Sling Blade. Rite Aid. You say potato, I say...

As a parent you often find yourself not having a regular bar/restaurant/cafe hangout, but a drugstore hangout. It's the neighborhood drugstore where you end up multiple times every week to pick up children's cold medication, slip'n'slides, cheesy tiki lamps because they make your son bray with laughter, lunch boxes, discount flip flops and a whole host of other dollar items and actual necessities that the grocery store never has or offers for double price. So you go to your local drugstore because your kid likes to wander down the aisles and touch each and every thing in his special Monk-like way and you think you can save some bucks. But you still pay. Oh, you pay.

This morning we went to Rite Aid to pick up some bug spray, and after picking up six other things we did not need, we got in line. The checker was clearly annoyed to have left her trailer far too early in the morning and itching to git out fer a smoke to further damage her 60-something skin and add additional weight to the bags under her eyes. Looking balefully at the line she called for back up. "Second checkerrrr," she drawled into the microphone.

Minutes passed as she examined each and every item in the basket of the person checking out. The man in front of me left in a huff after 4 minutes of "well, would you look at that" exclamations from the checker. The manager came up twice for price checks and averted his eyes from the line of increasingly antsy shoppers. Finally, after no second checker appeared and multiple people in line bailed, it was our turn.

The first item in our basket was a child's electronic piano. She stared at the shiny buttons, hyp-mo-tized. Then hit the first button, setting off a tune from the piano. She laughed like an infant who had just discovered her own feet. "I like that," she mumbled like Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, approximating his voice and oddly, as I just then noticed, his clothing style as well.

This commentary and amazement at each dollar item continued for several minutes, executed with an underlying score of Mac the Knife that she sang under her breath. Shawn Joaquin gaped at her from just below countertop level as she checked each item, before she turned her squinty eyes on him. "You sure are a cutey," she said and began to sing Lemondrop while swinging her hips, snapping her fingers and looking up at the stained ceiling. He was terrified and mute at her sudden attention, frozen in time and space like a small animal that is trying to evade the continued attention of a predator. Another minute passed before she regained her focus on the task at hand. "Did you need something?" she asks kindly, not noticing the pile of unbagged and unpaid for goods before her.

It’s like when Shawn Joaquin begins a conversation mid-sentence, leading me to believe I have perhaps blacked out or lost time. It takes me a few seconds to realize that NO, I am not the crazy one, she is. And that even though I have given up my past hangouts, I can get the same level of incoherence, entertainment and insanity I experienced at The Alley and other dive bars…along with similar juke box tunes…just by going down to the local Rite Aid. Suddenly trips to Rite Aid were no longer about the trip but about the journey I have while there, and the camaraderie with the other patrons that's not unlike that morning-after kinship one feels after a night of witnessing bad bar behavior.

So give me some Dramamine, those dollar flip flops and a water back, lady. And keep my tab open. I’m sure to be back.

Love is....

Saturday evening Gregg and I went out for a romantic early dinner at Cesar's, which I had been dying to go to since it opened. We drank wine, ate fine cheese, birds came down and tied ribbons in our hair as a jellybean rainbow magically appeared above us. It was all meant to be a celebration of Madelena and a precursor to a Grown Up Night Alone with No Children In The County. The sheets were clean, the bed was made, and the candles were at the ready.

Three hours later I was not in the throes of passion but throwing down my dinner, lunch and possibly parts of my small intestine. I was hit with the most vicious case of food poisoning I have ever experienced, and little did I know that while we DID have plans for something that would last alllll niiiight loooooong, fate would intervene with a little something else that would last even longer. And while it would tone my abs and slim me down, it was not exactly how I planned to spend my last 36 hours alone with my husband before departing for Guatemala.

G, he of queasy stomach and gagging at the sight of wet toast in the sink, was a trooper. He fetched crackers and ginger ale at dawn, barely flinched when they were rejected in all ways, talked to answering services and doctors and triage nurses and barely intelligible pharmacists. He drove 90 miles to pick up Demando, and kept him from my bed when all SJ really wanted to do was bounce on my stomach. He slept on the dog couch to avoid shaking the bed and increasing my nausea, and pretended not to notice when the clean sheets became less than spotless and vanilla-scented. He put the trash can by my bed, and as I attempted to change venues, carried it up to the sofa and back down again as I realized that my only safe haven was to be our bed. He brought me ice chips on demand, popsicles that were red-not-orange-oh-please-not-the-orange-make-it-blue-but-not-orange-even-if-you-have-to-open-every-white-wrapper and made chicken noodle soup merely to be rejected over and over again.

After three days of hell, I realized that sometimes love is not all candlelight and roses and jellybean rainbows. Sometimes, just sometimes, love is a trash can beside the bed and a man on your dog sofa.

Game on

The US State Department, in all its wisdom or perhaps just its inability to find its ass with its own hands, has pushed out the new DNA requirement by one week, allowing us to sneak in under the wire, take the baby and RUN.

Once again, it's time for chocolate old-fashioneds and extra Pilates. But this time I will be smiling and showered when I walk into Colonial Donuts, and will even willingly stop by our local department store to pick up the pink ribbons, bows and bands that I was so sure that I would never, ever put on any child of mine.

Watch out, Madelena Sofia. Mama is coming to get you.

The three faces of Shawn Joaquin

Public face.


You-will-do-as-I-say face.


Innocent-I-love-this-child-so-much face.

Bureaucracy, rhymes with "rat bastards"

Days before my departure for Guatemala to bring our daughter home, we have just found out about a new DNA requirement — effective today — that was made public yesterday through the passing out of fliers in front of the Embassy in Guatemala. A potentially devastating new requirement that could add months to our homecoming, the news distributed like a half-off coupon for shoes or a 2-for-1 hot dog sale.

I am angry.

I am confused and unsteady.

I am ready to kidnap my own child.

I am nauseated and on the verge of losing yet another breakfast because of the mercurial and capriciously erected barricades set up by the US government and keeping me from my daughter.

I am ready to move to Canada or some other country that is less swayed by political pressure and more driven by social services, beer and a love of ice wine and maple syrup.

I am forced to wait until Friday to find out how this will affect us, and to find out if it means another week, another month, or another season. Until then, I will eat chocolate old fashioned donuts, offset by extra hours of Pilates and hill walking and strenuous hugging of the child that I DO have at home. And I will both pray for and curse the US government in hopes that one or the other will bring my child home sooner, or at least give me a direction to focus my energy and avoid breaking anything in my home.

If you have a child, go hug him or her or them. And take a moment to ponder the wisdom of D-lister Jaime Pressly who said in a recent interview that people who adopt are vain or lazy. What I would not give to trade this endless wait for 5 minutes of procreation, nine months of minor discomfort and a pregnancy glow, followed by 24 hours of labor and the pronouncement: it's a girl.