A new day
I spent all of last night parked in front of CNN and twitter, biting my nails and refusing to believe that my candidate, Barack Obama, might actually win the presidency.
At 6 p.m. I started dishing out Election Cake to my family and hopping around like it was Christmas Eve.
At 8 p.m. I got wistful, wishing I was rooting for Hillary Clinton up there on the leaderboard.
Around 10 p.m., my sugar high came crashing down. I was weirdly numb, completely detached. The guy I voted for was ahead already. My candidates never win. I didn’t know what to do with this unfamiliar feeling of victory; I didn’t trust it one bit and resumed the nailbiting and constant info-checking.
About 11 p.m. I realized the game was over. The players were still playing, but really, Obama had swept it. He had swept it.
Suddenly, it seemed, CNN declared him the projected winner. I was speechless. I literally could not speak.
All I could think was, holy crap, the good guys won. The good guys won! The good guys NEVER win when I vote. Holy crap. What does this mean? How can this be possible? DOES NOT COMPUTE.
I stayed up longer to watch McCain’s surprisingly gracious concession speech, wishing I could box the ears of the bad-mannered hooligans who booed and hollered. I ventured a quick pee break while waiting for what seemed like eons for Obama to finally take the stage and make his remarks. And he did, with his wife and kids. And the look on his face when he picked up his daughter and kissed his wife — it was the first of many times last night and this morning that the tears started to roll. It was right then I knew I had made the right choice. No matter what else happened, whether or not he won, this here was Good People, and I picked the right man.
CNN showed the crowds, all over the world, leaping and cheering. Jesse Jackson struggling to hold himself together. People of every color, gender, socioeconomic class all clutching each other and screaming. Then realization dawned for me: Not only did my team win, but holy shit, America just elected itself a black man for president. Oh wow.
Somewhere along the way I had forgotten that it wasn’t just “my team” taking power, but a very real and very significant watershed in American History. My own parents grew up during race riots in New York, and here I am just 30 years later watching a black man accept the nation’s highest office. I still can’t believe it happened. How far we all have come. How important a night last night was for all Americans.
I can’t find a way to write how it feels to have watched that acceptance speech. To think about people of color in this country, to think about all the marginalized people in this country (and as a woman, I count myself in that category) — I feel like we all have a champion in the White House now. We don’t have to be ruled by Fear and Rich White Dudes any more. Obama really has given this country hope, and that’s the best gift we could get. Even if nothing changes over the next four years, we’ll still have that.
It’s nice to see you
One of the more fabulous aspects about moving to Pittsburgh is the amount of time I am getting to spend with people I like (with the sad exception of my husband, who has a lot of lesson-planning dues to pay at his new school, although we have painted side-by-side every weekend since we closed on the new house and I suppose that will have to suffice for the present).
Recently I had the opportunity to meet one of you Supafine readers at a coffeeshop in my new town, further cementing my fervent conviction that I have the coolest and smartest readership in all of Blogtown. Just this afternoon I got coffee with my BFF and old college roommate, a social event during which I laughed so hard and so long that I may have developed a brief fever. At this very instant I am surfing the web, reading Sarah Palin’s greeting cards and watching NUMB3RS in a cheesy Dorito fog of happiness at my parents’ house in Ohio, my children asleep upstairs. Tomorrow I am going to the Homecoming hoopla at my alma mater, BGSU, with my sister and another old college friend. We’ll be visiting the BG News alumni tent and bugging my other sister for a few hours (she’s a freshman living two doors down from the dorm room I lived in as an obnoxious post-adolescent).
All these little joyful meetups would be impossible to undertake if I still lived eight hours east of here. So I’m very glad we moved. I’m glad that my kids are finally able to keep my five siblings straight. I am glad that I’ve gotten to see my folks more in the last month than I had the whole year previous.
I do kind of look forward to getting my husband back, though.
Still fighting it
The last week has been emotionally wretched.
Last Thursday I attended the funeral for my cousin Jake, who was five years old when he was killed in a car crash in New York state. My brain still can’t wrap itself around the fact of it; I feel as though my head is an empty room with a one-way mirror, and behind that one-way mirror is something so terrifying and awful that I can’t look directly at it. It’s an awful reality no matter what, but the fact that he was my cousin, and that he was so close in age to my son, makes it monstrous.
Last week my family and I drove to Peekskill, N.Y., to be with my extended family, to represent the family at the wakes, and to stand with the rest of the town in grief and to pay our heartsick respects. The whole town seemed to rise up together for this, and I seemed to be related in one way or another to every person — and there were hundreds. It made me feel a part of that town, in a way, despite the fact that I never lived there.
It also made me feel separate: the fact that I never lived there. I am related to them, share an ancestry and genes with them, but don’t share a history. My mom and dad moved away to follow their fortunes before I was born. Now that part of the family and I share some history, but it’s history of the worst sort; it’s the worst thing to come together over. A morbid family reunion. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” we would say to each other at the wakes, forcing a laugh: aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, first cousins once removed …
And now the time for immediate grieving is over, and I am back at my mother- and father-in-law’s house in Pittsburgh, and I am still not feeling like I have come to grips with anything at all, except for one thing. Last Wednesday, I sat with “Aunt Tina,” my aunt Nancy’s sister, at Nancy’s house between wakes, eating New York Style pizza and sharing memories about Jake. She told me this: she unabashedly spoiled that boy every day of his life, and gave him whatever he wanted. Coca cola was an especial favorite of his — he called it Red Soda — and she never held out. “And do you think I regret that now?” she asked me. Her eyes were watering. I shook my head. “I don’t regret spoiling him for one minute,” she said. “Not for one minute.”
It’s a funny thing to take to heart, but I did. At my parents’ house for a visit, in memory of Jake, I allowed Owen to have Cocoa Puffs for lunch and a Spongebob Squarepants marathon all afternoon. Then he had Doritos for dessert and ran around the house in his pajams or even in the altogether, shooting imaginary pirates with a toy pistol, for hours on end. Normally I would require proper clothes, a healthy meal, and a minimum of imaginary ordnance fired, but if you could see how happy those little things made him! They are his Red Soda.
I don’t know if Jake died for a reason. It’s so nonsensical, so utterly unfathomable, that I think you kind of have to believe that he did. For my part, I have to thank him, and Aunt Tina, for a timely lesson: my kids aren’t pint-sized burdens, they’re bundles of joy. Wiry, slobbery little packages of happiness. And I’ll enjoy letting them gorge themselves on sugar and less-than-PC games if it means logging a few more of those toothy grins in my lifetime.
Warm lump of motherly love
Turns out there is no good way to photograph an injury on your rear end that you intend to post on the internet. There is no angle, no camera setting, that does not immediately say HEINIE!
So I’ll have to tell you, instead, with my powerful words of … telling stuff.
I can’t sleep right now, because I have a throbbing, heart-shaped bruise on my left hip. I’ve been thinking of it as my heart-shaped bruise of love, because it’s an injury I sustained while mucking around on the rocks in the creek at Double Rock Park. And I was mucking around on the rocks in the creek at Double Rock Park because that is what Owen loves dearly to do, and I dearly love him, so I do what I can to see that squinty, happy smile he does.
You may be able to tell, from my hockey-player’s toothless grin, that I am less graceful than most people. I have a strong tendency to meet the ground with body parts other than my feet. Between the moment I lose my balance and the moment I hit the earth, my body also forgets how to brace itself for impact. So I usually land pretty hard. Today I was following my little explorer up the banks of the creek when I stepped on a slime-covered rock and landed on my endside in three inches of orange-ish, germy, foamy water, watching my right Birkenstock sail downstream and hoping I caught it before it hit the pool with the dead worm in it (having already reconnoitered the area, I knew what horrors lay below). In that regard, at least, luck was in my corner. Sandal was retrieved in short order; with wet shorts, though, dignity was much harder to reclaim.
But later this evening, as I stared, fascinated, over my shoulder at my tangible proof of maternal sacrifice, I understood that river-smelly sandals and an alarmingly hot-to-the-touch butt bruise are a small price to pay for the mental photograph I captured today. My little brave son, standing with his chest thrust out on a smooth rock precipice 15 feet above me, dappled by leaf shade, shading his eyes against the glare and surveying his conquered territory. Seeing him as I knew he wanted to be seen — not as a preschooler in galoshes, but as a strong, clever swashbuckler, able to leap from rock to rock, outsmart his enemies and protect his loved ones from danger.
He loves the river, and I love him, therefore I love the river. Even when it bites me in the ass.
From last summer to this summer
Was talking with a few of my friends about the changes a year makes. As it’s been said: the days are long, but the years are short. Sometimes I can’t believe how much they grow.
Protected: 2007: Year In Review
Grateful and not dead!
Well, one of our fish is dead. I think it was Yellow. They’re an inch and a quarter long, so it’s hard to tell who’s who. Very sad.
But I am not dead. In fact, I’m going to venture forth and say that I am on the mend. Er, again. As I wrote to a friend, it’s amazing what proper nutrition, adequate hydration, and a shitload of antibiotics will do for a body.
So, I’m grateful for that, that I’m feeling so much better. And I am on-my-knees grateful that it was me who was knocked sideways by this and not my boys. They are still (touch wood) healthy as horses.
I’m also grateful that, although I was too sick for us to travel to the in-laws’ for the holiday, the holiday was delivered to us, in the form of a full Thanksgiving dinner. Iain has some very thoughtful and very generous friends, and that’s all I can say without crying.
Anyway.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Weekend report: Please Send Vodka
We’re back!
Yes, I drove like 400 miles to hang out with people I met on the internet. And I am so glad I did.
I’m not sure what to write here — the people who were there already know just how amazing it was that so many of us were there, live and “in 3D,” as one of us put it. They know that I love them even more than I did before, that I want to scoop them up and keep them in my pocket, that rarely do I feel as welcomed and accepted as I did this weekend. I have already apologized to them for bursting into tears when I arrived and for asking them to hold my baby while I used the bathroom and for any one of surely hundreds of little faux pas I must have made. And they forgave me! And held my baby anyway!
I mean, I just. Wow. They are so. Just. Wow.
I wish I had gotten more and better pictures. I wish the ones who couldn’t be there could have been there. I wish I had remembered my sling. Or my backup sling, or my backup-backup sling. I wish I had had time to have quality face time with every single person, including the husbands, who were pretty cool. I wish my own husband could have come and met everybody and held my hand. I wish I could have held all the beautiful, fat little babies and petted more wispy toddler heads, but they were having too much fun bouncing and eating chocolate and holding hands.
I wish I had a picture that showed just how freakishly comfortable it was to be there. Or a group shot. This is the best I can do for either.
I can’t thank Nicole enough for making this happen: PSV in the first place and this weekend in particular. Well, Nicole, and Al Gore, who invented the internet. I’da given him a hug, too, if we had thought to invite him.
edited to add toyfoto’s account of the party.
‘pix or it didn’t happen’
Kids these days. (To appease Katie)
da brudders
In their matching Supa Man shirts! God. So cute. I’m sorry.
People ask me all the time how Owen likes his new little brother. They ask him all the time, too, actually. And the answer is, he likes him just fine. Was pissed at me for about two and a half months, but likes his brother just fine. Gets all up in his face with kisses, keeps his chin free of drool, pushes him in his baby swing and informs me of his slightest peep.
In fact, “Mac’s wakin’ up!” is one of the top five most-heard phrases out of Owen’s mouth, right next to “I’ma roar you!” and “Please can I have some Nemo fruit snacks.”
I’m glad he likes his little brudder. And I keep watching Cormac intently to see how he reacts to this little person who takes care of him, as opposed to us, the two big lumbering people who trade him off like tag team wrestlers. He watches Owen as intently as I watch him. I’m waiting for that bond to form, the one I know is inevitable, when instead of all for one and one for all it becomes Us against Them, the brothers against their clueless parents. Call me crazy (and you should) but I’m looking forward to it, just a tiny bit.
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