Category Archives: Motherhood

carry on, girlfriend

06 Wednesday May 2009

Posted by in Motherhood, seasons, Writing

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My friend Joan’s stories been such a joy to read from day one; with each story I learn more about her as a woman, a parent, a survivor and a friend.  She writes with an honesty and humor that I find refreshing.  Recently she wrote a sweet story of how one word has epitomized each stage of motherhood for her.  She carries on, following her path even when the turns ahead are not yet clear.

dsc_00541Sometimes we all just keep going out of faith that our efforts will pay off in the end.  I planted these flowers at the end of last season.  The grocery store was giving them away, because it had reached the time of year when no one in their right mind would still plant pansies, even though they can overwinter in this zone; it depends on the year.  I took three flats worth and felt very lucky to have shopped there that day. I am a sucker for unwanted plants; I think it is an odd personality trait.  I will take any unwanted plant and find it a home, on my property or at school.  This soft spot for unwanted things is a compelling reason for me to not volunteer at an animal shelter… it would be disastrous for our household!  Also, I should not work at Goodwill.  Or the library book sale.

I knelt on the cold ground and tucked in the sad little flowers.  They bloomed a bit late last fall, but the snow soon came and frankly they all looked like goners. I silently berated myself for once again spending time on irrational pursuits instead of the dozens of unfinished projects I have around here.

Spring came, and some didn’t make it.  But some did.  Each time I walk out my front door, these beauties say to me,

“Voila!  Violas!”

They bring me more joy than many of the expensive plants that I just expect will come up each year.  They say to me, “Just carry on, and some things will work out, and others won’t, but there will be beauty if you look down at where you are.”

Like Joan, I find that stories bubble up from underground.  There are so many stories waiting for the right time to pop out and surprise someone.  The ideas are there for the taking; they just need a place to grow for a while before they bloom.  They just need me to set aside my logical pursuits and let them be.

day at the museum

24 Friday Apr 2009

Posted by in Motherhood, Photography, Writing

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On a recent trip to Chicago, we had the opportunity to visit some incredible museums.  It was not quite the famed Million Museum March of family lore, but we packed a lot into a couple days.  This handsome fellow graced the atrium of the Field Museum of Natural History.  Turns out our local museum center membership gave us free admission to many of Chicago’s best, so we were able to come and go without those pesky fees.  The program is called the ASTC (Association of Science-Technology Centers) Travel Passport Program. What a deal!

We watched the movie Night at the Museum quite a while ago, but the scenes still fueled our imaginations — at every turn we would stumble upon something that would be very creepy to see come to life after closing hours…  Usually art museums are more my scene, but experiencing the Museum of Science and Industry through the eyes of the boys (all of them) made it much more rewarding and fun.

Reconnecting with some wonderful cousins of mine, meal after meal of fabulous food, the feeling of staying downtown in a vibrant city — some of my favorite things.  Another unforgettable moment:  doing my first book signings.  Not formal signings, just signing the stock on the shelves and seeing the “autographed copy” sticker be placed on the front.  It was a thrill for this beginning writer, no doubt about it.

noo food, same rool

16 Thursday Apr 2009

Posted by in Foodies, Motherhood

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froot loopRemember the old rule, never eat anything bigger than your head?

*?*

It does NOT apply when Grammy makes Froot Loops for breakfast.

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Note to self:  The descriptive product name FROOT Loops gives the big clue that this breakfast cereal can only be “part of a nutritious breakfast” if served with steel cut oats, fresh fruit with antioxidants, a protein smoothie and a Flintstone vitamin chaser.

This young man is having his FROOT with some OJ and a pencil (which has lots of fiber).

*

That’s why we love Grammy.  She’s not a big grump like his mom.

swimming laps

14 Tuesday Apr 2009

Posted by in Motherhood, Photography, seasons

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dsc_0025Ahhh, the zoo in the springtime, for me the best time of year to go.  The summer — not so much:  heat and  humidity don’t mix well with the wafting aromas of african animal feces.  But now, the zoo puts on a wonderful floral show with the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths sharing the grounds with the flowering pear trees, magnolias and forsythias.  Oh, and the animals are more active when it is not stinkin’ hot.

Bonus!

This polar bear was doing laps around her enclosure.  I’m guessing summer in the midwest is not her favorite time either.  We watched her for quite a long time, from two different vantage points; we were fascinated by the methodical way she did the circuit.  The arm strokes were nearly identical on each pass around, and she would touch certain rocks along the back wall in exactly the same place each time.where's the exit?

At the risk of anthropomorphic musing, I could not help wondering what she was thinking or feeling or whatever polar bears do.  Did it bring her comfort, in these artificial surroundings, to go round and round in a pattern?  Did swimming laps work all the energy out of her body that must be pre-programmed into a polar bear’s DNA for survival?  Was she just bored out of her mind?  Whatever the reason, she was still swimming the same loop when we walked by two hours later.

We have not been to the zoo very often in the last few years ever.  Trips to the zoo never ended well when the kids were little, so I became zoo-averse early on.  When I see young mothers now, pushing their strollers with 1…2…3… kids in tow, none of them look like they are having a nervous breakdown.  Huh.  I’ll just say it is so much more fun to take the kids to the zoo now that they are a) ambulatory  b) able to read all the cool information about the animals themselves  c) not obsessed with riding the mini choo choo zoo train umpteen times at $5 a pop.  Other than the Little One being suddenly starving every 100 yards (because there is SO much delicious, affordable food at the zoo and the smell of monkey poo really whets the appetite);  it was a fun day.  We’ll just assume he was growing another inch taller that afternoon.

get them in the game

06 Monday Apr 2009

Posted by in good reads, Motherhood

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This just in, and just in time for tonight’s big basketball game — and baseball’s opening day — a new blog that explores sports themed books for kids and teens:  Get In The Game — Read!

Author Lori Calabrese has created this new forum to focus on all the wonderful books that energize and encourage kids to practice sports and reading. Here is an excerpt from Lori’s “About This Blog”:

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“If you think about it, sports and books just go together. The more

children practice, the better they become at sports. The more children

read, the better they become at reading. Both sports and books should

be inexpensive and accessible to everybody. They teach us about the

world around us, and overall, they’re just plain fun! So why not

combine the two? Avid sports fans can read a Sports Illustrated cover to cover, recite the

stats from the morning sports page, and read a program at a game. Avid

readers can learn about a sport, a specific athlete, or sports in other

countries. There are so many ways to incorporate sports and reading.

Make the most of all the resources that are available and waiting for

you: printed books, online books, magazines, etc…. Encourage

follow-up activities involving creative writing skills so your children

can expand on what they’ve absorbed and, at the same time, develop

their own creativity. As you help your kids appreciate the magic of

reading and the value of sports, you’ll find there’s a whole wide world

of fun and fundamentals!“

*

sluggers book threeWe’ll be watching her blog to see when she includes one of our family’s favorite sports series — Barnstormers, by Phil Bildner and Loren Long.  The series has just been re-released as Sluggers, but the stories remain as enchanting as ever.  As always with me, it is the emotions behind the sport that hold the greatest appeal.  Long’s illustrations are so evocative of baseball’s golden age gone by…

mom madness

06 Monday Apr 2009

Posted by in Motherhood

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Tonight is the final game of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tourney.  Oh, there’s been lots o’ b-ball watching in this house, especially in the man-cave.  It really doesn’t matter who is playing (since the Badgers were knocked out early); we watch virtually all the games anyway, at least in DVR’d speed watch.  I say “we” in a loose sense;  I wander through, bearing snacks, and watch a bit if it is close.  I’ll get sucked in to the experience.  There is such intensity and emotion at the collegiate level, joy and tears and arms linked together on the bench.  I love that part.

Professional sports just cannot compare.  The Professor’s opinion is that the NBA is less interesting because the players don’t make many mistakes;  the game just goes back and forth and back and forth.  I think it is because there is, naturally, less passion for the game.  Rare are the professionals in any field (or arena) that can maintain such a level of emotional intensity.  Their heads would explode after while.  They have to pace themselves for the long haul.  (The NBA season does eventually end, right?   Sometime in June?  When did that happen?)

Plus, in the NBA, their mom isn’t always watching.

I know that the NCAA March Madness games are filled with brilliant moments of athletic prowess, coaching strategy, and tetris-tight teamwork.  It is so exciting when the lead trades back and forth, and the crowd is cheering wildly in that rabid college-allegiance frenzy that reminds us why fan is short for fanatic.  I don’t get as caught up in the game itself, and certainly not in the outcome, as I do in the emotion.  For every spectacular play by the offense or the defense, I see the elation or defeat on the player’s face… and I think of this young man’s mom.  Or their step-mom, or aunt, or grandmother — whoever the woman is that loves this boy like a son, and watches his face while the game goes on all around him.  When there are 10 seconds left in a tie game and the player is at the free throw line, I just about go nuts thinking about how his mom must feel.  My heart is in my throat.  In a fun way.

I realize I may not be a typical sports fan.  I think most people care about how the game ends, and they remember who was the champion, and the final score.  I rarely remember any of those things, even though I had been watching the game very intently.  Perhaps my game score hard-drive is full with other important numbers like the birthdays of people in my 6th grade class.  I think that my interests lie in a different aspect of the game, the one that is the interplay between young people so full of dreams.  And their moms.

bon appetit

05 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by in Foodies, Motherhood

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It is not exactly news to write about what my kid(s) won’t eat.  Every parent has a story, right?  However, some blogs have elevated it to an art form.  At Suburban Bliss, author Melissa Summers has a regular feature called “Did They Eat It?”  She takes clever photos all through the meal preparation process, adds a liberal dose of humor, and tops it off with the comments from each of her (often disgruntled) family members.  As at my house, things rarely go well for her.    Plan, purchase, prepare, have everything be done (and hot) at the same time – ? – and then “they didn’t eat it.”  Sigh.  Perhaps my favorite part is the needlecraft motif header in her blog; a cross-stitch masterpiece that is to me the perfect juxtaposition of old fashioned “clean your plate” with modern parenting sensibilities.

The Professor was willing to eat anything when he was little.  Then came The Little One; he was much more, um, discriminating.  And that’s where I made the fatal mistake as the meal-preparing parent — I let one influence the other and it was a slippery slope down from there to Nitrate Land.  We still make them try new things on a regular basis — I take some amount of perverse pleasure in it actually — following a philosophy loosely based on some mythical research that when one tries a new food at least 20 times, one will learn to like it.  Or at least tolerate it.

The funny blog The Detective Mom had an amusing post recently, sharing a story of her toddler’s foray into salad.  It involves vegetables and the body functions of small poultry.  Sigh again, her kid eats salad!

So, we keep plodding along, throwing new culinary attempts at the wall to see which ones will stick.  The kids will eat more things if they are plain, raw or not touching any other food stuff.  They will eat all the ingredients separately, but not combined.  That’s not all bad.  There are always some healthy things to choose from on the table.  Someday they will eat food that is mixed together, I am confident.  I hear that at the age of three, I ate nothing but SpagettiO’s for an extended period.  Now, I will try virtually anything, and enjoy almost all of it.  (Except SpagettiO’s.)

Recently, The Professor and I were having a spirited discussion about what was for dinner.  I must have had an exasperated look on my face, because he suddenly looked empathetic and said, “Mom, I am really sorry that you have to go through so much effort to try to find healthy things that I will eat.  (long pause)  But it is kinda fun watching you try!”

Sigh.

put on a happy face

30 Monday Mar 2009

Posted by in Motherhood, Writing

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Happy Monday, folks!  I’ve put away the crowbar for another week — there’s nothing like getting a couple growing boys out of bed on a Monday morning to give those biceps a good workout with garden tools.

No one was smiling this morning.  Well, except me.

See, Monday morning now means a quiet house where I can just write.  Writing gets me out of bed.  Writing gives me energy.  So does reading great writing.

And coffee!  Coffee is really good too.

Finding happiness on a Monday, or any other day, is the basis for the wonderful blog  The Happiness Project.  (Yes, yet another great link found on Zebra Sounds!)  On The Happiness Project, author Gretchen Rubin shares her “adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier”.  In one poignant post, she shares the paradoxes of happiness;  just one thing learned during her year-long journey of test-driving every happiness theory she could find.  Good reading!

To me, the true paradox of happiness is its unexpected painfulness.  A broken heart hurts like hell, but happiness/beauty can also pierce the heart with its sweetness.  When I look at my children, I feel so blessed and happy and lucky that it hurts.  The heart aches when sad things happen, but it can also ache with joy.

An alternative is to go through life slightly oblivious to all the intense beauty around us, keeping busy and on task to keep the mind and the heart from feeling too much.  A conscious or unconscious decision.  Plenty of fun and happy and laughs and pleasantness, just not the joy so sharp,  it cuts.

Happiness brings tears to my eyes nearly every day.  Is it a fear that all that makes me happy in this place could be ephemeral?  The knowledge that in this crazy world, anything can happen, any day?  Maybe happiness and sadness are separated by a very thin line, and the heart feels them both as one.  Either way, I cry at inopportune times, but that is me.

my happiness projectAll I have to do is look at those sweet sons of ours in the morning, before they are awake, and breathe deeply in their sleepy necks to wake them up.  It feels like as much happiness as I deserve all day.

Of course, the sleepyheads are so much cuter before they start moaning about the need to get up.  The onset of puberty might also change my tune.  We’ll see.

If all else fails to stir the happiness in my soul, there is always the option of putting on a happy face, even on the days when life’s blessings are less obvious.  Gretchen says it is possible.

The Little One has discovered that a paper plate works in a pinch.

the pre-wash cycle

19 Thursday Mar 2009

Posted by in get along like cats and dogs, Motherhood

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There is an ongoing debate in my household about the “best” way to load the dishwasher.  I just put the dishes in.  Apparently that is not exactly right.  Apparently it is very important to stack them using a very complex logarithm that maximizes the mean number of individual dishes that can be wedged into every nook and corner.  It does not seem to matter much to this particular member of my household (who shall remain nameless) that the dishes do not get as clean when there are 537 of them in a single load.  I end up putting them through the dishwasher again a second time when this unnamed person leaves the house.

I think the dishes come out bright spanky super-clean when I load the dishwasher the “not as right” way.  Especially when I use the pre-wash cycle.

Before activating pre-wash, be sure to check the back of the dishwasher for something scary:

check the back for something scary

Activate pre-wash. (Note the cat looks disgusted about the whole spectacle.)

prewash

Handy tip: the pre-wash is also self-cleaning. (Even the top of the nose.)

selfcleaning

Note To Self:  set the real sanitize button after every pre-wash.

the ultimate what?

17 Tuesday Mar 2009

Posted by in Motherhood, Writing

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the ultimate momLater yesterday, when I was ready, I did the trip back out to the mailbox and retrieved the package.  I carefully slit open the tape, peeled back the brown box, and there it was.  The anthology The Ultimate Mom.

I went straight for the table of contents:  whew, I spelled my name right on the submission form.  Page 34.  “The Impromptu Birthday” by Jane Koenen Bretl.  It looks great!  Nothing had been edited in the story, which was a relief since the contract stated that last minute edits may be necessary.  In my mind, I thought that might be half of the tale when they came to their senses.  They printed it pretty much word for word; just edited my punctuation since I am a bit ambitious: about colons; semicolons and — dashes.  My 50 word bio in the back is the revised copy with my blog address. Whew again.

I felt happy. And relieved. And proud. And excited.  And then I put the wet laundry in the dryer and realized that, once again, there is nothing prepared for dinner.

Let me be very clear here:  I wrote one little story that is in an anthology with many other wonderful stories about the joys and challenges of motherhood.  My story is about potty-training, and a lie that I told my kid.  It is in the section “Merriment and Mishaps”.  The reality does not escape me, this auspicious start, to have my first published clip be about poo.  And me lying.

The Ultimate Mom.  The title of the book is a lot to live up to.  As the late afternoon sunshine slanted in through the front windows, I held the book and gave a cursory glance around me: an impressive 20 foot line-up of dirty laundry baskets still undone, the breakfast dishes inexplicably still on the counter, and no dinner in sight.  In the big, big story of motherhood, I am just an imperfect contributor.

But I smiled, because I am a writer.

And I am thankful that the publisher did not conduct a home visit as a qualification.