Summer Reading

“Oh, you should read this, I think you’ll like it,” my mother tells me. She and I exchange books a lot, despite the fact that one should always take her recommendations with a grain of salt.

How was the movie, Mom? “It was EXCELLENT. The best I’ve ever seen. That Cate Blanchett should win an Oscar.”

I heard you tried that new Italian place. “The chicken piccata was OUTSTANDING. I really can’t remember having such a good meal.”

Hey, welcome back from vacation! “Oh my gosh, Provence was AMAZING. I felt like I died and went to heaven. I’m so lucky to be alive.”

And finally, “My grandchildren are all so BRILLIANT . They are just such a pleasure to be with.”

My mother is a glass half-full kinda gal.

The book she passed on to me was Eat, Pray, Love.

It is a treatise for bourgeois women everywhere:

My husband is boring! I think I will collapse on my bathroom floor and bang my head against the cold ceramic tile.

I found a hot lover! Why is my husband so mad at me? I think I will divorce him.

My lover is emotionally unavailable. I think I need Zoloft.

If I am not going to be a suburban soccer mom, then I don’t know who I am. I think I will travel to an ashram to find myself.

I read 25 pages. I scoffed. Is this woman SERIOUS?!!

But, she uses the word smug several times. I read the whole thing. I have two concluding thoughts:

1. Hmmm, maybe I should get myself a guru.

2. Wait, I’ve heard this message before. Ah, yes.

Smug

I love the word smug. It is easy to be smug when you live the bourgeois life, this life of privilege and really good seats. Being smug is not the same as being judgmental. I am judgmental, too, but that has nothing to do with being bourgeois.

Judgmental is “I am better than you.”

Smug is “Don’t you wish you were me?”

“I think Eskimos are smug.” John Turturro, Anger Management (2003)

People Who Have it Worse Than I Do, Part 1

My beloved sister, my Irish twin, the only person with whom I can talk on the phone whilst* taking a crap.

My sister is highly organized. She runs a tight ship. She does not suffer fools, and is a very successful manager at work.

Her first child was born six years ago “all banged up” as she says. Grace is missing a part of her brain and a part of her colon. She is not wired right. It is terrible, heartbreaking, a tragedy.

But what really makes me feel for my sister is that the poor woman has to accommodate someone in her life who sucks on the wrong end of the Popsicle stick. “She’s not so smart, my Gracie. If this is God’s way of teaching me patience, then He’s got a really sick sense of humor.”

*no, I'm not British, but some of their words are better than ours.

Small miracles.

I’ve said that my son’s behavior raises my blood pressure. It’s challenging, no doubt. But it is what it is, and each day we take a deep breath and deal with it and love him the best that we can.

What really pisses me off about autism is this: A lot of the time, he feels lost to me. He’s in another world and I can’t communicate with him. I lose my patience. I grieve. I feel sad for him, for me, for our family.

Then, there are moments of lucidity, when DS IS the child I like to imagine him to be.

Last night. After dinner, I found DS and DD playing quietly in their playroom upstairs. “What’re you guys up to?” “We’re making DNA out of these bendy strips.” I joined them on the floor. Playing, talking, laughing. What do we know about DNA, viruses, our blood cells?

“Hey, look at this pattern; I can make it three-dimensional.” “That looks like a merry-go-round.” “No, a ferris wheel!”

The topic changed to sex and puberty. (This was me, teachable moments and all that.) They blushed, we laughed. He asked questions, he stayed on topic. “Girls, ewwwww. I’ll never kiss a girl.” He played, he poked fun at his sister. I looked at him, he smiled back at me. We chatted some more.

I didn’t want it to ever end. We stayed up until nearly midnight. The three of us, on the floor together. Just hanging out. No noises, no stims, no lost in his own world, no mention of Mario OR Luigi.

Then I had to break the spell. “It’s late; time for bed.” Everyone off to bed without a fuss. I kissed his forehead good night.

“I love you, Mommy.” “I love you, too.”

I went to check on his sister. Then all of us off to sleep, at peace.

I'm not worthy.

In the car:

DS: DD, what’s the matter with you? Are you DYING?!!
DD: Noooo.
DS: Well then why do you have your hand over your heart like that?
DD: We passed a flag back at the toll booth.
DS: Are you pledging your allegiance?
DD: No, just showing my respect.

Later that day at the beach:

DD: Is that a recycling bin over there?
Bourgeois Mom: No, honey that’s the trash. Recycling bins are blue, but I don’t see one. It’s OK to throw it out. Oh, look, here’s lunch.


DD picks her pony-sized plastic Snapple bottle up and treks off across the sand. She soon disappears from sight.


Ten minutes later, I am 4/5ths of the way through my bourgeois lunch of grilled vegetable quesadilla and $6.50 smoothie, with protein power pack. DD reappears through the hordes.

Grandma: DD, did you go to [two towns southward] to find a recycling bin?
The BP: Damn, I would’ve tossed that thing in the ocean halfway into it.

DD sets her 10-year old bottom down in her beach chair, minus recycling, and quietly unwraps her lunch.

A View from My Kitchen Window, or Keeping Score

All right, so I am in here preparing the family meal tonight, which I do almost every night. I will serve it and clean the kitchen afterward. I will maybe get a thanks.

But hey, look my car is washed and waxed, the kickstand on the baby’s bike is fixed, the hedges are pruned and holy shit the man is out there powerwashing the driveway. For the second time this month.

Pseudonym

I have not yet granted my husband a pseudonym. No initials, no middle name, no made up nomenclature. My husband has three names in real life, and I could use any one of them, and a significant percentage of the population that know him would not know about whom I am writing.

Given name – A grand and historic name. He has a numeral! I found this very attractive about him when I met him as a teen. That and his talking car.

Public name – A second name that his parents picked for him so he could enter kindergarten without being ridiculed (see nickname below). He still uses this name at work. It is a name that “used to be for the family dog” but is now very popular. Call him by this name in a crowded shopping mall and a couple or three six-year olds will snap to attention.

Nickname – The family name bestowed on him in utero. It is the preferred name of all family and dear friends. It’s the only name I have ever addressed him by, even when we exchanged wedding vows. It is the name of a large woodland animal.

From here on out, he will be the BP for reasons only known to me.

Boring.

Ugh, I so don’t want to go here. I met my husband at age 18. He has been my constant companion for the subsequent 21 years and counting. In 21 years I have not flirted, be-friended, or slept with another man (but for that summer in college when we were Ross&Rachel-style “on a break,” except that doesn’t count because the other “man” was really a boy.) This is both admirable and boring. Admirable because sustaining a marriage is really fucking hard. Boring for all the obvious reasons.

My husband and I like to sum up our differences – he is ENTP and I am ISFJ. In an off-the-charts way. He is completely non-judgmental. He is totally self-confident. He is loyal, dependable, competent. He can do many things that I cannot. He functions better in the world than I do. He can be a complete and utter prick.

In college, our roommates, classmates were befuddled. He was a WASPy, third-generation alumni legacy, all-male prep school graduate, Nth generation knee-jerk Republican, and I was a first generation American, first generation college attendee, Women’s Studies concentrator, with a shady past and wildly fluctuating mood swings.

Years later, we still have nothing in common. We both can sit on the beach for hours. We both curse in front of our children. That’s really about it. I’m not kidding.

All I know is that from the start we’ve been family and we will always be together, despite my regular divorce fantasies. A lot of times I prefer living in my fantasy world, and that’s OK, but he’s not usually a resident there.

That’s all I have to say for now. Because reading about married peoples’ lives, unless it includes explicit sex or perhaps episodes of verbal or physical abuse, is boring, you can find better entertainment on Lifetime television, and I am not going to talk about sex right now and, as my husband likes to say, “There’s not enough domestic violence in our house.”

This morning

Bourgeois Mom: There’s no coffee this morning because the filter door flew off the coffeemaker when I tried to put the ground beans in.

Bourgeois Mom's Husband: We’ve got problems.

My Special Kids

I am going to blog about my children now. They are very special children, more special than yours, even. I am their mother, I know this to be so.

My daughter is so cool. She is a better person than her father or I. She is healthy in all ways and came with bonus features. The greater being, whoever, installed an amazingly well calibrated moral compass in this child. When she was five years old, her friend Maggie, the Teller of Tall Tales, found a pack of chewing gum in the very special place in the car armrest where such things can be safely stored. She picked it up and started unwrapping a piece. DD told her not to, that pack of gum belonged to her brother. Maggie replied with logic – well, he’ll never know, he’s not here. Exactly, DD, said, he’s not here, therefore we cannot ask his permission to take a piece of his gum. Maggie was not deterred, DD became distressed. Here Maggie, she said, here’s my gum. You can take TWO pieces of my gum if you promise to leave Brother’s alone.

I don’t want to make her out to be a martyr. She’s not. Nor is she a wallflower, doormat, or nerd. She is just inherently good. I am afraid I will corrupt her. And she can pogo for 31 minutes straight. Easily.

My son is a pioneer. One of the first in a wave of newly diagnosed high-functioning autism spectrum critters. Nobody knows what to do with him – including his parents (yes, 50% of which is me). He would provide stiff competition in the Most Annoying 12 –Year Old Boy World Championship Finals. He would get a good run from his autistic friends, the Perseverator, the Echolalist, and The Boy Who Is Not Necessarily Finished Experiencing His Food Once It Enters His Mouth. But for the past six months my son has been training quite intensively. He is strict with his daily regimen of sticking his face into others’ and making loud groaning noises even when one is trying to converse with the nice car salesman, spitting on the floor, letting doors slam into people’s faces no matter how elderly or frail, interrupting conversations with howls or maniacal laughing, perseverating about hippopotami, touching his anus and licking his finger, rolling around on the floor in public places such as the lobby of the AMC movie theater, spilling, licking his shirt, chewing on his pen cap even though he’s been told 171 times in the last hour that he will pay for the replacement orthodonture with his own blood should another one of those metal things pop loose.

It is a generally accepted truth that a redeeming side effect of autism is that the afflicted also exhibit a special genius, the “savant” in idiot-savant. Hmm. The HFA, neuro-atypical boys that I know are no dopes and can get by with As and Bs in school. However, they are not geniuses nor gifted in any way, except in being blood pressure de-stabilizingly annoying.

Do I need to qualify this by saying that I love this child deeply, passionately, painfully, with every frazzled nerve-ending and worried molecule and the whole of my sometimes broken heart? I hope not.

Why blog?

Reason 1: To dump it. I really, really try to be pleasant in my daily life and interactions with other people. The wise credo of my grandmother, passed down through my mother, “Personal comments aren’t necessary,” reverberates. I really, really try to have a positive outlook in life, although I am a natural-born complainer. I really, really try to be laid back, to not sweat the small stuff. My stomach churns most days with anxiety.

I try and try, but it is so not natural for me.

So I want to dump my raw thoughts, exorcise the ugly bits. Say the things I (usually) only think. Get them OUT of my head. Then, perhaps move on to meaningful commentary, social observations, daily chit chat and spreading the love. Or something.

Reason 2: And end to lurking. I have been a lurker for five years. I read people’s blogs about sex and dating, triathlon training, addiction, bodybuilding, exotic travel. I read the blogs of autistic people, stay at home moms, women obsessed with food. I entertain myself with other people’s drama and minutiae. It is voyeuristic. So I am giving back to the blogging community that provides me with so much opportunity for procrastination.

The Bourgeois Life - An Introduction

I have a very bad habit. I observe people with an eye to categorizing them. Wait, no, I judge them. I think – are they better than or worse than I? It really is so bad that it bubbles up completely uncontrollably like mental vomit. Yes, it does too. Even when I am trying my best to be “tolerant.” Or to not even look. I actually believe this is an inherited trait. I got it from my adult-child-of-an-alcoholic, inferiority-complex-ridden dad. We are both afraid of people. That is my rationalization.

I got called out on this last week. I was spending a boring evening with my husband*, waiting in a bar lounge to pay too much money for mediocre food at a crowded, oceanside restaurant. Because that is one of the things I am supposed to do. My gaze of appraisal was drawn to a crowd of “late-40s, divorcees,” with big hair, tight jeans, high heels and a chokifying cloud of perfume. I know they were divorced because I looked. I decided these were the “type of women” to flaunt serious ice. No ice, but there were expensively manicured fingernails. I remarked aloud to my husband, “I think I am the only woman in a quarter-mile radius without manicured fingers.” He didn’t respond because, well yeah, exactly.

Walking to our table, I was caught up in my game of checking out feminine fingernails, lost in my judgmental thoughts, when I heard, “What the fuck are you looking at BITCH. You’re ugly.” The comment was snarled at the back of my head, and I did not acknowledge hearing it. I was mortified. Oh my God I am so pathetic. Then, I thought, “gum-snapping, hair pile.” And my equilibrium was restored.

Anyway, you can categorize me. It’s OK. I am a stereotype. I live in an “affluent” yet “left-leaning” suburb in a “blue state” characterized by “economic and racial diversity” craved by the many “urban transplants” who are my neighbors. I am a “soccer mom” and I live in “spacious five bedroom center hall colonial” nestled on “well-maintained” and “park-like” grounds. I have a lot of stuff coveted by those who covet consumer status markers. I am a member of that club. “Sub-zero” “BMW” umm and a bunch of other things. We are already bored with this list. I am bourgeois.

I would feel bad about this, except I could have turned out much worse. As a depressed, suicidal, promiscuous, self-hating and self-destructive adolescent alcoholic, the way I might have turned out is dead. That is my rationalization.

Plot point. At the age of 18, I entered an Ivy League university, met my future husband, and skulked into an AA meeting – all in the same week. I got sober, joined the privileged, married up. I stopped checking the ethnic boxes that got me scholarships and affirmative action, and started checking “white.” Wait...hold that last thought for another post.

Anyway, here I am. I am ordinary. I am not at all special, except in the way that all the world’s beings are singular and important. Blah, blah, blah. In this blog I am going to write about me. You can stop reading now or go start your own blog.

*fodder for many future posts, I am sure, but for now he’s just the man to whom I am married. And I will leave it at that.