Last night I dreamed I was given the task of babysitting Britney Spears. I chased her up this hill to where a pack of lean and mangy yellow-eyed coyotes was waiting and I tried to get her to come back down but she wouldn't. So I skipped down the hill and discovered I was pregnant.

I am a connoisseur of dreams. I dream vividly every night and I even have some recurring dreams that I've had since childhood. Lately, since I became aware of the thuggish gaggle of coyotes living in the woods behind my house, they've been entering my dreams. I think I dreamed about Britney because I think K-Fed is the leechiest jackass to ever pretend to be famous and I feel really bad for her. But I don't get the pregnancy thing. I've never dreamed that before, not even when I was pregnant. Are their any Freud-heads out there willing to answer?

I Wouldn't

go on Survivor unless I was being paid at three million. Just thought you'd like to know. And there's no amount of money that could bring me on Fear Factor.

This Morning

If you happened to catch Face the Nation this morning, you saw GeeDubya slip in and out of lucidity. My mother pointed out the symptoms of early onset alzheimers, but I have a different theory, and it's a little scary. I don't have time to tell you about it because Desperate Housewives is coming on, but it involves harvesting bodies for alien reproduction while maintaining the facade of a fully functioning human.

But then again, could be flashbacks. OK gotta go watch the girls...

Definition of a Good Mother (or Father)

I inadvertently hurt my friends feelings the other day. I said something that triggered inside of her the feeling that she's not a good enough mother. I've been thinking about it, and I believe I have arrived at a good measuring tool. It's really quite simple. If you feel, at any time, like you are not a good parent, that you are setting up your offspring for years of psychological deconditioning, that s/he is not well-fed/educated/trained/prepared for life, if you ever know, deep in your heart, that someone seriously fucked up when they let you walk out of the hospital with another human's life in your hands, then you are a good parent. If you were a bad parent, you wouldn't care. You wouldn't evolve. You wouldn't ever try to do better.

Here's how to reach that elusive bar of good parenting: don't. It's not even there. There are good days and others. The good days are drops of honey melting on your tongue. Savor them. When you don't have the patience or the listening ears or the intention of scrubbing the chocolate from the corner of the mouth remember everyone's been there and will be there again. That's life. That's parenthood. I'll never forget when my Phee-Phee was born. Satan's second in charge delivered her, the nurses were mean to me, they kicked Delta Hotel out then gave me a roommate in my private room and let her husband stay and fart on the pullout chair all night while I desperately tried to get Phee-Phee to latch on/sleep. I was a thousand pounds of pissed off when our pediatrician showed up the next morning. I INVENTED the phrase "poor me" that day. I even had a window facing the Human Soup pond. But in the midst of all that drama was a profound truth (I've found that those little nuggets are usually disguised in a pile of excrement). Our pediatrician sat down, put his hand on my shoulder, recognized my state of near breakdown and said, "All you have to do is love her. Do the best you can, and all the rest will fall into place. That's it."

Can you understand the freedom in that statement? Forget about the donuts for breakfast, the SpongueBob marathon, the nap on the couch when you could have been teaching your four year old advanced calculus/French. Forget whatever punishing standard your personal bar is raised to and just love your kid and do the best you can. The rest will fall into place.

Yuck Cubed

My Soul-Sister emailed tonight to remind me of something. Remember the pond I wrote about the other day, you know, the one I call "Human Soup"? Well brave readers, this is what Soul-sister wrote:

A) who is your arch nemesis
and
B) Don't you remember dipping your naked butt in L's Pond one summer night????????? That's enough to give you nightmares!

YES SOUL SISTER!!! I DO REMEMBER!! And it was more than just my butt!! BLECHHHHHH!! I remember something else about that night. I was floating on my back, staring up at the constellations pretending I was Beethoven when something brushed up against my heel. It was hard (mind out of the gutter SUPERROB) and at the time I thought it was a turtle. But now I know it was rally a cadaver. OH LAW!

Snow Day? What??!!

I used to think that the criteria for canceling or at least delaying school was the passability of the roads and sidewalks. If you needed 4WD, snowshoes and a pack of sled dogs just to get TO your vehicle, schools closed down for the day, everyone stayed in pajamas and the shameless ingestion of high carb foods was declared mandatory. But recently we've been in a pattern of bizarre decision making. It all started back in November when one lonely little half a snowflake fell from the sky and the school stayed closed for the day. Then there was this other storm that dumped about eight feet of snow in a five minute period and the schools stayed open. And of course, there was today. I was driving sideways to the school, simultaneously avoiding other skating cars and pondering what kind of logic was at work when I realized that there is no exact science to school cancellations. What there is, is a little grey troll who lives deep below the elementary school chained to a table where dripping candles burn day and night and when the morning's weather seems iffy, like today, the superintendent visits him, the troll shakes his magic eight ball and proclaims "No, definitely not. Don't cancel school." Scoff if you want, but there's just no better explanation.

Are We Greater than our Private Parts?

SuperRob thinks perhaps not. And while maybe I should be insulted, considering I am a member of the writing group and thus a "shameless hussy", I am grateful for the distraction for two reasons.
1. I proved my embarrassing ignorance of geography in an essay I wrote and then read to my slutty writing group and the patriarch of the sluts called me on it resulting in me feeling like a big stupid slutty loser for the last two days. Now I need to enroll in a geography course so I don't prove my disgusting lack of world comprehension to the entire universe again. I guess I was just so busy thinking about sex, I couldn't focus.
2. Yesterday I was at the gas station squeezing the pump handle while it ejaculated into my big empty tank when my ARCH NEMESIS walked around the corner. As a former Marine, I should have grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and beaten him sensless with it. Instead I shrunk behind my car and hid till he was gone liked a scared little girl.

Anyway, those two things have been eating up my pornographic thought time. Glad SuperRob got me back on track. Now I can go back to thinking about love triangles and how I'd rather be having sex.

Guilty Pleasures

Our Dear SuperRob has one of those tag blogs on his site today. You are supposed to read about his guilty pleasures and then go back to your own blog and write yours down. It could be the fact that as an only child I have lingering delusions of grandeur and have never ever denied myself anything that I want, but I just don't have any guilty pleasures. If I want chocolate, I eat it. If I want to watch Golden Girls, I do. If I feel like wrapping Roy Orbison up in Saran wrap, I did. No, I didn't but I read about it on Angry Little Bitch's blog yesterday and it's still sitting in my brain, undigested, like a lump of fatty gristle.

Anyway, guilty implies hiding, and I think it's painfully obvious that I hide nothing. Maybe I need some secrets.

Oh, and before I forget, Tag, you're it

Human Soup

Tiarra the Supernurse came by today, and as usual she fascinated me with tales of the darker side of human physiology. We discussed maggots and leaches and their purpose in the promotion of healing. We talked about gangrene infested feet she's seen was hanging on by a mere thread of sinew . We touched on the regeneration of nerves after an injury - such as sledding down the hill in the back yard and landing on a harpoon of a tree stump - offends them. We threw around several variations of parasite. And then I remembered a story I heard about 15 years ago. I cannot verify the specifics, but a long, long time ago, before medical waste was considered gross and disgusting (like we ALL know it IS), back when the hospital was called Framingham Union, Learneds Pond was a pseudonym for Human Soup. It was rumored that all things eviscerated, punctured, drained and snipped ended up in the sweet little pond behind the hospital, where many townsfolk sent their children for swimming lessons. They say it's clean now, safe to swim in up until August when the geese have tipped the balance of water/shit in their gooey white favor and flagellating pin worms ripple the surface in search of warm blood. But I think any pond that can choke up an army of patchwork humans from a hundred years of careless doctors throwing discarded body parts out the window is not EVER safe to swim in. Just my two cents.

Shameless Plug Alert (title recomended by Fat Charlatan)

Guess what? Somebody accepted my essay "Sandstorms and Miniskirts" for publication! It'll be available Feb 7th, so I'll post the URL here when it is. I'm so happy because I feel validated. I feel like the universe threw me a bone. Not a gross cow shin marrow bone like I cook for Darling Dog, but a juicy chocolate bone with peanut butter filling that has no calories carbs or fat grams and won't give me another gallstone. God, I love to write so much, and now I feel a little bit good enough. Not entirely good enough, but, you know, time stamped and validated.

Also, I got highlights because I am going with Delta Hotel to a fancy dinner this weekend. It's not as good as the ball. For one thing, it's only semi-formal. For another, I can't get drunk because my actions could potentially cost Delta Hotel his job and then I would not be allowed to get pedicures anymore and my feet would turn to horns. Lastly, the ball is filled with young hot Marines. That's basically self explanatory. Despite those few things, this work dinner is pretty fun. We went last year and had a blast. Oh no, wait, we had a blast at the afterparty. And I was drunk.

The Sun WIll Come Out...Tomorrow

Q. What's worse than enough estrogen to give an entire island full of concave chested eunics boobs and a set of hips ?

A. Three daughters to share em with (the hormones, not the eunics)

Boy oh boy was today a crappy day. The only highlight was when Tiara the SuperNurse came over and told me it's a good thing my immune systems so sh*t hot.

As many of you know, I have the grace of a backwards-kneed, brain-damaged 22 hour old fruit fly. So, naturally, when I took the girls sledding the other day my left thigh found the only spear tipped tree stub for a five mile radius. My jeans were thick and tight enough to blunt the impaling, but I ended up with a bruise from my knee to my hip, and that's no exageration for once. I hobbled around the back yard for a while howling and drooling, but no one seemed to care so I stopped and kept on sledding. Anyway, it's two weeks later. I won't get into gross detail. If you really want to know what happened, you can ask, but it was HORRIBLE. Delta Hotel said, "You need to see a doctor. This is the worst thing you have ever done to yourself. This is worse than the time you cut off your thumb." Just a bruise, I thought.

Back to today. Tiarra came over for a delicious cup of afternoon coffee. I mentioned my bruise, and she insisted on seeing it. So, I rolled up my pants and showed her. That's when she said it.
"Good thing you have a healthy immune system Didi. See that? It's a horrible disgusting cord of mangled artery and guts and if you weren't so healthy you would have gotten gangrene and rotted away from the thigh on out." That's not quite verbatim, but she did send me into a hypochondrial panic attack. Then she told me that sometimes when you get gangrene body parts fall off. If you happen to be Jewish, they bury the body part in a graveyard with it's own headstone. Can anyone out there verify that one for me?

Anyway. I'm off to soothe myself with some books on how to get your kids to stop whining and talking back. Self-help and parenting books make me feel proactive and therefore, better.

Trust

One of the greatest feelings in the world is when your child shows you a great truth.

Ya-Ya has been having these horrible nightmares this last week, about stone angels with eyes that watch her. That's freakin creepy. Tonight, while I was tucking her in, she asked me why she's so afraid to be alone. "Alone alone?" I asked, "like lonely with not a friend in the world, or just of being in a place by yourself?" (A key in parenting is to always KNOW what question you are answering. Answering can rapidly become a slippery slope if not handled with oven mits. Besides, being an expert on fear, I wanted to make sure I was dealing with the correct subcategory.) "Just alone by myself. Like in my room." So, I administered my dissertion on the primeval herd instinct and the logic of banding together at night in your cave so that no one should fall prey to a saber-toothed tiger. And since the saber-toothed tigers are extinct, there's nothing to worry about. Fear is healthy, I told her, and it's also controllable. I moved into a discussion about trusting in a higher power and believing in the best possible outcome because when you don't believe in a miracle you shut the door on one. And courage is being afraid but keeping on anyway. WHen you're afraid, I told her, think about Tom Brady or how you felt on Christmas. I am paraphrasing for the sake of brevity, but it really came out of mouth splendidly. The last ting I told her was to trust me, that I would protect her. A few minutes later, the importance of what we talked about settled in. Having someone trust you is an AWESOME responsibility. I stepped onto the deck into the frosty air and I wasn't even afraid of the coyotes or sex offenders or dead boys in mirrors or the girl in The Ring. Ya-Ya had empowered me with her trust, and she reminded me to trust. It's when we isolate ourselves and take the weight of the world for our own burden that we close the door on possibility and open the door to fear. Fear takes up precious space that could be spent having fun and it gives you bad dreams about creepy stone angel eyes. And I like stone angels way too much to risk having bad dreams about them.

Up Your Gas

That title is a double edged sword. It's the name of a magic pill I used to take before formation runs in the USMC so I would be able to keep up. I am inherently slow and lazy. Up your gas kept me in the runs. It also insured that would I vomit on the calves of the person in front of me, something I could accomplish without even breaking stride. I married one of those unfortunate people. Bet you're glad to know that. It also contained ephedra in unscrupulous quantities which should make me eligible for a claim in a class action law suit, only I have no heart problems. I'm just lazy.

The other reason I chose that title for tonight's illustrious entry is that I paid my gas bill today. Up Your Gas loosely rhymes with Shove the Bill up Someone's Ass, which is what I felt like doing. I paid more for one months gas than I pay to drive my SUV in FOUR MONTHS. I also had an energy audit. The auditor became the first human being on the planet earth today to cross the magical threshold into my attic. There was no hidden treasure or skeletons or flowers or dragons up there. There was a vast breeding ground for all the horrible scurrying brown spiders that torture me when I step out, naked and unprotected from the shower. Or reach my hand into the bottom of the laundry separator. There was but one scant, lacy, flimsy little summer shawl layer of insulation. There should be eleven. Thus, I have forked out four hundred dollars to melt the snow off the roof.

Philosophy of War

That's a misleading title. As you may know, the last week and a half-ish have included many things, none of which are school. There is nothing I like better than spending quality time with my girls. Which is how I always anticipate these "breaks". What they are, in reality, is Mommy Exams. I learned something interesting between tests of patience and endurance. Let me tell you a quick story. Maybe you'll think I'm crazy, entirely plausible after as many days in the house with three other females (and a manic-depressive dog) as I've had, but I think I understand the psychology behind the war.

Ya-Ya is my oldest, and she's a big, honkin' healthy specimen of a girl. She's slender but powerful and tall and healthy and full of vim and vigor. Phee-Phee is my middle, and she's exactly the opposite. She's teensy and petite and delicate. But, like a little snake, her fire burns very very hot. (The baby is, oddly enough, a precise balance of the two.) Anyway. Ya-Ya lives right next door to Phee-Phee. One day, out of boredom or whatever, Ya-Ya decided to go into Phee-Phee's room and raise a little hell. She demanded that Phee-Phee give her either stuff or a dollar. Phee-Phee, sitting on her bed combing her new doll's hair, doing the things that she normally does all day, refused. Naturally, Ya-Ya felt put out that her little puny sister should refuse her, and she demanded again, your money or your stuff. So, Phee-Phee sprang off the bed and attacked her, feeling the need to protect her property and her money. Then Ya-Ya physically removed Phee-Phee from her own room and locked the door, essentially occupying a bedroom which was not her own. Meanwhile, the baby sat in the corner and ate play-dough, but that's another story for another day. I kept things fair, hollered at everyone, sent everyone back to her own property, seized the play-dough and continued making lunch. This sort of thing happens from time to time in my house, and I'm sure it's a universal scene in homes where there's enough estrogen to drown an ox. No big deal. But let's say Ya-Ya had nuclear weapons, and Phee-Phee had a white van full of cow manure and Tide. Who has the kind of home-owners policy to cover that?

Naturally I love all my girls, and understand that they each have their own agendas and personalities and rights. I rarely take sides, preferring to reprimand globally, let them calm their little tempers and then do something else in a neutral area like the playroom. Point being, maybe the world needs a great big mommy to give certain leaders a spanking (which I find oddly appealing) and send others to their rooms then set up a nice little game of dress up somewhere in New Zealand. The thought of Dick dressing in a purple fedora for tea has just cheered me immensely.