Putting the "Us" in Hiatus

Once, a longish time ago--so long ago I don't remember exactly how long--Hubby and I were snuggled in on a night that turned out to be chillier than we'd expected.

I nudged him. "Do you think we need another blanket?"

He reached for an old blanket that was folded across the top of the cedar chest at the end of the bed. The blanket had been a hand-me-down from who the heck remembered where and we'd had it for the whole time we'd been together, ten years at least. When he held the blanket up to spread it out over us, there were spots thin enough to see through and a constellation of ragged-edged holes in various sizes.

"Baby," I said, sleepily, "that is not a blanket. That is a hole with a little blanket around it."

I would be embarrassed about how hard I laughed at my own joke were it not for the fact that, even now, years--nay, a decade and then some--later, I still get the giggles thinking of that moment.

I bring it up now not to flaunt my half-awake cleverness*, but so that you will understand what I mean when I say that this has become less a blog than a hole with a little blog around it.

I'm no triskaidekaphobe (though I am weirdly partial to words with two Ks in them), but here at Masked Mom headquarters, 2013 was a bit of a rough year in some ways I can't quite put my writerly finger on and, too, in some ways I can, but won't, at least not here on the blog.

Toward the end of the year, finally, it became clear that we were going to come out the other side of 2013 not only no worse for the wear, but in some ways better yet, which is how these things have a tendency of playing out, if we can only be patient enough to sit through the rough stuff.

I have mentioned here before that Hubby and I began our marriage at an absurdly tender age (though older than my own parents by a few years) in a hazy rush of hormones and impulsivity. I have mentioned, too, that the path has not always been smooth--which is a blog-sanitized understatement if ever there were one. But still, here we are--our twenty-sixth anniversary in the rear view mirror and twenty-seven fast approaching.

Very early on a morning in late November, our first grandchild was born, more than a month and a half ahead of schedule. At four-something in the morning, after mother and daddy and baby were deemed safe and as sane as could be expected, Hubby, Daughter-Only and I were driving back from the hospital on deserted roads through a snowstorm. The car was cozy warm and we were all awestruck and exhausted. Our conversation was a fragmented jumble of non-sequential moments from the night. Some of them we went back to again and again--for example, how the baby somehow looked feisty and fragile all at once and how both her parents looked pretty much the same.

Into a lull in this conversation, a weird thought wandered into my overstimulated brain. And as so often happens--particularly when my already faulty filter is further compromised by a heady combination of exhaustion and euphoria--immediately after this weird thought wandered into my brain, it wandered right out my mouth.

"Listen," I warned, "something just occurred to me. And, most likely, I shouldn't say it out loud, but I find that at the moment I completely lack the ability to not say it." I reached for Hubby's hand, which was sort of awkward because for some reason that I don't remember, he was riding in the backseat.

"Of all the people who attended our wedding, how many of them do you think thought we would still be together when our first grandchild was born?"

Hubby gave my hand a squeeze and chuckled. "Only us."

This was exactly the right thing to say and not exactly true at the exact same time.

I don't recall us being all that sure on the inside, though we talked a good game to anyone who asked. Predictably, the fact that everyone else's uncertainty was so much on display only served to solidify our own certainty, to harden our denial of that little voice inside each of us that was saying, "Hold up a second! You've known this person how long?"

I remember that at the time, the uncertainty was a tiny but terrifying force that was dulled only slightly by the haze of hormones and impulsivity. So terrifying was that tiny uncertainty that it felt necessary to try to bury it beneath shovelfuls of denial: of course we were sure, we had never been more sure of anything in our entire lives, thank you very much.

From this distant vantage point, the uncertainty seems not only perfectly logical, but a sign that, perhaps despite our young, impractical, hormone-addled selves, we actually were taking the marriage thing more seriously than anyone would've suspected. Of course we weren't sure, how the hell could we have been?

Now that we are older, slightly less impractical and still occasionally hormone-addled, the truth is that I distrust certainty far more than I do uncertainty. Sometime in the last few years, I woke up with this completely context-free thought in my head: "The things I've been the most sure of have often turned out to be the things I've been the most wrong about."

I am still certain of a few things, though. For example, this is certainly one of the most adorable and most loved babies on the planet:   

 Photo courtesy of her Mama. This photo was not taken specifically for First Granddaughter's debut on the blog, but I kind of thought the somewhat dubious expression on her face was appropriate for such an occasion.



And, for another example, I'm fairly sure that twenty-seven years of certainty and uncertainty and sometimes confusing one for the other can be woven into just enough blanket to hold all the threadbare parts together.



*But, c'mon! It was pretty clever.

Ways I Am Not A Grown-Up, The Twentieth In A Potentially Infinite Series

The summer I turned 13, I was miserable. To anyone who has been a 13-year-old girl, or even known a 13-year-old girl, this information may sound redundant at best. I was 13. I was a girl. Of course I was miserable.

Also of course, I in no way recognized that much of my misery was misery of the garden variety, hormonally driven, stereotypical 13-year-old girl sort. My misery, I was certain, was special.

Part of the specialness of my misery was that at the beginning of that summer, we had moved to a new town, leaving behind a boy on whom I'd had a crippling crush--a crush, needless to say, that I had never admitted out loud to him.

Because school was not in session and our new house was well outside of town, there were no new friends or even classes to distract me from spinning elaborate fantasies from the teeniest of what ifs. What if we hadn't moved for another week or month? What if three weeks before we had moved, I had somehow scraped together the courage to declare my never-ending love? What if he had loved me back?

I remember one afternoon, at the tail end of one or another of my all-too-frequent misery-fueled tantrums¹, my mother was in my bedroom patiently trying to get to the bottom of my outbursts and moodiness. This was no easy task, as I was (to put it mildly) not the most forthcoming of children, particularly about any feelings that may have been perceived as "weak" or "vulnerable."²

On this occasion, I managed to squeeze out something vague about how I wished things had gone differently before we'd moved from the old place--that I couldn't stop thinking about things I should've said or done.

My mother made all the right sympathetic noises and then she said, "You know, it's really not healthy to wallow in the past."³ She went on to make the inarguable point that the past cannot be changed so it's a waste of time and energy to imagine otherwise.

Twice in the past week, I have caught myself making somewhat the same point to two different people. Both of them were talking about regrets and wasted time--of failing to live up to their own expectations, of letting themselves (and in one case, others) down. I told them (more or less), you cannot keep carrying around that regret and disappointment--the weight of it is a burden that will only hamper future progress and forward motion.

It is ever-so easy to be wise about other people's lives, but I am a wallower from way back. And I am a wallower still.




1. Because if you can't take your misery out on your younger siblings, who can you take it out on?

2. I have thought a lot about why this was the case and I have some theories, but I also have a strong feeling it's something I might never really figure out without some professional help. "Professional" in this case being a synonym for "expensive."

3. I was lying in my bed when my mother said this and she was sitting in a chair across the room, right next to the fireplace. I had a fireplace in my bedroom because we were living in a nearly 200-year-old house and there were fireplaces in all the bedrooms. They were mostly boarded up or bricked in, but still fireplaces in every bedroom. This has nothing at all to do with this story except perhaps as a measurement of the power of 13-year-old angsty misery--I mean, who is miserable with a fireplace in their bedroom?!

Random Quote Saturday

"Put things into words and there's no telling when you'll get them out again."

~~Carrie Fisher, The Best Awful

Monkey Business

Tuck this into the ever-growing file of "what I'm doing today instead of blogging."

Monkey cupcakes: one down--23 to go.

Lullaby

When Son-One was a few weeks old, Hubby and I impulsively moved from our little furnished apartment outside of Altoona, Pennsylvania to my grandmother's house in the northwestern wilds of the state. I say impulsively because we had had no intentions to move, but while helping my parents move their household to that area, Hubby decided to apply for a job at the same grocery store where my mother was applying. It was a Saturday. He was hired on the spot and they wanted him to start the following night.

Hubby had desperately wanted out of the position he had at a shoe factory near Altoona and the move would mean we would be closer to family so I was all for it, but the logistics were a bit daunting. Yes, our belongings were meager. But, I would be moving them all from a second-floor apartment and trying to squeeze them into the back of an Escort GT with only a breastfeeding newborn and Youngest Sister for help. Oh, and did I mention I'd had a C-section only a few weeks before? Heavy lifting and repeated frequent stair climbing were not an endorsed part of the aftercare instructions I'd received from the doctor.

Anyway...we moved in with my grandmother,  my Nan, who was mostly happy to have us. She was, of course, full of advice for us first-time parents. Much of the advice sounded hilariously outdated, especially to the ears of someone who had prepared for motherhood with both book learnin' and the hands-on education of younger siblings, cousins and babysittees.

For instance, she firmly believed that holding a toy in front of the baby's face for even just a few seconds could make the baby cross-eyed. She believed, like many of her generation, and many even still, that picking up a crying baby too soon or too often resulted in a spoiled baby.

But the thing about which we butted heads most often was the importance of keeping the baby on a schedule. I was not working outside the home at the time and I had read a lot about the benefits of on-demand breastfeeding, especially in the earliest months. Add to that the fact that Hubby worked nights and there didn't seem to be any good reason not to let the baby dictate the schedule.

In the beginning, Nan warned, "That baby's gonna get his days and nights mixed up."

Eventually, of course, she declared, "That baby's got his days and nights mixed up."

And he may have a little, but it all eventually righted itself.

I have been thinking a lot about getting days and nights mixed up and what it means to be on a schedule that goes against your own natural rhythms. I have been working second shift (2:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.) for a little over four years now. Early on, I assumed I would adjust to it, but that hasn't happened so far.

I think I would be better off if I could just come home and go to sleep, but of course, I can't do that anymore than someone coming home at 5 p.m. would immediately go to bed. The minimum wind down for me seems to be about 2 hours, so I'm usually going to bed somewhere between 12:30 and 1, but on particularly stressful nights I'm up (or at least awake) until well after 2 a.m.

Since adulthood, and maybe even earlier, I have always been a very light sleeper who wakes frequently and has a hard time going back to sleep. That, too, has not gotten better with time. I often am awake at least once per hour all night long. It seems miraculous to me to make it through two or three hours of sleep without drifting to consciousness.

I linger in bed longer than I should, hoping to feel more rested, but instead, when I finally do get up for the day, I usually feel like I've been bludgeoned.

There's an old Steven Wright bit that I've always loved, he says, "My girlfriend asked me if I slept well and I said, 'No I made a few mistakes.'"

Sleep seems like it should be the easiest, most natural thing in the world, but I can't seem to get the hang of it. I wish my Nan were still around--I'm sure she'd know just what to do.

Random Quote Wednesday

"...it crossed my mind that to know others on a superficial level only is a desperate hell and that life is worth living only if the veneer is stripped away, the polish, the wax and we see the true grain of the other no matter how far less than perfect, even ugly, even savage at the heart."

~~Louise Erdrich, Four Souls

Random Quote Tuesday

"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version."

~~Chuck Palahniuk, "Almost California" from Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories

Masked Mom's Media Monday: '70s Sitcom Themes

Here's a frightening glimpse into my state of mind lately. I actually got a little misty-eyed when I heard this on the radio earlier today:




Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Timely.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Wednesday, December 27, 1989

Tonight's journal excerpt features a 21-year-old me (mother of one, enormously pregnant with the second), gushing with gratitude over the thoughtful gifts her family has given her for Christmas. Or not...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Wednesday, December 27, 1989

 

 

I have a few comments about the gifts--I got two in particular that I'd like to talk about. Mom got me a pair of red sweatpants. Not a subtle shade of red but RED, as in fire engine red, as in screaming RED sweatpants. Dad asked Mom why she'd picked such a loud color and she said, "Because she always buys dark back or dark blue for herself and I thought she might want to brighten up her wardrobe." Now, pardon me, but if I liked or wanted red pants, wouldn't I buy them? Isn't there probably a reason why I choose black or navy?

 

On the same note--the note being inappropriate gifts--Nan got me a sweatshirt and stationery with Garfield on them. I had a raving passion for Garfield when I was 13--my first journal is in a Garfield notebook! but I've outgrown him. I'll wear the shirt, but who can I write to on Garfield paper at the age of 21?

 

I guess my message is about how depressing it is to me that no one in my family knows me well enough--or likes me well enough--to buy gifts for the me I am right now. My mother wants me to be someone I've never, ever been. And my grandmother wants me to be the person she thought I was at 13 or 15. (The truth is, I was probably never that person either--though I pretended to be. I've never pretended to want to wear red (RED, folks RED!) sweatpants. Surprisingly, I'm not offended by any of this--just--well, if bemused weren't such a stuffy word, it's the one I would choose.

 





Drafted: Random Excerpts From As Yet Unpublished Posts

"Ah, the sweet smell of procrastination in the morning, er, afternoon or, you know, whenevever I get around to it."

"Daughter-Only and I do two kinds of arguing--the get-out-of-my-life-I-utterly-hate-your-guts-door-slamming stuff and then the other stuff, which we tend to do in front of her friends--an entertaining bickering which they all seem to enjoy greatly."

"We may have fallen short in a thousand ways as parents, but I count our openness with our kids about sexuality as one of our greatest successes. I do not harbor the illusion that my kids tell me everything, but I have little doubt that they know they can tell me anything."

"A week or so ago, I had a dream in which Mr. High School was trying to text me. I was somehow waiting to receive the text while also able to see him as he was trying to peck out the words with fingers that appeared to be freakishly large above the itty-bitty keyboard of the teeny-tiny phone he was holding."

"How far down your drunk-dial list do you have to get to call the girl you had a crush on in seventh grade?"

"A cigar may sometimes be just a cigar, but around here, a dog is hardly ever just a dog."

"It's a weird time to pursue 'fame and fortune' in a given field. In some ways--the American Idol, Survivor, and clones ways--it's easier than ever to achieve some semblance of fame or notoriety. But I think it's also harder than ever to get recognition for real talent without being dismissed as a 'wannabe.'"

"Eventually, Gram took to sending us to the library at the beginning of each period to 'study math.' Air quotes weren't in Gram's repertoire, but her tone made clear she knew that precious little studying was going on."

"A week or so before Thanksgiving, a friend complained in an email about his wife's hyper-elaborate holiday planning. He talked, mostly good-naturedly, about the binder in which she kept her sheet-protected, color-coded recipes and ever-growing shopping lists."

Random Quote Friday

"She liked to sit in the car. Marianne sometimes sat there in the driveway not going anywhere for hours. She enjoyed the quiet, the way it felt to be sealed inside of something, the suction of the air as the door slammed shut."

~~Hannah Tinti, "Bloodworks" from Animal Crackers

Trivialities

Daughter-Only and I competed in our second Team Trivia night at a local art center café. Last time, we came in second out of five or six teams. The teams can be up to eight members and we were the only two-person team, so we were patted on the back (mostly by other people, but a little by ourselves) quite a bit for doing so well "especially for a two-person team."

We went into tonight with some fairly high hopes/expectations--our own and those of some of the repeat competitors, a few of whom mis-remembered us as the winners from last time.

Right out of the gate, the first question stumped us: "When Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls for the first time in 1993, he signed a minor league contract with what Major League baseball team?"

No idea. We scribbled down the Mets, just to put something down. When I handed the sheet of paper to Daughter-Only to take to the moderator, I said, "That's the only question we're getting wrong tonight."

How wrong I was...At the end of the first round, the moderator announced totals and we were in fourth place. Out of six questions in the first round, we got three right.

The moderator did not update the standings after that until just before the bonus round and there is no big scoreboard on display to keep track of other teams' scores. It didn't matter, though, because I knew we were failing miserably to narrow the lead the other teams had on us.

We got four out of six questions right in the second and third rounds and just three out of six in the fourth and final round.

I hate to admit this, but my face was burning, my stomach was churning. I was utterly mortified by how poorly we were doing. I could not believe I had taken a night off of work to get so horrifically trounced at trivia in public. I kept trying to give myself little "It's just a game" and "We're having fun, that's all that matters" pep talks, to no avail.

Then came the reading of the points totals before the all-important bonus question, in which teams wager points (much like Final Jeopardy).

Daughter-Only and I had 175 points. The team closest to us had 145. We wagered wisely (I've not been an armchair Jeopardy player all these years for nothing), making the most of our lead.

The bonus question: "The Carboniferous Period is divided into two Epochs, each named after a U.S. state. Name the states."

Yeah. Okay. Uh, California & Illinois?

Wrong!

But...everyone else got it wrong, too so...we won!

We won even though I had spent two hours feeling like the biggest loser on the planet. We won even though I was absolutely certain we were humiliating ourselves.

I'm pretty sure there's some kind of lesson in there somewhere.

Maybe not.

Maybe it's just a really long story about how badass Daughter-Only and I are at Team Trivia.

PS--Pennsylvania & Mississippi.

Random Quote Wednesday, With a Tiny Bit of Commentary

"...your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate my subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out."

~~Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

 

 

 

Tonight's quote comes to you courtesy of an all-day Vonnegut binge which promises to carry on (even) later into the night. Thank goodness reader's block is nowhere near as common as writer's block. 

 



Understatement

So. The first few days of NaBloPoMo around these parts have been lackluster, to say the least. I have high hopes for the coming days, though I make no promises.

In the meantime, please enjoy* this gratuitous ultrasound picture of my first grandchild. ETA: January 13, 2014.

*You are under no obligation to enjoy this ultrasound. In fact, I will totally understand if you do not enjoy ultrasound photos at all. As I said to Hubby's Little Sister, I personally find them about equal parts adorable and disturbing. Many people find them baffling and meaningless, unable to pick out anything resembling a human being in the grainy gray murk. In this case, as Son-Three (the soon-to-be father of said grandchild) said when he texted this shot to me, "There's a face in there somewhere."

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Migraines

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Excruciating.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Saturday, February 18, 1989

Saturday, February 18, 1989

 

 

Anyone who thinks being "just'' a housewife and mother is not challenging has obviously never tried breastfeeding an 8 month old who has 3 teeth.

Random Quote Saturday

"...understanding that you suck at some things is useful information in life. The world would be a better place if people were fully cognizant of their areas of suckage."

~~Dave Barry, "A Festival of Grimness," from I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood

Random Quote Friday

"My mind spends very little time in my body. Where exactly it hangs out, I couldn't tell you. But I suspect it's been up to no good."

~~Eric Weiner, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine

 

 

 

(P.S. Happy NaBloPoMo everyone! See you tomorrow!)

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Thursday, August 26, 2004

Tonight's Spiral Notebook selection features the bitter ravings of a renegade on the front lines of anti-schedule activism. Or something.

Things have improved somewhat since this entry was written--working second shift and presiding over  a single (nineteen-year-old) nestling, it's gotten significantly harder for me to truly "oversleep."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thursday, August 26, 2004

To the extent that my life is ruled by The Clock (which, fortunately for everyone involved is to a much lesser extent than most other functioning adults, but is still to a greater extent than I personally consider ideal), I entertain myself with the illusion that I control the clock--an illusion I maintain by tinkering with the clock by setting it so far ahead that I feel I'm getting away with something (a habit I've mentioned previously) and also by setting the alarm itself so long in advance of when I need to get out of bed that I can hit snooze forty gazillion times and, again, feel I'm getting away with something (another previously examined habit). All this tinkering appeals to me as an act of passive rebellion, a way of living outside the constrictive bounds of normal society, but there is a price to be paid for standing up for what you believe in, and in this case, that price, ironically, is often much higher than the price of just going along with the status quo--though now that I think of it, that's probably true of most acts of rebellion: going along to get along is often not only a force of habit but also much easier and less risky than stepping outside the lines of the masses--that price in this case is having to go through mental acrobatics in the form of staggering algebraic equations required to calculate the actual time as well as how many minutes are left until the next "snooze" is interrupted by the jarring drone of the alarm and how many snoozes are left until I actually have no choice but to get out of bed, at which point a good portion of my allotted brain power for the day has been expended so I am not only bleary-eyed and suffering from bed head of truly astronomical (as in "oh my god I've discovered a 10th planet and it's orbiting around my head") proportions, but I'm also befuddled by the kind of brain buzz that comes from an excess of input into an only nominally functioning brain whose closest physiological comparison is a bunch of sugar on an empty stomach. What a way to start a day! And not only a day, but every day, all week, every week because even on my so-called days "off," I keep the alarm set because I always go to bed with the best of intentions for the next day, planning on getting an early start on all those eight million things I put off on al my work days, but when morning comes, as I'm sure is no surprise, I hit the snooze button over and over and over until I'm well past--hours past, in fact--not only the time I had, with my optimistic plans, intended to get up but well past the time I likely would have woken up of natural causes if I had simply left the alarm unset so then I rise groggy and cranky not only from oversleeping and being mad at myself from the previously mentioned performance of complex equations and from mediating the internal debate between my well-intentioned, do-gooder half and my much-neglected, self-indulgent, what-the-hell, you-deserve-it half, my part of which debate is to counsel the dark half that we will all feel better if we get some stuff done and sleeping in ends up being more punishment than reward because nothing gets done and then I feel guilty about it and nothing's done and I never feel all the way awake, unable to shake the crappy, groggy feeling, anyway so the extra sleep is a hindrance to even relaxing and is that really the kind of self-indulgence I might wish to engage in?, to which my darker half replies, "Shut up! You're keeping us awake!"

Random Quote Wednesday

"As our culture speeds incessantly toward faster and more convenient forms of communication, there is still something powerful in patiently scripted words, as they languorously flow onto a sheet of paper."

~~David H. Lowenherz

~~The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time