That's it! PUUUURRRRRRRGGGGGGGE!

I was going to paint our bedroom this weekend. Mine and Pynchon's. I guess it would be syntactically easier to just say "the master bedroom," but that would, semantically, be misleading you with respect to creating delusions of its grandeur. It is not the bedroom of a Master, but rather, as a room, it masters us and all of our bedroomly possessions, forcing us into the one arrangement that fits the furniture while still allowing doors to open and people to get into bed without crawling over one another. My clothes, for instance, have all been mastered right out into the hallway, actually, so unmasterly is the closet situation.

Anyhow. I was going to paint. But painting requires accessing the baseboards, and accessing the baseboards requires moving the storage chest into another room (easy enough), rolling up the scatter rugs and putting them into another room (easy), rolling the bed into the dead centre of the room (easy-PEASY! it's on wheels!), and ... moving the dressers ... and the .... bedside tables .... that are completely covered over in stuff like a paper cone entombed in candy floss, only not nearly so yummy. Books. Alarm clocks. Pennies. Bike lock keys. Stickers I'm hiding from Munchkin. Jewelry that doesn't fit anywhere else. Random bits of hardware that have fallen off I'm-not-sure-what but am afraid to throw away. An ugly photo album we got as a gift. A couple of sweaters. Earplugs. A pill cutter. Three water glasses with varying levels of water and cat hair in them. More books.

It's a cluttery disaster, and the worst of it is, it's not that I'm just untidy and have neglected to put these things away. There is no designated away to put them to. This, to me, is a special kind of horror.

So instead of painting, I spent the weekend purging stuff from my house. The entire trunk is FULL of stuff for the charity shop--TV, VCRs (yes, plural), potty chair, mounds of clothing, sports equipment, that damned photo album, glassware, table linens, towels, and blankets and sheets and duvet covers. The recycling buckets overfloweth with bashed down cardboard from long-neglected moving boxes, and boxes from new computer, new phone, new iPad, etc. etc. Pounds and pounds of paper that are no longer needed: bills from the old house! The garbage is full of expired sunblock, ratty t-shirts, too-small underwear, plastic bric-a-brac, and half-crayons. No room in the house was spared, from the attic to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the den. I mucked out closets and storage bins and hidden corners of stuff.

And! I'm on a campaign this week to use up all the little soaps and lotions and potions and salves and bathroom gewgaws I've happily received as gifts but am apparently saving for the apocalypse. No more! Little tiny things in my bathroom, be done with you! So today I used green tea and lime shampoo, lavender and shea body lotion, peppermint foot creme, and chocolate lip balm. I smell like a day spa that exploded.

Still. I was able to put away / throw out / recycle all the crap from my bedroom. Maybe next weekend I'll get to start painting.

Do you go on purge binges? What sets you off? Do you like it? Why?

The Not Dark Enough Midnight of My House

As you know, I'm kinda an insomniac. I spend a lot of time lying in bed, trying to get to sleep. Or get back to sleep if--heaven forfend!--I have to get up to go pee at night. In any and all cases, utter darkness is best. I like to snap off my reading light and have that moment of panic where I can't tell the difference between my-eyes-are-open and my-eyes-are-closed.

I rarely get to experience this panic.

It's not like it's bright enough in my room that I can see my fingers when I wave them in front of my face after I turn the light off. It's bright enough in my room that I could paint my fingernails after I turn the light off.

Sigh.

Part of the problem is the 'character' and 'charm' of the hundred-year-old house, where the door to the master bedroom has so shrunk that the latch no longer catches and the door has to be held shut with a garbage can. Or that the door in question has in fact shrunk so much that even when fully closed (with the garbage can) a fairly sturdy halo of light still penetrates the jamb around the entire perimeter. Nor even that the self-same door is shrunk so spectacularly that one of the wood panels has split and admits light through its very damn centre.

No. The main problem is Munchkin, and her need for the hallway light, compounded by the regrettable placement of this light square in the middle of the three foot hallway span that separates our rooms.

If you were to go look up there right now (you could see quite well; every damn light is on) you would notice that Munchkin's door is 'halfway open', with the effect of the hallway light being strong enough on the head end of her bed that you could count her eyelashes with no extra illumination.

Sometimes, when she's well and truly asleep, we'll close her door to a simple two-inch gap, and turn on a more distant hallway light (it's a really big hallway; there's three different, separately switched light fixtures, not counting the two in the two stairwells. Really.) while we switch off the one that so offends me. And then sometimes, when we're well and truly asleep, she opens her door up all the way again, and turns the light back on.

Sheesh.

What we never do is turn the light off completely. Sure, when we do that, I fall asleep like a champ--but then Munchkin screams me awake sometime between midnight and dawn, in high dudgeon about "MY LIGHT! MY HALLWAY LIGHT IS NOT ON!"

As it is, she wins. Me, I pull strands of my own hair across my eyeballs. I hold my palms tight against my eyes when I make the high-wattage 20 foot walk down the hallway to the bathroom, and back again. But it rarely works. The lights are killing me.

The long dark midnight of the soul? I wish.

On the upside, with all the lights on, Munchkin now has no qualms about getting out of bed in the middle of the night to go pee all by herself, then put herself back to bed. We know she's done this because she tells us. And she doesn't flush.

I'll sleep when I'm old, right?

My Yoga B0dy

It's hot.

Thursday night, Pynchon and I went together for our weekly yoga date. It was so hot and muggy, we drove, instead of biking. I've never really done much yoga in the summer, and not in a third-floor studio in a hundred year old building in a heat wave.

It was really hot.

Unrolling my mat onto the hardwood floor? Um, a little warmish. Sitting quietly in virasana and meditating? Too hot. Standing and raising my arms above my head? MUCH TOO FRIGGIN' HOT. Three minutes into class, I tore my shirt off in a fit of heat rage. I chucked it on the floor behind me.

So now I'm in a yoga class with something like 15 other people, and my husband, and I'm wearing quite small and tight yoga shorts (like abbreviated mid-rise bike shorts) and one of those fancy-shmancy Lululem0n yoga bras that is essentially just a really short, lined tank top.

Holy Jesus.

When I started doing yoga, about a year and a half ago, I was really intimidated by all the hard bodies and the fancy clothes. The kind of competitive athleticism of it. I had some oversized, very long shirts (to hide my very squooshy post-baby tummy) and dark, wide velour track pants (to hide my lumpy legs). Really, I've never been one to want to show off my body in this context; since I've given birth, at least, I'm pretty sure my body looks a lot better with clothes on.

Don't worry--this post isn't going where you think it is.

As I do more and more yoga, my clothes have got a bit tighter, and a bit shorter, for a couple of reasons. First, as my teacher is always telling us, the more advanced student isn't one who does 'harder' poses, but one who does all her poses with a greater degree of control or precision. So if my teacher is going to help me refine my trikonasana (Triangle Pose), she needs to see the arch of my back foot, the outer calf muscle in my front leg, the state of my inner thigh on the back leg. Second, I'm working out a lot harder now that I'm stronger, and holy mercy, I'm too hot bundled up to the neck in all my layers of layers.

It was hard for me to move from full long pants to shorts, though, and it was sheer heat exhaustion that prompted that purchase. Now I can see when I bend over into uttanasana (Forward Fold), for example, that my legs have wrinkles. When the hell did that happen? But I can also see--holy crap!--that every leg muscle engages and that I'm becoming very, very strong. I can see that when I lift my pinky toe, there's a carving of muscle up the side of my calf. I can still see leg wrinkles, and ingrown hairs, and more spider veins than I care to acknowledge, but overall, the feeling I get--get this!--is of strength, and beauty.

I feel beautiful at yoga. Not beautiful in the sense of sexually attractive, but beautiful in a kind of physiological, anatomical sort of way: all these muscles and bones and ligaments and skin, all working in a unit, making this beautiful shape--a straight line from ankle to to hip, a long spine. A strong shape, controlled but free.

And so when I took my shirt off, and felt the bareness of my poochy tummy, my knobby scarred back, my million moles, I was self-conscious for about 10 seconds. Then I just felt the relief of having removed the sticky t-shirt, and the beauty of a long stretch. Shit, I went upside down with no shirt on, and with a purple face and a belly button now significantly closer to my ribcage than before, I felt, again, beautiful, doing a tall forearm balance. Open from the heart! Floating ribs back! Push up through the heels! Strong. Powerful.

When I started doing yoga, if I may be frank, I was hoping to hit some kind of moment where my tummy might be flat, or my butt might get a little higher, where I wouldn't want to hide in my baggy clothes. What's funny is that I guess I've hit that moment of not wanting to hide, but it's not because the outer form of my body has changed all the much (you can see that I've got stronger, better defined muscles, but yoga doesn't do much about cellulite or that band of extra belly skin that resulted from pregnancy). It's because I see my body differently now, at least when I'm on the mat.

I'm not going to be marching around the studio in my bra as a habit, but if I have to rip my shirt off again, on pain of fainting from the heat, I don't really think I'll worry about it. Oh, how wonderful!

Nightmares and Demolition

In the last year, I've had one nightmare that recurs. It goes like this. Pynchon and I take possession of a new house. The dream starts with me just inside the threshold, confused. I'm trying to have a good attitude, but I'm surprised. Sometimes the surprise is that I'm in a different house at all, that it turns out we've sold our house and moved somewhere new. Sometimes the surprise is that the new house that we've moved into is ... gross.

This is where the dread starts.

I move deliberately through the new house and try to stay calm: it's much smaller than the house we've given up; the kitchen has a puddle of water in the corners; the dining room has a six foot ceiling; there are metal bunk beds in the cavernous but rotting basement; the second floor is accessed through a claustrophobic crawl space; once, memorably, there were tigers in Munchkin's new room. The general vibe is dank and brown and 70s shag.

This is where the panic starts.

I start to try to 'remember' why we sold our house to move here, realizing with a punch to the gut that it was the wrong reason, the wrong thing to do, oh my God, can we undo this, can we get our house back, no no no no no. Sometimes at this point in the dream I'm screaming and flailing in anger, but other times, I'm wailing and sobbing with utter heartbreak.

Then the dream just kind of continues, the awful house reveals its full awfulness, I try to cope by suggesting improvements, I desperately try to convince Pynchon to try to get our other house back, I tear at my own soul for being so stupid as to sell it in the first place, and then eventually I wake up.

I've had this dream probably once or twice a month since the business with the condo developers started. This week, I've had it every night. Every damn night, and, bonus, during my nap this morning.

Chew on that for a minute, okay?

---

So, it seems I'm not over the whole forced-sale-of-the-house business yet. Although, interestingly, the house I usually seem to be freaking out over losing in these dreams is our new house, not the first one (usually).

The condo sales are going ... not so well over there, apparently, which is why more than two years after we were forced out of this--


--it was still just sitting there, forlorn, blinds down, weeds growing.

Oh yeah. With this stuck on the lawn:


Suddenly this weekend, though, the developers tore the porch off. (I can easily enough keep track of when this happens, as I live, remember, 500 feet away). And today, up went the hoardings and in came the machines. Munchkin and I drove by on the way home from preschool to take pictures. "That's an old house, Mom! Look at that old house!"



Are they tearing it down? Now? Is this the source of the nightmares?

And what does it mean, this constant, repeating nightmare. Is it so literal as this? Or am I worried about a metaphorical homelessness? I did just submit my tenure package, a pretty stressful process that brought out, let me be frank, the worst in me. Maybe I'm feeling only tenuously rooted now that my whole future is up in the air. That seems reasonable.

Pynchon quite reasonably notes that we sold that house for a huge profit, enough to finance the 500-foot move into a much better house on a nicer street and have money for renovations and now we have lovely neighbours and no one can put a condo on top of us here. True.

So what's the dream about then? What do you think?

-----
* PS: compare the house pictures. Notice there's a new highrise behind the house? That's the condo behind us that got announced as an infill project the day we moved in. Condo fever!

Dinner During Dora

Cloud had a great idea for a series of posts on "Dinner During Dora"--you know, meals that you can whip up in the time between "Hey, are you ready to explore!?" and the final "Click!"

That's 22 minutes if you're using On-Demand cable, or DVD, which we do. Go!

Felafel During Dora:

You need:

* red onion

* tomato

* avocado

* lemon juice

* mayonnaise

* felafel mix

* pitas (I like to use tortillas instead -- less bread-y)

You do:

1. Mix felafel mix in a bowl according to directions: it should look a tiny bit soupy, but let it sit for a few minutes to start to thicken into a paste.

2. Peel and chop the avocado; in a medium sized bowl, mash it together with a tablespoon or so of lemon juice, and about a half cup of mayo. Dice a smallish tomato, and about a quarter cup of red onion, and stir in. This is the sauce.

3. Shallow fry the felafel: fill a frying pan about 1/2" deep in cooking oil. Heat it up to medium high. Roll felafel mix in your hands into Little-People-figurine sized balls. Fry on one side for about three minutes until golden brown. Flip 'em over and fry for another three minutes. Remove them from the pan onto a plate with some paper towels: blot!

4. Open the pitas. Spread thickly with the sauce. Drop or crumble fried felafel balls onto the sauce. Roll up and secure with a toothpick.

5. Serve with a simple green salad. (This stuff is FILLING.)

I usually have enough time to set the table, even, when I make this. Do you guys like felafels? God's gift to vegetarians, if you ask me. Yum! And meatatarian Pynchon often requests this meal, hooray.

Absence and the heart

"Oh, the liquor was spilt on the barroom floor! And the bar was closed for the night! The house mouse peeped from his little mouse house! In the glow of the pale moon light!"

What the hell is she singing? Pynchon and I exchanged confused looks as we zipped up the 401 to this unexpected musical accompaniment. The mouse, it turns out, drinks all the spilled liquor off the floor and gets belligerent, looking for the 'gol-darned cat!' Gramma had been coaching Munchkin on the lyrics the whole week she'd had Munchkin to herself Way the Hell Up North.

While Munchkin was on her holiday Up North, I was in England, at a conference, and Pynchon had to stay in Small City to work a ton of overtime, and so our whole little household blew apart to the winds for a week, with no Internet or phone connections between us. And when Pynchon collected me at the airport, and then we collected Munchkin at her Auntie Soosee's, we all looked at each other afresh.

Holding down the home front by himself for the week, Pynchon secured his dream job, full-time and permanent. On her holiday, Munchkin learned how to swim and was determined to now tip the scales at a full 50 pounds. Away in England, I tried to get by for a week with no Internet, by doing yoga on the pebble beach at Brighton. I got a tan. Things are different; we are different.

It's amazing what happens, sometimes, when you give everything a little breathing room.

So, err, yeah. You can see the segue into the blog business coming, right? The blog has had several months of breathing room. I didn't quit, but I didn't write. And now coming back and having a look around, I am both amazed by the detail and richness of the record of my life that's contained here and also by the really incredible community of support and friendship in which it circulates. Circulated? There's a lot of stuff from Munchkin's early years I would not remember if I hadn't written it down here; there's a lot of Stuff from Munchkin's early years I felt at the time like I would not have survived if you hadn't supported me.

But do you know the most amazing thing that's happened since I started this blog? I became Mom. It's a role I now inhabit fully, like I have mothering toes and mothering hair follicles and mothering knuckles. I don't feel like I'm ... pretending, or faking, or muddling, or not-quite-mom-enough yet. That feels pretty good--it feels natural, or at least naturalized, now.

(Yeah. We've got all our ducks all in a row over at our hizzouse.)

I certainly don't mean to suggest that I'm perfectly confident, or free of ambivalence, or well-accomplished, or not sometimes pulled in different directions by different parts of my life (mother, wife, woman, professor, sister, daughter, researcher). That's not it. Rather, I don't think that "Mom" is someone I'm not sure how to be. It's what I am, already, even as some of the tasks associated with the position are ones I haven't tackled yet. Dealing with ever-changing new stuff is part of "Mom," so I guess I'm doing it right.

And so, thinking about what "Mom" means has lost some of its urgency for me, and maybe this is why blogging has lost some of its urgency for me. There is a kind of irony in blogging, a kind of 'meta-' to it, as though writing about what it meant to be a mom would turn me into a mom that knew what it meant to be a mom. I think I know, now.

But I like doing this; I like writing about my family life, if only so that I can remember it later. I like sharing it with however many of you still haven't moved me to the 'defunct' folder of your reader. I have other things going on now, too, now that mothering has become more verbal, more interpersonal, and less physically and psychically gruelling. I'm doing a lot of yoga; I'm more and more engaged in my research work in social media; I am working on my home reno and interior design skills.

All the blogging guides tell you this: find your niche. Maybe it's your passion, maybe it's strategic, but find your little corner of the world and work it like crazy. Do that one thing and do it, do it, do it. So blogging as a new mother seems likely to succeed in the standard ways--pull together an audience, get some numbers, get known, in that small niche. That was then. Blogging for me now, like my mothering, is more diffuse, not so reliably niche-y. More like my life now: really full, but not of the same thing all the time.

"Mimi on the Breach"--it was about me, ostensibly, right from the start. "Me," when I started this (Christ--FOUR YEARS AGO), was about trying to get a toehold on this whole 'Mom' thing. "Me," now, is about more things, not instead of but in addition to mothering. So I guess we'll see what happens now.

Goodness, back when I started, 'Miss Baby' was two months old and went to bed at 2am. I had three reliable commenters (Her Bad Mother, CinnamonGurl-that-was, and Bubandpieand-that-is-now-Bea. Imagine!), and a total weekly readership of six people. Now I get more PR pitch emails every week than I used to have legitimate readers. Weird.

How about you? Are things changing for you? How are your families? How are your lives?

Tighter, Closer, Sweeter

It's nice, isn't it, to buy American money lately? Friday, I bought 200 US dollars for $207 Canadian. Miracle! I tucked the oddly shaped green bills into my wallet and double-checked my passport in my laptop bag. Slinging my lovely, soft-brown leather weekend bag over my shoulder, I started up my podcast, slipped on my sunglasses and boarded the bus.

Off to a meeting point with out-of-town colleagues and friends, heading down the highway for a conference in the US! A weekend of computer dork un-conferencing, hotel room to myself, drink ticket in my registration package, an id tag with a QR code and my (work) Twitter handle. Sunshine and passports and networking. Blessed focus on my intellectual life. The freedom of throwing myself into it, totally! The freedom of that one little bag, the foreign currency, walking through someone else's historic district on my own time, my own dime.

Fantastic.

But this?


I missed it like I never thought I could. Gone for, what? About 52 hours? I felt an ache for my Munchkin like I never felt when she was smaller. I guess that's what's so surprising. "Mom!" she yelled over the phone, "When can I come to Michigan?"

To break my heart, I tell you.

I used to make fun of these people, these mothers or lovers off on fantastic adventures, moaning and crying and pining for the absent objects of their affection. I mocked them: how on Earth can you be missing your Real Life when you have this sanctioned brief escape? My god, it's two days, sheesh louise you see your kid / your partner / your dog every day your entire life, enjoy the novelty of the now.

Ha.

Adulthood, I think, is the capacity to experience conflicting realities, simultaneously. Or maybe it's just a condition of motherhood: one of the hallmarks of my pregnancy was this odd thing where if I laughed--really laughed, a good lose-my-breath belly laugh--inevitably it ended in heartrending sobs. But oh, what a ride!

I feel like I live like that quite a lot now. Begin as you mean to go on, Mimi!

So, now I reno'd the dining room

I've been obsessed with painting and decorating again. I tackled the dining room over Reading Week, with help from Pynchon and my dad and a soundtrack of cowbells from the Olympic skiing events I played in the background for company.

From this:

We went to this:


You seemed to like my breakdown of the kitchen reno, where I told you what I did and what it cost and scoffed at the shelter and lifestyle magazines' idea of 'low cost' versus my somewhat more parsimonious one. So I'll do that again!

First, though, some more photos of the finished space. I'm just moving from one corner of room, sequentially around to the other three, okay? Think of it as a cheapo 360 degree tour ;-) These were all taken during the daytime:




What I did (and Pynchon did, and my dad did), and what it cost (cash money, and time):

1. We changed the lighting fixtures. The one fixture in the room was that dated 70s thing. It was too small, used weird bulbs, and was in the dead middle of the room. We bought two brushed-nickel and frosted glass fixtures at Crappy Tire for $40 (sconce--but that came with us from our other house, so I'm not counting it!) and $70 (chandelier). Electricians created a spot for the sconce over the sideboard, and moved the chandelier so that it was centred with the dining table, not with the room. Both fixtures are controlled by dimmers. The electrical work probably cost close to $200, because getting the fixtures where I wanted turned out to be a bit of a fiasco. Totally worth it though. Total for lighting: $270.

2. We painted*. This took a HUGE amount of time. Probably 30-40 hours. The trim, as ever, was a total pain in the ass: sand, wash, prime, three coats of white paint. The other thing with painting dark wood trim white, is that once you do, you see that the wood (over 93 years) has shrunk away from the floor, the walls, and all the joints are gappy. This is when you get your dad to come visit, and fill all the blessed gaps with silicone caulking that then needs painting. Results totally worth it, though. The white is Polar Bear by Behr, in a semi-gloss.The brown on the wall is Oat Straw, the same colour we used in the living room, in a flat enamel finish that is already proving itself nicely washable. Hooray! Two cans of paint, and a portion of the giant bucket of primer: $60 (got the paint 25% off this summer ...)

3. We added storage. The antique sideboard came with us from Edmonton to the apartment, then the first house, and now here. We keep our table linens in it, and the fancy cutlery. The smaller wood cabinet is used for hiding sunglasses and CDs and my chequebook and Pynchon's doodads and a bunch of Munchkin's toys. It's a Billy bookshelf from Ikea ($79), with doors (2 x $40, plus brushed nickel Attest knobs, $8). So we forked out $167 for storage: but no more clutter? Priceless.

4. We decorated. The room is dark. It faces northeast and is pretty grim most of the time -- that's not good because this is the central room, the hub, of our main floor. So the idea was to maximise the light by adding fixtures, painting out the dark trim, and using art to brighten up the room with colour and bounce the light around. The three prints above the sideboard came with us from the other house; it's framed calendar art. The big silver frame was $19 at Ikea, and is framing a sparkly and fun .... piece of wrapping paper ($4). The two abstract paintings bring me joy unaccountable, but the big one was $70 at Ikea and the smaller one (above the stereo) was $60 at Bouclair. Those brown-toned flower paintings flanking the window are going to go somewhere else soon: in their place, two 2' by 3' silver frames, with more wrapping paper in them, in a sort of green wallpaper patter (all in, $70). Speaking of the window, I removed the ancient drapes and hung simple, wide, 'faux bois' white blinds: $70. The piece de resistance up is the big silver mirror, $60 at Bouclair. Munchkin came to help me pick it out. She's a great helper:

Oh right! I bought a plant ($20) and a white ceramic pot ($30) for the corner, too. Decorating total: $400.

So that's the dining room! Since we've modernised the paint colours and hung modern / contemporary art and fixtures, our existing dark wood sideboard and dining set don't seem so overwhelming dark. And the room is so much brighter that the electrician and the cleaning lady both spontaneously remarked on it when they walked it.

Total total? Labout total? 9 days of one-and-off work by me, Pynchon, and dad. Money cost: $900, that we paid out in stages over about 2 years (electrical in 2008, paint and storage in 2009, decorating items 2010).

Now I need a drink of wine. You?

----
* painted: First, Pynchon had to repair the window wall--it's an exterior wall, obviously, and since we had a MILLION HOLES drilled in our exterior walls to have them insulted. So he sanded and patched, and sanded again. Dirty work.

And how was your day?

"Mom, Mom!" she interjects, as I take a break from telling Pynchon about something I read in the paper earlier to take a bite of my salad.

"Mom! Is it my turn to talk?"

"Sure. What would you like to talk about?"

"Um ... um ... Today-I-went-to-preschool-and-I-played-and-played-and-then-we-had-snack-and-when-we-went-outside-I-fell-down-but-it-was-okay-I-laughed."

She pauses. Takes a bite of cheese. Reflects.

"Tell me about your day, Mom."

We eat supper together almost every night, and we've consciously been working on table manners: asking for more milk by saying "please," using cutlery, waiting until everyone is seated before you start, wiping your fingers on a napkin instead of the table. I'm surprised to discover that at the same time we've been teaching her a more subtle set of skills. Munchkin is learning the give and take of conversation, its rhythms and pauses, the scripts that orchestrate who gets to speak, when, and about what. At dinner, we all take turns speaking. At dinner, the main topic of conversation is "your day" and speech is invited by direct questions to that effect.

So sophisticated is her understanding of the operations of mealtime that she even knows that breakfast is something different: at breakfast, everyone reads the newspaper, including Munchkin. If by 'read', you mean demand the section of the paper that has the most interesting picture on it, and have it propped up nice and high in front of you so you can make up stories about it.

Wow. And that's what family meals are for, I guess. Civilizing our barbarian toddlers while ingesting home cooked meals that feature some kind of green thing along with the cheese, the barbarian toddlers somehow and suddenly learning how to divvy up the morning paper and how to listen to mommy rant about her students.

When the fever breaks

Munchkin is adjusting to my return to normal daily family life. She is adjusting, as I begin to see is her pattern, by freaking out with abandonment issues after the absent parent is once more firmly embraced into the crush of daily family life.

That is, she misses me with great passion and hurling cries now that I'm home again.

I went to bed so early last night that I wound up sleeping in the guest room by myself. I awoke at 4 to sobbing cries of "Mommmmmm-eeeeeee". She pulled me down close to her, whispered in my ear, brokenly.

"Mommy, I missed you so much when you went to yoga, I was so worried. Mom, I missed you."

I tucked her up tight, covered her gently, shushed softly in her ear. But as soon as I crawled back into bed, I could hear her crying again, like her heart was broken. After a couple of rounds of this, feeling like she really did miss me and that was the problem, I asked, "Do you want to come sleep with Mommy tonight?" Like a shot, she leapt out of bed, grabbing her pillow and heading straight out into the hallway. She wrapped herself tight around me, sobs quieted and breathing getting deeper. I thought she would fall asleep right away.

She didn't. For the next 90 minutes, she lay there, quiet and awake, stroking my face and neck with her palm, with a fingertip, with the back of her hand. With her cheeks, even. She tucked her feet up between my thighs, snuggled her belly up close to mine. Every now and again she'd sit up and exclaim, "Oh Mommy, I love you soooo much," and then lie down again. Every now and again I'd slit one of my eyes open to see if she was asleep, only to find her an inch away from me, with a blissed out smile on her face. She pulled one of my arms up and around her, tucked my fingers under her ear and nuzzled me.

It took me back. The guest bed is where she and I used to sleep right after she was born, breastfeeding through the night and sleeping in spurts. She didn't much like me to hold her then. She was squirmy and angry and this affection now, in the night, on this bed, is all I could have dreamed of then, my barfy colicky squirmy 9 pounder. She feels surprisingly big in bed now, obviously not like sleeping next to Pynchon but not at all like sleeping with that baby three years ago. Except maybe for the smell, and maybe the softness of her hair.

As she patted and rubbed and sniffed and snuggled me, I realized that I needed it as much as she did. We were skin-hungry for each other, I think, that mother-daughter connection of touch that has anchored us. Sometimes the kids know best, know when some limit has been breached, and just what to do to make it right again.

Happy Birthday, Self!

So, I'm 37 now.

Last year we had a great big houseparty for 40 people, with a bartender, a big cake, and all the furniture pushed back to the walls, rented glassware, the works. We went smaller this year, a dinner for 14 at a new restaurant just around the corner from here. The smaller scale gave me more of a chance to reflect, first and foremost that I am truly blessed in my friends, and next that Pynchon and I have been here in Small City for six years, and have cobbled together a community of friends from three different workplaces, some neighbours, friends from before who find themselves here, and all the partners of same. People in their 20s; people in their 50s, and a good sampling in between. That feels good.

I was thinking also, naturally on this sort of occasion, I think, about, well, me. 37! I guess I am who I am going to become, mostly, and I'm intrigued by the continuities and discontinuities of all these years of Mimi-ness.

Different? I'm much more confident now than I used to be and this has the paradoxical but welcome effect of leaving me freer to be quiet, to hang back, to listen. We ENTJs, when nervous or insecure, tend rather to become bossy or strident, but a happy ENTJ can, I'm glad to report, can just sit back and cool out. God, it's nice to not always feel compelled to put myself in charge of things that, frankly, don't really need or benefit from hierarchical leadership.

The same? I've never had much of a social filter, or a well developed sense of decorum. I'm 37 and I still cannot prevent myself from gleefully responding to a compliment on my dress that I bought it for 29$ at Zellers. My mom visibly flinches in my inner mind: "Just say THANK YOU. No one needs to KNOW that, Mimi!" It's not demurral or false modesty--I'll agree that yes, I look great, but isn't it just a kicker that the dress is from Zellers? And so CHEAP? I look somehow younger? It's the bra! Raise the boobs 3 inches, take 10 years off. (Can you hear my mom, now?) I just have never seen the point of hiding the man behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz style. And I still don't, I guess.

Weirder are the combination same/differents, two of which I have been ruminating on today.

Same / different 1: I have grown into my face and my body--they're not much different than they've ever been, really, only now my stage of life has caught up to their promise. I was the kinda kid about whom adults always remarked that I was 'old for my age'. Not mature, certainly, but somehow ... not channeling youth. No button nose, no chubby cheeks, no ingenuous credulity. Instead, I was all sarcasm, always, all strong nose, piercing eyes, and sharply angled cheekbones. On an eleven year old, or even a 20 year old, the effect can be jarring. Helps one get into bars underage, but otherwise jarring. In my 30s, I see that button noses and blooming cheeks do not look so appropriate on my demographic anymore. Suddenly my face is just right, a canvas best able to hang my subjectivity from. It's strong and dramatic and sophisticated, where before it was precocious and disconcerting. At 37, I don't mind looking Dietrich-esque in ways I did when I was 16. I still have a great big nose and very square shoulders, but it kinda works now.

Same / different 2: I have grown into my personality, my character--in my teens, you know, I had that not uncommon delusion that I was Something Special, Marked For Greatness, Without Fault but nevertheless Fantastically Misunderstood. In my twenties, by contrast, I became excruciatingly aware of my own faults. The fault-finding was kinda sweeping; it was a decade-long orgy of self-loathing, really. Amazingly, at 37, I find I'm somehow becoming able to see my own character with a clear eye ... and love myself anyways. Yeah, I'm not really good at playing ponies for 3 hours in a row; I'm always looking for a little escape, something to read. But I do play ponies happily and with total focus for 20 or 30 minute bursts, several times a day, and for someone like me, that's pretty damn good, really. Yeah, I'm naturaly kinda judgy and over-rational, but I bring a lot of integrity to my job as a result. I'm still really sarcastic and biting by nature, but it's developed over time into a more sophisticated and age-appropriate wit that is not unwelcome by others.

I'm growing into myself, it seems. And I'm learning how to be flawed and happy at the same time. Huh.

If that means I've got to take some wrinkles along with insight and self-acceptance, it's still a pretty good trade.

Push / Pull / Stretch / Snap

One of the alarms on my iPhone (you can edit and save a bunch of them, like you can teach your thermostat the difference between Wednesday and Sunday) is called, simply, "stupid fucking Monday." It is set for five am. And every Monday for the last four weeks, that's when I get up, at 5am. I sneak downstairs, work for an hour and a half, shower, gobble breakfast and head to work, usually before Pynchon and Munchkin wake up. I watch the sun come up from the café across the street from my off-campus teaching lab. The rest of the week is a little better--I get up at six, work for an hour, then wake everyone up and we all hustle in to work.

In a rotten confluence of circumstances, this semester I have drawn the short straw. On a very demanding committee that has big deadlines and big obligations for the entire month (think, 11 hour days and 4 hour meetings, and you'll have it about right). Teaching two new courses, so that in addition to the time spent actually teaching it, and grading, and meeting students, I'm also trying to put all the materials together fast enough to keep ahead of everyone. These two courses are in different locations, both off campus, and both with some administrative hurdles (one has no heat and the other has heat set to 'bikini model', for example). I work at 5am; I stay at work until after supper. I work on the weekends. I do my email on the phone waiting for the bus. I grade design homework on the laptop while 'watching' Diego with Munchkin.

I am, in short, desperately overscheduled and overstressed at work.

At home, I'm ... absent. And that wracks me with guilt, obviously. Pynchon is carrying the whole family on his own back and the whole enterprise is straining under the load.

I don't like living like this. I don't like complaining about it. So today, as my big committee finished its giant task, and freed up probably 12 or so hours in my work-week going forward, I'm turning the boat around.

It's the end of January. The end of the crazy month of finally getting my insomnia under control only to start forcing myself to keep the same hours as when I couldn't sleep. The end of frozen pizza, canned beans, grilled cheese, McDonald's, and KD for dinner. The end of complaining and crisis management.

My birthday is this weekend. I will be 37. We are celebrating with a big dinner party at a fancy new restaurant. I will wear high heels, drink a lot of gin, and feel myself buoyed up on the love of my friends. I am coming back to my blog writing and to my blog reading. I am remembering the simple pleasure of cooking supper for my family and sitting down to eat it with them, of taking 5 minutes out of the morning rush to play 'puppy' with Munchkin, barking and sniffing and rolling over.

It's good to be back.

How've you been?

"You're Ugly"

She's sitting on my lap, facing me as we rock. I pull my face close to hers, her big blue eyes filling my vision, my fingers wrapped up in her wet hair, one hand on her bare back. I'm crying, a little, which is really surprising me and upsetting me.

"Tell me more about Kathy and Patti," she asks.

Kathy and Patti used to bully me when I was a kid. They were the cool girls, and I wanted to be their friend, but they were cruel to me. "You're not our friend," they would taunt, spitting their words in my face. "You're ugly." I cried a lot, then. And I'm crying about it now, in this desperate context of trying to teach Munchkin ... something. Empathy? Kindness?

In the tub, she told Pynchon about how she and Queen Bee at daycare were playing a game where they told the other kids "You're ugly." Pynchon tried to talk with her about it, but she wasn't taking him seriously. A major tantrum and all around blowup ensued. It was in the aftermath of this that I found myself both comforting and being appalled by my naked, wet, puffy-eyed little girl, this kid with the streak of ... mischief? In her eyes. Listening to me tell her what it feels like to be told "You're ugly" by girls you want to be friends with. But what she hears, apparently, is a story of two girls she wants to know more about. "Tell me more about Kathy and Patti, do you have pictures of them?"

I have dropped entirely out of the narrative, thirty years later once more pushed aside by the Queen Bees who draw everything in to themselves.

It's insane. I'm crying and suddenly feeling rejected by my preschooler, the little girl who wraps herself around me in desperate, passionate love. It's not her job to prop up my quite fragile ego, but her schoolyard games terrify me.

I was a terribly smart little girl, with almost no sense at all how to relate to my peers. Not in a charmingly awkward way, but just awkward: I was shy and arrogant, needy and sarcastic, bossy but desperate to please. Munchkin is experimenting with her own social skills, and already seems to be a lot better at peer relations than I ever was. So she experiments on me, tonight, telling me that I'm not ugly, that I'm beautiful, but also that she doesn't have a hug or a kiss for me, turning her back on my look of hurt surprise.

When she was a squalling colicky baby, lying angry and flailing on her back for nearly 10 months without even sitting up on her own, I longed for these days. When she would be a person. When I could talk to her, teach her, engage and interact with her through language, socially.

It's harder than I thought, but this, I know, is the real work of parenting. We will both be doing some growing up in the years that are hurtling so fast towards us now.

"You're ugly," she tells one of her toys, just loud enough for her father to hear her say it, corners of her mouth turned up a little as she peeks sideways and up, through her eyelashes, to see who is listening.

Fun, Old-fashioned Family Christmas

Like Clark Griswold, I tend to overdo it on the holidays. I say yes to too many parties, I bake too many cookies, I play too many Christmas CDs, I get too wound up from the end of November on--to the point that I redo my whole living room to look better in the Christmas morning photos. Obviously, I drink too much bourbon and eggnog.

What can I tell you? I just want to create and to experience a good old fashioned family Christmas. Hell, Christmas is even a favorite blog topic.

This year, the snow was slow in coming. Our social plans have gone a little ... awry. We missed one party because of sickness, we've had two sets of guests cancel on separate festivities at the last minute, my department is having a faculty-only party that spouses and families aren't welcome at, and tonight (because of one of these cancellations) I'm going to a Christmas party in a fancy dress and red accessories and with a box of cookies by myself.

Oh well.

Stuff happens, right? A lot is going right, actually. My sister came again this year (two weeks later than planned, but whatever!) and we baked for five hours. Munchkin helped.


We put up the tree, and Munchkin is actually old enough to put ornaments on the tree by herself, and to dig through all the decorations boxes with glee.*


The snow finally came (several weeks later than expected, but whatever!) and today we all bundled up and headed outside together. We shoveled and played and pulled Munchkin on the sled and threw snowballs in the brilliant sunshine. Wonderful.


So I think I'll focus on the things that we are doing, rather than the things that we're missing. With photos.


"Hope it enhances your enjoyment of the holidays."

------
* please notice! The living room looks better in the Christmas photos ALREADY. Renovation WIN!

Contract and Expand

You know, we have probably the biggest house on the street--there's a couple of big renos going on that are increasing the average square footage behind the 1917 facades in the 'hood, but we've got easily the biggest property ... and the smallest family on the block.

When we were so desperately hunting for a new house I was focused on the kitchen: my first house had a big, square, open kitchen with a pass-through and a breakfast bar. This kind of feature is very rare in these old places around here, and it was one of the things I liked best in the house that I never wanted to sell. So I searched and searched, panicked, and I got my big square kitchen. It wasn't until we moved in that I noticed just how much bigger this house is, overall, than the last one. Than a lot of other ones of this vintage, in this area. I will admit that I have tended to crow about it: 1800 square feet of living space, not counting the full attic or basement! Backyard 55 feet wide! Attached garage and full-height basement! Try to get that in the suburbs, bitches! But I looked at the bedrooms with a critical eye: this seems small, for a master, right? Munchkin's room has a small closet, doesn't it? Shouldn't the guest room fit a queen-sized bed? Wouldn't it be better if the main bathroom had a tub and a free-standing shower?

Honestly, I have no idea where I got these ideas. I grew up in a four-person family family in probably a 1200 foot house, with no attic and a basement with a six-foot clearance. Of the three bedrooms, only one could hold anything larger than a twin bed.

I started to question my own expectations for a couple of reasons. First, like a lot of you, probably, I have been sucked into the HGTV aspirational quicksand. The renovation shows devised a new normal, and every time I clicked the TV off, my house looked a little dingier, a little less attractive--less adequate--to me. But then, the real estate shows, with single secretaries sniffing at anything less than detached, three bedroom, steel appliances, granite countertop, dual vanities, three car garage, crown moldings! It started to seem out of control and hubristic. And then of course, the United States real estate financing market completely imploded. Goodbye credit-funded granite, hello second job linoleum. That was sobering.

Second, though, more personally, I learned a little more about this house's history. I may have mentioned that the house has had two owners: the family we bought from had been here since the 1950s. There were six kids, and a widowed mom. Where on earth did they put all those kids? Well, some of them obviously went up in the (uninsulated, unheated, barely electrified) attic. What about their stuff? Every available surface is covered in nails and racks and shelves and hooks, all built by hand, much from scrap. Closets are carved out of overhead spaces, accessed by--I kid you not--a drawbridge over the stairwell. Six kids in this house? Yeah, you'd need to maximise your storage.

We are only three (and a cat). The comparison is sobering.

More sobering? It turns out (two old ladies pointing at my house and laughing about the olden days tell me) that the first owners had--wait for it--ELEVEN children. Yes, they were Catholic. Yes, actually, five of them went into the church. Thirteen people in this house.

Thirteen people in this house.

Where in God's name do I get off turning up my nose at the bedroom dimensions? The guest room is bigger than my Mom's master when we were growing up; Munchkin's room is much larger, actually, than my own bedroom growing up. Why do I suddenly feel like I need so so much more than I ever knew growing up? Maybe it's the TV, maybe it's the decorating and lifestyle magazines. Maybe it's because all of our stuff needs so much more closeting than was ever required before in history. Maybe it's bigger and more fridges, bigger and more TVs, bigger stereos, bigger and more things that make noise / take up space.

Families are getting smaller. Our houses are getting bigger. Where does it stop?

I'm grateful for what I have. I don't need anymore. Really I don't. And in any case, in our family, more often than not, we all seem to find ourselves hanging out together, within arm's reach--or as Pynchon expresses it, "All the family, on one piece of furniture." I should be glad there's not thirteen of us on this couch right now.

Rhythm, breath, flow

We are catching our breath, collectively as a family after a long term, a long fall, but individually, too as we figure out every day what it means to be a family. As soon as we figure it out, it changes again. It has changed again, for the better.

I'm doing a lot of yoga lately, so I'm tempted to liken it to that: are we managing more balance all together, one pushing down through bottom of the feet to let another reach higher for the sky? No, not quite. Maybe--aha!--it's that we're balancing the front body and the back body, acknowledging and leaning into the universal, the communal, while pushing forward and celebrating our individuality.

Yes, that's it.

I'm doing a lot of graphic design lately, too--or at least prepping courses in graphic design--so I'm tempted to describe in those terms. You know, if yoga analogies don't suit you. So: we have, as a family, more white space. White space gives the eye a space to rest, allows the text or images that are the point of the composition to shine in the full glory, unpenned by visual clutter. In visual arts, white space is 'negative space'--where content is, well, not. But negative space makes positive space work.

Yes, that's it, too.

White space, openness, balance. What it means is that as Munchkin becomes more and more herself, we too are allowed to become more and more (once more) our own selves, too. To move through our days with our movements woven like a cat's cradle, but the strings suddenly with a lot more play. This weekend, yes, I've wiped her butt because she's not quite cleared for solo bathroom trips, although she can get the gist of it. But. She makes up stories to tell herself as we unpack the nativity scene together. She hangs ornaments by herself, with me. She sits still and 'reads', wrinkling her forehead in concentration, for twenty minutes at a time. She gets up on her own, walks calmly into our room, and crawls into bed for a family snug. She is at once a lot less work and a lot more fun.

We have a new rhythm to our days now: today, Pynchon was working in the basement and garage, and I was doing some renos upstairs and Munchkin sat on the living room floor, happily playing with her dollhouse, for nearly half an hour. Then we all came together and played. It was nice not to have to hypermanage the handoff of custody from one hypervigilant parent to another. It made coming together so much nicer, moving apart so much less stressful.

A new rhythm. I like it.

"You're not my friend"

Pynchon and I were animatedly discussing our respective workdays at the dinner table last night while Munchkin demolished her plate of cheese, breaded tofu sticks, and pears. As she finished eating she began to clamour for a turn to talk, to tell us about her day.

That's what family supper is all about, right?

"So, Munchkin, what did you do at preschool today?" I asked her

"Great!" she replied, I guess to a question I didn't ask her. "We had a librarian read books! About community helpers! Like a fireman!" And here she paused to consider, "And also? We had naps!"

Pynchon and I looked at each other over our forks: could this be any more adorable? Aw, look, the three year old is trying to make grownup conversation. How innocent and lovely.

"Did you go outside today, Munchkin?" Pynchon asked.

"Yes, and we played and played ... it was a game called 'you're not my friend.'"

And that's when my heart stopped. 'You're not my friend' is a game I remember well from my own youth, generally with me as its target, at the centre of a gaggle of girls pointing and frowning and testing the authority and heft of their voices. Me, lined up with all the other kids in the classroom for a walk to the gym, as all those girls moved off the white squares in the tile and onto the orange ones to distinguish themselves from me.

I looked at her closely: no signs of hurt or worry on her face. I was relieved, for a moment, to think that maybe she was in the in-group rather than the excluded one. Then horror at this flash. Then wondering what to do? What to say? I'm not ready to deal with this yet!!!

Isn't that always the way, though? We--parents--aren't ready when some new developmental milestone hits us in the face? It's rather easier to be surprised by crawling and talking, though, than by the development of a differential social awareness in your preschooler.

So I just smiled and made a note to talk to the teacher this morning. Apparently, 'You're not my friend' is sweeping the preschool rooms, and the teachers are putting the anti-bullying pedagogy into full gear, with stories about friends and lessons about kindness. But I should still do something.

I know that I'm lucky that Munchkin is unable to realize that some information is better not shared with Mom and Dad: I don't want to jeopardize her openness with us by immediately jumping on her disclosures as a reason to lecture or chastise her. But I don't want to just smile when she tells me about hurting other kids' feelings, either.

Advice?

Renovations done! With a MILLION photos

This post is for Omaha Mama, who seems honestly enthusiastic about renovations, and for Bea, who is--I can attest with certainty--rabidly enthusiastic about paint colours.

The living room is done! Just to refresh, this is what the living room looked like when we bought the house (these are the agent's photos):




Does it look like an old lady lived here? Because she did!

Aaaaand, here's what it looks like now! The paint colours are: Oat Straw on the walls and Polar Bear on the trim, both by Behr, and I have to say, the paint went on just lovely, but smells absolutely terrible, still. Okay, ready?






What do you think? I adore it (other than the smell, and the lingering wrist pain from doing all that fussy and humongous Edwardian woodwork). I think it looks bright and moder and unfussy. My mom and my sister and Pynchon's parents are horrified every time we paint over the wood, but you know, you can actually see it now that it's not grimmest darkest stain. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I freaked out and hung four sets of blinds this week to. Of course I'll show you!

I went with brushed aluminum miniblinds in the kitchen and bathroom, both because they reflect the light back nicely and because they're easier to care for in a high humidity dust-attracting zone.



And here's the blind in the living room, which you can't actually see in the photos above. Please note I put them up when the trim was painted -- but the walls were still that weird peachy-pink I increasingly find myself unable to live with any longer.


Ta-da!

Yeah, so I blew NaBloPoMo again this month. I got sick on Friday and really wanted to focus my remaining energy on getting the painting done. Failed again! D'oh!

Queen of teh Internets. Not.

Today it finally happened: I misfired an email so that something personal went to the wrong, wrong, wrong person. Doesn't this happen to everyone at some point? Did I think I would be spared, just because I'm the resident Professor of Internet Culture and Printer-Hookup and Switching People to Macs?

Sadly, no.

A month or so ago, a bunch of professors from all across campus got hauled out of our quotidian lives to Do a Big Favor for the Dean in a public presentation. The presentation exceeded expectations, I guess, and so today I got an email from some admin support staff in the Dean's office, a mass-email to all of us who participated, inviting us to a cocktail shindig of gratitude. It runs from 4-6. Okay.

Being an excellent and thoughtful wife and partner, I forwarded--so I thought--the invitation to Pynchon, with the following text added at the top:

"Can I go to this?
[M].
xo"

Yeah. That didn't go to Pynchon. It went to the admin assistant--at least, THANK GOD, I didn't hit 'reply all'. She promptly sent back a reply:

"Of course. You were an important part of the presentation in September."

Oh dear Lord. I wrote her back immediately explaining that I had meant to be asking my husband if he could do the daycare pickup, and that while she seemed very nice, I didn't think we were yet on kissing and hugging terms. I told her I was embarrassed, and I apologized for the awkwardness. I did NOT sign off with kisses and hugs.

She wrote back:

"LOL"

So, Internet friends. I feel like an ass. Send me your stories of how and if and when you've pulled a like manoeuvre on the World Wide Embarrassment Machine. That'd make me feel less silly.

Moral Dilemma

Having waited an eternity to get to the front of the line to order, and then to receive, my triple grande nonfat extra-hot latte, I fairly sprinted out of Starbucks towards my car. We had been too late leaving the house to pick up my coffee on the way to drop Pynchon off, so I dropped him at his building on campus and then Munchkin off at hers, before driving my behind-schedule self to the strip-mall Starbucks closest to daycare to load up on hot caffeine before dashing in to the office myself.

As the sun hit me in the face and I looked up to see exactly where it was I had parked, something in a minivan parked right in front of me caught my eye. It was two toddlers, strapped in to their car seats, completely unattended.

I pulled up short.

The girl was about 2, and the little boy I assume to have been her brother was about 1. They were smiling and swatting at one another. Nevertheless, completely unattended. I looked left, right, behind me: no one.

What to do?

They seemed happy. The weather was a cool 5 or 6 degrees, so they were in imminent danger neither from heat stroke nor hypothermia. But then, completely unattended! My mommy senses were tingling. I didn't know what to do. Confusion and indecision is no reason to just shrug my shoulders and march on--but it didn't seem smart or kind to intrude myself upon their notice, which would likely just scare them.

So I stood there, blinking ineffectually, and keeping my eye on them from where I stood, about 10 feet away from the van.

What to think?

On the one hand, it is just NOT COOL to leave little tiny kids unattended in a van in a parking lot at a strip mall. Even if they're strapped into their seats and happy. NOT COOL.

On the other hand, I only get to grab my coffee in speed and solitude because my kid is in daycare; many is the time I have deferred running an urgent errand because the inevitable tra-la-la of removing her from the car seat and cajoling her into and out of the dry cleaner's / pharmacy / tailor / liquor store and then back into the car and the seat belt is just too daunting.

On the one hand, this isn't the small town where everyone knows everyone and you can leave your kid unattended with security.

On the other hand, because this isn't the small town where everyone knows everyone you maybe don't have anyone you can ask to watch your kids for a couple of minutes while you nip out to the corner store. And in strip-mall-land on the northwest end of the city, there is precious little in the way of amenities it is possible to walk to even if you wanted to.

After about 6 or 7 minutes, the woman I assume to be their mother dashed out of Starbucks, hopped into the car, and drove off, no one harmed and no one the wiser as to my surveillance and confusion.

I've decided, I think, that I'm glad I didn't give her The Glare or make a scene. It was certainly not the smartest or safest way she could have got her coffee, but I had her back. I kept my eye on her kids, a small kindness to someone who likely quite needed it. I know that I would need something a lot stronger than coffee to stay home full time with two toddlers.

What do you think?