I'm a Thunderegg.

I’ve always been average-looking.   Not a face to turn heads, but not one to make small children cry either.   This means, of course, that for most of my adolescence I considered myself hideously ugly.  Middle school was particularly rough.  My mom made most of my clothes, I spent lunch hour in the library reading Anne McCaffery’s Dragon Song series and Agatha Christie mysteries, and I sang bass in the school choir, because my singing voice was deeper than most of the boys’.  I could give your more examples—or a completely different set—but either you know exactly what I mean, or you never will. 

Things started looking up in high school.  Overt cruelty became uncouth, for one thing, and I had the good fortune to attend a public school where getting into a four year college was the expectation, not an exception.  Suddenly, being a serious student was cool again.  I joined the swim team and made a good group of friends.   I applied for a short-term exchange program, and the summer I turned 16, off I flew to an island suburb of Bergen, Norway.

I had a fabulous time.  My host sister, Judith (Yoo-deet), and I became instant friends, which is fortunate, as we spent six solid weeks in each other’s company.  I saw fjords and glaciers and the midnight sun.  I shopped at Benetton and got a hot pink and black checked sweater AND a hot pink jumpsuit (it was 1985; what can I say?).  Judith and I walked down to the gas station and bought double decker ice cream cones, pistachio and chocolate, and listened to Springsteen singing “Jersey Girl” on the jukebox.  I learned how to say “good dog!” in Norwegian, and said it constantly to their sweet Burmese Mountain dog.  We took a ferry to Stavanger, and I bought a hand-knit sweater from a little old lady; a sweater I still break out every December.  I toured stave churches, and we watched Dallas on their VCR and Eurovision on their TV.  We went into town and saw Amadeus in the theaters, then hitchhiked back because we’d missed the bus.  (I was terrified, which amused her.)  The family made me a wonderful birthday cake, all whipped cream and fresh fruit, and I didn’t even miss my parents as we celebrated.   After I’d been there a month, Judith and I got weepy every time we remembered I’d be leaving soon. 

Somewhere in the midst of that delightful summer, I was dashing down the stairs of their home when I saw a familiar face.  I felt a jolt of happy recognition.  Sure, I was having the time of my life, but it was the first time I’d ever been so far away from the known.  I’d always taken a friend to summer camp with me; all my other travels had been with my family; I’d lived in one house my entire life.  So when I saw someone I recognized from home, I had a flash of sheer joy.

It was my own face in a mirror.

As soon as my brain identified that dear, familiar, face, I had an epiphany; one that has never left me.  To those who love me, my face is beautiful.  The affection I felt for that sweet little recognizable face is something like what my family and friends would feel if they ran into me unexpectedly.  Not “Wow, she sure has big earlobes,” or “That left eye is a bit squinty, isn’t it?” or “I guess she’s never heard of eyebrow shaping.”  Just, “Hey!  There’s Wendy!  Yay!” 

I pressed on through all those years, into what I currently recognize as my life.  I have days when I feel pretty, days when I feel hideous, and weeks when I don’t really think about my looks one way or another.  Only one person has ever really fallen for me, but since it’s the one person I fell hard for, it’s quite enough.  I smile for cameras like I was born to it.  I wear my bathing suit in public despite having put on 40 pounds in the past three years.  I wore a burgundy and silver gown to my wedding, because white makes me look more corpse-like than bridal, and I figured it was more about feeling beautiful than following “rules.”  

Then I adopted a little girl.  A very pretty little girl.  One who is fascinated with Barbie.  One who begs for earrings, and make-up, and heels, and who is perennially disappointed that I utilize those accessories sometimes, rarely, and never, respectively. One who refuses to wear a plain t-shirt, or even a simple striped one.  All shirts must have glitter, butterflies, or some other evidence of merchandized femininity. 

Last spring I went on her first grade class field trip to the zoo.  She was unabashedly thrilled that I would be there. Then the night before the trip, as I lay next to her at bedtime, she said, “I told the other kids not to laugh at you when they see you.”

“Um, okay?”

“Because of your skin,” she clarified, patting my cheeks, covered as they are in the characteristic red bumps of rosacea.  "And your teeth," meaning the gap between my front teeth.  “I told them that you are pretty on the INSIDE.”  

Clearly, this was meant to be an act of love on her part.  Clearly, I wasn’t taking it quite the way she’d imagined, so she plunged ahead.

“See, some people are pretty on the outside, like they’re a gem on the outside, but they’re a rock on the inside.  You are a rock on the outside, but you’re a gem on the inside.”

“Ah.  So, I’m a like a thunderegg.”

She still wasn’t sure if I was taking this the right way.  That made two of us.

“Because of your HEART, see?  You have a beautiful, beautiful, heart.  And that’s what’s important.  Kaliah at school is like a gem on the outside, because she’s pretty, but she’s like a  rock on the inside, because she’s mean, but with a little bit of a gem inside of the rock, because sometimes she’s nice.”

She trailed off.  This conversation was not going quite the way she had thought it would when she practiced it in her head.  I’ve been in the same situation, and I knew she really did mean well, so I rallied enough to thank her for looking out for me.

It bothered me all the same.  If there’s anyone who will think you’re beautiful, it’s your small children, right?  So if your adoring child thinks you’re ugly enough to warrant warning others, you must be pretty awful looking.

And yet.  I’ve seen her face light up when I show up to pick her up at the end of the day.  I’ve seen her make a beeline for me before she’s all the way awake in the morning.  She kisses, she hugs, she pats, she clings.  She turns to me when she’s scared or hurt or can’t get to sleep.  She quite literally can’t get enough of my cuddles and my attention.  She doesn’t think I’m pretty.  But my face is beautiful to her—I know this even if she doesn’t.  Someday she will look at pictures of me and sigh, marvel at how lovely I was, just as I do when I see pictures of my mom at 4, 13, 25, 68. 

My epiphany holds up.  I am beautiful to those who love me, even if they themselves don’t know it.  I am beautiful because I bring them joy.

FTSF: Compromise.

The prompt is "The one thing I'll never compromise on is..." and the blogger is stumped. 

I serve my kids foods my parents probably didn't even know existed.  I'm not talking pad thai and quinoa here, but chicken nuggets and top ramen.  My mom MADE HER OWN BREAD and we're not even Mormon.  So letting my kids eat crap just because it simplifies my life definitely feels like a compromise.

I was also raised with no TV, and felt no need to get one as an adult.  When I met my husband, he had 3 TVs in the house where he lived alone.  We quickly whittled that down to one, and banished it to a tiny spare room, but the TV itself has probably the same area as the previous 3 screens combined.  Compromise.

I buy fair trade chocolate chips...and Milky Ways.  I let my kids play video games I haven't screened.  I don't drive drunk, but I do drive after a glass or two of wine.  I read crap literature.  I let my students make a mockery of every seating chart I've ever made.  My happy place is the mountain, but I let my husband's grousing about gas costs focus much of my hiking on the city park.  It's an awesome park, alleged to be the country's largest forested area within city limits, but...it's a compromise.   I went camping every summer for 14 years with the same group of friends, whatever my schedule, my health, or my finances, but this year we're just doing a cookout because of others' schedules, health, and finances.

I live in the exact suburb I grew up mocking.  Suburbs themselves are a compromise of the worst kind--neither city nor country, losing the attractions of each but keeping the downsides of both.

Is there anywhere I won't compromise?  The longer I think about this, the more I begin to wonder.  But I finally come up with my answer.

Me and my Momma, a long time ago.

Love.  I don't compromise on love.  My love for my husband, my kids, my family and friends.  It's solid and real and one area where I am neither wishy-washy nor passive.  I love reading.  I love chocolate.  I love the woods.  I love my home state and the Baltic states.  These are unchangeable. 

Love is where I stand my ground.
 
#FTSF

Get Your Mamms Grammed!

That's what my friend Kristi always says.  We've been friends since 3rd grade, and when she turned 40, exactly four months before I did, she made her first mammogram appointment.  They found cancer.  She went through radiation.  She is a survivor.

My mom also had breast cancer, when she was about 65.  Having lost a dear friend to it before I was even born, and having seen women die of it in her job as a nurse, she already had her plan in place.  She made an appointment for a double mastectomy the day she got the results back.  Then she lived another 12 years.

I'm not very good about taking care of my health.  I love coffee, and sweets, and wine.  I don't work out.  I keep meaning to go to bed earlier.  But I get my mammogram every year.  It's a quick and easy appointment, and, although my dentist requires appointments to be made four months out, I get next-day appointments when I call the Breast Health Clinic.  There are so many ways to take care of ourselves that involve effort.  There are so many unknowns and uncontrollable things that can go wrong.  Breast cancer is common, and when caught early, very often treatable.  I get mammograms to honor my mom, my friend, and my mom's lost friend.  I get mammograms for the sake of my husband and kids.  Who do you do it for? 

The Kindness of Strangers

This post is being written as part of Finish the Sentence Fridays.  The prompt was "The nicest thing someone ever did for me..."

The first thing that popped into my head was the coffee shop owner who paid for my latte when I came into his cafe, dripping wet and counting change onto the counter.  I was dripping wet because I'd walked into town in the January rain without a raincoat.  I was counting change because all I'd brought into town was a pocketful of change, since my errand was to get the local newspapers to look for my mom's obituary.  He didn't know I was recently and deeply bereaved; he just knew I was damp, in need of caffeine, and flustered to be short on cash.  Many people were kind to me during that brutal winter; his act sticks with me because he didn't know how desperately I needed kindness right then, but he was kind anyway.

This reminds me of a more light-hearted kindness-of-strangers story.  In 1992, one of my best friends and I were volunteer English teachers in newly independent Latvia.  It was literally months after the Soviet Union had disbanded; Soviet troops were still in place and Soviet culture permeated society.  It was explained to us that the public surliness of the people was a result of state intrusion into every aspect of life--your personal boundary extended only as far as your own skin, so people guarded that boundary with scowls and gruffness.  We were both placed in small villages where we were able to make some great friends, but the first month was slow going.   Eager for company and conversation, we both made a weekend trip to the capital city so we could spend some time together.

Before she left home, Carla had been given the name and address of a young Latvian woman whose great-aunt she had met briefly in St. Louis.  The address was on a major street in Riga.  We tromped along one wintery day in search of the girl's apartment.  We'd walked about a mile, and were getting very close to the right address, when we came upon a fenced in construction site.  We were about to pass it by when Carla noticed there was a sort of large window cut into the fence, and someone was calmly climbing through it.  "I wonder if the apartment is back there!" she said, so we peeked through.  Yep, beyond the bumpy frozen mud of the fenced in lot was a five story apartment building, number 103, just like on the index card clutched between Carla's gloved fingers.  So we looked around, chuckled, and climbed through the fence.

After skirting the empty lot (nothing was ever built there; eventually the fence came down and grass grew back over the lumpy dirt), we discovered that the apartment building had two doors, both of which were locked.  We approached a woman who was leaving through one doorway and showed her the address.  She was startled to realize we spoke neither Russian nor Latvian, but indicated that the apartment we were seeking was behind the other set of doors.  She trudged across the snow with us and rang the bell.  No response.  We started to shrug and thank her, but she wasn't about to desert the helpless foreigners just yet.  She scooped up a snowball and chucked it at one of the 2nd story windows.  No response.  She tried again.  This time someone came to the window and groused down at her.  She called out an explanation of our situation, and the person buzzed us in to the building.  We scrambled in, trying to thank her before the doors locked again.  She smiled, waved, and clambered through the fence to the street beyond.  We walked up the stairs and knocked on the door of someone who would become a life long friend to both of us.  We never saw her neighbor again, but we spoke of her kindness often.

The pretty, renovated part of Riga.  Image from Riga.inbaltics.com

But Riga of 1992 looked more like this (just imagine it with snow and frozen mud).  Image from Rigabiketours.com)

These stories are far from each other in time and space  One memory makes me chuckle; one makes me want to weep.  Still, they prove the same point.  When life yanks the rug out from under you--no more mom, no common language, no whatever it is you didn't realize you counted on until it was suddenly gone--that is when a simple act of kindness becomes an unforgettable gift. It is so hard to write about without sounding unbelievably corny, but there it is, so yes, pay it forward.

Just Clean Something

So I read this brilliant woman's blog last night.  And I decided that I, too, need to challenge myself to clean something each day for a month.  I know myself well enough to know that if I wait for June 1, I'll forget all about it, so I started last night.  Each day for a month, I will clean something.  Anything.  Just...clean something.  (You gotta love a project that names itself so clearly.)

Here are my rules:  washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking out the trash don't count.  If the kids have a job and I take over get suckered into helping facilitate, that doesn't count.  If I get on a roll (hey, it's happened) and clean MORE THAN ONE THING in one day, I don't get to give myself credit towards future days.  Organizing counts, but decorating doesn't. 

Last night I cleaned out the equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer that's in the hutch.  Tossed a few items, found a few things to donate, and amazed my kids with a box of slides.  "Wow, these are so cool!"  Also discovered that I have more blank cards, return address labels, and stamps than I knew.  So that's handy. 

It occurs to me that in the past couple of weeks, I've written a post based on #BanBusy, finished a sentence for #FTSF, and now here I am trying to #JustCleanSomething.  What's up with that?  Part of it is that having a topic, a writing assignment in a way, is helping me to focus on my writing.  Or--I just read Seth Godin's Tribes--maybe I'm looking for a Tribe. 

Okay, it's Mother's Day, and my kids seem to want my attention.  Off I go. 

Every Day

Dear Mom,
Well.  This might be hard.  I've thought about you daily since you died just over 3 years ago, but unlike Daddy, I haven't talked directly to you.  He used to lay in bed and chat with you at the end of the day.  Peg once asked him, "Where is she when you're talking to her?" and he rather sheepishly replied, "Well, I usually look up towards that air vent in the ceiling."

And now he's gone too, and I try to convince myself that the pair of hummingbirds I saw outside my kitchen window, flitting around the winter-bare apple tree, was the universe's way of assuring me you are together again.

How often do I hear your words coming out of my mouth?  I can even feel my face and body arrange themselves into your patterns.  When Linden mastered riding her bike, I was laughing with delight, and I was rocketed back to memories of your face, filled with joy and pride, laughing your love for me.

I also do a lot of "My mom always said..."  I had no curfew in high school because my mom  always said, "They won't do anything after midnight they couldn't find a way of doing before midnight."  If someone says, "Trust me!" I reply, "My mom always told my dad, 'The last time you said that, we had twins.'"  Oak will take a deep breath when something is missing and say, "We know it didn't grow legs and walk off," and I am awed that this child who never met you has picked up on your phrases.  It makes me wonder how many generations back some of the words and gestures go.

We have no pictures of you in our home.  Your ferocious love for me left no room for my husband, and after one too many times of you exclaiming, "Wendy's here!" when the two of us walked through the door, he stopped wanting to come along.  You hurt some deeply vulnerable place inside of him.  I blame his mother, that last 2% of love she held back from him, but I refrain from saying so.  That's a relationship we both have to maintain.  Our relationship with you is more easily navigated, what with you being dead now.  So I have honored his wish to not be confronted by your face at every turn.  A silhouette of you rowing my big sister in a lake by Mt. Hood is the only photo on our walls.  But I have pictures of you in my classroom and tucked into my desk at home.  Even without those, mementos are everywhere.

In this room alone, there's the piano you and I picked out together after you sold the baby grand when you downsized, the rocking chair you salvaged and kept at the beach cabin, two of your fabric art pieces (one abstract in colors I love, one a 3D wall hanging of Multnomah Falls), your hutch, holding your mismatched china, your clock on the mantel next to the pottery candlestick you made in our backyard kiln...And in the same way my heart melts to hear my son using your sayings, I was moved to notice that when my daughter picked out the dishes for her birthday dinner, she decisively chose only the ones that had been yours, rather than a single one I'd received from my sister or chosen on my own.  They are not your biological grandchildren, but they come from your father's homeland, and they are like you in surprising ways.

I miss you.  Can you hear that, through my chatter?  I wish constantly to be able to talk to you again.  You were always so interested in what I had to say.  It's embarrassing to admit how much I enjoyed that about you.  But I also loved to hear what you had to say.  You were so reflective and wise.  You never apologized for your temper when we were growing up, but in later conversations, you told me about how frightened you were sometimes, how little you understood your own mood swings.  You told me about your own childhood, your own relationship with your parents, what it was like being a young wife and mother in the 1950s.  There are so many ways I am nothing like you.  There are so many ways I am just like you.  When my husband expresses humble awe at my ability to organize the car for a camping trip, I know this is something I learned from you without you even meaning to teach me.  Every plant I name along a hiking trail makes me think of you. 

Every time I let my kids lick out the bowl, which I purposely have left extra batter in, I think of you.

Every time I sew a little repair, I think of you.

Every time I pick a bouquet, put it in a vase, then say, "There.  I cleaned house." 

Every time I yell until my children cringe.

Every time I burst into laughter.

Every time I take a temperature.

Every time I make biscuits.

Every day.
 
Every day.

I love you.
love, Wendy

I wrote this as part of #FTSF (Finish the Sentence Friday.)  I have no idea what I'm doing, but I think I can figure out how to link up.
#FTSF

Hello, I love you.

So here's this week's journal prompt from Alissa at Creative with Kids.

FOCUS: If  you could choose five things your children would say when they are grown, about you in their childhood, what would they be? If you could only make four of those statement happen, which one would you discard? If you could only ensure three of the statements…?  Do this until you have one statement – if you could choose one statement that you hope your children will make about their childhood, what would it be? What is one thing you can do this week to support that statement?

And here is my response.  

1.  Mom used to freak out and do shitty things when we first came home, but then she got some counseling, started taking anti depressants, learned how to control herself, and mellowed out a bunch, thus showing me that people can change, that she loved us enough to change, and that counseling might be a good thing to try if I feel like I'm messing up my life. 

2.  I always knew how much she loved me.

3.  She really listened to me.

4.  I learned so many good and useful things from her, even when she wasn’t trying to teach me directly.

5.  My life long love of both reading and the outdoors come from her. 

I didn’t have to go through the crossing out exercise—it was obvious which one is most important to me.  (Well, the first one is pretty important too, but it seems to be a subpoint of the main idea.) To know you are loved--isn't that what we all need from our parents?  It smooths over so much messiness and human error.  It sets you up to love others, and to differentiate between actual love and any false copies you are offered.  

And let's be honest--I'm hoping that if they can just understand that I love them, they will be able to forgive me for the rest of it.  The "being human" part, and the "things I'm ashamed of" part, and the "things I never even realized I was doing wrong" part and the "things I should have done instead" part.  The absolute certainty that my parents loved me sure helped me deal with the mistakes they made.  

So what can I do to make sure they know?  One thing I’d like to focus on this week is greetings.  Me coming home.  Them coming home.  When they walk into the room I'm in.  Whenever and however we come together after separation, I want them to see me light up.  I know what a gift it was for me as a grown woman, knowing that my parents still lit up whenever they saw me.  It's one of the sorrows of them dying.  Nobody, not even my husband, sisters, or kids, can ever respond to me in quite that way.  I want my kids to have that same sense that their very existence brings me joy.   

Don’t focus on getting my coat hung up first.   

Don’t focus on the dishes I’m working on.  

Don't wade into the management of the evening or scolding about the mess or getting out of these damn shoes.  

 Stop everything and let my delight in my children shine directly at them for a moment.  

It's tempting to add to this, to plan more bedtime snuggles, and focused attention when they tell me about things like Clash of Clans or 1st grade micropolitics,  and asking interesting questions about their day...but I'm still busy banning busy, so I'm not going to overthink  or overplan.  Just...greetings.  

I'm so glad to see you.

Let me give you a hug.

Oh, I've missed you today.

Hi, sweetie!  

Hey there honey, what can I help you with?  

Yay!  You're home!

Look who's here!

And running through all of it, like light shining on water:

I love you.  I love you.  I love you.