June 2008

Hi. I’m Willow’s mailbox post. I’m sorry that she didn’t get to do her usual Self-Help Sunday post but I had a crisis and she was helping me out. See, I hang out on the street corner — at least Willow and the fam live on the corner. I just stand out here, waiting for my daily visit from the very nice mail lady and hoping that the kids rolling by on skateboards and rollerblades don’t crash into me. Life here on the corner is pretty stressful. I am post #5 or 6 and we were on mailbox #7 or 8. See, one of the streets that makes up the corner people have mistaken for the Indy 500 track so when they come flying around the corner, my box and I are sometimes right in their idiotic speed-for-brains path. My predecessors (various combinations of post and box) have been hit, vandalized, burned down, and last night some vandals literally ripped my box off of me.

This is what Willow saw this morning when she looked through the sheers at the windows on the front door. You can see that something doesn’t look quite right.

And once she got outside:

And up close and personal:

So anyway, Willow had to find a platform that would work with me and a new box and then she had to put us all together. She is an idiot about stuff like this not very mechanically inclined so it took a lot longer and a lot more effort and more fursing than should have been strictly necessary. My box has lovely fresh new numbers! But it was 90+ degrees while she was outside doing all that and it left her pooped. So I hope that you don’t mind that she skipped Self-Help Sunday in order to help me.

Signed,

Willow’s post (and new mailbox!)

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I found it courtesy of Robbin at My Level of Awareness. It is too cool! It’s really fun to put your Meez together and unless you get crazy it’s free. Thanks, Robbin, I needed another distraction!

Here’s my Meez:

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Okay, I’m not schizophrenic or anything but blogging about the stuff about my mom and having a good hard cry when I checked the mail and the check was there helped.  [Edited to add: It is later in the day and it occurred to me that the schizophrenic remark could be taken as me denigrating people with actual schizophrenia.  I'm not; it was just a turn of phrase.  I suffer from mental illness myself, major depression and anxiety disorder, so I'd be the last person to throw stones! ] Now, I’m doing as Mama would want, I had my good cry, I’m putting on my big girl panties and dealing with it.

So… I have errands today. The bank to deposit the check and the grocery store which is about a block away. What is in the middle of the two? Blockbuster Videos. So… I screech sweetly call up the stairs to the boys to see if they wanna go to Blockbuster today, that I would pay to rent them each a game and they wouldn’t have to use their allowance… a little treat from Mom. Well, of course, they’re hustling to get dressed because OF COURSE if Mom is treating they want to go!

The evil genius part of the plan is that the major thing I need to buy at the grocery store is 8-10 gallons of water. We don’t drink the water here; it’s nasty and makes my husband literally sick. I have a couple of conditions with my hands and arms (thank you 10+ years of medical transcription) which make it really hard to heft heavy things repeatedly. So my thinking is… the kids get a game or a movie and, unbeknownst to them until it is too late to protest, I get slave labor to dragoon a couple of strong backs!

Am I not evil and wicked smart? Of course, I ended up feeling bad because neither one of them found anything they wanted at Blockbuster… But, hey, I still got free muscular help!

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This is my first “real” post in a while and I’m breaking the “keep it light, keep it fun” rule of blogging. Do you ever have days when you have that nervous, anxious, coming-out-of-your-skin feeling? I’m having one today. Wonder if there’s a full moon? I have essentially been awake since before the buttcrack of dawn 1 a.m. Exhausted but unable to sleep. I think I have finally figured out why — at least I hope so because if it isn’t what I think it is, then I have no clue.

I had recently blogged that my mother, who died on Halloween, had a life insurance policy that neither my sisters nor I knew about that named us as beneficiaries. I sent in the paperwork for my portion of the proceeds and, when I called on Monday to make sure that MetLife had received the paperwork, they informed me that they had already cut the check that morning! Now, I laughed with the lady and told her Mama would appreciate that, which she would, my mother loved efficiency.

I live 500 miles from my sisters and where my mom lived. I had just flown up to visit the weekend before my mom died on Wednesday and, for a number of fairly important reasons, I couldn’t turn around and fly back again. Everyone assured me not to worry about it; I saw my mother while she was alive and that’s what mattered. Okay, I know that’s true. So I didn’t see my mother dead (yes, I know that sounds awful but I don’t mean it in an awful way and it’s still true) and I didn’t get to go to her memorial service though I was conference-called in so that I could hear it and participate if I wished.

This check from her life insurance is on its way here, probably will get here today or tomorrow. It occurs to me that, as much as she wanted me to have that money obviously, this will be the first tangible, physical proof I have of her death. And I think I don’t know what to do with that. My sister is holding in safekeeping for me one of my mother’s rings and a fleece blanket that I made for my mother a couple of years ago that she used all the time, right up until her death. My stepfather has my maternal grandmother’s china for me. We think these items are priceless in sentiment and beyond replacement so we elected to not have her ship them to me; I’ll get them when I go to Atlanta this summer to visit. So I don’t have even those tangible reminders yet that she is gone. The receipt of this check will be the first thing.

I have spent much of the last week or so wondering and worrying about what I should do with the money. It isn’t big money, like lottery money or pay-off-the-house money, but it is the only thing my mother specifically made provisions for for me so I want to be sure that it is used wisely and well, whatever I do with it. So I think I’ve been unsettled this week because I feel that obligation to do well with what she left me but I think I’ve also been letting myself dwell on that rather than facing that my mother is, in fact, gone.

I’m afraid that receiving this check is going to be just like getting that phone call all over again. And I don’t know what to do with that.

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Sorry to be so late getting this posted. I was waiting for one of my teenagers to FINALLY wake up — it is summer, after all, Mom!

Anyway, here we go (thumbnails are clickable):

Here’s Nic with the entries….

and here’s the winner!

Congratulations, IAMTHEWITCH! Please send me your info and I’ll get your beady goodness out to you on Tuesday!  Thanks to everyone who entered!  This was fun and I love sharing the sparklies so I think I’m going to try to do one of these each month.

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Just got this IM from my older sister regarding my 20-year-old nephew, who has been in Iraq:

“don’t know if you talked to Stacey yesterday or not, but she got an email from Blake; he’s in Kuwait! Thank God he’s out of Iraq! They’re giving them a week off to play too! So he’s going fishing, going to the beach, and just relaxing the next few days before he comes home.”

My heartfelt prayers of gratitude to God for keeping him safe and to all the folks out there who pray for the safety and safe return of all the troops from all the countries.

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Go out and have some fun!

Yep, that’s it! We spend so much time trying to improve ourselves, work on this, work on that, deal with this issue, resolve that one… Just go have some fun! Whatever your bliss is, spend some time today following it! Me? I’m gonna play with my beads!

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What or who am I becoming?

This morning I watched the first part of “Becoming,” which is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (If you check out my playlist at the right near the bottom of the page, the theme music is there – Close Your Eyes/Buffy Angel love theme). Both parts of this story have always touched me greatly. It is essentially about realizing who and what you are, acting in accordance with that, and taking the responsibility for it. Growing up, in other words.

There is a character named Whistler on this episode that sort of bridges the action over a century or two. Whistler is wise and sees things clearly – wouldn’t we all love to have that gift (at least most of the time!).

From Whistler: There’s moments in your life that make you, that set the course of who you’re gonna be. Sometimes they’re little, subtle moments. Sometimes they’re not. … Bottom line is, even if you see ‘em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments.

There have been a lot of big moments in my life over the last year. Mama’s lung cancer diagnosis and her death not quite two months later. My husband’s “inappropriate carrying on”, as he calls it, with a woman on the internet that was beginning as I was losing my mother and ran a few months. The onset of another bout of major depression. My older son’s graduation from high school and my younger son’s leaving middle school to move to high school. Lots of milestones. There’s no doubt that all of is shaping and molding me. Into what, I wonder? Will all of these things forge me into something stronger than I was before as heat does to steel? Will they break me?

In a lot of ways, I guess middle age (how I hate that somehow middle age snuck up on me!) is a lot like being a teenager again – the process of finding oneself and carving out the next segment of one’s life. My mother is gone. My kids need less of me than they did – or, at least, they need me in a very different way than they did – so what’s the next stage for me?

I love the character of Buffy. She’s all out there, girl power and all that, but very human, very flawed and very aware of her flaws. I love Willow, Buffy’s BFF, even more. How cool did it work out that the meaning of my real name happens to be willow? Willow, the character on BTVS, is the strongest character on the show in my opinion. She’s smart. She’s (mostly) comfortable in her own skin. She does not let the fears and insecurities that she does have direct her life. That’s who I want to be, who I hope I’m becoming.

I wonder who my children are becoming. They have watched me as I have struggled this year. They have had their own “big moments”, plenty of them. I wonder how their big moments and mine have interacted and what strengths or weaknesses are being forged as a result? I already notice my 18-year-old seems to be gaining a little bit in compassion, a little bit in empathy. While my path to becoming troubles me some, because it can so greatly impact my kids, their paths to becoming excites and exhilarates me.

Whistler closes the first part of Becoming with these words: So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.

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Is the zero-tolerance policy most schools have on violence reasonable? Or is it an understandable overreaction to tragedies such as Columbine and others?

This post is about 18 years in the making. Long time to sit on my thoughts, huh? All of the schools around here, probably most schools these days, have a zero-tolerance policy on violence. You hit, push, shove, etc., you’re suspended or expelled, no question about it. In theory I think this is a great policy. Certainly kids should feel and be safe when they’re in school! But how can one all-encompassing policy cover every situation? It can’t.

When my stepson was in 8th grade (let’s not count back how many years that was) which is middle school here, he was suspended for fighting. I got the call (we had all 5 kids, hub’s and ours, and hub traveled a lot for work so I was the parent on call most times), went to the school and found out that Jeffy had been fighting and would be suspended for 3 days. Now Jeff, then and now, is a happy-go-lucky, why-can’t-we-all-get-along kind of guy. So this fighting thing made absolutely no sense.

Talked to the assistant principal (the real principal was much too busy for such matters!) and, as it turns out, some boy had started a fight with Jeffy in the lunchroom and Jeff defended himself. Lots and lots of witnesses cuz, well, you know how it is when there’s a fight at school! Everybody comes to see it. He threw 1-2 punches to get the other guy to back off him as the other kid had Jeff down on the ground. And yet Jeff got suspended. I had ten conniption fits! Was he supposed to just stay on the ground and let the other kid beat the stuffing out of him?

The party line, as it turns out, is that they can make no exceptions and Jeff should have called for help. Hello? It was the lunchroom, for crying out loud, where teachers are circulating keeping an eye on things. Where were their eyes? And, in however many seconds or minutes that it took for the teacher(s) to get to the fight area, how much of a beating was Jeff gonna take? He has grown into a big, strong, strapping man but back then he was all knobby knees and elbows in the way of many teenage boys.

I don’t have any answers to this question or many others that plague my thoughts, but I would sure like to hear opinions from y’all about better ways for the schools to handle this stuff. Certainly it seems reasonable to me anyway that a kid should be allowed to defend him/herself. Thankfully, middle school, which is a brutal rite of passage in these parts (but that’s another post), is over with for us. The high school, believe it or not, is much more civilized for the most part.

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