Shut up about vasectomies.

It's not going to happen.  It's not going to become law. Comparing that bullshit to the reality of men regulating our uteruses is a false flag and it's not going to actually help our cause.

Stop it.


It's a great idea, yeah.  We KNOW men cause unwanted pregnancy - that is a legitimate undeniable fact.  But since when have legitimate undeniable facts shaped our legislative policy?

Please - show me a time?  Can we go back there?

Yeah.

In the meantime, fucking vote.  Take your friends to vote.  Call your state legislators and congress-people and fucking vote.

We are living in scary times.  Please, let's not go backwards.  Please.  I know we're all busy and tired, but seriously, are there really more pressing issues than our actual bodily autonomy?

Vote. Stop sharing memes that don't vote and fucking vote.  Drive your neighbor to the polls and fucking vote.

a day in the life...

The girls lost TV privileges last night for not listening.  For three days, because that's the number that came out of my mouth with exactly zero forethought or consideration when I was doling out their punishment.  They're actually being punished because they poked a hole in Daddy's air mattress, by jumping around on it when they'd been told over and over not to do that, to lie down and watch their movie or we'd put it up.  It was patched easily, but still, when you don't listen and you break things that belong to other people, there needs to be repercussions.  Television and candy are the only currencies my children recognize and in my efforts not to give them food issues I'm trying really hard not to give them candy and treats as a reward for good behavior and, as such, I don't withhold those things when they've been naughty, either.  But TV, that magical rabbit hole, I can take it away and they feel it to their core.  They're like little junkies, and those first few hours without are always rough, but even more so if you don't have something else planned, which, of course, I did not last night as I capriciously bellowed out their sentence.  But whatever.  It's not like I planned the second kid, either - living life by the seat of my pants over here.

Cora is in a phase.  She'll be 3 in two short days, so I'm going to rely on the old fall back and straight up blame her wild behavior lately on her tender age.  She is wild, though.  WILD.  If you're reading this, maybe you've noticed the Instagram feed over there on the right - did you catch the picture of her covered in enamel model paint?  She'd been upstairs for a few minutes.  Geneva was up there too, but it's a large space for two little girls, and it's not unusual for them to play separately.  I don't know what I was doing downstairs - laundry, dinner, cleaning, drinking - but I realized I hadn't heard from her in a few full minutes.  I started up the stairs as I called her name, and I smelled it immediately - you know the smell, that fumey paint smell.  Oh shit was my only thought, and then she came around the corner and I said it out loud, "Oh shit."  Her right arm was a swirl of sticky purple and red and white and black enamel paint, the sort that comes in tiny glass jars to be applied to miniature figurines with tiny little brushes; her left hand was the same, up past her wrist, and her chin and cheeks were similarly styled.  Cora had found these 10 year old glass bottles on a shelf in a closet, unscrewed the lids, and had, I can only imagine, poured the paint into her hands and rubbed it onto her face and arms as if it were lotion.

In a blur, I checked her over with my hands and eyes the way a mom will, making sure she didn't have it in her eyes, her nose, her mouth - somehow, she didn't. I was yelling for Jimi at the same time, thinking in the back of my head, "He'll know what to do, he'll know an easy way to fix this, he knows something about everything."  When he put his head into the stairwell and saw us there, saw colorful Cora, I saw the oh shit in his eyes, and his words only backed that up - he had no idea was to do, and he sounded a little higher pitched than normal.  I don't want to say he was panicking, but he was close - he was scared, and that scared me too, but also, strangely, it made me calm down nearly immediately.  I used my calm serious voice, the one that is very matter-of-fact, and as he stripped her down in the bathroom, I walked into the kitchen, grabbed the Dawn dish soap and my phone and delivered the Dawn to the bathroom as I googled "how to remove testors model paint from skin".  The answer, if you're not interested in googling, is vegetable oil and glycerin soap.  We had vegetable oil, and the CVS up the road had glycerin soap I figured, so I left Jimi and the paint-covered child in the bathtub with a gallon-bottle of Crisco Vegetable Oil and headed to the CVS.  They had glycerin - not soap, but in a little squeeze bottle.  I figured it would work well enough, and it did, with the Dawn, and with poor Jimi rubbing and sudsing for nearly an hour.  He even got it out of her hair.

That's sort of the way it is with her right now.  The Friday before the paint incident, thirty minutes after I'd left to head over to visit a friend, she apparently decided to try to change her own poopy pull-up and covered the bathroom in shit.  I missed that completely, thank goodness.  Poor Jimi.

But yeah, 2 days before 3. She's sunshine and rainbows and silver linings - she wakes up happy every single morning; she's quick to tell me she loves me and that I'm her favorite and that I'm beautiful; when she gets in trouble she says "I'm so sorry, Mommy.  I'm so so sorry." But she's also into everything, like a little tornado.  She bounces from one thing to the next without a break in between.  I'm regularly surprised to find myself cleaning one mess while she makes another mess, again, for the 4th time, and we've only been home for an hour.  I should stop being surprised, probably, but how realistic is that?  I'm still ever the optimist, thinking all day at work about how much I miss my precious little angels and how they are going to be so sweet and loving and well behaved once I pick them up from daycare and we head home to a fabulous evening of family dinner, a game or two, maybe a walk around the block, then bath, story, bed...and then I actually pick them up and one of them is in a shitty mood and the other just wants to play but it's at the absolute most inopportune time because we're in a parking lot and there are cars and also other parents but I don't give much of a fuck about what they think but I do still care a little because i'm not going to yell "get the fuck over here right now!" the way I'd really like to do.  And then the pouty one pouts her way into her carseat as I wrestle the playful-turned-screaming-banshee one into hers and by the time I'm buckling myself into my seat I'm angry and my heart is racing and what the fuck I looked forward to THIS all day?!

But I am still an optimist, because some nights are nights like tonight, when Geneva had a good report from her teacher and was giddy with the praise, and Cora ran into my arms and hugged me and said "I missed you so much!"  We laughed our way to the car, the three of us, and got buckled without any breakdowns. Cora is newly forward-facing, so she can talk and interact in a brand new way.  We talked and sang the new Taylor Swift song on the drive home, then we danced to Katy Perry and Psy in the dining room until it was dinnertime, when we changed the playlist to The Avett Brothers.  Dinner was delicious, and so was the piece of Halloween candy they each got to choose from their stashes after dinner. 

They wanted to paint, so we made it happen.  Cora had a shower, then we played Baby Store.  We can't watch the store being built, aka them getting naked down to their underwear/pull-up (presumably because new babies are naked under their blankets?)  and into their blankets, so if we don't hear them the first time they call us to come shopping, or if we don't come to the store quickly enough, Geneva - who up to this point has given instructions to us in her lilting sweet voice "Pretend you wanted two little girls who were perfect for you but you had to go to the baby store to buy them and me and cora were the babies you buyed" - will break character and scream out in her angry voice "Mom!! You have to come buy us!"  When we go into the store (usually the living room), they'll be laying on the floor or on the couch in pretend baby beds, wrapped in bedsheets or quilts that have probably been found in the basket of clean blankets and sheets I've just carried up from the laundry room, where said blankets and sheets were just as likely to have been washed because they'd been drug across the floor by these two versus having actually been used as bedding on a bed.  They'll be goo-ing and ga-ing and making little baby-like noises, and my job as the mom is to walk up to each one of them, fawn over how precious they are, and then ask them if they want to come home with me and be my new baby girl.  They always say yes, and I never have to actually pay anyone - I just pick them up and carry them to whatever part of the house Geneva has designated our pretend home, and then we either play kitchen or start all over.  Sometimes Cora is already my baby and she and I go to the store together to buy her a sister.  Tonight the game was Jimi didn't want any babies, but said I could have some if I wanted them. I went to the store, picked out each baby individually, then carried her to her daddy, who cooed and gooed over each girl in turn. 

They were both thrilled with their game of make-believe, and didn't argue a bit when I announced bedtime/story time.  We read a PeppaPig story about George and his dinosaur balloon.  I held Cora a moment and snuggled her, but she wanted down - and promptly climbed over the rail and into her crib, where she covered herself up and said, "Goodnight, Mommy, I love you."  Jimi came in to pat her as he sang to us all. Geneva was mad when I said I was going to sit with her rather than lie down in her bed - I've slept in there a lot the last few nights at her request and my back is a wreck because of it.  She pouted, but I held her until she was over it and she let me tuck her back in without argument.  She told me she loved me, I fluffed her blanket three times, and the night, that part of my night, the awake electric bright white part of my evening, was over.

And here I sit with the dregs of hot tea turned cold, surprised at how long it took to tell you those things and at how good it felt.  At how good it feels.  These are the days I want to remember.  These are the stories I want to tell. 

Also:  Last night, Cora fell asleep early, so we sat at the table and ate dinner as a family of three.  We were probably 2 hours in to our television moratorium.  Geneva loved the mashed potatoes and asked for seconds.  She loved her family.  She was so happy to be eating dinner as a family.  She liked the green beans a little.  (These are all things she told us, verbatim.)  She and I played Go Fish after dinner until bedtime - we tied once and I won once.  She didn't even pout - she kept proclaiming how much fun she was having.  There's seriously something to this no TV thing.  I think our Netflix is suddenly broken...

I Love Women.

I'm so proud of the women in our nation and around the world who marched yesterday.

I wish I could've been in it. 
I was afraid, I admit.
I am scared of our new president and I was scared of what the marches and protests would become and I wanted to take my girls, to be part of this with them...but I was scared and I kept us home.
I tell myself it's because they're so small, they wouldn't have remembered anyhow...but that's bullshit, and I know it, and I won't pretend you wouldn't see through the excuse immediately. 
I can't stop reading links with pictures of protest signs. 
God I love women.
I'm so impressed with their strength and bravery and intelligence and their will...and I haven't even gotten started on the women I personally know and love! 
I feel buoyant today after seeing images from yesterday.
I feel hopeful. 
I'm not as scared.

Well, until I got to the article about twitler's media guy's press conference where he insisted the inauguration, arguably one of the least-attended in history, was in fact the most widely attended ever, which is an easily verifiable falsehood.  These fuckers remind me so hard of 1984...and then I'm scared again. 

As a mother of daughters, to all mothers of sons:

As a mother of daughters, to all mothers of sons:

I respectfully ask that you please, please take this moment, in light of the most recent political news, to speak to your boys and young men about how to treat women.

Talk to them about how you grew up being told that you needed to watch what you wore so you wouldn't be assaulted.

Talk to them about how at every party you've ever been to, you had to remember to keep your drink with you, with your hand over it, and not to accept drinks from anyone, regardless of how well you knew them, so that you wouldn't be drugged and raped.

Talk to them about how you don't walk the dog or run alone before dawn or after dark without pepper spray or a weapon of some sort.

Talk to them about how you're always on guard in a room full of men, even in professional settings where you should feel safe.

Talk to them about how you've laughed at jokes that weren't funny because to speak out would've labeled you a trouble maker.

Talk to them about the times you were touched in ways that weren't okay, but you allowed it because you didn't feel safe saying no.

Please, tell your sons that it is never okay to grab a woman by the...anything. Tell them it's not okay to touch women, ever, unless they're being explicitly invited. Talk to them about how consent is absolutely necessary and required before each and every sexual act. Teach them that locker room banter describing sexual assault is disgusting. Teach them that a "boys will be boys" attitude assumes all men and boys are predators. Teach them that not all men are predators; teach them to not be predators. Teach them to respect women. Teach them to treat every woman they meet with the same respect they'd give you, or your mother, or your daughter.

Brock Turner's mom wishes she'd had an opportunity like this. Don't pass it up. You may think you've done a fabulous job with your young man, and you probably have, but talk to them about this anyhow. Make sure you've said the words that need to be said, not just implied them. Leave no doubt in his mind about what the expectations are. This is really important.

Please. Do this for my girls, for your daughters, for your mothers, for yourselves. Do this for your sons. This is really important.

Balance

I'm trying to identify and confront head-on sources of stress in my life.  In the last week I've been able to, with some pretty deep introspection, narrow down a few of the daily nuances that make me absolutely batshit crazy:

1.  Shoes.  Not being able to find my shoes, not being able to find Geneva's shoes, only being able to find one of the shoes...and don't even let me get started on finding fucking socks that match each other.  It's a Christmas Miracle in July if you can make that shit happen.

2.  Food.  Geneva's Lunch, my lunch, our breakfasts, snacks, morning coffee. Dinner - what are we having for dinner?  All are very important.  All are occasionally missed because I don't have my shit together.

3.  Clothes.  Knowing what I'm going to wear and being able to locate all of the pieces of said outfit.  Wash, Rinse, Repeat for Geneva and Cora. 

Sounds simple enough, right?  Shut up. 

I can recognize how silly and simple that list sounds, but I also know, from living in my daily reality, that those are legitimate, snakes-popping-out-of-my-head crazy-inducing triggers/challenges that can make or break my day before it's really even gotten started. 

I also know how to solve my problems, at least in terms of identifying the solutions - shoes go back in the same place after they come off, food is prepped the night before, laundry is done on weekends and work-week outfits laid out Sunday night.  I've tried.  Oh, how I've tried.  It's not easy being lazy, folks.  When it was just me and Jimi, oh, the lazy times we had.  G came along and required the discipline of every-other-day laundry and regular mealtimes, but she was settling into a pretty good lazy routine too.  Then we added Cora into the mix, and, through no fault of hers, just the pure fact of four people living under one roof, logistics got complicated and started requiring some real planning and execution and follow-through.  Things we're really bad at in the Fowler household.

I was doing great for a minute, though.  When I first went back to work after my maternity leave this last time, I had meal plans planned and prepped Saturday afternoon for the coming week.  Laundry was washed and folded and put away and laid out Sunday night.  Lunches were packed the night before; there was time for breakfast in the mornings before we left the house, rather than grabbing a granola bar on the way out the door.  We knew where our shoes were. 

Those things happened.  They did.  I distinctly remember.  And then we all got sick, and we passed some variety and level of funk around between us for the next few months and it just wasn't easy to keep on top of all of that neatness and organization - it makes everything run so smoothly, but man, it really requires work and staying on top of it.  Or, well, not being completely lazy asses and doing nothing. 

It made me feel better when I learned that there's an actual scientific theory out there that says chaos is the natural order of things - that no matter how nice and neat you organize things, the natural inclination is for those things to become disorganized and messy.  It made me feel like maybe I'm not such a complete failure in life.  Chaos is normal, and expected.  That was long before kids.  It's especially when you have little kids, though, right?  That's what people keep telling me. 

I called a family friend last week, a psychiatrist by trade, and told her that I was pretty sure I was going crazy, and asked her if she could refer me to someone I could talk to.  I don't want any meds or anything, I told her, I just want someone to tell me how to stop being so fucking crazy.  I'd cried the whole way to work that morning.  I was sort of a basket case.  She asked me to explain what was going on - what was my particular flavor of crazy, if you will.  I'm anxious all the time, I feel like I'm constantly going to fuck something up, or like I've already fucked something up and it's going to bite me in the ass.  I can't get my arms around anything, I feel completely overwhelmed and behind at work and at home and I fantasize about burning shit down or quitting my job because then I could start somewhere new and not be behind anymore.  She laughed at me.

"Natalie!  You're not crazy!  You're just a woman!"

dramatic pause

"That's what it is to be a woman in today's fucked up society.  With two small kids and a full time job, of course you're a little crazy."  We can't give enough of ourselves to any one thing to ever feel like we're doing enough or good enough, and then we've given so much of ourselves and our time to those two very important vocations that there's no time or energy left to give to ourselves.  It's a nasty vicious cycle and it can make your brain and your body sick.  She told me how for years she'd held out hope that women could come together, recognizing these truths we all experience every day, and help each other, or at the very least, band together to encourage some positive societal change wherein it was made easier for women to balance these roles.  What she found instead was a bunch of backbiting and judgment. 

Her advice to me was not to seek counsel of a local psychologist - she told me anyone I found locally to talk to would likely be a man, which no ability to understand the perfect storm of emotions i'm experiencing right now, and he'd want to throw a pill at the problem that wouldn't fix my problem.  She told me to hire someone to clean my house, or quit my job, or work part time, or come home and light up a joint to relax after the kids are in bed. 

So those aren't exactly the most feasible options for me, but she got me thinking - what are the sources of my stress?  What makes my day hard? 

I organized my pantry.  I cut up one of those over-the-closet-door shoe holder thingies I never use and put half on the back of the pantry door and filled the pockets with easy-to-grab snacks for us and the kids - fruit, babyfood pouches, granola bars, pretzels, oatmeal packs, fruit snacks.  Now I don't have to dig for nutritious things in the mornings when we're rushing to get out the door  - we have things easily available.  I made a meal plan for the week so we'd come home each night knowing what we're having for dinner and how we're getting it made.  I dug out an old CD rack that is a perfect fit for Geneva's shoes - retraining ourselves to use it is another matter entirely.  Jimi's been staying on top of the kitchen mess and the laundry so we've had things to wear and clean dishes to cook and eat with.  We're off to a good start, I'd say. 

Life is hard and messy and sometimes you just need a good cry and someone to tell you you're not alone, that you're not the only person who's ever gone through this or felt this way.  That you're not crazy.  Not in a "medicate me" sort of way - life is just hard.  And messy.  And chaotic.  Exactly as it's supposed to be.