What is she good at?

As I failed to get the volume button to respond on the remote, Asher remarked to a visiting five-year old friend, “My mom isn’t good at using the television. She’s not good at anything.”

Visiting five year old (clearly not raised by wolves): “She must be good at something. Everyone is good at something.”

Asher: “She’s good at sleeping.”

Couple of take-aways.

I’m not ashamed of the fact that I am not good at using the television. It’s part intellectual snobbery (have you guys ever seen how easy it is to open a book?), and part an acceptance of a deep inability of my brain to get interested in and then think through how anything in the world works (not sure what order those two come in, but I may have it backwards in the sentence). If I have a toaster with four slices that only cooks two slices, we will live with that toaster for years until either someone gets us another one, or the intersection of me feeling flush with cash (rare) intersects with me standing in a Home Goods store (equally rare). What will never happen, even were I to make six children who would all enjoy a nice buttered piece of toast, is that I will try and fix it.

Let’s stick with an example closer to our essay topic here. If I can’t get the remote to do what I expect it to do (essentially turn on MSNBC, Netflix or Amazon), I will just skip watching the show, and, you got it, read. This semi-Luddite approach is made palatable, of course, because everything is watchable later. Someone else in my house (these days, often one of the twins) will fix the remote (by which I mean, push the right button), and I will watch the show later, and as long as I avoid Facebook, I won’t know whether Josh Pfefferman and Raquel Fein break off their engagement (shameless plug for Transparent). Breaking News of course, I can’t avoid, whether it’s breaking for real or not, due to the community rooms on each floor at work in which televisions hang, perpetually playing CNN and my phone’s habit of sending me headlines from the New York Times, which I could certainly de-program, if only I knew how.

Remember how access to programming used to be? Anyone? I went to see the movie “Grease” eleven times in the movie theater because it was so good, just so good, and I would never see it again. Some of you might not remember that: try imagining walking out of a movie theater, or turning off the TV, and knowing there was no foreseeable way you could count on seeing that movie again. Maybe this becomes a more poignant example if you insert another movie in (one of the Godfathers, or a Star Wars movie, or The Notebook—I don’t know.) I had such a crush on Rizzo (a crush I could not articulate to myself at the time) that I spent $4 each time I went to that movie. Four hard-earned dollars. A dollar per hour—A DOLLAR PER HOUR, PEOPLE!—that’s what I charged for babysitting. I wanted to raise my rate to $1.25 but I did not understand how to do that. I knew I needed to tell these families the rate was now $1.25, but my mind balked at how bold such a gesture seemed to me. If I had been sitting for them for a year at a rate of $1 an hour, why was I now suddenly worth $1.25? What had changed? If anything I had become less interested in their children. (So put bad at capitalism in there with bad at fixing things).

Another take-away. Ouch. When Asher said his mom was good at sleeping, I wanted both to fall on the floor and curl up into a ball and at the same time to challenge everyone in the room to a game of kickball (have I mentioned my athletic skills?). My eyes filled with tears and it felt like a blow to my whole body. I’m good at sleeping. Am I already disappearing from his world? Am I starting to fade at the edges, becoming a memory of a mother who slept, then got really sick, then died. I can hardly bear to type these words, but is there anything that isn’t true in them? I understand that’s not the whole picture, but people who tell me the boys will remember me, how could they not, I’m such a great mom—that seems like a lovely set of lies.

I remember few things from when I was five. Specific details about my parents are not amongst them. I do absolutely believe you can create memories, create stories. That’s part of my project here, and it’s not intended for only the little boys, and certainly won’t be useful to them for a dog’s year. It’s for the big kids now, and for their short-term future, too. (For those of you who don’t know, that’s how I refer to them in my mind—the big kids and the little boys.) Trying to write as many blog posts, and stories and poems as I can right now is important to me; taking lots of photos (you wouldn’t remember Uncle Charlie visiting Ohio from California on your 8th birthday if there weren’t a couple indelible photos in a much-paged through album from your parents' first decade of marriage (especially the one of him with his really long, curly hair)) and talking to my friends and family as much as I can (as some of you know, I can be seen falling asleep mid-sentence these days, but I can be as lucid and sharp as ever, or, at least enough so that I am still being asked for my opinions)—my goal is that people, photos and preserved words can create memories for all my children, and possibly enough of a sense of me that the little boys feel like they know who I was and the big kids remember who I was and how I might react, and what I would suggest the situation at hand requires (big bowl of pasta and meatballs, weeping and wine, a long walk in the rain without a jacket followed by a hot bath and a summer cold). And the big kids, in turn, will advise the little boys, even if they mostly remember me sleeping.

I know this is morbid. That’s part of what sucks about stage four lung cancer. Believe me, it is not negative thinking, and none of this chatter will prevent me from doing everything I can to turn two years into three, three into five, waiting around with all the other lung cancer patients I have discovered in Facebook groups set up for survivors and fighters and believers who all are praying for the drug that effectively makes cancer a chronic disease instead of an earlier death sentence. So don’t worry that Tracy is getting lost, or needs to be brave like John McCain. I am fighting this, taking my shots twice a day, eating acai berries, seeing my long-term therapist—we joined the temple in Concord, for Pete’s sake.* But still, Asher’s comment was so painful. So accurate, and so painful. Someone from one of the Facebook groups recently posted a link to a site that feeds you a series of questions to determine “When will I retire?” and she posted: “I wish.”

*Just looked this up. What is the etymology of ‘for Pete’s sake,’ I wondered, deciding I could not leave it in here if I did not know. According to Wiktionary (!), the phrase is the euphemistic variant of for Christ’s sake, for God’s sake, neither of which I would ever use. So Pete works.