Learning #34 : Bring 2+ twist ties when you buy balloons

That way, you can tie them at the top and the bottom of the strings, and they won't get all tangled up  on the drive home.

Learning #33 : Good management is a honed skill

Not everybody is a good manager.  In fact, some people are pretty terrible managers. 

This is not something that’s generally discussed, officially, in a business setting.  On the contrary, the open exploration of what makes someone a really bad manager is a pretty taboo subject around the old conference room table.

And so, as someone who reads a lot of business books, I found myself genuinely surprised at the frank honesty of “Multipliers,” which tackles this sticky subject head-on.  This book teaches us that those great managers, the Multipliers, the ones under whom people stretch themselves and work their hardest and best, can increase the collective IQ and consequent effectiveness of an organization.  Whereas the bad managers - the Diminishers - suck the intelligence out of their organization, leading to a literal brain drain that dumbs down even the once-bright folks who have given up but stick around anyway.  (The "Quit and Stay," as its called in the book.)

This kind of frank discussion about both the qualifiable and quantifiable effects of bad management and bad managers, specifically, may be an uncomfortable subject for a lot of people to address directly, particularly given that the subject of bad management is most effectively addressed with the bad managers themselves.  But it’s crucial that senior management address the topic, because avoiding the subject doesn’t quell the conversation.  It just moves it.

Frustrated employees will start these conversations with peers over lunch, in carpool, behind closed doors after a particularly awful meeting, and in other secreted places so as not to be overheard by others who might either be negatively affected by their observations, or simply in a position to punish anyone making them.

Like all bad leaders, bad managers eventually frustrate and demoralize their employees.  People frustrated by an absence of good leadership will, inevitably, band together in a sort of dysfunctional camaraderie that will ultimately lead to a downward morale spiral if the root cause isn’t addressed. 

And once morale is shot, it’s really difficult to bring it back.  Bad morale systemically destroys once-healthy departments and can spread to others, the last of which is much more likely if the management dysfunction causing the problem in the first place is peppered throughout an organization.  Uninspired, unhappy people deliver, predictably, uninspired and unhappy work. 

So: to avoid creating a work environment that inadvertently rewards bad management by ignoring it, it’s imperative that we learn to recognize and discuss both good and bad management styles.  Remember, the conversations are going to happen anyway, so you as an organization should want to participate, learn, and move forward.

“Multipliers” gives us a guidebook for recognizing and understanding both excellent and terrible management, complete with charts and matrixes for those of us who appreciate such cheat sheets.  It also relies on extensive research and data to let the most left-brain of us know why this is important, as well as a staggering number of personal anecdotes to drive the point home for the right-brainers.

Basically, it’s “Goofus and Gallant” for the workplace.  Read it.

Learning #32 : Diversity is What You Make of It

When we were looking to move out of Oakland and to a neighborhood that we felt was more amenable to two women, 4 dogs and one baby, the mention of The Suburbs by my partner always made me (and my Oakland friends backing my reluctance to even look for housing in The Suburbs) wince about the lack of diversity therein.

I mean, it’s the Suburbs. Ozzie and Harriet.  Leave it to Beaver.  The American archetype of white picket fences and white picket people and kids riding their bikes to sleepovers in the well-kept homes of other white, straight nuclear families … yikes.  How would we fit in there?

And then, one day, I realized that my objection about the "lack of diversity" meant "lack of people like me" (read: gay), which is ironically the opposite of embracing diversity.  And then I had to wonder if maybe I was being just a wee bit judgemental and consequently self-limiting about the suburbs...

...especially since these suburbs are, after all, San Francisco Bay Area suburbs.  I had one friend in real estate tell me that we should be more concerned about folks worrying about our dogs (we have pit bulls) than about us being gay.

But she was wrong.  As it turns out, nobody seems particularly bothered by any of us.  In fact, when I wrote the blog post about moving to the suburbs, it didn't even occur to me to discuss the "There are no gay people here" issue, because it's just not really something that's part of our daily consciousness.

Of course, it’s not entirely true that there are no gay people here, because we’re here.  And we know 4 other 2-mom families, which makes for a pretty sweet Pride Parade of ten.

And I heard on my Moms forum that a few people know of, you know, A Gay Family here and there, so there might actually be 20 of us.

We’re so mighty, in fact, that we actually started our own Lesmorinda Moms Facebook group which, truthfully, was a joke, but then I heard from The Other Gay Family here in our town (we met at the park – Gaydar apparently still works on this side of the Caledcott tunnel) that they'd heard there was a Lesmorinda Moms group, so who knows? Maybe we'll be mighty.

(In fact, please go “Like” us so that we have more fans.  Because if you don’t, it means you don’t like gay people.  So go on, now: become a fan.)

But I’ve strayed off the main topic, which is: diversity in the suburbs.  And here’s the truth: there really aren't very many gay families in Moraga itself, but the Orinda folks tell me that there are more gay families than you might think, which is to say that there are more gay families than black families, but of course that’s not saying a whole lot, so… 

Yes: this is a very white neighborhood.  And this is a very straight neighborhood.  And most the dogs around here are of the purebred variety.

And that of course does not describe us (well, we’re white), which led to one of our biggest concerns moving out here: will we stick out?   Will people have an attitude about it?  Will our child feel different and awkward about her “novel” home life once she’s in school?

And the answer, so far, seems to be: Nope.

I mean, really, nobody cares to the point that people are almost embarrassingly welcoming.  I have been approached at both the Farmer’s Market and the park by straight women (on more than one occasion, at each) gushing that they’re thrilled that we’re here and that they’ve been waiting for more gay families and diversity to arrive and that it’s about time and that they hope more of us show up.

In fact, most the time people seem a little apologetic about the lack of more gay families here for us to play with.  It’s really sort of cute.

And nobody has actually given us the "Good God, there goes the neighborhood" glare except for one insane woman with a dog-aggressive Schipperke who frequents our local park, and she doesn't seem to like much about anything.

I will note here that a friend with a kindergartener did have her daughter come home and tell her that the girls in her class told her that she dressed like a boy, simply because she had a t-shirt on with a truck on it. I do think that folks here tend to be much more gender-specific in dressing their kids, but I also think that the neighborhoods will continue to loosen up on a narrow definition of gender roles due to lack of exposure to anything different as gay families decide that, shit, the'burbs are pretty freaking nice, and maybe it's time to be part of the diversity that makes this a normal thing for everyone.

And, while this most assuredly isn't Berkeley or Oakland or San Francisco, meaning that we don’t have the same level of socioeconomic or racial diversity, we move to The Suburbs to escape the annoyances of Berkeley or Oakland or San Francisco, most notably things like crime, sub-par schooling, and an utter lack of parking.  There is a tradeoff here, and it’s one that ended up being less of an issue than I thought it might be.

For one thing, when my partner asked me to honestly to list our Oakland friends and explain to her how this list of people could possibly count as being any more "diverse" than friends I might hang out with in the 'burbs, the best I could come up with were that a few were gay, one was a doula and a couple had Asian husbands. 

As it turns out, our friend list profile is much the same here.  I don't know anyone with an Asian husband (though I've seen them around), but I know an actual interracial lesbian couple, so I think that counts as 2 straight couples in Diverse Neighborhood Monopoly.

(The last of which would be a pretty awesome board game, actually.  Community Chest: hosting Cabaret night for the boys!  $100 for Cocktails.)

We may be starting a trend moving here, actually, because one of the Orinda Gays told me about another set of lesbians heading out this way.  Secret Fist Bump, Sapphic Sisters – I’ll show you the hiking trails where your inevitably rescued dogs can roam, and I’ll let you in on the delicious secret that you are allowed to wear comfy shoes here all the time.  I mean, men wear Crocs here. It’s utterly ridiculous, and yet so awesome in that suburban way that also apparently permits everyone from teenage girls to octogenarians to wear sweatpants in public.

Ultimately, our decision to brave the straight white people was that we are a family first, and we’re gay second. The 'burbs are freaking nice for families; why let all the straight people corner the market on safety, good schools, and nice neighbors?  Our next-door neighbors are indeed white and have 3 kids, but they’re also European and really interesting and their kids are great, and I actually talk to them.  Popping by the next-door neighbor's house is something that I never did in Oakland, in the 7 years I lived there.  I barely knew them.

Now, I can just drop by offspring next door to go to an appointment or something.  Or I can borrow a lemon.  Or I can just stop by for a "spot of tea" (they're Scottish) and feel suddenly cosmopolitan about it all.

Diversity, after all, is really what you make of it.

Learning #31 : A Great Partnership Makes for a Great Life

Every small town seems to have a Town Crier.  This person  welcomes you to the neighborhood with treats or hand-drawn maps of the street filled in with the names of the folks living there, and will stop by here and there to give you the lowdown on the goings-on in your 'hood.  Our Town Crier is named Kay, and she used to live in the house next door to ours before moving around the corner.  She stopped by yesterday to bring me some fresh tomatoes and some outdoor kid chairs that her grandkids had outgrown.

She also let me know that Shirley, of Larry and Shirley, had just died.

And so this post is to serve as an obituary, of sorts, for Shirley Stewart Baldwin, nee McDowell, 1921 - 2012.

Who are Larry and Shirley, you ask?  This is a good question. I've never met Larry or Shirley, but that's Shirley there at the left, sitting on a pony in front of what I assume is the Piedmont house in which she was raised.

We bought our house from Larry and Shirley a year ago.  The original builders of the home, they had lived here for 45 years and didn't seem to have remodeled much anything cosmetically since the time they'd had it built, so this house has been a pretty major project that we're still tackling, piece by piece, every day.

And so, I have to assume that both Shirley and Larry just liked things the way they liked them.

Per Kay, who used to take them to Doctor appointments and help them out with errands, Larry and Shirley were both in their '90's when they moved to assisted living.  Larry suffers from severe dementia, so Shirley was the one who made all the arrangements.  They had no children, and apparently had no other close family.  When we were purchasing the home we were dealing with a legal firm that Shirley had hired to sell the house, though Kay did tell me later that both she and Shirley read the "love letter" that I wrote to accompany my offer.  (And in Bay Area real estate that love letter can be the reason a seller chooses you over someone else, so you'd best make it good.)

One strange quirk in our home purchase was that, after I spied a few pieces of awesome mid-century office furniture that I wanted (Larry had excellent taste in chairs), the realtor hired by the law firm asked us if we just wanted to take the house and all its contents.

I said "No way!" just as my partner said, "Totally!"

And, since she was the one doing all the heavy lifting with the remodel, she got her wish.

Now, realistically, this was a terrible idea.  We were now dealing with a home stuffed with 45 years of accumulated stuff, and we had our own stuff to deal with, and we had a major remodel to do and were doing a lot of it ourselves, and we had a 5-month-old baby.  It was like cleaning out grandma's house, except that these weren't our grandparents, so there wasn't any context and nobody was sure how much stuff was really in there (answer: holycraplots), and there were plenty of other things to do, and we were under a deadline.

That being said, when you have to go through the stuff that a loving couple has accumulated in a home that they built for themselves 45 years ago, you do get a sense of who they were, and it does sort of impart a sense of responsibility into you to do right by the house and by its previous occupants (especially when you were chosen to buy a house priced under-market in a hugely competitive zip code with almost no inventory, and you went in under asking).

And so I feel compelled to tell the world a little more about Shirley Baldwin, who attended high school in Piedmont (I have her yearbooks) and, at some point in her youth, seems to have sat on a pony so that her family could take a portrait.

Shirley and Larry absolutely loved this home.  They designed it, had it built, spent a great deal of time and expense with a landscape architect to plant it, and took meticulous care of it.  They moved here from Oakland in 1966 (we have documents from their old house, too), and - as referenced previously, and as we found when we pulled carpet to discover even more linoleum - changed very little in all the years they lived here.

Bear in mind, though, that while this house was covered in the original wallpaper and linoleum, there was a new roof and a new water heater and a new furnace and new double-paned windows (huge score), and all of these things were top of the line.  Larry and Shirley had excellent taste in the things they chose to purchase, which I've come to believe goes along with Shirley's thoughtful and meticulous nature.

Shirley was in fact so meticulous that about 2 months after we moved in we received, in the mail, the spare garage door opener that she'd accidentally taken with them when they moved.  Oh, Shirley.  You rock.  And in the desk, we found an envelope labeled "house" in Shirley's writing, with swatches of the original carpeting and wallpaper and other building materials in it.  Cool.

Shirley seems to have enjoyed cooking; her cookbooks are dog-eared and notated, and there were a lot of them.  She also had an impressive collection of Pyrex and Tupperware, which I gratefully still use.  They really just don't make them like that anymore.

Shirley also had an endless supply of baggies, aluminum foil, wax paper, and other kitchen supplies that we kept and still have.  She labeled the open boxes with "Open" on their ends in Sharpie, so that she'd know which box of the 5 to pull out when she needed some foil.  I love this about Shirley; the consummate organizer, I can only imagine the sigh she'd let loose if she saw my sock drawer.

We also found the original landscape architecture plans, because Shirley and Larry planted the hillside and then fenced it from the deer.  They didn't fence the property line; they just fenced the planted area.  This means that we're treated to a picture window that looks out on mature plants but can still see the deer cruising by, because Shirley apparently realized that it was less important to fence off every last square foot than it was to watch the deer and other critters that live here while still keeping the flowers safe.

Shirley loved nature.  You can tell not only by the way the house is designed, with indoor/outdoor spaces throughout, but because she also loved greeting cards.  Boxes and boxes of greeting cards, some 40+ years old, were found here, and a lot of them contain wildlife scenes and bear the names of the various wildlife and marine charities to which she donated.

But one card we found, I should note, is quite naughty.  Oh, Shirley, you didn't.

I like to think that this naughty card had friends that were sent to other blushing housewives around here, but something tells me that this card was just one that Shirley picked up along the way and kept for herself, always dreaming of sending it to someone, but not quite daring to.

Shirley did have a little bit of a wicked sense of humor, though, because in addition to that card we also found a set of peek-a-boo cocktail glasses with ladies of various professions on them (Hula Dancer, Secretary, Fairy), and those ladies don't have clothing on if you look at them from the inside of the glasses.  What kinds of shenanigans went on around here in the 60's and 70's is a topic that can never be known by anyone but Shirley and Larry, but those glasses are one of the absolute greatest things we found in this house.

Most her 1939 classmates from Piedmont High had some sort of activity, sorority, sport or group listed, but Shirley does not.  Maybe she was shy, or maybe she wasn't athletic, or maybe she just didn't see the point in padding a high school resume when she and her fellow female classmates were probably being trained as housewives and not much else.  She was pretty, though (that's her in the middle), and has a lot of signatures in her yearbook, so it would seem that Shirley McDowell was well-liked by her peers. 

Shirley was a sentimentalist and kept lots of things that other folks throw away, but I hesitate to call her a pack rat because the things she kept were so organized and in such excellent working order.  The 1960's Singer sewing machine still had its instruction manual, and the old Royal typewriter had ribbons and carbon paper, all labeled and organized, in the desk.  Everything we found was like this: packed in original packaging, instruction manuals intact, and labeled in Shirley's handwriting, which was much the same as it is in her yearbook, only eventually, as the appliances and their assorted marketing materials became newer, the writing became a bit older, a bit more uneven, a bit wobblier; a testimony of times going by, as told by a stack of instruction manuals.

Both Larry and Shirley loved, loved, loved being out to sea.  They had a boat called "Misty" and were members of the Encinal Yacht Club for years (we donated a bunch old yearbooks of yachts and other vintage Encinal paraphernalia to this club).  Kay told us that, being unable to have children, Shirley and Larry essentially channelled that energy into their boat.  We inherited marine maps, books, ropes, and a lot of other yachting-related odds and ends, all preserved and organized and labeled.

In their day Larry and Shirley enjoyed entertaining, and the wet bar housed not only a collection of naughty glasses (among others), but stacks of cocktail books with awesome 1960's imagery.  We also found bottles of Trader Vic's mixers that might be older than I am.

And, more than anything, Shirley loved Larry.  A box of their love letters and seemingly every birthday and anniversary card he ever gave her was testimony to that, as were the photos of them on various cruises.  Those we were fortunately able to return to Shirley, without actually meeting her: we found them in the house before escrow closed, so put them out for her to find again.

The childhood portrait of Shirley and her pony is one of the things that I've been wondering whether or not I should get rid of, because the convex glass makes it look as though her eyes are following you around a room.  But something still has me hanging onto it.  I don't know what to do with it, exactly, but I feel strange tossing it out, so it lives in the office closet for now while we decide whether or not having it here is inviting Shirley to come back for a visit - which, having moved here from an 1898 Victorian full of mystery noises and voices and other unexplained phenomena, wouldn't be the strangest thing that's ever happened to us in our home, but truthfully we were sort of happy about leaving the paranormal behind for a change.

In any case, with nobody else to do it and being in the unique position to get up close and personal with Larry and Shirley through the belongings they'd accumulated here over 45 years, I figured it was only fitting to tell the world a little bit about Shirley Baldwin.

Shirley Baldwin was a thoughtful, sentimental and fastidious person who took great pride in and care of the things around her, and lived her life to the fullest with her husband.

I never met her, but I wish I had.

Learning #30 : My Car is a Diaper Bag

(Not my car, I swear...)

I was recently asked to give a quick lift to two friends who were on their way to dinner, as I was on my way out of town.

This is normally a request that I'd be happy to honor, except that in this case, I was being asked to give a lift by two single, child-free women dressed in Versace and Jimmy Choos, the last of which is the reason that they weren't able to walk 4 blocks to dinner in the first place.

And this is normally a request that I'd be happy to honor - hello, ladies, looking lovely tonight - except for the fact that I had already been in both of their cars.

Their immaculate, German, We-are-Established-Professional-Women-Without-Children-Cars.

I used to have one of these cars.  It had seat warmers and turbo and a Bose stereo system, and my CD case was the messiest thing in it, and even that had all the discs color-coded, because everybody knows that the easiest way to find the Ani diFranco Yellow One is to have a page of yellow CD's.

And then I had a baby. And now my car is simply not my car anymore.  It's a child transportation device, and it looks it.

Here is what established professional people without children may or may not realize about having a child (I certainly didn't):

Leaving your house is like camping.  All the time.

And this is because you never quite know what you might need.  A snack pack?  Two changes of socks?  A sweatshirt?  You may think you're going to Whole Foods, but then your kid falls asleep on the way there and she missed her nap yesterday and she doesn't transfer out of the car very well, so... well, you may as well drive somewhere, and the weather's nice, and wow, it might actually be nice to go for a hike in Marin, but the list of things to accomplish that is:

hiking shoes and socks for you
sweatshirt for baby
diapers and wipes
sunblock
food for both of you
water for  both of you
snacks for her
stroller
hat

And if you don't have these things with you, now you're either parking at Whole Foods and listening to the radio with the sunroof open hoping that folks don't think you're stalking their children, or you're driving aimlessly and trying to figure out where you can go with what you have with you.

And this is why I have a bin in my car full of what might appear to be a pile of discarded litter, but what is actually intentional litter like extra socks, diapers, sunblock, and a tupperware full of trail mix.  And this makes my car a bit of a mess, but damnit - I am ready, people.  Rain?  Hike? Trip to the pool?  Yes and yes and yes. Let's go.

But what really makes my car a mess is the food.

When I was single, I remember getting into the car of a coworker with two small children and being entirely horrified by the pen marks, crumbs and other detritus.  "God," I thought, "Why do these people let their children eat and draw in the car?"

And the answer is: Because otherwise they'd never get anywhere.

I mean, seriously, it already somehow takes me 90 minutes to get out of the house with a toddler.  Maybe, just maybe, I can do it in an hour - but it's doubtful, and I might have to go without a shower.

When you're already running 30 minutes late and your child needs a snack, you have two options:

1) Feed the child at home and run 45 - 60 minutes late.
2) Give the kid a car snack and just get moving, dammit, because you're packed and ready and you need to get out of the freaking house.

Now, there are certain snacks that should just never be car snacks.  Bananas, as I found out the hard way, are one of these snacks; yogurt is another, though if you put the yogurt in a Thermos kids can use the straw, but even still - one toss and you may have yogurt all over your seats.

On the plus side, at least your child is happy.  And she's not eating something made up entirely of carbs.

At some point between now and when my sister had kids, a packaging genius came up with Capri-Sun-like pouches of baby food.  These are portable and organic and fantastic and seem like a great idea for the car... right up until your kid squeezes its contents all over her freaking carseat and self.  Now, with 8 out of 10 times with a pouch leading to a satiated, happy child and only 2 culminating in mess-all-over-the-damn-place, this is a gamble that I'm usually willing to take.  But, be forewarned, potential backseat passengers: you may find a sad, stray dried-up drop of peas, pear and mango somewhere that I haven't noticed.

So, wet snacks, by nature, do carry their own risk factors.  But even snacks that you think are safe - trail mix, raisins - will inevitably end up in the cracks of your seat, in the carseat, on the floor, and of course in the bin that holds the sunblock and socks and scarf and baby sunglasses.  On the plus side, your child may be mildly peckish one day after having tossed all other proferred car snacks aside, and - being a resourceful sort - may reach into a previously undiscovered car seat crack and extract a pumpkin seed for consumption.  Nom nom!

Which is to say that, overall, when confronting the challenge of car snacking with children, you're between a crumb and a sticky place: dry things are messy, but wet things are sticky.   Choose your demon.

My mother used to take her car to the car wash once a week, without fail.  We often accompanied her on this errand, finding the car wash and its ready supply of candy and pine-scented ornamentation endlessly fascinating.  Her car was always clean.

So, one of the things I've learned about myself as a parent is: my mother is apparently a more fastidious and time-managed person than myself, because seriously, not only do I not want to spend $25 a week to have someone vacuum up raisins, but if I have 45+ minutes to spare and I'm toting the baby, I'm heading to the gym or the supermarket.  And I am definitely not willing to give up a precious, fleeting hour of actual free time every week so that my single friends aren't embarrassed to be in my car.  No way.

I don't even know where the car wash is, people.  And I'm not ashamed.

Well, OK, I'm a little bit ashamed.  But there's a reason that SF Gate has a "Messy Mom Car" photo contest, so at least I know that I'm not alone.

I'll note here that I am actually willing to pay someone to detail my car and start over and then try to somehow keep it cleaner than it has been.  But I haven't gotten around to it, mostly because a car detail takes hours and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with a baby for hours while someone scrapes crusty yogurt goo off the carpet, and paying a sitter so that I can go get my car detailed knowing that a toddler is inevitably going to funk it up again is just annoying.

And so we are at an impasse, me and my increasingly, embarrassingly filthy car.

We did finally wash the car seat cover, so while there are no more hidden snacks for the offspring to locate, at the very least I don't feel like her ride is a biohazard.

And this is about as good as it gets these days.

My newest idea is to get the neighbor kid to wash my car, because exploiting the value of $5 to an 8-year-old sounds a lot better than all the other car wash scenarios, most especially the one that includes me doing it myself.

Learnings #28 (& #29) : Uptight Men Wrote the Dictionary

There is a scene in "Foul Play" wherein some nice old ladies are playing Scrabble.  Being a classic Chevy Chase / Goldie Hawn late '70's movie, no gag is left unturned in any scene, and it's quickly revealed that these nice old ladies are spelling dirty words, which leads to a debate between them as to whether or not "Mutherfucker" has a hyphen.  And it's fitting that these nice old ladies verbally debated this important grammatical quandary, as dictionaries at the time didn't seem to include these kinds of words.  Or ours didn't, anyway.  We looked.

"Foul Play" is my mother's favorite movie.  And, thusly, it's only fitting that this story starts with her. (She, for the record, felt that "Mutherfucker" was not hyphenated, but that it was in fact misspelled.  I concur.)

But before we get there, I'll reference the screen shot on the above, from a recent "Words with Friends" game which, like so many of Zynga's games, is a classic board game (in this case, Scrabble) made mobile (and somewhat intrusively social) with a few slight rule changes.

One of these rule changes seems to be that certain profane words are not allowed; in the case of my play, above, I will note that I assumed that the non-acceptability of the word "clit" was due to the abbreviation and not the content.

A friend told me that she was unable to play the word "slut," and I never did get letters to play the entire word (too bad, because paying all 7 letters is an extra 35 points), so whether or not "clitoris" is in fact an "acceptable" word to Zynga's dictionary is still unknown.

Another friend did spell "vulva," so perhaps actual body parts are allowed (please take note, Michigan House Republicans), but misogynistic slurs are not.    Hmm...

And this brings me back to a long-ago game of Scrabble when I was 8 or 9 years old and, incredibly, somehow beating the single most literate person I have ever met in my life.  My Mom devours crossword puzzles on a daily basis; she has a dictionary made especially for the "extraordinarily literate"; she took a 1st grade assignment to recite a poem aloud for the class as an exciting opportunity to endear herself to her classmates by memorizing and reciting the entirety of Poe's "The Raven."

And that means that my Mom is a holy terror at Scrabble, and was always assumed unbeatable.  She will spell words that you think are made up and, with only a mild air of impatience for doubting her, will then sit there beatifically as you look it up to find that, yes, beaze is a word, and it does mean "to dry in the sun," and she got the damn Z on a triple word score, too, and now she's killing you.  Again.

Except for this one day, when I was winning, by a good margin, and I was just a kid.

It was dumb luck, really.  Mom had been getting terrible letters; I'd had a streak of good ones that led to simple words and good scores.  Scrabble is the one game in which my Mom is actually competitive, too, so I can hardly blame her for taking advantage of the triple word score with C-U-N-T.

I mean, the C is worth 3 points.  And it was the best play she had going for her.

The other thing my mother had taught us about Scrabble, though, is that the word must be a "real" word, and the judge and jury of that realness was our dictionary.  So when I saw this word, a tiny one-syllable word I'd never seen before, I simply announced, "Mommy, CUNT (pronounced: koont) is not a word."

Our conversation then went something like this:

Mommy: Well, Leslie, it's pronounced "cunt," and it is a word, but it's not a very nice word so we don't say it out loud.
Leslie: What does it mean?
Mommy: Well... it's a very bad word for "vagina."
Leslie: Ew, vagina!  I think "vagina" sounds way worse than "koont."
Mommy: Well... OK, you don't have to say either of them, but definitely don't say "cunt."
Leslie (doubtful): I'm going to look it up.
Mommy: OK

And, incredibly, the word "cunt" was not actually in our dictionary.  Victory!  Or so I thought.

Mommy: Well, some words that are really words aren't actually in the dictionary.

Now, this made me suspicious.  How on earth could a word exist without being in the dictionary?  I smelled some actual foul play here, and decided to bring in an impartial judge.

Leslie: I'm going to ask Daddy.
Mommy: No, no!  Let's not ask Daddy, he's... busy.
Leslie: But the word isn't in the dictionary, and that's the rule.
Mommy: Leslie, do you really think that I'd make up a word just to try to beat you at Scrabble?

I thought about this. And the answer was: no, I really didn't.  My Mom just wasn't a cheater, at all. A pottymouth with a fluid notion of Scrabble rules, maybe; but a cheater, no way. And she had looked both surprised and, might I add, rather indignant that "cunt" wasn't in the dictionary.

And so I let the play stand. And the universe punished her with a Q with no U and all consonants the whole game and I ended up winning anyway, which may also be attributed to the fact that she was distracted due to trying to move the game along before Dad came in and saw the board.

Or, you know, just the upper right-hand corner of the board, where the triple word score is.

And so we will flash forward 30 years, when I was in a heated match of Scrabble with both of my parents and, having suffered for multiple plays by having a Q in my rack without the damn U, and being tired of playing "Qi" every time that happens, I'd waited it out.  And I finally had the U, *and I had the opportunity for a double word score.  And so, proudly, I spelled:

Q-U-E-E-F

My Dad gave me a look, and said, "Queef?  Really?"   Oh, dear.  This might be awkward.

But I then realized that the look wasn't so much a "I can't believe you spelled that" so much as it was the same look I'd given my Mom 30 years before, as he then said, "Queef is not a word."

Um...  OK, now this was going to be really awkward.  Our conversation then went something like this:

Leslie (trying not to laugh): Oh, "queef" is a word, all right.  Come on, Mom, back me up here.
Mom: Queef?  What is a queef?  That is not a word, Leslie.

I couldn't believe it.  How could the woman who uses the word "elan" in everyday conversation and talks about Daniel Day Lewis' "attractive physique" and, more to the point, has a pretty impressive grasp of naughty words in general not know this word?

Leslie: OK, I can't believe that you don't know this word, but I swear, it is a word, you guys, seriously!  Look it up.

And so we turned to the trusty dictionary again - a more recent dictionary than the one we'd had when I was a kid - and that freaking dictionary failed us.  Again.  For Cuntsakes, Merriam-Webster, get the stick out of your bunghole and put some filthy queefing words in your motherfucking dictionary, if only to spare people like me and my Mom these embarrassing Scrabble moments.

And then our conversation went something like this:

Leslie: OK, seriously though, it is a word.  Have you really never heard this word?
Dad: No, so what is a "queef" then?
Leslie (looking sideways): Well, it's a vaginal fart.

And then my Dad made that same annoyed sigh that he used to make when my sister and I were fooling around in Church.  And my Mom burst into the same uproarious laughter that she always does when something this absurd surfaces around the family table.

Dad: Leslie, that is not a real word.
Leslie: Dad, of course it's a real word!  It's a real thing, isn't it?  Are you saying that a queef doesn't exist?  Have you never encountered a queef?
Mom: (laughing, harder)
Dad: (loud sigh)
Leslie:  Look, all I'm saying is that the phenomena of a queef is very real, and so of course there's a word for it, just like there's a word for fart.

Mom, still laughing.
Dad, shaking his head.

Leslie: Seriously, you guys, if penises had farts coming out of them I guarantee you that there would be a word for it, and it would be in the freaking dictionary*, because the dictionary - like every other old text we hold sacred - was written by a bunch of entitled men!

Unfortunately, I had now strayed into the world of Leslie-goes-all-political, and that world is not welcome around the Scrabble table.

And so I insisted that I be allowed to go look it up online, but unfortunately the only dictionary I could find with the word "queef" in it was Urban Dictionary, which I felt was at least better than nothing, so I printed out the page and brought it back downstairs.

More unfortunately, neither of my parents were particularly convinced that a site called "Urban Dictionary" was an acceptable Scrabble resource, particularly when my Mom took the printout and started reading aloud.

My Dad excused himself at that point to head to the bar, as I recall, which was conveniently located a few steps away from the game table... so not out of earshot, but far enough away that he could pretend that this absurd conversation about this apparently previously unknown vaginal phenomena wasn't happening with his wife gleefully participating.

I think it was definition #3 that sealed my fate.  Once my Mom got to the point about Southern ladies tooting their TOOTS, they both decided that I was simply not allowed to play this made-up-sounding word, whether or not it was in fact a word that was used by the Urban Dictionarians to describe an allegedly refreshing self-propelled Southernmost ladyfolk breeze.

I tried to appeal to my Mom's sense of fairness by reminding her of that long-ago Scrabble game in which "cunt" hadn't been in the dictionary, but it was to no avail.  I was outvoted.

And so I played "queen" instead, which cost me 6 points because the F is worth 4 and the N is only worth one.  Boo.

And this is why I have decided to make it my mission to get this word into the dictionary, because truthfully, "Queef" is a pretty excellent Scrabble move.   Merriam-Webster has this to say about how words get added to the dictionary:

Since words are entered into the dictionary on the basis of actual usage, the best way to get a word in the dictionary is to use it and to encourage others (especially professional writers and editors) to use it. 

If you'd like to join me in my Queefing Quest, here's how:

1) Go to the Merriam-Webster Facebook page
2) Either post a link to this blog post to the Wall, or send it to them in a Message
3) Drive it home by simply asking, on the Wall or in a Message, that they add the word "Queef" to the dictionary.
4) Go ahead and use this word, and encourage others to use it.

You'll be glad you did the next time your Scrabble or Words with Friends rack has a Q-U-E-E- and there's an open F on the board.  Trust me on this one.













(*And it would probably be a really awesome word, too, like "peenphoon!"  Not that I'm in any way critiquing the word "queef," which I find charming, and rather fun to say.)