But first, old business:
Someone named Matt at Redsparks.com emailed me with a BOMB ASS design for my back, so he got to pick one prize and he went with the necklace, for his wife, because he’s awesome like that, and do you want to see what he came up with? Too bad. Sneak peeks are all you get today.

And then I spent more time on Randomizer tonight than Janis Joplin spent on heroin, and I came up with two lists…one for jewelry entries and one for tattoo gift certificate entires. I deleted all the multiple entries, because tsk tsk, and in the end it spit these names back at me, which you can click to make bigger if you must.

And then I did it again, because someone was winning a $50 gc to Tattoo Factory, and this is what it gave me.

So, Janet, Matt and Island Mummy, email Lu at Below 14th and let her know what you’d like and Schmutzie, you’ve got $50 to play with at Tattoo Factory, and Lu and Amy from My Ladybug Picnic, you each have $25 to blow. Email Paul at Tattoo Factory to set up your appointments; he’ll be expecting you. For everyone else, we all still get 20% off tattoos and piercings, and a shitload of other fun stuff. I’ll be there for what looks like, um, forever, so I’ll probably see you. And I may need vicodin. Also, my mommy.

And now, new business:

I really like to fish, and I always have. There’s something about the mixture of me, sunshine, a fine line, total silence and all the time in the world that makes me truly, perfectly happy. I could do nothing but fish all day long, and I could catch absolutely nothing, and I’d live happily ever after. I don’t need the best equipment, or the biggest boat, I just need a stick and some string and a little jar of powerbait and I’m good to go. Because nothing works better than powerbait, nothing.

I’ve always wanted to try fly fishing, but there’s something about it that strikes me as overly-romantic, and though I’ve had one solid offer in my life to go learn how to do it with someone, that someone failed in every way to come through on that offer and I really don’t want to do it myself, so I’ve given up on that idea. I’ve also wanted to try ice-fishing, maybe just once, but good lord it’s so complicated and time-consuming and, well, cold. I hate being left out in the cold, especially by my own doing. So I don’t.

I did, once, wander out onto a frozen lake with an auger in my hand just to see what a little tap on the ice would do. I knelt on a sheet of ice that I wasn’t entirely sure would hold my own weight and I looked down through the ice to the waters below. I kept seeing this fish darting past me, under and back around and under again, almost like it was daring me to catch it. I watched that fish for a long time before I realized I was just in way over my head and that I needed some help if I was going to do it right.

And on my way home, someone stopped and offered to help me. Without me asking or anything, just like it was fate that we met. And I haven’t taken that person up on the offer just yet, but I’ve been thinking about it. A lot.

The longer I wait, the more clearly I can see exactly how I’m going to crack that ice open and get my rod in there and catch that son-of-a-bitch. I think I know how to catch him, I just need to try. I want to try. I’m ready to try. And so, I’m going to try. 

It’s something new, something out of the comfort zone I’ve created for myself with my little hobby I’ve developed over the entire course of my life. The way I like to fish, it’s easy. It’s brainless. It’s as comforting as my evening tea and as safe as my favorite blanket, the one my grandmother left to me when she died, the one that I can hide away from the world in when I have to. I’ve come to rely on my trips to the lake, all by myself, away from the things of man, and I’m starting to let the ease of what I know I can do so effortlessly rob me of the chance to do something a little bigger, a little harder and a little more satisfying in the end. And it’s not like I’m getting any younger or anything. My knees don’t bend like they used to and my fingers get all stiff in the cold and if I don’t do this now, I don’t know if I ever will.

And so, I’m going to do it now. I’m going to run away for the month of July, because really…if I’m going to hack away at a bunch of old, frozen water, July sounds like the most agreeable time to attempt it. I’m going to run away and I’m going to take a whack at that ice. I’m not taking my eye off that fucking fish under that sheet of ice for an entire month, and with a little help and a lot of encouragement, I’m either going to come back with dinner or frostbite.

But at least I’ll know. At least I will have tried.

Until August, my friends; until August.

My sons have always been completely unable to estimate. When they’d ask what time it was, and I’d say that it was quarter after 4, they’d go look at the clock and say, “Mom! It’s 4:12!” I’d explain that yes, I know it is, but that I was rounding up and they’d say, “But it’s FOUR TWELVE, MAWM.” Which all sounds fairly cute, until you repeat that 15 times a day, every day, and factor in pocket change, meal portions and legos.

Needless to say, I spent a good deal of their formative years banging my head against walls.

My children are just literal children. They’re not one for the imaginationy games, they don’t make up stories or have friends no one but they can see. They read non-fiction books for the first seven years of their lives. They are dry.

And then the girl showed up with her fake make-ups and her basket full of her brother’s old halloween costumes and she brought imagination into this house. Her best friend in the whole world, the one she spends hours a day on the phone with, is Sonic The Hedgehog. Her babies all have names and favorite foods. She insists on tea parties. She lives in this world that none of us know anything about, her head in the clouds and her feet in the mud, and oh my god, it’s so fucking cute I could die.

Except you know I didn’t dodge the reality-bullet with this one, oh no. It just showed up somewhere else.

I’ve never been one for giving my children many options in life, but I do allow them to dictate their own days to a degree. For example, if they’re really, really misbehaving, I’ll ask them if they are going to stop or if I am going to have to stop them, and then make them chose. If they stop, great; happy fun time can continue but if they chose to make me stop them, I do exactly that. And once I have, we talk about appropriate punishments. I ask them what they’d do, if they were me, and we come to an agreement. Maybe that makes me a shitty parent, but I think it makes more of a point if they have to come up with it. I think that’s part of the punishment, that it drives the point home when they’re the ones making the point. It also makes the whole thing less powerless for them, which is nice because I have no desire to be a dictator. They all have to grow weird, dark moustaches and wear polyester brown pants and, ewww.

I take for granted sometimes that my old tricks are going to work on the new kid, the one who hasn’t been here for a decade and doesn’t know the rules of engagement, and occasionally, in her big-eyed curly -haired cute ways, she reminds me.

Like the other day when I was out front, trying to get her to come inside while my neighbor was talking to me. I told her to come inside. I asked her to come inside. I bribed her to come inside. I demanded she come inside. She totally didn’t come inside. I finally looked at her and said, “Dude, am I going to have to smack your bottom or not?” and she thought about it for a full minute before she said, “Um….not” and wheeled away on her tricycle.

Because that was a dumb question, that’s why. Because she doesn’t know that when mom says “smack your bottom”, the situation has gone from mild annoyance to DefCon 4 and it’s time to run, not walk, but run in the direction mom is asking you to. My neighbor looked at her, looked at me, and Fell. Over. Laughing. I joined him. All he could say was, “At least she answered your question, eh?” and all I could do was hang my head because yeah, I’ve totally seen this before. We have achieved Literal Speed, and it’s going to be another bumpy ride.

Funny, but bumpy.

We sat together on the porch the other night, my husband and I, and under starry skies Mr Rationally Unemotional gazed squarely into the eyes of Ms. Happy Go Medicated and asked, “When exactly did they grow up? I mean, really; it wasn’t supposed to happen this fast.”  And all I could muster in reply was, “I dunno, but I think it was a while ago.”

Earlier that day, I’d called one of 2of3’s buddies who was rumoured to be having a pool party, and after confirming with the boys mother that it was all a big big fake fake lie, she told me about a letter she’d found in her son’s room. It was a letter that 2of3 had written to the girl he has a crush on, and she asked if she could read it to me, on the condition that I never tell him she had. Um, of course? Hit me, yo.

He said (and I’m more or less quoting here) that he needed to tell her how he felt, which was that he loved her, and that loving her meant that when he sees her, it’s as though he’s seeing an angel and when he’s near her, it’s as though he’s close to heaven. And, of course, that if she liked him back, he’d like it if she wrote him back.

Holy poet, Batman. Not bad for nine, I’d say. But when did he learn those sorts of analogies? When did he learn to feel so strongly for another person? When did he learn how to write?

We all say things like Oh, It Goes So Fast and It’ll Be Over Before We Know It but then one day something smacks you upside the head like your child being able to effectively woo and it’s different from the first words or steps or loose teeth because there isn’t one stinking pediatrician in the world with a chart that graphs the proper ages for sonnet-writing and zombie-movie-appreciation and cursing-in-context and breakouts. It’s just stuff you never, ever see coming and when it does come, they’re doing everything in their power to hide that shit from you. Because once they become independent people, internally, they don’t exactly take a minute and say, “You know what, mom? You’ve been awesome, and really…thanks for the womb rental, it was totally cozy in there, but I think it’s time for us to go our separate ways. Except, could you maybe still wash my colors and make me an occasional casserole? I’ll be sure to hug you once in a while and maybe throw you the random bone in return. Speaking of which, I’m the lead in the school play. Tomorrow.”

They don’t tell you this because they know you’ll be all, “Dude? What the barnacles? You know I was on set crew for years in high school, right? Can I help you run your lines tonight? Do you need a costume? Is it a romantic lead? Do you KISS A GIRL?” How’s the set? Do you need me to run up there with my hot glue gun and some foam core…” and then they’ll have to look you in the eyes and say, “Woman, you are so totally missing the point of this conversation” and then you’ll start to cry a little at the unfairness of the whole thing and no one wants to see their mother cry so instead, they just sit silently in the front seat of the car with their cap pulled all the way down over their eyes and their shoulders so hunched in together, you wonder if someone hadn’t installed hinges on their spine when you weren’t looking and they save themselves a whole lot of headache.

And you never, ever know they’ve grown up, until they have. Or until you send them outside to clean the car one fine Saturday morning.

And as they clean the car, they ask for the keys which they properly get into the ignition just enough to turn on that radio station, the one your mother hated you listening to when you were little, and they sing along to all their favorite songs while they work and you listen. You listen, and you remember sitting in your room, waiting for Dick Clark* to announce the next track, which was some amazingly crafted piece of music that was clever and important and relevant, like The Humpty Dance, and so you let them have their moment. You’ve, of course, already had the talk with them about that Britney girl, and how though you aren’t one to censor their music, that tramp just can never come into your home in any fashion. They’ve asked why and you’ve asked them to quote the hook in her newest single and they’ve said, “But all the boys and all the girls are dying to, If U Seek Amy” and you’ve asked them what If U Seek Amy spells and even let them say the word, because you’ve  learned that when you’re trying to make A Crucial Parenting Point, a properly-placed f-bomb tends to make or break the argument. And when they sheepishly say Fuck, because they’re not entirely sure this isn’t a trap, and then you ask them what Fuck means and they really just don’t know, so you tell them it means sex and that means that a young woman is singing into the radio that all the boys and all the girls are dying to have sex with her, they get it. They instantly hate that song and that girl because they’re still just young enough to not want to have sex with anyone yet, and thank you Jebus for that.

So you listen, knowing that they’ll change it if they feel they have to, and then Jamie Foxx’s new single comes on the station and you grind your teeth into dust because he’s not saying anything awful that you can make out, he’s doesn’t seem to be swearing or talking down on women and he’s not screaming Fuck The Police just like your favorite group at their age did, so you feel like you’ve got to let this one slide even though your nine year old whom you’ve just realized is in L.O.V.E. is bopping around, scrubbing the wheel-wells with his still-just-a-little-pugdy fingers, singing Blame it on the vodka, blame it on the henny. Blame it on the blue tap got you feeling dizzy. Blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol, blame it on the ah-ah ah-ah ah-al-co-hol. And then you’re all, Ooooh, that’s when they grew up, when they started listening to the fucking Peak.

And when they’re done, you have them inside with their four best tweenaged friends and the six of them watch The Sixth Sense, and you kind of smile a little because you realize you’ve reached the point where they can not only enjoy more intelligent, sophisticated and complicated things in life, but they can effectively filter out f-bombs in movies, which means the ensuing Summer of M. Night Shymalan is going to be so much more bearable than the previous Summer Of Home Alone was, and just when you’re feeling pretty damn good about them growing up, you sit down to write a blog post about it and you google the lyrics to Jaime Foxx’s newest single and then you have a heart attack and fucking die dead in your chair and then you decide that you all are moving back to Dutch Pennsylvania which is really close to where you grew up and were nobody so much as thinks what that man has throngs of children across North America belting out in their suburban driveways on chore day under cumulus clouds.

*For all you youngin’s out there, Dick Clark is an evil, undead zombie vampire who, once upon a time, found the perfect genome for human cloning and his very first lab test resulted in evil personified. AND SQUARED. I believe it’s commonly known as Ryan Seacrest these days.

We hardly ever get to see The Donor around these parts.  We see him get ready for work in the morning, and if we’re really really lucky, we might see him come home at night. But only if it’s all-nighter-zombie-movie-night.  We get him every Sunday, and we get him for dinner on Mondays, and that’s it.  As in, it.

And that’s why we stole him away this week. We missed him. It’s weird missing someone who technically lives in your house, but we do, all of the time. And he needed it, to be honest. Sure, I work all day, too, but I don’t do it in a tux and on my feet. I deal with three children under 5 feet, he deals with 40 children over 5 feet. His days, they suck. So for Father’s Day, we gave him all the day, none of the suck. And instead of just seeing him blowdry his hair and chug his coffee, instead of seeing him walk in the door and collapse onto the couch 14 hours later, this weekend we got to see him relax.

We got to see him enjoy the small things.

And revel in the big things.

We got to see him be someone’s friend.

And we got to let him be someone’s dad, too.

He got new shoes, and he got to use them. Twice.

He got to share his favorite thing in the world with his sons.

And they got to share their favorite thing with him.

But best of all, I got to see my husband, he got to see his wife, and our kids got to see their mom and dad. At the same time.

And no one was getting stitches.

I found you in 1996 and I lost you in 2006. It was your fault, it was my fault, it was everyone’s fault and no one’s fault. None of it matters anymore, except that all of it matters still. Because without that, with none of it, we wouldn’t have any of this.

Today you’ll celebrate your 11th fathers day with your children. We’re not giving you ties and we didn’t make you clay mugs and we won’t cook you breakfast in bed. What we’re giving you is us. We’re taking you away from the things of man, and we’re just going to be with you. We’re leaving the messages on the phone and the dishes still piled up in the sink and the sand that is all over the goddamn laundry room floor; we’re running away from all of it to remember each other. To remember you. To celebrate you.

But I’m not just celebrating you, and maybe that’s wrong on the day Hallmark tells us should be all about you, but you think I can write better than Hallmark so for today, we’ll make our own rules. Today I’m celebrating that everything we have was torn asunder, that it was stripped down to the studs and once we could see everything under the surface, once we really knew what we were up against, we started laying new bricks, one by one, together.

It was two years ago on Father’s Day that we laid that first brick.  It was two years ago on Father’s Day that we chose to accept it all without condition, without judgement, for all that it was and everything it wasn’t, and just build it back up.  We gave each other all that we knew, which turned out to be a hell of a lot less than we thought, and together we’ve built new walls and figured out how to make this house stand.

You’re still very much this alien thing to me, and our relationship floats through the universe like a satellite in orbit, occasionally going way out there, out of our orbit, but always coming back in again. I can see that satellite every time feel a little rain and look up to realize that there are still so many holes in the roof of us yet to be patched.  I think we need to be able to see it. I think we need that rain to remind us that we have to keep working. I think we need that rain to force us to look up, to remember that sometimes it goes and sometimes it comes and we don’t have it all figured out and that we don’t have to.  That you can be an alien, and I can be an alien, and it will still be beautiful rain.