And we call this next piece: "I Miss Mommy: A Study of the Maternal Archetype in Wood, Paper and Ink." But we'll come back to that. First, I will give you something my wife is an artist at creating, like many other things, and something I am weirdly unable to figure out to how use and instead simply mangle and make fun of and co-opt in a kind of robot-trying-to-play-human way, like many other things: a list.
Since You've Been Gone I Can Do:
1. Whatever I want.
2. Virtually nothing right, it seems, about half the time.
3. Some things kind of adequately, some of the time.
4. Some things heartbreakingly, heroically, Rocky-Balboa-Vs.-Clubber-Lang kind of INCREDIBLY WELL FOR AN UNDERDOG, pretty much all the time in my own head including the time I remembered where the hand soap refill was, a heroic act! but in reality absolutely none of the time.
5. Any kind of dance you'd like, any kind of tune you want to hear, any kind of treat you'd like to eat, anything you want me to do if you will JUST. FUCKING. LISTEN. TO. ME. To my children, I mean. I am the dancing monkey, and I've got mantits.
Since You've Been Gone I Can See:
1. Whomever I Choose
2. Messes. Everywhere. Every minute there's another godamned mess! And nobody else sees it! Nobody else sees it but me! Come on!!!!!!
3. Why so many parents fuck up so many kids because they just can't keep on a lid on their own crazy.
4. The following scene (dig, if you will, the picture, to do a paisley mash-up): 5 year old Finnegan Joseph Huntington, sitting snuggled up against his brother, cloaked in a mosaic knit blanket his Grandma Bibi made for him (special ingredient: LOVE), sniffling and wiping away tears as I stumble out of the shower first thing in the morning. "What's wrong, Finny?" "Well, two things are wrong. I can't find my gorilla, and I had him when I woke up and I had him when I walked in here!!! And, usually, when I wake up and I'm alone in bed in the morning and Mommy is awake I walk into the kitchen and she hugs me!!!" Sweet Jesus, the hug I gave that kid then. The hug of all hugs, the primal, rocking, goes-from-standing-to-sitting-and-snuggling whole body kind of hug. The kind of hug that defines what the word "hug" means in your mind. And he perked up. And I did too.
Since You've Been Gone I Can Eat My Dinner:
1. (On the couch, in the kitchen, outside, in the dining room, in my car, at Chuck. E. Cheese, but definitely not in a...) Fancy Restaraunt.
2. With the constant perfume of cat piss in the air about my head. After finally dealing with the litterbox today and then immediately changing my clothes, washing my face, washing my hands, washing my hands, washing all the towels and rugs and clothes, washing my hands; I have come to the following conclusion: the catpiss lives forever inside my nostrils. It's just a thing that happened, and it can't un-happen, ever.
And that picture, up at the top there, that. Finny was working away with blocks in the living room while I worked on the laptop, then scurrying to get paper and a pen, then getting his child scissors, then returning to the blocks. Finally he called me over to show me what he had made: "A picture of mommy. I couldn't use wood, you know, for the face, so I had to draw it on paper."
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