A dozen for the new year list
Sep 30, 2008 The Story of My Life
1. I have a wicked bad hormonal headache. I hope starting out in grouchy pain doesn’t cast a pall on the rest of my year!
2. My mom and my aunt are coming over for honeycake later. But we don’t have the car so no shofar for us. (Brett got a new-to-us car in what we’ve deemed a signing bonus. There are many advantages to going to work for a friend! But he doesn’t have the tags for it yet so we’re still acting as a 1-car family.)
3. Pennie is coming over tomorrow to see Madison’s very loose tooth! Yes, Madison is only four. We’re shocked, too.
4. Speaking of Madison and Pennie … the other day Madison and I were in the grocery store where there was a truly scary rubber animatronic witch with lit up eyes. (At the Westerville Kroger’s for you locals.) Noah would have had to leave the store IMMEDIATELY if he saw that at four but Madison was fascinated. I asked her if she thought it was scary and she said, “No, funny.” Then she wanted to touch it. Pennie is a huge fan of horror movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes (I can’t even look at those posters!) and also thinks they’re funny. Who knew horror appreciation was genetic?
5. I let the kids decorate for Halloween even though I usually make ‘em wait ’til October 1st but my head is killing me and I wanted some coffee and I wanted to drink it in peace. They did a bang up job of it, too.
6. I’m trying to dig out of the morass of undone housework due to Brett being home for that year. See, we thought he’d be a better housekeeper than I am but it turns out that he’s a surface cleaner. He doesn’t know that you also have to periodically clean from the inside out so I’m upending drawers, digging through closets and clearing off the top of the refrigerator.
7. I also went through the kids’ winter clothes and we will need to hit the thrift stores hard for both of them. I haven’t had Noah try his winter coat on yet but I think Madison is covered there thanks to Abby.
8. I’m caught up on work, which is a nice feeling. The article that was giving me fits source-wise went to bed and I really enjoyed writing it. I realize I’m most happiest when I can mix marketing communications with consumer stuff. Now if I can just figure out when to fit in creative nonfiction…
9. I’ve kept up with my exercise routine for over a month now. I’m definitely getting stronger and have lost a very little — and I mean LITTLE — weight. It’s going to be a long road to my fit by forty goals but it’d be an even longer road if I waited ’til fifty so I’m sucking it up. I love to exercise although you wouldn’t believe it just by looking at me. I also love to eat, which wouldn’t surprise you one bit.
10. To establish an exercise routine I can stick to I need: ease (no elaborate rituals, no weird schedules, no reliance on other people), privacy (no classes, no companions, no nosy trainers) and a decent soundtrack. One thing that surprised me about my mom’s trainer is that it feels like I’m moving in a smaller range than with the other but I think it must also be more focused because I’m really feeling changes in my back, especially my neck and shoulders. I get very sore but I’m also hurting a lot less from my whiplash (once I get past the lactic acid days) so the soreness is worth it. I haven’t really had a bad neck day since I started. Plus my mood? Not as psychotic.
11. I work out in the mornings while channel 34.1 (PBS) is showing kids’ shows. Madison watches ‘em while I sweat and Noah usually sleeps in. If he’s up, he’s doing his school work. A good time is had by all. (And today a better time than was intended because a quick glance at my browser’s history shows that Noah was on Neopets instead of Study Island. Busted!)
12. I want to think about buying a used piano for the kids’ big xmas present. I know Madison would like it and Noah might, too. But I don’t know anything about used piano buying. Anyone have advice to share?
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Tags: abby, clothes, creative, creative nonfiction, exercise, Family, goals, halloween, kids, Madison, marketing communications, my mom, Noah, whiplash, Writing
More on Brett’s cousin
Sep 21, 2008 Family
Her friends are asking folks to leave messages on the blog — even if you don’t know her — that they will read at the service on Tuesday. If you feel comfortable doing that, I think it would be a lovely thing. You can see some pictures of the family, too, and they’re gorgeous look alike kids (I always think that heads must turn when they all go out together).
I only met Kim once in person. She was just about to be married and up to visit her cousins. She was tiny tiny tiny with long almost white-blonde hair and big blue eyes. She’s a musician who plays several instruments, speaks fluent French but chose not to finish school in order to marry the love of her life and be a wife and mother. (He proposed to her on a white horse and in a suit of shining armor — literally.)
Back then she was more conservative than I am but her Christianity was more mainstream. It wasn’t a barrier to her other relationships with family. To her credit, she didn’t follow some church’s teachings blindly — she and Barry both studied scripture and together were led to their “convictions” (the things revealed to them as truth through study and prayer). Kim is very smart — she’s not one to be led around — and as they became more certain about some of God’s teachings, they found it harder to find a church community that was led the same way.
She and I were talking throughout her early marriage/motherhood. She started calling me when she was pregnant with Ethan, her oldest, whom she conceived on her honeymoon. Ethan’s about a year and a half younger than Noah and she used to call for advice and commisseration. We were both into attachment parenting although for different reasons. Kinda the creationism/evolution debate manifested in our friendship — she breastfed because it was God’s perfect food for babies and I breastfed because biology dictated. So there was a lot we could talk about and a lot of other stuff we just avoided talking about. She knew I was pro-choice and asked me never to mention it. I understood and complied. Stuff like that.
During this time she was living in a little A-frame house in Northern Florida and her mom was leaving nearby on a garlic farm in a house she built with her husband, Kim’s step dad. When Kim was pregnant with Hosanna (who was born when Ethan was 15 months old), her mom died of breast cancer. Needless to say, it was a hard, hard time. Kim and Barry eventually sold the A-frame and moved to her mom’s farm to take care of her stepdad who was then very ill with Lou Gherig’s disease. She was then pregnant with Micah and she called me almost everyday. Her stepdad needed constant care and suctioning so he wouldn’t suffocate on his own saliva, it was mid-summer in Georgia and she was eight months pregnant and mothering two toddlers. When Bill died she went into labor and nine months later she was pregnant again. (She gets pregnant six to nine months after the last baby is born, making her pregnant more often than not.)
We stopped talking around then in part because she was (obviously) too busy to call me everyday and in part because I’d started avoiding the phone when her number cropped up on caller ID. There were too many things I couldn’t talk about and too many times I had to bite my tongue. She disapproved of most every choice I made or of my reasons for making it. She insinuated my infertility was caused by my feminism and I found it hard to keep my mouth shut.
It’s easier to have thingsin common when babies are little — slings, cloth diapers, breastfeed on demand and co-sleeping. But as Noah got older and I let the world in, her disapproval became more jarring and her condemnation more overt.
“I would NEVER let MY children eat cereal out of a box!” she admonished. “But I guess after watching my mother die of cancer I’m just more worried about nutrition than you are.”
I mean, you can’t really say something smart to that. I could see why her rigidity mattered so much to her but I didn’t like being put on the defensive. Plus by then Noah and I had converted (she wasn’t happy that Christian Brett had allowed this to happen) and she was celebrating the “Biblical holidays”, which is basically all the Jewish holidays with Christian justifications. (The irony of this was not lost on me — we still had Christmas while her Christian family had given it up as pagan. Meanwhile they hosted a seder while I still couldn’t figure out how to put an authentic one together.)
Truthfully, she was lonely and I was it for her at that time. They still hadn’t found a church home and when it came right down to it, I’m sure she wasn’t any happier talking to me than I was to her.
One of the last times we spoke was when she called on 9/11 to ask me to turn on the tv and tell her what was happening. (They didn’t have a television.)
I kept track of her online (here’s one abandoned blog) and through Brett’s mom. Her views became more … I don’t know what to call them except fringe. (click through to read more) But she also found her people and went from being alone on that little farm with her passel of kids to having a real community to worship with, to study with and to just enjoy. She no longer had to call my sister-in-law the way she used to call me (my sister-in-law is Catholic, too, which I’m sure made that friendship a challenge) because she had women around her who could support and encourage her in her beliefs.
I hear from Brett’s mother that her community is taking care of her now, too. They have rallied around and she won’t need to cook for months. They are helping take care of all of the details and loving her through this. She was very alone when her mother died and again when she was caring for her stepfather and then when he died. She was very alone when she broke her ankle at seven months pregnant with her fourth baby and so her 5-year old took on most of the burden of caring for his little siblings and the livestock while she rested on the couch waiting for her leg to heal. But she isn’t going through this tragedy alone, thank goodness.
She had a hard childhood as an only child to a family that wandered and split apart, which surely is an especial reason she rejoices in her big family now even bigger because of the seeds she’s sown with her homechurch. It’s good to know that there will be many people to hold her hand and pray with her as she struggles with this most fundamentally wrenching loss.
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Tags: attachment parenting, christianity, cousins, Family, feminism, tragedy
This is Brett’s cousin’s baby
Sep 20, 2008 Family
This is why I read this blog — it’s our only way of keeping track of how they are.
Sad sad sad.
Although Kim and I grew further and further apart as her religious views became increasingly rigid, I was always happy to know she’d found a family who could be there in the way her by birth family could not. I know she’ll be needing them awfully in the upcoming months and am glad to know that she won’t need to go through this alone.
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4:20pm and signing off for the day
Aug 7, 2008 Friends, work work work
I finished most (not all) of my work to-do list but tomorrow is pretty open to get more done. I have a phone interview with a potential client in the afternoon but otherwise nothing scheduled so I want to crank out at least most of a big project (we want it to launch by the end of next week) so I can clear my desk to start research on another big project (also due at the end of next week).
Today is Thursday, which means Abby and Kristen are already off having a gay old time with Lynne and the kids but I’m not with ‘em ‘cuz I had work. Fortunately they took Noah (Madison didn’t mind staying behind since Brett was staying, too) since it’s the big kid who really suffers when we miss out on stuff. Brett and I are waiting for the husbands to get off work and then we’re all car pooling over there for pizza. I hope that I’ve figured out how to relax by then — I think I may just have to have a drink tonight. So there. And I think I’ll leave my cell and iPod at home. (Dare I? Oh rats. Yes. Darnit, I’m taking the night off!)
Brett asked me today what my dream job was and I said writing stuff I want to write (in a cabin in the woods and one of those fancy but not too fancy cabins, too, more like a Usonian house than Laura Ingalls) but if he means my dream job in light of a need to make money, I’d still say this is pretty close. It’s not like I spend all — or some weeks even most — of my time writing stuff that gets me all hot and bothered but it’s still writing or strategizing and talking to people who are passionate about what they want to do, all of which I like. Someday I hope to spend lots of time alone (with my family — they can come, too) in the green quiet writing essays but meanwhile this will do. Especially if there are friends with pizza and hard cider at the end of it.
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Tags: abby, Brett, cider, essays, Family, Friends, iPod, job, kids, Kristen, money, project, schedule, Thursday, work, Writing
Brett got a job!
Jul 28, 2008 Family, work work work
And in many ways it’s the perfect job because once he’s through the 7-week training he’ll go to second shift (3:30 to midnight), which means he will remain the primary caregiver when I’m working. We can have a big lunch as a family (instead of dinner) and on the days when I’m up to my neck with work, he leaves just as PBS Kids starts their afternoon programming, which means I can use the TV as my childcare during that time as women have done throughout the ages. Or at least throughout my particular age.
The two challenges are the 7-week training because it’s 9 to 5 and not worth it to go through the fight to find a decent sitter (I will cobble together childcare from family and friends so I’m not that worried — plus Noah is a good last-minute sister-wrangler) and it’s too far for him to walk/bike but not on a bus line. We may get a junker car for awhile. That’s what we did before — he had a lousy 2-door monstrosity that got great gas mileage and was just for his commute. For now likely he’ll take the van and I’ll rely on those friends and family for when I need a ride. Again this is why we moved here — there’s enough walkability that I don’t need a car most days anyway so it’s not a huge insurmountable block. I can always drive him, too, and we can take the bus to some of our homeschool stuff, which the kids will think is a treat and will remind me of Portland since that was our sole transport back then.
While I will no longer be the sole wage earner, I’ll still need to add my income to make our budget because the pay off for the flexible hours is not such great pay but we expected that. Our main goal is not to let go of our business because that has the most potential to give us the lifestyle that we want. And I have to admit that it’s nice to know that some of the heat is off of me so I won’t need to feel guilty when I’m writing something that won’t pay the bills.
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Tags: budget, business, childcare, Family, homeschool, job, work, working
