Boys

Right now, my life is full of boys.

About a month ago, I was hired to tutor elementary school kids in English or Math. I ended up with Math (go figure) and all boys. Two different schools, four days a week, one small room with me and the boys.

Two days a week, I meet Darius and Devon. They're brothers. Different fathers. Darius is beautiful, with chocolate skin, a winning smile and dark brown eyes. He's tricky and mischievous and completely honest at the same time. His brother, Devon is a year older. His bathroom breaks are so lengthy I think he might have fallen in. This week, however, I finally got some insight into why he's gone so long. A girl he likes is in a club that meets right across from the bathroom. Devon is gentle, soft-spoken and afraid to try something outside his comfort zone, as least as far as math is concerned. As for girls, well his huge dark eyes would melt even the coldest twelve-year-old's heart. As the older brother, he has the responsibility for keeping the cell phone, and he always holds open the door. He also must endure Darius' endless teasing about his girlfriend. Remarkably, it doesn't bother him and there's little sibling rivalry between them. They are as quiet and polite as my other tutoring group is rambunctious.

The other group meets in a room in an assisted living facility close to the school. Imagine four boys: two second grade twins, a fourth grader and a fifth grader tumbling like puppies into the well-apportioned living room of this very nice facility where classical music wafts from hidden speakers. They're noisy and untidy, shedding coats, backpacks and sometimes bits and pieces of paper, string and small stones as they make their way from the front door to the room where we meet.

The first few meetings were chaotic. In fact, I wasn't able to teach anything. It took all I could do to keep them from running like crazy through the halls, diving under chairs and leaping out in an attempt to scare with me or one of the other boys. After two completely out of control sessions, I had a meeting with the twins' mom. They were separated. From what I understand, I got the better deal. The tutor who ended up with Alex still can't keep him in his seat, let alone the room.

Now Alex's twin, Ian, is a self-assured cocky seven-year-old who decided today that he would sing all the answers to his math problems. This was . . . interesting. He not only sang the answer, but he'd sing his methodolgy as well. "Eight minus four is . . . seven, six, five, four . . . four." "Two plus six is . . . three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . eight!" However, it didn't do much for the other two boys' concentration.

Ian and the fourth grader, Parker are also brothers. Different fathers here too. Parker is slight and almost feminine with long, tapered fingers and fair blond hair that falls straight down from the crown of his head. The twins, whose father, I suspect is a manly man, recently cut their hair in Marine Corps "high and tight" style. Parker's father doesn't seem to be in the picture. Mom handles the twins and Parker by herself.

One day, Ian and Parker recounted how Parker had received a black eye over the weekend. Apparently, on Saturday morning, mom fell asleep in the bathtub. Parker was trying to sleep in, but the twins wanted him to get up, so they pounced on him and pummeled him until he threw them off his bed. Fists flew next, followed by door slamming and Ian retreating into the kitchen for a butcher knife with which to hack open the door. Mom, meanwhile, is still alseep in the tub. While I am trying to look both sympathetic and appalled--I cannot imagine my children chasing each other with butcher knives--I am shown the various war wounds, bruises and bumps, the result of these fisticuffs which went on for the better part of thirty minutes before Ian finally stormed into the master bathroom, still brandishing the butcher knife, to wake his mother up so she could get Parker out of bed. Yes, I think I might be exhausted, too.

Jerrick, the third boy in this equation, is a neighbor. Parker is allowed to come to his house, but the twins are strictly forbidden. No big surprise there. Jerrick is bigger than both the other boys, but easily cowed by Ian's sheer boyishness. He's an only child of a single mom and likes to collect things. He has hundreds of cards from various collectible card games, none of which he knows how to play. He has forty-one mechanical pencils in all different colors. He also has a trumpet, which he brought in this past week and attempted to play. "How long have you been playing?" I asked.

"Two days," he replied. And then continued to make sounds like drowning cats until I broke in to thank him for the performance.

The day he brought in his collectible cards, it was hard to get anyone interested in math. They were all over the three tables, on the floor, on the chairs. By the time we had retrieved all the cards and he'd packed them away--each set had its own rubber bands and had to be tied just so--I practically had to break out a cat-o-nine-tails to get them back into the mundane universe of integers and fractions.

This afternoon, while I was working with Jerrick and Parker was whipping through a page of problems so he could be done for the day, Ian decided that he would remake his science-class mobile into one large extended clear plastic straw with rubber bands, paper clips and squares of paper tacked onto the end. Earlier in the hour, he'd pushed one of the three small tables into a corner, claiming he needed his own space. Now, in the space he'd created in the room, he began spinning in place, faster and faster until the entire mobile flew apart and scattered across the room. Parker immediately dove out of his chair for the pieces near him; Ian collapsed onto the floor saying he felt dizzy (hm, wonder why?) and Jerrick looked stricken. For the next five minutes, while I got Parker back into his chair and back to work, Ian pestered Jerrick for his snack and then fell down again, saying he would die of hunger before the hour was over.

Jerrick hid the graham crackers under his shirt.

Ian tied his string sack around his neck and pretended to hang himself. Then he went to the fridge in the room, which is reserved for residents, and began rooting for something to eat. By this point, Jerrick is so traumatized that he's sitting stock still. It hasn't been this wild since the twins were together and I know it will only get worse as the weather gets warmer.

Three minutes before the hour is up, Ian packs up his bag, marches to the door and leaves. I let him go. It's not worth the fight at this point. He wins some. I win some. And in between, we work on math. Parker says, "You're just going to let him go?"

"Yeah," I say. "Unless you want me to tell him to wait for you."

"Nah," he answers. "I used to take karate and my sensei said I have a really fast punch." Parker seems to be worried that Ian will be jumped on the way home, though I doubt that anyone would come out on top with Ian, the butcher knife wielding seven-year-old. But Parker is more fragile and I offer to walk him home. "Nah," he says. It's not as dark as it was on the first night, when he asked me to walk him home and then made sure I kept a good twenty paces behind. I obliged.

They pack up. Jerrick has recovered his wits and he and Parker head for the door. Before I've even pushed in the chairs, they're running across the lawn through the gathering dark, all exuberance, bravado and pure boy-ness at its very best.

Claiming

People think that just because I am the Senior Editor of Orchard House Press that my day consists of rejecting manuscripts and drinking coffee. Actually, my job is much more Chief Operations Officer than Senior Editor and has been for about ten years.

Ten years is a long time to not write anything. The last novel I published came out before my son was born. Then when he was a baby, there were two collections of short fiction, erotica to be precise. They are, of all my books, the ones that have made the most money.The first one I wrote with him in a Snuggly. The second I wrote with him at my feet. In between I was on a panel about writing erotica. It started at 10:00 PM. The lateness of the hour conflicted with my son's bedtime. So I brought him. He fell asleep on my shoulder and drooled for an hour while I talked about the pros and cons of writing explicit sex.

When I look back, it seems like there was so much more time then. And looking back further, I wonder what the heck I did with all that time before I had kids and before I was a self-employed. Most of it was spent looking for my "other half," a journey that is half anxiety, half self-analysis. Now, at nearly fifty, I feel as though I should be settled, wise, serene.

But I am none of those things.

And today I am thinking about other writers.

I don't know how other people make their peace with the writers who get corporate backing, six figure advances and no other responsibilities than to produce a novel every year. I struggle. I struggle with jealousy, with wanting that life, with not wanting that life, with being thankful that I don't have to worry about my book being butchered by some nitwit with "the bottom line" as his motto. I struggle with the fact that I will, most probably, never be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review. With the fact that I know I'm a good writer. That I have a gift and that I am a better writer--in terms of the craft, especially--than a lot of the writers I read. And I read a lot.

One of the inherent dangers with depression (you knew that figure in here somewhere, although I swore that I wasn't going to talk about that today)... okay... one of the inherent dangers with being me is that I do tend to see the greener grass in someone else's pasture. Having come to realize recently that my mother's angry resentfulness about anything that she had to do for us--laundry, clean up, cooking, etc.--and my father's attitude that anything, even a root canal, was better than spending time with his wife and children, has left a few ... scars, has made me wonder whether it's actually possible to undo twenty years of intensive conditioning and then thirty more of reinforcing this behavior on my own by making choices that would echo that resentment and anger. I want to change. I don't want to be miserable. I don't want to make other people miserable. I want to be a beacon of light and hope ... okay, that last bit is not true. I'd just like not to be a sucking black hole of despair.

I thought that if I could simply disengage and stop caring it would be easier. The problem with that is that other people notice that you've disengaged. And while they're waiting for you to come back out and play it's easy to convince yourself that they don't like you anyway. So why bother going out at all?

I've always wanted a single fix, a silver bullet with which I could slay my enemy. But the mind is too tricky and complex for that. In Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, Peer looks everywhere for answers to the big questions. Toward the end of the play, he peels an onion, and as he pulls away layer after layer he realizes there's no center. Just layers. There is no answer, per say. Rather, the answer is in the layers. So it is with the mind. The answers to my questions lie in the layers of experience, conditioning and memory.

Add a healthy dose of chemical compounds and hormones moving around in living, changeable flesh that is fueled by food which may or may not be what the body actually needs the most at that moment--you need a supercomputer to figure that out, I think--and you have ... well a person. A human. Fallible, mutable, imperfect.

And so, we come round to that greener grass again.

I look at some of these other writers' blogs. One women, who has nearly twenty novels published by Tor, talks about how she likes to write in a cafe between her massage and going to the gym. She talks about the single malt whiskey she drinks, about working on an outline for a book, posts her workout schedule and what she eats. The fact that she has time to go to the gym everyday, and can afford a masseuse ... something about that life appeals. Yeah, I'd like to plunk down $50.00 for sushi after going for a "climb," at the indoor rock, but ... well quite simply, I can't. Don't have it. Don't got that advance, baby, for the book that's still on index cards on your kitchen table. Don't have the time.

I look at Scott Westerfeld's website. That guy is prolific. He travels, he speaks, he writes. He's a known commodity. He's not the best writer and none of his ideas are particularly unique, but he's struck a chord and that's why he is where he is.

BTW, neither of these people have children.

Downstairs, the kids are watching Food Network. It's just after midnight on a Sunday night, now early Monday morning. Jenn is working. Brianne is working. And I? I am claiming.

For the past month, I have worked every spare moment of every day without fail. I've signed off on The Mardi Gras 3000 Player's Handbook after reworking two stories completely and editing all ten others (some extensively); I've signed off on the Mardi Gras 3000 Crusade Battle Anthology, some twenty-odd stories written by twenty-odd different writers at various places in their writing careers. I've renamed almost every single book of the Bible for the Terrapyre Prayer Book with names that actually stay true to the text, context and yet bridge the gap between the "real" world and the world of Mardi Gras 3000. Then I proofread the Prayer Book. A lot has changed in this universe since some of these things were originally written. It's my responsibility to make sure everything is up to date.

Then I started in on the Sourcebook, which is the writers bible for this world. I'm still working on that. And I'm still working on a novel called Angelus: Fallen, which will be the first novel I've published in more than ten years.

Do I want this other woman's life?

Hm. Let me think about it. Nope. I guess because I can fill a blog with more than just what I'm eating and drinking and how many times I made it to the gym last week. It's important for me to claim my identity as a writer. I write every day and I nurture other writers. I might not be working on my "own" novels, but I can think of a bunch of people who would trade places with me in a minute.

I need to claim the grass that's at my feet, cause it's just as green as Six Figure Advance's grass. In some ways, mine's a lot greener 'cause where I live, it rains. All year. And the grass is greener now than it was last August. Where she lives, it's -4 degrees and under four feet of snow, her grass is dead.

Into the World

In the beginning of the film American Beauty, Lester Burnham is masturbating in the shower and his voice over remarks that "this is as good as my day is gonna get." He has a crappy job, an overachieving wife who feels she hasn't reached her potential and a teenage daughter who doesn't like him. He thinks back to a time when he was really happy. And realizes that it was when he was a teenager, working at a burger joint. It was a time without responsibility, a time full of possibility when the world lay before him like a sparkling, golden landscape waiting to be explored.

What happened to the person who used to be up hours before everyone else? What happened to the person who used to teach school with a puppet named Mouse? What happened to the person who . . .

I think part of the reason depression is so devastating for everyone involved is that it kills, just as surely as high blood pressure, a sudden heart attack or inoperable cancer. It kills slowly. But it kills just the same.

"The person who . . . " is long gone. Dead.

Where did that happy, early rising person go? Into the world.

When I feel this way, no one wants to be around me. This is ironic, because this is when I need people the most. But I'm not much fun to be around. So, until I'm in a better mood, I am alone. But the more I'm alone, the more alone I feel, and therefore the more depressed I become. Well, I guess it's my own fault, right?

I mean, depression is all in your head, right? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, there, girl! Turn your blue day into a new day! Look at these stupid pictures and feel better! Please. Spare me.

Nothing that I do can make it better. Nothing that I do will change how you feel. I can't do anything. I want to fix it, but I can't.

Funny. I feel the same way. I want to fix it, but I can't. Anymore than I can fix Faith's diabetes or Max's autism. It is what it is. I just don't want to fight about it anymore.

I think about characters like Lester Burnham. I think about the times I was truly happy. And when I find them, I try to identify what it was that made that time good. But then I remember that every time I have been happy, I've also been unhappy. I'm not like Lester. I can't just quit my job, start working out and go flip burgers. Because even if I did, I still wouldn't be happy. And that is how depression kills.

Happy Freaking Saturday

Thank goodness for the "unfriend" option on Facebook.

I don't like starting my weekend with a certified letter from an author. It amazes me that someone who can come to my house, spend the day with us and then decide it's appropriate to share confidential information about our company with a vendor. A vendor who was complaining that we hadn't paid them--when in fact we had.

It's not like this is a big surprise. I can tell the keepers from the lemmings.

It's amazing that you were stupid enough to hire a lawyer but forget to take me off your friend list at Facebook. Truthfully, you're no great loss.

What you are is a b****.

Every Day a New Day

Last night, Jennifer stayed up all night.

In 8 hours, she created a 14 page, scene-by-scene outline for the Mardi Gras 3000 novel Elijah. She wrote 3000 words. The plot is tight, the logic and science flawless.

I will never be as good as she is.

I will never be as able to suck it up and put the seat of my pants into the seat of my chair and just *do* what needs to be done without complaint or resentment.

She amazes me.

She inspires me.

And I'm damn lucky to have her in my life.

Cris

The Christian Thing

One night, fairly recently, I was on the phone with a family member. Her significant other came home, having just spent an hour or so with two of four elderly grandparents and announced that Jennifer and I weren't "pulling our weight" in terms of care giving.

This past weekend, my family and I (and here I mean the 5 of us), spent the day at this same grandparent's house. E. is Jennifer's paternal grandmother. Her husband, L., hasn't risen from bed for months. He's not ill, per say. He just doesn't want to get up anymore.

"What I wouldn't give to just lie down like that," E has said, a wry smile and self-depreciating chuckle follows.

But she can't. She has an adult mentally-disabled daughter who lives with her on the weekends. C. has moved out of the house within the past two years. For the first time. She now lives in a group home that she likes and takes the bus to and from her job where she does some basic office work like filing and copying. C. is intelligent. She loves to read and has a number of varied interests. She also likes being treated like a real person.

On a recent episode of Glee, the cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester, allowed a girl with Down Syndrome to try out for the squad. Sue put her through her paces, while the other cheerleaders cringed. The faculty reacted, too, condemning Sue for humiliating the girl. But did she? By the end of the episode, we've learned that the unlikable Sue Sylvester has a sister, who also has Down Syndrome. To see Sue with her sister reveals a side of this character that no one expected. Her sister, like the potential cheerleader, just wanted a chance to be treated like everyone else. It's not cringeworthy; it's a level playing field.

In this same way, C. wants to be treated like a regular person. She wants to be included in the conversation. When we visited this past weekend, I took the Kindle, which was a Christmas present to the family from one of our friends. Jennifer suggested I show C. how it worked. I did, but she wasn't as impressed with the ability to read books on this device as she was by the fact that she could go to Wikipedia.

C. doesn't have a computer. She's never been on the Internet. I don't think she's ever seen a laptop aside from the ones we've brought on occasion. But the idea of having access to the world's biggest library for free--and right from the living room--had huge appeal. I showed her an entry on bats--animals are a favorite topic of interest--and explained how some words linked to other articles about different kinds of bats, habitats, etc. "Wow," she said.

She sat back down on the couch and I returned to the chair I had been sitting in. A few minutes later she asked, "How much does that cost?"

I told her. "You know, if you want to give me the money, I'll buy one for you and I'll teach you how to use it."

"Really?"

"Yeah," I said. "You bet."

Now, let's go back to E. She's in her nineties. The reason her husband won't get out of bed. is he's become incontinent. It happens. Personally, I don't think it's a make or break situation, but I am also not a man of a certain generation who has always been THE MAN of the family. He's proud. He's dignified. He has been a loving father and good provider. He has borne the death of his only son. He has survived. But now, he needs help.

Well, you might be thinking, if their children are incapable of taking care of them and they are not able to take care of themselves, perhaps it is time for the grandchildren to step up. Said grandchildren include Jennifer and her sister, Angela. Angela and her husband live close to E. on the Seattle side of the Puget Sound. Angela has done quite a bit to help out, in addition to helping her husband's mother get ready to move out of a house she and her husband have lived in for 40? years and into an apartment. Oh, and they are run a successful dog walking/training business. And they're both actors who are regularly employed in Seattle's theatre community.

We live on the other side of the Sound. It's a ferry ride ($9.50 one way, $25.00 coming back) or a road trip ($20.00 +/-) in gas. Since we borrowed money from E. last year to keep the house of of foreclosure, she's knows we're not flush and it's difficult for us to get ahead enough financially to take a day off. Although we'd like to get over there once a week, we usually make it once a month.

Seen in this light, we aren't pulling our weight, as the Significant Other was quick to point out. I guess I should mention that S.O. works Seattle-side and stops on her way home to look in on E and family. But still.

The exector of the family will, however, is none of these people. Rather, it is their other daughter, let's call her R., who lives on Vashon Island, a ferry ride away, just like us. She has a M-F job, as does her husband. She works on Vashon; he works in Seattle. They have a grown daughter who lives on her own. R doesn't like to visit on the weekends because C. is there and they don't get along. Perhaps this is because whenever R comes to visit, she pointedly ignores C. This generally results in some anger on C's part. After all, she's come to see her mother on the weekend. Why is R monopolizing the conversation and ignoring her? R has flat-out refused to handle any of C's paperwork. That's left up to the increasingly overwhelmed E. R has also refused, despite her mother's request, to look into an assisted living facility that will accomodate E and L because R believes that her father doesn't want this.

R also feels that we're not pulling our weight. And has said so on a number of occasions.

Aren't families great?

Yesterday, I wrote about losing my temper. This situation is a field of land mines waiting for someone to step into it. I would really like to give R a piece of my mind (or the flat of my hand). But I won't. Because I've been mired in family politics long enough to know that it won't do any good. The best we can do is say she's a hypocritical b****. But a church-going one!

Our favorite slogan in this house is: If standing in a church makes you a Christian, does standing in a garage make me a car?

The Christian thing to do would be to set aside her anger, resentment and frustration with her younger sister and treat her like a person. It would be to listen to her mother's wishes and get her parents into an assisted living facility ASAP. It would be to help her mother with the reams of paperwork required for C's care. It would be to get her father help so that he doesn't lie in the darkness for 24 hours a day, drifting into numbing depression. It would be to show up on the weekends and help clean out the basement, the pantry, the piles of boxes in the closets and under the beds.

The Christian thing to do would be to buy her mother a dryer because she's never had one. She only got rid of her ringer-washer in the past 5 years. The Christian thing to do would be to remember that this is the woman who took care of her for 18 years and the man who worked so that she could have clothes on her back and food on the table.

But I guess that for all her talk, she really isn't a Christian. Funny, isn't it, how the ones who wouldn't be welcome inside a "Christian" church are the ones who are responding in a Christ-like manner. In fact, it's the Christian lesbians, the agnostics and the Buddhists who are working together to make E's wishes a reality.

I guess those right-wing "Christians" are too busy organizing and p0liticking to look to their own. I guess they've never actually read the book they spend so much time quoting out of context.

Meanwhile, we'll continue to do what we can. For E. For C. and for all the elderly, disenfranchized and poverty-stricken. Because we know what it's like to feel overwhelmed and helpless, poor and marginalized. Every. Single. Day.

The Switch

I haven't written anything for nearly a month.

It's not that I didn't want to. But I couldn't. Couldn't muster the enthusiasm for anything. Didn't really see the point. In some ways, I feel the same way right now, although three hours ago, I felt fine.

Depression is a funny thing. It's like being a child again and your entire world can come crashing down on you when your best friend decides to walk home with someone else or that snotty girl at school makes a disparaging remark about your outfit. Your world is small. Then and now.

A remark that, on a different day, would elicit no response at all feels like a deliberate slight. You ask yourself are you too sensitive? Are you overreacting? It's a crap-shoot, honestly. You have to take into account the speaker, what that person was doing when this happened, how his or her day was going at the time, the stresses, the pressures . . . it's ridiculously endless.

Some people have learned to shut their mouths during those 15 or so seconds that it takes the brain to catch up with the body's fight or flight response.

Unfortunately, I am not one of them.

Is my day now ruined? Hm. Don't know yet. It's still early--relatively speaking for this household. Am I still pissed off? Um. Yes.

It's ironic to me that I've come through the dreaded month of eternal darkness (otherwise known as December) by sheer power of will. I woke up this morning feeling more hopeful that I had in a while, thanks to a conversation with Jess last night, and then it all falls apart.

You think I'm being overly dramatic? You know, it depends on where you stand. It really does. An argument with someone you care about--child, co-worker, friend, partner--can ruin anyone's good mood. The difference is that I don't just bounce back.

There's a switch. A chemical reaction that takes place inside my body. It flips on. It flips off. For the longest time, I wasn't even aware it was there. When I became aware initially, I had no control over it. Over time, I have learned to pay attention to events or feelings which will trip that switch. If I'm lucky, I can re-wire the circuit before it blows.

Today just wasn't one of those days.

Am I still pissed off?

Not so much. The hard part is still to come. What do I do now?

I can apologize. Once, that was enough. But after a certain point, "I'm sorry," is just a bunch of letters that don't mean anything. It's automatic. You expect to be forgiven, but the truth is you have behaved like a jerk. Having been on the receiving end of a couple of these truly empty apologies, I've gotten to the point where I'm like, "Yeah, well I accept your apology, but frankly, that doesn't mean s***." So I could still say the words, but I'm not sure there's much point.

I can simply pick up from where I left off and go forward. Not pretend like it never happened, because that's just stupid. But just go forward.

Or I can stay up here in my little room and fuel my anger until I've really got the potential for a full-on out of control temper tantrum.

Hm.

You know what, Monty, I think I'll take what's behind Door #2.

That being said, I'd better go downstairs and make dinner. Maybe a little crow. Yum. Pass the salt.