Might and Magic of (a parent's) Halloween

To me, this time of year is chilly mornings and wood smoke, thunder storms and hot apple cider (and an assortment of apple-everythings left over from a fun-filled, calorie-packed, walk-til-you-drop, craft-shopping, road-trip-extravaganza to Apple Hill).  I love summer, Independence Day is always a treat, especially this year after a day with dear friends and a surreal drive home on the 110 with continuous fireworks bursting on either side as if celebrating the Season of Us! 

But for me it's fall, or autumn if you're in that sort of mood, and the Halloween magic of October that sets the holiday season in motion.  Halloween is such a unique holiday in its diversity of expressions and dress, and it's the only one I can think of where we cooperate en masse to celebrate -- truly selflessly -- with a massive host of complete strangers.

And because of that excitement and energy, not to mention the massive scope of such a start to what promises to be a busy holiday season, my to-do lists have lengthened by half and my time shortened by at least as much.  Writing, drawing, coloring, and keeping life in general going must now compete with costume making, pumpkin carving, and not-for-the-faint-hearted baking, cooking, treat-making, and decorating.  And throw in all this election stuff on top -- it makes for tired, overwhelmed, and (if you're like me) countless opportunities to feel as if you're falling behind faster than you can say "Boo!"

Well, I take a lesson from Jack Skellington, the most recent obsession for my preschool twins.  For those of you who've yet to see The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack, the very successful Pumpkin King gets a bit ahead of himself and decides to take over Christmas, adding a few Halloweeny improvements here and there.  Right or wrong, Jack is a skeleton of action!  He embraces nightmare-long to-do lists (and nightmares in general) with an enthusiasm and lipless smile that would (and does) raise the dead.

So for those of you who, like me, will be up until 3am every night so your daughter can be a pink spider kitty with a Minnie-Mouse Bow next to her twin sister, the Blue Web (also with all-essential Minnie Mouse bow), I say enjoy!  We only get to be this exhausted for a shocking few years.  Sleep, shmeep.  Be a skeleton of action!

And when you do clean your pumpkins and spend the better part of an hour painstakingly separating the seeds from goo so you can roast them tomorrow, assuming the appliance guy comes and can fix the oven, don't then try to walk both slippery glass bowls back to the kitchen across the hard-to-clean carpet.  Not two bowls at once.  And do wash your hands.  Or spend another painstaking hour re-collecting and cleaning said seeds, along with the carpet and bowls and walls and you.  Forget for a moment that ever-growing to-do list and make two trips!  

Burps In The Road

Screw The Devil You Know

For the longest time, I feared a creative career would make me hate being creative.  I'd heard authors and artists complain bitterly about compromising their vision or bowing to market pressure or client whims, or having to spend all their time making only one kind of thing which limited their time to explore other kinds of things.  Selling creative product corrupted their joy.  

I was terrified of that.  Of losing art.  Losing the joy of creating.  It's very personal and satisfying and self-indulgent to tap the imagination.  A person can do lifetimes of living deep within. 

What would I do if art and language ceased to delight?  The very notion is unbearable.  I don't mean to be melodramatic about that, but it is.  Unbearable to lose that passion, that escape, that huge component of my identity.  And because I worried so much that a creative career would corrupt my enjoyment of it, I kept it to myself and working was only a means of supporting my creative habit.  Art was my fantastical plan C or E or Q.  It wasn't something you do for a living, it's what you do after you get home from doing what you do for a living.  Art is for evenings and weekends and to be set aside before the rigors of a real work day.  

I worked and I created and I didn't sleep much, and all the while I secretly hated myself for giving it up like that.  And I resented any intrusions into my creative "free time."  I harbored anger, I nurtured dread, and I fed my inner-critic to bursting.  But the Devil you know, right?  At least going without art most of the time spared me the possibility of going without forever.

I worked a wide variety of jobs, putting in sometimes twelve hour days just to race home clinging to whatever kernel of an idea I was attempting in the hope I could execute it before exhaustion set in.  Road Crew was among the more vivid as it involved scraping up road-kill, repairing guard rails, digging ditches, washing trucks, laying asphalt, applying hundreds upon hundreds of those little yellow reflectors...  It may sound strange, but clearing culverts and rotting street-meat remains one of my most favorite support-my-writing-habit jobs.  It was physical and demanding and my brain was my own most of my time.  I could re-direct traffic and still write in my head all day long.  I could be there, and not be there at the same time.  It was great.  On the other hand, that's also a recipe for getting run over.  Happily, I didn't.   

Now that I have children, I look back on "my youth" in awe of the vast quantities of "free time" I had at my disposal and wonder, "why didn't I do more [enter any fun or productive pass-time]?"  I didn't vacation, I didn't party, I didn't entertain friends much or tackle my increasingly long list of hobbies and activities I'd like to get to one of these days.  Instead, I hoarded and funneled what time I could into my real work, my life's work, my raison d'etre.  I learned, I wrote, I drew.  Effort and inspiration poured out of me in sporadic, undisciplined bursts, often stalling out or switching projects as energy came and went.  Then back to work to earn scratch enough to keep buying supplies, to keep dreaming.

I don't know exactly when I started to really care about including others in my dreams.  I know I did care, right from the start, but at some point it became an actual goal, sharing with others.  It wasn't enough to make something, I wanted that something to be seen and felt, I wanted to engage with others, to be heard and to listen.  Maybe I grew up a little.  I realized I'd sabotaged years of creative productivity by wasting years' worth of available productive hours on irrelevant labors and being afraid of losing something I couldn't actually separate from myself if I tried.  I'm an artist.  I'm a writer.  I can't not be, I don't know how.  Thanks to a collection of odd jobs, I do know how to do a ton of other things.  I console myself saying these experiences all feed the writing, they all inspire the art, but I'd rather have that time back.  If I had it, I'd probably write a better post.  

On the other hand, I don't know if I'd have thought of the cartoon...

Blue, Pink, Sith, Oh My!

The best thing about getting a new dishwasher (or any other large kitchen appliance) is it comes in a gigantic box.  As all fans of the Toy Hall of Fame know, there is not much better in life than a great big, unassigned box.  It is object, space, room, canvas, frame, vehicle -- a big box can be anything, and if your home is kid-infested, too, that opportunity should not be lost.

In our house, the box met several needs.  All kids love a hidey-hole to make their own, and you can't do better for that safety and convenience-wise than with a big cardboard box.  The world of tike-mites is rife with stickers (almost every event and activity ends with 'em!), and we needed a convenient sticker-repository to spare the rest of our things from sticker-mania.  And we needed a kid-friendly project to interest-up a couple afternoons.  Then the dishwasher broke and --  Hooray!  -- we got a great big box!


For us, it was a multi-day event.  After much discussion of what it should be, my daughters decided they wanted a house of their own, so one day was spent transforming the box with a little  peaked roof, windows and a door.  Looking back, the windows could have had working shutters and I should have better re-enforced the door, but all in all the construction went well.  Another day was in preparation of its decoration, and we shopped for supplies and colors.  My daughters are identical twins, so of course one picked blue paint and the other picked pink.  We set up outside for an afternoon of painting any way they wanted.  I didn't care how it looked (it's not my house, after all, it's theirs), I just wanted them to make it their own.  

Boy, did they, with a miss-mash of color and design, speckled with stickers outside, a whole nebula of stickers inside, spiraling out and layers deep.  It has been a space ship, a cave, a submarine, a castle, a "kitty cave," a workplace, a school, the store, the library...  I'd wager it's one of the the hardest working boxes in America.

But something happened in the painting process.  When you're little (and when you're big), there are never enough chances to do things any way you want, and sure enough a couple of our young neighbors upon spotting our free-for-all wanted to join in.  We made do with the brushes and paints so everyone got thoroughly coated.  My girls were excited to share and to show their neighbors what they'd done to make the house ready, including the paints they picked themselves.  Then the oldest girl commented:


"Blue?  That's a boy color."


I couldn't believe the statement.  I mean, yes, I could believe it.  I'm in preparation for a friend's baby shower, she's having a boy, and I'm shopping around for "boy-colored" things.  And now that my girls are in preschool, I understand better how hyper-aware little kids are to classification and distinction.  They take great pride (and seem to feel great relief) when they can correctly group or identify a dominant characteristic.  Currently, my daughters are very focused on finding socially acceptable occasions to express the phrase "p.u., stinky!"  For example, if you smell a strong smell, like garbage, it is perfectly reasonable to mark the observation with a "p.u., stinky!" as long as you make the remark about the thing and not, say, the person carting it to the dumpster.  And you can see their confidence soar when they correctly identify a smell and occasion that justifies saying without reprisal, "that's so stinky!"


My blue-loving daughter looked like the older girl had struck her in the face, and for a moment I resisted the impulse to return the favor (I am frequently alarmed by these semi-violent mommy impulses I get from time to time.  They're totally irrational, I've never acted on them, but if fantasy prepares you for real-world situations, I can say with confidence I'm so prepared to war for these tots of mine, it scares me.).  But seeing my daughters' startled shock, and even more out of a sense of duty to little girls everywhere, I could not let that comment stand.  It's one thing to theme a baby shower, it's quite another to restrict half the human race from a major chunk of the color spectrum.  

And maybe I'm particularly sensitive to this issue.  Okay, yes, I am.  I grew up with a wide range of interests that included everything my older brother did, often to his annoyance, and while my many interests were encouraged, they couldn't all be financed.  My brother got the toolbox, but I borrowed it until he relented years later and gave it to me.  I still have it.  I made dolls, I climbed trees, I built forts, I sewed dresses, and none of that made me more or less girl.  My boy-pals didn't invite me to their all-boy birthday parties, my girl-pals made fun of me if I wore bows or ribbons, and I got real familiar with the term tom-boy, which to this day I believe reveals a significantly retarded imagination in the speaker.  And I hate that "girlie" and "like a girl" remain commonly-used if mild insults, while "oh, boy!" connotes excitement and "man-up" courage.  Boys have plenty of junk heaped on them, too, but I wasn't gonna let some first-grader crush my toddlers first forays into self and independence.  Besides that, both my daughters' eyes are blue.  And they know it.  Something drastic had to be done.

"There's no such thing as boy colors or girl colors," I said.  "There are only colors." 

I know there are tons of examples, I guess beginning with baby showers on up, when specific colors are not only easy identifiers but appropriate go-to shorthands for sex distinction.  But in a wider context, color is just color.  In another, it's the absent frequency of reflected light, so the color we see is really the color we're not seeing, and after our brain does some simple math, we say, "well hello, yellow."  

That's as un-sexed as I can describe it.

I think I succeeded in sounding  firm yet encouraging.  At least no-one cried.  And the painting fun continued.  Irrational protective-mommy impulses aside, I don't ever want to tear any kid down to prop mine up.  It's destructive, doesn't really work, and this world needs as many whip-smart kids to grow up with psyches and feelings intact as possible.  Funny enough, to help make my point, I steered their conversation to "girl things" they knew that are blue (certain items, characters, princesses, etc.), applying one kind of gross stereotype to try to combat another--sounds stupid, and it was, but feelings--and my daughter's self-confidence--were preserved.

Whether they decide to be Sith or Jedi, so far my girls' light-sabers are pink and blue.

Hero of My Own Story--Sort Of...

 
Whenever I'm cleaning up or putting away or scraping poo off my daughter's rain boot, I try to remember I am the hero of my own story.  This is my saga.  My time is now!  So is yours.

Tag-Teaming Twins

When you have twins, reality becomes utterly defined by the term "tag-team."  They tag-team you, and, if you're lucky to have a partner in this (heaven help you if you're flying solo), you tag-team them right back. 

Take bedtime.  One washes, the other dries, the first pajamas, the second stories, the first waters, the second herds to bed as the first chaperones to the bathroom, the second chaperones to the bathroom as the first herds from bathroom to bed, then second hugs-and-kisses, turning out lights...wait, why are you crying?  Use words, honey--

"It was my turn to turn out light!"  

Okay, then you turn out the--  

"No!"  

Okay, you don't have to-- 

"But it's my turn!"  

I...(sigh).  Hey, where's she--?  Where are you going?

  

"My bear has to poop."  

No, come back--can you catch her, please?  Wait, why are you crying now?  

"Because I'm not tired!"  

Forty-five minutes later, team-twins rests.  In contrast, team-parents has aged a year and a half.

You tell yourself it's about balance.  You play with your schedule, trading sleep for exercise, diet for showers, hedging your present against your future.  You apply the self-control and critical thinking that got you through graduate school to watching the squealing piglet riding a zip-line commercial "again, Mommy!  Again, again!" with genuine interest and enthusiasm.  You resign yourself to never completing a meal or a thought or a sentence unless they're asleep, and even then you do so quietly.  

"It's tough right now," you say when asked how you're doing.  "We're finding our balance."  

No.  No, you're not.  There is no balance.  They win.  That's it.  You tag, they tag back, but there is no balance.  They don't play fair.  They cheat.  And they don't expend a single resource to keeping you or themselves safe and alive.  While you're looking both ways, holding hands, picking up, doling out snacks, wiping and cleaning and band-aiding, finding lost loveys, untangling, re-tying, watering, pottying, righting and wronging, they're siphoning what little energy you've got left to dedicate in total every forming pathway in their shiny new brains to devising their next tag.  

"Where's the--take that out of your mouth!"  Tag.  

"Oh my God, I just said because I said so!"  Tag.  

"No, you don't!  How--?  Whaddya mean yes you do want a spanking?"  Tag.

It's hard and it's rigged and it's war and they're winning.  And it's taking forever and over so fast.  And they're so incredibly cute, you feel lucky and grateful to be lost and bleeding on the battlefield, feeling your way, muttering about "balance" with your duly bludgeoned partner.  Knowing even as it's happening that you're both gonna miss this the rest of your lives...

Tag.

My Dragon Year

Welcome to the year of the Black Water Dragon!

I'm pretty sure...  I read somewhere that the Dragon year technically begins on Feb. 4 even though I also read that Chinese New Year was officially yesterday and read some other stuff on Chinese astrology to figure out what that meant and didn't entirely understand it or do the tables properly...  But let's say I did.  

So again, welcome to the year of the Black Water Dragon!

Dragon is reputed to be the luckiest of all the animal signs in Chinese astrology, and why not?  What's cooler than a dragon?  And who couldn't use a little extra luck these days?  Especially with the Mayans sticking us with their super-vague 2012 count-down-to-DOOM.  (Thanks a bunch, Mayans!)  Although it probably wouldn't seem so vague, or maybe even as ominous, if their books had survived to be translated, studied, and understood, but that's another topic for some other post.  Today, let's look to the Dragon and to luck.

As luck would have it, I rang in a new birth-year with all of China and am welcoming this as my surrogate Dragon year, complete with extra black water dragon blessings (still not sure what that really means but have decided to believe it's positive).  In that spirit, prompted by stalwart friends and colleagues, boosted by family, and inspired by Jane Espenson's frequent tweets to join her in sixty- and ninety- minute writing sprints, and gifted the following book for my birthday, I decided to apply Pilar Alessandra's The Coffee Break Screenwriter to my creative process to produce more and better in the time-crunch that is life-lately.  

You see, I have twin pre-schoolers who have been, until this past weekend, physically restrained for periods dedicated to sleep.  From 7:30 pm - 7:30 am (ish) every night, and for roughly two hours every afternoon, our rambunctious tots have been secured in their cribs, so even if I'm frazzled to bits mediating twin-to-twin disputes and texting my husband, "no napping here!" I could, in theory, go to another room confident they wouldn't and couldn't actually harm themselves or each other and, in some days, actually get something done, like sketching or cartooning or writing or cleaning or organizing or spending time in the bathroom all by myself...

That blessed time is ended.


We were able to get away with cribs this long because our daughters are, by all criteria, angelic.  You think I'm kidding, but it's true.  They are fantastically wonderful girls.  We said climbing out of cribs is a "no-no," and they actually followed that rule.  Aside from proudly demonstrating for us from time to time that their little feet can indeed reach all the way over the side, neither has ever disobeyed the rule that they are not to climb out.  Miracle as that is, a few months ago when we suggested to our twins that we could remove one side of their cribs to make them "big girl beds" so they could get in and out all by themselves, both rejected the idea.  I was startled neither wanted her freedom.  Then I realized neither wanted her sister to have freedom.  You see, they share a room, and with their cribs intact and secure, each controlled a sort of castle keep, sometimes walled with blankets for added privacy, lined with plush-toy sentries to repel would-be invaders (read "twin sister").  Yes, freedom is great.  But even pre-schoolers know (and possibly pre-schoolers know this better than adults) freedom must be defended.  And defending freedom is exhausting.


Taking hearts in hand, possibly overconfident, not entirely unaware, we recently agreed our girls were "old enough."  With much adieu and production in due recognition of this momentous rite of passage, we removed one side off the cribs.  And now...we have lost containment. 

For the past three days, nap-time has been a 2 hour session of pre-schooler wind-sprints.  As if I can't see their tiny bodies flash back and forth from bed to bed through their slightly open bedroom door, or hear their giggles and squeals as they drag everything they own from one bed to the other, my twins have the nerve to look genuinely surprised when I appear and order them back to bed.  Ten thousand times in an hour.  Today they had the decency to engage in this mania fairly quietly...but come on!  Without naps, they're normally fried by six.  Add the running and heart-racing glee of being sneaky and they're practically face-planting by supper.  And grumpy, and clumsy, and zombie-eyed...  

History, Mystery, take a nap already!  Have you seen this book?


Our new rule is that once in bed they are not allowed out of bed until mommy or daddy says so.  To date, this rule seems only to apply at night.  No amount of sit-downs or talking-tos or stern looks has stemmed the nap-time antics.  So for the time being, and foreseeable future, I have lost my nap-time work-window and am back to writing only at night, with a brain bruised by hours of "get back in your own bed!" and "leave your sister alone!" followed by hours of being whined-at, tugged-on, and "no!"ed and "why?"ed to near insanity.  

Still angelic mind you.  But tired angels.

What better time to put Pilar's book, and myself, to the test?


My first attempt came--and quickly went--yesterday.  To no fault of Pilar's, I got through the Introduction (one page) and How To Use This Book (page and a half) before the day succumbed to twin-juggling.  In fact, I got just far enough to read that at the end of each ten minute "Take Ten" exercise (which I look forward to attempting), I'll see a summary of "What you've accomplished," which Pilar promises will remind me that I have actually moved forward in my story "despite the short amount of time in which you've worked."  Well, it was indeed a short amount of time.  What did I accomplish?  

I got started.  And that's not nothin', sweetheart.

So, I'm gonna stick with Pilar (I'll keep you posted on the new project and its progress), and I'm gonna channel my Dragon luck (starting now, whether it starts now or in February), and I'm gonna tell myself the Mayans would've simply tossed the old and started a new calendar in the eleventh hour of 2012 just like the rest of us who wait to the last minute to buy our new calendars so we can get 'em at half-price.  This year mine features tree frogs.   

Dragon up!

Actual Fear of Virtual Dates

Other than the utter lack of flying cars and jetpacks, I love living in the future.  But I have no idea what advice I'll be giving my twin daughters about dating.  

Okay, I have some pretty unyielding ideas about the NATURE and CHARACTER of any relationship they enter, and maybe I should recommend they not trade dates (they're identical twins), but if social media and virtual living continue on their current trajectory, I think I've got a caveman's chance at a cotillion of understanding the mechanics of whatever courting is becoming.

Come to think of it, what I know about "traditional dating" is pretty limited.  First date with my husband, we went to a movie -- a terrible, terrible movie, featuring bestiality, which cost me my laundry money for the week and was preceded by four hours of believing he'd stood me up, topped only by believing he was mocking me throughout the date and horus after.  Not a good first date, but a memorable story.  Check back -- I'll tell it sometime...

I thought Half-Life was something of a fluke when it was new.  Of course, I thought that about Sims and MMOGs and (okay, I'm a neanderthal) Twitter, My Space, Facebook (yeah, I get it, I must hang my head in shame), and now there are hundreds (thousands?) of social media hubs that are apparently so engrossing, people are doing their darndest to get as virtually close to actual sex with one or more partners who may not even exist outside the ether...  When I was a tyke, my parents told me one of the major goals of dating was to see and get to know the real person behind the nerves and social mask, and to muster the gumption to come out from behind mine.  It's quite possible by the time my girls are dating, teens'll be romantically pursuing -- heck, designing! -- ideal A.I. soul-mates instead of bothering with real people.

I have daughters.  They're gonna date.  Eek!

About SPOILER ALERT! Bambi...

We have a very vocal apartment.  Our refrigerator occasionally wails a shrill, broken-hearted lament that sometimes goes on for quarters of an hour, our walls are thin, and our bathroom is a cacophony of water, pipe and pressure any time of day.  If you've ever done sound design, it's a great place to live.  Our twins soon took an interest in the sounds and their many suspected causes, but one day I was startled to notice one or the other storming around (they like to take turns with these things -- they're impressively fair about things like this) with crossed arms and bloody-murderous looks.  

"What's the matter?  Did something happen?" I ask.

"I'm mad!"

"I can see that.  You look mad.  What are you mad about?"

"No, I'm angry!"

"Oh, I see.  What are you angry about?"

After a moment of deep introspection, she'd announce, with a vehemence that trumpeted intolerable personal offense, "THE WATER IN THE PIPES!" and then go on storming and huffing and crossing arms with vicious expressions.

They were practicing.  I'm a youngest child, and I didn't recall ever seeing children practice feelings before.  I guess we'd managed a relatively conflict-free household up 'til then, because for months, typically on alternating days (to share), one would affect the pose and manner of outrage and go through the motions of being mad and talking about it.  It was really difficult not to laugh -- it was REALLY cute! -- but it was obvious this process was sincere and an important component of developmental emotional play.

Now, I'll admit to fast-forwarding Walt Disney's "Bambi" past the [SPOILER ALERT] mother's death scene, telling my girls simply, "it's time for Bambi to go spend time with his daddy now," and they still don't seem to mind.  Initially, I did this to let them see the parts of the story I thought they were best able to understand and enjoy.  After all, they're three now and still not quite clear on the idea that waking up from an afternoon nap is not waking up to an entirely different day.  But seeing them play-practice feelings (wholly new and doubly startling for me when they switched from acting out anger to "help, help, emergency!"), I realized what I was seeing them do is exactly the reason so many stories, especially directed at a child audience, make little kids cry.  Stories afford us the great luxury of a multitude of surrogate lifetimes, showing us our many possible futures.  The best ones, those true to the Virtues, show us paths to the light, ways to overcome tragedy, pain, loss, fear, and the consequences of yielding to the "dark side."  We see Bambi love and grow and suffer, and we see him overcome.  If a fawn can do it, so can we.  If only Darth Vader had watched Bambi. 

Realizing all this, I recently let the story play out, no fast-forward abbreviation or quick cut to Bambi's time with daddy, armed for the moment my daughters asked me to "pause it," so they could ask me with a mix of awe and wonder and empathy, "Did Bambi's mommy die?"


"Yes," I answered, relieved to see they don't quite get what that means yet.  

"Mommy, will you die?" my eldest asked, wide-eyed.


"Someday," I said, resolved to talk to them honestly and plainly, though I did add without any reasonable foundation beyond my own hope it's true, "but not for a long time."

Then she was quiet and I thought we were done for the moment until she asked very quietly, "Mommy, will I die?"


Mommy shoulda fast-forwarded...