Day 47: Countin’ sheep, thunder bolts & days…

Posted on October 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Day 47: Count Sheep….

I can remember occasionally trying to count sheep when I was a kid.  For a short period of time when I was maybe ten years old I used to worry a lot about what it meant if we were really in a war with Libya.  So I started listening to my pink clock radio as I fell asleep.  But the trouble with listening to the radio while I fell asleep was two-fold.  The “sleep” function on either a radio or a television has the reverse effect on me.  I take it as a dare to try to stay awake until it goes off.  And then I started imagining that inside my radio was an entire universe.  That universe generated sounds and thoughts and “radio waves.”  I had a poster in my room when I was really little that had the alphabet on it.  So, I memorized the alphabet backwards.  That didn’t help me sleep, either.   So, I’d just let my mind wander and I’d imagine what it would be like to be married to Tom Selleck.  (Shut up, it was 1983.) Somewhere amidst all of these “fall asleep” techniques I am sure I counted sheep.  But it didn’t leave much of an impression.  So last night when I decided to give it a shot I felt like it was the very first time.

MQD and I both read before going to sleep last night.  It’s one of my favorite times of the day.  When we are both in bed, reading our own books, barely touching, but aware of the sound of the other’s pages turning, the smile that crosses my face when I hear him chuckle at something he’s read, the wondering if he can see the tear roll my down my face (confession:  I am a recently converted voracious reader of terrible chick lit, this will pass, so help me) all of these things add up to make this one of my very favorite moments.    I suspect this is in no small part due to the fact that it “feels” like something good.  Like the way a perfect marriage should feel.  Like something I’d have imagined doing with Tom Selleck.  (See, how I said that before you could?)

There’s something about those moments that feel just like what you imagined it would be like that is so satisfying.   I have been dwelling a bit on the “what is “it” supposed to feel/look like?  The “it” being our marriage.  I am confident in our ability to communicate.  And I earnestly believe if you’ve got that you’re most of the way there.  I am confident that when I make some smart ass remark at the television and MQD looks at me and says “I love you” he really does.  And that kind of love is the kind that carries you through, the kind that really means you like that person more than you like anyone else, that they are your favorite.  So I am not even really sure why I am so anxious lately. But I am trying not to dig too deep and just let myself feel it.  After all, nothing reminds you that even the most well laid plans can go awry like calling your ex-husband so your daughter can say goodnight, a task I complete five nights out of seven.  So it is no wonder I have a little bit of worry that I am making the right decisions.  I think a certain amount of worry is to be expected.  And yet all in all I feel more sure of this being “right” than anything.   I am not afraid to admit it out loud that I really, really want him, us, our marriage.  I don’t often admit to myself or to anyone that I want anything.  Because if you don’t have goals you don’t fail.

So, I needed last night.  One of those nights where you turn off your light and you think, ahhh…. this is it.  I’ve got this.  With little nagging at the corners of my mind I said “Good night” tucked my Snoopy under my chin (Tom Selleck was a phase, Snoopy was not) and started counting.  I really tried to picture each one, real sheep, not cartoon sheep, jumping over a fence.  I got to about twenty and remembered I’d not set my alarm clock.  Began again.  Somewhere around seventeen my mind started wandering and I realized I could feel my pulse in my lower back and I was actually counting my heart beats.  I rolled over and started again.  Put my hand on MQD’s chest. He was already asleep.  His ability to fall asleep in a moment is a trait I both admire and abhor.  Nothing like tossing and turning while your bed mate soundly slumbers to make you feel like a bratty child, desperate to wake up everyone else in the house, too, dammit.     I let the sheep jump in rhythm with MQD’s breath and I counted.  I don’t recall getting to thirty.

I woke to the sounds of thunder and rain around four this morning.  I could see the lightning through the bedroom curtains and I counted the moments between lightning and thunder-clap as I decided whether I’d try to get back to sleep or not.  I was still awake when MQD got up at five.  And still awake when my little lady hopped in bed around 5:30.  And still awake when I felt her chest begin to rise and fall more slowly as she fell back to sleep.  And still awake when MQD left for work so very early this morning.

But I was rested.  I’d counted sheep.  And calculated the thunderstorm’s distance.  And just now I counted the days.  198.  A hundred and ninety-eight days until we make a wonderful decision.  Until we have a party to celebrate a decision we made long ago…

It’s still raining.  Office door open.  Ella Fitzgerald on the radio.  I love today.

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Day 46: Birthday Day!

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 5 comments

Today’s challenge is indicative of the fact that this  book was originally printed in 2003.  It asks you to write down the birth dates of your friends and loved ones, in an effort to not forget them in coming years.

It’s nearly impossible to forget someone’s birthday since Facebook.  And in a lot of ways it really bothers me that remembering someone’ s birthday isn’t really very meaningful anymore.  I will cop to being a frequent facebooker.  It’s probably the equal parts voyeur and exhibitionist in me.  But I do try not to “Happy Birthday” everyone that appears on the upper right hand side of my screen daily.  Particularly if the recipient is someone whose birthday I never knew.  Maybe this isn’t really meaningful, either, but I highly doubt anyone is sitting around wondering why I didn’t tell them Happy Birthday amidst their 300 messages.

My inability to remember birthdays isn’t an indication of a general state of forgetfulness.  I am just bad about birthdays for some reason. Case in point, I just checked Facebook.  Today is the birthday of a guy with whom I attended middle school.  I did not know today was his birthday.  We shall call him Drew, since that his name.  I know that Drew’s phone number was 250-2435 before you needed to dial a prefix in Northern Virginia.  I know that Drew made me cry when I was 12 and that I (cringe) purchased Chicago’s “Look Away” cassette tape single for him as a  Christmas present but thought better than to give it to him.  Evidently, my heartbreak had healed in the time it took to get a ride home from the mall.  All of this to say, I am not a forgetful person.  I just have a mental block against birthdays.

So I have started entering birthdays in to the calendar on my phone. I’m not sure why I feel better about being reminded via one digital source than another.  But I do.  And I have PLANS.  Big Plans!  I am planning on setting up a 2011 file with cards and envelopes.  And addresses.  And maybe even addressing envelopes for 2011 and having myself all set up.  To send real, live, delivered to your postal mailbox birthday greetings.  Because there is forethought and intent in sending a real, live letter.

I wish I could send pink sparkly shoes to everyone of my birthday friends.  Alas, we are not all so lucky.

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Almost hilarious…

Posted on October 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

There are moments in my life that are almost hilarious.  And this morning was one of them.  Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues has a word for his kind of almost famous, fam-ish.  So, I guess this morning was hilari-ish.  These “almost hilarious” or hilari-ish moments often include a scenario that is not particularly amusing to anyone else there, but inside my head, with a  few small changes to the players and the scene… ahh, how hilarity would ensue.

On my way in to the office this morning a co-worker called me.  He has a cryptic way of asking me questions pretty regularly, so I am wary with my answers.  I never know if I am being conned in to lending a helping hand and this morning was a perfect example.  “Are you coming to work today by any chance?” Don’t I always? “Well, where exactly are you?”  And I’m thinking, umm… I’m four minutes from the office and running about twenty-one minutes ahead of schedule.  I’m kind of a fanatic about being on time.  I rounded the corner before the second to last turn on my way to my office and I saw his truck.  Ahhh… it was all clear to me now.  He was out of gas.  About fifteen feet on the other side of a tiny little bridge.   There was very little space for him to pull over and traffic was piling up behind him.  I waved and kept on towards the office where I could pick up a gas can and return and save the day.

It turned out I was lucky!  There was a can at the office with several gallons of gas so I was able to snag it and head right back to where his car was parked.  By the time I got back there I could  see the blue lights flashing. One of Carrboro’s finest had pulled in behind him  and was directing traffic.  I slipped in behind the cop car and hopped out.  My co-worker grabbed the gas can and I waited to make sure that he had enough to get his truck started.

It was after he got underway that my internal dialogue started getting funnier and funnier.  The cop had on this ridiculous traffic vest.  He headed back towards his car and removed his vest.  And then he walked back towards the middle of the street and put his arm out and stopped the oncoming traffic.  He looked back at me, pointed, and I shit you not, he winked and gave the “all clear” sign.  It was everything I could do to not get hysterical.  There was a little part of me that wanted to drive really slowly past him, checking the sides of his pants for velcro.

But sadly…. Village People inspired male strippers really only show up on a Tuesday morning at 9 am inside my head, almost never in the middle of the street.  And really even more rarely are hired by my co-workers to ambush me.  And it’s too damn bad. That was way funnier than what actually happened.

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Day 45: Learn Your Damn Homophones

Posted on October 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

Day 45: Romance Day, come up with a compliment that has never been made before.

The other day MQD posted a website that made me chuckle.  Learn Your Damn Homophones. It was funny to me on a few planes, but the section referencing compliment vs complement is pertinent here.  Today’s challenge… a compliment that has never been made before…

This isn’t all that difficult.  MQD and I went up to see some of the family this weekend and had our first multi-dimensional multi-family gathering.  Time again it was made clear to me that MQD really is the “complement” that has never been made before.  At the risk of sliding in to a long-winded “reasons I am sickeningly in love with this boy” kind of post I’ll wrap it up quickly.

We were on the way home from DC, Em was passed out in the back  seat and we were giggling our way down I-95.  As our laughter began to wane MQD said “We are really juvenile when we are together… ”  I made a smart-ass remark about how this was true and weren’t we oh so very  melancholy when we were  apart.

I am really juvenile all of the time.  But only when I am with him do I not feel in the least bit apologetic about who I am.  Not for being a pervert with the mind of a 14-year-old boy, not for the past that brought me to my present, not for my tendency to interrupt.  None of it.  It’s who I am.  And he really  does “get me.” And I think he likes me most of the time. There’s no accounting for taste.

So, I spent the morning trying to think of a compliment.  One that had never been made before.  Eventually one fell right from my lips, or from my fingers through my keyboard, as it happened to be…  “Demented bleats made me think of you, my love. “

MQD shook a cheese stick at me the other day.  From groin level. And he made this very disturbing sound, like a billy goat choking… It shouldn’t have made me want to kiss him.  But it did.  So when I saw  a reference to a “maniacal army of lobotomized pigmy goats” on Sleep Talkin’ Man this morning I instantly smiled…

I shot him the link and said “Demented bleats made me think of you, my love. “

It doesn’t get much better than this, kids.

And just to be clear, I’m not the only juvenile one in the bunch.   A picture from one of the funniest road trips I may have ever taken…. xo

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Day 42 & Day 44: It’s all about the shoes, baby…

Posted on October 8, 2010 | 1 comment

Since I accidentally skipped Day 42 the other day I thought I’d crank out Day 42 and Day 44 all at once.  Day 42’s challenge was to walk outside in the grass barefoot.  Not an uncommon practice for me and one I enjoy so I was looking forward to this one.  Day 44, on the other hand, I wasn’t so wild about it.  So in combining the two I made the less palatable challenge have a payoff.

Day 44 encourages you to defy superstition.  The book suggests you cross paths with a black cat or walk under a ladder.  Oddly enough, in spite of all my quirks, being superstitious isn’t really one of them.  The only superstition I really even have is one I inherited from my mother, who naturally inherited it from hers.  You didn’t put shoes on the table in my house growing up.  Not dirty ones.  Not clean ones, not brand-new shoes in a shoe box.  My mom tells a story about how she came home with a pair of shoes for her mother to wear to a Navy function, and threw them in the house, on the dining room table and left again.  Evidently my grandmother hunted her down and she had to return to take them off the table so that she could put them on.  If you put shoes on a table, it’s bad luck.  But even worse… touching shoes that someone else put on the table.  You just can’t do that.  I’ve never run across another person that thought shoes on a table was bad luck.  But a quick internet search informs me that I am not the only person that feels this way.  Granted, a false sense of community is perhaps the internet’s greatest gift.

In order to properly execute Day 42’s challenge, a stroll through the grass in bare feet, I first had to remove my shoes.

I went outside and made sure that no one else had come back to the office for lunch and that my focus on the grass would not be interrupted.  After confirming that I definitely had a little time to kill I came back in the office and bit the bullet.

Even looking at the picture now gives me the willies.  But I did it.  I put my shoes on the conference table and I got the hell out of there.

The grass felt good.  I spend a lot of time barefoot but I am not frequently in a grassy area.  Plenty of dancing at shows in the dirt and the dust.  Quick runs to the mail box or to grab the trash can down our driveway.  I frequently run from my office to the office next door across the parking lot in bare feet.  But it had been a while since I just strolled around in some grass.   It’s crunchy right now, with fall finally settling in. The grass itself was warm and crispy and the earth beneath it cool and soft. I’ve had my office door open all day, listening to the “Boird Pahty.”  But it was nice to actually be out and in it.  I walked around the back of my office to see if I can see the woodpecker that has been driving me batshit crazy all week.  I can hear him.  But I still haven’t seen him.  I keep thinking if I can see him then perhaps my hate will dissipate.

All in all I convinced myself that whatever bad juju I had been cooking up with my shoes inside on the conference table was canceled out by how great I felt just standing in the grass.

A piano didn’t fall on my head when I walked back in to my office.  But I did decide that I hadn’t really “defied superstition” if I was hoping that my karmic good juju was eliminating the potential bad.  So instead of removing my shoes from the conference table I sat back down at my desk.  And for one hour and thirty four minutes I left them there.  Staring at me.  Daring me to remove them.  Oh, and they stared.  Below is the picture of what I see if I look out from my desk, over my phone, through the conference room door.

But I only had to turn my head a little to see this… and then I could feel the grass again.  The Day 42/44 combo was a very “Facts of Life” challenge.  Yup, “you take the good, you take the bad, you take it all and there you have…”

This book still hasn’t changed my life.  But it continues to make me stop, turn around and be mindful of the life I am so grateful to be living.

Speaking of that life… the kiddo went to school today in a new shirt.  It is bedazzled with a jeweled purse and a fake glittery chain.  She is also wearing her red sparkly Dorothy shoes.  With it she elected to pair a Misfits button.  After MQD and I told her that under no circumstances could she wear the Butthole Surfers pin.   Today has been all about balance.

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Day 43: A day in ze life…

Posted on October 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

Day 43:  Keep a proper account of your day.
5:45 Wake up and have to pee super bad but it is freezing in our room.  That kind of freezing where you try and stay in one spot in your bed because if you move you will aggravate the cocoon of warmth you’ve created.  I consider getting up to pee and decide that Em would wake up.  I reach over and scooted her little self in to the crook in my arm where she fits and close my eyes again.

6:10  I’m up.  No sleep for the weary, evidently.  The headache I had this morning around 2am seems to have subsided.  Ever since I have had my IUD removed I have been returned to a regular menstrual cycle, complete with regular premenstrual symptoms.  Raging headaches and rock hard ginormous boobs for three or four days at the end of my cycle.   I almost welcome the headache. It reminds me I am just about to get my period, not actually knocked up, as the Gigantor boobs might suggest.

Remember to take my Basal Body temp this morning. Anyone know if you need to do it immediately upon waking up?  Or can you do it a few minutes later, so long as you don’t get out of bed?  I typically balance my checkbook on my phone when I first wake up and check my email.  (Nerd.)  So, I am sometimes awake for ten minutes or so before I get up.  So, I am awake… but not moving?

6:30 Alarm goes off.  6:31 text from MQD.   This makes me smile.  Sneak outta bed without waking li’l lady and jump in the shower.

6:50 Clean and ready to rock.  Quick chat with MQD.  It’s freezing in our house.  Contemplate sealing up the windows this winter while I dry my hair.  Excited to use our fire place this winter.

7:30  Em and I make the bed and “chit chat” about the logic behind not putting on the same underwear after you take a shower at night.  She likes her underwear to match her outfit, so she puts the same ones on after she showers and changes them in the morning after she decides what she’s wearing.  I call her Funky Butt the rest of the morning.  This is hilarious to her.  Naturally.

8:05 Leave for work with coffee, last night’s carbtastic leftovers for lunch.  Call MQD and say hey.  He’s making good time and headed back to NC after another show.  Damn, kids and their rock music.

8:10 Stop and get gas and check my air pressure in my tires.   Resist the temptation to get M&Ms.  Go, me.

8:17 Drop Em at school.  Remember that it is her buddy’s birthday and give her a big hug. Listen to the Steve from Blue’s Clues Moth Podcast on my way in and get a good chuckle.

8:32  Arrive at work and do final preparations for insurance audit.  Review yesterday’s notes from a staff meeting.  Complete a customer invoice… blah blah blah….

9:30 Auditor has still not arrived.  Consider eating my lunch for the second time since I have arrived at work.

9:45 MQD called and it reminds me again that when he’s gone for even 24 hours I really miss him.  This bodes well for our future.  Loving someone might be easier than liking someone long term.  And I consistently like that guy.

10:00 Auditor still not here. Make a pot of coffee and consider eating my lunch.  Again.

10:15 Auditor arrives and I spend the next hour nodding and smiling and examining this gal’s amazing high lights.  Seriously, if i were to suddenly turn in to one of those saccharine sweet Southern twenty-somethings that routinely get highlights I’d ask her where she gets her hair did.

11:36  Really might eat my lunch.  Reconciling the books for last month and then it’s on like Donkey Kong.

12:40 Lunch and nytimes.com

1:00 Confirmed dance class appointment with Constantin.  I get the giggles when I talk to him on the phone only slightly worse than I did when we met him in person.

1ish to 3ish Non-interesting work related stuff.

3ish to 5ish.  Drink a heinous amount of coffee and discover I semi-screwed up what I did earlier.  Redo.

5 Split for Em’s school and listened to some Rev Horton Heat. Stopped at the grocery store for items needed for Em’s cooking experiment.  I guess they are making Pumpkin pie this week.  Yum.

6ish We get home and I decide that dinner is not something I am particularly interested in making.  Steamed spiced shrimp and salad it will be.  Em has her buddy over for some hide and seek.  MQD comes home from work and kisses me.  One of my favorite moments of the whole, entire day. MQD and I chat in the kitchen while I finish dinner.

7ish We eat dinner and laugh a lot.  This is a good example of dinner time at our house. I decide that today is as good a time as any to tell Em I have a bone to pick with her.  The other day she informed me that she and MQD are magical, but she “wasn’t so sure about” me.   I inform her that Uncle Scott had a clown that did magic tricks at his birthday when he was a kid.  And that clown was Yours Truly.  Naturally she demands I “prove it.”  Moments later I am making the “Butterfly” fly away and it makes me misty.  Performing Pop-Pop’s magic tricks 30 years after I learned them makes me smile and wish our family wasn’t all so far away from each other.  Em’s mind is sufficiently blown with the butterfly trick but I wow her once more by rubbing a penny in to my arm and pulling it out of her ear.

7:40 We decide to look through the last year in pictures.  Now I am blown away.  Em has grown up a lot.  So has MQD.  And me I just keep gettign younger.  ;)

8ish Tuck Em in to bed and read “Big Plans.” This book is SUPER spectacular.  Props to Bethany for pointing it out to me.

Return downstairs and commence “Wedding Planning.”  Wedding Planning is a game MQD and I play where we sit around the house with the TV off and drink wine and beer and laugh and cry (well, I do) and we rehash the who/what/where/when and establish yet again that we kind of have a lot left to decide, and kind of have a lot already figured out.

Wedding Planning has two side conversations running.  1. MQD insists on relating everything back to Dimebag Darrell and how really great Pantera is… and 2.  Texting  with my new friend who is right at the epicenter of the hurt and the confusion of a fresh divorce.  If you’d have told me I’d marry a man that likes to wax poetic about various genres of metal or that I’d ever be out the other side of my own divorce enough to talk to someone about theirs… I’d have not believed you.

9:30ish  Wedding Planning SUCCESS!!!  Brand new idea for the wedding tattoos has us JAZZED and ready to skip work tomorrow and get them pronto.  Yes, Wedding Planning includes lengthy conversations about our tattoos, since we both find this more exciting than napkins.

10ish to 11ish Temporary reprieve from Wedding Planning so MQD can run out to confirm that his BFF is taking  a nap with her cellphone off and has not been abducted by an alien.  I watch Glee (which was outrageously disappointing this week) and fold laundry.

11ish to Midnight  MQD eats ice cream out of the container with peanut butter.  He smiles like he is a kid at the circus.

Midnight Hit the sack.  I’m gonna run it back again tomorrow….

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Day 41: There is absolutely nothin’ like a frame of a dame.

Posted on October 5, 2010 | 5 comments

Today’s challenge is to write  a letter to the British Prime Minister c/o the Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA, United Kingdom.

I was having a difficult time trying to decide what I should write in my application so I looked up a list of previously knighted folks.  I was dismayed to find that in 2010 both Simon Cowell and Patrick Stewart will receive this award.  This certainly took the pressure off.  Simon Cowell?  Really? Seriously?

I can get behind Patrick Stewart’s nomination.  Not only  is he a swell actor in his own right  but I obviously have a fair amount of reverence for parenting.  And Patrick Stewart spawned the delicious and charming Daniel Stewart.  I had the pleasure of sitting through a stage combat class ages ago and found Mr Daniel Stewart’s accent and his not inconsiderable height quite charming.

Once I decided that I didn’t need to try and remember the last time I had saved  a family from a burning building or discovered a cure for a rare form of a cancer it was easy to decide what I ‘d write in my application.

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to request consideration for an appointment in The Most Noble Order of the Garter. I chose this particular order because I think it would look charming on a résumé and really might be the only reason I would have an excuse to wear an unreasonably short skirt in a public setting thereby exposing my legs, the only part of my body I have ever been pretty comfortable with.  Insecurity aside, there is one thing about which I have always been extremely proud.   I’d like to nominate myself because of an extraordinary characteristic I posses.

We live in a competitive time.  And rather than try to set myself apart I’d like to explain how it is that I can identify with people from all walks of life.  An EveryLady, as it were.  I am sure you are familiar with the Morton’s Toe, the term used to explain the condition where your second toe is longer than your “big toe.”  My right foot is a wonderful example of this.  This is referred to as the Greek foot, or the “wise toe.”  My right foot is an example of my strength of character, wisdom and leadership ability.

This brings me to my left foot… yep, you guessed it.  My second metatarsal on my left foot lives in the shadow of my first.  This pitiful little toe means I am also a proud member of the 75% of the population that has an “Egyptian Foot.”  My feet are like the Switzerland of the Second Metatarsal World!   I don’t take sides!  Everyone can relate to me!!

I hope you will consider me for an appointment.  Wishing you the best in the coming year.

Sincerely,

Dame-to-be Kelly

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Day 40: Time to Lighten Up

Posted on October 4, 2010 | 1 comment

Today’s challenge was to play a practical joke on someone.  I had considered trying to pull it off at work.  I was going to replace the sugar at work with salt and get a giggle when someone had a foul cup of coffee… but I’d have missed out on the most important part of a practical joke, the reveal.

I considered a good old “Kick Me” sign… because really… what’s not to like about a “Kick Me” sign?  Somehow it takes on an even funnier element when slapped on the back of someone in the workplace.   But today turned in to the kind of day where I never saw a soul at work, but for a brief moment here and there.  (Which was not a terrible thing since I am wearing a marginally too short dress for work in order to add a teeny bit of Wow factor while picking up the main squeeze at the airport.)  I bring Business Casual to new lows regularly but I do my best to pass the “finger tip test” popular in high school dress codes.  (Students may not wear short skirts or dresses which do not extend past the fingertips when the student’s arms are extended down the sides of her legs.)

Back to my practical joke… I picked up MQD at the airport.  He has a mild flying phobia that seems to be well handled by a couple of pints and a Lorazepam so he was in good spirits when I picked him up.  I swung by the house and dropped him off and stopped at the gas station at the end of our street.  Upon exiting the convenience store I noticed two things.  1.  A couple of gentleman parked several parking spots from me had noticed I failed the “finger tip test.  2.  MQD’s car had just pulled in to the parking lot.

The combination of these two things afforded me an opportunity AND an audience.  I had just gotten back in my car and smiled at the two guys parked near me.  I jumped back out of my car and dropped down to the ground, carefully sneaking up to the edge of my car so I could keep an eye on MQD.  As soon as he got to the door I ran up behind him and screamed.  It was great.  I got a great, big “Ohh, man, whaaaat?” from MQD and a terrific giggle out of the guys in the car parked at the Buy & Go. MQD gave me a big old smooch and yelled at the guys “What?  I don’t even know her!!!”

Good times.  We all got a good laugh.  And I figure even a handful of hours after his plane took off there was still enough Lorazepam pumping through the man’s veins to keep him from actually crapping in his pants.

The scene of the crime and my victim wondering what?  what else you got for me?

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Co-Sleeping

Posted on October 4, 2010 | 2 comments

There’s a lot written on the subject of co-sleeping with your infant or your very young toddler.  (Some of the best advice can be found here at Dr Sears website.  Emily and I co-slept in some form or fashion until she was at least three nearly all of the time.  As she grew in to a more wiggly sleeper and when she finally started sleeping through the night she gradually started spending the whole night in her bed.  If  I am painfully honest I think I missed having her in my bed even more than she missed being there.  I think a fair amount of that was missing the closeness of sleeping with another person.  The way you can fall asleep faster if you have the steady rhythm of another person’s breath to call you in to slumber.  And I think I doubted my ability to protect her, just me and me alone when we first moved out.  Having her right there next to me made me sleep more soundly.  And I certainly love her little face first thing in the morning.  If we’d not still been co-sleeping last fall I’d not have heard what is now one of my favorite Emily quotes of all time.  Upon hearing the birds chirping in the morning… “You hear those birds, Mom?”

“Mmmhmm….” wishing i was still asleep.  “What are they doing?”

“Having a Bird Party.”  (pronounced, still, a year later “Boid Pahty.”)

This weekend it was an extended Ladies’ Night.  Whenever EM and I are alone these days she dubs it Ladies’ night and MQD was in Boston for the weekend.  I had the opportunity to have Em in my bed all weekend.  Little is written about the benefits of sleeping with your older children.  The family bed is really not an uncommon practice anywhere but in the Western industrialized world.  But for me it has two very distinct benefits.

1. I feel like a ROCKSTAR.  I went to bed at 8 pm all weekend.  And now I feel like a CHAMP.  I can’t recall a weekend where I got so much sleep.  At night.  It is simply grand to wake up feeling like yeah… bring it, Monday, I got this.

2.  Only when I see my girl asleep can I see that my baby is still in there… Otherwise all I can see is the mini-me ready to walk out the door…

I finished reading her a book and told her to just close her eyes, that I was going to read a few pages of my book.  “Mom, I can’t sleep with the lights on.”

“Just close your eyes, baby.”

“Mom…. I love you….”

and she was gone…..

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Posted in Attachment Parenting, Parenting

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Posted on October 3, 2010 | 11 comments

I got an email this weekend from a girl, a woman?  What do you call someone who was a junior in high school the last time you saw her and is now an amazing mother and wife? If I call her a “girl” then she is the girl I went to school with, that I thought I knew.  And a “woman?” Well I didn’t go to high school with any women.   That just draws attention to the fact that the woman whose blog I have been reading for the last several months is really almost a stranger.  And not because she is so different from the girl I knew but because she is exactly the woman I knew she’d become.  Genuine, funny, sincere, frighteningly smart and insightful.  She is as interesting to me now as she was then.  Only I am different.   She doesn’t intimidate me like she did then.  So there is an opportunity now for a discourse, albeit through the comfortable distance of email, but honest nonetheless.

So, when I got an email from her this weekend it gave me pause.  I wasn’t really sure how to answer her.  But I’ll do the best I can.

You write a lot about having low self esteem, and I guess as someone with self esteem problems myself I should understand it. But I am so perplexed! In high school I envied your confidence so much. You were popular and not just with the drama kids, you were hot and tall and you took your clothes off at every opportunity. All the girls wanted to be just like you and I think we both know what the guys wanted to do…All that time were you really insecure or did it develop later?

Low self-esteem means different things to different people.  I had it really easy as a kid, I was tall, strong, smart and kinda funny.  I can’t recall ever really feeling shy or embarrassed in any situation.  My parents went out of their way to ensure that I never went without even though we struggled financially at times.  Middle school came and went with just the right amount of awkwardness.  I was tall entering the seventh grade but by the beginning of freshman year the boys were catching up with me and I wasn’t so uncomfortable in  my own skin.  I fell in easily with the Drama kids.  I found my high school niche in our great big school early on freshman year and it seemed like high school might not be the torturous experience so many people describe.

I’m not sure how it started.  When I started feeling really uncomfortable with the fact that my life was so “easy.”  What was I going to rebel against?  What was going to make me special?  How was I ever going to be an actress, an artist, an anybody if everything always came easy to me?  How as I any different from the perfect cheerleaders at the other end of our long high school hallway?  It embarrassed me.  It embarrassed me when I was nominated for Homecoming Court.  It didn’t matter how much I yearned to be cast in a “real” role in a play. I was Pretty Kelly.  That’s what people saw.  At least that’s what I assumed.  Eventually I guess I let it define me more than it should have.  I hid behind my ‘”perfect face.”  If I feared that was all anyone saw in me than why not make it easy?  You can’t be annoyed that no one sees who you really are if you’re standing around in your underwear, right?    I knew (or at least I thought I knew) what the people I admired thought of me.  An inch deep.  I would never be an artist.

My issues with my body were nagging on their best days.  Crippling on their worst.  When you come to the realization that the only thing any one sees in you is the Outside you start putting way too much emphasis on it.

“Popularity” is a curse in high school,  You don’t get to come back after a summer, with a new look.  Because everyone knows you.  The quiet girl in the back of the room can reinvent herself ten times over.  Or again, at least, that is what I thought.  I felt trapped in my Perfect Family, with my Perfect 4.0.  I didn’t know who I wanted to be.  I don’t even think there’s anything I’d have changed.  It was just suffocating to feel like I didn’t have the freedom to try on a new “me.”  I just knew I was sick and tired of being Perfect.   I was “Best Looking Class of 1994.”  My best days would soon be behind me and there was no stopping that train.

College gave me a chance to start over.  I found a whole bunch of unhealthy ways to maintain my Perfect body.  I fell in love with a Townie.  I ran around with a messy crowd of people.  I fucked up at school just enough to feel like I wasn’t really a part of this Perfect William & Mary scene but tried to keep my nose clean enough that I wouldn’t be barred from returning to the Perfect world I was raised in when it was time.

Bartending was the perfect game for me.  I got to be whoever you wanted me to be every night.  I made money hand over fist.  I thought I was breaking out of my mold but really I was just digging myself deeper.  I had all but wasted my college education because I was busy getting paid to be Pretty Kelly.  So rebellious, right?

I’m still not really answering her question.  Did I always struggle with low self-esteem?  Absolutely.  Only it looks different on me than it does on most people, I think.  I never doubted that people liked me.  I never lacked confidence.  I just thought that if anyone really knew me, hell, if I did, than they surely wouldn’t  like what they saw.  I wanted so badly to stand up and say “hey, what you see isn’t what you get!”  But I was afraid that the next question would be “So, then who are you?”  and I didn’t really have any idea.

I had all the opportunity in the world handed to me.  I grew up in a great home.  With wonderful parents.  In a terrific school system.  I was smart, attractive, I think I even had a reasonable amount of talent at some point… but I didn’t know what I wanted to “be” when I grew up.  My friends from high school were following their “dreams.”  Each year at Christmas fewer people came home because they had “become somebody.”  They were building lives and fortunes and families of their own.  Some of them even had, shudder, careers.

And I still didn’t have a clue.  Because I couldn’t admit what I wanted…. not out loud.  It wasn’t enough, not for me.  Not for Kelly, Teacher’s Pet, who gave  a speech at graduation about how much potential we all had… I was almost thirty and I still hadn’t figured it out.  And even worse?  Pretty Kelly was fading.  I didn’t have the stomach for the drugs that had kept me skinny in my youth.  I didn’t have the desire to put in the effort it would require to maintain it in any other way.  I didn’t have the discipline because everything had been handed to me as a kid.  The lines around my eyes meant my youth was passing me by.  If I cried myself to sleep it took hours and expensive eye creams to look presentable in the morning, not just a cold shower.  I never wanted to be Pretty Kelly.  But all of a sudden I realized that she was fading like it or not.  And I had nothing waiting in the wings.

My twenties were a blur.  I was up and then down. I got “help” along the way from counselors and “groups” and books.  I had a partner in crime.  He was in so many ways just like me.  His own worst enemy.  You can’t fail if you never try.  I looked to him in moments of weakness, but even then I knew he was just as broken as I was.  I battled my own depression, I manifested sadness, drug problems, a bad marriage… all to give me something to overcome.  Something to lend “character” to Perfect Kelly.  Something to give me an identity I had earned.  And identity deeper than great genetics.

(Sitting here now, re-reading what  I have written, there is so much left out… but I am not sure how to wrap it all up in a bow.  Writing this all down here… knowing anyone might read it is like masturbating on stage.  If the point if to only make yourself feel good, than why do it in front of anyone?  I don’t have an answer to that….)

Until I got pregnant.  I was twenty-nine years old and it was finally not an embarassing thing to admit that all I ever really wanted was a family.  I wanted to be a Mom and a Wife.  A good one.  That’s all.  Not necessarily a “Stay At Home Mom” just a Mom.  You’re not allowed to be from Fairfax County and graduate at the top of your class and have no “ambition.” Not in theory, anyway.  I hated myself for not wanting more than that.

But now I am a Mom.  I still struggle with my body.  But at least the human being that I grew in there can be “blamed” for the less than flat stomach.  I struggle with aging, daily.  Because Pretty Kelly is on her way out. And like it or not I can already see that  Mom Kelly is not a hat I can wear forever, either.  But I figure I have a good fifteen more years to figure out who I will be after that.  More if I can manage to get this imperfect body to design another perfect child.  A lot hasn’t really changed at all.  But I am not ashamed of it anymore.

I’m a Mom.  And that isn’t all I wanted to be.  I also wanted to be a Wife.  And soon I will be that, too. As MQD and I plan a wedding it has been very hard for me to admit that I have dreamed of this moment all of my life. And not the way girls dream of being a Princess at their own wedding.  I dreamed of the moment someone would  look at me and see a woman that was not Perfect. Not on the outside.  Not on the inside. But a moment someone would say “I pick you to be my Family.”

It is impossible to talk about this part without acknowledging that I have done this once before. The Family I created with Jer wasn’t the one that was meant for me.  I desperately tried to fit my very, very round and average peg in to his square hole.  He is a Wanderer, a Dreamer, he is spontaneous and free.  I don’t begrudge Jer for not wanting the same things.  In many ways I think I picked him because I knew it would always be an uphill battle to build a Norman Rockwell life with him.  And I just didn’t want another thing in my life to be easy.

And now here I am on the precipice of the “Life” I wanted.  I make dinner and we eat at 6:30.  We play outside.  We have great friends and most of the time my kid asks to be excused after we eat.  We have a nice home even though we don’t have a lot of extra cash to  make it such.  I made curtains for every single window in our house within ten days of moving in here.  I pick up the living room really quickly before Mike gets home from work because it makes me feel good.  And I am not ashamed that this is “all” I wanted.  Because it is so much…. it is so very much.

All the “opportunities” I was afforded made me ashamed to want something so simple.  Or so I thought.  But all you have to do is read a newspaper or watch the news for five minutes to be reminded that the American family is a far from simple accomplishment.  I fight the urge even right now to say that what I want is a Perfect Family.  Because I know there is no such thing.  I just wanted to be a Mom.  And a Wife.  Not a perfect one. But the best one I can be….

So I get up every day and I forgive myself for my failures.  And I try again. And at the end of every day two people that I love so very much say “I love you, too.”  And that is enough.  It is so much more than enough.

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