6 posts tagged “family”
In my blog wanderings and perusals over the past three years, I've seen many lists of "Forty Things to do Before I Turn Forty." By the time I thought of composing my own, my time was seriously running out, and I was faced with either making a list of "Forty Things to Accomplish in the Next Nine Minutes" or of finding a creative alternative. (Allow me to offer a small bit of advice: given a choice between Lots of Potentially Emotionally Unhinging Work or a Creative Alternative, go for the latter.)
My alternative to the "Forty Things to do Before I Turn Forty" list? It needed to be something positive, something affirming, something that would help me appreciate the life I've had already and the one I have now rather than laying on the pressure to do more, accomplish more, be more. I needed not a list of things to do, but a list of wonderful things I have done in my first forty years, a list of appreciation and celebration. Therefore...
Forty Things I've Done Before Turning Forty
1. Learned to see God as a very real and compassionate Person rather than a Lurker with a Big Board.
2. Convinced my brother to willingly eat mud.
3. Slept in trees.
4. Jumped out of a barn loft.
5. Earned a writing degree, had success with creative pieces, publication, readings, two Pushcart nominations and served a week long term as Poet in Residence at Bryan College.
6. Been proposed to or seriously co-considered marriage five times.
7. Had a sixth man fall to his knees dramatically before me in a public place, spread his arms wide and sing loudly, "Besa me! Besa me mucho!"
8. Promptly married him.
9. Stayed married 17.5 years to date.
10. Gave birth to two children with a midwife presiding and no meds.
11. Learned to enjoy poetry. Learned to detest poetry. Learned I can't live without poetry.
12. Enjoyed mathematical theory.
13. Pieced and hand-quilted a quilt from dress scraps.
14. Found out what happens when one puts one end of an electrical cord in one's mouth while the other end is still in the outlet.
15. Learned to cook, yea, even unto a complete Thanksgiving meal for company.
16. Played the piano and the oboe.
17. Walked barefoot through snow.
18. Danced.
19. Put my brother in a tractor tire, rolled him down a hill and survived my mother's wrath afterward.
20. Attended wonderful Renaissance festivals.
21. Played the lead onstage in "Once Upon a Mattress."
22. Sang a solo in Handel's Messiah.
23. Learned to live without medication for an affective disorder--something a diagnosing doctor said I would never do.
24. Lived amid a passion for learning.
25. Discovered a passion for teaching.
26. Learned to live in the midst of prayer.
27. Made peace with an ongoing and difficult relationship from my past.
28. Learned where I fit in my family.
29. Read thousands of astounding, wonderful books.
30. Tutored and taught writing to amazing people.
31. Moderated for the beautiful ladies of LHM's Lighthouse and Covenant Women for several years.
32. Given up an addictive and self-destructive way of "coping."
33. Found the courage to keep/enforce my own boundaries while remaining unruffled.
34. Learned jewelry making.
35. Mentored some incredible young women.
36. Learned to recognize and name flowers, trees and other native plants.
37. Taken up yoga.
38. Kindled a love of books in two children.
39. Laughed nearly every day.
40. Been a student of grace.
Show us a photograph that makes you remember.
This picture makes me remember, all right. It was taken this week, but it reminds me of the time I put my little sister in my mother's dryer.
I don't think I turned it on, but I can't be sure. Maybe that was when I put in my brother.
She has fallen into a whole new world. We came back from the NJHS induction ceremony, and she'd unexpectedly and inexplicably become more grown up, as if she'd stepped across some invisible boundary line.
"How long have you known you like him like this?" I asked as the car rounded the curve before our turnoff.
She thought for a little bit. "Since yesterday afternoon," she replied.
Suddenly she wants to get up early to have time to do her hair and get to school early enough to maybe speak with him in the hallway, this child who would give her left leg to sleep late and whose hair normally resembles a haystack--a lshining, golden haystack, but a haystack, nonetheless--when she is finished "fixing" it, which until now has consisted of dragging a brush quickly through the thicket of her wild curls.
She came to the car after school yesterday so obviously happy that I was sure he had asked her to "go out" with him, the term used among Jr. High students, I am informed, for being someone's steady girlfriend of boyfriend. No. He had come to sit with her at lunch and give her his cinnamon roll, however, and he held the door for her, and he sat by or behind her in all the group pictures being taken that day, and he had a conversation with his pals about what a good friend she was, and he asked her to sit with him and his friends during lunch the next day.
She glowed, shimmered with happiness, the mirage of a beautiful young woman flickering and shifting with the face of my fourteen year old child as she told me of the day, her voice softer, gentler, brimming with a ripening richness I'd not heard in it before. Mystery, thy name is woman.
This weekend the girls made turkey cookies--happy little turkey cookies like this:
I was helping and taking pictures when I noticed a strange aberation among the happy little turkey cookies. One of them had three eyes.
"What is this?" I asked.
"That one," replied The Younger Daughter sweetly, "is a mutant. You don't have to worry about him, though. He's nice. It's the devil turkeys I'm making with the red M&M's that you have to watch out for."
We ate the devil turkeys promptly, lest they slay us. Thus, sadly, no pictures.
The last thing the girls said to me when they got out of the car at school this morning was, "Don't forget to vote!" Tonight The Younger Daughter decorated her new rinsing cup with the word "Vote!" around its rim and mock election returns on the sides. This is what happens when a family sits around the television watching the incoming election statistics the way it watches its favorite movies.
I understand that Missouri's senatorial race is one of national interest. Certainly its stem cell initiative is. As I write, The Husband calls out numbers from the next room, numbers that don't really mean very much yet, with only 5% reporting. Both matters are going to be exceedingly close. One thing that the Talent/McCaskill race and the stem cell initiative have done is to increase voter turnout in this state; estimates thus far are higher than they've been since the 1994 election, we heard on the news tonight. Evidently some locations were unprepared. Near Joplin, a shortage of ballots necessitated photocopying ballots that will have to be hand counted, so Missouri's final tally may not be known until tomorrow morning.
I was 2 months old, so the family legend goes, when my grandfather sat me on his knee and asked, "How's my little Republican today?" Most of my family (ok, all of them that I know of) are Republicans, although not so adamantly as was my grandfather, and I was certainly raised from a Republican viewpoint. That said, I was also raised (by my very rational and logical father) to find out the facts and think hard about them, to recognize ways that political ads (on both ends of the spectrum) twist and use facts to a particular politician's advantage, and to not ever simply turn off my brain. I don't vote a straight party ticket (Sorry, Grandpa), and I'm not entirely happy with everything that's gone on in this administration. As a matter of fact, I don't know that "Republican" is an entirely apt description, although "Democrat" wouldn't be, either.
It would be my hope that as our girls grow up, they'll stay interested and enthusiastic about doing their research and voting, even if their views don't coincide with my own. What I would most like for them to do is to think, to consider what is said and what is strategically not said and to carefully form their conclusions and decisions. It's a family tradition, after all.
My husband and I have two children. We are pretty careful about what we feed them, attempting to keep the sugar intake to a reasonable amount. One weekend out of every month his mother scoops them up for a weekend at Grandma's, where I am told they are indulged. ("She lets us eat sugar," gasped one on her arrival home, "with a SPOON!") Little do they know what their parents eat here at home while they're gone. Lunch today, for example, consisted of barbeque potato chips, chocolate eclaires and chocolate milk.
In keeping with the theme of this blog, I feel it only fitting to report that none of these substances have any refractive qualities to speak of. This given, I decline to here consider any potential theological implications.
