Bread and Bread

As an oversized kitten, he chomped the hand of a friend, and we said, I'm sorry, he's still figuring out what kind of cat he wants to be.  Which is to say: he is not a metaphor any more than he's a bad omen flitting blackly across someone's path, but I must tell you this— A year ago a new cat moved in; we brought her here, I held the door  for the invading army, and she marched in On short legs, waving her tortoiseshell tail, purring and rolling for the humans,  but chasing him down like a tiger He scaled the nearest fence, a big brother witnessing the horror of an infant, and disappeared, but he never bit or clawed her. He's figured out what kind of cat he wants to be. We don't see him in the sunlight anymore, and this is my great failure, among many. My mother birthed my sister because she loved having one child so much, she thought why not two; she ruined my life and created my best friend. It only took us twenty years to retract our claws. When I say this ha...

I understand a little better this year, when the air is thick with phlegm and desperation, the impulse to look up and ask for a miracle. Urgent case in California, begins the email from the adoption agency. A woman due two days before Christmas. I picture us racing up the coast guided by starlight playing the song our son danced to  last December, parents packed shoulder to shoulder in the auditorium. He'll nod along and then he'll nod off.  His eyes look more like his birthmom's  when he's sleepy. We'll talk giddily about TV shows, high on gas station coffee. None of this comes true.  Like the Christmas story, it has been tainted  by the teller. The woman chooses  different parents for her baby. Photo by Magnus Östberg on Unsplash This year our son is obsessed with his Christmas list: night vision goggles, L.O.L. dolls, a plastic waffle maker. He has discovered the power of wishing but not, yet, its limitations, which lurk at the edge of the frame. When h...

It usually goes something like this: We do our morning things. Dash starts angling to see the girls next door . If it's after 11, we walk over and knock on the metal screen. They pop up or they mosey. Change out of their pajamas or don't. Gather up their homework and shoes and spend the next two or three or five hours at our house.  They are three amigos: small, medium, and not-quite-large, ages four, almost six, and newly eight. They play post office and pizza restaurant and school and family. They whiz around on scooters and beg me to push them on the swing.  They want things: raspados and cheddar cheese slices and trips to the beach and to Dollar Tree.  Lately, Jasmine's* wanting has felt like a current that's pushing us along and sometimes pulling us under. She gets upset if we don't all do things her way. This used to manifest mostly in the dynamics of play, typical older kid/younger kid stuff. It was frustrating, but reminiscent of how my childhood neighbor an...

Yesterday you turned five and a half. You woke up in our bed and I relayed the news, this number clutched from the air. You said, "It's my birthday?" Half birthday, I said. Halfway between five and six, between the first COVID cases in Los Angeles and, if we are extremely lucky, the first vaccines needled into an upper arm. "Will we have cake?" you wanted to know. Time, at five and a half, is a torturous trip from popsicle to popsicle; there is so much waiting for all of us . Numbers are tricksters: the days since you were born, the days I've been in remission, the days in a row I've unrolled a yoga mat, the anniversaries that sideswipe me, a hit and run. I promised I would write you letters every month, and I haven't. I've written about myself instead, though you write me into new shapes every day. Today I am a net, full of holes, lightly shimmering. I tried to run a science lesson for you and the girls next door. We poured water in empty sp...

Denise's mother flip-flopped onto campus in a white tennis skirt each afternoon. Smoker's cough, sun-browned legs heels a jigsaw of fissures. Her feet were a wonder to my shade-grown, eight-year-old self. Perhaps Denise's mother made a choice: tennis over moisturizer and a pumice stone. Perhaps in the hours between work and ferrying Denise to gymnastics, she had time for just one luxury. In the months between March and the relentless now, I became reacquainted with my feet. Saw them emerge from boots to meet air and driveway dirt. Was the nail on my second toe always so thick? Dozens of narrow fault lines spread across my soles, and I was helpless to stop them. I always think that knowing should save me. I knew about time and it happened anyway. It was a place where anything was possible I told someone yesterday, through my cotton face mask, referring to my work with former gang members. There was the guy who started a solar panel installation comp...

The kids are slipping and sliding on an inflatable rainbow our lawn turning to mud. We have a lawn and there must always be a pause for that: our good fortune. My boss has ideas, and these too are luxuries born in her former hunting lodge in the folds of Laurel Canyon. She watches mountain lions on webcams stalk their prey. She outlines her vision and speaks of strategy. I say I'll try. Our most famous local lion crossed two freeways to get to Griffith Park and so maybe she believes in exceptionalism as much as conservation. The kids chant their demands like labor activists and I suppose that makes me management delivering Jell-O in plastic bowls shaky and blood red. I was pregnant once but never went into labor. The years between that unbeating ultrasound and eventual adoption created a wild beast in me. It crossed freeways. It looked back at the rushing cars and saw what might have happened. Our son has formed a union with the neighbor kids ...

The first week or so of the quarantine was strange for a dozen reasons, which I wrote about for MUTHA , but because we're living (knockonwood) through one of the most momentous non-moments of the past century, I thought it might be good to jot down some notes on this part of it too: the new-normal aftermath, the long days that are mostly okay but missing something. I have nothing special to add to the already overwhelming amount of content about the challenges of working from home with no childcare, or the dueling manifestos of "Now is the time to write that novel/build that treehouse" and "It's okay to just survive, we're in a fucking pandemic." But this is my blog, and maybe someday I'll want to look back at how we stitched together time during this time. I wouldn't say we have a schedule, but we have a rhythm. We're not really homeschooling Dash, but he's learning. We've never been especially strict about screen time, but we...