Oy.....

I feel just like Erma Bombeck.

After cleaning the house in preparation to have two adorable little girls for a couple of nights, I had also cleaned out the refrigerator.  

Into the trash went the leftovers from a ham we had at Easter (mostly just the bone, which I will never give to the dogs because I'm afraid they will choke and die).  Into bed went I without taking out the trash.  I just totally forgot, as did both the boys.

When I got up this morning the dogs had rooted through the trash, as dogs will do when we forget and leave it out, and all that was left of the leftover ham was a bunch of tin foil pieces.

And we were running late as it was.

So we made a general "sweep" of the house and did not find any evidence of the bone.

The dogs treat bones completely differently.  Shadow destroys and devours every single bit.  Jack just gnaws on his and spends most of his time trying to keep it safe from Shadow.  This is all futile on Jack's part, as Shadow pretty much runs the show around here.  No one cares enough to argue with her.  Frankly, I want to be Shadow.  She is one of my heroes.

Whether the bone is hidden in some special secret place or has been devoured and might kill them remains unknown.

So when my girls get here tonight, I guess we will just consider this the Easter egg hunt we didn't have?  Oh yeah!  Let's go with that!  While we're at it, let's go with hoping there is no prize to be found!  And that the dogs don't die, of course!

You know, people are always telling me they don't know how I do it.  I don't know either, I just do it.  I have done things that I never dreamed I would do, I have done things I hope I never have to do again, and I have done many, many things that I couldn't even have dreamed up, should I have had the chance.   If there is some way of getting out of doing it, please contact me at once.

AT ONCE I SAY!!

The "birthday" thing...or, Peace At Last

Birthdays.  How they change, one might even say "evolve", as we grow older......

Take my seventh birthday,  I remember this year in particular because I had gotten the idea (possibly from learning to read with Dick and Jane) that you got lots of presents at birthday parties.  LOTS!!  This year I did not consider the amount of presents I got "enough" and expressed my disappointment to my mother.  She quickly informed me that I was ungrateful and threatened to take away some of them immediately, which made me cry, which made her swat my bottom, which made us both have to take an exceedingly long time in the bathroom.  This made people curious, who then stared at me when I got out, (or so I was convinced), which upset me, which made my mother think I was pouting, which led to another "talking to", in which she did not swat me.  She verbally shamed me instead, teaching me two good lessons: Always be grateful and control your face because no telling what you will have people thinking..  One of these I have mastered.  

Not the last one.  

In any case, the day of my birth was already fraught with possible disappointments and control issues for me from that day forward.

The years between then and now have flown.  No, really.  Except for the years when I had small children, and I don't even remember those at all, so I'm not sure they even count.  If I don't remember them and there are no pictures to prove they happened  (because who, other than the mom, ever takes a picture?), they don't count, right? 

I remember my 38th, during which my mother was deathly sick with cancer, and I was in a very dark place.  Along came my birthday, (like I needed THAT!) and I was in a really, really bad mood.  I mean, dark, people, and I don't think I had said anything mean, but when I am in a dark mood I don't have to say anything.  People just know.  This year the only people around were my children and my best friend's children, who were almost exactly to the day the same age as The Rock Star and The Beautiful Redhead.  Such a dark mood was I in that I fixed spaghetti for supper (of course I had to fix supper) and I was in such a bad mood and not paying good attention that I served those children spaghetti with cold sauce that I had poured into the pan but never warmed up.  I did not know the difference until I sat down to eat, last (of course), and looked around at those precious kids who either loved me so much, or were so scared that I was going to kill them, that they had quietly and quickly downed that spaghetti, with COLD SAUCE, and were not going to say one word about it!  It made me feel so good (because they were such good kids!) and so bad (because I was such a horrible, scary, bad cooking biotch!) that I cried.  After I cried, which I should have just gotten out of the way and saved us all time, then we all laughed, once they knew it was safe for that kind of thing again, and I was so very sorry because I had temporarily forgotten the hard learned lessons of 7: to always be grateful and control my face!  And I vowed that I would never forget it again.

The next year I did much better.  Partly because it was my first birthday without my mother, partly because I had long ago gotten over the "birthday" thing, and partly because my 12 year old daughter, who did not cook, had made me an angel food cake.  I was so surprised and touched that I cried.   I asked her if she had gotten a box mix to do it and she said "I could have gotten a mix??????"  She has always been so wonderful like that, although she has never seemed to know it.  It's part of her charm, but mostly I was just so touched that she had thought about it and stepped in so that at least one year I did not have to make my own cake.  I do not like angel food cake, actually, and she didn't know that either, but if you don't think I ate that cake you would be greatly mistaken.  That was a good one. It's all I remember about that birthday, and it is enough.

A lot of birthday memories involving tears.  Tears of disappointment, anger, gratefulness, laughter.

Last week I celebrated my 48th.  I've gotten over wishing no one knew and I've gotten good at graciously accepting congratulations.  I gave up on wishes years ago, but this year I actually celebrated it for the first time in a very long time.

Sometime last winter I started feeling better.  Better than what?  Better than a tired, sad, jaded, cynical woman who would rather be hibernating.  I don't know if it's a hormonal change or just the end of deep grieving, and I suppose it doesn't make any difference.

Lately, I have been able to go out with friends and actually enjoy doing whatever we have done without wishing I could just go home after about 20 minutes.  This is like a miracle!

Just the other day it dawned on my that my wardrobe is comprised of dark, somber colors, as are most of the furnishings of my house.  There is a good reason for my clothes to be dominated by black, because I have wisely given up the struggle to eliminate black dog hair.  I've simply embraced it because it takes less energy that way.  Besides, I like black!  Black is always appropriate, it makes me look more streamlined, and it goes with everything.  I bought a new couch, which is black, but that's all right, not only because of the dog hair but because it matches my curtains.  Yes, they are black, but not all of them.  I have tan ones on the insides.  Black and tan.....not the color scheme of a happy person.

On Easter, I was marveling at feeling so alive and not viciously angry, and I had the strongest urge to put a pastel table clothe on the table and decorate.  This hadn't happened to me for at least 10 years.  Maybe 15?  I looked at my tablecloths and I have 2 in a burnt orange, 1 in what we called "maroon" in the 80's, and a plaid one in tones of maroon and burnt orange run through with a little gold.  I also have a green and white checked one which has been ruined by numerous painting jobs by the kids over the years, so I couldn't really count that one.

There I stood in my kitchen, in a good mood that had lasted more than 15 minutes, for the first time in many years, looking around and realizing that in the last 10 years I have literally been in mourning, and that I was not feeling that way anymore.   Even more than that, I hadn't been feeling that way for a while.....this lightening of mood seemed to be sticking around.  This, too, was like a miracle.

I mean, you guys, it was like a miracle!  All I could think was that maybe 48 wouldn't be so bad.  It felt like I had woken up from a deep sleep.  I had not been in a deep sleep, literally, but I was emerging from the fog (link included if "fog" is not another color here--technology is not my friend)  of grief that I had been in for so long.  Lately it has felt like the sun is shining through.  Lately I have gotten up and enjoyed days instead of just slogging through them so I could go back to bed.  Lately I have actually smiled for real instead of just doing it so people would go away and leave me alone.  Lately I have felt more like myself again.  When I first started to notice it, I thought it was fluke, but it's not going away.  It's lasted long enough now that I am cautiously optimistic that it is not a phase.

What I think is that, living through these times, like dealing with cancer, comes terror, resolution, and finally, a kind of peace.  The worst thing you could ever imagine has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen.  You know this, and yet......here you still are, still you, still here.   Is it not a miracle that you can wake up every day and thank God for that, even after you've had the worst news you could ever hope to hear?  Is it not an act of faith to keep slogging through the days, even if you are only pretending?  Is it not a miracle if, after slogging through many years, one day you feel alive again?

We have moved, as a country, to a place I never thought we would.  I don't like it, and I fight it every day.  But still I go on, singing with the radio, smiling real smiles, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.  Of course I'm prepared for the worst, you don't get to be 48 without learning that it never hurts to be jaded and cynical!  Otherwise you would just be an idiot, or a celebrity.  I will also admit that I have gotten old enough to take the attitude that whatever happens, I will not be the one to have to deal with it for that many more years, let alone pay for it.  On my worst days I symbolically tell younger generations "Good luck with that!" and laugh, because I fell for that crap too, when I was their age.  But only on the worst days, which are farther and farther apart.

These days I am mostly calm.  It is a calmness born of 10 years in the fog of grief and in the rain of constant disappointment, complete with dreary, mostly black props, and the knowledge that as long as there is still breath in my body, come what may, I have to keep going until my job is done. These 10 years may have seemed boring to those looking in from the outside, but in here it has been time well spent deciding what I really think, wrestling demons to the ground (then jumping up and throwing my hands in the sign for touchdown!)  and working on my faith.  I have never been alone for one second and the work has paid off: I feel peaceful and clear eyed, and ready, come what may.  I don't doubt that the hard times are getting closer daily, but I just show up to serve and let God take care of the rest.

And that, my friends, is my plan for the future, however much of it remains to me.   But I am definitely getting a pastel table clothe, too.  Life is too short to live surrounded with dreary props.  Don'tchathink?

Plowin' On Through

Sometimes I miss my children being small. When I think about the days when I could scoop them up and bury my nose in their little necks, the way their skin felt, how safe I always thought they were in my arms...it's easy to miss those days.  I comfort myself with the fact that they will give me grandchildren.  It's been a long wait already and those days are not yet in sight.

So I comfort myself instead with how much fun we can truly have now that they are grown.  Not only can we talk about the price of gas or eggs, but we are finally on the same side of everything.  There is no more hiding certain parts of reality from them.  If only there were!  More importantly, they no longer feel the need to hide certain things from me.  When you think about it, looking back, parents and children do a lot of lying (if only by omission) for the sole reason of "protecting" each other.  It's really silly but so far no one has come up with an alternate plan that ends with children being responsible adults.  Oh, there have been parents and children without these barriers, but they usually end up as a movie of the week.  Not my style.

This post is about some of the lesser secrets of life.  This post is about secrets in the kitchen.  Women are usually the sole conspirators, but the Lord knows that men are not immune, if they happen to spend much time in the kitchen.

Some of the best memories my daughter and I have (so far) is in regard to these secrets.  

When either of the older kids come home now, there is a flurry of activity with greetings and going here and there and catching up. Then we eventually drift to our natural environments, which with me is the kitchen.

The Beautiful Redhead and I had the best time making pies last Thanksgiving.  She left out ingredients and I spilled them all over the counter before we got them in the oven, but I told her not to worry.  "No one will ever know", I said.  "They have never questioned any kind of food I have given them in their entire lives, with the one exception being the time I sprinkled cinnamon over the chicken/broccoli/rice casserole instead of paprika", I said.  She remembered that and we had a good laugh.  That was the year I got bifocals, by the way.  heh heh heh.   But the pies were a roaring success that year, even if we did leave the evaporated milk out.  So if you ever "forget" the evaporated milk or anything, I advise you to plow right on ahead and dare anybody to be able to tell the difference.  My money is on you, my Wooden Spoon Brigade, and I am not even a betting woman.  I will have you know we served those pies just like we knew what we were doing.  And we had a bonding moment as I met my daughter's eyes while all her brothers were eating the pies without any comment except compliments. "Toldjah!"  my eyes said to hers.  "I can't believe we pulled it off!" her eyes answered.  We were in it together, come what may.

So with Easter coming and me being about chocolated out from all the recipes on Facebook last week, (what was the deal with that, anyway?!?!) I was dreaming of something fruity. I found this recipe jello ribbon cake.  It seemed simple enough, so we got started.

As we caught up on our personal lives the cakes were in the oven.  The orange one got done really fast. This was due, I believe, to it being in a glass pie pan, as I have only one round cake pan. I think I used to have another one but it got used in a sandbox or maybe the dogs ate it.  I forget the details. Forgetting the details is what keeps mothers sane.  I highly recommend it.  The cherry one overflowed and burnt in the bottom of the oven. "Do you smell something burning?" I asked, "It's the coffee" she answered. A few minutes later I took out the orange one and let her know the cherry one may be in trouble.  We mixed the filling layer, with me doing the steps and her reading it off, two or three times just to be sure, because this is how we left out the evaporated milk at Thanksgiving.  Learning from your mistakes is very important and a skill that I actively cultivate.  It is especially challenging when you forget details,  just one of the double edged swords of motherhood.  We got the filling done right. 

By then the cherry cake had quit smoking in the oven but it had, unfortunately fallen by the time it cooled.   "Oh well", I said, "we are going to paste this baby together with cream cheese and Cool Whip Frosting, no one will ever know the difference."  About that time the twins were cheering for some basketball team that was making them very happy indeed, and she just smiled.  March madness is a wonderful thing, especially if you don't follow basketball but need privacy in the kitchen.

The cherry cake ended up being able to be sliced in two.  The orange cake came out mostly in pieces, well, more like limestone layers, if you know what I mean. If you don't, you should be feeling superior right now because your cakes probably always turn out normal.  You are lucky if this is the case, but you also have no idea what you are missing.  Where is the challenge if your cakes turn out perfect? What fun is that?  You have no idea how much fun it can be to overcome these obstacles.

So we made a 3 layer cake, with extra filling between both layers.  We were actually starting to look forward to this cake. It did not look like much at this point, it was true, but we were sampling right along and everything tasted wonderful, so we plowed ahead.  I would have taken pictures but I haven't figured out if I can use the camera and the Chromebook together yet, plus I was too embarrassed.  It was all crooked and listing to one side pretty bad.  I could already tell we were never going to forget this cake!

The Cool Whip frosting is wonderful, as I'm sure you guessed.  You should make sure it's all the way defrosted. I don't know why they keep it frozen and it irritates me to death, but only because I have no patience.  I tell you now, IF you insist on frosting your cake too soon, it will smoosh the layers of filling out of the middle of your cake.  Oh, you can get (most) of it back in, but it takes a delicate touch and patience. This is why we have children, it turns out.  They will keep going while you lose your mind and open windows and complain about how hot it is, while drinking coffee.  I love my daughter.  I mean, I love all my kids but who keeps my secrets?  She does.  Who knows my objective when I am in such a state and works along like nothing is wrong?  She does!  Without her I would be lonely in a way that I cannot even begin to express.

By the time the twins were joyously yelling about "Kansas being out" (sorry about your bad luck, there, Kansas) we got the frosting on, threw some jelly beans on top, and it looked a little, well, amateurish.  But I never claimed to be a professional when it comes to cooking.  Never.  Not one single time.  Ever.  This is very important, in case you are making a plan for future disasters in the kitchen. You probably should be.  They come around on a regular basis.

Into the refrigerator it went, to set up (Lord hear our prayer) or possibly break down overnight.  Whatever else Easter brings, it will bring a very tasty if not beautiful cake.  "Don't worry", I said, "they'll never know", I said.  She just smiled at our beautiful creation.

I know that she will hear my voice in her head saying these words, comforting her and giving her strength to plow on through, all the days of her life.  With me or without me.  It's a family tradition.  One that I have no doubt she will pass on.  Someday.  Sigh.

Have a blessed Easter and never lose a chance to make a good memory. Some of my best ones involve what I regarded at the time as complete catastrophes.  Here's to making good memories.