Parting shot

I recently opened iPhoto for the first time in months and discovered this, the last picture I ever took of P. It was taken at a barbecue on Father's Day, two weeks before he died. I like it because it shows P doing something he loved to do, but it makes me sad because he's turned away from the camera, as if he's already saying goodbye.



I have his guitars in my bedroom closet, all three of them. I wish I could hear him play them again. I wish I knew how to play them myself. Maybe G will learn, one day. He'd like that.

You're not a real mother until ...

... you've been the author of your child's total public mortification.

This afternoon I dragged G out, over her protests ("I don't want any new clothes!") to go shopping. ("Well, you need them, so get in the car!") We were going to one of the huge outdoor shopping centers that are so popular around here -- the kind where you don't just shop, you have an experience -- and I thought I had an enticing offer for her: we'd go in a store, then ride the Ferris wheel, then go in a store, then have ice cream, then go in a store, etc. She wasn't impressed, but she went along.

So, at our third stop, she spotted a pair of black cowgirl boots she loved. We were attempting to read the tags to find her size, but they were all confusingly marked with "2Y" and 3Y" instead of actual sizes. And then we had this exchange:

Me: I don't get it. I would think 3Y meant "three years," but these are way too big for a three-year-old.
G: Maybe it stands for "three 'yeee-haws.'"

It struck me as hysterically funny, as not-that-funny things sometimes do, and I nearly fell backward into a rack of marked-down summer clothes as I tried to contain myself. I was dying of mirth; G was dying of embarrassment. She put her hands over my mouth to stop me making a scene, and when that didn't work, she whipped off the snazzy little Audrey Hepburn-esque neck scarf she was wearing and attempted to tie it around the bottom half of my face. This was even funnier. I was all but on the floor, my stomach aching, my eyes full of tears, while G looked around with a desperate expression that said Oh, please don't let anyone I know be in this store! I'm sure it was just the first of many mother-related humiliations to come.

In other weird kid news, last night G made a large sign that says:

Lost: Giant Carrot

Goes by the name of Philip.

If you find him call [our phone no.].

She drew a big orange carrot on it and stuck it to the wall behind the sofa. I can't look at it without giggling. Philip the Carrot! Hee!

I promise I have not been drinking. It was just a funny weekend.

The doldrums: six forty-five a.m.

G: I'm boooooooored.
Me: Go get dressed, draw, read a book, play with toys, watch TV, bother the cat.
G: I don't want to do any of that.
Me: I've got bad news for you, G. Big kids and grownups are responsible for their own entertainment.
G: I don't want to be responsible for my own entertainment.
Me: Ah, I see. You'd like me to wear a red clown nose and put my pants on backward and walk around on my hands to amuse you. You'd like me to dance up and down and sing and skip to lighten the burden of your ennui.
G (half laughing, half mad): Yes!
Me: Too bad. Go get dressed.

I know it sounds mean, but it's for her own good. I was an only child until I was almost nine, and the self-entertaining skills I learned then are still with me today. If I'm left on my own to do what I like, I'm never bored. (Long Friday-afternoon meetings and days at jury duty are another story.) She'll thank me for it twenty years from now, I swear!

It's a cat's life

Hey, lady, some of us are trying to sleep here.


Well, if you absolutely insist on taking my picture ... how about some kitty p0rn?

~~~

When you're still awake, and even your supposedly nocturnal pet is crashed out on the couch, you know you've got a problem.

At least now I have time to finish the laundry and pack G's lunch for tomorrow.

This fragile bond

Unlike the rest of the family, I very rarely visit P's niche at the cemetery. I've been two or three times since the interment, but it isn't a meaningful place for me. I don't feel any closer to him there. If anything, I feel less close than I do at other times and in other places. P's ashes may be there in the wall, but he -- the real he -- is not. Nothing there has anything to do with P as I knew him, P who could draw and play the guitar, who collected comics and once wanted to grow up to be Steve Austin.

I felt the same way about his body and the coffin during the long, long viewing and funeral process. Other people wanted to touch him in the coffin and to caress the wood of the lid after it was closed, and I understood that desire on an intellectual level, but I didn't share it. I did touch him once or twice, to be sure, and it only confirmed what I already felt. The body was his, but it wasn't him. I'd known since the moment I found him that he wasn't inside that body anymore, and I had no sense that he was anywhere near it, either: not around the coffin or in the viewing room or even in the funeral home.

It seemed particularly inappropriate to think that P of all people would linger around his body, because in life he hadn't liked it very much. He loathed his physical limitations, his thinness, his clubbed fingers, his surgical scars, the lump of his pacemaker. He always felt ugly, even though he wasn't, and went overboard with grooming and dressing nicely in an attempt to compensate. I can only suppose that feeling the way he did about his body, he never looked back once he was free of it. He wanted to be free of it. He told me so himself, the night before he died, and whatever he may or may not have known about what was coming, he absolutely meant what he said.

So I rarely go to the cemetery, but that doesn't mean I don't think of P. I think of him every day, all the time. So many things remind me of him: of some favorite phrase or joke or moment we spent together. And knowing P the way I did, I think that would mean more to him than a weekly pilgrimage to a niche in a concrete wall. When he was alive, he didn't visit graves or lay down flowers for people who had died, but he always, always remembered them. His only fear about dying himself was that he'd somehow lose his memories of me and G -- "I don't want to forget you," he said. And he wouldn't want to be forgotten.

You can rest easy, P. I remember.

Epistolary

Dear Cat,

Would it be too much trouble for you to visit the litter box and take your massive daily dump before 2:00 in the morning? I don't mind scooping the box (much), but I do mind waking up in a bedroom filled with a miasma of cat excrement. I mean, really. I don't know how the smell gets up the stairs, but it does, so please try to confine your poopage to the pre-midnight hours.

Signed,

The Janitor

~~~

Dear Kid,

I think you have a skewed definition of the word "mean." It is not "mean" of me to insist that you take a shower and brush your teeth before bed. It is also not "mean" of me to tell you that slippery-soled party shoes, two sizes too small, are not appropriate footwear for school -- no matter how sparkly they are and how well they go with your dress. For examples of what "mean" actually is, I refer you to such classic tales as Oliver Twist, Cinderella, Harry Potter, and the collected works of V.C. Andrews. Perhaps these stories will help you understand that even if you're tired of chocolate Teddy Grahams, finding them in your lunch box for the third day in a row does not constitute an act of child abuse.

Signed,

Your Mother

~~~

Dear Universe,

What are you trying to do to me? Stop it!

Signed,

A Small, Insignificant Speck

That Which Must Not Be Named

Tomorrow is G's first day of second grade, and she is not pleased. All day today, she kept begging me not to talk about it, which led to conversations like this one in the snack aisle at the grocery store:

Me: Hypothetically speaking, if I had to pack a lunch for you for no particular reason, would you want pretzels or cheese crackers in it?
G: Aaaaargh! I said not to talk about it!
Me: Yes, well?
G: Pretzels, I guess.

She's always enjoyed school, so I'm not entirely sure where this resistance is coming from. I think it's partly to do with P, because when I asked if she was worried that people would ask her about Daddy, she said yes. (He volunteered last year and was well known on campus.) I reassured her that I already told her teacher and the people who work in the office, and that seemed to make her feel a bit better. Hopefully I'll be able to get her out the door in the morning with a minimum amount of drama.

In other news, Catherine has just played that classic cat game known as "Sudden Demonic Possession," a.k.a. "Run Around the House After Midnight Like a Crazy Thing," and is stretched out in the middle of the living-room floor looking exhausted. If only I were that easily entertained.

The feline life

Dry cat food is so bland and harmless-looking. But as those little nuggets rattle into the cat's dish like cereal into a bowl, you look at them and have to wonder: What happens inside the cat to turn such inocuous stuff into a substance so foul you need a hazmat suit and an oxygen mask to handle it?

It's a real mystery.

Aside from the litter box, we're enjoying Catherine, and Catherine seems to be adjusting nicely. After a few hours under the furniture, she came out, ate, drank, washed, and settled down on G's bed with us, purring, for the bedtime reading hour. She's a very friendly little thing and wants to be right next to me all the time, preferably being petted. She's so well socialized that I'm surprised she was a stray, although I guess it's possible that she was someone's pet and they dumped her when she got pregnant. (Punk teenage cat-boyfriend: "Well, what do you want me to do about it? How do I know they're MY kittens?) We do need to get her a scratching post today, though. I can hear the telltale sound of claws in the couch right now. Bad kitty!

Meow

Meet the newest member of the family:



After all the prospective names G came up with, when the moment of truth arrived, she decided that she wanted to call her cat just plain "Cat." I said I'd no more name a cat "Cat" than I would have named G "Girl," but we could name her Catherine and call her Cat for short. So, this is Catherine. She's about a year old and was rescued from a parking lot with her four newborn kittens, all of whom went to new homes last week. Catherine herself came home with us this afternoon, and has spent most of her first two hours with us hiding under various pieces of furniture in the time-honored cat tradition. In fact, she's under one of the couches right now, sitting stubbornly while G calls to her in dulcet tones and tries to lure her out with toys and food. I told G not to worry, that in a day or two she'll be tripping over her every time she turns around!

Particle

Tonight I'm coming to you live from the first floor of my new apartment, a.k.a. Box Central. (I can see the carpet between the boxes, but only just.)

Earlier today I stood in the empty, echoing kitchen of my old apartment, next to a gutted hole that previously held a stove, and laid my keys out in a line on the countertop: screen door, front door, garage door. With the final key, the transaction was complete, and I no longer lived in the place where P and I spent the last five years.

I came home to the new place, but it didn't feel like home. I'm having a hard time believing that we really live here now, just me and G. I keep thinking that I'll wake up tomorrow and P will still be alive, and my real life will resume. Because that's how I feel, how I've felt for the last two months -- as if everything I'm doing is temporary, a stopgap to fill in the time until this mad dream is over.

None of it feels real. I don't feel real.

I don't know who I am anymore.

It isn't that I derived my entire identity from being married to P -- I've always had a job, and my own friends, and pursued various interests as far as time allowed. Plus, I'm G's mother, and that role hasn't changed. When you spend 13 years with someone, though, part of your sense of self becomes wrapped up in that person. It's inevitable, and it isn't a bad thing; it just is. The problem is when the person is taken away, that chunk of your self, your ego, goes too. It's like -- oh, I don't know -- it's like being a nuclear physicist your whole life, and then going to the lab one morning and finding that the entire profession of nuclear physics has been eradicated. Now you have to be something else, but no one's told you what it is, and you haven't been anything but a nuclear physicist in so long that you've forgotten what it was like not to be one. And what then? What do you become? How many days, weeks, months, years before your life stops feeling like it belongs to a stranger?

I can't go back to being who I was before I met P. I was only 22 then, and too much has happened since; too many things I can't forget and wouldn't want to if I could. And I can't carry on being the person I was with P now that P isn't here anymore.

I don't know what will happen to me next. All I know is that I miss nuclear physics. I miss it a lot.

Of beginnings and endings

Note to self: When you wake up at 2 a.m., do not get out of bed to brush your teeth, even if it feels like Hannibal's army and all its elephants marched through your mouth while you were sleeping. Unless, of course, you want to be awake until dawn, in which case go right ahead.

With two days to go until we start moving, I've reached the point at which I'm so overwhelmed that inertia takes over and I stop doing anything. I still need to finish cleaning under my bed, pack the contents of a few drawers and cupboards, and decide whether I'm going to have cable Internet or DSL at the new place. I can see the detritus of daily living piling up around the boxes, and I know I ought to collect those odds and ends before they reach critical mass. But it all seems like too much effort, so I don't. Even sitting on the couch seems like too much effort. I don't know whether I need a day off or a kick in the pants.

One really good thing about leaving this place: its problems will soon be my problems no more. Termites boring their way out of the ceiling again? Not my problem. Treacherous rip where the hall carpet's wearing out? Not my problem. Blasted heath backyard where nothing grows? So not my problem. Even regular chores like vacuuming are no concern of mine, at least temporarily.

Of course, you have to understand that I'm focusing on the benefits of leaving so I won't have to focus on the leaving itself. At the end of this weekend, I'll hand over the keys to this, the last home I lived in with P, and that will be it. I'll live a place he'll never see, with floors he never walked on, with a door he never entered, and in a way, that will be like losing a tiny part of him. And yet at the same time, I won't look at the floor and think, There's the place the paramedics put him down, and I won't look at the door and think that when he walked through it for the first time, we didn't know he'd be carried out through it one day, sightless and unaware, under a bright summer sky.

There is no normal

"I want to have normal weekends again," G said last night. "I want to have normal days at school and normal dinners and normal nights with the two of us."

"Things will be more normal after we finish moving and school starts," I promised.

"I hate this summer," she said.

Me too, G. Me too.

Still not queen

Names G has suggested for her cat-to-be:

• Stenchy
• Debbie
• Sir Meows-a-Lot
• Cat 412

I'm telling you, this cat is going to need therapy.

On another note, have I ever mentioned that G is not a morning person? She isn't. Even as a toddler, she was never one of those kids who wake up singing before sunrise, and now that she's discovered the fine art of sleeping in, she'd remain blissfully unconscious till midmorning if I let her. Unfortunately, I can't let her. I have to go to work, and she has to go to Grandpa's office, and both of these things have to happen before 9 a.m. every day.

To say that this causes problems would be a understatement. This morning, I went into her room five times between 7:45 and 8:25 to wake her up, and every time, she rolled over and went right back to sleep. At 8:30, I started dressing her as she slept -- entertaining evil fantasies about buckets and ice water all the while -- and that finally got her to open her eyes. And boy, was she grouchy when she did. Just what I need before I've had my coffee.

I know part of the problem is the time she's going to bed at night. For years, we've had a good, consistent bedtime routine that ends with lights-out at 8:30 p.m. Now, for a variety of reasons, everything is off schedule, and she's been falling asleep closer to 10 p.m. That's still ten hours of sleep, but G has always been an eleven- or twelve-hour girl. I'd love to just leave her asleep and carry her out to the car in her pajamas, but she's not much smaller than a small adult at this point (I'm 5'6" and she stands about shoulder-height on me), which makes that maneuver more or less impossible.

So, we have to find some way of getting back to the 8:30 bedtime. I think it'll be easier after we move -- it'll take less time to get home after I pick her up, for one thing. But for now, it's going to take discipline on both our parts. This morning, as she was wailing about having to get up OMG SO EARLY, I said, "You know you're tired because you went to bed late last night, right?" and she said she did. Then I said, "So when I tell you it's time to go to bed tonight, you're not going to argue with me, right?" and she said she wouldn't. Well, she didn't argue (much), but it still took her nearly an hour to settle down and go to sleep after I turned the light off ... mostly because she was cracking herself up by suggesting cat names like "Poopsie."

I await tomorrow with slightly weary trepidation.

Moving right along

Today my mother and sister came over to help me pack. Before they left, we filled thirty boxes, bringing my packed total to forty-one. I'm embarrassed to admit that twenty-three of those forty-one boxes contain books ... and that doesn't include the crate of books they took home or the three crates that are waiting to go to the used bookstore. ("Do you not have a library card?" my mother asked as she surveyed my collection.)

Anyway, it was good to have them here to help. I've been doing bits and pieces all week long, but it's hard to get much done on my own. G will help here and there, but then she loses interest and wanders off to play or watch TV. In contrast, the three of us managed to pack all five bookcases, the shelf of books in my walk-in closet, the DVDs, the games, P's action figures, and most of the pictures and knickknacks. The heap of boxes in my dining room looks like the Great Wall of China, and yet it feels as if we hardly made a dent.

I have too much stuff.

Also, moving without P is no fun. We moved together four times, and although it was always hard work, we had the excitement of a new place to look forward to, and we could make decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of together. Now it's all on me, and there's nothing at the other end but an escape from this house of tragedy. I don't like it. I don't want to have to make decisions about what to do with P's things. They're not mine, they're his. How can I say what's important enough to keep and what ought to be given away? I know P trusted me to do it, but I don't trust myself. I can't wait for all this to be over.

Hello, kitty

When I told G we were moving, the first words out of her mouth were not "Where to?" or "Are we bringing my toys?" or "Will I go to the same school?"

They were "Can I have a cat?"

I said yes. And it's a good thing I meant it, because G seized on the promise like a fruit bat on a ripe papaya. At each complex we toured, she turned to me in the leasing office and asked very seriously, "Is it pet-friendly?" Now that we have, in fact, secured a pet-friendly place to live, her excitement knows no bounds. She talks about her future kitty every day, and tonight she coaxed me into putting a Tupperware dish of milk outside our front door in hopes of luring one of the neighborhood cats for her to "practice" on. I'm sure one of the 40-pound raccoons that lurk around our trash cans is out there right now, enjoying a free drink on us.

The thing is, since G has never had a cat, she has unrealistic expectations of what they're like. Here are a few of the things she plans to do with her hapless pet:

• Dress it in little outfits
• Train it to walk on its hind legs and push a baby carriage (she saw this at the circus last weekend)
• Buy four tiny tap shoes and teach it to dance

As a veteran cat person, I've tried to prepare her by explaining that while (most) cats like to sit on your lap and be petted, they don't generally do tricks or tolerate dressing up. In fact, they do pretty much whatever they please, whenever they please, and don't appreciate having their plans altered. I have the feeling that G will end up getting scratched a few times before that truth really sinks in. She loves animals and would never do anything to hurt one, so there's no need to worry about the cat's safety. She just seems to think that a cat is more like a dog or a baby than, well, a cat.

She'll learn.