Dear Son:

I wish you wouldn’t worry about bad things that I can’t guarantee won’t happen.  I wish you couldn’t read so well, and I wouldn’t have to explain the “Future Porn Star” bumper sticker on the car parked ahead of us, outside your elementary school.  And finally, I wish you flushed on a more consistent basis.  Never let it be said I didn’t have wishes for you.

Love,

Mom

Dear Daughter,

I’m sorry I didn’t believe you when you said that you told your dad you weren’t supposed to have a brownie, but he gave you one anyway.  Even as a three-year old, I think you can see how far-fetched that one was.

My bad,

Mom

Dear America,

You’ve already absconded with one of my siblings.  If you think I’m letting you take another, you’re out of your automatic-weapon-loving mind.

Suck it,

Ginny

Dear Husband,

For the love of all that is holy, quit butt dialing me from your cell-phone.  (And keep in mind that at this point, I still believe your account of what’s happening, and have not yet fallen into the assumption that you are lying, and are instead engaging in an absurdly passive-agressive hobby.)  Also, if you could change the ring tone on your phone so that when I call, it DOESN’T play the Imperial Death March?

That’d be awesome.

Love,

G

Dear Smell Emanating from my Kitchen Sink Drain,

What the fuck are you?  More importantly, what will it take to kill you?

Yours in Confusion,

Ginny

A little while ago, I interviewed Headless Mom, here on my blog, as part of Neil’s Great Interview Experiment. She’s a cool, multi-dimensional chick, and I was glad to get to know her.

Now, it’s my turn to give up the goods.

Quadelle asked me some questions.  I answered them, mostly (although with language saltier than her blog is accustomed to.  My bad.)  Check out the interview here.

No, seriously, go check it out.  Because I told her things about me that I haven’t ever told you (What can I say?  She knew the secret knock.).

And I gave her one big, gigantic scoop.  Like, I’m going to have to change my “About” page, it’s such a big piece of news.

Off now, with you.  Follow those links.  Expand your (blog) horizons!

Long story short, on Saturday night, I ended up in a room full of Buddhists.

I sat at a table, with my non-Buddhist friends, and 3 women I didn’t know.

One of my friends broke the ice, asked if any of the women were members of the temple putting on this fundraiser.

“I used to practice there,”  answered one of the women.

She described the location of the temple.  Turns out, it’s right behind the “big” Buddhist temple here in town.

The other Buddhist temple practices, in her words, a more “gentle” form of Buddhism.  And although she wasn’t affiliated with that other, bigger temple, she had sought the advice of its spiritual leader.

One of the pieces of advice this spiritual leader gave was to reserve a room in your house for anger.  When you come in from work, from the stresses of the day, you should go directly to that room, get your anger out, find peace, so as not to spread that anger to your family, to your children.

We all agreed, that sounded like a very good idea.

And then I thought about my life.

And I realized that there are days,

when I would never come out of that room.

(Image is “Prayers for the dead…” by Wonderlane)

I avoid pregnant women.

It’s not a superstition.  I’m not afraid the condition is “catchy”.

I do it because I don’t want to ruin it for them.  I don’t trust myself not to go into visceral detail, listing off the maladies I suffered during those 10 months (9 months of pregnancy is the single greatest fallacy foisted on humankind.)  I don’t always believe I can hold my face in a way that conveys happiness, when I’m around a pregnant woman, because for me, pregnancy was the opposite of happy.  It’s not that I run screaming from pregnant women; I just don’t seek them out, and when I find myself near them, it feels vaguely wrong.

The first couple of months of my first baby’s life weren’t a whole lot sunnier.  Nothing came naturally.  The mythical “instincts” peddled to me in reference manuals failed to materialize.  Sleep deprivation drove me to a brink I hadn’t known existed.

I was pretty sure I was failing.  That was humiliating.  And so it became increasingly easier to isolate, to convince myself I was the only one going through this.  In my small (shrinking, at that time) world, I really was the only one going through it.  I eschewed the “Mom’s Groups”, became suddenly engrossed in checking my child’s diaper when I spotted other parents at parks, closed the blinds a lot.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one.  There were other moms in the city, in 2004, who were doing a lot of what I was doing.  There were moms who lived across the country, sleepless at the exact same time as me.

I just didn’t know any of them.

And even now, on the other side, knowing what I know?  I’m kind of glad I didn’t know them.

Because I would have wrecked it.

What would have come out of my mouth as my wild insecurities, would have entered their ears as judgement.  My desperation would have driven off all but the most equally desperate, creating a vortex of neediness that would have dragged us all under together.  The gravity of my situation would have led to needless comparison, one-upmanship, that would have eroded any kind of tenuous relationship I could have cobbled together.

Time, fate, life.  They did their thing.

Made me put one foot in front of the other.  Made me survive, strengthen, thrive.

Led me into a neighborhood, one whose school I never even considered in the move.

Put The Boy in a preschool class, where there were moms who smiled back, and didn’t click their tongues in disapproval at my obvious deficiencies in parenting.

Slowly gave me the confidence to talk , throw out comments just to see who would laugh, who “got it”.  Who was on my team.

The team is surprisingly big.

And nobody on the team gives a crap who breastfed, who used disposable diapers, who potty-trained their progeny by 18 months, who was a co-sleeper, a baby-wearer, an immunizer.

I still have to shake my head, to believe that over a dozen of these women, women I genuinely Like, women who are shiny and wonderful, can sit at a table, and drink, and laugh to the point of tears, and confess parenting missteps.

And know it’s OK.

If I hadn’t talked to them, tentatively smiled at them.  If I hadn’t set my heart on the stained glass in my front door, thereby (unwittingly) choosing the school The Boy would attend.  If I hadn’t failed to refill a prescription in the week that I did.

Yes.  I do know how lucky I got.

(Image is Shine on me by supermummy)

“I’m meeting people nice people too
I’m meeting people nice people like you
We’re meeting people nice people too
We’re meeting people nice people like you”

-Violent Femmes, “Look Like That”

If you are a regular reader of blogs, do you find that you have a stable of go-to sites, and you rarely deviate from them?

Because that’s what I do.

Every now and again, I like to break out, find new people.

Neil at Citizen of the Month came along with his Great Interview Experiment to shake things up.  He’s matching people, having them interview each other, to broaden our horizons, so to speak.  Go read Neil’s blog, because oh good god he’s funny, and if this whole interview thing sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, sign up, why don’t you?

I interviewed Headless Mom of “The Adventures of the Headless Family” (whom, despite the title, have NOT been in a decapitating accident.  I don’t think.  That wasn’t one of my questions, so maybe it just didn’t come up…).  Here’s what went down:

Why did you start blogging?  What did you know about blogs when you started?

I started blogging in Oct. 2007 after being an active blog-stalker for
6 months or so. Before that I had been and 'email only' computer girl
so I didn't know much. I loved the way women were able to share their
parenting experiences and make friends online. I'm pretty proud of the
fact that I'm completely self-taught. Granted, modern blogging isn't
like the old days of code-your-own, but considering I knew absolutely
nothing when I started, I'm impressed with myself.

Are you “out” as a blogger to your real-life friends/acquaintances, etc.?  What is the difference between blog You and real-life You?

I'm "out" to family and some friends. I started out anonymously but my
daughter found my minimized screen one day-thus my immediate family
found out. Then, not long after, my grandmother died and I wrote an
emotional post about her that I ended up being pretty proud of, and I
copied and pasted it into an email to my father and brother. Little
did I know that the title would contain a hyperlink and my techie
brother would 'find' me. I don't think that there is much difference
between blog-me and real-me, although I am a little guarded since
there are people that I know IRL that read me. I'm pretty careful not
to rant when I know that I would hurt someone's feelings. I also have
to be cautious because some of my husband's co-workers or their wives
read me.

You’ve met a lot of bloggers in real-life.  Without naming names (or, go ahead, name away, your call), were you disappointed by any of them?  Which ones were even better in real-life?

I think that when meeting bloggers in real life you have to make sure
that your expectations are realistic. Even the most 'open and honest'
bloggers only put a portion of themselves out there. Yes, I've been
disappointed but it was because of my own too-high expectations of
what our relationship "should" be. I could name dozens that are better
than I thought they would be. I think that my advice when meeting
other bloggers would be to remember that it's just like meeting
anyone-you chat, find common interests, feel it out for a deeper
connection. Not everyone is going to be best friends even if you adore
their writing. Most bloggers, though, are pretty much exactly as they
portray themselves.

Have you ever had a clear, crystallized defining moment?  If so, care to share?

I wish that I could say yes but I honestly don't think so. I'm the sum
of many small but significant moments. I think that becoming a
Christian in my teens could have been the 'one moment', but it took
about 15 years for that relationship to be significant and defining.
Not quite a crystallized moment in the sense that you're asking,
though.

I know it’s kind of impossible to go there, but let’s say you’d never met your husband, never had kids.  What would you be doing right now?

My life would be radically different. I think I would have continued
to have a career in training/development/traveling. I don't know that
it would have been in the same industry that I left when I quit
working, but that was the path that I would have stayed on. I enjoyed
professional development. I would certainly not be in Southern
California, seeing that this is one of my least favorite places in the
country, second, maybe, only to Florida.

You’re on a desert island:  one book, one CD, one food.

The bible, Jimmy Buffet 'Floridays', and chips and queso.

What would you say is your biggest vice?  Your best virtue?

Vice? Smoking, which I've never talked about on my blog. Virtue? I
think that I'm a pretty helpful and supportive person when those
around me need it.


 
 
So there you have it.  Headless Mom:
1. Has realistic expectations about meeting people
2.  Gives mad props to Jesus, and
3.  Would (probably) let me bum a smoke.  

I can dig it.

Plus?  The bit about smoking being her vice?  Totally put this song in my head.  Enjoy!
 

There was an assembly at my kid’s school, yesterday morning.  To mark Remembrance Day, the students laid wreaths, real-live soldiers spoke to them, two minutes of silence were observed.

Remembrance Day has always kicked me in the gut.  Anything to do with the military, really.  Watching families send their dads, moms, husbands, wives, sons, daughters off to foreign lands, knowing, accepting that they may not come back.   Young people with stern haircuts, steeled jaws getting onto transport planes, staring off into the distance at things I can’t see.  Flag draped coffins coming back.  And even farther back, hearing stories from old men, who sat in muddy foxholes and froze and watched their friends get blown apart.  Realizing that soon, there won’t be any of those old men to tell the stories.

I knew, going into the assembly, that I’d cry.  I didn’t want to.

Things I thought about, in an effort not to cry:

1.  I don’t begrudge the Royal Canadian Legion one cent of the money I have dropped into donation boxes for the poppies we have taken.  I really don’t.  But good gravy, we’ve been through a half dozen of the little plastic buggers

(image from here)

in the last week.  Surely we can come up with a design that can remain affixed to a lapel for more than 60 seconds?

2.  Those teenaged Cadets sure look innocent.  Too bad my husband was one when he was a kid.  And that I know what goes on at Cadet Camp.

3.  I totally forgot that every year, the Legion ran an essay contest.  And every year, I won.  Right up to the national level.  And at each level, there was a cash prize.  And that cash prize was where I got a good portion of my high school drinking money.  I’ve since drunk with the folks at the Legion, so I’m pretty sure they would have been cool with it.

But none of these thoughts worked.

Tears rolled.

It’s always “In Flanders Fields” that gets me.  (For the background of the poem, please visit this site.)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

- John McCrae

 

It’s that last stanza: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.”  It makes me think of the conflict dragging on in Afghanistan, of the roll of names that doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to end, the god damned futility of it all.

 

(photo is “In Flanders Fields” by xollob58)

 

 

If you have ever served in the military, if you have a family member who has left you behind to serve in the military, and if you’ve ever lost someone who served in the military -

 

Thank you.  Thank you so much.

My husband has a history of buying me some pretty damn perfect presents.

He is by no means perfect, or the perfect husband.  But he does seem to have a nearly supernatural ability to hone in on a less than obvious nook of my personality, and buy the gift that fills that cranny, so to speak.

For example, he knows I can be a little…specific about food.

In that it can’t touch.  Ever.

He can go to a Chinese buffet, and just start stacking.  The thought of rice touching my ginger beef makes me gag.  Even within a food, I can get picky.  The mustard needs to be on the meat side of a sandwich, never the cheese side.  (I know.  I know.)

And so, a couple of Christmases ago, he gave me this:

Perfect.

He also knows that I spend an entirely inordinate amount of time obsessed with the disasters that could potentially befall our household.

One Christmas, I found a carbon monoxide detector in my stocking.

(image from here)

And I slept like a mother-truckin’ baby after that.

A fire extinguisher and new smoke alarms followed.  They were muchly appreciated.

As of tonight, I’ve come up with a gift that combines both of these bits of freakishness.

Because as I was slicing into my pork chop, examining the piece closely, to make sure that the proportion of fat to meat fell within the acceptable range, I got a little too close.  And in a one in a million shot,  a piece of hot, salty, oily pork chop flew DIRECTLY into my eyeball.

A three-year old and a six-year-old might make lovely dinner companions.  They might even make worthy conversational participants.  But they make really shitty optometrists.

Neither one of them could see the offending piece of pork, nor could they help me dig it out.  And having never nested meat inside their own eyeballs, they were completely unable to empathize, and thus lost interest nearly immediately.

And while I sat there, feeling a ginormous eye booger begin somewhere in my lower eyelid, I mentally added a new item to the very top of my Christmas list:

(image from here)

(And to answer your question, no, I do not give a tiny rat’s ass what an eye-wash station will do to the resale value of my house, thank you very much.  Because clearly, rational is waaaay back there in the rear-view mirror.)

Honest

Classy

“One Hot Mama”

Waif

Hip

MILF

Others?

Last week, I announced a giveaway.  Fifty nice people left comments, in the hopes they would win a DVD Box Set of “Fawlty Towers”.

Initially, I thought I’d use a random number generator to pick a name.  But that lacked warmth.  So I went with the most honest person I could find, who wasn’t taking a nap at that moment:

He may look smug, but I knew he could be trusted.

We put all 50 names onto pieces of paper:

And then, we inserted all the strips into a forlorn pumpkin, still redolent with the scent of the previous night’s chocolate lucre:

The boy carefully swished them:

And then, triumphantly drew a winner:

The winner is:

Veronica, I’ll be mailing the set to you as soon as I receive it.

Thank you all so much for entering!

Aaaaand, if you’re not Veronica and therefore didn’t win, you can still enter the Fawlty Towers Look-a-Like Contest.

Once upon a time we lived in a small town.

Not my town.  My husband’s town.  It was an OK sort of place, not without its quirks.  Like the way nearly all the town’s businesses were shut on Mondays.  Or the way they printed obituaries on the front page of the newspaper.  Or the large horse ankle bone by the highway:

(which, really, deserves its own post, another time).

Suffice it to say, there were adjustments to be made.

The first year we lived there together, I came home one day, a week before Halloween, to find a note inside my door.  I scanned it, picked my jaw up off the floor, then waited for Owen to get home.

“What kind of Nazi regime are we living under!?!”  is how I greeted him at the door.

He looks at the note, casually puts it aside.  “Oh yeah, that’s just how we do it here.”

 What is in this little missive that shocks me so very much?

“This note is to inform you that you will be visited by 12 trick or treaters, sometime between 3:30 and 5:00 pm on October 30.  Please have your treats ready at that time.  Thanks for your cooperation.  Signed, The Town’s School.”

That’s right.  The school RAN Halloween.  They organized the kids into groups, Grade 6 and under.  They decided exactly which houses those groups would visit (approximately 20 houses per group).  And if Halloween had the audacity to fall on a non-school day? 

 They just moved it.

“But…but…how can they just…TAKE OVER?”  Halloween, as I understood it, was all about chaos.  How had no one protested this?  What about kids older than Grade 6, younger than school age that wanted to Trick or Treat?  Didn’t anyone have a problem being told which houses they were “allowed” to hit?

“Well, yeah.  It just sort of works.”  He tried to reassure me.  I was sure this system was just set up for failure.  Never mind that they’d been doing it this way for years, clearly, my outsider’s perspective would show them the grievous error of their ways.

So I waited, that Friday afternoon.  At exactly 4:00, 12 little kids came to my door.  Every one of them excited and happy to be there.  I had exactly enough candy, because I knew beforehand how many kids to expect.   The town’s little kids joined in, welcomed by the school to be part of the organized fun.  And the kids who were above Grade 6?  Were too damn old to Trick or Treat anyway.  So they didn’t.  And even with all those uber-polite little kids saying thank you, and showing off their costumes, the whole shebang took less than 15 minutes.  At which time I was free to enjoy my Halloween weekend in whatever non-kid way I chose.

Now that we live in the city, I will spend my Saturday night freezing my arse off, repeatedly opening my door to kids who will traipse through my neighborhood starting at I-haven’t-even-finished-supper-yet until man-I-wish-this-was-over-I’m-going-to-turn-off-the-lights-and-pretend-we’re-not-here.   I may run out of candy, because there’s no way of knowing how many kids there will be.  Kids who are way too old to be trick or treating will get candy from me, because I don’t want them to throw things at my house.  And even if I wanted to do something grown up on a Saturday night, I’ll be too tired by the time it’s all over.

Oh, those small-town rubes and their quaint customs…