Blooming Eventually

Four Days Until "Day Trips From Portland" Release!

2011-05-13T12:11:00.001-07:00

My travel guidebook Day Trips From Portland: Getaway Ideas For the Local Traveler will be available Tuesday May 17.

And...Announcing my new and improved website, and new home for this blog, www.kimcooperfindling.com.

See new site for book tour info and all details, including excerpts from both Day Trips and my second book, Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, due out in August.

Blooming Eventually will continue at the new site....see you there!

Toodles!

Anacondas in Oregon on the Travel Oregon Blog

2011-05-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

Swamps Invade Oregon Coast Aquarium is on the Travel Oregon Blog

OQ Essay Contest Reading Tomorrow!

2011-05-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

I will be reading my essay "The Friday's Trilogy", which won the 2011 Oregon Quarterly Essay Contest, tomorrow night on the University of Oregon campus, Gerlinger Alumni Lounge, 7 p.m. The event is free and open to everyone! See here for details.

P.S. Two weeks until the release of my travel guidebook, "Day Trips From Portland"! I'm on Amazon.com! Far out.

"Day Trips From Portland" Actually Exists

2011-04-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

The doorbell just rang.

There is nothing quite as exciting as receiving a box of books with your own name on them.

Yipppeee!!

The actual release date for my book "Day Trips From Portland: Getaway Ideas for the Local Traveler" is May 17.

There are two events scheduled so far.

May 24, Camalli Books in Bend, 7 p.m.

June 20, Powell's on Hawthorne in Portland, 7:30 p.m.

More to come!

Jesus

2011-04-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Captain Daddy and I almost didn’t get married based on vastly differing spiritual beliefs. All of that now seems like the sort of completely irrelevant nonsense that young people fixate on when making monumental decisions like who to spend the rest of their lives with, unaware that it’s actually anxiety, boredom and the laundry that will do you in, not God.

Religion rarely comes up around here. But it does have its moments, and it’s true that the Chickens get vastly different results depending on who they hit up for information on the subject.

Friday, Chicken Noodle approaches:

“What are we doing for Easter, Mom?”

Captain Daddy was nowhere in sight. This one was mine.

“Going to Grammy and Grandpa’s for an Easter egg hunt.”

Her face crumpled. “But we have to go to church!”

Curious. Where on Earth could she have gotten this radical idea? I doubted it was Captain Daddy. He doesn’t actually go to church anymore, just occasionally frets that he’s failing as a parent and going straight to hell because he doesn’t.

I looked at her inquisitively.

“Maddy said!” Ah. Maddie. In her Kindergarten class. Whose father is a minister.

“Hmm.” I considered. “Well, it’s true that Easter is actually a religious holiday. It’s about Jesus.”

“Who’s Jesus?”

I told you religion doesn’t come up much around here.

Knowing that if Captain Daddy were here, this conversation would now veer confusingly into talk of the flesh of God, and perhaps, gruesome-yet-apparently-necessary description of the crucifixion, instead I delivered up the child-appropriate version of what I actually believe about Jesus.

“He’s a famous and really wonderful man from history.”

Noodle contemplated this.

“So we’re not going to church?”

“Well, sort of. We’re going to the church of Grammy, Grandpa, chocolate and love. It’s quite nice, really.”

Thought For The Day

2011-04-15T08:49:00.001-07:00

"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."

--Fay Weldon

Coming Soon - Day Trips From Portland, Oregon

2011-04-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

Publishing May 17 is my travel guidebook, Day Trips From Portland, from Globe Pequot Press.

Rediscover the simple pleasures of a day trip with Day Trips from Portland, OR. This guide is packed with hundreds of exciting things for locals and vacationers to do, see, and discover within a two-hour drive of the Portland metro area. With full trip-planning information, Day Trips from Portland, OR helps makes the most of a brief getaway.

Stay tuned for more news about release events and more!

A Bird's Eye View of Malheur Wildlife Refuge

2011-03-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

A Bird's Eye View is on the Travel Oregon blog.

How Much Do I Love Bend Fire Pipes and Drums? More Than Green Ice Cream, Green Trees and Green Beer

2011-03-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

Bagpipes and Brotherhood on St. Patrick's Day is on the Travel Oregon Blog

I Won the Oregon Quarterly Essay Contest

2011-03-10T07:48:00.000-08:00

I won the Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives essay contest.

I had to write that twice because I still can’t quite believe it.

Yesterday I received a very unusual phone call, especially in these days of ubiquitous electronic conversation.

“This is my favorite phone call of the year,” said the magazine’s editor. “You won the essay contest.”

In response, I said nothing. I was too shocked.

I’ve entered this annual literary contest maybe seven times and never even been a finalist. And I won! Hot damn.

My essay is titled “The Friday’s Trilogy” and it’s an excerpt from my book, Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, to be released this summer. It’s about one of the worst periods of my life, when I bottomed out in Portland 16 years ago.

Here’s what judge Debra Gwartney of Pacific University’s MFA program said:

"(I chose) The Friday's Trilogy, which I found to be fresh, alive, exciting and bold writing. I had some trouble following the first few sentences, but once I was in, I was in. A compelling piece of writing, heartbreaking and redemptive. Hard to pull off without being sappy, and yet she does."

“I’ll come back to earth soon,” I said to Guy Maynard at the end of our conversation.

“Well, don’t come back down too soon,” he said. “Moments like these are too few in our world.”

There will be a public reading of winning essays on the University of Oregon campus, May 4, 7 p.m.

Things I Learned This Week

2011-03-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

Listening to Lady Gaga with the kids is super fun until you drop the little one off at preschool one day and she belts out to her teacher: “Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick. I want to take a ride on your disco stick.”

If you are feeling beaten down by grown-up life, a super upbeat movie about the rise of an underdog teen pop star is just the ticket. Especially if you get to drink two grown-up glasses of wine beforehand. (I LOVE YOU JUSTIN BIEBER!!! EEEEeeeeeee!!!!!!!)

Taking small, temporary mental vacations throughout the parenting day is fine, but becoming so spaced out that you hit your child in the head with the car door will only escalate your problems.

March and Spring don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another.

If your child poops on the booth seat in a restaurant, you will feel obliged to leave an extra-large tip.

While juvenile, it is actually quite satisfying to correctly guess the answer to the trivia question printed on the cheese stick.* (Take what you can get—it’s the simple pleasures, you know?)

*Q: What city is the largest in the world by area? A: Greater Los Angeles

Mawwaige

2011-02-25T08:13:00.000-08:00

“All marriages are happy. It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.” –Raymond Hull

“One study found that simply having a husband creates an extra seven hours of housework a week.” –Newsweek, “I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage.” June 21, 2010.

Overheard at a 50th wedding anniversary party. A guest: “How did you two make it this far?” The bride: “Well, we never wanted to get divorced at the same time.”

Overheard at a 70th wedding anniversary party. The bride: “My, those first fifty years were hard.”

“My opinion of gay marriage is exactly the same as my opinion of straight marriage: It’s impossibly difficult and sure to end in agony.” –Kate Braestrup in “Marriage and Other Acts of Charity”

"If love is blind, than marriage is a real eye-opener." --Unknown

Raise Your Hand if You're a Deviant

2011-02-17T08:51:00.001-08:00

Remember when you thought your parents had done the dirty deed twice—once to make you and once to make your sister?

And then at some point the illusion shatters. Too bad it’s usually far before the whole concept can be, ahem, appreciated.

A friend shared this story with me last week and I have been laughing ever since.

She and her nine-year-old son were driving in her car. They passed a billboard promoting safe sex. “Mom, what’s that about?” he asked.

“It’s about birth control,” she replied, being an open and honest sort of parent. “I’ve told you about it before. It’s what you use when you are having sex so that you don’t get pregnant.”

“I know,” he replied. “Which means you are doing it just for the fun of it, which is weird.”

She said she thought she'd remind him of this story on his 21st birthday. I say--wedding toast.

What Happens When You Go To Sleep With A Fistful Of Silly Putty

2011-02-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

In case anyone was wondering.

Central Oregon Magazine

2011-01-31T06:20:00.000-08:00

Check out my article Shooting Stars: Central Oregonians on the Rise in Central Oregon Magazine. I love writing profiles and had a blast writing this one about some truly inspirational people.

My Favorite 2010 Holiday Memory, By Far

2011-01-17T08:56:00.001-08:00

That's Noodle. This photo exactly summarizes her personality.

What's with the Angel sticker on the car, you ask?

For Christmas, my sister pimped her husband's ride. A 1990's era Honda Accord done up in dragon, skull/crossbone, and angel/devil motif is one hot ticket, let me tell you. The stuffed animals in the back window were priceless, the Hooters tee-shirts pulled over the seats a stroke of brilliance.
I wish she were my wife.

We laughed so hard we cried, which, maybe this is just me talking, really should happen more often during the holidays. Perhaps pimping a ride should become a Christmas tradition, far more tasty than eggnog, far more productive than getting drunk and yelling and sobbing.

Not that we've ever done that.

And we've never really liked eggnog.

Yep, that's how we roll, from now on. Keep an eye on your car on Christmas Eve, unless you have been longing for your own set of fuzzy dice....

The Unparalleled Allure of an Imaginary Brother

2011-01-04T08:41:00.001-08:00

Chicken Noodle: Mom, we’re playing princess castle and Little won’t be the prince and I want her to be the prince.

Me: I’m sorry, baby. But she gets to be what she wants.

Noodle: If our brother were alive, he’d be the prince.

Me: Yeah, maybe.

Noodle: And there would be more of us to play when we play Crazy 8’s.

Me: Yes.

Noodle: It’s not fair.

Me: (Thinking a: big brother might actually be more inclined to make her be the slave in the dungeon in his own masochistic play than be her prince, and b: if he was alive, she would never have been born, instead I simply say…)
Nope.
(Because it isn’t, really)

----

In related news, at the Christmas dinner table…

Chicken Little to Grandpa (sadly): Our brother died.

Grandpa: I heard.

Little: He was born too late.

Grandpa (lovingly): I know, I heard.

…and here all along I’d been thinking that I was the one born too late. Am I the only child of the 70s who wished she was born in time to enjoy the freewheeling 60s?

I always wanted a big brother, too.

Anyway.

This all makes me think about how pining away for the impossible brings with it a powerful element of fantasy. You can project whatever you want onto that blank slate. Kind of like writing a novel. Hmmm….

Holiday Retreat

2010-12-21T09:12:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, the chickens took my keyboard out of my office, wrapped it in Christmas paper, tagged it for their cousins, and put it under the tree.

There are several ways I could interpret this situation. Combined with the fact that my harddrive crashed last week, I think maybe I'll choose to treat the chickens' gift idea for my niece and nephew as a sign that I should take a break from keyboard-related, harddrive-related activities for awhile.

Say, until after the holidays.

Toodle-oo, and ho ho!

P.S. Don't worry, O&R--you aren't really getting a keyboard for Christmas.

P.P.S. Santa, can I have a Mac?

Oh Christmas Tree

2010-12-15T08:39:00.000-08:00

My Instructions for a Perfect Christmas Tree Hunting Experience is on the Travel Oregon blog.

Quote of the Day

2010-12-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

Chicken Noodle (Distraught, after a lengthy time out for kicking her sister in the head):

"Mom, I know I need to listen to my heart, but my heart said beat Maris up."

Hey, Kimo

2010-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Last week, I took seven days off of everything to help my mother through her first chemo treatment—or, as they say in Hawaii, her first date with “my friend Kimo.”

It was my first experience as witness to chemo. I imagine chemo looks the same anywhere, but here are my notes on Hawaiian Kimo. It’s all I’ve got to offer y’all this week, so take it or leave it, babies.

Should one travel to Hawaii for something un-fun, small talk on the plane becomes more awkward than usual. “Are you going home or on vacation?” asked the nice man next to me as he sipped on his Mai Tai. “Neither. Well, both. Well, neither,” I replied. Then I had to tell him the truth, which, turns out, from the look on his face, wasn’t really what he was after.

On the morning of Mom’s first date with Kimo, long before dawn, I watched a girl cross the parking lot below her condo, climb a fence, pluck a plumeria blossom from a tree and tuck it behind her ear. As she stepped lightly away into the darkness, somehow I was filled with the most delicate beginnings of hope.

A bit later on the morning, the most stunning, multilayered, salmon-pink-scarlet sunrise appeared on the horizon. I attempted to interpret this sunset as hope, too, but the detailed lecture I simultaneously absorbed about why I must immediately schedule a colonoscopy dampened my enthusiasm.

While we waited in the mauve-colored waiting room at the hospital, we were treated to the local news. “Home devoured by lava on the Big Island,” intoned the announcer. A rather ominous cloud descended on me. (Though lava, live, is rather pretty, even as it consumes valuable real estate.)

The blood on the floor of the Kimo room didn’t help, either.

The hospital food looked exotic—rice, a hamburger patty, a fried egg, gravy (plate lunch, ya); or sushi—but still managed, as does hospital food everywhere, to taste hideous.

The hospital staff ranged in race from Samoan to Philipino, hardly a haole (white person) in sight. Somehow, this diversity of faces brought the hope back again.

And speaking of hope, Obama’s favorite breakfast place from when he was a kid is now a boarded up spot in a strip mall, I was told as we drove past. Poor guy—and that, too.

When I held my mother’s hand as she met Kimo, it felt small and warm, like a seashell on the beach that I wouldn’t visit once all week.

When I finished watching chemicals drip for six hours in my mother’s veins, got her back to her place, and put her down for her nap, I collapsed by the pool under the most stunning plum-colored bougainvillea bush and a handful of palm trees wafting in the breeze. This, I realize, should have been pleasurable.

And yet it is true that taking care of one mother is easier than taking care of two small children and a husband.

When I called home, Chicken Noodle refused to talk to me. Chicken Little got on the phone only briefly, to say, “You are taking care of Grandma. I love you, now, bye!”

Love—Thank you, Little—love. Love is where the hope lives, and there is so very much of it, and that’s why everything is going to be okay. (And Obama probably has a new favorite breakfast spot, anyhow.)

When I got home, I tried to make Kimo into a funny blog post. I find that most of the time I can make just about anything into a funny blog post, and the process even helps make hard life stuff easier.

But I failed. Because Kimo isn’t funny. Kimo sucks. Even Kimo in Hawaii.

Stay tuned—next week, lost sense of humor rediscovered while wading through masses at the mall!

Literacy Begins At Home

2010-11-23T09:03:00.000-08:00

When you know your word-nerdly ways have been successfully passed on to the next generation:

Chicken Little, aged 3:

“Mom, I tooted twice. Hey, an alliteration! Tooted twice! (giggle)”

That's a Wrap

2010-11-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I did it. I wrote a book in nine weeks. I knocked out a 250-page, 65,000 word book in 60-odd days. Sent off to editor-land yesterday.

(Actually, apparently I got a little carried away, because I accidentally wrote 75,000 words. Dammit. Would this not have been a fine opportunity to taste the strange fruit of underachievement?)

Here’s what I learned in the process:

Writing is easy.

Writing is the best job in the whole world.

Writing sucks ass.

Writing is a hateful, evil, miserable affliction. Why didn’t I become an accountant, or an anesthesiologist, or an exotic dancer? Why, why, why?!

Stress brings out my over-dramatic side.

Writing a book in nine weeks will kick your ass six ways from Sunday, but nothing on earth is harder than parenting, which is what I had been doing with the majority of my time prior this project. Therefore, writing is easy.

Thinking—thinking is what is bad. Must stop thinking.

You might believe that for you to pull this off, everything extraneous will have to get out of the way. But life will just keep on coming.

My God, does this truly have to be this hard?

I really like almond butter and honey sandwiches.

There is a dust bunny the size of Texas under my desk.

There are a lot of really, really bad websites out there.

There isn’t much that can’t be cured with a dvd of Entourage, coral-colored toenail polish and vodka.

(However) Drinking and writing is not a good idea. No wonder Hemingway shot himself.

This is a piece of cake! Hell, I could have done this in six weeks!

My kids rock. Instead of resenting that Mommy was irritable and totally out to lunch, they bragged about me on the playground.

Capt. Daddy is a superhero. Of course, we already knew that. That’s why he wears tight shirts and funny shoes with toes.

It is totally possible to write a book in nine weeks, keep the children alive, turn 40, throw yourself a big-ass party, navigate your mother’s cancer diagnosis, talk your husband down from several mid-life crises, launch your eldest into Kindergarten, spend a week in NYC pretending you are a rock star, question the entire structure on which your adult life is based, and, in a strange finale, get locked out of your house by your three-year-old when you are in the hot tub.

But I don’t necessarily recommend it.

Still—once you’ve run the gauntlet, wow, what a rush!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go slip into a coma for several days. Or at least until the school bus comes.

How to Completely Freak Out the Trader Joe's Checker

2010-11-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

Checker: You girls are so cute!

Chicken Noodle and Chicken Little (preening): Thanks!

Checker: Do you have any other brothers or sisters?

CN: We had a brother.

CL: But he died.

CN: Yeah, he’s dead.

CL: Really, really dead.

CN: Super dead.

Checker: Oh. (begins to shove grocery items very quickly into bags, avoiding eye contact)

Trick or Treat

2010-11-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

When I was young, Halloween was my very favorite holiday. No big surprise for a kid who was always yearning to be anyone but herself. Even if it was a fantasy, this was my one chance a year to be wilder, freer, happier, better.

The last few weeks have been pretty darned real, as was this Halloween night. No rock and roll fantasies this year. I felt exactly like myself.

This meant I wandered around after two gorgeous princesses, drinking a beer straight from the bottle in the middle of street with no shame whatsoever, wearing a fresh pair of Rod Lavers, an oversized witch hat and some cherry chapstick.

With me were some of my very favorite people in the whole world and a pig on a leash. Iron Man was there, too, masked and ready to protect us all. He ran with the frilly girls from house to house and only once asked the Spanish Dancer if maybe she would touch the giant spider first.

There was camaraderie and laughter and love. For at least one brief moment late in the dark and starry evening, the whole world sat centered in the palm of perfection.

Right about then, The Pumpkin Princess climbed on my back, tucked her cheek into the nape of my neck and said, “I love you, Mommy.”

Why would I want to be anyone else?

Let Me Entertain You

2010-10-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

Chicken Little, three-going-on-four, has learned a new word. She’s been working hard to insert it in as many sentences as possible.

I need to go to bed right now, dammit.

Where is my ducky blanket, dammit?

Dammit, I hate oatmeal.

Dammit, I want to catch a butterfly!

Meanwhile, Chicken Noodle, five-going-on-six, is writing her own songs. She coins lyrics and a tune in her head before requiring us, her family and built-in fan-base, to sit raptly while she sings. She uses a red rake as a guitar. Occasionally, like so many rock stars, she performs half-naked.

Her lyrics, like her, are dark. Except for when they are inspiring.

We love the sun/the sun/the sun/but not the ocean/because sometimes you bonk your head/and get ate-en by a shark.

Wouldn’t it be great/if we had a cat cat cat/who didn’t bite us/and make us bleed bleed bleed/when we picked him up?

And we know in our hearts we are helpful and kind/sometimes we just make mistakes!

We can find the secrets in our minds/we can find the secrets in the stars/we can do it/we can!

I don’t know why anyone thinks they need amusement parks, or Wii, or heroin. Children are the world’s best entertainment.

Yo, Pumpkin

2010-10-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Check out Hunting For Pumpkins in Central Oregon, in Travel Oregon.

(and just look at those cute chickens!)

Same As It Ever Was

2010-10-12T07:33:00.001-07:00

For all the thematic tension I managed to milk from my looming 40th birthday in the course of this blog, as it actually loomed large, I barely mentioned it.

(Can anyone say denial?)

Well, anyway, it was yesterday.

Tra la la!

As for how it feels and all of that, I will only say, you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? You may ask yourself, am I right or am I wrong? You may ask yourself, how do I work this? And the days go by…

Dated

2010-10-01T07:38:00.001-07:00

Me: Today, we listen to 80s music.

Chicken Little: What is that?

Chicken Noodle: I don't know.

What Did You Do Today, Mom?

2010-09-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

After school, one day this week:

Chicken Noodle: Mom, you be me and I’ll be you.

Me: Okay.

Chicken Noodle: What did you do today, sweetie?

Me: I went to Kindergarten. It was so cool! I love it I love it I love it!

CN: Oh, that’s nice, honey.

Me: What did you do today, Mom?

CN: I wrote a book.

Me: Oh yeah? What’s it about?

CN: Courage and love.

Me: Wow. I really want to read that one.

CN: You have to learn to read first, honey.

Me: Oh.

Bend Film in Travel Oregon

2010-09-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

Bend Film Rocks

Blooming Eventually on Bend Moms For Moms!

2010-09-22T05:59:00.000-07:00

This very blog is now feeding onto Bend Moms For Moms, a cool new site for those of you lucky enough to be mothering in Bend. Check it out!

Horizon Air

2010-09-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

A new article of mine in Horizon Air Magazine's September Issue. It's about Education Specialization and it's on page 58!

Phoenix Rising

2010-09-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

I suppose it’s about time to tell you all I got another book deal.

I know, huh?

Three weeks ago, I received an e-mail from an acquisitions editor at a press back east. He’d been searching for someone to write a travel guidebook about Oregon for one of their series. He came across my bio on the Willamette Writer’s website. Then he “followed me around the internet.” He read various essays and articles posted on my website, my Travel Oregon blog postings, and this blog. He thought I’d be perfect. He thought I was funny. He’d like to talk to me about offering me a contract.

I sat there in front of the screen for a long, stunned, surreal moment. Then I forwarded the e-mail to Capt. Daddy, adding a few excitable expletives. Capt. responded instantly and wisely—“call him.”

A week later I traded my signature on a contract for an advance. Now I have to write the book by Nov. 15. Not even kidding. But never mind about that. I’ve been writing professionally for ten years. Surely I can churn out 65,000 words in eight weeks. No problem.

The amazing part is that for years all I’ve been told is that to get a book deal, writers have to burn up the keyboard relentlessly pitching agents, chase after editors with finely-tuned elevator pitch in pocket, be willing to offer publishers one’s first-born child and grandma’s gold coins. I did all of that. For years. It didn’t work. (I even sacrificed the first-born child—ha, and ouch). But something must have worked. Because ten years into this little song-and-dance, two publishers in a year came to me.

Because of the tight turnaround on the travel book, both it and my memoir (about growing up in Oregon—how coincidental) will be out at the same time—next spring.

Far out.

This photo is of a painting my dear friend and fellow writer Suzanne Burns made for me three years ago, after I set fire to my first memoir and pretty much figured my dreams of publishing a book were dead. It’s been hanging in my office since, guiding me to places I couldn’t see coming. Suzanne saw what I couldn’t yet—with work and faith, something new would come along.

Someone suggested that with two books coming out, I should change the name of my blog. Nah. Lots more blooming to do. I might have to update my bio again, though. That book fire really is starting to feel like it harbored the Phoenix instead of defeat.

Baby Takes Flight

2010-09-08T05:52:00.000-07:00

Actual dialogue between my husband and myself, two weeks ago:

Me (troubled): You know what I think it is? I think I am anxious about Kindergarten.

Capt. Daddy: You are going to do fine in Kindergarten, honey.

If anyone needs me this morning, I’ll be that middle-aged blonde dripping tears in the parking lot of M. Elementary. I swear just yesterday Noodle was a little package of love with a dimple in her nose who screamed like a pterodactyl when she was angry and got me up eight times a night to breastfeed.

Mama’s so proud. Her little pterodactyl’s going off to public school. Still got that dimple in her nose, though. Sniff…

Snip

2010-09-02T06:46:00.001-07:00

A year ago yesterday, the chickens did this to their heads.

Yesterday, I discovered this.

Coincidence? I think not.

From now on, Sept. 1 shall be National Scissors-In-The-Closet Day.

Last Week's Pop Quiz

2010-08-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

(answers below)

1. If you take the waffle iron out of the cupboard on a Saturday morning, open it up and discover an old petrified waffle inside, is it misguided to immediately turn an accusatory eye to the only man who lives in the house?

2. Should an (almost) 40-year-old woman really be expected to fit sheets on the top bunk? (“Mom, I can’t believe you came up here and didn’t break it!”)

3. If you’re at the public pool and one of your children tries to drown the other one, isn’t that really the lifeguard’s problem?

4. If you open your purse and find a half-sucked, half-melted lollipop embedded in its interior, would it be wrong to just throw the whole thing in the trash and buy a new one?

5. If you’re looking for a little stress release after a hell of a week, is happy hour with a three-year-old and a five-year-old the answer?

Answers:
1. He’ll just deny it
2. Darn kids should clean their own rooms, already
3. The mother is always responsible. Haven’t you figured that out yet?
4. Take the money out first
5. Hell no

Family Vacation

2010-08-16T08:10:00.001-07:00

Scenes from our camping vacation to the Redwoods, also the celebration of our ten-year wedding anniversary.
--
(As we greet a blackberry bramble enveloped in fog and mislabeled by California State Parks as our campsite)
Me: Honey! It’s where I always dreamed we’d awake on our ten-year anniversary!
--
Chicken Noodle: I am afraid all of these trees are going to fall on my head.
--
Chicken Little: I don’t want to hike. Carry me.
Chicken Noodle: You start hiking down the trail this instant or I’ll put you in time out!
--
Captain Daddy: Do you think this fog is a metaphor for our marriage?
--
Chicken Noodle: I am afraid a bear is going to eat us up.
--
(I come around from the backside of the truck to find Captain Daddy violently shaking a water jug over open flames burning in green grass five feet from the fire pit but two feet from the tent. His face is the color of chalk.)
Me: What did I miss?
Chicken Noodle: Daddy started us a fire.
--
Me: So, what do you think of your vacation so far?
Captain Daddy: I think it’s a good thing I didn’t have any expectations.
--
Chicken Noodle: I am afraid the ocean is going to drown us.
--
Me: So, the way I see it, we could pack up, hug one more big tree, and blow this joint.
Captain Daddy: Oh, baby, you turn me on with your words.
--
(At one more big tree)
Chicken Noodle: I am not getting out of this car until we get to a motel!
--
(In the pool of a motel on the freeway in Grants Pass)
Chicken Little: This is my very favorite part of our whole trip!
--
(Back at home)
Me: Next time I guess we’ll just skip the whole national park thing and go straight to a Best Western on I-5.

For a similar story, see My Hawaiian Vacation in Quotes

The Ghost in the Machine

2010-08-09T06:26:00.001-07:00

I went to a writing conference over the weekend. The chickens stayed home with Captain Daddy. Mysterious incidents ensued.

Each time I braced myself and called home, not one person screamed at me from the other end.

No one called me screaming. Not once.

In fact, at one point, someone sounding a lot like Captain Daddy called me, reporting to be in a jewelry store, and asked me what kind of ring I might have in mind for our ten-year wedding anniversary, which is this Thursday. After I hung up, I stared at the phone for a long while, wondering about that three-planets-in-a-triangle thing from last week which I didn’t really pay attention to. Had it opened up some kind of freakish space warp, and if so, how long it would last?

When I got home, my grocery list had suspiciously vanished from the countertop. The items that had been on it were in the cupboards and refrigerator.

The chickens reported that they’d gone swimming, taken a bath and consumed at least one vegetable in the previous 48 hours.

The tear in my favorite yoga pants had been mended.

My hot tub had been drained, scrubbed, refilled and reheated.

Gear and food for our vacation, to commence today, had been packed.

Hmmm, I wondered. Curious. But I couldn’t ask Captain Daddy about all of this odd business, because he’d left for his day job, saving the world.

I was left alone to ponder whether I would have to hire a special kind of exorcist to deal with ghosts who know what kind of hot dog buns I like, love my children, are good at sewing and wish to buy me jewelry.

Then I came to my senses.

PS Is this picture predictive these things? Or anything else that’s happened in the last decade, for that matter? I think not.

PPS No, of course we were not drunk at our own wedding.

PPPS Okay, just a little.

Chapter 59, In Which My Family Legacy of Tree Hugging Veers Off the Tracks

2010-08-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

Chicken Little on camping:

"Mom, do you think nature is beautiful?"

"Yes. I think nature is very beautiful."

"Well, nature is not beautiful to me. Stupid trees."

Shades of Blue

2010-07-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

A piece I wrote about Summer Lake is on the Travel Oregon blog.

Click here to see more of my Travel Oregon posts...

For the Bird(er)s

2010-07-20T05:59:00.000-07:00

A new story of mine, The Way of the Wing Watchers, is in the current issue of Oregon Lakes and Rivers Magazine.

It Was Fun While It Lasted

2010-07-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

Chicken Noodle’s obsession with death continues. Here are some of the latest utterances from my five-year-old Mistress of Doom.

On the couch, cuddling
Chicken Noodle: Mom, I don’t want to grow up.
Me: I know, baby. But you know what’s the best part?
CN: I am going to get old and die?
Me: Umm, no, baby.

--
At the park
CN: When people are alive, it’s way more cozier to be outside than to be underground, like later when you’re dead.

--
On the deck, eating dinner
CN: What if a tree fell on our house right now?
Captain Daddy: It’s not going to happen.
Me: You are totally safe.
CN: But what if it fell right here on my chair and then hit my dinner plate? What if it smashed my macaroni?

--
At Grandpa’s house
Grandpa, to Chicken Little: You’re getting so tall!
Chicken Noodle: I’m taller!
Grandpa: Yes, but you’ll probably always be taller, until you’re grown.
CN: Yeah, but I’ll die first.

--
In the backyard
CN to my mother: What if a meteor hit our yard while we were outside playing?
(My mother shoots me an alarmed look.)
Me: What can I say? She’s got a little Armageddon in her.

Happy New You Part IV

2010-07-12T07:43:00.001-07:00

Long overdue for an update to my blog profile. I've been confusing people with the whole book burning thing.

So here's me, modestly refreshed:

Me: mother, wife and writer watching 40 climb the front steps like a peddler pushing time and me with nowhere to hide. The writer part used to come first, the 40 used to be a 30, and marriage and motherhood were abstract activities I thought I’d try someday. Ah, growing up. If only it was the thrill promised when we were six.

I started this blog to chronicle my quest to publish a book. I’ve published all sorts of other things—articles, essays, even poetry. I wrote a first book. Then I set it on fire. I am now neck-deep in edits on a second book, and have a publisher interested. But as my mother says, “It ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.”

So the question remains—will I bloom, eventually? Or will I ditch the whole writing thing, adopt a xanax habit, abandon my own identity and live the rest of my life vicariously through my children? Hmm, let’s find out.

I Need You Like a Donut Needs a Hole

2010-06-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

Barry Louis Polisar emailed me yesterday. He saw my post here yesterday and sent me a message to tell me he’s glad he cracks me up.

It was like my childhood hero turned up on my front porch.

I stared at his name in my in-box while my brain did spastic flip-flops between 1978, when I listened to Barry constantly on a small black cassette player in my tiny yellow bedroom, and now, when I play Naughty Songs For Boys and Girls on the Ipod in my kitchen for my girls while I make breakfast.

But Barry turns out to be a real person living in Maryland who actually takes the time to email me because I posted the lyrics to his song?

Hot damn.

I was grinning like a fool.

I ran outside to tell my husband, who was raised Catholic in the 60s in a small rural town by a mother and father who were well into adulthood when he was born. He grew up watching Lawrence Welk and listening to big band and had never heard of Barry until we had kids. But even he thought this was extremely cool.

I emailed Barry back and said, “Is that really you?”

Those of you who had a deprived childhood may not know Barry’s songs and stories. But there’s a good chance you heard him sing "All I Want is You" in the opening credits of the hit film Juno. You know, when she's walking around with a big jug of Sunny D? That song was actually recorded on his second album in 1977.

Polisar has been making smart, witty, deep, funny, silly music for kids for over three decades. Kids like me, who grew up listening to "Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan" and "My Brother Threw Up on My Stuffed Toy Bunny.”

And only ended up only the most deliciously sort of warped because of it.

After he was censored, Barry started putting stickers on his albums that read “Warning: the songs on this recording may be offensive to some people. Children are advised to use discretion in exposing adults to this material. Exposure may result in a sense of humor.”

My pal Barry wants everyone to know that some of the rebellious children he used to entertain recently banded together and released a 2-CD, 60-song tribute album of his songs called We're Not Kidding! A Tribute to Barry Louis Polisar. Hear free samples at http://www.barrylou.com/.

Barry Louis Polisar emailed me! Made my whole stinkin’ day.

Tempting

2010-06-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

My mother ran away today
She walked right out the door,
Packed her tooth brush and pajamas
Said, "I can't take any more."

She said that she was tired,
She said she had her fill
Of cooking our meals, washing our clothes
And cleaning up all our spills.

She said she'd write us letters
With no return address,
She said she'd come back someday
But now she has to rest.

She took the plants, she took the cats,
Took our pictures from the wall,
And though it's just been two hours ago,
I wish that she would call.

I never thought I'd miss her,
Isn't that the way?
You don’t know how much Mom means to you,
Until she runs away.

Barry Louis Polisar. He cracked me up in 1975. He cracks me up now. Anyone remember the Man and the Chicken? I'll post it next...

Nuts

2010-06-17T06:51:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago while I was tutoring at the college, my blood sugar crashed. I emptied my wallet of quarters and headed for the vending machine, wondering if I would find any sugar-free, protein-laden options.

Yay—Smokehouse almonds. $1.25. I plunked my five quarters in and watched the little metal corkscrew arm make its slow rotation…and then stop. My almonds dangled there, caught on their own packaging. Then, strangely, a nickel dropped into the coin return.

I gazed at it in my palm for a moment, wondering what the heck I was supposed to do with it. Was five cents the returnable deposit on my risk? And how was it that I hadn’t realized that I was taking a risk in the first place?

Stubbornly, I went back to my bag and got more coins. I didn’t really want to pay $2.50 for almonds, but if I don’t eat, it’s possible that I’ll suddenly begin to stab my students with their own writing utensils. In went another $1.25 in quarters. This time, the twisty arm rotated, making its low whir, and two bags of almonds dropped to the bin.

Out of curiosity, I pressed the “coin return” button, and received two dimes and a nickel.

I scooped up my loot and headed back to my post, unable to shake the feeling that the whole experience was metaphorical somehow. Sometimes the world withholds your almonds. You do what you’ve been asked to do and get jack in return. Sometimes you get unexplained gifts that you’re not sure even you understand. Other times you get everything you’ve asked for and much more. And sometimes, you just get caught on your own packaging.

Vending machine as karma.

This week, the almonds are good and stuck. But I am waiting for the coins. I know they’re coming, sooner or later.

A New Essay of Mine in True North Magazine

2010-06-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

This quarter's True North Magazine features an essay of mine: Roots and Flowers: Loss, Grief, and Growth

I Entered A Contest!

2010-06-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

I know, it’s so *exciting*! I can barely contain myself.

But to truly feel the thrilling highs and lows of the absurdly-optimistic contest slut, I need your help.

Will you to vote for my entry in the 365 Days of Adventure in Bend contest held by trazzler.com before June 15 when the voting period ends? Here are some reasons why you might consider doing so:

A) You love me, you really love me!
B) Your Monday-morning brain isn’t working yet, and a new but totally manageable task is just what you need to kick it into gear.
C) You hate your job and/or boss and want to spend as much time as humanly possible not actually working.
D) You are drunk-Facebooking (some Mondays are like that).
E) You like helping strangers.
F) Your cat or three-year-old accidentally click on all the right places in sequence.
G) The voices in your head tell you to.
H) You really think my entry is the best (hmm, concept).

Here’s how it works:
Click here (or http://www.trazzler.com/, or Soaking Up Solitude at Shevlin Park)

click sign up on the upper-right corner of the page
log in with your facebook login (so easy!)
click the big green box that says SAVE

Takes 30 seconds. Budda bing badda ding! I win fabulous prizes and/or a writing contract. It could happen.

5 a.m. Returns

2010-06-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

Chicken Little typically appears at my bedside between 5 and 5:30 a.m. “Mommy!” she says exuberantly, as if she herself has already had several cups of coffee and can’t understand my languor. “Is it wake-up time?”

I always have a hard time answering this question. Primarily, because I am in a coma.

But also because no, of course it isn’t wake-up time, it’s clearly and obviously still sleeping and dreaming-of-a-Hawaiian-beach time.

But on the other hand, yes, simply the arrival of this small person grinning and shaking her mop of crumpled white-blonde hair and boinging up and down like a cross between Jack Nicholson in The Shining and Tigger means that, by definition, it’s wake-up time.

Usually I just grunt and haul her into bed next to me with hopes that she’ll go back to sleep, or at least allow me to lay there like a drunken sailor for five more minutes.

This morning she curled up under my arm. “We picked our mommy and daddy at the store,” she announced matter-of-factly. “We said: not that one, not that one, not that one. Yes, you. And, you.” She punctuated these last two statements with tiny jabs at my arm.

“Ummm,” I murmured. “We are so lucky.”

“And you and daddy picked us at the store. You said: not that one, not that one, not that one. Oh yes, THAT one.”

“Mmmm.” I was starting to come to. “Boo boo,” which is what we’ve called her since she was little-bitty, “why did you pick me?”

She put her cheek to my chest. “Because you have the softest, warmest skin in the whole world.”

If You Live Through It, Turn It Into a Story

2010-05-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

Back by popular demand and repeated request…published in High Desert Journal last year…the story of our ill-fated rafting trip down Hell’s Canyon...my essay Passing Through the Green Room…alternately titled, The Time My Husband Tried to Kill Me.

(well, he didn’t mean to, and it did turn out to be a good story, after all)

Click here or see http://www.kimcooperfindling.com/, “Chef’s Special”

The Perils of Working From Home

2010-05-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

So, just a few minutes ago I was diving into today’s projects here in my home office—gearing up for some magazine copy editing, prepping for a phone interview with a college prof at 10, trying to think of what the heck I am going to write about fly fishing, when I heard the doorbell.

Obediently I padded down the hall in my bare feet, glad I'd gotten around to getting dressed. I opened the door and was greeted by a tall fellow in a suit. He handed me this.

I can't really pass on all of the “happy news” he intended to share, because quite quickly I scurried him away by informing him that I actually WORK here, and not just the laundry-and-scraping-crayon-off-the-walls kind of work.

But I just had to take a minute and share this with you all right away, despite my deadlines, because isn’t it such good news? All suffering soon to end. It’s about time, really. Suffering is so Dark Ages. Personally, I am completely over it.

I’m not entirely sure what the moose has to do with it, but I suppose we’ll find out when we get there.

Super Moms, Unite!

2010-05-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

Happy Mother's Day to all you super mamas! This card came from my own superhero mother. She's awesome.

Since Captain Daddy is working today, I'll be performing all stunts myself. Now--faster than two small children high on maple syrup! More powerful than a mile-high pile of useless plastic toys! Able to tranform a disaster area into a functioning kitchen!

Wait...is that a cup of coffee I see? And the newspaper?

Hmm...come to think of it, no one but me will see the kitchen until Tuesday...

Seven Candles, Burning Bright

2010-05-06T06:12:00.001-07:00

Today is the seventh anniversary of the birth and death of my first child. There was a time when I thought it would get easier each year. Now I think, it doesn't.

First comes a frantic stemming of the tide. But it comes anyway—a massive tidal wave of grief. I cry for days. I mean, really, why not?

One of the most challenging aspects of this whole affair (yes, there are many) has been the inherent loneliness that comes with being the bearer of something so miserable that most people won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. From the get-go, the edges and depths of this experience were something only a few of my contemporaries even tried to comprehend, let alone address. I can count on one-and-a-half hands those who have really gone there with me in seven years, and several of them are bound to me by blood, married to me, or I had to pay.

Perhaps the death of a baby is just one of those life-situations irrevocably fraught with peril. I’ve always known that everyone did what they were able. But that didn’t make it any less lonely.

One silver lining of this whole affair (yes, there are many) is my chickens. Not just their blessed existence, of course, but their reaction to this day. I always intended for our family history to be something that was out in the open for them—not overly dramatic, but truthful. So once a year we go to the cemetery to visit the brother they never knew. And each year, I am surprised and delighted by the ways that Noodle and Little transform the experience for us all.

Last weekend, Chicken Noodle began the planning. “What will we bring to him? Ooo—candy,” she moaned, like it was crack cocaine.

“How about a bouquet?” said Chicken Little, who is three and prides herself on her growing vocabulary.

“Candy,” sighed Noodle, still lost in an imaginary-sugar-induced fantasy.

“Candy,” agreed Little with a reverent whisper.

“No, I know,” said Noodle, who is five and has to have the last word, even if it means trumping her own idea. “We’ll bake him a cake. But we’ll eat it! At his cemetery! And we’ll leave him one piece right there by his name. And we’ll put heart candles on it! And we’ll sing”—she broke into a warbling tune—“’Happy birthday, lovey boy!’”

All I’ve wanted was for someone to validate his existence, honor my pain, love me there, and make me laugh. I could never have guessed that it would be my own children who would do this the very best of all.

Off to bake a cake…

How's Saturday Night, Tom?

2010-04-28T07:27:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, I thought that all of the bands were actually at the radio station, playing live music that was then somehow funneled into our living room hi-fi.

It seemed rather complicated—difficult logistically. I couldn’t quite figure out how they switched to a new band between songs so quickly. Multiple studios? And wasn’t it kind of a bother to set up a whole stage for one song? I mean, each group was only at the station for, like, four minutes!

I recalled this last weekend, when Tom Petty, for whom I nurture a small obsession, turned up on the cover of Parade Magazine.

“Guess who this is?” I asked the chickens. Expectant grins. I threw them a hint. “He sings to us in our kitchen.”

“Tom Petty!” yelled Chicken Noodle. We’ve spent many a pajama-d morning dancing to “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” Noodle can identify a Petty song in about two measures (Ah, the joys of indoctrinating one’s young in our own sweet obsessions).

Noodle greeted Tom’s image appropriately. She began kissing the page, landing passionate smacks all over his grizzled 59-year-old face.

Then she became puzzled. “Is he playing the music right now?” she asked, pointing at the Ipod and screwing up her face.

“Here’s how it works,” I said confidently, proud to explain what I’d finally figured out all of those years ago. “He plays the music in a studio and records it so that we can listen to it anytime, without him here, which is handy, because he’s famous and probably wouldn’t come to our house.”

“Oh!” said Noodle, missing the main point of my little soliloquy and instead clinging to a much better idea. “I know! Someday can he come and be our babysitter?”

Just putting this out there, Tom. I pay $8/hour. For you, I’d go $10. I know you’re busy, so you pick the night. We’re flexible.

Snakes Are For Girls

2010-04-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I encountered a mom who was having a bad day at the festival. We were in line for face painting, and her daughter wanted to be a tiger. She was fretting.

“I’ve been trying to talk her out of it for the last half-hour,” she confided. “I said, wouldn’t you rather be a princess, sweetie? How about a fairy?”

I nodded sympathetically, holding my tongue. I couldn’t relate to her plight, but neither did I want to be impolite.

Captain Daddy had no such similar nagging inner voice. “She wants to be a snake,” he said, pointing at Chicken Noodle. “I think it’s awesome.”

I thought it was awesome, too. I take it as a sign of victory that in this princess-saturated world, my five-year old chooses of her own free will to have a gigantic blue snake painted on her face. She climbed up into the hot seat after the tiger was led away by her mournful mother. Ten minutes later Noodle had a life-sized reptile winding from her forehead to her mouth. Then she got up on stage and learned to belly dance with Rasha. It was beautiful.

My father was the sort to haul my sister and me into the woods and expect us to love it. We did. Mostly. If we complained, he told us that hardship in the outdoors built character. It did.

Now I want the exact same thing for my daughters.

Yesterday, we took a big long walk in the woods. There was dirt and discovery and rain and crying and running and falling and exploring and laughing and bugs. When we got home, Chicken Little put a fairy and a snake in a chariot. They were on their way to the ball. The fairy’s name was Rainbow Butterfly and the snake’s name was Lola Rose. They were best friends.

After the ball, everyone went to bed happy. Especially me.

Glory

2010-04-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I walked to a meeting. The route was a stretch of Nye Beach in Newport, Oregon. The destination was a local pub. The person I was meeting was my publisher. On my back, I carried 160 pages of paper—my book manuscript, completed last week and fresh from the printer.

The sun shone brilliantly, there was barely a breeze. I was all alone. Two miles of packed sand, open Oregon air and exercise lay between our rented beach house and my fate.

Of course, fate doesn’t work like that. There isn’t really one defining moment that sets a course of everlasting glory in a regular life. Glory comes and goes, is persistently fickle. Every happy ending is interwoven with the beginning of another new challenge.

I thought about a lot of things on that two-mile journey. How much outside validation I need from my writing, and if I can learn to just enjoy its creation and appreciate the successes that appear. My family, and what really matters. How rooting around in your past and trying to craft it into something salable is as dangerous and messy as my friend Jessica said it would be when I started this project. And, just what the heck might happen during the next two hours.

But when I quit thinking and looked up into the stunning sky, at the powerful surf, breathed the sea air, I thought about how lucky I am. How incredibly metaphorical this walk was! My story about growing up on the Oregon Coast was literally on my back as I marched down the Oregon Coast to deliver it to someone who would decide its worth. Sort of like the pearly gates, but with kites and sandcastles.

Judgment is still to come. But on the walk back, after a great discussion, with a pint of Oregon ale in my belly and my backpack much lighter, when the beach glowed even more marvelously and I felt like skipping over the sand, when I located my chickens chasing seagulls and Captain Daddy ready to hear my story, I simply chose to revel in the glory for however long it lasts.

I knew the true worth of that paper-bound journey, and almost didn’t care what anyone else thought of it at all.

Angels are lovely, but they take so long to get here

2010-04-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

Anyone heard of angel cards? They are a product of the woo-woo culture, a novelty I’ve kept by my bedside since college (which was a long time ago, btw). Like a deck of cards, you draw one to take as your daily inspiration. They each read one word—Strength, Healing, Purpose etc.

I don’t pay the angels much mind anymore, except to poke fun at Captain Daddy when he’s grumpy. Nothing like selecting a card reading “Peace” and thrusting it under your over-stimulated spouse’s nose to drive him completely off the dock. And sometimes I use them as bookmarks. And sometimes the chickens use them as confetti, as in, to throw a ticker tape parade for their Groovy Girls.

Anyway, I was at Powell’s Books on Sunday selling off some old reading material. The clerk pulled an angel card from the pages of “Blindness,” a book I started like eight years ago and never finished. (I thought it was depressing and unforgivably bleak, but what do I know, they made it into a movie last year). The card read “Freedom.”

“Thanks,” I said to the clerk, smiling. I felt downright gifted with my own personal allotment of freedom. So that’s where it’s been. I stuck it in my back pocket and went on my merry way.

Flash-forward to yesterday, when I pulled clean laundry from the dryer and discovered the shredded remnants of “Freedom,” washed to destruction before I could even enjoy its blissful sweetness. Drat.

I had quite the little self-pitying episode there in my laundry room, mourning the freedom I’d have to live my entire life without (as well as my inability to master the art of laundry), before truth smacked me in the head. Duh. You don’t need a small inspirational card in hand to stake claim on a little freedom, or any other longed-for life state, for that matter. These things are yours for the taking. Don’t you get it yet? Make them yours, for God’s sake. You’re almost forty. It’s about time.

Chapter 238...

2010-03-31T07:01:00.000-07:00

...in which our heroine is nearly finished with final edits on her book. In between fits of terror, she is quite jublilant.

Honestly, she is.

(Well, she's sure it's coming, anyway.)

Up next:

Riches

2010-03-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

Tax season mournful thought for the day:

“No one can stop you from writing. They can only stop you from getting paid for it.”

--Bobby Moresco, Hawaii Writer’s Conference, 2009

Silver lining: writing off this.

Try Die

2010-03-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

It has been said that all fear is fear of death.

I’ve managed to get my head around the fact that all negative emotions are fear. Envy is fear. Anger is fear. Anxiety is fear.

But I hadn’t gotten my head around all fear being fear of death until I came to live with a kid obsessed with death.

Two weeks ago: after a half-hour lost to the ephemeral delights of Screaming Flailing Crazyland on account of who-remembers-what transition, probably that it was time to go to gymnastics, I finally cornered Noodle, gave her a fierce hug, got down in her face, and said gently, “I know you have a hard time when things change when you aren’t ready for them to change.”

Her face crumpled. “I don’t want to grow up! I don’t want to die! I want to be five forever!”

Whoa, dude. And I thought I was existential.

Yesterday, on the way to swimming lessons, apropos of nothing: “Is everybody going to die, the whole world, everybody?”

I’ve learned to just cut to the chase. “Yes.”

“But that’s sad! I don’t want to die.”

“You aren’t going to die for a long, long time.”

“But, actually,” she brightly reconsidered, “ I want to try die, like, die for a minute and come alive again.”

“Well, sweetie, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not? I want to. Then I would know what it would be like, you know, for later.”

Before I could respond to this (who knows how) we arrived at our destination (“Land Ho!” hollered Chicken Little) and I was off the hook until next time.

Surely, if not before then, in May, when her brother’s birth/deathday rolls around. Unsurprisingly, Noodle thinks his cemetery plot is the most fascinating place on earth (“Is he really in there?”).

She recently told her entire preschool class about the cemetery (“We go and visit him at the place where all people go to die”) and her brother (“he lives there, but not really lives, because he’s dead”) with an enthusiasm akin to if he were, say, a newly acquired guinea pig.

To Noodle, the whole dead-sibling thing is like, seriously cool.

It’s given me a totally refreshing take on that particular situation, I must say.

Interesting Things That Have Happened Recently

2010-03-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

A postcard I sent to my parents from New York City to Oregon in October, 2008, turned up in their mailbox. (Where it has been in the interim might make an excellent plot for a novel. Or not.)

My husband presented me with a tube of bacon chapstick. (Note to the manufacturer—An appealing food does not necessarily translate well into an appealing personal care product)

Chicken Noodle burst into a near-perfect rendition of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” at the dinner table, a song I am fairly certain she has heard only a few times in her life and not at all recently. (I am considering the possibility of her reincarnation. Do you think she was at Woodstock? Do you think she died at Woodstock?)

Someone put $3000 on my credit card in a restaurant in Beverly Hills. (Sounds fun. Wish I'd been there.)

I rewrote and saved an essay three times, each of which the changes were not there when I reopened the document. (God? Are you trying to tell me something? Is it about my writing? Or Windows Office?)

I did a four-day no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no sugar, no corn, no wheat cleanse, and felt strangely non-plussed about the whole experience. (Wasn’t I supposed to be transformed instantly into a younger, more vibrant me? Made to levitate? Or at least lightened by a few pounds?)

Someone offered me a leech. (OK, this was in a dream. I declined. Still, I can’t help but wonder if it means something. Is there bloodletting in my future?)

I went to Kindergarten orientation but failed to realize I was supposed to take my future Kindergartner with me. (No one tells you anything, apparently. You have to figure it all out yourself).

Captain Daddy went in the women’s restroom of a new local restaurant, peed and washed his hands before a woman came in and interrupted his reverie. (He was completely unbothered by the whole affair. This is why I love him.)

Rockin' the Bard

2010-03-08T08:01:00.001-08:00

Of particular interest to anyone who has ever made-out in the back of a school bus...or wished they had...

An essay from my upcoming book, Chance of Sun: A Perfectly Imperfect Oregon Upbringing, is in this month's Oregon Quarterly Magazine.

Rockin' the Bard

Happy New You! Part IV

2010-03-03T06:15:00.000-08:00

The chickens turned three and five last week. I am still not sure how we all got here, let alone in one piece. But I suppose every parent feels that way.

At the park over the weekend, a father, while pushing his 20-month-old son in the swing, asked, “How old are your girls?” After my answer, he said, “Oh, so you’re on easy street now, huh?”

Easy street? Is that where I am? I do vaguely remember things being more difficult even just a year ago. But I wouldn’t say parenthood has morphed into a day at the spa.

Yes, there is very little ambiguous, ear-piercing crying in my life anymore. I gave away my stroller two weeks ago. If you hand the chickens a hairbrush, they just might brush their own hair. And never again in this lifetime shall I wear breast pads.

But these days, when Chicken Noodle finds my actions disagreeable, she lets me know with an ear-piercing and entirely unambiguous insult. “You stupid pooty booty head Mommy!”

And when I haul her off to her room for a time-out, she brings to the battle new advantages—40 pounds of muscle and a strong left hook.

And this morning after I started the bread maker and left the room, Chicken Little got into the cabinet, climbed up on the counter, and added several new ingredients, including dishwater.

And if I leave them alone together for too long, the scene inevitably transforms into four-star girl-on-girl wrestling, complete with biting, scratching and occasional nudity.

I suspected that Park Dad didn’t want to hear any of this.

I finally answered, “Things are pretty great, yeah. But they just change. Some pieces get easier, some get harder.”

He looked at me like I was a three-headed alien bearing news of the world’s imminent demise. Then he chose to treat me as an unfortunate anomaly. “I can’t wait until he’s four!” he proclaimed.

The one thing I hope I’m learning after five years of motherhood is to quit waiting for the perfect tomorrow and start living the imperfect today. There’s always frosting somewhere, if you look for it.

"God It’s Such a Drag to Have to Live in the Past"

2010-02-25T06:37:00.000-08:00

The other night I dreamt I was pregnant with my ex-boyfriend’s baby. This is impossible for many reasons, not the least of which is I haven’t laid eyes on him since 1996. (Oh, and my ten years of marriage, though I guess that doesn’t stop everybody from getting into this particular pickle).

No matter—in the dream, this situation was very real and posed many problems in my current life. Did I shun the boyfriend, stay with Captain Daddy and hope he’d agree to raise my love child? Did I ditch my family and go live with this baby’s father, to raise our illicit bundle of joy together? Maybe a baby was what we always needed. Maybe a baby would make him faithful, magically force him to appreciate me and love me as he never did all of those years ago. Maybe a baby would encourage us to put aside the self-destructive behavior towards which we’d been so prone.

In the dream, my boyfriend held me, spoke soothingly in my ear. He promised me everything. Of course we would raise this baby together. Of course there would be love, joy—all of my heart’s desires and more.

I awoke with Captain Daddy on my left and Chicken Little on my right in the bed I’ve slept in for well over a decade—far from Portland and the past. Far from pregnant, for that matter. I knew immediately the meaning behind the dream. The baby is my book. My ex-boyfriend makes a small but illustrious appearance in my story—the chapter he dominates marks the arc of the narrative. It was the lowest, most dangerous and chilling time of my life. And I do feel like, by writing about it, by publishing it, I am giving birth to it again. I am bringing events long-ago put to rest back to life. It’s unsettling, to say the least.

But as Chicken Little woke beside me in bed, threw an arm around me and kissed me a sloppy good morning, I knew the answer to the dream’s central question. Of course I would stay here. To write about the past, to unearth it, to put it on display is to bring it back from the dead. But I don’t have to go back and live with it. I can pull those things out of my personal history and still keep my feet firmly planted in the life I crafted from the Phoenix’s flames.

Still, for the better part of the morning, I couldn’t shake the image of my ex holding me so tenderly, gazing fondly into my eyes. Everything was going to be okay, he seemed to say. This time, there would be a happy ending.

Number Two

2010-02-17T06:32:00.000-08:00

When you are four, poop is hilarious.

Last night, Noodle and I corrected an overtired meltdown (hers, though some nights it’s mine) by crawling into her bed and singing a few lullabies together. It was a lovely mother-and-child moment, the sort that seems more precious to me now that she’s only days away from five, and mere months from Kindergarten.

But soon enough, the grand total of three lullabies I know became boring to my dearheart daughter. She wanted to sing something a bit more upbeat. A tune with spirit. We shifted to this ditty, something I picked up way back in my preschool-teaching years (which were, if you are wondering, roughly fourteen lifetimes ago).

When you wake up in the morning it’s a quarter-to-four, your mind starts humming, you head for the door, you brush your teeth, ch ch-ch-ch ch-ch ch-ch-ch.

Right away, Noodle took this song right out of my hands and kicked it up a notch. Perhaps--you might think after reading her lyrics--to a place that some grownups actually visit should they be awoken at a quarter-to-four.

You wake up in the morning with a toilet on your head, your toothpaste is poop, there’s pee in your eyes, you brush your teeth poop poop-poop-poop poop-poop-poop.

She had a good hearty laugh at that one. But she could do better.

You wake up in the morning and go in the yard, it’s snowing and there’s ten people watching, you poop in the garden, it makes the flowers sick poop poop-poop-poop poop-poop-poop.

I cannot understate the hilarity that ensued. But she could bring it even stronger than that.

You wake up in the morning with the King and the Queen of Poop. The prince of poop kisses you, you pee on the queen. You poop your pants poop poop-poop-poop poop-poop-poop.

I’ve always loved Noodle’s giggle. It’s like an old coffee percolator, bubbling up and erupting. But she still wasn’t done.

You wake up in the morning with the Wizard of Poop, the King and the Queen of Poop Oz turn your eyeballs into poop, your poop turns green poop poop-poop-poop poop-poop-poop.

“Noodle,” I said, tears spilling down my cheeks. “You are killing me.”

“Mom,” she said after awhile, between giggles. We both took a deep breath and gathered ourselves for a moment, exhausted by so much laughing. It was nearly time for me to untangle myself from her arms, turn out the light, kiss her forehead and let her fall asleep. “I have an idea," Noodle said, as if it had just occured to her. "Now let’s sing something silly.”

Yin and Yang at the Pet Store

2010-02-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

Recently I took the chickens to the pet store. I envisioned a fun activity with which to fill a foggy February morning. I imagined the chicken’s delight at my suggestion of a goldfish to bring home—maybe two, if I were feeling particularly magnanimous. What a good mother I am, I secretly self-congratulated.

Chicken Noodle had other ideas.

Once we got there:

“I want a kitty!”

“How about a fish?”

“No, a kitty!” She leapt around in front of the kitten cages.

“But look at these pretty fishies, aren’t they wonderful?”

“I want a kitty, I want a kitty!”

I steeled myself for battle. Put on my calm reasonable voice. “Oh, baby, a kitty is a really big decision. I don’t think we’re going to choose a kitty right now.”

“I want a big decision, I want a big decision! Please, Mommy, can I have a big decision?”

How many times have I asked for something small and cuddly like a kitten and instead found myself in possession of something clawed and unwieldy like a big decision? Asked for autonomy, got responsibility? Asked for romance, got marriage? Asked for maturity, got wrinkles? Asked for a published book, got the job of writing and editing it?

At the moment, actually, I am kind of digging it. No, not the wrinkles. The book writing. It is prickly and unwieldy, that’s for sure. Not to mention speculative. But as once went a wise quote in an otherwise horrible movie, the name of which I’ve forgotten—“The hard thing and the right thing are usually the same thing.”

And you know what? I have learned so much already in the process of writing this book. Just this six-month project has made me a much better writer. I have learned a lot about myself, too. Who knew there was so much left to learn, ten years into this little writing career of mine?

A decade ago, I asked for something small and cuddly—the right to live as an artist, and forge my own path. And got something prickly and unwieldy—the right to live as an artist, and forge my own path.

Isn’t it beautiful?

But no, we did not get a kitten.

One-upping Mr. Nelson

2010-02-04T06:51:00.000-08:00

Last week I was invited to a middle-school classroom to talk about being a writer. It was one of those moments that made me go “huh?” and look over my shoulder for the real grown-up/real writer who was surely standing behind me. “Oh, you mean me?” said my inner ego, who is nerdy, shy and still only 12 herself. She violently fears a room full of eyes on her, not to mention that she hasn’t a single thing to say.

But once I got there, perched on a red cane chair in front of twenty 7th and 8th graders, I surprised myself. I talked about writing, and kind of couldn’t shut up. I think my allotted time was ten minutes, and when I finally came to a sort of conclusion, thirty minutes had passed. The students were totally engaged, asking questions. One kid even tape recorded me. I can only hope that I was more entertaining and inspiring than the lawyer who’d launched this career series for them earlier in the week.

The kick of it was that it was really cool to talk about how I got here, and remind myself where “here” is. I worked my ass off, and it kind of even worked! It reminded me that talking about what you love is easy. I love talking about what I love. And I love writing. I even told them—with pride—that when I was a kid I used to spend every recess in the library. Even though at the time it made me a complete outcast, I see now that it was a crucial step in my developing identity. So there, Bangor Elementary.

But it wasn’t all about me. I told those kids they can be writers. All it takes is doing it, and doing it, and doing some more. Voila! You’re a writer. Unlike some things, like pro ball, which I could have done until I was brain damaged and still never excelled. I told them they didn’t even need to wait— starting today, they could be a writer. One kid said, “So I could submit an essay to a magazine right now?” I said, “You go for it. No one is going to ask how old you are. Just do it.”

Which got me thinking about Mr. Nelson. He was my 11th grade English teacher. He was a curmudgeonly sort who delivered fill-in-the-blank tests with questions like “How thick was the rope in The Old Man and the Sea?” He barely spoke a word to me all year long. Then on the last day of school, offhand, without smiling or even looking me in the eye, he said, “You’re the best writer in the junior class.” I was so stunned I just stood there like the dead fish in The Old Man and the Sea (was there a dead fish in The Old Man and the Sea? I don’t really remember. Surely there was. I am sure at one point I had to answer a test question about how long it was, and its species).

I’ve thought about that moment a lot, especially given that it took me another decade to decide to try to become a writer. Mr. Nelson, why not mention that little tasty tidbit of teacherly opinion a tiny bit earlier in the year? Why not encourage me? Why not point me in a direction that I totally wanted to go but hadn’t embraced yet? Why not be a mentor instead of just the giver of ridiculous tests?

That’s what I wanted to do for those kids. What I wish someone would have done for me. Why not? There’s always room for more of us.

I know, this is a long post. I told you I couldn’t shut up.

Exactly, Darling

2010-01-29T06:48:00.000-08:00

As a writer/mother, I always point out author bylines and photos when I read books to the chickens.

A few days back while unloading groceries, Chicken Little pulled this box from the pile.

“Look, Mom,” she said, all wide-eyed, pointing to Pa and Nell. “These are the people who wrote the popcorn!”

I get so misty-eyed when I see my parental intentions taking root.

Every Girl's Sunday Afternoon Fantasy

2010-01-26T06:39:00.000-08:00

So, I’m trolling through the grocery store. The chickens trail behind me. They bleat. “Mommy can we have this? Can we have that? Momm-meey?” They grab boxes of Pokemon macaroni and cheese and bottles of bubble bath shaped like Cinderella off the shelves. They bonk into other shoppers like poorly-shot pool balls.

It’s been a delightful weekend of homey togetherness. Captain Daddy has been at work, putting in his usual 48-hour shift. The rest of us-three have been crammed in the house doing the same puzzle over and over and getting increasingly sick of each other while it sleet/snows outside. Good times.

By this point—Sunday afternoon—I am over it. I am wearing a ball cap, old shapeless fleece jacket that I used to wear pregnant, and a scowl. Strutting my stuff. Running wild and looking pretty. Hot child in Fred Meyer. With offspring.

I round the bend at the end of aisle eight and nearly smash my cart into this totally cute guy in uniform. Turnouts, actually. Firefighter gear. He’s clean-shaven but a little rugged-looking, with crazy cheekbones and boyish good looks that have been around the block just the perfect number of times. His blue eyes gaze directly into mine. I am startled. I freeze.

The fireman takes a step closer. He leans over. He kisses me.

Though it kind of feels like it, I am not having a sleep-deprived fantasy, perhaps the sort that comes from getting no exercise and eating mostly only crackers and cheese for three days. I don’t recall having done any hallucinogens prior to loading my children into the vehicle and driving across town. I am not sure what else might explain this unexpected bright spot in my day.

“Daddy!” scream the chickens with delight.

This August, I’ll have been married to that cute fireman for ten years. We met 14 years ago this week. Every time I see him in uniform, I feel 25 again.

And yeah, on-duty firefighters grocery shop. And cook. That’s even hotter.

My Hawaiian Vacation, In Quotes

2010-01-21T05:52:00.000-08:00

Captain Daddy, on the plane over as Chicken Little climbs him like King Kong on the Empire State Building, roaring and kicking: “Kill me now.”
--
Captain Daddy, night one, 2 a.m.: “Are you going to take her to the ER or am I?”

R (age 6) to Chicken Noodle (age 4), day two: “Don't talk to me. Ever again.”

Captain Daddy, day two: "Where is Little's blankie?"

Me: "With Noodle's sweater. On the plane."

My sister, day three: “I had a dream that a nice normal family wanted to adopt me.”

--
Chicken Little, night four, 3 a.m.: “I kattack you big fat mommy!”

Me: “Middle-of-the-night time is for sleeping, baby. No kattacking.”

Chicken Little: “Kattack kattack!” (thump)

Me, day five: “Family vacations are about tradeoffs. You get this (gesturing to vast stunning tropical landscape). But you have to give up sanity.”
--
My mother, day six: “I used to think happiness was everyone I love in the same room. I’ve changed my mind.”
--
Me, day seven: “Sometimes you’re the pickaxe, sometimes you’re the coconut.”
--
Me, at the airport after our return: “I am not sure I am ever going to do this again.”
My sister: “Nope. See you on Facebook.”

Happy Blogoversary To Me

2010-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog! Bust out the champagne!

Oh. It's 6 am. Well. Coffee will do. Slip a little something in it, if you must.

Here’s a Blooming Year One redux.

First post: Popcorn

Blog Inspiration: Late Bloomers

Hero's Challenge, Act I: Consult

Foreshadowing: Free the French Fries

Plot Twist: Plot Twist

Hero's Challenge, Act II: A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

Audience favorites:

The Lost Weekend

We’re Going to Potty Like It’s 2009

The Farm Share Blues

Torn Between Two Lovers

The Perspective Express

Roots and Flowers

Post That Best Describes My Glamorous Life: Baby You’re a Star

Post I Should Reread When I Get Bat-Shit Crazy: Onward Intrepid Writer

Blog words written: 31, 400

Visitors: 2533

Personal Take-Home: It’s been one heck of a year

Hero's Challenges, Act III: to come

With that, I’m out for ten days. Santa delivered (Santa Brings The Heat)—I board a plane for Hawaii tomorrow.

PS We’re dropping Chester off on the way. I'll take pictures.

PPS It might be time to change my bio blurb to the left. Book burning? What book burning?

Aloha!

Welcome to My Disaster Area

2010-01-06T06:10:00.001-08:00

This is picked up

I sleep under fine art

The very latest in home decorating

We did this, yep.

A couple of weeks ago we went to a friend of Noodle’s on a play date. It turned out to be the kind of house that makes me feel bad about my house. Not a brand-new shiny McMansion, no. The kind that used to be a fixer-upper. That was then very thoroughly fixed-up.

You know, like what my house could look like. If I actually ever did anything to it.

This house was sparkly remodeled but livable and personal. The children’s rooms were nicely appointed and their toys were arranged in little vignettes on shelves. Family photos hung on the wall in neat rows. Cupboards and wainscoat were painted fresh white. Furniture was perky, décor just so. It was very lovely. I kind of wanted to move in.

The chickens and I came home to our own house, which seemed to have been mobbed by five-year-old Hells Angels in our absence. Mismatched toys littered the floor, piles of dishes mixed with art supplies in the kitchen, books were haphazardly crammed onto shelves, crayon covered the walls, stickers were stuck to the floor, the Christmas tree tipped at an odd angle.

In other words, it was exactly how I’d left it that morning.

I raced around trying to right a few of the most egregious wrongs, wondering how soon I could convince Captain Daddy to repaint the entire interior, before stopping dead in the living room with this realization.

I kind of like my house.

Even with Crayola walls and kid-art haphazardly taped everywhere, including the headboard of my bed. Even with a dozen slightly mutilated magic wands shoved in a vase instead of flowers in the dining room.

Sure, there are things that I’d like to fix, like the unpainted sheetrock in the basement and the stained linoleum in the bathroom. But when I look at those things in better moods, I see not ugly imperfection, but time—time spent elsewhere.

Time spent reading books to the chickens or hiking in the woods as a family or reading the New Yorker or writing a book or even sleeping. Time spent in pursuits other than beautifying my home. Which has never been nor will ever be my priority. And that’s just me. And so be it.

My chickens won’t grow up in bedrooms with beautifully arranged shelves of perfect toys. They will grow up, for better or worse, with a clear sense of my values, which are: people first, play second, work that makes you feel good third, work that impresses the neighbors last.

(This explains many things, including the fact that my median income over the last ten years is about what it cost to buy a Toyota ten years ago, and that there are several decaying objects in my backyard, including a rusted-out cruiser bicycle (though I actually blame Captain Daddy for that one. Funny. We share the same priorities.))

This epiphany made me so cheery I put the pile of kid art back from where I’d scooped it and sat down with the new Sue Grafton novel. Now that I’ll be happy I devoted time to when I am on my deathbed.

It's a caterpillar, duh

Just Another Bat-Shit Crazy Writer

2009-12-31T07:26:00.000-08:00

Well, I’m back. You didn’t notice I was missing? Just read the posts written from Thanksgiving until the week before Christmas, especially this one. They were written by my evil twin. Between you and me, she needs to be institutionalized. Or at least heavily medicated.

I must admit that I am not one of those serene, surefooted writers, who ease their way through creative days with persistence and grace. No, I am the kind who hurtles along like an over-stimulated toddler on a new Christmas tricycle, obsessive to the point of compulsive, until suddenly the wheels come off and I careen into the ditch.

Self-doubt and anxiety catch up to me in a swirl of black cloud. I frantically swipe about for my creative self, desperately afraid that if I can’t find her instantly she’ll never come back. If I can’t keep the magic momentum moving, I’ll stagnate and never write another word worth the price of tomatoes. This fear builds. The harder I try, the more I can’t write anything. I become paralyzed. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I just quiver there, in the ditch.

It ain’t pretty.

It’s been this way forever. You’d think I’d get it by now. During the years I spent writing my first book, I thought that it was just the topic. Once I finished writing about my dead baby, this fear/ocd cycle would cease. Well, guess what? It’s been two years this May since I set my baby book on fire, and still I behave like the poster child for the bat-shit crazy writer.

At least I don’t write with a pint of whisky in my desk drawer. Or a pistol.

Being as it is New Year’s and all, I am going to make a resolution. Next time I get all bonkers, I am going to see it for what it is—indication that the well is temporarily dry, not something else bigger, like, say, my career and identity imploding in a spectacular, traumatizing, publicly-humiliating, soul-destroying end.

“Back away from the computer,” I will tell myself. “That’s it. Real slow. Put down the mouse. Back away.”

I’ve tried everything else, believe me. Nothing but time away from writing cures the frantic paralysis. I seem to require intermittent distance from a project in order to be able to see it again.

I can spend that time gripped in front of the computer, having a gigantic fear-cow but producing only the occasional lonely sentence. Or go to the movies with the chickens, man. Go to the mall. No one cares if you’re bat-shit crazy at the mall.

Anyway, I am back in the saddle now and feeling perfectly excited and capable of finishing my book. I only have three essays to finish for a solid first draft. Of course, now I also have a newsletter and six magazine articles to write.

No matter. As long as she sticks around, Madame OCD can do anything.

This Morning While I Was Blogging

2009-12-28T08:33:00.000-08:00

Of course we all know it could have been much worse.

It's been four months this week since the snip-snip incident. The chickens are no longer getting double-takes at the grocery store.

In fact, if you don't look too closely, my babies look perfectly perfect once more.

Everytime Chicken Noodle asks for scissors these days, she quickly adds, "I won't cut my hair."

She seems to have learned something from this whole ordeal. Given the lovely blue on the arm of Little, it seems I haven't.

Oh well. I always feel better knowing I have one or two areas of self-improvement left to work on, don't you?

Santa Brings the Heat

2009-12-22T06:54:00.000-08:00

Santa stopped by the chickens’ preschool the other day. Very kind of him to go out of his way like that. Just like Santa to make sure that even the 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daycare kids whose parents don’t have time to go to the grocery store let alone the mall where Santa normally hangs got to see him this year.

But there he sat, alone in the corner. No kids anywhere near him, his cutie-pie elf, or his pile ‘o candy canes. It’s his season, but Santa looked a little forlorn.

A parent arrived to pick up his child. “Gavin doesn’t want to sit on Santa’s lap,” said a teacher apologetically.

“Oh, noooo,” said Gavin’s father, widening his eyes. “Santa brings the heat. Santa’s got power.” He waved his fingers around and quivered all over, as if Santa were Voldemort, or Idi Amin.

Chicken Little was terrified of Santa until this year (that’s her in the picture, three years ago). She needed a little coaxing the other night, but she hopped on his lap eventually. Probably helped that her baby sis walked right up to Santa and said, “Hi. I want a Rainbow Fairy for Christmas. Can I have a candy cane?”

That kid has no fear.

Some of us never get over our fear of Santa’s power. We cower at the sight of “December” on the calendar, require several dozen cocktails and a few sleeping pills to survive the holidays, and still emerge feeling like we’ve spent a month in a blender.

But isn’t Santa’s power a benevolent one? Sure, he’s kind of overwhelming in that big fuzzy suit. It’s a little freakish that you can’t see his face under all that cotton-ball facial hair. But I think Santa really wants to share his superhuman energy with us all. He doesn’t care how old we are. He does ask that we be nice instead of naughty. But then he’s like—here, take this pile of toys I just whipped up with my magic powers and be off with you. Go be happy. Live strong. Kick some holiday-blues booty. See you next year.

I personally could use some heat right about now—literally and figuratively. I want to be like Chicken Little, to walk right up to Santa (metaphorically) and tell him exactly what I want. I want to soak up Santa’s mojo.

“Santa,” I’ll say, “I’d like to harness your incredible power to finish this book with strength and finesse. I’d also like a trip to Hawaii. Five days spent with family this week without anyone snapping at each other or bursting into tears would be nice, too.

Right on, Santa. Thanks for spreading the heat. You ‘da man. And a big shout-out to the missus, eh?”

All Aboard the Perspective Express

2009-12-17T07:07:00.000-08:00

Should you find yourself in an anxiety-ridden funk like the one *someone* (ahem) has been in as of late, take these specific steps to immediately remedy the situation.

Take a road trip. Two cars, three adults, five children aged five and under, 24 hours, 400 miles and many salty snack foods should suffice. Weather: freezing rain/snowstorm. Destination: North Pole, via the Polar Express.

The driver of Car #1 should get pulled over within the first 60 miles. Reason: swerving. After determining that a) she is not driving her minivan ass-over-teakettle drunk at 1 p.m with four kids in the back b) driver of Car #2 (pulled up on side of road behind this spectacle) does not have our back as homey drug dealer/arms carrier c) no children will remain sleeping on this journey, Sheriff lets Car #1 go and leaves the scene, never noticing the expired tags on Car #2.

Crawl into the minivan back-40 to deliver juice boxes, crackers, raisins and fruit leather to wee darlings approx. two dozen times. Hit head on drop-down video player every time. Start being referred to as the flight attendant, subject to cracks like “Passenger in seat 3B, your freshly roasted peanuts are on the way, as soon as the flight attendant is back from her gin-and-tonic break.”

Delight in the appreciative noises of Child #4, who mutters at regular intervals, "You're stupid, Mommy."

Upon arrival in train station destination city, get lost and drive around for 15 minutes.

At restaurant prior to train departure, Child #2 crashes head into table and splits it open, bringing you *this close* to spending the evening in the ER instead of the North Pole as promised.

Ride Train to North Pole! Children laugh and dance and play and scale the seats! Santa comes aboard and hands out hundreds of small, noisy bells! Grown-ups wish for schnapps in their hot chocolate! Average people sing very loudly! Train ride never seems to end!

Send sister a text that reads “Still on train. People are singing carols. Have been kidnapped and sent to North Hell.”

Children’s eyes grow wide and awestruck at the sight of the lights of North Pole, making you feel all mushy inside about your newly updated “Mother of the Year” status.

Upon arrival in overnight destination city, get lost and drive around for 15 minutes.

Carry five blissfully sleeping children to bed. Purr over their adorableness. Stay up until midnight drinking wine and eating cheese and talking about life.

Leave children in bed. Sleep on floor. It's the least you can do.

Get up at 5 a.m. and blink blearily into your coffee while witnessing five slightly less adorable children run laps and scream at the top of their lungs.

On way out of town, get lost and drive around for 15 minutes.

At first potty stop, Child #1 steps in dog poop and then gallops all over every surface of car interior.

Come *this close* to running out of gas.

Respond to children’s endless whining pleas to flight attendant for juice boxes and bunny crackers by making up a handy list of mommy whines. (wheedling tone) “Where’s my chardonnay? I want a spa treatment. I need some beignets right now.”

Laugh so hard you cry at least six times.

Soak up the utterly joyful insanity only children can bring to your life.

Arrive home punch-drunk and cross-eyed, but happy as shit.

Remember that what matters isn’t choosing the perfect title for your book or squeezing just one more brilliant essay out of yourself before Tuesday. What matters is a) getting out in the world and doing the occasional completely cockamamie thing b) good friends c) oodles and oodles of love.

Bluto

2009-12-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Chicken Noodle got a flu shot. Afterwards, I took both chickens out for ice cream. We sat together in a booth in a very quiet restaurant, relaxing for the first time in a frantic day. After a moment my mind started to churn with all of the things I still needed to accomplish, one of which was to choose a gift for my book club members, as the one I planned had fallen through a couple of hours before.

“Hey, what should I get the aunties for Christmas?” I am perpetually surprised that my kids are suddenly at an age when I can put questions like these to them, and actually get semi-useful answers. Here were their suggestions:

A basketball
A Bend Brewing Co. tee-shirt
A turtle sticker
Snowflakes
A merry-go-round
An igloo

At this point, Chicken Little bumped Chicken Noodle’s arm, some ice cream spilled on Noodle’s new dress and she punched Little in the arm.

I said, “Hey, don’t hit your sister or I will take away your ice cream.”

Noodle pointed out that she’d already eaten it all. This might have been the end of the matter, but Noodle wanted to go deeper. Where had her ice cream gone? Might I still be able to take it away?

After considering the matter, Noodle speculated, “You would have to knock my head off and suck the ice cream out of my blood.”

These, I admitted, were not measures I was prepared to take.

Noodle said, “’Cuz you love me all the way to Bluto?”

I said, “’Cuz I love you all the way to Bluto.”

Perhaps in lieu of an igloo or basketball, I could simply give my book club members some ice cream and tell them I love them all the way to Bluto. It would be true, and I have a feeling they might prefer ice cream over a merry-go-round. Could be wrong about that, though.

Missing: Life Force. Please Return. Reward: Chestnuts Roasted on an Open Fire

2009-12-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

This whole book thing is sucking the life force out of me.

I know, I know. It’s what I’ve always wanted and I should be able to find the joy in it and by complaining I sound like a big fat whiner and nobody likes a whiner.

Captain Daddy and I got mired in a teeny, weeny Marital Moment about this the other night. Here’s what I said, roughly, over a beer at the local pub:

The bottomless soul-searching necessary to unearth the history and truth that will make these essays good is like letting 100 angry leeches feast on me from the inside out.

Sacrificing organic creation for “sit down and create something beautiful about Topic X—now GO!” is like the Bataan Death March for the fragile artistic soul.

When I sit down to write, it hurts. Metaphorically, but also physically. Like someone is taking bites out of my head.

Half of what I write is complete crap anyway and ends up in the file on my computer I named “shitcan”.

At the end of the day I want to slip into a coma and sleep for like 17 million hours.

When the chickens run past me screaming naked with peanut butter smeared on their bodies and hitting each other with sharp objects all I can manage is to stare at them blankly as if they are a bad television show that I would turn off if only I could muster the energy to locate the remote.

And I am feeling, well, just a little bit done. As in DONE. But I can’t be DONE, because I am not done. And there’s something to be said for showing up and persevering, but sometimes maybe there is wisdom in knowing that one is just DONE.

At which point, Captain Daddy gave me a rather bored look which implied that he’s heard this all before, and perhaps I was overreacting just a tiny bit, as well as maybe whining in that particularly irritating “my pain is bigger than your pain will ever be” melodramatic self-pitying shortsighted way.

And he mentioned gently that part about this being my long-lusted-after dream. And that lots of things in life are hard work, especially things that are worthwhile.

Which made me pout.

But I know he’s right. (Don’t tell him, because he’ll just do that “I was right” happy dance and I’ll have to throw spitballs at him made of tinsel.)

Do you think I just need a break, and beautiful things will bubble back up to the surface? Or is my coma permanent? Yesterday I took a rest by addressing 125 Christmas cards and holiday shopping for three hours in a 14-degree snowstorm, but the answer to this question did not become immediately apparent.

Joe Has Something to Say to My Friends

2009-12-03T09:17:00.000-08:00

Captain Daddy and I recently watched the original documentary “Woodstock”, made in 1970 one year after the illustrious event itself. I was born that year. Even though my parents weren’t hippies, watching the film explained them, their generation, and the last forty years in some interesting ways.

At turns appalling and deep, “Woodstock” turned out to be a strange catalyst to introspection for me, a sort of underlining tool for the years of my life thus-far and the coming-of-age essays I am writing for my book.

In any case, the film is an experience not to be missed. It promises a “living vicariously through one’s television” sort of evening. It made Captain Daddy shake his head repeatedly and say, “I was born thirteen years too late.” It made me think that if I’d been born thirteen years earlier, I’d have gotten into a whole lot more trouble than I already managed to do.

Many an unforgettable performance is on display here. Jimi and Janis do their thing, the latter in a quite fascinating state of intoxication and each just a year away from tragic death.

But my favorite performance by far—the one that you’ve truly not lived until you’ve seen—is Joe Cocker singing “A Little Help From My Friends.” I, personally, was rendered speechless. And those back-up singers! Wow. Watch the whole thing. He’s just getting warmed up in the beginning.

I send Joe out now as a little Thank You to all of my friends and family who have seen me through many ups and downs in the last decade, particularly in terms of my writing. Sometimes your love has been tough, but I know in my heart that underneath it all you’ve been as enthusiastic as Joe. I appreciate each of you immensely.

Pie

2009-11-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

Today, as I pull out my hair and gnash my teeth trying to get through some mind-scrunching edits on my book when I really should be in the kitchen baking two pies for tomorrow and definitely shouldn't be blogging at all, I offer you only a modest gift. But isn't it a lovely one?

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” – Arthur Miller

The question is, which will be the right regret? The unfinished essay or the unbaked pie? Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Happy Turkey Day!

Blooming Eventually, Repeatedly and Currently

2009-11-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

The meeting with the publisher went very well. If all goes as discussed, my book will be on the shelves next fall.

It’s the strangest sensation.

Driving home, my brain was short circuiting. I have every reason to think that this is actually happening, after so many years of it not happening. I am going to publish a book. And yet…that moment is not quite here, not just yet. When does one actually bust out the champagne? When the book goes off to the printer? When it’s released? At the launch party? When it’s positively reviewed? Sells well? When the next book deal comes?

I said to my mother, “I just realized that there will never be one final moment of victory. Just incremental triumph.”

“Like life?” she said.

Which reminded me of a message a friend sent me a few weeks ago responding to this blog. Here’s part of it:

The way I look at it is that women are ready to bloom at any moment. We are not the annual flower that blooms once in a lifetime, whose beauty is awed but is fleeting and temporary. We are perennials - ready to bloom over and over with the proper amount of care (love, sun, etc!). It is the person who thinks they have bloomed once and it is over who begins to molder. Sometimes we are dormant, but the bloom is always in there waiting for the proper care to bloom again.

Now is a perfectly appropriate time for the champagne. Ahead lies more uncertainty and certainly more work, but it’s too easy to skip the small triumphs while waiting for the big ones. I’ve done enough of that in the last nine years. There is always something to celebrate, and I intend to start toasting. Care to join me?

Thanks to Jennifer for the comments.

A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

2009-11-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

Imagine a dark and blustery night, a room cast with shadows. A writer polishes her working manuscript. The publisher has asked to see what she has so far. (Plot Twist). She adds fancy words, changes the formatting, calls on the universe for extra powerful positive thinking. The wind blows like a demon out her office windows. Will this be the realization of a ten-year dream? Or just another disappointment? Zap – she hits the send button on Halloween night (well, not exactly. Three days later. But it makes a better story this way).

Then she waits.

The publisher receives the manuscript and reads 50 pages within 36 hours. He emails the writer, responding with words so enthusiastic some are unfit for print. He loves it. Really loves it. He fell in love with the character, her growth and setbacks and little triumphs. Thinks maybe his press can’t do this book justice.

It is the email she’s waited a decade to receive.

But she doesn’t receive it. Unbeknownst to her, it languishes in her junk mail alongside a sales pitch for Discovery Toys. She doesn’t want any Discovery Toys. She does desperately want a book published. She waits, biting her nails, cursing every doctor who never gave her xanax. Would the publisher have responded by now? Maybe not. Maybe she’s a terrible writer. Maybe he hates her. Maybe the universe hates her. Maybe she should sell Discovery Toys.

She waits.

The publisher waits.

The email waits.

The wind blows.

Finally, six days later, before she’s had her first cup of coffee on a Tuesday morning, she opens her junk email box. What is this? Could it be? Such amazing things said? About her work? But the date—last Wednesday? Dear God, no! The horror, the horror! Do emails expire? Has he changed his mind? Has he decided she’s ungrateful, crazy, delirious on xanax? She emails him back immediately.

She waits.

Shouldn’t she be celebrating? Not yet. Not until the junk mail universe has righted itself. Blasted junk mail universe! She spins in anxiety. She neglects her children. She forgets to take the trash out. She drinks just the tiniest bit of vodka.

Finally, the publisher emails her back. He wondered why she hadn’t responded. He hasn’t changed his mind. They have a lot to talk about. He’ll see her next week.

Stay Tuned for A Terrifying Tale of Gut Wrenching Distress!: Getting What You’ve Always Wanted

Sorry About Those Totally Wasted Seven Years

2009-11-04T07:36:00.000-08:00

I got the completely wrong college degrees. I’ve never been bothered by this. At least I have some college degrees. And their wrongness is an accurate reflection of my nature (blooming ev-en-tu-al-ly). I didn’t know and/or embrace what I wanted out of life early on.

Who cares, because I got what I wanted in the long run—a self-made, totally authentic writing career. People pay me to write. Sometimes. That supercedes all ill-conceived college degrees, right?

Yes. Until recently. Feeling the need for something new, something less speculative, something to prepare me for the not-so-far-off future when I’ll need medical benefits, I recently looked into teaching writing at the local community college.

And learned that, two college degrees and ten years of professional writing aside, I am not qualified to teach even pre-college level writing. To do so, I would need a MA in English. (Not even an MFA in writing, incidentally, which I think says something about the controversy around MFAs in writing. Someday I’ll blog about that).

It’s the first time I’ve regretted my academic past, or rather regretted that I wasn’t more directed in my academic past. No point to this regret, naturally—it won’t change anything. And in the big picture, I believe you can’t be where you aren’t yet. In 1996 when I started down the road of MS in Natural Resource Education, I wasn’t a writer yet.

But the question remains—what now? Do I live with my inapt resume, or correct it by getting another master’s degree? Hmmm. We are education junkies in my family. But yikes almighty, back to school? (The third option is to write a mega best-selling novel, which would pay for those medical benefits.)

By the way, I took a teeny tiny job as a writing tutor at the community college instead. Apparently, I am qualified to do that. Next post: Blooming is reacquainted with comma splices, run-ons and fragments.

The Same Suit and the Same Skin

2009-10-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

Friday night, I took the chickens to the local brewpub for dinner. As is common to the genre “casual American restaurant”, the BBC boasts televisions perched above diners like rocks on a cliff, threatening to fall on your head or at least your nachos.

We have a TV at home, but it sits in the basement unenhanced by cable and functions more like a disregarded piece of furniture inherited from a maiden aunt than an entertainment device. This makes public TVs all the more enticing.

Chicken Noodle glanced up just after we sat down and said, “I saw the president!”

I looked up. On screen was the Orlando Magic/Atlanta Hawks game. Great, I thought. My child can’t tell the different between a basketball player and the president. But I knew immediately from where the confusion stemmed.

“Are you sure it was the president?” I asked her. “Or did he just have the same skin?”

“He had the same suit and the same skin,” she said matter-of-factly.

I watched the game with her for a minute and sure enough, here came a guy with the same suit and the same skin as our president—Hawks’ coach Mike Woodson. In practically no other way did he resemble Obama, but I could see how the misidentification might be understandable if one were, say, four, with a mother who never let her watch TV.

Ten years ago when we had time for such leisure activities, Captain Daddy and I used to pass entire evenings arguing about completely speculative, futuristic problems, like how we would raise well-rounded, cultured children in a practically all-white town, and what we would do if a child of ours demonstrated an impolite reaction to what would surely be an uncommon sight. How would we teach respect and equality without practical experience? “Well, if our country elects the first black president by then, we won’t have to worry,” was not part of any realistically imagined scenario we hauled into our futile discourse.

I observed Noodle split her attention between coloring a rainbow and watching the game. She had no further comment. And then it hit me—a wave of joy. This was my problem? My motherhood challenge of the evening was to correct Noodle’s assumption that all black men in suits are Nobel-prize winning leaders of the free world?

I think only as I watch my children come of age in this era will I understand the truly remarkable feat that Obama, and we who elected him, achieved a year ago.

(See Bye Bye Bush to read about last January’s Inauguration Playdate.)

A Three-Year-Old Could Do That

2009-10-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

I recently bumped into the professional photographer who took my glamour shot—the headshot I’ve used for magazine bios and my website for the last few years. The photo is only four-and-a-half years old, but friends have been complaining that it doesn’t look like me anymore.

(Aside: Chicken Noodle is also four-and-a-half years old. A coincidence that my entire appearance has changed in the same amount of time I’ve been a mother? I don’t think so.)

I told Carol that apparently, I need a new headshot.

“You know, I would totally do that for you, Kim,” she said.

“Well, I would pay you,” I replied, thinking that, in reality, my glamour shot savings account has a balance of about $1.52 these days.

She read my mind. “Really, who has money to pay anyone for anything anymore?”

Her generosity was appreciated. Still, my respect for the creative process is too great to take advantage of her. At the same time, I don’t want to be one of those writers who persist in using a head shot from thinner, blonder days; the kind that makes people do a double take (and not the good kind) when they see them in person.

So I went home and trolled through my own computer photo files for a semi-recent shot that would update me without breaking the bank. I found one I’ve always liked, taken earlier this year in Hawaii. True, it’s a bit overexposed in the face. But it looks like me, it's kind of fun and casual, and the background is lovely. Better yet, I already owned it.

Still, I thought I’d better ask the photographer’s permission.

I called Chicken Noodle into my office. “Do you remember this?” I pointed at the screen.

“At the Hawaii Zoo!” she said.

“Who took it?” I asked her.

“Me!” That kid has an ironclad memory.

I pulled off of my website the picture of that blonde I used to be and replaced it with this one, taken by Noodle when she three. With no offense to Carol (www.carolsternkopf.com), whose talent is clearly superior than my preschooler's and who I will definitely commission to photograph me prior to my first book publication, I think I’ll go with this for awhile. It feels more appropriate to the economy.

And anyway, it’s good to support budding artists, even if they aren’t in Kindergarten yet.

Bend Film: Portal to Blissville

2009-10-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

The Universe must have heard my siren call to the aging process, my little shout-out to 39, because last weekend was one of those rare times when the stars aligned and every single thing that happened made me want throw my arms in the air and sing like Julie Andrews.

Here’s how the hard facts lined up:
A) Birthday
B) Press pass to the Bend Film Festival
C) Captain Daddy willing and able to liberate me from motherhood for the better part of three days

Sounds pretty good, huh? But the hard facts never explain everything. Last year, the hard facts were that I was in New York City for my birthday weekend. The trip was undeniably incredible. But I will admit that on the day of my birthday I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sad that I wasn’t with my peeps (except for my main peep Captain Daddy). No reason to complain—it was 70 degrees and sunny, I spent the day walking through Central Park and visiting the Met. But something was missing.

This year the magic started with Bend Film’s opening night party and didn’t let up until the Chickens sang me “Happy Birthday” for the 15th time. In between were a hundred tiny miracles.

I drank Rainier beer with a filmmaker who made a movie about D.B. Cooper, my grandfather (okay, his movie (www.theskyjacker.com) was about the hijacker; my grandfather was just a regular guy with the same name). I met a woman who journeyed to Antarctica with the eco-conservation group Sea Shepherd to fight illegal whaling four years in a row; I sat next to her while watching footage of her in a Zodiac, zipping under the prow of a Japanese ship (www.attheedgeoftheworld.com). I met a trio of filmmakers in their 20s whose film was flipping brilliant and who swept the awards (no late blooming for these little buggers: www.theatticdoormovie.com).

I ran into friends I hadn’t seen in ages. I made all sorts of new friends. I saw amazing films. I saw one heck of a sunset from the roof of a downtown building.

I saw a movie about a guy and a bike and cancer that made me want to go right home and hug everyone I love. I did. Then I went back downtown and hugged all sorts of other people, because after four days of soaking up tons of energy and story and creativity in the company of others, I loved everyone. By Sunday I was on such a Bend Film high, I kissed the director of operations, even though I’d just met her.

I know! I don’t know what happened to me, but it was incredible. Like ecstasy, you know? Yeah, me neither.

Bend Film, which totally rocks the Kasbah, had a lot to do with my little trip to Blissville. It helped that my expectations for the weekend weren’t already sky-high (as they were for NYC, or my what-the-heck-was-that? class reunion (see The Lost Weekend)). Surprise rapture is always better than premeditated rapture. And it didn't hurt that it was my birthday.

But I finished those four days with such an existential buzz that I might venture to say that powerful joy and connection is always out there somewhere, should we just be bold and brave enough to go searching for it.

Happy New You! Part III

2009-10-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

This Sunday is my 39th birthday. 40 has been looming large this year: A Hindenburg blocking the sun, inflated by the hot air of my 20th high school reunion, Facebook, an offer of anti-aging products from my dermatologist and the realization there is little chance I’ll publish a book by the Big 4-0.

If 40 is when the weight of the past is equally balanced with the weight of the future on a life-sized scale, all the taking stock and anxiety that comes with it might be utterly requisite. (I am a Libra; naturally I will provide a scale metaphor with overdramatized consequences). This mid-life crisis stuff is not to be snickered at. I see the two halves of life pulling at each other in a matched tug-of-war, the past desperately trying to justify itself and the future taunting with undivulged secrets.

I spent the last year feeling 40 coming like a freight train, me the shrieking girl in red heels and fluttering skirt tied to the tracks. Count on me to get ahead of myself, fear the future when it’s still ten miles away. But now that here-comes-39, I am secretly a little bit excited about 40, and not just because I have another year until it hits or because I’ve been promised a massively awesome 80s dance party.

As my wise friend Rainie said on her 40th birthday last month, “My 30s were weird.”

Remember back in your 20s when you thought your 30s would be when you’d get it all together, blossom into your whole, fabulous, confident self? And then instead your 30s turned out to be about forgetting yourself altogether in the midst of new and utterly dominating identities as wife and mother? Then there was all of that grief—holy crap, who could have seen that coming? And how when you had two minutes alone with your own head all you realized—with an existential thunderclap loud enough to summon the dead—was how totally screwed up you were?

Wait, who am I talking to? Sometimes I slip into second person when I really should be in first person because I want everyone to feel the same way I feel so I won’t be so alone in the world and so I can pretend it’s really not about me, it's about someone else and therefore maybe I can get my head around it, seize control and fix it. This is because I have boundary issues. I just figured it out the other day. I plan to address it in my 40s.

(See Happy New You! and Happy New You! Part II for past birthday-inspired existential babble)

We're Going to Potty Like it's 2009

2009-10-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Chicken Little is potty training. This means that I’ve been carrying pants and panties in size 2T in my purse everywhere I go, scanning new environments for bathrooms as a claustrophobe would scan for exits, and muttering “do you need to go potty?” in two minute intervals like a paranoid schizophrenic with bad childhood memories.

I have also been witnessed leaping in the air and shouting “hooray!” over a pile of poo and groping my child’s crotch a little bit too often. It’s a strange time, potty training—thrilling and a biohazard all at once.

Little is doing great. Even so, twice I have dismantled the car-seat (a task those who have tackled will recognize as a gigantic hassle), once pulling it actually dripping from the car. Eww.

After that episode, and before a three-hour drive during which I decided to take the bold Mommy-step of giving Little, who refused a diaper, the benefit of the doubt, we three girls made up a song.

To be delivered in a ghetto accent with a strong cadence, accentuated by rhythmic finger pointing:
Don’t go potty in your seat
In your seat
In your seat
Don’t go potty in your seat
Bad idea

Fun to sing, educational and another example of the new skills motherhood has forced upon me. I can now add songwriter beneath hairdresser and short-order cook on my resume.

Meanwhile, Noodle, feeling the limelight shift to her sister, is reacting with predictable attention-getting behavior. The other day she left a urine sample in a cup on the front porch for Captain Daddy—trying to prove (I can only imagine) that while her little sister can now pee in the potty, she herself has honed her skills to accurate aim at smaller vessels.

Captain Daddy didn’t rise to her bait. He stepped right over the cup and left it there. The neighbor discovered it later, inquiring of its origins when he came seeking my help with a bit of writing.

“Shall I test it for pregnancy?” he asked.

Dear God. A nod to stages to come (hopefully not for at least twenty years), and a reminder to enjoy the innocence of potty training, the simplicity of problems solved by simply dismantling a car-seat.

Congratulations! You Failed.

2009-09-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

During her keynote at the Hawaii Writer’s Conference, Kristin Hannah said that before she could commit to the life of a writer she had to decide that it would be okay to fail.

Like so many first-time novelists, Hannah wrote a manuscript and sent it off to agents, certain that it would be on the shelves within the year. Soon enough, she was lucky to get personal phone calls from a couple of them—telling her it wasn’t any good.

She’d been a lawyer before she took up writing. (She said, “Every lawyer I know wants to be a writer.”) The rejection of her novel gave her pause. Hannah said she did some deep thinking and decided that if she was going to proceed as a novelist, she’d have to come to terms with failure.

Too often, I avoid activities that might end in failure. I lament failure, I fear failure. You Buddhist-types know that fear of failure is really just fear of death. But we’re all going to die, and probably not from a rejected novel. Or from looking stupid, not being perfect or not pleasing people (some of my other favorite fears).

Even after she became a New York Times bestselling novelist (15 times over, now), Hannah said she faced failure in her career. This is something to remember. As a writer there is often the misperception that once you publish a book, you’ve got it made. But publication does not come with a lifetime guarantee. This concept reminds me of when, after a year of trying, I finally got pregnant. I reveled in victory for about ten seconds until I realized all I’d achieved was a state of greater risk. Same thing, once Chicken Noodle was born. There is no endpoint of success; only gradients, each with more at stake.

Interestingly, Hannah said that in retrospect, she believes that none of her failures actually were failures. Each cast her off in a new direction; one that she really needed to take.

My challenge to you all (and myself)—today, go out and do something that might earn you a big fat F. Who knows where it might take you?

The Nose Knows

2009-09-25T11:04:00.001-07:00

My plan was to try to think of some thoughtful topic to tie to this photo, some interesting tidbit about marketing and writing to share with you all. Perhaps I could write about how at the Hawaii Writer's Conference we were informed that the title of your project alone could sell it or sink it.

Or maybe I'd write about the Kindle, how value is perceived and sold in writing and publishing these days, how no one knows what is going to happen next in digital publishing.

Or maybe I’d write something about how I never have been very good at selling things; how the concept of convincing people to want something is totally foreign to me, even though I've been hired to write ad copy before.

Or I could go on about how selling yourself is key to success in writing, and icky and weird at the same time.

Or maybe I’d write about the Country Fair, where this I took this shot. Or my nose, which seems to be getting longer and pointier. Or naked chests. Which generally, I like.

But it’s Friday, and Captain Daddy has been out of town for eight days and doesn't look to be reappearing for several more, and I am trying to pack for a weekend away with the chickens, and my mind has been strangely absent most of the week anyhow, and isn’t this just pretty great all by itself?

We Interrupt this Blog to Indulge in a Little Meta-Analysis

2009-09-22T06:10:00.001-07:00

I read a discussion online recently about how before signing a client, an agent will read his or her author blog. Naturally. For a writer, one major reason to blog is to create a body of work online for anyone to peruse, especially, should you be so lucky, a publishing professional. The point of the piece was that some agents say they won’t take on clients who write about certain things, including how hard writing is. (I can’t remember where I read this. My bad.)

About the same time, I read elsewhere that there are something like 18,000 writer blogs in blog-land. Most of them are pleasant and well-written. One commenter suggested that to stand out, one should create something a bit edgier. (Think that was here: Pimp My Novel)

These two topics are related to each other as well as to a question that applies to more than blogging: What representation of “me” do I want to present to the world? Nice or sharp-tongued? Smooth or edgy? Charming or honest? “Real” me or “Polished” me? You can’t be everything, at least not all of the time.

As for my thoughts on the first issue, I will say this: oh, please. Writing is hard. The life of a writer means facing tough odds, buckling down to lonely, self-directed work and getting your self-esteem cremated regularly. No, of course it’s not as hard as many other paths in life, like being a teenaged slave or dying of cancer. But it’s challenging enough that a little good-natured commiseration with other writers can really take the edge off. I understand that no agent would want to read a constant whine, but I can’t believe all agents want to represent Pollyanna, either. What is a story without a protagonist who faces challenge?

As for the second matter: Edgy or charming, polished or real—pick your poison. The important part is that you pick.

Voice is a basic question for writers: not just finding it, but owning it.
What do you want to project to the world? Are you going to craft a voice or simply be your voice? What voice is just enough out-of-the-box to be interesting but not so much so to become alienating? What is totally you, yet burdened only with consequences you can live with?

Once you figure that out and make it yours, stop worrying about what anyone will think and just jump in the damn water.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Torn Between Two Lovers

2009-09-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

The day before I left for Hawaii, I sat with a cup of coffee in front of my computer at 6:30 a.m. trying to come-to after a sleepless night. Suddenly Chicken Noodle burst in, arms aloft, and declared with delight,

“Everything’s better, Mom!”

About what happened next Noodle later recalled, “Mommy went (palms to face, mouth open, sharp intake of breath). Then she cried.”

Because everything wasn’t “better.” Not unless you think two children with their bangs cut to the scalp is “better”.

Noodle’s happiness crumbled in light of my tears. “Stop crying, Mommy! I’ll never do it again!”

But after a half-hour when I was still crying, she was all eye-roll: “Mom, are you ever going to stop crying? Like, by ten?”

I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t crying out of vanity because their school photos are ruined, even though they are. I wasn’t crying because they could have lost an eye, even though they could. I was crying because I took the situation personally. I saw it as a direct cost of my primary conflict: my work vs. my children. Or put more succinctly: self vs. family.

Because what I was doing in front of my computer at 6:30 a.m.—as beauty school commenced in the other room—was stewing over my book-in-progress. Obsessing, really. Not thinking about my children. Or their access to sharp objects.

My writing life lives in the same house as my family life. It’s like having two lovers. The problem with two lovers is that one of them is usually neglected. I steal a few moments for Lover A and Lover B slashes her hair off.

When I finally got my sister on the phone an hour later (yep, still crying), she laughed. “Almost every kid does this.” I continued to sob, insisting on my singular ineptitude and selfishness.

“Seriously,” she finally said. “When is this going to be funny?”

I sniffled. “Maybe next week?”

Here I am in next week, groping for the humor and self-forgiveness. As well as being practical. I've got to have a life of my own. And anyway, it isn't possible for the chickens and me to spend 18 years together without sometimes being apart. I am banking this will build autonomy and confidence for all.

Still, I am not an idiot. I hid the scissors.

By the way, the reason Noodle declared that everything was “better” after having removed her bangs? “Now I can see my forehead like you, Mom.”

Let that be the final word on the subject: as long as my oldest daughter wants to emulate me, I must be doing something right.

The Emphasis is on Eventually

2009-09-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

“You hear what you need to hear, when you need it,” said Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author, at the Hawaii Writer’s Conference last weekend.

So much wisdom and advice was delivered at the conference. It was fabulous—better than I’d hoped. I absorbed as much information as I could, but the message that kept hitting home—the message I needed to hear—was about patience.

Nine years at this game and I am losing patience. The threat of a “real job” looms. I have two days a week to write if I’m lucky. I spent six years writing a book that will never be published. Rumors floated from the industry warn that if you don’t publish a book by the time you’re 40, you never will. An interested publisher just makes me worry that if I don’t give him something really soon he’ll forget about me or move on. Lately, I sit at my computer and feel pressured. I am losing patience.

But in Hawaii so many smart people reminded me that good writing doesn’t come in a hurry.

“Make haste slowly,” said Patricia Wood, who published her first book to wide acclaim in her 50s.

Michael Arndt, screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, spoke of the 10,000 hour rule of mastery described in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (which I wrote about here in January—from Hawaii, no less—and then promptly forgot about: Thanks, Fred). It was true for him. Ten years of really hard work until he made it.

“Your job is to enjoy the process as much as possible,” said bestselling author Dan Millman, just to drive the point home that writing is a PROCESS.

Of course I knew all of this already, even if I sometimes wish it weren’t true. My best essays have taken months—even years—to write. It takes time for the good stuff to bubble to the top. It takes thinking and breathing and playing and changing. It takes living.

I am grateful to have been reminded of this now, with two good projects in the wings. I shouldn’t expect myself to create anything of substance in a big fat hurry, nor to settle for publishing anything that’s not slow-cooked to perfection.

Nine Lives?

2009-09-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

Nine years ago I got married, turned 30, quit my job and decided to take my writing seriously. I wanted to write professionally but had no idea how to do it. So I flew to Maui with my mother for the Maui Writer’s Conference.

For four days I absorbed everything I could about magazine writing. I learned about writer’s guidelines, queries, breaking in with front-of-book stories, features, essays. I learned about the Writer’s Market and how to track down contacts and market research and how to pique an editor’s interest. I took notes and avoided the pool and the mai tais and learned so much I thought my head was going to explode.

But I took it all home and worked like hell and within a few months, I was writing for magazines.

Tomorrow I fly to Hawaii to attend the conference for a second time. (It’s now the Hawaii Writer’s Conference and held in Honolulu, because who can afford four days at a Maui resort on top of conference fees these days? I can only pull Honolulu off because, lucky me, my mom lives there.)

It makes me feel retrospective to go back. Makes me think about that naïve, hopeful, determined girl. To just go for it like that—was that really me? And have it work out. Wow.

I’ve been to smaller conferences since. I’ve learned oceans more. Published lots, not published lots. Found out how hard this writing business really is. Gotten wiser. Made choices, made sacrifices, made compromises. Part of me thinks; I’ve heard it all, I know all there is, what more could I learn?

But there’s always more to learn. Right now I think part of why I need to go back to Hawaii is to figure out how much of that girl from nine years ago is still in me.

The Farm Share Blues

2009-08-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Last spring in a fit of earth-loving-passion I bought a summer CSA share. I’d written a story about community supported agriculture for a local magazine and fallen in love with the idea of paying in advance for farm-fresh food. After all, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a farmer. This would be a little taste of that dream.

Here’s what I expected:
I’d support a local farm!
I would be inspired to cook gorgeous yummy meals!
It would be a good example for my chickens!
We would all eat healthier!

Here’s what I didn’t expect:
It would be a gigantic pain in the ass!

Within a month, just the sight every Tuesday of that hot pink tote bursting with green things I would be required to cart home, clean, store and cook filled me resentment. Followed by guilt, about the resentment. Followed by irritation, about the guilt.

But now as September looms and I pray for an early freeze, I am taking the whole thing as a lesson learned, or learned again. This isn’t the first time I’ve made the wrong decision by assuming it would transform me into someone else.

In this case, I overlooked the following:

I hate to cook.

I don’t have time to cook. (Well, that’s not exactly true. More accurately, I would rather spend my free time scrubbing mildew off of the shower tiles than cooking.)

We were out of town half of the summer, making it particularly difficult to cook at home. Even if I wanted to.

While I can appreciate that fresh-farm food would arrive at my home covered in soil, scrubbing two pounds of dirt off vegetables and then my kitchen takes an hour, results in two screaming children at my feet, and makes me grumpy.

I do not love searching out creative ways to prepare gooseberries. I can’t even identify gooseberries. Same goes for radicchio, bunching onions and broccoli raab.

I do not want to eat braised greens five nights in a row.

I am wracked with guilt if I have to throw away food, which is what happened when we didn’t eat braised greens five nights in a row and I didn’t find a creative way to prepare gooseberries.

A freezer crammed with squash just means there’s no room for Captain Daddy’s Häagen-Dazs.

The kind of dinner that makes me happy all over is take-out.

Next year, I am going to embrace my slovenly, planet-ruining nature and spend that $625 on pizza delivery. I suppose I should now abandon any plans related to the other thing I wanted to be when I grew up—a librarian.

Bad Daddy, No Biscuit

2009-08-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took the chickens to the beach park. Because there are only a couple of places along the river that function like beaches, with sand and water access, this place is a city-population magnet. One of the things I love about it is that it makes for great people-watching. There is also the risk that my girls will be treated to cigarette smoke, the F-bomb, and playmates with blue Mohawks. I just figure it’s diversity training.

Yesterday, temperatures nearing 90, the beach park was packed. I selected a piece of real estate on the sand next to a group of 20-somethings. They had a boom box, beer poured not-so-surreptitiously into plastic cups and lots of cigarettes in plastic ziplocks (handy when one wants to go swimming with cigarettes, a popular local activity). The F-bomb was dropped almost immediately, and the smoke got old pretty fast. But I didn’t mind. I used to be 20, and it was refreshing to hear the music of contemporary artists I’ve up until now only read about in People (so that’s what Lady Gaga sounds like).

No, this post isn’t a rant about young slackers. It’s a rant about bad parents.

A little girl approached my chickens, honing in on their beach toys. I recognized her immediately. She’s at the local parks a lot, always with her dad—sort of. The guy believes in parenting from a distance. I’ve never seen him play with her, even though if she’s reached her third birthday it’s just barely. He’s usually nowhere near her. This time, I didn’t even spot him in the park.

“Where’s your dad?” I asked her after a minute. “Over there,” she nodded. Ah. Yes. 200 yards away, facing the other direction and lying on a towel. Sleeping? No, enjoying a little intimate face time with a woman in a bikini.

I try not to judge other parents. In the past, I’ve tried to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. But this is the river: The river that flows fast and unpredictable and drowns several people a year. And, dude: your daughter, the one there without a life jacket? She is a toddler. See—see how she wades out waist deep towards the current, barely keeping her balance? Oh, you didn’t see that? You are busy up there in the shade getting some? Gee, sorry to bother you.

Cut to half-an-hour later. The guy hasn’t even glanced up. His neglected child spies our bag of snacks, grabs it from Chicken Little and starts two-fisted shoving crackers in her mouth like a wild animal. So quickly I was actually startled, Pseudo-Dad is at my side. “Sorry, she’s eating your food.”

I shrugged, dumbstruck. So, let me get this straight. Her potential drowning doesn’t merit your attention, but her eating some mother’s Ritz does? Dude, I don’t care if she eats my snacks. But I do kind of resent doing your job for you.

After a minute, he wandered away to his hottie Latina. I went back to eavesdropping on the 20-somethings, inhaling second-hand smoke and, oh yeah, parenting.

Essayer: to try, to attempt (French)

2009-08-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

During the long weekend writing retreat of week-before-last, I dove into my work-in-progress essay collection (see Plot Twist). The challenges and joys of writing memoir reliably reared their little heads, leaving me somewhat dumbstruck for the first 24 hours. Some things you have to learn over and over.

Essay is my very favorite genre, and yet there is no getting around the fact that it can be heart-wrenching, soul-searching, scratch-around-in-your-past-and-see-what-leaps-out kind of work. Writing essays has brought me great pleasure and deep frustration. Kind of like motherhood, but with rejection letters.

Here are a few things I’ve learned so far about writing narrative non-fiction/memoir/essay successfully:

You’ve got to be completely honest.
Completely honest does not mean you must reveal every last detail of your life (i.e., humiliate yourself and/or bore people to tears).
Essay is all about voice. Find it, work it.
Don’t think too much about the audience. Write what you write. If they like it, great. If they don’t, they aren’t your people and you must not worry about pleasing them.
Definitely don’t think about the (potential) publisher, unless you are on assignment. You can’t read their minds and trying to will only cramp your style.
Make ‘em laugh or make ‘em cry. If you can do both in one piece, all the better.
Concrete anecdotes, not general memories.
Trying to write something that everyone will relate to is the kiss of death. Precision, not inclusion.
Essay is personal. Reveal yourself. Be willing to learn things about yourself.
Even a powerful story needs literary quality to become a work of art.
Every essay must be about two things: something obvious and something deep and subtle.
Conclusions are necessary but must be understated. Never preach.
Search for the fun. If it isn’t just a little bit fun to write, it probably won’t be fun to read, either.
Do not expect to write anything truly fabulous when you are a) in charge of the children b) in charge of the gigantic child masquerading as your husband C) drunk. Okay, this trio of advice actually applies to all writing. But holing up alone is especially important in essay, because essay is about you and you gets swallowed alive by all of the things other people need from you (at least in my experience).
Proceed without fear! (In essay and in life)

I have about 25,000 of the 45,000 words I need for an adequate draft. I'll keep you posted.

Spin

2009-08-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

I returned on Monday from a long weekend writing retreat to a kind-but-definitive email releasing me from the duties of one of my regular paid writing gigs. Nothing to do with my performance, etc., etc., it’s just that they found someone cheaper and more geographically convenient to do the work.

This sort of thing used to completely freak me out. I’d spin off into anxious hyperbole, convinced that this writing thing was never going to work out and I should give up now and get a job cleaning motel rooms or being someone’s secretary.

As is always the case, anxious hyperbole was a waste of time. Something new would always pop up.

That might happen this time. Or it might not. Ever since the first of the year, my clients have been evaporating.

But I refuse to I slit my wrists over it. Okay, so my income is starting to resemble that of a sweatshop worker in the Philippines. All right, so I just put the Chickens’ gymnastic classes on my credit card. But what’s money in the grand scheme of things (she says confidently, knowing full well that Captain Daddy will buy her toothpaste and wine)?

My goal is to remain calm and see this shift of fortune as an opportunity.

I have two big, potentially cool writing projects in the works (see A Puzzled Thanks and Plot Twist). Yes, these projects are speculative. Yes, I may never make a dime off of them. But by removing more remunerative projects from my path, the universe seems to be telling me to devote myself to my own stuff.

Or maybe it’s just the economy telling me it sucks. But I prefer to think it’s the universe, telling me that this slack time isn’t for whining, it’s for writing.

The Lost Weekend

2009-08-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

Put 110 people with intermingled pasts and pending mid-life crises in one room, add high expectations, a few cocktails and the pressure to connect in a short amount of time and what happens? Everyone loses their minds. Or at least I do.

I would love to report on my 20th high school reunion, but since it seems that not all of me actually made it there, it may be a bit difficult. I will try anyway.

Here’s a dialogue smidgen:
Overwhelmed blonde girl: “I have…memories.”
Cute tall guy: “Me, too.”
OBG: “The fourth grade.”
CTG: “Yep.”
OBG: “Such a crush.”
CTG: “And English, senior year…there was…something.”
OBG: “Oh, I am sure there was something.”

That’s pretty much how the weekend went. I had many semi-coherent, almost-meaningful exchanges with people who, sadly, I realize are a part of my ongoing existence only in foggy memories. I expected some sort of special bonding only possible between polliwogs from the same pond. I expected a fabulous party, an escape from my grown-up life, the chance to pretend to be 18 again. Instead I got a three-day out-of-body experience, lots of hugs, missed connections, a hangover and a bundle of sadness.

Why the sadness? Middle-aged angst. So many years passed, so many doors closed, so many opportunities missed, so many traumas and joys tucked away, so many permanent decisions made, so much living already lived. Given the dazed expressions on half of the faces in the room, I don’t think I was the only one suffering from this strange sensation.

I underestimated the impact of going back to my hometown and rooting around in my never-to-be-heard-from-again adolescence. Or maybe it’s just that a weekend spent subsisting on vodka, double espressos and Safeway deli is a sure ticket to misplaced self.

In any case, it was surreal. The prom queen’s husband kept bringing me drinks and telling me he loved me. A guy I’ve known since Kindergarten pointed over and over again at my face, repeating, “You were always so nice to me,” like this was atypical. I took the chickens to my favorite childhood beach and kept tripping over the fact that I was the mother, not the child. Some guy told me he spent high school mad at the guy who came between us in the alphabet. One of the few women who has remained my good friend told a classmate who couldn’t remember my name that if he could, she and I would make out. (He couldn't). Oh, and there was a bomb scare. Someone tried to blow up the grocery store next to my motel.

Perhaps it was one of us, we group of nearly 40s reeling from the realization that sometime in the recent past, the last breath of youth passed us by and we missed it.