Three Day Suspension.

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I picked my daughter up from school yesterday with a black eye and a tissue to her nose. Feeling distinctly low-class and ashamed of it, I got there, ready to raise hell with a baby on my hip.

Before that, I talked to my husband and then I did what I always do: I called my mom. There are a lot of things I don’t do the way my mom did with me when I was growing up and I don’t usually take her advice in anything but my favorite bits and pieces, but I always call her. If I can’t get a hold of her, I don’t panic or anything. It isn’t that I need to hear what she thinks to decide what I think. It’s that she centers me, just by being her. She’s my mom. Talking to her before I make any big decision is like being able to come home and get a good night’s rest before I travel somewhere new and unpredictable.

Her legs were crossed when I got into the conference room with the kids, hair in disarray and there was a tear sitting on her cheek when I asked flatly if she was okay. I couldn’t tell immediately if it was from the busted blood vessel in her eye or the “emotional state” the sixth grade administrator told my husband she was in after the fight. If there is anything I will not tolerate, any place that I draw the line, Mary knows that it’s fighting. (Fighting is kind of an epidemic at her school.) Then again, six months ago I would have said it was getting suspended off of the bus. A few months before that I would said it was detention. She’s a sweet, smart kid, and I refuse to believe that she doesn’t try hard. But even at her best, Mary has a knack for kind of tripping over the lines we draw for her. Giving this less-than-reputable school a shot with her has been the worst parenting call we’ve made to date.

The drive home was quiet. The administrator didn’t fault Mary for what happened and it looked like he sympathized with her a lot more than I was expecting. Fighting is fighting though, and it comes with a three day suspension. Normally there would be a separate conference upon a child’s return to school, but in this case, he said, it wouldn’t be necessary.

I gave her twenty minutes to transition home before we talked. I gave the younger kids a snack and told Matthew to play with Scarlett in his room. I had already run through all the different ways our conversation could possibly go in my head on the drive over to the school, so when we sat down to talk it out in the living room, I felt marginally prepared for it. I say “marginally” because you can’t script conversations like these. I knew that it could end up going one of a thousand different ways and that was fine. I didn’t want to script it. I wanted to hear her out. But to do this right, I needed to be clear on what was to come out of our talk.

I was going to listen to her first. I was going to hit her with a few of the things we could walk away from the situation with, no matter how it went down, no matter who was at fault. We were going to talk about smarter conflict resolution and how to know when to walk away from a high tension situation. I wasn’t going to attack her with a bunch of attitude; in situations like this I like her to know above all else that I am always in her corner even when I think she could have done things a lot differently. The rest is important, it’s just secondary. But I didn’t plan to be easy on her either. The fact is that she was suspended from school. This was not going to be a vacation and she needed to know that this was not going to happen again.

But that was before she cried. Not because of the bitch who hit her. Not because of the trouble she was in. Because she missed her mom.

　

　

One thing I pride myself on is being able to stay in control of my emotions. But even just writing this, I can’t not cry. It isn’t because I feel slighted or because it makes me jealous. It’s because everyone can relate to that feeling of just wanting your mom sometimes. I’m 26. I still want my mom when I have a rough day. And I’ve never even been punched in the face before.

As much as I love Mary and she loves me, (and we do, we are unconventionally close for a step-family, and there are plenty of times that I feel needed by her) I will always fall just short of being the person who fills that one, important spot. I think if things happened differently; if I were older and I came into her life much earlier, maybe I could have been the real-deal replacement. And in almost, if not every other way, I have. (I said that I wouldn’t, but since her mom has been absent, I have.) It isn’t tragic for me, because I don’t feel like I have Mary any less than I would if she had never known her real mom. Let’s face it, Mary isn’t exactly the easiest child in the world to raise, but she has never - not even for a second - caused me to question that I am loved and appreciated by her. Sometimes, even when adults are good at showing their appreciation, you have to question how much of it is genuine and how much of it they’ve just been conditioned to show out of common courtesy. For a child, utterly free from the chains of societal obligation or anything like that, to not only feel that way but take the care to show it? That’s remarkable. That’s something I wouldn’t have been lucky enough to get with any other kid in the world, I bet. So I don’t feel bad for myself when she says that she misses her mom. I understand. More than anything, I’m thankful that she knows and honored that she feels like she can talk to me about it.

But I cried like a helpless sap when she said “I’m sorry” for it.

In some ways, Mary’s just always going to feel a little off-balance by not having her mom in her life the way that a growing girl needs to have her mom -- even during the “ins” of her mom’s in-and-out ways. I’m always going to love her completely, without any conditions, and she’s going to love me the way my biological children do. I feel like she has for a long time now. But at her age, it won’t change that there is a void her mom isn’t equipped… for whatever reason… to fill, and unfortunately, neither am I. I don’t think that means she’ll have anything she needs missing from her life. But I do think that no matter how close we get, or how much of my approval she’ll always have, a part of her will crave it from her mom.

Mary didn’t see her mom at Christmas this year or Mother’s Day, and on the latter, she didn’t even bring it up. She was the first, even before my husband or my son to tell me Happy Mother’s Day and she was very specific about the card she picked out for her grandmother, treating it like extremely serious business. But I knew that those wouldn’t be the worst days. I knew that they would be days like yesterday. The ordinary ones that just somehow get away from us, those are the days we all need our moms. It doesn’t matter if they have any idea how to fix the problem or if they stop us from making a terrible mistake or if everything that comes out of their mouth rubs us the wrong way. We just need to know that she’s there, because as long as she is, life can never bend us too far in the wrong direction.

　

It’s been so long since anything’s triggered an emotional response over her mom that Spencer and I find ourselves forgetting altogether sometimes that she even has another one to consider. What used to be this relentless, looming elephant in the room all of the time; something I thought we’d live with forever, has diminished into little more than an afterthought on landmark days. For all intents and purposes, I’m her mom. In fact most of her friends this year don’t even know that she has another one and I’ve heard them sound surprised when on occasion, she calls me by my first name. She’s a totally happy-go-lucky kid with a wild sense of humor, a hard time sitting still, a ton of friends, and an untouchable self esteem I marvel at constantly. Our life together, our relationship, is everything I could have ever hoped it would turn into. But it isn’t often that I get to see Mary be totally vulnerable with me, concerning her mom. She’ll make jokes or cop an attitude before she breaks down. When I hugged her that day and she said that she was sorry, I just lost it. Every wall between us came down for a minute and it gave me the chance to tell her things the way I’ve always wanted to put them to her; things that so often get watered down when they’re just being exchanged in the middle of everyday crap.

I told her how unconditionally I love and respect her; how lucky I am to have a daughter like her in my life and how my biggest hope for her future is that she never, never questions that she can talk to me about anything… That I have a massive, massive responsibility to do right by her when it comes to important things, like raising her to have a solid understanding of morality and honor and all of that. And that I know I can be tough on her because getting the big stuff right is so colossally important, but that nothing she will ever come to me with -- even when she is completely in the wrong, from beginning to end -- will ever make me think less of her or change what she means to me.

　

Mary and I hugged it out and cried together and said that we loved each other while she held ice to one of her eyes and wiped the other with her free wrist. Then we cleared our throats and told Matthew we were okay with a hug and a kiss to seal the deal, and laughed when Scarlett came in the room and did something funny. I popped a coke and we talked for a while about how unfair the whole thing was and how that girl really sucks and how she’ll handle it when she goes back to school on Monday.

I can’t fill the void her mom left. And I think that if I spend my entire journey with her trying to do that, I’ll have wasted a lot of time getting to be what I can be for her. Which is a good mom, who is here, unfailingly. And someone who will do everything in her power to bridge the gap the best she can.

The less attractive side to the role I have in Mary’s life right now is that yes, I have to be the one to pick her up from school when she’s been suspended and the one to sentence her to the scrubbing of toilets when she’s tested being defiant to her English teacher, and still find the opportunity to remind her (more often than a “real” mom would need to) that she is unconditionally loved. But there is a lifetime of upsides and one of them is that for her three day suspension, I get to be the one she spends them with.

I couldn’t be prouder.

Tree Swings, Strawberries and Sprinklers.

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This memorial day we went to a cookout at our neighbors' house. Since our backyard would be kind of on display from their house, we had to spend a little bit of time this weekend cleaning it up. The backyard is basically my husband’s territory, taken up mostly by our detached garage, shed and whatever ridiculous number of vehicles the man is working on at the time. Add to that the fact that it’s being slowly overrun by training-wheeled vehicles that belong to our kids (because Spencer’s precious garage = man cave = tricycles are not welcome here) and you basically have the least attractive part of our property. Being a two person job, that didn’t leave me with a lot of time to make something remarkable to bring to the cookout. Until I thought of these:

Memorial Day Stuffed Strawberries



These were so good, I noticed a bunch of the kids reaching for them before the desserts! A good half of them were eaten before we even made it next door. They looked super festive, AND they only took about 15 minutes to throw together. Here’s how I did it:

Grab:
A pack of strawberries
A pack of blueberries

(For filling)
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened
1 cup sifted powdered sugar
6 tablespoons butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
Some cool whip (more or less depending on how heavy/light you want your filling to be)
Slice the tops and a little bit of the bottoms off of each strawberry so that they’ll stand flat on a platter. Hallow out the insides of the strawberries (I used a small knife and a potato peeler, which was really easy).

Beat all of filling ingredients together, adding desired amount of cool whip/whipped cream to reach a consistency you like. Spoon mixture into a Ziplock bag and snip off a corner to make a pastry bag. Fill each strawberry. Shower filled strawberries to your hearts content with red, white and blue sprinkles and top with a blueberry. Done!

　

We also brought a little Pinterest idea to life with a cute DIY project for the front yard this weekend: a tree swing!

I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love this thing. It took maybe an hour to throw together, practically including the trip to the hardware store for wood and rope. And it ended up being the talk of the party toward the end of the night when all of the kids gravitated toward it after the sprinklers were shut off at the neighbor’s and they roamed out front. It’s more for decoration than for swinging (or I would have went with some less attractive nylon rope and a rubber seat) but we made sure to reinforce it enough so that it’d be safe (fisherman’s knots around the branch with steel clamps underneath) for when neighborhood kids inevitably test it’s endurance. It was definitely put to the test last night too, when we literally found a group of like 10 to 12 kids forming a line around the tree to take turns on it. So far, so good!


For something so cheap and easy to do, we both agree it’s the coolest addition to the house we’ve ever made.

　

That’s it for now, I have a long weekend to finish up… Happy Memorial Day! Go get drunk have fun!

A Bucket List of Date-Night Ideas for Real People.

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It's okay, Christopher Walken. You can be in my picture.  

We’ve been married for three years. Date nights are high priority in our house particularly because the responsibility of raising three kids is a lot of weight for such a young marriage to sustain. Every marriage is unique. What stands us apart from most married couples our age is easily the fact that we have a full house so early into it. But every marriage has their defining characteristics; those things that makes romance come so easily and those things that serve as more of a challenge.

Raising three kids, we’ve found, is a lot of work, (Duh. Right?) but not just because kids are a lot of work; rather because it can often mean being separated even when we’re both under the same roof at the same time. I can’t tell you how frequently my husband and I end up saying, “You do this while I do that.” (You bathe the kids while I finish dinner. You handle Matthew in here while I fix the gutter outside.) At the end of the day it’s a must just so that we can make it in to bed together before one of us falls asleep. But if we aren’t careful, we end up doing it all weekend long and not having a minute to spend together ourselves.

Sometimes “being together” is reduced completely down to our weekend obligations. A niece’s birthday. A school event. A holiday dinner. Fun, sure (most of the time, anyway) but not exactly romance rekindling.

For the longest time, date nights had this stigma attached to them; this pressure to pack a punch that would get us through the next half-month or so before our romantic life could be rehashed again. It also came with the pressure to do things that were really fucking lame.

Back in the day we could have fun doing anything, but when you’re married with kids so much of what you do together is out of obligation that it makes you feel like what you do in any window of time you aren’t catering to kids, BETTER be worth it. Even if I’m fine with only having a mediocre time somewhere on a date, Spencer feels like he disappointed me for weeks (even though that is never the case!) and apologizes until he feels like he’s redeemed himself with a better one.

I’m extremely easy to please, but it doesn’t take long for dinner and drinks to get old, and because of our early schedules, late-night dates often mean we’re exhausted by the first drink and slightly irritable from the start. It got better when he told me he’d just rather I pick the places we go. At first I wasn’t sure I liked this idea, but I soon realized it works in my favor to appease him on this. It takes the pressure off of him which already sets a better mood because he isn’t stressing over every little thing that doesn’t go right, I get an easy route to something I want to do, and with the pressure off, he focuses a lot more attention on just relaxing with me and having a good time.

This spurred me to start looking into date-night ideas online for inspiration. You wouldn’t believe how disappointed I was to find a bunch of crap that we already do all the time. Not because they’re fun. Because we have to, BECAUSE THEY AREN’T DATES. Things like these:

Date night ideas that are really lame when you’re married:
(terrible ideas that have shown up multiple times on searches for date-night inspiration)

-go to the flea market!
-fly a kite at a park!
-clean out your storage room!
-cook something together!
-refine a piece of furniture!
-go to an open house, just for fun!
-play at a neighborhood park like a kid.
-Bring home a tray of fruit and take turns feeding each other.
-eat in bed.
-wash the car…

Seriously? Wash the car?

　

Okay, look, just because these things can be sweet when they happen on their own, does not mean that they qualify as a date. Is that seriously how lame marriage is expected to be? That making a date to refine a piece of furniture is the best way we can come up with to enjoy each other anymore? To be fair, some of these might actually be cute for a dating couple. It’s true, there is no bigger turn on than watching my husband get all dirty, fixing something around the house with his big, sweaty man-hands. Just like he thinks it’s super sexy when I’m all dolled up just to be housewife-y, so I get where these (ex: pick a day to fix things around the house, cook a meal together, etc.) are trying to go, but they would never cut it as date-night material. Anything you’ve done out of necessity before immediately loses any potential to be even remotely interesting when reserved for a date.

Then again, there are other ideas that might be great for some couples, but just don’t work for us -- partially because our interests aren’t identical, but mostly because we’re not fictional characters out of a made-for-TV romance. We actually have trace shreds of dignity. I’m sorry, I’m not asking my 30 year old husband to take me four leaf clover hunting at our nearest state park.

For instance, I like running and I like reading and he likes that I like those things, but he would never be into training for a marathon with me or reading a book I like and setting up a coffee shop date to talk about it. I’m not going to make him do things he obviously isn’t going to like and call that quality time. (It’s not just him either. I hate snow like most people hate old band-aids so everything from sledding to snowball fighting to skiing is out.) And seriously, enough with the Salsa Dancing! Salsa Dancing! Salsa Dancing! suggestions. I mean, sure… get a few drinks in us and we can get down with the best of them, (he’ll even humor me if I’m drunk and he’s not -- now THAT’S love) but I’ll spare both of us the humiliation of dragging him to a salsa dancing lesson we’ll both spend the entire time pretending I didn’t drag him to. And coupon books. Coupon books are cute for other people. I got some from a friend once it was the cutest thing ever. I thought it was absolutely adorable and totally fun. My daughter made me some when she was eight and I’ll keep them forever. But this is not a date-night idea. Please, stop calling it one.

　

So I’ve made my own list. A bucket-list of date night ideas that I wouldn’t be totally embarrassed to ask him on and he wouldn’t be totally embarrassed to take me on. A collection we could draw from whenever we find ourselves with a day or a night (or even a few) to ourselves. I thought it’d be fun to share and see what other people come up with.

Some are big and would take some planning. Some are small and we could do them all the time if they wind up being really fun. In fact, a bunch of them we already do. Some of them aren’t even available in our area, but might be worth planning as part of a road trip. Some are things we usually write off as something only to do with the kids, but end up being fun when taken out of their usual context. Some of them will probably wind up feeling totally awkward or forced or lame anyway, but they’d be cool to say that we tried and laugh about later. (Once, we went to this awful 70’s nightclub with women in bikinis and rollerblades dancing through hoola-hoops to Madonna. It was the worst thing ever, but we’ll probably be laughing about it at each other’s funeral wakes.) Take the good with the bad and roll with it. At least you aren’t repurposing furniture. 

It's four a.m. and we are not looking our best, but you can bet we're having fun.

Cool Things Real People Might Actually Like Doing On A Date.
　

- go to a wine tasting

- find a drive-in movie

- get seriously dressed up and hit the casino

- take a road trip to visit someone

- rock climbing

- take a class together -- it’d be cool to find something you’re both willing to give a shot
(I won’t judge you if it’s Salsa Dancing. But seriously, a lot of local colleges have one night classes. And I’m joking about not judging you.)

- ice skating

- camping

- skinny dipping - (Sorry. This one’s protocol.)

- nighttime picnic

- go on a dinner cruise

- park somewhere cool with a laptop and have your own drive-in movie

- see a play

- go to a carnival without the kids (or the zoo, aquarium, fair or museum; pick out something for each of them at the gift shop. I love picking up gifts for our kids when they aren’t around.. We get so sentimental.)

- get drunk on a plane -- this one isn’t really a date, it just sounds cool. I want to do it!

- see the ball drop in Times Square

- go to a shooting range

- fishing in a new spot

- have a game night with friends

- rent something cool like a four-wheeler or a wave runner

- mini-golfing

- regular golfing, for that matter

- bowling

- Restaurant hop - 3 stops in one night: appetizer/drinks, dinner and dessert

- hiking

- go to an art show (there’s usually free wine!)

- stay at a bed and breakfast, hunker down with some junk food and have an up all night TV show marathon

- go to a psychic reading, just for fun

- volunteer somewhere together (Sounds corny for a “date,” but I could see this being a cool experience. Especially Habitat for Humanity or something.)

- see a comedian

- bet on a horse at the tracks

- take a trapeze class

- disc golf is seriously fun

- go to a chocolate tasting

- take a helicopter ride

- go horseback riding

- do karaoke night at a bar

- Cook live lobsters at home (Okay, I don’t know if I could go through with this, but duh! that’s what a memorable experience is all about. Apparently, livelob.com has a cooking guide.)

- ride a ferry someplace cool (The next time we go to Atlantic City Spencer suggested taking the long way around to park the car on a ferry back home. I think that’s such a cool touch.)

- paintball

- go to a pool hall (and play the darts! No one ever plays the darts…)

- set off our own fireworks


- go to a rodeo show


- swing dancing






This was actually really fun to sit and think up. What would you add??

The Vow.

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I’m going to talk about something uncomfortable for a minute.

Last night I rushed through dinner with bated breath to watch The Vow with Spencer before bed. It isn’t normal for us to squeeze a movie into the middle of the week like that, (or for me to write about movie on my personal blog) but when I caught wind of what this one was about, I had to see it. I had to see it that day.

I have to admit, I’m always a little uncomfortable talking about our marriage here. The anniversary post I wrote last week was supposed to be the last of anything like that. Spencer’s a much less open-book person than I am (and I like that about him) so it’s tricky to figure out just how to say what I want to sometimes without stepping on his privacy. It’s no secret though that his accident flipped our married life on it’s head for a while. When the movie started last night and I saw that the whole thing had been inspired by a true story, I was immediately enraptured by it. Thank God, Spencer never lost his memory but the mood swings and the major change in personality “common to those with head injury” were so dead-on to what I remember experiencing from the other side that it gave me chills. Relating more to Rachel’s character in the movie - outside of being the victim of the accident - put an interesting spin on the story for me.

Once, a few days after he was up and walking around again after his accident, we said something in jest about how people could theoretically “forget” how to be in love after a serious enough injury to the head. Wow, can you even imagine how terrifying that would be for people who are married? we said, never thinking in a million years it might apply to us.

In the movie, Rachel’s character reverts back to the person she used to be several years and many big events before her life had evolved to the point of being ready for a man like her husband. You kind of think it’s going to be this incredible story about how he makes her fall in love with him again, but it isn’t that easy. In fact, the couple divorces. The book review says: [the husband] realized the woman he had married essentially died in the accident -- something I’ve actually told my husband feels as if it happened in a way to him.

Somewhere around December, maybe January, things fell pretty quickly back into place for us. But there were a whole lot of months, thinking What the fuck do I do!? up to that point. At our absolute lowest, we arranged for him to stay a few nights at his parents - something we never actually had to do - before it turned around. It turns my stomach to write about our own story like this -- something so, so far off from what we really are -- but the real story of Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter (who, by the way, are happily married with two children today even without ever having regained the memory she lost) was a validation for me I needed very, very much.

　


　

And as long as we’re on the subject of marriage, I found this last week and had to share: Lydia Netzer: 15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years.

There isn’t a point on here I wasn’t physically nodding my head to in avid agreement. Especially these less conventional but somehow, brilliantly pivotal ones:

1. Go to bed mad.
2. Be proud and brag.
3. Do your own thing.
4. Make a husband pact with your friends.
5. Bitch to his mother, not yours.

Read it, please. And tell me what you think! I want to make a husband pact with all my friends.. (if only it were totally possible with my mom!) :-)  How about you?

On Learning Motherhood.

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Motherhood found me in a way that no amount of pregnancy could have facilitated more. It held my hand and grew over ice cream dates with her dad where for others, it happened overnight; grew over the smells of infancy, the slow sting of breast milk letting down for the first time, and other perfect, natural things that I think help a woman evolve. Motherhood received me. I had no hand in making or molding it, which was the best way for me to have learned the ropes. It taught me to respect the sanctity more than I may have otherwise. Empowering as motherhood is, (and it is) I think surrogate-motherhood is every bit the opposite. I think it’s a truer vision of what motherhood should be vs. what we have the power to turn it into.


It engrained in me from the very beginning that motherhood is more powerful than me, my body, my decisions or my ideas. It’s given me the advantage of a bigger picture, teaching me from the start that there is no one, flawless route to the perfect family, being the perfect mother, or having the perfect child for me. Sometimes, though, looking back I think I did with Mary what a lot of first time mothers do with babies: I took it all a little too seriously. Motherhood came to me all at once with pretty blonde hair and knowing green eyes and the promise of a million opportunities to screw up if I chose to take it on. It was terrifying, but - like motherhood always is - worth it a million times over.

Now that I have two biological children (particularly one being a daughter), I think the principle difference is that Mary and I learned to be each other’s mother and daughter together. Scarlett never had to become my daughter, where Mary did. There is something beautiful between Mary and I because of that, something Scarlett and I will never reap the rewards of “having” to have.


Mary’s colored my world with so much spark and tenacity, I shudder to think how bland it might have turned out if she were never a part of it. Of course, Matthew and Scarlett could light up the world all on their own, but Mary? She’s sewn into our love story. Her little hands, right alongside of my and my husband’s, helped to make this family what it is. Being a step mom kind of challenges the ideal in this way I’ve learned to love because of her. Maybe little girls don’t generally dream of their Prince Charmings coming to them with a child in tow and a young, failed marriage under the belt, but my heart will always go out to those otherwise contented women who will never know the great joy it is to have a Mary in their life.

If this one, here, has taught me anything, it’s never to take it for granted. Any of it. Of all the rights and privileges a woman will ever have, it’s been said that the greatest is to be a mother. She’s taught me that children aren’t difficult; MOTHERHOOD is. Still, I know, the most challenging of days with any of my children will always trump even the best of any day I’d ever have without them. Always. Mary and I have a special relationship because she chose me as much as I chose her or her father. That’s something, that every time I stop to give thanks for this family, I’ll always remember she did for me.

Then there was pregnancy. Oh, my gosh, pregnancy.

Motherhood rooted itself into my soul with pregnancy, as much as it ever did into my body. One of my favorite sayings has always been: pregnancy does not a mother make, but wow, is it a thrill ride all the same; a part of life so cherished to me that simply trying to keep myself from jumping into it again has always been the hardest part of giving birth. (And I did that shit without an epidural once!)

Now, motherhood races toy cars at my feet, slides down the railing in snowboots and plaid shorts that don’t match with anything, jumps over cracks in the sidewalk. Motherhood is brilliantly alive in everything that he does, everything that he is, because I can remember a time when he somehow didn’t even exist and it reminds me of how much magic is actually involved in simply having him here. It’s in the way that he plays so hard it could almost pass for work and the way that he stakes his independence with a million wrong turns that will always be forgiven. Always, because they are landmarks of his growth. Motherhood swings from my neck when he gives me a kiss, climbs on my back when he gives me a hug, it goes into every endeavor 110%. It tells me I’m his best friend and his favorite place, if only for a little while longer, and his forever and ever and ever home in so many different ways.

Just watching him grow, just being here for every part of it, living out a slow and steady string of every-little-day happenings with him, trump pregnancy a million to one. With that, I learned to welcome change, to always embrace life’s next incomputable steps for our family. Since then there have been a million more times I thought life couldn’t get any more wonderful than it always was - and each and every time, it has.

Motherhood is seeing past the four year old in everything that he does, to the man waiting for him at the other end of this one, incredible childhood. And motherhood is protecting the integrity of both. When I don’t completely delight in his defiance, I love that he’s hungering for independence the way that a growing child ought to. When I don’t condone his stubbornness, I am proud of the confidence he has in his own ideas. Even when his behaviors fall short of anything angelic, I see the effort that goes into fighting against impulse to do what he’s learned is right and I can appreciate that it’s hard. I love the pace at which he is growing, because it is his and no one else’s. Whether he’s ever-so-gently kissing a caterpillar on the tip of his finger or trying to dive-bomb the cat, he dips a little heart and a little soul and a lot of pluck into everything he does, and shouldn’t we all live that way?

Matthew taught me, without even trying, to love with no holds barred. So much of early motherhood with Mary was drained into trying to find our way through all of these complicated technicalities involved in making ourselves a family that neither of us really understood. It felt like we were always trying to navigate and finesse these stupid rules about how we should be and how we shouldn’t be. Some people wanted Mary to start calling me “mom” right away while others felt very strongly that she shouldn’t. The Lord bringing Matthew into our lives taught me to stop trying so hard to see Mary as a daughter, and to just relish knowing her as a person, to take joy in all of the little nuances of her personality that I have always loved so much.

In so many ways, Mary taught me to be a better mother to Matthew and Matthew taught me to be a better mother to Mary.

And Scarlett? She has been my comic relief. My breath of spring. She is the “always rainbows and butterflies” that life is not supposed to be. Meryl Streep once said that “Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.” Scarlett is my humanizing effect.

Spencer started a new job the week that she was born. It was the miracle to thank for my becoming a stay-at-home-mom this time around, so I didn’t mind when he had to leave to go to it the day after she was delivered and I didn’t mind being in the hospital with her mostly on my own. When she got sick at 10 months old and had to spend a large chunk of her first summer in a children’s hospital on a feeding tube, I honestly didn’t mind being away from the rest of my family, waiting with her for rejuvenated health. We have simply learned to do what we have to do -- to live on essentials. And those are, of course, each other. No more, no less.

When life gets serious, as I have learned that it so often does, there is nothing like the sight of a child you’re too exhausted to do anything but laugh at, toddling on into view with her big sister’s padded bra draped around her shoulders like a scarf and her big brothers rainboots on up to her thighs, asking for cheese, to remind you of what’s really important. What’s important, I have learned in the end, boils down to almost nothing outside of a smile on their face.

This one? She is my filthy feet in a frilly top. My roll on the floor, laugh til it hurts, sprinkle of silly. My sunshine when skies are grey; my silvery, silvery over the trees lullaby in the afternoon. She is mastering the world, one syllable at a time; conquering life, with every button-sized triumph. She is the tug at my skirt, the tantrum on the floor, the dance on her Daddy’s shoes. She is sitting on the front step in nothing but a sunhat, a diaper and some rain boots, sharing a piece of cheese. She is everything important in life, whittled down to essentials, personified with an everpresent grin.

Tomorrow, maybe Scarlett will teach me some profound new lesson about how to be a better mother than I am today. She’ll take me deeper into the meaning of motherhood and I’ll learn, through the lessons that mothering her bestows upon my life that I should have been doing something a little bit differently all along. Something key. But today, we’ve got rainboots on in the sunshine and nothing has ever been so important.

You Call It Imperfection. I Call It Character.

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It’s easy to say when an anniversary rolls around that you wouldn’t change the year you’ve made it through for all the good times in the world. I know because I’ve said the words myself two years in a row, meaning them completely, thinking that we had really experienced some measure of life. There was a time I really thought that our marriage, because it was ours, was impenetrable to the forces of growth. Call it the honeymoon effect; I don’t know, maybe it was. I never thought that marriage would be easy or that we were really above anyone else’s threshold for love, but I definitely underestimated the unmerciful hold that just a small twist in the wind had the power to put on us. Us, of all the people in the world.

Standing at the other end of all we’ve been through this year makes this anniversary feel a lot like the end of a hard, hot run. The good part, after a long, satiating stretch, once you’re back home getting high on the feeling of a hot bath. It’s been a tumultuous year outside of our marriage - our daughter’s hospitalization, Spencer’s accident and consequent brain surgery; each event just a jumping off point for a dozen smaller problems to be spawned - it’s no wonder our marriage suffered the splints and sprains that it did.

I still remember Spencer yelling at Matthew his first day home from the hospital. It had been a week since he’d seen his father and now that he was, the man looked like something out of an R.L. Stine series. What’s worse, it had been almost as long since Matthew had seen me, after living half a month without me earlier that same, awful year, while I bunked at a different hospital to be with his baby sister. And he was being hollered at. It wouldn’t be the last time, either. (This is the same man who, just this morning asked me, ‘what did God sprinkle into that little soul of his to make our boy so sweet?’.)

Spencer wasn’t himself until at least December. For a very long time, he was detached from all of us, resentful and unapologetic. It was like being thrown into a marriage with someone you didn’t know - someone you didn’t even like, much less respect enough to award say to over your children. Before he’d recovered enough for me to tell he was any different, I was clued in by the recovery unit staff that changes to his personality and demeanor were likely to be permanent because of the impact location. On a separate occasion, a friend of ours called to see how he was and told me that after his own father had lived through the exact injury, his personality was never the same. While everyone else in our larger family circle celebrated his homecoming and recovery, I never really had the chance. I wanted to be happy, I wanted achingly to be happy, but it conflicted constantly with this hard pull that it was never actually him I got back.

I don’t hold any of that against him. Once he started to come back around, it became abundantly clear that whoever I was living with in those subsequent months wasn’t my husband the way that I knew him. It wasn’t that he was just in a different frame of mind, gripped by some newfound perspective on life - which would have been perfectly understandable to some degree - it was that he was of a different mind altogether for a while, one that I didn’t know and didn’t get. To compound matters, for three months, he couldn’t even go to work. We were boxed in together with three kids for the miserable duration of an entire winter; morning, noon, and night, without relent.

Maybe I can’t say that this year has been perfect, or that I wouldn’t change any of it if I could, but I can say that for what it’s worth, not a minute of it made me ever question the choice to go through it with him, and to get through it for him. Even in the worst of it, I never felt like we weren’t ultimately on the same team. And that’s always meant more to me than the nature of any great romance.

It turns out, what doesn’t kill you, makes you really good at apologizing. So our recent relationship has more than harvested the rewards of every hill his clinical dick-headedness post-surgery mood-swings had us climb. And things have been good… really, really good, ever since.

These past few months have been filled with the kind of days I would have killed for six months ago. I feel like I have my buddy back and I know it’s an overdone, watered down cliché, but we have a better appreciation for what the other is willing to go through for us, because we’ve actually lived the proof. There’s nothing cliché about that; it’s not an easy place to reach.

It’s funny because the third year is really the first of all the early ones that isn’t a big deal. Your first anniversary is big because it’s your first, and your second anniversary is thrilling because it’s an actual number, you know? You’ve been married for “a number” of years, and that’s cool in a wow, this is really happening sort of way. The face of our marriage has changed this year. It’s grown into something we can be really proud to say that we’ve made, instead of just lucky to say that we have. So celebrating this third year in with my husband means something to me in a way that almost trumps the day we got married in the first place.

I told him up until the day we got married, ‘It’s not a wedding I want with you, Spencer. It’s a marriage.’ I could have given a shit about the day going off without a hitch, or every detail of our reception being perfect, so long as our marriage was a thing of real integrity. I wanted that to be the thing people walked away from saying, wow, those two really put a nice thing together, didn’t they? He tells me every year that he remembers me saying that, and every year I mean it more. This marriage, to me… it means everything.

Lying adjacent to me on the couch the other day, he rubbed my feet, kissing my toes the way he does after a day that I’ve run or worn heels, and we talked about our third anniversary. I wore a fifty dollar dress to stay home, pull out the nice tablecloth, rent a movie and make his favorite meal. He planned a weekend getaway for us in Atlantic City next week and he thanked me for choosing him, for being his wife, for letting him love me. Falling asleep that night to the strum of his voice on the subject of appreciating everything we’ve built, I felt lighter than I have in a very long time. I felt happy in a way I’ve been aching to reach completely since Scarlett got sick. I felt proud.

It’s going to be a good year, I told him, feeling very comfortably loved. I can feel it.

I Wonder If She'll Always Love Horses.

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Sunday afternoon we wound up walking the trails of this adorable little equestrian center nearby that I had no idea existed until now. Spencer planned it as a surprise for us this weekend. He wouldn’t tell the kids or I anything about it until just before we left.

Spencer and I don’t always agree on how to spend our weekends. I love being home with the kids just like Spencer loves (or, at least is very grateful to have, and really doesn’t terrible mind) his job. But sometimes we all need a little moderation in our lives. Working sixty plus hours a week, he’d rather spend weekends taking care of things around the house and in the garage. (It’s hard to find fault in a man whose only wish is that he could get more work done in his down time.) But being twenty-six and living out the life of a middle-aged soccer mom with three kids makes it really hard to look forward to a weekend wherein my greatest sense of purpose will come from clearing the sink of dishes. I want to get out of the house; I want to experience things as a family. For a while it felt like no matter what we did, someone was complaining. We each understood and tried to sympathize with how the other felt, but coming to an actual solution was about as easy as trying to agree on how much is too much to spend on an eleven year old daughter’s first middle-school wardrobe. ANYTHING BUT.

We’ve worked hard lately to compromise; I’ve taken up running and gardening on the weekends so that I don’t feel so cooped up when we do stay close to home and he’s made it up to us by becoming a lot more fun to hang out with when we make it out of the neighborhood for some un-spontaneous, overpriced family fun. Him actually planning out a little day for us on his own and keeping it a surprise really won me over this time, especially because (being the worrier that he is) it’s not fun for him to plan things out the way it is for me. It’s always the little things that mean the most, though, isn’t it? Especially when the little things involve horses and ice cream!

(Bonus: Our pre-school unit last week was mammals, too! Score.)

Anyway, it was awesome.

The kids rode a handsome blondie named Pete and fed some of the others in buttercup blanketed fields that dipped and rolled with low, white fences. Spencer taught the team how to pick the right berries off of bushes lining the wood and we collected pine cones on a dusty rock path while we watched the horses trot and graze beside us. For a little while, we hung on the fence and just watched children take their riding lessons in a little arena outside the stables, making plans to definitely one day sign ours up for that.

Scarlett, fledgling animal lover that she is, was totally in her element. She took to straddling that thing like a fish takes to water, not a shred of intimidation in her. She even let go of the saddle with one hand to wave hello at us every time they’d clop and bounce past. On the trail, she fed the horses without being told that she was allowed (which she wasn’t because they bit, but we let her watch while Mary gave it a shot). We even had to stop her from climbing into their gate! The time she had alone was worth the price in gas. I’ve honestly never seen a child that small so richly enjoy anything in all my life. We all left unanimously deciding that if anyone should take riding lessons someday, it has to be her.

Getting her back into the car for lunch, she threw an absolute fit -- thrashing around, shrieking “HOR-SEE! HOR-SEE!!” so combatively it made my own throat swell. I never saw Spencer so patient with any of our three kids. When she was finally in and we were on our way out, he told me that it feels good to know she had so much fun that leaving sucks THAT bad.

And then I got to thinking, I wonder if she’ll always love horses this much. Right now there isn’t a toddler on the planet who’s likes aren’t virtually identical to hers: bubbles bouncing into formation at the end of a whisper, carousel rides, small doses of sugar in the lick of a big sister’s Blowpop… But I wonder if she’ll be one of those girls who really gets into horses when she’s old enough. You know, with posters on her wall and Lisa Frank stickers of purple haired ponies on all her math folders…

I wonder if she’ll be into 4H when she’s fifteen, or if she’ll see it as just another after school obligation. I wonder if someday she’ll tell us that earning her riding badge at eight was her favorite part of being a Girl Scout, or if she’ll want to be a girl scout at all. I wonder if someday we’ll tell her over a campfire that her love of all things equestrian can be traced back to that one, special trip to Carousel Park Daddy planned as a surprise back when she could barely talk. That we remember the first time she plucked buttercups and hay from the ground and tossed it over a gate so they could eat.

I have no idea. In fact, chances are she’ll be no more into horses than I was into ballet when I was ten. I don’t think that exposing her to a ton of new experiences at the age of nineteen and a half months is going to have some profound bearing on who she grows into on her own.

But I do love watching her, and having the chance to wonder. Sometimes, that’s what it’s all about. Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Every Little Piece Of You.

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For a month now, Scarlett’s been parroting everything anyone says to her. Slowly and steadily learning through example.

But last night, standing in her room with that precious head, heavy on my shoulder and a dozy little song in her ear, readying the both of us for bed, she pointed to a freckle on my chest and maundered dreamily, “freck-le!” all by herself.

My kids have the single most adorably placed freckles of any other people on the planet, I’m convinced of it. Those lonesome, rouge polka dots on their skin have been the subject of many a changing-table or bath time conversation and they have been giggled over and gobbled up more times than anyone could count. Matthew’s is right on the tip of his scrawny little hip bone and Scarlett’s is on her thigh. They have no others. Just those, so they stand out like an accidental sprinkle on a plain cupcake. A lost polka dot. And I love them so much that it almost hurts to put them away… and that’s what I tell them teasingly whenever I’m helping to hike up their jeans.

So the fact that “freckle” would be one of her first spontaneous words spoken makes total sense, even if we weren’t talking about them at all before then. The fact that she kissed it, though? The fact that she held my face in the cusp of her hands and kissed me goodnight, then leaned down and kissed the freckle on my chest? Well that’s just unparalleled cuteness at it’s peek, right there, OBVIOUSLY. But it’s more than that, too. That is all-encompassing love being learned through example. That, in all of it’s perfect simplicity is what this whole big picture boils down to at the end of the day.

“I love every little piece of you,” I tell her, tucking her in. It’s the same thing I’ve said to her and her brother everyday since the morning they were brought into the world. And I leave the room, knowing without another word spoken that she knows no better than to love the same way back.

Cool Stuff.

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I’ve never been an Oh My Gosh, I Need This Right Now kind of girl. I keep up with my appearance in that I pretty much wear at least foundation everywhere I go but I am still sporting the same hole-ridden pair of sneakers I think I bought back when I got my first apartment, UM, WOW, eight years ago? (Seriously? That was eight years ago??)

But Pinterest has effectively turned me into a coveting whore. Not stuff for myself, if that makes it any better. KIDS STUFF. Holy Crap, the kids stuff… 90% of the stuff I pin are things that are either free (like ideas, recipes and crafts) or stuff I can make myself. Then again, there are some things that cost money that I can’t help but stare at longingly, thinking out loud: Oh My Gosh, I Need This Right Now.

Among those things:




Cool maps for the kids’ bedrooms.





These prints.

And number one on my wish list:



This book from Amsterdam about a mole trying to figure out who pooped on it’s head. In fact, it’s actually called About A Mole Who Wants To Know Who It Was That Pooped On It’s Head. Look inside…