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l steinauer

l steinauer

Tag Archives: parenting

Reaching Through the Looking Glass

01 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

homelessness, parenting, writing, writing inspiration

Being a stay-at-home parent, I rarely experience moments with nothing to do. “Free time” usually involves running errands, cleaning, writing, and on the rare occasion, getting some exercise. But last week, for the first time in a long time, I found myself walking around downtown Berkeley with no kids and no obligations.

Ah, the sweet ambrosia of non-thought.

I walked toward the farmers’ market, my mind tuned to the voices around me, the smell of the concrete sidewalk, the peaceful solitude that is an unhurried afternoon alone. On the way, I passed by a girl- no, a young woman- putting on her white sneakers. She looked up at me, smiled, and said hello. That’s when I spotted the blankets behind her, the suitcase, the doorway that was her makeshift sidewalk home.

She was homeless.

How strange, I thought. She didn’t look homeless. Pretending not to feel the guilt I always feel when passing someone who lacks the basic comforts I usually take for granted, I kept walking. Just keep going and don’t think about it too much. There was still time to hit the farmers’ market before it closed. Maybe the season’s first strawberries had arrived.

As I circled street vendors selling kabobs, oranges and crepes, an imaginary voice entered my mind. It was the voice of a homeless girl. “You’re not really homeless unless you look homeless,” the voice said. “At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

Jeesh. Not this. Not a story about a homeless girl. This was my free time, my not-a-care-in-the world time. It wasn’t time to think about a homeless girl’s story. Too painful. Too hard.

Too late.

I passed right by the strawberries.

There is no such thing as downtime. Because it’s during downtime that your mind soaks everything in… and rearranges it. I don’t want to write about a girl on the street. I’d rather write about cats. Or about a boy who turns into a dragon whenever he eats broccoli. Or about pregnant fish, high school angst, fuzzy monsters, and uptight parents. Something simple. Something easy.

But you can’t always choose your stories. Stories sometimes choose you.

I turned around and began to retrace my steps, my feet leading me far far out of my comfort zone.

When I reached the doorway, the girl was no longer alone. Three homeless friends had joined her, so I turned back and returned to the farmers’ market to buy croissants- four of them.

I’m crazy. That’s what I am. Suburban housewife, mother of two, goes insane and hangs out with homeless people.

Standing over them, I mumbled some lame introduction and held out my bag of baked goods in offering. They thanked me, took the bag, and asked if I’d like a hit of weed- a return favor.

“No thanks,” I said. “But would you mind if I joined you for a bit… to talk?”

I spent my free afternoon in the shade of the doorway beside four young strangers who told me their stories. Well, only three of them did. The youngest, a fourteen-year old boy, silently smoked his joint until it disappeared, then immediately lit a hash pipe in attempt to burn away the pain of his past, and the uncertainty of his present. His future he blew into a smoky haze.

The rest of us talked about Lunchables pizza, the amazing mini pizza you can prepare without an oven, while people walked by us, averting their eyes, eeking out crooked, uncomfortable smiles. I saw myself in each of their middle-class faces, but this time I was on the other side of the glass.

No one asked me any questions. My secrets were mine to keep. But I told them a little, and when I mentioned that I was forty, they gasped. In their world, the world of the urban survivalist, I looked to be only around thirty, thirty-one max. I took the compliment.

The oldest of the group, Sam, was a friendly thirty-two year old man who looked older than me. He’d run away from home at fourteen, just like the boy sitting beside me. A father of three kids in three states, Sam told disjointed stories hinting of mental illness packed with kung fu fight scenes and gratuitous opinions about society’s ills. I found myself looking for opportunities to change topics and engage someone else.

It was really Marie, the 23 year-old girl wearing white sneakers, whose story I was most interested in. Maybe it was because she didn’t look homeless or sound mentally ill. Or maybe it was the way she first smiled at me and said hello, like she’d suddenly found herself on the wrong side of the glass. Clearly someone had made a mistake. She was a recent college graduate. She was sober. She was wearing nice glasses with a CS Lewis book tucked neatly between notebooks in her backpack. Her sneakers were clean.

Marie had been living on the streets for just a month. She told me her parents in Alabama forbade her from dating a Latino boy, so she moved to California with that boy, who then beat her. After two stints in ER, she escaped him and found herself suddenly homeless without a plan. I wondered how much of the story she told me was true. Maybe all of it. Maybe just parts of it.

I accompanied Marie to the Veteran’s building so we could keep talking. When the subject of her future came up, she shared her dilemma:

How do you grow in this environment without losing yourself?

I had no good answer.

She needed to get inside the building before the showers closed. Marie’s luxury was taking long hot showers. Once a week she’d go to Willet, the public pool- her spa, because she could take hour-long showers without anyone noticing.

Armed with a small white towel, Marie headed into the shower to continue her fight against looking homeless. I walked slowly back through the farmers’ market, giving a half-assed glance for strawberries. But I no longer wanted any.

I ordered a cappuccino in a nearby café and looked out the large glass window separating me from the outside. Inside, people wearing fancy sweaters ate arugula salad and talked about society’s ills. Outside, people wearing donation box clothes ate Lunchables pizza and talked about society’s ills.

I squeezed my key, the one that unlocks the door to my house, and took a deep breath. So much for relaxing free time. It felt like I had changed time zones and crossed international borders. Like I’d travelled into deep space and on my way back circled the moon. But I hadn’t really circled anything. I was just sitting in a Berkeley café three blocks from where I’d met Marie and her friends.

Three blocks, and one very thin piece of glass.

The Birds, the Bees, and why I lied about Santa

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

fish, kids, parenting, pets, Santa

Today I spotted one of my fish, Rainbow Sparkle Razzlesplazzle, or whatever impossible-to-remember-name my kids gave her, hiding behind a plant with a guilty look on her face. The moment she saw me, she hurried back to her regular hangout by the heater, leaving me to wonder what mischief she’d been up to.

The last time she acted so strangely it was because she had just given birth to a bunch of live baby fish. Two seconds after that, the only adult male fish in the tank, Taco, died. A month has passed, and as far as I know, Taco is still quite dead, his body flushed far far away. So Rainbow Sparkleplazzle couldn’t be having more babies. The only other adult fish in the tank is female.

Meanwhile, Taco’s fourteen children, the ones Rainbow didn’t manage to swallow whole, dart merrily between plants. They are a constant reminder that I now have way too many fish.

The next time I walk by the tank, something catches my eye. Something small, something that looks like a newborn fish. But that can’t be. It must be a leaf, a fish poop, or maybe my eyes telling me that I need to stop watching late night episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker.

Pressing my nose against the glass, I study the aquarium floor. One, two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten, twelve itty bitty brand new fish staring up at me.

The aquarium store’s fish-whispering misanthrope explains it over the phone. “Female Wag Platys can conserve sperm for up to a month, allowing them to birth two batches of babies from only one mating.”

Now she tells me.

Taco, you virile old dog, you. If you weren’t already flushed down the toilet, we’d be having a serious talk.

Of course I tell the kids. And for a few minutes they even feign interest in watching Rainbow Sparkplug chase her new babies. But my kids know better than ask questions about the fish. No more, “why do the mommy fish eat their babies?” Instead my four year old squeezes my hand and tells me she appreciates that I didn’t eat her when she was a baby.

My seven year old begins to ask how the mommy fish had more babies without a daddy fish. But she doesn’t finish her question. There’s a reason she doesn’t. It’s because she’s not ready for the full truth. It’s like when I mistakenly blurted out that Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was make-believe, causing her face to fall. For a moment she was silent. Then she frowned. “You don’t know that for sure, Mommy! How could you? You haven’t waited on the roof all night on Christmas eve looking for reindeer, so you couldn’t know for sure.”

In the meantime, the mommy fish keeps chasing her new babies around the tank. Watching this spectacle, I feel a renewed sense of gratitude: gratitude that I haven’t yet had to explain the birds, the bees, sperm conservation, and why I’ve been lying all these years about Santa to my children.

It’s been over a month since we first brought our three fish home and the novelty of having a pet (or in our case, 25+ of them) is long over. My kids have moved on. They are thinking about more important things, like summer vacation and how to dismantle the living room in less than 30 seconds. I am alone in caring for, or even remembering that we have fish. And as I open the aquarium lid to sprinkle some food into the water, Rainbow Frizzsplat corners a newborn and opens her mouth.

I should have bought a damn puppy.

The Zen of Querying with an Aquarium

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

aquarium, fish, parenting, querying, writing

While waiting to hear back from literary agents, here are two things you can do to keep your sanity from running off with your empty inbox:

1)   Write something else.

I made the mistake of devoting all of my free time (and I mean all of it) to writing and rewriting my manuscript. So when I started to query it with agents, I had nothing else to fall back on. Associating too much of myself with my manuscript made each rejection feel more painful than it should have. What I needed was another project to broaden my own identity as a writer. And it didn’t have to be big, like a novel. It could be a short story, or a picture book. With multiple projects, there’s always another angle to explore, another possibility…

2)   Get an aquarium.

Yes, I’m talking about living fish, those silvery zen creatures who swim in silent circles to the soft burbling sound of the tank’s filter. Feeling freaked out that you might not be the writer you once thought you were and every agent will reject your work?

Go look at the fish.

Feed them a few pellets and see how happy they are. At least they look happy, don’t they? For argument’s sake, let’s just pretend they’re happy.*

*Keep pretending they’re happy until one of them floats. Then you can call yourself a fish killer/bad parent/generally inept person. I mean c’mon, who can’t keep a lousy fish alive?

Apparently me.

But look at it this way, now you can have a deep conversation with your sobbing kids about the circle of life while driving to the aquarium store to have your fish water tested, resulting in:

1) A stern scolding from a fish-whispering misanthrope

2) A bigger tank

3) A new filter

4) An $85 bill

Then when you get home, you discover that your dearly departed fish, Taco, left  something else to remember him by:

Babies.

Lots of them.

Wait. How many?

Father of fourteen, Taco died with a smile on his face. And now your kids can watch the beauty of new life unfold in their aquarium…

Until the mommy fish start swallowing their babies.

Kids are crying again. Time for another, more confusing conversation about the circle of life. But we’ll leave that one for Dad.

So after all this grisly fish death and cannibalism, why would I recommend you get an aquarium?

Because you’ll totally forget about that empty inbox.

A mother’s whisper

20 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

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Tags

gun control, motherhood, Newtown, parenting

A mother’s whisper

In 2009 two women, Donna McNamee and Abigail Sicolo, lifted a 1,400kg car off of a little boy who was trapped underneath. Afterwards the women were shocked that they’d managed such a feat. But this is an old story, a story reenacted countless time through the centuries. Upon seeing a child’s life in jeopardy, mothers tap their inner Hercules and, in Donna and Abigail’s case, start throwing cars around.

With two young children of my own, I will long remember the Newtown Elementary school shooting. And as I sit in my living room, whispering to myself that this must never happen again, I know I’m not alone. I can hear the same whisper from every state, every town, every living room. And the whisper grows louder.

A woman pulls up to her child’s elementary school, feels her chest tighten, and for a moment does not want to open the car door releasing her child into the world and its looming uncertainty. Across the country, the mother feeding her baby puts down the spoon to wipe her eyes after having watched tiny coffins on TV with the sound turned off.

It’s not just mothers who feel this. It’s fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, caretakers, and more. The feeling lingers with us all, sitting between our ribs, simmering.

Another week will pass, and then three. Those of us who didn’t know the victims of this crime will continue on with our lives. Gun sales will spike, and the NRA will come up with some carefully devised tactic for self-preservation.

In the silence following last week’s shootings we could feel the howl of mothers and fathers who had lost their babies. This howl resonates in each of us, transforming us, reminding us of our communal responsibility to protect every child from becoming a victim of violence. And to our children we say, “We won’t let this happen again. We promise you.”

There are over 85 million mothers in America, a group typically too occupied with taking care of everyone else to make their own noise. We are the quiet lioness scanning the horizon for strangers while our children dance like butterflies in the tall grass.

For now, we pace and wait, knowing the call will come for meaningful change in gun control. And when it does, we will answer with a deafening roar.

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Recent Posts

  • From Across the Parking Lot
  • Sifting Through The Ashes of Berkeley Family Camp
  • Reaching Through the Looking Glass
  • The Birds, the Bees, and why I lied about Santa
  • The Zen of Querying with an Aquarium

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