My Level of Awareness

The party was a smashing success.  And when I have cleared the aftermath, I will post more on this later.

But for now, happy hats!

My best friend came down, and there were mojitos, shopping, waaaaaayyyy too much bad-for-us-food, and  have I mentioned that my nails are frosty pink?  Specifically they are “Desert Nomad” pink, whatever-the-hell-that-is.

And HATS!

I’m glad she liked it!

(I am such a geek.)

… why hair stylists hate hair?  At least long hair.

And why they seem inherently unable to tell the difference between three inches and six?

My waist-length hair?

Is now down to the bottom of my shoulders.

Again.

Okay, here’s a newsflash for the hair stylists out there:

Some of us? Like. Our. Hair. Long.

Really.  We are not fashion idiots.  We secretly won’t be happier or look better with some short style de jour.  So let me repeat for emphasis.  WE LIKE our hair LONG.

My hair is not scraggly long.  Or unkempt.  It is thick, it is wavy, it looks like SHIT short BECAUSE it IS thick and wavy, and I WANT IT LONG.  I want it to look even and healthy long, so I DO want a TRIM.  But a TRIM, is NOT SIX INCHES.

I.  Am.  Not.  Happy.

That is all.

(and PS - if you persist in making unrequested major style changes of your clients the day before they have an important social event, you not only WILL NOT get repeat clients or referrals, you will get stalked and hounded to the ends of the earth and will have all past tips beaten out of your body.)

My son turns three this weekend. THREE! When I look at his face, there is almost no baby left. If I look close at the roundedness of his cheeks and squint juuuuuussst the right way, I can see the infant that I could cuddle at will. But one glance at his thin angular muscled little-boy frame, and all illusions are dispelled. Although he is in the technically correct age frame for it, I don’t even feel justified in calling him a toddler. He does not “toddle” in any sense of the term. He is a scant thirty pounds of rocket-powered running, jumping, independence-declaring preschool little boy. And, by-the-way? Terrible twos? Notsomuch. Three is shaping up to be the year of frustration. I stopped the car TWICE this morning. TWICE I gave the “if I have to stop this car ONE MORE TIME, you are in BIG TROUBLE, little man”. TWICE he got a stern talking to.

The great horribleness of it all is I realized that I had become a wimpier version of my mother. My mother, now THAT’S a woman that could unleash a world of horror on a miscreant. I am purely a poseur of a disciplinarian.

So my son turns three. Which means birthday party - the first “real” birthday party that includes actual guests that are my son’s peers, as opposed to family and parental friends looking for an excuse to hang out and grill and drink margaritas. Of course there will be some of that, or I will not make it through the party. My son’s best friend Keegan, who he no longer sees every day at school, is coming to Harry’s party, and it will be the highlight of the event. Of course, this means Keegan’s mommy is coming, who I know only from Harry’s attendance at Keegan’s party. It’s that whole mommy-playdate-world to which I am completely and totally dense.

In Robbin-speak this translates to real “guests” at the house. This is not something that happens often. Most of my guests are friends, who by inclination or long association, know where I keep all the glassware, the spare toilet paper and feel perfectly free in raiding my refrigerator. These are guests I don’t clean house for. I live in a very casual world.

So, I will sum up:

A real party with real guests.

Which means cakes to be baked.

Groceries to be purchased.

A house to clean.

Activities to plan.

Yard to mow.

Decorations to be fussed over, placed, replaced and abandoned.

All by Saturday afternoon. Oh, and I have to work somewhere in there, because I have a major, major client coming to visit early next week.

And in-laws coming for the weekend.

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

If I were my mother, I would drop a sheetcake on the table, have a few paper crowns and candles and turn the kids out into the back yard to play. I didn’t really have birthday parties as a child.

I am not my mother. I am the domesticated, wimpified version.

So I have taken tomorrow off.

And what’s the first thing I will do?

Go to the spa.

Seriously.

Totally me, don’t you think?

Spittin’ image.

God I love the internet.

Christian living books are really not material that makes its way onto my bookshelves very often. Although I have been attending my local United Methodist Church regularly (a late development), and I do enjoy it a lot, I would describe myself as more spiritual than religious. My relationship with my Supreme Being is very direct and personal, and neither of us seem to stand a lot on dogma.

But my middle brother has become very involved in the youth ministry at his church back in New York, and as a Christmas gift, he sent me this:

You could have no children, completely skim the references to Christianity and read only the chapter on the differences between scarcity and abundance thinking and you will have gotten your money’s worth from the book.

The premise is this - our society is based on the idea that our measures of success are based on scarcity thinking, that things worth having derive their value from the fact that they are limited. Exclusivity increases value. From the standpoint of personal and society development, this is a recipe for disaster. It is a concept that places us in constant competition with each other, a system with a few “winners” and a losing majority. And the idea is that the constant competition will ultimate lead to innovation which ideally benefits all by trickle-down.

But it is a system that by its nature, by its very design breeds discontent. Progress is defined and driven by the feeling that happiness is brought by things that not everyone has. We are an economy and a society that is motivated by unhappiness.

How completely messed up is that?

I am an acknowledged gadget girl, and you are going to laugh when I tell you this, but if I think of all those moments where I am the most supremely contented, there isn’t a single material possession involved.

What brings me happiness?

Family.

Friends.

A job well done.

All these things are things that are available to us in abundance for the making. If we teach our children (and ourselves) that THESE are the things that bring us happiness, that these are the measurements of a good life, well lived, they will have the formula to live contented, fulfilling lives. If we convey to them somehow that we measure our worth by the car we drive of the size of our house, we are setting them up to compare their lives to the inevitable person with the larger house and the more expensive car, instead of teaching them that we “win” when we reach out and share what we have to create the circumstances for true happiness - companionship and cooperation.

We are setting them up to be unhappy. We are teaching discontentedness

And yet, avoiding that exact situation is damnably difficult. We are constantly bombarded by messages that tell us that the quality of life is in a bottle or can be placed on a credit card. Homes are not places to live and to love and to make memories in - they are investments to be traded upward in a race to make the most money and have the most house. We mortgage our happiness in an incremental race without asking ourselves that in the penultimate moment if this will be the way we will measure our existance. Will we leave this world at peace because of what we own? Or will that peace be brought by the happiness and love we gave away and were given?

Stop and think about the messages we send our children. Are their parties about the gifts or the companionship? What do we celebrate when we celebrate? What do we discard? What do we keep? Are our hands and our hearts open or closed?

What do we tell them about the value of life?

Knock on wood, because a lot can happen between now and December, but our current plan is to spend the Christmas holidays in my hometown.

Kris’ current job basically demands that he take two weeks of forced vacation between the Fall and Spring semesters. I was banking my leave time in order to be able to spend that time with him and Harry anyway, and it seems to be a good time to allow Harry to get reacquainted with his cousins, now that he is of an adequate age to be a proper playtoy to my herd of nieces and nephews (have I mentioned that I am the oldest of six children?).

I joke that I only remember my hometown of Rochester, NY in shades of cloudy gray. It is only nominally a city of Upstate New York; the green rolling hills of the Catskills and the Adirondacks are not really a defining feature here. It is more a city of the Great Lakes, sharing its climate and its culture with the likes of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. We have more in common with our Canadian cousins to the north than the City-that-Never-Sleeps.

Rochester is a working class town, a town of flannel and jeans, pub games and barfood cuisine (can you say “garbage plate” anyone?). It is a city that was once owned, lock stock and barrel, by Kodak. Almost every member of the generation before me worked for them for at least one time in their lives, banked with them, had their leisure time sponsored by them, and their homes mortgaged with them. These were company people, bought and sold, until the endless cycle of layoffs and hire-backs took their toll.

But for all this, there is a tremendous amount of culture in Rochester. At one time, it was the smallest city in the country to boast it’s own Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Eastman Conservatory was the first professional school formed at the University of Rochester. The Strasenburgh Planetarium has been awing children since before I entered Kindergarten, and it has expanded into a Museum of Science . In a nod to our cultural inheritance, the George Eastman House and Museum of Photography maintains an amazing chronicle of the art and science of photography. The last time I was there, the exhibition of mourning portraits made me weep.

Of my six siblings I am the only one to escape Rochester, and the only to leave New York. My youngest brother got as far as Staten Island for a time, but even he is returning to the fold. He is moving back this month. This is typical of Rochesterians. As a child, four generations of my family lived within a five square mile boundary. It is insular and conservative. Even chain stores took years to penetrate the Rochester clannishness, our local Sibley’s and McCurdy’s falling only in my adult years to the large retail chains, and even now, the family-owned Wegman’s is still the dominant grocery store. We are creatures of habit and strong familial ties, preferring our large networks of Irish and Italian family connections over convenience and, above all, over trendiness. The American fascination with novelty does not penetrate here.

It was never a place I fit. Dreamy and prone to wander, caught between two worlds, my face was always turned outward in family photos. At the same time that I miss the warmth of the family fold, I chafe under the myriad of little invasions privacy demanded in the close-knit pressure cooker of extended relationships. I love and miss my family dearly, but I have always instinctively guarded the peace of my life from the messiness of the ties that bind. I am, by heart and nature, solitary, and this is difficult to be in Rochester.

And yet, it is equally difficult to leave. A city on a lake big enough to have tides can also pull on the heartstrings in its rhythmic pulses. It calls me home like a Siren to its shores, and I will walk along the lakeshore in the windy gusts of winter, the remnants of the autumn leaves clinging to the black and silver skeletons of the maple and birch trees and the icy, pine-scented prickles of New England winter in my nose. I will share the joys of warm cider and the novelty of snowmen with my Southern son. I will remember how much I miss Rochester, and in two weeks of snow and ice and damp lake air, I will remember why I wandered away.

Always to return.

Ten years ago tonight, under a summer moon at a very wild party, I fell in love for the last time.

And I have a story to tell.

It is story that took ten years to write and it isn’t even done.

It is a story of new beginnings, and reinventions.

There is death, and there is new life.

There is joy beyond imagining and tears from the heart of despair.

There are kings and queens, and great disasters, and enormous triumphs.

We have seen the best and the worst of our natures.

Falling in love is easy.  That’s love as a noun.

Loving, actively loving, every day, for better or worse, through the endless rhythms of every day life, is a dedication and a calling.

But we are still here.

Together.

And we are still in love.

To my husband,

You are, and always will be, the love of my life.  I would not rewrite one chapter of the story we have written.  I will always wait breathlessly for the next installment.

Even though I know how it ends.

Together.

MTAMTE, Baby.

Yes, I have been experimenting with themes.

I am also trying to figure out how the heck to get my Theme Switcher to set back to default.

Sigh.

Wordpress.

Love it, but sometimes I want to slam the keyboard around a bit.

We took my son to the town playground Sunday evening. Our town park isn’t fancy, but it has an embarrassment of riches in the eyes of a three-year-old. It has THREE sets of playground equipment, well worn, but well maintained, separated by a creek bed (which from my childhood is a necessary element of imaginary play), two bridges and a walking path. Harry ran between the three in ecstatic confusion, hardly knowing which slide was the fastest, which ladder the most challenging, which swing went the highest. He was in little boy heaven.

Except that Harry largely plays alone. It isn’t that he inherited his mother’s solitary tendencies. From a social standpoint, Harry is his father’s son; easy and outgoing, always the first to start a conversation. But he has almost no interest in children his own age. Harry is drawn to older kids like a June bug to a porchlight, and he approaches it with the same physical bombardment. With his sophisticated-but-still-toddler diction, he will strike up a conversation and shadow them, trying to draw them into his chase and mirror games.

Older children of our friends, through familiarity or affection, indulge Harry. He never met a teenager he didn’t like, or didn’t like him, and my friends’ children have endless patience for him. The children of strangers are not always so consistently enamored of him, with his non-existent introductions and his immediate familiarity. They don’t always play the games that they are automatically co-opted into with such enthusiasm by my son and are most often unwitting and uncooperative players in his impromptu games of tag. I watch his interactions with a mixture of envy at the ease that he approaches strangers and tiny referent pains at the little rejections that do not seem to faze him or daunt his enthusiasm at trying to make a new friend.

Last evening Harry “started” a game of tag among the monkey bars with a slender little blond girl about 3-4 years his senior. He ran up to her and then ran away squealing “You can’t catch me!” and I braced for her to stare quizzically at him and walk away. But she didn’t. She turned and chased him and then he chased her back. She ran nimbly away from him, always staying just out of Harry’s reach, to his obvious delight. His face shone as he chased her, to almost catch up before reversing and running breathlessly away until she pursued.

When she crossed the creek, which Harry was not allowed to do, her father coaxed her back, telling her to be mindful of her little playmate. And she was.  For an hour or more, they chased and played back and forth amongst the slides and swings and see-saws. Trying to instill something approaching social graces out of him, my husband directed Harry to introduce himself and ask the little girl her name. She was Samantha. She looked like a Samantha - golden skinned and blonde and patient and quiet and gentle.

The meaning of the name Samantha?

Listener of God.

Blessed are the Samanthas of the world and the parents who raise them. Because they answer the prayers of little boys and their mothers, one breathless hour of tag at a time.

My son picked up the most incredibly ORANGE worsted cotton off the shelf the other day and demanded I make him a hat:

It was a challenge to match the wattage of that hat, but if there was ever a better depiction of “sunny smile”, I am not sure I have seen it.