Family of Five

Leaving Home

On The Porch At Grannie's, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

And just like that it's over. We are driving away from my sister's house, she is standing in the yard, crying, and I am confined to our rental car, already out of reach.

"I'm not that far away," I said in her ear as we hugged goodbye, and she sobbed, then laughed as if I'd said the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard. And up until that moment, it didn't seem that far--it's a smaller world than ever, now, and I imagined that we could call and email and chat online just like we did when I was only a thousand miles away in California. But in reality, she is right. It is more difficult to call, more difficult to send things to each other, and it is hours and flights and an ocean away.

She has understood this from the moment I told her we were moving overseas, but I swear it didn't hit me until this moment: I have said many times that I want to be closer to my sister, and here I am, moving further away again. It has warmed me, these last few weeks here, to watch my baby light up and reach for her from my arms, to see my daughter grow closer to her cousins, and to hear my son say, "Can I spend the night at Auntie Sara's?"

Oh, god, I feel like we wasted so much time. Why wasn't I with her every minute? Why do we fight when all we really want is love? These last few days she has held herself apart from me; she has kept her distance and guarded her heart. Perhaps rightfully so. But what I keep thinking is that every time we visit, we end up laughing about something until we cry.

But not this time.

Paying Our Respects

Respects, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

The morning that we left Rocksprings I took my children by the cemetery to visit the graves of my Mimi and Papa. It was drizzling and cool and there is something so quiet and affecting about standing near the ones that meant so much to you, knowing that although they are lost to you, some part of them remains there.

Rodeo

The Winner, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

Last night we took the kids to the Rocksprings Professional Bull Riding—we’ll just call it “the rodeo,” even though technically a rodeo would include other events, like roping, bronc-riding and barrel racing—and had a fantastic time.

While we ate hamburgers and enchiladas and drank sweet tea at a little foodstand, the kids found a big old turtle in a mud puddle to play with. Then we strolled over to the pens to see some of the bulls up close.

The kids were most impressed by the bullriding itself, although after a while they wanted to wander around behind the stands and explore the cheap attractions. Meena was absolutely thrilled when she managed to dunk a woman in a water tank by throwing a baseball at a target. Or so I heard. I stood up against the fence under the box seats for most of the show and took pictures while Rod, who arrived back in the States Friday night, managed all three kids by himself. God, I love that man.

Ahhhh-stin

Kids At The Springs, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

God, I love Austin. It is a place where you see people doing cool shit like playing guitar at the pool.

It's a really beautiful city, where there are green trees and blue swimming holes, bike trails and hippies, and healthy, happy people walking down streets filled with fun places to eat, look at art, hear poetry, buy t-shirts, and drink coffee. It is still a place that feels like home to me.

So yesterday I packed the chickens in the car and drove a couple hours to spend time with my dear friend Stew and his lovely wife, Angela. They have a darling house in East Austin, just across the 35 from 6th St., and their guest room has leather rug and a euro-futon. Suh-weet.

Stew and Angela are the kind of people that seem to enjoy, rather than merely tolerate, the chaos that ensues when you invite a harried mother and her three rowdy children into your home. Stew never says, "I'm serious," unless he isn't, and I love him so much I let him give my children gummy worms.  They welcomed us with beer and watermelon, then took us to Barton Springs and grilled steak for us in their front yard afterwards. I am so lucky.

And today there is more good news: Rod has found us a place to live, and it looks fantastic. It is four bedrooms over three stories, wood floors and carpeted bedrooms, a family bathroom AND a spare shower downstairs, a large garden, is three minutes down the street from a lovely park, seven minutes down the street from an even bigger and more fabulous park, less than 10 minutes from a train station, and it looks like we have a choice of two or three good schools. Halle-effing-lujah, people—just give me a couple months to get settled and then you can all start stopping over on your European vacations.

Good news is a good thing, because yesterday I was barely holding it together. After I arrived at Stew’s it seemed that all the distractions of these recent weeks came crashing into my head, and I could barely function. It took me, like, half an hour to pack 3 swimsuits in a bag to take to the pool, and another 15 minutes to untangle the strings of my swimsuit so I could put it on. And the longer I wrestled with the suit—that I’ve worn hundreds of times without a problem—the more I marveled: what the hell is wrong with me? It was embarrassing even without anyone watching. When I finally got out to the car, Stew kindly let me know that I had left my fly open, and then, as we crossed the freeway on our way to the pool Meena yelled, “Mommy! Marlee’s not buckled!” So there I was trying to drive, call Stew to tell him I need to pull over, and direct Meena not to let Marlee climb out of her seat. And freak out. But that was fairly easy, considering.

This is the ice-cream juggler at Amy's Ice Cream, where we went after our swim, and where Oliver completely and utterly lost his mind. As we got ready to leave I took his practically-finished ice cream away because he was playing with it, and he cried, and when he wouldn’t stop crying I took him in the car with me rather than letting him ride back with Stew and Angela.

I am a hardass, I know.

Anyway, he threw the mother of all tantrums. He screamed so loud, and so long, that I had to roll the windows up in the car for fear that someone in traffic might report us to child-protective services or something. It was such a spectacular fit that I recorded some of it, but I’ll upload later because I didn’t bring my uploader thingie with me to Austin. After we got back I had to hold him in a quiet room for a while until he calmed down, after which he spent the rest of the evening cheerfully trying to injure his baby sister: he sat on her, slammed a heavy toy down on the table right in front of her face, picked her up and tossed her down so that she would fall, and pushed her over two or three times. After too many time-outs and too many stern talkings-to, I finally put us all to bed.

We are better this morning. We have a place to live in London.

Vacation Bible School

Virgin Marys in the Wal-Mart Parking Lot, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

In Texas, summer means a lot of things: blasting the a/c, swatting mosquitoes, swimming in the river, watching the rodeo, and going to Vacation Bible School. Vacation Bible School, where they are kind enough to allow heathen children like mine to sing their songs and eat their cookies so that sinning mothers like me can take the morning off for a week.

So, although the prospect of free babysitting for four weekday mornings won me over, I was conflicted about sending my children to Bible school. My sister suggested it, and although she is a lovely Christian, I think in this instance, it was mostly about the babysitting for her, as well. We didn’t discuss the religious aspect of it, as religion is a conversation we generally avoid. It bothers her somewhat that I don't share her faith, as her belief in Jesus is central to the way she lives. I gave up Christianity many years ago, when I became completely incapable of swallowing the patriarchal mythology, and ultimately found my need for spiritual community better met in my yoga classes than in my sporadic church attendance. It turns out I’m the kind of person who more easily believes in a third eye than a virgin birth.

What sort of spiritual upbringing children need (if any), is the sort of question that many intelligent parents grapple with, and everyone has to find their own way. So I fretted about whether to send them. I don’t intend to raise my children as Christians, so I worried I might confuse them by sending them to Bible school. Plus, although it’s been a while since I’ve been to church, I recall that they don’t talk about Jesus like I do—you know, mostly as a curse word when I forget something or find myself frustrated or annoyed. As in, “Jesus Christ.” Next to Goddamnit, it’s just about my favorite bad word.

But I also thought that it might actually be good for them. I have considered that because I take the Lord’s name in vain without taking my children to church of any kind, I may be shirking my parental duty to provide them with some sort of spiritual framework with which to  make sense of the world. I could probably manage a Unitarian Church or something, but when it comes to deciding what to do on a Sunday morning, I can almost always think of something besides church I’d rather do: the Farmer’s Market, a big breakfast, a walk by the river.

My biggest fear was that it would be scary for them, somehow. My daughter especially. She is extremely bright, and I could easily imagine her engaged in conversation with some well-meaning Christian teacher about the prospect of eternal hellfire unless she accepted Jesus into her heart as her personal lord and saviour. Because that's what I remember of Jesus-speak: "Have you accepted Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Saviour?"

This is something I truly want to spare her, as I recall how I myself agonized over this as a child. Had I really and truly accepted Jesus into my heart? If I had, then why didn't I feel any different? Did I do it good enough to avoid hell, or not? Whatever spiritual path my children might eventually choose, I would prefer that fear not be the vehicle of that choosing.

But I did let them go. I let them go because I remembered that Vacation Bible School was fun for me, this one had a helicopter landing on the last day. I decided that I am up for any conversation Bible-schooling might provoke, and I am capable of talking to my children honestly about my beliefs regarding God and religion. By doing that I will hopefully lay the groundwork for them to find their own way in it, as I have. I mean, I went to Bible school—and look how I turned out.

Wild Wild West

Boy, Texas is a wild place. I’d forgotten all about that. To give you an example, this is my sister’s bank, where we went today to get a cashier’s check for my movers.

Don’t tell the lady that sits up front that I took this picture, because she told me I couldn’t take it. I took a couple others, just because she said not to.

Actually, what she said was, “I’m sorry, but you can’t take pictures in here because we have video cameras.”

This confused me. How, I wondered aloud, might my camera interfere with the video cameras?

“Oh, it won’t,” she said. “They’re for security.”

“Really?” I said, as if I found the idea of security cameras in banks a rather puzzling idea. “Are you afraid someone might steal the taxidermy?”

So please, everyone, please don’t steal any of this bank’s taxidermy because you might get me in a lot of trouble, not only for taking pictures of the bank's fascinating dead animal decorations, but probably also for tempting you to steal them by posting them on the internet.

You’ll also notice in the pictures that there are an abundance of deer and deer antlers mounted on the walls. Texans have an uncommon appreciation for the decorative potential of antlers, and if I was an animal with antlers (or horns of any kind), then I would stay the hell out of Texas. But the deer around here aren’t as smart as I am; they roam the streets of town, just waiting to be mounted over someone’s fireplace or turned into a lamp. The other night, when I drove from my sister’s to my mother’s, I passed like--ten of them on a  street in my mother’s neighborhood, which is cute, utterly populated, and right next to downtown. What I'm saying is it's not rural. At all. These town deer were milling around in a church parking lot, grazing on people’s lawns, and loping across the road in front of me. I even saw—get this—a doe with twin fawns peeping out of some tall grass in a vacant lot. We stopped for that.

“You should take a picture,” Meena told me.

And the BIRDS, my god, the birds in Texas are the noisiest birds I have ever heard in my life. I sat in my mother’s backyard and recorded them, and if I can find my digital recorder plugger-inner-thingie (hopefully, I packed it in my bags and not on the moving truck), I will upload that for you to hear later. It was so raucous that Oliver, who was playing in the sandbox in the backyard, stopped what he was doing, looked up and said, “Mommy, what’s making that noise?"

I actually noticed the birds when we first got here, but I didn’t remember that big-throated one that hoots and whoops. Maybe he doesn’t start doing his thing until the afternoon, when Ollie and I heard him. Anyway, that first morning we walked to the gas station to get milk for breakfast, and on the way back, Meena and I counted seven different kinds of birds we could hear. And underneath the birdsong, I heard the rise and fall of the cicadas’, buzzing like summer heat itself. It was—it was the loudest quiet I’ve ever heard.

Ah, Texas, I’m remembering it now, you do have a certain charm.