Just Say No

Pick your battle

It was a billboard on the way to the mall that touched off the storm.

“Condoms,” it said in larger than your standard copier paper-sized letters “prevent more than just pregnancy.”

I pointed out the sign to my daughter and asked the very question no child wants to discuss with their mother: “you know what condoms are, right?”

Oh. My. God. Mom! I’m so glad none of my friends were able to go shopping today!”

“What? I’m almost entirely sure I probably wouldn’t have brought up this subject if your friends were in the car. Or not.”

Our laughter meets over the center console, and I snap on my left turn signal and decelerate.

Almost there. “Promise me you'll talk about normal things while we're shopping: Ask me if I've finished my homework or if I've read any good books lately.”

I promise.

We talk about everything.

Well, I talk, she squirms in her seat and turns three shades of pink and tells me she already knows everything there is to know because of a health class last year that required a parent’s signature for her admittance.

And I know from experience that what she thinks she knows and what she truly understands are two things that don’t always match up.

“Remember when you thought you were suffering from appendicitis on the advent of your first menstrual cycle?”

“Mom! Seriously?”

She could say I am not entirely immune to the same misalignments. She wouldn't be wrong.

“Remember when you thought I was faking a stomach ache when the nurse called you to pick me up from school, and I threw up in the car?”

I’m not squeamish.

She’s not either. We both know uncomfortable talks are important conversations to have. 

I know there’s still time for these unpleasantries, which is why I don’t force the issue.

I just need to get the last word.

“Statistically speaking, teens

are likely to engage in their first sexual experience at the age of 16.”

Two years. Two measly little years.

I can tell this little factoid surprises her.

“But I had the HIV shot,” she said as if I’d forgotten. Or as if a medication could inoculate her against all the things parents speak of that their children wish would get stuck in their throats. 

“You had HPV shots,” I tell her, explaining the immunizations protect against an easily transmitted virus linked to cervical cancers. “It doesn’t take the place of basic precautions.”

Of course, it’s more than that.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster fueled by hopes and hormones. And like most human experiences, humans can’t truly understand them until they experience it for themselves.

Can I change the subject? 

Did you see that ad? The one that tells parents how to answer if their kids ask to throw a party with alcohol?

“You mean it was longer than ‘Just Say No?’”

She laughs, but even she knows some parents have an easier time accepting alcohol as a rite of passage than human sexuality as one.

I suppose we all pick our battles. We can't always Just Say No.

Freak love

My children think I don’t love them the same way I used to love them.

Photos of them have slowed to a trickle along my Instagram stream, as images of romping canines I walk at midday for other families flood in.

They are astute little beings. My kids; not the dogs.

I don’t tousle their hair the way I used to. Or rub their bellies. I don’t make special treats just because it’s Thursday.

“These look pretty yummy,” coos my daughter, reaching over a pan I’d just pulled from the oven and set on top to cool.

“Those are for dogs,” I quickly snap, hoping to stop her from bringing the biscuit she was eyeing to her mouth.

It’s true, of course. The love I show them has changed even if the love I have for them hasn’t diminished.

A parsing of words, perhaps, but true all the same.

It is love in a less concentrated form. It tries to stand back and observe. It provides a little more freedom while it forgets to breathe.

The space between us that is awkward by necessity.

It’s a love that takes fewer pictures. A love that asks permission before it shows them to friends on the World Wide Web. A love that let's go just a little.

This love is tricky. It so easily backfires.

It’s accounting of actions and inaction continually figuring into the here and now, projecting anxiety into the future.

It’s damned when it does, damned when it doesn’t.

I’m already writing the script the kids will be acting out one day in their minds; all the things I should have done that could have propelled them to stardom.

If only life worked predictably and without deviation, we could be [insert greener pasture here].

Of course, we all want this security of a standard, even though such sameness, though comforting, might also be boring.

We all know in our souls that getting what we want out of life isn’t the same as getting what we need. It’s difficult to separate the wants from the needs.

And getting what we need seems more and more fraught now that we tend to define “us” as individuals.

We all know life is what happens while we were making other plans.

How will they define success?

How will I?

I wonder as I let the dust accumulate on my college education.

I get tangled in the emotions of happenstance.

My son is proud to tell his friends his mom is a “... Dog Person. Like for money!”

These days I put my problem-solving skills to work figuring the best way to open doggy waste bags without removing my winter gloves. Discovering, quite happily, the warmth of my breath on a frost fringed day will separate the edges of a bag from its magnetic cling. ... just have to hit it at the right angle ...

“So gross,” says my daughter. “Can you talk about something else?”

“Sure! Did you know dogs are less likely to pull on a leash if it’s clipped to the front of their harness?”

“That’s fascinating, Mom,” my she says with a full-on ocular summersault. “But, I still love you, you freak.”

“I love you, too, you Norm.”

Fever dreams

Fever dream

My dreams have always been ordinary. Modest, even.

Awake or asleep, doesn’t matter.

I dream of being happy. Of finding the kid’s lost library book. I dream the ultimately and unmistakably possible.

Once, I even dreamed I’d bought stamps. Not even the fancy kind. They were the flag-bearing ones that could stick around forever.

Unsurprisingly, I proceeded to spend the better part of an hour, on bill-paying-day, turning out the contents of drawers and cabinets and pocketbooks I might have used within the fortnight, looking for a panel of stamps that never existed.

No transaction. No receipt. And, decidedly, no postage for this bill that was already overdue.

And I was so sure I went to the post office.

It’s startling to me to think about how many memories and life experiences I may have literally dreamt up.

There are untold numbers of conversations that took place only in my imagination.

How far back does this go? I wonder.

Did the neighbor boy actually train my pet milk snake not to bite me?

Did my dog steal a loaf of Freihoffer’s Split-Top White off of a delivery truck because she overheard my mom saying we were out of fresh bread?

These are memories I always thought to be true. They have even gone down in the family lore as undeniable fact.

Besides, my dreams are never that vivid. 

This dream was different:

We lived in a big house that was like our house but not.

In a neighborhood that was like our neighborhood if it was shifted a few streets over and shoved into another climate. Maybe rainforest. Maybe unfrozen tundra.

An old college chum and his gang of merry alumni pals came out of the blue for a visit. They had grey beards and guns. And they preferred to hang around a fire pit taking selfies.

I’d seen such gatherings on Instagram ... so I know they were possible.

Kids, teachers, coaches and other people were milling about, making small talk. I couldn't be sure if it were a party or a conference. The vibe had elements of both.

Except for the watercolor edges, the dream had all the earmarks of a comfortable memory mixed with a dash of late-night scrolling of social media sites before sleep.

It is at this point dreams tend to go sideways.

There was an attempted break-in. I escaped, taking flight into the neighborhood.

I drove around the street on a short bike - my knees brushing against my shoulders as I peddled. There were gigantic box turtles everywhere - crossing the road like worms after it rains. Then a fox came out of nowhere and scratched me. I tried but couldn’t avoid him.

It started to snow.

I was panicked. Sweating as I peddled faster toward my unfamiliar home.

When I got there and breathlessly recounted all that had happened, my dream husband asked me if I had attempted to pet the wild creature. 

Of course, he would ask that. He would think I was capable of rescuing a Vulpes vulpes, bathing him and uploading 43 pictures of the process to Twitter.

“Of course you would think it was all my fault,” I said to my groggy husband, awakening now to the after effects of my dream.

And for the briefest of moments, I wondered if I should get a rabies shot.