Wabi Sabi Bathtub Bubbles

It was an incredibly trying day. A crazy week, really. Whenever the kids have off of school, it always compounds the craziness in our home. Thankfully, I work from home, so when the kids are off, we’re not totally screwed…but my superiors expect my calls to be made in total silence as though I was in the office, which can tend to be complicated with kids. Even when they’re seemingly glued to the Little Mermaid, in that catatonic stare with their little mouths a little open and their breathing is hard…you never know when you’re going to be on the phone with a Fortune 500 CEO you’ve been chasing for months and you finally have his undivided attention and your child comes in and says “Mommy, Cody called me a poopy”- met with thunderous giggles in the background as Cody gleams with pride having made Rosalind say the funniest word ever invented and then the laughter wakes the baby who only just fell asleep after 3 months of being awake who erupts into sobs and booby demands. Naturally, this is the one New Yorker CEO who doesn’t have kids because his career came first and the idea of working with a company who’s rudimentary enough to have children running around the office or worse yet- to have their telemarketers outsourced to some stay at home moms club makes him squeamish and quickly dismissive. Gotta love those types… or better yet, the ones who have kids and are still so career-centered that all they think about is money and the picture frames on their desk from last year’s secret santa still have the same generic stock photo of someone else’s kid or some mismatched couple piggy backing on a beach. I work with such a person. She, unfortunately, makes my company a good amount of money, so I am subservient to her every whim. Having children and a husband has not humanized her at all. She’s evil. She’s manipulative. She’s dismissive. For example, she makes six figures a year as does her husband. However, last year when our colleague had his first baby, she vowed to throw in $50 toward the proverbial office gift I assembled- and $50 is much more than anyone else could afford, so I avowed to make her name large on the card and I bought the gifts… and spent the better part of last year waiting for her to come through with her share. The colleague is now on kid #2, no money, still empty promises that she’ll make the time to send it. The worst part of it is, her initials are B.B.B. Like B to the three. Like her Brains are like Bubbles in a Bathtub. And her last name is B----. She probably can’t read and has little time for blog surfing, so I’ll tell you it’s Bemis… Yeah, as it the largest toilet manufacturer ever- google it, I swear. So whenever I see that little logo on my loo each morning, I get to bend over and tell her what I really think of her, the lordess of loo, the dame of doody, the queen of queefs, the duchess of dung…. At any rate, being inundated with children and fighting with Si about money and house chores and trying to fit in have tos with want tos and throw in a splash of ‘enjoy this nows’… things get stressful.

We part in the morning knowing that I’m in for a hell of a day. Work while balancing both kids plus nursing a gassy fussy infant all day, try to make enough leads to make enough to pay for preschool, which even at a discount is far beyond our capacity to afford these days, then drop me off at the school dance party, take Cody to soccer, and then meet back at the party, go home, dinner, baths, story time, etc… We’re still tired from last night; and we’re completely going insane trying to figure out where and how to get more money. We have $40 to our name, no giant savings, not kidding, not exaggerating, and this house is like a giant anvil, pulling us closer down to hell, making us stay here in Florida and its completely broken. And to boot, I am trying desperately to show my school spirit by getting patrons to the school dance party fundraiser that I cannot afford to go to, myself. But we made the plan to go, borrow from our $157 in savings and make a cameo, cause we have to…. Trying desperately to think of where we can cut costs to make up that $32 to go to a loud, crowded party where at least mommy would get to socialize with her lady pals, but the kids won’t eat, someone will have a breakdown and we’ll end up far more tired than its worth, but we’re going. We said we were going. So, we’re going. Silas gets home, I’m folding laundry, balancing my call list, the kids have cabin fever and Rosalind woke up from her nap in a foul mood, Cody refuses to wake up and we’re getting close to go time --to work out the drop offs, the soccer, the party, the food, the baths, the sleep…. My head is spinning when I take Roz outside to see if the fresh air will calm the baby and put her in a better mood and suddenly, everything stops for a minute. It was like all the have tos got put on hold and we entered this dream sequence and everything was in slow motions like we were under water. Silas started building our fence and Roz started dancing through the grass and laughing and tumbling. I put the baby down on a blanket and he stared up at the sky and cooed. Cody woke up and tumbled around with Roz and they both named all the animals they saw in the sky. The breeze was cool and fragrant. Suddenly, the sky was filled with dolphins and turtles. I started pulling the weeds out from our garden while the kids giggled and chased each other in perfect harmony. Roz started singing, belting out show tunes while Cody cozied up to the baby and made silly faces and made him giggle. Silas and I glanced at each other now and then and smiled as our kids giggled and played and we worked deep in our own soil, cultivating our land and absorbing every moment… The sun set and I went inside and made dinner. I sautéed and boiled and made a healthy dinner that scented the whole house and we all sat together and ate while the kids chomped away and whispered “I’m growing, momma… I’m growing…” as though each bite made them taller… I watched them and smiled as they each told me they would be bigger than me soon. I watched them grow and eat and tried to soak in every second of their youths. We all jumped in the bath together and made funny faces and then read stories and piled on one another… It wasn’t until our night routine was almost over that I fully realized that we had forgotten about how stressed we were and how broken our house was and how little money we had….we’d also forgotten about soccer and our dance party, but we got to be us for a little. We got to recharge. I got to take a breath and see my babies before it was too late. We got to enjoy our big front lawn and how easy it is for the kids to know and love each other now. For a moment in time, everything was just as it was supposed to be and none of the B’s and S’s could make their way into our home.

For the first time, things were clear. I knew what was important. Last week, I wasn’t sure why I was working so hard in school toward a profession that wouldn’t bring us wealth. To go back to school and put us all in such debt for something that wouldn’t fiscally pay off just didn’t make much sense to me anymore. I have the brains to be a lawyer or doctor, why not try at it? I’d be gone a lot more, but then I could really rub elbows with my temple peers and be more at ease cause money would be off the table as the main issue of concern. I wouldn’t go to bed at night and kick myself for going to McDonalds with the other moms when I knew we couldn’t afford it. I hate to be so fiscally focused, but three kids and a mortgage makes you nervous. I had no idea that one missing check would throw us so far under the bus. I hated that I got my moms cupcakes for her birthday instead of something more lavish. I hate that I can’t afford to replace the $10 crocs that I have worn into the ground. But I don’t want handouts, you know? I didn’t want to be the family who got into the fundraiser dance party for free. I don’t want to be the charity case. I want to save the world and I want to save my family….and I want people to take out my services in trade and to be rid of my debts.

So, check it: I always thought how I would innovate palliative care. To work for VITAS and HOSPICE, you need to be a licensed social worker… And how do I improve upon an existing method of care while improving upon the existing conditions? Sure, I’m there for the clients, themselves…but I’m also an artist and I always thought to work that into my practice somehow. Singing to my dying clients hardly seems appropriate, but what about my artistic abilities? Like 20 years ago, I saw this article in People about this guy who would find unclaimed crematory ashes from hospitals and mortuaries and work them into oil paints for art. It was a way to make their memory into a beautiful something and somehow make their memory carry on. Another neat fact was that every set of ashes worked in tandem with the oil pants and added its own hue. It was so moving to me, that it stuck with me all this time. It came back to me as a service I may be able to offer to my clients. I looked it up, turns out, in the last 3 years, this type of preservation…memorializing… has become somewhat of a thing. Yeah, check it out: http://www.memorials.com/art-in-ashes.php. And this is just one.  But people can have their ashes turned into art. Some think creepy; I think ‘how cool.’ And I could market to my geriatric patients… We’ll call it “I want to be in pictures…’ like that song, right? I don’t know, I think it’s neater than being in a wall or the ground with the centipedes…and having to have your loved ones walk over a thousand other corpses to find your headstone that marks where they dumped you. It’s so impersonal. You leave a rock and say a few things and come back next year… but what if you could create a picture or memory with your ‘person’s’ remains and have them always… Like there was this woman who put her husbands ashes into a mural of a beach where they spent their last vacation together. Um, cool?

At any rate, it’s late…for me. I’m tired. Tomorrow, we’ll be back to the schedule. I’m sure some people will be angry that we didn’t make the party when we were such big advocates for the cause, and I’ll spend another day apologizing and explaining my way out of the frowns. Tomorrow we’ll be back to the chaos of not wanting to wear our Shabbat shirt and who is not going to eat and how to fit in 30 hours of to dos into a 24 hour day…but today…for just a moment…it all made sense. Cody was three and said funny things like ‘sounds like a good plan, ma” and “Thursday is like the birthday of the week” and was generally very three… Roz performed an entire aria on stage in front of our house and was the soundtrack for our night. She went for 3 hours without a diaper and managed to mess up the house with every other fluid and crayon and food spill EXCEPT for pee. The baby managed to be held and take up time as most infants do, but he met his brother Cody for the first time tonight and they got to know each other a little better.  Our garden got a little more attention. Our neighbors got a closer view of the manic family always on the go with more kids than they can count… and we got to be status quo for a moment in time. We got to ditch the had tos and share some spaghetti on a Thursday and piss away our obligations for once without harming anyone or disrupting our wabi sabi. Word.