This can apply to any work, volunteer, or COMMUNITY THEATER environment.

Through the passive-aggressive veil.

Threw it away.

1.  Speak in soft tones, even if you are telling someone to eat their feces.

2.  Phrase everything as a fake suggestion, even though it’s a command:  So, maybe we can sniff my toenails one more time.

3.  Have thick, curly hair and rearrange it frequently.  This suggests softness of spirit and an easy-going manner.  It also has a distracting effect:  hair is quicker than the mind.

4.  Just be totally fucking crazy.

5.  Attempt to elevate your status by offering compliments with an overdone and obvious restraint in both your tone and word choice:  Lovely job.  Nice.

6.  Use the word ‘professional’ in every fifth sentence.

7.  Tell everyone that you work for a major entertainment conglomerate, but do not disclose your job title.  They will forgive your numerous shortcomings because they might think you actually drew Buzz Lightyear.  And when you watch the Oscars, discuss it like you’re a cinematic proctologist.

8.  Wear scarves.

9.  Use animosity when asking someone where the animosity is coming from.

10.  React to someone who disagrees with you the same level of victimization that you would exhibit if your boyfriend yelled at your sister, slapped your mother, and bought you a bag of poo for your birthday.  And then forced you to sniff his armpits for a half-an-hour.  While he ate his boogers.

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I Feel Pretty

I struggle to not lose my mind during one of too many laps down the same uninteresting stretch of freeway to drive my kids to school, from school, from school to softball, and from softball.  And please don’t forget to credit me with the little pesky return trips on most of these.  Oh, the suffering.

Now this is not a noble kind of suffering.  It’s not true, pitiable misery.  It’s not respected work.  It’s not something to be proud of.  But it is.  It is my life.  I traded in the impossible balance of work and motherhood to become a full time SAHM.  Now, I am an unpaid shuttle driver.  And I have it GOOD.  I do.  I am lucky enough to be home full-time to ‘be there’ with my kids.  Ladies and gentlemen, ‘be there’ means ‘drive there.’  And it sucks.

When I complain to other moms, they just smile faintly and stare.  Do they think I’m a whiner?  I am.  Even I don’t respect me.  You shouldn’t either.  Or are they numb?  Have they lost the ability to feel human feelings?  Have they become one with the machines they ride?  Am I slowly becoming a Honda Pilot?  If that is to be my fate, I hope it comes fast, because the human/car hybrid is not a cute place to be.  You don’t know whether you should cry or drink gasoline.

The tedium is exacerbated by fighting girls who whine for Starbucks and play sparkly purse tug-of-war, causing an in-your-face kind of quarter to fly arrogantly from the glamour pouch and plink itself into your Climate Control System’s vent.  Possibly an $800 repair one day.  Or did it just land my wind pipe?  Hard to tell when you and your car become one.

No one warned me about this when we began having children.  They’ll need health insurance: check.  Clothing:  fine.  Time:  okay.  Patience:  on a good day.  Love:  no problem.  But rides?  To softball?  Physical fitness never seemed more inconvenient.

And then there’s the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL for which I drive a combined 2 1/2 hours a day, if you include the waiting in the parking lot of the parking lot.  The parking lot is literally a parking lot.  It’s one thing for a freeway to be a parking lot.  It’s another for a parking lot to be a parking lot.  I know my readers from Montana just gave up on me.

Yes, you pass your neighborhood school, which humbly eyes you asking, So what’s so great about the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL?  You’re too good for my humbleness?  You think you’re a snob with high performing children?  Nice Lexus.  No, wait, sorry, that’s a Honda.  ANYway…you’re a dumb snob because you rear-end is flying idly through the air when it could be contracting and releasing its way to fitness down the little tree-lined path to me.  Good luck with that.

Well, I chose the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL because of the high test scores, since I have taught at both very high performing  and very low performing schools.  It was very clear which students were getting all the opportunity and which were being left behind.  I wanted my children to have those test scores that made people want to move to a certain neighborhood.  I wanted my children to defy their zip code and outperform the well-to-do children in the southern part of the county, in the name of social justice, egalitarianism, and, heck, personal vanity.  That was before I knew how those test scores were achieved (by moms wearing tight pants, diamond studs and make-up before 8 AM, interrupting yoga to plan the White Man’s Multicultural Day, and gleefully transporting WHEELBARROWS full of flashcards to and from home, after dislodging their faces from the inner recesses of the Teacher Sphincter, one of the most kissed varieties of sphincter on the planet.  It’s right up there with Boss Sphincter, Producer Sphincter and People with Vacation Homes in Hawaii Sphincter).  Those high scores are not school-made.  They are parent-made.  By parents who sit, stay, roll over and play dead for the teachers who take pride in the progress of their students.  I didn’t know I had to drive all that way, just to pick up flashcards to make the teachers look good.  And I don’t get AMEX gift cards in December and June.

So the subtle but certain torture of the car is quite an unhappy conundrum.   The suffering, by its very vagueness, is tedious and, thus, torturous.  But unlike true trauma, it lacks the malignancy that allows you to feel entitled to pain.  It’s like having someone powerwash your eyebrows off, with white chocolate syrup.  Sure, your eyebrows have been blasted off, but come on, WHITE CHOCOLATE.

And so I struggle in a way that even I cannot justify.  Yes, the SAHMs of the universe suffer, only to be dismissed by the work force as lucky to have the opportunity to experience such boredom.  Oops, I forgot to be grateful.  Thank you, Boredom.

Now, somebody hit me over the head with anxiety and a deadline.  Or, at the very least, some some urgent voicemail to return or ignore.  I could use some adrenaline.  Perhaps I should just cultivate a love of repetition and talk radio, and burn a really interesting CD for the car…  Help!

What are the tedious trials of your day?  Please share with me.  I hope you’ll comment away.

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Greta is enjoying a long winter’s nap.  She misses you, though, and appreciates your visit.  Please check back this weekend for more of her adventures, delivered fresh to your PC or to Justin Long.  ‘Night.

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With the Olympics and Fourteen Days of Love and Food and the fake Broadway show opening behind me, I feel in need of a little rest.  But before I take the next eleven hours to not think about the rumpus room that is my website, I would like to give you my final thoughts on the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.

• I wish I were a hockey fan. I missed the game and it didn’t destroy me.  And that’s the problem.  It’s great to be an individual with your own drumbeat in the drum line and all, but it sure is fun to be instep with the rest of the world who loves hockey and give yourself the gift of elation or heartbreak when your team does what it ends up doing.  Vancouver was a sea of maple-leaf-red after the Canadian team won gold.  I want to care enough about something to wear red for it and bump into people on the street while screaming things.  How come I’m stuck loading the dishwasher in a state of envy and indifference?  I will not let this happen again.  I will watch.  I will embrace the chaos, the fight, and the inability to really see the puck on TV.

• The Canadians didn’t just own the podium, they paid off the mortgage, raised five kids, and buried all their dead pets there. Fourteen gold medals.  They deserve it.  If nothing else, for being in our shadow all the time.  (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.)  I’m not sure why the Americans are called the winningest team or the most decorated.  We (you know, Lindsey, Shani, Apolo and me) got the most coin necklaces, but bronze has only the fraction of the importance that gold does:  He’s worth his weight in bronze.  It’s a bronze opportunity.  Nothing bronze can stay.  Bronze Girls.  Bronze Gate Bridge.  Fool’s bronze (even the fools won’t have it).  Bronze digger (hey, that might be me).

• The US men’s four-man bobsledding team ended a sixty-two-year honor drought and won gold. Glad I didn’t hear this statistic before.  I didn’t know how bad I had it.  But no disrespect, seriously.  I’m always happy for people to shock themselves by how cool they are.  What I want to know is how you get in to that sport.  Is there a pee wee bobsledding league or is all training done in saucers?

In any case, thanks for joining me here at Saving Private Mommy for your primary source of irrelevant Olympic coverage.  I had a great time being rubber cemented to the TV and the laptop.  Now we, the good spectator citizens of the world, must rest up for more adventures in the summer of 2012 in London.  It’s going to take of lot of napping between now and then.

And coming up, is the gorgeous spring outside that nature will officially hand over in the next few weeks. In anticipation, the trees in my neighborhood are sprouting their pink blossoms and the hills are soggy and green.  Ahead are longer, warmer days, and a big boot to comfort foods, plus the Easter Bunny and my girls turning three and six and me turning thirty-nine and my husband, too.  And my oldest turning eight much later.

I hope you’ll join me as I put my feet up for a bit.  I’m going to need my dogs to be in good shape and perhaps you do, too.  I have telemarketers to take on and a governing board of the PTA to make fun of.  Please check back.

And now, a little March poem from our favorite spinster, Emily Dickinson.

To March

Dear March, come in!
How glad I am!
I looked for you before.
Put down your hat–
You must have walked–
How out of breath you are!
Dear March, how are you?
And the rest?
Did you leave Nature well?
Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
I have so much to tell!

I got your letter, and the birds’;
The maples never knew
That you were coming,–I declare,
How red their faces grew!
But, March, forgive me–
And all those hills
You left for me to hue;
There was no purple suitable,
You took it all with you.

Who knocks? That April!
Lock the door!
I will not be pursued!
He stayed away a year, to call
When I am occupied.
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come,
That blame is just as dear as praise
And praise as mere as blame.

In what are probably the last races of Apolo’s Olympic career (sniff, sniff), he earned a team bronze and a personal DQ (in exchange for the silver medal which he enjoyed for a almost a full minute).  And now, it’s time for him to make out with someone other than an ice rink.  I only ask that it’s not Lindsey Lohan.  Yes, Apolo Anton Ohno is sending  the golden years of his career  (marked also by a silver rush and a Bronze Age) back on the plane for home.  They will be forever parted.  They will remember their time together fondly, but the years of training, fouling, and triumph will be summed up in one confusing, unsatisfying statement:  Here’s looking at you kid.

At a time like this, the only option is to quote Robert Frost (just ask S.E. Hinton or the writers of daytime television drama).

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Okay that felt good.  No matter how much this poem has been exploited and abused by bad writers (not you S.E. Hinton), you can’t argue with these words.  And you can’t argue with the fact that short track is about to become boring again.

When I first saw Apolo skate in the Olympics, I was  three months pregnant with our first child.  That was when she was still a boy and dangerously close to being named Apolo, though we would have honored the Greeks with a correct spelling.  (We could have name her Apolla, I suppose.  Apolla Antonia Ohnoyoudidn’t Koenigin.)   I was on Winter Break from my job as a high school teacher, and in a lasting bout of pregnancy nausea, I endured the hours of the week on the couch that felt much more like a boat.  Apolo eased my pain.

Well since that time, our baby Apolla has grown to be seven years old.  My child can be used as a unit of measurement for Apolo’s career.  Judging by her height and her ability to sing harmony, Apolo’s done well for himself in Olympic racing.  Perhaps that’s why I find his decline or exit so sad.  When I became a mom, he became an Olympian.  I suppose it’s good that he’s retiring.  I don’t want to have a fourth child at the age of 42, though it’s certainly possible…hmmmmnn.

Though in the end, we must all kiss certain things good-bye.  Our youth, our reproductive years, the ability to unload groceries without saying ‘ouch’.  And there is a very fleeting period of perfection in the pieces of our lives.  Perfection that is so easy, delicate, sumptuous.  Like the time during which our children are old enough to watch Sponge Bob so we can sleep in, but young enough to still want hugs all the time.  Or when you are young enough to look good, but old enough to not be so dumb.  Or when you directed that wonderful high school theater production, with that magic minute-and-a-half where the meaning of the play flooded the audience with inspiration and emotion.  And your mother-in-law was there watching.  And now she isn’t anywhere.

That’s not to say old people don’t have fun.  When Apolo is 58 he’s going to be happily drinking margaritas and eating chips and salsa with Kate Hudson, and he will be much happier than he was when he was courting the ice.  Talk about cold.  Lifeless.  Just lays there.  But those moments of brilliance or triumph can’t be canned, jarred, preserved or even tape-delayed.  Unless you’re a visual artist, but they dress weird.  And even then, the triumph is not on the canvas that hangs in wanna-be permanence before the crowds that don’t get it.  Or think it’s nice or love it.  The triumph is in the moment that the tube of ochre screamed to be squirted on the otherwise cool palette, and threatened to destroy the comfort of blue fading to gray, and did and was.  perfect.  Those moments can’t be frozen in canvas or on ice or in archives.  Those moments exist for a fractions of minutes of our days.

At the risk of sounding more Ohno-centric this Olympics, I would like to thank Apolo for enlivening our spirits for the past eight years.  I wish him well as he begins the next phase of his life.  And I wish all of us well as we find a new hero or heroine on which our hopes can hitch a ride.  Lindsey Vonn has crashed way too many times for this honor.  It’s scary riding in her fannypack.  And if I cry with her about any more of her victories, I won’t be able to respect myself.

Here’s looking at you, kid.