I love kids. I love my nephew, my partner’s niece, our friends’ kids, unsuspecting four-year-olds that I try to lure into my van with candy, all of them. They bring me joy, they light up my heart, they give me hope for a better world, because as pre-crack Whitney Houston once said, the children are our future.

Yes, I love kids. I’ve always loved kids.

But after what just happened, I think I may no longer love kids.

Last week, my partner and I (and 15 other friends) went on a cruise to Mexico. We’ve been on a number of cruises, mostly international ones that left out of places like London, Barcelona, etc., where the children on board numbered maybe 50.

This was a cruise to Mexico. Over Thanksgiving week. Leaving out of LA, where most of the schools gave kids the whole week off. And among the 3,500 passengers were at least 1,000 kids – of all ages, from roughly 15 minutes post-epidural to teens.

And all, seemingly, unsupervised.

Apparently, there’s an underground network of parents who know that if you take your kids on a cruise, you can be off getting hammered somewhere while they’re busy depositing bowls of cereal in the elevators, tearing through the adults-only pool area screaming like burn victims, and throwing up in the swimming pools.

After all, you can’t really lose them. Little kids are too short to fall overboard, and the older ones are too busy popping their zits in the hot tubs and hitting on each other in the buffet lines to try. And what better place to unload your offspring than into the arms of 998 other kids who would love nothing more than to try to either, a): beat them senseless with a floating noodle in the water park  or, b:) make out with them.

It appears that what I really should say is, “I love well-behaved kids.” “I love properly dressed kids.” I love sanitary, non-pukey kids.” “I love chaperoned kids.”

So, really, it seems quite clear to me that I do, in fact, love kids.

Provided we’re sailing on the Queen Mary.

In 1937.

My mother has been going through a rather dramatic extended illness this year, and at one point, I announced to my partner, “If I ever get this bad, just hit me over the head with a brick and call it a day.”

Of course, I was kidding. A brick is unwieldy, and most people don’t have them just lying around. Sleeping pills are the way to go – you can make pithy last-word proclamations, and then drift off attractively as your family members gather around you in a circle of love and light and start slipping off your jewelry.

Actually, I’ve always believed that even the most difficult of circumstances has lessons in it for everyone involved, annoying and inconvenient as they usually are. But when you watch someone you love lose almost everything that mattered to them, that idea gets tested more than a Jersey Shore castmate for brain damage.

My mother, who has always been an incredibly dynamic woman, now spends her days in one room of their house. She hasn’t seen the lower level of their home since Jesus rose from the dead last spring.

Although she has always preferred books and magazines to television, she now watches endless hours of the Food Network because, thanks to a wide variety of medications, she can barely read a watch without falling asleep.

She used to love sitting amidst the three acres of lawn and trees in their backyard, but the only trees she has seen since April are the ones whizzing by the car as Dad drives her to the doctor.

All her life she has worshipped a, shall we say, “orderly” house. (Growing up, our home was so disturbingly clean the CDC could have used it to store vaccines, and I used to have to rake myself into my bedroom at night so that our carpeting was a pristine, undisturbed meadow of shag.) Now, although a maid comes occasionally, Mother barely has enough energy to write her own name, much less a To Do list.

She loved to go to the Missouri wineries, some of which are quite beautiful (and which would provoke a Norm-from-Cheers response upon her arrival). Now wine interferes with her medications, and even one glass would likely turn her into a cast member of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Her hair is no longer perfectly coiffed. She wears no makeup. She sports no diamond rings or fashionable pantsuits. And this woman, who has always had a steel trap mind, will ask me three times, in the space of seven minutes, if she’s had her pills.

“You should have been here the other day,” she’ll say and begin to recount a story. One that occurred 20 minutes ago. While I was sitting there.

Yet, curiously, this formerly glamorous go-getter doesn’t seem to mind that everything that was once important to her has, at least for now, fallen away.

I, of course, initially ascribed this to the drugs. “She must be high as a hot air balloon, or she’d be really pissed.”

But as I’ve watched her very slowly improve, and she’s no longer stoned on drugs, I’ve realized that some of those things just aren’t so important to her any more. It seems that now, her happiness comes from her determination to enjoy each day, no matter how small the events, or how large the annoyances. (And when you go to the bathroom twenty times a day, the annoyances add up.) She’s enjoying the slow process of recovery, not the idea that, once she’s recovered, she’ll be happy.

Every Friday, Oprah’s Lifeclass show is about what Oprah calls “Joy Rising” – those moments of pure joy when something wonderful happens. And although I think we’d all agree that Oprah giving you a house could be considered “joy rising”, my mother seems to have discovered her own version. The diamond rings and trips to far-flung locales and a perfectly ordered house are no longer her joy. Her children coming to vist, my dad quietly holding her hand, or a really good episode of Paula Deen – that is some joy rising.

You know those sweet, toothless, double-wide dwelling hillbillies you see on newsmagazine reports who’ve gotten scammed out of their life savings?

As an extraordinarily compassionate human being, I used to cluck my tongue at these tragic situations and think, how sad that these idiots are foolish enough to hand their money over to some grifter. How ironic that they’re too clueless to see through the ludicrous promises of extravagant returns. How pathetic that they’re reckless enough to trust someone they barely know.

And as a benevolent and empathetic soul, my heart would break for these boobs.

And then I met Lloyd Belsmack (named changed to protect the guilty).

Lloyd is a commercial real estate developer who my sister – in her kind and trusting naiveté – got us involved with. Together with a couple other investors, we bought a piece of commercial property with the intent of building office condos.

Six years later, we’re nearing a trial date against Lloyd – and his posse of degenerate cohorts – for a scam that has cost us in the neighborhood of a half million dollars. And I’ve come to realize that: a) not everyone who gets swindled is a cousin-humping mouth-breather; b) they are, and I might as well buy a home with a steering wheel in the living room, knock out some molars and start humming the Deliverance theme, because I’m one of them; or c) even reasonably savvy folk can lose their shirt in a con.

Oprah’s Lifeclass topic the other night was on the power of forgiveness. Which was particularly ironic given that I’d written the latest $5,000 check to our attorney that day. Although I no longer spend countless hours envisioning Lloyd dying in a fiery – and highly entertaining – car crash, having to constantly deal with the court case, and having our (albeit wonderful) attorney attach an industrial vacuum to my savings causes the issue of forgiveness to continually to rear its ugly head.

Oprah says that forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different. In other words, it’s the process of accepting that something happened exactly as it did.

But here’s the thing: when I first met Lloyd, my intuition – what I like to refer to as God whispering in my ear, although, since I’m deaf in one ear, I always hope he remembers to whisper into the right one – was screaming at me that there was something fishy about this guy. But, I didn’t listen.

So I guess I’ve had a little trouble accepting that things happened the way they did, because I’m mad that I didn’t listen to myself. If I could just get Doc to fire up the DeLorean and take me back to the future of 2005, I could save my sister and I a world of pain.

I’m really not angry at Lloyd anymore. I view him simply as the messenger of the lesson of forgiveness. (Don’t get me wrong, we still hope to have him living in a Kenmore box by the time we’re done, so that he doesn’t do this to anyone else.)

The thing that’s weird is that, apparently, it’s not really even Lloyd that I ever had to forgive…it’s myself. And that’s one bastard that REALLY doesn’t deserve it.

I’ve always wanted to be a better person.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I consider myself unkind, or selfish, or hateful. In fact, I pride myself on hardly ever wishing that selfish drivers or old ladies with coupons were dead.

I would just like to be REALLY good, since emanating pure and utter virtuousness would not only feel incredibly fulfilling, it would allow me to rub my moral superiority in other people’s faces.

Perhaps this is what led me to last night’s premiere of Oprah’s Lifeclass, which was – coincidentally, I’m sure – on the subject of ego.

This nightly one-hour show on the OWN network, featuring the return of America’s Spiritual Leader (and I say that with no irony – she really is, people, get with the program) is an intimate, docu-style show where Reverend Oprah offers one life lesson each episode.

“How does your ego get in your way?” was the question posed last night. Naturally, my immediate answer was, “Oh, it doesn’t, thanks for asking. My goal is to be nothing more than a deeply spiritual, highly evolved human being whose only purpose is to love and be loved…all while driving a nice car, becoming a famous author, and (courtesy of friends who buy the tickets) attending celebrity-filled benefits for good causes, the names of which I sometimes even know before I see it on the gift bags.”

As the hour progressed, and Oprah began to illustrate how insidious the ego is (by using her famous “fat wagon” episode as an example – where she lost a ton of weight and lived to regret it after she trucked it out on a Radio Flyer for the world to gag over), it began to dawn on me that perhaps my goal could use just the tiniest bit of tweaking. Perhaps my desire to be a spiritual master comes with caveats – albeit minor, insignificant-in-the-scheme-of-things caveats.

Sure, I suppose I have a small attachment to driving around in a Lexus. But come on, I spend at least 90 minutes a day in my car, and I drive the cheapest Lexus they make (essentially a Prius with a little lipstick slapped on it). If I were attached to the image a luxury car provided, I’d be driving the $80,000 convertible. Right? (Sure, I can’t even remotely afford it, but still.)

And maybe I find some sort of personal aggrandizement from having my first book in development as a TV series. But come on – we all know how difficult it is to get a series on the air, and then have it be a hit. In Los Angeles, having a TV series in development is like saying you’re “taking meetings about your screenplay”. Right?

And I guess some would say that the idea that giving to others involves drinking signature cocktails at charity events – instead of just donating money or doing any actual work – is not necessarily the most evolved form of philanthropy. But hey, I work 60 hours a week and write books on the weekends. How am I supposed to dish up food at the LA Mission – right?

Oh, and I suppose I have a minor, insignificant obsession with appearing to be a spiritual master in the first place. Apparently, real spiritual masters don’t announce this as their goal – as if anyone would know that’s what they were aiming for, otherwise. (I mean, come on, in LA, sandals and a Tibetan gong just means you’re headed to your Yoga class in the Palisades.) But isn’t wanting to appear spiritually evolved better than wanting to appear to be ball-busting, or slutty, or Republican?

Apparently, Oprah doesn’t think so. Apparently, Oprah thinks my ego is getting in my way. And I have just one thing to say about that:

See you in Lifeclass at 8:00.

I sure hope tonight’s lesson isn’t on giving up potato chips. I mean, even Gandhi had limits.

But I did some NPR interviews that you can listen to on the Media page, if you’re hard up for new material on your iPod.

www.ericpoole.net/media