I've moved!

This blog has been relocated

http://everythingness.wordpress.com/

Moving

No, my house did not sell. I am still stuck in the winter of Cleveland.

However, I am astounded, ASTOUNDED! by my lack of time and inspiration to post here. This could be due to winter doldrums or the simple fact that I am failing at the balancing act called life. For inspiration, I have decided to move this blog to the more modern, fun and user-friendly forum of wordpress.

My new residence is here: http://everythingness.wordpress.com/

I would love for you to follow me there...

Today "bitch" prevails on my slate

This post is in response to my previous post about how I was planning to spend Lent this year.

6:00 AM--Awake to my daughter screaming something in a language that no person being yanked from a Matt Damon dream could understand. Word on my slate: Crabby

6:05 AM--Daughter has finished two cups of chocolate almond milk and wants to pretend that we are sharks swimming in the ocean, otherwise known as the hardwood floor. I indulge her despite my aching PMS boobs. Word on my slate: Goofy

8:20 AM--Trying to get daughter ready for day care while waiting for the Molly Maid cleaning service to arrive so I could tell them how to clean my house. Word on my slate: Panicked

8:40 AM--Molly Maid service tells me that they could totally clean my house by using the extremely generous gift certificate from my friend Meredith which came in good handy today because I am hosting our book club tonight. Word on my slate: Grateful

8:49 AM--Daughter is screaming bloody murder because she is pulling her arm out of her coat while I am trying to pull the same arm in her coat. I scream "give me a fucking break!" (daughter repeats above phrase, and mom learns her lesson) Word on my slate: Bitch

10:00 AM--I discover that most of the women in my book club are not attending, and I think of my wasted anxiety, Molly Maid gift certificate, and $200 worth of food that I purchased for the evening. Word on my slate: Passively Aggressive Mad (okay, three words)

10:01 AM--Remembering all of the times that I had to bail on book club because of some kid/travel/weather event. Realizing that less people could just mean less anxiety in my one-square-foot house. Word on my slate: Humbled

12:00 PM--Smelling the clean fumes from the upstairs while I work from my basement, telling me that hiring the cleaning service is something I should do every week. Word on my slate: Calm

3:30 PM--Receiving a message from my husband that he is on his way home from Michigan to help with what is left of the evening festivities and daughter corralling. Word on my slate: Joy

3:33 PM--Deciding not to tell husband that the floors are so clean that he will slip and land on his ass like I did when I emerged from my desk for lunch. Word on my slate: Well, I guess that would bring me back to bitch, now wouldn't it?


The day is only half over, and if I read over this post I am able to see how amazingly blessed I am even in moments of chaos. I am also able to see that I may have a small PMS problem going on.

Lent, 2009

Today is Ash Wednesday, and if you are not Catholic and have ventured out in public, you have probably seen someone that made you think, "Dude. Did you look in the mirror this morning? Who leaves the house with a head that looks like you have been doing yoga in a coal mine?" I am sure that it did not take long for you to remember that this is how Catholics start their Lenten season. I know, it could not get any more Catholic-weird than this ritual that marks us as a reminder that we are sinful and need spiritual cleansing. I do have to reinforce a truth that I live here: no one is sinful, only fearful. Fear generates all wrong doing, every unkind word that escapes our lips, every judgment, every type of harm.

Spiritual cleansing on the other hand, is something I can stand behind...and I love Lent as a time to redefine my relationship with my spirituality. I have a hard time listening to other Catholics who choose to give something up, such as some food to propel a hidden weight loss agenda, or some habit that was on their New Year's resolution list and fell through the cracks. By doing this we focus on ourselves and our ability to what? Turn your head when confronted with a bowl of Hershey kisses? I can speak for the universe here and say BIG.EFFING.DEAL.

(Deep breath)

So seriously, what will make this Lent a time to develop a closer relationship with God for me? Are you ready for this? NOTHING.

No-thing.

In a world full of lists and agendas that is fueled by the self-battering, er, I mean self-help industry, how many of us stop to do no-thing? Have you ever cleaned your slate? Erased what you decided you were that day and just let yourself be defined by the moment? By noon of every day most of us have decided that we are fat, lazy, unproductive, tired, overwhelmed and ready to check out until the next day. Have you noticed how the universe responds to this? By piling on more things that make you feel those ugly things. Our relationships with others even strain to meet this realm of negativity. This is where resentment enters into the cycle, including judgment and gossiping, leading to an eventual spiritual exhaustion.

What if you woke up each morning and said, "I don't know who I am, but I am going to allow each moment to tell me?" I have a feeling that life and God would seize this opportunity to show you things that have been hiding in your perfect soul all along. Perhaps you will discover that you are an artist because you noticed that green things are starting to peek through the snow. Perhaps you will discover that you are a terrific mom because you took a moment to build a purple Play-Doh giraffe. Maybe you can cook, when you decide to throw those questionable pea pods into a simmering pot of broth. The moment may even inspire you to stop and stroke the cheek of your partner as a way of saying, I am a person that radiates love and notice that you are a essential part of my life.

What a way to live a day! By doing any form of these things we have been cleansed, redefined, and lifted to a exceptional existence. Despite what the self-help gurus tell us, we do not need to be improved, we need to slow down our doing and our thinking.

I invite you to clean your slate with me. Let us start each day by expecting nothing, no-thing, of ourselves and the people around us.

We are blessed. Happy discovering.

Sophia, I'll start with you.

Not because it is a monumental day in your life or anything, but because I am avoiding all the other things that I want to write. These things take actual thought. With you, there is no thought, just simple being is all you want, and sometimes I don't realize how good this actually is for me. What therapy! To dismiss everything that awaits my attention in the corners of my mind to simply spend time throwing a ball in your arms that are making a bit O to resemble a basketball hoop. You make a lousy hoop, by the way. The circumference of your arms is too small, so the ball just lands between that O and your nose. Tonight this made you crack up at the 1000 times I threw it, though. Good enough.

You seem unsettled lately, and I am positive it is because I am unsettled. Despite my efforts to pretend that all is well with bags of valentine candy and new videos, I still notice that you stiffen when you hear my voice crack when I say even simple things, like "want juice?"

I am sorry, but life forces us into periods when they days seem heavy, and I will never be able to shelter you from this. You have been such a bear when I try to put you to bed and I cannot help but wonder if it is because you are afraid to leave me alone, that I will somehow break under the heavy day and fail to come get you in the mornings to say, "want juice?"

Tonight I could not handle the devastation you displayed when I told you it was bedtime--the tears falling from your large, scared eyes, and the mumbly something or other about not wanting to be in your bedroom. I forced you sit in my lap and tell me about it, about what was wrong with the bedroom. I reminded you that there were butterflies hanging from the ceiling that bring good dreams about all of your favorite princesses and friends. Through your sobs you managed to tell me that tonight you were going to dream of you, me and daddy. This made me realize that our tiny family trumps all of those princesses and friends, and bags of candy and new videos cannot mend that part of your life that seems broken and unstable most of the time.

I don't know what to tell you. That one day you will be so embarrassed by your parents that you will hope the ground swallows us whole? That we are going to anger you more than please you with our constant "no" and "too dangerous" statements? Right now you want us all together, and that is all you know.

I am sure daddy is thinking of us from whichever part of the crap-hole called Michigan he is in, and I am thinking of him and of course, you. From where I am sitting, I can hear your tiny breathing and random rustling over the baby monitor. I am mustering every restraint to not run upstairs and snuggle us together in my bed. I hope your dreams have started, and I hope they take you back to our many family hugs, where daddy and I pick you up and squish you like a marshmallow between our tired but grateful bodies.

Wordless

I would not label this state that I am in as "speechless" because if you really asked, I could talk your ear off about something or other. Simply put, I am wordless to describe what has been going on in my life and in my days and in my head. There are periods in my life when I am afraid to write about something out of fear of changing it. Ultimately this is what happens to the poet; his poetry is unraveled by the failure of words to describe what is observed.

Perhaps this is why I tried my hand at science for so many years. The idea of pure observation and quantifying this observation was exciting. The joke was on me as it has been on the scientist for years. Numbers fail. Observation and quantification fail. Logic ALWAYS fails, and I will argue that point with words and numbers until I die of breathlessness. Ultimately the scientist finds herself out of the lab and at her desk hand waving with the same tool as the poet: words.

The number of blog posts rolling around in my head are driving me insane: I would like to write about celebrating my parents' 60th birthday on a cruise ship. I would like to describe my dear friend who has gone through loss and health problems, and her mental and physical recovery. I need to describe the bravery of another friend who has stage 4 breast cancer and cannot catch a break in the physical realm, but somehow found the time to read this blog and let me know that she loved it. I would like post some advice to my newly engaged best friend. I would like to post some advice to a friend not far from giving birth to her first child. I would like to write another letter to my child, because she fills me with the kind of anguishing love that takes over my whole existence. I want to write about a country that is shaking itself free of the evils of torture and automatic weapons. I want to write about how fear of change, even if it means turning away from these evils, is guiding the tongues and hands of so many people.

Right now, I am humbled by the failure of words to describe these events that have me swimming or wading on my knees through my days. The truth is, no matter what form you take, poet or scientist, the key is to not miss a moment. If you are watching close enough, the words eventually gather at your feet.

Getting Started

I just finished mopping up a pool of tears after rereading an excerpt from Patti Digh's book Life is a Verb entitled, Just Help Them Get Started. On the surface it is about her struggle to realize that her toddler daughter is giving up her afternoon nap. It seems at first that her daughter is wailing and screaming and scratching at things in protest just to hurt her mother. I have a toddler. I can relate.

In a way that only Patti Digh can open our eyes, she turns the tale around by realizing that she was ignoring the fear of her daughter, a lack of the ability to get to sleep at that time of day, a fear of being left alone in the room to try and try and try to sleep in the boundless dark. As she is storming out of the child's room, she finally hears her words through the screaming, "Just help me get started!" This is kid-speak for "stay with me, I can't figure out how to do this myself." I am an insomniac. I can relate.

In a follow-up challenge to this story, Patti encourages us to examine our own hall of fears. The ones that make us stop listening to the cries of fear from others that are so often disguised as hurtful actions. I hurt people around me when I am fearful. I can relate.

My big, glaring fear is loneliness. This is almost a joke because I am not a people-person at all. As a stay at home/work at home mother, I am debilitated by isolation when it hits me that I have not spoken to an adult in many hours or when I have not accessed a spiritual outlet such as hospice or church. This fear can often make me seem like I resent the people closest to me, the ones who live with me. My husband and my daughter...not the cats--I honestly do resent the cats most of the time.

Yesterday my husband's company decided it was time for him to move to Michigan, with or without me, whether or not our house has sold. Because we are not making the type of money to carry two mortgages, this will leave me ALONE during the week in an old house in Cleveland, with a toddler that I love but is prone to drive me insane and two cats that I resent. He will rent a small apartment in Michigan.

To summarize with an understatement: I am afraid.

My husband is super-man. He puts my needs first. He puts our daughter before all of that. He notices when I am too exhausted to bathe our daughter and get her in her PJs. He notices when I need a break and gives me the day off. Basically, the way I live my life is because I have him in it most every day.

Now who will I be without that? I will examine this fear. For now, I am forgiving myself for being stuck in the stage that has me clawing and screaming, "Help me get started!"

SAD

Oh, it is time to admit that this season has control over me. Deep winter envelops every part of me that I like and freezes it over. It hurts to walk outside, it hurts to get out of bed, it hurts to fall asleep, and it hurts to crack a smile. Cleveland is especially brutal because we see the sun this time of year about once every 30 days. We are at the point where the icicles spend the day weeping as the thermometer approaches 30 degrees, but freeze into rigid points by 4 pm, when the temperature dips back into the teens. Or as they are predicting this week--below zero.

The worst part is, my best friend named guilt seeps into every crack of my frozen self. I know there is no tragedy in my life. I know I am not going to starve in the next week. I know I can control the thermostat in my house. I know I can walk 2 miles down the main road near my house and stumble over someone who will surely freeze to death tonight--and that person is not someone I know. So I feel horrible AND guilty for feeling horrible.

In a month I will start flipping through the phone book for a shrink. Or light therapy. Or I will spend a week on a diet of chocolate cake.
I am old enough to know that spring always comes.

Christmas Eve, 2008, Shlubby Style

I would like to note some progress on my part here. This time of year, it is so easy to fall into the traps of societal craze, and I just don't do it. Every year I get better and better. I wrap less, want less, bake less, decorate less, and therefore stress less. I have no expectations about what Christmas should be, I just let it be, and each Christmas that passes transcends the magical.

This is because I am watching and not doing.

While there may be people in my life that feel they received something small from me when they expected something bigger--a gift, a greeting, or glitter pouring out of every orifice on my body--I hope they notice that not getting "caught up" allows me the space I need to give what I want to give: the time to be the ear on the other end of the phone and not the voice, the Mom who says, sure, let's read that book for the fifth time today, the person who stops to listen what God is saying and not the advertising industry.

After closing this post, I am going to drink strong coffee and sloppily wrap some gifts. When my daughter wakes, we will eat the last piece of waxy chocolate from her 49 cent Advent Calendar. I will turn on the Christmas lights that are so ill placed they look like they should decorate a frat house. Then I will think and sing and dance and eat with my family, because today we celebrate abundance of spirit. This abundance will be just as exciting in August as it is today, and next year, if we choose, it will still fit.

Dear Sophia,

I could write this whole letter about how yesterday, I left you for one minute to grab something from upstairs, an act that I totally thought was pretty okay, seeing that I birthed you over 2.5 years ago. Then your father, of course, walked into the room and saw that you were getting crafty with the scissors I was using for Christmas cards. My sharpest scissors. It is not as if you were cutting your plump, tiny fingers off...you were just making fringe out of the Christmas Eve mass schedule. Of course, my first thought was to feel like a negligent, dangerous parent, but then I thought no, no she knows what she is doing. She is making fringe on that paper so I can no longer read it because if so help her God she has to wear another scratchy dress and a pair of droopy tights this winter...
Nice try babe. We are going on a 7 night cruise next month and I have purchased scratchy dresses for every day. I may make you sleep in them. Oh, and Christmas mass? Droopiest tights ever.

You see? I am learning to handle you with such grace!

I ran a marathon a week ago today. What got me across the finish line was thinking that I had you at home and I missed you. I know if I never made it, had croaked at mile 2, you would assume that you would have Daddy all to yourself to build you one big fort your entire life and cook you bacon for every meal. Well, I made it and there are once again big tubs of salad in the fridge.

Lucky you, lucky me. Let me tell you something about luck. That marathon showed me how much of that day was luck for me. Yes, I had to do the 4 months of work that prepared my body for five hours of running. The rest was pure luck. I was born in a country where events like marathons that contain over 10,000 people eager to inflict torture on themselves happen every weekend. Luck. We are not distracted by hunting our food for survival or dodging bombs. Luck. I have not been in an accident that has left me wheelchair bound, like so many of the spectators that looked me in the eye and said, "Keep going, great job." Luck. My right hamstring did not snap at mile 9, as it did for a man who was screaming behind me and rolling around on the ground. Luck. The marathon course took us through some pretty destitute areas surrounding Las Vegas, and I grew up differently than the children who were hanging from the walls around their homes watching us with faces that plainly wondered if they would ever be in a position to do something like a marathon. By position I mean rich and educated and under stimulated enough to even think about running a race. Luck.

I hope at my age, you have as much luck, and I hope even harder that you are aware enough to notice. If you do not notice, you will not feel it, it is as simple as that. I will do my part. When we watch a sunrise together, I will talk about this kind of luck. I will even talk about it while searching for the good in a crisis.

Seeing how you react to Christmas lights, sparkly ribbons and unexpected gifts--you make a sound that no animal or soap opera actress can duplicate, like you are replacing breath with pure glee--I am sure you know a thing or two about abundance and gratitude.

Love,
Mom

26.2

As I am writing this my hands are clammy. I am having a hard time taking a breath as I pour my first cup of coffee down my throat. This is because my marathon in Las Vegas is this Sunday, and today I leave with my sister-in-law for that sunny city. I can't decide if my nervousness now is because of the travel, leaving my daughter for the weekend or the running.

This is how I center myself: I have trained. This body of mine has 26.2 miles to give. Even if I sprain my ankle at the starting line and cannot continue, the fact remains that I could finish even if I never start.

26.2 is in me.

Once again, my pre-race-courage-giving poem:

ATHLETE GROWING OLD

By Grace Butcher

The caution is creeping in:

the step is hesitant

from years of pain;

a soft grunt bends the body over,

and straightens it.

The skin loosens; everything moves

nearer the ground.

To overcome the softening,

the yearning toward warmth,

she exercises,

makes her muscles hard,

runs in the snow,

asks herself when she is afraid,

“What would you do now if

you were not afraid?”

She listens for the answer

and tries to be

like that person who speaks,

who lives just outside

all her boundaries

and constantly calls her

to come over, come over.

Happy Birthday, Rainer Maria Rilke

Sorry Matthew, Mark, Luke and John...but I kinda pretend that this guy was the one who knew how to sum it all up best.

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."

German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875.

Gratitude. It has to travel.

Logan International
by Mary Oliver

In the city called Wait,
also known as the airport,
you might think about your life---
there is not much else to do.
For one thing,
there is too much luggage,
and you're truly lugging it---
you and, it seems, everyone.

What is it, that you need so badly?
Think about this.

Earlier, in another city,
you're on the tarmac, a lost hour.
You're going to miss your connection, and you know it,
and you do.
You're headed for five hours of nothing.
And how long can you think about your own life?

What I did, to save myself,
was to look for children, the very young ones
who couldn't even know where they were going, or why.
Some of them were fussing, of course.
Many of them were beautifully Hispanic.

The storm was still busy outside, and snow falling
anywhere, any time, is a wonder.
But even more wonderful, and maybe the only thing
to put your own life in proportion,
were the babies, the little ones, hot and tired,
but still
gurgling, chuckling, as they looked---
wherever they were going, or not yet going,
in their weary parents' arms (no!
their lucky parents' arms)---
upon this broken world.

Gratitude. Something other than food to increase me.

An Arabic proverb:

Write the wrongs that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble. Let go of all emotions such as resentment and retaliation, which diminish you, and hold onto the emotions, such as gratitude and joy, which increase you.

Gratitude. A pre-Thanksgiving kick in the ass.

As the days are darker and shorter, so are my thoughts. They are gloomy, often clipped complaints about the status of the physical world around me. Cold hurts. My house is messy. My child is whiny. I feel blah.
I hear it out in the world too, these same crabby reflections from tired and over-bundled bodies. It is hard not to fall into that dialogue of constant negative judgment.

I am about 2 weeks away from running the Las Vegas marathon. Because I have run one marathon and several triathlons, I know that training the body is nothing. Easy. Anyone can do it.

Training the mind, trusting your mind is everything. Training this time has been a reminder that what the mind says, the body follows. When I am out there, especially the day that I ran 24 miles in a steady rain, I felt despair when my mind let me think of despair. I felt elation when my mind decided that there was nothing wrong; yes, I was uncomfortable, but is that really something wrong? Was I not going to be warm and resting soon?

I have been using this training tool to refocus my day-to-day thinking. My complaints and discomfort are fleeting and can be easily changed. This is not the case for millions of people who are sick, afraid and really despairing. If I ever become one of these people, I will be ashamed of how I wasted my good days with made-up complaints.

Living in gratitude is living prayer.

I can't even pout through my smile.

This morning I was walking on air because 1) the results of last night's presidential election and 2) because my husband is in town and was able to take my daughter to get a long over-due haircut. Last time I took her and had to come home to take a Valium. I am sure the poor, young hairdresser had to do the same. For some reason children like to put on a show for their mothers to express distaste about things like haircuts. A crying, screaming, you are hurting me show, while for Dad they will just sit quietly, sip apple juice, and let the scissors work their magic. For the same reason children learn that squeezing mom's boobs gets them all the attention that they have been looking for, even if it is angry attention, but they never learn how to kick daddy in the nuts.

However, lately we have learned from our daughter's daycare provider/sitter, that we can make her smile by telling her not to smile. Genius! If she is pouty and whiny, we say "Doooooon't Smile!" and she will be in stitches in seconds.

When my daughter arrived home happily chirping about the blue blanket she got to wear as a coat, I struck the following conversation with my husband:

"Where do we buy flags?'

He froze and slowly turned to face me. "What kind of flag?"

I can hardly blame him for this question. I once asked him if it would look weird to fly the flag of Spain by our front door, or if changing our citizenship would be that big of a deal. This time I was serious, "The American Flag. Stripes and stars and things like that."

He tightened his arms around our daughter and started to back away. "What do you want to DO with the American Flag?"

I shrugged, "What do you mean? Fly it outside our door or maybe run down the streets and do cartwheels while waving it."

"Amy," he whispered, "are you proud to be American?"

I tried my best to smirk, but I can't seem to get the stupid smile off my face.

Change, it's the new status quo.

During my run this morning, I was shocked by the weather. I live in Cleveland. It is November and it is 75 degrees and sunny. Running felt downright balmy. However, everything will be status quo by Saturday...cloudy and snowy.

I also was shocked by how I got hornswaggled into voting today. My husband called me from our polling place to say that there were no lines, and you could just walk right up to a booth. With a dramatic roll of my eyes, I walked out the door, still wearing what I slept in last night, to go across the street to the school to vote...not even 100 yards from my house.

Teenagers greeted me at the door to ask if I knew what precinct I was voting in...to which I almost replied, "No. I don't even know why I am here," but luckily I was distracted. It was hard to ignore the state of that musty public school that I only look at and think please, please, house sell, so I don't have to send my daughter there. I noticed that families were there with children. Large, extended families from this area where we can hardly boast about affluence. People were quiet, but expectant. I saw hunger and exhaustion and desperation in many faces, I heard hunger and exhaustion and desperation in the voices of teachers and students that haunted the school hallway.
My God, I thought, they actually think that this matters.

Which, in a way, is everything.

Breathing in the "..."

Phew. Halloween is over. Now the year will start to wind down, but in a fast-forwardy sort of way. This is because every week marks some sort of event: election, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all the preparation and travel that is required to make these events happen. Because I am brilliant, I threw training for and running a marathon into the mix. Brilliant.

Now that I am aware of life via the eyes of a two-year-old, I look back on Halloween as sort of a warning. Here is how I think my daughter perceived the day: waking up to find a carved pumpkin that was instantly her best friend...Thanking daddy when he woke up for "putting the Halloween on her pumpkin."... Being told that it was the day of trick-or-treating, and not really knowing what that means...Getting shuffled to daycare...having fun friends visit at daycare...watching a Halloween parade...getting picked up at daycare--but not to go home...Going to Aunt's house to a pre-trick-or-treating party, what ever that is...Having mom stuff her into a Barbie and the Diamond Castle costume...running around to houses that apparently have not felt the economic squeeze because their Halloween decorations totaled more than our monthly mortgage payment...having to say "trick-or-treat" and "thank you" over and over...Ending up at a post-trick-or-treating party... Back to Aunt's house to get a small sugar high on...going home only to be put to bed...

Exhausting to read, even. Maybe because I overused the "..." in that paragraph, but that "..." resembles everything that is real and exhausting to write about: the smiles and laughing that we did, the tantrums we all threw, the tantrums we watched every other kid throw, the pooping in our pants. The real stuff. The stuff that makes us crazy and joyful and tired. The stuff you cannot capture in a photograph.

The thing about the "..." is that those are the times we catch ourselves breathing and looking around. The "..." woke me up from the Halloween hysteria when I realized that my two-year-old did not want makeup on her face and did not need it to complete her costume. It woke me up when I realized that we over exhausted ourselves, and I had to bag the trick-or-treating and carry a limp and cranky toddler down the street.

It tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, "take it all in, next year she will be too big to carry that way, so don't miss it now."

As I face the fast-forward effect of the upcoming holidays, and I jump from event to event, I will remember to stop in the "..." and not miss a thing.

To my 28-month-old

Dear Sophia,

I know, I know, I said once you turned two I would stop counting your age in months. And I have, but once in a while I have to think about it in that way to remind myself of how young you are. You don't act that young. In fact, you act older than most adults that I know. This includes the tantrums that you throw, oh, ten times a day.

You have changed in so many ways in such a short period of time: You know every word in the English language and half the words in the Spanish language, thanks to Dora and Diego. I have never seen anyone, besides me, get so excited about peeing and pooping in a potty. Plus, you have become quite the negotiator. For example, when you threw a book across the room and it hit me in the face, your reaction to my exclamation of pain was, "It's okay, it's just my princess book." When I stepped on something while trying to get to my computer, again yelping in pain, you said, "It's okay, it's just my plastic kangaroo." When I entered the room while you were eating lunch, and asked why the floor around your booster seat seemed like it was covered with glue, you shrugged, "It's okay, it's just all of my apple juice."
There is no way, no possible way, to be 10 steps ahead of you.

Part of your development is learning fear. You suddenly say you are scared of things, even though I have tried to enthusiastically shrug off most things as not scary. Halloween has had a lot to do with it, I think. Last week when I took you down the Halloween aisle in the drugstore hoping to find some new candy that I could not live without, about 1000 animated decorations started hooting and howling and groaning at us. All you did was jump in my arms, while I took off running. I have always hated Halloween, it demeans the paranormal and the spiritual, but that is a conversation that we will have when you are a little older. When daddy is not around.

There is really nothing to be scared of in this world, sweets. Besides Republicans. We are given the capability to endure anything, that is what I want you to know. But there is absolutely no way you can know this without learning it first hand, and I hate it, I hate that I have to stand by and watch. I think you woke up from a bad dream last night, so I had to hold you and rock you and rub your back for a while. Then I did the unthinkable: I put you back in bed. You wailed and screamed, "Don't leave me, Mommy!"
I know it seemed like I did leave you. But you have no idea, kiddo, the tears I cried while standing outside your door for the five-minute eternity that it took for you to fall back asleep.

Then I smiled, as I pulled a card from your deck. Into the dark, I whispered, "It's okay, it's just a hard lesson." For us both. The truth behind that lesson is that there is no possible way that I could ever leave you.

Love,
Mom

Oh, so now I am THAT person

Before we had a kid, my husband and I used to marvel at how parents could tune out the incessant naggy, whiny voices of their children while engaged in conversation with other adults.
"How does that happen?" we asked each other, wide-eyed and dumbfounded, when we would leave an engagement that involved such parents and children. You see, back then we were the "other adults."

Now I am a parent, and my child talks ALL OF THE TIME. My ears are constantly ringing at a pitch that mimics the voice of my daughter, even when she has been at daycare for hours. The last time we slept over my sister's house, after a night of drinking some (lots) of wine, a collective attempt to knock the voices of all of our children out of our ears, I jumped out of bed in the middle of the night because the smoke alarm was running out of batteries. It was chirping at the very same pitch as her voice and I thought she was calling to me. If you have ever heard a smoke alarm chirp, you are getting the picture of this torture.

This morning, as I was dropping her off at the day care/sitter's house, I was trying to have some much-needed adult conversation with the sitter. I was talking and laughing until I realized that during the entire conversation, my daughter was whining something at me over and over. The problem is, she was whining about picking up the bag of toys we brought, and I did not realize it, did not even hear it, until her sitter bent over to pick it up for her. As I rewound the moments and tuned in, there was that chirping, "I want that bag, I want that bag, I want that bag, I want that bag, I want that bag. Get me that baaaaaaag."
The sad thing is, I was holding my daughter the whole time, which means her mouth was about 2 cm from my ear.
The sad thing is, I have no idea what else I am tuning out in the world.
The sad thing is, I am really missing her pinball-like movement around the room right now, and yes, even the sound of her voice.


About this photo: Taken last weekend at a local park, she is holding a tiny leaf, explaining to me that it was falling, falling, falling from the sky, how it lived in the clouds, in a castle on top of a beanstalk, that you had to climb, climb, climb and be careful of the BIG GIANT that says fo fum and stomps, chirp...chirp...chirp...chirp.