Election day questions

K had the day off from school on Election Day. I took him out to lunch at the diner, where we told knock knock jokes while we waited for our food. After a string of increasingly silly jokes, K said, "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Why do you always pay more attention to X than you do to me?" Whoa. Shit just got real.

I explained that I had to keep X from destroying everything and/or himself, but I tried my best. And we agreed to have some one-on-one time over the weekend. I felt guilty because he has a point. But I can't feel too guilty with K because even when we're attached at the hip for days, it's never enough togetherness and attention for him.

[I am now going to make a really bad mom confession. In the book "Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai, the mom tells her kids that every time they lie, she loves them a little less. And especially in the first couple of months after X was born, but on occasion still, the treacherous thought crosses my mind: Every time you are excessively clingy, every time you ask me to do something for you that you could easily do by yourself, every time I'm already looking right at you and you say, "MOMMY, MOMMY" I love you a little less.]

K also asked me, sort of out of the blue, "Was Reagan a bad president?" Out of the blue because we had been talking about something completely different, but only sort of because the night before we had been looking at a slideshow of U.S. presidents and I did indicate that a few of them were either good or bad. Don't worry, I didn't try to indoctrinate him and mostly went for uncontroversial ones. Lincoln good, Nixon bad. I think he picked Reagan because there's a kid in his class with that name.

I told him that people have different opinions and different things that they think are important. "Well, what do you think?" I told him I didn't like Reagan's trickle-down economics, and explained that Reagan had the idea that if you give rich people money, they will use it to start businesses and hire people and get money to the poorer people. But it didn't work, it just made the rich people richer while the poor people got poorer, and I didn't think that was right.

He thought for a moment and said, "Why don't the rich people just give the poor people some of their money? That would be more fair." My little socialist. I told JW this story and he said, "Yeah, if either of our kids grows up to be a Republican, it's going to be X."

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The day after

Happy post-Election Day, everybody! Whether you're elated or disappointed with the results, there's one thing we can all be happy about... no more political ads, mailers, and Facebook posts for a while!

Over here, we're in the elated camp. JW is a diehard Democrat and political organizer. I was out there knocking on doors for Elizabeth Warren, my former professor and current Senator-elect.

Also, while I'm sure Mitt Romney is a good person in his personal life, as a governor he spent the entire time campaigning for president. He spent more time outside of Massachusetts than in it, and while he was out stumping for himself, he both disparaged our state and completely changed the positions on which he had run for governor. We saw firsthand how his convictions blow with the wind, and I feel like nobody else in the country cared what we thought because they dismiss people from Massachusetts as crazy liberals.

Election Day is like JW's Christmas. Every year he takes the day off to work for his political campaigns of choice, and for weeks beforehand he disappears, off to meetings and strategy sessions and phone banks. Last night he showed up around 12:30, wearing his Elizabeth Warren for Senate shirt and grinning from ear to ear.

This is how our marriage works. Election time is hard on me, just as my frequent absences for work are hard on him. But when one of us wants or needs to do something, the other is on board. The only question is how we can arrange our schedules to make it work. There's no resentment or weighing of whose activity is more important. We used to do that when we first had kids, but it just made both of us feel miserable and hypocritical. Now, we're 100% a team. (Although it helps that our politics are similar. I don't know how I would feel about him disappearing to work so hard for someone who doesn't support marriage equality or women's health. But meanwhile, go team!)

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Real Simple, November 2012

I usually read Real Simple for fun and recycle it the same day. This was the last issue in my subscription and I didn't renew, since I find it's the same stuff over and over -- inspirational story, stuff to cook that I'll never cook, ways to "simplify" my life by spending tons of money on things I don't need. Still, the pictures are pretty and all the advice and stories provide at least momentary inspiration. For $1-2 a month it's a small indulgence.

This month's actually had a few things I found worthwhile:

1. A lovely article about saying grace by minister Kate Braestrup: "Saying grace invites you to just be present. . . . If you are safe from danger, sheltered from the elements, and not alone, grace gives you a chance, a crucial moment in which to know it."

2. Statistic that the average American home has $7,000 worth of brand new, unused stuff! Now THAT is inspirational. It inspires me to think twice before buying anything. (I had a similar realization a few years ago when we had a yard sale, and the $35 Pottery Barn cheese dome we had received as a wedding gift and never used didn't sell at $2.)

3. Interesting guide to digestive health that focuses on the mind-body connection.

4. URL of FSAstore.com, a website that supposedly has only FSA-eligible items and accepts the FSA debit cards. But I'm a little skeptical of that site because it implies that everything on it is FSA-eligible, yet it lists all sorts of things that I know are only eligible with a prescription. By the way, Walgreens.com also accepts FSA debit cards. We have a ton of FSA money to use up since I accidentally paid all our medical expenses out of the wrong account all year.

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