knowing me, knowing you

in between tasks today, i had some lively discourse on a local board. my participation waxes and wanes with my free time and the topics running.

the recent opening of a place with a french 3-star michelin chef attached has people going crazy, lol. the project got waylaid when the original management company pulled out and that delayed the opening by about 8 months. luxury condos are attached and it sits on very pricey waterfront property.

caveat: i have not been to the restaurant. in fact, i was offered a chance to go last night for drinks, but my foul-weather gear made me feel under-dressed. my expense-account wielding companion agreed so we'll try another night.

the boards were a-twitter with talk of $20 martinis, but next to nothing about the food. (dial up your way-back machines, my friends, and i was a bartender at the place that broke the $10 glass of wine ceiling. the office chix in keds/anklets/anne taylor went insane.) the economy and the weather have kept many away, but an astonishing number had fierce opinions about a place they have never been. lmao.

the op sparked related threads. one poster and i had an interesting back and forth in all of them. he eventually linked his website. it has his picture. i know him. i laughed out loud. while polite, he always treated me as a lackey when dining in my places of employ. yet my nom de net allowed me the veil so he instead saw me as somebody passionate, knowledgeable and *equal*.

in that same set of threads someone began stalking me with the j'accuse of "tell us where you work, or your words don't mean jack." the site is tightly moderated, so all his queries did get deleted, but not before a bunch of "whoa, dude, how dare you?" replies popped up. i like to think i post in a thoughtful and passionate way -- my devotion to food and grape apparent and articulate. my defenders agreed, lol.

strange small world.

the web derailed my life once, ya know? not again, my friends. not again.

baker's dozen + 1

GAH.

the california woman who recently birthed a litter of 8 already has 6 children, including a set of twins.

i realize doctors are not ethics police and cannot force patients into choices, but, um, fertility treatments for this woman? are you fucking kidding me? she has proven sufficiently fecund, don'tcha think?

rumor has it that she lives with her parents and no "father(s) of the brood" is present.

who is paying for all this?

how long before she is on oprah?

is eight enough?

earlier today, a woman outside los angeles gave birth to OCTUPLETS. six boys and two girls, some weighing less than two pounds. delivered by caesarean, they all were born within five minutes of each other. what -- scooped out like fish teaming in a barrel?

the mother is expected to be in hospital a few more days, but the infants will be in at least two months.

doctors were quite candid about mothers who conceive with fertility drugs "selectively reducing to a viable number of fetuses." that she chose to carry all of them as long as possible was "unusual".

oh, and it was so crowded in the womb, docs thought she only had seven wrigglers in there. surprise!

forty-six medical staff were involved in the delivery.

the babies were nine weeks premature. three of them could not breathe on their own.

the mother of the *first* set of octies born in the u.s. calls it a "blessing". no. it. is. not. it's science and ego run wildly amok.

this is so profoundly wrong and garish on so many levels i'm speechless. truly.

who are these people?

the news that precipitated my recent trip home was horrible. not a thing that had ever crossed my mind in its bleakness -- it skipped the generational sequence, ya know?

guilt and anxiety battled it out in my head and heart as i rode down to ny in the dark. the years of silence, preceded by years of hurt, misunderstanding, selfishness, and confusion. i mean, everybody's family has its own brew of dysfunction so why was i so poorly equipped to deal with my own? honestly? long ago, i just decided it wasn't worth it. from a very young age i was given no emotional foundation and while still a teen, the finances dried up too. caught up in their own anger, and still playing emotional tit-for-tat, i could no longer harness the energy for it. at first it was surprising how easily they gave up on me. then... not so much.

i was alone. for real.

my mother and grandmother had always been fierce. bitter disappointed tempests who often reduced me to tears by the volume and power of their rage. rarely did i fight back, hoping to let the storm pass without adding to the ledger for future accusations. it was astonishing how tightly they held onto every hurt -- actions from my childhood, when consequences couldn't be understood because i was a CHILD living in a very confused dynamic. expected to be truthful and kind, yet party to deceit so often it makes my head spin to think about it now.

years pass. who are these people? they are my family and they are old and sad and alone and afraid.

my father cried upon seeing me, couldn't meet my eyes and confessed a very difficult relationship between he and my brother. a sibling to whom i feel no familial tie, really -- i've met him twice and both times he was a sulky quiet teenager. my father's guilt over my mother and me was apparent. but... so? let it go already. yeah, you treated us both awfully, but my mother was impossible and so complicit, right? me? it was so long ago, whatever i felt is buried so deeply i now only feel uncomfortable at his emotional displays. he stepped up for once in his life and offered to help at least cart me around a city i forget is so big. thank you.

part of my grandmother's decline is par for her age, i suppose. heading towards 90 and having had several bad falls. nothing ever broke, but years of standing at work followed by years of sleeping on the couch (still!) cannot be good long-term spinal strategy. the true shock was her brownstone actually being the grey gardens i nightmared it would be -- the cats, the smell, the rotting walls, the filthy kitchen and bathrooms, the trash, the overgrown yard and undone laundry. bedrooms that had become giant litterboxes for feral cats. my mother had been living there and her room, bathroom and even the bathrobe still on her bed were just filthy. which meant she was unwell for a very long time. she had always been a fastidious housekeeper, eat off the floor if you wanted kinda person. let's just be thankful blogger hasn't added a scratch-n-sniff widget yet.

this was my first visit to a nursing home. it was clean and didn't smell! my mother was getting her hair done. she didn't recognize me. she was in a wheelchair. she looked a million years old. her two front teeth were broken, i'm guessing in a fall, (of which i guess there were many) but that seemed impolite to ask at this point. we waited over an hour for her to be finished and then for whatever reason, my grandmother was in a huge fit was to leave. i ventured alone the next day, contrary to my grandmother's determination that i join her at some old folk's hoo-hah at the church. my mother seemed "in the moment", i guess, but only just there. she responded to my remarks, but never more than a few words. she knew about obama though and was amazed i'd met him. (even though "he is not the right color to be president.") she holds her resentment still about her mother, my father and the aunt who was the one who finally bothered to track me down. she was either confused or ashamed about some issues, like where is your car, where is your stuff and what the hell happened? i lobbed softballs, but none of what she had to say matched anybody else's accounts.

so now what? exit my own life that i've built for better or worse? in its present state, i could not live at my grandmother's. even regular weekly trips down to clean wouldn't make a dint in the dire state of the place. my perilous financial state will not allow me to rescue anything or anybody. my signature anywhere could prove to be my ruin.

part of my own disavowal of emotional quid pro quo was that there never was any "quo". saber rattling and blackmail, yup, but the returns were miserly. so i'm stuck in this tail-chase of what do i *owe* them? again, it's all on me. my phone hasn't rang, no e-mails or notes in the post. i can make my own rules, i suppose, but again, i have no play-book.

i promised my mother magazines. i will start there.

curtains

in the wizard of oz, much goes on about paying "no attention to the man behind the curtain." if that damn wizard wasn't irish, i'll eat my grandfather's shilaleagh.

"lace curtain irish" was a long-ago slam to those putting on *airs*. the first yuppies. your windows might look pretty to the street, but inside your house must still be a boozy caterwalling free-for-all, cuz god knows.

my first confessions involved curtains, not doors. the openings cloaked by heavy velvet red drapes -- obvious much?

i was a young young noodle (yes, that young) when i became aware of the curtains my family kept drawn. not asking others meant you didn't open up for others to ask you. don't say this, don't say that; i'm sure i recall only a small amount and yet it seems like a giant lead apron. i do remember heavy prepping before parties at the shore. my mom was never there. my grandmother's boyfriend's family... there was a woman whose name was "nanette", so when i screwed up and said, "nanny", i got a pass. it was many years till i wondered if that's why i was told to call her that.

well into my life as an adult, i know i don't *share* well. i guess i feel like i have too much to hide! frequently i am amazed by what others tell me. (sir bob might be a whole other post...) often i think they feel safe sharing because i don't. think about it. much like chaunce, i admit, i do "like to watch."

today i answered emails that had lingered too long, from women who have known me most of my life. friends. right? for over a year, i've been unsure of the best (?) way to explain the not-so-new dynamic of the owner and me. he's divorced now, i'm in the clear, right? ahem. no matter how i feel, their lives make me wonder what they truly think. i'm happy, he's happy, but on somebody's back? ack. they tried an intervention over the black eye, so we'll just see here.

and then? i had to tell them about peg. it was profoundly hard (then & now) to type " she's never coming out." they knew her as the sharp redhead with the jaguar, who let them skirt the truth if they got to our house on time. used to keeping secrets, i guess she felt as long as they were inside by curfew, all was cool. even when their moms called, peg never ratted out my friends. she did clue them in and make it VERY clear she would not lie on their behalf again. it worked. everybody wanted to stay at our house, lol.

recently they've all sent me family snaps. it's the holidays. i realized it's been ages since i've had a pic snapped. like -- years. for so long, i hid, and i still feel unsure about that. ( sidebar?) if there is no pic with my face, i don't exist. right? with the owner, it still feels safer to be hidden.

man vs. woman, again

from this morning's ny times:

One mother in TriBeCa, who is married, at least for now, to a Wall Street executive, put it rather bluntly: “My job was to run the household and the children’s lives,” she said. “His job is to provide us with a nice lifestyle.” But his bonus has disappeared, and his annual pay has dropped to $150,000 from $800,000 a year. “Let me just say this,” she said, “I’m still doing my job.”

since the crash, the times and its upscale sisters have all spent a fair amount of column-width on the newly spartanized lifestyles of the former masters of the universe, many of whose families were in the 1950s model of dad as breadwinner and mom at home. yes, these modern women had staff, botox and s.u.v.'s, but most of them gave up lucrative careers in their prime. hey, we all make choices, ya know?

time after time, (as if you need further proof of my masochism, i do keep reading the bits) i am dumbfounded how these women simply will not adjust or bend. they might go an extra week between blonde root-touch-ups, but won't forsake their $200 haircuts. they choose to keep buying $300 jeans and their kids' clothes at ralph lauren. why the hell are they still shopping? oh, right, cuz that was part of their job description.

but what really gets me is the blame. we face an economic meltdown of cataclysmic proportions, its depths still unknown and unfolding, and these wives fault their husbands. it's not seen as a time to pull together, scale back, make different choices, experience life as less of an acquisitional race, maybe get a job (!) most americans would view a salary of $150k as quite comfy. yo, ashley, boohoo about that in flint, michigan why don'tcha? many of these men were victims of hubris, which wasn't unique to the individual, but endemic to the institutional culture. yet their mean carbo-deprived wives see only personal failure and betrayal and not a gigantic paradigm shift. eat an english muffin (ok, just half) and step outside yourself for just a sec, maybe?

a woman who works for me is in the midst of a divorce, details of which i'm fine not knowing. the genesis of her remarks last night aren't so germane here, but the message was essentially any woman is an idiot who goes out of her way, even one inch, for her man. that he should be crawling before her at all times. she thought i was insane for taking the commuter line back and forth to see the owner. if i were meaner, i suppose i could have offered that i clean his house too and watch her have a nervous breakdown, lol.

heading back to the vipers' nest, i guess i've spent a little extra time of late pondering where and when so many women become so parsimonious of spirit, why they don't see it and why they don't put on the brakes. i watched sadly as so many people got hurt by it for so many years. souls blackened, love crushed, my own emotional development suffocated for so long.

let's hope it's enough to know i want better and i expect more, while being fully aware it's up to me to make it so.

distance

one of the more popular family anecdotes about little noodle was "the time she ran away". just past the age of 8 months, i was walking. whether it was the lure of the shoes or ambitious independence -- you make the call.

honestly, i'm sure having something that small toddling around had to have been a royal pain for my mom who frequently played single mother for stretches. she was shoe shopping (yup!) and i was being a "brat", so she put me outside the store, in the stroller, with admonishments to "stay put! i'll be right out. don't you dare move!" all that was left of the transaction was to pay, and when she did and came to fetch me, i was gone. being better behaved, the stroller had followed instructions, but i was nowhere in sight. we were in a very busy shopping neighborhood of brooklyn, on a wide avenue. she ran to the corner, screaming my name. nothing.

she dodged traffic, across the street to the police station. a childhood friend, who still carried a torch, tried calming her down and ran outside with her. they crossed the street.

he canvassed the other shoppers, people in the nearby stores. how could nobody see what happened? unlike today, with milk-carton kids, amber alerts and sex offenders, it wasn't off the charts to take your eyes off your kid for a second, so i can only imagine the panic in my young mother's heart. she wasn't yet 20.

no doubt it felt like a life-time, but i had been missing about 15 minutes when ronny (the cop) saw my hot pink beret bopping through the crowd. he ran and swooped me up in his arms, my mom fast on heels. of the 100s of adults i passed, not one thought to pick up this baby and look for her mom? wtf, ya know? or did i look that determined, lol?

best they could guess, i had simply walked a big square, all the way around the block. i wasn't crying or upset, in fact was laughing with delight.

from as far back as i can remember, i tried desperately to get away. i begged for sleep-away camp (which i got for several summers, and cried hysterically when i had to go back home. on parents' day, when they were always hours and hours late, i secretly hoped they'd not show, even though the counselors always worried about me being alone); i pleaded for boarding school (which i did not get); vacations, i went off by myself as much as they'd allow. if we had to sit separately on the plane, i was thrilled and pretended i was traveling alone. when i got a car, i would sometimes drive backroads aimlessly, just to get out of the house.

when it came time to choose a college, boston was acceptable because i could be home in a few hours if there was an emergency, and we all joked "ha-ha", that it was far enough away they couldn't just drop in on me.

as soon as i moved away patches of silence, emotional distance, punctuated the miles between my home and theirs.

the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, my mother insisted i wasn't allowed to remain in the city and had to come home. it was a long hot summer in that house and i cried often and ate little. one of the last teary exchanges ended with her saying, "you don't ever want to live home again, do you?" in my anger, i heard it as a j'accuse, don't ever even think about it, you little bitch, but she could have just as easily been dying inside knowing how bad things were between us, and that i never would.

this last stretch? i am not even certain quite how long. i know how long i have been with the owner, and i think it is longer than that.

as months turn to years, you stop wondering why and it just *is*.

then something you never dreamed comes true and you have to bridge the miles. in lots of directions.

the question remains how close do i get and still stay safe?