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.

What was she wearing?

"It's hard to take a person seriously when they're wearing a pink kitten hat," he scoffed.

It doesn't have to be a "he" stringing these words into a sentence, and sending it out as a mantra into the world wide web. I’ve heard plenty of women spit out pink invective. 

But in this case, it was a member of the male gender putting his weight behind what he thought was a mighty statement.

I didn’t bother to argue.

Maybe to most people, "serious" looks a certain way. It keeps its head level and its countenance formal. Serious wears a suit and never smiles. Not even with its eyes.

Who am I to argue style over substance?

That's not the battle I'd ever pick.

I'm not a protestor, mind you. Not that I think there's anything wrong with joining crowds and waiving signs, I've just always thought of myself as an observer. A journalist. A person just outside of the moment, pressing my face up against the glass, taking pictures for posterity.

Of course, in truth, I have an opinion.

As I weave among the crowd reading signs and committing them to the memory card of my camera, I can’t help but feel a certain amount of solidarity.

I feel safe here. Welcomed, even, as I blend into the crowd.

A face smiles as my shutter flaps. I smile back as I ask for names and what brought them to this place today.

I listened to the speakers who talked about fear and hatred and love.

They talked about women and men and children. About community and compassion. About how equality lifts everyone up.

They spoke of service, and hard work, and change.

They told their stories. Where they had come from and where they hoped to go. They spoke about togetherness.

The scoffing man wasn’t there. It’s not his scene. I could hazard a guess that he’s just an observer, too. But he might be a letter-writer, or a lobbyist, or is working on an algorithm that will ensure human equality in some near future.

He might have the answer to a question no one has asked yet; I don’t know. I'd hate to dismiss whatever contribution he hopes to make.

Likewise, I don’t know what will happen to this movement given time and distance. I have to think change this big is more complicate being able to come up with a slogan that sticks. It's a process that moves so slowly we are unaware that it's happening. 

But “glacial pace” isn’t what it used to be is it?

The thaw seems to be coming faster and fiercer than ever before.

I was standing in a crowd, witnessing people of all types and descriptions, of all genders and ages, and I was moved.

They were protesting sexism, racism, neglect of the poor, the militarization of our communities and greed. They registered voters and inspired folks to run for office; running not as women, but as the competent people they are who will benefit society.

Time is not up. The clock is just being wound up.

And as I type this I can't stop thinking I had to pick this battle. Because it shouldn't be difficult to take women seriously. And it doesn't matter what she is wearing.

Love and misunderstanding

“What’s that face about?”

Not surprisingly, she wouldn’t answer.

Still, I persisted.

“Come on. Tell me. Maybe I can help.”

Also not surprisingly, the result of my insistence on prying into the nature of her downturned mouth and razor-sharp glare was to reinforce her desire to clam up.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did something happen at school?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“On the bus?”

“Which part of “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT” isn’t clear to you?”

“Is there something I can do?”

“Yes, you can NOT TALK ABOUT IT.”

Of course, to a parent, this is an impossible request. How could I NOT talk about this elephant she’d walked into the room on a leash woven from her woe-begotten demeanor? How could this beast she named “IT,” but refused to speak of again, not hijack the entirety of my attention? I had no idea what this IT was, but the mystery and not knowing was killing me.

Am I not her mother? Doesn’t she know my sole purpose on this Earth is to help guide her through the trials and tribulations of teenaged angst? Boiling frozen ravioli on demand is just a bonus.

I was once 14. Many, many, many, many, many ... many years ago. 

“Yeah, but you were my age before the Internet, and Snapchat, and Pretty Little Liars.”

“Is it your friends? Middle school can be the worst age of all. You read ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’ You know.”

“That’s not at all helpful.”

I realize. 

It’s odd how we sometimes have perfect understanding without really saying a word.

Not that we haven’t had moments of misunderstanding.

Like the time I told her that she could always use me to get out of uncomfortable situations.

“You know ... if your friends pressure you to do something you don’t want to do, just blame me. Tell them I won’t let you date boys … or drive in cars with people I don't know.”

That seemed simple enough. 

... Until she told one of her friends “Sorry, I can't go to your sleepover because my mom doesn't like one of the girls attending the party.”

“Why on earth would you say that?”

“You told me I could use you to get out of peer pressure situations.”

“Yeah, but this is not what I meant. You can blame me for general strictness, not for specific meanness.”

“You could have said 'I'm grounded' or 'my mom doesn't let me sleep over other people's houses' or even 'my mom is making us go to some lecture on the History of Walking as a Sport that day. Sorry'.”

Just as I realize my circular explanations of infuriating human behaviors tend to get tangled in the hairball of my thoughts on how to best address these rocky relationships. 

Including ours.

“You know what I mean right?"

Translation: I’m lost in my own desire to help.

She shakes her head.

“Yeah, I get it.”

Translation: “Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

Universal remote

How does this dumb thing work?

I pointed a black plastic box at the television.

Nothing happened.

Well, not nothing, exactly. 

Eventually, a red screen came up, and then some pictures cascaded past. The effect was frustrating. Nothing I clicked would bring them to a stop. 

“Give it to me.”

My daughter. My savior. My technological sherpa.  

She pointed and pressed buttons, and the movie started to play.

The only thing that could make her appearance at that moment any more perfect would be if she stopped jamming her socks in between the couch cushions, where the remote controls, spare change, and granola bar wrappers usually tend to migrate. 

“If we had Alexa or Echo you could probably do this yourself.”

She said “probably,” because she’s never used a smart home device and doesn’t know its full capabilities. Could it feed the cat? 

Do you know how I managed before having children? 

It’s not a rhetorical question. My daughter would like to know. She refuses to believe that I was ever capable of changing channels on my own. 

Maybe it is wishful remembering.

When I try to think back, the only vivid memory that comes is the notebook I carried around like a bible during the early days of personal computing. I could never keep track of all the ways basic commands like “colon, copy, backslash, backslash, alt, shift, command” that combine with individual letters from the alphabet - say “S” - to make computers do things ... like, turn on. 

I like to think times were simpler back in the day, especially once I discovered Apple computers and their intuitive engineering. I must have blocked all those nightmarish memories of trying to start up a mainframe and create a word processing file from scratch.

“Never say ‘back in the day,’” my daughter pleads, shuddering from head to toe as if I had said, “Let’s be 'twinsies' and wear matching clothes.”

That aside, I refuse to admit that I never knew how to work the television. 

The red button turned the set on and off. The Volume and Channel buttons went up or down according to the corresponding arrows. Number buttons existed, too, but with fewer than two dozen channels, no one ever used them. 

And when you lost the remote in the couch you could get up and turn a knob. 

Though no one ever did.

Back then televisions didn’t do fancy things like take note of your “favorite” channels, or record shows when you’re at work. 

Not that I don’t appreciate all the bells and whistles.  I just wish I could go back to the days when my television didn’t “lisp.”

“Oh, I fixed that for you,” said my daughter. She adjusted one of the knobs I had no idea was at odds with another knob on two different machines that work our entertainment hub. 

“When the volume of the TV competes with the volume of the home theater system the actors all sound like they’re lisping or slurring their speech,” she explained.

 I don’t believe I recall seeing a section on remote control detox in the owner’s manual. 

The idea that two different volumes could make a single soundtrack play almost harmonically is a phenomenon I wish could just go in one ear and out the other. 

 The reverberations scrape at my eardrums like an over inserted cotton swab.

“How is it that I mess this up every single time? I used to be good at this stuff.”

My husband, who appeared out of thin air like magic when I uttered those fateful words, laughed:

“Honey, you were never any good at this stuff. You once tried to use a universal remote to turn off an alarm clock.”

Oh man, I almost forgot about universal remotes. “Those dumb things never worked.”

Lovely, brutal

It's brutal out there.

Not just the cold, which is seasonably barbarous as well as inevitable, but also the climate. The air in which we surround ourselves is getting thinner and thinner.

I find it hard to catch my breath.

But you don't need me to tell you that things don't seem to be going well. The news torrent has made sure you understand.

As we welcomed a new year, four souls were savagely murdered in our city, two of them children. A young man in a unicorn hat laughed at a suicide victim and posted it on YouTube while hundreds of thousands of minions pressed a “like” button. And the old man at our helm rattled a nuclear saber as if it were a school-yard taunt.

Each day brings a new opportunity to let our jaws hang wide open.

There's no reason for any of it. Maybe there's just no reason.

To live in this age feels like jousting with Don Quixote. Only in our time, it seems as if the windmills at which we tilt have become truly dangerous.

Every misstep a potential disaster.

As we move from one tragedy to another, we think our skins toughen up or we just become numb. Or maybe it is the same as it ever was: precarious at best.

We live our lives as watershed moments.

Every change seems like a place in a river where water collects for a time before it drains off. Often in a new direction. Sometimes, but not always, with calamitous results.

We live, we die. In between we experience everything … anew. We can't learn history because we haven't experienced it.

We are not unchanged by the current or past events, perhaps, but we must move along. We may keep our heads down, holding our breath. Or we may find exhilaration in the tide and splash along happily.

My mother used to say there is nothing new under this sun. Even its shadows have existed throughout time immemorial.

I miss my mother.

She left this world last year around this time and went back to the earth. She is with her mother now.

But I know I'd miss her more if a part of her didn't live on in me … and in my daughter and son. Reminders of her are in the strangest of places. A song, playing on the radio. A kettle, boiling on the stove. A pencil scratching paper.

Even a look on my boy's face can bring her back: A curled lip that opens into a laugh.

Her laugh. Her smile. Her dark sense of humor filling the air with spice. Its particles floating around with the dust motes, as they glint in the sun and seem to stop time for an instant. Like a hologram.

Memories visit this way. Flashes only I can see that appear suddenly and unexpectedly.

It's not an altogether unpleasant feeling. It's warm and familiar, like finding glimpses of home as you pass through the unfamiliar.

The flashes leave as quietly as they came. An internal hug against the ordinary or mundane.

It's like sound after it snows. Everything blanketed in cold and silence.

It's not brutal out there if you can just listen to the snow and be still. It's beautiful.

New Year, Same old me

In one cozy moment, quiet had settled over the house.



Christmas had come and gone.

There was nothing to do but throw another log on the fire and relax.



Each child had retreated to their bunkers with their Santa loot and were happily engaged introducing the new to the old, and rearranging pecking orders.



Time enough to breathe and loosen my white-knuckled grip on this manufactured reality.



A carpet of canines had just settled in for a short winter’s nap while the cats that had lain doggo were finally stirring.



The Bumpass Christmas, as this year’s carnival of excess, would become known, at its most festive featured ten humans, six dogs, one ginormous roast and at least three subsequent meals made entirely from leftovers.



And despite some minor disagreements, some involving sharp words others involving sharp teeth, somehow we had survived mostly unscathed.



Of course, it wasn’t all happiness and fancy Christmas lights shot out of a cannon in the direction of the house, although the lazy light show did its part to lessen our grief the night “Luna,” still lustrous of fur though elderly in hamster years, finally trundled off to the giant cardboard tube in the sky.



Her departure serves as a tiny reminder of the humans we were missing this year, too.



All those shiny packages containing even the smallest of treasures helped to redirect our thoughts. Not that we will ever admit such selfish soothing.

What is Next if not a distraction from Last?



Life is good. Good. Not perfect, but that’s what keeps it interesting.



Tomorrow we will try to build us better selves.

We will strive to be more organized. We will seek to exhibit fewer vices.

 We will be our thinner, healthier, happier selves, though we will still be recognizable. It’s just that our finances will be in better order and our hearts will be at peace.

But the process in our house is also external, born of the unhappiness of others in us.

We squint our eyes and see where our lives would be better with less of someone else's life spilling over.

My husband wants less clutter and more peace and quiet.

My daughter wants to eliminate all the dog hair that seeks to cling to her formal-hued fashions.

My son would like his time on the internet uninterrupted.

I would like everyone just to get along.

We won't all get what we want. And that's as it should be. Even my most pessimistic self should know the process of resolve is incremental. Small starts are starts all the same.

And not all failures are regressive. Most of our missteps still send us forward, just in a different direction.

It will still be noisy and chaotic. But there will be joy.

Dogs will still leave a trace, but you will learn to use a lint brush.

Sometimes the internet goes out “unexpectedly,” and the world doesn't end.

Even when we argue, we're still talking it out.

Getting along sounds loud and angry sometimes, too.

So it is with some hope that I step off into a new year and another beginning. Next year may not be better, but it will always bring something for which we can be thankful.










Learning the ropes

“In four miles take a left onto Route Nine.”

For fifty minutes I’d been following Siri’s every instruction, starting with an easterly turn out of our driveway.

“In one mile you will reach your destination.”

I was worried.

“Did you hear her mention of our destination was on the right or the left?”

My co-pilot for this leg of the adventure was an eighth-grade friend of my daughter’s who’d apparently drawn the short straw.

The four other girls on this journey had already pretzeled themselves into the second- and third-row seats, and were nervously chirping away, twittering about what to expect, but trusting I would get us there.

We were going rock climbing.

Or, more precisely, wall scaling inside a two-story metal warehouse made to look like rocks.

It was my girl’s 14th trip around The Sun, and she had a dream.

Or rather, her father had a dream:

“Hey, kiddo,” he said one morning over eggs and toast. “I had the strangest dream last night. You and your friends went rock climbing on your birthday.”

She tilted her head and laughed the kind of laugh that threatens to either choke a person or propel orange juice from their nose.

“Oh that’s hilarious, dad,” she said with an overly dramatic flair. “I can’t see any of my friends agreeing to climb rocks.”

Somehow, between a second helping of bacon and me as the designated driver squinting off into nothingness as my Australian-accented navigational assistant insisted we had arrived, my daughter (having been fed a few web pages of details about a local rock gym) had managed to make his dream a reality.

And she had talked a handful of friends into accepting the challenge.

I’m not sure what I was going through my mind when I floated the idea that a rock climbing dream wasn't out of the question.

Because as I stood at the gym counter with five girls and no experience, the look on the guy’s face momentarily told me I had made a mistake.

There were too many of them. And I wasn't enough.

“How old are they?”

“14ish?”

His face relaxed.

“Oh, great! They can belay for each other. No problem.”

Before anyone could have third thoughts, he’d taken the group to get equipment: shoes and harnesses and a little device that would help them return to safety after reaching unimaginable heights.

It looked like a candle flame snuffer.

In 20 minutes he’s talked all five girls through the process of literally “learning the ropes.”

Ropes, it turns out, is more involved than climbing, which had only one hard and fast rule: “if the belayer tells you to slow down ... slow down.”

And then... just like that ... one girl after another scaled to the top of a wall and repelled back down to the floor. Each girl putting their trust in another girl who was keeping their rope from going slack.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

It was almost as if they had been doing such a things in their sleep their whole lives.