I have always been told my obsession with words is wrong.  Weird.  Hurtful.  A waste.  Stupid.  Every time I've tried to share something that made me tremble, the eyes turned glazed and the conversation screeched.

But words have taught me everything.

"You have to learn to get up from the table when love is no longer being served" N. Simone

"We are our choices." J.P. Sartre

"Walk your memory's halls, austere supreme" E. Millay

"I want to unfold.  I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie" R. Rilke

"I was more than your echo" M. Atwood

"You will always be too much of something for someone.  Apologize for mistakes.  Apologize for unintentionally hurting someone - profusely.  But don't apologize for being who you are." D. Laporte

"La vida sigue - dicen, pero no siempre es verdad.  A veces la vida no sigue.  A veces solo pasan los dias." P. Neruda

"I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself" D.H. Lawrence

"Does my sexiness upset you?  Does it come as a surprise that I dance like I've got diamonds at the meeting of my thighs?" M. Angelou

"There is always a time for departure even when there is no certain place to go" T. Williams

"You are not a burning building and pain is not the only way to feel alive." S. E.

"You have brains in your head.  You have feet in your shoes.  You can steer yourself any direction you choose." D. Seuss

"Be open to learning new lessons, even if they contradict the lessons you learned yesterday." E. Degeneres

"Thank the Lord for my kids even if nobody else want em" T. Shakur

"Smile and wave boys.  Smile and wave" Skipper

"Listen, Linda" cutest cupcake lover ever

"If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values - they're hobbies." J. Stewart

"Yeah" L. Jon

"I love you more than chicken enchiladas...and that's a lot." M. Romero

"When you meet someone for the first time, you're not meeting them- you're meeting they're representative." C. Rock

"You're easy to love." P. Lowry

"If your kid grown enough to talk back, your kid grown enough to get fu$&@d up." B. Mac

"Peanut butter shotgun!" S. Romero

"It's far" C. Holliday

"Good night, mama.  I LOVE you." E. Romero

Words given have taught me so many things.  Words found have filled in the blanks.  And, words withheld have taught more lessons than anything ever found on paper.

And I can't keep trying to explain that to people.  

I won't apologize again for the solitary comfort only found in the stringing together of thoughts.

I've learned too many times how to drown carefully and purposefully.  I cannot tread lightly again.

Critique

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.  You think I'm doing it wrong.  I'm not a good parent.  I could learn a lot from you.

Well, I'm sure you're right.

I could learn a lot from you.

Tell me about that time you did it all on your own.

Take a moment and describe how you got all three of your daughters to every activity known to man on time, dressed properly, and prepared for anything.

Please, describe for me how they all maintain straight A's, are each in advanced level courses, and consistently become some of their teacher's favorite students.

Enthrall me with your tales of how they always say "yes" and "no", "please" and "thank you", "excuse me?" rather than "huh?", and always "I love you".

Don't leave out how they race to greet you at the door every evening when you arrive home from work.

And please share the recipes you created to make sure they're fed better than you have ever been.

Remind me how you work a full time job, which you started after giving up any chance of a career to stay home and raise them for thirteen years, and run a very small business in the few minutes you're not at their beckon call.

And, don't leave out how not once have you been able to turn to your left and say "your turn."

Yes, please tell me again how you're an expert on these three girls.

Wait....nevermind..... that was me.  But, yeah, I'm sure you're right.

These poor girls and their successes.  

Whatever shall they do?

Messy breakups

I went through a pretty bad break up this weekend.

It had started with such promise - the relationship and the weekend, I mean. 

In the beginning of the relationship, we spent ALL of our time together.  We were completely devoted and 100% exclusive.  We could read each other's eyes and knew each other inside and out.

Then something just sort of switched off.  It was gradual before it was sudden.  Snuck up like a freight train, I suppose.

Saturday morning also came with promise.  Quality time and days laid out like a well wrapped present.  It was going to be absolutely perfect-ish.

Just the way our good relationship had always been.

Then.  BAM.

It was over.  Heart pulled from my chest, stomped on, shredded, decimated.

My oldest daughter broke up with me.

Of course, she says it was me, not her.

It's just not working for her anymore.

Now she won't speak to me.  The tension in our once-whole home is palpable.

We've been "on a break before".  She's looked elsewhere for the comfort I so willingly give (between the hours of coffee and moscato), but she's always come back by dinner.  Not this time.  I think she really means it.

I think my sweet daughter has really left me.

Which is bad enough.... but when you consider that she left an eye rolling, back mumbling (because she isn't crazy enough to back talk), door closing, whiny, cranky, full blown hormonal mess behind.... My lord.

This is why the dumpees end up on Snapped! and the dumpers end up grounded.

Tinkerbell-free zone.

I'm an adult.  I know this by more than just the calendar.  I get downright giddy over the thought of a nap.  I partake in an icy cold glass of adult on a quiet Friday night.  I drag my ample behind to the workplace without rampaging through it with a machete.  And I delight in the pleasures of the old school hip hop channel on Pandora.

So, yes, I'm all grown up.

One of the harder lessons that come with this age?  Realizing that not everyone gets the opportunity to share in adulthood.

Some, like Peter Pan, stay childish fools their whole lives.  Unfortunately, unlike the green tight-ed boy, they insist on leaving the island and invading our peace.

So, here's what we adults have to accept:  you can't meet everyone where they are.

Not everyone can put ego aside and do what's best for others.

Not everyone can take a situation, find the good in it, and move on down their path.

Some people just have to do their level best to drag you down to their wallowing mud.  

Some people are just impossible.

And that's ok.  Well...it's not really ok, but we grown ups call it ok so that we are able to keep our forward direction.

All we grown up, responsibility taking, bill paying, head held high walking, children raising, too good for this argument making people can do is shake our heads and say:

"Thank the good lord above that I got away from that".

And to you Pans, you ex husbands, you former friends, you parents:  you don't ever have to grow up - just go back to your island.

We'll just be here, sipping adult beverages and holding kitchen dance parties .  You know: adulting.

Jackpot

Sometimes they waste their dinner.

They spend way too long in the shower considering their hands are still vibrantly colored from art class three days ago.

I've bitten back countless four letter words from the indescribable pain of discarded Legos meeting soft arches.

They haven't put their laundry away properly since 1943.

There is a defined trail of sunflower seeds leading down the hall -- though no one did it.

The tears I wade through to get homework completed correctly could drown a country.  A mountainous country.  A mountainous country on Mars.

Their shoes cost more than half my closet.

Their bathroom floor hasn't been dry in months.

They clog toilets and peel paint and leave lights on.

There are fingerprints on every wall of my house four feet up from the crumb covered floor.

Socks stuffed between couch cushions and twisted jeans behind dressers reveal themselves to my nose before they reach my eyes.

Pink toothpaste should just be the official color of their sink.

And, if I won the lottery tomorrow, my luck factor won't have increased an inch.

This is the life no one tells you to aim for.  But they should.  This is the life.

And I'm grateful for every headache, every sleepless night, every slammed door.  I'm grateful it's my house they're destroying.  It's my heart they're filling.

Damn, I'm a lucky one.

Let them see you do good or they may never know how to do it themselves

We had just had the need vs want conversation for the zillionth the time.  They wanted the fancy cotton candy milk.  I said that's a want and we're not doing that kind of shopping today.  They tested me by pointing out the coffee flavor milk.  Would I be a hypocrite?  Of course not.  I again reminded them that I don't need coffee flavored milk, coffee flavored coffee is of course another matter.  So we made it all the way to the checkout line with only a cart full of vegetables, protein & plain old cow udder flavored milk.  Our needs met and my paycheck mostly gone, we declared ourselves victors!

In line in front of us was a familiar face.  A guy I had seen a few times at the bank who was always so very sweet and friendly to me.  He had a young boy no more than six years old at his side.  I don't think he noticed us at all, but I immediately remembered how nice it had been to see his smiling face on the days that tended to drag me through the muck of cranky at my former job.  

I heard him say, "I only have $50 on this card, so we won't get that stuff."  Still with that genuine smile, he gave the cashier his gift card and left the several boxes of jello pudding on the conveyor belt.  His son, only two years behind my baby girl, looked disappointed but didn't once even consider throwing a fit about leaving behind the only treat they'd chosen. The gentleman grabbed his two small bags of groceries and kindly thanked the cashier.

And I knew it wasn't much, but I couldn't just do nothing.

"Sofia, will you do me a favor?" 

"Yeah."

"We're going to buy that stuff the people in front of us couldn't afford, but I don't want to embarrass him.  So, I need you to run the bag out there as soon as I pay for it."

I quietly asked the cashier to pull the boxed pudding out from under the counter.  

"That's very sweet of you."

"No.  It's really just a tiny thing."

Sofia took the bag out and came back to the cash register quietly smiling.  

"He said thank you very much, mama."

Another daughter asked why I did it.  

As we walked our own groceries out, I explained.

That guy was always nice to me.  We had talked about his struggles to raise his son on his own.  He had never once complained about how hard it is.  And, an opportunity to put a smile on a kid's face is never one you should pass up.  Who doesn't smile at pudding?!

But I thought we were only doing needs right now - that's what you said.

Yep.  But sometimes we just need to do nice things for nice people.  One day I might not be able to make you dessert.  We'd want someone to help us.

My girls want for a lot.  They don't have the newest, nicest clothes.  They don't carry the shiniest gadgets or the name brand purses.  But they get pudding when they want it.

And, today with our little $4 donation, they gave a sweet little boy and his humble dad the chance to smile even wider.

So, here's to the dad that had to make some hard choices, but chose correctly.  Here's to the man who didn't take his money to the beer aisle, but put food on his son's table instead.  Here's to the little boy who's learning to sacrifice without letting it hurt.  And, here's to my three luckies who not once mentioned that I could've used that $4 to buy cotton candy milk instead.

The opportunities to teach right are always there. Take them and enjoy the pudding.

Confronting ghosts

She had been a giant.  Cast a huge shadow over every piece of light I tried to filter.  Directed and produced every imagined scenario for years after I last heard her voice.  She had been a battering ram in my glass house.

But not this day.  All that's left now is a shrunken, broken mosaic of anger, sadness and confusion. Still refracting my light while no longer controlling the scene.

That's what I'm left with two weeks after meeting my mother for the first time since she couldn't remember my face.

Before this starts to sound like some sort of tragic Nicholas Sparks novel, let me just say that she did this.  My mother isn't of an advanced age or suffering from some horrible fate of fate's design.  To save time, and a story that I may never be ready to share, let it just be known that her condition is entirely of her own making.  Pity her if you must, but she chose Jack Daniels over her responsibilities.  Worse - she chose numbing the present over knowing the future, and my girls deserved more.  The sole purpose of me walking into the facility where she will live out her days in comfort was to get out the words that might give me a little of my own.  

But first we had to meet.

From the end of the hall and around the corner where the nurse had disappeared, three people slowly came into view - two nurses and a small, round figure in between.  As soon as she saw me, she started yelling that she didn't know me.  

It had been nine years since we'd last spoken.  In that time, she had gone from living in a big house she didn't own and pretending to be the wife of a man who didn't love her - through several sinkholes of her own creation - into a nursing home in a condition I can best describe as what lies at the end of the road you pave with a child you abandon and grandchildren you forgot while you pour yourself another drink of self pity.

And she didn't believe that it was me.  Though, to be fair, if I hadn't been warned about what to expect, I may not have recognized her either.  Smaller than I remember, I suddenly couldn't recall why she scared me anymore.  

Over the next hour, I answered the questions she repeated and waited through her yelling at me for things I wouldn't try to understand.  Sometimes it felt like she was inches away from the woman whose messes my childhood hands had tried to mop, but she always faded back before I got a real look.  Her broken heart, the one I had spent so many years trying to glue together, almost appeared to be back in my grasp moments before she'd wander off again.

Finally, I realized why I was there.  

"They're good girls.

You would've liked them.

Sofia is a nerd and she's beautiful and special and smart.

Eva is an athlete and she's sweet and good and everything I could ask for.

Maya is my queen.  She's daring and freaking funny and three handfuls in one.

They're good girls.

I'm a good mom."

I had spent weeks trying to decide why I was going, trying to figure out if I even had anything to say to her.  Sitting in the well lit dining room of a place where she comfortably forgets our existence, I wanted to tell her that I did fine.  Turns out I didn't need her at all.  

And, though my grandmother in heaven would've never allowed me to say those words to her daughter, I knew she gave me permission to tell her in my own way.

You chose you, mom.  I choose them.

And we are fine for it.

I made it to the car before I cried.  I got my breath back before I made it back to the girls.  It took two weeks, but I finally put words to the healing.

And ten minutes after I left, she wouldn't have remembered my face again.

But I'm ok, mom.  

Paving my own road with real memories and undiluted love.

We're just fine.