Category: Slice ‘o Life

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The Clunky Boots of Life and Other Mid-Winter Blues

I live in Chicago.  Chicago in February is not the easiest place to live. Despite global warming (and if you don’t believe in global warming, are you sure I am the right blogger for you?), February in Chicago is messy — the cold, gray, slushy kind of messy.  The bitter, sad, will it ever end kind of messy.  Messy.

Ugh.
Ugh.

This morning, getting ready to bring the kiddo to school, I was keenly aware of the monstrosities called “snow boots” I was wearing.  They are large and clumsy and supremely unattractive.  When I walk in them, it’s hard to shake just how different they feel on my feet, how awkward.  And heavy.  I kind of drag my heels and then the rubber makes me trip.

Looking down at my boots today, as I bumbled along the snowy sidewalk with my boy, I realized just how potent a metaphor these boots are for life.  So often, life is messy and clumsy and awkward and cold and sometimes, even bitter.  At least my life.  Maybe you live in La La Land where it’s always sunny and pleasant and warm and joyful.  I live in a world where children get sick and die and family members need lots of help and when I write things on the Internet people tell me how much I suck (in excruciating detail).

Bah!

I am in the thick of it.  That mid-winter semi-depression that gets worse before it gets better.  Yuck.  But knowing folks who have experienced depression to levels I can’t even imagine, I just slog my way through it.  I strap my boots on and go. I don’t have a choice.  People need me.  They rely on me.  That need is maybe the only thing that keeps me going some days.  And I am grateful for it.  Lordy, I am grateful for the many people in my life who need me.

So you’ll forgive me if I take a little longer to get back to your messages and requests.  You’ll forgive me if I only serve sloppy joes and turkey burgers and frozen lasagne for dinner.  You’ll forgive me if the thank you notes from my boy’s birthday that were written weeks ago are still sitting waiting to be addressed.  You’ll forgive me if I am not sufficiently cooing over your baby and puppy photos on the Facebook.  You’ll forgive me if I am fantasizing about curling up with the latest episode of The Bachelor under my cozy down comforter while I smile and nod vacantly during chit chat.

I got my boots on, folks.  Let’s do this.

If you like this, for the love of God, “like” this by hitting that little button above.  Throw me a bone, will ya?

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The Hole in the Middle of the Bed

I was just tucking Mary Tyler Son into bed for the night when he asked me to make a circle in his bed.  “What do you mean, a circle?,” I asked.  “Well, there is a circle in my bed and in the middle of the night I fall through the circle out of my bed and right into your bed.”  He described a hole that immediately reminded me of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, with Mary Tyler Son as Mickey.

This makes sense in our home, this hole in the bed, as every night, without fail, our boy sleepily walks from his room to ours, crawling between us and settling in for the end of his sleep.  I honestly can not remember a morning waking up without him there.  Some days it might be midnight, some days five AM, most days somewhere in between.

We are not really parents that give a fig about co-sleeping or crib sleeping.  Our first child always slept in a crib.  That changed when she was diagnosed with cancer at 20 months.  Somewhere in the midst of her treatment, Donna simply moved to our bed.  It wasn’t even really discussed, it just was.  I don’t regret that in the least.  The way I see it, we got hours and hours and hours of more time together with that shift in sleeping locations.  When your life is measured in the number of years that can fit on one hand, hours really do make a difference.

Poor Mary Tyler Son spent his first five months sleeping in a car seat.  Literally.  He had acid reflux that I first noticed in the hospital when he was born.  He would not sleep on his back and sort of made a barking noise.  It was honestly kind of alarming.  I asked his pediatrician about it before we left to come home and he was the one who suggested using the car seat.  “Three weeks at the most, and he should grow out of it,” he told me.  Well, that three weeks eeked out to five months.  And one day, as promised, he simply grew out of it.  Into the crib he went.  Which worked well, as Donna owned that real estate between us in the bed.

Some of my sweetest moments occurred with Donna between us in bed.  And some of my most terrifying.  Feeling her breath on my cheek, being tickled with whatever little tuft of hair she had left.  Hearing her whisper sweet nothings into my ear.  Counting the stitches from her scar behind her left ear.  Those are priceless memories to me.  The other side of that coin are the hours I spent awake in the middle of the night, imagining what our life would be like without Donna, as I looked at her, tears falling down my cheeks.  Then there were the times I lie awake monitoring her breathing, after the cancer had moved to her lungs.  Fucking cancer.

Donna died in our bed.  There we were, one parent on either side of her, all of us sleeping.  Neither of us were awake for her final breath.  There was no wailing or screaming.  Instead, there was Mary Tyler Dad shaking me awake telling me, “She’s gone.”  And she was.  Donna was gone.

To scoot in the middle of our bed, after Donna died, was to inhibit sacred space.  I can still feel her there sometimes, and certainly think of her there if I migrate too close to the middle.  We sleep on the pine futon Mary Tyler Dad used as a bachelor.  I can’t imagine another bed.  I mean I can, like a cool platform bed with storage drawers that we need desperately, but then that thought disappears.  Our bed is where so much of Donna’s life was spent.  And now, so much of Mary Tyler Son’s life.

When my boy talked tonight about the hole in the middle of the bed, that hole that connects us and him, and Donna, too, in such a profound way, well, I don’t think I have ever loved him more.  There are few things in life that bring me more pleasure and comfort than waking to the sound of my child telling me they love me.  And for Mary Tyler Son to imagine a fantastical world where our beds, that great symbol of nesting and rest and comfort and peace are magically connected, where one just tumbles into the other, what greater evidence of love do you get in this life?

Good night, dear readers.  I will sleep well tonight.  I hope you do, too.

 

UPDATE:  I am thrilled and honored to report that this post was awarded a VOTY  (Voice of the Year) from BlogHer in July, 2013.  It was selected as one of 100 VOTYs from over 2,500 submissions.  Thank you to BlogHer reviewers for selecting it, and thank you to fellow ChicagoNow blogger, Listing Toward Forty, for the nomination.  I am surrounded by immensely talented writers and made better for it.  

 

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How to Change a Tire and Other Lessons of Marriage

Well yesterday was quite the morning.  About four blocks from home, on the way to drive my boy to school, a flashing red panel came up on the dash board.  Looks like the rear passenger tire had a pressure reading of 6.  Um.  This could not be good, but I was a mom late for school and thought it might be able to wait a few miles.

BUZZ!  Wrong answer.

I called home and was so grateful to hear my husband’s voice.  I explained the situation and he immediately told me to pull over.  “Where are you?” “By the 7-11,” I said.  Mary Tyler Dad gave me clear directions to pull the car over again.  In my head I was all, “Pffffft.  Don’t take that tone with me, Mister.  I need to get this kid to school.  I’ll deal with the tire afterwards. ”  I had driven on a flat tire before and this did not feel like a flat tire.  I honestly thought it could wait until I got to a service station.

By the time he convinced me of the seriousness of the situation, I was a good four blocks from the 7-11.  I asked what needed to be done.  “Change the tire,”  was the answer.  Are you kidding me?  I can write a kick a$$ blog and run a charity and raise money for pediatric cancer research, but change a tire?  Nope.  Not me.  I know my limitations and changing a tire rests on the other side of that line.

Clearly frustrated, my man told me to sit tight and he would come and help me.  Part of me was all, “Damn right, you will.  I do not change tires.  Are you kidding me?”  But the other part of me was holding my head in shame.  I was beholden to a man, reliant on him to get where I needed to go, even if that was our kid’s school, because I did not know how to do something every adult who drives should probably know how to do.

Within minutes, my dear man found us and got to work.  With a few swears, a little sweat, and lots of jumping on the thingamajig to get the lug nuts to budge, we were back in business.  Kisses were exchanged, hugs all around, and we both went our merry ways.

Then I did what any self-respecting mom blogger in the universe would do.  I wrote about it on Facebook.  You know I did.  Bam, that thread took off like the papparazzi chasing the first bump shot of a Kardashian.

Turns out, I am not alone.  Turns out, the vast, vast majority of the 414 folks who responded in the thread also leave it to their man or other such qualified individual (AAA ring a bell, anyone?).

Sigh.

Why, then, do I feel disappointed in myself?  I believe I should be able to change a tire.  I watched it once before, when my Dad and I took a father-daughter trip to Ireland in 2000.  The tire blew on our rental as we were driving up a cold and rainy mountainside.  That blew in more ways than one, but basically, I just stood there and watched my Dad.  Exactly as I did yesterday with my husband.

I hate feeling helpless.  I hate playing the damsel in distress card.  I like to exercise knowledge and skill.  I do.  I like to be independent and self-sufficient.  But I’ll tell ya, ain’t no way in freaking hell I was gonna get those lug nuts off.  And honestly, I didn’t know those thingamajigs were called ‘lug nuts’ until yesterday’s Facebook thread.  And again, another sigh.

The truth is, my marriage looks eerily similar to my parent’s marriage.  They wed in 1958.  There is truth to the adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  I am home with the kids and my husband earns the money and changes the tires.  And sometimes, I need him to rescue me (and vice versa).  And every time I need it, he is there (and vice versa).  And I am grateful for that.  Shame be damned.

For those wanting to solve the age old mystery, “How do you change a flat tire?” Click here.