Walking with Maggie

Maggie is our 16-year-old chocolate lab/terrier mix. A “how does THAT mix turn out” expression usually crosses people’s faces when I describe her this way, and my usual response is: You know how terriers “talk”? Imagine a terrier with the lung capacity and appearance of a chocolate lab, with some white on her face and white feet. That’s Maggie.

Harold met and adopted Maggie as a puppy. Our friend Monica went with him to The Pound and was skeptical, because apparently Maggie was exactly as talkative and excitable as a puppy as she remains today, but Harold fell in love, and Maggie spent all of a few hours of her life in The Pound before he took her home.

When I met Maggie, she was about 3 years old, fast, smart, talkative, and selective in who she chose as “her people.” She is not the dog whore that Gus is (he will love the exterminator as much as me, if the exterminator pets him). I am a dog person; I know how to approach them, and usually they meet me halfway and I have an instant friend. Maggie isn’t like that, though. She ignored me at first, occasionally would check me out when Harold and I took her for walks. She actually sat herself between us on Harold’s couch when we were on a date, and she went wild whenever Harold and I danced in front of her (Harold called her a Baptist). But before long, I won her over.

I love taking walks, particularly with a dog to share the experience, so when Harold and I started dating, he would give me a key and I’d go to his place and take Maggie out for a walk. I did this a few times a week for a while, always keeping her on a leash, until one day when I decided that we were ready to test our relationship. I let her off the leash. She was so happy that she did the breathing/talking terrier thing and pranced her feet up and down. She would run ahead but always run back to me, as if to make sure it was still OK to be off the leash. “Good girl,” I’d encourage when she came back. She’d wind her tail like a helicopter, ears perked up, and run off again. Our walks bonded us, and after that she decided that I was OK. By the time Harold and I were married (less than a year after we started dating), Maggie would follow ME around, check to make sure I was OK when we went mountain biking, would wait for me if Harold went to bed first.  She’s definitely OUR dog.

These days, walking with Maggie is a meditation and an act of compassion. She is arthritic and can’t go very far, she doesn’t see well, and she doesn’t hear well. It is a slow and quiet walk. This walk is not for me; I wait patiently to let her sniff everything that she wants to sniff, let her wander in whatever direction she wants. I smile when I see her ears perk up when she smells something good. I remember the quick little dog that she was, and we slowly head back home.

Walking with Gus

Don’t tell my husband, but I prefer walking alone with my dog to walking with anyone else, including him. I’ve been thinking a lot about my needs lately (because I’ve been reading Cheryl Richardson’s The Art of Extreme Self-Care), and I have discovered that walking with Gus ranks up there with good food, sex, and sleep.

It has been tough to walk with Gus regularly since the kids arrived on the scene almost 5 years ago. He is too strong to walk while also pushing a stroller, so I had to either find another adult (Harold or a neighbor) to go with us or I had to enlist Harold to watch the kids while I escaped with Gus. Add on our crazy schedules and the fact that there are minimal streetlights in my neighborhood and, especially in the winter, it was very difficult to work in more than a weekend walk.

Somehow, in the last few months, I’ve found ways to squeeze in more walks with Gus (though not always alone). I want my kids to like walking their dogs (I want them to understand that it’s part of having and caring for dogs), and the kids have recently turned a corner of sorts and abandoned the strollers. Kate will go for short walks with just Gus and me. The promise of alone-with-Mommy time is enough to buoy her through the mile or mile and a half route. Matthew will also go on walks with me, although it’s slightly more stressful because he runs the whole way and I don’t always have full confidence that he will listen to my pleas to slow down and not run out of my sight when Gus makes a pit stop to pee on a bush. Still, we all let off steam and get some fresh air, so I take the stress with the benefits.

My favorite walks, though, are the ones with just Gus and me. Gus’s ears are perked up and he lopes along, thrilled to be smelling other animals, peeing on bushes, and stretching his legs. Just the act of walking with him makes him so HAPPY. Who else is so easy to please? When I am walking with Gus, I am alone with my thoughts but I am not ALONE. There is minimal talking (other than an occasional “good dog” or “this way”), which lets me smell the air, feel the wind, hear the birds, hear my thoughts. When I run in to other walkers, I am less self-conscious when walking with Gus because, again, I am not alone. I have a purpose in my walk.

Gus is also a great “pace dog.” Although he is about 11 years old (rescue dog, so no one knows his exact age), he is still pure muscle. His walk is probably about a 14-minute mile, and he tolerates my jogging, which is about an 11-minute mile. When I walk by myself, I notice that I’m exercising and I feel the stress on my ankles or back. With Gus, my interval trainer, I actually enjoy what I’m doing. The sight of his perked up ears bobbing up and down are enough to keep me going.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the mortality of my dogs. Maggie is almost 16 years old (I’ll write about walking with Maggie later this week), and I know that she can’t defy the odds forever. I do complain from time to time about the realities of sharing my home with two big, hairy dogs. I flip ottomans and kids’ toys and laundry baskets on the living room furniture any time we leave the house to keep the dogs off of the furniture. I am incapable of keeping up with the tumbleweed of dog hair on my hardwood floors. And if I don’t wash the dog beds weekly, you can tell as soon as you enter my house. But despite those minor inconveniences, I can’t imagine not having the greeting when I return home, the gentle presence when I’m feeling ill, and my walking partner who helps me stay sane.

Real Holidays

This year I had two entire weeks off from work over Christmas. We chose not to travel, and I thought this would be an opportunity for good solid TIME with my kids. In anticipation of this time, I had all sorts of plans. We would go to the zoo one day, we would go see “The Tale of Des.pereaux,” we would bake lots of cookies, we would arrange play dates, and there would be crafts.

Quick reality check: I was sick from the week after Thanksgiving until oh, about yesterday when I hit day 3 of the antibiotics to which I finally succumbed. Endless coughing and congestion lingered, then add pinkeye to the mix the day after Christmas, and top it off with 2 weeks of a sore throat. Needless to say, I didn’t have a lot of energy over the “break.” (As any stay-at-home mom will attest, being at home with a 2- and 4-year-old, particularly when they have access to and have been consuming obscene amounts of sugar, is not exactly a “break.”) Let’s review my plans:

1. The weather, which is almost always decent or even GOOD in my location within any two-week period in the year, was crappy. It was damp, it was cold, and on the rare portion of the day when it was nice, we weren’t all healthy. Skip the trip to the zoo.
2. “The Tale of Des.pereaux”…I hemmed and hawed about whether my kids could hang with the plot, after I read a little more about it. I thought it was way beyond the two-year-old, and I have yet to figure out an ideal time to take them to the movies, since Matt still naps in the afternoon. Instead, we watched Kung Fu P.anda, Sleeping Beauty, and Barb.ie and the Dia.mond Castle (Christmas gifts) about a hundred times.
3. Cookies: our oven has been on the fritz (a la “F2 Error” beeping at me when I haven’t gone anywhere near the damn thing). When we get the error, which is all the time, it shuts itself off. We have a toaster oven that has been saving us, but it’s not the greatest cookie oven. Also, did I mention that I was feeling sick? So the great cookie baking of 2008 consisted of “break and bake” sugar cookies, dipped in sprinkles, hastily cooked on Christmas Eve so that we could leave cookies and milk for Santa (who felt so sick that he and she had to bury the cookies in the trash because they didn’t even want to eat them).
4. Play dates: There was one play date, it involved two friends, and you already read the resulting quote from Kate. So, she never again wants to invite to our house more than one friend at a time. Well, at least we learned something. It was a tough thing to learn at 9 AM, though, knowing that the moms wouldn’t be picking up the girls until 1 PM.
5. Craft Day was intended to be part of The Play Date. Oh, the visions I had of artistic masterpieces and how I could do the crafts, too. What fun! My kitchen went from zero to chaos in 7.2 seconds. There will be a separate post about Craft Day.

So my husband and I have already discussed how maybe next year we won’t try for a “quiet Christmas at home.” Maybe there’s something to be said for a little travelling chaos. If we’re healthy in 2009, we’re outta here.

Quotes from the holidays

Did you have a favorite Christmas gift?
Kate: Jelly beans, gum, and the gummies. Oh, and the Barbie and the Diamond Castle Princess Liana.
Matthew: Spiderman phone (Kate gave him the phone, which is why it ranked above the Spiderman BIKE — very sweet)
* * *
Kate: We have to stop fighting. If you forgive, God will spare your life. Your life will be spared. God blesses you (pause) If you go up to heaven, I will blow you a kiss every day.
* * *
Matthew: Mommy not God.
Me: You’re right, Matt. Mommy not God.
* * *
Kate: I don’t like having more than one friend over at my house at a time. I don’t like two people playing with my stuff.
* * *
Happy New Year! Real writing will commence this week.

Why “Passionflower’s Canvas”?

In October, H. was pestering nagging encouraging me to join an online writing group and start a blog. Once upon a time, during that brief period when we were living in the same city but did not yet have children, we used to meet at a coffeeshop once a week and write. We aren’t likely to have a similar opportunity again until our small children are in college, so she offered up a digital alternative. I was hemming and hawing mainly because…I couldn’t think of a name for my blog.

Let me start by saying that I don’t look like a “Passionflower.” In many ways, I am a resounding example of “normal” or “standard” without appearing extraordinary. My build is well proportioned with no particular feature standing out. My hair is a “medium” brown with some red, some blond, some gray, with no particular color taking center stage. In the winter I wear a uniform of khakis, white shirt, and some form of sweater. I have a job in the technology industry that certainly doesn’t scream “passionflower.” With two small kids, a husband, and a full-time-plus job 70 miles from my house, there’s barely time to trim my nails or dry my hair, let alone cultivate passion. And yet, one day, someone on Hayhouse Radio (I think it was D*enise Linn, or maybe S*onia Choquette) called me to do so.

I was doing a time-consuming but rote task at work and listening to Hayhouse on headphones to make the act of verifying translations of CD labels more pleasant. The whole show was about connecting with your spirit, and the host kept asking callers to name their spirits. Every caller hesitated. “Come on,” she’d encourage, “if you had to make up a name, what would it be? Tell me the first thing that comes to you.” And they’d come up with something. Could I name my spirit? What part of my spirit would I name? What is the essence of me, without the kids, husband, job, education, experiences? When those are stripped away, what is left?

Passion + Flowers = Passionflower

In the moments when I can still my mind, I rely on my body for guidance. I feel my intuition in my heart, the heart in my physical chest, and then I see pictures. This time I saw my heart, sporting a few old wounds but quite healthy overall. Maybe it was all those trips to a local science museum that had a heart big enough to walk through when I was a child, but I have a clear vision of what a real heart (not a Valentine heart) looks like. When I thought of the word “passion,” flowers started sprouting from my heart and opening. I felt the opening, the flowering, in every part of me, the way the oxygen gets carried to the cells in every part of your body. So passion flowers (verb), and I decided that my spirit was a flowering of passion, a passionflower.

Canvas

Although writing is certainly a compelling practice for me, this blog is not called “Passionflower’s Notebook” because it wouldn’t convey the whole picture. If I were to call myself a writer only, I would be denying the part of me that longs to create visual beauty. So, even though you haven’t seen evidence of it on the blog yet, I wanted to be an artist long before I knew how to read or write. My favorite gift the Christmas when I was 5 was a big Crayola set with pastels, paints, colored pencils, and crayons. It still chokes me up to remember hearing my mother’s father (who died when I was six) say, “I never saw anyone so small draw so well.” When I was in elementary school, my mother kept me out of school on my birthday and took me to an awesome art museum in the big city nearby (because that’s what I wanted to do). When I cut school as a senior, I went to the same art museum. By the time I was 8, I knew on exactly which shelves at the library to look for books on the Impressionists and Picasso, and I checked them out on a regular basis, right next to my Beverly Cleary and Sweet Valley High books.

The tagline of this blog is “One woman’s journey to rediscover her creative spirit.” I don’t know where those words came from, I don’t remember crafting them in my mind, so they must have been my spirit speaking. If I am to rediscover my creative spirit, it’s going to be a multimedia activity, with physical and digital canvases as well as words painting images for your to create in your own heads. So that’s why this space is more than a notebook, it’s Passionflower’s Canvas.

Memorable Christmas tree

I grew up in a Cape Cod style house built in 1976. It was a house my parents built, and I suppose that means they CHOSE the harvest gold carpeting for my bedroom, the avocado green carpeting for the bulk of the house, and the dark PLAID carpeting for the boys’ bedrooms (I have three brothers), which seemed to be indoor/outdoor in nature. My decorating sensibilities cringe, but in retrospect, my mother was a genius. The carpeting in the boys’ rooms looked to be in the same condition 18 years after it was put down, after all of the unspeakable things that had happened to it.

When there were six of us at home (2 parents and 4 kids), we had one complete bathroom (and another one upstairs, behind a door, waiting to be finished). By the time there were four of us left at home, my parents managed to finish that bathroom. When brother number 3 went off to college, my parents built a large family room addition, which had built-in bookshelves, a nook for a card table and chairs (at which we did actually play cards, or sometimes type on Dad’s typewriter — whew, I sound old!), a bathroom with shower, and a seriously high ceiling. It was 14 or 15 feet high.

My parents are very responsible people — a pastor and a nurse, responsible with their money, good neighbors, good parents, and all that good stuff. We went out to eat as a family about twice a year, at the Ponderosa, after church, with a coupon. They had an actual budget for each week (for food, for gas, whatever) and paid attention to it. We went to church every Sunday, we had dinner as a family every night, and we returned to the same places for vacation. But every once in a while my dad shows his impulsive side.

Unlike in the South (where I reside now and am happily married to a southerner and have been converted to say “Hey, y’all” instead of “Hi, you guys” — so, no offense, y’all!), where you apparently must purchase your Christmas tree by December 3 or you will end up with some brownish stick that drops needles, where I grew up we used to get our tree between December 15 and December 20. By that time, everyone was home from college and we could all be part of the setup. I didn’t go to pick out the tree the year my parents built the addition, but I remember the looks on my brothers’ faces when they came back with Dad. They were beaming. They were laughing. They were dragging in a 14 and a half foot tree. I have no idea how they got the tree on top of the small car my dad drove. I’m not even sure how they got it through the front door, but they did.

The very top of the tree grazed the ceiling. It took up an area bigger than the large cubicle I sit in at work. God only knows what it cost. They got out 8-foot ladders and still had to kind of toss the lights over the top. We decorated and ran out to the store for more lights and more candycanes and decorated some more. My mother walked in and her eyes got really wide, and she LAUGHED. I was fourteen years old, and I have no idea what presents I opened that year, but that tree was magic.

Finish one thing.

A wise man (a real man, he was one of my professors) once told me: “Finish one thing. Then finish another. You will gain energy in the finishing.”

I needed this yesterday, after a whirlwind three and a half days of packing, driving, visiting, trading presents, and more presents and visiting, repacking, and driving home. At our last stop (in addition to the kid presents) we received several armloads of a wardrobe for our 2-year-old, which started out in a nice big box but could fit only if the contents were dumped over all of the other present loot. This was a rented vehicle, mind you, so it had to be emptied yesterday. With all of the excitement and driving and odd eating habits, Kate was not feeling well and I spent the last three hours of the drive praying that she would not be sick in this rental all over our stuff. She made it home and seemed to mend from a magic formula of  loose PJs, a movie, and, later on, some bland oatmeal, but the stress of worrying that she MIGHT be sick was exhausting for me.

“Finish one thing” drove me to empty the car, put away laundry, put away the clean dishes waiting for our return, put away the snacks we had dragged 5 hours south and east and back again, put away the toys we’d brought as diversions (before we got the slew of new toys). I managed to gather up the pieces of an outfit to wear today, set up the coffeemaker, set my alarm, and NOT check e-mail. One at a time, item by item, bird by bird (love that Anne Lamott!).

I thought it would be OK if I got that far. I thought that all I needed was a plan for dinner and a start on the kids’ lunches. And yet…today…my head is like the inside of a snow globe. All the work to-dos, swirling around, and I can’t quite catch one individual flake to finish one thing. I try to catch one, and I end up swirling around all the rest. Breathe, focus, reach up one hand to catch a flake…swirl them all around again. I wrote out a list of priorities before I left on Thursday and sent it to myself in e-mail. The letters are Greek. I can’t break down the tasks into the next step. Reach, focus, almost catch the flake…swirl. Finish one post. Stop. Then finish one more thing.

My English degree in action

I have come to the conclusion that Mulan is the most emotionally mature of the D*isney princess stories. As the mother of a four-year-old daughter, I feel amply qualified to make this judgment. I am far more familiar with Belle, Jasmine, Ariel, Mulan, and Cinderella than I am with Ophelia or Juliet. I have put in hours, probably many entire days studying these characters in movies and books…here are some observations.

First of all, I have to say that I am proud of myself for avoiding Snow White completely. Snow is not part of the family DVD collection. I heard her voice on a preview once and good LORD it sounds like an inexperienced piccolo player. I can’t comment on Aurora because we don’t have Sleeping Beauty, either, though I just wrapped her the other day for Christmas, so I might have to amend this in January, by which time I will surely have watched it 100 times. On to the serious analysis.

Despite Ariel’s strong spirit (she has the guts and independence to go against her father’s wishes) and her brief flash of feminist insight in the secret grotto (“…bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to stand…”), let’s face it. She gives away her gift, her talent, her VOICE to be with a man she sees once. Now, I’m not dissing Prince Eric. He is strong, handsome, can sail a boat and play the flute, and is kind and thoughtful enough to take in Ariel when he assumes that she has washed up on shore from a shipwreck. But still — she saw him ONCE and changed her essential being (mermaid to human) and gave up her gift for a chance to be with him. Not a course of action that I recommend for Kate.

Cinderella seems like a ridiculous pushover at first glance, keeping up the “yes, Stepmother” and “yes, Drizella” as she gets treated like a slave. But you see a tiny bit of intelligence and humor, so quick that it is easy to miss, when she raises her eyebrows and almost laughs about interrupting Anastasia and Drizella’s hideous “music lesson” to deliver the announcement of the royal ball from the king. Still, she maintains her sweetness just a bit too long for my taste.

Belle does have a brain and realizes that she would not make it as Gaston’s “little” wife. She is the only princess caught reading, and she cares about her family and about the beast. The other thing she has going for her is that she appears to be about twenty, which, though young, is much more palatable than the 16-year-old Ariel running off to get married (don’t even let me get started about Pocahontas). In addition, she actually spends at least weeks getting to know the beast, unlike Ariel (3 days before marriage) and Cinderella (one evening and she gets married the next day).

Jasmine is an independent young woman who wants to marry for love. She is still kind of Daddy’s girl (by the way, Daddy is a carbon copy of the King in Cinderella), but she can see through the pompous idiot suitors. And she can leap across buildings in a single bound, which counts for something. Her age is unclear, and I don’t recall her reading any books. I do like the theme of freedom: freedom from the bottle (genie), freedom from forced marriage (for Jasmine), and freedom from potential-stunting poverty (for Aladdin). But again, we are talking about 3 days of courtship, tops, before she is marrying the guy.

Then there’s Mulan. She doesn’t fit the mold of perfect silent wife: she speaks her mind and risks her life to save her father. Though she demonstrates physical strength, her greater strength is her intellect. Mulan figures out how to use any challenges or liabilities to her advantage. When faced with with the task of climbing a pole with heavy large discs weighing down her wrists, she loops them around the pole in a way that helps her reach the top. She uses one cannon to take out an entire army by aiming at the snow above, causing an avalanche. And in the Forbidden City, she uses her weakness (as a woman, no one listens to or sees her) to her advantage by dressing the male soldiers as women to sneak into the palace.

We see the destruction of war, an entire village burned to the ground, the Imperial Army slaughtered, no survivors. We are reminded that this really is a war movie when she takes a small doll, says a silent prayer, and places it beside the helmet of the fallen General, as if to honor the women and children lost as well as the fallen warriors.

Finally, Mulan’s father is not portrayed as a slave to honor and tradition, though he clearly values both. He puts aside the tokens of honor (the crest of the emperor and the sword of the enemy) to hug his daughter (“the greatest gift and honor is having you as a daughter.”). Yes, Captain Shang shows up to see Mulan, but she simply invites him to dinner. They don’t get married in the next 5 minutes. This time, the big D got it right. And yes, this is how I deal with English major withdrawal.

The Birth of Lucy and Ethel Day

Since children (4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son for me, 2-year-old daughter for her), it’s been hard for my best bud from college (H.) and I to get together for more than an hour every couple of months. Recently, it occurred to me that in addition to e-mail and the four times a year when we can actually catch sight of one another, we should have one day a year (two if we can swing it) when we get to be the friends that we were when we met in college. We get to try something new, chat over coffee, share music and ideas, and mostly, laugh — laugh at ourselves, laugh at life. In our senior year of college, we had many adventures living with two other roommates in a farmhouse. I think that was the year when we started having Lucy and Ethel moments that we described as such: Lucy and Ethel paint the exterior trim, Lucy and Ethel go to the beach in February (in a snowstorm), Lucy and Ethel put up a Christmas tree. Lucy and Ethel get stuck in the farmhouse in another snowstorm and mix too many alcoholic beverages. You get the idea.  That’s when it came to me that we needed a Lucy and Ethel Day, and it should happen one weekday during the last week of February (because everyone knows that February really is the longest month to endure — just ask Dar Williams). Here is how this idea started in my mind.

In the course of going through our attic for yard sale purposes, I came across my two College sweatshirts (both purchased while I was in high school and had chosen but did not yet attend the College). I don’t think I’m going to wear them anymore, but I don’t want to throw them away. So I had the bright idea that I could cut out the fronts of the sweatshirts, in a square, and turn the sweatshirts into a pillow. This pillow would work in my son’s room. He just got his big boy bed and the cover is all balls and sports. That way, I would get to keep the pillow but not actually keep it in my bedroom because, well, do I really have to explain? I didn’t even get as far as pulling out the scissors when I remembered that I cannot sew. This did not stop me from continuing the creative process, though. I thought that the square College emblems would not really be big enough for a pillow, so I should get some red sweatshirt material to use as a border to sort of frame it. Again, the realization that I cannot sew. Then I thought, “H. sews things. She has made curtains and purses and the like. Maybe she can help me.” Then I remembered her blog about making the crib skirt. And I imagined us bent over the sewing machine in her living room, with some sort of alcoholic beverage, laughing. And I realized that this would probably take more than our hour-long quarterly visit to accomplish. And I thought about how this seemed like a Lucy and Ethel moment. And that’s when I decided that we should have a whole Lucy and Ethyl Day.

Once a year, at the end of February so that we have something to look forward to during the awful beginning of February and so that we can make it to March, we should get together (on a weekday, so that we already have childcare in place and it doesn’t really disturb our families), starting fairly early in the morning, and have coffee. Lots of coffee. And maybe smoothies and later on some coffeecake or something similarly decadent. During the coffee, we could listen to music and actually talk and laugh, much like we used to do, oh, almost every weekend morning when we were in college. The Lucy and Ethel portion of the day means that we must either make something or do something we have never done, or go somewhere we have never gone (something that can be accomplished easily in part of one day). For example, we could make pillows (not something she hasn’t done, despite the crib skirt incident, but something I haven’t done successfully since the seventh grade). Or we could make homemade pizza with homemade dough. Or we could make foccaccia from scratch. Or make “Vision Boards” of what we imagine our lives can be. Or we could go somewhere in an hour radius that we haven’t been before (Lucy and Ethel love roadtrips).

Lucy and Ethel Day is about friendship, but it is also about the creative beings that we were when our friendship started. I want to remind that girl inside me that she still gets a voice, a chance to laugh and make something that doesn’t turn out perfectly. Too often she ends up waiting patiently for the adult me to get the kids to bed, make lists, make a presentation for work, sweep the floors, and go to C*stco for milk. So, this day is about that girl, too — the girl who went to London for a semester without really knowing what she signed up for, the girl who wrote damn good essays, the girl who took the first dance class of her life as a college senior (Modern Dance — one of these days I’ll write about how that was the most valuable class I took in college). That girl deserves a day to play. If the end of February doesn’t work out one year, we can have a Lucy and Ethel Day in the summer. There is a whole different set of possibilities then.

Writing prompt: What I’ve learned from four Anns in my life

The first Ann that I can recall was Ann C. I don’t know exactly how my mother found her mother, but Ann C. was my age and had an older sister, Mae, and lived in the neighborhood, so my mom decided that it was a good idea for me to go to her house a few days a week when I was in preschool and every day after kindergarten (it was half-day kindergarten). I remember several things about this experience:

1. I didn’t enjoy Ann C.’s company, because she whined.
2. Her sister Mae felt that she somehow got the raw end of the deal in life because her little sister somehow garnered more attention from her mother (perhaps because she whined?)
3. Ann C. had trouble saying “s”s, I guess, because she would whine, “You’re not ‘upPOSED to do it like that!” To which I would reply, “It’s “SUPposed, not ‘UPposed.”
4. Her mother watched soap operas in the afternoon. Let’s pause here for a moment. I’m pretty sure my mother was paying her to watch me. So, I barely saw her and she watched Days of Our Lives while I tolerated spending time with her daughters. Moving on…
5. They had an above-ground pool. It was about 3-feet deep. I couldn’t swim then, and I still can’t now. I guess I wore floaty things so that I wouldn’t drown, because I don’t remember constant supervision from Ann’s mother (though, in her defense, at least her own daughters COULD swim).
6. I accidentally broke the leg off of the Brunette Darci fashion doll when I was demonstrating how flexible her legs were when compared with Barbie. Ann was upset, but she handled it rather well, and the Brunette Darci (who had another name, I’m sure, but I can’t remember it now), did carry on as a special needs representative in the Barbie/Darci world. She was still played with, but we didn’t put swimsuits on her anymore. She wore a lot of long gowns.
7. It was with Mae and Ann C. that I gained clarity on the following religious classification: All Catholics are Christian, but not all Christians are Catholic. (They were Catholic. I am not.)

I think I met Ann G. when I was 11 or 12 years old. She worked as the secretary for the international adoption agency for which my dad was a social worker, went to our church, and sang in choir with my mother. More to come…

Oh, alright. A Writing Plan.

I hereby announce to The Word People and the Universe that I am committing to a Writing Plan. First, here’s why I’m resisting the Writing Plan. I am the Queen of Guilt. I mean, for a non-Catholic, I am truly gifted. So, I don’t want a plan that’s going to make me feel GUILTY. But I see the whole, if-it’s-in-writing-it-will-be-a-source-of-motivation side of the picture, too. So, how about an un-plan. A…plun? Here it is:

1. Write for at least 15 minutes during lunch on Mondays and Thursdays.
2. Write on Fridays after work. (I work a half-day, so this is doable).
3. Write for at least 15 minutes over the weekend.
4. Create at least one something (could be collage, photograph, shrinky-dink, painting, drawing with markers, batch of cookies) a week.
5. Celebrate every little step I take in the right direction. For example, this writing plan counts as a post, dammit!
6. Let go of the guilt.

There you have it, folks. A plan. Plun. Oh, whatever!

Writing prompt (step one): 25 things to write about

1. The worst Thanksgiving we ever had.
2. As a girl, I spent all my money on…
3. The Kate/Dorothea Katerina/Lydia Matilda-Katherine connection
4. Toddler grammar (“No I like that” = “I REALLY don’t like that” and other revelations)
5. Childhood weeklong summer vacations in Blue Stone Park, West Virginia
6. 8th grade track – 2nd place in the 800 meters
7. Card games with my grandfather
8. Maggie, the 16-year-old grande dame of the house (chocolate lab mix — still kicking…well, mostly still BARKING)
9. What IS Gus (the 10-year-old mutt “new” dog of the house)?
10. The unfortunate Key lime pie incident of 1985.
11. Contrast: The trip to the hospital for Kate’s birth versus Matthew’s birth (not the gory parts, friends, just the attitude)
12. Why I need to revisit Paris
13. Words from my childhood that have shaped me (from “I’ve never seen anyone so small draw so well” to “blimpo, are you going to eat that ice cream?”)
14. Modern Dance was the most valuable class I took in college.
15. Eleanor, my first yoga teacher
16. Mom’s cooking lessons (knowing about salmonella at age 5)
17. “I love dogs more than people” (A quote from something written by me in first grade)
18. Contrast: dropping off my older brother at College in 1984. Me getting dropped off at the same College in 1992.
19. Favorite holiday traditions of MY family (the one where I’m the mommy) – some that exist and some that I want to institute
20. most memorable Christmas tree of my childhood (ok, so there are two)
21. Talents that I appreciate in Dorothea
22. Last year her favorite gift was the Disney Princess Go Fish game. Go Figure.
23. Paci Wars
24. The 1984 white Camry
25. Learning to drive a stickshift.

Paci Wars

My daughter never “took” to a pacifier. I remember her using one when she was about 5 months old and needed to be still for a full body x-ray scan. Other than that moment, when it was impossible for her to be attached to me, I served as her human pacifier, and after 12 months, we were done. It was a reasonably easy transition (though this memory is likely clouded by 3 and a half years of space).  Matt, on the other hand, was all about the Paci from the beginning. This worked out because Kate was 28 months old when he was born; I needed to be THERE for both of them.

Because he took to the Paci (by the way, I am purposely capitalizing “Paci” as one would capitalize the proper noun of a person, deity, or method of birth control because it is that important to Matt), he slept great. He was easily consoled. He was just plain a laid back baby. At about 12 months (the perfect time in my mind), the Paci had been gradually removed from our lives. He would leave them in the car or in his “cubby” at childcare, never to be asked for during the day. We went whole days without it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite finished removing something else from his life yet. I couldn’t seem to get rid of both the Paci and the breast. During the weaning process, I gave in. I needed to be finished with breastfeeding. I was starting to get really irritated at my 14-month-old nurser. So the Paci returned to help him get to and stay asleep at night. It would be easier to get rid of than my breast, right? Well…it went OK. In fact, we ditched the Paci completely at 20 months when the last one was “lost.” But then it returned after a febrile seizure that scared the bejeezes out of me on Memorial Day. When he asked for his Paci, I did not refuse.

The war against the pacifier is waged on two fronts. First, of course, is the war with my 2 year old. I’ve tried losing the Paci, tried reasoning with Matt about how it’s time for the Paci to go, tried to explain that the Paci is for little boys and he is a BIG boy, tried to shame him into it by pointing out how the big boy neighbors and cousins don’t have Pacis. He doesn’t care. He wants the Paci. And he has even more than the usual 2-year-old worth of stubbornness, thanks to some, ahem, genetic factors. So, the Matthew front is fought every day one way or another. But the second, more potent front in the Paci War is the one waged in my head between Everything’s Cool Mommy and Paranoid Freakout Mommy.

EC Mommy thinks, “He’ll grow out of it. He’ll stop when he’s ready. No one ever went to college with a Paci. It will be fine.”

PF Mommy has another perspective: “I’m a failure. I can’t get my kid to stop using a Paci. I can’t convince him of anything. He has all of the power. He will need braces because of my failure as a mother. He will trade the Paci for cigarettes. I’m going to have a three-year-old smoker. He is too dependent. (EC Mommy breaks in: HellO…he’s TWO! Of COURSE he’s dependent.) Even my mother, the sweetest woman alive, has mentioned in her low-key way that have I noticed that maybe his teeth have been affected by Paci usage. When is he going to stop? When will we be done with the Paci? I can see the disapproving looks from my father, from other parents, from strangers at church. Bad Mommy. Bad Mommy. Bad Mommy.”

Unfortunately, PF Mommy doesn’t just fight the Paci Wars; she is a tireless footsoldier who sometimes even promotes herself to General in my head. I guess PF Mommy is handy when it comes to following instincts about your kid’s health or behavior, but I really wish she would take a vacation when it comes to stuff that is way less important. The Paci will go away, eventually. In two years I’ll probably forget all about the departure of the Paci, just like I’ve forgotten exactly how Kate became potty trained. Sigh. Time to take a breath and let EC Mommy take the reins again.

Public apology

For anyone who will receive my Christmas photo/card thing this year, can I say OOPS?

I didn’t notice it while I was obsessing about which photo to use.

I didn’t notice it while I was obsessing about which template to use.

I didn’t notice it when I checked the whole thing for spelling errors for the twentieth time.

I scoff at those morons who would need to check spelling of names and ages of their children and such.

And then…when I was stuffing about envelope 6, I thought, “Hmm…Matthew’s age is 2 (that’s right), but the year says “2009″, which would make him 3. He’s not three….he was born in 2006. How is this possible?” It is possible, dumbass, when you put down the wrong year! The card does say “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,” so let me just clarify by saying that I wanted to be sure you knew I was wishing you a happy 2009. There.

No career aspirations (to speak of)

I had to fill out a form at work today…it was one of those forms that can be seen as either a waste of time (is this going to be used for ANYTHING?) or troubling (is this going to be used to determine if I make it past the next round of layoffs?), depending on your mood. You have to provide a bunch of biographical/experiential information as well as rate yourself on intangible skills that fall into categories like “Winning attitude” and “Embraces change.” For the skills that “require development” (and you have to have three of those), you need to come up with a plan to bring yourself up to snuff (in 300 characters or less). In addition to the ratings and the plans, there was one field that I left blank. I know I’m going to get called on it, but–there it is. It was the “career aspirations for the next 3-4 years” blank (in 300 characters or less, of course).

I have never known what to say in those annual “employee development” conversations. Usually I tell the manager of the week that I don’t want to go into people-management, and that’s about as far as I get. It’s not that I dislike my job. I’m pretty good at it, and I like the people I work with. It’s more the word “aspiration.” To aspire to something implies a sense of wonder and delight. The truth is, my aspirations have never had anything to do with the jobs I’ve had, so I skirt around the issue and come up with something vague. Here is my real list (probably in more than 300 characters, so forgive me):

• Write interesting things and get paid for it. (I am paid to write stuff, but it is far from interesting.)
• Make order out of someone else’s chaotic information (it goes way beyond editing; I love taking a mess of information and putting it into categories and making sense out of it).
• Do visual arrangement (layout).
• Train to be a yoga teacher and work as part of a team of teachers.
• Encourage writers (in small groups of 2 or 3).

Of course, I want to do all of this when I am at my most energetic (early morning and late afternoon), in a schedule that enables me to be there for my kids, and mostly (but not always) at home. Is anybody looking for a creative person who can make order out of chaotic information, help you become a better writer, and help you document your life in beautiful photobooks? Just wondering.

A house full of old souls

I found myself having this conversation today:
Kate: I might die before you.
Me: Why would you say that? That would make me sad.
Kate: But if you die before me, I would be sad. (she pauses) Let’s die at the same time.
Me: Then everyone else would be sad.
Kate: (She thinks for a minute.) When we die, do more people come?
Me: Yes.
Kate (smiling): And then it’s our turn again — again and again and again.

We have never had a conversation about reincarnation. She came up with this notion on her own. I am living with an old soul.