Years Lived Ten, Let's Do It Again

Writer's Block

So I have to tell you all about my last day in New York spent trying to visit my ex-fiance.

But I want to tell you all about how it started.

I have a stack of old photos that I want to scan.  But the first one is a shot of the World Trade Center from our balcony, and the rest are pictures of us together.

And I have writer's block.

I look so young, so cute, so innocent...I want to step into the pictures and hug the girl smiling at the camera and tell her that eventually she did get the happy ending.  It took a long time, but it finally did happen.

Then I kind of want to slap that sap.  I just hate thinking about the three years I wasted mourning after he broke up with me.

Just Another Corny Cliched Love Letter

Dear Madeleine,

Happy 12th birthday.

It's hard to write anything original about how much I love you.   From time immemorial, mothers have tried to express how much they love their children.  So instead of glurging up the internet with another sappy love letter,  I'm going to list the reasons I love you.

1.  You're a genius.  So I've been told by many people who measure this stuff.   I'm pleased that you have been issued one of the few Golden Tickets and have the talent to live an interesting, creative life.  Go far.   I'll be watching you and clutching you to my heart as you sail through life picking up awards and accolades.

2.  You're exactly like me.  Our life has so many spooky coincidences that when another one pops up I've given up exclaiming and now I just shrug.  Your sixth grade section was 61 in the same school I attended.  My section was 6-1-1.   Some say we both should have been put in 6-6-6, but I say they're just jeluz of us, don't you?

3.  You have a healthy self image.   If you didn't, after teachers fawning over you for 9 years, I'd wonder about your intellect.  The day we placed you in daycare every teacher in the building came by to see the cute new kid.   As adolescence dawns, you're starting lose some self confidence.   Kid, the Fates will  knock you to the floor regularly.    I'm sorry about that.   But I can't stop it.

4.  You're ferocious. So am I.   We both become rabid when we feel that we have been shafted or mistreated.  I like that.  And you're so funny.  You and I can now riff off of each other.  Your sweet Daddy sometimes becomes horrified when we do our Mom and Daughter Sarcasma Act, but we enjoy it, don't we? 

5.  Just like me, you hate to show your sweet, soft inner self to many people.  Good. Protect it.  You will meet people who are not interested in you.   Don't be afraid to show your heart to people who have proven their loyalty and love for you, but don't give your heart or your body cheaply. 

6.  You're pretty.   The world is kind to pretty women.  I'm not a ravishing beauty, but I've gotten things because of my looks.  I've gotten things because I can be smart sometimes, and charming sometimes.  And I've been smacked down by people who didn't like me.   It will happen to you.  Don't worry about it.  You can't please everyone.

7.  Wear sunscreen.  Oops, wrong homily.

8.   Our real mothers, our birth mothers, the ladies who grew us in their tummy, are misty images that will never materialize into concrete forms.  I'm not going to romanticize them.  It's hard to love someone who deserted you, isn't it?   I'll never ask you to do that, nor will I ask you to believe that she loved you.  I don't know. 

I hate that for you.  I hate it for me.  We didn't adopt from China to rescue you, we adopted from China because we couldn't have kids.  You rescued me.  I can't make this all right for you. But I can hold out a hand when you need it.  Take it.

America persists in its naive belief that being able to grow a baby makes a person a competent mother.  After working with child abuse cases for 30 years, that seems as quaint as...oh...."Just Say No"...or "Shock and Awe" ...or "trickle down economics."

You're going to run into a lot of people who get angry at you if you don't romanticize the whole reason you came into my life.

Ignore them.

9.  We both have great fathers.  You'll find this to be a double edged sword as you grow up.  It's hard to find a man like Daddy.   But on the other hand, complaining about having a great father is stupid and people will hate you when you do that.  Be kind and remember that many people can't say that.  Save the bitching for your therapist.

10.  And finally..you complete me.   You're the daughter I dreamed about as I packed my Scholastic books and clothes up at age 13.  I knew I would have you in my life, and you would bring me more joy than I could possibly imagine as a child.   Thank you for rescuing me. 

Thank you for being the daughter of my heart.  Thank you for being difficult, funny, surly, aggressive, angry, brilliant, sweet, creative, and sarcastic.  

Thanks for being a daughter I can relate to.

all my love, all my heart,

and thanks for giving me the title I cherish over all others except for wife....

Mom

Blogher 10: Part Five: One Is The Loneliest Number

August 1997:

I'm at a legal convention in Arizona and my co-worker hops in a cab to go party with someone he went to law school with and I am in the middle of a group of five hundred people and I know nobody.

I went up to a group of women sitting at the onsite restaurant and asked if I could have drinks with them.  They said yes.

I caught the look they gave each other...a look of boredom, pity, and irritation.

We sat down and made polite conversation for about an hour and they excused themselves, disappearing into the night, and I crawled back to my room to read a trashy novel.

I swore then and there that I would never again attend a large convention without a group of friends to hang out with.  Thirteen years later.....

I went to Blogher.

I was miserable.

?

The location was wonderful.  That's Radio City Music Hall in the background.

I laughed a lot.

The people I met were all very nice, every single one of them.

I squealed like a fangirl when I met one of my favorite bloggers ever, Cecily.   She's gorgeous and just as real as she writes.

Yvonne was also just wonderful.  Here we are at the Cheeseburger party.

I got to go to a party sponsored by Edens Fantasys which had arts & crafts unlike things we see down heah in the Land O'Cotton.

The food was great and the people were just hilarious.

I got autographed by someone who just might be the most beautiful person I have ever laid eyes on.

Chookooloonks.  She is also known as Karen Walrond, author of The Beauty of Different and a recovering lawyer, just like me.  The only different is that she is famous and beautiful and African American.  Otherwise,  we're pretty much alike.

I got to go to Sparklecorn 10....

And it was the best cake I have ever tasted.

I got to meet Sweetney and Amalah, and since Amalah was the first blog I ever read, I again did my patented Southern fangirl squeal.

The party was huge and loud and the music was extremely danceable.   I danced.  See, here in the South, a room full of women dancing is unheard of.   We are so steeped in the Must Have Male Partner stuff that women who get out and shake their groove thang alone are looked upon as a. desperate b. extremely drunk or c. both desperate and extremely drunk.

I called home.

"I'M AT A PARTY WITH A BILLION WOMEN DANCING AND I DON'T HAVE TO LOOK AT YOU WITH PITIFUL LOST PUPPY DOG EYES PLYING YOU WITH INTOXICATING DRINKS IN A FUTILE EFFORT TO GET YOU TO DANCE WITH ME," I screamed joyfully into the phone at Roger, 800 miles away with his feet up in his easy chair watching someone hit a ball at somebody else.   He was happy, and so was I.

So...what's the problem?  Please refer to the title of my blog, Clueless in Carolina.

I arrived at the festivities thirteen years after that gruesome meal in Arizona with the innocent but quite mistaken belief that I had developed such a fabulous personality at my advanced age that I could instantly find a group of women who would cling to me like leeches in the swamps surrounding Columbia and we would all have fun together.  Didn't happen.

It's nobody's fault.

There were a million billion things going on and everybody was trying to talk to everybody and do everything and go everywhere.    My friend Jenny, the one and the only Goddess, I mean Bloggess,  described it perfectly, "it was like we were floating in an ocean."  She told me that she barely got a chance to talk to people she's known for years.  It was sensory overload.

I struck up conversations with complete strangers who were friendly but then drifted away to be with people they knew.

I didn't have a posse.    I wasn't staying at the hotel because I love my family couldn't afford it and couldn't stay all day at Blogher because I was too busy partying all over town sleeping due to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

So it wasn't Blogher's fault.  The convention was filled with interesting, cool, funny, creative, fabulous women.   Blogher did a great job planning and presenting a convention for two thousand women.  

Would I go again?  Heck yeah, in a second.  (shrug).   I didn't leave the convention weeping and rending my garments.  In fact,  in one of those delicious twists of irony I stepped outside at midnight to hail a taxi and struck up a conversation with two total strangers.  1 1/2 hours later, we took each other's names and said goodbye.  It was one of those epic College Roommate Midnight Dialogues.

But I will never go alone again.

Almost A Teen!

September 11, 2001

Pictures taken last month at 9/11 memorial sites

Her first memory

Blogher 10: Part Four: Tourist Time

I love New York with a passion.  However, I also love sitting on my back porch, reading, looking at the lights twinkling over my pool, living in a 2000 sq foot house that would cost 45 bajillion squadrillion dollars in the city, doing my laundry in my own home, and wearing sweaters in the wintertime. 

So, join me for a quick tour of some of New York's landmark buildings and neighborhoods while I whistle a medley of "New York" and "Dixie".

First stop:  St. Patrick's Cathedral.    Always a beautiful building that takes my breath away, but leaves me feeling uneasy.  Didn't Jesus say something about one or two of you gathering in his name?  I don't remember the part about building a billion dollar place to worship him.  

 Also, I can't get behind the rampant sexism in the church and priestly celibacy is ridiculous and denying condoms to people who will die a gruesome and painful death without them doesn't sound very Christian to me.

And yet my children are baptized and received Holy Communion in the church, and I'm married to a Catholic.  

I've debated a long time about writing this but you might as well know the real me, about as shallow (and dirty) as a mud puddle.  It came down to Episcopal (me) v. Catholic (Roger) and since God decided to yank my Episcopal parents away from their grandchildren thereby denying them the opportunity to know two absolutely wonderful and hilarious people and denying me free babysitters  but allowed Roger's to stay around I decided to throw some more members towards Rome. 

Also, I wanted an excuse to dress the girls up in white and put wreaths on their heads and it was either Catholic ceremonies or the Renaissance Faire and there you go.

I posted this last picture on FB with the promise that if God heals my fibromyalgia I'll be shoving one dollar bills in that box like I'm hitting the slot machines in Vegas and some wag suggested that I contribute 50 cents since I'm halfway there.  I seriously considered that but I was running out of change for the bus.

Now, one thing about St. Patrick's....Catholics don't have to use the bathroom.    Therefore, the ushers kindly direct you next door to Saks Fifth Avenue where I took a minute to document myself
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stylishly attired in a shirt I bought the day before when Sally took me thrifting at the Salvation Army store for $3.00 and a skirt that my sister bought in 1986 to go clubbing.   The nattily attired salespersons winced in pain when they spied me and if I had been wearing a box entitled "For The Poor" I bet they would have shoved a dollar or two in it.
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Here are just a few random shots of Rockefeller Plaza and the Farmer's Market at Rockefeller Center where I bought a jar of no-sugar-addded-organic apple butter made by dancing elves and fairies in the bucolic wilderness of Vermont underneath the full moon.

I hope that United enjoyed it, because they removed it from my carryon before I was allowed to board the flight home and I HATE YOU UNITED.  Wanna read some stories about United that will make you hate them too?  Try this.  UNITED, I HATE YOU SOOOOOOOO VERY MUCH.   Okay, deep cleansing breath.

The next shot is a slogan on a metal plaque that tickled me, since my husband is a dedicated coffee drinker and I hate the stuff, and the last shot is just the kind of wonderful, wacky art that is all over the place in my most favorite wonderful, wacky city.