Friday, October 26, 2012

Conversations with Angel

Last week, my niece turned 3. 3! And today we talked on the phone all about her birthday and how she got a Thomas the Tank Engine play set, and how she goes to school now and she's such a big girl, and oh yeah, she loves Happy Feet because the penguins dance. I didn't understand most of it: Evangeline has a significant speech delay. Her little brain works faster than her mouth can move on the best of days, and when she gets excited ... well, let's just say all that usually comes through is, "Woohoo! Oh Gosh!" and a bunch of jabber I can't follow.

Oh, I try: when she chatters away, I listen ever so closely for one word, one phrase, to tune me in to whatever it is we're talking about. Then I can take the one word and extrapolate a topic. If I hear "train," for example, I know darn well we're talking about Thomas: she's obsessed with him. Then I can keep the conversation going. But I have to tell you, this doesn't always work. If I'm to be completely honest with myself, Angel probably thinks I'm stupid half the time, because she's clearly telling me something of overriding importance and all I can respond with is, "You did? That's so cool!"

Now, the speech is being worked on. She has a speech therapist, and a few weeks ago she started 2 full days per week at a special-needs preschool while her amazing Mama, whom I swear wears some kind of invisible superhero cape, kicks butt in nursing school. And the work is working. Today I got, "I went to school!" and "I watched Happy Feet!" And today, I got the best present ever: She called me Aunt Tif for the first time, and I actually understood her.

Now, this would melt any auntie's heart, I'm sure. But for me, it's extra special. For those of you who don't know the back story, I'll try to sum it up: most of my family these days is family I have chosen. We have no blood ties, no common ancestor. I've heard it said that family matters most because blood is thicker than water, but that's not entirely accurate. Family matters most because whether you spring from the same tree or find one another later as two trees from two different forests, love is thicker than everything. 

I have a biological brother. His name is Matthew, and he's 24. But the way our lives were, growing up ... we're not close anymore. We haven't spoken or seen one another in almost 8 years. Last Christmas, when he had the chance to come in and tell me hello, he stayed outside in his truck. There's a chasm of pain there for him, and it's too wide for him to cross. Oh, I love him: I love him so much I try not to think about it, because it rips my heart out. I dread his birthday every year, because I can't help but remember the adorable little boy he was, all dark eyes and dimples, and how I always felt so much older, so protective. There are memories ...

One night, when our father came home drunk and he and our mother were having a screaming match in the living room, we both crept out of our beds and stood unseen in the hallway, watching, worrying. I was behind him with my arm around him, and in the split second before Dale hurled a flashlight through the wall, I covered his eyes so he wouldn't have to see.

I read him bedtime stories; his favorite was Mudpie's Big Adventure, about a little dog who goes on a picnic. Then he had a love affair with Horton Hears A Who. He loved the Disney version of The Jungle Book and used to go tromping around singing, "Colonel Hathi's March." It's funny how I remember it, the way I remember it, as if I were a little mother instead of a 7 year-old girl who hid in the basement most of the time and was scared of the world. I was determined that he would come to no harm. He was my brother, dammit, and anything that wanted to get to him would have to go through me first.

For a long time, Matt and I took care of each other. Then we had to push apart each for our own survival, like two boats in a narrow pass. We have not come back together. I still hold out hope, but with the way things are likely to be for a good long while yet, when I get nieces and nephews from Matthew, they will be in name only. I will not get to hold them, rock them, sing them silly songs, talk to them about Thomas the Tank Engine. I will not hear, "Aunt Tif" from their mouths. So when I heard it today from Angel, I nearly cried.

Her Mama didn't have to let me be an aunt. If circumstances had been just the slightest bit different, Chelsey and I never would have met one another. I wouldn't get an exorbitant amount of pride from calling her my baby sister, from knowing that her children are forever my niece and nephew. I love Chelsey fiercely for this honor: I would do anything, anything at all, to protect her and those beautiful babies. I think everyone has at least one person they would stand up and die for; I have at least 3. At least. Because when it comes down to it, heartache and hardship aside, I am a blessed woman. I wouldn't hesitate one second to say, "Take me instead." For Chelsey, for Evangeline, for Gideon, for Elizabeth, for Lou, for Michelle, for my brother Matthew, even now -- for them, I would stand up and volunteer to die. That is how I love; that deeply, that ferociously. Maybe you think I'm just being dramatic, but I cannot love any other way.

Today, Angel called me Aunt Tif. And if I went through decades of blood and pain and terror and loneliness just for that, just to hear those words from that baby's mouth -- well, that's the best argument for Providence I have, because it was worth it.

Lina and I share a smooch for the camera last Christmas.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Captain OddCat: A Plan for Prosperity

I have hit upon the perfect get-rich-quick scheme. The idea was inspired partly by a blog I read called "Cat Versus Human" (www.catversushuman.blogspot.com), and partly by my own nutty feline. Jude has a lot of weird personality quirks. He won't touch a box, for example, and most cats go ape shit over boxes. His voice sounds like Fran Drescher and Bugsy Seigel did the mattress mambo and Frannie gave birth to a cat. There's a lot of fodder just right there. I could stop there and be good. I have thought, however, to exploit my cat's singularly odd psyche for profit. It'll keep him stocked up on that insanely expensive prescription kibble. It's for his own good.

Here's the idea: I make Jude into an internet celebricat. (Think Hipster Kitty, or First World Problems Cat.) I get him an internet alias. (I have decided on Captain OddCat, because it sounds appropriately meme-y.) Touting him as Captain OddCat, I make him into an overnight meme sensation. I start a blog, the Captain OddCat blog, and make a comic strip for him. (There is evidence that this works as a money-making device. Cat Versus Human has a comic strip, and then there's the Simon's Cat videos all the cat lovers -- including me -- enjoy so much. Both of these ventures have enabled their fearless entrepreneurs to market products and rake in the dough.) When the comic strip explodes into stardom, I start printing Captain OddCat mugs and t-shirts and buttons and tote bags and suchlike and selling them directly from the blog page.

Of course my Jude will be a worldwide sensation, so the dollars will start coming in immediately. Boom. Rich. Me, myself, and Captain OddCat move out of this apartment and into a giant mansion. I carry him on my arm in public, with his own sunglasses, so his celebrity won't interfere with his ability to lead a normal life. He can have prescription wet food and a roomful of paper coils to chase, while I'm busy getting laid because of course all the hot cat-loving chicks will be all over the mastermind behind Captain OddCat, and we'll both live happily ever after.

Now I just have to learn how to draw.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Paper Flowers: When "Big Kids" Play


"Say say oh playmate
Come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three
Climb up my apple tree ..."

"Go play." Parents say it to their kids all the time. I've said it to my niece:
Baby, go over there and play for a minute while Auntie folds the clothes." 

Just recently I've started wondering if any adult really knows what it means to play, or if we all lose the gist of it as we get older. I have, on my camera, a video clip of Lina helping my sister fold the clothes -- bunching them up and then handing them over for Mommy to "Oooo," over while she covertly actually folds them. But Lina is so proud of herself while she's "folding". She can hardly stand still. She bounces from foot to foot and comes to show me a shirt she did. "Oh, good job!" I tell her. "That's so awesome, helping Mommy fold the clothes! You're such a good helper."
And every time I watch this video, it strikes me just a little more that for my niece -- who will turn three on the 21st of this month -- folding clothes *is* playing. Play is all about learning by doing. I tend to think that as adults, many of us think that we don't need to play anymore -- "learning by doing" is accomplished your second hour on a new job, when your supervisor leaves you to drown in a stack of policy manuals and a line of patrons screaming for your attention. But play takes learning by doing to a whole new level: play makes it fun. 

I'm reminded of how I made it through chores as a child. I'd pretend that I was a kid in a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle story, trapped in my room by a giant mess that I had to clean so that I wouldn't have to drink from the garden hose put through the window and eat peanut butter sandwiches off the tines of a rake. (That's an actual story, by the way.) Or I'd pretend someone really, really important was coming to visit, like the President or the Queen of England, and everything had to be impressively spotless. This made chores suck less. I wasn't out in the yard with a Super Soaker or in the playhouse with a doll, but I was playing just the same -- and in recent weeks, I've noticed that I'm still playing. 

Now whether this is a product of retarded social development due to a traumatic childhood or just something I've picked up on that most people aren't aware of, I think it's a good thing. And I think, too, that its origins might not be "or" but "and." I play to pick up on social development, and I've probably been doing it all along without noticing. What brought it to my attention was my new-found obsession with crafting.

I'll admit it: at this point, I still suck at crafting. I don't have a lot of patience or practical know how, and my fine motor skills are blotto thanks to CP. Tying intricate knots or folding papers *just so* is difficult and time consuming -- and yet I find I'm still enjoying it. 

I love to color and draw, too. I didn't realize how much until I sat down and let myself do it, until I stopped criticizing it and just scribbled. CP has left me with a sizable deficit in my ability to recognize proportion and spacial perception, so I can't make a symmetrical anything, and 3-D artwork is still largely beyond my grasp. I was teased for this mercilessly when I was in school. Art class was my worst enemy. The yearly ritual of having classes hand-draw a design with the teacher's name on it to put over the door was pure torture when it came to the voting-for-the-best-one part: every year I was the worst artist, hands down, and even though the "entries" had no student names on them, my classmates knew which entry was mine and would boo and snigger at it. So I stopped thinking I could make pretty things. I was ashamed of everything I drew or colored, feeling that it stuck out like a hideous growth from all the other pretty things everyone else had made. I stuffed my inner artist into a little closet in the back of my head and resolved never to let that bitch back out.

But oh, I love to create!

I mostly do this through writing. Writing is my lifeline, my happiness; writing is cathartic and fun and I would be lost without it. I make my pictures out of words. And now, sometimes, I make my pictures out of crayons and pencils and markers and paper too. I'm letting the artist in me out to play!

Most of my stuff is crude. Flat. Clearly drawn laboriously and erased again and again. A Kindergartner could out-draw me, with my (lack of) spacial perception: I can see the picture so clearly in my head, and then I look at a piece of paper and the dimensions unravel until all that's left of my mental picture is a bunch of loose threads all tangled together. But I'm enamored with color! Texture! Design! ColorColorColorColor!! Color makes me happy!


I've started drawing these huge, garish abstract flowers
for no other reason than that it's fun. I like it. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but I like to make them. I'm playing, and I like it, and I'm learning -- slowly, I find that my drawing is getting better, that I'm becoming less hindered by what I always thought of as the "right way" to draw or create art. I'm reminded of the easel and paints in the playroom at the hospital when I was 7 years old and recovering from major surgery, and the simple joy I found in taking a brush and spreading broad sweeps of aimless, happy color over the page. I had nothing in mind then about what was "good" art: I had color and paper and I was happy. It's been an exercise in true learning, getting back to that point ...

One gigantic explosion of a paper flower at a time!

Friday, October 5, 2012

Occupied Dwelling Inspection: Stress Overload

It is ODI (Occupied Dwelling Inspection) time ... again. The good part about ODI is that it forces me to clean everything. The bad part about ODI is that it forces me to clean everything. I have a love/hate relationship with domestic chores: I love to hate them. In addition to having my paternal grandmother's hoarding gene (just a touch of it, honest,) I hate chores because chores were used as punishment when I was a child, and just like everything else my mother used as punishment, they were a little ... over the top. If Michelle told me to clean my room and it didn't pass muster, she'd trash it -- all the way down to actually *turning over the bookshelves* -- and make me do it again. Consequently, I tend to avoid cleaning because as soon as I start, I get very, very stressed -- there's just no way I'll be able to do it perfectly enough. And when it comes to ODI and I have 3 men in my apartment checking for dirty dishes and soap scum, well ... you can see the problem, right?

STRESS OVERLOAD.

The biggest problem with ODI is this: we get a notice that has on it a 2-week window -- Inspections will be conducted between such-and-such time on this date and such-and-such time on some other date 2 weeks away -- but absolutely zero hint as to where, within that window, specific apartments will fall. The Stormtroopers could come bustin' in this Tuesday, or Tuesday twice removed.

STRESS OVERLOAD.

Out of necessity, I clean everything as soon as I get the notice: Do I have 4 days, or 14? No telling. Get on it. I scrub out the fridge, scour the stove top and burners, clean the oven, bleach the counters, scour the bathtub, wash all the linens, organize *everything*, polish the furniture, sweep, mop, vacuum, make sure the closets are decent ... it goes on and on. And then I suffer

STRESS OVERLOAD

because I feel I must keep everything perfect until they arrive. I go ballistic if I spill something. I have a freakout attack if I see a crumb. Heaven forbid Jude kick kitty litter out of the box.

One redeeming factor is that the ODI Stormtroopers aren't allowed to look in my personal appliances or furniture. If I hear them coming down the hall and I haven't done the breakfast dishes, I can hide them in the microwave. If my room is just too cluttered but I have no place to put things that looks tidy enough -- a common problem in a place this size -- they go bye-bye under the bed for awhile. Simple enough. But I often feel like some sort of fugitive of war, stashing away my belongings till it's safe to bring them out again. And with every day that goes by without ODI being done and over with for the year, I get progressively more neurotic.

I failed an inspection once, some years ago. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and was working at the supermarket, where I put up with physical pain and overt discrimination over fear of losing my job. My depression and anxiety were horrible: I could barely wash my own hair, let alone the dishes. And the consequences weren't dire; I wasn't evicted or anything. But I did have to suffer the utter embarrassment of a CCHA employee showing up at my door with a folder of cleaning tips and a dumbass housekeeping video to watch, as if I had no idea how to operate a can of Pledge, followed by a second inspection. I was so humiliated I actually cried, which humiliated me more, which resulted in me being severely pissed off for several straight days. I have no desire to repeat that experience. Therefore, I suffer

STRESS OVERLOAD

and clean like a maniac, and grumble the whole time about how much I loathe living here, and entertain fantasies of walking into the home of a member of the Housing Authority board and declaring it a sty, and forcing him to watch a video about how to use Pledge.

... really? A housekeeping video about *dusting* was my punishment?