Wrestling with Worries

Right before bed, Big Sis summoned me for a private conference.  "I've been worrying," she shared.  We hopped onto my bed together, as is our custom when she needs to talk. 

"I'm worried about bombs and poison gases, Mom.  I mean, what if something like what happened in Boston happens here?  How do you know it won't?  We're learning about the chemicals in water and I'm thinking about how our water could be poisoned, and I can't get it all out of my mind..."  Her anxieties issued from her in a gush. 

I don't know it won't happen here, sweetheart.  I can't promise you it won't.  But I can reassure you that kindnesses in our world are more likely than terrible things.  And while we live every day with the knowledge that accidents happen and sicknesses happen and pain is part of our experience, births also happen, and celebrations, and beauty and wonderfulness are all around us. 

A few more trips from her bedroom for reassurance followed, until we finally sent her back to bed with an assignment to think of a baby girl's name for each letter of the alphabet. 

We're all worried these days, aren't we, though we each feel it and wear it and express it in different ways?  Our daughter, prone to apprehensions and anxious wonderings, was bound to come to us with Boston-inspired concerns and questions.  She devoured a copy of The Hunger Games over spring break, a book I'd hoped she would wait to read, with its poisonous berries and...everything else.  Being displaced right now, between old house and new and on an extended vacation at Mammom's and Bampa's house, provides another source of instability.

I watch my own reactions to news and personal circumstances closely.  Pregnancy--even simply embarking on the journey of parenthood by attempting to conceive or adopt--means stepping onto a landscape of uncertainty and unknowns, new frontiers of hope and worry.  I mark the hurdles:  heartbeat on ultrasound, first trimester completed, negative screening results.  But there's no point of earned complacency in parenthood and life, only comfort in acknowledging the risks and joys associated with vulnerability. 

Disasters and tragedies aren't required to provoke our anxieties--all we need is a convenient temporal basket for our worries.  Moving, and a new house, have been ripe fodder for my over-active imagination at 3:00 AM.  I pictured the deck on our house as higher than it really is, the hillside steeper, with guests tumbling into the canyon in the event of a collapse.  Upstairs windows might be easy for children to fall from.  The canyon could be a nesting ground for rattlesnakes.  Would our house be easy to burglarize?

And then I remembered this week we'd momentarily forgotten to be afraid of North Korea.

So much randomness and unpredictability inspires the desire for us to exert controls on identifiable and accessible areas in our daily lives.  I could put locks on the windows, install an alarm system, forbid the kids from exploring the canyon.  But the worries would only reinvent themselves, seep through cracks in the door frames like poison gases.  There aren't enough sandbags to guard against uncertainty.  And somewhere along the bucket brigade we stop living how we truly want to, with chin up and eyes on the birds twittering on the fence, on the sunset, on the horizon.

So we hold hands, snuggle on the bed, reassure, and resolve.

We're working on managing our fears and anxieties over here.  How about you?  How have worries surfaced?  How do you balance caution with embracing wonder and vulnerability?

P.S.  a shout-out to Jewel, whose song "Hands" made it into the iPod shuffle on my jog this morning, with timely lyrics:

"If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we're all OK

And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful

And useless in times like these

I won't be made useless

I won't be idle with despair..."

33rd Street: June 2001-April 2013

We left our little bungalow behind last weekend, moving the last remaining items out as our excited buyer began spackling, painting, and making plans for her new abode. 

This was the first house we ever bought, the one whose mortgage we were promised we'd "grow into," as we dumped our change jars and counted every penny.  It's the house with dear neighbors, our amazing Apello pine tree, the yard where fairies fluorished, and rooms which welcomed us, newly married, and our babies. 

We're between houses until wood floors are installed in The New House and kitchen cupboards are painted.  Meanwhile, we've established temporary residence at my parents' house. 

The new house is still The New House.  Soon it will feel like Our Home--but not yet.  Now empty and echo-y, it waits for us to fill spaces and establish new routines, acquaint ourselves with neighbors, and create comfort. 

The girls said their own goodbyes to our beloved home and gardens; their tributes will be featured in a longer, forthcoming post. 

Farewell, sweet habitat. 

Plenty of Poetry

I've been *enjoying* 3:00 AM insomnia for the past few months.  Sure, call it my body's way of preparing for a baby who is likely not as predictable as whatever internal alarm clock nudges me from slumber at an eerily consistent hour I can't even celebrate as close to early-morning workout time. 

I generally get up between 5:30 and 6:00, so it's sobering to think of how many hours I have after 3:00 each morning to accomplish something, and how little I actually do, as I snuggle my iPad and scroll through blogs and read articles and play a few rounds of Words with Friends (lather, rinse, repeat...).

Today, though, I used the United States Postal Service website to forward our mail to our new house and signed up for a poem a day via email on the Poetry Foundation's website.  I was so grateful to myself when Marianne Boruch's "Pencil" arrived in my inbox later this morning; I had to share it with an art teacher colleague. 

In the afternoon I spotted another teacher/friend scurrying away from the office who called out, "I just left you a poem!" 

Seriously?  Yes. 

There was a photocopy of Billy Collins' "The Effort" waiting for me on my keyboard. 

Today felt like a wonderful profusion of poetry, especially since I unearthed a poem I wrote when I was pregnant with Big Sis to publish here today:

Flutter

Something new is overtaking me
The wonder of you inside
My body a housing,
encasing hope, fantasy,
and infinite possibilities:
The unwitting agent
of change in the world, a new prophet
for the world's devout, I carry you
gently,
little moth. 

Easter Egg Cake Pops, Executed

We rallied and pulled off our Easter Egg Cake Pops.  Our project was saved from jettisoning by a lucky find in a Costco "Cake Pop" making set, which included colored candy coating discs, cake pop sticks, sprinkles, and a styrofoam platform for propping the pops.  We ditched the cake mix part of the set, because our recipe requires only a package of Oreo cookies and a package of cream cheese, food-processed, chilled, and shaped into eggs by little hands (no baking!).  We dipped them in the melted candy discs, sprinkled them--and then used the remnants of each melted candy color to make frosting swirls on some of the pops.  We nestled the "duds" that fell off their sticks into the paper grass. 

Voila!

Easter Ideas to Execute or Just...Consider

Last weekend the girls and I were feeling crafty, and the Easter box from the garage provided some inspiration.  We created a simple papier mache/decoupage egg project out of three materials:  plastic eggs, cut/torn tissue paper, and gluey water. 

All the eggs are waiting for now is a little Modge Podge shellacking, or some glitter glue stripes or ribbon, stickers, or...?  Note:  littler fingers can get frustrated with the gooey tissue paper...but I, who had many more important tasks to accomplish, found decorating these eggs (and "fixing" Little Sis's attempts) to be conveniently soothing and distracting.

We're going to a party on Saturday, and I'm tempted to make these cake pops (find recipe here):

We could shape them into eggy ovals and cover them with white chocolate and decorate...they don't require baking, and don't have eggs...perfect for our friend with allergies.   

But there's a very real possibility that the Easter Bunny will never get around to Modge Podge-ing the eggs above (I believe the Podge is packed in the storage container), and has enough to do figuring out how she's going to fill some baskets (and hide some eggs QUIETLY) on Sunday. 

What about you?  Any dyeing or decorating or basket-filling buds of inspiration?

List: March Madness

If February was Morning Sickness Month, then March is A Little Bit o' Madness Month with hopes that April is Moving Month.

We found a house we love.   A house with more space.  A house on a canyon (surely with fairies) and cul de sac, with a front yard and raised garden beds for my green-thumbed husband and with a decadent deck (a deckadent!). 

The offer we made on the house was initially rejected.  But I couldn't stop thinking about it, and neither could the kids.  So when the call came last Wednesday that the other offer fell through, we jumped at the chance for another chance.  We'd have to sell our dear bungalow quickly.  We called our friends with a mobile storage company and ordered one to be delivered the next day.  And we (well, mostly Husband, with the help of our dear neighbors), loaded that thing up on Friday with half of our shizzle so that our house was "staged" for professional photographs on Saturday (staging which includes litter boxes and baskets of shoes and a few dust bunnies). Open House on Sunday.  Offers on Tuesday.  Counter offers on Wednesday.  Accepted counters on Thursday.  And I'm reluctant to say more than there's hope we have a new home soon, but there's hope! 

In the meantime we moved the dog and ourselves (so sorry, Bunny and Kitty) into my parents' home so our house stayed reasonably clean for folks taking a look.   There's been driving back and forth, meetings with inspectors, appointments at the city, finding and faxing and scanning and signing of documents, phone calls from realtors, and minor cliffhangers about financing and offers and inspection reports and disclosures. 

But we're so darned lucky that it's all happened so fast (knock on wood).  I'm feeling a lot of respect for sellers whose homes are on the market for months, enduring long stretches of keeping their houses clean and hoping it will all work out. 

Here are a few conclusions I've drawn from our experience thus far:

1.  Mobile storage containers are ingenious. 
2.  I'm going to hate myself when we unload that storage container.  Because we were so desperate to move things out of our house post haste, I packed many unlabeled boxes of random stuff worth nothing, which we then threw willy nilly into the container.  Many of you have commented that I'm likely moving my Piles of Denial to a new abode.  Indeed. 
3.  One should not pack last year's tax returns into the storage container.  I believe it was only a few hours after the storage container drove away that I received the email asking me for our 2010 and 2011 tax returns.  I actually know which box I threw those folders in, along with some of the girls' schoolwork from kindergarten and a few framed photographs and art. Maybe a few Polly Pockets. 
4.  Packing a house and a storage container provides rich fodder for spousal squabbling.
5.  A fish can survive many things, but not our hectic week.  Also, I changed the water in its bowl.  Let's call this a science experiment with a clear conclusion.
6.  I appreciate him, but I don't want to be a realtor.  I've watched ours work very hard, as well as be available to us at all hours. 
7.  It's wonderful to live close to my family.  I do not take it for granted. 
8.  If you're grabbing outfits one day at a time, you're bound to forget a key component.  On Monday I was glad I had flip flops in my office at school.  On Wednesday, I wore a jog bra. 

February Was Morning Sickness Month

I found out I was pregnant after I'd already poured myself a glass of wine.

I'd spent a chilly Friday night supervising a high school soccer game and was looking forward to a glass of red and some time on the couch with my husband.  My period was due today, I recalled as I drove up the hill to our neighborhood, thinking that just to be safe, I could grab both a pregnancy test and wine at the drugstore.

So confident was I that I couldn't be pregnant, I poured myself a glass of Cabernet before I headed to the bathroom.

The wine, and my relatively simpler life, went down the drain that night, January 11.

Of course, I didn't feel immediately pregnant.  I felt, instead, alternately disbelieving, giddy, panicky, hopeful, selfish, unprepared, worried, old, young, wary, nervous, excited, embarrassed, irresponsible, defensive, strong, determined, gleeful and guilty: conflicted.

I was 41, soon to be 42.  I'd recently had a miscarriage.  Only a week earlier, I'd half-purged the house of baby and toddler gear, ready to accept that we wouldn't have a third.  Our house was small. Money wasn't growing on our big tree in the front yard.  Husband didn't see this coming, now.  No one would, I thought, though having another child was a not-so-secret long indulgent wish of mine.

The risks, all of them, and the potential of raising our little girls' hopes (one of whom had asked for a baby for her birthday) and having them ultimately dashed them made keeping this pregnancy secret paramount.

Meanwhile, I began feeling tired.  And then, hungry.  And then... blergggggghhhhhhhhaaaaggggghhhhhh.

Flu season had struck at school with a vengeance, so I fit right in, though I resisted curling up on the nurse's office cot and going home. I groaned through weeks of what felt like the flu and also like the world's longest hangover, bearing all the same characteristics, including internal wails of why oh why did I do this to myself?  I never threw up, at least outside my mouth.  But I entered many classrooms and meetings with an escape plan in mind.  I conjured images of pregnant women around the globe, sicker than I felt, plowing fields and chasing toddlers.  So I rallied.  

But I lacked oomph. 

And I could smell your breath, and your perfume, or lack thereof.  Also your socks.  

Nothing sounded good.  And then everything sounded tempting until I put in my mouth or smelled it. I ate to fill my stomach with a feeling other than nausea.  I craved sandwiches.  I craved sleep.  I spent most afternoons and evenings lying in bed, feeling like a terrible mother and wife.  The girls grew used to me doing little.  We read books together in bed, but I hardly wanted to play.  Husband patiently tolerated and tended to me, tempering his excitement and unspoken anxiety.  

I became a boring and absent and unavailable friend.  I really did want to meet you for that beer! But.  And I'm pretty sure I was in bed by 7:30 that night.

I felt duplicitous and sneaky as I engaged in conversations with others, including my sister-in-law, about their pregnancies.  "Nope, nothing new or big going on in my life," I fibbed to unsuspecting and remote friends and family members.  I kept Big and Little Sis in mind, figuring I'd ask for forgiveness and understanding later.  

But here we are now at 12 weeks, with some assurance that a healthy little bean is sprouting inside me.  And my growing belly (why yes, I have had a big lunch!  A foot-long sub, in fact!) is ready for its debut.  We have some very excited big sisters and new landscapes ahead. 

Yeehaw!