The Cost of Sacrifice

The other day, my daughter was talking enviably about a girl who'd made it big as a performer. She's been on TV, in music videos, commercials. We've had these conversations before - nearly every time she watches the Olympics or sees someone break big on America's Got Talent, or hears a story of a teen who publishes a book. It is always the sort of wistful, why-can't-that-happen-to-me kind of talk that leads to me talking about discipline and hard work and commitment.

This time, though, the conversation was ripe to talk about sacrifice. This kid who is now famous, I told her, gave up pretty much everything in her normal life years ago. She stopped going to school and having friends so she could spend all of her time in a studio and at lessons and traveling. She gave up free time on weekends to work. She gave up eating whatever she wanted. She gave up privacy. Just a few years ago, her parents divorced because one supported (pushed?) this fame agenda and the other just wanted her to grow up a bit more like other kids.

Would you be willing to give up all of that to be in her place, I asked. Would you give up your friends, your swim team, your band, your sleepovers with friends and Pinterest cooking parties and vacations? Would you give up Dad or me?

It's a discussion we've had in our house a lot lately, this cost of achieving a dream. How much are we willing to give up to get what we really want?

Going after what I want is something I've been wrestling with in particular over the past year. This week's question - how much are we willing to give up - has put a good perspective on it for me.

I want to write. I want to be able to do that much more than I've been doing it lately, which is not enough. It always seems that life is crowding in on me, and in the back of my head, I've thought, if I really wanted this, wouldn't I make it happen?

But the fact is, there are only so many hours in a day, and there is a lot that fills those hours.

What would I be willing to give up to get what I want?

I know a writer who realized she couldn't be a full-time writer if she had a mortgage hanging over her head. So she doesn't have a big house with modern luxuries. She lives a very minimalistic life so that she doesn't need another job. I know a writer who knew if she had kids, she would never have time to write, so she chose not to marry and have kids. I know people who have married and had kids, and still walked away from them to pursue their own dreams.

Am I willing to give up my family and house? Absolutely not.

When I think about what takes up my time, it is this. My kids. My husband. My home.

I am forever doing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning floors, cooking and packing meals, running errands so there is food in the fridge, clothes that fit, band instruments that work. I carpool kids. Endlessly carpooling kids.

I do a Bible study. I pray. That gets me through each day like breathing.

I work. I work now because my oldest is looking at colleges and we need to pay those looming bills so that he has the opportunity to live out his dreams.

What is there in my day that I could trade for a few hours of writing?

Not even sleep. There's not enough of that as it is.

It was good this week to look at what fills my hours and realize that there is hardly anything there I can sacrifice. Would want to sacrifice.

For now, what steals the hours from writing are those things even more valuable to me than writing. My kids. My husband. My home.

That realization gave me a few moments of peace. And then, I wrote a few lines in my novel, and went to bed.

Chaos

 (I wrote this blog post sitting in the car waiting for my daughter just a little over a week ago. It seems fitting that I couldn't post it here until now... because things have been so chaotic.)

Sometimes I feel like life is blowing up around me. I wake to the house rocking and shaking, the toiletry items falling off shelves. I walk through a maze of bricks and upheaved trees and mounds of red clay, the driveway under rubble. Our kitchen and stairs are tracked with a thick white layer of dust that won't go away, no matter how often I vacuum and mop.

I don't even live in California anymore. I live in a home being renovated. And while I knew it would be difficult, while I know what it will be is worth the what it is now, I can feel my heart clenching, my blood pounding under the stress of the chaos.

Everything is chaos now. Not just the house, which has parts of the roof ripped clean off so that you can stand in a room and stare up at the stars at night, but life in general is void of the order and routine I thrive on.

Summer is usually a bit lacking in constants, but this year has been worse. Three kids, three different schedules, three different sets of activities, and I find myself most often in the car, a hundred miles a day under my belt going no further than twelve miles from my house. Back and forth, pick one up, drop one off, trying to figure out where to fit buying more milk and eggs into the equation, nearly running out of gas because the gas station is not on the way to anywhere my kids go. And other people love this kind of craziness, but my stress levels are going up and the sight of more white cement dust and red mud tracked through the foyer is about to send my blood busting out the ends of my fingertips and tips of my hair, my face in a perpetual frozen state of The Scream.

I think part of my less-than-loving attitude about all of this is that I'm not involved anymore. Summers are usually are time to reconnect as a family. During the school year, the kids are out all day, home only long enough to do homework and drop into bed, exhausted. But the summer is OUR time. Time when we get to go hang out at the pool together, do crafts together, obsess over tv shows together, go explore DC and the zoo and museums, have picnics, go to restaurants and laze over milk shakes and burgers.

But now, I'm just the chauffeur and cheerleader. I'm the alarm clock in the morning, the laundrymat for their muddy, stinky, sunblock-smelling clothes. I buy the cases of water on one end of town and drop it off at camp at the other end. I fix breakfast and pack lunches and somehow try to squeeze in a homemade dinner that is well-balanced enough to replenish the kids' energy before they drop into bed.


I am with my kids in some form all day, but I miss them. I miss when summer meant you got to kick off the high-stress, packed days of the school year and sleep in, hike along the creek, lay in the sun reading books, stay up late and watch movies together and build forts in their rooms and watch the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling until they went dim.

I miss writing. I've hardly written at all this summer. This summer, when my novel was absolutely, positively, without excuses going to be finished. I haven't even read much. No time during the day, too tired at night, a few books started but not that made me want to finish them.

All the magic has leaked out.

And yet...

I watch my daughter from the car where I am waiting for her. Her head is thrown back in laughter, surrounded by a group of equally giggling girls she hadn't known three weeks ago. She's found her place in the high school before the year has even started, happier than she's been in ages.

My son bounds to the car, asking if he can go with the guys to buy balloons and back to a friend's to spend the next hour filling them because his drumline is totally going to demolish the brass section tomorrow at the afternoon battle. I agree, because percussion rules, and I know this.

Parents stop to ask if I'll be there for the football game, if my youngest is going to help this year, too. Yes, I say, pointing to my youngest in the back seat, already decked out in her band helper t-shirt, a week early. We wouldn't miss it for the world.

Summer will end and routine will come back. The house will eventually be finished, the dust settled, the multitude of cars cramming our drive gone on to another project. I'll find time to write again. I'll probably still be in the car too much. But that's okay. My kids are there with me - most of the time my oldest now driving. And we'll crank up the radio and we'll sing along, and we'll talk about books and kids at school and band and art and politics, and everyone will be talking all at the same time, and it will be chaotic, but I will love it. This is the kind of chaos I can love.

We will eat on the run again, but together, and we'll go separate ways one last time before the summer ends and school begins. But there's one weekend left - one glorious weekend where we all will be home, after the crazy summer schedules and before the still-crazy school schedules. Maybe we'll fire up the fire pit. Maybe we'll roast some s'mores. And as long as the garage has no roof, we might as well just lay out there and watch the stars. The real ones. And maybe, if we can find a sliver of time, we might just build a fort under them.

Little Grain of Sand Things

There was a time when New Year's meant a flood of glamorous invitations for my husband and I. You know the kind - the swanky hotels with the pricey dinner and dancing and midnight toasts; the black tie parties, the high-above-the-city or floating-on-the-ocean kind that made my heart yearn for just one night without changing diapers or wearing sweats.

We never went, the cost seeming a bit extravagant or the idea of a babysitter too scary. There was always time for that when the kids were older, I told myself. I shelved the idea with all its glitter and promise onto the same bucket-list-shelf as going to Time's Square to see the ball drop. One day....

What no one says is that the bucket-list is not written in stone. It is as changeable as we are, and while I might feel a twinge of regret for never having seen Times Square on a New Year's Eve, I don't wish to do that now. After an exhausting fall of keeping up with my hectic teens, starting a new job, and escorting my husband to a dozen embassy and business events, I desperately wanted some down time. The idea of standing in the freezing cold for hours on hours crammed like sardines, no bathroom in sight, sounds horrible. By New Year's Eve, I just wanted to stay home next to a fire and spend time with my kids. Honestly, I had no energy for getting all dolled up and dancing and being perky.

But I did want time with my family. Time that wasn't running around, in the car, in a stadium, in an auditorium, in a waiting room. Just time to reconnect and have fun without the pressure of homework and time constraints.

Instead, I got a night of total tech obsessions.

My mother-in-law had gotten a tablet for Christmas, so she enlisted my son to help her set it up and install apps and figure out how to use it. From about seven in the evening to nearly eleven at night, I don't think they looked up once. My father-in-law enlisted my husband to help him with something on his iPad, and they never looked up. My eldest daughter, who'd gone out babysitting earlier, came home around 9:30 and upon seeing the lack of interaction, took out her phone and began to text and search Pinterest. I had a puzzle out and tried to enlist the help of my youngest, but in her excitement and determination to stay up until midnight, she wanted to watch the countdowns. It didn't take much TV hunting to realize New Year's celebrations are not G-rated TV anymore. She settled on a movie.

And I... I worked my puzzle, gave up trying to have conversations, and realized that this would never be one of those nights everyone looked back on and said, "That was a New Year's Eve to remember!"

The thing is, it doesn't take a black-tie affair or a pricey dinner with confetti or - as it seemed on TV, a ton of alcohol - to make a memorable night, but it does take interaction. We could have played some crazy board games, made a huge tent in the living room, built a fire in the pit in our backyard and told ghost stories under the stars. We could have made the sugar cookies we'd planned all month to make, turned our fingers blue and red and green with the icing and sung loudly and off-key to the radio. We could have written down our favorite memory of the year and talked about it. We could have written our biggest failures and fears and tossed them ceremoniously into the fire. Instead, everyone buried their heads in a screen.

I've become more sensitive these days about technology. When I take time off of work and writing to have coffee with a friend and she checks her phone every time it dings and tweets, I feel slighted. When I am in the middle of a conversation with my husband and he picks up his Blackberry to answer an email, I feel devalued. When my kids come home and immediately attach themselves to their technology rather than talk to me, I feel like the housekeeper and cook rather than a mom.

My husband reminds me this goes both ways. That I have, for many years, buried myself in my computer. This is the trap of being a writer and working from home. I have ill-defined work hours and a difficulty in breaking away from a chapter when the writing is going well.

But I'm trying. I've curtailed my facebook use significantly. I rarely blog. I close my computer from the time the kids get home until homework is well underway and we can work together in quiet. I'm not perfect. I still can't just sit and watch a movie with the family without doing something else, but I've begun to substitute crocheting for surfing the web. I'm working on it, anyway.

Our family does a lot of things together. We love being together. We eat dinner most nights all together, and those dinners are full of talking and laughing. We take day trips often, vacation occasionally. We build memories all the time. But in the day-to-day, it is harder to make those memories and easier to get sucked into technology. So this year, I'm making a plan to get myself out from under that, with hopes that my family will want to follow.

I want to sit and listen to my daughter practice guitar. Not just half-listen as I do dishes or work on writing, the way I usually do, but really sit and give her my undivided attention. Sing with her as she plays.  Create a project with my youngest; paint with her or teach her something new. Cook dinner with my kids rather than just for them. I want to build a sand castle with my kids like I did when they were too little to do it themselves. To get out of the beach chair and out from behind my book and get sandy and wet and create a masterpiece. Instead of wasting the day at home, I want to use the kids' teacher workdays to go to a museum in DC we haven't been to before. Replace a few of our Saturday movie nights at home with a game. Turn off my phone when I'm out with the kids, and when they come home. Ask them to turn off theirs in the car. Treat my family's updates on their day with the same interest as I do near-strangers on facebook. Ask more questions. Look at them when they answer. Pray for them. Pray with them.

I don't really have a bucket list. We will probably do enough grand things this year to fill a scrapbook. But what I need to mind is those little grain-of-sand things that fill our hours that either say, "You don't matter much to me," or "You are the most interesting thing in life right now." I love my computer. I love my phone. But in the scheme of things, the people standing in front of me are the ones I value the most. Maybe it's time I showed that.

The Family That Reading Saved

 (This is a photo from Humans of New York. It melts my heart!)

My teenage son and I were standing outside an audition room earlier this month with another mom and son, waiting for orchestra placement. My boy was talking up a blue streak about what the audition had been like, what they'd asked him to do and how he'd bumbled through some parts and aced the others, and what he'd do if he made it and what he'd do if he didn't, and his words came out like this sentence, in long, unstopped, unpaused thoughts, and the mom looked over at me and said, "Does he always talk this much?"

I had to laugh, because the answer to that is yes. And I have two other kids that do the same. Talking on top of each other sometimes, so that I have to hold my hands up and say, "I know I have two ears but I can only make out one of you at a time!" There is a constant stream of conversation in our house that doesn't even end when I turn out the lights and say, "Goodnight! I'm going downstairs now!" Sometimes they keep talking, even louder, so I have to yell up the stairs, "I'm downstairs. I can't hear you anymore. Go to sleep!"

The mom sighed a bit and looked over at her not-a-word-said-yet son. "I can barely get anything but one word answers from him."

It's a blessing, I know. This conversation overload in our house from two teenagers and a pre-teen is not the usual fare in a lot of homes, and I soak up every minute of it.

There was a period where that wasn't as true. When my son was in fourth grade, something shifted in our relationship. It was no longer cool to be close to your mom, to hang out with her and act like you liked her. He developed more commonalities with my husband, and I could see the guy thing edging me out. While I knew that was normal, was indeed preferable, I didn't want to lose him altogether. So I handed him a Harry Potter book.

Harry Potter is my thing. My husband has kindly gone to the movie with me as they came out, but that was really an act of selfless love. He didn't read the books. He didn't care about the movies. When I gave my son the books, and he devoured them like I did, we had something in common no one else in the family did.

While I made dinner, he sat at the counter and talked about the books with me, excited about the triumphs, sad about the losses, in awe of the magic of it all. By the time the sixth movie came out, he'd finished the series and went to the movies with me in place of my husband. When the last movie came out, he was invited by a friend to go to the midnight opening show, and I heard him say on the phone to his friend, "That sounds awesome, but I want to see the last one with my mom. It's kind of our thing."

We've had lot of other books since. He skipped the YA books altogether and jumped into my old reading list: early Michael Crichton, the entirety of John Grisham, the Left Behind series, Animal Farm. Ender's Game. Fahrenheit 451. With each book, he sat at the counter at dinner and talked to me. When carpooling got quiet, I'd ask about what he was reading, and that would start a flood of conversations.We talk about the stories, but also the issues they bring up. Justice and politics and faith and science.

In middle school, my daughter entered that phase of "I don't really have much to say." I handed her Harry Potter. Then, The Hunger Games. To Kill a Mockingbird. Animal Farm. The Princess Bride. A Wrinkle in Time. And the same phenomenon happened. We talked. All the time. And even now, when she gets quiet and withdrawn into that 13-year-old self-conscious world, all I have to do is talk about a book, and she is back.

Once, in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I sat in a college room full of students from all over Virginia discussing why we read. And one person said something I'll never forget: "We all come from different backgrounds, different schools. We love different things. But we ALL read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade. That is something we all have in common."

There are a lot of reasons why we should read, but this is my favorite. To connect to others.

I worry sometimes that if I take time to just sit and read, I am neglecting more important things that need to be done. The laundry, the dishes, meals, shopping, volunteering at the schools, cleaning. But then I remember how books saved my relationship with my growing kids, and I think, What could be more important than that?

Imagine Amazing

Today, the kids tromp off to school again, freshly sharpened pencils and neatly stacked paper and backpacks that have yet to be scarred and dirtied by the dragging through buses and shoving in lockers. They have new clothes, shorter hair, bright eyes. It's the best thing about the first day... everything is new.

I'm not one of the parents jumping up and down about school. I love so much about summer. I love not getting up at 5:30am. I love not packing lunches. I love lazing around a pool or floating in the ocean or long family car trips. I love late nights and family movies and Wii bowling tournaments. I love not having to harass anyone about homework. I love the lack of stress. Mostly, though, I love having my kids home. I love taking them places we don't have time to go during the school year. Seeing museums and zoos and hiking through the woods with them. I love the way they talk to me about what's on their minds. And talk. And talk. And talk.

I grieve a little when they go back to school and I lose them for almost all of their waking hours.

But I thrive with schedules, too. I loved being up early this morning and having everything done by nine, and getting to sit at my computer to write and tutor. I love being able to tutor for hours at a time, instead of a small chunk here and a smaller chunk there. While I miss my kids and all the busyness they bring to my day, I do like having quiet time to write again. It's been so long since I've worked on my novel!

Maybe the thing that I love about this fall is that everything is not new. For the first time since my oldest started kindergarten, we have the same school schedule as the year before. The kids are involved in all the same activities, mostly on all the same days. Rather than the pains of learning a new routine, we are sliding back into an old one... something comfortable. They have new teachers, of course, and I have new tutoring and editing jobs, but overall, the broader things are like slipping into a favorite sweater.

Last night, as I kissed each kid goodnight, we mused about what possibilities the year would bring. How can they possibly imagine what amazing things might happen in the next ten months, what amazing people might be in their lives?

It's not that different for adults. Who is to say the kids get all the amazing chances and changes? I hope in the next ten months I am finally finished with this novel - finished, polished, off to an agent. I hope I meet new people in the blogosphere to call friends. I hope I get another short story published. I hope God does something huge in my heart. I hope I am important in someone else's life. I hope I make a difference somewhere.

It's true that every day is the start of the rest of your life. It doesn't have to be the beginning of school, or a birthday, or New Years. It can be any day. It can be today.

What amazing thing do you hope will happen this year? I'll bet whatever it is, something more than you can imagine is on its way.

Finding Your Place

 (My daughter in her younger days)

My daughter is currently struggling through her pre-teen years. While my son seemed to sail, untouched, through middle school, my daughter is like the poster-child for stereotypical made-for-movie 7th grade. There are cliques and popular kids and snotty kids and bullies. There's name-calling and gossip and enough meanness to make the bus ride your proverbial hell.

She craves belonging. She wants the right clothes, the pretty hair, the perfect skin, the athletic ability and smooth social skills that make it seem so easy for everyone else. I can't tell if she wants to stand out in a good way or just blend in, but what she doesn't want is to be a target. She doesn't want to be different. There are times in life when uniqueness is prized, but not in middle school. Not among her classmates, anyway.

She can't believe that I understand this, that I, too, struggle with this same thing. Since finishing up school, I've begun looking for a home for some of my stronger short stories. Lit magazines are something I've never really explored before. Until the last two years I probably had never even cracked one open.

But now I am reading, both the fiction in them and the guidelines for submission. Nearly every one says, "Get a feel for what we publish before sending in something. Make sure your work fits in. We strongly suggest you read a few back issues of our magazine before submitting."

I get it. You don't want to send a horror story to a family-oriented parenting magazine. But lit mags... I mean, mostly they just publish run-of-the-mill literary short stories.

What does it mean to fit in? Do I have to stop writing like me, in my own voice and style, and start conforming to the masses? Okay, I've read a bunch of stories now and what I can tell is that none of them - across the board - are like mine. I find them snoozy, mostly. Lots of narrative, little action, little dialogue. There are a few truly unique ones out there, but not just a little unique - I mean radically experimental.

But none like mine.

And shouldn't that be good? Shouldn't it be the way agents for novels are crying out for unique voices, for something that sounds different?

So why isn't it?

I don't have the answers, anymore than I can answer my daughter why it isn't okay in her school to be unique.

What I tell her, every day, is to be true to herself. Not to be what others want her to be, but to be who she is, wholly and entirely.

It's good advice for life. I hope it's good for writing, too.

Vacation of DOOM

Every year we spend a part of our summer at the beach. It's our family wind-down time. The only week, really, in the entire year that we get away from all the crazy schedules and activities and stress of our lives and just hunker down as a family together. Just us, a sandy beach, and the ocean.

This year we decided to venture away from our traditional beach and try out Key West. We had visions of it, the Hemingway-tropical-beachiness of it all. If there was anywhere to kick back and relax, surely Key West was it.

It wasn't until we started looking at hotels did we realize there really isn't much of a beach in the Florida keys. No, really, there isn't. It's a tropical island with no sand. How the heck does that happen?

But there are reefs! And we love to snorkel! So we set out on a 1250 mile car trip south with a stop in Savannah, Georgia, where my son and I discovered the TROLLEY OF DOOM. Yes. That's what they call it.

We walked around all night, saying in a spooky voice, "the trolley of DOOM! the trolley of DOOM!" and laughing our heads off.

And then he ate fish and got food poisoning and we spent all night up with him sick. :(

And thus began our VACATION of DOOM.

Once recovered, the family found a beach near Savannah to get our sand fix and headed out. We are used to calmer waters than Georgia, apparently, because my son decided to just wade into the shallow water a little, and along came a wave and BAM threw him to the ground, stealing his glasses and taking them out to sea. So we spent the next three and a half hours - nearly the entirety of our day - in a Lens Crafters trying to find a pair of glasses that fit him and get his prescription faxed and waiting for them to be made.

Goodbye Georgia.

Florida will be better, right? 

Well, the hotel... not exactly what the internet said.

Sure... the service was great, the place relatively clean, great breakfast, free wi-fi and parking, and a beautiful pool:

But the "hotel" was really a motel, and the rooms... well, let's just say that calling them a room was a euphemism for "closet." Which, by the way, the room didn't have. No closet, no floor space... just two full size beds, a sink for one, and a bathroom so small one had to stand on the toilet to the door shut behind you.

This was where 5 of us slept.

It was a miracle none of us killed each other. We had to sit on the beds to let someone pass, and to pass you had to crawl over suitcases. Fun times.

But there was still snorkeling, right?

Ahh... Peace.

Usually I spend a good amount of beach time sitting on the sand reading. Especially this year, I needed this time to catch up on reading if I wasn't going to be writing. But there was almost no sand. Just woods and rocks and then, water. And it was hot. Africa hot. Hot with a humidity that beat even Virginia in August. There was no way I was NOT going to spend the entire day in the water.

I get in after I've gotten all three kids geared up in snorkels and fins and as I'm wading in, my youngest swims up and tugs at my swimsuit. She pops her head above water and says, "You're still wearing your pump."

AAARGH!!! I scrambled over the rocks like an idiot, trying to get out of the water. My insulin pump, which keeps me alive, is "dunk proof" but not water proof, and there were some scary moments there were I thought I'd killed it.

But I didn't. Phew.

Then, two days later, we went on a boat trip out to snorkel the third largest reef in the world.

I jumped off the boat. With my pump on.

And I killed it. My $4,000 pump that I need to wear all the time ... was dead.

I swear. You can't make this stuff up.

After getting back on dry land I called the pump manufacturer and they informed me they could have a replacement to my hotel by morning. All I had to do was give myself shots once an hour for the next 18 hours. That was fun. Especially the "during the night" part.

STILL  - They DID get a pump all the way from California to Key West in a matter of 16 hours (earlier than promised) and I was still alive. So yay!!

Friday we woke to head home and my husband's knee blew out. He's now walking like an 89 year old man with bad arthritis, and in a lot of pain. We stopped on the way home in Georgia to break up the trip, went to dinner and my youngest promptly threw up.

DOOM, I tell you. DOOM.

It seems logical that I'd be dying to get home. But right now I am tucked in a beautiful hotel, with more room than my family of 5 can use. There is carpet on the floor and big fluffy duvets on the three beds. My husband is drugged and pain-free for the moment, and asleep, along with my youngest. My two oldest are watching Pirates of the Caribbean and staying up way too late, and I've gotten on the computer for the first time in over a week. I've not thought about the story I'm working on in a week, and I'm hoping the time away has shaken loose the shackles that are keeping me from writing without fear.

We are safe, all five of us, together, having ended our day with a ton of laughing, a week's worth of memories we will never forget, and some great stories.

And really, can you ask more of a vacation than that?

Confessions of a Pinterest Mom

Ah Pinterest... how you fascinate  depress motivate inspire me!

It's not as though I need another thing to do, another "social media" that I can't keep up with. I tweet only when I remember that I might should do that, which is rarely.  I haven't been to Google+ in ages - too long to remember. I'm on facebook much less than I used to be, and let's not even start with how behind I am in blogging. Outside of my Word program, my computer is highly underutilized.

But when I finally gave in to the buzz of Pinterest and accepted an invitation from my cousin to join, just so I could find out what it was, I was ... overwhelmed impressed enthused confused excited.

If you don't know what Pinterest is, it is basically a virtual bulletin board that acts much the same as your bookmark tool does on your computer... only better.

At first I thought, "this is so much better than bookmarking pages, because now I can categorize them and find them easily with pictures!"

Then I realized that as I did that, others could see what I was bookmarking... and that I could see what they were bookmarking! (I'm a bit slow in the figuring things out department, but when I signed up, I really did have absolutely no idea what it was!).

And people out there... they are bookmarking incredible stuff!  Recipes that look divine! Crafts for kids! Home decor! New ways to do hair! Holiday decorations! Cleaning tips! Technology advice! Books! Quotes! Photography of amazing places!!

And since it's done with photographs... it's all so pretty!!

So pretty!!

So... perfect.

Then I spiralled into what I can only imagine is the typical Pinterest stage 2 - depression. Because how in the world does everyone else's life look so beautiful? So perfect? How are people so creative and chipper when doing such messy projects with kids? Who in the world can fit into the size 0 clothes everyone seems to put together in fashion collections?

Seriously - the clean and model-looking houses, the perfectly coiffed children, the fashion sense and dedication to food preparation I could only dream of doing if I had all day to cook and a bottomless wallet to grocery shop. And on closer inspection, most of the amazing fashion collections are not much more than jeans and t-shirts with cool scarves and nail polish that match. Who wouldn't look good in anything in a size 0?

I started thinking... are these people real? Do people actually doing all this, living like this?

And to top it all off, they are photographing it all - and not just with your point and shoot camera in bad lighting. Professionally. Like magazine quality photography.

I was depressed, because my life does not resemble any of this. Half the time, I'm lucky to get my hair in a ponytail before waking the kids, packing lunches, pouring cereal, and shoving everyone out the door to school. Laundry sits in my dryer until the next load needs the space, and then it sits in the hamper until it is so wrinkled I have to put it back in the dryer. There are piles of stuff around the house because I don't know where to put it, and there isn't time to clean out closets and get rid of some stuff to make room for others. I wear jeans and t-shirts, but they never look fashionable. And I've been known to occasionally set the kids in front of the Wii so I can get more writing done.

I consoled myself by thinking no one did ALL of this stuff. I bet the people with the fantastic delicious dinners have  gross bathrooms and unruly kids. And the mom doing all those amazing crafts with her kids probably does not match her nail polish with her high heels. 

Seriously, one can not be ALL put together, right?  So maybe I could find just one thing...

Apple nachos.

My kids need snack, right? And this looked super easy, and fun. Slice up some apples, melt a little peanut butter and drizzle over them, throw a handful of coconut, chocolate chips and nuts on them and WALA!! Gourmet snack!!

I did this for them on a Friday and it took less than five minutes and I was hero, I tell you. HERO!! They gobbled them up, I felt pretty good about them eating apples and peanut butter (and this is SO MUCH EASIER than trying to spread peanut butter on apples!!), and the next day they begged for them again. And then I realized they could make them themselves, and now they do. WIN!!

Then someone posted a sure-fire way to get out stains from clothes. I was highly skeptical. But I have this yellow Eddie Bauer sweatshirt I practically live in in the winter that I love love love. And it has this big stain down the front I nearly cry over. I think it's coffee. It's been so long I don't remember. But I do know I have washed and dried this thing to death.

But I tried the solution: baking soda, peroxide, and Dawn dishwashing liquid. Just a little of each, rubbed it in and let it set and...

OH MY GOSH IT CAME OUT!!! The stain was gone, and the old ratty sweatshirt looks like new!!

I tried it on underarm stains on my husband's t-shirts (that was actually what it was suppose to help with in the first place) and it worked! White t-shirts again!

I've done searches on Pinterest for things I could just as well have Googled, but more often than not, I find things I didn't even know I was looking for. Ways to make scarves (super fast!) out of old t-shirts, DIY glow-in-the-dark slime for the kids, how to store Christmas lights without tangling, dozens of creative uses for mason jars (including outdoor lighting and pre-made salads with dressings you can store in the fridge for the week ahead), cheap, homemade weed spray, window cleaner that is pennies and works better than any windex or other cleaner I've ever used, holiday and party ideas. The list goes on and on.

You can go nuts. I know. It gets crazy looking at everything out there. I've vowed to only pin the things I actually can do (except pretty home spaces... I just like looking at those). I check recipes to make sure they are doable before pinning them on my own boards. I pin only those crafts I think the kids and I could do reasonably without killing each other.

I spend only a few minutes each day on Pinterest, breezing through the latest pins. I could care less how many people follow me, or how many I follow, or how many repin my pin. I am not into the competition it could turn into. This is just for me. And my family.

And my kids will tell you over and over that Pinterest has made our lives better. They love it. And I think I'm getting out behind my computer a little more to do things with them.

Over spring break, we did these together:

Bunny cookies. We used prepackaged sugar cookie mix and cut out them out with egg-shaped cutters I had from when the kids were little. We also (finally!!) (on Pinterest!) found the recipe and instructions for how to make icing that "flows" and then hardens. Powered sugar, milk, corn syrup, lemon juice. That's it. These took us about an hour between mixing the dough, cutting, cooking, and decorating.

And a wreath. Cardboard, ribbon, and plastic eggs. It didn't cost us a dime, because we had so many eggs from previous years. My daughter cut out the cardboard "wreath" and the kids all hot-glued the eggs onto it, sticking a little extra "grass" for texture.  I love it!!! Less than half and hour to do.

Colored eggs with Kool Aid. Hmmm... we're always looking for new ways to decorate. No way is perfect, fun, and gorgeous, but the kids loved this. The best hint I got, though, was to boil the water with baking soda so the eggs peel more easily. And also, don't peel them. Cut the egg in half and then scoop the egg out of the shell with a spoon! Miracle tip!!

My youngest saw these cupcakes on Pinterest and wanted them for her birthday. Easiest birthday decorating ever! Chocolate cupcakes, green icing piped on with a grass tip (which I already had) and a bag of Cadbury eggs. She put the eggs on. :)

One week we had a new dinner every night. Great food. Some simple - like crispy oven fried chicken and Chick-fil-A knock offs, and others incredibly decadent (but also easy, because I don't have time to be cooking all day!). One tasted like something you'd get at Carrabas, and since I've never been good at Italian, I was stoked! We've incorporated almost all of those into our regular menu, which is a breath of fresh air for all of us.

I can easily get depressed looking through all the pins, thinking how less-than-magazine-perfect my life is. There are still piles around my house, dust layers on pictures. I still miss appointments occasionally and run late almost everywhere I go. I will never look like a model in my jeans and t-shirt.

But I now have a purse and nail polish that match. And sometimes, that is enough to make me smile.

The Lessening of the Horrible

My daughter is learning the oboe. She's just begun, and even though I played throughout middle school and high school, I'd forgotten how horribly awful those learning curves sound. Squeaks and squawks and barely-there, full-of-air notes that are always out of tune. I don't think she expected that either. After all, when she learned piano, the problem was getting the fingers in the right places, but even if you didn't, the notes themselves were still pretty. It bothers her, this screeching that comes from her instrument which she can't seem to control.

Strangely, though, it doesn't bother me. It's the sounds of learning, and every time she plays, I hear her getting better. Less squeaks, less air, more music. I don't hear the horrible; I hear the lessening of the horrible.

She is too much like me, though. She wants to be good at something right away, and if she isn't, she wants to move on to something she IS good at. She doesn't have to be perfect right away, but she needs to see that she's good, that there is immediate hope of being good. I have to keep reminding her that there are some things in life worth working at, even if she isn't good at it right away.

As I was listening to her practice this weekend, I realized how true this is of me, too. This semester I took time off working full-time on my novel and shifted most of my attention to writing short stories. It wasn't an easy decision. I talked a long time about it with my advisor, with my past advisors, with friends and fellow students. I agonized over it. Maybe more than I should have. Because I knew, I'm not particularly good at short stories. I think if you could put sound to my words, they would sound like those early squawks of the oboe.

I've been reading a lot of short stories lately: books by Benjamin Percy, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Andrea Barrett. I love many of those stories, but I don't always get them. They move around too much, aren't always very linear, don't always seem to have fully developed plots, or any plot at all. They sometimes start in one place and end somewhere entirely different and I don't know how they got there, and how the end relates to the beginning. They are sometimes slices in time in which nothing happens. I love them - the words, the rhythms, the characters. I can sense a brilliance about them. But I don't get them. I can't dissect them and figure out what makes them good the way I can about a novel. I just know they are brilliant. And I know, if I wrote something like that, it wouldn't be.

Working on something I'm not good at is hard. Not just in the sense of writing and rewriting, but emotionally. Who wants to spend hours and hours during the day doing something they're failing at? Not my daughter. And not me.

So I have to remind myself every day of what I try to impress into her: some things are worth working on. Some things are worth enduring long bouts of awful to get to the fantastically good. Sometimes the work is not just about becoming better at your art, but becoming a better person. And with hard work and lots of practice, the horrid parts lessen, and the beauty increases.

Burning Questions

 

I'll admit that a small part of me liked Pacific's MFA program because the website promised bonfires on the beach. While I joke that this is the main reason I chose it, the fact that the program is ranked #4 in low-res programs in the U.S., has amazing faculty, is exactly the kind of curriculum and semester requirements I'd hoped for, and didn't require a foreign language proficiency to apply all ranked higher in practical reasons I chose it.

But the bonfire might have ranked highest on my emotional levels.

Really, is there anything more literarily romantic than a bonfire on a beach with a bunch of writers standing around talking shop? That just might be might idea of a tiny slice of heaven.

The funny thing is that it never once crossed my mind how ironic it is that a bunch of writers aspire to stand on a beach around a bonfire, considering the history of literature and how many books have been thrown in just such a bonfire. 

This was on my mind this morning, though, when I spent breakfast talking to my two middle-school-age kids about profanity in required reading at school. This weekend my son told me his reading group at school (8th grade) is getting ready to read The Book Thief, which happened to also be on my semester reading list. In anticipation, I moved it up on my to-read list and began last night. In the first 40 pages, there is a not-inconsequential amount of profanity.

My son's been choosing a lot of adult fiction to read on his own lately: Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Tim LaHaye to name a few. Grisham and LaHaye have been pretty safe, but Crichton he's had to sift through. On his own choice, he puts back the ones that have profanity, because he just doesn't want to read it. I admire him for that.

But now he's heading into a book required by his teacher that he doesn't have a choice in.

In our breakfast conversation, my daughter, who is currently in 6th grade, informed me that last year her class had to read a book with profanity in it as well. And they read much of it out loud. She said when one girl had to read a page to the class that had a word she wasn't allowed to say (by her parents or, according to the Code of Behavior, by the school), the teacher told her to go ahead and read it, because it was part of the curriculum. The teacher himself read much of it out loud, and my daughter said the class giggled because their teacher was "swearing" in class. She told me she never laughed because she didn't think it was funny.

Call me what you want - a prude, a fundamentalist, a head-in-the-sand parent - but this disturbs me. 

I've never used profanity. I didn't growing up, and I don't now. I don't wear that as some point of pride, anymore than I would be proud that I've never worn stilettos or eaten foie gras. I just haven't. It's a choice I've made for my life. I don't make it for yours; you are free to talk however you wish. And when my kids are adults, they can choose to talk however they wish. But while they are in our house, they are not allowed to use profanity - or scream, or hit one another, or throw things, or eat dessert without finishing their vegetable. The thing is, I've had to teach them not to scream or hit or throw, but I've never had to teach them not to swear. Because they know instinctively that, like screaming and hitting and throwing, words like that are meant to hurt or shock. 

My kids know it's out there. Sure, they hear it in the stores and on the street and even, sadly, at DisneyWorld. It's everywhere. It's true. I can't shield them from life. 

But I wonder why public school choose books with language in them that the kids aren't allowed to speak in the hallways. 

Don't get me wrong: I think a lot of these books are great books. The Book Thief is outstanding. I don't want to throw books onto the proverbial bonfire. I'm not saying kids shouldn't be allowed to read them. I'm just saying, shouldn't they have a choice? Shouldn't books in lower education be put to the same standard as the kids themselves? Should kids who are nine and ten be made to read books with language that would, if it were a movie, be rated PG-13?

So my son will read The Book Thief, and we will talk about it together, which is a good thing, and something I'm unable to do with every book my kids read. But that doesn't make the exposure go away. And while some might say that exposure is going to come anyway, that doesn't make it beneficial.

There is, hopefully, an awful lot of life left for my kids to hear these words... to decide for themselves if they want to use them, to read them. Is it a crime to want them to have a few more years without them?

(And don't think I haven't missed the irony that The Book Thief contains a crucial scene of book burning in Nazi Germany... which brings us back around to the irony of the beginning photo... )

A Book and a Memory, and Another Word About Authenticity

I've been thinking lately (and blogging) about authenticity in writing fiction and just how much of ourselves should go into a book of fiction. The answer is, I think, as much or as little as you want.

I just read a book review about Francisco Goldman's novel, Say Her Name. The book is essentially a memoir - the story of his wife Aura, her childhood and their marriage and her way-too-early death – and yet it is categorized as fiction. This is what the critic said:

Why call it fiction then? At several point Goldman writes about competing narratives, the ways memories conflict and different stories can grow out of the same fact. Maybe Goldman, a former journalist, just could bear the pressure of "the truth," of worrying about anyone's take on Aura but his own. 

It's an interesting gesture, to take something that is nearly all truth and instead of calling it memoir, or creative non-fiction, to label it fiction, as if saying The truth is relative.

This week we celebrated my youngest's birthday, and I took the time to hold her on my lap and tell her one of my favorite stories of my life with her. So much my favorite, that it made its way into my debut novel.

When Some Kind of Normal first came out, I had family and friends rushing through it, seeing if they could find me somewhere in it. They guessed a lot. "Is this scene real?" "Is this the way you think?" "Are you really Babs?"

If you know anything about me, you know I am nothing like Babs. She came as a gift, a person walking through my head fully formed and opinionated and somewhat offensive to me at first.

And yet, there is some of me in there. It's inevitable, because no matter how out there our subject may be - sci-fi, dystopian, historic romance even - we write what we know. How can we not? We write about music that we know, or the kind of potato chips that we see in the store, or the emotions we have felt. We can't write about what we don't know - food we've never even heard of or culture we have never read or experienced.

And as a mom, it was inevitable pieces of my experiences as a mom would make it in the book. Tiny, incremental pieces, but pieces nonetheless.

So here is my admission: this paragraph from Some Kind of Normal is true. The names have been changed, but otherwise... it's me. It's my daughter. It's one of my most precious memories.

Ashley was born screaming.  I think she came out with her mouth open, her eyes scrunched into tearless cries which no amount of bundling could soften until the nurses put her on my chest and I said, “Hi there, baby girl.”  And just like that, she stopped crying.  She looked up at me with wide blue eyes, not even blinking, like she knew my voice from all those months inside me.  The moment they took her away she cried again, until they brought her back.

 

So happy birthday to my little girl. You give me plenty of material! :)

Now that the birthday celebrations are over, it's time to get myself back to work!

The Day Your Heart Breaks

There is something I want to admit: I bought into it. Hook, line, and sinker, although I knew better, and should have been the rational person I've always been. But something about small pink booties and pastel plaid blankets in the softest cotton and the smell of baby powder and skin like heaven.

I bought into it, even though I was proof it was a lie. That's the power of parenthood, I think, that when you are holding the tiniest person ever, this creature that lived in you, that grew inside you and who came out with your eyes and a future wider than the world, you want to believe. You want to believe so badly that any other option isn't even fathomable.

Your child can do anything. They can be anything. Anything they set their heart to is possible. We live in that kind of world, right? We live in a place where opportunity is endless; where determination and motivation are all it takes to be what you want to be.

You can do anything.

If we are lucky - the luckiest - we believe this. We've been taught this from the time we could understand, that the world is our oyster and limits are something we set on ourselves. We can be anything we can imagine.

Somewhere along the way, we learn this isn't true. For whatever reason - for economics or intelligence or personality or opportunity or people around us, but eventually the world presses into us that this is a lie.

When I was young I wanted to be a brain surgeon. I'd been told all my life I could be anything I set my heart on - that I could work hard enough to make any dream come true. But my lack of skill in chemistry and my interminably shaky hands and my need for sleep spoke otherwise. I remember the moment I realized this - that I could not do this. Even though it was a vague dream, one I'd rarely spoken of and one I'd invested little in - this was a shock. I could not do anything I wanted do. I could not be anything I wanted to be.

This was a lie.

But it is one thing to know this yourself. I found other loves, other dreams. I found enough. I was enough.

And then I had kids. And I believed again that anything was possible. Anything they wanted to do, they could. Whatever dreams they kept were possible. I - well, I had been less than perfect. My limits were not theirs, and their lives were new and sparkly and wide as the sky. They came into the world with a blank slate waiting to be filled. They were possibility personified.

I have to stop here. I reach for a kleenex and wonder if this day ever came for my own parents. If it did, they sure didn't tell me. I don't remember them leaning over the dinner table one night saying, "Honey, I love you and all, but you can't carry a tune to save your life. Give up the idea of singing and find something more practical, more aligned with the gifts you have instead of a pipe dream that will never come true." Or something along those lines.

But there is a day, and I can't help but think all parents get to this realization, where we know suddenly the world is a much smaller place for our kids than we hoped. That there are limits for our children. Gifts they are given, and gifts they are not. Dreams they may dream that we know will never be, because something critical is missing.

Yesterday - heart surgeon, concert violinist, Olympic swimmer,  veterinarian, astronaut.

Today - maybe not.

And maybe the thing that breaks my heart is not that they can't do it - because I know there will be other dreams, other careers, other wonderful amazing things they will accomplish and be in life - but that I see the walls in front of them, and they do not. Because they still believe: "I can do anything. I can be anything." And yet I know that not to be true.

And oh, today, how I wish I didn't know that not to be true.

Mommy Meltdown

I am now officially on our third week of the kids being back in school, and I have to be honest: I thought I'd have a lot more time.

Over the summer, the kids were an ever-present pull on my time, and I got nearly no writing done. I juggled the guilt of not writing with the guilt of not entertaining the kids and spending time with them, and the kids won. They won in part because they are just so darn fun, and in part because I know they are growing so fast, and there won't be many summers left when they want to spend time with me.

But when school started, I thought things would change. They'd magically disappear onto the school bus every morning and I'd magically have five full hours to edit and revise my current book.

That was the plan, anyway.

What really happened was more something like this:

1. One child needed books from the library which necessitated a four hour cross-county, multiple branch scavenger hunt.

2. One child needed swim lessons scheduled and another needed evaluations for swim team placement.

3. Orthodontia appointments. Enough said.

4. Groceries. Clean Laundry. Apparently people need that stuff.

5. Friends that I'd neglected long summer months wanted coffee. I wanted adult interaction.

6. Car brakes were recalled, oil change needed, and sliding van door broke.

7. My running shoes fell apart. Literally. I had to hit five stores to find decent replacements I could still afford.

8. The bathroom scale said I desperately needed to hit the gym on a more regular basis.

After school, there's been a barrage of homework, piano practices and lessons, swim team practices, paperwork, choir, Bible studies.... in short... barely time to scrounge dinner and get everyone off to bed.

The nights have been late, the morning early. For the one hour I've gotten to sit and actually write, I looked like that picture up there. I'm exhausted. I fall asleep at the computer.

I've started getting cranky when things pop up to keep me from writing. I threw a pencil across the room yesterday when someone demanded something of me right when I sat to write. I yelled. "I give up trying to make writing a career. I can't have a career. I don't know why you think I should have a full time job when I can't even make a part time job of writing when everyone still just thinks of me as a full time mom with nothing more to do than get everyone else's stuff done!"

It wasn't my finest moment.

I still wrestle with how to get everything done. My stuff and their stuff.

Today I didn't shower, I didn't go to the gym, I didn't do my morning Bible study. I put the kids on the bus, threw my hair in a ponytail, made a huge pot of coffee and sat down to write. Writing first today.

And it's gone really well. I added over 1000 words to a scene I've been writing in my head since summer, and I'm ready now to move on to editing the next chapter. I think things are shaping up really well for this book.

My plan was to go to the gym once I finished that one scene, but now I'm thinking I might just keep writing. The gym will wait. My butt will still be just as big and need just the same workout tomorrow.

Today, no one is home. No appointments are scheduled (until after school). The dog is happy outside in the fall-like weather. And I'm getting stuff done.

Somewhere in here I'll have to fit in the shower, but for now, my computer doesn't care.

Summer Has Begun! (It's Friday: It's a Good Thing Edition)

This is officially the last day of school for my kids. You know what that means: pool days and sunburns; less writing, more sleeping; vacations, roasting marshmallows over our fire pit and eating s'mores; catching fireflies and laying on our backs in the grass watching the stars come out; trips to Krispy Kreme – a summer-only treat. Hours and hours browsing the used bookstore; sipping Paneras iced coffees and working on the book while the kids are in music camp. Crazy art projects and bike trips through forest trails. Sand between our toes. Turquoise toe nail polish and good books.

I love summer. I love not having to hound the kids to finish homework. I love not having to wake up at six and fix three lunches before I can even think about breakfasts. I love drinking coffee because I love it and not because I need it. I love no after school activities. I love traveling to far away places. I love the fresh, crisp feeling of our new passports, and the prospect of breaking them in. I love sprawling on the living room floor with three kids and a new book, reading. I love trips to the zoo, and to museums when the zoo is too hot.

Two summers ago I finished the book I would call the "book of my heart." Last summer I got a contract for that book.

Summers are good things. Full of possibilities and hope. Friends and family.

Today: it's not quite summer yet. Today is crazy. Today is frantic getting ready for summer. Today is "how am I ever going to get it all done and survive?"

Tomorrow, though... tomorrow it all begins.

What's your favorite thing about summer?

The Opera singer sang like a bad simile...

Last weekend my family went to a concert close to home. The kids in particular loved this one because they knew a lot of the music: some of their favorites from Disney movies and the Sound of Music.

There was a guest soloist who was amazing. She's a professional, sings with the National Opera, has traveled the world. She needs to only sing one or two notes for you to know: she's a star.

The thing is, she sang several beautiful songs from movies that my kids knew, and sang them true to the original versions.... until the last few bars. Then, unexplainably, she went into a highly operatic, showy series of notes as if to prove she was deserving of all the great things the program said of her.

The notes by themselves were, well, incredible. The problem was that they totally took us out of the song. All of a sudden I wasn't sucked into the beautiful melody and lulled by the emotion of the lyrics. I was suddenly thinking of those few notes, the ones that, while gorgeous, did not belong.

Earlier that afternoon I'd been talking with my 9 year old daughter about writing tests she was being prepared at school to take. One of the things the teacher has tried to drill into them is to use figurative language in their essays. So, like most young kids, my daughter has learned to sprinkle her writing with similes and metaphors.... which usually don't make sense. Or at the very least are awkward.

We were talking about how in school you have to learn how to do things that later you aren't suppose to do, like liberally use similes. When I told her that in my writing, editors discourage the liberal use of similes, she asked why. I told her that unless a simile was very very good, it takes a reader out of the story. They notice the comparison and stop to think about it instead of staying in the flow of the story.

So when we walked out of the concert, she said to me, "That last song, where the singer did that big thing at the end - that was like a simile, wasn't it? Because it made me think about how she was singing instead of enjoying the song."

Lesson learned.

Living In the Dark Places

Sunday afternoon was gorgeous here. Mid-80s with bright sun and a warm breeze. The birds were singing and the puppy was chasing bumblebees (which is his new favorite past time, something I'm guessing will fall far down on his list of favorites the first time he catches one), and I decided to catch up on some writing.

The kids were playing in my usual writing space, so I took my laptop out to my front porch to enjoy the weather while I wrote. The section of writing I'm working on is probably the hardest part in the book to write: the aftermath of a murder – and I thought the bright sun would balance the darkness of the book.

As is typical, the kids gradually discovered I was missing and came to find me. They are like moths to a flame when I'm writing. No matter where I go to get some quiet, they manage to seek me out to play around me anyway. As a writer, that's frustrating. As a mom, it's kinda cool.

So my two bookend kids decided to ride bikes, and my middle child decided to read a book on the bench next to me: a book she had just borrowed from the library the day before.

I'd warned her it was probably too easy for her. The problem with her is that she's a fourth grader reading at a sixth grade level, and books at her level aren't really her subject cup-of-tea. She like the things written for her age. So she sat and read and I wrote, and in less than 30 minutes she'd finished the book. THE WHOLE BOOK!! 

And you know what my first reaction was? Not "Wow! Good job!"  Not "You're an awesome reader!" 

No, my first response was: "Do you know how long it probably took that author to write that book? It probably took her longer to write the first page than it took you to read the whole thing!"

She rolled her eyes at me and decided to go ride her bike.

But this is where I am right now, in that middle ground between writing like a writer, and writing like a reader.

My book has a dark part. A murder. It's not the crux of the book. It's a turning point but not the central part. This is not a crime book or mystery book. And my hope is that when a reader reads it, they will flit over these pages so they are but a drop in the bucket of the story. They won't wallow in the darkness of it but it will merely be a catalyst for getting on in the journey of the main characters.

And yet.... as a writer, it takes more than flitting to make the pages work. Everything in me is screaming, "get in, get out!" as I'm writing it. I don't want to stay in this place anymore than my characters do.

I started having nightmares about it two nights ago. Gory, terrible, graphic nightmares. And I woke up and thought, I have to change the murder weapon. Not that the reader will care. Not that the reader will even know what the murder weapon is (I haven't decided how in depth to go about the deaths...I'd like to keep it more to the characters that live and less about the crime). But I know. I care. And even though I'd already decided what happened, I changed my mind because I couldn't live in that space while writing it.  Even if it takes the reader only minutes to read those sections of the book, it is taking me longer to write them, to research them, to make sure I'm getting the details right.

My hope is, if I do it right, the reader will get the weight of the scene, but not stay there.

As for me, I'm hoping to be over this scene today or tomorrow and move on as well. After all, this gorgeous spring weather can only last so long.

Heartache

I'm heartsick tonight.

Right before bed, my daughter started crying and proceeded to tell us that her best friend, the little girl we've loved and taken to baseball games and had to dinner and over to play, has been demanding she give her money to be her friend.

She took money out of her own piggy bank for who knows how long, a quarter at a time. And then, when her friend told her to take it from her brother, she snuck into his savings and took two dollars from him.

It finally crushed her. It crushed us.

I had to call the mom, a woman I completely and utterly adore, who I think is probably one of the best moms I have ever known, to ask her if her daughter had taken money from mine.

8:45 at night is not the time for this. There is no good time for this.


It is heartbreak for all of us. For the kids, who may or may not ever have that special friendship they once had. Us moms, who may or may not have the special friendship we once had. The kids, utterly broken because they know they made some very bad choices. Us moms, utterly broken wondering where we went wrong.

I don't think there was malice on either of the girl's parts. I don't think my daughter's friend is a bully. I just think something that started fun ended up very badly, in a situation that spiraled out of control. Part of what makes me heartsick is how easily is spiraled that way, and how young they are for such a thing.

If they had been older....

If it had been something even more serious...

It is the reason I can never find it in my heart to judge another mom or child. In even the worst of cases, I never think, That couldn't be me.

It is the reason I live on the teetering edge of worry: because that could always be me. 

One small decision. One bad choice. One friend who makes a bad choice.

The perfect world we try to create for our children is a fragile and precarious one.  Just like our own.

Why I Love You

I've been thinking about moms a lot lately. It was Easter that got me thinking about them – about many of you. Church services on Easter morning were predictably crowded, and though our family got to the church early (prior experience taught us that was necessary... a hard lesson to learn by experience!), there were many, many others scrambling for seats. There was hardly a single seat left, so when a mom and her two kids came down the aisle and saw two seats in the row in front of us and the one next to me, she (rightly) figured this might be as good as they got. Unfortunately, her kids were young and neither wanted to sit by themselves, and she didn't want to leave them to sit by themselves. So they took the two seats and put one child on her lap.

We had seven people in our family. Splitting up wouldn't really feel like splitting up. Besides, we feel very at home in our church, which clearly this mom didn't. So my husband and I left our kids with the grandparents so she could have three seats together, and he and I sat in their seats.

In front of us, then, was a new family. A mom with three kids. And I started looking around, and I realized how many moms were there with kids without dads. And I wondered, where did all the dads go? We live in a highly military area, so it's likely there are quite a few overseas. But maybe some of the dads just didn't want to go to church. Maybe some of these are single moms.

And I couldn't help but watch these moms all alone, struggling to juggle the kids and their crayons and the trips to the bathroom at the most inopportune time and keep them quiet and in their seats. I thought about all of the moms I know who do this every day at home, husbands or not. Us moms who stay up until our eyelids can't stay open to sew costumes for school or shop for posterboard for projects thought up at the last minute. Who have to juggle six schedules and be three places at once. Us moms who give up precious writing time to take forgotten gym clothes to school or pick up drum sticks to replace the lost ones. Us moms who bake cupcakes for school parties or buy cookies to send in because there just isn't time to bake. Who feed their broods three meals a day and keep the drawers full of clean clothes and moderate fights and still manage to play outside a little when they beg. Moms whose hearts ache for their kids when they cry and fight the urge to go beat up the kid who broke their hearts. Moms who sleep on the cold floor when their kids are sick all night.

Moms totally rock.

And somewhere in there, I realized this is why I write what I do. Some of you are YA/MG writers, because you have a heart for kids. I get this, because I taught middle school and led Campus Life groups and taught Sunday School. I love kids.

But as I've gotten older, I find myself constantly reassuring other moms that what they do is important, that they aren't alone, that they are AMAZING for doing the things no one notices but everyone needs. For the sacrifices they give every day in putting others first.

I love moms.

Yesterday our family went to see How to Train Your Dragon. Among our discussions afterward (because that's our family's favorite part of seeing a movie - talking about it over ice cream!), I remarked, "It's not even Disney and they still killed off the mom!  What is it with kid's movies always having a dead mom!!"  (This has always really bugged me...).

And my husband said something that seemed utterly profound.

It's because with a mom, there wouldn't be the story, because the mom would do anything to protect her child, would make sure they knew they weren't alone, would nurture them and love them and talk with them when everything looked black. A mother would deal with the overbearing or demanding dad. In other words, a mom would let the air out of the pressing crisis.

Okay. Wow.

So I know it was Easter and not Mother's Day, but this is what was on my mind. I love you moms. I get how hard it is. And every little thing you do matters. Even if no one notices. It matters.

You totally rock!

Dear Snow: You're cramping my style (and my arm, and my back...)

Two days ago I wrote an open letter to the snow. Either mother nature didn't get it... or she decided to ignore it, because when I woke up yesterday, this is what I saw out my window:

 

You know, before this winter – before the record breaking 20 inches of snow that fell in December – a snow like this would have been talked about for a week. There would have been a run on snow shovels and milk and children would have been doing the inside-out-jammie dance and throwing ice cubes down the toilet for luck, and everything would have shut down. That's what 6 inches of snow would do to this small town south of the Mason Dixon Line. And let's not even forget that this 6 inches fell on top of the 5 inches we got just days before.

Any other year, this would have been major stuff. After all, we've exceeded our yearly average snowfall by 400%. I kid you not. That one 20-inch snow pretty much set us up for snow totals for the next two years, and that was only one of 5 times it's already snowed this season.

So you can imagine my concern when this snow "storm" barely hit the radar with local weathermen, as they were skipping ahead to what they are calling the new "major storm" that's going to hit tomorrow.

So I ask you, if 6 inches on top of 5 inches isn't major snow now, what is???

Turns out, I really didn't want to hear the answer to that.

The answer is between 15 and 24 inches. That's right. Another two feet of the fluffy white stuff, on top of the about eight inches we still have left. That's 1800 square feet of driveway to clear with approximately 3600 square feet of snow. 

That's right, I did the math.

And you know what?  With the 54,000 square feet of snow I've already shoveled, that is my own personal inconvenient truth. Where the heck is global warming when you need it??

Someone at the grocery store said she was just going to let it melt, because the temperature is supposed to get up to 40 degrees (F) today before the next snow wallops us, but I stood looking at my driveway and thought this:

I could let it try to melt, and have three inches of slush I could easily drive over today, which overnight would turn to ice in the below-20 degree (F) cold front, which then would be 3 inches of ice under two feet of snow, which would pretty much preclude hiring someone to plow the driveway (I know your phone number Sean... I know you have a plow... don't think you're getting out of it this time!) and would sock us in for quite possibly the next two months. 

(Don't ask how I know this. Experience is a painful teacher.) 

So even though yesterday I could have been lazy and let the sun do it's thing, I shoveled. I shoveled because I knew in three days it would make the biggest difference in the world to us, and I was willing to do the extra work to spare the pain later on.

And if you're looking for a writing analogy here, the lesson might be to stop and work out the problems you're having with your WIP before just ploddding ahead and thinking you'll go back and clean it up later. Except, I've decided I'm plodding ahead because I can't keep going back to fix stuff or I'll never finish. So I'm not sure if that analogy actually works. 

BUT: on the lighter side, we did have fun too. 

We had a massive snowball fight.

 

 We built not only a snowMAN but a snow PUPPY!

Isn't that puppy awesome?? Here he is closer up:

  

Tell me if he doesn't look like our Scout?

  

Well, color nothwithstanding, of course! 

We made chocolate chip cookies, sledded down the steep hill in the back yard (while I closed my eyes and prayed no one would hit a tree), played Wii, read by the fire... 

In short, I took a day off, like all the other working moms around here had to do when school was canceled. I have a niggling feeling it won't be my last.

Because tomorrow the "major storm" hits, and is supposed to last on into Sunday. And you know what? There's another snow storm headed this way for Tuesday.

The good news never stops.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go stock up on milk and snow shovels.