beanski

i need to get a few things off my chest

Do you ever have one of those days when you feel like you are the worst mother on planet earth?

You know, one of those days where you wake up at 2AM with your daughter in your bed and your husband snoring so loud you want to smother him with his pillow and you can't sleep so you grab your blankie and pillow and go crawl in your daughter's bed only to wake up to your son screaming bloody murder because you're not sleeping where you're supposed to be sleeping and after wanting to poke your eyeballs out with a pen, you head for the shower in attempt to restart your morning by taking the five extra minutes to shave the three inches of hair off your legs only to be interrupted by your daughter SCREAMING from the other room because she had a bad dream and doesn’t want to go to school today.

You race out of the shower, throw your dirty pajamas back on and carry your almost forty pound, almost four year old down the stairs because she’s crying and acting like a baby and you sit down with her on the couch long enough to get her to stop whining and crying about wanting to stay home from school (thank-you Little Einsteins) and then your son starts crying and screaming because he wants the Fresh Beat Band instead and you distract with him with taking him in the playroom to play with cars and while you’re in there you pick up the 4,000 legos scattered all over the floor that have been sitting there for five days because you’re too tired and lazy at the end of the day to give a shit about the mess that you all live in.

For two minutes the children are quiet so you pour yourself a bowl of cereal and sit down at the counter only to look over see Renee’s school flyer on the counter that haven’t looked at it in a while so you pick up and start reading and at the end of the first paragraph you realize that she needs a costume that represents the letter S for her Chicka Chicka Boom Boom play by the end of the day TODAY. You get instantly annoyed at your forgetfulness and decide you’ll have to plead for more time from her teachers and you go upstairs to get dressed and can’t find a single thing to wear in the mountain of laundry that is clean (you think) but hasn’t been put away in God knows how long and so you just throw something on and don’t bother to put make-up on or give a rip about how you look and you go back downstairs to try to coerce the children to get dressed but your kids think it’s really funny to lay on the floor like limp noodles and pretend they are babies while you try to put their clothes on. You finally get her in her swim suit for Swim and Gym and him in the right pair of shoes (he’s very particular about shoes) and you get up to take them out to the car and realize that you forgot to pack your daughter’s lunch for school. You use a few not-so-nice words under your breath, throw some cucumbers and cantaloupe and a bagel in her lunch box and tell yourself that it’s fine because she doesn’t actually eat anything anyways and then you head out the door to get in your car to go to work and you can’t find your ever-loving car keys. You wander through the house cursing your forgetfulness, telling yourself that you are the worst mother on planet earth; snap at your husband who is trying to help you find the keys you lost in the first place and then you finally just accept defeat, take his extra set of keys and accept his explanation that we can find the keys after work.

You storm out to your car, forget to give your kids a kiss and a “have a great day, I love you” and you sit down in the driver’s seat of your car holding back tears while your cell phone is ringing and you can’t find it and you look down and guess what? The effing keys were sitting right in there in the ignition the whole time.

Holy hell. How am I going to do this for the next 16 years? And more importantly, does anyone out there that in the off chance is still reading this blog I never post on anymore have a really good idea for a costume to represent the letter S that I can throw together on my lunch break? The lunch break I don’t actually get because I have this irrational need to skip my lunch in order to spend an extra hour with my children after school, an hour that is usually spent listening to them argue about which way to drive home or whether to play in the front yard or the back yard. The answer, in case you are wondering, is that they just want to play wherever the other one isn’t which pretty much requires mom to be in two places at the same time. That’s totally easy for moms, you know. Like, moms can do anything and everything on the whim of one of the short people dictating every single minute of their life.

I feel better. I needed that.

haunting

I grew up in a small neighborhood in rural northern Minnesota. We had a loop of twenty or so houses; each spread two and a half acres apart. We had a kickball field and a volleyball field and in the winter, my dad flooded the field so we could ice skate every single day. I lived in that house from the day I was born until I turned eighteen years old and headed for the twin cities for college. At that point my parents sold it and built their dream house on Rainy Lake and honestly I haven't really been back to the old neighborhood since then.

The neighborhood was one of those neighborhoods where the children run from house to house to play. If you were in my yard around lunch-time, my mom fed you. It was just the way it worked. We hunted the ditches for tadpoles and we took turns on one another's rickety old swing sets. We didn’t have cable.

My best friend and her family lived two houses down and honestly virtually every memory I have as a child involves her and her family. From my third grade birthday party to my senior prom, my friend Shawna was there. Her mom drove us trick-o-treating every year. Her dad baited some of my first fishing hooks. Her mom cooked me breakfast the morning we graduated from high school and I can still remember the tears in her eyes as I walked through the door that morning. She was so proud of me.

Shawna moved out east for college, married military and has lived everywhere from Japan to Hawaii. We lost touch for a lot of the years only reconnecting in the past few on Facebook. Our conversations involve mostly "Oh my gosh, your daughter looks just like you" and "I like that wine too."

But, I found myself standing in her kitchen this weekend, a kitchen that for all intensive purposes looks exactly the same way it did thirteen years ago when her mom remodeled it for Shawna's graduation party. I stood there with tears in my eyes and I hugged my old friend as we listened to her fifty eight year old mother struggle to breathe from the next room. She beat breast cancer five or so years ago only to have it come back in her bones and most recently, her brain. In all the years I knew her, I never saw her eat anything unhealthy and I don’t even remember seeing her drink a glass of wine. She was always so put together and beautiful and healthy.

I left there yesterday afternoon with a heavy heart and I yearned for those days when we were young and carefree. I wished that we could go back to the days when everyone was happy and healthy and I wished that Shawna and I could jump on our banana bikes and ride around the loop with our moms just one last time.

I took a detour and drove by our old house on my way out of the neighborhood. I stopped at the end of the driveway to admire the Amur maples my dad planted when I was a toddler. I looked up at the window of the bedroom I shared with my sister for over half of my life thus far. Life has gotten so busy, so stressful, and so unpredictable.  So unfair.

My mom called yesterday afternoon to tell me that Janet died there in that living room yesterday morning, only a few hours after I left. I laid awake half the night last night replaying memories from my childhood, mourning the life of someone who was taken away much too soon.  

I wish I had taken the time to tell her thank-you for everything she did for me growing up. I wish that I could do something, absolutely anything to take away the pain that I know her daughters and grandchildren are feeling today. It’s been thirteen years since we lost touch, a lifetime of change for all of us. In a lot of ways my reaction to her sickness and her death has surprised me. But, after replaying it over and over in my head, I think it’s just that there are some people in your life that make such a strong impact on you that imagining them not getting to be there to be the awesome mom and grandmother that I know she was is truly haunting.