A Mom's Life

I loved first grade. I loved my teacher and I loved to learn. I remember writing stories on that paper with the blue lines and the red dash in the middle. I'd write page after page, crafting stories about mermaids and princesses and castles. I remember how excited I was to share them with my teacher. If I close my eyes, I can see her. I can see the classroom, with the chalkboard, the alphabet letters and days of the week on the walls. We learned about dinosaurs that year. I remember learning their names and how amazingly exciting it was to imagine dinosaurs. To imagine and dream about so many things. My passion for learning started when I was 6 years old and I never stopped loving learning, straight through graduate school. After college I was lucky to return to my school (well, new building)to substitute teach. I had lunch in the teachers' lounge with my first grade teacher and several of my other grade school faculty. It was so hard for me to call them by their first nam...

When I was in college my friends were afraid to have me meet their families. I don't really blame them. I'm not totally sure what all of the reasons were, but I think the primary was the fact that I have a mouth like a sailor. I'd like to thank my family for the gift of vulgarity. I was raised among blue collar workers, loggers, truckers, and a generally loving, yet tough crowd of people. I spent many a night coloring at the kitchen table of my grandmother's house, surrounded by adults chain smoking, drinking coffee or beer, and arguing about anything and everything. Every other word was an f-bomb of something of the like. My mom, a selective swearer, taught me a few rules about using my vocabulary wisely. I was allowed to swear at home but never at school or in the presence of non-family adults. I'm proud to say I never got detention in school nor do I think most adults in my life knew about my potty mouth. That is except for my BFF's mom, whose house I spen...

Ever since I was a teenager I have had this problem. (Andy would say I have LOTS of problems, but this time I'll focus on this one). I clearly recall, one summer afternoon, after getting off my housekeeping shift at the nursing home, sitting at the dining room table having a snack. My dad was seated across from me, doing paperwork. He was eating an apple. With each crunch, and breath between, rage sparked inside of me. Crunch. Breathe. Crunch. Sigh. Crunch. My chest tightened and I felt that was about to explode with insane anger. "Dad!" I asked as calmly as I could, "Can you please stop eating. So loudly?" This comment sparked my dad's own rage and suddenly we were in the middle of a heated argument which ended in me leaving the house for the night. This was the beginning of my "problem" with certain sounds. A illness I have been plagued with for years. A secret I've hidden. Well, sort of. See, this is how it goes for me. I su...

I grew up surrounded by superwomen and I married a man who was raised by a superwoman. The thing about superwomen is that you never see on the outside that they are on the verge of insanity on the inside. If you follow my facebook status updates, or what I like to think of as my mini-blog, you may have caught the Andy quote update about his mom working the fields with a baby on her back and one in her belly. This statement, a story that almost seems legendary and one that I've heard often, stemmed from Andy's remarks that women of our generation just aren't as resilient as the women of ye olden times (aka, our own mothers). Our moms are awesome moms. They are incredibly strong, survived some difficult family situations, manage health concerns, volunteer for the community, hold down jobs, support their spouses, care for family in need, and raised sometimes unruly, and always needy, children. Not to mention, those children grew up to support themselves and raise families of ...

I consider swimming a survival skill and enrolled Caroline in lessons at six months old. We attended weekly "Mommy and Me" classes, which she delighted in, and I managed. I always felt self-conscious in my "body shaper", armor-like swimsuit, with what seemed like a pool full of dads. (Andy is the family anti-swimmer. I've only seen him swim once. In 2006. In Puerto Rico.) All was well in the pool until Caroline turned three and "Mommy" wasn't allowed in with "Me" anymore. A series of private swim lessons (in which Mommy slowly worked her way out of the pool) ended my near nervous breakdowns fighting Caroline as she screamed at the top of her lungs in refusal to swim without me. Everybody was a happy clam at her fifth birthday and she swam with a bubble strapped to her back and I even floated around a bit while Char shrieked in the arms of another mom. When I was a little girl, I loved to swim. I carried around a jean purse with a bikin...

I've been thinking all week long about how to summarize my summer home with the girls. For me, one who is never short on words, I just can't quite figure out how to explain the last eight weeks.A poem, or two, perhaps? How quickly work fades/When two little faces smile./Can I stop time, please? A real summer here,/Made for easy days at lake./Everyone is tan. Three mile point love./Makes winters here easier./Beautiful upstate. Caro is a fish./Handstands, front crawl, doggy paddle./So proud of my girl. Char pees on the pot/sometimes but not every time./She gets candy, yay! Oh Canada trip./Thank you to Grams and Opa./Memories for life. Visits with Nana./Got in the lake, yes she did!/So proud of her, too! Days spent with good friends./Playing is so tiring./Let it never end. Me: stay at home mom./Borderline insanity./Hardest job ever. In trying to draft something for this post, I looked back at my posts from last year at this time and I felt relief. Well, first, ...

*I apologize to Andy, and my friend Elise,or your granny, or you, if my use of profanity or the word poop offends you.* This has been the shittiest summer ever. You guys! I'm serious! I had no idea how much food children consume nor how much poop they, in turn, produce. We are frequest grocery store shoppers, so much so that I'm pretty sure we're close to getting a free tank of gas, or at least a highly discounted rate each week. Here's what our summer days, in relation to food, look like: 7:00 am: Children wake up. 7:02 am: Kids tell me they are starving. 7:03 am: I feed them breakfast. 7:08 am: I offer drink refills and seconds. 8:15 am: They tell me they are starving. 8:20 am: They eat the breakfast I just got around to making for myself. 10:00 am: Snack 11:00 am: They eat everything out of the cooler I just packed for the beach. 12:00 pm: They tell me they are starving. 12:01-4:00 pm: At the beach, they eat everything out of our cooler and then th...