Christmas passed

Here are some recent bits I type-scribbled in the dazzling absence of my children over winter break.

The van is killing me.  I need something new, something that speaks volumes of self value and integrity. Something that says, I haven’t given myself away.  I bought that van to carry other people’s children.  I wanted to know that at any moment, if anyone wanted to be at my party, I could carry them there.

I don’t belong to those people now.  The boys and I could fit neatly into sedans, my stash all over the front seat and the two of them separated by a skinny middle island.  It’s time to buy things that cling to the lines of our family.  I don’t need room for someone who isn’t there, and I don’t need someone to fill what is already a complete.

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I wake to the sick mouth of overgrown bacteria and scratching, dried up throat.  There’s a large, dessicated chunk of booger lodged somewhere between my nasal cavity and the swallowing mechanism of my throat: is it in my oropharynx?  It’s headed there, anyway, and if I don’t get rid of it it soon enough I will be forced to taste it.  I pull myself off of the family room couch as animated voices carry in from the living room and I search, blurry-eyed, for a paper and pen.  I press the paper out in front of me and walk out to my family.

“I think it’s moving,” my brother-in-law says as I sway into the living room.  The sign catches his eye.  “Oh! It’s communicating!”

Good Morning, I have written.  I am desperate for a toothbrush.

Willow, my sister and hostess, is answering before Peter has fully translated for me.  She still has the toothbrush she gave me the last time I came and has it conveniently stored for me next to the bathroom. This forgetting of toothbrushes is apparently a chronic thing.  I suspect it has something to do with my overdeveloped awareness of microbiology; I can’t quite bring myself to put a damp mouth scrubber, covered in dead skin cells and with things that would grow large and orange in a petri dish, into a dirty cosmetic bag lined in a coating of shampoo and lotion, and then put that same scrubber back in my mouth.  I’d rather leave it at home gathering dust and fecal particles out of the bathroom air, and so I actively forget it every time I travel.

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And that's pretty much how I spent the last week: making my family laugh, laughing at them, falling in love with the places I come from and trying to sanitize my self all at the same time.  It was fucking great.  I'm home now from the butter-yellow, peachy light of Marin County and all atumble with the limbs of gangly boys again.  I forget every year how awesome it is to be away from my kids, how much better it makes our family when they live in the arms of others for a while and I go do my thing.  None of the neuroses stick quite as hard when we reunite, and I discover, in the freshness of being with them again, this fundamental truth: I can love them and have my own life.  I must have my own life, in order to love them well.

We've got a few days left and we are about to dust our way through The Hobbit, a box or two of satsumas, and a whole shitload of youtube clips.  Also, there will be more flirting with the hick who really isn't one (or who might actually be the redneck he claims, in which case, more tasty complications).