Mother’s Guilt

It began on Mother’s Day. Well, it began long before that but Mother’s Day will suffice.

My two younger kids ran over to play at the neighbor’s house. My oldest, my daughter, was with her mom, being Mother’s Day and all, an odd situation for a stepmom. I get to miss one of my kids on Mother’s Day. I imagine it might be different for most steps, or at least the ones who differentiate between the kids they bore versus the kids that came into their lives but I’m an all-in mom.

I don’t have that edit. I’ve had to learn over the last ten years to back off sometimes, not an easy proposition for someone like me. But I do it because it makes my daughter’s life flow. If you’ve ever been a child of divorce or a parent in a divorce, flow will make sense. It’s the first thing to disappear as people argue over children as if they are property. They argue about money owed, time owed, who bought what when and whose turn it is this time around.

I’m lucky in that we work on flow. We try really hard to keep matters that are adult between the adults. What that means is sucking it up when you need to suck it up. I call it being a grown-up.

So my two youngest went over to the neighbor’s on Mother’s Day. We went for a run/bike/hike in the morning and then they went off to play with their friend who is two and loves them dearly, a couple of dogs and hang out with parents much more relaxed than their own.

Guilt. Mother’s guilt.

Memory engaged: When my daughter was five she got a new baby brother, the first of many. She also got a sleep-deprived stepmother. One day, she asked if she could go down the street to play with a girl that was never really a friend, but someone she really wanted to be a friend.

I peeked out the door, and waved to the mom sitting in the driveway, my newborn cradled in my arms as I prayed he would just go to sleep. I put the baby down in his stroller and pushed him around the house when in one of the very few times for that period, he did fall asleep.

I peered out the front window, just able to see the driveway down the street and I saw my stepdaughter walk over and sit in the neighbor mom’s lap. Now, this wasn’t a dear friend of mine, just an acquaintance. I knew her, felt comfortable with her so it wasn’t that. I stood by the window and cried.

My kid would rather walk down the street and sit in this other mom’s lap than be with me. Guilt. Pain. Ache.

I wanted to be that mom, the one who sat in the driveway as her kids ran around like nutters. Nothing phased her. It probably helped that she taught special needs kids, so her patience and education was leaps and bounds over mine in the area of children. But seeing my daughter there, knowing what a hard time she was having with her new baby brother and how she wouldn’t say it but she felt completely displaced, and there I was watching from a window.

My new neighbors are fantastic people. They are laid-back. The mom is a stay-at-home but used to teach preschool. They don’t yell. They laugh. And they give my kids soda and let them watch the television whenever they want.

I wonder if the battles I’ve picked are ones that will come back to haunt me.

Tonight I help my youngest put together his little gift bags for his friends for his pseudo birthday at preschool. When we were done, we went upstairs where my husband was reading Charlotte’s Web to my oldest son.

I asked my youngest if he wanted to go in my room and I’d read him Harry Potter, his request every night.

“I want Daddy to read it.”

“Well he’s already reading Charlotte’s Web to your brother.”

He sat quietly before he said, “It’s not that I don’t want you to read, but I miss Daddy. Maybe you could read to me tomorrow?”

My heart broke partially because my husband is their go-to and partially because my son felt the need to make me feel better. I swore, absolutely swore, I would never raise children to make them feel guilty. I know what that feels like being too young to handle the emotions of a grown-up.  And yet, here we were.

“Honey, that’s fine that you and J want Daddy to read to you. Really truly. But he can’t read two stories at once.” I tried my best to remove the guilt because if there is one thing I can give them, it’s that. Then my husband walked in.

He told them it was too late to read more of either book so he read this:

It’s become one of their favorites about a boy who gets a kite stuck in a tree and continues to throw things up there to get it out.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, he keeps doing the same thing over and over…

Many people comment on how lucky I am that my husband does all that he does and it’s true, he is amazing. But I don’t know that anyone but a fellow working mom understands how hard it is when your kids don’t come to you when they fall but run to your husband instead.

Your heart breaks a little every single time.

I worked on my book this morning and saw that it’s really about mothers. And how mothers fail. And how they keep trying. And how they fail again.

Surprised?

Jump In

Happy Bunny day!

Spur of the moment we decided to drive to Florida last week. The kids above were terrified of the water. They love those shows on National Geographic, the ones about the ocean where they show in detail the life living far below.

Three midwestern kids, terrified to set foot in the ocean. We stayed with my brother-in-law and his family and went to the beach exactly once, the only seventy degree day of our stay. And there the kids stood, all declining to go into the water.

Then they inched out, all thirty toes, only one set of ten turning back, the little guy. Within five minutes, all had changed into their suits. Within ten…

…and the older two looked like this.

I didn’t tell them that I had read earlier in the week that there were numerous beach closings for a shark migration north of Cocoa Beach. I didn’t tell them the undertow could sweep them out to sea in a nanosecond.

They were fearless. And I watched what brave looks like.

Right before I left, I decided things had to change in my life. My body, my back specifically, was rebelling against me. I felt the opposite of brave. My body was weak and my mind was despondent.

Then we drove for twenty-odd hours, the five of us in a van.

Right before we left, I sent one of my oldest friends the first two chapters of my book. I had to know. I sent it to her because she isn’t a writer, but she reads and I knew she’d tell me the truth. Kindly.

I occurred to me that right now, I didn’t want someone to critique my book. It was the wrong time. What I did need was to have someone read it and tell me whether or not she could get through it and if not, where it sagged. I told her to be honest with me. We’ve known each other thirty-seven years. We tell each other the truth, but we know how to tell each other things others are too scared to say.

She’s a Scorpio and I’m a Sagittarius. For those of you who go in for such things, this should make it clear why people may be fearful to tell us the truth sometimes.

The closest I can get to describing the feeling of sending unasked-for chapters to a dear friend is the first photo, those scared midwestern kids looking out to sea.

So I didn’t get as much revising as I wanted done in the car. Technicalities of motion sickness and my wonky back prevented it. But I got back her response and am so relieved and thankful to all of you who said I should get some feedback.

Because there is nothing so scary as staring out at the water fearful of possibility.

That kid in the second picture? He gets the joke. The fun is in the water swimming with the sharks, hoping things go his way because he realizes that not swimming isn’t an option.

Sometimes you put on your suit and jump in the waves.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

 

A Little Bit Mo’

Apropos nothing, I was driving to the train this morning, running late, and wishing that I had chalkboard paint on my dining room walls. Odd?

Not if you’re Mo Willems. No really. Check this out.

In case you’re unfamiliar, my first introduction to Mo was this book:

And then this book:

What’s not funny about a naked mole rat?

And then possibly my favorite, the Piggie and Elephant series:

I waited in my car for the next train and remembered an interview with Mo about how he painted his dining room and now when he had guests over, randomly people would get up and draw on his walls.

So different from when I get home from work and have the kids crying about how they hate cooked carrots, why aren’t they not cooked, and then I’m yelling at them about how hard their dad works to put food on the table and some kids don’t have food to eat (Yes, yes I said it. I swore I’d never say it and I said it.) and they can sit there all night but a carrot will be eaten so help them…

Not exactly the pop-up-and-do-a-quick-sketch family dinner. The older I get the more determined I am to get it closer to right. Not right for everyone, not right as in that way is right and this way is wrong, but right as in closer to what I’ve imagined I’d be like at forty-odd years old. Closer to right in the way that I’m drawn to silly chick flicks about families (Has anyone other than me seen The Family Stone more than once? Yeah, that’s what I thought.) because I want to raise my kids and at the end have them want to come home whenever they can.

I want to be able to hang out with them when they’re grown and sit around listening to music and drinking wine and draw on the walls. I want their significant others to enjoy being at our house because we’re odd. We aren’t the parents who spent their children’s youth yelling at every dinner to get their elbows off of the table.

And yet. I have a thing about manners in children. I want them to know how to behave around people. I don’t want their elbows on the table and I don’t want them to shovel food into their mouths until no more will fit and then start talking so it sprays everyone in a thirty mile radius.

I expect them to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and they will refer to a grown up by Miss Susan or Mister Bob unless the friends are older and the last name is required. Under no circumstances will my small child be allowed to come up to you and say, “Hello, Bill.”

They aren’t allowed to get up from the table until they are excused and they must ask to do so. I know. It’s sounds a bit like a police state, but I suppose that’s what this is.

You see, I’m in an odd situation. I don’t have a peer group. I don’t have friends nearby who are moms and I spend so much time commuting that I don’t make any friends because when I’m home, I want to be with my family. I don’t really see them all week, so the brief bit of time I’m here, I don’t want to share.

But I think much of child-rearing is bouncing ideas off of one another. I would love to see how other moms do it, pick up some ideas, see if I’m ridiculous. But the thing is? I already know I’m ridiculous. I have seen a kid run out in front of a car and the mom rolled her eyes as if there was nothing she could do to change it. The kid was five.

I have seen many, many kids tell their mom to shut up. In those words. I have seen them call their mothers stupid and tell them they hated them. I’m sure I’ll hear the latter eventually, but the rest of it I will not tolerate. Not from a co-worker, or a friend and certainly not from one of my children.

And my kids know that. My youngest and I had a stand-off last night. He was to eat some of his carrots and some of his peas. Then he could go outside and play. He refused. He cried and yelled while the others went outside to play in the snow. I did the dishes repeating that he didn’t have to finish anything but he had to eat some of everything. He screamed. But the whole time he had one eye open watching me.

I walked over to the stereo, put on a CD, turned it up and went into the kitchen and did the dishes. He yelled, I sang. He pitched a fit, I scrubbed the dishes.

Where does he think he gets his stubbornness anyway?

By the time I was done, so was he. He ate the carrots, not the peas and instead of playing he had to go take a shower. Right thing? Wrong thing? Who the hell knows. I’m in a mom-vacuum.

What I do know is that I want to have fun with my kids, but I’m not their friend. I have a job to do if we’re going to be friends down the road.

I just wish we had some walls in the dining room so I could paint them like a chalkboard. Then I’d write “EAT YOUR PEAS” with a picture of a funny elephant dancing next to it. I wonder if he’d draw a stick figure with his middle finger in the air. Thank God he’s four.

Unlevel

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

-Einstein

The question then becomes how do you evolve to a new level of consciousness?

How do you become what you are not in order to become who you are?

My only hope is that by asking the question, I open the door to the possibility. I’m ready to move forward in so many arenas. I am a force of nature because I force my nature and perhaps the time has come to be still. Unless I’m like a shark and need to keep moving to breathe. Perhaps I’ve convinced myself that is who I am because if I stop too long, the thinking becomes complicated and circular and ruminative.

I thought there would be a lightning strike at some point in my life and it would all come together. This week has just about done me in.

Did any of you ever have that lightning strike? Was there an impetus that got you to see past what you had created and lead you to what you wanted to create? Are you who you thought you’d be or are you still waiting…

Spinning the Story Or A Night in My Life

The snow started coming down at work so many people with flexible train schedules took an earlier one. I like to think of my train as the Ol’ Iron Steel Line. Three trains going in, three trains going out. No change. We are the diehards.

I trudged through the flooded crosswalks, my muscles tired and achy as the snow came down. My son signed up to do some fitness nonsense thing where he/we have to do some activity for a half an hour a night, every night.

Half an hour, no problem, right? We’ve divided it up between yoga videos which bore him to tears, treadmill running for five minutes interspersed with jumping jacks, sit-ups, the plank, the dreaded plank. We’ve also embarked on a couple of dusty WII games, Just Dance and a Biggest Loser game that I asked for one Christmas and never played.

We’ve been doing it all.

It’s easier on the weekends when we can go for a hike or go sledding, but during the week it’s adding that one straw that killed the camel. The camel did die, right?

The train pulled into my stop and the masses jumped out running for their cars. I walked looking at the snow on the ground, the snow on the cars. Despite these people and their valiant hopes and dreams, they wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

Two inches of snow sat wet and heavy on my car. My green fuzzy gloves were sopping wet and the snow thudded when it hit the other cars as we each used all our strength to muscle it off of our own.

Then, BLAMO!

This here was packing snow! You have to understand, we rarely get much snow in my small town. We’re just far enough from the lake and when we do get snow it’s the dry powder. I brushed the sludge off of the car and walked through my front door at 6:30 p.m.

“Hey Mommy! We’re gonna do The Biggest Loser, right?” said my littlest guy.

“Do you happen to know what kind of snow that is out there?”

“Huh?” Two sets of eyes peered around the corner at me. They know my tone when I’ve got a better idea. Think of the moment right before Ricky Ricardo scowls and says, “Loooo-cyyyyy”. I have that Lucy side.

“Would you rather do our exercise with that or maybe…making a snowman?”

Squeals of joy.

Oh, but we hadn’t sat down for dinner yet. And my son had to do his flashcards. And piano is tomorrow and he needed help with his theory. And it was a shower night.

We had a mission. Dinner, theory, flashcards, snowman, shower, bedtime snack, story, bed. We had two hours to get this done. Oh and there was some laundry in there, but really just assume that is always the case and I won’t bore you with the details.

May I present you the fruit of our labor:

This sexy beast is our mustachioed, lipstick-wearing, mohawk-touting, piece de resistance. And what goes better with a mustache than a grass skirt?

Can I tell you how much I love packing snow??

And that was how my night started here and ended up there with just a tiny adjustment. What doesn’t get better when you add a Sexy Beast like this to your day?

Nothing. That’s what.

And now my night is ready to begin. The kids are in bed and I’m set to tackle the papers laid out on the floor. Piccoli passi and it will all get done.

As long as there is time for snowbeasts.

The Vortex

I laid out the chapters on the library floor. They covered the entire floor from top to bottom, side to side. Somehow I thought that once it was typed, it’d all come together, that the issues would be more apparent.

Oh they’re apparent alright.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday I walked past the library and find myself short of breath. Saturday, I spent most of the time on the couch, napping on and off. There is nothing I detest more than being tired and worn-thin on the weekend. I didn’t play with my kids. Not really, anyway.

I got sucked in to some kind of black hole vortex.

This morning I was going through the work clothes, hanging them up, putting them away, when I saw that my husband put one of my button down shirts in the dryer. The thing about being 5′ 9″ is that if I buy clothes that just fit, I can never dry them. In the last couple of months, almost all of my work shirts have been shrunk.

I cried. I’m not proud.

My husband walked into our bedroom at that moment and asked me what was wrong. I told him that I’m embarrassed to go to work with clothes so ill-fitted. That half-inch that shrunk from the bottom makes it a half-top. That I can’t keep up with the rate my clothes are disappearing. I left him standing there befuddled, and shut myself in the bathroom to take a shower.

I cried some more. The vortex is powerful.

It was thirty-five degrees today. The snow was melting and the grass peeked through. Knowing what I know about me, about depression, about irrational thought patterns, we went over to the school nearby to try to sled over the snow and grass.

We flew down the hill, one time, two times, on and on and I began to laugh. I sailed down the hill once with my butt hanging over the edge blazing a giant, butt-trail. My daughter had no snow pants, her legs were freezing so we traded coats. My mid-thigh coat was over her knees. Her down jacket made it down mid-arm on me, just barely covering my sides. Needless to say, it wasn’t zipped.

I decided I had to push the dark away more aggressively. While they continued sledding, I ran down the hill and bound back up. One. Two. Then my daughter joined me and she and I ran down the hill together, her competitive streak shining as she zoomed past me.

She gave me tips as I tried to catch my breath. “My track coach had us do this. Balls of feet into the hill, knees up. You know…if you want.” Oh, I want.

Three, four, five, six, down and up, seven, eight, can’t breathe, nine, ten. Bent over at the waist, the cold air burning my throat as I sweat despite my mini-coat. If I want the vortex to spit me out, it has to hurt.

We walked back and I waited for my older son. The other three made their way ahead. In a rare moment these days, he grabbed my hand and told me how much fun it would be if we had three feet of snow and we couldn’t see the mud. Yes, my dear boy, yes it would.

We got back, threw the coats in the washer, changed into dry clothes and the kids began to play. I pulled a bean bag up from the basement and sat in the doorway of the library with a fresh cup of coffee.  I looked at all of the papers divided by poorly planned chapters. My husband handed me some colored-flag sticky notes, “Thought you could use some of these.”

Yes I could.

I opened my laptop and began at Chapter One. I skimmed the chapter on the floor, put an orange tab on the paper to designate the character involved, then summed up the chapter in two sentences.

I didn’t look at what was before me. I looked at Chapter One. When I was done, I picked up Chapter Two gave it a pink sticky note, and summed it up in two sentences on the laptop. Three, four, five and on and on. I’m still not done, but I found a place to start.

So here’s the thing. I can’t give up now and I can’t look at the big picture without freaking out. What I can do, what I’ve always done when things are too much is either hide or stop everything and look at what I know.

I can’t look at the disaster of the structure. It’s too big to handle. I can take one small piece and OCD the hell out of it. I can run up that hill until I have conquered the whole book with more knowledge than I started.

I can work piece by piece until it becomes clear. What I’ve found in my day job is that if you don’t know the answer and asking isn’t prudent, you have to be quiet and observe the truths around the question. The question may be too big of a thing to understand, to handle. But the small truths that make up what I do know will stretch and change as long as I keep working and moving forward.

The point is to keep working and move forward.

Because what I’ve found about people who succeed is that they aren’t the smartest or the most gifted. Mainly, they’re just the people who didn’t give up when they wanted to.

They just kept going.

Which is exactly what we’re going to do.

Because you know what? Fuck the vortex.

 

One Small Apartment

When my husband and I first moved in together we had a two bedroom apartment. There was a tiny kitchen with just enough room to push a small two-person table up against the wall. Our first Thanksgiving was there and we had the food displayed on the stove burners as there was no other place to take the dramatic turkey pictures.

The living room had bookshelves stacked with books, nothing has changed there, and there was one small tweed two-seater sofa that pulled out into a bed. The sofa was his mother’s, our bed was his brother’s.

Our daughter’s room was huge with only a white-painted toddler bed and a plastic horse in a large plastic frame, the kind where the horse is attached by springs and the child can bounce around with glee and merriment until they go flying off or pinch a toe in the spring. I think the powers-that-be may have outlawed the renegade horse but we still have it in our basement wreaking havoc on each new child with unblemished skin until an altercation with the horse of mayhem.

In our daughter’s room, the base of the horse was filled with stuffed animals piled high enough to cushion a fall.

The entire apartment could be cleaned in an hour including vacuuming the floor and disinfecting the bathroom. The entire apartment. I’ll give you a moment to wrap your head around that.

Sometimes I look back and wonder what would have happened if we were to have stayed in that space. A certain simplicity exists when you forego stuff. We have so much more now and proportionally we aren’t any happier than we were then. We aren’t any unhappier either, but we’re generally happy people. I may be using the “we” I like to use when making statements like “we really need to paint”. As you may have surmised, I don’t paint.

When we were first together I came across a notebook of my husband’s and not knowing it was what it was, I opened it. There was a date and the comment, “She is never satisfied.” I closed the book wishing I had never read it, but could feel the burning in the back of my throat.

Now to understand the comment, you’d have to understand my partner. He doesn’t say things out of malice or vengeance. He doesn’t get angry and throw around words. Angry hyperbolic words, ding, ding, ding, entirely my arena. He is very specific and a bit too calm at times.

And when I confronted him? Many years have passed since then but I do believe he said, “But…you are never satisfied.” No anger, no fighting. Imagine reading that sentence the same way you would read, “You do have green eyes.”

Talk about defusing me. How does a person such as myself handle this? I’m used to fighting, arguing, making a case, getting emotional, holding a grudge. I’m not proud of these traits and the older I get, the more I can be reasonable, but most of that is due to his influence on me. He makes me better.

So he says that to me and I say, “Oh.” A quick glance and I saw that not only was he right, but I had never seen it before. How is that possible? I have a constant need to do something big, brilliant, mind-blowing. When that falls short as it must when you expect to be mind-blowing and you’re just another cog in a wheel, it is, well, unsatisfying. I find a new challenge instead of modifying the last and around and around I go.

He is completely content with a good book, good music on the radio, and a good meal. Utterly happy.

What does that feel like?

I am rational, ahem, and know that we would have outgrown the apartment eventually with three kids. We bought a small house and my car is ten years old. It’s not that we live extravagantly, but we are connected. We have the computer and laptop, the smart phones and television with streaming Netflix.

I don’t know what all of these things add to the quality of the big picture, but I do know that I wouldn’t know what to do without them now. When we met, I didn’t even have a cell phone. I think I was the last holdout. My reasoning? If I was out and I wasn’t with you, then my priority was on the person I was with. No interruptions.

Maybe I’ll grow into satisfaction the way I’ve grown into technology. Or maybe I’ll just find something new and mind-blowing to do instead.

 

 

Crafty Von Crafterson Ideas?

Energy yields energy.

It’s true. The more you run, the more energy you have. I find that after long runs, my mind is bright and alive even as I can’t move my body. I become more attuned to when I need to sleep, my body just drifting off because it’s tired not because I’m emotionally exhausted. Now I’m just on the emotionally exhausted scale because I can’t fit in the running. Well, I could but I think I’ve said it before, I draw the line at getting up when the hour mark says four.

Creativity breeds creativity.

I need a new project. Last year for Valentine’s day I made these clay people and then I made these clay people then there was the garland rampage. The birds were the focus of this season and now after all is said and done, I need something to do with my hands.

For some reason, when the writing is going so is the crafting. I need something that requires absolute focus and attention to detail. I need to shut off my mind. Now what I should do is run, run until I can’t feel my body anymore when I just stop caring about the jiggly bits. But at the moment, I’m just not there.

I’m a thousand words short of the 100,000 mark and that may come tomorrow on the train. But I feel lopsided. I need something to balance the words so I don’t tip over.

So does anybody have an idea, something they saw, something they thought would be so cool to try to make? Looking for ideas.

I wish I was different. I wish I could do all of the things I want to do, but so many are long term. The guitar, yep, that’s a long term, no immediate gratification type of thing. I can’t handle another drag on my life. I need something beautiful and tactile. And something that can be done in a relatively short amount of time.

Coming from someone who has spent years writing a book and run a six-hour marathon, short is anything less than that.

The Rest of the Story

The other night we watched the latest episode of Portlandia. In the skit, a man invites a girl he’s been on a couple of dates with to go with him to Italy. He takes some pictures of them on the plane with his phone then immediately posts them to Facebook.

They arrive in Italy, she is horribly jet-lagged and sleeps the day and a half they are there. They go from plane to hotel right back to the plane and home. A weekend excursion bust.

His friends see how exhausted he is and comment about the pictures, what a wonderful adventurous weekend they must have had.

“People aren’t having as much fun as you think they are having, ” he says.

That statement reverberated around my brain. People aren’t having as much fun as you think they are having.

We are surrounded by instant updates on friends who are writing a book a week while taking swing lessons and taking their kids to toddler yoga. Full documentation upon request.

Their family photos are smiling, carefully planned, all of them in white t-shirts and jeans with a backdrop of a covered bridge. They go hiking every weekend and volunteer at the soup kitchen.

We flip through their brief accounts of Joey’s black belt in karate and Susie’s church solo. Dad is in the kitchen making a gourmet meal (pictures as evidence) and mom is training for a triathlon in between her doctoral studies in basket weaving and astrophysics. They took the kids on an African safari over spring break and fell so in love with the place, they’ll be adopting a baby boy in the spring.

These people do not exist.

If I went out to dinner, an actual dinner out, with a grown up, and my spouse got out his cell phone to photograph the food and then paste it on Facebook or Pinterest, I would have him shot.

I am exhausted by the need to constantly document. I think people are losing the ability to actually live. If I am taking a picture of the food, I am not observing it with all of my senses. There is a movement among chefs to ban cameras from restaurants. They have noticed a surge in this phenomenon and have had patrons go so far as to stand on the table to get the perfect shot.

If this isn’t an omen for the end of the damn world, I don’t know what is.

I know that we writers are an odd group from the get-go. I fully admit to that. But have we hit critical mass on this thing yet?

So here’s the deal. Here’s the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would have said.

Little Joey joined karate because his teacher was ready to have him kicked out of school for disciplinary issues. Susie was forced by her controlling mother to sing that church solo and after wetting her pants, she threw up all over the pastor. Dad is in the kitchen cooking the meal because if he has to deal with his wife or his children he’s swears he’s walking out that door and never coming back. As for mom, she trains so hard because she knows she will never be good enough despite her rampant anorexia keeping her forty-year old frame in a size 2 jean. Yes, she does have a degree in astrophysics but that’s because she doesn’t want to be around her family either which is where the nannies come in. They are raising the two children. The nannies, it should be noted, are never in the photos. The world does not know they exist. The child will never be adopted and they will blame corruption in third world nations but the truth is they will bore of the idea as they have of many others.

They will continue taking beautiful pictures. And we will continue to think they live the life they don’t.

And that, as they say, is the rest of the story.

Let’s go live our messy, unplanned, unscripted  lives and maybe write something great every now and again.

xoxo

Better Living Through Video Games

The last load of laundry is in the dryer. The dryer has stopped and I can’t bear to go down and get it. Today I have done six loads of laundry. What did I do with all of my time before I had a family?

Once upon a time, I lived in a house that was a ten minute walk to the train and a half an hour commute. I left my house at 6:45 a.m. and got home at 5:30. There was a stop before mine in Edison Park where you could stop off and grab a beer or three before hoping back on the train and getting home by six. When I was running, I would get up at 5:30 a.m. and get in a run before work. I might have two loads of laundry a week.

I didn’t have time then because I didn’t know how much busier I was capable of being.

Yesterday we went to the Monster Truck Jam and I can only say you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Smart Car with a jet engine attached to the back. The flame shot out twenty feet, the diameter was ten feet and I could feel the heat on my face within a split second. We were in an arena and in the second tier, nosebleed seats. Less than a second and our eyebrows were scorched. Bizarre.

Then we went to exchange a shirt where the seam was coming out, buy some essential beauty supplies (I may have been remiss in the fact that although my hatred of shopping is well documented, I could shop for hours in Sephora or Ulta. Although I don’t wear much makeup, I buy it as if I do.)

Then we stopped off to get something to eat. Day over. Home in time for the kids bedtime, and my husband and I watched the latest Portlandia (love) and Amelie because I needed a beautiful movie. If you haven’t seen Amelie, do. It’s quirky and funny and the cinematography is absolutely stunning. Her apartment is what I would do to my house if money was no object.

So everything got pushed off until today. The kids watched John Carter while I did laundry. In between I pushed onward on the book, just past 95,000 words.  Not much longer and the typing will be done. I did the typing while being the boss of a spy syndicate, “What’s our mission now, Mommy, I mean, Boss?”

The little guy and I baked a cake. I finished The Mermaid Collector. Lovely.

I wonder what it would have been like if I was the parent I started out to be. When my husband and myself and my step-daughter became a family, she watched a half an hour of television on Saturdays. The rest of the time, we played games, made crafts, you get the idea. We were actively managing her childhood.

Now on a Saturday or Sunday, my kids are likely watching video games or cartoons until I make them shut it off. Today that didn’t happen until lunchtime.

I enjoy the time that they are occupied and I can get things done and by that I mean that I have time to punctuate the end of my thought within my own head. I feel like I should be above it somehow, that someone who appreciates books and literature and all of the beauty of life, should be an integral part of her children’s development.

Yet.

I grew up watching reruns of The Brady Bunch until my brain dripped out of my ear. I spent my post-college years nursing Saturday hangovers with bad B movies on Lifetime. I am a die-hard television watcher.

But I’m also a reading fanatic.

Maybe it’ll all turn out okay. I wonder if in the end, I’m doing my kids a favor by telling them to go play. Perhaps this will allow them to entertain themselves better than kids whose parents were more involved.

Then again, perhaps I’ll see them on a show of the future about how they are hoarders and haven’t left their house in a year because they have all they need with their dungeons and dragons online, their porn magazines and of course, the pizza guy’s cell number.

Maybe you’ll see the gray-haired woman in the background with the maniacal look in her eye as she shakes her fist at the cameraman telling him to leave her be she’s almost done writing. She better be wearing a beer helmet.