Today I Hate Myself Because...

...ah, what a long and exhaustive list, but just one item for now.

I can't help my son.

When he's hurt, I usually don't know where he's hurting or why or how it happened. I have to Sherlock Holmes my way through and hope for the best.

And when he wants or needs something he can't get or do for himself, which is just about everything, more than half the time I have no everloving idea what it is.

He tries to tell me these things, tries and tries and tries. The longer I don't know what to do or how to help, the more desperate he gets so that soon he just starts scrolling through his words, pulls out all he's got in there...milk, juice, downstairs, cookie, potty, socks, pizza, popcicle, bed (or bread, never sure), cheese, movie (or mommy, hard to tell, and if it's movie, which one, there are hundreds), jump, pretzel, open (and I go "open what?" to which he replies, pleadingly, "open what?").

And the real bitch of it is that maybe he doesn't want or need any of these things, he rejects them one by one as I try to make it right for him, to fix whatever's wrong, whateverthehell it is. He wants something, he needs something, something that only I can get for him, and if he just starts rattling off all the words he has maybe his idiot brain dead mother will finally hit on it, like the old story of the monkey left alone with the typewriter long enough to plunk out War and Peace.

Sometimes he drags me over to the couch, stands on it so we're the same height, and tries to make me lift him up and hold him like a baby, rock him back and forth, swing him around. He weighs seventy-two pounds, seventy-two very dense, very static pounds. Sometimes I oblige him, but once isn't enough and sooner or later I have to stop. This is met with great dissatisfaction. I try to explain that if I end up in the hospital in traction, then we'll really be screwed. He clearly believes I'm bluffing.

Sometimes it's like tonight, where he screams and cries and bellows and keens until I want to ram my head into a concrete block as hard as I can so I can't hear it anymore. Tonight Grace has just about had it too, stick a fork in her, she's done, so she's yelling on top of it, trying to yell over him. Oh the cacophony. I hear myself muttering things like "Jesus have mercy" and meaning it, lapsed Catholic or not, like the atheist in the foxhole that is suddenly more devout than the Pope.  I tell her that her screaming is making it worse but she doesn't care, she's been a good sport for as long as she could and enough already so could he just put a sock in it so she can watch Spongebob in peace.

I feel the anger, the scary kind, rising up like a giant wave, and I want to explode at the both of them, but mostly at him, to scream at him to shut the goddamn fuck up. Takes everything I have not to let it rip and shake the house. Every time I take the big breath in to let out my own earthshattering kaboom, I breathe out instead, as many times as I can.

Finally got to the point where I'd exhausted the amount of times I could breathe it out and the kaboom was coming, ready or not.  Everybody'd better hold on to something.

But then I looked into his face, which I suddenly realized I'd been avoiding.

Sadness. Not bratty tantrummy squalling. Just a deep ocean of sadness.

So that weird sound you heard a little while ago that you couldn't identify? That was mostly likely my heart cracking in half.

His mouth was doing that thing it does when he's trying so unbelievably hard to sort it out himself, to soldier through, to find an answer on his own, because clearly help's not coming. With eyes grown so huge and earthen and wet they could drown me like quicksand. No wonder I didn't want to look.

My child has worked harder in his almost seven years than most people do in a lifetime. Just to manage being here, in this world, with all its inescapable assaults and insults, its intolerable mayhem. One goddamn imposition after another, as my grandfather liked to say.

Guess what, though. We just got back from the bathroom. He took a crap the size of a groundhog,  And in this very moment, I have never seen a happier child. Dancing feet, laughing eyes, singing his wordless singsongy songs. Suddenly putting his face right up to mine, eye to eye, impish and elfin and free, smiling like the sun.

Oh my Cal.

If You Can Do Nothing Else...

People of the world, I have two words for you. Then I'll have a whole lot more, of course, because I do tend to go on.  But first just two, and here they are:

Be kind.

As I watch the media coverage (yes, I have power, don't hate me, I feel guilty enough I promise), I find myself walking around the house and muttering those two words, like a mantra, like a prayer.  Be kind.  Be kind.  Be kind.

I'm afraid of a lot of things. Not losing power on Monday meant I heard and saw, in real time, the things I was the most afraid of at that moment. Trees crushing people, a father in Rockland County, two little boys in Upper Westchester, right in their homes, gone in a second. A mother and her two babies in the rushing waters in Staten Island...I can't go on with that one, I don't need to, you've all heard it, we've all heard it and can't unhear it, can't unsee it through eyes open or closed.

So every time the house shook and groaned that night, I felt my body do that thing like a cat must do right before it pounces. Because it knew, my body that is, that it had to be ready to throw itself on top of those two small ones, those two little beings that own my heart...and it had to be ready to do it with or without my conscious participation.

As I said, I'm afraid of a lot of things.  But right now, the thing I'm most afraid of is people forgetting who they are. Forgetting that we are all made of exactly the same stuff, all on different roads that are all leading to exactly the same place, and that whether we've met or not, we're...

How to do this without being nauseously trite, cliche, churchy, Pollyana-ish, irritating. I don't want to annoy people, things are bad enough.  Let's try it this way:

One day, probably well more than a decade ago, I was having lunch with my parents at a McDonalds. I'm pretty sure it was the one in Mamaroneck, NY (much of which may still be underwater right now). I have no idea why we were doing this that day, it's not something we did much of once I'd grown up and moved out, we must have been at some event or something together and stopped for a bite.

A young couple with a baby sat at a nearby table. The baby was maybe a year or so, maybe a year and a half, old enough to eat some fries in her high chair, and one of those fries must have gone down the wrong way. Didn't seem like much at first, but after a few seconds of patting her back the baby's sounds started to change, and the mom and dad started looking like you never want to see any mom or dad look.

Before I knew what was happening, my mother, a registered nurse and unregistered supermom, had gotten out of her seat.  In what I remember as one swift, graceful movement, she took the baby from that other mother, held her with one arm so the baby's head was angled downward diagonally, thumped her tiny upper back between her shoulder blades while holding her that way, and then we finally heard what we were all begging God for, the outraged cries of one pissed-off baby.

At that, my mother handed the child back to the grateful parents, who were falling over themselves as they tearfully tried to express their thanks in their broken English.  And then it was over. Kind of.

I sat in that spot where I'd been frozen those few seconds it took for this world-shaking event to occur as I watched my mom come back to her seat. Then, for lack of anything else to do, and at a loss for words, we all started eating again. Silently. As if nothing had just happened. Kind of.

But as I sneaked looks at my mother between bites of my Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I saw her face do that thing--that thing when it's fighting itself not to cry, which to this day hurts my solar plexus like some giant brute just gave it a good sharp elbow. She and my dad were looking at each other, and I saw that his face was doing it too.  And then it hit me.  They were remembering.

They'd been here before. It was Zwieback toast instead of french fries. (BTW, don't give Zwieback toast to your babies, eat it yourself, it's great dunked in coffee.)

And instead of that stranger baby with the blocked windpipe, it was me.

Yep, I'm here today to babble endless stream-of-consciousness at you because of one simple fact: After trying everything you're supposed to try to save a choking baby, methods my mother could do in her sleep, my father finally did that last-resort thing you're not ever supposed to do because you risk lodging the blockage further. But my face was blue-black at this point, and it was time for the Hail Mary play.  He reached down my throat with his finger and scooped that chunk of baby-death-cookie right out of my windpipe.

I'll bet that back then, a thousand years or so before, I sounded just as pissed as that other baby.

But the point is this: At that moment in McDonalds, there was no "other" baby, was there?. What my mother did without even thinking was demonstrate what we ALL know in the deepest parts of us.

There are no "other" babies. There are no "others" period.

As we drive around right now, it's going to be easy to hate each other. Believe me, I get it. This one will try to cut you in line to get to the pump faster.  That other one will look at you funny.  Some other one will shoot her big mouth off because she's been idling in line for 4.37 hours and the driver in front of her just got the last drop of fuel available for miles. He's selfish, she's inconsiderate, he's texting and not paying attention, move up already, moron!!!!

And guess what else.  The news media will show you these moments.  Moments like this are nice and loud, they draw the camera's attention. They tell a story. We're all going to hell in a handbasket, sleep in your car or your gas'll get siphoned, folks are snapping left and right, punching each other out on Main Street, every man for himself, people suck. Not a pretty picture.

But is it the real picture? Because what about the moment where one guy notices the harried woman pulling her hair out in the minivan with the seven screaming kids, and he decides to let her in ahead of him in line?  You're never going to hear about that guy. But he's going to do it, and it's going to make her feel like she'll be able to make it through the day without ending up in a padded room drooling into a cup. And he's not the only guy who's going to do it, thousands will do this kind of thing. You won't hear about it. It's not loud.

Then there's that  woman who sees the ancient looking man with Jersey plates who doesn't have a clue about how to pump gas because it's against the law to do that in his state and the last time he did it he had hair. Where's the lever? What's with these buttons? Swipe what?  Instead of being outraged that he's making an interminable wait even more interminable, this woman will go up to him and gently help him cope. She'll show him how to run his card, what buttons to push. He'll be so relieved that he knows he'll never forget her.  PS, this will happen over and over again too. You won't see it on the news nearly as much as you'll see the angry mobs who think they're in a Mad Max movie. But KNOW this, friends. It is happening. More than the rage and flying fists. People are helping each other. Even if it's just that wry smile from one to another that says, "Man, this sucks."  Lives are saved because of acts this simple, acts that ripple and ripple beyond your wildest dreams.

Most people will remember who they are in these times.  Please be one with most people.

Be kind.