Actual Unretouched Photo

Sometimes, I look at the painted flowers on my daughter’s bedroom wall and feel the world ending.

One day, those flowers will be a memory and the very thought of the end of all this makes me want to stomp my feet and cry.  I don’t want things to change!  I don’t want her to grow up and go to college and meet a boy and get married and move to another state.  Or house.

Sometimes, I look at my 12-year old son’s soft cheeks and his freckled nose and his green eyes and want the whole world to stop. I want to hold his face and touch each freckle but if I did he’d roll his eyes, jerk from my hands and think I’d gone crazy.

Can’t we just take a time out?  Can we pause on twelve for a few more years?  I don’t want him to grow whiskers and fall in love with girls and choose a career path and stop laughing at things that aren’t funny unless you’re twelve.

I spy the distant Mt. Rainier in its white-covered glory and I feel frantic.  We haven’t sojourned to the mountain in two years.  What if that time was the last time we’d stomp its snowy sides?  What if we don’t venture back up the mountain?  Will the kids even remember the delicate alpine flowers and the pure thin air?

Just moments ago, my teenagers were little kids, wandering the back yard waving sticks and throwing balls over the roof of the house to the front yard.  They refused to eat vegetables and only drank apple juice.  Those mundane days already glow in the fading hazy light of memory.  The past seems sweet compared to the reality of uneven facial hair and loud music and their uniform of black t-shirts and baggy jeans.

I hate my kitchen counters.  They’re old, pale yellow formica.  I don’t have enough cupboard space.  The sink is a ghastly gold.  And yet, sometimes I’m already nostalgic for it.  When I’m an old woman and I think about raising kids, this is the kitchen that I will remember.  This homely, inadequate kitchen is like a friend I miss already, even while we’re still holding hands.

Sometimes, I just want to press the pause button.  I want to appreciate this moment, to breathe it in, to gather it all in my arms and sit and rock, rock, rock in a peaceful rhythm before it all scatters, never to be assembled again in quite the same way.

But there is no pause button.  The children won’t stop growing.  I keep getting older and grayer.

The whole thing, when I consider it, makes my heart hurt.

Nothing stays the same and there’s a peculiar pain in noticing the fleeting days for what they are–a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow.

When you are young, you can’t wait until you are in charge, until you can make decisions about your own life, about your own schedule, about how you will spend your hours, your days, your life, your paycheck.

You make life choices, whether conscious or unconscious and then you live with them.

And then when you are forty-five, you look around and realize that almost every bit of your life, every minute of every hour, every effort you expend belongs to someone else.  You wash clothes you don’t wear and cook meals you don’t eat and attend sports practices you only watch.  You buy snacks you don’t like and wash forks you didn’t use and iron pants that don’t belong to you.

You deliver other people to other places to participate in events that exclude you.

You worry about situations that will affect other people.  You don’t care too much how the outcome changes you but you care because of the others.  They matter.

You slice and dice up bits of your heart and life and give them away and wonder, in the end, if you’ll have anything left over, if the lunch you’ve offered to to share will actually feed five thousand.

When you are young, you steer your life in a certain lane, take a particular exit and you don’t realize that you’ll never again wake up in the morning with only thoughts of yourself.   You’ll never face an entire empty day full of possibilities and choices because everything you think and everything you do tilts the orbits of other people circling you.  You are anchored.  You are snared.  You wake up in the night because other people wake up in the night and say your name.

Part of you wants to use giant shears to cut yourself loose but the other part of you finds the web you’ve spun to be a lovely, soft nest.  You’re swaddled tightly and the immobility soothes you.

But all the same, you want to shout back to your distant self a warning to savor those days when you think you are so busy because you have to  meet a school deadline.  That is freedom.  You just don’t understand that then because you aren’t paying the mortgage.

Welcome to adulthood.

Yesterday, my husband and I took the children to their great-grandmother’s funeral. As funerals go, this one was a marathon which reflected the marathon 102-year life she lived. My daughter insisted on wearing her pink Easter dress and was a bright spot in the sea of somber clothes. Afterward, she wanted to see her great-grandma lying in the white casket. My daughter gazed at her great-grandma for a long time. A spray of spectacular flowers sat on the closed part of the casket while my grandmother lay in repose looking surprisingly well considering she was 102 years old and lifeless.

Also, I noticed she wore coral lipstick, which was the only time I’ve ever seen lipstick on her. That shade did not suit her at all, but what did they know? They should have gone with something that had plum undertones.

Grandma wore a pink Easter dress that my mother picked out. My mother’s face reflected her terrible grief. At the age of 65, my mother has become motherless.

My boys dressed in their best clothes and didn’t complain about going to the funeral. They sat quietly, even though the service dragged on for ninety minutes. (Four speakers, a choir, a soloist, congregational singing and a Powerpoint presentation.) My daughter declared it the “most boring” thing ever, but she also behaved well. She and my 10-year old both wanted to view Grandma after the service while the twins chose to go immediately to the lobby instead.

So, yesterday was a long, emotionally draining day. Before and after the funeral, I worked, finally finishing my shift at 10 p.m.

* * *

This blog is not a comprehensive dissertation about my life as a mother. Believe it or not, I leave out large chunks, including most of my life prior to my blog. You don’t know about how we adopted our twins, nor about how we parented them when they were young. I am not at liberty to share much of my life since my life is intertwined with the private lives of other people, just like yours. I cannot tell you much about my childhood in deference to others.

On occasion, I pull back the curtain and reveal some shameful truth about my failures as a parent and about my children’s perception of me as their mother. It’s risky, but I choose to share snapshots from time to time. I want to remember these moments–especially the ugly moments because in memory, these will be the brightest days of my life. Selective memory has a way of blotting out the blemishes and mistakes we make. (And I love the way most of you support me and make me feel not alone.)

So, when I post something here that is unflattering to me (usually) and my children (on occasion, though they are not completely identifiable), I am already fully aware that we are imperfect. I consider my own flaws in the glaring spotlight of self-flagellation and when other people turn their flashlights upon the dark corners of my soul, they’ll find nothing that I have not already illumined and examined with a microscope. I know how I am failing as a mother. I know the errors I’ve made. I know my personality and how my personality clashes with other personalities in my household. I can catalog the many ways I’ve failed my children as a mother, a role-model and as a person.

I’m pretty sure that I’m not an inhuman monster and my son told me the next day, “I overreacted. But you should be easier on my brother.” My other son apologized repeatedly for his behavior on the day in question. However, my children see me only from their teenage perspective, just as I only saw my parents from that angle when I was their age. I thought my dad was much too strict with me. I did not understand. I judged him with teenage harshness. I think that’s part of growing up, of separating.

So my children judge me, too. They’ll understand more when they are older. I hope they will grow to understand me as a human being. I hope they will forgive me for the mistakes I make. I allow them to speak freely to me, probably because I was gagged as a child, unable to ever address my parents honestly. I was much too scared to tell them how I felt about anything they did or said. We did not talk in our family. When I was home, I went to my bedroom and locked my door.

My children are living in a different type of household and even though I do not relish backtalk, I’d rather have my kids argue with me than shove their thoughts deep inside to fester. I spend almost every moment of every day at home with my kids. My boys have been doing school-at-home for four years and I don’t think that longing for a regular period of kid-free time every week is a failure. In fact, if you’re an introvert like me and being with people drains you, you know well that unless you have solitude, you will wilt like a plant without water.

And don’t even get me started on the nature versus nurture conundrum. (Hint: Nature wins.)

I do consider every comment I receive here, especially the ones that sting. I try not to be defensive, because there is often truth even in the hurtful things people say. So, please, continue to share your thoughts but do remember that you don’t have the whole picture, all the facts nor a complete understanding of my private life. Such is the nature of blogs.

20 Years After video And that’s all I have to say about that.

Edited to add: This is not in response to any of the published comments on the last entry. So do not fret.

My daughter woke me this morning by climbing on top of my bed and whimpering. I held her, thinking maybe she had a bad dream. She fussed and carried on for a good twenty minutes. Then she finally said, “Why didn’t you answer me?”

“I didn’t hear you!” I said.

“Oh,” she said. And she slithered off and returned to her room.

Kids are so weird.

* * *

All the crocuses are up, blooming with great enthusiasm. Are you ready for summer? It will be here in what will feel like twenty minutes.

* * *

My grandmother is almost 102 years old. About six weeks ago, she fell in her bedroom. She was taken to the emergency room, but I heard just last night that they didn’t bother to x-ray her. A day or two ago, they brought a portable x-ray machine to the house and, as it turns out, she has a fractured pelvis and a broken femur. She’s been hobbling around on these injuries for six weeks.

I am stunned by this news. She is heavily sedated for perhaps the first time in her very long life. My mother says that she may or may not hang on until her birthday, which is March 10.

I cannot even comprehend the idea that my grandmother might not boss us around forever. The worst thing is that I have a trip scheduled in the near future . . . I leave on March 13. I selfishly hope that she will hold on until I return on March 18. (I’m going to a writer’s conference in California.) It would be awful if she died while I was gone, or even if she died right before I’m supposed to leave.

And now I will wrap up this rambling post.

The end.

I feel kind of lonely for all my blogging buddies . . . before I started working full-time I had so much more time on my hands, even though it was time broken into a million fragmented pieces. I would walk by the computer on my way to the laundry room, pop onto the computer, read a few blogs and leave a smattering of comments. I’d pass by on my way to the patio door to check on the kids and stop in for a blog visit and leave some comments. I had time, somehow, to read blogs, a lot of blogs. But no more.

Now I am practically chained to my computer and my beloved blogs–not the ones I write, the ones you write–may as well be floating around Saturn they are so impossible to visit. It’s past midnight now, my shift has just ended and David Letterman is talking to Steve Martin on his show. My head throbs with the exhaustion of working twelve hours today. (Not every day involves twelve hour shifts, but Thursdays are killers.)

So, if I used to leave you blog comments and you’ve noticed my conspicuous absence and silence, it’s nothing personal. I long for a day full of blog-reading and blog-catching-up and blog-commenting . . . but, alas. Alas.

However! I will make a promise, here and now. Leave me a comment. Include the URL of your blog and I will stop by and bring you a plate of fresh-baked cookies. Or a comment. One or the other.

I miss you, Blog-writing Friends!

My 5-year old spent the afternoon at her grandmother’s house which is chock full of bric-a-brac with a large side order of gewgaws, and a heaping helping of curios. Grandma also has a lot of stuff, particularly costume jewelry and chocolate sitting around in candy dishes. My daughter adores visiting.

While I stood in the kitchen waiting for my mother to package up some ham and cheesy potatoes she had overbaked, I caught a glimpse of my estranged sister’s handwriting on an envelope. The sticker-dotted envelope sat right next to the kitchen sink. It looked like a Christmas card.

For a moment, I felt the tiniest ghost of a pang, the flimsiest regret that my sister and I no longer speak. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in over five years. A couple of years ago, I sent her an email and asked if we might discuss in through email why we weren’t speaking. She emailed back, “I’ll call you when I get there,” (there being here–she lives in Japan and was due for a visit to the Pacific Northwest). I emailed back and said, “No, we need to talk before you get here.”

She never emailed me again. She never called me, either.

It’s strange when a person you’ve known literally your whole life (except for those first sixteen months, but I wasn’t exactly a conversational wonder in my babyhood, so that doesn’t count) rips you out like a perforated page in a book. Granted, my anger at her was justified, in my opinion–despite my explicit instructions not to make copies and keep some particularly graphic pictures of my giving birth, she ordered herself copies from negatives and took them back to Japan with her. When I discovered this theft, I emailed her a concise, direct demand to return my photographs. I never got my photos, an explanation or an apology. And that was the end of our sisterhood.
Not that we were very good sisters anyway. If friends are the family you choose for yourself, sometimes family are the friends you wouldn’t have chosen in a million years–you have nothing in common other than a gene pool. For all our differences, though, we were still sisters, sister who had nothing in common, who grated on one another’s nerves and didn’t particular like spending time in the same room from our very earliest days together.

Still. She’s living a life completely outside the frame of my life. She not only cut me out of her life, but cut my children out of her life, too. I imagine it’s easier for them and yet some day, will be more difficult. They don’t miss what they never had, but one day, they’ll wonder why we don’t speak and ask whatever happened to their aunt.

And my explanation will sound so ridiculous: Your aunt doesn’t speak to me because I asked her to return some photos of me giving birth that she took without permission. The deeper explanation is so tangled even I have no idea where it begins and where it ends. You know when you can’t unravel a knot? Sometimes, you just have to cut it out and start fresh.

I guess that’s what we did.

A life well-lived is one sensible decision after the next. A life well-lived is full of kept promises, even when they hurt. A life well-lived ends and those left behind cry, but their tears are not bitter, but rather sad tears of loneliness and loss. We cry because we realize just the swiftness of our journey on this planet, how few sunsets remain in our lifetimes, how much time we have squandered.

Her life well-lived was extravagant, full of beauty. She loved her husband, her children, her grandchildren. She loved her garden. She filled her house with lovely objects and her closets with fashion.

I will remember her jet-black hair, her meticulous make-up, her shiny bright smile. I did not walk up to the casket to peer at her lifeless form. I want to remember her alive and beautiful.

Watching her husband of 53 years stand at the white casket lined with pink broke my heart a little. He stood so tall, so distinguished in his suit, so composed, so still. He stepped back, then closer again. I averted my eyes from this private moment. He kept his promise to her, though the last years were bleak and her mind had fled. He was faithful and strong.

One of my other uncles delivered the eulogy, a message full of scripture and poetry and reminders of God’s love for us. The flowers were so gorgeous. I rested my gaze on them while I listened to the powerful words of a man I admire and love. I thought, “I would like him to do my funeral,” and then I realized that I would have to die young or he will have to live to be 150.

Funerals and weddings . . . so much alike, so vastly different. Flowers everywhere, men in suits. One is the beginning, the other the end. And endings are always so sad that if I start to cry, I may never stop.

I am a fragile flower, a delicate spidery web, a candle flame barely burning. One little puff and out I go. Touch me with two fingers and I crumble. Leave me in the sun without adequate moisture and I shrivel. Or, easier still, send me a form letter rejecting my painstakingly written query letter and I will crawl under my desk, push aside the outlet strip and refuse to come out and write another sentence fragment (at least until it’s time to cook dinner.)

I say to myself, “Self, why must you insist on something more? Isn’t it enough to raise four children, two of them adopted through a process so arduous you cried on the bathroom floor more than once and questioned the very existence of the Almighty God, and two of them the most exquisite babies conceived against impossible odds and born into dimly lit bedrooms with midwives in attendance? Are these miracles not enough? Is your husband of twenty years, that hard-working, calm, funny man who laughs at your jokes and didn’t divorce you when you gained 75 pounds not enough?”

“Self,” I say, “You have a spacious house (nevermind the clutter and dust), a safe neighborhood, shelves full of good books to read, new highlights in your hair and hot pink sneakers . . . and yet, it is not enough? You grappled with your faith as a teenager, wrestled with God through college, had a fist-fight with Him in your twenties, decided to trust in Him even when He tried your patience . . . you believe, you trust, you feel the comfort of God’s presence in your life and receive the occasional touch of grace to remind you of His care and it’s not enough? Is all this not enough?”

I’m a giant castle built with blocks and when one teeters, they all crash to the ground. The teetering block, that thing I thought I’d discarded years ago in a fit of despair, it keeps reappearing, insisting I pick it up, incorporate it into the construction of my life. I never asked to be a writer. I never studied writing, never majored in writing, never dared to call msyelf an author . . . but I write. I can’t help myself. I cannot be silent. The words march in my head, keeping their own beat, pounding pounding pounding until I line them up in sentences and make them behave like paragraphs. Then, sometimes, for a moment, everything is still and ordered and quiet and I am satisfied that I have expressed something just as it appeared to me. I have written and I am at peace.

I wish I had an obsession with handbags or designer shoes or something that did not come attached to the occasional rejection letter. A hunger for leather could be appeased. But this desire for publication is mean. I come apart like a seam only basted, not stitched. Today, today I am coming apart, unraveling, verging on tears, prowling in the kitchen for something to feed the gaping hole that food cannot fill. Today is a bad day, a day when I think that something might be wrong with me. I want to write, to describe the world from my viewpoint. I want to be read, too, to know that someone catches the ball I’m throwing into the universe.

Yet, I fear that I am completely delusional. I recoil from the business aspect of writing, the pushing and shoving your way to the front of the line, the impossible locks you cannot undo without the secret combination. (For instance, in the form rejection letter I received today, the editor gave me a list of ten possible reasons my query was rejected. Ten. This is maddening.) I’m not a member of the secret club, but if I could get in the door, I know I am capable of writing what they are buying.

Or I’m completely insane. You decide.

I quit. I think I will devote myself to creating the perfect muffin recipe (moist, yet nutritious), getting the laundry even brighter and whiter and organizing my sock drawer. I will purge the storage room of excess stuff, paint frames black and hang up photographs, degrime the corners of the floor. I will repaint the family room (away with you, red stripes!), alphabetize the spices and sneak stuffed animals out of the my daughter’s room undetected.

Yes, it will be a very satisfying life, one free of rejection form letters and editors who overlook me in their search for the Next Best Thing. You win, Universe. I get the message. I quit.

I hope you’re happy.

You’ve probably been picturing me like the little Dutch boy with his finger stuck in the dike, holding off impending disaster by plugging my heat pump leak with an index finger since last Wednesday. But no, that’s not it.

Wednesday afternoon I walked my kids over to the neighbor’s house, came home to curling iron my hair, dot some makeup on my aging face and pull on some black pants. The sun warmed the air with half-hearted strength. Summer is ending. I wore a sweater.

Cars jammed the parking lot, even though I had arrived twenty minutes early. I joined a line that snaked across the asphalt. I had no idea why I was standing in line nor did I ask or speak to the couple in front of me, even though I knew them and I’d just spoken to the woman earlier in the week about becoming my daughter’s preschool teacher. After some minutes, a man appeared on the steps above us and announced that due to the length of the line, we were invited to just come inside and sign the guestbook on our way to the reception.

I walked up to the front row and sat between my husband and my friend. She said, “There are no tissues to be found in this church!” and I opened my purse and handed her three. My husband patted my knee.

The funeral celebrated the life of a father–almost exactly the age of my own deceased father who was born fourteen days before Jeff’s birth on September 15, 1942–husband, grandfather and friend. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from tearing up, but this strategy failed completely during the congregational singing of “There is a Redeemer,” a song written and recorded by the late Keith Green.

By the time we sang, “When I stand in glory, I shall see His face . . .” the lump in my throat convulsed and burst into a sob. I couldn’t catch my breath and then I held my breath on purpose, thinking that I could prevent what Oprah calls “The Ugly Cry” if only I didn’t breathe. As the music flowed, I remembered that I had to breathe and that breathing would keep my heart beating in rhythm and if my heart continued to beat I would not collapse in tears, never to stop crying again.

So, I told myself, “Breathe,” and I did. I gulped in air, bit my lip and gathered my composure as the song ended.

Why does music unravel my soul?

My husband spoke eloquently about his friend and I understood for the first time how deeply this loss affected him. When Jeff’s children spoke, I could hardly bear it. I felt their loss as a daughter who lost her own father, and yet I rejoiced with them because their father had lived his life with such joy and with a lack of regret, unlike my own father.

I did not speak at my own father’s funeral, nor could I have managed. I admired these three grown kids who loved their father freely, who embraced the love he gave them. I also listened with some envy–their father lived 18 years longer than mine did. If your father is still alive, if your mother is still alive, be grateful. I had my own father for only 24 years.

• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse buy

Two of his children sang and again, I cried. By the time the slideshow ended, showing picture after picture of Jeff with his family through the years, my three tissues were wet wads, useless.

When the funeral ended, I hugged the widow and then I had to hurry home to my children. Life resumed, regular precious life.

The rest of the week has been unremarkable, as life does after a crisis. A second repairman came to look at the heat pump and fix what the first repairman had been unable to solve in two visits. I helped the young moms of the church paint the nursery. The ceiling hole remains and we are reduced to sharing one bathroom with its inadequate showerhead. I’ve taken baths again which reminds me of college when I had no choice; the entire girls’ dorm only had bathtubs without showers.

I’ve taken my daughter to the pool where she swims in near solitude. The summer crowds have thinned. Everyone has abandoned summer for fall, even though the calendar offers us a few remaining summer days. I’ve been cleaning bedrooms, vacuuming happily with my new vacuum cleaner, worrying a little about the school year, neglecting my own mother, planning a birthday party for my daughter which will take place on my dead father’s sixty-fifth birthday.

I’m drifting in a swirl of sorrow and monotony with spots of joy here and there like lumps in a batter. This is life and as happens from time to time, I am painfully aware of its rushing current which drags some of us out to sea and some of us to shore, while most of us bob in the waves, feeling no current, but only motion.

And my email box is stuffed full and I can’t seem to catch up.

I’m turning into my grandmother with her intolerance for noise.  Macular degeneration stole her sight, so she sits in one chair, mostly, listening to the silence when she isn’t listening to the Bible on tape.  I hardly ever take my kids over there because I know she can barely tolerate the noise.  She’s 101.  What’s my excuse?

I am a quiet type of person, one who wouldn’t turn on the radio or television if I were alone all day (which I never am).  I have no need for conversation or for expending a certain allotment of words per day.  I have had to develop my ability to make small-talk because chatting doesn’t come naturally to me.

And yet, I’m living with a bunch of people who just can’t stop talking to me.  My daughter is the worst of the bunch.  If I sit down, she appears like a pesky genie, begging me to get a snack from the “covered” (aka the “cupboard”) and asking me if I “bemember” when she was three and cut her hand on a barnacle.  She uninterested in snuggling or playing with Play-doh or lying down to rest, even if she tells me how tired she is.  No, she just wants to talk, talk, talk.

If I happen to be alone, thinking actual thoughts while washing the dishes, my sons will traipse through the kitchen on their never-ending quest to drink all the milk without my knowledge and they will ask me crazy questions, questions that spring from the murky space in their brains where they are piecing together the mysteries of life and plotting to get their hands on some Chinese egg rolls soon.  Just because I’m standing still, working, does not mean that I’m not occupied in my head, pondering something or another.  To them, I look like a fount of knowledge, the person who can answer any question which might flit through their heads.

I can’t have two coherent thoughts in a row which positively frustrates me and honestly makes me feel a little crazy as if I’m being tortured by the systematic drip-drip-drip of words. 

I want to spend my days stringing words together like so many fancy beads, but I can’t.  I can’t because I’m living in a madhouse with chatty kids.  And I’m complaining about it which definitely disqualifies me for the Mother of the Year. 

My daughter will turn five on September 2.  She misses the local kindergarten cut-off date by a day.  I never thought I’d do this, but I am likely to send her to preschool because she has turned into Miss Extrovert who asks every visitor who appears at our door, “Can I come to your house?”  She wants to go, do, talk, visit, play, and then go some more.  She’s wearing me out which makes me feel guilty and old.  Also, uninteresting and uncreative. 

Silence is all I want which is ironic because I spent so much of my twenties crying because all I wanted then was a baby.  I just can’t be pleased.  Now I just want to be alone.

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Don’t forget to check out my other blog, The Amazing Shrinking Mom.  Every click counts!