PP for March

First, let me just say I have no idea how it is that March is gone already. You know what else I don't understand? How can an individual day seem so freaking long (especially at work!) and a week or a month or a year (yes, the years especially) go by so dang quick?

But pointless whining is not what we're here for--at least not this time anyway. It's the end of March and time again for the Perfect Post Awards hosted by those generous chickies at Suburban Turmoil and Petroville.

With no further ado (or whining--but okay, maybe a little whining--do you have any idea how many great blogs there are out there? And how hard it is to pick just one Perfect Post for a month?), my Perfect Post award for this month goes to Tawny over at Blogger's Nightmare for her post The Meltdown.

Tawny and her family are in the middle of moving into a brand new house and they're all understandably excited about the new place and all the possibilities but this post was more about the things they'll be leaving behind. I've mentioned (okay, whined about) growing up an Army brat so it's no surprise that I have a special place for all those bittersweet feelings we experience in those moments before a Big Change. I think Tawny did a great (Perfect!) job expressing those feelings.

So here's my button:

And, Tawny, it's all yours!

The Phone Crush

At the Day Job, a lot of our business is done on the phone. It's not unusual to talk to a customer every other month or so for years on end without ever meeting them in person. There comes a point with every customer when you instantly recognize their voice and can recite pertinent information before they do: the address and person their order will go to, the amount they usually spend, their payment method, etc.

With one customer in particular, that point came much sooner than it has with any of the others I've dealt with in my seven years at the shop. This customer was blessed with an amazing voice--rich, warm, flowing, enveloping. It gets me every time, inspires involuntary cooing and giggling. I once saw actress Dana Delaney on a late night talk show describing her trip to South America. She said she'd stepped off the plane in Brazil and the heat, the humidity, the teeming crowds and strains of music from the street musicians, "went straight to my crotch." The Voice is kinda like that. I have to steel myself against it. And it's a major effort.

My only defense is to remember the week a few summers ago when I got to meet The Voice in person. The Voice calls to mind tall, dark, handsome, charming but not "slick," sexy but not smarmy and a whole host of other appealing characteristics. The reality of The Man Behind The Voice is stocky, average height, minimal neck, and very, very hairy--troll hairy, the kind of hairy you can only suspect when you see a fully dressed man, that hints of the horrors that lie beneath.

The day after I first met him, I made a delivery to his parents house and was greeted by TMBTV wearing shorts and a tank top, which left his pelt alarmingly visible. This is a profoundly hairy man--so hairy, in fact, that the tattoo on his right shoulder reminded me of moss-encrusted statuary you see in cemeteries and at battlefield memorials--you almost want to scrape away the moss, but can't bring yourself to touch it. He was sweating a little because it was so humid and he had been moving tables and chairs all morning, so each strand and clump of hair glistened in the morning sun, winking in an ominous and repulsive way.

I'm not in general a squeamish person--I mean seriously, would I have made it this far with four kids without requiring electroshock therapy if I were squeamish?--but thatch-like body hair not only repulses me, it actively alarms me.

In this case, that alarm is a good thing because it's the only thing that keeps me from making a total idiot of myself every time he calls. I counsel the primal response to his voice with reminders of the visual reality: "He's hairy, he's hairy, he's hairy, he's hairy."

And, most of the time, it works.

Wrong!

In 17 years of parenting, my most constant companion has been doubt--guilt often runs a close second, but doubt is the undisputed winner. The is-this-the-right-thing-to-do's and the will-this-or-that-decision-be-the-one-that-scars-them-for-life's have buzzed in my brain from morning until night for years on end and sometimes caused nightmares that woke me from what little sleep I managed to get.

I'm happy to report that when it comes to mothering an almost-twelve-year-old daughter, all doubt has been removed. There is no doubt whatsoever that absolutely everything I do, say, and am is completely, unequivocally, totally, one-hundred-percent wrong.

The certainty has its comforting moments--of course, I'd rather be right than wrong, but I have to admit there's a certain sense of freedom in knowing I can't win--it's a lot easier to throw up my hands, flip a coin, just wing it when I know I can't possibly be right. Just by being, I am already wrong. I've got nothing to lose.

I'm exaggerating, but only a little and if you have an adolescent daughter or, for that matter, can remember being an adolescent daughter, you know exactly how little I am exaggerating.

A short list of recent infractions: I woke her at 7:45 (as she'd asked) and was informed that's too early. Next day, I woke her at 7:45 (as she'd asked) and was informed that it was too late. I bought her an alarm clock to eliminate this issue. The alarm is too loud and it's not loud enough and it's too hard to set and I didn't remind her to set it and WHY do I keep reminding her to set it? She's not a baby! She says we don't spend enough time together, but when we do, she can't stand the sight of me, the sound of my voice, the activities I pick for us to do together...

OK. I'm exaggerating again. But, again, just a little.

I may be in danger of being disloyal to my gender but I have to say, in my experience, the drama of living with a girl on the cusp of adolescence is wholly different and much more, uh, dramatic than seeing a boy through the same passage. All three of my boys have had their surly, door-slamming, I-wish-I'd-never-been-born moments, but they seemed to come less often--and less loudly--than Daughter-Only's you-can't-do-anything-right-moments. Not only that, but the boys seem--have always seemed--less inclined to take my failures as a mom and human being personally and, conversely, less likely to make personal attacks when they're in a bad mood.

Do the early stirrings of womanly hormones account for some of the mood swings? Most likely, but that's of little comfort, considering the fact that we have to spend (at minimum) another six-plus years under the same roof. And, honestly, Daughter-Only has always been more drama-prone than her brothers. She has been so high maintenance at times that I have joked that if she had been my first child, she would be an only child.

Every time that joke comes out of my mouth, I feel the sharp pinch of guilt. I hate catching myself comparing my children to one another. I know from personal experience the way accidental, offhand comparisons can breed years of resentment between siblings and cause all sorts of self-image issues. But, really, I don't mean it in a bad way.

My relationship with Daughter-Only just seems so much more tangled and complex than mine with her brothers. Sometimes the boys hate me and sometimes they love me and mostly they just ignore me until they need something from me, but I'm always reasonably sure that we'll all get over it. With Daughter-Only, it seems like every single thing (especially lately but, really, since she could talk) is a matter of life or death. Is it that she's a girl or is it just that she's who she is and the girl thing is incidental?

One thing you can be sure of--whatever I think the answer might be, I'm soooooo wrong.

Bowled Over

A group of us went bowling a week or so ago. Every time we do it, we talk about how fun it is, and cheap and how we don't do it nearly enough--and still somehow we only do it once or twice a year. Anyway, Son-Two and I were sitting together at the little scorekeeping table where he was mostly making fun of my inability to understand more than the barest minimum of how to keep score and my brother--Baby Brother even though, you know, he's going to be thirty-two in two days!!!!-- was helping his daughter bowl her first ball in the tenth frame.

In much the same voice he was using to lecture me on scoring, I say to Son-Two: "Now, we're going into the tenth frame where, if you do well, you get three balls. Of course, in nature, three balls is considered an anomaly."

Without missing even a nano-beat, Son-Two says, "Well, I don't know about that, but some people have three nipples and that's pretty hot and happenin'."

I snort out loud before recovering enough to say something about how it kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it? Are those people with three nipples lagging behind a little evolution-wise? Did everyone once have three (or more) nipples? Or are those triple nippled types the next step in our evolution and a couple of hundred years from now, everyone will have three nipples?

Unfortunately and not for lack of trying, I haven't discovered any scientific evidence to support either theory. I do, however, think I've figured out why we don't go bowling more often. It's really loud at the bowling alley and having these sorts of intellectual debates is so very difficult with the clatter of falling pins and slamming, um, balls.

Escort Service

That title oughta really bring out the Google freaks, huh? Ever notice that the more sedate, academic web searchers use MSN while the freaks prefer Yahoo and Google? Countless people researching the Radziwills found my site through MSN's search engine, but the ones searching for "masked women" or "tight Lycra" or, best of all, "mom made son wear high heels," they all use Google, or once in a while, Yahoo. My point? Well, actually, I don't have one, and if you were expecting one, I sure am sorry to disappoint.

Now on to the subject at hand. I learned to drive the summer I turned fifteen, under the watchful and not-so-patient eye of my grandfather. Pap had a beat-up Subaru sedan that he put into my inexperienced hands for an hour or so each evening. I would make the rounds of the narrow, rutted dirt roads that extended for miles in any direction from his house and Pap would minutely critique my every move.

Some of the things he told me really stuck with me. To this day, when I catch myself following the next car too closely, I hear his gravelly voice: "Look out the windshield--you see the hood? You know the engine's under there, right? If you hit the guy in front of you, where the hell's all that going to end up? In your lap--that's where!" When I pull a "rolling stop" at one of the many quiet intersections in town, I remember Pap pointing out the subtle shift your upper body makes when you come to a complete stop--nothing else counts as stopping.* When I brake in the middle of a curve, I remember, "Never brake on a bend. Once you're in it, it's too late to slow down. You'll steer better if you gently accelerate." (None of these things should be construed as advice since I am not a professional driver--as will become crystal clear later in this story.)

Like most people, Pap practiced much less than he preached. Every one of my siblings and I have memories of him doing 65 on a dirt road, 80 on an open stretch of two-lane highway, driving with his leg propped on the bit of dashboard to the left of the steering wheel. A few of us even have memories of "The Queen of Hearts" period: Juice Newton blaring on the 8-track player, Pap tapping the accelerator in time to the music--making the whole car and everyone in it dance in time to the music. ("Dance" in the sense of neck-jarring, involuntary jerking back-and-forth, a little too similar to an epileptic fit to be altogether enjoyable.)

It would be easy to blame my subsequent driving record on my poor grandfather--on his "do as I say, not as I do" teaching method--but the truth is much more nefarious and complex. So, whose fault is it that I've totaled not one, not even two, but three vehicles since I got my license twenty-some years ago?

I'll let you be the judge: All three of those vehicles? They were Ford Escorts. I've never even been in a fender-bender with any other vehicle, but I've totaled every Escort I've ever driven.

*Rolling stops are so common at some of the intersections in town, I call them "stoptional signs." These are signs at which it is no less illegal or inadvisable to roll through, but the odds of a collision or a ticket are so low you could get away with it 99 out of 100 times.

The Comeback, In Which I Pull A Muscle Patting Myself On The Back

It's been said that nobody likes a smartass. To this I say: "It's way better than being a dumb ass." But, even more importantly, I think the proliferation of shoot-stuff-out-your-nose-hysterically funny blogs has disproven that old wives tale. Clearly, there are people out there (myself very much included) who not only like smartasses, but love them.

As someone who has cultivated my smartassitude for more than three decades, this is great news. That cultivation has led me to moments like the following, which I share with you now trusting that you are all of the likes a smartass persuasion:

The Scene: The shop the other morning. One of the shop groupies, a wannabe lecherous older guy who's been loyally and happily married for a bazillion years but nonetheless likes making dirty jokes and randy comments, many of which are hysterically funny, was talking about a conversation between him and an equally unlecherous lecher friend of his.

Wannabe Lecher: R and I were talking about what heaven was going to be like and we decided it would just be acres and acres of boobs.

Me: Yeah, and then when you and R get there, there will be two more!

What's not to love, right?

A Post About PP

As you begin to read a Mommy blog post with PP in the title, you can be forgiven any trepidation you might feel, since you know we've all heard more than enough about bodily functions.

In this case, the PP is for Perfect Post Awards--an idea dreamed up by Lucinda and MommaK. And, not entirely coincidentally, the PP is also for Penny Pressed over at Fashionable Chaos who is the recipient of my Perfect Post Award for February for her post "Unrequited and it feels so good." This post captured the rich complexities of real romance and it even did it on Valentine's Day, that day dedicated to reflexive expressions of expensive, and not necessarily real, emotions.

So here's my button--



And, Penny, it's all yours!

When I Grow Up...

My youngest niece--of money-growing purse fame--turned six earlier this month, as I've heard her announce loudly to anyone unfortunate enough to mistakenly refer to her as five. Her heartfelt pronouncement, "I'm six!" reminds me of an animated bit that used to run on Sesame Street years ago (and may still for all I know), in which a little boy sits up in bed first thing in the morning and says, "I'm six years old today! I'm six years old today!" and then he leaps out of bed and begins bouncing around his room, singing, "I'm six! I'm six! I'm six years old today!"

Strange--when it's 36 (and then some), the impulse to dance around is considerably diminished.

Don't think, though, that I'm complaining about getting old (or older). I'm not of that mindset--at least not yet. Whenever I feel the urge to be overly sensitive of my age, I remind myself to consider the alternatives. It's get older or die, you know? I'm not sure how much longer that pragmatic approach will work in the face of wrinkles, creases and sags (Wrinkles, creases and sags! Oh my!), but for now, it's holding up.

In other age-related news, my next-to-the-youngest niece, older sister to Little Miss "I'm Six," saw me scribbling away in my trusty spiral notebook the other day. She said, "Do you want to be an author when you grow up?"

Now, if she were a few years older, that remark may've been laced with mockery and sarcasm (as are most comments out of the mouths of those in the early double-digit years of adolescence). After all, duh, I am a grown-up, right? And if I were gonna be anything when I grew up, one would think I might have wanted to get started on it sometime before now. But since my niece is only eight and said it with such sweet sincerity, it got me thinking about how even when we're stuck in the rut of our real lives and we think to ourselves, duh, it's too late for me to be anything different "when I grow up," maybe all those possibilities are still out there and maybe I'm not quite as grown up as I thought.

It's All In My Head, Or Why Not to Post Under the Influence of Cold Medicine

On the one hand, I'd like to whine about my head cold, and regale you all with descriptions of the Day-Glo green stuff clogging my sinuses, but on the other hand, I think it's rather ungrateful of me to complain considering this is the first cold I've had all winter and shoot, we're within spittin' distance of spring now. (Of course, my gratitude is tempered by the knowledge that viruses really know no season and the two times I've had pneumonia in my life were both in August.)

This hasn't been much of a winter in our parts in any case. This past weekend was our first real dip into the single digits, with windchills in the negative double digits. So not only has my nose been running, my boogers have been freezing when I'm outside, which is a universally recognized signal of extreme bodily distress brought on by inhumane temperatures. But again, I'm not complaining because as I said, this winter has been mild.

Though my relief at how mild the winter's been is tempered by my concern that this is just another sign of global warming and we're all really, really, really screwed, which reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon in which two goldfish are standing on their tails on the table beside their fish bowl inside of which the little ceramic castle is aflame. The one goldfish says to the other something like, "Whew! We made it...of course now we're equally screwed."

So now I've solved the problem of not posting, but, um I'm thinking we might all be equally screwed.

Valentine's Day Rant*

Is Valentine's Day the most romantic day of the year or a purely commercial holiday, which only suckers fall for?

Being on the one hand a cynic by nature and on the other hand employed in one of the so-called industries that benefit directly from the commercial aspect of the holiday puts me in an odd position in that argument. (Rock(ME)Hard place? Not that bad, but close.) The couple-of-day rush at Valentine's Day pays my salary not just for a couple of days, but for a couple of weeks or more so I don't know where I, or the shop, would be without it, but of course I think it's asinine that so many people (almost all men) spend so much out of what amounts to a Pavlovian response to societal and (in the case of demanding, high maintenance women) interpersonal conditioning. Not only do I think it's asinine, I bitterly resent having to jump through hoops for these suckers who not only fall for the hype, but wait for the day of the hoax-holiday and expect my help in working some miracle in their romantic relationships.

That was my mental landscape last year as I put in 36 hours over the course of three days. I was arranging a dozen roses, which with balloons and delivery charges came to right around $100, when I wondered, really, what emotion would motivate someone to spend $100 frigging dollars on one day. I don't buy it as an expression of love--I think it's fear of the highest magnitude. There are two kinds of guys spending $100 on Valentine's flowers--one is living in fear of his woman (a condition commonly referred to as pussy-whipped, or just plain whipped for the faint-hearted among us) and one is guilt-ridden for his own failures the rest of the year. As with all sweeping generalizations, there are exceptions...I just haven't met any lately.

I don't have much faith in the grand gestures--they are hollow and pointless in unhealthy relationships and wholly unnecessary lily-gilding in good relationships.

I hate, too, the dismal lack of creativity and individuality we see on this holiday. A dozen roses is the grand gesture of grand gestures, widely understood to speak of commitment and depth of emotion. It's so arbitrary and, ultimately, meaningless because it pushes the same buttons, at least theoretically, for every couple everywhere. It's not personal in any way--I just don't get it at all. Clearly, there are a lot of men and women who do get it (women who have tantrums when they don't get it, in fact), but I just don't understand why. How can a cliche move anyone?

That having been said, I'm off to arrange about a million roses.

*With thanks (or blame) to Just Me, whose post in part inspired this rant.

Adventures In Parenting: Communicating (Or Not) With a Teenager

From inside Masked Mom Headquarters, 7:23 a.m., one morning last week:

Son-Two: I didn’t sleep very much last night and I’ve been up since 5:30.

Masked Mom: And what were you ruminating upon all night?*
(Pause during which I’m partially dreading his answer and partially trying not to fall back asleep.)

Son-Two: You don’t really expect me to answer that do you?

Well, um, no, I didn’t actually expect a straight answer, but to not ask seemed rude and even a little neglectful. For Son-Two, this conversation is over, but for Mom the conversation is just the beginning…the beginning of ruminating all afternoon about rules and boundaries and being involved enough to show you care without being so involved that you permanently stunt their emotional growth, thereby guaranteeing your children a lonely, hopeless existence.

With teenagers, communication, if it exists at all, is a tricky and terrifying thing. Respecting their privacy, protecting their safety and encouraging their independence all seem essential and often at odds with one another. Finding the right balance is made all the more challenging by the certainty that the right balance is probably different in each new circumstance, with each individual child.

During my own adolescence, when my mom and I were wrangling, long and loud, over her place in my life, I scribbled something in my journal that has come back to haunt me a thousand times since. I wrote that she was so busy trying to be the kind of mother she’d needed or wished she’d had that she had no idea what kind of mother I needed or wished I had.

I know, I know: I sounded just like the spoiled, adolescent brat I was, but I still think I was on to something—not necessarily about my mother in particular, but about parenting in general. Unless we were blessed with perfect parents or perfect perspective on our parents’ imperfections, we carry disappointments about our own parents’ failings with us into parenthood. We’re determined not to make the same mistakes our parents did.

And, we’re right, we don’t make the same mistakes because we’re too busy making our own gloriously messy mistakes for which our kids will no doubt require significant amounts of expensive therapy later on. Mistakes, maybe, like not running after Son-Two that morning—not chasing him down and quizzing him on what might be bothering him. The teenager I was would’ve responded to that kind of interrogation by closing down—answering in shrugs and grunts if at all—and instinct tells me that would’ve been Son-Two’s reaction as well. But instinct is all tangled up with wondering if I’m just being the kind of mother I wished I’d had at sixteen and not the kind of Mom he needs in this moment.

There is so much uncharted territory—streams and bogs and open fields and wooded hills—between us and our kids and as they grow they make more and more of it all their own. Sometimes we must trespass for their own safety—the rest of the time the rules aren’t so clear. Some days, I think the best we can hope for is not to do any lasting damage and to steer them into careers with excellent mental health coverage, just in case.


*Yes, we really do talk to our kids like that around here--occasionally in a mock British accent or snooty professor voice (think John Houseman in The Paper Chase, if anyone out there besides geeky me remembers John Houseman or The Paper Chase). It's had the unintended but totally cool effect of painlessly building their vocabularies--not that the size of their vocabularies is often obvious since they still rely heavily on slang and four-letter words and four-letter slang words especially when talking with friends.

Whose Story Is It Anyway?

We had something dramatic happen in town a few weeks ago--something that directly affected only a few people, but took many more by surprise. The week that followed the news was full of "Well, I heard..." and while I occasionally participated, it made me feel like I needed a shower. Gossip: is it evil, pointless chattering or is it a sincere attempt to make sense of the world and our place in it? Or both, alternately or simultaneously, and depending on the spirit of the participants? In this case, most of the people I spoke with or overheard seemed to really be trying to piece together a puzzle, to make sense of a seemingly senseless event.

This leads to another question that's always been of great interest to me, as a person and especially as a writer: to whom does this story--or any story--belong? I've read a million examples of family members feeling betrayed by a writer's work. Do we have a "right" to tell the stories even if the privacy of those closest to us is invaded? I've read in both Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg's work, among others, about giving ourselves permission to tell the truth as we see it in whatever form it flows out of us--poetry, fiction, memoir--and consequences be damned. Tell the truest, realest story you can and take your comfort in that. Your first loyalty is to the story. Okay, yeah, but you don't have to share an apartment or a Thanksgiving dinner with the story except in the most figurative sense.

Even before the local drama, this subject had been on my mind as I read What Remains by Carole Radziwill. She was married to John Kennedy, Jr.'s cousin, Anthony Radziwill and she had a very close friendship with Carolyn, John's wife. Carole's husband died of cancer three weeks after John and Carolyn were killed in a plane crash.

In September of last year, when the book was released, I caught maybe thirty seconds of an interview on one of the morning news programs. I'm a chronic channel hopper when it comes to those shows--thirty seconds here, a minute there--so I'm not at all sure who was interviewing her, though I'm reasonably sure it was someone male. One of the questions she was asked had to do with how John and Carolyn would've felt about intimate details of their lives being made public. I don't even remember Radziwill's response because I was so busy making a snap judgment--she was taking advantage of her close relationship to John and Carolyn, she was capitalizing on her intimate knowledge to sell books.

Having since read the book--which I never expected to do, but was persuaded by an excerpt of it I stumbled across in a magazine--I can say I was wrong. The interviewer was wrong--unless the rest of the interview somehow redeemed the snippet I caught, somehow revealed the interviewer's depth of understanding of and respect for Carole's book. I doubt it, but hey, I've got to at least put the possibility out there.

The truth about this book, at least, is that the story within it is Carole's: unmistakably, intimately, Carole's personal story. The details she reveals of John and Carolyn's personal lives--and even Anthony's--are just enough to make the reader understand their places in Carole's life--to understand the depth and breadth of her loss, the holes left behind by the disappearance of these three people from her life.

Since it's a question Radziwill has no doubt faced (there's interview transcripts all over the Internet--I was too lazy to read, let alone link to, them all) I have to say that it's likely that if she'd been married to a Schmoe cousin and was close friends with Joe Schmoe and his wife Jane Doe she would never have gotten the book deal she got--especially with a major publisher willing to spring for so much promotional support. But that would've been our loss, you know? And, also, that truth is much more revealing about the nature of publishing and the "book business" than it is of Carole Radziwill's character or talent.

The story in What Remains included John, Carolyn and Anthony, but it was Carole's story and, to a lesser extent, the story of all of us who have faced a loss. There is an elemental way in which the story of one of us is the story of all of us: "No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main..."* It is our stories that help us map the landscape of our lives and the world.

*Ms. Tolman, if you're out there, aren't you proud of the way I worked that John Donne quote in there? And aren't you at least a little comforted by my (admittedly half-assed) attribution**? It's almost a footnote. (**Thanks, Nita!)

When In Doubt, Throw It Out And Other Highlights of My Month So Far

~~~Someone, whose privacy I have vowed to protect so I can't mention her by name, but if you're really curious, e-mail me or give me a call and we can make fun of her behind her back, called me over the weekend for some advice regarding a jar of homemade sloppy joe sauce, which was maybe a little old. Thinking it might be as much as three years old, in which case I wouldn't eat it, I said, "When's it from?"

She said, "It's from 1993."

Okay. Even if the sauce were not awash in harmful microorganisms, even it were perfectly safe to eat, I would think there would be some serious deterioration in quality. I mean, if after twelve-plus years in a dust-covered jar in a musty corner of the pantry (or basement or wherever one keeps a jar of sloppy joe sauce for 12 years!) without benefit of the industrial strength preservatives found in store-bought canned goods, it still tasted exactly the same as it did when it was brand new, how good could it possibly have been to begin with?

~~~A friend who owns several rental properties around town was running an ad that specifically said, "No pets." Imagine his delight in receiving three seperate calls in an 18-hour period in which the caller casually mentioned, "I have a cat." We're all aware that many pet owners, myself included, consider their pets members of the family and it couldn't be clearer that most cats do not consider themselves pets, but let's remember that by the strict definition, cats are, in fact, technically pets.

~~~While working on a display window for Valentine's Day, I put a strand of heart lights inside a reproduction Victorian bird cage. K, a guy who sometimes helps out at the shop, but who is mostly a Shop Groupie (one of a group of colorful people who would make great Blog Material if I ever get around to it), was watching me with a raised eyebrow. "And just what is the significance of hearts in a cage? Is your heart a captive of love?"

Gosh, I almost wish I'd been clever enough to think of that, but no, as I told K: "The significance is I am lazy, the bird cage takes up a lot of space and cramming the hearts in it tied it in with the holiday theme with almost no effort on my part."

The window, despite my admitted laziness, has gotten some compliments, but with its white lace, gauzy red tulle, and gold accessories, it turned out a little too Best Little Whorehouse In Texas for my taste.

A Change Would Do You Good...

...so says Sheryl Crow and, as it happens, Mr. High School. He's become something of a personal life coach--like Dr. Phil, but nowhere near as smug and annoying with the added bonus that I respect his opinions way more than I do Dr. Phil's.

In the time we've been back in touch, Mr. High School has made some changes of his own. He quit his job at a place he'd been working--underpaid and underappreciated--for almost 13 years. He's now in a new job, which he loves and where they truly respect and appreciate him. He has been challenged in this new position in ways he hadn't been for years. He's become an enthusiastic proponent of change--swears by it as a positive thing.

We have a lot in common, Mr. High School and I, but this isn't one of the things. Change--even when it's my idea and even when it's a change for the better--is Big Scary. It can be overwhelming and I tend to resist change with all my resources, even when embracing it might be for the best, or at the very least, more energy efficient than digging my heels in against the inevitable.

Hubby can vouch for this trait of mine. Some of our most heated trivial arguments* are about rearranging the furniture. If it were entirely up to me, every single thing would be exactly where we put it the day we moved in here (eight and a half years ago). If it were entirely up to Hubby, the tinkering (he prefers "improving") would never end. As a result of our ongoing tug-of-war, our house has a look and feel that's a hybrid of "lived in" and "just moved in." While we've clearly been here a while--as evidenced by the clutter--nothing seems quite finished or settled.

As is my geeky habit, I've given a lot of thought to where Hubby and I picked up our respective attitudes toward change--he craves it; I shun it. Not surprisingly, our childhoods were very different in regards to change. After the age of 5, Hubby lived in the same house in the same tiny town in New Hampshire while I bounced from place to place.

Maybe we're all hard-wired to certain traits and attitudes and we'd have both ended up at opposite ends of this spectrum regardless of our circumstances growing up, but I sometimes think of our adult lives as prolonged rebellions against our childhoods. He was stuck in one place, with no choice in the matter. I was yanked from place to place, with no choice in the matter. Now we have a choice and we're making it, stubbornly, logic or what might actually be best for us be damned.

So, I'm thinking I should start trying to see change in a new--more reasonable--light. Maybe Mr. High School was right: change can be a good thing. I'm just glad he doesn't have Internet access--I wouldn't want him to see this post and get all smug and Dr. Phil on me.


*If you are now (or have ever been) in a long-term relationship, you know exactly how heated a "trivial" argument can be. If, however, you've never been in a long-term relationship, you probably think "heated trivial argument" is an oxymoron and any explanation would serve only to confuse you further and perhaps make you take a vow of chastity and then I would feel guilty that you ended up a hermit all because of an offhand comment in a blog, so let's just skip it.

An Answer To Your Financial Prayers

So my five-year-old niece was here the other morning, toting an adorable baby blue corduroy purse. She says, "Guess what? I have real money in my purse! Because, you know, money grows in purses."

No, I didn't know that--maybe that's been my problem all along. I've always been more of the wallet-you-can-stuff-a-few-essentials-into-and-tuck-under-your-arm type. Considering the lack of fiscal growth in the wallet I do lug around, I've got to assume that it's time to switch accessories. Or maybe the wallet would work, too, if only I had the right fertilizer?

That would be a truly miraculous feat even for Miracle-Gro, wouldn't it?

Perspective, Courtesy of the Spiral Notebook

I had a crappy day yesterday--not for any reason, really, except for maybe the realization that I was at work on a Monday, when the two previous Mondays had been spent relaxing (ha--have I mentioned I have three teenage sons and an eleven-year-old daughter?) at home. It was drizzly and rainy and while nothing went spectacularly wrong, nothing was quite right either.

Sometimes when I've got the crankies for no reason, I like to dip into the old Spiral Notebook journal that I've kept since I was fifteen. Here's the entry I stumbled upon last night--at the time, Son-One was four, Son-Two was two-and-a-half, and Son-Three had just turned one. I was a few months away from returning to the workforce, but employed full-time tending three boys, whose sole job was attempting to drive their mother insane. Oh, we also had an 8-week old border collie puppy...

Wednesday, August 19, 1992

11:08 AM--There was no toilet paper this morning when I got out of bed. I thought maybe it was the TP Fairy, but I looked everywhere and I guess she forgot to leave the money. Son-Three's diaper was full (of record-breaking, rancid, green shit). My bra situation has gone from desperate to hopeless. I could find two this morning, one had dog shit on it and the other had a gaping hole in the left cup. I washed out the second one and offered the first as a sacrifice to the gods in charge of this day. I hope they appreciate it--it was a hell of a good bra, it served me long and well and I loved it dearly.

I make this pit stop entry in an effort to dispel whatever evil spirits may be hanging over my day. When the first hour I'm out of bed goes like this, I've got to do something. I'd cross my fingers for the rest of the day, but I'd probably break a nail or put an eye out.

Yeah, yesterday was pretty bad, but if I made it through August 19, 1992, I'm pretty sure I can survive anything this week has in store for me.

A Resolution I Can Keep

New Year's Resolutions are proof that hope springs eternal--foolish, blind hope that is disappointed time and again and yet comes back to the table for more.

Late on New Year's Day, my sister-in-law said to a group of us assembled around the table: "Okay, what are your resolutions everyone?"

I answered, "My resolution is to not make any resolutions this year."

It's the best resolution I've ever made. Think about the very nature of New Year's Resolutions--we spend the first few hours or days of the New Year thinking about all the ways we aren't good enough, all the changes we need to make to be worthy of this New Year. Here's a little secret, though--yeah, it's a New Year, a new day, another chance, blah, blah, blah, but I'm the same old me and odds are my energy will be better spent being the best me I can be and accepting all the ways I fall short of the goal of perfection rather than struggling to become more, better, faster, stronger.

So here I am on the 5th of January and I haven't even wavered in my resolution one teeny bit. I think I may have set some kind of record.

Ah, The Power!

Daughter-Only wanders home from a friend's house last night around 5. She's in the door two seconds and quizzing me already:

"What's for dinner?"

"Um, leftovers."

"Leftover what?"

"Ham and scalloped potatoes from the night before last and meatloaf and mashed potatoes from last night. There's also..."

"Stttttooooooppppppp! You're gonna make me puke!"

It's a good thing I'm a superhero and not a supervillain. Imagine all the havoc I could wreak if I used my powers for evil instead of for good.

Ho! Ho! Holy Crap! Is That What I Think It Is?

A leftover slice (or two) of Christmas cheer for those of you who still have room:

---Little Sister and I were on our way for some almost last-minute Christmas shopping (the weekend before the Big Day), when I saw one of those lighted reindeer hanging from a tree by its feet, much the way a hunter would hang his trophy (dead deer for the uninitiated, non-rednecks among you). As an added artistic touch, the guy (c'mon, you know it was a guy) had hung a strand of red lights right down the center of the deer to make it look field dressed. Ewwww...but hey, the giggle I got was worth the gross factor.

---In a related note (and in yet another argument for Decebuary), a friend of a friend came up with a brilliant plan to put one of those reindeer on a spit, rotating over flames made of orange tube-lighting. Alas, he ran out of time before he could execute his plan this year. I share this with all of you on the condition that no one steal the poor guy's demented idea before he gets the chance to get it all together. I mean, I'm pretty sure that all the higher-ups involved in the holiday season would frown upon theft of intellectual property. If they're out of coal, who knows what you might get in your stocking?

Santa's Elves Are Everywhere

To give you some idea of my current mental state, when I wrote the word "everywhere" in the title of this post, the voice in my head wasn't mine--it was the voice of Ray Stevens in his song "Santa Claus Is Watching You." In the background of the chorus, Stevens says in a panicked, bordering on insane, voice, "He's everywhere! He's everywhere!" That's the true voice of this holiday season...

Anyway. Santa's Elves are everywhere, spreading joy and Christmas cheer. And, generous blogger that I am, I'm happy to share some examples with you.

---Customer calls the shop the other day says, "Hi, my name is So-and-So Massengill..." and just as I'm thinking "great, I'll bet she's gonna be a real douche bag," she says, "yes, my last name actually is Massengill." I thought it was uncommonly kind of her to immediately acknowledge the giggle power of her last name.

---In the space of five minutes on Tuesday night, I experienced not one but two true Christmas miracles. Years ago, I inherited two waffle irons from my grandmother that she used to make two varieties of waffle cookies every Christmas. The first few years I had the irons, I diligently turned out cookies to share with friends and family. Then we moved and I somehow lost track of the recipes--which were written on two stained 3x5 index cards in my grandmother's hieroglyphic handwriting. So for going on six years now--no traditional waffle cookies. No one's mentioned them, probably everyone assumed I'm just neck-deep in the details of daily life and too busy to bother with recipes that begin "1 dozen eggs." Anyway, it's been a nagging thought and several times a year, I dig through all my recipe cards and cookbooks and other likely places in search of these damned cards. Tuesday night, while looking for something else altogether (a burned CD with Christmas classics such as "Chipmunks Roasting On A Open Fire," I feel compelled to confess, in part so you can see just how undeserving I was of the miracles about to come my way), I found both of the recipes, one right after the other, in two separate places, places I'd repeatedly looked, by the way. The only thing more miraculous would've been finding them a month and a half ago when I might still have had time to make the cookies.

---I ventured into a Wal-Mart this weekend--I know, I know, THE INSANITY! Anyway, it was exactly as horrible as you'd imagine and maybe even then some. No room to manuever in the aisles crowded with all those other shoppers with their glazed eyes and haunted expressions. Most of the people were too dazed by their own misfortune to be nasty to anyone else, which I guess is a blessing. There was one guy who seemed to be having entirely too much fun. He was dancing around in circles with his cart, while waiting for his wife to paw through the clearance racks of women's clothing. Along comes a woman, clearly on an urgent mission to fill her cart with even more crap, and runs her cart right up the guy's leg, above his ankle and over his foot--and she did not even slow down. No "excuse me," no, "oh--I'm sooo sorry," not even a "please don't file a lawsuit against me." The guy looked sheepishly at his wife, who said, "That's what you get for whipping that cart around like that." And the guy kept on a-grinning. That's some Christmas spirit. Too bad it's not contagious.