Back in the day, before kids, I was a creative director at an ad agency. I had a secretary. But that was then, and this is now. I’m the youngest of four, my father was a Southern Baptist minister. My mother was unable to attend my wedding because she was dying in a hospital 100 miles away. That was almost twenty five years ago and yet, I feel the need to mention it out loud, really loud—in a screaming sort of way.
My father moved to my neighborhood just a few short months ago. He’s clinically depressed and suffers from serious OCD. Not the clean freak, count everything and turn the light switch on and off kind, but the self-absorbed I can’t function outside in the real world because the temperature and humidity are never perfect, my shirt is too itchy, and those pollens and perfumes are irritating my nose kind.
Okay, so I have plenty of material. The thing I don’t have is time. But then who does, damnit. Yet, my husband and three brilliant children gave me this iBook. Now I can sit at my computer at my dining room table, while my husband Michael sits at his computer in his isolated, quiet, more important than mine home office—pretending to work but actually playing chess with his best friend in Berkeley—while the kids fight over the household computer and look longingly at me. And because I am who I am, I already gave in and let my son David use MY iBook . He was diligently using my dashboard dictionary to look up vocabulary words for his IB English class, for a while...then I found him face down in his Facebook and now I’m back.
I’m back trying to write at my dining room table, while Hannah, my fourteen-year old daughter sings a song into the phone with her best friend Audrey. Isaac, my oldest eighteen-year old, asks me if it’s i before e in Wuthering HEIGHTS, since it’s not after C, and my father calls my cell phone to tell me that he’s so cold he can’t get warm. (Even though I just freshly washed a set of long johns and had David deliver them to his door.)
PREVIOUS PAGE
