100 Things

I've never done this, and I need a reason to get my blog going again, so here we go:

1. My favorite color is red. A rich velvety red, not an orangey or a pinky-red.
2. I am the only one of my siblings who was born in a hospital.
3. One of my earliest memories is going trick-or-treating the year I was 2. I was a cowgirl, with little cowgirl boots and a Western shirt with little rosebuds on it.
4. My kindergarten teacher was a man.
5. The first sentence I ever read was "Gus is a bug." I remember it vividly.
6. My mom caught me reading Clan of the Cave Bear in the guest bedroom when I was six and took it away from me. I was on page six and I never finished the book until I was 27, but the earthquake scene always stayed with me.
7. In Jr. High I used to hide in the girls bathroom and read during P.E.
8. I always thought I was terrible at sports until I discovered running in high school and ended up the captain of my cross country team.
9. One of my biggest regrets is quitting the violin when I started high school.
10. I love music, but I don't play any musical instruments.
11. Maybe I'll take fiddle lessons.
12. I met my husband when he lived downstairs from me in our college apartments.
13. He invited me over or dinner and cooked pasta with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese.
14. He cooked me the same thing 2 years ago for my 29th birthday dinner.
15. He used to be a far better cook than me, but I've since caught up.
16. The first summer we were dating, I told him that I had spent the Thanksgiving before all by myself in my apartment eating ramen and watching TV, so that night he cooked me a Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes in the middle of July.
17. We ate it outside in the backyard.
18. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.
19. I still want to be a writer when I grow up.
20. I read the entire Anne of Green Gables series, all 8 books, about once a year.
21. It's better than therapy.
22. I'm a Catholic, but I'm not sure I believe in God.
23. I'm also a liberal feminist, so there's a lot of irreconcilable differences between me and the Pope.
24. But I love religious iconography and the smell of incense.
25. I think if there is a God, He, She and the Universe are all the same thing.
26. As you can see, I am something of a heretic.
27. I think those mandarins with the wrinkly skins smell like Christmas.
28. If I couldn't live in California, I'd like to live in Spain.
29. I spent a summer in Barcelona when I was 21 and decided that I was coming back there to live.
30. It's been almost 10 years, and I haven't been back. But I suppose you never know what life has in store.
31. There was this little falafal place in the Placa Reial that was amazing. The flatbread was thick and fluffy sort of like naan. I hope when I go back that place is still there.
32. Nine-eleven happened only a couple of weeks after I came home from Spain.
33. Someone called us and told us to turn on the TV. We were still in bed.
34. It seems like everything was different after that, in the world and in my life.
35. I have one sister and one brother.
36. They are both younger.
37. My sister has a little boy. He is the fifth person in his family to bear his name.
38. I was there when he was born. It was raining. It was beautiful.
39. It took four years for me to get pregnant with my daughter.
40. She was born at home.
41. Giving birth was the hardest thing I've ever done. I don't think I want to do it again.
42. Actually, sometimes I just say that to hide the fact that I'm afraid I'll never be able to have more children.
43. I named my daughter California because it is the most beautiful place in the world.
44. I've had the same best friend since I was 3 years old and we lived in the same neighborhood.
45. We lost touch for several years when we were in our twenties, but now that we have kids, we're closer than we've ever been.
46. I wish she lived closer to me.
47. She has a little girl who is three months younger than Cali, which is exactly how much younger my friend is than me.
48. Our next door neighbors have a little girl two weeks older than Cali. They are best friends.
49. I hope someday they will still be as close as my best friend and I am.
50. This is taking a long time and I will have to finish it tomorrow.
51. Turns out it took me over a month to get back to this list.
52. I guess you could say I'm a procrastinator.
53. I hate watermelon. Other than that I'll eat pretty much anything.
54. Summer is my favorite season. I like the idea of winter, the cozy intimacy of long nights inside listening to the rain, but the reality of it usually gives me the blues. I need more light.
55. I like the Christmas season, but generally don't enjoy the actual day. Holidays make me neurotic and miserable.
56. I hate that about myself. My rigid expectations about certain things make it impossible to just relax and enjoy them.
57. Having a child has helped. I have to slow down and savor every moment.
58. Sometimes I do feel like I waste too much time wishing bedtime would arrive, though. It makes me feel horrible, like I'm wishing away my child's life. I have the rest of my life to read books undisturbed and only a couple of years with my daughter as a toddler.
59. It makes me sad that I was so depressed after Cali was born that I have trouble even remembering the first year of her life sometimes. I'm so glad I wrote a lot of it down.
60. I made a New Year's resolution to write more. I'm burying it on this list where no one will see it if I fail.
61. I love my friends deeply, but I have weird social anxiety issues that make it hard for me to maintain relationships well.
62. I'm trying to do better, because some people are too beautiful to lose.
63. This is why my husband is my best friend; he doesn't let me hide from him.
64. I love the house I live in. Every morning I wake up and try not to take it for granted.
65. It is only two blocks from the beach.
66. Almost every day last summer, Cali and I took a walk along the cliffs after dinner. Those are some of my best memories.
67. The last walk we took it got dark before we got home, and Cali discovered stars for the first time. Since then, it's been too dark to walk after dinner.
68. I love to drink Jameson neat.
69. I love to eat tomatoes raw, but only in the summertime. Winter tomatoes aren't really tomatoes.
70. I'm afraid of failure, and I've still failed quite spectacularly in my life at times. I can't even list those failures here, because thinking about them gives me anxiety.
71. I hate small talk. I hate going to parties where I don't know anyone. You'd never know it, though. I'm good at hiding it.
72. I taught myself to knit, and I love it.
73. I'm teaching myself to sew.
74. I used to be a pretty decent artist, but I haven't drawn or painted in years.
75. Sometimes I take photographs.
76. My husband made me resolve to write one page a day on my novel every day next year.
77. I find the resolution exciting and terrifying.
78. I'm afraid I'll find out the reason I've never committed to writing a novel is because I'd totally suck at it.
79. Being sucky at things is a huge fear of mine. I'd rather not do something than do a sucky job at it.
71. Probably why there are so many things left undone in my life.
72. See, even writing about this feels ridiculous. The idea of me, an untrained, unpublished nobody writing a stupid novel that no one will read, is ridiculous.
73. I'm still going to try, though.
74. I drink way too much coffee.
75. I don't exercise enough.
76. My favorite food is soup. My first sentence, at 15 months (so says my mom) was "I love my soup". After having had my own fifteen-month-old, I find this hard to believe.
77. I like to follow politics, but doing so exacerbates my anxiety, because politics are so fucking depressing (excuse my French).
78. My favorite movie is "It's a Wonderful Life." It always makes me cry.
79. I like happy endings.
80. But I like sad endings, too.
81. I cry easily, but not as easily as I used to.
82. I am the worst passenger ever. Seriously. You'd probably rather not drive with me. Especially if it's raining.
83. I don't get carsick, though. I can read in the car like nobody's business.
84. I love long car trips. I'm not sure how that works with the driving anxiety, but it does.
85. I've read most of the Harry Potter books aloud to my husband during road trips.
86. I love reading out loud. I can't wait until Cali is old enough to read longer books to.
87. If I had one wish, it would be to never again disappoint anyone that loves me.
88. Well, I'd also wish that my husband wasn't allergic to cats.
89. I love cats.
90. I HATE being cold. Our heating bill does not make my husband happy. Oh well. Being cold does not make me happy. Good thing we live in California.
91. I look more like my brother than my sister.
92. My brother is seven years younger than me. We didn't become close until we were adults. We are so alike and so different. I love him very much.
93. My sister and I are so different, and not so much alike. I'm five years older than her. I love her very much.
94. I miss living near them.
95. But I also enjoy the privacy of living farther from my family.
96. I am a very private person.
97. That's why I bear my soul to the entire world in this blog, ha ha.
98. I need to go to sleep. I hate going to sleep. That's probably where my daughter gets it from.
99. I'll probably go to bed and read instead.
100. I love to read.

Conversation with Cali:

"What does a cow say?"
"Mooon!"
"What does a frog say?"
"Wubbit wubbit"
"What does a dog say?"
"Woowoo"
""What does a cat say?"
"Meeeooo"
"What do YOU say?"
"Pease."

Poor Sick Baby

Poor Cali Girl has been sick. I knew it two days ago, when, after a perfectly normal day of typical rambunctious climbing-ness, she crawled into my lap at six o'clock and fell asleep. Fell asleep, I tell you, the child who never spontaneously falls asleep, and who has to be wrestled to sleep each night, which is something between an hour-long and an all-night ordeal. I woke her up after a few minutes because she I was afraid she would wake up at bedtime and not go back to sleep, and at first she seemed okay. But my initial instincts were correct. By nine or ten she was burning up, and then woke up and vomited profusely all over the bed. As I'm sure you other parents know, tiny children can hold quite a bit of puke. Poor baby.

I have to tell you, having a mildly sick child makes me feel such incredibly profound awe over parents of truly sick children. Tears spring to my eyes when my own feverish girl wakes up disoriented and glassy-eyed and says, with a desperately insistent voice "dog? dog?", then looks around and starts sobbing with confusion and misery. Then I feel so grateful and almost ashamed of feeling sorry for myself and my sick baby when there are so many children that are truly, horrifyingly ill. My heart just cracks open with pity and sadness when I think of it. And of course, there's that tiny grain of fear that lodged itself deep in my chest the moment I first became her mother, the basic fear that can't be put more simply than this: that she might die. It doesn't haunt me or take over my life, but it is always there. That other people actually have to experience the reality of this fear is something that is hard to reconcile in this world. I've been keeping those who have sick children in my thoughts these past few days, and my heart has been aching for them.

A Philosophical Question:

If one had a very small child who happened to learn how to say the S-word, and said it quite often, but mispronounced it so that it sounded like "ditsh", would that still make one an unfit parent? Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Ruminations While Driving

This morning we all woke up tired and draggy and I decided not to take Cali Girl to her morning swim lesson. This made me feel a little guilty, since it's only the second day of class, but not guilty enough to gather our still-damp swimsuits and swim diapers and all the other necessary paraphernalia and drive to the outdoor swim center and get into the water first thing on a cool foggy morning. Did I mention that Cali is decidedly unfond of her swim lessons, and that "unfond" is a nice way of saying "terrified"? (The lessons, as it turns out, are not really lessons as much as just a gathering of five moms carrying their babies around in the splash pool at the same time while a teenage swim teacher with unbelievably tan skin and a flat tummy sings "The Wheels on the Bus" and makes the rest of us feel pale, puffy and old. Really, it's kind of a waste of sixty-five bucks, in my opinion.)

So instead of swim class, we all went to Safeway to get bread and yogurt, since we are completely out of food at our house. And since there is a convenient Starbucks right inside our Safeway, I got one of those, too. Cali is convinced that there is a dog that lives outside the window of Safeway, right by the Starbucks counter, because we once saw one there two or three months ago, waiting patiently by the bike rack for its owner to come out. When we get to that part of the store, she starts questioning "dod? dod?" over and over and over and over again until you take her to the window to show her that there is no dog out there, which greatly perplexes her. Then we went home, and I did not clean the house, but instead sat on the couch with Cali and drank coffee and fed her her yogurt.

When Ricardo went to work, I decided to take Cali for a long drive and hope that she would take an early nap. She hasn't been sleeping well because I think she's teething again. At fifteen months she only has four teeth, so we're still in the thick of teething season. I drove up Highway 1, while the girl slept in her seat, looking at the pewter ocean and the golden hills, and noticing this one solitary farmer who was working his brussels sprout field right along the cliff edge above the ocean. This is a drive that my husband and I used to make all the time, back when we were in college and he was still my boyfriend, in his blue pick-up truck (affectionately named Bob), listening to this particular mix CD with a Cowboy Junkies song that I loved on it. I thought about how back then, all I wanted to do was become a writer. And this made me think about how much of the decade after college I spent struggling with depression, and how it makes you feel like you have cobwebs in your brain, and it keeps you from being able to imagine yourself and your life as anything different than it is at that very moment in time. It took a serious crisis after the birth of my baby to get treatment and to realize that feeling that way isn't normal or acceptable.

I'm grateful to be largely free of the intense burden I carried for so long. I'm not perfectly happy, or anything, but I finally feel like what I used to call a "real person". I'm glad to be writing again and enjoying my time with my daughter and planning for the future, but I have this nagging voice in my ear that keeps whispering that it's too late to accomplish the things I once dreamed of. That the last muddled eight years were my one chance to make things work, and now they are gone forever. I'm too old and tied down to think of finally finishing my nursing degree, and of doing humanitarian work with health organizations, and of maybe still writing a book, and of travelling again. Too late, too late cycles round and round my head, and I know this voice is not even worth listening to, but it's rather persistent all the same. So that's what I'm thinking of, and fighting against, lately. The urge to give up on myself, and settle for less than I once thought I could do. Is that a good thing? To be content with what you are? Or are you supposed to keep pursuing the things you feel that you are meant to do? I'm really not sure what the answer is.

When I was nearing home Cali woke up and was crying softly in her seat, wanting to be taken out, and saying "he'p me." I parked and got out of the car and went to get her, and she looked at me with huge tears rolling down her face, and I said "Oh, Cali, you don't need to be so sad!" And she said, in this tiny quavering brave voice, "I know." This is one of her favorite all-purpose phrases, and I don't think she really knows what it means, but she still always says it at the right time.

Do I look like the kind of person who doesn't know how to have a good time?

Pretend it's the Fourth of July and it's been cloudy all day and you find yourself without any real plans because your weekend guests left unexpectedly early this morning. And pretend that this lack of a firm checklist for celebratory enjoyment is making you upset and anxious and more than a little grumpy because you become inexplicably manic during holidays. You have an irrational need to have everything go exactly as you pictured in your head, which is generally pretty unrealistic, since the pictures in your head seem to resemble something between a Norman Rockwell Painting and a commercial for Summertime brand lemonade, and your real life resembles something between Calvin and Hobbes and the part of the infomercial where the person simply cannot manage to make a regular blender work without clumsily spraying its half-pureed contents all over the kitchen. You spent the day chasing your toddler around a decidedly adult-oriented barbecue and wandering aimlessly around the touristy area of your town, and now it is dusk and you have bundled your child into the stroller and left the house to try to see fireworks, because it is the Fourth of July, and you must see fireworks because that's just what you have to do, because it's fun, dammit, and someday your child might ask you "Mama, why was the Fourth of July when I was 15 months old so dreary and devoid of fireworks?" Because it is completely reasonable to imagine that she might remember this day at all.

So here, you are, walking along with your daughter and your husband, and your big toe is throbbing and possibly bleeding where you stubbed it on the wheel of the stroller, and you know you are greatly annoying your husband by going on and on about whether you are going in the right direction or whether or not you might miss the fireworks, and being generally neurotic, but you can't stop yourself. And you look down to see if your child looks cold or upset about the loud booming, and she's sitting in the stroller, blanket up to her chin, and her little round face has the most delighted and astounded expression on it, and just then another firework goes off, except this time she sees it as it lets go its loud BOOM, and she says "wow!" in her little echo-ey voice, with genuine awe. And your husband jokes, "I'll bet she thinks this is what happens every night after we make her go to bed."

And you take a deep breath and you notice the white foam on the surf glowing against the dark water, and the shimmery trails of red and yellow light shining across the bay from the waterfront, and the fireworks exploding in great glittery blossoms above the lit-up boardwalk. And there are families sitting on the cliffs with their children, pointing at the sky, and teenagers riding by on cruiser bikes, and one exuberant fellow who keeps yelling "America! High five!" (okay, that guy was a little annoying), and you wonder how many more moments you will almost miss because you are too busy trying not to miss them.

Cali in the Morning

This is my summertime Cali Girl sitting on the front step in the sunshine eating a juicy, juicy plum.



Here are some more things about Cali, guaranteed to counteract the melancholy of yesterday's post:

1. In the mornings Cali and I generally snuggle on the couch for the hour or two it takes me to become human (have I mentioned I'm not a morning person?). I drink coffee and mess around on my iPhone or attempt to read a book and Cali intermittently sits on my lap and runs around scattering toys and Cheerios and the contents of my purse around the house until she simply can't take it any longer, and then she brings me her shoes, hands them to me and says "doot!" (her word for shoes) very sternly, to let me know that it is now time to get off the couch, put on her shoes, and take her Out of the House. If my response is not prompt enough for her liking, she goes to the front door and knocks on it repeatedly, while saying "park? park?" in a pathetically cute and plaintive Oliver-esque voice.

2. (And, trust me, I am well aware that this does NOT paint me in a good light.) Lately Cali wakes up (ridiculously early, of course) sits up in bed and asks for the remote control. I am not kidding, people. My habit of blearily turning on Playhouse Disney at 6:30 am so I can sleep for 20 more minutes has seriously backfired. Well, not backfired, I guess, since it works exactly as intended. In fact, it has shamed me by working entirely too well. Having my one-year old wake me up by patting my face and asking " 'mote? 'mote?" has not been my proudest parenting moment.

3. On one of our morning couch-sitting sessions, Cali brought me her baby doll, Baby, so that she could sit on Cali's lap while Cali sat on my lap. I gave Cali kisses, Cali gave Baby kisses, and then Cali wanted me to give Baby kisses, too, so I did. Then I rocked both Baby and Cali and kissed them and we played the ny-ny game, where Cali and Baby lie down on the couch and Cali says "ny-ny", lies her head down for two seconds, pretends to sleep, and then "wakes up" and runs around the house laughing. (The ny-ny game should in no way be confused with the ny-ny battle waged nightly in my home which is not nearly as fun or cute as the ny-ny game.) I decided to play the part of Baby, and when Cali came back, I had Baby get all clingy and snuggly on Cali, and say "Mama, Mama, Mama!" Cali pushed her away and said "nyo!" So I said, "Cali, your baby wants snuggles and kisses!" Cali took Baby from me with an irritated look on her face, marched her to the other end of the couch, put a blanket over her and said "bye-bye!" I completely sympathized with her. Being a Mama is hard sometimes.