Better Half

“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.” ~Jalal ad-Din Rumi

My husband was sent to me. This I believe wholeheartedly. God, fate, my mother, SOMEONE, up in the galaxy tilted the gravitational pull of the Earth and pulled him into the orbit of my life. One slow night after we first started dating, we actually tried mapping out all the different possibilities and ways we would have met, a 'la Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I think we stopped around the thirteenth scenario because we started to get a little freaked out. Inevitable is a word that comes to mind when I think about us getting together. And I couldn't be more grateful for that.

Some people get insulted when their spouse or significant other is referred to as their "better half," but I'm a realist in my world, and will be the first one to affirm that term for him. He is the Roy Croft quote come to life; "I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you."

When I'm frustrated with a project and ready to throw it against a wall, he's the first one to pry it out of my hands so I can go take a breather before I do anything I'll regret later. When I'm wound up and angry, he knows how long to stay silent before offering a lame joke to break me out of my red haze. When the kids are making me climb the walls, he usually manages to pop in with a distraction so I can go hide in the stairwell and take deep breaths to get myself under control. And lately, when I'm depressed, he knows just how to hold me, or compliment me, or lean down and talk to the baby in my stomach, to get me to see the light again in the self-imposed rabbit hole I fall into. Even though somedays I feel like we're doing such a good job raising our little wildebeasts as a united front, and others it feels like a baton race, I never have to wonder who or where my partner is. He is all around me, keeping me up, watching my back, leading me on, and best of all, at my side. Coaxing me to enjoy the view.

Never fully dressed

When I have weeks that involve stuff like this happening, which is totally out of my control; (that crack is in my car's front windshield, by the way)


It's nice that I can come home and spend 2 hours making a dress that makes my Monkey smile like this;


Or set up a $10 slip n' slide that can elict shreiks of glee out of Scootch;

Sometimes on my darkest days, I think that if I just keep looking here, at the personifications of my heart, everything is just going to work out. If I can just keep myself smiling, it will have to turn out for the better. For them.

The Science of Solace

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight.... Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko

It has not been a good past few days.

The mood swings from my lack of meds is frightening. The kids are wound up tighter, most likely due to the beautiful weather outside and their lack of playing in it. And on Tuesday it was my birthday. Not just any birthday, but the last birthday before I cross that prime meridian in my mind where I will be on this Earth for more years without my mother than I will have knowing her. My personal Y2K crisis.

But its things like this that really bring home how much I'm missing my mother.


Fallen cupcakes might not make much sense to you, but my mother was both a baker and a scientist. When the cookies came out flat she knew that I needed to add more flour. When my boxed cake didn't come out right, she could tell I was being impatient and didn't mix it for the whole 2 minutes the package directs. When she fell in love with a batch of orange muffins while we were on vacation, she went home and made up a recipe for them. She knew relationships that existed between baking powders and sodas and salts and flours, and I was content as a child to be honored when I was allowed to lick the beaters.

How I wish back for that lab time now. There isn't a recipe that I try to make for Scootch that has come out right yet. Pancakes, boxed cakes, scratch cakes. Modified, fortified, and verbatim. They all crumble, fall, or fail to rise at all. I used to love baking. My husband used to brag I was good at it. But lately it just feels like I'm failing a midterm anytime I lug out the Kitchen Aid. And as much as everyone is sympathetic, I just have this feeling that if my mom were here, she would fix it. She would HAVE a recipe that wouldn't fail me. Possibly multiple ones at this point. In all kinds of flavors so her grandson wouldn't be missing out on what red velvet or devil's food cake did to your tongue.

My only small solace is this;



At least she left me the means to still decorate my disasters.

Hurdles

When the world says, "Give up,"
Hope whispers, "Try it one more time." ~Unknown

I like to make plans. Maybe its due in part of my OCD nature, or maybe its because I grew up in a boating family that charted and plotted a course in the summer before undertaking it. Either way, I've grown up to be a planner. It helps to keep the anxiety away when I think I know what to expect. But its becoming more clear that I should have taken up a sport like track and field in high school instead of indulging in something safe and choreographed like the Drill Team I was on. Hurdles seem to be a common fixture in my life.

When my husband and I got married, we had a plan to stop at three kids. Plans changed after Scootch was born, and I found myself unable to function or leave the house without help. So we decided it would be best to change the plans and stop at two. We've made plans since then, we just recently tried to start up our own business, bought a car, and basically have tried to stick to the plans. Apparently, though, someone else has different plans for us.

Two Fridays ago, I just got confirmation that we'll be expecting baby #3 in December, despite the measures we went through to ensure a limit on our family numbers. The anti-anxiety medication I've been on will have to be stopped for the baby. I'll have to quit my day job and hope that we'll still survive without my additional income paying for the food and utility bills since the business isn't pulling in any money yet. And I'm already stressing over having to remove my kids from their wonderful school, and turning their days full of friends and learning into being walled up at home with an over-anxious mother.

Its hard to keep feeling like I can keep it together when so many things start spinning out of control at once. And as much excitement we're feeling over actually getting the 3 kids we originally planned for, the hurdles are looking a little daunting and numerous. But I'm hoping. I'm hoping that whoever changed our plans will also point us in the direction of the solutions. I'm hoping this is an experience that might help me recover some strength against my fears instead of further exiling me to the shadows of my anxieties.

I'm hoping that hope will prevail.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

This is where the magic happens. (No, that's NOT where I'm headed, just keep reading!)
This is where dressing rituals become tickle matches, where fortresses are built, or rivers are explored. Where refuge is gained from scary sharks and alligators. Where sheets become cavern walls, or parachutes, or dresses, or bridal veils. Where pillows are seats, or airplane wings, or the coal car behind a train engine. This is where hiding in plain sight is still the best game, with only a thin sheet between you and the world that seems safer than the thickest steel wall. This is base when playing tag. Where mornings are started with giggles and peek a boo. Where talks are shared, and reprimands, and make-up kisses and cuddles. This is where sick restless nights are soothed into quiet daybeaks. Where daughters watch mothers transform into princesses before their very eyes.

This is where I lie awake at night and turn over my blessings in my mind.

This is, by far, my favorite place in the house.

Up and Down

I love my Mother in Law. And I don't mean that facetiously. She's funny, and truthful, and sometimes she's losing her mind, but we love her anyway. (I'm convinced Me-Ma is Monkey's favorite person on the entire planet.) She is also the first one I turn to for advice since my own mother isn't here. My Mother in Law has talked me down from many a metaphorical ledge in the past.

So when she called me last Tuesday in a panic about Scootch, I convinced myself to stay calm and return the favor.

Tuesday morning I dropped off Monkey and Scootch to Me-Ma's as usual and then was off to work. The cell phone rang before I even got to my destination. My MIL was frantic, asking me what Scootch first signs of an allergic reaction were. Apparently, she was finishing her breakfast when I dropped off the kiddos, and Scootch asked for a bite of her cereal. He had almost 3 spoonfuls before she remembered there was some granola mixed in with her Cheerios. Granola with almonds.

We went through the signs of a reaction and the protocol for what medicines she needed to use if he did react. I also called every couple of hours to see how he was doing. But the miraculous thing is that he didn't have a reaction at all. Peanut allergic Scootch, who has been ordered to avoid all other nuts as a general rule, doesn't seem to be allergic to almonds.

I'm hopeful after such a happy accident as this.

Someday We'll Look Back on This and Laugh

Food is such a sore issue with me that I sometimes forget that the Monkey doesn't have any problems with it. Unless, of course, they're the problems SHE comes up with about it. She is almost four, and very decisive about what passes through her lips. There are bargains twenty times a day for candy, and now that the Easter Bunny has visited, her definition of "eggs" means the hollow plastic kind filled with Kisses and jelly beans.

Taking all this into account, she is also very rigid about her meals. Breakfast is either oatmeal or cereal. Lunch is a soy butter and jelly sandwich. And judging by the fiasco last Friday, her refusals aren't based so much on a matter of taste, but more on a matter of control.

When I announced on Friday that we were heading home from the store to eat lunch, her first response was that she wasn't hungry, "So, we don't need to go home. We can go to another store." Nice try.

I went through the contents of the fridge as offerings as we drove, trying to entice her to want something different. Pizza. Yogurt. Chicken nuggets. She still clung to the "I'm not hungry" testimony.

I decided that I was not going to partake in the classic Fake-nut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches, and settled on grilled cheese instead. So I tried to persuade her to live a little and have what I was having. Bread grilled in butter with cheese in between. I even offered to throw some bacon in the middle (bacon is the other holy food in her treasured list of acceptables). But to no avail. She staunchly refused to eat any thing but a soy butter and jelly sandwich. "With RASPBERRY jam, Mom. Not grape like my brother." Yes dear.

Well, I pick my battles. So soy butter and raspberry jam sandwich it was. Cut in four pieces, just as she decreed. With a side of chocolate milk in the pink princess cup.

I calmly made myself grilled cheese. (I even treated myself to a strip of our precooked bacon in the middle). I threw it on a plate and sat down in my spot between Monkey and Scootch, lifted my sandwich to my mouth, and as I look over to see her dismantled sandwich with all the jam scraped off and consumed by her fingers, she pipes up with, "Mom. Could I have some of your grilled cheese?"

Someday her antics will amuse me. Just not today.