My Heart, Walking Around

There are all kinds of good descriptions of what it's like to be a mother, but this week I'm remembering what a friend told me when my first child was born. 

For the rest of your life, she said, your heart walks around outside your body.

February has been a stressful month for my Boys. Life is good, but moments are hard, and when I heard one of the Boys on the phone a few days ago I immediately knew he was struggling.

"Can I do something, or do you just need a sympathetic ear?" I asked him. He needed the ear, he told me.

So for the next half hour or so, I tried to not give advice. The pressure he's feeling comes from the high expectations he puts on himself and the high expectations others justifiably have of him, but it's pressure nonetheless and too much pressure hurts.

I want to fix it. I want my child to be happy, and I know there's a part of me that won't be happy again until I know he is as well.

Oddly, I find myself reverting to the instinctive ways I comforted my new babies. "It'll be okay," I told him, my fingers unconsciously patting the arm of the chair as if it were his back. "You can do this."

"Don't think ahead until next week--finish today, then work on tomorrow."

And I give the ultimate mom advice. "Go get a good meal, with protein and something green.You'll feel better if you're eating right."

By the time we finish talking he's laughing at his father's latest shenanigans, and ready to forge on through this rough week.

I mentally rub his back one last time, and remind him, "God's in control."

Then I hang up realizing that if I didn't truly believe that last word I left with him, I would not be able to get through each day, with my heart exposed as it is, out there walking around.

Another Thing I Love About Working Here

Working at Small College, as I do, means there's plenty of opportunity to support student fundraisers. This is a good thing, as opposed to elementary school fundraisers which tend to consist solely of opportunities to buy overpriced name brand stuff I would ordinarily buy in their generic versions. Wrapping paper. Cookie dough. Greeting cards.

I'm right, aren't I, parents?

By the time they're in college, kids are actually useful. Who knew? So fundraisers at Small College actually are worth supporting. Besides the warm glow of helping student go-on-trips/buy-new-warm-ups/attend-a-conference, there's an actual something-I-want attached. House cleaning, say. Or leaf raking, or bicycle maintenance.

A couple of years ago at an auction to help students go on a mission trip, I bid on an authentic Asian dinner. Then I forgot I had won the bid. (Chalk this one up for the win side of memory loss.)

Yesterday a lovely young Malaysian girl came in my office. "Do you remember when you bid on the Asian meal? Well, J and I put that up for auction, but J is going home this weekend. Could we bring you dinner tonight?"

Oh, the joy of those words. Let me repeat them once more just so you can savor their loveliness with me: "Could we bring you dinner tonight?" If Mr. Rochester had said this to Jane Eyre in chapter two, that book could have been a lot shorter.

Anyway, A and J showed up with a smorgasbord of Asian food, to mix a geographic metaphor. We had Beef Rendang. Stir-fry Cabbage. Papadam. Steamed Egg. Perfectly sticky Asian rice.

This was so the opposite of  the usual Wednesday night pre-meeting  fare in the MomQueenBee house (which is to say, "What kind of cereal do you want, Honey? You'll need to get it yourself.") that it felt as if we'd won the lottery.

The yummy, yummy lottery.

New 'Do

Not me, but strikingly similar to what I looked like 24 hours ago

I've been overdue for a new 'do.

With the arctic weather and some work deadlines and a compulsion to wait as long as possible before calling my hairdresser in a panic, my hair had gotten just a little...bad. 

This, by the way, is the way I approach a cut and color every single time.

"Oh, I can wait just a day or two more, because I really want to get my money's worth out of that last cut, and seriously it doesn't look that...EEEEK!"

One of the reasons I am so averse to making hair appointments on a timely basis is because I know that with every cut I will have to reintroduce myself to my hair. Each cut has its own personality: One is aggressive, the next one innocuous and lank, the one after that just what I was hoping for, followed by "when did I get so gray?" and so on and so forth.

Also not me, but I empathize with the hair

The one thing all of my haircuts have in common is my instructions to my fabulous barber: "Just like last time." And just like every time, I always leave her shop looking something like the photo at left, except without the drug use and early death and bright red lipstick and wearing a shirt under my jacket. Oh, and the hair is shorter.

But it feels JUST LIKE THIS. Too blond, and too froufrou, and too much look. If you are your hairstyle, I'm one hit away from being in the Country Music Top 100.

So usually I leave the beauty shop* and immediately go home to brush brush brush brush until my head is my own again. Last night I had to go straight from the whatever-you-call-it-place-where-there's-a-sink-and-a-hairdryer to a meeting. To my amazement, the other women there were complimentary.

"Oh! Your hair looks so cuuuute!"

"I've never seen your hair like this, and I love it!"

And so on.

Huh. Either those lovely ladies were lying, or you can hand me a guitar--I think my destiny is calling.


*(Does anyone still call it a beauty shop? What's the right word for a chair in a friend's back room? Salon? Barbershop? Gossip aggregator?)

Aaaaahhhh, Kansas!

All but one of the Boys chose colleges outside our home state. One of the indispensable items they require when leaving home, though, is a flag. The three expatriates have taken state flags with them to remind fellow students that you don't mess with Kansas, either.

I know just how they feel. When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to move somewhere interesting. Interesting, of course, was defined as having mountains or oceans or mass transit. Even though I had grown up in Kansas, this place just wasn't happening enough for my 20-year-old self.

Then I ended up in the Peace Corps. I had oceans and mountains and mass transit, and sometimes all three at once. As an added bonus I had gorgeous sunsets, cartoonish-looking birds, earthquakes, and tropical fruit straight off the tree.

But at the risk of sounding like the most-despised movie in Kansas history, there's no place like home.

That strikes me again today as I look out my office window. Six days ago the temperature was -20 degrees when I rolled out of bed. The Snow Joe and I were clearing off sidewalks and we were cancelling classes because it was just too darned cold. Today, at this moment, it's 55 degrees, with highs tomorrow expected to be in the upper 60s.

How fun is that? We can complain about the cold and the heat all in the space of less than a week, and not many places with mass transit can do that.

As Boy#1's Facebook group proclaims as it celebrates the sesquicentennial, Ad Astra Per Awesome! Because every day should be Kansas Day.

So Romantic

Someone asked Husband and me at church if we were going to the Valentine Day dinner last night. We looked at each other and grinned.

"Naw," he said, "we're not too romantic."

And we aren't, by some standards. According to Dr. Google, "the single most romantic thing in the universe can be calculated scientifically. It is, simply, a small red candle made out of chocolate and shaped like a teddy bear holding a heart with scribbles all over it that plays a tune when you wind it up."

Well, alrighty then. And if you wanted to scientifically calculate the single item in the universe most likely to make me roll my eyes and gag, that would be it.

I have my own list of what is truly romantic:

Romantic is balancing my checkbook and not wincing when I haven't totaled expenditures for...a while.

Romantic is being a good dad.

Romantic is not rolling his eyes when I write about him here even though he does love his privacy.

Romantic is knowing who sang every single song recorded during the '70s.

Romantic is modeling how to treat an aging mother, so that Boys will know how to treat me in the not-so-distant future (i.e.buying cat food so she can feed the strays around her retirement apartment, even though he is so not a cat person. Nor am I, Boys, so don't bother buying cat food, but you get the point.).

Romantic is eating everything I cook, including lentils, because I love them even though he doesn't.

Romantic is starting my car when it's cold outside.

Romantic is valuing my opinion, and letting me know he thinks I'm smart and capable.

Huh. I guess he's romantic after all.

Happy Valentine's Day, Husband!

Birth Story

Husband and Boy#2,  Feb. 12, 1988

 (Warning: This post contains bodily fluids. There. You've been warned.)

The most shocking moment of my life occurred 23 years and seven hours ago as I sit here at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. That was the moment when I "rolled over" in bed, gasped, and poked Husband in the side.

"Honey! Honey! Wake up! My water just broke!"

Honey was at that time on faculty at Small College and had been up late grading tests. To to his everlasting chagrin (because I don't plan to ever let him forget this), he opened one eye and mumbled, "It can't. I just got to bed."

It wasn't as if we didn't know we were having a baby sometime in the not-too-distant future. You know those women who gestate their unborn children as tidily and efficiently as kangaroos? I was not one of them. I didn't carry high or low; I carried all over. "Rolling over" is in quote marks in the first paragraph because that maneuver at that point looked more like the breach of a particularly clumsy orca.

Anyhow, we knew Boy#1 was getting a sibling sometime in the future, but the due date wasn't for another month. The sure and certain indication at 2 a.m. that whoops! The due date is today! was perhaps the most shocking moment of my life. No birthing bag was packed, the friends with whom we were going to leave One during the birth had a flu bug going through their house, and the hospital was an hour away. 

But Husband and I are nothing if not a well-oiled team. We immediately dropped into the roles that have worked well for us for 27 years now: I washed my hair and he handled everything else. (What? No way was I going through labor with dirty hair.)

This is where the squeamish might want to close their eyes and scroll down a bit. Boys, I'm looking at  you again.

As everyone who has gone through or witnessed a birth knows, sit-coms are not a reliable source of education as to what actually happens during that miraculous process. The Friends actresses sit up in bed in their pristine hospital gowns, make funny but charming faces, pant a few times, and voila! Twins!

They don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies. Birthin' babies, it turns out, involves an impressive amount of fluid, and this amount is not exhausted on the initial "Hey! My water broke!" moment. I realized as I stood at the sink washing my hair that bath towels would be my friends during the trip to the hospital. I folded several into diapers of appropriate orca size and stuffed them into place under my maternity jumper.

Husband called other friends who could wrangle One for a few hours, dumped One's top drawer of clothes into a suitcase for the subsequent days he would spend at Grandma's house, plopped our beloved first-born into the carseat for the one-hour trip to nearby Big City, and we were off. (I could write an entire post about the puzzled delight One had at going bye-bye in the middle of the night, but I'll save that.)

Fast forward one hour. By this time it was 3 a.m., and we had deposited One with friends and were pulling into the hospital emergency parking lot. Signs on every lightpost screamed that parking in this lot was for EMERGENCIES ONLY!, but labor was starting in earnest and I didn't want to wait for us to find a different lot.  Husband opened my car door and I ponderously swung my legs out. The orca diapers, lacking any kind of fasteners, dropped to my knees.

"Oh, dang!" I wailed at poor Husband, who was beginning to show some signs of nervousness that I was going to give birth right there on the frozen asphalt. I tried to make modest readjustments, but it was no use. Finally I thought "It's 3 a.m., we are the only people moving for blocks around, the heck with it." I turned my back to the ER entrance, hiked up my skirt to approximately shoulder level, and refolded the towels. Husband was scandalized at the level of exposure I was displaying but I was unconcerned. "It's okay--no one saw that," I reassured my prince.

Fast forward again six hours or so. By now labor was well-advanced, the epidural was in place, and we knew we would have a baby in the next few hours, but there was a lull in urgency.

"Do you suppose I ought to move the car out of the emergency parking lot?" Husband asked the labor nurse.

"Naw," dear Audrey replied. "They have high-powered video cameras on those lots and they're watching every time anyone comes in or out. They know you're in labor."

Grandpa and Boy#2

I looked at Husband. He looked at me. Without saying a word, we were reliving the moment when I mooned the security staff, and realized that this moment was probably being immortalized in the Wesley Christmas party blooper reel.

Now, as I look back over the 23 years I've been Two's mother, I think of the beautiful blue eyes that we saw for the first time that day, and remember how my father happened to be in the area and held his hour-old grandson right there in the delivery room. The shock of that morning, and the chaos of the preceding hours, and the...exposure? Oh, so worth it.

Happy birthday, Two. I'm glad I'm your mom.

This Made Me Cry

You know that I don't very often embed video, and I've never embedded one this long before, but folks, this made me cry.

It wasn't James Franco, although he seems like a lovely man and may be my new favorite actor. His comment about self-centeredness is right on target.

Look at the face of the junior high boy doing the interview, though, especially at about the three minute mark. That face, right there, is as familiar to me as the back of my hand. Even though this California kid looks nothing like any of the Boys, I've watched my Boys in difficult situations that nevertheless delighted them. They knew they were mastering the task at hand (usually not interviewing James Franco, but maybe nailing a difficult piano solo, or answering a geography bee question, or working a complicated math problem) and the joy burst through on their faces.They simply could not stop smiling.

The memory of that joy, even as tears slide down my face, is making me smile as well.