Twelve Years Ago Tonight

Twelve years ago tonight, we had a barbeque, just me, Baroy, and my brother-in-law. Steve drove me nuts, watching my every move.

"Was that a contraction?" he'd ask every time any one of my facial muscles twitched.

It was my due date, but I wasn't there yet. I just knew it.

"No," I said, time and time again. Or, "Just a small Braxton-Hicks."

At some point, though, there was a sea change. I knew that if I told Steve, we'd never get him to go home, and I needed him to go home. I needed to get some sleep. It was almost time.

Instead, I told him that the Braxton-Hicks contractions were coming pretty regularly, and would he do me a favor and time them for me? By the time they were coming every ten minutes or so, I told him that, yeah, he should probably keep the next day clear, just in case. I also told him he needed to go home. Now.

In fact, it was pretty much right now--11:15 on August the 24th--as I'm typing these words tonight. Once we'd finally shoved Steve out the door with orders to get some sleep and keep his phone by his bed, Baroy and I got into bed ourselves, gearing up for a rest that wasn't to be. Within a couple of hours, it would be August 25, 1997, and I'd be up and on the couch, contractions coming every five to seven minutes, beginning the work of becoming a mother for the very first time.

But today--or, rather, 12 years ago today--it was not quite time yet. And that was good, because I wasn't ready. Almost, but not quite. And then, suddenly, without knowing it, I was.

Happy 12th birthday, Em. I love you. And I love what you made of me.

(A photo of a photo of me and Baroy at a picnic, one week earlier...
I loved my belly.)

We Really Can't Go Home Again

On the way to dinner last night, we passed the street where Baroy and I (and our friends M and G and another guy who we try not to think about) all lived together. Baroy and Guy We Try Not To Think About lived there for about six years, G had moved in a year or two after, and M moved in about eight months before I did. I was there a year and a half when the stress of having Guy We Try Not To Think About around all the time--plus G's hour-long commute and my and Baroy's impending marriage--caused us to decide to go the more conventional route and go out and get our 'own' places.

I could write long books about those 18 months. I've started to, several times. They were, in many ways, the true Best Time of My Life. We often talk about the 'what ifs' of having continued to live together (the four of us, only) and having been a less-conventional family; Em, in particular, likes to wonder what it would have been like to have so many much-loved people living in her house with her.

So it was a little bit upsetting, when I impulsively swerved across traffic to turn down that old street, to find that the house we lived in is gone. Like, completely. Like, it and the house next to ours--both duplexes--had been torn down, and in their place was the shell of a new 'luxury' apartment building that, from the drawings out front, is going to wind up looking more Vegas casino than most Vegas casinos.

The feeling was similar to that of seeing the photos my mom occasionally sends of the complete destruction of the house I lived in from ages 13 to 18--and which I visited or stayed in throughout the years thereafter. Except, in that case, I knew when my mom and stepdad sold the house, and I knew what was happening to all the other nice, modest houses on that block as they sold. So when the wrecking balls moved in, and when the nice modest house turned into a cement monstrosity, it wasn't much of a surprise.

But this house...I can't remember the last time I drove past it, but it's been years. At least three or four years, since my friend Tamar--the last person I still knew in that neighborhood, moved away in 2005. But probably more than that, because I don't actually recall visiting it when I visited her. All I know is that the last time I'd seen it, it was intact, and it has remained untouched in my memory all that time, and all the times we've sat with M and G and reminisced. So to see it gone...hurt, frankly. Hurt a lot. Because now I can't show it to the kids one day, like I'd always assumed we'd do. But also because now when I think about it, it's going to truly only be a memory, and not a reality...not sitting there, ready, waiting, holding on to my past for me.

16-Year-Old Bubbles

I just poured the very last of a jar of bubble bath into the tub for N. You know how sometimes you hold an ordinary object in your hand, and suddenly it ceases to be an object, but it becomes an entire experience? That's what happened to this plastic jar as I reached over to drop it into the garbage pail. It stopped being a container, and became instead my friend Joyce and myself, giggling together as we shopped for lotions and potions at The Body Shop in the then-still-relatively-new Herald Center, a "vertical mall" built right across 34th Street from Macy's. I loved Joyce; she was fun and silly and she always made me laugh. And she was one of the few people in the world who simply refused to buy my "I'm not a girly-girl; I don't *do* cosmetics" schtick and instead dragged me from store to store spending money on frilly and fluffy things as if we had nothing else to do with it. (Which, mostly, we didn't. We were single and in our 20s, and aside from buying subway tokens and beer at Cedar Terrace on Friday nights, had very little in the way of financial obligations.)

I could still hear her laughter in my head as I started doing the math: I moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1993. Joyce, if I'm not mistaken, stopped working for ABigScienceMagazine well before that.

Those bubbles, in other words, have probably recently celebrated their Sweet 16.

Lesson of the day: I really need to take more bubble baths.