Sickos Inc.

I, like many people with unbridled internet access doing hard time 8 hours a day in a crappy cubicle, have been obsessed over the last few days with CNN's round-the-clock coverage of the 'House of Horrors' in Cleveland. For those of you too hoity-toity (or poor) to fritter away half the day reading sensationalized, shabbily-covered online news bytes, this is the grisly tale of three young women abducted over the course of several years from the same neighborhood, and kept captive for a decade in a house in the middle of a suburban subdivision.

It's almost too awful to even comprehend. Everything about this story smacks of an early Stephen King novel, but infused with the lurid cinematic terror of the 'Saw' movies.

Now, those of you who know me well, or even not so well (because I broadcast my innards all over the internet in several forums, it's not hard to get to know me) may remember that I am kinda obsessed with true crime.  OK, more than kinda; I spent over $100 this summer in Kindle fun-money purchasing serial killer books to inhale during my week at the beach and at one point got myself so freaked out reading about the 'Sex Slave Murders', I blacked out briefly in a chaise lounge and may have suffered a mixture of anxiety-attack/sunstroke, but I digress.

What's so appealing (which is really a poor choice of words, and for that I'm sorry...these women went through hell and I absolutely am amazed by their fortitude) about this story is that it happened in real LIFE. Middle class America, right under the noses of residents who, while thinking their neighbor's introverted behavior a bit off, never could have imagined that he had three grown women (and one of the women's eventual offspring) held captive in the house next door for years on end.

There is so much I want to know. Which is why I've been scouring the net looking for answers. Who the fuck was this man, for starters? How the hell does a person decide that it would be a cool thing to abduct another human being and contain her against her will for years and years? Then do it again and again? What kind of person can systematically violate another person then walk out the door and go pick up some Big Macs or hop over to a neighborhood barbeque?

It boggles the mind. And it's the kind of real-life horror story that keeps me up at night. Just another thing toss into the overflowing mental dumpster of fears that a mother has about what could happen to her child.

We first heard the story on the radio on the way to school the other morning. Being the pain in the ass that I am, I opted of course to seize the opportunity to go on one of my Stranger-Danger rants.

(Like a cheerleader): "What do you do if a man tries to get you to go in his car?"

(rote response): "I run away and come tell you!!"

"What if he has, say, a puppy? Or a broken leg? Or tells you he's lost and needs directions? And he looks like a totally normal guy, and he's really friendly and nice?" (Thanks, Ted Bundy biographies)

"I KNOW, mom...I don't go anywhere with strangers..." this reply is delivered with pursed lips, window-fog fingerpainting, and plentiful eye-rolling.

Maybe it's overkill. So what. I don't give a fuck. Lily is six months away from double digits. We live in a world where a 14 year old can be walking  home from junior high school, thinking about her recent first kiss and how the dumb violin her mom makes her play is too heavy and the case bangs against her legs when she has to carry it home, and then suddenly she is spending the remainder of her teenhood shackled to a radiator in some sick bastard's basement.

Life is precious. Keep your babies close. Even if they are annoyed by it. Some day they will thank you. That is all.

Oh, lord. I just looked at the date of my last post and gave myself a swift mental asskicking.
I need to write more. There's certainly no question about that. It just seems lately like the days swirl into great funneling tornadoes of have-tos and routines, and suddenly, after I've worked all day, taken care of the kid, attempted to create a somewhat nourishing meal that doesn't require much prep or oven usage (mac n cheese goes great with...bread! And frozen peas!), 'cleaned' up, and fed our thousands of cats, its 10 pm and I've barely even sat down or taken a moment to indulge in my 15 minutes of social networking iphone porn.

But I'm a try, y'all. Actually, I'm just saying this publicly for me. Because nobody really knows about this blog. BUT THEY WILL!!!

Maybe. Probably.

hope so.

I'm gonna lock you up in a tower til you learn to let your hair down far enough to climb outside

This time it was innocent. I SWEAR. I was simply cleaning out the kid's schoolbag and out tumbled two carefully folded papers. Curious things to find in the hobo-like knapsack of a girl who can't manage to turn her homework in without food stains and wrinkles.

Yet I know these papers. Lined – wide-rule. Each filled with the pencil-thick penmanship of someone nervous and pressing down too hard. Folded once, twice, maybe six times total so as to slip inconspicuously into the front pocket of a backpack. Notes from a boy.

A FIFTH grade boy, no less. A boy who, when I pick my daughter up at aftercare every day calls me "Ms. Lily's Mom", and who standing up is taller than I am. Taller than I am! And this boy has told my daughter in hurried scribbles that he wants to marry her and has bought her a Christmas ring. And that he wants to give her $20. For some reason.

At the moment I am somewhere stuck between mouth-curling horror and hysterical laughter. In this note, filled with promises to 'perteckt' my daughter and sing her a song he wrote himself, this boy tells her that he always stares at her because she is 'hot'.

I am not ready to have a daughter who is hot.

So I of course took well-lit photos of the evidence and texted it to all of my friends and family in the hopes of getting some perspective. Some reason. Anything. Help me understand how a little girl who needs to sleep with two kitchen lights and a closet light on, who bites her toenails and loves to be tickled, who each night tucks her American Girl doll into a crib lined with kitchen towels, can be hot.
She isn't fucking hot. It's blasphemy.

Help me, blogosphere. gulp...help

How to Ensure that Your Child Will Never Talk to You About Anything, Ever, Part I

Well, we've finally gotten there. Earlier than expected, I have to say. But we've reached the point where my little daughter, the more beautiful, weirder, slightly more mercurial version of me but with a much better butt, has begun to separate herself from me.

It's been happening in little ways. She doesn't need me to do her hair in the morning. She spends more time with headphones on. But still, it's the beginning of something more.

This should make me happy. This should be the shit. Because ever since that gorgeous little monkey ambled out of my body nine years ago, some part of her, I think, has always kind of been trying to figure out a way to get back in.

That is to say, we're close. Partly it's because I wore her in a backpack well beyond the point when her legs were perfectly formed and in good working order. And breast fed her considerably longer than 'Make other moms at the park uncomfortable' age. Probably it's also because her dad and I split when she was three and we starred in the Mommy-Lily show for years and years (sometimes a lighthearted sitcom, like "Friends";  sometimes more frightening,  like "American Horror Story" or "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo". )

Regardless of the reasons, Lily and I are a unit. And I love it. But she's zooming toward the newly identified demographic of 'Tween' (Thanks, Mary Kate and Ashley) faster than you can say "Justice gift card".  She thinks Santa is bullshit. She wants to text people. She thinks Ke$ha is pretty. I'm not ready.

Which explains, I guess, why I do really dumb things. Like a couple weeks ago, I happened upon a journal. And I did the unthinkable.

Yup. I read it. Disgusted, aren't you? I know. It goes against every touchy-feely, crunchy-hippie-mom attachment parenting instinct I have. And yet. And yet. There it was.

It's okay, I told myself. You're only peeking in to make sure everything's going okay with her. Just getting a birds eye view of her life. Find out, perhaps, a teensy bit more than the usual 'Uh huh's and 'Fine's I get in the ride home from school lately.

Well, part of me wishes I hadn't. A really REALLY big part of me wishes that. But another part of me, the bitchy, worry-prone, See-I-Told-You-So part, felt totally, disappointingly justified. Because as I read the most recent entry, besides having to squelch the urge to break out a red pen and correct her totally shitty spelling, my knees started buckling and my whole midsection felt like it turned to liquid heat. I nearly burst into tears as I read the words (edited, of course):

DEAR DIARY, I AM SO EXCITED BECAUSE THE BOY I HAVE A CRUSH ON FINALLY ASKED ME TO BE HIS GIRLFRIEND!!!!

It fascinates me that you live on, even after you've been dead to me for, like, ever

I've always had a hard time imagining people, once they've made their grand exit from my immediate sphere, actually going on about their own lives without me in them.

This makes me sound like the horrible megalomaniac villain in a kid's cartoon, doesn't it? What an egotistical wretch, you're all thinking. Assuming the world revolves around her. Ugh.

Hey, maybe I am. No, I probably, most definitely am. As my age creeps closer and closer to the 'middle of the road' mark, I am beginning to accept that the world is a vast and wonderful place that will continue to spin on its axis with little more than a wince or a resigned sigh when I make my final departure – hopefully not for a while. My role, in the big picture, is probably fairly small. Significant, I'd like to think, but small nonetheless.

Yet, it's disgusting how I imagine myself playing such a huge role in peoples' lives, I actually have allowed myself to assume that once they've moved on and are no longer players in what I imagine as The Kristin Show, they remain forever suspended as they were the last time I saw them: wearing a flannel smelling of woodsmoke, drinking a Coors Light, and never again beyond, oh, say, 22 years old.

Oh, and never being quite the same after losing me as a friend/lover/student/coworker.

Technology is fucking all that up for me though.

I don't remember what the world was like without the internet; I can't remember having pen pals or having to go to the library to research something. And now that we have the Facebook, this crazy train on which every single person I've ever known at every stage of my life is a card-carrying regular commuter, I can find out just how wrong I was in my self-centered theory whenever the heck I want.

I think I blogged about this some time ago on FERTILE. About old boyfriends who'd gotten married and gained weight but lost hair, who'd produced little humans who carry their characteristics in the most devastatingly obvious ways – my GOD, she has his EYES, just look at how he SMIRKS! – and how strange it all is, and sorta, well, unnatural.

Part of me has always believed that on this journey we encounter all kinds of people. Some stay with us a long time, some only briefly, but we are to learn important life lessons from each of them.

That's why I'm having a hard time understanding how it can be that I'm Facebook friends with the boy who put a booger in my sandwich in a junior high school cafeteria, thereby humiliating me and devouring my self esteem for my entire pubescent tenure. I log on each evening and see pictures of his little girl trick or treating or playing Wii and 'like' them. Is that masochistic? Or is it evolution? Or is it, like cloning the family dog, simply against nature's plan?

I struggle with it. I really do. And yet I will hop on the old iPhone, while stuck in traffic, and hastily type in some simply HILARIOUS thing Lily's quipped in the backseat of the car so that the kid who grew up in the house next door to me can read it while HE is stuck in traffic or on the subway or laying in bed or on the toilet or something.

WHY this need to be so tightly connected? Curious what y'all think.

Tall Talk

"Ever feel like you're life is swallowing you whole?"

I like to send texts to people sometimes, just to check in with everyone around me, see who might be going through what I'm going through, and who might suggest I seek a mental health evaluation.

Lately I feel like I'm sealed in a goddamned wooden box that's getting airmailed to a remote, desolate location. Hunched inside, legs folded up to my armpits, I punch at the walls of it, I scratch my nails bloody trying to claw my way out, and yet, I cannot escape.

I also have a flair for the dramatic, you might have noticed.

And I tend to get obnoxiously hyperbolic when I've gone too long doing the single mom thing without even the teensiest of breaks. And I don't count an 8 hour workday where I am so busy I forget to pee for three hours in a row as a break. I just don't. Woe is me! No, I'm not starving and I don't have dust in my eyes and flies all over me because I live in a place where the soil is too dry to grow food and the infant mortality rate is through the roof. I have a home. Good people in my life. A fantastic, inventive and adorable kid.

But being a single mom is hands down the hardest thing I've ever done. I remember siting in my therapist's office years ago, idly throwing around the idea of leaving my husband, while simultaneously fiddling with the tassels on this wonderful woman's beautiful moroccan pillows and honking my nose into her deliciously soft, expensive tissues. At the time it was a spark of an idea, a fleeting thing I sometimes played with to when I was feeling really out of sorts. It was certainly nothing I ever thought I'd have no choice about in a few years. 

I was struck with the severity with which she looked me dead on and said, "Being a single mother is the hardest thing in the world. No matter how bad things may seem right now, they'd be ten times harder if you didn't have someone to do it with."

She was right. As much as I love it just being us sometimes--me and Lily, just the girls, doing it our way! --sometimes it's downright terrifying. A lot of the time, actually. I worry about her all the time. And when I'm not worrying about her, I'm worrying about money. Basically when I wake up at 4 am listening to the cats chase each other around the kitchen, and I stare at the ceiling, wondering if maybe god is there or what, my brain skitters between fear of my kid not wanting to tell her secrets to me and fear that we both might end up being homeless. It's hard to fight these fears, this crushing darkness that seems always to be around the corner, beckoning me like a cartoon shadow with a finger like a curl of smoke, saying, come on, Kristin.

Fall.

Just fall.

Sometimes it seems so delightfully simple. I spend so much time trying to be awesome -- she's a super mom! She's so creative! Look at her cooking pumpkin soup and sewing a halloween costume at the same time with her 8 awesome arms after working a full day and taking care of her kid! And wow! Her house is so clean! You can't even smell all the fucking cats that live there! (oh wait. Maybe you can)--

it gets tiring. Sometimes I just want to strip off all my clothes and lay down on my back and lose myself for hours. Sometimes I want to walk and walk until my feet get blisters. Sometimes I want to drink a goddamned jug of chardonnay.

Sometimes I feel like crumpling, like one of those paper marionettes with the accordion legs. Someone let go of the strings and I need them to pick em the hell back up. Just a teeny bit of guidance. A push, a kiss on the forehead. A whisper, "Everything's going to be alright". 

Because I know that it is. It's just that sometimes I need a little reminder.

Wheels

I took my kid roller skating today. I have to bear in mind that opportunities for these kinds of just-us dates in the middle of lollygagging Saturdays are ever dwindling. Somehow I must relish in the stinky brushed-suede nastiness of rotting rented skates and too-shiny rink floors, to imprint on my mind the sweetness of red slushies and the wonder of her still wanting to hold my hand during a couples skate.

While I came of age in the garish, glinty, Jordache Jeans-Thriller-Neon and acid washed 1980s,
I'm actually really glad that my kid isn't going to have her first awkward sensations of budding pre-teen sexuality in the neighborhood roller rink. The way things are going, her first kiss will probably be via Skype.

While I'm definitely not saying that the dank, poorly-lit corner of a skate floor is the ideal place for a girl to discover the power of cotton candy lip gloss and a plastic comb in her butt pocket, a part of me mourns the experiences she will never have.

My first date, at the age of twelve, was at Laces, the roller rink down the road from our house (which was later bought by yuppies and changed to The Rolls, after which it closed almost immediately) and the experience was magical and heart-palpitatingly delicious. Of course, the date only even happened because my best friend at the time, after being instructed explicitly by me at a sleepover, called the poor bastard and told him to ask me out to go skating the following weekend.

But let's not focus on details. He did as he was told. Perhaps this was a first step in a terrible lifelong progression of me expecting men to do what I told them to. I don't know.
Regardless, I was bewitched by the poor schmuck.  He was quiet and sweet and had a giant head of dirty blonde hair and the skinniest frame I'd ever seen, even on girls my age (which earned him the affectionate nickname from the older girls at school, "The Mop").

Too cool to admit I'd orchestrated the whole damn thing, I arrived a little late, found him and instructed him right off the bat, "You'd better not try to hold my hand or anything".  I might even have added a curse word in there for effect. "You'd better not try to hold my damn hand"; "You'd better not try to hold my shitty hand". Clearly I wanted to maintain control.

My god, kids are stupid.

We skated to some fast songs and I tried out my ridiculous made-up dance to Earth, Wind and Fire's "Let's Groove Tonight" (something with fist-bumps and extended arms). We took a Snickers break and maybe had a hot dog, and before the date was over, we eventually did hold hands to a couple of slow ones. And it was heavenly.

Now, thirty years later, I still can remember exactly what those disco lights did to my already spinning head. How beautiful I felt with the breeze lifting my hair off my neck. How wonderful it felt to just glide glide glide next to a boy I liked on a roller rink floor. Nothing seemed simple back then, but wow. It really fucking does now.