Fig #4

This week's fig is a big one: Take my kids camping.

This is big for me for several reasons. First, my husband is gone, so taking my kids camping will be a single-mom thing to do, and single-mom stuff has always scared me. I don't know why it is, but the thought of wrangling both my kids in the middle of the wilderness sounds exhausting and wrought with potential pitfalls, such as my child falling in a lake and floating off because I was concentrating on trying to somehow secure shelter.

I have been camping twice in my life. Well, there was Outdoor School in elementary school, but we stayed in cabins and it wasn't by choice, so I'm not going to count it. Incidentally, I only remember being really cold (it was in Oregon) and hating that experience, which may be why I've never had a love-affair with the whole camping idea to begin with.

So, my first real camping experience was in China. I took a horse-trekking excursion through northern Sichuan, from a charming little town up in the mountains called Songpan. When I say it was charming I'm not being facetious. It was one of those cities displayed in glossy photos in travel magazines. It was at one-time a walled-city, and the crumbling remnants of that wall still remain today. When you arrive in Songpan, you invariably arrive in the early evening, after a 10 hour bus ride from Chengdu, when the sky is hovering just between blue and gray and the air is crisp. I was there in October, when I had a break from school to celebrate Chinese National Day (think July 4th for us Americans). The Chinese take an entire week off for this event, and it was sort of the perfect time to travel: not too hot - not too cold.

Songpan is a little bit like stepping back in time. I say a little bit because the Communists have gotten their hands on the place, so there are the ubiquitous white-tiled buildings and other dodgy, gray, Communist structures. Usually, foreigners are forced to stay in hotels pre-approved by the Party itself (I'm sure there are some kick-backs involved in this process), but because my travel buddy and I spoke Chinese and a twinge of local dialect, we were allowed to stay at a cheaper guest house rather than the concrete, white-tiled slab the other tourists were directed toward. We stayed one night in the guest house before departing early the next morning on our trek. I recall only one thing about this guest house, and that was the bathroom. It was a squat toilet, of course, but it was porcelain and was flushable, so it wasn't altogether bad. Well, it wasn't bad until the next morning. Apparently, the water is turned off during the night, so all the offerings build up over night and greet you when you first go in for a morning wash. It was really awful.

The trek lasted a few days and nights, and our group consisted of myself, another PCV (Erin) and a few Japanese tourists. We were a motley crew, to be sure. Erin and I were all geared up in North Face fleeces, zip-off pants and hiking boots. The Japanese were decked out in brightly colored designer jeans, shoes and shirts, and it felt good to finally be an American tourist somewhere and not be the utterly ridiculous ones.

We rode our horses several hours each day. It was a slow pace. The horses were in no hurry, likely because they were old, worn and had little incentive to trudge along carrying loads of gear and a 130 pound foreigner. Still, we rode along, often at the very edge of steep drop-offs, and I feared more than once that my horse would simply dump me off the side of the mountain. He never did. At one point, while I was kneeling on the edge of an incline to take a photo, my horse did nudge me with his nose, and I sort of toppled down the incline and landed a few feet below, having grabbed hold of a small, frail tree trunk. Erin thought that was very funny.

Each afternoon we arrived at a pre-designated camp site and our guides made camp. When I say pre-designated I only mean that they meant to stop there. I don't mean there were any amenities. None, actually. There were no toilets. No running water. No trash cans. There was only a patch of clearing for our tents and supplies. And when I say tents, what I mean to say are long white pieces of cloth held up with sticks. There were no zippers. There was nothing on the ground other than the bare dirt and a few dirty blankets that had spent the day underneath our saddles. Oh, and our saddles? Those were our pillows. Right, so you got inside your tent, and there was a hairy, dirty blanket on the ground, and at the head of that was your horse saddle. Homey.

It was so cold that Erin and I couldn't sleep and huddled together for warmth - and this was with our polar North Face fleece jackets and special Smart Wool socks.

When we had to go potty in the middle of the night, we had to call out to our guide, who would come shuffling over from his neck of the woods. Incidentally, we had a very charming and good looking guide who was Muslim and one of China's many minority. I had a mild crush on him that was based, I'm sure, on some primal part of me that found a man in Communist-Army issued green tennis shoes and high-water pants attractive. He was so sweet about those midnight potty breaks. Well, we'd call him over, and he'd come and take us off into the woods. Erin had one of those REI headlamp things, and he got a big kick out of that. He thought it was the best thing ever..........and when we left Songpan, Erin gave it to him. I mean, he must have been the shit among the trekking guides after that.

So, the trip was a success because I did it and enjoyed it and didn't complain about lack of sanitation. At the end of the trip, our guide took us home with him that last night, and we ate a meal with his family. They lived in a fabulous home made of wood (again, everything in China is white tile, so wood was very bohemian), and they lived off this dirt road just as you made your way into town.

There were clumps of corn hanging to dry upside-down off the rafters of the second story, and the sky was so big behind that house, dark as it was in the night and filled with stars. We rarely saw stars in China, what with the pollution, so it really struck me there, just after nightfall, as our guide led us through the streets to his home. I should also mention that during our camping trip I'd gotten my only pair of pants thoroughly soaked at a hot springs, and though I left them dangling from the side of my horse for the remainder of the trip, they never dried. So, as I made my way to this Muslim family's home, I wore my fleece, my huge hiking boots and a pair of skin-tight silk underwear that I'd unfortunately bought one size too small.

As I said, he was Muslim, and his mother wore the headscarf, and they didn't eat meat. We ate dofu noodles, which were heavily spiced with Sichuan red peppers, and it was wonderful. We sat in their home, on a sofa, a TV blaring in the background, children running in and out, peeking at us from behind their mother's legs. We talked as much as we could, our Chinese being fairly limited at the time. There is a lot that can be said with a few words, a big bowl of steaming noodles and some smiles. I'm not sure how it happened, but I ended up wearing the Muslim hijab, and I have a grainy black-and-white photograph of me with it on, a weary smile on my face. I remember that picture being taken and not wanting to smile too big for fear I'd offend this woman and she'd think I was mocking her religion.

Anyway, that was my first camping experience. I went to Songpan again, with my Chinese boyfriend, and it was much less exciting because the Chinese don't get such a big kick out of nature and camping and trudging around a quaint little city with a crumbling old wall and some charming wooden houses.

I camped once in the States, just after I'd gotten home from China, with my mother's new husband. We went white-water rafting down an Oregon river, with a huge group of other rafters, and the difference between Oregon camping and Songpan camping is like the difference between a backpackers hostel in South East Asia and the Paris Ritz. My mom's husband was all about the fancy camping, with swank tents, a 2 burner stove, plenty of wine and excellent food. In fact, everyone on this trip camped this way, so the evenings were spent drinking wine around a camp fire, eating grilled shrimp and chatting with cute boys whose parents had dragged them along as well. I loved it, but I'm well aware that I loved it because I didn't have to lift a tiny finger other than to hoist myself on and off the raft each day and, of course, my wine glass at night. And yes, we used wine glasses.

So, I've camped. It's just that the thought of doing it with my kids has somehow always overwhelmed me so much that I've talked about it and thought about it and yet never done it. It always just seems like so much work.

This week, however, friends invited us to camp with them near our home. It's only a 45 minute drive for us, so it's not a long haul. When my friend suggested it, my first instinct was an internal groan. I was suddenly very tired. But then I said to myself: hey, this is life. this is having kids. get on with it.

We are meeting them at a campground and they have a pop-up trailer, and they have an 18-month old daughter. So, we'll be all crazy parents and kids together, and I'm thinking it may wear me out but it may well be fabulous and at least my kids will know the joys of dirt and food cooked over a fire instead of gelato at the mall.

Wish us luck...........

MamaP

Quote 4 of 52

I think most of us have heard this week's quote many times over. It's quite famous. But what I love about the quote most is what comes toward the end of the quote - the bit about retreat and advance. It's funny because so often, that part isn't actually quoted. And yet, I feel that it's the meat of what Roosevelt is trying to say - that fear causes retreat when we should advance. Obviously, this can be taken in a military context, but I love to apply it to my own life. I feel, as I stand up and pluck these figs from my imaginary tree, that I'm advancing rather than retreating or, perhaps worse, sitting still.

The quote is from Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address - March 4, 1933:

So let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Thoughts on a Spray Tan

I've had the spray tan now for a few days, and it's much, much better. In fact, it's nice. It is even-colored and not at all blotchy. It gives me a faint glow, nothing particularly noticeable. I'd say that it sort of just takes the edge off the starkness of my white skin. The shower and loofah obviously helped, and by the next morning, the green color was gone and I no longer looked like a part-time, volunteer fire-fighter.

So, I looked at myself and my first thought was this: I don't look better.

Hmmm.

I didn't look any worse. But even with that soft glow, I don't think I looked better. And I'd been waiting basically my whole life to look better.

I think what struck me most is that my skin didn't look like my skin. It looked like a tan person's skin, except that I'm not a tan person so my own personal coloring wasn't such a big hit with the spray tan. I think if my skin naturally tanned, things might be different. But since my skin doesn't naturally tan, it sort of just looked odd to me. Again, not bad but not good either. Just different.

I noticed that my eyes didn't stand out as much against the tanned skin as they do against my white skin, and I realized that I like my blue eyes in part because of how they play off my skin.

My lips also seem pale to me, not quite as pink. My lipstick and make-up look slightly off with this warmer skin. It all just doesn't seem to suit me as much.

I had a friend write me an e-mail after reading my first post on this blog, when I was floating in the pool contemplating my life. She said something that I don't think anyone has ever said to me before: she said that my skin is part of what makes me beautiful.

I have been thinking about that ever since she wrote it. It's the first time someone other than my mother has said I have nice skin - and even then my mother encourages me often to get tanning lotions. Isn't it nice when our parents give us those blessed mixed messages???

Anyway, my friend's comment made me realize that I've always thought of myself in terms of being on the cusp of being beautiful. If I only had tan skin, I'd be pretty. If I only lost 10 lbs, I'd be thin enough. But now that I've actually gone and gotten the spray tan, I realize that it doesn't make me any prettier; in fact, my skin looks best in its natural state, and I guess I have to give mad props to God for creating me right the first time, sans golden skin and all.

I think that if I have a beauty-based goal, it's got to be to love myself as I am, today, right now. I think that if I could teach my daughter one thing about herself it would be that - to love herself as she is, to appreciate what she's been given and to focus less on the outside and more on the inside. Because as I age, I do realize that it's the soul of who we are that gets us through the rough patches and enables us to celebrate the joy - it's never the size of our thighs or the color of our skin.

I know some people don't understand how a woman could be so consumed with a spray tan. But I think we all have our thing, and for whatever reason, it's our thing. It's that proverbial monkey on our back that tags along with us, sometimes in the forefront of our thinking and other times lingering behind but still somehow attached.

I sit here tonight, the remnants of my spray tan starting to fade, and I can't express how happy I am to have had this experience and to put it behind me. I look forward to my skin returning to its glaring white, and I hope that this feeling lingers, that it knocks that monkey officially off my back, allowing me to shift all of that mental energy to the experiences that will enrich my life.

Isn't it funny that in life, so often when we get what we think we wanted, it turns out we were wrong all along?

MamaP

*Photograph/Painting: John Singer Sargent - Madame X

The Spray Tan

As I walked in for my much-anticipated spray tan, I thought about a lunch date I had about 12 years ago, when I was a fresh little thing just out of college. I was meeting a friend, a good friend, a male friend. I'd met this guy in college, when he was my waiter at Chili's. He was adorable. He was very nice, and we became fast friends and I was aware that he had a crush on me. This went on for several years; though he never came right out and admitted the crush. But, it was obvious not only to me but to others. I only mention this because it relates to our lunch date, which I'll get to in a minute.

This friend, I'll call him "R," was very sweet and good to me. We were friends all throughout college and kept in touch after graduating. I even visited him once, for a weekend, and we had that kind of friendship that is easy and fun and honest.

That honesty is a stickler, though.

So, fast-forward to our lunch date. I hadn't seen R in well over a year, and I was excited. We were meeting at a swank restaurant in Dallas, and I'd gotten all dressed up (like a good Texan girl) and was waiting at the table when he arrived. He walked toward me, all smiles and he hugged me in one of those big bear hugs that lasts a minute or two longer than it probably should, especially at a restaurant full of other people. We sat down. I put my napkin in my lap, and he looked at me and said, "God, you'd be gorgeous if you just had a tan."

I know.

Here's the thing: he was fairly pale, freckled, with strawberry-blond hair and a good extra 20 to 30 pounds. I mean, this guy was no American Gladiator.

I can only think that in his mind, he was giving me a compliment.

I thought about R as I arrived at the salon for my famed spray-on color. I had to take my kids. That's part of this whole year, actually - doing these 52 figs even when it's inconvenient or a hassle. It's hard for me to take my kids to things like a spray tan. I'm not one of those easy-going women who can somehow handle a brood of small children in a public place without alternating between a horrid sing-song voice of false enthusiasm and the clenched-teeth whisper of a mother at her wit's end. But this year I'm not going to say to myself: oh, I can't do that because I can't take the kids. I can't find a sitter. Blah, blah, blah.

So, I took the kids. I plied them with sugary treats from Peet's Coffee, which I held ransom until the very last minute before I headed back into the depths of the salon where the spray tans are doled out.

The receptionist promised to keep an eye on the kids, and the spray-tanner (I'm sure this woman has an official title I'm unaware of) also did the same. I left my kids with a carton of yogurt, a lemon-iced scone and two boxes of chocolate milk. Dear God, I thought. What will this waiting area look like when I return?

I followed the woman back, and I was somewhat calmed by the fact that she too had pale skin. She assured me I was going to love this, that it was going to be fabulous and that I'd be back again and again.

"Don't worry," she said. "You'll be a little blotchy and dark for a day, but when you shower later, it will wash off and you'll just have a nice glow."

"I won't be all streaked and orange?" I asked, still skeptical. I mean, I know other people get spray tans, but other people have natural pigments in their skin that lend themselves to color. I don't.

"Don't worry," she smiled, handing me a bottle of lotion and telling me to apply it to the bottoms of my feet, the palms of my hands and my knees and elbows. "You'll be great."

So, here's how it works - the spray tan. First, you are taken to a small room that has a tent in it. It's like a camping tent, except that it's very tall and just big enough to stand in. On the floor is a little pad of what looks like aluminum foil. You stand on that. You can chose to wear underwear or you can chose to go naked. I chose to go naked.

I asked the woman, "That doesn't bother you? To spray tan naked people all day long?"

She laughed and said, "Oh no. Just last week I had to hold a woman's boobs up for her to get underneath."

I sort of loved her right there and then.

Okay, so I stripped down, applied to the lotion to my hands and feet (I guess to keep from the spray tan collecting there) and then sort of just waited, half covering my naked breasts with one hand, my legs kind of crossed over one another. It was awkward. She finally came back.

"Ready?" she called to me. I assured her I was ready. She opened the door.

"Your kids are fine, just waiting for you and eating."

I loved her even more for checking on them for me.

So, we commenced. She took hold of a small tool with a long wand on the end of it, and she began to spray me down much like you might spray-paint a car. It was odd. I stood still, buck-naked, and watched her evenly apply a light mist to my body.

"Okay, turn," she said. I turned to the side and lifted my arm. I turned around. I turned to the other side. I closed my eyes for a light misting over my face.

It was all done in about 5 minutes. After that, she left me with the said machine, that had been converted into a dryer, and I stood there for another 5 minutes drying myself off. Then, I got dressed and walked out into the salon.

I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and my first thought was this: Holy Shit I Look Like George Hamilton.

As the day progressed, things only got worse. First, my bra wiped off the tanning solution around my boobs, and since my boobs are so small I have to wear a padded bra with chicken-cutlets, the area with the chicken-cutlets had apparently sweat so much that the solution had entirely worn off. So, my boobs alternated between deep orange, slight orange and stark white.

The woman had also failed to catch that area underneath my butt, that nice little spot where one's ass overhangs one's thighs. So, if I bent over, there were some really nice white creases there.

Also, after about two hours, my skin took on a strangely green pallor. It's hard to describe, so I'll just let a photo speak for itself.



All of this, however, is nothing compared with my face. My face. My face. My lips seemed to be gone from my face, because now instead of being white with pink lips, my lips are just the same color as the rest of my face, which is a very strange look. My face, after a few hours, was very dark. I looked like I'd just rescued a box of kittens from a smokey basement in Boca Raton, Florida.

I called my sister on Skype, and when she saw me she had to turn away. Finally, she just gave in and laughed openly. When she could talk she said, "Um, don't take this the wrong way, but you look like you're 80."

I hope this whole thing eases up with a good shower and some exfoliant!


MamaP

Fig #3

This week's fig is going to be a spray tan. As you may recall, I have very white skin. My sister says it's more like translucent than actually just white, and you don't have to look awfully hard to see the veins running up and down the backs of my legs.

I think I have come to terms with my skin. I mean, I think there will always be a part of me that wishes I wasn't quite so glaringly white, but I have outgrown the phase of allowing it to stop me or hold me back. And in the past years, especially since living in Asia, I've grown to see it as a positive aspect of my appearance rather than something I should cover up and hide.

I know it seems like a lot of angst, the color of my skin. So lest you think I'm hung up on it for no good reason, allow me to regale you with a few stories of my romantic past.

In college, my freshman year, I dated a football player. Well, he was a little bit more than a football player. I lived in Texas, and I attended a Texas state school, so he was more of a football hero - as are all Texas football players (in the very least in their own minds). Not only did my boyfriend play football for our college, but he played baseball as well. He was quite the athlete. He was also very big. I use that word because there isn't another word to describe him. He had a medical condition (acromegaly - a hormone imbalance) that made him big. He was 6'3 inches tall and 275 of muscle. He was so big that my entire hand fit into the palm of his hand. His calf muscle was bigger than my thigh muscle (we measured them). He was blond and blue-eyed and tan. Everywhere we went, women sort of looked at him and smiled at him and threw themselves at him, all of which he laughed off with an affable shrug. So, right there you can kind of see that a girl might be a little insecure as his girlfriend, and then he was 24 and I was 19, and he was a senior, and I was a freshmen. Well, I could go on.

I remember several times waiting for him to pick me up in my dorm room only to find that he'd never gotten past the elevators, what with the small crowd of girls hovering around with their questions, and hair-twirling and infectious laughter.

Lest you think he wasn't a good boyfriend, I can assure you he was. He was very sweet, cooking for me and shuffling me all over town and spending hours sitting with me while I studied (he never did study, that I can recall, and yet he seemed to sail through his classes with ease - I guess that happens when one is a sports science major). Anyway, he was lovely. I was sick once and feeling pathetic and miserable, and I was all self-pitying and mopey and he said to me, "What do you want?" And I sort of threw myself on the floor and said, "I want cake."

I'm well aware, at the age of 34, how pitiful this story sounds.

Anyway, he got up and went out in a snow storm and got me two different kinds of cake and fed them to me from a palate on the floor, in front of a fire.

So, he was sort of great. The only thing I ever recall him being not-so-great about was my skin. He was, as I said, very tan. And he always hinted that he'd love it if I tanned. Finally, one day he just came out and said, "Will you go to a tanning booth if I pay for it?"

I didn't know what to say, and so I shrugged and agreed. I knew, of course, that I wouldn't actually tan. I mean, it wasn't as if I hadn't tried. But people never believed me. It's as if they thought I should just be trying harder or something.

I went to the tanning bed the next week. His excitement was palpable as I walked in and winked at him over my shoulder. Really, he could hardly contain himself.

In his defense, when I walked out 15 minutes later, red as a boiled lobster and sort of walking with my arms and legs splayed out to keep them from rubbing against each other, he was mortified and shocked and felt very badly. Very badly.

He never mentioned tanning again. But I knew how he felt about my skin, then, and it was always hard for me to wear shorts around him. And we lived in Texas, so the option of wearing jeans throughout the summer was slightly worse than my alabaster legs.

This week, since I've given the old tanning bed the college try (literally), I'm going to get a spray tan. I've used tanning lotions over the years and given up. Looking streaked and smelling as if I peed myself isn't worth it. But I've always wondered if a spray tan would look good. And I've talked about it for years.

I don't know what worries me more about it - that it will look (and smell) like crap or that it will be fabulous and I'll spend my family into deep debt from a tanning habit that stems from an insecurity about myself that is so superficial I am embarrassed to write about it.

MamaP

Quote 3 of 52

And now a quote from my favorite author, Hemingway. I love this quote because, like Hemingway's writing, it's simple and to the point and yet says everything there is to say:

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Jackpot

I went to Nordstrom today to pick up my Creme de la Mer body lotion. You can imagine my delight when they told me that since I purchased the lotion, I was also going to be given a special anniversary gift. Now, let me just say that Creme de la Mer isn't known for gifts. They're not like Lancome or Clinique, who seem to have a constant rotation of "gifts-with-purchase." I've never before even seen a gift-with-purchase at la Mer.

Well, in addition to my bottle of lotion, I received a .24 oz. jar of actual Creme de la Mer face cream (which I use everyday), a small bottle of the tonic and a little jar of the eye concentrate. As if that wasn't enough, she threw in a small tube of the body creme, which is thicker than the lotion, and which I'm especially pleased with as my hands are beyond dry at the moment.

In addition to all of this, I tried the sunscreen. Now, let me say that sunscreen is very important to me - as you might imagine - given the whiteness of my skin (which my sister says is better described as "translucent"). I have tried every facial sunscreen on the market. I like Clinique City Block in 40 SPF and Cetephil's new facial moisturizer with SPF 50. Both are quite nice, but both do feel like sunscreen. They go on and leave just a hint of that white, sunscreen film, catching the tiny hairs across my face in a faint glow.

I didn't expect much from Creme de la Mer's sunscreen, because how can you really improve upon facial sunscreen? Well.........let me tell you, however they do it, they've done it. The sunscreen is incredibly light and soft. It feels like putting silk across your face. There is no white residue. None. It actually feels like a sheer coating of primer, which makes putting make-up on even nicer. I felt my skin was smoother after applying the sunscreen. It is lovely. It is an SPF 30 and has 4% zinc oxcide. And really, it doesn't take a heaping gob. The stuff really does smooth over the skin so that it only requires a small amount.

I bought it. It's $65 for a small tube, which should last me several months. I think it's totally worth the money.

I am excited about my body lotion. I will apply it today, when I get home from the pool, after I shower. It will be especially nice and luxurious after spending hours under the sun, slathered in drying sunscreen (I have to use an SPF factor of 50 to 70).

My sister read my post from the other day, and she called me and said, "I think your post makes you sound more frugal than you really are." She has a point. I'm not all Mrs. Frugal, coupon-shopper, never buy anything nice. When I spend money, I can really spend money. But the point is that I agonize over it, wring my hands, put it off, and then I end up returning much of what I purchase. The point of this experience is to buy a luxury item and to use it all with abandon, no hand-wringing, no dabbing it on once tiny minuscule amount at a time, no returning it. When I got home today, I tore off the packaging, put the lotion in my bathroom and threw the box away. It feels great.

MamaP