vindicated in my complaints

Long-term readers may recall that I have railed against my insurance company (going so far as to write on this blog that I would dearly love to lightly stab some of its executives), one of the crappiest insurance companies I have ever had the misfortune of being insured under. Well, my insurance company is soooo crappy (how crappy is it?), so crappy that it has singlehandedly reignited the once-dead debate of national health insurance reform. Yes, my insurance company is Anthem Blue Cross of California, currently gouging California consumers with a 39% rate hike despite its literal billions raked in last year.

The insurance commissioner of California stated that he has "a healthy skepticism" about whether Anthem Blue Cross is breaking the laws requiring an insurance company to spend 70% of its income on health care. Additionally, Anthem Blue Cross is facing investigation over literally hundreds upon hundreds of incidents involving misleading its insureds to rip them off, failure to pay claims, failure to abide by rulings against it in favor of its insureds, etc.., etc...

Among its other misdeeds against me personally, Anthem Blue Cross refused to pay a cent for a doctor-ordered mammogram for me and charged me hundreds of dollars for a routine pap smear. To add insult to injury, Anthem Blue Cross sends me form letters and robocalls me to nag me to get mammograms and pap smears, services for which it refuses to pay. Their basis for refusing to pay is that those were optional tests, tests done when there was no reason to believe that I had cancer. On the one hand, they strongly believe I must get preventive screenings and nag me to do them, but on the other hand, they claim screenings are frivolous and I should do them on my own dollar. Subsequently I have not had a mammogram in a couple of years because I am on a budget and find it difficult to spare a couple hundred dollars for optional medical testing.

We were charged over two hundred dollars last year for getting Iris and Lola a routine, annual physical and the normal vaccines for their age. Again, Anthem Blue Cross displayed a rather cavalier attitude towards preventive medicine. Are they shortsightedly trying to discourage people from vaccinating? I imagine there must be many parents out there insured under Anthem Blue Cross who find it very difficult indeed to pay for routine, normal vaccines. I will pass up mammograms for myself, but I'm not going to stop getting the children vaccinated.

There was also the oh-so-amusing time when Anthem Blue Cross sent me a letter requesting that I switch to a generic antidepressant. I raised this with my psychiatrist (whom I pay completely out of my own pocket), who told me that the generic drug was not a true replication of the drug (he had a complicated explanation for that involving molecules which bind on the left side and molecules binding on the right side) but that I could save money if I tried a higher dose of the less-effective generic. When I tried to fill my prescription for the generic drug, at my crappy insurance company's own request, I found out that my insurance company was going to charge me a $225 copay. When I reported that back to my psychiatrist, he was really shocked. "That pill only costs 75 cents a pill! How on earth can they charge you $225 for that?"

Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between being insured under Anthem Blue Cross of California and being uninsured. Oh, wait, the difference is that if I were uninsured, I could just cut to the chase and write my big check without having to endure forms, unintelligible letters, profoundly irritating phone calls, and a massive, two hundred page booklet setting up all sorts of threatening conditions under which Anthem Blue Cross will dodge out of coverage. As a representative from Mt. Zion Hospital said to me when we were trying to work out coverage for my surgery, "I've never run across an insurance plan requiring anything like this."

Lord, I wish Doggy-o, the Sober Husband's employer, would get a decent healthcare plan. Sadly Doggy-o has gone the other way, downgrading our Anthem Blue Cross plan from the previous, extremely sucky plan to a fresh, new, unbelievably even suckier plan, done just in time for my recent surgery, which is going to bust our budget for the year. Sigh.

You can read more about Anthem Blue Cross in the San Francisco Chronicle.

p.s. For Christmas this year, I would like a mammogram.

the convalescent's day

Yesterday was my first day since surgery I didn't have a companion by my side, a caretaker to fetch me my meds, drinks, and whatever else I wanted. The children were back to school after winter break, and the Sober Husband went back to work after a week and a half's family leave.

The day started by my realizing I'd let the cup of coffee the Sober Husband brought me before making his escape get cold. I didn't feel up to getting myself another cup of coffee, and so I just took a painkiller and wrote off the possibility of coffee. I felt weird and lonely (not having had a moment alone since my surgery) and weak and pathetic. I didn't feel well enough to play Warcraft, but after a while, I did manage to log in and play easy Warcraft (Warcraft can actually be rather demanding, and dulled by pain meds, I've been just doing easy things in the land of Azeroth.. especially since on one of my first returns to the World, I was running a random heroic dungeon with one of my guildies and some unknown players, and I realized afterward that I'd gone through the whole thing on my rogue without using poisons on my daggers. I had wondered why I was doing so little damage, heh. In a more sharply aware group, I would have been summarily voted out for that stupid mistake, but this group contained a sympathetic guild member of mine as a healer, a new tank who was continually apologizing for his own perceived errors, and two remarkably tolerant other strangers who mostly devoted their energy towards cleaning up after the tank and reassuring him. Usually the World of Warcraft is not such a kind and encouraging place).

I did manage to microwave myself some lunch, noting darkly to myself that I wasn't going to be getting good service any more. As the day wore on, I took a nap, which was interrupted by a hangup call and by construction racket. After a few hours of interrupted sleep, I felt like hell, and I was long overdue a painkiller. After the painkiller sank in, I played a bit more Warcraft, and then the husband arrived with the children. Asking me how my day went, he got up, saying, "Good! Good! You didn't even mention pain anywhere!" before I'd gotten to the part about how awful I felt after my lame nap.

"Come back here!" I shouted at him querulously. "I was just getting to the part about the pain!" I am certain he rolled his eyes then.

The Cat by Iris

So everyone knows Ray Charles, (Baby, as called by Momdude,) the most depressed cat on the face of the Earth. He just sits around all sad and self-pitying. He is very sad and likes to suck on clothing as if it were his mother. He is over a year old now and was never weened.

One day at my art class in golden gate park, daddude came to pick me up, and I had a drawing of his bird. I had drawn the bird with a mad looking eyebrow, and daddude said that didn't make sense because birds don't have emotions and don't feel anger. When I told this to Momdude, she pointed out that his bird DOES have anger, it is a very VERY mad bird and wants everyone in the house (except for daddude,) killed. Momdude said that "Baby" had plenty of emotions that he was always expressing.

Ray Charles is frequently pointed out as an idiot. He is good friends with our other idiot cat, Henry. They love each other more then they love the people who give them food. Lucy wrote a comic about them getting married and having a baby who was an idiot. The comic reads;

One day two cats got married.

They were Ray Charles and Henry.

One day they had a baby.

It was an idiot.

But it fell well into the family.

They were all idiots!

Currently Ray Charles is huddled under the bed feeling depressed for no apparent reason.

-Iriszilla

not feeling so hot

My recovery has had some setbacks, and I'm not doing so great.. For a while I was feeling hopeful that I'd be bouncing back quickly, but it looks instead like it's going to be like I was told to expect: several weeks of pain and discomfort and low energy.

Hello Earthlings!

Hello Earthlings!

Yesterday I visited the neurologist at the headache clinic at the hospital. And he said that I have migraines and I will for the rest of my life and I have to take responsibility for it and eat more and eat less aged cheese and ALWAYS eat breakfast. He also said I might have Anemia or I might have a problem with my thyroid. So I need to get a blood test! Ack! I don't like needles. I don't like shots. I don't like shots that last for ten seconds. And I don't like the idea that people are taking my blood and doing stuff with it! Those vampires!

I also need to get this biofeedback therapy thing if our insurance covers it. They stick electrodes on me and show a thing on a screen. It sounds very boring, but according to daddude, it is a mental challenge. a very boring one involving electrodes.

Also the neurologist had giant feet. And he said there would be no needles, and then he says that they're going to suck out my blood! It all sounds very pointy.

But what I don't get is how people can stick electrodes on you and see how stressed out you are. Also I wonder if they're gonna put one of those things on my finger that goes "Beep Beep Beep" when I'm stressed out.

I realize that snake is irrelevant, but I love snakes almost as much as I love chinchillas. Also this post is kind of boring without it.


-Iriszilla

the pornographic mystery

Before I went into the hospital, I kicked up my heels one last time on a rare grown-up night out in downtown SF, with the Sober Husband and a rather hard-drinking couple we know from when our fourth graders were in preschool together. The Sober Husband rarely drinks these days, with weeks going by before he'll dare to sip a single, abstemious beer (he ignores the charms of alcohol and other substances these days, despite the fact that he put it away like a champion back in our courting days, claiming that he must always be at his sharpest intellectually each and every day and that even a single drink of an evening can cause him to be duller the next morning), but when we get together with these friends, he'll throw 'em back like a Drunken Housewife's mate indeed.

After the Sober Husband and I had had a pre-game drink at a lovely hotel bar and met our friends and enjoyed a huge, delicious, boozy Mexican dinner and postprandial drinks at the fabulous Colibri, we moved back to the hotel bar for a bottle of wine. Here my friend told me that her fourth grader had come to her with a big worry recently: he'd started typing in something on his laptop, and the browser autocompleted the search he'd started, suggesting to him that he wanted to search for "fat men with big dicks." Our friends' distraught son said to his mother, "Dad must have been using my computer! Is Dad gay?"

My friend and I roared and roared with laughter, being the sorts of mothers who find this kind of thing hilarious and having had many drinks by that point. The husbands were not amused. I shared that I'd had quite a discovery of my own that very day. I was using the Sober Husband's laptop for the first time in ages, he having been away on business nearly all week, and his laptop filled in the search window for me with the interesting suggestion, "Arab porn Arabic porn muslim porn arabic sex arab sex muslim sex." "Hmm," I thought. "The old husband must have been doing some interesting computer searches off in his hotel room this week." My friend, her 140 IQ shining through the haze of alcohol, instantly had a helpful suggestion: "We've got to get you a hijab!" We roared again. Once again our husbands were not amused.

"I must have searched that for work," said the Sober Husband. "Yes, I have to look that kind of thing up all the time for my job." We laughed again, and he soldiered on, saying haughtily, "I had to sign something once, saying I acknowledged I would have to view porn in the course of my employment."

Meanwhile the other unamused husband was trying to work out the implications of the "fat men with big dicks." "Why did he think I had searched that? And what made him think I was gay? Who did that search? Who has been using that computer?"

Later as we said goodbye, our friends said again that I should call after surgery if I needed anything. I said that if I were bored, perhaps the husband, using his discerning eye and expert opinion, could drop off a DVD with the "best fat men with big dicks" for my convalescing entertainment.

home is the sailor, home from the sea

Well, I'm back home after surgery, and I shouldn't complain, but yet somehow I do. Overall the surgery went very well indeed, better than expected, and my recovery is trotting along, but it's still early days yet. Right now, I'm having considerable pain still (for which I have a variety of medications), and I'm generally feeling very weak and shaky. On the other hand, it's not as bad as it could be, and I have every hope I'll be feeling better soon.

The actual surgery experience itself was very good, much better than my prior surgeries. I highly recommend the Mt. Zion Hospital to any of you who may be in need of surgeries, and I strongly prefer it to any of the other hospitals I've spent time in here in SF. (Pathetically enough my dear friend Kim called me on an odd behavior of mine once some time ago. She pointed out, rightly enough, that wherever I took her in San Francisco, I would stop to point to some hospital and then share a medical horror story which had occurred there. I told her that I thought we'd worked through the list by then, but now I have a new hospital to add to the Marvels of San Francisco Tour). After I checked in for the surgery, I was stored in a pleasant, private room while waiting, and various medical people would stop in to place an IV, review my history, take my blood pressure, etc.. When the time came to whisk me away, I was given some powerful sedatives there in the room and wheeled away on a bed, which was a very big improvement over a prior experience over at California Pacific Medical Center (where a person waiting for surgery must sit in a public waiting room with other surgical patients, all pathetic examples of human suffering in undignified cotton robes, and then we had to walk by ourselves --- after having our spectacles confiscated -- down a long, scary hallway into a big, scary operating room). By the time I'd entered the OR, I was exchanging pleasantries with a surgeon about my tattoos which I didn't remember later and feeling just fine.

The recovery room was also much nicer at Mount Zion. My prior memory of a surgical recovery room was of a full-voiced nurse bellowing into my face, "YOU'RE... IN ... THE... RECOVERY... ROOM!" as though exactly what one wants to shake off a general anesthesia is a good scream. This time around, there was a kind, caring nurse using a pleasant, low voice to chat with me until I was deemed ready to be taken off to my room. I do have to say that the aide charged with transporting me complained that my bag (which really was a light bag, containing some underwear, a couple of novels, a toothbrush, one dress, a hairbrush, and not much more) was too heavy and she couldn't bring it and my bed as well. After taking me to my room, she later arrived with the bag and dumped it in a corner, churlishly announcing, "Here is your HEAVY bag!", which I found as amusing as annoying.

The worst thing that happened to me was that my first nurse didn't want to give me any pain meds. It had been spelled out to me, over and over again, by my surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the recovery room nurse, the admitting nurse, etc.., etc... that I had a carefully prescribed pain regime for after the surgery, which was completely normal for this surgery. I was to be given a button controlling a powerful narcotic, which I would give myself whenever I needed to (but no more often than every six minutes) for the first day or so, and then I would be transitioned onto oral painkillers of a less strong nature but able to call for heartier injections as necessary. A goal would be for me to manage my pain on oral medications alone. I was also given some hearty prescriptions to get filled before the surgery, so I'd be dosed up and comfortable at home.

However, this first nurse, a rather annoying woman named Patricia, had no respect for my surgeon's orders. She started getting a pill for me, which I was in no condition to swallow. Here I should say that the one thing which is worse than I expected, which I wasn't prepared for, is how much my throat hurts. Whatever was put down my throat during surgery really ripped it up. It didn't hurt my throat this much when I had a gastroenterologist perform surgery exclusively by little tiny knives and a little tiny camera which were shoved down my throat to my bile ducts on great, thick metal cables. My speech was an agonized croak for the first two days, and my throat still hurts a lot now, five days after surgery (if you have tried to call me and I haven't spoken to you, that is why and it should have been explained to you by either the husband of the house or a child of the house). The idea of swallowing a pill was ludicrous, and I said hoarsely I was supposed to have a button. The nurse hissed at me, "I had this same surgery as you, and I didn't have a button. I didn't take anything for it at all! You don't need a button! You don't need anything!" She made some other remarks about how my surgery was nothing, really nothing, and I shouldn't get anything for it. I mumbled, "Morphine" a few times, and with a lot of hostility she eventually gave me a single injection of morphine into my I.V. and flounced off, holding her ground about the magical button.

Later my surgeon came by to check on me, and by that time, my pain had gotten out of control. It was agonizing, having built up over the hours. I asked for the button, and she got someone to install it quickly. A lovely male nurse came on duty much later, and when he left in the morning, I asked him to make sure I didn't get Patricia again. Instead, I got another lovely and kind nurse (with the exceptions of the bag-hating recovery room nurse and the sadistic Patricia, every nurse and doctor I had at Mount Zion was good looking and kind, with a pleasant bedside manner).

I had a large, private room, which was a happy surprise indeed (I'd expected to share a small, noisy room, like I did at CPMC before), and the Sober Husband was encouraged by the staff to spend the night there, on a chair which folded out to a rather uncomfortable bed. A kind nurse brought him sheets, blankets, and a pillow, and the visiting hours were not enforced at all. This was really very helpful all around, as I didn't need to ring for the nurse every time I needed to get handed a drink or some ice chips the first day (the first day, I was really just lying there in bed, doing nothing at all except clicking that button once I managed to get it, submitting to having my vitals taken, and gesturing for a drink) or be assisted to the bathroom the second day (I had to have my oxygen unplugged and get some assistance with my massive IV stand, which would have to have the special button draped around it).

On the second day I had a lot of trouble with nausea, and I didn't eat those first two days. I was supposed to start getting up and walking around, but I hadn't felt strong enough. Even though I didn't feel ready to, I decided that I had to make myself get this convalescence off right and do what I could to get better, and that meant getting up on my shaky feet and stumbling down the hallway with my IV, so I did. On my first, wobbly walk, the nurses and doctors (with the exception of the pain meds-withholding Patricia, whom I swear hissed at me, probably having heard that I had asked not be assigned to her again) rewarded me, like a good little dog, with a lot of generous positive reinforcement. This did help motivate me to get out and take other shaky walks on that and the third day. The Sober Husband and I took field trips to other floors, getting off the escalator and slowly exploring the new hallways.

On Day Two, as well as nausea, I was beset by an intense itching all over my body, a reaction to the other drugs I was on. This was maddening, and the poor Sober Husband was continually having to scratch different parts of me, until a kind doctor gave me a really stiff dose of Benadryl in injection form (who knew it wasn't just a pill?).

While I was in the hospital, Iris uber Alles was often on video conference with us. I didn't speak to her at all that first day or so, as my throat was so sore and my voice so lacking, but I waved occasionally. At Mt. Zion, children are strictly forbidden from visiting, but the video conferencing made up for that. We felt as though we were hanging out with Iris, who saw my undignified old rump hanging out of my hospital gown as I teetered past the computer on way to the bathroom. The Sober Husband made up for my lack of talking (indeed sometimes I put in earplugs so I could doze off while he addressed Iris in stentorian tones).

There was a lot of talk of having me stay a third night as it didn't seem I could meet the criteria for leaving the hospital if I couldn't eat anything, but I managed to get through that on the third day and get discharged in the afternoon.

field trip to the bathroom (Hello Earthlings, Momdude is back in this post,)

Iris' take on the story;

(Note, this may not make any sense whatsoever.)

Since Lucy did not like the idea of the Nueva School, Momdude has been thinking about joining a homeschooling group for children. While I was in the tub, it got brought up. Once I understood the conversation, I said, "I think she'd get a PhD in video games." Then Momdude frowned. After some more jibber-jabber I don't remember, Lucy said, "Could we study toilets?" So Momdude said, (Momdude asked I removed this part, "I didn't sound like that. I was much more sophisticated." So Lucy looked all enthusiastic. And then they started talking about what they would study about how people go to the bathroom. And then I said, "You could take a field trip to the bathroom!" And then everybody laughed.

La la la snakes photo discussion

Ha ha ha ha ha! Peese shut mouf, woomun. That is Larry the croc from Pearls Before Swine, created by Stephen Pastis. He is the most hilarious character.

That chinchilla is so awesome! Look at him! With his little hands! If anyone out there has a chinchilla, please comment saying so.

That rabbit is freaky. Look at his ears! Look at his tail! I just don't like rabbits as much as other people do. But I would never murder one.

That snake is so shiny, like, how does he get so shiny? Like, shiny shiny?

What do YOU think of these photos? comment our opinions.

Momdude is home today. She is fine. But the cat Ray Charles is being bad and refuses to interact with anyone. All he ever does all day is be depressed without reason to be so depressed. Sometimes he reminds me of Larry the croc, but other times he does not.

la la la snakes.

-Iris

hello again earthlings!

Hello it is I, Iris. I have decided that from now on, for as long as I am posting on this blog, I will have a picture of snakes being weird. so here.


"I am evil. I am a snake."

ha ha look at his face!

apparently in Momdude's hospital room there are two tv's with cable and a table and a guest bed that folds into a chair. that sounds better then my room.

also the food there was actually FOOD! they gave her real vegetarian food but she didn't eat it so Daddude did and he said it was fine.

here's a picture of a chinchilla.


"Oh I am so cute I am so cute singing about it all day long"


you know chinchillas have 300 hairs per square centimeter? it's true. and that automatically makes them better then rabbits. rabbits are weird.

"Wait, I hear the space unicorn calling with my giant ears! I must flee!"

now in the ultimate comparison which of these pictures is
a. the cutest
b. the weirdest
c. the funniest

???

It is up to you to decide....

but in my opinion the chinchilla is the cutest the rabbit is the funniest and the snake is weirdest.

Comment what you think on the ultimate comparison.

-Iris

Hello earthlings!

Hello it is me Iris Uber Alles and I am supposed to post on this blog while momdude is away. I'm supposed to say that momdude had her operation today. She is fine.

um...

here is a picture of two snakes kissing for you to enjoy.




awesome huh?

I just finished my homework for the week and I can't wait until next week when there will be no school and no homework!!!

ski week rocks except for the fact that all my friends leave town and rent a giant house in Lake Tahoe. I am somewhat alone for the whole week, but it is still fun to lie around and watch tv.

I hate the stupid digital converter box thingy! It makes the tv worse when it's supposed to make it better!!!

I think I've said too much so I'm going to stop.

-Iris

living it up

It's been hectic here. Today I cleaned the kitchen, made cookies for Iris's publication party at her writing class, emailed the children's teachers, ran over to Haight Street to find nose jewelry containing no metal (the surgeon was vehement yesterday that I could not wear my silver-and-pearl nose screw, because "anything metal heats up" --- what are they going to do up by my nose which is going to be so dangerously hot?), bought gifts for the children while I'm in the hospital, got myself a Captain Sensible CD as a special treat, wrote notes for the children to read each day I'm gone, read the first 175 pages of A.S. Byatt's latest novel [I realized the day before that if anything went awry, my biggest regrets in life would be not reading A.S. Byatt's new book, not visiting Antarctica, not finishing writing my novel, and not seeing the children as adults, and of those things, I could at least partially achieve the A.S. Byatt novel-reading), played cards with Iris and Lola after school, took Lola to her art class, comforted Lola's art teacher after a child in the class took a freakish fall and visibly dented her skull, got Iris over to her publication party and listened to many nine and ten year-olds read their work aloud in little, faltering voices, inquired about Lola's registration for an upcoming writing class and instructed the Sober Husband how to follow up on this in my absence, packed my bag for the hospital, cleaned the litterbox and remarked pointedly that it was the last time I would be doing that for some time, thanked my mother-in-law for coming out to help, wrote a Valentine's Card for the Sober Husband, drank a few glasses of champagne made from the world's oldest champagne maker (since the 1300s!), and explained the children's upcoming obligations one last time to the Sober Husband, who may or may not remember them.

Tomorrow I'm off to the hospital for a few days. I'm not sure when I'll feel up to blogging, but stay posted: I have arranged for a few, very interesting guest bloggers who will hopefully be blogging up a storm here, to the point where my return will be met with "Oh, her again?" as a reaction.

love to all, from yer Drunken Housewife.

the preliminaries

I had an appointment at the hospital today to prepare for my surgery. I filled out a few clipboards worth of forms, had a lot of blood taken (Lola was indignant when she heard that they didn't give me a cookie after taking the blood. "Evil!" she said firmly), met with an anesthesiologist who measured my neck's circumference and took a good long look down my throat, and was shown where to check in on Thursday.

Everything seemed well-organized, with the only down point being when I asked about getting vegetarian food in the hospital. The person I was meeting with sighed. Fixing her gaze upon me with peculiar intensity, she said, "You can refuse the food. Remember that: you can refuse the food." No one needs to remind moi, a picky eater and vegetarian to boot, that I can refuse food. What I wanted to hear was that there would be something I might not need to refuse. This will be the third hospital in this town that I will have stayed in, and I haven't yet been served a vegetarian meal. The hospital where I had two surgeries in 2000 added insult to injury by sending me a flier in the mail a few months after my stay -- during which they didn't bring me a single vegetarian food --- about how I could improve my health and live longer by adopting a vegetarian lifestyle.

I picked up a couple of take-out menus from neighboring restaurants on my way back to my car. I don't think I'll be very hungry in the hospital (the last time I was hospitalized, I just went without eating for two days; if food came when the Sober Husband was visiting, he ate it), but if I do get hungry, I think "The Falafel King" is my best best.

cut off at the pass

I asked first grader Lola to tell me a story the other day while we were killing time, waiting for Iris uber Alles to finish her writing class. She happily obliged:

"Once there was a maaaaagic kitten, and he was just the size of a speck of dust. He lived on a blue couch! Then he traveled to Buttocks Land, where he met a pair of buttocks. They were very sad, because they had lost their toilet!"

"Stop right there. I don't like where this is headed."

the snit

So the Sober Husband has been gone this week on a business trip to the East Coast, and before that, he had a business obligation taking up the entire day on Saturday. Complicating matters Iris was sick during this whole time, leading to some stressful juggling on my part. The worst was on Saturday, when miserable, feverish Iris needed to stay home and perky, healthy Lola needed to be taken to a birthday party downtown, and my car was down the Peninsula with the Sober Husband.

What was shaping up to be a rough week got rougher when I had a sudden realization in the car the other day that time is up: my surgery is next week, and I'm not ready.

Meanwhile, the Sober Husband, ensconced in luxury hotels (why does he insist upon emailing photos of his suites and the magnificent views from the windows?), was out of touch with me. During the first few days of his trip, he sent a couple of emails to the children, but none to me. I answered the phone when he called, and he just said, "Put Iris on; I'm returning her call" and then hung up when he was through speaking to her. What a difference from the old days, when we talked on the phone for an hour or more every day whenever we were apart. On top of that, Iris was excited that he'd promised to take her to the Academy of Sciences during her upcoming vacation... which was when he was taking off work allegedly to take care of his post-surgical wife in the days immediately following her return from the hospital.

I became livid, particularly as I'd sent him off in style on his trip. (He'd effectively guilt-tripped me, saying, "What if my plane crashes? You'll want my last memories to be happy ones"). I sent a pissy note to him informing him that he was treating me as though I were nothing but the mother of his children and that if he didn't take care of me after my surgery, I was going to call a cab and check into a luxury hotel which offers room service, and I was going to stay there, charging up a storm, until I felt able to take care of myself, and I would no longer read his automated daily spending reports and budget nagging. He whined weakly that he "did email you", but I riposted that a picture of the view from his resplendent hotel signed "Love, Daddy" was not an email to me and did not count.

an elite group

Lola came home from first grade with a picture, which she kept concealed, but which I later saw was labeled "Purple Vampires Who Have Finished Law School."

This struck me as such an elite group: Vampires of a certain exotic pigmentation, who also must not have only been accepted to law school but also have completed their legal studies. It was a kindness, however, not to require the vampires to have all passed the bar exam.

clearing the decks

It's February already, and I'm seized with a feeling of doom. Back in December my fabulous surgeon scheduled me for "the first available surgery date", which was mid-February. Back then, that seemed so far away. Now all of a sudden it's here, and I am not feeling ready.

I scheduled a couple of fun things (next weekend we'll go out for a night of hardcore drinking with my favorite hard-drinking couple, the husband of which once said to me, "Open another bottle; I'm Scottish!". I held a brunch for the 'funemployed" members of my Warcraft guild, where we drank mimosas and ate a fresh-baked coffee cake and frittata while annoying the on-line strangers who ended up completing our dungeon group). I meant to declutter the house, get rid of all those bags of books I always claim I am going to take to the used bookstore, and finish some partially-done quilts, and I haven't done that. I wanted the Sober Husband to take a day off and go hiking with me around Muir Woods, while the children were stowed away at school, but that isn't going to happen. Instead he ended up doing two business trips (he's up in the frigid Northeast right now). I also wanted to see a play which just opened at one of my favorite theatres, but I don't think that's going to happen, either.

While most of the "have some fun before several really crappy weeks of convalescence" hasn't panned out, I'm trying to get a variety of child-related things taken care of before my surgery. I'm wrangling a variety of of obligations related to our applications to a school for gifted children [I took Lola for hours of additional testing; I drove Lola down the peninsula for her day visiting the school in the worst storm of the winter, hydroplaning twice and blurting out that classic prayer, "OhGodohGodohGod"; Iris also spent a day visiting there on another stormy day as well]. I've got a playdate finally set with Lola's new best friend from school, a delightful and very highly-scheduled child. I chaperoned a first grade field trip and helped the fourth grade do a sewing project. The art teacher invited me to come back and help more over the next several weeks, but I can't.

I wish I hadn't known so far ahead of time about this surgery. It just gives me too much time to dread it. The first time I had surgery, it came out of the blue: I was admitted to the hospital one night and operated on right off the next morning. If I'd had time to worry, my worries would have been washed right away by the handy morphine injections they were giving me.

I'm not finding much comfort anywhere or understanding of my dread, either. My own darling husband said, when I first told him that I was worried about having surgery, in a judgmental tone, "Well, you chose to go down this path by getting that ultrasound." [My psychiatrist first said, "What an odd thing to say!" but after pondering it, found the logic in it. "If you had just sucked it up and endured the pain, it is true you wouldn't have had that ultrasound and wouldn't be having surgery"]. Another loved one questioned why I would be spending two to three nights in the hospital, saying incredulously, "I thought they'd have you out right away!"

"It IS major abdominal surgery," I said defensively.

"I know someone who had that surgery, and two weeks later, she just repainted her whole house! She just went right outside, and she repainted that whole house! By herself!"

After that I had very little to say whatsoever. My surgeon has advised me to take an entire six weeks of convalescence, the first three weeks of which I should do absolutely nothing whatsoever, but I felt like the hero of "The Magic Mountain" when he was called upon to explain why he was spending the flower of his youth secluded in a sanitarium.

Indeed I stopped asking for help, since it didn't seem to be doing anything other than making me feel worse and to realize that people I like to think love me don't really, at least not as much as I like to think they do. This depressingly leads me to the conclusion that I am a supremely unlovable person. But! Support is coming from unexpected quarters. My mother-in-law, with whom I have always had a pained relationship, is flying in to be with the Sober Husband and the children while I am in the hospital. This will allow the Sober Husband to visit me in the hospital, which has strict rules forbidding child visitors. She also sent me a signed Mary Karr first edition to read during my convalescence, a very thoughtful gift indeed. A beloved friend from high school is flying in for a few days the second week after my surgery to do some cooking and drive the children around (this isn't unexpected because this friend is really very kind and conscientious, but unexpected because she's going to trouble and expense to help).

And then again, I feel like a loser for wanting help. I should be able to figure this out. If I were a different sort of person, a less lazy one, I would cook nutritious meals for my family for every day of my convalescence and freeze them all. In reality, the freezer unit on my refrigerator is very, very tiny, and it is almost entirely taken up with my ice cream maker (which I like to keep at the ready, in case someone gets a whim to make ice cream), several pounds of coffee, a couple ice cube trays, a bag of popcorn (Handy Hint: all the kernels pop if you keep them frozen), and the ends of puglieses I save for when I need good bread crumbs. Also, I don't cook the sorts of food which freeze well. The kind of food I cook tastes fabulous fresh, usually pretty good the next day, but just becomes a horrible mess if frozen. I remember some amazingly difficult Barcelonan dish I made in a large quantity and froze, which the Sober Husband said of dismissively, "Isn't this going to make us sick?"

If I'm not cooking gourmet, I'm having the children eat canned lentil soup or macaroni and cheese out of a box, and those things don't need to be frozen ahead of time. I like to excuse this sort of laziness and child-pandering on the basis that it's compensated for on the other days of the week, when I present the children with a delicious labor of love with a variety of fresh ingredients. In this case, they'll just have to have a few weeks under their father's care, whose skill is capped at making Ramen noodles.

The other problem is the driving. I won't be able to drive for a few weeks, and the children require driving, quite a lot of driving. I suspect at the least they'll miss their art classes and Lola's dance classes, Iris's book club and Lola's special comic book drawing outing. A few weeks of living on Ramen noodles and not being enriched shouldn't harm them too much, but I'm not looking forward to it myself. One Ramen meal a week is more than enough Ramen for me, personally.

it's the end of the world as we know it

In the car, Iris hummed and then sang out, "Leonard Bernstein!"

"Mom, do you know the words to 'It's The End of the World As We Know It"? " she asked presently.

"Not really," I admitted. "Were you thinking of the 'Pearls Before Swine' cartoon?" (In the "Pearls before Swine" collection Iris got for Christmas, there is a cartoon where two of the characters admit that although that is their favorite song, they only know the words "Leonard Bernstein").

Iris admitted she was thinking of that cartoon. I asked if she knew who Leonard Bernstein is.

"He invented the Bearenstain Bears."

I attempted to explain who Leonard Bernstein was, going so far as to sing bits of "West Side Story" tunes after pointing out the differences in pronunciation and spelling between "Bernstein" and "Bearenstain", but Iris was adamant. Arriving at her writing course at 826 Valencia St., I called upon the scruffy writer manning the pirate store to arbitrate our dispute. He informed Iris that Leonard Bernstein was a famous conductor who invented the Bearenstain Bears.

an entry in the ongoing study of a young hypochondriac

Today I insisted that we all walk down to the library, as I had overdue books and we all needed some exercise (and the rain had let up after five days of storms). Iris uber Alles was game, but Lola was upset.

"You need exercise, Lola! You haven't had any exercise today."

"Then why am I kicking my legs?" Lola, lying prone on the landing, kicked her legs listlessly over and over again, attempting to prove that she got more than enough exercise without being made to leave the home. This falling flat, Lola was compelled to go out.

As we walked down the hill, Lola explained that it makes her throat hurt to walk on a slant. This symptom was complained of all the way to the library.

pants, the overrated clothing

Iris uber Alles, like Lady GaGa (whom incidentally she admires greatly), likes to abstain from wearing pants. "Pants are overrated", Iris rants. Unlike Lady GaGa, Iris thankfully limits this behavior to the home, and lately she sports a bright pink Slanket. A day is a successful day in Iris's opinion when it can be spent entirely pantsless.

As Iris walked across a room in her pink Slanket, the effect is like that of a hospital gown (and indeed it made me preemptively cringe on my own behalf, as I'm scheduled to check into a hospital for a few days in the near future). This can lead to unwanted commentary. "Iris," chirped Lola sweetly, "your underpants are just dazzling today!"

Lola plays the race card

We've been assailed by vicious storms these last few days, storms which we welcome heartily with the hope that our drought-afflicted reservoirs will recover, but from which we recoil in fear of traffic accidents and power outages (it took me two hours yesterday to make what should have been a 42 minute drive on 280; two horrendously stressful, white-knuckle hours during which I hydroplaned twice and drove past three accidents). The children and I looked about cautiously as we were leaving the house to take Iris to her evening writing class. "Is it going to rain?" they asked me.

"I think so."

Lola took offense. "You're racist!"

"What?" I didn't get where that was coming from.

Lola explained. "Maybe that is a colored person cloud, not a rain cloud. You're racist!"

I stared at Lola nonplussed. Iris explained. It turns out there was an all-school assembly today in honor of the Dr. Martin Luther King, and Lola was quite impressed by it. Why she would take this new-found commitment to acceptance to turn against her own mother, who baked a cake on MLK Day in remembrance of one of the most celebrated graduates of her own beloved university, Boston University, though, remains obscure.

dashing

an original song, sung in a sweet, tuneful voice by Lola:

Have you looked at your buttocks this morning?
They are looking so dashing.
You should look at your buttocks right now.
They are looking so dashing.
Are they looking dashing, are they looking dashing?
I think they are...

Oh... who doesn't like buttocks?

I am even better than a cat

Seven year-old Lola presented me with a bright pink Post-it note. It said:

a poem
MOMMA RULES
MOMMA RULES
HATERS DROOL
MOMMA ADORES
KILLERS IGNORE
MOMMA IS BETTER THAN THAT
EVEN A CAT

I was deeply moved as Lola said proudly, "Even better than a cat!"

making friends in the insect kingdom

I ran across an interesting Carolyn Hax advice column today, where an aggrieved mother-in-law complained about a disastrous Thanksgiving visit which had led to an estrangement with her son's family.

On Friday morning, the new wife said she had bug bites. I said that twice in the past I had bites also and thought they were from bedbugs. We had done some Internet searching and gone to my dermatologist and discovered bedbugs are not medically dangerous and not the result of uncleanliness. We gave her hydrocortisone and sympathized with her.

That evening, they moved into the hotel. Our son said his wife was absolutely adamant that they get out of our home as soon as possible. She has the reputation of being a "strong" woman, and she earns a very high income, so she is able always to get her way.

My husband and I felt embarrassed and disappointed that she reacted that way, but we are aware that a first-time, 45-year-old mother probably had mother-bear hormones at play, and we don't blame our son too much for giving in to her demands.

Leaving aside the spellbindingly unsubtly veiled hatred of the "new wife", this letter fascinated me due to the accepting approach the writer took towards bedbugs. She "discovered bedbugs are not medically dangerous and not the result of uncleanliness", and so she decided to do nothing about them but instead live with them peacefully. This reminded me of someone I know with the same live-and-let live attitude about parasites.

Last year there was a major lice infestation in Iris uber Alles's class at school. Iris did not go unscathed (by the end of the year, 70% of her class had lice), and there was a lot of sturm und drang at the school. There were many parents who took a very common sense attitude and just worked hard to eradicate the lice without drama. There were other parents who also worked hard to get rid of the lice, but who had some drama along the way (some wanted a scheduled overnight field trip canceled). And there were some parents whose children (allegedly) did not have lice, who you would think would be happily sitting on the sidelines, but had a lot of drama anyhow regarding those of us who did and got it treated. Several parents weighed in that those of us using professional lice treatment clinics were idiots.

Most memorably one mother sent a couple of angry emails to the class email list, rather condescending emails about how she is a medical professional who "could not remain silent any more", so anger-provoking were our emails back and forth about the status of treatment and preventive measures. We needed to know that lice were not considered a disease in many countries, and that many schools do not check for lice, and we should just let the lice go. (It is true that some public schools in our area no longer check for lice, but it's because they cannot afford to stay lice-free. Schools get funds based on each day that a child actually attends, and a child who must stay away due to lice causes a little cessation of state funding. Additionally, one district determined it would no longer bar lousy children because the lousy children would perform poorly on tests if they missed a lot of school, and this could result in a loss of school funding and local administrative control under the No Child Left Behind laws).

At school one day I had the misfortune to run into that angry, louse-loving mother. The conversation amongst the parents waiting for their third graders turned, naturally, to the ongoing lice epidemic, and that mother glared at me angrily, and, with a loud, raised voice and with veins visible in her forehead, ranted, "LICE IS NOT A DISEASE!!"

"I never said it was," I said firmly. "But it's a disgusting parasite which I don't want to live with. You can live without parasites." The louse-lover was disgusted and furious, and she stomped off. Another mother whispered to me, "She thinks we should all just learn to live with them. She thinks that's the right thing, like those countries where they do that."

"Where do they do that?" I've lived on three continents but had never met a louse-lover before.

"England. I think she used to live in England."

plays well with others?

First grader Lola was upset when her older sister quit playing a game with her and burst into a room, handed Iris a note, and ran out. Iris looked at the note and said incredulously, "Lola just gave me a note saying 'Play another round or you go hell"!?" When that note failed to pay dividends, Lola acquired a huge poster-sized piece of paper and wrote, "ANOTHER ROUND OR GO HELL love Lola" in foot-tall letters.

the look which is not of love

First-grader Lola reports excitedly, "Iris is looking at me with guilt!"

the further adventures of Lola's friend, Audrey

"Okay so once upon a time, there was a venomous fly trap, and it bit Audrey. This was not just any Venus fly trap, it was a poisonous venus fly trap. And then she got very very sick, and she was just a second away from dying, but she didn't die. She lived on and on. "

(This particular story has been repeated to me by the Sober Husband, Iris uber Alles, and Lola herself).

being pressured into discovering one's true team

It has probably escaped almost nobody's attention that "Twilight" in all its forms has gripped the girls of North America with a firm, expensive grasp. I myself read all the Twilight novels last year, on the theory that in a few years Iris uber Alles would be reading them and so I should stay on the jump and know what the phenomenon was all about [I found the books weirdly absorbing for something so repetitive(how many hundreds of pages about dry humping can one woman write??), and I commend the author for her creative revision of the vampire and werewolf mythologies].

Fourth grader Iris uber Alles brought up Twilight with me some time ago. She shared that a friend of hers was very ostentatiously reading the books "but she doesn't understand them, I don't think." I told her that I thought the books were fun but highly repetitive and that they probably wouldn't make so much sense to a pre-adolescent, who wouldn't quite understand why a tortured teen would act like hormonally-driven Bella. Iris decided to wait a couple of years before getting into the whole Twilight thing.

Then the "New Moon" movie came out. Suddenly the fourth grade joined the higher grades, which had already been Twilight-obsessed (when I read the books, I was unable to get them from my private library or from the school library, as the private library had abstained from buying them and the school library's were always checked out. My friend and hairdresser loaned me the first one, and I bought copies of the others, which I donated to our school library after reading. The librarians were grateful indeed to get more copies). Evidently Twilight is now the primary topic, and all the fourth graders were reportedly taken to the movie, which they to a child loved.

Iris felt left out and felt a lot of peer pressure to see this movie. "My reputation will be ruined if I don't see it." But neither of her parents wanted to take her. I let it slide, hoping someone would invite her if they went back to see it again or that she'd forget about it. Then I unfolded a piece of paper I found in the kitchen and discovered a list she'd composed and left lying around the house, a list of arguments for her being allowed to see the film. I realized this was a much bigger deal than I'd thought, and I decided to get Iris to that damn movie.

First I devised a fun and painless plan. We would invite a friend of Iris's who also hadn't seen the movie, and I would take the girls to a particular theatre which has lovely tables and couches just outside the entrance to the screening rooms, near the popcorn vendor. I would stay there, on a couch or at a table, with an engrossing book and my laptop, while the girls enjoyed a modicum of independence and saw the film by themselves (the Sober Husband argued a bit that I should be right by the girls, which I countered by saying that we were overprotective parents and that I'd be right nearby and that if anyone bothered Iris, she could say, "My mother and attorney is here if you would like to speak to her"). This ran into a snag when the invited friend (who attends a different elementary school, a Catholic school, where it appears the nuns and priests have kept that damn vampire nonsense out for the most part) reported back that after some investigation, her father had decided she wasn't allowed to see that film and could we go to "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" instead on that same night?

Seldom defeated entirely, I created a new plan which was also pain-free. I suggested strongly to the Sober Husband that he take Iris to the film on his last night of holiday vacation, so Iris could return to the fourth grade no longer a Twilight ignoramus, able to hold her head up high and proclaim some opinions. He recoiled on the grounds that he needed to get some sleep before returning to work, but I shot that down, pointing out that an early showing would work just dandy with his REM cycle. Iris booked the tickets on the spot using the Sober Husband's iPhone. That night they set out, the Sober Husband having no idea what he was in for. I instructed him tongue-in-cheek upon his departure, "When you come back, you need to tell me whether you are on Team Edward or Team Jacob." [This inspired Iris to inform us quite gravely which team each of her friends is on. They really do take their teams seriously, these girls].

When they came back, Iris was buzzing. She couldn't stand still, and "Yeah. It was great."

"Was it better than 'Avatar'?"

Pause. "They were about the same. Both good!"

"Which team are you on?"

(very emphatically) "Team Jacob!!"

"Who is your favorite vampire?"

"The Volturi!"

"But those are the bad guys."

"They're Italian and cool! They have style!" [Iris uber Alles vacationed in Italy as a toddler, and it was a formative experience].

The Sober Husband said, "Can I whisper something in your ear?" He had no opportunity until much later after I'd had a long talk with Iris about what was good about the movie (Taylor Lautner), what was not good (Bella "is just depressed and doesn't do anything, she doesn't have a personality") and my question, "How much do the vampires sparkle?" answered ("A lot. It's like they're suns, with rays coming out of them"). Finally the Sober Husband said to me vehemently, "That was the worst movie I ever sat through. It was PAINFUL."

"Why do you think I wanted you to go? Why did you think I wanted to sit in the lobby?"

lost

Over dessert tonight, Lola asked out of the blue, "Did I miss anything? I was lost in the whipped cream."

the sweet love between mother and child

Yesterday I made the children go hiking in Marin, since we were all in desperate need of some exercise and I felt like seeing some nature. This was a deeply unwelcome activity to the children. As Iris noted, "If you wanted me to be so into nature, why did you have me in a city?"

At one point we crossed a creek on a little board bridge. Crabby fourth-grader Iris said vehemently, "I could fall and hit my head!" I had a hard time restraining my laughter. Iris upped the ante.

"If I fall, I am going to sue you!"

"I'm not going to send any children who sue me to summer camp." (Iris uber Alles has taken to perusing summer camp websites like a adolescent boy looks at porn).

"I could have a concussion! I could die! I am going to sue you!"

"If you sue me, I am NEVER sending you to summer camp, and I'm not having any more birthday parties for you, ever."

"Stop threatening me!"

"You threatened me first!"

"I stopped threatening you, so you stop threatening me."

I guess she won't be reading much Dan Brown

The Sober Husband mentioned the Holy Grail. He was referring to Monty Python, but he ended up having to explain the concept of the Grail and the Crusades to fourth grader Iris uber Alles. "Let me get this straight," she said. "They went on a quest to find some cup? Were they idiots? It's just a cup! They didn't even know what it looked like! It could have been any cup!"

Frowstcam

Iris gave me a wonderful Christmas present, something I had been longing for: a petcam. It is a small camera which you clip on a pet's collar, which then takes a picture every fifteen minutes to document what your pet has been up to. We specifically wanted this to see what our most glamorous pet, longhaired Frowst, got up to.

"I'm afraid we'll see a lot of dead animals", one child worried. Disagreeing, "I think we'll see his friends and other houses," a family optimist said.

What we have learned is that Frowst is much more boring than anyone suspected. You can see that he often spends over an hour without moving. When he does move, he generally seems to lurk about in trees.

I never noticed that he went under our beds, but he spent an hour lying next to Iris's rollerblades. This is all extremely disillusioning.

It's not all over for the petcam, though. I plan to attach it to the Sober Husband when he goes back to work. "I could just take a picture every now and then," he offered, but I said that wouldn't be the same.

"You'd be thinking about it then, and you'd plan the pictures. This will be different."

a holiday thought from Lola

Recently Lola presented her father with a beautifully drawn, colorful, sweet Christmas card, showing him getting his Christmas stocking. "Awww," I said. "I'm jealous."

Lola then happily presented me with her handmade Christmas card for me:
It's Holiday Road-Raging Mommy! I especially love how I'm driving on the wrong side of the road. Lola explained, "You are shouting at idiots! See, you are saying, 'Hurry up, it's Christmas!'"

one miracle of St. Audrey

Audrey, a child in the first grade, exercises a sort of fascination over Lola, who believes every word Audrey says. "Once Audrey was at the top of the climbing structure [at school], and she fell off, but a big wind came, and she floated, and she landed on top of the roof [of the kindergarten building]!"

"Lola, you know THAT'S NOT TRUE!" said big sister Iris, who finds these Audrey stories maddening.

"But Audrey told me," insisted Lola.

they like big butts

Iris, who is a sponge for pop culture, was singing that enduring classic, "I like big butts" around the house the other day. "Lucy! You sing it, too!" she commanded her little sister.

After a pause, Lola, who didn't know the words, gamely sang, "I like big butts when I have them for dinner."

the disagreement

Last night we were driving home after seeing "The Hard Nut" (enjoyed greatly by fourth grader Iris uber Alles and me; first grader Lola wanted to leave early. I myself could watch fifty-something, paunchy Mark Morris dance forever; that man is magic). Somehow the Sober Husband brought up the subject of Arthur Kade, who exercises the kind of fascination over me that a maggot-ridden corpse would for a small boy with a stick.

The Sober Husband (who has not even read Arthur Kadyshes' stupid website or watched his maddening videos) opined that Arthur Kade is a genius and an artist, a performance artist.

"No! He's not! He is for real!" squawked Iris (also an Arthur love/hater) and me.

"You're just saying that because of Sacha Baron Cohen and the Borat movie, but Arthur's for real," I said.

"Yes, Daddude, a guy from 'Philadelphia' magazine followed him around for a couple of days, and he's for real!" Iris said very earnestly, but her father was not to be dissuaded.

"He is an artist. He makes me think of Andy Kaufman." [There followed a long, squabbly and emotional debate, where I called Andy Kaufman "a comedic genius" and the Sober Husband called him "a horrible person who shouldn't be on TV." So why, if the Sober Husband dislikes Andy Kaufman so much, was he comparing Arthur Kade, whom he proclaimed to be a genius and an artist, to him?].

The Sober Husband would not back down on this issue, and he grew loud and animated. "Look at you. You're torqued because I called Arthur Kade an artist and a genius. That proves he is. He has such a powerful effect on you. I can't believe calling him an artist torques you like that."

"Ummm, Daddude, can you focus on driving? I hate to say it, but you are waving your hands around, and the car is moving around," said Iris worriedly. It was true. The car was weaving as the Sober Husband, with shining eyes, gestured and ranted about Arthur's genius and artistry.

"I am going to be really torqued if you get into an accident because you are calling Arthur Kade a genius and comparing him to Andy Kaufman. I will be laughed off The Lego Wig," I said very firmly.

"Why is that called 'the Lego Wig'?"

"Because Arthur got this really bad free haircut from his stepmother, and someone posted on his blog, 'Arthur, you appear to be wearing a wig made from Legos', and everyone thought that was funny."

Iris laughed uproariously. A wig made from Legos! We were all able to join together, for a moment of pretend harmony, in ridiculing Arthur's hair.

love blossoms, but not politeness

Today we drove to Doggy-o to pick up the Sober Husband after work. While we were waiting in the tiny parking lot, fourth grader Iris uber Alles got out of the car and tried to moon her little sister. Iris was not tall enough to effectively moon, and so she was trying to jump up in the air while bent over with her butt stuck out. Little sister Lola shrieked and shrieked with laughter, and then shouted exuberantly, "I LOVE IRIS!" Then reality sunk in, and Lola said, "Oh my God, did you hear that? I love Iris? I LOVE IRIS? What is this?"

Eventually the Sober Husband showed up. On the way home Iris shared about how she'd been forced to write an essay about the meaning of Christmas with a classmate, and she was assigned to work with the child she considers her archnemesis, a very religious girl given to correcting Iris, and as a result, their joint essay was largely about the Baby Jesus. Iris wondered aloud why non-religious people celebrate Christmas, and her father attempted to explain, until this civilized discussion of ideas about Christmas was interrupted by first grader and noted Jesus fan Lola shouting, "YOU ARE A JEW! SHUT YOUR YAPHOLE!" In yet another display of hideously bad parenting, I was taken by a fit of uncontrollable laughter lasting several blocks.

Pigwidgeon as Pygmalion

The Sober Husband has been very sarcastic about my African grey parrot's failure to speak. Pigwidgeon spoke on one memorable occasion, when desperate for attention (the girls and I were ignoring her while we ate lunch), she said, "Hello" in a sweet, piping voice, and we fawned over her for hours. She never spoke again.

"My parrot can talk," the Sober Husband snarks. "Yours is stupid."

We researched the matter and learned that most African greys don't talk until 1-2 years old. Therefore Piggle is not delayed in her speech. However, I tasked bored Lola with working on Piggle's speech. Seven year-old Lola took this assignment very seriously and went off to write down some phrases to teach the parrot. Returning, she pulled up a chair next to Pigwidgeon's play tree and, in a very serious voice, intoned certain phrases over and over again, including notably, "[The Sober Husband] was wrong. [The Sober Husband] was wrong."

packing

Iris has a sleepover tonight, and Lola is happy to send her off. "Pack your bags, Iris! Pack them fast! Pack them fast!"

a doctor and a plan

Today I saw the specialist, a doctor whose practice is devoted to fibroid tumors, and I liked her a lot. She discussed my ultrasound results, gave me a physical exam, and covered the various options, and we made a plan. I will have a hysterectomy on "the first available date", which will most likely not be until late January or even February.

I feel so relieved. The Sober Husband was just dismayed and depressed sounding when I called him to fill him in, but he kept to his prior commitment not to second guess me or my medical advisor of choice (and I am so glad to finally have a doctor handling this whom I like and respect).

a pleasure wasted on the young

The other day I was playing Warcraft, and someone was seeking others to join him in a twenty-five person raid. One of my guildmates reacted: "I hate that guy!" I asked why, and my guildie elaborated. "He only does .624 damage. He dies all the time; he's always bugging the druids for battle rezzes." My guildmate went on and on, thoroughly dissecting and condemning this other player, finally winding up by saying, "He's fourteen."

"He should understand that Warcraft is a game for the middle-aged," I said.

My guildmates, who are almost without an exception middle-aged, all agreed. Perhaps in twenty-five years this other player might mature into a good Warcraft player. In the meantime "someone should send him a 'Hello Kitty Island Adventure' membership" one snarked.

a raw fish

"Did you know Audrey ate a raw fish?" asked first grader Lola. "I heard about it at school. Once Audrey was at the beach, and there was a big wave coming [measures about 2 feet with hands], and she wanted to drink it. So she opened her mouth really wide, and she drank it in.... AND THERE WAS A FISH IN IT! So she ate that raw fish."

(This is the same Lola who treats virtually every utterance coming from her mother's lips with complete disbelief and condescension).

medical update

I now have an appointment next week with the doctor who is basically the local authority on this sort of tumor I have: her entire practice is devoted to this. Previously I tried in vain to get an appointment with her and couldn't get anything before January, but my persistent husband called several times and got me shoehorned in. Emboldened, I canceled my appointment for Tuesday with Dr. Condescension. I'm feeling much more sanguine now, hoping to get this dealt with quickly. I'll be so happy to stop having to cold call doctors, much less see them in person and endure their doctorly antics.

the outlaws and Lola

"Cats have no laws," observed Lola, who added sadly, "I have so many, so many laws that apply to me."

well, that was a waste of a morning and $170

So today I went off to try a new doctor, at a boutique medical firm recommended to me by countless friends. To a person these friends all rave about how their doctors have so much time for them, are such good listeners, send them email all the time, etc... In order to step foot across the threshold one must pay an annual membership fee, on top of having acceptable insurance and paying all the regular copays (a steep $40 for every visit in my case). I was happy and optimistic as I went downtown. I also had a printout in hand from my October ultrasound, with detailed measurements and descriptions of my tumor (the one thing which went right in all of this medical hell was that I went to the medical record offices at UCSF yesterday in person and got that printout promptly from a very friendly black woman).

In contrast to my friends' experiences, with doctors who have all the time in the world for them, the first thing this new doctor said to me was, "I hope they told you I only have a few minutes for you." He did not prove to be a good listener. I had filled out a form noting that I take Xanax, and I told him "it's for insomnia, NOT anxiety; I have no anxiety problems." I'd barely said that when he riposted, "Are you seeing a psychiatrist for your anxiety disorder?"

And what I came away with was nothing but a list of other doctors for me to cold call. Like Dr. Baby Gay whom I saw before, this male doctor knows nothing of the female organs, doesn't want to contemplate the female anatomy, and doesn't even want to discuss the female organs. Why is it that a tumor, just because it happens to be attached to a uterus, is so untouchable and icky? Why do uterus-phobic doctors accept appointments with women? Note: I was not expecting him to operate on my tumor personally, but I did expect him, as my new primary care physician, to want to make the arrangements for my care. Back in the old days when I had a doctor and needed surgery, my doctor set it up. I'd never met the surgeon and gastroenterologist who both operated on me back in 2000 before I went under the anesthesia; my old doctor arranged it all (and I read a profile of my surgeon in the Wall St Journal during my convalescence).

I was distraught when I left. I've put a lot of time into coldcalling doctors, and I'm not eager to work my way down a new list of unknown doctors. I have no faith in today's doctor to give me a good recommendation, either. He just picked some names off a hospital's practice list after I was unenthusiastic about his first choice, whom he raved was "a real holistic practitioner." "What does that mean?" I asked. "She's really good with herbs," he said. I looked at him. "I'm really more of a science type," I said dryly. What I need at this moment in time is a surgeon, not some herbal remedies. "So someone more allopathic," he said with disdain, and he pulled up the list of faculty from a local hospital on his computer.

When I got home, I looked up "allopathic", which Wikipedia says is a term "coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy. It meant 'other than the disease' and it was intended, among other things, to point out how traditional doctors used methods that had nothing to do with the symptoms created by the disease and which, in Hahnemann's view, meant that these methods were harmful to the patients.. . . During the 19th century it was used widely among irregular doctors as a pejorative term for regular doctors. In the United States the term 'allopathic' has been used by persons not related to homeopathy, but it has never been accepted by the medical establishment, and is not a label that such individuals apply to themselves."

I think we can safely say I will not ever see this fancy new doctor, who sneers at science-oriented doctors as "allopathic", again. Going to this expensive boutique was supposed to solve my healthcare problems, but I'm back at square one, just out $170. Leaving the office I felt the familiar pain in my abdomen, and tears sprang to my eyes. I choked them back and trudged to the subway.

okay, okay, I came to my senses

I got a lot of responses on and off the blog about my post yesterday where I wrote about my fibroid diagnosis and how I'm going back to the same crappy doctor I hated to deal with it. To a one, the readers felt I was making a big mistake seeing Dr Condescension again.

Also, I got out my calendar to look up when I'd had the ultrasound, and it took Dr. Condescension one full month to get back to me with my test results. Irritatingly enough the sweet nurse who finally called me was kind of panicky sounding that she couldn't get me in within a week for an appointment to set up a treatment... which was ironic since a month had already gone by.

I am willing to take a big part of the blame there. When I never heard back within a week or two, I should have called and nagged them to pull the test results and look at them. In my defense, I had meningitis and felt like crap and could barely do anything, but still, if one doesn't hear back about test results, one should call up and be persistent.

I spent a couple hours this morning trying to get a new doctor. I can't see the fibroids specialist who heads up a special fibroids clinic until January. Every single primary care doctor recommended by a friend is not accepting new patients. I ended up agreeing to an unheard-of doctor at a recommended practice, whom I will see tomorrow morning. If I don't like him, I can try another doctor in that practice (and I will, since I've paid $129 as a new patient fee to get my foot in the door at that boutique practice). I'm leaving my appointment with Dr. Condescending on the calendar for now, and I am keeping open an appointment in January with the hotshot fibroids doctor as fallbacks.

I just wish my old doctor hadn't left. I've had the same bad luck trying to get a new dentist since my Dr. Huey moved to Arizona. Thankfully my children have a good doctor and a good dentist.

the chosen path

Along with a painful bout of meningitis, I've been suffering from persistent lower abdominal pain (and a variety of other annoying little symptoms I will spare the reader by not describing) this fall. Unfortunately this came at a time when my beloved Dr. Stephanie Scott had abandoned her patients, leaving the world of private practice in San Francisco to join Kaiser Oakland.

Doctorless, I decided to try a friend's doctor. That doctor was not accepting new patients, so that was a no go. Next I decided to find a doctor through recommendations on Yelp. This led to my discovering the top rated doctor on Yelp, who was conveniently located on the very same floor of the very same building where my beloved Dr. Scott had been. However, he was booked up solid, and I ended up getting booked to see his young associate. Yelpers seemed to feel that if you couldn't see the Wonder Doctor, you would be okay seeing his junior sidekick, so I went ahead with the appointment. I showed up early to the appointment, assuming that I would need to detail my checkered medical past on forms before meeting my new doctor for the first time. Instead, the office only cared about my insurance history. They had no interest whatsoever in learning a thing about my health past.

The doctor, a young gay man just out of medical school, seemed unsure of himself in dealing with a middle-aged straight woman. He also had no interest in learning about my medical past and also had no questions for me about anything which might relate to my reproductive system, which happens to be of the yucky female sort. The baby gay doctor decided, after a brief consultation following an extremely long, boring wait on my part, that I most likely had diverticulosis. I researched diverticulosis on my own (Dr. Baby Gay didn't bother to take the time to explain it to me) and learned that it is little irritated pockets in the colon and large intestine. It is believed that these irritated pockets form due to a lack of fiber in a person's diet, and they cause pain and constipation. That diagnosis was asinine. First of all, I don't suffer from constipation, and second of all, as a vegetarian I eat a diet rich in fiber. Diverticulosis is a disease for fast-food grubbing meateaters.

After my unsatisfying encounter with Dr. Baby Gay, I got side-tracked from the abdominal pain by coming down with meningitis. The Sober Husband asked me at one point how my abdominal pain was, and I said it was like how you'd feel if you were in a lot of stomach pain but then got hit on the head by a hammer repeatedly. You'd be distracted by the hammer too much to notice the stomach pain.

While I was recovering from meningitis, I dragged myself over to try out a new gynecologist and see what he had to say about my pain. At least he, whether he were gay or straight, would not be so yucked out by a woman's feminine anatomy as to pretend it didn't exist. This new doctor proved to be immensely condescending (every single thing I said, he had a condescending comeback to), and I disliked him intensely. However, he scheduled me for an ultrasound, and I kept that ultrasound appointment.

After the ultrasound, I got a bill right off the bat, but no one called me to discuss the test results. Dr. Condescension had assured me that he or his nurse would be in touch with me as soon as the results came back. When I never heard from them, I figured that was because the news was that there was no news and nothing showed up on the ultrasound. Indeed Dr. Condescension had disagreed with me (in a condescending matter, natch) when I had brought up the possibility that it was a fibroid tumor which was my problem. He felt that I was being stupid by speculating that, so of course he must have been proven right by the ultrasound. I also thought the ultrasound must have shown nothing interesting because I had been able to leave the ultrasound without a doctor being called in (I learned years ago, when I had an ultrasound which revealed gallstones plugging up my bile duct and a severely diseased gallbladder, that there is an emergency call button in the ultrasound office, so if the tech sees something freakout-worthy, a doctor may be summoned while the patient is still recumbent upon the ultrasound recliner).

I decided that I'd keep gathering doctor recommendations and try out another doctor in December, and I felt fine not doing anything right off as I'd had an ultrasound which must have been normal. Then the phone rang, weeks after that damn ultrasound. Dr. Condescending's nurse shared that I do indeed have a massive fibroid tumor, over three inches wide and three inches tall and about two and a half inches around, and it needs to come out. Dr. Condescension suddenly needed to see me ASAP to discuss my treatment options, but yet, despite the urgency, Dr. Condescension didn't have any time to see me for over a week.

After I got that call, I felt pretty upset, and I felt scared about getting major abdominal surgery. I called my greatly beloved husband of eleven years, the Sober Husband, at his office and blurted out the bad news to him and then shared my fear of surgery. The Sober Husband's words of comfort? He said, "You chose to go down this path" in a voice making it clear that if a person whimsically chooses to go have an ultrasound, she needs to deal with the surgical consequences like an adult.

After this second upsetting call, I took a few moments to calm down. After all, I should have known better than to expect the Sober Husband to be calming and reassuring without advance notice. The man benefits from having my expectations of him spelled out clearly, and so I went off and emailed him, explaining in very few words that my expectations were that (1) he would not question my judgment whatsoever in setting up treatment and would not ever say that I "chose" this unnecessarily and (2) he would take a couple of days off work when, as expected, I have surgery. (I know that there are controversial non-surgical treatments involving massive hormone doses, and I am not willing to choose the hormone path. There is also the option of just living with the fibroid tumor, as it is 99.99% sure not to be malignant, but I'm not willing to do that, either, given my pain and other symptoms. That would be essentially saying that I am willing to go on living as though I were in the second or third trimester of pregnancy with a fetus pressing on my organs and pelvis indefinitely, and that is not a pleasing option).

My plan is to stick with Dr. Condescending long enough to get a referral to a surgeon and a surgery date. Then I will post a scathing review of him on Yelp and never go to his office again. My hope is that I will be able to have surgery over the Christmas holidays, as that will be a convenient time for the Sober Husband to take off from work and be with Iris and Lola and help me out while I convalesce. My fears are that Dr. Condescending will himself want to do the surgery and that I won't be able to schedule it until January, which will be a busy month for the Sober Husband where it will be awkward for him to take time off. But of course, one might say that I chose this path, and therefore it's my own damn fault if I don't get to the end of it before January.

the mafia for beginners

"Did you know Lucy is in the first grade mafia? It's a group of individuals in organized crime who are all in the first grade," narked Iris today. "They go around attacking some people and protecting others. They attack kids that are bigger than them, not littler, and they protect ones that are little."

"Oh, no," demurred organized crime figure Lola. "Sometimes we attack kids that are littler than us."

eh, meh, feh

We had a lovely, quiet Thanksgiving. Yesterday I was happy and relaxed and busy. Today I'm feeling overwhelmed by stress.

This fall I had meningitis, and Lola is having a rough year at school. The Sober Husband created a custom nagging program, which sends me an email every day detailing my credit card and checking spending (upside: reduced spending and heightened ability to live within our means; downside: daily nagging, and also the Sober Husband often reclaims the best laptop to keep rewriting this little piece of software). After months of abdominal pain and a variety of other unappetizing symptoms, I have a diagnosis of a tumor bigger than my fist. On the bright side, it's 99.99% believed to be benign, but on the other hand, I need to have it surgically removed. I really dislike the doctor I've seen for this, but on the other hand, do I want to wait until I can find a doctor I like before dealing with this? The Sober Husband has also been highly stressed this past fall at work.

Iris has been the best off of all of us, but she's been suffering from chronic headaches. An initial attempt at treating her headaches through medication was an odd failure. Her doctor suggested a prescription antihistamine, and Iris and I were eager to try it, but the Sober Husband balked. He insisted upon setting up an experiment where Iris would be randomly medicated or given a placebo. He purchased empty capsules and decanted the contents of Iris's medicine into some of these capsules and filled the others with sugar. Iris was enthused at first at this experiment but soon tired of it. "I wish I could just take my medicine," she confided when her father was safely away at work. However, even with the intermittent taking of her medication, Iris was able to figure out that she was having the downsides (dry mouth, dry throat, sleepiness) without enough improvement in her headaches, and she gave up the meds. Iris has also been troubled by her teeth: several times when an adult tooth has grown in, her baby tooth refused to fall out, and the two teeth became somehow stuck together for several months. We refer to this as "a snaggle", and these snaggleteeth plague poor Iris (but again, Iris has otherwise been on the ascendant. "I have my teachers wrapped around my finger," she confided one day).

Today-- the day after Thanksgiving -- is the one day of the year when a person most needs a microwave for warming up leftovers. This is the day my elderly microwave chose to die, shorting out part of the kitchen in its death throes. "It had to take the toaster with it," I said darkly, but the Sober Husband assured me the toaster could be resuscitated. He opened up the microwave, which had some interesting radioactivity warnings inside, but several hours of surgery determined that the microwave was warming up leftovers in heaven or hell and not to be lured back to our earthly kitchen.

don't accept a drink from Lola

Yesterday first grader Lola and I were relaxing on the big bed, Lola watching old Pee Wee's Playhouse episodes and me playing Warcraft. Lola made me look at her, and she gazed at me sternly while speaking in a tiny voice without moving her lips (she may have a future in ventriloquism). In that tiny voice, she issued a series of minor commands, and she looked at me searchingly. After a while, she stopped and confessed. "I was trying to hallucinate you."

talking points

Around our house, the beaten-down-by-life parents do not stay awake long after the lively, sleep-avoiding children have finally succumbed to slumber. Typically there's a brief period of time where I play a bit of Warcraft on a laptop in bed while the Sober Husband reads a piece of serious non-fiction.

Lately, however, he's been feeling talkative at night. I am not talkative after 10 p.m., having talked plenty to Iris and Lola since picking them up at school. A few nights ago he sank into a state of angst where he was unveiling an epic amount of existential despair related to a work matter, at the very time I was trying to slip into peaceful sleep after having taken a sleeping pill. However, that was the same day I had told him, after an unpleasant morning conversation about money, that I felt the only conversations we ever had were about my spending and our budget. Therefore the Sober Husband went on the offensive over my reluctance to talk at length over his angst, saying that he was bringing up a fresh topic of conversation aside from money and that I should be grateful. (Lest I be cast forever as a Callous, Uncaring Spouse, I should note that this very same work topic had been discussed to death on a nigh-daily basis for about six weeks).

In the morning, fresh from some sleep, I brought up his work issues and talked and talked at them. However, that night, after the children were in bed, once again he was talking, and this time it was about evolutionary biology. Always a serious man, the Sober Husband listens to podcasts of Yale lectures on his way to work, and lately it's a series of evolutionary biology classes. He made me avert my eyes from Warcraft and look at some diagram of the Tree of Life. He began to realize just how ignorant I was (in my defense, I said, "You can't imagine the extent of what is not taught at crappy public schools in rural areas"). He droned on and on about the bacteria found in human excrement ("Stop being scatological," I said) and about how sexual selection is largely mythologized, until, feeling pummeled by heavy scientific words the meaning of which I couldn't understand, until I broke and said, "STOP! It is too late! This is too heavy!"

A resentful silence, and then he said, "I was just talking. This is what's on my mind" and then "You have too many rules for talking."

"You're not talking, you're LECTURING."

We both went to sleep in the ensuing resentful silence, his side of the bed the one devoted to lofty scientific thought, mine the side of the bed with a Janet Evanovich and a C.J. Box novel underneath it.

In the morning I accosted him. "Look at me! I'm rested! I'm caffeinated! Now is when you can talk to me about heavy things!" I had thought about his accusation of "too many rules for talking", and I felt that there was in fact only one rule, which I imparted: "After I go to bed, I'm tired. I want things light. Only light conversation! Like a cute thing Iris did or a cute thing [Employee] did. In the morning, that is when you can get heavy." I drove him to work, and we brainstormed a managerial problem he has all the way to his office.

more rules about walking

Today as Lola and I walked to school to pick up Iris, Lola was trying to enforce her walking sensibility upon me. She was bothered that I stepped on the yellow lines in the crosswalk, which is very bad luck. With great solicitude, Lola inquired if I had stepped on any dragonflies.

"No. What happens if I step on a dragonfly?"

"If you step on a dragonfly.... If you step on a dragonfly... I don't know!" Lola pondered and then said triumphantly, "If you step on a dragonfly, you will apologize... in hell!"

sharing happy news

The other morning as the Sober Husband was about to leave for work, I shared with him, "I just became an Exalted Champion of Orgrimmar!" [I like to start the day by running some quests on Warcraft, using his vastly superior laptop, while he's driving the girls to school, before he takes that computer away for the day].

He said, voice dripping with sarcasm, "We should go out to celebrate."

superstitions

Today first grader Lola and I were walking hand in hand, and Lola said sternly to me, "Stepping on an acorn is bad luck." (I had been walking carelessly, with disregard for both cracks in the sidewalk and acorns). Lola thought and added, "It is also bad luck to drop a peacock feather. A peacock will appear and peck a hair out of your head! And it will hurt FOREVER!"

an alarming symptom

Last night seven year-old Lola had trouble going to bed because, as her father reported, "her left nostril hurts." Lola corrected that. "It FEELS WEIRD, not hurts. Feels weird." In either event, it was viewed as an excuse to avoid sleep at all costs.

11 motherfuckin' years

This weekend marks the 11th anniversary of the Sober Husband and I trying marriage out together. We had two marriage ceremonies: we sensed that our minister was flaking on us right at the time of our wedding, so we ran down to City Hall alone on Friday and got a homeless guy to be our witness. On Sunday we went ahead, with my father reading the vows, with the ceremony (not telling anyone we'd satisfied the legalities on Friday, as it would have been strange for the relatives who'd flown in from the East Coast and midwest to see us going through a faux ceremony).

Most of my friends and law clients back then(funny to think that eleven years ago, I mostly hung around with my devoted law clients) were incredulous that I was going to marry again, after an increasingly acrimonious divorce following a ten year relationship. Indeed that incredulity seemed appropriate for a year or two recently, when it looked like we were going to call it quits (and many blog readers were saying, "Just get it over with, for god's sake"). But! My idea of divorce from this Sober Husband (as opposed to the first husband, the Scotch-Drinking Husband) at the darkest days, meant something like selling our house and buying a duplex in Pacifica or Daly City, so we could each have our own separate living quarters and allow the children to swarm back and forth at will. Thankfully after a year of intense marriage counseling and a serious and obvious commitment on both parts, we worked out our differences and didn't have to sell our adorable Edwardian.

I will say honestly that fixing our problems was the biggest, hardest, and most adult thing I've ever done. It would have been much easier and more ego-gratifying on both parts to call this over and move on to separate adventures (with Iris and Lola absorbing the shrapnel). But the miracle has been that, after all that hard work and highly expensive marriage counseling bills, love rekindled in what was, after all, intended by both parties initially to be a meaningless fling betweenst two people who met at Burning Man.

in the right light, if you squint

In the morning the Sober Husband likes to take the green parrot out of its cage, and the two enjoy some toast together. (Since we acquired the African Grey parrot earlier this year, the two parrots are known by various names. The Sober Husband calls them "the green parrot" and "the gray parrot", I call them "your parrot" and "my parrot", and the children call them "Zoe" and "Pigwidgeon"). His parrot has come to regard this as her divinely ordained birthright and can get quite squawky in the mornings until she is in her proper place, on the Sober Husband's shoulder, picking out the most toothsome toast morsels and throwing inferior bits to the floor with disdain (where my weird little cat, Ray Charles, licks up the crumbs).

My parrot is a more flexible, easy-going bird and spends a lot of time out of her cage. The other morning I had her out at breakfast time as well, and we both sat, feeding our parrots, while having a cup of coffee and looking through the paper. "I like this," I said. "It's so nice, we have our parrots out at the same time."

The Sober Husband looked at me like I was an idiot. He thinks one parrot is enough to deal with at any time, given their strong personalities and his parrot's predilection for violence, and having two out at the same time is begging for trouble and bloodshed. "Why? Why do you feel that way?"

"Because it looks like we're sharing a common interest. Imagine, if someone came in here that didn't know us. They'd look over and say, 'Aww, they both love their parrots. Look at them, with their parrots. They're so lucky they found each other.'"

The Sober Husband let this conversational fancy die a natural death.

for the reader known as Keith (and any other WoW players)

I started a character on your server, but I haven't run across anyone from that fabled, funny guild yet. Leave a message with your character names, please!

Indeed, all Warcraft playing readers are enthusiastically encouraged to leave a comment with their server and toon names here for networking. (I'm usually playing "Hassenpfeffr", 80 paladin, and "Hassy", 70 rogue, on Doomhammer these days, both blood elves, but I also share Chlonnaa, a level 80 Draenei mage, on Drenden with Lola). Just be braced for running into Iris and Lola on Azeroth....

precious moments

Today when I picked up Lola from first grade, she was carrying a work labeled "The Master of Evil Year 1999 Age 8." "You are just about the most interesting person I know," I said to her. She smiled and said, "To me, you are completely average." Ouch!

Later I returned to meet Iris uber Alles at fourth grade dismissal. Iris ran eagerly toward me, arms extended, and ran right past me to embrace her third grade assistant teacher, hugging her passionately. "Oh, Chamblino!" she said. I stood there like a lump. This teacher tried to urge Iris to show attention to her own mother. "You saw me all day, what about your mother?" Iris hugged her harder.

It's these special moments where the children show their love and affection which make all the sacrifices and hard work of a stay-at-home mother so worthwhile.

raging at me, in my kitchen

On Friday the Sober Husband and I hosted our first children's slumber party (we've had the odd child stay over here and there, but it was our first time being outnumbered in our own home in the wee hours of the night by visiting children). As the guests arrived, I was in the kitchen, assembling a salad which resembled a haunted forest: broccoli trees, little ghosts made of hard-boiled eggs with eyes made of tiny pieces of black olives, trailing bits of spaghetti dyed green with food coloring, etc... I invited a mother dropping off her child to join me in the kitchen for a glass of sparkling wine while I concentrated on putting my little steamed broccoli trees into bases made of potato to get them to stand up in the forest.

We chatted and sipped sparkling wine as I crafted my haunted salad, and it was pleasant, until the visiting mother's mind turned to money. She began by complaining that her family had a great deal of difficulty paying the tuition for our children's private school. Her voice got louder and shakier as she announced that within a few years, they would probably have to change schools as a result. Then she began to rant about families with a stay-at-home mother who get financial aid from our school. Spit flew from her lips as she loudly raved on and on. "How can they think they don't have to work? It drives me crazy, how they can accept that money and not go to a job. The rest of us are working so hard, and it's JUST WRONG."

After what seemed like an eternity of angry, loud ranting, a silence fell over the kitchen. The angry mother picked up her flute of sparkling wine and took a long swig. We both knew this was a personal attack. I am a stay-at-home mother, and our family receives a modest discount on our tuition.

There were a lot of things I could have said -- things like "your family takes several expensive vacations a year, and we rarely leave the city limits" and "believe me, the school imputes an income to both parents regardless of whether they are employed for pay or not" and (my personal favorite) "fuck you", but I stayed silent and concentrated on cutting up tiny slivers of black olives for the eyes in my hard-boiled egg ghosts. The angry mother drained her glass and left.