Ba-Ba-Buoy!

Yesterday, a good friend of mine asked me (again, because he's elderly) about marriage and children, which are admittedly much easier questions for me than you might think, but here it goes, one more time: I was married (in a outdoor ceremony by a female Methodist minister, which makes it "null and void" in our Catholic tradition) to a friend of mine from the SUNY school we attended that he failed out of, and because he's a manic/depressive alcoholic, we didn't have any children. I did "know" he had problems without really knowing it, because I don't share his disorders, but I wanted him to make it as my friend and a fellow native.

I was "down" with him as a squaw, which meant it was more than just between us; we were fighting to survive in this world, and I understood that about our lives. Plus, he was really handsome and a carpenter, which meant that he gave me enough space to create without actually being a gifted artist, and that was serious: he just didn't have the intellect I needed. But, he was a nice boy and he could be very charming, so I helped him with counseling ONCE by holding his hand for the first visit, and then he never really addressed healthcare again. Oh, well. If his family didn't support our vows like they promised at our wedding, then there wasn't a real marriage between us, like my father said to me over the phone. It was time to go. And that was that. He got re-married and divorced again, to come looking for me again, too.

"Well, what about kids?" Oh, uh...what about children? They love me, and I've been taking care of people my whole life, so....you know? It isn't some desperate thing for me to be a caring person. He said he'd noticed me around town with a tall handsome man, and I laughed. Yup! That totally sounds like me. Experience is a hard master to learn from, especially if you don't have that much, which is why I've always enjoyed talking with older people. They really connect with what I'm saying on a deeper level. Besides, I've always been a natural parent, and it's about stuff that matters, too, like this time at the beach with my niece.

Her mom was riding the corporate pony like a seriously programmed drone, which meant me and my brother were free to go to the bay without her tense dramatics and canned marketing copy following us there. Fine by me! Let's go. It was a beautiful summer day, so I took the train (actually, several) from Brooklyn to Grand Central to Connecticut, so we could go swimming in the sound near their hometown. My niece wasn't getting along with her brother, so me and my bro split up: he took the boy, and me and my girl went swimming. The bay is a lot calmer than the roughness of the ocean, so we felt easy in the water. She confided to me that she always wanted to swim out far enough to touch the big red buoy floating in the bay, and she was feeling confident with me by her side, so we decided to do it.

The sun was warm and the water felt great, but like any big swim, halfway through it, you feel the distance spread out before you. It got choppier, too, and I could see the apprehension in her eyes, so I let her know she could put her arms around my neck and I'd swim us back to shore, anytime she wanted to. Nope. She wanted to do it. That's my girl! I talked about other swim strategies to combat swim fatigue, like floating on your back to catch a rest, and we tried it a couple of times together. It was a lot farther out than she thought, but that was the challenge of it for her. I think she was 10, at the time. I asked her how come she hadn't done this swim with her mom, and even though I knew the answer, I wanted her to keep talking to lessen her fears.

She said her mom told her she was "burnt out" from swimming because of her swim team days at school (she's a compulsive runner, too), so now she was just "bored" with it. Oh, how fucked up and selfish, I thought to myself. But, that's who she is, and my brother married her anyway. And that's why, on that day, I easily took on the role of a mother to fill in the gap that her sick mom leaves behind, with the grace of a native New York girl who's been swimming her whole life. I could do it, so I did it; not to take away, but to give.

We finally made it to the buoy, and it was a lot bigger than we expected. She got scared as we clung to it bobbing on the waves, and then she was done with it. "Okay, let's go back. Like, now", and then she started swimming without me. Smart. She was a little breathless, so she wanted to have enough energy for the swim back to shore. I gave her some space to enjoy the experience on her own, following her in the water from a safe distance. We were tired when we made it back to the beach, but we knew we'd just had one of the best days ever, because my little Jane had passed one of her first real tests of bravery. Well done, Métis. See you in the ocean again, soon.

Caravan

You'd think I'd have learned my lesson about transporting potentially dangerous goods across country borders and state lines back in my Montreal-bound college days, but I hadn't. It was in this same spirit of adventure that me and my ex from Colorado decided to move back east with an almost fully grown werewolf sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my car, connected to my boyfriend driving alone in his big red truck through walkie-talkie. Uh, yeah.

Ted did not wear a seat-belt, nor conform to quaint human customs like not moving around a speeding car while driving on a busy highway, which included his attempts to get into my lap as I drove us cross-country, because he "werewolf-remembered" sitting that way with me as a puppy while Kent drove us around Denver. Clever. The first two days were fine, with our biggest concern being the motel owner not noticing a rather large wolf-like object accompanying us into our hotel room for the night, though I had tried to prepare for our overnight stops with a list of animal-friendly places along the way printed off the computer, like any other idealistic new mom.

On the third day of our road trip, Ted totally lost his shit. He'd been wonderful until then, but two days of long boring car rides had offended him beyond belief, conditioned as he was to better stimulation from his parents. And it wasn't a light rebellion, either. He fucking blew his stack in the middle of a rainstorm high in the Pennsylvanian mountains while I was passing two large trucks on both sides that completely doused my car in vision-impairing sheets of water while Ted tried to climb into my lap with more force than I'd felt until then, before banging his head against the window and crying at the top of his lungs.

I scrambled shakily for the walkie-talkie with an emergency "Mayday" call to Kent, who was pissed off about stopping while we made good time, but there was nothing else I could do. A Giant M'Loot Malamute with exceptional bloodlines has been bred to know when enough is enough, and we'd both had more than enough. We stopped at a misty field in the mountains, waiting for Ted to regroup while he walked around scenting the air.

He reluctantly got back in the car, but the warning to me was clear: no more, Mom. Any East Coaster knows that every big road trip ends with the massive length of Pennsylvania's mountains of forest to confront for hours and hours of radio silence before finally making it back home, like a lesson in patience and homesickness. Lesson learned. While Kent deconstructed himself to implode within a mere ten days in the city (nice, New York; what is that, a record?), I walked through beautiful Prospect Park with Ted, as I promised myself I would never let anyone get between me and my home again, and I haven't. That's the strength and power of a mother's word.

See you next week.

Allie

Being a natural mother can be odd. I'm often asked about my life, and how I spend my time. Do I ever get lonely? Sure, but not nearly enough to go to a bar in town by myself, to rub elbows with the angry drunk locals who never made it to the city for a career. That was high school for me. Townies are really sensitive about their lack of experience; a trait that is not well-heightened by excessive amounts of alcohol.

They prefer to remain singularly clannish and inbred by pretending an exclusivity that has successively bred the fatal Tay-Sachs disease into their children, offering roadblocks to their status by remaining exactly where their parents and grandparents dropped them, stubbornly adhering to the idea that someone who has only gone to school in one small town somehow has a leg-up on the rest of us Rocklanders. Good luck with that. I found out through their local genetic study that I wasn't "Irish" enough to be considered for their Tay-Sachs research, and my Norman ancestors would be very glad to hear that. Job well done, for a sophisticated merchant family with ancient roots.

Provincial pockets of lonely cousins are still rather common in this area, as a place built before the relative ease of commercial travel, bane as that is to the environment and our collective health. I found another pocket of genetic oddity in Brooklyn, introduced to me through my rabidly social cousin, who drinks like a good time is at the bottom of each and every glass. When I dated a friend of his, the car service driver from Park Slope was astonished at the change in scenery on the way to his house. This is Brooklyn?! He was from the Middle East, and he'd never seen a seaport town with no lawns like the Jersey Shore in a city borough, but that's exactly what it is.

The houses are built right up to the curb, often with no grass; just crushed shells or stones. Everyone was related to one another, and that was the way they preferred it, trips to the green motherland of Eire or not. Most homes had an old-fashioned nautical theme, with anchors or ropes and buoys prominently displayed. My boyfriend John had kept a boat that he didn't use often enough to justify the fees attached to mooring it all year long, and many of his friends had boats, too. The one bar in town had a pier to the jetty; we often went for boat trips to restaurants and bars that were only open in the summertime to boaters who pulled up to the dock.

His family and friends were immediately suspicious of me, because they couldn't tell just by looking at me who I was related to, in their town. Uh, probably the lot of you, though we've had a good deal mixing of the air since then, I'd suppose. Their Irish decor was also everywhere, and I remained (besides my cousin who introduced us) the only person in his crowd who'd actually been to Ireland. Twice. But, that's clannishness for you. I didn't expect a bunch of high school drop-outs who'd married their cousins and/or half-siblings to take a shine to me, and John and I were frequently on the outs from his drinking habit.

He was the only really successful man in his area, which made him both big-headed and a huge target in equally large measures. He made a lot of money with his trucking business, much more than he knew how to spend well or efficiently. I immediately suggested he begin trust funds for his nieces for their college education, to which he cynically huffed, "They ain't goin' ta college. They ain't goin' nowhere." Ah. Keen to help, are ya? And that was that. He was similarly spooked by the subway ride to my office in Manhattan, and the one work-related event where art directors are treated like rock stars, with free food and drink. He could distance himself from my life while at home with me in Park Slope, but not in the bigger world, and that's the place I lived in.

His best friend was an affable short Mick with a round, cheerfully red face who married the prettiest girl at school, and we all wondered about that. She and John seemed awfully chummy, too, which was confirmed for me by my ever-drunk cousin who manages to stay sharp as a whip, G-d bless 'em. He finally admitted that they'd dated for a brief second in junior high, and that was that. With the size of their neighborhood, there weren't a lot of options around. Suffice to say, they were cordial to me and also deeply unnerved by my presence as resident townies, which I respected by staying politely in the background so as not to offend, as I was taught. But their daughter Allie knew of no such barriers that existed between us.

His best friend's daughter loved me from the moment she met me, with her perfect spiral curls and big round eyes. She loved going to the beach with me because unlike her towel-bound parents, I actually love swimming in the ocean. They seemed to be of the belief that the beach was just one big outdoor bar, without need of a cooler, what with all that sand for beer bottles to go into. Allie seemed nonplussed by her parents bad alcoholism, preferring instead to sit next to me whenever she could, at their family get-togethers. My cousin made a lame attempt at making fun of me for playing with her Christmas toys on the floor with her on Christmas Day, but like my stale beer, it fell totally flat among so much dead-eyed, robotic arm-lifting. Ranking on the only adult present enough to enjoy the company of a child wasn't funny in his 40s.

It was like the joy had gone out of all of their lives, in service to a disease that so plagues Celtic people in this century, still. In between our horrible make-ups and breakups fueled by his illnesses, John would relay her messages to me that she missed me, and that it was the first thing she said whenever she came over to his house with her parents. "Where's Marie? Is Marie coming over?" She wouldn't be the first child to miss a mother she never really had. It's not my place to rear the children born to so many sick parents, but it is my fate to do it better than they ever could. I'm right here, Allie. I'll be right here, where you can always find me. Always.

Vive Le Hate

 
While some women had terrifying brush-ups with serial date rapists and other ghouls that haunted the free site Craigslist during its heyday, I famously dated an international explorer and one very lonely celebrity chef. Neither was a good match for me, but I got pretty close to some decent relationships. Francois was an insecure Parisian businessman who convinced himself that I only wanted to date him because he was rich. Au contraire! The sex was as good as his West Village apartment, paid for every month by his firm.

Our first date was on a snowy evening to see "Le Jazz Hot" that I thought boded well for us both. But, soon he was doubting our age difference and language skills (neither true obstacles), and the discrepancy he saw in our looks. He called me a "Petite Modelle" (mannequin) during our first few beers together, astonished that a woman as beautiful as me was single, and therein lies the rub. He was a bit too thin perhaps, with a receding hairline and stained teeth of a European kind, but it was workable enough for me, though his insecurities were not.

At first, he insisted on seeing me more often, which meant I had to hurry home from work to walk my dog and then trek back to Manhattan for our dates. It was a good thing I was in my 30s and more motivated. Then, when that accommodation became intolerable, he said he would pay for my car service rides to-and-from his place, even though technically he had no money. Oh, mon dieu...then, he made a big deal out of taking the subway to see me in "le suburb de Brooklyn". I began questioning his judgment even more. He chipped away at our relationship like a gay man caught kissing a drunk girl for kicks at a soiree. What gives?

He mined the false construct of the Brooklyn 'burbs all the way to calling me "une salope" for my last name (so suburban), then ridiculing his limited palette sexually ("go find a lesbian to do the 'lick lick'. I am macho"!), to finally excluding me from a dinner party for his middle-aged friends because they would only speak French. That was after he accused me of pretending not to be fluent "en francais", so I could get out of reading his bad murder mystery he supposedly wrote on an intercontinental flight while sitting next to a showgirl from "Le Moulin Rouge" who obsessively counted each bite of food she ate because she was paranoid about getting fat. 

"So cute!" he said to me, as he pulled a bowl of chips away from me sitting on his piano, while rebuffing my amorous advances, citing that we should have dinner instead. He unraveled the strands of our relationship one-by-one to avoid an entanglement, because he told me the only successful long-term "affaire de coeur" he ever had was with a married woman whose husband didn't care if she slept around. Oh, how droll. I think I was supposed to be impressed by his utter lack of ability in handling a woman full-time, but, sadly, I was not. As I sussed out his neuroses one at a time, he just threw more obstacles in the way, culminating in a date "with a friend" that he suspiciously gave me the street address to after a series of texts, so I could find him with a pretty older woman with dark hair and eyes who was obviously interested in him, then fly into a jealous lover's rage.

We had our final mis-en-scene in the posh MeatPacking district of Manhattan. I dressed him down for encouraging these behaviors deliberately to get my attention, while his co-worker awkwardly waited down the block to see what would happen between us, finally coming up to us as we were walking away to say her "au revoir". Out of all these negatives, came the results of one inconvenient test that was absolutely positive. He told me Frenchmen were deliberately seeking to replenish their dwindling bloodlines outside of the country, then moving back home to retain custody that would actively cut the foreign-born mother out of the picture, and that was the last straw for me. It was preposterously abusive. You can only jerk around a smart New York woman so much before the "wild child" in her comes out, and that really threw him for a loop. When my patient French Catholicism was finally exhausted by all his trying immature antics, this mama did what any sane woman would do: I ended his line of succession forever. 
Tell me, where's the sin in that?

http://m.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/kelly-rutherford-loses-custody-children-ex-husband-article-1.2466812

Second Life

When my mom and I first met Dom and Angel, we didn't have great expectations about their stewardship of my Giant Mal, Teddy, but we were in dire straits. My father had come up very briefly to help me by putting my dog in a kennel, as I began the most intensive medical care process of my life so far that included surgery, DVT, PT, and then more DVT's. I knew I couldn't have him back in my life full-time, and besides, Teddy had been designed for me and my large Scottish ex-boyfriend, and he wasn't around anymore to do the heavy lifting needed. 

I was unused to being single so I had clung to Ted even tighter, but deep in my heart, I knew Brooklyn wasn't the right place for a huge snow dog like him, even though I took excellent care of him in Park Slope. We took frequent walks to Prospect Park for off-leash runs every morning that ended one day after a group of pit bulls set upon him, then we went on to "doggie discipline" classes for his safety while out on walks, and then a move further down the hill that was closer to a smaller enclosed dog run off of the Slope's Fifth Avenue that I could monitor much better for crazy dogs and their whacked-out owners.

I had worked it out to the best of my ability, even hiring a few good dog walkers in the process, but he was far too large for a woman my size, and I knew that, too. My father had told me to adopt him out right after my move back to Brooklyn, but in the wake of the financial crisis my ex had left me in, I didn't have the heart to do it, and with no one around me (as usual) to help out, I found a way to use my exuberant energy that marks a woman in her prime during her 30s to great effect. The exercise did me good, and after my bad break, I quit smoking to take up regular exercise again, albeit in the form of mixed martial arts, but it was either that or fencing, so I went with fighting, because I'm a natural-born fighter, and I'd been fighting all my life in one way or another. It was a good fit for me at the time, and it helped to fill up the void that had been devoted to an exceptional animal's daily care.

Ted was amazing, but I hadn't had a good night's sleep or a day off in over four years that led up to my accident while walking him. I knew I needed the break. So, I wasn't as "bummed" at the prospect of someone else taking care of Ted as much as I felt like a bad parent that had let him down. He hadn't done anything wrong really, besides pull for a bagel in the street too roughly after I put him on a diet at my vet's urging, and it was 5:30 in the morning, at the continued harassing insistence of my fucked-up downstairs neighbor. It was a situation designed to hurt me, it was I'm saying to you, and I knew that, too. Nothing new. So, after me and my mom had talked with Angel and Dom on the phone after advertising him for sale and for a free adoption, they chose the latter cheaper option, but on paper, they looked great.

Angel and Dom had worked for a pet store, and Dom had had several Mals before, which made them the perfect candidates. I was suffering from a bad sickness and heartache, with intolerably sad pictures of Teddy taken by digital camera in his pen at a Brooklyn kennel that tore my insides to shreds, and I just couldn't take it anymore. My brother decided to take the momentum from my natural motherly guilt to pour on more abuse about my "selfish" behavior in the wake of the most serious injury I've ever had in my life, not of my own doing. It was too painful for anyone to bear. And so, they offered to drive out from Pennsylvania to meet us before we signed over his doggie papers to them and then they picked him up from Brooklyn.

It showed us that they were serious enough dog owners to go through all that, and we weren't doing it for the money, even though both of us could have used every penny we could get, then and now. When I met them at the door, they could see how injured I was, and my mom in her walker just re-confirmed the seriousness of our situation, because she is a very crippled lady. "Oh, wow...", Angel said as I struggled to open the door with my crutches while my mom feebly limped into the room on her walker, "you guys really need our help!" Yeah, we do. My mom and Dom struck up an immediate acquaintance brought about by their shared Bronx upbringings as Italian-Americans. They were lower class than us, as we could plainly see from their dated dress and hairstyles, but times were what they were. They were available, and they answered all of our questions perfectly, but not before making sure that Ted was free, because they'd seen the ads for him at a fair price.

We explained that we put out as many feelers as we could, including those to some of my mom's crazier friends and the insane dog rescue lady from upstate, before settling on them as a couple. Dom had Ted's picture gripped tightly in his hands, looking down at it while we talked. "You're 'in love' with him, already, aren't you?" I asked him. He just nodded his head slowly. Both he and Angel had multiple marriages, partners, and kids before, and now they were empty-nesting. Dom was trying to quit smoking, so they decided he could use the exercise that came with regular dog-walking because he was rather significantly overweight, with nothing to do in their rural home besides surf the web all day, and that's what led to our engagements on social media.

Honestly, I could care less about their day-to-day lives as people outside of my social class, but I got a chance to see them interact with Ted through their posted pics on an almost-daily basis, and for all you parents out their with an ache in your heart that never heals, you know the feeling well. It eased the tight band around me just a little bit more, each time I saw a new photo or comment that was favorable to him and his care. I could go on living and getting better with his life finally settled, like I'd promised all those years ago after his car accident. "I'll always take care of you, Ted. I promise. And if I'm not around to do it, I promise that I will make every effort possible to see that someone else does." And I meant it, as I nursed him through his car hit, and then the serious bacterial and viral infections he got after swimming in a public park lake in Denver that included e-coli and Ebola.

It was enough, enough hurt and pain for him to last a lifetime or more. Ted deserved a nice grandma who was openly lonely while empty-nesting, and Angel was that. She and Dom broke up (of course), and I was continually horrified to see Dom's FB posts about "sexing" his "SL daughter" online, but combined with Angel's redneck views of life and her daughter's online porno business, it seemed like both she and I had finally gotten what we really wanted: some peace and quiet at home with a nice, large, furry, and very high-maintenance werewolf. 

She and I got a real second chance at the good life that eludes so many mothers and their serious heartaches. Would that we all get that shot in life! How great would that be? To actually find the people, places, things, and animal friends that give you a second shot at the life you deserve. How wonderful it was for us, as hard-working single women, to finally get the chance we really deserved at having some peace of mind for those we care about so much, because that's what being a mother is all about: giving until it hurts, then give some more. You just keep giving love.

Sista-Mutha

It's often been noted derisively that our "ethnic" families are so large, that the older siblings are forced to become parents quite young (like I did), and that's true; my mother was to her much-younger sister, as were both of my maternal grandparents, as many Catholic families have done before them. In fact, raising children is so much a part of our lives, it's astonishing to me when people assume that I am merely another average single woman who's "childless", alone in a sea of sameness, when nothing could be further from the truth.

All of my life, people have told me that I am their only "healthy" or "normal" friend, which is in ironic contrast to another part of my family who still refuse to see me as their natural leader, which I am. In my professional life, leadership is a quality that you cannot live without, whereas in my personal life, it's often been wrongly assumed (because I don't wear my womanhood on my sleeve for something that's simply genetic) that I cannot care for children, a family, and a home, which is so far off from my actual reality, I find it quaintly charming at times.

Doing laundry doesn't make you a good housewife, anymore than giving birth makes you a good mother. We learned in the home from our first years about babies and children, because our larger families had all sorts of kids, of varying ages, sizes, and types. My mother's youngest sister was 16 when I was born because my grandparents had her so much later in life, just like my grandmother's older sister (my grand-aunt, who also lived near us in Rockland County), because later-in-life childbirth is more common among our ancient Mediterranean bloodline. I always expected to have a family later in life, which is turning out to be exactly how I predicted it would be, and I am so glad.

I can't imagine being as great a mother in my twenties or thirties, because my background in business has added that extra experience I really needed to excel at running an excellent home, made to fit to my exceptionally high standards. It isn't about not ever having dirty dishes in the sink (for the sake of keeping up appearances); it's about genuinely being there for someone who needs you to be reliable on their timetable, just like every person who's ever relied on me (and just me) to keep to a really tough deadline on a limited budget, which is pretty much everyone associated with me.

And so it was at home, too. I've done almost every type of housekeeping chore I can think of (and some chores you modern ladies have never heard of), because my mother channeled her fussiness (honed in a laboratory) to a house full of children and one very fluffy white dog, allergies included. It was onerous hard work, and it inspired me to be something more than a kitchen drudge for the rest of my life, because being stuck in the home while chained to a dishwasher is about the worst nightmare I can think of for anyone, let alone an extremely intelligent woman. 

I can hire someone to cook and clean (not that I would overmuch, given who I am, because you can imagine the pratfalls of having strangers in the home with someone like me), but what I can't outsource is me, the essence of who I am and everything I have to teach. Who better to educate your entire family than you? What would be the point of all that time spent learning and educating outside of the home? Making money for other people and their families, over me and mine? Oh, heck no! I don't think so. Not the way this Acadian girl was raised.

Who would be better than me for my family? Nothing outperforms love, as every woman who's ever sought validation in the workplace (like a man) has found out, because children grow up so quickly, that you can <blink> and miss it. For women, there's no choice between her, her man, her home, her children, and some job, because work often represents money needed for food, clothing, shelter, and health insurance for those pricey medicines needed to combat common childhood illnesses. We've never needed ego gratification from strangers to fill our needs. Family does that for us.

For all the mothers raising other people's kids, I read you loud and clear: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Teachers%27+Day&oi=ddle&hl=en