The magic of crashing stars and chutes and ladders

Forgive me for sounding naive but I always forget how fucking exhausting kids are. Gabe and I spent the weekend with his family and especially his little niece and nephew, girl age 3 (almost 4), and boy 1 and a half. I’m an only child, only grandchild mostly and I always try to mentally (and physically) prepare myself for being around little ones but it’s like I’ve come to assume that I get what it’ll be like being with kids for more than a few hours. Overnight. Days. Every single time, I think I know what I’m getting myself into because I so love watching my favorite writers and bloggers with their little ones (here are some of my favorite mom and dad bloggers-look for your name, hey!) and I think I’ve garnered enough info and facts to successfully rein in and understand these little ones I adore.

Hahahahahahahaahahahahaha. I never have a clue.

THEY’RE SO SMART. I’m not shocked by this but I AM. I’m not going to lie to you, I think some kids are sort of obnoxious but the good ones, man, they’re the best. These two, they are such characters at such young ages. I last saw them at Easter and they’ve grown inches in such a short time! The little boy was soft and still in that baby stage then and now he’s taller, running all over, getting into everything, and losing that baby stance of back arc-tummy out. Even his face looks more like a little boy, not as round. His mom pointed out with a sad face that he only had one roll in his thighs now. He kissed me goodnight and would look at me for long stretches of time before bringing me his toys shyly; he’d then try to get into cabinets and test his voice and all his big boyness.

The other one had grown taller, all jumping, prancing little girl, and she is so, so lovely. The best thing about her though is her mind. A few weeks away from being 4 years old, she is so smart and so verbal and sassy. Not bratty but already a fully-formed little human. She wore me out physically, attempting to play badminton and “valleyball” and hide and seek, but mentally as well, trying to read me storybooks and making up elaborate games for her dolls. We spent a lot of time in the above playroom which also has her brother’s toys but is still a very HER zone as he moves out of his baby years.

I sat crisscross applesauce on the floor with her and looked at the drawings and coloring book pages torn out and baby dolls and princess dolls and Dora dolls and I wondered if I had been like this as a little girl. My mother assured me a few days later that I absolutely was as energetic but I can’t remember a time when my mind seemed to brimming with so much joy and energy and possibility and creation. I still burst at the seams with these sensations but it seems muted and slowed down by the mundane details of every day life. There are glimpses of the old exhilaration at times, when your hand brushes the small of my back, when I’m riding a bicycle downhill, when I hear a song I know all the words to, when I think of the perfect turn of phrase for a story, when you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cut it in half diagonally how I like it just because. Both of these little ones reminded me of how much I have and how little living I sometimes do because of my own fears and insecurities. There is such pleasure in doing the things that make you happy, the way children do, and I wonder why we don’t do this more when we grow up.

We came home tired after just a weekend. I lied on the bed and wondered how moms and dads do what they do, 24 hours a day. I don’t say this for sympathy but I really wonder if I could do what you do, without a break. I wonder if I have knowledge to impart, if I’d be a mom a little boy or girl could look up to, if I’d be able to keep an eye on the dangers seen and unseen. In a day and age where speed and efficiency is so highly valued, I am in awe of parents who not only watch their babies grow up in what is seemingly hyperspeed but who also have to be so patient with those little ones simultaneously. I don’t know if I’d be a good mom at all. I do know that I love the smell of baby feet and the tiny arms of little kids wrapped around my waist but I wonder if that’s enough. I’m selfish and set in my ways. I wonder if there’s enough love for all of us.

I see you with these little ones, holding them, making them laugh, and I know that anything is possible in time. Perhaps.

Ghost City

I’m beginning to think that blogging, and writing to some extent, involves muscles that get underused when you take any kind of break from it. Living causes layers of fat to grow over and you become comfortable in the other things you’re doing but when the itch returns, it takes a little bit longer to get going than you’d expect and like. This combined with the heat, even from eleven stories up, makes my mind still. I read books while standing directly in front of the AC. My feet move in the positions I know from ballet: first through fifth, tendu devant. I wear sundresses without undergarments or I wear nothing at all. I wilt by midmorning.

Something falls in the bathroom on Sunday afternoon and we both run to see. I am on your heels to see my shaving gel rolling in the bathtub. We stare out the bathroom window as the wind whips the rain against our faces. It’s shockingly cold. I step on the edge of the tub to pull the window closed and we go back to reading in bed. There’s a noise in the living room but I know every single window is closed in there. I can only imagine my face.

“It’s a ghost,” you say. You grin.

“Shut up.” It’s not funny nor is it ever funny.

The first house I ever lived in, where my parents brought me to from the hospital, was mostly brown. It was a ranch style house and it sat on the corner of a quiet street. There was a long, wide driveway paved with black asphalt and a two car garage which we always used instead of the front door. It had four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a big kitchen, and a vast backyard with orange and lime trees. My mom planted roses that bloomed pink and cream, and we barbecued on weekends. It was a perfect house for a family of three and we were very happy there for a while.

I first slept in a Moses basket by my parents’ bed and then in a crib in my nursery. When it came time for my first big girl bed, the nursery became a playroom and the spare bedroom became a brand new room for me. I slept in the canopy bed with Little Mermaid sheets but I still spent afternoons playing in the nursery, where my toys slept. I solved puzzles, had tea parties with Mr. Potato Head, and listened to Sesame Street books on a tape recorder on my own a lot but when you’re little, you don’t notice the solitude as much; when you’re an only child, you notice even less.

My parents played with me as well but it is more important to this story when they didn’t. On her own, a little girl of five doesn’t find it odd when the closet doors in her nursery open and close by themselves or that toys would fall right off shelves without being pushed or being on the edge. It’s not until this is mentioned to someone who knows better that this is seen as strange at all.

“There’s a dark thing in the corner when I go to sleep, Mommy.”

“Dark thing?” She looked in the rearview mirror at me in my carseat. “I’m sure it’s just a shadow, sweetheart.”

I knew shadows from dancing with them on the sidewalk; this was no shadow.

The doors continued to open and close on their own and I tried to ignore them. I kept my eyes on Barbie’s Corvette as I felt them open. They would close a few minutes later as Barbie drove down the carpeted road. If I ever tried to look up quickly, they would slam suddenly. I learned this when I sat directly in front of them one day and looked up. They closed quickly and on my fingers. I screamed in pain and my mom came running. She couldn’t understand what I was trying to tell her through my tears. I slept in between my parents that night.

I dragged my mom back to the nursery the next day. She indulged my needy behavior and helped me assemble the train set my aunt had sent me. I grabbed her by the leg when she tried to leave. She looked at me curiously while she played with me.

“You’re so quiet today,” she said, unused to an almost silent five-year-old.

“We have to listen,” I said. My eyes were only half-raised.

She looked at me strangely but for some reason didn’t ask. She smiled that mom smile that’s supposed to radiate steadiness; her eyes crinkled a bit. We linked the train cars as I heard the hinges creak as they usually did. I grabbed her hand.

“Don’t look all the way up,” I whispered, as if varnished wood and hinges could hear me.

They opened on cue and I squeezed my mom’s hand. I heard her inhale sharply. I’m not sure if she followed my directions or she just couldn’t move. The doors closed calmly a few moments later. She was crying.

“How did you,” she sobbed. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t, Mommy. It does it every day.” I let go of her hand and realized I was shaking on my own.

“I need to call your father.” Her breath was jagged.

She stood and picked me up as she walked out of the room. At five, you don’t get carried as often so I was secretly pleased about this. She went into her bedroom and shut the door. Picking up the cordless phone, she took me into the bathroom with her. She dialed my dad’s office as she looked through a drawer. I could hear the dialtone as she took a deep breath from her inhaler. He picked up and she told him what happened while trying to breathe. She paced back and forth in front of me as she spoke.

“No, you don’t understand, no one was touching them. I have no fuc-no clue.” She looked at me apologetically for the slip.

She gasped for air with her inhaler as my dad’s voice calmly tried to rationalize what had happened to her. He somehow convinced her that everything was fine and they soon hung up. She put the phone back on the charger and walked me into the backyard. She sat on one of the swings of my jungle gym. I sat on the swing next to hers but didn’t get very high at swinging by myself. I knew better than to ask her to push me right then. She stared at the house while the bar above us creaked with the swinging. Mosquitoes bit our ankles but we stayed outside until my dad got home. That night, we all slept in the same bed again.

My parents moved all of my toys into my bedroom the next morning. I was not to go into the nursery anymore for any reason. The door remained permanently closed, opening only for the cleaning lady who vacuumed it weekly while I was at school. My parents regularly popped their heads when I played by myself or did the homework that came with first grade a year later. Things improved somewhat and none of us mentioned what had happened. We avoided the topic as we did the room, ignoring the times when we did hear the click of the closing doors.

On a Wednesday, my mom picked me up from school. It was one of the days I didn’t have ballet class and so we went directly home. The garage door opener didn’t work no matter how many times my mom pushed the button. She frowned and we walked up the stone path past the pink and cream roses to the front door. My mom searched for the house key on her key ring as I played with the straps of my backpack. She turned the key and unlocked it, the door falling slightly open. I stared at our neighbor walking his dog while she picked up her briefcase and turned. Her breath caught and I turned towards the door as she screamed.

One perfectly straight row of Mexican tiles had uncemented itself from the floor. Each tile, installed before I was born six years before, stood on its side and led directly towards the end of the house where my bedroom and nursery were. My stomach turned as I stared.

My mom was still screaming a full minute later. She picked me up and ran to the car. She left the front door wide open. We reversed out of the driveway and somehow made it to my grandma’s house. My mom was wild-eyed by the time my grandma opened her front door. I was scooped away to the kitchen by my grandpa while my grandma tried to get my mom to say anything more than the word tile. She took charge and called my dad and my uncle, both of whom arrived within the hour. My uncle, the physician, sedated my hysterical mother while my dad held her hand.

“I am never going back to that house,” she moaned to my dad drowsily as the sedative took effect.

And she never did, and I never did. My dad and grandpa were commercial contractors and they, along with several architects, could find nothing wrong with the foundation of the house to cause the tile to react in such a way. A crew of eight men had to jackhammer the tile out in order to put new wood floors in; however, the varnish never quite set.

My dad is not one to believe in anything besides what he can see and touch in front of him. He was baffled. I imagine he hired paranormal investigators mostly for my mom but a bit for his own curiosity. His tax writeoffs for 1992 include “ghostbusters” as he called them. I never saw the people who entered our house with gadgets and touched our not yet dusty belongings to get a feel for the place. They stayed overnight with my dad and concluded that we had a poltergeist. He laughed as he wrote them a check but stiffened at their final piece of advice.

“Do not bring your little girl back into this house.” He silently watched them drive off.

We all stayed with my grandparents for six months. My parents put our house on the market and began searching for a new one. It sold quickly to a divorced man who did not believe in anything supernatural. My dad supervised movers as they packed every clock radio, book, sandal, picture frame, doll, fork in the house. A priest and a rabbi blessed our new house while we waited in the driveway. We only made our way inside after they exited safely. Nothing strange ever happened in that house except for the dissolution of a marriage and a family.

I moved from a dorm into my boyfriend’s apartment into my own apartment when I was 20. That first house sticks in the back of my mind whenever I move or even when I walk into someone else’s home for the first time and as the sun set on my first night in that one bedroom corner apartment, I knew I could not sleep yet. I drove to the Catholic church on University Avenue and tried every locked door of the perimeter. I banged on the rectory door as it began to rain. A priest with a loosened collar opened the door and let me in as he looked at me oddly.

“I just moved into an apartment today and I can’t sleep until it’s blessed or given the okay or whatever.” I felt my bangs dripping.

“Well, I can’t bless it for you at this hour but I can give you holy water.”

“Tomato, tomahto.” My inner Catholic schoolgirl grinned.

He led me through a back hallway and we found ourselves in a room behind the altar. He correctly assumed I didn’t bring a bottle and he filled up a holy water bottle and a smaller vial for me. I thanked him with a damp handshake and braved the rain home. I soon stood in my doorway and squeezed the plastic bottle of holy water in the general direction of the room. I knew I should say something in accompaniment.

“Be okay, apartment.” I thought about what people usually said in movies. “The power of Christ compels you!”

I squirted the rest of the bottle all over the apartment. The carpet was damp. I slipped the smaller vial of holy water into my purse. It stayed there for the next three years just to be safe. That night, the lapsed Catholic slept with the light on. Glow in the dark silly bandz on each wrist do the job now as the sounds in the night are nothing more than an old apartment and my boyfriend’s nighttalking.

Yes. Of course.

My parents met at my aunt’s wedding, that is, my dad’s little sister. Somehow because of family friends in common, my mom ended up being a bridesmaid because in the very late 1970s, there were still not so many Cuban families in South Florida and they all seemed to know each other, having fled in the 1960s on airplanes as opposed to the rafts now seen on tv, just before the Mariel boatlifts that brought a mass exodus of Cubans to the United States. My mom came to the United States from Cuba when she was little, four or five, with my grandparents and they settled in the middle of the country, Indiana, where they experienced their first winter in a non-tropical climate. My grandpa’s first job in this country was chopping logs in the snow. They grew used to the weather and made a home, falling in love with this new country they found themselves in. My dad was also born in Cuba but left as a child, growing up in Spain and for a while in Mexico. Somehow both of their families found themselves in Florida almost twenty years later, assimilated into middle class America and sharing similar histories. The world is small.

The wedding was at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. My dad, having been out of town for a while, was not a groomsman but he sat near the front of the hall during the ceremony. He told me that he noticed my mom when she stood at the altar during the ceremony but thought she was too young, 21 or so at the time (he was 30 or so). His eye kept drifting to her throughout the night as she danced with other men and laughed with her friends. The younger members of the reception drifted out towards the pool, including the bride and groom, and they drank more champagne on a balmy May night.

My mom told me she caught my dad looking at her and winked just before she jumped into the pool still in her bridesmaid dress. Some of the wedding party followed while the rest of them laughed and watched from the edge of the pool. My dad reached a hand out to help my mom out of the pool and lifted her out. He gave her his tuxedo jacket and they talked quietly as they went back inside. My grandma caught sight of my mom’s soaking wet dress and smeared makeup and fumed. My parents talked quietly at the edge of the dance floor, laughing at the puddle she was making with her wet dress. With her veil tipsily askew on her red-haired curls, my aunt tossed the bouquet and it landed in my mom’s hands without effort. They laughed about it awkwardly and too loudly, the way you do when you first meet someone. She left with flowers beginning to wilt, he left with her phone number.

They dated and got married a year and a half later. She now remembers that she was nursing a broken heart from her first love around that time and he recalls being charmed but unsure about commitment. They almost divorced a few years later, had their one child, me, and finally did divorce twenty years after meeting. They are still good friends and are remarried or involved with other people now. Both my mom and dad have told me my entire life, especially since they got divorced, to never settle for anyone less than who you are madly, passionately in love with, to live my life and go to college and know who I am and do the things I want to do and be independent but to never settle for anything other than that person who would kiss your spleen if he had the chance. They never loved each other like that.

But damn did they meet cute.

Morning Sickness Becomes Electra

I was an accident.

I don’t mean that in a really dramatic, “I wasn’t wanted!” Lifetime movie way but in all seriousness, I was an accident. My mom confirmed this after my parents got divorced when I asked her once while she was drunk.

“So you just told me you had wanted to divorce Daddy since early in your marriage. Why did you have me then?” I said to her as her glazed-over eyes swirled.

“Well, you weren’t planned. I wanted you, I wanted a baby but I was all set to leave,” she slurred. “It just never worked with your father, we weren’t a good match.”

She then tried to tell me about her apparently nonexistent sex life with my father but I stopped her before my therapy bill became astronomically high.

What happened was that my parents were married for about four years during which things just weren’t really working out. As they were about to hit their fourth wedding anniversary in early 1986, they decided to go on a final trip to see if they could work out their problems. They went to North Carolina and stayed in a bed and breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains; unlike me and my dad, my mother is not one to rough it. After a long weekend which apparently involved some kind of sex or at the very least, some sperm got inside my mom somehow, they left for Florida, having come to the resolution that they weren’t meant for each other and that they were going to get a divorce.

My mom started packing up some things and she told my grandparents about the end of her marriage which pissed them off to no end. They were traditional and at that time, much less open minded than they have since become. Regardless of their reaction, she continued going about her business of getting divorced. After a few weeks, she went to go see the lawyer she had hired to handle her side of the divorce. While going over paperwork relating to assets, my mom gets the urge to vomit and ducks into a nearby wastebasket. The lawyer looked at her curiously.

“I bet you’re pregnant.” The lawyer smirked while looking nauseated at the vomit in her formerly paper-only trashcan.

“That’s ridiculous, you have to have sex to get pregnant,” my mom replied, quoting what sounds like every romantic comedy about a pregnant woman ever.

“I’m just saying, make sure.”

“It’s probably something I ate.”

Leaving calmly, she freaked out as soon as she got home and made a doctor’s appointment for the next day. She was indeed pregnant. She told my grandmother and said that she wanted to continue with the divorce, that she wanted to raise me alone. My grandmother did not react well to this bit of information and threatened to not be involved in her life if she didn’t give this mystery baby a proper home. Head hanging, my mom went home to tell my dad, who had been sleeping in his den, that she was pregnant.

My dad who was older at this time, almost forty, was over the moon that he was going to be a father. They decided that the universe had taken the decision of ending their marriage out of their hands and so it was. My mom had an uneventful pregnancy with me where she drank a whole gallon of milk per day and got really, really fat and a few months later, I arrived late and healthy with a tiny baby fauxhawk.

My parents remained married for 15 years after I was born. 15 years. They really made a go of it and even though I knew since I was little that they didn’t love each other how my grandparents did or how people did in movies, they cared for each other greatly. They never fought or had disagreements in front of me and until my mom told me one day after school during my freshman year of high school that they were getting divorced, I would have thought that they would just stay content to be sort of in like with each other for the rest of their lives.

It’s weird how things work out. I was my mom’s first and only successful pregnancy. She miscarried something like, five times after I was born, and some late in the pregnancy. I remember her being pregnant when I was little and then nothing. Every Christmas, I would ask for a little brother or sister (to rule over, naturally) and I would always begin to think I was getting my wish sometime in August but then nothing; I just thought I was being punished by Santa for never picking up my toys or something. All the pregnancies that they tried for were literally fruitless and yet, this one random instance of fornication in the mountains produced me, springing from the womb fully formed, personality intact. It’s strange.

I’m glad they stayed married. I used to feel guilty that they stayed together for me, unfulfilled in many ways, but now I can see that we had some good times together. Despite their issues as a couple, we were, we are a family. My dad’s remarried now to an awesome lady and my parents are friends; we all hang out together and it’s the most natural thing in the world. I don’t know if this is common, my experience is perhaps unique. I just had a good time growing up as their tiny sidekick.

I don’t know if I believe that everything happens for a reason but I do to some extent. Things seem to click in place like puzzle pieces at times. I came to be as a bunch of cells in the place where I feel most at peace and I was christened with a name that has seemed to guide my fate in life in certain directions. I grew under the tutelage of two very different but cohesive people who have helped shape my views and opinions and tastes but have left me room to seek knowledge and experiences on my own. It doesn’t really matter how you came to be though, planned with the help of doctors or entirely accidental in a serendipitous way. You will be the product of many things and how you came to exist at this exact moment matters little in the long run. If you weren’t wanted, not even by your parents, someone will want you and at the very least, the universe wanted you and here you are.

I am my mother’s stubborn and passionate dark eyed fire and my father’s wry, wandering dreamer’s heart, filled with the haze and poetry of the mountains. I exist.