Let's talk Grandmas! Okay!

All of this talk of elderly females got me thinking about grandmas.

I had two, which I believe is considered the norm. They are dead now.

My siblings and I used our grandparents' last names, so they were Grandma Mariano and Grandma Bradley. It still sounds weird to me when people call their grandparents by their first names, or even weirder, use some adorable made-up moniker, like Pop-ola or Grummsy. As if grandparents are figures of affection and warmth, and not forbidding matri-/patriarchs under whose shadow you must cower and throw offerings.

Actually Grandma Mariano was, by all accounts, the (much, much) less forbidding and stern of the two grandmothers, but she died when I was eight, so my memories of her are murky.

Wasn't she lovely? (That's my mom on the right.) I have many pictures of her, and she's gorgeous in all of them. ( have no pictures of Grandma Bradley, strangely. Although she didn't cast a reflection, so maybe that's why? And every time we tried to capture her image our camera burst into flames? I have to look into that.)

My most vivid memory of Grandma Mariano is sitting in the passenger seat of her car as she drove the wrong way down the one-way exit/entrance to my sister's high school. I remember a lot of people shouting and running out of the way. She seemed unconcerned.

I am told she did that sort of thing quite a bit.

I have also been told that instead of using the phrase, "I'll treat you," or "it's on me," she would say, "I'll blow you." Now, apparently this was some sort of vernacular in her day (I HOPE), but not the sort of thing you want to hear out of your grandma's mouth. My sister still talks about how mortifying it was to have her grandma utter the words "Let's go out for ice cream! I'll blow you!" in front of a whole bunch of teenagers who had wandered outside to see who had driven the wrong way into the parking lot and caused all the ensuing chaos.

Oh, how I wish I could remember that part.

This post is entirely the Pope's fault.

First of all, my turning-off of comments was an experiment. I was feeling comment-averse, and I wanted to see what it would feel like to not have comments. It turns out that if you’ve lived with comments and then you turn comments off, you feel like no one likes you anymore. And then you get too many emails to respond to, and you feel like a bad person. So the comments are back.

I want to be funny and brighten your day with some humor, but I am feeling like the lowliest of people today. I have not been good to my son today, O Internets. I am a bad person.

An hour ago my husband took Henry to the in-laws to spend the weekend. Tomorrow there is some kind of Thomas The Tank Engine event in Connecticut. Henry and his grandparents will ride a life-size Thomas, and Sir Topham Hatt will be there, and then they will gorge themselves upon the cotton-candy brains of Claribel and Annie, the Dim-Witted Coach Cars. Whatever will happen, Henry has been sick with excitement. He has educated everyone we’ve met about his plans for the weekend. The cashier at Met Foods now knows all about it. As does Crazy Shuffling Guy by the Q train, and Eye-Patch Man outside Natural Foods. “I’m going to Thomas’s World!” he told them, and then invited them to come along.

So this morning I woke up at 9:30, quickly realized that my kind husband had woken up with Henry two hours earlier and had let me sleep in, and was just as quickly plunged into shame and guilt. (Thanks, Catholic upbringing!) My baby is going to be away all weekend, and I should have been awake to spend these last moments with him, I told myself, and hurried to the living room. Where Henry got one look at me and screamed, “GO AWAY.” And then said it again, as if I hadn’t gotten the idea the first time.

And like the sulky adolescent I am and will always be, I stormed back to the bedroom and slammed the door and threw myself on the bed. That sure showed him! He’s going to feel bad now, I bet! And I’m being an excellent role model, with my stomping and slamming!

Thirty seconds later, it occurred to me that I was an ass, and so I returned to the living room, where my husband and I proceeded to yell at each other—over what, I can’t even remember. All I remember is saying I JUST WOKE UP COULD YOU LEAVE ME ALONE. I might have said it a few times. And then noticed Henry was weeping. So I went to him, I apologized to them both, I tried to make things right. “I want breakfast,” Henry wept, and I tried not to ask my husband why the fuck he hadn’t fed him yet, and I carried Henry to his high chair.

Where he proceeded to scream incoherently about some pain on his cheek. And then pain on his fingers. KISS IT, he shrieked, and I did, but then he raged some more about how the pain wasn’t going away. “Could you tell me what he’s talking about?” I asked Scott, maybe a little too loudly, as Henry screamed and screamed and stuck his fingers in my face screaming at me to KISS THEM TO MAKE THE PAIN STOP. “He has a bug bite on his cheek. I have no idea what the finger thing is.” KISS IT KISS IT KISS IT he continued. Did I mention about the screaming? The ear-piercing screaming?

I kissed. And I kissed. I had already poured his cereal, which was now soggy from soy milk and tears. Finally, Internets, I began to lose it ever so slightly. My reason deteriorated as follows:

I feel bad for you, so I shall kiss your hand.

Yes, okay, your hand hurts. I’ll kiss it more.

I’m beginning to doubt there’s anything wrong with your hand.

You are now freaking me out with the screaming, so I’ll tell you your hand isn’t really hurt.

I’ll tell you to be quiet. That will calm you down!

You’re just hungry. Hungry and out to get me.

If I tell you you’re okay in a louder voice you’re sure to understand me.

Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll rip the bib off and throw it away, then I’ll slam the cereal bowl down on the counter, and tear the high-chair tray off of you, so that your pain gives way to sheer terror!

At this my husband wheeled around and shouted something like What Are You Doing, You Monster, and I told him to shut up. Nothing enables someone to see your point of view like telling them to shut up. Didn’t you know that? Then I took the weeping boy and held him until he calmed down.

I have no idea what the finger-pain thing was all about, as he never mentioned it after that. I hope I didn’t terrify him into denial. He seemed completely fine after I kissed him multiple times and apologized and flogged myself and donned my Virtual Hairshirt (see above, re: Catholic), but I know that somewhere in the Future, a therapist is profiting from my failure as a parent.

I may be overreacting a tiny little bit. But one of my worst memories from childhood was being subjected to screaming by adults who believed that their anger or upset entitled them to scream whatever they felt like screaming, as loudly as they felt like screaming it. And now, experiencing that same loss of control with my own kid… well. It does fuck with one’s head, a little bit. It does make one feel like something lower than dirt. Whenever I was screamed at, it felt like there was a hole opening up inside me, like anything happy I had experienced before was false and I was stupid to believe it, and if I looked into the hole I would fall and fall and keep falling. I know it makes no sense but it’s the best way I can describe it, and God help me if I make Henry feel like that. The last thing I ever, ever want to do is make him feel like that.

Fireworks are pretty, but also loud.

I can’t take this long between posts. I’ve forgotten how to do this. It’s taken me at least an hour to figure out that punching the keyboard was wrong and only resulted in gbhj hgh fg som m m bnmbbv gh.

(Once, on a job interview, I took a typing test and I was so nervous that I didn’t look at the paper as I typed (this was back when we typed on “typewriters.” I’m old!), and when the interviewer took the paper out of the typewriter , he looked at it, then at me, then at the paper, and handed it to me and said, “I don’t know what to say about this.” Turned out I had placed my hands incorrectly on the keyboard and everything I had typed was gibberish. I responded, “What, that’s not right?” and laughed maniacally, which he apparently found more alarming than amusing. And that’s why I’m not working for the William Morris Agency today. True story!)

I’ve been at my parents’ house, eating their food and enjoying their clean and pretty home, with its lovely flowers and relative absence of mouse urine. On Friday night my mother went out dancing—did I not tell you that my mother is a ballroom dancer? And dances in competitions in which she wears spangly outfits down to there and up to here?—so it was just me and my dad. And Henry, duh. But then I put him down for the night, and my dad and I were hanging out, and we decided to watch a movie.

The movie, by the way, was “The Life of Brian,” rented by my mom, whose motives I can only guess at. I was uneasy at the prospect of watching this with my dad, as he is a holy man, the Catholic-est of Catholics, with his “Liturgy of the Hours” right there on the coffee table and his rosary beads invariably at the ready, and there we were, about to watch a movie that makes light of crucifixion. And I was pretty sure there was a blow job, somewhere in there.

The sacri-larity of it turned out to be less of a problem than the DVD’s audibility; we had to turn it waaay up in order to make sense of the dialogue, and then when the music surged we were deafened. Anyway, I was having a hard time paying attention because I kept hearing… something. A faint something or other. A high-pitched squeak somewhere off in the distance. There had been some fireworks earlier, so I figured the sounds were bottle rockets. But I couldn’t relax. Well, I thought, I’ll just check the child. I’m sure it’s nothing, but, you know, can’t hurt to check.

So I walked over to the stairs and OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING. THERE WAS SO MUCH SCREAMING. I tore ass up the stairs and there was my child, still lying down (it never occurs to him to stand up, he is so good and I am so bad), his face red and mottled, his head and the surrounding environs utterly soaked in tears. He must have been crying for a half an hour, at least. I never did figure out why he was so upset, because when I threw myself at him and scooped him up, all he could tell me was, and I quote, “I was crying so much and you didn’t come.” Wow. For the next half hour or so he snuffled into my neck while I read him stories and considered ritual disembowelment as a way to alleviate my guilt. Surely a little seppuku would convince Henry that I didn’t mean to ignore him! Surely!

The end! How dramatic that story seemed, before I wrote it. “I didn’t hear my son and so he cried.” Thank you, World Wide Webs, for showing me how silly I am. How negligent, yes, but also how silly.

I have so much more to write about but I’m so tired. Next: my near-death (or near-ankle fracture) experience on the subway and my interview on Bravo. Anticipate!

Welcome to Williamsburg. Here's your beret.

First off: my Dad thanks you for the prayers and good wishes. While I may be lacking in religiosity, or at least let’s say I don’t cotton to the church-going, my Dad is one holy bastard (and I’m sure he would be charmed by that turn of phrase) and appreciates very much all the praying. So if you have any more you feel like serving up, you go right ahead.

Okay, also? Apparently in addition to getting a Dacron stent inserted (what’s with the Dacron? Didn’t one of my commenters mention this? Can someone tell me why Dacron is the fabric of choice?), he’s also getting some pig valves. Pig valves. “Available only from Hormel,” as my Dad put it.

I don’t know what to say about that.

Last week I wrote an entry about a conversation with my family-in-law, in which the older members of said family quizzed Scott and me about what a “hipster” looks like, after I made some comment about the hip kids in Williamsburg. It was a funny entry. Oh, how it made me laugh. I was going to post it, to share the surreal joy with you. And then evil gnomes invaded my computer and destroyed the document because, well, didn’t I say they were evil?

What I can recall of their guesses as to what hip people wear:

1. Berets. (Or some other manner of “interesting hat.”)

2. Fringed and tie-dyed apparel. (“You mean hip like hippie?”)

3. Sweaters and sportjackets. (Yes. Hip people dress like Bing Crosby.)

4. Spats and corncob pipes.

Okay, I made that last one up. I wish I could remember the rest. Oh, it was funny. Hoo boy.

I couldn’t tell them anything about the attire of the hip, because when the hipsters approach I’m so shamed by my comparative absence of hipness that I am temporarily blinded and all I can do is roll about on the ground shrieking until they retreat.

Moving on:

Yesterday Henry and I had the following exchange, after I came upon him curled up on the ground next to his Star Wars dolls (THEY ARE NOT DOLLS, my husband shouts even though he’s not here), I mean figures.

Me: Are you okay?

Henry (eyes squeezed shut): I’m a baby.

Me: You’re my baby.

Henry: No. I’m just a baby. [After a second, he gets up.] I will have some water in a big boy cup. [This is as opposed to a sippy cup, you see.]

Me: Good idea!

We go get some water.

Henry: You feel sad.

Me: I do?

Henry: Water will make you feel better.

Me: Sure, I like water.

[We drink water.]

Henry: Do you feel better?

Me: You know, I do! Do you feel better?

Henry: No, you were sad. Do you feel better?

Me: I absolutely feel better now. Thank you.

Henry [putting his cup down]: Good. Now it’s time to spin around and around.

And dear god, he was right.