You guys were unbelievable on the whole Mother’s Day situation. Comments and tweets have been pouring in for days. It is hard to know how to adequately thank for something like that. But: thank you. It was balm to the wound.

I emailed some non-online friends, friends who have been even more in the loop over the years on Paul Stuff good and bad (I don’t like to overdo it on the blog), and they feel the same as you do. One question they asked, as some of you asked, was whether Paul might be mad about something. Another question they asked, as some of you might have wanted to ask but didn’t feel you could, was whether Paul might, perhaps subconsciously, want out of the marriage, and be pulling crap like this to make it happen. It’s a possibility I’ve been forced to add to the list along with brain tumor and early-onset dementia. As one friend put it, Paul has done his share of Jerk Moves over the years, as ANY human does, but she says in the last few years there has been a shift in the kind of things he’s been doing—as if he has actually changed as a person, in a concerning way that seems to require SOME sort of explanation.

It’s very hard to know how much of this to discuss here, as you can probably well imagine. My parents raised me in a sort of “What happens in the marriage stays in the marriage” environment, but I found that really backfired when my first marriage ended: no one could believe it had been bad, because I hadn’t talked about how bad it was; and because I continued not to talk about it as things were wrapping up, everyone assumed that meant it must have been my fault, and/or that I was a flighty person who would ditch a marriage at the very first non-blissful moment. And because my soon-to-be-ex husband had no trouble talking about it, he soon had the ear and sympathy of everyone involved. If things DO go badly this time, I’d prefer it not to go that way.

On the other hand, there are solid reasons for the “What happens in the marriage stays in the marriage” concept. As Judith Viorst says in Love & Guilt & The Meaning of Life, Etc., “One advantage of marriage, it seems to me, is that when you fall out of love with him, or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you maybe fall in again.” Marriages go through bleak times, and if you come OUT of the bleak time, then it’s nice not to have everyone knowing your business and casting side-eyes at your spouse (or at you, if it’s your spouse who’s been talking); also, it’s easy to overstate things when upset, and harder to walk them back when things are okay again. But…then if there comes an insurmountable bleak time and you finally decide it’s time to put everyone out of their misery, you have people saying you’re ditching the marriage at the very first sign of bleakness, and that any stories you tell of the earlier bad times are just you rewriting history to justify your bailing. Plus, who wants to act as if their marriage is perfect all the time? But of course you also don’t want to tell Every Single Little Bad Thing That Ever Happens, as if creating a record for the court. So it’s a pickle.

It’s even more of a pickle with online things. I can email my friends and vent freely about Paul, because we have long-established relationships with each other and know that a vent does not mean anything is seriously wrong. My friend M can tell me how her husband has recently been an idiot, and I answer back that husbands are idiots, and if possible I add a reassuringly similar husband-was-an-idiot story of my own, and we go on with our lives, feeling better and more able to cope and less panicky that maybe we married the wrong people. Neither of us think that husbands in general or either of our husbands in particular are literally, actually idiots, or that there is any real need for concern, and we both feel better for the interaction, both of us thinking this kind of stuff just falls into that not-really-serious category where EVERYONE is sometimes an idiot.

Online, that whole thing is less clear. You have probably seen it before: someone will vent about something that’s clearly being told at least 75% for the amusing entertainment value of the story, by someone who is clearly in love with the idiot they’re ranting about, and yet there will be commenters either going Full Concern and suggesting marriage counseling “to deal with your anger issues” or whatever, or else saying, “You should be grateful he’s not DEAD” or “You should just be glad he’s not CHEATING ON YOU” or whatever. It can be difficult online, speaking to an extraordinarily mixed group (from strangers on their first visit to the blog all the way up to people you’ve been friends with for years), to get across that tone of “just venting about an otherwise normal and satisfactory marriage.” It’s even more complicated when it’s NOT just that.

A long time ago there was a blogger whose blog I didn’t usually read, but I was aware of her and would sometimes go read a post if someone else linked to it. One reason I didn’t like to routinely read her blog was that she so often wrote things about how she and her husband were more in love every day, or how she fell more in love with him every year, or how she never knew how much their previously large amount of love could have gotten so much LARGER. That’s not how I feel about things in my own relationship, and so reading things like that made me understandably nervous: did I marry the wrong person or what? I mean, there are all those studies that say the fluttery-lovey feeling lasts, what, two years, and then it’s more a matter of shared experiences and mutual goals and growing trust/dependence and so forth. But then you see people talking about how the flutter-love has gotten EVEN MORE FLUTTERY and it can make you wonder. Look: you can tell it makes me nervous because I switched into second-person.

Anyway, when this blogger whose love for her husband was more intense with every passing day announced that she and her husband were divorcing, and that all her earlier words on the topic of love were because she was hoping that saying those things would make them true, it was hard to know what to feel. Relief, because maybe my earlier nervousness was unfounded (at least in this case) and most marriages DON’T keep reaching for higher and higher levels of ecstatic, heart-pounding love? Anger, because she had lied with reckless disregard for how those lies might make others feel about their own relationships, and because I am probably not the only reader who thought, “Uh oh…” as a result? Sympathy, because this stuff is hard and no one knows what they’re doing and it’s easy to make a mistake you think will reflect only on yourself but in fact has much further-reaching effects?

In my own case, with my own situation, I am not sure which way to go with this, and I think it’s quite possible to choose one direction and then decide later that that was wrong. But I am able to edit and/or delete posts, and you have shown yourselves to be unfussed by previous mistakes. Also, we are all in this life thing together, and it doesn’t help any of us to read a lot of posts about how blissful someone else’s life is, but it can help TREMENDOUSLY to read about someone else’s struggles. One of the best parts of a blogging network is that “I’m not the only one!!!” feeling. There is nothing as lonely as thinking you’re the only one who manages to be depressed even when you have this beautiful perfect new baby and everything went fine and nothing is wrong, or that you’re the only one who sometimes has to resist the temptation to get in your car and keep driving, or that you’re the only one whose marriage is having troubles that don’t make funny stories, or that you’re the only one whose kids are having worrisome issues, or that you’re the only one who isn’t finding at-home motherhood particularly #blessed #MomLife #HappyMama, or that you’re the only one finding it hard to make friends, or that you’re the only one who regrets some of your life choices, or that you’re the only one who doesn’t know what to do about a situation, or WHATEVER.

All this is to say that I plan to continue discussing what’s going on, at least for now, at least in general, though of course not alllll the details. And I will try to keep in mind the goal of representing things with reasonable fairness—or in a way that shows you clearly that I am feeling too mad at that moment to be fair, so you know to take it with a grain of salt, and so I know I can walk it back later when I’ve calmed down.

I am still thinking about how I want to handle things with Paul/kids; it takes me a long time to think such things out. Right now my loose plan is to address it with the kids as part of the Father’s Day preparations. I don’t want a do-over of Mother’s Day; I thought that was a really good idea, but I find I don’t WANT it. I will use the frame of Father’s Day preparations to explain how I felt when there were no Mother’s Day preparations. Then next Mother’s Day I may do a little refresher course ahead of time, or I may make my OWN Mother’s Day plans; we’ll see.

Paul and I have had one brief talk: it made me think he might be reading my blog even though he has agreed not to, because he seemed totally fine all weekend and Monday evening, and then Monday night came to me acting very sad and saying he had felt very sad for the past few days over the Mother’s Day thing, but that on Mother’s Day he just hadn’t known what to do. I’m not sure I can explain what a baffling thing this was to hear. It would have made SOME sense from a new father on his first failed Mother’s Day; it makes zero sense from a man on his 20th Mother’s Day, when the previous 19 went fine, and when he knows from extensive experience that I am not sitting there waiting to be WOWED by something BIG and IMPRESSIVE. Also: he felt sad? HE felt sad??? I didn’t know what to do with that. He seemed to want ME to comfort and reassure HIM, for something that HE had done to ME. Which. Again, this is something I would have expected from him 20 years ago, when he was young; it is absolutely not something I was expecting to start from scratch on at this stage of our relationship, when we have already covered this amply in the past. I seriously don’t understand what is going on. This is why I am not kidding when I say I have considered options such as brain tumor and early-onset dementia. It’s not that these behaviors are out of character, it’s that they’re back full-strength as if it’s 20 years ago and we’ve never done any work on them. Why are they back? Why are they back with no seeming recollection of having been dealt with before? Where did the work go? Where did the progress go?

Furthermore, he seemed to think that interaction, in which he said he felt sad and I said yeah that day really sucked, was the end of it. He has been cheery, and seems to think it’s all over now and everything is fine. So clearly there needs to be more talking, which I am dreading, especially because I am wondering which OTHER behaviors/attitudes from the distant past are going to show up. Will it even be possible to have a reasonable discussion, or is this going to immediately dissolve into more baffling events?

There’s one more thing I think you and I should discuss, if I’m going to give occasional updates on this topic. I think that if you try to keep giving sympathetic and supportive feedback, you are going to get quite tired of doing so, and also I will start to feel as if I shouldn’t tell you anything else because I’ll worry it’ll seem like I’m begging for another fix of sweet, sweet commiseration. If this goes on long enough, you may start feeling that I expect you to keep propping me up emotionally, and I may start feeling like I need to explain that actually I am ALSO really hard to live with. Let’s see if we can avoid all that. It is of course always, always, ALWAYS fine not to comment on ANY post of ANY kind, OBVIOUSLY, but I want to explicitly state that it is fine to take all future updates on this subject as the sort of thing where you read it and nod and go on your way: you have ALREADY expressed sympathy and/or outrage and/or support on this topic, and you should not feel you need to keep feeding me that. And of course this is not to say you MAY NOT keep discussing it with me if you WANT to.

Paul and the kids did literally nothing for Mother’s Day, and I’m mad/upset/disappointed about that, while also not being able to figure out how to say anything about it without seeming whiny/demanding/self-pitying. I don’t want it to seem as if I need presents, and lots of money spent on me, and breakfast in bed or a big meal out or whatever. But, like, what I wanted was some sort of feeling that it was in any way a special day. When it’s Father’s Day, for example, I’m extra-careful to load the dishes into the dishwasher promptly so there’s no way Paul would feel as if he were expected to do it or even be given the chance to do it on auto-pilot; I pick up beer at the grocery store so there’ll be some in the fridge if he wants it; I ask what he wants to have for dinner. When it’s one of the kids’ birthdays, they don’t have to unload the dishwasher even if it’s their turn; they get to sit in the front seat even if it’s not their turn; I’ll make their school lunch for them even though I normally won’t. So on Mother’s Day, it would have been nice if someone else had, say, loaded the dishwasher; but I let dishes build up on the counter all morning and half the afternoon (and seven people generate quite a few dishes), and people just kept adding dishes to the pile, and no one loaded them, so finally I did it—and felt pretty martyrish about it too, I’ll tell you.

And quite possibly the answer to this whole issue, at least according to some of you, will be that I should have SAID something, in the moment. And maybe I should have! But I didn’t want it to go down like that: I didn’t want it to be me saying, “It’s Mother’s Day, so do these chores for me, I shouldn’t have to do any work!” I didn’t want to spend Mother’s Day nagging other people to do things: that is how I spend my REGULAR days. I wanted it to be like them thinking, “It’s Mother’s Day, so let’s make sure Mom doesn’t have to do the dishes.” I wanted there to be that slight Special Day feeling in the air that makes people think of things like that themselves.

I would have liked it very much if someone had asked if they could bring me a cup of coffee, something like that—a feeling that they are trying to think of little unnecessary and indulgent things they wouldn’t do on a regular day, because it isn’t a regular day. I would have liked it very much if someone had put dandelions from the yard in a jar. I would have liked it very much if someone had said, “Wait, Mom should choose what we’re watching on TV!” I would have liked it very much if someone had colored me a card. I would have liked it very much if someone had asked if I wanted them to go pick up a box of doughnuts for breakfast or if I wanted to go out for lunch, even if I’d ended up saying no. It would have been nice to think that ANY OF THEM were thinking about me AT ALL and wondering AT ALL how I might like to spend the day, even fleetingly.

Also, I hesitate to put this part in because it makes me so angry and fills me with so much despair, but I overheard Rob asking Paul on Saturday night if they were doing anything for Mother’s Day, and Paul said, “I don’t know—she’s not MY mother.” [Edited to add: I need to clarify here that he said it in a good-natured way, and more as if he were suggesting to Rob that it was time for Rob to start figuring this sort of thing out for himself. Which is true. Nevertheless, it’s not a good concept for him to be introducing to the children for them to later say to people-who-are-not-their-mothers, and his own actions then ended up completely in line with everything I hate about the statement. He also missed a teaching moment with Rob: instead of being dismissive, he could have taken the opportunity to guide. Instead, Rob seemed to feel smacked-down, and dropped it entirely.] I think that’s one of the stupidest attitudes/excuses of all time, and also it makes no sense. Thoughtfulness and consideration for others are skills for children to learn, and holidays are a wonderful time to learn/practice them, and on Mother’s/Father’s Day the other parent needs to do the teaching/coaching/reminding/helping. Just for starters, kids usually don’t have the right level of funds to pay for things such as flowers/meals, and the parent wouldn’t even WANT them using their own small allowances for something like that; but also, many kids start out as selfish little jerks who need specific instruction on how to think about others, how to choose a gift the other person would like (as opposed to buying Mom a new Lego set the child wants), and how to think of little tasks that show others you’re thinking of them. And I am not Paul’s mother but I am the mother of his children and so I am presumably a special mother in his life, and Mother’s Day is for celebrating ALL mothers, not only one’s OWN mother—and pretending to think otherwise is disingenuous to the point of stupidity. I got a nice Happy Mother’s Day text from MY SISTER-IN-LAW’S BROTHER, for heaven’s sake! Because he knows it’s Mother’s Day and that his sister and I are both mothers, so he’s wishing his sister and me a happy day! He didn’t think sending each of us that text would make it seem as if he thought his sister and I were HIS mothers!

But also, and this is why I’m not just angry but also filled with despair, Paul and I have talked about THIS VERY THING before. We have discussed that “She’s/He’s not MY mother/father!” is a stupid attitude/excuse, and exactly WHY it is a stupid attitude/excuse, and WHY the other parent needs to be involved in the whole Mother’s/Father’s Day thing while the kids are in the Training Stage of life, and we have agreed on that. (If their dad were not in the picture, it would be different and I would train them myself on how to approach Mother’s Day.) So how, years later, are those words leaving his mouth? It is baffling, and concerning. It doesn’t leave any wiggle-room for this not to reflect badly on Paul. Like, early on, I could have thought (and did think), “Well, his parents didn’t teach him about this, and his dad was exceptionally self-centered and that certainly had an effect, and he hasn’t thought it all the way through because he’s new to this, so we just need to talk it through and then he’ll understand because he’s a smart guy and these are not difficult concepts.” But…it HAS been covered. He has agreed that the “She’s/He’s not MY mother/father!” attitude/excuse is wrong and can’t be applied to Mother’s/Father’s Day. He has understood my feelings on the topic, and knows that I expect him to assist/train the children on Mother’s Day, just as I will do for Father’s Day. It’s as if he’s had a brain-wipe and I have to start all over again with Idiot New Dad Whose Pre-Frontal Cortex Has Only Recently Finished Developing And Whose Parents May Have Done Well In Many Other Areas But Really Dropped The Ball In Terms of Thoughtfulness Training. I actually, seriously wondered if this could be an early sign of his mind going, because I can easily imagine anyone forgetting certain things (partner’s favorite flower, partner’s clothing size, what partner reminded you to pick up at the store, etc.) just as a matter of being a normal human, but it’s hard to imagine going through the entire mental process of why “She’s not MY mother!” makes no sense AND THEN SAYING IT EVER AGAIN, SERIOUSLY EVER AGAIN, without it being alarming evidence of a worrisome malfunction.

And now it’s hard to know what to do for Father’s Day. I have semi-joked in the past that it is nice Mother’s Day comes first, so I can base the level of the Father’s Day celebration on that—but I don’t want to do literally nothing for Father’s Day. I don’t think doing literally nothing is RIGHT, not for me and not for how I should be bringing up the kids. But it is very hard at this point to imagine taking a day like yesterday, tucking it aside, and turning with joyful heart to the considerate celebration of Father’s Day.

I think what will probably happen is that I will do Father’s Day at the child-training level: encouraging them to think about what he might like, etc., but with no enthusiasm of my own. I won’t, for example, stop at the specialty beer store and ask the clerk to help me choose a really expensive Special-Occasion Beer, as I did last year. Then NEXT year I will start talking about Mother’s Day during the week ahead, and discussing some things they might want to consider on a day like that—the same way I helped them with Father’s Day. I will train the kids the way I would if their dad were not in the picture. And/or I will go out to see a movie on Mother’s Day by myself, and stop for a treat on the way home.

I am having the kind of week where each evening before bed I have to write out a careful schedule for the next day so I don’t forget to send in something or pick up someone or go somewhere. And meanwhile I am cooking for six using a toaster oven and a two-burner hotplate. I would like to tell you that story, and also inform you that “liquor store” is on today’s to-do list.

1. I authorized Paul to make a decision and order a new stove, since he did so well with that last time. [Last time = A very risky move on his part that, luckily for him, worked out: long ago, when I was still covered in babies and toddlers, he got tired of waiting for me to research which stove I wanted to replace our failing one, so he just picked one and ordered it without consulting or telling me. If that stove hadn’t happened to be Exactly Right, things could have ended…very differently. One does not make major-appliance decisions without consulting the primary user of such appliances.] I thought he was remembering the bare essentials of what I consider to be The Right Stove, because we have discussed them repeatedly over the years when admiring the stove he chose; those essentials are: (1) white, (2) coils, (3) no flat tops. That’s what I like, don’t @ me. [Edited to add: For me saying “don’t @ me,” there has been a lot of @ing me on this. Would it help if I said “This is what I like, but for the purposes of this story it doesn’t matter what I like, only that what we got was something completely different?” Like, just imagine what YOU prefer in a stove, and then imagine getting something OPPOSITE TO THAT, and then it doesn’t matter what you do prefer or why you prefer it: the problem is the DIFFERENCE, not what the reasons are for the preference.]

2. Paul ordered the new stove. The happy day arrived. The delivery window was verified by automated phone call at TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING so at first I thought someone was hospitalized/dead, but whatever, new stove! The stove was delivered. The old stove was taken away.

3. Paul read the manual and discovered that the stove he had ordered, which was black/stainless with a flat top and no coils, was an induction stove that also required SPECIAL POTS AND PANS. None of our pans would work with it, except his grody cast-iron skillets which I will never use or eat out of, at least not until several layers of gunk, oh sorry “seasoning,” are removed from them; also, while you can USE a cast-iron pan on this kind of stove, you can’t MOVE it on the stove or it will scratch it. We would need to get all new pans. This all happened one week ago today.

4. (Yes, I absolutely do already know that “seasoning” is an actual thing with cast-iron skillets. This is not seasoning. This is Gross Crust.)

5. I spent a queasy, spiraling afternoon estimating that we would actually come out ahead financially if we donated the new induction stove to charity, purchased a $400 white coil stove, and did not have to buy all new special pans including all the extra-large pans that don’t come in standard sets but are needed when cooking for 6-7 people. I mourned my old pans and planned to store them in the basement. I panicked on Twitter.

6. Twitter said, “OH GOD RETURN THAT THING AT ANY COST!!” Actually, that’s what Twitter-I-listened-to said. Twitter-I-didn’t-listen-to said, “Oh, that kind of stove is great! We love ours!” MY PANS THO

7. I told Paul very gently and carefully that either the stove was leaving OR he and the stove were leaving, but that either way I and the pans were staying. (Is it necessary to clarify that I did not say anything of the sort? What I actually said was something like “I know this would be a terrible hassle and might not even be possible, and if it IS possible it might cost significant money and also mean we’d be without a stove for awhile and have to figure THAT out, and maybe we don’t even want to do this because maybe this stove is great and I just need to get used to it and maybe we should be switching to stainless steel pans anyway. But is there a possibility that we should consider finding out if it’s possible to…return the stove?”)

8. Paul called and arranged to return the stove, with us agreeing ahead of time that we did not really care if we had to pay for return shipping, re-stocking, whatever. So far there does not seem to have been a cost, but we are still ready for it if it happens. The customer service representative was awesome: she wanted the reason for the return, and Paul told her about the pans, and she said, “That is just CRAZY!!”—and put the return right through. (Or rather, that’s what he said that he said. He might very well have instead said “My wife is scaring me.”) She said they could come get it Tuesday. The replacement stove (white, coils) would come Friday. For one solid week we would have no oven and no stovetop. I am on a diet that saps the fun and excitement from eating out, and anyway it gets HELLA EXPENSIVE for six people to eat out every night.

9. I drove to the store and bought a two-burner hotplate. We draped the new oven in towels to protect it from cats, children, etc., but I continued to be intensely anxious about something happening to it. Meanwhile, the two-burner hotplate has been possible to cook on, but not with any of our big pans; also, it is verrrrrrry slow: I started with hot tap water and it still took over 20 minutes for a saucepan of water to boil. I have been making dinners in batches, using the hotplate, the toaster oven, and an attitude that it doesn’t really matter if we have to eat in shifts.

10. On Tuesday the guys came and picked up the induction stove. I was very worried they would refuse to take it because Paul had removed all the wrappers and crinkled them up and put them deep in the trash can and then put raw-meat wrappers and cream droplets all over them. But there was no issue, other than that the guys were supposed to come between 3:00 and 6:00, and instead they arrived at 2:45, in the 15 minutes between the time I had to leave with William to have his x-ray done (his knee is bothering him) and the time Paul arrived home early from work to be sure to be home by 3:00, and Elizabeth was home alone and she had to handle it. Which she did, by calling me so that I had to answer my cell phone during registration at the x-ray place, under several signs prohibiting the use of cell phones. Anyway. The delivery guys waited out in the driveway, Paul arrived shortly afterward, and the Bad New Stove was removed without incident.

11. Today Good New Stove arrives! At least, we hope. We were supposed to get a delivery-window-confirmation call (we hoped not at 2:00 in the morning), but did not. This worries me.

[Update!:

It works with MY PANS]

I wrote that cheerful post and then crashed into Post-Fun-Time Blues. There will never be anything fun ever again. Or if there will be, it’s too far away to have any possible impact on the present.

Also my newish jeans feel both too tight and too loose: they’re constricting me but also falling down. I take this to mean I need to switch brands. I am normally of the pearish persuasion (I take approximately one size bigger in pants than tops), relatively long-torsoed and small-waisted, and when I gain weight I gain it mostly in the Jeans Regions. But before I started this diet that I am not going to keep constantly referring to, I had started gaining higher up on my stomach and also in the Bustular Region (THAT was a novelty). I was really happy with the way Roaman’s bootcut jeans fit that shape. Then I lost weight and ordered a smaller size of the same jeans, and these don’t fit right at all. I think it could be that the design of the jeans changed since my last order, but I think it’s more likely a change in my proportions.

Also, I am annoyed that “bootcut” jeans are now cut like what used to be called “straight.” Bootcut used to MEAN something, you guys. It used to MEAN something. Now bootcut looks like straight. And straight looks silly on me. (Skinny makes me look like a kite.) So not only are these jeans uncomfortably snug AND falling down, they look silly on me and I feel betrayed.

Before switching to Roaman’s I used to wear Lane Bryant, so I’d just go back to those—but they underwent a design change (“Genius Fit”) that made them not fit me right at all anymore. I also tried Torrid, which fit beautifully but had NO (or only tiny) POCKETS. Which I can’t even fathom. JEANS HAVE POCKETS, even if they’re women’s jeans. I looked at Lands’ End because I wore those before Lane Bryant, but they don’t have anything in an actual bootcut (except in a CROPPED bootcut, which no). These are not bootcut:

(image from LandsEnd.com)

Those are straight, heading for slim.

If you wear plus-sizes and are roughly pear in build, have you found any jeans you like that are actual-bootcut jeans WITH POCKETS? And not cut too low in the waist, either: good tum coverage, not perched on the hipbones.

I’m particularly annoyed because less than a year ago I finally got rid of an entire enormous bin of my excellent-but-too-small jeans, thinking it was wasteful (and not realistic) to keep them any longer when someone else could be making use of them. Probably if I still had them, I’d be looking at them now and thinking they were way too out of style to wear anyway. But in my memory they exist as the best jeans ever, classic favorites, so perfect—and now WASTED.

Also the children have been very irritating lately and so has Paul. And the cats are too warm and sheddy. And I have a slight headache and feel just sort of non-specifically prickly and crummy. And I was trying to make a college-visit appointment for William and the college’s website was SO FRUSTRATING that I gave up. And I am having more than the usual number of Food Fantasies. And…*looks at calendar*…oh.

I had such a fun weekend, with so much beer and wine and so many treats—and oh also such a good time with favorite people, not to imply with syntax that those much-loved people came second to the frosted lemon pound cake, even though it was exceptionally good frosted lemon pound cake, moist all the way through so that even the non-frosted parts were delicious.

There was also a very good café mocha.

And then I came home to find one child cleaning the bathroom sink (for money, but whatever) and another child baking cookies (for payment in cookie dough, but whatever). And I was reminded of the days when I couldn’t get away for an overnight like this without accumulating SIGNIFICANT marital debt, and the days when I was buying multi-packs of children’s clearance underwear so that I at least had the OPTION to just throw away a pair when I felt I Really Couldn’t Cope with another terrible potty-training accident without breaking down and possibly leaving forever, or the days when I had to grocery shop in small batches because I had one child in the top of the cart and one child makeshift-strapped with a belt to the inside of the cart and one child fussing in a frontpack, or the days when I had to carry significant diaper-bag luggage with me to leave the house and STILL might end up having to buy replacement clothing for a child who had barfed in the car on the way.

And really, overall, I would say that despite my occasional tender sentimental feelings about the baby days and the region I used to call my waistline, life is vastly preferable now. Like, if right now you are more in the stage of not getting anywhere near enough sleep and then spending your days standing in line with those many children, that enormous diaper bag, those clearance underpants, the emergency replacement clothing—and, while you are holding on to your last exhausted nerve and trying hard not to snap or cry, if you have older ladies in line behind you telling you to enjoy every moment, and you are wondering if that means everything ahead of you must be bleak and sad in comparison to this time when you are barely keeping your head above water: No. It’s a memory problem they’re having, and they don’t mean to be implying that next up for you is a downward spiral into a meaningless future where you would actually tell a struggling young mother that it’s all downhill from there.

Your babies just look sooooooooooooo delectable and sweet to the people who don’t have to sustain them with their bodies, get up with them in the middle of the night, clean their barf out of the car upholstery and the unremovable car-seat cover, figure out how to get those revolting soiled onesies off (pull them DOWN the baby’s body, not up over the face), monitor them every waking moment to make sure they don’t die, etc. etc. etc. You have to admit you DO HAVE very cute babies. It blows older ladies’ circuits temporarily, that’s all. They remember the feel of a warm satisfying little baby settled comfortably on a hip.

But do not be dismayed by the baby-drunk onlookers and how much they seem to miss that time. It’s really great to be able to get only your own self into the car and have all the kids get into the car on their own and close the car doors and buckle their own seat belts. It’s really great to be able to say, “Hey, take a shower” and have a kid do the entire thing themselves. It’s really great when a sick kid barfs into the toilet and you only know about it after it’s over. It’s really great to be able to eat and drink things without thinking of the impact it will have on fertility or a fetus or a nurser. It’s really great to go to the store by yourself, packing just your own purse and your reusable shopping bags. It’s really great to be able to go away for an overnight with friends without having to do a huge I.O.U. to the other parent. It’s really great to have “cleaning up someone else’s barf” be an EXCEEDINGLY RARE thing. It’s really great to say to the kids, “Okay, I’m going to [get a haircut / go to my appointment / have lunch with a friend / have dinner with Daddy], I’ll be back in a couple of hours, be good, be nice, don’t fight, don’t use the stove, my phone number is on the counter”—and then LEAVE THEM THERE WHILE YOU GO ELSEWHERE, NO SITTER REQUIRED. It’s really great to remember the weight of those little footie-sleepered babies in our arms, without remembering the spit-up trailing down the back of our shirt and the milk-circles forming on the front.

(image from Amazon.com)

I have just finished extended-audible-sobbing my way through the credits of the movie Pride, and if you haven’t seen it I think you might like to. I will tell you why:

1. The last year or two has felt to me like a constant mental tug-of-war between “WE NEED TO STAND TOGETHER AND HELP EACH OTHER AND MARCH FOR EACH OTHER AND PREVENT CRUEL AND HEARTLESS THINGS FROM HAPPENING TO EACH OTHER!” and “This is exhausting and futile and everything is just going to be an unavoidable relentless descent into chaos and cruelty for the limited time we have left before we use up all the oxygen and fall into the sweet release of human extinction.” This movie, about a gay and lesbian group in the 1980s that somewhat impulsively decides to help the cause of the striking Welsh miners because the group feels empathy from being on the receiving end of the type of bullying/persecution the miners are facing, takes a day like the latter and turns it into a day like the former, complete with rousing music.  And it is based on a true story, and during the credits you get little updates on some of the characters.

2. Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty from The Wire) is in it, and his hair is bleached, and he wears ’80s clothing, and he dances. WITH THRUSTS.

3. I mean, the 1980s styles alone are worth it.

4. Bill Nighy is in it, and I may have mentioned once or twice before that I would watch an entire movie of nothing but him walking around, talking wryly, and periodically quirking his face. In this movie he has a scene with a full-on close-up on-fleek eyebrow quirking. Like they KNOW we are just waiting for that eyebrow shot.

5. Dolores Umbridge (actor Imelda Staunton) from Harry Potter, but playing a GOOD character so you can LOVE her!

6. Middle-aged women going to 1980s gay men’s clubs.

(image from Wikipedia.com)

Another movie I recently watched and loved (though no sobbing) was Meet the Patels. Within five minutes I knew I had found EXACTLY my favorite kind of documentary: personal/revealing, some interviews, some animation, some sneaky footage (“Put that camera down!” “Okay….*puts camera delicately down onto seat, where it is still recording*”), interesting information about another culture. It’s about a 30-year-old man who breaks up with his white girlfriend and attempts to find an Indian wife using a combination of traditional and modern methods from his family’s Indian culture: biosheets, parent-arranged blind dates, giant marriage-seeking conference with ice-breaker activities, taking advantage of wedding season, etc. The film-maker is his sister and she does a good job of making him a sympathetic character without failing to lead us to understand what might not be working for him in this endeavor.

I have some pottery back from my second session of classes! During this session I impulsively (that is, it’s not something we covered in class) experimented with drawing on things before they were fired, and I did more messing around with using multiple glazes on a single piece.

These are on the smallish end of bowls, maybe more like candy dishes. The bowl on the far right had a bad crack through the floor of it, but I took a picture before breaking it the rest of the way in the driveway (quite satisfying to do).

For scale, the thingie on the left holds slightly over half a cup of liquid.

Miscellaneous/decorative shapes.

The thing on the left is the largest thing I’ve ever made, and nice and thin too: the clay was jussssst on the verge of collapsing when I stopped messing with it. The thing in the middle is the second-largest, and the largest/straightest up-and-down thing I’ve ever made; it’s about the size of a nice big pencil-holder, or a canister for smallish scrubbie brushes.

These bowls are about right for a sad restricted amount of ice cream, or for a nice amount of M&Ms. The mug is smaller than I wanted it (it’s the size of the small mug of coffee you have late-afternoon when you really shouldn’t have any), and the glaze didn’t come out how I wanted it, but I’m happy with the shape and with the handle.

I am pleased with the things, and pleased with the progress (first batch, for comparison). Some marks of progress you can’t see but they please me: everything is thinner and lighter than before, and the bottoms are much nicer and more even. I’m not sure if I will take another session of classes or not; they’re not offered again until the fall, so I have time to think. Toward the end of this second session I was feeling as if I was making the same things over again, and also feeling a little tired of doing it. I don’t know if that means I’m done, or just that I need a break and some new ideas.

I have perhaps ten times thought of something I want to say, then forgotten what it was, then remembered it when I was elsewhere, then forgotten it again. It wasn’t even very interesting, it was just a good thing to open the conversation with, and now it’s gone again.

*looks around for inspiration* My New Yorker cartoon day-by-day calendar has been less awesome than I expected. The cartoons seem like the ones from the last page of the magazine, where readers submit the captions.

Hm. Pretty mediocre topic.

Let’s see. I could complain for awhile about the new health insurance we have through Paul’s employer, which has allegedly been in effect for nearly a month and WE STILL DO NOT HAVE CARDS OR ANY WAY TO ACCESS COVERAGE. And Edward has an appointment in the next week for his many-thousands-of-dollars-per-dose Remicade infusion, a medication which, understandably, requires an intense level of pre-authorization, for which a person needs to know INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE. But I called the Remicade nurse yesterday and she was so relaxed about the whole thing, and she thinks she can get the pre-authorization done with only the information I had so far, and she was similarly relaxed about the possibility of needing to reschedule the appointment, and she has infused me with a fresh calm. What must it be like to go through the world feeling calm about things? I now have a taste of it.

Really, I am wracking my brain for topics. I feel so chatty, but we are down to barrel-scrapings here, apparently. I am so excited to show you pictures of my pottery from the second set of classes!—but I do not yet have it back from the final kilning. I want to do a sort of year-end summary of Rob’s first year of college!—but he is still at college, doing that year. I could give an update on my tooth replacement, but the only thing that’s happened is that I’ve been back to the oral surgeon and I’m cleared to have the fake tooth installed, but that’s not going to be for like another month. Ooo, how about another story about my new friend Morgan?—no, two stories is enough for now, and also one day if she and I remain friends I will tell her about this blog and she will read it, and it would be embarrassing to have her see my severe case of mentionitis. Paul is at the point where I say “Oh! Another thing about Morgan:” and he closes his eyes very briefly and inhales lightly through his nose.

Well, would you like a turn to talk? I can certainly sit and sip coffee and listen for a change. Gripes? Vents? Stories? Fun things going on? New things coming up? Stuff you’re looking forward to or dreading? Learn something new lately? Looking for advice on an upcoming purchase? Just kind of feel like talking about something?

I have something to tell you about, and I realize this will be a little surprising—but I am taking country line-dancing classes. It is entirely due to my new friend Morgan (she of the Citywide Marshmallow Egg Quest) and her peculiar interest in Going Places and Doing Things. I am not myself someone who would normally seek out a new activity and try it (pottery classes were a startling exception), but Morgan has a persuasively direct way of talking me into things. “I think you should come to country line-dancing classes with me,” she says over coffee. “I will tell you my reasons why. First:”—and so on. Before I know it I am doing a step-ball-change and wondering if cowgirl boots would let me do a better step-turn.

I mentioned something about New Friend Morgan on Twitter, and Superjules asked if I would be sure to post about How To Make a New Friend. I will tell you my secret: get noticed by an extrovert.

Tangent: I first typed “extravert” above, and spell-checker didn’t like it. So I looked it up, because I have been thinking it was introvert/extravert. And I found source after source that said the original words WERE introvert/extravert, but now the common usage is introvert/extrovert. Well, okay. I am a reluctant descriptivist, so I will go along with that if that’s what we’re all doing. It’s more satisfyingly parallel anyway. But I didn’t want those of you familiar with introvert/extravert (probably the same group of you who know it’s “I was graduated from” rather than “I graduated from”) to think I didn’t know. /tangent

As I was saying: if you want friends, put yourself straggling-antelope-style into the sights of an extrovert. They are usually looking to make new friends, sometimes because they have worn out all their old friends, and they seem to be good at doing the hard part of initiating things. If you can just make yourself RESPOND (“Yes, I’d like to see that movie too! How about Tuesday?” “Okay, I guess I will try country line-dancing but I warn you I tend to fall over while walking”) instead of getting tangled up in a ball of uncertainty (“Does she REALLY want me to go with her?” “What if she’s just being nice?” “What if it’s not fun?” “What if after this she decides she doesn’t like me and she’s sorry she invited me?” “What if after this I decide I don’t like her and then I don’t know how to get out of future invitations?”), you’re IN. Before long you will be leaving your house ON A REGULAR BASIS!

As with pottery, I HATED country line-dancing at first. I was trying not to cry in front of my new friend, and also trying not to radiate the kind of palpable misery that might make her feel bad, but it was AWFUL. I couldn’t get it AT ALL. I felt as if everyone was looking at me. (This impression was enforced by the fact that other people kept saying “Here, just do it like this! It’s just a simple shuffle-step!” at me, showing they Really Had Been looking at me.) However, I was bolstered by my recent pottery experience: I hated THAT to the point of tears at first TOO, but I kept at it and soon I really liked it! I think I just pretty much always hate new things, that’s all, but the only way for them not to be New Things is to keep doing them until the newness wears off, and that’s just pretty much always going to involve a certain degree of suffering.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing: wearing the newness off of country line-dancing. I’ve had five classes so far. Every class, they teach one new dance, and I can’t do it at all, and I steep in utter misery. Then they review the new dance they taught the previous week, and my misery starts to dissipate a little because I kind of know parts of this one—but I am still mentally counting how many classes I still have to suffer through, and planning to quit after that. Then we review the previous-previous and previous-previous-previous weeks’ dances, and oh I can mostly do these! This is fun! I like this except for just that one tricky part! Let’s do it again and maybe I’ll get the hang of it! And then we review the one from the very first week, which I can totally do as long as I don’t get distracted, and it’s fun, and such a good way to trick oneself into exercising, and I start mentally planning to sign up for the next batch of classes. …Is this making you feel a little sorry for Morgan and what she’s gotten herself into with this friendship?

I had a post mentally ready to go, I don’t remember how it went now, something about how I’ve been watching the Veronica Mars movie (takes place after the end of the TV series) and having a few surprisingly Team Logan dreams—and then I found out that one of my high school friends died this week, of a routine illness. We weren’t close anymore and I had mixed feelings about him, so I feel weird telling you about this because then some of you are going to feel like you should say “Sorry about your friend” and it feels wrong to accept even that degree of sympathy. But we were close back then, and it’s startling to think someone can just DIE like that. Not heart attack, not stroke, not cancer, not old age, but just, like, a virus. It makes it harder to do that human thing humans do, where they self-soothe their Death Fears by victim-blaming: “It’s fine, I’m okay, that can’t happen to ME because I [take care of myself / eat right and exercise / am not fat / get medical care when I need it].” He died because he got sick from a virus and the treatments were not effective and the virus took him down, and that sometimes happens to mortal beings no matter how many magical kale and yoga spells they cast.

The reason my friend and I stopped being close is that he wouldn’t stop pursuing me romantically. At first it was awkward (I didn’t feel that way about him at all) but also cute and flattering: I’d just had a bad break-up with my high school boyfriend, and it was nice to feel as if other guys might like me. And he was a nice, smart, funny guy, and fun to be around, and a great part of that friend group. But then it got distressing when I turned him down and it didn’t stop. He was the stereotypical Nice Guy, who thought I was dating jerks and I should just realize the perfect guy was waiting for me all along—and I was 17-18 years old when this all started, so I was theoretically on board with that narrative and couldn’t figure out why it seemed so icky in practice (answer: because that kind of thing only works when two people like EACH OTHER, not when it’s one-sided). He kept inviting me to go places, implying it was with the group, and then it would turn out to be just him. He would invite me to see a movie just as friends, and then put his arm around me. He’d bring me presents, not MEANING anything by it. I’d get mad and he’d back off, but then when I was like “Whew, now we understand each other and everything’s okay!” and be friendly again, he’d take it as an encouraging sign that this time I was starting to LIKE-like him.

It seems so clear that I should have broken off the friendship entirely over this, but I was young, and I DID like him as a friend, and he was part of a friend group I absolutely didn’t want to leave. Even now it makes me angry and upset to think that in order to get away from HIS inappropriate behavior, I would have had to give up that whole friend group. Meanwhile our friends were saying I should give him a chance: he’s such a great guy! you guys would be so good together! But there was NOTHING THERE except warm, fond, friendship feelings. I knew he was great! But he wasn’t FOR ME.

I was so glad when he finally seemed to hear me on the subject and he moved on and started dating someone else and she was really great for him and they seemed to be getting serious. This was a few years later, when I was in college and dating someone myself. Then when I was home on a break he took me out to lunch and told me that he still had feelings for me and would dump his girlfriend if I said the word. You might think that would be heady stuff, but it made me feel sick, and my heart sank, and I was angry, and it made me think very poorly of him that he would do this to his girlfriend. Also, it didn’t feel as if he really DID like me. It was as if he had some sort of Ideal Girl in mind, and he’d put my face on it, and it wasn’t me at all.

We had another talk in which I tried to explain that it was Never Going To Happen and that I wanted him to stop all this, and he became angry and accused me of “using him.” I couldn’t think of how to explain how wildly that assessment missed the mark, and I thought maybe it would finally end his stupid crush if he believed that about me. We parted on very dicey terms. Then one of his parents died suddenly, and I found out about it from the newspaper and sent him a condolence note, and he responded petulantly that he hadn’t told me about it because he didn’t think I wanted to be that kind of friends. That led to an I-give-up silence of a number of years, and then we became Facebook friends but never interacted directly, and it’s been that way for many years. You can see why you don’t need to say “Sorry about your friend.”

I think what’s hard to work out is that he really did seem like a great guy. It doesn’t seem as if that can be true based on the stories I’m telling about him, but he REALLY DID or else I wouldn’t have kept trying to be friends with him. It seemed as if he just had this ONE glitch and if I could just EXPLAIN things well enough to him… Well. I was happy for him when he finally did get married. I have a lot of good memories of him as a friend from the days before he became problematic. But the fact is that this friendship ended because when I didn’t like him the way he liked me, he first blamed my judgement (she just dates jerks; she can’t see the great guy right in front of her) and then my character (she’s “using me”; she’s not a good friend), and then he used it against me (if she doesn’t like me romantically, she doesn’t get to hear about important things that happen in my life). He was manipulative and petulant and unfair and unreasonable, and he managed to spin that into a narrative where he was doing it out of love for me and I was not appropriately appreciative.

But so much of that could have been chalked up to being really young and stupid and inexperienced and immature. And so many genuinely good guys DO fall for the Nice Guy theory of why a woman doesn’t like them, before they’ve realized they can use mirror-empathy to find another solution (i.e.: “Sometimes a woman likes me but I don’t like her—not because she’s a Nice Girl and guys don’t like Nice Girls, or because I’m an idiot who can’t see true love right in front of my face, or because she needs to work harder or wait longer to make me love her, but because she and I just don’t click; maybe it’s the same way sometimes when I like a woman and she doesn’t like me that way”). So I was kind of hoping that one day I’d get an email from him saying that now that he was older and was in a real relationship and had a good life, he saw the situation more clearly and realized what an idiot he’d been, and was sorry for acting like he thought we were actors in a dumb teen movie. His death means this is never going to happen and I am always going to remember him this way.