Back in December, at Velocikitty’s suggestion, I installed a Theme Switcher to let my readers choose how my blog was presented.
But, in my mindful meanderings today (when I should have been working), it occurred to me that now I have no idea what the heck most of you SEE anymore when you read my blog.
So out of curiosity (and because I am adding some more themes and ditching some old ones) - what do you see when you are in “My Level of Awareness”?
Wow.
I want to say thanks to Gerbil at There’s a Penguin on the Telly for giving me my first (and only) blogger award. She just tagged me as a “Thinking Blogger”:
The flag above will take you back to the origin of the award.
Now, I am charged with the task of passing on the love, and tag five blogs that make ME think.
I will admit to being a fits-and-starts blog reader. There are some that I read more or less everyday, and there are some that I tune in to infrequently, then read everything that I missed madly. And some of my favorite “Thinkers”, like Her Bad Mother, Bub and Pie and Toddled Dredge have already been nominated.
But here is my short list of bloggers that never really leave me when I navigate away from the page, no matter what the frequency of my visits:
The first is one that I don’t read everyday, but it is the first blog I read that startled me with it’s candidness, with the author’s ability to bring her inner life outward, warts and all, in a way that was hauntingly beautiful. And her ability to do the same thing with photography is amazing. I don’t know if she has it, or even if she will know if I gave it to her, but Mom on a Wire remains a complete inspiration to me.
Christy of From the Mountain Top to the Valley Floor is raising her son, Elias in Alaska. Elias was born a micropreemie, four MONTHS premature. Her honest writing about the self-examination, uncertainty, and joy of seeing him grow is pure eloquence.
Beck, at Frog and Toad are Still Friends is one of my favorite kind of bloggers - the kind that writes about everyday things in a way that transcends the everyday. It’s the thoughfulness “in the moment” that intrigues me, because that’s how I like to live my life. Must be my inner Buddha talking. If she hasn’t already gotten tagged on this, there is some sort of massive oversight going on.
And because I am in an “Up with Older Moms” kind of mood, I am also going to tag the absolute best of our underrepresented lot - Antique Mommy. Middle age tends to make you thoughtful in a retrospective kind of way. But raising a very young child at the same time means you project yourself back into your past, and forward into their future in a way that makes you feel the full scope of life like you never have before. Antique Mommy does this in a way that makes me want to scream “YES! YES!” at the computer screen a lot. Except, they tend to frown on that around my office on my lunchbreak.
And I am going to stop there because those are the blogs that jumped into my mind right away and demanded my attention when I got tagged. You won’t find a couple of them on my blogroll only because I am a slacker when it comes to updating links.
I am going to waive the obligation for my nominees to pass it forward - do it if you have, like I did, some bloggers in the forefront of your mind that make you go “oh, yes!” when you think of what a “Thinking Blogger” is. Mostly, I just want those folks to know how much I have really enjoyed their writing and how much of it I have taken home.
I have been tagged by Jodi to participate in the Real Mom meme that has been working it’s way across the Mom circuit. Basically the rules are this: Put up a post “Real Moms [insert what you do here]”, followed by an explanation, a picture, and a “Real Moms. Making ….”. Then tag five people.
If you have been reading this blog regularly, you know that I occasionally travel for business. In an active study, this amounts to about two days on the road every three weeks. Not a particularly heavy travel burden in the great scheme of things, and significantly less than the position I held with my firm thirteen years ago. I went through periods back then where I didn’t spend more than three days at a stretch in a single time zone. But, I also didn’t have a toddler in those days.
After a rocky start, Harry has adjusted to the absences fairly well. I call him every evening, and I send him emails with pictures and audio from my cell phone. I bring him back presents from every trip, because I remember my Dad doing that from time to time when he traveled (which was a lot), and I always remember the breathless anticipation of searching his luggage to see what came home for me.
And I have learned to be a morning person. An omigod-it’s-so-early-the-birds-aren’t-up morning person. If I catch a 6am flight home, I can clock in at the office upon returning and by noon my reports are filed and I can guiltlessly cut out of the office, pick Harry up from daycare, and have a playday.
Last week it was the Wonder Place. Harry played with complete abandon for two and a half hours. If my attention wandered in any way, he quickly recalled his place in the center of my universe with a loud “Mama! Mama!” Look at me! Look at me! My presence was mainly required as a spectator. He was the sole orchestrator of his fun. I was cast in the role of appreciative audience, but a role that was nevertheless absolutely required - in fact, commanded.
It was a part I was more than happy to play, and I applauded enthusiastically at every appropriate interval (and a few inappropriate ones). I also acted as both bank and concessionaire, procuring goldfish and juice at intermission. Even in this marginal role, by the time I ushered him out the door, I was exhausted. The combination of rising to my alarm at 3am, and maintaining my constant attention had utterly done me in. I don’t think I have gone to bed before 9pm since I was six years old. Until now.
But that’s okay.
In balancing the books of time,
I figure I still owe him a few.
Real Moms, making up for lost time.
As to tagging? I tag all the non-moms who read my blog. When was that moment that made your mom a “Real Mom” to you? Same rules apply.
It took a full two months before the act of delivering my son to his daycare facility didn’t end in a veritable fountain of Harry tears, two little outstretched arms, and an absolutely heartrending chorus of “Noooooooooo!”.
I have a very good daycare. The teachers are kind, affectionate and attentive. The atmosphere is homey, if a bit worn around the edges. And they keep Harry busy. He has fun. I know this from illicit glimpses of my unaware son through the window, stolen as I creep in to pick him up. He is always happy and helpful, helping the teachers clean for the day, and dancing in his funny little way for their amusement. I hope the self-consciousness of his future adolescence never steals from him his love of dancing in uninhibited happiness. Watching him whirl and twirl, from my surreptitious vantage point, is one of the quiet joys of being his mom.
But those stolen moments were bought and paid for by early-morning anguish. Vacation obliterated the progress we had made at peaceful morning transitions, and we were finally returning, just this morning, to something approaching an even keel. I let Harry open the door to the building and walk through the rooms back to the Two-Year-Old room, waving hello to the older children as he passed through.
As we turned the last corner, just ahead of us, the mother of one of Harry’s classmates was re-enacting an all-to-familiar scene. Her son was outstretched on the floor, arms clenched in desperation around his mother’s ankles, tears streaming. “Noooooooooooo!”
I held my breath.
Harry gingerly toed past the pitiful little prostrate form, looking down, forehead wrinkled.
And ran straight to his teacher, the perfect picture of calm.
I let out my breath.
As I passed by the captured mom, balanced teetering as she unlaced her son’s grasping fingers from her ankles, I sent all my sympathetic vibes in her direction:
“Girl, I feel for you, I really, really do…”
And one, tiny, little self-satisfied, evil, guilty, thought:
“…but, better you than me!”
At the risk of losing my “mommyblogger” title, I suppose the time has come to throw in a “Harry” post. But it may not be the one you were expecting.
I have been watching one of my son’s prodigious growth spurts lately in amazement. There is almost none of the baby that I snuggled in a sling around my neck just one year ago. Four months away from two years old, and only four teeth shy of a full set (he is cutting the evil canines of doom right now), he is full in the bloom of running-jumping-shrieking toddlerhood. His slight speech delay let me live in denial for a little longer than some, but he has now fully caught up with his cohorts, learning new words daily and stringing them together at entirely unexpected moments. Having only vicariously (and none too attentively), witnessed my nieces and nephews pass this way before him, I marvel at how he wakes up a different little human being each day than the one I put to bed the night before.
I don’t know if this is a function of my delayed motherhood, or if all moms feel the same way, but it is hard to resist demanding a “do-over”. That his babyhood is vanishing before my eyes fills me with more than a little sadness. For better or worse, I will never pass this way again.
However, this is a fate that I fully brought upon myself. While I will not deny the melancholy of watching Harry grow up as an only child, I cannot allow myself the luxury of whining about it.
It is another of the great ironies of life that so many of our decisions are made at a time of our lives when we are so ill-equipped to understand the consequences of them. Teenagers, in fits of fancy and the arrogance, erect MySpace pages that are shrines to the “in-your-face-recklessness” of youth, before the future opinions of college-recruiters and potential employers even cross before their radar screens. We are simply unable to project into our futures and understand our middle-aged selves with our middle-aged needs. We live blissfully in the momentary self-absorption of the young. And, if we grow at all, we must learn to live with the delayed payment that “life in the moment” requires.
As young women in the age of liberation, we preoccupy much of our prime childbearing years with the task of NOT conceiving. We live in an age where we are allowed personal goals, personal aspirations, and the social luxury of putting them first. We see media-hyped visions of successful and ever-young Hollywood actresses and celebrity figures having their children well into their forties, without seeing the airbrushing and the costly fertility treatments that bolster the image. Forty is the new thirty! Thirty is the new twenty! We can have it all with our children as the cherry on the top!
Yes. I had my son at forty. Yes. I had a successful career first. And yes, I feel I am a far, far better parent at forty-two than I would have been at twenty-two, or even thirty-two. And, no, I don’t look my age, even without the airbrushing (although I can’t say that will last much longer). I wont allow myself the indulgence of playing what-if games, but I pray fervently that no woman in her early thirties ever, EVER looks to me as an example and tells herself “See, I have a few more years…”.
If I can spare one woman the sadness of knowing that every “first” my son has is a “last” for me, I will gladly, gladly post myself on a Wanted poster for all the badness of delayed motherhood. If I can spare another the agony and tears of an infertility struggle that was the result of nothing more than plain old age, I will expose every procedure, every test, every dismal pronouncement from every fertility doctor. I am not infertile through bad luck. I am infertile through the simple, relentless, march of human biology.
Here it is. Plain black and white.
Your fertility starts falling off in your thirties. It accelerates after 35. It falls precipitously after 37. By the age of 45, 85% of women are completely infertile.
We need to be realistic about the demands of children on our lives. I grant you that. Your life reorients itself in ways you can never imagine.
However, we need to be equally realistic about how much luxury we really have with our time. If you are waiting for the ideal time to have children, I can tell you, with a great deal of certainty, that the ideal time NEVER comes. For me, first it was money. Then a failed marriage. Then my career. Then my sport. Then I woke up one day and I was about to turn 40, and had no idea how I even got there. And I realized that all those things could have been rearranged. That life doesn’t end when you have kids. You reorient. You recover. You move on. And you are happier beyond imagining.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind being an older mother. My son is the joy of my life. I would do it all over again in a bloody heartbeat.
Which, I guess, is exactly my point.
I’m back. Sunburned, bruised, still damned tired (hence my extra day of blogging absence), but more or less back.
I could give you a rundown of the highlights and down-lows of my week, but what it comes back to is friendships. I got to spend a lot of quality time with people I don’t see anywhere near often enough. We ate, we drank, and we played some cutthroat bocce. There was teasing and a few practical jokes, which were thankfully balanced out by an abundance of good humor.
The next year just can’t go by fast enough.
In accordance with one of the many laws of Murphy, I have contracted rotavirus from my son (courtesy of the bacterial cesspool alternately termed “daycare”) just in time to take my vacation. Trying to find a silver lining in my misery, I am comforted only that I will start my vacation with a clean colon (for the second time in as many months), and a rather euphoric lightheaded feeling brought on by dehydration. And there is, of course, the added bonus that I won’t have to take any time off, because I had conveniently already scheduled for it. Aren’t I a considerate employee? How many other people maximize their productivity by rolling their sick days and vacations together so efficiently?
As a consequence of my imminent departure, “My Level of Awareness” is taking a brief sabbatical until next Monday. If you don’t hear from me by then, assume the virus is continuing to hold me hostage and alert the CDC.
Folks, during the 5-Minutes-for-Mom Blog Party, I got a comment from a blogger whose blog I hadn’t surfed through yet. So I went. And I read the whole thing.
Now, normally, I don’t do these party-socialization-type things. For those of you who know me in person, you know why. I am of the solitary-bordering-on-antisocial-intimate-gatherings-are-okay kind of person (who is married to a the-more-the-merrier-look-at-me-with-my-posse kind of guy, without whom I would likely never attend a single social function, but I digress). But, I am a new kid on the mommy-blogger circuit, and I actually do like the interaction between reader and writer (from both sides of the equation), and, since I didn’t have to have all these people in my actual living room, well, what the heck.
If for no other reason than I discovered There’s a Penguin on the Telly (or rather, she discovered me), it was all worth it. Go read her blog. I laughed my ass off.
Or rather, I wish I laughed even a tiny bit of my ass off, but that will lead us to a whole discussion of body image issues that I would rather avoid.
I digress again.
Anyway - go read. It’s great shit.
Seeing as how it looks like only two of us managed to actually read last month’s GAMBLE selection (which I am marking off to the “Holy Shite, it’s only xx weeks to Gulf Wars!” syndrome), I suppose that it doesn’t matter that this month’s book introduction is a wee bit on the tardy side. If you didn’t read last month’s selection, I really recommend that you pick it up later. It’s a fast read and it’s a oddly sweet little book.
I know most of you aren’t going to be spending your time reading at the War, but if you were to do it, this month’s selection is not a bad choice to maintain the ambiance:
Publishers Weekly
A medieval illuminator with radical views finds himself sharing quarters with a widow struggling to preserve her independence in this enthralling historical novel set in the 14th century, a time of religious strife. Lady Kathryn, mistress of Blackingham Manor in East Anglia, must be practical to ensure the future of her 15-year-old twin sons. Little as she cares for the money-grubbing worthies of the local abbey, she is happy to do them a favor by taking in a master illuminator as lodger. Finn, a widower with a 16-year-old daughter, proves to be a congenial guest. He is educated, perceptive and kind-and soon, irresistible to Kathryn. Their subsequent passionate affair blinds them to the romance developing between Finn’s innocent daughter, Rose, and Kathryn’s pious son, Colin. Meanwhile, the unsolved murder of an unscrupulous priest on the manor grounds puts everyone in jeopardy, and Finn’s secret sympathy with John Wycliffe and his Lollard followers, who champion an English translation of the Scriptures, endangers his livelihood, not to mention his life. Kathryn’s plainspoken fortitude and warring loyalties to lover and sons make her a compelling figure, and Vantrease’s secondary characters are brilliantly sketched as well: confused Colin; his carousing brother, Alfred; Agnes, Lady Kathryn’s cook and confidante since childhood; Half-Tom, a courageous dwarf. In Vantrease’s medieval England, justice is determined by the powerful; violence is a first, not a last, resort; and love must take second place to duty. This is an absorbing, expertly told tale, plainly and forthrightly written and embroidered with plenty of homespun detail. Agent, Harvey Klinger. Foreign rights sold in 10 countries. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
It might just be the perfect book to head off the post-war blues and prolong the afterglow.
Can chocolate cake be written off as a business expense?
Because I could SO use a huge honkin’ slice right about now.
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