Some Days

Some days are easy. When Lena wakes up early, and walks bleary eyed into my room and crawls into bed, demanding covers. When I make us a fried egg sandwich for breakfast, cut it in two, and bring it to the table, where Lena is sitting and waiting. When I'm a little sad, or lonely, and Lena knows this, and decides to inundate me with stuffed animals and offers up a shared nap, because there is nothing in the world that cannot be cured with snuggling. Snuggling. They way that Lena asks to snuggle. Easy days. The days when Lena exuberantly talks all the way home about Jupiter's moons and how Pluto is the smallest coldest planet. They days when laughter comes easy and often. The tears that fall go away quickly. We pick ourselves up off the ground and we laugh.

Some days are hard. There are moods. Lena is angry or I am angry, and no clothes fit right and Lena doesn't want to get out of the bath and I want to go to bed. Or Lena doesn't listen and I'm impatient. And there are days when I'm a little sad and a little lonely and a stuffed animal just can't quite cut it. 

Some days are easy and some days are hard, and I'm starting to learn how to better remember, in the depths of the hard days, there are always more easy, sweet, wonderful ones to come. 

Mama said there'd be days like this

There'd be days like this, my mama said

All the families

Hey.

I wouldn't normally do this here, but this is really important.

I just took the time to go to http://www.protectallncfamilies.org/ and contributed to fight against Amendment One on May 8th.

I know here I'm preaching to the choir, and a lot of my friends are amazing advocates for social justice, more so than I am, but I also know that there are a lot of people that are just apathetic. And apathy was cool until we all turned 18 and were able to vote. And then apathy stops being cool.

I think right now a lot of people get that. And that's resulting in this great movement, and I'm so thankful to be part of a community that is intelligent and realizes that there is no reason not to deny basic rights to anyone based on something like race, or sexual orientation, or marital status. But at the same time, I'm still worried about the overwhelming apathy that still exists among some of my friends and some of this community.

I think the statement "don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes" is really true. And there are things that we take for granted or don't think about because we just are who we are. As a heterosexual female, I never once imagined that there would be a law preventing me from marrying the person I loved.

But as a heterosexual male, maybe you've never had to imagine paying for birth control every month, or never realized the implications that that has on health insurance.

The political atmosphere--as naive and optimistic I might be (Obama loves the Tar Heels!)--is really scary. It's scary because the far right is trying to make a lot of people second class citizens. And sure, I'm heterosexual, so I'll be able to get married, so whether this amendment passes or not on May 8th won't directly affect me, but I'm going to stand up to protect the rights of all North Carolina families. Because when someone comes threatening my rights, as a woman, as a single mother, I'm going to want someone standing up for me.

And if you're not registered to vote, or you've moved and you're not sure where you're registered, or you just don't even know how, please, ask me. Or ask someone else. I will help you figure out what you need to know to vote on or before May 8th. It will only take a few minutes. And it may not mean anything to you, but it will mean a lot to a lot of different people and a lot of different families. And I cannot stress how important that is.

Seeing yourself in someone else

The strangest thing is happening.

Lena is starting to remind me of me.

My parents will disagree. They say she's brighter and more outgoing and more fearless, and OK I GET IT you love her better than me, but that's not it.

She's starting to remind me of me in ways that only I would know.

When I was younger, 7 or 8, I know it was 3rd and 4th grade, I had a best friend, Lily, and we would spend hours on weekends or teacher work days or after school playing in the woods behind my house. We have a great creek down there, and there was a set of trails that we would roam around, pretending we were indian princesses, running away from our families. We would scout out hiding places; a fallen tree leaning against a standing one would be our shelter for the night. The exposed roots of trees overhanging the creek would be our secret hide out. We would jump to the rocks in the middle of the creek and we were on deserted islands. We turned over rocks, caught crayfish. We were always on the look out for the perfect walking stick. Small and straight sticks became arrows for bows and arrows. We were armed, we were fearless. Some days we were barefoot.

Lena is like this too. She's mesmerized by running water. She's starting to point out campsites. A small depression in some weeds becomes "a home for a wolf". She sees things in the trees. She points out letters and shapes.

She loves bugs and frogs and snakes.

But I loved bugs and frogs and snakes too.

When does that leave you, you know? Being a carefree kid with nothing to worry about. Sometimes I worry that it's harder for girls than it is for boys. After elementary school girls and boys started to separate. We (as girls) were supposed to be more worried about what we wore and what we looked like. I can't remember who stopped going down to the creek after school first, all I remember is that it stopped.

There were a couple of glorious days when we fell back into our carefree exploring lives. It was a snow day, we were in middle school then, and there was a big development going up in the woods behind our school. (Modern day Southern Village, for those in the area.) Susan and I tramped through bulldozed roads and walked into houses that were being built. We were explorers, runaways, tramping miles through the snow until we found shelter. Now I drive by those houses to and from the park and think to myself, if only you knew who the first occupants were.

Life is really hard, and blah blah blah, and sometimes I just want to know if I'm the only one scared shitless about the future, and if I'm not and I know I can't be, can't we all admit it and lose the facade of having-it-together, and then can we all go out for a drink and talk about it? Because that would be way more productive than me sitting in my parked car outside of daycare and trying to decide which parents are having marital problems, which dads still smoke outside on the porch, which ones are recovering alcoholics. Can't we just admit all of our problems and move forward?

I think my problem is that I'm too attached to being 19.

I still feel like a kid sometimes. I remember going down to the creek. I remember walking back up the hill to my house. It's still my house. I remember what it was like. And I don't know how to explain it. When I see these things in Lena, it's hard to just play along with her and encourage her escapades. It makes me want to runaway and play by myself. I don't of course. It just sends me back.

And I see this in Lena, and I know that this is what she's supposed to be doing. But part of me thinks she's taking my place now. She's the kid. And the kid in me wants to say, what am I supposed to do. But I know the answer. Now I have to be the grown up.

Gosh, there's like a theme here or something.

Picture of maturity

Sometimes I wish that reading aloud burns calories. Lena now has this great bedtime routine that involves me reading to her for an hour until she falls asleep. I have discovered that I'm actually able to use this time for something other than reading. When I'm reading say, Peter Pan for the 24th time, I've discovered that my mind can start to wander, and I can think of other things, and then every now and then I am jolted back into the story with no memory of the previous pages. Once, I actually thought I skipped a page, and when I went back Lena said that, no, I had read that page already. Weird right? Reading blackouts? Does anyone else get these?

The other thing I've found myself doing, is finding the most innocuous sentences from Lena's books and turning them into something far more salacious.

(This kind of is like in the app Draw Something. EVERYTHING LOOKS SO PHALLIC TO ME.)

My favorites are from Green Eggs and Ham. Spoiler alert Sam is trying to get Our Hero to try green eggs and ham, and the nameless main character doesn't want to try them. Sam then proceeds to pedantically offer many different scenarios in which our Main Character would want to try green eggs and ham.

Then this line appears:

Would you, could you with a goat?
I would not could not with a goat.

HA! Get it? He would not could not with a goat. Hahahahahaha. It never fails!

Then from The Butter Battle Book, in which there exists the intrinsic prejudice between Yooks and Zooks, and Dr. Seuss tries to illuminate how arbitrary our distinctions are between people, and why all kinds of warfare are ultimately counter-productive. (He fails at this, with regards to Lena. Lena proudly names herself a Yook, because she indeed eats bread with the butter side up.)

But then there is this gem of a line, as Our Hero the Grandfather is about to drop the bitsy big boy boomeroo onto the Zooks, but then he sees Van Itch jump up on the wall with a bitsy big boy boomeroo as well:


"I'll blow you," he yelled "into pork and wee beans!"

teehee.

He said, I'll blow you.

That's it, I'm done here.

Who ever decided to give me a kid (Don't answer that.)

And come on! Everyone else is thinking this, right?? I can't be the only one.

Helpful

Lena: My eyes burn, mom.
Me: Try to close them sweet pea.
Lena: They burn when I close them.
Me: Ok then, keep them open.
Lena: ....

Squirrel hunting

On diapers and cigarettes

I feel certain ways about diaper brands as I imagine people who smoke feel about cigarettes.

I'm a Huggies (tm) girl. I have been since Lena was very small. Other people gifted us diapers, I read reviews, goddammit. (What a waste of time. If only I knew. No diaper can contain the explosive...contents...of a breastfed newborn. To say the least.) Anyway, so what happens in this very impressionable time of exploring and discovering, you find a brand, and you stick with it. And for four loyal years, I have bought Huggies diapers. From size 1 to size 6 overnight absorbancy, I have bought Huggies diapers.

And then, one day, we ran out of diapers.

Usually I wait to buy diapers on the weekend at Target, but this was the middle of the week, so we went to the grocery store instead. (Because in true addict fashion, when we have discovered that we have run out of our preferred product, we will then stop at nothing to replenish.) But then, you can see where this is going, they didn't have my brand. But I had to have them, of course, so I bought a different brand. I don't want to name any names cough LUVS cough, and it was not a good feeling.

This brand is deodorized. It has this weird smell, so whenever I put Lena in one for the night she doesn't smell like Lena. She's not the fresh-out-of-the-bath clean smell, she's this artificial baby powder smell. Who is this impostor diapered child? Oh well. Only 48 more days of this.

But the funny thing is--she thinks to herself as she's reading to her daughter and silently cursing the misjudgment of the diaper stocks--I'm sure there are other people out there that are devoted to Pampers, or Luvs, or whatever. And diapers are one of those paradoxical products that are really all exactly the same (except for that horrid smell!) and people just get stuck on a brand they like. And I'm sure there is some mother out there who swears by Luvs and then when she forgets to buy diapers at her weekly Target trip, and instead has to go to her neighborhood grocery store and they only have Huggies, and she puts on on her child after the bath, and goes to tuck him or her in, I bet she's thinking to herself This does not smell like my child. 


And in conclusion, that is what I imagine being addicted to a tobacco product is like.

Insta-weekend

This weekend I crafted.

Lena and I made signs for our room, and Michael's had 50% off fake flowers.

Then I made a Hunger Games t-shirt.

I completely stole the idea from Forever Young Adult, but what can you do. Also I was the original t-shirt maker so it was very high school.

And then I cleaned my room and am still debating whether or not to throw away this doll.

 Lena likes it, and it's clearly Jewish, but for some reason this doll really bothers me. I have no idea why. I really want to toss it. I won't, but I might do something immature and not allow it in my room. It freaks me out!

Wow I am just a picture of maturity.

Also when Lena sleeps in my bed, I always want to do funny things to bother her, but instead I just stay in bed too long watching her sleep. And taking pictures.