Annual review went surprisingly well, aided by Primera's crash and burn performance last quarter. She attended and immediately tried to take over the meeting. The meeting chair was actually quite masterful at drawing her in and calming her down: stopped the interrupting and demanding that began immediately on Primera's entrance. I, on the other hand, was a wreck and was tempted to ask for a break so I could leave the room b/c I was getting so agitated/irritated. At any rate, we seem to have her talked into some form of resource room for the rest of the year, which she NEEDS DESPERATELY OH MY GOD. She even volunteered to have her agenda book signed, a promise she has not entirely fulfilled, but it's more important that she go to resource room.

Her solution to her not doing her homework in a timely manner? I should get in her face more. That would go with the external locus of control she has. She also thinks I'm "too passive" with her. Oh, the places I go with my kids: the unexpected, sometimes uncongenial places I've needed to go.

She did, however, look gorgeous on arrival: all pouty and sulky but beautiful.

Took the kids to the amusement park today. Primera was being exceptionally unpleasant all morning--she has developed a penchant for cussing lately, which she directs at us. Like I said, exceptionally unpleasant. Anyway: she and her BFFL ran into some boys they knew from school and there they were going around together on all of the rides, Primera just grinning her head off. Which made me think yet again how fortunate we are that she just about got kissed by the autism fairy.

Does anyone listen to Phil Ochs anymore? I love Phil Ochs. I'm sort of enjoying having the iTunes library on this computer: 24/7 nostalgic sixties folk/protest music if I want it. Tom Paxton is up next.



Our district has this dumbass policy on "wellness" (is that even a word?) and what kinds of snacks should be allowed. I'm all for educating kids on nutrition, sparing allergy sufferers from potential danger, and encouraging exercise. But this thing... As I wrote in my less than temperate commentary to the head of PTA Council, it was prescriptive, Draconian, and anal-retentive. I know, say how I really feel.

Also? Primera was always so godawful picky I was thrilled to feed her anything, no matter how low in nutritional value. Also also? The people who get excited about this always remind me of the mother of the kid with Down Syndrome and autism who laughed and said, "I've got REAL problems." Yeah, I'm probably underselling the importance of nutrition, but I'm perfectly happy to be judgmental and dismissive. It suits me.

So I ran into someone I know very slightly through things SEPTA-related. She and another mother founded a foundation. As she put it, she'd raised thousands over the years on autism walks, and while the research is great, she wants help for her child now. So rather than wait for the district to cut through red tape, she found a creative way to arrange to donate things to the district's autism program. Which immediately prompted me to write out a check, of course. As it happens, it's my mother's yahrzeit and I'd have been making donations anyway, but it struck me as particularly appropriate to make this donation in memory of my mother, b/c it reminds me of how mothers (okay, all parents, but I tend to see mothers doing things like this) will do ANYTHING for their kids: start a foundation, a school, an organization, whatever is needed.

And an excellent post on autism cults. Encapsulates it all very well.

I've probably bitched about it in this space, but when Primera was a preschooler, I had her at a "typical" preschooler from ages two-three, then when she was three-four she went 1/2 day at the typical preschool and 1/2 day at a therapeutic program. That first year was a really bad year: my mother's health started going downhill midyear, and then by the end of the school year it was apparent that she was really, really ill, and indeed she died in midsummer. So all during that year I was confronting the extent of my kid's disability and thinking, "Well, I can't find out my kid is autistic and my mom is dying all in the same year, can I?" That just seemed like an unusual amount of Shit to Hit the Fan in one year, especially in what had seemed a pretty ordinary life (I had not yet learned that no one gets out untouched).

Anywho. So we were new back in town, and my kid started the year out just getting services, and then it turns out she needed SEIT services (not German for to be; stands for Special Education Itinerant Teacher). At this school were a bunch of mothers who were mostly younger and thinner than I. They uniformly ignored me. They communicated on some frequency I could not hear. They came to Primera's birthday party and snubbed me. Even my mother, a notably charitable person, commented stiffly that they weren't too friendly. I spent most of the rest of the year ignoring and getting ignored as we waited for our kids to be picked up. I would stand in the back, my son in a baby stroller, staring at the walls. A lot of the time the teacher would need to talk to me because of something that had happened in class.

Anyway, the snubbing and the stares hurt at the time, enough that I'm still very angry all these years later. And just today, whom should I see but the High Priestess of them all, the Queen Bee ringleader, the center of the Gold & Meyer morning bagel kaffeeklatsch that I was of course never ever invited to, at the local amusement park. I had an amazingly strong wave of hate. Still. You'd think I'd get over it, but no.

Oy, Judith Warner

Sweet Moses in a rush basket: another salvo in the Breast Wars. Seriously, do we really need to relive this discussion again? And if we do, can't we moderate it? And avoid making a case for why one side is more feminist than the other?

I usually skip her columns because I always think, "Bright, nice woman. Young." It's like these posts I used to read on some of the new parenting blogs: people who are just discovering issues like Baby Einstein videos! And breast versus bottle! And think that they have something funny to say that no one else has ever thought of. I wonder if part of the reason is that discourse about mothering has not been hep and treated in serious media, so bright women running across this stuff for the first time think it is fresh and new and ripe for satire.

Also, I am reminded that we're still maturing into our thirties and beyond. Or mellowing, maybe.

Things I Did Today

Wrote 4,000 words (approximately, I think). Took holiday card pictures with family and dog. Went to a PTA meeting. Took kiddo to craft store, started work on school project. Took said kiddo bowling (didn't bowl, but kept up lively convo). Not much in the way of dinner. Went to bat mitzvah class (oh, yes, I might as well be an educated agnostic). Went to shopping center, got big-@$$ free kosher turkey, came home, worked on project some more, baked cake, made completely terrible cream cheese mix.

Now I can't sleep.

Haven't felt much like posting after my latest flipoff from yet another school district. Fuck 'em.

Yet another good summer with Primera: she notes that she has tons of friends at the arts camp she goes to. How little I look forward to September. She is very style-conscious and, Primera-like, starting to get obsessive re shopping for school. She's moved upmarket from Abercrombie and wants Juicy now. I hate Juicy. They're velour jogging suits. They are obscenely overpriced. They have an asinine logo. They have quasi-ghetto fabulous slogans on their T-shirts like "Juicy Delinquent." Howsomever, I remind myself that my mother had to put up with my Levi's infatuation when I was Primera's age: I think I had over a dozen pairs in various colors of corduroy, and of course two styles of denim. I bought her a hoodie at an outlet (reduced about 70%, so I didn't feel the sting as much), and she was very happy.

BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE!

May I first say that I am proud to be my best friend's wingman. There is no more badass pair of middle-aged women in all of the tri-state area. And if you attempt to cut us off when we have been waiting at an intersection for 25 minutes, we will not stand by silently. I'm not going to reprint the thing my friend said about a car with out of state plates, but it was very funny and completely inappropriate in front of our preteen daughters.

Anyway: the songs he played that made me happy and in some cases delirious:

Badlands
Atlantic City (They blew up the chicken man in Philly!--the man is a poet)
Rosalita (a song I never quite "got" but I get it in concert)
Born to Run
The Rising
Bobby Jean
Meeting Across the River
Jungleland
Brilliant Disguise


Songs he left out that displeased me or made me very, very unhappy:
Backstreets
Thunder Road (seriously: Thunder Road. I was heartbroken)
She's the One
Jersey Girl (Jersey Girl! We were freaking IN Jersey. C'mon, Bruce, work with me here!)
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Independence Day
Fourth of July, Asbury Park (and the concert was in July! And my love for that song is absolute and infinite)
Blinded by the Light
Hungry Heart
Cadillac Ranch, not to mention Pink Cadillac
Born in the USA (meh, I've heard it enough, but he played very little from that album)
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
Philadelphia (maybe not much of a concert song....)
The River

There's more, but these were the ones that stood out. Still, the man was up there for over three hours and did not disappoint, even from our noseblood seats one row from the top of the stadium (no exaggeration). Primera and my best friend's Primera were somewhat bored and kept texting each other and us, then whining to leave, which was so not happening.

Do I have anything to say today? Maybe not. This blog is just one of my many bad habits.

I tried to upload a video of Bruce Springsteen singing "Independence Day" yesterday, but I couldn't get my YouTube account to work. But we all know what he sounds like, yes?

A fascinating encounter with the Circumlocution Office, aka the principal at Primera's school, who was terrified to lend me a copy of the pre-algebra textbook for next year because "Then I could have twenty parents down here wanting to have the textbook over the summer." Fortunately Primera's guidance counselor is capable of thinking outside of the very tiny, narrow box enclosing the principal's brain: she got me the book and I exited the school very quickly before the authorities were onto me. Imagine what trouble I could start, working with my kid on math over the summer.

She strenuously objects, by the way, and thinks I am the Worst Mom Ever for making her do math, but she was the one who wanted to go into accelerated, so my will prevails. As it must.

I feel depressed lately, but it's probably the uncertain employment prospects for me and the thought of Primera's bat mtizvah arrangements. No one liked my idea of crypto-Jews of Hollywood. Spoilsports. For Secundo I am going to use Jewish sports legends: the Hank Greenberg table, the Sandy Koufax table, Mark Spitz, etc.

Bad Bat Mitzvah Themes

Primera wants something along the lines of Hollywood. Which, fine, everyone these days has themes and I know she's going to want a bat mitzvah EXACTLY like her friends', except she also wants 50 Cent or Aerosmith to perform, she's not sure which. So then I was thinking at dinner about themes. I'd always joked I'd wanted to do a nursery in a Hieronymus Bosch or William Blake theme, suitable for future years of therapy.

Then I was talking to this incredibly New Age-y woman who was really into "spiritual sexuality": she gave the health talk @ Primera's school, and she was very sweet and sincere, if a bit over the top. And I was saying I thought it would be wicked cool to have a Planned Parenthood theme, with the Margaret Sanger and John Rock tables. But yeah, I'm not doing that.

Then I was thinking that if we wanted to do a Hollywood theme, we could relate it to Judaism by having, I don't know, tables that were salutes to famous crypto-Jews: the John Garfield table, the Edward G. Robinson table, Leslie Howard, Paulette Goddard, Kirk Douglas. Primera thought that was a tad obscure. I was trying to think of movies w/J-themes, but most of them were pretty dismal or pretty bad (The Jazz Singer, Yentl, Fiddler? The Sorrow and the Pity?).

An article in today's NYT on parents who've gone back to school so that they can work with autistic children or fill in gaps in services that they've encountered. It's a good article, and it reminds me of two things that I've often thought: 1) that someone really ought to promote the idea that ABA, at least for now, is one big growth industry that pays well--might get bright, motivated people involved; and 2) that it's sort of fascinating how a child's disability ends up reshaping and refining the parent's life--usually, though not always, the mother's.

Most, not all, parents have that moment before or after the child is born, the one that involves some sort of pledge or promise or blood oath to keep the child safe, variously but not exhaustively defined as protection from enemies such as wolves, sharks, human predators, car accidents, faulty home safety systems, SIDS. And then the child grows, and there are other dangers or weaknesses: sometimes we vow to fight the school district, and sometimes we turn the disability into the enemy to be conquered, and sometimes more nebulously it's society we're going to change.

And then some more time passes and the blood oath may become a promise to do this specific thing we know we can do: found a school, write a book, help other parents and children.

Wow, I've been quiet lately. On another short-term leave replacement, so that's been keeping me busy.

I started reading A Young People's History of the US, by Howard Zinn, to Secundo. Have to start indoctrinating them early. He'll thank me later, or join a conservative think tank in protest.

Edible Meal

Prepared ravioli, the kind you boil
Crushed tomatoes, slightly doctored with basil and garlic
Mozzarella cheese and parmesan

Boil ravioli. Cover with doctored tomato sauce and cheese. Bake for like ten minutes. Serve.

I'm Martha Fucking Stewart; at least it was dinner that didn't require defrosting, tipping the delivery guy, or talking into a mike.

I won't do this talk justice (I have bronchitis and otherwise am not in a chatty mood), but I saw Rick Lavoie give two terrific talks last week. It was interesting watching him perform in the two venues, actually: he used some similar jokes and anecdotes as openers but covered very different material based on the audiences. The one thing I've always loved about his work is his focus on how the child is perceiving things--yet another one of those parenting reminders that I really need, to stop and imagine what my child is seeing or feeling. He talked about the stages parents go through to reach acceptance, and he pointed out that acceptance isn't a final destination, that the various phases of anger and envy and fear can recur.

As I've said many times, I think part of my coping strategy has been to get angry or to problem solve and intellectualize. The grief, I have no defense against the grief so I don't let myself feel it very often.

Drunk Blogging

Like drunk dialing, only more permanent!

Anyway: took the kids to Walt Whitman's house today. Awesome idea with two kids both of whose secondary dx is something along the lines of ADHD. I had to tell the younger one to stand in the middle of the room and not touch anything, b/c he kept leaning against the 200-year-old glass mirror that was original to the Whitman homestead.

Primera fell asleep during the video demo (granted, I thought it was a snore too--started with someone walking through the fields as part of one of his poems was read. Not something to grab a kid in primary school).

Had an appletini at dinner. Whee!!!!

And happy birthday to Secundo, my darling.

Book Review for Anxious Kids

Not that this is rocket science, but if you have a kid whose anxieties routinely center around health, and who used to spend the ride home from nursery school conversing about the H for Hospital sign and who would likely go to the hospital and for which accidents, the book Plague is not an excellent choice. Swear to God, this thing had a giant picture of some sort of vermin on the cover (lice? Murrain?), and consisted entirely of descriptions of various deadly diseases. So he was reading this while I was on the computer, b/c it was safer if Mommy was in the room, and periodically (= every ten seconds or so), he'd say, "Do we get yellow fever in this part of the world?" or "Influenza. Can that kill you?"

A pox (see what I just did there?) on the librarian who let him take this thing out.

Maybe it's genetic: as I note below, my grandmother's favorite epithet translated to "Cholera on you."

Random thought: I came late to parenthood--I was 35, to be precise--and I think it's why I often have the feeling that I used to be someone else and that there's something else I should be doing. I spent a long time as one kind of adult, then abruptly became another. 11+ years and I still haven't entirely made the switch.

Our new obsession: Stacey J. Aswad, the insanely annoying hostess of Disney's Top Seven Must-Sees. I'd remembered her from last time and started doing imitations of her, which of course the kids, particularly Primera, couldn't let go of. So of course when I got home I had to google her, which means I now know she was an artistic roller-skating champion and Juilliard graduate. I will never need to know this. Also, apparently she didn't write her own material, which is good, because it was hella stupid. And that she decided not to change her last name. Go Stacey! Also, the J. stands for her mother's name, which kind of reminds me of Edward G. Robinson. You know the Edward G. Robinson story, right? His real name was Goldberg, and he always kept the G. to remind himself from whence he came.

Also, Primera is going to an Ali and A.J. concert. I am going to have to start acting more overtly contemptuous of mass culture, I think.

Also, bro, if you read this, tell your spouse many happy returns of the day.