Feeling Like a Number?

My sister is 7 years younger than I am.  We look and sound very alike, but couldn't be more different unless we'd  been raised in different countries. But when we were younger, my mother often began her sentences with, "You girls are so..."

The truth was, there were very few comments that rightly applied to both of us; I came to believe that if one of us did something, it was automatically attributed to us collectively and this kind of comment followed.  My sister, though, had her own way of dealing with it:  every time my mother started a sentence that way, my sister burst into a rendition of  Bob Seger's "Feel Like a Number". It never did a thing to change the way my mother lumped us together, but we all got a good laugh out of it.

These are my daughters:

No, I didn't give birth to the older one. Do you really want to quibble?  They're six years apart. They look and sound quite a bit alike, but they couldn't be more different unless they'd been raised in different countries.  I try to be very conscious of those differences--I talk to them differently, teach them differently, ask different things of them, etc.

I have never, ever, ever said, "you girls" or "the two of you" about them in my entire life.  I'm pretty sure that neither of them has ever "felt like a number"--at least, not because of anything I've said or done.

And yet.

For the past month, my younger daughter (who lives with me) has been visiting her father in Indiana.  That means she spends a lot of time with her sister, who lives just a few miles away.  And, often, they call me together.

And...

um...

a lot of times when I'm talking to them on speaker, I can't tell who's who. 

That kind of came as a surprise to me, but what came as a greater surprise was that most of the time I don't care.  When they're talking to me together, they're usually doing something together; there's a common theme.  They're telling me a funny story about one of the grandkids or laughing because they're dancing in Wal-Mart and wanted to share that with me in the moment or any of a hundred different things they share. And I find that it doesn't matter in the least who told which part of the story or which one of them is holding the mud-covered child and which one is wiping him down.  I just address them as "hon" or "sweetie" and let the story unfold just as it would have a decade ago, when I was hearing those mingled voices and bursts of laughter from the next room as they sang along with Britney Spears or worked on each other's hair in the next room.

RJ Buckler is NOT in the House

The other night, Tori and I attended an event celebrating the release of our friend Dawn Xiana Moon's new CD, Spaces Between. Tori had a small part in the music video for "Strong", so we knew a few of the people involved in the production, and we were a little surprised not to see Director RJ Buckler throughout the evening. Tori had commented on his absence and I'd scanned the crowd when I walked through a couple of times and he just wasn't there.

That's why we were both surprised when Dawn stepped up to the microphone and said, "RJ Buckler is in the house." In fact, we both said (albeit very quietly), "No, he's not."

My friend Margo was with us; she doesn't know RJ, and so she leaned in and said, "Is that RJ?"

Tori and I both looked at the tall, behatted man at the microphone and said...nothing.

See, it clearly wasn't RJ.

Neither of us knows RJ well, but Tori's worked with him on a few projects and we did once spend nearly three straight days with him during a 72-hour film contest. We know what he looks like. It's different from what this guy at the mike looked like, and not just in some vague way. The guy at the mike was shorter, and had an entirely different nose, for example.

But everyone clapped. He started talking, and he claimed to be RJ, and he talked about making the music video, and he was funny. Everyone laughed. And still, neither of us answered Margo. Because we were both pretty sure that wasn't RJ. No, not pretty sure. We KNOW RJ. That wasn't him.

But Dawn had introduced him as RJ.

It was a very strange phenomenon, knowing full well that this guy wasn't RJ, but somehow feeling like we might just be confused, like he might just have had a nose job, like it was dim in there and we hadn't seen him for a long time...because how could this whole room full of people be accepting a fake RJ?

The event was in Chicago, so we had a long drive home, and during the drive we talked about how that clearly wasn't RJ. We talked about how funny it was that everyone had accepted the fake RJ just because he was introduced as RJ, and about the obvious differences. We brainstormed half of a screenplay about a guy who is replaced by someone who looks nothing like him and no one mentions it.

But every once in a while, we wondered whether that might have been RJ. Because, of course, sometimes people just shrink a few inches, have their skin bleached a few shades and get a radical nose job in the few months since you last saw them.

The next morning, RJ posted on Facebook from South Korea. Early the next morning. That clinched it for us. Except...the YouTube video from the event said right in the description, "RJ Buckler was on hand to..." And there, in the thumbnail, was the guy we were pretty sure wasn't RJ.

Finally, this evening, we confirmed that the guy wasn't RJ. Which, of course, we knew. Which everyone knew, right? Because we know what RJ looks like. But it was fascinating, that niggling doubt...that piece of our brains that was almost ready to accept what our eyes were telling us was absurd.

Sliding at Midnight

Yesterday, Andrew had a rough day and we didn't get to go to the park. We also got a bit thrown off of our usual schedule by some of the fuss and ended up eating dinner pretty late. By that time, though, he'd come around to his usual sweet and charming self, and when he mentioned as we were cleaning up that he was being good now, we all wholeheartedly agreed. And then he said, "So now we can put on our sunglasses and go to the park."

It wasn't really midnight, of course, but it was after 8:00. It was full dark outside. And I started to say that we'd go to the park in the morning, but Tori cocked her head and said softly, "Or...we could put on our sunglasses and go to the park."

Someone raised that kid right.

My contemplation lasted just about as long as it took me to say, "I...guess we could." Fifteen minutes later, we were piling out of the car onto a dark, quiet playground and the kids were giggling like it was the biggest adventure of their lives, talking in those half-hushed tones that people unconsciously adopt in the dark. And we did, in fact, wear our sunglasses.

Okay, we had to stick a little closer to those little people sliding in the dark, and maybe a few of us got a little wet on the equipment...but it was almost jammie time, anyway, so that didn't matter. We only stayed about twenty minutes--the whole adventure from door to door only took about 35--but Andrew is still talking about "park in the dark", and I think I may be feeling a children's book coming on.

So, I'm in Love Again...

This is Sammy. Isn't he beautiful? (Hint: The answer is "Why, yes, Tiff. He's perfect.")

And, as if this tiny being weren't enough of a delight in and of himself, his older brother (age 3) whispered to me at bedtime that him and me were best friends.

I'm just bubbling over with love, really. If you don't have any grandchildren, you should probably run out and get some or rent a few to see how you like it. I haven't experienced anything better since...well...I had babies.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

So, depending on where you left off, you may or may not be aware that my beautiful grandchildren have been staying with me for a little over a week.



And you may or may not be aware that however cute and innocent they might look, Caleb (the LITTLE one!) managed to land me in the hospital on Friday night with a concussion. It wasn't an accident, either: I was flat on my back on the couch with a bad case of the flu, and he picked up a hard plastic toy and swung it like a baseball bat, cracking right across the top of my head so hard that my daughter heard it from across the room.

So that was fun.

Saturday I was back down, this time resting for 24 hours on doctor's orders, and by Sunday my absolutely amazing super-hero mom-stand-in daughter was a little frayed and I had a serious backlog of work to get done. Oh, and there were a lot of dishes in the sink.

But guess what? That's all just background--I haven't started the story I sat down here to tell yet. Kind of long-winded? Blame the concussion. Or brain damage from the gas.

Yes, that's where today's saga begins. I left the house to do some laundry and hadn't been gone for fifteen minutes--I had actually just unloaded my laundry at the laundromat--when my daughter called me to tell me that the house smelled like gas, and not just a little. In a matter of minutes, the smell had spread from one corner of the kitchen throughout the lower level of the house.

I told her to get the kids out of the house and that I'd be right home. Because I live in this lovely little midwestern town, I left my laundry right where I'd unloaded it and hopped back in the car. (Well, probably I would have done that anyway, but since I live where I live, I did it without concern for our clothes.) On my way home, I realized that I hadn't said, "And the dog" and considered calling my daughter back to make sure she got him, but you're not really supposed to use a cell phone in a house full of gas, so I decided to just hurry home instead.

Turns out that she'd figured out that we didn't want the dog to blow up all by herself. He was happily on his leash. Andrew (3) was running in circles around the Whoville tree in an oversized t-shirt, his jacket and a pair of snow boots. Caleb (18 months) was sitting on a lawn chair in a similar t-shirt and his winter coat wearing only socks on his feet. Tori was also in her pajamas, and had had the wisdom not to stop and brush her hair.

I took a deep breath and popped back inside to grab Caleb's shoes and a blanket for him, and then we waited around outside for NICOR to come and tell us everything was fine. Because that's what they do, right? I mean, I've called the gas company because I smelled gas before. They come in with their little machines and run them around your house and then either tell you that a pilot light is out and fix it in half a second or tell you there was never any gas to begin with, and you go on with your life.

Except today. Today they said, "Your furnace is leaking."

Fortunately, they were able to just shut down the furnace, which meant we could all go back inside and everyone could get dressed. Unfortunately, they shut down the furnace, and it was 39 degrees today. Oh, and I had my doors propped open the whole time we waited for the gas company, trying to clear the gas out of the house.

Hey, at least I rent. That furnace was someone else's problem. So...the morning was a hassle, but it's all over now, right?

Ha.

While we were waiting outside, Jake had some sort of...ummm...stomach malfunction. Because he has his long winter coat on and we were a little preoccupied as it happened and didn't address it immediately, he ended up with his own disgustingly mushy waste all tangled up in his fur.

My still-heroic daughter volunteered to bathe him while I dropped by the property management company with the threatening notice from the gas company. But Jake had had all the trauma he could take for one day, and he escaped, dripping and smearing everything he was trailing across the bathroom floor and then running for downstairs. So then she had to wash not only the dog but also the tub, his leash and harness, and the bathroom floor. She opted to just throw away the towel he'd rolled on.

As soon as I came in from the rental office (which turned out to have closed for lunch 4 minutes before I arrived), she called me upstairs to tell her this story. While I was upstairs, Andrew called up that he needed to use the bathroom and I told him to use the one downstairs (since the one upstairs wasn't fit for humans). He said okay, but a moment later let out a wail that had me down the stairs at a dead run.

He was standing in front of the toilet, but his clothing was soaked and there was a puddle on the floor to rival what the dog had left behind upstairs (though this round, thankfully, was just urine). "Me pee everywhere," he sobbed. And he had. I think with all the chaos, he'd waited just a bit too long and then barely made it in the bathroom door before it let loose. It took me some time to convince him that it wasn't the end of the world and we could just wipe it up and wipe him up and get him into some clean clothes. Or so I thought.

While I wiped up the floor, Tori sat him down for lunch and he told her he'd been bad and peed on everything. ("Really?" I'm thinking. "You still think you're bad? After I picked you up and hugged your naked little urine-soaked self? That accomplished NOTHING other than creating a need for me to change my clothes?") So we all had a talk about how accidents weren't bad ("Oh! Okay.") and then I looked around and decided enough was enough. The temperature was dropping, someone would be working on the furnace, the bathtub needed a good scrubbing and we were all so far past the ends of our ropes that we didn't remember having them.

So I'm writing this from a hotel, where everyone had a nice swim and we had pizza delivered for dinner and it doesn't smell like gas and no one had to clean anything.

Well, almost nothing. Earlier this evening, a little voice called out from the bathroom, "Tori's mom! Me peed everywhere again!"

A New Year Indeed

Honestly, I wasn't all that optimistic about 2012. It wasn't that we'd been warned that the world would end--that seems to happen all the time. And it wasn't that by the end of the year I'd been unemployed for more than three months. I'm bizarrely unconcerned about that. It might have been in part due to the fact that I was sick for both Christmas and New Year's Eve, we didn't have any snow for the holidays and when 2012 began it seemed like there was a lot of unfinished 2011 business hanging on. And it was partly, I'm sure, due to the state of the world. When most new years dawn, I'm thinking about what the year ahead holds for me and my family. This year, more than most, I was thinking about what 2012 would hold for the country and the world; my expectations on those fronts were pretty bleak. That's still true.

But something changed for me with the new year, something I didn't plan for or resolve about or even anticipate.

2012 became the year to finish all of those dangling projects of the past, to clear out my filing cabinets and find a home for whatever was in them, to clean house not by tossing things and donating things as I usually do but by following a thousand paths mapped out in the past and interrupted or abandoned.

For example:

• In November of 2006, I wrote a romance novel on the train. I did it for no reason other than that a lot of women I knew were participating in NaNoWriMo and I wanted to find out whether I could write an entire novel in a month. Because I had a full time job and a 2+ hour round-trip commute and was a single parent, I didn't have a lot of time to write...but I managed to wrap up that novel largely during my commute (by train) that month. Then I basically let it sit on my hard drive for five years. During the first week of the year, I reviewed it, proofread it and added about 5,000 words; then I uploaded it to the Amazon Kindle store.
• During that same week, I vetted the children's books my daughter and I had written together during her early childhood--books that have been sitting around much longer than that romance novel had. These, in fact, only existed in hard copy. I picked the two we wanted to publish first, sent one off to get a quote from an illustrator I'm super-excited to be working with, and set Tori about making illustration notes on the second.
• This week, I finished creating e-book files, uploading them to my website and creating Paypal code and then created a sales page for my law school admissions e-books. Mike Gifford turned that content into an actual web page for me and added it to my site this evening.

I have two freelance projects to wrap up over the weekend, so that's probably it for this week, but really...I can't wait to see what next week holds.

Everyone Is Alive

When my kids were in elementary and middle school, we went around the table at dinner every night and each of us told the best thing that had happened to us that day. My theory was that sometimes there's something great to share, but there's always something at least a little bit good, and the smaller good things tend to get lost. A friend giving you a cookie at lunchtime or making it to the top of the monkey bars for the first time might pale in comparison with getting yelled at unfairly or someone pushing you down on the playground, and you just might come home focused on the negative--especially in middle school, where negative experiences outstrip positive by about 50 to 1 for a lot of kids.

Sometimes talking about the good thing can turn your whole view of the day around, or at least the way you're feeling in that moment.

Now that it's just me and Tori, it's not something we do all the time. We're always talking about the things that are going on in our lives, good and bad, and with only two of us in the house I don't have to work so hard to make sure everyone is heard. But every now and then, I'll pull it out.

So that headline there...that's mine for today. No one is dead. And please don't think I'm being cynical or using this as a backhanded way to say nothing good happened. I couldn't be happier that everyone is alive.

See, we were supposed to take my grandson Andrew home this morning, but yesterday afternoon while my son-in-law was on his way to work, his timing belt snapped. Fortunately, a relative loaned them a van almost immediately; if she hadn't, my stepdaughter Beth would have been home alone with no transportation when my younger grandson, Caleb (1), stuck a ruler in his mouth and turned to run from her, tripping before she could grab him and jabbing it through the roof of his mouth. But that didn't happen. She had the van available and swept him right out to the emergency room, where they shipped him to Indianapolis for some frightening testing and then determined that the blood supply to his brain had NOT been affected and they could just stitch him up, rehydrate him and, as soon as he was able to eat soft food and drink, send him on his way.

That hasn't happened yet. That means that his mommy (who is 6 months pregnant) was up all night at the hospital and Andrew didn't get to go home this morning...and he took it hard. So hard that when he told me at McDonald's Playland this morning that he had to go to the bathroom and I said, "Okay, let's get your shoes on," he threw a fit instead and stood his ground until he peed all over the floor. And that, of course, made him all the more hysterical, not to mention pretty darned uncomfortable when we went out in the freezing cold to take him back to my house and change him.

And Tori, who was up most of the night waiting for calls or exchanging texts with her sister at the hospital (and hasn't gotten a whole lot of sleep since she's been playing aunt-in-residence this week, anyway), actually fell asleep in the shower this morning and woke as she was falling. She managed to protect her head, but hurt her wrist a little and her ankle quite a bit.

So that's my good news for the day. We're all alive. If that's still true at the dinner table tonight, I'll be counting my blessings...if I can stay awake long enough to get dinner on the table.

Update: Though we're all still alive, I told the story of our day just a bit prematurely. Andrew took a flying leap into Tori's nose about 8:00 this evening and we ended up at the emergency room having her checked out for a broken nose. Verdict: maybe it's broken, but it's straight and her nasal passages are open, so no need to take any action. Go home, take some Motrin, put some ice on it, and stop envisioning slivers of nasal cartilege in your brain.