Awkwardly Social

First month down, you guys!  A million to go!  And at the rate it’s taking me to write this entry, he’ll be 8 years old wondering why I’m still talking about that time he peed in his face, shat on his dad and puked during a nap.

Moe went from a sweet sleepy baby with jaundice to a grumpy baby who hates when he’s either not eating or not on his tummy.   That’s not entirely true, but the kid does have a healthy appetite and really would prefer we let the SIDS fears go and just let him sleep on his stomach already.  He probably wants a blanket and a pillow too, goddamnit.

All kidding aside, he’s a pretty good baby.  He smiles at us (we think? sometimes it corresponds with a major shitstorm, but other times it’s when Seth gets home and says hello).  He has these adorable coos and squeaks.  Even his early fussing before he starts to wail is pretty adorable.  It sort of sounds like he’s fake laughing. He finally lost his belly button stump last week, so we finally gave the little buster a bath.  He LOVES the bath.

He goes by Buster, Buster Magoo, Mr. Magoo, Moe, Momo, Momar Khadafi, Mr. Moe, Booger, Bugs, Bugsy, and Bugsy Doolittle.

We’re currently struggling with some “sleep issues” mostly he doesn’t like to sleep and we do.  It’s an issue.  Last night, Seth was up with him for 3 hours while he alternated between screaming and catnapping.  Could it be the thrush? Could it be a growth spurt?  Could it be we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing?

Yes.  We have thrush.  Yes, I have called my dear sweet baby “vagina mouth.” And my own formerly awesome breasts are now my enemy.  My yeast infectiony enemy.  After struggling with latch issues, I wasn’t aware that your breasts aren’t supposed to burn and hurt and feel awful all of the time.  So, yeah, I’ve probably had it for about a week untreated.  Moe only has a little bit of white on his tongue and doesn’t seem to be too bothered by it, he doesn’t love the Nyastin drops however, but whatever we got to coo over baby’s first prescription!

But enough about me, let’s talk about ME.  I’m still healing.  My incision looks weird.  My stomach is so weak I sometimes struggle to get out of a reclined position.  My arms are getting SUPER strong though. And as of this morning I’ve lost 25 pounds.  Which would be awesome if I only gained 30 pounds during pregnancy.  I DID NOT.  I gained 50 pounds.  So there, babycenter!

It’s all happening so fast. Slow down, baby. If you want more Moe, I post on twitter (@awkwardlysocial) and Instagram (also @awkwardlysocial).

He’s such a charming little baby. I can’t help but forgive his crying jags.

My aunt passed away this week.  She was my mother’s brother’s ex-wife, but I still called her Aunt Billie. They divorced when I was fairly young, so I don’t have any memories of her with me as an adult.  I just remember thinking of her as a fascinating gypsy, a woman who always had a cigarette in her hand, who always had pugs.

During the week of my mom’s funeral, her oldest daughter, my cousin, helped us with everything from cleaning my mom’s floor, to helping us decide what to keep and what to throw.

I was scared to call my cousins, mostly because I knew I would break down if I actually talked to them, and also because I didn’t know what to say.  But having just been there, where they are, I wanted to let them know I was thinking of them and that they weren’t alone.

I left them messages and I’ll be sending letters, but it doesn’t seem like enough.  It’s times like this when I understand why families don’t move far away from each other, why they stay close and so they can prop each other up.

I don’t know how to respond to all of your comments, except to say thank you and tell you that I cry pretty much every time I get a new one.  I cry pretty much every time I have to talk about it.

There was an empty file folder in her file cabinet that had, in her neat handwriting, the words, “Advance Directive.”  She thought about it, but just never got to it.  So we were left with the same question ringing in our ears, over and over, “What would Mom want?” My mom, an advocate for seniors and a woman who made sure all of her clients were taken care of in terms of their wills and estates, either didn’t see herself as old enough to really worry about all of that yet, or just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

To say that planning my mom’s funeral, cleaning out her apartment, taking care of her small estate and wondering about all of these unanswered questions is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, seems akin to a person taking a huge gulp of the Pacific Ocean and saying, “It’s kind of salty.”  I’ve never experienced grief of this kind. The kind that sneaks up on you when you remember the things you meant to tell your mom, but just never had the time to pick up the phone.  The kind that keeps you awake at night wondering what her last moments were like.  The kind that makes you worry about your sister because she was the one who got the call, she was the one who had to go there, she found her.  The kind that makes you feel like you shouldn’t be laughing yet and makes you wonder why you don’t find anything funny.

I’ll feel completely fine, and then I feel my shoulders sink and my stomach clench, my mom is gone.

My sister and I read the eulogy at my mother’s service today - here are my words.

Our mother’s life was one of service to her community, loving her family and educating herself and others. She was a force to be reckoned with. From releasing lab rats from the University of Minnesota to raising our ducklings in her bathtub – from protesting the Vietnam war to protesting our dirty rooms – from teaching us to read when we were infants to telling us our Master’s degrees were good but a PhD would be better – from falling in love with the desert of Arizona to moving to the rainforest of Seattle – Everything she did she did with passion. 

Mom, having grown up in a small town herself, wanted to make sure that Tavia and I weren’t small town girls.  She encouraged us to look beyond the borders of our community and reach out for bigger and better things. We were coddled only when absolutely necessary, but we were loved every moment.  Even those teenage moments when we ourselves hard to love.  Mom didn’t want her daughters to be push-overs, but I’m sure there came I time when she regretted teaching us that if you believe in your cause you better prove your side and never give up until you’ve won.  (Whether it be can we have YET ANOTHER cat, or can’t we just stay out until midnight like every other person).

The motto “Shoot for the stars and you’ll get the moon,” was altered a little bit while raising us it was more like, “Shoot for the edge of the Universe and you’ll get the Milky Way galaxy.”  We were expected to be perfect, but mom was happy that we became the flawed and slightly deranged people we are.  I never got to take her to the Oscars with me, like I one day hoped to do, and she never got to see my name on the big screen like I know she would have wanted, but she watched the terrible shows I work on and she told me “Well, I’m glad you’re working, at least.”

My mom could be a tough cookie with us, sure she cried at every Kleenex commercial and personal interest story on the news, but she trusted that we were going to be ok.  One of the last conversations I had with her, after a run of particularly bad luck for me and my husband, she cried on the phone with me and told me that she just wanted things to be easier for me, that she wanted things to go my way and that she would do anything she could just to make me feel like things were going to be OK.  We didn’t say a lot of I love yous, my mom and I, but she told me she loved me, I and said I love you too.  And I do, I love you mom and I miss you and I hope you know that I’m going to be OK.

Carol, mother to Tavia and Tamara, mother-in-law to Andre and Seth, sister to David and Harry, grandmother to Fiona and Amelia, born December 26, 1945, died July 14, 2011. We love her and miss her and will not be the same without her.

We lit our shiva candle a day late, I don’t think God or Seth’s dad will mind.  It’s sort of expected behavior from this branch of the family.

I’ve never been to the part of a funeral where the funeral director sits you down and tells you how the service is going to go, but I’m guessing most funeral directors don’t start the conversation with a long discussion about how awkward it’s going to be when the rabbi gets there, because he’s now dating the rabbi’s ex-girlfriend.  Like, he couldn’t stop talking about it.  I would have been embarrassed for him, but he was so clearly freaked out about how that would go that he couldn’t stop talking about it.  Then, oh god, when the rabbi got there, he brought it up again!  He told the rabbi “We have something in common, I’ve heard a lot about you, I’ll tell you about it later.”  I wanted to crawl in hole.  Thankfully the grave site was far away so I couldn’t just crawl in there and hide.

There are many things I don’t really understand about Jewish funerals and hopefully I won’t have a lot of opportunities to have these questions answered.  I rather there be no more funerals in my near future.

I have odd cobbled together information that when I write it down sounds like crazy rules someone made up.  I’m a traveler in a foreign country with a different alphabet when it comes to Judaism.  Some of the rules seem like they make sense, they wash the body but don’t embalm.  Then there’s the no shoes rule - something to do with bodies not being buried with the skin of an animal.  And Kosher concrete?  I guess I didn’t even know something like concrete could be Kosher.

I wanted to see him.  And I did.  It’s the same old story, he was not there, it was not him.  I remain unconvinced that making up the dead body to look like it is just sleeping is the best we can do.  But it did provide me with some closure.  He was really gone.  He was not in that body anymore.

We went to the grave site, and Seth’s daughter leaned in to me, “What’s the deal with the powder blue hearse?  I mean…  tacky.”  We smirked but were quickly distracted by trying not to step on any graves.  Then she leaned in again and said, “In college, I was really drunk and I peed on a grave.  I still feel really bad about it.”  And I said, “If a college girl ever pees on my grave, I have this feeling it won’t be the worst thing that’s ever gonna happen to my dead body.”

The rabbi began to sing the Kaddish and I tried to follow along on the phonetic side.  I have to say, when you’re just listening it all sounds very slow and plodding, but when you’re trying to sing something you’ve never heard before phonetically it goes by really fast.  I could not keep up.

We all went back to the house and ate cold cuts and drank champagne.  I got to meet the artist of one of my very favorite paintings in their house, he said, “Oh god, it’s so old, I did that in college.”  He went to college with Seth’s dad.  I looked around at the aging and elderly, gathered to send off their friend and wondered if the reality of the situation was freaking them out.  They all seemed very calm.  Maybe we all think it won’t happen to us.

Maybe we’re comforted by the prospect of finally not having to make small talk anymore.

We lit a baby Jesus candle next to the shiva candle.  They look pretty together.  And it makes the shiva candle look less lonely.

There’s a lame family joke about how my grandpa never complimented my grandma on her cooking.  She would ask him if he liked it, and he would say, “It could be worse.”  Which is, now that I think about it, really horrible.  My grandpa was kind of an asshole.  I guess we all are in our way.  But that wasn’t my point.  My point was, I got into a car accident today.

I’ll leave some of the details out, because, ugh, my insurance premium is going to go up as it is, I don’t want to give them any more ammunition.  I was on the phone with them and the adjuster got her serious voice on to tell me that I would see an increase in my premium, on top of the increase for moving into a nicer neighborhood.

Somehow I managed to crash my car.  Again.  Today.  I think the last official crash was this one.  The one I got sued for.  Which, creepily enough, is almost three years ago.  Exactly 10 days less than three years.  I’ve been in at least two other accidents since then, one which wasn’t my fault in a parking lot, the other where I bumped someone, which was my fault, but there was no damage to the other car (and neither were reported to my insurance company).  I would say I’m accident prone, but really, I’m a bad driver.  I know this.  I warn people.  I try not to drive, but I live in Los Angeles.  It’s almost impossible not to drive at least some times.

But it could have been worse.  I could have hurt someone.  Or been hurt myself.  I’m trying not to complain about my stupid little self inflicted car accident.  But come on, universe, this week has been shitty.  And with the funeral coming up on Thursday, I have this sneaky suspicion it’s not going to get less shitty.

I’ve written this post in my head a couple of times but now that I’m here, I feel mute.

My father-in-law died yesterday.  I’ll start there.

When Seth told me the prognosis early this week, I was scared.  Scared for Seth, scared for his father, scared for his family.  Not scared for me.

I visited him last week in the ICU.  He was awake and agitated, unable to talk because of the breathing tube, his blood pressure was dangerously low and his pulse rate dangerously high.  His chronic cough was making him struggle against the tube, and I made eye contact, told him not to try to talk, that I was there.  We sat for a while and the nurses added some pain medication and he drifted into sleep.  When I left I touched his foot and said goodbye.  That was the last time I saw him.

The anti-biotics weren’t working.  The breathing tube and blood pressure medication were keeping him alive, the pain meds were keeping him comfortable, but it was no way to live.  So, as a family, they decided it was time.

Just a few days after his 85th birthday.  Just a few weeks after he had come home.  Just a few months after his fall.  Just a few years after I met him.

When Seth told me about the last few moments, I held it together, until he told me he whistled “There No Business Like Show Business.”  I’m a mess now just writing the words. Why is that?

He was someone who barely knew me, but was proud of me.  We talked about “the business.”  He was interested in my job, and he had been there.  His work is why my work is possible.  He knew more about movies and television and the players than anyone I know, and I’ve worked with encyclopedias.

But it’s more than that.  Seth’s dad is dead.  And it feels wrong. It feels heavy.  It seems too soon.

I left work and got lost trying to find the canyon to get to Beverly Hills.  I was driving Seth’s Mercedes and the transmission stuck.  I turned off the air conditioner in 102 degree weather and tried not to cry too much to see.

I hugged Seth’s sister and his mom and sat in the sun room, where we’ve never sat before.  The den seemed empty, the hospital bed was gone, but the gap in the furniture where it sat was too much.  I played with the dog and his mom sat down, she is one of the most stoic women I’ve ever met, she sighed and wondered why the hell there was laundry sitting out.

We went into the kitchen and Seth made a sandwich, we talked about politics and family and there was a moment when she forgot someone’s name, and I could see a momentary flash across her face where she wanted to yell out his name and ask him who it was.  But she didn’t, and she won’t.  And then we figured it out, and the conversation moved on.

I got a couple of e-mails this morning with pretty much the same message, “Happy Birthday!  We got you a new President!”

Way to over-shadow my special day, Obama.  God.

So, anyway, I’m 33 years old.  Too old to be an ingenue or a wunderkind, but old enough to mastermind a Ponzi scheme, create a religion to span the test of time and most of all old enough to know better but to do it anyway.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes on Facebook, Twitter, via Text, e-mail and messenger pigeon. I’m sorry to report the messenger pigeon, well, Lula ate it. But! It was the thought that counted.

UPDATE:  Please see the comments for my mom’s explanation of the benefits that are being cut.

My mom works in the Seattle area running an adult day care that is funded through the state budget. Because of recent budget cuts and reassignments the money for this very important service has been cut.

Adult day care is important for working families with frail, elderly and mentally disabled family members. It provides them with a safe place to take family during the day while they work.

Please call your state legislator and say the following: Please preserve funding for adult day health care in the State budget. This is a service that helps frail disabled adults remain in the community and supports family caregivers.

If you don’t know who your state legislator is please go here www.leg.wa.gov and put in your address and your legislator will be identified.