OmegaMom

Ah…

Ahhh…

AHchew!

In my early 20s, I would visit Grandma down in Sun City on a regular basis.  As planning would have it, there were a whole slew of elderly aunties and uncles that lived there, too–my grandfather having decided, as he was nearing the end of life, that he should move himself and Grandma to that area so that they’d have family around. 

Great Aunt Iola lived down the street from Grandma.  A tall, rangy, raw-boned woman with a deep voice, she was one of my most favorite of the elderly aunties.  Her austere exterior argued for a no-nonsense kind of woman, someone who was brusque and cold and distant.  In reality, though, Auntie Iola was a sentimental pushover, warm and loving and fun.  She introduced me to the wonder that is ginger-ale floats, a much better concoction than root beer floats, trust me.

Auntie Iola had a Siamese cat named Greta, cross-eyed and with a creaky voice, who loved to sun herself in the little courtyard attached to Auntie Iola’s Sun City duplex.  Greta would bask in the sunlight, and, when the mood struck her, would roll about on her back in the dust for minutes at a time.

Given that this was Arizona, and in the summertime, with low humidity (obviously pre-monsoon season), Greta’s fur would fill with static and she would return from one of these dust baths with her fur filled with torrents, masses of dust.

This is how I learned that I was allergic to dust.

KtChew! Ahhhh….ahhhhh…

Because Greta was a sucker for luvins.  So one day, when I was visiting, she returned to the house after her daily dust bath, leapt up onto the table in front of me, and did some serious nose-diving, begging for luvins.  I obliged, scritching around the base of her ears, scratching gently under her chin, pushing her over to massage her tummy.  And within minutes I erupted into the absolute worst allergy attack I have ever–before or since–encountered.

…chew!  Ktchew!

In this area of Alaska, the prevailing winds come looping up the coast, circle inland a bit, and barrel down the glaciers.  The satellite loops look like immense commas, great big swooping spirals of cloud that march in on a regular basis, dumping the moisture sucked up from the ocean.

Right now, though, they’re not dumping moisture.  What they’re doing is kicking up dust from the glaciers and riverbeds as they go.

Small Town Alaska, to the east of us, where OmegaDad works, has been shrouded in clouds of dust for days.  Suburban Alaska, where we live, hasn’t.  Until this weekend.  Suddenly, the laminate flooring upstairs has this fine layer of dust, blown in through the open windows.

We were outside in the back yard almost all weekend.  Early Sunday afternoon, my eyes started itching.  A few hours later and my nose was streaming, and sneezes were exploding from me like the snooze alarm on our clock.  A little series of sneezes–ktchew!  ktchew!  ktchew!–and then a momentary rest where I could snurfle up the runnies with a sound like the honking of a goose, and then another eruption of sneezes.

Antihistamines don’t seem to be doing very much good, either, though I suppose if I weren’t taking them, things would be worse.

So even though it’s gorgeous weather, the sun is out, the trees are green (yes!  green!  woot!), and we have actually had a series of red flag warnings due to (it is to laugh) "low" humidity and high winds, I am praying to the Kozmik All for a good drenching in the next few days, just to get the dust to settle.  And pollen, too, I suppose.  But mostly the dust.

Ahhhh….ahhhhh….

KtChew!

It’s Mother’s Day.  OmegaDad and OmegaDotter let me sleep in, and then marched in with breakfast in bed.  Whoa!  It was little Nancy’s quiches and strawberries, plus one of my Frappucinos…they then brought in their own and joined me, and presented me with a cardboard box which contained truffles (yum), three "flowers" made of pipecleaners and seed packets (some nice pansy varieties), a large abalone shell from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), a scarf from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), and another shell.

It was, actually, quite charming and loving, and I loved it. 

So much for being a "non-mom mom".  Har.  I’m cynically amused at how Teleflora and NBC scrambled all over themselves trying to recoup from that blunder.  At the same time, I’m glad that they did.

I’m sure they’d flinch at including birthmothers in any way in their motherhood tribute–too ambiguous for their tastes.  After all, they’d have to figure out how to present birthmothers as saintly martyrs who are gently satisfied with their choice, and avoid all the questions that even thinking about birthmoms brings to many folk.

OmegaDotter wrote a letter to her birthmother this morning.  She was happy to do it; she had asked me a while back if she could write a letter to her.  This entailed, of course, explaining that while she could write a letter, we had no way of delivering it because we didn’t know where her birthmother was or if she was okay.  But, I said, we could make a special box, and put letters to her birthmother in the box.  This morning, when she wrote the letter, she had completely forgotten that we couldn’t actually send it, and was all excited (momentarily) about getting a letter back.

::whimper::

But I explained again, and the dotter took it in good stead.

The letter was pretty short, but the first thing the dotter quickly wrote out was "I forgot your name."

::whimper::

She wrote that she can do cartwheels, and that she is good at learning.  And signed it, "Love, OmegaDotter".  Then she put it in an envelope clearly labeled "CHINA", and put it on the refrigerator, held by our very best, strongest magnet.

Then, that done, she merrily went on her way, demanding to help OmegaDad with building the veggie garden, helping me rake (yes, more raking), dipping into the house to build a picnic basket out of paper, and then dashing off next door to play with the kids there for a while.

I know that I have readers who simply don’t understand why we do things like this.  That it seems like a way to make the dotter feel capital-A-adopted.  That we make too much of it.  That our lives are all adoption angst.

First off, no, our lives are not all adoption angst.  In fact, there’s very little of it.  It’s just part of the tapestry of life for us and for the dotter; there are some things that remind her of being adopted, and we talk about them, and she chews on them a bit, and life goes on.  She goes to school, she has to do homework, we play with friends, we deal with Ballet Recital Madness, she practices her gymnastics, and on and on.

The thing is, she is adopted.  She’s our dotter, through and through, but somewhere out there is a birthmother and a birthfather, and a big question as to "why?"  From our readings of musings by adult adoptees, it seems that even the most happy, well-adjusted (female) adoptees think about birthparents and the circumstances of their adoption throughout their childhood, adolescence, adulthood.  And a lot of the adoptees who have written about it say that they were afraid to talk about it with their parents, that they feared hurting their parents by even thinking about another set of parents, by even wondering about their biological background.  Or that they tried talking about it, and their parents brushed it off, and they learned, very quickly, that it was a subject not to be touched.  And many of those adult adoptees said that they thought about the subject of birthparents a lot and were hurt and worried that they couldn’t talk about it with their parents.

Also, there’s OmegaDad.  OmegaDad’s mother died a week after giving birth to him.  He thought about her a lot.  He, too, learned early on that it was a sore subject; of course, it was because she died young, leaving a bereft husband and sons and parents, all of whom remembered her and were hurt by her early death.  So OmegaDad remembers wanting to know more about his mother, and not being able to talk about her.  So he feels it incumbent upon himself to make sure that OmegaDotter know that it’s okay to talk about her birthmother to both of us.

We’ve told the dotter her adoption story since we brought her home, too small to even understand what we were saying.  "Once upon a time, there was a lady in China who had a beautiful baby girl…" was how it started.  And "on the other side of the world, there was a man and a woman who really wanted to have children…"  And ending, "And they drove up the mountains to Small Mountain University Town in the little white car, and got home just a few days before Christmas, and that was the Very Best Christmas Ever."  As she’s grown older, the story has changed, gotten more detail, specifics have been fleshed out.

It’s all a little bit like sex, actually.  Well, not having sex, but talking about sex.  You want to keep the channels open.  You don’t want One Big Just So Story scene where you talk about sex when the kiddo is 17 and that’s that.  So you start out basic, you get comfy talking about the whole idea (omigod omigod i can’t even think about the dotter having sex omigod omigod), you try to not get tied up in knots when A Question comes up. 

I dunno.  It works for us.  Somewhere on the other side of the world is a woman who gave birth to our dotter.  Goodness knows why she had to abandon her–it could be that the dotter has an older sister, and her birthparents were trying for a son; it could be that her birthmother was a young, single woman who couldn’t keep a baby; it could be that there were in-laws who took her away and told her birthmother she was dead, in hopes of a future son to carry on the name; it could be that her birthmother couldn’t afford to keep her…We don’t know.  On a day like this, though, I think of her missing being able to watch this amazing girl grow up, not knowing her belly giggle, not knowing her artistic creations, not knowing her need to bounce and thump.  The least I can do for this other woman out there is to keep her memory alive and not flinch away when the dotter wants–or needs–to talk about her.

Adoption ranting alert!

Whoop!  Whoop!  WHOOP!  Brrrp…brrrp…brrrp…brrrp!

At this point in family life, I normally let the usual mainstream media faux pas (tell me how to pluralize that?  Please?!) about adoption pass me by.  At this point, life is less about Deep Musings About Adoption and more about how to survive the few weeks at the end of school year that are jam-packed with stuff like "Teacher Appreciation Week" (please bring a dish–Monday is breakfast, have it there by 8:30!, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is sandwiches–but the staff are bringing the makings so don’t bother, Thursday is salads, and Friday is desserts) and "The Kindergarden Circus" (in which the dotter is being–natch–a "prancing horse"–and they really need volunteers to help sell popcorn before the circus) and ballet picture day (scheduled for the middle of the morning?  Oh, well, at least it’s not in the middle of school, since school ends two days before) and Ballet Recital Madness (update:  no, littlies don’t need to be there at oh-dark-thirty and stay for 24 hours straight, thank heavens!).

In other words, general adoption stuff has taken a back-burner to Real Life.

(Which is not to say "general adoption stuff" doesn’t happen, and isn’t important.  It does, and it is.  It’s just that what pops into the ol’ noggin to write about tends to be more on the panicky side than on the thinking deeply side.)

But when egregious mainstream media cluelessness attacks, I just have to sit up and take notice.

Brought to my attention by two adoption bloggers is this little lovely:  The category in the Mother’s Day TV special "America’s Favorite Mom" that is called–wait for it–"Non-Mom Moms".

I had a few "non-mom moms" in my life.  There was Aunt Lou, my mom’s best friend.  There was Mrs. Crysanthemum, who lived next door to my paternal grandparents, and who stunned me, absolutely stunned me, when she announced to me, at 16, that I should stop calling her "Mrs. Crysanthemum" and call her by her first name.  It took me years to be able to follow that request without feeling both awkward and disrespectful.  These were women who spent a lot of time with me, disciplined me, gave me hugs, fed me, let me have adventures with their kids, knew me from the time I was a wee chee-ild until I was a grown adult.

I never, ever though of Mrs. Libby, who lived on the other side of my grandparents and had an adopted kiddo, as a "non-mom mom".  Honest!  She was just Jarrett’s mom.

NBC and its minions, though, would place her (and me, and every other adoptive mommy on earth) smack dab into that category.

There it is, in all it’s glory, among the "semi-finalists" in the category "Non-Mom Moms":  "She was an adopted child who is now mom to her own daughter, plus six adopted children who started life as "meth babies"."

First off, even by their skewed standards, she’s a "mom mom":  she has "her own daughter".

OmegaDotter, of course, is not "my own daughter".  I’m just play-acting mommy for her.

Secondly, there’s that old cliche, the "crack baby", recycled as the "meth baby".

Thirdly, she’s not being a "mom" to those adopted children, oh no.  She’s being a "non-mom mom".

Sweet Kozmik All above.  Don’t these people think?  Don’t they have any concept of what "adoption" is?  Don’t they realize how they’ve dissed all the adoptive moms in their audience by that casual sweep of the semantic hand that dusts adoptive moms off into the "non-mom mom" dustbin?

Gah.  Get a grip, NBC.  My dotter has two moms, and they’re equally valid and important in my dotter’s life.  (Which I will talk about on Mother’s Day, I think.)

Frick-frackin’ rowrbazzlin’ dim-witted dismissive twits.

Nothing is going on with our lives.  Okay, yeah, the dotter ends her first year of Real School in a week and a half…it’s spring and I’ve seen one tree with all sorts of itty bitty pale green leaves bursting out, so that’s exciting.  And we have rhubarb growing.  And Mother’s Day is coming up.

But I?  Am in a rut.  Nothing seems interesting or exciting to me right now.

So, channeling my mom, I hear:  "Just join a club!  Go to a Mensa do!  Go take walks!" et cetera.  And I say it to myself, too, especially the "go take walks!" or the variation, "go get some exercise on a regular basis!", but it doesn’t help.

My life is boring.  My blog is boring.  Nothing is going on.  The most exciting thing that has happened to me recently is that I stabbed myself beneath my fingernail with a cactus spine opening the kitchen window.  And it hurts.

I even went off to The Daily Meme to see if any of the subjects might amuse me or incite me, and it was all…meh.

The dotter is losing teeth left and right.  The last one was one of the two top front teeth; this left the second one, also loose, all on its lonesome and able to stick out by itself when her lips were closed.  It was cute and adorable.  It also became quite wiggly.

At which point, it is my job to supervise the evening ablutions.  While both OmegaDad and I get the heebie-jeebies at really wiggly teeth, I have teeny-tiny heebie-jeebies; OmegaDad gets wigged out and has to leave the bathroom entirely.

Of course, it reached that particular point that parents the world over know:  it wiggled itself loose on one side and not on the other, and the dotter had reached the pinnacle of impatience.  I assured her it would come out over the next few days, but OmegaDad decided to promote the tie-a-string-around-the-tooth approach.

This resulted in severe dithering.  First it was "Oooh, yeah!"  Then it was "Ewwww, no!  Stop it!"  Then it was "Maybe I’ll try it."  Then it was tears and "I can’t do it!"  And all of this was before the string ever reached the tooth.

Like going zero to 60 and back to zero within a minute.  Whiplash!

So we abandoned the attempt and the dotter and I headed off to her bedroom for story time.

At which point, she decided she wanted to try it again.

This time, we avoided the bathroom, so she couldn’t see what was going on.  Apparently, it was seeing that was scaring her.  So we plopped her down on a dining chair conveniently scooched near the kitchen door, took the neat little lariat that OmegaDad had made out of cooking twine, and I slipped it over her tooth and cinched it down almost tight.

At which point, she decided she didn’t want to try it again.

Foreseeing an hour or two of this back-and-forthing, I reaching for the string, saying "Okay, okay, kiddo!  I’m taking the string off!" and surreptitiously yanked with one hand on the string while the other was making ineffectual forays at the string-encased tooth.

Pop!  Out came the tooth (of course).  (There was one moment of resistance, and I had a queasy fear that it wouldn’t work and the dotter would be both in pain and brokenhearted that Mommy was torturing her.)  The dotter had one moment of "Owww!" and then realized what had happened.  Much surprise and great swelled-headedness on her part:  "I did it!"  She totally thought that I had really been trying to untie the tooth…

Later on, in her bedroom, I whispered to her, "You know what?  I was sneaky.  I wasn’t trying to take the string off, I just yanked…"

She thinks it’s hilarious.  She has spent the last day giggling about it, and saying, "Ooooh, you’re so sneaky, Mommy!"  (Tee hee!)

She now has a two-tooth gap.  Another tooth is loose.  The Tooth Fairy is soon going to have to make another run to the bank for Sacajawea dollars.  I have it on good authority from the girls at gymnastics that at least one kid gets $20 per tooth, and another $8.  Whoa.  I got quarters.  The dotter gets the nice golden Sacajawea dollars.  And the Tooth Fairy is running out Real Soon Now.

Many years ago, when I was growing up in Chicago, my mom and I would go to the Jewel on Clark Street to go grocery shopping on Saturdays.  We’d take a taxi off to the store, do our shopping, then I would hang out with the filled shopping cart while mom went into the drug store to buy cigarettes, and then we would call another taxi and head home.  (Keep in mind that this was many moons ago, when the taxi rate was something like 5 cents per one-sixth of a mile.)

Normally, mom’s foray into the drug store wouldn’t take too long, so I’d sit perched by the cart on the metal railings cleverly designed so that you couldn’t get the carts out into the parking lot, and daydream.  Cars would come and go, people would squeeze through the openings in the railings with their bags of groceries, the sun would dart in and out behind clouds.

Once in a while, though, she’d take "too long", as measured by my ten-year-old mind.  At which point, my daydreams would take a distinctly dark tone.

She’d been kidnapped.

There’d been a robbery, and she was shot, lying in the store by the cashier’s counter in a puddle of blood.

I knew I would sit there for hours before anyone would think to tell me that she was in the hospital on her death’s bed.

Something Dire (but unspecified) Had Happened.  My life was about to come crashing down.  Stuff like that.

And then she’d show up, purse and purchases in hand, and anticlimactically we’d await the taxi.  I was always very relieved, though I kept it to myself.

To this day, when someone precious to me takes "too long", as judged by my forty-mumble-year-old mind, I go off into that panic zone.  This is, of course, very silly.  "Too long" is extremely subjective.  But if, say, OmegaDad informs me that he and the dotter are going off to Home Debit to get some specific drill bits, my brain puts a fuzzy-logic time limit on that expedition.  Home Debit + "specific drill bits" = Not Too Long.  So, if the expedition expands to include, say, a stop at Greasy Fast Food Palace for burgers, fries, and sodas without my knowledge, a swirling mass of evil starts emerging around their heads (in my imagination).  It starts small, then grows.

When it reaches a crescendo, when I’m just about to start asking myself out loud, "Okay.  Is it time to start worrying for real yet?", this is, of course, when the garage door opens and the dotter comes barreling in, junk food in hand, with OmegaDad behind her.

"Precious" is one of those words that has been devalued and marginalized by pop culture.  "Oh, isn’t she just precious!" is the saccharine coo that the word conjures up these days.  Or–worse yet–gooey sweet big-eyed pastel figurines.  In our society, "precious" is something oh-just-so-darling-and-cute.  Oy.  Now, take Gollum–Gollum knew how to treat something precious: he obsessed over it for centuries.  That is "precious".  Something very important.  Very special.  Very loved.  Something you are protective about.  Something to be treasured and cherished.

For some reason, now that Great-Grandma is gone, the idea of my mom gallivanting around the U.S. on her own is much more disturbing than it was.  Before, mom was the "accompany-er", the travel companion for Great-Grandma.  As such, the focus of any worry, the need to care for and cherish, was Great-Grandma.  Now, however, mom is planning to travel off to visit OmegaBro and family, and OmegaCuzes and families, in one fell swoop.  The outer, more mature part of me is delighted, is glad that mom no longer has to stay in town to worry about her own mom and can be free to do such traveling.

But there she is–my one and only mamasan.  I have one aunt and uncle left alive, and mom.  None of the other forebears are alive.  She is doubly–triply–precious these days.  My safety net of elders has thinned, and I find my over-imaginative ten-year-old coming to the fore with Visions of Disaster.

Not too often, mind you.  But there it is.  Because she’s precious to me.

"Make new friends,
But keep the old,
One is silver
And the other gold…"

Anyone who’s been to Girl Scout camp knows that song.  I remember singing it (among others much less uplifting) while we hiked from our area of platform tents to the main mess hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  (I also remember that the much-sought-after reward for doing clean-up at mess hall was to get the "cows", the huge plastic bags that held milk for the milk dispensers, which made very nice inflatable pillows for the camp cots…)

Today I got a call from an old friend.

The sun is out, the day is warm, and I got a call from a good friend–what more can I ask?

Like many of my blogging buds, I am rather introverted.  It takes me a while to make friends, and I usually only have one or two "good" friends at a time.  Some were friends for long periods of time, some for shorter; I’ve lost touch with a bunch, which makes me sad.

I had lost touch with J–life being life, small kids occupying one’s mind and time–and hadn’t talked with her for about two years.

But last week, she called OmegaDad at work, having heard via the network that we moved to Alaska, and using her mad Internet research skillz to locate him.  He gave her our phone number and various email addresses, we coordinated times through email–me being out here in the Final Frontier, she being on the East Coast, and many hours of difference dividing the two.  And today, her being out and about on her own to go shopping and me being home after work hours coincided.

A good friend is the kind of friend who you can talk to for an hour on the phone after a lapse of two years and it’s like you haven’t been away from each other at all.  Sort of like my faux Ugg boots, or a good armchair–comfy and cozy and…well, friendly.

We have, of course, been making tentative social moves here, reaching out and getting to know people.  We’ve hung out with A’s mom and dad (A being adopted from the same area of China, one day older than OmegaDotter, and also in her gymnastics class), and it seems like there might be potential with S’s mom, too (another gymnastics bud).  It’s nice to start feeling less isolated.

But still.  Still, having an old friend call, and falling into the old, comfy conversational back-and-forth…ahhh.

(I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of the camp, but it was in Virginia, we paddled canoes on the Potomac, learned to carve rudimentary artwork in redwood, hiked through forests, had sing-alongs around the campfire, and collected shark’s teeth.  All was good.)

The dotter is better.  It seems to have been a 24-hour bug; she was sick long enough for me to cancel a visit to a buddy on Saturday, but by the end of the day was able to eat regular food and keep it down, yay!

Yesterday was sunny, but we pretty much did nothing all day–the dotter, still recuperating, laid about and napped a few times, and I wasn’t feeling up to par myself.

But today–today was sunny and warm again.  Up in the 50s.  Oh, joy!

We now have slightly more than an acre.  About a fourth, I would say, is wooded.  The remainder is lawn.  One spot in the yard gets sun more often than any other, and it was free and clear of snow.  So I began raking it at 11 a.m.

By 4 p.m., that part of the yard was looking awesome.

I, on the other hand, now have been informed by both OmegaDotter and OmegaDad, on separate occasions, that my butt is quite dirty.  ("Hey!" says OmegaDad, "So sue me!  I like looking at my wife’s ass!")  I have a raw spot from where I was raking without gardening gloves.  Luckily, I realized it in time and grabbed the gloves, so it’s my only raw spot.

But my arms!  My legs!  My back!  Ack!

And it ends up I’ve only done about one-sixth of the yard.  I look out my office window into the back yard–the endless expanse of back yard, where the snow is rapidly shrinking, and say to myself, "Myself:  Look at that yard.  Maybe we want to let the woodlands come back."  Myself shakes her head and says, "No, no, me.  We need lawn so kids can run around and get tired out, and besides, we can’t let the woodlands grow over the septic tank or we will be sunk.  We can do this!  We’ll just do bits and pieces over the next few weekends, and then it will be time for OmegaDad to start mowing…"

By the way–underneath all the leaves?  The grass was green.  Not everywhere, just in spots.  But it was such a lovely, lovely color to see!

I spent the late afternoon snuggled up in bed, suffering from a sinus headache.  Oh, joy. 

Once upon a time, I didn’t have sinuses.  Or, rather, I had them, but they didn’t bother me.  It’s similar to how the dotter never complains about things like headaches; she gets a rather cute, scrunched up "Hunh?" look on her face when you ask her if she’s got one.  This went on for many years.  And then, one day…

One day…I got the Mother Of All Sinus Infections.  It came on fast and sudden.  I don’t remember very much about it except for the fact that my eye swelled shut and I was hauled off to either the doctor or the ER, and forthwith tossed into the hospital for a few days while they Did Things.  One of those things involved a bubous transparent plastic doo-dad attached to a big transparent plastic tank.  The nurses would come by every few hours, jam the end of the bulbous doo-dad into my nose, and vacuum me out.

Ewwwww.

I just want you to think about that.

My response?  Ewwwwww.

I think I was around eleven years old at the time.

After that–having primed the pump, as it were–my sinuses were in full-time infectious mode.  If the weather turned, if there was a high pressure system, if there was a low-pressure system, so long as there was a fluctuation in the humidity, I’d get sinus headaches.  Never to the extent of that first big blow out, but I could feel the fluid building up, then the skin on the right side of my nose near my eyebrow would start to puff out a bit, and the pounding would begin.

Then I moved to the great American Southwest.

Woohoo!

Freedom from sinus headaches!

Yay!  There was dancing in the streets!  (Except for the fact that my other headache bete noir, migraines, decided to take up the slack…)

Then we moved to Alaska.  Land of soaring mountains!  The Final Frontier!  Land of the Midnight Sun!  Yadda, yadda, yadda…

Also, land of unending humidity.

Guess what?  They’re baaaaack.

Oh, joy.

The husband frosted it, and the dotter decorated it.  It says "Happy Barth Day I ♥ you"…:

There were some very pretty roses and truffles:

A hand-made card from the dotter, featuring a "pop-out" present, and, inside, a B@rnes and N0ble card:

And then we ate cake, as Marie Antoinette recommended:

All in all, it was a good birthday.  Many thanks for all the birthday wishes!  My mamasan needn’t feel G.U.I.L.T. as she proclaimed in last post’s comments, since it was her guidance that produced the nostalgic birthday cake, via a flurry of emails between her and OmegaDad.

I will have you know that all the pictures were taken at about 8 p.m. (except for the roses, which were this morning) to give you an idea of how light it is at that time…

Today, we have had more snow, and more is expected tonight.  Have I mentioned that I am sick and tired of snow?  Gah.

When I listen to Santana and Chad Kroeger rocking out on "Into the Night", or listen to Lorena McKennitt or other singers with passionate rhythm sections behind them, I imagine myself dancing in the living room in dim light, with a long, swingy skirt, swaying to the rhythms and putting the world away.

I also imagine myself as a 25-year-old with long hair.

That self-image is resilient.  It sticks to me like chewing gum to a hot sidewalk.  I look at myself in the mirror and say, "Kate.  You’re forty-mumble years old.  Your hair is going grey."  But when it comes to "seeing myself" mentally, there I am, skinny, sexy, young, dancing.

Not plumpish, lazy, and arthritic.

Sigh.

So today I am forty-mumble-plus-one years old.  "Late" forties, to be honest.  Very.

My darling geeky husband sent me a birthday email with .kmz file to pull up in Google Earth, pinpointing the spot in Los Alamos, NM, where he remembers us having our first kiss.  He and the dotter have made an orange cake and will layer it with either apricot pie filling (preferred) or lemon curd, frost it with lemon frosting, and sing "Happy Birthday" to me this evening.

I’m borrowing Mrs. Figby’s "Hypochondriac Thursday" theme today.

The past few days, I have been merrily working along, dealing with this and that, and suddenly, out of nowhere…

(cue the theme from Jaws)

I will have a sharp, stabbing, electric-shock like feeling in a very specific spot in the arch of my foot.

We’re talking something that jerks me wide awake out of my deep thought with an audible "Ah, ah, ahhhh, OH!" and grabbing at my foot in desperation.  Lasts about five seconds.  Then, poof, it’s gone again for a random number of hours.

Years ago, I had a pinched nerve in my neck.  Or else something called "thoracic outlet syndrome".  Either way, it manifested itself similarly in a spot on my upper right arm, with a delightfully, painfully zingy electric shock sensation, numbness and tingling in my last two fingers on that hand, and the ability to actually trace the radial nerve down my arm (yes!) because of the pain.  (The radial nerve tracing felt like I was touching a healing bruise.)  The pain started out occurring fairly randomly, like maybe once a day, and then escalated to a point where I was feeling it jab my upper arm once every 30 seconds.  Like someone is stabbing you with an ice-pick.

It took six months of physical therapy to get rid of that feeling.

Add in to this a family history of diabetes.

And the fact that a typical diabetes symptom is something called Neuropathy, and it typically occurs in the feet.

My oldest brother had both his feet amputated due to diabetes, which led (indirectly) to his death.  My dad had problems with his feet for years related to his diabetes.

Probably it’s another pinched nerve.  Fun, fun, fun.

Or, according to Dr. Google, it could be a Morton’s Neuroma.  Fun, fun, fun.

But then again, almost every single "foot pain" link I connected to that talked about zingy electric-shock like things in the foot talked about diabetes.  Since it’s been at least a year since I had a diabetes check, I guess it’s time to go and look again.  Bleah.  I am totally paranoid about diabetes, even tho my fuddy-duddy older brother biologist claims that diabetes is genetically linked through the mother and I should be fairly safe from it…

So, hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to see the doc-in-a-box we go this afternoon.

Right now, it’s a balmy -10F.  It’s 30 degrees warmer "back home".

The dotter has lost a second tooth and I again successfully performed the Tooth Fairy Move.

I have a new computer, a Christmas gift to myself; spent many hours today configuring and re-configuring my network router and home network (entailing schlepping laptop and new computer up and downstairs a few times between office and dining area, where the router is located), finally figured out that the reason my new speakers weren’t working was because they weren’t plugged in (duh!), and am dealing with Vista.  And a clacky keyboard.  The office is full of boxes.

The tree is trimmed.  Pics to come (assuming my camera plays nicely with the new computer).

Damn, it’s cold!

More tomorrow…

We got on the plane in Anchorage…the sun was low down on the horizon and beginning to set.

The dotter behaved beautifully all day long.  In the morning, when our petsitter arrived to "practice" with the dawg (we haven’t received any frantic phone calls yet, so I’m guessing things have gone okay).  During the quick stop at OmegaDad’s office so we could print out the itinerary and various confirmation numbers.  At the airport.  In the plane.  All the way.  She was awesome.  We were pleased (and relieved).

The flight stopped at Sea-Tac, we deplaned and replaned, and OmegaDad leaned over to me and whispered, "That young lady is traveling by herself."  I knew exactly who he was discussing:  the pre-teen brunette with the slightly excited air, who was sitting a few rows ahead of us and on the other side of the aisle.

When we deplaned in the Valley of Death at oh-dark-thirty, tired and running on empty, as we exited the jetway, we saw a small head peering from around the doorway.  As we got closer, I realized it was a small Asian head, attached to a small Asian girl about the size/age as the dotter.  We headed into the gate area, to an empty, echoing area devoid of people, except for a woman in the distance.  OmegaDad and I glanced at the girl, glanced at the woman, assumed they were together, and headed on, trudging wearily to the baggage claim, with visions of a bed at the hotel luring us forwards.

We get to baggage claim, and OmegaDad decamps for the little boy’s room, OmegaDotter snuggled up beside me on the bench (I think, I honestly can’t remember at this point!) and we zoned out.

I see in the distance the lady with the little Asian girl and the cute pre-teen and one of those bag-carrier thingummies.  She comes closer and smiles, and says, "Excuse me…are you by any chance…"

Mentally I’m already finishing the sentence:

"…are you by any chance part of the Phoenix FCC?"

"…is your daughter by any chance from China/Korea/Vietnam?"

Or something similar–the kind of encounter you become accustomed to, where you have a quick meet-and-greet of someone who has a family similar to yours, recognition of commanality in the middle of an empty airport.

And then she knocks my socks off by saying:

"Are you by any chance OmegaMom?  I read your blog all the time!"

WHOA!

NO SHIT?!  Someone is asking me if I’m my blog persona?!  In an international airport?!

Holy cow!

This was such an amazing ego-boo I can’t describe it.  A shot in the emotional arm.  An OMG-I’m-blushing moment like you wouldn’t believe.  I have a real, live reader!!!  (Okay, of course I know I have real, live readers, and have actually met a few on purpose, but this was my very first chance encounter and way kewl.)

This is, obviously, one of the reasons actors act and pop singers sing:  Just to get that zingy ego-boost out of nowhere.

We chatted; I asked her if she had a blog (no) or had commented, and she said, "Oh, no, I’m just a lurker, but I read you all the time."  The lovely young pre-teen was her niece, visiting from the bush, and her daughter was, indeed, exactly OmegaDotter’s age and also from China.

So, to my nameless fan:  Hi!  I’m sorry I didn’t talk more, and wasn’t more prepared, but we were honest to goodness almost staggering with exhaustion and the ol’ brain cells weren’t firing quite right.  And I just wanted to tell you that your greeting was truly appreciated and made me feel all warm-n-fuzzy.  Shout out in the comments!

So we’re here.  We chowed down at our favorite dim sum restaurant in the Valley of Death, then stopped at Trader Joe’s to grab some stuff for OmegaGranny, and headed up the hill.  I soaked in the sunlight, and felt the fifty kazillion knots of tension and misery in my back easing off.  OmegaDad eyeballed the clouds and voiced his sincere hope that he’ll be able to tell his coworkers, when asked, that it snowed every damned day we were in Arizona.  Har.

The sun has been up since 7:30.  It’s almost 5, and the sun hasn’t set yet.  I’ve hugged my mamasan like she hasn’t been hugged in a long time, and same for Unka Bill.  Cousin R. has made it here and is relaxing in her hotel room for a bit, and then we’re off for dinner.

Great-Grandma’s 104th birthday was two days ago; I thought it was yesterday (my mnemonic is Pearl Harbor Day–but I left out the "day before" clause in my memory).  A post about her tomorrow.

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When you move 4,000 miles away from your old abode, your address changes in lots of far-flung places.

So, in this age of the wonder that is the intertubes, you sit down at your computer once you have sorted out all the details (like, say, where you’re going to live, and what your phone number is going to be), crack your fingers in a semi-macho display, poise the hands over the keyboard like Leonard Bernstein, lift a hand…

…and type http://www.bofa.com…

…and Hey Presto! you’re there, you answer a few security questions that no-one else is ever going to know (your father-in-law’s middle name is not exactly common, nor is it exactly common knowledge outside your spouse’s circle), and voila, you have happily changed your primary address and phone number and your bank statements are now delivered to your bank-o-mailboxes at your new address by the postal person and you’re happy.  Well, kinda.

You do the same with a variety of services.

All on the web.

All nice and easy.

All using Sekrit Kwestshuns with Sekrit Ansers that only you know.

And you go along with your life, merrily having a grand ol’ time trying to adjust to life in your new abode.

Then one day you discover Etsy.  Some wicked woman lists some artists in her “gifts for less than $50″ blog post, and you foolishly click on the links, and you are in love and you MUST.  HAVE.  THESE.  THINGS.  NOW.  (Especially since you are trying to decorate a new house, and counteract the continually shrinking amount of sunlight by scattering Bright Things around the house.)

Now, Etsy allows you to use PayPal.

You have a nice small amount in your PayPal account, due to your previous go-round with blog ads (and you wistfully hope that your new go-round with blog ads will prove as pleasantly pseudo-lucrative).  So you decide to purchase your new treasures using PayPal.

There’s a little note at Etsy when you select PayPal to pay; it says to be sure your shipping address in PayPal is the correct one.  So you schlep over to PayPal’s website, knowing you haven’t changed your address, so maybe it’s time to change it.

And you think you’ve done it, and order your Glittering Things, and the shipping address that shows up is not your new address.

So you scratch your head.  “Say what?!  Dayum.  I know I changed that address.  Hunh.  Maybe I need to change the address that’s marked as the main address.” 

You are in a maze of twisty, turny passages that all look alike.

You are in a maze of turning, twisty passages, all looking alike.

You are in a maze of twisting, turning passages that all look alike.

First you add an address.  That works.  Then you add a phone number and an email address.  That works.

Then you try to make the new address your primary address and delete the old one.  You get a page that says they will contact you with a Sekrit Code so you can confirm the changes.

They will contact you at your primary phone number, which is not the new phone number you just added.

OR…

They will contact you at your mailing address.  Which just happens to be the old mailing address.

OR…

You can select “Other”, which brings you to a page where they say to contact Customer Service at this particular phone number.

So after trying a few go-rounds (surely there’s a way to get your new address and/or new phone number to appear in the drop-down??), you grit your teeth in frustration and call the phone number (which is not toll-free).

You get a nice pleasant-sounding computerized voice.  You follow its instructions.  You select the “change customer address and/or phone number” option.  You get a voice message that says…

“Did you know you can change your address and phone number on our website?  We’ll be sending you instructions on how to do this to your email.”

See OmegaMom.

See OmegaMom’s eyes bug out.

See OmegaMom turning red.

See OmegaMom start howling.

See OmegaMom jump up and down in frustration, just like her five-year-old daughter does.

See OmegaMom go wash dishes to get away from her frustration.

See OmegaMom sit down at the computer once again to try to figure out how to contact a real, live human being who might be able to help her do something that LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF PAYPAL CUSTOMERS MUST WANT TO DO, JUST LIKE HER!!!

Now, really.  Banks do it.  Utilities do it.  Lots of places that are just as needful of security measures as PayPal do it OVER THE INTERNET.  Without all this rigamarole.  Why the fuck can’t PayPal?!?!

I just want to be able to use my “OmegaMom fund” to be able to buy myself some kewl artwork.  Is this too much to ask?

Grrrr.

So I’ve sent an email to their help desk.  Now I have to wait until Monday to be contacted.  The Kozmik All is no doubt arranging, right now, for the person at PayPal to ignore my offered new phone number and new email addresses, and try to call my old phone number.  ARRGGGHHHHHHH!!!

For many years, my mom took me to see the Nutcracker in downtown Chicago.  I am trying to follow in her footsteps by taking the dotter as well.

Big City Ballet was showing the Nutcracker, so I bought (ack gasp!) (expensive!) tickets for the three of us for this afternoon.  Unfortunately, OmegaDad got the creeping crud yesterday and was feeling like hell today, so it was just the dotter and I.

Of course, we had already purchased the requisite fancy Christmas dress…last year’s is much too small, making me forcefully aware of how much bigger the girl has gotten.  (As Miss C. said in her commentary on my last post, OmegaDotter is forever three years old in memory.)

What might not be immediately evident in the above picture is the fact that this year’s requisite fancy shoes that grabbed the dotter’s fancy are…

…are…

Well…urg…they have heels.  ACK!

Strappy black shoes with heels.  I felt like I was introducing an innocent to something like crack.  Or like a traitor to feminism and battling the patriarchy.  Additionally, I felt like a dreadfully wussy woman, to cave to the dotter’s pleas for these shoes, no others.  But, dayum, they did look mighty cute.

In honor of the occasion, I, too, wore heels.

Let me just say:  I am out of practice with high heels.  My feet have gotten longer.  And fatter.  And flatter.  My darling husband, my the Kozmik All forever smile upon him, eyeballed the shoes and asked me, “You are going to take some ’sensible’ shoes with you, right?”  Quickly disabused of the idea of wearing them all the way to Big City and back, I backpedaled and said, ”Oh, of course!” and crammed my tootsies into my nice, comfy, ugly faux Ugg boots.

Thank heavens.

Because wearing the high heels and walking the two blocks from the parking garage to the ballet venue made me quite aware of how out of high-heel-shape my feet are.  By the time we sat down in our seats, I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I surreptitiously kicked my pointy-toed high heels off.

At intermission, out in the middle of the lobby while looking at kewl Christmas ornaments for sale, I slipped them off again, and just carried them with us wherever we went.

There was, of course, a whirlwind of little girls dressed in fancy dresses and holiday finery.  I adore looking at all the girly girls in their Christmas splendor, and sighed quietly at some of the dresses which OmegaDotter had nixed (in favor of that triumph of marketing, the fancy dress with the doll-sized version of the fancy dress hanging off, ready for your 18″ doll to wear to match you).

The problem was, at the end of the performance (which was splendid) I couldn’t just walk back to the car in my stocking feet.  By the time we got downstairs and outdoors, I was mincing and wincing with every step.

So say bye-bye to the pointy-toed high heel shoes.  They are hitting the “donate to Goodwill” pile as of this evening.  Too bad, because they are quite pretty…but I will not suffer for beauty!

(P.S.  For those who are wondering:  Yes.  That is a Christmas sweater.  Not only is it a Christmas sweater, but it has glitter and beads, to boot.  I have admitted in many previous posts that I am an anti-fashionista, and I’m sure the very fact that I have a Christmas sweater, let alone wear it, consigns me to the utter depths of non-fashionable depravity in some people’s eyes.)

(Isn’t that a great word?  Whinge.  Love it.  For those who don’t know, it’s the British version of whining.)

Leah has given me permission to whine.  So here goes with confession time.

I’m homesick.

There.  I said it.

I live in Alaska, land of wilderness and mountains and oceans, a place so many people dream about coming to, and I’m homesick.

I miss the sun, oh so much.  Right now, we’ve got 6 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight per day.  That’s if you call it “sunlight”.  First, we get “sunlight” maybe once every four days.  Second, the angle of the sun is so low that while the sky gets light, we don’t get the sun for about an hour after “sunrise” (it hides out behind the mountains), and similarly it hides before sunset.  Third, that low angle of sun means that the sunlight we do get is watery late afternoon sunlight all day.  But most of the days are gray with clouds.

I miss the stars, oh so much.  When we were moving here, I just assumed that, being in the northern wilderness, we’d have glorious stars.  Not so.  We’re near enough to the coast to have high humidity, which washes out the stars…when it’s not totally overcast (those gray days extend to gray nights, too).  I miss seeing the Milky Way almost every night, arching across the sky.  And so far we haven’t had any northern lights to take the place of my glorious, shimmering, take-your-breath-away stars.

I miss the smell of pine trees in the sunshine.

I miss the openness of the piney woods.

I miss our ratty old log home, smelly and poorly designed and cold and drafty as it was.  It had character.  Our new house is nice enough, but it’s a basic box and lacks character.

I miss my buddies back in Arizona.  I miss having the Society of Geeky Gals meeting up for dinner and a play on a regular basis.  I miss my Northern Arizona FCC buds.

I miss my mom and my grandma.  Oh, lordy, do I miss them.  I miss being able to say to myself on a lazy Sunday, “Hunh!  Wonder what Mom’s up to…I think I’ll drive down and hang out for a while!”

I miss our old neighbors.  We had some cool neighbors back there.

I feel so guilty to be feeling so homesick.  Here I am, on the adventure of a lifetime.  For cryin’ out loud, the feds paid for us to come here. 

I know that I need to give it all some time, that I will make new friends, that in about six weeks’ time the days will start getting longer, that we’ll find new places to hang out, that I’ll be able to visit my old hangouts every now and then to get a jolt of piney woods and stark desert and stars and vivid sunlight.

I know all that.

But right now, I’m homesick and I just want to cry.

The perennial discussion about “Gotcha Day” is rearing its head once again on a China adoption site.  First there’s the person who posts a link to an article about how “Gotcha Day” is offensive to some adoptees with a “something to think about” comment.  Then some more folks post pointers to other articles.  Then someone gets offended by the offense and says it’s all PC-talk.  Someone says that the kids feel kidnapped by their adopters.  Someone takes real offense to that, saying they didn’t kidnap the kids, and should they just leave them in an orphanage?!  Things escalate, and feelings get all hurt all over the place.

Nothing new.  It’s been a topic of discussion for years.

Articles by adult adoptees who say they find the term offensive have been available for years, too.  I read those articles way back when, and posts by adult adoptees on adoption triad lists, and decided to ditch the term myself, because I could see how it could be offensive.  I “got” a car.  I “got” a dog.  No-one asks when I “got” my husband, eh?  They always ask when I “met” him.

So we’ve gone on our merry way, and I’ve trained myself to use the phrase “when we met you” to the dotter so it’s become ingrained in my psyche.  When talking about that day, I use “Metcha Day”.  But other than that, I don’t think much about it until a hoo-rah like this rises up.

A few months ago, when we were newly come to Alaska, the dotter and I had gone for a hike along Little Lady River in Margaret Pass and were returning to the parking lot.  As we emerged, my Caucasian-parent-with-Asian-children radar went off, focusing in on a guy with a bunch of boykids with him, all of whom were Asian.  At some point he hailed me and I wandered up to introduce myself and the dotter.

At some point in the conversation, he asked, “We got him” (pointing at one son) “in (some city), and him” (pointing at another) “in (some other city) and him” (yeah, there were a bunch!) “in (third city).  Where’d you get her?”

Now, he was an utterly nice guy.  The boys all looked like fine, happy, healthy lads, playing all over the place and doing boyishly romping things in and out of his eyesight.  But y’know, this was the very first time someone had ever asked me that question in that way, and it just…jarred me.  And I guess I hesitated, or something in my face showed, because he was suddenly somewhat defensively apologetic, saying, “Or are you one of Those Folk who don’t like that term?  I know some people don’t like it!”

Erg.  Well.  Um.  Yeah, I guess I’m one of “those folk”. 

Anyway, I answered that we had met the dotter in Guilin, avoiding the whole question of where I stand on “get” versus “met”, back in 2002, and yadda yadda yadda.  We talked some more, the dotter and I left, and I sort of forgot about it until the topic came up again.

I don’t know how OmegaDad feels about it.  I’m pretty sure he’d like the cuteness of “Gotcha Day”, and thinks more in terms of the daddy chasing the giggling girl, catching her, and going “Gotcha!”  Whereas I listened to the nice guy at the parking lot “getting” his boys (a pre-teen two of whom were sitting right there listening to the conversation), and just imagined going to the kid shop and “getting” one.

I dunno.  I suppose I’m turning all PC, and a lot of my readers are rolling their eyes at me and my oh-so-Victorian sensitivity to the term.  But for some reason, that meeting just cemented in me why I don’t like it, and made me understand just why some adult adoptees (and teens) might find it offensive or just icky.

(On a totally different note:  Have any of my blogging buddies gotten a slew of separate multi-page hits in a row from a new-to-them reader, all of them direct links without a referring page?  It’s just kind of weird…)

In a comment to the previous entry, Kate said I should try the Lindy Hop.

Come with me friends, to a time long ago, a simpler time, a time when OmegaMom was a carefree single living in Chicago…

There was (and still is) a “lifelong learning” organization in Chicago called The Discovery Center.  After many times flipping through their monthly course catalog and looking yearningly at the dance classes, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Swing Dance class, even though (being single) I had no partner.

It was a great class.

The teachers started out slow.  We partnered up with each other, and switched partners after every little bit of practice, and then, at the end of the evening’s class, they put on some nice slow jazz and we’d practice our mostly-klutzy-but-slowly-improving dance steps.

(Part of the idea, of course, was to introduce singles to each other.  Sort of a pseudo-mass-dating scene.)

It was an eight-week session.  By week six, Mr. Police Officer Into Nudism and I were heading out after class to Jukebox Saturday Night, on Clark Street, and tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor.  We danced well enough, I might add, that we got applause and had people asking us how long we had been dancing together.

(Let us pause for a moment while OmegaMom preens herself.)

It was grand fun.  Let’s put aside the fact that Mr. Police Officer kept a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants at all times.  And that he really, really wanted me to come to the nudist club with him for a weekend.  And that I was too uptight to even consider it.  I got some experience with a radar gun and some dates out of the whole affair, and we both had fun at the nightclub.

The problem is that this was at least twenty years ago.

The additional problem is that OmegaDad has the rhythmic competency of a piece of driftwood:  i.e., none.

The third piece of the puzzle is that, while OmegaDad actually can dance if he is very carefully handled by my cousin Sissy (I have seen this with my own two eyeballs), my cousin Sissy has the patience of a saint.  I do not.  So any practice would need to be done by OmegaDad and Someone Else.  But OmegaDad is finicky about things…for quite a while, he would get insulted if some cute thing flirted with him in the checkout line, because he was Married! dammit!  My explaining that the flirter probably didn’t see his wedding ring wouldn’t cause him to pardon her; she was automatically placed into the category of Bad Person.  Anyway, I can hardly imagine how he would respond to dancing with some woman who wasn’t OmegaMom.  Except for cousin Sissy, who is a special case.

Anyway, once upon a time, OmegaMom could dance quite well, and all the credit should go to the method of teaching, which was:  slow, steady, and practice over and over and over again.  And have fun.

Which is what I was talking about in my previous post.

And to all and sundry who said they’d take one of these courses if I started one, I will merely point out that I am in Alaska, Land of Wild Freedom, and you all are Outsiders.  (That’s what they call the Lower 48 here: “Outside”.)  It would be quite difficult to hold a class for someone who lives in Kentucky, someone who lives in NJ, someone who lives in Oregon, and someone who lives in Arizona.

But!  If we were all in the same neck of the woods…!  Hey, we’d have to just hire ourselves a dance teacher and have a grand ol’ time.

Right?

Sooooo…Did OmegaDad return home with the blue Spiderman backpack as threatened?

Well, no.  He returned home with a pink thing that, even though it wasn’t a “pully” kind of backpack, which she particularly wanted, had lots of compartments and a water bottle, so it fully satisfied the dotter.

Onto other things:  A few weeks ago, I signed up for a ballet class for adults at the dance studio the dotter goes to for ballet.  I’ve gone to one class.  Last week I fizzled at the last minute, blaming Halloween pumpkin-carving and dinner makings.  This week?

Well, I think I’m not going to go.

Why?

Um.  Y’know…I don’t really like ballet.

There.  I said it.  It just doesn’t do anything for me.  And the class was all bar work.  Lots of pliés and footwork.  In a word:  boring.

So I’ve been watching the dotter’s ballet class, and it’s fun.  Her gymnastics class is fun.  They don’t push the kids; they move them at a slow pace, repeating things, making sure they learn each new thing well, and making sure it’s just plain fun.

Why can’t they do that for adults?  The dotter won’t be stuck into bar work for another few years.  But she’s getting lots of dancing and lots of basic moves and having fun.

I wanna have fun.   I wanna take a gymnastics class that lets me bounce on a trampoline and run an obstacle course where you do lots of somersaults and walk on a balance beam (over and over and over again) at a very basic level before being asked to do more.  I want a basic class that admits that, yes, adults can be klutzes, and, like children, need to repeat the same thing over and over and over again before it sinks into the kinetic unconscious.  This is why I back out of aerobics classes or step classes that are too advanced:  they whip you from one combo to the next when you’re just starting out, and the next thing you know, while the entire class is be-boppin’ in one direction, you’re doing a box-step in the other direction.  I don’t get embarrassed by it any more, it’s just the way I am.  But I do get frustrated, and I do end up box-stepping right into someone who’s be-boppin’, and it just isn’t fun.

But, when I do get a class where they take it slow and let klutzes like me learn the basic combos a bit at a time, and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse them before moving on, I do have fun.

Klutzes of the world, unite!  We need to demand fun classes that are slow-paced in the learning aspects, but not slow-paced in movement!

Woohoo! Join me, fellow rebels!

Miss Cellania asked about “weird people” I have known.  Alas, my mind immediately went blank.  All I could think about, rather than people, were the various odd living spaces I’ve either considered or lived in.

Shortly before I moved out of Chicago, I was wisting for the country life.  I was also wisting for a cheaper rental (though, looking back, I could slap myself upside the haid, because I had a lovely one-bedroom rental with built-in bookcases flanking a defunct fireplace, a balcony, hardwood floors, and lots of closet space for the amazing price of $365 per month, all in a place that was walking distance from the beach and lots of nice restaurants).

Anyway, yearning for a different place to live, I scoured the classifieds in the Chicago Reader week in and week out.  Most were retreads of what I was in–three flats, small brick apartment buildings, some swanky stuff on or near the Magnificent Mile.

But one day, I read an ad that piqued my curiosity.

They were renting a silo.  A real live, honest-to-goodness, grain silo.  Four floors, one room per floor, hardwood floors.

They also had a refurbished barn for rent.

It was way the hell and gone north of the city, but it sounded just too cool for words, so I called the owner up and set up an appointment to view the silo.

It looked great from the outside, but once you were in it, it was quite the letdown.  I had had visions of a spiraling staircase on the inside of the walls, circling up the interior, with each room using the most of the space (like this).  Alas, the guy who had done the work was…um…lacking in imagination.  Or dumb.  Or just plain weird.  Y’see, he had built this weird boxlike structure down the middle of the silo with the stairs there.  It ate up all the space.  What was left was, oh, four feet of space surrounding the stairwell.  And the stairwell was no great shakes, either; it was rickety and poorly built and looked like the slightest bit of wind coming through the cracks in the silo would have it all come tumbling down.

My heart was broken and I abandoned my silo dreams.

Years later, when I went back to college for the final time in the Bay Area, I knew I needed an inexpensive place to live.  So, once again, I found myself scouring the rental ads.  Interestingly enough, in the East Bay, there were lots of little cottages to rent–inexpensively, too.  But each time I called, the ad had been out for a day already, and the place was rented (no doubt to other penniless, hungry students).

One day, I found an ad the day it was posted.  I called the guy up.  I went to take a look.

And ohmigosh, it was just darling.  It was a tiny little 10×20 cottage in the back of a house at the bottom of the San Leandro hills.  It had a wall full of French windows, a teeny-tiny galley kitchen, an itty bitty bathroom with a shower stall, and exposed rafters painted white.  I was sunk.

The most interesting thing?  It started life as a chicken coop.  Yes.  I lived for two years in a former chicken coop–and I loved it.  There was an avocado tree right outside those French windows…there was a boxed flower bed at the foot of the itty bitty porch, which I filled with California poppies…there was a bottle-brush tree beside the porch…It was wonderful.  Best of all, I could pop into my car, drive up the hill five minutes, and be able to hike around the San Leandro Reservoir.

These days, of course, we live in a log cabin in the piney forest–a dream for many folks.  We almost bought an octagonal house, instead (apparently, they were all the rage for vacation homes in this area for a while).  But I still yearn for a yurt, or an earthship, or something equally offbeat, miss my darling cottage, and daydream about what that silo could really have been like, if the owners had just tried a bit harder.

Technorati: Silo, yurts, earthships, non-standard housing

SpaceMom asked:

Has the experience of being a mother changed you in any profound ways? Or are you still Omega woman just with another section added to your life?

When I was a non-mom, there were some particular emails that got forwarded on and on, over and over.  One was “practice for parents-to-be“, always good for a guffaw or two.  Another was “Motherhood–it will change your life“, which was always good for either a tear or two or a screech of annoyance accompanied by a full-scale meltdown, depending on where I was emotionally with respect to infertility.

Really.  When you’re in the midst of a harrowing attempt to just get pregnant, you don’t want those reminders of just how your life changes.  And, to top it all off, you just don’t know how your life will change.  Oh, you can imagine it.  You can come up with all sorts of rosy scenarios.  And, as any childless person will tell you, it’s grating to have parents tell you, “You just don’t know what it’s like.”

Um.

I hate to say it, but…well, you just don’t know what it’s like.

Paradoxically, the profoundest change has been that I’ve become more patient and I’ve become more impatient.

I never realized just how much patience it takes to tell or show a small person, for the umpteenth time, how to do something.  These days, I am able to achieve a zen-like stage in some areas of interaction with the dotter–either I’m aware that this is something that just takes lots of repetition to sink in, or else blowing a fuse about it is way down the “battles I want to start” list.

On the other hand, sometimes that zen-like stage just goes “whoosh!” and I am a veritable volcano of impatience.

Who’d've thunk it?

Having a small child around takes time…lots of time.  And, I admit, I resent it sometimes.  Before Dotter, I would spend an hour or two a day hiking around the woods surrounding Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods.  I’d get home, grab the dawg’s leash and the dawg, we’d pile into the car, drive ten minutes or less to one of my favorite trails, and be off.  I’d be able to spend the time to look, to listen, to breathe in the fragrance of the woods.  I loved it.  It nourished my soul.

For a very short time after we brought OmegaDotter home, I was/we were able to do hiking–we’d stuff her into a baby-backpack and head on out.  But only a few short months after she came home, she became a toddler.  A very stubborn toddler, who Did Not Want the baby backpack.  And my hikes suddenly came to a screeching halt.

We are at the point where I can now take her out with me for short hikes.  What, to me, are very short hikes.  Slowly, slowly, she is increasing her stamina and interest.  But even so, while at times it’s grand to have her along, dancing and running and peering and chattering away, I still miss–extremely–those hours of peace and relaxation spent among the trees.

(The dawg, too, misses this.  The dawg has become fat.  Very fat.  Sigh.)

I’ve become more empathetic and compassionate, and, paradoxically, less so.  I find news stories about little girls being kidnapped and raped, or just lost, or dying, to be excruciating.  I can’t read them any more; while I felt it intellectually before, now…now I put a little girl’s face to that faceless news story, my breath catches in my throat and my heart skips a beat.  My liberal “oh, he must have had a bad life!” intellectual reasoning about the perpetrator gets buried deep underneath a very primal desire to rip his jugular out.

I didn’t know how your heart could fill with all-out pride at some very simple things–like a child who only weeks before couldn’t take a step out onto the ice rink suddenly being able to fly around on the skates.

I didn’t realize just how hard capabilities that adults take for granted are to learn.  Lost in the mists of time are my own feeble first attempts at buttoning buttons, tying knots, or reading.  Now, when the dotter tries something new, I can see just how hard it is to learn the basics, have the ability to stick with it and practice, and then, suddenly one day, it becomes easy.

I didn’t know how just looking at a sleeping child could take your breath away.

I didn’t know that you could look at that sleeping child and see the teenager-to-be, and have your heart fill with worry about some faceless unknown pimply teenage boy.

Oh, yeah, it changes everything.  Honestly.  But, at heart, I’m the same OmegaMom, with additional depth.

Technorati: Motherhood, parenting