Stealing a Centipede's Life and Other Buddhist Parenting Hypocrisies

I was trying to get the key in the back door when I heard my son furiously stamping on the porch. I turned around and saw him stomping on a bunch of tiny ants.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" I gasped.

"I'm killing these ants," my son said and stared at me round-eyed.

"Why?"

"'Cause they were moving around."

We stared at each other.

"Were they hurting you?" I asked.

"No," he said, his eyes getting bigger and more troubled.

"Well then why did you kill them?"

"I don't know. I just did."

We stared at each other.

"You know, once you take an ant's life, you can't give it back," I said.

"I didn't mean to!" he said, eyes getting bigger and sadder, the full impact of his actions now dawning on him.

"You need to be careful about killing things. It's stealing life, and you can't give it back. Those ants weren't bothering you, they weren't hurting you, and you killed them forever."

"I'm sorry!"

Now he looked like he was about to cry. My work was done. Time to reel him back in from the edge.

"It's okay. But just promise me you'll never kill anything that's not harming you, okay?"

"Okay, Mama! I will never steal an ant's life again!"

Buddhist lesson for the day: Check. Awesome parenting: Check.


Fast forward to yesterday morning. As I'm putting the finishing touches on my shimmery face, I hear my son begin to whimper in the hallway.

"Mama, there's something SCARY in here!"

I freeze, mid-dusting of bronzing powder and feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I walked into the hallway with my make-up brush held out before me like a switchblade.

"What is it?" I asked, nervously looking down the hall.

"THAT," my son pointed to the floor at the end of the hallway.


A.

GIGANTIC.

FURRY.

CENTI-BEAST!!!


"AHHH!" I yelled and jumped straight into the air.

"Oh no!" my son yelled and ran into his room where he started to cry.

I have an enormous and well-documented phobia of centipedes. I have even discussed it in therapy. It's that bad. I usually cry and scream and run away. I have had several shriek-y battles with them involving Edge shaving gel and other people's shoes. I once saw the granddaddy of all centipedes take a free fall from the ceiling and land on my husband's chest. I had to divorce him after that.

THAT bad.

So in this moment, my fear putting me on full-tilt irrational panic attack mode, and my weeping son beckoning me to be strong, I was caught. Fortunately my love for my son enabled me to get out of my freak-out-induced paralysis, and I went to his room and hugged him.

"It's okay, baby. It's just a centipede. It's a scary-looking bug and mama is afraid of them too, but I will get it for you."

"IT'S SCARY AND I DON'T LIKE IT!" he wailed.

"Mama is going to be a super hero and get that centipede for you," I said and marched out of his bedroom in search of a shoe I didn't care about.

I held the ratty flat sandal I use for gardening out before me. I felt like I was going to throw up, but I lunged forward and squished the huge, hairy, wriggling beast.

"GAH!" I yelled, shuddering as I heard it crunch.

"Did you get it, Mama?" my son called, still sounding weepy.

"I got it!"

He came out and stood next to me, and we examined the remains of the beast.

"What are all those things?" my son splayed his fingers out to represent the multitude of legs and grimaced. I grimaced in return.

"Those are its legs," I said.

"Yech!"

"Seriously," I agreed.

"What do you call that thing? Anemone?"

"Centipede."

"It's not going to get me any more?"

"Nope. I killed it."

We stood in silence, watching our fallen enemy. He had been a worthy opponent.

"I only kill centipedes. Nothing else," I added.

"Only centipedes. Not ants."

"Right," I said.

I'm totally certain if there had been centipedes in India, the Buddha would have put a disclaimer on that whole "Do Not Kill" thing. I'm sure of it.

Make Cream, Not War

The coffee creamer war is over.

For a long time, during the dark ages here at the agency, we had to buy our own coffee. Many a gray employee tromped down flights of stairs to the belly of the building, to a windowless "cafe" of sorts, next to shipping and receiving, and a lone ATM. There you could buy a cup of coffee for a dollar, and if you filled up five punches on your coffee card, you could get a free one.

Oh man, that got me. Kremlin-Gulag Agency was so stingy, whereas my former employer (YES-IT'S FREE, Inc.) brewed vast vats of Starbucks brand coffee and plied us with free Twix and Kit Kat bars. But the sun shone down on we weary advertising hacks, and a golden coffee maker was bestowed upon us from our now-benevolent ruler.

*Cue angels choir*

No sooner had the serfs sated themselves on free coffee, they began to fight amongst themselves. Some of us brought our own creamers, of varying flavors and fat contents. We brutally scrawled our names on the containers, in large angry-Sharpie-medium-point print.

"MANDY"

"SALACIOUS BEE"

"EPIC"

"THAT ANNOYING GUY IN THE WINDOWLESS CUBE"

Etc.

Despite the clear demarkations of our cream, there were thieves amongst us. Soon notes were taped to the cabinets in the employee kitchen, and ominous floor-wide emails were sent, admonishing the greedy peasants for stealing from their neighbors.

"IF IT DOESN'T HAVE YOUR NAME ON IT, IT'S NOT YOUR CREAM!!!!" the messages hollered at us.

It sort of made me want to steal other people's cream, despite having my own clearly-marked cream. Maybe other people had better cream if theirs was being stolen? I mean, sure I bought the fat-free, but everyone knows the full-fat tastes better. Maybe if I stole it the fat grams wouldn't count? Plus the idea of stealing cream, right there in the middle of our corporate town square -- anyone could catch me! What if they saw me adding a huge dollop of "SALACIOUS BEE" cream to my non-salacious cup?

Oh, the very thought of it gave me the tingles.

But I didn't do it. Because of the Buddha. He's always telling me not to do bad things. But my co-workers, non-believers that they are, went on stealing from one another, and the hatred grew. We now passed one another in the cube-corridors, slit-eyed and suspicious.

"Good morning!" Salacious Bee would chirp.

"FUCK YOU!" I would scream back at her, my guilt from coveting her cream as clear as the florescent lights above.

Kremlin-Gulag Agency was in a bad state of affairs. Rather than bringing joy and peace to the agency, the free coffee had brought hatred and in-fighting amongst the formerly peaceable copy writing and art directing plebes. I trembled in my cube, afraid to venture out into the now-lawless second floor. Though I hadn't noticed anyone stealing my cream, I lifted it carefully each morning -- shaking it, listening to it, trying to determine if any of those bitches had sipped at it.

I'd become someone I no longer knew. It was with a heavy heart that I walked to the coffee maker yesterday morning. Resigned, I opened the refrigerator and braced myself for the hate-speech scrawled across cartons of half-and-half.

But wait.

What's this?

"FREE CREAM FOR EVERYONE! THE INTERNATIONAL COFFEE CREAMERS OF PEACE ARE HERE! HELP YOURSELF! THERE'S MORE CREAM WHERE THAT CAME FROM!"

A message like a sweet call from an angel on high! I looked past the note, to rows and rows of assorted International Coffee Creamer bottles. There was Southern Butter Pecan, Irish Cream, Vanilla, Hazelnut, so many flavors, both fat-free and full -- I stood in the open door of the refrigerator and wept.

Oh, I wept like a new-born babe.

For it was as the Buddha always said: "Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love. This is an unalterable law."

Salacious Bee came around the corner and our eyes met, mine moist with tears.

She opened her arms to me, wide-open in her forgiveness. I walked to her and stopped a few feet short.

"Don't fuckin' touch me," she said with a grin.

"As if! You freak!" I said, and nodded my head.

Peace had returned to the agency. Through love, not hate.






Namaste, my bitches.

If You Can't Make Yourself Happy, Make Someone Else Happy

Such a non-Western concept:

If you are in pain, despair, sad or drenched in suburban ennui and you can't see your way clear of it, make someone else feel good. Oh how we bristle against it! "What? What about ME! I'm the one who's not happy! I need attention! I need love! Me! Me! Me! Screw you! You should be making ME happy, dammit!"

Yeah. See how far that gets you.

Years ago, hell, possibly ten years ago, my therapist gave me this self-same advice. I was in a pit of misery so deep, I could hardly breathe. I spent nights battling demons, battles I mostly lost. Battles that left me in a dark bathroom, my head resting on the cold porcelain of the toilet, weeping. I wept until I was weak, and then I wept some more. I stretched myself out across the tile floor and fell asleep there, more nights than not.

No one ever came to save me from myself. And clearly, I was in the grips of a beast that would not let me go. Make all the jokes you want about eating disorders, I know it's the hip thing to do, what, with all these celebrity anorexics to choose from -- but quitting an addiction is brutal. It doesn't matter if your addiction is a drug, alcohol, food, pain or righteous denial -- you need it to get you through the night.

It took me ten years of therapy to quit over 18 years of being bulimic.

I waged a private war against it, and it was a bloody war that took no prisoners. I lost more battles than I won. I reached out for help and was shoved away. I had nothing but shame and despair to comfort me, and an impassive husband who just didn't want to hear about it.

Had I known my husband was battling his own war -- a war he would lose -- perhaps things would have been different. Or perhaps not. Who am I kidding? Nobody expects the Alamo, or schizophrenia, for that matter.

I was sitting in my therapist's office one day, one of four visits each week, grabbing my head, rocking back and forth.

"I just can't make it stop. I just can't make it stop."

I was losing it.

I couldn't stop the pain. Chronic, excruciating mental pain. It never fucking let up. I walked around in the real world like a puppet, I moved my arms and legs and performed for the people throughout the day. But all the while, a constant torrent of invectives, slurs, hate-speech played in my brain.

"Sometimes, if you can't do anything to make yourself feel good, it helps to make someone else feel good," my therapist stated.

In that moment, I hated him.

"What about me! Who's going to make ME feel better!" I wailed, and then laughed at my own ridiculousness.

He laughed too.

"Maybe you can make you feel better."

Well that pissed me off.

"Achhhhhhhhhh," I said, making the sound of disgust in the back of my throat like we do in my family.

But I tried. Tentatively that night, as my husband and I lay in bed, I reached out and rubbed his back. I rubbed and rubbed, touching him for the first time in months. I stroked his back until he fell asleep, softly snoring.

I did this for a week. Seven nights of selfless love and kindness.

He never once touched me. He never once acknowledged it.

I felt lonelier and sadder than ever.

"It doesn't work!" I yelled at my therapist.

"Maybe you need to try it on someone else. How about your students?" he suggested.

So I did. Gave up on the husband, and began spending late hours at school. I let my students hang out in my classroom, laying on my carpet, staring at the ceiling. We dubbed it "Carpet Time" and I listened to them bemoan their various outcast states.

And we laughed.

And I felt better.

Last night I took my son to Toys R Us and bought him a cartload of toys for no damn reason other than the fact that I was depressed and lonely and couldn't make myself feel better.

"Can I have that golf set?" he asked.

"Yes."

"A T-ball set?" he asked again, giving me an incredulous, sidelong glance.

"You got it."

"Can I be a policeman?" his jaw was now hanging open in disbelief.

"Of course you can."

Oh, we loaded up that cart. All those toys, all that happiness, cost less than $50.

"You want to go to McDonald's and eat dinner?" I asked.

"What's Old McDonalds?" he asked.

So I took him and bought him a we ate fast food. Then he played on the giant PlayPlace, with the florescent lighting humming above us and the faint whiff of children's sweat and urine.

He was ecstatic.

Though I counted down the minutes before I could take him home and douse him in a hot shower, I couldn't help but laugh with him in his joy.

I did that. I made that happiness happen out of thin air.

When they named it a "Happy Meal," they weren't kidding. I just didn't realize that the happiness of the meal wasn't limited to the consumer of the meal. Turns out the buyer gets some of it too.

Just like my therapist said. All those years ago.

"Snap Out of It!" and Other Italian Wisdom

I have long been aware that men derive most of their wisdom from The Godfather.

"Go to the mattresses."

"I'm going to make him an offer he cannot refuse."

Men use these quotes to aid their friends, to offer counsel in times of confusion. The Godfather knew how to handle everything. When in doubt, you go to him. Especially when it concerns business.

I think there is a female equivalent, and I've decided it's Moonstruck, also a film about an Italian family. I'm thinking the Italians might know a thing or two about a thing or two. Capiche?

Everything you need to know about love is in Moonstruck. Don't believe me? Here:

When you encounter the irrational:

Ronny Cammareri: "I love you."
Loretta Castorini: [slaps him twice] "Snap out of it!"

When you encounter denial:

Rose: "I just want you to know no matter what you do, you're gonna die, just like everybody else."
Cosmo Castorini: "Thank you, Rose."

When you encounter blame:

Ronny Cammareri: "You ruined my life."
Loretta Castorini: "That's impossible! It was ruined when I got here! *You* ruined *my* life!"

When you encounter fear:

Loretta Castorini: "What am I going to tell him?"
Cosmo Castorini: "Tell him the truth. They find out anyway."

When someone tries to blow smoke up your ass:

Johnny: "In time you will see that this is the best thing."
Loretta Castorini: "In time you'll drop dead and I'll come to your funeral in a red dress!"

When you find true love:

Rose: "Do you love him, Loretta?"
Loretta Castorini: "Aw, ma, I love him awful."
Rose: "Oh, God, that's too bad."

When you announce your second marriage:

Loretta Castorini: "I'm getting married."
Cosmo Castorini: "Again?"
Loretta Castorini: "Yeah."
Cosmo Castorini: "You did this once before, it didn't work out."
Loretta Castorini: "The guy died!"

When you're engaged to someone else and realize you've found true love...in another:

Ronny Cammareri: "You're gonna marry my brother? Why you wanna sell your life short? Playing it safe is just about the most dangerous thing a woman like you could do. You waited for the right man the first time, why didn't you wait for the right man again?"
Loretta Castorini: "He didn't come!"
Ronny Cammareri: "I'm here!"
Loretta Castorini: "You're late!"

When you discover your husband's been cheating on you:

Rose: "Have I been a good wife?"
Cosmo Castorini: "Yeah."
Rose: "I want you to stop seeing her."
[Cosmo rises, slams the table once, and sits down again]
Cosmo Castorini: "Okay."
Rose: [pauses] "And go to confession."

When your wife discovers you've been cheating on her:

Cosmo Castorini: "A man understands one day that his life is built on nothing, and that's a bad, crazy day."
Rose: "Your life is not built on nothing! Ti amo."

And lastly, when you realize the whole point to this whole thing called life:

Ronny Cammareri: "Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!"

The End.

Spanking The Monkey

I just read my friend Salacious Bee's blog about a humiliating shopping experience. (Read it now.) It reminded me of an embarrassing sojourn to my local Blockbuster, back in the innocent '90s (re: Pre-Divorce Mandy).

I believe I'd clipped a newspaper column of Siskel and Ebert's top movie picks for whatever year it was, and was making my way through the list with an anal-retentive yellow highlighter. I had a penchant for foreign films and indie flicks, indie flicks being more indie back then.

I found the one and only copy of the independent film du soir, and sashayed up to the counter. It being a Friday night, there was a long line of people, with dirty children clinging to their parents' legs staring at me with their conjunctive eyeballs. (This was also Pre-Single Motherdom). At last, it was my turn.

"Spanking The Monkey," will that be all?" the boil-faced youth asked me.

"Yep, that'll do it for me." I was surprised to hear muffled laughs behind me. I swear the kid at the register looked over my shoulder at the other patrons and snickered. What the hell?

So off I went with my video, to watch a mother and son tale, fraught with enough Oedipalism to make Freud quiver.

Then I discovered what exactly "spanking the monkey" meant.

I was mortified! (If you don't know, "spanking the monkey" is slang for jerking off. You know, throttling the bishop, choking the chicken, I'm sure you can go on from here...). A few days' later I slinked back to the Blockbuster under the cover of night to slip the tape into the overnight dispenser. I'd had enough humiliation for one rental fee.

About a month later I went to rent another tape from the old Siskel & Ebert file, this time stockpiling two or three wholesome titles in my arms. Again, it was a busy Friday night and I tried to push the little children out of my personal space with my left foot. Get thee away from me, germ-devils.

I collapsed onto the counter when it was finally my turn, and let the tapes fall onto the counter dramatically. I believe I probably emitted a long-suffering sigh because I don't like to wait in line, and I don't like strangers jostling me. Even small, dirty strangers.

Abscess-Face scanned my tapes and then said, "You have a late fee from your previous rental."

I had watched 20/20 and knew that many late fees were a "scam," so I went Scottish on him and demanded the specifics.

"I'm quite sure I've returned all my movies on time. Can you tell me which movie it was?" I raised an eyebrow at him.

He snickered.

My blood ran cold, and before the words, "THAT'S OKAY NEVERMIND!" could escape my lips, he said, loudly, "SPANKING THE MONKEY."

This time he boldly looked at the people in line behind me, his eyes alight. The snuffles, snickers and choked laughter were unmistakable this time.

I thrust my 20 bucks at him and bumbled out of the store, face burning red.

I learned a good lesson about how to treat people in the service industry. Be nice to them if they know what movies you watch. Pervs.

Autumn Song

"Autumn" by Paolo Nutini

Autumn leaves under frozen souls,
Hungry hands turning soft and old,
My hero crying as we stood out there in the cold,
Like these autumn leaves I don't have nothing to hold.

Handsome smiles wearing handsome shoes,
Too young to say, though I swear he knew,
And I hear him singing while he sits there in his chair,
While these autumn leaves float around everywhere.

And I look at you, and I see me,
Making noise so restlessly,
But now it's quiet and I can hear you sing,
'My little fish don't cry, my little fish don't cry.'

Autumn leaves how fading now,
That smile that I've lost, well I've found some how,
Because you still live on in my father's eyes,
These autumn leaves, all these autumn leave, all these autumn leaves are yours tonight.



I was listening to Paolo Nutini's song for the umpteenth time on the way to work yesterday morning. The sun had set the late morning on Illuminate and the bright snow looked like frosting scraped off the side of the pan. I paid attention to the lyrics this time, though I had been vaguely aware that the song tugged at my heart. Such an ache.

The words flooded my brain and I couldn't back up or out of the song, and before I could brake, my eyes welled up with tears. Mourning the loss of someone you loved doesn't really follow any sensible chronology. Grief is a story that has no beginning, middle or end. Grief, like fiction, is always in the present tense as soon as you open the book.

My son is that book, walking and talking around the apartment. Each year that passes, each new accomplishment, a reminder of what Murph will never see. It is hard to type these words because the tears well up again, and I try to choke back the emotion. I want to cry out. I want to howl in this moment. I want my son to have a memory of Murph.

I know Murph lives on, I see him in my mother's eyes. Perhaps there is a reflection of him in my eyes, a gleam my son sees each and every day? You don't love someone for nearly 30 years without them leaving something of themselves on you -- some impression. Though he may not be encoded in the chemistry of my bones, believe me, I carry him with me.

I hope I give some of him to my son.

He wasn't your grandpa, exactly, I'll tell my son. He was your Papa Murph, and man, did he love us.

A Little Extra

My friend K has worked with the mentally ill and impaired for much of her life, and has many family members with Autism. She is an expert. I recall going grocery shopping with her, and she repeatedly standing at the end of the aisle, barking at me.

"Mandy!"

"What?" my head would snap away from the box of cereal I had been staring at, pulled out of a reverie.

"Oh. My. God. You're mildly autistic," she would laugh and shake her head.

(Pause for two beats.)

"Really? I seem autistic?" I would reply, head-cocked to the side, vaguely interested.

"You're doing it right now!" she would yell, and burst out laughing again.

I can't tell you how many times we had this identical conversation, with my slow and unalarmed responses repeated word-for-word.

Since then, I have also named it "ADD-lite" or "Autism-lite" to account for the spacey, stuck-on-a-record-in-a-groove quality that there can be in communicating with me. Most of you wouldn't know this, since we've never met in person. Fortunately for those who love me, I think it's viewed as "cute." As you can imagine, it could prove annoying over time. Actually, I had a boyfriend who used to go apeshit over my communication style.

I never understood why he got so mad.

He even got mad at my classic facial expression: Scrunched eyebrows, pursed lips, cocked head.

"Quit looking so mad at me! Say something!"

"What?" I would ask, and then cock my head and pause. "I'm not mad."

"If you can't tell me what you're mad about, if you can't COMMUNICATE, this relationship is doomed!"

"Okay," I would say, pause, and then cock my head. "Let me think about this for a minute." And then I would proceed to think about it, try to figure out what he thought I was mad about, and then I would search my brain for fragments of anger.

"DAMMIT! COMMUNICATE WITH ME!"

"I'm trying to," I'd say, honestly perplexed. I neither understood his anger nor his complaint. Clearly I was processing his request.

"COMMUNICATE FASTER!"

"Okay. Let's see. What am I mad about....ummm," I paused, hummed, and tried to focus in on my brain again, so I could find some material for him. While searching, I lost track of time outside my brain.

"JUST FUCKING FORGET IT! YOU ARE IMPOSSIBLE!" and he would storm out the door.

This was, essentially, our entire relationship. We even went through three couples counselors, to no avail. I could never make my gray matter fire quickly enough to count as "communicating" for him, and he could never slow his gray matter down enough to wait for mine.

Recently, The Boyfriend brought his dog over to spend the night. I noticed the dog was continuing to get thinner and thinner, and recalled I'd meant to ask him about this before and had forgot.

"How much do you feed Louie?"

He told me.

"Huh. You might want to feed him a little extra. He could use it."

He again explained how much he fed the dog, and how the dog had been overweight. He may have acknowledged that he could give the dog some extra.

"Well, you sure could feed him a little extra, it certainly wouldn't hurt."

The Boyfriend gave some sort of reply.

"A little extra. He really could use a little extra," I said.

The Boyfriend said something.

"A little extra."

"Yeah, I got that. A little extra, I will give him a little extra," The Boyfriend's reply broke through the fog of my brain this time.

"A little extra?"

"Yes, a little extra," he said, laughing. Now he was clear as a bell. "You realize you've said that over and over again."

"Said what over and over again?" I looked at him and cocked my head, furrowed my brow.

"A little extra," now he was laughing. Hard.

"Really?" I looked mildly interested.

"Really. A little extra."

"A little extra," I repeated, and giggled.

"A little extra," he repeated, immitating my deadpan Rainman-style of delivery.

"A little extra," I said, and started gasping for breath, laughing, now realizing how ridiculous I must sound.

Thank god.

Someone who gets me. Or who doesn't get mad at me, I should say. And now anytime we say, "A little extra," it is guaranteed to result in a volleying back and forth of Rainman-esque "A little extras."

Of course now I notice that memory loss, difficulty focusing and slowness, are all symptoms of Hypothyroidism. Oy. If only I'd been going to the doctor all these years, I wouldn't have misdiagnosed myself as Autism-lite or ADD-lite or "lite" anything.

It turns out I'm a little extra.