You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2007.
Periodically I do what I like to call turning over a new leaf. Wait, that was all grammatically wrong…. Anyway, every so often suddenly I feel the call to change and better myself and I do really well for 5 minutes until I get bored or hungry or my left big toe itches or something. Willpower, I have thee not. But for some reason, the most recent new leaf seems to be staying turned – not that it’s a huge life change or the solution to world hunger, but for me this is huge. HUGE!
I have been keeping up with my dirty dishes.
Isn’t that sad? That this is my life’s greatest accomplishment for the moment? And yet I am proud as hell of myself for doing this because 1) I hate – passionately, violently, hatefully hate – washing dishes. It is such a gross chore, and it makes my hands all wrinkly and dried out and old lady-ish. And 2) I avoid dishes at all costs. I will leave the sink full of dishes, washing out a coffee cup for the morning and then pointedly ignoring the sink for the rest of the day. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit the embarrassing truth. I have left dishes in the sink so long that mold has grown there and clogged my dish drainer. I totally want to backspace over that in case somebody ever reads this and decides not to be my friend because I’m so disgusting, but I’m going to be brave and leave it.
Anyway, the hugeness of dish-doing has also been accompanied by me attending college again. This is also huge but less so, except for in the huge amount of time I find myself spending reading about topographical maps, streams, and groundwater, and for the huge enormous amount of time spent driving to and from my photography class. Plus actually attending the class is weird because I’m OLD (27 is old, right?) and I haven’t actually gone to a real physical college class since 2001 when a lot of crazy shizz happened and I left mid-semester. It’s so weird to be carting around my notebook and my books and wandering around campus with these kids who were in elementary school when I was graduating from high school. (I feel like that should be an exaggeration, but it’s not, they really were! I graduated in 1997 and if you’re a college freshman you were in what, 6th grade then?) There’s also a niceness to having school again, though – it adds this rhythm to my days that I think was lacking a bit before. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to my life again, instead of just sort of haphazardly living it. And it’s making me feel like family time is all that much more precious – I’m enjoying my Boyo time much more lately. This could also be partly because E has a new job (I should be saying huzzah and hurrah to this, but actually I miss having him home, even though I do like having a few hours in the morning to myself while he’s at work and Boyo is at school). Anyway, before, while E was on unemployment and working from home (read: obsessively refreshing his Flickr and his email and leaving cameras littered across the floor), we saw so much more of each other and I miss that. It was nice going out to the river and watching the fog and talking idly over coffee sometimes.
So, lastly, I am committing here to new leaves in blogdom. I am going to post every weekday for a week or two and see how I feel about it. It should be a good exercise for getting my writing skills back. (for some reason I really wanted to make that skillz and then make a West Coast symbol with my hands. I might not be getting quite enough sleep lately.) So, internet, expect to see much more of me for a while. Huzzah!
Of course I mean the Today show segment on boozy playdates (one glass of wine is a step closer to alcoholism! Watch out!) I watched this piece of unbiased, free-thinking journalism on Friday, and I’m still mad today. I can’t imagine how pissed off Melissa must be. So today I wrote to the Today show to let them know that I am mad, mad, mad; and that the internet is coming to their house to have a drink:
As a long-time reader of Melissa Summers’ Suburban Bliss blog, I was eager to watch her segment on the Today show. Imagine my shock as I saw her skewered by Merideth Viera and Janet Taylor in an obviously anti-drinking, anti-mother piece. Imagine my horror at being labeled a “babysitter” for my own son! Excuse me, Ms. Viera, but I am a mother ALL THE TIME. I do not get days off, I do not get paid, I do not get to go home at the end of the day to a child-free environment. I am always a mother. I am NOT a babysitter unless I am watching somebody else’s kid. The other thing is this: I drink in front of my son. The other night I drank three beers over the course of an afternoon/evening. I did not get drunk. I didn’t get even buzzed. I simply sat at home, playing Connect Four and coloring and making dinner with my family, enjoying a few drinks. As an adult over the age of 21, this is my legal right. As a mother, I feel that I was modeling the responsible consumption of alcohol for my son. Perhaps someday he will look back and be horrified by the fact that his mother was allowed to drink in front of him, when the laws have changed so that he can’t spank his kids or drink near them or parent them at all without consulting The Great American Handbook of How to Parent Correctly. But right now, I am the mother and there’s no handbook, and so I have to do what I feel is right. Personally, I’d rather he see safe, responsible alcohol consumption than go away to college with no reference at all. My ex-boyfriend’s parents never, ever drank and he ended up a raging alcoholic. I’m not saying teetotalers always raise alcoholics, nor am I saying all moderate drinkers raise well-adjusted moderate drinking children – there are always exceptions. But if parents are not there to model behavior for their children, where are children learning to behave? From TV; from magazines; from other, wilder children? From somebody else’s parents? Right now, I know that I am raising my son to be a good, solid person; one who understands moderation and is concerned for the environment and enjoys a good book more than TV. I am his mother and I am proud of what I am doing for him, and I am proud to show him that the world is not always sanitized for his protection, that there are shades of black, white, and gray, and that he has to learn to make his own responsible choices in life.
This is all to say, I think the Today show owes Ms. Summers an apology for the atrocious way she was treated. I think the Today show owes me and every other mother who saw it an apology for calling us “babysitters”. And I think the Today show needs to do another, less-biased, piece about mothers and drinking, along with a piece on fathers and drinking (I am not even going to get into that whole can of worms). And I think Meredith Viera and Janet Taylor need to spend a full week with their kids, no time off, no work, no babysitters, and see what parenting really is, then come back and be so smug and condescending to those of us who are truly in the trenches.
I just deleted my whole blog and decided to start over. This is hard for me because I am the girl who can’t throw anything away. I have pictures from 1995 that are just my blurry hand that I’m hanging onto – you know, just in case I wonder what my hand looked like in 1995, as viewed through a lens smeared with butter. When I was 20, my boyfriend (now husband) helped me clean out my closet at my parents’ house. There was, I kid you not, a layer of clothes and junk 2 feet (perhaps more) deep on the floor in there. Clothes I wore in high school but would never fit in again, clothes so small I couldn’t wear them in high school but was saving for craft project of some sort, a box filled with bad short story paragraphs I’d started as far back as 6th grade, a bunch of notebooks filled with adolescent misery…. My husband is a champion discarder and encouraged me to throw it all away. The sad part is that I look back now, when rightfully it shouldn’t even blip on my radar, and I feel sad about my favorite jeans and my weird 1960’s plaid scottie dog shirt and all those pre-adolescent scribblings being gone forever. I have a hard time letting go, but I read back and decided that this whole blog was, largely, crap. (My husband inadvertantly helped here, since he read a few entries and then sweetly told me that my blog sucked. It was true, though, so I forgive him). Anyway, so here we are. First post.
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I had written this a while ago and then was so scared to post it – first post of the New Me, how final is that? I kept feeling like I need to make it witty and funny and interesting, something that sucks you right in. But the thing is, I don’t know if I am witty and funny (though I am sucky sometimes, ha-ha. I’m starting to joke like my mother…) Anyway, I’m realizing that if I go for perfection, I’ll never post this. Or anything else. So, here goes. Here I am, warts and back fat and stretch marks and all.*
*Note: I don’t really have warts. I do have back fat and stretch marks, but not warts.
