Author Archives: admin

metawriting

by

I love writing, I promise. I really do. This isn’t so obvious when you visit my page, especially lately. I know. I would apologize, but I’d rather just explain:

There are those things that you do that don’t really serve a purpose outside of just amusing you while simultaneously improving something about yourself, like knitting, or painting, or playing guitar. Something you haven’t mastered, but they’re still fun to do. I think they call them hobbies. Well, actually, along with knitting, painting, and playing guitar, I enjoy writing as well. In fact, I prefer it above all of those other things, and it’s partially because, unlike any of those other things, I think I might be good at it. At least I’m better at it than I am at playing guitar or knitting (I never actually learned to knit.I have the stuff for it. Still can’t create so much as a stitch.)

The problem with hobbies is that it’s hard to find the time to devote to them. After a long day of taking care of two extremely demanding kids, cleaning a very messy house, studying, making dinner, cleaning up said dinner, I don’t feel like doing anything other than sitting on my ass at the computer or on the couch and just zoning out. I want to play The Sims or watch netflix, and I am too exhausted, physically and mentally, to want to do anything that might challenge myself. I don’t want to think too hard. I want to do as little thinking as humanly possible for the rest of the night. Too much to ask?

But that’s not all there is to it. I’m writing right now while Vance watches some weird Japanese anime. It sounds like people with grating high-pitched voices are randomly being  picked up and violently jiggled mid-sentence. (Think cat yodeling) I’m struggling to concentrate, but, BUT, it’s almost 10 and I am still here, writing away. By this time of night, my attention span is devastatingly short. Writing this short entry is eating away at my time, and none of this is good for the fate of this blog. My drafts folder, as well as my Windows Documents folder is full of incomplete pieces. It’s terrible. I blame the internet and children’s programming.

Lets just say that I have the time and the privacy to write. The things are clean, the kids are asleep, Vance is downstairs perusing Reddit, and it is still early enough that an article in Reason magazine can still hold my attention through to completion. It all sounds good, yes? Well, sometimes writing is hard. If I write about the things that I want to write about, the things that I think I should write about, sometimes it means confronting things I have been avoiding. It means digging up the past and reliving the things I have been trying for a very long time to forget. Sometimes, when I recount some of the things from the past, I start to panic, and I get dizzy, and nauseous. Why would I voluntarily put myself through that? I guess I feel like writing is, in some ways, safer than talking.

No one says I have to do all that. I mean, I just need to write some stuff and put it on my blog. It doesn’t need to be all heavy and gross, right?

But, damn, playing the Sims is fun.

 

The most wonderful time of the year

by

 

Dude. I love Halloween. Always have. Hopefully always will.

Deven was psyched for weeks about getting to wear his costume and knock on doors and get candy. Even though he went trick or treating last year, he really didn’t remember any of it. He knew all about this trick or treating stuff from Yo! Gabba Gabba.
Woody
You wouldn’t know it from the picture, but he was really excited, and kept nagging me to hurry up! so we could go get candy!

Archer, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think off all this mess. He wasn’t feeling great from the four shots he had to get that morning. By the way, this is why I scheduled my kids appointment on Halloween: The entire Pediatrics department dressed like Smurfs. His doctor got to be Gargamel because he is the tallest person on staff. Wonderful.
Archer's first Halloween!
It took me a while to come up with a good costume idea. I looked through the inventory of women’s costumes and I was so very disappointed. I’m a mom, and I’m going to be taking my kid trick or treating. I don’t want to be dressed like a Pirate whore. Or skanky Alice. Or a slutty Lucille Ball.  Or a whore zombie Amy Winehouse. So, at the last minute, I had a break through. This what I came up with:
Greaser

A greaser. I couldn’t afford a nice wig. I did my best. At the end of the day, I made some people laugh, which is what Halloween is all about, you know, when you’re not drenching yourself in fake blood and making people piss themselves.

What you think you look like.

What you actually look like:

Greaser

I don’t have any still pictures of it, but Vance actually dressed up this year! I bought him a spider costume. It was hilarious. I have it on video, and maybe some day when I have the patience, I will upload it. I have to warn you though, he was capturing me when I wasn’t aware of what was going on. I don’t even know what you’ll see or hear.

Halloween this year was a blast. It always is. So, we can’t afford to go all out with decorations, and our all but nonexistent social lives mean we can only talk about all of the awesome parties we would rock in our very well-thought out costumes, but whatever. We take what we’ve got, and even if we spend an hour getting ready to walk around the neighborhood in the dark, we make Halloween the best holiday of the year.

October 1

by

This is my mom. She would have been 64 years old today. She passed away on December 8, 2003.

I look around, and so much has changed since the last time I saw her. Even though I was technically an adult when she passed, I was still a kid, and I remained one for quite a while afterward. I still needed my mom. I still do.

Going through my first pregnancy without her was incredibly hard. She was a labor & delivery nurse, and I always pictured her being right there when I gave birth. I needed her there so badly when I miscarried. I get my support from others around me, and I am so very grateful for them, but it’s not the same. Nothing comes close to the comfort a mother provides.

There are two little boys in this world who won’t get to know their grandmother. There is still a small, more faithful part of me that hopes that they got to know each other a little bit before they were born. But here in the world I know, I have to figure out some way of teaching them who she was.

She was far from perfect, but that’s a given. No parent is perfect, and it’s impossible to ever be perfect. She was bipolar, she did a lot of really messed up things when I was a kid. But she’s still my mom. I know that doesn’t relieve her responsibility for her actions, but it does allow her forgiveness. At least from me as of today.

I remember reading a post from someone on some parenting site criticizing all of the other posts they see from other people complaining about their moms meddling in their business, being too critical of their own parenting, or just being around too much. I can’t help but laugh. I personal don’t think they are being ungrateful; I know that if my mom were still today we were would probably be perpetually angry with one another, weaving through periods of speaking and then periods of not. That was just our relationship. We were both really stubborn, but we always made up.

There is still a huge hole in my life, and it will probably always be there. I make it a little easier by preparing her same side dishes and deserts every Thanksgiving, by stubbornly decorating the Christmas tree, even though none of us really give a shit, and by snuggling and kissing on my kids the same way she would if she were still here.

On the weekend of the 22nd, our family members, consisting of her sister, brother, and their children and grandchildren, are all getting together in Wimberly. We’ll be baking pies, looking through family pictures, and reminiscing about old times, and remembering those who have passed on. Spending time with my family, particularly those who were especially close to my mom, helps me deal. I also hope that through spending time with my favorite Auntie, my son will understand how funny and sweet his grandmother must’ve been.