Author: Pam

Gratitude

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After the other day’s rant, I thought I might devote some time to being grateful—to adjust the karmic balance.  I’m not going to apologize for ranting—the pounding continued all day, until we finally fled at 6:30 to go to a movie.  However, I am exceedingly grateful for my lovely back yard, having a home to live in, and a good job that enables this lifestyle.  I’m grateful for my health and for my family, for my sweetie and for her putting up with me lo these twelve years.
Lately, I’ve been most grateful for my children:  for the opportunity to be their mother, for the myriad life lessons mothering engenders, for their successes, for their struggles too.  This year, 2012, is quite momentous as Anna has just graduated from college and Taylor will graduate from high school in a few weeks.  Momentous too in that Taylor just turned 18 and Anna will be 22 in a couple of weeks.  They are both adults now, free to make their own choices, in charge of their own destinies.  I am one proud mama.  As my kids embark on new life paths, I’ve been reflecting on the past, the journeys that brought us to this place, a place I didn’t think we would all get to just 16 short years ago. 
In reflecting, I realize how much gratitude I have for friends and family who saw me through the most difficult years of my life; gratitude for my therapist who listened to me even when I couldn’t afford to pay her, who kept answering my middle of the night phone calls, and who insisted that someday I would get to this place, to today.  I really didn’t think I would make it, but I did and so have tremendous gratitude for my parents who came through when I most needed them, for my girls who kept seeing me as their mother even when we couldn’t live together.  Gratitude for Nancy, who happened upon this train wreck and dove in anyway, taking a chance and becoming my rock.

Ahhh, Life in da hood

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I hate my neighbors.  I’ve been sitting here trying to write something philosophical and erudite about life in the ‘hood, but as the banging continues, I just decided to come out with it.  Our neighbors hate silence—that could be the only explanation for the continual relentless unending NOISE that emanates from their yard.  All day long, year round, day in and day out, nothing but hammering, drilling, sawing, power sanding.  Even at 11 p.m. on a rainy winter weeknight, the pounding continues.
This morning, I grabbed my coffee, and, ever hopeful, headed to the backyard to sit in the sunshine on our deck.  And for exactly two seconds I reveled in the bliss of singing birds and a summer morning, sipping coffee, reading.  A rare Friday.  A great start to a long weekend.  And then the banging started. 
An hour has gone by and the pounding continues. I put up with it for about a half hour, maybe 45 minutes, but when I felt the scream building deep inside me, I picked up my stuff and stomped back to the house before I let loose with a very undignified scream.  I could feel the words building and my mind spinning—I had to get inside quickly.  I did not want to be that crazy person screaming over the fence. 
Then I remembered.  We have outdoor stereo speakers.  We have SiriusXM radio.  I dialed in the rap station and turned it up.  I can hardly hear the banging now, beyond the banging bass.  Beyond the lyrics, a satisfying spray of nigga, fuck, pussy, shit, ho, bitch.  The royal penis is clean your highness.  Offensive?  I hope so. 
We’ve had too many conversations with these people across the fence.  The time to talk is over.  I can work with Flo Rida, Snoop and TPain, Drake, Usher, Kanye pounding in the background.  But the neighbors can’t both hammer and cover their ears at the same time.

Shaking My Head

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The headlines are out of control again.  This morning I woke up to this first:  Do Babies Need Crawling Helmets (msn.com); then this: Obama Sticks Up for Ann Romney in Working Mom Flap(bellinghamherald.com); US Halts N. Korea Food Aid After Rocket Launch (multiple sources).  Plastic Surgery Gone Bad (msn.com). The inanity goes on ad nauseaum and I close my news browser quickly and shake my head.  Too much stupidity so early in the morning. 
Do babies need crawling helmets? Are you freaking kidding me?  We’ve already raised a generation of overindulged, narcissistic, germ-free and allergy-ridden children who bring their parents to job interviews.  Now we are going to wrap their little heads in helmets?  Good grief.
Obama needs to grow a pair already.  Hilary Rosen was right on when she said that a wealthy mother who stayed home to raise her five boys is not the best source for women’s views on the economy.  Ann Romney knows as much about women’s struggles in the real work a day world as, hmmm, say, Donald Trump.  Why in god’s name would Obama defend her? Maybe if she had been a single mother of five who had to work three jobs she’d have a clue.
Clearly the N. Koreans need food, and their pathetic rocket launch attempt only proves that malnutrition hampers proper brain development.  Besides, the starving masses had nothing to do with Dear Leader’s megalomaniacal need to engage in a pissing contest with leaders of the free world (and I use the term free loosely).
And finally, I got sucked into a series of slides of plastic surgeries gone badly awry.  Just further proof that the world really is going to hell in a hand-basket.  I mean, look at this face (and that’s a dude):  

Rigid Notions

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Writing a memoir is hard.  I didn’t think it would be, you know, given that I have had first hand experience and front row tickets to the whole show all these years.  But a few difficulties have in fact arisen in the past few months, and the biggest challenge has been My Memory.  My Memory sucks.  Fortunately the writing class in which I am currently enrolled is subtitled Memory Sparking Imagination.  Because my memory isn’t sparking any memories.  Now that I want to get my memories in the official record, I can’t remember shit—it turns out that my past is one vast impressionist painting.  If I try to look more closely, train my mind’s eye on the details, it just deteriorates into unrecognizable blotches.  So, that’s the first challenge:  teasing the detail out of the blotch.
The second difficulty arises when the elusive details, some of which (with enough scrutiny) do become focused and sharp, reveal Disturbing Truths.  Cuz, you know, sometimes I can discern the details and that’s when I realize that we lose our memories for a reason.  We do not need to be able to recall the nitty grittiest parts of our youthful traumas.  Turns out God made the blotches to protect us from ourselves.  He made it that way so we could go on living, free of the DTs.  For me, Religion is my primary DT and I don’t even believe in a god.  But religion formed me and made me who I am, so clearly it is going to be a big, BIG part of my memoir.  Remembering leads to reliving the trauma.  I have very definite ideas about Religion, and in spite of what I said about God in the earlier part of this paragraph, I don’t really believe in God (that god, the one with the white hair and the flowing beard who sent his only son to die for our sins, if only we believe in him, etc. etc.).   I do not believe there is any kind of great life force that we cannot see, no great spirit has our meager little lives in its consciousness.  I have judgments, really, really negative and condescending feelings about people who do believe.  Super narrow and very prejudiced feelings.  I have Rigid Notions.
I am realizing it might be time to dispense with my Rigid Notions.   Writing my memoir entailed taking some very close looks at how my life is currently informed by choices I made while under the influence of said Notions.  I constructed much of my self-image (not my self-esteem, don’t confuse the two) from being an unbeliever. In my mind, my (lack of) beliefs made me smarter, more free-thinking, more better. JThis is not a Universal Truth.  This is a highly biased, circumstantial personal belief formed in reaction to the Bad Religion of my childhood.
I would like to stop visibly twitching every time someone utters any of the following:  church, god, Jesus, the bible, heaven, Christians. When I was a believer, I was encouraged to hold myself apart from the “world,” i.e. people who did not attend our church. I’ve spent the last 25 years doing the same damn thing, cutting myself off from a vast swath of experiences as I’ve held my self apart from the religious world. My last job (in a Catholic school), my writing classes and workshops, and my current van pool are bursting with smart, creative, intelligent and discerning people, people I respect. People, alas, who adhere to the whole Higher Power thing.  I am unable to dismiss them as I might have even nine months ago. I do not want to hold myself apart any longer as it finally occurs to me that I am getting mountains of acceptance and love from the very people I judge based on my very outdated Rigid Notions, which are rooted in fear.  Fear of things that are long over, gone, past, and mostly difficult to remember.  How crazy is that?
Writing, as I always suspected, demands much from the writer, but the hard work is not always about what goes on the page.  

Boggle Me This Batman

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These days I sit down to blog and my mind boggles.  The Catholics have taken over women’s health care and make the evangelicals look reasonable these days.   The 1% keeps taking and taking and taking and taking.  Kids (actual children) shoot one another dead regularly.  People would rather look green than actually be green (check out this from Freakonomics Radio—reality mimics South Park).  And a Mormon (seriously: secret underwear, baptizing the already dead, big love) is running for president.  And Sarah Palin still gets media attention.  Women are sluts if they use birth control.  Rush Limbaugh still has a job.  Homeless people are 4G Hotspots, and people are shocked, SHOCKED that Goldman Sachs has no soul.  The Afghani’s can’t believe one of our soldiers would snap and kill a bunch of them.  People dare to judge and convict a soldier who has been on FOUR tours in what?  Six years? Ten years? Does it matter?  The guy snapped.  In case no one has noticed, soldiers are snapping like brittle bones—I would.  Wouldn’t you?
So much to rant about, I cannot decide.   Like I have one foot nailed to the floor, I keep spinning:  I’ll blog about this!  No! I’ll blog about that!  No.  Yes. No.  Wait.  This. No, that! Spin, spin, spin, spin.  Around I go, absolutely flabberghasted that it (and by it I mean absolutely everything) is completely and utterly fubarred.  What good will it do for me to rant?  I’m a small, though very indignant, voice.  Seriously, my impulse it to grab people by their shirt collars and just slap them silly.  Slap! Slap! Slap!  Wake up!  Grow up! Get a conscience! Stop the wanton arrogance. Take responsibility.  Stop trying to be a Rock Star.  Stop imitating Snooki.  Think for yourself.  Man up.  Stop driving, walking, running, like you are the ONLY person in the world that matters.  Have patience.  Keep your eyes in your own damn campfire.  Worry less about what I do in the bedroom (and on the couch, and in the kitchen, and over the washing machine) and more about why you’ve been married five times.  Our children will soon be eating “pink slime” meat for school lunch, and pizza sauce is a vegetable. 
The. Mind. Boggles.
We are, to appropriate a phrase from a friend, standing on our heads in shit.  We are on a down escalator and riding it all the way back to Cotton Mather and his merry gang of bro’sters. (Yeah, I mixed that metaphor but good).  What’s next?  As many have pointed out, our country is beginning to resemble the landscape in Margaret Atwood’s chilling The Handmaid’s Tale.
I feel all self-righteous hammering out my anger, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying “you sound just like your grandmother, afraid of change and unwilling to embrace progress.”  But when progress looks like this, I don’t want to keep moving forward.

Acronyms and Artifacts

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Technology has a way of changing even the most mundane aspects of life. Last weekend The Wife decided to do some early spring cleaning. She started with the easy stuff: shredding. There’s something our parents didn’t have to do. Shred. Anyway, I decided to wander to the back room to see what papers of mine she might have put on the shred pile. We’ve been together twelve years–sometimes I get a sense that she’s messing with my stuff.

Sure enough. I walked in on her ripping my old checkbooks apart–the NCR copies I’d saved these past sixteen years or so, relics from my past. Not much of one for recording and keeping track of details, I tried to compensate by saving any and all paperwork I might ever need. Here, right in front of me, I had tangible, hard evidence of nearly every expenditure I made 12-16 years ago. I flipped through a few of the yellowed and curling copies, curious to see what I’d spent my money on then, such money as I had, for those were some lean years.

Clearly I lived life in a hurry then, to busy to write out full names in the days before online banking and debit cards, because I had to puzzle my way through many long forgotten acronyms: FRA (Fairhaven Red Apple), BSE (Bayside Espresso), WWUCDC (Western’s Child Development Center, aka daycare), WAMU (you remember WAMU, right?), COBRA (way, way cheaper than it is now).
Intrigued by what I found in the first couple of used checkbooks, I moved on to the others, temporarily halting the shredding. I didn’t want to so cavalierly destroy an artifact I might need now that I am writing my memoirs. Who knew what tidbits of long forgotten purchases lingered here? I discovered quickly that every set of 25 checks had pretty much the same payees: groceries, daycare, mortgage, coffee, as well as the general utilities: SSC, COB, PSE, CNG (garbage, water/sewer, electricity, and gas).
Much has changed in the past 16 years. And much hasn’t. Obviously I no longer write checks for much of anything A good chunk of money still goes toward childcare expenses more or less, since one kid is in college and one soon will be. These days I am not burdened by the process of actually writing out a check and mailing it. The kid doesn’t have to go hungry while awaiting my check. Now I simply log in to WECU and transfer funds. I still have a mortgage to pay even though WAMU imploded, and I get my coffee fix now at The Rustic in Fairhaven since BSE had to make room for condos and an audio shop.

This box of old checks may be the very last box of old checks I ever get to peruse. Technology is robbing us of these experiences. Soon no one’s attic or basement or garage or back room will yield such unexpected tangible evidence of our pasts. All the detritus of our lives will be in the cloud and possibly inaccessible, locked up by long forgotten passwords, trapped in obsolete media. I’ve been a computer user since 1983 and nothing I wrote and saved to floppy disk in those days is any longer accessible without extreme measures on my part.

Gay Marriage & Getting Jiggly With It

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After a year or so of not having much to say, blog-wise, tonight I find myself with two very important thoughts that bear further exploration on the page: gay marriage and being all jiggly in the mirror at the gym. Maybe if I write more about my thoughts on both of these issues, I will find that they are somehow related, so bear with me Dear Reader.

Generally the music at Xtreme Fitness is extremely loud and tonight was no exception, but we did get a momentary reprieve and I launched into a discussion about running with my friend Crystal. Not an unusual topic of discussion at the gym, but the way she said “doesn’t your wife run as well?” caught me off guard. So nonchalant. So matter of fact. So, uhm, well, weird, I guess.

I’ve never referred to the little woman as my wife in general conversation with straight people, as in “my wife and I went running” or “my wife and I would like to invite you to dinner.” I also avoid terms like “girIfriend,” “life partner,” “domestic partner,” or that old standby, “luscious lesbian lover.” I usually just say “Nancy” and let folks draw their own conclusions. Sure, I’ve made comments about how nice it is to have a “wife” at times, by which I mean someone to cook and go grocery shopping, but rarely do I say this in public, and I’m pretty certain I’ve never said it at the gym, and I think this is the first time anyone has used the term “wife” with me so matter-of-factly, and not just to ask stupidly “so which one of you is the wife?”

With the possibility of Washington State actually legalizing gay marriage, perhaps it is time to suss out a few things, not the least of which is figuring out what we are, to each other, to the world at large. How do we see ourselves? Are we both wives? Is one of us the husband? Are we back to the butch/femme dichotomy? These thoughts swirled around in my mind as the music started again, making further conversation impossible and an hour of xtreme sweat inevitable.

As I sweated, I pondered the wife thing, the legal marriage thing, and then, the “why am I so damn jiggly in the mirror” thing. My train of thought went something like this:
I’ve been at this for six months now, I shouldn’t be so jiggly and lumpy. Good god my boobs are enormous. No one else here has boobs this big. Well, I am wearing spandex/lycra. It’s not exactly flattering. And I am almost fifty. No one else here is almost 50. I’ve got to work harder and eat less. Why am I so jiggly? No one else is this jiggly. I can’t believe Crystal so nonchalantly said “wife.” That’s pretty awesome, actually. And so on. Round and round on the little hamster wheel in my head.

The cynic in me says that it won’t matter what we call each other because this whole gay marriage business will be theoretical at best and tied up in the courts for decades as the crazy evangelicals continue to insist they really do know god’s will.

The idealist in me says that wife and husband are archaic terms that no longer apply in this, the 21st century, that religion no longer dictates who can be in relationship with whom and that the entire institution of marriage as we know it needs to be ditched.

The aging (but occasionally vocal) lesbian feminist in me wonders why on earth gays and lesbians want to imitate a failed heterosexual institution, though the taxpayer in me knows that filing a joint return really would be a most excellent option.

The fat (but fitter) and jiggly nearly 50 year old in me says “get over yourself and sweat some more. Be happy you have your health.”

I’m not finished with this conversation, reader. But right now, my Xtremely tired and jiggly self desires to join my wife in the marital bed.

Xmas Letter

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The little woman and I have been together approximately 11 years now, and this is the first Christmas/Holiday letter we have written. I do remember sending out cards one year, but I don’t believe we included a snappy letter full of lies and half truths, so here it goes.

Pam and Nancy both ushered in the new year with new jobs. Nan got invited back to the company that laid her off in April 2010, only for a better position and more money, and Pam ditched the Catholics (before they ditched her–it was only a matter of time) to take up with Big Oil. I know, I know. From the frying pan into the fire. So pretty much, January – June went something like this: sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, work. No lie. Quite a shock for Pam who truly enjoyed the previous eight years working roughly 8 months out of the year. For Nancy, it was justice and a long time coming.

Also, Pam and Nancy now live together full time for the first time in eight years. No more living most of the week in Bellevue and coming home on the weekends for Pam. Our therapists have profited a great deal from this new arrangement. To make herself feel better, Pam bought a new Jeep Wrangler that she can’t afford to drive to work on a daily basis.

We took our annual trip to Palm Desert in June, put on our bikinis and realized we had spent far too much time on the couch the past 6 months. Nancy turned 50 (fifty!) while we were there, and upon our return home we realized there had to be more to life than working and sleeping. Pam joined Extreme Fitness, and Nancy, admiring Pam’s fine slim ass, joined a running class in the Fall. We spent the summer eating salad, started exercising, and now we are thin. Awesome. Oh, and we just ran our first ever 5K!

We have reached that special time in life (we joined AARP) when our parents occupy more of our time than our children. The girls are pretty much launched. Anna graduates from WSU in May, and Taylor will finish her career at Sehome High School in June. We gotta start saving up as it promised to be an expensive spring. We are proud of our girls–I won’t bore you with a long list of their accomplishments and achievements, medals won, and astounding number of hours dedicated to helping the less fortunate. I think we are all looking forward their impending adulthood.

Mother did not break any more bones this year, so she was a bit lower maintenance than in 2010 when she shattered her left leg and moved in with us for 6 weeks. She did however require gall bladder surgery and hospitalization for a couple of days in July. She’s better than new now that that pesky organ and its associated stones are gone, and is almost done with her third and final year as president of Kingston’s Friends of the Library. She continues to belong to at least three book clubs and insists on reading the last chapters first.

Dad still lives in Mexico, on the Nayarit coast, a beautiful and amazingly cheap place to live, where he and his wife run a B & B and sell real estate. They have Mexican health insurance for $35/year and couldn’t be happier.

Pam took her semi-annual trip to Lake Wallowa with her brother and his family in early August where she at least got up on the wakeboard, if only for a few seconds, and completely enjoyed being Madeline’s and Liam’s auntie. She got to drive there in her new Jeep, top down! Try that in a Prius.

August found us in Las Vegas–a much needed long weekend in Sin City with good friends at Caesar’s Palace. Pam perfected playing blackjack in the pool, and Nancy didn’t mind as long as the chips kept rolling in.

One of us has been taking writing classes since January and is now working on her memoirs. Everyone should be very, very afraid.

And now it is freaking December, Christmas is just around the corner, and a whole year has gone by. We’ve had our ups and downs, and in the grand scheme of things are both quite aware, thank you, of our extreme good fortune: we have each other, we have our health, we have jobs, a house, a supportive family, and good friends. We won’t retire til we are 110, but what the hell? We’ve cheated death yet again.

Mentor Me This Beotch

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Menopause mentors–here’s an idea worth pursuing.  When we hit puberty we turn to our friends for information; we do not want to talk to our mothers, celebrate, or otherwise acknowledge the horror we experience.  Our mothers wanted to talk to us then, and in fact tormented us with stories of poorly inserted tampons and bulging pads and mysterious belts, they wanted us to know because no one ever told them.

But what about now?  Now that once again my body is turning on me? Where is dear old mom with her post-menses wisdom? Isn’t there some sort of comforting ritual for us now? Something on par with that trip to the drugstore for a box of pads and a bottle of Midol?  I try to seek solace in my friends, but none of them really know any more about these changes than I do,  and what we do know about The Change isn’t something we want to discuss with friends.

I don’t know about you all, but when I was a teenager my friends and I all coded our sexual adventures–it was a system loosely based on the old baseball theme–first base and so on, but we found our adventures went beyond the infield and that there was a whole world between first base and home run. So we improvised on a theme.  I’m thinking we need to repurpose the old metaphor for this next phase, or maybe we just need those who know to give it to us straight.

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Just last week, as some of you might know, I completely fell apart in a staff meeting, much to my mortification.  I’m on shaky ground at work anyway, but this, uhm, episode really did not reflect well on me at all.  Those crazy Catholics–the ones with and for whom I work– kindly cut me huge slack for my low low low protestant church upbringing, and they even tolerate my being a lesbian.  But now my rosary is a decade short of a century, and  just a touch of the menopause may find me out of communion, shall we say.

Why the reticence, Mother (and by Mother, I mean all our mothers, not mine, specifically)? Why the sudden and feigned indifference toward your daughters’ biological clocks?  Must we suffer alone and without your guiding hand?  I take back every less-than-appreciative remark I made about your giant Kotex pads and utter ineptness with tampons.  Just tell me what to expect and how to deal with this, this horrible affliction.  Alas, my sneaking suspicion is that you still don’t have the first clue about menopause–when it begins, what the symptoms are, when, or if, it ever ends.  Oh sure, there are a few rumors and some menopause-ish standards:  hot flashes, erratic monthly visits from Aunt Flo, monstrous mood swings.  But there’s more.  Far more.

Unfortunately, we (and by we, I mean all of humankind) don’t know squat about this death of our reproductive system.  And that’s what it is–the end of our, that is women’s, ability to bear children.  Which by my experiences so far, is meant to be the end of our natural lives.

We’ve not yet evolved enough to be able to live with our own old damn selves.  Our minds still believe we are young and vibrant, lithe and sexy, clever and witty . . . okay, some of us may still be clever and witty, but none of us are young or lithe, and sexy is now an extraordinarily subjective state.

Oh, I can hear you all clucking in the background–this is going to set feminism back a few years.  What feminism?  Have we looked around lately, and anyway, that’s not my point.  My point is that no one wants to talk about menopause, not really.  Sure, we are all taking better care of our bodies, eating right, exercising, meditating, playing Bunco with our girlfriends, but it’s not doing a damn thing to stop our bodies from their eventual rejection of all things procreative.  And I’m not even exaggerating–I’ve actually heard rumors of vaginal atrophy.  No wonder no one wants to talk about it!  What special brand of hell is this?  Men get Viagra and Cialis, and we get stuck with vaginal atrophy?  How is that even right?

Vaginal atrophy, pubic balding, month long-hemorrhaging.   Our mothers don’t or didn’t want to tell us about menopause because they can’t or couldn’t actually believe that it never really ended. They did not want us to know what they looked like under their matronly polyester pants and appliqued sweatshirts.  It was bad enough that they had to watch their once buoyant breasts droop to their knees, let alone tell someone else about it.  That’s not a legacy anyone wants, but it makes perfect sense for them to keep quiet about it 

Many of our mothers were fortunate enough to unravel, physically and emotionally, in the comforts of their own homes.  Most women my age can’t stay home for this unraveling, with only the children as our witnesses (not to mention scarred for life).  We must, in our menopausal states (both states, pre- and full on), pull ourselves together and go to work in a world where at least half of our coworkers do believe we have lost our minds. We sell ourselves so we can afford all of this whole and local, sustainable food that will keep us healthy, if not lithe and young, and the gym memberships that will keep us toned (under the sagging skin) and to make arrangements for our old age because you can bet our kids are not going to be able to take care of us (I could give you a million reasons why not, but I am trying to be positive).

How does any woman work with these mood swings? The bloating? After sweating and not sleeping the night away? What can we do about sudden-onset madness? Just how many pads per hour can one woman go through? And aren’t you kind of sad to see your pubic mons as less of a well-forested mountain and more like a vast and wind-swept, treeless desert?

Clearly it can be done–women are not sissies. A few survivors seem to make it through the madness and into the golden years to thrive.   So, start talking, dammit.  What does it take? We can even dust off the old baseball metaphors if it will make you more comfortable.  I need to know while I still have a job.

I need a menopause mentor.