Princess yawns, smuggles lemons into bed.

This is not going to turn into a site about my child, but this first day of July started so sweetly...I would normally be annoyed that my 3-yr old woke up at 5:30am, but because she lit up the monitor with a gusty and relieved: "AAAAAAAhhhhhhh" with perfect princess tone and inflection, I was tickled.

I went to get her and she did it again, this time with arm-stretching, fake yawn movements. I threw the window shade open to let the sunlight beam through and sparkle off of her pink and green walls. "White Rabbits! White Rabbits! White Rabbits!" I said. (This is a superstition that I keep. They must be the first words from your mouth, on the first day of the month, to ensure great luck.)

"NO! Lemons!" she screams with a smile. "What? I said white rabbits." I say with a hand on my hip (conversations we have could fill a loony bin)

"Lemons! Lemons! Lemons!" she reiterates while pulling back her bed covers. And there they were. This little girl had 3 plastic decorative lemons in her bed. I have no idea how, I have no idea why, but in the land of toddlers and my child...it makes sense.

"Obviously, what was I thinking?" I say.

"You thought white rabbits silly mommy, its just me and lemons." she clarifies.

Other hilarious things my mini is saying:

"Bizzerk" = Dessert. ie: "Can I have some bizzerk?"

"Prackissing" = Practicing. ie: "You can't clap now! I'm just prackissing!"

"Barak Omama" = You get it. Anytime his name is on the news...she stops what she is doing and yells "BARAK OMAMA!" then tucks her chin, tilts her head and waits with a wry smile for someone to laugh.

And July begins.

Cardboard Regatta and a geeeetar.

On a day like this..it is good to be a suburbanite. "The Lake" a short 4-minute walk from home... Families came out on a crystal-blue-sky Saturday to watch 300 + hours of labor and paper marchie launch into our lake. Multi-family or local small businesses slave with cardboard, glue and paint to prepare for the Regatta.

The mini (an emotional apple from the mommy-tree) was worried and stressed about the future of these poor "boats". Upon arrival we watched and listened as the crowd made a unanimous "Ooooooooooooooooooo!" with perfectly timed inflection as a 20ft Troy-like trojan horse capsized.

No sooner than we negotiated NOT playing on the see-saw, and NOT getting in the sand box we saw it....The bright red guitar. I think my eyes twinkled as much as hers. The sheer size of it was impressive (tee-hee) but it was well-crafted and had a loud and rowdy bunch to boot.

We posed with the giant guitar neck and then watched them carry it in. Throngs of people crowded around to watch the high schoolers and middle-aged men struggle for balance, steering and paddling. They got stuck trying to make a left turn around a buoy, and tipped over leaving one youngster clinging to headstock, until he was pulled in by the rest of the floundering team.

"Awwwwwwwwwwwwe poor geeeeee-tarrrrrr! It fell in the water! It can not play anymore! It cannot play guitar-hero anymore. It's wet." said the little brown munchkin atop her father's shoulders. Dare I cringe at the fact that "Guitar hero" made it into her assessment? No. Some other time I can berate myself for her pop-relevance exposure.

I did have a few ideas for our own entry one day...maybe a HUGE lotus flower, or an obscure 10 foot long hot dog bun with strategically folded deli-meat that bares a strange similarity to a...hm. Bun for hot dogs. Maybe a gymnast on a beam upside down doing a spread-eagle handstand...that would be funny photo-ops while it sank..I'm nasty. Oh well...

Happy Saturday. I'm off to see Wanted. (shiver...Angelina.)

Diana Ross is my mother!

Okay, This is not the first time anyone has heard this particular breed of conspiracy theory, but tonight my sister reminded me ( while watching the KCH awards): I am the love child of Diana Ross and my father. No offense, mom. Really. But who can deny these facts:

1.) The timing works out perfectly. I'm 30. She is....old enough to have a 30 yr old. The year I was born she won 7 AMA's. How could she claim me?! She was so busy! I love the number seven...Spooky.


2.) She divorced in 1977, and was "single" for a little while. She was then scene with a skinny, goofy African-Arab engineer one late December night in Knights bridge. She then ( get this) married a Norweigan dude in the 1980's, who happens to be my mother's twice-removed cousin: Arne Neass Jr. and ( double get this) I LOVE his daughter ( my sister) Leona Naess's music! See?!

3.) I present the below pictures. Which one resembles me more?




4.) Let's take a gander at me ( the early years). Note the hair explosion on my head, and the cleavage! Hm...



5.)I have always been an attention monger, and at the ripe age of about 5, I stated it. Claimed it. Even recited/imitated her. Diana Ross is my mother.


Stop in the name of love....Think it over.

Perspective is a choice.

So strange is the amount of innocence I had in a place so full of absolutism. The dichotomy of my parents alone was something I didn't fully digest until later days. What a curse for an Arab man living in Saudi Arabia, to have not just one daughter, but two?! I was the second, the hope for a son, squashed at my birth. Another girl. As a child I felt he was lucky to have us. (of course).

Being a parent, my perspective of my father changes. In the kingdom...we were liability, some gradient of a huge burden. Yet, I felt so safe, so strangely aware of the corruptness of such a place where my father would speak in three languages in a day (Arabic, Swahili, English). I would watch, attentively. Learning the ways of the world in a third world country. The barter in every situation, the lies, the constant need to seem in control. Beauty in a landscape and a certain beauty in the way my father would bend and fold to whatever the moment required to protect us, to provide.



So strange the family I grew up in ( who doesn't say that?) There is a grand ignorance I had to growing up in a multi-cultural family. A socialistic mother, and an Arab father. My odds of living a duplicitous life was fated at conception. If only I could weave that into the explanations of myself and my many mistakes..Instead, I have come to accept that there is a certain point in time where one must let go of all blame, to the injustice of childhood, the betrayal of parental loss ,or worse, parental denial. I have found a softness through the lens of blind acceptance of what is, and what was. It cast the type of filtered light that makes everything a simple, but golden glow.


Perspective is a choice. Simplicity is harder than winding the complicated roads of how we got to where we are. There are so many things we don't chose. So many things that happen to us, happen for us. The choice is in how to see it. One can swallow and hold the pain and dark suffering of the history that created us in contradiction, in lies, in hurt and fear. That is usually the easiest reaction, at the very least; it is the most natural.


Or you can choose to repel all the negative attachments to the things that have carved our path, accept them as building blocks and proof of our own strength in survival. The choice is to carry weight, or merely acknowledge the load and pack it away somewhere visible, but ineffective. As if to say: "I see you damnit. You exist, but you are just a paint stroke in the masterpiece."

When, for whatever reason ( and there are too many to count) I find myself warring with myself, triggared by someone, thing or memory... I picture a spider-webby creaky attic full of cardboard boxes. A room deep in my subconscious with labels on smaller doors: "Childhood" "Humiliation" "Love"....and every time I need to reconcile a part of my life, I gently push the old wooden door open, clearing years of dirt and film on the floor in the shape of a semi-circle. I look around in amazement at the endlessness of the boxes, and how the room always seems uncomfortably familiar.


Today I approach Childhood (yet again). Take a deep inhale and blow the fresh dust off of the decomposing cardboard box marked: "Missing Dad." Unfolding the rectangular flaps one at a time. My heart plummets for that moment. I see the files and files of daily hurt, the raw wounds that still tremble next to the neatly packed folders that almost smile back at me with resolve. The sound of his smooth, even-keeled voice challenges my throat to swallow hard. I place my acceptance of missing him this morning in the accordion size folder full of these kinds of mornings. It slips in with an echoing "plop" sound like a rock hitting then sinking into water. I love him. I am allowed to hurt, and I do. Today.



Unceremoniously, I re-approach the door, look back again at the boxes on shelves lit by the light from the window of hope. I nod my head to the distant but strange beauty in knowing we all have this, we all deal. Instead of carrying out the attachments and meanings, and trying to deconstruct all these boxes full of complex thoughts, I leave a little less heavier than when I came. That's how it goes.



That's how I choose to leave it today.

Family dysfunction killed the holiday roadshow

The gas prices should be enough to deter us from driving across three states. The feeling of my daughter's feet pounding the back of my seat with her snow boots should keep me from the tradition. The sound of my patience slipping out the backdoor of my soul as we line up in typical Chicago traffic for over two hours just to clear the city limits...that should be enough. None of those things kept us from enduring the annual five star, five stop family road show.....Instead, it was the five stops that stopped us.

It is no secret. "Normalcy" is dysfunction. My specificity of experience is growing up in a home of early divorce, and remarriage. Until this year, I thought I had seen all of its vile by-products: Trust issues, blurred family roles, stunted ability to commit, and so on. People love to throw the statistics at you like social grenades of justification for their relationship issues. Shite, I did! "Marriage to one person is inane, it has less than 50% chance of survival" or "Look at Kurt and Goldie! That's how to do it.".

Those of us who grew up in homes of early divorce look at each other with knowing eyes. When the holidays roll around we say things like: "Whose house is hosting?" or "Are you baring the elements of multi-family gatherings?" We nod in recognition, and hand over the glass of wine. The one thing (lack of thing) I noticed was that fewer people were making the trip. This year, more of us put the proverbial foot down and said: "We are staying home.".

Think about this. It is nearly impossible to please every one with all the factors, and multiple destinations. Let's use our example. My husband is adopted, and in touch with his birth family, and his parents divorced and remarried. Right there....we got 3 "moms" . Add my mother and step-mother and there are 2 more. His father lives out west, and my late father's wife lives out of state. IF you followed ANY of that, you are sorely in the same spot as us. Leaving several people upset with you this year for not making the trip. Even worse, when you do make the trip the inevitable complaint comes out: "I wish we saw you guys more." What?!

Let's further do the math. If we want to see 5 sets of people twice a year, that is 10 weekends. There are 12 months a year, so that makes it more than every other month we are either entertaining or traveling. Short, condensed, forced family togetherness. I'm not as jaded as I sound, just explaining the facts alone sounds exhausting, imagine living it? Wait. You do....live it. Everyone does, unless you are part of the 1% of of us that live with Sally Fields-like matriarchs or have the "Dan-in-real-life" reality. Right. You are like us.

Well, my thoughts on this.....too bad. Times have changed, marriage has changed. If there was ONE central location ( like a grandma's house) that we could trek to and see everyone, we'd be more than willing to deal with the pain and suffering all at once. Maybe we could rent a huge ski lodge/cabin. Keep the different "groups" in different wings. They could avoid each other so as not to have any awkward moments. We could arrange the meetings like speed-dating. Or isn't that what family holidays are about?

Family dysfunction killed the holiday roadshow. You know what? I'm not complaining. Yes, Id love to have a knock-em-out holiday where family was a union of cheers and laughter. Yes, Id love to feel like everyone got to see their granddaughter, niece...children. Yes, Id love to fit into some ideal we all hold of family holidays, but truth be told: I'm a little excited that we finally have a good and debatable reason to skip the trip....

You got divorced.

( nervous smile) Tee hee.

Happy Thanksgetting Crazy

Ahhhhh, the smell of red apple cider, and smokey fires leads the heart to a place of family and food, football and friends. You picture yourself at a large table, every one's faces with cheerful glow and attentive gratefulness for all you are doing. ( record scratch)

Or, maybe it looks a little like this. Your holding the corn souffle with two hands (one without a oven mit) while kicking the oven door shut so the toddler doesn't stick her grimy little lollipop hands in it and get burned. Meanwhile, the husband and friends are watching football in your living room with their feet up, periodically chirping in: "wow, that smells great....Im gonna get fat today". This is only the before meal moments, the during and apres are the most stressful, making sure everyone is served ( while you chug some wine in between filling glasses) and the god-awful countless chore of dish washing. These are the kinds of dishes you cant rinse and flop into the washer, they are serving platters, goblets, butter boats, and hand painted cutesy gifts you have to use so people don't get offended.

I say all of this, not with ill-gratitude, quite the opposite. It is the strangest self-induced chaos anyone could commit to, yet we do, and look forward to it. At least I do. There is something predictably delightful about it, in the same strange way cranberry sauce from a can is curiously the completion of a good-cooked meal. It is both a poetic dance in the kitchen and purposeful prose in the result of sated happy family members.

I am Thanksgetting crazy, and grateful.