"You are not behaving like a decent person, and I do not respect you."

You are not behaving like a decent person. 

I do not respect you.

Gabrielle Blair, The Consequences of Your Actions


I hope you'll read the above link, because in this post Gabrielle, otherwise known as Design Mom, writes literally everything that I think, on a nearly daily basis, as I struggle to maintain relationships even in my own family. It's incredibly exhausting and debilitating to all involved, I'm sure, even as I acknowledge how it pales in comparison to my fellow human beings who are fighting for their lives.

A lot has happened in the last week or so since I've been here on the old blog. I tested negative for Covid, thank goodness, and I'm sorry I didn't let you know earlier. I took Sophie to the beach for the first time in years -- down to the water -- in her new beach wheelchair that my parents bought for her. I think I'll leave you with these glorious pictures. Having access to the beach again is transformative and brings me to my knees in gratitude. Sophie was so happy.

The Edge of the Continent

What's happening with you? We're living large out here in Covid-California times. I haven't posted in over a week, but I've composed many in my mind. That was our Fourth of July celebration. We weren't celebrating #TerribleAmerica but tried to make the best of the day. I don't feel like using this space today to rant and rave about this country or the POSPOTUS, but I will inform you that I don't think I've ever been this stressed out in my lifetime and it's not just about the pandemic, the POSPOTUS and the Assholes Who Still Support Him. There is so much stuff happening, none of which I can control but all of which I am juggling because -- well -- apparently that is what the universe is currently demanding of me. I am on edge. I am the edge. My ex continues to detonate giant mushroom clouds; I am now supporting my tenant whose job was affected by Covid, who can't pay rent and who is entitled to stay rent-free as long as the moratorium is in place.  Don't ask. I've started my baking business up to help make ends meet and am currently deep into peach pie. Last night, Sophie had three giant seizures in a row and I changed over five diapers in two hours and then I just told Henry to keep an eye on her, got in my car and drove toward the edge of the continent. I played Ennio Morricone's music because he died yesterday, and I cried and wanted to yell but then I got to the ocean, so I parked the car and walked out onto the sand and just stood there, in the dark, listening to the surf, the lights of the Santa Monica pier bright in the distance. No one was on that ferris wheel but it looked pretty in an apocalyptic way. The world is vast and oh, so weird.

I felt better.

Today I am thinking of you, Reader. How are you doing? What are you doing? Reading? Listening to? Watching?



Here's a poem:

Not Writing

A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs

at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.

Jane Kenyon (1993)

More Mexico

Tonight the full moon rose over the top of a distant mountain as the sun sank into the ocean and made the sky orange. It was outrageous. As Carl remarked, never is it more evident that we're just spinning round and round as when the moon rises so quickly into the sky. Of course my photos do not in any way do it justice.

That jeep/van thing had four children and two parents inside. It was like a cross between Mad Max, Noah's Ark and Howl's Moving Castle. I had a moment where I envied them their seeming nomadic life, but then I came to my senses.

That's where we've stayed for most of the week -- a beautiful spare and perfectly appointed Air BnB that my friend, The Poet, rented.

Tonight we're staying in town in another beautiful spare and perfectly appointed place.

The picture at the top of this post was taken in a tiny chapel that overlooks a beach where fisherman take off every day and return with their catch. It was a SCENE.

I left the men to their bloody fish and went inside the chapel to light a candle for Sophie.

It was decorated with a beautiful Virgin of Guadeloupe as well as twisted tin foil in an arch and plastic flowers. A rather large Jesus hung (literally) across from a sweet window adorned with painted flowers.

Here it is from the beach:

I'll leave you with a few sweet photos and the intention to regale you with the story of our "whaling" expedition in another post.

Hallelujah on Adult Day Programs That Come Through and Gratitude for Your Tax Dollars at Work

at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

I wasn't going to say anything until it was a done deal, but it's a done deal for the most part and Sophie has finally started her day program in Santa Monica.

This is big.

This is HUGE.

Sophie "graduated" from the LAUSD over a year and a half ago. She's been on a waiting list for years for this place, got a place and then we basically had to wait a million years for the right aide and the right paperwork and the right funding and you know the drill. Sophie has been at home with me and Saint Mirtha for all this time, and I can tell you that I'm a really boring mother at this point and an even more boring entertainer/cruise director/activities coordinator. I'm not lying. I am as burnt out as they come, and I'm making no apologies for that. Catholic girls have enough guilt flying around their parts to cover it, and while I've sworn off the Catholic church, I can't swear off the guilt. Saint Mirtha's got some chops in all those fields, but Sophie has basically been hanging around us or a bunch of toddlers and babies and nannies at the neighborhood park. Nothing wrong with that, actually, as Sophie is very interested in babies, and I've fantasized about her taking on a second job (when she gets off her Uber shift) as a baby whisperer.

But this day program is the bomb. It's community-based, so the young men and women go out everyday into the community and do stuff. If they're able, they work, go to the YMCA and work out or learn a trade. If they're like Sophie, they go to museums, the park, the beach, have music therapy, learn self-help skills, learn how to better communicate their needs and -- well -- make friendships and enjoy their lives.

on a Metro bus, on her way to the mall

The drive to the program is pretty brutal because I live in Los Angeles and the program is in Santa Monica. I'm talking about 9.8 miles but forty-five minutes on the highway, but I'm happy to drive to the proverbial Timbuktu if it means Sophie is happy and getting what she needs to lead a good, dignified life of value.

I found out today that she has several classmates from her PRESCHOOL in an LAUSD program at UCLA. That was back in the last century! I've lost touch with nearly all of those families in the last twenty years, mainly because we don't live on the west side where most of them still reside, but I have such good memories of those early days, and I'm thrilled to get acquainted again. Sadly, several of the children that Sophie began her school years with have passed away -- in those early childhood days, it was not unusual to go to at least one funeral a year of a young person. Looking at these grown men and women and imagining all that they've been through is emotional for me in bittersweet ways.

Saint Mirtha is training Sophie's fabulous new aide, Lauren, this week. I dropped them off both mornings, went for a walk on the beach and then did some freelance writing work yesterday, another interview for a possible job today and then -- wait for it --

began revising my manuscript at the public library.















The universe is abundant.

Both Confident of the Tune

The road upon which we are ramblers

To Chris

I am rich in friendship, bound to a few women I've known for decades, to many that I've known for years, and to several that I've known for only a short time. I met my friend Chris at a writing workshop a little more than a year ago and fell in love with her at another writing workshop up in Tomales Bay last fall. I say fall in love because it was that but not that -- it was her reading her writing and me reading and listening. It was me reading my writing and her reading and listening. The deep connection of writers. I sat to the right of Lidia, our workshop mentor, and Chris sat to the right of me. I was aware at every moment of these two women on either side of me -- Lidia's blond braids and red boots, her Cheshire cat smile, the way she coaxed eros out of all of us and Chris' wide cheekbones, her dark eyes and silence, her coiled energy that unfolded in words on paper. I heard Chris read her life several times during the five days we met in workshop and sat in witness to what some may deem unbearable about that life except that some would bear it and do so gratefully. The power of Chris' coiled energy rippling outward from the page, her sweet voice. I do that because I can. Because it's an honor to be witness. As a mother I am rooted to the earth. My lap is broad. My hands are large. I would have gathered Chris up into my arms as she read, placed my hand on her head, my palm to her forehead, my fingers a cradle. I held her words instead. They held me.

I say fall in love because it was that but not that --  it was getting to know her through conversation about books, about our lives, over food and wine, Chinese fortune-telling, laughs. She brought beads to Sophie the first time she met her, looked in her eyes, spoke to her. I imagine she heard Sophie's voice such is her quiet, her coiled energy. 

Chris is the big sister I've never had.

On Friday night I took Sophie to the beach and picked up Chris. She had told me earlier that she would be happy to accompany us sometime this summer to the beach, to spend more time with Sophie. We walked along the water for some time, got soaked at high tide and then walked back to the car where Chris held up a towel as a shield while I changed Sophie into dry pants. When I sat Sophie in the wheelchair and began to pull her hair up and into a hairband, she began to seize, and Chris asked what she could do, how she could help. She shook the sand out of a towel and gently draped it around Sophie, covering even her feet. There's nothing to do, I said, and there is nothing to do. There's nothing to be done, really. Nothing has been done, really. It's been the same every single time Sophie has had a seizure. Nothing to do, nothing to be done, nothing has been done, nothing. That's what it feels like. Energy coiled in me as Sophie expends it. When it was over, Chris said, I've never seen one before. And that was everything. As a mother I'm rooted to the earth. I speak in confident tones. I reached across the wheelchair and put my arms around her, my big sister, my witness.

It is not what you have but what you have lost that links the reader and the writer. The longing to repair loss is in the rhythm and tone of the written piece, not in its words. The rhythm is where the reader senses the writer's truthfulness, as unerringly, I think, as an infant senses whether the person who is holding it loves it. The writer and the reader are always singing along together, both confident of the tune, but the writer more certain of the words than the reader. I understand what people are saying in their letters to me. I might say, What am I supposed to do with the sorrows people have confided in me? But isn't it the same thing as I want them to do with my sorrows, published to them? Don't do anything for me but know about me. You know this song too, don't you? Well, won't you help me sing it?

Nuala O'Faolin, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman 

Read these:

Where She Came From 
Too Much Hope
The Lid

Saturday Late Afternoon Sanity Beach Trip

I asked Henry to come with me and Sophie to the beach for an hour or two around 4:30 this afternoon. O,K., I begged Henry to come with me and Sophie to the beach for an hour or two around 4:30 this afternoon. I was desperate to actually go in and under the water, have been feeling this deep craving to do so for weeks.

Even though he had no interest in going in himself, he obliged me and brought his lacrosse stick to practice what they call cradling.

It was a scorcher elsewhere in Los Angeles today -- in fact, I went into the deep dark valley earlier in the afternoon to pick up Sophie's cannabis oil, and my car thermometer read 105 degrees. The temperature at the beach in the late afternoon was about 80, though, and the water as warm as it gets here which is still refreshingly cold. I took Sophie for a walk along the edge of the water and then in to about our knees before bringing her back up to her stroller and Henry. Then I walked down past the lovers and the mothers and the children and one small man in a bicycle helmet and what can only be called a private-parts or -- let's be blunt -- penis holder whose fabric was the American flag. I surmised porn star, such was the area and -- uh, length -- of the flag (honestly, Henry and I could not get over it), and when he turned away, it was difficult not to notice the line of stars, perhaps twelve out of the glorious fifty, disappearing into his ass.

Anyhoo.

The surf was pretty high, but the water was clear and blue and I felt immediately refreshed and replenished. Thank you, southern California. Thank you, Ocean Park. Thank you, Pacific Ocean. Thank you, Henry.

Another Day in Paradise

I took Oliver and Sophie to the beach in the late afternoon yesterday so that we could walk for a bit, eat dinner at our favorite beachside cafe and then watch the sunset.

The sky turned pinker and pinker as we left, but since I was driving I couldn't get a good shot. Here's one I took at a stoplight before Oliver screamed at me to not text and drive. Even though I wasn't texting and driving, he was right that I shouldn't have been so distracted.

Beach Evening Seizures

It was fun for a bit, but I'm not sure what happened for another bit because Sophie had a bunch of seizures. Was it the THCa? Was it the last dregs in the bottle of CBD? Too much THC, perhaps? The seizures kept coming, unusually. They were very small -- which is also unusual, but constant. I didn't feel worried, though, which is unusual. We're skipping a dose of the CBD and perhaps stopping the THCa. Big sighs all around for a day that's done. Tomorrow is another day, as they say.

Homeschool PE at the Beach and Just Enough Snow

Oliver and I went for a very long walk today in Santa Monica. It was a blustery day and incredibly beautiful. He actually skateboarded while I walked briskly, and I called it Home-school Physical Education. My sister, who lives in St. Louis, texted me the question how is the homeschool thing going? The meaty stuff?

I told her great. I told her that we would be doing another unit of history when we got home and then some English Language Arts. The more I do this, though, the more I realize that it might be the best way to educate, even to live. I wake up every morning in some bit of existential distress. What's it all about? I think. How do we keep on keeping on? There's so much suffering. I'm getting old. What if Sophie lives forever? What if I do? What if I don't? What if the world melts? What if the Republicans win in 2016? How will I afford college for Henry? Who's going to take care of this world? How do we go on? Why are we so lame? You know the drill. After working with Oliver, though, and learning myself, going on these outings, opening my eyes to the very real goodness that is my life, the existential angst recedes. I move outward, see blue.

On the way home, we faced the mountains, covered in snow. I decided that was all the snow I needed to see at just the right distance.

#IloveLosAngeles

January Sunset in Malibu

Oliver, his friend Mac, Sophie and I drove out to Malibu at 3:30 this afternoon. It was about 75 degrees today and gloriously sunny, but we hadn't been to the beach in ages, and we particularly wanted to catch the sunset. I drove my sexy white Mazda on Sunset Boulevard all the way from our neighborhood to the coast and then headed north so it took some time, but the drive was easy and the boys entertained themselves by counting luxury cars. Luxury cars here are not the Mercedes and BMWs, but the Lambos, the Maseratis, the Porsches, the Rolls, the Bentleys, the G-Wagons, etc. ad nauseum and every single one was noted, and either Mac or Oliver "claimed" each one as theirs and I just nodded my head and hmmmmmed. Boys who love cars are entirely nonplussed by middle-aged women who couldn't give a damn. 

The sunset, on the other hand, a couple of hours later, was easily the most spectacular that I'd ever seen. I'm serious. It brought me to tears. I'm prone to hyperbole, but this was something else -- first some gentle blues and then pastel sorbets and then a bit of pink and orange and then -- well -- see for yourself! The sky was literally glowing.

I swear to you that there are no filters on any of these photos!

I don't know where ya'll live, but you should move here. At least in January and February. The universe is particularly abundant, then.