Owners of classic cars (beauties!) joined together one recent Saturday to raise funds for a local historic site. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and the scents of grilled beef and car exhaust wafted through downtown. There is a sizeable fountain at one of the main intersections, and it was too irresistable not to let my son play in the water on such a stifling day.

Desperation will set in soon. I can feel it mounting.

It’s not like I’m not searching for employment. Maybe I’m just looking in all the wrong places. At any rate, I just put the child in day care this week. The structure and social setting have done him worlds of good. He kept saying, “I wanna go work.” He calls day care “work.” It’s toe-curlingly cute; his vocabulary and sentence structure are growing every day! He sorely misses the day care he was in before we moved, and I regret having to remove him from such a great environment. But here we’re paying half the tuition, which is great.

I miss my work, too. Finding a new job is scary — all the unknown factors. I don’t know if I’ll find something in this town that’s as good as the job I just left. Certainly I can hope for that or better, but at this point my hope is waning. I hate the task of having to sell myself just to get a frickin’ job.

Here’s a pic of my son from Father’s Day 2007, age 1.5 year:

 

I’m not dead!

For those of you unfamiliar with Monty Python, a scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

I haven’t been online much in the past month. Well, blogging anyway. Moving back to my parents’ has been interesting. My two year old son takes up every bit of oxygen and energy when he’s conscious, so my parents and I haven’t really had much of a chance to get in each other’s hair. My son is very active and very curious. He can’t just leave well enough alone when he’s told, so he has to be watched every second. When he isn’t under sharp supervision, he wanders off or he gets into dangerous/ destructive circumstances. Oh, the child. Most of the time he wants 100% attention anyway, so simply watching him won’t do. He makes me smile, that rotten little boy.

Time has slipped away so quickly. I’ve spent so much time dallying that I’m ashamed to admit how little I’ve done in the way of searching for new employment.

There was a tornado in the neighborhood just before sunrise on Mother’s Day. Two times in my life I’ve been so scared that my body shook uncontrollably. The first was when I was being rolled down a hospital corridor to have a C-section and all the cords had been unplugged and I couldn’t hear my baby’s heartbeat and I was scared for both our lives. The second was the morning of Mother’s Day this year when the wind was so loud and the only other thing we could hear were the loud cracks and enormous thuds of trees. Mom and Dad were awakened upstairs by the falling of limbs onto the roof. They quickly grabbed the baby and brought him to the basement (he had gone to sleep upstairs the night before). We emptied a safe closet of spare luggage and huddled in fear; listening to the wind made every second feel like an eternity. Mom told me to run to my room and get shoes and something to go over my gown. I stood with the flash light for a moment and stared at the window, listening to the wind howl. My knees and legs were trembling. I forced myself to go into the bedroom, but I couldn’t make my mind focus on grabbing anything, so I ran back to the safe closet with nothing but the light. The worst of the wind lasted only a few minutes. My son was still disoriented from being abruptly awakened, and he was scared because of the palpable fear emanating from the three adults; he stayed in my mother’s arms without complaint. How long we stayed near the closet after the wind died down, I do not know. We were frightened that the tornado might come back. Times like those are what make me realize how very precious life is.

As dawn approached we disbanded into our corners of the house, dressing for the day, preparing for what we knew would be a long one. I peaked out the window on what used to be a lovely thick horizon of trees at the far end of the back yard. Only a few tall trees were silhouetted against the dark gray sky. A new cherry tree, which we planted only the day before had been blown to perfect diagonal in its muddy spot. As the light grew stronger, the scenery grew increasingly grotesque as more and more of the aftermath became visible.

Nature is awesome and stunning. Thankfully, the house and the cars were untouched, but several large trees in the yard were either snapped like twigs midway up their trunks or had been completely uprooted in the wind. All of the day was spent recovering as best we could. Other home owners in the neighborhood were not so fortunate. We learned that a married couple just a few houses down were barely out of their bed during the tornado when a tree landed in the middle of their bedroom. We think our houses and our lives are untouchable until something like this comes along. We have been very blessed to have very good friends and members of my parents’ church come to help with all the trees in the back yard.  It has been amazing to see how people have come together to help each other in this disaster.

All this to say: there has been quite a bit of upheaval and complete disarray keeping me from updating the blog in recent weeks. Things will settle down eventually, but not any time in the near future, I think.

The genius and I dated happily for seven months before we conceived a child. We were mushy, sappy, goofy, young and stupid; we didn’t stop to ask the all-important questions about ourselves or each other. We both wanted children; we agreed on many principles and we saw our lives taking shape as a singular entity rather than the two very different human beings that we were. I made my decision about him rather early — that I wanted to spend my life with him; not such a smart idea, but I was living intuitively.

We weren’t ready to jump immediately into having a family, but we weren’t careful enough. We really wanted to be more financially stable with a couple of graduate degrees to our names before there were any babies, but we weren’t committed enough to ourselves to ensure that pregnancy wouldn’t happen. I fault myself for not implementing any kind of contraceptive measures. I was too accommodating to insist he help me out in that regard, and he was one to actually drop the line that every girl is warned of.  You know the one, don’t you? Of course you do! There are even commercials about it on every kind of media, for crying out loud.

Ready or not, a tiny life was created. I knew within days . There were the usual symptoms of the monthly ordeal exquisite joy of being a woman, but there were other symptoms, too. I did minor research about the body weirdness, then proceeded to the nearest store for their stock of pee-stick tests. The test results were all positive, of course. When I shared the news with the genius, he was quietly happy. He assured me that he would not run away from the responsibility. He asked me to marry him shortly after I told him about the baby. We decided to get married because our respective upbringings dictated that this was how an unmarried couple should handle pregnancy.

I was terrified of what my parents would think of me. I knew it would break their hearts that their only child (and only daughter) had gone against their will and against their God, and conceived a child in her iniquitous living. I kept the pregnancy from my parents for three months because I was delaying the inevitable. I was in shock and still dealing with the magnitude of suddenly having a family of my own; I wasn’t ready for the disappointment that I knew I would cause my parents, and the unbearable guilt I knew I would feel when their unhappy faces saw the truth in me. The news wasn’t met with celebration when we finally did fess up. It didn’t take them long to get excited about the coming of their first grandchild, but that first night was a big upset. Mom had a few questions and choice comments, but Dad simply crossed his arms and frowned.

Dad had recently been ordained as a deacon at the church, and all through the ceremony I was burning with the knowledge that I was a blemish on his record as a father (in this particular belief, that means head of household who should be in control of the actions of the family). Truth be told, mom is really the one who has always worn the pants in the family, so it was her disapproval and pain that burrowed deepest into me. The guilt of being a blight to my family reputation burned in me like seering coals. I cried rather harder than maybe I would have at the ordination if there hadn’t been a tiny human growing in my unwed womb. I have since come to terms with why I felt so guilty, and I’ve let go of the severe expectation upon myself to be perfect and live by such a hampering set of rules. To hem myself in with all those crazy Do’s and Don’t’s is to set myself up for failure on too many levels. I now embrace my humanity, which is not to say that I’m purposefully Living In Sin; I’m taking a page from Sally’s book of wisdom — I’m being empathetic to myself. I’m taking loving care of me (or at least trying my damnedest to), which I haven’t done in a long time, if ever I did to begin with. 

Dad and I don’t have to verbalize our thoughts to communicate with each other. It has always been this way. Subtle facial expressions, or eye contact alone is how most of our personal communication goes. When dad shored himself up that day (Father’s Day!) behind folded arms, the sadness in his eyes made me want to run and hide. He was hurt. And mad. And disappointed. And afraid for me. I had become accustomed to being a big disappointment to my mother because she’s always had such high hopes and expectations for me. At some point in time I accepted the fact that I could either do everything she wants me to do, and possibly still have her want and expect more for/ from me, or I could live with being the constant disappointment. I love my mother dearly (love you mom), but I’ve had to draw personal boundaries that I’m learning to live by so I can be sure I’m doing what’s right for me. I hate to make it sound like me, Me, ME, but right now I’m working on finding my center. I still take into consideration my responsibilities and the expectations put upon me, but I’m learning to make my decisions for me – not based on how someone else will react or judge. This is my one life; I can’t waste any more time scrambling in circles trying please everyone else. If ever I get back to biblical living, this self-love, self-care thing will benefit others, in terms of “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” I’m not trying to go about this in a selfish way, but I do want to be happy. Isn’t that a basic need?

Looking up into dad’s hurt eyes was exactly why I waited to tell my parents about the baby. It may, in fact, have been the biggest Facing The Music moment in my life. We all lived to tell.

Pounds lost in eight months: 32

And for what it’s worth: 5 pounds to BMI 30.

I was emptying drawers yesterday afternoon. I know I haven’t given you the novel I promised on why things with the genius are falling apart. It will still come, just not before I interject: I’m moving back to my home town. I do not wish to pay another month’s rent here, so I’ve got the rest of April to put all the pieces together. 

Six months of intense soul-searching has brought me to this strange precipice. I’ve known it was coming, this life-altering decision I would have to make. I was afraid that there wouldn’t be any sign-posts along the way and that I would just have to leap, terrified, into the unknown. Clinging to the hope that I wouldn’t have to go so blindly, I was bouyed and I’ve been rewarded.

When I finally started to do something about all the mess I’m in, puzzle pieces came into view. I don’t want to say I’m jaded, but with each little step I have to keep questioning and doubting and hoping. It’s a new life. I don’t want to lose the urgency to live wide open. There is much to do. There is much to hope for.

I raised a sport purse out of a deep drawer, and when I opened the purse, a fortune cookie fortune greeted me from a clear pocket: “Your dearest wish will come true.” It’s not really one wish in particular. It’s a schema of wishes. At a time when everything seems ripe, I want to say yes to life. I still waver with uncertainty, but I’m now taking steps, no matter the measure, instead of lying stagnant in fear and confusion.

(The link to “yes” in the previous paragraph is one of the best stories ever. Read it. It’s worth it.)

For some reason, this post is giving me fits to republish from the old blog, so I’m re-entering the whole shebang:

This is my favorite cookie recipe from childhood. It brings to memory the dark brown kitchen cabinets of the house of my youth. The yellow linoleum and its golden glow reflecting under the light of the over-the-stove vent. The warm, cocoa-rich aroma and the fun of helping mom cook. It’s a very good memory, and so are the cookies.

No-Bake Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients 
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1/2 cup milk
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
3 to 4 tablespoons peanut butter, optional
3 cups quick oats (or old-fashioned)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preparation
Combine chocolate chips, peanut butter (if used), oats, and vanilla in a large mixing bowl. Combine the margarine, milk, and sugar in a saucepan; bring to a rolling boil. Boil for 1 minute. Combine the hot mixture with the oatmeal and chocolate chip mixture; stir well. Drop by spoonfuls onto wax paper; let cool. Voila. Disperse as desired.

Note: quantities of this recipe’s ingredients can be tweaked, and other complementary ingredients can be added to taste. Love it!

A friend has told me I need to smile more. Maybe that friend is right, as I do tend to gravitate toward being Eeyore-ish more than I should. Here’s a poem I wrote in an electronic invitation for a baby shower I rounded up for a co-worker a few months ago:

In the blink of an eye December is here,
and the birth of Laura's baby boy draws near!       

So let's get together in this shivery weather;
we'll celebrate the approaching date!       

Think practical for the parents-to-be,
for this is their first child, you see.       

Lavender wash for sweet baby dreams;
to protect baby's bottom: diaper rash cream!       

Blankets, pacifiers, bibs and toys;
teethers, burp cloths, sleepers for boys.   

When shopping for baby, be in the know:
Daddy would like neither frill nor bow.       

Light foods will be served; don't eat too much lunch!
We do hope you'll come. ~The Agency Bunch

It was a fun little party, and the mommy had no idea we were conspiring for a month to give her a baby shower! At 43, she is doing well with her perfectly healthy little man. He looks just like her, and simultaneously he looks newborn and geriatric. Newborns are amazing little creatures.

Dead blogs are a bummer. I haven’t intended to neglect this one, but my time and energies have been very limited lately. My proximity to computers is either at work (where I’m supposed to be working) or at home (where my new blog isn’t supposed to be known). So, I don’t have much time to devote to this blog. I suppose I could wait until the genius is sleeping, but I go to bed before he does, and I really value staying asleep these days.

We are down to one vehicle for the family. My car — my dependable, faithful, practical car — perished last Tuesday in an accident I cannot talk about for insurance and legal reasons. I cannot even divulge the severity of anything to do with the incident, but you can glean from this that it was not my day to die.

The continuation of the Shaken and Stirred context is underway, albeit slowly. I am simply letting you know that I am here, and I have not forgotten. Carry on!

The tail-spin began when I was a sophomore in college. Flannery was right when she said everything that rises must converge. A mass of tiny little pieces joined over me and crushed me with their weight. Against warnings of many a concerned adult, I studied Christianity at my university of choice. Not the umbrella of “religion,” but specifically Christianity. Until then I was a faithful Baptist — a Bible Belt Baptist at that. As a compliant person by nature, it was easy to plug in and be herded. The blindness of the faith (that by the faithful is considered a positive) was a blindness that covered more areas of my life than I was aware needed awakening. Delving into the classes taught by alleged heretics, I became bogged down and befuddled by the politics of religion. We dissected dogma, we devil’s-advocated ourselves silly, we waxed poetic and theoretic on all things above and below (and whether those above and below places even exist). There were too many questions, options, and political institutions. Christianity became more about social control or acceptance, and the faith wasn’t enough for my mind to hang onto. I became simultaneously apathetic and burnt-out. I was two classes away from having that Christianity degree when I graduated with a studio art degree.

Shortly after the big burn-out in that sophomore year, I started dating someone. We had our good moments and he had some very endearing qualities, but mom was right when she called him “The Evil Presence.” Even though he and my parents got along very poorly, and knowing he had an open disrespect for women, I continued dating him. Two years into our relationship I allowed myself unblinkingly to be engaged to this person. You know it’s a bad sign when the bride-to-be hesitates on setting the wedding date. I kept giving generalized projections like, “maybe the fall after I graduate college,” or “maybe the following spring.” A very great friend, at the thought of my eventual marriage to this person, told me that she would be the one to come yelling and screaming at the “speak now, or forever hold your peace” bit of the ceremony. That was a major wake-up call.  The next epiphany was when I made a phone call and reached the husband of the woman I was trying to call. He sounded just like her. They were a middle-aged couple, and listening to his voice — the tone, the cadence, the annunciation — made me think about being married to The Evil Presence and growing to be like him and sound like him over the years. My instinct was “I don’t want to be like him!!” I didn’t immediately end the relationship like I should have; we fizzled miserably for another six months.

Three weeks after I graduated college, my father flew off a tin roof and met a landing that required rods, screws, and replacement joints for all his broken (or obliterated) bones. The fiance was jealous of all the time I spent at the hospital with my father. He was an absolute snot about visiting his fiance’s (my) father in the hospital after the major accident. If that wasn’t flabbergasting enough, he also started behaving suspiciously. He began using a pass-code to get into his mobile phone (hmm, something to hide?). The way he kissed me changed drastically. He was more moody than usual. Then someone in my network of acquaintances reported seeing my fiance sharing an intimate lunch with another woman. The town is so small that you can’t go anywhere without seeing someone you know, and the fiance had a history of finding a new fling before letting go of the previous one. I knew without doubt he was cheating. That’s when I had no problem ending the relationship with that guy.

As a new graduate, I hadn’t sought full-time work. Through the last year of college I’d worked weekends running the office of a medical staffing agency — two twelve hour days together. The weekend job was perfect in allowing me to get my work done in two days so I could be a full-time student and focus on my studies during the week. After dad’s accident, the weekend job let me take care of dad during the week when he came home from the rehab hospital. My mother was able to care for him over the weekends, and we alternated thusly for as long as he needed us.

Fast-forward a few months, and I’m working a second part-time job. When I wasn’t working the weekend medical staffing agency job, I worked in the frame shop of the local art mart. [Framing is a lucrative business if you don't mind the manual labor of creating the moulding and building the frames. The rest is a breeze, but I digress.] I averaged about 25 hours a week at the frame shop. A week-day employee in the staffing office was becoming increasingly disabled due to a mounting case of carpel tunnel syndrome added to the high stress level of the office. The staffing office was in the middle of the hospital, amidst two nursing stations and across the hall from an intensive care unit. Medical personnel see a lot of high-stress *stuff* at their jobs, and when our employees needed a place to vent, the office was the perfect place — most times, the closest. Many times we were chewed on by the medical staff simply because we were their first contact after leaving a severely stressful situation. The staffing office also required acute attention to detail (nothing went undocumented), critical thinking skills always at the ready, and double-time speed and accuracy in everything. Amplifying the stress was our tyrant director who expected everyone to read her mind, and the woman had zero consideration for others’ perspectives or feelings. [I swear, I myself was never without heartburn during the five years I worked there. Even thinking now about those crazy days, my chest gathers tension and my adrenaline is up!] When the staffer with the deteriorating health missed work, nine times out of ten I was the one filling her shift. Between the two jobs I worked upwards of 80 hours some weeks.

Working weekends, I had been out of church for two years. Being so busy with work and decompression after work, I never made time to deal with my uncertainty regarding religion, God, spirituality, etc. My psyche was still reeling with the bitterness of the break-up months before. Even though I despised him and knew that I was so much better off without him, I still missed all the details that make a relationship. I missed him a little bit, too — the scoundrel. Wading through those emotions drained my motivation for any other kind of psychological reckoning. Just when I was starting to be open to the possibility of dating again, a co-worker at the frame shop took pity on my single status and suggested emphatically that I should meet a buddy of hers.

Enter: The Genius. My co-worker brought her friend by the shop one day to introduce him to me. His face was familiar and I placed him immediately — the psychology student who was always hanging around the psychology building any hour of the day or night. I took one psychology class during my time in college, and that was the same semester that I recoiled from religion and lost my sanity. It was all I could do to keep fair marks that semester. I spent odd hours at the psychology lab studying and making up for lost time. Sometimes this guy was in the lab, too — usually he was asleep with a funny note saying, “please wake me up at suchandsuch time.” I remembered thinking he was good-looking — he had the dark hair and eyes that always catch my attention. He was just a background character in the life I lived then; we never even so much as said hello. I officially met him when my co-worker introduced us at the frame shop a couple of years later.

And so it was that I was adopted as the newest member of a bong-happy clan. My co-worker, her boyfriend, and the Genius were a close-knit crew who loved to while the hours away in the inebriated glow of marijuana (and god knows what else). I was hesitant to partake of the high; in fact, it was months before I even dabbled, which I only did because I gave in to the curiosity and the awkwardness of being the one in the group who abstained. It wasn’t for me — I care about my brain cells and my lungs, thank you. And the smoke isn’t friendly to the sensitive sinuses I’ve inherited from my mother. I continued hanging around with the laid-back crew because I liked the genius.

He is incredibly brilliant, the genius. His aptitude for math and scientific logic are well above average. He has a silver tongue and can easily convince lesser minds of anything at all. For three months he remained aloof, but when July rolled around he suddenly saw me as more than a friend. Those first few months I was so taken with his smooth talking and his seemingly endless depth of knowledge. He’s romantic far beyond 95% of the male population, I guarantee. On the weekends he would sometimes walk from his apartment close by just to visit me at the medical staffing office. On these occasions he usually brought me a flower he had plucked along the way.

It’s amazing the things we let slide when we think we’re in love. We were so over the moon that our flaws were invisible among the fervent love we had for one another. We talked of marriage and children; we shared views on many different aspects of life at the time. [I've since learned that principles in theory can be vastly different from principles in practice.] In his favor was the fact that my parents didn’t (openly) disapprove of him. There wasn’t a single thought in our minds that we should really assess ourselves as individuals and as a pair. Before the honeymoon period was over, we were rushed into more commitment and responsibility than we were prepared for. In March I was with child.