And I Don't Know What to Do with My Anger

I'm very angry. And by that I mean I've made snarky comments to my husband and he's now sick of them so I'm going to blog about my anger. It takes a lot to get my blood boiling. And it takes a special kind of asshole for me to publicly acknowledge that assholishness. I'll take a lot of shit from someone. But I can't stand a person who lowers my property values.

If you've read any of my blogs, you're familiar with the woman who took up residence in the beautiful, well-maintained home next door. You're also familiar with the 4-6 grandchildren living with her at any given moment, the revolving door of pets, and the daughter(s) in and out of rehab/prison. You know that she converted the two-car garage into bedrooms and allowed the above-ground pool to congeal into a cesspool that eventually broke free of its walls and killed the grass and beautiful ornamental bushes in the backyard. You know there's the constant smell of dog shit wafting from the yard. For reasons unknown, she's never bothered to use the sprinkler system on the grass and has let the crape myrtle trees and hedges grow willy-nilly. The doorbell is missing. Only two wires remain, poking through a dark hole near the front door. The front bedroom window has been boarded up for two years, ever since one of the ragged teens broke the glass with a baseball bat.

Earlier this summer, the teens were all been shipped off to their respective fathers. Then, my neighbor's brother suddenly died, and she has been left to care for her elderly mother. She stays with her mother for days at a time and the house has been empty, quiet.

But last month, she took in a woman with three children. The youngest child, and only girl, is a year ahead of our daughter in school. They have been attached to each other all summer, often playing until it's dark outside. She is a sweet little girl, well mannered. I like her. And that's saying something. Because I hate kids.

So I allowed myself to think that perhaps I was being too hard on my neighbor. If my daughter enjoyed playing at the house, and I enjoyed having one of its residents as a guest, I really shouldn't get upset when the sturdy wooden mailbox post suddenly disappeared and was replaced by a rickety bent pole held up by three landscape pavers. It was a price I was willing to pay for my daughter's happiness.

I was even a bit awed--and jealous--this weekend when a whirlwind of activity began outside of the house. A parade of lawn care dudes and pressure washing dudes and shirtless dudes, marched around repairing, cleaning, pruning, and sprucing. I thought perhaps the young woman and her three children were making some sort of positive influence on my neighbor. Perhaps with the other teens gone to their daddies, my neighbor could finally make the house a home. She was even out in the yard cutting away dead limbs on the once-lush knockout roses.

Then, the unthinkable happened. They put down pine straw.

Mulching is a commitment. It says, "See, I care if my trees and shrubs and flowers live through the harsh weather."

I thought, Holy shit, they've actually started to take pride in the place now that they've completely fucked it up. Even with the enclosed garage and still-boarded window, the yard maintenance was enough to make me think that the property value had risen a bit.

I bragged to my neighbor on the fantastic job.

I should have known.

I came home from work today and a "For Sale" sign was in the yard. And not the half-assed yeah-we-may-sell sort of "By Owner" shit. This is the real deal. A Coldwell Banker sign.

Great. I think we all know the kind of people who buy homes with converted garages. I hate those people. They have a slew of lonely pets. Their garbage cans are constantly over-filled. There are strange smells seeping through the cracked windows. That's right. I'm talking about large families. Families with hoards of kids. Knock-on-your-door-all-the-time kids. Kids with snotty noses and scraped knees and sticky hands. Kids like mine.

Now that my neighbor has done so much ugly damage that a pressure wash and a layer of pine straw won't cover it, she's abandoning ship. She's going to allow a huge family to move in and terrorize me. I can see it now: the mother who will home-school the entire brood. And the husband who will shake his head because I work. They'll take "stay-cations."

And they'll lower my property value with the 10,000 plastic sand buckets and ride-on toys strewn about the front lawn.

I just can't wait. Can't. Wait.

Go Ahead, Take the Hormones. But, Please, Not "Caitlyn"

So here's the post you've all been waiting for. And when I say "all" I mean about half of you. Or, realistically, about five of you.

Okay, really this is just for my one friend with whom I had the following text war:

She wrote: "Have you seen Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Cosmo?"

"No," I wrote. "Do people actually read magazines anymore? Is Cosmo still around? Do they still publish those quizzes about what type of sex you'd be best at doing? I think I need to take that quiz again now that I'm older and fatter."

Her: "You're missing the point."

Me: "Which was?"

Her: "Caitlyn Jenner."

Me: "Is that one of those reality TV people? You know I don't have cable."

Her: "You're hopeless. Caitlyn Jenner is Bruce Jenner."

Me: "Bruce Jenner's what?"

Her: "Huh?"

Me: "His daughter? Wife? Sister? Mother? Aunt?"

Her: "No, you idiot. Caitlyn Jenner IS Bruce Jenner."

Me: "I'm confused."

Her: "No, you're an idiot. Don't you even watch the news? Bruce Jenner is a guy who ran in the Olympics and now he's a woman."

Me: "Running in the Olympics made him a woman?"

Her: "I hate you sometimes. He was an Olympic athlete. He has lived as a man and has secretly been changing himself into a woman with hormones. He's on the cover of Cosmo and it says Call Me Caitlyn because he wants to be Caitlyn not Bruce."

Me: "He wants to be called Caitlyn? Why? Can't he think of a better name? That name is so trite."

Her: "I don't know what that means."

Me: "It means it's stupid. And common." (I know the real definition.)

Her: "Oh."

Me: "Couldn't he have chosen something better? Less popular? Like Claire or Catherine or Cher? Or just move away from the C names altogether and choose something even more fabulous like Miranda or Penelope? Caitlyn is stupid. Every ten-year-old I know is named Caitlyn."

Her: "Know a lot of ten-year-olds?"

Me: "Shut up. It's a dumb name and you know it."

Her: "You're missing the point."

Me: "I don't think I am."

Don't Mind Me, I've Just Been DNA Testing

That moment when--after thinking for all 37 years of your life that you'll never know who your biological grandfathers were--you realize: "Holy fuck, I just did a DNA test and found out the identities of both of my biological grandfathers."

Yep. That's me this week.

Let me back up a little and explain how both of my grandmothers were promiscuous young women. Or at least one of them wanted us to think she was and the other one was but didn't want us to know.

It's difficult, I know, to think of a grandmother as a sexual person, with desires and needs. And a vagina.

For many years I've trained myself to divorce the chain-smoking, man-hating woman who was my maternal grandmother, from the young woman in high-heeled Mary Janes and a red feather in her hair who worked on a Louisiana riverboat casino and played blackjack until the wee hours of the morning. I've trained myself to separate the white-haired, plump woman who fried bacon every morning for my father, from the laughing-too-loud, flirty twenty-something that Granny had been when she was a waitress in Kansas City, Missouri.

First, the liar. Yep, my maternal grandma wanted us all thinking she was a big-time hoe-bag. So much so that when both of my sisters got pregnant out of wedlock, and in their teens, she lit up a Pall Mall and was like, "Oh that happens all the time."

When my youngest sister got divorced last year, after thirteen years of marriage, I told her, "Dude, go sleep around. Just blame it on our whore gene." There's a mixed bag of theories in genetic research whether or not it's in an individual's DNA to be promiscuous. Still, in a March article of Daily Mail, it was reported that 8% of woman aged 65-74 have had ten or more sexual partners. My grandmothers fit into that category, or were slightly ahead of the curve, so that gives my sister a free pass. Just catch up with Grandma.

This week I confirmed with a DNA analysis of my spit that I hail from a group of people with the surname Tippen. My fourth great-grandparents were named John Wesley Tippen and Elizabeth Castleberry Tippen. I share genes with another living person who also had their DNA tested. This person is the third great-grandchild of the Tippens. The Tippen line carried down to me through my mother, and to her from a man Grandma married because, as she told my mother years later, she was preggo and needed a hubby, STAT. My mother's real father, Grandma said, was already married, was a traveling salesman from Michigan or Minnesota, or one of those "M" states no one ever admits to being from. She never told my mother a name or anything about this guy. Just that the Tippens were not blood relatives.

Grandma was lying. But why the hell would you make up some shit about another man when there was no other man? The only thing I can think of--and this totally fits Grandma's possessive compulsions--is that at some point after Grandma had moved to California and remarried, my mother asked her about her biological father's identity. And Grandma, who couldn't handle any sort of rejection, told my mother a lie so she'd never want to go back to Texas and live with her father. So my mother has lived most of her life thinking there's a mythical father somewhere who may or may not know anything about her. When, really, her biological father died in 1971 and she never got to mourn him properly because she didn't think he was really her dad.

Yep. I know. That is fucked up.

It's the total opposite of what I'd do. If I got divorced and my kids wanted to live with their dad, I'd be all, "Sure. Here's a suitcase. Don't let the door hit you on your way out."

Then I'd bust out my slut gene.

Now let's address Granny. A born-again Christian, she's has never been forthcoming about the details of her sordid past. Instead, she's stuck a short story titled "I-Don't-Remember-Who-Your-Grandfather-Was," which reads, "Your father was adopted by Don when he was seven, so Don's his father." And that's it.

But she can't deny the DNA that has linked me with a living second cousin, a huge branch of people still living in Missouri that have pictures of my father's biological father, who died in 1961, and lament that they never knew my father ever existed. They seem like a happy enough bunch and are curious about me and my sisters and our father. So I didn't really know what tone to take when I called Granny to give her the news. I finally decided on the casual route, saying, "Hey, I think I found a link to my biological grandfather," and gave her the name of the dude.

And without missing a beat she said, "Yeah, that's him. He had red hair so I just called him 'Red.'"

What the fuck?

She's not senile. She hasn't been hit over the head with a blunt object. How the hell do you forget the name of the man who got you preggo and then, poof, remember?

Though, I could completely understand a drunken one-night-stand, which is what I was thinking when Granny suddenly got even more of her memory back and elaborated: "He was an iron worker, much older than me. He worked on a crew building bridges. I didn't know he was married until one of the guys on his crew told his wife we were running around. By then I was pregnant with your father."

Okay then.

This is the big family mystery she's kept for over sixty years? She's never told my father the identity of his father because she fell for a married man? Sure it was 1953. Sure she was young and looking for a good time. But really? Never telling anyone? Or at least, never telling anyone who might need to know family medical history information? Apparently, having her son and three granddaughters write "unknown" on doctor's office information forms, then having the doctor say things like, "This cancer could be hereditary, if only we knew..." was a lot less humiliating than telling her son the name of his father.

What is with that generation and lying? Is this what sex-shaming has done? Created an entire female generation, or two, or three, or thousand, who are so completely terrified of living the truth that they deny it even happened? And we wonder why we have a mental health epidemic in this country; we're afraid to live our own truths because of what our neighbors will say about our bedroom behavior. When will we, as a culture, embrace women's sexuality and promiscuity without labeling them "sluts"? Without running them out of town, pushing them to the fringes because they remind us of our own unfulfilled sexual desires? Instead, let's practice birth control--educating young women about how to effectively use condoms and hormonal injections and little pills that can keep away unplanned pregnancy, and allow them the sexual freedom they deserve.

Let's not be afraid to talk about Grandma's vagina.