I lock my door when I change in the morning. Otherwise, I’d never finish dressing or get any peace. My daughter has an incredible knack of appearing, effortlessly, in my bathroom whenever I’m about to take a shower. She leans against the wall and bites her lip and stares at me.

She doesn’t understand why I always take so long to get ready. I assure her I am no beauty queen, but I do like to keep layers of dirt from accumulating on my skin. I told her it just seems like I take forever because I’m always the last one to get into the bathroom. If we’re leaving as a family, I prepare food for my son since he can’t eat anything in restaurants because of his allergies. Depending on the length of our trip, I package snacks or water and sweaters and diapers and then the stroller has to be loaded into the car.

Coco and I made an agreement that if my door was shut, she knew to leave me alone so I could have a few minutes to myself. My house is a high traffic area with lots of people wandering around all the time: nannies and friends of my kids routinely walk past my door. Though I’m not a prude by any sense of the word, I do like to keep a little distance when deciding what to wear.

Closing the door didn’t work. I started locking it. This morning, Coco and her friend were playing puppies under the cover or something like that on the other side of the house when I decided to get ready for my day. I closed the door and locked it. As I was about to get into the shower, the girls starting pounding on my door and screaming:

Help! Help! We’re scared! We’re really scared.

I began to get scared. This sounded real. Did someone enter the house? Did someone get bit by an iguana?

What? What’s the matter?

I said while searching for a towel and a shirt to wrap around me. I opened the door and the girls rushed past; flew onto my bed; and continued to scream while failing about the puppies they held in their hands.

I scowled.

Scared? I said, approaching the squealing children as if I was a crooked old monster.

I’ll give you something to be scared about!*

I lurched towards them while holding up the towel around me and making low gurgling noises. They fled out the door. I locked it, again, as I heard the squeaking continue on the other side of the house.

Now, let’s see, I thought as I gathered my senses. What was I doing?

Oh yes, the shower. A mother’s work is never done.

*I credit this phrase to my dear father who used it freely when we were children:
I’ll give you something to cry about.
I’ll give you something to fight about.
I’ll give you something to (—fill in the blank—-) about.

I spent an hour changing the dressing on my wounds. The gashes and cuts are less bloody. I used about 30 regular sized Band-Aids on my legs then put gauze over that and then tape. If I go out I put Ace bandages over that mess so any bumps won’t be excruciating.

I extracted two more small pebbles from the palm of my hand. The guys the construction site had cut out the jutting metal from the sidewalk and filled some of the holes with chunks of cement. For this country, progress. I felt listened to. Maybe I’ll saunter on by and comment on their good work and suggest maybe, just maybe, they could fix the gaping whole in the middle of the sidewalk and tidy up a few other spots.

All in all, a good day. I’m considering a walk tomorrow. Got to get back up on that horse. Life keeps on-a-comin’.

I was thrilled to start the day. The night before I had successfully found a website and URL for the Podcast SunStruck Radio I am publishing. It was a magical moment, alone at the cafe. Months in the making.About 50 feet from my house, I fell. And, I fell hard. A couple was walking behind me and they helped me up. At first, a fall never feels that painful. I looked at my hands and saw a few rocks wedged into the right palm. Both knees had scrapes like razor cuts from the kneecap to the ankle. I could barely walk, and the pain set in.I try to find meaning in everything. It’s either a path of spirituality or just an annoying trait. What could it mean to fall so hard just when I was so happy?I talked to a nurse about cleaning the wounds. I’d spent $40 bandages (since my house was stocked with nothing) and wanted to know if she thought I had it all clean enough. Years ago I landed in the emergency room after a nasty rollerblading spill because I never could brave cleaning those pebbles out of the cuts in my leg. Trust me on this, get the dirt out now or suffer tweezers, Novocain, and agony in the emergency room later.She thought I would be fine.But what could this mean? I said, telling her how happy I was before the fall.I don’t know, she said.Remember to look down?We’re always happiest before the fall.

I was thrilled to start the day. The night before I had successfully found a website and URL for the podcast I am publishing. It was a magical moment, alone at the cafe.

As I was furiously scrubbing the shower free of it’s scum, I simultaneosly was cursing everyone who wasn’t living up to my standards.

You didn’t do this for me!

Why did you do that?

Well, let me tell you a thing or two…..

Needless to say, I was not having a good day. I was cleaning toilets and scrubbing a greeny-brown goo from my shower and wanted to condem the world for making me scrub ceramic basins instead of whiling away my hours writing prose even Papa would be proud of.

I felt trapped. Caged in by my kids, by money, by my age, by my injured elbow, by my ex, by the weather, by the gorgeous chair I saw in the store front that I can"t yet afford, by Down Syndrome, by the dishes…….imagine how crowded it got in that bathroom!

I smacked my other elbow good and hard; said a few words that I won’t repeat here, then I began to sing. I saw it as my only way out.

Most parents know the ups and downs of babies. I mean the picking up, the putting down, the picking up and the putting down especially when the tyke turns to walking. In our case since my son spends all his time scooting on the floor, the ups and downs last longer. There’s an advantage to all this. I get to see the world from another view point because I spend a lot looking up.

I see the specks un-swept; the scratches on the bottom of the coffee table; the dust balls under the sofa; and the sunlight as it beams in from the window in the ceiling. If I wasn’t down here, I’d have missed it all.

A person, an old friend (male), said to me just a few months ago:

You haven’t had to work for 8 years.

I stared in disbelief. I thought we were over that. Well at least I thought the people I aligned myself with thought differently. Funny thing is…I don’t think society really thinks much differently. I mean really.

I get no worker’s comp when my elbow goes out. I still have to work and just "deal with" the pain.

Cracked ribs? What are you whining about?!! Get that dinner on the table! Change that diaper. Dry those tears.

The biggest sock in the stomach is not only am I valued less in society, but out in the work force putting mother or home engineer or social design expert or tough-ass mama doesn’t hold an ounce of value when competing against that guy who’s been knocking down ceilings without ever dropping out. The final kick in the stomach is that I’ll get no social security for these years when it’s my turn to collect a check.

I sat down to read the Rolling Stone 40th anniversary issue. Where We’re Going - that was the central question asked to 25 people out there and in the know.

Guess how many women were interviewed?

Half?

Ten?

Eight?

Four?

The answer is three: Meryl Streep, Jane Goodall and Lisa Randall one of the world’s leading physicists. These are good women; great women. The interviews with the men were insightful and revealing also: Al Gore, Bono, Craig Venter, Tom Hanks, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton to name a few.

But 3 out of 25. Doing the math makes it depressing for a magazine "hooked" in to youth and new ideas. We can’t do better than 12%? I just don’t get the deep resistance to ask the expertise of mothers. Meryl Streep said in the interview:

Next to climate, the changing status of women in the last hundred years is the most destabilizing thing that’s happened on Earth. It’s precipitated so many seismic changes and reactions in cultures. I think you can lay all the fundamentalism that’s been rearing its ugly head in the world at the feet of that change. It’s better for Western women. But that idea - that women have rights - hasn’t permeated much of the world, even today. The forces that don’t want to consider it are going down hard.

Bearing children makes us vulnerable. I looked around at gym class today as my son clapped to the horseshoe song. Every little one there has this dedicated, struggling human making sure he/she can walk and talk and feed themselves and hopefully enhance society rather than work to destroy. Then, I looked at the mothers. Someone had to make sure they were cared for; and the security guard; and the banker; and the guy who will probably honk at me in traffic. Without it, we’d die. And it doesn’t take the world’s greatest physicist to tell us that without love and nurturing children will not thrive. The inhabitants of this planet stay alive because of a bright, dedicated, clever, experienced group of people who sacrifice money, career, time, basic human rights, sanity, and any hope of wearing unstained clothes.

I have a good feeling about this Internet thing. Look at all the bright people putting their voice out there. Together it will be impossible to drown out our voices.

Costa Ricans greet each other with a kiss. Usually a one-sided, right-cheek kiss. Men don’t kiss. They give a handy hand shake, sometimes a manly hug, with a good tapping on the back. I’ve gotten used to this custom and rather like it. “We” ex-pats occasionally have a hard time deciding whether to kiss, shake hands, or just give a high-pitched: So, how ya’ doing?

Greetings on the phone follow the same warmness, except, except for the wrong number. If I get a phone call from someone I know, it’s a pleasant and polite experience. The person on the other end always asks not only how I am, but how are all my children. (Americans could learn a bit from this.) But get a person calling a wrong number. Boy, that gets my goat. This is usually how it goes:

me: A-lo. (This is kind of Spanish/English hola/hello.)

other: Who is this?

me: Who would you like to talk to?

other: What number is this?

me: What number are you calling?

other: Who is this?

me: No, see you called me? Who do YOU want to talk to?

This is usually where the person hangs up. If that doesn’t work I slip into the heavy English accent and that usually gets them.

I’ve checked around and this happens to everyone - not even Costa Ricans like it. But, it’s hard for a Costa Rican to reisist talking to this stranger because generally Costa Ricans are warm and love to talk.

I am slowing returning to the simpler days of yore: my phone doesn’t take messages; I can’t retrive my cell phone messages because the service never works; and I don’t have caller I.D.

When someone calls, I never know who’s on the other end and neither do they.

There’s no place better to think than by water. The sound of the waves drown out the chitter chatter in my head. If I stare long enough I can see better than I ever have. I can hear what goes unspoken.

On a road trip, I stopped at a little “Typico,” which mean typical restaurant, in Costa Rica. I had eaten and drank everything in my cooler from chocolate covered coffee beans to Mentos to two bottles of coconut water. Wasn’t doing the job. Finally, after many hold ups for construction, I made it to a place. I ordered the “casado de la casa,” which is the married plate. Basically a large amount of ingrediants end up on the plate, married. If I wandered to the restaurant across the road, they’d have the same thing. It’s actuallly a sure thing at any typical restaurant. And it’s cheap. If you stay away from the pork rinds, nothing’s fried and it’s pretty good for you.

I pulled out my computer to read something I had downloaded and to my surprise! Internet connection. Who’d have thought in the middle of Central America, in a small mountain town I could read about the latest news on the latest book that’s come out about Diana. It’s freaky. A marriage made in heaven.