Category: Confessions

. . . are good for the soul.

Oughts and Nots

Well, let’s see. This is what I intended to do this week:

1) Sort through the children’s closets to weed out clothes that no longer fit. Assign them to categories: Goodwill, Lady at Church With Baby Girl, Little Boy I Babysit, Consignment Shop, Save Forever.
2) Pick through children’s toyboxes, shelves and cubby holes to remove broken, unwanted and misfit toys.
3) Clean my pigsty house.
4) Bake Christmas cookies, at least a few.
5) Force Encourage children to “do” art lessons for school-at-home.
6) Create Christmas ornaments/gifts using doilies, clothespins, and cut-out photographs of their faces.
7) Catch up on laundry.
8) Visit my 99-year-old grandmother.

This is what I’ve actually done:

1) Stayed in bed (off and on) until 9:30 a.m.
2) Read Memoirs of a Geisha, just in time to see the movie.
3) Baked chocolate chip cookies.
4) Mailed all but two or three Christmas cards. (I’m missing addresses and ran out of stamps.)
5) Dumped tons of laundry in the laundry rooms. Failed to wash, dry, fold, put away said laundry.
6) Napped.
7) Ate Hickory Farms summer sausage at 10:30 p.m
8) Finished two art lessons for school-at-home. Only eight more to go.

Clearly, I’m an underachiever.

Now. Here is what I ate today:

Breakfast, about noon:
Last Little Debbie Swiss Cake Roll I found hidden on top of buffet. I ate this standing over the sink, wondering what to have for lunch.
Lunch, 1:30 p.m.: Salad with ranch dressing. Diet Coke.
Afternoon: Kringle, which arrived by mail. . . a slice here, a sliver there. Three almond roca pieces.
Late afternoon: Chocolate chip cookie dough. One chocolate chip cookie.
Dinner: One bowl homemade potato soup sprinkled with sharp cheddar.
Dessert: More Kringle.
After exercising: Hickory Farms summer sausage and eight Ritz crackers. Two more cookies.
After summer sausage: Half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Marsha-Marsha Marshmallow.

Clearly, I need an intervention.

How I Am Frittering Away My Intellect

1) Reading books far beneath my intellectual level, such as “Good Night, Moon” and “Home for a Bunny”.

2) Handling the majority of the physical labor in my household, including wiping bottoms and flushing toilets.

3) Mothering more than one child, thus ensuring a life of indentured servitude.

4) Spending my days involved in mind-numbing childcare.

5) Watching late-night television, specifically David Letterman, in addition to an assortment of reality shows.

My intellect is so compromised that I can’t even think of the additional ways I’m harming it.

* * *

Today it snowed an inch and my boys had a twenty-minute snowball fight. My daughter tentatively stood on the patio and said, “I don’t want the boys to hit me with a snowball!” and I assured her they would not. After all, she is a girl and I still believe boys should defer to girls, but I’m old-fashioned like that.

The snow has fallen again tonight in the dark, so it’s a veritable Winter Wonderland outside. But there’s no more time for musings . . . Oprah will be on David Letterman momentarily.

Oh, and because you’re wondering, I’ll tell you. My kitchen table now boasts a festive candlelit Spode church. But the Advent calendar is still buried in the storage room, along with the Christmas tree.

Okay, okay, time to watch the Oprah/Dave reunion. I can feel my brain cells withering away, because as a stay-at-home parent, isn’t that inevitable?

Well. Deep Subject for Shallow Minds.

When I was younger (and cuter), I used to say, “Well,” all the time. It was a nervous habit, a verbal twitch of sorts. This led my friends to eventually say, “Well, hell, Mel,” which was uproariously funny (okay, mildly amusing) to us. I’d unthinkingly fill in blanks in conversation with “well,” and the rhyming would begin. (My brother always said–without fail–“that’s a deep subject for shallow minds.”)

I also found myself saying too often, “I’m so tired,” especially in my sleep-deprived college days. I didn’t really notice it until people began to mock me. To this day, I can’t say, “I’m so tired,” without being hyper-aware of that phrase.

Well.

I’m so tired.

But I wanted to thank everyone who added themselves to my Frapper map. As of tonight today, there are one hundred and seven fourteen of you. I only wish I could email you each personally to thank you for your comments and for de-lurking long enough to give a shout-out. (And I would have, except that Frapper didn’t include a space for email addresses.) As a former pen-pal, I have to say that having so many distant friends warms my heart.

Sometimes I have nothing more to say than “well,” and “I’m so tired,” but I think of you all staring at your computer screen and I feel this tremendous sense of responsibility to say something. Anything. Preferably something funny and self-disclosing, but not too intimate because what if I ran into you in the grocery store and things were completely awkward because of some far-out (but not groovy) personal confession I’d made?

Well. I’m so tired. So tonight, how about you share something instead? Do you realize the most comments I ever received were in response to my question about ironing blue jeans? How about breaking that record tonight?

Confess your sins. Showcase your talents. Leave a link and we’ll all traipse over and check out your blog and we promise not to leave fingerprints or break glasses.

Speak. One hundred and seven fourteen people await your comments.

True Confession

I confess that I started drinking early today. It’s true. I popped open a can and stacked an iceberg’s worth of ice into a large purple cup. Normally, I try not to drink before noon. But today? Today, I needed a drink.

You would, too, if you were here, surrounded by the scattered toys that the 3-year olds dump and toss and inundated by the twins who either can’t or won’t stop talking. At one point, one 12-year old boy traipsed into the living room to bug the other 12-year old boy. A great ruckus ensued and one boy came racing into the family room, hollering and giggling, until he was tackled by his brother.

I sat here at the computer, clicking my way through the K12 website, ignoring the attack.

Sometimes, pain is a good teacher. The troublemaker ended up on the floor, wailing for awhile until he realized he had no audience. Then he went and got his vocabulary book.

As for me, my cup is almost drained of the Diet Dr. Pepper. The kitchen table is a mess of old newspapers, schoolbooks and dirty bowls. My daughter hides behind the patio curtains wearing only her tights with the puppy on the back because her dress just dragged into the toilet. The 4-month baby girl ought to arrive any second. Good thing she is immobile, still, because my floor is definitely not baby-safe.

I do, however, have enough caffeine coursing through my veins to keep me going until naptime. And that’s A Good Thing.

A Few Notes

Once, in college, I knew a girl who liked a boy who liked me. Then, that girl hated me. One night, as I quietly prepared for bed in my dorm room (my roommate always went to bed so early) I heard voices in the bathroom that linked my room to the next suite.

They were talking about me. More specifically, they were mocking me. I stood in silence and eavesdropped in horror until my roommate bolted from her bed and whacked that bathroom door, bringing that mortifying incident to an end.

I still think about how it felt, though, to hear people making fun of me. It’s odd and even today, on occasion, I stumble into the same strange land.

* * *

With regards to the outrage I hear expressed over occasional mis-spending of the $2,000 FEMA debit cards . . . it sure seems to me that once you give someone something, it’s theirs to do with as they please. So, if people displaced by the hurricane wish to buy something outrageous and expensive, they have that right. Why are people so outraged? Haven’t they ever been behind someone in the grocery store who was buying something with food stamps that seemed to them to be inappropriate? Don’t they know people who spend good money on cigarettes and beer while their children receive free lunches? This is just more of the same thing. People who get “free” money seem to spend it a little carelessly, if you ask me.

* * *

Twenty years ago, I met my husband. My summer roommate pointed him out to me and I pulled aside the curtains just in time to see him spit on the ground. He’d been running in the North Carolina summer heat and he was sweaty. He looked nothing like the Man of My Dreams. A few days later, we met after I made a smart aleck remark during a Bible study. Imagine. Me, being sarcastic.

Well, that wasn’t a big stretch, was it?

And twenty years later, here I am, living happily ever after with a man who has ugly feet and a heart of beauty.

On Being Cool. Or Not.

I’m reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. One of the chapters is called, “Church: How I Go Without Getting Angry,” and in that chapter, he talks about the church he attends in Portland called Imago Dei. He mentions “this friend from Seattle named Mark who was the pastor of a pretty cool church near the University of Washington, in the village.”

And I realized that my church is not cool. I kind of felt the littlest bit wistful, realizing how uncool our church is, too. If churches had flavor, that cool church would be mocha (and more) and our church would be vanilla.

I was cleaning up the kitchen table after dinner (which my long-suffering husband rustled up since I am still trying to not die from coughing). For some reason, I was thinking about what “kids these days” (I always feel like an old-fogey when I use that phrase and it makes me laugh) are wearing. Specifically, which fashions are cool.

And I realized that I couldn’t pick cool clothes out of a well-lit store. I notice what girls wear, but I can’t really tell you what cool boys wear. This would be problematic for my kids, if only they actually cared about their appearances.

I’ve never been trendy, really, except for a time in the eighties when big hair was the rage. My hair just happened to be long, blond and frizzy. I looked like a member of a hair-band. The fashions of the time, leggings and big shirts, worked well for me. There was a time when I could at least recognize the hippest songs on the radio and even hum along.

But my life’s intesections with “cool” have been mostly accidental, I’m afraid. I’m terrifically, overwhelmingly not cool.

I don’t have an iPod, nor any digital music device. And I don’t want one.

I couldn’t care less about enormous, expensive leather bags, nor small cupcake-sized dogs to carry around in them.

I can’t hum even a line of “Hollaback Girl”.

I don’t “get” rap and I can’t stand how everything is misspelled and mispronounced in modern music.

I don’t drink anything stronger that Diet Coke.

I never watched “Sex in the City” and we don’t have HBO. Or TiVo.

I still use Blogger for my blog and I use a plain, old, prefab template. I have no polls, no clocks, no “100 Things About Me.”

I drive a 1993 Mercury Sable.

I live in the land of Starbucks, yet I don’t drink coffee, fancy or plain.

I used to want to be cool, but that was back in 1978. My parents never bought me cool clothes, nor did we go on any cool vacations. I had no cool friends and my hair never feathered in the cool fashion of the day. (Natural curls do not “feather,” especially in a rainy climate.) Of course, when you are thirteen, you want to be cool because you don’t realize how much more to life there is than blending in like a chameleon.

And when you’re forty, you realize it’s hopeless and that you never will be cool and that furthermore, who cares? Now I know why my dad wore those hideous shoes and flannel shirts with holes in the elbows. He’d given up on being cool, too.

Cool, shmool. Who needs it?

I Contradicted Myself and Then I Wrote This

Not even a month ago, I proclaimed
Jennifer Hyatte was stupid. And by “stupid,” I meant “a person who is not very bright.”

Because how bright can you be if your idea of living happily ever after involves helping a felon escape and murdering a prison guard?

Then, a few days ago, I wrote with some sympathy about criminals who look a lot like us. And by “us,” I meant me, of course.

Some time today, in the midst of my illness-induced stupor, I remembered my proclamation about Jennifer Hyatte a few weeks back. I stopped cold. My glaring inconsistencies flashed to neon light and I broke into a cold sweat (although, admittedly, that could have just been the fever). Why, when I read about Jennifer Hyatte shooting a prison guard to free her husband, the prisoner, did I roll my eyes and shake my head at her actions? I easily sorted her into the Stupid Category. And yet, when I read about Judy Brown, who taught at the college I attended, I sat with my mouth agape, stunned. I didn’t think, how stupid is she? in suburban judgment. I felt pity, sorrow that she essentially drove her life off a cliff for love.

I know for a fact that Judy Brown is not stupid. I could not easily slide her into the Stupid Category, which presented a problem for me. Why would someone do something so stupid if one was not stupid? It was so simple to stamp “Stupid” on the forehead of Jennifer Hyatte and move along. That could never be me, I thought, because I am so bright and all.

I didn’t feel any pity whatsover for Jennifer Hyatte and the thing she did for love. I figured if you are stupid and you do stupid things, you ought to pay for it. And none of that has much to do with me.

The truth is that if you do bad things, hoping that good things will result, you are mistaken. Never in the history of the world has it been possible to plant pumpkin seeds and have tomato plants sprout. You get what you plant. (I know all about this, being smarter than the average bear.)

Jennifer Hyatte wanted to live happily ever after with the man of her dreams. So, she did a series of bad things and ended up with . . . bad things.

Sabine Bieber wanted babies in her care to nap peacefully. So, she did a bad thing and ended up with . . . bad things.

Judy Brown wanted someone else’s spouse for herself. So, she did a bad thing and ended up with . . . bad things.

The small bad things ended up sprouting and growing into giant bad things, it seems. And did all the bad stuff start with self-absorption? Some people call self-absorption sin. (Just tonight, I came across that idea in Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I can’t think of a better description of what sin is, really. I’ve always been told that sin is “missing the mark,” as in missing a target, but why? What’s the motivation? Self-absorption.)

If I line up the pieces of these stories, I find self-absorption central in each one. I find self-absorption in my own life, too, even though the very nature of my life forces me to put other people before me. Isn’t that what Jesus asked us to do? To love our neighbor as ourselves? To serve one another? The farther we get from following His instructions, the more myopic we become, until at some point, we can’t see beyond our grabbing hands.

The more we do bad, hoping for good.

Just like Jennifer, Sabine and Judy. Just like me.

A Long Rambling Post Going Nowhere, Really

If you had told me thirteen years ago that the day would come when I wouldn’t long for a newborn baby, I would have slapped you and then collapsed in my bathroom in a heap of self-pitying tears. For those were my infertile days, the days when everyone had what I wanted (babies) and I had what I didn’t know was valuable, namely sleep and free time.

This was my second week of babysitting an almost-3 month old baby girl. She has chubby thighs and a baldish head and the loudest scream I’ve ever heard come from an infant. She has no “fussy” stage. She is either deliriously happy or screamingly furious. I only have her half-days and every day has been different. She appears to have no rhythm whatsoever, so I can only hope that she’ll ease into some kind of schedule. And I hope she stops spitting up down my back.

I’ve been in the same mode–childproofed house, toys in the family room, sippy cups in the cupboard–for twelve years. And I’m tired of circling. I’d like to land and do something else, ride a shuttle to an airport, for instance, or go sightseeing (figuratively speaking, of course). My friend yesterday reminded me that the children will fly out of the nest before I know it. (And yet, I’d like to have a schedule which doesn’t revolve around naptimes–I’m intolerably demanding.)

My own almost-3 year old daughter has been hitting her playmate and “best friend” who is also almost three. Yesterday, she had four or five time-outs. When I scold her, she crosses her arms, purses her lips and shouts “NO!” at me. Which is cute and all, but must be nipped in the bud. He throws a cup at her. She smacks him. She tosses sand his way. He pushes her.

Today, I had nine children at my house at one time. Nine.

I thought I’d be a whole lot more like the mother in “Little Women,” which is nonsense, of course, because I don’t even wear dresses on weekdays or do needlework. And I don’t have four girls. I really did picture myself with a set of docile children, doing craft projects, sewing, reading, pleasantly remarking to one another about ideas contained in those books. Ha! This afternoon, the boys were all in the back yard brandishing fake swords at each other.

In my kitchen this morning, I found an overflowing sink full of dishes–which accumulated since dinner last night. I did every single dish last night before I left. I am so sick of washing dishes I did not dirty. I know, I know. I should make the boys do their own dishes. I should.

At least they fix their own lunches. That’s something. TwinBoyB spent thirty minutes yesterday lovingly making himself scrambled eggs. Then I saw him take a bite, then another. Then he stood, put the plate on the kitchen counter and walked away. I said, “HEY! You made them, you eat them!” He smiled sheepishly and said, “They have eggshells in them.”

My husband has been working diligently on our overgrown yard. For some reason, the previous owners planted every manner of invasive plant you can imagine. We have English Ivy everywhere, laurel hedges that never stop growing, holly bushes that keep sprouting up, bamboo which is determined to take over the neighborhood, and just for fun, blackberry vines which will not die. Ever. The world will end and the blackberries will sustain the lone survivor who was down in the subway bathroom during the Last Catastrophe on Earth.

Yesterday, he took one thousand pounds of stuff to the dump–the old yellow couch I painted the living room walls yellow to match and a cat-scratched hand-me-down ugly brown recliner. Our living room’s kind of empty now, but we are getting another hand-me-down couch which we think will be better. Since he was going to the dump anyway, we gathered all the broken things scattered in the backyard and tossed them, too. The yard seems so much more sanctimonious and self-righteous, which is only fitting, really.

Anyway. The other night, we were all outside. The kids were playing basketball with my husband and I was yanking waist-high weeds. Then he came over to clip more ivy. I gave him some helpful pointers, and he said, “Dear, when I want your help, it will sound like this–‘Mel, will you tell me how to do this?'” And I retorted (in love, of course), “Well, when you do it right, I’ll say something like this, ‘Hey, you did it right!'” (I’ve never said, “Hey! You did it right!”) We’ve been married eighteen years. We joke like this all the time.

Then he pointed out how I put the “mean” in meaningful and we brainstormed about possible uses of that slogan. I think it would be a great blog tagline. “I Put The Mean into Meaningful.” I like it.

Now, a true confession. (I read this on a blog and I can’t remember which one. . . sorry!) Someone was complaining about people who don’t return shopping carts. Well. Sometimes I don’t. But only if I have a cranky baby in the rain far from the shopping cart return thing. I never park in handicapped spots, though, and that’s got to count for something. Doesn’t it? And I never scratch my key along the shiny side of cars that park badly and annoy me. That counts for something, too, right? And I’ve never smashed a windshield or even written my name in the grime of someone’s back window.

And now, my judgment for the day: This woman is stupid. What an idiotic series of things to do–marrying that man, helping him escape and then committing murder.

Me, Me, Me

Let’s talk about me.

I am a middle child.

I earned straight A’s in school, but a choir teacher gave me a B+ for a semester grade my sophomore year of high school and thus ruined my life. I am still bitter. I never took another fine arts class in school, though I love art and music.

I have brown eyes and what used to be naturally blond, curly hair.

I read Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders when I was younger than ten years old. What were my parents thinking?

My first job (involving a W-2 form) was as a clerk at a natural foods store. I think I was fired (or did I just quit?) when my boss got word that I said to a customer, “I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything around here.” I was fifteen.

I once shook hands with Jim Bakker on a dare. I was working at Heritage USA on the grounds crew at the time.

I was voted “Outstanding Junior Girl” in my high school class of four hundred. If not for that stupid B+ in choir, I might have been one of the three (or four) valedictorians. I graduated fourth out of four hundred students. My parents did not have a graduation party for me.

I traveled to Jamaica when I was seventeen with a church group. I hated Jamaica. That could be because when I was sixteen, I traveled to Tahiti with a church group and Tahiti rocks. Just look here.

I don’t drink alcohol and the one time I sipped champagne, it reminded me of Nyquil. I always thought I’d probably like drinking so much I’d probably end up sleeping under a bridge and living in a cardboard box.

I’ve been in the following states (which I can type in alphabetical order by singing a song I learned in Miss Brittingham’s third grade class): Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

I play the piano, but I never practiced enough to become excellent. I can’t play by ear very well at all, much to my chagrin.

I am an introvert.

I like to watch “The Real World” and have watched almost every season.

My favorite television show of all time was “thirtysomething.” Oh. And “Seinfeld.”

I hate raw tomatoes and Kraft macaroni and cheese.

I’ve been deep-sea fishing off the coast of Florida. You haven’t really ever seen navy blue until you’ve looked down at the ocean and seen navy blue.

I swam in the Pacific Ocean when I was younger and didn’t mind my whole body going numb from cold and didn’t realize I was risking my life.

I swam in mountain streams in my youth, also not realizing the danger. I white-water rafted once and loved it. Today I might be too afraid of dying.

I hate to camp. (This might be because I don’t drink alcohol.)

I have red stripes on my family room wall.

I bought a Lifecycle exercise bike at a garage sale over the weekend for $50.00.

The last movie I saw was “Must Like Dogs.” I really wanted to like it because it features a Newfoundland, but it was a rotten movie. Stupid, stupid dialogue and ridiculous ending. The dog was cute, though.

I owned a Newfoundland for two years. She nipped two of my kids and was returned to the breeder, despite many tears and begging by the children (even the bitten ones).

I bought a hamster cage at a garage sale this weekend, too, for $10, including all the supplies you could dream of. It has a hamster bed and a hamster potty. I don’t want to own any rodents, but my youngest son is a fan of animals and has been begging for another pet. If I soften my stance, I am prepared. (The cage still had its original sticker–$49.99.)

I am sarcastic, smart, an excellent typist. I hate coffee and adore books. I am a pessimist. I never read historical romances. I like depressing stories. I am critical and defensive and never forget a slight.

Well, I could go on and on about me, you know, since I am completely narcissistic and all, but I am boring even myself. Tomorrow? Judgments. Let’s see how many I can make in one post.

You Might Want to Skip This

I remembered tonight the time I tried to talk someone out of getting an abortion. She was twelve weeks pregnant, ready to vacuum her uterus clean, while I was trying desperately to get pregnant.

I wonder if she still hates me.

I thought of my dad today. He’s been dead for almost sixteen years. Since he’s been gone, computers have become mainstream. He once built one from a kit–and programmed it with cassette tapes. He died before everyone had cell phones in their pockets and video cameras in their closets. There are a few mysteries. For instance, what ever happened to his handgun? I found bullets, but no gun. Also, what was in the locked briefcase that I willingly handed over to a woman friend of his–she told me it contained letters and pictures from her children to my dad. (He’d been a mentor of sorts to her children.) I never quite believed her and I wish I had pried the lock open instead of giving the case to her.

When the phone rang at 10:00 p.m. and he’d leave the house, where was he going? Who left roses at his grave every week for the first year after he died?

These are things I wonder.

I remember tonight that winter day in college when I rode in van full of my friends. We were taking a fellow student, our friend, to the airport. He’d been kicked out of Bible college for drinking with my friend, a girl of seventeen, who was underage. The underage part wasn’t why he was kicked out, though. Drinking alcohol was so against the rules at that midwestern college. I sobbed on the snowy days and for days after wept, wondering what just happened. He had been a potential boyfriend–we’d danced around the idea for almost the entire year before–and then he picked up my friend, the one who’d attended that college based on my recommendation–and they’d gone out, drinking.

Betrayal, loss, stupidity. That was a bad year for me and not such a good year for him, either. Our friendship flickered on and off for a few years after that and died a sudden death before my wedding. I wonder if he still hates me.

A local church just built a new building. The plan was to expand their existing food bank which served almost two thousand people a month, but not enough money came in for the project, so the food bank, which has existed for years, was shut down. I wonder what Jesus would think about that. I know people who’ve had to use food banks and sometimes, a food bank is what stands between you and your kids going to bed hungry.

What a cheery post! To bed I go, hopefully to dream happy dreams and not dreams filled with mysteries and faces of those who aren’t fond of me.