Making Lunch

I bet I am not alone in this. As a mom who works at home I most often have whatever is left unclaimed in the fridge as my lunch. Sometimes it is the remnants of a couple of meals, Sunday's leftover piece of fish and a cup of Tuesday's rice. It is economical and I get a little thrill at using up what would otherwise be thrown away. Sometimes, though, it begins to feel like my job to consume what no one else wants and it makes my solitary weekday lunches feel a little poor and miserly.

I do not enjoy feeling poor and miserly about my lunch.

So, I am trying, at least twice a week, to cook lunch for myself. Nothing fancy but something fresh - food just for me. I am trying to sit down at the table and have a civilized meal at noon. Water in a pretty glass, a cloth napkin. No eating at my desk or snatching bites in between other tasks.

I make a little ritual of coming to a full stop.

It makes a huge difference in the tenor of my day.

Valentine's Day

Historically, we have celebrated Valentine's Day in all kinds of ways. When Frank and I were first married and living in a tiny, tiny apartment in Ithaca, we had these long, boozy, romantic dinners with no care for bedtimes or tomorrow mornings. We talked for hours and gazed into each other's eyes and crunched our way home through the snow. We gave gifts of books and music. One year, Frank gave me a beautiful red and black April Cornell dress that I wear to this day.

More recently we've had special dinners and desserts and made each other homemade valentines.

This is a holiday that gets a lot of buzz in elementary school. Max will have a class party this afternoon with enough sugary treats to make even his sensible head spin.

We are really not celebrating the day as a family this year. Frank is teaching. Max has the aforementioned party and then an hour of robotics, a little breather to do homework and decompress, and then his triumphant return to his tae kwon do class after last week's toe injury. By the time we get back home and get dinner on the table it will be late and we will all be tired and hungry.

So, to honor the day, after we share our highs and lows and light the candle and slow down just enough to really see each other across the table, we will each name a handful of things we love about each other.

A small reminder to appreciate the love that is right in front of us.

Because while hearts and flowers are all very nice --

it doesn't really get any better than this.

Happy Valentine's Day, Y'all.

Observation

Valentine's Balloons

I really miss writing in this space.

I have not been writing over here for all the reasons you've probably guessed. It is so simple and easy to just Facebook a sentence or two and move on. I am working on poems which require a different kind of focused attention. Life gets in the way over here just as much as it does at your house.

But I miss this kind of writing, this immediate, conversation-over-coffee-kind-of-prose and I am tempted to put a toe or two back into these waters and see what I might be missing.

Dreaming the February Full Moon

And Now I Am Fifty

I had a birthday last week.  Fifty is one of those milestone birthdays that get a lot of press and I spent a lot of time trying to decide how I wanted to celebrate.

I seriously considered a tattoo. I came up with designs and words that I loved and even got the name of Max’s heavily inked stylist’s tattoo guy but in the end, I decided against it. It wasn’t that I was scared of needles – what I had in mind was so tiny, I’m sure I could handle that. And it wasn’t that I was distressed about the permanence of getting inked. Fifty, I discovered is one giant lesson in impermanence. When I thought about getting a tattoo and was really honest about why I wanted one, I think I wanted to change my physical body – my outsides – in order to reflect a change I’m cultivating on the inside. As the day got closer I realized that what’s happening on the inside is enough for me. I don’t need to etch something onto my body as a sign.

I didn’t want a big celebration either – though I struggled with this too because isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on a milestone birthday? I thought a long time about how I wanted to celebrate and wound up having a really perfect day that balanced time with friends and solitude. There was cake and dinner at the mexican place down the street and it was exactly the kind of celebration I wanted.

But it is fifty.  A milestone to be sure (and if I wasn’t sure, my AARP card came in today’s mail just to drive the point home). So in honor of fifty, I hereby declare this my jubilee year. (In the bible, the old testament, God declares every 50 years a jubilee year wherein debts are forgiven and celebrations abound.) I will celebrate this birthday all year long, choosing at least one special something to celebrate every month.

It is as simple as that.

We Have Bad Days

Sometimes we have a bad day. Sometimes we have a morning where the wheels fly flaming off the little vehicle of our family before breakfast is on the table. Sometimes we have a day that make me want to weep or yell or slam the bathroom door or stomp out of the house and hit the ground running, not turning around until I am far away and exhausted.

In the past, I might have responded to conflict with any one (or perhaps all) of these. I am a woman with a temper. My childhood was spent in a dangerous home – a place where conflict meant violence. To this day I am quick to disengage and protect myself. It is as ingrained in me as my fingerprints. It is not, however, an appropriate response to a small pre-breakfast disagreement in our gentle and kind family trio.

The details are not important. We had a rough morning. There were tears and then that awful hung-over feeling you sometimes get from crying. On Facebook I confessed that we were trying for an emotional reboot and after a while, we got rebooted.

Here are some things that helped: sandwiches, deep belly-breathing, laughing at myself, praying the ever-eloquent “helphelphelp” prayer, folding laundry, drinking a very large glass of water, Katie reminding me to stop struggling against the quicksand and hold still. All of these things forced me to stop – to be present.

And then things got better.

Things settled down.

The sun comes out, or sets or rises.

We shake it off.

We move forward.


P.S. My computer says that helphelphelp is not in the dictionary. I think it should be.

Dreaming the January Full Moon

Start Where You Are

 The holidays were particularly good to us. We had a meaningful and happy Christmas followed by the celebration of Max’s eleventh birthday. We had  fun on New Year’s Eve. (Max got to stay up till 11 and beat us at Uno!) Yesterday afternoon we cleaned and cleared and took down the tree and this morning Max went off to school and Frank drove off to work and it was just me and the laundry and the birds in the backyard.

This was, without question, the sanest holiday break I have ever had. (And when I’ve said that to people some of them have looked at me like I’m crazy.)

What I mean by that is that I didn’t do a lot of last minute guilt-induced Christmas shopping for anyone. I didn’t feel that urgent need to make everything special and perfect. The holidays just were…  and they were lovely.

I think 2012 is going to be a  very good year.

Word Cloud for the Long Poem

Conspire