Tuesday, December 29, 2020

CandleSnotBlob

Ansel and Hadrian are really into making jokes, especially body-themed jokes, right now.  This was tonight.

::After a lively discussion about whether Captain Hook's last name was always "Hook" or if he changed it after his crocodile incident.::

Me:  Well I think he changed it from Smith or something.

Paul: I think it always was Hook and that's why he made a hook hand.

Ansel: ::deep breath:: I think his name is ........................... CAPTAIN SNOT!  (eyes get huge, makes a "GET IT??" face, pauses for laughter)

Me and Paul:  politely feigned raucous laughter

Hadrian: No!  No!  His name is CAPTAIN ..............SNOTBLOB! (same "GET IT??" face, pause)

Ansel basically falls off his chair laughing so hard he can hardly breathe at this hilarious escalation.

After recovering a bit, he winds up for his final joke.

Ansel: He's!  He's....CANDLE SNOTBLOB!

Both boys are then beyond the point of no return.  Paul and I look at each other with concern and try to finish our dinner while the boys rolls around the floor laughing until we tell them dinner is over.

Monday, December 28, 2020

Mostly Twains

 Ansel is a pleasure to chat with.  We have long conversations about all kinds of things:  twains, cats, cass-ohs (castles), twains under the sea, sips (ships), magnatiles, staws (stars), and how much he loves eating stick cheese (string cheese) and graham crackers...  Today at dinner we talked about Venice and how it doesn't have any cars - he thought that was mostly hilarious.  Laughed a long time.

Today Hadrian told me that "a vaccine is like when tiny pieces of the sickness that aren't strong are put in your body so your body recognizes what it looks like and then it can fight it."  It was amazing.  I asked him where he learned that.  "You told me, mom."  Well, I don't remember that at all, but I'm glad it stuck.  

Sunday, December 27, 2020

On Being The Scapegoat

Back in October, I was talking to my best friend from college - via text, because pandemic.  I was describing to her what I had thought could be an anxiety attack.  I'd noticed a car started parking directly in front of our mailbox - which seemed like something that was probably against city ordinances.  At the very least, it made things very difficult for our mail carrier.  And I'd noticed that the car had only appeared there the day after I had put out our Biden-Harris sign.  It never moved.  

Almost immediately after making that connection, my heart had started racing, I felt shaky, I imagined increasingly dire and improbable escalations:  If someone had done this, would they spray paint "SOCIALIST BABY KILLERS" on our garage?  Would some cul-de-sac teenager beat up my son?  That night I woke up gasping, crying, and sweating from a nightmare where Paul and I had been dragged out of our house, tied to a tree, and our house set on fire with our children inside. 

The end of our text chain was a pact that we would both call therapists, for the first time in our lives, and make appointments - her to work through what she calls "Temple PTSD" and her inability to ask for help which causes overwhelm - me for what is clearly my latent and exponentially worsening social anxiety.  We had to make our appointments by November 1.  If we didn't, we would donate $100 to the Trump Campaign.  Perhaps the only way to get us to follow-through - it was a very effective.

____________________

My New Year's resolution last year was to lose 20 pounds.  Pretty much the most cliché resolution imaginable.  "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for [that] meddling [Coronavirus]."  

This year, I want, no, I need to, shed some emotional weight instead.  Or maybe the metaphor is more to heal a wound or find my confidence or some-such like that.  First step was making those calls to therapists in October.  Haven't actually had an appointment yet - turns out that 2020 has done a number on the mental health of the general populace and a certain amount of triage is in place.  I'm on a waiting list, which is understandable, as my request is more on the order of relationship/thought coaching and less on the suicidal ideation side of things.  Get those folks help first.  

Basically, though, my ultimate goal this year is to work through, with intention, how to be ok even when branded the Family Scapegoat™.  Amazingly(!) achieving said dubious distinction with both my own and my in-laws' families.  Perhaps it all is in my head.  That I'm imagining this scarlet letter - just like I imagined (here's the kicker) that the car was parked in front of our Biden sign on purpose (it wasn't).  

After over ten years of trying to examine the whole situation as objectively as possible, however, I'm fairly confident it's not imagined.  It's been a surreal and toxic experience to go through excruciating political, personal, spiritual (all the -als) transitions the last decade+, all alone, doing all that mental and emotional work by myself, feeling the full brunt of and taking responsibility for any extended familial and social fallout put squarely on only my shoulders.  That's hard enough.  But then, after surviving that (or trying to still survive it when I get sucker-punched by aftershocks that never end and always surprise me)...absorbing all that for myself...already broken and bleeding and not understanding why I've been the target of so much pointless emotional violence, curled up in a corner just trying to find a place where I can breathe a bit...  

I then have the privilege of, as I said, being the Family Scapegoat™.  Where if anyone else shows any inkling of a shift similar to my own, or any shift away from the status quo at all, (I suppose because I was the first to move? Dark side of being the oldest.), I get to take quite a bit of the "blame".  I become, as it were, the cause of it all.  Guilt by proximity.  A couple well-placed kicks to the ribs for being the one who "started it" - doesn't matter if I never had a single conversation with that person about their own decisions.  Doesn't matter if I did have conversations with that person to tell them I would support them and be happy for them if their choices were always different than my own.  Doesn't really matter at all what I do or don't do in reality - it never really does for a scapegoat - there just needs to be a convenient single someone to label as "suspect/contaminant".

It's easier that way, you see.  It's so much harder to give everyone fully-fledged autonomy.

I'm not naive enough to believe that this year I'll be able to change my status as Family Scapegoat™.  It may shock you to know that I actually don't think that I can control the decisions of other humans with their own fully-fledged autonomy.  But, I hope - I really hope - that I can learn how to live with it more gracefully, or at least more protectively.  Some kind of kevlar-lined fur-trimmed parka for my heart and soul?  The metaphor has run away from me now.  Something where the cold shoulders don't make me shiver uncontrollably anymore.  Where any disappointment aimed at me can't slice and fester.  What I don't think I'll ever be able to do, though, is to stop caring.

Monday, December 21, 2020

Solstice

 


Happy Solstice.  I always think of Barb Butler, my friend and part-time employer at the Marine Lab's library in Oregon, on the solstice.  She was the first person I ever knew that made a point to mark it and celebrate.  I've tried to ever since.  This year with the convergence made it extra special.  

I'd like to say I lit a bonfire and burned memories of 2020 or made a decadent hot chocolate and watched the stars. 

But instead I showed the kids the convergence for 30 seconds, ate some fancy chocolate, and then spent the evening building Christmas presents (it's going to be good) in the basement with Paul.  

Still, happy solstice everyone.  Turn away from the darkness and look forward to the light.

Thursday, December 17, 2020

Snow

 


She will be the snow today.

#foreverinmanydirections



Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Annie

 

Another sleepless night for me - likely due to forgetting to take my thyroid medication one, maybe two, days; I can't remember.  Or maybe something else.

I found myself scrolling past many tributes to Annie K. Blake tonight and being overwhelmed.  I am, of course, in the outermost of the farthest reaches of the most remote circles of her social world.  Barely within the gravitational pull, barely in orbit. Claiming space there almost through sheer force of will.  But I've followed her and Simon these last three months much more closely than even before.  Took homemade "churro milk" and homegrown eggs.  Flowers.  A note.  Sent her a video of our chickens when friends asked for little snippets of beauty in the world to fill her days.  I hope they made some split-second difference.  Just a split-second - to fill in any tiny gaps between when the love of her closest friends and family could rush in.  I am, after all, a very, very small human in this world compared to a force like Annie K. Blake.  And living less than a mile away, it's like living near a pulsar.

Now she is leaving.  It seems she is leaving very soon.  Part of me hopes she will be here on Thursday afternoon when we'll get 6" of snow.  She could watch it cover Cascade Mountain from her big mid-century windows.  But, then again, she'll probably watch the snow no matter where she is.  Maybe she will be the snow.

Paul is surprised - he'll find me staring out Ansel's window at Cascade during sunsets.  Just say, "This is really affecting you, isn't it?"

It really is.

Stay with me now. I don't want to talk too much about myself in a post about Annie's departure.  I'll try to be concise.  

We are the same age.  We both have two children.  I knew about Annie K. (at the time) as a friend of friends even when I was 20 years old - we were at the same school, same social orbits.  We both went through excruciating and beautiful faith journeys that led us to very similar destinations.  

I suppose, perhaps, it affects me because I have always thought I would die young.  And I have often tried to think through how to die best - I mean, to die with nobility and love and acceptance, but giving the right, humane amount of space to regrets and fear and pain and sorrow.  Annie has shown me what that looks and feels like.

It affects me.

Even more than that, though, is how I've seen the massive and fiercely loyal network of her close friends organize the most supportive army.  And reading their goodbyes today was all overwhelming.  

They reminded me, though, that I am now here and not likely to be moving anytime soon - for the first time in my entire life.  So perhaps now I can do my best to build my own long-term, local, close connections in a new network of supportive, fierce, smart, wonderful women - for the first time in my entire life.   I don't even know how to begin.  How do you do that?  Starting at 36 years old?  It's always been so hard for me.  But I have to try.  The benefits of the possibilities outweigh the risks of rejection now.  I wish I could figure out how Annie K. Blake did it.

Though I suspect, she didn't really have to try very hard.  It's not hard to pull in others close when you have always been a pulsar.

Basilock and Sushi Twain

 Today Hadrian told me about a monster called the Basilock (not the Basilisk, he was clear).  A Basilock has the head of a rooster, the body of a dinosaur, the tail of a "serpent" (not a snake, a serpent), and....the chin of...a pelican.

Ansel laughs suddenly and long at almost anything.  We were looking through a new kids geography book I got today (Everything and Everywhere by Marc Martin) - it highlights a different city in the world on each page with a collage of illustrations about it.  In Tokyo, there was a line of trains, the last one being in the shape of sushi.  Ansel almost fell off the couch laughing at the sushi train.  "A TWAIN???  OF FOOD?!?!?! THAT IS A TWAIN??????" 

Then I overheard Hadrian chatting with Ansel downstairs, telling him all about the Leaning Pizza of Tower.

Monday, December 14, 2020

Bowl of Bacon and The Golden Rose


During our typical we-are-very-old-people-and-always-have-been evening wind-down of drinking a cup of tea (or, for tonight, glogg) and watching a couple episodes of Jeopardy, Paul's phone buzzed and he leaped (LEAPED!) off the couch to grab it.

"I think it may be the vaccination schedule!" (for his university)

"What? Already?"

"Yeah!  Maybe? I don't know.  I thought maybe..........  Oh....no.  No it was just a student email."

"oh."

"Yeah...  But maybe soon?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

Also tonight one of the Jeopardy categories was "Oregon" and another was "European Geography" so, we pretty much cleaned up.

Ansel basically ate a bowl of bacon for dinner tonight.  I didn't care - just wanted the little skinny kid to eat something.  I'm also worried about his tonsils - they're very large (not as bad as Hadrian's used to be, but still) and when he fell asleep on my lap tonight while we listened to Wind in the Willows, it almost seemed like he wasn't able to breathe fully.  Like he had to overwork to get enough air - like breathing through a straw.  And snoring.  I wonder if children can have sleep apnea, or if it can be tested somehow?  Little dude always has bags under his eyes.  

I just worry about him.  He's so little and wonderful.

Hadrian spent the afternoon drawing a castle for his favorite teacher, Miss K.  He told me it was named "The Golden Rose."  Which is a great name for a castle.  I'm just glad he didn't want to call it "EVIL DRAGON FORTRESS OF LAVA FIRE AND EVIL AND CANNONS" or similar.  Naming castles something like that in the afternoon never portends a nice, calm evening of snuggles.  "The Golden Rose" was a good sign.

During the book tonight, Paul got to a part where they mentioned eels.  Paul looked up and told Hadrian a bit of the story of the time he ordered Eels in Aspic at a restaurant in Lubeck, but didn't realize what it was.  Then he (and I!) had to eat it because we were so relatively poor at the time that we always took turns ordering only one dish to share when we ate out.  Hadrian whispered to me, "But what kind of eel was it?  Electric or Moray?"  This kid.

Sunday, December 13, 2020

France Ancisco

 


Today, Hadrian kept asking me about the city "France Ancisco."  I couldn't correct him, so we talked about the famous Golden Gate bridge of Fance Ancisco for a bit.  Decided it would be a cool place to visit someday together.  

A typical Sunday for us - our "chore day" where we clean the house and get ready for the week ahead.  We walked around our glogg/Scandi-Wassail neighbor presents after lunch - the boys got really into ringing doorbells and running away.  After that, Hadrian settled in to keep building "Lava Land" and Ice Castles in Minecraft while Ansel watched a few episodes (again) of Octonauts.  Paul and I washed the fronts of our kitchen cupboards (long overdue) and the bathrooms (embarassingly long overdue).

Paul had found some chestnuts at Harmon's, so we roasted those up and watched Miracle on 34th Street in the afternoon.  The boys thought the chestnuts looked like the absolute most disgusting thing they'd ever been forced to look at.  Paul and I ate too many - the last time we had them was a Christmas Market in Hamburg that we stopped by in between our train arrival and our plane departure, on our way for a quick 3-day trip to Istanbul.  Amazing how that little taste zoomed me right back 9 years - I even remember how the chestnut booth was right next to a vintage carousel, and they were literally roasting on an open fire.  They taste like sweet potatoes to me.  (Which of course then also zooms me right back 20 years to the roasted sweet potato trucks in Tokyo - they'd drive around neighborhoods with loud midi music blaring just like ice cream trucks.  But in January.  And...it was not ice cream.)

Ansel cannot stand to be sockless or shoeless.  It's the first thing he does in the morning.  So slippers have been added to the Christmas gift list.  

I watched footage of the trucks, filled with vaccines, rolling out of the Pfizer plant today.  It brought me quite a significant bit of Christmas cheer and hope.  I'm so impressed with humans when I think about the vaccine they were able to produce and test so quickly.  (It's a much nicer feeling than how I've felt seeing people blatantly refuse to try to slow this virus down - so I'm trying to focus more on the Pfizer trucks than the people walking around Target holding masks in their hands.)

Saturday, December 12, 2020

Sacred and Mundane, All Mixed Together

 



Now. Here's the trick.  Jumping back in here.  Do I try to cover everything that's happened in my life since, well, basically, July 2015?  I started trying that in October 2015 and never caught up, even then.  So perhaps we start with just today.  I actually only want to talk about today anyway.

It was a day of mundane and terribly sacred and sad and typical things.  A day where I shoveled old sand out of a chicken run but also cried in front of complete strangers in a flower shop.  I don't know how to make those two things exist on the same day in my mind, but they did.  

So what did I do today?  Well, I woke up, as I always do, with Paul's arm flung over me, and could tell by the light in the windows that it had (finally) snowed.  I planned a series of errands in my head - buy some apple juice from the orchard, look for bigger pajamas for Hadrian, visit the flower shop, go to the Asian Market...  At home, later, I would deep clean the chicken coop and make a test batch of glogg from a recipe on the Norwegian advent calendar my friend Maren sent me (hi, Maren).  We ate waffles for breakfast because Ansel made the iron-clad argument that "It snowed, so we eat waffles."

I hadn't left the house for a week - so even in my full-pandemic cautiousness, I was happy to be driving around, even in the snow.  But this was definitely the longest list of errands I'd tried to run since, well, March.  At Foxglove, I broke down trying to ask the florist if she wouldn't worry about making a "pretty bouquet", but just give me one sprig of every kind of plant they had in stock.  It was for Annie, I said, like the florist had to understand everything I meant just with that much to go on.  I kept trying.  She's dying, I said.  She...she's an artist, I said.  She has two young children, I said.  And I thought maybe she would want to see as many kinds of flowers as I can find right now.  

I wandered the Asian market looking for cardamom and star anise while I waited for the bouquet-of-many-flowers.  I remembered how we could find those things so easily in the Bazaar in Odense.  We'd ride our bikes there every Saturday morning to buy all our produce from Ahkmed (who became so used to us that we became like friends there in Denmark - all foreigners together.  When we left we made him a pecan pie, which he said he'd loved eating in Texas, in our only pie pan.  We weren't taking it back in our suitcases after all.)  We'd check out the spice market, the nut market, the Turkish bakery every week just to see what would show up.  It was the place we first saw and tried persimmons and dates.  It was the only place we could find cranberries in our Danish town.  

I had time to burn before the flowers still so I walked through Pioneer Book - ended up with three more books (Bill Bryson, the history "Salt", and a Christmas pop-up for the boys) because I can't help myself.  Stood in line for Hruska's Kolaches next door.  And finally picked up the flowers.

What a day - dropping off Kolaches to my youngest sister, just to check in.  Walking through a department store -- quickly, looking for pajamas, but never stopping my near-jog until I walked right back out the door because I was afraid of being around so many people.  Just such mundane things. And then pulling up to Annie's house, seeing the windows filled with paper cranes, a large flag that said "Peace".  Leaving the flowers and a note, knocking, walking quickly away because I didn't have any words.  I do know that the house felt...it felt like a sacred place.  I almost wanted to take off my shoes before walking up to the door - I might have if it wasn't freezing.  It's been a while since I've felt that heightened sense of the sacred.  I'd missed it.  But I didn't like the reason it was here in my life again.

What was the rest of the day?   Watching my kids play outside.  Raking new sand through a chicken run, like a monk in a rock garden.  Making the trial glogg - realizing it was the real deal, and then spending the afternoon quadrupling another batch with the last gallon of apple juice for the week from the neighborhood orchard, jarring it all to go out to the neighbors tomorrow, literally sewing my dried orange slices onto ribbons and tying it all together.  

Holding my kids on the couch while we listened to Paul's very impressive performance-reading of Chapter 2 of The Wind in the Willows.  And now, writing about what I did today.  A sad, strange, regular, warm, cold, pure, mucky, snowy, windy day.  

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