May 15, 2008 at 8:36 pm · Filed under self
at 6:30 this morning i decided i have too much of a dark side. it is my father’s birthday, and steve and i toasted to him tonight as we had a margarita a little too early in the day. my father is uncluttered. he would not do therapy, push through demons, or confront complicated histories. he is forward-moving only. he does not have a pile of clothes on his dresser that should be put in the drawers. he doesn’t have dirty dishes by the bathroom sink. he owns very little that is truly his, though because he is wealthy and married and in a suburban town, it appears that he owns a lot. he would rather be on a sailboat, which is how he grew up. he has no interior life that leaves him in a library until past bedtime. he does not really know how to use a computer, so this doesn’t suck time out of his evenings like it does mine. he’s read one serious book in the past four years. he simply rises early, works all day at his corporate office where he is the successful and respected vice president, returns for dinner, jolly and quiet, goes on a walk after dinner, and then watches a television show while he tries to not fall asleep until 10pm, when like clockwork he is out.
i woke up wanting that life. not wanting to overeat my organic cheese puffs while drinking wine until midnight, not having had an actual meal all day. not chasing a puppy while workers bang behind plastic three feet from my ears. i woke up wanting a job. so that i can go to work, and come home feeling like i have been somewhere and done something, even if i haven’t done any more than i would if i were home. though while many people go to work and spend much of the time building connections, talking, emailing, checking the sports section, my father goes to work and works. i want to do that. i woke up and i gave up celebrity websites for thirty days. i had a bran muffin for breakfast, i rose early and vacuumed and walked the dog for an hour.
by noon i was bored. i want a dark side. i don’t want it to overtake me, but there is something about choosing to live in the realm of literature and art and relationships which means i will not have the same schedule for the rest of my life or even for two days in a row, and i will have to think complicated thoughts and read books that take so long to finish that i stay up past my bedtime and don’t finish anything the next day because i am too distraught by the sequences in the book’s end. if my life goes as it looks like it will, it means i may not have a dress-up job for a long time, and i will have to make my own studio schedule and be okay with throwing away a drawing that took all day to make.
i don’t think i will ever be comfortable with any of this, but i love the risk of it. our one dog was behaving well enough that i could almost take him on a walk alone and so we choose to get a new puppy: this is how we function, craving chaos to push us to evolve further just as balance is achieved. i don’t know if i will die feeling that i have accomplished as much as my father or that i am as content as he is, but today i was okay with that. it doesn’t mean i should sleep in tomorrow, i know he is my father for a reason, but all day i saw where he fits in a little better. i saw how i haven’t been giving my life the schedule that i grew up with, and how that means i’m not accomplishing enough, and that that’s because i have been exhausted from trying to overachieve for too long. i know i say this too much, but i saw on my father’s birthday that i am ready to push away the demons that cause me to grovel, ready to ask more of myself. i don’t know how to end this without sounding too cheesy, and i don’t even trust myself as i’m writing it because i feel the trumpets starting. but i really did see how my life could hold some of my father’s dedication inside of my everyday, even if it looks nothing the same.
May 14, 2008 at 2:54 pm · Filed under dog
there is drilling going on to build a foundation to our garage that we did not know we needed, and the drilling in my brain from the extra $5,000 the renovation will cost because of this unknown, and the dogs are wrestling and right now trying to dig up the patio that steve laid this spring. mud on their paws, sandy mud, and their noses brown and gritty, and eye gunk very white on their dark fur. beside the toilet paper in the bathroom are our clean dishes, and when i brush my teeth i have to spit into a sink of dirty bowls and silverware because our kitchen is a skeleton.
steve’s office desk has become the place where the cats eat, so that joon doesn’t eat their food, and so the desk is caked with dried-up cat food. my drawing yesterday, which i drew at steve’s office desk because my studio has become a holding ground for various kitchen objects, is now stained with cat food. and if i want to put the boxes away with the ink pens and the wells of ink, i have to balance the boxes, kick the dogs away, open the baby gate, wade through three layers of terraced plastic that is hung from the ceiling, wade through two more layers of plastic going downstairs, which have wood nailed to the bottom to keep them from blowing around, and then climb through the downstairs maze of kitchen cabinets. so i have not put those two boxes away. and on steve’s office desk is also our newest altar, our chandelier balancing dried orchid blooms. but now the blooms have blown off because i had to open the window in steve’s office to call out to the dog, and joon ate one of the blooms and the cat batted another, and below it is that crusted-up cat food.
when i’m on the computer my knees fall asleep because i’m sitting on the hardwood floor at the coffee table, trying to protect my breakfast and coffee from the dogs. yesterday joon jumped up on steve’s office desk to get the cat food, which she is getting tall enough to do, and i ran over to tell her off, but she didn’t get off. i brought out a treat, off, and she ran to me. good girl, good off, good off, joon. but then she’s back up again, and i don’t have the patience so i put her in her crate. she is calm, good girl, good girl, and after half an hour i let her out and she runs straight for the cat food again, putting her paws up on the desk.
today during the jackhammering, an elderly neighbor came to the door and he couldn’t hear me so i had to sneak outside for three minutes while he talked to me about white russian corn. i reentered to find that joon had chewed through my computer cord and taken my lunch off of the coffee table. it is my fault, obviously: i should have her leashed next to me at all times, or else i should put her in her crate. but up until this week she has been well-behaved. now we find it hard to like her, with her potato brains and the barking and chewing. this is when people give up their dogs, right around the five-month mark, when they aren’t little-puppy cute and yet still act like a puppy, just stronger and capable of longer periods of wildness. of course we won’t give her up, but still. moby could go to harvard on a track scholarship, but joon might go to washtenaw, maybe, and she might be a nail technician. beside her, moby is so glorious. moby is gorgeous. tall and velvet and calm. he is a beacon, wise and sorry for joon’s puppy-sins; he is a reminder that this chaos passes.
May 12, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under self
the first mother’s day with rosie and jack, we went to rosie’s mother’s deceased father’s past partner’s house in ypsilanti for a dinner celebration. i wrote their mother a note that said how great the children are, what a good job she’s doing, and how honored i am to be a part of all this and how much i have to learn.
the second mother’s day, we weren’t talking to amity anymore and jack had been taken. rosie made her father a card and said to him, thank you for being like a mother to me, and i was standing beside him.
the third mother’s day i don’t remember at all. i think there was some conflict with our having rosie when her mother wanted to see her and we were going to be gone so we had to change our plans. no mention in this house of any mother. their mother’s deceased father’s past partner had moved away. we were far from that time of trying to all be one family, and still stuck in the drama of trying too hard not to be.
the fourth mother’s day, i was graduating from cranbrook and my family was in town, my sister with her baby and my mom receiving cards. i remember saying something to my sister after everyone else had left about stepmothers and the silence around them, and i remember her face in the car looking back at me, and she said happy mother’s day.
this weekend we were up north at steve’s parents’ cottage, helping open it up for the summer. we had rosie and jack, but we had to leave pretty early on sunday so that they could be back with their mother by the afternoon for a mother’s day lunch. all weekend there was talk of mother’s day. steve’s brother is about to go into rehab for a drug addiction, and so his mother is not feeling particularly proud of the job she did. and steve’s sister has had to leave her son in michigan while she’s been in boot camp for the past six weeks and in training for the next fifteen, so her son is having mother’s day without her. and i am not a mother, we all know this, i would not take that title away from the one who birthed these kids, but here i am with them rubbing jack’s back after he falls off the swing, and here i am telling rosie i will not go to the store to buy her advil just because she thinks the aspirin won’t work. we went on a hike and i told jack to find something for his mother for mother’s day, and he kept picking up huge rocks and trying to fit them in his pockets. he finally ended up with a very large tube of birch bark, and he carried it for two miles so that he could present it to his mother on mother’s day. i told rosie, when she showed me a lizard she made on friday, that she could give it to her mother for mother’s day, and so this is what she did. on mother’s day i woke up and it’s the first thing rosie said to me, happy mother’s day, courtney. a first, and the words a gift. sorry i don’t have anything for you. i’ll have something before the day’s over. but i told her she didn’t have to, that she made me happy enough. and she didn’t end up having anything for me, and she apologized as i dropped her off at her mother’s, but the apology really wasn’t needed.
then her mother rushed out the door as we were about to pull away. she had a gift for me. you’re a great mother to the children, she said. i don’t know what i am to the children. i don’t know how they think of me. i know what i have to pretend to be when i’m in my house so that there’s order and love, but i don’t expect their mother to acknowledge that. i don’t know if i’m a mother, and i don’t know if i’m a great one, but she said it without excess drama or any weight in the words, just with kindness.
i sometimes heal so quickly. that gesture patched up every messy moment between us. i couldn’t think anything mean about her all day. steve had to demand that i open the present. i didn’t want to. just that i got a present, nevermind they were books, nor what books. i was choking up in the car like a real parent, how they get too sentimental, or at least like someone who is part of a family.
May 8, 2008 at 7:10 pm · Filed under self
i’ve been trying to update my personal website, and here are some buttons i made today.
in my dream world i would have a website with a lot of white space and you swim through it and click on buttons that appear out of nowhere, or buttons that, when you pass over them, transform into something else. i’m not particularly good at making websites, but after spending way, way, way too long studying joomla and wordpress and typepad, i decided that it would just be easier to make my own front page that functions as a sort of map that links to other pages around the web, like to this blog, to nougatcroc, to a page that will eventually house an easily update-able catalogue of drawings and paintings. a map is a drawing, i realized, so i can draw this thing and not have to worry about updating in html all the subpages that offshoot from it — which is the original reason my personal website fell apart before.
i was reading through my cranbrook blog yesterday, and i felt nostalgic for that time of fast forward movement. even though it’s left me fried for this whole year, i wouldn’t take it back. and i yearn for that rigor again. i have it in spurts, but i do believe that i perform better when i’m given a schedule. the days go by so quickly now. i have to work on that.
steve and i are also in the process of re-conceiving our nougatcroc website. what is important to us is the process: taking a photograph each day is a miraculous process, and it’s simply easier for each to hold the other to the plan — it ensures we do it, and it makes it easier on steve, who is busier, because i’m always the one to upload them to the web. but writing a stereograph is more powerful than taking a photographic one. the camera is the art tool that makes everyone, eventually, an artist. you don’t have to be a great drawer or writer, you have to see and point and shoot. i can’t say that my photographs look very different from steve’s, or that i even photograph different things than steve does: eventually, i’m going to photograph what he has photographed. definitely there are small differences, but it’s not the difference of drawing or writing. and because the subject is always pretty similar and the medium makes the styles similar, the differences aren’t powerful enough to make the project worthwhile long-term. the schtick of seeing visual metaphors is beautiful, but it can’t be the meat of the project for an entire year. the project functions better as a book, or as something to be looked at once a month and not each day: it’s not exciting enough to see one photograph or two photographs a day. it’s not enough to look forward to. we have other ideas, but we’re still processing them. neither of us wants to give up our practice of photographing daily, so we’ll just have to see where that process takes us.
ps: if i owned an h-vac company, i would definitely name it 8-track h-vac.
May 7, 2008 at 2:54 pm · Filed under house
humid day unfurl, the house a bad hair day, dogs outside and then in and on the bed, i change the bedsheets, dogs outside and then in and on the bed. fur on the keyboard, dirt on the screen. rope toy, black ball, tennis ball rolled in dead grass, dirty towel on the floor, paw prints drying matte dark. i have a body, slimy, i do not have a body, shiny. then wind, which finds pockets of cool where do they come from. cars pass: a sandpapering sound. the adirondacks not yet teak-oiled, bring them in. summer stacked on the coffee table. rugs making waves on the floor. i do not mean to complain: rain! the garden wine. watch the leaves like devil-tongues peel out of the branches.
May 5, 2008 at 8:07 pm · Filed under house
the builders have come to start our renovations, and now the house is made of glass. the house is made of air. i stand in the garage and i see into rosie’s bedroom. open the garage door and all the bees swarm in to what was the kitchen. the kitchen now a toothpick diorama. the paint chips taped to the only wall.
the workers see that i get a beer before quitting time on friday. they see that i don’t have a quitting or a starting time at all. they note that i am still in the shower when they have already driven from chelsea to get here. they listen to me listen to a song on repeat for two hours. they watch how i am obsessed with the dogs, how i sing to them and run joonie around on her leash in the backyard and take moby for walks and return with a paper coffee cup instead of a reusable one. they listen to joon whine in her crate, and maybe they judge because i don’t heed her. or they judge when i take her out too soon after her cries have stopped. they may judge that i eat thai take-out too many days in a row, or that i make coffee at 4 and then complain that i had a bad sleep the next day.
steve and i have conversations together and i can tell that we talk like we’re being watched. i can see it in his eyes, how he’s being over-expressive. i can see it in how i’m being too catty. then we feel stiff, we have a stupid fight with our voices hushed. the storm is over, we read, we type, the workers leave at last and we are home again.
with someone watching him, steve gets more defiant of his life. he’ll pad around in his sweatpants and spend the afternoon watching a television show on his computer. i feel i’m being watched and i work harder than i normally would, just to show that i’m working. i feel it in my knees, that i’m showing off how fast i’m typing or how much laundry i’ve done in a day. i sigh a little too loudly when i pass them to bring the laundry downstairs. i look too serious when i’m taking the dogs out, as if i think that i’m working as hard as they are, the great responsibility of raising a dog to be a member of society. i feel awkward standing out in the grass with joon’s leash in my hand, and so i do leg lifts, i think serious thoughts, i inspect the branches suddenly blooming as if i am thinking of a poem to write, or at least a blog.
May 2, 2008 at 7:06 pm · Filed under rosie
the three moments that led to my feeling that there may need to be a structural and conceptual overhaul in how we manage rosie.
1. she just got two Es in school. she is only in eighth grade. school doesn’t suddenly get easier. she will have to deal with more lectures, more homework, and less help in high school. we have tried everything that i can think of to help her with her homework — a tutor, the strategies class, getting teacher signatures, having steve email the teachers once a week to hear a report from them personally, taking her to a psychiatrist to see if she needs anti-depressants or adhd medication to help her to focus and care, giving her a special afterschool dose of adhd medication to help her with her homework, setting aside a specific time and space for her to do her homework, hounding her delicately about her homework, etc. still, her grades have all gotten progressively worse.
2. i went to d.c. and had a talk with my mother. she said: we always talk about the good things, is there anything not-good that you want to talk about? we were on a walk, my sister’s daughter was sleeping. so i talked about rosie. to get an outsider’s perspective was a relief. i got to crack open a window and show her what i deal with each day, the world i’m not supposed to talk about. i realized while talking with her that i felt with all my heart that i am doing everything i can and still rosie, in some ways, is getting worse. my mother tried to tell me how someone needs to control what rosie eats and monitor her exercise and whip her into emotional and physical shape. i could never do that, i don’t think it would ultimately help her or her relationship with me, but talking to her reassured me that i could only control half of rosie’s life. if she exercised and ate as she did at our house all the time, if she did her homework in the manner that she does it at our house all the time, her weight and confidence and academic problems would not be spiraling. in that moment i saw that i really am doing the best i can, and that rosie’s world is truly now divided more than ever.
3. when i first came along, half of rosie’s clothes were at our house and half at her mom’s. sometimes the balance would shift, and then rosie wouldn’t have any pants to wear to school the next day besides the ones she’d just thrown in the laundry. last year we began carting rosie’s clothes from house to house: with the every-other-week schedule, it seemed easier to do this (as opposed to the every-other-day schedule that rosie followed when i came along), and rosie’s clothes were getting more expensive and she was getting more attached to them. last week when i dropped her things off at her mother’s, it took up all of the back of the car. she has so many clothes now, as teenagers do. i had to wash them all, fold them, pack them up for her. she has a special tote for her hair dryer and her hair straightener, plus her hairspray and her facial cleanser and the lotion she likes for her hands. plus her nail filer. plus her headbands, the black plastic one and the thick one. and her two belts, one black and one pink. plus her ipod, and her ipod charger. and her morning medicine in the blue container, and her afternoon medicine in the orange container. plus her school books, all her school notebooks, her calculator, and whichever book she’s reading plus the one she’s thinking of reading. and her phone, where is her cell phone, and where is her cell phone charger? the transition, her life, it’s bulky.
on this planet, in this country, where love and bodies decide who connects to whom and what to do with the children that follow, it is determined in this part of this century that joint custody is fair for the adults. and maybe if jack had been born of steve and rosie’s mom, maybe then the joint custody arrangement would be fine: jack has less emotional attachment, less anxiety, and way less depression. he is less attached to his mother or anyone else, and he remembers the sundry daily details — homework, belt, setting his alarm — that rosie forgets. maybe then it would be fine to split a child between two paradigms.
but i am beginning to wonder in a very serious and solemn way if perhaps rosie is exactly the wrong child to be split like this. and if that’s true, then what do we do. she cannot be taken from her mother because her mother is the one about whom she has nightmares and the one who holds the complexities of rosie’s heart — no matter that her mother has said that if we move away, we can take her with us. but if she stays at her mother’s, chances are she will not do her homework or have a regular, reasonable bedtime or have anyone to pack her lunch for her. as much as rosie might be better off with us as her constant guardians when you look at the situation close-up, with a telescope you could see that this would cause rosie further emotional damage, being cut off from healing the relationship with her mother.
i don’t know what to do. i don’t know how to help both rosie’s grades and her heart at the same time. but whatever we are doing is not working for this particular girl, and the solution to her problems might break our hearts and leave us, as martyrs for her own good, childless.
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