Posts Tagged ‘Cedars Sinai hospital’

Battle Scar

Friday, September 9th, 2016

baby-oliver-me-axel-on-pink-bed

A few months ago, Oliver, my eldest son, walks into my bedroom, “I really like what you’ve done with the room. Very hospice chic.” Jimmy Kimmel might be blasting on my TV at midnight, and he will come in and say, “So, this is what it’s like at the end?” His humor and teasing are endlessly entertaining to me. I laugh until I cry at these bits poking fun of his mother – me. The newest bit is that he tells me I’m over- painting my eyebrows. “They’re too high on your forehead, you look like a scared cartoon character.”

Just tonight, while he playfully beat me up with his hilarious take on me, he thought he had me. “Wait” he asked. “How old am I?” In the middle of both laughter and tears, I answer Oliver. “I know how old you are.” The truth is, I really did have to think for a second. And he knows that. “You’re thirty-three, right?” I realize that adding the right will give him more fuel to make fun of me but maybe I feed him material sometimes.

There is one thing I might not have revealed to my son and that is the truth of his birth experience. But, one day while he was growing up, his father let the story slip. Oliver has never once made fun of it. In a way, it’s a relief. I hate secrets. But I would keep a secret if it kept someone safe. Actually, my friends know that I will go to the grave with their secrets if they ask me to. I just hate to be asked. (more…)

To Die for Mandel Bread

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

okay, in person it was quite the sight, 1983, pregnant with Oliver

I’m not exaggerating when I say I gained a person during my first pregnancy. Not an eight-pound person, a fifty-pound person. And fifty looks more like a hundred on my tiny frame. I’ll try to track down a picture to prove it.
At the time, I was often seen in the nicest restaurants sporting a leopard print Fiorucci number, a one-piece that was meant to have a big belt cinching it to show off your hot early-eighties bod. But I was dressing “for two” and looked more like a giant spotted pumpkin than the sexy dame I thought I was. Strangers laughed at me when they took in the sight. A real ego booster.
Cedars, where I gave birth, became a huge party where all my friends visited at all hours. I was one of the first of us to have a kid. Okay, Kimme, Sherry and Barbara started a bit before me, but it really seemed like I was hosting a big premiere. Think “The Wizard of Oz” and the moment she wakes from the dream, looks around the room and says to each person “…and you were there, and you were there…. “ Well, all of YOU reading this were probably there — only it wasn’t a dream.
Periodically, everyone would leave my room en masse to visit the nursery to look at my new, perfect, ten-days-late, stunning child with the Mick Jagger lips. And no, I didn’t fuck Mick — though I met him a few months after Oliver was born and told him it WAS his baby. Should I totally digress to that story? Sure, why not. (more…)