Tag Archives: mom

~thankful thursday~ flyer

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/24

I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/24

I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/24

I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.

 

 

(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.

It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.

She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.

I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.

I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.

But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.

That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.

In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.

After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.

In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.

But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.

So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/24

In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/24

I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.

~thankful thursday~ soft walls

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Thursday… ish?

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/22

I am grateful to be feeding a bottomless boy and playing endless rounds of Tiny Epic Quest this evening. As Quinn has slowly reintegrated into life at the dragon house, I stood in Fred Meyer one recent day contemplating the gummi vitamins. The ones in the cupboard from when he was in seventh grade and the pandemic began that led him to shelter in place at his dad’s for over two years were kids’ multivitamins, now hardened with neglect and past their expiration date. On the grocery store shelf, I looked back and forth between kids’ and men’s. Kids’. Men’s. I put the men’s gummi multivitamins in my shopping cart. Grateful for vitamins, and the boy-man sleeping under my roof tonight.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/22

I am grateful for sunshine again. The dwindling of the busy market season allows me to work a little on Saturday to earn my produce, then go home and nap. Then walk in the woods with the kittens (I guess feral kittens love to be taken for walks) taking backlit photos of vine maple leaves to wake up from my nap again. A newt saunters by with a wave. A stand of tiny mushrooms sprouting from a pinecone catches a sunbeam. I go back inside and I am grateful to get to watch Quinn, also sunlit, eat systematically around the flaky pastry crust edge of the Danish I brought home for him, then the gooey cream cheese center, then lick his fingers.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/22

I am grateful for a phone call with Mom today. Another big 2022 gratitude is that I finally got to visit Mom and Dad in January and June, and I’m looking forward to another visit in January. And then June (when I graduate) and then having them come out and visit us in Oregon again. I am so grateful for my parents and for their love.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

11/14/22

I’m grateful that even when a day in the middle of November is a blur between the hours of still dark and dark again, sometimes it’s a very pretty blur.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

11/15/22

As I spend each November being grateful, I tend to take a closer look at gratitude.

Every October, I know that by mid-November some gratitude momentum will build. But every November 1st is daunting. There is something about October that whittles me down. Only because I know the benefits do I intentionally sit down each November 1st and begin again.

Sometimes I judge my gratitude posts because they are tainted with ungrateful sentiments (say, about a difficult coparent or a bad hiring process) and think, my gratitude isn’t pure. And then I think, if I strain out any negative feeling, I’m not being very real.

I can both have a terrible day and express gratitude. It’s not that gratitude wins, or that it erases death or taxes or my archnemesis coparent. It doesn’t resolve my inlaws’ complicated estate-trust-thingie and it doesn’t end war or defeat the patriarchy.

What gratitude does do, is it lights a little warming fire in my soul while the shitstorm howls and sleets and ices over the part of the world I can’t control, just outside. I have soft walls and the wind can knock me over sometimes, but I prop my shelter up and keep rebuilding my little fire. Imperfections, scars, holes are all illuminated. But so are textures, colors. I notice the way the sunset makes the tent walls glow orange, noticing that the night is long, but the sun does rise again each morning. I keep turning toward it, and it keeps being there to greet me. Grateful for gratitude, year six.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/22

I am grateful for salted caramel rum gelato.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/22

I am grateful to be married to such a hardworking person who works overtime hours for large chunks of the year. I am also grateful that he leaves work promptly at 4:30 for date night, because priorities. Also, the sunrise over the bay when I arrived at work this morning was easy to be grateful for.

~rainbow mondays~ snow capped nest

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Sunrise on the icy farm.

This is my New York rainbow… as you may be able to guess, it features a lot of white! And a lot of a certain furry friend who is more of an off-white character.

FINALLY seeing my parents was just the best.

The weather was exactly the weather you’d expect for Central New York in January, but the light was lovely most days. The kitchen… site of the soap making Mom and I did together. I learned how to make the faves of the hick-a-rew household: lemongrass lime and vanilla sandalwood.

Mom also kept Christmas up at my request, which felt like it made sense given the snowy ambiance.

Any given day’s temperature report, but I was snug in my “writing loft” upstairs for week one, attending my second semester residency! I love going to writing school.

But Dad took one for the team and plowed the driveway over and over again.

But blue sky though! It was lovely the few times it warmed up to 20 and I got to take walks.

The longest walk I took was all the way to the east orchard (which they barely visited in 2021 due to excessive rain/mud), where I set eyes on Big Mama, the apple tree matriarch.

I spied many dormant bird nests around the orchard, which were easy to spot all capped in snow.

I watched a northern harrier patrol the fields.

And I spied a fox a few times!

My handsome husband joined me for week two. We had a great, mellow, trip, and made it home safe and healthy.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

missing

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I’m not here to tell anyone to be happy today. I’m at a pretty low ebb in my identity as a mother – am I even a mother if my son has spent over a year not with me? I’m on a two week social media hiatus so I don’t have to look at everyone else being happy today. I consider it self-preservation at this languid, eroded stage in the pandemic. I’m not looking for a pity party, or answers to my rhetorical questions, but I’m also going to put this here to be real with myself, this still hurts. I still miss my son and I still miss my mom.

There don’t seem to be very many photos of just Mom and I, but I have found a couple over the past year as I have been scanning batches of family photos. Both of them happen to be taken in the Adirondacks, one I suspect taken by Nana, and one I took myself. I’d like to get back there one day, and I’d like to take Quinn there to see a place that was so important to my childhood, and Mom’s. For now, it’s another item on the list of things I miss.

Sending love to all who are experiencing missing today.

 

 

mother hands

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I stood rinsing the dish soap off of the strawberry dinner plates and setting them in the drainer this morning, letting water run over my hands, I pondered whether I would write a mother’s day post. The strawberry plates in my hands were a mix of those that actually belonged to my mother’s mother, and those that I bought from a vintage etsy shop for my birthday this year, to replenish the stack that had dwindled to only three. An eight-by-ten-inch swatch of Nana’s strawberry wallpaper hangs to my left above my sink. Dish washing is not my favorite chore, but it is mine to do, and I try to keep my sink area cheerful with reminders of the reason behind the love labors. Part of mothering is washing these dishes, and I am thankful to have the chance to mother, and grateful for the long line of mothers who washed the dishes before me, and all of the other mothering they did to bring me here.

I chose this photo for my mom’s card this Mother’s Day, originally because heart-shaped flowers seemed right for the tenderness of mothers, and the way these hearts lined up, with the long line of our grandmothers in mind, stretching into the past. My own heart has bled during this season of separation from my son, another layer to the flower’s symbolism, one that is common to the hearts of all mothers, I imagine. I know there have been seasons when my own mom’s heart bled for me.

Mom has taught me so many things throughout life, and most of them I have not rejected, although her habit of reading the last chapter of a book first to determine if it is worth reading the rest is one I never adopted. Mom does not like to sit with uncertainty, not even in a work of fiction. Even though I start stories from chapter one, right now I am finding it a daily challenge to live with so much uncertainty of how this story of world chaos ends. How the story of my separation from my son will resolve itself finally. Here I sit on Mother’s Day, without my child, and knowing so many who sit without their child or without their mother, and wonder if the holiday is worth the trouble of the grief it cannot help but bring along in the celebration of mothers? The older I get, the more I realize what a tough holiday it is, and that for so many good humans, today’s status is, at best: it’s complicated.

I busy my hands in the garden, working to achieve my 2020 garden goal of more flowers for butterflies. I add compost to the front garden bed, seeding scarlet sage, seashells cosmos, and black hollyhocks in a freshly weeded area, and spend a while weeding around the bleeding hearts on the edge of the yard today as I ponder, and try to keep from pondering, all the hard topics of Mother’s Day. My mom is having a lackluster Mother’s Day herself, and she makes me feel better in the solidarity when we talk on the phone.

I lean heavily on the butterfly metaphor lately, at the risk of cliché, but I find it coming to mind again, when it comes to not writing the ending of the story before it can be lived. I am holding out hope that we will emerge in a more beautiful form than we went into this darkness, transformed into beings capable of things we could only have imagined in our wildest dreams, Before.

In one November gratitude post I wrote about how I am grateful for overlapping generations, unlike the monarch butterflies who never know their parents at all. Still, I can’t help noticing that our nature is not that different from theirs; I know my own mother, and I knew her mother briefly, but the long line of mothers that stretches back in time before her, I never knew. A few have names to me, Patricia Ann, Anna Hilda, Hilda Louise, Anna Louise, but beyond my great great grandmother even names fade out of memory. I repeat their names today, as I began to do on my first mother’s day as a mama, another string of rosary beads I work through my hands, these hands that wash the strawberry plates, till the soil, make the lasagna according to Mom’s recipe, these hands that resemble the hands of the women whose names I utter. Despite not knowing them all, I am tied to them by that soul heartstring which is much too elusive to describe but irresistible to try to capture in words. Tied by apron strings longer than centuries and as impossible to pin down on the page as a butterfly’s fluttering flight.

These names are in my blood even if I can’t know the women who bore them. Their meanings include noble, grace, and warrior. A quadruple helping of warrior, in fact, with two of Hilda and two of Louise among my recent maternal lineage. I can only hope that the triple helping of grace (Anna/Ann) will help me through the times I grow weary in my warrior capacity. I believe that grace and gratitude are related in their roots, and default back to this trusty tool of gratitude that I carry in a prominent place, like a sword that I wear as part of my warrior armor. I look down at my hands, the hands of my mother, my Nana, of each noble warrior mother walking ahead of me, as I pull it from its sheath once again.

Today I am grateful for the hearts and hands of mother warriors.

thankful thursday ~ search your feelings

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28 days of gratitude ~ day 7

i am grateful for the expertise of medical professionals taking care of my parents’ health.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 8

i am grateful for the weekly return of my son. every time.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 9

today i am grateful for large snowflakes;

karate seminars, and people who willingly spend many hours of their lives teaching others to be able to defend themselves from physical violence in the world;

dance performances, and people who dedicate many hours of their lives to creating impermanent acts of breathtaking beauty;

and kitties who spend many hours of their lives worshiping the wood stove.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 10

i am so thankful that my husband lets me put him in arm bars and wrist locks so i can practice my newly learned skills.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 11

thankful for eleven year olds. and for the amazing conversations that happen in the car when we are parked in our own driveway.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 12

in yet another instance of gratitude feedback looping, my mom and i had a heartfelt conversation during which i asked her if she had any elderberry syrup for soothing her sore throat. as i was telling her to do nurturing things for herself, she pointed out that this was always what she has said to me. i had to agree, and shamelessly recycled her words to use back on her. today i feel very grateful for mom, for elderberries, and for self care awareness.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 13

i am grateful for having 3 concerts lined up for 2019! seeing live music with my husband is one of my favorite things. in other online purchasing news, i got rich a new and safer welding hood for work, and when he tried it on, he vaguely resembled darth vader. i expressed doubt that the person in front of me was my husband, so he told me, “search your feelings. you know it to be true.” i’m grateful for both the frequency and intensity of the laughter he brings me.

 

28 days of gratitude ~ day 14

feeling grateful for my bestie and our ongoing deep understanding of all the things.

~thankful thursday~ warmth, choke slams, baseball and apple pie

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i’ve been posting a daily gratitude post on facebook this november, inspired by a couple of friends who have done so in the past. this year i saw their november 1st posts and impulsively decided to join in, and i am transcribing these posts here because it turns out that it’s already becoming a self-assigned writing exercise (read: verbosity ensued), which i’ve already established is much needed self care right now. add to that the self care of the gratitude itself, and we’re using self care in layers, as self-prescribed for the cold darkness of november. plus, top readers mom and wedding boss have had the better judgement not to join facebook, and i don’t want them to miss out! here is the first installment of grateful posts:

~30 days of gratitude~

11/1/16 day 1

gratitude has become a cliché hashtag to many people, but it’s also an important practice, and one that helps me think outside of myself. i’m going to join in with friends who practice 30 days of gratitude in november this year, for selfish reasons, however, because i have quite frankly felt better, and i am hoping that attempting to count my blessings on a daily basis for a whole month will improve my mood and help ease me into this cold and dark season of the year, my most challenging time of year by far.

there are many ways i could begin this month of gratitude, but i’m going to start with what’s happening right in front of me right in this moment… my sweet fiance, keeping me warm by building and tending a wonderful fire in our wood stove. I am so very thankful for his hard work of cutting, hauling, splitting, hauling, stacking, hauling, lighting… dealing with all things power tool, knowing how to make a blazing fire nice and toasty warm for me, since i can’t seem to generate any heat myself, and all with a smile on his face. i am being so specific about his fire-making abilities because i know i will have numerous other thankful things to say about this wonderful man throughout the month! and maybe this whole gratitude thing is also secretly a way to shout my love for him from the rooftops of facebook, because i am one lucky woman to have him in my life!

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11/2/16 day 2

i am thankful for the balance in my life right now between yoga and karate. yoga: what can I say, it saved my life 10 years ago when i started practicing it, and has been a constant friend ever since. from prenatal yoga when quinn was gestating, to meeting a tall dark and handsome man in an evening yoga class 5 years ago, it is a source of great memories, comfort, wholeness and sanity. (oops, i told rich this morning i would give him the day off of being talked about when he asked in horror, “you’re going to write about me every day this month?!” oh well, sorry, honey. maybe you can have tomorrow off.)

now karate, i started practicing on a whim because my son was doing it and because i got a free month for being his mom. that was back in may. last week i completed my first belt test and graduated from white belt to yellow, and i see myself in it more than i originally anticipated. i’m more of a yogi than a fighter, but there’s more to it. learning one of the self defense techniques on my white belt curriculum, designed to defend against a left hook punch, i was brought back to a distant, jarring memory of a left slap to my face, and not only that, but the drunken lecture that followed, about how lucky i was that he had the self control to use his left hand to hit me instead of his right, given that he could probably kill me with a blow from his right (dominant) hand.
back at that time, i did not perform any self defense whatsoever, in fact, i cowered in fear. i made myself as small as possible and prayed he would pass out without hurting me further, so i could get myself and my baby to safety. and i did just that, and it’s been onward and upward ever since.

i know i began to carry myself differently after i started doing yoga, because my body had been so slouched and collapsed into itself from exhaustion, fear, self-loathing, criticism, and emotional abuse. it hurt, at first, to sit up straight in a seated yoga posture. with long, slow, movements and mindful breathing, my muscles have lengthened and strengthened and i’ve stood up a little bit taller ever since.

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karate is all quick and powerful, not the long and slow and graceful, but the feisty kicks and punches and blocks that feel foreign to me. and yet… there might be something about it that makes me stand up even taller still, with the inner knowledge that i would not cower in front of a left-hand, or right-hand punch.

today in yoga class my teacher had us meditate on the space around our hearts, and specifically visualize the space in the front of our heart as the place of giving of love from ourselves to others, and the space in the back of our heart being the place where we receive love. i can tell you one of those spots contains a substantially greater amount of tension for me than the other, and it was a bit startling to me that while i feel i have come a long way towards loving myself whole, there is still a decent amount of work to do. so along with the gratitude practice, i’m going to be breathing into that back heart space a little more mindfully this month, with the goal of more graciously receiving the love of others. love is all over the place, after all.

and wherever i’m getting no love… i’ll just kick some butt.

11-3-16 day 3
mom-and-me-lounge-yes

today i’m thankful for my mom, with whom i had a nice long phone conversation yesterday.

i was thinking of being thankful for baseball today, but then i’d probably end up mentioning my <3 date <3 last night to watch the cubs win a very exciting game 7 of the world series, which hasn’t happened since my grandparents were infants, and then i’d really be in trouble. it’s his day, off, people, so i’m not going to talk about him. the pear cinnamon cider was lovely, while we’re being thankful, though.

my mom is an even bigger baseball fan than my significant other, probably the biggest baseball fan i know, and she would choke slam anyone in new york mets trivia. she is the subject of today’s gratitude post, not because of her baseball passion, however, but because she is the most supportive and loving and nurturing woman in my life. i’m really just the luckiest.

when i was 6 or 7, she had a hard time with me, but she left no stone unturned, and eliminated the hydrolyzed fat peanut butter from my mostly peanut butter diet, and i’ve been a model daughter ever since (hahahaha. she’s not on facebook to submit a rebuttal to that claim, so i’m safe!) of all the things i learned from her, how to be a mama stands out as the most important one, and if i am doing anything right with my kid, it’s because i learned it from her.

mom has a lot to do with why my brothers and i have such an independent streak, and also why we are insatiable readers, and also why we never stop learning. she’s the definition of a lifelong learner, leading always by example. her latest passion is the stand of antique apple trees (planted pre-1948) on the farm where she and my dad raised me, and she has become an autodidact expert in vintage apple variety identification. she also makes the best apple pie which she taught my brothers and i to do as well and has given us all a wonderful gift by unearthing information about the chenango strawberry, winter banana, red astrachan, hubbardston none-such, and blue pearmain apple varieties that she and my dad are rehabilitating. see, didn’t you just feel like you got a gift, reading those amazing names? i bet blue pearmain cider would be lovely.

mom always knew she’d be a teacher, so when we each decided what we wanted to go off and pursue, she wholeheartedly supported. this included sending her daughter off to sail on tall ships, with her blessing, which i can tell you is not how all the parents react to their kids taking a few years off from life to travel the high seas.

her support is also what shines through to me when i think of her strong faith, because even though she has always been clear about her christianity, she also never expected us to fall into line just because it’s what she chose. as a “lapsed catholic” who has been a free methodist all my life, she emphasized that to her, what’s most important is that we are all on a spiritual journey, she always encouraged us to ask questions and think critically and make conscious choices, not to follow blindly but to think and feel and intuit for ourselves. i get the feeling this is also rare among parents of my cohort.

finally, if you know the side of me that doesn’t believe in t.m.i., that likes to sit in the red tent and discuss uteri or any other aspect of being human that other people can be squeamish about, a good deal of that is because of my mom, again, for setting the example that it’s important to be comfortable talking about this stuff so we can all learn. so, if you and i have chatted fertility charting or how to broach the subject of where babies come from with your kids, then you, too, can count my mom as someone you’re thankful for.

i love you, mom!