Guilt Orchid Orphans

Remember my orchid? And how I was gonna find the special dirt for it and everything? Well, I found the special dirt and it wasn't that hard. The florist also gave LE a bunch of daisies that was on its last legs, then he gave him another one to give to me.

Nice stuff like that just happens here. A lot, actually.

Anyway, I got to thinking about the orchid, now that it is with child.

Except apparently orchid babies are called keikis. It's cute they have a special name.

So this orchid. I never would have bought an orchid myself. The last one I had, one my mom gave me like 20 years ago, died slowly for no apparent reason and I felt awful for killing such a delicate thing.

But this orchid even had an unfortunate providence to begin with. Shortly after BE and I split up, like a week after I kicked him out of the house, he came by while I was at work (he had a key for awhile), and left me a diamond ring, an orchid, and some red rose petals scattered on the floor and around the orchid.

Guilty guilty guilty. Guilty for making him feel bad. Wait, what?

Well, you know how it is.

Also guilty for not wanting any of that stuff. Guilty for being mad at him all over again for not knowing that I wouldn't want that stuff. Guilty for feeling sad for whoever had told him that might be a good way to win me back, and for not being the sort of person who could be made happy by jewelry and flowers and romantic gestures, however belated and surreal. Guilty for being annoyed that I would have to clean up the rose petals.

I gave him the ring back. And then I felt guilty that I was now saddled with the care of an orchid that was completely innocent and had nothing to do with any of this.

So I asked my mom how to deal with the thing, and found a reasonable spot for it to live, and carried on like that.

And it didn't die. Then it grew. A smashed cigarette box holds the pot up straight in the bowl because it grew so much it couldn't stand up by itself and I had to MacGuyver it a little. When my mom was here for Christmas, she showed me where to prune it, so I did. And this year at the beginning of summer it flowered again.

For some reason, the orchid doesn't hate me. I don't hate it either. It just makes me feel kind of bad. Not that I blame the orchid.

After it flowered, it started having babies. There are two of them. I snipped one of them off and stuck it in the potting mix I bought from Mustafa the Florist. The other one, I'm waiting for the flower to drop before planting it.

And I have a sinking feeling the Guilt Orchid's babies are going to take. I'm not sure what to do with them. Usually I give my flower babies to my mother-in-law, but this seems inappropriate somehow. I offered one to a friend who knows the Guilt Orchid's life story, but he's afraid of killing the baby. So I'm a bit stuck on this one.

Making peace with the orchid.

Also it's hard to decide what all the orchid means, at this point. A symbol of lingering guilt? Or does it mean something cheesy about a new life and getting by against the odds or whatever?

Maybe it's just a flower that's been genetically modified to survive a houseplant spaz like me.

Anyway, want a baby orchid that may be a really good omen, or a really bad one, or no sort of omen at all?

A Mission: The Missing Piece

But First, An Unrelated Topic

So I was gonna do a post about the obsolete-ness of blogs like mine. It's so early 2000s, journal-writing blogs like mine. This has been kind of smacking me in the face for the last few days because last week we had a unit on social networking in the class I'm teaching, and not only do none of those kids (born in 1994, fuck!) read blogs, none of them even use forums anymore except for the same reasons I do, which is to find the answer to a problem like, "My computer is plugged in but not charging."

Blogs nowadays are supposed be on a single, focused, Google-able, tag-able topic, which this blog is not. I mean, in my my mind it's on a single topic (the topic here is ME, by the way, and my fucking brain and the tiny events that make up the experience that creates ME). But in Internetland, this blog is a bunch of topics, like mothering and being an expat and living in Turkey and ME ME ME ME ME. Except ME isn't something turning up in Google searches, as much as I like to think I am the center of the universe.

A few students said they read blogs for football. A few clever ones read them for news commentary. The programmer types read programmer stuff, and apparently blogs are a good source of game cracks and links to pirate stuff. But that's it.

Won't mess with this shit.

As for online forums (which I'm pretty sure should be fora in the plural, but I don't want to be a dick), the information you get from those is pretty dodgy. Even my "plugged in not charging" problem, I solved with someone's blog. Forums contain scary techie people who tell you to do stuff with the computer's insides via something in the Start menu, that, while in English words, makes no sense at all. Or they get all snarky and insult each other in Klingon or whatever. Forums get way too incestuous and in-groupy-y Also they want to know a bunch of stuff about your computer that I have no idea about, and can't find from looking at my computer's underside. It's embarrassing all around.

Just this week on the one forum I look at regularly, the renegades from Dave's ESL cafe, one of the super champion moderators, a guy who knows how to mess with with the forum's insides, announced he was leaving the forum because the medium has become obsolete. Smack!

Crap. Because without certain forums, there were a few years there I might not have gotten through on my own. But apparently the kids these days are doing their own thing. Good for them. They pretty much own the medium anyway. The Internet medium, I mean. Digital natives and all that. It's kind of like the "Who Owns English" argument, but more fluid and less populated with grouchy old men. It's cool.

(Hint: Native speakers totally don't own English anymore. Suck it.)

One reason the forum was becoming obsolete was that I couldn't find the "Like" button.

And it's apparent from both forums, Dave's and the renegade one, that people are going to more useful places for information. Even the socialization has moved elsewhere. After the moderator resigned, we all gave our real names so we could become friends on Facebook.

And Now, The Topic At Hand

And to honor my online curmudgeonliness, I shall now change topics comletely. Ha!

It's ever so slightly cooler.

So I mentioned about buying a new iPhone while I was in the States. I didn't get the cool one everyone was camping out for. I didn't even get the one before that. I got the even-older version, which I mostly envied for its titanium outside (virtually kid-proof!) and super-tough airplane glass front and the two-way camera and the fact that the new battery would last longer than my existing one.

Which left me with a mostly perfectly decent old iPhone that needed getting rid of. So I found a guy who wants the old phone. I waited a month or so after getting the new phone activated by the tax people and Turkcell, just to make sure it wasn't going to mysteriously quit working, and then went about erasing everything on the old phone so I could give it to this fellow who wants it.

It came time to make the exchange, with the phone all plugged into the computer after the system restore, and the phone was asking for the Simcard. The Simcard was ready, as were the tequila shots, and I discovered there was a problem with that hole in the top of the old phone I didn't remember being there.

It turns out I'd somehow lost the little thingie you put the Simcard into and shove into the phone. It's small and looks like a piece of trash left over from a toy.

Serious business, only with lemons.

Does this thingie have a name? I don't know. Online, it was alternately referred to as a "tray" and a "Simcard holder." No matter. Mine was lost somewhere in the house I-don't-know-how-long-ago. And there were tequila shots waiting. So.

So anyway, this morning I undertook a wee search of the missing Simcard thingie. The fact that it was lost was baffling me, because I'm usually pretty anal about stuff like this. I have a collection of spare buttons that come with clothes. I have a special ashtray for tiny broken things to be fixed at a later date. I own a glue gun and I carry a tiny screwdriver in my purse.

But the Simcard thingie wasn't in any of the places it was supposed to be. Not in the basket of tiny useful things even my cleaner knows about, nor in the ashtray of even tinier things. Nor was it in the fake-silver tray where tiny stuff sometimes turns up. Or amid the crap on the desk where it might have gotten lost, not even in the cup of almost-dry pens and broken pencils.

I was faced with a choice. Tear up the entire house looking for that tiny bit of plastic that most likely has been thrown away or vacuumed up sometime in the last month, or try my luck outside buying a new one. I opted for the latter. Crazy, I know.

You want this kind of a place.

My first idea was to go to one of those little phone-electronics shops. Those places can do anything. When I went to Turkcell awhile back to find out about getting my Simcard cut into a micro Simcard for the iPhone 4, the girl was a bit bitchy and told me to come back a few days later and wanted to charge me 10 lira. So I marched a few doors down to the phone-electronics shop, where they had a cool little puncher thingie just for cutting Simcards into micro Simcards, and the guys were sweet and charged me 3 lira.

I even still have this thingie, from the Simcard cutting.

But then I ended up spending the day at a shopping mall, mostly because I wanted the good food therein, plus some Macro Center pork and cheese, plus the company of two nice new teachers who've just arrived here and my own company was looking bleak for the day. Before I met up with my friends, I went to a posh electronics shop that's the closest thing to an Apple Store because they mostly sell overpriced Apple accessories, such as 75tl iPhone cases.

I barely know what to call the Simcard thingie in English, so trying to call it something in Turkish proved challenging. So I called it "that little thing that holds the Simcard." It took some doing, but they got it. Only they didn't have that and sent me to Turkcell. Before Turkcell, I tried Techno SA, who also sent me to Turkcell. Turckcell told me to go to a place called Genpa somewhere in Etiler. I wasn't into that. I asked if they might have it at one of those little phone-electronics shops, and the guy said, "No, you'll never find it at one of those places," with a bit of disdain. And oddly enough, after explaining the little Simcard thingie several times in Turkish, my ability to explain it got worse, not better. The only thing I figured out was that likening it to a drawer was really a bad strategy.

Guys like this can do anything.

When I got back to my neighborhood, I tried the local Turkcell just for kicks and also because the bitchy girl was busy. Then I went down to the phone-electronics shop that punched my Simcard. They had all sorts of iPhone parts lying around-- replacement screens and cases, the cool earphones with the volume control, and interesting-looking inside bits. It was more heartening because they asked if I wanted black or white, and then went and had a look. No dice. So I tried the phone-electronics shop a few doors down. By now, my ability to explain the Simcard thingie had completely deteriorated. First, they offered me a Simcard. Then they offered me the outside of a cut Simcard, for free no less. Then they got out some tweezers, apparently to remove the Simcard they thought was stuck in my phone.

But the orchid babies are another story entirely.

Finally, we managed to work it out. And I'll be damned if they didn't have one. It looked a bit worse for wear, and it occurred to me it was probably best not to ask where it came from, but there it was. I'm really glad I didn't listen to anyone who was telling me those little shops wouldn't have it. It means my Turkey Spider Sense of where to find things is developing all right.

It almost makes me feel good enough to take on the electric company for overcharging me for the month we were out of town. Almost. I've heard that process involves a dilekçi and the account isn't in my name anyway.

Still, I definitely feel good enough to try to find some orchid potting mix so I can try to root some orchid babies I now have.

To celebrate, I fried up a massive T-bone steak I'd paid way too much for because I totally fucking earned it.

Rewarding myself with meat. Hooray!

Hugely Pointless

This building is not for sale.

Quite why someone felt compelled to hang this sign I would really like to know.

A Week Of Teeth

When LE was the appropriate age for growing teeth, he grew some. I don't remember the exact age because I'm such a bad mom.

He used to make this face on command.

The first few came without much fanfare. Another bullet dodged, I thought, couched as the new teeth were with so many other milestones it was nigh on impossible to tell which milestones were making him cry and not sleep. I think of the early teeth as one of many dodged bullets because LE never had colic or gas, he weaned without hardly a peep at 2 years and 3 months, and potty training him was way easier than it is for us now to get up at 6am for work and school.

The top front teeth were kind of a bitch, I admit. One of them kept coming out and going back in and bleeding and it made us both insane. But those teeth also coincided with a lot of other bad marriage crap and a trip to the US, so it's hard to say which thing, exactly, was making us insane. I gave him some homeopathic teeth medicine because what the fuck else are you gonna do? Nothing works, believe me. It's just that you have to do something to make up for all the other crap, and loading the kid up on Nyquil is frowned upon these days.

Anyway, he grew a bunch of other teeth until he had a mouthful of them.

And then the cavities started. The first one I let go for a long time, because he had reached the age of Bitching About Stuff Overly Much. Also he'd started bitching about it when we were in the States and I figured it would be better if he could hold out till we got back to Turkey where dental care is relatively way cheaper. But it was not to be. My dad took him to the dentist and the dentist was all, "You mean all this kid did was bitch a little?" because apparently he needed like a baby root canal. After a huge scream about the needle, he fell asleep for the rest of the ordeal.

Oh shit. I'm having and old fart moment where I'm telling a story I've already told. At least I used different words this time. Humor me and pretend I told it way better this time. Apologies to Lori for bringing up the tumble again, via linking. I really had totally forgotten about it.

Only little baby bitches cry, bitch!

Subsequent cavities went by unblogged because I was all busy getting divorced and shit. One cavity involved this sadist at the dentist office down the street, where she drilled the fuck out of my kid's head without anesthetic and he screamed and squirmed and I had to hold him down on the chair by lying under him and pinning his arms and feel the drill through his skull in my shoulder. Also that cow talked too much and didn't listen to me at all and thank goodness she went on holiday for the follow-ups, so we were able to visit a nicer dentist upstairs who was less interested in testing a 4-year old's fortitude.

Two cavities later, the boy seemed fine. I'm a demon about morning and bedtime teeth brushing and he brushes his teeth at school, too, after lunch.

I call him Clarence and he likes meat.

But here's the rub. There's fuck-all I can do about the poor kid's teeth. When I was a kid, I had this Christian Scientist dentist who I guess believed the Grace of God doesn't apply to teeth. In one of my earliest dental records, he wrote, "This child has the Devil in her mouth." BE's teeth are worse than mine. For all the gorgeousness our kid somehow got from the two of us, the boy was cursed with our teeth.

I noticed another cavity on the plane to the States this last time, because there's not much else to do on the plane than find things to freak out about. I once again hoped this one would hold out till we got back to Turkey because I've been nothing but broke since I kicked BE's sorry ass out.

So I took him to the dentist, another one this time that came with good recommendations from some friends. Turns out the cavity was preparing to be an abscess and the tooth needed to come out, from a filling that wasn't so good the first time around. Plus there were four other cavities that needed seeing to.

That's right, four. I started bargaining with LE right away-- did he want a small, crappy toy for every cavity, or one big super great toy when all the cavities were filled? That's the deal, where he gets a toy for every visit the dentist. I'd learned from the last round of cavities that the trips to the toy store are nearly as bankrupting as the trips to the dentist. He opted for the first choice. I was kind of bummed he hasn't yet learned to delay immediate small pleasures for big ones later.

Your advice is worth jack-shit, Mr. Tooth!

To add to the major teeth-related fun that's been going on around here, the other night LE accidentally bit an olive pit and started whimpering. One of his front lower teeth looked a bit bloody and I touched it and of all the goddamned things, it wiggled.

Fucking milestone alert! Kid has his first loose tooth!

He was extremely upset. Between all the dentist visits and the upcoming tooth-pulling, he got all mixed up and I'm pretty sure he thinks all his teeth are gonna come out of his head. Which they are, but not in the way he thinks.

It's fair to say the kid and I will share the same recurrent nightmare, the one where your teeth keep breaking and falling out. It's a common nightmare, I hear. But closer to home for some than others.

I tried to offset all this with a tremendous and non-feigned display of amazement and pride and cuddles LE didn't understand. We Skyped with my mom and she confirmed that this whole loose-tooth thing is tremendous and great. LE is suspicious, but a little bit into the whole losing his teeth and getting Big Boy teeth now.

I remember, Little Man. It's the one on the left.

And I'm a little bit sad because the tooth that's loose is also the first tooth he ever grew.

Still, the tooth pulling went way more smoothly than I imagined because the tooth didn't have any roots. LE didn't care for the Novocaine needle and screeched a lot about that, but the dentist was great and had him giggling in no time. He snuck in the fourth filling and whipped out the tooth lickety-split. LE mostly only bitched about the wodge of cotton in his mouth on the way home.

Super cool! And gross!

And when we got home, he was ready to play with the kids in the street. He settled for a picture of his tooth hole, rather than a good look in the mirror. "It's cool," he said, when I showed him the picture.

Teeeeeeeeeth...

Apparently, they don't have the Tooth Fairy in Turkey so that's something we're spreading the word about. Apparently, it's hilarious. But we packaged up the tooth in a paper towel and plastic bag and some stickers. Then we un-packaged it so LE could look at it again. Then we re-packaged it and put it under the pillow and LE kind of froze up, looking around in terror in case the Tooth Fairy was going to suddenly appear and start flying around the room.

The Tooth Fairy gave him 5 lira. Also she took the tooth and packed it away in a box. She plans to take each and every tooth from his head and stash it somewhere, like serial killer trophies piling up, because she is a bit creepy and trolls her kid every freaking moment of his sweet skinny arm squeaky voice smelly little boy life.

Mama loves Precious.

Cengiz Amca

Yesterday on my way to work, BE phoned me to tell me Cengiz Amca was gone.

He uses that euphemism in English, "gone." I'm not sure if they have the same one in Turkish. But I knew from his voice he meant "dead."

Cengiz Amca is BE's best friend's dad. BE grew up across the street from them. We call him Amca because that's what BE called him when they were kids. BE and this friend went to school together, played in the street together, skipped school together, and even caught the clap from the same Bakırköy whore when they lost their virginity together.

BE hasn't really spoken to me properly in a couple of months. I'm not sure why. He just got mad again, for some reason. But he called me up for this because he was sad.

He needs to get over me already, I know. And he makes it too easy to be good to him even when he doesn't deserve it. When I told him my cousin died back in November, he just grunted. The high road is always wide open for me. I've won the divorce over and over again, without hardly trying.

I'm glad I'm not BE. It must suck being pissed off and hung up on me all the time.

Cengiz Amca was cool. So is his wife, Sema Teyze. They both had thrilling adventures as subversive students and you could talk about anything with them. They smoke like it's going out of style and make it look cool. Sema Teyze was the first Turkish mother I'd ever heard say, to one of her children who was complaining about being hungry, "You have feet and you know where the fridge is." Granted, the child was like 20, but still. If you live here, you know what I mean.

Cengiz Amca was an engineer. BE and his friend jokingly called him a çopçu (garbage collector), which I guess is technically correct, but what Cengiz Amca did was run one of the yards where the gypsy trash collectors bring all the stuff, to separate it and clean it for recycling. It was his own business, something where he could make a living but still have a social consciousness.

I asked BE what happened, assuming some horrible health crisis involving smoking and working too hard. But it was a car accident. And that was that. It just makes me think that at any moment you can get one of those phone calls that changes fucking everything for-fucking-ever.

"We're wasted," BE said. "We've been up all night and now we're at the morgue filling out papers. Then we're going to wash the body."

WashthebodyWashthebodyWashthebodyWashthebodyWashthebodyWashthebodyWashthebodyWashthebody.

It's hard not to get stuck on that. But then I thought of when my grandfather died and they turned him into Wax Grandpa for an open-casket funeral. Or how when my other grandfather, and my grandmothers, and a few other people died and they were just gone and I never saw them again.

And then I thought of that extraordinary kindness allowed to people, to wash their dead themselves before sending them off. Some last act of tenderness and affection. I don't know if I could deal with it, but I hope I could. Could I wash my mom or my dad or my brothers or LE if they were dead in front of me? I hope BE and his friend dealt with it okay, because it seems like some kind of privilege when I really think about it. Maybe totally horrible but also a privilege.

Cengiz Amca and Sema Teyze have long been some of my favorite people in Turkey. I used to secretly wish I'd landed them as in-laws instead.

And now one of the world's good people is gone, in some stupid and senseless way, but then again, when does it make any sense at all when someone dies?

That's all there is to say.
 

First Week Back: A Bureacratic Success Story, The Cats Are Off The Island, and the Retard Report

This makes it all inspirational and shit.

This post is unnecessarily long because I really wanted to fit "The Cats Are Off The Island" and "The Retard Report" into a single title. It was purely out of vanity, I assure you.

Still, you might as well settle in because it'll be awhile. I'll try to put lots of pictures.
 

Chapter 1: A Bureaucratic Success Story

Oh, baby.

It's been a busy week full of busy things that never seem to end. For one, I went to the tax place to pay the money to get my new phone activated. If you buy a phone in a foreign country, you still have to pay the duties on it to get it turned on. So I did, because even with the extra 100tl, it was still cheaper to buy it over there.

Who thinks of these colors?

With the help of a minibus driver I located the tax office. It was one of those dismaying institutional places with bland, graying paint that's always kind of dirty. There are always multi-colored yet somehow colorless speckled floors, and windows and desks where a lot of people appear to be doing nothing very slowly. I asked a guy where I could pay the money to get the phone turned on, and he asked if I'd ever done any work there before. I happily misinterpreted the question and said "no," so he gave me directions for somewhere upstairs to go to get a tax number.

But I already have a tax number. It's just that I got it in Bakırköy a long time ago, not in the particular tax office where I was. He sent me off the Vezne. Having the tax number was just the first in a series of tax office successes.

Ready for anything.

I gave the Vezne guy my tax card and he eyed it suspiciously, turning it over and back a few times. I would have been suspicious too, since the tax number is simply handwritten onto a laminated card. But he accepted it. After that, it was like a challenge to see if he could want something I didn't have.

Passport? Had it. Residence permit? Had it. The phone? Had it. I offered the receipt for my phone, but he didn't want that. I also could have offered 4 passport sized photos, LE's and the cats' vaccination records, a box of crayons, four different shades of lip gloss, a marble, and a small bottle of antibacterial hand sanitizer, had he asked for any of those things. I carry a lot of shit on me at all times.

He seemed faintly disappointed everything had gone so well, and with a grunt, waved me off to the fellow in the next window, who took my money. Which I also had, cash or credit, nasıl isterseniz.

As I walked out, I looked around and realized I probably should have been a lot more scared of this place. The new normal freaks me out sometimes, even if it's just because it's not freaking me out.

Chapter 2: The Cats Are Off The Island

Not missed. At all.

So for the last week, I've been deciding I can't live with the cats anymore. It's not just their wanton, needless destruction or their constant need to be into whatever I'm doing or their endless desire to sit in my lap and knead my tits with their claws. It's also their insane, ongoing quest for food, even if it's just to scatter it across the floor if I turn my back for a second, and the fact that I discovered I own cornmeal because they clawed the cornmeal and made it fall all over, along with some rice. Also there's the thing where I never want to do anything that involves entering a bedroom because it entails extracting a cat from the closet before anything else gets chewed to pieces and then tossing them both out the door and closing it before they run back in. I bar my bedroom door night while they keep me awake, flinging themselves at the door so they can come in and kill the laundry and my sweaters and attack my feet and knead my hair and tits with their claws. Plus their box is gross and they throw their litter and sometimes poo all over the place.

Good riddance, fucker.

And then they developed this maniacal obsession with tampons (unused ones), which they started stealing and running away with in triumph so that I had to corner the cat to take the tampon back. As soon as the bedroom door opened, a cat appeared to stick its head in the drawer and dig out a tampon. It was a trend I didn't care to continue with.

Enough, I thought. So I made arrangements with the neighbors to take Havuç and Spider to the cat farm where their mothers and siblings and half-siblings now live.

My neighbors like cats, so I'm inclined to believe them that the cat farm is a fine place for them. Maybe it isn't, but in any case it's better than the street and it's better than my house and it's better than me murdering them.

I'm sure it's like this.

The night before the cats were scheduled to go to the farm, they knocked their kitty carrier off a top shelf onto the floor and broke it a little. That morning, after a thrilling bout of tampon theft, they knocked over the garbage in the kitchen and scattered it all over the floor, then they walked in the wet bathtub and then walked all over the house with wet dirty feet. Havuç refused to leave the sink so I could brush my teeth, and Spider almost killed me by being underfoot between my legs. So they made getting rid of them really easy.

Murdered sweater: a special gift from the cats.

I took a tampon and tossed it into the cat carrier and they both ran in to get it. Then I snaked the tampon back out, locked the door, and taped the whole thing closed where they broke it so they wouldn't escape in the car. I dropped them off at the neighbor's, and that was the end of the cats. The neighbors returned the carrier to me when I came home that afternoon, with a big hole ripped in the tape and some of Spider's fur stuck to it. Apparently the cats were very eager to go to the farm and destroy whatever there is there.

When I got back to the house, I opened the front door wide because there weren't any cats there to stop from running downstairs. I opened all the windows because there weren't any cats to fall off the windowsills, and I opened all the bedroom doors because the contents of those rooms are now safe from cats. For good measure, I threw some clothes on the floor because there were no cats to chew and claw holes in them.

I told LE the cats were gone and his face crumpled like he was going to cry. So I reminded him about how they chew up his toys and knock over his castles. He thought about it for a moment and said, "Goodbye, cats."

And that was the end of that. LE mentioned this morning how nice it is being able to leave his crap lying around on the floor.

I must say, I completely agree.

Chapter 3: The Retard Report

So a big huge thing I've been long-term trying to deal with is the problem of LE and school. Back in March, the government announced that the school system should henceforth be the now-notorious 4+4+4 system. The short version is that it's been decided that schooling shall be broken into three phases-- 4 years of elementary, 4 years of middle, and 4 years of high school.

No one is ready.

On the face of it, the new system doesn't seem so bad. More school! What could be wrong with that? Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find that it's profoundly flawed both practically and politically, like so many other apparently straightforward issues in Turkey. But I'll spare you all of that because I've ranted endlessly about it for months virtually and in real life.

Instead, I'll go straight to the part of the new law that bothered me most in the concrete sense, which was that our good leaders declared children shall start first grade at 5 1/2, or 66 months. LE turned 66 months at the end of August.

So since March, I, like many parents of children my age, have been trying to work out a solution to this. Most people I know had been planning to send their kids to kindergarten. LE's preschool had even put together a really nice kindergarten curriculum.

At first, the media were saying you could write a dilekçi (like a petition or formal request) to keep your small kid out of school. Then they said they weren't taking dilekçi anymore. Then they decided Eğitim ve Beslenme shools (public schools that go all day and give your kids food) should be open to everyone in the district, not just the working families they'd been designed for, because it was unfair for working families to have some kind of advantage, like quality care for their kids.

At that point, I gave up and resigned myself to the winds of fate. There's fuck-all you can do about some things, except trying to force yourself into being accepting of the idea that LE will be in first grade this year. I was theoretically successful, but not really.

It was around this time that LE started saying, "Fucking government. Mama, what's the government?" Things have been really heavy around here.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago while I was in the States, I read on Facebook that schools or the government or whatever were accepting health reports saying it would be harmful for your child to enter first grade because he/she was mentally underdeveloped or whatever. I was all, "I need me one of those." And I became optimistic that LE might not have to go to school. This required a lot of sorting out because, having resigned myself to first grade, I hadn't worked out a plan for daycare for LE, other than planning to hire my cleaner to look after him in the mornings until noon, when it was time to start school. It wasn't ideal, but it was the best I can afford and I figured at least she'd clean every day and cook a little, so it would be like having a servant, which is kind of cool.

A useless website that doesn't work with Firefox.

Then the on-campus school he's been going to closed down and moved because they couldn't agree about their rent with the university. The new school had just opened, and I had no idea if there was a place for LE, or even if they were taking kids his age. Since I was in the States, there was nothing I could do but ask around a bit.

BE heard about the Retard Report, too. It was the only nice thing, the only full sentences really, that he spoke to me at the airport when we arrived home. It was agreed that I should sort out a preschool for LE, and then BE would get the health report.

My part of the agreement is still somewhat of an ongoing thing, but BE did a big scramble to get the Retard Report. He went to the place he'd heard about, only to be told that Ankara had issued an order that any doctor who wrote a health report to keep a younger child out of first grade would be fired.

I got this news while meeting in my office with a student. And I was all, "WTF, did we miss it by one day?" A friend of mine had, that morning, sent me a photo of the report they'd gotten the day before. The student got to learn some first-class swearing, as well as a lot more about my personal life than he was probably counting on.

So I told BE to call my friend's husband, the one who'd gotten the report the day before, and find out what he did. BE tends to give up awfully easily. He's also a bit of a fuckup, even though he does have it in him sometimes to get things right.

The Retard Report.

The next part, the part where BE gets the Retard Report, was relayed to me secondhand by his parents, because BE isn't talking to me now. Apparently, there was one good and upright Cumhuriyetçi psychologist somewhere deep in the interminable bowels of Bakırköy Hospital. Finding this doctor took some doing. I imagined a small group of frustrated parents running hither and yon together, clamoring for Retard Reports for their kids. The doctor didn't even need a bribe, apparently.

So it's official. My kid is a retard. This is not by my accounting. It's according our good Tayyip. According to the various statements he's released in the past few weeks, not only are kids who get reports to stay out of school for a year retards, they are also traitors and they support the PKK.

I couldn't find the one with Erdoğan dancing, singing "You're a retard!" to a little kid.

It's an awfully heavy load for a small kid. As soon as mine knows what "traitor" and "PKK" and "retard" mean, I'll be sure and let him know the government says he's all of those things. For now, he's just happy he can play with his gun with the sponge bullets the cats were insane about chewing up before they discovered tampons.



Bonus Chapter 4: The Retard Report Wrap-Up

At the end of the week, I took the Retard Report to the elementary school LE had been automatically registered at. The security guard sent me to whatever office, but he had given me the wrong name and I couldn't find the office. I went up and down four floors, wandering the halls looking.

They all kind of look the same.

The school was being painted with a fresh coat of institutional blah. The new paint was hard to distinguish from the graying paint underneath. The floors were from the same Institutional Standard Issue Speckle as the ones in the tax office. Tiny orange and green footprints had been painted on the stairs to show the kids which side to walk on for going up or down. I saw something that looked like animal poo on the floor. The rooms had beaten-up desks and cupboards carelessly stacked in the center, and they had interesting names like "Science Lab" and "Art," but the insides were the same as the other classrooms.

Everything's gonna be fine.

I wanted to cry, seeing that place. The only positive thing is that I have a year to get used to the idea of sending my kid to that unbearable place.

With the help of a cleaner, I finally found the right office. The assistant principal (a different guy from the one I'd talked to before) had also come from the same Standard Issue as the guys in the tax office, with a big thick mustache and dyed black hair and graying skin. I told him what I was there for and he took my stuff and gave me someone else's dilekçi to copy because I have no idea what you're supposed to write in those things, but they have to be either typed or written in your own hand. While I was copying it, he talked to a few other visitors, doing everything very slowly, endlessly shuffling papers and opening and closing the same drawer. His answers to them were short and vague and final-sounding. Then he asked me if, in America, they make kids start first grade at 5 and a half. I said they don't, usually. He muttered something bitter about our good leaders and the state of things in Turkey.

Then he asked me about my husband and I told him I was divorced, which probably wasn't such a good idea because then, get this, he started flirting with me. "Bekarlık çok zor, değil mi?" (It's hard being single, isn't it?) I began getting concerned it might take a blowjob to bring the school matter to rest, because, I don't know. It's just the sort of thing one worries about in the back of one's mind. So I asked him if he had kids, and he said they're all grown and have no use for him anymore. He's been apart from his wife for 20 years.

So I wrote the dilekçi as fast as I could, made a mistake, scribbled it out and fixed it. The assistant principal shuffled papers and talked about how glad he was I'd come to his office. When I finished writing, I gave him the papers. He looked them over several times, then shuffled them around a bit. Then he put them in the drawer and closed it. Then he took them back out again and shuffled them some more. I pressed my knees together and subtly tried to pull my skirt even farther down over them. His phone kept ringing and he kept hitting the button to shut it off. Then he complained about how busy he was.

Um, no thanks.

I seriously felt like saying, "May I go now, sir?" Instead, I tried to be like a fellow educator and said how difficult things are in September. He said that he was feeling tired and bored, but since I had come to his office, he was feeling much better. So I asked him if everything was in order. He offered me tea. I declined and said I had a lot of work to do. He wondered what sort of work that might be. So I stood up and said something vague and thanked him and bid him good day, offering a handshake because that seemed to be about the least feminine thing I could do in the situation. Then I got the fuck out of there as quick as I could without looking like I was scurrying.

So it seems to be done, this school thing. I'm going to go again tomorrow and check with the woman in the other building, the one he was talking on the phone with, just to make sure everything has been properly data-entered and accepted and accounted for.

And with a week's worth of taking care of shit officially out of the way, I went home, showered, changed into a far more interesting skirt than the one I'd been wearing, and headed off into my next big misadventure.

It's the new new-normal. And it mostly doesn't suck except sometimes it sucks.

If Only.

There were a series of signs along the road to campus this morning.

Would that it were true.

But they were lying.