Chicken And Cheese » Uncategorized

So. Yeah.

Mrs. Chicken — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 05:13:30 +0000

So I was pretty sad this week.

I feel like I only write here now when I’m feeling upset or sentimental, and you all have to put up with all the sturm und drang. It’s not like that all the time, I swear.

The thing is, there isn’t a spare minute to record the daily chaos. I’m working what are essentially three full-time jobs, plus raising these two hellions. My children have suddenly become quite willful, indeed, and insist on things like clean clothes and hot meals served at tables and regular bathing.

I know! The nerve.

And have I mentioned the cyclone that is The Babyman? Shit, that child would make Mary Poppins scream for mercy — or at the very least, rethink her stance on corporal punishment. He has a big, giant and rather devious brain in a 2-year-old body and I’m 99 percent sure his main goal is to kill me and eat me.

Meanwhile, his sister has decided she is suddenly 15. Last week she told me that the crust on her sandwich was — and I quote — her natural enemy. I’m about ready to send her off to boarding school. Lucky for her, she happens to be unintentionally, hysterically funny. Case-in-point:

Me: I can’t believe you’re 5 years old!
Her: I know! But I still have the smile of a 1-year-old.

Then, while we were at the Indiana State Fair, this:

Her: Look at all these parents having so much fun!
Me: Yeah, they sure look happy.
Her: They’re happy because their kids are having such a good time. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Someone, please kill me.

She started school on Aug. 5, was in school for two days, and got the chicken pox. I know! The chicken pox! Who the hell gets the chicken pox anymore? No one! No one but my kids, that is. So she was off school for four days for The Great Pox Outbreak of 2010, and then her grandparents showed up and she had three more days off, one of which was spent at the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had to stay home, but I heard tell that the child was unimpressed by “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette” (according to her, Seurat decided to do the whole pointillism thing because his “girlfriend was named Dot”), but fell in love with “Death On A Pale Horse.”

She is so totally my kid.

Anyways, after our mini-holiday in Indiana (wow, there’s a string of words I never thought would come out of my mouth), she and her brother came down with some other kind of plague that involves rivers of snot and unfortunate bowel movements, and thus, the girl was home from school AGAIN this week.

Alas, now she is well! And she will go back to school on Monday, for a full goddamn week, or I am running away to Aruba.

Speaking of running away, I’m going to Type A Mom in September and I cannot wait. I had such a good time at Blissdom (even though I really missed my babies, yes, I really did, I am THAT MOM), and I hear that some of my favorite people will be there, too. Marty, I’m looking at you.

So that’s what’s up. Mostly I wrote this so I didn’t have to look at that sad post here at the top of the page anymore. Well, that, and I wanted to thank whoever showed Redbook this post, because they linked up to me and I almost fainted when I saw A Major Periodical Read By Many People in my stats. So thank you, whoever you are.

Oh, and one last thing: If you’re feeling gloomy over the loss of a dear, dear loved one and you want to watch a movie to cheer you up?

Do not rent “A Single Man.”

Trust me on this one.

The Twenty-Sixth

Mrs. Chicken — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 04:28:52 +0000

Dear Dad,

I’m usually asleep by now, but I’m thinking about you.

Tomorrow is your anniversary. Tomorrow marks six years since I heard your voice. It wasn’t the last time I saw your face — no, that is another date on the calendar. But in an hour, it will be August 26.

Your final day.

I still miss you, daddy. I keep thinking it will go away. I don’t feel sad every day now, and I think you’re happy about that. I have such a good, full life. I have a husband who loves me and two children who are as bright and shiny as any new penny.

I was laying in bed just now, wishing that tomorrow I could go to the cemetery to see you. I can’t, because I am so far from home. I’m living this strange, new life, dad, one that I think you would approve of. I take risks now, big ones, and they are paying off.

I stumble sometimes, and recently I was chastised in public for writing about you too often. For a moment, I was embarrassed. Shamed by the fact that I am still so close to the grief. Ashamed of needing you so much, still, even now, when I am on the cusp of middle age and you’ve been gone for so long.

Get over it, I think to myself.

Get over it, I hear them say.

Then I think about your last months, and how painful they were. I think about how you tried to be brave. I think about how I was a coward, turning my face from what was surely the mask of death. I wasted those last months with you wishing for you to live, when I should have been helping you die.

I’m sorry for that, daddy. I owe you an apology for that, one that I won’t ever get the chance to deliver.

So instead, I write to you, here in the ether.

The other night, in a parking lot, I told a friend how August gets me right in the guts, how it takes me and twists me and I don’t even realize it until I’m standing under some street lights in a strange place that’s slowly become my home, weeping.

“I’m doing all this stuff,” I said to my friend. “It’s just that I’m doing all these great things, and he isn’t here to see any of it.”

It’s hard to be away from mom, K and AJ on days like this one, when I want to be with the people who knew you best. When I want to be a family. We were a pretty good one, for a long time, us five. We were never perfect, but we always had love to spare.

Tomorrow is a day when I’m home. I stay with Henry, no babysitters. I try to keep my schedule open so he has some of my time, so he can just be with me.

Tomorrow is a day when I will be more grateful than usual to have him close by me. He is so joyful, daddy. He looks so much like you. He is just purely, utterly happy almost all the time, and so loving. He is everything you could ever want in a little boy, your grandson is.

Tomorrow, instead of laying flowers on your granite stone, I will hold close the warm, sturdy body of my boy and tell him about his grandfather, the one who loved M&Ms, just like he does. I’ll tell him how you fed me spaghetti and meatballs when I was his age, just like I do for him.

I’ll tell him how much I loved you, and how much you would love him. I’ll show him pictures, and hug him tight.

I will try not to cry, because that scares him.

We have plans to go out for dinner, to get a butterburger. Remember how much you liked those? Isn’t it funny how Emmie loves Culver’s, too?

We’ll have fries and ice cream, and I’ll try very, very hard not to remember what your eyes looked like in those last few minutes we were together.

I feel so far from home tonight, dad, and I don’t mean the physical places of my history. I mean that I feel so far from the time when I knew exactly what the rest of my life would look like.

But I’m OK, dad. I’m OK, but I really, really miss you. Especially today.

Love

Your daughter

Untitled

Mrs. Chicken — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 04:53:24 +0000

I miss my father.

He’s been dead for such a long time now. Longer than my daughter has been out of my womb. Longer than I’ve lived in my house. Longer than I ever could have imagined on that first day after we left him in the hospital, eyes closed and soul dispersed.

It sneaks up on me. It feels worse when I haven’t been writing a lot. Lately my work is about numbers and connections and technical bullshit that has no relationship to what I used to do here.

Here, I wrote. Here, I shared. Here, I was vulnerable and I felt safe being so. I don’t feel that way anymore, for a variety of reasons. But as I lay in the darkness tonight willing sleep to come, I had the urge to come here, to say something.

What that something is, I don’t know yet.

But I miss my father.

Tonight both kids went down hard. There were tears — sobs, really, the kind that break a mama’s heart. Footsteps on the stairs after lights out, pleas for hugs and cuddles. I was exasperated; tired, and anticipating a busy week with company in the house. I wanted them to go to sleep already.

I wanted them to leave me alone.

They’ve been all over me this week, whining and climbing the walls. The girl is sick, and she’s contagious. The days I wasn’t working we three were trapped indoors while outside the sun beat down on the flat land. Our grass is dead. Watering it seems a fool’s errand in this sweltering heat. It’s too hot even for the kiddie pool and our eyes itch and burn from some unknown irritant.

So tonight when I heard sobs from the nursery I was impatient, angry, even. I wanted some time to just be still.

I opened the door on a screaming baby (but he’s not a baby, he turned 2, he turned 2 and I didn’t even make a note of it here). I soothed him back down on his pillow, snuggled up with blankets and a book. I got him some milk and when he looked up at me from his bed I almost had to step back.

He looked exactly like my father.

Maybe it was my sore heart — always sore in August, this month of his passing — or maybe my tired eyes played a trick on me. Either way, I saw my father’s face on my son and the chasm of longing that opened up inside my heart was a staggering surprise.

My father never laid eyes or hands on either of my children. I am so angry about that. So angry, and so deeply sad. The kind of sadness that comes on with the rain. The kind of sadness that makes a summer’s day look dark. The kind of sadness that people tire of hearing about so you keep it to yourself, like some malignant treasure box.

I am 39 years old. I had a birthday last month, you see, and now I am on the cusp of 40. On my father’s 40th birthday, I took a plane from Boston to Rochester, landing in a snowstorm so severe that the other passengers and I applauded when we landed. I was home from college, just for the weekend, for a surprise party for my father.

I was a freshman in college. When I turn 40 next year, my oldest child will be in first grade.

My father died 15 years after his 40th birthday, just as did his mother and his older brother. I feel the weight of that mortality heavy on my shoulders and it makes me regret every harsh word, every tear shed, every moment wasted in ennui or anger.

I sometimes feel like I am standing across a wide, wide river, separated from the ones I love the most by this vast history. This water muddied with grief. The rapids are dangerous and so I just stand on the shore, helplessly watching as we drift further and further apart. I know my father stood on a similar embankment and his solution was to turn away and find higher ground.

I don’t want to do that.

So I slip in the mud. I get dirty, I fall down. Sometimes it hurts when I land. But I won’t stop looking for a way across. I can’t.

Because I love my father, and because my son was wearing his face tonight.

Peter

Mrs. Chicken — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:04:55 +0000

He was the second youngest of five children, or at least he was, when I started babysitting for his family.

He was a skinny kid, with brown hair. He was only 4 years old and he sometimes got lost in the shuffle of the busy household. His older siblings — the eldest was 11, the others came in two-year increments — led typical wealthy Bostonian lives. Private school (”President Bush went to our school”), piano lessons, Girl Scouts and summer camps. Sometimes I ferried them hither and yon in my 1989 white Ford Tempo, but most of the time I was with Peter, and his baby brother, Nathaniel.

We went for lunches at McDonalds, to movies at Copley Square. We ate pizza afterwards at the food court while he asked me nonsense questions. We went sledding at a park near the four-story brick townhouse that opened up on a garden that made you forget you were in Brookline.

Linda let me drive the minivan sometimes, when she had a volunteer commitment that kept her longer than the school day. One afternoon I let myself into the house with my key and started to stir the soup on the stove, which was the centerpiece of a luncheon she was hosting for the other women on the hospital’s auxiliary organization — her husband was a surgeon there.

“So you must be the angel babysitter,” said one of her friends.

But it’s Peter I think of now. I can’t make out the details anymore, but I remember this: I sat on the sofa in the playroom folding their laundry. Peter was tired; we’d done a craft together earlier. He inched closer and closer until his head was on my knee, and he fell asleep. We sat there, me folding his underwear, and that was how she found us.

She paused at the bottom of the oak stairs. She tilted her head at me and smiled. “He really needs that,” she said. “He really needs that attention.”

That was 17 years ago. Peter, the first little boy to ever steal my heart, is a man now. I wish I could remember more.

***

Yesterday, Liz asked us why we blog. Her essay was, as always, insightful and thought-provoking, and, oddly, it made me think about the little boy who was one of five children for whom I was a nanny my junior and senior years of college. I have a great deal of affection for this child, but I can barely remember him. I spent the greater part of my time with him in 1992-1993, but I can’t retrieve many memories.

I started blogging in 2006, and those first few posts were like a whisper into the wind. I was talking to myself, really, moving writing muscles so creaky that it pained me to do so. What wasn’t painful was reading your blogs, taking solace in your words and then — wonder of wonders! — you started talking to me. You left me comments, I left them for you. We talked. We had community.

We were friends.

My motives, though, were not entirely pure. I wanted to get paid to write again, I wanted to make a living with words. I didn’t know how else to do it after such a long sabbatical. I wanted to be noticed, I wanted to get “discovered” and I waited and waited for that to happen. While I waited, I wrote thousands of words about my children and my life as a mother. Write what you know, my professors had told me.

I listened.

Now I am a working writer. I got my wish, and both directly and indirectly, this blog made that happen for me. One editor read one of my posts and took a chance on me. I was hired for my current freelance gig by a woman whose blog I’d long read and admired greatly. This space gave me the confidence to start my own business, to believe in my abilities.

I don’t need to blog anymore, if you take my original motivation as the basis for what I’ve done here: To get hired by someone who will pay me to write.

So why do I blog?

I blog because 17 years go by in a blink. Because yesterday I was a girl with waist-length hair folding the laundry of a doctor’s wife while her son napped on my knee, and now that is all I can remember of the 14 months I spent with him.

I blog so I can remember today, a crappy day with multiple, ridiculous child-induced injuries. A day when everything went slightly awry. A day when my son and daughter ran to me when a clap of thunder shook the house and I held them tight, relishing the feel of them in my arms.

I blog so I won’t forget.

I don’t ever want to forget.

Not Fancy

Mrs. Chicken — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:57:11 +0000

The yard could only be described as pastoral.

Children of all ages ran around the verdant grassy stretch behind the white house, its full back porch decorated with bronze butterflies and a string of lights. Cozy rattan couches invited guests to sit and relax, and the two — two! — wooden play structures snuggled into a grove of trees elicited screams of delight.

The kiddie pool was filled, and the big girl wanted to swim. I gestured for her to join me inside the big, old house so we could change into her bathing suit.

Together we made our way through the cheerful kitchen, granite counters covered with potluck offerings. The wooden floors were worn but clean, and a sleek, well-appointed blonde in a summer skirt pointed me to the powder room in the front hall.

The bathroom occupied by another young swimmer, so the girl and I sat down on a built-in bench to wait our turn.

She kicked her feet, I rubbed my eyes. It was nearing the end of a long visit back East and I was running out of patience and clean clothes. Outside, my husband tended to the boy, who, fueled by lax rules and sugar, ran wild with the others.

I looked around at the grand staircase and the elaborate, antique light fixture over the dining room table. The high ceilings of a bygone age gave the home an air of grace, the kind of relaxed luxury it is so easy to envy.

“This house is fancy,” my daughter said, tilting her head at the walls with their high wainscoting. “Everyone here has a fancy house. Our house is not fancy. Why can’t we have a fancy house?”

She ended the small soliloquy by squinting up at me.

I scowled back at her, embarrassed by my own thoughts articulated in her girlish voice.

“We have a very nice house,” I snapped. “Don’t you like our house?”

She hung her head; I shamed her.

She tried again.

“But Mama, our house is so plain,” she said. “We could make it fancier.”

The thing is, we can’t. We have what we have, and we live a nice life. Our center-stair, four-bedroom Colonial is palatial compared to so many. It is clean and comfortable and it holds us and our possessions just as well as that 100-year-old mansion with a sprawling back porch on a tree-lined street would, without the attendant headaches of an older home.

Sometimes, though, when we’re there, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by it. The simple fact is that we lead the life of two artists. We are fortunate, indeed, to have what we have. We have more than enough, but what we do have is not fancy.

When my daughter looked at me and spoke the words in my own heart, it hurt, more than I imagined it could.

The Obligatory “They Took Down My Ads” Post

Mrs. Chicken — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:00:01 +0000

So.

I went home for a spell, back to the land of Wegmans and the Great Lakes. I even took the children by myself on an airplane, which is akin to committing ritualistic suicide using a hot poker and rubbing alcohol.

But we made it, there and back. The kids were rock stars and ate up all the time they could get with their grandmother, aunt and cousins. I did very little work at all, and, much to my surprise, I really needed to do that. It’s been a break-neck pace since December, when the BIG BIG PROJECT got off the ground and I started writing virtually full-time for my paid gig. I like the work, it energizes me.

But I needed a break. And I took one. And it was, as they say, good.

We got home around 5:30 last night and Henry ran around the house inspecting every toy like he’d never seen it before, and the big girl moaned about never seeing her cousins again, despite the fact that she will see them in exactly 37 days. Me? I celebrated the fact that I came home with suitcases filled with freshly laundered clothes by watching “The Challenge: Fresh Meat” and eating a metric ton of popcorn.

I have some things to say, some things bottled up that need to be let loose. I can’t do that now, sadly, because I have to wake Henry to fetch his sister from school. I do, however, need lattes, and so please, BlogHer, put my ads back up?

Later, my peeps.

Because Her Life Is, Like, One Long Self-Sacrifice

Mrs. Chicken — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:01:09 +0000

“Mom, you know, sometimes it’s OK for me to do something just for myself, you know.”

The Love Of Her Life

He’s A Very Good Co-Worker

Mrs. Chicken — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:52:56 +0000

No related posts.

Tripped Up

Mrs. Chicken — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 02:01:29 +0000

In a stunningly apt metaphor, I tripped going down the stairs going from the public library to the parking lot Wednesday.

I was juggling my messenger bag stuffed with papers and my laptop, my phone and my jacket. It was nippy that morning but by afternoon the sun was shining hard and hot. A kindly woman walking up as I came down put her hand on my arm and asked if I was OK.

I wasn’t. I twisted my ankle but good. However, I had to get the girl from school so I limped/ran across the lot to my van and gunned it.

Yesterday I got a call early, well before I’d had enough caffeine to make good decisions. My editor asked me to take a feature story; I declined. She expressed surprise; I went into pleaser-mode and retracted my refusal.

I spent the morning reporting the story and desperately trying to meet the deadline. I finished it today, and it’s good, but what’s better are reminders it represents:

A: I am a much better writer than I am a reporter.

Period, the end. If you give me the facts, I can weave a story. But give me a specific angle and tell me to go find the facts to support it? Not nearly as easy for me, and let’s not even talk about my feelings regarding the telephone. My dear friend and business partner — who also happens to be a crackerjack reporter — gently gave me some hints for interviewing my sources. And she was right.

B: I take on more than I can handle sometimes because I feel trapped.

The story I finished today brings in money. Period, the end. So how could I turn it down? Combine that with my canine instinct to please my master and there you have it: Me, over-extended.

C: I don’t like work that takes me away from words on a page.

I took a Web 2.5 kind of gig that gives me a little more predictable income. It involves a lot of things, including the dreaded “metrics and goals” that finally drove me out of my cushy corporate job. While no one would ever describe me as a free spirit, I don’t do well under the constraints of specificity. I like my worth to be measured in more amorphous terms.

Walking down the steps at the library Wednesday, my feet got all tangled up under me because I was checking my email on my iPhone and flicking back and forth between Twitter and Facebook when I should have been watching where I was going.

I can’t help but feel that the heavens sent me a stern telegram this week, in the form of two very sore ankles.

No related posts.

Welcome to Body Dysmorphic Monday!

Mrs. Chicken — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:44:31 +0000

I am so sick of my clothes.

No, seriously, my clothes can suck it. It’s spring here on the prairie and my wardrobe is in transition and I FUCKING HATE IT.

Did you get that?

I put on three outfits this morning: One made me look like the mascot for the Syracuse University Orange, one showed my kangaroo pouch midriff, and the one I settled on is a dreadful combination of too-big and -too-small. And don’t tell me to go shopping. I somehow lost my sense of personal flair.

It may be under the couch cushions with 1,000 Cheerios and an old sippy cup full of moldy juice. But I’m not looking under there, I’m too scared.

A lot of it has to do with the changes in my body. I’m in denial about the whole “two kids and an advanced age two years shy of 40″ thing. If I don’t look in the mirror, I’m good. If I don’t look in the mirror, I still have the effortless, bikini-ready body I was blessed with for 30 years.

Welcome to Body Dysmorphic Monday! Come on in! Share your unhealthy obsession with your ass! We’re here to listen.

ANYWHO.

So y’know what felt good? Blogging. Yeah, writing something without outside editorial direction or comment — or worrying about its SEO content — felt really fucking good. Not that I’m writing all that much anymore over at my paid gig. I’m not complaining — getting paid to obsessively check Facebook is a good gig if you can get it. And PS, if you aren’t already, become a fan or like it or whatever the fuck Facebook is calling it these days, will you?

*bats eyelashes*

But I miss writing. What I really miss, to be honest, is the sense that no one is reading what I’m writing. I know! Totally fucking crazy, right? I spend five years blogging in obscurity, begging for money and recognition, and now I’m all,”Boo hoo, I want to write essays about motherhood that no one gives a shit about, booooooo hoooooooo!”

Hi, my name is Amy and I am absofuckinglutely nuts.

*waves and smiles*

Then there’s this guy:

Too cute, right?

Yes, and he is very lucky because that face saved his life this weekend. He’s cutting molars and generally filled to the brim with hot piss and vinegar, besides. He wakes up screaming to go “OUSSSSSSSIDE MAMA” and I’m sorry, I am not going to hang out in a thunderstorm with sidewalk chalk because Mr. Naughty Noonoo can’t bear to play with the mountain of toys in the house.

Me = bad mom.

Me = inside girl.

But hey. I took a shower this morning, FTW! I am at the coffee shop for the next hour and 30 minutes and I am getting paid to write goofy shit on Twitter. You can’t really beat that.

What’s happening, my peeps? I’ve missed you.

Chicken And Cheese » Uncategorized

So. Yeah.

Related Posts

The Twenty-Sixth

Related Posts

Untitled

Related Posts

Peter

Related Posts

Not Fancy

Related Posts

The Obligatory “They Took Down My Ads” Post

Related Posts

Because Her Life Is, Like, One Long Self-Sacrifice

Related Posts

He’s A Very Good Co-Worker

Tripped Up

Welcome to Body Dysmorphic Monday!

Related Posts