19Dec

‘Twas the Friday Before Christmas – LIVE!

Posted by: Bethany in Live-Blog 9 Comments

3: 49p – Coerce 3-year-old into going potty. Change 1-year-old’s diaper. Tuck both girls into bed with their favorite stuffed animals and a kiss. Resist the urge to shout “I’M FREE!!!” as you close their bedroom door.

4:01p – Turn on your favorite Christmas movie of all time, “Love Actually,” and instantly glow from the loveliness it exudes. Retrieve secret cookie recipes from vault and begin to whisk ingredients while watching Colin Firth. Feel sure Mrs. Claus never had it so good.

4:11p – Hear suspicious noise from girls’ room. Pause movie.

4:12p – Discover 1-year-old has managed to turn on the bedroom lights and is sitting in the Lego bin. Put her back to bed. Stuffed animals, kisses, etc.

4:15p – Restart movie and whip butter as light and fluffy as your heart currently feels. Think jolly thoughts. Occasionally swipe a handful teensy taste of cookie dough.

4:26p – Hear suspicious noise from girls’ room. Turn off mixer. Pause movie.

4:27p – Discover 1-year-old sitting in a pile of books, rapturously tearing out pages. Put her back to bed with stuffed animals and admonishments. Pretend not to notice her springing up as you shut the door.

4:30p – Restart movie. Line baking sheets with parchment paper, roll cookies, and deposit in the oven. Sit down to start on secret sparkly elf tasks.

4:39p – Hear suspicious noise from girls’ room. Pause movie. Think bad words.

4:40p – Discover 1-year-old halfway up the ladder to her sister’s bunk bed. (Sister is giggling uncontrollably and egging her on.) Tuck her back in bed with mild threats.

4:43p – Restart movie. Have a hard time concentrating on elfin responsibilities with all the crashes and shouts of glee coming from the girls’ room. Remove first of 400 batches of Christmas cookies from the oven.

4:51p – Can no longer ignore the sounds of merriment issuing from the girls’ room. Pause movie. Say bad words.

4:52p – Discover 3-year-old hanging off the top bunk and 1-year-old dancing a jig on top of her toy dumptruck. Notice a decidedly un-festive odor surrounding her. Escort 3-year-old to the potty and change 1-year-old’s diaper. Identify with the Grinch. Strongly.

4:58p – Duct-tape 1-year-old into bed. Agree to let 3-year-old, who says she is not tired, not at all tired, in fact she has never been less tired, can’t she stay up, pleeeeeeaaaase? play quietly on the living room floor amidst the remnants of your Christmas spirit.

5:01p – Eject movie. Retrieve sense of humor. Turn on holly-jolly dancing tunes and bake the remaining 399 batches of cookies with the sweetest (and most talkative!) 3-year-old helper this side of the North Pole. Dream up Christmas goodies for favorite husband and daughters and know with certainty that Mrs. Claus never had it so good.

17Dec

Christmas Shovels

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

It’s perfectly normal to have a violent allergic reaction to the sound of coughing, yes? To feel your sanity slowly dismembered with every raspy bark? To fantasize about intubating your sweet sick daughter who can’t stop coughing any more than she can stop being three, but still… THERE ARE LIMITS TO HUMAN ENDURANCE.

Christmas preparations are in full swing—piles of presents to wrap, photos to edit, a solid ton of cookie dough chilling on the balcony—but every time I think of tackling a project, I run smack-dab into a shovel (name that book/film!). First, I smashed my thumb into smithereens. (It continues to leak interesting substances and sulk in its room listening to emo.) Then, a shelf corner deliberately planted itself in the path of my forehead. Oh yes, I also got mild food poisoning after a delightful lunch with relatives of a well-known Italian actress who is married to a well-known French actor (10 points if you figure out who!). Dan’s been sick, Sophie’s sprouting molars*, and now poor Miss Natalie is home sick. COUGHING. This holiday is seriously doomed.

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* About that, teething bites. Hehe.

11Dec

Dramatic License

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

Husband, gently: “Aren’t you being just a wee bit dramatic?”

Me, dramatically: “NO! See that gray glob on the kitchen floor? Those are Sophie’s lungs that she screamed out this morning, and next to it are two-thirds of the thumb I slammed in the car door earlier. And next to THAT are the shredded remains of any talent I used to possess, and of course the enormous puddle seeping under the fridge is my sanity.”

I am never anything but strictly literal, you see.

—

One particular Thursday, over six years ago, Dan sat down in a senior college class lovingly dubbed “Stupid English” and asked the girl next to him if she was having any fun. The girl, who was at that moment being introduced as the class tutor, allegedly told him “Shhhh.” I have no recollection of doing such a thing, but I do remember looking forward to every Thursday morning thereafter. (It had less to do with the Stupid English and more to do with the Future Husband, though I wouldn’t have admitted that at first.)

“Stupid Thursday” has since lived up to its name. The first year of our marriage, we began to notice increasingly stupid things happening each Thursday. Tripping in public, food burning, cars dying, bread landing butter-side-down. By now, catastrophes are a common Thursday occurrence. Today, it was a rusty hacksaw of a molar boring through Sophie’s gums, my thumb discovering just how flat it can get, and Natalie’s lovely flower-shaped Danish Butter Cookies melting to a gooey mess in the oven… not to mention lesser ills like all dropping my keys in the rain while my arms were already full and my freshly-bloodied thumb was screaming obscenities… or all the dirty silverware being dumped out by a family member (no names, but “Sophie” does come to mind)… or stovetop spills or stains on clean clothes or an entire half-chewed banana ending up under the kitchen table.

It is such a relief that days like this are in no way related to my gross incompetence or the inherent need of toddlers to create disasters. No, it’s merely Stupid Thursday, which 1] gives me unlimited license to be dramatic (not that I ever am. ahem.), and [2] means that tomorrow is Not A Thursday. Joy!

10Dec

The Old Man is Snoring

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Because sometimes Shel Silverstein says it best…

Rain

I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain,
And it dripped in my head
And flowed into my brain,
And all that I hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of the rain in my head.

I step very softly,
I walk very slow,
I can’t do a handstand–
I might overflow,
So pardon the wild crazy thing I just said–
I’m just not the same since there’s rain in my head.

4Dec

Ducks AWOL

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

It’s a little after midnight, and I really should be in bed. If a 24-hour virus hadn’t made bed a necessity, my 8 a.m. dentist appointment tomorrow certainly should… but I can’t pull myself off the couch just yet. It’s been a hard couple of days. On Monday, Sophie snuggled up to me on the rocking chair and sweetly threw up 15 gallons of curdled milk. I came down with it yesterday around lunch, then Natalie at bed time last night, then Dan this morning, and I would just about trade my soul for a sick day right now. Just one day to settle into my skin without dishes piling up or little tears to wipe. Paid leave to hibernate under the covers and figure out who the heck I am again.

I feel as though my reserves of mothering strength have worn down over the last few weeks through rainy days and too many bouts of sickness, but mommies can’t be pansies. No, every bit of strength goes by instinct to the girls, which means other things suffer—marriage, health (ha!) career aspirations (ha2!). Nothing is terrible right now… just a little frayed. Too tired to exercise, too tired to write, too tired to fully engage my mind with my husband’s, too tired to shut down the computer and go to bed already.

When I was in school, autumn never lagged like this. A little by late November, sure, but there were always still tidy typed deadlines and bursts of knowledge to keep my mind churning along.  Without that pressure, without someone dictating most of my time to me, I feel grossly incapable. I come up with aspirations for myself, then divide them by two little daughters, then subtract housecleaning duties, then lower them by several degrees of self-esteem… and still I can never seem to reach. It sure looks a lot like failure around here.

This isn’t exactly how I wanted this year to end. I guess I supposed that 2008 was going to be the year I would get my ducks in a row… but here I am, and one of those ducks is lost somewhere under the couch, and one is partying in Bali, and one drowned just four hours ago under a deluge of preschool vomit, and six are wearing cool glasses in NYC getting published without me, and one tiny one is pecking around in the fridge for something resembling food. The ducks, they’re decidedly NOT in a row, and I’m not sure how okay I am with that. I can’t get to officially living my life until they are, right?

Probably not. I’ve always like John Lennon’s quote, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” though I kind of hate it when it applies to me. I enjoy my plans working from time to time… but I’m pretty sure that nothing—plans or life or ducks-getting-in-a-row—is going to happen tonight. Perhaps I should get myself tucked responsibly into bed to get some of that sleep I keep complaining about not having, eh?

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P.S. – If you like getting surprises in your mailbox, the holiday goodie from my last entry still stands!

1Dec

Gloom and Cheer

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

My little sister is sixteen and gorgeous. She sports a sparkly little nose stud, stylish clothes, and a haircut adorable enough to kill. She brims over with smiles, and in the Thanksgiving pictures, she and my mom are cheek-to-cheek with matching lipgloss, making silly faces together. I grin at the photos, but I can’t help the urgent stinging under my eyelids.

It’s not jealousy. I love my sister, and I’m quite honestly delighted with my current life. However, I wasn’t when I was her age. Frumpiness was thrust upon me young, and I spent nearly every moment of my early teenage years sinking with humiliation. Sinking and hiding. My mother—burdened with griefs I’m only now beginning to understand—never smiled at me. We never giggled together or shared makeup or staged silly photos. Any photos, for that matter. And when I see my beautiful sister and my beautiful mom having fun together, it inflames my war wounds. I may be a decade and an ocean removed from my past, but recovery still eludes.

Holidays in particular bring out the tangles in my emotions. No matter how happy I am with my sweet husband and precious girls, I can’t entirely forget the family life that once hurt me so deeply—the tense mealtimes, the clouds of violence, and the Christmastime hopes that always failed to fully materialize. While the New Year rang in on my fifteenth year, I lay in bed discussing suicide with myself. Happy holidays!

If I could ask any gift from my sister this year, it would be a memory—just one would do, and I’d return it in perfect condition. If I could just once remember my teenage self feeling beautiful or treasured or brimming over with shared smiles… well, Christmas would be a bit easier to look forward to.

—

With the gloom worked out of my system, I have to say that I really am excited about this month. We’re planning Christmas crafts and outreach projects and deliciously sneaky shopping trips with frost-tipped noses and hot chocolate at the end. One of my favorite parts of the holiday is planning gifts for friends, and I certainly can’t overlook the wonderful blog community this year. My husband may be getting tired of me telling him how much I like the internet, but I really do. I’m madly in love with it. I love having a place to spill my thoughts and having you all sop them up for me, and I love the way gratuitous kindness can spread unhindered across the globe. I know it’s not much, but I’m excited to send out a little end-of-the-year gift to you in time for Christmas. (Hint: It’s a recipe, and it’s Italian, and I promise it will be in the best interest of your happiness… and that of your sweet tooth. Enough said.) Just e-mail me with your mailing address, and I’ll send an envelope of holiday cheer your way! ‘Tis the season… and I’m grateful for you all.

26Nov

Mismatched Socks

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Thirteen minutes, by my calculations, until the girls are awake… or at least half-awake, rosy from sleep, and needing closeness. Such little time, and as always—do I do, or do I write?

I think constantly these days about something Jenn Mattern once wrote, about her writing not being widely accepted because it was too haphazard. Too funny and too serious all at once with no firm publishable constant. That’s me, I think. My writing style is as steadfast as mismatched socks… much like my days, swooping from hilarity to dejection and always the vague sense that I’m not getting it right. I hesitate so often to blog because I just don’t know where to take this next. This isn’t a mommy blog or an ex-pat blog or a humor blog or a depression blog. It’s the unwashed contents of my brain, and who really wants to see that?

I’m in wildly different emotional territory than I was a year ago, but I can still feel these gray mornings tugging like gravity. I lie in bed until the last possible moment and wish and wish I knew what to expect throughout the day. The week. The month. Every uncharted moment faces me like a linebacker as I try to figure out if I am really as messy as I feel right now. Who knows? Maybe these daily giggles and heartaches are more of a gorgeous mosaic rather than a mess. I can’t help but hope so, at any rate… And until I figure out what kind of mosaic it is, this will just have to be a haphazard blog. Thank you for braving me.

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