I’ve been asked a lot lately why I think people read my blog. “Why do strangers care what you had for breakfast?” my friends ask me. The truth is that I have no answer - I have a theory, mind you – just nothing definitive. But here’s why I think an increasing number of people are reading my blog: it’s my overuse of commas. I plop them in wherever I can, despite breaking all the grammar rules. And it isn’t because I’m a rebel – I’m simply considerate. I can go on, and on, and on – too long, at times – and I know my readers need to take a break…a time-out for a breath, at least. Just as they think, Geez, will this girl ever shut up?, I relieve them with an “ahhhh,” that only a comma can give them. Kind of like coffee. We shouldn’t be drinking an abundance of that either. Yet we do.

Every, single, morning.

If I were forced to work in a hospital, I’d choose the geriatric floor as my beat, not the maternity unit. I have nothing against new babies, mind you – nothing’s better than that new baby smell, right? I just happen to like old people. Their layers of sweaters and wads of Kleenex are like magnets to me. And I love how they start every sentence with a chuckle. “Heh, heh…where’s my breakfast?” Or how the grumpy ones begin with a grunt. “Harumph…this breakfast is crap.” But at least you know how they’re feeling. And they’re big hand-holders - human touch is so important, I think. In fact, I chose a church for my kids simply because 80% of its churchgoers were over 90. There are sooo many hugs those Sunday mornings, (well, we’ve only been once) I feel like we’re celebrities.

Anyway, I just thought that I’d share that little tidbit with you: That I like old people. Oh, and I also crave hot tamales in the morning. 

I should mention that I drove up to “Frisco” with my kids by myself – a nine-hour drive from Laguna Beach, if you include the forty-seven-thousand stops. I mention this because whenever I do, people are impressed. (And if it’s one thing I like, it’s to impress people!) It was relatively easy until my DVD player conked out - then I had to make kid-friendly conversation to keep them from killing each other and me from them killing them.

“Hey, did you see that spaceship/dinosaur/Big Foot over there?” I’d ask.

“Where? Where?” They’d scream, united in their new spy mission.

Naturally, this didn’t last. And it wasn’t because they don’t believe in spaceships/dinosaurs/Big Foot, they just don’t care about them – not when they can spend their time torturing each other, and in turn, torturing me. But I lucked out when Benji fell asleep and I was left with an audience of one.

“If you could ask me one question, what would it be?” I asked Jackson, hoping to eat up a few miles.

“Hmmmm…” he started. “Where do we get our belly buttons?”

So I told him about the umbilical chord and how we were once connected, passing along food, love and life with one another. And once he was born, it was cut to make a button, symbolizing his independence from me.

“So it’s like a heart, where we could feel each other?” he asked.

“Sort of, but that’s not where you laugh or cry. It’s more like holding hands forever.”

From my rear view mirror it was tough to discern whether his furrowed brow was out of disgust or bewilderment – there are days he can barely stand the sight of me, let alone connect with me.

But he surprised me with a, “Huh, well I’ll make sure Benji and I don’t punch each other in the stomach then because that would be like hurting you.”

I swear, I felt tears well from the bowels of my own belly almost instantly. Maybe he was right - our belly buttons are like our hearts. But then he added, “I’ll just kick him in the head instead.”

Um, next time we’re flying.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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?

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.