Odd and Curious Thoughts [about Thanksgiving]

November 23, 2014 By

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(1) It occurred to me that Thanksgiving is an apt description of this important holiday, which is refreshing.  So I’m going to rename the holidays Christaninfantborn and Greenbeerdrinking and CandyHeartsTasteLikePeptoBismolI’lltakechocolate.

(2)  My children took the booster seats out of the car to make “chairs in their boat” which translated to “Hey mom we’re just going to take this wagon and ruin these booster seats real quick by dumping it all into this large puddle after the storm whereby everything will be muddy and ruined, K?” but they were so cute with their little shovels being used like paddles and laughing that I could say nothing.  I watched them ruin things and said nothing.  I’d do it again. So cute with the paddles.

(3) My daughter is making little sticky notes that read “1989” and putting them all over her room, because naturally it’s Taylor Swift’s new album and when the pop singer was born so my daughter thinks that’s super cool.  It makes me realize someday around the Thanksgiving table she’ll remember these days and will someday say 2006 with the same vintage ring to it and I catch myself eating bran cereal.  #lordhelpmeiamgettingold

(4) Speaking of this pop album, it has some objectionable lyrics for 8-year-olds so instead of “handsome as hell” (which makes no sense anyway) we sing “handsome as zell,” a made-up  and very handsome creature, and I make them all say oh-my-gosh and being clean and sober is “that fresh wonderful feeling when you get out of the shower.” 

(5) We were playing the Game of Life and my daughter instructs my son that you will get farther if you skip the fork in the road that reads “college” and there’s a mandatory stop to get married and have kids without a choice involved and “the goal is to win with the most money.” Exactly the lessons we are trying to teach in real life.  What the hell/zell.

(6) I am painting pumpkins a natural cream color to go with my natural décor theme for Thanksgiving.  I don’t want any color aside from natural tones so I’m putting burlap covers over the chairs and hanging a tree limb from the ceiling and using my brown-and-white antique plates. I’m starting to get a little cray-cray with the decorating and when I asked my neighbor for fishing line, wire, and a stud finder he asked me if I needed a drink.

(7) Fall weather is so lovely.  For example, today in Texas we all wore flip flops.  Take that, Wisconsin.

(8) Our Netflix wasn’t working this morning so I found the kids watching “This Old House” and I decided if that’s what they will watch without Netflix we are DONE WITH NETFLIX FOREVER. Let’s go, Norm.  Tear down that wall. These New England homes are handsome as zell.

(9) Regarding said booster seats they are so totally going back in the car.  #thatswhatthehoseisfor #mommahastobuymoreburlapandboostersareexpensive #priorities

(10)               I was talking about my boyfriend the other day and our Fall Foliage Tour of New England and thought the word “boyfriend” sounds so juvenile but “lover” sounds risqué and “friend” sounds like someone I go drink beer with and burp and “main squeeze” sounds like an orange and “significant other” sounds like a person who does my taxes.  I’m remiss for a title. Who is this person that drove me to Lenox, Massachusetts?

(11)                  I told the lover/main squeeze/boyfriend about wanting to hang the tree limb from the ceiling for Thanksgiving and perhaps in a few weeks we could wire it later to the kitchen ceiling covered in lights? I mean I cut it down with an ax and how hard could it be to wire it to the ceiling?? I wondered if I would ever hear from him again or if he might get in his car and move to Miami. But at least he knows what he’s getting into.

(12)               I’m so grateful for my life.  This year more than ever, I am just so thankful for all I have been given without earning it or deserving it. If today was my very last on earth, I would die happy. So we shall toast with wine and make fun of my neurotic decorating and I’ll cry and say long prayers and hug everyone and we’ll listen to Taylor Swift and dance.  This, my friends, is my amazing life, during a holiday worth celebrating, and if leaves fall from the dead tree limb I cut down and into someone’s pie they shall just pluck it out.  Because that’s how we roll round here, flip flops and all.   Happy Turkey Day to everyone. I hope you’re all clean and sober.

Filed Under: Motherhood, My life, Texas, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Eat Your Veggies, Punks

September 16, 2013 By

 

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The other day I stood on aching feet in my kitchen whipping together toasted walnuts and cream cheese, sautéing apples with cinnamon and butter, and lovingly tucking it all with thick slices of munster cheese in the middle of fresh raisin bread to make the most awesome grilled cheese sandwiches ever made by a mother in the history of the world.  Maybe next time I’ll use gruyere and add some arugula. See how well this is working in my mind? I’m probably singing and imagining strings of melted cheese while laughing, bubbly children give me hugs and beg for seconds.  This pretend world is what gets me through most of my days. That and putting expensive things into imaginary shopping carts and wearing orthopedic insoles.

I call them in for dinner, wearing an apron and hope for all of humanity.

But The Royal Children stared at the sandwiches like I was asking them to eat kitty litter, scrunched up their noses in the most unattractive fashion, and ran off the opposite direction.  I stood in the kitchen holding a plate of sandwiches and tired feet, practically begging them to take one tiny bite.  That’s not how the Pottery Barn catalog makes it seem when peanut butter and jelly on white bread is shaped like an acorn and sliced grapes make the cutest little flowers.  It’s just assumed that children will eat the things and parents won’t be left like fools holding cheese sticks and crying.

My offspring somehow believe they have the authority to pick out roasted broccoli, sleuth out chunks of zucchini, practically gag over sundried tomatoes, and don’t even set Brussels sprouts in front of them because they will FOREGO dessert, I tell you, because no child should be subjected to such food that promotes notions like health and vigor and stamina until Spanish class.  If given knives, my children would stake them forcefully into the table, proclaiming a ban on all foods that don’t contain the words macaroni and cheese in that particular order (we see you grinding up that squash into a paste because it’s the same color as the cheese sauce, momma, but we are onto you, lady. We weren’t born yesterday)

It’s exhausting.  Sometimes I just throw my hands in the air and call it Oatmeal Wednesday, even though that doesn’t even rhyme or sound cute like Taco Tuesday, which honestly takes too much work.  So that makes me more depressed and I just sit down beside them while they suck down maple and brown sugar while I eat Pringles.  Eat up, kiddos. I’m not in the mood to fight today.  But the next day, I roll up my sleeves, my motherhood pin dangling preciously close to revocation, and I take another stab at a balanced meal only to face the wrath of Those Who Shall Not Eat Fresh Green Beans with Bacon.  For the love, guys.  It’s got shallots and bacon. You guys don’t know how good you have it.

I just want to say for the record that I grew up in a house with two working parents.  There wasn’t an option to say “no thanks” to casserole of unknown origin, or shake-and-bake, or yet another night of veg-all.  We just ate it, and got through it like homework, and mom wouldn’t dream of us turning up our noses no matter how bland it was.

So the other day I just had it.  I told my daughter when she refused to eat peas that children in Haiti are forced to eat mud cakes to fill up the aching in their stomachs, and I worked for an hour on dinner, and they can at least have the decency to eat it because they are not spoiled rotten brats, and by gosh they had better learn to be grateful, and I may or may not have said after a long-winded soliloquy about respect for parents and all things holy and the glory of roasted beets that they better eat their damn food.

That night, I felt bad I yelled.  I sat on my daughter’s bed and apologized for the harsh words.  For losing my temper.  For sounding so mean. “Even moms are human,” I said as I kissed her beautiful cheeks (the same cheeks that rarely house broccoli, but I digress).  She looked at me with her big blue eyes and said it was okay, and she forgave me a hundred times.

The next morning, I sat bowls of Cheerios with bananas in front of them.  My son said he didn’t want Cheerios for breakfast.  “Just eat them,” my daughter said to him, looking at me with a slight tinge of fear radiating from her peripheral vision.  Success.  Even if it’s only for a morning.  I smiled as I poured my coffee.

I’ll take it. 

 

photo:

Veg Box Friday

Filed Under: Cooking, Motherhood Tagged With: , , , , ,

Eggs are excellent

June 14, 2012 By

For dinner, I made a lovely quiche.  I took my time rolling out the fresh piecrust dough.  I was teaching my daughter how to drape it over the pan, press it down, and trim it with a sharp knife.  Crimp and press, crimp and press. All the way around. She nodded in agreement.   We were on a cooking show, you see, and she was explaining to the imaginary audience that I was making the most excellent dish.

I smiled as I whisked the bright, yellow, happy eggs.  They came from our neighbor’s chickens down the street – one green, a few brown.  All different shapes and sizes. I added roasted broccoli and milk and two different cheeses and slid it into the crust.  An hour later, dinner would be served.  Even raw it was beautiful.  And later as I walked through the kitchen, I could smell the crisp forming on the sides, all golden and flaky and becoming the proud landlord of a cheesy, puffy center.  My palate was screaming for a wedge of sharp cheddar and a glass of smooth Pinot Noir.

Soon, we would all sit around the kitchen table, laughing and eating tossed salad and remarking on how broccoli never tasted so good.  “Why don’t we have this more often?” I imagined my daughter saying as she asked for seconds.  In this pretend world things like “made from scratch” and “mamma’s doing all this for you, kiddos” matter.  In my pretend world, children eat with grateful hearts, don’t whine or scrunch their noses up when they are lucky to have such food at their disposal.  In a pretend world, quiche is most excellent.  Like in my daughter’s cooking show.

Sadly, I don’t live in a pretend world.

The phrases that actually eclipsed my children’s mouths, once the plates of food were set before them, included, but were not limited to:

Why do we always have to have quiche? 

Ugh.

It’s too hot.

Me no eggs, mama.

I’m not hungry.

Can I have applesauce?

Yeah, yeah.  Applesauce!

I can’t pick out all this green stuff.  

Did I mention I don’t like broccoli?

Can I watch my show now?

And the like. 

Finally, I told my kids they could just starve to death for all I care.  My son then threw his plate on the floor with gleeful gusto like I had just said something wonderful and the dog proceeded to inhale all the contents thereof. Did my canine appreciate the homemade crust, or the two kinds of cheeses?  Did he notice the broccoli was roasted rather than steamed?  Was he benefiting from the organic, free-range nature of it all? He eats his own poo, so I kinda doubt it.

Later that night my daughter said she was hungry.  I told her there was always quiche.   She just looked at me funny and instead asked for water.

My kids don’t realize how good their life is.  How rich and beautiful and plentiful are their days.  Someday we will go to Guatemala, or Malawi, Africa, or Haiti, and they’ll appreciate their lot in life a tiny bit more.  They will hopefully become more thankful.  More grateful.  They will roll their eyes less and be excited about foods that do not contain the words “mac” or “jelly” or “nugget.”

“You really wouldn’t let us starve to death, would you mom?” my daughter asked before bed.   The fact that she asked made me chuckle.   “No, sweetie,” I said as I pulled her blond hair away from her face and scratched her back.

Little do they know they are getting eggs for breakfast.

That’ll show em.

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood Tagged With: , , , ,

lucky one

October 10, 2011 By

I remember the marble being such a pretty color, peachy with ribbons of coral running through it.  It was everywhere.  Marble tub.  Marble sink.  Marble floor. “That’s a lot of stinkin marble,” I thought to myself as I was lying there, half-naked, face-down on the floor with a nose that might be broken. I was only sixteen.  When it happened– the familiar burning and surging and cramping in my abdomen– I’d carry pillows with me to the toilet.  I figured that if I passed out, they would break the fall.   It never worked, and I never learned.

Once, after waking up on the floor in a public stall, I simply wiped my face off and headed back to Chemistry class.  My friends in college all freaked out in that dramatic, ohmygodshe’stotallygoingtodie way, as supportive as newly formed friends who share a common dormitory can possibly be.  The doctors never figured out why the pain caused me to pass out.  The neurologist ruled out epilepsy, although according to some probe-strapping test, something was definitely a “bit off” with my brainwaves.  That explains a lot.  But one day, I had a beautiful little girl and I never passed out again.

My life doesn’t exactly follow the odds.  I guess you could say I’m lucky.

▪               Ten years ago, an oncologist told me I had a chunk of melanoma living in my eye socket.  Eye cancer is very rare, as it turns out.  One in a million.  Who knew I’d get to travel to Philadelphia and have surgery in one of America’s oldest cities?  As it turns out, I love cheesesteak and Thomas Jefferson.

▪               When I was in the hospital after the birth of my daughter, first a week and extending to three and then four, undergoing multiple surgeries and stabbing myself with blood-thinner injections, I was told it wasn’t exactly normal.  I tried to put on lipstick to make it all better, but with a four-week-old child at home I’d barely begun to hold, Chanel can only do so much.  Don’t get me wrong – it can do a lot. But there are limits.

▪               Most people don’t pass out after having their wisdom teeth extracted and have CPR performed in the oral surgeon’s office lobby because they had some extreme reaction to Demerol. Lucky for me, they had some sort of anti-Demorol agent locked away someplace they stuck in my arm.  I remember getting to drink juice when I woke up. But then again, I’ve woken up from loads of surgeries, so I might be getting them all confused.

▪               Before the birth of my son, right after the spinal tap was placed and the medicine was slowly crawling through my veins toward the arteries of my heart, it stopped. The monitor would just so naturally flatline, because that’s what luck I have.   But like I arose from the marble floor, so too would my heart begin to beat.  After, of course, the chest compressions, the stabbing of epinephrine, and some other medication that apparently gives you dry mouth.

So it wasn’t all that surprising that our house was struck by lightning.  And instead of killing us or burning our house to the ground, it instead wiped out all our plumbing.  “That’s very rare,” the fireman said.   Yeah.  Welcome to my life.  Things happen to me.  Things that don’t happen to normal people.

I can’t help but think God has some grand scheme behind all of this, like there is some grand point to be made.  In response, I’m actively searching for what that is.  What role I need to play in the universe in return for my good fortune.  I’m open, as they say, to change.

I am truly grateful for the moments in which we are tested.  To see what’s most important.  I am grateful for a faith, true and honest, despite all reason to the contrary.  I am grateful for this body, as battered and broken as my insides might be.  I am grateful that I’m not married to some boring widget of a man, but a man bursting at the seams with heart.  I’m grateful for my children, deep in character and beauty.  I’m grateful that we are living in a rental, with Goodwill furniture and mice in the garage, because we are together. And laughing.  Last night, I fell asleep holding my husband’s hand.  And today, my daughter told me she’d give me hugs and kisses even when love got so sweet it turned rotten.   I’m a lucky, lucky girl.

I think I’m going to buy a lottery ticket.  I’d probably lose.  Just my luck.

Filed Under: Eye, Health, Humor, Religion Tagged With: , , ,