Seattle – Page 2 – Clownmommy

The Missoula Public Library and The Book Exchange

I was literally plugging in my laptop so I can check my e-mail from a public wi-fi site (because my parents only have dial-up) when my cell phone rang. It was Kendall asking if I’ve sent out the e-mail blast asking for donations for the troupe. Yikes I haven’t. GUILT. I’m a bad friend. I am a bad company member. I dropped the ball. Twice that I’m aware of–maybe three times if end up not making it to the Bigfork Summer Playhouse Reunion this weekend. I’m here in Montana without a car and just today getting passwords and such so I can walk over to my brothers house in order to use my laptop outside of a coffee shop with wifi.

Last night I really missed being able to check e-mail and facebook as part of my bedtime routine. At the hotel in Seattle I’d go to the lobby for wifi or use The Husband’s bluetooth connection because I don’t have a crackberry of my own.

In Brooklyn before we left we made it to the good-bye party for the friends moving to Uganda but I didn’t get back to the friend running for office in Brooklyn who needed me to fax him our info because his campaign lost our donor card. The Husband was too busy at work trying to get ready to leave town for a week. I was cleaning and packing and trying to say good-bye to the friends who will have moved away by the time we get back to Brooklyn. Things were dropped. Things were missed.

Now I’m at the public library where I have come with My Kid, Girl Cousin and The Grandparents. The girls are signing up for the summer reading program (grand prizes provided by Dairy Queen) and searching the shelves for matching books to read to their dolls.

And now we’re at The Book Exchange where my father has a lot of credit and his grandaughters are sure to acquire some new books in the next few minutes. While I try once again to go on facebook and see who I know from long ago who is in Missoula, Montana at this point in time. Yesterday I got a call on my cell phone from an old friend and we were so excited to speak to each other that it took a while to figure out that I who live in Brooklyn am in Missoula and she who lives in Montana is in New York.

Now that I’m sitting here looking across the street at the fairgrounds where the rides and animal pens are being set up for the Western Montana Fair and My Kid is otherwise occupied I can’t remember what I wanted to say. It’s just so weird being back in my home town, a not-young (this is a college town) mom, just visiting from my Brooklyn, New York.

And the girls are ready to go.

The Last Day of Vacation in Seattle

Saturday 8/8/09

Last Day

Up and awake and watching Discovery Network Shark Week. The clock is ticking. Today is our last day together in Seattle. Tomorrow The Husband returns to work in New York City and My Kid and I continue on to two weeks with My Parents in Montana. Last year the husband was able to take enough time to come to Montana with us (but the Seattle leg was cut short). It’s so frustrating trying to combine parental obligations with a family vacation and also trying to see old friends in the city where we used to live. We never get to succeed in doing it all. I think we’re starting to feel that “sandwich generation” squeeze.

more Saturday 8/8/09

The pressure mounts on the last day of vacation, the last day of summer vacation for The Husband. We left the Westin Hotel (the one that looks like 2 round nuclear plant cooling towers) for a walk to Pike Place Market. I guess I was fantasizing when I thought we could eat them for breakfast every day of the vacation– on that first day when we took our walk from the other hotel through Pioneer Square to Pike Place Market the Nordstrom Rack and the rest of downtown in our relaxed “here we are again in old familiar–and also different since we lived here–traveling home to Seattle city day.

Today, we walked again to Pike Place market where we ate crumpets covered with yummy sweet and savory foods and unlimited mugs of tea (and we bought a dozen crumpets for his mother and my mother). We passed Goldmine Jewlery where our wedding bands were made. I would have stopped but there was a “back in a minute” post-it on the door and as I said the clock was ticking. The thought crossed my mind, wouldn’t it be lovely to have her design a tiny gold ring for our little princess–maybe when she is older… Then we walked on to Pioneer Square to take My Kid to Magic Mouse Toys. She enjoyed her time there very much but didn’t find anything she needed to buy today. Amazing. My Kid can show amazing restraint. (I mean come on, we were vulnerable parents feeling the pressure of a vacation ending, we probably would have bought anything if it brought a smile…)

We didn’t get to the pool today. We never made it to the Pacific Science Center. We never went for a boat ride. There are friends we’d hoped to see who we never got to see. Now our time is up. When The Husband talked to his mom on the cell phone about all she thought still needed to be done there was so much tension that I ended up with significant shoulder pain from carrying the same purse I’ve been carrying around all week long.

We went up to The Mother-In-Law’s apartment to work on THE LIST. We took some old chairs to Good Will and waited in line to drop them off. We took some stuff to the UPS package express store and paid $100 to ship it to Brooklyn even though we don’t want most of it that is still the easiest way to deal because we are out of time. (that list had 14 items on it when I looked–just sayin’)

Finally…

For dinner we had reservations at Etta’s, the Tom Douglas restaurant. Our kid didn’t like the not-so-great-tasting-of-hamburger-grill crab cakes we got from the hotel room service last night and The Husband wanted to change her mind. She wasn’t impressed with the Tom Douglas crabcakes either but that’s OK because we inhaled what she didn’t eat. AND My Kid ordered half a Dungeness crab for her dinner and ate it all by herself!!! It was so good that when My Kid and The Mother-In-Law ordered desert The Husband and I split another half Dungeness crab. It’s so much better than lobster or any other kind of crab even King crab. Dungeness crab is the best shellfish either of us have ever had and it is not available on the East Coast. Our meal was over $200. But it was that time versus money thing and The Husband’s vacation time is so short and so not relaxing, we have to enjoy what we can. We enjoyed the seafood at Etta’s restaurant in Pike Place Market very much.

After The Husband dropped My Kid and I off at the hotel and drove his mom and her car home and returned in a taxi (more cash up front that seems extravagant to my people of origin who drive their own cars and carry their own food) he said his mom said something that acknowledged that he may not have had as nice a time as he might have had because of the numerous errands he succeeded in accomplishing for his mother.

Room Service

Friday 8/7/09

We’re moving slowly today. I was awake at 7:30 am but those people I travel with weren’t. I ended up reading for a while (The Husband’s copy of The Fall of the House of Bush.) My book is Suzanna Clarke’s A House in Fez about restoring a house in Morocco but I wasn’t in the mood to read about houses after visiting our friends sweet home last night, stepping into the life we might have been living if we had stayed in Seattle and continued the life we started when we bought our little house near Seattle U.

After we got back to the hotel, My Kid was hungry (as she seems to be every 2 hours these days) so we took a short walk to Palace Kitchen, the Tom Douglas restaurant with the late-night kitchen we used to frequent when The Husband was started making decent money while we were still doing theatre at Annex. So there were memories.

Now it’s after ten and we have ordered some room service because My Kid is hungry and The Husband and I are both on our laptops and not moving quickly at all.

In preparation for the end of this leg of the vacation…The Husband is giving My Kid all her chargers (Nintendo DS et all) to put into her luggage because we’re going on to Montana for two weeks with the other grandparents and The Husband is going back to work. Sigh.

Yeah! A phone call from an old friend. I’m going to have coffee today with someone I know from both Montana and Seattle!

The day is shaping up with plans for swimming and lunch and Seattle Center and more time with The Mother-In-Law. But for now we are still in the hotel room content with cartoons on the TV and real live window washers on the office building across the street.

Deception Pass

Wednesday 8/5/09

After a late start we got on the road for a day trip to Deception Pass State Park. We chose a northern destination because we had to drop off The Mother-In-Law’s surger at the old school sewing machine repair shop at 200th and Aurora. There were some beautiful old singer treadle sewing machines there.

Then, on the road for a long drive. My city kid continues to be amazed that she falls asleep every time we buckle into a car and go for a long drive.

Driving North on I-5 from Seattle brought back so many memories, Annex Retreats, trips to Port Townsend and Orcas Island, that school show job I had touring elementary schools of the I-5 corridor in the utility company musical.

I remember going through Deception Pass on the Spirit of Discovery. The CSR’s had just finished setting the table for lunch and the boat hit a whirlpool just right and tipped sideways enough for all the dishes and glasses to slide off the fully set tables.

My Kid played in the sand at Admiralty Inlet while I felt a little sentimental and sad. Why did I ever stop working on the boats that went up and down the Inside Passage? What was I thinking?

There was to be an alternate life in Seattle where car trips and outdoor activities are almost effortless. Oh well.

We had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Mount Vernon and then drove home under one of the most beautiful full moons I have ever seen.

old friends and new creative work

8/4/09

The highlight of the day fro My Kid and The Mother-In-Law was lunch at the Rainforest Cafe in Southcenter Mall which has been inexplicably renamed “Westfield”. As an aspiring downtown Seattle creative person I never went to that mall. Then when we got pregnant and had a baby we started to go there frequently because of the nearby Babies R Us.

The Rainforest Cafe, impressed my kid to the point that it is now her second favorite restaurant after Dave and Busters (beating out Bubba Gump Shrimp). The drinks were too sweet and the food too heavy. But hey there were anamatronic monkeys, elephants and snakes, with live sharks in the saltwater fish tanks. And the dessert brownie volcano was topped with a lit sparkler! Other than that the mall was a bad mall according to My Kid did not get anything. She couldn’t even any clip-on earrings at Claires, her favorite mall store. I looked at handbags, but I did not buy one. She was upset that they were all over $100 and therefore not anything she could expect to get so she stopped enjoying the mall. The only person who got anything at all was The Husband who purchased a much needed pair of casual sneakers to wear during the rest of the vacation. And it must be remembered, My Kid did get the giant special frog-head glass with a toy in the bottom compartment at the Rainforest Cafe so it wasn’t like she was leaving completely empty handed. But, her emotional state may have been entirely unrelated to the mall experience. In the car her child’s piped up from the back seat asking if this was Tuesday:

“Today is Eliza’s birthday and today is the day I’ll never see Mutessi ever again.”

She was thinking about neighborhood friends back in Brooklyn, one lives on our block, the other is moving to Uganda.

Because My Kid’s dark mood plans were changed and I hoped out of the car alone at the Northwest Film Forum while The Husband took My Kid and The Mother-In-Law to Uwagimaya to look for novelty erasers and snacks. Then back to her apartment to make small repairs while I watched the evening of short films about water commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs with Seattle Public Utilities;

“The projects reflect SPU’s management of the complete cycle of hydrology for Seattle’s water resources from drinking water through drainage, and Restore Our Waters, the city’s initiative to protect and restore Seattle’s urban waterways.”

Everything in the Northwest is green. Even one of our old theatre friends now works promoting sustainable agriculture.

There were 5 films. SJ Chiro (our Annex Friend) created a fairy tale based on a story by Brett Fetzer (another Annex Friend) narrated by Susanna Burney (another Annex Friend) Cynthia Whalen (another Annex Friend) was in it. Other people we knew from our time at Annex worked on the film and some were at the screening and it was good to see them and go to Eleseyan afterwards for some yummy Seattle microbrew.

But, I was filled with mommy guilt throughout entire film event. My Kid would have enjoyed the short films, especially the stop action animation piece in which the role of water was played by clear glass marbles and the two live-action stories featuring children near her own age. I wish she had been there to see some kids on screen from outside the Disney Studio stable and I was blaming myself for not monitoring everyones protein, rest and happiness levels in the hours ahead of 7:00pm in order to alter the balance of my child so that we could have gone as a family to see the films and friends. Besides, there were some friends’ kids in the audience she might have played with.

Two of the films featured novelty photography and modern dancers in the rain which reminded me why I was hesitant to major the arts while at the University of Montana.

SJ Chiro’s films and Kendall Cornell’s latest work Clown Axioms both rely on fairy tale imagery and that is exciting to me.

Sometimes the simple things take me so long, like logging onto the internet using the hotel’s wifi connection that by the time I have my Clownmommy dashboard on the screen I forgot what I had intended to write about.

I don’t know how much of my “writing time” I wasted hitting buttons and guessing at the procedure for logging in from a different connection. I ended up calling The Husband on the phone and having him walk me through the simple procedure that I ought to have down by now. But, I don’t. Story of my life–and that’s why I am a clown. The movements are too small though, getting frustrated in front of a laptop, it would have to be so subtle, so underplayed. Maybe it could work on film, certainly not on stage. In either case it would be a pretty boring piece to watch. (I do have a performance date in the fall…will I do something completely new or rework something I’ve already tried…)

While I am trying to remember what brilliant mommy thoughts I had that are now lost I am overhearing parts of the conversation of the two men at the set of couches next to my own seating arrangement here in the lobby of the Westin. One of the men seems to be ordering custom made shirts and possibly other clothing from the other man. It seems to be a regular event as the salesman type in a suit said to the other man in shirtsleeves “See you in September.” And they both made references to “last time.” I think that’s how Obama gets his clothes. Fascinating. Most of my clothes come from the sale racks at discount stores.

Speaking of clothes, I have been looking at the clothes of the people on the street her in Seattle. So much khaki, such baggy clothes. It was a difference I noticed right away when we moved to New York and there was so much black and the clothes were so much tighter, even on people who weren’t athlete thin. There is also more bright color in New York. Seattle people wear muted earth tones. When we come back each summer I start to feel dressed wrong in Seattle, but by the time I am in Missoula I start out feeling so uncomfortable I inevitably buy items like Tevas or shorts that I proceed to wear nearly every day of my visit home and never wear again back in New York. But I did notice a Gucci and Louis Vitton stores right across the street from each other near the 5th Avenue theatre in Downtown Seattle. That was a bit disorienting.

I see the thin young people riding their bikes and am then startled to see myself, a middle-aged mom type, reflected in a window, not at all the person I was when I lived her as an aspiring actress riding a bike while wearing Dock Martin boots with black leggings under a skirt, oversized T and flannel shirts. Yeah that. I also learned from another out of work actor that if you got a very large Starbucks coffee off the day you could doctor it up with vanilla and cinnamon and milk and it tasted like a latte and with enough milk it was a fine stand in for a meal all for less than $2.

That period of my life came completely to an end when The Husband, Baby and I flew back to Seattle from NYC where we had lived for only a couple of months for the final Annex party in the theatre space at 1916 Fourth Avenue. We stayed at the Kings Inn under the Monorail tracks on 5th Avenue. In preparation for the trip I pushed my stroller around Macy’s in Fulton Mall and Marshall’s at Atlantic center struggling to find something “presentable. . Presentable was a disappointing goal for such an emotionally charged special event. I was still nursing so I ended up with a easy access stretchy polyester top and skirt outfit for the party, a far cry from the slip-like or corset containing Betsy Johnson dresses I had worn to previous Annex-related events that were part of the courtship that led to our wedding here in Seattle over 10 years ago.

And my alone time has once again come to an end, The Husband, My Kid and The Mother-In-Law will be here in a few moments and we’re going to drive to a mall.

a moment or so

I’m sitting here ALONE in the bar in the lobby of the Westin, the hotel that looks like a silo, in downtown Seattle. I have in front of me my laptop which I haven’t touched since we got off the plane and a pretty lemondrop martini. The Husband took My Kid for a walk so I could have some time to myself. But, I’ve been checking my e-mail and facebook which is good because we’re trying to hook up with some old friends while we are in Seattle. (And of course there was at least one e-mail from someone who used to live in Brooklyn, back home to visit their relatives checking to see if we’re around to get together, and we’re not…) Though I have been here, at this table with my laptop, for some time I have not yet written the blog that I sat down here intending to write. There is so much to process. This is the city where The Husband and I met working in the same theatre. This is where we became engaged, got married, had a baby, bought a house (I felt tears trying to well up behind my eyes this morning at Home Depot, where we drove The Husband’s mother on an errand for some shelf brackets for her apartment, because we spent so much time at Home Depot with our little baby, right after we bought our little house that needed so much work, as we lay the groundwork for the life that we ended up not living in Seattle. I had selected my paint chips…

AND THERE’S MY CELLPHONE RINGING!

“Mom. Dad fell asleep.”

“Are you in the room?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. I’ll be up in a little while and then we’ll go swimming.”

and that’s all she wrote

more cool friends moving away

The day before we left for Seattle there was a party for neighborhood friends who are moving to Uganda. I was shocked by how tall were these little girls, all going into 4th grade, My Kid among them. We met when they were babies and our talk was about diapers and strollers and weaning and we were lucky to put 2 sentences together in an hour long playdate. Now the kids go off on their own and amuse themselves. One mom calls it the sweet spot. They’re still young enough to want to be seen with you but when they are with other kids watching them can be effortless for hours at a time.

My daughters childhood in Brooklyn flashes before my eyes.

Ssanyu and Mutessi were one of the first Mommy-Baby pairs I met when I started walking around and exploring our new neighborhood of Forte Greene, Brooklyn in May and June of 2001.

At the hotel in Seattle I awake at 3:00 am so sad that our friends are moving away. So sad that our babies have been vaporized into almost-tweens.

I must have been traumatized by an early data entry experience

Our home is not large. Rain is pouring outside. My daughter has a friend over and she has decided she would like to play in the front living-dining-media-play-room part of the apartment. So I am relegated to the back bedroom half of the apartment which is fine with me. I’m listening NPR and writing this blog post in which I hope to unwind all the anxiety I have built up over the past few days.

Last night, we had a production meeting for Clown Axioms which I had been looking forward to because if I do too much stay-at-home-mommy-camp without a break I start to go a little nuts. In addition we’re going to travel West tomorrow to see all of My Kid’s grandparents and cousins and there is the stress involved in that, cleaning the apartment, packing the clothes, which involves multiple trips to the laundromat both to drop off stuff to have washed (towels, socks, jeans…) and to wash clothes myself using my own detergent and pulling half the stuff out of the dryer while it is still damp (black clothes, brightly colored clothes, clothing containing spandex) additionally my husband has his shirts done and of course the wool suits are dry cleaned. I grew up in Montana where maybe dress coats are dry cleaned in the spring but that’s about it. My mother and her peers all had laundry rooms! We washed jackets with tennis balls to fluff up the down. Special t-shirts were routinely tumbled in the dryer to get the wrinkles out and then hung to dry. Other things went on drying wracks or ironed on a board set up in front of the television. When I was growing up during the last great period of economic downturn and environmental awareness my mother eschewed paper towels and used wash clothes that she threw down the basement stairs to end up in the laundry room. I can comfortably handle only 1 or 2 wash clothes in the bathroom and at the kitchen sink and one hand towel in each place. I have no laundry room, mud room, or back porch to hang wet anything. I can’t seem to manage haul laundry down the two flights of stairs two blocks to the laundromat more than once a week. I am always behind.

As a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t stay home I have had a great deal of difficulty getting a handle on the housework over the years. I am experimenting with hiring a cleaning lady which friends of mine do without thinking and which I have a great deal of angst about, possibly because I am descended from Nebraska farm wives and why shouldn’t I be able to get my work done by myself. OK. So yesterday, the cleaning lady cleaned while I went up and down the stairs and down the street with six bags of laundry. At the same time as I was saying good-bye to the cleaning lady I was telling My Kid to put on her shoes and get ready for her tennis class. As soon as her tennis class was over I was telling her how we were going to take the train to Penn Station so I could go to a production meeting and The Husband would take her out to dinner in the city.

And so I found myself sitting around a conference table with the other clown women excited to see them and to get going on our next project. At the same time all the talk about all the things that need to be done to take our company to the next level began to fill me with anxiety. There was much discussion of fundraising and data bases and donor spread sheets and mailing lists. I found myself feeling guilty for hesitating to “step up to the plate” at the same time knowing that I am already counting down the hours and things that need to be done before we check in at the airport tomorrow. (Phone, Nintendo DS, and lap charges have to be collected and packed. Windows have to be closed. Electronics that must be turned off. Suitcases that need to be packed. If the flight is at 7 should I feed My Kid before we leave or pack food to eat on the road or buy something at the airport. If we leave NYC at 7 and get to Seattle at 10 how many hours will we really be on the plane?) I really couldn’t bend my mind around exporting the “vertical response CSV files” by the end of the week people were talking about. I just felt vaguely guilty and incompetent. When the multitude of tasks were being assigned I felt so much anxiety it crossed my mind that maybe it would be so much work that the performances at La Mama that I have been looking forward to for some time might not be worth it. I held back and was careful with my volunteer choices. Press kits. That involves hand carrying original documents to Kinko’s and printing a set number of copies and arranging them colored folders in a particular order. I can do that. It’s immediate, tactile and physical. Other jobs were so technical or so vague I knew they would leave my head as soon as I crossed the threshold of the conference room. Then I would come back from my trip Seattle and Montana, finish up My Kid’s summer activities and get her settled into her new class and grade only to realize I’ve completely forgotten to do some clerical task for the clown troupe the dereliction of which will cause everyone in the company to hate me.

And then there was the doctor appointment I had this morning which was just a check-up but in the context of my anxiety over packing for a cross country trip to see the in-laws and the parents and the publicity and fundraising tasks of the growing theatrical company I was ready to throw in the towel and not even go when the voice mail from the doctor’s receptionist reminded me that the doctor runs on time and a tardiness of more than 10 minutes could cause the appointment to be rescheduled and or cancelled. Since I had a different appointment in Brooklyn Heights at 9 am and then had to take My Kid back to Fort Greene to hook up with her friend for an outing to the Scholastic Store in Manhattan and get back to Brooklyn Heights in time for the appointment. I had to be talked down from my fear of failure by someone who pointed out that it would not be the end of the world if the particular combination of car service and subway rides that I put together failed to get me to the doctor’s office by my check-up had to be rescheduled and the doctor I’ve never met probably would not have time to be upset with me if all the pieces of my life puzzle did not fit together at exactly 11:15 am in a particular office in a particular building in a particular part of New York City.

I don’t know who these people are that they have been talking about on the news who use way to much medical intervention. (They must be hanging out with those “Welfare Moms” who go through pregnancy and childbirth not to mention living with a baby/toddler/preschooler/kid just for a few additional dollars per month.) After I’ve been weighed and measured, had my blood drawn, peed in a cup and wired for an ECG. It was just an office visit, completely anticlimactic given my fear of cancer/heard disease/unknown. I’m done! Significant numbers of calendar pages will turn before I seek additional medical care.

Such a long exhausting week I was afraid I would forget to show up at the theatre for my own perfomance

By Saturday I was so exhausted I was afraid I would forget to show up for my own performance in “Clownical Trials” at Theatrelab. It has been a very long week.

It began to go south a week ago Saturday at 8:00 am when the buzzer rang while we were still asleep. It was the Verizon repairman there to check the phone line that enters our apartment in the bedroom. We hadn’t had phone service for over two weeks and this was the third repairman–the first to arrive before 2 pm.

Early Sunday morning I had to get My Kid up and dressed and to her religious education class as per the Friday e-mail informing us that the regular “first Sunday of each month” class was THIS SUNDAY MARCH 29–big surprise to me and to many others… (because of Palm Sunday festivities on Sunday April Fools Day). We joined My Kid’s friend and her mother to hear the PS 8 choir at an event but it ran long and My Kid had been promised “Monsters vs Aliens” so we left and bought our tickets at the Court Street Theatre an hour early. We went across the street to a deli for sandwiches but by the time we had eaten and The Husband had hooked up with us and we returned to the theatre with our tickets only to discover there were no seats together except in the front row four feet from the screen. My Kid produced tears and we left although her friend was willing to stay so we didn’t get to see it together. We exchanged our tickets for the next show pushing back dinner and homework and started the week tired:

Unaware of the week that was about to unfold I wasted energy walking from My Kid’s school in Brooklyn Heights to the McBurney Y on 14th street in Manhattan where I took two Pilates classes and got some writing done before returning to pick up my child after school. After she played in the playground for a while we caught a train to Grand Central Station meet up with The Husband and go together to our appointment to have our taxes done by someone we’d never met. Our previous tax preparer, the only one we’ve ever used (our lives were simple and we did our own taxes when we lived in Seattle) passed away. The tax man we met does pro bono work for small theaters and he was so nice that I didn’t go through the shame of failure I usually experience when my work as a “performing artist” is examined and graded on the income tax report card. That made me so happy.

Afterwards, there was still the chore of dinner (I just don’t understand why The Husband and My Kid can’t be satisfied with a meal of “Odwalla Super Protein” and a banana–like me.)

As a reward for sitting through the tax meeting My Kid was allowed to choose the restaurant. When she saw the lights of Times Square she thought immediately of the Bubba Gump Shrimp theme restaurant! At least there was no line to get in on a Monday. Happy child with her light up theme beverage glass changing the license plate sign that says, “Run Forrest Run” or “Stop Forrest Stop” to control the attention of the happy jokey servers. I would have preferred to slink into dark booth for a quiet sip of wine and decompress…

Then it was Tuesday. I spent several hours sorting through some old papers at home before running out of time and going to pick up My Kid from school. Two of the mothers on the playground were commiserating over the hair of one of my daughters friends. The experienced mother told the other mother, “That looks like a nit”. The lady in Borough Park was called. An appointment was set for that very day. That evening I got the call from the mother of My Kid’s friend (who had hosted my child for a playdate the previous week). Positive!

Mobilize! I woke up at 3 am and researched lice on the internet until dawn. On Wednesday morning I called the lady. We went after school and paid almost as much as we had paid the tax lawyer for her to comb the vermin out of My Kid’s hair which hangs down to her butt.

On Thursday I changed all the bedding and spent FIVE HOURS at the laundromat washing more than 12 loads of laundry. Coats were sent out to be dry cleaned. All the stuffed animals and couch pillows went into plastic bags for two weeks. Or stuffed animal jail as My Kid calls it. Thursday night there was a 4-hour rehearsal at Theatrelab for Jef’s remount of “Clownical Trials”

Friday morning I was again the Y for Pilates and swimming. I’m trying increase my stamina. I had time for one hour of Jef’s three-hour afternoon workshop between before returning to Brooklyn Heights to catch the Brownie Girl Scout ceremony (at which the experiences lice mother identified nits in the hair of yet another friend of my child!)

Saturday for me was all about spending time with My Kid and The Husband and making sure meals were consumed before I left around 4 to make the 5 o’clock call for the 8:00 pm performance. I can’t say it was our best family day. We were all tired and cranky. None of us had slept well for days. I have my own mixed up life. The Husband has a “real” and therefore stressful job in Manhattan and My Kid is under pressure to “read more” of the books she doesn’t like and should be taken out for a bit of a run–like a dog, ideally twice a day.

After the performance there was a reception with some interesting creative types, but I was done being awake by 11:00 pm. (I took the L to Williamsburg to change to the G because the A and the C weren’t running. I was home just after midnight.) The younger performers went out for more drinks and conversation. Another time I would have joined them. But, this Saturday I was too worn out by the mommy part of my clown life.