When Good Sons Do Bad Things

I love it when I can steal projects from other sites. I found my latest project Ihere. I’ll let you know how it goes later today. My guess is the results will be similar. Besides, teasing the dog is way more fun and interesting than accomplishing what I need to accomplish today. And I have 37 months to finish Beav’s scrapbook which is still in the visualization stage because As God as my witness: my younger child will have an actual baby book and not a bound volume with crap stuffed into like I had. And it’s only 75 or so today versus the triple digits on my last day off. And it’s not like I can accomplish anything until I actually put things away and clean things up because right now it looks like a crazy person on their way to being featured on “Horders” works down there! Because there are still a few DNA strands from my father’s good solid hard working Quaker ancestors: I have made a deal with the studio: I will clean you if it rains today. Which is a step towards the whole scrap booking thing. A step much like Tom Kelly’s when he thought to himself: “I’m gonna make a car for the moon!” The back porch and the back yard at this point are much more seductive.

I did complete a project lurking in the basement today. A couple of weeks ago I started infusing olive oil with some of our herbs and drying a mix of herbs to be grr-ed by the food processor. I had to laugh because the herb mix looked more like pot than it did culinary herbs before I attacked it. While growing marijuana would be easy in my garden, I‘m not Nancy Botwin and prefer my life to be led on this side of the law. The olive oil thing is a lot less glamorous than it sounds. It’s mostly messy. So messy, it takes longer to clean up after myself than it does to triple strain the olive oil and make the labels. The more accurate name for this project is Cleaning The Kitchen. Cleaning the kitchen is on my chore list in Hell.

After I finished patting myself on the back for finishing something on this beautiful lazy day, I remembered the cup of peach yogurt I had put in the frig freezer and this would be the time to reward myself for a Job Well Done. So I sang my little tra-la-la song (like Pooh’s honey song only pitiful because I’m a middle-aged woman and not a cute, ageless, cartoon stuffed bear) and opened up the freezer and reached to the place I had put it.

Nothing. Not there. Just a bag full of vegetables, a bowl of ice, hot dog buns and dinner rolls. I looked on the door: nope, not under the little bags of lime juice, lemon juice or egg whites…I looked again, repeating the steps several times, my heart sinking to my toes. I did find the top secret mango sorbet but there was only enough for a wee bit and I was saving that for The Girl. I was incredulous!! Who ate my yogurt? My yogurt that I put in the freezer specifically for my own enjoyment. I know it wasn’t TG because she doesn’t like peach yogurt. And I know it wasn’t Kipper because if he had access to the freezer the only left would have been empty bags; and I checked him this morning and he still hasn’t--much to his chagrin--grown opposable thumbs.

Jesus wants me to say I didn’t have revenge in my heart as I thought of my two “Little Angels” asleep in their beds; all cozy and peaceful in their boy smell…sleeping the morning away…ONE OF THEM WITH A BELLY FULL OF FROZEN YOGURT. But I resisted the temptation to awaken either of them for two reasons: even I’m not that psychotic and --most importantly--chances were great I would then have to drive someone somewhere and I really couldn’t muster up the energy to actually put on something other than my pajamas, brush my hair and leave the house before afternoon. And damn! I thought I had it hidden better than that, too. I was counting on the blight they share with every man I’ve ever known. The dreaded “Male Pattern Blindness” means I can pretty much count on things like ice cream, sorbet, or chocolate chips to be under the peas or behind the mixed veg packs because why the hell would you pick up anything or move anything to find something. It must not exist if it isn’t in your immediate line of vision, right? Hah! We fooled them for two weeks and they didn’t discover the caramel ice cream in the back. I had it so well hidden that they would have only discovered it if one of them had made themselves vegetables to eat and boy howdy that ice cream would have been satisfying on that particularly cold day in Hell.

I must refine my hunting and gathering skills. The enemy has breached my food stores. In the meantime it’s time to see just how retarded Kip is while I’m waiting for my strawberry yogurt to freeze.

New Toy

My birthday isn't for about six weeks but The Girl bought me a new toy and begged me to open the box this week. She told me it was something I could use on vacation. Well the box wasn't big enough for a plastic surgeon with a liposuction kit and it was too light to be an invisible head to toe body suit that gives the impression I am without varicous veins, cellulite and am as toned and skinny as I was twenty plus years ago (twenty years ago I was preggers so that doesn't count). I thought it was a new rain jacket because she said it would come in handy this trip and then in June when we go to Angor Wat. My rain coat is fine and dandy for fall/spring rain but it's too hot for tropical showers and June is the beginning of the rainy season so a rain jacket would be just the ticket for The Year We Travel and Avoid Home Improvement. At her insistance, I opened it up and found to my utter amazement a new camera! Wheee! It's a beaut, too: a Canon Rebel with all the bells and whistles. I've made it to chapter 4 in the manual and think this is a huge achievement because I don't usually read the manuals for anything. Digital photography is so forgiving. I've taken 250 pictures today playing with the settings and have saved four of them.

I didn't really need a camera so I'm guessing she gave this to me so she can have a chance with the other camera because I am a camera hog.

Faded Photographs

Even though I have a lot of blog worthy ideas swirling around in my head; I promised myself this week, before I launch back into the world of nursing, I will finish Wally’s scrapbook. It’s about time isn’t it? I thought it would take maybe six months of diligent work but it took me eighteen months! I kept hitting creative or emotional walls and then came summer with the advent of my other writing project and gardening. The picture on the blog is the last image in the album. It was a very weird picture of him standing next to my dresser in my messy bedroom when he was two. Why I took his picture at that moment I’ll never remember. What makes this picture strange is it is triple exposed and in the shadows you can see Christmas as well as a fragment from an image on a deserted highway outside of Taos. Even in the 90’s with point and shoot cameras it was hard to double expose film. This film was exposed three times. I remember talking to the guy at the camera store who told me chances are the film didn’t advance in the camera and it was a small miracle any images were visible.. Much less a collage of images which capture our busy life, and at the time, happy life as a family. The Beav came downstairs Tuesday night when I was laying out the last pages and asked me if this was Wally’s Christmas present. I laughed the idea off because, please, would a 19 year old really want a baby book and scrapbook of their school years as a gift? Beav assured me that Wally has changed so much over the last two months that he would probably think it was “cool” I had finished the book. When I finished this afternoon, I was a little choked up like someone who had finished their first marathon. It was a relief to have completed the task but at the same time I was really saying good-bye to the little boy.

One boy album down, one to go.

I think Beav is secretly hoping I start on his book this winter but I’m a tired of looking at little boy pictures so I think the next project will be to put the very old and very fragile family photos Dad recently gave me in an album. Just a simple acid free album, no embellishments and the journaling will be limited to identifying (if I can) people in the photographs. Some of these photos are unspeakable funny and sweet: my cousin and Sister playing with Hula Hoops, baby me pulling Sister’s hair, my mother and her sisters over the years grouped together, the body language apparent which sisters had just fussed with one another. Many of the photos I’ve seen over and over again but one picture was a surprise. It’s a candid snapshot of my father and mother standing together, he is standing behind her and his face is almost shadowed by her hair blowing back. They are bundled up and probably huddled close against a chilly Kansas wind. Their hands are gently intertwined one with the other making this beautiful candid photo sweetly intimate. I love stealing glimpses at the past before I was born. I also have a set of photos from a particularly rowdy party my parents had when I was about two. Who knows where I was that night, probably locked in my room with my eight year old sister supervising me, giving me Kool-aid and animal crackers when she wasn’t trying to convince me to stick my head between the very wide slats. I’m kidding I was probably not in a playpen but playing with a screwdriver and an electrical outlet [wink]*) Anyhow, those crazy kids were having fun, drinking their very strong cocktails and smoking their strong cigarettes. Those were the days, weren’t they when you could put your two year old in a play pen, get drunk and smoke. Damn, I was born too late.



*for the record, I was at my grandmother’s house and was no doubt being indulged by her and teased by my older cousins.

Best. Day. Off. Ever.

"JuneJuneJuneJune have you lost your mind?" my readers are muttering to themselves. "You hate snow and you especially hate snow when the rest of the country is enjoying spring flowers and warm temperatures, maybe a soft rain. Wait a minute! This is a wacky April Fools post, isn't it? . . ."



Despite the weather, I count this as my best day off ever spent at home. The real best day off better is a tie between Ephesus and January 21, 2009 when the sea was so calm it was like heaven. Anyhow, why such a great day? Because it was perfect.



1. I actually got The Beav to school on time without having to break the sound barrier. As an added bonus he was awake and getting ready for school when I went to awaken him (!)



2. The gym. I love going to the gym now. My body hurts but it feels good to move. Perhaps I'll see some results in a few months. (I was going to write about the gym this week but I got distracted)

3. I listened to podcasts rather than disco music while I worked out so I fed my brain

4. I pampered my soul today. I had an inspiration to make a friend's baby gift and I finished it. (why yes, I have friends young enough to have babies with all of their chromosomes intact!)

Isn't the cover pretty? It's actually for a baby girl. What a joy it was to make scrapbook pages with flowers and butterflies and bunnies and girly things! I've hit a wall with my own scrapbooks because I'm sick of boy stuff.


This is my desk before it was completely out of control. At one point it looked like my crack dealer's sticker and paper sections had puked on my desk.


5. My heart was nourished when an old friend called just to say "I was thinking about you and thought I would call." What a beautiful gift to know someone faraway is thinking of you. Our conversation lightened the bleak snowy afternoon.

6. I have time to take a bath and soak in the tub with a historical romance I received (in a round about way) from Lisa.

7. I took the time to create my own pages in my art journal. Sometimes I forget it's OK to create something for myself.



Next week, I promise to tell you about the Characters at my gym.

Scrapping the Past

Six months ago, I took on the huge task of making scrapbooks for the boys. Huge because Wally is 18 and Beaver is 14 and neither of them even had baby books. They did each have a small box with cards, pictures, mementos. I suppose I could take the easy way out and just scribble their names on the sides of the boxes and call it done. Trust me, this idea has crossed my mind a few times as I play detective and try to remember when a specific picture was taken. The good news/bad news? I simply don’t have that many pictures. When I ran away to myself in 2000, I left the albums with Ward; I was a bad mother and didn’t deserve the albums. (Oh God is that pathetic or what?). It felt cruel to take them with me: I was the one leaving, after all. “Tearing the family to shreds” was one of the many accusations hurled at me. The family pictures must stay with the family. I was no longer in the family according to Ward. The albums proved to be so *important* to Ward, they now languish in a storage shed. Given his propensity to dithering it isn’t worth waiting until 2020 or his death to repossess the albums. Frankly, I have bigger things to nag Ward about than old pictures. What concerns me is from an archival point of view: I just sort of threw pictures into cheap albums which continue to expose the photos to the element. My frustration rests more in the damage being done to the pictures rather than possessing the pictures. I should have taken better care of so many things, these pictures are just a small detail.

Fortunately, I had the foresight to “steal” the extra pictures haphazardly put in yellow envelopes. The B team pictures--you know the ones--heads are half gone and if they aren’t half gone, one or all of us are sprouting poles or trees. If we aren’t maimed our smiles are goofy or nonexistent. I lucked out and have a few gems. When I shared my project with Mother, she gave me all of her pictures to add to my little horde. I’m lucky only one very favorite picture is lost and I discovered several I thought lost. One of the lost treasures caused an explosion of weeping. It’s the only puppy picture of our Kipper-Dog and it captures his goofy personality like no other picture. (insert picture here). I only have three pictures from our trips to Canada. Luckily, I kept trip journals and they are lucid, thorough and without naval gazing so those memories are preserved for my family. I even stumbled across a journal Ward and I both kept when we went to Yellowstone before Wally was born. Sweet gifts all of these.

Looking over these pictures has brought back so many memories but the fact remains there is much I can’t remember. I can’t remember The Beav’s first step (nor do I have a picture of it). My periodic depressions have also muddled my memory, too. Two significant episodes have blocked a lot of memories. Unfortunately, one of these periods is much of Beaver’s first year. Go Team PPD! The other episode was the summer of 1999. But this space in time is easier to remember because I received real and credible help and it was the beginning of my Real Life.

I do have stacks of self-serving crap masquerading as prose journals and I thought reading them would help jog my memories of the boys and help tell the story; in some cases it has. However because they are my personal journals and I am terribly self-centered, they are simply documentation of inner turmoil vomited into spiral notebooks. If I relied on my journals, my scrapbook journaling would read something like this:

"Isn’t this a sweet picture of you and Daddy? This was taken the week we got the demand letter from the IRS and Mommy had to find daycare for you so she could make money taking care of other people’s babies so the government wouldn't take away our house!”

“A white Christmas for the Cleavers! Gram and GrandDad took you out for a sled ride isn’t that fun? Good thing you were outside because Mommy was screaming at Daddy after she caught him red-handed doing something unforgivable!”

“Ahhh yes, the trip to Texas. Ward certainly was upset when I just loaded the two of you into the car and drove alone all the way to Fort Worth!”

Sometimes the desire to include angry snippets is overwhelming and my jaw hurts from pushing away the unhealthy compulsion. I did manage a sardonic touch on the page featuring the last picture: “Same Life, Different City”. How poetic my mother lopped off the top of my head reflecting how I felt at the time: my brain half gone; Wally tugging at me and Beaver squirming to get away.

Because my glass is sometimes half full, it took me a minute or three to remember the stop we made in the middle of nowhere New Mexico a few hours before the picture was taken. The night was one of those perfect dark nights free of clouds or moon. I was taking a break so I rolled the window down, smelling the twlight lit mesa and listening to the quiet. It was well after midnight and the highway was empty. Wally roused when he felt the car stop so I asked him if he would like to join me in the front seat and look at the stars. He clamored into the front seat and I held his sleepy body close to mine as we hung our heads out of the window, the night air brisk across our faces. He gasped as he looked out at the millions of stars. Then I exclaimed: “Wally! It’s the milky way! A magic cloud of stars!“ We ohhed and ahhed over the view for a few minutes until I felt his head bob and I knew I should finish the first leg of our trip. When I remember things like this; my love for the boys and even the way I once fought for happiness with Ward floods back to me in a brilliant instantaneous joy and peace.

Reading my journals has also been hard because as chance would have it the first entry I opened to was written the day we discovered Beaver was gravely ill--at 22 weeks gestation--and my own health was at risk. April 1994. I hadn’t read those entries since I wrote them and I still hold the cellular grief of hearing the hard news. “We have reason to believe there is a grave chance your baby will not be viable at birth. If he is viable, he will require surgery and at least twelve weeks in the ICU.” Hard news for anyone to hear. Especially a Neonatal ICU nurse, knowing what the outcome can look like and the slim odds of a favorable outcome. (obviously it was favorable, isn’t he a strapping fine boy?)

April remains a hard month for me and because I’m a bit slow, it only took about ten thousand hours of therapy to realize why I greeted spring with a dull sense of loss. I’ve learned to observe April with an extra dose of self-care and to find little ways to show Beaver how blessed we are to have him in our lives. Surprisingly, scrapping these pictures from spring/summer 1994 wasn’t as hard as I thought. I remembered how re-engaged Ward became when there was a possibility he could lose his wife and child; I reunited with my sister and forged a healthy and vibrant relationship with her after years of estrangement.

My memories make me wish I had been a better SAHM. My journals just make me wince over how truly terrible I was at it. The free floating resentment was so unfair to my boys. Staying home out of duty isn’t the way to do it. Had my earning power been on par with Ward’s he would have been home with the boys. Ward may be a lot of things but he is profoundly more patient and easygoing. I’m amazed my kids aren’t more anxious and screwed up.

I sound eaten alive with bitterness when I describe the pictures I include in this blog but after working my way through the bad bits it is easy to remark on what was good and right about the snapshots; and I am lucky enough to experience serendipitous healing. Not that my life is so terribly special. All lives are bittersweet and mine is no more or less than others.

So now I’m scrapping the past, and with each page the bitter is sealed behind the photo. The only thing you can see is the sweetness of two childhoods.