Faulted, Flailing, Failing, and Forgiveness (at Forty)

How's that for an alliterative title?

Last night, something, or should I say, someone happened to me. But I have to say something first before I actually write about what that was and who it was. (Okay, it was Eight).

I've never had great confidence in myself, but over the years I've come to accept the things I will never be and the things I probably won't ever have. But, I have also finally decided that there's something that I actually like about myself: I am comfortable with my outgoing personality, my ability to be silly and have fun, and sometimes even my verbosity. I highly believe in the powers of the written and spoken word and encourage people to communicate whenever and however they can, be it by letter, email, face-to-face - whatever.

I noticed from the time Eight was a mere One and A-Half that she was a talker. Her vocabulary was astounding for her age and she amazed her pre-school teachers when, at barely Two, they said she could probably run their class. (Swear to Thirteen Billion, they said that.) And yes, I wrote only days ago how her chatterbox ways were grating on me and yes, I still mean it (although not as emphatically). Over the years, though, it has been becoming my happy realization that Eight is like me in the one way in which it's okay with me that she is: she, like me, is silly and fun, but mostly I'm thrilled that she uses her words. And last night, I found out just how articulately and thoroughly she knows how to express her small self with those words.

We sat together until midnight, the two of us holding hands, the two of us crying. First, she stared at me with her huge, blue eyes and cried while she spewed her innermost feelings about her troubles with school and how she's already worried that she's not smart enough for third grade and will never be smart enough for college because she's struggling with math (for the record, she is quite bright). She confessed to using a calculator when she was struggling. She told me about the mean children at school and her feelings about not having a younger sibling (because as she told me, she would know just how to be the perfect older sister and take wonderful, loving care of a brother or sister); she explained how it makes her feel sad when I am on the phone and how I shoo her away; how she hates herself because she annoys everyone and how nobody calls her first for play-dates and how she's always the one asking. Suddenly her age-appropriate clothing is now ugly, she feels incapable of everything and anything, and she thinks I don't want to spend time with her. She doesn't understand why I do things that she can't do with me and why I get upset with her when she asks me where the ice cream is. She wanted to know why I yell at her all the time.

I looked at my Eight in disbelief.

In my own defense, she gets a disproportionate amount of attention in comparison to Twelve and I most certainly do spend time with her and I have gone above and beyond for her as a class parent and even when I wasn't the class parent. And because she's a child, she seems to need me most when 1) the phone rings (it's always the best time to tell me that she has a hole in her sock or that she can't find her Polly Pockets), 2) we are watching a movie we've seen 18 times and after only getting three hours sleep the night before, I doze a bit, 3) she is fully involved in a movie or a game and I decide to write or check my email because, well... I fucking enjoy doing it , or 4) I go out once every two months and she can't bear to be without me even though she's going to sleep anyway.

Anyone that's a parent can relate to these things, I'm sure. It's quite frustrating to never be able to close the bathroom door to pee without someone trying to break in or tell you a really loooong dream she had through the door. We all know it's impossible to have an uninterrupted adult conversation because even when we walk into another room for privacy, there are always footsteps not far behind. I've tried to talk to Eight about how I need grown-up time and privacy, just like she needs her private time with her little friends. I've tried to let her know that sometimes I need to be able to think a complete thought without it being interrupted. It's not mean, it's just... true. I've also tried to explain to her that she needs to be respectful of me and the very few things I ask of her (and her brother) and to be a good listener. Shit, my kids really have it easy here - too easy. So when I ask either of then to brush their teeth at least once a fucking day, they can comply to the request without an argument. Right?

But she was right on some levels and man, to see my faults and possible misguidances through the eyes and mouth of my Mini-Articulate-Me threw me. Maybe all these years that I thought I had my parenting skills down pretty pat, I didn't. I had always thought since the time my kids were able to move around as infants that it was best to speak to them as small people rather than speaking to them all goofy and babyish all the time, as they would learn better communication skills that way. I was right, too, since my kids both were exceptional speakers and were always able to communicate clearly as soon as they learned their first words. But maybe I went too far. Maybe by trying to reason with them all the time and by me trying to be honest and explain things to them was the wrong way to go. Maybe although bright and communicative, Eight just still wasn't understanding my explanations. How could she not understand that it's rude to interrupt a conversation just because she feels the need to tell people she saw a caterpillar or the dog farted? How could she not understand that if after the tenth, "please brush your teeth" they still weren't brushed, that my yelling isn't because I'm mean, but because I'm frustrated?

But those aren't the real questions. They're: How the hell don't I - Ol'Forty - understand that she is just eight; my Eight? How is it that even though it all sounds reasonable to me, a supposedly reasonable, intelligent adult, that it might be completely unreasonable gibberish to her? How is it that she sat there, so maturely, yet so gripped by her sadness that she just couldn't stop sobbing and saying horribly awful things, that I never realized just how small and vulnerable she truly is?

All I could do was cry with her, apologizing.

Forty-Four came down to see what the commotion was about and just stood over us, glaring down at me. He later chastised me for crying in front of Eight, standing by his belief that it's too scary for kids to see their parents cry. He said she was just in a mood and the gist of the rest of that "conversation" was that I shouldn't have indulged in her alleged "mood."

Maybe I've expected my children to understand too many things that were far beyond their comprehension. Maybe I've been a little harsh here and there because my own private, non-child-related things are pressing on me.

But even if I screwed up in some ways with my kids, I stand by my own belief that they can know their parents are humans and as humans, we are imperfect. Parents make mistakes and should always apologize when they do. There is absolutely nothing wrong with showing emotion to those you love, whether big or small, or with asking for forgiveness, no matter who you are.

I learned a lot in my almost-two weeks of being Ol' Forty. A friend recently told me there's always room for improvement with everything and I applied that to this situation. Certainly, I can always improve my parenting skills and with Eight's confessions and insights about how she feels about things in her life and how she feels about me at times really opened my big, green orbs. I learned that even my child can humble me and that she can also be quite profound. I learned that I have a lot to learn.

That scene will play in my head forever, I am sure. It will serve as a reminder of many things:

- My kids can be exceptionally deep and thoughtful. And everything they say should be considered.
- While they need to be loved and entertained, I still stand by my children needing to learn and respect adult/child boundaries.
- Even if my kids are frustrating the shit out of me, I need to step back and make sure my responses are appropriate and based on their actions and behaviors - not based on anything else.
- The unconditional love we give them is fully reciprocated. Eight told me I was the best mother and how I am never, ever wrong.

But in the end, even if have a wonderfully articulate child, even if I have tried to explain the unexplainable to her in the past and have to learn not to anymore as she is still just a little kid, I still had to make sure she knew and understood that I am human and fallible (of course, in smaller words).

"Mommy was wrong," I told her. "Please forgive me."

And she took my face in her little hands and did.

Like White on Rice

I'm always awake; the noise in my head is so fucking loud. New problems, old problems, solved problems: they're all game for some re-thinking. I'm still trying to figure out why I dated a boy/man who was five years older than me when I was in 9th grade. Five years of my life were completely devoted to him, and the next 25 had been sprinkled with thoughts of regret over why the hell I was so devoted to him.

My mind doesn't shut off. Little things, like how bad I'm going to feel in the morning when I have to leave my dog alone, to the larger things, like how I'm going to pay for school, consume me. These things sit in my head, heating up as the day progresses like kernels of corn sizzling in a pot of hot oil waiting to pop. And when my head hits the pillow at one or two in the morning, the popping is what keeps me awake until three.

There's so much discontent in my life, but even on the days when life is sitting well enough with me to a certain degree that I can actually start a task and carry it through to completion, I still don't feel any peace of mind. I often wonder why it is I can't put anything to rest. No matter how hard I try, nothing's ever dealt with and then forgotten; nothing ever has closure.

One particular relationship in my life barely had time to blossom before it was cut off; the person moved away, leaving a huge question mark what-iffing me to death for a long time, just like many other things before that and after. Friendships that I had thought sat on solid ground always seemed to end without warning or explanation, leaving me, again, faltering and wondering. But of course the biggest lack of closure, and the most significant one, was regarding who killed my father and why.

It's been almost 20 years since he's died and now that I, Thirty-Nine, am approaching Forty, I've come to accept he's not here, and have tried to reconcile his absence from mine and my children's lives. It's a difficult thing to attempt, but I never give up trying. After all, I have no choice. But even so, there will always be that desperate melancholy that permeates my soul when I see grandpas and grandchildren together.

Sixty-Seven called me up the other most shittiful day with Forty-Seven on the line. The two of them together meant something was a-brewin'. Apparently, they had just gotten off the phone with a psychic and needed to inform me of what had happened. Over the past 20 years, we have talked to psychics: some on the phone while they searched through old coffee grinds to "read" our fates, and others in person. Some seemed to say a few remarkably accurate things, while most just generalized. We've been to George Anderson, one of the first famous mediums to blast into the public eye claiming to communicate with the dead. My family read his books voraciously; they explained how he learned of his "gift" of communicating with dead people and how he couldn't be disproved. We suddenly had a tiny spark of hope: maybe there were people in this world who really might be able to help us communicate with our dad so that we could finally get some answers. Then we found John Edward. He, too, communicated with the dead. We read his books and watched his television show and even saw him in person. We still hoped for answers even when we weren't able to get them from either medium. But that day, two days ago, that awfully shitty day-in-the-life-of-Thirty-Nine, was somehow different.

Sixty-Seven: "This psychic told me I had a daughter with one child, and another daughter, my youngest, with two. She said the oldest grandchild has an attitude and a half and is a crack-up. He's also sometimes a prick."

We all laughed. Accurate enough.

Sixty-seven: "She then said my youngest daughter has a son who's sweet and mild-mannered."

Awwwws all around. My boy, Twelve.

Sixty-seven: "And listen to this."

I sensed something good, but never this good:

Sixty-seven: "She described Seven to a T. She's a princess and a yenta and a half. (laughter) She said Daddy can't get enough of her and he's with her all the time, protecting her. In her exact words, he's with her 'like white on rice.' He gets such a kick out of her because she reminds him of you as a little girl. He's always with her."

I cried the moment the words fell out of Sixty-seven's mouth. Just the thought that my dad was with my baby girl -protecting her, hovering around her- made me weak with relief. And belief. I never believed anything so much in my entire life and nobody will ever convince me otherwise.

Sixty-seven was flabbergasted as well. She said she was sure the first boy in the family, Fourteen, would be the focus of his dead grandfather's attention; never once did it cross her mind, or our's, for that matter, that Sassy Seven would have been the one Grandpa liked to hang around.

I wiped my eyes and fetched the now-burned chicken nuggets out of the toaster oven.

Thirty-Nine: "Here, Seven. Sorry they're burned."

I handed her the plate, phone still cradled on my shoulder. I couldn't help myself:

Thirty-Nine: "Hi dad."

Sixty-seven and Forty-seven laughed.

It was funny in a way, but serious in another. Funny that I addressed my dead father as I handed my daughter her lunch, yet serious in the way that now when I look at her, at her heavy-lidded eyes that we always joked were like her Grandpa's, I see my dad. Almost literally.

We were told by this psychic woman that my father is always with us, watching and protecting. We were told he loves my mother now more than he ever did. We were told that my father's father saw the gun and immediately came down and brought my father's soul quickly to heaven. We were told that his biggest regret is how he left us alone and in such a mess.

Sure, we might be gullible. But if someone told you after 20 years of whys, what ifs, and I wishes, that your daughter was being protected everyday by her grandpa, wouldn't you, too, believe?

It's the kind of closure I always dreamed of...

Fear Factor....

(Note: This isn't really my blog... This is just an assignment I had to write for my class in school. When writing for magazines, word-count is of the utmost importance, so it's important to be aware of it as you write. But how do you get across a feeling, an idea, or an experience when you have to do it in 1,500 words or less? It's hard...really, really hard, and word choice is crucial. So, because I am unable to blog the silliness I sporadically blog about, I figured I would post this. Hopefully, if anyone reads this, everything, or at least some of the things, I was trying to convey in this piece will come across the way they were meant to. (And if the message you get by the ending is that I'm a freak... wrong message!) Anyway, this is my Fear Factor...

Every Sunday night when I was around nine years old, I would start crying as soon as I went to bed. To this day, my mother still tells me how frustrated she was whenever she heard the whimpering coming from my room.
“What is it?” she’d ask when I’d peek through her bedroom door minutes later, rubbing the tears from my eyes.
“I don’t wanna go to school.”
“You have to.”
“It just comes into my mind that I do not want to go to school.”
And that’s what I said, verbatim, every week. I didn’t know why the thought of going to school on Monday mornings caused me so much grief and anxiety. But halfway through my favorite Sunday evening television show, The Jeffersons, I’d start feeling sad, and by the time Alice came on afterwards, I’d start monitoring the clock, counting the minutes until it would be over. When I finally turned off the T.V. to go to sleep, my eyes would get scratchy and begin to water.
It was only when I became an adult that my mother finally figured out the reason for my weekly crying jags. I had lost two relatively young grandparents when I was around five, the only uncle I ever knew when I was around eight, and the family dog (who’d been with my parents longer than I had), when I was nine. My mom’s theory that I was scared she might die while I was in school made sense and manifested in my Sunday night crying jags. Even if I couldn’t articulate it, the seed of fear had been sown in my mind. I somehow knew that a person didn’t have to be old and wrinkled in order to die, and that once you were dead, that was it. My uncle could never make me one of his toasted-bread-tuna-fish-and-lettuce sandwiches again; I’d never hear my dog, Kelly, howl from the sound of a passing police car’s blaring siren; and because I rarely saw them to begin with, I’d never remember what my grandparents’ voices sounded like.
That cluster of loss unfortunately was not the only one like that in my life. When enough years had finally passed to at least mellow my fears about death and loss, a friend of mine was killed while crossing the street on her bicycle, and a few years later, a boy from my high school died in a car crash. As all bad things happen in threes, or so it’s been said, my mother’s fifty-two year old best friend died right after I turned sixteen. What he figured was minor heartburn had actually been the beginning of a heart attack and he died that night. Death was neither choosy about age, nor its method, as I was learning, and its unpredictability was unnerving. How would these families ever survive?
In November 1989, my friend’s father, who was a cop, was killed on the job. I couldn’t imagine how he’d be able to go through life knowing his dad died by someone else’s hands until a month later when my own father never came home for dinner. He’d been late many times before, but my mother had never gone looking for him, until that night. My one sister had gone with her while my oldest sister and I remained home. The tension in the air between us while we waited wasn’t because of her usual disdain for my presence; it was caused by an unfamiliar worry. They seemed to be gone for a long time, as the store my father owned was only about seven minutes away, but for all I know now, it might have only been a few minutes since the anticipation of anything invariably makes time go by slower. When they finally did return, my mother must have been shocked into an eerie sense of calm when she rather neutrally announced, “Your father’s been murdered.”
We had no solid reason to think anything was wrong that night; we never received a phone call, nor had a grim-looking officer shown up at our doorstep informing us of bad news. The friendships the Freeport police had cultivated with my parents over the twenty-plus years they’d known them had indeed been in conflict with their duties as officers. It was only our mom’s sixth sense that something had happened to our dad that spurred her out the door that night. Her fears were confirmed when she saw police swarming the parking lot where my dad’s car was parked. My mother’s last vision of my father was his body slumped over the steering wheel in his car. We were later informed that after he had closed his store for the night and sat in his car waiting for it to warm up, someone shot him at close range. From what we were told, he must have seen the person, lifted his arm instinctively, yet uselessly, to protect himself, and the bullet hit the main artery to his heart, killing him instantly.
There was scarcely time to absorb what had happened as funeral arrangements had to be made within twenty-four hours, according to Jewish law. The funeral, however, was two days later, and I can only guess it had to do with the nature of his death. His extended family made all of the arrangements as best as they could to conform to the religious procedures of a faith we barely practiced because, “that’s what he would have wanted.” We were driven to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn where the women huddled together on one side, while the men prayed on the opposite side. We watched as an unadorned pine box was carried in by some of his cousins and his deceased brother’s sons, his body naked inside and wrapped in a religious shroud. The entire service was done in Hebrew, none of which we understood, and without emotion or consolation. When it concluded, we left the temple and stood in the middle of some street in an unfamiliar city. Because of a ridiculous rule that didn’t allow women at the cemetery, we were only allowed to watch as his body was driven away in a hearse. We never saw him; we never threw dirt on the grave after it had been lowered into the ground; we never said goodbye.
We grieved by instruction, not by individual need. Jews sit Shiva for a week and that’s what we did. We were told when to eat, how to accept visitors, where to sit, and not to answer phones or doors. The dictates of a religion I cared nothing about superseded how I needed to mourn. It was my loss; our loss; I wanted to be angry and hateful, eat when, or even if, I wanted to; I wanted to smoke a carton of cigarettes and crawl into bed. But even at nineteen, I knew life outside of my house on Ann Road still continued, and that I had no choice but to continue living, as well. I went back to my same job and my same college classes, although a slightly different person. I knew his death not only signified physical loss, but abstract loss: no cheesy father-daughter wedding dances; no more fishing trips; he’d never know his future grandchildren. I knew I’d be forced to grow up quicker by being forced into the working world, and out of the security of my former family life.
But there are more than just those losses. Although I’m no longer that child with normal fears about death, I’m now an adult with irrational ones. The first, most vivid memory of my life is when my mother told us my father was murdered. The second is the coverage from Channel 12 News. “Freeport Business Man Murdered,” some newsperson said, as cameras panned the image of my father’s dead body hanging out of his car, the Reebox on his feet my Chanukah gift to him a few days before. For a while after he was killed, I was scared and looked over my shoulder wherever I went; I became fearful of everything.
I attach extraordinary amounts of danger to the most ordinary things, and it not only applies to me, but to my children. I worry if they stand by a railing on the second floor at the mall because they could topple over and fall into the Koi pond below; a low-flying airplane means a crash is imminent and makes me wonder if I’m close enough that I’ll get hit with part of the wing; a jog over the Southern State parkway incites a panic that I might somehow stumble and fall over the surrounding fence and die a splattering death on the hood of a speeding Honda. I had never considered the possibility of a murder happening in my family, but because it did, it makes me believe something just as horrific is equally likely, and I unfortunately live my life waiting for it.