If I start with the assurance that I know blogging isn’t “dead” (as evidenced by the number of BLOGGERS who are BLOGGING), and go on to say that I realize that what can SEEM like dying is more like “moving on”/evolving/progressing, can I THEN say that I’m sorry the changes are what they are and also sorry that I don’t feel like changing along with them?

I will tell you what it feels like to me, even though that means slipping into second-person singular. Imagine being new to an area and not having many friends and feeling kind of isolated and less social than you’d like to be, but without seeing much of a way around that. Imagine that every day you pass a coffee shop that looks like it has what you want: people sitting around, talking, happy. It feels like you’d be intruding if you went in there—but one day you’re in a heck-with-it mood so you just DO. You order a coffee, you sit down, you feel super-self-conscious but no one is being mean to you or telling you not to sit at that table. You listen in to the conversations but you don’t join in.

You start going regularly, and then daily. People start recognizing you and saying hi. You start to recognize people, and you start to get to know them just based on what you can overhear of their conversations. One day, part of the group orders too many doughnuts, so they offer you one. One day someone says “Is anyone sitting here?” and sits at your table. Sometimes the conversations are split into smaller groups, but other times everyone’s talking together—and one day one of the loudest people turns to you and says, “I mean, RIGHT? You agree with me, right?” And you DO, so you say so, very briefly and shyly, and then the conversation goes on and LOOK YOU PARTICIPATED!!!

From there it goes much faster. You start saying something sometimes when it’s a big conversation. One day you buy a big box of doughnut holes and you offer them around. LOTS of people now say hi to you when you come in. One day you have a dentist appointment so you don’t go to the coffee shop, and the next day someone asks where you were. It’s exactly what you want: a low-pressure, big-group social interaction situation where you can drop in or drop out whenever it works for you—but also, over time, really get to know people well. Sometimes you sit with just one person and have an intense conversation; sometimes you sit with a small group; sometimes everyone’s talking at once. You get to know people and it’s fun to catch up every day. Some people do a lot of talking; some people do a lot of listening; some people do a lot of both.

Then a huge percentage of the group discovers a new place. It’s dark and loud—lots of dancing and dance music. You can kind of talk there, but you have to yell. It’s hard to see who’s there. A big chunk of the coffee shop group starts hanging out there all the time. Maybe they come to the coffee shop once a month, but it’s hard to catch up on that much time; you lose track of their lives and they lose track of yours. They say, “Dude, we’re not gone—you should join us at the new place! Come ON!” And so you try, but you don’t like it there. It’s not your style at all, and it makes you feel frazzled and exhausted, and you don’t feel like you get to talk to anyone there anyway. So you don’t go, or you only go once in a while.

Some of the group still hangs around at the coffee shop. And some new people start hanging around there, too, but they’re in a different stage of life and you don’t really click with them, and also you’re discouraged by the thought of getting to know a whole new group. You wouldn’t say the coffee shop is OVER—I mean, you’re still there and so is some of the group and so is the coffee shop itself. But it’s not the same thing anymore, and you miss everybody else, and yet you don’t want to go to the new place.

Yes? Good analogy? Does it include all the elements: the non-death of the old and yet the unhappy effects of the new? The concept of what is lost, and the sense in which it is lost? The missing of friends, without accusation/blame and with a total understanding that the left-behind person doesn’t HAVE to be left behind and yet chooses to for understandable reasons, and yet is ALSO SAD ABOUT THAT? The sadness of wanting to want to—but not wanting to?

Twitter kind of felt like a coffee shop to me at first, too: the way you could drop in at any time and find people to talk to. But now it feels to me more like the dark noisy club: chaos, with short storylines and missing most of it and too many strangers in the dark and I can’t see who’s talking to me and I can’t concentrate on what people are saying, and following someone means you have to listen to EVERYTHING THEY SAY EVEN IF THEY NEVER SHUT UP and you have to set up filters and lists just to process the number of people talking. Vlogging feels like it puts internet interactions RIGHT BACK with EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD where people get points for being attractive and charismatic and outgoing and fast-thinking, as opposed to blogging/internet where people could take their time and think about what they wanted to say, and didn’t have to look good, and where they could be good at written communication rather than spoken communication. Blogging still exists, but commenting has gotten difficult because of all the spam-blocking mechanisms, and also commenting has itself changed. And many blogs have turned into sales pitches—like someone who comes to the coffee shop and keeps talking about this great line of products they sell. Many others have turned into one-subject blogs about decorating or fashion or fitness or children, which feels similar to having a friend who starts only talking about one subject.

Meanwhile, there were people who followed my blog and I followed theirs, so we kept up on each other’s lives. I know that when they stopped blogging it doesn’t mean they’re GONE or that we can’t still TALK—but that WAS the way we talked! WITH OUR BLOGS. And now some of them never or almost never come to the coffee shop (which is just as understandable as someone not wanting to go somewhere else), so I’m back to wondering how to increase social interaction WHEN I’D THOUGHT THAT ISSUE WAS SO PERFECTLY FIXED. That was how I made friends; that was how I related to my friends; now some of those friends have moved away and I don’t know what’s going on in their lives anymore and I miss knowing what’s going on in their lives and I miss those people and I feel like I don’t know them anymore. Even though they have zero obligation to keep blogging about their lives just because I wish they would, and even though I would be pissed if anyone implied I was obligated to do so myself, and even though there ARE still people who ARE still blogging.

NO ONE HAS TO BLOG, just like no one has to be your friend. NO ONE OWES ANYONE A WINDOW INTO THEIR LIVES. But when so many people I knew stopped, I started missing knowing what was going on with them, just as if they’d stopped coming to the coffee shop where I used to see them several times a week, and I don’t feel like I get anything equivalent from Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram or Pinterest. (Except when a Facebook friend didn’t realize her Pinterest account was attached to her Facebook account and she pinned a whole bunch of “fun ways to announce a pregnancy” stuff.)

I took the kids to get their flu shots the other day, which caused quite a sensation. I forget how MANY of them there are until people are staring and I’m thinking, “WHAT?? …Oh yeah.” The funny thing is that I feel the same way when I see someone out with three or four kids, or when I see Christmas card photos with three or four kids: I look at them like, “Whoo, that is a LOT of kids!”

Anyway. I have a tip to pass on, from the nurse. Passing on this tip involves by necessity passing on a compliment someone gave me and the children, and I realize that’s a special kind of annoying, but I request that you allow it to slide this one time because of the potential benefits involved if you end up finding this tip helpful. OR: allow it to slide because you already do the same thing, so the praise also applies to you. OR: allow it to slide because I will do NO preening and I will remain utterly aware that for every compliment someone gives me about parenting there are a hundred others thinking something vicious about it. Also: I think it’s a tip pretty much everyone already knows.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The nurse was giving the shots one after another and she and I were getting a really efficient assembly-line style going. She praised how well the children were doing, and then she said, “It makes ALL the difference that you’re being all matter-of-fact and we’re-just-getting-this-done about it. We get parents in here who are like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mommy’s sorry!!’—and it’s just a MESS. It freaks the kids out, they think something horrible must be happening.”

So! A parenting tip from me and a pediatric nurse: act NONCHALANT. Callous, if you will. If you would like to copy me exactly, you should add a layer of grim assumption that the children will be awful and embarrassing despite the firm and scary lecture delivered beforehand in the car; plus a layer of feeling self-conscious about having so many children, taking up so much of the waiting room, generating so much paperwork, etc.; plus a layer of feeling like an idiot because in your distraction you called a child by the wrong name TWICE (“Willi…Henr…EDWARD”) AND got the age order wrong, right in front of the nurse. Putting your mind on yourself really helps you ignore the children!

Which is not to say you necessarily CAN apply this tip even if you WANT to. (PLUS, it fails to solve the issue of all the children who are going to lose their flip no matter HOW calm the parent is.) When I took Edward for his first blood draw, I knew my own calmness was a Key Element. And then who do you think could barely even talk to him because she was choking so hard, tears running down her cheeks as the nurses looked grim and disapproving and like they were inwardly rolling their eyes at stupid hysterical parents making everything so much worse? That’s right. I should have brought the other four kids with me to achieve the necessary level of detachment.

Also, here is the annual reminder (which most of you don’t even need so you’re free to go do something else now) that stomach flu is not flu. I know, they CALL it flu! It’s so silly! But it’s not flu. “Flu” is short for “influenza,” which is a respiratory illness: like a cold, but EXTREME. Stomach flu is a completely unrelated category of illnesses related to the digestive system. I think it’s fine to call a stomach ailment “stomach flu,” because that’s just how the language shook out there, and because a lot of the time we don’t even know if what we had was a virus or food poisoning or what. What I DON’T think is fine is “Oh my god, the whole family has stomach flu!! Stupid useless flu shot!!” The flu shot may reduce a person’s chances of getting influenza but it will do THING ZERO about the completely unrelated categories of stomach bugs and food poisoning.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I wanted to review The Cuckoo’s Calling WITHOUT mentioning that Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym of J.K. Rowling, but it would never have worked: someone would have mentioned it in the comments immediately. Besides, once People magazine has mentioned it AND a new edition has been put out with the information about the pseudonym right in the author section, it doesn’t seem like it’s exactly a secret anymore.

Learning who actually wrote it is the reason I read it: I wouldn’t have been interested in it otherwise, partly because I feel like I’ve reached my lifetime limit of books written by men about male detectives, and partly because of judging it by its cover (I think it looks like a “beach read”—i.e., trashy and lightweight).

But I DID read it, and I wonder what I would have thought of it if I hadn’t known the real author? I never would have recognized the writing style. I’d say she successfully pulls off writing a male narrator—but I’m more sensitive to such things in the other direction (men trying to write female narrators) so I’d want to ask a few men what they thought.

I liked the book overall, and I would recommend it. I hope she writes more stories about this same detective.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Saving Fish from Drowning is by Amy Tan, but it reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver. It has, however, been a long time since I’ve read a Barbara Kingsolver, because I find they leave me with a card file of horrifying and depressing imagery, plus the feeling that the world is a terrible place and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, and that anything we TRY to do about it (1) actually makes things worse and/or (2) makes us look ridiculous. That’s what this book left me with, too. If you LIKE that sort of thing, however, this is a great book for it: an interesting story, an interesting cast, and an omniscient narrator (I love omniscient narrators).

I almost forgot to update on how the school volunteering thing is going. First of all, the comments on that post were SO HELPFUL. I find it so soothing to have a list of ANSWERS—I think partly because it makes me think “Other people go through this too” and “Other people need to think these things out too rather than just Naturally Handling It,” and partly because I feel like I have a Next Thing to Try, and then a Next Thing if that doesn’t work, and so on.

Anyway, I did my first official shift (so far I’d only done training), and there is one bad news and two good news. The bad news is that the woman in question is even worse than I thought. After I’d gone away from her the first time and calmed down a bit, I’d started to feel like she might be manageable after all, and/or that maybe I’d just had a bad first impression. But no.

I am tempted to say “She is awful” as if it were an objective fact—and that is certainly how I say it in my brain, with incredulity: “She’s awful! She’s AWFUL!” And I DO think a satisfying percentage of people would ALSO find her awful, if I could take a survey (*drifts into reverie, considering how fun that would be*).

And yet it seems clear to me that some of this is more like a chemical reaction. Do you get that, sometimes, with certain people? Like, it’s like EVERYTHING THEY DO hits you wrong, and if you tried to explain to someone else what the person in question had done it wouldn’t sound all that awful? That’s part of what’s going on here. I couldn’t even focus enough to give some of the Next Things to Try a fair shot, because it was like electrical interference. She’d say something and I’d want to burst into tears. It felt so hopeless to even attempt a reply—like, the FACT OF HER EXISTENCE was too much for me to cope with, let alone whatever she’d just said.

Fortunately this kind of thing doesn’t happen often, but when it does I’m curious what percentage of the time it’s a reciprocal feeling. Like, when I feel like I can’t tolerate the mere existence of another person, how often is that other person completely neutral about me and/or even favorably inclined toward me, and how often do I set their teeth equally on edge? It’s probably similar to the percentages with romantic sparks, where one person can be Really Feeling It and it seems like the other person MUST be feeling it too—and yet the other person is completely flat-line. Or sometimes the sparks are completely reciprocal, or sometimes the person likes the other person enough to be friends, but there are no romantic sparks, or WHATEVER. People don’t always feel the same way about each other, is I guess my Captain Obvious point here, and it would be interesting to have a chart of that.

So that’s the bad news. Do you know that song The Twelve Pains of Christmas, where the woman who mentions her in-laws is holding it together pretty well until she blurts out tearfully “She’s a witch I hate her!!” during the verse about the eleventh pain of Christmas? That is how I feel. It’s a panicked, tearful kind of dislike. Or maybe this video clip from Clue is a better way to describe it:
 
 

HERE IS THE GOOD NEWS. There are two. The first should probably count as more than one, because it’s “basically everything else”: I like all the other people I’ve met so far, and the job itself is good, and it went well, and it’s just the right level of work and flexible scheduling for my first crack at this. And also the first good news includes that I don’t think the other people there like this woman either, though they seem better able to handle her (but perhaps I seem that way to them, too), and they DO seem to like ME, and I felt like we were compatible and things were likely to go well. One of the other people there made a statement everyone else disagreed with, and she registered that from our awkward non-responsiveness, and so she changed the subject—unlike the awful woman, who in that scenario pushes harder and tries to force agreement.

The SECOND part is that I HAD THE WOMAN’S NAME WRONG. So when I’d thought I’d inadvertently signed up to work with her for five of the six days I started out with, I WAS LOOKING AT SOMEONE ELSE’S NAME. I THOUGHT it was the awful woman’s name, BUT IT IS NOT. So I will have to look again at the schedule to see if I’m just ALSO working with the same THIRD person every time—but it’s more likely I inadvertently avoided her almost completely. And of course now that I know her, I can try to avoid her, as long as she signs up first. And if I want to get bold about it, I can keep asking for the schedule as if I’ve had something come up, and I can keep scribbling out my name and putting it on different days or whatever.

Don’t you wish sometimes that you could access the hive mind and find out what percentage of other people dislike someone you dislike? Imagine how wrongfully delightful it would be to find out that no one else likes someone either! I suppose that would be more than counteracted by the horror and despair of the times when you’d find out that actually a majority found the person you disliked just wonderful. Plus I’d feel some pity for her if I found everyone agreed with me. Okay, so I don’t wish I could access the hive mind. I DO wish, however, for several other parents to make subtle remarks over the next few months that let me know (without it turning into back-biting, because that feels wonderful at the time but comes with a nauseating hangover) that they don’t like her either.

I have finished my Jincy Willett tour, and now I am recommending reading The Writing Class first and Amy Falls Down second. Unless you don’t like mysteries: The Writing Class is a mystery. In which case, Amy Falls Down works on its own completely fine: it only partially cheeses up The Writing Class by letting you know not to suspect a couple of people, but that’s no problem if you’re not going to read The Writing Class anyway. I feel like re-reading Amy Falls Down now that I know some backstory, but you don’t need the backstory to try it.

*******

I have planted the tulip bulbs. I hate messing with dirt, but it went fairly well except when I saw something out of the corner of my eye and it was a substantial (more compact than some, but also sturdier) daddy-long-legs on my shoulder, just PERCHED there like “Hey.” I practically saw its little chin do the “Hey” lift. In my panic (SOMETHING TINY THAT CANNOT HURT ME IS NEAR MY FACE!!) I first BLEW on it; it flinched down irritably. I then brushed it away with my hand without looking, which is a good way to not have to see your hand touching a spider but is a bad plan in the long run because then you don’t know if you got it and you have to search your entire self multiple times and you still feel like it might be, say, on the back of your collar, or sitting on top of your bun (*compulsively checks back of collar, and then bun*).

Something must have bitten me while I was out there, too, because one ear is itchy and magenta. Let’s say you have it on good authority that that’s what happens if a daddy-long-legs bites you. That should not inspire you to TELL me so. Especially since the daddy-long-legs was on my OTHER shoulder, and I don’t want to imagine it spending that much time on me before I noticed it.

********

An interesting part of the menopause book I ended up giving up on and returning to the library right around the time she said it was no accident that the word menopause sounded like “a pause” from “men” was that she said men tend to get more domestic right around the time women are feeling (and here I’ll paraphrase) like they cannot spend one more goddam second with saucepans and washcloths. (It’s no accident that the word washcloth contains the words “ash” and “lot,” “ash” signifying burnout and “lot” signifying what a lot of them we used.) That’s consistent with how things have been going at my house: I feel like I am just absolutely out of the energy it takes to clean something for the hundred thousandth time even though I have plenty of time to do it, and meanwhile Paul has started gardening, canning, and baking bread.

I’m not complaining per se, but I plan to later on when I figure out what it is I want to complain about. It has something to do with his domestic inclinations seeming to lean only toward the impressive (rather than also including cleaning toilets, dusting shelves, or putting away the summer clothes), and something to do with how at this point I would kind of like to start going on adventures but now he wants to stay home and make jam, and something about how nice it would have been to have this kind of domestic participation going on when I was so exhausted and busy with babies. Except I think I would have killed him if he had been fussing around with jam for hours in the kitchen while I was dealing with infants and diapers, whereas now I appreciate having a little space—so again, please stand by while I eat homemade jam on homemade bread and figure out what specifically it is I want to complain about.

Here is the order in which I have been on a Jincy Willett kick:

(photo from Amazon.com)

First: Amy Falls Down. I found this on the library’s New Books shelf and thought it looked like just my sort of thing. When I finished the book (having confirmed my guess about it being just my sort of thing), I noticed there were quotes on the back of it from David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. I looked up Jincy Willett online, and found that David Sedaris is the guy who brought her to national attention. Which is interesting when combined with the plot of Amy Falls Down, which is about an older female writer who is brought to national attention by lucky fluke.

All through the book I kept saying to Paul things like, “This is DIFFERENT. This is my kind of thing, but in a way I can’t figure out how to say it.” There are a few authors I’ve reacted to this way over the years: I’ll be reading along and I start thinking, “Wait. What is this. What is happening here.” Authors who make me lose appropriate punctuation. I’m not saying YOU will necessarily feel the same way, but David Sedaris and I are in agreement and maybe you would be too.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Next I requested Jenny and the Jaws of Life through the library system, because our library didn’t have a copy. I liked this book less. One reason is that I rarely like short stories. (They are too short, which is similar to the reason Paul’s grandmother didn’t like cats: “Too soft.”) But also, I felt like I was pushing my way through character summaries rather than reading a story. “Can we stop talking about what this person is LIKE and instead move the plot ahead just an INCH?,” I would think, my punctuation having returned to me. And I was left feeling depressed and upset after most of the stories, and I prefer not to feel that way unrelentingly even if the dismal stories are very nicely-written, so that was the final blow. I still liked the book, even though it sounds like I didn’t, but I’m glad I didn’t start with it or I might not have tried others.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Next I read Winner of the National Book Award. It was dark, like the short stories, but longer. Character descriptions felt worthwhile because we were going to be spending so much time with these people, and because the plot did keep inching forward. (Though I would sometimes have to put the book down because I felt worn out waiting for the next inch.)

This is the kind of book where you know upfront that something bad is going to happen: in this case, that the narrator’s twin sister is going to kill her husband (her own husband, not her twin sister’s) (the second twin sister’s, not the first twin sister’s) (okay, so the sisters are Dorcas and Abigail, and Dorcas is the narrator, and we know from the start that Abigail is going to end up killing Abigail’s husband, is THAT clear?). And then you jump back so you can work toward this Bad Thing That’s Going to Happen, feeling jumpy about it and wondering how/why it’s going to happen. And then it turns out there is another layer or two of things to anticipate.

It wasn’t cheery, but I liked it. I kept pausing to re-read particularly good parts, wishing it worked well to quote little pieces to someone who wasn’t reading the book. (It never does, which is why I dislike Meaningful Quotes.) (Unless they are meaningful to ME, in which case they’re marvelous.)

Thinking over it afterward, I find I still don’t feel like I understand the characters (despite all the description), so Amy Falls Down is still my favorite.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Now I am reading The Writing Class. I am only a little ways into it, but I see it comes before Amy Falls Down. You definitely don’t need to read this one first, and in fact so far I’d advise against it. The narrator (not the author, as the author keeps using her narrator to remind us) is trying a blog, and the way I feel about what she says about bloggers and blogging is very similar to the way the narrator (and perhaps also the author) feels about the things everyone says to her about fiction-writers and writing fiction. I’ve nevertheless already found several parts to wish I could read aloud to someone, though, so clearly I am ENJOYING it, it’s just that she happens to be hitting some of my personal irritations. [Edit: The part that was irritating me is over, and now I really love it.]

To sum up: I recommend trying the author. I recommend starting with Amy Falls Down or else with The Writing Class (The Writing Class is meant to be first). [Edited to add: I finished The Writing Class, and now would recommend reading that first, then Amy Falls Down. But Amy Falls Down stands alone, if you only want to read that one, and/or if you don’t like mysteries.] If you notice a self-conscious stiffness to this post, it’s because the narrator-who-is-not-the-author says she uses Google Alert on herself.

Last night I had such bad dreams—and they’d started out so well, too, with the classic romance-novel plot of “I thought he didn’t like me but actually he was in love with me,” plus I also had David Boreanaz interested. But then the first guy wasn’t where he said he’d meet me, and instead there was some blood, and I realized something bad had happened to him and was about to happen to me, and I was thinking, “Ah, so this is what Gavin de Becker meant about how when it’s Real Fear it will help you—but then, shouldn’t I be able to run faster than this?,” and I ended up at a dead end and couldn’t tell if THAT was the trap or if backing up and going the other way was the trap, and anyway maybe I shouldn’t be watching Bones so close to bedtime.

I got up and did the Nightmare Cure from my childhood (go pee, eat a Tums, brush teeth, get a drink of water), but as I was getting the drink of water, a spider threaded down from the ceiling a foot in front of my face. And when my eyes had followed its return climb, I saw two more spiders up there. So it is not particularly surprising that when I went back to bed, it turned out the Nightmare Cure had not worked and I dreamed that I was at the animal shelter and it was flooding and I couldn’t figure out how to get the animals out without releasing them into the wild, and also it was clear someone was flooding the place on purpose and therefore was out there waiting for all of us.

I have no reason for being so sleepy and laggy and unmotivated and sad the last few days. Except that we’re all going to get old and die and so will everyone we love.

Rob has been at the moodier/angrier end of the teenager spectrum recently, surprising me with his sudden outbursts over what seems from my point of view to be NOTHING. It’s hard to respond peacefully/defusingly [ha—I originally had this as “diffusingly,” like I was making tea] when I’m not even sure what’s going on. Sample conversation:

Other child, looking at Paul’s desk: “OOOOooooo, a new keyboard! Let me try it!”

Rob, turning around and getting involved with sudden and unexpected scorn: “It’s not even PLUGGED IN yet.” *scoff sound*

Me, in a friendly voice: “It’s a cordless one.”

Rob, with even more intense feeling: “It still has to be PLUGGED IN. The thing that MAKES it cordless still has to be plugged in SOMEWHERE.”

Me, puzzled by this outburst and unsure how to respond/proceed (i.e., is it that he’s embarrassed to have been wrong so he’s trying to prove he really was right, or does he know the thing that needs to be plugged in hasn’t been plugged in yet so he’s trying to rudely-but-nevertheless-accurately correct what I said?): “Mm hm, yes, that’s right.”

Rob: “WHAT?? It DOES. There’s a THING that gets plugged into the computer!!! YOU SAID it didn’t need to be plugged in!!”

Me, cautiously, in a mild, explaining tone: “Yes, I know, I just thought you might think it had a cord, since the last keyboard did. You can check if you like to see if that other thing is plugged in yet. Maybe it isn’t yet, but I thought Daddy already set it up.”

Rob: *exasperated sound; hands briefly beseech the heavens; he spins around in his chair and is back to his computer typing crankily*

Me: *bewildered and annoyed*

It’s difficult to imagine this going on for the next decade or so, but perhaps it gets easier with practice. I’m trying to remember if it got easier to deal with toddler irrationality/outbursts or not, and I THINK it partly DID—if only because by the time the fifth child was being a toddler I was aware that the stage would pass without me having to actually make a toddler understand that he/she was nuts.

I have started the menopause book recommended by the nurse-practitioner at my OB/GYN, and I am having mixed feelings. The author is Not My Type, and nor is her ex-husband, and in fact I would be mincing rapidly away from either of them if I encountered them in a social or work setting. And so when she is describing how their marriage fell apart due in part to menopause, I have to do extra work to separate out the actual point of the story from the parts catching my attention, which are things such as him saying he hates when she acts disempowered, and her saying he should be more supportive of her truth, and me thinking “I would divorce BOTH of you without even FLINCHING.”

So what happens is I skip ahead a few chapters, because I think, “This part about marriage readjustments is making me dislike her, and I don’t want to dislike her because I want to glean usefulness from this book, so I will skip this part.” But then as I’m skipping ahead, something useful catches my eye and I think “Well, it DOES make sense that the marriage would need to adjust to the new stage of life…,” and then I have to go back to see what she’s talking about, and before I know it I’m back to where I started skipping. And then a minute later I’m wondering if she and I are too different for me to apply her advice to my life anyway.

Another big issue is that the author and I are not of like minds on the subject of what causes what, medically speaking. Certainly I allow room for the idea that one day in the future it will be proven scientifically that uterine fibroids occur when a woman has been prevented from giving birth to something creative and powerful, or that acne occurs as a literal manifestation of something metaphorical “getting under our skin.” In the meantime, I am not following along—and such things form a strong foundation for the book. If you stop taking care of your husband the way you did when you were in your mother role, he may get heart disease or high blood pressure in unintentional revenge—that sort of thing. It makes me wonder if I should even bother to look up her take on the physical changes I’m curious about. If I try to look up this hair-thinning-at-one-temple situation to see if it’s from hormonal changes or if it’s because I grew my hair longer/heavier and I’m wearing it up, am I going to find information about how this is really my body’s way of communicating to me that I am metaphorically “pulling out my hair,” and that it’s because I’m struggling to style my old dead strands of creative energy when I should be “cutting away” the old stage of life and welcoming the new growth?

But then I got to the part about how many women have trouble switching from “the mothering stage” to “whatever is next,” and so they try to prolong the mother stage and delay decisions/adjustments about the next stage by having more children, or by adopting more children, or by getting very involved in their children’s activities, or by taking care of their grandchildren, or by over-mothering their grown children, and I thought, “That does make a certain level of sense, and also I recognize that category of impulse.” So in short, I’m still reading, but Paul is getting tired of hearing me read sections aloud in that tone of voice.

Well! I managed to sign up for some volunteering at one of the schools! If you remember, I tried to do so earlier, but never heard back from the volunteer coordinator. This time, I was dropping off Elizabeth’s Epipen at the school nurse’s office (such things have to be hand-delivered by a parent), and an acquaintance was there and mentioned there was a volunteer training session going on right that minute for a particular volunteer position she’d done before and thought was a good one, and she said I should go right now and join in. And so I did.

The reason I’m not specifying the type of volunteering is that I’m about to make some complaints about a fellow parent and suddenly I’m nervous about being Found Out. So what I will do is use a stand-in for the type of volunteering AND for the types of things I want to complain about. Let’s say that the type of volunteering is helping set up the lunchroom, and let’s say it takes an hour and a half each time, and you can sign up for however many/few days you want out of an available eight days per month, and that there will be two or three volunteers each time. There: now you can imagine me going to this training session, and they are showing us how to set up the tables and put out the silverware bins and where/how to set up the milk station and so forth.

Okay, now I will describe the other parent. So, we are there to learn how to do this. And she started RIGHT IN criticizing the old way, before we’d even been fully trained, let alone tried out the job for real. She was disgusted by how unclean the back of the silverware caddy cart was (“Ug, don’t you ever CLEAN this?,” she said, constructively, to the person training us), an area that no one touches and that touches nothing, and also I didn’t agree it was dirty (it looked like it had been cleaned many times but was old and had been periodically re-painted without sanding first) and so I certainly don’t want to clean it with her when that is not what I’m volunteering for, and also at that moment we were SUPPOSED to be learning how to fill the silverware caddies. And also: RUDE.

Then, during a 30-minute training session, she managed to perform THREE highly-controversial and irrelevant mini-rants, one of which criticized public schools in general (keeping in mind that we were at that moment standing in the public school our children attend); one of which was on a topic such as vaccines, or why we should consider a relationship with Jesus Christ; and one of which directly criticized one of the policies of the school we were in. The root of her complaint on that third subject seemed to be that she should be exempt from that policy, and that she had every reason to be indignant/offended that it was enforced even for her. She told us how she had given the principal what-for (evidently she was wildly victorious in the way most of us are only while lying awake imagining it differently than it happened—and yet no policies changed as a result of this confrontation, not even for her) and then delivered a rather scornfully-put closing remark (“I mean, SERIOUSLY! What are they THINKING??”), and then waited. A couple of us tried to brush it off politely with “Mm” sounds. But she would not have it. “You know what I mean?,” she said, turning directly to me. “Mm,” I said. “I mean, RIGHT?,” she said. So that I finally said, mildly, “Well, I see what you mean, but I still see why they do it that way.” So then she kept going about how actually it was stupid, and then I tried another “Mm,” and it didn’t stop her, so then I did what I should have done first, which was to say, “Oh, I see they’re showing us how to…” and trailed off as I walked away toward something I acted like I needed to have explained to me about keeping the forks and spoons separate.

I looked at the sign-up sheet and guess who I am working with on five of the six days I signed up for? Yes. Paul thinks she will simmer down a bit, but he was working on the theory that she was nervous and keyed up in a new situation, whereas my impression (and I’ll remind you that I was there and Paul was not) was that she was just starting to get comfortable. She didn’t seem nervous, she seemed oblivious and over-confident and a little dim, and like she hadn’t yet reached the stage of life (“adulthood”) where she knew there were different ways to think about things and that not everything was set up around her own way. I suppose nervousness could exhibit in that way; I’m not ruling it out, but I’m not counting on it either. Instead I am reassuring myself that I have only signed up for six sessions, so if it’s awful and she’s awful, I will get through it and then not sign up for any more of that, and try something else instead.

In the meantime, I am looking for advice. The volunteer job-type I used as a stand-in for the real job sounds like people would be spread out working separately; but the actual job is working closely together and not being able to get away from each other, and not much need to discuss the work itself (and thus, plenty of time to chat). What are some good things to say to someone who is basically DEMANDING either agreement or disagreement? Like, what I’d like to say is “Dear god, why are you bringing up this controversial topic HERE and NOW, and WHY OH WHY aren’t you taking a hint from our unenthusiastic/noncommittal responses and away-turning body language??” What I DON’T want to do is discuss my opinions one way or another with someone so aggressive: I don’t want to argue with her, and I don’t want to pretend to agree with her, and I don’t want to clean that silverware cart with her.

So that is why I am asking: What are some of your ways of dealing with people who won’t take “Mm” for an answer? And I’m thinking of actual, sayable things, not the things we say in our imaginations while lying awake showing reality how it OUGHT to be done.