Barnmaven

Picking up the phone, I said...nothing

I was the fourth child of an alcoholic and (so I am told) abusive mother, whose husband (not, incidentally, the man who fathered me) was in prison and who was likely not going to receive any more welfare money from the state for baby number four.

That’s my side of things, anyway, after listening to her story, and the varying, often conflicting stories told by other biological relatives.  The “facts” vary: I was the result of a rape and she couldn’t bear to keep me; the state told her that if she didn’t relinquish me for adoption they would take all of her children; her mother recalls her saying that “if it [me] is born handicapped I’m going to keep it.”  My sister remembers the Christmas that her mom wasn’t there and she and her brothers stayed at Grandpa and Grandma’s house.

There are likely millions of adoptees whose beginnings are similar to mine and there are millions more who had both better and worse opening paragraphs to their life stories.  It is important to me that my story be valid and clear, that I own what is mine to own and be willing to acknowledge that there is a lot to my own story that I do not and likely never will know.

I don’t know who fathered me.  There was a time when I was younger that I thought that was important.  I’m no longer so certain of this; there are days, though, when I remember the blank half of my heritage and I feel a sense of loss.  Was he a rapist?  I don’t know for sure.  My birthmother, told me once that his name was Marty, and that she didn’t know his last name.  She had been “dating” him for a month or so, and then he raped her and she never saw him again.  The agency information I got when I applied for my non-identifying information from Children’s Home Society stated that my birthfather’s first name was “Pete.”  Surely this was more than a simple spelling error, it seems rather difficult to turn “Marty” into “Pete” for even the worst transcriptionist ever.  Sylvia insisted that Pete was just a friend who agreed to be named on the paperwork in order to keep the agency from attempting to contact the other man to obtain his waiver of parental rights.

What’s true?  What’s false? Over the years it’s become such a confusing jumble of what others have told me that I at some point decided that pretty much none of it bears any relationship to the truth and that I might as well just let it go.  I’m never going to know and I have to be OK with that.  And I have a father, a father who loves me and who I am like in so many ways that people who didn't know better would be surprised to know I wasn't his biological offspring. 

I’m grateful that I didn’t live the life that my older siblings and the two younger sibilings she had after I was separated from the family suffered through.  But depending on which story surrounding my conception and birth you believe, its not really clear on whether I owe my birthmother any gratitude for that fact.  Not knowing who to thank leaves me simply grateful to God for benevolently allowing me to grow up free of violence and pedophilia.  Not so my siblings, who were unfortunate enough to suffer for a long period of time under the heavy hand of their mother and rape and sodomy from her second husband

I met my birth family when I was in my early thirties.  Seeing her for the first time, I was surprised.

In certain physical ways, my birthmother and I resemble one another not at all.  I am tall, she is short.  When I first met her she was quite heavy and so far as I know still is.  But when I look at myself in the mirror, I see her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth, her hair.  I’m even starting to get silver hairs at the temples, the same place she has what I remember her calling her “devil horns.”  Consdering the difficult nature of our relationship (if that is what you can call something that doesn’t really exist), the resemblance is both ironic and disturbing, at least to me. 

We haven’t spoken in years, she and I.  There was a family issue over something that happened with my younger sister during her teenage years, everyone took sides.  My birthmother sent an identical letter to all three of her daughters.  I grant that she didn’t have the ability to solve this problem for anyone and that the division and the drama surrounding the issue were terribly painful.  I acknowledge her desire to distance herself from the drama and focus instead on the things she could control.  Other parts of the letter were not as easily acceptable – her attempts to evoke sympathy by mentioning an abnormal medical test result, her tendency to allow blame to be placed everywhere else but on her.  We talked a few times after that, but eventually I decided the relationship was not healthy for me and I just...withdrew.

Recently she reached out to my older sister, and for the first time that my sister can recall, her denial of past events and her refusal to accept her part in what happened to my siblings finally ended.  She acknowledged that the things my sister remembered did indeed happen.  She apologized for her part in it.  She listened. 

I was happy for my sister, but at the same time I was resentful. Even though I am the one who eventually ended contact with her, that small part of me that will always be searching for my missing roots cried out in jealous anger.   I know this is not even a reasonable thought, particularly when the proportion of the wrongs committed against my sister and other siblings so enormously outweigh any grievance I may have.  But still. 

I tried months ago to let her know through my sister that I would be receptive to contact if she were willing to make it, but no contact ever came.  I reasoned with myself that for her to take the step of reaching out to me would mean that she must acknowledge that I am right and she is wrong so this must be why she had not made the effort.  I didn’t stop to consider that thought might apply equally to both of us.  I didn’t for a moment give thought to the fact that I can be a little intimidating sometimes and perhaps she had plenty of reason beyond my snap assumptions not to reach out.    Eventually some recent birth family drama (it is always the drama with these people!) our impasse came to mind again, and I began to wonder if maybe I wasn't that one being unreasonable.

So then I had to examine myself and my feelings about her, about my birth, about all that has transpired in the years since, and I had to decide whether I was ready to let go of the past and be more concerned with how the future might shape the present.  And in truthfulness to myself, I had to acknowledge that the pain I might feel at times over my lost roots and the cold hard reality of my adoption is not really quite as large as I sometimes perceive it to be.  Once upon a time it was a central issue for me, but that time is long gone.  And so I resolve myself, I surrender to the idea that the mystery of the past is simply that:  a mystery.  Unknowable and ultimately unimportant to my future.  And so I ask my sister for her mother’s phone number.  I resolve to be responsible for reaching out, to forgive, forget and move on.

I have yet to pick up the phone.  It feels the time is never right, that I haven’t yet found the right words to say.  I’m sure its simpler than I’m making it out to be, but the willpower to do it eludes me. 

I'll let you know what happens.

You're Beautiful. No, Really.

Jane Devin wrote another great thought-provoking blog post yesterday about beauty.  I'm a huge fan of Jane's writing.  Her book Elephant Girl was as haunting a memoir as I have ever read, but her use of language as an art form makes it impossible not to read her, even when what she's written about is ugly and painful.

So anyway, beauty.  Jane writes, "We’re never going to make it okay to not be physically beautiful if we don’t get off this beauty kick we’ve been on for so long. We’re not going to change our futures and those of other women as long as “beautiful” remains a priority. We’re not going to change the culture that places such an inordinately high premium on female attractiveness as long we keep promoting beauty myths through the lies we tell ourselves and each other."

  I posted on her FB wall that I wasn't sure I agreed, and I mentioned my now-deceased friend Peg, who was morbidly obese and losing her hair thanks to Rheumatoid Arthritis and a cupboard filled with medications both toxic and ill-suited toward maintaining one's weight and hair volume.   Whenever I saw Peg, or when I think of her now in my mind's eye, I see beauty.  I see large brown eyes with impossibly long lashes and I hear the softest, most soothing voice imaginable.  I hear her tinkling laughter as she regales me with yet another story about her Boston catholic family. 

I concede the point that we give too much emphasis and value to the concept of beauty when we try to compliment someone or try to boost their self esteem.  But I also believe we misuse the word "beautiful." The term has been warped by our media to mean an almost impossibly achievable standard of physical appearance.  And Jane isn't really talking about the people who miss this standard by some small or even medium mark, she's talking about when the whole person doesn't come close due to physical deformity or flaw and that the act of trying to make someone feel beautiful when they aren't phsyically attractive is to her a disservice.

I know Jane's opinion comes from experience and from her own sense of self, her dedication to speaking the truth as she sees and feels it.  We talked about it back and forth on Facebood a little, and to a large extent I agree with her...but there is a space between that extent and my own feelings about looks and attractiveness.

What I wish were possible was for the propensity toward shallowness to somehow disappear from the human gene pool.  Its not ever likely to happen, but I can still dream about it.  I'm raising a girl, and there's no doubt that females are held to much stricter standards than the male population.  (In general, that is, because there are certainly men and women who possess no such incremental measurements of beauty when appreciating one another or their partners. )  It starts so young, with the TV shows for tweens that have mostly very attractive and thin lead characters, and their not-so-cute and maybe-a-little-dorky and often a little fat sidekicks.   Its pretty easy to decide which character you'd rather be -- and pretty easy to look at yourself and see all the reasons why you could never be her. 

It only gets worse as we get older.  Movies and television use all the tricks of makeup and lighting, props and camera position to disguise that which is unacceptable and magazines taking it a step better and photoshopping models and movie stars to the point where the real person and the picture no longer resemble one another.  And these are the people we are supposed to emulate?  How can we emulate them?  Trust me, if I could photoshop my ass for real to make it a couple sizes smaller, I would.  Well, maybe I would.

I'll never forget the really average-looking guy who came up to me in a bar when I was in my very early twenties, and said (right to my face!) "You'd be a really attractive girl if you didn't have such a big butt."  I spent every day of my life from that day forward feeling horrible about the size of my posterior.  One doesn't forget that sort of comment. 

How do we teach people to value themselves and others by non-physical standards?  How do we teach people that diversity in size and color are not marks of shame but badges of uniqueness?  How do we get human beings to learn how to give a compliment that doesn't include the words except, but, if only and however?

To address Jane's point, what about those who fall far short of the current physical standard of beauty?  Is it a disservice to seek beauty in those who feel they have none?  Do we need to know we are beautiful?  What is beauty anyway? 

And maybe that's where I see the difference in people -- my definition of "beauty" is subjective.  It isn't necessarily the same as others.  I see people as a whole picture.  I look at my husband and even though I could give you a short checklist of things about him that aren't what might be considered conventionally handsome, those aren't the things I see.  The things I see are the things that make him handsome to me -- his big smile, his broad shoulders, his warm brown eyes, and the one thing I can't see but I can hear it the moment he opens his mouth -- his intelligence and his sense of humor.  I'm NOT LOOKING for the other things.  I suppose its the same for him -- when he looks at me he sees the things he likes and discards the rest as unimportant.

I think I could look at anyone, even someone I don't particularly care for or someone who copes with a serious lack of conventional attractiveness and I could still see beauty in them.  Beauty and ugliness coexist in all of us, and they can't always be seen with the naked eye.  No human being who has ever lived is immune to the ugliness of that petty, selfish little voice in our heads, and no human exists who doesn't display physical and emotional moments of pure, unadulterated beauty. 

Childbirth -- not the prettiest sight imaginable.  And yet, that slime-covered, squalling purplish red infant with the pulsing cord still attached is beautiful in a way that cannot be described in words.  The physicality of the act of giving birth - blood, fluid, poop on the table, maybe an emergency cesaerean with intestines being pulled onto the table to get them out of the way!  There is ugliness but the spiritual and emotional experience of expelling life into the world was for me and for many women as beautiful as it was painful.

I postulate that we are all - every one of us - both beautiful and ugly.  The outside may lean far more one way than the other, but to deny the existence of beautfy at all is to deny that inside this flesh wrapper is tethered a being made up of nothing but spirit.  We are not our bodies.

Like Jane, I tend to find things other than physical appearance to compliment others on, regardless of how physically attractive they might be - or not.   But I'm going to politely, compassionately and lovingly disagree that we do service to another by refraining from letting a person know we find something about them beautiful.  Insincerity is in itself not at all useful, but a sincerely meant compliment is another thing entirely.  I compliment my daughter on her sense of humor and her strength, her sensitive and loving heart, her ability to write amazing stories and her fierce protectiveness of all things  furred and feathered.  I try to compliment her on these things more than her beauty, because I want her to always have those messages in her mind when she remembers what her mother thought of her, but she also knows I think she is stunningly beautiful. 

Jane of the amazing large eyes, I only know you from your photos on your blog and your book, but know that I do see beauty when I look at you.  We both have voices in our heads that spit out reminders of the things we know about ourselves that are the antithesis of "pretty."  Nonetheless, you have beauty that is not limited to the inner you.  Its there on the exterior as well.

 

 

Coming soon to Barnmaven.com:  My colonoscopy!  And yes, even THAT is beautiful!  I KID YOU NOT.

 

 

Planning ahead

NOW when the number of my years

is all fulfilled, And I

From sedentary life shall rouse me up to die,

Bury me low and let me lie

Under the wide and starry sky.

Joying to live, I joyed to die.

Bury me low and let me lie.

                    ~Robert Louis Stevenson

 

On the days I'm actually in the mood to hear what's going on in the outside world (its an election seasion, mostly I'm not) I tend to listen to NPR's Northwest stations on the way to and from work.  Sometimes I have to throw in a CD or switch to a music station if its early morning and I'm having a hard time waking up or if its the way home and the soothing voice of Robert Seigel starts causing me to nod off at the wheel.  One of my doctors told me once that an attribute of unmedicated ADHD is  tendency to be extremely sleepy in the afternoons.  That was a BINGO! moment for me, as I had been having terrible trouble driving home from work on a daily basis.  Once I started medication it got much better, but I still have days when I'm a little overtired and driving home is a crapshoot.  But I digress.  Again.  I know, you're so surprised!

So a couple of weeks ago Diane Rehms did a segment on aging and preparing for end of life issues.  One of the guests kept talking about a program called Five Wishes.  Its basically a living will but with extras, like telling your survivors what you'd like them to say when people ask how you wanted to be remembered, picking songs or passages you'd like at your services or if you even want services, along with standard advance directives.  In most states, signed by the proper witnesses, it stands as a legal document. 

Its not easy to talk about death and dying, not for most people.  I don't mind it, but my parents have been very open for years about their wishes for end of life issues.  Mom keeps a folder with all the pertinent instructions and information on where all the necessary documents are located.   Other people aren't so comfortable about planning for or talking about what will happen if they get ill or very old or die suddenly.  I suppose most people don't often like to think about the fact that we're going to die someday.  Its the great unknown, isn't it?  It will happen to everyone, but we don't know how or when and we don't know for sure what happens after.  We might believe certain things about what happens when we die, but there's no clear information to be found about exactly how that goes down.  Is there a test?  A door greeter?  Is there really a Rainbow Bridge and will there be a Noah's Ark of all the animals I've ever loved waiting there for me?  Who's scooping all the poop up there in the meantime? 

I do know that I'm not afraid to die, per se, but I'm afraid of dying while my children are still young.  And because my children are still young and because I only recently remarried and I don't have a current will and my advance directive is about twenty years out of date, I really dug into what the folks on the radio were saying.  SG and I talked some about what we would want to happen after Ken died, but we never went ahead and put anything on paper.

When my brother died, it was completely unexpected.  I can't remember ever talking to him about what he wanted done when that time came, it just wasn't something we thought about.  We talked about what we knew our parents wanted, but it never occurred to either of us that we might not outlive our parents.  Because he'd never had those conversations with anyone and because he didn't have any advance directives, his death was exponentially more difficult, especially for my niece and nephews. They are young adults, and my niece was in the position of having to make a lot of decisions without really knowing for certain what her dad would have wanted.  She also had to deal with the pressure of making these decisions with a lot of different people telling her what they thought she ought to do.  Its a position I would never want to be in, and its a position I don't ever want to put anyone else in.

I kind of forgot about the Five Wishes site for several days, but at some point I had a chance to actually use my laptop at home and I checked out the information there.  I was planning to sit down with SG at the next opportunity to talk about the end of life planning and the need for us to outline our wishes and probably get wills made.  And then...

(This is where the hair on my arms starts to tingle a little bit)

...the doorbell rang.  The dogs freaked out, so it took a few seconds to shove them into their crates.  I opened the door and there was a very nice looking older blond lady standing on my stoop, holding a clipboard and carrying a casual looking briefcase.  She introduced herself and as it turns out, she is a sales representative for a local funeral home. 

COINCIDENCE?  Does this stuff ever happen to you?  Isn't it really spooky when it does?

It wasn't really a good time to have her come in and sit down with us (kids rampant, house messy, in the middle of things), but we made an appointment, and she came back a few days later.  We talked for a good hour or so, and she left us with some materials.  One of the materials is a pamphlet we keep even if we decide not to do any pre-planning, where we write down all of our important information, things we or our families would need to know if when we die.

I'm not planning on dying anytime soon, and neither is SG, of course.  Most of us aren't.  But this is a one way trip, boys and girls.  Making plans isn't something we are doing for ourselves.  Its something we are doing for each other and for our children and our families and friends.  When my spirit no longer lives in my body, what happens to my body won't matter to me.  It will matter, though, to the people I love.  And so we plan ahead, hoping that those plans won't be needed for many years to come, but having some peace about knowing that they are made just in case.

(No, SG, I'm NOT having your body shot into space on a rocket.  Stop asking me.)

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/justintron/6245250507/

 

Finis.

SG's Theory of the Universal Application of Love

In a conversation with SG last night about religion, Jesus and what SG call his theory of the Universal Application of Love as Christ's answer to pretty much every problem that exists, I was translating horse and human behavior as I am often wont to do.

Amongst practitioners of Natural Horsemanship techniques you will often hear horses referred to as "push" animals.  Because they are at the bottom of the food chain, their response to threat (or pressure) is to run away.  This natural tendency can be taken advantage of quite easily to train them.  When I apply pressure in this way, you move that way.  Because they are so sensitive to pressure, horses will soon learn to read your movements and so once they understand how it feels when you ask them to do a certain thin, they begin to read the smallest movement from you.  Thus,  maybe you start off by asking your horse to trot by leaning forward and giving him some leg pressure, or you might even have to spank him with your hand a little or your rein, and if he still is not trotting, you might let him feel the pressure of a spur.  In any case, once he has begun trotting, you don't need to continue to ask him to do it.  So long as he is doing what you asked him to do, you stop applying the additional pressure.  Soon he learns that when you shift your weight slightly and send a little energy down your legs, this means to move into the trot, and so you don't need as big a physical cue to get the same result.

Some people are better at responding quickly when the horse gets it right, and other people need a lot of practice to get any good at all at recognizing when the horse tries and begins to get it right.  When the latter happens, you will see a person continuing to put pressure on the horse, the horse has done or is trying to do as the rider requested but there's no reward. He's still getting stabbed in the side with a spur or spanked with the tail end of the reins.  If this goes on too long,  the horse gets incredibly frustrated and likely scared too, because he doesn't understand what you want from him at all.  You forgot to tell him he did it right, and because he is a prey animal and the pressure you put on him makes him scared, he may begin to fight - buck, rear up, kick - to get away from you.  Some horses have better minds about this than others and they are easier to work with, but with horses who are poor-minded or fearful to begin with, this kind of treatment will very quickly begin to develop a pathological response in the horse.  If he has to buck to get you off and that's what makes the pressure stop, then you've reinforced the pathology and the downward spiral begins.  Pretty soon you've got a horse that just hates to be ridden, doesn't trust anyone, and becomes a danger to people.

I believe this is an apt metaphor for what happens when we treat other people badly.  I see it in churches and organized religion all the time.  Instead of treating others with love, some people prefer to respond to others with judgment, hate and sometimes even violence.   The data has been in for a long time now; children raised in violent homes have a predictably much higher likelihood of become violent parents.  Children who spend too long in institutionalized environments as infants do not learn to have loving bonds with others, will end up being unable to relate as well or have appropriate trust levels.  As with a horse who has been improperly handled, you can usually improve the situation, but its a lot harder to fix it when it began badly in the first place, in horse OR human.

This bears out throughout the path of history, and it continues today becuse abuse begets abuse begets abuse.   Bad treatment by other people, whether we are children or adults, invariably results in some level of negative pathology and response within us.  If our experience is compounded by past abuse or other triggers, our stress and fear may compel us to either fight back in a way we ordinarily wouldn't dream of, or cause us an inverted response that leads to self harm - drug abuse, acoholism, or even worse, suicidal behavior.  We hurt ourselves or others when we learn that we have no value.

At my ten year high school reunion I remember someone reporting that this kid Ned, from a class a few years behind me, had built himself a shelter of some sort out in the woods, a la Ted Kaczynski  , booby-trapped the area around it and told everyone that if he caught anyone attempting to come near him they'd get shot.  I dont' know if the story was true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Ned was one of those unfortunate kids who got bullied in school.  He was picked on constantly, he was small and wore thick black plastic-rimmed glasses, didn't dress like the cool kids, and from what I heard had a rather crappy home life as well.  In retrospect, the negative pressure on that poor kid from all sides must have been endless and unbearable.

In mixed company I am sometimes loathe to verbally announce that my beliefs are Christian in nature.  I know quite well what many people think of Christians, and its generally not very nice.  I tend to be far from the mainstream in my views of Christianity.  I think Jesus was a radical promoter of ONE value:  Love.  Jesus didn't write anything.  He used his words and his actions to preach a gospel that love, applied liberally and without prejudice, was the answer to everything.  In the early years after his death, Christianity had a lot of foward momentum.  People could understandably be open to the concept that treating one another with love, compassion, mercy and grace was THE way to live. 

All it took to effectively shut down this Love Revolution was a little politics.  Once the message of Christ was adopted by the government, it took no little effort to turn it back into a religion where reward came only from following hundreds of difficult rules, and "love" became a euphemism for "treating people like shit until they do what you want them to." 

We are born with an inherent need to be loved and nurtured.   That need for love, unfulfilled, creates problems.  Even if  you don't buy into my personal belief in Christianity, when it comes to the concept of love, I'm still right.   What frustrates and sickens me is when people are drawn to a group or a belief concept because they sense that what they need is that higher order of love, but what they get instead is condemnation.  They seek the application of mercy and instead receive a heavy dose of hatred. Oh, the people condemning won't admit that's what they're doing.  They try and camoflouge their hateful behavior as "love" but dehumanizing and hating other people resembles love about as much as a fluffy baby bunny resembles a honey badger.

If we really want the world to change, we need to radically change the way we treat others.  That doesn't mean becoming enablers or not being able to be honest and truthful when people hurt us or they act like assholes.  To me it just means that we remember to apply compassion when it comes to other people and stick to the basics laid out two thousand years ago by a Jewish carpenter.  Love others.  Easy in theory, often hard in practice, but ultimately the only answer I see that works long term.

 

Passages

Over the years I've fallen in love with so many blogs.  Every so often I'll see someone I really look forward to reading stop posting with any regularity, and I wonder if they're OK, if this is the beginning of the long decline to the end of blogging altogether or just the silence while they weather a crisis or a dry spell.  When I first started blogging I was so enthralled with the form and the media I couldn't imagine ever wanting to stop.  I'd see someone I really like put their blog on haitus or take it offline entirely and I'd be so perplexed...why would anyone want to go silent like that? 

I also remember being a woman without children and I'd watch people who were parents say and do certain things and I'd be absolutely flummoxed why parents were so crazy.  I, after all, would never say or do such things.  I'd never buy my kid a happy meal just to make him stop crying for one goddam second.  I'd never fill my kids rooms with plastic crappy toys or ignore them just so I could have one minute of sanity in the bathroom or let them wear clothes made in third world countries by indentured servants to the smiley face or...and so on.

I gather this is the standard process for most people.  When something is new or not yet experienced, we bury ourselves under the weight of uninformed opinions and find ourselves surprised when we one day find out just how little we actually know about anything.

The good news (depending, I suppose, on your point of view) is that I'm not planning on falling off the web into that large graveyard of discontinued blogs.  The bad news, if there is such a thing, is that I have no current urge to write much at the moment and no idea how to solve that problem.  Or even know if that's actually a "problem."   My health has been a bit difficult of late, work has been very challenging and stressful, and the things that need doing far outnumber the hours of time available.  In truth, my attitude about blogging and bloggers has changed dramatically over the last year or so, and my reasons for writing, such as they were, are no longer the same.  My goals for blogging have changed significantly, and my self-knowledge of my place in the world of blogging has clarified.  I'm ok with where I am and who I am, and I'm less worried than ever about accidentally offending anyone or even whether or not anyone "important" is reading, because I DO get, frankly, that everyone who takes the time to come here and read my continuing attempts at writing has given me a great gift of time and attention, and I'm grateful for every single one of you. 

Lately I'm in a state of wonderment at the ability life has to be simultaneously amazing and awful.  Or joyous and depressing.  Or stressful and flatlined.  Pick your metaphors, they all fit. 

My friend Debbie, who has taken the reins over organizing my barn, my pastures, my horses and trying to convince me to implement ten thousand fabulous ideas all at the same time, says constantly "Its amazing how you're just so normal!"  I think she has it ass-backwards.  I think we get along really well because on a certain level we have brains that work the same (wrong, not-normal) way and we don't get frustrated by the tangential nature of practically every conversation we've ever had.  Over the course of the summer we've repaired stall doors and expanded so that I now have three working stalls.  When there was only one stall functional and three to four horses being fed with different requirements for supplements and each with the right to be able to eat without someone else chasing them away from breakfast, things were a little crazy out there.    She's also picked my dry pen clean of weeds and rocks.  She's found someone to haul away the manure pile.  She's found someone to put up wall racks for tack and someone to paint.  She's cleared the area behind the barn where all the scrap lumber and fencing materials used to get tossed (don't look at ME, the old owners started it, I just kept the tradition alive) and put down pallets and tarps and quadrupled our ability to store hay.

She also drives my husband a little batty because he is used to being along much of the time and she is by nature a very chatty person.  I can tell he likes her though. 

The kids this summer...what an amazing change in both of them.  My daughter is getting taller and more beautiful by the nanosecond.  She's taken two sessions of swimming lessons, gotten to level three and only needs to perfect two things to get to level four.  She's at that stage of transformation between little girl and startling long-legged tween and she's just stunning.  That's not even subjective mother-pride.  Its just God's honest truth.  What I find fascinating is her ability to verbalize her understanding that she knows she's growing up but she's not in any hurry to do so.  "I just want to be a kid, mom.  I don't want to grow up yet," she'll say, and my heart melts with love and pride and bittersweetness all at the same time.  She will grow up whether I will it or no.  I know that little girls can change dramatically as they age, and I hold onto the firm hope that the person she is, the things about her that make her so awesomely her will stay intact.   She gets more out of my reach every day, and as I let go with a heart that strains under the hope and fear, I simply pray that God lets life be gentle with her for as long as possible.  In les than two weeks she will be a fifth grader. 

My son is learning to negotiate.  His anxiety and ODD issues make certain things difficult.  He hates taking showers because he doesn't want to get any water in his eyes, but baths take too long and his anxiety informs him that soaking in your own dirty water is just YUCK.  So showers were always a struggle, until he came home from his dad's one weekend and announced that he and his dad worked out a deal:  Daddy bought him swim goggles and now he doesn't get upset in the shower.  I'm not sure who thought up the idea, but hot damn if it hasn't made getting the little dude clean a much less stressful event.  Hallelujah and pass the cornbread!  He's gotten tons more compliant about taking his meds, and he's learned to negotiate that as well.  We've also had to learn to listen when he starts to refuse things - sometimes we have a hard time remembering that his anxiety makes certain things far harder for him to tolerate than we can understand.  

SG has been a stay-at-home stepdad all summer and has had both kids pretty much every day of the week since their dad and I are both working, and I really believe his even-tempered nature has had a positive impact on both of them.   Their dad and I both tend to moodiness, and I sense that our unpredictability has been stressful for them.   They have evened out much, both of them, they fight with one another a lot less, and its clear that they both adore their stepdad.  School starts soon, so my husband will be joining the ranks of the employed unless I either get a highly unexpected and very large pay raise or I actually buy a lottery ticket and it turns out to be a winnah.  He's been my rock the last month or so while I've struggled physically and mentally.  That's love for you.  I am not afraid to admit that my patience is thin and my attitude bad, and he has endured it with a great deal more grace than I would likely exhibit were I in his shoes.

We lost Mojo kitty this summer.   He disappeared in the spring for a few weeks and when we finally found him he was so skinny and deteriorated we weren't sure he would make it.  He recovered for a while with special food and supplements and monitoring, but then he went suddenly downhill and we had to make the tough choice to say goodbye.  I suspect it was cancer.    He's joined Hercules, Lady and our little old banty hen Cin-Cin under the tree out in the back pasture.  I think I've learned pretty well the last few years that people and animals too often leave our lives far sooner than we are prepared for them to do, and it reminds me to make a point of taking time each day for each animal to have some attention, for me to be more vigilant about picking up the phone, and to treasure every opportunity to play with my children and create memories to sustain me when they have grown up and begun lives of their own.  It will happen sooner than I think.

How's your summer been so far?