A Jen Too Many

We are out of juice. Thirsty little people have drunk up everything that was in the pitcher on the table. Now it is dry and Mommy is refusing to allow anyone to make any more delicious fake sugar-free strawberry juice. At least part of this is because she is sick of the way they insist on licking out the little cup the juice mix comes in, and then walk around with red chins for the rest of the day.

So I am writing, trying very hard not to hear as they complain about not having anything to drink and assure me that death is imminent and they perish! They perish! Well, OK, maybe not actually using the word "perish".

And no, they cannot drink water, because that would cause the heavens to open and the world To Come To An End.

Mommy: Thirsty? Try water.

Oldest Girl Child (falls to ground gasping in horror, clutching throat): Water is yucky! I don't like water! Water will make me sick!*

Mommy: Well, you could try milk.

OGC (writhing in agony on the living room carpet): I'm thirsty! I don't want milk! Milk is yucky! ... Do we have chocolate milk?

Mommy: No. You can have plain white milk, or plain clear water.

It went downhill from there. I finally told her that if she wanted to scream and cry she was perfectly free to do so in her room.

I am so mean.
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*For the sake of posterity and future blackmail, allow me to point out that these were her actual statements and I am reporting this entire conversation word for word. For the sake of honesty, I admit I might have embellished a little bit on her actions. But only a little.

My father thoroughly enjoyed tormenting, umm, teasing his children when I was little. He would tell us the most outrageous things, and we, being little and assuming our parents were omniscient, fell for it every time.

The joke I remember the most clearly was the time he told me that I was going to grow up to be a boy. I was aghast. I hated boys. Boys were swamp fungus. Boys were icky. Boys were everything that was gross and disgusting and utterly repellent.* Turning into a boy was the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to me!

I didn't believe him at first. I'd been fooled by him before and I was suspicious. Besides I'd never heard anything about this, and you were what you were. Right? You couldn't change from a girl to a boy. Could you?

Absolutely, my father told me. In fact, he, himself, had been a little girl when he was a child, and turned into a boy when he grew up. And Mommy had been a little boy, just like my little brother was going to grow up to be a girl.

I was so horrified I didn't know how to react. No sound or movement I could make could possible convey the depth of my alarm and dismay. My mother attempted to pop Dad's balloon by reassuring me that it wasn't true, but I wasn't entirely sure. After all, Daddy said he'd gone through it himself! Surely he would know what had happened to him in his life!

It wasn't until Dad reassured me, laughing the whole time, that he'd only been teasing that I started to breathe again.

Of course I wasn't going to turn into a boy. I knew it all the time.
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*All boys except my father. I loved Daddy. I hated boys. Therefore, despite the technicality of Daddy's gender, he wasn't really a boy. He was Daddy, and daddies didn't count on the disgusting scale.**

**Little brothers did, though.

It is 9:27 a.m. as I am writing these very words. Youngest Girl Child has been asking me for the last half hour if it is time to go to preschool yet.

She dressed herself without being told and has her pink boots on (it is raining outside.) We are half way through brushing her hair and taking a break before finishing the rest of it.*

Her preschool open house isn't until 1 p.m.

She keeps asking me if we are late.

This is going to be a very long day.
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*She takes after her mother in the hair brushing department.

Toy, on the floor, Youngest Girl Child standing casually on it, as if it were some sort of stepstool.

Mommy: Don't stand on the toy, pick it up. You're going to break it!

YGC (getting off toy and kicking it across the living room): It's Oldest Girl Child's!

Oh. Well. That makes it OK then.

So I was going to write this post about blogging publicly about private things and why people might choose to present a totally unreal and fluffy-perfect image of their family...*

...and then I followed a link to this blog and now I am so nervous about sounding anything like this self-absorbed that I feel totally inhibited. Bye-bye Muse!! I'll see you later. Maybe in a few years?

No, she's not serious. She's making fun of a particular subset of LDS thinking. I actually used to have a roommate frighteningly like this. She was busily collecting every Disney movie she could get her hands on, having somehow gotten a bee in her bonnet that Disney was an essential step on the way to salvation.**

Which reminds me of another roommate, who quit her job when she got engaged because she was just toooo busy getting ready for the wedding.

And then there was the roommate who went to pieces when she turned 19 because she'd never been proposed to yet. She didn't have anyone she wanted to marry, and no particular desire to get married yet, she just wanted a proposal or dozen. Turning 19 without a single scalp, umm, proposal put her into old maid territory, fer shurr.

Which all just goes to show that there are crazy people everywhere. Also, I appear to have had very poor judgment in the matter of roommates back then.
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*Inspired by this post at Mormon Mommy Wars.

**Put down the flame-throwers! Mormons do NOT believe this. That's why I used it as an example of how absolutely insane she was.

Thank my sister for this:

Two names you go by:
1. Jennifer
2. Jen Jen
Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. Jeans
2. Green-striped button-up shirt, with 3/4 sleeves, two patch pockets and princess seaming. (What? I sew!)
Two Things You Want Very Badly At The Moment:
1. A magical weight-loss pill that will also make me look 20 again.
2. Nope. That about covers it.
Two People Who Will Fill This Out:
1. Don't know any bloggers well enough to ask
2. Ditto
Two Things You Did Last Night:
1. Watched a DVD
2. Got Oldest Daughter ready for her first day of school
Two Things You Ate Yesterday:
1. Quesadilla
2. Yogurt
Two People You Last Talked To:
1. Youngest Daughter
2. My husband
Two Things You're Doing Tomorrow:
1. Washing dishes
2. Doing laundry
Your Two Favorite Holidays:
1. Halloween
2. Christmas
Favorite Vacations:
1. The beach
2. Hanging around the house with my husband
Favorite Beverages:
1. Root beer
2. Grape juice

Do you ever have those times when it feels like one of your children has just wrung out your heart like a sponge? It's a physical sensation sometimes, the love and compassion I feel for them, one so strong that it's as if everything in my chest is twisting from the force of my emotion.

I've only just gotten Youngest Daughter calmed down. She has been sobbing for the last half hour, because she misses her friend from preschool. She hasn't seen this friend since May. I had their phone number, but lost it, and now I feel like the most evil mommy on the face of the planet.

I first realized something was wrong when I heard muffled weeping coming from the girls' room. I looked over and saw YD's head just sticking out the door as she laid on her tummy, looking at something in the light from the hall. I called her over and she came out, sobbing now, holding what I recognized as her class photo from preschool last year. She told me she missed her friend, that she loved her and she missed her.

Nothing I said would comfort her, not even the promise that she will be seeing her friend in two more days. She just kept sobbing. It wasn't her usual crying - tears of pain, or anger, or frustration. Those are light tears, deeply felt, but still all on the surface. These were tears of bone-deep mourning. Her sobs came up from her belly, shaking her whole body, making her cough and gag with their force. She grieved over her friend's absence as if they'd never see each other again. Two more days of separation might as well have been two decades.

It caught me off guard. She's talked about this friend a lot, and made it very clear to me that she dearly loves this little girl, but she's been happy and contented all summer and made only a few passing references to her. When I realized I'd lost the paper with the phone number I felt horrible, but as the weeks passed and YD only mentioned her friend in passing I was relieved to have gotten off so easily.

Have I ever mentioned my phenomenal talent for falling flat on my face?

Hugs wouldn't calm her down tonight. Snuggling with Mommy didn't work.* Frequent reminders that she'll see her friend at preschool on Thursday, "...and that's only two days away, Tuesday and Wednesday, then Thursday!", went nowhere. I finally got the idea to have her color a picture to give to her friend. That proved to be the key. YD calmed down and even started smiling as she colored, and then dictated a letter for me to write.

This is the letter:

Dear C----,

I love you. You're my friend and I miss you so much. I hope you'll come again and I love you. It's me, YD. I love you so much. I hope you'll come again because you'll always be my friend and I love you.

YD

She wrote the first two letters of her signature and I wrote the rest.

There are times when there is absolutely nothing that could possibly express how much I love these kids. All I can do is sit there and feel it and hope that I don't make too many mistakes.
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*It did, however, give me what is now my top contender for funny things my children have said: "She has my hair, and she has my skin, but I don't know if she has my pull-ups."**

**YD is the only blonde in the family. She gets very excited every time she sees another person with "yellow hair like mine!"

1. I have five dirty bowls sitting in my dishwasher. There are no bowls in the cupboard where the bowls are stored. The set contains eight bowls. How many bowls are missing?

2. There are five people in our family. When we set the table for dinner there are only three clean tablespoons. All the dirty spoons in the dishwasher are teaspoons. How much will it cost me to buy 8 new settings of flatware that all match?

3. I discover a small pink plastic cup under the couch and a large blue plastic cup in the side yard. The blue cup is plastered with dirt. How many pink cups will it take to fill up the blue cup with fruit juice?

4. There is a large white plate with a chip in the edge in the Boy's lair in the basement. A fork is balanced on the edge of the plate. Something red* is crusted on the plate and fork. How long will it take him to bring the plate upstairs on his own? How many hours will I need to soak the plate to soften the red substance?
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* Spaghetti sauce?

Oldest Daughter is sobbing hysterically in her room because she yelled nastily one too many times at her younger sister and I had to follow through on my threat and ground her for the day. She is not allowed to go play outside with her friends. I feel terrible. I hate when I have to do things that upset them. I know it's good parenting. I know letting her do whatever she likes without consequences is bad parenting and will ruin her life quite handily, thank you. Nevertheless, she feels like the world has come to an end and she will never be happy again, and I feel like a mean person who just went and kicked a kitten.

On a more pleasant topic, last week we saw my dad! The trip to the airport went rather well, and the time with Grandpa was great. The only real problem was when Youngest Daughter finally truly grasped that Grandpa was not coming home with us. She fell apart and sobbed the most heartbroken little sobs you have ever heard. There she was, holding Grandpa's hand and skipping along very happily, and then BOOM! Grandpa has to get in line to go through security and that was that. It took us quite a while to get her calmed down, and she was touchy the rest of the evening.*

We drove an hour and a half to spend about an hour and 15 minutes with my dad. It was a very nice visit though, well worth the trip, and he brought me a surprise! I thought I had lost my Senior Memory Book right after high school, but Dad found it and brought it to me. My senior photo is in there, along with signatures and note from my friends - some of them people I haven't thought about in years. It was a lot of fun to look through.

There was also my 9th grade, junior high school yearbook. Wow, I was a weird-looking kid back then! Whatever possessed me to think that was an attractive way to wear my hair?
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*OK - so maybe not enough of a change of topic...

Must. Blog. Regularly.

Gaaaahhh.

It's easy to think of things to write when the kids are being cute, but what do I write about when I want to run away screaming from my family - or start screaming AT my family?

Not that I have anything to complain about. I have a whole house to feel crazy in. I can go shut myself in my bedroom when I feel the walls of my self-control starting to splinter.* My poor sister has been cooped up with three small children in a hotel room for days now. I'd be flat out raving at this point. She's a much better woman than me.

My dad is doing a layover at an airport near us, so we'll be going to see him for an hour and a half. The kids are very excited to see their grandpa. The poor things haven't ever had a chance to get to know their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins very well. We live so far away from the rest of the family that they've only see my parents twice, and most of the rest of the family once. We flew back home for a family reunion last year, which was great, and were planning to do the same thing this year. Then gas went through the roof and so did food costs and plane ticket prices and everything else.

*sigh* I miss my family.

I get to see my dad, though, so that should be nice! Now if I could just find a way to see my mother, my sisters, and my brothers. Also all my nieces and nephews.

I spent three hours shopping for school things yesterday, children in tow. Amazingly they didn't whine much at all. I think it's because it was far too riveting to get to buy so many things all for them. Shoes, socks, underclothes, backpacks, pencils, paper... We also went to McDonald's, which I loathe, but they have one right there in Walmart, and the kids were complaining about being hungry and I was tired.

Not that they turned out to be as hungry as they claimed. They played with the Happy Meal toys until I ordered them to pay attention to their food. Yes, mine are the children that have to be ordered to eat french fries and hamburgers. You may have noticed them - they're the ones jumping up and down and squealing with delight when I put a frozen package of brussels sprouts in the shopping cart.

They're weird, but I love that about them.
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*On really bad days I go in the master bedroom, shut the door, then go in the master bathroom and shut and lock the door. It doesn't stop my children from lying on the floor and sticking their fingers under the bathroom door, but it does stop me from hurting them.

Oldest Girl Child (after her father jokingly told her that our car was staying overnight at the mechanic's for a sleepover): That's silly! Cars can't have sleepovers! They don't have sleeping bags!

Now that I'm old, I can afford to buy all the music I longed for so desperately when I was a teenager, but could never afford. And might I point out, it's a lot of fun?

I didn't have my first real job until after high school. Until then, I got all my money through babysitting, and while I was thrilled to be making $1/hour (remember, minimum wage back then was only $3.35), a few hours here and there on the weekends did not add up to much spending money.

Lacking the funds to patronize the mall's lone music store, I resorted to taping my favorites off the radio. I'd wait, finger poised over the red-daubed "record" button, waiting breathlessly for the first few notes of the song I wanted to tape. As soon as I thought I heard it, I'd smash my finger down - and then, frequently, had to stop and rewind, because it wasn't the song I thought it was. (I remember sitting on the living room balcony*, listening to Casey Kasem count down the year's top 100 hits on New Year's Eve, trying to get 99 Red Balloons, while my dad yelled at me to turn off the radio, come downstairs, and join the family.)

I listened to those tapes for years. They disappeared eventually, of course, but I can still remember all the words to those songs. I remember the order they played in on my tapes. And now I'm buying them all as mp3s. I have found that when you only have to buy one song at a time, and it's only 99 cents, it's ridiculously easy to wind up with huge amounts of music before you know what's happened.

Old? Me? Naah. Not while I still know all the words to Our House!
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*Ah, yes, the balcony. Our house was an A-frame that Dad bought while Mom was with the kids at our old house in another state. It was built by a guy who had a justifiably bad reputation. In fact, one of his previous houses had actually split down the middle, we were informed (several times, by different people.) The living room carpet was long red shag; the upstairs master bedroom was the same shag in purple. The dining area was wallpapered in a red-flocked and gold-foil wallpaper that was straight out of a movie bordello, and there was dark, dark paneling everywhere.** The living room ceiling only covered half the room; the other half was a cathedral-type ceiling that opened onto a long balcony (not a romantic Romeo and Juliet type of balcony - this was more like a room cut in half lengthwise) with an edge protected only by flimsy dark-stained spindles. My parents used it as an office and storage area. My brother used it as a launching pad for his parachuting Lego people.

**Years later, when my mother was finally able to do something about all the ugliness she tried to take down the paneling, only to realize that there was no drywall underneath. Furthermore, the builder had evidently ascribed to the philosophy that you should never use two nails when you can get away with one, so the nails that connected the molding to the top of the wall, were the same nails connecting the paneling to the studs inside the wall. She finally wound up doing something terribly clever and creative with texture and paint that made the walls bright and cheerful without having to spend a small fortune getting the entire house drywalled.

Sacrament meeting is a frustrating, wiggly time for our family. Especially for the smallest members. Especially while the sacrament is being passed. It's OK to draw and color, or play quietly with non-noisy toys before and after the sacrament being passed, but not during.*

Generally, what I advise my kids to do during the passing of the sacrament is to think about Jesus and all the nice things he did for us. This last week, however, my littlest responded to my whispered admonishment to "think about Jesus" with her own whisper. "Why is Jesus important, Mommy?"

(No, really. We have talked about that before. I promise.)

It seemed a good topic for family home evening, so that was our lesson the next evening. "Why Jesus is Important" It turned out to be desperately needed, as we discovered when we asked Oldest Girl Child why she thought Jesus was important.

She thought for a moment, face screwed up with concentration and then answered, "Because he makes it rain?"

(Really. I talk about this all the time with them. Obviously NO-ONE HAS BEEN LISTENING!)
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*Things that are not OK during sacrament meeting:

• Climbing over the pews
• Lying on the floor underneath the pew
• Leaning over the pew to talk with friends behind us
• Kicking the back of the pew in front of us
• Escaping to the aisle so we have more room to spread out with our coloring books
• Somersaults
• Handstands

My youngest has been washing her hair by herself for a while now but rinsing has proven to be more problematic. When you are deathly afraid of getting water in your eyes it takes a lot of courage to pour cupfuls at a time over your head. Unfortunately, that leads to Mommy pouring cupfuls over your head while you shriek and clutch a towel to your face.

So. Not. Fun. *

This morning I coerced her into washing her hair, which I had let go far too long. (Please tell me I'm not the only parent who lets things go sometimes because she gets tired of fighting with her children!) When I went to help her rinse, though, she looked up at me with a triumphant grin on her face and perfectly clean hair! She was so proud of herself she couldn't hold still and giggled and wriggled for several minutes while I wrapped her in a towel and took her into the living room to tell Daddy what she'd done.

I was in the kitchen later, when I overheard her talking to her stuffed Bambi.

"You did it, Bambi! You did it! All by yourself!"

I love it when they're proud of themselves. (And please! Is that not just soooo cute?)
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*Like so much else in parenting, I have come to have great respect for what my parents put up with from me. With me, it wasn't the hair washing, but the hair brushing that was the problem. I'd do whatever I could to avoid getting my hair brushed. Generally I had to submit (with much shrieking and sobbing) on Sundays for church, but I did my best every week to make it as many days in a row as possible without getting my hair brushed. Summers were pretty good for getting away with it. The school year was terrible - brushing almost every day. The best luck I had was the summer I hid the hairbrush in the middle of the blankets in the linen closet. I vividly remember Mom tearing the house apart looking. It took her days to find it, and I'm still not sure what led her to the blankets. I thought it was a pretty fool-proof hiding place.

I have been tagged, so here is my list!

1. I can take a conversation 17 different directions before getting back to my original point. More often than not a conversation with me is punctuated with at least one person saying, "How did we get on this subject anyway?" From point A to D to W to J to ...

2. I "lose" nouns. I'll be in the middle of a sentence and all of a sudden can't retrieve the word I wanted to use. I wind up having to describe the object I'm talking about because I usually can't remember the word until I hear someone else say it. "The thing, umm, the thing that's, umm, round, and orange, and ..." "You mean an orange?" "No, no, you bounce it, and there's black lines on it ..." "A basketball?" "Yes! That's the word! Thank you!" This only happens to me when I'm talking, never when I'm writing.

3. When I get interested in something new, that's all I'm interested in for at least several days and up to months. I have to make a real effort to get myself to do anything unrelated to my current obsession, and every spare minute I have I spend on it. When I lose interest, it's usually complete. I can go months and never think about my old hobby. Some things are cyclic for me - puzzles and word games are a good example of that. I'll do puzzles for a couple of months and then I'll spend the next several months with half-completed puzzle magazines lying around my bedside table drawer, meaning to get back to them, but not really interested.

4. I play with my hair as I'm falling asleep. It relaxes me.

5. I cannot get a snail mail letter into a mailbox. I will write a letter, put it in an envelope, address and stamp it - and then it languishes forever, never actually leaving the house. I don't know why I do this.

6. My husband reminds me that I tend to put things down on the nearest surface while distracted, then wander around in confusion, asking, "Did anyone see where I put my book? I can't find my book."

Oh, yes! That's right! I have a blog. I suppose I really should update it. Somehow.

Actually I have thought about it before this, but I can't bring myself to actually post a new entry, because, well, people I know, like my family, will be reading this, and that is just too, too intimidating. So, I write, and I polish, and then I rewrite and polish some more, and in the end I have a really great essay on how my family can't ever figure out what they want to eat, that will never see the light of day.

Maybe someday I'll anonymously enter it into the Erma Bombeck contest.

Reason #101 why I will never be a best selling novelist. "What? Read my writing? Are you crazy?"

I belong to a writing list and this is a topic that has come up before. A large number of us are shy (not all of us mind you - an equally large number are not shy at all) which makes it difficult if you want to be a successful fiction writer. After all, if you write technical manuals, web content, or magazine articles you are fairly anonymous (I know an enormously successful magazine writer from that list - you name the major magazine, she's had articles in it - but, unless you are obsessive about reading bylines, you would never recognize her name.)

Writing fiction, however, is very different from selling fiction, and selling fiction tends to be very personality driven. It's not enough to write a brilliant and fascinating novel. You have to travel around and do book signings, interviews on local radio stations and television shows, have a website and interact with your fans. And, since fiction does seem to draw a disproportionate number of writers who are people who really prefer interacting with the characters in their head ...

Look at it this way: The writer puts in weeks and months of solitary work, only to be dragged out of their nest, like Punxsutawney Phil, to blink painfully in the light of attention and publicity when the time comes to convince people their book is really worth publishing / buying / reading.

The problem with being a writer is, you can't help yourself. You write. You have to write. It's a compulsion. And when you write, you usually want someone else to read it. Having a reader is an essential part of the process. Writing that is never read is incomplete. What's the point of putting all that work into finding just the right word to convey the exact way fog feels on your skin, if no-one but you ever reads it? Oh, sure, you've got the satisfaction of personal accomplishment, but it's not enough.

I have found that just as much as I feel driven to write, I feel driven to find readers, which is a painful process. Even bad writing involves delving into yourself. Show someone else your writing and you show them a little piece of your soul. That's frightening. So frightening that I can rarely do it. Essays, fiction, poetry - they make me too vulnerable. Much better to keep them forever in electronic form, locked away in sterile little kilobytes of ones and zeroes.

Wait a second - how did I let my sister talk me into this again?