Bleary

I am currently in a sleep pattern in which I crash at about 9 PM, wake up at 2:20 AM, stay up with my monkey mind jumping all over the place while fretting that I need to get up in a few hours, get back to sleep between 4 and 4:30 AM, and wake up at 6 AM completely exhausted. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is not a good situation.

I am now on the couch wrapped in a blanket because I was tossing and turning and didn't want to bother my sweet husband, who also never gets enough sleep.

Insomnia is a bitch.

Here's something cute--Ceeya at the park about 12 hours ago:


This one, of course, is now sound asleep and snoring. Sweet, sweet thing.

I am going to sign off now and try to meditate to clear my mind and start my week. Peace out.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Greetings from the Island of Misfit Toys

I am having angst. It is career-related angst, and it is not a pretty thing. It is a bright red, heavy, sharp-horned little creature yanking on my neck and piggybacking along throughout my days.
 
In a recent post I wrote that my current job, the one I referred to as Safety School and where I’ve been for all of two months, is not Awesome with a capital A. I bemoaned the fact that I took the job out of desperation. I noted that a position at my First Choice, where I really wanted to work, was still open.

I don’t think I have fully conveyed how unhappy I was at my previous job. I had been there for 5 ½ years, still love the organization and the people there, but the job itself was killing my soul. I wasn’t growing at all and there wasn’t any way for me to move up or even laterally there.

This new thing I’m doing is a higher level than what I was doing before, but I am still basically doing a lot of the same functions. Now I am supervising staff and that is taking up a lot of time, because I am editing work as well as writing my own.

But it is still the same hamster wheel.

I am trying to figure out what to do now, realizing it is partly the place where I work but also partly the work I am doing that is clouding my days.

In all this, I am aware that I am very lucky to have a job. My job is what gives my family health insurance and a steady paycheck. It has now been almost two years since Sweet Dub was laid off. He continues to freelance, and some months are better than others. Quite honestly, I feel a steady low-thrumming, kind of free-floating anxiety in the back of my mind much of the time.

I am wondering how to transition out of this. Can I afford to take classes on the side? Should I actually enroll in a degree program or just pick up a class here or there? How can I handle this job in the meantime? Why won’t a pile of money drop from the sky? Would I be better off just dropping off the grid and moving my whole family to…I don’t know, where would we move to?

I feel I am operating out of fear rather than out of enthusiasm in this career thing right now. I am skateboarding (badly) while holding an egg. I can’t just leave, and I don’t want to bail out of this job into another one doing what I have grown to dislike. I have decided against trying to re-apply for a job at First Choice as the appeal of that job was not the job itself but the organization, which is very artsy and creative—as opposed to where I am now, which is very rigid and sterile.

(An aside: I have never worked anywhere where such a high degree of social awkwardness pervades nearly every interaction. It is truly bizarre.)

(Also:  I found out that the person I now supervise interviewed for my job. And really wanted it. And is rather bitter and sarcastic, occasionally flaring up with an attitude when I ask her to do things. Work things, conveyed to me by my boss as Things We Need To Do. Oh, it is a blast and a half at Safety School.)

(Not to worry, I am documenting everything.)

 So, yeah. It is a conundrum! A dilemma! And being the Grown-Up sucks some days, the end.

Safety School

When I was job hunting this fall, I applied for a couple of positions, and I got an offer at the first one I interviewed at before I even interviewed with the one I really wanted. It’s like being picked by your safety school and having to give them a decision before you hear from your first choice.

So:  as I was in the midst of the serious due diligence required to be employed at Safety School (fingerprinting, criminal check, etc), I got a call for an interview from First Choice, but they couldn’t schedule anything for nearly three weeks. You know where this is going, right? I scheduled an interview, and in the meantime as much as I delayed with Safety School, they made me an offer. At this point I still hadn’t had an interview with First Choice, so I decided a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, or whatever that crappy expression is. I took it.

I took four weeks off in between jobs and I have now been at Safety School for six weeks. To be blunt: it is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Today I found myself driving past convenience stores when they weren’t even on my way home*—oops, I mean I found myself back on the website for First Choice. It appears that the position is still open.

Er-hrrrrm.  This is a bit of a pickle. More to come.

* Sorry, couldn’t resist. I just have that image in my head of Nicholas Cage driving slowly past the convenience store in Raising Arizona, feeling hemmed in by domestic life and trying to resist going back to his checkered and more exciting past.

Happy Leap Day!

Gjon Mili—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

I love this picture. It makes me want to jump for joy!

What leaps are you taking today?

Change

There's a light on a hill

That's far out in the distance
And it calls out my name
It calls out for a change
- Fishbone, "Change"

Well, my friends. There have been a lot of changes going on and it has been pretty overwhelming.

For one, I changed jobs. Of course, every job is different; every job has its good and bad things about it. I had been at my last job for over five years and I guess I got pretty comfortable there. So now, being in a new place, I am struck by the contrast. There are good things: the people I work with are really on the ball, super organized and detail-oriented. The work flow proceeds at a much quicker pace, so there is definitely a sense of accomplishment. Some things are neither good or bad--just different. Among those: the corporate culture here is very reserved. People don't do a lot of socializing. There seem to be an inordinate number of rules and safety regulations. To be in compliance with licensing, we do multiple types of drills--earthquake, fire, civil unrest. The bad: many of the employees are unhappy. There's a lot of talk about how the organization has gone downhill in recent years. Interestingly, this has not a whole lot to do with the economy, which you might expect, but rather with what many see as a shift in corporate culture. What also strikes me is that at the last place I worked, people uniformly seemed excited about the mission and purpose of the organization--even people who didn't work directly with the clients were proud of the agency's work. There was a sense of ownership. Not so, here. There is a definite divide between the people who work with clients and who genuinely seem enthusiastic about their work, and those who don't (no buy-in whatsoever, it could be just any job). These are just my impressions, but it is a big difference to me.

Other changes:  a lot of family drama. A LOT. Not in my immediate little Blah Blah circle, but in my family of origin--i.e. my mom, my sister, my brother-in-law and ther family. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but that whole crew lives together. Until my grandma passed last year, there were four generations in one house. In the last year or so, relationships there have deteriorated. My mom and brother-in-law stopped speaking, there were periodic outbursts followed by more not speaking, my mom packed her things and went to live in a hotel for a few days, etc. It has gotten really out of hand. The ownership of the house is complicated; the value of the house is 2/3 of what it was when they bought it five years ago so they can't sell it and get away from each other even if they could overcome the ownership issue. It is a basic nightmare. Oh, and my mother was evidently diagnosed with a mental illness several years ago and no one told me.

All these years I have been trying to come to terms with wildly erratic and sometimes downright hurtful behavior from my mom, completely bewildered by it. Trying to respond from a loving place, with understanding, and yes, sometimes anger because it was so frustrating and it seemed like she was at times being malicious. And maybe she was. But I feel like I would have been more understanding had I known what was really going on.

Oh, so much more to say. I have just uncapped a flood.

Other changes:  My sister just got let go yesterday. She had been at her job for 14 years. The economy.

I love my sister so much. She has a heart as big as the world and is so very sweet. She makes mistakes in judgment at times, but mainly from wanting to make everybody happy. She was already so stressed by the situation with my mom and the house and her husband that her eyebrows started falling out. (I am not making this up.) I am disheartened by this latest development, but buoyed by the hope that her recent job interviews will pan out. Yes, she had already begun looking for a job. She worked for a family-owned small business that had really been struggling in the recession, and she could tell by the balance sheet that something was going to have to give. So I am trying to remain hopeful.

It helps that my little bunch is a messy, loud, hugging, smothering ball of goodness. At the end of the day, when I get home from work, I am coated in love. Sweet Dub is a child-wrangling, dinner-cooking, laundry-doing, always-kissing rock star. Viva is a doe-eyed eager-to-please sweetpea. And that Ceeya--well, I am here to tell you that Age Three can be Challenging. I much prefer the Terrible Twos in some ways. But Ceeya is always quick to run to me and wants to be by my side constantly. For better or worse. (Like especially when one of us is in the bathroom. she wants me to sit down next to her while she's on the toilet. Sigh. She won't always be this small, I know. I should enjoy even this.)

Next time: a little more fun. Maybe some discussion of Viva's upcoming birthday and what our plans might be. If you're still reading, that is.

Wee Hours

Can't sleep.

Starting a new job is exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. Last night I had the classic teeth-falling-out dream. Tonight, I fell asleep around 10pm, woke up sometime after 12, and haven't been back to sleep since. I have to get up at 6. Fun times.

Yesterday as part of familiarizing myself with my new job, I took a tour of one of our early care facilities which serves kids from 18 months to 3 years with developmental disabilities. It was amazing. It's a really comprehensive program with family support, clinical assessment, occupational therapy and individualized attention for the kids who are medically strong enough to be in a classroom setting. I sat in on a parent support group and then watched some of the kids during Circle Time in the classroom. The kids were singing along with the teacher and they all looked happy and engaged--well, there was one little boy who decided he was not interested in singing just at that moment, so he was sitting apart from the group on a kid-sized couch, looking out the window onto the play yard and up at the sky. We all have our moments when we need to collect ourselves and calm our nerves.

It's important for me to remember this during my first weeks at the new job. As at every non-profit I've worked at, space is at a premium and I am in a shared office with no window. My tendency is to work through lunch while eating at my desk. In my last job, I would often walk out to my car at the end of the day and realize I had not been outside all day since arriving in the morning.

My goal now is to take a cue from that little boy on the couch and be mindful to take a break, rest my nerves, and leave the office so I can look at the sky.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Happy New Year!

No, I haven't been eaten by a pack of wolverines, I've just been trying to keep my head above water--but my blog has suffered for many months and I apologize for that. Since the layoff in April 2010, Sweet Dub has been doing freelance videography and photography, and one of his regular clients is a bar/club, which translates into him being gone a lot in the evenings. This translates into me doing the evening routine with the kids by myself, which translates into me being too tired (after a full day of work) to do much else besides fall asleep on the couch watching TV. Sweet Dub comes home and wakes me up in the wee hours, and I often don't get back to sleep for a while. It's not a good pattern.

In the New Year, I resolve to figure out a better balance with this situation, and be more conscientious about making time to write here.

Many blessings, love and light to you and yours in 2012!

Moving On

So:  I gave notice at my job this week. No worries, I have another job to go to. More to come.

Frowny Face

This morning I was sitting in a ballroom listening to a talk on the neurophysiology of empathy. The presenter stated that one of the major factors involved was facial feedback.  Basically, however your face is arranged impacts how you feel—your mood, and even your respiration and your posture. The example she gave was when you are talking with someone and their face is scrunched up in an expression of distress, you subconsciously do the same, and that this impacts you physiologically. She told a very interesting story: research shows that injection of Botox into the area between the eyebrows, where people typically get a frown line, has been shown to reduce depression. Because you can’t physically frown, it impacts your mood!

This is fascinating to me. Not that I’m going to run out and get Botox, but simply because I never really thought about this at this level and yet it makes sense. How many times have you heard from self-help gurus something along the lines of “fake it ‘til you make it” or “act as if?” The idea is that no matter how you feel, if you put a smile on your face and act as if everything’s great, you create that reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling action. Naturally, if you have a serious mental health disorder, this is not going to cut it. But for most people, often times it’s just a matter of a shift in attitude. Take a minute and regulate your breathing, relax your face (unfurrow your brow!), and you are going to feel better. 

Now, I must have missed the flap about this research when it first came out—and having delved into it now, it turns out that the doctor who conducted this research only used ten patients as subjects, nine of whom were allegedly depression-free two months after treatment, so it’s hardly an authoritative study.

  

But anecdotally around the web, a number of people have come forward to state that while they got Botox for cosmetic reasons, they noticed two unexpected side effects: the first, a lifting of what had previously been a lengthy depression; and the second, a reduction in headaches, including migraines.

Okay, that all sounds pretty great, but then there are the cons, among them: facial paralysis. Thanks, but no. Others have said Botox seems to suppress certain emotional responses. How can that be healthy? It seems like if you were sad and wanted to cry, but couldn’t, it would be toxic to your insides. 

Well, I think I’ll be keeping my frown line and just try to be more mindful not to scowl while squinting at my screen. How about you?

Being There

I think I have mentioned on here that there have been some big bad scary things happening to many people I know. (Oh, yes! Right here.) One of these things is that a good friend of mine (let’s call her “R”) has been diagnosed with cancer. She is a tough cookie and is convinced she is going to beat this. She is a single mom with two kids and a very strong support system of family and friends who are rallying around to help her out.

She has started chemotherapy and is on her fourth round—and her hair has begun falling out. On Halloween night, we got a whole group of kids together to take them trick-or-treating around her childhood neighborhood, where her mom still lives. R. was dressed as a punk rocker, with a Ramones T-shirt and a fantastic hot pink and black long wig. I told her I think she should wear the pink wig every day. She told me she couldn’t stop looking at my hair. I really wanted to shave my head right about then.

She told me amazing stories about how her kids have been helping to take care of her. I had suggested that we take the kids this weekend for her since she was scheduled for treatment again on Thursday and she gets so sick afterward. (Her mom and sister will be taking care of her, she won’t be by herself.) “[The 7-year-old] might go,” she said. “But [the 11-year-old] won’t leave me.” Her sweet son, who is already taller than I am, breaks my heart in his tenderness with her.

It’s been challenging with R. I reach out and sometimes she will accept help and sometimes a wall goes up and I have to just step back and let her work it out. I hope she beats this.

Neat-O

Viva recently got a bee in her bonnet about tidying up before bed. She picked up all the toys in the living room, folded up all the throw blankets we had strewn about, and replaced all the throw pillows on the couch and loveseat. Then she wiped down the dining table and said,"I moved the napkin holder into the middle of the table so it's equidistantly in reach."


Who IS this person???

I May Have to Concede

Having just purchased a box of haircolor to cover my roots, I look in the mirror and conclude I am fighting a losing battle.

Is there a way to gracefully go gray? Discuss.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Up, Up and Away

The other day, when I was working from home, it was a beautiful day. The weather has been a bit cool, which Viva doesn’t appreciate, because now that we live somewhere with a pool, she wants to spend virtually every free moment in it. Since she was thwarted in her Pool Dreams over the weekend, Sweet Dub decided he would pick her up early from her after-school program and take her swimming. To optimize the experience for her, I told Sweet Dub I would pick up Ceeya from preschool and take her to the market with me while I picked up some groceries. Viva would get free time with her dad and since Ceeya doesn’t really swim, and thinks she can, and very much complicates the pool experience, this would take her out of the equation and minimize stress for all involved. (Sorry, future Ceeya, that you were deliberately left out of the Funnest Time EVER. Mommy loves you.)

So we went our separate ways. I pulled up at preschool, spent some time with Ceeya and friends, and then we (just Ceeya and I) motored on to the market, just five minutes away. Shortly after we arrived, Ceeya saw a big red strawberry balloon with a face on it and insisted she must have it. It was the most incredible thing in the world to her, and it was eight dollars. FOR A BALLOON. I admit I was feeling a little guilty that Viva was having her fun time without her sister, so I grabbed the balloon for Ceeya and clipped it to her jacket. It floated along with us hither and yon throughout the store.

Speaking of which, the market is a massive Ralphs which stretches from here to Chicago and back. About halfway through our very leisurely journey through the store—remember, I was trying to give Sweet Dub and Viva some time together—Ceeya said she had to go pee. Naturally, the bathroom was somewhere east of the Mississippi, but somehow we managed to make it in time, and Ceeya beamed as I told her how proud I was that she did not have an accident. We washed up, reclaimed our cart and merrily trudged back to the other side of the moon store, got the rest of our items, waited in a really long line, and finally left the store.

As I was putting the groceries in the back of the car, Ceeya decided she didn’t want the balloon clipped to her jacket anymore and she pulled it off.

Up, up, up into the sky it went.

This is when Ceeya completely lost her mind. Louder than any child has ever screamed since the dawn of time, she let it all out, veins sticking out in her neck, her whole face turning purple, her entire being outraged and her overall attitude one of, “WHAT THE---?? DID YOU SEE WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME???”

And that is when a very nice older gentleman approached and asked what had happened, and then offered to give me a dollar to buy Ceeya another balloon. And because I am an idiot, I blurted out that it was not just a dollar, it was eight dollars, and then he offered to give me half. And then I politely refused. And then we went back and forth like one does, and he insisted he must give me money. “Look at her, she’s hysterical,” he said. So finally I said yes, okay, it was very sweet of him, and then he pulled out a twenty and asked me if I had change. Which miraculously I did.

And then he asked her name, and then he instructed her very seriously that when she got the balloon, “Don’t let it go. Hold it tight in your hand, like this, baby! Will you do that? Do you promise?” and by this time, Ceeya was very quiet and very serious and she nodded and I thanked him again and we went back inside and had to find someone to get us another balloon exactly like it and then we stood in line again and paid for the dang balloon and then we got back in the car and I shoved the balloon into the back seat with my purse on top of it so it wouldn’t float into my line of vision as I was driving the five minutes back home. And then my phone rang from the back seat where I couldn’t reach it because it was inside my purse and I knew it was Sweet Dub wondering where in hell we were.

And that, my friends, is the story of how just stopping by the store for a few things to kill some time turned into an hour and a half odyssey that cost me 12 squillion dollars in balloons and made us late for dinner (which I had to cook).

Viva, on the other hand, had a great time.

Testing

Disregard--just testing to see if I can actually publish from my phone. Thanks for your patience.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Not Really Amazing

 Today I am working from home, in the living room of my new apartment. I am facing the windows, and all I can see is trees. It is a beautiful sunny day, but not hot—perfect Southern California autumn weather.  A slight breeze is blowing.

I spent a big chunk of my day working on one writing project, writing and rewriting and reading here and there online to flesh out ideas and going back to rewrite. Then I took a walk, came back, had a snack, quickly went through email, and decided to sit a minute and try and get back in the habit of writing for myself. I find that if I don’t post for a while that when I sit down to write I don’t know where to start. Once I start, I often go back and delete whole paragraphs from the beginning. I don’t love getting started, but I do love having written and being done.

I am distracted these days.  Lots of big, bad things happening to people I love—and since they’re not happening to me, I don’t feel I can completely share here. Nonetheless, I am worried, and upset, and distracted.  What do you do to distract yourself?

I am listening to lots of music, and getting irritated with iTunes, since sometimes it will let me purchase songs from my phone and sometimes not. It makes for a very disjointed playlist, which I am trying to embrace so as not to be annoyed. I am trying to let it play out as it wants.

In related news, I am reading lots of comparative religious stuff these days. I find the similarities between various world religions calming—just in terms of the very basic messages. Love each other, treat others the way you’d want to be treated, etc. Sometimes the unexplainable happens. Is it a miracle? Do such things exist?  

Parenting small children is also very distracting. I am very tickled by my kids’ use of language.  Right now, Ceeya is apt to say, when something doesn’t please her, “Mom,  that is not really amazing.”  She is not saying it in opposition to me, as if I have said something is amazing. No, she is just letting me know, drawing my attention to something—maybe she expected to like it, but she doesn’t, and so it is not really amazing, and she says it with great seriousness, looking deeply into my eyes with her giant dark brown ones. And I say to her, “I am sorry that it is not really amazing. I hope you find something else that is really amazing.” And I think she will.

And I hope you do, too.  Because right now some things are not really amazing. And I wish they would turn around a bit.

 P.S.  Do you want to know what else is not really amazing? Blogger insisting I should switch over to Google Chrome. And then all my posts publishing with the format all wonky. That is extra really not amazing.

P.P.S. I chose to work from home today because of several chaotic events going on at work. My co-worker friend, who is in the office today, emailed me to let me know it was a good call because I would really be annoyed if I had gone in. I wrote back, "I think annoyed is my default setting." That is also not really amazing. I don't enjoy being annoyed (although it is good fodder for humorous anecdotes). I am trying to work on being less annoyed. I'll let you know how I progress.

This Must Be the Place

Home - is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place

-- Talking Heads

Home is where the heart is.

-- traditional proverb

Mama, I yike this new house!

-- Ceeya

Viva is eight years old, and she has lived in five different homes. Heck, Ceeya is not even three and she is on her third residence. That is a lot of moving.

I have been thinking a lot about what home means lately. I moved a lot as a kid—not just from apartment to apartment but from school to school as we moved. I moved away to college in Pennsylvania, and then I moved back to my hometown of Boston.   And then I moved all the way across country, to San Diego and then Los Angeles. Pre-marriage, I also moved a lot within Los Angeles, which I actually enjoyed because I got to try out a lot of different neighborhoods.

Moving sucks. At the same time, I like moving. I like finding a new place, exploring how things fit together, figuring out new routes to work and school, discovering the little gems of each new place. Now even though we have only moved about three miles away from our old place, I am learning all the ins and outs of our new neighborhood and our new space. There are so many pleasant little surprises as you go.

And at the end of the day, no matter where we are, when I open the door and hear, “Mommy’s home!”:  I am home. And I get to plop down in the middle of my grabby, yelly, huggy family and be bombarded by tales of the day and how hungry they are and look at their boo-boos and fingerpaintings and math homework and the latest photographs Sweet Dub has taken. And what could be better than that?

The Blah Blahs Have Landed

I won’t bore you with the details, but on Friday, September 9, the Blah Blah Family finally moved.

It took weeks of preparation, as we were essentially cutting our living space in half—moving from a three bedroom house with a separate studio to a two bedroom apartment. If you have never had to do something like this, well, I am not going to say you should try it. But it was cathartic, the amount of stuff we had to go through and decide what we could and could not live without. And also, with the number of times we have moved in the past five years, I have never had a decent amount of time to go through all my belongings and decide what I did not need to keep. Since I knew space was at a premium, I elected to take a week off between Labor Day and Moving Day to devote myself 100% to going through every room in the house and culling all unnecessary items. Result: this time around I was shredding tax documents dating all the way back to 1998. Can you imagine? I’ve been carting all that stuff around?! It boggles the mind.

So: lots of trips to Goodwill to give stuff away, handing over bags of outgrown clothes to Viva’s friend in second grade, a bed to Sweet Dub’s stepbrother, a couch to the Parent Center at our local elementary school—and countless trips to put stuff in storage. Sweet Dub is determined to empty out the stuff in storage (lots of baby items—stroller, car seat, etc. in excellent condition) by putting it on Craigslist/eBay. We shall see.

I have added another 15 minutes to my commute, which means I leave the house with Viva by 7:30 AM, drop her off at school at 7:45-7:50ish, and get to work by 8:15. I am trying to mellow out about it and listen to podcasts or mixes I love on 8tracks or Pandora by hooking up my phone to my car radio. It’s not the end of the world, but for those familiar with LA, I am driving from Culver City/Fox Hills to Echo Park and back during rush hour. I do not recommend it.

The kids are happy, because now we have a pool and Viva can swim every day and Ceeya can float about with her life jacket on when she feels up to it. There are long stretches of pathways and sidewalks that they can tear about on, on their bikes. We are all together, which is all that matters when it comes down to it.

Related story: the night before the move, as I was putting the kids to bed, I said, “Okay, you guys, time to sleep and not a peep. Daddy and I are really busy getting things ready for the move tomorrow so I need you guys to go right to bed and no shenanigans.”

Ceeya: (Sniff. SNIFF!)

Viva: Mom?

Mama Blah (extricating from the bedclothes): Yes, Veev?

Viva: Ceeya is crying.

Mama Blah: No she’s not, she’s fake crying, just like she fake hiccups. You know she does that.

Ceeya: (SNIFF, SNIFF!)

Viva: No, Mom, I think she’s really crying. Look at her eyes.

Mama Blah (peering in the dim light of the nightlight and realizing she’s right): Ceeya? Are you crying?

Ceeya flings herself into my lap.

Mama Blah: Oh, no! What’s wrong, baby? Are you sad?

Ceeya (wrapping her arms around my legs): Yah.

Mama Blah: Are you sad about the move? About having to leave this house?

Ceeya (mournfully): YeeeAAAAH.

Mama Blah: Aw, honey. That’s normal. We’ve had a lot of happy times in this house. But we’re also going to have a lot of happy and fun times in the new house, okay?

Viva: Yeah, Ceeya, it has a really big bathtub [the pool] for you to play in! And we’re right by the park! And lots of kids live around there!

Mama Blah: That’s right. We’re going to go swimming, and to the playground…

Ceeya : (SNIFF! SNIFF!) I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE DADDY! (breaks down completely)

Mama Blah: What??
Viva (simultaneously): Oh my God.

Mama Blah: Baby, Daddy’s coming with us to the new house. You thought we were leaving him behind?
Viva (simultaneously): Oh my God, Ceeya, you’re so weird, we’re not leaving Daddy!

Mama Blah: Viva, go get your dad. (Viva leaves the room.) Ceeya, baby, we all go together—you, me, Viva and Daddy. We are ALWAYS together. We would never move and leave Daddy, okay? We are all going to live together in the new house. (Sweet Dub arrives and we all pile in for a big Blah Blah Family hug as he reassures her.)



Man, kids are something else.

By the way, any tips for cooking on an electric stove? I’m completely useless at it.

Rockin' It

Following up on my last post: on Saturday, Viva got her hair trimmed and re-done in a half-twisted, half-out chunky 'fro. She totally rocks it. She was really happy with it and then on Tuesday some little girl at camp told her that her hair looked nappy. 

Now, you know what? Her hair is nappy. I don't have a problem with that. As with many words that should be non-offensive but have become negative because of how they are used, it was the way she said it that I have a problem with. Like nappy is the worst thing it could be. Like nappy is synonymous with ugly. I am not teaching my kid that she should hate what God gave her.

Look at the picture again. And try and tell me that my child--my smart, funny, kind and sociable kid--should be made to feel ugly. Some people drink a bit too much Haterade. And self-Haterade is the worst kind.

I'm off to see if I can find a "Happy to be Nappy" T-shirt. Wish me luck.

My Baby is a Maverick

My Viva is 8 years old. She is bigger than she has ever been, but she is still, in the scheme of things, a little girl. She often shows such maturity and a sensibility beyond her years that I forget she is still quite small yet.


This weekend, after I took her box braids out on Saturday, she wore her hair “wild” on Sunday. At first she was rocking a Macy Gray-style ‘fro, but then she styled her hair so it fell across her forehead. “I want to have rock star hair!” she said. I noticed her hair could use a trim and some conditioning (she’s been swimming a lot this summer and her hair is drier than usual), but no harm hanging around the house or going to Target like that. However, on Sunday evening, which is usually Hair Night, she told me in no uncertain terms that she wanted to wear her hair “out” to camp the next day.


“Ooooh,” said Sweet Dub. “I don’t know about that.”


“Honey, tomorrow is a swim day,” I said. “Do you really want to go with your hair out? It might not look the way you want it to when you come out of the pool.”


“I don’t care,” said Viva.


“Kids might make fun of you if you wear your hair wild,” Sweet Dub said.


“I don’t care,” said Viva. “I like my hair. It’s cool.”


After a bit more discussion, we agreed that she should wear her hair how she wants. I have been a big cheerleader for natural hair over Viva’s lifetime, so evidently it somehow soaked in. She very rarely wears an Afro; her preference is for two-strand twists so she can shake her head and feel her hair swing around. I was pleased she stood her ground, but a little apprehensive. After we concluded our conversation, I said to Sweet Dub privately, “I have a feeling I’ll be doing hair tomorrow night.”


The next day, I dampened Viva’s hair, put some moisturizing crème on it and sent her off to camp. When Ceeya and I went to pick her up at the end of the day, she was standing off to the side of the gym, by herself. She gathered her things and as we were walking out, she said, “Mom, I had a horrible day,” and then she started crying.


Kids made fun of her hair all day. She cried as we walked home, and she continued crying as we sat with her dad and talked about it. Not only did a variety of kids (most of whom were bigger than she is, since this camp admits kids age 7 and up) make fun of her hair throughout the day, but one of her closest friends told her that her hair looked ugly. (This is a kid who usually is at our house after camp literally 4-5 days per week. She is the daughter of a single mom, one of Sweet Dub’s best friends from high school who works until 6 in Santa Monica and can’t pick her up on time. We consider this child family, one of Viva’s “play cousins.” She eats dinner with us several nights a week, we are her emergency contact for the camp, etc. I could not believe that in this instance she would not have Viva’s back. Yes, I am still furious at this 7-year-old child. It is not rational. Let me back off this tangent before I really get going.)


We all cuddled in a pile on the couch, Viva’s beautiful eyes shiny with tears as she let all the stored-up heartache of the day spill forth.


“This is not your problem, this is their problem. It says more about them than it says about you. Your hair is beautiful and you can wear it how you want,” I said.


“You don’t have to do what everyone else does,” Sweet Dub said. “You can be different. It’s people like you who change the world. Who cares what they think?”


“You crying? Why Coco* is crying?” Ceeya said, patting her sister’s leg.


(What is really infuriating to me is that the vast majority of the kids in the camp are also black. “The same flipping hair grows out of their heads!” I said to Sweet Dub later in my Mama Bear rage. “They don’t even know what their own friggin’ natural texture looks like!”)


After she dried her tears and blew her nose, Viva said, “I’m going to wear my hair like this for the rest of the week. Because I LIKE IT.”


She is badass. I wish I had that confidence at 8. And I’m proud of her.

* Coco is her nickname for Viva. This in itself is a long story.

All Over the Place

Are you still there? 

My mind is kind of running amok these days. Work has been extra busy since sometime in May. As I reached a deadline of July 15th for a major project, about to breathe a sigh of relief and expecting to take just a couple of days off, my boss informed me that she needed me to write a $500,000 proposal, due in less than two weeks, on a brand new project we are developing. “You’re not going to be able to take any time off until August—like me,” she said. I was already fried then, but I sucked it up and just kept going. It had to be done, and no one else could do it. My boss has been working every weekend since March. She is a machine! (And I say this with affection. She never asks more than she would do herself.)

So: other deadline reached. While others loom, we have both cried Uncle. She is off on vacation and I am finally going to get some time off later this week (just a couple of days to celebrate my birthday. I will be 43. Ye Gods!). I will then come back, refreshed, and work a couple more weeks before I take a full week off around Labor Day, at which point we will be moving into the hypothetical new home we are miraculously going to find this week. (Yes, I agree, not much of a vacation.)

Here’s where we are with that: given our current economic status, we need to downsize. Sweet Dub, God bless him, has been out of work since April 2010. While he has been exploring various avenues*, freelancing and the like, he does not have a regular source of income. Our house, which is awesome, is a little big for us and we could stand to go smaller. While I was hoping we could find a modest house to rent in the area, here is what I am finding:

(1) small, rundown crappy houses where I would have to buy a gun and a German Shepherd 5 minutes after moving in or, if in a reasonably safe area, houses which need major home improvements/repairs which have not yet even begun but are “planned” (e.g. installation of central heat);

(2) huge, rundown houses that would cost a fortune to heat and cool;

(3) ridiculously overpriced condos;

(4) cute houses in decent condition that are a good $500-$1000 more a month than we can comfortably spend.

An added wrinkle is that to remain in proximity to our current neighborhood—i.e. within a three-mile radius—we are looking at areas that are actually not in our school district. We are on the border of Culver City, which has a really good school system, and we are also on the border of Ladera Heights, which I just recently learned is not part of Los Angeles Unified but part of the Inglewood School District (definitely NOT good schools, from all I’ve read and heard). For many reasons, this bums me out, because Viva is happy with the magnet program at her LAUSD school and I would hate to move her. As I’ve said before, we love the neighborhood we’re in and feel very much a part of the community, so we want to stay in the general area.

We have finally faced the facts and are looking at apartments (still not in our current neighborhood, because the trend there seems to be “nice little houses not-for-rent” and “kind of crummy apartment buildings.” Not sure why this is. ). I am trying to make peace with this.

I know, woe is me with my petty little problems. I grew up in a series of cramped apartments, so I know where my resistance on this comes from. But really: “Oh noes, we have to move into an apartment!” It’s not the end of the world. I am lucky, given the continuing crappy economy, to have a job. I can still feed my family. So we will have to give up our cushy house with the yard and our illusion of suburban home living. Big freakin’ deal, right?

But honestly, I am not trying to live in the lap of luxury. I just want a place that’s clean, and safe, and peaceful. I don’t want to have to spend my first few days in a new place scrubbing to get it clean. If you know me in real life, you know I am not a neat freak. Trust when I say that too many of the places we have been seeing are grubby. I can’t believe people expect you to spend hard-earned money to move into a place that is raggedy and dirty.

This weekend I saw a house for lease which, if I had been in the market to buy, I might have considered. I might have been able to live with its flaws if I knew I could fix them. It was spacious, it had great bones, and it was in a quiet neighborhood with a decent yard. The paint on the exterior was peeling, the upstairs bathroom was godawful (bright pink tile and a baby blue bathtub), and the whole interior had a feeling of neglect. Walls needed spackling and painting, carpet should have been ripped up and replaced or maybe let the hardwood floors come out to play. In any event, I knew Sweet Dub (who was off hammering out some legal issues with prospective partners in Glendale) would hate it. I had to smile and pass.

Right now it is looking like we are apartment-bound, for sure. I am less upset about that today than I was over the weekend. Stay tuned.


* Sweet Dub has really been working hard to get a number of television projects off the ground. This is an added frustration, because while he does have interest from some major players, including a cable network, things move slowly. Everyone is very encouraging; we are hopeful that he will get a deal but it could be six months from now. Or, it being Hollywood, it could be never. He now has three projects in development, one of which looks like it will actually happen (network people have been flying out from New York to talk with him, they email back and forth constantly) but not before we move. Of course. Sigh.