The Most Expensive Thing I've Ever Had ...

... is Brendan.

Kids are frigging expensive. There’s tuition and afterschool and clothing and entertainment and Christmas gifts and birthday gifts and birthday parties. Geez!

Big Bren made fun of me the other day because I bought some eye shadow at the dollar store. I thought about making my usual trip to the Mac store, but when I thought about the amount of gas I would spend to get there, plus the $18 for the actual eye shadow, I decided to go down the hill to the dollar store and called it a day. The damn thing probably contains lead and might dry out my eye lids, but what can I say? I’ve become “frugal” in my old age.

The Unloveable

For most of my life, I have not felt loved. Worse, I have not felt love-able. My parents were neither affectionate nor effusive. They never said “I love you.” They never hugged us or kissed us. They didn’t tuck us into bed at night or say “I’m proud of you” if we did anything noteworthy. By the time I was seven, my mother cut off any physical contact with my father, like kisses goodnight or sitting on his lap, because she had seen too many instances of incest in the Honduran community and she wanted to remove any “temptation.” My mom was also of the opinion that a child would be “spoiled” if showered with attention; my dad left all the child-rearing decisions – insofar as it related to us girls – to my mother.

On one hand, it was good that my mother ruled with an iron fist, because my sisters and I avoided the pitfalls that surrounded us in the projects where we lived. All around us, the girls were dropping out of school and getting pregnant. And while we probably would’ve have sought out the attentions of young men to fill the void of love we felt at home, my mother timed our commute to and from school, was on good terms with a welfare mother on our floor (who watched everything we did and if anyone entered the apartment while my mother wasn’t there) and had a voice-activated recorder on the phone in her locked room that taped all conversations on our telephone line. Simply put, we had no opportunity to become sluts.

Growing up that way comes at a price. For many years, I harbored a deep-rooted belief that no one loved me and was convinced that no one could love me. I felt unworthy and ugly. I mean, if no one in my early life had – and who better to love you than your mother, your father, your family – then why would anyone in my later life? As a result, I always felt that any man I was with had an ulterior motive for wanting to be with me. The first time that I have felt true love – given and received – was when I had Brendan.

In recent months, I began feeling a sense of stagnation. Life was not bad, but not great. The fact is that I feel a yearning, a longing for something, but the something is fuzzy, not clear. I feel like there is more to be done, but I’m coming up against an unbreachable wall that will not allow me to do it – whatever “it” is. I knew that there was something I was meant to learn, something I was meant to understand once and for all. Whenever I get into these depressive moods, I try to pray or meditate them away. And so it was that I bumped into Michael Bernard Beckwith’s “Life Visioning Program” on CD. I won’t describe the whole program here, but it entails asking the “right” questions for personal growth. He recommends not asking “why” questions (those are my personal favorites: Why me? Why now? Why? Why?), but “what” and “how” questions. What must I become in order to manifest my vision? How must I grow? What must I change about me? What is it that I need to let go of? Once you ask the question, you should mediate on them and let the Universe, your subconscious, God, or whatever you want to label it, will give you the answers.

I asked the questions and … nothing happened. (Did you expect the skies to part and God to give me the answer??) I was truly frustrated. I copied the discs onto my I-pod and sent the originals to my sister, thinking that perhaps, she’d get better use out of the program. Maybe I had done it wrong.

That night, as I tucked Brendan into bed, I kissed his forehead and said, “que sueñes con los angelitos, Hijo” -- “Dream with the little angels, my son.” And I stopped. That was odd. I never say that phrase to Brendan. I almost always say “goodnight, Baby. I love you.” But I remembered the phrase well – when my mother wasn’t working nights, she would be in the living room watching her telenovelas, my siblings and I would line up at the living room door to say goodnight. As we kissed her cheek, she would say to each of us, “que sueñes con los angelitos negros” – “dream with the little brown angels.” Odd, indeed, that I would say that phrase.

A few days later, I was going to a seminar when the answers struck me. Seemingly out of the blue. Memories came flooding into my brain. There was my older cousin, Adora, caring for me when my parents came to the States. She was carrying me on her hip, so the hot sand would not hurt my bare feet in Honduras. My head lay sleepily on her shoulder as she carried me. She was smiling and planting feather-light kisses on my forehead as she walked. There was my oldest sister, Elsa, playing "school" with me in our bedroom in the projects. She was teaching me English words. There I was, feverish and coughing, during a bad winter soon after we’d moved to the South Bronx; and there Elsa was again, rubbing Vicks into my bony chest to ease the cough, then leaning me against her and covering me up with sheets. Elsa yet again, at the book fair at our school; my mother hadn’t given us enough money to each buy a book, but Elsa had found me and was handing over her few coins so that I, at least, would get something I wanted. I saw me at around 8 years old waking in the middle of night with a nightmare and having Elsa, who was only 5 years older than me, rub my brow until I fell asleep again. Now, it was my brother, Arles, holding me in his arms, shielding me from our mother; she was trying to get at me because I had not ironed my uniform jumper properly and we were going to be late for school. She was screaming and frustrated; she pounded furiously on Arles’s back and arms, but he would not let her get to me. Even my mother made some positive appearances; she had taken time off from her day job to take me to the dermatologist – in times of stress I get severe bouts of seborrheic dermatitis. My mom again, getting up early to braid our hair before school, even though she’d worked at her night job and must have been tired. And last, my dad, making the car “dance” to music by stepping on and releasing the brakes, so my siblings and I could laugh; taking us to the movies to see the Mexican actor “Cantinflas” in his latest comedic escapades while my mother worked; and driving two hours to the beaches of Long Island each Sunday during the summer so we could see something other than projects and crackheads.

Then the inner knowing came: I had been loved all along. Perhaps I hadn’t known it, but I had been loved. Then the same inner voice implored me to look at my life in recent years. How my mother and my sisters had driven to Buffalo to help me move from one apartment to another. How, after I had carbon monoxide poisoning and was afraid to sleep, Elsa -- who was the working mother of two young boys at the time -- stayed up the whole night watching me to make sure that I would wake up. The voice said to see my mother in her perpetual penance: cooking my favorite meals, calling to see how I am doing all the time, saying “I love you” to my son. To notice how my husband has lived up to his vows of in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. And all my friends who care for me for no reason other than they care about me. And I felt a sense of peace. A sense of belonging unlike anything I had felt before. And I knew – I know – that everything will be okay. That I will do whatever it is that I am meant to do.

Change has Come

Today, my co-workers and I gathered around an archaic television set in our conference room and watched Barack Obama become the 44th president of the United States of America.  It was totally awesome (in the original meaning of the word -- not the way teeny boppers and my almost-5-year-old use it).  I was a huge goosebump for the entire duration of the ceremony and his speech.  Standing before the country was the epitome of the American Dream.  He is what my mother always said people of color could be.  He is what Dr. Martin Luther King foresaw when he said that one day Black people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  Today, I was truly proud to be a person of color and an American.

Behind the Curtain

I think The Wizard of Oz is one of the best books ever written. Unlike most people, however, I don’t think the best parts are those that come after Dorothy discovers that the Wizard is a sham. Once she opens the curtain and exposes the balding little man working strings and levers to make the “magic” happen, it is not the beginning of an adventure, but the beginning of the end. At that point, she loses hope. There will be no wizard who will save her; no white knight. Then and there she knows that she’s going to have to save her damn self. The winged monkeys and the wicked witch are just distractions. At the end, it’s just a girl and her shoes.

I started thinking about The Wizard of Oz the other day after a conversation with Big Bren. Brendan had gone to bed and we were laying about, just killing time. I was on our bed, in my flannel pajamas, doing what I always do in the evening before bed – reading the gossip rags on line. Suddenly, the conversation turned to how I had been 10 years ago, when Big Bren and I first met. Smiling, he said, “I like you better now. You’re more real. I’ve made you into a woman; you know, a wife.” For a minute, my blood ran cold. Not that I don’t like being a mom and a wife; I most definitely do. But I feel like I had to kill my inner wizard to become that.

In some sense, Big Bren is right. When we met, I was a completely different person. I would work at the firm until late in the evening, then go hang out with my co-workers at some posh restaurant or bar. All my clothes were designer and I thought nothing of spending $1,000 on a handbag. I had a personal trainer at the local gym, and a standing appointment on Tuesdays with a Russian aesthetician named Anya, who gave me a mani and pedi and made sure that my various parts were plucked and/or waxed to my satisfaction. I had a closet full of lingerie and I could not walk out of my apartment in the morning if my bra and panties did not match. What can I say, I was a bit of a pretentious twit. But that was my curtain; everything that anyone saw was simply the projection -- the show -- that I was putting on. None of it was real.

I don’t know when my wizard died (let’s face it, that old me ain’t making a comeback). A piece of her died when I got carbon monoxide poisoning in the Murray Hill apartment that I rented for more money than I could reasonably afford, because I convinced myself that I just had to live in Manhattan. I was removed unconscious from that apartment in my fabulous Victoria’s Secret underwear.

Maybe she died when I started suffering stress attacks after the carbon monoxide incident and I couldn’t sleep for fear that I wouldn’t wake up. It’s hard to think about matching underwear when you’re falling apart psychologically.

No, I don’t know how or when it happened. Big Bren did not ride in on big white horse to rescue me. There was no knight in shining armor. We just took one step at a time. It feels like I just woke up one day, wearing no make-up, with unshaved and unwaxed body parts, stuffed into flannel pajamas. It wasn’t something that I planned or even wanted. And, yet, it is more real to me than anything I have ever lived before. When my little guy rains kisses on my face, it’s worth more than a million Gucci bags. When I put my head on my husband’s chest at night, he doesn’t care that I haven’t had a manicure in a month.

Sometimes, when “real” life threatens to overwhelm me, I wish I could click my heels three times and go back to that life – it seems so easy, so glamorous, in comparison to my reality today. But I know, as Dorothy came to learn, that there really is no place like home. Right now, there may be more dish-washing than Broadway plays and more laundry than pomegranate martinis, but, at the end of the day, it is the place that I call home.

What Donuts Do

Brendan and I were running errands today when we passed by the local Dunkin Donuts and Brendan asked if he could have a donut. While I’m not a big proponent of giving kids what amounts to pretty much unadulterated sugar, I felt like having a little something sweet myself, so to Dunkin Donuts we went. Brendan wanted a powdered donut; I got him 3 powdered donut munchkins and some hot chocolate and we got back in the car.

I focused on driving and totally forgot about Brendan and his donuts until I snuck a peak in the rear-view mirror to see what he was up to. I almost drove off the road when I saw that my child, from head to toe, the booster seat and the backseat immediately surrounding him were covered in white powdered sugar.

My eyebrows came together in a frown. At the next stop light, I turned around and said, “Brendan, look at the mess you’ve made back there.” He looked down at himself and his chair and over at the backseat, then shrugging slightly, he said “But, Mommy, that’s what donuts do!” Despite myself, I had to laugh. He was absolutely right, powdered donuts will no doubt create a mushroom cloud of sugar and little boys will undoubtedly make a mess.

The Kindness of a Stranger

I work in the legal department of a large insurance company. Part of my job is to provide legal support and training to claims folk across the great State of New York. It was in that capacity that, not too long ago, I got summoned to Syracuse. I started driving from downstate New York in reasonably balmy 40-something degree weather and clear skies. I made it up to Syracuse without incident, got something to eat and settled into my hotel room for the night.

When I woke up the next morning and looked out the window, I thought I was still dreaming; the world was blanketed in snow. Not just a dusting, but several inches worth. I’m not an idiot, I know it’s Winter in New York; but I had checked the weather and no snow had been in the forecast.  As I looked at my buried rental car, a sense of despair overcame me. I had no scraper, no brush, no shovel, absolutely nothing. I glanced down at my flats and trench coat and just knew it was going to be a long, cold, miserable time before I unearthed that car.

I walked gingerly across the parking lot, snow filling my shoes with every step.  And with every snow-filled step, my mood got darker and darker. I finally made it to the car; I used my gloves and a credit card to clear off the frozen snow on the windshield where my eyes would be.  Still, I couldn’t hope to drive like that – there’d be too many blind spots.  I settled into the warming car to think. What to do? What to do?

Then, suddenly, the ice and snow was being cleared away from my windshield!  Then, the side and rear windows. I rolled down my window to speak with the child of God who had decided to perform a random act of kindness for a perfect stranger that morning.  I found out that he worked at the Hampton Inn where I had stayed that night and was getting off the night shift.   He had seen me shuffle across the parking lot in my inappropriate attire and had realized that I would never be able to clear my car, and so, he had come out to help.  I thanked him profusely aloud, and silently heaped blessings upon him. He just shrugged, and with the car now road-ready, he trudged back into the hotel to complete his shift.

I never asked his name, nor is it likely that he will ever come across this blog. But if he ever does: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

How Do I Live?

How do I live?

How do I live, with this dream heavy on my chest?
Unfulfilled, yet refusing to die
How do I live, with it taking up such space?
It’s blocking light and air. Oh why?

How do I go on? Pretending to exist
In this role I call my life?
What will I do? What will I be?
Can’t I be simply mother, worker, wife?

Why do you, o Dream, torment me so?
Please, just go and let me be!
I am too tired to fight and humbled by life
Please, just set me free.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

May 2009 bring you much joy, love and peace!