Being a parent is as much about deciding the kind of mother you don't want to be as much as it's about being the mother you are... and I decided a long time ago I wasn't going to be a yelling mom. I was going to be all mellow and zen and 'Honey, your feelings of anger
are pure and valid and crucial to your brain hemispheric development but
please don't take them out on the dog.' Then my kid threw a fresh hot plate of pasta all over the newly mopped floors and I hollered like, well, like my mother.
I grew up in a yelling house. Mom yelled at us, Dad yelled at us, Dad yelled at Mom and we all yelled at the dog. Yelling was what people did in the sixties and seventies. Hitting and spanking your kids was extremely acceptable, unless you had a family that didn't read Dr. Spock. Those un-Spocked families parented free-style, wherein they incorporated hitting and yelling. Don't get me wrong my mom tried to hit us, but she was short and we were fast- so she had a long wooden spoon that she whacked at us and when it connected with a calf or a shin, it stung. I seem to recall some belt-snapping too, but again, it didn't reach us all that much. Our father was massive, so he never laid a finger on us, but would punch holes in doors or throw boots through walls to make a particular argument linger in our memories.
My sisters became parents long before I did. My younger sister has a senior in college, I have a two year old in diapers. Guess who planned out her life and married smart, early on. That's right, not me. This sister is also a Ph.d, a clinical psychologist who raised four daughters almost completely single-handedly while her husband worked crazy long hours building a successful law firm. I have never heard this sister yell at any of her girls, all of whom are wonderfully polite, adorable, funny and excellent at their studies. My sister's girls adore and obey her so thoroughly that they cower and beg for forgiveness at the calmly delivered threat of potentially being yelled at. I thought I'd be like this sister.
My older sister has two teen boys. These boys are each delightful, charming and deeply creative, imaginative and talented at many artistic disciplines. My older sister yells. She is simply a yeller. She doesn't hit her boys, but speaks calmly when she says that in order to shape her boys into unfailingly polite young men, she stood on their necks from two until... well, I think she's still standing on their necks. But these boys will agree with her, and amenably tell stories about how she disciplined them like General Patton- and they never say (even when she's not around, standing on their necks) that they disagree with her parenting style. They have grown and thrived despite or because of how they were (and are) raised.
My father went on to have two more children with his second wife. Big yellers. Both of them. Even when they are happy, it's all yelled. Yelling and interrupting are hallmarks of this family. Stunningly, their older child, a boy, is quite soft-spoken. I don't think I've ever heard him yell, but his sister thinks yelling is speaking. She's a calm, friendly, smiling yeller.
I never thought I'd be a yeller. But I also thought I wouldn't be menopausal while changing diapers. My husband does not come from yellers. His parents are studious, blinking Unitarians- the kind of people PBS was invented for. Hence my husband is soft-spoken and mellow to the point of prodding him occasionally to see if he's still breathing. But when Clementine dumped a hot cup of coffee on his head early Saturday morning, he yelled like, well, me.
The night that I yelled at my daughter, we went on to have a rather emotional bath, with her sobbing and furious as I rinsed the unwanted bubbles from her hair. She ran away from me, all the way up the stairs to my bedroom, crying until I stopped her and calmly said, "Look. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I yelled. I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. But I'm trying. "
She climbed wet and naked into my lap and gave me a hug. She knows I'm an old yeller and she loves me anyway. But honestly, what choice does she have? Until she is strong enough to open the refrigerator, she had better forgive me. Because I forgive her at least fifty times a day. And I love it.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
My story that just ran in the LA Times- unexpurgated!!
As I listen to my husband read Hop on Pop to our 22 month old daughter,
I still find it hard to believe I met this man on Craigslist.
I came to Los Angeles to escape my falling apart first marriage. When I discovered my newly estranged husband had moved on rather quickly with a much younger dancer, I fell the rest of the way apart on my own.
It was 1997, the winter of El Nino. The heavy rains helped me grieve. It felt like Los Angeles was crying along with me. It was also the year that Beck's "Loser" was constantly on the radio. It was the winter of belting out "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" while sobbing on Laurel Canyon Boulevard as trash cans floated downhill past my car, going faster than me… thanks to the traffic.
I came to Los Angeles to escape my falling apart first marriage. When I discovered my newly estranged husband had moved on rather quickly with a much younger dancer, I fell the rest of the way apart on my own.
It was 1997, the winter of El Nino. The heavy rains helped me grieve. It felt like Los Angeles was crying along with me. It was also the year that Beck's "Loser" was constantly on the radio. It was the winter of belting out "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" while sobbing on Laurel Canyon Boulevard as trash cans floated downhill past my car, going faster than me… thanks to the traffic.
Since I was prone to bursting into tears at the slightest provocation,
the only job I could get was living with a rock band and taking care of their dogs
while they went on tour. I was a doggy au pair- and as much as I helped those
dogs, they helped me more. They were diabolical pooches, jumping out the
window of my moving car onto Mulholland Boulevard, but they kept me going, one
muddy walk after another.
Other men eventually came along, all oddly named the same name as my ex-husband. After ten years of Todds, I found myself forty and alone. I was scraping by with freelance writing jobs and struggled to come to terms with being a woman who might remain alone forever. I discovered Los Angeles isn't a kind city to women of a certain age.
It was almost as if the moment I turned forty I wasn't approached in coffee shops or even set up on blind dates, except by my meddling mother back in Brooklyn- who desperately signed me up for six months of eHarmony, which turned out to be an online version of male/female age politics. The only men online who were interested in meeting a forty year old woman were grandfathers in their 60s. Or older. I even experimented with the age game just to see what would happen. I started another eHarmony profile and stated my age as 38, which apparently was the magic number for flushing out allegedly available men 46 years old and above. Through eHarmony I did meet someone wildly interesting, and despite my being willing to work around his STD, he couldn't forgive me for shaving two years off my age... so I gave up.
I spent the next five years writing and working hard, watching my friends get married and have children or worse, second and third children. My mother stopped asking if I had met anybody because she already knew the answer. At 44 I attempted a career change. I decided to embrace reality TV and started working as the Gal Friday of a physically adorable but emotionally Draconian reality show producer. Apparently I wasn't very good as hiding my disdain for the brains behind "Dancing With Dolphins" and I was fired after two hellish months of pretending to care.
A dear and wildly successful friend took a group of us to Hawaii for my 45th birthday- it was the most romantic holiday that two single women and two gay men have ever experienced. One night in the hot tub I saved a baby gecko's life as he churned in the jet bubbles and the four of us screamed like kindergartners. Somehow I scooped the little lizard out of the human stew and he took off for the hills. The next day a Hawaiian lady told me that saving a gecko's life was going to bring me great luck, which I immediately chalked up to the things tired natives tell naive tourists over souvenirs.
Two weeks later I found myself manning a yard sale to pay off my Hawaiian vacation. I was cleaning out the garage of a profoundly successful female architect who decided she finally was ready to park her car in her garage, which was jam-packed with the debris of her first and second marriages. I posted her drafting table from Harvard Architecture School and a bunch of other stuff on Craigslist and waited in the early September heat of a South Pasadena morning for the potential bargain hunters to show up.
He was late. At least an hour. But finally his old Mercedes Benz station wagon pulled into the driveway and he climbed out of the car and smiled at me. A very calm voice in my head told me, "Oh, that's your husband."
And he was. The oddest part of meeting him was that he seemed familiar to me. Once we started talking we realized we had worked together ten years before, on a TV show in Vancouver. On that set, we must have walked past each other twenty times a day for two weeks straight, but since he was planning his first marriage and I was going through the turmoil of my divorce, we never actually met.
Three years after we met in South Pasadena we eloped to Marya's Wedding chapel on Normandie above Melrose- it was 10/10/10 and we were shocked to discover that we were the only ones willing to pay extra to get married on a Sunday.
A year and a half later we adopted our daughter. I am now 51, happily married and ecstatic to be a parent. The three of us live in a Craftsman Bungalow in Echo Park and almost every day I thank the three Todds and Dancing With Dolphins- if it weren't for all of those relationships not working out, I might not have found the one relationship that did… in Los Angeles, after all.
Other men eventually came along, all oddly named the same name as my ex-husband. After ten years of Todds, I found myself forty and alone. I was scraping by with freelance writing jobs and struggled to come to terms with being a woman who might remain alone forever. I discovered Los Angeles isn't a kind city to women of a certain age.
It was almost as if the moment I turned forty I wasn't approached in coffee shops or even set up on blind dates, except by my meddling mother back in Brooklyn- who desperately signed me up for six months of eHarmony, which turned out to be an online version of male/female age politics. The only men online who were interested in meeting a forty year old woman were grandfathers in their 60s. Or older. I even experimented with the age game just to see what would happen. I started another eHarmony profile and stated my age as 38, which apparently was the magic number for flushing out allegedly available men 46 years old and above. Through eHarmony I did meet someone wildly interesting, and despite my being willing to work around his STD, he couldn't forgive me for shaving two years off my age... so I gave up.
I spent the next five years writing and working hard, watching my friends get married and have children or worse, second and third children. My mother stopped asking if I had met anybody because she already knew the answer. At 44 I attempted a career change. I decided to embrace reality TV and started working as the Gal Friday of a physically adorable but emotionally Draconian reality show producer. Apparently I wasn't very good as hiding my disdain for the brains behind "Dancing With Dolphins" and I was fired after two hellish months of pretending to care.
A dear and wildly successful friend took a group of us to Hawaii for my 45th birthday- it was the most romantic holiday that two single women and two gay men have ever experienced. One night in the hot tub I saved a baby gecko's life as he churned in the jet bubbles and the four of us screamed like kindergartners. Somehow I scooped the little lizard out of the human stew and he took off for the hills. The next day a Hawaiian lady told me that saving a gecko's life was going to bring me great luck, which I immediately chalked up to the things tired natives tell naive tourists over souvenirs.
Two weeks later I found myself manning a yard sale to pay off my Hawaiian vacation. I was cleaning out the garage of a profoundly successful female architect who decided she finally was ready to park her car in her garage, which was jam-packed with the debris of her first and second marriages. I posted her drafting table from Harvard Architecture School and a bunch of other stuff on Craigslist and waited in the early September heat of a South Pasadena morning for the potential bargain hunters to show up.
He was late. At least an hour. But finally his old Mercedes Benz station wagon pulled into the driveway and he climbed out of the car and smiled at me. A very calm voice in my head told me, "Oh, that's your husband."
And he was. The oddest part of meeting him was that he seemed familiar to me. Once we started talking we realized we had worked together ten years before, on a TV show in Vancouver. On that set, we must have walked past each other twenty times a day for two weeks straight, but since he was planning his first marriage and I was going through the turmoil of my divorce, we never actually met.
Three years after we met in South Pasadena we eloped to Marya's Wedding chapel on Normandie above Melrose- it was 10/10/10 and we were shocked to discover that we were the only ones willing to pay extra to get married on a Sunday.
A year and a half later we adopted our daughter. I am now 51, happily married and ecstatic to be a parent. The three of us live in a Craftsman Bungalow in Echo Park and almost every day I thank the three Todds and Dancing With Dolphins- if it weren't for all of those relationships not working out, I might not have found the one relationship that did… in Los Angeles, after all.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Black Santa or A Very Non-White Christmas
This was the first Christmas in a long time that I didn't utterly hate. BC, aka, before Clementine, I found every holiday after Halloween pushy and inconvenient at best & greedy and depressing at worst. The pressure of getting family members gifts was as much fun as simply burning the money I didn't have to spend on other people's presents. When tradition simply becomes expectation- it's not 'the spirit of Christmas'- it's a pay off, a bribe with a bow.
But this Christmas some deeply buried, long-cold pilot light was re-ignited in my coal-black holiday soul. I craved a cozy tree with charming decorations, lights in the windows, mistletoe over head and Johnny Mathis coaxing hope and love back into my heart. I forced the husband to go along with my Grinch re-awakening and he lit the place up like Vegas. And I remembered, in a shocking fit of sentiment, my childhood Christmases.
We had no money growing up and my parents struggled mightily with multiple jobs and each other but something came over us all right after Thanksgiving. We decorated our little run down house within an inch of it's life. By the time we finished, the decorations and lights probably held our house together. We wore out Julie Andrews' Christmas album until the needles turned to stubs and Julie started to sound like she was begging us to give her a break.
Even worse, we were such nerdy little theater fags, my sisters and I would rehearse Christmas Eve. We'd write scripts, complete with dialogue, lines like- "Elizabeth, wake up! Do you hear what I hear?". We'd practice how we'd sleep on the narrow staircase leading down from our rooms to the living room, where our ceiling-scraping tree groaned under the overdose of shedding satin-wrapped Christmas balls, which were buried under layers of cotton-candy-esque gobs of 'snow' draped over the branches, which turned out to be asbestos-laden fiberglass or something equally carcinogenic. They don't make that stuff anymore... perhaps not even in China.
I've played along with Christmas ever since then, but begrudgingly so- as if it was a relationship I was too lazy to end, so I just phoned it in year after year, wondering if I'd ever be brave enough to just ignore Christmas until it went away for good. Until I became a mother.
While I knew that my kid was still too young to understand Christmas or even simply grasp the concept of an older, bearded man in belted red lounge-wear breaking into our home while we sleep, I wanted to create traditions for us as a family to feel pressured to honor year after year, no matter how much we all would eventually grow to hate them. One of these traditions is a visit to Santa, which more resembles a torture rite of passage that parents exact on their kids, with professional photographers dressed as elves conveniently on hand to commemorate our children's agony. When I really think about it, it's insane how otherwise devoted and proud parents laugh and coo as their children scream and sob in terror on some oddly bearded stranger's red velour lap while someone photographs the whole sordid mess.
And then I got a kid, and I joined that club of parents who simply must do this. As a child we'd get all excited and dressed up, go into the city, marvel at the store windows and the tree at Rockefeller Center and then go and weep on Santa's lap at Macy's in Herald Square, then go to the Rockettes and Nativity show at Radio City. We'd freeze and cry and be exhausted- our beater car would inevitably break down on the way home, once in the actual middle of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, our furious dad would swear this was the last effing time, ever. Then we'd do it again the next year.
Christmas in LA in 2013 means you go to the Grove, try not to let the falling man-made snow get in your mouth or eyes then wait for four hours to sit on Santa's knee. If you are white. As a white person, I am not slogging white people for doing any of this, it's what you do when you have a kid and you want them to have a feel for Christmas despite the golf club weather.
So we did it. We dressed up Clementine and let her wear her red rubber boots with her tights and dress and we showed her all the lights and decorations and trolley cars full of musicians and we waited to see Santa. She found it all underwhelming and really only enjoyed the fountains. Until she met Santa- a truly incredible man who took the time and care and knew exactly how to not make a baby cry. I wanted to tip him for his sweetness towards her, but that felt creepy. The photo is fine, she just looks a bit annoyed and baffled at the whole crazy scene.
Then something came over me and I simply had to take her to Black Santa. Perhaps it was because I read about the beloved Black Santa at the Crenshaw mall but mostly it's because my daughter is black and because Megyn Kelly, the Edward R. Murrow of Fox News declared that Santa is white. That inspired me, my sister, husband and nephew to get Clemmie all dressed up again and head on down to Crenshaw Mall on Christmas Eve.
It was hard to find a parking spot, it was crazy hot out and a long walk to the front door. It probably took 45 minutes to navigate Macy's, find the up escalator, walk deeper and deeper into the mall where we finally spotted the big-ass tree and massive white leatherette chair surrounded by elves on the clock. Clementine couldn't have cared less about any of this, except for the escalators. She wanted to ride them up and down over and over.
The biggest difference between Crenshaw Mall's Santa-land and the Grove's Santa-land was access to Santa. At the Grove, Santa is ensconced deep inside a massive cottage-shaped lair made entirely of fake candy, baked goods and ice cream and of course tons of wrapped presents, in case we forgot we were inside a shopping mall conveniently full of crap to buy. You don't see Santa until you are asked which photo package you are willing to shell out the dough for. Signs everywhere warn you to keep smart phones deeply hidden. No stealing selfies with white Santa.
At Crenshaw mall we could see clearly see Santa, since he was completely exposed to the mall elements... as we descended on the down escalator. And that was when I easily saw that Black Santa was not black. Maybe Megyn Kelly was right after all. My heart sank as we got closer to Santa-land, despite the slight concession that under an obviously fake white beard, this Santa was more of a South American brown.
By this time my sister and nephew were laughing so hard they were crying as they asked what I wanted to do now. We quietly discussed that it seemed pretty racist to come all this way and not get a photo with Santa because he wasn't black enough. As I tentatively approached the head elf, my mind raced with how exactly to ask for Black Santa without sounding like a reverse-racist.
"Um, hi. Is there... another Santa... somewhere else in this mall?"
The head elf, a black man in his 50s eyed me quickly with no emotion.
"You mean Black Santa? He doesn't come on until 1:30."
It was 11:30 and the clock was winding down to Clemmie's iron-clad naptime which is at noon. We could wait until 1:30 but she'd be such a raving banshee by then that we'd probably get kicked out of Black Santa-land.
So, I ponied up the 15 bucks and walked her over to Brown Santa who spoke no English and had zero baby savy. He just grabbed Clemmie, plopped her in his lap and she FREAKED out. I even sat with her and put my arm around Santa as if to indicate he was okay after all but she screamed holy hell, reaching for her father who froze beside the camera, smiling inexplicably at her misery, which only compounded her fury.
For some reason I grinned like an idiot, as if to compensate for the howling grimacing Clementine, forever commemorated kicking out of her red rubber boots and reaching futilely for her father's arms. The photo elf showed me the photos, all of them ridiculous and heart breaking. I picked the one that was most flattering to me.
At least we had four escalator rides before getting out of the mall. Those wild mechanical rides made her forget all about Santa... until next year.
But this Christmas some deeply buried, long-cold pilot light was re-ignited in my coal-black holiday soul. I craved a cozy tree with charming decorations, lights in the windows, mistletoe over head and Johnny Mathis coaxing hope and love back into my heart. I forced the husband to go along with my Grinch re-awakening and he lit the place up like Vegas. And I remembered, in a shocking fit of sentiment, my childhood Christmases.
We had no money growing up and my parents struggled mightily with multiple jobs and each other but something came over us all right after Thanksgiving. We decorated our little run down house within an inch of it's life. By the time we finished, the decorations and lights probably held our house together. We wore out Julie Andrews' Christmas album until the needles turned to stubs and Julie started to sound like she was begging us to give her a break.
Even worse, we were such nerdy little theater fags, my sisters and I would rehearse Christmas Eve. We'd write scripts, complete with dialogue, lines like- "Elizabeth, wake up! Do you hear what I hear?". We'd practice how we'd sleep on the narrow staircase leading down from our rooms to the living room, where our ceiling-scraping tree groaned under the overdose of shedding satin-wrapped Christmas balls, which were buried under layers of cotton-candy-esque gobs of 'snow' draped over the branches, which turned out to be asbestos-laden fiberglass or something equally carcinogenic. They don't make that stuff anymore... perhaps not even in China.
I've played along with Christmas ever since then, but begrudgingly so- as if it was a relationship I was too lazy to end, so I just phoned it in year after year, wondering if I'd ever be brave enough to just ignore Christmas until it went away for good. Until I became a mother.
While I knew that my kid was still too young to understand Christmas or even simply grasp the concept of an older, bearded man in belted red lounge-wear breaking into our home while we sleep, I wanted to create traditions for us as a family to feel pressured to honor year after year, no matter how much we all would eventually grow to hate them. One of these traditions is a visit to Santa, which more resembles a torture rite of passage that parents exact on their kids, with professional photographers dressed as elves conveniently on hand to commemorate our children's agony. When I really think about it, it's insane how otherwise devoted and proud parents laugh and coo as their children scream and sob in terror on some oddly bearded stranger's red velour lap while someone photographs the whole sordid mess.
And then I got a kid, and I joined that club of parents who simply must do this. As a child we'd get all excited and dressed up, go into the city, marvel at the store windows and the tree at Rockefeller Center and then go and weep on Santa's lap at Macy's in Herald Square, then go to the Rockettes and Nativity show at Radio City. We'd freeze and cry and be exhausted- our beater car would inevitably break down on the way home, once in the actual middle of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, our furious dad would swear this was the last effing time, ever. Then we'd do it again the next year.
Christmas in LA in 2013 means you go to the Grove, try not to let the falling man-made snow get in your mouth or eyes then wait for four hours to sit on Santa's knee. If you are white. As a white person, I am not slogging white people for doing any of this, it's what you do when you have a kid and you want them to have a feel for Christmas despite the golf club weather.
So we did it. We dressed up Clementine and let her wear her red rubber boots with her tights and dress and we showed her all the lights and decorations and trolley cars full of musicians and we waited to see Santa. She found it all underwhelming and really only enjoyed the fountains. Until she met Santa- a truly incredible man who took the time and care and knew exactly how to not make a baby cry. I wanted to tip him for his sweetness towards her, but that felt creepy. The photo is fine, she just looks a bit annoyed and baffled at the whole crazy scene.
Then something came over me and I simply had to take her to Black Santa. Perhaps it was because I read about the beloved Black Santa at the Crenshaw mall but mostly it's because my daughter is black and because Megyn Kelly, the Edward R. Murrow of Fox News declared that Santa is white. That inspired me, my sister, husband and nephew to get Clemmie all dressed up again and head on down to Crenshaw Mall on Christmas Eve.
It was hard to find a parking spot, it was crazy hot out and a long walk to the front door. It probably took 45 minutes to navigate Macy's, find the up escalator, walk deeper and deeper into the mall where we finally spotted the big-ass tree and massive white leatherette chair surrounded by elves on the clock. Clementine couldn't have cared less about any of this, except for the escalators. She wanted to ride them up and down over and over.
The biggest difference between Crenshaw Mall's Santa-land and the Grove's Santa-land was access to Santa. At the Grove, Santa is ensconced deep inside a massive cottage-shaped lair made entirely of fake candy, baked goods and ice cream and of course tons of wrapped presents, in case we forgot we were inside a shopping mall conveniently full of crap to buy. You don't see Santa until you are asked which photo package you are willing to shell out the dough for. Signs everywhere warn you to keep smart phones deeply hidden. No stealing selfies with white Santa.
At Crenshaw mall we could see clearly see Santa, since he was completely exposed to the mall elements... as we descended on the down escalator. And that was when I easily saw that Black Santa was not black. Maybe Megyn Kelly was right after all. My heart sank as we got closer to Santa-land, despite the slight concession that under an obviously fake white beard, this Santa was more of a South American brown.
By this time my sister and nephew were laughing so hard they were crying as they asked what I wanted to do now. We quietly discussed that it seemed pretty racist to come all this way and not get a photo with Santa because he wasn't black enough. As I tentatively approached the head elf, my mind raced with how exactly to ask for Black Santa without sounding like a reverse-racist.
"Um, hi. Is there... another Santa... somewhere else in this mall?"
The head elf, a black man in his 50s eyed me quickly with no emotion.
"You mean Black Santa? He doesn't come on until 1:30."
It was 11:30 and the clock was winding down to Clemmie's iron-clad naptime which is at noon. We could wait until 1:30 but she'd be such a raving banshee by then that we'd probably get kicked out of Black Santa-land.
So, I ponied up the 15 bucks and walked her over to Brown Santa who spoke no English and had zero baby savy. He just grabbed Clemmie, plopped her in his lap and she FREAKED out. I even sat with her and put my arm around Santa as if to indicate he was okay after all but she screamed holy hell, reaching for her father who froze beside the camera, smiling inexplicably at her misery, which only compounded her fury.
For some reason I grinned like an idiot, as if to compensate for the howling grimacing Clementine, forever commemorated kicking out of her red rubber boots and reaching futilely for her father's arms. The photo elf showed me the photos, all of them ridiculous and heart breaking. I picked the one that was most flattering to me.
At least we had four escalator rides before getting out of the mall. Those wild mechanical rides made her forget all about Santa... until next year.
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