This one is short, I just feel very proud today. Celia's grades came today. Celia had come from England and we decided for a range of reasons not to put her in public school. We lived in the ghetto, she was blond and 2 to 3 years younger than kids here in the same year. We'd worked too hard to put her back 2 years to go with her age level. While the local public schools offered assessments that promised your child would go into more challenging classes, we'd not only missed those for the year but the local public schools have a phenomenal failure rate. NM is ranked near the bottom in education, there were only 1 or 2 passing schools and we'd missed the transfer windows. So on and so forth. I began romancing the idea of homeschooling. We had also missed the intake windows for the private schools and charters.

Homeschooling will have to be another blog. From being told I was overwhelming myself, under-qualified, and elitist I met much opposition. Plus the ever, constant, tune of I was hurting my kids through lack of socialization. Hurting. I was hurting them.

Still we plugged on. Originally, when thinking private we knew of only 2 that met our criteria. One Celia detested on sight. The other she was wait listed on year after year. Still, of the thousands who applied, being one of a hundred kids on a wait list was still a boost of confidence.

Then, the last year we said we were going to try (if she didn't get in one more year it was a sign that ABQ really was the arm-pit of the universe and we were well past done here) we discovered school number 3. School number 3 enchanted us and her. We thought there was some hope and even if we left, maybe she could be happy there till we found a way out of town. Lo and behold they accepted her.

She was sent a letter telling her no matter what her choice was - to accept their acceptance or to go somewhere else - she should know she beat out the hundreds of other applicants for one of 5 seats that year. She should know THEY thought she was very special. They said their board had "unanimously" voted in her favor and I bit my tongue from saying to her I was sure that must be standard policy.

Still we'd been sort of writing our own curriculum. I had no idea how after 3 years what a formal setting would do to her. We decided to send her, she'd have fun while it lasted. On her second day there she was elected to the student government seat for her grade. She had had to give a speech. She'd heard about this at the orientation weeks before so she had written the speech at roughly the same time she was writing her speech for her Bat Mitzvah.

Her first grades came in and I was crushed. I wouldn't let her see them. I told her some of it was bound to be that she'd been homeschooled and the other 80 kids in her year had been hand raised for the last 3 years at that very school on this very curriculum. Still secretly I felt we possibly had made a huge mistake. I had never managed a D in my life, let alone a page of them. I didn't think she was stupid, I thought maybe, for once, we'd aimed too high.

Her next grades came in, barely better. D's to C's and 2 A's. I felt the same and decided we'd pull her out over the summer.

One day, a few weeks ago she said her homework was no longer stretching her. She said she'd learned to think like them. She said she thought she'd cracked it and that it was just retraining her English/Homeschooled mind.

Today, her 3rd quarter grades came. We had all A's with the exception of her 2 hardest classes which came in as solid B's. Seriously - no Seriously am I proud of her. She did this, virtually all by herself. She sought out her teachers, she e-mailed them and her adviser daily. She stayed at school to meet with teachers and haunt the library. She stayed up hours past the rest of us to crack the never ending math problems. She met her own goal of an A/B average. So maybe she's not entirely her father's daughter. Maybe, just maybe, there is a hint of me in her after all. Maybe she'll break away from him genetically and become her own person. We can hope, right?


This brings me to the End

I have to admit quite often that Albuquerque was a bad choice made for all the right reasons. The road to hell, yadda yadda.

I came here because I still had some residual guilt about all the time I spent away from my Mom before she suddenly died. I came here because I had some seriously mislaid family loyalties. I came here because I'd never been actually happy in England and this was America. I came here because of false promises made to me by the family members to whom I had my mislaid loyalties.

There are traditional family values, I get that, but I've redefined my family to be the people who deserve to be family and to myself as the oldest-acting generation. My new family have other family names such as Horowtiz and Zinmer and Trujillo and Blackledge and most importantly Brian, myself and the kids. I realized one day when the kids grow up they will say "my family" and they will mean me, their daddy and their siblings. I decided to reconfigure my image to match theirs.

Therefore, I'm not going to entertain conversation here about how things got this way. About how I am disloyal to my "family" and blah blah blah.

(One day one of my kids said "Mommee, can you re-tell that story only with the real things in it and taking out the blah blah blahs?")

So I admit that by and large ABQ has been an epic fail. Which leads me to ask where would I go, if I could go anywhere. That has been a problem in itself, the whole entire country to choose from.

I took Austin off the list because I wanted seasons, and snow. I also didn't want to be in another island, there is so much of nothing on all sides of Austin. Mostly, I took Austin off the list because of the imminent threat of people with whom I wish to never share a continent (let alone city) showing up there. "They" recently announced, and have often announced over the last years, that they are moving to Austin.

Then, I was looking at pictures. Pictures on Facebook of my cousin's new baby horse. He said Celia could always come there and be on the ranch with the horses when we move to Austin. Or pictures of my other cousin's kids who might make my kids happy - having blood cousins to grow up near. Or of course, my cousin John. I would really love to have John in their lives as they grow up. Which made me look back at my own happy glowing pictures of Austin.

I got all nostalgic and I felt once again joyous to remember that I have normal humans in my bloodline.

A friend tells me Jewish friends of hers are happy there. There is an Ikea. The beach is not 800 miles away.

I said to my husband "let's put Austin back on the list, at the top."

The next day I heard -via Facebook- that my oldest child's father is being posted at Ft. Sam, no it is not Austin but in my tired head it was close enough.

I'm not prepared to have a relationship with them. It took me till now to recover the emotional damage  his August visit caused. I was satisfied with him showing up once every so many years until August when it was obvious that the things in his personality that had driven me away had since intensified ten-fold. A few emails from him wanting to discuss his post made me aware that if we lived in Austin he had every-other-weekend style parenting in mind. I became violently opposed to this and mournful all at the same time. Why the day after I'd put Austin back on the list? The universe has been trying extra hard to slap me in the face recently.

Brian has argued in Austin's favor, it is a huge city - big enough to share. We'll finalize the adoption before we go, there will be no every other weekend interloper. So on. Still, karma-wise, what the hell?

To be honest, most days the only thing ABQ has going for us are 1 or 2 wonderful friends and 2 amazing schools which brings me to Celia

Personally, I think Jews recognize deeply-seated neurosis in themselves. How else does Woody Allen stay in business? Saturday started with a bat mitzvah. One of my daughter's best friends and thankfully away from the establishment I have mentioned previously. While walking into the building I was shouted at by a total stranger for letting Leif walk ahead of me. I did this because I was actually feeling guilty about being late and thought his entrance would soften the blow of my lateness. However, the stranger shouted that I was intentionally letting Leif run ahead and therefore get hit by cars.

Because it goes without saying that at 8 years old he's too stupid to stop and look both ways at the stop sign. It goes without saying that I wouldn't take his hand and it goes without saying that he would not wait for an adult to come level with him before crossing. It also goes without saying that he wouldn't see the car coming, even though we were on a private road and the speed limit was 5 and there were no cars within half a mile. I'm surprised that guy didn't call social services right there.

Then, we went in through some massive double wood doors. I whispered to Queak to please shut the door behind us gently. A woman (another total stranger) came running up and grabbed the door - glaring at me - and said loudly "be careful sweety, these big doors could really hurt you!"

Yeah, because he's 5 and I've never taught him how to close a door. Again, because like his brother he is too stupid to take simple direction and close the door gently. Again because I am too stupid to run to his aid and avert this whole disaster. Sheesh, there's another social services call.


Wait - before I go on - is it really okay to talk to other people you've never met before in this tone about their parenting? I didn't get the memo.

Okay, so in the service I barely had time to admire how my aforementioned neurotic friend was stood literally beaming as her daughter gave an absolutely flawless Torah reading  when some other woman with a look of utter disdain dashed from her chair to the tall vase of bamboo decorating the scene and swiveled it around so the bamboo was pointing another direction.

At which point my husband said, out loud, "I liked the bamboo the other way and I'm going to move it back."

That was when I knew my cover had been blown. I looked nervously around to see who had noticed when I saw a woman I was dreading to see. Let's not call her neurotic, she might see this and be incited to homicide. Let's call her charming. Let's call her another story. Let's call her balefully glaring at us. So I moved to the other side of Brian (he deserved to be her fixation) so I would be less in her field of vision. Brian turned and saw her and in a stage whisper said "to quote  the emperor Claudius, that woman is capable of murder through violence." If you get the impression he was trying not to be invited back you'd be right. Brian has totally lost his tolerance for the local jewry, though to be fair, as I contemplated it, I realized Jewish neurosis is universal.

 The day progresses -

At one point I had a total stranger almost push Queak off a bar stool even after I tried to step in and  him  down so she could get closer to the dip. This caused him to lose his personal space to a total stranger and hide under the bar stool, spilling his cucumbers and sobbing about losing the cucumbers and strangers touching him. Before you get your back up, let me remind you I have already made clear in this blog that I'm Jewish, I'm a mother, and I recognize my own neurosis.

After calming him I reached to clean the cucumbers up and had another woman snatch them up with a paper towel - I said "I was just going to do that" she said "I'm SURE you were."

Smack. "Brian, honey, I'm ready to go - now."

Looking outside to see if Daddy had pulled the car up to collect us Queak stepped onto the porch, Celia  stood watching and a young woman slams the door shut snapping at Celia "Ever hear of closing a door?!" Celia shouts back "MY BABY BROTHER IS OUT THERE!" orther girl shouts back "that's his problem, he shouldn't have left the door open."

Another woman took a brownie out of Buttercup's hands because she hadn't seen Buttercup eat "real" food yet. Seriously. You touched my child's food. I'm now torn between a screaming fight with this woman (who was surely the 8th person who should have called social services) and not being the one to start a fist fight at my daughter's best friend's bat mitzvah.

At the lunch I had a woman dart in front of me to exchange her salmon she slid it off her plate, onto the rest of the salmon and grabbed another salmon from the other tray. Two people cut in because they wanted seconds, a woman demanded yellow beet soup since she'd only gotten red in her bowl and a woman behind me spent the next several hours passive-aggressively telling a dozen or more people how she never got beet soup because some woman had to have yellow beet soup and all that was left was red and who wanted just red? I saw another woman act so self-importantly that she actually physically repelled me as she gnawed on her fingers after every bite she took, and held herself in the most peculiar and sexually open ways I've ever seen anyone move. And not one of these people failed to comment on which of my children had not eaten their beet soup, who had taken 1 too many cookies (Leif) on why I was letting them not eat their salmon (it was raw) and how I expected them to grow up to be healthy drinking coffee. 

This all sounds aimed at women, but don't worry the men were annoying too. Each man acting disgusted at beet soup and raw salmon. A host of men blocking the door and the food line while talking, oblivious to people trying to say 'excuse me' to get to the stupid beet soup (I like beets, I liked the soup, I may be alone in this) each man trying to one-up the other in the "what I do for a living and how intellectual I am" tirade. Plus, the group of little old men Shushing the week-old baby who was crying because it was hungry and the poor dejected mother was terrified to break away but also terrified to feed him in public.

I said to no one in particular "you know, I know he sneaks coffee, he only gets away with it at buffet lunches like this and I really don't care" The woman closest gasped "really? You know you really shouldn't do that"

That's about when I decided I'd rather be anywhere else that day which leaves me to leaving

The Most Recent

Last Monday-- I opened the front door to discover a LEO. He asked me how many chickens I had, I said 9. He then explained they had a complaint of rogue chickens flying about and upsetting my neighbor. I dutifully walked around the house with him to count my chickens. Heart in my mouth, wondering who had managed to jump a 6 foot fence and how on earth their wings had grown back already. 9 chickens were to be seen, 1 appearing to be "tied down." The tied down comment came when she was not moving at all. Not dead, just not moving. I lifted her up to show she had huddled her daily egg and someone else's under herself and was protecting them from our visitor. I tried to explain that Black Australorps are broody. Then, satisfied that the chickens were present and even cared for (food, water, nesting boxes, shelter, heat lamp) he went to talk to my neighbor.

LEO soon returned with the complaint that I had too many chickens. He said he set neighbor straight, as I am allowed 15 and a rooster. He asked if I wanted a rooster, I said no, never. They peck you and since all I want out of my chickens are eggs the last thing I am going to risk are fertilized eggs. He told me a story about being a child and his grandmother's rooster attacking him. I told him a story about once killing a rooster that viciously attacked me as a child (I figured the statute of limitations were up on chickenicide). He was nice and told me to consider a new coop and to keep the food and water visible since his guess was he'd be back to chase another complaint up within the week. Seriously though, if someone took my chickens away I would have hit my final straw, this town is hanging by a thread already (a later thread called leaving).

This led me to Neighbors