I wake up nauseated. This is not morning sickness, I tell myself, because all of my friends have been puking, and not just the pregnant ones... so many pregnant friends. I think harder. No, this is not morning sickness, or food poisoning, or anything except the stomach bug that is going around and it has got me. Conveniently, this happens on the first day that the MOG is completely out of pocket due to teen camp duties.

Observation: I have been known to question the usefulness of men, but I cannot deny that stuff happens as soon as they are unavailable. It is SCIENCE. If the basement is going to flood, multiple children are going to vomit, a sniper takes out your back tire on the freeway, etc, these things will happen as soon as the male in your life is totally unavailable. They will happen as his plane leaves the ground or his phone battery dies. Feminism meets her match in those moments.

I make a goal. "I will not puke", I say. "I will do everything in my power to not puke." as God in heaven laughs. My children, who have been awake for hours, catch wind that I am ill. "Maaaaaaawwwwwwmmmmm," they scream, "can we eat cookies for breakfast?" I nod weakly, because no one is listening anyway. Tristan comes up with his cookie for a little snuggle time. "I'm sick," I groan, "I can't cuddle you, I'm sick." He takes it in stride and does jumping jacks on the bed, crumbs flying as I clutch my stomach and beg God for the sharp knife of a short life.

At one point, I make a mad dash for the bathroom, closing and locking the door as Tristan bangs on the door and howls at the heavens. I kneel on the floor and am suddenly made horribly aware of the state of my bathroom. "This is the grossest bathroom in the world," I think. "This is worse than that Quik-E Mart in El Paso. When I get better I am going to clean this bathroom." Time passes as I camp in this location. I give passing thought to taking a pity-selfie but decide against it, which is why this post will have no pictures. #regrets

I do notice, as I scroll through Instagram while laying on the floor, that my husband is making a rap video for teen camp. Because I am selfless and very near the end of my days, I forgive him.

Eventually, I hobble downstairs, because I am the only grownup and the government requires that children be fed. I make lunch for them and feebly request that no one eat it in the sunroom, or the living room, or anywhere. As I stop by the bathroom before attempting the stairs, I am sure I can hear the sound of macaroni bouncing on the tile floor of the sunroom. I carry on.

"When Cameron was in Egypt's land," I sing to myself from my deathbed, and then watch an excessive amount of television, which is all gross. Toby stops by, wise to his power. "Mom," he says from the doorway, "can we play Vampire Bikini Bordello Party?" or something like that. I raise my hand faintly in protest. "Thanks, mom!" he cries, running away.

The MOG stops by with crackers and Sprite. It has been hours, so I nibble cautiously. Various children stop by the sickroom. "WHAT?" they say, shocked, "Why didn't I get any crackers?" I let them take one, two, many crackers, which I know they will eat on the stairs, crumbs stretching like a Hansel and Gretel path for all of the ants, who will eventually find their way to my room.

The MOG comes home as the children are being desperately entreated to please, for the love, to go to bed. He takes over, using a Dad Voice, and they scatter and I go back upstairs to collapse in my cracker nest. The day is over, the stomach bug mostly conquered and life goes on. Next up: cleaning the bathroom. Tomorrow.

I've never participated in a blog roundup before, but it sounds fairly Texan so I guess maybe I should. Last week Jolie from The Gray Matters invited me to be a part of a Monday Blog Tour, and I accepted. As far as I know, this is Monday, although it is summer and all of the days are a blur of all the things that all the other days are a blur of. I would be more specific, but I don't know what I do all day.

What are you working on? 
Currently I'm working on a lukewarm cup of chai tea and a Seinfeld marathon. Also I am doing a few part time jobs online, and in my spare time I parent. In my dreams, I'm writing a book, although it's just a skeleton of ideas, desperate hopes, lame jokes and duct tape. 

How does my work differ from others in its genre?
Well, for one thing I would have a difficulty placing myself in a genre. I mean, I guess I'm a mommyblogger, a faith based mommyblogger, but when I hear genre I just think "Well, I'm definitely not Euro-pop-dance-metal."

One difference, I think, is my need to celebrate, not mediocrity, per se, but normalcy. I love telling the stories of the field trip fails, the cake fails, the stumbling drunken-monkey attempts at parenting. I wouldn't say I have an aversion to excellence, it's just I really want to avoid the glossy Instagram-filtered dreamscape that is prevalent. We're all doing slightly less than our best, and we need grace. There's joy in the imperfect, there's success in the failed attempts.


Why do I write what I do? 

I started blogging because I was on bedrest with a difficult pregnancy and I didn't want to talk on the phone. I mean, I never want to talk on the phone, ever. But specifically when the pastor or a great-aunt needed the deets about my cervix, the appeal of typing words to the world in general got super... appealing. 

Over the years, I have realized I write to make sense of life, or to make fun of life. When I write the story of the chaos and the crisis and I find a way to make you laugh at that, I end up laughing too. And then when it hits the fan over at your place, maybe you can think, "She lived through this, I can live through this." I want to make life relatable, the life and the world we all share. I rarely experience something that I don't think, "other people know how this feels, a lot of people". I have learned we are vastly different but so much the same. 

How does my writing process work? 

Somebody figure this out and get back to me. As far as I can tell, I just live my life, funny things happen, and I let my kids play video games and eat peanut butter off the floor so I can write it down. I have stronger than a sneaking suspicion that the process should involve effort and discipline, but that's maybe why there's no book yet. 

Who's next?

This is where this experiment starts feeling a little like a multi-level marketing deal where I hit up my pals for a great opportunity, but, shoot. I'd like to draw your attention to my online pal Katey over at Sweet Goings, who I have never met in real life but feel super bonded to through crisis pregnancies and genius children, and my new friend Sara at Every Bitter Thing is Sweet, because she is a poet-about-real-life and a visionary who I like so much, and also because she complimented me last night at a wedding, or at least I think she did, but the music was pretty loud. 

My twins' birthday is today. They would be 10, and I miss them with an ache that has almost faded beyond pain. I miss them like I am missing a part of myself, and the wound has healed, but there is a wound, and a lack. I see them in the awkward lankiness of R2, in the blonde hair and quirky mannerisms of Toby... I see them in 10 year olds that ride past my house on their bicycles.

I'm thankful for the glimpses, thankful that they have not slipped into a not-really-there place for me. They are real, they are alive somewhere, and they are irrevocably mine. I am thankful. 

I wrote this for them last year: 

How many? they ask

and I hold you in my mind

like a dream, like a secret prize

In the shadows of my heart

you age

through a veil, through a glass

you are alive

my daydreams keep time

losing teeth, climbing trees, sweaty sleeping blonde heads

always with me

in the shadows of my heart

And I am so rich

with my arms overflowing

laughter all around me

laughter in me

but always 

hearing

the laughter beyond me

This week we celebrated Richy's 15th birthday. Last year his celebration was joyous and beautiful, but almost in a whiplash-we-just-dodged-a-bullet-and-here's-a-party way. This year he was actively involved in the party planning. I had planned on having cake and pizza at home, until he specifically verbalized that his party was going to be at Chuck E Cheese. Oh, Chuck E Cheese, you overstimulating wonder. Still, the boy gets what he wants.

(if you're new here, R2 was born at 24 weeks, and last year he almost died but he DIDN'T <catch up links :D )

I have a FIFTEEN year old. I think that might make me super old. I met R1 when I was 15. Weird.

I made a Monsters, Inc. cake... well, I made a cake that was vaguely reminiscent of Sulley's fur. R2 can't see very well anyway, so I think he was very impressed. He ate 3 slices, so you tell me. The staff at CEC was super accommodating, maybe because we were there at a pretty chill time of day, or maybe because R2 was in such a celebratory mood. He stalked Chuck E around the restaurant and finally got his picture taken.

It was a joyful, busy, noisy birthday. I feel like the fog of his illness has lifted to the point that we can really enjoy him and his quirks. A friend texted me after the party to ask how it went and I called it "a perfect day". I meant it. If we have 5 years or 50 with Richy, this memory will stand as a day that he was truly happy and enjoyed.

Happy Birthday to my first baby!

It's swimsuit season, I guess. Every year I think about taking a spin back to the 1920's when we got to cover up all of our reproductive organs when we went out in the sun, but I don't want to look like a Duggar. I mean, I heart the Duggars. If my kids wanted to marry Duggar stock, I would give a hearty Baptist thumbs-up. Side hugs errwhere. But I don't really want to look like a Duggar.

Every year this time, I think, "maybe I will find something that looks great." and I go to stores and try on swimsuits and all my flesh is like WHYYYY THE LIGHT and I put my jeans back on and eat nachos in my bed with the lights off.

Now maybe you're saying modesty modesty modesty over like a mantra and I get it. I chanted that for years and once my daughter (God help us) gets older, I'm sure I will start a whole foundation for the eradication of "mixed bathing" and bring back the burkini. Until then, I'm just going to try to find a swimsuit that, from at least one angle, does not look like I am smuggling play dough sculptures inside my leg-skin and also that masks the fact that I stay 5 months pregnant.

I am relatively skinny. I'm absurdly short and relatively skinny. I am not terribly fit, however. So when I see articles about "The Perfect Swimsuit For Your Problem Area(s)" or "These Plus-Sized Women Tried On Bikinis, But You Won't Believe What Happened Next!", sign me up. I will READ that article.

And that is how I discovered that I am a plus-sized woman. Technically I'm a size 7, or a 4 in especially kind clothes, but the women in these articles, these Bounteous Beauties look.like.me. Actually, they look like me if I had a little bit of Photoshop work and better hair. I have a sneaking suspicion this is not technically plus-sized, but I'm going with it.

No more dithering between the Junior Prostitute and Corporate Grandma sections of the department store. I'm going straight to Woman's World and I am going to FIND the perfect swimsuit and try it on.

Feel free to join me afterwards for nachos.

Last summer comes to me in a dreamy kind of haze. "Remember?" it asks, gauzy linen sleeves blowing in the wind, "remember the memories? dreamy days in the park, laughing together at the movies, exploring the city hand in hand? Remember?" I do, faintly. I remember it like that. Also I very faintly remember sweating a lot and crying in the car after a particularly strenuous movie outing... but most of the memories are sweet.

Already, the chubbiness has slipped away and I find myself grasping the slender hand of an older child, a child who is pulling away toward independence. Already the baby laughter of last year has changed, the closeness of just me and them has changed as they make friends and learn the world. Already they are growing and I am not ready.

I made the summer schedule, all the camps and lessons and vacation Bible schools. My stomach sank as I realized they'll spend half their days away. Maybe I'll cancel some things, I thought, dreaming of snow cones and togetherness. I'll cancel things and we'll go to the zoo, to the water park. We'll rent a movie and make heaping bowls of popcorn. Tomorrow, I think, we will begin. Family Memory Summer '14, game on.

7 am on the first weekday of summer: I am awakened by a foot in my face. Tristan is asleep in my bed, Darth Vader undies and a train clutched in his fist. Downstairs, the natives battle it out over Super Mario Super Mega Something Or Other 12. I pretend I am asleep.

9 am: the natives are offered cereal. They don't like cereal. The oldest wakes up from the screaming. "When is my birthday when when when when when cake chuck e cheese birthday when when when change my diaper" he sends via brain waves. "I don't like cereal either" he sends and it lands directly on my central nervous system.

9:04 am the cereal is gone. I step in pee.

9:05 am: everyone is very, very bored. I send them outside to play in the kiddie pool. They are entranced.

9:07 am: bored. hungry. bored.

Vacation Bible School is starting to look pretty good.

Part of my soul thrives in a city, with its concrete borders and the cacophony of street performers. Cities speak my primary language, color and chaos. This, the most familiar part of my heart, is like an abstract painting with slashes of red and blue intersecting haphazardly. I love cities.

In the city, strangers gather in groups and in families. The architecture, the excitement, the risk, all entirely human. The city current pushes us along sidewalks, in and out of shops, across crowded streets. In a city I am part of a collective, sharing air and sight and sound with the crowd. 

I love the crush of humanity, the shared experience and the flavor of a hundred cultures in a single block. In the city, my heart reminds me that I am so human. 

The ocean says something different. It speaks to something I'm less aware of. I find myself reaching for the boundaries, trying to find the edges of my world. There are no edges, the world stretching beyond my vision, beyond my understanding.

By the ocean, we stand alone. I climb the rocks, going to the end of the world I know. This is it, the edge, the furthest I can walk before I leave the most connected parts of land. I squint at the horizon, desperately alone and terribly small. This is bigger than me, I think, and I grieve. 

Behind me, a beach ball rolls across the sand, disconnected from my longing for the deep. The waves lap across my feet, every one changing the shore. Where has this water come from, I think, as the sun beats against my skin, skin I did not create and do not understand. My toes dig into the sand and their impact is immediately erased. 

All around me, the deep blues and long stretches of beige, like the loneliness and the tragedy.  I let the sun heal me, the waves remind me. I listen to the silence and I understand, I am not only human, but more.

May is a minefield of memories. Twice, I walked through May with my unborn children and my desperate wish. At the end of May, I laid down my plans, twice. I'm always surprised, every year, by the wave of strain and melancholy that hits me on these memory days.

My heart remembers, my body remembers what my mind forgets.

These early weeks were the golden days, bright spring days with the restless kicking of my sons. Strawberries and sunshine, watching my stomach swell with the very sweetest dream. Later, May would become a fight, a grasping, terrified fight to hold on to what I had. It was a fight I lost, and even with all the redemptive years, new miracles, and personal growth, it will never not be a loss.

I tiptoe through these sweet altars, the places they were, the person I was. Heaven is never more real to me than these days of aching and longing for what I held.

may is the bittersweet
days of birdsong and sunlight
and aching even in the joy
may is treasures lost and found

I was 21 when my dad died. I think, if someone had said that sentence to me when I still had a dad, I would have thought, "Well, at least you're grown, at least it wasn't while you were still a kid..." In reality, though, I don't think we ever stop being kids. There's this strange dynamic where our parents age and slow as we grow into adulthood, and the roles begin to shift, but even as it is happening, there's an inner struggle to still be the kid, to still be walking in the safety of their shadow. I don't think you, or I, anyway, can ever fully settle into the new reality of being the stronger one.

He died almost a year past the atomic bomb that was the birth of my first baby. You can read that whole story, if you don't already know it, but that baby (R2) was 4 months early and he taught me about joy in suffering. But back to my dad. His heart attack and death was a total shock. He was 52 years old.

I usually write about him today, April 30th. Today marks 14 years I have lived without my father. I was at my parent's house every day, I worked with my dad at his graphic design/animation business. The day before his heart attack, I was there, trying on a bridesmaid dress for my friend's wedding. "You look beee-yooo-tiful," he told me, the last words he said to me in person. The next day he called me on the phone to come see his new computer, but I was busy with life and the baby, so I told him I'd see it later. I did see it later, but he was gone. My last words to him were on the phone, "Love you, see you tomorrow."

It's easy to immortalize someone who dies young, especially if they were important to you. I don't want to do that with my dad, or Daddy, as I called him every day of his life. He was normal, human, flawed and so very, very good to me. He taught me how to laugh at myself, how to take my heart seriously but my circumstances and my pride lightly. He taught me what it means to have someone in your corner, the safety of a big hand to hold in scary places, how it is never as dark as it seems.

I carry him with me, when I teach my children to laugh. I am flawed and inadequate, but I hope that the canopy of my acceptance and my deep love is something that they can find shelter under all of their life, regardless of where I am.

It's hard to really have a nemesis in this day and age. When you're a grownup and a relatively nice person, you don't get much wiggle room for enemies. "Friend you avoid at the store", maybe. "Nail Salon Lady who always cuts you"... now, she's a contender. But in general, you don't get a human nemesis when you're a normal-ish person.

My archenemy is less tangible. Every day I fight a chaotic force and every day it is beyond me. Before you pick up the phone, let me clarify: I do not answer the phone. But ALSO, I am not talking about a real paranormal or psychological force. I speak of the innate ability of my home to generate messes.

I have to own it somewhat. I have never been a neat person. I just don't naturally clean up after myself. "How," you are maybe thinking, "do you not SEE the bread left out and the peanut butter sitting open and the naked toddler cutting the checkbook with scissors?" If so, you might be my husband, or just another person that thinks like him, that personality type he commonly refers to as "everyone, all people." I don't see it, because I am looking at something else. Once someone starts slamming cabinet doors, I remember.

Some days, I wake up with a plan. Today, I think, I am going to clean the house. I have that thought silently, but it sends a bat-signal to my children, and then they think, today, I am going to break this house into a thousand pieces. Today, they think, this house will bow to me.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Science.

I make an attempt to mop the kitchen floor and somehow a glass container of spaghetti sauce is hurled from a great height, causing not only glass shards in a 3 mile radius, but also a CSI-worthy sauce field. "Why," I start to ask, and then decide not to, because there is no acceptable answer to why a child was standing on the counter with a jar of red sauce at 9 am. If I did not try to mop the floor, the sauce would never have made the climb, I know that. Science.

Once that is handled, I move to the next room. I put all the shoes away, vacuum the rug, straighten the paintings. As I turn my back to a child, the unmistakeable sound of a toy basket being upended while another child loses their grip on the milk carton.

Like a superhero walking away from an explosion, I move on.

I will sweep the stairs, I think. I will clean the toilet. I will fold all the laundry. I WILL MAKE MYSELF LIKE GOD. And like Lucifer, I am thrown down like lightning. I will read a book, I think. I will eat cheese puffs.

I acknowledge defeat and retreat. There is no evidence of my hours-long struggle, no clean window, no unsullied dish. The world is as it was before me. I pick up my book, and suddenly the world is still. My children fall into an easy camaraderie, quietly playing in another room. No one throws sauce, no one pours cheerios in the air vent, no one puts peanut butter on the cat. All is calm in our chaos of shoes and electric-bill-snowflakes.

Into this scene he walks. "Uh," he says, attempting to phrase it carefully, "so... what did you do today?"