Wednesday Writing Prompt - I Wouldn’t Say It Was My Best Idea

I wouldn’t say it was my best idea, but when I was 17 years old, I decided to just stop eating.

It was surprisingly easy.  I set myself up so I didn’t have any choice.  I wouldn’t eat any breakfast, and then I’d go off to school with no money and no lunch. I’d spend lunchtime in the library or walking around talking to people in the cafeteria while they were eating, and the weakness and the stomach growling felt like victory.  When I got home from school I’d eat a can of soup or an apple, and at dinner time I’d tell my mother that I had too much homework to take a break, or I’d mention that I already ate before my parents got home.  No one noticed.  No one really seemed to care.

It was surprisingly easy.

I started out weighing 125 pounds, and at 5 foot 2. I was convinced I was hideously fat.  Eventually stepping on the scale turned into a game, and every time I would lose another pound, I’d tell myself that I wanted to see if I could drive it down even farther. And I could.  All I had to do was not eat.

It was surprisingly easy.

When my father saw me that summer his eyes sort of bugged out of his head and he told me that I looked like a waif, but he was the only one who seemed concerned. Everyone else told me how good I looked. My mother bought me new clothes, smaller and smaller.  We wore uniforms to school and I had to roll my uniform skirt up twice to keep it from falling down.  I bought myself a pair of the smallest shorts I could find, covered with stars, and I’d try them on every night in front of the full length mirror in my bedroom to make sure they still fit.  Then I’d pull down more and more things from my closet, trying on everything I owned, posing and preening in the small corner of my bedroom where the mirror was.  I could do this for hours, and when I was done, everything I owned would be piled in a heap in the bottom of my closet.  This was my favorite way to spend an evening. It made me feel calm, and beautiful.

There was a moment I will never forget as long as I live, when I stood up in biology class and one of the popular girls looked up at me, bitterly, and said “You are so skinny” in a voice tinged with envy.  It was one of the best moments of the entire year.  I keep it wrapped up, safe, in my memory, even now.

People were nice to me, for the first time.  Boys who had ignored me told me I looked good and kicked my seat, flirting.  I got asked to dances.   And I kept on not eating.

Eventually I started to feel sick, all the time, and that made it even easier not to eat.  I had a note and a doctor’s permission to eat in class, if I could, and I would eat one green apple, slowly, throughout the course of the day.  No one could figure out was wrong with me. I weighed 89 pounds.

This may have been when I first realized most doctors were idiots.

I still felt too fat to wear a swimsuit in public.

I wish I could tell you about the day I hit rock bottom, about how I smartened up and my brain got fixed and about how now I love my body now and happy happy joy joy, but that isn’t what happened.  No one ever said anything to me about my weight, and eventually I went off to college and I couldn’t keep myself from eating anymore, and i gained some weight and then some more and eventually I’d end up weighing almost twice that 90 pounds, and I’d be at the other end of the spectrum, wishing for the will power not to eat again.  I’d lose sixty pounds and then gain some back and then get pregnant and gain some more, and since that day I first decided to stop eating, I’ve spent the rest of my life feeling guilty over every bite of food I’ve ever put in my mouth.  Eating feels like failure to me.

I don’t know if I learned any lessons from starving myself into a skeleton. The sad truth is that I’ve felt fat since the day I hit puberty.  I felt fat at 180 pounds, when I was, and I felt fat at 125 pounds and at 90 pounds, when I wasn’t.  I feel fat now.  Before I had Eli when I running every day and I worked my ass off, literally, to get to my goal weight and I was wearing a size four, I felt fat.  There are always too many curves, too many handfuls I can pinch disgustedly. My body is never right.

So yeah, no magic answers.  The only progress I have made is that intellectually, I know that it’s not a good idea to just stop eating, and I would never do it again, no matter how much it may sometimes seem like a good idea. It’s not a good idea.

A good idea would be to learn to love my body at any size, but that’s one of those bossy little thing people like to just toss out at you, things like “calm down” or “You need to let go” or “Just relax” - but when they dispense this advise, they never tell you HOW. I am waiting to learn to love my body. I would love to just relax.  I need to know how, though, because I have no idea where to start.

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This Wednesday Writing Prompt was chosen by Jennie at She Likes Purple.

Other bloggers participating this week include:

Rantom Rantings - and she has the prompt for next week up as well.

American Family

Gentleman Savant

Raven

Let me know, either via a comment or email, if you would like to be linked here and I’ll add you.

Reminder: Today Is Tuesday. That’s How I Know That Tomorrow Is Wednesday

This weeks Wednesday Writing Prompt has been posted at She Likes Purple, it is:

“Start any story with, ‘I wouldn’t say it was my best idea,’ and go from there.” .

If you participate tomorrow let me know and I’ll link to you.

How To Hang Living Room Curtains In 33 Easy Steps

1.  Obsess over the Pottery Barn catalog from the time you are 14.  Think to yourself “Some day I will own some overpriced striped silk curtains even if I have to sell my liver.”

2.  Eat more pie than you ever thought humanly possible. Buy a house.

3.  Move. Feel immensely proud of superior organizational skills when you designate a box for all hardware during moving process. Put nothing in box. Lose all old curtain hardware immediately.

4.  Decide time has come.  Choose and fall in love with overpriced curtains at Pottery Barn. Get cold feet.    Wait until curtains are sold out to decide you will die without them.  Pay exhorbitant price for curtains on Ebay.  Try to think of how to explain large Paypal payment to “Sandy’s Cattle and Meat Ranch” to husband.

5.  When fabulous expensive curtains arrive, leave in old cardboard box for eight weeks.

6.  Begin to harangue husband regarding curtains.  Use well documented persuasive arguments.  Be sure to mention that he never picks up his beer cans and you don’t appreciate him leaving his flip flops in the middle of the floor every day and it’s not your fault you never have any time to do anything since he’s the one who had the big idea to have a baby.

7.  Do not, under any circumstances, measure the window where curtains will go.  At any point.

8.  Attempt to buy curtain rod using minion of satan self check out at Home Depot.  Poke other shoppers with curtain rod nine thousand times. Yell “Goddamn it, I did put my item in the basket!” nine thousand times.  Sigh dramatically.  Roll eyes.

9.  Continue the delicate process of forcing husband to put up curtains despite that fact that it will require actual work.  Bribe husband with toys a laser level.

10.  Have all pleas to put up curtains fall on deaf ears.

11.  Decide to take matters into own hands. Declare “I am woman, hear me roar.” Grab electric drill, charge into living room, rip open curtain rod box, pull out curtain rod!   Discover curtain rod is many feet too short.  Call husband accusitorily.

12.  Return curtain rod. Accidentally poke nine thousand Home Depot customers.  Know, deep down, that they deserved it.

13.  Pass out from shock when pricing correct length curtain rod online.

14.  Revive self using steady application of Diet Coke and chocolate chips.

15.  Ignore all moral compunctions and order new curtain rod in size ginormous from Walmart.  Have it delivered to dirtiest Walmart in town.  Listen to husband piss and moan regarding dirty town Walmart.

16.  Ignore 373 emails from Walmart reminding you to pick up your new curtain rod.

17.  Force husband to look death in the face and venture to dirty Walmart to retrieve curtain rod.

18.  Listen to husbands tale of woe regarding bad! customer! service! at Walmart. Note that said husband seems to have survived dirtiest Walmart in town.  Have husband concede, grudgingly, that it “might not have been all that bad.”  Pass out from shock.

19.  Once again, apply Diet Coke and chocolate chip patented revival technique.

20.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.  Wait for baby to fall asleep.

21.  Discover laser level emits sound which could piece the barriers of space and time whenever it is turned on.  Blame husband.  For waking baby and also all other problems in entire world.

22.  Have protracted argument with husband regarding placement of curtain rod, in which you declare he does’t know anything about interior design, your aesthetic, good taste, the english language, curtains, or baseball. Have him explain you may not grasp the properties of basic physics.  Explain you got an A- in Physics.  Explain that husband can suck your belotes.  Cry.

23.  Have protracted argument with husband regarding curtain tie backs.  Cry.

24.  After husband declares that no curtains of his will be tied back with deadly baby eye poking head stabbing curtain tie backs, loudly announce “Then we will just have to use RIBBON and I might have to order some more!” accompanied by emotionally cutting chin raise.  Complete by flouncing out of living room.

25.  Admire ribbon collection.

26.  Refuse to walk ten feet to retrieve step stool husband left in front yard.  Balance precariously on chair.

27.  Hang curtains. Hate instantly.

28.  Ask husband accusingly “Where are all the curtain rings that we used to have?” seventeen times.  Fix husband with evil “I know you lost the curtain rings” stare.

29.  Return to Home Depot.  Wonder which is louder, wailing shriek from child you are hauling kicking through store or the stares of death being cast your way by the entire population of greater suburban Sacramento who has chosen today to shop for screws in your Home Depot.  Buy new curtain rings.

30.  Hang curtains again using curtain rings.  Love.  Ask husband “don’t you feel that the curtain rings add the perfect touch of industrialism to the overall look, thus tying everything together in an eclectic, fun cohesive manner which really matches our overall design aesthetic and our personal feelings about life, the future, and the world in general?”  Ignore husband when he can only manage to grunt out a “Huh?”  despite vigorous prodding.

32.  Realize new curtains highlight all now obvious flaws with window, other furniture, entire house, dog, and life.

33.  Dog ear page in Pottery Barn catalog with totally impractical wildly uncomfortable looking $1200 bench which matches new, fabulous curtains perfectly and would also totally bring our your eyes and solve world hunger.

Now, with more pictures! Please ignore that giant rocking chair, it’s going in Eli’s room, eventually.

Candy Weekends and Rocky Road Dreams

Am I the only who goes to the grocery store and stuffs her cart full of healthy goodness and gets all excited about lettuce and celery and low fat butter and then comes home and thinks “Huh. Where the hell’s the candy?”

Happens every time, I swear.

Yesterday I got a giant iced tea from the McDonald’s drive through right about the time I wanted to kill Mr. E with my bare hands for having the cajones to be mad at ME because the whole world is just one pizza I can’t eat because I am trying to lose weight AGAIN and anyway the point is I was up till 4 am because drinking a giant iced tea at 7 PM isn’t really conducive to sleeping, you know, that same night, and so while I was tossing and turning DYING Of hotness I started to think about all these weird tv shows and books I sort of half remember from when I was a little girl….

Luckily Google always comes to the rescue and this morning I uncovered two tv shows I remembered from when I was a kid -  one of them is about some kids whose parents die in a car crash and they have to run the family ice cream parlor on their own.  It was, appropriately enough, called Rocky Road, and is it just me or is this IMDB commenter a complete stalker:

I loved this show. I think the first time I tried rocky road ice cream was due to this show. Wasn’t the shop located like right on the beach or something? I actually wrote back and forth with Marci for several years. I lost touch and wish I could reconnect now as adults. Anyone know where she is now? I wish they would put it out on DVD. I seriously doubt that since I think there maybe like five or six people who even remember the show airing in the first place. They just don’t make shows like this anymore, do they? I wonder if it would still hold up in this day and age. Do you guys know anyone that could burn DVD’s of the show they taped on VHS? I’d be willing to pay(within reason).

Yeah, total restraining order right there. No one tell her where Marci is!

The other show was this weird preteen soap opera called Swans Crossing, and I think it was the first thing Sarah Michelle Gellar was ever on.  I LOVED it, and rightly so, let me tell you, as there are episodes on You Tube and it effing rules. In the first thirty seconds of the first episode, SMG is being chauffered in a convertible! and they come across a family of swans crossing the road (it is, after all, SWANS CROSSING) and she just sort of growls, to the chauffeur “USE YOUR PEDAL” and he guns it for the swans.

OMFG so awesome.

PS From now on, I will be working “use your pedal” into my daily lexicon.

Also, speaking of tv, are you watching My Boys? I find it entertaining, aside from the fact that everyone knows that PJ and Brendan should be together and also have I mentioned that I love Brendan and why are they wasting all this time on that spiky haired lamo Bobby character?  Anyway, the point is that I super adore the name PJ and obvs I probably won’t even need any girl names ever since I’ll be giving birth to eight boys, but if I did, it’s driving me crazy that I can’t think of any girl names I could use to make the initials PJ.  Although I did just remember that I have a great aunt who was named Pocahontas and a great grandmother who was named Pulcifer, so perhaps the search for a good P name has ended.  Pulicifer Jane does have a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? I hope Aunt Tonta wouldn’t be offended.

So what are you doing this weekend?  Besides babbling incoherently, which I can now check off the list, we’re not doing anything too fun.  I have instituted Boring House Weekend, so we’ll be childproofing the kitchen sink and hanging curtain rods and you know, just generally getting all crazy with our bad selves.  I might send Mr. E to go see the Dark Knight, as I just can no longer take the delicate balance he is walking between sulkiness that he hasn’t seen the Dark Knight yet and sulkiness that when he does see it he has to go see it ALONE like a pathetic loser.  Whatever.  I for one am not up for Heath Ledger acting all crazy weird, there’s just something about that that I’m not quite sure about, and since Mr. E and I have no friends and no baby sitter it’s totally a moot point, so he can go alone or he can sit at home with me and watch 7,000 DVR’d episodes of House Hunters.  Suck it up whine pants, sitting alone BY MYSELF for three whole hours in the dark is my ultimate fantasy of all time at this point.

Actually, Mr. E is bringing me home three books I requested from the library and all I really want to do this weekend is lie around in the backyard reading and drinking Dr. Pepper through a Red Vine straw. In that case perhaps I shouldn’t have gone and had myself a baby who has to be held during every waking moment of his life unless he is eating dog food.

Really, I know this isn’t right, but I swear to god every single time I walk outside I find myself looking back and forth between my idiot dog and my, um, let’s just say…spirited child and thinking “Really?  Can’t we work something out here?  You’re absolutely for sure certain that a dog can’t watch a baby, just for a few minutes? The two of you just can’t…you know, just kind of look out for each other for a little while?”

Also, I think it’s pretty evident from this post that I’ve got absolutely tootely freaking nothing going on - unless you count the wild curtain rod hanging that may occur this weekend - and I am ashamed to admit that I’ve decided I’ve really got to do start doing some more exciting shit because otherwise I just won’t have enough cool stuff to blog about.  And that’s how you know I’m a winner.

For reals though, next weekend I am going to Thai Brunch at an actual Buddhist Temple AND I am also going to the Heath tile factory, and if that doesn’t make me the MOST exciting person you’ve ever met, well, let me just say it again.  A TILE FACTORY.

I know.  I know. I’m a rock star.

Oh Boy

I wanted a girl.

I find this difficult to admit.

People trot out the most ridiculous innapropriateness when they know you’re going to have a baby and one of the things they ask you is if you want a boy or a girl, and Mr. E always said his thing about ten fingers and ten toes and I just kind of let it go and said nothing.

It didn’t really matter to me anyway.  What I wanted was irrelevant, because I was 100% butt crazy absolutely no doubt certain that I was having a girl.

And if you wonder why I would even waste time making my mind up over something so arbitrary and ridiculous, why I would waste time deciding something that it was never up to me to decide, well, for reals, you might as well as just ask why Elizabeth is Elizabeth.  Ridiculous is just how I roll.

To be honest it kind of cracks my shit up when I think back on the whole experience and I remember that I actually considered not finding out the sex of the baby at my 20 week ultrasound.  Oh, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, me.  I just love being totally naive about my own raging insanity.  Senor Pants would have had a very pink room, let’s just put it that way.

I will remember the moment they told me that Eli was a boy for as long as I live, for the rest of my life.  I hope it’s one of those life flash moments if I ever get hit by a car or something…the ultrasound tech asking if we were sure we wanted to know, and then, sing songy, announcing “It’s a boy.”

I have to go on record though, and say that I didn’t cry at the ultra sound.  I wasn’t even that upset, I don’t think.  More than anything I felt sort of pissed off, if you must know. It felt oddly like Mr. E had won the big gender contest and I didn’t care for that, at all.  Plus, I mean, crying at an ultrasound over the sex of your baby is the kind of asshole move that I just refused to allow myself.   One must have some perspective in life.  People have ultrasounds and find out genuinely upsetting things.  People get pregnant and then don’t bring home babies.  It happens every day, and in a world where really, almost all the time, it all does revolve around me, I have to draw some kind of line in the self centered sand.

Let’s not pretend though, that i didn’t collapse in a sobbing heap three days later, on my birthday, when Mr. E hadn’t even wished me a happy birthday yet and no one had called to sing me the birthday song.   It all got to be a bit much.  But somehow when I bawled “You didn’t call to tell me Happy Birthday! Where is my ice cream cake? I really really really wanted a girl!” soggily into Mr. E’s shirt front and this good good just plain kind man laughed at me (!) and then just held me and let me cry I think I let go of that little girl I’d had in my head, that day.  And I let myself begin to fall in love with my son.

When Eli was born, I announced, loudly, a few minutes after he was born, “I wouldn’t trade him for all the girls in the world.” and of course, of course, I would not.  I would never.

I never thought I would be saying this, but if I ever have another baby, some day soon or far away, I sort of hope it’s a boy.  I have a really fabulous boy name all picked out and I just know Eli would love to have a little brother, and there is just something about a little boy in a romper just learning to walk that nothing beats, nothing at all, really.  There is just something so amazingly perfect about being a mom to this dimpled, serious, intense, blue eyed son of mine.

I mean.  After all.  Would you trade this one in?

I thought not.

Tell Me A Story - Wednesday Writing Prompt

I am seventeen years old, and I am wearing a humiliating catholic school gym uniform. It still feels like summer, but it’s a few weeks into the first semester of my junior year, at a new high school, in a new place, and I don’t know anyone yet. My loneliness is palpable, and I wake up every morning with a stomach ache that never seems to leave me.

Gym class is the very worst part of every day, in a day full of worst parts.

We’re supposed to be playing flag football, and I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do less than display my total lack of athletic prowess to all these queen bees I am somehow surrounded by. Each and every one of them is so ridiculously over the top perfect that the locker room scenes before and after gym class may as well have been dubbed from some dirty B movie. That I am expected to play a sport in which I might have to actually touch these girls, girls who can’t be bothered to know I exist - seems too impossible to be real.

I’m not sure what sadist is responsible for high school gym, but I am pretty much convinced I’ll spend the rest of my life trapped on this field with this pit of dread in my stomach, wishing I were anywhere but here. I genuinely wish I were dead. I simply cannot fathom how I will make it through these 45 minutes, this class, this year, this school.

I’m dragging ass as slowly as I can out to the football field and doing various calculations in my head, wondering how many minutes I can shave off of this experience – if I walk slowly enough maybe I can somehow manipulate 45 minutes down to 30, or 12, or none.

There are deep ruts leading out to the field and as I walk across them I wonder who would drive out here, and why.

It dawns on me that my gym teacher will almost certainly make us pick teams, and in that moment I truly do wish god would strike me dead on the spot.

There’s a slight stirring among the clusters of girls on the field, and then a rumble on the road behind me, and I emerge from my fugue and turn towards the sound. And there’s an old green convertible, top down, and a boy I know so very well is behind the wheel, streaking lines of dust across the field towards me. In an instant, I grow taller, and thinner, and blonder. Somehow, I’ve got the football, and I fling it behind me and a grin I can’t control breaks across my face, and then I am running and my gym teacher is yelling and there is shrieking and pointing and I’m across the field, away from school and football and mean girls and priests and rules and choosing teams and I’m performing feats of physicality I’ve never performed before and leaping into the passenger side of an old MG and then there is nothing but the two of us and pure joy and “oh I’ve missed you so much” and crying and kissing and I’m laughing and happy and I’m a different girl and everyone knows it. And my life has been changed forever by this instant and this day, this day has made me wild and popular and mysterious and almost as cool as Alicia Silverstone in an Aerosmith video and I am in so much trouble but I do not care because I am saved. Saved.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

A whistle blasts.

I am late for gym.

I am chosen last for the team.

I stand, awkward and shifting and alone, on the sidelines, and I make sure to not accidentally rub my unpopularity on anyone, and I try to look natural, as if I could care less about flag football or friends or girls or anything, anything at all. My fondest hope is that no one notices me.

That gym class, that day, that year – it must have ended, somehow. After all, I am here now. But I remember nothing else from that day. Not much from that year. After I emerged, I think my brain must closed that time off, as if to protect me.

And yet, there are some days, even now, when I am reminded of high school, or flag football, or gym class, and it’s as if I am standing right there, all over again, in that field, and if I turn and look, I can still see the dust on the road.

Other bloggers participating in this Wednesday Writing Prompt Are:

http://mommatimes.com/

http://www.mytwopercent.com/

http://www.shelikespurple.com/

If you would like to participate or to be linked here, please let me know!

Jennie (She Likes Purple) has next weeks writing prompt at the bottom of her post.

Wednesday Writing Prompts

So maybe I am stealing this idea from someone I don’t read, if I am, please forgive me.  Great minds and all that.

But one of the things that seemed to come up a lot this weekend among all of us bloggity types was that it’s really hard, day after day, to come up with things to write about.  And as I sit here staring at this empty screen for what seems like the trillionth time, I had an idea.

What if we formed a sort of writing circle, per se, and once a week we all took turns thinking of something, a writing prompt, and then everyone who wanted to wrote a blog post based on that prompt?  We could email the prompt out on Monday, and everyone would post on Wednesday, and then we’d all link to each other’s posts so we could read all the different things people wrote. It would be open to anyone and everyone who wanted to particicipate, and hopefully someone else’s perspective will prove inspirational. At least to me.  Because I have a serious case of writer’s block.

Anyone? What do you think?

Ok, well, I’ll start. And I’m semi cheating this week, since I just thought of it now, so if you want to participate, even though it’s already Tuesday afternoon, let me know.

My Wednesday Writing Prompt is “Tell Me A Story.”

Now I just have to write something.

My Favorite Things

I was thinking of how to write an I sort of went to Blogher recap post without being gushy or annoying or in-jokey or name droppery, and I thought I would just tell you this.

This weekend was one whole huge weekend chock full of my favorite things.

I got to eat Thai food and sushi and introduce a weight loss blogger to Inn and Out, AND we watched them make the french fries.  Jennette was super cool, and we showed her all around San Francisco, the wharf and Haight Ashbury and the Golden Gate bridge arching up out the fog.  I sat around in a hotel room with four amazing and lovely women while they gushed over my son and made me laugh and told me stories about sex bloggers (who knew!) and just generally reminded me that as weird as the internet can be, friends can be made anywhere and at anytime and sometimes things really do just seem to click.

I got tipsy on Jack Daniels at the top of the Marriott and spied, from waaaaaay up high, someone having their wedding pictures taken on a windy, cold, July day.  Red roses and all. It was inexplicably lovely.

My husband let me sleep in until nine am and then I ate croissants and fruit and a latte  - right across the street!  I took pictures that won’t turn out to be anything but blurs and I tried to explain twitter to Mr. E and I had a favorite life moment when we took Eli and Jennette to see the sea lions and Eli turned to me and squeeked, clear as day, “Arf arf arf!”

I did not wear my new shoes or my new dress and I cursed San Francisco for her dismal weather, and I formulated a new life rule that goes something like “Never ever ever ever ever ever EVER leave the house without a spare pair of fleece yoga pants and also San Francisco is not the city to wear a wrap skirt in ever.  The end.”

Everyone I met was delightful.  Even the people I didn’t meet were delightful - when I got home late last night I had an email from Slynnro telling me how bummed she was that we didn’t get to meet.  What a nice cool thing to do. I was also bummed that we didn’t connect, but next year we are gonna hit Neiman Marcus HARD.

This was the year that I dipped my toe in the Blogher pool to test out the water - don’t want to get into these things too fast, you know.  I can tell you that I intend to go next year, for sure, all the way, with the registering and everything.  But I am very happy I tested the water in this way because I think I learned some valuable lessons about myself and fame and the internet and blogging and people.  And mostly what I learned was this.  If you are going to Blogher so you can meet pseudo famous people and run up screaming to people you have never met in real life and leverage your brand and increase your page views and latch onto the coattails of some big time bloggers and hope that they lurve you and see the genius in your finely crafted wordcraft missives, I’m not sure you’ll have a good time.  The stress of all that networking alone could probably kill you.

However. If you come to Blogher intending to meet some new fabulous women who happen to also write about their lives on the internet, if you forget about page counts and business cards and twitter and shoes and just let it go, I think you will find kindred spirits, forever friends, all around you.  I think I did.

Jennie and I walked through H & M talking about babies and husbands and life, and I said something about how my life has always shown me that when you let things go, when you really give up, that somehow, that’s when what you’ve been looking for all along seems to find you.

Indeed.

Packing For Blogher

In The Light of the Moon, A Little Egg Lay On A Leaf

I was worried when I wrote that last post that it made me sound kind of assy, but Mr. E assured me that no, it was just depressing to realize how hard I am on myself.   To be fair I do know that I have many unique talents, and the truth is that what I really wanted to say was “I hate gymnastics.  I hate driving. I hate math” but I thought that was too negative, and I got a weird mysogynistic Barbie vibe from writing out such things as “I hate math” so I thought better to just proclaim my inability for such subjects, rather than my hatred.

But it reminded me of how much I hate to let go of the possibility of things.

Like certain days you wake up and maybe you just watched Blue Crush or something and you say to yourself “Huh. I am probably never going to be a professional surfer” and even though you don’t even really like surfing, you aren’t ready to let go of the idea of it…the idea that if you really really wanted to, you could still buy an old station wagon off craigslist and throw a roxy bikini on and head out and catch some waves?  And there’d be sandwiches for lunch, for sure, and you’d never gain weight, because everyone knows that surfers burn so many calories and they just eat all the time and you’d have a hot surfer boyfriend and enter surf competitions and wear a lot of floral prints and tank tops and you’d give surf lessons to NFL stars on vacation to pay the rent and fight off the tourists who tried to steal your surfing mojo and your little sister…

Oh, sorry, where was I?

This is not at all what I set out to talk about.  I was going to tell you that lately Eli has become obsessed with The Very Hungry Caterpillar and he drags it around all day and makes us read it to him over and over again, and this stuns me at such a basic level - to see him become a person who does persony things is just astonishing - at the same time as it fills me with a weird feeling of nothingingness.  I mean, for god’s sake. My husband is a paleolimnologist, people. I don’t even really know what that is.  Every night I ask him what he did at work and I understand NOT ONE WORD of any of the things he tells me, and then he asks me what I did all day and I tell him how many times I read that one page about the little egg and the leaf.   The most exciting thing I’ve done all day was to think about whether or not I should buy a Furminator.

I think sometimes the worst part of being a mom 100% percent of the time is that you are not a professional anything.  You don’t wear fancy heels or suits, you don’t click your way through a marble lobby on your way to work.  You don’t need spreadsheets to do your job.  No one else cleans your bathrooms.  You can’t demand that IT fix your computer when the wireless goes out.  Corporate doesn’t pay for your blackberry.  No one really cares what you think.

I think that may be why stay at home moms and blogs go hand in hand, why we get a little carried away with buying new shoes for our once a year crazy blog conference.  We’ve realized that we’re never going to be  professional surfers.   Our job doesn’t require fancy shoes, and so we leap at the chance to buy them, for any reason, now.  What we do isn’t, most of the time, something you can put a label on - when someone asks your father in law what you do, he will tell people that you are the mother of his grandchild, and to be fair, when someone asks what I do, I never know what to tell them.

“I read that one page in The Very Hungry Caterpillar over and over again” doesn’t quite have the ring of “I’m a professional surfer”.  Does it?

Sigh.  I think I’ll have an avocado sandwich for lunch and DVR Blue Crush.  I’m sort of caterpillared out.