Holding Still

stuck in my craw

How do you exorcise the demons of "why didn't I say this?", or "I shoulda said that?"  

I'm trying to use cleaning as a therapy, but the same bitter thoughts keep running through my head.  Usually cleaning is a good way to clean my brain, as well as the house, but it's not working this time.

Onto brighter subjects.  Lire informed me for the 130th time or so that he is going to marry me.  Very sweet, I know.  I reminded him about Daddy, that I was already married.  

Me:  "How will you marry me if I'm already married to Daddy?"

L:  "When Daddy dead."

Me:  

Me again:

Me finally:  "Uhm, well, I will be very old by that time, and you will want to marry a much younger person."

L:  "No Mommy.  When you die, you come back young, and then I marry you."

This guy already "gets" reincarnation.  I don't remember exactly what I said, maybe something along the lines of "la, la, la,I didn't hear you!" I forget.  It did remind me of a meditation exercise in one of the Dalai Lama's books.  It is about developing compassion for all beings, even those you don't like.  You begin by imagining someone you love very much as having been your mother.  Having borne you, nourished you, loved and protected you.  Then you go on to imagine the same about a neutral person in your life.  Then someone you have an incredibly difficult time having compassion for.  I tried to meditate on Dick Cheney that way, but I got nowhere.  

I was reminded of all this because one of the assumptions is that we have lived so many lifetimes, it is very likely we have been mother to a good number of people, and many, many people have been mother to us.  We all know that not all mothers are good at mothering, but I think the idea is to imagine being a person who sacrifices all to care for another, being a person who is capable of unconditional love, and then imagining that that "other" person has been capable of the same.

Maybe this is the direction I should take to get the negative words of my in-laws out of my craw.  Maybe this is why I sat down to post in the middle of the day when I should be working on the boys' Halloween costumes.  Speaking of which, I've got to get cracking!

A month in pictures

I realize that some think photos are a cop-out.  And perhaps they are.  But I like 'em, and they illustrate perfectly what's been going on with us the past month.  Though I still need to get pics from the trail-a-bike.  Thank you, btw, for your lovely, lovely support.  It's just what I need to feel human again, and to know that the world is a big and wonderful place full of great people.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

At my friend Lulu's wedding -- not wanting to put a hole in her gown, nor to raise the ire of her  deluded GOP relatives, Sen. Obama is something new and something blue.

September dahlias and Japanese anemones from our garden.  I almost wept every time I looked at it.  Ok, I'm exaggerating, but it was so very beautiful and so very ephemeral.

Big boys on a big cow.  Can you believe how much they've stretched out?  

On a nature walk...

...Lire finds "poison berries" for the birds.  

Mystery solved!  We visited Fang-Fang and family up the Hudson while we researched a relocation.  FF is reading to Alex from an inspirational pamphlet.  I think she is extolling the benefits of Signing Times videos.

Big brother Spike dons a mustache courtesy of Queen Mab.

Friday night fever!

pretty place we saw and walked.

Like Lire, I have a thing for rocks.  It reminded me of a cubist painting.

Ouch!

We're back from a wonderful long weekend visiting a wonderful person and family I met online.  Maybe I'll mention tomorrow who this mystery person is, but I'd rather get her permission first.

Al and I traveled to look for a maybe new place to live in the not-so-distant future.  To give a bit of background, we are living on the property of my MIL.  That's right.  MIL.  

(Sigh.)  

She does not live here, in fact this has never been Al's family's first home.  It's a vacation home that was mostly rented out to other people.  Until we asked to borrow it for a few years, with everyone in the family able to come and enjoy it.  Of course, nothing goes that smoothly with families and coveted vacation homes, so things have been a bit bumpy over the years.  The bumps got bigger and increased in frequency once we brought the boys back from Ethiopia.  It has been as bumpy an experience as the drive into the mountains we took to meet H and L's first family.

We thought things had been going well since the last blow-up.  Apologies were made, promises to try harder, etc.  Then, for no good reason, things got ugly the night Al and I returned home.  MIL and SIL had been taking care of the boys so we could explore new frontiers.  We were (and still are) incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to leave for a few days alone.  A kind of a vacation of sorts.  Ahhh-lone.  It was really nice.  So the fact that it turned so awful still confounds me.  I was irritated by something Lire told me.  I wasn't annoyed with L, but with something he said my MIL had said.   I decided to keep it bottled up inside me until the next day -- or until everyone went to bed.   But my conversation with L was overheard by SIL, who pressed and decided we all needed to have a "discussion."  

I told Alex that I hadn't had a "discussion" like this since my last interaction with my alcoholic boyfriend when I was 25.  I hadn't heard such awful things said about and to me since then.  Hadn't heard things from left field like that, hadn't heard so many untruths uttered.  

To be unfailingly honest -- I am not saintly.  I err.  I lose my temper and get snappish and can be quite critical.  However.  I'm not as bad as they decided I was. When it was all over, I found Alex and repeated the entire thing.  Then I cried, because put all together like that, it was pretty painful.  I slept poorly, and then awoke in tears.  I felt sick to my stomach, so very sad.  

The bright spot in all this?  My beautiful, loving, sweet, sweet boys!  Every one of them.  I missed H and L so much while we were gone, and didn't realize how much until I saw them and kissed and squished them again.  Their love was so uncomplicated and open, it nourished me and filled me up so that my vision became clearer.  Chauncey and Alex were also incredibly supportive.  Chauncey removed my hat, wagged his entire body and tossed our new rubber cane toad about the house.  Alex apologized for his family and was right there where I needed him.  Which he always has been, and may he ever be.   

Phew.  Sorry for the rant.  I don't usually blog about this stuff, but I felt so assaulted, I guess I needed to write it down.  I may delete it later, just in case.  The crux of the whole thing is that the house will either be rented or sold, so we must vacate, most likely by the beginning of the summer.  We may try to rent here for a year or so until we find the right place to settle.  Most likely we'll spend a good chunk of time this summer up in the area we explored this weekend.  Then we can see the parts of it we like best, get a feel for how it will be with our blended family, etc and so on.

My camera has been giving the computer the silent treatment of late, or vice-versa, so I don't have any photos yet.  Once I decide to have an intervention with them they might get it right and upload my darn photos.  But I will not attack their characters!  I will try to use "I" statements and utilize a non-violent communication strategy.  Because I never want either electrical device to feel as badly as I have the past two days. 

And until that day comes, here is a picture of two friends who continue to inspire me to this day.

trail-a-tike

I've been posting in my mind, so I thought perhaps it was time to return to the old blog.  Unfortunately, I'm unable to upload my photos all of a sudden, so no cute pics of the guys, I'm sorry to say.

Things have been mostly good, thank the cosmos, with only a few moments of insanity, defiance and irritation.  Those are the three challenges we seem to face here on a regular basis.  The best thing that has happened to our family is the trail-a-bike.  OMG!!!!  Thank you M!  

Some background.  We live in a beautiful, mostly flat area.  Perfect for bike riding.  Except.  Except.  You guessed it -- Criminally fast and irresponsible drivers!  I don't mean to insult anyone's choice of vehicles, however, most of the transgressors drive black SUVs.  And one of them had an Obama bumper sticker with a red slash through it, which really made me want to key the car, but that is another story.

The kids cannot safely ride their bikes in our 'hood.  Usually we would drive the boys and bikes to the local school or the beach parking lot to ride.  Now with the trail-a-bike, Habtam can ride in front of me on his own bicycle (yes, he rides without training wheels and has no fear), while little Lire rides "connected" as he likes to put it -- "Mommy!  I like this ride!  I connected!"

Another plus is that right now it is off-season, so there are many fewer drivers, many fewer sports cars and SUV's.  Mostly potato trucks, senior citizens, and work vehicles like pick-ups.  It is wonderful to finally get to ride to the post office, the library, the school, and the little bridge.  There we watch the Romanian fisherman catch carp with canned corn and vanilla extract while his high-heeled and bored girlfriend waits impatiently for him.  And he doesn't even like fish.  Just fishing.  He has captured Lire's imagination.  That and the gigantic animal femur that still sits half-immersed in the water below the bridge.  Probably a deer  bone, though H likes to think it may be a dinosaur bone.

I've only lost my mind twice or thrice since I last posted, which is pretty good.  I'm mostly healthy, though my sense of smell has blunted as the weather has become colder.  The boys LOVE school.  Lire has a more diverse situation, for which I am grateful.  One of his teachers is AA, as are two other children in the class.  There are also three children of Latino origin, and four white children.  It is a very small school, but it is predominantly AA and Hispanic.  Habtam goes to the public school for which he is slated, and it is much less diverse.  We thought about putting him in the school Lire attends, but then he would be the only boy in a class of five.  He is very happy in school, but has told me that he wants to have "clear" skin like mine, and straight hair.  

The moving situation is pretty up in the air, mostly because of the economy -- have you heard?  We're still going to start exploring other places to live, researching demographics, etc.  Meanwhile, I'm going to find out if the boys can attend a local after school program a couple times a week so they can have more kids to play with, more kids who look like them.  They don't officially qualify, since we don't live in that school district, but I've gotten to know some of the people there, so I'm hoping they'll be open to the idea.

That's it for now.  Thanks for being patient with my break.