I Get Along Without You

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

That line leapt out at me when I had the privilege of seeing Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz at The Public last week. In it, ERS performs the entire text of The Great Gatsby. It’s an eight hour evening altogether and I’d sit through it again right now if I could. While I was watching, I shifted between getting swept up in the performances and marveling at the text itself, the gorgeous glittering sentences.

That particular line sums up the way I always feel when I’m taking a cab into the city from JFK. On the one hand, I’ve seen it a million times before. On the other, it’s always new. I’m always a little girl, looking at the New York skyline and wondering what magical possibility is there waiting for me.

In an hour, I head home to my boys. I miss them something awful and at the same time, I have enjoyed the big lonely bed and the experience of waking up and facing no immediate responsibility other than getting some caffeine in my system. I admit that part of me is always longing for the freedom I used to have, even as I’m living a pretty free kind of moment. It seems a waste of a beautiful morning, this longing. But nevertheless, there it is.

We’re doomed to be like sailors. We survive months at sea, driven only by thoughts of home. Not long after we finally reach shore, we find ourselves gazing at the ocean again. But none of this gazing negates the fact that my family gives me all I’ve ever known of any real kind of happiness. So now I gladly go pack my suitcase to return to the chaos that almost certainly awaits me.

It’s been a wonderful trip, overall. There were stories told and words read and meetings had and dinners eaten and babies cuddled. There were late nights crying with old friends and late lunches at Barney’s (best people watching in all of New York). All the stuff I’d never do at home. Plus, a friend of mine must have bribed the president, because he somehow scored tickets for us to The Book of Mormon and I’m certain it’s the funniest show ever written.

I’m always sad to leave. I always can’t wait to get home.

Here’s my perfect soundtrack for a midnight ride over the Brooklyn Bridge. I get along without New York just fine- except perhaps in spring…

Holla at the Mommas

I’m in New York right now for some meetings and events, so I spent Mother’s Day away from my son, which felt like spending it without one of my arms. Something essential was missing. I was vaguely blue all day.

But the picture above is of my run this morning in the Catskills, so that was kind of amazing. As a child, I spent my summers in these mountains. Dredge that lake and you’ll find all my kid firsts and kid fears. The light through the leaves, the particular purple of the shadows the clouds cast on the mountains, the softness of the air in the early morning- all these things feel as familiar as the lines of my palms. I’m not sure if it makes me want to run away or move back here for good.

As I was running, I thought about the mothers in my life: my mother, my birth mother, all the women that have nurtured me in various ways. And I thought of my son’s birth mother and of the women that cared for him in the orphanage before he could finally come home. I thought of the mother I’ve managed to become, finally, and of the mother I haven’t managed to become, in spite of my best intentions.

I let all these thoughts rattle around in my head until the last leg of the run came and I tried to imagine that I was T when he runs. Because he doesn’t bother with some big reverie- he runs with nothing but freedom and joy.

PIL’s “Rise” started playing on the shuffle just in time for my final sprint. So, as John Lydon says, May the road rise with you today, my beautiful mommies.

Also- fuck Time magazine and all the corrosive perfectionism we’re called to embrace as mothers in this culture. Fuck the seeds of divisiveness that article sows. We’re stronger when we’re kind to ourselves. We’re stronger when we stand together.

The Night Max Wore His Wolf Suit

I imagine that Maurice Sendak‘s spirit rose so fast, so high, buoyed by the collective love of the children in all of us.

My grandmother, a children’s librarian in the Newark, NJ school system, knew Sendak a bit. I took the signed copy of Higglety Pigglety Pop! that has followed me since my own childhood off the shelf this morning.

I have so little family right now and I often feel rootless, cast adrift. As if I’m still sailing in and out of weeks, somewhere in between the place where the Wild Things are and Home. But I held the book in my hands, a corner of it chewed by a much-loved puppy years ago, and thought of the moment it passed from Sendak’s hands and into my grandmother’s. The man who wrote the book passing it to the woman who taught me to love reading. And now it sits on my son’s bookshelf.

I have these books to give. I never need feel rootless at all.

Bodies Speak

I saw this video a week or so ago and it keeps coming back to me in flashes. I love these women.

A couple of weeks ago in the NY Times there was an interesting debate about the legalization of prostitution. For the record, I stand firmly in the legalization camp. But this video reminds me that while legalization is a fine place for the discussion to start, it’s hardly where it should end.

Healthcare. Safety. Trafficking. Indeed, these are the most pressing issues.

But I’m also interested in shining a light into the soul of the thing. Bodies as currency, as communication, as electrical conductors. Bodies as objects, as vessels, as recording devices. Bodies as rentals, as shrines, as homes.

War. What is it good for?

I used to be one of those anti-gun moms. No weapon toys. Ever. You know- only developmentally appropriate wooden toys made by totally-not-oppressed elves, who live in a socialist eco-village in Vermont.

Tariku is four now and he wants guns and swords. He wants knights and pirates and battles. True, I do expose him to media like Puss in Boots, which features sword fighting. Maybe if he had never seen a weapon he wouldn’t want one. He saw that movie once and has been mock-fencing ever since. But I feel the instinct is more primal than that. He bit a piece of toast into the shape of a gun last week.

I make up stories for Tariku all day long and lately he’s been requesting stories of battle. I tried to tell him a story about how Puss in Boots walked him to school and they met a Tyrannosaurus Rex, who seemed really scary. But when they talked to him they discovered he actually was friendly and just roared so loudly because he was insecure about his little arms. Puss and Tariku and the dinosaur became friends and he let them ride on his back down Colorado Blvd.

And T said- that was a great story. Now can you tell me a story where Puss fights?

And here’s the thing- as a storyteller, I naturally gravitate toward stories of battle. Because all good stories are about conflict. And heroic stories often have sword fights. And if you’re going to tell a story, why not make it heroic? Tariku struggles with a lot, frankly. He has tremendous fears and challenges to face. Maybe battle isn’t such a bad metaphor for him, if I can place it in the appropriate context.

What broke me down finally? We were at a friend’s house the other day and Tariku got in a water gun fight. His friend had a WAY better gun than him. T had some lame foam shark thing that he had to reload every two seconds and he got massacred. That was all it took. I strapped him soaking wet into his car seat and promised him a better weapon next time.

It’s liberating to shed my big assumptions and theories- to open myself up to this aspect of parenting a boy. I’m curious see where it leads and if it can be channeled positively. I marched into Target the next day and bought the most bad-assed water gun they had. Actually, I bought two. One for me. It’s so on.

Sleepless

I’m not sleeping much. I keep waking to a sharp clarity at 4am or thereabouts. It’s a non-specific kind of clarity. Not the kind that brings answers, but rather the kind that makes the room feel brighter than can be explained away as moonlight. I turn away from the window. I put my hands over my eyes, but the light isn’t really the problem.

I try to fight it, knowing it will have a price later- yet more of the same brain haze I’ve been grappling with for the last three years. I keep waiting for the fog to lift, but it hasn’t yet.

I can’t explain it. The months leading up to Tariku’s adoption were nearly as sleepless as the ones that followed it, yet I remember them as being fantastically inventive and engaged. Maybe the most alive I’ve ever felt creatively. Since returning from Africa, I search too long for words. I find it hard to follow anything but the most linear narrative. I can’t remember names of favorite books, of friends’ spouses I’ve met time and time again. It’s unlike me.

Somehow, these recent early mornings have been as close as I’ve come to reclaiming something recognizable of my brain function. 4am is too early to go for a run. Too quiet to start banging dishes around. Too precious to start in with the emails. So I make some tea, go to the upstairs den, open the shutters that face east and I read as the sky shifts from black to cobalt. A few days ago I moved the coffee table and I unfolded Anne Carson’s Nox along the carpet. Yesterday, I sunk into Bolaño’s Tres. Maybe it’s the unchallenged quality of that particular early morning solitude, but it seems I’ve found a brief window during which I have my attention back. Of course, the pendulum swings the other direction and I pay for it with bleary afternoons. For now, I’ll take it.

Nerd Prom

Authors’ kids took over the green room this weekend at the LA Times Festival of Books. Here’s T-Bone with Claire Bidwell Smith’s Vera and Samantha Dunn’s Ben. They’re starting a band, which is way more sensible than a literary journal.

There was a party on Saturday night at the Main Library downtown. Scott and I made a date night out of it and went for oysters at The Water Grill on the way. In front of the Biltmore Hotel, we passed a bunch of kids on the way to their prom. The girls swished by us in sequined mermaid skirts, teetering on their heels and hanging on the arms of rented tuxes. It occurred to me that the Book Festival is like a grown-up nerd prom, with less slow dancing and more panel discussions.

It’s kind of nice of the world to give me a second chance at this prom thing. I’m doing much better this time around. Here I am at the awards ceremony with Rachel Resnick, Janet Fitch, Elissa Schappell and Carolyn Kellog.

It’s heartening for an author to spend a couple of days in this swirl of enthusiasm for books. I felt grateful for the chance to mingle with readers and colleagues.

And for the last dance of the nerd prom, I got to see Amanda Fletcher, my mentee from the PEN Center Emerging Voices fellowship, kick so much ass at her reading at the Hotel Cafe that I got a little tear of pride in my eye. Watch out for her. She’s about to conquer the world. Or at least make homecoming queen.

I Swear, I Didn’t Teach Him That

Check out my fucking awesome post about swearing (mine and his), up now at TODAY Moms.

Leave comments and all that. Really filthy ones.

Rammstein Auditions

Tariku is gunning to be the first African-American toddler member of the German metal band Rammstein. Check out the part in which he’s actually singing the lyrics. His first favorite song is “Island in the Sun” but his second favorite is “Du hast.”

If this doesn’t give you a giggle, you seriously need to consider upping your dosage.

Writing from What’s Missing

A handful of times in my life, I’ve read a book that seemed to already exist somewhere behind my eyes. Reading these books gave me a feeling of recognition so exquisite that it’s not overstating the case to say they saved my life. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson was one of those books for me. As was Salinger’s Nine Stories, Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Mary Gaitskill’s short stories and certain poems by Rilke and Dickinson. But truthfully, I read most of these soul-altering works in my early teens. I encounter books that change my life much less often now. Perhaps there’s just more of a life to change- it takes a stronger force.

I just finished Jeanette Winterson’s new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, and I wouldn’t exactly say it changed my life, so much as I felt like it was my life. As an adoptee and a writer, there were sentences in her memoir I was pretty sure I wasn’t reading on the page, but on my heart itself.

She talks about the wound being close to the gift. I live it. I count on it.

Here’s a passage I love that relates to adoption:

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of story — of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you, and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

That isn’t of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

Gorgeous.

New Podcast! And a Giveaway…

My friend Melinda Hill and I started a podcast! We’ve been working hard to get Eat My Podcast off the ground and it’s been an absolute blast. Our first guest is the smoking hot, totally fascinating Thomas Jane, of Hung fame. Give us a listen. You can stream or download from the website now and we’ll be up on iTunes soon.

I’m gonna do a giveaway of…anything you want. You can have a signed copy of any book or audiobook of mine, including foreign editions. Dying to read Some Girls in Swedish? Now’s your chance. Just do one of these things then come back here and leave a comment telling me you did and I’ll enter your name in the drawing:

1. Follow us on Twitter @eatmypodcast.
2. Like us on FB.
3. Listen to us!
4. Subscribe on iTunes.

Here’s what we’re about (from our website):

Eat My Podcast is a scream of a podcast hosted by comedian Melinda Hill and bestselling author Jillian Lauren. Known for dishing about unusual personal experiences with truly original voices, these two brainy babes explore what their superstar guests wanted to be when they grew up and how that’s panned out for them. Eat My Podcast is an insightful journey into the defining experiences of the little people who became the big people we love today. And if you don’t like it, you can eat it.

A Lot Like Spring

Happy Easter or Passover or pagan fertility rites or whatever you got up to this weekend. I demonstrated my poor assimilation skills by not knowing that you dye the eggs on Saturday rather than Sunday (sue me- I only just got the Christmas tree thing down). So we settled for chocolate in plastic eggs, which is totally better anyway because of the chocolate part.

I still feel kind of guilty every time I tell T some big lie- like the Easter Bunny. But lie I did:

Oh gosh, you just missed him. He hopped through here so fast….

All the popular parents were doing it.

It was nice to spend the gorgeous day with family and a few friends. T did really well. He wanted so badly to be with the other kids that he managed to go a whole day without hitting or biting. He definitely paid the price for all that self control and unspooled into an hour-long screaming meltdown once we got back to the house, but that was to be expected. I sat with him until he exhausted himself. At least he didn’t throw up this time. Any holiday without barf is a successful holiday.

Sundress weather and flowers all over the hillside and the first figs on our trees. It’s officially spring.

Big Loud Hope

My memories of the public school system are…not so great. One thing that comes to mind is my battle with my junior high school principal about the clothes I insisted on wearing, which were generally dyed, bleached, cut up, sewn back together, deconstructed and reconstructed. The principal kept sending me home for being “distracting to the other students.” In response to which, I distributed pamphlets (that I wrote) about freedom of expression. My sweet but NOT rebellious mother nearly died of embarrassment. She cut my clothes to pieces with a scissor one night.

So it comes as no surprise that I approached my dealings with L.A. Unified School District with trepidation. I dreaded the paperwork, the headache, the bureaucracy. I dread “the man.”

But my back was against the wall. T had been kicked out of three private preschools within two days of starting them. Over the past couple of years, it’s become clear to us that T has special needs socially and emotionally. The private preschool programs that are equipped to address his needs are at best an hour drive from here. So, I bit the bullet, made the phone calls, filled out the paperwork and got him assessed by the school district.

Last week, Scott and I went into a meeting with the director of services, a psychologist, a special ed teacher and an occupational therapist. We walked out of the meeting with an IEP – an Individualized Education Program. Tariku is set to start public preschool next week. In our corner we’ll have a behavioral support team, an occupational therapist and a teacher who is familiar with and prepared to address his needs.

The education professionals we’ve encountered throughout this process have far exceeded my hopes. I believe they really care what happens to T. We sat in that meeting with them for nearly two hours and I felt heard and validated. I cried when I thanked them all at the end.

On this parenting journey I get to learn again and again that my assumptions are so often wrong. Half the time, I’m making decisions based on fears that have their origins in my own childhood. That childhood is long gone. While I believe that its wounds deserve to be acknowledged, I don’t want to live from a place of hurt. I want to live from a place of hope.

Tariku starts preschool again next week. I’m going to go ahead and be hopeful about it.

The City Within the City

We spent family day at LACMA, visiting Chris Burden’s fantastically popular Metropolis II. We loved it- the energy, the million little twists and turns to look at, and, of course, the CHOO CHOOS! It was frenetic and oddly meditative at the same time.

I found it amusing that Chris Burden, an artist famous for having himself nailed (yes, nailed) to a Volkswagen, has created the cult fave activity for families in LA right now. Does this mean that the world is going to let me pen a children’s book someday? I hope so.

Eat Your Heart Out, John Bonham


T rocks The Sweater Song.

True Lies

For the past couple of days my inbox has been full of, “Have you heard this, yet?” and, “Check this out!” and, “OMG, Mike Daisey!” The storytellers of the world are abuzz with this latest scandal, in which the much-lauded monologuist Mike Daisey is called out by This American Life for fabricating aspects of the story he told on the show, which was culled from his latest theater piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Now, I really respect Mike Daisey and he has a few monologues that I love- particularly the one he does about PT Barnum (ironically). I will tell you something that all storytellers know: some of every story is fiction. Every time you tell a story, you are further from the the actual event. Every time you tell a story, you are really telling a story about the story as you last told it. This is how stories live and breathe and transform. I would argue that this is how stories become MORE truthful, not less. But they often become less accurate. Truth is a slippery thing. There’s room for slipperiness in stories, just not in journalism.

And I believe that’s where Mike Daisey got into trouble- when he presented the story as journalism, which was probably never his intention. I can imagine that things just snowballed on him. The story blew up. Things got out of hand. And I suspect he rationalized his lies to himself by saying that there was so much good being done as a result. The story he told was about the genuinely terrible conditions of the workers in the Apple factory in China. Mike’s voice had a hand in those conditions changing. I sympathize with Mike, but at the same time I think his intentionally misleading people is inexcusable, regardless of the result.

I will also say that I saw The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs months ago, and it left a funny taste in my mouth. I didn’t much like it. Not because I doubted its veracity, but because I thought that Mike was so clearly manipulating the emotions of the audience for political reasons- in order to inspire action on their part that would facilitate a change that Mike wanted to see happen. In my opinion, that’s where art starts to turn into propaganda. At which point, I get a little less interested and a lot more guarded, regardless of how righteous the cause. So my complaint wasn’t that the piece was a lie, but rather that it was generally condescending and coercive.

As for lies, I’m going to tell some tonight.

I’m about to go stand on a stage tonight and tell a story about something that happened to me nearly twenty years ago. And I will look the audience members in the eye and I will say this line…

I stood at the bar and calculated that in two hours I had made exactly fifteen dollars.

And I will probably be lying. I have no idea if it was seventeen dollars or if it was twenty or if it was twelve. I will also say I bought a neon pink bikini, when the truth is that I can’t remember the color. Or I think that I can remember it, but I’m probably just remembering the last time I told the story. Tricky stuff, stories. Twisted stuff, memory.

But I will be telling the story of a girl who transformed herself into someone new overnight by simply imagining it to be true. And I will tell the story of how she only later realized that she should have been more careful about what she imagined. And that story, friends, is dead true.

Lost in Translation

Here is the cover for the Portuguese translation of Some Girls. I looked up the title. Apparently “comprada” means “purchased,” similar to Spanish. It’s interesting to me that none of the foreign translations have used the original title. I’ve been told that it’s because the Rolling Stones reference gets lost and that without it, it’s not as exciting. I’m just thrilled that the book is finding its way into so many different languages.

Highlights from MOTHER TONGUE

Here are some highlights from the recent NY performance of my solo show, MOTHER TONGUE. For those of you who haven’t heard me go on about it ad nauseam already, the show is a multi-character, autobiographical piece revolving around the themes of adoption, blood, tribe and identity. It follows my circuitous journey to get pregnant and, when that proves unsuccessful, to adopt T in Ethiopia.

Hang in until the end for some awesome pics of T. That’s one way to get your kids to be enthusiastic about your creative endeavors- include giant projected pictures of them.

Hope you enjoy.

Micro-Aggressions

I love Cesca Leigh’s Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls. Can’t get enough of it. It so eloquently addresses micro-aggressions.

Micro-aggressions are described by Chester M Pierce as: brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of other races.

I’m not a comedian, per-se, but I am a storyteller and I often find myself sharing a stage with comics. So I’m pretty comfortable getting in the ring and slugging it out with big, loud racism or sexism, or ability-ism (please tell me the right word for this if you’ve been to a liberal arts college more recently than me, which is to say anytime since the industrial revolution). I’ve cheerfully burned a few professional bridges by standing up at the mic and saying, “Hey, you’re an asshole and here’s why…” I have fond memories of an evening during which a woman stood up ahead of me and told a story in which the humor depended on the collective assumption that she should be horrified that her internet date turned out to have an adoptive kid with special needs. I followed and took it upon myself to point out that I could see why she was staying single.

But micro-aggressions are often more confusing. For some that I face regularly, I have memorized responses (He’s so lucky. No, we’re lucky.). But when I’m caught off guard, I often don’t know what to do.

For instance, I was recently in a doctor’s office getting ready for the painful removal of a surgical dressing, when he told me a story that involved a “big black guy” coming to his door at 6:30 at night. You know- someone who just didn’t look like he, “belonged in the neighborhood.” And I sat there with my mouth shut and didn’t say a thing. My friend in the waiting room heard the whole exchange. She put a picture of Tariku in my face when we walked out the door and said, “You know this is going to be the big black guy who doesn’t belong in his neighborhood, right?” And I was like- sue me. I didn’t want to have a big confrontation with the guy about to rip a bandage off my face, okay?

But then I was at a reading a couple of weeks ago and another reader began by describing a “dark lady with a mustache” on an airplane and I knew we were in for it. He went on to mock her accent and her eager friendliness, calling her “Gunga-din.” And again, I sat silently. I meant to speak to him afterward, but I was talking to readers; I was signing books. Then I had to run out so I could get home and let the babysitter go. I told myself there simply hadn’t been time. But there probably had. I was just overwhelmed with everything going on. I didn’t have the right words.

There isn’t always a mic in front of my face. And even when there is, the situations are sometimes delicate, the offense subtle. I can’t always find the right joke with which to counter. And those are the kind of moments that haunt me for days. Why did I stay silent? Was I being cowardly? Opportunistic? Should I have said something? And if so, what?

I don’t think there’s a way to get this perfect. But I’d like to get better at it. I think that opening up a dialogue is always a good start.

I’m fantasizing about doing a “Shit People Say to Trans-Racial Families” video (with all my spare time, but what the hell). Who’s with me? Leave a comment and tell me your pet-peeve micro-aggression. And if you’re in the LA area, let me know if you want to be in it!

I’ll start…

Is he yours?

This is T with Kristen Howerton’s kids, btw. Man, I love those peanuts. I’m totally recruiting them for the video.

T-Bone is Four Today!

Today is T’s actual birthday, but we celebrated on Sunday. Last year, I fought for our right to party. This year, I just called his two besties three days in advance and had them meet us at Descanso Gardens. We chowed Babycakes gluten-free brownie cake (best. ever.) and then let the boys ride the train until they almost threw up.

That was it, folks. And it was such a great, sun-dappled, mellow day.

I could say all that stuff- I can’t believe how big he is. He’s growing up so fast. Blah blah. And it’s all true. But mostly, his birthday stuns me because I look at him and think how much he survived to get here. I marvel at the resilience of his joyful heart. It’s the honor of my life to witness the miracle that is him in this world.