Barnmaven

Sometimes Vain

I like to think I'm approaching aging with the same philosophy I approached parenting babies - somewhere in the median between crunch and plastic.  I didn't cloth diaper, but I did extended nursing.  I vaccinated, but selectively.  I did sleep training, but gently and over time.  I co slept but not until they were walking and talking, only until they could sleep through the night without nursing.  I was too crunchy for the mainstream circles and too mainstream for the crunchy.  Like every other aspect of parenting I tried not to judge other people's choices, vowing instead to focus on my own choices and let other people do what worked best for them.  I fell to judgment on many occasions, but I tried to keep it under my breath.

As I've crossed over the top of the hill and the aging process has most definitely gained some momentum, I find a precarious lack of control on my balance in the  middle.  I have long stated - emphatically, I might add - that while everyone has the right to choose for themselves whether they would undergo the knife or the needle to be comfortable with their looks, I personally eschew such dramatic measures.  I've even had the dishonor to be proud of myself for my lack of skin care regimen.  "Oh sure," I'd laugh, "I have one,  if you can call falling asleep in my makeup and never remembering sunscreen a 'regimen'!"

"Oh, I don't color my hair to cover gray," I have been known to say.  "I color it because its so fun to be a [insert color here]!"  

I humbly assert that these things are far easier to say when one is young.

Menopause, evil-hormone-sucking-she-ninja, entered swiftly and with deadly intent.  She stole my sleep with surges of heat and sweat and suddenly the undereye circles I've laughed off since my twenties made me feel disheartened and teary.  The drying skin and hair and nails that were merely annoying a decade ago became insurmountable overnight.  I started looking in the mirror less and less; this "aging gracefully" thing isn't happening AT ALL as I imagined it would.  The "aging" part, hell yes, but without very much of the "graceful."

Several weeks ago SG gifted me with a spa massage and facial package.  It was a day of pure bliss, and the crunchy mama inside me crumpled and added the glycolic peel to the package without one ounce of remorse for vanity.  I impulsively bought the skin care items the aesthitician suggested, and they really did work and my skin looked and felt better.  So much so that as I waltzed through the hair care aisle on a trip to the store I made another impulse buy and threw a reddish haircolor kit a few shades lighter than my own sturdy brown into the cart.  

For whatever reason that haircolor job was an unmitigated disaster.  It didn't cover my grays, and over the weeks since I've noticed that the grays seem to have gone into unmitigated copulation mode, bursting into existence in numbers heretofore unseen. I even found that the hairs growing in along my part were alarmingly populated with silver.  

All the self-assured platitudes have gone right out the window.  

I'm not aging gracefully -- I'm just AGING.

I tell myself that its OK to just let my gray hair arrive naturally, but the minute it does I'm hitting the haircolor aisle at the drugstore trying to find the magic solution that doesn't make it look like I'm trying too hard but doesn't give off the suggestion that I'm not trying at all.  

I've reached the point at which my self-talk has devolved into an ongoing wrestling match between my crunchy better angel and my inner narcissist.  There's a lot of finger pointing and things have been said that can never be taken back, never forgotten.  I look in the mirror and words and phrases pop into my consciousness uninvited:  "Botox!"  "Boob Lift!"  "Tummy Tuck!"  At one point (or two) I may have even pressed my fingertips against the skin at the end of my eyebrows and swept upward, wondering just how much it costs to get a facelift.

What have I become?

More importantly, when does this stop?

I reassure myself that I "have" to do these things, that I'm still in the workforce, and we all know that the career field can be unkind to women who are growing older while rewarding those who maintain a youthful appearance.  But we all know its more than that.  

Its not "career-mindedness."  Its vanity.

I imagine every woman who has ever fancied herself a rugged individualist and self-appointed icon for young career women everywhere has run into the same, painful brick wall:  Its beautiful and admirable and amazing when someone else does it but GOD FORBID it should happen to YOU.  Its all great in theory, but when the push comes to shove (or broken capillaries come to nostrils), all bets are off.

This is the time when we start taking selfies carefully, judging the quality of light and the capability of our photo editing software.  This is the time when we admonish everyone to "keep it real" while hiding our own true face.  

This is the time that I realize that age will catch me no matter how I try to avoid it, and it will not only put to test all of the things I decided I would be when I reached this point in my life, it will reveal many of those things as nothing more than lies I told myself.

This morning I plunked a box of "darkest brown" haircolor on the bathroom vanity after my first cup of morning coffee.  Ten minutes plus one shower later, that crappy gray red dye job had swirled its way down the drain and SG met the newest version of his wife.  Unfortunately she still has the same set of luggage under her eyes.  One hopes, ever so fervently, that the new haircolor makes them somewhat less noticeable.

 

 

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.

Traumatic

I have always loved words.  I grasped the concept of reading at the age of three and I never looked back.  Through the bright afternoons of my childhood and the impossibly dark years of puberty and college, reading provided me with a way to escape, an avenue of avoidance.  My life has never been so bad, but I did have a lot to avoid.

That early grasp of language earned me a boot uphill, out of kindergarten and into the first grade.  Academically I was more than ready, and it feels sometimes that I got average grades in school simply because I was always three steps ahead of where the rest of the class was learning, and so distractible if I couldn't be challenged, that I just got bored and stopped trying.  Academics were never really the issue, but social skills were for most of my childhood the crisis du jour.  Its one thing to say that I was a precocious little girl who easily got along with most adults and never met a stranger.  Its another to say that I had, then and now, difficulty making friends within my peer group.  Then, it was hard to be the child who wasn't socially mature, who was sensitive, who cried easily.  Whether it was that they sensed in me an easy type of prey or whether they resented me for being smart or just because they loathed me on sight, the girls in my classes from elementary school all the way up were not kind to me.  I had few friends, none of them from my class in school.  The older I got and the more aware of it I was, the worse it felt. 

When I started fifth grade we had a new teacher at my school.  She and I did not click well, she seemed to resent the time that I was pulled from her class for advanced learning modules, and I didn't have any respect for her.  I sensed clearly that she did not like me, and I simply refused to perform.  My mother met with the teacher a few times, and then with the principal.  When it became clear that we were going nowhere fast, my mom applied to the district to put me in a different school.

This meant Mom had to pick me up and drop me off at school every day, but apparently she felt this was worth the effort. 

It was in fifth grade that I started to develop, somewhat.  I got my first bra that year. 

They didn't make stretchy little cotton training bras back in 1975.  They made torture ensembles of heavy straps and heavy cups, or so it seemed to me.  But I was proud of my new bra.  I thought it made me very grown up.

My first day at my new school with my new bra, I showed it to one of the girls in the bathroom.  "What size is it?" she asked.  "32A," I proudly replied.

That was the last moment I was proud of my boobs for a number of years.  Because the minute I walked out of the girls bathroom into the hallway and onto the playground for recess, my new classmates had cleverly concocted a little chant just for my benefit:

Roses are red, Violets are blue - Mary wears a bra sized THIRTY TWO!

I wanted the pavement to crack open and swallow me whole.  I spent recesses for the next few weeks inside the classroom or in the library, reading books and making every effort to escape my classmates.  They would find me, though, and the chanting would begin, until I think finally some teachers and playground duties cracked the whip and the taunting stopped. 

By the time I started my first menstrual cycle in junior high I knew WAY better than to tell anyone.

Of course, it wasn't easy to hide those bulky kotex pads that you had to pin inside of your underwear.  It would have been less obvious to wear a diaper.  Fortunately by then, most of us girls were menstruating and the girls that weren't didn't want to make it obvious that the rest of us were more "mature" than they were, so they kept their mouths shut.   We were all old enough to be horribly embarrassed by our rapidly changing bodies, and topics of menstruation and "female things" were mercifully left untouched.  Besides, there were plenty of other things to find fault with.

Thankfully I've recovered from the horror of those early days of development.  I've learned to appreciate my bosom and to not feel embarrassed when other people (visibly, verbally, whatever) appreciate it too.

Two weeks ago my daughter came home from her dad's wearing a cute new outfit.  The top has patterned sleeves and a hoodie, but the part over her chest and torso are thin white cotton.  Looking at her twirl and preen in front of the mirror, I was smiling under my hand when the awful realization struck me.    I wanted to throw up.

My baby girl needs a bra.

Its different for her, thankfully.  She's not the first one in her class, not by far, and the selection of bras for budding girls is by far superior than what we had available to us thirty-odd years ago.

We went shopping.  She picked out three - one gray, one pink, one turquoise.  She looks adorable.  Not once has she come home in tears having been teased by her peers for wearing one.

Do you know what's more traumatic than being teased for wearing a bra to school?

Being the mother of a girl who is now old enough to need a bra.

 

Common Ground

My children have spent the last three hours not fighting.

Let me repeat that slowly, for those of you who might not grasp the improbability of that statement.

MY CHILDREN HAVE NOT FOUGHT IN WELL OVER THREE HOURS.

I'm sure you realize how bone-deep I wish that I could chalk this one-in-a-million event up to my stellar parenting, the ungodly amount of money I've spent on doctors, therapy and medication or even the alignment of the planets.  Alas, all for nought.  (Well, probably not for nought, but you know I'm all about the drama, kids.  Get real.)

Why, then, you ask, are my children getting along so well?

(You did ask, right?)

 

Or, as I like to phrase it, EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN AND SPEED RACER ROCKS THE CASBAH.

Climb into the time machine and let us take a trip back to 1971.

I am almost six years old.  I have fallen off a horse and (as we later find out) broken my arm.  As my mother frantically dials the doctor to describe my symptoms and ask what she should do, the only thing preventing me from shrieking like a banshee and ripping the bag of ice off my forearm is the fact that my crush , my love, the man I fully intend to someday marry is on television.   His show comes on and I am spellbound. 

He is Speed Racer.

Who does that crazy chick Trixie think she is, horning in on my boyfriend?

Its 1972 and me and my best friend Rich Butler play Speed Racer endlessly.  We turn my rope swing into an elevator that we ride down to the lab where we do crazy modifications on the Mach 5 and turn it into a space ship, a submarine, a horse drawn buggy, an armored tank.  We fight evil.  We win races.  GO SPEED RACER, GO!

It is 2011.

My son, he is in love.  The object of his affection?  A car.  Oh, not just any car, mind you.  The Mach 5 has been replaced, in Speed Racer:  The Next Generation, by the Mach 6. My son is rapt, and I can see he imagines himself behind the wheel, navigating every turn, repelling every danger. He is a hero.

My daughter?  She is in love as well.

Somebody needs to tell her that Speed Racer is already taken. 

 But it won't be me.  I'll gladly trade away my first crush for the blissful quiet that ensues when one cartoon wraps itself around this generation's heart and gives them, for one afternoon, something they can agree on.  SPEED RACER IS WICKED AWESOME.  And my kids are not fighting.

Amongst the beautiful flowers

So a few weeks ago I went to a bar for the first time in forever.  I think it may have been first time I've gone to a nightclub of any sort since I moved here.  (I know what you're thinking.  Crazy old bat sure doesn't get out much, does she? Shut up.)  It was a going away get-together for a coworker who took a job on the other side of the mountains.  She's headed west to hang out with the Moss People on the Seattle side.  Normally I don't go to these things, but my screaming monsters children had been begging for the chance to torture maim and hold for ransom spend the night at Grams and Poppy's house, so I decided to paint my toenails pink and have a little night out on the town.

People-watching is one of my favorite pastimes.  I don't often get to indulge in it, my business trips are rare lately and I'm not a big fan of the mall.  Digging up broken irrigation pipes, cleaning stalls, fixing fences and mowing the lawn fill my time nicely but don't offer up too many flavors of passersby to stare at.   As far as prime locations go, bars are second only to airports in the variety and flavor of human they offer up for your viewing pleasure.  This night was no exception. 

When I was in my twenties I would often be consumed with envy in the dance club environment.  I was always the tall, gawky girl who needed to lose a few pounds.  I didn't appreciate my assets nor did I know how to dress to emphasize the positive.  Those pretty women who seemed to know how to naturally exist in their own bodies baffled and shamed me. I wanted to be like them and didn't have the first clue how.  With twenty more years under my belt, my outlook is completely different.  I know what I have, I know what I don't have.  I'm not going anywhere to try and attract a date, and I get a whole different level of enjoyment watching the young people, bright and energetic, attractive and heady with the rush of youth. They have so much life in them, and new to adulthood, they are enjoying the freedom of what is probably their first apartment, no curfew, the right to legally enjoy adult beverages, the change from those high school partnerships to the possibility that every person you meet is The One.

I envy their youth but not in the same way I used to envy the prettier women.  They have it all ahead of them; my bad choices are all behind me.   I have fewer choices left to make. Their world is wide open.  I wish I could take those awkward girls standing back waiting for someone to come ask them to dance and tell them to learn to appreciate their assets, to dance regardless of whether someone asks them.  To trust their friends, even though sometimes they might get hurt.  To love without fear, to never accept less than the real deal just because they're scared if they don't marry THIS one then a better one might never come along. 

The other part of the bar crowd are the people MY age.  There aren't many of them.  They stand out, don't they?  I notice that they fall into two categories - those who act their age and those who don't.  In my humble forty-something opinion, 'acting my age' means that of course I can dance if I want - but those stripper poles on the dance floor are for someone half my age to gyrate on.  I don't try to dress as if I have the body of a twenty year old unless I happen to have a forty year old body that looks like Demi Moore - and I don't.  I don't overdo it and get drunk in a room full of people half my age.  I enjoy the conversation with the people I'm with.  I enjoy myself but I'm realistic.  I'm not in the market for a date or a pick up and frankly, even if I were, this is not a place where I would meet that person. 

Its not a matter of being a fuddy duddy.  In part its a fear of looking ridiculous (well based, if you ask me.  I remember some of the stuff I've done over the years after drinking too much in bars.  Stories for later - or never.) and in part a sense that I have of wanting to age with some grace and dignity.  I don't know that I qualify as a sexy old lady - I hope I do - but I DO know that I'm NOT a sexy YOUNG thing.  For women that can carry it off, it looks wonderful.  But not everyone can, and I know my limits. 

Part of me wanted so badly to go and whisper to the drunk forty-something lady in a tube top writhing on the stripper pole, "I know the alcohol told you this was a good idea...but really, its not.  You're a very attractive person but this?  Is not attractive.  Not."  I wanted her to respect herself a little bit more.  And I guess that part of it is that watching someone act without dignity makes me a little uncomfortable.  Well, OK, if I have to admit it, a LOT uncomfortable.  What I can't decide is if that says more about me in not a good way than it does about her. 

A night out on the town amongst beautiful flowers.  It was a fun night, even if I turned into a pumpkin at midnight and even though in the end it made me feel a little bit sad.   Because I think I know who I should be, but I wonder if my insistence on maintaining my dignity makes me an old fart. And does that other woman's ability to discard hers, does that make her sad or does it make her brave?  And I wonder why, at forty, I'm still trying to decide how I SHOULD feel about it and can't just accept what I think and feel.

At the end of the day, though, I'm not the one who woke up with a headache, or with a stranger in my bed.  And that tells me that maybe - just maybe - I'm on to something.

Being an Us

I love the show RENT.  I saw it on Broadway with my mom about 10 years ago and have loved it ever since.  The movie was just as phenomenal - wise move, that, using pretty much all of the original cast.  I've watched it countless times and I have no less than three CD's of both the Broadway recordings and the tracks from the movie.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend either watching the movie or seeing it live (I believe its still running at the Nederlander Theatre and also on tour in the U.S.).  One person who saw it for the very first time ever with me said that it was the first time they had ever *really* understood that there was no difference between being gay and straight, that "love is love, no matter who it is you love."  Its not that this friend was prejudiced before that point, but I think that they may have lacked understanding, not having had spent a tremendous amount of time around gay or lesbian couples.  I think there are a lot of things that you can walk away from RENT feeling or understanding more clearly, but what a powerful statement that was on how true and clear the characters that the sadly late and very great Jonathan Larson brought to life in his script.  Oh, crap, I'm digressing AGAIN. 

Perhaps my favorite song from RENT is "La Vie Boheme."  It evokes a fierce response in me, from the feeling of being on the fringes as a kid to clinging to music and experiences and ideas that were somewhat out of the mainstream.  As much as I have one foot firmly in the buttoned-down, a huge part of me simply doesn't belong there and wishes she could just fly away and be free all over again in another world, another life. 

In part B of the song, after the Roger/Mimi Interlude and toward the very end, there is a line that grabs me by the heart: 

"To being an "US" for once, instead of a "THEM!"

Last weekend I got to be an "us" again and it was so wonderful.

My experiences with Bastard Nation were among the most powerful of my life.  Never had I connected in such an enormous way with others.  Despite different circumstances - Late Discovery adoptees, adoptees who had found, adoptees who would never find, adoptees who hated their adoptive families, adoptees who loved theirs, the members of this group shared something special and unique.  Some of the friendships I formed with my fellow Bastards will last my whole life.  Conferences, protests, rallies - every event brought with it not only the opportunity to learn, educate others, raise our voices and be heard, but to connect and share with people who felt like family.  I suppose that's incredibly odd, considering that if you put ten adoptees in a room you're looking at twenty family trees.  Hell, you want confusing?  I married another adoptee.  Our children would have six sets of grandparents were everyone involved still living, speaking to each other, or known.   And only another adoptee would really understand how normal that truly was. 

Being a Bastard was the first time in my life that I knew unequivocally that I was part of an "us."  It wasn't only the experience of growing up adopted, but the shared passion for reforming a system that treats adoptees as a suspect class, denies us the same information that is available to anyone else, and for loving the gallows humor that everyone else appears to find tasteless but from which we derived the deepest, truest laughter.

Friday night, after an incredible dinner with a couple of my favorite Bastards under the sun, we sat up late in a hotel room drinking too much wine and laughing and talking about everything.  I felt as if I had been transported to another hotel room in another time and place at one of our many conferences or rallies.  Every good thing I have ever felt about being a Bastard just welled up inside me and filled my heart and my soul.  We talked of the old days, old friends. We mourned those we have lost.  We meandered through laughter and a thousand "Oh, yeah, I remember that!"'s down the warmly-lit paths of memory and shared experience.  We looked at where our lives had come since those days.  We caught up, bonded, reconnected.

To my Bastards who were present, and to the other Bastards, wherever you are, thank you.  Thank you for being my people.  Thank you for being a place where I belong, where I don't feel like I'm different.  I love you guys.

And if you're ever in Troutdale, OR, go have dinner at Tab's Chicken and Dumplings.  Make sure you get a window seat.

How to get more sleep

1.  Put the kids to bed early later than usual at midnight.

2.  Have your last glass of wine no later than 7 pm right before bed.

3.  Make your bed your personal space, only for sleeping Eat in bed, read in bed, drink in bed, watch movies and talk on the phone.

4.  Eliminate unnecessary noises Let three large dogs (combined total weight of 215 pounds) sleep with you.  Or rather, wrestle, lick themselves, snore, fart and shed while laying on your bed.

5.  Meditate quietly with your eyes closed Periodically threaten your children with death when they are still whispering and talking across the hall at two am.

6.  Its best to sleep on your back on your left side, then your right side, then your left side, then your back, then your right side.  Rotate every half hour.

7.  Train your body to sleep through the need to go potty get up every half hour (or when you change positions) to pee.

8.  Television should never be watched in bed left on all night so the flickering lights and the muted sound make you think there's someone else in your room. 

9.  Leave your bedroom door closed open so the cats can come in periodically and taunt the new dog.  Then close it in the middle of the night so that they get mad at you and start clawing at the handle.

10.  Get a pet sitter and a babysitter and get a hotel room.

Tonight?  I'm going with option #10.  See you in Portland Charles & Julie!  You don't care if I just sleep the whole time, right?

The Less I Know

Converse of that old saying, "The older I get the more I know," I believe my life is teaching me that the older I get the LESS I actually do know.  At least, the less I find I that I will fight you to the death to be right about.

I have begun to find that I am a woman who likes it when her ideas are challenged; likes it when she has to admit she's wrong.  I do.  Its painful sometimes, but I still like it. 

Its not that I don't have opinions, thoughts, beliefs.  I do.  There are still, in my outlook, some things that aren't so flexible.  Protecting children.  Mandatory castrations for rapists and child molesters.  UW tops WSU.  Basketball trumps football.  Life is a journey.  Voting is a right people died to attain for you so get off your ass and do it.  That sort of thing.  But a lot of the other things I "used to know" -  they've changed and evolved over the years, my thoughts on relationships, parenting, politics, faith.  When I was in my 20's I would take a stand and prepare for battle.  I KNEW what I knew. If you didn't agree with me you were questionable. I was absolutely rigid in the strength of my convictions and my knowledge of the future.  Every life-altering decision I made was right for me - whether it was or not.  I played hopscotch on the landscape of my future, firm in the unwavering resolve of my immature mind.  Humility was an infrequent, perhaps completely absent companion.  My life was an adventure written on scraps of paper then cast willy-nilly into the air.  I didn't realize then that it was paper I was casting, I believed it was stones, stones that would stay where thrown and sit tight under the weight of my will.  But paper it was and paper it remains. 

Paper swirls and dances and tosses on the wind of chance and whim.  Paper might stay still if you can put your finger on a corner and hold it there, but if you are distracted even for a moment, off that paper flies to dance and skitter across the yard.

Consequence.  It was a word I struggled mightily to avoid, large, unforgiving, crushing.  As long as I could avoid consequence I could live in the denial that my ego demanded.  Eventually, like chickens come home to roost, consequence found me.  Picked me up and body-slammed me to the ground.  As I lay there, gasping for breath, realization dawned that the consequences were not going to end quickly or painlessly.  No wonder I had avoided them for so long.

The amazing thing about having your life fall apart is the opportunity that it creates. 

It has been the end of my assurance to self and others that I have it all figured out.  It has been the acceptance of my humanity and all of the simultaneous strength and frailty that term encompasses.  In the last year I have learned, slowly and painfully, that I'm not always right.  That just because I have an expectation doesn't mean that it is reasonable.  That if someone disagrees with me I don't have to argue them down into the dust; that I can listen to their thoughts and beliefs with my ears AND my mind open. 

It was when I realized I knew nothing that the path to learning everything opened wide. 

Powerless

Sometime over the night our power went out.  My alarm clock woke me up around 3:30 am with the cd player whirring as it tried to reset itself.  I reset the clock and alarm and went back to sleep.  Power was still on at 4:30, but within 15 minutes it went off again.  I ate breakfast in the dark, stared longingly at my computer screen, sitting there are black and lonely-looking, and decided that if we didn't get our lights on again soon I was going to have to just be late to work, since there was no way I was going out in public with morning hair.

While I was eating my bowl of cold cereal by the light of my scented candle, I of course wondered how long it would be out, why it went out, and what could be fed to the two pickiest children on earth that didn't require electricity to prepare.  My mind wandered back to February of 1979, when in the wake of a massive windstorm, we went without power for several days.  The storm, which we later learned had blown and sunk out a half mile section of the Hood Canal Bridge, reached wind velocities averaging 80 miles per hour.  According to the US Weather Service, some gusts may have reached as much as 115 miles per hour.  We were living on Marrowstone Island at the time, a small community in Puget Sound.  Marrowstone is about 7 miles long and 2 1/2 miles wide at the widest point.  We lived on the belt of the island, on East Beach road and I could stand on our road and see water at both ends, Mystery Bay to the West and Puget Sound to the East.

It was a hell of a blow.  I woke in the middle of the night to hear trees snapping and falling and my horses shrieking like crazy idiots.  Dad and I braved flying tree limbs to get them in the barn so they'd feel safe.

For days after the storm, while local husbands and sons helped out the county crews by helping to remove the fallen trees from the countless miles of road in our county, we lived like pioneers.  When they built the house we lived in, my parents had installed an antique wood stove.  It was vented and the floor and wall around it bricked so that it could be used if needed, although we had an electric stove.  Thank goodness for that old Modern Acorn.  It was still cool in February, so not only did that stove keep us fed, it kept us warm.  We couldn't get off the island to get to a store and it was too early in the year for gardening, but our chickens were still laying eggs, and we had a pantry full of dry goods.  Milk could be gotten from our neighbors up the road who still kept a dairy cow that they milked every morning. Bathroom time was a bit of an issue - our water came from a well and our toilets fed into a septic system that required a pump to run, so unless it was an extreme middle of the night I need to go RIGHT NOW emergency, we took a short walk to the county park at the end of the street and used the wooden outhouses.  We lit candles at night and for entertainment we read books and played games.  It was a rustic few days, and interestingly enough, I look back on it with fondness and nostalgia.

Could you just imagine if I had to do it now?  DISASTER.  Life without internet?  Warcraft?  Television?  DVD player?  Cell phone charger?  MICROWAVE?  Forget it.

Twenty minutes later when my power came back on I knelt and kissed the power outlet that feeds my computer. 

They don't slow down

Today was a very important day.

Today, I registered my son for kindergarten.  My baby.  The last baby I'll ever have.

I remember when he was born and one of my sorority sisters from college, who had also had a baby that year, sent me a card that said "Welcome to the Kindergarten Class of 2010!" and I thought how far away that seemed.  And here we are, almost six years later, almost there.  It has flown by.

He was born two days before his due date.  In stark contrast to the herculean labor I'd had with his sister (29 hours of it, including three hours of pushing plus a cartload of meds/interventions), the Racecar Man was born in just over three hours, about 10 minutes of pushing, and no meds.

He was an easy, sleeping, smiling baby.  I had been so worried about having a boy.  What if I didn't know how to parent boys?  Worry melted into the sweetest, soft love the moment they placed him on my chest.  What I felt was akin to the worst crush I'd ever had, multiplied by a thousand. 

As he has grown, he has changed.  Plump baby to sturdy toddler to skinny preschooler.  He was climbing stairs at nine months, walking at ten.  He talked early, his fine motor skills were better than mine when he was two.  He takes apart everything he can find and his favorite toys have wheels on them.  He knows how to operate the DVR and the Wii and how to put his own toast in the toaster.  But he still crawls up on my lap to cuddle, he still hold my hand when we walk through the parking lot or on a busy street.  He's scared of bees and positively heroic in the face of spiders.  He is so very sensitive, incredibly naughty, and totally enchanting.  I reach for his warm, heavy baby self and find myself grasping instead a tall, bony lad, all elbows and knees and ribs.

My baby.  Who is not my baby anymore.

 

 

No more babies in my house.