How My Mind Works

Prologue:
My husband recently treated me to his spot-on impression of me: “I have a backache. Do you think I’m dying?”

***

The day before Thanksgiving, my neighbor called to see if I had a rolling pin she could borrow. I told her I sort of did; our rolling pin is now just a cylinder – the handles were unscrewed, dismantled and lost by one of my sons when he was a toddler. You can still roll with it, though, so she came over and I presented it to her. “It’s really only a dowel,” she said. Which is true. A rolling pin without handles is basically a dowel.

Twenty-seven Thanksgivings ago, my brother was home from college and he needed a ride to the home of one of his high school friends. I brought him there and came inside to say hello to the kid who I hadn’t seen in a few years. The kid’s older brother was there with his girlfriend and I talked to them for a while, lamenting how I had graduated from college a year before but still wasn’t able to find a job I liked. “Are you interested in communications?” the girlfriend asked me. “Because I work for a company that’s actively looking to hire.”

I was a psychology major and had a very different idea about what “communications” meant than she did, but I said yes and she gave me her colleague’s name and I called the woman and got an interview and then got a job there all within a few short weeks.

I thought of all this because my brother’s friend’s last name was Dowell.

At that job, I met my husband. He was one of very few single men working among a sea of linen-clad, pedicured, estrogen-laden Communications professionals. He and I went out for lunch a few times and then occasionally to the movies. I had a boyfriend at the time, but didn’t think much of it. I was in New York and my not-yet-husband was thin, well-dressed, and fun to talk to, so I assumed he was gay.

It turned out I was wrong about that and we started dating and then one thing led to another and now here we are, 27 years later, lending dowels to our neighbors.

I was thinking yesterday, about how much I have to be thankful for and topping the list was finding someone who can reflect to me who I am and help me laugh about it.

I’m glad we have been left with a pastry-rolling dowel. Because the people who come into our lives and become the most important to us are often the result of chance encounters and uncharacteristic decisions, and my gratitude for these types of happenstance may never have come into such clear focus if what I had was still a regular old rolling pin.

Opposites Attract

My husband just came back from a speaking engagement at Philadelphia University. He was asked to give a presentation to a group of animation students. He put together a bunch of work he had overseen when he was the creative director at Nickelodeon. I’m not sure what it all amounted to, but he said he left them with this sentiment: You all have a lot of opportunity right now, because everything is falling apart. If you’re willing to think and figure things out, there’s probably a lot of different ways your careers could go.

He told them, “When I started at Nickelodeon, it was kind of a nothing network. We had to build it up into something. If you went there now for a job, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun.”

This is one of the things my husband does best: imagine things that don’t exist yet. I don’t even know how that’s done.

He told me that afterwards, one after another student came up to him and said the same thing. That they really appreciated his perspective. That everyone else that comes to talk to them – everyone – describes a future of doom and gloom. Even the professor said that to him.

“I don’t do doom and gloom,” my husband told the professor. “For that, you need to talk to my wife.”

One Happy Mother

The other day I agreed to let the Almost-Teenager have four friends spend the night. Don’t ask me what I was thinking. As far as I’m concerned anything beyond one single houseguest is a “sleepover party” and I’m philosophically against sleepover parties, so it’s a mystery. It seemed like an okay idea at the time – when the Almost-Teenager was alone and well-behaved and asking politely – but as soon as just one boy showed up, I could feel the shrillness in the air and I knew that my decision was a very bad one indeed.

Early in the evening, the five Almost-Teenagers left the compound and went on a short neighborhood adventure. It was quiet while they were gone, quiet enough that I noticed how tense I’d become while they’d been braying here with their hootenanny antics.

Instead of seeking out my husband for comfort and solace – asking him to help calm and center me – I did what I always do: I cornered him and started complaining that we have too much “stuff.”

I don’t know how those two things have become inextricably entwined in my psyche, but they are. I go from “The Kids Are Acting Looney” to “I Feel Like Every Single Thing In This House Has One Purpose And That Is To Stand Between Me And Whatever It Is I’m Looking For.” My husband usually finds these rants of mine understandably distasteful. He feels defensive and ashamed. He does have a lot of stuff, but the truth is, so do I. And I have a really difficult time going through it and getting rid of all I don’t need.

On the heels of that ugly scenario, I read this blog post from my friend Laura about her being gifted a session with a personal stylist. Someone who came to her house, went through her closet with her and instructed her what should stay and what should go. The stylist took what remained and showed her how to put pieces together so they actually look good. So that she looks good.

So last week I told my husband that what I wanted for Mother’s Day. Please don’t get me a plant, I told him. I don’t want any gifts that I need to keep alive. And that one year that y’all got me that tree pruner – that was imaginative, but it didn’t really sing Mother’s Day to me. I’m happy to have Mother’s Day be business as usual, but if you are going to go to the trouble of getting me something, this is something I’d really enjoy.

I don’t know why having a clean, streamlined, efficient closet would make a difference in how I feel about a slew of sugar-pumped boys ransacking my house, but in my mind’s eye, it does. I might not convey any more authority when I yell, “Put your popsicle sticks in the trash!” but at least I know I won’t be wearing the sea-green tee shirt (which is wrong, wrong, wrong) when doing so.

I have to say, I feel the difference already. In fact things began to shift starting with that initial sleepover breakdown. My husband did not get defensive during my fit, and instead listened to me quietly. He said something rational like, “We can clean out the basement and the playroom together, but we’re not going to start that project tonight.” I felt heard, so I calmed right down. He didn’t take my barbs personally – or at least I think he didn’t. The whole thing passed uneventfully and I thought, Wow, this is how grown-ups act.

I don’t know why it requires something cataclysmic for me to put my own life in order. Or to ask for what I secretly want. I don’t want to turn into (or remain?) a person who feels like she needs to endure months of feeling stifled or oppressed in order to break out, Helen Reddy style, and roar about what she’s rightfully entitled to. I just want to be a woman who says, “Hey this seems like fun and would make me feel good,” and have that sentence be completely independent of how many lunches I prepare or how many carpools I drive. To provide for myself simply because I like making myself happy.

And because it feels good to be one happy mother.

Come Cry With Me

When my husband and I left the AA Meeting the other night, he asked me if I’d cried. No, I told him. I just teared up a little.

“That’s crying,” he said. “Tearing up is crying.”

I don’t actually agree with that, but it seemed a crazy thing to debate so I let it ride.

“For some reason you label it ‘crying’ based on audibility, not eye moisture,” he said. (I’d had a very tough week with more than my fair share of audible eye moisture, so I felt like this was an accurate portrayal of me.)

He went on: “I consider any moisture in the eye to be crying. If I’m riding my bike on a windy day and my eyes tear, that’s crying.” I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that information. At the very least, it deepened for me what I consider the Endless Mystery of Men.

Later that weekend, my kids and I watched Blindside on DVR. We took bets on who would cry during this famously touching movie, going so far as to wager who would “cry first.” My sons have never cried during a movie. Not even during Up. The teenager thinks it’s both charming and revolting that I heave and sob while a pile of tissues grows on my lap.

I watched Million Dollar Baby with him. He didn’t cry. Juno, where Micheal Cera climbs into the hospital bed with her and they just lie together, silent. No tears. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a personal mission to simply find a movie that will break him down.

“That’s so sad,” my older son said about Big Mike when he told Sandra Bullock he’d never had a bed. I’d seen that clip in trailers about a hundred times and still I started convulsing as soon as Big Mike delivered his line.

The little one passed me a box of tissues. “We win,” he said. The teenager looked over at me with bemused pity.

I feel so good after a Movie Cry. It never produces that hangover feeling like a Fight Cry or a Therapy Cry, or what I imagine to be an AA Cry. A Movie Cry is just pure release.

I looked over at my boys -- my "Mystery Men in Training" -- and tried to detect a touch of eye moisture. I couldn't. “As usual,” I told them, “you have no idea what you’re missing.”

Mmmmm....Humble Pie

It’s been four and a half weeks since my husband broke his ankle. It will be another few days until he can put weight on it, use a walking cast. After that, another several weeks until he can walk on his own. Until then, I will continue to minister to him as I have been since mid-February.

Oddly enough, I hadn’t really expected his accident to affect my life to the degree it has. I worried deeply about his pain management those first few post-op days. I hate seeing people in pain; I hate feeling helpless around another person’s suffering. But once those days had passed, I thought it would be business as usual.

Early on, maybe the third day we were home from the hospital, he said something to me like, “So. Don’t you appreciate everything I do around here, now?”

At the time, I said, “Yes. Yes, I do.” But what I was really thinking was, “What on earth are you talking about? I did everything before and I’m doing everything now.”

At the time, I was feeling like his contributions were minimal. He waters the plants. He puts the garbage cans out on the curb. Sometimes, he folds some laundry, empties a dishwasher. The kids can pick up the slack on that, I thought. I won’t even notice the difference.

My head is still reeling from the stupidity of that thought. Having a man down is all consuming – like having an infant again, except without the nine months you have to mentally prepare. In a typical blogpost, it is here that I might start giving examples of all the extra things I have to do. But I won’t now. Because it’s too humiliating for me to list things that other women do regularly (like buy food and prepare meals for their husbands) which, to me, falls into the category of martyred service. I know it’s no big deal to have to change light bulbs. All I’m saying is, that’s not something I usually do.

And there are about a hundred things like that, little and big, that I now do all day, every day. They’re not difficult, and each one in and of itself, is not time consuming. But they all add up to the colossal contribution that my husband typically makes to the household – a contribution that I, for the most part, have taken for granted.

It didn’t take me an entire month to come to this conclusion. But it did take me a while to stop feeling sorry enough for myself in order to be able to write about it. To figure out how to manage his chores and responsibilities enough to find the time to write at all.

Messy Jessie

I’m pretty good at taking care of people. What I’m really bad at is keeping things off the floor. I was expecting a challenge when the doctor told us that Scott’s foot would need to be completely immobilized for four weeks, but I didn’t think it would come in the form of having to conquer my own compulsion for chaos.

Scott can only get from here to there with his left foot. His right foot may not touch the ground at all. He can use crutches, he can use a walker, he can hop or slide or shimmy on his butt. But he can’t put any weight on his ankle for another two weeks.

We live in a house with approximately one thousand stairs, so there’s that to contend with. But bigger than that, there’s me to contend with. She who leaves clothes on the floor, cabinets open, shoes strewn about. It is my nature and my habit to carry armloads of parcels in from the car and just dump them on the floor until I’m ready to deal with them. Often that takes days.

I pile things on the bottom steps to be taken upstairs whenever I’m making the trip. I have my places for backpacks, tennis bags, laundry baskets, snow boots, magazines to be filed, garbage to go out, and guess what – it’s all on the floor.

My head hurts from trying to turn myself into a person who puts things in their proper places. I don’t mind the extra chores, the bed pans, the tracking of meds, picking up all the little slack that my husband can’t manage. But picking up in general – I just don’t roll that way.

Date Night

“Well, we’re out together on a Friday night. And I’m nude.”

My husband really did say those exact words to me last Friday night. And they were true. Unfortunately we were in the emergency room, he on a stretcher, me by his side, both of us in the corridor waiting for an orderly to wheel him over to the operating room for surgery.

He’d fallen on a patch of ice on his way home from the bus stop. His feet slipped out from under him and he landed entirely (and wrongly) on his ankle, which was dislocated and fractured. A neighbor moved him into my car, we went to the nearest hospital, and they moved him onto a stretcher and into an examining room. Then hospital procedures took over.

Hospitals seem like alternative universes in some ways. Time doesn’t work the same way in there. I remember realizing this the first time I was in labor – thinking that everything seemed to take forever to happen, but also that time seemed to gallop along much more quickly than you’d expect. That was certainly the case on this Friday night, where Scott was examined, x-rayed, sedated, reduced (that’s what you call it when the doctor pops the joint back into place), x-rayed again, and ultimately prepped for surgery. He was in the operating room four hours after he was wheeled in the door, which seemed like forever and also seemed like no time at all.

It felt as if a million little miracles happened that night. First off, that Scott managed to avoid being run over by the neighbor who was backing down the driveway that he lay at the base of. That we were considered at the top of the triage list. That the orthopedist was already in the ER when we arrived. That the nurses were able to remove Scott’s favorite pants without having to cut them.

Every time a “worst case scenario” was presented, it never came to be. Little miracles, just like that, until the miracle of all miracles: ten o’clock on a Friday night, my husband and I are out together -- him naked, me awake. But alas, we’re not alone.

The Gecko Chronicles - VII

Note: The Gecko Chronicles are not posted sequentially, but you can find them all batched in a tidy little group at the left.

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE
Technically, Scott is now in charge of getting crickets. But it’s cold out. And he doesn’t drive. And all the cricket vendors are a long bike ride away. So when I have an errand to run and I’m driving near Petco, I either take Scott along, or I just buy the crickets myself.

I consider it a temporary situation. When the weather warms up, and it’s neither raining nor humid – that is, during those seven Good NJ Weather Days we get every year – I’ll be totally off the hook for cricket retrieval.

Scott and I had to go to Staples recently to get a presentation printed for his trip to LA. Petco is right next door. For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, the “superstore” was not able to provide Scott the services he needed, so we left Staples, bought crickets and went to one of the local printers closer to home.

“Don’t put the crickets in the back seat,” I told Scott as he twisted his body around to put the crickets in the back seat. “I’ll forget them if they’re back there.”

“I’ll remember,” he said.

The printer needed a full day to make Scott’s presentation binders, so it was my job to remember to pick them up the following day. Before Scott left for work he said to me, “Please, please, don’t forget to pick up the binders.”

He also said, “Guess what’s in the back of the car.”

I truly had no idea where this was going.

“The crickets,” he said.

He brought them inside and shook their frozen carcasses around the bag like maraca seeds. He felt just terrible that they’d frozen to death overnight. I felt terrible that I now had to make a whole separate trip over the mountain to get another batch.

“I think I can bring them back to life,” he said as he retrieved the crickets and transferred them into one of the quart-sized containers we get when we order Egg Drop Soup.

“You’re not going to microwave them, are you?” I only asked because that seemed especially horrifying.

“No,” he said. “Just wait.”

A few minutes later he came back and tilted the plastic container toward me. “Are they moving?” he asked.

“Only if you consider their sliding from one end of the container to the other 'movement'.”

“Wait. I think I can do this,” he said, and ran off with them yet again. After twenty minutes I yelled a polite inquiry up the stairs. “I flushed them,” he called down, an unusual sound of defeat in his voice.

For better or for worse, the frozen cricket incident illustrates the main difference between my and my husband’s approach to life. His ability to remain hopeful and optimistic in the face of almost any circumstance, no matter how improbable or dismal. And then mine.

Confessions of A Popcorn Addict - Part III

I was embarrassed to tell my husband that my Period Key was sticking. I’ve had the same problem with my 8 Key in the past, but I can go for days without typing an 8 so it’s something I was easily able to ignore. I knew once I told my husband about the Period Key, we were going to have to have The Popcorn Discussion.

I know popcorn is ultimately not my friend. I can feel enamel cracking under my crowns and am often vexed by hulls wedged into molar gums. And last week was not the first time I’ve had popcorn detritus caught in my throat. I know some people think I was overreacting to that, but I do personally know someone who had to go to a doctor to get a popcorn hull removed. Not only that, but if you Google “popcorn hull stuck in throat” there is some scary information available about not only infections, but asphyxiation.

I confessed to the popcorn in the same sentence as I lamented about my Period Key. I hung my head and giggled, a sure sign that I am wracked with shame.

My husband left the room and reappeared almost instantly with the Electrolux. He ran the wand over the keyboard once or twice, turned it upside down and shook it a bit (the keyboard, not the vacuum) and, like magic, my Period Key was back to its old supple self. My 8 Key also worked like new.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I swear I won’t eat popcorn in here anymore.”

“You said you weren’t going to eat popcorn anymore at all.”

“I know, I know,” I whined. “I’ve been trying.”

Even I could hear how pathetic I sounded.

I know that the first step in overcoming an addiction is to admit you have a problem. I feel like I have done that. I guess, deep down, I wish that were the only step necessary. That the rest of it would take care of itself.

I don’t know any other way to get through my 3 PM to 5 PM slump without an enormous bowl of popcorn. I need it. Even though it turns me into something primal and ugly.

My name is Jessica. I am a popcorn addict.

I’m Not So Odd…

My husband recently characterized our relationship as a Felix and Oscar, which is just blatantly untrue. Yes, I leave drawers and cabinets ajar, but I don’t set half-eaten sandwiches on the couch and then go off to bed.

What I do do is float in and out of tidiness. Some days I’ll bend down and pick up the dirty socks that “Felix” left on the kitchen floor. Some days I just walk past them.

What I am not is fastidious. I don’t know how you get like that, but it seems way more complicated than just a decision that’s made over morning coffee. I have a friend who launders his shoelaces and has black rubber galoshes for his windshield wipers. (Wiper booties, they’re called.) Some of my tennis pals have relationships with their irons and steamers and vacuum cleaners that I cannot even begin to understand.

My big problem is that I have no secret intermediary area – a household purgatory, if you will -- where things can reside for a while between the time that I’ve decided they’ve outlived their usefulness and the reaching of their ultimate resting place. I pull things out that need to be recycled, or donated, or trashed, or sold and they just sit out in the open because I’m afraid that if they go in the basement or the attic, I’ll forget about them.

But really, does any of that make me an Oscar?

I’d love to think of my husband and me as more like Ricky and Lucy or even George and Gracie. But if not Felix and Oscar then I think I might have to cop to his other favorite characterization of me:

This one is almost too easy to picture. Me with my nose pressed against the window, wiping my hands on a dishtowel and, in my squeaky, nasal voice, shouting, “Ab-ner!