TOO HOT to write.

This writing consistently thing is challenging for me.  Especially now in summer, with both adorable wonderful time-consuming children expecting food and general care-taking 24/7. Summer in Texas. It's hot, friends.  Those of you who know me from high school know this all too well.  I often thank God Houston was the first place I lived, instead of say, the third, because had it been a domicile later in life, I would have understood the ARMPIT I was in.  Instead, it was a blissfully innocent if moist first eighteen years.  Houston: where every day is a bad hair day.  Were they being honest, this slogan would appear on brochures boasting city information.

Not to knock Houston generally--it has some fantastic culture, theater, restaurants, that Fast Times teenage club teeming underage squalor where I watched (sweaty, of course, and envious) all the girls with boyfriends dance to "Sister Christian"--but all I'm saying is, be prepared to sweat. Be prepared to shower and blow dry and get ready and put on makeup and to have it literally drip from your face like some colorful experiment.  Some Mary Kay nightmare. To have your hair suck up the steamy air and quietly devastatingly EXPAND (please refer to my high school graduation picture below for vivid proof, where my hair literally sticks out past the frame of the camera).

And while Dallas isn't Houston, and as an adult, I live in Dallas, where it isn't quite so humid, it is it's own brand of boiling.  It makes me believe in global warming.  It's not science, I don't get the science, it's just common sense.  It's hot as hell.  Is it startlingly more balmy or am I just getting older?  Is it really helping at this point to wear sunscreen?  I drench my tender-skinned children in Banana Boat.  I try in vain to protect them.  Still Jack returned from the pool the other day pink as fresh meat.  He already has freckles sprinkling across the bridge of his nose.  He's only seven.

And two Saturdays ago, while Isabel was no more than two feet away from me, she fell and bumped her lily-white face against a drawer, and we spent the next several hours in the emergency room getting stitches.  It did not help that the plastics doctor we requested, while clearly skilled at his job, showed an hour and a half late and had the bedside manner of Nurse Ratched (whom I played in high school, and can say with authority this guy resembled).  I tearfully asked, "Will it leave a scar?"  And he didn't bother to hide a snort.  "It's a cut.  All cuts leave scars.  I don't have a magic wand."  Patronizing doesn't really begin to cover it.  

My husband, normally the grounded reasonable one (like who is not that compared to me?) looked like he might vault the bed and throttle him.  Sorry we ruined your dinner plans, doc, I was too stunned to say, but this is my tiny beautiful girl; what if it is my fault that she has a scar on her face forever?  Later I would think ad naseum about this reaction, knowing in my gut, I would have felt less devastated if she had been a boy.  The insidious nature of the need for a female to be attractive in this world has such a hold on me, it caught me naked, before I could put on my stylish yet natural battle gear.  I like to think I'm not part of this inane Juicy Couture culture, that I am somehow beyond the airbrushed madness.  And then I see myself sometimes, frightening close to a version of womanhood I am disgusted by.  And I realize all over again why I was apprehensive to have a girl, that being mother to a her is inherently different, in too many ways to imagine.

But it wasn't just that she's a girl.  When our children get hurt, we feel responsible.  She was physically so close, yet I still couldn't do anything to stop it. Accidents happen and it doesn't have to be anyone's fault.  This past week a family was riding in their car to Beaver Creek and got in an accident; a 5-year-old son was the only survivor.  Is five, I keep wondering, old enough to remember?  Yet we just troll the streets and go to Central Market and watch Mad Men and brush our teeth and act like the possibilities aren't possibilities.  Because what else can we do?  We live in a world where planes run into buildings.  But we still have to get to work.  Being constantly aware of the fragility doesn't do much but cause mental paralysis.  

So we adapt to the heat.  Sweat it off.  Take a shower.  Remember.  Laugh at The Bachelor.  Feel sorry for Lindsay Lohan.  Live, us all, in our existential Texas.  Instead of trying in vain to hide them, maybe we embrace them sometimes, our scars.  Maybe that's what makes us beautiful.

 HOT OR WHAT? 

(certainly liberating)

Look at the halo surrounding.  So large was my hair, it had its very own aura.