About potty training: alcohol helps.
I have heard the following words 285y9869472065720707052734 times: "It's dancey-dance time! Go! Go! Go Brobie! Go! Go! Go Brobie! I like to dance! Hahahahaha!"
He sits backward on the toilet. He's too big for potty chairs. At one point today he was bent over the lid, sobbing and singing at the same time: "No, no, no, don't take the toy away... say you're sorry..."
I have developed a twitch in my right eye.
I wasn't forcing him to sit there while he sobbed, by the way. He was tantruming about a cookie. I watched him and thought, if this were caught on video, it would be on the news. Headline: world's worst mother forces her innocent child to sit on the toilet while he sobs and strains. I could hear the anchor's deep voice saying, "Our more sensitive viewers may want to change the channel while we play this video."
That's alcohol for the parent, not the kid, by the way, but what an idea.
I may have ever-so-slightly overshot things in the potty training arena. I bought these little 100-calorie packs of cookies at Trader Joe's and told him he could have one if he went potty in the toilet. I underestimated his - I don't think "desire" is enough word - for cookies. He ran immediately to the toilet and climbed on and pushed, straining, his little face turning red. Then he got manic, yelling about not being able to make it come out, could I push it out? And I'm like, oh shit, this isn't right. So I tell him it's not good to try so hard, and we could try again later, and he screamed and wept and said "Don't pick me up!" in a total panic. He was freaking out so I tried to force him off the toilet and he did his limp noodle routine and finally I just walked out, sat on the carpet outside the bathroom and looked down at my DS until he decided to climb off.
Then we had mac & cheese and pears and iced tea. These things help a lot.
At this age you have a few things down. You can, with absolutism, tell people about certain things that work for your kid, and things that don't under any circumstances, and stuff that he likes and dislikes, and what you do in your family, and where in his development he's ahead and where he might be the wee-est bit behind. But there are still these times where I just feel like such a
parent, in the most frightening sense of the word, where you not only are concerned but you
know beyond any doubt that you're doing it wrong.
Spongebob helps also. I'm glad he's into Spongebob because it's so weird, random, and horrifying. I feel in one very embarrassing small spot in my stomach that the popular kids would like Spongebob. My childhood social life was so terrifying; I was always at least one step behind everybody. It was like how you know a band is so over when your mom says she's into it. I would get into the vest and jeans thing a year after it was in, and I'd have only one outfit like it, and only on that day would I feel great about myself. I wasn't athletic; I sucked at soccer and the rest of the team hated me. I couldn't watch horror movies or MTV. So now there's this oblong little nut sitting heavily in my gut that tells me to be one of those horrible permissive parents who lets their kids watch whatever and picks up porn
for her boys and installs a jacuzzi so he can have naked hot tub parties and serves everyone beers... and that's just the fourth grade. Because god, wouldn't it be nice to wake up looking forward to that day at school, and having a closet full of clothes that are all fashion forward, and one of the newest bikes or motorized scooters or Ferraris or whatever, so that you don't have to walk around with your head down day after day and plot against the plots and separate the kids who hate you from the kids who hate you but pretend not to...
The Bug knows he's not allowed to say no to me, so he says other things. First, he tried "I can't." Smart little booger. I 86'd that and he went to "I'm scared." Brilliant. Now when he says "I'm scared" but I know it really means "No" and he's not scared in the slightest, I have to look like cold bitch mom in public.
It's toilet training time. Now that I've decided on it, I have to push forward. The worst thing about this process is having to be so fake all the time. I turned red and asploded rather than laugh at the video of the little boy bending over to show us the little hole where poopoo comes out, and I had to retreat entirely when The Bug bent over in front of the mirror to see for himself. When it doesn't work out and there's pee on the couch and poo in his underwear I cannot show how frustrated I am; I have to be all supportive and move forward and plop the poo into the toilet and say "bye bye poo poo" and drop one little dollop I missed on the way to the washing machine.
And of course, he's "scared" constantly. I know when the kid is really scared for godsake, and when he is, he does not say he's scared. He has all other vocabulary for that.
He's in the bath now and you should see my hurricane of a house and the laundry and the CD I'm supposed to burn for my ma and the grime he's coating the shower with and the toilet targets he's supposed to pee on and the milk solidified in his cups and what workout? What writing? I'm doing lunges through the house. I'll use his naptime to clean because I get two things unloaded from the dishwasher and he's got some other whammy to throw at me. I should be washing his dirty ass right now but I felt myself losing it just a tad and knew if I didn't take ten minutes to type this that I'd bark at him.
Learning how to love my husband is one of my life's great journeys. I cannot say I have always been up to the task. I'm human; I can't go back. But I can be aware, I can have faith, I can believe in magic. Those are pretty big things.
Omgah, I'm okay now.
Still not working, but okay. I'm reading. I'm annoyed that I have to go back and fix shit I've already done. No bueno. But I'm okay.
O hai. As of this writing I am doing my half-laying thing in bed. I don't know if that's "laying" or "lying." I've decided not to care. It's one of those mysteries, the laying/lying thing, that I can't be bothered with. There are other things to obsess over, like how I'm going to die eventually, and what a waste of space and oxygen I'll be until then.
So funny, 'cause I wouldn't say I'm one of those neurotic writerly people who think they're really frauds and all that cuteness. I'd bang the gavel and say no, I've got it together, dear Lord; I have a voice and a style and I don't expect to ever publish or make money off of whatever I write and I just do it for the pleasure, the joy! of seeing the gooberous characters in my head come out onto the page, fleeing my fingers like -
- I can't write. It's just like I've mentioned before, about piano lessons. I took piano lessons for eight years. Eight! I can't play a note. I can kind of remember what it's like to feel the keys under my fingers. I had to practice every morning. I liked doing the rote stuff, the scales. That is, I liked doing the stuff I had down pat over and over again. Piano practice also taught me how to lie. My mother would ask if I was doing what I was supposed to be doing and I'd be all like, "Oh yes, he told me I needed to do scales for one hour and to ignore the songs for now. Don't ask me; that's his
method." I'd usually have my teachers play me the piece I was supposed to figure out that week first. Once was usually enough for me to pick it out by ear. After a lot of him-haw and lying I would make the piece happen eventually, badly. Do not go presuming I was one of those geniuses who just didn't like the
reading of music, who could play beautifully by ear. Like Yanni or something? Nuu. I'm not even as good as
Yanni.
I'm like that with writing, too. I flirt along the edges of talent but mostly I cheat and lie and steal. I write like whoever I'm reading at the time. For instance, you can always tell when I'm re-reading the old Anne Lamotts. She's super easy to steal from. I do it constantly. And my actual stories, I can usually track them back to another story I read, sometimes years earlier, that I'm practically re-writing on a near-parallel. I wrote a story for class a couple years ago, whenever that was, about this woman whose kid hurts himself while she's doing some bad things in another room, and it was only after four edits and publication that I remembered that story's near COPY in my writing class' textbook. The original? Much better.
Who could forget my Palahniuk time? Oh god, my testosterone fiction was adorable.
Nothing reminds me of what a goddamn fake I am more than being around real artists and writers. What sucks is, I have never learned not to hang around these loathesome people. I
married one. I am in love with and fascinated by the creative life because I do not fucking
have one. I do love watching it, though, and doing its laundry, and driving it places. That is where I belong.
I wish I could take pride in that, because it always sucks so bad to find out that everyone's cute accolades have been just those who love you patting you on the head.
O holy shiz
Outside people were banging pots together and stuff, just like six minutes ago. It's 12:12 AM now. There were fireworks. I thought The Bug would stay up this year. I was training him the last few days, keeping him up on the couch watching DVDs, zombielike, until after 11:00 PM. It didn't work, though. He was hell on wheels after 10:00 PM so Mister Aran put him to bed.
I thought I'd abandoned this page a lot longer ago but it was only last February. Goodness. Almost a year, I guess. I did shred off ten pounds, which was the last thing I was talking about, if you're at all interested in that kind of thing. Jillian Michaels is my god. I could go on and on about that. Maybe I will eventually.
It was the Year of Celeste, the Year of Organics, the Year of Living In A Cave. I tend to dip into long periods of darkness where I stay up all night hanging out in online communities, listening to music and typing. Places where I can be profound and gorgeous because people only know me by my typing, which is better than my speaking by far. By faaaaar. I reserve the right to use compound vowels in words for emphasis these days.
Anyway, so after the darkness times, I clean myself out, and I mean I stick the metaphorical tube up my metaphorical ass and flush out all the stuff, the bad stuff and the good stuff. And I spend a lot of money replacing things that have worn out, and I start taking care of people better (I think?) and I write. I am writing, but I won't talk about it, don't worry. Not right now, anyway.
I have been buying things because I am a patriotic American and I think this means filling up the Matrix with gas and buying stuff made in China so our economy and the economy of the world will get back up to fighting speed. I don't know what I'm talking about, but at least I know I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not proud of that, but I know.
I bought a teensy laptop, and I mean teensy, like my hands take up the entire thing. The shift key on the right is in an odd place so I find myself avoiding starting sentences with words that begin with letters that require that key.
I bought a bunch of shirts and skinny jeans and suede boots. I stood in a dressing room and had a child, I mean a girl born in the
nineties, bring me clothing and show me how to wear it. At the end, she said she was having a belt epiphany and I had one, too, because I got it. I said, "Oh, it's the
eighties again." She was all like what?
Aside: I went to
Twilight on Christmas and there was this girl sitting next to me who entertained me the entire time with this commentary: "She's like,
what?" "She's all like,
okaaaaay." "She's all,
huh?" Brilliant, and I'm not being snarky. That pretty much sums things up nicely. I won't get into
Twilight here, though. That, along with the whole writing thing and the shredding weight thing, needs more blog posting time than I'm allotting now.
Again I reiterate: there are people born in the nineties who are adults now. Working in stores, selling me things.
I feel like such a nonconformist on holidays when I go to Trader Joe's and park far away and walk with purpose and smile at everyone and leisurely surf the web on my Blackberry in line and cheerfully help sack my eighteen different kinds of desserts.
Can you believe I've been posting on this page for like four
years? Why?
