Mommy Magic

When I was a kid and still in public school, we had a Halloween party. I think I was in kindergarten or first grade (my memory is of course a bit hazy). The teacher provided the most amazing cupcakes, decorated with inches of orange and black frosting and topped with tiny plastic skeletons. When I got home from school that day, I excitedly described the cupcakes and how delicious they were to Mom, who told me to draw a picture of them for her.

So with my budding artistic talent I drew as close a representation as I could in crayon of the wondrous cupcakes and gave the picture to my mom. "Watch" she said. "I'm going to do Mommy Magic!" and put the picture in the microwave, waving her hands over it. A few seconds later, she reached into the microwave and pulled out a tray of the exact same cupcakes that we'd had at school that day.

I was amazed. I was still young enough to believe in magic, and that my mother was capable of anything. Here she had worked a fantastic trick before my very eyes. I became a firm believer in Mommy Magic that day, and reverently told my friends at school about it.

Years later when I was old enough to realize that magic was not the actual thing at work that day, I asked Mom how she had done it. "I ran into your teacher at the grocery store while she was buying cupcakes for the party that day. I thought they looked good so I bought some as well, and when you came home talking about them it was too good an opportunity to let go."

I still remember the sheer excitement and awe I felt that day, fully believing that she could do magic. She used Mommy Magic for other situations as well (mainly to make us behave ourselves), but the cupcake trick is what I remember the most. It was better than Santa and the tooth fairy, that beautiful belief that Mom had turned a child's drawing into cupcakes through her own special powers. That was what she did for us. Made magic from bits of paper. Created memories that I can cherish now that she is gone.

How Does Your Garden Grow

I've always enjoyed gardening. Growing up, my mother had flowers growing at every house we lived in. When we made the move from Florida to Kentucky she had a vegetable garden, and the fresh produce made the difficulty of planting and weeding and keeping pests away well worth it. 

I always had a little garden patch of my own during that time. I grew pumpkins one year, enormous things that needed a wheelbarrow to be moved. Flowers were my main love, though, and I grew Johnny Jump-Ups and Siberian Irises and any other flowering plant I could convince my mother to get for me. 

When my husband and I bought our first house together, it came with two very plain "builder's special" type beds in the front. Holly bushes and Liriope and a scraggly Juniper grew in them, and I was already planning on removing those plants and replacing them with something prettier.

It's been five years since we bought our house. Over the years I dug out the holly bushes (a massive undertaking that took hours every time I removed one bush), cut down the wasp-attracting Juniper, and laid waste to the Liriope. I replaced them with Rose bushes and Clematis and Phlox and as many different varieties of Columbine that I could find. 

Now I also have a vegetable garden in the back, and I have advanced to starting seedlings indoors with grow lights to make sure that the longer season plants actually have a chance to produce something before the frost sets in again. 

My Luffa squash experiment.

This year I have been particularly ambitious. I started far more seedlings than I usually do. I'm growing more herbs than I really have use for. It's a comfort thing, though. Gardening was a thing I did a lot with Mom. The past year or so both of our gardens suffered due to her failing health. I was too busy caring for her to really take care of my plants or hers. My routine became going to work, going to her house after work to look after her, going home with just enough time to maybe make dinner and then go to bed, and then getting up the next day to repeat it over again. Not having her to occupy my time has led to an unusual number of empty hours for me. I have to find ways to fill those hours, and focusing on an activity we loved and shared has helped with that. So I started a legion of peppers and tomatoes and squash. I bought pounds of Zinnia seeds for a cutting garden. Every pot in my yard is occupied by seedlings or by plants I dug from Mom's garden. We will have to sell her house and I wanted to preserve some of it for myself, so the flowers that she loved so much have been divided and relocated.

It will be hard, this first year without her. I'm hoping the seedlings will help. A little bit of life to help offset the grief of Mom not being here. Something I can tend in place of tending to her. 

Blades of Grass

One of the things Mom always took great pleasure in was mowing her yard. She had three acres of land that sloped uphill, riddled with ditches and bumps and holes, and for years she mowed it with an old Husqvarna riding mower that backfired and died more often than it worked. In addition to the ditches and holes her yard had a lot of very old maple trees,and their roots broke the surface of the earth, massive and gnarled and waiting to snag the blades of the mower. They also covered the lawn in an assortment of sticks in all sizes, and my job when I was growing up was to run outside and gather up all the fallen sticks and pile them up to be burned at a later time.

Eventually Mom grew tired of the jolting, jostling riding mower and bought herself one of those fancy John Deere zero turn radius lawn tractors, and she would ride up and down the slope of her yard, carefully turning circles around trees and nimbly avoiding the ditches and maple roots. She loved to listen to Maroon 5 as she mowed; she said they were the perfect band to mow to and would grumble "Doesn't Adam Levine know that I have grass to cut?" every spring when they hadn't released a new album yet.

She wouldn't let any of the dogs outside while she was mowing, except for Alfie, who knew not to run in front of her as she rode up and down the lawn. Alfie would trot along behind her as she made each pass, trailing her the whole way, frolicking and rolling in the clippings that flew like confetti, pouncing on any snake or other creature disturbed by the mower's wake.

As years passed and her illness progressed, she still climbed onto that mower at the start of the season even after her hands couldn't quite grip the handles anymore. I bought thick black lengths of foam that's used for insulating pipes and fitted those around the grips to give her something more substantial to grasp, but finally between her hands and her growing frailty she couldn't do it anymore. In 2014 she reluctantly gave up the task to my husband, which she hated doing, especially because Adam viewed the mower as something more akin to a go-cart. "He mows too fast! I swear I saw him catch air when he went over that one bump" she would complain to me. "He doesn't mow in the same pattern that I did. The grass doesn't look as nice." To me, I could see no real difference, but she fretted and complained about it every time he mowed for her. I think it was less the fact that he did it differently and more that she could no longer do it herself that bothered her. Giving up caring for her yard hurt her more than even giving up driving had. Despite all evidence pointing to the fact that she was only getting worse, she stubbornly held on to the belief that one day she might at least be able to mow the yard again. Of course, that never did happen.

Before she passed away, she made sure that Adam would inherit the lawn mower. It's too big for our yard, really. We have a relatively small lawn and using something like that to take care of it is overkill. But it sits in our garage, a hulking beast that has eliminated Adam's parking spot. "Are you actually going to use it?" I asked him, and he just shrugged. "Maybe. I've got a sentimental attachment to it." My husband is particular about his lawn, though. His grass is green and lush and he has his own patterns, using an old push mower that had also once belonged to my Mom. He worries about introducing weed seeds into his lawn and so the few times he has taken care of a neighbor's yard for them, he has used their mower rather than risk "contaminating" his. Since we've had buckets of rain recently, the grass has grown fast and thick and was in dire need of cutting already, so during the brief break between storms Adam mowed our lawn with the push mower. Next door to us is an empty house, a foreclosure with a yard choked by weeds that no one comes out to cut, so after he finished our yard he decided he'd break out Mom's mower and do that one as well.

In addition to inheriting Mom's lawn mower, we also inherited her dog, Alfie. He'd been unwanted by anyone else. I worked with rescues and foster groups and shelters and there simply was no room for an 11 year old terrier mix with ridiculously floppy ears. Adam had always insisted that we'd never have pets, but he broke that vow to take in Alfie when it became clear that the humane society would be the only other choice. In the house, Alfie had slept through the cutting of our grass, the sound of the weed whacker and the leaf blower. When Adam fired up Mom's mower and rolled out of the garage on it, Alfie started to go ballistic. He barked and howled and scratched at the door like mad. I couldn't figure out why until I realized it was the sound of the mower. Every spring and summer for 9 years he had trailed along behind that lawn mower, tracking back and forth with Mom and then later on with Adam. He didn't quiet down until I put his leash on him and took him outside, so he could watch as Adam zipped up and down the yard, spinning and weaving. I thought "Mom would absolutely kill Adam if she could see him driving it like that." But I bet it would also make her happy.

On the subject of grief

My mother was sick for my entire life. She was diagnosed when I was a baby with an autoimmune illness that could cause severe complications as it progressed. "You'll be able to live with it as long as you never develop the heart and lung problems associate with the illness", her doctor told her. She did live with it, for over 20 years before she noticed one day that she was having trouble catching her breath. Two misdiagnoses later (first they decided she had asthma, and then emphysema) and it was confirmed. She had developed Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, and was given 3-5 years to live.

I was in my 20s by that point, and always in the back of my mind was the vague knowledge that one day, Mom's health condition might progress to something far worse than what it already was. She was always so tough, so difficult to keep down though that even after the diagnoses it was impossible to imagine that she would ever succumb to it. She had survived breast cancer. She fought the day-to-day complications from her autoimmune illness like she was dealing with something mildly inconvenient. She grew a little more weak every year, a little thinner, shrinking steadily as time went on, but inside she was always pure determination. She did better than her doctors thought she would on the medication for the PAH, staying on the first level of drugs for far longer than most people did. Three years passed. Then five. Then seven. She walked me down the aisle at my wedding and was there for the birth of her first grandchild in those stolen years, the years that her doctors didn't quite think she would still be around to see.

I kept the knowledge that one day it would finally catch up to her tucked away in the back of my mind, only dusting it off every now and then when a holiday or birthday would come around. "This might be the last one, you know" it would whisper to me, and I would think "yes, but she's come so far already and what do the doctors truly know? They're making advances with medication all the time. She'll keep going. It's what she does."

 Denial is a wonderful and terrible thing. It's like the blanket you pull over your head at night, telling yourself if everything is covered the monsters can't get you. But bit by bit, it started catching up. Her hands started to give her problems as her disease marched on, causing the tendons in her fingers to shorten and the skin to harden, rendering her once-clever hands into claws. She used to paint and take beautiful photographs. She would garden and knit and cook. It became more difficult for her, and one by one the things she loved to do became things that she used to be able to. She couldn't drive anymore, so we sold her car to help pay for all the medical bills that constantly piled up. Her ability to sing was the next thing to go. She always sang, all day, whatever snippet popped into her head at any given moment. She had a song for every situation, every occasion that arose. She knew some lyric that fit, and she had a beautiful voice. But her breath was too short and it took too much effort, so she stopped.

Still, I told myself that she would somehow manage, though the creeping fear was growing more persistent. I saw how she couldn't take care of herself anymore and I did my best to shut my eyes to it, because I didn't want to admit what it meant. Her stolen time was running out. In 2013, she was getting steadily worse. By the end of the year she was barely functional in many ways. The slow progression of her illness had turned into something faster, something more difficult for us to ignore, and by the time she was ready to admit that she needed help she ended up in the hospital. Anemia, fluid on the heart and in the lungs, double pneumonia, an infection in her ankle, and so on and so forth. Her doctor used the words "life threatening" and told us that perhaps we should prepare for the worst.

But once again, against all odds she came through it, but this time there was no true recovery. She lingered in the hospital for weeks, then a care facility for months, trying to get strong enough to walk and function again. For a brief time, she managed to drag herself into something resembling life again. It was temporary. Within a year she was fading fast. Her health was going downhill, and one year to the day of her going into hospital, she was admitted again and this time her doctors gave us the worst news. This was it. There would be no more recoveries. There would be no care facility, no rehabilitation, no adjusting of her medication except to take her off of some because it didn't matter anymore. They recommended hospice care and they had her fitted for a new wheelchair because she couldn't walk anymore.

We had one last Christmas with her. Her sister came from Florida to spend it with us. Then her mother and father came and spent a month with her. A few days after Christmas I was over at her house. She and my aunt and I were sitting in her bedroom, talking about music. Mom sang a few broken pieces from songs she had always loved. It was the first time I'd heard her sing in a year or more, and I knew then it would doubtlessly be the last time.

A week after my grandmother left, Mom started having trouble eating. Nothing stayed down. She could barely move. She was admitted into the hospice facility and even then, we all still clung to the hope that she might keep going a little longer. Please, just a little more time, I thought. I knew that it would happen eventually but I wasn't prepared for "eventually" to become "now". She passed away the next day, in her sleep. The night before she passed away, she looked at my sister and me and said "I'm so sorry. I tried." It was the day before my sister's birthday, and exactly one week to the day before her 61st birthday.

Her being gone was a shock to the system. We'd known it was coming. Of course we did. We'd spent years with the knowledge rubbing away at us. I spent years pre-grieving, watching her slip further and further away, knowing she hated the way she had become and wishing there was some way to make it stop for her, without her having to be the one who stopped. When she passed away it was a feeling of "how did this happen so fast?" paired with "finally, she's not suffering anymore. All those years and it's finally over for her." It was an odd combination of feelings, that too-soon and too-long. Her last year was a difficult one, her last month a nightmare. Her tenacity and ability to keep going against all odds won her more time, but it wasn't a pleasant time for anyone, least of all for her. Seeing her deteriorate so much was probably the hardest thing I've been witness to.

Grief has been an odd thing. It's been a month and it feels sometimes as though she's been gone for years, and other times I forget she's gone at all. The first two weeks after she passed away I felt peaceful, full of warmth and love for her, and I thought "I can deal with this. If this is grief, I can bear it". I thought all of my years of knowing what was coming had allowed me to bypass the loneliness and gut-wrenching pain. That quickly gave way to depression and anger, but those days were still mixed in with those oddly peaceful ones. I see things in the store that I think she would like and then I remember that she's not here anymore. I nearly had a breakdown over a red stone cat statue, because it was exactly the kind of thing she would have loved and had she been alive, she would have been getting that cat for mother's day. I had to stop myself from buying it anyways. I have emotional responses to teacups and pairs of slippers (she had a million sets of both). I changed salons because we used to go to the same one, often together, and I couldn't bear to go without her, and the first time I went to the grocery store after she died I almost had a crying fit in the bananas. I'd done all of her grocery shopping for her during the last year, and she was particular about her bananas. No more than four to a bunch, but no fewer than three, and they had to be short and skinny and a mixture of green and yellow so she'd have some to eat right away and some to eat a few days later. Picking out bananas for her was the biggest pain in the ass at the grocery store and the first time I didn't have to do it felt like someone had ripped my guts out. I cried when I got home from the store because of the fact that she was gone and I wouldn't ever be hearing her complain about inferior bananas again.

I assume one day things will even out. That like her, I'll pick myself up and carry on through this. It's what she wanted, for us to live our lives after she was gone. She didn't want us to be lost in grief or to even mourn her too much. "I'll always be there, in some way or another" she said. "Just talk to the trees, and the flowers, and I'll hear you." I hope she can hear me. Even if she can't, talking to her helps. Day by day, I remember her and smile more than I remember her and cry.

The Sandman Sucketh

I have a rather rocky relationship with sleep. We've not really been on good terms for years now. Sleep is a grudging visitor at night, often arriving far too late and then fleeing before I'm ready for it to go. I sleep in fits and starts, and what I do manage to get is often punctuated by disturbing and extremely vivid dreams. Part of my issue with sleep is that my brain simply will not turn off. It doesn't matter how tired my body is. As soon as I climb into bed and turn the light off, it's like my brain decides it's time to drag up every worry or fear I could possibly have and parade them through my head like supermodels on a runway. I've tried everything to stop this. I've faithfully followed every piece of advice on relaxing before bed time, not using the computer or watching TV, letting myself unwind, not eating after a certain time, making sure the room is dark and quiet. I've counted sheep and I've gone through relaxation techniques and I've even tried to force my brain to picture a quiet meadow with wind blowing peacefully through the long grass. The problem with that is I have an overly active imagination that insists on populating the meadow with squirrels and rabbits and deer and creating stories about what they are doing. Eventually I'm obsessively building generations of wild animals that, akin to some Disney movie, live happy little lives until something awful happens. Like a fire.

To stop my brain from either going through the anxiety parade or sending squirrels to a fiery demise I just take OTC sleeping pills, of the sort you can get from any grocery stores.

I have been doing this for..oh..about four years now. Unfortunately they don't really provide me with good sleep. It's better than the no sleep I'd get without them, but I typically wake up feeling groggy and like someone has been beating me with a stick. I'm always exhausted and it takes me a few hours in the morning before I feel even remotely human. Over the years my quality of forced sleep has been getting worse and worse, to the point that I've been having episodes of sleep paralysis. On my list of fun things to personally experience, that one ranks very low indeed.

So this week I am attempting to venture back into the world of natural sleep. Last night was my first foray back into dreamland without the aid of sleeping pills. It went better than I expected, but still not as well as I would like. When I woke up this morning I didn't feel as groggy or sore like I usually do, but it took me so long to fall asleep last night that I spent the entire day yawning and doing my best not to doze off at my desk.

Probably I should finally give in and go to a doctor about it. I just wish I could do what I used to be able to and drift off into a peaceful, natural, deep sleep without my brain being an asshole about things and making it complicated. Sadly, something tells me that those days are probably long behind me. Unless I can find some sort of "off" switch to stop myself from focusing on every wretched little thing when I get into bed, I think I'm probably stuck with some form of assistance in getting myself to sleep.

Something New

I've reached the point in my jewelry work where I am no longer comfortable teaching myself new techniques. I've taught myself wire wrapping, beadweaving, etching, piercing and cutting metal, and various other things over the years. I've wanted to get into metalsmithing badly for years now, but the fact that I am incredibly accident prone paired with having to use an open flame seemed like a really bad combination. It's not that I am careless. I'm just naturally clumsy, and even when I am being as careful as careful can be I seem to attract injuries like a magnet. Take yesterday, for instance. I was sitting in the break room, reading a book, when a co-worker walked past me swinging a can of soup in her hand. Somehow she managed to whack me squarely in the knee with the can of soup as she walked past me. My bad knee, mind you, the knee that dislocated in 2010 and is only really starting to heal properly. All my care and babying of my knee undone in an instant by an unintentionally well-aimed can of Progresso.

Because of incidents like that I'm pretty certain at times that the universe has it in for me. So again, me + open flames + trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing while unsupervised = bad things bound to happen.

One of the universities in the city I work in offers non-credit courses for a variety of hobbies. This year they're offering metalsmithing classes for a relatively reasonable price, so I went ahead and signed up for the first available class. I will be learning how to make a sterling silver bezel-set ring, and a small copper box. I'm having to overcome my various personal quirks with this class, though. I am a hermit by nature, preferring to hole up in my work room by myself. I tend to avoid other artists and haven't gotten involved in the local scene at all. It's not through any disdain or thinking myself above such things. It's rather a personal nervousness around people and new experiences that keeps me solitary. Right now I'm a swirl of anxiety at the thought of stepping outside of my personal comfort zone, paired with excitement at finally being able to learn a technique I've loved and coveted the knowledge of for years. I collect techniques like a crow collects shiny things, and no sooner do I learn one than my eye turns to something else, some other new fascinating thing that makes my heart pitter-pat a bit faster.

I'll be sure to post progress pictures as I make my venture into metalsmithing. Wish me luck for tonight!

Captain Underpants

We've been living in the subdivision now for just over a year. We're only really familiar with a few of our neighbors, but mostly we just chat with our next door neighbors on either side. To the left of our house live a married couple close to our own age, and to the right of our house is a single mother and her 14 year old daughter.

The daughter recently lost her cat and had spent weeks combing the subdivision for it. She taped "lost cat" signs to every stop sign and put cat food out on our porch, as the last place the cat had been spotted was in my front flower bed. Eventually I had the bright idea of loaning her my father-in-law's live trap, and she caught her cat this past weekend. The trap was returned and profuse thanks offered, and the girl was happily re-united with her lost kitty.

Until this morning, when our doorbell rang about two minutes before my alarm went off. Our bedroom is at the front of the house, with our windows right next to the front porch. I groggily elbowed my husband and said "someone is ringing our doorbell!", to which he offered the response of "muuuugrrhhh...."

The doorbell ringing was followed by hard knocking, and then we heard the sound of someone hysterically crying. This spurred my husband into Instant Action Mode, which pretty much meant that he leapt out of bed and was out the front door in lightning speed, thinking Something Bad Was Happening Outside.

What had actually happened was that the girl's cat had darted outside again this morning when she was getting ready for school, and she was desperate to catch it and wanted to borrow the live trap again.

What also happened was that my husband went charging out the door onto the front lawn clad in nothing but his Marvel comic book hero t-shirt and a pair of baggy blue boxer-briefs. The trap was quickly retrieved and given to the girl, and then he seemed to realize that he was outside. In his underpants. In front of a teenaged girl and her mother. You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've done something horribly embarrassing? I'm guessing that was the feeling churning through my husband's gut as he hightailed it back into the house and retrieved his pants before the whole neighborhood got an eyeful.

While he was procuring his jeans, another bright idea crossed his mind. When he bought some special edition of one of the Call of Duty games, it came with a pair of functional if rather comical looking night vision goggles. I'm sure you can all imagine where this is going. Now clad properly in pants and t-shirt, my husband decided to join the cat hunt..with his Call of Duty night vision goggles on.

Because that's not weird, or anything. I suppose I should be grateful that he didn't decide to grab one of his replica lightsabers while he was at it. Just in case, you know, an evil sith lord appeared from the bushes.

Thankfully the cat bolted back inside when the mother raised their garage door, the trap was returned, and my husband came back inside. I'm pretty sure the cat was terrorized by the sight of my husband charging around on the lawn first in his underpants, and then in his night vision goggles, and decided "screw this outdoors shit, I'm going inside for some friskies!"