I’m jumping back in here to the blog
after a long hiatus involving work and more work and then some work, and lots
of bickering with Jessie—as we tried to find our way through the new “no-rule”
experiment we are trying at our house (and a few major performances involving
ALL our time and energy). I will share the best of the worst with you tomorrow
(involving infamous text messages and a meditation breakdown) and hope that
that will bring some closure to a difficult period and lead us into a joyous
summer. Or at least make you laugh. Or at least make you grateful that a)your
daughter has not yet reached puberty, b) your daughter is way past puberty,
c)your daughter is not my daughter, or d) you don’t have any children at all!
But just in case you were wondering what
I might do with all this spare time I have not blogging, or what I do for fun
on a Friday night . . . I offer you this:
627
Now, you might wonder why I would be the
one sorting through her notes. The simple answer is because it needed to be
done. And who do you go to when something needs to be done? Ghost Mama. That’s
right… Us Ghost Mamas are the ones that slip in and start the work that needs
to be done, leaving the finishing (and upping the odds that tasks actually will
be finished) to the ones who actually own the task. I know one Ghost Mama who
is, at this actual moment, virtually lurking, from her comfortable kitchen
office chair up here in Ottawa, somewhere near Humbolt Redwoods State Park in
California scouting out good biker/hiker camping sites for her daughters who
are cycling down the West coast. There is no doubt that technology makes Ghost
Mama work much easier, but it also, as I am finding, creates a new kind of
adolescent messiness that rivals the proverbial teenager’s room in the kind of
madness it can create. Whole gigabytes of garbage.
So. That’s what I was doing on Friday
night. Taking out the garbage. Most of which involved wedding planning, along
with a few Glee scripts and an invitation to Daniel Radcliffe to come volunteer
at the Foodbank where, Jess assured him “I would make sure you were treated
like a normal person.”
As I started to weed through the notes
(and look at the clock), I realized I could be there all night. So I narrowed
it down, making sure that she knew that cleaning up her note list would be one
of her chores Saturday, to just the wedding invitation list, variously labelled
as: “ Who’s invited to the wedding,” “who’s coming to the wedding,” “wedding
guest list,” and of course “Hollywood people invited to the wedding.”
If you were not aware, my daughter is
planning her wedding to her boyfriend, Drummer Boy, who seems to be as involved
in this process as she is, although he doesn’t seem to have the same level of commitment
to Yes to Dress. Also note that this wedding is not high on our “to do list,”
as we have told Jessie that she has to live out of the house with friends before
even considering booking the Santa Monica pier for her interfaith marriage (as
you can see, she has spent a lot of time of this). Given that it took Dan and I
25 years to get married, I was finding it a bit disconcerting to have to scroll
through more than 300 notes dedicated to guest lists for a glitter wedding in
some foreign country.
But, once I had done deleting those, we
(ah, I’ve gone all communal here, having spent more than half an hour swiping
my finger and tapping delete. Swipe, tap; swipe, tap; swipe tap; sip coffee;
swipe tap) were down to (see the number at the top of the phone screen):
281
Woo-hoo! 281 is a perfect number. Low enough
for Jessie to be able to delete or sort, high enough to make it boringly
painful, perhaps painful enough to convince her that having MORE THAN 300 notes
about one topic is just a bit over the top.
So it went on her Saturday to do list,
along with the chores she didn’t finish throughout the week, and which she had
to complete before going out on her date with Drummer Boy. Ah motivation.
When Dan and I returned from grocery
shopping Saturday morning, I reminded Jess that she had to sort through the
notes on her phone.
“Oh, I already did that!” she said.
“How many are left?” I replied, telling
her that I could show her how to email them to herself and then convert them to
word docs to ….
“None!” she blithely and proudly
announced.
“None?”
“No, I deleted them all at once. I don’t
really need them,” she said as she disappeared into the family room to watch
something on her computer.
Dan had to pull me away from the kitchen
cupboard where I was slowly, repeatedly, gently—yes gently—banging my head.
