finslippy

Look, everyone, it's my hair. (Yawn.)

All right, all right.

Listen, I didn't really want to put up pictures because I'm pretty sure someone's going to get all mad about my stupid face. I don't take these comments seriously, as I am perfectly aware that I am a vision, but it does give me pause. My appearance seems to anger people so. You may recall--and if you don't I will remind you--that last year, when I was on the Today show, a thoughtful reader told me that all she could see was my "enormous ass and teeth."

Well!

But this is only my hair, so at least you will all be spared my ass. And of course the teeth. The misshapen, unfortunate teeth.

The first thing I learned, while trying to take pictures of my gray hairs, is that it's harder than it seems like it should be. The light in my bathroom's all buttery and lovely but it doesn't work when you're trying to show the horrible divide between the graying roots and the oxidizing awful of the rest of it. Here's my first try. Where are the gray hairs? They're right...right there! Oh, can't you see?!

A little closer, reluctantly. I wasn't really anticipating a close-up.

Okay, look over here, it's really gray--no? Crap. It really is. Damn it.

Fine, I'll lower my head. THERE. Now do you see?

Here's the back of the head (look, you people asked for these), where you can't see anything at all. Take my word for it, it's gray. Darker than the front, but definitely a steel-gray kind of thing.

The other side. Because my hair is longer on top than the sides, the gray's way more apparent around the ears. Which I like to think makes it look like I have a coppery toupee squatting on my head.

Now I'm looking up even more. I'm so whimsical!

In my zeal to expose the white-ness of my roots, this happened.

This is the kind of hair I have: I can yank my hair upward, and it stays. This is an advantage for silly pictures and/or to amuse my son when he's crying, and a disadvantage every morning, in that I wake up with the craziest bedhead ever and if I forget and answer the door, I terrify the meter reader. Jealous?

Now I'm just making faces. But look, in this mirror, you can see the gray hair a little more clearly.

I am the epitome of loveliness.

Finally, just to piss people off: my butt. Sweet fancy Moses, how did anyone let me on television?!

No! No, not the teeth! OH GOD CLOSE THE MOUTH CLOSE IT

Over here

School has started! OMG! LOL! I am writing things like that, now. My brain is entirely gone. I spent last week giggling into my balled-up fists.

Our son denies it, but he's pretty happy as well. If you ask him directly, he'll claim that school is torture and he despises every minute he has to endure there, but if you avert your eyes and stay quiet and still, he'll eventually walk right up to you and volunteer all kinds of happy news about his classroom and the lessons contained therein. Then if you lose all self-control and shout, "See, you DO like it!" he'll run away and you might find him eventually behind the washing machine, snapping and growling.

Henry's feral, is what I'm trying to say. It's about time you all knew it. I am not ashamed. I love my feral boy.

I would be a lot happier overall if seasonal allergies were not trying to kill us all dead. I spent the night pleading with Scott to roll over on his side; he's much happier when he's on his back but this means that his allergy-related congestion leads to snoring which leads to me engaging in homicidal fantasies. Scott told me this morning that whenever I was asleep, I was snoring just as loudly, if not more so. Instead of angrily shaking me awake, Scott just shrugged and gazed at me tenderly. Well. I find his side of the story hard to believe, as I am far too delicate and feminine to do anything like that. This is all to to say that I am now quite sleepy, and would like to go back to sleep, please, yes, okay.

What else? My graying-hair adventures are proceeding apace. I don't know how anyone does this who doesn't cut their hair crazy-short. My hair is, at its longest, 3 inches (oh yes, I measured) and about half of that length is gray. I am not liking the orangey color the rest of my hair has faded to. Mostly I'm concerned that someone out there probably thinks that I think this looks good. So from now on, anyone looks at me, I'm going to shout, "I KNOW WHAT I LOOK LIKE." I'm sure this will clear things up right away.

Oh! If you keep up with me on Twitter, you probably heard all my ramblings about the Park Slope Tornado of 2010. In case you didn't: we had a tornado. At least I think it was a tornado. In Brooklyn! It was five minutes of sheer chaos, with the dog going cuckoo-nuts while the three of us stood around and tried to make sense of what we were seeing out the windows--or to be more precise, what we weren't seeing, which was anything, because it looked like we were going through a car wash. And then the wind died down, and we saw this:

This, my friends, was the table we had on our roof deck. The large, heavy table. Taaable. The storm picked it up and dropped it down to the street below. What's amazing is that it didn't hit that white car, nor did it hit any people, with its jagged edges and enormous nails and so forth. So the dinky little lanterns on the roof deck and feather-light folding chairs, those stayed up there, but the table was blown off the roof. Oh, weather. You confound me.

Eden and I finally got around to updating Let's Panic, so you should really go over there. This week: More Things Pregnant Women Shouldn't be Allowed to Do." I'm going back to sleep now. No I'm not. Maybe I am.

Questionnaire

Henry’s new teachers (he’s got two this year) mailed us a questionnaire. We received it in June, so naturally we filed it away until last night, hours before his first day of second grade.

This has been an extraordinarily challenging couple of weeks, parenting-wise. Camp was over, school had not yet begun. It was hot and humid, as it generally is this time of year. Most of Henry’s friends were out of town. Henry was bored. We were out of things to do. And we fought. All three of us, in different permutations. Eight-year-oldness, at least around here, has been a preview of adolescence and all its sulky, dramatic horrors. I didn’t like it. Scott didn’t like it. We were exhausted. At the end of the day we’d put Henry to bed and watch Lost on Netflix. We started at Season 1 a couple of months ago and we’re already nearing the end. We’d watch episode after episode until we were falling asleep. Somehow it was comforting to watch. Our kid was being difficult. We were undoubtedly being difficult right back. But at least we weren’t trapped on an island, fighting for our very lives!

So last night we filled out the questionnaire. How would you describe your child? What does your child most enjoy? What are your child’s greatest challenges? I struggled to answer it. Could I even accurately describe my own child? Could I get past my own anger and frustration and hopes and projections and see him for who he is? Damned if I know. Sometimes I can see us hurtling toward some future where we don’t understand each other, not even a little bit. I hope that's not true, of course, but it's not as outside the realm of possibilities as I once thought it was.

I found out last week that someone very dear to me died. She died last year, and I had no idea. She was 85, so it’s not like it was unexpected, but it hit me hard.

Lois Hunt was my voice teacher. I was pretty serious about singing, when I was in high school, and then I found Lois. I went to her a couple of times a week. And Lois, well, she took me seriously. Is there anything you want more, when you're a kid? She had a talent I suspect few adults really share: to consider a teenager like I was--a goofy, depressed, anxious, semi-formed being--a peer worthy of attention.

Lois didn’t mess around. She had little patience for my antics, and she gently dismissed my frequent attempts to deflect her attention. And believe me, I tried. I thought if anyone really got a look at me, they would find out how wrong I was, how hopeless and awful. What that would mean, I didn’t know--there were no words for it. But all those fears were beside the point when I was with her. I was there to work, and I was expected to be serious, and I was. When I was at Lois’s house, I was okay, and I would be okay, and I knew it.

Lois and I spent a lot of time together for only a couple of years, but they were important years, as anyone who’s endured high school knows. I was struggling. After my lesson, we’d talk. She’d make me tea and show me pictures from her storied musical career. I’d play with her cats and tell her about my latest troubles. I don’t recall her giving any advice, although I’m sure she did, but I do remember feeling understood. If there had been a questionnaire back then, if someone had wanted to know about me, I would have asked Lois to fill it out. Even though I only saw her a couple of times a week, and even though she didn’t have the considerable task of raising me.

What do I most enjoy? How would I describe myself? What are my greatest challenges? I’m still not sure. I still sometimes think that if I could call Lois and we could catch up, she would lead me to some answers. And I hope that someday, if I can’t help Henry know who he is, he finds someone like Lois who can.

Read this: Half-Baked

I love Alexa, and I’ve been a fan of her blog, Flotsam, since I found it. Back then, five long years ago, she was not yet married, not yet undergoing IVF, not yet mourning the loss of her son Ames, not yet dealing with the premature birth of her daughter Simone.

A lot’s happened to Alexa in the past five years.

Having followed her life in real time, I was looking forward to reading her book, but honestly, I kind of thought I’d be reading a lot of stuff I already knew about. Alexa is a singularly charming writer, and I knew I’d enjoy it, mind you. But part of me hesitated, because it was about pregnancy and babies and I’m done with all that. Then the more intelligent part of me purchased the book, because after all, this was Alexa. Duh.

I expected a diverting read, but I was blown away. Half-Baked is really, really good. I knew how it ended, I knew all the high points and low points along the way, and I was still mesmerized. I started reading on Sunday and I was finished by Tuesday. I read it every chance I could get. I lost sleep so I could read more. Sleep is my favorite thing to do, and I gave it up, for Alexa.

In a lot of ways, Half-Baked is a much more intimate look at what Alexa and her husband Scott went through than her blog was. Which makes sense: I can imagine that writing in the moment, especially when your child is in such a precarious state, you might not give voice to your darkest fears; you’re conscious of your audience and their expectations; you have to soldier on, and you’re distracted and exhausted and overwhelmed. It’s only afterward that you can look back and fully describe what you went through. And I’m so glad she did.

In short, this book is in no way a retread of her blog: it’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s gripping. I was so annoyed to find this in the “Pregnancy and Childcare” section of Barnes and Noble that I refused to buy it there. This is a memoir, and a first-rate one at that.