My Superhero Power

I have discovered my superhero power: I can make a mountain out of any molehill. I can do it fast, and I can make it big. Mount Everest ain't got nothing on me. In less that 48 hours, I have successfully turned one word into more than 60,000 seconds. (Why,  yes, that would be me sneering at Sir Edmund Hillary.) I can even make molehills out of mountains and sometimes, I can do both at the same time. It is a talent, I tell you, and one worth watching (if you have a slightly sadistic bent to your humor, that is). Now if only I could manifest a slightly more useful superhero power, I would get really excited!

Thinking Big

So I read this article at Scientific American the other day, and I've decided that I'm not thinking big enough. No, I'm not going to try to improve my vision (that might be a hopeless cause!), but I am DEFINITELY going to count playing with my son as my daily allotment of exercise! :)

The Grumpy Side of the Bed

Which is where I woke up today. I should have been wearing this as a warning sign:

5 Ways Being a Writer Is Like Being a Parent

• The delete key (aka Magic Eraser) is your best friend.

• Your project is ALWAYS a work in progress.

• You are always practicing your craft.

• The Editor (also known as mommy blogs) will make you second guess yourself a lot.

• No matter how much you practice, study your craft, or learn the rules, sometimes you just have to go with your gut.

Chrysalis

I think "chrysalis" is one of my favorite words. Such a beautiful sounding word, for such an amazing thing: the cocoon that hides a caterpillar while it becomes a butterfly. I'm not sure why "chrysalis" popped into my head the other day, but it did, so I've been meditating on it, almost, over the past few days.

I feel as though I'm in my own "chrysalis." Working through the after-effects of my divorce, learning to be a single mom, learning to be a co-parent, getting more deeply in touch with my faith, meeting new people, trying new things and generally becoming someone new. The old me is still here, but there's a lot more to me now than there used to be.

So much of the new me is beautiful: my newfound respect for my own strengths, the understanding of the courage I didn't know I had, the awareness of weaknesses I knew I had (as well as a few that I'm newly aware of!). And some of the old me is pretty ugly: my reactions that are based on past experiences, my fears over facing such a different future than I'd ever imagined for myself, my willingness to always see what has been instead of what could be.

I'm still in my chrysalis, still becoming what I hope to be. These things that I'm struggling through are part of that working loose, of shedding those behaviors, attitudes and fears that keep distracting me from the beauty of life where I am. The amazing thing about my chrysalis is that I will always be "becoming." I may be fragile, beautiful and flawed now. Tomorrow I will be stronger, more healed, but I will still be "becoming." 

And Now I Remember ...

,,, Why I quit blogging for so long. Gonna have to think on this one a bit. 

International Cherry Pit Spitting Championship

So today, Tree-Mendous Fruit Farms in Michigan held their annual Cherry Pit Spitting Championship. They have not yet posted the winner's name on their web site, so I'm just going to skip the congrats and jump right into some memories of my youth.

My parents planted several fruit trees and shrubs around our properties when we were younger. There were blueberry bushes, apple trees, a peach tree, an apricot tree (I think), a few wild plums lurking about and, yes, a cherry tree.

None of them, saving the blueberries (of course, the ones that were the biggest pain to pick!), did very well. The apple trees gave maybe 3 or 4 small apples a year. The peach tree always straggled, and we got maybe a peach off it a season. The apricot tree, I believe, died very young, and the cherry tree eventually fruited beautifully ... but the birds refused to let those fruits ripen before descending in droves to pick it clean.

So the year that my younger sister and I had our very own cherry pit spitting contest, I believe my mom bought the cherries at the grocery store. And in her motherly wisdom, she sent the whole bunch of them out on the deck for my sister and I to pit and get ready for a pie.

No, we did not eat all the cherries. We didn't even eat most of the cherries. We didn't even really have a pit-spitting contest. We did, however, have a cherry juice splashing contest. Who could get the pit out of the cherry making the most mess?

I'm sure you can see where this was going. Yes, we did eventually have pie, and yes, it was delicious, and yes, we made a big, big mess. We looked like we just strolled off the lot of the latest Chain Saw Massacre movie AFTER we had been dismembered with a chain saw. I suspect my mom probably relieved us of our cherries and sent us right back out to try to hose down the deck before it was permanently stained (I suspect, but don't remember ... apparently, it was such a challenge that I've blocked it from my memory).

One Scary Post

I'm oddly nervous about penning this post. I never wanted to be labeled as one of "those people." "Those people" who talked openly about their faith, who were obvious in wearing it, in being over-bearing with it.

I was raised Catholic in a very non-Catholic area of the county. Most of my friends were Baptist, occasionally Methodist, and once I got to high school, I met someone who was Episcopalian. My very small parish was also an older parish: there were only 4-5 other families with children our ages, and few of them stayed as long as we did.

I didn't talk much about my faith. For one thing, it didn't come up all that often in school. Weighty subjects like God, heaven and hell didn't come up all that often over junior high lunch. For another, there were — and probably still are — some pretty anti-Catholic elements in my hometown. Mostly just ignorant tirades sent to the local newspaper, but words and ignorance can hurt just as much, especially if you're an overly-sensitive adolescent girl.

So I put distance between myself and my faith. In fact, I put just about as much distance between myself and my Catholic roots as I could manage: Buddhism, Hinduism and even paganism were all paths I flirted with, desperate to find my home. I'm pretty sure my mom thought I was going straight to hell. I think I figured if I was going to be weird, well, I was going to own my weird.

But all my wanderings kept leading me back to the place I started: the faith I grew up in, the rituals that feel like home, and the traditions can help make sense of our crazy, chaotic and constantly changing world. It took a lot of false starts, some hard knocks, some moments of pure grace, but I'm getting there, where I feel at home in my own skin.

And the more I get used to my own faith, the more I want to learn about it. I'm reading "Rediscover Catholicism" by Matthew Kelly right now, and something he wrote is really resonating with me: "We become the stories we listen to."

Without putting it so eloquently, I've spent the past few years looking at the story of my life and realizing I didn't like it. Not that my life was terrible and evil and wrong. Just empty. And the media I was using to fill it — TV, movies, music — I realized I didn't want to expose my son to it, and gradually, I didn't want to expose myself to it.

So I became one of "those" people: I started listening to Christian radio, I got rid of my TV (honest truth, though, that was primarily an economic decision), and I started trying to become a whole person. I want to tell my own story, not one cooked up by a lyricist or a soap opera writer. I want my life to tell my story, and I want the soundtrack to be the laughter and joy of living in the here God meant me to inhabit.

Happy 4th of July!

I'm so thankful to live in the county I live in. I'm so thankful for the men and women who had the courage to stand up for what they believed in so many years ago. I'm so thankful for the men and women since then who have fought and continue to fight to protect our freedoms. I'm thankful for a government of the people and by the people, because even if they don't always get it right, we have the opportunity to fire them for doing a crappy job without staging a bloody coup. I'm thankful for fireworks and watermelon and hot dogs. I'm thankful for muggy nights and the smell of grilling and for family and friends. Happy Independence Day!

Remembering My Childhood: There's a Chicken Theme

As I've mentioned before, my son is in a "tell me a story about when you were growing up" phase. I'm not sure if it's just the novelty of new stories or appreciating the strange way his mommy grew up, but those stories are miiiiighty popular right now.

It's funny, too, because most of them I had forgotten. Some, of course, are family legend: the vicious rooster Valentino, who would attack you if you dared enter his domain to retrieve the eggs the chickens had laid. So Mamai (my mom) kept a wiffle bat by the chicken coop so she could knock him over the head before going in for the eggs. If she was lucky, he'd stay in a corner shaking it off long enough for her to get the eggs and get out. Unfortunately, my older sister (probably 6 or 7 at the time) didn't use the bat trick when she went to go get the eggs one day, and Valentino took advantage of her lapse. (YES, my big sister was attacked by a vicious chicken!) Mamai, alerted to the danger by the star of this story (that would be me! ;)), came to the rescue with the bat, and shortly after that, Valentino became stew. Good ol' Valentino.

Some stories, though, I'd forgotten about until I started consciously trying to remember tales to tell my son. For example, I'd forgotten (quite possibly on purpose) that one of my favorite toys as a 5 year old was a rubber chicken. And not one of those cartoony silly rubber chickens; oh no, mine was a bald, life-like chicken that I was so proud of that I even took it to show and tell. Like I wasn't weird enough already. Ah well. It makes for interesting reminiscing and lots of laughs for the kiddo!

Tip From a Wise Mom

Totally stealing this idea from a mom I met through a church support group (The Catholic's Divorce Survival Guide): she took her daughter's toys and put them in different bins. Her daughter can "check out" a bin and play with the toys in that bin. When she wants to "check out" a different bin, she needs to put all the toys back in the original bin and return it before she can get the second. I seriously think this mom is a genius! Can't want to try this one out on N (full confession: I have some of the bins I need, but I haven't gotten a chance to get his toys in them. Baby steps!),

Who Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?

For most of my childhood, I answered that question by profession: I wanted to be a supermodel, teacher, novelist, teacher, writer ... Now, firmly in the middle of my 30s, I'm still trying to come up with an answer to that question, and trying to find it has only gotten worse.

I started thinking beyond the limits of a single profession. I want to be the-best-version-of-me, the person I was created to be, using the unique and odd assortment of talents I was born with and skills I have developed. But who needs a singing writer who crochets and has an oddly macabre sense of humor? Hmmmm ...

So now I've come to purpose. It makes answering that questions slightly easier, although I still have quite a few jockeying for supremacy. To be the-best-version-of-me. To help my son be the-best-version-of-him (with no undue pressure!). To improve the world I'm in, even just a little.

So. Starting there. And praying lots!

Passing on the Odd Torch

My almost 5-year-old son loves to listen to stories. At first, he wanted me to read to him at home. He still loves to curl up with mom to be read to (and I love it, too!), but he recently expanded his love of stories.

He started asking me to read to him in the car. Now, obviously, I'm not going to read to him while driving. I'm talented, but I'm not that talented! So I started telling him stories that I remember. That development happened right around the time we made our first trip to Disney world, so suddenly I was telling him princess stories every morning (and evening and any other time we hopped in the car). While I don't mind the occasional Disney story and I tried to mix things up by varying my stories, by about the ba-zillionth re-telling of Cinderella, Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty, I was ready to start some new stories.

So I decided to go to my treasure-trove of childhood memories, those experiences of growing up in the wilds of South Carolina that have shaped me into the person I am today (and a pretty snazzy person, at that, if I do say so myself!) and that he won't get a chance to experience.

Re-telling those stories made me realize a couple of things:
* I am really lucky to have grown up the way I did.
* I am REALLY lucky to have turned out as normal as I did.
* As strange as it was, I wouldn't trade my childhood for any of the "normal" ones I thought I envied as a kid.

The more memories I dust off and share with my son, the more I treasure the different-ness (growing up in an underground house), odd-ness (not having central air or heating until I was in grade school) and general outside-looking-in-ness (Midwest-born parents raising their Catholic kids in the very rural, predominantly Baptist South Carolina upstate) of my upbringing. And re-telling those memories has also made me want to share them with a slightly wider audience, so you may see more of them popping up around here. Starting off with ... (and yes, I'm ending that way on purpose!)

Thinking Out Loud: Children's Church

I am the proud mom of a high energy, smart as a whip, sweet and temperamental almost 5-year-old boy. I think he's a pretty cool kid, and I'm only somewhat biased by the fact that I'm his mom. But I swear to you, I did not have that much energy at his age. Holy guacamole! He if full-throttle, highly verbal and usually moving. I love it. Except for those times when it's more appropriate for him to be quiet and still. Like going to church.

I know that sitting quiet and still is not a skill most 4-year-olds are great at for long periods of time (basically, anything over 2 minutes is awesome, right?). That's one of the reasons I enrolled him in the children's program through our church. But he gets to go to that only on the weekends he spends with me; on the other weekends, we attend a later mass during which the children's services aren't offered. I was bringing toys to keep him entertained, but I'm beginning to think that's counter to the whole point of bringing him to mass with me.

So I'm looking for faith oriented toys that will relate to the service, help him to understand what's going on (generally ... he is only 4!) but be entertaining enough that he's not trying to climb under the pew, borrow toys from the kids behind us or try to get an impromptu play-date going with the kids in front of us (and that's just within the opening hymn!). Most of the activity things I've found seem to be geared toward older kids who are reading on their own (he's smart, but he's not there yet!).

While I've found a few things that might work, I'd love to hear if you have some suggestions!

Things I Am Thankful for Today

* Such a beautiful, beautiful spring day!
* I made banana nut bread that smells soooo yummy.
* I found a late mass so that N. and I could still go to church together this evening. (Yay, me!)
* I had lunch on my patio.
* My sweet son told me he loved me to 109030 million galaxies and back.

Bat Appreciation Week

I know, I know ... random topic for a blog post tonight. But since the "publish" button and I are having an off-again relationship, I'm pulling a random topic. So bats it is!

I don't particularly care for bats. Their flight is a little too full of awkward breaks and pauses. Chasing bugs is apparently a very staccato sport. Also a low-flying one. I can distinctly remember a few youthful, panicked flights inside when the bats made their evening debut.

That being said, I do appreciate the amount of insects bats can consume. Apparently, a bat can eat a couple hundred insects in just a few hours (thanks, Wikipedia!). That's an awful lot of bugs, which holds great appeal to me, the woman whose blood is irresistible to any mosquito within a mile of me. Maybe I should get over my nerves and invest in a pet bat! Of course, a pet bat combined with my allergy to direct sunlight (not literally ... but I do get a sunburn in the shade!) might lead to some unfortunate associations. But I'd have a good excuse to drink Bloody Marys!

Showing Up

So this past year hasn't been the greatest for me in showing up here. So here I am. Putting words out there. Hitting the publish button. Not looking for rhyme, reason, purpose or plan. Just habit.