Manners Matters

Once upon a time I was a little girl, and I wore ribbons in my hair, delighted in shoes with buckles, and twirling around with abandon to get the skirts of my dresses to flare out and make me feel like a fairy.
I delighted also in being the solemn, mature eldest child in my family, and I glommed on to words I thought made me seem older than I was. I was especially conscious of being polite. It was so pleasant to trot up to my mother after attending a birthday party and listen to the parents praise 'Jessica's exceptional manners.'
I still recall the single time I attended my best friend Becky's birthday party and I was so excited at cake time I was sitting on my knees on the bench around the table while she blew out the candles on her cake. I wiggled my body with joy and completely forgot about the polite little girl who would sit in her chair patiently. Becky's father was a little bit older than my dad, and he reminded me of a mysterious old wizard. He had an office with an abstract chess set whose pieces were all made of twisted, heavy metal, and Becky and I used to attempt to play without really knowing which shape was what. Mostly we liked the clunking noise they made on the board and against one another.
He seemed very friendly, and so when he admonished me for not sitting in my seat properly, I turned and with an uncharacteristic flare of rebellion, stuck my tongue out instead of obeying his order.

To be fair, he was a total gentleman disciplinarian. He came over and asked me very sternly to come with him to his office where he told me it was very impolite to ignore the rules when you are a guest at someone's house, he also told me that he knew I was a good little girl and that it seemed odd for me to be so disrespectful.
I burst into tears and was so upset that even when he guided me back to the table with a kindly hand on my shoulder and got me a nice big piece of cake, I could hardly swallow a mouthful.
It should tell you a lot about me to say that on some nights when I can't sleep, after I've run through every stupid thing I've ever done and every time I've ever wronged anyone, this memory rises to the surface like the bloated corpse of a long dead manatee, and I still feel a curl of guilt in my stomach like an ancient thread of steel wool.

This being said, I think the emphasis on manners in my childhood had a great deal to do with being brought up by parents of the Commonwealth, in a country still under English rule. I think it also has a great deal to do with my being a girl.

Everyone likes a polite little girl. And I really liked being liked.

Of course, when I moved to America, the politeness thing made me stand out like a sore thumb, alongside my soft Australian accent, it was the most definitive thing about me, and it quickly got me shoved out of line for the bathrooms, laughed at during class discussions, and ostracized from most playground games.

But before you go feeling bad for me, let's get to the meat of this post.
Now that I am an adult, I feel that manners make for superior humans, of all genders, races, origins, and languages.
Being polite, especially to strangers, is the first vestige of kindness.
You are polite because you may never see the person to whom you are being it ever again.
You have no idea if they are having the best day or the worst day.

I cannot tell you how many times I was walking the streets of wherever I lived struggling with my medium to well done depression, and a small gesture made me feel like maybe I wasn't a worthless piece of shit.

Working in the service industry for most of my life has led me to interact with thousands of people in microcosmic conversations, and I can tell you with confidence that I know how a please, a may I, and a heartfelt thank you can completely transform a human confrontation.

I know this from being on both sides. I have single handedly moved someone's mood from absolutely dreadful to surprisingly pleasant with a few pleases and thank yous and the honest questions, "How are you doing? You having a good day?"
I have also been flattened by a crap person, who dismisses me, treats me like a moron, and then finds something to yell at me about because they are a small human with no power in their life other than to make someone they don't know sad.
It is a really awful feeling to know that a stranger thinks of you as a throw-away-person.

Because here's the thing,
we're all both throw-away-people and lovely humans to one another.

I can be a total bitch if I want to be. I know you can too.
I can lock eyes with a stranger, look at the way they hold themselves or park their car, decide that I am better than they, and cut them in line to the deli counter just like they can to me, but it is heinously rude, and genuinely makes me feel bad.

I believe that every action we do has a kinetic energy of either positive or negative nature, and it is possible to make both yourself and another person feel like the world is worth staying in by stepping back and saying the words, "no you go ahead."

I am always amazed when people blow through crosswalks, or jostle in lines, or make a big deal about getting somewhere before someone else because it really doesn't matter. I would rather take the extra four seconds to let an old dude cross the street than get to wherever I'm going.

In these times of frightening social distance, where we feel so safe inside social media as to say absolutely awful things to absolute strangers on the internet, I see people retreat from actual person-to-person interactions more and more.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot more unabashed solicitation going on now that there ever was before.
I can't walk a block without a tall young dude asking if I have spare dollar for a bus, or an enthusiastic person in a beanie with a clipboard trying to get me to sign a petition, or a twenty something wearing nine hundred dollars' worth of make up and cologne asking if I'm happy with my pore size, mortgage interest rate, or data plan.

STILL. THESE ARE HUMANS. They deserve a respectful shake of the head and a smile, or if that doesn't put them off a, "I'm sorry, no thank you."
You don't even have to put in the I'm sorry if you don't like, but No Thank you, goes a really long way.
So does door holding.
Like, for everyone.
If you go through a door, just flick your eyes back and see if there is someone behind you, and hold it for them for the .25 of a second it takes for them to get to it.
It doesn't make you late for things.
It doesn't make the stranger think they can be your friend now, and if so, and you're not into that then say, "no thank you," and walk away, or if you're totally about new friends, then great! You have one!

Manners are the thing that evolve into kindness. They are the gestures that remind all of us that we are in this thing together.
Letting someone go ahead of you may be something you can do every day, until that one day that you really are late, and you really do need to get somewhere really soon, and YOU SHOULD STILL BE POLITE.
YES.
Because manners karma is real, and the more politeness you exhibit, the more it comes back to you.

I find people's wallets a lot.
I always have.
I find pocketbooks and purses, laptop bags and phones, and sometimes I just find money on the street.

And you can bet your sweet bippy I take the wallets and the pocketbooks and anything else to the police station.
Did you know that you can drop off someone's wallet at the library if you find a library card in it because their library account has a phone number, and the librarians can call them to return their shit?
Yes. You can do that.

I've called people and heard the relief gush from their voice when they realize that their stuff is found.
I've turned over phones and watched previously horrendous humans smile gratefully and say "Oh my god, thank you so much!"

And even if they didn't that's not the point.

The point is I know how fucking crazed I would be if I lost my phone or wallet.
I know I'd be a mess, trying to figure out how to replace all my cards, my IDs, cancel my accounts with every single goddamn thing, and then trying to remember new account numbers.

And you know what?

I've never had to do it, because whenever I've misplaced my shit, some kind human has found it and returned it.

Manners Karma, people.

Anyway.

I just wanted to impress upon you how small the planet is, how alike we are, and how it really does not hurt you to say those pleases and thank yous and to hold doors, and take a moment to turn in the phone you found in the bathroom of the coffeeshop because it is these small, every day moments, that make us all okay. They remind us that the world hasn't completely turned into a dumpster fire, and that we're all just doing our best to be human beings.

So thank you, for reading, and for that thing, you know, that thing you did for me that time.
Thanks for that.

Poop City. Population: You

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about motherhood the other day.
She jokingly suggested that we change the title of mother to "fecal manager," because all we do is clean up poop, all the poop, in every form.

Yes.

This is really a post about shit.

So turn away if you are like I used to be, someone who might identify as fecal-phobic.

If you're still here, you were warned.

When you sign on to have a child, you are aware, in the abstract, that you will be forced, as a kind of payment for the amazing wonder of bringing a child into this world, to deal with their poop. You comprehend the idea, but you'd rather not think about it. You buy diapers and marvel at their smallness. You decide you want to do cloth diapers or biodegradable diapers. You've read that diapers make up some horrific percentage of landfills, and you refuse to be part of that problem.
You get up on that pulpit reserved for not-yet-parents and you sway with the conviction of your gospel.
You forget about everything else.

You forget you have a cat and that the cat poops.
You are allowed to forget that the cat poops because the cat poops into a convenient little box that you rake once every couple of days (or weeks if you're lazy). If you're extra lucky, you get to pass that task to your partner while you're pregnant because toxoplasmosis is a thing now.
You forget you have a dog.
In the world before you have a child, bringing yourself to pick up your dog's poop in a little plastic bag is the epitome of filth.
You place two, maybe three bags over your hand and you still shudder with revulsion as your claw closes around the turd. You scamper to the nearest trash barrel and fire it like a missile from your person.
If you're really honest, a lot of the time, you run off with your dog before anyone can notice she did anything.

You hate poop.
A lot.

When you have a baby, your entire view of poop changes.
The first few days you are concerned with the baby doing it at all, what they expel is important, the frequency with which is leaves them is also notable. The amount is comparable to what they pour onto sanitary napkins in commercials, which is to say, not much, and taken care of quickly and easily.

Then you leave the hospital, the changes are still novel, and you're still very concerned with them. You're surprised with how clinically you regard them actually, but there's this weird feeling that the baby is still part of your body, and watching its functions is akin to popping your zits. You're a little grossed out, but more fascinated that you produced something capable of producing other things. It's like a magic trick inside a russian nesting doll.
But it's also poop.
You don't forget that.
It just doesn't bother you as much...yet.

The bothering actually sneaks up on you.

It shivers through you when your partner returns to work, and you change a diaper blowout at 6:30am, which takes a while because there are washings and wipings and outfit swaps that must take place. You come into the kitchen and the dog has peed all over the floor because you didn't get her out early enough and your partner forgot, since you always used to get the dog out before the baby was born.
You feel extra skeeved out by cleaning up the pee because you have to do it while the baby is strapped to you.
What if a microscopic fleck of dog pee gets on your baby?!!! You wash your hands eight times.

You take the dog out and conveniently forget to pick up her poop because you've already had to deal with enough today.

Then a couple of months later, as you're dragging the dog away from her latest deposit, trying to adjust a larger baby in his sling, attempting to juggle the leash and the house key and your phone as well, a woman comes out and yells at you for not picking up your dog's poop. You point at your baby. She says, "I don't care."
You clumsily use your shoe to kick the poop off her lawn into a storm drain while she folds her arms and watches.
You hold the tears back until you are back to your driveway.

A year later, your kid is wearing the horrible landfill diapers like every other kid.
You gave up on biodegradable after the six-blowouts-in-one-day day.

You're a bit more of a poop warrior now.
You've had it in your hair.
You've washed it out of so many shirts, you've stopped buying nice shirts unless you have to go somewhere, and you have three "going out shirts."
You've sieved turds out of your bathtub and tied onesies like shit-filled balloons and lobbed them right into the trash along with the diaper inside them because there isn't bleach enough in the world for that mess.
You've dealt with a stomach bug that ripped through you, your kid, and your husband and left you retching into a toilet, while you held your kid away from your face, and through it all, you thought about the diaper you would have to change when it was all done.

Oh fuck.
Someone has to clean the cat's box now, don't they?

And it's rancid when you get to it, because you genuinely forgot it existed until one June morning it smelled like ammonia and death and you were suddenly acutely aware that you didn't know the last time you bought litter.

You tie a rag over your face like you're in a dystopian movie and you wear gardening gloves, and the curse words you utter while the baby lumbers around his pack n' play in the other room, are the filthiest most offensive things you've ever said.

Another year goes by.
You've begun potty training the kid, but the dog is very old and doesn't make it outside at least once a day and relieves herself with no discrimination on the linoleum.
You're child knows to stop when he enters the kitchen and to point at whatever's desecration the floor. He can identify it by name even while you stoop to wipe the spot with antibacterial wipes, or scoop up the matter and then run a mop across the surface.
You clean your kitchen floor more times than you change your kid's diaper now, and you refuse to go barefoot into the room anymore.

Your potty training child has suddenly decided to lie about when he has to poop so you have to take your chances with diapers versus underwear, swimtrunks versus pull ups, or tarp versus hose.

Sometimes you use all of it, and there's still fucking poop in your hair.

You feel like you have to model good, responsible behavior for your kid, so you scoop up the dog poop every time you take her outside.
You clean the cat's box every thursday, which is trash day, and you haul a bag of landfill diapers and litter to the curb and apologize to the sky for fucking the planet up, and then stand there a minute and wonder what you used to do with your amazingly poop-free youth before your partner sends you a text that says,
Are you coming back?
It almost sends you into an existential crisis that question, and you have no answer for it because you'd be lying if you hadn't just considered running down the street in your pajamas and bare feet, running until you were far away, alongside a highway with your thumb out squinting into backseats to make sure there's no duct tape and chloroform waiting for you, but instead you return. You sniff your fingers, because you are convinced now that you smell of poop, everywhere, all the time.
You wash your hands.
You wipe the kitchen floor. You watch your red-faced son squat over a plastic bucket shaped like a frog and you have a canister of m&ms you shake him encouragingly.

You find yourself saying, "Come on, sweetie! Poop for Mummy!" with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for high school cheerleaders whose boyfriends have just miraculously recovered from cancer in time to be quarterback for the big game.


You sometimes look longingly at a bottle of wine at two in the afternoon, wondering if you have a glass if you'll turn into one of those moms from tv, and instead you lock yourself in the bathroom, ironically, and cry while your child watches some pixar monstrosity in the next room. You hope the emotionally manipulative soundtrack drowns out your heart wrenching sobs.

Then you sigh, and wash your face, and go back out there, and he greets you like you were gone for a thousand years, and you get kisses and hugs, and his little sweaty fists balled up into your armpits and ribcage and everything falls away for a little bit.
You sigh and you stop thinking about the future for a second, and you relax. Maybe you think about the fact that there are parents who would trade limbs to have their babies back with all the shitty diapers they could make.
Maybe you think about that time your parents talk about, when as a baby, you painted the walls of your crib with a booty blast to frighten for centuries.
Maybe you just close your eyes, and sniff your baby's little head and remind yourself someday, someday very soon, he'll be grabbing an apple after school, pecking you on the cheek, and running out the door to some mischief or another, and by then he should be potty trained...probably.

Then a little wistfulness mixes in with the sweet, hay and milk smell of baby hair and you think how odd it is that wistfulness smells so much like ammonia, and goddammit, when did you last buy litter?

What was and the Mother

Last night, I took ten minutes.

I took ten minutes, and I realized she is still there.

The woman I was before I had a baby.

In here, pushing through the jungle of guilt vines, choked with responsibility mosquitoes, thick with the oppressive humidity of doubt and the anxiety of everyday darkness. She's in here. She's still here. She's okay.

I worked from five thirty in the evening until nine thirty making cookies like I do every tuesday and thursday in the cafe a block from my apartment. I worked with the twenty four and twenty five year olds that I work with regularly. They played music from video games that have hundreds of hours of story lines and from bands whose members weren't born when I graduated high school. They talked obsessively about how stressed out working at a cafe made them, about how they were the only things keeping the place together, about how they "couldn't handle much more of this."
I smiled and kept doing their dishes.
I got my cookies made. I listened to them whinge about dating and apps and being single and being an introvert because apparently everyone's an introvert now, and they know their Myer-Briggs label, and they practically wear it as a t-shirt or use it as the heading on their resume. It's always been cool to be broken, but now it's cool to tell everyone your diagnosis and compare meds.
No shame...maybe that's a good thing?

It's all the same though.
The vocabulary is different.
The music is unfamiliar, and the technology has changed things a little, but it's still pretty miserable to be twenty. All the internal conflict, and an endless amount of energy to fuel the self doubt and discovery.

The night wore on. I listened. I thought about the rest of the day, how I'd been cleaning up the geriatric dog's accidents, chasing the baby, trying to get him to eat, taking my Dad out to lunch, getting myself to a dentist appointment, and making the baby and my husband's dinners all before I headed out the door to my shift.

I thought about how four or five years ago, when the compound housed all my closest friends, and we all worked in cafes and bakeries, how we used to waste time like it was an olympic sport.
Entire days were spent doing whatever we liked.
I could come and go as I pleased, go to the beach and change my mind halfway there.
Still, I would worry.
I would obsess about restricting and over-exercising and not getting fat.
I would obsess about reading books and being at parties or bars or seeing people and being clever and funny and looking like I had my shit together.
I wanted people to think I was a big deal so badly.

But so much of the best times were just sitting around with my friends, drinking coffee and listening to music and talking. Or sitting out on the porch having a glass of wine and singing along as my best friend strummed her ukelele. Or even taking slow wanders around the cemetery or the beach, working through the fogs of our emotions and forgetting to feel the breeze on our skins.

One of the things I miss the most since having a child, and the forced isolation it incurs, is the casual ways I could always access my friends.

I struggled so much with the feeling that I was being left behind.
I was anchored to my couch for an entire year, nursing and cleaning and finishing my masters degree.
Then I was stepping gingerly away from the couch and the baby, overwhelmed by how reluctant I was to leave him even for a couple of hours, confused as to who I was now that my priorities were so different from my single or child-free friends.

It hurt.
I know, right?
It doesn't make any sense.

It hurt that I had changed so much I could barely stand to leave my kid with his dad for a couple of hours and toddle down the street to see a jazz band play. It hurt that I skipped parties so much that I stopped being told they were happening.
It hurt that couples I had introduced were no longer texting me to come to their backyard bonfires or that the times I saw them were alway incidental, and I missed them, and they missed me, and we'd make promises to call each other for a drink, knowing as we walked away that we were never going to follow through.

Most days, I am spent by seven pm. I've spent twelve hours caring for my kid while his dad's away at work, and he's a magical joy of a human being, but he's also more exhausting that I ever fathomed another human could be.
It's surprised me how working a couple of days at the cafe has helped expand my perspective.

Last night, I came home from my shift, and I was tired, and I was hungry, but I was also kind of flying.
I'd made an absolute ton of cookies in a very short amount of time.
One of which was an experimental riff on oreos, and I'd never made them before, so when the results turned out spectacularly, I was over the moon.
I walked home and it was a surprisingly mild night.
I'd forgotten my coat, and barely missed it.
One of the blessed twenty somethings had handed me a third of a bottle of rosé that they couldn't serve, so I poured it into a glass when I got home, and I sat down on the porch.

It was almost ten, and my husband texted me, "Where are you," and I lied. I said I was taking out the dog, but instead I sat out under the stars and watched the blossoms from the apple tree in our yard shed all its petals like snow.

I sat out there, and I took sweet sips of the wine and breathed, and I realized it's all still here.
The parties, the books, the beautiful nights, the walks through the cemetery, the long talks, the fires, the coffee, the music, and the laughter. It's all still here waiting for me whenever I'm ready.
I sort of thought I'd been swallowed by motherhood, and that there was no coming back, and in a way, that's true.

I finished the glass of wine, and a breeze that smelled like someone's laundry steam floated by and was criss crossed by one that smelled like ocean. The petals floated by and settled into dimples in the grass and asphalt. I lifted my hand to move a stray hair off my cheek and my knuckles smelled like buttercream, and I smiled because I'm still me.

She's here whenever I am still.