I am proud to say that I had a signature design that I presented year after year, made the same way for each and every holiday that might come up. I drew a bird on the front and wrote, “This birdie has dropped in to say…” and then you opened the card and it read: ”HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!” (or whatever the holiday might be…Happy Birthday and Happy Valentine’s Day worked equally well, and so did your lesser holidays, like Arbor Day and St. Patrick’s Day, if need be.) I felt this card was brilliant for its versatility, and I was quite taken with its rhyme scheme. It was easy to produce, could be dashed off at a moment’s notice (after a day of forgetfulness about the big day), and always was guaranteed to bring a smile.

I guess I grew up not really thinking much about Mother’s Day, once I was too old to make my fabulous card anymore. 

Last year, though, two days before Mother’s Day my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and two days after Mother’s Day they told her that it was incurable. It had spread to her liver and lungs and bones and was on the march to every other organ it could find, in a mad sweeping rampage across her body. 

She had, it seemed, been ignoring some symptoms for a very long time.

And so we started talking on the telephone every day during the next five weeks. We’d sit up late at night–her in Florida and me in Connecticut–and I’d hold the phone to my ear, hearing her laugh and cry, listening to her stories, to her fears, to all the random, stream of consciousness things she wanted to tell me. She’d light up her cigarettes and take sips of her beloved Pepsis, coo to her little dog, and we would stay on the phone for hours and hours.

What did we talk about? Just ordinary things, nothing momentous at all. We’d talk about songs playing on the radio, about the men she had loved and the crazy things she had done. Why she liked to sunbathe but didn’t like to swim. What the lady across the hall said last week. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder years before, and she talked sometimes about why she hated taking the medication for it (”it makes me feel so colorless, like all the red has gone out of the world”) and we talked about the delicious freedom she felt in ordering madly from Home Shopping Network, buying jewelry and diamonds and kitchen appliances and makeup, even though she knew she wasn’t going to pay for any of it.

Whereas I had once seen it as my job to lecture her about all this, now I didn’t anymore–not when she was dying.

But now, in her final illness, she seemed real to me, neither manic nor depressive. She just talked, and I just listened. I felt it was the least I could do, to listen. Sometimes I would type the things she was saying to me on my laptop. My family was fast asleep, and I needed to be sleeping, too, but it was as if I were connected by this umbilical cord of telephone wires, hissing with static, holding me fast to her, even as the time grew short.

She said: I can’t understand how it’s going to happen that I’m going to go from being the fun-loving, lively-spirited person you see before you to being a dead person. Just how is that going to happen? How is it that I won’t be here on the Fourth of July? What in the world is going to happen between now and then that I don’t know about yet?

She said: I think I’m depressed. Or I would be depressed if I weren’t in denial.

She said: In this whole nursing home, all any of us want is to get naked. And they won’t let us.

And then she said: I’m not going to put up with this. I won’t live under these conditions, feeling as bad as I feel. I am out of here. Will you write about me someday? 

And then she stopped eating and let herself fade away. I flew down to Florida and sat beside her and played her favorite songs and held her hand, and she’d smile and squeeze my hand sometimes, silent now.

“Are you scared?” I asked her the day before she died, and she shook her head no. Emphatically NO. 

These days I think of her a lot, even without Congress enacting a Mother’s Day holiday to bring to mind all mothers.

My mother, like probably a lot of women out there, was often not that great a mom. Now, a year out from her death, I think that she was probably consumed with her illness, fighting to stay above it, to remain as clear as she could. Whereas for so much of my life–even as a child–I was the adult in our relationship, the one who needed to protect her and to try to manage her finances and her medications and her adventures, I’m so grateful to have had that winding down time with her. At the end, we were just two people, not mother and daughter necessarily, but just two people who had shared a whole lifetime (mine) together, having made mistakes and come to a place of talking and maybe understanding and forgiveness.

That is grace, I think. That lightness I feel now when I think of how, in the last five weeks of her life, she poured out all she had to me, and that I wrote it all down.

Well, it’s because I am working on my new novel…and I’m now teaching two writing workshops (both of which are a lot of fun, but take up a lot of my brain power)…and blah blah blah….I’m also sneezing a lot, which is my body’s way of celebrating springtime. And then there is the ever-fascinating election to follow the nuances of.

But just because I do think of you out there in the Land of Real Life, I am always on the alert for things you might enjoy, my precious darlings. I recently got sent this in the email, and it made me laugh out loud!

Next Life by Woody Allen
In my next life I want to live my life backwards.
You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too
healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink
alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no
responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and
then.. Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
I rest my case.

I long ago gave up trying to figure out where she gets all her energy, never mind trying to keep up with her.

Recently, she let me in on her latest project. She wants to have a cooking show for teenagers, because (1) she’s noticed that quite a few teenagers are left to figure out their own meals while their parents are at work, and (2) that usually means they eat a lot of fast food, and (3) that’s also perhaps why the levels of childhood obesity are so high because kids don’t know the first thing about nutrition and how fun and easy it can be to put together a healthy meal all by themselves.

So she’s made this wonderful You Tube video as a promo to her first show (while she’s waiting for people to send her vast sums of money to finance this worthwhile project)…and she sent it along to me, and I thought it was great, so I’m sharing it with you.

Go watch it. Naturally I can’t embed it into the text here, because wordpress and you tube are not friends…but here’s the link. Enjoy! And let me know what you think, and I’ll pass your advice and comments along to Carol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5dB442T5mc

She’s right. Picking a name for a character is even more exciting than picking our child’s name, mainly because when you’re naming somebody in a book, you already know the person. You are the only one who knows at the outset of whether he’s an Alessandro or a Jake, whether she’s a Gwendolyn or a Bertha. And even more wonderful is the fact that people just accept whatever name you pick. Nobody says, “What kind of a crazy name is that? Why did you give him THAT name?” like they do when you’re naming a baby.

When it’s a baby, people feel entitled to having their opinions heard about whatever name you picked. My friend Diane, who named her daughter Maisie (surely one of the best names in the English language) spent the first two weeks of the child’s life politely explaining her decision to people on the phone, and then spelling it for them.

But I digress.

This is all to say that I have reached page 125 of the novel I am writing, and suddenly I realized my characters have the wrong names! Does this ever happen to you? You think you know a person well, and then it turns out they had a different name and personality altogether?

The main character was Cate until Friday when she suddenly became Annabelle, not the same kind of person at all. I don’t know why, but when she was Cate-with-a-C, she was a little bit timid, more likely to be walked over than she is now that she’s Annabelle. Before, when she acted out emotionally, the characters around her just reacted with, “Oh, stop it, Cate! You’re always so exasperating.” And now that she’s Annabelle, the people around her seem to know that she’s a little bit flamboyant and surprising.

Some of the minor characters asked for name changes, too, once Annabelle got her true name. Annabelle’s daughter, Tansy, requested something a little more…ordinary. She’s not as airy and drifty as you’d have to be to wear the name Tansy…so she’s now Sophie, and she’s much happier, thank you. Annabelle’s former lover, Dmitri–he turned into Jeremiah…and the contractor’s baby mama blossomed into a Chantelle.

Even more fun, I looked all these up on The Baby Name Wizard: Name Voyager, which you should go to right this minute and type in your own name, all of your friends’ names, and any name you’ve thought of giving your characters and all your children and dogs. It gives you in marvelous graphic detail all you need to know about the popularity of any given name from the 1890’s to the present.

You’ll learn, for instance, that the name John was in the top 10 of names through every decade until the 1990’s, when it started to slip. It’s now reached a new low of being the 20th popular name for boys in 2006. It’s one of the most fun, time-wastingly addictive web sites you’re ever going to come across…and if, like me, you happen to be writing a novel, you can totally justify being on there for hours because you’re researching your characters.  

Tell me: is naming characters (and children) fun for you, or has it been a major source of stress? And do your characters (or children!) ever insist on new names after you’ve gotten to know them better?

Do you remember when you first found out you were going to be a parent, and how suddenly the whole world seemed to have advice to throw at you? Did you have people saying, “Get ready for your life to suck” and warning you that you would never sleep again?

And did it seem to you that people were almost gleeful as they described the myriad ways in which your life was now going to be in ruins?  

You’re not alone.

In fact, that kind of unsolicited, ”helpful” advice provides the framework for a hilarious and touching new musical just written by Bill Squier and Jeffrey Lodin, two award-winning writers from Stamford. The two have taken Dana Bedford Hilmer’s book, “Blindsided by a Diaper”, which was  published last June by Three Rivers Press, and turned it into a stage show that captures the almost universal experience of panic, fear, excitement, love and confusion that comes into play when the little pink line appears on the pregnancy test stick.

The book is a collection of 30 essays written by men and women who give an unflinching portrait of how having a baby changed their relationship. Some of the essays are hilarious, some are sad, but all have a breathtaking honesty to them, as they tackle some aspect of parenthood.

And I got to see a read-through of the show on Monday night.

The show is a wonderful, amazing compilation of the essays, all framed around a young couple discovering they’re expecting a baby…and realizing through the pregnancy exactly what they’re in for. Bill and Jeff have taken many of the book’s essays and turned them into stories that other people tell to the couple, warning them about what to expect.

The result is both funny and powerful–and so universal. There’s not a single cliche in the mix, probably because the essays come from so many different people, all writing about their own powerful experience.

And, oh yeah, full disclosure here: an essay that I wrote for the book (”Dating the Hubs” about how my husband and I finally got to go on a date and had to learn all over again how to talk to each other) got turned into a skit, and even had a song written about it.

Oh my! 

May I just say that I was unprepared for what it was going to be like to sit in an audience and see somebody who was playing ME, saying my words and singing a funny song that illuminated them perfectly? I felt as though my nerve-endings were electrified. 

And although I’d been warned by my friend Beth (who is Bill’s wife) to bring along Kleenex, I wasn’t prepared for what it was going to be like when the woman playing me looked out at the audience and read the part about how going out on that date was just the first bit of learning to say goodbye to our child…and now that she was going off to college, she was the one saying goodbye to US.

I could barely breathe.

And when at the end of the skit, the cast stood up and sang in a low voice, “Go, speed racer…” which is the song my husband used to sing to our daughter during those  middle of the night walks around the dining room table…well, thank goodness for Kleenex. And waterproof mascara.

Now the show just needs a million dollars so it can turn into a real stage play and go to Broadway. That’s all. I’m saving up my quarters.

And just when we had decided to stop our wild, spendthrifty ways, too. We have had three months now of trying to be soooo careful–radical things like eating at home ALL THE TIME, canceling subscriptions we can read on-line, cooking all the food we buy instead of throwing half of it out, not driving places unless we absolutely have to, and clipping coupons. I’m even learning to turn off lights when I leave the room.

And then, wouldn’t you know, the cell phone bill goes completely haywire.

It’s not like a regular human can actually READ a cell phone bill to try and figure out what happened, so I called up customer service and said, “Would somebody there please walk me through this 14-page document and explain how it is that my cell phone is always $114 but now is $229? Did I somehow walk in my sleep and sign myself up for a new deluxe, charge-me-for-everything plan or something when I had to replace my old phone last month?”

The woman who had answered my call said, “Oh, didn’t you just want to faint when you looked at that bill? I know just how this is!”

I was silent for a moment. ”As a matter of fact, I did consider fainting,” I told her, “except that I knew I would probably just bonk my head on something on my way down to the floor and then I’d have an additional medical bill to pay.”

“Well, let’s just see what’s going on here,” she said. “Sit down and take a few deep breaths, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She kept typing things–I could hear the clicking of the keys–and after a moment she said, “Oh! I see exactly what this is! One of the people on your family plan made lots and lots of calls last month!”

“Yes. That’s my daughter,” I said. “She’s at college and she doesn’t have a land line. She uses her cell phone for everything.”

“Ohhh. She must have had a tough month. Usually we see this when kids are stressed out at school. That’s when they need to talk to their friends.”

“Yes,” I said. “They do.”

(March had been a tough month: lots of sickness, a couple of friend crises, some heavy decisions about next year’s courses and housing situations.)

“Well,” said the woman. “Let’s just make all that go away. You’re back to where you usually are. Just tell your daughter to use the phone nights and weekends unless her friends are on the same network, and then they can talk anytime. This was just a one-time deal, though, I bet. She’ll be more careful from now on.”

I sat there stunned. “You took the extra calls away?”

“Yes. You’re back to where you usually are. Your bill is $114.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No! Have a good day.”

“YOU TOOK THE CALLS AWAY?”

“Yes. It wasn’t your usual bill.”

“Um, can I send you some chocolate chip cookies?” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You know how much trouble I’d get into for that?”

Has anybody else ever had anything like this happen? Are there LOTS of companies just waiting for us to call them and say we need our bills explained?

Maybe I should call up the heating oil compan. Would they say, ”Ohhh, I see what happened! George Bush really messed up the economy with that war in the Middle East. You shouldn’t have to pay $3.80 a gallon for heating oil. Let me just put that back where it used to be….”

Clearly I am in no danger since I know how to not blog.

Actually, though, life has not been exactly a stress-free dream around here.

Things keep coming up.

April and May are always the months when the world seems to come out of hibernation, and things start filling up the calendar. Last weekend I participated in a writers’ conference, which was fun, but…well, talky. I think I spoke nonstop for about six hours on the topic of how you find characters to write about, and by the end I had nothing left in my brain.

And now that that is behind me, it seems I have to prepare for a 45-minute talk on the “challenges of my writing career” to an audience of students at the 5th Annual Writers’ Festival at Tunxis Community College on April 23. I laughed when the organizer told me that they would love if I could bring any photos to illustrate the challenges of this so-called career, which could be shown on an overhead projector. Perhaps I should take a picture of me slumped over my desk, still wearing my bathrobe at 4 in the afternoon, and tearing my hair out while I down cup after cup of tea. Oooh, or perhaps I should show this picture, of the true way my writing gets done. I outsource it to dogs.

At any rate, the good news is: spring is at last coming to Connecticut. There are buds on the trees, the grass is greening up, and at night now you can hear the wonderfully creepy sound of the peepers, sounding like space aliens have arrived.

Excuse me while I go get another Tums and remind that dog he has a novel due on September first.

Now it’s daytime, and I’m sitting in Panera with my laptop, and even though it’s waayy past lunchtime–already 2:45–the place is just teeming with humanity! Much of this humanity consists of people under the age of one, all of them munching on pacifiers and flirting, or occasionally flinging bottles of formula to the floor just for the pleasure of seeing perfect strangers react with surprise and then jump up to retrieve those bottles. Again and again and again. 

I have not had much sleep. With a novel waking me at 2:14, and real live adorable children coming in to see me at 6:30, there wasn’t a lot of truly good rest time in the middle.

I awoke this morning to find Charlie (a deep thinker of four years of age) sitting cross-legged next to me on my bed. “Oh, you’re awake,” he said when I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what you think about the light fixtures in here. Are they interesting?”

I looked at them. They were nice, but on the whole, as I told him, I’d rather think about them after 7 a.m.  So then I persuaded him to get under the covers with me and go back to sleep. We got exactly twenty more seconds of shut-eye, and then Josh (ten months old) woke up, and the day had officially begun. We all went upstairs (their two bedrooms and the playroom are on the third floor) where we played drum-like instruments and read stories and changed one person’s diapers and found Mickey Mouse underwear for another person, and got dressed–(”comfy clothes, no pants with snaps today!” said Charlie), and then Ben came and we all went on the Breakfast Train to the first floor, where we cooked eggs and ate pears and waffles and Cheerios. And then Ben took Charlie to preschool, and I put Josh down for a nap, which was THE most luscious time of all. Just sitting in the glider with a fat, cuddly baby drinking from a bottle with his eyes closed, is a divine experience, even when you’re tired. Maybe especially when you’re tired. Just looking upon those plump, pink arms and hearing those wonderful sucking, sighing noises he makes. The lashes on the cheek. And the way he just tucks himself right in, snuggling as close as can be. He drank and drank and drank and then, in his sleep, pushed himself away from the bottle, with milk running down his chin like a drunken sailor…and I reluctantly put him in his crib and went to take a bath.

And now I’m in Panera, and just a moment ago, I dived for my notepad to see what I’d been so driven to write in the middle of the night, since I have absolutely no memory of what was so vital, and here’s what it says, in nearly indecipherable handwriting:

“And you know what? My mother became my real mother again, just a bad year, not w/father but w/__________.

Also, in telling of past, goes on and on. Then talk about Mentor. Way he was at fault somehow. THEN we see Jeremiah. Surprise?”

This, I don’t have to tell you, is Novel Misbehavior of the highest order. The first rule I have for novels (in the middle of the night, or any time) is that they try to make some sense. And if they have to wake a person up for some all-important news flash, they need to phrase it in something approaching coherence. Something one can find the way back to, eventually.

The sun is shining on me here in my armchair here in Panera, and I see the way this could so easily go…Maybe this is the kind of message from the subconscious that will make more sense to me if I just go back to sleep for a moment or two more before I head back home to my Real Life, where there are no babies with fat arms and children who want to discuss the interestingness of the light fixtures with me, or any other deep subjects.

Yesterday when I picked up Charlie from preschool, he stared off into space in the car, clearly lost in thought.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

“Well, I’m thinking about blame,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.”

Yeah, me too.

He may end up writing novels, himself. I just hope his novels let him sleep through the night.

My writer friends, Alice Mattison, Leslie Connor, and I are giving an all-day writing conference together, and I couldn’t be more excited. If you’re anywhere near Fairfield, Connecticut on April 5, and you want to get a chance to talk about writing all day long…please come!

Here’s the notice about it that the organizer, Carol Dannhauser, has sent around:

Calling All Writers
You’re invited to a daylong writing conference
in Fairfield with three top authors!!
WHO: Alice Mattison, author of the New York Times Notable Book In Case We’re
Separated: Connected Stories, among other works, and an instructor at the
graduate writing program at Bennington College
Sandi Kahn Shelton, fiction and non-fiction writer whose contemporary
novel A Piece of Normal was selected as the Target book of the month
Leslie Connor, whose works include the much-acclaimed young adult
novel Waiting for Normal.

Together, the trio has published literary fiction, short stories,
contemporary fiction, non-fiction, magazine articles, essays, poetry, children’s
books and young adult books.
WHAT: The authors will share writing tips, strategies and stories in a morning
roundtable, then split up to conduct three hands-on sessions.
Lunch is provided for an additional fee for your
convenience.

WHERE: Connecticut Audubon Birdcraft Museum in Fairfield, 314
Unquowa Road. Presented by The Writers’ Workshop of
Fairfield.

WHEN: Saturday, April 5, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

WHY: Jack-up your writing. Strengthen your skills. Learn from these enthusiastic
and knowledgeable authors.
Sign up now, as the conference is limited to only 40 participants. Send a
check for $99 (or $114, if buying lunch), made out to The Writers’
Workshop, 2490 Black Rock Turnpike, # 360, Fairfield, CT 06825, or
bring payment to The Birdcraft Museum prior to March 15. Payment
postmarked after March 15 is $125, plus $15 for lunch (optional).
For information, call Carol Dannhauser at 203-374-8343
or e-mail Dannhauser@aol.com.

Have you met Google Talk?

I have to admit: I’m on it all the time, whether I want to be or not. It’s the main way I write my novel AND talk to my kids all at the same time. Sort of like major multi-tasking.

I’m getting used to having the little screen pop up in the corner of my novel, and I can dash over to it and type a few lines, and then go right back to my book without ever having to click out of anything.

But the other day I was there, typing away to Allie, when suddenly my computer started to sound like a phone ringing.

I jumped back.

And then there was Allie’s voice, COMING OUT OF MY COMPUTER. She was saying, “Hello?” and she sounded as baffled as I was.

“How is it that we’re talking to each other instead of typing?” I said.

She didn’t know. Except that it turned out that her baby, Miles, was sitting on her lap, and then he leaned over and pressed a button on the computer, and suddenly we understood what that little “Call” box was referring to.

YOU CAN ACTUALLY CALL THE PERSON YOU’RE TYPING TO.

We felt a little ridiculous when we realized that this had been available to us all along–times when we foolishly used the telephone to communicate, for instance.

“The BABY figured this out?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Get used to it. Children always know more about modern technology than their parents do.”

“But, Mom,” she said, “he’s not even eleven months old.”

They learn fast these days.

P.S. I tried to tell my friend Alice about this amazing happening.

“Allie’s voice came out of your computer?” she said.

“Yes, after the sound of a ringing phone. Allie’s computer had called my computer, don’t you see, and then we could talk to each other.”

“How did the computer CALL another computer?”

“Well, who knows? There’s a button you click on.”

“No,” she said. “No. That didn’t happen, and it’s not true, and I can’t hear about it anymore.”

“Well…” I said.

She took a sip of her wine. “But I’ll tell you another amazing thing,” she said. “My son was visiting over the weekend, and he used his CELL PHONE to check his email! Did you know people could do that??”

Yes, I said. I’ve heard of that.