It Was Fun While It Lasted

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.

Try Die

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.

Bend Film: Portal to Blissville

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

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)

Me, Justified

“Explain yourself,” my step-father intoned from the driver’s seat as we traveled to the north shore of Oahu. “Justify your existence!”

He snickered wickedly. This is his idea of small talk.

JB is cursed with an existential preoccupation. He takes stock of life regularly—his and everyone else’s. What have we accomplished? What will we leave behind? And, after all that, are we happy? Have we learned to let go, figured out what matters, mastered a pitch-perfect balance of meaning, occupation and pleasure?

I have this same problem. That’s why we get along so well.

Of course he was only joking about me justifying my existence in a 25-minute car ride. Sort of.

He giggled with delight. “Well?”
--
The problem with hard work is that I’ve never felt like it was the only way to go.

I’ve done a lot of writing in the past decade but not 10,000 hours worth because I’ve filled half of those hours with other things—hiking and skiing and camping and reading a novel in the sunshine and learning to play the guitar and napping and loving and running and making money and raising babies and, finally last week, a little surfing.

I’ve never wanted to spend all of my life working, and I never have.

Perhaps at some point justifying my existence will mean learning not to apologize—not for unachieved successes, but for what was compromised for the sake of happiness.