Tales from the Shark Tank

After a solid month of “I need to get to that”, I finally got a start on this year’s garden this evening. I spent about an hour dismantling the wild grape vines that are trying their best to devour the deck and pulling mints of varying sorts – some intentionally planted and some not – out of places that they were never intended to go. Some of it I can and will hit with herbicide, but the trouble is that there are actually plants under all that jungle I put in and want to keep! So I’m pulling what I can, raking what I can’t pull, and using the chemicals as the last resort in places I simply cannot otherwise get to, like under the deck.

Choosing my plants was interesting, though. I looked at the flowers, of course, and bought some. But most of what I got was chosen for scent even more than color. I suppose that’s the same bias that leads me to look first at the herbs when I go to the nursery. Big showy flowers make lovely photographs, but I can’t bring them in the house (too many people with allergies), and I can only stand and look for so long. Scented plants are a different story. I can sit on the deck and read or run in the yard with my son, and still smile at the scents stirred by a breeze or our passing feet. So I have sweet annie that has been reseeding itself since the first summer we moved here, and sage, and the aforementioned mints. There’s thyme and marjoram in the raised beds, and I’ll be adding basil to them. And I have phlox and yarrow, both of which are hardy perennials, to put in as soon as I clear the creeping charley and grapes out of the beds beside the deck. There will be ginger from the roots that sprouted in my kitchen and radishes for the little boy who saw the seeds and wanted to grow them because they’re pretty. I have tomatoes and cucumbers because a salad picked half an hour before I serve it is one of the things that makes it worth putting up with Indiana summers. And yes, there are some flowers that are simply bright and pretty.

It’s a garden!

Last night a friend and I were playing the “what to do if we won the lottery” game. I had a list of things ready at the tip of my tongue, as there is a fair collection of stresses in my life that money would resolve. When I ran down, she said “but what do you want for yourself? Everything you’ve listed is for someone else.”

It brought me up short. I haven’t actually thought much about what I want for myself since I didn’t get into med school in about 1979. I’ve done what other people thought I should want, or what I felt obligated to do. Oh, there have been things I wanted with all my heart and did; I wanted to marry my husband that much, and I wanted my son perhaps more passionately, if that’s possible. But I haven’t done anything professionally that I particularly wanted to do since I walked away from history/ academia. I keep going, yes, but out of practicality rather than any particular interest.

But I’ve been thinking about it since she raised the question, and I think I do know, at least short term, what I want. I want the time, and the leisure, to figure out what I would actually be happy doing. I’m a damned good lawyer, if I do say so myself. I take satisfaction out of doing things no one else can manage, and while a lot of lawyers don’t bring creativity to the practice, I do. But I don’t really enjoy it, and haven’t for years now. So if ever I win the lottery, that’s the gift I’ll give myself. I will give myself time.

I would really take this day over from the top. I have some issues for the script writer.

To start with, it was a lovely day and I barely got out in it. Some of that was inertia, but most was trying to juggle and failing miserably. I had wanted to get my garden in at long last, but my son did not cooperate. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. It won’t be so cool to work, but at least another parent will be about. Hopefully, J. will go along with Daddy.

Then the power went out this morning. Ok, that happens; it’s no big deal. What distressed me was that I jumped immediately to the suspicion that my husband had forgotten to pay the bill. He hadn’t; when I called the electric company to report the outage I got a recorded message saying they were aware of the problem and that it should be fixed in a couple of hours. At his most depressed and immobilized that did happen, but it hasn’t for over a year now. But I still went immediately from “no power” to irritated and readying myself to go fix the mess. Now the irritation is at myself. I thought I’d let the past be past. I found out I haven’t quite.

Meanwhile, while the power was out I couldn’t work. Ok, my son wanted to go to the playland beneath the Arches, so I packed up my laptop. He could run and shout with the other little bodies, and I could click away. Upon arrival I discovered that the battery is so incapable of taking a charge that I couldn’t even turn the poor thing on. So once again, work that needed done didn’t get done. I looked for, then asked for, an electrical outlet. No joy in Mudville; Mickey D’s doesn’t put outlets in their table areas at all.

And so the day went on. While I was out someone called about my husband’s employment taxes, unpaid for the past two years. There’s a good reason for that – he hasn’t been in business for the past two years, much less had employees to pay unemployment taxes on! I’ve been trying to correct that misinformation with the State Department of Revenue since we learned of it in February. Obviously, they still haven’t got the word. It looks like I get to deal with them on Tuesday.

I don’t need to ride a roller coaster this summer. I’m living on one, darn it!

I wish I knew how to reset a sleep clock. Mine’s gone wonkier than usual. Bedtime is a quite reasonable hour, but I wake up after about a three hour nap. Then I’m up for a couple of hours. By the time I’m ready to go back to sleep, I have at most a couple more hours until I have to be up. If I show signs of being flakier than usual, now y’all will know why.

This minor grumble has been brought to you by the Truth in Advertising Counsel.

Tomorrow is our son’s last day of kindergarten. I don’t know if they’re planning a graduation type thing. On the one hand, I’ve seen no mention of it in the notes they send home on a daily basis. On the other, J. is talking about caps and gowns, so it’s possible. He still doesn’t always communicate as clearly as might be, but it’s way ahead of where it was when we started the “what’s up with our kid” adventures four years ago.

I’m anticipating the change with both excitement and dread. I really don’t know how I’m to keep that little perpetual motion machine busy and interested for two and a half months. I remember how summer stretched forever when I was little. It does so again, now that I’m the mother of a little. I have things he’ll like doing – craft projects and a garden and swimming lessons – but that only occupies so much of our time. And therein lies the source of dread. I truly enjoy spending time and doing things with my son, but when he is home he wants every second of my time and attention. And I can’t give him that. There are mundane things to do, like grocery shopping and laundry and maybe an attempt at reversing entropy inside the house (a task which his presence will only complicate further). And there’s actual work to do, for which I can hopefully get paid someday. Unemployment lasts six months, and I’m having a hard time even finding things for which to apply.

I foresee a lot of time spent in our neighbor’s yard – and possibly in their pool, as this mom does not do well in hot steamy midwestern summers. A friend who lives in Texas comments that she prefers cold, but doesn’t really start getting uncomfortable in the heat until it gets up around 100. She also tans. I’m a bit jealous. I melt when the thermometer reads 80, and burn in the sun like the crispy red-head I am.

But all in all, I know the summer will go quickly when I look back at it, and that J. himself will have filled in much of the time just being a little boy. He will take me on walks and pick up pretty rocks. He will gather the cut grass after Daddy mows the lawn and pile it into “haystacks” for his trains to crash into. He will play hide-and-seek in the hibiscus, and stage spontaneous squirt-gun fights. He will crouch down behind the foundation bushes and enact inumerable scenes with trains and cars and crashes. The space looks too small for any human, but he’s made it his own little play-house. And I’ll sit on the porch with a bottle of water that we can share and enjoy watching him be what he is – a happy, creative little boy.

I thought about doing a complete catch-up, but I really don’t have a couple of hours to sit here writing. Wish I did….

Short form on cause of disappearance: broadband equipped computer HUNGRY. Hard drive – YUMMY. Sigh. I’m not altogether sure of cause-and-effect on this one, but I’m looking for a way to have a computer upon which I can paint “Do Not Touch” in large, unfriendly letters. I do have dialup access, but it’s slow and ties up the house phone line, which is bad under the circumstances. So I’m either on the lab computer, at my friend’s house using her cable-modem, or at the public library with a half-hour time limit. I’m hoping I can manage a better laptop, but we’ll have to see. Anyone looking to dispose of a last-generation laptop that they don’t want to bother putting on e-bay?

The hearing for which I was preparing to wrangle alligators did not get the result I wanted, but went well none the less. It went well in the sense that the judge was paying attention to everything, even if he ruled only on a very narrow issue. It went well in the sense that the county attorney got a good look at his client’s case, and likes it so little that he was advising me on how to get back to the judge for reconsideration. And it went well in the sense that the mastermind behind it came out looking like the petty, vindictive idiot she’s been. I wasn’t sure, when I started, that there was a religious issue behind this. The thing is that this just doesn’t make sense unless that is factored in. My clients are openly Pagan, and when you get down to the level of restrictions that child protection is asking the judge to endorse, all of them have their impact in keeping the family away from Pagan sponsored events. It’s not dispositive, but, well, it’s way past coincidence.

Joseph managed to inveigle his way to having pizza twice yesterday. He asked for it in the evening, and we decided to indulge him. Then he mentioned that they had had a pizza party in school that day. I’m amused. I’m also amused that when I looked at the recommended booklist sent home by the school for kids going into first grade, my son had already read them all…as well as all the books recommended for incoming second and third graders. And he’s still my cuddle-bug. We proved that the other morning, when I woke up before he did. I was downstairs, and we had a full-stop refusal to move until I figured out what was wrong, came upstairs, and cuddled him for 10 minutes. We were late for school, but hey, now I know what’s required. And I must admit, I’m passing fond of the practice myself.

My husband had an interview last week, and has another next week. Hopefully that will bear some fruit sometime very soon. This un- and under-employment nonsense has got to stop.

And that’s it. It’s got to be. It’s been a ridiculously busy week and a half, but I have to get home now. I have promises to keep.

One must be careful of how one kicks an alligator. Either end can hurt.

In a valiant attempt to defuse an escalating situation, I took on representing a woman who is being jerked around by our local child protection agency for reasons that only make sense if you look at it from a religious crusader’s perpective. The original allegation was that the oldest teenage child was molesting some much younger siblings. That has not been substantiated in six months. But today, not twelve hours after I called and confirmed that I was representing her and set up a meeting for Monday, they have declared her “uncooperative” and removed – no, not the teenager – the younger kids. When I tried to discuss it with the case worker, she said “we’ll just have to let the judge decide. I have a court order.” Asked why, she said “therapeutic reasons”. Non responsive answer, twit. This woman has taken her kids to the therapists every single appointment. No one has alleged that she is any danger to her kids, either in terms of neglect or abuse. But they took them anyway. She can’t talk to them; she can’t go to their ball games.

I can’t measure the damage this will do to the kids…all the kids. The little ones are too small to understand it; they will know only that the rug got yanked out from under them and they couldn’t go to Mommy for comfort. The oldest will be blaming himself for what has happened to the little ones. I got into it to try to be the voice of reason, and never even got the chance. The mother is Wiccan, and the therapist keeps asking if she’s started taking them to church yet and whether the oldest kid “believes in a higher presence”. This situation is everything I never wanted to face again, and I’m going into it head first. Joseph climbed up in my lap after the phone call, and I kept thinking “there but for G-d go I.” Given his garbled use of language, I can see that happening all too easily.

I’m going to drive to Bloomington in the morning, although I’m not sure what I can do. I’m a lawyer, not a fairy godmother. I’m going to try to get an answer on the specific allegations, and I’m going to try to get to both the attorney for CPS and the judge, to at least get some sanity into the current situation. Unless I’m very lucky, this case will go on for months now. I’m headed straight into something that broke me before. But I can’t let this family be railroaded and destroyed for utterly bogus reasons and not try to do something about it. If I did, I wouldn’t still be me. So now I get to choose: do I kick the alligator’s nose or its tail?

I know my life has gotten too crazy when I have to pry out an hour to spend with my son in the afternoon. And I did; I knew I needed to be a diligent lawyer, but by the time I got home I just wanted to watch Joseph play with his best buddy down the street, rocking in their hammock with a watchful mother on either side or pushing them on the swings, with my son indignant because I pushed a small body with each hand instead of keeping both for him.

I took the time, of course. The legal work is getting done this morning, while J. is in school. I’ll be out this afternoon again, this time helping a fledgling register for unemployment and picking up my housemate’s sort-of-ex-boyfriend for the evening. I’ll get my son to help me pull weeds in the back yard, so that I can actually put in the plants I acquired at the plant sale before they die. But my son won’t want Mommy to make his life happy forever. In a few years, it probably won’t be a special treat to walk to the library with me, as it was yesterday evening. Ten years from now I will still be a lawyer. But ten years from now, my boy won’t be little. I want to play with him while he is. So excuse me, please. I need to go make a date with my son.

I have done what I suspect most who qualify for recognition on Mother’s Day do…I’ve been both a mother and a daughter. I’ve run after my small son, provided a lap for extended periods, sung my 5 month old nephew to sleep (to the surprise of his grandmother, who commented that the baby had never gone from screaming to quiet in 3 seconds flat for anyone but his mother that she had ever seen), made sure my son spent time with both his grandmothers, and sat with the neighbor and watched him splash with their son in their pool. Both little boys are regular water babies, and the pool – six feet in diameter and about a foot deep – seems huge to them.

Right now my own mother is sitting downstairs talking to my housemate, having come over for the express purpose of escaping the dead air conditioning in her house. It was 86 degrees out today, which is way too hot for Indiana in early May. I’m upstairs listening for the small boy who has run himself into exhaustion as he tells himself stories to put himself to sleep. I’d invited Mom and Dad over earlier in the day, but Dad forgot even to tell Mom I’d called. Oh, well. Given the miscommunication, that’s just as well. Dad thought I’d invited them over to my in-laws. My mother in law just had knee replacement surgery. I tremble to think of the reaction if my parents showed up out of the blue. Eeek!

I must have been pretty testy lately. Mom asked to come over and promised “not to discuss anything you don’t want to discuss.” That hasn’t historically slowed her down much. Most recently it’s been over, of all things, my hairstyle. When I told her I was getting my hair cut so I could manage to look professional on short notice, she begged me to get it done as it had been when I was a little girl. I finally ended up telling her that was the one style I would never, ever wear again. But tonight’s conversation revolved around the classes she’s taking at Oasis, so there was nothing incendiary in it.

I must admit I’m amused. I spent literally years trying to convince her to look at the Oasis course catalogue, and being met by inertia. Finally I registered her myself and took her that term’s catalogue with the things I thought she’d be interested in highlighted. I was campaigning to get her to get out of the house herself even if she couldn’t budge Dad. Finally, very hesitantly, she signed up for one class. Now? She literally tried to register for 100 different classes over the summer (a lot of them are one-time lectures), and is disappointed because she only got into half of them! She’s interested, and excited, and happier than I’ve seen her in a long time. And in the middle of telling us about all the things she signed up for, she stopped, looked at me, and said “you told me so!”

I did. And I’m glad I have a mother who wants to learn the next thing, and the next, and the one after that. I got that aspect of my personality from her mother and from her. I hope my son learns it from me. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

Ever since high school, I have periodically revived the phrase “this too shall pass” as a personal mantra. When one attends 4 different schools over the course of high school, keeping that in mind is a necessary survival skill.

Today was decidedly a day to remind myself of that. It started with opening the dishwasher to unload it to find the upper level spray arm lying on the dishes in the bottom rack. Repairman came by 1:00 p.m., but now the part won’t be in until Monday. So I have a split-level dish drainer for the weekend. Then there was the sequence of “Dear Abby” type phone calls. I escaped to aquire shoes for my son only to realize that I had forgotten to check his current size…and someone at home had knocked the phone off the hook, so I couldn’t get through to ask. Got the shoes Wick needed, anyway…and then the clerk opened the box to discover that someone had switched the contents with another box. Believe me, what was in that box was not anything my husband would be caught dead in! (Three toned patent leather tasseled pseudo-loafers that would make a pimp blush) So I trotted back to the far corner of the store, only to find that his size wasn’t there in the style I had intended to get. Went to the grocery only to forget that which my small son lives on, which we were out of. And oh yeah, tried to get some actual lawyer type work for which I might actually get paid done, but couldn’t do it through the phone calls.

We did manage to go out to dinner and the opera, courtesy of tickets given us by my in-laws. The music really is the saving grace, as the plot of Rigolleto is lame even by opera standards. You know it’s bad when, at the most melodramatically tragic moments, the 21st century audience giggles. Each individual was very quiet about it, but when it’s everyone in the house it’s hard to mistake. On the other hand, it was a three-plus hour performance and it did not seem like it. The arias were magnificently performed, and the soprano had me sitting there in absolute awe.

And of course, I came home to more crises in my e-mail. I’m going to go to sleep. Hopefully the cache will clear out and the brain reboot. I know how to reinstall an operating system for software, but this seems to be a wetware malfunction. That’s a bit more problematic. Anyone know how to defragment a non-artificial intellegence?