Velvet Verbosity

I was woken up this morning by someone’s emergency somewhere. A line of emergency vehicles sailed past my house with sirens blaring. Fire trucks I think. I buried my head deep under my pillows and pulled the comforter over my head. I wasn’t ready to be awake.

It briefly passed through my mind that whoever was the source of these emergency vehicles rushing around our hazy small town morning probably would like to be sleeping peacefully too. I felt a tinge of sorrow pass through my stomach. Then I remembered that there was a time, not that long ago, when the sound of sirens would have set my teeth on edge from the surge of adrenaline that sound immediately invoked. Back then, my son was in his “angry phase” (as he calls it). He was certainly angry, but there was more going on and it took four years of a good fight to finally land on the doorstep of the right therapist and a novel treatment called neurofeedback. Things are better now. Now I can hear a siren and feel a little irritation, and a little sympathy. Back then, a siren might be followed by a phone call; “Your son is hurt”, or “Your son is in trouble”.

Those years taxed my adrenaline system so much that I started to have responses without any triggers. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and terrified of something that wasn’t there. I tried meditation, therapy, and finally drugs (prescribed of course) to quiet my body’s physical response to danger that had gone haywire. It was understandable. My beloved child was drowning in a dark pond with a rescue team standing all around watching, shaking their heads and telling me they were out of options. They didn’t know what to do. It was up to me, but all of my attempts to save him only served to make him duck and dodge and go under faster. He was like a wounded wild animal, biting and thrashing against the approach of salvation.

So as I listened to the sirens fade into the morning on their way to who knows what personal despair, I could feel some sadness for a stranger that tragedy had visited, but my body was ok. It didn’t rise to fight. I knew my son was downstairs sleeping and he was ok. That was then, this is now.

Evil Kenievel (that would be my 16 year old son) is at it again.  I think he’s trying to break the world record in Emergency Room visits.  He flew off his skateboard yesterday and landed on his arm resulting in a compound fracture.  If you don’t know what that means, it means SERIOUS, BADASS, and BLOODY.  It means bones poking through skin.  Yep, I’m a little more gray today.

I miss libraries. There are few times in my life that I miss, probably because there have been many hard times, but I loved when my children were young and I stayed home with them. I love the term, “stay at home mom”, as though “mom” needs any sort of qualifier. During those years that I “stayed at home”, I and my two children did little staying home. We did a lot of biking, walking, park visiting, people visiting, exploration of the world, and lots and lots of library visits. We were library junkies. Or rather, I was a library junkie and I dragged my kids along to get my fix.

Even though I was a young mother, and quite adamant before having children that I would NEVER have children, I found motherhood almost entirely blissful. Particularly all those hours when it was just the three of us, wandering around our life in a seemingly close to perfect symbiosis. Each day stretched out before us with infinite potential. I don’t judge it, but I’ve never understood parents who put their children in front of the television and walk away for hours at a time. I suppose it’s so they can keep the house clean. But for what? In the end, what real purpose will that have served? You bet our dishes were going to wait when there were probably caterpillars turning into butterflies right outside our door and right that very second. Life was all around us, and I didn’t want to miss a second of living through the eyes of my children as they discovered it. I was so in love with them.

So tonight, when I walked into a public library for the first time in three years, I was washed over with that melancholy nostalgia we feel when life hasn’t gone as we thought it would and we are suddenly reminded of a time that was full of blind hope. Back then, I was so sure that by sharing the world with my children that it was all going to turn out well for them, if not downright perfect. I would feel confident and satisfied as I tucked them each under one arm and read story after story out loud, complete with animated character voices. Everything, back then, was going to be alright. All those days at the library, curled in corners and chairs and beanbags and nooks reading was all the evidence I needed that life was kind and good.

As I walked through the children’s section of the library looking for my, now teenaged, son who was supposed to be there somewhere for community service to make amends for some trouble he got tangled up in, I couldn’t escape those waves of bittersweet sadness and longing. How did everything go wrong? How could it have? Why wasn’t I strong enough for my children, to keep them forever safe, forever in my lap with a book, forever ok?

When I found him finally, I wanted to be happy and carefree and beam that mother-love smile onto his face, but instead my face crumpled into haggard worry and I berated him for being late, for taking chances he shouldn’t, for making me worry, and for not being responsible. Who is this other mother that keeps eclipsing the mother I was and still want to be? How could I know then to let the dishes go, but now I lecture and nag and obsess and worry? How could I know then to not interfere with the unfolding of these two little sentient beings, but now I’ve let the hammer of cultural pressure knock me into senselessness as I hear that other mother tell them what they’ve got to be? How could I have so much grace, patience, strength and compassion back then, and now be reduced to tears, or yelling, or pleading, at the drop of a hat or a forgotten chore?

I’m going back to the library tomorrow, and every day after that until I find her again. The mother I was and still want to be. I know she’s there somewhere.

Hi, my name’s The Mad Sister, aka The Bear, and I’m a chocoholic. The need for chocolate has overtaken my life and affected those I love. Before I found Chocoholics Anonymous, my life had become a blur of chocolate. Late nights with Ben and Jerry, bars of melted chocolate ruining the pockets of my best blue jeans, the adrenaline rushes of stealing chocolate from my mother’s purse to get my fix…there was no end to what I would do to get my chocolate fix every day. I’ve come to rely on the Twelve Steps of Chocoholics Anonymous to restore me to sanity and to Vanilla. I no longer want to live in this chocolate prison!

I share these twelve steps with you today so that you might come back to sanity, come back to the Vanilla. Now that I am 30 SECONDS sober from chocolate, it is time for me to help others. With Valentine’s Day, that most unholy of chocolate consumption days, just around the corner, the matter of chocolate addiction is urgent!

The Twelve Steps of Chocoholics Anonymous

Step 1: We admitted that we were powerless over chocolate in all its forms, but most especially when embedded in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and that our lives had become unmanageable due to obsessive thoughts about chocolate and the coercion necessary to obtain it.
Step 2: We came to believe that a power higher than ourselves could restore us to Vanilla.
Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Vanilla as we understood Vanilla. (boooooring….er, ah, ahem.)
Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and then a fearless chocolate inventory of all our cupboards, pockets, and drawers.
Step 5: We admitted to our higher Vanilla, to ourselves and to another human being the exact daily weight of our chocolate consumption.
Step 6: We became entirely ready to have a Higher Vanilla remove all our defective chocolate seeking taste buds.
Step 7: We humbly asked our Higher Vanilla to remove our shortcomings and all the chocolate at the grocery counter.
Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed in our pursuit of chocolate (and there were many), and became willing to make amends over a hot fudge sundae vanilla shake.
Step 9: We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except if they were eating a chocolate bar at the time.
Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and promptly donated all hidden chocolate stashes to my Mom to the needy.
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Vanilla as we understood it.
Step 12: Having had a Vanilla awakening as the result of these steps, we work to try to carry this message to chocoholics everywhere, and to practice Vanilla in all our affairs.

** A message from Velvet Verbosity, mother to The Mad Sister: “Please pray for The Mad Sister as she battles this insidious addiction. Her constant need for chocolate has brought our family to the brink of financial ruin and torn us asunder. May the Vanilla be with her.”

Image from www.buychocolatecandy.com

This is what happens when you tell your savvy 15 year old daughter that, NO, she cannot get her belly button pierced because it sends the wrong message and all that. And if you don’t know, this is Pink.

A little video entertainment while I’m busy behind the tarp. (The video takes several seconds to start.)
. At the end, it reads, “Time flies, and we fly with it”

There’s a little morning ritual that my daughter likes to go through. It’s called “Not Getting Up if My Life Depended On it”. This morning, I wake her up several times, each time my assertions getting firmer and louder. Finally, she throws off the covers, pops out of the bed and brushes past me heading for the bathroom. I smile a little victory smile and go back to my room to get dressed for the day.

Several minutes into my morning prep, I realize something doesn’t feel right. Things are too…still. Too quiet.

I knock on the bathroom door. No answer. I knock again, still with no answer. There is not a sound coming from behind that bathroom door. Could it be…? I open the door and right there, on the floor, is the Mad Sister curled up on the bathroom rug! And because she’s a teenager, she is actually PUT OUT when I wake her up.

This morning I announced, rather firmly, that I would be canceling internet service and cable television. Evil Knievel and The Mad Sister murmured “whatever” into their pillows and then promptly fell back to sleep because they stay up too late watching television, playing XBox Live, updating their Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and SO on. Not to mention I myself have been staying up way too late blogging, reading blogs, commenting, etc.

What? Did you hear something?

So I will be composing blog posts in Word and then only checking during lunchtime and at the end of the work day for comments. If I’m scarce on your blog, forgive me. I need to reign this in for my family or we’re all going to end up looking like the Simpsons.

Two weeks. That’s the goal.

Ephebiphobia - the fear of teenagers.