Perspective (the Night the Tree Fell)

I had a blog post half written about our experiences with the tree through our dining room. And then Wednesday happened, and people lost everything, including their loved ones, and any damage we sustained seemed suddenly so ridiculously insignificant by comparison. A rug? A table? A couple of weeks in a hotel?

Not much, when you've seen the footage of that breathtaking hammer of destruction making its deliberate way through a city you love and friends' hometowns, picking away lives, homes, neighborhoods, the very fiber of the places, and leaving rubble in its wake.

So after all, I have little to report. My husband, my children, my dogs, and I are all present and accounted for, no worse for the wear unless you count a fading circle of rug burn in the very center of Katherine's forehead from when she tried to fly off the bed. Unless you count Alex's newfound anxiety about bad weather, which remains thus far in the realm of healthy respect and not the haunting paranoia that I grew up with and which would require more than calm amateur weather lessons and hugs and assurances.

Assurances, which, it turns out, are generally pretty empty. Some things are just too big, too powerful, to protect each other from.I guess that's my own scar. That, and my recent tendency to eye the general tree population with suspicion and distaste. (For the record, I was nowhere near Toomer's Corner.)

Two weeks in the Residence Inn taught us how to live on top of one another without resorting to violence, and two weeks living in my parents' basement left the dogs fat and happy. There was cabin fever, mainly for the almost-6-year-old who is used to being able to run in and out at will. There was crankiness from all corners but mainly from Katherine and me, who both have a hard time adapting ... a trait slightly more appropriate for the 10-month-old than the almost-33-year-old. The good old RI saw us through Steven's modest birthday party, Easter and illness.

When the latest and most severe round of storms crashed into the state and pieces of other cities started raining down outside our hotel windows, I took the kids and hid out in the bathroom. Alex was all eyes and questions ("Why isn't Dad in here with us?"), Katherine thought it was great fun. She found a plastic Easter egg and threw it repeatedly, endlessly, into the bathtub just to watch us retrieve it for her. Babies train their people very well.

I guess all of us (save Kat, who only seems concerned with her general physical comfort at any given moment, as it should be) were thinking back to that night, that comparatively insignificant storm, the suddenness with which hell, when it breaks loose, breaks loose.

There was little warning if you don't count the sirens, which we should have but didn't (we're those desensitized people they keep admonishing on the news, or at least we were. Now we'll pay more attention). There were some weird noises in the distance, coming closer, that we heard/felt, and I remember looking at Steven and both of us pausing to be puzzled by it, but just for a second. Because then the lights went out and our dining room exploded, and it started pouring rain on us. I don't remember running but I'm sure I was headed for Alex's room. Alex met me in the hall, trembling head to toe, straight from the shower, in his too-small, mismatched pajamas with his freshly washed hair plastered to his forehead and his hands grasping, squeezing, clawing at me, screaming, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"

And me, with my refrain of "It's OK, it's OK, it's OK," which was both a lie (I really didn't think it was) and not an answer to his question.

"Where's Katherine?!" Steven yelled from twenty miles away in the living room, and my heart stopped because for a split second my fear-distorted brain couldn't retrieve the information.

When it did, I ran in and grabbed her up from her crib, poor little oblivious thing, and she grumped at me for the rude awakening, and I squeezed her tight in one arm, with the other arm around Alex's thin, trembling shoulders in a death grip. I stood there in the hall surrounded by scared creatures (the dogs had apparently determined that I was somehow going to put things to rights) and feeling utterly vulnerable.

With the lights out, the house was pitch-black except for flashes of lightning that showed us just enough to know that it had been a near miss. Steven had been sitting at that computer desk, now covered in hunks of ceiling, support beams, and pink fluffs of insulation like the disemboweled remains of a cotton candy machine, a minute before if not less, cursing the bad luck that the power flashes had disrupted his progress on our tax filing program. I had been sitting at the dining room table scarcely five minutes before, going through a stack of junk mail mixed with important documents (no lectures, please, I KNOW birth certificates and such don't belong with long-expired coupon leaflets), looking for Katherine's social security card.

We had no working flashlight (note to self), and Steven was persistently searching through the rubble on the computer desk for his cell phone. It didn't even occur to me to ask why. (Turns out it was the only place he had our homeowner's contact information.)

And I think we could've been all right then if the burglar alarm hadn't gone off. There's no adequate way to describe the piercing wail that started out of nowhere and refueled our panic, but we ran outside onto the front patio without even thinking because that sound ... it's just not humanly withstandable. Bad for our situation, good for a burglary.

The storm had reached its peak by then and lightning was all around us, making the night bright as day and really simplifying our options into: get struck or go deaf. Getting into the car proved harder than it might've. Alex was terrified and refused to walk, and I don't blame him because I was tempted to ask Steven to carry ME. I ran through the rain in my socks and nightgown with Katherine in my arms and huddled in the back of the Trooper with her. Poor Steven was tasked with rounding up the panicked, confused dogs. Charlie jumped right in but Jack, always the holdout, required some coaxing. And it's not easy, coaxing a terrified golden retriever into the back of a truck in the middle of a tornado. Hats off to Steven for making it happen without knocking him out and throwing him in like a giant sack of potatoes.

We sought refuge at my parents' house, in the basement where I think Alex wanted to stay until he felt completely safe, maybe forever.

Looking back, I realize how lucky we were and also how lucky others weren't. The ones whose trees didn't stop at the dining room, or the ones who were in the wrong place at the wrong time like any one of us could have been. It's a retrospective nightmare, and I pray for healing for everyone whose towns, homes, lives were irreparably altered.

We're back home now, safe and relatively sound in our much emptier great room with its new scuffs on the wood floors, unhung artwork, and odd, unlived-in smell.

It's home, and I've never been more thankful for it.

Coupla things

It's hard to believe I started this blog so long ago. I was just going back through old entries and only made it back to last Easter before calling it quits. I mean, reliving one's second child's birth is kind of heavy, and I hate to say that the early, early posts make me miss being pregnant, but ...

JUST A LITTLE.

Today Alex and I took a bike ride and went to swing at the park before coming home. He spotted his student teacher, a PYT from Samford who is acting as his classroom's primary teacher this month and on whom Alex seems to have a massive crush. She hugged him and he turned three shades of red. It was kind of adorable.

Katherine managed two restaurant lunches and a trip to the library this week without getting us kicked out of anywhere. That's my girl! She has also developed a weird/hilarious fake laugh: "Ha! Ha! Ha!" that makes me think she's going to be a funny one like her big brother, who started TRYING to make us laugh at about 7 months of age.

Also in the name of nostalgia, OH SWEET LORD, CLICK HERE FOR BABY ALEX.

Sweetness

My father won't call Alex sweet, but he will say that he's a good boy, which means the same in Southern-man-speak. Steven uses the word sweet more now that he has a daughter, but either way, we agree that our firstborn child is goodhearted, thoughtful, considerate, empathetic. It all seems to add up to sweet.

He told me last night that he thinks when he has trouble falling asleep it's because God wants him to keep Him company. I think that's an extremely interesting and rather self-important way to look at insomnia.

Also last night he brought us his DS (do we all remember DS-gate of pre-Katherine?) and said, "The good thing is it still works!" And then he showed us that it's hanging by one hinge, and since it is still operational, I'm not too concerned. It was kind of pitiful though, how obviously he expected us both to be horrified, angry, vengeful (and seriously? We're kind of too lazy for vengeful). It's all good now; he fixed it by wrapping half a roll of Scotch tape around it. Now it won't open, but somewhere inside that closed box, rest assured that games can be played.

Today he clogged up the toilet, broke a shelf off the entertainment center in his room, spilled a half-full bowl of cereal all over the kitchen floor and tried to clean it up with toilet paper before anyone noticed.

He also sustained a pretty ugly elbow abrasion from a fall off neighbor-girl's scooter, but was so proud that he didn't cry and has refused Band-Aids so that he can show it off at school tomorrow.

He kisses his sister and has a made-up song called "Little Pinky Toes" that he sings while he grabs said toes to make her giggle. (Well, if Katherine were capable of giggling; she has developed a laugh that one could accurately describe as part shriek, part maniacal cackle, part Revenge of the Nerds.)

People keep telling me to treasure these times with these little boys who are trying so hard to be big boys, and I do. Some days it's easier than others. Some days he seems to have warped right over to the teen years, sulky and brooding and, yes, jaded.

Then other days he clips a plastic sheriff's badge to a rubber Iron Man wrist band, colors little hearts around the band, and presents me with a special bracelet for being the best mom in the world.

It's things like that that make me bite my tongue when, um, shall we say dirty water starts overflowing the toilet and flowing across the bathroom floor.

Today we went to a birthday party at Pump It Up for a boy I will always remember as the sweet, chubby redhead in Alex's Toddler I class who always wanted me to pick him up if I arrived to a function before his own parents got there. He turned 6. Amazing. He and Alex fell back in step together like they haven't been at separate schools since August, and it was a lovely thing to see. Maybe boy friendships ARE less complicated, as my husband insists.

Miss Katherine is doing great now that she's over the cold that took both of us down. Her hair is coming in like gangbusters, light light brown unless you're in direct sunlight, when it's blonde (and Steven says I'm crazy, it's blonde and I just WANT it to be brown).

She charms the pants off people everywhere we go with that crooked smile that lights up her whole little body. Not that Steven and I are antisocial (hey, I just like the people I like), but where she got this innate desire to bestow upon everyone we walk past that dazzling grin, I do not know. Alex was the one who would stare at his shuffling feet until you nudged him to respond to a question with something other than a monosyllabic mutter. He outgrew that shyness, I think, or at least most of it. Yesterday he told every single person we met that he had a real game that day.

We don't know if they won. No one keeps score. But I'm going to say that they did. Go Durham Bulls!

Yesterday and today we hit the Lakeshore track by bike; yesterday it was Alex, Steven, and me, and today just me. It's easier with company. Even if your company keeps wanting to stop for a sip of Gatorade and the 5.2 miles down and back takes about twice as long as it should otherwise. I'm never going to develop Steven's enthusiasm for biking, but it's certainly fun enough to add to my shortlist of potential ways to get my @$$ back in shape.

And I'm getting there. Slowly.

Katherine's latest gift is those open-mouthed kisses that make up for in heartstring-pulling what they lack in not being sloppy. And I hate to wipe her kisses off, but sometimes there's little pieces of food stuck on my cheek after she gets affectionate...

Feeling good this week, feeling good about this weekend. God grant it sustenance.

Pan Out, Julie

The devil's in the details, isn't that what they say?

I just came up with a whole long explanation of potential origin for that saying that involved crops and livestock and sulfuric retribution, and then I reread it and realized it made me sound like a crazy person, and since I don't need any help doing THAT ... it's gone.

You're welcome.

What I will say is that I'm all about the details. That's probably why I was drawn to copy editing (Lord knows it wasn't the money, yuk yuk yuk), and why I tend to get so sidelined by what some might call insignificant that I miss the hugely obvious. I'd be the one in the plane struggling to bring my seat to the full upright and locked position while we were nosediving toward the Atlantic Ocean.

I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at the little paint splotch on the knee of Alex's jeans earlier today (and don't even get me started on why an art set marketed as a CHILD'S TOY comes with paint that could conceivably be used to coat your house) and was elated when it finally faded to the point that the pants were at least wearable again ... and then when I was tossing them into the washer for the fifth time, I saw an Alex-sized green handprint right on the seat of those pants. I gave up.

Today was the kind of day that spawned surrender from all corners.

Katherine refuses mixed veggies for lunch? Meh, give her a cookie.

The dogs want to stay in all day and be maddeningly underfoot and frightened of the vacuum cleaner and the baby, respectively? OK, but don't blame me if I suck up a tail in the vacuum or send Katherine to play her favorite new game, Squeal at the Skittish Dog.

Alex wants to skip his shower because "I didn't sweat that much today"? Well, I tell him, "At least run a washcloth over your feet."

It's not so much that I was lazy today, though I was, or that I had relaxed my let's-face-it-never-pristine standards of child-rearing for some noble purpose or strange experiment. It's just that, and bow out here if you can't stand to see a grown woman whine, I DON'T FEEL WELL.

I'm not good at being sick. All those jokes about "man cold"s and such apply to me. When I'm sick, nothing is fair, nothing is easy, and mostly, nothing is not irritating on a grand scale. My mother always took good care of me when I was sick. She gave me ginger ale and brought me sympathy and Saltines, a "food" whose sole purpose in existing is to sit on a sick person's bedside tray and silently taunt her with their almost-goodness.

Now that I'm a grown-up, now that I live with people who depend on me to be an actual functioning human being when my body is spontaneously deteriorating? Now I get "what's for dinner, Mom?" and the incessant leg tugging that is the universal baby sign for "Pick me up, pick me up, pick me up or I'm gonna screeeeeeeeeam!"

Details, though. Details.

Big picture tells me that this is a little sinus infection, that I'm going to get over it, that soon the sight of my children will not send me spiraling into NAGdom and my son will stop whispering to his dad when he thinks I can't hear, "I think Mom's gonna explode!"

Big picture also tells me that this is a decent place to vent, wail and gnash teeth and that the one or two people who read my blog and actually know me more than to wave at on the streets won't judge me for having a bad day. Cathy? Katie? (G or F, I love you both!)

So while the details insist that it's just about 5 degrees too hot in this house, that Jack has positioned himself right in front of the air vent so that not only are we not getting any air, but the whole bedroom smells like dog, that I forgot to get Alex's snack, water, and school bag ready to go for tomorrow, and that I'm about three days past the point where I need a girls' night (aHERM), the big picture is far less bleak.

It shows my kids warm (5 degrees too warm, perhaps) and safe in their beds, my sweet, helpful husband laughing at something on TV that probably only he would find amusing, two freelance projects in the works that I thank GOD for, friends, family, and goodness in the offing. And it's nice to remember those big-picture things when the details of the day involve lots and lots of snot, a hacking cough, an aching head and face and ... hair follicles. And what may very well be oil-based house paint that came disguised as a toy.

Oh, and there's at least one good detail: Clean sheets on the bed and new-to-us pillows. Thanks, Mother!

I'm going to make use of those riiiiiiight ... NOW.

I'm spring-broken.

I don't remember spring break when I was a kid. I remember AEA week, which had something to do with continuing education for Alabama educators, but I didn't call it spring break, and neither did anyone else.

But this was Alex's spring break, and I was determined to give him a good one. Sometimes beyond all reason, both physical and intellectual.

We went to the park a lot. I don't think that actually counts because the park is almost literally in our backyard. It takes five minutes to get there, walking slowly, and I know this because I've set the timer on my iPhone every day in the hopes that I would rack up some notable burned calories to add to my daily tally. Nah. Five minutes of "walking, pushing a stroller," according to My Plate, only counts for 33 calories.

Every day, when Steven got home from work, Alex and I went for a bike ride. The track behind his school is flat enough that I don't feel like I'm going to die, and the painted-on lanes inspire in him a limitless array of pretend race configurations. We've raced (and beaten, of course) Auburn, Tennessee, and "The Navericks," just this week. And that's not to mention the excitement of near-misses with two kids on scooters, an unleashed cocker spaniel, and a toddler named Brooke someone left to her own questionable devices.

We hit the petting barn at the state park, where we arrived early and were the only ones brave and stupid enough (on my part) to spend a good half-hour before the day warmed to comfortable. Alex brought a notebook and crayon and ran around heedless of the horrifying volume of farm animal excrement to take a survey of each animal he saw.



A goat tried to eat Katherine's stroller and pacifier clip, and she lost both socks before we decided to call it done.



A failed attempt at going to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch one day (thanks to a very well-intended grandmother) led us to the bowling alley, where Alex played one of the few operational arcade games a million times in a row and earned a whopping 59 tickets, to which I had to add $5.50 so that he could "win" the most expensive deck of cards ever purchased out of a mostly empty prize vending machine.

Pump It Up's pop-in playtime was our best choice of the lot. Alex jumped to his heart's content while Katherine crawled to the five-foot distance I allotted her before dragging her back to start over. She drew a crowd of preteen fawners, and Alex joined forces with a day-camp group while I sat on a bench and pondered all the germs they each were coming in contact with.



Afterward, we ate Chik-fil-A and I took them to Yogurt Lab, where Alex got an atrocity of Dulce de Leche with toppings of nonpareils and sour gummy worms.



All in all, it was a great week, and I'm glad we had it if not altogether sorry to see it end.

Have I mentioned that separation anxiety has suddenly kicked in with a vengeance? That Katherine doesn't want me out of arm's reach, much less sight? That she tries to climb up my legs, or, failing that, to fling herself backward so that I'll have no choice but to drop everything and catch her? That I've lost feeling in my left arm from holding her and have seriously considered cobbling together some sort of papoose-like contraption? That it's intensely more frustrating than one might have hoped?



No? Well then. Never mind.

There's something to be said.

After a weekend like this past one, when a particularly nasty stomach virus took down two of our troops (the boy had his bout a week ago, and I have THUS FAR, PLEASE KNOCK ON WOOD been spared), it's good to let oneself bask in the good things.

So I won't tell you about Katherine's new skill, wherein she lets out a bone-chilling scream when she doesn't get what she wants right away. Or about how today she tried to and for all I know succeeded in shattering all the glass in Publix by testing that skill when she caught sight of the Gerber Graduates puffs container that I put in the cart (GASP!) without giving her any.

I won't tell you that Alex's first teeball game got canceled because of the rain and that he cried his poor little heart out even though his parents were secretly rejoicing because (a) his dad was just mastering being in an upright position without a violent vomiting episode and (b) his mom hadn't had time or inclination to procure all elements of his ridiculously specific uniform. And (c) his grandparents were also ill, making it a double blessing in disguise that the teeball field was a mudpit, because sick baby sister in attendance would've brought down the SKY.

I will skip over the place where my diet just stopped even pretending to work, and the one where I felt really, really isolated and starved for the kind of grown-up water-cooler conversation (and hell, Idol gossip) I used to take for granted.

And I'll tell you, instead, that things are better. Baby K hasn't forgotten how to scream your eardrums loose. Alex still thinks that running more than one base at a time is cheating. I still haven't finished buying all the parts of his teeball uniform.

BUT.

I've already achieved most of the things I wanted out of life, and I experience all of them on a daily basis. I'm a wife. I'm a mommy. I'm a WRITER.

I have fantastic friends, people who would answer the phone if I called in the middle of the night to say "Bail me out of jail, " or, far more likely, "I need to talk."

I know more than anyone ever wanted know about unpredictable (and thus un-divulgeable) topics, I watch Judge Judy religiously, and I'm currently, shamelessly, reading Books I and II of R.L. Stine's The Baby-Sitter.

As of Wednesday, I will have been married for nine years to the only man in the world capable of not just putting up with, but somehow actually loving me along with my unshakable jumble of unclaimed baggage.

My kids, they are wonderfully weird, incurably awesome, and heart-piercingly sweet. And they remind me that, even when I manage to explode the tempered glass oven door facing and reduce Kraft mac and cheese to unrecognizable mush because I got sidetracked by some court show or other, I am loved and I've been given the rarer-than-you-might-think gift of loving unabashedly, brazenly, and without a filter.

It's the best I could've hoped for, and more than I ever expected.

Step Inside My Brain. It's Scary.

I'm not a perfect mom. Shocking, I know. But sometimes there's a gap between not being a perfect mom and being so much less than perfect as to feel inadequate. That's where I am right now. Today I changed my baby in the back of my mother-in-law's Yukon with mostly dry wipes in dripping rain and sleet and biting wind buffeting us because I forgot my house key when we left for lunch and I thought hubby would be back before us. Today I attempted to micromanage Alex's every move because he wasn't acting the way I wanted him to act. I failed, by the way.

Katherine is just about as easy-going as they come, but lately her behavior in restaurants, such as the testing of her volume, the endlessly repeated dropping of her bottle and pacifier, and her sudden bursts of displeasure are making it hard for me to want to take her out. It's a phase, I know, I know, I've done this before. I ALSO know, because I'm much more self-aware this go-round, that my perception of her is far, far different from that of the people around me. At least nine times out of ten, and certainly when the people around me are both of her doting grandmothers and a 2-year-old little boy at the next table who coughed two inches away from her face. No, really.

I guess, as mothers, our hope is for our children to be their best with people they don't get to see very often. In this case, my husband's parents. Not that I think Katherine will be judged for her post-afternoon-nap crankiness or her tendency to fight sleep when more than one thing is happening in the living room, but I do wish they could see her at her best. And Alex, with him I feel even more at a loss and less in control. His come-and-go shyness, his unpredictable (but OH so familiar) moods, and his excellent ability to push all my buttons at once converge to make me want to scream. Preferably while running away in the general direction of a spa.

But instead I'll bite my tongue and give him the speech for the ten thousandth time about how if you focus on the bad things (his grandparents leaving on Monday) you'll miss all the good things that happen in the meantime (tomorrow's fun and festivities, for example). He doesn't buy it, and I'm not sure I would either. His negative outlook he gets from yours truly.

I'm just feeling like I came in a little bit under the Bell Curve O' Motherhood the past couple of days, I guess. And I feel like making it publicly known (again?) that my sun rises and sets on those two small people. Even when he flips about losing a DS game, forgets what he's supposed to be doing in the middle of doing it, or is already acting like an emo-teenager at the age of 5. And her, even when she is inconsolable from exhaustion but won't go to sleep or seems to time her bowel movements to the worst. possible. moment.

They're mine, and I love them. Who wants perfect kids? Does the same go for mothers?