“Hey, Slick! She’s a Hick!”

My parents were from a small Alabama town, they moved to a larger town in Georgia when I was two and then back to their home town when I was 15. What that basically meant for me was that I moved from a freshman class of 900 and a high school with one-way halls due to overcrowding into a high school where my Senior class had a little over 200 and where one of my new friend’s moms actually said to me, “You aren’t from around here, are you?”  It was then that the notion of “perverted Mayberry” entered my mind, WHERE had we moved to? And, was it actually in the contiguous 50 states?

It took a while but eventually I grew to consider it as my home as well.  There were 25,000 people in the whole town on the day I graduated from high school.

I’ve lived lots of places since then but there is one thing that I carry with me everywhere that I go, one thing that never lets me forget where I come from, it gets better whenever I’m gone for a while but it comes raging back the minute that I spend any time at home- my accent (if you could hear that word inside my head as I type these words it would sound like “ack-cee-int.”)

I was up above LA (yes, the one in Southern California) at a playground with Middle Child when he was about a year old. I’d been chasing him around the playground equipment when I noticed this little girl watching us intently.
We gradually drifted closer to her and, finally, she looked up at me and asked, 
“Are you a cowgirl?”
Her question caught me off guard and I smiled down at her,
“No, I’m not.”
Her dark brown eyes grew confused and then I figured out what she meant,
“Oh! I talk funny, don’t I?”
She nodded her head, “Aren’t you from Texas?”
“No honey, I’m from Alabama.”
She stared at me for a beat and a half. 
“Well,” she asked, “can you ride a horse?”
I giggled at her logic and because she’d caught me, <giggle> "Yeah, I can.”
Her little chin bobbed in victory, “Well then, you’re a cowgirl!”

Now, we all know what that accent says to outsiders. I mean, we may play dumb but we ain’t. That accent says, “Dumb Hick.“  I commented on this at one of my poetry meetings, there, in So Cal one night. I said, 

“I know that I have a strong accent. And, I know that my IQ automatically drops 10 points    

the minute that I open my mouth.” 

A whole group of people who knew me and liked me, laughed out loud ‘cause it was the truth and we all knew it. They loved my poetry, they’d given me awards for it, they didn’t think of me as a “dumb hick,” but it was a hurdle that I’d had to get past before they’d take me seriously.

My own theory -and some etymologist or linguist (OOOOOOOO! Those are BIG ole’ words for a hick!) may have much better explanations- has to do with weather. I figure if you are THAT hot and THAT wet from humidity then it just takes too much energy to enunciate your words.

“Honey, can you grab me some sweet ice tea?”

Yes, it SHOULD take a month of Sundays to drawl that out.

“36- 24- 36? (heh,heh) Only if she’s 5’3!”

 A-Girl : Pull up to Preschool. Take off cowboy hat. Take off ropers, put on flip-flops. Cover up sweaty tank top with cleaner tank top. Turn off "Baby Got Back." Put on mom-face. Pick up kids. Wait, who am I again? 

It’s not that I don’t know who I am.

It’s that I am so many people that I get fuzzy around the edges, sometimes.
I mean, I don’t pretend to be someone that I’m not but who I am gets tweaked based on who else is around. (That may be one of the reasons that I like the barn so much, it’s just me there, often times-me and Horse, and he doesn’t talk back.) The “A-Girl” that is appropriate for Saturday nights with my husband is just not appropriate for Monday morning at the Preschool get-together.

Still, I pride myself on living my life in such a way that is honest and open.  I never want to look in the mirror and wonder who that person is, staring back at me, because I’ve buried her so far down that not even I’m sure who she is anymore.

As I’ve approached middle-age, I’ve found that I am steadily nixing the places where I can’t be “me” the most completely.  If I have to change who I am for you then, maybe, we were never really friends to begin with? Yep.

(One of the biggest places that I find that I can NOT be myself is church. That is a real downer, as my belief structure about who God is has never really changed. He was fine with me Monday-Saturday, why did I suddenly have to put myself in a box on Sunday morning? I grew up in the church, I was a Chaplain’s Assistant/Youth Pastor/Pastor’s wife for nearly 12 years. I spent time at Bible college. I taught Sunday School, for god's sake! I’m not mad at God, I’m not even that disgusted with humanity. I just...you know what? This is a conversation better had in person than on the web. Subtlety and "heart" are missed in a written conversation. If you're still interested, I loved the book,  A New Kind of Christianity by Brian D. McLaren. Yep, that's pretty much where I am at this point in my life.)

It’s not really that forty is such a big deal. It’s not the number or even the age, it’s the place. It’s “the middle,”  I’ve lived for a few years and I have a few years left to live. Here I am, in the middle, looking backward and looking forward. I’ve overcome some stuff and hope to become some stuff. So, the “A-Girls” that I’ve been and am and that I still hope to be are all knocking around together inside my head.

Some of them that I’ve been and some that I still am, are:

Poet
Artist
Writer
Wanna Be Equestrian (read: cute little helmet, cute little pants, cute little saddle, jumping
   my horse over JUMPS!)
Wanna Be Cowgirl (read: cowboy hat, chaps, F-150 driving, riding crazy buckin’ horses-yep, I
   sure did, for a couple of barns)
Daughter
Survivor
Wife
Mother
   (ALLLLLL the subsets of wife/mother-maid, nurse, call girl etc)
Ex-wife
Step-Mom
Art Teacher
Sunday School Teacher
Drama Coach
High School Newspaper Editor
Pastor’s Wife
English Major
80s teenager- “Like, to-tally!”

Yeah, it gets sorta crowded up in my tiny head, sometimes.

A-Girl that I hope to be:

Balanced
Steady
Fair
Healthy
Confident
Strong
Accomplished
Content

Hmmmm, my past “selves” are defined by “what” they were. My future hopes are defined by “how” I want to be.  Wow. Maybe, I’ve really learned something along the way-that what you are is not nearly as important as how you are. Wow. Let me take a moment and digest this…<digesting>… “talk” to you soon.

WIS, That was Fun!

Why I Sewanee (to my time,) that was fun!

So, yesterday, I took some stuff to Goodwill and the KID that was working there started coming on to me. Seriously, coming on to me - stayed outside to talk to me, coming onto me.

I stifled an impulse to point out,

“You do know that I am old enough to be your mother, right?"

  

I didn’t say it  ‘cause I didn’t want to watch him throw up on the pavement. Hahahaha  Do you know the last time that happened to me? Yeah, me neither. But, that wasn‘t what was so much fun. That was only mildly amusing.

This was F.U.N.

Now this might look like a boring picture of horse trailers. And, it is. But I parked that sucker, the one on the right, I PARKED IT! All by my little ole’ self.

I guess, to most of you, that isn’t a very big deal. And, why would that be considered FUN? Well, of course, there’s a story and most of it would not be described as so much fun.

Okay, so here goes.  A while ago, I bought a POS horse trailer that sat exactly where it was for about a year and I kept saying to myself, I need to learn to pull it, I need to learn to load my horse into it, I need to learn to back that thing.  I had no idea how to do any of it. Horse trailers are one of those necessary evils of owning a horse.  Most people aren’t very good at any of it and they just do the best they can. In fact, a lot of accidents happen to people and horses pertaining to horse trailers because horses don’t like “metal cages on wheels” and most people aren’t really savvy enough to be dealing with 1000 + pound animals who are frightened of “metal cages on wheels.”  It’s just ugly waiting to happen.

Eventually, I'd ended up pulling my trailer behind my truck enough to be relatively comfortable, I’d spent lots of time with Horse working on loading and unloading, loading and unloading, loading and unloading. What I hadn’t done was really learn to maneuver that thing.

Let’s talk about my brain and learning.
It’s a bad subject.
I score, literally, off the charts on IQ tests. It’s not the intelligence, it’s really the learning.
I don’t.
I don’t learn.

Let me clarify.

I’ve often said that I have “dumb blonde disease,” and  it’s true. The hair is brown but the brain is blonde. I remember my ISC (Independent Studies Class-the egghead class) teacher from elementary school.  I easily scored high enough to be in there but I couldn’t do the work. For instance, we had to do these 3 dimensional puzzles-she’d dump one out in front of you and then stand over you with a stop-watch while you put it back together. Then, she’d dump one out in front of the next kid. Every week, the same thing. I sucked at this.  One of my friends, she was on, like, level 9 or 10 by the end of the year. I never finished the first level, not the first one. I think Mrs. ISC Teacher wondered what in the hell she’d done to deserve me.

If I can take it, whatever it is, home and teach it to myself, I will eventually be able to do it, but if I’m gonna have to comprehend it in front of other people (ie a teacher and other students) and then apply it, if there is any pressure at all-FORGET ABOUT IT! It’s like a feed-back loop-the more pressure (internal as well as external) the more steam comes off the top of my head in complete frustration, the more I bumfuzzle around and get nothing done.

My horse trainer and I have talked about this (it took me weeks to learn to tie that dumb rope halter, weeks!)- she has got to be the most patient woman on earth. It’s not like it’s rocket science, I look at the problem and I KNOW that it’s simple but I CAN. NOT. MAKE. MY. BRAIN. LEARN. AND. APPLY. Not quickly anyway. I’m gonna have to try and try and try and fail and fail and fail and sleep on it. And, sleep on it, again.

And, finally, (sometimes, months later) once I have, and understand, ALL the information, THEN, I can make it work. I will probably be able to do it really well, at that point. But it’s a lot of failure until then. She says that I process like a horse. That’s kinda cool.

No, it sucks. It is no fun to feel like the dummy in the class all the time.

Meanwhile, my POS horse trailer turned out to be a P.O.S.-I know, shocker.  And so, eventually, I had a brand new horse trailer sitting in my drive-way. A brand new horse trailer that needed to go to the barn and be BACKED into a spot.

Now, I could have asked my husband to do it but I’ve always wanted to be one of those women who is self-sufficient:  Attach my horse trailer to my truck? Load my horse into it? Drive it cross-country? Park it between those two trees without a scratch? No problem!! <little confident bobble of the head> I’ll make coffee while I do it!

Yeah, I’m never gonna get there if I let other people do this stuff for me…but it’s so much easier if they do. I HATE being the dumb girl.  And, have I mentioned? I don’t learn quickly.

Unfortunately, taking this trailer to the barn- this is not an easy thing to do. This “spot” I’ve got to take this trailer is not very big.  It’s sorta a box between a driveway, two barbed wire fences and a bunch of other trailers- and you‘ve got to BACK INTO IT-stuff in front of you, stuff in back of you and stuff on both sides. AND, there is no guarantee that there won’t be a crowd at the barn, a crowd to watch me fail- MAJOR PRESSURE. I have no idea what I will find at the barn, I have to show up and do it. And, I can’t.

But I've got to try, so I'd loaded up the the trailer and was sitting at Shane’s Rib Shack (because it was the only parking lot that I could find where there was enough room for me to park and then pull straight out with the trailer) eating fries and waiting on courage to descend from on high and smack me in the head. It wasn't happening.

I was completely overwhelmed. I mean, I was almost in tears and the fact that I was almost in tears had me…almost in tears from frustration.  Good god, A-Girl! It’s just a horse trailer, it's just backing a trailer into a parking spot. You can do this.  No. I can’t.

I texted the barn manager, maybe I can do this if someone is there is help me (Yeah, I know, I’ll never learn if I let them take over, but I’m chickening out.) She won’t be there but there is this church with this great parking lot between where I am and the barn. A parking lot? Has she not met me??

So, I texted Best Barn Friend. “You can do this! I believe in you!” she texted back.

And, I headed to the church parking lot. It was perfect for failure-big, open space, no other cars.  I took a deep breath, You are going to do this. You can figure this out.

Over and over, I put the truck in reverse, I cranked the wheel, I pulled forward, I cranked the wheel, I backed up, straightened up, backed up, cranked the wheel. It was a battle of inches but, amazingly, I began to get it. The first time that I picked a certain parking space (third from the end) and pushed the trailer into it- square, tires up against the cement- I got out of the truck and LITERALLY jumped up and down. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

I kept going-  this spot, now that one.  I did this so many times that I was dangerously low on fuel when I headed  home. I tried NOT to think about the guys inside the church, “Hey Jimmy, come look at this! WHAT is that woman doing??? Do you think she knows that we don‘t have any horses?”

Finally, I headed to the barn. It wasn’t perfect, I had to manage panic the whole time, and it probably took me 100 more moves to do this thing than it would have someone else but I DID IT!

<silly happy dance>

(At some point, I’ll have to move that trailer again but I’ll break down and cry worry about that when I get there.)


Things, that having “dumb blonde disease,” has taught me:

Fail. Fail. Fail. Until you get it right. Success is just being stubborn one more time than you fail.

Use your friends, that’s what they’re there for. You need encouragement? Ask for it.

Park your pride at the door. If you only attempt the things that you know you‘ll do well, you’ll never learn anything new. Learning to do something is all about doing it badly, for a long time (for me, a very long time). Persistent is much more important than talent.

What you think about you is much more important than what other people think about you. Most people, before they get to know me, really underestimate me-that’s their problem. I hate it but there’s nothing I can do about it except go home and sit on my couch so I won’t be underestimated. Not gonna do it.

Celebrate the small things. If it’s big for you, it’s big. A contented life is full of celebration over small things.

And, when you struggle and struggle and OVERCOME. That is FUN!


(Oh, and I did all this with a 3yo and a 4yo screaming in the backseat -put that in your pipe and smoke it!- I am Woman, hear me roar!)

Fb Status (Statuses? Statusi?) Since My 39th B-Day.

A- Girl: Things my 4yo son says out loud at the Pizza place tonight:
"I want to go with Daddy, I want to pee in the urinal with Daddy."
He points to a sign across the restaurant, "What's that?"
I say, "It's Yuengling."                                                                                    
He says, "MMMMMM, I like Yuengling."
"Oh, really? Where have you had Yuengling? At preschool?"
"Yes, I had Yuengling at preschool. It's good!”

A-Girl's 4yo picks his dirty clothes up off the floor and often says, "It's Ben Kenobi, he went out of his clothes and he died!" Then, he laughs and takes them to the hamper. She can just imagine Ben Kenobi wearing red Power Ranger Pjs while he fights Darth Vader. :)


A-Girl dropped her cell phone while talking to her husband. She looked down at the mess-phone, battery and back of the phone- splayed all over the concrete and heard her 4 yo say, "Oh, no! Daddy, you're broken!"

A-Girl arrived at the preschool, got the kids out of the truck, grabbed the 4yo's hand and swung the 3 yo up on her hip. He patted her shoulder, looked her in the eyes and said with a straight face, in 3 yo -ese, "I gave up...(garbled English)-ing, women and drinking last night. It was the worst 15 minutes of my life."
She burst out laughing.


A-Girl : Yesterday, (AFTER I totally LOST (Middle Child) and BEFORE the lady in the bathroom stall next to me apologized for laughing at what the boys were saying to me in my stall :) ) I heard myself say out loud to my 3yo and my 4yo, while at lunch at the CROWDED Georgia Aquarium, "Chill out, give Mommy a break. There's only 1 of her and, like, 150 of you." haha Yeah, it was like that.

A-Girl has been informed by her 4 yo son that when you eat too much food, "you become a girl."

A-Girl 's boys are dropping toys from between their legs and shouting, "Poop!" <sigh> She went to college for this?

A-Girl's hubby bought their three year old a Whoopee Cushion. Just think about that for a minute...."I want a BIG MOMMY FART!" Thanks, Honey! :)

A-Girl : "Shocky ta hot! Momma, I want to hear the shocky ta hot song!"

A-Girl is "chatting" with her 15 yo from across the kitchen table. Ah, me. Technology.

A-Girl- Note to self: Make sure (Wild Child) did not have too much milk and too many scones for breakfast before going shopping. Or it will, literally, come back to haunt you...in the middle of Target.

A-Girl : "Nascar Fingers"- The process by which A-Girl's kids run their cute little fingers along the inside edge of their cereal bowls and make engine noises.

A-Girl : "Napkin Head." My children put diaper wipes on their heads, run around the house, call out "Napkin Head!" and request to be hit on the diaper wipe with beach balls. They then laugh hysterically. Think Parker Brothers would be interested? :)

A-Girl would like to make dinner, she really would, but the hamburger meat disappeared off the counter... her two year old stole it. <Deep sigh>

A-Girl 's note to self #15603: BEFORE postponing the kids' nap times and working your little fingers to the bone changing batteries in stupid little blue toy, check to be sure that the "on" button is switched "on" and that said stupid little blue toy actually NEEDS batteries.

A-Girl is frequently freaked out by arbitrary "singing" toys from the living room after the kids have gone to bed.

A-Girl :"Mommy! We don't want to see this! Fast forward it! Fast forward!" What is this terrifying, nightmarish movie preview on the boys' Curious George DVD? Why, it's Disney's 12 Dancing Princesses, of course. "Not the princesses!" hahaha Boys!

A-Girl is listening to her youngest "play" with his Goldfish crackers, one little Goldfish says to another, "Nemo, come back here!" Cute.

A-Girl : So, I was standing at the checkout telling one kid, "No, you will NOT get Tubby Custard AND when we get to the truck I'm gonna spank your butt. You have NOT been nice in the mall, today." The sales lady pulled out a sticker, stuck it on my arm and said, "AND, Mommy gets a sticker." hahahaha Guess my kids were driving her crazy too. :)



A-Girl hears a little voice from the back seat say this: "Mommy, you dirty,you broken. I gonna put you in the trash and I get a new mommy."  Oh, feel the love.:)

A-Girl : "Mom, my tongue hurts. Kiss it!" Um, nope.

A-Girl 's note # 5,679 to Self: If (Wild Child) is "too quiet" in the play-car up in front of the shopping cart, it's because he's "stolen" an arbitrary item from the basket and he's eating it.

A-Girl hears a little voice first thing this morning, "Heeheehee Mommy, I fart on you!" Oh, joy.

A-Girl's two year old drug his wagon out to the steep hill, aka the STREET, in front of her house and let it go...with his four year old brother in it. <sigh> If she survives this kid, somebody, PLEASE, give her a very large medal.

(This "two year old," is the same kid who spent over a year in duct tape to curb his “Poo-Picasso“ tendencies and who excells at locking her out of the house…in her Pjs. But, somehow, those posts were absent from the que.)


A-Girl is thinking, again, of changing her name from "Mommy! Mommy! Mom! Momma!" to "Beautiful Woman." If she has to hear it whined ALL DAY, it might as well be something complimentary, right?

Yeah, I’m too old for this…

A-Girl -Sounds that make a mommy smile: "Hey, hey (Wild Child)! I like you, I want to play with you!"- Middle Child

A-Girl 's 4yo kissed her on the lips, hugged her neck, patted her back and said in her ear, "You're my best friend." Some days are SOOOO worth it!!! :)

A-Girl wants to know, what is the point of sending the big guy to his room for hitting the little guy if the little guy is going to go sit at the big guy's door and play with him from under the door?

A-Girl says to the 4yo, "Sweetheart, you don't have to take care of (Wild Child), Mommy will do it." He says back to her, "OF COURSE, I'm gonna take care of him, he's my little brother." :)

…and, I wouldn't miss it for the world.

My Three Sons-Cue Goofy Music & Shoe Animation

One of the cool things about living for a bit in life is that you find out that stuff happened like it was supposed to, in spite of you.

I had one son, I wanted a daughter- a daughter, all pink and sweet good-smelly.

My second child stuck his thumb in his mouth and announced his boyhood with no reservations while still in the womb.

When the ultrasound let us know that my third child was another boy I was disappointed…for about two seconds.

In the succeeding few years, between son #1 and son #3, I’d discovered some things about myself: calling 911, blood running down the face, extreme sports- that, I can handle. Princess parties?  Not so much.

The first time my sweet little baby girl wiggled her head at me from the top of her neck and spurted out, “What-ev-er!” I swear, I'd probably just knock that head right into the living room. I am so not cut-out to parent a girl. However, I am putting my order in, right now, for girl-grandbabies. Primarily, ‘cause I can love ‘em and send ‘em home.

“Sure, Honey, we can paint your toenails…

…there ya go, all them little piggies are 

Rockin’ Red,

now run on home, 

Grand’s gotta take a nap!”

I love my boys. Let me tell you about them.

I’ve had three-one was born in Georgia, one in Oklahoma and one in California (which tells you something about me, I’ve been a gypsy.)  They are the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me…and they’ve created some of the hardest stuff that I‘ve been through.

The oldest is 15 and he won’t show up here much-he finds this embarrassing and embarrassing him just isn't worth it, I value our relationship too much.

One is 4 and the other is 3. The two youngest can not read and therefore are oblivious to the fact that I am writing about them, by the time they are old enough to know and care (try, at about 40) I will be long dead and all they will be able to do, to retaliate, is to kick my tombstone. So, there!

I also have two step-children, a step-son who will be 21 and a step-daughter who will be 18, both very soon. Which brings us to another point-I, very obviously, do not always play with a full deck. Our other, older kids were fully functional, they were automated-they WIPED themselves- and we started over. Seriously, totally over.

My son was 10 when the first of the younger two was born.

I love this picture for a lot of reasons and one is that Oldest Child ADORED Toy Story when he was little (it came out, originally, the year that he was born- 1995) and here he is, 14 or 15 years later,with his two LIVE Buzz and Woody dolls.

Middle Child and Wild Child (you have no idea, words can not express his Wild Childness- don't let his cuteness fool you, if he weren't so cute, I'd of already pinched his little head off. :) ) also LOVE Buzz and Woody and it’s been sorta surreal watching the whole process over again.

The thing is, is that I was totally prepared for being an OLD mom. All my friends, when Oldest Child was born, were like me, in their mid to late twenties. Over a decade later, when I had Middle Child and Wild Child, I was totally okay with being the only mom on the first grade playground pushing a walker, I'd thought about it and prepared myself for it...

( In fact, I am a better parent as an older parent. I'm much more laid back and easy going, I'm a lot more stable in a lot of ways and more comfortable in my own skin, all of which means that I do not commit one of "A-Girl's Unpardonable Sins of Parenting" -confusing my identity with the identities of my kids- nearly as much as I used to.)

...and you know what? It's not gonna happen. Something happened in the succeeding 10 years that I wasn't aware of-women, having babies, got older. Now, most of my friends are old fogies like me, trying desperately to juggle wrinkle cream and diaper rash cream. (Lord help us, sometimes we forget which cream goes where. :) )

I'm not sure why it happened but it happened. My recent twenty-year high school reunion was overrun with little ankle-biters and surprised middle-aged adults,

"I just knew 

I'd be the only one here with small kids."  

Nope, not today Jethro, today we’ve ALL lost our minds.

Bikini on Aisle 6, CLEAN UP!

 I really wanted to be good at something. By now, I was supposed to be an expert on some level. And, wiping stuff, whether it’s kitchen counters, or little noses or baby butts just doesn’t count. I had an expectation of what "now" was gonna look like.

Expectations are everything in life.

I mean, it’s one thing to see a woman in a bikini on the beach but to see her in Wal-Mart shopping for grapefruit, well, that’s just cause for great alarm. Egads! Someone call the Social Crimes Division. I was just NOT EXPECTING that, at all!

My expectation was that by this point I’d be, I don’t know, a rock star? Oops! My generation is showing, again. Okay, maybe not a rock star but something, in addition to, “somebody’s mom, somebody’s wife, that weird lady next door.”  It's not that I don't like being those things ("weird lady next door" is especially gratifying :) ) but, in the back of my mind, I had an expectation:  I was also gonna be a career woman, a lady on her way “up,”  the go-to chick.

The thing about my mom’s generation is that a lot of doors were opened for women that had been closed and that was way cool. They finally knew that they could have it all.

My generation grew up thinking that we were supposed to do it all.  And, you know what?

You can’t. You can not do it all. You are not superwoman.

You do not have clones of yourself all spiffy in the closet just waiting on orders. It is completely impossible to be in two places at once; you can NOT attend every little thing at elementary school AND work a full time job. You can NOT make dinner every night and then arrange little quality-time segments of “Leave it to Beaver" moments for your family AND work late so that the boss will get off your ass about that deadline. Nope. Nada. Uh-uh. Not gonna happen. Zip-po!

We are, most of us, just surviving this life and hoping desperately to do a good job in the process. The fact that we actually make a difference to somebody, somewhere, well, that would just be so GROOVY and  feels totally undoable a lot of  days.

“If I could bottle the energy I waste 

on insecurities and second guessing, 

I could power my house with it.  

Why are women inherently flawed to be both 

super human and super sensitive 

at the same time?”

- Best Barn Friend

I made a decision not to have a career, to stay at home with my kids. It wasn’t about finances. I stayed at home when my ex made not a whole lot of money a year (seriously not a lot) and also, now, when my second husband, the love of my life, makes quite a bit more.

You can do anything that you want to do if you’re willing to make the sacrifices.

My decision was about a lot of things, too numerous to go into right now. But, it was a decision that I made, that I don’t regret, MOST of the time. When I catch myself LUSTING over my husband’s commute, then I know I need a break. :)


Every decision costs you something and every decision gives you something, in return.

We all make decisions and we all have to live with them (and know if and when they need to be changed.) So, why bother feeling bad or embarrassed about your decisions? Live them, be proud of them, they’ve made you who you are. 


 Above all, forgive yourself  for not being able to “do it all," for failing to meet your own expectations.  


Try to make peace with a life that is less than stellar.  Or, even better, redefine "stellar."

"If neurotic is 

wanting two mutually exclusive things

 at one and the same time, 

then I'm neurotic as hell. 

I'll be flying back and forth between 

one mutually exclusive thing and another 

for the rest of my days."  

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 8

And, accept your neurosis. It ain’t going anywhere!

Darwin Would Be Proud, Actually.

Okay, so I’m working on baby steps for Flylady.net, a website that helps you get a handle on your messy house. My house is a disaster although, admittedly, not as bad it used to be. I used to say that my house was a Darwinian experiment gone terribly wrong: throw some pizza on the floor and see who’d survive the longest-dog or kid (that kid is now 15 years old, so it seems he did okay.) Actually, I’d have bet on the roaches. Even the aquarium was a scary, messy place where whole fish disappeared one day to reappear, with stringy pieces, the next and float around in the tank, a macabre warning to the rest of us.

Now, the years have past, I’ve picked up a tip here and there, overcome some things, and improvements have been made but with a 3 yo and  a 4 yo running amuck, my house still more closely resembles a toy box- a toy box complete with sand, sticky stuff and little boy shoe stank (Honestly, HOW can such sweet feet make such horrible smells? It is a wonder of nature!) - than an actual functioning place where people actually live. In fact, my living room IS the toy room. Actually. I'd decided why fight it? And, it was a good bet. The toys have won.

I find myself facing down my 40th birthday and wondering, well, what the hell happened? Wasn’t this house-keeping thing some basic function of adulthood, like paying bills and cooking dinner, (I am getting better but I pretty much suck at those too,actually) that I was supposed to have mastered by now? Weren’t my twenties supposed to be this learning curve where I’d get good at being an adult and, by now, I’d have it down to a fine art? Aren’t I supposed to be cruising into the rest of my life, right about now? Actually, no. I’m still struggling to find my feet on the deck of the ship of my life. (Only, sometimes, my ship actually feels more like a pirate’s ship than a cruise ship. “Swab the poop deck, Matie!”)

One of the things that Flylady says, that really hits me in the gut as TRUTH, is to let go of your perfectionism, “perfectionism is what got you into this mess in the first place.”  Thank you, very much! That concept was always hard to explain, even to myself- "Actually, my house is a disaster because I am a perfectionist.”

If I don’t have the time and energy 

to clean the whole house, ceilings to baseboards, 

then FORGET IT, I won’t do anything.  

< Insert feeling of being totally overwhelmed and then go sit on the couch.>

Flylady is teaching me that “good enough” is good enough. (And, to use a timer-you can get a lot done in 15 minutes and you don't get overwhelmed.)

That’s a great lesson for life, in general, and not just housework.  For most things, spend just enough time and then move on or you won’t have any energy left to have FUN. Break everything down into tiny pieces and knock it out over time - consistency and patience are the two big virtues to make a life that is fun and fruitful. That’s my two cents, actually, since you asked. :)

"Don't do nothing because you can't do everything. Do Something. Anything." -Colleen Patrick Goudreau

"Little by little, one travels far."-J.R.R. Tolkien