Happy birthday to meee

Despite my self-proclaimed ambiguity regarding my birthday, I ended up really leaning into it this year and thoroughly enjoying it. Sometimes joy is just a choice, you know? 

I promised myself I wouldn’t do any real work just for the day - I would answer customer service emails, but no big spreadsheet marathons or lengthy tasks. Then I took a new Pilates class to make up for the one I have to miss on my summer schedule, ran home unexpectedly to move all the boxes of trophies left on the stairs into the house so they wouldn’t melt or get stolen, then headed to the local bar that does food deliveries for another run at supplying groceries for neighborhood folks afraid of deportation. I will probably just do this every Friday that I can from now on, because why not? 

The H really pulled it out this year, I have to give him credit. He sent me a beautiful bouquet, we all went to dinner at my favorite place, and he even had the kids get me cards and presents (this isn’t something we typically do - I realize I need to up my game in this area). I asked for a good knife set, and he got me that. It was a great day. Spontaneously after dinner I made everyone watch one of my favorite movies, Blood Simple. Theo wandered off after a few minutes and the H kept yawning and falling asleep - not stimulating enough for him, I think - but I think Bobby liked it.

I feel like I had more texts/messages/FB posts than usual. Considering how rarely I text people on their birthday, it was really sweet. It made me feel loved and appreciated. I guess I needed that, and I guess I put myself in the mindset to receive it, too. Earlier in the week, my bandleader asked if I wanted it noted on tonight’s gig advertisement that we’d be celebrating both our birthdays (his is the 14th) and I said I didn’t want to be a bother (making the venue re-do their artwork to include me) and he said “don’t minimize yourself. You deserve to be celebrated.” Makes me tear up a little, thinking of that. It’s weird to think that even people like me who (I think) don’t really have an issue with self-esteem still have these little moments of not being ok asking to be put forward. It might also be a woman thing, and/or a middle aged woman thing. Everything about society teaches us, even now, that young women are to be elevated and celebrated and older women just need to step aside and let other people have their moment. In some ways I agree with this - older people not stepping aside in government is a huge part of our problem in this country - but maybe on a personal level, I might need to rethink this strategy.

Midsummer

It’s my “birthday week”, but I’m ambivalent about it. I’m looking forward to celebrating on Friday (like last year, dinner at El Coyote followed by cake at home), but otherwise, I don’t feel the need to make a big deal about it. I guess these mid-life birthdays just sort of lose their magic. Honestly if the day went by with no acknowledgement - and that was normal somehow and not something I should take personally - I really wouldn’t care. 

So, at (almost) 54, here are the stats:

Still bleeding regularly. WHY.

The heaviest I’ve ever been, outside of pregnancy 

Other than my sometimes debilitating arthritic toe pain on my left foot, still able to do anything physically - lift weights, long hikes, etc. 

Not on any medications 

No real menopause stuff other than bad sleep and brittle nails (slightly)

I’m the mother of a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. I remember years ago doing the math and wondering what it would be like to be going through menopause with two boys going through puberty…but a) I’m not in menopause, and b) Theo is not going though puberty, yet. Honestly, it’s been fine. I often wonder if my life with girls would be different; you hear so much about the drama of girls at these ages. I suppose there were some ugly moments when I was at that age, but, of course, all of that was cut short when I moved in with my sister at fourteen. So I don’t really have a road map for life in an intact family as a teenager.

We had an idyllic family day yesterday, the type that I used to dream about but only got to have during the pandemic because of the H’s (until now) 24/7 work schedule. We all had a free day so I posited that we make a pool day of it, and I got out all the cushions and scrubbed the bird poop off the table and chairs while the H scrubbed the rat pee and poop off of the grill and burnt it off, as well, before cooking anything. We splashed around and hung out in the hot tub and watched the World Cup on a phone, while making steaks (for them), cherry tomato/basil/mozzarella bites, grilled corn, chips and dip and watermelon. It was such a nice time that I’m encouraged to try to do this every free Saturday - and there are a few - until summer is done. 

As Bobby’s about to start high school, college is being pushed to the forefront of my mind. There’s a lot I still have to investigate and learn about, of course, but I feel like we’re in a decent position - I’m able to save about $10,000 a year for him (I currently have $25,000 saved, and we have four, technically eight, years of savings to go); and so far he’s been a straight A student. We’re not going to be able to afford some fancy private school with room and board of course, but surely we can come up with something suitable in California’s system, even if it’s two years of cheap community college and then transfer out somewhere impressive, and living at home. I also have the fantasy of him going to a Santa Barbara-area school and living in one of the spare apartments belonging to a dance friend of mine for cheap. So many possibilities, it’s exciting. I love to think about how (hopefully) much easier these kids’ young adult lives will be than mine - working a minimum wage job and living in slums and just trying to stay afloat, wanting a future but not having the slightest idea how to get there, all my friends off at college leaving me completely isolated. You know what happens when you’re a young girl looking for guidance and comfort at that age, lost and struggling and with no support? Some predatory man steps in and takes over, which is exactly what happened to me in the form of my New School film teacher, eleven years older and incredibly toxic and controlling. 

This is the thing I couldn’t see when I was a young adult but I see now, which is that young people still need a ton of support and guidance; I think us Gen Xers were sold the line that the minute you turn eighteen you’re automatically autonomous, whereas we now know this is far from the truth. So it’s easy for us to harrumph about kids today still living at home in their twenties and not living an independent adult life while we had to suffer and struggle…but I don’t want my kids to struggle, not unnecessarily anyway. And I’m pretty sure if I’d gone to college and had friends and was studying something I was passionate about, my life would have been dramatically better. Those post-high school years were some of the worst of my life. I don’t want that for them. 

Thankfully, these kids have loving and engaged parents, and although I’m struggling financially at the moment, it’s not so bad that I can’t put money away for them. Their lives are going to be very different. And just imagine what the world could be like by 2030 - our Trump nightmare over, things looking up…? Maybe? Lindsey Graham died suddenly last night, so anything is possible.

First day of camp

It was a weekend. I’m soooo glad it’s behind us and I don’t have to think about it anymore. This 4th of July was like childbirth - the only way out is through. And once it’s over it’s best just to put it out of your mind. 

Friday I drove down to ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association. I don’t know why driving to San Diego always says it will take 2 1/2 hours and yet always takes 4 hours and why I never remember this, but the delay caused me to miss about half of what I was going to participate in, and that was a huge bummer. I arrived frazzled and frustrated, but thankfully the first person I saw was my friend I was going to see, and she was equally frazzled for her own reasons, so I didn’t feel out of place. As I had suspected, the conference itself was really for clinicians - the talks I went to were very technical and over my head, and all the questions asked were “what do I do when a client says they…” or “how can I help a client who…”. Still, everyone was friendly and welcoming, and I sat in on a group talk with the organizers and felt very at home there, as it was obvious that even though most people there were therapists they were also survivors. I had a moment where I felt like these are the only people who really understand me. And that felt good.

I had a nice dinner with my friend and three other people, and the conversation was fun and interesting, and then I headed home. I can’t say I would go to this again, but the opportunity will probably never arise again, anyway, since my friend said as much as it moves every year it had never been on the west coast before. I’m glad I went, but the driving just about killed me (about seven hours in one day). Then the next day we all piled in the car for another three hour drive to Lompoc to our friends’ for the 4th. It was a long, exhausting day. I’m glad somebody took it upon themselves to have a party with like-minded people so we wouldn’t have to be surrounded by MAGAs in a high school parking lot, but the day itself was full of sadness and anxiety for me. Anxiety because of the fireworks (as always) being torture for someone like me with auditory sensitivity, and sadness for the state of things. I just wanted it to be over. And over it was.

Today was the first day in a month of getting us all out of bed and out of the house early in the morning; I am completely discombobulated and out of it, but I have to say it’s glorious to have the house to myself for the first time since mid-June. Being on a schedule is just better - I hate being off my routines, I haven’t been able to do my exercise classes, everything’s a wreck. I hope the kids like - or at least tolerate - this camp for one more summer. I worry that Bobby is going to be glued to his phone and the camp counselors will complain about it; I worry that one or both of them will come home and say they don’t want to go anymore when they have five weeks paid for. But at the same time I think they crave the structure, too - they want to be with other kids and actively play, not just sit on devices. So my guess is they’ll be ok with camp. Not sure about next summer, but thankfully I don’t have to worry about that yet. It’s weird to think of the day when summer camps will no longer be in our lives, after all these years - but that day is right around the corner. 

Feral summer

I’m getting a peek at what future summers with teenaged boys will look like. My job is to make sure they get up at some point, brush their teeth twice a day, shower occasionally, have some food, and see sunlight once in a while. Mind you, I’m being especially lax because there’s only a few more days of feral summer before their rec center camp kicks in - there’s no way I’d be like this if it were the whole summer. But still - I don’t know how to entertain kids this age, day after day, without spending a shit ton of money I don’t have. On Friday the cleaning lady came so I spent $100 on a couple of hours at a trampoline park and lunch out; it was a fun day for them, but I sure can’t do that all the time. 

Both kids have reading assignments for school so I did at least acquire all four books and have been making them get off screens for a half hour each day to read. That’s something…right?

This week I continue my old video digitizing (I’m in the process of getting all of my 2002-2010 event videos online, which will take a couple of weeks of constant work) and general event work. While my numbers are still dismal, so far I have not had a flood of refunds, and today is the last day for cheap refund fees so you’d think I’d be getting a lot of requests. I got them mostly in the beginning of the month, apparently. 2028 and 2029 hotel contracts are signed, which means the event will happen through Bobby’s senior year in high school. Crazy! What a different world we’ll be living in by then. Assuming our US institutions hold and biology does its job, Trump will be gone either by being voted out or natural causes. It’s crazy to think about since we’re so in the weeds right now; what a truly awful time. I try to think about the generation who, like my grandmother, survived the Great Depression only to be plunged into WWII - she couldn’t catch a break for about fifteen years. Since we’re going on ten years since that orange turd descended the escalator and blew up our country and the world, we’re right behind those days. 

Right now I’m entertaining myself with low key planning yet another western road trip - preferably a cheap, short one - over Christmas break since we have no plans. I’ve always wanted to go to Nevada’s Valley of Fire state park, and that’s best done not in summer. So I’m trying to arrange some hidden gems around that general area - may dip into St George, UT for a couple of hikes; but I’m also trying to avoid real winter weather, which is tough. I don’t want to be stuck in a snowstorm or driving on icy roads. I wanted to head to some remote places further north in Nevada like Cathedral Gorge state park, but it may be just too cold. Everything outside of Las Vegas, apparently, is very remote and isolated. Which I like, but not in the dead of winter. I’ll figure it out. 

I’m spending the day Friday at the International Cultic Studies Association conference in San Diego, dipping my toe back into that world for a minute. This conference is held in a different country every year, and with it being so close this year, made me think I need to go check it out even if just for the day. I imagine it’ll mostly be pretty clinical and over my head, but hey, it’ll make a nice day trip if nothing else. Then for the 4th our friends are again hosting a “gathering” of like-minded folks who don’t feel like celebrating but want to do something. I cannot believe this is where our country is at on its 250th birthday. It’s so fucking depressing I can hardly stand it. 

Oahu

We returned from a week on Oahu late Sunday night and have been a hot mess ever since. Mainly, our sleep is all dysregulated - I keep canceling things I was supposed to do before noon, and our mealtimes are all over the place. Yesterday Bobby slept in until 1:30. So, he’s basically me at fourteen.

Our trip was good, but not without a few stressful snafus - due to World Cup traffic, we barely made it to the airport on time when we left LA, then when we arrived and were just getting into our Turo car, the H realized in a panic that he’d left his phone somewhere and insisted on driving us all out of the parking area to a loading zone and leaving me and Theo there while he used Bobby and his “find my” feature to run all around the airport trying to find his phone - this would have been stressful enough, but he left me in a Nissan Rogue which has a completely incomprehensible gear shift - it might as well have been a manual stick shift. So of course when the security officer came by seconds later and said we had to move the car, I spent probably fifteen minutes while he was glaring at me trying to figure out how to move up the seat and how to get the car out of park, then didn’t know where to go or what to do so I just pulled into a parking garage where I got stuck not being able to reverse the car for another fifteen minutes until I finally figured it out. Mind you this was well after midnight (3 AM our time); I was exhausted and starving and had already had a few stressful incidents that day, and was furious with him for once again leaving his phone somewhere (he’s done this several times - thank you, adhd) and then panicking and abandoning me in a dangerous situation in a car I can’t drive (which he could barely drive, either, so he knew it was problematic). It was well over an hour before the phone was found on the plane and brought out; by then he was relieved and laughing it off but I was seething. This was the beginning of our vacation. It didn’t bode well. I let him have it, and he saw how serious this was to me and apologized for putting us in that situation. And then I had to just get past it. Ah, marriage.

Thankfully the trip looked up after that and there were no more disasters. There was snorkeling and swimming and hiking Diamond Head and an emotional visit to Pearl Harbor. All the things I hadn’t done there yet. I wouldn’t stay in Waikiki again, but we did it once, mainly because it was all my points could afford. I split it with two nights on the north shore which was a lot nicer. Tons of traffic and parking issues which isn’t what you want on a Hawaiian vacation, but hey, it’s overrun by tourists and we’re part of the problem. 

I’ve come home convinced I look fat in all the pictures and I MUST lose weight before my event in two months. We’ll see how long my resolve lasts this time. So far getting up late as hell the last three days and only having a couple of low calorie meals a day has been helpful. 

It’s weird front-loading the summer with a trip right away; I can’t believe we’re back and yet have the whole summer ahead of us with not even so much as a weekend away for at least three months. I sure do miss the cabin already. Temps in the desert are high 90s to low 100s. 

We have two feral weeks before the kids start summer camp - this one and the next. I’m struggling to think of lunch foods and how to get them out of the house. I’ve been working on event stuff round the clock since we got back and am only just now coming up for air; everything hit when I returned and requires a lot of time and focus. The hotel sent me contracts for 2028 and 2029 to review, and so far they look fair. It’s good to know they still want me and that I still have a future there, assuming my attendance doesn’t completely collapse by then. Will it turn around once Trump is gone and people feel more optimistic about their finances? Perhaps. Right now I’m on track to lose another 100 people, although it could get even worse and I just don’t know it yet. It’s a terrible reality to have to live with. I just keep telling myself that somehow it’ll all work out even if it means a few years of austerity. At least the house is paid for.

Theo graduates 6th grade

Theo graduated from 6th grade today in a nice ceremony at school, which officially ends our elementary school experience which began in 2017 when Bobby started kindergarten. What a long, strange trip it’s been!

As always, I have mixed feelings about it all - part of me is done with the little kid stuff and ready to move on to the next phase, and with Bobby two years ahead I know exactly what that will look like. But I couldn’t help but look a little longingly at the parents at graduation cradling newborns or corralling littler kids - all of that is in the rear view mirror for me now; it’s hard not to get a little misty about it. Any ideas I had about getting really involved in their elementary schools and really bonding with the other parents is over - things went down the way they did, and that’s it. I stood a chance at their old school, but then Covid ruined that momentum and we never really recovered. 

Theo got a citizenship award (no doubt for being a kinder helper all year) and the presidential silver award (with our loathsome president’s sociopathic signature on it - I thought about blacking it out, but then thought it might make an interesting historical artifact some day). Bobby played hooky from his last day of school to be there, and of his own volition chose to dress up. Now we’re home sorting through Theo’s leftover supplies and artwork, then we’ll go for lunch and end of school ice cream later. I asked Bobby if he would still get ice cream on the day he gets his Masters and he said yes. 

We’ve got a few days to prepare for Hawaii and then we leave on Monday. I’m looking forward to having this time off from the daily grind, especially dragging myself and everyone else out of bed (to be fair, Theo’s always up because he’s a morning person, but Bobby and I hate it). The kids don’t start their summer camp until after 4th of July, so we have a nice long break before we have to be on a schedule again.

On to High School

Bobby graduated from 8th grade on Thursday. There were no caps and gowns and no diplomas, but a nice walking ceremony and some acknowledgments. Bobby got High Honors, Perfect Attendance, and Service in Action. I had him wear his black pants and shirt from homecoming, and I’m glad I did, since almost all the kids were dressed up. This is a funny age, since there’s such a discrepancy between the kids who have gone through puberty and those who haven’t. Some of the boys looked about nine years old; others could have been eighteen. Bobby is right on target, I think. 

We all got up early and went to wait on line, then the H left after Bobby walked, and I thought went to work - then I get a notice that our front door is open and our alarm has been tripped. I can’t check my ring camera because I just happen to be charging the battery; I have about twenty minutes of sheer panic as I’m trying to get a hold of neighbors to go check it out, and then the H calls to tell me he went home frantically to pee and couldn’t remember our alarm code. Why he didn’t call me the minute this happened, I don’t know, but at least our house wasn’t being ransacked as our 8th grader was graduating. It took a good hour for the adrenaline to leave my system enough for my hands to stop shaking. 

Bobby came home after graduation, but I did make him go to school the next day. He told me they did nothing but play hacky sack and hang out on their phones; and they have three more days of this. Grades are in so nobody’s teaching anything, they’re just being baby sat until they reach the required 180 days of school. Theo graduates Wednesday and Bobby wants to go, so I’ll let him play hooky that day being as it’s the last day of school so nobody cares. That means two half days and then an early morning graduation and then we’re done. 

My sister is visiting and we took a hike up by the boys’ old school. I could see the graduation getting underway there…I still have moments of wishing I had just let both kids stay there through 6th grade as originally planned. But I know I need to get over that because the kids are fine - they don’t regret the move, and it all worked out. I guess I feel guilty/bad that I’m so disconnected from their current schools and never made an effort to connect with any of the parents. There’s still time, of course. But I feel like I’ve failed in that department. I have my dance community and those are all the friends I need, really. But it would be nice to be connected to other parents.