Hearts beat as one. Beach, cold fog drifts in, comes in waves, Ice Cold from the Pacific blows in our faces, it chills our skin, I see goose bumps on Fiona’s girl baby legs. I think to myself, but out loud, “And this is the one time I leave all the warm changes of clothes in the back of the car all the way back through the sand, up the hill, and across the terrifying road. “Jack and Fiona this is a VERY dangerous stretch of road. You could get hit.” I wonder how am I going to carry the picnic lunch, the beach towels, blanket, sand toys, floaties, diapers, wipes, sunscreen, hats, waters, and purse. I put both babies in the wagon and strap them in, pull it across the street, in between fast cars and carry three bags. We pick a spot, noticing a gazillion people to the left we go right. Jacks in regular form, he dumps out his bag of excavators by the little stream and starts playing. Fiona joins in after a few minutes. Jacks not affected by the cold gusts of fog. I watch them, squatting, touching the sand, water, using little plastic blue and red shovels, green buckets, a yellow toy excavator and dump truck. Little tiny excavators too. Fiona runs into the stream and falls face first. She jumps up and cries, face red, a cold burst of wind hits her, she looks at me, I run over, grab her with a towel warm from the sun, I take off all her wet clothes and diaper and redress her, covering with the towel. Jack comes over and we eat seaweed, cherries, hummus, tortilla chips, and drink water. Jack wants to go over and play with these kids building dams in the stream. I take the babies over there, “Is it weird I’m the only adult here?” I think and possibly say out loud to Jack and Fiona. There’s nothing I can do. The kids seem cool; I think they’re locals. They start talking to us, showing us a jelly fish in a bucket. They tell me it’s still alive but it’s broke up into tons of slimy parts. “It will form new jellyfish from all the little parts” this kid tells me. “Really? I didn’t know that”. Another kid tells me they are all homeschooled. A little girl comes over and tells her two-and-a-half-year-old brother, “Come on Vander, mom doesn’t want you talking to strangers”, but he doesn’t listen, he just keeps enjoying playing with Jacks excavator, which I had to convince Jack to let the kid play with. Now I’m feeling even stranger. But I don’t know what I could have done, either not let Jack play with the kids or not go over there and just tell Jack “Go on, go play with them and I’ll wait here.” A woman walks over to me, maybe Vander is her son? I assume she’s someone’s mom. She points out one of her kids, he is the one who broke up the Jelly Fish, she tells me she has three more somewhere, she’s taught kindergarten four times, homeschooled all her kids. “Today is community day for our homeschool group. All these kids know each other; we meet once a week. We’re from Vacaville.” She says. “Oh, really, that’s cool. Do you have a teaching credential?” I ask. “No” She says. She went on to tell me how they do it, that they still have to take the standardized tests, and that she likes it because she gets to bring her faith into it. I felt connected to her and repelled by her at the same time in equal portions. I wondered if she was voting for Trump and if she taught her kids creationism, what did she tell her kids about the ocean? Does she wonder if I’m a Christian too? I felt myself getting close to a magnet or a sink hole, being drawn in. I imagined her life, perfect. Her being the perfect mother and wife. I asked her “Do you ever get breaks? How do you do it, how you teach four different grades and make dinner and cook?” She said it’s hard, but that “God provides us with what we need”
Month: June 2016
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It’s a hot summer day, we’ve been playing outside in the water, my night-shirt wet from sitting on the ground. Fiona has gone into the house, is standing on a chair pushing the button that turns on our speakers, but the music’s not on. She’s singing really loud and moving her shoulders and arms. I walk in the house, take off my top, and turn on some music, I flip through a few stations and when I get to teen beats both babies ears stand to attention. Fiona doesn’t have her hearing aids on, I turn the music up loud. The doors are open, they are filming a Netflix movie down at the park, I wonder if they can hear us. We all start dancing, Jack and Fiona run out onto the deck and back in again, I’m tempted, but I would be seen for sure, not that I really care. After the first song is over Jack says “More”. We listen to three more songs dancing away, arms, legs, bodies flowing with the beat, the Teen beat. The music’s not bad for this sort of thing. I’m enjoying this, my naked body four decades old dancing with babies, boobs bouncing, I catch a glimpse of my reflection on the glass door. My body looks pretty good, I watch myself dance, I started watching myself dance in Elementary school. I would pretend I was sick, stay home from school. After my mom and brother were gone I’d dress up and dance. I don’t know where I got the idea, but I loved doing it. In my twenties I went out dancing every chance I got, especially to REGGAE. I loved dancing, since getting married I haven’t gone to see music and dance very much. There’s been family parties where everyone started dancing, my body wouldn’t dance, it’s as if the dance was buried, like the words sometimes, or the creativity. A self-consciousness takes over. But as I’m dancing naked, my oldish body, bouncing boobs, in front of my two-and-a-half-year-old twins, as they dance naked with me I feel a freedom that I haven’t felt in a long time. I almost danced naked out on my deck, I can hear the neighbors now, “Mommy they’re naked” I heard this the other day as some neighbors walked by and Jack leaned up against the railing naked, pushed his body up against the railing as if he was showing them his willy or going to pee on them. I was laughing so hard, I guess I wanted to do the same thing today, then I thought what if we all just walked down to where they’re filming, naked, with shoes on only and hats. We’ll just sit and watch with the other neighbors like nothing is unusual. Tempting. I realized last night at dinner, having so much fun with my sister in law, great conversations, then seeing an artist friend I haven’t seen in forever, who I look up to, love her work, she tells me she was a teacher for seven years and it was the best, she loved it. If you can help one person, if you can make a difference in one person’s life, that is the theme. What I realized was we may not be able to change anything, the people with the guns and the anger and the hate will always win over peaceful people. I used to get mad when I saw people posting on Facebook to pray for Paris or pray for Orlando or Sandy Hook, or the Refugees from Syria, or the kids being shot in gang crossfire, praying won’t do anything I said. But now I get it, all we can do is pray. We can try to change laws and make the world a better place, but it seems like there’s fifty percent of any given population that wants guns, or are racist against this group or that, that aren’t peaceful people. I can’t change them. I can only be myself, I can only help myself, and maybe a few more along the way. I want to go to Pride today and dance naked in the streets of San Francisco.
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“Look mama! I did it!” Jack calls. I find him in the bathroom looking into the toilet, smiling the proudest smile.
“Great Job Jack, Daddy, Fiona, come here, Jack went poop in the toilet!” I say.
We all stand around the toilet looking at three light brown poops. He finally did it, it’s Jacks first time pooping all on his own in the toilet. Yea! I think. I wipe his butt and we all go on about our business, Alan watching the votes tally in Britain to see if they will be leaving the E.U. on his IPHONE. I’m doing my usual cleaning up in the kitchen, the NON-Stop picking up, I hear Jack and Fiona across in the other room laughing and having a great time. I go over to see what they are up too, on the way I look at the pictures on my IPHONE from the day. I can’t stop looking because it was complete paradise, just what I needed. WE met up with my good friend at Mc Nears beach, it was beautiful. She had her kids (she’s their nanny) We had a picnic, played in the water and sand, the kids all had so much fun, but relaxing fun. I did not have to say no hardly at all. Only when Jack walked on moss covered rocks or was about to throw sand, but it was easy to have eyes on all four kids at any given time, my friend and I were able to have great conversations, I actually laid down and looked up at a palm tree. It was brilliant. I’m recapping the day, Alan comes and asks me who I’m texting, “I’m not, I’m looking at pictures” I say. I think I smell poop but don’t think much of it. Then Alan and I both realize there’s poop and pee on the floor, Jacks pushing the mop, the part with the bristles along the floor “cleaning up” poop is streaked all over the floor, rug, ground into the mop, on Jacks hand, foot, butt, and the wall. It’s not easy cleaning poop out of the fringe on the edge of the carpet. Have I mentioned Jack and Fiona won’t wear diapers or clothes when we’re at home? That was part of the brilliance on McNears, they just walked around naked, or with just shirts on. Fiona kept her swim diaper on longer, I think she thought it was cool. They’ll definitely be potty trained by the end of summer, no training required really. I’ve heard so many stories from moms about bribing their kids to potty train, I need to bribe them not to potty train. I don’t do that, but it’s tempting after I’ve just put on a clean diaper and they tell me they have to go pee. I get so frustrated! Right now I’m so happy, it’s 6:26AM and not a peep from below! I’ve eaten my toast and drank my coffee in peace. It’s wonderful. It’s hard to get peace with toddler twins, every peaceful moment in a miracle.
I am finding it hard to fit in everything without any time off. I have to choose between my studio and working out when they are napping. This week I’ve picked my workouts, we’re in an intense stage of development and I have been feeling SUPER STRESSED by the time I put them down for their nap, I just need a good sweat session and nice hot shower. It totally works. And my workouts are thirty to forty-five minutes versus needed at least an hour in my studio. Especially when I’m ready to start a whole new series. I guess I could always work in my notebooks. If only I could work on them up here so I wasn’t so limited. I’ve also been spending LOTS of my spare moments studying my sign language, I’m making real progress and I am dedicated to incorporating it into my daily life. In Fact, yesterday at the beach, Fiona didn’t wear her hearing aids for half the day because of the water play, we were sitting down and she started saying something to me, I couldn’t understand. I used sign language and she responded, we moved past the whiny thing, and she showed me what she wanted, her friends’ rubber boot. I was also able to communicate with my friend who has hearing loss and is fluent in sign language from afar, that was pretty cool. I’m quite impressed with myself, thinking back when I first started my journey into sign I was so upset, I thought I would NEVER be able to learn, I thought the alphabet looked SO difficult. I got mad at the fact my dominant hand is supposed to do all the action, I was really frustrated with all the rules. It was kind of like the way I felt when I first started running. I could barely run three miles, I couldn’t get my pace up and thought there was no way. One day I found myself running a 10K at a nice pace, no pain in my knees, just feeling good. Maybe that’s just the way it goes, every new practice we embark on will come with growing pains, frustration, self-doubt, but then there’s those moments when we feel fluidity. An ease, an immersion.
I really got excited last week when I decided getting my credential was my long term plan. Then I started self-doubting, what if it’s a mistake, what if it’s too much work with the babies, what if I hate it, I haven’t even talked to my husband about it yet because I’m afraid of all the things he might say. (But if he reads this blog post today I guess he’ll know) He might say it’s a waste of time, no money, ect, ect, ect, and what if he’s right. He’ll say I told you so. I don’t want to be taken away from my babies, my art, my husband, my home, my life. Am I being idealistic to think becoming a teacher in my community, maybe at even the same school my kids go to will enrich our lives as a family? Even though Alan makes enough to support us all, wouldn’t my financial contribution to our family, even if it’s just getting us health insurance be worthy of something? I do feel like there are so many positives to the plan. But will I get burnt out or inspired? What about the bureaucracy? Will it be soul crushing? But to change the world we need to start at the bottom. I would be in the system. I feel like it’s the right thing to do, I know I can do it. I’ll be spending the rest of my savings on school, but if I die tomorrow what difference does it make, I can’t take my savings with me. I feel like I have so much to offer my community, and my paintings aren’t getting out there enough, yet! Someday they will, I’m sure, maybe when I’m eighty, if I live that long! Anyhow time to start thinking about the day ahead! It’s gonna be a great day, just breath!!!
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 