Thanks for the (Altered) Memories...

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

The worst part about having the memory of a goldfish is that people can mess with you.

Don't want to take out the trash? Say I didn't ask you to. Want to cut me off in the middle of a boring story? Tell me that you've already heard it. Go ahead and be an hour late to our lunch date. Just claim I told you the wrong time. I'll never know the difference.

Being of unsound mind, I have no idea whether my friends have used my low brain RAM against me. But I can promise you that my family has taken full advantage of it. Mom, in particular, has made a sport of altering past events to directly contradict my memories of them.

I have (vague) recollections of missing my best friend's seventh birthday party so that I could be entered in a beauty pageant. I (barely) remember being very confused the entire time I was at the pageant. And I (think I) recall being startled when the winning trophy was thrust into my hands. Over the years, however, this story has been retold as a glimmering example of how Mom successfully pumped up my withering self-esteem. Each telling omits the missed birthday party – and, in truth, I'm no longer sure what happened.

That's fine for minor childhood traumas, but when the Memory Game creeps into my adult life, to events that are only a few months old, the results can be infuriating. I was about 15 minutes into an argument with Mom about whether or not she told me my nipples were too big to effectively nurse my son (she had), when I realized it didn't matter that I was right. I wasn't going to win.

A simple "I never said that" is all it takes to deflate my argument. How can I – a woman with a head the size of a grapefruit and memory that won't outlast a stick of gum – possibly produce any proof to the contrary?

Sis has the same memory issues, and I've often imagined us flubbing through our grandkids' questions about our lives. I figure we'll have to usurp other people's histories or make stuff up altogether: "My father, your great-grandfather, was originally supposed to give the Gettysburg Address, but he got a lozenge stuck in his throat and couldn't talk. And would you believe he didn't get that lozenge out until he made the closing arguments at Nuremberg? Incredible man, he was. Invented wheat."

But maybe there is hope for Sis and I – and a way to put to rest future arguments with Mom. When Zev was born, Hubby's dad bought us a video camera. The idea was to record every precious second of our little boy's life for posterity. But the camera doesn't just pick up Zev's babbles and coos. It picks up all of our nonsense, too.

When Zev turned a year old last week, I asked his family and friends to gather around the table and help blow out his birthday candle. I requested that everyone make a wish on Zev's behalf and help him welcome in his second year of life. Then, right before everyone was about to help blow, Mom chimed in, "Don't spit on the cake." About half the people standing there were so dumbfounded, they just kept the air right there in their inflated cheeks.

It's the kind of bizarre buzz-kill statement that Mom would normally deny having said. Except this time, it was caught on tape.

A few days after the party, we watched the footage Sis had shot, and sure enough, there was Mom's voice warning guests against any insidious saliva spraying. Mom said, "I said that?" But this time, she couldn't deny it. There it was. On video.

There is no way anybody can possibly deny having said something when it's on tape. I mean, you'd have to be some kind of spin-meister Donald Rumsfeld to refute … wait, rewind that part. Sis, did you really say, "Eew," when you panned the camera over to one of our guests? That's kinda mean.

"No. I said, 'It's you!'"

"Let's replay that."

"Ew," Sis says on tape.

"You said, 'Ew.'"

"No, I didn't," Sis says, the pitch of her voice growing higher to meet my rising eyebrow. Never mind that it was as clear as a bell. Never mind that everyone else in the room heard it, too. Sis managed to undercut the one weapon I had in the war against the Memory Mafia. And she used the oldest trick in the book.

"I never said that."

Dirty, Dirty Girls

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

Until I gave them away, two of my dining room chairs had odd markings on them. No one ever asked about them, particularly the one that looked like the wood stain had been bikini waxed right off. Guests just sat in them, politely, and hoped not to stick to the seats.

What stained the chairs? I have no idea. It doesn't matter really, because my chairs suffered less from a specific chemical than from a force: The Girl Sty.

Women don't like to admit this, but we all at some point in our lives were messier – filthier, really – than any of the men we know. We piled wet towels on the floor of closets, we shoved candy wrappers under beds, we have left apple cores in our cars for so long they developed ecosystems.

Men can be plenty gross, but their bathroom counters never seem to develop that layer of film – what the hell is that stuff, anyway? – that coats our tiles. Try as they might with their quaint piles of smelly sweat socks and tightie-whities, they will never match the power, the wonder, the stench of The Girl Sty.

My car is just a rolling Girl Sty with a great sound system. CDs, empty water bottles and scraps of paper are crammed into every corner of my car that isn't taken up with baby blankets, baby socks, baby toys and, of course, my baby. I change Zev's diaper right on my passenger seat hoping 1. His tush isn't going to transfer any germs to my next passenger and 2. Desitin is good for leather.

Still, nobody beats the Queen of The Girl Sty: My sister. Growing up, Sis would curl up in bed with spent razors and bottles of hair spray. It was The Girl Sty that she created while living with us one summer that left my old chairs stained forever.

After visiting Sis' new place in Northern California, all my mom could talk about was how clean Sis' apartment was.

"Everything is so neat and so clean," Mom gushed. "You wouldn't believe it."

I didn't. I suspected Sis' newfound cleanliness was a ruse, and without much pressing, she very cheerfully admitted as much.

"Right now there are big things of trash," she said. "I'll take it out later. It's just me, I'm not being harmed by the trash. Why do people rush to the trash? I have a lot of room, I can share it with the trash."

Apparently, though, she's not as bad as she used to be. When Sis lived with Hubby and I, we kept the door to her room closed and prayed that an earthquake would break it off from the rest of the house. I guess she learned from that because these days, the bulk of her Girl Sty is confined to her second bedroom – the door to which she also leaves closed.

The rest of her place, she promised, is actually pretty clean.

"Right now, the reason it's clean is my friend's roommate is a boy and he keeps their apartment so clean, so when they come over I'm embarrassed."

I'm convinced that this peer pressure is the reason many women clean at all. We don't want men to know we're filthy. We want them to think we wash our hair every day and that we'd never leave the house without showering. We want them to think we have never licked a spoon clean and put it back in the drawer. Because if they don't – if they catch on to the fact that we're hardly the "fairer sex," how can we ever browbeat them into doing our dishes?

Sis agreed. Our conversation turned nostalgic, and I reminded Sis of the time she heard a crunch as she settled into a chair in her old apartment and found she'd killed a mouse.

"Ha. Oh yeah," she said. "Well, so far, I haven't seen any bugs, so I'm OK."

I can't wait to drive my Girl Sty up north for a visit.

Mommies and Me

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

Aside from my fantastic bum, I thought I had nothing in common with Britney Spears. Even when she started to get picked on for being a bad mom, I shrugged off the circumstance as mere coincidence. But as the media flogging intensifies, I feel, suddenly, like Britney's my kindred spirit. Mine and probably every other mom's on the planet.

Britney deserved to be excoriated for driving with her child on her lap. That was just plain stupid. But the high chair thing was a little murkier. And driving with Sean Preston's car seat facing forward is actually notin violation of state law, provided her toddler weighs more than 20 pounds.

A few weeks ago, America's Worst Mommy was back in the news for tripping and bobbling her baby. I challenge any of those tabloid editors to raise a child without ever once dropping him or bumping his head.

But it wouldn't matter. It's like the paparazzi have been replaced by a pack of meddling yentas: "Oy, she's such a bad mother. Like this, I'd never raise my child."

Don't you have a Jennifer Aniston uterus-cam to monitor? Leave poor Britney alone.

I'm not the only one saying this. Last week, The Associated Press reported the results of a Parenting.com poll that asked whether the media have "gone too far" in skewering Britney. Of nearly 10,000 responses, 75 percent said yes.

I'm guessing moms are siding with Britney because they're fed up with their own paparazzi-esque critiques. For a society that won't talk on elevators, we sure have a lot to say about other women's children: I've been chastised for dressing Zev in hats and for taking him outside without one. A homeless guy once followed me for a block, yelling that I should give my crying baby a bottle. (What he really needed was Orajel, which I was on my way to get; but thanks for your concern, Mr. Homeless Man Baby Whisperer).

After I wrote a column about my dog biting my son, reader Stephen Thompson e-mailed to say my child should be taken away from me.

I'd liketo write back, saying, "Hi, Stephen, we haven't met, but I have a suggestion of two things that should be taken away from you." But of course, I wouldn't actually say that because who would say such a thing?

Nobody.

Similarly, nobody would ever stop a woman CEO and say, "Oh, darling, that's not how you hold a briefcase." But they would if they thought they could get away with it. Motherhood may be the last grassy plain where misogyny can roam free, and Britney is stranded in the middle of it.

Not all celebrity moms are subject to Death By Scrutiny. Nobody's calling Gwyneth Paltrow a bad mommy. She's willowy, so she can go ahead and name her children Apple and Moses and no one calls the police. The worst anyone could say about O.C. native Gwen Stefani is that she had the temerity to give birth the same weekend as Angelina Jolie, thereby ensuring nobody would care. And, by the way, who's to say Brad and Angelina haven't already dropped Shiloh 150 times by now? As the saying goes, if a child falls in Namibia, nobody hears about it.

But Britney is a different class of celebrity, the class that is just as unclassy as the rest of us. And, therefore, she's subject to the same kind of unsolicited critiques we are – albeit under a much bigger, harsher lens.

So the next time you see an "Oops! She Did It Again!" headline (and you will), remember that your own mother did not strap you into her car with anything more than a seatbelt (if that) and that you have likely made your own share of mistakes. If you do, if you cut her some slack, maybe one day we will live in a world where people don't feel as casually entitled to stick their noses in everyone else's dirty diapers. A world where well-intentioned moms can feel good about simply doing their best.

A world where all I have in common with Britney Spears is my fabulous rear end.

Aaaaye! Robot

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

This year marks the 85th anniversary of the robot, which begs the question: Why do I have a cold?

Robots were supposed to be our faithful servants. They were supposed to scrub our toilets wearing French maid outfits with nary a whisper about minimum wage or wedgies. At least that's what Karel Capek had in mind when he wrote his 1921 play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)." He used robots as a metaphor for humanity's capacity to torture and our natural leanings toward depravity.

Or whatever. The point is, I'm sick, and if the robot has been around for 85 years, why hasn't it figured out a way to make me better?

Better yet, why didn't a robot - Secret Service-style - intercept the nasty germs that made me sick in the first place?

Where are those magic wands of "Star Trek" fame to shoot nano-love bits into me to eat up my virus? Where is my "Jetsons" machine to conveyor-belt me from my bed through the shower, closet and breakfast table without me having to lift a single, aching digit? I'm too sick to move, so where's the robot nanny who can comfort my crying child, feed him, dress him and teach him to be fluent in over 6 million forms of communication?

Nowhere. That's where.

You're going to tell me that the chick in your dashboard tells you when to turn right to get to the supermarket, and I'm going to tell you that she should do your shopping for you. Especially when you've got the chills and the very thought of the refrigerator section makes you weep.

Let's face it, my human brethren, robots have largely been a disappointment.

In fact, the Cambridge Robot Project, which launched this month in England to celebrate the bloody bloodless creatures' birth, is so at a loss to find cool robots to extol, they've had to define "robot" as any machine that'll do your work for you. Less "Terminator," more calculator.

This should offer some comfort to people who fear robots will one day take over the world. They needn't worry. My dishwasher has been making funny noises, but I doubt it's telling my coffee maker and microwave to rise up in revolt. Instead, it's probably telling me that it's sick and that I'm going to have to call a humanto come make it better.

That's how it is with these robots, isn't it? Whine, whine, whine.

To my dishwasher I say, "Shut up and make my throat not hurt.

"Can't, can you? Stupid, useless robot."

My animus toward robots might just be displaced frustration with my physical exhaustion and the fact that my cold forced me to give up my ticket to Madonna. But who cares? I feel lousy, and if I want to beat up on robots, I will.

After all, they haven't become, despite Capek's prediction, thinking, feeling circuits of artificial intelligence. They don't know that I'm casting aspersions on the whole of their miserable, mechanical race.

Or do they?

Come to think of it, no one else in my household is sick, and I'm the only one who has recently cursed my water heater. What else but sinister robots could explain the fact that Hoobastank is still releasing albums? And, really, how can I prove that my dryer didn't infect my duvet with typhoid?

Maybe robot-fearers are right. Maybe it's not bird flu we should dread but human-hopping computer viruses. Nano death rays shooting out of our laptops. Mucus-smearing hands-free car washes. Maybe the robots are staging their revolution one feverish, delirious human at a time.

It's too late for me. Save yourself.

If your throat starts to tingle or your nose starts to drip, hug your vacuum cleaner, look deep into its nozzle and say, "Happy 85th birthday, robot."

I pray it takes pity on you.

Lace 'em Up

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

Zev turns 1 next month. Which means he'll taste his first bite of cake, drink his first sip of cow's milk, and surrender his All-Access Pass to my breasts.

Nursing my son has been an amazing bonding experience, and I ache at the thought of weaning him. But I also just plain ache. Zev's become quite the sharp-toothed suction fish, and I'm so used to being a dairy cow I can't remember what it was like to be a woman.

So it's with a little more delight than I'd anticipated that I am preparing to end this phase of motherhood. And I know exactly how I'm going to celebrate this milestone: I'm going to buy a big-girl bra.

I'm going to buy a bra that's pretty and frilly with underwire and actual support. One whose cups can't be unsnapped by the ever-refining motor skills of an 11-month-old. One that doesn't smell like milk.

I'm going to buy a bra that makes me feel like the women in those bra ads are paid to look like they feel.

I've never been a big underthingy person - unlike some people I know, I will actually leave the house in a brassiere that doesn't match my panties. But something about spending a year switching between two racer-back nursing bras has me pining for La Perla.

I hadn't recognized how obsessed I'd become with trading in my worn-out undergarments; but when I started to notice the amount of arm hair on individual underwear models, I realized I'd been staring at the ads too long.

In fact, I've become something like a pervert, pawing at padded pushups in department stores, caressing elastic bits of spandex-blend lace, tossing expectant glances at little spaghetti straps.

"Can I help you?" a Nordstrom saleswoman recently inquired.

"Not likely," I stammered. "I'm pretty much beyond help right now."

Maybe it's ridiculous, the way we allow what we wear to influence how we feel about ourselves. But tell me you wouldn't feel frisky if you were dressed like a rabbit, or invincible in a superhero outfit. Now imagine a superhero outfit with bunny ears and a tail, and you get an idea of what I'm shopping for.

A big-girl bra would also serve a very practical purpose: interference. Weaning is going to be somewhat difficult. I've already started the process, and Zev doesn't much care for it. He likes me. In fact, if he so much as catches a glimpse of my bare breasts, he screams and lunges at me. Think Victoria's Secret would give away their security guard free with purchase?

I've considered the possibility that my increased meditations on all things underwire is a coping mechanism, something to take my mind off the fact that my little baby is growing up and entering a new, more independent stage of his life.

I've considered that possibility. And I've dismissed it.

It's not that I've grown wary of nursing. I still love that sweet, milk-drunk smile that spreads over Zev's face after a feeding. I love the way his hand curls around my thumb and his giant eyes look up at me while he's gulping down his breakfast.

It's just that it's been nearly a year of this maternal bliss, and I'm ready to reclaim my body. Reclaim it, and stuff it into lace. This is going to be a difficult and delicate process, I realize. There will likely be tears - mine and his, and some frazzled nerves.

I might need a miracle to get through it, but for now I'll settle for a Miracle Bra.

Devotion Bought In Bulk

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

We long ago let our membership to Costco lapse. Hubby and I did the math and figured that $50 was too much to spend every year for the privilege of buying toilet paper. But lately I realized that choosing not to be Costco members was possibly the most un-American act we've ever committed.

Costco is like the United States itself: vast, overwhelming and seemingly teeming with options that are just this side of necessary.

One toothbrush might be good enough for a Chinese peasant with bleak prospects for the future. In this country we buy 'em by the fistful.

And how about those glorious packages of paper towels? Oh, man. Those golf-cart-size mounds that you just want to throw your arms around and squeeze? Is it me, or do they scream, "This is America! And we have a lot of sopping to do!"?

Pardon my jingoism but I recently set foot in Costco for something other than a flu shot for the first time in several years, and I'm feeling a bit awe-struck. I had this idea to accompany my mom to Costco in Huntington Beach for a column about how she visits the warehouse superstore as often as some people visit their refrigerators.

The store is set up for, at best, monthly trips, so I don't understand what she does there every few days. But my writerly conceit vanished as soon as I walked upon the hallowed grounds of this Grand Canyon of savings. From the mountains of cereals to the prairie-style dinette sets to the ocean of children's toys made of foam - I knew I was someplace blessed.

Standing in the home entertainment section, with the sounds of "Ice Age" mixing in the air with the hum of the floor-cleaning Zamboni and the scent of free chicken tender samples filling my nostrils, it was all I could do to keep from placing my right hand over my heart and pledging my allegiance.

NSA, forget cell phones: Target households that don't buy their kiwis in bulk. Because if you haven't bought into Costco, you haven't bought into America.

One of the beauties of Costco is that it plans your life for you while tricking you into thinking you have options. Like an immigrant who believes the streets of America are paved with gold, a naïve Costco member will walk into the store, thinking they're going to buy cleaning products and produce, but leaving with a $1,600 children's treehouse.

The gorgeous treehouse display will make you believe that you've been in the market for a treehouse for quite some time, and, well, golly, aren't you just glad you came across this treehouse in the nick of time? You know, before you bought that other treehouse you'd been eyeing somewhere else.

This is how my mother came to own an outdoor patio set that is slightly too big for her back yard, a digital camera she barely knows how to use and a grandfather clock.

"A grandfather clock?" I remember asking her.

"Yes, I always wanted one," she said.

"You did?"

The other bit of Costco genius, the one that squares nicely with the American way of life, is that nothing sold there is meant to be used in its entirety. We, the people, do not take kindly to running out of things - be they Listerine or crude oil.

So we don't look at a 36-muffin flat and think, "There's no way I'm going to eat all of those." We look at it and think, "I'm going to have kids someday. And one day, one of those kids is going to want a muffin. If I buy these now, I'll be prepared."

During our trip, Mom filled her cart with a shirt for her brother, baby clothes for my cousins' kids, a package of three large bottles of hand cream, vitamins, blackberries, flats of water, a henhouse's worth of eggs, toilet paper (for me! I was so excited), paper towels and a few other items. Grand total: $174.

I've spent that much on groceries. But there's a difference - and I guess that difference explains why I didn't march over to customer service and renew my Costco nation citizenship right there and then; why, even in these post-9/11 times of heightened patriotism, I'm destined to roam the wide streets of suburbia as a downtrodden, one-toothbrushed expat: When I buy food, I buy food.

As we were leaving, my mom wanted to brainstorm a plan for the rest of the day.

"Let's drop this stuff off and get something to eat," she said.

"Didn't you just buy $174 worth of groceries?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, examining her cart. "But there's nothing to eat."

Reunion Becomes a Blessing

MAYRAV SAAR

Register columnist

I scanned the crowd, looking for the sweet woman who was always by her baby's bedside, day and night. I looked for Dr. Dar. And for the three nurses I loved best, all named Jennifer. I looked for the sleepless but incredibly competent residents. And the Spanish-speaking grandfather who was once accidentally left behind by the rest of his family - with no way to tell anyone he'd been abandoned.

I looked for all the people who had touched us during the month that Zev spent at Children's Hospital of Orange County's neonatal intensive care unit. I didn't see any of them.

Oh well, I told myself. The reunion ended at noon, and we showed up at 11 a.m. What did I expect? At a quarter to noon, we found one of the nurses we knew, said hello, schmoozed with parents we hadn't met before and then prepared to take off. Kind of a bust, really.

Then I saw him. He was walking briskly to his truck, a purposeful stride that made him instantly recognizable, even without his police officer's uniform.

The day Zev left CHOC, attached to an oxygen tank and still so frail, Officer Dad was the last person I said goodbye to. I hadn't made a point of doing so, it's just that he was standing in the hallway, and we'd seen each other in passing every day for a month, and I was so gushingly happy to be taking Zev home that I just extended my hand, introduced myself and said goodbye.

By way of introduction, he told me about his son.

Officer Dad's baby was born so extremely premature that he weighed less than 1 pound and could fit in the palm of your hand. He may have been the smallest baby the NICU had ever seen - no one knew for sure. But he wasn't going to make it, that much everyone did know. His lungs were underdeveloped, his brain was underdeveloped, his heart, his digestive organs, his everything.

After a few weeks of trying to keep him alive, the doctors and nurses told the family nothing more could be done. The tiny baby was taken off his ventilators in a solemn ceremony at his bedside. As a priest gathered with the family to give the last rites to this unlived life, the baby's mom asked to pick him up. Because he'd been in an incubator for so long, this would be the first time she would hold him in her arms.

"And something happened," Officer Dad said.

Pressed against his mother, the baby's vitals signs started to return.

He normalized. He came back.

From that day forward he kept fighting - just like Zev, just like all the kids who have "graduated" from the NICU - to stay alive.

The day Zev was born, a doctor told me, "He has one foot in this world, one foot in the next." I'm just glad he extended so much as a foot, so we could all grab it and pull him here.

Officer Dad's story reminded me of that. I've thought of it countless times as Zev has defied odds and gotten better. So when I saw him at the reunion a few weeks ago, I practically chased him down.

"Hey," I said, breaking away from my family and running. "Hey ."

He turned around, and I flooded him with questions. How is your son?

When did you come home from the hospital? How much does he weigh now?

Officer Dad answered all my questions evenly and then asked me one of his own: "Wanna hold him?"

I had never actually seen him before, sequestered as he was in a private room. So holding him felt something like a miracle. He held me in his gaze, and I told him that I'm proud of him for being well enough to go home and that I know he'll keep growing bigger and stronger. Then he rested his head on my shoulder, reached up his tiny hand and stroked my cheek. I felt like I was receiving a blessing.

I handed back this amazing baby; and just like I had 10 months earlier, I said goodbye to Officer Dad, gathered my own son and headed home, truly touched.