::: true story tuesday: stuffed brainwashers :::

Did you know that stuffed animals are aliens who were sent to earth to transform children's brains into nostalgic gobs of senseless, sentimental goo?

I know this because a kid can have a whole swimming pool full of these things, see another one in the store, and immediately become brainwashed. I remember standing in the aisle of K-Mart when I was about ten, crying uncontrollably over the thought of leaving behind the sad-eyed brown furry bear that had brainwashed me. I was sure it would be sad, alone, frightened and pine for me for the rest of its sad, lonely, frightened life.

And, yes, I do remember being fond of the book Corduroy.

I had enough stuffed animals to completely cover my bed. Each one was very special. And I just don't mean that they each had names. They had personality traits, relationships, feelings. The stuffed animal that had the most power over my little child brain was a red and yellow bear named with the same originality as my cat, Kitty. My bear's name was Teddy.

Teddy was given to me by my parents when I was very, very young. Before I could even talk, actually. Teddy was a gift to me when I was only a tiny baby. In fact, I believe Teddy was a gift to me for when I came to live with my parents.

I don't know the whole story, because my parents were so incredibly protective of me, but I do know, and always knew, that I was adopted. That was never a secret. But information about my biological parents (not my "real" parents, I was constantly told, but my "biological" parents. My "real" parents were the ones who raised me) was very guarded. I think my "real" parents were too freaked out to tell me about my "biological" parents because they thought I'd pack my bags and go back to them or something. As if. My "real" parents were very much real to me. My biological parents were strangers. Only my real parents would tuck me into bed every single night and pretend that they couldn't tell which one was me amidst my mountain of brainwashing stuffed animals.

When I was a very young child, my mom was an excellent mother. She would sit by my bed and sing to me, running her fingers very gently over my closed eyelids and my soft eyebrows. This was such a magical feeling. I loved how it felt so much that I would keep my eyes closed long after she'd stopped, because I didn't want to lose that magical feeling or break its spell. I can almost still feel her fingertips on my eyelids. I try, now, to use this technique on my own children. They're not so easily enchanted.

At some point in my little life, my mom decided to bring out a good friend of hers to introduce to me. Barney was a very big, very old teddy bear that was given to my mom when she was a child. I thought it was strange but also kind of cool that a grown-up would keep a teddy bear, and that they would call it by an actual name. My mom trusted me enough to borrow Barney for a while, but it was always very clear to me that Barney was her bear, not mine. While I thought this was a rather selfish thing, for an old person to keep a teddy bear from a little kid, I didn't argue about it. If she wanted to be a grown woman and get all freaky about a stupid old bear, that was fine with me.

Still, I dressed Barney in some nice clothes, a sweater and a pair of jeans, and introduced him to the rest of my stuffed family. From that point on, Barney spent a lot of time on my beds. When I had a camera, I would get Barney, Teddy and all the other stuffed brainwashers in line and photograph them. My dad would give me such a hard time about this. "Film is so expensive! Why do you waste it by taking pictures of your stuffed animals?" Mostly, though, he would just make fun of me. You'd think I was the world's biggest idiot for going to Washington DC on a fifth grade trip and taking pictures of the pigeons instead of the Washington Monument. Big deal. The monument would be there forever. These pigeons were gonna take off. Seriously.

I never regretted taking pictures of my stuffed animals. Sure, I felt silly about it sometimes, but regret? No. After all, these animals were just as much a part of my family as my "real" parents were. As a matter of fact, one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to my little brainwashed self was when we came home from a long drive, returning from West Virginia to visit my mom's relatives. When we arrived home, one of my thoughtless, inconsiderate parents opened the hatchback and Teddy FELL OUT of the car onto the hard, rough gravel driveway. I knew immediately that he was dead and went directly into the process of grieving.

Yes, I was a drama queen.

But it wasn't all my fault! I mean, my mom took my bear very seriously, almost as seriously as she took her own. Once every few months, she would cut a little slit in the seam on the back of Teddy's neck, take out all of his stuffing, and wash his body in the washing machine. After he had been fluffed dry, she would carefully re-stuff him, adding more fluff if necessary, restitch any places that were in need of restitching, and fix any facial features that were in danger of falling off. And then, she would carefully re-stitch that seam in the back of his neck and it would take me days to get his stuffing back the way I liked it.

It was understandable that Teddy needed an occasional bath. I took him absolutely everywhere. And I'm sure I threw up, peed and drooled on him and I most definitely know that I cried on him. He understood so much more than anyone ever did. He understood my heartaches, tears, and all of the unfairness of a child's life. Teddy stood by me. Or rather, sat by me. Or kinda hung limp beside me.

As I grew older, Teddy and I remained close, but Barney and I grew apart. After all, he was my mom's teddy bear. He just shouldn't be around, I thought, when I cried to Teddy about the bad words my mom would say to me, the bad words she would say to my dad, the bad names she would call us both, the embarrassing stories she would tell her friends about me, the fists that struck me, the hands that slapped me. Barney could never have understood the feelings I had. But Teddy did.

Teddy remains with me still. He went with me when I moved out of the house at age 18, no longer able to stand the mental and physical abuse my mom continually dosed out. He stayed with me through a failed engagement, many jobs, several apartments, and a handful of boyfriends. He continued to offer a shoulder (or head, or tummy, or back) to cry on.

 
Shortly after I moved out, Barney left with my mom when she divorced my dad and moved out of the home in which we'd lived for almost my whole life. My dad lived there alone for a while, but since my grown, adult parents couldn't come to an agreement on how their stuff should be divided, and since the divorce continued to get uglier and uglier, they sold the house. My childhood home was no longer mine, and all of my stuff, everything in my yellow room, including Miss Kitty, disappeared from my life forever.

But I still have Teddy, and every once in a while, I'll turn him over and run my fingers along the seam in his back

::: it was easier to fly slicing potatoes :::

As long as I can remember, my father has taught me fear. Don't take risks, don't take chances, don't dream dreams or trust others. Just fear. I didn't recognize it as fear when I was a child and was told that if I was ever found riding my bike on the road, it would be locked up forever. Living on a rural piece of property with no good riding land, I just never rode my bike. I wasn't allowed to spend the night with friends, go on dates or take walks. I wasn't allowed to have poor friends, black friends, hispanic friends or friends whose parents were divorced. I still had them, of course, because my dad, in spite of how much he loved me in his own way, wasn't really involved in my life.

Still, his fear branded me, instilling in me an unhealthy obsession with freak accidents and a very vivid imagination (okay, maybe God gave me the imagination, but my dad helped me with the vivid part). To this day, if one of my children has gone overseas, or over to the neighbor's house, if they are jumping on the bed or jumping on the trampoline, if they are climbing ladders or climbing trees, he's there, fretting, warning, instilling fear.

I was cutting potatoes for dinner when The Baby came running into the kitchen, her pink My Little Pony from McDonald's held firmly in her grip.

"Can I help cut potatoes?" she asked, grabbing one of the wet potatoes from the bowl. My first reaction was to tell her no, that I'm busy, that I want to get this done quickly.

And then I heard my father's voice behind me. Literally. He was sitting at the counter reading the paper, and I heard him say, "No, no, no. You'll cut yourself."

And then I remembered my grandmother, my father's mom, placing a potato in my hand long after I should have learned to cut potatoes, showing me how to cut towards my thumb, letting the blade meet the pad of my thumbprint. She taught me to peel them so that a long, unbroken string of brown peeling would fall to the counter with each peeled, naked potato.

I also remembered my husband's grandmother teaching me, long after I should have known, that potatoes need to be started in cold water when making mashed potatoes.

I took a knife from the utensil crock and handed it to The Baby. She dropped the My Little Pony on the wet countertop, taking the knife into her hand. It took a few tries to show her the right way to hold the potato, the right way to hold the knife, to keep her fingers out of the way, to angle the blade toward the pad of her own thumb, but soon she was peeling potatoes, cutting them into cubes and dropping them into the big pot full of cold water, which went onto the hot stove, and was turned into delicious whipped potatoes with browned butter, which she brought to me in a little vintage bowl and asked me to photograph.

I know that my father loves me. I know that he loves and wants to protect his grandchildren. But I will choose today not to allow my children to be bound by fear, not to let others bind them to fear, and we will both be better for it.  And maybe my father will even be better for it, too.

::: true story tuesday: crushed :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share a true story about my life.

Jimmy was one of the most handsome men in the whole world. He had wavy black hair, very big brown eyes, and the most friendly smile ever. I knew that our lives together would be very happy, and that he would treat me like a queen. Every word he spoke to me was like honey. Every look he gave me sent chills down my spine. Spending the rest of my life with Jimmy was all I could think about. I knew that I would have plenty of time to think about him, too, for the rest of my life.

Jimmy was in my first grade class.

It's so funny that a six-year-old child can have such strong romantic feelings, but I definitely did. I was very serious about Jimmy and could barely concentrate on learning my addition facts or staying inside the lines with someone as cute as he was sitting in the same room with me. And the thing about Jimmy wasn't just that he was cute. He was nice, too! He always had a polite word to say, and a nice smile on his face, and a nice answer for the teacher. There was no better word for him. He was just nice.

You would think, with as nuts about Jimmy as I was, that everyone would know how I felt. But they didn't. Not even Jimmy. He was, and remained until now, my secret crush. Sure, I've mentioned him a time or two. Why not? Jimmy and I were classmates from kindergarten all the way through graduation. But I never shared with anyone exactly how I felt about Jimmy. Not my friends, my other classmates, and especially not my parents.

As a matter of fact, I think that my relationship (or non-relationship, actually) with Jimmy was the conversation piece (or non-conversation piece, actually) that set the tone for communication (or non-communication, actually) with my parents for the rest of my life. I remember, very distinctly, sitting in my room watching T.V., because as an only child, it was totally understandable that I would have my own television in my room, and since my dad was (and still is) a T.V. junky, it only makes sense that there would be T.V.s in every room in the house, including mine. I was probably watching Sesame Street, or The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie. It seems like it was evening, so I could have been watching The Brady Bunch or Sonny and Cher, too. But I remember that I was totally immersed in the show and not really interested in having a conversation. But here came my mom. And somehow, I felt very uncomfortable with her there in my room. I sensed that she was sabotaging me, somehow, and I didn't even know what that word meant when I was six years old. But there I was, and here was this uncharacteristic visit from my mother, right in the middle of one of my favorite shows. Maybe, in all fairness, she was just trying to bond with me. Maybe she had just been thinking, like I often do as a mother, that she should be spending quality time with me instead of letting me sit in my room watching hour after hour of television. But I definitely had the feeling that I was being set up. So here she was, in my room, sitting on my beanbag chair, and she was asking me about my day at school. I may be wrong, but I don't think it was the first day of school, and it wasn't like my mother at all to ask me about my day (at least not that I remember). She just wasn't a milk-and-cookies-when-you-get-home kind of mom.

After a few seconds of chit-chat about who-knows-what, she asked me.

"So...do you have any little boyfriends?"

I knew it. Sabotage. Maybe it was in the way she tried to slip into my room and be all nicey-nice. Maybe it was because of the way she worded the question, so demeaning, "any little boyfriends." Whatever it was, it totally set me off. I, even in my little six-year-old head, was offended by my mother's allusions to my immaturity and childlike silliness.

And it was at this point that I made the decision that would affect my relationship with my mother for the rest of my life.

I lied.

"No." I answered. That was it. Nothing else.

And I went back to watching The Six Million Dollar Man or Sanford and Son, or whatever I was watching. It could even have been Hawaii Five-O, because I just wasn't paying attention anymore. All I could think of was that my mom found out, somehow, about Jimmy, and that she was trying to weasel her way into my personal life, and I just wasn't about to let her.

This was a trend that continued all through my at-home years. Never, not even once, did I share with my mother about my crushes, boyfriends or even my fiances. Somehow I knew that she had some strange ulterior motive, that she was too overprotective or jealous to be trusted with such sensitive information.

I also vowed that I would never refer to my daughters' crushes as her "little boyfriends."

And I never have.

::: the incredible sweet corn massacre :::

Yes, there were some tears. Yes, my back and feet are aching. But now we have twenty-two quarts of corn and five quarts of basil in the freezer. There's still a ton (Okay, maybe not a ton. Maybe a few gallons.) more basil to harvest, but some will be pesto and some will go into sauce and bruschetta. Most of it, though, will be put into more freezer bags and pulled out in the middle of winter when heating up the oven to make pizza is more fun than it is during this hot, humid August.

An Owlish Kind of Morning

Often early in the mornings, my dad, who lives with us, will come knocking on my door either to ask me for help with something, or to tell me he's going somewhere or to show me some critter. This morning, much earlier than usual, I stumbled to my bedroom door, managed to find the doorknob, twisted it open and, saw this:

It took me a few minutes to realize what it was, but then my brain adjusted, and I realized that it was an Eastern Screech Owl. Apparently it had flown into the cabin on our property where my dad is spending his summer and he caught it to send it back out into the world, but not before we woke everyone in the house to show them what Pop had found, each in turn saying sleepily, "What is that?" or "Is it real?" since it sat so perfectly still within Pop's firm grip. Then we took it onto the porch where it flew off into the east, on its search for a quieter place to sleep for the day.

Since I'm not usually up that early, I strolled around outside with my camera.

::: a walk on the trail :::

Of snow and scarves and hats and men

Man, check out that snow. It's like a shake-em-up after all of the big flakes have fallen and the after-effects of the giant hand have stopped. The air is almost perfectly still, and just the little bits and wisps of tiny, delicate flurries remain. The birds are totally into the feeders right now, especially the suet, and while I sit here, a little downy woodpecker is hanging off the suet grate, sending out gentle chips and chirps, not eating, really, but just hanging there, basking in the comfort that energy and sustenance is right beneath his feet.

It's a still and peaceful morning. Bo has trudged off to his new job (as of about five months ago) as the production manager of a local chocolate company, the children are nestled all snug in their beds (even the eldest, I'm sure, who is making the most of that bohemian bent she gets from her father now that she's a freshman in college), and even the dogs are silent, all six of them, dotted here and there throughout the house, some under covers with children, some snuggled together in a pile of cast-off clothing that's not good enough for the thrift store, and one curled up on the soft blanket behind me. Even my live-in father, who rises early to indulge himself in one of his favorite obsessive activities, vacuuming, is still off in dreamland.

It won't last long, this silence. In less than an hour, Sweetheart and I will be scrambling to get to piano lessons, stuffing ourselves into our winter layers and wrapping scarves around our necks. I might even wear my hat, which is something I love to do but am still not convinced that I can actually pull it off. Some people's heads are made for hats. Some people have just the right distance between their eyebrows and their hairlines. I, however, have eyebrows that get lost under ever hat I wear, and it makes me look like a very serious swimmer who has shaved off all of his body hair to gain speed. This hat, however, looks halfway decent on me. At least I think it does when I first put it on. After a while, I think it just looks silly, which irks me because I really want to be the kind of person who can pull off wearing a hat.

Scarves, however, I can do, because anyone with a neck can do a scarf, and so I proudly don the masterpiece I created in honor of Bo's 36th birthday. It's made of this beautiful natural, earthy brown wool from Australia, which has no meaning whatsoever, other than it's natural and it's earthy and it's brown. But everything else about the scarf has meaning, symbolism. It's 36 stitches wide, to represent the number of years Bo had been on the planet at that time. It's 6'2" long, which is how tall he was when he'd been on the planet for 36 years. It has 13 ribs, which represents how many years we'd been married at that time. And it took me for. eh. ver. to make the thing. Ribbing and I are not good friends. I've tried several ribbed projects and always seem to mess them up somehow. But I was determined with this one, so I kept at it. And now it's done, and it's still beautiful six years later. Problem: Bo doesn't really wear it. Solution: I do. And I love how I can toss one end ever-so-carelessly over my shoulder and the other end still hangs past my belly button. It matches my style, my general color choices (earth tones and blacks) and I am unabashedly proud that I made it. I used to resist wearing it because it belonged to Bo, but now I think it belongs to me. He's just not a scarf-wearer, even though he has a neck and everything. Even though I always knew I'd have a Great Gatsby dresser in my stash of immediate male relatives, I just don't. They don't like khaki pants, or crisp white shirts, or those very cool haircuts that men had in the 20's. For me, a pocket watch chain draped from a pair of tan pleated pants is such a turn-on, just about as much as a simple pair of jeans and a white t-shirt. Classic. Quite sexy. And while I've recently talked Bo into wearing white t-shirts (love it, love it, love it), I don't think the crisp dress shirt, pocket watch and khakis are coming along anytime soon, and it seems I'm out of men, with my sons prefering much more casual attire.

And now I hear the click of the microwave door as my father starts his daily rituals of coffee, the telling of terrible news stories, and reminders of what I must do today. And then the vacumming will begin.

The silence is broken. It's time for me to get going with my day.

What Is It with Us and Winter? A Tragedy Averted

For some reason, winter is always a problem for us. Terrible things seem to happen during winter. One year, I was very overdue with The Baby and my dad ruptured several discs in his back. We were living in a small cabin with no indoor bathtub or toilet and there was ice everywhere. For my dad to get back and forth to Ol' Rosy (the outhouse) was impossible, so he had to use a bedpan, which spilled on several occasions. I, and my very pregnant belly, spent a lot of time close to the floor that winter cleaning nasty messes.

Then one year our whole family got sick. Pneumonia, bronchitis, sinusitis, laryngitis--you name it, we had it. Bo was sicker than he'd ever been, unable to sleep and in terrible pain. On Christmas eve, I'd still not put up decorations, wrapped gifts, or anything. We were in the middle of building a house and everything just seemed hopeless.

Two years ago, we had a horrible ice storm and were without power for a week over the Christmas holiday.

Because we live on a hill, getting into the driveway once the winter weather hits is quite a challenge. The first winter we lived here, we were driving home from visiting friends up north and arrived home very late, to the tune of 2 a.m. When we reached our road, it was clear that we wouldn't be taking that route with our big van, so we tried an alternate route. That route was completely drifted over, a fact we didn't discover until we'd unsuccessfully attempted to navigate it and ended up back-end first in a snow drift. With a two-week old baby, four kids and a young guest in the car, we tried to figure out what to do. It was a two-mile walk in the drifting snow, by now it was 3 a.m, and we couldn't run the engine for fear of the tailpipe being blocked by the drift. We'd die of carbon monoxide poisoning. My husband had his cell phone and called my dad to rescue us. He got the Jeep stuck in a snowdrift and staggered through the storm a 1/2 mile to be stranded with us. We finally called a neighbor who brought his truck and shuttled us to our drive, where we trudged uphill and then steeply downhill to our littel cabin in the woods.

This year, we've had very mild weather. Until today. It was great for sledding and snowboarding, but when we arrived home from church, we were unable to get our van up the drive. That was tolerable this morning; there was nothing to carry. But this evening, we had fourteen gallon-jars filled with raw milk, a sleeping toddler, three bags of groceies and a few sundries to haul.

We decided to get out and push.

The three older kids and I got behind the van and pushed as hard as we could. At first, we didn't seem to make any headway, but then we moved it a couple of feet. The frightening thing was that everytime we seemed to get the thing moved, one of us would lose footing and the van would start sliding backwards. I thought for sure I was going to end up on the ground with the van sliding over me.

But we made it up the hill and into the parking area. There, we realized that our Jeep was parked on the wrong side of the garage, which would make it difficult to unload the van.

"Do you want to move the Jeep, or do you want me to?" asked Bo.

"Doesn't matter," I answered.

"I'll do it, then." And he hopped out of the car, leaving the van running.

Sweetheart asked if she could play in the snow. Her brothers had run down the hill after pushing the van instead of riding inside of it, and she thought it unfair that she'd not get to throw a few snowballs, too.

"It's dark," I protested. She lamented from the back seat.

The next thing I knew, fifteen-year-old Houdin was yelling Sweetheart's name. I looked over to see her lying on the ground behind the Jeep, the vehicle still moving slightly. It stopped, and Sweetheart scrambled to her feet, and then collapsed in frantic tears. My darling daughter had almost been backed over by her own father. He hadn't seen her. How could he have? She'd been bent to the ground to pack a snowball. I hadn't even realized she'd left the van.

While sixteen-year-old Bard was helping Sweetheart into the house and comforting her, Bo finished maneuvering vehicles and then began unloading the milk from the van. As I was putting away the mountains of hats, gloves and scarves, I hear a crash and a yell. I raced into the garage to see that one of the crates of milk had fallen out of the back of the van, shattering a glass bottle and breaking the lid off of a plastic one. Bo was beside himself with frustration.

At the same time all of this was going on, my dad was kneeling in the back of the van with his feet sticking out of the side, extracting The Baby from her carseat where she was groggily talking to him. I closed the front passenger door...on my dad's foot.

I'm not sure why these things happen in winter, but they seem to be very attracted to us. It made me think about how many things could go wrong during the day and how blessed we are that these things were potential tragedies, not real ones. At church tonight, someone announced that in a nearby city a car had slid off the bridge and crashed through the guardrail into the river. They still had located neither the car nor the passengers. How horrible those people must have felt. How terribly frightened they must have been as they realized what was happening to them, to see that river rushing toward them just before impact and to feel the icy water close in around them. My prayers immediately went up for them.

I don't know why God spared Sweetheart tonight. A foot or two further, and we might be in serious mourning right this moment. But we're all safe, as a family. We're warm and alive and blessed to be so.

I don't know, either, what it is about winter that brings these challenges, but if they come to you, too, during this time of year, please be safe and count your blessings.

Peace to you.

::: the attack of sweet tooth :::

Every year for Christmas, all of the kind people in our whole neighborhood distribute plates of home-baked goodies to each other. Because the majority of my neighbors are Amish, we have some absolutely amazing baked goods on Christmas day and before, and plenty of them.

Beginning a few days before Christmas, they come. They walk up the driveway in their plain clothes, men in black hats or stocking-caps worn way up high on their heads, women in their white bonnets, strings dangling over their shoulders, and they bear plates full of home-baked pies, sugar cookies, thumbprints, Buckeyes, chocolate chip, snack mixes, pretzel clusters, chocolate-dipped Oreos...the list goes on. They bring them early so that folks can serve them on Christmas day.

Though my intentions are always good, I tend to bring up the rear. We pretty consistently deliver our gifts on Christmas Eve or, more often, the days following Christmas. For me, I guess, that extends the season a bit, gives folks something they can savor after all of the other stuff has run out. Sounds like a good marketing strategy, doesn't it? It's not all that intentional. It's actually justification for my being too busy to get it all done. What am I usually busy doing?

Why, baking, of course.

The explanation of where all that baking goes is simple. I have a dishonest, unrelentless sweets addict in my house who will devour anything that is not totally and completely hidden, locked-up or removed from the premises, and, furthermore, will stop at practically nothing find and consume the sweets.

My father, who lives with us, is notorious for eating sweets in large quanitities. The kids tell the story of how they locked their holiday candy into a little locker. He literally ran over it with the car to get it open. They go to great lengths to secure their goodies, but he always finds them somehow, and gets all angry and self-defensive when he's discovered. The kids have actually created a comic strip series where he is the bad guy, Sweet Tooth, and they are doing their best to prevent him from doing his dastardly deeds. When I bake cookies or make candies, buy cookies or candies, they must be completely secured, or they will, definitely, be gone. Ice cream doesn't stand a chance. Since I don't have a freezer with a lock, I must buy ice cream in massive quantities if we expect to have any. Last year, there was a sale on Breyers--$2 a half-gallon--and I bought about twelve half-gallons. Before I knew it, he had eaten over half of it. He'll consume a half-gallon in one night during a series of midnight snacks. It doesn't matter how I threaten or beg. It doesn't matter if I guilt or coerce. It doesn't matter if his blood pressure is up or his cholesterol is high. He'll just take a new medication to fix it. And, since he rides a bicycle ever day for 20-30 miles, his body doesn't look any worse for the wear (though, at a little over 60, all of his teeth literally rotted and fell out and he had to have very expensive dentures made last year). He has a sick addiction. And what's worse, if the goodies are forbidden, that's even better. If I buy him a sack of candy just for himself, he will hardly touch it. He'll give it all away to the children. But if the children get an Easter basket full of goodies, he'll have them gone before you can say Peter Rabbit.

This year, I made dozens and dozens of cookies, several kinds of shortbreads, hand-dipped Buckeyes, and a batch of vanilla caramels that had to be boiled to the right temperature, cooled for several hours, cuts into bite-sized pieces, and wrapped in little hand-cut squares of wax paper. These last little treats were placed in a grocery bag and hidden deep in the confines of my closet. All of the other goodies were consumed almost as quickly as I could make them. If they weren't hidden well enough, they would become part of a midnight snack, which I would not realize had occured until it was time to break them out to make the gift plates. This is a struggle every year, for every holiday, and during every baking session.

One evening, two of my former co-workers from the cheesehouse came by and brought us dinner. It was such a lovely thought and such a delicious dinner, and I was so glad to have them here, that I decided to show my appreciation by breaking out the caramels and giving them each a few. Goodbyes were said. Hugs were given. Greetings of the season were tossed over shoulders as they headed out the door. And I, in the busyness of it all, forgot to confine the caramels.

When it was time to make the goody plates, the entire bag-- several pounds of hand-wrapped caramels--were completely gone.

You would think I would learn. Because this, my friends, is not the first time this has happened.

Several years ago, during the Christmas of 2000, the kids and I made a half-dozen batches of caramels and hand-pulled molasses taffy. We wrapped them each in their little wax paper blankies. Our plan was to make up plates for all of our friends and neighbors (we lived in the city at the time) and go caroling. I never would have dreamed that all of those candies, probably ten to twelve pounds in all, would have disappeared. Yet when I went to take them from the cupboard, they were all gone. Every last one of them. When I asked the sweets thief about them, he confessed (which came as more of an announcement than a confession)to taking them with him to work and distributing them to his co-workers.

He gave our caramels away to people I don't even know. Without asking. All that work and time and hope was gone.

When I reminded him of this after his last caramel-scarfing episode, he didn't remember that at all. Or, more accurately, he pretended not to remember.

Because that's his other maddening trait. He pretends he didn't do it. He pretends to forget he did it. Or, with a terribly annoying smirk on his face, he blames it on The Baby (or whichever child happens to be the baby at the time). Or the dog. Or a burglar. Or the potbellied pig.

I don't know why this gets under my skin so much, but it does. It absolutely infuriates me. I feel my heart begin to race, and I feel my temper flare, and I feel I have no control, and I lose it. I say the most angry things to my dad. I guess, mostly, because I know how much work it took to make those things, or how, when I or the kids get candy as a gift, we savor it, keep it for when we really want it, and he doesn't. It doesn't mean anything to him. The time doesn't mean anything. The effort and care doesn't mean anything. It's just sugar. And there's never enough. He just scarfs it down with no apology and no compassion. Just lame jokes and a stupid smirk.

So, with all of the pre-holiday cookies being devoured as quickly as I could bake them, and all of the caramels and Buckeyes stolen by the despicable candy thief, I arose early on the day after Christmas and baked. And baked. And baked. And baked. And I stood watch over every cookie and every piece of toffee and every little peanut butter cup-- feeling guilty for being a greedy, selfish, ungrateful daughter (his indignant comments certainly never help)-- until the goodies were safely arranged on plates, sealed into baggies and shuttled to our car. Then Bo and I delivered each treat to the kind, thoughtful neighbors who had delivered their treats to us a week before. Only then was I able to relax.

Well, except for the nagging guilt that is mine as the daughter of a manipulator.

Today, I will bake several batches of Tasha Tudor cutout cookies, and I will place them on a big, important-looking plate. I will not stand guard. I will not offer them (because he won't touch them if I do).

I will just leave them sitting unattended and say nothing.

It's my feeble offering to the guilt gods.

::: just roll with it, baby :::

I hadn't been on roller skates in, like, fifteen years, and there we were, among a group of our peers, taking our children to skate, among a group of their peers. And our children had never been rolling skating.

"Quads, speed skates or in-lines?" asked the man behind the skate counter. I glanced around me. I couldn't believe how skating rinks had stayed virtually the same since I'd skated. Snack bar, video games, loud music.

"What's the difference?" I asked.

"Uh...well..."

"I mean, I know what quads are, I think. But what are speed skates? And in-lines? Are those the same as roller blades? And which should I get if I haven't been on skates in fifteen years?"

The nice man gave me a quick lesson on skate differences while The Baby pulled on my hand, eager to get onto the rink. Did she have any idea what she was in for?

The evening out was a result of an invitation from our homeschool support group. The rink had been reserved entirely for our group, so it was good to see friendly faces there. As I laced up my skates, one of the fathers chatted with Bo about skating. "Our daughter broke her leg here a couple of years ago." Great, I thought. That's wonderful. What was I thinking?

"Well, I haven't skated in fifteen years...since junior high school," I said, suddenly realizing that it's been more like twenty-five years. What WAS I thinking?

But it really wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be. I mean, I actually stayed upright the entire time. And none of the kids complained about skating. Monet, always eager to try new things, roller bladed and fell many times, but kept getting up and trying again. Bard was greeted immediately by one of her homeschool group friends and they stuck close by each other through the evening. She, too, fell a few times, but she got right back up and tried again.

Even Sweetheart and The Baby put wheels on their feet and tried. And Bo, who seems to do well at everything he tries, braved the Limbo and actually made it through the first round.

Even though they were playing Petra and Steven Curtis Chapman, it reminded me of my pre-Christian junior high days. An evening wasn't complete without a couples skate, and there were always the ever-popular standards playing as I wheeled expertly around the rink--Hold On Loosely, Strange Magic, Caught Up in You, Working for the Weekend, Hold the Line, Hot Child in the City, Kiss You All Over, and Xanadu. Ahhhh...the excitement of Saturday Night Skating.

But I do recall one not-so-pleasant memory from my early skating experiences. My dad had taken me to a skate rink when I was about eleven, and he sat on a bench as I skated. The older boys were racing around the rink while I fumbled along, jerking backward and forward awkwardly. Plus, I was eleven, for pete's sake! That horrid age when you so very much want to be cool but are very much NOT, especially with your boyish just-out-of-the-seventies haircut and Holly Hobbie shirt, where all of the older boys are so very cute, but they wouldn't notice you unless you...

...unless you happened to skate a bit too slowly right in their speed-skating path. Unless they happened to receive a very big push from one of them as they race past you. Unless you know for a fact that they notice you, because you see them pointing and laughing as you swirl into helplessness. Unless your dad happens to see the whole thing.

And then, as a young girl, you find yourself sprawled on the floor of the skating rink, nothing bruised except maybe your pride (and possibly your butt), but still feeling a secret thrill that he TOUCHED you. Sigh.

Yep, that was me. Right up until I saw my dad reach across the kneewall that separated the seats from the rink and grab that kid, yank him up by his shirt, his skates dangling above the wooden floor, and scream nasty things into the boy's, face which included watching out for little girls on the rink. And I, the little girl, wished that the whole world would just open up and swallow me whole.

I can still remember stealing a glimpse of that boy as he continued around the rink, and I think that was the first time I ever saw anyone give a person the finger. I knew that it was a bad thing, because that kid was mad, and my dad just ignored it.

But I saw it. I see it, still. And it still makes me feel small and humiliated.

I know my dad meant well, but I think I would have been happier to have had him on the floor with me, and my mom and a few siblings would have been nice, too. And if someone knocked me to the floor? Well, he would have been out there to pick me up.

That's why it was so good to see Bo skate around the rink with Sweetheart and encourage The Baby to get her balance, to encourage her to skate into his arms.

And to have him hold my hand as we glided--okay, eased warily--around the rink.

::: changeback messages :::

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

The past few days have been very trying and challenging. I've been trying to adjust to some recently discovered behavior issues with one of my kids, and it has not been easy. On Wednesday, I was so intensely depressed that I had no will to even attempt to deal with my family in a fair or rational way. I was just angry. Every call of "MOM!" or request for help was just too much for me to handle. Everything I'd ever done, any decision I'd ever made about family, childrearing, love...it was all futile. There was no point to anything.

Edison, my 13 year old son, bore the brunt of my anger, even though he wasn't the main source of my frustration. He and I have been butting heads since he was two, and I have journal entries to prove it. Something just got into that boy's system and has never found its way back out. He's argumentative, independent, headstrong, persistent and his mood changes very easily depending on his surroundings.

He's a lot like me.

So we went head-to-head about his argumentativeness, his sloppiness, his rudeness, his criticism of his siblings. I was ruthless. He was ruthless right back.

The thing is, this is just the type of behavior I've been trying to address. Not that I've been trying to address it so much in Edison, though that seems to come as a side effect of my own changes. I've really been trying to address behavior problems in me.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. ~Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969

Raised an adopted only child in a very, incredibly dysfunctional household, I got some pretty screwed up signals from my parents. My dad was, and still is, a manipulative liar. My mom was simply out of control. She didn't know how to handle me, and decided that the authoritarian, belittling, beat-the-tar-out-of-the-child approach was what would whip me into shape.

I inherited the best of both parenting worlds.

Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

This is absolutely, amazingly appalling to me, given that by the age of 12 I had begun planning my post-childhood life, and it did NOT include repeating with my children anything my mother had ever done to me. At that age, I didn't see the manipulation and lying that my dad practiced regularly. I simply saw that he was my savior. He rescued me from bedtime, from discipline, from having to face my mother.

When he was around.

And he wasn't around often. Birthday parties, friends' visits (which were limited, as my mom hated most people and criticized all of my friends), family dinners, you name it. My dad wasn't there. He didn't attend my track meets, dance recitals, school functions or softball games. He just made sure that when he was around, he was the ultimate "good guy."

My parents were not very social, didn't belong to clubs or groups or organizations. My mom had very few friends, and my dad didn't have many good ones. They weren't Christians, so they didn't belong to a church. They simply stumbled along in their child-raising life. I was there to stumble along with them.

When I moved out, my mother carried out the threat she'd screamed many times all through my life. She divorced my dad, and told me that she no longer had a daughter.

So, coming into motherhood, I was ill-equipped. As a daughter, I had been bullied, threatened, beaten, manipulated, lied to, distracted, rewarded, screamed at, hated, argued with, applauded, slapped, shaken, frightened and frustrated. As a mother, I was determined to be better.

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. ~John Wilmot

I read every parenting book I could find. Since I was a Christian, I read a lot of books that approached child-rearing from a "Christian" perspective. Most of those books included some kind of physical or emotional punishment. Spanking, time-out, ignoring the child when they displayed bad behavior, etc. I had been insistent with my husband Bohemian that I would never spank our children. The system I liked best was natural consequences. We spent many conversations discussing this, him telling me that this sounded good in theory, but how would it work in this situation, that situation, and what if it didn't work at all? I stood firm. Until my daughter was born.

Theoretical parenting, or theoretical anything for that matter, is not nearly as difficult as hands-on. I have never done anything in my life as difficult as being a parent. With Bard, I worked very hard to change my ways. I would be positive. I would not allow certain television shows to be viewed. I would bake more, cook at home more, speak positive words more. I would be firm, but fair. I would be consistent, but caring. Bard responded to this so well. But the hardest was yet to come. Bard was actually a fairly easy child to raise, and we raised her by the James Dobson method. Discipline immediately, consistently, lovingly, and informatively.

But, as I said, Bard was easy.

Boy, n.: a noise with dirt on it. ~Not Your Average Dictionary

When Edison was born, I was confused. I had been confused about how he was conceived, I was confused about when we should tell people that I was pregnant only six months after my first child had been born, and I was confused about when he should be born. The issues have changed, but the confusion has not diminished. With Edison, the parenting books flew out the window, and the discipline became much more serious. He was headstrong, to say the least. Some of his first words were "shubbup!" (shut up) and "goway!" (go away). Some of the things he would do would just break my heart. Some of the things he would do would just melt it. So I plugged away, disciplining, caring, trying to be consistent, trying to be fair, and most often, doing all right. Then along came Monet.

Around the time that I had Monet, I joined a feminist mothers at home e-mail list which had influenced my decision to become an attached parent. Monet was with me all the time. He was either attached at the breast or slung from my hip. I taught him sign language to give him a communication advantage. I tried not to spank, but instead ignored bad behavior and rewarded good behavior. Monet, in his effort to be heard, just made the bad behavior louder. And louder. And I became more and more frustrated, and less and less of a person.

Around this time, Bard and Edison discovered a new, entertaining pasttime. Sibling rivalry. This, I believe, was the beginning of my parental breakdown. Up until this time, I thought I was at least a decent parent. By the time Monet had grown old enough to join in with the sibling battles, I had begun reverting to my old parenting tactics, the ones I had learned as a child. Bullying, spanking, anger, belittling, sarcasm...even a few occassions of slapping. The worst one, I think, was screaming. The older my children got, the more they fought with each other...and the more I hated myself.

Because the rule for me had been to always be fair, but the only way I would ever have been able to accomplish that was to be everwhere at all times or to install a million dollar security system in my home. There was no way I could be fair, and to me, that just didn't seem fair. There was only one thing I could do...stop having children.

Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it. ~Jean Kerr

And then Sweetheart was born.

While Monet had been a planned pregnancy, Sweetheart was a total surprise. Through the whole of my pregnancy, I worried that she would be another boy. It was because my boys were boys that I was having such a hard time. Girls were, in my very simple opinion from my limited experience, easier than boys. I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when the midwife called to me to look at my baby's face, to see those rosebud lips and to just know. Sweetheart was a girl.

With Sweetheart, I was walking the line between being an attached parent and a conservative Christian parent. There were a lot of changes going on in my life...buying land, selling a house, moving into a tiny cabin, bringing my dad along with me even though I didn't really want to, but felt too guilty and indebted to say "no," and then, later, building our own home, which took the other part of the time that was left when I wasn't trying to keep a 16x24 foot cabin clean while seven people were living there. The one thing I most desperately did NOT need was another child. And that is precisely when I found out that I was pregnant with Baby. It was the worst pregnancy I could have had, from the horrible vomiting, to the kidney stones, to the flu, to my dad having an incapacitating back injury and, consequently, a nasty bicycle accident. I was so not ready to have another child.

And here's where I need to clarify. It's not the child that's the problem. No, not at all. It's totally and completely ME. I don't know how to care for my children. No, it's not like I can't feed them or clothe them. It's just that I haven't learned to talk to them.

But recently, I've been learning to do just that.

I picked up a book that I had tried to read several years ago, a book called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I had originally glanced through the cartoons, and then I tossed it aside, maybe even gave it away, because it sounded like a bunch of psychobabble. But this time, I read it. And here it was. Me. Right there on the "don't do it this way" illustration. Again and again and again, I recognized myself. I was amazed. Because, before, when I would read How To books on raising children, I would feel so inadequate because it never told you what to do if you'd already screwed up beyond belief. But this one does. It shows you what you've been doing wrong, and how to do it right.

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while. ~Josh Billings

In reading this book, I also saw a lot of my childhood, a lot of the things I remember hating about how I was talked to. There was no compassion, no understanding. It was all authority, all "you will do it MY way, you bleeping brat!" I think, to give my mother some understanding, she was just too, too tired to try to talk to me. I was difficult. My father was difficult. She had already lived through a lot of difficulty.
So now, here I am, faced with a new way to deal with children. Listen to them. Be compassionate. But be firm. Be kind. Be empathetic. Oh, Lord! Doesn't that sound like...like...
...like what Jesus would do?
So here I am, trying to be more like Jesus, and along comes this issue with one of my children, an issue that just smacks me right in the face. It was embarrassing, deceptive, troubling behavior. What was I going to do with it?
And the first thing that came out was this: change back. What you're doing doesn't work. What you're doing is wrong, it's bad, it's damaging. Change back. You're giving them too much leeway. You're giving them too much control. Change back.

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. ~Stacia Tauscher

And then comes my mother-in-law in her infinite wisdom, listening to me cry about my fears and my humiliations, hearing me insist that I'm doing it all wrong, just when I thought I was doing it right. I tell her how my son has done this unspeakable thing, has done it and another parent had to tell me about it. Another parent whom I fear, who intimidates me, and she tells me these things. My mother in law tells me these two things. First she says, you're humble. Of course you're humble in front of someone who intimidates you. Why be humbled in the presence of someone who doesn't count? Secondly, she tells me that I'm getting changeback messages, and that I need to refuse to accept them. Changeback messages, I say? What are those? She gives me a brief explanation. It's in all the twelve step programs, she tells me. You do something good in life, and someone comes along and tells you that you're doing it wrong. They want you to change back. The husband quits drinking, and the wife, who has nagged him for years to quit drinking, buys him some beer, justifies it. "It's the only pleasure he really has." Why? Because she feels guilt, she feels uncomfortable with his change. She had grown accustomed to his story, to who he is. So she "tells" him to change back. Satan, my mother in law tells me, is giving me a serious changeback message. You're doing something right, she says. Keep it up.

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard. ~Sloan Wilson

I let my boys ride their bikes on the road. My dad wouldn't let me do that. He was afraid. He was afraid, I'm sure, of losing me. Somehow, though, he lost me, but in a different way. He lost me, he lost my mom, and now, he's losing his grandkids.

My son didn't do what he did because I let him ride his bike on the road. He didn't do what he did because I started talking to him like a human being and stopped talking to him like the control freak that I am. He did what he did because he has free will. He did what he did because he's a human boy, with ideas, thoughts, worries, needs, emotions, fears. My son needs my support. He also needs freedom. These are two things I never had.

I will not change back.

::: from the green book :::

Jerren, Colin and Maggie were Saturday. Went to Inventure Place and came to cabin. New beds are in the cabin. Love the Mission bed!

Bo's mom came Sunday morning, left Sunday afternoon. Planted 9 fruit trees Sunday, April 22nd. Sprayed some of the existing apple trees with copper, left 2 1/2 unsprayed (maybe 3 1/2?).

Planted Red Sails and Grand Rapids lettuce with radishes in second deep bed. Soil tested "neutral."

Lane is almost done. It's been graded and now needs gravel.

Dad was here yesterday and today. Richard loaned us John Deere tractor with option to buy.

Replaced thermocouple in water heater. Having hamburgers for dinner.