Moonspun Spins

So I don’t know for sure how it started, maybe the night before when we got dressed for the women’s hockey game and I let lil moonspun braid my hair. She did fine, she is a great braider, actually. Every once in a while I put my hair in two braids and the last two weekends when we have gone to hockey games it seems like a great way to contain it and still look cute under my hat.

Anyway, it was Saturday morning and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop. Lil m was seriously impatient waiting for her friend T to come over for a long awaited lego playdate. She was kind of fussing around me and somehow asked me if she could clean my studs—by which I mean my earrings people, not RP or the cabana boys that had yet to show up at that point. I have two piercings in each ear and the second hole has a pair of garnet studs in them. I don’t take them out, but I do clean them when necessary. I told lil m if she really wanted to do the job of taking them out and cleaning them and my ears, she could and instructed her to get cotton balls and alcohol from the bathroom.  I figures she could futz with my earlobes and I could still type.

We are working hard with lil m on improving her ability and awareness to take care of things, her own and helping out. If she is able to do this FFO and I have agreed she can get her ears pierced on her 10th birthday in July. So I imagine the fascination with my own earrings is part of it.

She did fine and as instructed with the studs. (Still no cabana boys!)

And then she looked more closely at my left ear where there is a third hole. I have not worn an earring in it for, oh I’d say 15 years and the last time I poked at it over the summer I was pretty sure the back had closed up and was fine with that. The next thing I know, lil m is dipping a paperclip in the alcohol and coming at me with it.

WTF?

(This is the moment I refer to in the beginning)

Me: What are you doing???…..

Lil m: Hold still, mama, it will be all right.

Me: ……With a paperclip?

Lil m: (looking confused) What? I put alcohol on it! It is sanitized.

Me: What are you doing to do with it?!

Lil m: (giving me the obvious look) Poke the hole back in your ear!

Me: NO YOU ARE NOT! NOT with a paperclip! That’s gross and it’s too big.

Lil m: Oh. What should I use then?

Me: (sighing as I realize there is no fighting this) An earring…one of my earrings from upstairs.

Lil m: OK!

And she bounds up the stairs to our room to get an earring.

A couple minutes later, she has excitedly and successfully poked through my third hole. It didn’t hurt at first, but as it’s not been used in a while, it was sore. I had to talk her out of me having a dangly in it and said it needed a stud. Several trips up and down the stairs (all the while me blissfully getting some homework done) resulted in her finding, goodness knows where, a lone stud with a celtic design on it. I think it was FFO’s actually. But it’s all we could find.

Lil m was still so excited this morning about it she sat me down in the bathroom to clean it again. And reminded me that after tomorrow she won’t be here for the week, I’ll have to remember on my own!

The episode did prompt several conversations about what it was like to get your ears pierced and how important it was to take care of them. that were valuable. But I’ll tell you my friends, the sight of my 9 year old coming after me with a sterilized paper clip was a sight I’ll not soon forget!

I am playing hooky (with GB’s permission) from work today because I wanted to keep treading water and not drowning in my academic work. So I am home having a pretty productive day thus far. But I had to pop up and say hello!

If you have not gone to the website for Very Demotivational Posters, you must! Add it to your reader, I promise you will be highly amused and appalled several times a day. Like yesterday I sent this one to RP and told him I was glad that THIS was NOT what he looked like. For comparison, here is a post from last summer with a pic of my ‘buff’ hubby playing volleyball.

Anyway, so I was taking a break before delving into working on my final project on the Civil War and I saw today’s picture. And laughed aloud, sent it to GB and realized it reminded me to two things.

First, the picture, please check it out now…it will only take a second and what I say afterwards will make sense if you see it….

Go here now.

Great. So when I was in high school and college, there was a $1 movie theatre that we went to, because well, movies were $1! And it was called the “Flick” Ok…so given the picture can  you imagine what my cousin JB and I called the theatre. Yep you guessed it! The “Fuck” theatre. And when I think about it now I sit here giggling to myself  thinking of us making plans. JB: “Are we going to see blah blah movie?” Me: “Sure! Where is it playing?” JB: “The Fuck” Me: “Great! Are you coming home first or should I meet you at the Fuck?” (JB worked across the street at a grocery store). JB: “Meet me at the Fuck”

Let’s say you knew someone whose first name was Lisa. Imagine said name on a gold necklace worn around her neck. Yea, that baby looked like it said “USA”. Now think about how self-conscious you are in junior high school. How long do you think said girl wore the “USA” necklace? Right, not so long…

Happy Friday!

I don’t have them tonight…I feel tired…and there is much to do. Good stuff and fun and huge amounts of academic work. So, maybe my picture will be worth the 1000 words I don’t have tonight.

This lil moonspun right after she opened a Christmas gift from my parents, the doll she really really really wanted…

I’ve spent alot of time on Facebook and via e-mail (I just wrote e-male…isn’t that funny? I bet one could get alot of jokes out of that if one was feeling creative) spreading around a great line that lil moonspun said last night. So why not share it via my corner of the www?

I went to dinner last night at Applebee’s with FFO and lil moonspun. [Side note: FFO being invited was kind of spontaneous and it turned out fine. Even though they had just come from her having an ultrasound and finding out she is having a boy, she knew not to talk about it too much and not once during dinner did I want to scream. And I love  Applebee's and went last night because RP was out and he hates it.]

So….lil m is doing a madlib type thing and she asks me to read a word for  her. “Adverb” I say and go to explain what it is.

“Mama!” She says rolling her eyes at me. “I KNOW what an adverb is.”

Oh.

I laugh and look at FFO and say “Well it’s good to know she is learning things at school anyway.”

Later as we are driving home, the best part comes.

“Mama? how come adjectives aren’t called adnouns if they describe nouns?”

“That’s a good question,” is all I could say.

I don’t think about it everyday, as I am sure he doesn’t either. But sometimes I’ll get a glimpse of the 10 inch scar that graces the side of his left thigh. And I’ll think idly “what if he hadn’t survived?”

You see, while I have mentioned it a time or two in relation to our work with the Relay for Life committee on campus, my handsome and loving husband is a cancer survivor. Of twenty years.

When he was 21 the summer before he was a senior in college, he came back from a semester living abroad in Africa and went to a doctor because his left leg was sore. That’s when they found the large tumor that was attacking the muscle in  his leg. That’s when he was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. That’s when he went into surgery not knowing whether or not he’d wake up and have that leg or not. That’s when, after the surgery and recovery he ran even harder than ever before and two months after “earning” that foot long scar he ran in his first marathon. And hasn’t looked  back since.

RP in some ways is not your typical cancer survivor because, by his own admission, he was young and felt invincible and since the surgery took care of most of it, he went about his business. It took him years to process the magnitude of what he had gone through as well as to be comfortable talking to people about it.

Not long after I’d met RP, I was chatting with him online and was telling him about going to my first boobsquishing mammogram which was just routine. “Are you ok?” the words flashed across my screen and with them I could feel his palpable concern. After I assured him I was fine, he told me about being a cancer survivor. A couple months later he showed me the pile of his medical records from the diagnosis and surgery that he’d kept and never showed anyone else.

I’ll never forget the first Relay for Life that we participated in with the girls before the lrps had moved back to Kentucky. I have never been to one and it was a great experience. The first lap of every Relay is a survivor lap. RP had donned his purple survivor shirt and I stood with the girls on the edge of the track near our tent. I watched him come around the corner with the other survivors and was completely overwhelmed with emotion and got choked up. I mean very choked up.

Since then I’ve seen him speak at several Relay for Life events as the students ask him to be a guest speaker. As is his personality, he is warm, genuine and inspiring. And I always get choked up watching him walk that first lap, because that first time floods back to me. And there continue to be those odd moments when I wonder “what if he hadn’t survived?” My world would be so different now and I’d not even know why. But that’s not what was meant to be. He was meant to run 40+ marathons and ultra-marathons and hundreds of small races on a leg he almost lost. He was meant to become a professor and an inspiration to students. He was meant to be a great dad and step-dad. He was meant to be the one person whom can imitate me and make me belly laugh when he does it. He was meant to be the person who is my hero. He was meant to love me.

Yesterday at the hockey game RP and I volunteered with the Relay for Life committee and RP wore his purple survivor shirt. We walked around selling 50/50 tickets, RP being the front man because of his outgoing personality.  We had fun and did well. But it was the subtle parts that really got me. The older woman who told RP confidentially that she’d been in remission for 6 months, the man who said he was a fellow survivor, the co-worker who told us about her husband who was in NJ helping his brother whose wife was just diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer. It was the spoken and unspoken thread that cancer is a disease that touches all of us that strucke me this time.

And later as we watched the game and yelled loudly for the team (who kickass…they are still undefeated) I thought again how grateful I am that RP is a survivor. And I watched the statistic scroll across the message board that one American dies of cancer every single minute I felt stunned. I am so glad that my husband is a statistic on the positive side, because so many aren’t.

After the game we went out to a local pizza places (despite our small town we do have several restaurant choices!) and ate awesome calzones. We talked about a range of topics including history and my final project (yes we are geeks) and when we came home it had been a very good day.

A very good day indeed with my husband, my survivor.

(This is a picture of us back in November at the 1/2 marathon in York that my cousin, EightofNine ran. RP had just run a 50 mile race before and this was before the 5k walk that I did with JB and her kids and my aunt and cousins.)

It’s Saturday morning as I type this. I feel that odd weekend way where you are both tired and rested at the same time. We slept in until 7, which is like noon for most people. And yet it’s 10 am now and after breakfast of a yummy chocolate chip pancake made by my hubby I spent an hour or so in my online classroom waxing all kinds of smart about air power and the second world war. (I know you are jealous, but try to contain yourself) Now I have a weekend stretched before with me ample time to get my butt caught up on reading for next week and a bibliography due next week for my final project. My class will be done in a month…yikes, there is much to do before then!

It’s somewhere in the single digits here, but the sun is out and so that’s just fine. Outside our front windows, the snow pack from the roof has been slowly sliding off during the week and these huge icicles are hanging from it. The sun is hitting the ice and it looks all sparkly and pretty, especially since I am warm and toast inside.

This afternoon RP and I are headed to campus to a hockey game. The Relay for Life committee is going to be at the game giving out prizes and raising awareness and we said we’d help. Plus the hockey team is currently undefeated and games are always great.

I want to clarify my middle of the night post regarding mentioning Lil moonspun going to therapy. Her seeing a therapist has been nothing to do with the comment made by Wren. This was in process before that. FFO has been looking for one and apparently they are both hard to find for kids at all, let alone at good times. Despite my misgivings, I was outvoted by FFO, the teacher and another woman at the school who is a liason for kids trying to find them in the area. Apparently they all think it’s worth lil m’s while to miss 1 1/2 hours of school every other Wednesday, so who was I to argue. I didn’t feel passionate about it, but just not great. And as, FFO admitted yesterday, lil m might not like her and so if that  happens, she will hand over the reigns to someone else to help.

I do know that for me it’s a bit of a control thing. Lil moonspun has the Vermont state medicaid insurance which is great for kids. This is because FFO has defrauded the stated is listed as her parent. The state has no way I guess for me to be categorized as lil m’s parent for these purposes because FFO and I were never (thank goodness) Civil unioned or legally attached. When I went to apply for foodstamps after FFO and I had broken up I put lil m on my form and said half time and the woman told me that FFO had not only already claimed her and was getting the benefits, that there was no way in their system for half-custody. Wtf?   But now since, FFO is in charge of lil m’s insurance (although we could cover her if need be) she has to make the calls and blah blah blah. That’s the part that scares me since she isn’t super organized. But thus far there have not been any big issues.

Lil moonspun, as you all know, does have a bit of a unique and complicated life and would like to talk to someone. Which is fine. It is interesting for me because FFO keeps telling me that lil m is obviously going through something because she is emotional and can’t sleep at her house and cries. Lil m has not recently acted like that here. Although she does sleep walk occasionally (and last week at a most inopportune time) she goes to bed without issue, sleeps through the night and goes through her days just fine. I talk to her about stuff, she talks back and while I know she has mixed feelings about the baby FFO is having, she doesn’t act with me the way that FFO describes. It makes a mama wonder.

In other news, I ran for a 1/2 hour last night on our indoor track. It was the first time I’d run since, well, November I guess. I purposefully asked RP to run with me, because as I told him, I am least likely to back out of a running date with him as opposed to other people. It’s a matter of pride. I was a bit nervous, but it felt fine and today I feel a good sore in my quads, but nothing crippling. Now I just have to do it again and again….ok, can’t think too much about THAT….

I sat down with my calendar and wrote in all the dates for my classes until the end of the year. Ok, the end of my master’s program. Uh, people, we all know  how time flies by. Well when I end the seminar I am in now I’ll be half done and by Thanksgiving I will be ALL done. Which means that between now and then amidst lots of reading and writing and analyzing, I will also be picking a topic and researching and writing a 50 page paper on it. Now I KNOW that I can do it, but it’s alot to think about sometimes.

While I go ponder my life and its choices, I’ll leave you with two pictures. One of the Big ass icicles and one of my hubby who just left for a 13 mile run and who will probably knock down said icicles when he comes back. Happy weekend!

Why yes, yes it is 2:48 am as I am typing this and I got up to pee as usual, but had to write Lil m’s teacher an e-mail on the prayer that she reads it before school tomorrow so she can tell hopefully FFO that taking lil m out of school every other Wednesday afternoon to go to therapy is NOT a good thing. Why yes, you read that right, thanks for your concern.

So while I was up, I thought I’d explain more about what happened to lil moonspun at school last week. I alluded to it in a post and you were all lovely and sympathetic to lil m in your comments without even knowing the whole story and I so much appreciate that.

First, a quick backstory (as it could take a while time if I told the long version)—lil m’s biological father, G, is not part of her life. She has not seen him since she was 2, he does not have any legal rights to her, he gave them up and I have them. However, him not being part of her life was not what FFO and I wanted, but at this point it’s best we don’t know where he is and vice versa. Lil m does have some pictures of him and does know who he is in name and image.

Second, about the boy in question, whose name in Wren, I kid you not. (Come on! It’s a Waldorf school, his little sister’s name is Maple. Although I have always wondered if his oldest sister, Mary, feels left out or is relieved at her ‘normal’ name.) And Wren is a good kid.  He’s not one of the ‘boy boy’ rough kids and there are a couple in lil m’s class. Wren also had THE nicest parents, especially his mom who is sweet and sincere and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Third, lil moonspun calls FFO’s husband ‘Daddy’ which is all fine and good. (She sometimes will call RP that to his face, but never refers to him outside to other people as that and that’s all fine and good, too).

So the scene: It’s snack time and lil m is in her corner of the class eating pistachios. She is telling a story about something that her Daddy does unique with pistachios, which I believe had something to do with opening them with his elbow. Wren then matter of factly says “But he’s not your real daddy. Your real daddy ran away.”

Thank the goddess this is a comment that Mrs. E, lil moonspun’s teacher overhears.

This situation in many ways reiterates why I love Mrs. E so much. As the kids file out for recess, she takes lil m aside and asks her is she is ok and she says lil m looks a little shell shocked and tells her the comment made her feel sad. So a sit down conversation  with Wren is arranged. They talk about it all together and Mrs. E says that lil m is able to articulate pretty well how the comment made her feel to Wren.

I was grateful that day was pick up for me for carpool and so I am able to hear the story from Mrs. E fresh. She wonders how Wren even knew anything about lil m’s biological father and it’s obvious that lil m had talked about it at some point. Wren is supposed to do a “kindness” for lil m and Mrs. E is going to talk to his mom about it, too.

“But mostly I want you to know that this is living inside her,” Mrs. E says to me. Which is one expression she uses that I love.

I told Mrs. E that it is hard a parent to know that your child has this hole in her life you can’t fix. No matter how much love she has in our house and in her home with FFO, hubby and pending baby, none of that can fix a little girls desire to know her dad. I know she will live and prosper no matter what, but I acknowledge this is a point of sadness for my precious daughter.

Lil m didn’t want to have a big conversation about it, but she did say she was sad and had been very shocked by Wren. I figure that Wren’s mom is going to die a thousand deaths over it. And I am right. FFO tells me yesterday that the mom apologized to her over it profusely and that Wren is supposedly writing some kind of story for lil m as an extra apology. He’s apparently already done his ‘kindness.’

I am sure that he will have learned that one off handed comment can really really hurt someone and affect not only their life, but your own. This is probably living a bit inside him, I’d bet.

I was so grateful that lil m had Mrs. E witness that and hear the comment. It at least made her choice of doing something a non-choice, it was taken care of. I love that her teacher really cares about my daughter as a person and not just as a student. That makes me grateful. And while I have probably mentioned it before, I do love that she will have the same teacher for the next few years. We all benefit by this woman’s smarts and compassion.

Maybe that one lesson is enough for there to be one less boy being cruel to others. Maybe.

Now it’s 3:17 am and I am going back to bed to curl up to my hunk of burning log, aka my husband whose fast running metabolism make him a delight to sleep next to in the cold…he’s warm!

My dad sent me a link to an article from the obituaries in the Boston Globe on Monday and when I opened it, I found out that Mrs. P, my former swim coach, had just died at age 75.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that in the way life has of taking you in different directions, I had not consciously thought of Mrs. P in, well, literally years. But as I stared at the picture on my computer screen I was stunned. The picture they had used was from the early 80’s, so the Mrs. P that I had known and loved was smiling back at me just as I remembered.

And just like that images flooded back to me and I swear I could smell the chlorine from the pool, hear the caucophonous sound of dozens of swimmers practicing, and feel the burn in my arms and thighs as I pulled out just one more lap. I could hear her firm yet encouraging voice shouting  instructions.

It is no exaggeration to say that Mrs. P, whom I met by accident at the town beach while swimming laps for the first time ever for a fundraiser, literally threw me into the pool and a sport I loved. After climbing out of the musty water back when I was 13 and awkward and gangly, she introduced herself and told me about her swim club that met on Sunday nights in the next town over and said she’d love me to come. (My  hometown to this day does not have a pool) And it was there where I learned strokes and about being on a team and practice and how to compete and win a race or two. Backstroke was my thing, although I never did nail down that damn turn.

And it was Mrs. P who suggested when I was 16 that I’d make a good lifeguard and that she just happened to be teaching a class I should take. And so I got myself certified. And it was Mrs. P who called me up a few months later and said the pool at the local army reserach base where her son was the  head lifeguard needed a guard for the last three weeks of the summer and was I interested? That was my first official job and I worked there for four summers after that.

I found things out about Mrs. P through the article I didn’t know, that she had started the swim club because she thought it was terrible there was no swim pool in the town. I found out that it was unusual for her to have been the boys coach in high school because she was a woman. At the time she was just Mrs. P and was everyone’s swim coach.

I was also amused to find a quote from one of her former swimmers who now coaches swimming at a local high school. He was the first boy I kissed back when I was in 8th grade and he in 9th (and I was not particularly impressed by it).

And so I just want to pay homage to a woman who influenced my younger life in good ways. Since I still love to swim (although I don’t do it as often as I want to) I’d say she had a lasting legacy on me.

Thanks, Mrs. P. Rest in Peace.

She was still sleepy this morning, reluctant to get up and face the fact that it was morning. Some gentle and not-so-gentle prodding, including an unintentionally sharp tone from her slightly-harried-and-also-tired mama, eventually prodded her into the car and to the point of the carpool drop.

Her backpack was full, lunch bag bursting with her favorite fruit, cheese and yogurt. She clutched a canvas bag full of beloved dolls, those too precious to reside at just one of the houses she called home.

The fresh fallen snow was wet and there was an impromptu snow ball fight between the her carpool friends and one of the dads. The world was quiet, snow had fallen on the town overnight and since public schools were closed today, not all town roads were closed. But this group was heading off to their school for a normal day.

There was that moment when I grabbed her and kissed her as I do every morning. And I felt the pang of the days ahead. “Have a good week,” I whispered and felt my throat unexpectedly catch.

Backpacks were loaded into the back of the minivan of the school’s office manager that would take three boys and my precious girl away for the day. I said goodbye again and she turned. Her cheeks were flushed and she held her dolls tight in their bag close to her chest and her purple coat. She came back toward me and embraced me tightly once more, holding on for just that extra second and kissed me again. “Bye bye Mama” she said and her eyes looked sad for a moment as she climbed into the van.

The door closed and I waved with the other moms as I do every other week. And I realized as she drove away that moment of unspoken affection meant much to us both. And again my heart ached for the pieces in my daughter’s life that I cannot  hold together for her. I cannot fix the situation that put her splitting her time between her two moms and living in two households. Nor can I fix the hole left by her biological father and the cruelty of the world when a boy at her school last week, one who is normally unfailingly kind, said hurtful words that pointed out this gap in her life.

I can only reassure  her that she is loved. I can only reassure her that she is special. I can only love her in the precious time  she is with me to the point where my heart breaks at its intensity. And despite my rules and structure I know she loves me.

That moment that happened this morning, that extra hug? That makes all the difference and will get me through the week ahead without her.

At Christmas Eve my mom got our some pictures from my childhood and was passing them around. We don’t have many pictures, mostly slides actually, and it was fun to see them. My cousin JF, who just turned 50, has three daughters in college and they were fascinated see their dad and his cousins as kids. Most of the pictures were taken from 1967 (when I was born) through probably 1973ish, including when my sister was born in ‘71. I managed to wrangle a few choice ones away from her to scan, promising to send them back. (what? I will…otherwise it won’t be worth hearing about it for the next umpteen years).

On Facebook, EightofNine posted THE cutest picture of her and JB as kids. Seeing them brought me back to my own childhood, of course, because I was there!

Although I have a few more pictures to scan, I did go to RP’s office today and ask him to scan a couple for me. It felt like a lighter topic. Although I don’t look nearly as cool as Aunt Becky in her retro post, here goes a couple pics me lil moonspun (meaning me being little, not my daughter).

Now, I am not sure I could articulate enough how much I loved the dress I am wearing. I was passionate about it and wore it until it was a very faded light pink and up to my knees. I loved it that much. I am pretty sure I’d be in 1st grade or so and this would be circa 1973. I have scrutinized the picture and have no idea what I am holding, they look like little ponies, but I am not sure if they had them back then. And if my pink bow and fashionable dress does not give this away as early 70’s…well…those curtains behind me sure do. Yea baby! Thank goodness I don’t have a dress made of them in Scarlet O’Hara style!

It’s kind of weird to think my parents still live in the house where that picture was taken and the couch they have now sits right where I am standing. With better curtains behind it.

This is one of my favorite pictures of all time. It’s from Christmas 1969, yes FORTY Christmases ago. That’s my 2 1/2 year old self on the right with the still blonde curly hair. On the floor is my cousin JB, just 5 months old. I am talking to her, making sure she is ok.  This picture was taken at our grandmother’s house where we celebrated Christmas our entire lives until my grandmother died in 1991. I have NO idea whose knees those are. They look too plump and old to be either of our mothers. Check out the vintage wrapping paper!

Good stuff!

This weekend, RP, lil m and I are heading to Maine to stay with a long time family friend of his parents. I am excited to meet Mrs. H. She and I have been fast friends on e-mail and she seems delightful.  She was a great source of support for RP and I during the planning of the surprise birthday party for my FIL.  After several missed attempts we are finally going to do a quick 24 hour trip so we can just see  her.

Have a great weekend!