It’s a Gift

The whining is a gift. So too, the exaggerated shoulder slumping and foot slamming that comes with it. The forty-fifth time she asks for the iPad is a gift, even after she’s been told “No” forty-four previous times. The flopping around on the bathroom floor to avoid the toothbrush. The screaming about not wanting to take a bath. The water’s too hot. The water’s too cold. The water’s too wet. Each of those howls of protest are gifts. The milk spilled in the car, the peanut butter on the new couch. The second shirt every morning because the first was so very wrong. The tutu and tiara and baseball glove and twirling, twirling when it needs to be pajamas and bedtime. Running over there when I said to “Come here.“ Outside voice when it’s time to use inside voice. A whine for ice cream when dinner is untouched on the plate.

It’s a gift to be irritated with them. It’s a gift to be frustrated with them. It’s a gift to be exasperated with them. It’s a gift to be with them.

Partners in Crime

I should start with the last time I had to travel for work while there was a birthday party scheduled. The following text exchange ensued after I received a picture of our two-year-old daughter standing in front of daycare the next day holding something weird.

Me: What is she holding?
Husband: A light saber.
Me: Why is she taking a light saber to daycare?
Husband: It’s show and tell day!
Me: And you sent her to school with a weapon. Where did she even get it?
Husband: Toy store at Franklins. We had to go get a present for Molly’s party so we just got two!
Me: And you sent her to a two-year-old’s birthday party with a light saber as a present.

Today I’m out of state and my husband was taking her to a party. I received the following text: ”We went to Franklins and bought the World’s Longest Beard!”

Other mothers love us.

You’re Pro-Life? That’s Nice.

It occurred to me recently that I operate in my personal political life (outside of work) in a type of post-persuasion mode. I don’t believe any of my family or friends my age or older can be convinced of anything anymore. We’ve picked our sides, donned our respective teams’ pinnies and are ready to scrum to get our ball over the goal line. And here’s the thing: that’s fine.

Because increasingly each campaign season is about exactly that: the ground game. It’s not some epic battle for the hearts and minds of the voters we know. I post political material on Facebook and Twitter all the time. I don’t do it to convince those who disagree with me. There’s no point. The day I post a pro-choice item and get an email from someone who had been pro-life telling me they’ve come around is the day that I start requiring employers pay me in magic beans for my services. I don’t operate under the delusion that it’s the 100th pro-Obama posting that’s going to do the trick for you Romney fans. Bam! Finally got ya! Welcome to Hopetown! And let’s be honest, most of you have already switched me to “Block until Nov. 7″ in your Facebook settings.

This year, as in recent years, the most important thing any of us who are activists can do is get our team members out to the polls. Keeping like-minded voters engaged through social media is a huge part of that. Every post can help get them fired up to knock on doors, phonebank, and donate to candidates. So I’m focused on revving up those who agree with me, not worrying about the politics of those who don’t.

There are about three weeks left until the election. Three weeks until we can go back to focusing on what really matters: what we had for brunch.

iMticked

My husband takes a lot of ribbing, mainly for this:

Does he want to see your ass thrown in jail or croon you a Barry White song? Who’s to say?! That photo hits all potential reader demographics.

But recently he got local media attention from WTOP, DCist and Fishbowl when some jackhole on the Metro tried to swipe his iPhone. What the story doesn’t say is that he got ripped off twice.

I was sitting at home that night, not knowing that at that very minute my husband was making like Mssrs. Starsky and Hutch, chasing the perp through the Metro station, when I got a call from his phone. His face appeared on screen but on the other end was a chick who sounded so Midwest nice that I figured her for a Prairie Home Companion extra. She told me she found the phone but couldn’t get it to my husband “before he ran off.” [Editor's note: At this moment I thought, "before he ran off? He hasn't run in a good many years, Pippi Gundersson. He saunters. He moseys. He does not run."]

But here was Miss Fargo 2009 assuring me that she would drop the phone off at the Takoma Park station, her next stop, in a few minutes. When she conferred with an apparent chum that that was the name of the station and then laughed a little I thought, “Huh, OK, kinda weird. Anyhoo.” But I thanked her profusely and figured my husband had just dropped the phone. How nice that this good Samaritan was returning it. The good Samaritan whose name and contact information I did not get.

Problem: the good Samaritan never turned the phone in. I called WMATA police to alert them the phone was on its way to the Takoma Park Metro booth, so there was little chance of it disappearing once it hit Metro staff hands. Moot point. It never showed in the first place.

Robbed twice. First by a garden-variety thug. Next by a twerp who apparently decided her good deed would get her only so far and the $600 phone in her hand would get her much farther. What she had no way of knowing is that I’d majorly splurged to buy the phone for my husband for Father’s Day. That he’d started amassing a collection of photos of our toddler that we can’t get back now. That one of his primary work tools — his source list — was on that phone. That he’d built an impressive music collection on it that he loved to unwind to on his way to and from work.

Not famine, not murder, not anything horrible. Just all a bummer and maddening and unfair.

Everyone assumes that you can automatically track an iPhone when stolen, but that’s only if you’ve pre-loaded the proper app. And my husband didn’t have a password on it, so she’s free to peruse any of the content on the phone. Hopefully she’s stupid enough to take it into a Verizon store to get it re-activated, where a computer will indicate it’s stolen. Hopefully she will also soon have the grown-up equivalent of having your ice cream cone tip onto the sidewalk. I’d like to think I’m bigger than wishing that, but I’m not.

A Very Special Why The Terrorists Hate Us Friday

Item: The Navy SEALs

Pitch: Navy SEALs are a special breed of warrior who conduct special operations in any environment, but who are uniquely trained and equipped to operate from, around and in maritime areas. SEALs take their name from the environments in which they are trained to operate: sea, air and land.

Sure the terrorists hate us for our fried Coke balls and our Bibleopoly. But every now and then their hatred is really on the mark. They hate us because, occasionally, mustachioed men in jogging shorts with 0-percent body fat and awfully good aim come and kill them. Hooyah.

Occasional Job Changer Who Sometimes Works Out and Watches 30 Rock. Also, A Mother.

There was a kerfuffle in the online lady-universe in the seconds after Natalie Portman dared to proclaim while accepting her Oscar that motherhood was the most important role of her life. Mary Elizabeth Williams fired the first professional shot, arguing in Salon that Portman was selling out her ovaried sisters by implying that creating, birthing and raising life was more important than being lauded for pretending to be a ballerina pretending to be a swan who stabs herself in the gut.

At the time I thought, “Jesus, lady, chillax,” and moved on, but a similar conversation today, in which it was asserted that a woman’s pre-baby lifestyle and traits must remain the dominant ones for the rest of her life or she’s somehow settling for some sad Betty Draper-esque existence, renewed my contemplation of the subject. Specifically, it had me yet again thinking, “Jesus, lady, chillax.”

The notion that a woman’s identity is somehow pitiable if it gives itself over to that which comes with motherhood is based on a few flawed premises:

1. That there was some inherent superiority to the pre-baby life.
My life pre-baby was pretty cool, involving somewhat regular trips to museums, an occasional night out at the ballet and a concert here and there. But most nights involved lounging around in sweats watching television, reading or fiddling with the Times crossword, and doing laundry. And now that I have a child I still fiddle with the Times crossword, watch television in my sweats, do laundry and make somewhat regular trips to museums. Except now when I go to the museum I get to watch another set of eyes widen at the riot of color in a Lichtenstein.

2. That there is some soul-shackling inferiority in the tasks associated with parenthood.
This would seem to include spooning mushy peas into a babbling baby, taking a child to piano or lacrosse, or wiping little noses. So here’s my challenge to those who poopoo the rigors of handling, er, poopoo: What did you do today that was somehow better than helping guide a child through the world well fed, happy and healthy? Oh, you dumped some food in your cat’s bowl, got some froyo, and went to Target? Well played.

3. That increased selflessness equals weakness.
Because that’s what the argument folks like Williams are making comes down to. That the act of giving up some concern about yourself — your social life, your poetry reading circuit, your wardrobe — somehow means you’re giving up, period. (This is not to say that those who never have children are living an inferior, vapid life. I am specifically addressing those who would criticize mothers for reveling in motherhood.) What some frown upon as weakness, others call maturation.

It’s a sad group that points to a woman setting her Facebook profile picture to a smiling shot of her child and sees evidence of an anti-feminist plot to lease all available brain space to the patriarchy and the kiddieocracy. Because sometimes a cute picture of your kid is just your favorite picture that week. And it’s your Facebook profile, not your obituary. The day that the sum of our feminist selves comes down to what snapshot we’re putting on a site designed to ensure college students get laid is the day that Betty Friedan officially lost.

It’s a sad group that believes talking about your daily goings-on with your child when asked how you’re doing and what you’ve been up to is proof that you, poor thing, have lost yourself. They have no idea that this life lived in tandem with a child is a new evolution of you and it’s pretty goddamned spectacular.

Since having a child I have helped save 30,000 teachers’ jobs. I have helped my husband grieve the loss of his mother. I have done the best writing of my life. I have built communications vehicles from nothing into powerful tools that speak daily to tens of thousands of people.

But I have also changed approximately 4,200 diapers, read Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy roughly 108 times, made 16 packages of personalized pink sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day treats, and turned tears to smiles with a belly tickle more times than I can count. I have, without regret, wrapped up nearly every ounce of my concern in the well-being of my daughter.

This has been the most important role of my life.

And this is what a feminist looks like.

Hoisted on Our Own Petard. Hopefully Not Literally.

You’re goddang right there’s a dragon in our moat.

My husband got his first official death threat recently.

It seems that while the New York Times is a big fan of his highly successful “Most Wanted” feature, some of the folks who land in his articles are less enthusiastic. They are apparently unmoved by the Times recently calling him “the capital’s version of John Walsh” after his writing led to the feds’ arrest of 24 of the most wanted fugitives in the area.

One of his as-yet-uncaptured subjects penned him a letter a couple weeks ago. Suffice it to say the dude could work on his people skills. (Although in an odd twist, after specifying how he’d prefer to see my husband shuffle off his mortal coil, he closed it with something to the effect of a seemingly genuine, “So anyway, have a good day.” Which of course reminded me of the Ricky Bobby Talladega Nights line, “I said with all due respect” and that made me chuckle. Until I remembered that someone wanted to kill my husband and then I stopped.)

This whole bit of unpleasantness made very personal the sticky wicket that is privacy in the Internet age.

As an avid social media user I’ve got absolutely no online privacy. I gave up anonymity on my blog years ago, trading it for the increased traffic and reader engagement that comes when people feel like they actually know you and can scrutinize pictures of your living room to see if you have any taste. And I’ve linked to my husband’s reporting work before so it would take a marmot about .04 seconds to get his name. These days, I think it’s a given that anyone can figure out someone’s identity, quickly.

But I draw a bright line between having an online identity and having my actual residence identified. In light of the open letter recently penned to my husband by Stabby McVengeful, I’ve started the process of getting us scrubbed off of the major websites that list our names with our address. I know I’ll miss something though. So do me a favor: see how easy it is. This is the kind of project that is ripe for crowdsourcing. If you know his name or mine, are you able to come up with our address? Email me what you find.

If you don’t have my email it should take you about six seconds to find it online.

I’m Kind of a Big Deal in the Hotel Closed-Circuit Television World

Here’s a story you would think sprang forth from my me-focused subconscious but no, it actually happened.

My husband and I took the little lady to the park this afternoon and ran into a neighbor whom he has met but I have not. Yet we’ve exchanged waves in passing so he’s seen me a couple times. The guy says as we’re all standing there chatting, “You know, I’d met your husband but never officially met you. But you looked so familiar and I was thinking to myself, ‘Where do I know her from?’”

Punchline: He and his wife were in New Orleans last summer staying at one of the major hotels at the same time that my work’s mammoth annual convention was in town. We had delegates in most of those hotels so we were doing convention news broadcasts on all of their in-house networks. So this poor guy and his wife, after a long day in The Big Easy, would come home, put their feet up, turn on the TV and see… me.

To reiterate the noodle-blowing small worldness of all this: This dude and his wife are traveling in a city a bazillion miles away and I show up on their teevee. A week later, I move onto their street.

And yes, of course I offered to sign his baby’s head.

WhaWhaaa…

There’s nothing like that feeling you get in your tummy when someone writes to you, “Um, you know you’re on [insert any website here] today, right?” So thanks for that, LJ. But once I was assured it wasn’t Drudge or Why the F*ck Do You Have a Kid I was totes fine.

Yes, it appears that my firmly tongue-in-cheek tweet about my massage yesterday made it onto WhiteWhine. And yes, that’s right above supermactress Elizabeth Hurley’s selection yesterday.

They’d probably be decidedly less enthusiastic about my selection if they knew I’d used a gift card for the massage.

When I Became A Man I Put Away Childish Things

I craved childhood this week. Not for me, but for my husband. On Tuesday afternoon, after being blindsided by cancer only six months earlier, his mother passed away. He was with her, holding her hand and telling her she could go, that he and his two younger brothers would be OK. She needed to hear it I think, a mother first and foremost until the end.

He’d spent much of the past two weeks in her bedroom, talking softly to her, holding her hand and stroking her hair, giving her water. He helped ease her out of the world doing the same things that she’d done after bringing him into it.

After she’d gone, the men of the family pulled out boxes and boxes of old family photos, becoming engrossed in better days. The scrawny blond boys in those photos mercifully have no idea what’s coming in too few years. It was all Star Wars and Saturday morning cartoons and bike riding under the south Texas sun, then later, goofy sunglasses and pretty prom dates. I wanted it back for them.

As the week unfolded, my husband and his brothers tackled a long list of sad tasks. They went together and picked out her casket (the three Texas A&M alums swearing it was coincidence that it was a deep maroon — not that the former Hays County Aggie Moms president would have minded). They pulled their wives to them as we fell into tears. They spooned out yogurt and entertained children too young to grasp what was happening. They held their father, knowing when to talk and when not to say anything.

When their mom was taken away, these sons became even stronger men. But I just wished they could slip back into boyhood.