"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts"

" You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast" Counting Crows

If I can make it on the 700+ mile car trip with a two-year-old, I will arrive on the South Carolina coast sometime late Tuesday. I am familiar with this drive, as I did my undergraduate education at Clemson University, and it goes...a whole lotta Ohio, the winding roads of West Virginia, a rolling and tunneled North Carolina, and then finally South Carolina-where the soft piny green of North Carolina changes to the needle green of South. The air does get a little sweeter, as the magnolias converge on every highway side. The forest tightens up too, bound together by the parasite of Kudzu, waiting to make its final kill, just as it has been waiting for years.

I left a lot of tired emotions in South Carolina. My family vacationed there through my adolescence, and then I decided to stay for college. After that, gone. Until Tuesday.

It is said that our most memorable times imprint the environment where they were spent. If this is the case, I will be bouncing off of imprints until my head spins. Laughing, crying, loving, being reckless, escaping, and many broken hearts and lost friendships. I remember that the air is so thick and humid that it rests upon your shoulders and curls underneath your chin. Thick and humid and full of heavy imprints. I best not blog for the next week.

A good week to you all.

Ephemeral

The problem with luck is you don’t know

when you are lucky.

And Joy is a puddle after a rain,

stagnant and waiting,

to splash your calves and soak your socks.

To remind you,

laugh now and dry clothes later.

Stop avoiding small baptisms of the everyday.

Look up and dig down into the muddy old soul,

Take tiny steps, tiny breaths

on the path to your beginning.

A. Lucky, 2008

A Little Crush

I am starting this post by saying that yesterday, on my birthday, my husband was wonderful to me. He didn't complain when I wanted to do a workout class and then swim (he never does), and he even pushed me out the door to go get a pedicure from my favorite nail place where Cambodian men do your nails. Typical me, instead of enjoying a dark man rub my feet and legs, I always insist that the pedicurist tell me about life in Cambodia. "How long are the lines for a factory job? The typical salary is $20 per month?" Then I ask him to airbrush little Amnesty International symbols on my shiny pink toenails. Contradiction anyone?

Back to my husband. He gave me wonderful gifts too. A sleek new pair of running shoes, soft and seamless underwear from Victoria's Secret, and one not-so-soft pair that he threw in the box with a whole bunch of high hopes. If he vacuums the entire house today, I might choose the not-so-soft ones to wear. He even made a CD of songs that are so sweet.

I love that man, really I do. He loves to make me happy AND he is the only human that will put up with me 24/7, so I am pretty sure I won't ever leave him. But read on...

I am confessing to a new crush. On an electronic toy. No, no, no, not that kind. It is my Nintento Wii Fit. Yesterday, it was the first thing to wish me happy birthday. The character, the Wii Fit Board, wore a party hat all day and threw confetti. It doesn't have to be your birthday to realize that this thing is the most encouraging, lovable addition to your family....and it knows more about you than any family member. I am already imagining how I am going to explain its presence at our extended family Thanksgiving dinner table.

Seriously, this thing makes me want to be a better person. Fitter, happier and emotionally stronger. When I walk by the Fit board, I puff out my chest, wink at it, and give it a loving nudge with my toe.

When the brains at Nintendo come out with the Wii Maid, I am just not sure if there will be any room in my life for a human.

Prophet

My new Wii Fit tells me I have poor balance.

Seriously, I could not have figured that one out on my own?

Oh, okay. Now I get it.

Today Sophia turns two. Now I can stop measuring and telling people her age in months (even though every Mom never really stops), and just say, "Two. She's two. That is why she is acting that way. TWO." I will get looks of empathy from other moms and looks of annoyance from non-moms, but who cares. My baby girl made it to two, and I had a lot to do with it.

This is not to say that the egoic, shadowy part of me was not kicking and screaming from the inside (and sometimes outside) for the last two years. I was (am) afraid, unsure, tired and lonely. Yesterday, a friend had us over with a whole bunch of other friends that I love to be around and share a lot of laughs. I am the only one in this bunch with a kid, and I had mine with me because my husband was out of town, so I honestly cannot remember one conversation from this gathering. I do remember constantly picking up the plastic princesses we brought along, so no one would kill themselves by tripping over them. I do remember sitting at the table with Sophia and asking, "More chips? No, you just had chips. How about some chicken? Okay, don't scream, here are your chips," while trying to listen to the what my friends were talking about in the living room. Something about a favorite show and a funny part of something or other. I knew I would not have been able to contribute if I was a part of their conversation because I doubt they were talking about Dora The Explorer.

Just as that part of me, the one that kicks and screams, was starting to feel sorry for myself, Sophia leaned over and reminded me that I looked like a princess for the tenth time that day. Then it hit me. I was sitting with a friend. My best friend. So we don't have conversations about the degrees we are earning, work and the latest movies and books that have caused a stir...but we get to wipe chocolate off of our hands and faces and splash around in bathtubs, puddles, pools and sprinklers almost every day.

So now I get it. That shadowy part of myself that takes me over used to be a baby, now it is a toddler, and today it turns two, right along with Sophia. I know that the next few years are going to be a tantrum-y whirlwind of trying to figure each other out. The people in my life are always going to grow up, at a different pace, without me. Having a child is making the choice to step out of that pace, to slow down, and to see the world through eyes that are constantly in awe. Today I am going to celebrate this choice. After we give daddy a hug for putting up with us, we will laugh and chase balloons and bubbles, mouths stuffed with ice cream cake.

Itsy Bitsy

Last night my daughter convinced me that she needed some pre-bedtime play in the basement, the area of our house that holds all of the fun that a toddler can dream up. We were pretending that her little plastic animals could cross a bridge of blocks while eating plastic fish, which took all of my brain power that late in the day, so much so, that I didn't notice the black spider that was crawling under my legs. Sophia sprang to her feet when she saw it and started babbling "tiny, tiny, cute" until I saw it too. Yuck. It was black as night and could crawl sideways and looked like it had tiny pincers. Apparently, this was so adorable to my daughter that she got down on all fours and started talking to the thing.
Luckily, my husband was in the room, and he was equally as startled at the leggy monster on our new carpet. He gently picked it up with a LEGO and a piece of paper and told Sophia it was going outside.
She lost it. I mean, the type of instant sobbing that I only see when something drastic happens. Drastic as in no, you cannot have ice cream at 6:30 AM.
Like every stupid mom of a 2-year-old, I tried explaining things. "Spiders can't live with us, Sweets, they belong outside."
More tears. More "no, no, no, spider back, puleeese, spider back?"
Really, we should try to get out more.

Surrender

The universe hangs talismans

of gentle, bold reminders.

We balance on the edge of change,

we birth change, and tuck it away.

A constant dance of nurture and rejection.

Somehow we are never distracted quite enough

to not hear the train cut through the still morning,

after we have forgotten they existed at all.

To not feel a swelling storm, a shift of heat underneath

an abrupt breeze.

What of the life that blooms and dies at our feet,

screaming with velvet tongues,

This time, don’t hold on with your life.

A. Lucky, 2008

Father's Day

When a woman is young and chooses a husband, he might seem good enough get off his butt and propose, look up at her from his playstation now and then, fix the occasional broken thing (or break it worse) and remember important dates. Few women are forward thinking enough to wonder if he is the right person to father her children. I simply lucked out.

Right now, my daughter is not making it easy to be a father. She is at the stage where every suggestion is met with a resounding "NO!" When my husband simply walks into a room, she says, "No, no, no, no, daddy." This started after I had to leave town for a couple days, and we are guessing it continues because she thinks that by him coming into the room, I might exit. He has also had to travel an excessive amount with his new job. Overall, she is pretty mommy-centered these days, which probably breaks his heart little by little.

What my daughter does not see is that she has replaced me as the top girl in his life. When he sees us, he looks at her first, reaches for her first. This is all okay with me, until the day she catches on and they form a little daddy-daughter alliance against mom. Even then, I will remember that important bond in a girl's life, and it will still be more than okay.

I hope that she uses her father as her standard of how she expects men to behave. If she looks for the qualities of her father in other men, she will be looking for patience, chivalry, humor and the general willingness to drop everything to help if you nag him enough.

Every time I look at this photo, I think to myself how silly I was to assume that I would be his greatest love.

Doll House

I remember loving to play with dolls. For some reason, even at a young age, I would make up elaborate dramas about my dolls. Someone was always pregnant (with Kleenex), for example, or a single mother. My childhood was swift and sweet, so I must have felt the need to over-embellish the lives of those tiny, amorphous figures. Perhaps this was the writer that still tries to claw its way into my way of seeing.

I just don't want to see that way anymore. As adults, we are bombarded by drama, mostly the kind we make up and act out just because we stopped playing with dolls, I think.

For my daughter's upcoming second birthday, I ordered her a dollhouse. I can't help but feel excited for the arrival of this plastic paradise...it must be a girl-thing. I imagine we will arrange tiny furniture in tiny rooms and then stare at it until she is six or so, old enough to act out a soap opera dialogue of her own. On the other hand, by then life could be so challenging that she will have all of the dolls arranged in the living room with their feet up on ottomans holding tiny margaritas. Either way, I can't wait to hear what she comes up with.

Big Mouth

I am talking about mine. Even though most of the words that come out of my mouth in conversation are as empty as the nutritional value of a Ho-Ho, I have said some things aloud that seem to jinx the entire world.

I don't believe in a judgemental God, but I do think there is some sort of ass-kicking universal power that just wants me to shut up.
Some examples?

Once I complained to a friend that Americans tended to focus on petty things (like iphones and waiting in line) because our lives were not threatened every day like the citizens of most other countries. A few days later...9-11.

My husband and I once decided that the only way that Americans would realize their co-dependence on mindless consumption of well, most things, was if gas were to reach $5.00 per gallon. Now we are just about there.

In the same conversation with the above husband, we determined that the only way Americans would notice that we were at war in the Middle East instead of thinking of it as the words, words, words between news reports on which celebrity gave birth and who got kicked off of American Idol, was if a draft were instated.
Now John McCain might be our next president.

Uh. Oops.

(Sometimes good things come from my off-the-cuff mis-speakings...like when I was talking to myself the other day about how no one, sigh, seems to comment, sigh, on my blog. Now look! 5 comments on my last post! An Everythingness record! Thanks...)

Belch

Yeah, okay. So I deleted the over-ambitious post about participating in NaBloPoMo's blogroll for June. If you are one of my three regular readers (Hi Emily, Hi Meredith, Hi Michelle), you probably thought this was a burp in the blogger software. No, no...it was more like a burp in my life. Not to worry, it is just a burp. You know, the kind that makes you feel better, the kind that makes you say, "Oh I can totally eat two more soft taco supremes."

My kid is sick and my husband is always out of town. I work too, did I mention that? So things are a little off balance, which can only be restored by cutting down on obligations and going with the flow. Maybe NaBloPoMo is something I can do when I sit in a rocking chair next to a phone waiting for my daughter to call...not when she sleeps for 30 minutes at a time and slobbers all over my new $6.99 tee shirt because she won't let go of me.

One way to restore balance is to remember gratitude. So here are things that are saving me, in no particular order...

1. A friend who purchased a $200 gift certificate for me from Merry Maids.
2. A friend who purchased a chocolate milkshake for my screaming, feverish daughter last night.
3. A husband who is on his way home.
4. A sister that I can call when my daughter looks at me funny and I don't know what to make of it.
5. A flexible, obscenely high-paying job.
6. Ambien
7. Red wine.
8. Blue speckly things (don't ask).
9. Two pregnant friends who are going to be great mothers of two.
10. A newly engaged friend.
11. Obama on the ticket.
12. A 1 pm pediatrician appointment.

Huh. That felt really good. Give it a try.