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Because we’re friends, I’ll share this precious nugget with you.

Because we’re friends.

Calling San Francisco “Frisco” is worse than calling a croissant a “crescent,” or Paris “Par-ee.” And “San Fran,” though passable by other native San Franciscans, is just as offensive to me. But I understand our innate need to abbreviate things. As a Cynthia, I have been touched first hand by the world’s inexplicable “Cindy” reflex - regardless of the fact that I’ve never gone by that name, never have and never will. (Hey, I know a lot of great Cindy’s – I’m just not one of them.) Now “CJ” has sort of happened upon me since my married name change, mostly by males (must be a Baywatch thing?), which I’ll dutifully respond to in surrender of our abbreviation epidemic. “Cynth” or “Cyn” is ok if you know me. “Little C” is a vintage nick I’ve grown a soft spot for, even though no syllables are saved. And that I’m not that little.

But with my hometown, I’m not as flexible. I’ll give you “SF” only if you’re on some monk-ish syllable conservation mission. But other than that, San Francisco has earned its letters. All of them.

And I have earned a vacation home. So I’m off for a week…I’ll miss you.

Not ‘ya,’ mind you…but YOU, my friends. YOU.

Kiss, kiss.

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My favorite reader comment so far - just read over this morning’s coffee.

Hello, i’m an avid reader of your blog, and i have a confession to make. i have been reading your posts religiously but never leaving comments. i know im the worst, the cyber voyeur. this evening i was thinking that the least i could do was thank all the bloggers that make my day (with their humor and infinite wisdom).

so here goes.

thank you for all the funnies, the trues, the oohs and the awwwwss. i love your blog and will be back for my sugar fix often.

and by the way, if you are wondering for statistical reasons about your reader base, you are the proud owner of a reader (me), born in england from moroccan parents residing in montreal for the moment. hey, you covered three continents!

Thanks, sister. you made my continent.

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I’ll admit it – I have nice feet. I’m no model, mind you, but I can flip-flop my way through life worry-free. I never realized how much I took this for granted until a few friends confessed that they hate their feet. “You’re all dainty, Cynthia,” they tell me. “while my feet look like and elephant’s/rhino’s/hamburger meat.” I used to laugh it off, like who cares? Who even looks at people’s feet? But now as the rest of my looks wane, I’m suddenly claiming my allure de pied. I paint my toenails, wear sandals even when it’s raining…sort of pathetic sounding, as I read this. Especially when I am married to a man who’s got some serious foot issues. He wouldn’t even show me his feet until after we had…gotten close. I actually never noticed that he hid them - and I should have - because we waited…to get close…for a long time.

Anyway, one day at the beach he said he had a confession to make. “Great,” I thought to myself. “Here comes the ‘you’re really a sweet girl and all, but…’ speech.” Instead he whipped out his right foot from under the sand and showed me his conjoined toe. The pinky toe and the one next to it share a bone. They look kind of like Siamese twins. I was sort of shocked at the sight of them, but my silence was more due to my calculating how he could have hid it/them (?) for so long. (Again, I don’t think about feet like those who hate their feet.) Anyway, he got up to go into the water after I failed to say anything, but as he did so, the twins left an imprint in the sand.

They (it?) made a heart.

“Look, Joe.” I said. “It’s a love toe.” Naturally, we got married and lived happily ever after. But you know, that toe serves as a reminder for me that things like elephant feet, double chins, moles in unsightly places…

It’s really all about perspective.

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Phoebe and La La were the names of my sons, Jackson and Benji – respectively - had they been girls.

Had they been girls.

I emphasize this because they were supposed to be girls. Growing up with two older brothers and two dads (one is my stepdad), I was boyed out by high school. Plus, I’m a girls’ girl – the kind who paints her toenails by the pool with a magazine. The kind who does drive-by’s of her friends’ exes while they hide in the front seat.

The kind who takes secrets to her grave.

It was the second ultrasound, I think, when I found out Phoebe was really Jackson. (La La, sadly, never made it past Benji’s first ultrasound.)

Ironically, they are very much their girl counterparts. Jackson is intense, freckly and a wicked door slammer just as I’d imagine Phoebe to be. Benji has crazy hair, is impossible to catch, and has a laugh that heals wounds – a total La La, in my opinion.

But alas - stitches, gym socks and penis jokes are clearly my destiny no matter how girly I am. Or how much girl I had hoped to infiltrate into a home of my own.

My sons know their girl names – they bring them up a lot, actually. Just last night, after I broke up a german shepherd-on-pug-like fight between the two of them and relegated them into their beds without a story or a kiss, Jackson asked me as I stormed out of the room, exasperated, “Mom, do you wish we were Phoebe and La La instead of boys?”

I didn’t answer. I know I should have said no - that I love them just as they are. But I ignored him and kept walking down the hall, to the kitchen, to the mess they had left after a couscous food fight…to my life as a mother of two wild boys I hadn’t asked for.

After I was done cleaning up, I went back into their room and stared at their flushed cheeks and listened to their heavy, sleepy breathing. I must have sat there for thirty minutes, exhausted, soaking their boyness in. “You may not be my Phoebe, Jackson.” I finally whispered. “And you are definitely not my La La, Boo. But you are my everything else.” And then I fell asleep – sound asleep – in their pile of (clean) gym socks they had thrown during their fight.

You can’t always get what you want, I reminded myself. But you get what you need.

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I’ve received countless emails and phone calls over the last two weeks from friends and colleagues wondering if I’m ok. “Where you been, sister?” is what I frequently hear after the beeps. The truth is, I’ve been right here, just a bit under the radar, run down…I don’t know really what to call it. But I’ve opted for folding laundry on the couch over several to-do’s this month - taking a break from being funny and wise. Because the truth is, I – like you – just want to talk about whether or not Lindsey and Samantha are really together. And what an opportunistic jerk Madonna’s brother is. Or how my kids are driving me to …well, fold laundry on the couch this summer, alone.

But I hit record viewership this month (!) and as I see people click on my site only to leave moments later, I know I’m disappointing more each day. So I’m on the search for my funny bone this week, which I’ll probably find right next to my ever growing wise-a- -.

Precisely where it’s always been. 

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The photo of Princess Diana embracing her two sons at boarding school will forever be imprinted in my mind - the one where she was reprimanded for showing too much affection. Anyway, I don’t care if it’s only been an hour of separation from my sons, I always greet them with a big smackeroo just as Diana did. But this afternoon when I picked my five-year-old up from tennis camp and leaned in for my sugar, he stopped me.

“No kisses,” he said.

Hey, I understood – he had a bunch of buddies around. But when we got to the car alone and I tried to give him another big squeeze - the kind where you nuzzle their necks and can smell what they had for lunch - he wriggled out of my grasp.

“No more of that,” he said and he climbed in the car.

I’d by lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit slighted. He’s only five for Chrissakes! Am I already that un-cool?

“Yes,” he informed me. “None of the other mothers attack their kids every day like you do.”

Well, Princess Diana did I wanted to say. But if its one thing I learned from her, it was grace. So if it’s space my little prince wants, space he shall get.  

Oh…but he’ll be back, though, right? I mean, who’s going to make sure he ate his lunch?

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I remember my first piece of hate mail. It was in regards to a column I wrote for Parenting OC entitled “His Two Dads.” The gist of the letter was that because I supported same sex parenting I was, in part, responsible for the AIDS epidemic. And I was responsible for the exorbitant expense of AIDS research and AIDS-related medical resources – resources, this guy intimated – that should be reserved for more ”just” causes. It was well written and filled with facts and figures, in an effort to legitimize his anti-gay point. (As well as the point that I am a terrible parent.) Anyway, I read it for the first time at the grocery store.

I had picked up a subsequent issue of Parenting OC at the aisle, flipped to my bio photo (I do that a lot), which was right next to the Letters to the Editor section…and there it was staring at me, published for the world to see.

I poured over every word, with my heart beating and palms sweating. I was so absorbed, in fact, that I lost track of my kids. But only until one of them pelted me in the head with an avocado, which ended up hurting a lot worse than the letter. But my point is that I do read them, and while I much prefer fan mail, you have the right to disagree with me.

And my kids reserve the right to throw avocadoes at your head.

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Finally, I actually get PAID to talk about how pathetic I am instead of the other way around…

http://www.parentingoc.com/sugarmama_0807.html

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I was at dinner with a girlfriend and all of our kids on Friday night when she asked me why I never write about her. I told her that I never write about my friends unless it’s a unique parenting situation.

“What, I’m not unique?” she challenged.

“Actually, you’re very unique,” I answered. “I just wouldn’t want to say anything that could come between us.”

“Like what? Come on, I’m an open book.”

“Well…” I ventured, “like whenever you call and leave me a message you say, Hey, CJ - call me back ASAP! I have a quick question! And you never have a question.”

“You can write about that,” she said. “I probably just forget my questions by the time you call me back NINE DAYS LATER.”

“Or how about the fact that you have more nannies than I have underwear, each of whom drive nicer cars than I do.”

“So buy more underwear,” she shrugged, “and get a new car, while you’re at it. I’m sick of looking at it.”

“Well, what about the fact that your kids know the difference between McDonald’s fries and fries from Jack in the Box? Wouldn’t that hurt your feelings if I wrote about your fast food tendencies?”

“Look at our kids right now,” she pointed “and tell me who’s eating their veggies. Mine. So go ahead and spew – I love it. Hey, if you didn’t have me in your life, who would you use to make you look so darned high and mighty?”

And then I finished my meal of eating crow. (Which she bought, by the way.)

But she’s right, I do need a friend like her.

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Joe and I made a pact when our kids were born: “Our house, our rules; Your house, your rules.” So if you allow your kids to stay up all night and play Wii and have my kids over, so be it. When your kids are at my house, however, they’re beholden to our “no-Wii” rules. Anyway, I just had my girfriend’s fourteen-year-old daughter visit from Texas for a week, and realized that Joe’s and my credo needed amending. If your friend says “No MySpace,” you should respect that. Regardless of whether or not her daughter has perfect grades, manners and hygiene.

By day three my friend’s MySpace rule had been broken – all her daughter’s recent MySpace history stared me in the face one morning, as I searched for my sons’ swim teacher’s contact info. I was so crushed when I saw the updated profile (to say she was in Laguna Beach - true, and 17 - not true) , personalizing her actions as if they were an offense to me. What, did she think I was a pushover? But I didn’t want her to hate me, either – like if I busted her, she wouldn’t think I was her “coolest aunt” anymore.

We haven’t reached the MySpace-or-not-to-MySpace phase of parenting yet, as our oldest is only five. But as I read the news that same morning of yet another young girl who had gone missing after a MySpace date gone wrong, I knew that my house needed to uphold my friend’s rules, too.

She lost computer privileges for the remainder of her stay and was forced to sweat out the details of her pending punishment upon her return home. (The worst kind of punishment, in my opinion.)

But I hope that if my sons are ever allowed in your houses (but totally understand if not, especially of you possess anything valuable) you’ll do the same.

Your house, our (collective) rules, OK? And the same now goes at my house.

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