pink pajama mama

Uncle Calvert, Calvy for short, came striding to our family gathering at the park with a huge smile on his moon-like face. His thinning black hair was slicked to one side and he was wearing a t-shirt sporting a pair of naked women’s breasts across his chest, causing all the adults at the party to break into laughter and all the teenage girls to stare in horror. Uncle Calvi’s laugh was deep and hoarse, like a smoker’s. And he always, always smelled like beer. This could have been his drinking habits, or it could have been his occupation.Uncle Calvi has been a bartender at Bully’s in San Diego for more than 40 years.I guess he was considered a hottie in his day. He hooked up with my best friend’s mother when she was a waitress at Bully’s back in the 60’s. My Dad loves to tell the story of Uncle Calvi’s prowess on the football field in high school, how he could have gone pro, but he was too violent.  He bashed in a fellow player’s head one day and was kicked off the team. Or he injured his knee, I get the story confused. In his later years, he dated Wanda, “Wonderful Wanda and her White Cadillac” as my family called her, delighting in the alliteration and Uncle Calvi’s scandalous ways.We visited him in San Diego when I was a teenager. As my parents and my sisters and I sat on his couch, Uncle Calvi slipped out of his sliding glass door to smoke. When he returned, he carried a potted plant. He had a delighted smile on his face as he triumphantly held it above his head, like a football player making a touchdown. “This is My baby,” he said, turning it around so we could admire it. “My marijuana baby,” he chuckled, sending my parents into uproarious and horrified laughter. I think that was probably the one and only time my parents had ever seen cannabis, and even though they’re church-going conservative Mormons, they thought my Uncle Calvi’s eccentricities hilarious. He was with Wonderful Wanda at this point. She laughed her husky smoker’s laugh too, shaking her long wiry dark hair, one hand perched on her hip, red nails on tight white pants.When I was little, I thought Uncle Calvi was cool because he let his daughter, Salina, have a horse and keep chickens. I’ve wanted a horse my whole life, so I was in awe of the beautiful doe-eyed Salina, who was worldly at 14 and ended up cutting her long dark hair into a mohawk a few years later and piercing one ear seven times when she became estranged from the family. But I still remember her mesmerizing sketches of horses and her gentle hands with her baby chicks, and how she brought a blind chick into the kitchen to show her father. She laid the fluffy baby chick on the table and Uncle Calvi used his thick calloused finger to trip the chick over and over again, laughing gleefully at his own cruelty. I still remember the sick feeling in my stomach as I watched. It had never occurred to me that someone might want to hurt something so small and helpless. And yet, violence is fairly routine in my mother’s family of excessive drinkers.I have no idea where Uncle Calvi even is these days. My brothers unknowingly happened to share a tee time with him one day in California not long ago. They vaguely recognized each other, chatted for a few minutes, and that was it. After my grandparents died, my relatives lost touch with each other for the most part. It was for the best–they had become a scary bunch. But sometimes I think about Uncle Calvi with his few wispy black hairs and his big round head and I imagine him lying on his pillow sleeping and I hope he’s found peace and that his dreams are sweet.

The other day, my 72-year-old father told me he wants to get his chest and back waxed. “What? Are you crazy? Do you know how much that will hurt? You look fabulous just the way you are!” I replied.”My hell, Marci, I should be living in a tree eating bamboo!”My Mom took the phone from him and said, “Marci, you should have seen what he looked like when I married him. He was a golden adonis with no hair ANYWHERE on his body!”Oh boy, I was hoping by the age of 72 I would have gotten off of this crazy carousel of vanity swirling around me. At 41, I’m already relieved that I can just be myself with no pretense for trying to look, act, or be sexy. I look around me and see women on the endless and relentless treadmill of botox, plastic surgery, workouts and diets, and I think there’s got to be more important things to spend time and energy on!And yet, I can’t help but be sucked in. I’ve been on one diet after another since my body was pretty much destroyed with my pregnancies. On one hand, I embrace my imperfections. My body shows the after-effects of bringing two beautiful beings into the world. I’m proud of my body, amazed by my body, and yet, I’d like to be toned and thin and be able to eat whatever I want with no exercise. I’d like my breasts to shrink back to a D, my body to shrink back to a size 4.But alas, it’s wishful thinking for now. I’m a mother of two young children–I have to be peppy and cheerful. There’s no room in my life for the grumpiness that comes along with dieting. I can’t prioritize exercise since I want to be with my children. No, the world will just have to live with my mushy mama body, my DD breasts, my muffin top and jiggles.We went out to dinner at a restaurant where the servers are all opera singers whose voices make me weep in the middle of my Penne Arrabiata. I walked into the ladies room there and found an intriguing painting–it looked like an old cameo of a beautiful victorian woman, but she was a skeleton and it said “Tis all vanity.” Indeed.Why do I struggle so with vanity? I am about to turn 41, and I am so thrilled to be able to release vanity. It’s a relief to be comfortable exactly as I am, to not feel like I want to be sexy, dress sexy, act sexy.And yet, I looked at my legs this morning while stretching in my living room and thought “Who’s legs are those? Surely not mine?! Mine are lean and tanned and toned!” This is where my reverse anorexia comes into play. I feel good. I stand behind my yoga teacher when I make it to class and I think I look like her. I’m always shocked when I catch a glance of myself in a mirrored building. What? Who is that chunky matronly woman? And there I go again! Feeling the ever-tugging pull of vanity. I wave at someone and I feel the undersides of my arms move! What the hell is happening to me!! I made my living off my body for years. It has served me well. But what is going on now? Do I have a few more years left in me for bikinis? Or is it time to hang up my strings and go for the tummy control tankini? Or do I just join the hordes of women who just don’t care, who let their muffin tops hang over their suits and say “To hell with it!” There has to be a happy medium. I suppose it all boils down to feeling good in your body–feeling strong and flexible and capable…For example the last time I went water skiing I popped up on one ski on my first try. I felt so strong and fabulous! And now, I’m more flexible then I’ve been in years, able to do headstands and sit in the splits for long periods of time. And it feels REALLY good!! So I guess I just keep going, feeling good even thought I could stand to flatten my belly and tighten up everything. But maybe that’s gravity and age. I no longer skinny dip–I chunky dunk. And maybe, just maybe, one day all the jiggles will melt of their own accord and presto! I’ll be the new improved me!In the meantime, my parents and I have been talking a lot about zombies lately. I did a paper on the theme of zombies in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys at UCLA and my Mom recently read a book about zombies so we’ve had lot’s of fascinating conversations. My Dad wrote to me the other day after his high school reunion: “If you’re in doubt about zombies being real, you have only to look at my high school reunion group photo! Yikes!” Well, if the quest for vanity never ceases, at least I can keep my sense of humor.

My mother would make a brilliant scientific study–this is a 72-year-old woman in perfect health who has pretty much lived on candy and dessert her entire life. You may think I jest, but let me give you an example. She came to help me out when I had my second baby. My first baby had just turned two and never tasted candy. The first thing my Mom did when she got in the car was give my toddler a bag of gummy sharks. When my husband told her Annabelle didn’t even have the right amount of molars to chew such a thing, coupled with the fact that we didn’t give her candy, my Mom was awestruck. “Wow, you’re really serious about this candy thing,” she said.Yup. As long as I have control over what goes in my children’s mouths, it will not be candy. My mom, however raised us on candy. We were the envy of the neighborhood children with our kitchen full of candy jars. Dirty kids with long stringy hair would come to our sliding glass door, shield their eyes form the glare with their hands over their eyebrows, and try to catch a glimpse of our candy jars. It was a bit creepy.Cavities were par for the course when we visited the dentist, but no dental visit was complete without a beeline straight to the drive-thru for a milkshake. On the same visit to help me with the baby, my husband asked my Mom what she might want from the store. “Oh, just some little cookies,” she said, not missing a beat on the rocking chair. She had come to help with my toddler, but ended up holding my newborn in the rocking chair for hour upon hour being waited on hand and foot by me. It was like having three children.All these years have finally taken a toll on my Mom and her stomach is just not what it used to be. For years we have all marveled at her “iron stomach.” This is a woman who could sit in the back seat reading a book and munching on cookies as we drove the winding roads of the Redwood forests while the rest of us turned green and hung our heads out the window. This is a woman who wore a red bouffant wig and black go-go boots and piled her six children into her orange VW bus every Sunday for church. This is a woman who, at 72 years old, still has peaches and cream skin, big brown eyes, thick black lashes, and looks at least 15 years younger. This is a woman who told me that my 10-month-old baby girl was too pale and I should put a little blush on her cheeks.This is a woman who has finally met her match–an aging stomach. She recently got a blood test and was floored to find out she had food intolerances to almonds and wheat and flour and gluten. She spoke to me over the phone in amazement. “You wouldn’t believe it–everything has flour in it!?!”I told her that if she went to a health food store she could find gluten-free cookies.  She said,, “Yes, but they’re too expensive! Can you believe, even those little cookies, what are they called? The little round ones–vanilla wafers! Even they have flour in them!”Yes Mom, I would immediately assume with any food intolerances vanilla wafers would be the first to go.And so I hear she is shrinking smaller and smaller. She was already getting smaller from walking on her treadmill. She started doing pilates last year and said this is the first time in her life she has muscle tone. “Wow, this exercise thing really works!” she told me in amazement one day.Yes, so that’s my Mother. It took her 72 years to figure out that exercise is a positive thing and cookies are not. Will I miss all the cookie jars filled with gummy sharks around her house? Will I miss the jar containing 2 year-old yogurt-covered pretzels? (They still taste good!) Will I miss her constant experimenting with which salty food tastes best with Junior Mints? Almonds or peanuts or cashews? Will I miss her long distance calls to my friends to tell them her latest Junior Mint discovery?Now I’m waiting for her to realize that real foods have a shelf life. She doesn’t cook anymore so when I went through her spices to find some cinnamon, I was shocked to see an old jar labeled with masking tape that said “mole.” “Mom? What is this?” I asked her. “Oh, Lupe gave that to me.”"Grandma Lupe? Mom, Grandma Lupe died more than 20 years ago! Spices don’t last that long!”"Of course they do! Spices don’t wear out!”"Mom, I get rid of my spices if they’re more than a year old.”She grabbed it out my hand. “I like these spices, she gave them to me.” And she put them back in her cupboard where they sit to this day.I am consistently awestruck by my Mother and her amazing diet. She loves it when I come to visit because she says it’s the only time she eats vegetables. I called her today to see how she was doing. She was in the car with my father going to get a Diet Pepsi and then a frappucino. For some reason, her blood test didn’t tell her she was intolerant to soda pop and coffee milkshakes.By gummy shark or frappucino, that sugar will find its way into her system. I think she’s lived on preservatives and sugar for so long her system has been permanently preserved. And if that’s the case, all the better for us to keep her around forever, gummy sharks and all.

When I was 15, I was exploring the local bookstore when I happened upon a Playgirl calendar. This being a conservative Utah bookstore, I was immediately sucked into the scandalous nature of the calendar and so I perused it. I screamed when I saw Mr. December. My cousin David, wearing only a Santa hat, stared out at me with a big grin on his face.I immediately bought the calendar, of course, and took it home to my parents, who were so delighted to see David, they never even asked me how it came to pass I might be looking at such a dastardly calendar. My Mom just pulled out a black Magic Marker and drew swimsuits on all the guys in the photos and proudly showed it to anyone and everyone.David had a very crummy childhood, and he had come to live with our family as a teenager. I loved him. He was about 10 years older than me and did super-cool things like make skateboards from scratch, including whittling places for his fingers to grip the ends so he could do handstands on them, and he worked at Pizza Hut, one of my favorite restaurants. He also flew me around like an airplane and pretended he was going to dunk me in the fountain in the mall. Like I said, super cool.Well, something scandalous happened, I’m not sure what, and David left one day. The vague reason I heard is that he confessed a sin to a bishop who told him he couldn’t be forgiven for it. My Dad is still mad about it twenty years later. But whatever the reason, he disappeared and noone in the family heard from him for seven years, until I came across his photo. Well, my Mom called his Mom, and it turned out David had changed his name to Doug and was actually going to be a Playgirl centerfold that month. Now, it is no easy feat to acquire scandalous magazines in Utah. You can’t just walk into a Circle K and ask for one behind the corner. At this time, there was one Circle K in the middle of nowhere that sold the magazine and my parents had to drive for more than an hour to buy out their five copies. My Mom took her Magic Marker and by the time they came back, every man in all five magazines was wearing a bathing suit. And so I, at seventeen years old, got to see my fun-loving cousin wearing only gray leg warmers, and the queen bee centerfold, a picture of him lying face down on a white furry rug, his buns exposed. My mom didn’t draw on this one, I guess she thought since everyone has a set of buns, it was ok for us to see them. In any case, it was way too much information, but it was entertaining to watch my parents carry this magazine around with them for a few days.I guess it was about two years later that I had spent the night at the Rose Bowl with my little sister and a bunch of friends, definitely one of the most miserable memories in my life. It was freezing and we stayed up all night on the sidewalk, shivering and miserable, with a bunch of drunken fools around us. At 8 am, I was wandering around waiting for the parade to start with about two million other people, when who should I stumble upon? That’s right, David/Doug–fully clothed in black leather! “David!” I screamed! And ran up to hug him. Out of the hundred sof thousands of people who attended the Rose Parade, I ran into David! He seemed happy to see me, and we exchanged numbers, but he was too far gone in another world to really keep in touch with our family.Twenty years later, he did start sending my Mom postcards, but instead of writing her a message, he cut letters out of magazines just like a psychopath in a movie and said crazy things about my grandparents and my Mom’s family in general. This didn’t go over well with my parents, and David’s communication was finally cut for good.Still, I always liked him even though he acted crazy. I liked his deep raspy voice and the gap between his front teeth. I liked that he went out of his way to play with his seven-year-old cousin and to make things fun. I’m sorry that something made him leave and hit the streets and start down a road that seems to have made him crazy instead of happy. But if nothing else, I hope he kept those leg warmers to keep him warm and that white fluffy rug so he always has a soft place to lay his head. 

My parents called me today to see if I remembered a boy from my hometown by the name of Mark Long. Of course I do. I used to beat him in leg wrestling even though he was three years older than me. I was best friend with his little sister, Sherri, in first grade. Our parents were childhood friends. When I went over to their house to play, I challenged Sherri’s brothers to leg wrestling matches and beat the pants off them every time. One was younger, so of course I’d beat him, but beating the older one was especially gratifying. It was great! I got so cocky about my leg wrestling skills I started challenging adults as well, namely my father, who outweighed me by about 200 pounds and would humor me for a minute before flipping me over onto the floor. Leg wrestling champ… a strangely invigorating memory.Then I remembered the time my cousin, Guy, told me he was taking Judo. Guy was my age, twelve, and very macho. His mother was the cocktail-drinking Louise who had a mole on her chin just like Ginger on Gilligan’s Island and had kissed Elvis. I told him to show me some moves. Ba-da-Bing -Ba-DaBoom, I shocked the hell out of him by flipping him over my shoulder. Ah, victory was sweet.Little did he know I offered karate lessons in my own backyard to the neighborhood children for free, even though I had never taken karate. I also taught tennis against the side of my house, and organized a dance show for my whole neighborhood with all the neighborhood kids. I choreographed and taught them a dance number on roller skates to Greased Lightning,  a vampire number to the Fifth of Beethoven, and a highly theatrical number to a song about Raggedy Ann and Andy, a song I wrote and recorded with my tape recorder. The whole neighborhood attended, they even brought popcorn!My history with beating boys started early, in kindergarten, when little scrappy Charlie refused to share his blocks with me. I kicked his tower down and he punched me in the nose, making it bleed. From that day on, I did everything I could to best boys in every situation. This bizarre desire to dominance continues today. Just the other day, I tried to flip George over my shoulder, but he proved to be immoveable. I have to work on my technique.

My mother has an interesting relationship with beauty. She has this amazing olive mexican skin where she doesn’t have a wrinkle at 70 years old. She glows! Even after spending her youth in the sun getting tan. It’s not fair to those of us who inherited our father’s fair freckled English skin. (Although he looks gorgeous at 70 too.) My mother never even wore makeup until I was twelve years old, when she decided to become a Mary Kay consultant. Twenty five years later she’s STILL using Mary Kay and refuses to see any of us in the morning until she “puts her face on.” She’s gotten crazier and crazier withe the makeup.”Marci,” she’ll say to me. “Put on some blush! You’re so pale! You look sick!”Thanks Mom. Even worse, she said to me once, “Marci, why don’t you put a little bit of blush on Annabelle’s cheeks. She’s so pale!” Annabelle was 10 months old. The mere fact that someone would think it acceptable to put makeup on a baby is terrifying to me. Even worse, to suggest it to me, someone who only wears makeup on date night or to perform. Sometimes the things she says are so far out there, they don’t even merit a reply. You’re too stunned to even answer. This was one such occasion.Last time I visited her, she had gotten permanant eyebrows tattooed across her forehead. She called today and said she was putting ice on her eyes every half hour as she had permanent eyeliner put on her eyes. She spent a half hour explaining the whole thing to me, and then said loudly, “I have to look good in my coffin you know!”Mom, you’re so much more beautiful than you could ever know. A little crazy maybe, but always beautiful.  

Happy Halloween!! I always do this–celebrate so much for a coming holiday that on the actual holiday, I”m too exhausted! We managed to make Halloween cookies, but never got around to frosting and decorating them–they’re in the freezer. We made marshmallow-gumdrop ghosts and forgot to pass them out. And we never made it to George’s offices to pass out treats in costume. C’est la vie.
This morning I was making waffles and Henry was being unusually quiet–never a good sign. “Annabelle,” I said, “can you go check on Henry and tell me what he’s doing.” “Sure,” she chirped and ran out of the kitchen and down the hallway. “He’s squirting milk all over!” she shouted from the stairs. Sure enough, he was sitting on the steps with chocolate milk and a straw, fascinated by the way it squirted when he squeezed it. He was pouring it over the top of his head, the front of his pajamas, and all over his galoshes (yes he wears galoshes with his pj’s in the mornings.) Henry loves to play dress-up, unless I want him to wear a costume and then he refuses. He was a handsome baby boy for Halloween because he refused to wear any of the costumes I offered him. I had an alligator costume, an owl, a chicken, a cowboy, and an elephant and he refused all of them. now, you may be wondering why I have so many costumes but don’t forget we live in New Orleans so we use costumes all the time for he festivals and parades. Not to mention, I love costumes. maybe it’s my mexican blood–I can’t resist anything sparkly.

The costumes: I saw a darling ladybug costume on someone else and decided to get one for me, but it didn’t quite look the same on me. In fact, I looked like a chubby ladybug in an ill-fitting way-too-short dress with major panty lines. Yuck. But then, I figured out a way to make all the parts work by wearing the dress as a skirt I could make longer and adding a different top. Much better–and FINALLY I had a real costume and not a makeshift witch or cat. Annabelle ended up being Cinderella just as she’d planned.

We had a great entourage trick-or-treating with us tonight. Kendra, George’s marvelous co-professor who adores children; Roxana, our incredible babysitter and one of George’s students who is a superstar in her field of international business and has just landed the most coveted job among Business students in NY at a famous bank, but she really wants to illustrate children’s books and is a fabulous artist–she was dressed as Princess Jasmine in a costume her mother made for her and sent up from El Salvador; and of course, Miss Cathy, our royal photographer, a brilliant artist (look at her website! www.cathyweeksphotography.com), parade partner, and cat lover extraordinaire (she strolls her gorgeous cat Colonel Bourgeois around the neighborhood in a cat buggy). It was the perfect group–everyone fun, lovely, and positive.

I was talking to my mother earlier and she said she had decided to be a flower child wearing flowers in her hair. She asked me what else she could do to look like a real flower child. I told her to pretend she was taking psychedelic mushrooms (which wouldn’t be a leap for her–not taking them but acting like she was on something) and she laughed gaily (my mother is always laughing gaily, even when things aren’t funny.) She said, “I had four children in the 60’s. Then two more in the 70’s. I missed the whole free love movement (we were living in San Francisco at the time). What is this “free love?” Then I heard my Dad pipe in the background, “You wouldn’t know, you’ve always charged me.” She laughed again. It’s so hard to be so far away from them, we talk on the phone nearly every day.

And so, here it is, Halloween night, and I nearly crawled up the stairs in weariness. Longing longing for a long hot candlelit bath. We’re going to have a quiet All Souls Day tomorrow.

My older sister, Maria, called me this morning to let me know how her Halloween trip to Vegas went this weekend. Maria has inherited my Grandma Lupe’s love of gambling. I was lucky to escape this family trait as my parents spent many an evening inside some nasty casino, leaving my little sister and I in the car. It turned me off gambling forever, but Maria loves it. Probably because she always wins ridiculous amounts of money, even taking into account her losses. So, certain hotels in Vegas have gotten wind of Maria’s love of gambling and they invite her to participate in their “slot machine tournaments.” This I don’t understand as slots seem to be games of chance and not skill, so how could it be a tournament? But she keeps going and she keeps winning.
So, Maria is 41 years old and has been married for 23 years and has three sons. She’s entitled to a little wild phase at this point, and she’s loving it. She dressed up as Naughty Snow White and took a Las Vegas Stripper dance class where she learned to dance on a pole, do a lap dance, and even got a certificate that says “Las Vegas Stripper.” Another notch in her belt. Another dream fulfilled.
She had to get off the phone as a client was calling her (did I mention she’s an extremely successful businesswoman as well?), so I didn’t get to hear the rest of her wild weekend, but then my girlfriend Flora called me. She said her husband’s grandmother was about to die, and that he would have to go to St. Louis for the funeral, and that he had always had a dream to make his own boat and take the River back here to New Orleans. While he had decided against making his own floating device, he was going to try to convince a captain on the river to let him ride a boat back to NOLA. She said this laughing. “So Ben’s taking a little trip and we’re not sure when he’ll be back.” For some reason, this story delighted me. A grown man following a sweet Huckleberry dream. I like it.

My Dad and I were recently discussing a mutual relative. This relative is having “Issues.” I asked my Dad what kind of “issues” this relative was having and my Dad said, “He’s been yanking his tulip.” We started giggling at the terminology. My family is mormon and I guess masturbation is against the rules. My Dad, as irreverent and funny as ever, commenced to tell me how he worked at his father’s lumberyard as a young boy with all his relatives. He kept asking his cousins what the word masturbation meant. They wouldn’t tell him, so he started to guess.
“Does it have something to do with music?” he asked.
They thought for a minute. “Yeah, it could.”
“Is it a solo?” My Dad asked.
“Well, it could be,” they replied, “but it’s a lot more fun when it’s a duet.”

My little sister’s husband of twenty years is quite a piece of work. Busting with testosterone, the man is a burly bear, a work-machine, a snap turtle, and a sweetheart underneath his very gruff exterior. Scott physically looks just like Kurt Russell, walks with a cocky strut ala John Travolta in Grease, and snaps at people like Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond.
He does have his moments though.
Like the time they were watching the World Series and the Star Spangled Banner wasn sung.
“Why do they have a spanish name in the Star Spangled Banner?” he asked Marlise.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Jose, can you see…” He replied.

We’re still laughing.

But it gets even worse.

One of Marlise’s favorite songs is “Spooky.” I was standing next to her, baking cookies, while she was singing along with it on her stereo. She was grooving along, “Love is kind of crazy with a spooky little girl like you, spooky!” Then her version: “Like a goat you keep on humping me, so I propose on Halloween.” This she sang at the top of her lungs while dancing with her arms above her head and wiggling her hips.
I stopped mixing. “What did you just say?” I asked.
“What? Like a goat your keep on humping me so I…”
“You can stop there,” I say. “Those are not the lyrics.”
“Yes they are,” she says, her beautiful face turning red.
“No, they’re not. They don’t say “like a goat you keep on humping me” They say “Like a ghost you keep on haunting me, so I propose on Halloween.”
“No! they’re talking about a goat!” she replies.
“Um no, why would they propose on Halloween if a goat was humping them?”
She thought about this. “They just don’t understand their own lyrics,” she said, laughing so hard she snorted.
“Did you ever think those lyrics were a little bit strange?”
“I never thought about it,” she replied.
Ah yes, Marlise and Scott, two peas in a pod.