TanyaEby.com

I’ve been struck with a stuffy nose and a tired body. Stupid mid-winter colds. And right before I’m due to narrate too. Grrr. To offset this yucky feeling, I pulled on my hot pink velour pants, which I recently rediscovered in the back of my closet. These are a step above the comfort of yoga pants, because these pants don’t even pretend to be active wear. No. They’re called LOUNGE PANTS. They’re whole purpose is so you can lounge around. Brilliant!

I crawled into bed at 2PM for a nap. The Claritin D was kicking in and making me feel woozy and I thought a nice little sleep would help. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t sleep because there was a nasty little dance going on in my head. Ugly twisted creatures called the I Haven’t Beens.

They’re insidious buggers. They’ll keep you up for days if you’re not careful. My I Haven’t Beens are as follows:

I haven’t been working on my novels

I haven’t been reading enough

I haven’t been blogging enough

I haven’t been hanging out with the friends I miss

I haven’t been cleaning my house

I haven’t seen my sister or talked to her in a while

I haven’t taken my mom out to lunch

Then I got really annoyed with myself, because while I have really good intentions and I want to do everything on the planet, I’m only one person. Here’s what I Have Been doing:

I’ve been working on a short story

I’ve been eating healthy

I’ve been exercising

I’ve been devoting myself to my kids

I’ve been planning and prepping three classes

I’ve been relaxing so I don’t freak out

I’ve been tending to my relationship with Kealoha

So while there’s a ton of things I Haven’t Been doing, there’s also a ton of things I Have Been doing, and I’ve got to be happy with that.

Plus, when you’re wearing pants like these, you’re not SUPPOSED to do anything strenuous, except maybe bake brownies. Which I might do any second now.

In short, I’m still here. All is well. I’ve just been busy with living.

My daughter sometimes calls herself The Fart Machine. She’s five. Don’t tell her I told you she calls herself this. She’ll deny it. Sometimes, she’s really proud of her ability to create noise from her own body, and other days she insists that someone else did it. Like an invisible squirrel. Or Peanut (the kitty we had to find a new home for six months ago). Or Kealoha. Sometimes it IS Kealoha, but he usually owns up to it.

Yesterday morning, Simone let out an impressive fart. It positively vibrated.

“Simone!” I said. “Did you do that?”

She shook her head. Then she moved quickly away to another area (you can figure out why). She turned around and said: “I didn’t make that fart. The Adams did.”

The Adams? “Who is Adam?” I asked. “Your cousin? He lives like a half hour from here. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it.”

“No! Ma, the ADAMS did it.” She looked at me with that ‘how can you be so stupid’ face. “You know. ADAMS. Those tiny invisible things that have stuff swirling around them.”

“You mean atoms?”

“That’s what I said! The Atoms did it!”

“Are you telling me that you didn’t fart but atoms colliding around you made that fart?”

She looked at me like I was finally understanding something really simple. “Yes. That’s right,” she said, sounding relieved that she wouldn’t have to continue educating me. “You know, ma, your hand is made up of thousands of atoms. THOUSANDS.”

So. Okay. Wow.

According to my daughter, the atoms did it. And you know, she's right.

Don’t tell me that kids today aren’t learning anything. I don’t know where she learned about atoms, but it wasn’t from me, and if she can take that concept and blame her farts on it, then I am in awe of her awesome power. Brain power, that is. She makes me so proud.

I love Facebook but every once in a while it annoys me. Mostly, when I’m already annoyed to begin with…or depressed…or whatever, I can feel my inner shark surfacing, complete with that JAWS music. When you’re anxious or struggling, it’s sometimes hard to hear how happy everyone else is and how great running is and how they’ve lost 40 pounds by drinking shakes and eating a totally organic diet. I mean, I have trouble taking a shower every day because there isn’t enough TIME, let alone go for a run and make organic smoothies from my own window garden.

Allow me to provide a specific example, but first a little backstory. Two weeks ago, I gave up wheat. It was an experiment to see how it affected my mood and energy and general sense of well-being. And…dammit…it was great. I felt great. Chipper, bright, flat tummy, etc. But by the end of the second week, munching on so much protein just made me want to take a shower. But I was determined. If I could do two weeks, then I could keep going. And then I took my son to the allergist and that went okay until she noticed from his charts that he hasn’t gained weight in A YEAR. I made an immediate plan to see his primary care physician, and my brain started spinning.

This morning, I’m a ball of nerves. I need to cry. Big time. The place I narrate for isn’t returning my emails on availability. I think a gig is in the works, but I’m terrified that something happened or someone said something and they’re not going to hire me again. That would be tragic. I’m also obsessing over my son’s health. His dad and stepmom think he might have celiacs…an allergy to gluten. (We’re going to the doctor’s on Monday.) And I realized just how fucking hard these last two week were trying not to eat wheat. I mean, gluten is in everything. It’s in CHEESE and coffee creamer. You pretty much have to shop at a health store to get food that’s entirely wheat-free. Plus, when you’re stressed out and it seems like you’re kid isn’t growing and you’re really stressed out and no one wants you to narrate for them and your students aren’t doing their homework and you don’t want to yell at them because if you do, then they put that on their reviews of you and then you don’t get hired at your job again and then you’re poor and on the street and eating gluten any chance you can get…

I sort of lost where I was going with this.

Oh. Yeah. Facebook.

So I read a post this morning that this super nice, beautiful woman had run 2 miles in 23 minutes. It made me mad. First, she’s gorgeous. Second, she was out running while I’m wearing tight yoga pants where you can also see my panty line and that I’m wearing big ol’ panties and not a cute little thong. Also, she could run two miles in twenty three minutes, whereas I had just eaten two cupcakes in under twenty seconds, saying Fuck You to the whole wheat-free diet., and to my general diet, and to not being hired to narrate, and to my son being sick, and to the stress of a job that has no security, and to just generally feeling not-good-enough-all-the-time.

I ate two of these bastards. Fucking owls. (click on photo for link to recipe.)

And that’s why Facebook annoys me. Mostly, I annoy me. Not all the time, and not during the time I was stuffing my mouth with delicious cupcakes, but about five seconds after and for probably the next two weeks while I try to give up wheat AGAIN.

I do have to say those cupcakes were terrific and now I’m on a lovely gluten/sugar high.
I’m going to go cry now. Then wait until Monday in hopes that all is well with my kiddo and my jobs and my life and I’m just having an understandable, normal freak out moment.

Dammit.
Now I want a loaf of French bread.

Seriously. With a chaser of pancakes.

-Four-

Kealoha will probably kill me for writing this (or go into the website and delete the post. I’ve given him permission to do this if I ever cross the what’s-appropriate line). But it still makes me laugh.

We were snuggling in bed and I was just about asleep. He was wrapped around me and I felt something sort of ‘lower down’ moving a little bit. I could ignore this, or I could ask him about it. So I said: “Are you fiddling down there?”

“Fiddling?” he asked, whether because he was unsure of my meaning or just needed me to say it louder.

“Yeah. You know…are you ‘fiddling’ on the sly?” I said. Louder.

Kealoha burst out laughing. “No, Maw, I ain’t fiddling. I’m a-scratchin’ my leg. The stuff you fiddle with is higher up.”

Then I realized that maybe he was laughing at my vocabulary. “What? People talk like this! People say ‘fiddlin’ on the sly’ all the time. Naturally. Don’t they?”

“In the thirties maybe. In the deep south.”

Hmmm. Just yesterday I talked about being bamboozled and something being a lot of hooey. Kealoha may have a point. This isn’t a natural vocabulary. Maybe it should be.

And maybe my marathon of Boardwalk Empire has had a slight effect on me. I’m starting to think that my palpitations might be cured by a little backwoods hooch.

Hooch is alcohol, right? And not…uhm…a vajayjay?

Shoot. I better stick to modern slang.

My son is seven and has been struggling with learning to read and write. He’s a super bright kid, but honestly, I don’t think he really cared or was interested enough in writing and reading until recently. Even now he’s not all that interested, especially when at school they make him read boring books about families and apple picking. There are no explosions or blood anywhere in these stories. They’re BORING. Mostly he reads and writes now because he’s forced to. I try to breathe through it. I tell myself “One day, he will love reading. Just not yet.”

Lately, though, he’s started writing little notes. If something is hard for him to say, he’ll write it down. I usually have to interpret it, but the notes include things like “I don’t know why I throw fits” and “I’m sorry, Mom” and other stuff to make me all weepy and proud like.

Recently, he played a game on the computer and wanted to show me what he’d accomplished. It’s a Dr. Seuss game and you get to write your own captions. The first picture shows the elephant from Horton Hears a Who talking to a skinny creature. Here is the story he wrote:

HORTON: I like to poop on me

SKINNY CREATURE: me to

The next picture shows the same characters looking very pleased. Here’s what he wrote:

HORTON: I like to pee on me

SKINNY CREATURE: me to

The next picture introduces a new character. Here it is:

My son showed me this looking proud and just a little bit mischievous. There was a moment where I had to make a decision. Should I punish him for the ‘innappropriate’ subject matter, or commend him for writing? It took me about a second to decide. See, there is a comedic narrative arc here. Horton and the Skinny Creature meet and Horton shares a secret interest. He is relieved to find that the Skinny Creature also shares that same secret interest. Then, the story amps up and they find they have even more in common! It’s so exciting! Then, the story takes a twist with a third character being introduced. Not only does this character also enjoy peeing, he enjoys peeing on basically every letter in the alphabet, and possibly every person on the planet. The end.

It’s sort of brilliant.

Okay. So maybe I’m reading into a bit much. I high-fived my son, told him to keep writing. And reminded him how to spell ‘fart’. You’ve got to engage their interests, right? I mean, he is only seven.