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Two Moms, One Minivan 
The first year and a half: May 1996 through December 1997.
(I left the page looking the way it did back then. I didn't know how to do anything but type.)
Newest entries | Next: 1998 >>
Last day of the year. Kathy is asleep on the couch with a glass of sparkling cider going flat on the coffee table, Nicolas is asleep in his big-boy bed (he climbed out of the crib in November like a little escape artist, so that was that), and I'm up with the computer and the cat.
The tamalada at Mamá's on Christmas Eve went better than last year. For those who don't know, a tamalada is a tamale-making party: all the women in the family around the kitchen table from noon until dark, spreading masa on corn husks and gossiping. Kathy spread masa again. Mamá watched her hands for a long time and then said, "Thinner," which is the same thing she said last year. But this year, when Nicolas wandered in with masa on his face, she picked him up and sat him on her lap and let him put the olives in. My mother has not held my son on her lap since he was born. Kathy and I didn't look at each other. We didn't want to scare it off, like a bird.
We saw Titanic last week at the big theater in Mission Valley while my sister watched Nicolas. Three hours and fourteen minutes. Kathy cried at the old couple in the bed. I cried at the mother telling her children the story in steerage. We came out and it was dark and I called Yolanda from the pay phone just to hear that Nicolas was asleep.
Happy New Year. I have been writing here for a year and a half now. Thank you to everybody who writes back.
Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris. It was on the TV late last night and Kathy woke me up to tell me. We sat on the edge of the bed and watched the coverage with the sound low. I was never a royal watcher. But she had two boys, and I kept thinking about those two boys.
Nicolas turned two on the 3rd. His party theme was trucks, because everything is trucks. He calls the minivan "the big grape truck." Mamá came to the party this time, and stayed for cake, and left before presents. Progress is progress.
Last night Ellen came out. On television. On a sitcom, in prime time, on a major network.
We had nine people in our living room for it, which is about six more people than our living room holds. Somebody brought a cake decorated like a TV set. Our friend Rosa brought her mother, who is seventy-two and doesn't speak much English, and who laughed at every single joke anyway. When the moment came, the whole room went quiet, and then everybody screamed, and Nicolas woke up and screamed too, and we all laughed and passed him around.
I know it's a TV show. I know some people are furious. But I kept thinking about a girl somewhere, sixteen, maybe in a town where she's the only one, maybe watching it alone with the sound turned down. I was that girl in 1973, and there was nothing on television for me except Maude.
We took Nicolas out in his pajamas at nine o'clock tonight to see the comet. We drove up to Mount Soledad where it's darker, and there it was over the ocean, fuzzy and bright with its tail streaming back. Kathy held him up and said, "Look, baby, a comet," and he looked right at it and said, "Moon!" Close enough. He fell asleep in the car seat before we were down the hill.
I want him to remember it. He won't. We will. That's how it goes.
We have names! Nicolas has sorted us out on his own. I am "Mama." Kathy is "Mommy." We never decided that. He just started doing it around Christmas, like he'd been filing us away all along. When he wants something to eat he says Mommy. When he falls down he says Mama. I've decided not to read anything into that. (I read everything into that.)
Kathy wanted me to write down that the cat is "Chewy." The cat's name is Chuy. Close enough, again.
Nicolas's first real Christmas, the first one where he understood that paper is for ripping. He ripped everything. He ripped paper off presents that weren't his.
Kathy went to three toy stores the week before trying to find a Tickle Me Elmo. She stood in line at one at six in the morning with forty other parents, and they sold out before she got through the door. She came home with a regular Elmo that doesn't laugh. Nicolas loves it. He does the laughing for it.
Christmas Eve was the tamalada at my mother's house. My whole family: Mamá, my sister Yolanda and her husband and their two girls, my tías, cousins, everybody. First year Kathy has come. She's from Minnesota and has never spread masa in her life. My mother watched her hands and said, "Too thick," and that was all Mamá said to her all afternoon.
Mamá's gift for Nicolas was a nice sweater with a tag that said "For the baby." Yolanda's girls' tags said their names.
I'm not going to make that into more than it is. I'm also not going to pretend I didn't see it.
Thanksgiving at Yolanda's in Chula Vista. Nicolas ate mashed potatoes with both fists and the turkey was dry and nobody cared. My brother-in-law carved. Mamá said grace in Spanish and thanked God for "all my grandchildren," and then she looked at Yolanda's girls. Maybe I'm too sensitive. Kathy says I'm not.
Clinton won again, by the way, which I suppose we all expected. I voted for him. I held my nose on account of September. But I voted for him.
The President signed the Defense of Marriage Act this weekend. No ceremony, no cameras. Just signed it.
It says the federal government won't recognize a marriage between two women or two men, even if some state someday allows one, and that other states don't have to either. Kathy and I have been together nine years. We have a mortgage and a son and a maroon minivan. Nobody has offered to marry us anyway, so in one sense nothing has changed. In another sense it feels like somebody went out of their way to shut a door we weren't even standing at yet.
School started two weeks ago. I have thirty-four seventh graders in my third period and they cannot divide fractions and I love them. I came home tonight and Nicolas was in the bath and said "Mama!" and splashed me, and that took care of the President for a few hours.
Nicolas turned one yesterday. Kathy made a cake shaped like a duck, which turned out shaped more like a boot, and he put his whole face in it.
My mother came. She brought a gift and she held him when I handed him to her, politely, the way you'd hold somebody else's baby at church. She calls him "the baby." She calls Yolanda's girls by their names. She stayed forty-five minutes and left before the cake.
Here is something I've never told anybody. My mother keeps a big white family Bible in the front room, and in the front of it, in her own handwriting, she has written the name and birth date of every grandchild. Yolanda's two are in there. Nicolas is not. I checked at Easter. I haven't asked. I don't know how to ask.
The Olympics opened Friday night in Atlanta. We watched the whole opening ceremony, and at the very end, when Muhammad Ali came out with the torch, his hand shaking, and lit the cauldron, I cried like a fool. My father loved Ali. He'd have been on his feet.
And in the middle of all that, Nicolas let go of the coffee table and took three steps to Kathy. Three! During the parade of nations! Somewhere around the letter G. Kathy grabbed me so hard she left marks. So now we have to watch him every second. The cat is very worried.
Ear infection number three. The pediatrician says some babies just get them. Some babies apparently get them at 2 a.m. on a school night.
We have a system. Kathy takes midnight to three and I take three to six, and whoever has the next day off gets to sleep through the other one's shift. This works beautifully on paper. In real life we are both awake from midnight to six, and one of us is pretending not to be. He is on the pink medicine again. The whole house smells like bubble gum.
Last night around four I was walking him up and down the hall and he finally went quiet on my shoulder, breathing that little whistle through his stuffy nose, and I stood in the dark kitchen and thought: I would do this every night for the rest of my life. And then I thought: please don't make me.
Three more days of school until summer. My seventh graders can smell it.
We bought a minivan. We are officially those people.
It's a 1993 Plymouth Voyager, used, with sixty thousand miles and a color the salesman called "dark cherry" and Kathy calls "the Grape." It has a sliding door and eleven cup holders and room in the back for a stroller, a diaper bag, a Pack 'n Play and, as of this afternoon, a cooler of Popsicles. I told Kathy that nine years ago, when I first saw her across the room at a friend's party in Hillcrest, I never pictured the two of us arguing about cup holders. She said she did.
Hello. I'm Janet. I'm thirty-eight, I teach seventh grade math in San Diego, and I live with my partner Kathy, who is a physical therapist and forty-one and from Minnesota, and our son Nicolas, who is nine months old and has two teeth and opinions about both of them. Kathy carried him. I was there for every minute of it, from the first doctor's appointment to the delivery room, and I cut the cord. He is ours. He has her last name for now. We'll see.
Today is Mother's Day. In our house that raises a question. Who gets breakfast in bed? We decided we'd both get it, which meant nobody made it, and we ended up at a pancake house with a baby throwing Cheerios. It was perfect.
I'm writing this because a friend at school showed me these pages, and because I think there should be more pages like ours out there for people to find. I'll try to write once a week. Please be patient. I don't know what I'm doing. The minivan and I have that in common.
Janet
Newest entries | Next: 1998 >>
Write to me: [email protected]
© 1996-1997 Janet Arellano