Don't Like it......

So there's some unfortunate drama as the school year winds down.  Facebook is helping, in it's own weird way.  I hope things turn out for the best, that the bullies are properly dealt with. That the victims aren't terribly bitter and scarred.  

There have been some amazing parents and brave kids who were not bystanders and stood up to the bullies, so lessons are being learned.  

High school should be a breeze, right?

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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Write On, Mamas! announce our newborn Anthology

Mamas Write, (Bittersweet Press)
29 essays by the Write On, Mamas! 

It's been a long and thoughtful gestation, and our due date is imminent.  Deep cleansing breath, and.......

Sunday, April 27 (3 PM) at Napa Bookmine

and

Sunday, May 4 (7 PM) at Book Passage Corte Madera

we get to follow Ayelet Waldman and Andrew Sean Greer!  OMG.

Join us!
Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

and stay tuned for the A to Z challenge......

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Jungle Plant

there's one in every litter

Remember looking at National Geographic magazine's pictures of jungle tribes?  Lying on the living room floor, your head bracing hand falling asleep, the scratchy carpet irritating the skin of your belly where your Hang Ten hand-me-down shirt had lifted up,  turning the slick pages with your functioning hand.  The smooth skinned naked natives with their blackened nub smiles both fascinated and repulsed.  The body manipulations: ritual tattooing, scaring, piercing and stretching of the dark jungle moist skin was so other, alien.  I thought about this as I seated myself at the dinner table on Christmas Eve, forcibly softening my squint of disapproval and holding my tongue in order to enjoy a rare visit from my eldest son.

to find some books on xeriparenting

Modestly pierced ears were pretty much unanimous at the table.  My scientist brother-in-law has tiny hoops in each ear, but my eldest son has surgical steel in various gages looping in and out in three different directions, plus rosewood bottle cap sized plugs in stretched lobes, but most festive is the thick shiny silver bull ring ending in double ball bearings dangling from his upturned nose, jewelry that would be more suited on a 350 pound Samoan, not my delicate featured, freckled, blue eyed Scot-Irish Neo Primitive. Plus I think we can all agree that white boy dreadlocks are unfortunate. Two ambitious rope heads are seated at our dinner table. Brothers, one dark, one red. Seeing them seated next to each other, eating only the quinoa salad, I recall rinsing playground sand and sweat from their toddler scalps as they battled with multiple Batman action figures – and me -  in the tub.  I would pour water from a Toy Story popcorn bucket as they covered their eyes with a washcloth, the stream pulling their ringlets down their backs as the suds were rinsed away. Now those curls are matted and hidden in rough ropes that smell worse than they look and include remnants of camp outs on Mount Tam, beads and feathers.  The elder, the redhead, ‘the Gingerdread Man’, has crafted his signature look into a dread mullet, cutting the front short, growing a pompadour, bleaching it, then shaving it down to a burr cut again, and with the red ropes pulled back, he passes as employable. 

The Gingerdread Man, as he sits here before me, is six months into what we are collectively agreeing to agree is a gap year. He left college after his freshman year and he is the only person at the table who is happy about this. His freshman year of college was a busy one.  While he did well academically, he also hopped freight trains, took up with a nefarious crew in Portland, can use the term ‘squat house’ with confidence, has earned an arrest record and he has three four DIY tattoos. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he hasn’t been wearing his retainer.

I’m enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with my family and baffled by my poseur Hobo. When he left school he and his tribe went on food stamps because they didn’t want to be tied down to summer jobs. He wanted to roam and since we, the evil fun oppressors wouldn’t be sponsoring his plan, well he showed us. He and I had a chat about integrity and I might have used the words ‘lacking a moral compass’ when I forgot to use my inside voice.

Willing to sleep in a squat house in Oakland or the joint custody tribal van rather than his bed in our home.  Opportunities rejected, intentionally festooned to appear unemployable, throwing himself headlong with gusto into risk laden situations, all the while knowing he has options.  His reality is his choice.

HoboCam Pic

My choice is to detach, and enjoy my dinner, sip my wine and breathe. I look at my kids and realize it was never my intention to raise house plants, children who fear the world and I cannot control his 20 year old choices. I am fascinated and repulsed. I say nothing. 

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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F is for Fan

I am a San Francisco Giants fan with a small f. I have some shirts and caps and attend a few games each season. I love to watch them play, have minor crushes on players and I always root for the Giants. I do admire the the die hard Fans, the facepaint, dye your Mohawk, full orange and black battlegear FANS.

I went to my first Giants game when I was visiting a family friend, Lance, and he took my friend May and I to Candlestick and we froze our asses off. In July. We were teenagers from Phoenix and this was a harrowing experience. I’d never been to a Major League baseball game before, at that time the Diamondbacks didn’t exist. I earned my first Croix de Stick pin, without knowing what it was.

 I was living in New York in 1989, had just opened a beer and settled in to watch game 3 of the Bay Area World Series when the screen went black. Being New York I assumed it was the cable. Soon we learned of the Loma Prieta earthquake and watched sportscasters doing hard news as they interviewed drunk tailgaters in the Stick parking lot holding up chucks of fallen concrete and yelling ‘Go Giants!’

 When I moved to San Francisco in 1991 we started attending games, and my son went to his first as a four month old, complete with his first Giants cap. I have a picture somewhere of both my boys at the last game played at the Stick, with their grandfather in 1999. They lost to the Dodgers. Boo! I learned that day that The Beatles played their last complete concert there in 1966.

The Giants move to AT & T (PacBell/SBC) Park coincided with my daughter’s birth. Our first game at the new park I had a three month old Bjorned to my chest and was terrified she’d get beaned by a foul ball. Our seats were now behind third base and the Giants dugout, and she’s grown up attending games and has become a real Fan with a capital F.


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D is for Direction

seventeen NOLS Alaska

My son was an early walker, and would lunge like a two foot tall Frankenstein's monster at any dog, arms outstretched bellowing 'Daw! Daw!'. Leaning forward, the weight of his giant ginger baby head nearly toppling him, gaining speed, he lurched forward until he was face to face with the Daw. 

 Dogs loved this. He was clearly their new chew toy. He also had an uncanny talent for impaling his forehead on all coffee table corners. In hindsight, nicknaming him Danger Boy was a bad omen.

A logical adult knows it takes at least couple months before any real respect for your parents grips the conscious mind of a child. Screeching 'No!' as my lumbering infant went on Daw patrol was not effective. I had read in one of my useless baby behavior books, that I needed to redirect his impulses, so that 'No!' would not become another meaningless mom noise, like 'Wear a Helmet!' This was months before he gave up on crawling and started running with the dogs.

ten

I nursed him in the beautiful oak rocker I'd bought long before I was pregnant, so beautiful it needed several cushions and a blanket to be comfortable. It was because of his teensy crab claw infant fingernails that I first wanted to yell at my gorgeous sweet baby. They grew as he slept, Nosferatu style, and as he nursed into a milk orgy he would take a miniscule bit of tortured breast and pinch the bejesus out of me. I would take his fat dough baby hand and nibble off the nails with tears of pain in my eyes and he would pass out like a drunk frat boy, milk running down his chin.

Throughout his school years it was much the same. He lurched forward towards the most exciting thing, skirting disaster, right on the razor's edge. Direction Danger, full steam ahead. My attempts at redirection have been mostly about health and safety, and largely ignored. From sunscreen, helmets, drugs, condoms, hitchhiking to the latest tattoo, I say my piece and hope for the best. Sometimes I tell him to call his aunt or Gramma, and miraculously he does.

This morning I texted him for the forth day in a row, Check in please, with no response. Because we're on the same phone plan I can see that he read the message. So I know he's alive. I have sketchy second hand knowledge that he's headed to New Orleans via Mexico, hitchhiking with two other young men. I am doing my Lamaze Breathing and hoping the universe has a plan for Danger Boy.

nineteen    photo by one of his tribe

He called while I was writing this. I had turned my phone off and he left a voice message. 'I'm in Reno. I'm fine. Well Reno isn't, this place is bad. My phone got wet but it's working now. We're hitchhiking to Salt Lake City today. Bye.' His Direction, for today, is East. That's all I've got, but for today it's enough.


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