peevish mama

Indulgent? Ambitious? Definitely. Maybe. But it’s six weeks. Just looking at this pile is sure to heal.

Every time I try to write about my upcoming knee surgery, I feel myself morphing into a paunchy ex-jock, swigging my beer as I regale you with war stories of  my high school football glory days. Not very sexy, but nevertheless, here it goes. Errp. Scuse.

It was May of 1988 and the Academy of the Sacred Heart Gazelles (I know, so cute and yet so ridiculous) had travelled to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio for the last lacrosse tournament of the season. A few of us seniors had come straight from prom – my light pink strapless dress swung virginally from the garment hook of Marian’s mom’s car. She drove us through the night because there was no way we were going to miss this tournament – even if it meant bidding our flummoxed dates adieu at two a.m.

By this point in the season – the end of the season, we were in the best shape of our lives – we had hearts like bulls. Lacrosse is a graceful running sport and it is played with no out-of-bounds. If you wanted to burn up time on the clock, you could just take off with the ball and sprint across the next field over, pretending you were a young Native American brave thumping across the prairie in a loin cloth, your heart pounding in your ears. Our coach, Ms. Dritsas, never let us forget it was a game invented by the Plains Indians and played on vast fields that were miles and miles long and wide. The games could go on for days, with hundreds of players on each team. We Gazelles proudly played with the traditional wooden lacrosse sticks made by a guy in Northern Michigan, while all the other teams used plastic sticks, easier sticks we used to say. A stocky woman with spiky gray hair, Ms. Dritsas ate orange peels and was suspected to be a lesbian due to her habitual ass slapping. Somehow, this seems a lot less newsworthy and titillating now than it did then, but we were sheltered Catholic school girls and we liked to make fun.

The beginning of the season was a cold rainy blur of Ms. Dritsas sending us on long runs. Don’t come back for an hour. Go. We would dutifully trudge off, our pony tails flicking behind us, our colored spandex tights gleaming from beneath our oversized shorts. As soon as we were out of sight, we would drop into a saunter and go to our friend Sherry’s house to eat Pop Tarts for fifty minutes before wetting the hair at our temples in the sink and jogging back to school. Sherry isn’t alive anymore. How could we have known as girls, giggling in her house, feeling like we were getting away with something, that she would die in a tragic accident in her early thirties? It is still beyond comprehension.

I’m not sure if I felt it as much as I heard it, but mid-stride in a dead run, there was a pop. A pop that ended my world as I knew it, a world where girls played fierce and hard and felt completely invincible. As I lay on the ground, a thick fence of gold knee high socks surrounded me, but I couldn’t see past anyone’s knees. I remember screaming, over and over, I don’t want permanent knee damage. Please don’t let it be permanent knee damage. Even then, at that moment, there were too many words coming out of my mouth. Meaningless, impotent words. 

Arthroscopic surgery determined that in the last game of the last year of my high school career, I had a completely torn my ACL, screwing up my knee forever. And for the next twenty years I would put off getting it repaired, learn to favor my other leg without even thinking about it, let all the sports I used to love fall by the wayside, and generally get on with my life. 

In five days I’m having surgery to repair my ligament and the cartilage that has been worn down due to instability. If I don’t perish during surgery or from a flagrant, angry infection, I will be on crutches for six weeks. War and Peace, the Nile River, Rapunzel’s hair. Six. Long. Weeks. This is bleak, people. Bleak. Doctor Dash has a couple weeks off during that time and my mother and mother-in-law are each coming for a week, but still – how is this going to work? Who’s going to do everything that I do? How am I going to tolerate sitting around all day, lying around all day. What am I going to do if Devil Baby throws a tantrum in a parking lot? How am I going to get used to asking for help? 

I was fitted for my crutches today and given a lesson on how to get up and down the stairs. This is going to be incredibly humbling. Every fiber of my being feels like I cannot possibly be taking myself out of commission for six weeks. That this is utter insanity. That I will end up crying on the floor as my house crumbles around me, my family falling away with the debris, their faces covered in white dust. I have to dig deep – dig back. I have to rely on the fierce, fearless, selfish girl in me to see me through this, to push me through this. Why? For the sake of the old lady I hope to become. So I can walk and dance and coyly cross my legs when I’m sixty, seventy, eighty.

What is six weeks against decades? Right? RIGHT? Please tell me I’m right.

postscript: if there is a girl athlete in your life, check out this article.

Supergirl has been begging, begging, to go to Circus Camp for two years. When she was four, I told her she was too young. When she was five, I told her she was too young. Now she’s six and she can go. Good Lord. Flying trapeze, balancing balls, bungee trapeze, high wire, clowning, German wheel – what the hell is a German wheel? I don’t like the sound of that – sounds sinister. As I read through the website, I feel a lump in my throat. It all sounds so . . . dangerous. It all sounds so . . . perfect for Supergirl. Sigh. What else can we do but try to follow our children’s bliss? So I’m signing her up and she’s jumping out of her skin. Her response when I told her? “Aw, sweetness!” uttered with the face and voice of a six year old girl, but the ‘tude of a fifteen year old skateboard rat.

“Circus Juventas, a performing arts circus school for youth, is dedicated to inspiring artistry and self-confidence through a multi-cultural circus arts experience.” We are lucky enough to have this place just over the river in St. Paul and on Saturday we went to their big open house celebration. I was curious and I figured, what the hell, let’s give Supergirl a little teaser of what’s to come this summer.

I can honestly say that there is nothing I did not love about it. They had all their equipment set up in the Big Top and after collecting a waiver, the kids were allowed to try their hand at the trapeze, the swinging rope, the trampoline, the high wire and all sorts of other cool things. We caught two performances while we were there and there was a moment when, I swear to God, I got choked up watching this beautiful girl soar through the air on a trapeze. We were practically underneath her and I could see every one her muscles working and straining to gain momentum before she draped herself into poses of breathtaking precariousness. It was poetry to watch a body performing so fluently and so beautifully. Later some contortionists crawled out in freaky green leotards, looking like really buff amphibians. These three girls were healthy, which is to say that they were by no means skinny, which is to say that they had big glutes and breasts and were a joy to watch as they bent their spines into almost unimaginable positions. I do yoga, I do back bends. Holy shit, these girls made my back bends look like paltry hillocks to their acute Mt. Kilmangaros. They were fantastic.

And as we clapped and watched with mouths agape, I was able to crack open why I was digging it so much. This was all about bodies – beautiful fantastic strong and limber bodies – but it was about what these bodies can do, not about how these bodies look. It was a celebration of physical prowess and artistry and it was gorgeous to watch. It was a really inspiring bookend of sorts to my recent, admittedly dour, body ruminations. 

There was also a real joyful looseness to the place in terms of what has become the overbearing strong arm of “safety”. Maybe because they are circus-types and there is a certain degree of physical peril implicit in the whole endeavor, but it was clear their focus was on set up and rigging and no one seemed to get that bent out of shape about all the kids climbing around like monkeys and perched on ladders and scaffolding watching the shows. Most of the kids were Circus Juventas kids, but of course, Supergirl shimmied her way up on to a platform for a better view and they let her be. I watched people who work there see her, expecting them to tell her to get down and they didn’t. I tell you, it warmed my cockles to see that kind of freedom and faith. Faith that a kid can manage not to kill themselves ten feet off the ground.

So Supergirl is all signed up and ready to go. She’ll go for a week this summer from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon and there will be a performance on Friday. I know she’s in it for the swinging, the speed, the height, the adrenaline. I’m just hoping this is one more way for her to realize just how much power and grace she carries in her little frame. I hope she has a blast.

Of course I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that this all doesn’t backfire on me. That ten years from now doesn’t find me clutching a tattered, tearstained goodbye note to my chest, weeping unconsolably as I blindly urge my minivan down a long dusty dirt road in hot pursuit of the circus train choo choo chooing into the dusk.

Minnesota winters are nothing if not body-annihilating. Who remembers that all those parts below the neck even exist after months upon months of bitter cold? These days my body is just something I skitter around in, crouched against the slashing wind, turned in on myself like a fetus. I am as modest as a nun, cloaked in wool, denim and goose down, murmuring whispered prayers for summer, for warmth. Only yoga and sex remind me that hey, the body – it’s not nothing. 

So a trip to Florida at the apex of this cruelest of winters is a bit jarring to someone of my delicate sensibilities to say the least.  Suddenly, there I am in a bathing suit again, my long forgotten toes pale, squinting and disoriented from the shock of being freed from their SmartWool sock prison. I settle into a lounge chair and stare down my femurs. Hello legs. Long time no see. Mmmm. Sun on skin. No words.

Sunny Florida. But where there is sun, there are old people. Old people in bathing suits.  And in my state of mild body shock, I stare in horror from behind my sunglasses at the parade of fleshly decay and decomposition shuffling around in front of me. All manner of withering appendages and muscular atrophy, spinal curvature and bowleggedness, skin taught and shiny over healed incisions, varicosities branching over the backs of legs like ant trails, skin mottled with liver spots, sun spots, age spots, and flesh – dry and sagging or plump and cellulitic – like topographical maps of difficult and foreboding terrain.  Knuckles and ankles swell, nails thicken and yellow, shoulders yearn to touch each other. The ravages of time. 

It is no small mercy that, for the most part, we do not see ourselves as we walk through this world. 

We are not our bodies. We feel like teenagers and yet the mirror tells us otherwise. But watching all these dear old people floating on noodles and moving their legs in the water, creakily bending over to remove white tennis shoes after walks on the beach, leaning on shopping carts picking precious few items off the shelves, sleeping in the sun with hats or yellowed paperbacks over their faces, I can’t help but think: we are not our bodies – but what are we if NOT our bodies? 

Until such time as I evolve way past where I am right now spiritually, I am struck to the core by how very tethered we are to our bodies. It feels painful and unfair. This is what we’ve got. When this is gone, so will we be. What choice do we have then, but to be kind to our bodies, enjoy them, and hope that they won’t betray us too soon?

When I’m old I will read books constantly. Sometimes I will reread books from my teens, my twenties, my thirties. Suspended in story, wrapped in words, I will find escape from my old age. I will walk and swim as much as possible – hopefully do some yoga. I will talk to anyone who will talk to me. Maybe I’ll get a little dog. I will eat olives and ice cream and ridiculously marbled steaks and fries dipped in mayonnaise and watermelon. I will drink loads of white wine – sometimes gin and tonics if I’m in the mood for a good laugh or a good cry.  

But mostly, I will lounge in the sun. Sun on skin. Warm bones. I will bake my old body in the sun because I won’t care about wrinkles anymore.

And my skin will get as brown as bark.

As of late, I’ve noticed that the insides of my two front teeth are feeling a little, well, chipped . . . micro-chipped, like tiny slivers of enamel have simply fallen off, leaving them feeling a little rough and impossible to ignore with my tongue.  Of course, because I worry, I worried.  Is it my electric toothbrush, supposedly so forgiving for my gum tissue but perhaps too punishing for my enamel?  Is it my toothpaste? My gum?  Yes, probably my gum!  Trident whitening.  Truth is, my teeth are white enough – I just like Trident and the push-through foil packets. Maybe I need a substitute?  Yes, new gum, definitely.  And then the other day as I’m driving along in my minivan, I reach for my pint glass of ice water and it suddenly hits me.  Ever since I forsook plastic, I’ve been bringing glass glasses of water in the car and every time I go over a bump . . . shit, does it take a genius? 

And another realization from this very evening: I have always always always coveted a huge, throaty, slippery, rich, honeyed singing voice.  A voice with soul and ache that sounds like it has murmured through thousands of cigarettes.  Always.  If I had my pick of Superhero talents, that would be it.**  So tonight I was out with my betties, Nanook of the North, Crackerjack and Birdie for a much needed airing, having a full-on rumpshaker of a good time watching our fave band New Congress.  (En passant, Bunkers, aside from its unfortunately cheesy name, is a fabulous bar on Thursday nights.  It’s big and dark and New Congress draws a really quirky and diverse crowd.  For some reason I can’t put my finger on, silliness and good times always find us when we go to Bunkers.)  So we’re dancing and drinking and watching the female back-up singer and a new girl who popped in for some really sexy, heavy rapping, and we’re remarking how both of these girls, being on the let’s say, curvaceous side, would really benefit from losing the jeans and tight t-shirts and slipping into sexy little wrap dresses – showing a little cleavage, showing a little leg – and then you’re rapping like a bad-ass mother fucker . . . ah, what’s not to love about that?!?!  But they’re in their twenties and Lord knows, it takes some years to figure it all out.  And then I’m telling Nanook, that I’d love to be able to sing and she’s telling me she’d love to be able to rap, and I’m watching these young buxom beauties belt it out and I’m struck by lightning.  The bosoms are actually responsible for the voice!!!  Am I the first person who has thought of this?  It totally makes sense – there’s more flesh, girth, cushion from which to reverberate.  Kind of why a base drum has so much more timbre and soul than a snare drum.  Think about it, can you think of a singer with a really good voice who’s skinny and flat as a board?  Well, PJ Harvey comes to mind . . . Joan Jett . . . but those aren’t the kind of voices I’m talking about.  I’m talking about HUGE voices.  Maybe I don’t want a voice so much as I want breasts.   

*Caveat Lector:  this entry is the product of post-New Congress two o’clock in the morning drunken musings. Only grammatical changes were subsequently made in the cool (painfully bright) light of day.

**Actually, geographical travel in the blink of an eye with the ability to take twenty people would be my ultimate first choice power – super deluxe hotel in Rio de Janiero for Carnivale, anyone?  Sunburnt country villa in the outskirts of Sevilla, Spain (con picina y cocinera), anyone?  Sunset-to-dawn rave in a Moroccan desert anyone?  Tree house eco-resort in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, anyone?  Rowdy Karaoke bar in Tokyo with the Japanese national baseball team anyone?  Deluxe white water rafting trip on the Snake River in Idaho, anyone?  Beautiful chalet in the Swiss Alps for New Years, anyone?  Horseback riding trek through Patagonia followed by a decadent weekend in Buenos Aires, anyone?  You see, this power would not be wasted on me.  Week-long Indian wedding of two huge Bollywood stars, anyone?  Don’t even tempt me to go on . . .

                                            Photo by Kathy Quirk-Syvertsen

Everyone has their sleep rituals – the little noises they make before they drift off, the way their bodies move as they slip into sleep.  Last night Devil Baby came to our bed in the middle of the night, which hasn’t happened in a while, and I became reacquainted with hers.  I’m not sure what time it was, but having turned in at nine, I had gotten my chunk of sleep and knew I wouldn’t fall asleep again.  Not that I could have with the foot frenzy that was happening next to me.  Devil Baby flutters her feet around like a pair of crazed seal flippers.  At first I thought she was messing around, but I realized she was trying to fall back asleep.  As her little feet ran up and down my body, probing every nook and cranny, I felt like I was being frisked by a saucy and opportunistic Italian policia.  I blearily thought - Jesus, she’s like Helen Keller over here.  Then I thought - No, wait, Helen Keller had arms . . . she’s like Bonnie . . . Bonnie Consuelo . . . 

For my old friends who read this blog, even though you didn’t actually know and even though I didn’t actually know, we both sort of knew on some unconscious level that it was only a matter of time before Bonnie Consuelo sashayed onto my little stage here.  In middle school religion class we were shown a movie about one feisty armless woman named Bonnie Consuelo.  She was a petite brunette with a feathered-hairdo.  And no arms.  Nevertheless, she was a mom and able to do all the things a mom needs to do.  She insisted on wearing sleeveless shirts (I suppose empty sleeves would have looked a bit lackluster and deflated), and she was able to drive and shop and cook and apparently, style her hair.  She could even put on a belt.  In the supermarket, she pushed her cart around with her waist and slipped her feet out of her white open toed wedges to squeeze melons (a discerning consumer, Bonnie was) and place them in her cart.  The movie was supposed to teach us valuable lessons about overcoming odds, perseverance, acceptance . . . blah blah blah. 

Obviously, when you serve Bonnie Consuelo up to a bunch of mean girls on a silver platter, the message is going to get lost.  We were horrified and hysterical.  We couldn’t get enough of Bonnie.  At one point in the movie, Bonnie is sitting on a stool at her kitchen counter, cutting tomatoes with her toes.  They are juicy and messy and she is wielding a knife like nobody’s business.  All of a sudden a fly starts buzzing around (and if this isn’t the kind of unscripted coup de chance that directors dream of, I don’t know what is). Bonnie puts down her knife and snags that fly right out of the air with her toes, Mr. Myagi-style, and throws it in the sink.  She then resumes her tomato slicing . . . without washing her feet hands!!!!  We were jumping out of our skin!  Gross!  we shrieked. That’s so foul! Nasty, Bonnie, nasty!!!  We jeered and heckled.  If we had had food, we would have thrown it at the screen.  Our poor teacher.  Talk about missing the point entirely.

No matter.  It has taken me all these years of hard won growth and maturity to appreciate Bonnie Consuelo. Who else but Bonnie would be able to provide a small chuckle in the middle of the night after twenty-five years? My teacher would be so proud.

Doctor Dash is going to get all persnickity and flustered when he reads this.  It’ll ruffle his feathers and get his undies in a bunch.  It’s one of the things that I say that annoys him.  If ever we are watching TV with our legs stretched on the coffee table in front of us and I sigh and wiggle my freshly painted toes and start in with “I really do have nice feet . . .” he’ll roll his eyes and do his best to disavow me of my illusions by making snarky comments intended to erode my foot-confidence.  It’s like he’s trying to protect me from myself, to shelter me from the inevitable disappointment I will suffer when I enter the Ms. Minnesota Foot Pageant and don’t take home the crown, or toe ring or whatever the prize is.  He doesn’t want me to find an agent, or get my feet insured.  He says my feet aren’t all that. 

Well, he needn’t bother with the squelching, because I know I have nice feet.  They are big.  But they are pretty.  And as far as I’m concerned, their only flaw is that they’re flat, which explains why they are so big.  If I had a decent arch, I would be a size 9 instead of a size 10. Furthermore, my large dogs are very good for swimming and keeping me firmly planted on the earth on extremely windy days.  

My feet: big, pretty and useful, like a corn-fed farm girl from America’s heartland.  

And I don’t even get pedicures!!! My feet are natural beauties.  Imagine what we could accomplish if I let a professional buff and massage and primp and polish!  I think there could be serious income involved.  But I live with a man who is not supportive of my dreams (and also, I’m kinda cheap and would rather spend seventy bucks on a cute t-shirt than a pedicure), and so my feet are stuck in the small times, cooling their heels in this two-bit-good-for-nothing-but-dashed-dreams-town.

A few years back I read a great article in the New Yorker about a guy who was hellbent on making shoes out of natural materials that simulated walking barefoot.  He used grass and mud and animal skins.  I love crazy fuckers that get obsessed with stuff like this.  Anyway, I devoured the article with relish, because in addition to having nice feet, I  like to walk around barefoot (unless I’m in a wet and potentially hairy environment like a locker room).  The author described three foot types, which, if I remember correctly were as follows:  The Greek Foot is the kind where the second toe is longer than the big toe.  We all know people with this affliction, in fact, it even runs in my family.  My mother and, I believe, all of my siblings have the snaggle toe and it ain’t pretty.  My feet are nothing short of miraculous having emerged from that genetic stew of pedal malformations.  The second type is the Egyptian Foot where the first toe is long and the others taper down in an aesthetically pleasing way.  This would be me.  The third type of foot is the Peasant Foot which is a thick, blocky foot where all the toes go straight across.  Like Fred Flintstone.  Or peasants.  Not as ugly as the Greek Foot, but nothing you need to be seeing in your glossy fashion magazine.

Doctor Dash has Peasant Feet.  French Canadian Peasant Feet, to be specific.  To add injury to the insult of his charmless squared off toes, he has a propensity for maiming them by wearing ill fitting shoes for stop and start sports.  He’s on his third round of losing his big toenails, which is always a long, dramatic ordeal punctuated with lots of moaning and discussion, amateur self-performed podiatric care, and photographic documentation (seriously, we have lots of pictures of Dash’s nasty, oozing, about-to-fall-off toenails)

So, I think that what we have here is a simple case of jealousy.  My feet lead a charmed life.  It’s just so easy to be my feet and though my feet are humble, they do like to prance around naked, which can’t be easy for the broken and downtrodden French Canadian Peasants.  Maybe I need to be a little more magnanimous and cover up once in a while . . . wear some socks when we’re watching TV so the Peasants don’t get so ornery.  Charity begins at home, after all.

O.K., I know the toes pictured below look Egyptian, but it’s because Doctor Dash has shrewdly tilted his pinky toes away from the camera giving the illusion of his toes tapering down.  The shot of my foot at the top of the page is a candid from a few years ago . . . very au natural and unrehearsed.