Barnmaven

If wishes were fishes

I love the way memory is so intricately connected to the senses.  A smell, a taste, a song can take me back along the timeline of my life, often to a place or person or event I've not thought about in years.  There are times when the reverse is true as well -- a memory will evoke a sensory response.  I look at a picture of me cradling my infant daughter and I can smell milk and lavender-scented baby wash.    I can flip through an album of old remodeling pictures and remember the feeling of being caked with soot and fine black dirt from taking four layers of roofing material off our old house.

I have tons of photo albums full of images I really should put in digital format to preserve them.  For every picture that was developed and put into an album, there are about five more that didn't make it into the highlight reel of my life.  Those photos and all of the duplicates that didn't get given to friends, relatives or grandparents, they are all in a plastic bin in the extra bedroom.  The last time I really went through them is when my ex and I divided our belongings and I needed to go through and give him an equal sampling of our joint history as captured on film.  The problem with going through that box is that what started off as a planned one-hour project quickly turned into a four-hour journey into the recesses of memory.  I need to go through that box and get its contents put into a more durable format, and right now I don't dare.

I would love to tell you I live life with no regrets, but the hubris of saying so would only invite the Universe to go right ahead and unleash the Kraken. 

There are people I've lost touch with that I wish I hadn't.  There are people I've hurt that I wished I hadn't.  There are people I've loved that I wished I hadn't.   Choices I've made that were so monumentally stupid that I'm shocked it was me that made them. 

As many regrets as I may have, marrying my ex and having our children is not one of them.  Sure, there were times during our separation and divorce that I wondered if it had really been worth it, but that was mere misery beating its breast.  My children are the greatest treasure of my life, and I would not trade one moment with them for any amount of money, comfort, or success.  I don't make that statement lightly; In the past months I've had career opportunities dangled in front of me that were definite steps up the ladder in terms of title and income.  Two questions I asked myself: 

1.  Is there anything so wrong with my life right now that I would consider making a dramatic change?

2.  Would this career advancement make me less available to my children?

The answers were and are crystal clear.

My babies are not babies anymore, but they aren't teenagers either.  The years remaining where they will really need me the way they do now are few.    I see no gain in wasting what small time I have left of their childhood.   Its not selfless; I worry less what they would think of me if I treated my career as being more important than their needs.  I worry more what I would think of myself if that were true.

When it comes to my children, the only possible regret I have is that I have only two.  Before I met SG I didn't give it much of a thought.  In the last year or so, however, its been an oft-discussed topic.  I've examined every ramification and rejected all of them up until the realization that one reaches a point in life where it is no longer optimal to be pregnant or raising an infant.  I don't want to be depositing my youngest into Kindergarten when I'm 52. 

Its just water under the bridge now, but that doesn't mean my soul is yet fully convinced I should be done having babies.  If anything I wish that I'd started earlier.  I was already considered to be in "advanced maternal age" when I had my daughter.  Three months shy of my 40th birthday I delivered my son.   By the time it would have been about right to consider another baby, we were in the throes of a cross-country move which was soon followed by a string of diagnoses and eventually the end of a marriage.  

I'm left to imagine who a child of this marriage might be.  Every time the kids say they wished they had a little brother or sister I feel a sharp pang of loss for the alternate life's journey where I wasn't on the wrong half of my forties or had gotten my shit together a lot sooner.  An alternate timeline where I met SG more than a decade sooner, or wasn't so old now or where we hadn't chosen permanent options regarding fertility.

The days for babies are over for me.  All that's left to me now are pictures, videos and the occasional pang of regret.  The reality I live in is truly sufficient; I am fulfilled by my relationships with my family.   There is nothing that I need that I do not have in abundance.  Sometimes, though, its not the things you need that trip you up; its the things you think you want.

 

Girl things

My left shoulder hurts.  It has for years, but not like it has lately.  Lately whenever I try to put my arm up over my head, do pushups, carry hay or saddle my horse it really really hurts.  I went to see the shoulder guy at the Orthopaedic clinic, and he gave me a shot of steroids but that only worked for a little while, so I was back there this morning.  He wants to rule out a small tear in the rotator cuff before he puts me in physical therapy, so they're scheduling an MRI. 

I'm so excited.

I've never had an MRI.  And what if I have to have surgery?  Another scar to show off!  Cool!

Yes, I'm that person.

I'm the person who sees snow falling and I might pretend to be annoyed, because that's apparently what you're supposed to feel when it snows.  Inside, though, I can't wait for the adventure of driving in it.  There might even be an accident!  I might end up stranded in the wilderness and have to hike through the mountains and eat my companions to survive!

I'm the person who gets a scrape or a cut and the only reason I go looking for a bandage is so I can walk by my husband and kids and say "LOOK!  I'M BLEEDING!"  If the cut isn't bleeding enough I'll probably squeeze it a little to see if I can get more out of it.

I'm the person who hates needles and gets tattoos.  "How many hours did that one take?"  "Four two hour appointments."  "Didn't it hurt"  "Oh, yeah, it hurt like hell.  It was awesome."  And when I'm under the needle and the artist asks if  I need a break and I say that I'm fine and they respond with "Wow, most people would have had to take at least a couple of breaks by now," I'm all "FUCK YEAH."

I'm the woman who will smack a volleyball into the face of the guy on the other side of the net with barely concealed glee, run over the shortstop on my way to second base and barrel through the guy trying to set a pick on me when I'm guarding the guy who's driving the baseline.

I put on my coveralls and a baseball cap, put my truck up on ramps and change my oil, change my filters, refill my washer fluid and try to see if that pesky leak is just a loose bolt that I can fix myself.  I look like a greasemonkey, and I could care less.

And this may sound crazy, but at the same time I like that I can put on a fancy dress and get my hair and makeup all just so and knock my husband's socks off with my awesome female self.  I very much like my femininity and all that it entails.

I'm not alone in this.  So many women I know are just like me, strong and soft.  Tough and tender.  My daughter is one of them.

Pink, bright hot pink, is her favorite color.  She loves My Little Pony and Dragons, stuffed kitty toys and light sabers.  She wants to be a princess and a ninja. She has beautiful hair to her waist and she prefers jeans to dresses.  She came to me on Christmas day to talk about how upset she was when some relatives and friends gave her brother "boy" toys and gave her "girl" things like body wash and perfume.  She was upset to think anyone might think that she was a "girly girl." 

There is so much to love about being a woman.  While its a sure bet that my childhood in the late 60's/early 70's subjected my psyche to a great deal of gender role absolutes, I enjoy wearing makeup and dressing in clothes meant to showcase what I think is attractive about myself.  I care about how my hair looks, and I struggle like many women about the impossible-to-walk line between having fingernails that are neat and pretty or fingernails that allow you to do things like cinch a saddle, throw hay bales and repair fencing. 

In 1983, the year I graduated high school, 95 percent of autobody repair workers were male.  There must have been something brewing in us and the classes of women that followed.   As of a decade ago, the number of women in that industry tripled -- a 369% increase.  Other typically male-dominated industries have seen similar jumps in female workers - firefighting, millwork, engineering and law enforcement, to name a few. ¹  I've been a lot of things in my work life, but the bulk of it I've spent in transportation. 

I might have grown up watching Charlie's Angels, but I think I still understood at a very deep level that those women were still playing to male sexuality and that they represented very little that was real.  Anyone with half a brain knows that television and movies tell you lots of lies about how people look and what they say and do.

So when Amazon Girl complained about some of her gifts, I told my daughter that people weren't trying to be unkind if they bought her "girly girl" presents.  I told her even though she might not be a perfume and flowers kind of young lady that it wasn't demeaning for people to think of her as feminine.  Besides, isn't a gift is more of a reflection of the giver than of the receiver?.  But I get it, as might any woman who in the hormone hell of early puberty was mistaken more than once for a boy.  But I want her to know - to believe - that she doesn't have to be one or the other.  Both aspects of her exist together and there's nothing wrong with that.  There's nothing wrong about being a woman who can both take care of herself and look good doing it.

The dividing line between two worlds that were once very separate has become thin and transparent.  We may be very different physically, we may in large part have critically different ways of thinking and organizing our lives, but in so many ways we have broken free of the gender roles that at one time were used to contain and limit us.  I think thats a good thing for all of us, men included.

So hey, do you want to arm wrestle?

 

^{1.  Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005 Current Population Survey}

 

Thanks Blogher for featuring this post on Blogher.com!

 

 

Yes I would

 

A very smelly dog who hasn't had a bath yet is lying almost entirely on my pillow as my husband sleeps, oblivious.  The stitches from her surgery haven't come out yet, so we haven't been able to give her a much-needed bath. 

Exasperated, I kiss the dog on the head and shake my husband awake.  "You want to move the dog?" I ask.  "If you're going to let her stink up the bed, let it be on your side." 

For a moment I think "He's lucky I love him."  It only takes a moment or two for me to remember that I'm pretty lucky he loves me.

Sometimes its something powerful that causes you to consider the depth of your feelings for someone; other times its the mundane.  Considering how often we annoy the shit out of each other, its amazing we remember at all.  But remember we do.

The other day I'm sitting in the living room quietly minding my own business and he feels the need to come in, change the channel to some band I've never heard of doing a live concert and then turn the volume waaayyyyyy up. 

Annoyed, I gather my things and change rooms, grumbling the whole way about how I live here too, you know, and not everyone wants to listen to music all the time.  Then again, its likely he feels the same way about my tendency to try on every outfit I own and leave all the stuff I decided against piled up in the middle of the bed for him to deal with after I leave for work, or to wake him up at 5:00 in the morning because I something large and furry went scurrying when I opened the garage door and I needed him to prove it was a kitten and not a rat.  And he even went along with me when I suggested that if it was actually a kitten we should probably start feeding it. 

This morning I'm putting on my makeup and he comes and leans against the bathroom doorjamb, watching.

"Why do you watch this?" I ask.  "How am I supposed to maintain any sense of mystery?  Not that there's a lot left to the imagination at this point..."

"A woman's personality is always a source of mystery" he says, laughing and kissing me.

I am lucky that my dear husband is a forgiving sort of fellow, he likewise that I am a woman inclined to seek the good.  We're both old enough to be at peace with our respective faults, which makes it far easier to accept them in others. When I finally reached a point in my life where my self-love was greater than my self-loathing, that's when I met the person who could love me as I am.  Perhaps the fact that I had come to accept and even at times celebrate my own strengths and acknowledge and forgive my own weaknesses made it easier for someone else to come along and love me too.

Even though life is busy and like most people I invest too much of my time and energy slogging through the daily grind of work, chores and bills, there are times on my long commute that I turn off the radio and pay attention.  Driving through the frozen desert and the stubbled, winter-barren crop circles, I reflect on the mystery of us and one more time am humbled by just how lucky I am, at this stage in my life, to know this kind of love.

 

I would marry this man again in a heartbeat.  Yes, I would.

Carnivore

When I was in my 20's I toyed with vegetarianism for a while.  I still ate fish, but eschewed any other meat.  (For some reason, it didn't occur to me that fish are alive, too.  Perhaps I mentally disqualified them due to their lack of innate cuteness.  When something looks at you with warm brown eyes its easy to not want to eat it, but fish, well, they're coated with slime, they never blink, and would anyone want to cuddle with a fish? )

I'm not much of a vegetable eater (which in retrospect makes me question how I ever thought I'd be a successful vegetarian) so my diet consisted mostly of carbs.  Pasta, bread.  Ice cream.  It didn't take more than a year or two of staring longingly at other peoples' prime rib dinners for me to admit I was living a lie.  I wanted meat.  Even though it stung my pride to eat my words, I finally came out to my family:  "I'm not a vegetarian anymore.  Can I have a one of those hamburgers?"  Bless them all for only saying "I told you so" with the voices inside their heads.

I like my steak rare.  Once on a trip to Boston for work my then-boss took me to a little steak house.  That sirloin was the best tasting steak I've ever eaten.  I don't know what they used for seasoning, but I've never been able to replicate it.  I'm starting to salivate a little just thinking about it.  Every steak I've ever cooked since that meal has been a vain attempt to seek carnivore nirvana.

When I "accidentally" ended up with a small flock of chickens (another story for a rainy day) and they started gifting me with fresh free-range eggs, I was reminded of living on our little hobby farm as a kid.  We had our own eggs, our own garden, and every year a deer and half a grass-fed angus in the freezer.  Still, the money aspect.

Last year we had the opportunity to buy part of a steer from a friend.  It weighed out at about 700 lbs, and my brother, a friend and SG and I bought a half and sorted it out into three relatively even piles of beef.  Those steaks, those roasts, they were excellent.  Worth every penny. 

With SG on the road and earning, we felt emboldened to buy another half a beef this year, but this time a whole half.  The steer went to the butcher just after Thanksgiving, and two weeks ago Stephen went up there and brought home 325 lbs of steaks, roasts, ribs, hamburger, stew meat and carne asada.  We had to clean out the box freezer to make room for it all. 

Whenever I put a steak on the grill or a roast in the oven, my taste buds remember that perfect Bostonian steak.  Sometimes I get it right, sometimes its a miss, but always, especially when you know the meat you're eating is hormone-, pesticide- and drug-free, its better than good.  So far I've cooked a couple of roasts and made one batch of chili in the crock pot. 

I am a happy, happy carnivore.

 

Post Holiday Wind-down (a/k/a the "wine" down)

Christmas seemed quiet up until about 1 o'clock Christmas Day.  My kids were with their dad from their last day of school on Friday.  We spent the time wrapping gifts and enjoying sleeping in.  On Christmas Eve SG went to the airport in Spokane to pick his son Josh up at the airport. 

We've had Josh's dog Kylie for a few months now while he transitioned from Arizona to Florida for the first part of Navy flight school.  He's ready to take her home now, and Christmas was a great opportunity to come get his dog and spend some time with his dad and his extended family here in Washington. 

Christmas Day we slept in, had a lazy breakfast and pretty much hung out until the kids finally showed up about 1:00.  Then the fun really started. 

They tore through their presents by 1:15 and were busy playing with their toys before the minute hand hit the 30 minute mark.

Once we could tear them away from the video console, we joined SG's family for Christmas dinner.  The wine and the conversation were excellent.  SG carved the turkey, escaping with only one sliced finger.  Why do people insist on trusting my husband to handle sharp objects?  Don't they know any better?

The kids and their cousins made a snowman in the park.

It was a damn fine Christmas. 

By contrast, New Year's Eve was extemely quiet.

Josh flew home that day, taking Kylie with him.  Roscoe misses her.  We told the kids they could stay up until midnight.  That would have been great, except the adults couldn't make it that long.  They're still mad at me.

We're still enjoying the quiet around here.  Its the third of January and my tree and outside lights are still up.

Don't judge.  Happy New Year!