Archive for May, 2010
Because the world has been melancholy lately, 
Because there are oil spills bigger than the Valdez spill (Doesn’t spill sound too minor? We need a bigger word.),
Because there are John Gardners on this planet,
Because it’s Memorial Day weekend and it’s sobering to think of all who have sacraficed and given their lives for our country,
Because there is cancer, people losing their jobs, and so many struggling financially, emotionally and physically,
Because we’re all trying to find our way and sometimes it’s hard,
Because my fellow blogger and friend at Welcome to the Middle of Life started me thinking about happiness,
Because people write about it, like Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun”, so why not me?
Because Buddha said, “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” I’m sharing my light with you.
Because Abraham Lincoln said, “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And today I’m making my mind up to be happy. What about you?
And finally because Molly turned 21 yesterday and she is having a hard time transitioning from childhood to adulthood (Her mom is finding this transition for her daughter difficult, too. I’m not mad I’m getting older, I’m mad Molly is.), and since Molly is probably going to have a wicked hangover today, I’ve decided to write down a list of those things that make me happy. In no particular order, drumroll please…
- 42-ounce Diet Cokes through the McDonald’s drive-thru
- The fall season
- Shoes
- Gerber daisies
- A good book or a bad one, just time to read it
- Speaking of books, the smell of a bookstore
- Purple
- Wearing a peacock feather in my hair
- Naps
- Earth, Wind and Fire
- SPF
- A deep breath
- Kelly dancing and being goofy
- A good glass of red wine, or a bad glass, just time to drink it
- Travie McCoy’s song, “Billionaire,” cause I want to be a billionaire so freakin’ bad
- A good belly laugh
- A gut wrenching scream
- Instant gratification
- The smell of the ocean
- David helping me without rolling his eyes
- Free time
- Happy endings
- Taos
- Coconut lotion and chapstick
- Getting my hair cut
- Blogging
- Commercial-free anything
- When things work out
- Rhonda
- Jack’s stories. One day there was a Frito bag with leftover Fritos. His name was Frank. His parents were very, very mean. One day they ate Frank! Then after a few months, he got out. He was a colleger [he went to college], he got an A+ every day and when he was 42, he ate his parents. The end.
What makes you happy? I want to hear all about it.
When I was in seventh grade, my family moved to Alpine. One minute I was walking to PB Junior High, worrying over the promised fight between the surfers and the kids bussed in from Southeast San Diego with the metal utensils from the cafeteria to being dropped on a two acre ranch on the outskirts of Alpine, a town with no stoplights. My dad had bought the foreclosed ranch house from the owner of a bar in Hillcrest. He’d done carpentry work on the bar and the guy couldn’t pay him so they worked out a deal.
Mark Murphy
Alpine was thirty-five miles away from Pacific Beach but it could have been a thousand and thirty-five. It could have been a small town in Iowa or Ohio. Eight thousand people lived in Alpine. I went from living in a place where there were block parties with drunk, stoned adults to family picnics with the rest of the town on Fourth of July. Opening day of Little League was a major event which brought the majority of the town to the field.
Alpine, or maybe age, brought a change in my dad, too. He got his real estate broker’s license and opened up a business, Lodi Realty, named after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, “Oh, Lord, I’m stuck in Lodi again.” My mom got her real estate license. She managed the office. She hated being a salesperson and left the schmoozing to my dad. Dad directed and produced vaudeville shows at Alpine Elementary. There was good ol’ fashioned singing, dancing, skits, and stand-up and Marcia and I ran the spotlights. In Alpine we started to go to church again. After a couple of years at Christ the King, we stopped going all together. Now my mom played the organ at Queen of Angels Catholic Church and my dad was the choir director.
Marcia, Mom, Me and Mark on the Alpine ranch.
I flourished in Alpine. I loved the quiet. I loved the slow pace, although calling Alpine sleepy is exaggerating. I loved horseback riding on Linda’s Shetland Pony, Rojo Caliente. I loved slumber parties with friends and staying up all night eating popcorn and Mystic Mint cookies, talking about boys and listening to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Elton John/Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” I felt normal. Not for one second did I miss the craziness of Pacific Beach.
But my dad’s ghosts followed him. He lost his driver’s license after numerous DUIs and he had Jenn, a single mom and his and my mom’s assistant at Lodi, drive him around Alpine. I remember seeing them zooming down Alpine Boulevard, my dad in the passenger seat, Jenn in the driver’s seat, my dad smoking a Winston, floating his hand up and down in the wind.
Dad planted pot in between the rows of corn in my mom’s garden.
I rode a bus to high school in El Cajon, and nestled myself in with the popular group of cheerleaders, football players and the rich kids. I realize as I’m writing this there was more drama in my years growing up as a hippie in PB, more angst. During my years in Alpine, the biggest drama was my teenage broken heart over boys and finding a ride in to El Cajon so I could hang out with my friends.
Years later I married Bill at twenty-one. Bill was a man with a career, someone who would never be an alcoholic. We bought our first house, had Molly and then Kelly. Life went on and we became the King and Queen of Suburbia, the perfect suburban couple. But my ghosts followed me just like they had with my dad. I pushed down the wild child who had grown up in Pacific Beach. During this time, I squelched every hippie, creative, free urge I had. Instead I wore button down shirts and sensible shoes, went to work and came home and made dinner. For over ten years, I lived this way, until my rigidness got the best of me; I broke apart. I’d grown tired of being pretty on the outside, while trying desperately to squelch the chaos, messiness on the inside. I’d been living a double life, split down the middle, just like I had in my childhood between Pacific Beach and Alpine.
I’m now in my forties and most days I’m whole. That is to say, I’ve grown into a suburban hippie, no longer splitting myself half. I live in suburbia with my family. I go to work at a university. I drive a SUV. But I write. I dance with abandon, although I’m sure this is an understatement. I have multiple piercings. I wear peace signs and bright purple tights. I have a Buddha in my front yard (and a cross hanging from my rear view mirror). A crystal hangs in my bedroom to ward off evil. Yes, today I know who I am. I am a suburban hippie.
Who are you? Tell me about the moment that defined you.
Me (14 months), Mom (age 21), Dad (age 24) and Marcia (3 days)
I’m convinced one of the reasons I’m screwed up is I spent half of my childhood in Pacific Beach raised as a hippie, and the other half in the bucolic, hilly community of Alpine as a surbanite. The communities are only thirty five miles apart but it’s not the miles that separate them.
When I was born, my dad was an officer and a pilot in the Navy. After graduating from University of San Diego, a private Catholic university and before being stationed in Pensacola, my parents married on December 22, 1962. Ten months later I was born; my dad was twenty-three and my mom was twenty. Fourteen months later my sister was born. My dad gave four years to the Navy and left because of the rules and the fact he couldn’t drink the way his body demanded him to. Plus it’s not a good idea to fly when you’re an alcoholic, although my dad claims there are plenty of alcoholic airline pilots (something you should never tell your aerophobic daughter).
We moved to Pacific Beach when my dad left the Navy. For three years, my dad tried being a stockbroker and an insurance man. He tried to walk the straight and narrow, but he cried every night to my mom that “the man was killing him.”
“Monita, they’re keeping me down.”
“What was I going to do? We had you and Marcia, and I was pregnant with Mark.” my mom told me when I was an adult with children of my own. “We had one car. He needed to work.”
Work became an auto wrecking/junk yard that he bought in Southeast San Diego. He was the only white man in the neighborhood. I was seven when my dad bought the junk yard, and it’s when my memories of Pacific Beach and that time are most vivid. I remember crawling through gutted and totaled cars to find treasures in the glove compartments: a tennis ball, loose change, a rosary. My sister and I played hide and seek with my dad’s junk yard dog, Lobo. Dad soldered old car parts into sculptures like a fish with a metal gas cap lips.
There are memories of Pacific Beach: hitchhiking to downtown San Diego with my dad, brother and sister to walk around Horton Plaza and the homeless (before the multi-million mall was put there), driving to Oregon the whole family and our camping equipment crammed into the station wagon to visit my dad’s friend who was a goat farmer (and tasting goat milk for the first time. Yuck.), visiting a commune in Valley Center, nakedness, parties that would go all day and night, the smell of weed, the sound of yelling and screaming and listening to The Eagles, War, Carly Simon, and Led Zepplin. My mom went along for the ride, in more ways than one. She baked granola and funny brownies. She grew out her hair and partied with my dad and their friends, but her heart was never really in it the way my dad’s was.
I have memories of the dirty old man down the street, streaking, and my dad moving away to Oakland for six months to become a glazier. When my dad owned the junkyard, he started taking us to Christ the King. The Catholic church was down the block from the junkyard. I loved that church for the Virgin Mary and Jesus whose faces were painted dark brown and for the black people who went there and sang their hearts out. For the way they clapped their hands and waved them in the air. For the joy. When my dad moved to Oakland and visited once a month, he always left after the Sunday service. I stopped going. My stomach hurt so badly from holding in the tears from missing my dad.
Back then I had stomach aches that doubled me over, and migraines where I had to lie in bed in the dark with a cool washcloth on my forehead. There was so much chaos during that time I swallowed it whole and kept it down. I became a serious child. I worried about everything. What was my dad doing for a living? Was there going to be yelling tonight? Would I come to a house full of drunk, stoned people? During this time, I became Alex P. Keaton whose character on “Family Ties” was the lone republican in a house full of hippies and democrats. While I wasn’t a republican, I became a model child who rebelled against my dad and mom by being a perfectionist. I became rigid with control.
When I was in seventh grade we moved to Alpine. [Coming soon, "Growing a Suburban Hippie: Part II]
“I think I’m going to film Kelly or Jack next for the blog,” I said to David, even though I was staring at my computer screen, answering emails, checking blog stats, or commenting on FaceBook. “Molly’s video was so great, and the kids are so funn–”
“Why don’t you ever write about me?” David asked as he headed out the door to walk the dog.
“Huh?” I asked. “What?” I looked up from my computer but he was gone.
This wasn’t the first time he’d asked, but I’d always thought he was kidding. David is the most unassuming man on the planet. Where I’m loud, outgoing, inappropriate; David is quiet, introverted and always a gentleman, a gentle man. I considered his question and the reasons why I hadn’t written about him. I knew David liked being behind the scenes; he’s the photographer of the pictures I use on the blog and a webdeveloper who created it. But it was more than “his” desire to remain in the background. The reason I hadn’t written about David was it’s hard to put into words what he means to me without sounding like a blasted Harlequin romance. Wait, that’s not all of it. I feel too vulnerable talking about David in a way I don’t with my kids. My relationship with my kids is pure, easy and obvious. As the woman who had once been the President of the Man-Haters Club, I find it hard to admit how much David means to me. But here goes…
I love David because when my dad calls to have me drive my mom’s potholders to their house in between working out, my mother-in-law’s birthday party, and making dinner, David chuckles and says, “You’re just like him.” And the fact he can laugh at my tearing the house apart for the !@#$%^&*! potholders so I can get in my car NOW and drive them NOW over to my parents’ house NOW and why can’t my dad who is retired drive over and get them??? How David can find humor in my inheridited obsessive-compulsiveness is a miracle. Because if I was married to me I’d be crazy for sure.
Speaking of Dad, I’d started to write a memoir about him and the men in my life. This had stirred up all my anger at the injustice of my childhood with an alcoholic dad. “I don’t get it,” I said to David not for the first time. “His grandfather and father died from drinking. So how could he become an alcoholic? Disease, schimease. Really? I’m not an alcoholic–” ” But your dad did stop drinking,” David said. “He has stopped the cycle.” David has given me and my dad a gift. After forty-six years, I now look at my dad with empathy and love.
David is the poster child for stepfathering. I’ve heard of stepfathers who come on the scene and insist on being dad not David. Even though the girls live with us pretty much full time, he has never, ever been anything else but the girls’ stepfather providing guidance when he can, stepping back when Bill comes around to spend time with the girls. Because he was so good with my girls, I wanted to him to have a child of his own. I wanted him to know what fathering felt like. Not once did David pressure me about having a child, instead “he was happy to be married to me.” Wouldn’t you have given him a child?
David is my biggest fan and my greatest supporter. He thinks all the agents who have rejected me are crazy. Three years ago when I didn’t win the San Diego Book Award for my unpublished novel, he leaned over and whispered, “Who is the winner sleeping with? Because it can’t be about talent.” He holds me up when our kids or life have worked me over, massages my shoulders, looks me in the eyes and says, “Now get out there and do it again.”
Wedding Day, May 18, 2002
Those who have read my memoir, HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO: A MOTHER’S STORY, has asked if David is really that perfect?” For the record, David isn’t. Who is? But he’s perfect for me. So here’s to you, as we celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary tomorrow. Now can I wait another eight years to write about you?
Love, me
You’ve heard my feelings, my whining, my lamenting about Molly, my oldest, going off to college three years ago. So wrecked was I about her growing up and out of the house that I wrote a memoir about it. Molly’s leaving fanned my abandonement issues. Okay, fanned in an understatement. It was a roaring fire. Molly was the first person I’d given so wholeheartedly to, the first person I truly trusted. And even though Molly was doing what every normal, healthy eighteen-year-old does, if we’ve done our job right, I felt left behind. What does Molly think about this time? See my ambush interview with her about what the hardest thing about going away to college was and what was the best part. She gives advice for moms who are going through this transition now.
Shoot. I thought I was Barbara Walters there for a second and had Molly crying. But it was the light shining in her eye that was making her eyes water. I should have asked her what kind of tree she would like to be. See how Molly feels about leaving home AGAIN to go to UC San Diego.
You can see this wasn’t scripted. If I wrote it, believe me it would have been a whole lot more about me and some tears. I’m kidding. I’m very proud of Molly and who she is. I appreciate her honesty, and think this is one of the reasons why going away this time is easier for both of us because we’ve found a way to be honest.
But really does she have to be so brutally honest? Ha!
I hope this helps any of you who are struggling to let go. Does it?
