Ohmmmm.....

I can't believe I forgot to mention that my kids found a Smith and Wesson pistol to play with when we went to Montana. We were staying at the home of my Aunt's orthopedic surgeon, and he keeps a pistol in a fun-looking plastic case by the bed. According to Tim the gun was locked, and they couldn't have fired it, but I almost vomited. And here I am worried about raising my kids in the city. Meanwhile, my future sister-in-law is worried about my brother-in-law's inability to be on time. She's imagining herself at home with the kids all day desperate for a 6:45 yoga class, and he rolls in at 7:15. Yoga is going to be the least of your worries...

I wrote this a year ago when I only had 2 kids:

Next time you’re in the bathroom alone, appreciate it. I got a 10 minute shower this morning by myself. I felt like I’d been to a spa for a week because I got to shave, condition my hair, and put on lotion. I'm at my mom's house. It's a new parenting ballgame for me because my kids have figured out how to get out of the house via the dog door, and my mom lives on a cliff. Luckily I’m pregnant, so it’s rare that I have to poop, but it does happen, and I can’t just quietly go do it when I have to closely watch 2 kids. (No one told you pregnant ladies are constipated? Now you know.)

So the kids followed me into the bathroom as they normally do, but this time they spotted the ceramic toilet brush holder and toilet brush. Only a potter would give her mom ceramic toilet brush holders. My friend, Paola made them. They have stylized toilets painted on them, and they say, "Made by Italian hands" on the bottom. Who doesn't need one of those? Our toilet brush at home is hidden above the washing machine. I really look forward to the day that we can have toilet brushes near the toilets as we have these super-green, low-flow toilets that seem unable to remove ALL of what goes in them.

I panicked as they grabbed the brush envisioning Steel using it to brush Jack Peter’s teeth. In the scuffle the holder smashed and cut my hand open, so there I am spraying blood from my hand with two kids running around with a toilet brush. Don’t forget, I’m still on the toilet. My mom is a mini-tornado in general, but when someone is bleeding she really puts it into high gear. Blood is all over the yellow bath matt, my pants, the toilet, towels, wash cloths, children. Pregnant ladies have way more blood than normal people, so they really bleed. This is the bathroom that my mom sponge painted after taking a faux-finishing and decoupage class. “It looks just like Monet’s water lilies!!” she gushed. Despite the impression that one is in a French garden, the bathroom is not big enough for 4 people and a fountain of blood. I’m trying to get to the sink with my pants around my ankles, my mom is trying to open band-aids and screaming at her boyfriend to get peroxide. At that, I am frantically gesticulating to the cupboard where I know there is peroxide: gesticulating because I am unable to be heard above the wails of my children and mother, frantically because I was desperate to avoid his coming in also.

Meanwhile every band aid mom gets onto my finger becomes so saturated with blood it won’t stick. Her hands are becoming too bloody to negotiate the subsequent band aid wrapper, and both of my kids are screaming at the top of their lungs, “I WANT A BAND AID!!!!!” All of my mother’s maternal instincts have kicked in, and my kids are merely an impediment to her helping HER baby, so she’s screaming at them to wait their turns, and I’m fully expecting her to kick one of them.

A possible disruption of your yoga practice? My whole life is a disruption of my yoga practice.

lollies in the hood

I've always been good at doing what I've been told to do. The word "coachable" was common in my athletic reports. I've noticed it lately because I'm so used to the beep of my Sonicare toothbrush when I've completed the 2 minutes; yesterday I manually brushed my teeth for 6 minutes waiting for the brush's permission to stop. Am I coachable in my ceramic work? One of my professors told me my cups aren't pleasant to drink from because they go in at the top. "They aren't inviting." It bothered me for years. I can't tell you how happy I was when a friend cuddled his cup and said, "I love that it goes in slightly. I never spill when I go up the stairs!" Thanks Rene...

People constantly coach me to leave the city. (for the kids!) I worry about it sometimes. Over the summer the body of the 19-year-old hostess at our local burger joint was found naked and strangled 4 blocks away. I was enormously pregnant the previous summer when the place opened, so we were there a lot. Burgers and pregnancy go well together. I'd always stared at the girl, Sabina, because she had a really interesting shape, and something about her reminded me of my grandmother. I still keep thinking I see her every couple of days. She was raped and killed for the bicycle someone had lent her to get 4 blocks home from a party.

We went to Sabina's memorial; the kids danced and had fun. We didn't explain anything to them, but we had to go to a wake a few weeks later, so they are now death-obsessed. I can't blame the city for that. Jojo was in her 80's. En route to the viewing I told the kids, "We are going to say good-bye to Jojo. Her body will be lying down in a pretty dress looking asleep, but she's not going to wake up. She's up in the sky with Grandpa Jack and Aunt Erin." Moments later I heard Jack Peter say to Steel in the back seat, "It's just going to be her body...NOT HER HEAD!" By mistake we'd taken them to a open-air screening of a Twilight vampire movie. Jack Peter's little body jolted when a vampire lost his head. "What happened?" he asked, perplexed, but not upset. I said, "He was beheaded." thinking a new word would further flummox him and it would all go to the "does not compute" part of his brain. Our sa-nanny-ty said the next day, "Why does he keep talking about beheading?"

Steel was apparently shocked to see Jojo's head still there. She stood back from the coffin waving "good-bye" with an uncertain look on her face as Jack Peter ran right up to Jojo's face and started chatting away. Steel went through the receiving line asking every other person, "Why is she dead?" None of the answers was acceptable. I was just mad that I'd not gotten around to glazing the sugar bowl I'd made for Jojo.

I did have a pang about kids in the city recently. We went to a family wedding in Big Sky Montana 2 weeks ago, and everyone there is so fit. The Sweet Pea Parade in Bozeman began with a kids' 1 mile race. There were thousands of them younger than my kids running a mile. I came back inspired wanting to bring country clean living to my little urban family. I instigated a run on Sunday. After 45 minutes of fighting over running shoes they each ran about 14 steps. Steel demanded to be carried, and Jack Peter said it was time for a rest. It was a multi-tasking run. We were going to pick up high-fat yogurt at the Jerusalem shop to keep Toby at her fighting weight.

It's an Halal meat shop run by soccer-watching Egyptians who often give my kids blow pops. Ages ago I took my mom there to buy a leg of lamb. There were 3 flayed lambs on the counter and a lone head on a table. The woman in front of us said in a thick accent, "I want the head." Unflappable lollipop guy started to wrap up the head, and she shouted, "NOT THAT ONE; I WANT THAT ONE!" pointing to the middle dead lamb. He refused. She berated him for 10 minutes, and when it was clear that he wasn't going to budge, my mom said, "I just want a leg." He merrily went about hacking the leg off of one of the lambs. The woman went apoplectic and ran out screaming "WHY SHE GET THE LEG?"

So our "run" turned into a lollipop-in-the-ghetto fashion shoot. I didn't realize the lollies were going to look like cigarettes.

clicker nicker

I sent an e-mail out to 10 people last week demanding to know the whereabouts of a garage door clicker. The clicker nicker turned out to be one of my new tenants, the intended recipient of the clicker. At one point I had 4 clickers. I doled them out labeled "Tim" "Pat" "Stroller" "Car" so blame could be appropriately allocated. "Stroller" is the only one that remains which means that our 19-year-old former nanny and my 22-year-old former tenants are the only ones in the group with their shit together. Who am I to worry about entrusting it to the 23-year-old new tenant?

The first day the new tenants moved in I went up there to lecture them about smoking marijuana during office hours. "Please go to the bathroom on the east side of the loft to get high during office hours and blow it out the window. If a group of bankers is coming in to my husband's office and the place smells like pot, it's not going to look good." I felt like Miss Drew, my dormitory counselor at boarding school. She seemed relentlessly uncool. We attributed our constant escapes from discipline to her being too lame to know we were breaking rules. In hindsight, she was probably too cool to want to deal with a bunch of remorseful, weeping 15 year olds and their possibly-retribution-seeking, pissed-off parents. The encounter was especially humiliating because I tracked clay dust throughout the loft, my Dansko clog footprints self-consciously meandering all over the dark wood floors.

On a cool spectrum I thought I was doing OK. I'm a potter. I have an edgy loft/studio in a ghetto. My husband is a design/build architect. (Love it that he's not too white collar to do some plumbing; check out the clump of hair-muck he pulled from the tenants' drain.) My children do funny things like get on a plane and stand on their seats to get in the faces of an entire row of women behind us and demand, "Are you FAT?" (One of the women looked at me and huffed, "Her seat is back. She needs to pull it forward for take-off.") or they make up dinosaur names like Predatorknockeroverkiller without previous knowledge of those homophobic dinosaur names that went around in the 90's: Lickalotopuss and Igotasoreass.
If I'm e-mailing about garage door clickers and lecturing people I don't know about smoking pot during business hours, my cool rating is plummeting...not to mention that I'm typing this still wearing high-water mustard, chocolate and brown striped pants purchased in the early 90's despite the fact that they have a big clump of banana baby vomit on them, and I just poured a nonalcoholic drink for me and my husband and got really excited about using up 3 different bottles of liquid a day before recycling, and I'm currently freaking out because my Sonicare toothbrush won't go out of massage mode. Shit. I could spend the rest of the night giving examples of how uncool I am.

chromophobic

My tenants are moving out of the loft we lived in for 3 years. They are leaving 8 months early with 2 weeks notice, so it's been a flurry of activity. In showing the space I noticed that they had painted the upright piano that stays in the apartment. Who paints a piano? More importantly, if you're going to paint a piano why paint it MasterCard yellow?

Color is a touchy subject. I remember when I'd picked the colors for our new place, and one of Tim's architect friends referred to it as "Candyland." I felt ashamed even though I love most of the colors. When I went to London for 3 years, I made a whole new line of light whitish pottery. People were treating me like I was some whore on Jerry Springer because I like hot pink, so I had to see what I could do with pastels. Begrudgingly I'll have to admit that it's my most popular line when it comes to full-set orders. I still don't understand who said, "Food looks TERRIBLE on blue!" If you put a lobster on one of my mom's blue plates, and there's a dish of butter next to it that's a lighter blue, it doesn't look bad, I promise.

The tenants had published a little blurb about their space on a trendy apartment site. They wrote, "One of the biggest problems we had was picking the right colors to paint the non-wood walls. Originally the kitchen was dark royal blue and olive green while the living room and bedrooms were maroon — all of which made the open floor plan feel small and crowded. We wanted to brighten up the space with light, modern colors that would offset our eclectic belongings and help us appreciate the bare 12 foot ceilings." It turns out that "modern" means white. I can't say I ever liked the blue, either, but taking the only thing in the earth-toned apartment that isn't all that nice (I hate drywall) and painting it white? yuck...

It's so great when I meet a fellow color-obsessed person. I had the following e-mail exchange with a genius who was ordering a set of tableware from me:

Think chocolate brown- Michelle Obama's skin- citrus/acid yellow, marine blue/turquoise accented by black. I saw that in India one time and decided it was one of the greatest color combinations I'd ever seen. Now I've just seen Michelle wearing acid/citrus yellow and Caribbean blue with a black belt. Of course, she looks fabulous. Ergo: may I humbly request at least one dinner plate, salad plate and one bowl in that combination, please? Another combination that always stuns me is when Matisse combines tomato red with olive green. As you know, that invites pink, chocolate brown, Dijon mustard yellow, black accents, dark plum/maroon, possibly scarlet....

to which I responded:

hmmmm......that sounds great. I've stayed away from lemon yellow, and now you want citrus yellow; are those different colors to you? What I've decided to do is make a bunch of bread plates first. I'll photograph them and you can tell me what you like from there. I'm a big red and green fan myself. I have trouble with red..I only like it with green and maybe a harvesty kind of tan...and pink, but that's so flamenco...with black it looks 80's, with yellow it looks McDonald's, with blue it looks patriotic, (Although I do sort of like it with a slate blue in a "New England blue house red door" kind of way.) With purple it makes me feel dirty, orange...nah, brown-same as purple, white-candy cane. Red is Jack Peter's favorite color. It's so weird.

My favorite thing about the exchange is Adrian's writing, "As you know" It sounds as if we're talking about some objective science in which we both have advanced degrees. I also like the fact that he'd been thinking about a color combination he saw in India for 20 years.

chro·mes·the·sia (krōˌmĕs-thēˈzhə) n. A condition in which another sensation, such as taste or smell, is stimulated by the perception of color.

I do sense a mild sulfur taste every time I see yellow and brown together. I could never work for UPS. I could have been saved from some very grating dates if I'd known about my chromesthesia..."I'm sorry, we can't go out tonight unless you change. That kelly green shirt is really setting me off." I think some people have chromophobia..a fear of color. Although bright colors have gotten a tacky wrap or a hippy dippy one in certain communities. Maybe it's not so much fear of color as fear of what people might think of you if you choose a bold color.

When I was first moving into places in my 20's. I couldn't BEAR any tacky furniture, bad colors, or heaven forbid, carpeting. I'd haughtily repaint, strip and remove. Things weren't acceptable unless they were trash-picked and re-habbed or antiques. Way-out-of-reach high design might be acceptable, but I could justify not affording it from some sort of hippy green perspective.

It occurred to me in the middle of giving a tour of the loft that 3 out of 4 closets were nowhere to be seen as well as the 2 little chests of drawers. They were all from Ikea. It wasn't the most aesthetically pleasing decision to put those in, but it solved the problem of creating some storage in an open plan. The tenants thought they were doing us a favor by getting rid of all of them. I can hear my own 20-something self saying, "Ugh! those are awful! They have to go right now!" How much of the horror was about the stuff itself and how much was from the worry that their hipster posse might think that they'd bought it.

It's not that I like ugly things now. I've just built up a tolerance because kid crap is so hideous, and anything nice gets immediately trashed by kids. I suppose you do have to consider what people are thinking; we are all horrible and judgemental. As the 20-something couple was telling me they were breaking their lease I was unable to focus on their words. I was thinking, "My God, she is so pretty. Why the hell is she wearing those jeans?"

Gimpy Philly

I'm starting to feel old and crotchety in the studio. 5 years ago I would wedge clay for 3 hours every morning, throw pots all day and then teach 10-person classes at night. A week ago I had my godson and his sister come into the studio to play on the wheels for an hour or so. I was leaning over to help them out, and I could barely stand afterwards. It's also been 98+ degrees. I'm too cheap for AC. I work in Peugeot coveralls that have polyester in them. I don't normally have breasts, but because I'm still breastfeeding the sweat collects in that fold and dribbles down my belly.

Clearly I'm destined to be a hunched-over gimp. Tim describes Philly as the City of Gimps, so I'll have company. There certainly are an inordinate number of handicapped parking spaces here. My sa-nanny-ty's boyfriend, James, walks with a cane. The kids adore him, so a cane is a glamorous accessory in their minds. As observant as they are, handicaps escape them. We were out last night and I had to sprint to the bathroom with both big kids. They do everything together, and they are about the same size and weight. Precise little machines that they are, they need to poop at the exact same instant. I was terrified to see the "out of order" sign on the second stall, but Steel waited patiently. While they're on the toilet, they have me captive, poised with a wad of toilet paper in my hand. They enjoy it, so they prolong things. A little line was forming. Undaunted, they include everyone in their conversation as they sit there, knickers and pants on the floor. I felt bad enough that they each took 20 minutes...who sent in the patient, but obviously uncomfortable, 1-legged woman in short shorts on crutches? Neither of them noticed.

Tim's 1-armed friend, Mike was visiting a while ago. He brings groups of architecture students to Philly from Canada. I was making breakfast and forbade Steel to go in and wake him up because they tend to go out at night. I got distracted and she disappeared. She returned saying, "Mike has no eyes!" Her little head had been 3 inches away from him staring at his sleeping face for the past 10 minutes. I said without thinking, "He has eyes; he's missing an arm, and you shouldn't have been in there!" When I first met Mike I was setting up a show. He kept offering to help, and finally I had to say, "MIKE! the boxes are 16x16x16, and YOU ONLY HAVE ONE ARM!" One night he returned late and uncharacteristically exploded into a tirade..."Do you know how hard it is to deal with cling wrap when you only have one arm????" I sent him one of those boxes of Saran Wrap that has the little zip cutter. It made me so happy.

Babies are fabulous gimps. Toby's starting to get frustrated about her inability to walk. We appease her with bones. Now that I live in Philly I forget that vegans even exist. I brought lamb chops to a play date the other day because the kids are always sprinting around and not eating; it's good 'on the run' food. Heather had to do some fancy PR work to get her kids to try them: "It's steak on a stick!" she said jubilantly. Ciela, in a tinkerbell dress was the first to scream hysterically, "I want steak on a stick!" Toby gets the half-finished chops. She gnaws on them for hours, eyes wide with a harrowing look of intensity, grease shining on her fat forearms and hands. It keeps her from wobbling around, losing balance and banging her head on the floor, and I get to chat and drink too much wine.

sa-nanny-ty

Taking pictures of myself with my phone and handing it back for the kids to see made 20 minutes of a 7-hour car ride bearable...until they started screaming at each other about who had the phone longer. We resorted to playing Earth Wind & Fire really loud for the next 2 hours.

My parents had a hideous divorce in 1996. My mom went back to her high school sweetheart, my dad refused to work for 5 years prior to the divorce to whittle down his assets. It got ugly, but that was almost 15 years ago. This year my brother's posse and mine all went to my mom's in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA for the 4th of July to the house in which we grew up. I was feeling bad about not calling my dad who lives 2.5 hours away, but 9 of us going to meet him at the Cracker Barrel 1.25 hours away just didn't seem feasible. On the morning of the 4th my mom sent Dick, the sweetheart, out to get the paper at 7:45 am. He came back with Peter, my Dad. Peter bellowed as he sauntered into the kitchen, "SUSIE! I'M BACK!!!" We had a civilized day. Dick served breakfast. Peter murmured something about how great the service was and how he needed to come up with a tip. Dick retorted, "Don't worry about it; I'm getting your car towed off of the lawn as we speak." The only acknowledgment of the historical ill will was in jest. I was proud of all 3 of them.

Meanwhile, the spouse of my best friend next door was accused of being an alcoholic by his in laws because he had a beer at lunch. I told him to respond next time, "I know, but it's really helping with my heroin problem!" Another friend who has an at-home flower business was talking about a new client, and her childhood friend said to her, "Which relative has hired you now?" The "friend" went on to discuss how stay-at-home moms are robbing their children of the opportunity to see a strong, happy, successful mother. What does a "trying to stay at home as much as she can" mom say to that? "Yeah, you're right and the woman you're paying to raise your kids is probably doing a much better job than you would..."

What is wrong with people?

People can be nice. I hear constantly, "How do you do it? You have a pottery business, AND 3 kids..." It's nice to hear, but I can't really pat myself on the back too hard. The women I've found to pay to raise my kids have been amazing. Our first nanny was Alissa. She became Sass. I would say objectifying things like, "Everyone needs a Sass!" Sass abandoned us for Texas although she's still part of the family. Our new one is Julie. A Julie just isn't as fun to say, so when I go to objectify her I've come up with, "Julie is my sa-nanny-ty."

We had 13 house guests last weekend. On Monday morning 2 out of 3 kids had wet their beds, (Steel told me it rained in her bed) and I hadn't coped with it. I admitted this to Julie as she walked in; she said, "GREAT! I was planning on stripping their beds today because I knew I'd be doing a lot of laundry to get the house back together!" On top of taking on my houseguest laundry...who responds to having to change 2 urine-soaked beds with GREAT!? She's a lot like me, so she'd probably done some quick mental algorithm about the statistics of both kids' wetting the bed on bed linen laundry day, and it was like winning the stingy New England housewife lotto. (I'm way too lazy/cheap to launder bed linens until something vile has happened) Julie was raised by Mormons in Utah; she refers to herself as a U-tard. Maybe Mormons are the lost tribe of New England.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel lucky that my family and people who aren't even my family have my back. When I look around it seems rare. Although next time my dad or my aunt berates me for trying to have 4 kids, I think I'll happily chirp, "You wouldn't believe the money I'm saving on tampons!"

the whippersnapper complex

Every year the McDonalds put on a golf outing in Tim's Dad's honor. The proceeds benefit the John D. McDonald foundation which funds kids in Havertown. In the 5 years I've been a part of the family I haven't golfed. I'd babysit kids and wait for a bunch of drunk, sun burnt Canadians to come back in need of a swim at my mother in law's house. Jack McDonald was born and raised in Canada...1 of 14. Initially I enjoyed holding down the fort, but since the kids I was sitting became my own, I've been bitter about being left while everyone has a good time. I've only golfed once in my life in Idaho. My then boyfriend and I were escorted off of the course for bad behavior. This year I chose to golf in a 4-some of chicks, the girlfriends of Tim's 3 partners: 2 are his brothers and 1 his best friend from high school.

Emlyn, the latter's girlfriend came to my studio a month ago-the day I found a massive roach in one of my bowls. I showed it to her, and she said, "Can I take it home for my kids?" She emptied the contents of an Altoid container into her pocket and nestled the roach in there. She then forgot about it until she was at a picnic and a baby bird fell out of a tree. Someone yelled, "does anyone have an insect to feed the bird?" Can you imagine the stir when Emlyn produced a sewer bug as big as my thumb from her purse and cut it into baby bird bite-sized pieces?

That was off-topic, but I had to put it in there. The outing was a blast. Golfing is fine. Chatting with 3 great women and whizzing around the great outdoors in a cart full of beer, not a child in sight, is even better. One of our posse, Chelsea, had some tutoring from "the new guy" in Tim's office. Ryan golfed in college, and, unlike me, college was recent for him, so he's still really good. Chelsea is a gorgeous cross between Sigourney Weaver and the brooding vampire girl in the Twilight series. She's also a brainy academic type, and she just had deviated septum surgery. She's been floating around for a week on codeine periodically resorting to wearing an elastic supported trough-like bandage under her nose and around her head. (The day she emerged from her post-surgery stupor, Steel, of course, demanded she remove the trough) Watching her lurch up to the tee and repeatedly deliver a resonant, sailing drive straight down the fairway was mesmerizing for all of us, including her.

Ryan's group from the office chose not to go for the beef and beer after golf. It was revealed that Ryan was disappointed by his performance. The McDonald brothers had made a big deal out of Ryan's being a great golfer, but I'm sure everyone was too drunk to notice or care how he'd performed.

A childhood friend and I called that feeling, the whippersnapper complex. She had blown off her senior year and ended up at UMASS for a year. My godmother asked after her, saying to me, "Whatever happened to that Eliza Minot? She was always such a whippersnapper!" I relayed the question to Eliza, and she rolled her eyes as she guiltily exhaled her cigarette. (She's a successful author and a mother of 4, so it's all gone just fine, Aunt Maryanne)

In the office, I made a patronizing clucking sound as I was saying, "Oh that makes me sad! Ryan shouldn't feel bad!" After that conversation, I threw some pots and shipped an order musing to myself that I'd forgotten how it feels to have high expectations for oneself. I was in denial. I don't feel too bad about playing a bad game of pool, but I'd be lying if I said I'd outgrown the whippersnapper complex.

I recently made 24 cups for a cafe in my neighborhood. I had to get them done in a short time. I can make a cup in 5 minutes, so I wasn't too worried, but they came out craptastic. Haven't I been making pottery too long to have stuff look that bad? I shamefully delivered them for opening day and then brooded all weekend until I came upon the crazy, novel idea of re-making them. I couldn't bear continuing to define myself as a maker of gorgeous cups knowing 5 blocks away there's proof to the contrary.

It's the self-definition part that brings on the angst. I also define myself as someone who has babies easily, happily, and with little physical repercussions. A baby ago, however, I had a horrible miscarriage. Tim and I had cockily been telling everyone early in the pregnancy, and I lost the baby. Nothing has undermined my confidence, faith and optimism more profoundly than that loss. In my mind EVERYTHING from that day forward was going to fail. The mental floodgates were open to disease, bankruptcy, death and all of the horrible things that happened to other people.

Meanwhile Ryan, being 21, probably forwent the beef and beer for a shower and a date. After 4 hours in 90 degree weather drinking with a bunch of Canadians, who's going to want to stick around for another 4 hours? The Canadians are known for long toasts, drunken singing of partial songs and weepy hugs...my kind of party.