You know, single folks aren’t the only ones who dread this holiday. Women who have been with their husbands for over thirteen years do too. People in relationships, who feel all kinds of pressure to do something romantic that day, roll their eyes when the hearts and cupids get busted out as soon as Christmas day is over. Because if we don’t come up with something romantic, something good enough, something that stands up well enough to a 10 year marriage, well, what kind of wives, husbands and partners are we anyway?
Now don’t get me wrong. I love my husband dearly. And I am happy to celebrate our relationship whenever I can. And I certainly don’t think we absolutely must prove the worth of our years together simply because this “Hallmark Holiday” has rolled around once again.
But still. It’s Valentine’s Day and, well, I want to do something for us. Because it’s easy to forget about us and this day reminds us to give what we have some attention.
And yet that pink and red aisle and all those stuffed animals and boxes of crappy (whats in the center of those things anyway) candy just annoy me. And the price gouging for dinner reservations. And those insane $50 bunches of roses. And the cheese-ball, heart shaped, diamond chip encrusted necklaces now on sale at JC Pennys for $99.99. Are you kidding me with all of this?
Please no.
So after all these years together, we have to – once again – come up with something for one another. And not any of the usual over-priced silliness listed above either.
So where does that leave us?
We’ve been trying at this holiday for awhile now. And unless you get super creative and thoughtful, it usually comes up flat. And I feel bad about throwing together a card and a kiss and he feels bad about the sad batch of roses he picked up on the way home at Publix that never bloom. I love you for those roses, hon. I do.
Who are we kidding.
Valentine’s Day is meant for kids….
Who chomp away on those heart shaped candies and gleefully give away tiny perforated Valentine notes, making sure the card they pick for that one cute boy at school is the best one in the bunch, and should they sign “love” before their name, giggle, giggle?
Valentine’s Day is meant for high school sweethearts…
Who buy into the boxes of candy and pink stuffed bears and cards and all of the crap. It’s still a novelty then. And your sweetheart makes your heart soar and who cares how silly it all is, I’m buying it for them and they’re going to love it. And they do.
Valentine’s Day is for first loves…
That’s when you do the dinners out. The bunches of roses. And not care how expensive it is. How could you while you can hardly eat or breathe or think from the distraction of the other. Hearts, hearts, hearts, birds tweeting about your head… so what about the rest.
Valentine’s Day is for when you meet your husband…
Ah yes. Those fluttering hearts and tweeting birds spun furiously about my head in February of ’97 – the first Valentine’s Day I spent with my now husband. Cupid had landed one where it counts and I was utterly besotted, I tell you. Lovesick but on a shoe-string college budget, I was forced to get creative. I made a mixed tape (which is SO what you did for the one you loved back then, never underestimate the romantic power of a good music mix). I also bought a fantastic bottle of pathetically cheap champagne. And I bought four bags of heart shaped balloons. Then, with help from an eye-rolling friend, we blew them all up, bagged them and drove over to where my husband’s car was parked at work, always unlocked. Sure that we would be caught at any moment, I slipped the tape into the tape deck of his old Lumina. I carefully placed the champagne on his passenger seat. And then filled his entire car with those balloons. He drove around for weeks with those balloons in his car.
*Swoon* that he did that too.
Sigh.
That was a good Valentine’s Day.
But as the years have rolled by and kids have busied our days and late work schedules interrupt our nights and breathtaking budgets keep frivolity to a minimum… well, Valentine’s Day? Ugh. Really?
I don’t want any of what’s on sale for that day.
He doesn’t want any of what’s on sale for that day.
The value of our relationship and all that it stands for doesn’t deserve any of what’s on sale for that day.
So where does it leave us? What DO all of our years together actually deserve on Valentine’s Day? Well, the answer is so simple that even CVS forgot to shelve it. If it even could.
The answer is TIME TOGETHER.
The kind of time we had thirteen years ago. The kind of time where we’d meet at a local coffee shop or bar and wind up spending hours there talking and telling stories. The kind of time when we could laugh uninterrupted and dream up fantasy vacations and sit in the space of the other and adore having a partner as amazing as this one.
It is no wonder that stuffed bears and enormous pink boxes of mystery candy and $50 unbloomable roses just don’t hack it.
After thirteen years, nothing seems to do enough justice to our time together other than time itself.
I love you, husband of mine. We’ll find the time. Wilted Publix roses and all.
It’s Groundhog day! It’s my holiday. Cheers, a toast to me.
Well, its my holiday in the Groundhog Day MOVIE sense of the holiday. Do you remember that movie? With Bill Murray? From about 15ish years ago? I remember going to that movie with an old boyfriend. I thought the movie was kind of lame at the time. So did he. I don’t think I ever thought about that movie again. At least not for a long while.
However. Years later, this holiday – in the sense that it is in the movie – has become my day. And I am sure you can guess why. Or why any mother home with her kids might relate. Stuck in my own personal Groundhog Day, I wash the same damn dishes every day, I yell the same demands of “stop beating your brother on the head with a baseball bat” about the same time everyday, I ask daily that they eat their carrots, and pee in the potty, and pick up their underwear off the ground, and not slosh every drop of bathwater onto the floor, and stop jumping on the bed, and WIPE for God’s sake, and yes you DO need a nap, and look both ways. Its always the same. THE SAME. Everyday.
In some ways there is a certain comfort in it all. I know there is for my children. By nature, kids require adults to create predictable rhythms and army issue schedules which we can set our watches to. They need that routine. And parents abide. To a child, in an ever-changing world, that schedule is wholly welcome and needed and comforting. And who am I kidding – the guarantee that I will see my 6 year old at 3:45 everyday is assuring and wonderful and something I look forward to daily.
But while I look forward to 3:45pm, to see him bopping up to my car with his backpack on, it always seems that this day could be the same as the last or the day before or the next day coming. The same buses pass me on the way to school, the same cars line up and sit next to me in the car line, the same fights happen in the backseat on the way home.
Its Groundhog day. Everyday.
Ugh, so… do I really need to make a disclaimer here? And say that while this painfully predictable same same saaaame-ness in my daily schedule can be extraordinarily tedious… and even though I admit to that plainly here… even so, I do truly love being here for my children. Do I need to say that? I hope not. I hope it is clear that I cherish my time with my boys. Just because my job is mind numbing and exhausting, doesn’t mean I don’t love it. I know. It makes perfect sense.
But oh once just to throw nap schedules to the wind, to bust out of the car line, to not have dinner ready at 6pm. My children would be better off for some spontaneity now and then. Which we try to do. And succeed at now and again. But I will tell you this. While the crazy fun is exciting initially, they don’t do so well with unpredictability long term. And they are much easier to parent if they know what’s happening next. So the routine is a must. It allows them to grow, to flourish and to trust that their world around them is still the same and that dinner will be ready by 6pm, I promise.
But still. Happy Groundhog Day to me.
And if you forget to wish me a happy one today, well that’s ok.
Yeah, hi. I’m back. Been MIA awhile but, you know, the holidays and all.
And how did those go? Busy, very busy, lots of family. But really, I just wanted the whole “night-before-Christmas-day-of-Christmas” stuff over with. Usually being around family makes my missing my mom better. And it did. But still. My dad was just so sad. And I was just so sad. And I know my brother was sad. We didn’t exactly stand there and weep and blow our noses on each other’s shoulders or anything. But it was understood. We said nothing when we sat down to eat with one less person. We nodded when we handed over gifts she had bought for us early in the spring. We weren’t exactly clinking glasses and singing “Joy to the World”. We just went through with the whole deal. The kids loved it, and it was certainly comforting to be together so, really, it went fine.
(“Fine”. Yeah. Kind of laughing at myself for writing that. “Fine” is kind of my family’s code word for “it sucked”. “Fine” means that there were no appropriate superlatives. “Fine” is about all you’ve got. So “fine” is never promising.)
We even spent a little time looking at old Christmas movies of years past when my mother was alive. We found her, seconds at a time, before she darted out of the camera shot. But seeing her really did not seem odd at all. She was there, THAT was normal. Her being gone NOW was the weird part.
And we talked about her in the present tense. “Oh mom HATES it when that happens!” “Mom would know where that is.” She is still part of our present after all.
And so the hustle and bustle and the “lets fill up every second of time with busy activity so we don’t get sad” is over. I don’t know about the rest of my fam, but I am certainly breathing a grateful sigh of relief that we’re a few days into 2010 finally. A fresh start, new possibilities, lets go.
Although, my usual inspiration for blog fodder seems a little off right now. Maybe its just post holiday exhaustion. Whatever.
So to remedy that, this afternoon I logged in here, deleted the stacks of spam that had built up, opened up a new post and, well, here I am. Not much point to it. Just kind of checking in. Because sometimes I think just jumping in and writing is the best cure for writers block. It reminds you how much FUN it can be.
Cuz isn’t this fun???
Well. Yeah. Anyway.
Stick with me folks. 2010 is bound to rock out and I am sure as hell not going anywhere.
I’m thinking we need a little cheer around here. A little holiday cheer, in fact. And as the wonderful Buddy the Elf would say:
“The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.”
And so, here are my boys singing loud for all to hear.
When they aren’t showing off, being silly and singing gibberish. Or saying their favorite word “stinky” or laughing about farts.
(Hey. Don’t judge me. When you throw two little boys in front of a camera, already frothed up on sugar cookies, candy canes and Christmas anticipation, you just never know what you’re going to get.)
I had the best intentions. In the spirit of the holidays, I decided to make Christmas cookies for all four of my sons teachers. I love cookies, I mean who doesn’t LOVE cookies, so I baked cookies. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Yeah, well I decided to get creative. Since my son has a peanut allergy, a lot of the Christmas cookie recipes must be ruled out. So sugar cookies can get a little, I don’t know… YAWN… after awhile.
What to do, what to do. Cookie recipes books? No. Of course not. I can handle this.
And then I eyed the candy canes hanging on my tree. Hmmmm. I could crush up candy cane and put it in the cookies. OH! Even better, I could roll them in it. Or how ’bout THIS! Maybe I could swirl a little red food dye in (…don’t look at me that way…) and maybe get that Christmas-ish, candy caney, red swirling effect. Yeah. It’ll be great.
So maybe I was distracted by my father on the phone. Cut me a break, he’s trying to figure out how he’ll get from his house to the train station in DC tomorrow. And feet upon feet of snow are coming down. “Get a ride to the metro Dad! And don’t shovel all of that, whatever you do, it’s not good for your heart!”
*Squirt*
I had the food coloring in hand. And. Maybe? I squirted too much in.
Oops. So I stirred the mix. When suddenly? I had Pepto Bismal colored cookie dough mix.
Yeah. Awesome. Well. To hell with it. I rolled it into balls and dipped each into the crushed candy cane. Into the oven they went.
Out came this.
EEEWWWWWWWWWW…..
And, to top it all off (so to speak) the candy cane melted and stuck to the pan. So, as I tried hacking them off the cookie sheet I busted my cheap ass spatula. Crack. Just like that. So, it was a free cake spatula from Publix but it was nice and thin so it didn’t mess with the cookie shape. Yeah well, cracking it sure messed with that particular cookie’s shape.
Merry Christmas to my son’s teachers. Truly, I had the best intentions. And I *think* they taste ok (if you shut your eyes and try reeeeally hard not to think that I just mixed in a tub of Bepto Bismal).
I’m linking to Craftastrophe too. If they want to feature this particularly unfortunate batch of cookies along with some choice words about my cookie skillz, it would be my honor.
I was a Barbie freeeak when I was younger. I’m not sure what it was exactly about those dolls. It certainly was not about the whole fashion, try her in a million outfits thing. Sporting some outrageously colored, polyestered, peter pan collared hand me downs and tinted glasses – while a victim of it, I was not very concerned with fashion. For me, I think my obsession was having a little adult that I could put into made up situations. It was about wondering what it would like to be a grown woman someday. And so I created these elaborate story lines about going on trips and meeting people and having a job with a real computer (a novelty back then) and doing grown-upish things.
Did I yearn to be the blond, unrealistically proportioned bean pole that she represented? Well. Not consciously. Do I think Barbie sets unrealistic body image ideals in girls minds? Um, yeah I do.
But I still loved playing with them. And the glorious imaginary world I created (and escaped into) with them was worth whatever mind melding she did to me. Yeah, I hate my baby belly and wished I could tighten up some and my chest is so far from the example she set for me… but whatever. Barbie was a blast!
And back then, my Barbie came something like this.
The other day I gathered my courage and braved Toys R Us. I rarely set foot in there. It gives me a headache. Too much plastic. Maybe its a BPA thing.
But it’s that time of year again (you know – the most wonderful time of the year?), so I headed in during a rare child-free moment. And. I will admit something. When I walked past all those aisles in Toys R Us, I slowed right down when I saw all the pink.
The Barbie Aisle.
I remember all of those wistful moments spent in the pink aisle of Toys R Us as a little girl, day dreaming about all the cool Barbies and extras and houses and cars and horses and fun I could have. So I couldn’t help but sneak a peak and see whats in there. Yes, even with the stupid body image crap that I so wish Barbie didn’t perpetuate, I would have bought Barbies for my daughter if I had one.
So there I was the other day. Checking out the goods, slightly wistful, at the ripe old age of 36.
And that’s when I saw this new Barbie being sold.
Um.
What the hell?
(And please note. She has been turned demurely here for the pic. The plunge is much “plungier” when seen full frontal, so to speak.)
Ok, so I could forgive the big boobs and wasp like waist before because Barbie was wearing clothes that actually covered up those distorted parts. For the most part. But this one? Wearing “a striking black dress with plunging neckline”???
Oh no. Not ok. Sorry Barbie. A dress cut down to your navel is not part of the Barbie world I come from. Nor should it be for any little girl. I just can’t push my feminist tendancies aside for this (must crack horrid holiday pun here… wait for it…) “Ho Ho Ho” look.
Just bad.
And so is the slightly oversized, Brat doll-esque head that gives the illusion that her strangely disproportionate body is even tinier than it was before. Yep, Barbie has slimmed down so much, her head – with hardly much substance to hold onto – may loll off its own body and roll away.
Don’t call this fashion. Don’t call this keeping up with your market. Don’t call this anything but a reeeeally bad idea. Oh. And you know what else I’d call this doll.
A couple years ago, when I still considered myself new to Florida, I noticed something quite fascinating happening out my window while I was decorating my Christmas tree.
It looked like we were having a snow flurry.
Was this a Christmas miracle? But we were in shorts, the sliding door was open, it was balmy as usual, how could this be?
And then I looked more closely and realized the “flurries” were something else, something from a local plant, flying through the air. But that was ok. Because if I didn’t look right at it while I focused on tree decorating, I could kind of sort of pretend it was a flurry outside. And the music playing in the background seemed to make just a little more sense. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
We’ll take what we can get, flurries with our shorts on.
I decided to tape these flurries this year. Enjoy Florida’s version of a “White Christmas”.
It’s so predictable isn’t it? The holidays arrive on the scene and *BAM* time to get all buuuummed out again. Yup, here I’ve been moving along pretty well the past few months. I’ve somehow managed to keep my “happy” momentum going at a fairly steady, normal-ish pace… and then the holidays come along and that momentum fades to a slow, hiccuping crawl.
Because, oh yeah. My mom is gone.
It’s a strange thing. My mother has lived many states away from me for almost two decades. She’s even lived continents away from me at times. It’s been years since I’ve lived near my mother for very long periods. Honestly, I’m not sure either of us would have survived it if I had. So I have prepared for the holidays without her many times over. I’ve spent most Thanksgivings without her. I’ve even had quite a few Christmases without her too.
So why is it that this year, as I drive by neighborhood decorations and pick up a poinsettia for my front stoop, that I feel such blank, cold loss?
Ok, sure. It’s because she’s gone.
But still. Sometimes (and here’s when the guilt creeps it’s way in) the void she’s left rings through my soul much MUCH more loudly than her actual presence ever did. She seems to have made a larger impression on my life dead than she did alive.
Ugh. That’s real nice.
But I’ll just assume there’s probably some very logical explanation for this, straight out of a psychology text book, under the chapter marked “Grieving Process”. (There better be, or else it’s probably found under the chapter marked “Sucky Daughter”.)
Whatever it is, I have no say over it. I’m simply sad because someone – who was never here very much anyway – is gone forever.
Here’s the thing. I LOVE Christmas time. I totally over-do the lights and holly and the silver and gold. And Christmas music? I think I may have five versions of every jingle. You want “Winter Wonderland”? Well, I’ve got that in Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra. Bring it. I love to get all holly jolly up in here.
So I really WANT to be happy. And I think I can be happy this year. I just need a little Christmas cheer, that’s all. Because I don’t have our tree up yet (we only just got back from our Atlanta a few days ago). But I would bet my last candy cane that I’ll feel much much better once we do. MUCH better. And when we go to see the local Christmas lights show, I’ll simply ooze with yuletide glee. And then I’ll make some sugar cookies (and stuff my face with half the batch), pour myself a hearty glass of wine, haphazardly toast my fantabulously over-decorated tree and fricking CRANK those Christmas tunes… (Mmmmm, Christmas with the Carpenters. That Karen, she has got a voice of an angel, I tell you….)
That’s called COPING, people.
Really though, I just need to learn to do things differently this year. I need to work around the loss. Not ignore it. Just acknowledge that its there, maybe drop a little tinsel on it, offer it a spot near the tree and hand it over a cup of rum-soaked eggnog. There’s no other way around it – grief and loss will just have to be part of the… er… festivities.
So, here’s where I pull myself up by my Christmas stockings and get on with it.
Right?
Just get on with it.
Ching ching ching.
Deck those halls.
Feel the spirit.
Ok.
….ok.
(And here’s a little Christmas diddy for my mom from Karen herself…)
No, I’m not entirely packed. It’s past 11:00pm the night before we leave and crap is everywhere. The bottoms of my six year old’s special spiderman pajamas are still at large. Actually, I’m not sure that ANY pajamas have been located. (*Scribbling this fact down on the list next to me.*) I think we are going to have to bring the training potty (thanks to my 3yo being a little particular about exactly where he goes… ew to that). We can’t forget to bring the antibiotics my 6yo started today thanks to the 100 degree fever he sprouted this morning. Coloring books, DVDs, snacks, juice boxes (if they’re organic and contain 25% sugar, maybe the sugar freak outs will be 25% less freaky? My logic must work…), games, stuffed bears and a tooth box. What’s that? It’s the little box my 6yo likes to keep his tooth in for the tooth fairy. Because his front right tooth is hanging on by a very thin thread, it is something to be seen (or not) I tell you. Wow. Will it make it – still attached – to our destination, I do not know.
And I suppose now isn’t the time to realize that I don’t even own that many “winter” clothes. Shoot. I’ve only now just come to terms with the fact that I should not pack my flip flops. What the hell. I have totally lost my previously hardened Winterized edge. I remember the days in Boston when I scrambled over frozen snow hills, pregnant, to catch my bus. Now? I am CLUELESS. And ashamed.
So. Tomorrow. Hot-lanta. Thanksgiving with family and friends and dogs and kids and cooking and copious mugs of mulled cider. I hope to check in during a free moment while the rest lull around the house in tryptophan induced comas and I am hopped up on one of those 25% less sugar juice boxes.
But until then, if you are wondering how our trip is going, I’ll leave it to “They Might Be Giants” to illustrate what I expect our day will be like tomorrow.
Without further ado, I introduce to you a favorite Morningside Family car trip tune: “813 Mile Car Trip”.
So Valentine’s Day is coming up.
The other day I gathered my courage and braved Toys R Us. I rarely set foot in there. It gives me a headache. Too much plastic. Maybe its a BPA thing.
Um.
It’s so predictable isn’t it? The holidays arrive on the scene and *BAM* time to get all buuuummed out 
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