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My eyes fluttered open at the thunder. It wasn’t a loud, startling clap. I always manage to sleep through those, oddly enough. This thunder was gentle, unimposing…like the sky was politely clearing its throat. The rain splattered onto the ground in those big, summertime drops and for a few seconds I took in the scent of the street cooling off.

But at the next cough of thunder, my heart suddenly sped up. The desk. The desk was on the porch.

My husband and our neighbor had hauled it out there a few days earlier. I had meant to cover it up with a tarp but kept forgetting. Now I thought of it sitting there, alone, rejected, its beautiful wood probably getting damaged by an otherwise lovely storm.

The desk came into my possession five years ago. We had just gotten married and were still setting up our house. The desk was going to go into my office-to-be on the second floor. There I would write and pay bills and do most of the managing of my life and our home. It settled into its temporary home in the dining room, because the second floor office was not yet perfect. Its perfection would only be attained once we had graduated, started making more money, and fixing up our house exactly how we planned.

But over the five years that it sat in the dining room, I realized a number of things. We weren’t going to be making the money that we thought we were. The office wasn’t going to look exactly how I’d planned. The desk, with its extreme, antique heft, was not going to make its way upstairs. I needed to adjust my expectations. I needed revise what I viewed as success.

I needed to find a more sensible desk.

The desk needed a new home, but I wasn’t going to give it to just anyone. I wanted it to go to someone who recognized its potential perfection, that the scratches and water ring marks and the drawer that stuck didn’t take away from it was: a beautiful home for hopes and ideas that would fit perfectly into someone else’s life. Just not mine.

The desk was, after all, an artifact from a life that never came to fruition, but that was replaced with this other life that I hadn’t planned for, that would probably always frustrate me with its reluctance to let me manipulate it into a shape in my silly desire to please people who don’t even have to live it. But this life will never fail to awe me when I let it, even if I draft its blueprints, blindfolded, at a smaller desk.

The desk would be fine. Whatever the rain did to it could be fixed. In the morning I would put a tarp on it like I had promised to and would see to finding it a new home. I shuffled onto my side and fell back to sleep.

One of the churches in our neighborhood (I’m not exactly sure where it is because, surprise, I don’t seek these things out) is having a festival this weekend. I’ve seen signs posted all over for it and whenever I read the name of the festival, Resurrection Fun Flair, I can feel my tongue locking up because my brain wants it to be “Fun Fair” and that extra L just totally messes with me. So my brain goes through several iterations of “Resurrlection Fun Fair,” “Resurrection Flun Fair,” “Lesurrection Fun Fair,” trying to figure out where exactly that L goes until I finally read, “Resurrection Fun Flair.” Then I have to take a nap from the exertion.

The signs are mostly very basic that someone with an old version of Microsoft Publisher or something did. Then there’s this one rogue sign on a barrier rail on Brookline Boulevard that is made up of a huge banner with the church’s name and a very plain sign next to it with the name and dates of the festival. Its size and starkness always strikes me when we go past it because it’s like:

RESURRECTION FUN FLAIR JULY 6, 7, 8, 9

So while half of my brain is doing its usual, “Resurrl–…Lesurr–…Flun–…” tap dance, the other half starts giggling about the word “resurrection” being so prominently placed next to the word “fun,” and suddenly this image is all I can think about:

Party up in hurr!

Clearly, no thought is safe in my head.

Speaking of my head, I wrote a little bit about my bummedness over on MamaDojo this week, which was partially prompted by facing my student loans and being completely terrified by what I saw. I spent some time being upset about it for all of the usual reasons: debt, paying for something I kinda sorta regret a little, handing over money that I would rather set aside for my baby, various other dreams that might not come true because of this money, etc. Pure melancholia. But in this period of, “Less mope, more action,” that I’m in, I put fingers to keyboard, got it out, invited others to share their current woes, then got to work. I researched my options without panicking and quitting and sticking my head back in the sand and I think I actually found a feasible solution, a way through this financial muck that won’t choke me. I’m only kind of irritated with myself for not doing this sooner and instead allowing myself nearly two years of anguish because that somehow seemed like the most appropriate way to deal with it. I can’t get mad at myself for being ignorant in the past.

Alright, enough of this Stuart Smalley business. The weekend is upon us.

I posted on MamaDojo the other day that I’ve been putting some effort into my appearance. For me, 32 has been a particularly shifty year when it comes to my self-image. I’ve never been so at peace with my body, but I’ve also never been so proactive in changing it. Well, changing probably isn’t the best way to put it. I think I’m finally at a point where I’m recognizing how good this bag of bones has been to me and I want to treat it right. I eat well, making almost all of my meals with a focus on what my body needs, what will make it feel good. I exercise, but not so much that I risk hurting myself. I regard the tiny lines that are quietly etching their way around my eyes with a sense of, “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

Pretty much the opposite of what I was doing 15 years ago when my body was, outwardly, Holy Shit Amazing to most standards.

This is not to say that I’m “cured” of all of that nonsense. I still fret about the size of my belly and how weird it is that the meat on the side of my left knee is so much bigger than that of my right. Stuff like that.

But I’m noticing that I want to be more…visible? Like I mentioned in my MamaDojo post, Joan from Mad Men rocks my world. She’s got boobs. She’s got hips. She’s got an ass. And we know all of this, but more importantly, we know that she knows it. I’ve been trying to adopt some of that attitude while remaining true to the fact that I like being comfortable and somewhat conservative.

So, today, I was a little apprehensive about my outfit, especially when the husband sized me up and said, “What…what’s with this outfit?” I then peppered him with questions, paranoid that I was, to use a somewhat offensive and not at all feminist word*, skanky. Of course, this recalled another hilarious exchange between the two of us when I had some anxiety over a pair of shorts that were shorter than I usually buy.

“Are they skanky?” I fretted.

“I think you and I have very different definitions of skanky,” he replied. “You look like you’re about to go golfing.”

“But not, like, skanky golfing?” I confirmed, because you know how skanky golfing is totally a thing.

I just want to make sure that I’m not overdoing it and that I’m projecting a relatively youthful vibe without looking like I’m denial over the fact that I’m 32.

So, here’s me in the bathroom at work this morning while our network was down. (What else was I supposed to do? Write things down on paper? Pssh.) I’ll provide the inner monologue.

Conservative shot…terrified someone will walk in.

Try to emulate one of those ladies who document their outfits everyday…ow, I think I pulled something.

Getting really daring now. Attempting to look up without falling over. Oh, why does my posture look weird? Can you tell that I have a wad of paper towels in my left hand?

I need to stop messing around. Jaunty, flirty pose. Vogue.

Not pictured is a bracelet I was wearing this morning…until I remembered that I really don’t like wearing bracelets.

It’s shorter than I would normally go for and the addition of a belt was, to me, completely impulsive and weird. And I would have worn a necklace but I was so thrown off by the belt and the bracelet that I was worried my head would explode. But how do you think I’m doing?

* I’m usually really conscious of my language but sometimes I just have to go there.

The husband called me one afternoon last week and told me that he and the baby were stuck in a good deal of traffic coming home from the Pirates game and would I mind taking the bus home? That was fine with me. I left work a few minutes early to beat some of the rush and on my way to the bus stop, I could see a cluster of inbound buses idling at the stop light. I knew that I was way too far away to catch them before they pulled up to the nearby stop and decided to just take my time and catch one of the next bunch.

Then this…nonsense ran through my brain.

As dumb as they are, I kind of wish I had a Segway right now so I could just make one of those buses…

But Segways are for douchebags.

I should jog more so that I can build up my speed so that I could just run to the bus stop…

But then I would have to wear my big ol’ sports bra all the time just in case I have to take off and my sports bra gives me UniHooter.

What would be really awesome is if I could fly. Then I could fly to the bus stop…

But wait…if I could fly, why would I be taking the bus? Wouldn’t I just fly home? Why is my imagination making me a pigeon?

Around this time I realized that I need to quit being so absurd.

Last night, I was talking in my sleep so loud that I woke myself up. I took a few seconds to wonder who I was talking to and about what before I realized that the answer to my questions was “No one real,” and “Probably bacon.”

I took the day off of work on Friday because I had a dentist appointment at a weird time. I was also, apparently, very exhausted as I slept on Thursday night through Friday morning for something like 12 hours. That evening, we headed out to Oakmont for the annual Greek food festival, which was unfortunately rained on but not before we had some delicious chicken, lamb shank, and loukoumades.

Saturday I was not feeling well, physically or emotionally. My mom came over and was trying to do stuff around my house while the husband was going to his grandmother’s to pick up his grandfather’s old hi-fi and there was too much stuff going on for me to handle. I burst into tears quite irrationally, but to my credit I haven’t done that in WEEKS. The baby felt really bad for me, though, and gave me a bunch of hugs, then took me by the hand and led me to the couch. “Lie down, Mum. Take a nap. You’ll feel better,” he said, and put a blanket over me. He then brought me some books, his DS, and a cup of water and patted me on the shoulder. It was the sweetest thing ever.

Of course, this morning, I was trying for 15 minutes to get him out of bed amidst his whining and groaning. While brushing my teeth, I yelled, “Are you out of bed yet?” He replied, “Yes! Gawd!” And technically he was. He had climbed out of bed…and then curled up on the floor and was falling asleep again.

We all have nightmares. None of us is unique in that respect. And I think we’ve all had a few that have always haunted us. I have at least a handful of nightmares that have so thoroughly terrified me that I’ve never forgotten them. Like the nanny legs from the Muppet Babies trying to kill me, which sounds silly but, seriously, if I brought this to life in a horror movie you would lose your shit.

But maybe less so if they were played by these guys.

There was also the series of apocalyptic nightmares that I had in the months following 9/11 and leading up to the baby’s birth, obviously spurred by that harsh realization of the kind of world that I was bringing a child into.

There was the weird, crucifixion-type dream that I had when I was pretty young, in which I was executed along with two other people for the vague crime of being bad. I woke up screaming, desperate for forgiveness.

And there was, of course, that weird alien one from a few years ago.

But I think the scariest nightmares are the ones that don’t scare us at all.

I had one last night in which I was abusing the baby consistently over a long period of time. Hitting, screaming, abandoning. It was terrible. Thinking about it today I’m thankful to be fuzzy on the details since what I do remember makes me feel sick.

I haven’t talked about it much here, but I’m coming out of a pretty dark period in life from, I think, a lot of insecurity about mistakes that I think I’ve made. I’m doing so, so much better now. Like 180 degrees better, but I know that turning over the rough stuff about what the baby must have thought of me when things were getting bad has been on the back burner.

I don’t beat myself up for having days when I’m just not being the mom that I wish I could be. It’s not always up to me. Sometimes the baby is in a cranky mood and I’m exhausted and we end up bickering. But what I did in my nightmare was make sure that he knew that I did not love him, which has never been the case no matter how inescapable my darkness may have seemed at times. I think it didn’t scare me because no matter how improbable those other nightmares have been, this one was the one that was utterly impossible.

Much to his increasing embarrassment, I will often grab him and smother him with kisses and hugs and “I love you”s. Something inside makes me do this, I think because I fear that he’ll have dark days like the ones I’ve had. If one of my jobs as a parent is to teach him survival skills, then I’m going to always be braiding a lifeline for him that he’ll be able to find even in the murkiest of waters.

Not long after I published my post on Friday noting that I hadn’t uploaded last day of school pictures, I realized that I totally had and just forgot all about it. Dur. So, here is the (not so much) baby on his last day of third grade.

That crumpling sound you hear is my heart. Please ignore.

But anyway, I’m coming off of one of the best weekends I’ve ever had and I have the messy kitchen and piles of dirty laundry to prove it. Friday night I accompanied the husband to Eclipse where he was playing records. That place is decent, though I was a little put off by the Ikea-heavy decor and the odd 1998 look of the place. However, the original glass block bar is so cool-looking. I gawked at it for a good 20 minutes. We took off kind of early because we had a big day on Saturday.

I got myself and the baby up kind of early and my mom took us into Shadyside where I was getting a long-overdue haircut and pedicure. My mom dropped me off at home and she and the baby went to Legofest at the convention center and I made one more stop to the nail shop to get my fingers looking nice. It was, as Truvy from Steel Magnolias would say, “a full day’s beauty.” Then the husband and I got dressed and headed into town.

Aren't we swell?

We ate at Seviche, which we’d been dying to return to since we ate there last year, and had one of the best meals ever. Here’s our obscene list of tasty things:

Strawberry Mimosa Champagne Mojito
Cuban Pomegranate Martini
Trio of Chips and Salsa
Traditional, Curried Tropical Fruit, and Fire & Ice Seviches with Ahi Tuna, Scottish Salmon, and Hamachi
Mojo Criollo Nigiri
Bistec Bocadillos with Filet Mignon
Chorizo Wrapped Diver Scallops

I also made the executive decision to order a really expensive bottle of Malbec and noted to the waiter that we splurged because of the special occasion. As a surprise at the end of the meal, he brought us a piece of Tres Leches cake with fresh strawberries and two glasses of Champagne.

After dinner, we walked over to the Consol Energy Center for the Sade concert. It was a happy coincidence that it came around the time of our anniversary, because it was the no-brainer special event. And the concert was so, so amazing. Sade the singer and Sade the band are all so beautiful and talented and smooth and wonderful and sexy. Sade didn’t speak much, but when she did her soft British accent made things like, “Pittsburgh, you’ve built a lot of bridges and they all lead directly to my heart,” and “He charms the birds out of the sky because they want to bask in his light,” sound beautiful and poetic instead of kinda cheesy. The stage was gently lit and adorned with sheer white curtains that would dramatically fly away or drop into the recesses of the floor.

The music, of course, was beautiful. The highlight for me was “By Your Side.” I’ve always liked that song just fine, but never really regarded it as one of their greatest. But for that song the stage was lit in this warm, sunset color and at the end confetti was shot out over the audience. The husband and I were literally by each other’s sides and I knew that we would remain that way for many more years to come.

Edited to add: Can’t believe I forgot to mention Father’s Day, which we spent at my mom’s house with my dad, grandparents, aunt, and uncle. After a slight panic early in the afternoon, we had a rad cookout and then went to see Super 8 at the drive-in. Yeah. This weekend ruled.

Pretend that I have here a picture of the baby’s last day of school on Wednesday and a comparison shot of his first day of school and, perhaps to torture myself, some half-assed collage of his first and last days of school. I meant to upload those pictures last night but I started playing some stupid game on my computer and it didn’t happen.

But yes, I’m officially the owner of a fourth-grader now, which just seems way too surreal. I only kind of remember third grade. I think the main reason that I remember anything from it at all is because that was the year that I got chicken pox and you don’t really forget that kind of misery (two words: sitz bath) (four more words: pox. inside. my. eyelids.). But I definitely remember the fourth grade so it’s weird to me that all of this is really going to stick in his brain now. Or maybe it won’t since he got that chicken pox vaccine and he won’t have that experience to anchor him.

Little League also ended for us last night in a playoffs defeat. The baby’s team had a really rough season, I think winning only two (maybe three?) games. They had a ton of rain-outs and as a result never really gelled as a team. Oh well. I can’t say that I’m not kind of glad to have our evenings returning to some semblance of a routine and to not get dinner from the concession stand multiple times a week.

I’m not sure what exactly is up with me, but I’ve gone to bed insanely early the last couple nights. I’ve put in at least 9 hours each night and am still forcing myself out of bed, albeit with much less misery on the far too many days that my total sleepage is pathetically low.

As schmoopy and gag-worthy as it sounds, I have a hard time sleeping without the husband and I think his nearly week-long absence caught up with me.

In other schmoopy and gag-worthy news, today is our fifth wedding anniversary.

All together now: "Awwwwww!"

When we mentioned it to the baby this morning, he said something along the lines of “Time flies,” and it really does.

I was looking through my “Wedding” folder that I have on my work computer (yes, I did some wedding planning at work, couldn’t be helped) for something and came across the track list for the mix CD that we handed out as favors. Among the songs that we chose was “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads, which seems kind of odd since it’s a somewhat cynical look at life and marriage and adulthood. But listening to it today I thought about how there have been plenty of times already when I wondered who I was and what I was doing, certain that I had screwed up terribly. There have been plenty of times when I have, in fact, said to myself, “My god, what have I done?” But when I take a good long look at the husband and the baby, I know exactly what I’ve done and I know exactly how good it is.

The husband returned from Chicago yesterday and was able to resume his Driving Me to Work duties this morning. Of course, I got to experience one more morning commute to work aboard Port Authority Transit. On a Monday, no less.

Pittsburgh doesn’t have the worst public transit in the world, but it is beleaguered by a perfect storm of inadequate funding and the city’s troublesome topography. It’s also just not the simplest system. You kind of just have to KNOW how it all works. And with frequent service and route changes, I’ve had multiple experiences in my close to 20 years of PAT history of shuffling up to the driver and saying, “Uh, I think I screwed up. This is not where I was trying to go.” (But, then again, I’m kind of an idiot.) This has made me less than confident in my ability to get anywhere and last summer when I was in New York, I had a great deal of anxiety about navigating the subways by myself. Of course, as I soon found out, NYC’s transit is amazing and idiot-proof. After all, it’s a huge city with all manner of people in it. And really, this guy, whose mind is obviously preoccupied with other things, gets around just fine so I should really quit getting my ovaries in a bunch about it.

Anyway, yesterday the bus was a little late, but I had told my boss that I was going to be arriving around 9:30 on the days that the husband was out of town because that’s just how it is when I have to get the baby off to school first. We meandered out of Brookline and I turned my attention to my phone as we headed into downtown. I looked up a few minutes later because I noticed that the bus had been idling awhile and realized that we were in Allentown.

I immediately became concerned because while Allentown is far from the worst place on earth, for me I’m always wondering, “Why are we in Allentown?” if we hadn’t intended to go to Allentown. I glanced at my fellow passengers to gauge how I should be feeling, because I sincerely thought that maybe I had passed out or something and managed to get on the wrong bus. This seemed reasonable because I had two sleepwalking episodes (and one sleeptalking episode in which I requested some chicken) when I was a kid and now I’m just waiting to become one of those people who is like, “Oops, stepped off a building.” Everyone else had that Allentown face, too, though which brought me some relief until I realized, “Holy shit, no one knows why we’re in Allentown!”

The bus driver sped past people at two stops who were trying to flag him down and at that point I concluded, “Well, this is it. He’s driving us to the woods somewhere and is going to make us dig our own graves behind the murder shed.” But then I remembered that I hold the internet in my hands and was able to ascertain that there had been some massive power failure in the Mt. Washington tunnel. This was but a detour, which made a little more sense than my murder shed theory.

We finally pulled into town a little after 9 and a 61B quickly arrived, thus beginning the second part of my journey. I anticipated a quiet ride to work.

No.

The 61B was filled with one of each of the characters that God created specifically to ride the bus and make your commute that much more interesting. It was like the Noah’s Ark of mass transit. Loud Talker was there, as was Smelly Guy. The lady who refuses to sit on the seats or touch any of the handles was there, stumbling about and bumping into people. I mean, I get where she’s coming from. I, too, have seen those Dateline specials that have titles like, “Fecal Matter Everywhere” and “Feces Pieces” and “How Much Feces Are You Inadvertently Eating Right Now?” But I figure at some point someone told me to, “Eat shit and die,” and I’m just kind of going along with that. But if you’re going to go the germaphobe route, own that shit (no pun intended). Get on the bus in your hazmat suit and gloves. Don’t put all of your faith in your ability to defy physics. It’s annoying.

I realize I’m being very snotty, but that’s what such an eventful bus ride will do to a person. It changes you, strips you of your compassion. This seems to be a universal experience:

One more thing before the weekend…

Reading this post on Gin and Tacos led me to this video on AT&T’s archives.My grandparents still have their rotary phone, which I regarded with disdain when I was young. If I was spending the night there as a kid, I had to think long and hard about how badly I wanted to call my parents, because our phone number had 8s and 7s and even A ZERO AND DEAR GOD LIFE IS TOO SHORT. Now, it’s kind of cool to use it. The whirring zip of the dial gives me the tiniest thrill and the action of moving it around with my finger makes me feel like I possess some mysterious old skill.

The husband and I were watching Adaptation the other night, which we love and I was struck by this scene in which Meryl Streep’s character, deep in an experiment with mind-expanding orchid powder and finally fascinated by something, has a winding phone conversation with her article subject and soon-to-be lover.

I remarked to the husband, somewhat sadly, “People soon won’t remember what dial tones sound like. Cell phones don’t have them.” I never noticed it before, but it really is quite a beautiful sound.

The other day, I noticed a few ants in the kitchen. I wasn’t concerned and disposed of them pretty quickly. The next day I was slightly alarmed to see two more surveying my cat’s food bowl. Disposed of those as well, and cleaned the bowl.

And then.

Yesterday morning, I came downstairs and was horrified to see that my cat’s food was now moving and wriggling. The call had gone out and the buffet had begun. A steady stream of visitors were marching through my kitchen and my entryway looked like Grand Central Station for Disgusting Insects.

Of course, this discovery came right when the baby and I had to rush to get to his bus stop and mine, so I did the only rational thing I could think of and grabbed a hand vac. I sucked up a good hundred ants or so and dumped them outside, then ran back in to throw some kind of lunch together for my kid and put some kind of clothing on me.

When we came back downstairs to get our shoes on and leave, I was extremely upset to find that the ants’ cronies had replaced their predecessors with a vengeance. For reasons I won’t get into now, I had a box of unopened potato chips in my entryway and worried that they had somehow attracted the ants. With three minutes to finish getting ready and out the door, I grabbed the box and tossed it onto the basement steps. My cat, constantly curious about the existence of Basement Cat, zoomed past me. Once he gets down there, he doesn’t emerge for hours. Flustered, I yelled after him, “Well, I guess you’re staying down there all day, then!” and closed and locked the door, not realizing until later that I could have left the door open, since I lock the door to keep the cat OUT.

I was upset all day, feeling shame and disgust with myself that I had ants, and worried about leaving my cat to his own devices all day without food or water. Maybe he’ll make himself useful and kill a mouse or something, I thought.

I burst in the door that evening on the way to the baby’s Little League game, certain that my entire house would now be made of ants and that my cat would have managed to kill himself in the basement. I thought of the husband, returning home from his Chicago trip on Monday to an ant-house and a dead cat and a frizzy-haired wife shrugging and saying, “I dunno. It just went all wrong,” and how he would realize that I can’t be left to my own devices.

I turned to the MamaPop distro for advice and heard about cinnamon sticks and talcum powder and traps. I pictured my entryway and kitchen looking like something out of The Blair Witch Project with a cinnamon stick man seated on a boric acid trap surrounded by a circle of powder while I stood nearby chanting. I opted to go with the basic ant traps and warned my cat to not manage to kill himself on those, either.

This morning, the situation was still…a situation, but seemed to have improve somewhat. I went about packing the baby’s lunch and wanted to slice a peach for him. That’s when I remembered my lack of ability when it comes to stone fruits. I slit all around one peach and tried to pull it apart, but I was too forceful and it became mush. I grabbed another that felt firmer but the same thing happened. With time running out before we had to leave, and my neurotic need to never waste food, I stood over the sink and ate both mangled peaches. “Get your shoesh on, dude! Come on!” I shouted, mouth full of peach and spitting juice everywhere.

Husband, don’t worry. Everything’s under control.