Saul Good and Co.

New Leaves

You know those people who can leave well enough alone? Who can have an idea on which they fixate, but are able to put a pin in it for the time being? Welcome to the blog of not those people.

It was about time for a haircut, and I had this idea to go full gamine, and I couldn't let go of the thought so I just did it. Because I figured, even if it turned out bad, life's too short to not go for the things you're really jazzed about, particularly when they're things so innocuous as a hairstyle. And so I got it done and after a one-day "oh well, it'll grow" adjustment period, I seriously love it. To all who recommended Linda, she's amazing and really gets my hair. I don't know if I'll keep it this short for always, but for now, it's the best. I don't know why I didn't do this years ago. (You can't actually see it all that well in this pic, but my allotted selfie time expired, so you'll have to take my word that it's short and awesome.)

Et voici the weekend's other big doin':

That thar represents the final frontier in the big boy bed transition (awaiting this afternoon's mattress delivery). The toddler-sized daybed served its purpose, but since HR insisted on putting the mattress on the floor and never using the damned frame, we decided to just level up. There's only one sleep option for him now. We'll see how it goes with the actual sleeping part tonight, but so far he has been a very enthusiastic participant in the process. That is way more than I could ask for considering if you rounded up every old coot on every porch rocking chair in every country of the world and entered them in a restistance-to-change contest with my boy, my money would have been on HR.

I've stated before that I'm way less sentimental as a parent than I thought I'd be, and that remains true, but I'm not a total cyborg. Chucking out the recliner that served as his rocking chair and nursing and story spot for his first couple of years is not as easy as I thought it would be. It's still gotta go, but not without grasping at some of my heartstrings on its way to the curb. But 'tis fitting for the season and all that renewal crap.

Sox take the field in Baltimore at 3:05, I've got the telltale throat-scratch of springtime allergies, and we turn and turn and turn.

No Offense to Betty

I feel so rant-y this week. Most weeks, to be sure. But I find I'm sitting atop an especially large pile of rants in response to things I've chosen to internalize. I've acclimated to the elevation at the top of Rant Mountain, and am in danger of making myself comfortable. Ah, but I don't want this to become a place where I'm playing the role of rage-oid reactor. So I'll keep it to one go-off per week. I've already used up this week's allotment. Maybe you'll get treated to my outdated thigh-gap rant next week, maybe something will boil up to take its place. You never know what's going to tick me off, that's the fun. I'm just hoping I can continue to come up with things to write about that are my own and not the result of being consumed with feelings I've let the world make me feel. Is that all writing is though? A reaction to something else someone else did? Or is it threatening to become my schtick?

I actually don't obsess about it all that much, I write what I write. But I'm trying to tighten it up a bit overall. To have a purpose maybe. To be more conscious and thoughtful instead of blathering on like a dope and calling it an entry. Starting tomorrow, I guess.

I actually DO obsess over "Broad City." Friends, have you been watching this?  Ilana and Abbi are my idols. Would that I had found that sort of calling when I was young. Still I'm not counting out the possiblity that I could be the Grandma Moses of comedy. Betty White's gonna have to go sometime, and someone will take her place so why not me? I could be demonstrably funny by the time I'm in my sixties. It could happen. It's all part of the beautiful journey.

Official Declaration of Enough

Before I get rolling, I just want to say that I am as much a participant in the internet viral revolution as anyone. I love to share things that resonate with me. I try to cull the list to things that I haven't already seen in my social media feed a hundred times, but somebody somewhere's seen everything a hundred times. It's the nature of the beast, and the idea of going viral should be something I actively seek out as a someone who wants her writing to be, you know, read by people. But I've seen much better blogs than mine implode after the fame that comes with a HuffPo feature. Not that I'm in any danger of being picked up by a major wire, just that instant notoriety is a double-edged business. The public is a fickle entity, and we are not afraid to brandish our pitchforks when we turn. But that's not really what this is about.

What's been on my mind is the recent and ever-expanding glut of "Ten Things I Will Tell My Son (Really Just That He's Perfect as Long As I'm the Only Woman in His Life Ten Times)" and "Ten Ways I Will Remind My Daughter She's Beautiful Because Beauty is Everything and Her Body Does Not Actually Belong to Her and Once Her Virginity's Gone She's Nothing. " Fine these aren't actual titles, but they are if you include subtext.

Guys. People. We all love our kids. And we're all qualified to write about our own kids, even if we don't identify as writers. We're experts of our own lives. But what makes the rounds these days is puzzling to me at best, and downright scary at worst. I have read so few of these types of clickbait that touch me in any way other than a bad touch.

(Puke. See also: puke.)

Sometimes a beautiful writer can capture a beautiful sentiment about parenting, or reveal a truth or make me laugh and shake my head with recognition. And I will high-five that writer in the form of liking or maybe even sharing. But I can't get behind the fetish business that writing about parenting has become. All our precious royal offspring are precious to us, because we made them, and how we teach them to live in the world is our business. I know full well that what makes it into print isn't necessarily how lives are truly lived, when I read some of these things I want to take my whole family and live in a different world in case there's a chance we'll accidentally intersect. On the whole, I was better off before I let myself get into anyone else's child-rearing headspace.

At this point I figure I've got the amount of expertise equivalent to anyone to write about my motherly words of wisdom. Which is to say, I tell my kid I love him every day. I also tell him that naked bums aren't allowed at the dinner table. Parenting guru, over here! Yes, I know, my catty glibness is not attractive. I've just had it up to here with everything. I think the internet is a weird and wonderful place, I wouldn't want to be living my life without it now, but I will say I bet our parents were pretty glad it didn't exist when they were raising us. 

IGTOFTS

Mondays are not anything like they used to be for me. I'd go so far as to call them enjoyable, as long as the insane things awaiting me at work are merely chaotic and eventually manageable and not like, call-the-cops insane. I like the feeling of being re-set, a clean slate for a new week. It also helps to have passed a weekend that felt like it happened, complete with going out on the town.

My parents were in for my cousin's baby's birthday party, and you know what that means. Well, two things. One thing is that you get to see adorable babies and have cake, the other is that grandparents = enthusiastic (and enthusiastically received) babysitters. OK fine three things, if you count getting to hang out with my parents, and I do. But the novel part of the whole thing was that I got to go out with Mike and my brother (and even my dad, for one pint) and visit our old haunts as well as knock two new ones I've been wanting to get to off my list. It became clear to me at one of the new places that I'm definitely too old for any kind of scene.

(^ ^ ^Me ^ ^ ^)

Acknowledging that is liberating as hell. I'm just so grateful to have the option to get out there I legitimately don't care that I'm the mom-haircut with no tattoos and no tolerance for people throwing up at the bar or servers who are too busy being cool to do their jobs. I say this all the time, but it's a true fact of aging that the experience is like acquiring the power of invisibility with most of the perks and few of the drawbacks. I had a great time, and now it's Monday and I'm into it.

Sometimes

Sometimes you have a lot of words about a thing, and sometimes you spend up all those words before the thing even happens. I just want to say that I'm so proud of my nephew for the brave work he put in this past weekend, because I know that getting up on that bimah and doing what he did was the opposite of easy for him. And he powered through and got it done and went on to help his basketball team win a championship the next day. I'm proud he is my family, and that his family is my family, and that his family loves my own birth family and vice versa. I'm so thrilled we got to be with far-flung relatives and see a new baby we hadn't yet had a chance to meet. It was fortunate to be gathering for a joyous occasion and to eat great food and dance like we just didn't care and take silly pictures. Thanks Sam, for taking one for the team, the team being your loved ones who were psyched to assemble in your honor. And thanks to Sam's mom and dad for putting together such a weekend. You have got a great couple of kids, but that's not a surprise nor an accident.

There were many, many pictures taken, which I will acquire eventually, but I took none so please accept this tee-shirt as a placeholder.

 

Listful

The party weekend was amazing. So fun, so life-affirming. HR behaved like a dreamboat for just about the entire time. Then Monday came and I fell into a workhole, followed by a body-ache sickday and didn't write and didn't write. And I'm still not going to write about it today, probably not until tomorrow. But that's OK, because who doesn't love a late and drawn-out recap? Really. Take my word for now that it was the jam, and Mike's family outdid themselves as hosts and bar mitzvah stars.

I haven't popped out a list in ages, and I feel like making one today in honor of it being spring-eve and all. Some happiness of the moment:

-wornontv.net - best/worst thing to happen in a long time. Best for my budding sartorialist, worst for my wallet (potentially, I have managed to hold off making purchases thus far)

-a trip to Maine is in the forseeable future

-"Wallykazam" on Nickelodeon - mark my words, Bobgoblin will go down as one of history's great troublemaking characters

-The Goldfinch, gifted by my extremely astute Secret Santa. I haven't actually gotten the chance to read it yet, but it's enough that it's there so that I may crack its binding as soon as this weekend

-mini-egg season is upon us

-music of the now - I'm really feeling White Denim and St. Vincent.

OK then. It's above freezing. I saw a robin fly over my car yesterday. LET'S GET ON THIS, NATURE.

When Did They?

A dozen or so years ago, before we were ever seriously serious about when to have a baby, Mike and I used to sit for our nephews a lot. We'd usually team up with Mike's mom and stay over at his brother and wife's place and play house for days at a time. It was a pretty great system, and I have so many memories of playing with those little dudes, of them coming into the big bed in the morning and imagining what life would be like when we had our own, someday. Being the aunt was the best gig going at the time, and would provide us with our fix for months. If not for those exhausting-yet-wonderful weekends, we might have started our family sooner. But that's all beside the point. What I mean to express is that the younger of the two boys, the one who was so happy and playful at 6 a.m., so cute that you could just die, is about to become an official man in the eyes of G_d. And I don't know how that happened.

I've been around for the entirety of our nephews' lives, before they were even individual twinkles, which is pretty cool. And though we share no blood, to me they will always be as much mine as they are Mike's. I feel that way about our niece too, of course, and her little brother who is cooking away in the baby oven. MINE. Whether they like it or not. Of course it will be the same if and when my own siblings have kids (no hint dropping, just putting it out there in case there was any doubt). I've got infinite monster aunt love. I've got it coming out of my pores. And it's just as CRAZY to me that one of the flock--the second of the flock, in fact--is old enough to be making his bar mitzvah this coming weekend. I did not sign off on this.

It will be a great party, guaranteed. I'm looking forward to being with family and getting fancy and celebrating this milestone. But it's tinged with some kind of quasi-maternal nuttiness. I am not against kids growing up. I mean, even if I were, tant pis, that's like protesting the moon. It's just the sweep of it all. This boy for whom I cared and cuddled and engaged in sock fights in the basement is a serious man now. I see it through a misty watercolored veil of shock and nostalgia that I haven't yet experienced with my own growing boy. I will someday, and it will hit me with a different end of the same sledgehammer. Because thirteen years from now, the time that has elapsed since my nephew was in the tiniest size of diaper, HR will be gearing up to leave the nest. I was thinking about that last night, and you know it's not helpful to think in those terms. But I've reached the point in my life where 13 years is not such a very long time at all. 13 years is a calendar page, a stop on the Green line, a waffle in the toaster.

Life is THE trip. OK. I'm ready to get to the dancing part now.

 

Lucky 42

The highlight of my weekend: we were paying our bill in a restaurant before going to the Museum of Fine Arts and HR was dancing around, singing, "I can't wait to look at paintings!"  Of course we got there and he was tired of it after 10 minutes, but the moment really clicked for me. I have a great life. It's not exciting. It's not unusual. But I get to take my kid to the museum, and not just for a super special occasion. We get to go to restaurants. We get to hole up at home and be snuggly and lazy. And so far I think our boy is happy. He's growing up happy. So far, I think we're doing OK by him, and I don't actually mean the museums and treats and such. That's just extra, something I enjoy being able to add to the mix. Watching his moments of unselfconscious joy, it makes me think we're giving him a life where he feels secure, where he knows he is loved and cared for, even if he doesn't know there are alternatives. That the world is full of disappearing airplanes and real-life "True Detective" scenarios. There's work to it all, there's worry, but overall, our existence comprises the most luxurious set of circumstances I can imagine. We don't have to fight for anything, and it's only partly because of the choices we have made leading up to now. Luck, it's called luck. I don't have a better word for it. I don't believe in blessings, so I just say luck. And I acknowledge and cherish that luck.

It's not that I don't have ambition, or want big things for us all. But I'm determined not to overlook the richness of the small parts of our days. I know I do it all the time. Waiting out phases, getting through the boring bits, phoning it in. It happens, and I let it happen. Letting it happen less is a good goal, I think.

Mikey had a birthday and we celebrated in a low-key fashion. I think he was ok with it, though I will say I feel he's owed some kind of major break, someday. But I hope he feels he was celebrated enough when it counted.

PSL

I am currently in the throes of post-sandwich letdown. Got-DAMN that was a good sandwich. I miss it in my mouth. Yes I'm the lady who eats lunch at 11:30. It will probably happen to you one day, don't be afraid.

 

 

Reverse Cougar Roundup

When it comes to babes, I'm an unapologetic ageist and always have been. If you appreciate mature beauty like yours truly, here's a handful of eye candy for your Wednesday.