this is what happens... part 2

in the pool saturday maddy pulled my bathing suit out and peered inside. i asked what on earth she was doing.

looking at (owen)'s food, she said.

this is what happens to someone who also forgets the 18 m well-baby exam

yesterday, alarmed that owen was in his second day of non-stop diaper runs, i racked my brain.

what on earth have i been eating?!

only after checking off everything i'd consumed the previous three days did it occur to me that one had nothing to do with the other.

owen is 21 months old, and i think he stopped nursing seven months ago.

*

big much and tiny bit she'll now say.

our new inside joke. how much i love my maddy.

the first time she said "tiiiiny bit" narrowing a gap between her thumb and finger until they almost touched, i gasped in laughter.

one very bad valentine's vern gave me a bear. it is white with a red shirt reading, "i love you this much!" his paws are clasped tightly together, held there by magnets in each. vern found it in the kmart check-out lane.

i love you thiiiiis much.

our old inside joke. how much my vern loves me. always announced as he squints with one eye through a tiny opening between his thumb and first finger.

me, too

maddy's first words were 'baby' and 'abby'. her first sentences were in fact her name said over and over and over again in varied inflection. eager for lunch, arguing with her brothers, cuddling. she was only ever saying her name on unending replay but what we heard was "feed me first!" and "caleb. back. off." and "i love you so much."

her first sentence containing two distinct and separate words was 'thank you'. she said it with such deep, genuine emotion that it would knock me back in wonder for how gracious a thank you could be. as if i'd never really heard a 'thank you' before. standing naked beside the toilet. she would throw her arms around me with such unrestrained joy that i had helped her pull down her panties to go pee. "oh, thank you, mommy!" taking the crust off her bread. finding her shoes.

when we told her "i love you, maddy" she would say in a soft demure chime "thank you."

it is the sweetest response i've ever heard to those three little words.

i taught her then how much i loved her. in maddy's language, "big much".

and then may came and one day i said, "i love you, maddy."

and she said, "no you not wuz me. i peed in my's pants. i hit nincoln. i not eat mines carrots. you not wuz me."

i could translate it to proper english, but then it wouldn't sound like maddy. she has the hardest time saying 'love'. it comes out 'wuz'. and since then i have been given at least three reasons i don't really love my baby girl each time i tell her i do.

i remind her i always love her, no matter what. and how much do i love her? from that very first day in may she has now said, pinching her thumb and first finger together, "tiiiiny bit."*

sometimes i ache for her innocent and free toddlerdom so quickly slipping away.

sometimes i get cold sweats fearing what is in store for us when she hits her tweens and discovers fully the great power of manipulation.

sometimes i wonder how much i sound like maddy in my prayer and response to His unconditional love.

i'm not really deserving Your love. i was an arrogant, crappy, nasty mom today. i was lazy. i totally neglected my husband. and my mom.

memememememememe.

amen.

sometimes i practice feeling a thank you, Lord, as much as my two year old daughter does.

i write

we spent weeks researching laptops last summer before investing in an hp hdx 16. the first time we turned her on, she froze. within three months, the 't' button had broken off.

i finally let her go to be fixed and in the month it took hp to repair and send her back, i lamented not going apple. though no one chided me for that. not that specifically. apparently every(non-mac)else has a dell and was shocked vern and i never got that memo. every(non-mac)else exclaiming, "what?! you didn't get a dell?!" totalling at least six people within our close network of family and friends and three of their entire offices.

plus one to each tally if you include vern and vern's office. vern who just brought home his own dell laptop from work. vern who sat in agreement with every(dell)else about how great dells are, and the speed of their service center. heck. most of them paid a little extra to have dell come to the house and the great value in that...

and let me repeat now how 'we' researched laptops for weeks.

a few days into our internet black-out, the bedroom's digital converter box blew and our living room tuner lost nearly every signal available.

i did not panic having lost the french open finals and call mediacom. no. i read. and read. and remembered how much i miss reading when not distracted by hot men on clay, yahoo news and facebook.

but more than that, i missed writing.

loading the dishwasher, folding clothes, mopping the floor, trying to forget the tire of doing push-ups and really wishing that portion of jillian's shred was over with already as it's my least favorite bit of the workout... during these mundane activities so many random things i want to tell the kids when they aren't kids anymore spring to mind. about me. about what i don't know. about what i do. about them.

and this is where i write it.

on a blog kept public - resisting the urge to become by invitation only - because if i know anyone, at anytime, can peer inside... i don't know. i guess i feel what i say to my three carries more weight if i'm not afraid of someone else hearing me say it.

around here we grate our own cheese

there was a joke going around when i was a kid that i belonged to the milk man. an old joke that became overtly tongue-in-cheek when applied to me.

i did not like meat. especially the red meat my family raised. how else could one be born to a family of hard-working nebraska cattlemen and not appreciate God's cannery unless they were, indeed, the milk man's?

i used to object that i didn't like milk either.


grandpa did not know what to do with me. he could tempt me not with a hamburger. steak. prime rib. his signature grill was a three-inch porterhouse. we would sit together and he would look sadly from his dish, years cumulative hard-work, perseverance and planning perfectly marbled and medium-rare, to my plated cheeze-wiz sandwich.

i never would have survived had i been born a generation or two earlier, he would grieve.

i would correct him that i could have lived off berries.


it didn't help any that we'd have these discussions about what a shame of a prairie woman i would have made while looking out the window at a herd of grazing angus. my cousin that summer habitually failed to close a pasture gate and inevitably cattle would be found wandering around. peering in the kitchen window watching us eat... the them of last year.

so darn cute.

i didn't have trouble eating beef because it came from something so darn cute; i had trouble eating beef because i didn't like the taste. and moreover, i couldn't stomach the feel of raw meat. it's hard to shape a hamburger patty without touching it. hard to trim a steak. a chicken. wrap a roast. stuff a turkey.

i would cook with my grandfather and he would spy me acting all silly and squeamish. my grandfather loved me, but he knew i was just too lazy to have ever survived his generation. and he told me so. with love. and a little pity.

meat came from neat and tidy wrapped packages at the grocery store. cowboys were nearly extinct. people were turning vegetarian. the world was going soft, and i was its proof.

last week we stopped buying bagged cheese. i had read the ingredients listed on our package of shredded. i had uncovered my mother's old grater. i told my family, from now on we grate our own.

the first time i did so, the kids watched with awe. they didn't realize cheese came in hunks. they were fascinated to watch the slivers fall down and pile up. the soft, springy, salty pyramid of colby jack. i told them stories of my childhood, of when grating cheese was my risky job, of how careful i had to be not to grate my knuckles towards the end.

i reminded myself of my grandfather telling tales of butchering chickens.

i felt very pioneer-ish.

we don't grow our own, we don't butcher our own, but by george...

i felt like posting it above the sink in a hand-lettered sign. beneath the title of our weekly posted meal plan "the dine-n-dash menu" - that twice daily includes some sort of dried berry and rarely requires more than a boneless, skinless breast or fareway-prepared grill/slow-cook item.

...we grate our own.

sweet and heart

i sit all day. all. day.

i sit so much it is increasingly hard not to be in a sat position even when i can lie down flat.

there is not a lot of calorie burn in sitting. reaching. bending. my body can hardly make use of what i already eat in a day.

and yet there is a lot of extra cheap fuel sitting around in easter baskets. i do believe i spent all last week nabbing a reeses buttercup egg here, a chocolate bliss there, as i would pass by.

it finally struck me, and i considered my priorities and the mindless energy i was wasting. all those calories are going straight to storage, and i hardly take note how big my storage bill is until a few days later. when i become alarmed at how tight my jeans are on date night. that would be the 'finally' and 'struck' point.

little miss e gets her heart patched in a couple weeks. i decided if only i would swap a prayer for her and her parents, her surgical team and post-op nurses everytime i caught myself about to swipe another chocolate egg instead of actually doing so.

and so i have.

and wow. i go to rob my childrens' easter baskets more than even i realized.

i won't be noticeably thinner in two weeks. eisley's outcome will not be guaranteed because her aunt traded easter goodies for moments of prayer.

even so. this is is a bit of a work-out for me. this is energy very well spent.

the "so? what do you do?" of it

i heard version #211 of the never-ending banter regarding who has the most demanding 24: the mom who spends part of her work day earning a paycheck from outside the home or the mom who spends her entire time working for her family within free of charge.

to quote my own verbose mother: whatever.

it's such a pointless debate, and i'm thankful to be surrounded by friends who don't. one who felt a sense of relief when her maternity time was up to be among adult chatter again, along with the challenge of her job and the satisfaction in being able to actually finish something there. one who chose leave her career path untended a few years longer when the thought of leaving their daughter in daycare made her physically ill.

what a mom does, and how that affects her and her individual family, is such a personal experience i can never understand why anyone try sit and judge, analyze or compare. it's like expecting everyone wear a size 10 jean regardless their size.

that said.

i am not above laughing when the acquaintance who is focused on letting everyone know her trials and tribulations as the mom who works two full-time jobs. trumping any measley stay-at-homer who has all day to do laundry or dishes and never has to answer to a project manager, navigate office politics or make a hundred cupcakes for daycare...

then acts like she and her husband would lose their sanity if they had to deal with their children for a full three-day weekend and congratulates herself on picking a daycare that will watch the kids that holiday friday or monday and all of spring break. ya know. so she can get something done during her day off at home and have a breather.

because that would be impossible with the kids around.

well yeah. it generally is.

i laugh that my day is so less demanding in comparison to hers and yet she can't do mine for more than two.

the real superhero moms are the ones in uniform far away from their children and civilian lives. the single moms. the terminally-ill moms. the moms who don't have the luxury of choice.

did i forget Christ lives?

no.

i was thinking how somewhat strange it is that every year people get all bubbly about God's gift to us. sometimes as if it all just happened. now. like, yesterday, and they themselves saw the stone rolled back and empty clothes, folded. Christ is risen! He LIVES!

well. yeah. did you just join this party? do we not celebrate this faith every week? it makes me chuckle the jubilation some people exhibit once a year as if it is all a fresh realization.

God came down to earth to experience life on our level and guide us home.

and then it occurred to me. sometimes it is a fresh realization.

conan would be proud. indeed, i am learning to be less and less cynical.

bunny notes

funny what one finds in her blog drafts. this is officially one year old:

i remember easter my sr yr of college only for how i spent some part of the holiday sitting on top of our bathroom counter at 118 talking to vern with the door shut. i'd never sat on that counter before. it reminded me a little of sitting on the kitchen table talking with mom as she cooked. the bathroom because by then i no longer had a room in my childhood home. on the sink because it felt too odd sitting on the toilet, lid closed or not, talking to my __. vern. my brain always caught at the word 'boyfriend' where husband has always flowed easily.

we spent every easter after together. i always made him a basket. i always ate the majority of his candy because he neglects sugar. except the one year i determined i was not. no easter bunny would be visiting us that season. early then that easter morning i had a positive pregnancy test and was so sour. what a fitting addition to a basket that would been. i grumped at the new dad for this whole loss of the sweet tell was of course his fault for never basking in basket goodness.

save the cadbury egg. he does like those. i do not. for some time at the farm his mom always had on the counter one egg for each of us. joel got my share after the amusement of me once tasting mine.

i always enjoy dyeing eggs. you get to know a lot about people during art projects. vern will plop an egg into one color and just sit on it. i'll have three done all in varied hues and mixed shades and he'll still be waiting on just that one. one look at maddy's brilliant purple hands and it's plain the kids take after their father.

with young kids again, doris began hiding eggs filled with change and forgot about our cadburys. she always leaves them in plain view, the eggs. this year that made it a little lame for caleb. walking in and spotting the entire loot immediately. i think this is so grandma remembers where all the loot is as well. it seems it was a thanksgiving once long before his birth that a curtain was brushed and an egg popped out. no one could remember the last time the bunny had visited.

it's the egg hunt at the farm that caleb most remembered as being 'easter' from years past. i hope that memory never dims for him. his easter basket arrived one year from his aunt kel. we found a match for maddy last year and baby owen this. i'm not sure how to explain how the easter bunny fills the same baskets every year, with the same eggs and same grass from the easter storage tub they help exhume. maybe i over-estimate a child's intuitive suspension of disbelief.

if we get to church, that's when the easter bunny arrives. otherwise the baskets are on the table come easter morning. the kids sat on the table, too, until this year when maddy wanted to be in the bay window. next year maybe we try the miller way and leave an egg trail to hidden baskets. because we don't really have any steadfast easter traditions from our childhoods. we've got room to play until we find the right fit for our family. and that has made all the difference.

what i thought before i fell asleep last night

i can look at my kids fifty times a minute for fourteen hours and feel like i never really saw them all day.

the most impressive thing to me about God was his massive, intricate, layered, and unending creation.

now it is His sight.

25 things about me i will not post on facebook: a revision

5. we spent 10 days in kaua'i. i realized there my best friend is indeed my husband joel.

we have a jim, jo, jill. vern always gets his attention in a crowd. just like our oldest will say his dad's given name in a sea of daddies, i say vern. sometimes he calls me fred. it makes no sense.

best friends' inside jokes rarely do.

From that day on, if I was ever going somewhere, I was running!

commitment, courage, determination, fantasy, perseverance, and strength.

according to lady footlocker and disney parks, these are the qualities of a true princess. and specifically, today, of the athletes in disney's princess half-marathon.

i've known megan as a brownie, band geek, cross-country runner, harry connick stalker/jean claude cry-baby, drama queen, quiz bowl champion, tuba baby eating something-or-other, graduate, engineer, bride, mother...

and now.

princess.

which makes me giggle cuz not so long ago i'd imagine if someone called her a princess, she might have smacked them.

i don't know how her race went, or if she met her time goal, or if she hurled.

those things are really secondary to how proud we all are of her, and i couldn't think of a better way to show her than to post it.

i'll file this under: "and that's ok, too"

i admire my girlfriends who are always composed and civil with their husbands. even when these husbands say or do some pretty outrageous things.

composed.
civil.
calm.

at all times.

that is so not me.

i have a threshold that my husband can and has met every now and then, and in those moments i am anything but composed, civil or calm. in those moments i am raw and intense and completely exposed.

in those moments i don't hold back. i leave it all on the field.

i've never been proud of this. in trying to model my more mature girlfriends i've employed a variety of techniques that, while maybe providing extra strength for managing a whiny troop of children, has yet to impact my response to an impossibly thick-headed and stubborn husband.

last night vern and i watched 'the hangover'. after the kids were in bed. wrapped up and relaxed into each other on the couch. giggling. not 24 hours earlier i was practically levitating from the anger and hurt and frustration billowing inside me and spilling out.

i considered then what a gift i have been given in a stubborn and thick-headed husband like vern. one who refuses to see in such raw, intense, and fully-exposed emotion anything other than his lovely, committed and passionate wife. having a very bad day.

and while it pains him to see her like that, it never changes how he sees her.

he always tells me as much, but i finally got it there on the couch.

i might feel horrible and ashamed for my overreactions, cursing myself for failing again to keep my head and be a more perfected wife.

but.

he doesn't. he loves me the same as always. he loves me where ever i am at on my growth curve.

the safety i have in my husband is freeing.

even as i'm out-of-my-skull mad with him.

vern brought me flowers with his apology for pushing that final button of mine, the one that catapulted me over the edge of cool, the one that only he can access. he has never brought home flowers in apology in our 12 years together before - so there is hope for us. for him. for me, and the possibility that one day i'll evolve into the noble wise of my girlfriends.

until then i've decided not to be so ashamed. even as i try to tame it, my slow progress in doing so has allowed my most glaring character flaw to cast light on the fact that i don't have to be civil, calm or composed at all times to be deserving of my husband's love, devotion and after-hours on the couch.

were i a perfect wife from the start, i never would have known that. i would have sold vern's love short thinking it hinged somehow on my perfectness. or at least my upper-tiered goodness. perfect would mean i could make lisa's toasted cashew salad and have it taste even somewhat like lisa's. i can't.

salvation

when i said good-bye to my great-grandmother for the final time at clarkson i also asked that she let her daughter-in-law helen know how much i missed knowing her. i didn't say that bit out loud. i thought it really hard and hoped with all my seventh grade might my comatose grandmother could pick it up in the air as she passed through to heaven. like a note you find in your lunchbox at school.

when i said good-bye to her son at the same hospital for the final time my sophomore year he told me to get back to college and study hard. i smiled and told my grandfather how much i loved him in my head. i hoped it was something he'd pick up on his way out, too.

my family had sat in quiet wait at clarkson so many times that my great-aunt mused how she'd grown accustomed to the place, that the sadness and angst of sitting in the family lounge had worn off even as she knew this wait would be short and our last. aunt betty had picked her head up from her book and gently expressed the odd feeling i had in my stomach. what i imagine we all had.

i used to daydream about giving birth there in omaha. just so my kids could be real nebraskans like their mom, so they could come in to the air my loved ones had exited. what i have are full-fledged iowa kids born in the same northeast iowa hospital as their father and uncles. it was a livable plan b and more sane than driving five and a half hours in labor. not that i didn't get a little excited for an unplanned clarkson birth when at thirty-six weeks and five days owen was giving me fits at his uncle's wedding. because pregnancy makes me loopy like that and forget how much i depend on our ob/gyn and adore our birthing center and the short post-natal hour drive home with a newborn you fear will choke on his or her gurgling and bumps. have-mercy-on-a-new-mom bumps that remind one how a tahoe's suspension is really a truck's, not a car's.

and so it felt like a homecoming pulling into the hospital parking lot two weeks ago. i wanted to get the kids and explore what had remained and what had changed from my memory. the old brass wall plaques next to flat screens. vern and i went directly to the nicu and signed in behind our three-day-old niece's divider in the log book. we fell into that comfortable routine of sitting and waiting and watching our loved one sleep as the machines beeped and scrolled and pumped her blood in and out. the family lounge. football. hand sanitizers. and repeat.

a dear friend asked if she would be baptized, this little baby whose physical being had been saved by a bypass machine. i considered the added complexities of last rites and just-in-case baptisms to the clarkson routine as i listened to the brief explanation that in her family we didn't. then i considered how i hadn't even considered it.

God loved this babe so much he had already armed her with anne as her mother. untethered. anchored. the safest place on God's earth was with anne for with anne there is always God. in a stunningly beautiful mix of humor and hormone and hugs.

when i said good-bye to eisley for the first time i told her how happy i was to see her and in my head i told her how much we loved her and more. as if her soul could pick up my thoughts better than any audible words i'd have said. like the air was already well primed to carry this type of message for me.

plus there were two nurses in the room and they didn't need to hear how i amuse myself sometimes while switching laundry by imagining the reaction the purse snatcher had when s/he saw uncle charley's picture in her mom's purse. the ps must have known anne somehow to have access to her locker. i always wondered if, as anne was dating eisley's dad sean then, the ps had acquired some cash and as bonus an assumption that anne was carrying on a secret affair with another guy. or funnier still, if the ps had never met sean and thought sean liked to dress in high-styled 1970's fashion - which at the time had not come back into popularity.

sanctuary, a prequil to salvation

my cousin is the sister God gave me, and there are studio portraits of us as babes, toddlers and pre-schoolers our mothers had taken to prove it. He blessed me with more, but she is the one who shares with me that familial heritage and knowing. she knows how our grandpa's neck smelled. she knows how the back of my mother's hand felt. she knows how our family sounded when they laughed in chorus. she knows my dad was a good man, and the beautiful pieces of my dad's family as well. she knows me. listed number three in my baby book of first words is 'anne'.

after mom slid through an icy intersection and into a train that mangled her car and shattered her universe, i was given mom's purse. tucked deep in a pocket was a picture she had kept there for nearly my entire life of dad's baby brother. given to her by the photographer, the very last picture taken of uncle charley the day before the dark night he drove into a cow standing on a dirt road, rolled out of his open window and was crushed by the car my grandfather had given him - fulfilling his promise to do so if my uncle kept straight a's from kindergarten until that year. that year my uncle charley turned sixteen. what that picture, gifted to her, meant to my mother was unmeasurable.

the year i turned eighteen my world rolled onto its side, and as a sick finale just before my nineteenth my home had been overtaken by grief-stricken grandparents who armed their grief with blame and loathing towards my father and by association, his entire family. my father they directly blamed for causing the accident with the strain he had placed on their baby girl. physical abuse. separation. betrayal. financial ruin. causing her to be so exhausted, emotionally and physically, over that year as to be completely unaware that she was about to take on a locomotive as she drove to work that december 30th. and in darker conversations and musings: that mom had intended to do so.

no one had more animosity towards my father than i did. anger that was stiffening into apathy. no one carried more right to it than me. in that emergency room when my father entered i could see the torture in his bright blue eyes. lost. with the one person in his whole world who really understood and loved him unconditionally in a heap of bruised muscle and blood and tubes. i didn't want to feel for him. i did. i hurt for him more than for myself, my brother, and certainly my grandparents. and that hurt only made me more angry at him. and completely disgusted with my grandparents.

i gave dad mom's purse. i didn't trust him with mom's treasure. lost in his relationships, his handicap, and his clutter. i didn't trust my grandparents who were angling for possession of the checkbook and house key. inaccessible in their grief and warfare. i didn't trust myself. i could barely hold on to the edge of the earth so tilted it was. i needed this one thing to be safe. but more to the point: i needed this tangible connection to my family when it was whole, that my mother had kept close to her heart for so long, to be in the company of someone who did not hold the ropes of doubt and hurt and mistrust pulled on either side of me. someone whose only concern was me and let my doubt and hurt and mistrust be my own, and never borrowing from it. someone untethered and yet so wholly anchored.

i gave the picture of my uncle charley so beloved by my mother to anne. she put it in her purse.

maybe a week later someone broke into her locker at work and stole it.

where was i again?

i cannot multi-project task.

annual green bay vacation photo books. postings of current pictures in on-line albums. finding my desk and the receipt for maddy's duplicate hat and mitten set. Christmas photo books. meal plannng. baby books. blogger. neither can my computer. so as it forbids me from looking through my friend's Christmas album on snapfish as i upload ours to shutterfly, i thought some thoughts and came over here to quickly jot them down.

because while i could be organizing the desk or putting clothes away (or calling united airlines, shed list item #1), i cannot convince myself that the computer can actually upload all by itself without my keeping it quiet company.

i hit 'edit posts' rather than 'new post'. there are plenty to edit. i forgot how much jotting i do. as an example, this, unpublished post #11 titled "the n word". i thought to myself, "what on earth were you about to say regarding the n word? the word that comes up so infrequently in our corner of the globe i practically forget it exists until february's black history month rolls round again?":

pbs doc shelter

in trying to decipher what the heck that meant i forgot what i ran over to jot down in the first place.

substitute caleb for on-line albums, maddy the fridge and owen my ransacked office corner. my jotted blogger notes for 50% of every request, story and quip i begin aloud. insert aggravation that i cannot accomplish what i seemingly should and yet always find time to eat whatever i want and direct that at the children, coupled with guilt for being short with them for no reason and voila. you have how well i multi-parent.

caleb raced to tell me something the other day, reached my attention and then stumbled over his lips. he furrowed his brow, squished his eyes and finally sighed, "oh. i just lost my words again."

i've heard that line before. as if it couldn't be any worse, i'm rubbing off.