I’ve been working on categorizing all my blog entries.  If you look at the “Categories” list down on the right sidebar (scroll down), you can look up entries by category.  Most of my entries are still uncategorized, but I’m having fun reviewing my life as recorded by this blog and shuffling each post into a category or two. 

Anyway, feel free to browse since I have nothing new today . . . I’m feeling a little under the weather.

Yesterday, my fingers discovered two lumps in my neck, one directly under my chin and one under the corner of my jaw.  I’m not prone to lumps in my neck, though my dad was.  While showering, he felt a lump in his neck and one thing led to another.  He had Hodgkin’s disease while still in his twenties, so I was introduced to the terror of cancer when I was a young girl.  The cancer didn’t kill him, then, though.  It took another bout with cancer–melanoma–twenty years later to do him in. 

At any rate, lumps kind of scare me, even though I know that we all have strings of glands in our necks which swell when we’re fighting off infections.  I know this.  And I am dragging a little bit, fatigued, clearing my throat a little more than normal.  So, even though I can’t stop fingering these symmetrical lumps, I am certain (mostly) that I am in no danger of dying young.  (I will die, however, since that is the fate of all human beings.  Alas.)  I’m just fighting off a little virus which is no surprise since my daughter was sort of sick last week.

But I can’t stop teasing my husband.  He wanted me to make popcorn for him and I said, “Yes, I and my lumps will make you popcorn.”  And we talked about how I could just be disposed of in the Back Yard Hole.  (Please, though, send flowers.  Lots of flowers.  No donations in my name to any charitable cause, just an excess of flowers.)

Really, the truth is that I and my lumps are going to bed early tonight, partly so we can finish reading To Kill a Mockingbird and partly because we are utterly exhausted from checking our email every ten minutes without fail throughout the whole day.

If you go to “5 Minutes for Mom” you can enter their contest to win a book by Mary DeMuth.  When I went to California in March/April, I met Mary–she taught the daily morning workshop I attended.  Mary is the mother of three children.  She lives in Texas, though she grew up in Washington state.  I read two of her books, so far, Watching Tree Limbs and Building the Christian Family You Never Had:  A Practical Guide for Pioneer Parents. 

Anyway, you might not have heard of Mary DeMuth before (I hadn’t until California), but consider this a recommendation to read her books!  She’s newly published, but has four books on the market now with five (five?  something like that) more in the works.  She writes fiction and non-fiction and maintains a couple of blogs. 

So, check out that first link and maybe you can win yourself a copy of her book!

And so life goes on.

Saturday morning my 4-year old’s best buddy came over to play with her.  They spent most of the chilly morning in the back yard.  She shuns shoes and a jacket at all times.  I cannot understand this–I wear slippers during the cold months and can hardly stand to wear shoes without socks during the summer months.  A neighbor boy showed up and the three of them spent a long time collecting pine cones in a plastic bucket.  (Occasionally, the kids decide to have pine cone fights.)

When my husband returned from his Saturday morning meeting (at 2 p.m.), I abandoned the family.  I saw a movie (”Disturbia”) which was entertaining, but the most distracting thing happened during the whole movie . . . the movie was subtitled.  So, instead of just watching the movie, I kept comparing the words the actors spoke and the sound effects (which were all described!) with the white words on the screen.  I’m considering writing a complaint to the theater owners because I hated the experience so much.  Now, if I knew that someone in the theater were hearing impaired, I wouldn’t have minded.  But, I have no idea why that happened and the unexpectedness of it annoyed me.

Also, to the person with the little white car that smelled like cigarettes . . . you’re welcome.  I turned off your lights.  Good thing you don’t lock your car.

Yesterday was a quiet day . . . my only noteworthy accomplishment involved the tangles of leave-stripped ivy in the front yard.  Earlier in the spring, twelve boys played a rowdy game of baseball in my ivy-dominated yard.  The ivy turned brown and appeared dead, but now green shoots have appeared.  I thought it best to untangle as many of the vines as possible and trim it back as much as time (and the yard waste bucket) allowed.

And yes, that is as boring as it sounds.  My yard is a disaster.  And the hole in the backyard continues to grow thanks to the combined effort of every boy in the neighborhood who jumps into it and hacks away at the dirt.  (Me:  “Stop using my garden tools!”)  I’m pretty sure it’s big enough to bury a cow now.

My daughter is four and a half and as the youngest child and only girl in my family, she exerts her will on her brothers by crying.  Sobbing, weeping, screaming, in fact.  Which makes my ears bleed and my head spin on my neck.  Her brothers, ages 14, 14 and 9, cannot remember being four years old.  They can’t remember being irrational or whiny or unreasonable.  They demand that she act fairly, that she adhere to rules, that she not follow them around.  They accuse me of letting her get away with everything.  They critique my parenting and tell me how I ought to do it.  And they cannot get get along with her.  So she cries.

This dynamic is driving me nuts. 

They whisper something to her just to get her goat.  She wails.  I holler.  They protest.  She sobs.  I lecture.  They comply.  She stops.  Until the next time. 

I am a terrible mother, no doubt about it.  As I mentioned to someone in an email, I thought I would be a dandy mother, a singing in the kitchen, humming under my breath, eye-crinkling, smiling at all times mother.  But then again, I thought I’d give birth to Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy and we’d sit around embroidering, playing sonatas on the piano and conversing in quiet tones about Papa.  (In lilting British accents.)  I would have been a terrific mother to reasonable, sane, crafty, gentle girls.  (I would.  Don’t argue with me.) 

But I am the mother of whiners and kids who stink.  I am the mother of kids who have the temerity to point out my faults to me.  I am the mother of children who sass me on a regular basis and question my authority on the basis of my flawed human judgment.  I am the mother of boys who have devoted the spring to digging a coffin-sized hole in my backyard, the mother of a daughter who will not wear shoes outside even when it’s only forty-five degrees.  I am the mother of children who demonstrate no interest in contemplation or meditation or quietness.  And they leave wet towels and underpants turned inside out on the floor.

I am a mother with chipped edges and missing parts, a mother who lost the map and wonders if maybe she ought to turn around rather than forging ahead into the wilderness.  I am a mother who has no clue if I’m doing all right or if I am destroying my children with my temper tantrums.

Tonight I thought of that sunny afternoon in September of 1989 when my dad called my sisters and I into his brown-toned living room.  He sat in the rocking chair.  Terror filled me because we were not a family who had family meetings or a family who sat around and chatted for no good reason.  I knew this was a meeting with a purpose and that purpose would be bad.  I knew in my thumping heart.

The sun shone through the blinds marking a horizontal pattern on the carpet.  My dad took off his glasses, wiped his balding head and face with his hand.  His hands were always rough, his fingertips so dry they cracked and sometimes, I’d say, “What did you do to your hand?” and he’d shrug and say, “I don’t know.”  I couldn’t imagine that, not knowing where the blood came from, but now I’m a mother and my hands are worn, dry and sometimes, I find a streak of blood on my finger and I have absolutely no idea where it came from.  I don’t even notice the pain. 

He started at the beginning of the story, describing the time he noticed he couldn’t read some writing on a piece of paper.  This puzzling event led him to the ophthalmologist, who sent him immediately to a neurologist who sent him for tests which revealed a brain tumor.  That news led to a prognosis:  four months to two years.  As he told us this, he broke down and cried and I reached for him in an awkward hug–we were not a hugging family, but this news called for a hug, even an awkward one.  Some time passed while we sobbed, and then we stopped. 

Then he mentioned a hidden two-pound bag of M&Ms and we broke it open and ate M&Ms in defiance of the certainty of his impending death.  Which is odd, but that’s the way it was.

I wondered for the first time tonight if he wasn’t actually crying for himself.  I don’t think he feared death at all.  But as a father, did he look at us and see orphans, victims of his cancer?  He knew that we’d suffer the loss, that we’d be broken, that we’d have to find our way through his illness, his death, his funeral, the grieving, the unknown.  He’d miss his grandchildren, his retirement, the vibrant changing colors of fall, Kringle at Christmas-time, hot-fudge sundaes, bratwurst you could only buy in Wisconsin . . . but he was a father and I think he cried because he knew that his death would cut us to the bone. 

Almost twenty years later, that occurred to me.  What’s shocking is how keenly I feel the loss of him the older I get.  He was the guardrail, keeping me on the road, keeping me from fall off a cliff to certain doom below.  And although I can stay on the road without a guardrail, I drive so much more carefully, I worry so much more, I fear sliding off the road entirely.  I resent the fact that my father was taken from me when he was so young, while I was so young, just when we were getting the hang of being father and daughter. 

I suppose that has nothing to do with the fact that I feel like a substandard mother on days like today when I said too often, “Please!  Go play!” and rushed to judgment instead of walking down the stairs and investigating the crying.  Being a parent is hard.  I thought that my parents were just not very good at parenting, but as it turns out, they did the best they could under the circumstances.  The job itself is just really difficult.  Especially when you aren’t parenting little women but real kids who forget to brush their teeth unless you walk them into the bathroom and point at the toothbrush.

Want to be a featured “Blog in Focus” located in the left sidebar?  If so, please nominate yourself and tell me in a sentence or two about your blog. 

Thanks!