Pretty soon I am going to have to stop saying that I hardly ever read books by male authors.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Truth in Advertising, by John Kenney. I liked this one a lot. I wouldn’t say “it reminded me of Augusten Burroughs,” because I think that phrase is used to describe a much stronger similarity than was present. But I WAS reminded of Augusten Burroughs, in that he periodically came to my mind while reading this book. I think a lot of it was the dialogue, which was the kind that made me want to be friends with every single person. And the fact that the main character was in advertising.

Speaking of advertising, I wouldn’t want to oversell the book: there were a lot of flaws and rough spots, and there were entire pages where the narrator stopped using contractions and the lights dimmed except for a single spotlight on the stage so he could do his monologue wondering what REALLY mattered in life. But they were the kinds of flaws and rough spots I found tolerable/skimmable, and I thought there were a lot of times when the author then pulled it right the heck out of that kind of thing in a charming way. The flaws all felt “first-novel-ish” in a way that made me want to see how the next novel would go.

I liked it, I found it funny, and it made me tear up a number of times. If you are still resenting your non-perfect parents but it’s weirder now that it turns out you can’t be a perfect parent either; and/or if you feel like maybe you should have gone into a different career / done something different with your life, there are nice solid chunks of that.

There is a scene that I found hard to handle as a parent—but I DID handle it. So I wanted to mention that it exists, and if you want a spoiler you can email me, but it’s not the kind of thing where I thought that if I’d known about it beforehand I wouldn’t have read the book. I just had to sort of breathe carefully and not picture anyone I knew in that situation.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The Shelter Cycle, by Peter Rock (which is an interesting name, for those of us who spent a lot of time in Sunday School). Speaking of scenes that are hard to handle as a parent, this book has a kidnapping theme. I avoid those AUTOMATICALLY: like, I’m in the library reading book jackets, and I see “When a child disappears from a small town…” and the book is back on the shelf before the word “NOPE” has fully formed in my brain. This book handles it in a way I found just barely tolerable; for example, it doesn’t show us the parents’ point of view. Again, if you think you’d be interested in the book but only if you had further spoilers (like if you need more details, or if you need to know ahead of time if everything turns out okay or not), you can email me.

I would have liked to have known ahead of time that The Church Universal and Triumphant is a real church, and that they really did build shelters in the 1980s so that they could wait out a predicted apocalyptic situation. It’s not like you have to know it actually happened to read the book, but it does add an element of interest. The story is about two kids who grew up in that church at that time, and how it affects them as adults. I felt like the female character was sketched-but-not-drawn, which is often my problem with books by male authors. (Quite likely there’s the same problem with female authors and male characters, but I notice it less because I’m not male).

I liked it and felt like it gave me a lot of interesting things to think about. For me, a downside is that it’s the kind of book where mystical things happen but you don’t know if they’re real or not; for others, this would be a major upside.

The younger children were so agonized this morning giving me the Mother’s Day presents and cards they made in school: a high percentage of elementary school teachers (all three of them this year) favor poems and prose in a style the children find mortifying. “I DIDN’T WRITE THAT!!,” they assure me, or “SHE MADE US WRITE THAT!!” Aw, thanks, honey, I love you too!

But I identify and empathize, because our family does not talk that way. Paul and I have never described our marriage as a magical journey or as a twining of souls. I’ve never told my children that they are precious gifts or the stars in my sky or that they will always be in my heart. The children seem completely unnatural signing their names to cards that claim to think the word mom is the most beautiful in the language and to revere my tender care and my gentle smile. I don’t say such things to my own mother, either, nor do I call her my guiding light or the best mother in the world, or suggest that she is an angel walking on this earth.

I think some people really do talk and feel that way toward each other: they really FEEL that way, comically foreign as those words seem to me. They think of their spouse, and they envision entwined souls; they think of their children, and they think of precious stars. They hear that “I’m Already There” song where the guy claims to be the sunshine in his family’s hair, and they don’t think to themselves, “No, seriously, I’m wondering like what time specifically you’re going to be home, I need to plan dinner. Unless you want me to just spoon some into our hair for you.” The imagery RESONATES with them. (I’m sorry, I’m getting tired of the word “resonates,” too, but it’s just so USEFUL.)

Then I think there’s a second, much-larger category of people who don’t talk or feel that way EITHER, but they use it the way they’d use the King James Version of the Bible for a wedding, or the way they stop using contractions when they’re discussing Something Meaningful: the language seems appropriate for the message. They don’t analyze each part (“Is it actually accurate to say that she is the wind beneath my wings?” “Does ‘do not’ where ‘don’t’ would be more natural make me sound Trying To Sound Meaningful instead of actually meaningful?”), it’s more like getting dressed up. It’s special language to indicate a special occasion.

And then there’s the last category of people, which includes me. And yet I cut some slack, as I do with the word “blessed” in Christmas-card letters (it’s only after the first use of the word that people start losing points), because of that second category: if a friend sends me a “To My Dear Friend” poem-card and yet I know from years of experience that we’re compatible, I interpret it correctly as a Dressed Up / Special Occasion card rather than wondering if she’s switched sides on me.

Paul’s mom and grandmothers sent cards like that all the time. It was odd to get a card from his mom, when we didn’t get along, telling me in flower-decorated script poetry that I was like a daughter to her and that she was so lucky I’d married her son. She didn’t mean it, but it’s not that she was faking it, either: it’s that to her, on special occasions you use this language. It’s not what’s said, it’s the WAY it’s said. She was category #2 all the way.

I’m sure she was puzzled why I never sent her the “A Poem to My Other Mother” card from the mother-in-law section—not because she thought I felt that way, but because that is the card the daughter-in-law is supposed to send. It’s MEANINGFUL; my stars, who said it’s supposed to be TRUE? Civilized people say sorry when they don’t deep-down care about the stranger’s foot they stepped on, and they say thank you even when they hate the gift, and they send “To My Special Daughter-in-Law on Mother’s Day” cards even when their son married someone stubbornly unwilling to listen to the abundant wise advice offered by their mothers-in-law who only want to help with all those OBVIOUS MISTAKES they’re CONSTANTLY making, like what is UP with buying the WRONG BRAND of peanut butter and the BOXES of brown sugar instead of bags and wasting money on NON-GREEN bell peppers, my god this girl needs HELP, why won’t she TAKE it???

It’s not just a love-language thing, either. I tend to express love via food and gifts and tasks rather than words, but if I DID do it with words, I wouldn’t use the kinds of words I keep seeing on cards and framed poems and Facebook status updates, the kind my mother-in-law would buy pre-printed. It’s not that I don’t like WORDS, it’s that I don’t fit this STYLE of words. Words are clearly my thing, but I would use DIFFERENT words. A good example is blog posts: I write them, just like a lot of other people write them, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever in my life end a post in the “I hope you always will, baby. I hope you always will” style. (If I ever DO, please remember the warning signs of stroke.) And I like to RECEIVE love via words, but by that I mean, “Wow, you did so much work on that closet!” and “Cute hair!” and “I don’t know how you managed to be patient with him during that whole thing,” and not “You are the most perfect wife in the world and I love you with my whole heart,” or anything that requires the use of my whole name, or anything that includes unrealistic certainty about the future. So it’s not that I don’t express love with words (don’t Paul and I say “See you in hell” to each other pretty much EVERY DAY?), it’s that I don’t identify AT ALL with the TYPES of words.

And neither do the kids, poor things. I had to assure Edward, who was lying face down on the couch with embarrassment, that I KNEW he wasn’t the one who chose that poem glued to his card, and that I TOO hated to be forced to say something in someone else’s words. When he’s grown up, I assured him, he can communicate his Mother’s Day feelings via boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates and a card that invites me to meet him in hell. And I will understand. I will understand.

I have been so truly madly deeply cranky the past week or so, I’ve wondered if it could be menopause. It feels sizzlingly hormonal, and yet the calendar says no. I once took a pregnancy test several days early, specifically because I felt exactly like this, and it turned out to be TWO babies’ worth of hormonal change. (…*pauses*…*wonders*…) (No.)

I’ve tried treating it with alcohol, vegetables, protein, water, herbal tea, more coffee, less coffee, candy, TV, books, exercise, sleep, breathing, shopping, getting away from the computer, getting out of the house. I wouldn’t exactly say that nothing helps, but it’s hard to see any consistent correlations.

I’ve been thinking of hiring a housecleaner, because as the decades go by it becomes increasingly apparent that I’m just not going to do it myself—and that when I do, I turn into an unpleasant and resentful person. And yet, when I don’t do it, I feel miserable about the mess. So it feels like it makes sense to have someone else do it.

BUT. I hate having people in my house. Whenever we have work done on the house, I feel crazy while the workers are here. And also, it seems like my primary issue is having stuff all over every surface, and I don’t know if a housecleaner could work with that. But I wonder: if the floors weren’t so dusty, would I feel more inclined to pick up the books and papers? Like, if someone came every other week to make the surfaces more shiny, would I feel like it was more worth it to keep them clear?

Also, I don’t want to be bossed, and I think a lot of housecleaners are bossy. Or at least, when I look up their sites and ads, there’s a lot of talk about how they really ENJOY helping people get rid of clutter and clean up their lives. No, no, leave my clutter and life alone, just get the dust and dirt. And I’d need someone who could work with my “Let’s have you clean AROUND the clutter, and we’ll see if over time there’s less of it to clean around” plan. And I don’t want anyone who would be scornful of the current situation, and yet it seems as if a person would HAVE to have a certain contempt for mess and dirt in order to get any satisfaction out of eradicating it.

And I don’t know how to choose someone. I wish someone I knew already had a housecleaner, so I could just hire THEIRS. I don’t like to do my own research.

UG SO CRANKY

Here is the kind of marital situation I find difficult to handle:

Last night I made dinner, and it was rather an EXTENSIVE one and used many pans. With that kind of meal particularly, it makes the most sense to me to clean as I go: wash the pasta pan and strainer as soon as the pasta is out, wash the cheese sauce pan as soon as the cheese sauce is on the pasta, wash the cracker-crumb bowl and butter pan as soon as I’m done with THOSE, wash the cutting board after I’ve cut up the ham, and so on. So even though I like the general concept of “one person cooks, the other person cleans,” I can start out with a base layer of resentment because I’ve already done quite a bit of the clean-up. Plus, we don’t have an official rule for clean-up in place right now (we have in the past, but it’s not in effect at present), and so I really DON’T want to deliberately work against my own style and leave dishes all over, because _I_ might be doing them.

After dinner, Paul didn’t appear to be cleaning up, but it’s hard to tell because sometimes he prefers to do it later, which is certainly up to him. I was not in a mood that was opposed to doing dishes, though, so I scraped plates, put away leftovers, loaded and started the dishwasher, and put the two remaining pans in the sink to soak. There were dishes that didn’t fit in the dishwasher, but I figured by the time the dishwasher was done/unloaded, it would be the perfect time to finish the pans.

Okay, so LATER, I heard a Showy Fuss being made in the kitchen, and I went in to find Paul thinking he was doing the dishes. And he DID do SOME: he put away some of the teetering stack in the drying rack, and he made a kid empty the dishwasher, and he put the few remaining dishes into it, AND he did the two pans I’d left to soak.

This already makes me feel a little crazy, but I can handle it. I did 80% of it, and now he’s doing 20% and THINKING he’s doing most of it. There is no way to gracefully/kindly/maturely point this out, AND he will expect a certain amount of praise even though he didn’t praise ME for doing all the rest, AND AND AND he will be left feeling good about himself, as if his 10 minutes in the kitchen in any way balanced my hour and a half. I would genuinely rather have done the whole job myself, and yet, I feel like I can RISE ABOVE IT.

BUT THEN. The final straw was this morning when I was putting the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and I found that he had NOT scrubbed the two pans, but had instead PUT THEM INTO THE DISHWASHER. First of all, they take up a quarter of the dishwasher, which is hugely inefficient. Second of all, it won’t even WORK: they won’t get clean that way. THIRD of all, they would have been pretty easy to scrub after their soak, but now they’ve been dry all night and everything’s crusted on. So I have to re-soak them, AND scrub them, AND he’s still got afterglow for being so awesome as to do the dishes last night, AND anything I say will be perceived as giving him negative feedback for doing household tasks unasked and/or for “not doing it MY way.” GRR.

One of the best parts of belonging to a group of friends formed around the grade-level of our children is that it’s a great way to figure out what’s going ON. For example, I’d heard from Rob that the last dance of the year was an 8th grade semi-formal. Have I heard anything about this from the school, even though this is allegedly happening next month? No. Luckily, I have the group, and some of them have kids older than 8th grade so they’ve been through this before. Unfortunately, none of those kids are boys, so I still don’t know what the boys are supposed to wear—but I know the girls are wearing dressy-but-not-prom-like dresses, so that makes me think trousers, dress shirt, and tie for the boys.

At Goodwill yesterday I bought Rob a pair of dressy trousers. They could end up being the totally wrong thing, if it turns out he needs a suit. But they were $4.49, so I figured the risk was low. One weird thing is that there’s no size/fabric tag in them—and there wasn’t in any of the other pants we looked at, either. Paul rolled his eyes at me, like DUH, of course there isn’t, they’re men’s trousers! But I’m left wondering if they’re supposed to be dry-cleaned or if I can just put them in the laundry or what.

********

In our school system, children are not allowed to bring treats on their birthdays. It’s because the absolutely brand-new, certainly-not-done-for-generations-without-having-the-affects-currently-attributed-to-it tradition of eating a cupcake once or or twice a month is one of the leading causes of children being fatter than they used to be. Instead, on one day a month, all the children with birthdays that month can bring in a non-food “treat” (pencils, erasers, little party-favor-like toys) or a “healthy” snack to share.

I find this extremely irritating, but I am willing to go with it. HERE IS WHAT DRIVES ME CRAZY, though: many parents STILL send in cupcakes with their children on their birthdays. I suppose some parents didn’t read the handbook, and perhaps those same parents also don’t read the monthly newsletter which contains a monthly reminder of this policy. Others probably read those reminders but still forgot. Others think it’s a stupid rule and decide not to follow it. But MAN. Unenforced rules are one of my least favorite things. EITHER have the rule and enforce it, OR don’t have the rule. Because as things are, my own children are complaining that they don’t get to bring in cupcakes on their birthdays because their LAME MOTHER doesn’t want to break a CLEARLY-STATED rule.

At one point, when I had seen for myself that parent after parent was bringing in cupcakes (before then, I’d wondered if my children were exaggerating the number, but at kindergarten drop-off I got to see it), and when both twins were complaining to me about it at the same time, I started to compose an email to the teacher. My goal was to ask if I could send in cupcakes despite the rule. I worked on that email for a week, and could not come up with one single way to phrase that question that didn’t sound judgey, prickly, manipulative, passive-aggressive, and/or bitter. It’s surprisingly difficult to avoid a tone of “Since you’re not enforcing the rules for those other rule-breakers, does this mean I don’t have to follow the rules either?”—even if you really, really try to go for something more like “I want to make sure I’m behaving correctly in this situation.” Finally I told the twins that I was sorry but we were going to have to follow the rule even though other people weren’t following it, and fortunately they said “Awww!” and then dropped it.

Last night was a high-school-redo dream. We were all in the gym and I was making eyes at the cute boy I liked freshman year, and I was thinking that now that I had the advantage of NOT BEING THIRTEEN, I would go over and talk to him instead of just staring at him across an English classroom for 9 months. And then a song started playing in the background; it was a boy band singing about a girl. They’d finished the segment praising the girl’s awesomeness, and now they were at the part where one of them has a solo mournfully/dramatically listing the hurdles standing in the way of the relationship:

But she’s a size 16
I’m the skinniest guy at school
And she’s a…QUEEEEEEEEEEN

So my brain wrote a song. To call me fat.

That boy I liked, by the way, was the son of another teacher at school. I’ll bet the English teacher TOLD him in the teacher lounge. Because _I_ would, if I were a teacher. “There is some girl who just STARES at him! The whole class! Every day!” I wonder if they worked together on the plan she put into action, which was to suddenly move me from the very last seat in the back corner to the desk next to his in the very front row. She did it abruptly and obviously, like: “Okay, settle down everyone. First, I want to make a few changes to the seating chart. Swistle, move up here next to Jason, and Andrew sit where Swistle was. Now, let’s open to page 37…” I’ve wondered if that was a cruelty-based plan, or a helping plan, or a “I am so tired of her staring at him instead of paying attention in class, and in fact I can’t stand it even one.more.day” plan.

This morning I looked the guy up on Facebook. Facebook is excellent for snooping, but also can be a terrible dream-killer—even more than unkind brain songs. The guy I liked is now a serious outdoorsy person. (Maybe he was back then, too—I never talked to him.) There are pictures of him camping without a tent in March, and biking a mountain trail in full biking gear. There is no way that would have worked out.

When we left off, I was working my way through the List of Things to Tell You poem:

Happy with comments
Front teeth; portrait appointments
Lost phone list
Crown, and already chipped
Too much apocalyptic fiction

Let’s do the front teeth next: Henry has lost both his two front teeth. Don’t be ridiculous, that’s nothing to CRY about. Just because I’ve had ample opportunity to notice that the baby/adult front-tooth transition is the one that pretty much ends the young-child stage completely, and just because this is my LAST BABY—goodness no, I’m fine, stop patting me.

I took him to get his picture taken to mark the occasion, which is something I highly recommend. I consider portraits such an enormous and stressful hassle (choosing what child should wear! child not cooperating with photographer! all the attempts to sell me “portrait collages” and “enhancements”!) and EVEN SO I would highly recommend the front-teeth-out portrait. They tend to be my very favorites, and it’s such a short stage: I have one million snapshots of, say, “age 6,” but only a very few that show the missing front teeth. I usually try to dress the child in a very neutral shirt, ideally one that is close to the color of a studio backdrop: I dressed Edward in light blue, for example, knowing there was a light-blue backdrop, and I dressed Rob in light grey, knowing there was a light-grey backdrop. This helps direct attention to The Teeth.

It was puzzlingly difficult to get an appointment. There’s no big portrait occasion in May, is there? But the session went well. I mean, Henry was pretty terrible, but the photographer is the kind who can catch the half second between “making a stupid face on purpose” and “covering an accidental smile with his hand,” and I’m happy with the photos. I dressed Henry in a t-shirt that was kind of old and grubby and that I knew wouldn’t go particularly well with any of the backdrops—but it was a sentimental choice because it’s been a favorite shirt, and all five of the kids have worn it.

Let’s see, what’s next? Oh, the lost phone list. We somehow LOST our phone list, the one we keep tacked up next to the phone. Since it’s a printed-out list, it should be no big deal: just print a new one. Except, er. It turned out I hadn’t updated it since adding Rob’s first grade teacher’s phone number at the beginning of that school year. (Rob is almost done with 8th grade.) I just kept writing new names/numbers in the margins. So this has actually been a huge problem. It’s not just that I’ve lost numbers, it’s that I can’t even remember whose numbers I’ve lost.

And finally, the comments. I think I’ve mentioned that switching from Blogspot/Blogger to WordPress was a huge and stressful hassle. BUT: one thing I love love love is the new commenting set-up. No more word verification! All I did was put it on “moderate first comment.” So all the spam comments get sent directly to moderation, and they never show up on the blog! And everyone else has to wait for their first comment to show up, but then they can just comment freely without having to figure out what those blurry letters/numbers are!

The downside is that the word verification was apparently keeping out a huge number of spam comments: I’ve moderated over a thousand in the short time since moving here. With word verification, I would sometimes get a few spam comments leaking through all of a sudden, but usually they were few and far between. It’s not all THAT big a deal to click “spam” a thousand times, but it’s not uplifting to the spirit, either. And my eyes have to look at those comments, even briefly, and a lot of them are gross.

Oh! And here’s a weird thing I’ve seen others mention too: some of the spam comments are INSULTING, or express disappointment in the post, or they accuse me of plagiarism, or they complain that the feed isn’t working or the lines are going off the screen. Why would a spammer go that route, I wonder? (And if it has briefly flickered through your mind that perhaps these are real comments and I’m incorrectly assuming they’re spam, I don’t feel hurt by your doubting, THOMAS, and I’m happy to explain further that the comments are left by, for example “[BRAND NAME] LUGGAGE 4 CHEAP” and “MALE ENHANCEMENT NO PRESCRIPTION NEEDED,” and are followed by many, many links to various spammy locations.)

Wait, this was supposed to be about how HAPPY I am with the new commenting system. And I am! It’s great. And I could sign up for a spam filtering program that would help with the many spam comments; I haven’t so far because the one I want charges for that service if you’re a “business” site, and I think the baby names site might qualify now that it offers the paid private consultation option.

I made myself a list of things I wanted to remember to talk about, and look, it’s almost a little poem:

Happy with comments
Front teeth; portrait appointments
Lost phone list
Crown, and already chipped
Too much apocalyptic fiction

However, I notice there is only one happy thing on the list. Well, that is consistent with my recent mood, which has been cranky/stressed.

I think part of it can be traced to the last thing on the list. I started with The Road, as I wrote about in this post, which led to a lot of great suggestions in the comments section for other apocalyptic fiction. So then I read Oryx & Crake, which I liked a lot—until the end, when it presented a terrible dilemma, went on a bit about how terrible the dilemma was…and then ended. I don’t have to have every little loose end tied up (even though I WAS hoping at some point for a letter from someone explaining why they’d done something a certain way), but if I have to write the ending myself I want to be paid fairly for it. Worse, because of the many, many times the lead character thought to himself that the clues were there all along right in front of him and he should have been able to figure it out, I felt like the author thought I SHOULD know what ending she had in mind. And I am someone who doesn’t even like to TRY to solve a murder mystery, but instead waits contentedly for the author to let the detective explain it to me.

Then I read Pure. It’s not young adult, but I’ll bet there were a lot of arguments at the publishing house about whether it ought to be. I liked that one TOO, but it’s a trilogy so of course it didn’t END-end, and then my library doesn’t have the second book and there’s an inexplicable “can’t be requested” tag from the library in the system that DOES have it.

Then I started World Made by Hand, and that’s where I stopped. One of the main downsides of apocalyptic fiction is that it tends to be preachy and told-you-so-ish, and this was either the worst one of the group so far or else I’d just already reached my limit on “Look what could happen if you don’t listen to what I think is wrong with the world” lecturing. I think it was the latter. And I’d already been wondering if I should take a break from the theme, because I’d been feeling increasingly paranoid, twitchy, and impotent-despairful, and also unable to tidy the house because IF THERE’S AN APOCALYPSE WE MIGHT BE SORRY WE BLITHELY THREW OUT THIS HOLEY SOCK. So this afternoon I’m going to go to the library, return the rest of the books I’d checked out, and pick out something where the world is still basically the way it is.

Some of the twitchiness and despair, though, can be attributed instead to dental work. I had the first step of a crown done this week, and I just hate everything. A little piece of the temporary crown chipped off the very first day, and I have three more teeth the dentist says need crowns in the relatively near future, and I just hate everything. (Except the new comments system. I do love that.)

I have been allowing spiders to live in my house, and I don’t know if this is a Stretching Exercise or if this is something that will land me in the madhouse, because AIEEEEEE SPIDERS IN MY HOUSE.

This came about because of a meme, in case you have been thinking nothing anyone says on Facebook changes anyone’s mind. If you’d prefer not to click any link in a spider post, it’s the meme where a spider is saying things like “Okay, I got all the termites and ants taken care of for you… HEY WHAT’S THAT BOOK FOR?” and so on. In school, my friends teased me for anthropomorphizing ANYTHING (even on one memorable occasion a crouton) (it’s Paul who makes it so memorable, by never letting anyone forget it), and this just GOT to me. Fine, spiders are good. I accept it. I will attempt peaceful coexistence.

But dear sweet biscuits, there has got to be an UNDERSTANDING. They can be up in the corners, that’s fine. They can even walk from place to place as long as I don’t have to see them do it. But there can be no (NO) dangling down from the ceiling. There can be no (NO) showing up in the shower. And this morning when I turned the calendar page to take a look at May (HOW IS IT ALREADY ALMOST MAY?), I had to add a new rule: no (NO) climbing around in the calendar. IT IS NOT A JUNGLE GYM.