Good Bye

When I first heard that my Aunt had died, I was sad. I was sad for my uncle who has shared his life with her for more than 40 years. I was sad for my cousins who would now have to live in this world without a mother. I was sad for her grandchildren whom she adored. I was sad for her great-grandchildren who would not grow up with her around. I was sad for my mother who lost her only sibling and sister. I was sad for my grandmother who lost the baby she carried in her body and brought into this world. But I wasn't really sad for me.

Not ever really close, I'm not sure when the last time I talked to my Aunt. No animosity, just lives lived in different cities and only that delicate thread of family connecting us. I loved seeing her at family gatherings. Her laugh was outrageous--reflecting so much of who she was. Her crackling laughter began somewhere in her toes and zig-zagged its way up her body until it jumped out of her and onto everyone in the room. I have many memories from my childhood. I remember riding in her VW van as she flew over the hills near my grandmother's house. Long before the days of car seats and seatbelt warning systems, all five cousins would be jostled around in the back of that van. We would cry, "Faster, faster!" as we approached the big "belly bender" hill we loved so much. And she was happy to comply. I'm pretty sure we caught air on some of those trips. And yet, even as I reflected on my memories of my aunt, I wasn't sad for me.

But then sitting in her funeral service, I began to feel sadness for me and my loss. I was sad because I lost someone who loved me. In this crazy world, having people who love us is a simple and amazing thing. My Aunt was someone in the world who held me in her heart and wanted the best for me. No matter how much time passed between our meetings, I knew my Aunt would greet me with genuine joy. She would question me about my life and my family because she cared. She loved me and having one less person in the world to love me makes me sad.

Later, after the funeral, I realized I lost something else as well. I lost someone who held memories of me that I didn't have of myself. My cousin and I were born one month apart. My mother and my aunt both had brand new baby girls at the same time. We all lived in the same town and my mother and aunt shared those first terrifying and joyous years of motherhood with one another. My Aunt was there when I was born. She played with me. She laughed at my antics. She disciplined me. As we sat around after the funeral looking at old photo albums, I saw in those old pictures my very young aunt holding a very young me. I saw joy on her face and I saw glee on mine. She knew things about me that I will never know. She knew how I smelled after a bath. She knew what my skinny baby legs looked like. She knew the things that made me giggle with abandon. As long as she was living she safely carried a part of me with her. And now that she's gone the memories she held are gone as well.

I lost my Aunt last week. I lost someone who held love for me in this world and who knew knew me in ways I don't even know myself. While my loss is nothing compared to others in my family, I am sad for me and what I have lost.

Goodbye Aunt Sharon. Thank you. I'll miss you.

Early Drop Off?

My son is leaving for college in four months--four months.  It leaves me breathless.  I cannot image daily life without him.  I will miss his laugh, his ability to argue about absolutely anything, the way he tenderly loves on our dogs, the way he gently teases his sister, his giggle when I mutter a cuss word, his indignation about a wrong he has discovered and even his inability to put his clean laundry away before it becomes dirty laundry.  I am sure I can't even begin to think of all the things I will miss.

I feel like I'm giving birth again.  Right now I'm in the early stages of laboring to send my child into the world.  I'm afraid and also excited.  I'm feeling pretty good.  But I have no doubt the next year will be that awful period of labor benignly called transition.

* * * * * * *
I wrote that in April.  In April, I was unable to imagine our lives without our son's daily presence.  It's now July and my imagination has started working.

I am ready to drive him to college today.  When he was in daycare, they had a program where you could drop off your child early for a fee.  I've considered calling his college to see if they have a similar program.

I've been told by older and wiser mothers that this is how it goes.  The arguing increases until you are ready to kick them out of the nest--literally and with force.  Mother Nature is smart that way. Yet, there are still some days I can't imagine the depth of the hole he'll leave. It's a roller coaster of emotions. I know he's ready to go and I'm making him just as crazy as he makes me. We both push the other away and then pull closer, sometimes swinging between the two with whiplash-inducing speed.

I've been reading about this process and I really believe this is a good thing. If leaving is too easy, the parent/child bond is not very strong. Yet if leaving is too hard, the parent and child are too emeshed. Thus, the push and pull, daily swings and general turmoil are not only normal but good. SIGH.

If April was the early stages of labor, July is transition: painful, seemingly endless and faintly hopeful. The only way out is through. One more month and then this part is over. We move on to figuring out exactly how our lives have changed and how they have stayed the same.

I'm ready to see what this labor produces both for him and for us. I can't wait to miss him.

Warm and Cold Air

I've always felt that I learned what it means to be a woman from my son. I grew up in a household of women. I knew nothing about men and their ways.  I thought the feminine way of being was the way everyone was.  When I married, I thought my husband was an anomaly. But then my son was born and I quickly found out that boys are very different from girls and furthermore they are all truly born that way. After 18 years with my son, I've learned a lot. I now know that a whack on the shoulder is a form of endearment. I now know that exchanging insults is actually a complex bonding ritual. I now know that discussing bodily functions is a genre of comedy all its own and demonstrating them is a special sub-genre.  I know a lot more now that I did.

While I learned about being female from my son, I'm learning about being "me" from my daughter. At 14 she is brave and beautiful and developing a clear sense of who she is. I am in awe.

"Mom, what causes a tornado?" she asks as she emerges from the pantry where she's been searching for an after school snack.

"Well, when a warm air mass meets a cold air mass they collide and tornados form." I answered.

"Yes." she confirmed with a nod and attitude of certainty.

"Why do you ask?"

"I told Ms. Emmett she owed me an apology," she responded defiantly.

"What? I'm confused."

"Well, Ms. Emmett asked us, 'What causes a tornado?'   I answered, 'Warm and cold air.' She told me, "No, there's more to it."

"NO? More to it?" I asked raising my eyebrows. I'm from Oklahoma and I know a few things about tornados.  "I'm confused. What else causes tornados?" I asked truly puzzled.

"That's what I asked her. Then she told me to drop it"

"So, wait. She told you that you were wrong and then she told you to drop it? She didn't explain what she meant?" I ask and feel my mama bear rising. Before I realize it, I've got the phone in my hand mentally preparing what I'll say to this teacher when I demand an explanation for not only her incorrect information about tornados but her teaching style.

"Yeah. She told me to drop it. Then we watched a movie and the movie said tornados were caused by warm and cold air. So when the movie was over I told Ms. Emmett that she owed me an apology because I was right," the defiance rising in her voice.

I'm fairly certain that my jaw did not actually drop but it sure felt like it. My quiet, easy-going, teacher's pet of a daughter had talked back to her teacher. At first I must admit that I cringed. I didn't want her to "be in trouble." I wanted her to be respectful of adults. I wanted her to just get along. But with a deep breath I was able to step back. She's not a kid who has been in trouble at school--ever--not in nine years. She's not rude to others. She's a good kid. And besides the teacher was wrong and did owe her an apology.

I took a deep breath and asked, "So what did Ms. Emmett do?"

"She told me to drop it again," she shrugged, "so I did.  She knew I was right."  

I hung up the phone. She didn't need me to fight this battle for her. She handled it fabulously.

From my daughter I am learning the subtle art of being myself. As a kid I had to scream to be heard. I had to demand that my point of view had merit. I had to fight to be me.  As an adult I've wavered between the extremes of silencing my own voice and stridently demanding that I be heard.  I lost the ability to calmly, self-assuredly speak my own truth.

While it's certainly not her job to be my teacher, I am grateful for the lessons my daughter continually teaches me.  She teaches me simply by being who she is.  She teaches me that standing up for myself can be done with a strong but quiet defiance. And just because someone tells me I'm wrong, I don't have to make myself believe it.  And most importantly, when I know I'm right I can drop it. I don't have to always demand that I be heard.

I don't know where she learned this lesson since it obviously didn't come from me.  Maybe she learned it from her brother when he was farting on her.

Beating the Odds

Part of me has been waiting on this phone call. I've known it was destined to come but I was dreading it.

"Mom," his voice wavers right on the edge between tears and manhood. "I had a wreck."

I forced myself to take a deep breath.

"Are you hurt?"

"No, but I hit some woman." When he speaks this time there's no wavering, the tears spill over into his voice.

He rear-ended a woman because he was looking around. She stopped at a light and he didn't see her. It was clearly his fault. He made a novice driver's mistake. No humans were injured. However, he was driving my car, which was injured.

My husband and I were at a soccer game with our daughter when I got the call. After I ascertained that he was not physicallly hurt, I handed the phone off to his father. He quickly got in his car and drove over to help out. I stayed at the soccer game. No one needs their mother around when they're trying to be a man. I got a ride home from soccer. When I walked in the door, I turned and looked at him; he burst into tears again. He was afraid that I was mad, he was embarrassed, he was still in shock from the whole experience, he was angry. So many emotions.

But here's the thing. I'm proud of him. Not because he was in an accident but because of how he conducted himself. The woman he hit was very angry--very. Before his father arrived she was standing outside of the car yelling at him. He was shaking from the shock of the whole thing. He said he apologized but she continued to yell. Finally, he told her, "I'm sorry. This is my first accident. I need you to stop yelling at me."

How amazing is that? He's 18 years old. He was able to first recognize what he needed in a stressful situation and then he was able to verbalize it--to a stranger no less. He was appropriate but firm. I'm in awe.

And besides, as he told me later, he beat the odds. He didn't have his first accident until he was 18.

A Perfect Day

Growing up I was taught that perfection was attainable.   With enough effort, enough money, enough spectacle, enough time perfection could be mine.  And with perfection would come all good things in life: money, friends, family, possessions, success.

For several years now, I've been trying to un-learn this lesson.  I've been trying find an equation that fits my life.  I no longer want to be perfect.  I want off the perfection merry-go-round.  I'm tired of circling around life and not really living it.  I don't want perfection; I want happiness.

So yesterday I was surprised to realize was a perfect day.  Not because every little thing was perfect but because it was a simple, easy, nice day.  A day spent with friends enjoying one another and good food.

We invited friends over for Easter lunch.  I did not prepare all the food by myself in a cloud of martyrdom and dirty dishes.  Neither did I purchase unreasonable amounts of food from a trendy restaurant. The food was not served on matching serving dishes.  We ate on paper plates using plastic forks.  Nothing about the event was worthy of a Pottery Barn spread.  Instead each family brought food from their own kitchens.  The food was prepared with care and thoughts of those who would eat it.  And we could taste that special care in each plastic fork-full.

We sat outside on a perfect Texas day.  The sky so big and blue it seemed endless.   The sprawling live oak over our heads sheltering us from the still mild Texas sun.  We laughed and told stories.  We watched our children teasing and playing together.  We remembered good times we had shared together.

In one of those moments that catches my breath, I saw what perfection truly is.  Perfection is really found in the commonplace living of life.   I realized I've been defining "perfect" incorrectly.  Perfection can be defined as the absence of any defect at all.  This is the definition I was taught growing up.  I thought that when I was able to remove any hint of inadequacy or shortcoming from my life that I would be happy.  What I realized yesterday is that perfection can also be the idea that a thing is as good as it can get.  It's like a glass that is neither half-full nor half-empty, but is full to the point where it can hold no more.  The glass is perfectly full.  Perfection is not matching dishes or designer food.  Perfection is not the illusion that we can keep others from seeing us as the flawed and scared human beings that we are.  Perfection is the idea that an imperfect day is perfect because it is as good as it could possibly be.  A day that is as full of laughter, friends and happiness as it can possibly be.

Another Blog is Born

"Click here," she said as she pointed to the computer screen.
"Now type your name."
"Click that little box to accept."

With a few mouse clicks and some personal information, a new blog is born. Shouldn't this be more difficult I think. Shouldn't I get some sort of license before I let my thoughts and opinions loose on the world? Shouldn't I have to attend some class that warns me about the perils of posting while impaired? Shouldn't I be forced to lisen to stories about blog navel gazing going horribly wrong? Shouldn't it take more than a cup of cappucchino, a new friend and free wi-fi at Panera?

But no. It really is just that easy.

So unless the internet police are real and one of them shows up, I have a place to play with ideas. I have a place to be me and practice living out loud.