Goodbye soul-sucking commute. Goodbye not seeing my kids for eight hours a day. Goodbye unrewarding paychecks, not giving a shit, and giving too much of a shit. Goodbye job that stopped being right for me a few years ago, and started being actively wrong for me six months ago.

Yesterday I said goodbye to Workplace. Today I am officially a self-employed freelance writer who works from home.

Hello to dreams coming true.

All & Sundry

He hates balloons, loud noises, and unfamiliar foods. He’s not too sure about dogs.

He loves spaceships, rockets, motorcycles, and guns. He loves the idea of the Blue Angels but not so much the earsplitting scream of their presence. He loves Legos, and he can build anything.

He loves to argue. He loves to dawdle. He loves to push boundaries. He loves to be praised.

He loves his brother. He loves his family. He loves to run and jump and yell. He moves through the world with everything set to eleven. He is a wide-open flower tilted to catch as much sun as possible.

At five years old, he’s outgrown my ability to describe him. I paint a tiny corner of his ever-expanding picture and it’s never enough.

I can only tell you how much I love him. That’s an easy story to tell.

Five today. All the fingers of a hand, spread wide.

All & Sundry

Most of the parents lounge poolside, chatting with one another while their older children attack each other in the water. JB and I reluctantly submerge ourselves and settle into the task of keeping an eye on Dylan while ducking flying water toys, thrashing kicks, and careening inflatables.

Everywhere I look there is a wet blonde head, churning movement, a flash of goofily-colored swim trunks. Riley calls from a few feet away to look at him, look at him. I wipe stinging chlorine from my eyes after a little girl practices her kicking next to me. Dylan is giggling and bouncing around and sometimes he slips off his feet but catches himself, flailing back upwards.

Then, suddenly, he falls and can’t push himself up. He is, for a brief and utterly horrifying moment, immobile: his legs dangling down and slightly behind him, his upper body floating, his face in the water.

In Suzanne Finnamore’s Otherwise Engaged, she refers to what her friend Jill calls a Grand Klong: a sudden rush of shit to the heart. “A Grand Klong is when you look in your rearview mirror and you see the police car.”

Your child, floating facedown in a pool, is most definitely a Grand Klong.

I scramble to my feet, scraping against the concrete steps and peeling a strip of skin off my back, and yank Dylan up and out. He splutters and briefly rubs a fist against his eye, then laughs and squirms, eager to get back down.

He’s off again, happy and upright, and I’m sagged against the side of the pool, chest hammering. I shake my head at JB, who looks back at me and grimly nods. Parenthood. Jesus.

All & Sundry

Then JB was working for Microsoft, and, well, you don’t quit Microsoft. You stay there as long as you can while they grind everything they can out of you, while simultaneously firehosing money and benefits in your direction. If you stay there long enough, you retire on a bed of gold ingots. Sure, your vocabulary will be replaced with Dilbert-speak, your eyelid will spasm whenever you get a new email, and your teeth will be permanently bared from years of aggressive turf-defending, but you will have a SAILBOAT.

We talked about Oregon a lot in those days, but it was never the right time. There were ladders to climb, promotions to get. My job was going well, too—I’d joined the company when they could only afford to pay starving-artist salaries, and now we were getting fat holiday bonuses.

After an insane amount of work and stress and plotting, JB and his business partners turned Vioguard from a dream into a reality. And he did quit Microsoft, which was a terrifying, epic decision and I’m so proud of him for having the balls to do it.

Forget those sailboats. They’re made of souls.

Somehow during all of this, the months and years just slid right by. The child who was a suspicious newborn will be a suspicious five-year-old next week. We thought we’d have plenty of time to figure out how to get to Oregon before the kids started school, then suddenly we were looking at local school scores and trying to figure out if we should move across town instead.

We ran low on money and we learned we didn’t need it the way we thought we did. We spent a week in Oregon with family and realized we didn’t want those moments to happen only a few times a year. JB’s father had another cancer scare. Traffic has gotten worse and city-living expenses keep piling up.

When the home you want for your family is a few hundred miles from where you’ve made your life, all you can do is keep checking that balance. For years, the scales have tipped in the favor of staying put. The timing wasn’t right. This summer, the scales finally tipped the other way, and it became clear that for a change of that magnitude, the timing will never be right. It will always involve risk and fear and compromise.

So that’s why we put the house on the market. If it sells, we’ll move to Eugene and start a new life there, and JB will continue his work with Vioguard. If it doesn’t sell, we’ll stay put until we figure out the next thing. We’re in a good position, in a lot of ways. Nothing’s forcing our hand with this move. It’s hard, once you’ve made such a big decision, to have no forward momentum—but we can afford to be patient.

At least we took that step, I tell myself. We broke out of the inertia of the timing isn’t right. Fuck the status quo. Fuck being comfortable. Fuck staying still and never reaching out to grab the ring behind the gold, the one that really means something.

August thus far has brought more changes than I ever would have thought possible—and none of them in the area I’d been focused on. Our house hasn’t sold, we don’t appear to be moving any time soon, and yet everything has tipped upside down like a snowglobe: all the little routines and realities floating off in a new direction, sparkling and winking as they catch the light.

All & Sundry

I thought we’d have a bunch of people coming by, to the point of total inconvenience—oh, we have to leave the house again, quelle fucking drag—and I thought we might get low counteroffers and I thought we might find out some terrible thing during the inspection, like that the roof is actually formed of popsicle sticks and there’s a poltergeist in the TV.

Instead, there’s been virtually no activity. We’ve had exactly two agents look at the house, and one lady who was house-hunting for her adult son and liked the place enough to go and bring her son back to see it for himself, and then they went and made an offer on a bigger place with less yardwork, and all I can say about that is that if they had bought our house I would have described them as a charmingly close family who have found the perfect sort of arrangement that works just right for them, but since they didn’t, I hope Mr. Sissy Mama’s Boy is happy in the low-maintenance mansion his MOMMY bought him, since he was clearly too much of a goddamned PUSSY to live in a house where he’d have to mow a LAWN.

Ahem.

I keep thinking about all the work we did in the days before the sign went up in our yard and I feel so stupid. We reamed out closets and painted trim and cleaned windows and ripped out weeds and bought plants and hauled stuff to the dump and re-arranged rooms and it was just this totally consuming, stressful effort that went into double-time in the last few days before it officially went on the market and I swear to god we nearly killed each other in the process.

I mean, that stuff needed to be done, and I’m glad it IS done, but jesus. I went at it like we had a ticking clock hanging over our heads, you know? Like the instant we had the MLS number we’d have crowds of people banging on our door.

Every morning before I leave for work I prep the house with the hope that somebody is going to come by, which means vacuuming, picking up, wiping counters, hiding toys, making beds, and on and on it goes. The novelty has long worn off and now I go about my cleaning-lady chores feeling more and more bitter. Will anyone come by today and notice the shining floors, the neatened children’s rooms, the carefully rolled towels arranged just so in their little stupid fucking wicker basket? Oh hey, probably not, but I can’t skip it because WHAT IF THEY DO?

I planned for every contingency except nothing. In the absence of information it’s hard to know what we should consider changing. Maybe we need a new agent, a new listing price, a new set of photos, a new economy—I just don’t know yet. For now we’re just hoping something . . . happens, soon. Anything is better than nothing.

All & Sundry

The silly thing, of course, is that I do live where they have small-town parades. Jesus, we drove maybe fifteen minutes to get there.

I know what I mean when I think that, but sometimes it’s obvious to me that I get caught up in dreams of where we want to be—our someday-home, our someday-town, our someday-lives—and forget that there’s so much here, right now.

All & Sundry

“Had we gone to trial, we had ready an expert from the Masters and Johnson Institute who was going to testify that in 30 years of research on masturbation the institute had never found one person who masturbated with his or her nondominant hand. “

Now, I didn’t go on to read the entire article so maybe it eventually becomes clear that he was making that up. I mean, 30 years of research? Not one person chokes the chicken/slaps the mackerel with a nondominant hand? I call bullshit. Surely most of us could get creative if the other hand was busy, like, holding a bucket of popcorn in a movie theater or whatever.

Then I thought about it, and realized that I only use my left hand. My dominant hand, if we’re categorizing hands into the one that addresses holiday cards and the one that rides bitch. I don’t think I could use my right hand if my life depended on it, assuming there was a really bizarre terrorist-demands-orgasm situation going on.

Frankly, I’m less of a fingers-do-the-walking and more of an Energizer-bunny gal when it comes you, you know, taking a solo trip to the happy place. What can I say, I value efficiency. But I can’t imagine using my right hand, even to hold the battery-powered device in question. It’d be like the difference between signing my name in cursive flourishes with my left hand, then switching to my right in order to stroke-victimly scrawl out LNDO.

According to my extensive Masturbate My Johnson Institute study of one, I could sort of see where Mr. Reuben’s coming from. (Back row, aisle seat, guy with the handkerchief.) I got curious about what dudes had to say about this, though, so naturally I went to Twitter. My question was if guys ever used their nondominant hand for personal solitary activities, and here are some of the responses:

My husband uses his non-dominant hand when he’s…handling things himself.

Of course, if we didn’t the calluses would start to rub us the wrong way.

I then asked JB, who said he couldn’t be sure unless he was doing it, so maybe we should retire to the bedroom and, like, see for ourselves? Then he admitted that he prefers the left hand. The non-dominant hand.

So, maybe Pee-Wee was engaged in hand-to-gland combat in that theater all these years ago, and maybe he wasn’t, but I still say shenanigans on his so-called proof of innocence. Unless self-pleasure ambidextrousness has greatly improved since 1991, perhaps as a result of texting? Someone should do a study on this. In fact, I will. Give me a research grant and a day of Twitter access and we’ll, you know, bang this thing out.

All & Sundry

Dylan: “CWYING!”

Me: “Right. Just—”

Dylan: (delighted) “SWEEPING!”

Me: “Exactly! No crying tonight, just sleeping. Okay? Okay. I love you, sweetie.”

8:49 PM

Dylan: “LA LA LA LA WE ALL LIVE IN A WELLOW SUBMAWINE . . . . LAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Me: “Dylan. Shhhh. Riley’s sleeping. It’s night night time, remember?”

Dylan: “Just SWEEPING!”

Me: “GoodNIGHT.”

9:12 PM

Dylan: (incoherent yelling)

Me: “Hey, hey hey hey! What’s going on in here?”

Dylan: “Uhhh. I don’ know!”

Me: “Okay, come here. Listen, you. It’s bedtime. You need to close your eyes, okay? Think of something nice.”

Dylan: “Like CHICKENS!”

Me: “Oookay. Sure, like chickens.”

Dylan: “An’ a horse. An’ a COW. An’ a BUFFALO. An’ . . . an’ a coyote.”

Me: “Right. Sure. You think about coyotes.”

Dylan: “Where COYOTE go? Dat coyote RAN OFF! He’s inna WOODS!”

Me: “Yep. Probably sleeping.”

Dylan: (indignant) “No! He’s eating GWASS!”

Me: “GOODNIGHT.”

9:38 PM

Dylan: (standing up in crib, peering around room)

Me: “Dylan, did you poop?”

Dylan: (slyly, waggling eyebrows) “Yeaaaaah!

Me: (sniffing) “You did not. Now go. To. Sleep.”

9:45 – 2 AM

Blissful silence

2:12 AM

Dylan: (incoherent shrieking)

Me: “Mmmfff. Dylnn. Wassa. Plz gobackto. Sleep.”

Dylan: (chirpy) “Okay!”

3:45 AM, 5:12 AM

Repeat of above

6:00 AM

Dylan: “EHHHHHHHHHH. EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”

Me: “?!?!?!”

Dylan: “I got a LEAFBLOWER!”

Me: “WHAT? IT’S NOT TIME TO GET UP YET. GO BACK TO SLEEP. OH MY ACHING GOD, KID.”

7:15 AM

Dylan: “Hi Mommy! Wake up now? Wake up?

Me: “Dylan. We can’t keep on like this. You have to start sleeping better. DYLAN. SERIOUSLY. ARE YOU LISTENING TO—”

Dylan: (bouncing happily) “Just SWEEPING! Iss okay Mommy. Shhhh! I’m lookin for COYOTES. An’ horses, an’ buffalo, an’ . . . an’ CHICKENS.”

All & Sundry

I did not, in fact, drop to my knees and release a window-shattering howl of despair, but I can assure you that the only reason I resisted this action is because I’ve seen those Walgreens floors. No human knee or other uncovered body part should ever encounter its MRSA-laden surface.

Still. I kind of hope whoever’s in charge of their merchandising schedule gets a pumpkin rammed up their ass this fall. Screw you, drugstore seasonal display, it’s still summer and it’s going to STAY summer until I goddamned well say it’s not.

All & Sundry

Yesterday, however, when JB picked him up from school and Dylan was in the midst of some angry tirade about god knows what, his teacher confessed that no one in class tantrumed quite like Dylan. She said it lovingly and with a rueful shaking head, but still. You don’t like to hear that it’s your kid who’s the very best at being very bad, you know?

He get so furious, so upset about the stupidest toddler-sized things, and I know that’s par for the course. 2-year-olds go all Naomi Campbell at the drop of a hat because that’s how they’re wired: with a jumble of frayed, sparking electronics half-submerged in water.

They may lose their shit when faced with the terrible injustice of having to wear shoes, but they’ll go equally ballistic with joy over spotting a squirrel outside. Toddlers are binary creatures and they pretty much either suck or are awesome, with few in-betweens. I know this.

Ah, but still. I feel this creeping sense of failure. Why is it my kid who’s top of the class in shit-losing? What are we doing wrong that he can’t be calmed out of a tantrum, that we’re at his mercy until he’s goddamned well decided to be done?

We try distractions, soothing. We lose our own tempers and yell. We send him to his room. In the end, nothing really helps but time.

Afterwards he wants to be hugged, he buries his little wet face in our necks. It’s like we forget he isn’t in control, in those maddening minutes. We can’t seem to help him get control.

Meanwhile, I worry about my boy Riley, whose reactions to getting hurt are equally epic in sheer energy expenditure. The screaming, the flailing, his crazymaking refusal to allow comfort. Later, the giant damp eyes, the quiet, and my fearful wonder of whether or not we made the situation worse with our own frustration and impatience.

Different issues, same loss of control. Same inability to cope. Same parental bumbling—what do I do, what do I do, what do I do. Ultimately, the parents end up in the same place as the children: operating by emotion, filled with regret afterwards.

And how ridiculous it is, how stupid and painful to admit that I have this hope or expectation that they can learn to control themselves better—when I can’t seem to do it myself.

All & Sundry