your roots touch-up for another month. No more blowdryers and curling irons and straightening rods, no more mousse and gel and paste and wax and "Product." Just pop on that sexy little beret. A dashing toque. A demure yet ooh-la-la pillbox. A jaunty newsboy cap. A feminine, postmodernist take on the cowboy hat. Oh, the possibilities are endless.

But if the grassroots Hats-and-Gloves movement fails, then I suggest we all adopt the hijab in solidarity with our Muslim sisters. Or shoot. Given the realities of the Body Facing 50, let's just go for the fullout burka. All this time, I've identified the burka with oppression, but honestly, maybe it would be the ultimate liberation: Time to go to work? Pull on the burka and you're heading out the door, 60 seconds max.

But I've got my eye on the cutest straw cloche with a black silk ribbon, paired with lacy black cotton gloves. Maidens of menopause, unite!

The Dude abides--but not here

My 18-year-old son wants to connect me with a drug dealer.

Owen is in his first year of college in Portland, Oregon, where medicinal marijuana is legal. Well aware of my chronic headaches, he's decided weed is just the thing.

I'm touched that he's been thinking about me. But. "I can't smoke weed, Owen," I tell him. "I don't know how to smoke. I've never smoked anything." It's true. Weird, I know, but true. I grew up in a family of cigarette smokers so I rebelled in adolescence by not smoking.

"It's ok, Mom. You don't need to smoke. You can use an inhaler. I've thought it all through."

I remind him that pot remains illegal in Louisiana and that if he brought it home from Portland, he'd be transporting illegal drugs across state lines. And that's bad, if I remember my cop shows correctly.

Deep sigh. "Mom. It's not called pot any more. It's weed. Only people who say 'groovy' call it pot."

I'm thinking that if I don't know what to call it, I probably shouldn't smoke it. Or inhale it. But Owen's excited. He explains that he's talked to Neal and that Neal is absolutely psyched to procure weed for me. Neal is a high school buddy of Owen's and a great favorite of mine. Also, as it happens, a pothead. Excuse me, umm, weedhead?

Once again, I'm touched and a little teary. I mean, my son and his friends have plotted drug running on my behalf.

And I am tempted. I have daily headaches, and according to my research, marijuana would probably offer some relief. And even if it didn't, maybe I'd become more, you know, Dude-like. People do not associate me with the Dude. The words "mellow" or "laid-back" or "chilled" do not, somehow, feature very strongly in descriptions of me. Dudedom would be lovely, I think.

But I can't do it. I can't even drive by a police car without feeling furtive and guilty, though I've never had as much as a speeding ticket, let alone any more serious brush with the Law.

So, Dudedom must wait. I am, however, thinking about a trip to Amsterdam for my 50th birthday.

Grounding and Garbage

Hugh is grounded. Again. "Can't you think of a different punishment for once?" Hugh demanded. Dweeb parents that we are, we can't.

Could be worse, I tell him. My brother J.T. was grounded for his entire senior year of high school--and even into that summer. It didn't initially start out as a year-long grounding. I think first he faced a month-long detention, but just as the month was ending, he snuck out of the house. And got caught. So the month became three months. And then, just as the end of his purgatory was drawing nigh, yes, out he snuck again. And got caught again. Poor J.T. He really really wanted to be a Bad Kid, but he just wasn't very good at it. Anyway, on it went, for his entire senior year.

We kid my mom now, about the endless grounding. It's not really fair as she was generally quite creative in the punishment department. Take the time she found some pornographic magazine--not Playboy, not Penthouse, far beyond that--that J.T. had tucked in amidst the towels in the bathroom. (Like I said, he was really very bad at being bad.) Mom didn't say a word. But that night, when we sat down for dinner, there was no plate at J.T.'s place. "I've made something special just for you," she explained to him. Cheryl and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes; it wasn't out of the ordinary for my mother to cook just for one of the boys. In fact, once there was no longer a boy at home, Mom simply stopped cooking altogether. The fact that Cheryl and I were there, well, that didn't count. But--I digress. Back to the fateful dinner. So daughters roll their eyes, son anticipates a treat, we all say grace. And then my mom gets up, pulls a plate out of the warm oven, and sets it in front of J.T. On it sat a pile of garbage, an oozing glop of gunk from the trash can. And then, very calmly, she said, "If you're going to put garbage in your mind, you'll put it in your body."

I was totally impressed.

I was even more impressed by what she said next: "If you ever show such disrespect to me or your sisters again, you'll eat nothing but garbage at my table." I was 15. I had never thought of myself as someone to be respected. I certainly had never dared to think that any one of my five older brothers was supposed to respect me. I rather liked the idea.

Hugh hasn't a clue how lucky he is that I failed Creative Punishments.

Camping

Kitchen renovations stalled again. Still no sink. "Think of it as camping," I say to Keith.

Except we hate camping.

Booyah

Significant health care reform--BOOYAH!

Politics is (are?) a weird thing. I grew up in a Republican household, although for much of my childhood, I had no idea. My parents never talked about politics. They always voted--that was a Christian's duty--but they never seemed to indicate that it mattered much, or maybe they just never thought there was anything to discuss.

This parental political vacuum left me free to make sense of the world with what I had on hand: a religously infused value system, an "eldest daughter" obsession with being good and doing right, a voracious reading habit, and, by and large, a genuine love of learning anything involving words rather than numbers. So, unguided, with none of the maps usually provided by family dictates and labels, I put all this together and, profoundly influenced by John F. Kennedy's Profiles of Courage (plus the fact that he was cute-as-all-get-out in the photos), concluded that I was a Democrat. After years in church services and Sunday School classes and family devotions and Bible classes, I could recite whole passages of the Old Testament prophetic condemnations of the rich and powerful who failed to ensure justice for the poor, as well as Jesus' teachings, such as "when I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me water." And, as I read and read and read in American history, it just seemed that the party that championed unions and social security and civil rights and the minimum wage and Medicaid was the party of the right and good.

I was stunned to discover, then, that most of my family disagreed, shocked to realize that my parents (small business owners) regarded unions as evil, genuinely horrified to learn that my mother had voted for Barry Goldwater. Barry Goldwater. I mean, geez.

Now of course as I grew older and read more and saw more, things grew more complicated. I grew up in suburban Chicago, in the shadow of Richard Daley. Daley's machine--not exactly a force for right and good. And my gorgeous JFK: turns out he was a Cold Warmonger who desperately crawfished on civil rights throughout his short life and of course launched us into Vietnam.

Still, despite all that, despite my family's objections, I could never see any other way to embody my religious beliefs in political terms, other than to be a Democrat.

And then in my sophomore year of college, I took a course on the social and cultural history of the U.S., and it changed my life. It introduced me to social and cultural history, for one thing, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But more to the point of this posting: in the lecture on LBJ, Nixon, and Medicaid, the prof said, "Now let me be clear and let me be honest here. I strongly believe that a civilized society is one that ensures that all its citizens have access to decent health care." I had never thought about health care before. When I got sick, Mom took care of me. But this lecture, and that particular statement--they tore open the universe.

That was 30 years ago. I've been a staunch advocate of universal health care ever since. We're not there yet. But damn. We're a helluva lot closer. BOOYAH!

Girlie Glam

I'll confess, I wanted daughters. Actually, it's not much of a confession. Anyone and everyone who knows me knows my longing for a daughter. Not instead of my sons, mind you, but in addition to. (Well, ok, it is true that I have proposed a straightforward swap to my sister Cheryl on numerous occasions--"I'll trade you Hugh for either Elizabeth or Allie"--but that's only because both of her girls seem like they really should be mine, and Hugh really wants a mom who wears high heels, drives a cool car, and has granite countertops.) Nonetheless, I have found raising sons fascinating.

Particularly the gender-bending. By the time Owen was three, I waded daily through imaginary pools of blood and climbed over piles and piles of fantasy bodies--the pretend corpses of the Bad Guys slain by Sir Owen, Owen the Cowboy Kid, Pirate Owen, and Owen the Red Power Ranger. And yet, when we pulled up to the McDonald's drive-in window, he would ask for the girl's Happy Meal, because he preferred the mini-Barbies to the Matchbox cars.

With Hugh, the gender bending intensified. Unlike Owen, Hugh had no interest in Romance or History. With Owen, bedtime reading brought us to Narnia, to Prydain, to the Shire and Mordor. Hugh, however, preferred to read about shark habitats and the nocturnal habits of ants. When I traveled on imaginary excursions with Owen, we trekked to Camelot or Sherwood Forest, to the Alamo or to Perelandra. With Hugh, we drove to Shreveport. The point is, Owen found that sparkle and glamour, the sense of glory, the breach in the boundaries of space and time--all of which is so essential to make it through the agonies of childhood--from his rich fantasy life. Hugh had to find it elsewhere.

And when he was little, he found it in cross-dressing. Let's face it, boy's clothes are pretty boring. But walk on over to the girls' department, well, it's the stuff of fantasy: Glitter, lace, sequins, silk, velvet. Camis and slips. Shawls, feathery boas, capes. Nail polish. Eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, blush, lipstick. Earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, scarves, belts. High-heeled booties, strappy sandals, spiky-heeled and toeless pumps. Barrettes, braids, ribbons, tiaras, headbands. Who can blame a little boy in search of glamour and glory for plunging in? And so he did. At his request, I regularly painted his toenails (that way, he could hide the color when he felt it necessary and flaunt it when he found it safe). He saved up his weekly allowance to buy sparkly high heels from the Girlie Dress-Up aisle in Walmart's toy section. He adapted whatever was at hand (dish towels, my negligee's, aprons) to fashion evening gowns.

Then we moved to England, and on one school holiday took a trip to Scotland. And there were men in skirts. Men. In public. In skirts. Within 24 hours of our crossing the Scottish border, Hugh had a kilt. Which he proudly wore for the next two years--with his beloved cowboy boots.

Name it

Quite awhile back I watched a movie, the name of which I can no longer recall, that featured several women having a drink in a pub, and one of them was telling the others that for the longest time she thought clitoris was pronounced cli-TOR-is, "like a woman's name." And I was tickled because for the longest time I thought vagina was pronounced veh-JEEN-ah, and that it really did sound like a lovely name for a girl. As does vulva, actually. "Have you met my daughters? This is my eldest, CliTORis, and this is VaGINa, and our the baby of the family, Vulva?" But it's not just specifically female body parts. Divorce rectum from its meaning and just focus on the sounds. Now, isn't that a rugged guy's name? Or urethra. It's quite pretty. I can imagine meeting girls named Tibia and Fibula, or a man named Clavicle.

I mean, it's no more odd than the fact that my classes are now populated by individuals named after cities in Texas--Houston, Austin, Dallas, Tyler. I'm just glad Lubbock never caught on. And then there are all those girls named Reagan.

Keith says we should have named Owen and Hugh "Carter" and "Clinton," just to balance things a bit.

Sitting on Eggs

I attend a church that is very careful to use gender-neutral language in all hymns, prayers, and liturgical forms. Honestly, I don't see the point. God is clearly a guy. Only a Guy God would have created, or allowed the evolutionary process to create, something as poorly designed as the female body. Particularly down there.

So yes, I have spent the last several days dealing with "female problems." As in, I'm trying very hard to understand the nuances of a rather complicated argument in a book of essays on Victorian constructions of Englishness vs Britishness, but actually all I'm really thinking is, damn, my crotch really burns.

It's quite amazing, given the structural flaws of the female body design, that women ever achieve anything of intellectual note. So often I feel like nothing more than a host for various infections, a bacterial breeding ground, a playyard for little squiggly viral bodies. If it was just me, I'd figure, well ok. It's me. Insomniac, headache-prone, neurotic, allergic, nutty me. But it's every woman with whom I am intimate enough to be familiar with the state of her vagina and vulva. So, I figure it's probably every woman, tho' I haven't yet accosted my regular supermarket check-out girl or the department secretary to see if my theory is correct. But my sister Cheryl is constantly having to insert yogurt up there to get the proper bacterial balance and my good friend Karen regularly sits on a warm hardboiled egg for relief. Yes, she sits on an egg. When I get really down, I think of Karen on her egg and feel bizarrely comforted.

Except the thing is, if God were female, if God at least embraced femaleness, we wouldn't have to sit on eggs. I have few religious beliefs of which I am absolutely certain, but this one, this one, is indubitable. Like Luther, "Here I stand, God help me, I cannot do otherwise." Except I'm not really standing; it's more of a crouch, really, because fuckkkk, it hurts down there.

Fire hydrants

When Owen was about 3, he announced that when he grew up, he wanted to be a fire hydrant. "That's great, honey," I said encouragingly, "you'll be a wonderful fireman." He fixed me with his "oh-you-sad-woman" glare, and replied, "I don't want to be a fire man. I want to be a fire hydrant." I blamed Keith's side of the family.

Lately, tho', I've been reconsidering Owen's career ambition, and thinking maybe I dismissed it too hastily. I think I'd like to be a fire hydrant. I look good in red, for one thing. And there's something quite appealing about the idea of a life of squatting on the street corner, stolid, solid, just being, yet at the same time performing an invaluable if little-used function. Of course, there would be the occasional shower of dog pee, but I figure I can handle that. At least when dogs pee on you, they do so with honesty and integrity. No dressing it up with a genial, "Oh, by the way, a quick word, if you don't mind;" no papering it over with labels like "constructive criticism" or "peer review." They just piss, shake, and move on.

I wish I could piss, shake, and move on. But I can't. So I'm aiming for fire hydrant-hood instead.

Bless ye, St. Patrick

I feel like I should be using a teeny-tiny typeface here, to signify that I am whispering. If I speak too loudly, I might jinx things. I fear disrupting whatever cosmic alignment has brought about this extraordinary development: three entire days without a major conflict with Hugh. I wish I could say it's all due to my extreme self-control, amazing sensitivity, and mastery of behavioral therapy. But, it's not. I didn't do it. St. Patrick did.

Every year Baton Rouge has a big St. Patrick's Day parade that rolls right in front of our house. Now, you have to understand that in south Louisiana, you don't just watch a parade. It's not, in fact, about watching at all. It's about The Party. Louisianians aren't really very good at things like, umm, government. Or education. Or economic development. Or urban planning. Or race relations. But partying. That we have down to an art form. By the time the St. Pat's parade rolls at 10 am on the Saturday nearest the actual holiday, the crawfish are boiling, the chicken frying, the burgers grilling, and the beer flowing. In vast quantities.

But this year, I declared that we wouldn't be joining the party. At least not in the sense of having our usual party. Kitchen renovations remain stalled: still no floor, no sink. So no party, no way.

Hugh went nuts. Hugh loves St. Patrick's Day. Hugh loves parades. Hugh especially loves the St. Pat's parade.

So, we compromised. I agreed he could have a party. Which meant he would have to do it. And he did. All on his own, with nary a prod or reminder or nag. He planned the menu, did the shopping, mowed the lawn, tidied his room, trimmed the bushes around the deck, cleaned the lawn furniture, readied the coolers. By 7 am on parade day when he brought me my cafe' au lait in bed (!!!!), he had already baked brownies, iced the drinks, and readied the veggie tray. And he was happy. So happy. Pleasant. Polite. Talkative. Fun to be around.

Hugh is 15. He is not happy. He is not pleasant or polite or talkative or fun to be around. Not with me.

But he was. And (sshh, don't say it too loudly), still is.

All of which reminds me how crucial it is to remember the Truth that I first realized when Hugh was two years old: this child hates being a kid. He's not really very good at it. But maybe, just maybe, he'll be really good at being an adult. Which would be great. At least one of us should be.

Avon Calling

My new Avon Lady is named Alan. Alan the Avon Lady. I decided I should support Alan and place an order. So I plunged into the Avon catalog: first a range of skin care products for the "20+" crowd. Moving on. Then the "30+s." Flip a few more pages. Ah, the "40+" line. But no, wait, I'm going to be 50. Shuffle some more pages. And some more. And some more. Turns out there is no "50+" section. Evidently when it comes to skin care for "50+", it's Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Alan the Avon Lady has some explaining to do.

Sex Cat

I had my first real haircut--as in, I wanted it and I chose what happened--when I was about 12. Given that I'm almost 50, that means 38 years of hair cuts, and let's see, sometimes I went three, even four months without a cut, but sometimes I've had quite short hair that needed cutting every four weeks, hmm, let's say 6 cuts per year on average-- I come up with 228. Let's round up to 230.

230 haircuts in my life.

Why, then, did I believe Current Haircutting Guy when he assured me that the new cut would have a "tousled, playful" effect, and that it would be a style with "lots of action, lots of movement"? I hadn't realized hair was supposed to be active; guess I've always just assumed my hair was supposed to be a couch potato. But hey, movement sounded good, so did the whole tousled, playful thing. I'd like to think I'm playful and, well, tousled. In a good way. A feminist sort of tousled.

Turns out "tousled and playful" translates, in non-Haircutting Guy-speak, as "frizzy." And "action" and "movement"? It means "straggly." It means "mad menopausal woman with bad hair."

Awhile back, ok, a long while back, when I was in my early-to-mid-30s, I went to a new Haircutter Guy, and he studied me and my hair for awhile with a kind of sad and concerned look, then sat down on his stool, and declared, "What you have here is a Schoolmarm Look. But I, I think we should go for something more like a Sex Kitten."

Absolutely. I stuck with him for years. All we ever achieved was Poofy Southern Lady hair, but hey, the promise of Sex Kittenhood was so enticing, I kept coming back.

I want to be a Sex Kitten. All right, all right, all right. Facing 50, I'll settle for Sex Cat. I want to be a Sex Cat.

And even after 230 haircuts, I refuse to give up hope. I have faith. After all, I'm a Chicago Cubs fan. And a Christian. And even a firm supporter of single-payer universal health care for all Americans. We shall overcome some day. And on that day, I will be sporting playful, tousled hair. I will be a Sex Cat.

With apologies to Jane Austen

So I was reading this article about all the new cupcake shops suddenly springing up all over. Even Baton Rouge has a couple of these cupcake places. The reporter explained this phenomenon by arguing that in economic hard times, a cupcake seems a small and therefore acceptable splurge. Nonsense.

Why all the cupcakes? It's obvious. Like almost everything else, it's all down to the baby boom. Well, half of the baby boom. Half of the baby boom is entering or deep within menopause.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any middle-aged woman in possession of raging hormones must be in want of a cupcake.

Teenager in Menopause, Part 2

I had my kids in my 30s, and I've never regretted that.

'Til now.

I thought it was a good idea to make sure I was at least somewhat sorted out and settled before trying to sort out and settle a couple of Little People. (Obviously I entertained such thoughts before I actually had any Little People. Once you have them, you realize you have no chance whatsoever of sorting out and/or settling them. You just hope to keep them alive until they can do their own sorting and settling.)

All that worked, as much as anything actually works when you're dealing with actual, still-living Little People, 'til now.

The problem is, I've entered menopause at the same time that Hugh has embarked on Being a Teenager. So the house pulsates with hormones, doors slam, cabinets rattle, the walls endeavor to contain the shrieks and accusations and utter rage--and then Hugh returns home from school. And the hormones and the slamming and the rattling and the shrieking and accusing and raging all multiply to the Hugh-nth degree.

We feed off each other. We feed on each other.

I know what I should be. What I'm supposed to be. What he needs me to be. The impregnable fortress to which he can retreat when he's defeated. The island of calm on which he can rest when he's exhausted. The laughter that reassures him when no one else gets the joke. The boundaries when all the fences seem to be broken and all the lines are muddled.

But I'm not. I am not impregnable. I am not calm. I do laugh, but it's more along the lines of maniacal cackling. I am hopelessly muddled. I can't even figure out what clothes to put on most mornings. I'm a friggin' history professor, for pete's sake. Clothing is not difficult. Docker's and a button-down shirt or long-sleeved tee-shirt, preferably with padded bra in case one gets excited (it's pathetic, but I do get excited when I lecture, not sexually, mind you, but my nipples don't seem to know the difference). This uniform has stood me in good stead for years, but now, every morning, my bedroom looks just like a, yes, a teenaged girl's room--shirts and sweaters and skirts and trousers and tights all scattered about as I frantically hunt for Something To Wear. Geez. I didn't do this when I really was a teenager. Why now? Because I'm insane, that's why.

And a teenaged boy, a genuine teenaged boy, needs a sane mother. If there's a version of What To Expect When You're Expecting for parents of teenagers (there must be by now), I'm sure it says that it is important to be sane. Probably just as important for mothering a teenager as making sure you get enough zinc when you're expecting.

And, when I was expecting, I was utterly scrupulous about taking zinc. (Well, not in Hugh's case, because he's adopted. But dammit, if I'd been pregnant with him, I would have been totally good about the zinc.) So, tomorrow, I'm seeing my doctor. I'll try HRT. Maybe it will make me a fortress or an island. Or at least a little less crazy.

[Teenager in Menopause I]

Not like that

Six weeks ago, we began kitchen renovations. It was supposed to be a three-week job. Now it looks like we'll be without a sink for at least another month, if not longer, and who knows when the kitchen will actually be completed. The price has nearly doubled.

Of course. That's the way it always goes with kitchen renovations. I know this.

Except not really. Everyone told me, and I nodded politely, but I didn't actually believe them. We had done our homework. We knew what we were doing. And most importantly, we are not Like That. We are Exceptions.

Except not really. I just hate that.

Like before I had kids and I met up with a friend who just had her first baby, and she went on and on about how she was so glad to get out and to see an adult and to think about something other than breastfeeding and spit-up, and then all she talked about was breastfeeding and spit-up, and when I drove away I thought, "Geez. Thank God I'll never be like that." And then I had Owen and we had a couple of childless friends over and at the end of the evening it dawned on me that I'd dominated the dinnertime conversation by describing each of Owen's first six bowel movements. In detail. Color. Consistency. Quantity. Overall olfactory ratings.

Just like that.

Or later in the grocery store with baby Owen--chubby-cheeked, chuckling, leg-kicking, arm-waving, toothlessly grinning. His colic has passed and I've lost all the baby weight and I'm feeling like, whoa, I've got this whole mom thing down, and I see some woman in a stained sweatshirt and mom jeans shrieking at some tangled-hair little kid wearing a torn Holly Hobby pj top and a bedraggled ballerina skirt and crying because she wanted the Disney Princess sticker pack. And I think, "Geez. Thank God I'll never be like that." And then a few years later I'm in the same grocery store, same goddamn aisle, and a little kid in Powerranger slippers, a pair of faded purple shorts two sizes too small, and my pale pink lace teddy is dragging on my arm and whining because he wants Shrek pasta shapes and I crack and scream, "I SAID NOOOOO!!!" and he throws himself to the floor, sobbing wildly. I look up, and there's this really pretty blonde Junior League type with her accessorized baby and they're both staring at me in horror.

Just like that.

And now I'm washing dishes in the bathtub and part of the sub-floor looks rotten and there's a problem with the vent for the oven hood. That's the way it always goes with kitchen renovations.
Just like that. I hate it when it's just like that.

Facing Facts

Well, Woman Facing 50 has to face the fact that if she does not resume daily exercise, by the time she is Woman Facing 55 her butt will be dragging along behind her in some obscene parody of those elegant trailing skirts worn by women in the 1890s.

Boot Gal Reporting In

So, a few posts back, I described my transformation into Boot Gal. This transformation included the purchase of a pair of totally wow, classic yet funky, knee-length, black leather riding boots. Gosh. Forget intellectual depth, cultural values, timeless spirituality. Forget a world in socio-economic crisis, on the verge of ecological disaster. These boots rock. I love striding around my life like Errol Flynn on steroids. Had I had these boots 20 years ago, sheesh, 10 years ago, who knows what I could have been by now. A senator. A corporate CEO. At the very least the chair of my department.

But that's ok. Money, power, prestige, status. . . . who gives a damn. I've got these kick-ass boots. Life is Good.

When we can do nothing

On the night of Clinton's re-election in November 1996, my niece Anne lost our car. These things happen.

In 1995 Anne was a freshman here at the university--like me, Anne was a Chicagoan in exile, tho' unlike me, by choice. She'd chosen to come down, to escape Family, yet to be with Extended Family (me). Naturally, I'd invited her to join us for our election-watch party that, given the results, turned into Quite The Celebration. At which my then-18-year-old niece got rather drunk. I figured it was ok. A learning experience. A Teaching Moment. She was spending the night. She wasn't driving. I'd be able to hand her Tylenol, hold her hair back while she vomited, and offer gentle, non-mom-like-but-totally-cool-aunt-like advice as she showered.

I was an idiot.

The next morning I awoke, as usual, to baby Hugh's cries. Plucking Hugh out of his crib and Owen from his bunk, I headed with my two pajama-clad little guys toward the kitchen. I turned on the light. Oh sweet Jesus. Something Gone Awry. A chair on its side. A couple of overturned bottles of red wine. Broken glass everywhere.

I did what I always do in a crisis: I shrieked, "KEITH!!" Said hero came running, well, stumbling, really, out of bed. "Geez," he said. We looked at each other and then, as one, went running toward the guest room where Anne was supposed to be sleeping. She wasn't there. She wasn't there. We ran outside. Neither was our Toyota Tercel. Anne, our regular babysitter, had her own set of keys to our house and the Tercel.

The next few hours were truly, tremendously, terrifying. When I was 13, my 20-year-old brother had died when his car crashed into a culvert as he was driving home late one night. A few years later, my sister was in a serious car accident. A year later, another brother was injured in another car accident. And then, a few years after that, that same brother. plus another and his two sons, my oldest nephews, were in a serious car crash that left two of them in comas. So--Anne, lots of red wine, our car--the possibilities were horrifying.

In fact, she was asleep in her dorm room. When we found her, well, we got the giggles. She was ok. Miserably hungover, but ok. And meanwhile, we couldn't find our car. Anne had no memory of the previous night. The car was nowhere to be found. We ended up having to call the campus police (Hello? Um, yes, we've lost our car. No, no, it hasn't been stolen. Just, um, well, misplaced). After several hours of searching thru the campus parking lots, we finally uncovered the Tercel. Parked perfectly. Anne turned out to be an amazingly capable drunk.

Flash forward to 2010. Owen is a freshman at a college far far away in Portland, Oregon. People say to me, "How can you stand him being so far away?" And I think, "He's 18. At least I have no idea what he's doing."

When Owen was 8, I took him for his second snow skiing trip to Colorado. Already attuned to All Things Cool, this time he wanted to try snow boarding, so I enrolled him in snowboard school. And, as it happened, I ended up on the chair lift just behind him as he headed up the mountain for his first snowboard run. Oh. Dear. God. Owen was in the middle of two bigger boys. The lift seat came around and up they jumped; he wasn't on properly, yet up the seat swung. So there I was behind him, watching my beautiful boy, the light of my life, the center of my existence, precariously dangling on this chair, while the two boys on both sides of him proceeded to kick their legs and swing the chair vigorously. I could do nothing. Cell phones had yet to be invented. I could do nothing. I could only watch my boy, his butt slowly slipping off the seat, as the chair moved higher and higher up. "It's ok, it's ok," I told myself, "no one dies slipping off a chair lift, right?"--in actual fact, a child died just that way at a ski resort in Colorado just a few months ago--while I watched, helpless, praying, praying, praying.

It really is best that we have no idea when they're dangling off the chair lift, when the seat is swinging and their butt is slipping off, when they're driving after drinking a couple of bottles of red wine, when they're 18, when we can do nothing.

On the bright side

One nice thing about facing 50 is that I now have an excuse for many of my failures, flaws, and disabilities. For example, I have this weird thing about numbers. I can't remember them. Keith was quite hurt when, several months into our relationship, he discovered I didn't know his phone number. Until I explained I didn't know mine, either. I carry it around on a little slip of paper in my wallet. My phone number, my address, my license number, the cell phone numbers of my kids and husband, let alone the phone numbers of friends and relatives--they slip and slide and blend into each other. The most embarrassing is the fact that frequently I cannot remember my children's birthdates. It's a problem when you're standing at the doctor's receptionist's desk and she spits out in her computer-like voice: "Child's date of birth?" and you stammer, "Umm, June. June 20----um, 28, no 27, right June 27." And she glares at you and says, "Year?" And you panic and blurt out, "Uh, 1990!" And she taps away, looks up suspiciously, and says, "Our records show he was born in 1991." And you have to admit, "Right. You're right. That's it. 1991." And then you wait for Social Services to appear at your door.

But now I can just blame my number thing on old age. Menopause. Hormones, ya know. Mention hormones and half the human race looks around wildly, shuffles his/their feet, and says, "OK. Gotcha. No problem."

In addition to the numbers thing, I'm also really bad at, well, common day-by-day observation. I just tend not to notice. To illustrate: when I first moved to Baton Rouge, every morning at 4 am I'd be awakened by what sounded to me like a bunch of semis sounding their horns as they blasted by on the interstate. So I was complaining about this one morning to my colleagues over coffee. I couldn't understand it; why would these truckers do this every morning? And why were they all on the interstate at that time every morning? My colleagues just stared at me. Finally Fred said, "Allison, you don't live near the interstate. You live near the train tracks. It's the train." I replied indignantly that of course I lived near the interstate, right by that overpass. And they all gently, gingerly, in that "we're dealing with a mad woman" sort of way, explained to me that no, no, there was no interstate highway under that bridge, just train tracks. So that morning I went and looked, for the first time actually looked, and damn, they were right.

Nowadays, I could just blame menopause. "It's the hormones, Fred," I'd say, and he'd duck for cover faster than a Greenpeace activist at a Tea Party Rally.

Once, some years ago, I admitted to Keith that I really feared getting Alzheimer's. And he replied, "But how would we know?"

Sort of a comfort, really.