Mending Relationships

It was never easy growing up with twin siblings.  They shared a bond that I could never have with anyone.  Even though I have always understood that, it sucks!  I remember my dad and his brother talking all the time on the phone, getting together when they could, etc.  To me, that’s how it should be.

As we got older, the distance seemed greater with every passing year.  Last year, it hit an all-time low for a while.  I was getting closer with one of them but growing even further apart from the other.  It was to the point where my brother and I barely talked and when we did, it was very cold and formal.  It cut like a knife.

A few months ago, things slowly started getting better.  We now visit more often, have each other’s numbers stored in our cell phones, and have silly interactions.  Most recently, I wound up behind him on the highway.  After four miles of trying to figure out if it was him or not, I got a sure sign it was.  Yes, it looked like him from behind.  The car looked like his (but it’s a common vehicle), he had his hand resting on the window frame nearly identical to mine, the same way his twin does, the same way our dad does, probably the same way our grandfather did.

What sealed the deal was him giving me the bird at 65 miles an hour.  I saluted him back.  It wasn’t in a malicious way.  Was it what many families would do?  No.  After that, I saw him reaching for something on the passenger’s seat, perhaps his cell phone.  Nope, it was a bottle of water, which was then opened and held out the window so the wind carried it directly to my windshield.

I called him, we laughed, and went back to driving.  A few miles later, he called to let me know there was no one coming and I could pass the annoyingly slow driver that he had already passed.  Shortly after that, I sailed past him as he waited to make a left turn, both of us laying on our horns.  It was a sequence of events that made me smile.

Last night, we all met up at a huge fireworks display, completely by chance.  My other brother was coming out of the sea of 200,000 as we were getting there.  He told me where they were sitting, and we joined them.  We laughed as we ripped on each other, wrestled around play fighting, stood by each other through the anthem, raising of the flag, and an F-16 flyover.  We cheered together, comparing goosebumps on our arms.  We shared the perspective of an almost three year old watching fireworks for the first time.

All in all, it was an amazing night!  A night that I’m sure wouldn’t have happened a year ago.  I once thought there was no hope of having a relationship half as close as our dad an uncle had with that brother.  I think we’ve hit that point and hope that in time we could reach 75% as close.  It’s nice to finally have hope.

Direction

Many times, I come across message board posts asking how to decide what direction they should take with their blog.  For some, the answer is obvious.  They are blogging to promote their books, trying to develop an online presence, or have a specific message in mind when they start.

For me, my direction has been all over the place.  I’ve written what I thought people would want to read, I’ve written whatever comes to mind knowing it only really mattered to me, and some of the things I’ve written had a specific purpose.  The problem was that my blog never felt the way I wanted it to feel.  I don’t want to only blog about the cute and funny things peanut does.  I don’t want to be a whiny blogger who only talks about how crappy her own life is.  At the same time, I didn’t feel that I had anything to contribute in one specific direction.

Tonight, as I drove home, it hit me that I enjoy blogging about family.  I’m not an expert in motherhood, but I can blog about what I’m going through as the mom to a 3 year old.  I’m not an expert child (dad, hold back the laughter), but we’ve all made it through the first 30 years with relatively few problems.  Lord knows I’m not an excellent wife, but I have worked to make my marriage work even when I thought it was hopeless, only to realize that when we work together, my husband is a pretty good guy!

One thing that helped me realize that there is some good done on these pages was looking at my search hits.  Divorce comes up daily in some way or another.  Well, I know a bit about that.  I became a “child of divorce” eleven years ago today.  I was divorced from my first husband in 2001, at the age of 24.  Searches related to toddlers come up quite a bit.  Siblings is another search that brings people here.

It’s nice to realize what’s been in front of me for a long time now.  I do have something to say.

Accepting Help From a Toddler

Imagine the following scenario:

You’ve been working all day.  You come home, start dinner, and figure out what housework you have to tackle before you can call your day done.  As you fill the sink to wash some dishes, your child wants to help.  She brings her stool to the sink and starts splashing around.  Before you get the previous day’s dishes all put away, you notice that your sink is being filled with dishes from the drainer.  As you step in to save what’s left of the clean and dry dishes, you step in a puddle of water.  What do you do?

There was a time when I got upset.  The work I had done the day before was being undone, there were new messes to clean up, and it was going to be impossible to clean the dishes with her under-foot.  Then I remembered how much it ticked me off as a child to be told I was too small, too young, etc, to help.

The other day, I decided that the problem wasn’t the two year old who wanted to help, it was mom’s attitude.  I put down a couple of towels to sop up the puddles.  Her stool was moved to a new home in front of the rinse sink.  I threw out the need to get dishes done in a certain order, have them lined up in the drainer the way I always do, and turned off the timer that tells me when I’ve spent 15 minutes cleaning so I can move on to something else.

The result?  A dish drainer that only held half of the dishes I could have put in there, two wet towels on the floor, and a soaked counter under the drainer because the two year old doesn’t comprehend dumping the water over the sink.  But the best thing was the sense of accomplishment I gave her.  She felt like she was contributing to the family, she helped mom with the dishes.

I think that parents tend to focus too much on their own perceptions of how things need to be done and what their children can or can not do.  This is true whether the child is 2 or 20.  Slowly but surely, those perceptions are being kicked out of my head.  I think our family will be more successful for it.

The next time your child wants to help with something you normally wouldn’t let them help with, give in.  Figure out what you can do to make the task more child friendly.  Don’t worry if you have to re-do something.  The look on your child’s face will be worth it!

Compassion

The story below was posted on a friend’s blog. Does it really matter if this is a true story? I’d love to think it is, but even if it’s not, it can be a lesson in compassion.

What would you do? You make the choice. Don’t look for a punch line, there isn’t one. Read it anyway

My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning-disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: “When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?”

The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. “I believe that when a child like Shay – physically and mentally handicapped – comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.”

Then he told the following story:

Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, “Do you think they’ll let me play?” Shay’s father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

Shay’s father approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, “We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.”

Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. His Father watched with a small tear in his eye and warmth in his heart. The boys saw the father’s joy at his son being accepted. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs, but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.

At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.

Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head, out of reach of all team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, “Shay, run to first! Run to first!” Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, “Run to second, run to second!” Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball … the smallest guy on their team, who now had his first chance! to be t he hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

All were screaming, “Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay”

Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, “Run to third! Shay, run to third!”

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, “Shay, run home! Run home!” Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.

“That day”, said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, “the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world”.

Shay didn’t make it to another summer.

He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

AND NOW A LITTLE FOOTNOTE TO THIS STORY: We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail without a second thought, but when it comes to sending messages about life choices, people hesitate. The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our schools and workplaces.

If you’re thinking about forwarding this message, chances are that you’re probably sorting out the people in your address book who aren’t the “appropriate” ones to receive this type of message. Well, the person who sent you this believes that we all can make a difference. We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realize the “natural order of things. ” So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice: Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up those opportunities and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?

A wise man once said every society is judged by how it treats it’s least fortunate amongst them.

You now have two choices:
1. Ignore and go about your day

2. Copy and paste this into your own blog.

May your day be a Shay Day.

Out of the search phrases

Tonight, I found an interesting phrase that led to my blog, “dating divorced dad with grown kids”.  I had some things I could have blogged about, but this jumped off the screen at me.  I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I was 19 when my parents separated, 20 when they divorced.  While that barely makes me an “adult child of divorce” at the time, I was an adult then and still am (or so they tell me).

While not getting into too many details of my father’s dating life (you’re welcome, dad), let me give you two ends of the spectrum, from my own memory.  How these relationships were in reality may be different but kids’ perception is what it is.

First, there was a warm summer night when my ex-husband and I showed up at dad’s house.  Shortly after that, my younger brother popped in, both unannounced.  Dad was dating a woman at the time, and she had made dinner for them.  Dad being dad, he wasn’t about to ask us kids to leave.  This was when he drove truck and he valued his time with us, even after we were grown or not living with him.

For a while, we all made nice on the deck.  If I remember correctly, we were all talking about life in general and playing cards.  We noticed that the girlfriend was not happy that we were there.  Dad came walking around the side of the house and said that she had gone home.

In general, she was a great woman.  She and dad were friends before they dated and I liked her.  As a partner for my father, she forgot one important thing.  He is a father.  Yes, I was married (or engaged, I can’t remember) and my brothers lived with our mom, but he is our dad.  The fact that he didn’t ask us to leave so they could spend time together didn’t sit well with her.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was a woman dad was dating who invited us to her home and the first time I met her I learned how to make peanut brittle, caramels, and other Christmas goodies.  Maybe it helped that she had kids, I don’t know.

I met her a few times here and there but didn’t know her that well when my first marriage went to hell.  One morning, my ex-mother-in-law drove me to my dad’s house because I couldn’t look at my ex.  I was a complete mess.  I remember crying, dad consoling me, sleeping in dad’s recliner, and basically being a lump for the day.  Not only did she not seem upset that I crashed their weekend together, she was there to comfort me and be a female I could talk to if I needed.

Luckily, the second woman is now our “other mother”.  I have none of the bitter feelings that many have towards their step-parents when talking about her.  I firmly believe that is because of the fact that she was respectful of my dad’s role as a father and tried to get to know us as people rather than as “Jim’s kids”.

I’ve never dated a man with grown kids, but speaking as an “adult child of divorce”, there is a fine line to walk if you decide to date a man with grown children.

We don’t want a replacement mom.  Even when our moms are goofy and piss us off, we have them.  That’s not to say you can’t be another mother-figure.  Feel out the kids over time and be there for them at whatever level they are comfortable with.  Someday, if you marry the dad, you may become “dad’s wife”, “our step-mom”, or “another mother”.  As long as you are respectful of dad’s relationship with the kids and the kids’ relationship with their mother, you should be safe from becoming “that evil bitch dad married”.

Now I Know…

Yesterday, I had to take the ServSafe certification course.  This is a requirement by the state to become a licensed restaurant manager.  The good news is that I will soon be licensed, and if I choose to find a job closer to home, I would be able to take those certifications with me.

I understand the need for classes like this, really, I do.  I even managed to learn a few things along the way.  We learned how to implement a crisis management plan (please God, don’t let me ever need that knowledge), where to get the state food code, things to look for in the store to make it beyond the required minimums, etc. For the most part, it was common sense.

What struck me was the amount of time they spent on washing hands.  Yes, it’s critical that hands are washed regularly.  I think anyone who goes out in public knows that the health department requires employees to wash their hands after using the restroom.  I was truly surprised to see an entire 20 minute section devoted to handwashing on top of the many other times it was brought up.

I guess it all comes back to my theory of food karma.  Many years ago, I realized that part of my reasoning for always washing my hands and never doing anything to someone’s food no matter how much they pissed me off is because by doing these things, I will get the same in return when I go out to eat.  I know the chances are slim, but I think that delusion may be the only thing that allows me to eat out!

An Interesting Conversation

“God, I was worried we’d run into someone I know.  That would have sucked.” said one of my best friends as we stopped to pick up munchies and soda for the trip home yesterday.

This was foreign to me.  We had visited her hometown, a working trip to help her parents make sure they were set in case of flooding or utility outage.  I don’t have many friends from high school I keep in touch with.  I wasn’t a popular girl by any means, that’s what happens when you’re overweight, in band, in choir, in orchestra, and involved with theater.  Any one of these things can put you on the “uncool” list, combine them and you’re hanging out in the land of misfit toys.

At the same time, I’m looking forward to going to our hometown festival later this month.  I had planned to visit the beer tent for the first time and see Super Tuesday, an amazingly talented local band that I briefly enjoyed a few weeks ago.  After talking to my brother, I found out their playing on “parents’ night” and “reunion night” (both unofficial titles) is the night before.  I actually decided that I’m going to try to go for part of both nights.

I know that the jerks I went to high school may have grown up.  I don’t hold enough animosity to not want to see them.  And hey, at least I can see who had high hopes that fell short and maybe feel good about myself.  (Yes, it’s immature, but who doesn’t look at the now obese former cheerleader and giggle???)

I drive through my hometown often, frequent businesses there.  I enjoy it, I’m proud to call it home.  Someday, I truly hope to move back there so my daughter can go to the same school I once went to.  To dread going home and pray you don’t see anyone you know is just weird to me!

I’d be interested to see how others feel about their childhood and their hometowns.

Quitting Again, Day One

When Rick and I realized that our insurance offers smoking cessation medication for a $10 copay, we both jumped at the opportunity. Neither of us truly enjoy smoking. It drains the bank account, makes everything smell bad, etc. Last Monday, we both received prescriptions for Chantix. As the medication builds in our systems, smoking becomes more and more of smoking for the habit rather than smoking for the cravings.

Last night, we were both running low on cigarettes and decided to quit two days earlier than our set date. We talked about it and both felt like we were ready and that it was just the habit that kept us lighting up. This morning has been a bit tense, he’s irritable and I’m anxious. I feel like if I’m not doing something I need to light up. For that reason, I’m cleaning my house like you wouldn’t believe (and trust me, those who know me wouldn’t believe). Once peanut is down for her nap, I’m going to the gym. I’m hoping that physical activity becoming easier will become another motivator for me. It is nice to bump the treadmill up to 5mph (don’t laugh) and go from a walk to a jog.

I’ve given Rick a free pass to play his game until he forgets his name this weekend. Whatever we need to do to get through the first couple days, that’s what we’ll do. As of today, all of the ashtrays, ashes, cigarette butts, and empty packs will be out of our house. There is no going back!

Carnival Rides at 15 and 30

Last night, two friends and I hit one of the first festivals of the season.  Our intent was to find the beer tent and enjoy some great music.  We did achieve that goal, but not before a quick trip to the midway.  The first thing that struck me was how expensive it is!  I can remember when it was $1 for a game.  Now it’s $3 for one try and $5 for two.

I’ve never been a fan of the ferris wheel, it scares the hell out of me!  Last night, it was so bad I actually called my mommy to calm me down while we were stuck at the top.  I figured that if nothing else, she could rush over to claim the body when the wheel came falling to the ground.  Once we were in motion, it was great!  The fireworks were going on and being able to watch them from the top of the ferris wheel was great!

Next, I went on one of my favorite rides, the Zipper.  So much has changed since the last time I rode it, half a lifetime and probably four inches ago.

At 15: “Damn, this is going to be fun!”
At 30: “What the hell am I thinking?!”

As they load the rest of the passengers:

At 15: “Damn, finish loading so we can get going!”
At 30: “I wonder how many ways this door is closed.”

At 15:  “Seriously, how long does it take to load everyone??”
At 30:  “Uh, that noise couldn’t have been good.  Do you suppose this is a new crew and they didn’t get all the bolts tight??”

At 15:  “If I rock this enough, I can get it spinning before we even start!”
At 30:  “No, really, what is he doing with that hydraulic lever?  Oh well, at least I have a friend on the ground who has my phone.  She can call my family when this thing falls apart and I die.”

Once the ride is going:

At 15:  “How can I get this spinning faster??”
At 30:  “Do you suppose this cage would hold up if it flew off from this height?”

At 15:  “Wow, I’m not touching anything other than the support bar!”
At 30:  “Ow, this can’t be good for the neck!  Ow, ow, shit, if I don’t stop spinning, I might puke!”

Is it a bad thing when the carnie asks if you’re okay as you get off the ride??  Other than walking like I’d been in the beer tent for hours, I was fine.  It was still fun, but not as much fun now that I have adult responsibilities like staying alive for my daughter!