I left Baylor at home with my mom over the weekend to attend a wedding in Los Angeles. The decision to leave him was harder than I had thought; but with much encouragement from other mamas who had “cut the cord” (again), I went.

I’d been planning and stressing for the past month. Pumping and freezing enough breast milk to hold Bay over until I got back was no easy feat. I did not have a supply beforehand (classic Allison), and really do hate cleaning all of the little parts of my super pump, so I rarely take the time to fill a bag with my precious liquid. I pumped and pumped and had just enough to feel like I was not leaving my child without, um, food.

I started a non-profit called Project Parachute with Jason Mesnick who was the bachelor on tv. We give child care scholarships to single mamas and dads who are working or going to school. We also are starting support groups across the country for single parents who need to vent about all the dynamic parts of single parenting. This process has been intense and I have learned more than any college class could have taught me. Anyone who has filed a tax-exemption application (or 501c3) with the IRS knows what a task this can be… It has also provided me with the opportunity to help some single parents out there!

It also meant that I was invited to Jason’s wedding, and to represent this project that I have become so passionate about.

I met Christina, the other executive director of Project Parachute. We’ve been talking on the phone for almost 6 months and started the foundation together – from across the country. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and we met for the first time in LA. She is fabulous. Christina has followed another “famous single dad” and insisted that we meet up with him.

An absolute bonus about LA was meeting Matt Logelin. Matt’s wife just died after giving birth to their daughter, Maddie, while still in the hospital. Matt started a blog and a non-profit, and is in the process of finishing a book about his experience. After picking his brain about how to run a successful foundation, Matt disclosed that he digs sweets, good music, and dropping f-bombs. I obviously wanted to be his new bff.

Matt talked about his blog and what it did for him. He never considered himself a writer, but just started doing it to cope with his loss… and his new love, Maddie. His writing is raw and honest and to the point while still poetic. There is no beating around the bush or leaving you wondering about what he meant. He told me that he had to stop caring about what other people thought and just write exactly what he observed and felt.

Of course we have different writing styles – I am more into telling a story… with a splash of “funny” – and I’m too nervous about what everyone will say if I bare my soul to the world (ok, maybe not “the world”). It was inspiring and amazing and it broke my heart. All of it.

Meeting Matt, and then witnessing the behind-the-scenes of a televised wedding couldn’t have been more of a juxtaposition. Both famous daddios, and for entirely different reasons. Both working on helping single parents… and a few new loves.

Maybe I do need to be a little more “raw” with my writing. I guess for Matt, after losing the love of your life – in front of you – you realize that the small stuff doesn’t matter and who gives a shit about what people think. It’s making the most out of your life, and about being the best parent you can be to the little eyes that look up to you and trust each decision that you make. Right?

I gave Bay extra kisses today… Then, he peed on me and I loved every second of it.

[photo credit: Flickr- Viastula]

Last night I was reading with Daija, and after a few rounds of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom she got out another favorite… Grandfather Twilight. I read it to her once and then she flipped through a few pages. On the last page, the dog and cat pictured in the story are curled up asleep. She said to them ‘Good night… I love you…’ then kissed them/the book. When I read it to her again, on the first page you see the door to Grandfather Twilight’s house in the trees, and she reached over and put her fist on it. I asked her if she was knocking, and then she knocked. I ask her sometimes if she can identify objects (where is the moon, where is the cat), after she pointed out to me ‘him glasses’ a couple months ago (there is a picture where the book he’s reading at the beginning of the story is placed on a table with the glasses he was wearing on top). So anyway, instead of asking her to identify objects, I asked her on the next page, what G.T. was doing, expecting her to say something about him reading. She answered ‘him sit chair’ and so I asked ‘What is he doing in the chair?’ and she said ‘him read story’ babble babble ‘him cat’ (cat was curled up on the back of the chair). In the next two pages G.T. unlocks a chest and takes out a pearl, and she told me ‘him lock’ ‘ him keys’ and ‘him open.’ Then the story continues without words and he walks through the forest to the beach, with this pearl growing each step. He releases it into the sky above the water. At this page, Daija reached out and pretended to snatch the big pearl from the sky and said ‘gimme my moon.’ I asked her if she wanted the moon, and she pretended to snatch it again and claimed it as ‘her’ moon. Then the story shows G.T. walking home, and when he approaches his house in the trees, Daija reaches out her fist again, and I realize that she was not knocking… she’s pretending to open the door. She is developing such an imagination!

Kira’s back is a bit better, and we are hoping by tomorrow she will be up to snowmobiling or even– fingers crossed — skiing.  This morning we headed out early to the Telluride Gay Ski Week Hospitality Tent at the “Beach” at the bottom of the slopes at the Mountain Village.  The staff and sponsors were extremely friendly and helpful, pointing us to all the action.  We also picked up some great swag – classy pens from American Airlines, lip balm from Matthew Shepard Foundation, herbal throat lozenges from Ricola, Nalgene water bottles from Brita, Jucy Juice (hydrating is the name of the game at 10,000 elevation) and other sponsors.  We hopped on a gondola, which we learned is the only free transit of its type in the US, and we crossed over the mountain to Telluride town center.

After Kira’s fall with Stephen yesterday, we thought it best to have our hands free to hold rails, keep our balance, etc., so we stuffed him in his snow suit into my back pack, so he rode high and dry above all about town.  Then we saw a dad pulling his tot on a tiny sled and we realized that was the way to go.  We got a sled at the local ACE hardware store, and we were on our way with Stephen literally in tow.  He loved it!

The town itself defines quaint.  The snow-covered streets are lined with story-book cute chalets and small independent shops and boutiques.  A couple local snowboarder girls who rode the gondola with me last night informed me that Telluride has a commitment to no chain stores, so you will never see a Starbucks or Pottery Barn or any of the stores that populate Every Mall USA littering the landscape of this purist town. How refreshing.

We stopped for lunch at the charming TPK Bistro where we had a delicious (and surprisingly reasonably priced) lunch of Panini di Italian prosciutto ham and fontina cheese and Stromboli di pollo, served by a friendly and gracious wait staff, who seemed genuinely happy to serve us.  Stephen was well-behaved the entire meal, though it didn’t matter much because we were the restaurant’s only guests, at 12 pm.  Despite excellent food, great service and an ideal location on Colorado Avenue, one of the town’s main streets, the eatery was empty, as was much of the town.

One of the producers of Telluride Gay Ski Week told me that this is the tail end of the season, so hence the quiet streets, but with most Gay Ski Week visitors arriving today, the town is about to get much livelier!  Now, I’m off to my room to get ready for the Stoli Lounge and then the opening party here at my home base, the fabulous Peaks Resort.  It may be a quaint sleepy little town of 2,000, but it’s about to wake up!

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[photo credit: Flikcr- Timo wr2]

This is our four-year anniversary, Molly and me. As you know, I adopted her from the animal shelter on the day Michelle Kwan dropped out of the Olympics so the Winter Olympics will always remind me of my dog.

Speaking of which, where IS Michelle K? I haven’t seen her in the stands at the Pacific Coliseum, so unless she is being hidden from the camera by the obscuring presence of that ridiculous bong-totin’ galoot, Michael Phelps, I guess she’s not in Vancouver. I hope she is okay. I hope she is doing better – four years later – than Molly is right now.

Poor Molly. She is not doing great. She’s old, lame and incapable of sleeping for more than two hours at a time. I am back to living the life of a new mommy – up every hour, stumbling and lurching my way towards the back door to let Molly out and then falling asleep on the kitchen counter while I wait for her to come back. Not that I put my newborns out in the back yard to pee while I slept on the kitchen counter, no sireeee. I stayed awake back then. And had headaches all the time. And I was very bitchy. Very bitchy. In fact, Robin once said to me, “I guess the beauty of you being a bitch every day is that no one will ever accuse you of having PMS.”

And now, almost thirty years later, here I am back in the world of the sleep-deprived, only without a baby. In fact, come to think of it, I am the one who sleeps like a baby these days, not Molly:  I wake up every two hours, cry, and then eat until I fall asleep again. All night long. If my pants get any tighter, I am going to have to take to wearing those stretchy Onesies with the snaps on the crotch.

It’s totally fucked up that at the two stages of life when everyone around us most needs their rest – babyhood and infirm old age – we are the worst sleepers. And exhausting the people who are in charge of our very survival is probably not the smartest thing to do. Robin once put that red-hued, gum-numbing medicine in our son’s nose because he was too tired to keep his eyes open while taking his turn soothing our teething baby.  He did it, like, four times during the night and when I saw the poor kid in the morning, he looked like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.  My friend Julie once got her baby’s toe fungus medicine mixed up with the pink-eye medicine.  You’d think that squirting toe fungus ointment into your baby’s eyes would sober one into paying closer attention, but it just so happens that a few years later, Julie ignored her daughter’s complaints about boogers bothering her nose -ignored her for days – before realizing that the booger in there was actually one of Julie’s pearl earrings.  Oh, and my friend Wade once left his newborn baby in the car after dropping off his wife at a restaurant before he went searching for a free parking place. Which was five blocks away. Which was where he left the car – and the baby – and sprinted to the restaurant, ready to enjoy a nice dinner. Until his wife asked him where the baby was. I bet after that, it wasn’t such a nice dinner with the wife.

I was halfway through a vitamin C tablet at four o’clock this morning while waiting for Molly to finish peeing outside before I realized that it wasn’t a vitamin C tablet at all; it was seven Wheat Thins with Laughing Cow cheese on them. Okay, well, I guess I knew about that, but who can blame me? When you are tired, you do not make good decisions.

I’ve been through this before. Blacky was an old cat, and for most of her life she needed nothing from us. The kids found her when we lived in LA – she was a stray; self-sufficient and completely independent. It was a relationship that knew no demands. When we moved to Oregon, Blacky came with us and adjusted to her new life by settling herself in the upstairs of our new house and never setting foot outside – or downstairs – again.

By the end of her life, I hated Blacky.  I loved her, too, because sometimes even after she’d shit on my carpet and barfed up a bloody hairball in my bed, and even after we had to have all her teeth extracted  (to the tune of a thousand dollars) so all she could eat was baby food, I could still look at that dainty cat face of hers and feel my heart stretch out and soften. But I was exhausted all the time and she cried all night long. She needed a spoonful of food at 3 AM, and then another spoonful at 3:30 and then she pooped and then she meowed that mournful, primal meow for about a half hour.

I used to lie in bed and listen to her calls. Murr-ahow it began, in a soft guttural clearing of her throat. Murr-OHWHW it crescendo-ed, louder and more alien, but I pretended not to hear her. Once, I swear, she jumped on my bed and over-articulated her meows right into my ear, the way we speak loudly and slowly to non-English speakers. Me-ow. Do-you-understand-this, you idiot American human? ME-OW.

A few years ago I complained to my mom about how Blacky was taking over my life. “It’s not worth it, you’re exhausted” she said. “Put her to sleep. You need your sleep.”

I was aghast. My mom just laughed.  “Oh, come on. Stick a little poison in some brisket and give it to her. She’ll eat it right up.”  I didn’t know if she was joking or not.

But either way, I still make sure my mom eats the first bite of her brisket at Passover. I mean, I used to keep Mom up a lot when I was a baby. She might be holding a grudge.

I spent the better part of the last week as a single parent…

needless to say this blog entry is a little more off the cuff than my prior two.

I haven’t had a lot of time, or inclination to sit around reflecting…

any reflecting time has been spent reflecting on Bushmill’s and Reese’s  Pieces.

Jennifer, went to Cleveland for a Theater Conference – the hoity toity academic was presenting a paper there – and managed to use the time to connect with a few long lost friends and colleagues, as well as get some fabulous intellectual stimulation, and, I think, come home ready to charge into the last few dissertation battles.

Some amazing and interesting things happened while Jen was gone.

I streamlined, I stayed calm, my rope or fuse or whatever was longer.  I set limits and boundaries and followed thru with the consequences. I had no problems ending a meal when it was obvious it was going to lead further into chaos. I had no doubts handing out a serious consequence or determining when it was required.

I found a balance between planned activities and spontaneity. Lil’ Chaos put herself to bed, and got herself dressed in the morning, she was self-sufficient in a lot of ways, as a matter of fact.

I got to put Wobzilla to bed!

I guess as the sole resource, I found reserves of patience I didn’t know I had.

I guess when there was no one around to come in and bat clean up I was able to find the strength or fortitude or determination to follow thru to the end of the game.

I guess on my own I was able and willing to set the bar a little higher for the 4 year old, out of necessity.

It’s amazing how the chemistry of a family is so interwoven – and that when one element is missing it can change the dynamic dramatically.  Amazing too that while we all felt like we were missing a limb and needed Momma terribly, we got by.

Now the challenge remains; how to integrate some of what I learned and did now that Jen is back. It is so easy and reflexive to fall back into old patterns and habits, I mean they don’t even feel like habits and patterns, they just feel like “how it is…” But I know a little something more now, about myself as a father, and it feels good.

It also feels good to have Jen home!

Fashion magazine just named Some Girls one of six great airplane reads. I once had a friend in an awesome band who, when I admitted that I cleaned my house to her album, said, “That’s so great. I always wanted to write an album that people cleaned their house to.” In the same vein, I always wanted to write a book that people would read on an airplane. So I’m psyched.

I just celebrated my birthday a couple weeks ago.  I was born in 1973, the same year that change was declared impossible in the field of psychiatry for gays and lesbians, the year that 81 words became 263 in the nomenclature.   It’s hard for me to believe that only 37 years ago, being gay was a mental illness.  That notion seems like it should be centuries away from where we are today yet it was barely within my lifetime that I may have been locked up because of love for a human being of the wrong sex.  I can’t possibly imagine what gays and lesbians of that time must have felt to be so deeply oppressed.  It would make a person crazy don’t you think?

Susan and I sat in the car listening to NPR quietly playing on the radio as Sophia took her afternoon nap in the back.  The story was about the history of the deletion of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the people who fought against the psychiatric board, determined to prove that being gay is simply a variant from heterosexuality and not lunacy.

Prior to this great change in our history, homosexuality was pronounced by the Psychiatric authorities as a mental illness.  “Much literature on mental health and homosexual patients centered on their depression, substance abuse and suicide.” Most of these studies were taken from prisoners and people under extensive psychiatric care.  When one is not accepted for their lifestyle there is obviously a tremendous amount of stress that comes with that burden and so much so that it would likely drive you to severe depression.  These arguments were passionately presented to the board of Psychiatry and at the end of it all it was determined that “social ostracism, legal discrimination, internalization of negative stereotypes, and limited support structures indicate factors homosexual people face in Western societies that often adversely affect their mental health”.

35 years later, in 2008, the year my beautiful daughter was born, we appointed for the first time in American history, an African American President.  The night Barack Obama won I rocked Sophia to sleep sobbing for the amazing change of which our country is capable.  I am proud to say that the only change that is impossible is that of who I was born to be- a girl who loves a girl who has a little girl that completes a happy family.

Last night, when I opened the door to greet my daughter as she arrived home from school she looked up at me and said, “When our friends and family members die, my heart will break open.”

She is five and a half going on thirty.  Part Hello Kitty, part Sarah Bernhardt.  She is devastatingly sad and ragingly angry and her heart (broken or not) is huge and juicy and filled with passion.  She is clearly the child of my womb.

I moved aside, to let her walk into the house.

“Did something happen to make you sad?”  I asked.

“Just thinking about death,” she replied, skipping into the dining room and doing a little twirl.  “Look what I’ve got.”

She held out a white paper tub.  Beneath a circle of mesh on the lid a mass of small black bodies moved together — shiny black legs and abdomens and an occasional flash of enameled red wings.

“Ladybugs!  They’re ready for an aphid buffet.”

As Sadie made plans to set the ladybugs free in our cauliflower bed where they would decimate the population of aphids, I went back to stirring the risotto on the stove.  My kids have been to several funerals and memorial services.  They are interested in cemeteries and know what a casket is for.  Sadie will often tell people that we have three pets and three graves, which, though slightly disconcerting, is true.  We’ve lost an old cat, a hamster and a fish and we’ve still got an old cat, a hamster and a fish, so chances are this loss is not going to stop.

My dad died just over seven years ago.  When Sadie was three she could not stop asking, “So your Dad is dead, right?”  At first this question brought tears to my eyes, but after awhile, I kept answering and answering and it opened the way to a lot of long conversations.

“Yes, my Dad is dead,” I said.  And Sadie and her brother wondered what happened next.  We talked about heaven and reincarnation and the possibility that this life, here and now, is all we’ve got.  Theo likes the idea of heaven because he wants to know he will continue to move around and Sadie hopes there are angels because they have beautiful wings.  We talked about how dinosaurs might be reincarnated into people, but how they most likely evolved into birds.  We all think it’s nice to imagine that there is a kind of observatory where our loved ones can train telescopes on our lives and gaze at us for a few minutes.

The risotto finished cooking, my son hopped out of the bath and Sadie returned from the garden smiling.  She’d tipped out her little bucket of live things and now she was set on making a necklace for the cat.  Sometimes the workings of her mind are so fluid, it’s hard to keep up.  My dad was this way.  I hope he’s watching.

So I took a plunge from one of the skyscraper high diving boards of parenting today and talked to Tyler (and Halle) about huffing. I’ve been dreading having to do this for so long… you just never want to have to be the one to tell your kids about the bad stuff. But if he doesn’t hear about it from me first… I don’t want to think about where and how he’ll learn it. He’ll be in Jr. High next year. He knows that drugs are bad, and says all the time that he won’t do them… he understands that there are legal and illegal drugs, etc. But huffing is something he might not understand is a ‘drug.’ I’ve been getting these newsletters from www.theantidrug.com (that’s me, btw, in case y’all haven’t heard the PSA’s), and today there was a link to a newspaper article about a couple boys in Michigan that died (Second Bay City teen dies after ‘huffing’ accident). I took it home and had him read it, and we talked about what it means to get high… he thought it meant get taller. Can you just imagine, my little baby who is always complaining about being short and wanting to grow, being offered a way to ‘get tall?’ He’d sign right up. So I explained that sometimes people use drugs to get high, and it’s kinda like people using alcohol to get drunk. And I told him how I hope it never happens, but that some time someone might ask him to get high by breathing some fumes, or smoking something, or taking a pill, or sniffing something into his nose, or injecting something in his arm with a needle. I told him how sometimes kids think that it’s not dangerous to breathe in fumes from paint or gas because you can buy it at the store, but that it’s still really dangerous… it makes you do stupid things like light cigarettes by gas and cause fires, and the chemicals can hurt your body so bad that you can be sitting at home and just fall over dead, even if you’re only 14 years old, or 12 years old, or 10, or 8. I told him that getting high can make you hurt people, and steal from people, even people you love like your family. I told him how if a woman is pregnant and does drugs it can hurt her baby so bad the baby can die, or be born with something wrong with its body, or with brain damage that would make it hard for the baby to learn in school. He wanted to know how I learned so much about drugs, so I told him my introduction to the concept (Elvis) and then he looked at me like I was stupid and commented, ‘you know I’m going to think about this tonight when I’m trying to go to sleep’ and I told him I wished I never had to ever tell him anything scary or bad, but that I have to make sure he understands how dangerous huffing is. But he’s sleeping sweetly now, so hopefully ‘Pirates Past Noon’ was what he was thinking of after I turned out the light.

Cyndi Whitmore

I may have mentioned I have this little, er, quirk wherein I imagine kicking the butt of a man near me. As I said before, I believe this is solely a function of wondering about my own strength and not a sign of any latent violent tendencies within me. Still, I am not unaware of the reaction my confession evokes. I see you scooting your chairs away from me as you read this.

And I feel a need to explain myself.

I read somewhere that the most important thing women over fifty can do to keep themselves healthy is stretch every day. As a woman over fifty, I generally discard the advice I read because so much of it  centers around changing my negative attitude about aging and, frankly, my negative attitude about aging is all I have left of my youth so I want to hold on to it.

But this stretching thing got me to thinking. They’re right. We rarely stretch ourselves. We don’t use all we’ve got.

After The Revolution, when we all live on my commune in side-by-side yurts and grow hemp, stretching ourselves to our limits will be a regular part of daily life. I mean, just chopping wood and folk dancing to the water hole will fulfill the 10,000 steps a day quota that the makers of New Lifestyles pedometers warn we all need to stave off premature death. And I bet our children would be perfectly well- behaved because after a day of using up all they’ve got, they’d be tired. In fact, we’d all be tired. The good tired. Not the tired I usually am, bitchy and distracted by afternoon, licking the morning coffee grounds from the compost pail for a buzz, and updating my list of transgressions the world has committed against me (most recent: water in my ear that is making me dizzy when I look down to type. Ow.)

I took a lot of dance classes in college. Mexican couples dances, Indonesian Gamelan dancing, Greek dancing, every day was filled with dance classes. (Note to the college bound: be an Ethnology of Non-Western Music and Dance major. Totally rocks. And when you graduate, the world will offer you a smorgasbord of jobs. Bitchin jobs. Like, once I sang Jewish folk songs in a maximum security prison in Tracy, California. Try to land that gig with a degree in, say, medicine.)

What was my point?

Oh, right. Dance classes. At the end of a day, I was wonderfully, satisfyingly, deliciously spent. I slept like a log (as opposed to these days when I sleep like a baby: wake up every two hours and cry until I eat). I believe that when we move to the commune, there will be no fighting, no bitchiness, no whining, no interrupted sleep because we will all – children, adults, parents – be well used up. Also, because we can smoke our hemp tunics when life gets stressful.

But in modern life, here in suburbia, we live such contained lives. We have to share armrests in movie theaters. We have to refrain from jumping onto the moving clothes rack at the dry cleaners and taking a ride. We are not even allowed to finger wrestle prospective employers when they shake our hands. And we are left with a bunch of leftover energy that has nowhere to go. We are left wondering just how strong, fast, loud, obnoxious, fearless and mighty we can be.

So I check out the men in my classes. I take in their upper body strength, the contour of their forearms, their overall look and I fantasize bopping them on the nose, kneeing their groins and, occasionally, swinging them over my head and twirling them round and round like Brutus used to do to Popeye before the can of spinach magically appeared.  I have no reason to feel threatened by men. I’ve never been in a situation that would warrant a need to hurt them or get away fast. Well, once a guy forgot to pay me for a parenting consult but he remembered as soon as he got home and he came back. With a ten dollar tip, as apology. No need to break his kneecaps.

My point being, there is no rational reason to fantasize about this. And, let’s be honest, unless a man was in the middle of a serious heart attack, I’d probably not be the victor. I mean, I am no weakling but my 45 minute daily stroll in the park with my dog and the occasional foray into Curves isn’t gonna get the job done against a forty-something dad. I suppose I could just sit on him and that would be that, but I am too vain to use my weight as a weapon because what if he lived, and told everyone, “she fucking sat on me and she weighs a ton. I thought I was dead” and then the papers would sleuth out my actual weight and report it and, yikes. Yikes.

Still, I crave real-life experience. Tae-Bo with TV Billy Blanks in my bedroom is like practice- kissing your pillow, you know? So with my late-fifties around the corner, I am going to do a little more stretching in my life.

I believe I will begin by reaching over my computer to that glass of wine.

Ow, my ear. Damn it.

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Ann Brown