Category Archives: musing

April 1, 2016 · 1:31 pm

Five.

Attention King Soopers’ Shoppers – I apologize profusely if you were subjected to my shameless display of nostalgia and longing in the baby product isle this week.

It’s just this – my kid turned 5 on Sunday.

FIVE.

How the actual eff was the kid in this picture, which CLEARLY happened just a blink ago, now 5 full years old?
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I have been a damn mess pretty much my whole life the past week or so – reminders of his completed babyhood have been everywhere.

As I cleaned out some toy bins to prepare for the onslaught of superhero crap birthday gifts that would need storage, I stumbled on this old friend:
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This is Pocket Bert.  Toddler Jr loved Bert so much that we had Bert in varying sizes – Pocket Bert got his name because he resided in the pocket of the diaper bag, there to comfort and amuse Jr at a moment’s notice.  Oh how he loved Pocket Bert so.

:::pause to make Pocket Bert do a dance while humming  “Doin’ the Pidgeon.” :::

Sniffle.  Whimper.

Andplusalso, stop what you are doing and behold this picture of his tiny baby cuteness that TimeHop threw at me this week.  (Well, don’t stop what you are doing – keep right on reading the awesomeness of Reluctantly Suburban, but pause to take in that smoosh.)
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I can’t even so much that I can’t even EVEN with that one.  All of them, actually.  I can’t open TimeHop without a box of Kleenex stationed next to me.

So it was inevitable, I guess, that as I was grabbing some groceries this week, I found myself at the end of the isle of baby products:
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I knew I shouldn’t – but I ventured in.

There it all was – tubes of diaper cream both awesome (Purple Desitin) and pointless (Butt Paste,) and gas drops and washes for tiny people with sensitive skin.  Jars of liquid fruit and veggies, delicious little “puffs,” and the Baby Mum Mums that I used to order by the case from Amazon since the stores weren’t carrying them then (oh sure NOW you have them, King Soopers.)

Bottle parts and teething rings and liquid gold Jr’s expensive special formula…. Itty bitty, teeny tiny diapers that used to be too big for him in his first few weeks of life.

It was that last thought that got me – that was in the first few weeks of him and I…  we were together in his nursery, high above the busy city below, figuring out all of those crazy products and what we needed to do…  now there has been 5 years of him – and of me as his mom.

BOOM – grocery store ugly cry. Waterfall of tears.  I could almost hear the PA announcement  “Wet (and sloppy, and crazy) clean up, isle 16!!”

I walked the length of the isle slowly, taking it all in and having a good cry (if there is a “good cry” to be had in public, FFS, Keri.)

Then I went and got him a new Super Friends straw cup and a box of the shortbread cookies shaped like doggies that he loves so much and collected myself (kinda) before checking out.

Then, for some reason, the Catalina coupon dispenser shot this puppy out at me after I paid.
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Diaper coupon.

But my son is 5.

FIVE.

“Wet clean up near the crazy crying lady at the U-scan.  Bring Tissues.”

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March 22, 2016 · 4:32 pm

Another Monday in the Burbs

We’ve all been there.

The family is gone/sleeping/miraculously quiet for unknown reasons and then you hear it.

That repetitive noise that signals distress in your abode.

Maybe it’s a chirping noise. Or dripping.  Or tapping. Or air whooshing.   It’s something – over and over again, and now you are tasked with finding the source of the mystery noise.

Working away at the kitchen table yesterday, my ears caught a repeating noise – so faint I thought it was a drip in a far away bathroom (seriously – in The Treehouse I would have known where that was coming from instantly, but not with three floors of potential origins spread out for me to search through,) and got up to investigate.  Master and  hallway upstairs bathrooms were drip free, as was the main floor laundry, kitchen, and bath.   The ceilings all looked dry….  At the top of the basement stairs I heard the noise again, louder this time.  Was it a drip, or was it a chirp?  (I panted and wheezed at the top of the stairs for a moment resting contemplating this question.)

Bathroom, windows and ceilings all seemed dry – leaving only the utility room.  As soon as I opened the door the noise sounded again.  It was a chirp, not a drip, Not a fire alarm battery chirp, it was lower – Potter wasn’t losing his doggie mind yipping and running all over the house in desperation to escape.  On the contrary, he was sitting on the sofa watching me run up and down the stairs, having himself a doggie blast.

It was an alarm of some sort.  But beyond narrowing it to that little room, I couldn’t pinpoint the source. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Bouncing off the furnace,  leading me briefly toward the unused whole-house-humidifier, before sending me back toward the radon mitigation piping.

WHERE THE HELL WAS THAT COMING FROM!?

I did what any grown-ass woman does when she can’t figure out what’s wrong with something.  I called my dad.  He didn’t answer, so I left a message and went back down to keep investigating.

Then I saw it. The pressure gauge on the radon system was a perfect U shape –even on both sides.  Not good.  One side should be higher (BTW – I am not a radon system expert – it says this very clearly on the pipe.)

Damn.    Off I went to Google to find a solution, and spent the next hour or so checking breakers and cords and switches and such, while the faint chirp taunted me from downstairs.

I noticed the switch on the outside of the house by the fan was in the “off” position, so I flipped it to “on.”

Nope. Nothing.

Poop.

Daddy came over with his trusty tool bag,  poked around inside the house and out, but we couldn’t find anything.   Clearly the fan had gone kaput and I needed a new one, so he loosened the coupling on the top and bottom and pulled the fan and it’s housing out from its spot in the piping –  and stopped short.

“OH!!!  That’s your problem right there Ker-bear!”

I peered in.

Fairly fresh dead squirrel.

I jumped exactly nine thousand and two feet into the air while yelling a slew of strung together swear words that made no sense and included the Big F at least twice.  I can count on one hand the number of times I have dropped the F-bomb in front of Mom and/or Dad… that number may have actually doubled and moved on to the second hand yesterday. (Sorry Daddy.)   Of course I am always level headed and never over-react, so this was totally shocking behavior from me (where is the sarcasm button on a keyboard, anyway?)
We dumped the deceased offender into a hefty-bag for disposal at an alternative location, and surveyed the fan inside the now empty housing.

He had eaten the wires down to NOTHING – he’d even taken chunks out of the metal fan.  “Probably electrocuted himself” observed my dad, poking at the tiny nubins where the wires once were.

Internal conflict was rampant.  No one likes to think about a fluffy little squirrel diving down a pipe sticking several feet up off the top of a roof- plunging down into a slick-sided abyss he has no hope of escaping, then thinking “oooo – toasty in here though, and look – stuff to ea-AHHHHHHH!!!!”

BUT – that little douche killed my fan, and killed it so well that I have to pony up the almost 200 bucks to get a new one and then strap it to the side of my house.  So I kinda don’t feel that bad.  Except that I had to carry a little wrapped up parcel away and have a dumpster-side service before hucking him in, hoping he cleared the tall side of the receptacle and didn’t fall back down toward me seeking revenge from beyond the grave. (Yep.  I clearly have a very realistic idea of what goes on in the mind of a squirrel.)

We are 4 years into this suburban adventure –and as I have previously confessed, I’m pretty well soft on the place at this point.

But I have my moments, people. This shit didn’t happen in the city. I know I am sound bonkers but I maintain that city animals are smarter than wildlife in the burbs.  The squirrels in the city are scrappy and mildly suspicious even in the parks where picnic crumbs and  bulging trash cans demonstrate the usefulness of the humans around them.

Suburban squirrels are always wandering in  and getting caught SOMEWHERE.  Like many things in burbs, they are just too trusting and friendly for their own good.

Don’t even get me started on the damn geese out here.

Oh – and fun side note – that chirping noise?  Wasn’t even the radon mitigation.   As my dad pointed out – those systems aren’t actually equipped with a “squirrel electrocution alarm.”  The water sensor on the floor below the water heater needed a new 9 volt.

So, to make a long story short (WAY TOO LATE,) water sensor needed more power, squirrel needed less.

Just another Monday in the burbs.

 

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March 1, 2016 · 1:51 pm

Maybe Reality Really DOES Bite.

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Ya know what, Troy?   Cram it.  (Credit: http://www.spot.ph)

40 is coming. Or rather, I am currently rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell toward my 40th birthday in June. If you smash my twin sister and I together, that is 80 years of twinny “us-ness” on this planet. Scary stuff.

I didn’t think 40 was going to bug me. After all, 40 is the new 30, right? We are a FAR CRY away from the 40th birthday I remember my mom having, complete with coworkers stringing black streamers everywhere and outfitting her with a cane and veiled black hat to go with her “over the hill” cake.

That just isn’t what 40 means today. Think about who else is turning 40 this year. Reece Witherspoon. Ryan Reynolds. Melissa Joan Hart – Sabrina the teenage witch, yo! Keri Russell – awesome first name to match her awesome looks! 40 ain’t nothin’ at this point, right?    I remember thinking when Jennifer Aniston turned 40 (7 years ago, people,) that 40 was spectacular. That all you had to be by 40 was a grown-ass version of you. (With apologies to Troy from Reality Bites, because none of us knew ANYTHING at 23, really dude.)

But therein lies the rub. 7 years ago, 33 year old Keri was, if I remember correctly, putting some fairly substantial pressure on herself regarding her Jesus year, and thinking that “way far off into the future” of Keri-ness, at the ripe old age of 40, she would finally have gotten it together as a grown up.

Guess what? NOPE.

I am a warmed over mess. Don’t get me wrong, it is my warmed over mess… this is my 40 year old bed, I made it and I can lay in it, blah blah blah… It isn’t the whole “I’m so damn old, woe is my aged self” thing that has me reeling, although I do confess feeling kind of old of late. It’s the nagging “shouldn’t I feel like a dang grown up by now?” question. I am like, way far into this dog-and-pony show, right? At what point, exactly, am I going to stop feeling like I should be calling my mom to come and pick me up from this charade, because it MUST be way past my curfew? The ghosts of Keri-ages past would be pretty disturbed to know that at 40 it was all still going to be feeling like a total crap shoot. That sucks, yo.

I briefly considered diving into a good old-fashioned midlife crisis- but dipping my toe in those waters by taking an ill-advised shopping trip in the Juniors’ section for clothes that look ridiculous on me, drinking like a 23 year old at the neighbors’ house, taking on a bunch of contract work in all my free time so I can “do what I love,” and otherwise generally acting “un-Keri” just left me feeling embarrassed and desperate and old.

Man, I miss just feeling old.

So the midlife crisis is off the table, as I don’t have time for self-destruct just now since I can’t get even my adult shit together without that added BS.  There’s really no spare time to blow everything up when you are just hoping to get your kid and yourself out the door with lunch packed and pants on both of you, can I get an amen?

But what then? Or what now, I mean. Here I am being all old (but not,) coming to terms with the idea that maybe, JUST maybe, this is all there is.

I am not destined to change the world, or even my little corner of it. There is no cosmic line to cross or switch I have to find and flip to make things “the way they are supposed to be.” No fairy godmother is going to come donk me on the head and pronounce that I am now fully qualified for adulting and open a door to some wonderland of grown-up-edness.

I always pictured myself as the girl humming the Mary Tyler Moore theme song and whipping my hat off to toss as I spun around knowing I was “gonna make it after allllllll.”

But staring down the barrel of the very adult age of 40, all I seem to be able to muster is a half-hearted bit of the theme from “One Day at a Time.”   Then I realize that BOTH of those shows are so ancient, I can’t even come up-to-speed on TV references. AND I LOVE TV!

Again I find myself back at Reality Bites, and Troy; the-once-and-now-again voice of my generation…  Now it seems, is “the winter of my discontent.”  But Troy remains forever frozen in fresh-college-grad smuggery as he utters that line through his 90s facial hair.

Here in 2016 and MANY years away from my English lit degree, borrowing lines from Shakespeare seems awfully grand a way of phrasing the realization that I’ve been on the planet for 40 years and still cope with stressful situations primarily through nacho consumption and magical thinking.

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February 4, 2016 · 12:36 pm

Legos and longing -second thoughts on working mom-dom.

I am sharing this piece which I first posted on Spirit of Power early this week, because the response has been so overwhelmingly supportive, and because the topic has consumed my thoughts since the spark was lit in my little mind.  I have joked that I seem to have triggered my midlife crisis (which it very well might be,) but I hope that I can channel the upheaval into something mildly more practical than buying a sports car.  (ha)

Original Post Here

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Late this morning over a quick lunch break, I was diving down the rabbit hole of Instagram to let my mind wander from a project I was a bit stuck on for work. I stumbled on a simple post of an ADORABLE baby sitting in the sun in a chair, giggling at his mom off camera. SO CUTE! I clicked to read the caption of this cuteness.

Two minutes later I was broken, sobbing and groping for tissues in a haze of envy and guilt and sadness.

The cutie-patootie’s mom posted the smushy picture of him to celebrate her first day as a stay at home mom. It is a simple thing, upon first thought. It was the second wave of my mind’s wandering that kind of ripped me in two.

It was her first day of being with that smiling boy at home, completely on purpose. Not because she was on vacation and trying not to think about the email that must be piling up and the fires that will need putting out when she returns.

Not because the baby was sick, or because plans for his care fell through, or because she was working from home with him there as well due to a heavy snow storm. (The latter of which never truly works, resulting in guilt about sticking in a video and begging the kiddo to please be quiet for that conference call, followed by work guilt because productivity drops when you have one eye on the laptop and one eye on your offspring.)

It was her first day without division in her mind, her heart, and her time. No internal war to be everything to everyone. For the first time, she was all his. Concentrating on him, and his surroundings, and nothing else, is ok for her now.

Years ago, before Junior came along, I would daydream about that being my reality…

It wasn’t in the cards, and I adored the lovely Christ-centered daycare Junior attended during his first year of life. I am so proud of all he learns and of the way he has found his place in his little community at the academic center he attends now, truly I am.

In our neighborhood, there are many moms who stay home with their children, and I think it has accentuated some of the things I fear Junior misses as a “day care kid.”

He misses the flexibility of schedule to try new activities, or have a play date with neighbors, or even stay in pajamas all day “just because.” There’s no chance to abandon an activity to head outside for a bike ride or snowman building or kite-flying, regardless of perfect weather conditions.

Days are full of hurrying out the door late, off to day care as mom worries over email and deadlines and trying to cram it all in, while also figuring out when doctor appointments and dentist visits and haircuts might fit in to the picture. Of course, always keeping fingers crossed that Junior doesn’t get sick and bring the whole precarious mess to a screeching halt.

It’s a tough realization to find that I am resentful of my child for getting sick, when he does, because it throws off the tightrope walk that I am barely pulling off with him healthy.

Evenings are a blur of pick-ups and meal prep and rushing toward bedtime routine to (hopefully) get him in bed before “tired” turns to “overtired meltdown madness.” Usually I am thinking of the To Do list I need to get started on once he is asleep and praying that he will drift off quickly. Then in a few short hours the whole scene plays out again.

It feels like our family, and especially Junior and I, are running and running to get to some place or goal or SOMETHING, but never getting there.

Suddenly today, while inhaling my lunch and trying to distract myself from the reality of my truth, it smacked me square in the face.

Today is the first day of a really great new normal for that mom and her sweet smiling son.

Today for Junior is just another day where his mom bustled him off to “school” early because she was stressed about looming deadlines and semi-dreading what the impending snowstorm would mean for her ability to work tomorrow (while trying to squeeze in some “one eye on each” activity with him, if possible.)

You know what? That sucks.

My proudest accomplishments lie not within deadlines met and task lists checked off. They are measured in the way he pulls my ear down close to his mouth and whispers “I love you mommy,” and in the joy on his face as we build a new incarnation of a superhero hideout out of legos.

I do imagine what it would be like to focus just on him.

I don’t know what a next step would be – Instagram mom’s new SAHM path can’t be mine right now.

Parents who do stay at home with their children have challenges and feel conflicted too, I am sure. I don’t mean to discount the mountains each person must climb each day.

But I think that the search for a new normal has begun today…. in my heart, and I pray also in my actions.

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January 11, 2016 · 11:42 pm

Mom’s night out

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Oh look! The oppressive fog of Mom Guilt! (No? Just me?)

I saw the text as I was exiting Jr’s room with my usual grace after a particularly quick bedtime. (In other words, I fell over the laundry basket and landed in a pile of library books, stubbing my toe on his dresser and holding my breath as I glared over to see if I’d woken him. Nope. Stuck that landing.)

“I know you may be in Jammies, but you wanna meet me at the brewery for a beer at 8?”
Two things….
1. It was like, 7 pm on a Saturday night.
2. I was TOTALLY in jammies.

An internal battle began. The Mr had just brought home a new load of wine that was calling my jammie-clad name, along with my comfy chair and puffy dog.
BUT.
Nobody wants to be the lamest mom on the block, right? Jr had fallen blissfully asleep super quick, The Mr had some hideous Bob Marley concert on the DVR he was dying to watch; in short, the stars were aligning to send me off into the night.
I would bet 20 bucks that my friend swore audibly from the shock of seeing my “sure I can do that” return text.

Mama was breaking out.

With almost no notice. On a Saturday night. WAY past the usual happy hour time for typical outings.
I took one last look at my snoozing offspring on the monitor and told The Mr adios. Then I backed out of the driveway, cranking up the Banner Pilot as I stole away from the subdivision like thief stealing freedom.
If I was going to do this, I was going to go all in. What did teenage Keri do when she was out and about in this town on a Saturday night?
Oh Hayyyyy, Taco Bell drive thru. Bell Grande me, por favor!

Except I sat in that damn drive thru for 20+ minutes. My pumped-up-edness totally deflated by the time I finally rolled up to the window, where the uber uninterested girl took my money and then didn’t come back FOREVER. When she finally stuck my order out the window, I was like “what’s going on in there!?” She looked at me like I was crazy. Every substance on those nachos comes out of a freaking caulking gun – how could it take 20 minutes!!!

Was the universe conspiring against me due to my horrible decision? Was it just me, or was Taco Bell girl giving me a “why aren’t you home with your small child!?” look?
I pressed on – I had REALLY hard-earned nachos to share, and there was beer to be had.
We laughed, we drank, we ate nacho-type-product. All was well. I only semi-obsessively checked my phone/imagined my son waking up and being devastated beyond what therapy could heal when he found his ever-lovin’ mommy had abandoned him. (There is a small chance I might be inflating his image of me in my mind. Nahhh.)

After a couple hours of girl-timey goodness, I departed to head home in time to give Jr his booster of cough meds, LONG before the hour that Cinderella’s accessories were in any danger of becoming fodder for the farmers’ market. But hey – baby steps, yo.

A layer of super dense, weirdly stilling fog had settled over the town. Like, “can’t see the stop light until you are almost running it” fog. “Thick like potato soup, but not my grandma’s gross watery potato soup, REAL potato soup” fog. “Serial killers come out of this shit, don’t stop by that clump of trees, stupid” fog.
Like SERIOUS fog.

Again – my mind wandered to thoughts of universal signs, and images of Jr reading a fairy tale of a mother who left her son for selfish reasons and was swallowed up by a fog in the woods, NEVER to be seen again… except it wasn’t a fairy tale, it was YOUR CRUMMY MOM, JR!!

I hunched into granny-over-steering-wheel posture and soldiered on – MAMA’S YO’ RIDE OR DIE SON, even in the fog – I am coming!!! I am like the U.S. MFing P.S. – no weather can keep me from my appointed rounds!!!! (My parents always said I was “over dramatic” when I was young… I clearly grew out of that just fine.)

I punched the button on the garage door and did a total runner into the house, convinced that was the smoke/CO alarm I heard going off, or SOMETHING.
Nope.
There was The Mr. sipping on some Jeffersons, monitor humming an image of Jr peacefully off in dreamland, possibly having not even moved since I pulled my laundry basket dismount from his room hours ago.
Hm.
As my Aunt Della would say – guess I’m not so mucking futch around here after all.

But that Taco Bell wait was still totally messed up, yo.

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