Author: kathie

Nancy Keenan

I noticed in the schedule of the Democratic National Convention that Nancy Keenan spoke yesterday as the president of NARAL.  I like her!  As a teacher and legislator, she was one of “our people” when I was a lobbyist intern for the Montana Federation of Teachers.

One day there was a call of the house, a motion which can be adopted by a deliberative assembly that has the authority to compel the attendance of its members in the absence of a quorum. The effect of the adoption of this motion is that the president of the assembly makes out arrest warrants which authorize the sergeant-at-arms to arrest any or all absent members and bring them to the meeting hall so that a quorum may be present. This motion is usually seen in houses of legislatures, such as the United States House of Representatives.

When the members realized that they were going to be forced to spend the night in the state house (because of the two absent members, one was undergoing a root canal and the other had flown to California to retrieve a wayward daughter) some of the Butte representatives sent out for liquor and broke out the cards.  

Nancy Keenan and one of the other female lesislators set up a free-standing tent in the aisle, unrolled sleeping bags, got in and went to sleep until the boys were done playing their games.

Michelle Obama

I suppose if my husband was running for president I would let professionals groom me.  As it is I’m ready to go to the salon of the mom of a kid who goes to my school and let her have at it, even though her six-year-old looked like she cut her own bangs.  (Her mom cuts hair for a job, what are the chances?…)

Watching the speech I kept trying to memorize phrases for later reference, but in the end, my favorite part came after the speech when Malia and Sasha came on stage and waved to the video feed of Obama and said “Hi Daddy!” into the microphone.  Tall stately Michelle Obama bent down to talk to her daughters. (Physical Theatre–stronger than words)

At the YMCA swimming pool we were getting ready to leave and I said to the other mother, “I think we’re missing Michelle Obama’s speech”  

“They work out a lot!” was her reply.

I was preoccupied with the visual.  That’s what a successful professional woman looks like.  

Once upon a time I wanted to be a successful woman like that.  I saw some of them when I interned at the DNC as a college student and returned after graduation to work for my congressman.  I thought maybe I should go to law school.  But, most women I met did not look like Michelle Obama.  Most women did not carry themselves that tall.  They wore suits to work, but their jobs were in reality sucky clerical jobs, or they had the titles but the job they got through connections (It was Washington, DC) was an uncomfortable fit.  I never found a role model like Michelle Obama was said to be in the pre-speech DNC film.  It would have been nice.  I wore suits and carried high heel pumps in my shoulder strapbriefcase while I commuted in running shoes with white socks over my nylons.  But, once I got do work, I didn’t know why I was there outside of a vague aspiration to do good work and be the kind of person who wore Anne Taylor suits to work every day.

Michelle Obama has a lot more going on.

Miley Cyrus is still a kid

As My Kid watches the annoyingly juvenile “Disney Channel Games”, I can’t help but think of the people who made such a big fuss about Miley Cyrus and her too adult Vanity Fair photo shoot—so that she was forced to pull out of this age-appropriate summer campy televised activity. She seemed to genuinely enjoy being on a team last summer.  Too bad.

Gearing up for the Festival

I’m getting nervous.

There is a lot to do.

I’ve got my South Oxford Space rehearsals booked for daytimes when My Kid is in school.  

I’ve decided what to wear on stage.

My Kid has a dentist appointment this week.

We have to shop for school supplies.

I have to get the apartment ready for company.

We’re going to Coney Island on Friday to see the Cyclones play.

My Kid and I need to clean her room and go through her closets and toss the outgrown clothes and toys.

Hardest of all–I need to get my kid back on the school year sleep schedule!

Someone is on a business trip and it’s not me

 

Someone in this family is in EUROPE on business AND IT’S NOT ME.  

IT SHOULD BE ME.  I’M THE ONE who studied French.   I’M THE ONE who loves to travel.  I’M THE ONE who has a list of European clowns and circuses  and opera companies I want to see.  I’M THE ONE creating a non-verbal physical theatre that I hope will take me to EUROPE someday.

Instead, I am hiding in the bedroom trying to write (as a journalism grad it was supposed to be my career once upon a time) while My Kid watches too much “Spongebob Squarepants” and eats sugared cereal in the other room.  I feel guilty because as a “stay-at-home-mom”  I am supposed to prepare frugal yet organic meals  in my beautiful yet practically decorated home while simultaneously presiding over creative art projects and planning educational outings for my offspring.

When a couple has a baby, as a general rule, one of the careers takes a back seat.  Nursing mothers have to work so hard not to stay home that they generally stay home.  Then one by one women on maternity leave go back to work and after a while the only adults pushing strollers to play group and playgrounds are the professional caregivers, freelancers and artists.

Subsidized childcare outside weekday office hours is rare.  Jobs with irregular hours are not.  Nannies can cost less than daycare, but the economy comes from being able to offer a regular schedule.  If I was in rehearsal for a play now,  instead of “working on a piece”, I’d be screwed.

 I am enabling The Husband to have both career and family simply by being the one who is always around.  It is the path of least resistance.  For a woman without paid help or near-by relatives involved with her children to the point of sleep-over babysitting, it would be almost impossible to leave the country for a week WITH ONLY 2 DAYS NOTICE.

When I was still single, I worked in Japan as part of a group of 10 variety entertainers on a 4-month contract.  Two of the men had toddlers and neither was still with the mother.  

“She was into having a baby…but, I couldn’t practice at home…so I had to leave…” said one of the jugglers.

The mother of a teenager almost broke her contract when her own mother, who her daughter was staying with, called to let the performer know that her child was cutting classes and threatening to drop out of high school.  Her juggling partner and husband (who was not the father of the teenager) didn’t think it was his problem.

Another juggler desperately missed his 3 boys, but his relationship with his wife was not good.

Sigh.

Work is hard.  When combined with family life it can seem almost impossible.

There is ego involved as well.  

When My Kid was a baby, I met several men who were stay-at-home-dads (because they worked in the arts and their wives had the jobs with insurance).  Inevitably when I next saw their kids on the playground they were with a babysitter and when I next ran into the men, they had gone back to work because being home with the kids and not working was making them crazy.

I can’t find it now, but a while ago, I read a blog that was started by a man who was staying home with his infant son.  He blogged about how easy it was to plop his kid into the jogging stroller and go for a run.  He blogged about training seriously each morning before his wife left for work.  He was a triathlete or  marathon runner or something like that.  The days were going so smoothly he didn’t know why more men didn’t stay home with their babies.  The blog ended abruptly after a month or two.  No more entries.

My body doesn’t work like it used to

I went running in the morning, just around the park, just for half an hour.  But, by evening my hip hurt and after googling I think it is bursitis.  That’s not who I think I am.  That’s not how I move in the world.

I was multi-tasking, can’t get out of the apartment alone for very long, need some physical exercise (I want to juggle my fat around and really annoy it until it decides to leave me forever) and some time to think about the piece, and was thinking of it as a physical warm-up for a creative day.  

When I found out I had been accepted in to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, not yet 20 years ago, I began almost immediately to run several miles a day in the swampy Washington, D. C. heat with a significant number of push ups and sit ups every day.  Clown College was like boot camp, a large percentage of the students were just out of high school and most were male.  I had flexibility and stamina but I lacked upper body strength (my entire experience of flying trapeze was taking one swing out over the mat and sliding off onto the mats below).  I was not one of the students singled out special trapeze work.  I was pretty thrilled to be one of the small flexible women who were pulled out to be taught some two person basket hanging move (the name of which I can’t remember even though I desperately want to write it to prove will know I’m not lying and actually did once know circus people) for an idea the director had for clowns falling out of a flying kite.

I am working now as a stage clown, different from that kind of circus clown in that the gymnastics are emotional not physical.  In Europe clown is an older person’s game.  I wish I had seen Deborah Kauffman’s clown piece “Veni Vidi Vici” this past weekend, as I had planned.  She’s a local female clown role model.  But, The Husband’s sudden business trip required me, as The Mom, to make my priority family time and not ditch them to go into Manhattan for some obscure theatre that only I wanted to see.

What was so disturbing about that woman in the park was the way we didn’t exist to her and yet she felt comfortable telling us to do things (Is she someone accustomed to hired help???)  She never acknowledged us as people.

When someone trips and falls in the street, most people kind of freeze until the person gets up off the ground or it is clear that someone else helping them up.  They don’t stand next to them and say, “Could you press that crosswalk button for me.”  

It’s not like the playground was crowded and she hadn’t seen or heard the drama of the smashed finger.  There were only the two women with toddlers and us.

fuck you–you self absorbed toddler parent

After the fact, I was shaking.  I had yelled back at her as I left; “Fuck you, my kid’s bleeding!”

I didn’t realize how shocked and upset I was until after I did that.

We were having an uneventful afternoon in the apartment when the buzzer rang and it was My Kid’s friend. She and her brothers were riding their scooters and soon My Kid was with them in the park, all 4 of them flying down the walkway in the park looking like a commercial for some kind of organic yet commercially available snack food.  Then they went into the playground.

In the playground a couple of toddlers were walking around with their anxious mothers following close behind them–just like we used to do, back when we were shocked that there were dangerous older kids wildly hurtling their tough bruiser bodies around with abandon.  That was until the first physically gifted 3-year-old in our set learned to ride a bike without training wheels.  Are you nuts!  You can’t let that baby out anywhere near the street!!!!  

Our kids today were 5, 6 and just barely 8.  Big compared to a toddlers but still babies in the real world.  Our parent talk was about schools and neighborhoods and Freakonomics.  We were aware enough of the larger playground environment to yell at our kids to get off the baby swings because real babies needed to use them (this particular playground only has baby swings).  We were discussing the next playground to visit (Parents and caregivers make the rounds of playgrounds on a daily basis, like a bunch of frat boys on a Friday night pub crawl.)

One of the toddler mothers called out from about 15 feet away; “Could you watch the Razors there are babies.” Playground etiquette requires saying “hello” to other parents, or at least going up to them and making eye-contact before you tell them that you think their kid is doing something wrong.

I’m just sayin…

Anyway, our kids got off their scooters, and were playing around, and then we hear a scream.  A loud and sustained scream from the cast iron gate by the swings where My Kid and Her Friend were both standing frozen and screaming.  We looked up, my parent friend and I.  We stood up, my parent friend and I.  Then I ran over when we realized it was MY KID who was screaming. She had (or her friend had) smashed her finger in the cast iron gate.

Oh My God!!

Run to the kids.  Look at the finger.  Screams in the air.  Fear.  (back ground mind emergency protocol kicks in; going through the mental rolodex…–“Where is the insurance card?.. Which emergency room do we use?.. Car service phone number?…)  Take the kid with the finger to the cold water of the drinking fountain.  Examine the wound.  It hurts.  There’s blood.  Bruising and swelling.   But she can move the finger and ice and a bandage will be the treatment.

And yet, it is still traumatic.

 The plans to move to another playground have been abandoned.  I will take My Kid home and Her Friend and her brothers will be taken to their home.  Outside activities suddenly curtailed.  A bummer end to an impromptu playdate that was going so well.

As I was struggling out the playground gate guiding my sobbing bleeding child with one hand and juggling her sports equipment with the other, while simultaneously saying a forced cheerful goodbye to Her Friend (who is either guilt-ridden or afraid of being punished) and her brothers (who don’t know why their outside time has been suddenly cut short) and their parent (who must be thinking “Damn!”)  I hear the breathy passive-aggressive voice of the mother of one of the toddlers right beside me, “Could you shut the gate.”

After we finally get through the opening, I reach back and push at the gate with my arm  without even looking behind me (most parents and caregivers, myself included, turn back and face the gate checking for little escapees while pulling it closed and working the latch) 

I walk with my sobbing child for about 10 feet.

Then it hits me.

I suddenly yell without thinking…

“Fuck you, my kid’s bleeding!”