What Price Beauty?

Back in the spring, my older daughter came home and surprised me with a gift, a spa package at Elizabeth Arden. I was thrilled. Of course, it could have been a piece of gum and I would have been thrilled, tickled by the idea that she had thought of doing something nice for me for no apparent reason at all.

The extravagant spa certificate has sat for months on my dresser, still wrapped in its enticing little red box with the white ribbon. I'd promised my daughter I would set aside time one day to enjoy all the services at once, and not just squeeze them in piecemeal. We agreed that I could make substitutions, as long as I treated myself to the special pleasure of an uninterrupted day (or half day) at the spa.

The most enticing service in the package, at the time I received it, was the massage. I had recently injured my back, and was struggling each day to limit my Advil intake to one small bottle a day. A few months down the road though, my back is fine, and I decided to forego an hour of some stranger's hands all over my body (isn't that what dating is for?) and focus on my face.

And so it was, under terrifyingly bright lights, that my spa technician -- one of the nicest ladies on the planet -- stared at my clogged pores and my wrinkles and my waning elasticity and put together a creative combination of facial treatments that would start to reverse the aging process. She even tossed in some freebies, careful to make sure whatever she did would be covered by my gift certificate. The old me would have objected; the new me accepted everything she offered. I rationalized my greediness; I have, after all, been a good tipper for years.

She cleansed, she scrubbed, she massaged, she peeled. Then there was the mysterious microdermabrasion, during which she guided some bizarre electronic implement of torture over my face, assuring me it would help to stimulate and glue the cells of my cracking cheeks back together. A promise like that is nothing to sneeze at, so I gritted my teeth and endured the excruciating pain. A trip to the dentist was starting to look appealing.

She finished me off with a collagen mask (the room was dark and I was pinned to the table with a three hundred pound warmed blanket, so I couldn't see myself, but I'm pretty sure I looked like the guy from Phantom of the Opera), and a gratuitous dose of eye cream, which made my eyes feel irritated and swollen for the rest of the day. I was sent off with a jar of miracle cream which would continue to glue together the cells on my cracking cheeks (at thirty per cent off, who could resist) and stumbled home to admire my new youthful face in my bathroom mirror. Yipes! I was as shiny as a new penny.

Oh, but shiny sounds so negative. I've chosen to think of it more as a healthy glow. And, with my new elastic face, its fissures and fault lines closing up before my very eyes, I'm thinking I'm more than ready to get out there and date, find that super nice guy who will find me so irresistible that all he'll want to do is give me that massage I passed up. Talk about getting the most bang for your buck!

The "IT" Girl

When I retrieved my daughter from "poms" practice at the high school late yesterday afternoon, she told me she had been too stressed to eat all day. Boy, was I glad I happened to have gotten dinner ready before I picked her up.

But I was distraught. When your kid tells you she's stressed, and you're someone who thinks everything is your fault, it can be devastating. I immediately rejected the idea that she might be stressed for the same reasons other fifteen year olds are stressed this time of year, with September approaching and the lazy, carefree days of summer becoming an increasingly distant memory.

So I pressed her, and, naturally, she offered up a laundry list of stresses that would cause any teenager to break out, but she included the vague "what's going on with you and dad." I heard nothing else. Talk about stress; I could feel more of my teeth starting to crack.

My therapist told me last week that I'm good at problem solving. I immediately put those skills to work. "Well you can erase that from your list of stresses. You don't need to worry about what's going on with me and dad." Pretty clever, huh? Like telling someone not to think about the pink elephant in the room.

We dropped it, to the extent I can drop anything, which means for about a nano-second. "Anything in particular bothering you?" I thought I had been so careful. No bad-mouthing, no details, no finger pointing. Same on his end.

"I just don't want to hear about it."

Oh. My therapist has also told me that kids, no matter how old they are -- even if they're married with kids of their own -- don't want to hear about mom and dad's problems. Any of it. Last week, I arrived home quite late for dinner twice because of court appearances and meetings with my attorneys downtown. I suppose I could have told her I had been at a party, but I had already been stupidly honest about the day's destination, so that wasn't an option. Both of those days, I came home drained, exhausted, and maybe just a little anxious. Knowing she already knew I had been dealing with divorce "stuff," I assured her that things were going well and dad and I were working hard to get it all done. I realize now that no news might have been more preferable, in her mind, to good news. I should have kept my mouth shut.

"Fair enough," I responded. When she says she doesn't want to hear about "it," she is by no means referring to any gory details. She is just referring to "IT." Its very existence. I get it.

I apologized to her for adding in any way to her stress, and she seemed to accept my apology. And she seemed relieved that she had said something to me, that from here on in, she wouldn't have to hear anything about IT. I could see her face lightening, her entire body relaxing, as if a great burden had been lifted. For one more day, at least, I feel confident that I will not be sued for "bad mothering," as some poor soul in Chicago recently was for failing to buy her kids good birthday presents or to put checks or cash in their birthday cards.

Just to be sure, I stopped on the way home from teaching yoga last night and bought her an oreo McFlurry. I even waited to ask for a taste until I knew she was done. We smiled, we chatted for a while, and everything, for a brief moment, seemed right with our world.

Time Shares and Time Shared

I finally had the chance -- or maybe it was the nerve -- to sit down and flip through the overstuffed blue binder my friend's daughter had given me on Saturday morning, minutes before she left for her first day at college.

The binder itself reminded me of my friend: haphazard, scattered, and filled with warmth and humor and dreams and honesty and hints of thoughts kept to itself so as not to make anyone else uncomfortable. I have a similar binder somewhere, the one we were given on our first day at a writing class together in Milwaukee, a three-hour weekly class bookended by two hour and a half car rides. During the class, I had to share my friend with others; I liked the rides to and from the best, when I had her all to myself.

Barb was an immediate hit with the folks from Milwaukee, who, as creative as they all were, were somewhat unaccustomed to her special brand of brilliance -- a unique blend of self deprecating humor, insightful amusement, introspection, and more than a touch of lunacy. Within three minutes, she was everyone's pet. I was both proud to have brought her into the fold and, I admit, a bit jealous to have suddenly become simply the person responsible for bringing everyone such a magical gift.

As competent and gifted as she was, even the smallest things in life could be tough for Barb to navigate. Having struggled for years with multiple sclerosis, she was, at the time of our writing class, also struggling with breast cancer and all the special things that entailed -- overinflated and itchy implants, side effects from various medications, and, most unsettling, the constant fear of metastasis. Fears aside, she was always hopeful; she had no idea, at the time, how limited her days would be.

I flipped through the binder this morning, and found a piece she had written to share with the class. It was about a Hawaiian vacation she and her husband had taken recently to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The descriptions were hilarious, and, to someone who knew her and her husband quite well, frightening credible. Somewhere on page two, after she alluded to the annual personal documentary of her life that "flickers on the screen of [her] closed eyelids" each year around the time of her birthday, she put on the brakes.

On the threshold of revealing some of the "indescribable joys and unthinkable sadness" of the decade that had just passed, she panicked, unable to put them in writing. Instead, she inserted a brief explanation of what she had hoped to be able to write, but could not:

(THIS HERE IS THE PART WHERE I WRITE REAL GOOD STUFF ABOUT AGING, ILLNESS & ATTEMPTS AT PERSONAL GROWTH AND SEGUE SEAMLESSLY TO THE REST OF THE STORY.)

And, as promised, she segued seamlessly to the rest of the Hawaii story, focusing on her brave and stumbling foray into the unknown world of snorkels and the ocean floor. A fearsome trip into a mysterious new place. Hmm.

I wish she could have seen her daughter on Saturday, looking all grown up and yet like a small child, at once nervous and excited as she packed up her last items and headed to a mysterious new place. She would have been so proud.

It's Just an Expression

A friend was demonstrating last night how he is physically incapable of smiling. His mouth is too compact, he explained, and it turns down at the edges.

I wasn't buying it. I've known this man for over seventeen years, and I am absolutely certain I have seen a full range of facial expressions, from deep scowls to broad smiles. But his presentation last night was convincing. He would begin with his mouth in the neutral position, and, upon my command, attempt a smile. He had a point. His lips didn't stretch very far, and he looked like my grandmother used to look when someone would snap a picture of her and tell her to say cheese. Jaw tight, teeth peeking through the small gap in the lips but looking as if they just wanted to go back inside and hide.

This was discouraging to me, to think that my friend of so many years was not possessed of a genuine smile, especially when I can't remember receiving anything that didn't appear to be a warm smiling greeting from him (well, except for the times he was clearly scowling and not very happy to see me). Have I been misreading him all this time?

Hogwash! It's not about the mouth, stupid (I say, speaking to myself, of course). If anyone has seen a baby smile, it makes sense. Babies do the whole body smile, shaking their limbs, jiggling their bellies, crinkling their eyes, stretching their chubby faces into the oddest contortions. Happiness simply radiates from every pore, but if you look at their mouths, they're not necessarily turned up at all. Most of the time, it just looks like they're trying to take a crap. But the feeling is so genuine, all we see is the upturned curve of the lips and the rows of bright teeth, even though your average baby has neither.

For some reason, we were talking about Batman during the whole smile discussion, and the wildly upturned lips of the evil and dastardly Joker sprung to mind. Then I began thinking about the dancing teenage girls at the high school football game the other night, their toothy smiles as gorgeous and technically correct as anything, that is until the music died and it was time to return to their parents in the stands and issue the next carpooling orders.

Like I said, it's not about the mouth, stupid.

Well That Just Stinks!

There are few moments more disheartening than the one in which you realize the skunk smell is not just outside.

I've been down this road before, always at about two in the morning, always on a night when the absolute last thing I needed to be doing was waiting downstairs for the sky to start lightening and, ultimately, for the PetSmart grooming department to open. Note to self: next time Manny wants to pee in the middle of the night, let him do it on the carpet.

I started by doing what I could with what was available. I dragged Manny into the downstairs bathroom and found my emergency stash of tomato juice. After a few rinses, I couldn't decide which was worse: the skunk odor or the smell of old, warm tomato juice from a can. I'm convinced they're quite similar; no more Bloody Marys for me any time soon.

Anyone who's ever experienced the unparalleled delights of a skunked dog knows that the stench becomes so embedded in your nostrils you become certain that you yourself have been sprayed. No matter how many vanilla candles you light, no matter how many times you stick your nose near your dog's fur and think maybe it's not that bad, you're stuck with the odor for quite a while.

After the tomato juice bath, I went on line to refresh my memory as to the necessary ingredients for a plain old household deskunking concoction. Naturally, I was missing one. So, off I went to Walgreens, happy for the break from the smell of my house until one of the nasty little critters had the gall to cross the road right in front of me. I told him to move on if he knew what was good for him; next time, I'd turn the little stinker into a rug. Luckily, it was almost three in the morning by then, so I'm guessing nobody heard me yelling at a skunk. People are already wondering about me around here.

When I arrived at the checkout in Walgreens, the nice lady at the register told me I was the third person in the past hour who had appeared on an emergency skunk run. Hopefully I don't smell as bad as the stench in my nostrils would have me believe, and it was simply the cans of air freshener and the two bottles of hydrogen peroxide that clued her in.

Manny is now whimpering at the back door, desperate to go back out and play with his new friend -- the one with the really cool tricks up his sleeve. I am trying to curl up in my desk chair and catch a little nap without carrying any of the contamination to the upstairs rooms.

Naturally, I'm looking at the bright side. I had gone to bed trying to figure out which of the thousands of things I had to do in the morning before leaving town I would get done. Now I know the answer is none of them. I will simply be counting the minutes, waiting for the doors to open at PetSmart.

Transitions

It's in the natural order of things to lose a parent. Especially once we've already navigated our way through a good chunk of life, and are fully capable of living day to day without them.

My friend's dad passed away last night. I wrote about him -- and my own father -- in this space about a week ago. In the days since, my friend has traveled back and forth to Cleveland, trying her best to comfort and gain comfort from her mother and her siblings. And hoping, no doubt, to be there at the right moment, to be there holding her dad's hand when the time came. That last part didn't work out so well; she was off by a day or two. It bothers her, even though she knows it shouldn't.

I will never forget the fog I entered the moment my father died. I, like my friend, had traveled back and forth out of town, hoping to be there at the right moment. My timing was off by mere hours. I had flown back to Chicago from New York that morning, knowing I could not stay away from my young children indefinitely while I waited for the mysteries of nature to take their course, and thinking I'd still be able to see him one more time. That afternoon, he died while my mother held his hand with one of hers and, with the other, held the phone to his ear so I could tell him how much I loved him. Dumb luck that I had chosen that moment to call.

Great comforter that I am, I jumped in the car at midnight to go give my friend a hug. An I get it hug, a welcome to the club hug. "Open the fucking gate," was what I texted when I arrived at her house, annoyed that she thought it was somehow more important for her to try to get some sleep than deal with the crazed pain in the ass waiting in her driveway. But she, and another friend, had forced themselves upon me the day my father died, and it was important for me to return the favor, no matter how outrageous the hour.

We sat together briefly, talking about the inexplicable pain of losing a parent. The feeling that your roots have somehow been snipped, that your legs have been cut off at the knees. It may not be as tragic as the death of a younger person, but it is devastatingly sad and you feel like a piece of you is actually gone; you wonder how you can continue to get through life without the person who brought you here in the first place. Inevitably, you manage, but, for a long time, you feel like a lost child, no matter how old you are.

My friend will learn, as the rest of us in "the club" have, that they never really leave you. They're parents, for goodness sake. They are always available for a good chat, even if all they can do is listen.

The Measuring of a Man (and a Woman)

In my next life, I'm going to be a bailiff in family court. It's cheaper than going to the movies, and a whole lot more entertaining.

As I told my attorney when I left his office after round two with the judge yesterday, I would love to see him go to trial -- just as long as its not on my case. The pretrial was more than enough for me. There are few experiences in my life that have been anywhere near as icky as sitting on a cold, hard bench listening while people who barely know me try to convince someone else who barely knows me what my life -- at least my financial life -- should look like. What he should pay for, what I should be doing or not doing, where we should all be living, how much I should reasonably spend on food and clothing for my fifteen year old daughter. Guess I shouldn't have blown my wad on all those bras the other day.

It was my soon to be ex who finally seemed to get visibly fed up with all the line item nickel and diming. While our attorneys went at each other, he silently walked over to my side of the courtroom and we chatted amicably about how we would work out the minute details of a temporary support agreement. We probably could have ducked out for a cup of coffee, maybe even a quick nosh, and returned, unnoticed, before anyone turned around and realized the shocking violation of protocol and seating arrangements.

The judge looked like a proud parent, so happy that we were acting like two human beings in our fifties who have raised three children together and shared, well, a whole bunch of other stuff along the way (and I refer, here, not to tangible marital assets but rather to a quarter century of laughter and tears and accomplishments and disappointments, the good stuff and the bad stuff, the stuff that life is made of).

Maybe the matrimonial bar is onto something. Maybe its members know that the only way to get the litigants to get things done is to make them spectators at their own horror show. The Marital Dissolution Follies. Having your life reduced to a balance sheet, discussed by virtual strangers as if the whole thing was one arms length business transaction, well it really makes you think. Sure, getting back together is not a viable alternative, but there's gotta be a better takeaway than some stupid, arbitrary number (which, not surprisingly, seems to always fall right smack in the middle of where the two sides started).

We've both done some shitty things. People change, people grow apart, and, yes, people hurt the ones they're supposed to love. But he's the Irish Catholic guy who went ballistic when they forgot to deliver the chopped liver for our son's bris. He's the guy who delivered a eulogy at my father's funeral when I couldn't speak. And, as the judge pointed out, we have somehow managed to raise three wonderful, thriving children. Yes, we're both bitter and have managed to hate each other with such passion in the past few years it's surprising we can be in a room together. It's complicated. But how do you measure any of that with a simple arithmetic equation, a regular old balance sheet, prepared by someone else, no less.

As if the experience wasn't sufficiently surreal and nauseating, we ended the pretrial with the court reporter asking each of us -- just as a formality -- to raise our right hands and swear everything we had said in court that day was the truth. "I do," we both said in unison. Isn't that the simple phrase that got us into the mess we're now trying desperately to get out of? My soon to be ex and I avoided looking at each other, for fear of cracking up (at least on my end). I decided yelling mazel tov and breaking into a hora would not be appropriate. Sometimes I can be really good at reading situations.

I'd like to think that maybe it's not so interesting after all, day in and day out, for the bailiff. The guy who no doubt makes a lot less money than a lot of the folks entering his courtroom, and who can't figure out for the life of him what these people are all bitching about. Entertaining? Possibly. But I'm guessing it's just sad.