Hey, thanks a lot for making me feel unsafe in my own neighborhood, in broad daylight! Really appreciate it!

Earlier today I was thinking about how untouched I have been by all the street or random harassment I read about. Something about being a nearly 40-year old mom, pushing a toddler in a stroller, must be some kind of creep-repellent. Uh huh. Before you begin to laugh derisively at my naivete, I have now been disabused of that notion. Walking with my children doesn’t make me less vulnerable, it makes me much more vulnerable.

Today was such a beautiful day, absolutely perfect for walking Monkey to school. So we did. We got him dropped off in his class; and Pumpkin and I started walking back to the House. But first, I stopped to talk to another parent, C’s dad. As we were talking, a man rode by on a bicycle. I have seen this person outside Monkey’s school several times recently, and thought him kind of odd, but probably harmless. That is until today. He spotted me talking to C’s dad, swerved across the street, and interrupted our conversation to say, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” Excuse me, WTF?! I didn’t smile, I hardly responded. I said, “Um, yeah.” and kept talking to the other parent as the Creep rode on.

Pumpkin and I started walking home. I always pay attention to traffic, walking defensively, even on the sidewalk. Cars drive too fast on that street, even in front of the school, and I have seen or heard several serious accidents along that road. At one intersection, I looked back to check for cars, and the Creep on the bike was bearing down on us. Starting to get a little concerned, I picked up the pace and started thinking about options. He passed us and I made a point to not look friendly. Then, oh Lord, he turned his bike onto our street!

I slowed down, tried to figure out who I could go to for help, and tried to rationalize. Surely he turned down our street randomly. But I knew better. And sure as shootin’, I turned the stroller down our street, got about 2 houses down, and noticed that the Creep is down the street a ways, waiting. He started riding back towards us. I had already spotted a neighbor at home at the end of the street. Pumpkin and I went to door, I rang the bell and prayed furiously.

The Creep rode past us just before the man answered the door. My neighbors are very nice and he was very understanding and concerned when I told him what happened. He walked to the end of the street with me, but the Creep was gone. I thanked him, a lot, and started back to the House. Then I heard my neighbor yell something. Thinking he was trying to get my attention, I turned back. The Creep came back and my neighbor yelled something at him as he passed. When the Creep was gone, I waved at my neighbor’s wife (who apparently came out to see why I dragged her husband out into the street) and ran up my driveway.

He may be harmless, I may be overreacting, but… Why would some random guy use a smarmy pick-up line on a middle-aged mom with a toddler? How did he know which street we lived on? Who does he think he is to make me feel uneasy about being outdoors while female? And one other highly disturbing thing: I’m no hot, young thing (as if that would make it better), what if he was trying to get to my kids?!

Something made my internal alarm go off, and I’m not in the habit of ignoring my instincts. I’d much rather overreact and be safe than under-react and be dead. The upshot is: we’re not going to be walking for a while.

You know, I have walked that route many times and seen many different people all over the neighborhood. Other parents, teenage ne’er-do-wells, lawn workers, utility crews, retired people, even the occasional hobo, and I have never been harassed or followed. Apparently, I just haven’t run across any harassers until now.

Nobody reading this blog is likely to think this way, but some people dismiss random harassment, thinking that women somehow provoke it by dressing or acting a certain way. Just for the record: I am a pudgy, middle-aged mom with so much gray in my hair that I’m starting to resemble a badger. I was wearing the ever-alluring mom uniform of: relaxed-fit jeans, baggy black T-shirt, loose black cardigan, Doc Marten boots, and not a stitch of make-up. Except for my hands, I was covered from neck to toes. I did not smile or flirt and I was busy wrangling a toddler in a stroller.

There is nothing I did nor didn’t do to make that Creep try to follow me home. There is nothing I could’ve done differently to get a different outcome. And no matter how fully-clothed or scantily clad a woman is, if a man is decent, he won’t act like a Creep. The only “mistake” I made? Being a woman and being outside my house.

Creep.

It only took me 16+ years, but I finally broke Hubby of an extremely bad habit. Or he just got sick of being yelled at over this, whatever. He finally stopped saying, “Now don’t get mad…”

Here’s the deal, people usually say, “Don’t get mad” right before they say something they know or suspect is going to piss you off. It’s a hedge, a way of deflecting the responsibility for an offense onto the offended. “Well, I told you not to get mad.” Grr.

Like most things in life that affect me more than they probably should, this “don’t get mad” thing hews a little too close to (my childhood) home. My parents, bless their pea-pickin’ little hearts, subscribed to the stop-cryin’-or-I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about method of parenting. Children’s emotions apparently sent them into some kind of downward spiral, you don’t want to go there, red-eyed fury. Anger was not permitted. Crying was mocked. Stifling and repressing negative emotions were a way of life. I even saw it in their relationship. It probably would’ve been easier to maintain an upbeat attitude if my childhood had not been suffused with constant, undeserved (although I’m sure I had it coming sometimes) criticism. The overriding lesson was: they dish it out, I have to take it, and I’m not allowed to even be upset about it.

So, I am probably hyper-sensitive to criticism and to being told how to feel. I think most women have to deal with this crap as a matter of course. We have to act nice, act like ladies. We have to make excuses for everyone else. Anybody gets to say anything they want about us and we’re supposed to not raise a stink about it. We are expected to be these nice, little, mousy, meek people. We are supposed to know our place. We are not supposed to get mad.

But as an adult, I have a right to my own fury, my own outrage, my own sadness. Do not tell me not to get mad, do not tell me to snap out of it, do not tell me I am making a big deal over nothing! I will get mad if I damn well please. I will bawl like a baby if I damn well please. I will make a scene if I damn well please. I will not be your definition of good, I will not tread lightly, I will not care what the neighbors think, I will not take this lying down!

All of this tends to boil up out-of-control whenever I hear “Don’t get mad”. So the other day, when Hubby came to me and said, “This may make you mad, but….”, I so disarmed and pleased that he might have been able to tell me that he was voting Republican, without damage to life or limb. He acknowledged that what he had to say may cause me to get mad and that my feelings were valid. If he hadn’t been on his way out the door to go to work, I would’ve shown my appreciation. Now, what was that I was supposed to get mad over? Who cares.

Hubby and I got a bit of late start on having kids, not entirely by design. I found out I had PCOS when I was 22, it was mildly disturbing to hear, but not devastating. Yet.

So we knew going in that it may take us a little longer to get pregnant, but we didn’t know it would take us FIVE YEARS!!!!! Five years of tests, treatments, pills, shots, daily temperature taking, procedures, optimism, pessimism, defeatism. I gave up. I didn’t actually tell anyone else that I had given up, but my heart was tired of disappointment and giving up was a hedge against more of it.

Lot’s of other things happened during those five years: changing jobs, buying a house, moving to Chicago, moving back. All the while, I had that giving-up as an insurance policy against getting too invested in all the things that weren’t happening in my body. One of the things that happened in the course of moving was changing doctors.

In Chicago, I starting going to a doctor affiliated with Northwestern Healthcare in Evanston. The beautiful, wonderful, miracle-working Dr. Jennifer Kim put me on Metformin, a drug commonly used to treat Type II diabetes. When we moved back to Oklahoma, my new doctor here approved of that treatment and kept me on it.

Eventually, after some other bumps in the road, we got pregnant with Monkey. It was officially a high-risk pregnancy, but I suffered only the usual annoyances plus gestational diabetes. After the level hormonal playing field of PCOS, I was completely unprepared for the wild fluctuations pregnancy brought. Day after day, I would come home from the bank and tell Hubby, “I hate everyone but you.” And then Monkey was born.

His birth story is one for another day. What is important here is what happened afterwards. If the hormonal changes of the pregnancy threw me around like a rag doll, the ones postpartum were expontentially worse. And I had no idea what was happening to me. You see, no one told me that I was going to be sick and crazy for a year.

Oh, everyone knew about the “baby blues”; and postpartum depression and psychosis had been in the media but I never applied these things to myself. I could get out of bed in the morning and function like a normal person. There were no crying jags, no dramatic weight loss or gain, no sadness. But there was an underlying current of anger. Sleep disturbances come with the territory when there’s an infant the House, so does a loss of interest in sex. I was never suicidal and never thought about harming myself or others; I was just…crazy.

I was so angry at everything and everybody and I did feel worthless. Since the age of 18, I had worked full time, gone to school full time, or some combination of the two. After Monkey, I stayed home, something with which I had no experience. There was this huge chunk of who I used to be that was now missing. And a terrible isolation took over. With Hubby at work every day, no other SAHM’s that I knew, and only a drooling infant for company, I was starved for grown-up interaction.

Every day, I felt like I was at the bottom of a dry well or that I was twisting in the wind, alone. The twisting-in-the-wind days were bad; I was the last dead leaf left, buffeted about by the weather, clinging desperately to the end of the thinnest, driest branch on the tree. The dry-well days were oh so much worse. I could taste and feel the fetid, stale air like a noxious slime at the back of my throat. That well was too dark and close and deep for even an echo of my voice to escape. And even if I could’ve spoken aloud, I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it. Weeks passed, then months. Monkey turned 1, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then the new year all passed me by. Then one day, in the Spring, I came back. The person that I had been before, that I hadn’t been for so long, came back. I could, again, feel the familiar curvature of my mind. The dark, jagged, bitter thing that it had become was gone and once again my mind took on its usual gentle hills and valleys. Oh, my temper was still there, but the fury was gone. I bid adieu to the alien thing that had taken up residence in my brain and never saw it again.

I may never know why I was hit so hard. Perhaps it was the years of trying and disappointment and anticipation, followed by a cold splash of reality. Maybe it was my utter inexperience with hormonal changes due to the PCOS. Whatever it was, I didn’t have those problems with Pumpkin. All my problems with that one happened during the pregnancy. But that, too, is a tale for a different day.

There was one major self-discovery that came of all this: I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Don’t get me wrong, I love my babies and I like being a mom. But that can’t be all that I am. Once, before I had kids, I read one mother’s tale of much the same discovery of self. She came to the realization that she was a better mother to her children when she worked outside the home. Of course, being a pre-parent, I knew absolutely everything there was to know about raising kids. I simply couldn’t understand what she meant. But I do now.

It is an ongoing process, but every day, every semester, I get closer to my goals. And that makes me a happier, better person and mother-day by day and semester by semester.

It’s been longer than I’d like since the last time I posted, but life sort of got in the way. That fall I took on Superduperpooperscooper Tuesday? A lot more serious than I thought. Ended up in Urgent Care the following Saturday and missed two whole classes the next week. I hate that. I’m feeling marginally better now, thanks.

Some things occurred to me during my minor convalescence and I’ll being sharing them with you this week. The first item of interest is something I like to call Pre-parents.

Look, every parent knows that having kids is, by turns, horrible and delightful. Parenting is a rough, dirty, messy, smelly job with nothing in the way of financial rewards. Children are like little primates we have to evolve into human beings. It’s our job to ensure that our children become functioning members of adult society. And it’s hard, and we’re going to make mistakes, and we might or might not do a very good job. My own parents made a lot of mistakes and hopefully I can learn from them. So I can make all new mistakes with my kids.

But most people know that kids can be unpredictable, stubborn, loud, annoying, tired, cranky, hungry, or happy, charming, quiet, thoughtful, entertaining, and pleasant. That said, there are two kinds of people who just aren’t prepared for how real kids act in the real world: anti-parents and pre-parents. Anti-parents are those people who know themselves well enough to realize that they do not like children and do not want to become parents, ever. Ok, I say “bravo” to them. If you know you aren’t suited to being a parent, then by all means don’t have kids! We don’t have that in common, but I can’t fault you.

Then there are the Pre-parents. These are people, usually married, who want kids but don’t have them yet. And they know absolutely everything there is to know about raising kids, because they haven’t done it yet. They’re kind of like teenagers in that respect. Teenagers have no actual, practical experience in life so, of course, they are way smarter and know way more than their stupid parents, duh.

Pre-parents think your children, and mine, are ill-behaved little beasts. And what do you mean they’re not potty-trained at 3! Why, their kids, when they get around to having them, are going to be the very model of well-behaved! Their children will sleep through the night the moment they come home from the hospital. Their children will never misbehave in public. Their children will be potty-trained and reading by the time they are 2. Their perfect darlings will never poop on the floor, never have a melt-down in the grocery store, never cause a scene in a restaurant, never watch T.V.,and never disobey; all because they know absolutely everything there is to know about raising kids.

You can see them when you take your tragically flawed children out in public (because you’re cruel). They are the ones looking all smug and clean in their non-spit-up-on clothes and their perfect hair. They are the ones who look like they get enough sleep, in long, luxurious, unbroken stretches of glorious time. And they are currently sneering down at you from their impossibly high horses; all because they know absolutely everything there is to know about raising kids. And some of these amusing little creatures aren’t shy about enlightening you about everything you should be doing differently. They are so cute at that age!

How do I know all this? I used to be a Pre-parent. And I can remember thinking things like, “Sheesh, can’t those people control their kids!” This was not in response to actual disruptive or destructive behavior, usually, just the normal, annoying behaviors that kids and babies are prone to, like fussing or crying or whining. Boy howdy, did I know absolutely everything there was to know about raising kids! Imagine my surprise when my kids turned out to be real kids, not the perfect little angels I had envisioned!

Some people never get over being Pre-parents even after they have kids. To hear them tell it, their little Johnny is just doing so well in everything! And he never wets the bed, and he’s so advanced for his age, and any day now he’ll start speaking Japanese, and all of those other kids are just jealous! Hey, where are you going? Don’t you want to hear how well little Johnny is doing at potty training?

My mom is still a Pre-parent. She can’t believe I let the children mess up any room in the house, or that I let Pumpkin poop on the floor. Like I’m cheering-on the floor-pooping or something.

You know what? No kid is perfect and no parent does as good a job as they should. But, hey, Pre-parent, you just go ahead and keep gracing us with your wisdom. Because you know absolutely everything there is to know about raising kids. What? No, I wasn’t laughing. I swear.

Today has been a day of anticipation and hope. For the first time ever, I voted for a woman running for president of these United States. But I had to wait all day to do it, until after Hubby got off work. I had a slight butterflies-in-stomach feeling all day, kind of like how you feel during those few minutes between peeing on the stick and finding out if you’re pregnant or not. If you’re a girl, that is. Or maybe it’s the same for guys, I don’t know. But I digress. It was a long day. But half-way through my day I saw something that just thrilled my little heart-a group of Hillary supporters holding placards and cheering at a major intersection in midtown. One of the ladies smiled and waved and pointed at her homemade “Vote for Hillary” sign and I hooped and hollered like a madwoman and gave her “thumbs-up”. Pumpkin didn’t understand why mama was yelling like a fishwife, but she liked the signs. She waved at the people on the corner and they waved back.

Later, we picked up Hubby from work and went voting. We vote as family, not that the kids are really much help, but it’s good for them to see us vote. The poll workers were very nice to the kids and gave them “I voted” stickers that were proudly displayed for the rest of the evening. I cast my vote, Hubby cast his and we all prepared to walk back out in the cold rain.

Then something happened. I’m not entirely sure how it all transpired, but Hubby is convinced there was some kind of supernatural angle to the whole thing. As near as I can recall this is the exact sequence of events: I was  thinking how proud I was of my country for the first time in too long a time and whether I should carry Pumpkin or let her hold my hand and walk to the car. Then a very young adolescent boy walked in the door we were leaving out of. Our polling place is in a church (a liberal one thank goodness) and  he was probably a member, there for some activity. It was cold and rainy outside and the boy was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. So on top of everything else, I was also thinking about how cold he looked and how very polite he was for holding the door. As I always do whenever someone holds the door, I said “Thank you”. Or I tried to anyway. Apparently I had reached some kind of theoretical synaptic limit in my brain and something had to give. Pumpkin took that very moment to stumble, and my brain, having used up the last synapse, couldn’t make my feet work. I went down like a sack of wet cement.

I landed somewhat on the Pumpkin, but as I am an old pro at falling I was able to keep my weight off of her by taking the fall on my butt and my right hand. She was understandably scared and began to cry. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t even look back at the kid who held the door, but he was probably appalled, just like everyone else.  I got up, picked up Pumpkin and checked her for visible injuries, there were none. She was fine, just a little shaken up. Me? I’m a little sore, thanks for asking.

Hubby had quite a bit of fun at my expense once he knew that I wasn’t really injured. He said that one moment he looked back and we were upright, but then he heard a commotion and turned back to see us on the ground. And he jokes that he saw a puff of smoke. He also says that my falling has taken on a supernatural tone, that there must be ghosts involved. Not that he believes in ghosts, mind you. No ghosts, just me and my debilitating lack of grace. But I did have to agree when he said, “You have done this our entire marriage! We’ll be walkin’ along one minute, there will be a commotion, I’ll look down and you’ll be on the ground.”

We laughed all the way to the grocery store and back to the House. Hubby said, “There’s a blog post in there somewhere.” And here it is, my story about how I fell for Hillary Clinton. I swear this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

With two absolutely fine choices open to me on the primary ticket-Obama and Clinton-the House was having no small amount of difficulty choosing between them. It’s like being asked to choose between cupcakes and cookies. Or Star Wars and Star Trek. Or Hostess and Little Debbie. Somehow it always gets back to dessert. But voting for either one of those fine individuals is like finally having dessert after a meal of endless tripe. There are so many analogies I could use: oasis in the desert, port in the storm, the whole raining-soup-bucket thing. We’re back to food, I must be hungry or something. Seriously, the political field like the proverbial raining of soup and I’m bringing my bucket.

But, I have to choose one. And that is no small task; both have so much more to offer than anybody over on the other side. I wouldn’t have to hold my nose to vote for either Obama or Clinton, I would mark my ballot gladly for either. But I have to choose one, just one. Prominent people that I respect have endorsed both candidates and until today none of those endorsements pushed me over either edge. Today I learned that Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (of which I am a registered member), endorsed Hillary Clinton for President and I will follow her fine example. The House of the Burning Prairie officially endorses Hillary Clinton for President of the United States. For what it’s worth.

With this caveat-should she not garner enough votes to win my party’s candidacy, I will proudly support whoever does. After years of embarrassment, I’m ready to proud of my country again. Oh, and girls rule!!!!!

Addendum: I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I base my voting choices on endorsements or pet projects or voting record nitpicking or any other one thing. Except for being a staunch Democrat like my maternal grandmother, I approach voting as a gestalt. But sometimes, when all else is equal in my mind, a good word from people I respect can help. Not that I am induced to vote in a way that I normally would not, but that realizations floating in my mind, unformed, are crystallized when I hear others put voice to my thoughts.