Another Goodbye.

Today.

Oof.

Today I am trying to feel positive instead of my usual negative. As we speak, my husband is upstairs on a conference call (we’ll get to that in a minute), Sophie is watching Octonauts, and I just finished packing for the night. Once he’s off the call, we will pile, with dog, into our car and head down to my mother- in- law’s pool. We try to go once a week, but this summer has had us on a whole new path. My parents moved to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, and a lot of free time has been spent driving to them to help them get settled, to help them unpack and so Sophie can see her grandparents. And my husband has been with us the whole time. He ruptured his Achilles’ tendon at the end of June and has been on crutches since. He’s had surgery, but recovery time is long and arduous, and since its his right foot, he also can’t drive. It’s been a trying summer in that respect, because he needs a lot of help, I’m constantly driving him to work, to the doctor, to his parents’ houses and to Pennsylvania. It can be a bit much- I’m not  used to having someone else in the house with us during the week. It kind of throws off the routine. It’s hard to explain to a 3- year- old that even though Daddy is here, he can’t play right now. Anyway, off we go, shortly. Sophie will play in the pool with me and her grandmother, while Matt works in the house. Hopefully, we will manage to convince Sophie to take a nap (fingers crossed), they will all BBQ and have dinner in the yard while I shower and change so I can meet my sister for the night. For a wake. Of an old friend.

I don’t want to go spreading things around, so we’ll call her Lisa. Lisa and my little sister became friends in middle school, 20+ years ago. There was a group of them that seemed to be together all of the time. All of them towering over my shrimp of a sister. They fully embraced the grunge of the early 90s, wearing over sized pants, flannel shirts and overalls, sitting around in someone’s room listening to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, smoking cigarettes stolen from someone’s mom. A few of them actually got the opportunity to go see Pearl Jam live, and I was sooo jealous. I remember one of the girls calling my sister to let her know that they got the tickets, and my sister happy- cried for an entire day. They were a hysterical group of kids, always laughing, always doing something silly. Always.

I don’t really remember what happened after that. I know that the friendship stayed strong through a good amount of high school. Some of the girls took a different route, adopting a different style, everything from raver to rockabilly, and some just holding on to the hippy- dippy style of their parents. Some moved away, some got married, some went to college. Our parents were far too conservative to really allow us to have our own style or opinion, so we basically took the respectable route: college, salary jobs, studio apartments in decent areas of the city, getting married to nice guys, buying practical automobiles. My parents’ influence on our lives was infuriating as a teenager. I completely get it now.

To make a very long story short, drugs (big drugs) entered the picture at some point, far after my sister and I had lost touch with the group. Occasionally we would hear through the grapevine that someone had overdosed and was in the hospital or was seen strung out in town somewhere, and unfortunately the call would come that someone had overdone it and had died. It has made me very grateful that we had managed to dodge whatever bullet it was that had hit our friends- girls that at one point were so much like us. And here we are today. Attending yet another funeral or wake or memorial for another friend who took the wrong road. I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve been through this. I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve been through this in the past year. But it’s not.

I don’t know if it’s because I am disconnected from that whole scene now, my party and club days far behind me, but it amazes me that with all that we know about this shit, that people (in their 30s!) are still doing it, and still dying from it. I don’t know. I’m not an addict of any kind. I don’t feel left out, necessarily, but I do feel like, maybe, people who have gone through it and have come out, just think I should shut up. But I made a conscious decision a long time ago that I would stay far away from it. And you can call me a goody- goody, or a prude or whatever. But Lisa is dead. I’m not. Nothing in the world is more important than that. It’s so sad, it’s so fucking sad. Maybe it’s because I’m a mother now, but the idea of losing my baby is hands- down the worst thing I could think of. I have no idea how I am going to be able to look her parents in the face tonight. I have no idea how they have been able to cope the last few days.

For the most part, our friends are all clean now. Unfortunately, we don’t really talk to, or about, the ones that aren’t, and some of them aren’t here anymore to talk to. This wake tonight is going to be awful. My gut wrenches just thinking about it. Lisa is at peace now, but her husband, her family, all of us are left to miss her and to hopefully learn about how to live from not only the good examples she left us (she was such a happy girl, she loved her friends desperately, she was so in love with her husband, she saw beauty everywhere, she laughed a lot),  but maybe we can learn from the not- so- great examples too.

I hope your demons have left you now. We honor your memory today, lovely girl.

Noggin Food

Something just recently occurred to me.

I am a mother.

I am someone’s mother.

That is INSANE.

My mother is a mother. My grandmothers were mothers, my frumpy friends who had kids right out of college (and frighteningly, now have middle school- aged children) are mothers. But me? Maybe not so much. I’m just this young hot chick with a kid! Ha. That’s hysterical. I wasn’t even sure I wanted kids, and I sure as hell knew I didn’t want them early on. I enjoyed the freedom of my 20s; traveling when and where I wanted (when I could afford it), moving when I got sick of my apartment, dating the wrong people and staying out until the bars told us to leave.
I got married at 31, and being in New York, that was considered young. Some of my friends didn’t get married until their 40s, some not at all. Anyway, getting married did nothing to change my life, other than I had this person living in my apartment. And I wore a ring. I still traveled (with him and alone), I still maintained my social life with my friends, went to work everyday, and I pretty much carried on as usual. I was hardly going to become a housewife. I never understood how getting married justifies not having a job.
Fast forward to summer of 2010, when two lines showed up on a stick. And although I wasn’t surprised, per se, it was certainly a shock. Adios cocktails with girlfriends. Adios apartment in the city. Adios freedom. And even as my belly grew, I still hadn’t grasped that the thing moving around in my stomach was an actual person. It was still almost a novelty to me. And 43 weeks later in April 2011, when she was born, I still didn’t get it. During the time I was on maternity leave, the company I worked for went belly up. And suddenly, not only was I a mother, but I was a stay- at- home mother.  And shit got real. I was now a NJ- living, CRV – driving, three- size- bigger- pants wearing, stay- at- home parent.

WHAT THE HELL?

Anyway, I have this little person that came out of my body. And I was a little confused. Did this make me a mother? I can tell you, in all honesty, that for a good while, I didn’t really even love her. Doesn’t that sound incredibly shitty? I know! I know! It felt pretty shitty too. Thankfully, I have talked to other mothers about that, and I find out that I am not alone. Now I can’t even find words to describe the ferocity with which I love this girl, but then it was a little different. I realize now that I was in pretty serious denial of a pretty serious case of post- partum depression. Anyway, as I am sure you know, it’s a really crazy thing, having a baby. You find out you’re pregnant, it grows in your person (weird and alien in itself), and then you push it out (or cut out, whatever the case may be), and then your body (and brain) is all fucked up, and then they send you home with it. And you’re supposed to know what to do. When we adopted our dog, the shelter came to our house to make sure that it was safe, and that we weren’t hoarders or junkies before they let us take THE DOG home, but no one came and made sure we weren’t maniacs before they sent us home with A BABY PERSON. And oh, by the way, you are supposed to feed it with your boobs (which in my case was extraordinarily painful), never put it down, and love it for the rest of your life. No pressure. But that is a story within a story. Another day, another day.

So here I find myself 2 years, 3 months and 2 weeks into this mother thing, and I am just starting to accept that the things I do are actually impacting this kid. Maybe it’s because she can talk a whole lot more now and I can understand what she needs. Maybe it’s just because she has the ability to absorb more now into her spongy little brain. Maybe it’s all of the above. It’s incredibly cute sometimes to hear her say things on her “phone” that I would say, but it’s also really frightening that I, a person who probably has no right procreating, am the one feeding her little noggin most of the time. Well, me and that effer Doc McStuffins. I’m no teacher, no rocket scientist, no genius. I’m certainly no saint, and I need to upgrade the brain- to- mouth filter because mine ain’t no good no more. I mean, we are trying to accept that we are old and we have become our parents. That all of the shit we said we were NEVER going to do we are actually doing. Or all that our parents said we couldn’t do? Oh, my kid’s totally going to do that!  Except that Goobers stuff. The peanut butter and the jelly in one jar? My mom was completely right on that one. That shit is gross.

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I Miss New York

I have 3 favorite times of day/ year in New York.

Number one is first thing in the morning in the summer, when only the coffee and bagel places are open, when the plans of the day have yet to be ruined, when only the poor suckers who work weekends and the joggers are out. When we were still in Brooklyn and had no kids or responsibilities, Sunday mornings were the best. I would send Matt down to Villa on the corner to get bagels and coffee, and I would sit in the sunlight of our living room and read my food magazines and eat my breakfast. I would call it “Having a Morning”. When I think about life before baby, that’s where my mind takes me. Selfishly sitting on my couch, eating a bagel, actually drinking (and maybe finishing) a whole cup of coffee, reading something glossy.

The second of my favorites is Friday evening in autumn. It’s light enough that it doesn’t feel like night yet, but dark enough that people put their front lights on, and I can sometimes see into their houses. I love to perv on people’s homes, when I can see just enough of their house to imagine what that rest of it looks like. But on Friday evening, my walks to and from the train, down the rows of brownstones, a slight chill in the air, and the prospect of the weekend ahead, are my list of wonderful things about city living.

And the last of my favorites was something I got to experience this past Thursday night. Summer evenings in New York City can be the grossest thing in the world, but they also seem magical to me sometimes. Everyone is out on the streets, in the park, on their stoops. Drinks flow, music pours out of the bars, and the restaurants with even the tiniest sidewalk real estate have outside tables. When the sun sets, there is a wonderful haze that covers the city, and even the boozy walk to the train made me feel lucky to live there.

This week I met with a wonderful friend who I don’t get to see much these days, and we got to sit and drink and chat in a way that I don’t do since leaving the city and having a kid. We talked about traveling and renovations to his apartment, about his boyfriend and scotch.  And when we left, I was sober but happy as I walked to the train. The city just seems alive on the nights leading up to the weekend, I was lucky to have some time to be part of it. It makes me miss the city, and for a few hours the next morning, I felt a little melancholy. I think Matt is used to my suburban doldrums a day after being back in NY.  I miss the late nights and late mornings of pre- baby life. I miss the ability to call a girlfriend on a whim and go get tanked up at some dive bar on 23rd Street. I miss not having to run for New Jersey A- Hole Transit and banging on the train door as it closes in my face. Or maybe I just miss sitting in front of a sunny window and drinking a whole cup of (hot) coffee.