Category Archives: Nathan

I Made It Through Week One.

The first week of NaBlo is over and I’ve learned something already. I really like writing nonsense. I’m not sure how you feel about reading it, but since it’s 13 minutes from my bedtime and I’m determined not to mess this up on week one, you’re getting another dose of my nonsense.

I could tell you how busy I was all day, but you probably don’t care. I’m still tired, too. I’m already thinking of the coffee I’m going to drink tomorrow.

I listened to a lot of Pandora today. I put on the Sara Bareilles station and, oddly enough, barely heard any Sara Bareilles songs. I did realize that I really like Regina Spektor though, so that’s cool. I think I’m going to create a Regina Spektor station so I can hear more Sara Bareilles.

I’m considering parting my hair in the middle instead of on the side. I haven’t worn my hair that way in many years. Upon further consideration, I realize changing my part will require me to take my hair out of my ponytail which really seems like a lot of work. Meh, I wasn’t really committed to the idea either way.

I have high hopes for writing a cohesive post tomorrow. If not, Saturday definitely. Or Sunday. Quit pressuring me.

I’ll leave you with this picture of my kid. He’s really cute, particularly when he’s asleep. And yes, I went into my kid’s room and took a picture of him, with a flash, while he was sleeping. But look at how cute he is. How could I not take a picture?

A rare moment when this child is silent.

This is NaBloPoMo Day 7.

I Wish I Had The Answers.

I had a post planned for today, but it’s going to have to wait. It’s the kind of post that can. Mostly it was going to have links and such and I’m not much in the mood for a multiple link post. I’m worn out, so you’re going to get some words.

I woke up on my couch just before four this morning. My husband was on the other couch. This happens a lot, us falling asleep in front of the TV. When Kris realized I was up, he told me about the shooting at a mall very close to my house. I wasn’t able to fall back to sleep after that.

I had three different part time jobs in that mall. When I staged my own What Not To Wear style intervention, this is the mall where I replaced my wardrobe. This was the mall of my youth, where I went to try to meet boys, hang out with friends, and buy my New Kids on the Block posters. Just on Sunday, I met up with someone in the parking lot of this mall to sell her an old car seat.

Now this mall was the location of yet another shooting. Thankfully, no one but the shooter was hurt last night. I know he had bad intentions, but I can’t help feeling sadness for his family, his friends, and even for him. To think that this is what people become – one who murders or attempts murder for reasons we may never know – it’s devastatingly sad.

Today I happened to see a post on Facebook that mentioned a local school on lock down, but didn’t say which. I went to Google, thankful that my own son wasn’t in school today, only to find two different area schools were locked down due to threats of gun violence. My heart sank again for the second time in about twelve hours.

I don’t have the answers. I don’t know how to stay safe. I don’t know how to protect my son. And I worry that my family or friends will become the victims of this crazy violence. I wonder what it is that causes these people, in some instances practically babies, to turn so hateful and angry. Could someone I know take this sort of action? One of my son’s classmates? The child of a friend? My own child?

I took my son to his first real karate class tonight. I sat and watched Nathan jump into things, in a manner quite unlike him. He wasn’t shy or nervous. He participated, he focused and he was joyful. I started to well up, but this time with pride and happiness.

Tonight my son is safe in his bed, tuckered out from being a kid. I wish I could keep him safe and innocent and small forever. I can’t and I probably shouldn’t try. Instead, I think I’ll focus on talking to him, loving him, and doing what I can to make his world a better place.

This is NaBloPoMo Day 5.

I Can’t Blog With Paper on the Laptop.

Ten days without an update. Eek! Egads. Yikes. Stuff like that.

I woke up last Thursday (that’s LAST, as in the tenth of October), with a scratchy throat. I figured it was allergies. I figured wrong. I seem to have contracted a small form of death. Coughing, sneezing, fatigue, general malaise. It’s fun times. I’ve been going to bed at 8:50. Why such an odd time? Well, when one normally goes to sleep around 9:20, there isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room.

Why do I go to sleep at 9:20, you ask, and not just 9:15 or 9:30? Because. That’s why.

I think I’m finally starting to see the tail end of this cold, which would be great since I’m really tired of feeling like crap.

Next month I’ll be participating in NaBloPoMo. That’s National Blog Posting Month for those of you unaware. I did this last year, with moderate success (I missed one day that I made up about 8 hours into the following day). I’m hoping to do better this year by planning my posts via an editorial calendar. The problem is that I was so busy saving posts for next month that I sort of forgot to keep planning posts for this month. And I was in a phlegmy haze too. You’ll forgive me right?

So I have some good stuff planned for next month, with about 10 days of posts planned. I’ll be hooking up with BlogHer and yeah write this year as well because these things are just more fun when other people are involved. That translates roughly to mean that I want better traffic. It’s all about the numbers, people. (No, it’s not.) {Yes, it is.}

November is also known as NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month wherein people shoot to write a novel during the month. I don’t write novels, so I’m not doing that. I decided to make up NaMeWriMo, National Memoir Writing Month. I won’t finish mine in one month, but I hope to work on it every day of the month. Maybe if I do that I’ll actually hit my goal of finishing the first draft this year. I doubt it.

I also acknowledge that I may not have made up NaMeWriMo but I’m too lazy to go look it up. So if I bit off your idea, sorry.

I wanted to give you a quick glimpse into my life these days. I have done that. I need to wrap this up because my child has ripped up and crumpled three sheets of paper and he is throwing them at me while I type. This makes blogging more difficult than you’d think. I’m trying to finish this last sentence while he gathers his scraps into a pumpkin shaped bucket. Too late, he just dumped them on the keyboard.

Hooking up with yeah write’s weekend moonshine grid. That’s fun times, for reals.

Gutted.

I’m depressed again. I realized it a few days ago. I thought I was just tired, but then there was what should have been a slight disappointment that actually felt more like a devastating blow. I cried about nonsense that I knew was nonsense but cried anyway. I didn’t feel better after I cried and that’s when I knew.

And just like I knew I was depressed I know that it will pass. I need to ride out this storm and it will all be over eventually.

I yelled at Nathan the other day. He acted poorly, I asked him for some space and when he not only didn’t go into the other room like I asked but acted even more poorly, I lost it. We’ve been talking a lot about using our words when we are upset and need space. I used my words and he didn’t respect them and I yelled at him. A rational woman would have had better control. A rational woman would not have expected a six year old to respect her need for space.

I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t want to yell at my kid. My mother used to yell at me like this. I’d do something that I knew I wasn’t supposed to do, I’d push buttons, and she’d blow. She’d explode on me in a way I didn’t deserve and was excessive considering the infraction.

I was watching TV later that night and one of the characters had to attend the funeral of his father. He turned and looked at the casket and the reaction was one I understand so well, that feeling when you fully realize that your parent is dead. There in a box, or in my case a marble urn, just utterly and completely dead. No longer alive to complain about, or hope someday things will be better, or to see as a burden, or any of the other feelings one could have when a father/son or mother/daughter relationship is complicated beyond measure.

There’s a certain comfort in the norm, in the same-shit-different-day life with someone. Even though it may seem like it won’t ever end, at some point it does. Things change. People die.

I watched the guy on the sitcom come to terms with his newly dead father by the next commercial break. I remember sobbing in the church at my mother’s funeral, feeling completely gutted. To this day, I do not know why I was crying. I guess it was 34 years of cut-short sobbing that flowed forth, unstoppable, a culmination of everything. To see this guy look at his father’s corpse, feel the gutting and get over it so quickly and neatly, it didn’t feel genuine to me.

I wish I could say I’m depressed about my mother and so I yelled at my kid, but it’s not that linear. The depression, the yelling, the grieving, they all happen in swirls around each other, connected, but no one causing the other. Of course I can see how my relationship with my son conjures up unresolved feelings about my relationship with my mother. How I use what I know to not screw it all up, to not do more harm than good, that escapes me. Keeping the past in the past, being the mother he needs amid the uncertainty of the future, that’s the difficult thing.

Sometimes I’m still standing in that church, gutted, wondering where I go from here.

Joining my pals on the yeah write grid again this week. Stop by.

The Neglection of the Flour Baby.

I’m bring back an old post to join in on the moonshine grid this week. Enjoy!

My son’s babysitter came barreling through the front door five minutes after her start time, as usual. I’m not sure if it’s her chronic tardiness, the way she stomps around like an elephant, or her atrocious manner of speaking that drives me insane. I suspect it’s all of the above.

“Yo, they gave me my flower-baby today,” she offered up, 100% unsolicited.

“Your what?” I never know what she’s talking about.

“My flower-baby. You know, a flower-baby. They make you take care of it so you know how to take care of a real baby. See, here’s a picture.”

She thrust her phone in my face. There was a picture of a sack of Gold Medal flour, dressed in infant clothes, with a photo of a baby taped to it.

“Oh, a flour-baby. OK. I see,” I said, rapidly losing interest.

“Yo, they make us do craaaaazy stuff. And we have to take real care of it, too. If you leave it in your locker? That’s neglection. If you break it? That’s death.”

I interjected a few uh-huhs and mmm-hmms in the appropriate places. She kept talking.

“Yoooo, but some teachers, they’re cool, right? If your baby has death, you get to write an obituary and you still pass. But some are straight up bad, man, because if your baby gets death and you write the obituary, you still fail. That’s not right, right? They shouldn’t be able to fail you like that for breaking your baby.”

I considered pointing out that the assignment was probably to not break her baby. Instead, I asked her where her baby was at that moment. She explained that she left it with a friend since she didn’t want to bring it to work. I considered pointing out that her job is to babysit an actual child, but figured she wouldn’t make the connection.

“Yo, so, like, maybe I’ll bring it tomorrow. But, like, that thing is legit heavy, so I’m all like whoa.” She shook her arms for dramatic effect.

I decided that was as good a time as any to get back to work and let her get to taking care of my son.

The next day, she bolted through my front door, five minutes late of course, with Flour-Baby in arms. She complained a bit about how hard it was to take care of a fake child. She figured I didn’t really understand since I didn’t have to do this assignment in high school. I nodded in sarcastic agreement. She didn’t get it.

Once her shift was over, she went home. It wasn’t until I was serving my son dinner that I noticed someone looking at me. It was Flour-Baby, sitting in Nathan’s chair in my living room.

I had half a mind to call her teacher to report this… neglection.