small victory

Big J plays hockey. You all knew that. He’s on a local in-house squirt team (squirt = 9-10 year-olds). He’d make the travel team in heartbeat, but the cost is double and the word “travel” means we’d be trekking as far as DE, MD, and NY (as well as all over PA) for games on the weekends. Maybe when he’s older and H can drive herself to all her events, then we’ll have time (and maybe the $$) for him to play on the travel team.

At any rate. This is Big J’s second year as a squirt, which means he’s about the biggest kid on his team, and he’s definitely the best skater. And I’m not just saying that. Big J is, like, amazing to watch on the ice. He goes from forward to backward in a sleek, side-switching spin and without missing a beat. He can stop with an effortless backwards lean, throwing a spray of snow up onto the boards.

He can walk just about any other kid down, and if he’s got the puck, no one’s catching him. Even though I’ve posted before about how much I love watching my kid play hockey, it bears mention again here.

They didn’t win today, but the one goal scored was a break away by the J-Bear.

punishment for skipping Thursday’s run

View this running route and more at RunThere.com

a [short but not unsubstantial] christmas list

A piano. I’m not picky. A small console, used — free, even — as long as it can hold a tuning and the action isn’t too heavy.

A Vic (AKA Garmin). This one is nice, but I’d settle for something cheaper or older, as long as it can tell me how far I’ve gone and how fast I’m going.

A second bathroom. We have, yet again, found ourselves living in a single-bathroomed house. We are seriously flawed in understanding our own limitations concerning home improvement. History proves that we do not learn from our own history. Said history suggests that we will 1) purchase a house based on “potential” and (low) cost 2) plan to use the money saved to capitalize on that potential 3) realize even with the “saved” money we don’t have enough to do what needs done to make the house even CLOSE to what it could be. And then 4) usually emerges as us frantically making upgrades to the house before we have to sell it. And PS: the house we find ourselves in how, while it is amazingly located and full of character, is already too small. The big and little Js have decided they no longer want to share a room.

*sigh*

 

 

ten hours of cartoon network

Please don’t call child protective services. Today the kids are off because of parent-teacher conferences. Since I have a strange teenager living in our house, I now am able to go to work without finding a babysitter on such days.

Except today that teenager has the slime flu, or whatever, and so she’s laying in bed half-conscious. But did I find a proper sitter for the boys? Nah. I’ve got a TV. During my lunch hour I stopped home and I observed they’d fed themselves Cup Noodles and left over pizza — I know this from the evidence left in the kitchen. But they were sitting in the exact positions on the couch and floor that I’d left them in this morning. They were dressed and warm and the house was intact. This afternoon I have to attend their conferences (I cannot bring them),  attend a budget committee meeting, and then work at the Major’s Fair on campus.

10 hours of TV is probably a LOW estimate.

doing lines

In writerly company, if it comes up, I refer to myself as a “recovering poet.” The recovering part refers to my inability to stop, but that I’ve admitted I’m powerless and blah blah blah.

Actually, though, the recovering also refers to the kind of life I lived when I identified primarily as a poet. Few people I’m close to now, aside from family, knew me then. I was (I imagine) a kind of raging lunatic — or maybe a sociopath. I wrote poems like prodding fingers into wounds: insecurity? anger? oppression? Mine or yours, it didn’t matter, I was taking some spray paint to a bed sheet and hanging it on the front porch. And then probably telling you that it’s your fault you’re mad that I hung that up for everyone to see, because if you’re mad then SEE! I TOLD YOU I WAS RIGHT.

At some point I hit bottom and realized that writing, the prodding into hurting places all the time, would probably make my husband leave and my family hate me and my friends non-existent. I moved from the MFA to the composition and rhetoric program, and began the hard work of perspective shift. I read Where Ever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Peace Is the Way by Deepak Chopra. I read Thich Nhat Han and Pema Chodron. I read The Four Agreements and The Voice of Knowledge.

Now, if someone is driving like a maniac, I imagine (earnestly) they have a pregnant woman in the back seat in labor — or some other forgivable circumstance.

That is background for the links I have to present today: I love this, and I’m trying to reconcile this, and I want to write poetry again, desperately. And I want to be happy.

And I’m so lucky to have this sort of conundrum.

things I did while I wasn’t blogging that I would have blogged about, had I been blogging

1. Sang at a wedding with my mom and sister. Our act now includes djembe. We work for Starbucks coffee and the excuse to travel.

2. Ran the Virginia Beach half marathon. Solitarykitsch offers a moving account.

3. Spent some late summer mountain time writing, writing, writing.

4. Learned what epizeuxis means, really.

5. Grew my hair back out. I nearly look like myself.

6. Developed a curious OCD habit: washing my face >3 times a day, with serious abrasion. When I run now, the sweat burns my face. But still the scrubbing.

7. Settled into an easy 3-day-run week. 4 on TR; 6+ on Sunday.

8. Wondered if I’d quit blogging altogether. It seems to be a funny thing, the place so many of us are getting to where we can’t, or don’t, write in these spaces we once found so engaging and useful.

9. Have tried not to think about #8 too hard, especially the second “funny thing” about it, since I’m still

10. Writing a dissertation about mom blogs.

the reason I don’t write about sports

I’ve been watching the series faithfully (well, as best I can — last night I fell asleep during the 6th inning). I grew up a Cubs fan, but our American League team was the Yankees. And now I live in Pennsylvania, so based on geography, I’ve cultivated some  excitement for the Phillies.

I’m struck by: How many eye-candy-type  players the Yankees have. Alex Rodriguez, of course, but Jeter, Teixeira, Posada, Damon, and Cano; and how few the Phillies have: Werth, Rollins, and kind of Utley (but ugh his Pomade hair??), and Lee, but just because he’s been such a fabulous pitcher.

I have still not decided on who should win. I watch each game rooting for the team that’s losing, or for the team who needs to win so that the series will continue. 

My fandom is unconventional. I worry about who’s cute, and who’s losing. No wonder this ain’t a sports blog.

 

un-ode to halloween

No, I don’t have pictures of my kids in their halloween costumes.  I convinced my oldest that having boobs means you’re too old to trick or treat; I pawned my middle child off on some family friends for the evening; and I did (reluctantly) chase the youngest (a white ninja, most often mistaken for a mummy) around the neighborhood.

Now the process of slowly, sneakily throwing the candy away begins.

thirteen

Hannah and Madeline 2009, originally uploaded by madyonk.

There’s a person in my house. She’s 13 now, which makes me the parent of a teenager.

How did this happen? [Don't answer that.]

Strangely, rather than feeling old, I just feel like she’s not really *of* me anymore. Like she’s not my kid, because she’s NOT really a kid, and so there’s this person in my house. She’s tall, she does a whole lot of homework, and requires rides to various places constantly. She eats a bean quesadilla nearly every night, and mostly remembers to put the cheese away. Last night she left 3/4 of a block of Colby/Jack out, which was annoying since cheese is a precious commodity here. I speak to this person: “You left the cheese out.”

She responds: “Oh! I’m so sorry.”

It’s odd, this body. In my house.

is this the comeback story?

Yes. Yes it is.

Sybil at Bitch posted a narrative of her average day, which, as I read it, felt eerily similar. And then I felt even worse at the end of it where I wanted to cry for her and realized that it was really ME I wanted to cry for.

The kids and I came home yesterday, spilling out of the car and into the kitchen, book bags and coats flung about and Goldfish bags torn open, and much much whining about being hungry and get out of my way and watch out for the cat and I forgot my social studies homework and I can’t find my tap shoes. [Say it with me now: Good. Effing. Gravy.]

We have exactly 15 minutes to eat a snack and regroup before we’re making the Wednesday taxi ride of: Dance, Soccer, come-home-inhale-dinner, and then Hockey. In that 15 minutes Big J usually practices his drums, which luckily involves a “practice pad” but still manages to be loud, and therefore manages to elicit even more loud reproach from the other kids. [Aside: I can't be the only parent who experiences the "MOOM! MAKE HIM/HER BE QUIET!" uber-irony?]

I normally do not pay attention to much in that 15 minutes. I normally am in the basement speed-switching the laundry out, or speed-loading the dishwasher, or doing something domestic speedily. So yesterday, Big J was not pounding the practice pad, he was running the microwave. This, to my mind, is a good thing, as it means he is not entreating ME to prepare him some kind of snack (and he’s being quiet).

I ask him: What’re you making?

He: A chicken sandwich.

Me: … Where from? Did you save it from lunch?

He: … mumble mumble

Microwave:  beep beep beep

And thus, he removes his sandwich and I’m off to attend to somesuch elsewhere, forgetting about the mysterious chicken sandwich.

Insert Wednesday evening madness here.

Then last night, as I’m drifting off to sleep, the image of a Burger King bag, which had been on the floor board on the passenger side of my car, looms in my mind. I wake from near-unconsciousness and roll over to shake B.

Me: When did you all go to Burger King?

He: Oh, Sunday for lunch.

Me: Oooooh Gaaaawd.

Now, if we lived in CNY still,  I’m sure the near-40 October temps would have (maybe?) properly preserved the sandwich for the 4 days it was in the car; however, the lovely 70-degree days we’ve had earlier this week did little to keep the sandwich from being salmonella-ified.