Angie Kinghorn

Will you accept this rose? Hell, no.

Image courtesy of ABC
Things I know for sure about The Bachelor: it is a vicious cycle of addiction.  It disgusts me, yet I will watch it.  There will be hot tubs and pools at every opportunity.  No matter what the job listed below each contestant’s name, if you dig deep enough, you’re likely to find that the real profession is “actress.”  
Each season, I vow to stay away from this train-wreck of a show.  And then I tell myself I’ll just watch the first episode, to remind myself how horrible it is.  It leaves me feeling hungover and in need of a shower, fighting the urge to run out wearing sandwich boards teaching the general population the proper usage of personal pronouns.
***Begin rant***
The continued butchering of personal pronouns on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette is so egregious that it cannot possibly have been accomplished by accident.  This particular franchise gets it wrong every single time, with the kind of deliberateness that makes the conspiracy theorist in me come out to play.  

I think ABC employs a grammar coach.  My guess is that said coach flunked out of an English program at a respectable school (or couldn’t get admitted to one in the first place) and decided to consult on The Bachelor to help the contestants clean up their language.  He or she then sits behind the scenes of each interview, waiting for the hapless contestant to stumble into the “me” or “I” dilemma.  Then the coach steers them directly into the wrong pronoun, but with confidence!  The audience is then treated to such gems as, “Today is all about Michelle and I.”  Or, “Brad and I’s relationship is really moving forward.”  Or, “Me and Ashley were horrified to find out we had the two-on-one date.”
People.  As one who loves the Queen’s English, I beg you, please, STOP.  I will give you some simple tips in a separate post to help you figure it out.  It’s not that difficult, I promise.
***End rant***
The second week of the show, I find myself watching even though I really don’t want to, because I’m convinced that this is the season that someone is going to blow this thing out of the water.  Surely this is the season where all of the bachelorettes will stomp out of the mansion, yelling at the cameras that this loser of a guy is not worth it, that they came here to find a husband, not a fame-whore, and that dammit, they’d like to have access to a newspaper or a book so they can do something with their free time other than sit around and ponder which of them is “there for the right reasons.”  (Here’s a hint about the answer: none.)  
Alternatively, I think that surely, this season, the Bachelor will attend one of the first few pre-rose ceremony cocktail parties, look around at the room packed with preening women squeezed into scraps of jewel-toned fabric, black holes smoldering out of each pan-caked face where eyes should be, over-processed hair teased over Bump-its where brains should be, and say, “Dammit, ABC!  I give you my life to fix up, you have an entire world of women from which to choose, and THIS is what you give me?”
It hasn’t happened yet.  But since it might happen next week, maybe I’ll watch.
You know, just in case.

Wordless Wednesday: snow reading

Wordless Wednesdays are supposed to be, um, wordless.


Once again, I’m not so good with the rules.


Anyway, the sign above pretty much says it all, but I’m going to add my two cents anyway.  Since we are fortunate enough to be living in a place where today’s high hit 60 degrees, I have no right to be bitching about the snowpocalypse that has much of the nation in its grasp.


So I’m bitching on behalf of my friends elsewhere.  You should meet some of them.  They’re very funny and intelligent, these women.  Even while struggling with stir-crazy children, blocked driveways, icy sidewalks, and (in some cases) lack of storm-meat.  (See The Martha Project for explanation.) 


We were there, in the wake of a snowstorm, a few weeks ago, and “not fun” would be the understatement of the century.  Two small children cooped up inside for a week turns this Mommy into a stark-raving-nutjob.  I was ready to throw myself upon anyone capable of linear conversation with multisyllabic words.


So what did I do?  I read while they played.  My reading was mostly blog posts, since I have been horrendously behind and my beloved Kindle DX has been on the fritz (more about that later).  I found some fabulous (and useful!) stuff.


For instance, I almost took my friend Lori’s advice on how to sell your children to the gypsies.  And once things were sufficiently cluttered and dirty, I contemplated talking a page from Tina at Life Without Pink, and actually cleaning with my kids.


Y’all, calm down.  I said contemplated.  That’s as far as it went.


Then I read some more blog posts.  Like this one, from my friend Law Momma, about the inherent incompatibility of mothering and the billable hour.  And another, from Babble, titled “Does my Cesarean really count as ‘giving birth?'”  


So if you find yourself snowbound in the wake of the monster storm, here at least is some fun reading material.


Let me know what you think.


Oh, and by the way?  In my book?  A C-section definitely counts as having given birth.  





Exploded

“Sure, we’ll keep an eye on him,” they said.  “Go ahead, take her in to the bathroom.”
Her tiny hand clutched mine, gritty with sand.  Both monogrammed totes sat sentry next to the playground bench and the two mothers.  The squeaks of the swing chains hung in the cold air, mingling with happy shrieks and sneakers squealing down plastic slides.  It was the usual comforting cacophony of happy children and chatting mothers.
Silence greeted us in the school building, and I waited in the bathroom while A did her business.  We washed our hands quickly in the freezing water that gushed too quickly from the tap, spattering our shirts.
Her tiny hand in mine was slippery, not quite dry from the rough brown paper towels.  I clutched it until we got to the gate, and she slid away from me and ran to the sandbox.
Wiping my hands on my jeans, I noticed the playground had quieted.  The swings hung empty.  The air was still but for the murmur of the mothers’ voices.
I rejoined them and we talked, eyes roaming; lifeguards on land.  Was that a flash of a green shirt?  Was that his laugh?
“Where’s G?”  I asked them.  
“Oh, he was right here just a second ago….”
Three heads swiveled as one as I called his name.
“There he is,” one sad, as a blond head and green shirt appeared over the edge of a climbing wall.
Sun glinted on hair that was too dark and too long, on green that was a shade too green, and I remembered: G does not play on the climbing wall.  
Too still, too sharp, too bright.
Sometimes, a mother knows.  
I ran to look behind every tree, under every slide, around every corner. 
“G!”  I yelled.  “G!”
The totes mocked me, side by side, as I grabbed A’s tiny hand, gritty again.  My other hand groped beside me, a reflex, seeking her twin and finding thin air.  The world was unbalanced,  and as it began to whirl around us, I felt G in my arms as an infant.  Downy tufts of hair, that sweet milky scent, his laughing gurgle.  
Around us, four mothers raced in circles, each yelling for my son.  Each getting only silence in return.  One turned to run to the mostly empty parking lot, and as she did, I saw my own look of panic mirrored in her eyes.
A’s hand was my sea anchor, and I clutched it until I heard her, “Mommy, ow!”  And then, she noticed her other half was gone.  She began to look back and forth, frantic, like a spectator at Wimbledon on fast-forward.  “MOMMY!  Where’s my brother?”
She pulled her hand free of mine and raced the edge of the playground like a greyhound.  “G!  Where are you?  G!”
Never apart.  Two swaddled burrito shapes, nestled into one crib, faces turned to each other.  Smiling toddlers always holding hands.  Must kiss each other goodnight before every nap and every night.  Two parts, but one whole.
One gaping hole.
One hole where I failed as a mother, where someone snatched my precious boy right off this safe haven of a playground, beneath the noses of two of my friends.
“We’ve got him!”
“He’s right here!”
My heart.
Exploded.
Because the first one to the boy in the green shirt was his twin sister.

For the love of…blogging

Ok, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon a bit late, but the lovely ladies of Sluiter Nation and Not Super, Just Mom, Katie and Miranda, are hosting a week of blogging festivities.

Yesterday’s task: a top ten list of reasons we love to blog.  Rules and I do not always get along, and I lack David Letterman’s flair for top ten lists.  So I’m ditching the top ten part and just telling you why I love to blog.
This is something people ask me frequently.  “Why do you blog?  You don’t get paid, right?”
Sadly, no.
“And you’ve got plenty of stuff to do with the twins, right?”
Oh, yes.  Plenty.  Do you know how many stickers two four year olds can spread throughout one house in two days?  Approximately 1200, and that’s not counting the–
“So why do you do something that’s so time consuming when you don’t even get paid?”
Well.  That’s a doozy.
I blog because I am a writer.  Always have been.  I kept journals from late elementary school on.  For me, there was no sight more full of hope, of promise, than a fresh journal page, a quiet cup of coffee, and time to contemplate.  At the front of my endless stream of journals, which also served as idea central for my creative writing classes and spare brain-space when mine seemed full, I always wrote the same lines, from Philip Sidney:  “‘Fool,’ said my muse to me.  ‘Look in thy heart and write.’” 
Why am I a writer?  I simply have to be.  There are things that must come out onto the page.  Over the years I’ve found outlets in journalism, creative writing, and journaling, but nothing has quenched the writer in me nearly so well as blogging.  Blogging is a combination of all three of the above, and that’s a huge part of why I love it so much.  You are part reporter, part creative writer, part diarist.  
I love blogging because I love words.  I adore the moments of inspiration when the right combination of words form a perfect sentence; re-reading that sentence, feeling the ebb and flow of the words as they caress an idea into being, I adore falling in love with words and their infinite combinations all over again each time I sit down to write.
Anyone who comes out of undergrad with a degree in English and Creative Writing, as I did, can tell you that there are few career paths in which your skill set and grammar skills will be truly appreciated.  Like many others, I went to law school, where I met an entirely new type of writing.  Legal writing contracts (seriously, no pun intended), aiming to squeeze ideas into neat and orderly packages, whether or not those ideas were intended to be so constrained.  I was used to writing to expand; writing to explode one tiny bit of dialogue or poetry into a firestorm of interpretative word dance.  The idea that paragraphs should all be constructed identically and according to a set model made me want to rip my hair out.   
Aside from the writing, I blog so that my children will know me.  When they’re old enough to need the things I know right now, I will, in all likelihood, have forgotten them entirely, or glossed over the nitty-gritty to fill my memory with soft-focus memories of their childhood that won’t do justice to any part of the experience.  I want them to know me, not as Mommy, but as a person, and I want them to see how desperately they were loved, and what that kind of love looks like.  I blog as a love letter to my children.  
And as a scrapbook.
My children have no baby books, and let’s face it, at this point, I’m not likely to create any.  During their infancy, we were too busy dealing with dual reflux and the havoc of twins combined with postpartum depression to worry about preserving everything.  Yet, buried somewhere in my daughter’s closet, there are a few zip-lock bags containing doll-sized preemie onesies, preemie diapers, and their birthday footprints.  Their impossibly tiny hospital bracelets are nestled in my jewelry box.  To me, they are precious.  
But scrapbooks?  Pictures?  Professional photography sessions that render the subjects stiff and posed?  No.  These things, my children will not have.  I am dangerous with a glue stick, and far more expressive with words than my horribly out-of-date point and shoot camera.  I will save their pictures in digital form, but they will not leave this house for their married abodes lugging along boxes heavy with bric-a-brac framed photos of birthday parties long gone.
Instead, they will have all this.  
And that is why I love to blog.