As the Corolla sits stinking up my garage, Beloved is back in the Ozarks. And it's occuring to me I don't actually even know where. Have I learned nothing? I mean, I talked to him last night and this morning, and I forgot to ask both times. He was somewhere last night and he'll probably be somewhere different tonight, and after ten or twelve different times of him road warrioring his way across Missouri every week, I've grown more accustomed to this new life of ours. The only problem is my absent-mindedness. I have my head in my novel, and that means I forget to do stuff like turn on the coffee pot and ask my husband where he's sleeping.

There. I just texted him.

And printed my boarding pass for my flight tomorrow to Dad 2.0.

My parents will be here soon to be here for the little angel when she gets home from school because Beloved will get in late on Thursday.

I worry about my parents driving down here. I worry about Beloved driving around Missouri. I worry about me flying to Austin. But that's what people do. They move freely about, even though it's a dangerous world out there. It does no good to sit in your house and hide from that world.

When the worry comes, I try to imagine a big windshield wiper sweeping across my thoughts and pushing them away. Sometimes it helps.

Sometimes I just crawl back into the novel in my head, where I control whether or not there are tornadoes.

My sister wrote an open letter to my daughter on her blog today. My favorite sentence in it is this:

We may see phantoms that aren't really there, but we also see a kaleidoscope of colors where others may only see shades of gray.

Read the rest at her blog. It was such a beautiful letter that it took my words away -- on a day on which I'm in huge suspense over my own creativity and whether or not others will agree it exists.

On a strange whim, I bought the little angel a betta fish last week. His name is Simon. His stomach is the size of his eyeball, so she is only to feed him three pellets every other day. 

I bought him a little plastic tank with a light and a small filter so that she (read: we) only has to clean the tank once a month. 

She wanted a puppy. I bought her a fish.

This is the sort of parent I am.

I did, however, buy her the fish quite unexpectedly, which in the world of kid-dom makes it the coolest present ever.

The pet store guy asked if I was getting it for her birthday. I said, "No, it's Wednesday." He said, "She gets a present every Wednesday?" And I stopped myself from telling him he was very Judgy Judgerson because I realized I was thinking what an idiot he was to not get my joke.

This is the sort of person I am.

Simon seems happy. I'm not sure what the hell he does all day, but it seems to involve hiding in his little plastic plant and chasing the bubbles that come out of the filter. 

This is the sort of fish he is.

I'm pretending to my daughter and the neighbor kids that I bought Simon for the little angel to teach her responsibility. But the truth of the matter is that I really liked the fish and I really love my daughter, and I thought they might be happy together.

That is the fun part of being an adult.

I've been including poems with my holiday cards since I was 21 and I sent out Christmas pieces of paper instead of Christmas cards because I was too broke to buy cards. I'm 37 now, so that means I've sent out 16 holiday poems.

And this year, I didn't.

This year, I was working on revisions on my novel and all my creative energy went to that. This year, I sat down at least three times and the words wouldn't come. This year, I wondered if maybe that well had dried up, if I'd said everything there was to say about the holidays and family and goodness and light.

There were a few complaints. And I felt guilty. I'm really pleased people liked them enough to be sad when they ended ... but not enough to try to force something that just wouldn't come. I was telling Beloved about this problem when the little angel piped up that she would be happy to write one. Since I've already sent out my holiday greetings, this year, here are the poems she wrote. I think I'm passing the torch. From now on, there's a new sheriff in town.

Happy holidays to you from the Arens bards!

Snow

Nose

Only

Wow!

Man

Awesome

Nice

Sliding

Lightning-fast

Exciting

Daring

Christ

Holiday

Rejoice

Israel

Stocking

Tinsel

Mary

Angel

Santa

Dreidl

Exciting

Cradle

Elves

Mistletoe

Berries

Embark

Remember

October 23, 2011: The first time my daughter said, "I hate you."

Somehow I made it until second grade, seven and a half years without hearing those words. I knew it was coming, the closer she got to tweendom, the faster and harder the attitude came, and these past few months have spawned a love of pop music and a need to wear fashionable shoes, and I knew it was coming.

Today she and a neighbor friend got in a fight, and I said the friend couldn't stay for dinner. Even though I'd said she could an hour earlier. Even though I'm not sure my girl even wanted her to stay. The friend burst into tears and I dug in: "If you two are going to fight, the day's over," I said, despite their protests, despite their cries of agony. I only had one child for many reasons, and one of them is this: I don't break up fights.

On the way across the street to walk the friend home, she said, "I hate you." Quietly. But not under her breath. And though I've been expecting it all these years, my skin tingled and my stomach twisted.

We deposited the friend at home and I deposited my girl in her room to ponder her sins. And then I went to the sink and stood, washing cupcake pans and crying as though my heart would break.

Beloved rubbed my shoulders as he passed by.

"I know this is part of being a good mom," I sobbed. "But it sucks so much."

He rubbed my shoulders again and left.

We made up less than an hour later. She's an impetuous seven. I told her how much it hurt me while knowing that I couldn't appear to be the destroyed mother, that I had to be the locked door. Children need boundaries. Children need something strong to rail against. The worst thing I could do for her is to let her manipulate me because she hurt my feelings.

I know this.

But this, October 23, 2011, is the first day my daughter said she hated me.

And I'll never forget it.

Five minutes ago, it was Friday night and I was cleaning my house at 10 p.m.

Then it was Saturday, and five of my friends and I threw a shower in the morning and a bachelorette party in the evening for our bride getting married in two weeks. I laughed and cried alternately and with equal force for more than 24 hours straight as the seven of us worked through the happiness of the upcoming celebration and the grief of concurrent personal tragedies.

Then it was 2 a.m. on Sunday, and I was drifting off to sleep in my friend Kathy's house on my air mattress.

Then it was noon on Sunday, and I was hauling downed tree branches out of the yard in preparation for our end-of-summer neighborhood barbecue. That my daughter and her friend unexpectedly invited more people to than I realized. Note to self: Don't hand a seven- and eight-year-old invitations and tell them to go deliver them unsupervised. It was, of course, totally, fine, but the shock, I tell you.

Then it was 9 p.m. on Sunday, and we were dragging back inside the tables and food and laughing about nine kids playing swords and shields while hiding behind the protection of every umbrella in my garage.

Then it was 11 p.m. on Sunday, and I was realizing how many memories we packed into two days, and their bulk shoved aside any other thoughts in my head.

Then it was 8:30 a.m. on Monday, and I sat down to write this. I'm literally shocked it's already today. My conscious mind is still stuck back on Friday night, which is the last time I wasn't swept along completely in the moment.

Life isn't always linear. Not really.

This week, some stuff happened that caused me great anxiety. As the stress washed over me, I tried to ride it out like a wave. I tried to put it in perspective. And actually, for one of the first times, it worked. Not to say I haven't gone back and forth a bit, but life is like that, and human beings aren't static -- nothing about us is static.

I talked to a few friends and family members about my reaction, which I have learned in the grand scheme of things is actually more important than the event -- the repercussions of my reactions last far longer than the crises. The general consensus seems to be that 2011 Rita is really handling things far better than 1992 Rita or even 2007 Rita. Wow, 2011 Rita, they said. You get down with your bad self.

I thought this morning as I was driving home from dropping off my girl at summer camp that great friends are like that: They are our mirrors. My friends reflect back to me not a glamorized version of myself flawlessly executing under any degree of pressure, but the real version, the version who sometimes wins and sometimes loses but is always someone they regard with love.

Because they accept me with all my flaws, it means even more when they tell me they are proud of me. Because they have seen every iteration -- in one case, every iteration since I was three years old -- they are even better judges than I am of my progress or lack thereof.

Having these people in my life -- my husband, my family and friends -- brings forth the best me, better behavior than I would exhibit left to my own devices in the depths of my psyche (which would far prefer a bag of Doritos and a stack of John Hughes movies or perhaps a baseball bat and some windows). I recognize all the time that wanting to show these people I love that I can do it keeps me moving forward most of the time.

It's weird that I was thinking all this before this latest series of events occurred when I wrote my review of Terry McMillan's Getting to Happy (it's the sequel to Waiting to Exhale) for BlogHer Book Club. Even then, I wrote:

And that's what I found with the women of Getting to Happy. You get to happy, then you get to sad, then you fight your way back to happy again. The triumphs don't last any longer than the falls, but the reverse can also be true.

Normally I would've tried to find some witty way to tie back this post to a review that I wanted to tell you all about anyway, but today it's so organic as to be shocking even to me. We are all trying to get to happy. And it, by definition, is elusive, because it, by definition, is relative.

We've been going through the annual hatred of summer camp at the Arens house. She hates bowling. Rather, she hates the fact that her team never gets any strikes. She's sick of swimming with the babies and hasn't passed the swimming test yet. She doesn't want to get up in the morning.

And she blames me.

"I promise I won't bother you," she says, noticing for the 800th time that my office is in our house.

Beloved reinforced it had nothing to do with that. "You know why you have to go to summer camp."

She splashed water up the sides of the bathtub. "Because Mommy thinks I'll bother her here," she said, making the mad eyes at me. "But I'll be really quiet. I just want to be home like a normal kid."

"What are you talking about?" I said. "Almost everyone you know goes to summer camp. All your friends from your old school, all your friends from this camp, nearly all of your cousins. You are not the only child in the world who has two parents with jobs. You are completely normal."

She started crying. "I just want to stay home with you."

I didn't react well. For a variety of reasons, yesterday was a shit day, and that sort of knocked me over the edge. I picked myself up, put myself in time out in my bedroom and sobbed into the pillows.

She knocked on the door after a little while. "I'm sorry I made you cry," she said.

I tried to tell her it wasn't her, but I could see she didn't believe me.

In the wee hours of the morning, she woke up with the pirate nightmare and I woke up with puffy eyes and a crying hangover.

I don't know what normal kids do. I just know what we do, how we adjust and react.

I'm pretty sure it's normal to want whatever it is you don't have.

She stood on her tiptoes to put the Father's Day cards in the mailbox, her pigtails so long they hung halfway down her back, blowing occasionally in the hot summer wind already sweltering at eight in the morning. From the back, she could've been my seven-year-old sister back in 1984.

 

Most of my childhood memories are of summer -- on my grandparents' porch or under the weeping willow, visiting Gran in the hairdryer heat of Arizona or running around my own yard barefoot. Hot wind blowing through my pigtails.

Sometimes, when the wind is just right, the memories come back with such clarity, I can taste the rhubarb pie or feel the upholstery of my gran's ancient car. I can see the firefly jar.

What will she see when the hot winds blow on her at 37? I wonder.