Sun Breaks

Much like the apocryphal hundreds of ways to say snow in Eskimo, those of us in the Pacific Northwest linguistically differentiate between all sorts of rain events.  Pouring, drizzling, misting, showers, spitting down, steady rain, etc.  Then there are the sun breaks.  Do you have sun breaks where you live?  In case it's not obvious, a day with sun breaks is a day with mostly wet weather, but when the rain pauses, it's not just a sullen dampness that replaces it, but actual sunshine.  Clouds blow around, blue sky peeks through, and for five, ten, even fifteen minutes, we get a sun break.

Then, usually, it starts raining again.

The skies here have been steadily grey the past several days.  It hasn't rained all that much, but we haven't had the relief of any sun breaks either.  However, the internal weather, ah, that's a different story.

February was bad, man.  Death and a sinus infection and a snowstorm I couldn't enjoy.  I didn't work a full week all month, and I didn't do anything else either.  There were a few days when things were quiet enough that I could read mindlessly--YA fiction, mysteries.  But there were more days when I dragged myself from the bed to the couch and back again.  I couldn't be bothered to figure out what to cook, since I had neither energy nor appetite.  I didn't vacuum once all month.  My kids developed a sense of entitlement regarding screen time that I suspect we'll be regretting until June.  My husband has been struggling with his own crap--depression and losing a job, which really really really helped with the depression, as you can imagine--but he did get some medication adjusted towards the end of the month and stepped up, making sure we all had clean underwear and hot food.  

Last weekend I finally got some antibiotics.  Monday afternoon I looked around and said, "Hey, I think I'm ready to go back to work."  I was pretty exhausted each day when I came home, but I worked the rest of the week, and while it was horrifying to see how little my students had gotten done all month, it was good to start regrouping.  I even spent some time Friday working on a complicated list of students to sort out for a big project for the team of teachers I share students with.  It wasn't much, but it was the first time in a while I'd been able to think bigger than "What am I teaching next period?" and actually carry my weight with my colleagues.

This weekend there were more such moments.  I baked salted caramel brownies for a potluck dinner party.  I showed up for the damn party, after bowing out of social engagements for weeks on end.  Today I'm making dinner from a cookbook, instead of falling back on spaghetti or baked chicken.  I finally pulled out the stack of torn stuffed animals and mended did surgery as needed.  I had some free time and looked at my stack of mindless reading, then reached past the genre fiction to pull out "We Need to Talk About Kevin," which is not mindless reading.  (Boy, is it not!) I let the neighbor girl come over and showed her how to set up an embroidery hoop and outline her initial, and I helped my own girl organize the art supplies, which we store in her bedroom just because that's where there's room.  I helped my husband apply for jobs, and celebrated with him when one winery contacted him to say they think he's overqualified for the job he applied for, so would he please come in next week to talk about a different job?

I took the Christmas wreath off the door and deconstructed it so the boughs went into composting and the bones into the trash.  Yes, I took down my Christmas wreath on March 1 this year.  It was time.

Rain will come again, but I'm turning my face to the sun while it lasts.

It's true, thank goodness!

 There are some very charming PSAs on the slogan "You don't need to be perfect to be a perfect parent.

That's all.  Watch a bunch.  Smile.

Grief, snow, laziness, photos.

In the past 10 days, in roughly chronological order, I found out that my husband was about to get fired, my dad went into the hospital, my husband got fired, my dad went into hospice, my kids both got vicious ear infections, and my dad died.  Catching a cold and the snowstorm arriving were pretty anticlimatic. 

Strike that.  The snowstorm has been a blessing.  I'd taken the first two days of the new semester off when my dad died, which of course resulted in chaos (middle schoolers being especially poor at CHANGE and also SUBSTITUTES), so I went back in on Wednesday.  Thursday we were sent home early, and Friday wasn't even a question.  My kids were mostly over their crud by then, and it turns out that snow is an even better babysitter than electronics.  For one thing, it involves them leaving the house, which allows me to read and nap.  For another thing, they can indulge all day long, and I don't feel like a terrible parent.

But then I go on Facebook (I know, I know), and see all these photos of laughing families playing in the snow, and I'm all, "Why am I just sending my kids out into the snow all day without me?  This would be such a great bonding experience!  Think of all the attachment I'm not doing!  I bet all the other parents are out there going, 'Gee, why don't Linden and Oak's parents ever come out and play with them?' What if it doesn't snow again for five more years and by then they won't want to hang out with me?"

And then I realize that merely standing up makes my head hurt, and the wind blows a spray of snow and ice off the neighbor's roof, and I'm all, "Nope, I'm good.  At least they're having fun instead of stuck inside with the two gloomy grown-ups."

I think a lot about my mom.  We all do, right?  She's our example of Mom and Wife and Woman, and we can't help but to compare ourselves.  Mine was tough.  Indomitable.  In my mind, she would have gotten out there and played, plus the bathrooms would have been clean, and she wouldn't have plaintively asked friends to bring her dinners, and she would have already figured out what to do about death certificates.  Then again, I will always remember waking up to the sound of her shrieking and wailing when she got the call that her mom had died in a house fire, so you know, grief.  It fucks you up.

Grief plus head colds?  Blech.

During these past ten hard days I've napped off and on, stayed up too late scrolling Pinterest, and eaten food other people brought us.  The kids have gotten no craft projects or library trips; I've only read aloud once.  The Winemaker and I have spent too much time on separate computers instead of actually with each other.  We lay on the bed, unable to wake ourselves up, and when we hear a kid come stomping noisily onto the back porch, we groan.  "Okay, I'll take this one if you get the next time." 

And then I read this, and even though it's about much more than that, the point I pull out of it is that it's okay to not be productive every single minute of every single day, that I can pull back from my life and not be a bad person.  

I'm still, after all, a mom and a wife and a person.  I've shown up at work, washed four loads of laundry, played cards with the kids, and made cookies.  I insisted on 20 minutes of schoolwork this morning, I wrote my dad's obituary, and I talked my son through his hurt feelings about sled hogging to lead him towards a resolution that involved him starting with an apology for his own earlier sled hogging.  I helped bottle five cases of wine and made my husband's favorite breakfast.  I sat on the couch with sisters and friends and looked at family photo albums.  I read a book.  I wrote those goddamn sub plans, which is always a hellish experience, made worse by the knowledge that the sub is pretty much screwed no matter how hard I work at the plans, and I will just have to come back and start over again anyway.  When the kids swing by the house, I supply them with dry clothes and hot snacks, and I bite my tongue to keep from bitching about the mess they strew behind them.

Two friends brought bouquets, so like my mom always said when she put fresh flowers out, "There.  I cleaned house."

I'm going to close with a bunch of pictures of my dad.  That kind of breaks my privacy policy, but he's in no position to complain.  (Too soon?  Sorry.  But he'd think it was funny, so I'm okay with it.)

Since he was, obviously, a photographer, here are a few of his shots.  I don't have many on this computer, but trust me, he was great.

 And finally, this super hot picture of my parents on Sept. 10, 1955.

Girly girls and tomboys

I am a girl.  Well, a former girl.  I was raised in a family of four daughters.  I wore dresses that swirled out when I spun in a circle.  I played dress-up and dolls.  All of my friends in elementary and middle school were girls.  I did not participate in sports, unless you count twirling on the gym bar, kickball in the backyard, or the occasional game of HORSE with my dad.  I read Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Trixie Belden, and my favorite movie was The Sound of Music.  I took ballet and piano lessons.  Nobody ever called me a tomboy.  I was a girly girl.

As an adult, I drink lattes and snarf down chocolate.  My absolute favorite thing to do is sit and chat.  Next comes reading, knitting, hiking, and cuddling with my kids or my husband.  I make picture books on Snapfish, obsess over Pinterest, and have to wait for my husband or kids to turn on the DVDs for me.  I can bake a cake, but not change the oil.  I wear earrings and scarves, and my favorite recent purchase is a burgundy skirt that swirls around my calves when I walk.  I overuse the word "cute." 

I also haven't shaved my legs since my junior year in college.  I wore makeup daily in high school, but somewhere in college started to only wear it when I was going out.  At the time, that meant once or twice a week; now it means a few times a year.   I don't style my hair, other than to stick it in a ponytail if I overslept and didn't wash it.  I wear ugly shoes because they don't make my feet hurt.  When colleagues start discussing who they think should appear in the movie version of "Fifty Shades of Grey," I haven't heard of any of the actors mentioned, and I still haven't read the book.  I don't care if my husband or kids dress funny.   I've never had a manicure, and I get the cheapest haircut I can find.  I wore a wine colored dress for my wedding, which took place in my parents' living room with fifteen relatives present.  Pinterest weddings seem insane to me.

I have always felt that my infertility is not that big of a deal.

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Today Linden was sitting in my lap after school, and apropos of nothing announced, "There's a girl in my class who's a tomboy."

"Only one?" I not-so-innocently replied.

"I mean, Mom, most girls like girl things but she likes boy things."

"I know what a tomboy is," I responded tartly.  "I am just surprised there's only one in your whole class."

I want to sit her down for a lecture about gender roles and stereotypes.  I want to call on her to be kind to this girl who has been singled out by her peers as different.  I want to point out that at Target or any other cheap venue for toys, the toy aisles are so garishly and extravagantly color coded, while at the expensive, locally owned stores they are not.  (What does THAT say about gender and class?)  I want to quote at her an article I read today, written by a coworkers daughter--that if we like swirly skirts and talking about our feelings and eating chocolate, it is not because we are women--we are just women who happen to like those things.  And if I don't shave my legs and don't need years to recover from the disappointment of infertility--I'm not less of a woman.  I'm just a woman who doesn't worry about those particular things.  Another woman could feel the exact reverse about each of those, and still be a woman.  A woman, in fact, could be born in a man's body and still be a woman.  Or a woman could be a lesbian, or a football player, or a model, or a pilot, or...you get the idea.  I basically wanted to rain down "Free to Be You and Me" feminism on her head. But her brother came in and wanted attention too, and the moment slipped away. 


Can I be a girly girl if I hate pink and have no skin care regime?  Can I be a feminist if I do all the dishes and count on my husband to deal with all things car related?  Does my 25 years of membership in a mountain climbing club make me a tomboy?

Well, duh, yes to all of those.  And also no, to all of them, because who wants to live in one of those little boxes?  That's what I want her to understand, I think.  You get to be You, and so does everyone else.

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Aggravated Parent's Soul

I was mad at my kids today.

So mad that I put CARROTS in the homemade chicken noodle soup.  Screw you people and your incessant demands for only uncooked vegetables.  Your whining and backtalk makes you ineligible for Special Mommy Soup that caters to your whims.  Instead, we get soup the way MOMMY F---ING LIKES IT.

Luckily for them, I share their feelings about cooked tomatoes, or I would have totally put a can of those in there too.  I almost did anyway, just to piss them off.

Does this qualify as passive aggressive?

It Was a Dark and Stormy Afternoon

When she sat down to right a blog post about her favorite mystery series.

Seriously, it's noon here in the Pacific Northwest; I'm sitting in the room with picture windows on two sides, and I just had to turn the lights on. 

Why a mystery review on this adoption blog?  Well, the other night I had dinner with my sister.  It was the anniversary of our mom's death four years ago (four years?  how?) and Sister's life is falling apart, and she said she needed something to read, and I started talking mysteries, and she wound up pulling a pen and a receipt out of her purse to take notes.  Because I have a lot to say on the topic. 

It started in my childhood with Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators.  Then when I was ten, the same sister got me going on Agatha Christie as I was recovering from appendicitis, and from there I moved to Dorothy  Sayers, Barbara Pym, and eventually Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series, Sue Grafton, Martha Grimes, and Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries.  All of these eventually got...old.  (Well, finding out that the young Anne Perry helped murder her best friend's mom may have influenced my disenchantment with her.)  I've read dozens of mystery series, and there are several that I like and will continue to read as long as the author keeps them coming.  There are a few mystery writers, however, that I really believe are elevated beyond genre, and are among my very favorite authors overall.  These are, in order that I discovered them, Reginald Hill, Elizabeth George, and Tana French. 

Reginald Hill's series is based in Yorkshire.  He writes about a classic odd couple, the vulgar, boisterous Superintendent"Fat Andy" Dalziel and the educated, self-aware Sergeant Peter Pascoe.  (Actually, in researching spelling just now I found out that Mr. Hill DIED last year, which means there will be NO MORE Dalziel and Pascoe. I am heartbroken.  What a depressing turn of events.  Further research indicates that the last book I read by him is indeed the last one he wrote, so there will be no more new Dalziel/Pascoe books for me.  Ever.) 

The earliest books, written in the '70s, are not as great as the latter ones.  Like season 1 of Buffy, the main benefit of slogging through them is that you understand the character's background as you move into the truly great books.  If the first ones just feel too dated to you, then I'd start with 1983's Deadheads, which was the one that first made me sit up and take notice. 

The single complaint I can come up with--and it's a stretch--is that the character's timeline is a little off.  Not as extreme as Martha Grimes, where the hero ages five years while the books move from the seventies to the nineties, but not as accurate as Sue Grafton, who covers about five years of the 1980s in her series, meaning that what started as a contemporary series now requires historical research.  Pascoe marries (his wife Ellie is a major character in her own right) and has a child, while Dalziel (no, I don't know how to say it), ages and moves towards retirement, but the child seems to grow awfully slowly. 

What makes the books great is the interactions between the characters, the way their relationship develops and changes, and the strong supporting characters (besides the fiercely feminist Ellie Peters, there's also Sgt. Wield, the ugly, gay policeman who is beautifully drawn.)  Mr. Hill is the kind of writer who plays with words and forms, including one book that's a send-up of Austen, and a short story in which actors playing the roles of Dalziel and Pascoe in a TV series get caught up in a murder mystery.  Multiple points of view.  Sleight of author's hand.  All the fun stuff you wouldn't get in your average, predictable best-seller.  He's the only author I can think of that sends me to the dictionary each time I read--because he uses words that are not only rare, but interesting enough to bother looking up.  

I must now go back and re-read all of these.  I feel like sending a condolence letter to his wife, letting her know how much I will miss him.

Elizabeth George is an American who writes very British mysteries.   Her main character is Lord Peter Whimsey Inspector Thomas Lynley, who is indeed a titled peer, but prefers to ignore that fact.  Again, recurring characters are a major reason why this series is elevated above most, although honestly, I don't care for a few of them.  There is one novel in which his best friend's wife (and his former lover) Barbara St. James spends the whole time making herself and her husband miserable over her infertility issues.  I know it hits everyone differently, but as an infertile woman myself, FOR GOD'S SAKE SHUT UP AND GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE ALREADY.   I'm also not a fan of Lynley's lovely wife Helen, which, as it turns out, is all for the best.  But I love, love, loooooove Sgt. Barbara Havers, and it sounds like the next novel features her, so yay.  The other two things to know about these mysteries are that the stand-alone features are beyond excellent.  I still find myself thinking about characters and situations from individual books.  While a series must have compelling and interesting recurring characters, very few have as compelling and heartbreaking characters in each mystery.  For the Sake of Elena, Playing for the Ashes, What Came Before He Shot Her, Deception on His Mind--okay, apparently I need to stop, because I could list about 80% of her books as examples of mysteries where the characters and situations have stuck with me.  This is not true of the vast majority of mysteries, even well-written ones.  Another thing to be aware of is that there's a lot of kinky stuff.  Ms. George sees human sexuality as a powerful motivating force for all sorts of things.  I realized this when I enthusiastically recommended this series to my Catholic brother-in-law, and then was all, "Wait, um..."  But did I mention heart-breaking?  There is a lot of sadness in these books.  The love (romantic, platonic, parental, etc.) between the recurring characters is all that keeps this from being The Most Depressing Series Ever. 

Just last summer I started reading Tana French.   She better not die soon, because she's only written three books in her Dublin Murder Squad series.  And I need more.  The first one involved a detective who, as a child, was the only one of three kids to come back out of the forest after getting lost...and neither he nor anyone else ever found out what happened that day.  He's assigned a case with eerie echoes of his own history.  The next novel features the detective who was his partner in book one.  The next one features a detective who was a major source of annoyance in book two.  This certainly keeps things fresh, and it is very interesting to get into the head of someone who was formerly observed just from the outside.  Plus, everyone cusses Irish style, which is just so dang cute. 

I realize I told you next to nothing about any of the books.  I am a firm believer in No Spoilers.  My favorite thing is to pick up a book by an author I trust and read it without even looking at the cover blurb.  I want it all to unfold like the author intended.  Unless you a) hate mysteries or b) like sweet, fluffy mysteries, I can only recommend that you give all of these authors a try.  And I'd even say a) is not a deal-breaker.  I'm no sci fi fan, but Ursula Le Guin is one of my favorite authors, you know what I'm saying? 

Argh.  Julia Spencer Fleming.  If the previous three series are my grade A's, I'd say hers are an A-.  Her main characters are a small town police chief and the female Episcopal priest who covets him.  What's not to like? 

On placemats, expectations, and not swearing at my kids.

One of the many things you can't get until you're in it is what it means to adjust your expectations for your kids.

Yesterday my husband and I sat in the driveway after running an errand together.  We were discussing our son.  Specifically, my husband was praising the way I had not once screamed "SHUT THE F*** UP!  WHY ARE YOU BEING SUCH AN A$$HOLE?" all day long.  Not once.  Not even close.  He was impressed.  He had managed to avoid a profane tempest by holing up in our bedroom, while I was actually engaging with the kids. 

This made me think of something I'd been reminded of while discussing with Oak when he would gt computer privileges back.  "He doesn't know the days of the week," I said. 

"He doesn't know left and right," replied the Winemaker.

"Do you think it's fetal alcohol?"  I asked.

"Who knows.  I am too tired to figure it out.  I don't even know where to start, and I am so afraid of being a terrible parent that I'm afraid to engage long enough to figure it out."

(For the record, my husband is in the midst of a medication change to help with his anxiety, irritability, noise sensitivity, and depression.  The jury is out on whether this new med combo will be helpful.)

I keep looking for glimmers of progress.  We've been doing this long enough that I have something to compare it to.  How was last Christmas?  What was it like going grocery shopping?  How many times a day did we use to head out to walk around the block as a cool down?  On all of these fronts, there has been progress.

Tonight I realized something even more quantifiable.  The placemats we've used since we got married are bamboo, the kind that resemble long toothpicks rafted together.  The first day the kids were home, they rolled them up and started swatting each other with them, laughing hysterically and knocking over glasses in the process.  I immediately confiscated them, and we bought cloth placemats for them, ones that can be wiped off after the inevitable spills.  More importantly, ones that make lousy weapons.

For Christmas, I got out the holiday placemats.  These are cotton ones my sister made us years ago.  Since there are only four, when we had company on Christmas day, I hauled out all the bamboo placemats as well. 

As we've reverted to our regular place settings, the kids started using the bamboo placemats that match ours.  I just set the table, and put actual dishware (not the plastic Ikea set) at all four spots, resting on actual matching placemats.  I paused and looked at it, and realized I trust them with all of it.  Not that there won't be spills.  But no intentional misuse of tableware, and that is enough.

Before having kids, would I have ever thought that "safe use of placemats" would be a milestone?