Mind Body Mama: Love Letter to Seamus

My entry into Momalom’s Love It Up challenge: a love letter to my on-again/off-again martial arts training buddy Seamus who leaves for a new life in Tennessee (what the--?) this week.

Dude,

I know you are leaving soon and I have fairly spectacularly failed to say goodbye. I could blame it on a lot of things, like the fact that we just don’t fit into each other’s worlds in any kind of way that makes sense. (Seriously, do you see me fitting in at your karaoke goodbye party?) But the truth is I’m just not dealing. Jender asked me the other day how I felt about you leaving and I said, “I’m sticking with really, really pissed off.” So, there you have it.

The truth is that we stopped hooking up a while back, but so long as we both still resided in this neck of the woods there lived the possibility that on any given Wednesday night we’d be locked in a sweaty embrace, desperately trying to knock each other down. Or kicking each other across the floor with teeth-rattling power. Or practicing joint-locking pain-compliance techniques.

And laughing, always maniacally laughing.

When I met you—damn, I was jealous! You were this hot young phenom and you remembered everything they taught us. I had ten years’ training on you and just hoped to make up in depth and principles what I lacked in straight out memorizing. But then you started coming to my Saturday morning sparring class—hung-over—and I realized what a total goofball you are.

Somehow, along the way, you became my go-to person to practice anything with. The stick fighting that confused me, the falling that scared me, and the kicking that makes me love my life. I wanted to do it all, but I wanted to do it most with you.

I have trained with a lot of women in the past twenty-two years, and I have grown to love and trust many of them, but I have never had another training partner like you. I have trusted you with my body more than I have ever trusted anyone other than a lover—and if I’m honest I have to say I’ve had lovers I trusted less.

At the School of Love we say that training can bring up strong feelings, and that’s okay, but it’s one thing to say it and it’s another thing entirely to see someone else’s badass ugly rage and not want to run screaming off the scene. You and I always knew that our snarling snarkfest had more than a grain of actual anger running through it. And that was really okay because we were strong enough to hold it for each other.

Who would have thought to put the two of us together? I arrived in town with my wife in tow and my wild days a safe and distant memory while you were still stomping around in your army boots doing the Big Dyke Around Town thing. I bought a house and I’m pretty sure you slept in your truck, before it got towed. I had a baby and took her to story hour while you studied auto mechanics.

But it worked. I can’t think of another way we could have been friends but for the sheer delight we found in slugging each other. Maybe if we’d been really young together in the same city we could have squandered our connection on a drunken one night stand and a few months of really tired drama and bad poetry, but that would have been a flat-out waste. What we’ve had is the perfect dojo love story.

Did I ever thank you for everything you did for my black belt test? Like dying your hair Spike-blond, and reminding me not to punch you with my right arm after Strawberry almost broke it? Not to mention the months upon months upon months of loyal practice. That was your test too, I hope you know.

I love you like that bruise you get while sparring that doesn’t bloom until two days later and you smile when you see it because you remember how goddamned much fun you were having.

I love you like that predictably stupid fake somebody throws that still works after all these years.

Like the sneaky uppercut to the ribs,

like the way your wrist cracks in the hanging lock,

like the irritating sweep that takes your foot right out from under you and lands you on your ass,

I love you, man.

Safe travels. Don't forget us.

Lessons (1)

When we bought this old heap house, the bathroom featured broken Fifties-vintage plastic tile. The previous homeowner, affectionately referred to around these parts as “that dirt bag,” had not reached the conclusion that showering was off limits. We immediately recognized that restriction unless we wanted to transform our walls into a mold colony. So we got Seamus to come by with her hard hat and crow bar and tear the whole thing down to lathe and plaster. Sweetie’s next-to-biggest brother crept through crawl spaces no other human has ever seen to install plumbing and wiring and her biggest brother rebuilt the walls with glossy white subway tiles.

Moments later, I birthed baby Small.

So we had a shiny, functional shower but perhaps not the greatest amount of attention to lavish on its upkeep.

Years later—two? Three? I am not the best at tracking the SAHM period of my life— I noticed that the subway tile—or more specifically, the grout—was no longer shiny. At the end of the stall where the shower head is the grout was yellowed and scuzzy looking. At the far end it was as clean and bright as the day it was laid.

That’s when the shame started dogging me. Unlike the rest of this dirty old place, I felt responsible for this tile. I could remember the day we bought it from the smart, sassy Irish saleslady in West Springfield and left the showroom asking each other if there weren’t more things to tile in the house—she was that good. I could remember the brother’s red reading glasses sliding down his broad nose and the way he held his beer bottle in one hand and tilted his head to survey the placement of the next tile. This shower stall represented one tiny corner of my home where a century of other people’s dirt did not precede my tenancy, and I had failed to keep it pristine.

While I felt ashamed and inadequate every day, I never felt compelled to change my cleaning routine.

Which was this: Every six months or so I would agonizingly choose between a green cleaner and a toxic cleaner. Every six weeks or so I would squirt the chosen cleaner onto the dirty tile. The grout would fail to immediately resume its original whiteness at which point my shame transmogrified into frustration, bitterness and anger.

“I don’t know how to clean this!” I would howl—sometimes to Sweetie, but more often to myself. I’d think of the clean, bright homes of my mother and sister and grandmother’s and sister-in-law, and how they would never have let this happen. Occasionally I would spend an afternoon standing in the shower with a toothbrush or a tiny bleach pen, obsessively cleaning the grout with the same lack of results.

The whole experience of failure was so exhausting and upsetting that I’d need at least a month to recover before I could try again.

I kept that up for a few more years.

Six months ago I had some kind of shower epiphany. I have noticed that these surges of self-efficacy have corresponded to Small’s developmental stages: The first time she slept through the night, we painted the dining room. Something about her first grade self determination restored the emotional wherewithal required to shift my shower stall gears.

I decided to act like a person who cleans her shower stall once a week. I expected it to keep looking awful, but I’d know it was cleaner and maybe that would make me feel better. Every Monday I squirted cleanser onto that tile; just the random toxic cleanser that happened to be on the closet shelf. I felt a frison of environmental guilt but determined to take this project on without agony: the next bottle of cleanser might be a gentler brand. I didn’t take hours with a toothbrush or waste evenings Googling “How to clean grout.” I just squirted the cleanser on the tile, wiped it off, and moved along. When it didn’t get newly, beautifully clean the first week, or the second or even the third, I forced myself to think positive. “Oh well, maybe next time.”

Gradually, the grout got clean. Now, you might not even notice a difference between the shower-head end and the dry end. It’s unremarkably, simply clean.

There’s no way to tell the story that exactly explains how this felt like a tiny little miracle in my soul. Every Monday I squirted something out of a bottle and a month later a burden of guilt I’d been carrying for six years lifted off my conscience.

Aha! I thought. There is a lesson here. I could even write about it: “Imperfect effort, applied consistently, will yield results.” I thought about how already knew this lesson from karate, how just showing up is more important than doing things perfectly.

I felt very smug, and serene, and wise from my Zen shower lesson.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and I noticed how discolored the grout was on the bathroom counter that was installed two years ago. My conscience started twisting and whining. “I don’t know how to clean this!” it howled.

For the love of God. I thought I could generalize the lesson to my whole life, and I couldn’t even generalize it to the whole bathroom.

Abundance

There is no better recommendation for voluntary simplicity than the great Christmas schlep. Somehow this year I was able to name and know this, and therefore hold back my humbug even as I moved things in and out, up and down in this little house for days on end.

Adding to the schlep of gifts in and packaging out, ornaments up and storage boxes down, tree in and furniture to other rooms was the fact that we’d been on auto-pilot since before Thanksgiving and there was a pile-up of detritus in every wrong place: bedroom toys littering the living room; library books hiding among Small’s own books; my shoes in the four corners of everywhere; blizzards of paper. Great stacks of laundry spilled forth from the second floor closets, needing to be washed in the basement, folded on the first floor and put away throughout the house.

I would have said—and I would have been backed up on this, at least by members of my family who find my aversion to capitalism distinctly odd—that we live a simple life. Not an off-the-grid life by any means, but a life which is not defined by earning and owning. I heard a lot of pissing and moaning this holiday season of the variety of how can we have a meaningful Christmas and not spend a lot? And, won’t I disappoint my children if I don’t buy them all the crap their friends are getting? Sweetie and I covered the “meaning” part of Christmas several years ago when my humbug was really bringing her down.

I am—I suppose, now and forever, for better or worse—the Director of Physical Reality of the Interior for our family. Which is to say: the lawn could turn black and die overnight and I would blithely walk past it without noticing, but I am responsible for tracking every item that passes our threshold. Every ATM receipt; every toy beloved one moment and abandoned the next; every piece of clothing to be washed and dried in accordance with label; every ornamental chicken displayed proudly on our porch that gets dusted and washed and dried and replaced on a freshly wiped shelf twice a year whether it needs it or not.

The weight of the physical reality of Christmas dragged me down, which made Sweetie sad because she wanted to love Christmas with me, to enjoy ourselves and find meaning and fun. So we brainstormed the things we loved about the season—not carrying countless boxes of fragile ornaments up and down the basement stairs and painstakingly unwrapping and hanging them, perhaps, but drinking festive beverages and listening to the Peanuts Christmas soundtrack. Not the obligatory hunk of dead flesh we have to serve the collected masses on New Year’s Day, but a date for dim sum at the best Chinese restaurant in the Valley.

And so we created a road-map for the six weeks from Thanksgiving to New Year’s marked with the highlights of our season. While I’m still the able bodied schlepper, I am largely released from the ornament adventure and its piles of newspaper and tangled hanging wires and empty boxes. Instead, I get to stop by to admire my family’s progress between batches of salted caramel popcorn, taking a turn around the room to the piano stylings of Vince Guaraldi.

***

But as small and restrained as our Christmas—and our life, by extension—is, I am still struck by its abundance. For us the season of un-Christmassing lives on: the extra dining table never got dismantled, and now it doesn’t make sense to put it away with Chinese New Year around the corner. The Christmas tree got tossed just last week to make the deadline of the neighbor’s bonfire, and the boxes of ornaments still stall in the corner.

But abundance doesn’t strike me only in the volume of physical reality, although I ought to write myself a cheer for this time of year: “Schlep, schlep, schlep, schlep, fight, fight, fight!” I also see that no matter how carefully we winnow Small’s gift list and guide the relatives towards the essentials there are always more toys than can capture her attention, more games than we have time to play. Items set aside on Christmas day have yet to be rediscovered; I will find craft kits unopened and gifts untouched as I prepare for next Christmas, just as I did this year.

Even our Christmas dinner had a “loaves and fishes” quality to it: the modest menu we had planned continued to feed us for three days. On the holiday itself we did not even make the entrée or dessert: instead we spent the afternoon assembling the Vietnamese summer rolls that were to be our appetizer and lolling around sated after eating an enormous platter full of them.

***

I would do well to remember that we have much more than we need. And that our simplicity is to a great extent voluntary even if it does not always feel that way. Half empty I see the deck stacked against us: two women of working class origins, not a professional degree or trust fund among us. Half full I see that we have ordered our life in accordance with our values and that money—even when we long for more of it—never makes our top priorities.

mind body mama: Fire Season

In the early morning of December 27 the fire departments of The County Seat and its neighbors responded to a flurry of suspicious blazes in the neighborhood surrounding the two-hundred year old fair grounds. Before dawn broke two houses had burned to the ground. Several cars were destroyed and thousands of dollars worth of property was damaged. Two men died.

Two weeks later another local family was shattered when police arrested their young son on suspicion of arson—and murder.

This past Sunday, Our House of Worship rocked with a lay-led Martin Luther King Day service. After lunch I took Small contra-dancing and ran into the Birth Pie family along the way. It was after sundown when I finally got home and booted up the PC to see how my Facebook friends had passed their day. Sweetie turned on the evening news to get some intel on the slushy mix starting to fall from the sky. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Small on Sweetie’s lap, transfixed by the television screen.

I heard my wife murmur, “Yes, it’s sad, someone’s church burned down.”

In a second I was at their side to see a steepled New England meeting house engulfed in flames. With a few keystrokes I confirmed that this was the church beloved by a new friend; visited often by SpecK; whose minister performed the perfect wedding of the Life Coach and her sweet man in October.

There is something about the image of a church burning that makes me cringe. There is something about the image of a church burning on Martin Luther King Day, in a season of fires, that was too much for me to see. I turned my eyes away but not before my insides curled like singed paper. The picture I could only look at for an instant hit the morning paper above the fold and followed me through Monday. It was gorgeous and repulsive, haunting and indelible.

There is, as yet, no reason given for the fire at the hilltown church. Churches burn, apparently, brilliantly well. They are filled with fuel and oxygen that feed a hungry fire. It is a great blessing that no one died.

On Tuesday afternoon I looked up from my computer to see my factory-working, motorcycle-driving, beer-drinking neighbor coming up his driveway in a suit and tie, his body hunched against the icy rain, arriving home from his mother’s burial. Later that night the Massachusetts Democrats were sucker punched and ceded Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a right wing centerfold model. A week after natural disaster struck the most devastated nation in our hemisphere, the desperate people of Haiti still waited for help.

I curled up with Small on the sofa and finished reading Dennis Lehane’s masterpiece, The Given Day. The novel chronicles the human cost of the 1919 Boston police strike, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and a few crystalline moments of our nation’s bottomless capacity for racist, xenophobic violence. The next book I reached for was Geraldine Brooks The Year of Wonders, a chronicle of the 1666 plague in a small English village.

Reading, it appears, is not always a great respite. My mind became a soup of suffering, endurance, loss, humiliation and defeat. How tragic the death of any one of us is to those who live on, whether an elderly woman at the end of a life filled with love, or a sleeping young man victim to another’s cruel indifference; a little girl in a fire bombed church or a man fevered with a virulent flu.

Grief clings like ash. There is no getting clear of it; loss defines our time here. It seems almost senseless to speak of it; it is like trying to describe air.

Which is why I am looking upon my neighbors with nothing short of wonder this week. I am amazed that we keep getting up in the morning, given as it is that each of us will die—yes, even our mothers. We dig in rubble every day, whether the rubble of a nation that has nothing reduced to even less than nothing, or the rubble of our hearts when hope is buried by hurt.

I am thinking of that burned church’s congregation and how they will be called upon to love one another and hold each other’s grief and work for their common future. I am thinking of Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood for dreaming and of Sasha and Malia Obama waking up each day in the White House. I am thinking of the workers who died for our rights to an eight hour day and of the fact that someday there will be better health care in this country, whether or not I live to see it. I am thinking of the Democrats and how wildly we screwed up this election, and how nothing is really to be gained by self-recrimination and hurling accusations at one another.

We just have to dust ourselves off and begin again, because we are human, and that’s what humans do.

Self Defense Snap-Shot: On the Bridge

The self defense teacher grows accustomed to being asked, “Have you ever used your self defense?” Her answer: “I use it every day.” When the questioner is someone accustomed to practice—someone who prays or does yoga or employs affirmations or has already dipped a toe into the great river of martial arts—she may tilt her head curiously, already understanding how a philosophy and spiritual discipline can insinuate into every aspect of a person’s life. When the questioner is someone who doubts the instructor’s ability to kick some ass she’ll respond by rolling her eyes and sucking her teeth in impatience. “That’s not what I meant,” she might say petulantly.

The path between these two ways of understanding self defense occurs through stories It’s the only way I know to make the internal experience of self defense practice visible. The challenging student wants to hear how the teacher has kicked and punched and caused damage to another person’s body. But the every day work of self defense has nothing to do with kicking and punching and hurting. It is a silent and nearly invisible practice of breathing and centering oneself, listening to ones own deepest desires, facing fear, speaking up, and making ethical choices.

My colleague Sally Johnson Van Wright uses stories in an exercise she calls “What She Did Right.” It invites students to witness a woman or girl’s courage and self control and decision making skills as she practices self protection.

Today I’m introducing a new feature on the blog: Self Defense Snap-Shot. I’ll tell you some stories of how I’ve used my self defense practice in my every day life. I encourage you to follow along playing “What She Did Right”—looking for the moments where I employed choice and agency and relied on my self defense practice to guide me.

As you read these stories you may find yourself remembering your own Self Defense Snap-Shots—moments of assertiveness or trust in your own instincts or self calming. Please share your stories in the comments or on your own own blog with a link back here! Teachers love stories; self defense teachers love self defense stories.

It was early spring or late winter, one of those days when you can finally leave the house after being cooped up with a small child for so many stormy days. My daughter was two, maybe three, and I was pushing her in the stroller on the stretch of Cottage Street that washed out almost a century ago in the hundred-year-flood. I passed over the water where I’ve seen small boys fishing and once, a piano. From the little bridge I could see through the window over over the altar into my dojo, one small studio in the huge old factory building that dominates our town, the structure our firefighters call “The Big One.”

We were heading home, walking toward the traffic on the narrow, crumbling section of sidewalk. Up ahead I saw another mom pushing her own stroller. She was young and had two children much smaller than my girl. Two strollers won’t fit on the sidewalk at the midpoint of the old bridge. While she was still on the far side, before I had a chance to step off the bridge into the empty turning lane, the other mom steered her kids off the sidewalk.

That surprised me. It would have been safer for me to walk in the street. I was facing the traffic. My girl was much bigger than her babies.

As we passed, I said “Thank you.” I said it quietly. I don’t know if I smiled. I don’t know if I saw her eyes.

I know I said “Thank you.”

I was three paces past her when she turned and screamed, “You’re welcome, BITCH!”

I have heard self defense students say “I blacked out” to describe the explosion of rage across their brains that obliterates all other awareness.

I say, “I saw red.”

My neck snapped back and I saw her howling red face and her body moving away from me.

The heat and tightness in my chest was unbearable. It was like pain. The sudden tension in my jaw. My hands clenched. It was like being hit. It was worse than being hit. Everything went blank.

Like an animal, my body leapt to respond. A screeching, cursing, howl of a reply seared my throat and stalled behind my teeth. I could feel the spit flying from my mouth as I screamed back at her; I could feel her hair in my fist as I yanked it from her head and the tiny bones of her shoulders as I shoved her into the gravel.

My fuse—down to a stub after a long sleepless winter of mothering—was lit. I could hear the sizzle and smell the smoke.

But I couldn’t take my hands from the stroller. I couldn’t step away from my sweet burden on the street, on a bridge. The stroller formed a canopy around my girl and my body was between her and woman screaming at me. If I turned around, if I raised my familiar mama voice, the anger and danger would separate from the traffic noise and rain down poison on my girl. She had not noticed a stranger shrieking at me but she would notice me if I screamed or cried and she would be frightened.

“I said ‘thank you,’” I whispered, trying to catch the breath that clutched in my tight chest. “I said ‘thank you.’”

And I thought, “It feels bad to feel so bad.” It felt awful in every way to feel angry, frustrated, misunderstood, embarrassed, regretful. I could feel those emotions from my tight scalp to my clenched toes. I saw how the monster of rage could relieve the hot red stew of bad, bad feelings, how blacking out or losing it would get me out of this moment of feeling so awful.

But I knew that it was only a moment, and then maybe a few more moments, and that under the bad, bad feeling there was fatigue, and sadness, and eventually resolution. I could already feel the tiredness in my body as the adrenaline slipped away. I wanted to fall down on the ground and rest. I could see the gas station and the corner bar and the sidewalk on my street and I knew in only a few minutes I would be home and this moment of feeling so bad would be in the past.

I caught my breath, shaking. I never looked back. I took my girl home.

Mind Body Mama: A few things I learned from Momalom’s Half Drunk Challenge

Remember the Momalom Half Drunk Challenge? A week long period of blackout level stupidity and online overload just before Christmas? Here are some reflections.

1. When you write more, you have more to write. Even though writing every day in the week running up to Christmas was an idea singular in its insanity, the experience demonstrated beyond a doubt that when I write more I have more to write about. As my friend the Blunt Christian has put it, “I think in sentences again.” Writing every day, even briefly, turned my head into a tumbler of ideas and words and phrases that worked on its own between and during my domestic and workaday duties. This might be why Ellen Snortland and Kate Hopper and practically every writing teacher I’ve ever had or heard about endorses daily writing as necessary practice. Point taken.

2. I do not want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. I’ve always been clear that I didn’t want to be that kind of blogger—the product-endorsing, one-woman brand machine that’s about following and being followed, creating a scene, turning myself into a channel of new media.

But I have credited blogging with saving me from the lonely writer’s room, for making it possible for me as a middle-aged mom to write without desperate isolation. I’m grateful—so grateful—for the connections I made with other bloggers during Half Drunk. I am delighted to witness their writing, to consider my computer part of the energy and space that holds their creative process in the midst of their crazy mom real lives.

But my real mom life is crazy too, and I don’t want to spend much more of it sucked down the monitor. My life is enriched by holding an open heart for the other mama writers I’ve met online, but not more than it is enriched by driving up to the hilltowns to lunch with my new friend the brilliant and gifted writer Erin White. It is too easy for me to stay home thinking I am not isolated because I’m chatting with—or maybe not even chatting, just peering into the life of—another mama writer. I’ve got to put on my hat and go out in the cold, hear my own voice somewhere other than inside my own head.

The Half Drunk also showed me a dark side to the blogging adventure. Erin named it for me over soup and sandwiches: the pitfall of cheekiness. My voice changes insidiously when I write to an audience as I imagine them. I feel compelled to play a character, to alter my narrative to conform with a self that is bright and sarcastic, dark and quirky. My friends and family will be quick to tell you that I am actually bright, sarcastic, dark and quirky. But I don’t want to write myself into caricature. I want to be a careful, precise writer, I want a voice that is true and strong, not trying to please. I want to be an essayist, sometimes a humorist, occasionally a preacher. I want to be a writer.

3. Feminism saved my life. (I’ve got to credit Erin on this one too—it showed up in an email she sent me a few weeks back.) I find the mom-o-sphere—whether online or in real life—stunningly and surprisingly different from the women’s community in which I’ve lived my adult life. That community is overtly feminist, anti-violence, anti-racist, supportive of economic and social justice and—in the words of my first karate dojo, The School of Come-the-Revolution, “unapologetically pro-lesbian.”

Not so among the moms of my daughter’s contemporaries, which is why I often feel like a shadow of myself among them. In my real life, I am almost never the only lesbian in the room—unless I am hovering over the Cheetoes at a seven year old’s birthday party. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t shave or wear makeup or color her hair—unless I am at my daughter’s school. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t speak disparagingly of her body—unless I am waiting with other moms outside of a ballet class.

Online, I encounter moms writing from their hearts, so far past the cocktail party chatter of the playground that I almost want to weep with gratitude. But even here, the personal doesn’t leap to the political. For all the hand-wringing and heart ache we each experience—around our agonizing about how to balance childcare and paid employment, for example—most don’t see beyond ourselves to understand the condition of women—of mothers— as collective. "Motherhood is a labor issue" I want to whisper while slipping copies of Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars into diaper bags around the country.

Twenty years ago when I came out as a lesbian and feminist, a relative expressed his distaste for my political ilk because “they make themselves out as victims.” I didn’t have the chops to answer flippantly, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” I wish I had. I’ve aged, and mellowed, and gotten married and had a baby and seen my world shrink to a domesticity I could not have imagined in my rabble-rousing days. I’ve failed to keep up with the women’s movement and find my credentials challenged in new radical circles, as my politics on gender and disability and race and the environment and globalization are not sophisticated or embedded enough, stalled as they are in the 1990s of my youth.

But I know that my experience as a woman and a mother in this time and country are not just an expression of my rugged American individuality. I know that my life is an expression of my time and culture, that my path is forged as much by my privilege and limitations; as much by my race and class and gender and sexuality and ability as by my abundant creativity and will. I might not always have a cogent analysis, I might not be at the forefront of today’s radicalism, but I don’t imagine myself the only architect of my condition. I know my life reflects my world as much as it reflects me. When we don't talk about that, I feel a part of myself left in the shadows.

mind body mama: A few more ways my life has been enriched by motherhood

An observation I might have lived without, if had not become a mother:

• “It’s cool how your stomach goes into all those little wrinkles when you bend over.”

Word usage I might not have considered:

• “I want to walk on the snow to get a hang of these new boots.”

• “We are all wearing different styles, but we are all cool. Mama, you are sensible cool. Mom, you are normal cool. And I am crazy cool!”

• “One of my suggestments for the bathroom is a tiny shelf right here for books and magazines. And a taller toilet. Because Mom likes a taller toilet.”

Questions I might never have asked anyone:

• “Why are your underpants on the dining room chair?”

• “Do you need a klenex? Are you sure you don’t need a klenex? Because you look like a person who needs a klenex.”

Conversations I might not have been party to:

Sweetie: [Preparing for a solo road trip] “I’m taking more money from you.”
[Minor inconsequential parental financial squabbling.]
Me: “…Oh, it’s ok, I don’t want you to be on the road without cash.”
Small: “Yeah, because what if you have a sudden need for Cheetoes?”

Small: “I’m sorry I spilled that.”
Mama: “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with spilling something. There is something wrong with standing still while it runs all over the place.”
Small: “Let’s be optimistic that we can fix this situation.”

And a question I might never have asked myself:

“I heard you and Mom fighting. Why did you say all that crap about her?”