Party Pooper

While the children were happily munching their snacks at H’s fourth birthday party, blue marshmallow pops stickily and rapidly disappearing, J woke up from his nap. I excused myself, and headed off to quickly get him up and fed so I wouldn’t miss present opening. As I washed my hands after changing him, I got the following text. (Please note that I am not responsible for the poor grammar.):

I am so ready to go. This is boring and the momma are weird.

The blood drained from my face and every party planning, living-up-to-other-moms phobia I have flooded into my chest with a whoosh as I read this text, sent from one of the moms in the next room, at my daughter’s party.

Was this really just sent to me? Surely she meant it to go to someone else? What mom was she calling weird? Should I say something? Should I let it go and be the bigger woman?

It was too rude to let pass. I had also spent too much time carefully cutting bathing suits out of scrapbooking paper, making tissue paper puffs, and crafting a swimming pool cake complete with teddy graham swimmers. The children had all been playing wonderfully; they liked the craft I’d pulled out of thin air two nights earlier when it was clear that the thunderstorms in the Midwest would make our kiddie pool too cold for swimming; no one had complained about our snacks. The text came from a woman that I’d been friendly with all school year. I had thought we were friends—not besties, but more than just acquaintances.

With shaky fingers I sent her back a message saying, “I think perhaps your last text went astray.” I am non-confrontational. I expected her to either ignore it or to somehow explain herself. I still felt sure that she had sent me this message by mistake. By what explanation could it be justified to send it to me on purpose? Immediately, she wrote back and asked if she could come talk to me. She came into J’s room while I nursed him. I could go into the attempted explanations, but it’s not worth the space. Suffice to say she apologized, and I thanked her for doing so.

As you get older it’s harder and harder to make friends. As a mom especially, I find myself talking to women on a regular basis whom I know only as Susie’s Mom, and with whom the only connection I share is the commonality of our kids’ ages or extracurricular activity. I spend lots of time talking about kids and parenting, but rarely do I discuss myself. I almost never talk about the fact that I play two instruments or that I used to ballroom dance or work in corporate communications. I don’t discuss my favorite authors, bands, or the latest piece on NPR.

On the other hand, I’ve never heard anyone on a playground or in line to pick up kids discussing in depth, life-long-friend making topics. I hear the same banal, “How’s your day going?” conversations that I’m having myself. Yet, I always feel as if these other moms have somehow created the type of friendships I’m looking for. I wonder when they find the time, and why they never invite me along. Is there some secret handshake I have yet to learn that would give me access to coffee dates at Starbucks and lunches out? My own newness to the area and my penchant for seeing the best in people leaves me open to false friendships from the type of people who smile at your face and sneer at your back. Every time I run into someone like that I’m shocked because it’s just not how I operate. What you see is pretty much what there is to see.

With a smile plastered to my face and a raw hurt in my heart, I rejoined the party. It wasn’t my day. It was H’s day, and no matter how I was feeling, I wanted her to enjoy herself. After the cake had been eaten and the goodie bags handed out, I showed my husband the message and shared its aftermath. I realized that this woman, who had taken my daughter to school and whose daughter I’d watched in return a few times, was in fact a virtual stranger to me. Despite countless 10 minute conversations, I know almost nothing of her actual life or character. I don’t know her favorite anything or how she met her husband. The relationship we had (which is now very much over from my viewpoint), was based on the fact that we happened to be in the same place, at the same time three days a week to get our girls from preschool—nothing more.

None of that excuses the extreme rudeness of her text, no matter who she intended it for. It does remind me, through the harshness of experience, that the moms we meet in these casual, harried, child-intensive moments are not always true reflections of the women themselves. Some friendships are best left in the pick-up line at school.

The Bible - Part V

I’m finally in the New Testament! Yay! I’ve been rather tardy in blogging, so we’ll be covering the Gospels and Acts.

The Gospels cover the life of Jesus four times. You hear from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and get more or less the same stories each time. Just like any other happening, you get slightly different points of view and a few different stories here and there. While I was familiar with the overall story, this was my first time reading it all, and I greatly enjoyed it.

It’s sort of funny how some of the parables like the seeds that fall on fertile ground or rock are so familiar and seem so obvious to us, but at the time not even the disciples really understood what Jesus was saying. That particular story is a good example because the disciples went up to him afterward and asked, “What the heck were you talking about?” Jesus does explain it to them, but sometimes I feel like he’s also a little impatient with them. To us, it makes the disciples sometimes seem foolish because it seems obvious, but at the time it was so new that it’s no surprise that the disciples wondered why Jesus was talking about farming.

Actually, I kind of got the impression that there were a lot of times that Jesus got frustrated. I wonder what it was like to have all that knowledge and power, spend all your time trying to enlighten people, and then have those same people come up and ask what seem like the dumbest questions. It probably was frustrating on some level. After all, he only had limited time and he was trying to pack in as much teaching as possible. I’m sure there were some times he just wanted to say, “Listen, trust me. I know what I’m talking about.”

Acts is entirely new ground for me. I enjoyed learning how Paul went out and spread the word all around the Mediterranean, but it also saddened me by how little has changed in human spirit from then to now. Paul was doing a good thing. He was teaching about love and forgiveness. He wasn’t discriminating, but trying to teach anyone who would listen. Yet, the powerful Jews, who stood to lose power and prestige if this new church prospered, tried to have him killed. They were so threatened at the thought of losing their position they wanted to kill him for spreading love. Love! How insane does that sound?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed for the very same thing. What’s equality if not loving one’s neighbor? Power is so corrupting that even when the “subversive” message being preached is one of love, it threatens us. And you can extend that perceived “threat” to so many other topics.

It leads me to hope that one day we can truly embrace those principles of love and forgiveness. The world would certainly be a better place for it.

When I Grow Up

As I mop the spit up from my shoulder for the seventh time today and discover with a horrified sniff that I do, in fact, smell of sour milk, I wonder how I came to be in this place. I was probably not a normal kid. I used to dream of owning my own robotics firm with an in-house day care for the daughter I wanted to have.

I went so far as to major in Physics in college and make a good effort to look at electrical engineering graduate programs for robotics. It tipped off an early-20s existential crisis that ended with me in a science journalism masters program. I have never worked as a full time science journalist in any sense.

Most days I don’t have time to contemplate how my dreams changed from high-powered business owner to mom. I carry my son and chase my daughter, clean messes, and make dinner. I’ve moved with my military husband all over the country, which in itself would be enough to foil my childhood dream. Moment to moment, I’m happy.

The niggling little problem is when I talk to friends and family I haven’t seen in a while, and they ask a question that I’m coming to half-dread, “So, what’s new?” I can tell them about my husband’s job. (He’s loving being home with me and kids; not really digging office life.) I can tell them about my daughter’s days in preschool. (She can write her name!) I can tell them the new baby tricks J is mastering. (If he could lift his head up, he’d be crawling. Until then, he’s bulldozing.) But I honestly have nothing to say for myself. There is nothing new, and certainly nothing exciting.

Like so many moms, I struggle. I like being at home to see J grin at me when he wakes from his nap. I like, most of the time, to listen to H sing to her tiny princess figurines at one of their endless weddings. I know deep in my heart that I’d be unhappy if they were at day care. I know from experience that life in cube-land would not fulfill me. But none of that is an answer to what I’m going to do with two degrees that cost as much as a small house.

Part of my mid-mom crisis was to start this blog. And all 50 or so of my steadfast readers have certainly helped provide me with an outlet. But, despite harboring secret dreams of writer-dom, I know I am good, but with only moments of greatness. I continue to contemplate an Etsy shop for crocheted baby gear. It’ll probably never happen because I’m not actually an entrepreneur. (Yet another good reason for not opening that robotics firm.)

What I am passionate about is childbirth. I would like dearly to go to nursing school and become a midwife. Until we’re in a position where Josh is done flying and the kids are more self-sufficient, that isn’t going to happen. And I don’t really know where that leaves me.

Good bloggers have a goal they’re taking you to. There should be a cathartic summation that ties it together and leaves you feeling complete. I don’t have one for you today. I leave you instead with a question—how do you tell yourself that you’re doing one of the greatest, most important jobs on Earth on those days where it only seems like you’re marking time?

Traveling Together

It was my anniversary on Monday. I had been planning on a funny/ironic “marriage by the numbers” post. For example, we’ve only spent three of our six anniversaries together. Or we’ve actually been a couple for almost 15 years. But then there was this number: four. As in the four states we drove across with a three-year-old and a five-month-old on our anniversary.

When you’re an Air Force family, most of your “vacation” time is spent visiting family. It’s not always strictly vacation. A lot of times you end up drying dishes, cleaning things, and sometimes helping your father-in-law reseat wrought iron railings. It’s not terribly glamorous. When that family is 14 hours away, it’s even less glamorous.

Pretty quickly you’re faced with a choice to overcome the lack of glamour and the incredibly long car trip and spend time with that family so your kids know where they came from or stay home. Josh and I both come from families who felt it was more important to connect with our roots, so it’s no surprise that we packed the kids into the car and drove a total of 16 hours straight through the long night and the 80 minutes of continuous baby wailing and the toddler tantrums. And as it turned out, we faced one more choice of spending an extra day in West Virginia with Josh’s 93-year-old grandmother and driving home on our anniversary. It might not be the choice that everyone one would make, especially not when you’ve spent so few of your previous anniversaries together.

Another thing you learn as an Air Force family is that the fact of being together is more important than where you are or when you are. When we found out that Josh would be deployed for our first anniversary, he took me to a five-star restaurant—one where men have to wear a coat or they won’t seat you—before he left. On our second anniversary when we were together, I asked him to take my gigantically pregnant self to Friendly’s for a sundae.

I hate that we’ve had so much time apart over the years of our relationship—five years of long distance, four deployments, a six month training, almost countless trips and trainings. But the silver lining to all of that is that I’ve learned that dates are not sacred. For it to be our anniversary, we don’t have to be at a five-star restaurant (though it’s nice). We don’t even have to be together physically (though that’s nice too). We just have to be together in our hearts. Because of that, it’s almost no big deal if we “celebrate” or not.

All of that to say that getting all of us home across those four states after ten days of traveling to visit family felt like an accomplishment. Not just the accomplishment of a day, but one of six years of taking it a day at a time, overcoming so many obstacles—some of them heart rending, laughing when we wanted to cry, laughing so hard we did cry, and coming out stronger and stronger because of it.

There are lots of nice things that I can say about my husband. But the compliment I want to pay him right now is that even after all those miles, I’d get back in the car with him and our children any day—no matter how many states we have to cross.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Synopsis:

I’m going to guess you probably know this one, but I’ll give you the big picture anyway.

Alice is playing in the garden with her older sister when she spots a white rabbit checking his pocket watch and remarking on his lateness. She chases him and falls down the famous rabbit hole. She finds herself in a hall full of doors, all of which are locked. She eats and drinks and changes size several times trying to get into a tiny door that leads to a beautiful garden. But it’s all to no avail.

As a tiny person she comes across a whole group of animals and spends some time with them. She insults the mouse several times when she brings up her beloved cat, Dinah. In this way she puts off all the animals she’d been talking to and goes wandering off by herself.

Here she runs into the rabbit again who sends her to his house to fetch him a pair of kid gloves. She finds the house and the gloves, only to grow very large while inside the house until she is trapped. A bevy of animals under the rabbit’s direction then tries to get her out of the house by throwing things at her. The things turn out to be little cakes, which she eats; they shrink her back down and she runs out of the house.

Next she meets the caterpillar. He shares with her the secret that one side of his mushroom will make her grow larger and the other smaller. With that she goes off to the Duchess’s house. There the cook is throwing things and demanding more pepper. The Duchess is breastfeeding an ugly baby that won’t stop screaming. The Duchess leaves to get ready for croquet with the Queen and hands Alice her baby. The baby promptly turns into a pig and wanders off.

It’s then that Alice notices the Duchess’s grinning cat in the tree. The Cheshire Cat gives Alice directions to the March Hare’s house, where Alice finds a tea party in progress. There she also meets the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse. Apparently it’s always tea time there and the group keeps progressing around the table from place to place, drinking more tea.

After a few rounds of riddles, Alice leaves and finds herself in the royal garden. There she meets some playing cards who are trying to paint the white roses red. The Queen catches them and orders their heads cut off. She then presses Alice into playing croquet with her using a flamingo for a mallet, a hedge hog for a ball, and more playing cards for the arches. Of course the game gets nowhere, and the Queen spends all the time ordering people’s heads cut off. 

Finally the Queen takes Alice to the Gryphon, who introduces her to the Mock Turtle. The Mock Turtle proceeds to tell some thoroughly confusing stories until they hear that a trial is beginning and Alice and the Gryphon run off to see the Knave of Hearts tried for stealing the Queen’s tarts. After much silliness Alice grows in height again and tells off the King and Queen. When the cards begin to attack her, she wakes up to discover that her adventures were really just a dream and the cards were just some leaves falling from a tree.

Other Thoughts:

• When I was a little kid, I danced the part of a flamingo in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Just thought you should know.

I thought I was "da bomb" in this costume.

• Lewis Carroll clearly had a vast and vivid imagination. I would say that he perhaps had some recreational habits, but the writing reminded me a good deal of A.A. Milne and Winnie the Pooh, which is to say, it’s clearly the sort of silliness you invent for the toddler/young child set.

• I once again missed a whole rash of very English, very period references. Alice recites several poems which are meant to be comical because they are slightly off from the real versions. Having no acquaintance whatsoever with the real versions, the references were lost on me.

• I was impressed by how many of the stories I did actually know. Quite a bit of the original story has made its way, in one form or another, into popular culture.

• My copy has a color illustration of the tea party on the front, which has prompted H to ask me about Alice. I’ve had rather a good time telling her some of the stories—abridged for both content and time. She’s a very practical child and doesn’t understand the comedy of the cook throwing things for no reason whatsoever.

Next up: The Wind in the Willows.