Son

It’s looking like Carol’s son, age 12, will be staying in Minnesota with a couple we found there who wants to take care of him. They are well-off and kind and active and have a nice house near a lake with good schools and a skate park nearby. They also have older sons, so they’ve been to that show, as it were. And he’ll have brothers, which is great.

After one of the neighbors found out that he was going to be living there, they rounded up all the neighborhood kids at once and showed up at the house to meet him, sort of an impromptu getting-to-know-you party. I think the attention did him good. He made friends with a 13-year-old boy right away.

He hadn’t had much to say about his mom since it all went down. But after a few days of living with this couple, he showed up at their room in the night, tapped on the door, and told them that he missed his mom. He cried and talked, for the first time. They told him he could come and talk whenever he felt that way. I’m so grateful to know that he’s capable of attaching like that, that everything he’s been through hasn’t left him to fiercely independent at too young an age, as the adult sphere of his world has–at times–been so dark and frightening, here today, gone tomorrow. It would have been easy for him to turn out differently. But he hasn’t.

Sometimes

I get rewarded for being like I am, all sloppy and lovey-like.

We went to California for my sister-in-law Angel’s high school graduation. Most of the week we also spent with her boyfriend, who seems to spend most days hanging out with A and the family. I like that. My boyfriends were always dragging me off someplace; many of them never met my family.

He came to Ben’s birthday party on the beach. He had his graduation party at the house in conjunction with Angel’s. Most of their time together seems to be spent with the family. He hangs out. He pitches in. He helps. He talks when called upon, and he’s quiet and tranquil, too. He won me over in about the first five minutes and then kept growin’ on me. I told everyone who’d listen, including his girlfriend (kitchen, me: drunk on tequila, middle of the night) how much I thought of him.

I found out he had been nervous to meet me and Ben, and I was actually nervous to meet him, too (me? Nervous to meet an eighteen-year-old boy?). At the graduation party, after knowing him about a week, he thanked me for the card and few dollars me and B had given him. I gave him a hug and told him, without thinking first, “I love you, Omar,” as if I’d known him all my life, and immediately thought, Now, why did you say that? He’s gonna think you’re weird, and that’s ’cause you are!

But he responded, casual-like, without missing a beat: “I love you, too.”

Now, how do you like that?

Destruction

I just found out that someone else I know is getting separated from her husband. She just moved into her own place clear on the other side of town and everything. How many couples my age does that make? Three? Four? No, five, maybe. Six! I’m losing count. And I’m not even thirty yet.

There was a time, like maybe two years ago, when this would have given me a little threatening needle-prick, this would’ve gotten my hackles up. You know, as a married person who publicly is so sure of herself, and her rock-solid marriage. But since then I’ve seen that being married isn’t about being rock-solid at all. I’m not still married because I’m good at it.

Now I’m just sad. I don’t feel separate, like just like my friends are splitting up; I feel like a cookie being eaten. I wonder if my friends and family are a representative sample. I wonder if half of the people I know who get married will split up,

like America.

felicidades y família

When I first met my friend a couple years ago, he told me about his eleven-year-old daughter,
about the funny things she’d say, about what they did
last weekend, but after we became friends I asked him once,
“So how’s your daughter?”
He looked at me sideways and said,
“R, I lied to you.”
“What do you mean? About what?”
“I have another kid, too. A son.”
“You do? How old?”
“Fourteen. I just don’t always like to tell every body
every thing, you know?”
I told him it was okay, that he didn’t have to, but he felt bad.
He’d held back this part of himself and he didn’t want to anymore.

I told him yesterday that I got a good grade on mi exámen de español–he said,
“You’re taking Spanish?” I said, “Sí, en Wright College.”
He asked if they were teaching me el alfabeto, and I replied,
“No, I’m in the second class; ya aprendí para dos años en escuela.” He grinned big and said,
“You know more already than my son,”–his son who is fourteen
and being raised by his native Puerto Rican ex and himself, a Salvadoreño–
“He doesn’t speak Spanish?”
“Not one word.”
“How is that, with you guys as parents, and living in Chicago?”
“No se, but he can’t speak any.”
We were quiet for a minute, drinking our water,
looked out over the dance floor,
listening to the song that was playing.
“What are you guys doing on Sunday?”
“…Nada.”
“Maybe you can come meet him then.”

He said it easily, but I could tell
he was sharing a secret treasure, like a smooth lucky rock
from his pocket, unfolded in his palm.

What are sisters for

So I had a great trip home, punctuated by a horrible Christmas Eve. I had two arguments with my 19-year-old sister, who I drove to Detroit and then back to Kalamazoo. These days she generally seems so ice queen, why-don’t-you-just-drop-it-Rachel, although if you confront her with any accusation of being uncommunicative or “cold,” she has been known to fly into genuine fits of rage, even tears, however uncharacteristic.

(We grew up sharing a bedroom. I used to come home from middle school torments and cry to her in her bed, charging her to grow up and defend the defenseless, to never pick on anybody, and she would nod solemnly and agree, “Okay, Rachel.” I think I knew even then that she would be better equipped to get through school unpickedon, that she was a likely cantidate. I think I knew that she was going to be cooler than me, in middle school anyway.)

At one point during this last visit, I actually said to her, all bitter and shit, “And about the ride home? You’re welcome. You’re welcome.”

I really did. Ben was there. So was Ev. You can ask them.

She never says thank you to me. It’s awesome that she walks around feeling entitled to her own shit, but she doesn’t have much shit of her own to entitled to just yet; she’s walking around feeling entitled to favors from other people, it seems like. To drive her to and from Kalamazoo without a word of thanks just makes me start to feel like a sucker. Especially after I, albeit in a fucked-up way, told her that it bothered me.

The thing that really sucks about all this is that I adore her. I think she walks on water the rest of the time, and I’m amazed by her strength and resiliency, however untested it might be at this point in her life. I left the house for a while on Christmas Eve., cried an inordinate amount, and drove around aimlessly, talked to -I- for a while, who said, “I don’t know what to tell you, except to say that it won’t always be this way.” He’s right, and he also says that she probably isn’t as indifferent as she seems; she just doesn’t know how to say what she means. But now is the time when I feel like I have the most to offer her, now and when she was a younger teenager. But who am I kidding, really. Those were the hardest years of my life, and probably the easiest of hers. But then, how would I know?

The day Jim and Reid went crazy

While we were home for Thanksgiving, my dad told a story about some crazy stuff that two of his younger brothers once did when they were maybe five or six. My dad has eight siblings, four brothers and four sisters. Two of those brothers were very close growing up, like twins but not twins. They had their own language. They used to call me “Schmeg.” They would never tell anyone what their language meant.

One time someone went into the basement to find that everything–the floor, the walls, the television, etc.–had been PAINTED with white interior paint, by Reid and Jim, the two brothers I mentioned earlier. My grandma was beside herself, and she and as many of the other seven siblings as they could round up came downstairs to try and clean up this paint before it dried and permanently ruined everything (I picture this sterile, white room, like something out of 2001, but it was probably a lot messier).

In the confusion, Jim and Reid slipped upstairs and proceeded to enact other kinds of mayhem, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, who were scraping paint. At some point one of girls went upstairs to use the bathroom or something and shouted down, and the rest of them rushed up to find stuff that was ten times nuttier than some paint.

In these days, with nine kids and a husband to feed, my grandma bought food in some quantity: large packs of hamburger, boxes of five dozen eggs at a time, several pounds of butter. Jim and Reid had taken the sticks of butter and stuck one on each of these hooks on the mantle, usually reserved for stockings hung by the chimney with care. The mailman came in and said, “Do you know that there’s all this meat out here?” They had emptied the freezer of all the packages of meat and hamburger and had neatly placed one in the center of each sidewalk square in front of the house, thawing. The family found Jim and Reid in the backyard, with what used to be a box of five dozen eggs, that they were gleefully flinging over the fence, not a care in the world.

God help me

As I type, my mother is most likely cleaning my apartment. Well, it’s her job, isn’t it? Kidding, kidding! You are so touchy about gender roles and female servitude. Just relax, already. She has a really fancy vacuum cleaner, and is also borrowing the cat when she leaves.

She’s visiting in order to HELP ME clean my place from top to bottom, and take my cat away for a few weeks, so that I can test a hypothesis: “I have become allergic to Pedro the Cat and that is what is causing me to have an average of 1-2 migraines a week.” I don’t know if that’s what it is, or if that’s even possible, but Pedro’s the only factor that I know of that coincides with my brain exploding. I have a habit of getting ahead of myself without the necessary information when it comes to theories like this, but a couple weeks ago LR put her hands on me and prayed that I God would give me some kind of discernment about what the fuck is going on up there, so maybe this is it. My record is 6 migraines in a row, every morning for 6 days. That was also a couple weeks ago. I am also in the market for an Ionic Breeze, possibly remanufactured. I have also started using a neti pot to wash out my sinuses with salt water. It’s more fun than it sounds. I will try anything. Anything.

I also have my annual review today, in my boss’s backyard. I wonder if I’m due for a raise…I don’t remember. I’m comforted by the fact that it will probably involve wine. Yes, I know that red wine is a migraine trigger. I can’t think of many things that aren’t, these days.