Thirteen Candles

My daughter turned thirteen earlier this month. On her birthday, when I was dropping her off at school, she begged me to go home. She didn’t want to go to school and thought she had the right to sit it out since it was her birthday. We were ankle-deep in the daily routine, and going home would be back-tracking since I head into Sacramento after dropping them at school.

Sitting in the congested carline, she fought me for what felt like an hour but might have been ten minutes. Her last act before facing defeat and getting out of the car was to scream at me, “I hate you.”

I funneled into the car line exit and had a massive cortisol dump. Having a fight with my daughter on the morning of her 13th birthday was the farthest thing from my mind when I woke up that day. She never yelled I hate you at me before.

I heard horror stories of “when they turn,” meaning your kids hit some age where they go from nice to a vestibule of dark energy.

When I walked my dog I ran into a neighbor, she’s a retired engineer and funny in a serious way. She asked how old my kids were, and I told her thirteen and eleven. A chill ran down her spine and she said, “Teenagers, ugh.”

I told her what happened on my daughter’s birthday, and she said, “It gets a lot better when they turn eighteen.”

I don’t know if its because their personality improves, or it’s because you go from seeing them daily to a couple of times a year.

The same week, in my writing class, the teacher commented on someone’s teenage character, and he said, “Something happens to a teenager’s brain. It is a chemical reaction.” He added, “I know this because I recently went through it with my daughter.”

He was like a man back from war, who would only share his stories with other soldiers over dollar beers at the Veterans Hall.

I thought my daughter would glide through this time since she’s an introvert and loves a good chill with her mom. When she was a toddler, she refused to let me buckle her into her car seat, and one time in a grocery parking lot, she screamed and straightened herself like a board, I broke a sweat but eventually got there strapped down. A woman approached me and said, “My daughter did the same thing; she was the easiest teenager.”

I held on to that lovely woman’s comment, maybe she was an angel, and thought, my daughter’s control issues would keep her on a straight path into adulthood.

It is not like my daughter isn’t temperamental. She fights with her brother like crazy. My son gets so much joy from making her mad; her anger fuels his fire. One morning, taking them to school, she made a comment intending to piss him off, and then he told her he was turning her in to Stop It.

She screamed at him, begging him not to do that. I asked what Stop It means; he said it’s the anonymous bully tip line at school. 

I asked him if I could use it too.

We still had fun on her birthday and talked about how that’s pretty harsh to say to anyone, let alone her biggest fan. The next day, though, she woke up sick. Was she really sick? I don’t know, I had to go to work. She stayed home and probably watched six hours of TV while drinking Coke Zeros. 

She ended up having her introverted birthday party-for-one after all. I still think she might be an easy teenager, that angel-lady from the parking lot planted the seed over ten years ago. I'm not letting it go because of one "I hate you." But, morning drop-off might not be that pleasant.

Brilliant Idea

 

Saturday morning, I was making Kiki breakfast. I stood at the stove, moving the scrambled eggs in the pan, and looked at a plate of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I made the night before. I took a sip of coffee and thought of how well the two would go together; the cookie and the coffee: the series bite, sip, bite, sip.

These were cookies I made after watching a reel my sister sent me, of a foul-mouthed lady aggressively giving the recipe for her world-famous flourless cookies. They are equal parts sugar and peanut butter, with an egg, a splash of vanilla and a bag of chocolate chips. It was the sugar content that had me questioning my desire.

I knew if I ate the cookie, I would feel like shit. I don’t have the stomach I once did, and eating a cookie with the sugar content of a can of Coca-Cola would leave me with a stomach ache.

I ate the cookie, and then I ate another one.

After I brought my daughter her normal breakfast of eggs and sourdough toast, I lay on the couch, waiting for the corrupting backlash. It was significant, compounded by the six cookies I had eaten the night before.

This day was meant to be a writing day, and I intentionally withdrew myself from the game by giving myself a wretched stomach ache.

Around noon, I figured, I would lay back and close my eyes to try and think about the story I’m working on. I had binaural beats playing on Spotify and because I’m too cheap to pay for the membership, I deal with advertisements.

Listening to the same ads over and over is annoying. Sometimes I listen to an ad for toilet paper and the next ad will be for a different brand of toilet paper. I have the ads memorized, but I use them as goalposts at the gym. I’ll say, “Go at the fastest pace for the length of three commercials.”

But as I laid down, the ads served a different purpose. I love how Thomas Edison would sit in his rocking chair with a silver spoon in his hand. His goal was to get into the state of mind right before drifting off to sleep. The mind goes somewhere we don’t see when awake. He wanted to go there because it was when he had eureka moments, and ideas came to him that he couldn’t access after prompting the mind, “Give me something great to work with.” 

So as he rests, he starts to drift off to sleep, the muscles in his hand relax, the silver spoon drops, and he’s brought back to being fully aware. Well, Spotify ads are the silver spoon. I laid back and enjoyed the wonderful time traveling to my dream brain, but right as I was about to power down the brain and sleep, the Spotify ad and its out-of-place, increased volume, jingle intro would pull me back to fully awake.

I didn’t have a brilliant idea. The blog I wrote afterward went into the computer garbage can because it wasn’t funny. 

Actually, I had one brilliant idea. I went into the kitchen, saw the last two cookies on the plate, and ate them. I’d already wasted my day, and I wouldn't waste another.

Ghosts and Deoderant

 

I saw a deodorant commercial. This is a multipurpose deodorant, I learned as the lady talked about her “crotch smell.” When she said crotch I nearly fell off the sofa. Then I did fall off the sofa when she followed that up with instructions. She said, “Rub some deodorant cream between your fingers and apply in your butt crack.”

She made a sweeping motion with her fingers as if applying the cream to an invisible butt crack. I looked at my daughter who seemed unfazed, and said, “What the hell has civilization come to?”

She listens to music that breaks my heart, not because it is touching but because it can be so vitriolic and self-critical. I hear her repeating lyrics that sound like, “A-B-C-D-E - Eat shit, fuck you and your dog… your mom’s crotch smells like shit.” Something along those lines. Whenever I hear her unconsciously singing lyrics of this sort, I blast Cat Stevens through the house, to replace the messaging.

I saw the deodorant at Target. A man was standing in front of the shelf examining the different scents. I imagined he was buying it for his girlfriend, and then he handed her this offering, “Oh babe, I was at Target and I picked you up some crotch deodorant.”

That guy is probably dead somewhere.

My older sister is a nurse and she told me that wearing yoga pants all the time will cause vaginosis. Vaginosis is the medical term for crotch smell. Would the word swap have elevated the commercial? I’m not sure.

I’m wearing fewer yoga pants lately because I canceled my hot yoga membership. It's surprising because I was talking about yoga like the middle-aged-California-gal I am. I’ll miss the meditative benefits of yoga, but to be honest, I feel ridiculous chanting in a room full of women with Botox foreheads, collagen lips, and three-hundred-dollar Lululemon outfits.

The yoga studio times didn’t fit into my schedule so I am back to the regular old gym. I forgot how chugging a Red Bull and running six miles is just as effective at clearing my mind. So now I am working out around a bunch of people with earbuds instead of being surrounded by people who attribute their mediocre existence to the superpowers of crystals. I get it; it’s hope, and sometimes you want a tiny rock to solve all your problems.

Last week I woke up at 3 am and scared the shit out of myself thinking that a ghost could, at any moment, touch my foot that was sticking out from the cover. This made me then pull my foot back into the comforter, feeling safe from that potential ghost-touch, but it’s hot August nights, and having my entire body baking under a down comforter is not sustainable, so I’d have to stick my foot back out, then starting up the escalation of dread again.

While I work around the house, I play TV shows in the background. I like to watch investigative reporting on UFOs, Big Foot, time travel, psychics, and ghosts. I hit the ghost stories a little too hard. This indulgence keeps me from criticizing people who love to binge Fox News or CNN because I binge the equivalent of The National Enquirer.

So as I lay awake scared that a finger was going to poke me through the thin veil, I pulled out all the Catholic stops to prevent this from happening. Asking my angels to protect me and praying to the saints to keep anything scary away. My cat doesn’t help the situation, as she looks like she could be in cahoots with an alternate dimension. See picture below.

My daughter is turning 13 this year and she started her classes for confirmation. Confirmation in Catholicism is like a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, it is the ceremony when you become an adult. The church does not make the process easy. She has to attend classes twice a month for two years and do various volunteer and service projects. 

Keeping religion active in my kids’s lives is hard as a divorced person because they get to indulge in this notion of choice. My daughter said to me, “Dad said I should be allowed to choose my religion and if I don’t want to be confirmed, I don’t have to.”

I responded with, “That is what someone who doesn’t have a religion says.” But I really wanted to say, “He ought to go to church... it just might be that sad-boy cure." 

She said, “I will do it because it is a family tradition.”

My son needed to be convinced with the insight that there would be a bounty of monetary gifts from the family after the ceremony. I did feel bad having to use this tactic, but he is not as “spiritual” as my daughter, and I don’t think he would lean into anything I had to tell him other than that. 

I told them, “You will go through periods when you might not believe in God, and thats okay because you will always have this for when you have a moment where you can’t deny that God exists.”

On a smaller scale, the institution of family will do the same. There will be a time, not too far off probably, when my kids will think their parents made terrible decisions, and they’ll resent us. But, they grow through that, and the ego that ballooned with the onset of “freedom” starts to deflate, and they learn to be empathic, eventually towards their parents and the choices they made.

The other day talking to my mom, I realized she is my best friend. I don’t know how it happened but I am so much like my mom it is bizarre. I ended up being a teacher, like my mom, and this was never on my radar as a kid. I’m a writer, and my mom spent a decade working as a children’s book author. And, we both can get spooked in the night to heart-attack-inducing levels.

After I told my mom about being up all night, scared half to death there was a ghost waiting for an invitation at 2 am to chitchat, she said, “I hate it when I scare myself in the middle of the night. That’s why I sleep with an eight-inch screwdriver under my pillow.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll accidentally kill Dad?” I asked. She confidently replied, “No.”

It’s a good thing my dad is smart enough not to buy my mom deodorant… of any kind.

Jersey Summer

 

I was in Geoffrey’s room. We were in his bed reading. I insisted he listen to me read a Mary Oliver poem. As I read the end, a tear trickled from my left eye. After I finished reading, I nudged him, and when he looked at me, I pointed to the tear that now traveled down my cheek and said, “It moved me.” He laughed and cozied up to the pillow next to him.

Mid-July we visited my sister in Philadelphia and she took us to The Jersey Shore for a week. It was fun, and coming from bone-dry July-Sacramento I was blown away by the July-Philadelphia climate that felt like coastal Mexico. The first day up the shore the eight of us adapted to the two-bedroom apartment, and my kids and I took off to explore the boardwalk. We did a silly haunted house and then played haunted house-themed mini-golf. The golf game started fun but ended with only Kiki and me playing because Geoffrey couldn’t handle his jealousy after watching his sister get a hole-in-one, so he threw his ball and had to wait for us by the exit.

Everyone is allowed one meltdown on vacation because being away from home can be hard. Kiki’s was triggered by our walking eight miles a day, and she insisted on one-on-one time which was awarded by us leaving for our evening boardwalk walk five minutes before everyone else, and meeting them at the end an hour later.

My three-year-old nephew fell to his knees, crying to the heavens, when his sister found the biggest sea shell I have ever seen. He was driven mad with treasure-hunter energy to try and find a shell that was bigger than hers. While he screamed from the injustices of the universe,  Geoffrey followed him gently explaining that sometimes life isn’t fair. I laughed at the irony and told my sister about the haunted house mini golf debacle and then she told me about my Grandma and cousin getting so scared walking through one of those roadside attraction haunted houses, that they made the workers turn on the lights and escort them from the building.

The day we were scheduled to fly home, the Philadelphia airport was the saddest sight. It looked like a homeless shelter because of all the stranded people from the great-software-update-debacle. I should have known things would go wrong. After many delays, our flight was canceled, and our trip was extended another three days. This is when I should have had my meltdown. I should have screamed, “FUCK YOU DELTA AIRLINES!!!” But I didn’t want to stress my kids out, so I went inward.

Luckily my sister didn’t have to work those days, so we had a bonus trip where we went to an amusement park, swam, ordered an 18-inch cheesesteak, and hit up some American history sights in Philly. I had a great time, but in the back of my mind I was homesick, and to make myself feel better, I made plans to organize, rearrange, and clean out my house.

When we made it home my body made it impossible for me to leave; I came down with the flu. This kickstarted my week-long cleaning frenzy. I worked my way through every inch of the house. After Geoffrey and I stood on one side of my massive dresser and pushed with all our might, we couldn’t even get the thing to move a millimeter, I decided to hire people to help me move the furniture later.

I wanted to nest, but my little sister and I made a deal. If she watched my dog while we were on vacation, then I’d babysit her kids so she could have a weekend trip with her husband. Babysitting her four kids was fun and it wasn’t that hard because we all stayed with my parents, so I forced them to babysit with me. They were happy to help. My dad did all the cooking, my mom was the woman who got them snacks, and I was the one who had to put them to bed. The three youngest were sleeping on a queen-size mattress and after I read them the book they requested, the symphony of “I’m hot,” “I’m thirsty,” and “I’m bored,” started. They reminded me of the bud-weis-er frogs. Hot-thirsty-bored. I sat bedside for an hour, but it felt like three hours. After a while, I played a Spotify bedtime playlist, and they were immediately hushed and lulled to sleep by the sounds of waves crashing on the beach.

During the day we took all the kids to the pool. My mom and I sat on lounge chairs, and I saw Geoffrey walking towards us from the changing rooms. I looked at him, and shouted, “Hey there, babe.”

I didn’t notice a man walking in front of him, but my mom started laughing so hard after watching this man react as if I had shouted this out at him.

She also was unsure of what I was doing, and said, “I had no idea you were so bold.”

After babysitting, the kids and I had to prep for the new school year. Kiki was in my room going through my clothes. She dressed herself up and pretended to be me introducing myself to my students on the first day of school. She stood up straight, and in an authoritative tone said, “My name is Alicia Davis. I like my coffee black and my tampons super.”

This made me laugh so hard, and I quickly scribbled it down on an index card. I do this when something tickles my fancy, I jot it down because I want to remember the moment and it's excellent writing material.

I brought the card to the now organized stack. I found cards all over my house when I did my cleaning. I flipped through them and pulled one out from Geoffrey. I think he gave it to me on Mother’s Day. The card said, “I love you a lot so take 34.76 USD.” He presented it to me with all the money he’d saved. 

At the time, I laughed at a ten-year-old writing USD and I told him I couldn’t take his money. He was deflated and sad I wouldn’t accept it, so I said never mind and kept it. 

This time, when I read the index card I laughed but then a tear came to my eye, and I felt it trickle down my cheek. Unlike my furniture, I was moved.

The Long Recital

 

Last night was Kiki’s dance recital, a three-hour show where her two-minute dance was two hours and twenty minutes in. She decided to take tap dancing in January, and from her second lesson till last night she screamed, cried, and pouted before each class. The timing was not ideal, it was Fridays at 4, and after a long week, she wanted to binge Bob’s Burgers, play with her makeup, and make snacks in the kitchen.

Two hours into the recital Geoffrey told me he was hungry. I forgot to feed the kids dinner because I ate two sandwiches and a small cake at lunch and the thought of food wouldn’t enter my brain for at least twelve more hours. I didn’t plan to eat so much, but Kiki said she was full after two bites of her sandwich, so I had to eat her leftovers. When it is 100 degrees and you just ate two sandwiches and cake, all you can do is sleep like a boa constrictor digesting a cow. The perfect place for a nap is a three-hour dance performance in a dark air-conditioned theater. 

I brought a book too and went between dozing, reading, and endearing smiles at groups of five-year-olds spinning around to their interpretation of a dance routine. The pageantry is like Toddlers and Tiaras, all these kids wearing clown makeup and up-dos. 

It’s cute when little kids get glamour shot ready, but it is bizarre when older women dress like children, and it’s so easy to do with the cute accessories at Claire’s. An adult woman wearing pigtails is usually a sign she is allergic to cellphone towers or oblivious to the emotional abuse of cats. She carries an NPR tote bag as a purse and always has an anecdote to share about the lack of elasticity in socks.

I’m not thinking about infantilizing stylish pigtails like Chrissy from Three’s Company, I’m thinking more of shooting-out-of-the-side-of-the-head pigtails, like Boo from Monsters Inc. This look on a woman tells you she will either drive you crazy or be so unintentionally charming, you’ll be mesmerized by her weirdness.

On my sober app, there is a community message board. A few people post often, and they graciously offer trigger warnings before going into lengthy posts wondering if they were molested. I never comment, only read. Someone gave the strangest introduction, claiming to be the oldest soul in existence, descendant from aliens, but also having had a past life as an alien. I imagined her unashamedly typing up this overly confident pile of garbage with two pigtails bopping in rhythm to the keystrokes.

There are women at yoga who wear their hair in pigtails. It’s obvious when the hairstyle is done to minimize soaking straightened hair, there’s a functionality to the style, and usually, the pigtails are at the base of the head below the ears. But there will be a woman, with those pigtails shooting out the side of her head, right above her ears. Her demeanor is as happy-go-lucky as her hair indicates. When I get a good look at her, I know she used to love doing LSD.

I hate showering at the yoga studio, but sometimes it has to be done. There is only one shower, and a line can build up. One of these LSD-loving, pigtail, hippie women was in line behind me. These women tend to make me nervous because I’m afraid they're going to say some psychic shit to me that will stress me out. She decided to give herself a whores bath with the sink, and said, “We used to all just get in the shower together.”

I gave her a “what are you gonna do” shrug, and looked at the ground.

After the kids and I came home from the performance I made them dinner. Geoffrey was exhausted and went to bed, but Kiki and I stayed up chatting. I told her I saw someone from her school in the bathroom at the recital. She asked, “What did they look like?”

I told her, “They had long brown hair.”

Before I could add more, she said, “It doesn’t sound familiar.”

The most common of hairstyles, yet the least memorable.

Then she talked about the recital and to my surprise added, “I think I’ll do jazz in the fall.”

And I said, “I’ll try and get you in a Monday class."

The Lottery

 

I was searching my mom’s bookcase for a new read. It was a trip down memory lane, so many books I abandoned on one of the moves I made in the last twenty years. I pulled out a book How to Win Lotteries, Sweepstakes, and Contests in the 21st Century. My mom said, “You can have it.”

The book was from 2004 and was a second edition, so I’m not sure how things changed in the first four years of the 21st century, but obviously, I was reading this book. I flipped through the pages, and lucky for me, my mom highlighted all the important parts. I didn’t know we were so alike.

Last summer I read The Power of Positive Thinking and made a set of flashcards to have on hand. My son also has this delusional optimism that the lottery is ours for the taking, evident by him jotting notes while listening to the audiobook Think and Grow Rich.

Last week, I stayed with my parents for a few days while my kids were on vacation with their dad. My mom and I went to TJ Max and Ross and every night my dad would make us dinner.

I secretly check the expiration dates on everything because they won’t. Those dates aren’t even a suggestion to my parents. I’m strategic after noticing they’re trying to feed me something old, and I pretend I don’t have the appetite for it rather than mentioning its toxicity. Refusing to eat salad dressing that expired in 2016, I might as well slap my dad across the face. He is just like his mom, in this way. My older sister Lacey ruined a family dinner one night after spreading the news that my grandma scraped mold off the top of salsa before feeding it to us.

My mom isn’t as sensitive about my adherence to expiration dates, but she thinks it’s dramatic. Of course, I started my period the day I arrived at their house, and forgot to buy tampons when we were out running errands. I told her, and she ran off to grab some she had under the sink.

I flipped the box over and saw the year 2009. Maybe I would have considered it if the applicators weren’t plastic, but I told her, “No way, I’ll just keep making homemade toilet paper pads.”

My mom said, “That’s ridiculous. If you’re really that worried, take it out after four hours instead of six.”

One night we watched Expendables 3. Well, my dad left ten minutes after it started to go work in his office. We wouldn’t have picked the movie if it weren’t for him, but the agony of picking out another movie was too overwhelming so we committed to it. I’m glad we did. The ridiculousness of the cast, every 90’s action star, was hysterical. We nearly fell off the couch laughing when Dr. Frasier Crane strolled on the scene.

I read about a movie at the Cannes Film Festival getting an eleven-minute standing ovation. Eleven Minutes!! Even the best movie I’ve ever seen, I don’t think I could clap longer than one minute. Wouldn’t clapping for eleven minutes cause nerve damage, or make your hands fall off?

The Hot Chick, a Rob Schneider classic, is a 21%. You can’t trust the critics. My childhood favorite, Pretty Woman, did better than I would have thought with a 60%. 

Tomorrow I’m turning 42 and I feel more like Margot Tenenbaum than Vivian Ward. I remember, as an eight-year-old thinking how amazing adulthood would be. There’s Julia Roberts, making money, getting high fashion, and aspiring to finish high school. And here I am reading the highlighted parts of “How to Win Lotteries, Sweepstakes, and Contests in the 21st Century.”

I guess I missed the key takeaway from Pretty Woman, don’t kiss them boys on the mouth, it will only bring on trouble… unless they drive a Lotus Esprit and are best friends with George Costanza, then it’s like winning the lottery.