8 TIME ZONES

She and my dad live in a suburb of my city, so we see each other at least once a week. For the past month, however, they were out of town, and they just got back last night. (I have to admit that it was really nice to have them gone for a while.) So I dutifully went over to their house last night to say hi. The three of us sat down in the living room with glasses of juice, and my dad and I chatted about their trip (to their vacation home in Alabama) and what's been going on in the Twin Cities while they were away. My mother, sitting on the couch next to my dad, found a plastic bag in the seat cushions and put it on her foot like a boot, and tied it snug around her ankle. Then she got up and went into the kitchen and came back with a small screwdriver and a packet of envelopes, and she tried to write on the envelopes with the screwdriver. Every once in a while, she'd interrupt my dad and me to say something completely non-sensical. 

"Are there three of them?"

"Uhhhh, yes. There are three pillows on the couch. Here they are. One, two, three."

Sometimes I just look at that long, white forehead of hers and wonder what the hell is going on in there. Is her brain actually shrinking? I imagine it drying up and hardening, like a sponge left on the side of a sink. I use parenting techniques on her now; I squat down to put her shoes on her, I hold her hand or arm in public, I follow her if she starts to wander away. Parenting a toddler is great practice for having a parent with Alzheimer's. If you thought these skills were non-transferrable, you were wrong! 

I don't know. I tried to start a blog nearly one year ago because I thought it would be a catharsis over this weird grieving I'm doing over my son being overseas half the time, and also, my mother (66 years old) has dementia, and she's fading fast. So there's these two quasi-griefs in my life, and it would make sense to write about them, since I'm a writer. But last year, I made this big dramatic entre into the blogosphere with a solemn treatise on Why Mother's Day Sucks For Me As A Mother And A Daughter, and I just couldn't muster another entry after that. I think I forgot to see any humor in the situation, was my problem. It seems like self-deprecating, sardonic humor is a big part of the mommy blogosphere, and in my attempt on M. Day '09 I was taking myself pretty fucking seriously.

I worried to my BFF this week (my first week of blogging) about the whole kid-worship aspect of mommy blogging. I just can't let myself get too into my son. I'm still mostly interested in myself. It feels like a survival mechanism from him being with his dad half the time, and it's also just more natural for me. I love him with all the altruism of a normal member of the human species--I'd definitely cover my body with his against a barrage of bullets, or hoist him out the window of a burning house only to succumb to the flames myself. No problem. But it's weird, I'm still number one in my life, apart from the base protective instinct. And that feels way healthier. For me. 

Anyway, my BFF said my blog should be about me, not about Victor, anyway. The best blogs are, she says. Okay, I'm good at that. I'll give that a try. What am I most interested in? Frankly, sex. Human sexuality. So this might turn into mommy blog-human sexuality information aggregator.