A Broken Record and a Conversation

I wanted to post about regular stuff today.  About motherhood or lawyer stuff or some other random musing of mine.  But I can't.  

I can't shake Newtown.  

I was on my way home from a lawyer networking event on Friday when I heard the news on the radio.  When I first heard there was a shooting, my ears peaked, but I wasn't that surprised.  I mean, we're all immune to this stuff now, right?  It seems there is a random shooting on a weekly basis.  What a sad state of acceptance and resulting numbness.  

But when I heard it was children - young children - at an elementary school, I let out an audible "Oh God," despite the fact that I was in the car all by myself.   I could feel a pit in my stomach forming that I knew wasn't going to go away.  I actually felt sick.  I turned off the radio and vowed that when I got home I wasn't going to turn on the TV or computer.  I couldn't deal with it emotionally, and didn't want to.  I didn't want to see crying relatives, scared children, or gurneys. Maybe if I ignored it, that pit in my stomach would go away and I could resume my normal afternoon.  

How

I am sick and heartbroken.

There really are no words.

Five minutes ago I went to the Brady Campaign website and donated.  It was hard to get on the site - it crashed a few times, presumably because so many people have my same idea.

Here's the link if you want to do the same:  http://www.bradycampaign.org/

Things need to change.  NOW.  What's it going to take?

The Era of the Wedding

For me, 2004 was the year of the wedding.  I was 25.  I haven't counted specifically, but I would bet that my husband and I attended at least 15 weddings that year, all over the east coast and midwest.  It was an expensive year, but a fun year.  We were constantly seeing friends, constantly getting dressed up, constantly celebrating the next happy couple.  There have been a few weddings scattered in the years since, but overall the era of the wedding, for us at least, is over.

Now I am in my (almost) mid-thirties, and the divorces have started.  Not a lot, but definitely more divorces than weddings.  And if you would have told me eight years ago that things would end that way, I would have laughed in your face.

If my twenties was the era of weddings, then my thirties so far has been the era of rude awakenings.  And that's probably because my twenties were based on some pretty faulty assumptions:

Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Braden loves all things boy, almost innately.  He loves cars, trucks, superheroes, tools, trains, etc. It amazed me how he was attracted to these things, without me even trying to force it.  Of course, once we realized his interests, we reinforced it by buying even more cars, trucks, superheroes, tools, trains, etc.  But our den/playroom didn't start off as a car-park.  It just evolved into one.

But you know what else he likes?

He loves dolls.  He loves dollhouses.  He loves pink (his current favorite color).  He loves watching me put on my make up and then trying to put it on himself.  He loves my jewelry and wearing bracelets and blow drying my hair.  He frequently asks me if I can paint his nails (pink, of course).

For a while I didn't encourage these behaviors.  I don't know, I didn't know what the "right" thing to do was.  I mean, he's a boy, right?  So if he asks me to put on make up, then shouldn't I say no? Shouldn't I tell him that "make up is for girls?"

What I Should Be Doing Right Now

- Folding laundry.
- Wrapping presents.
- Ordering presents.
- Watering the Christmas tree.
- Cleaning the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the den, and my disgustingly messy car.
- Taking out the garbage, which is overflowing and has resulted in me putting a bag on the counter to house the excess.
- Contacting someone at my son's preschool regarding the upcoming auction.
- Taking a shower.
- Updating baby books.
- Putting photos in photo albums.
- Ordering photos still stuck on our camera.
- Following up about this summer's Cape Cod rental with the realtor who seems to refuse to call me back.
- Rolling over my two separate 401ks into an IRA (I have been meaning to do this for two years and am beginning to think I might just never do it).
- Figuring out how to get my kindle books onto our Ipad (thanks, Jodifur, for the tip!)
- Updating our address spreadsheet for holiday cards.
- Printing out address labels for holiday cards.
- Filling out Casey's paperwork for school (which he is starting January 2, aaaaaaa!).
- Scheduling an appointment for Braden to get his Hepatitis A vaccine, which I apparently never got for him and now the Board of Health says he can't come back to school in January unless he gets it.  Oops.
- Paying bills.
- Opening a week's worth of mail, which probably includes more bills.
- Taking my calcium pills, which I just realized I forgot to take this morning, but it would involve me getting up to get a glass of water, and I'm thinking it's not going to happen.
- Probably a thousand other things I can't even think of.

So what am I doing instead?

I am laying in bed, in my pajamas, with a computer on my lap, typing this post.  Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is on in the background.  And once I'm done with this, I plan to read Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a book about street life in Mumbai which I started last February but lost interest in and am now resurrecting because the New York Times says it is one of the best books of 2012 and I figure I should give it another chance.

Life at home isn't always so bad, you know?  T minus 62 minutes until Casey wakes up...

Great Expectations

A friend of mine had a baby last week.  I offered to bring her food and visit her in the hospital.  I obviously wanted to see her, but I'm not going to lie - I was ecstatic at the sight of seeing a newborn.

When I saw her I could tell she wasn't having the most fantastic time.  She had been two weeks overdue.  She got induced, got an epidural that didn't fully work, pushed for almost three hours, and then ended up with a c-section.  She spiked a fever right before delivery, so both she and her baby had to stay longer in the hospital to finish a course of IV antibiotic.  

I could see it in her face that she was struggling internally - wanting to be happy that her baby was with her, that she had a healthy, beautiful baby - but feeling overwhelmed, overtired, and disappointed that the birth didn't go as she had envisioned, that she was still in pain, and that she wasn't brimming with joy.  

I wanted to embrace her, tell her that it was okay, that she doesn't have to feel overjoyed, that she will feel better, that it will pass.  But I resisted the opportunity to lecture, and instead just listened, and tried to tell her gently that I completely understood. That despite popular sentiment, this really isn't the best time of your life.  That I related to how she was feeling.  That I struggled too. 

Kids bring great expectations that rarely come to fruition.  

A Beat Down and a Christmas Tree

Yesterday was one of those days where I just felt beat down.  Beat down from ALL sides - from my personal life, from my professional life, from random mean blog commenters...  It was one of those days where you just have to laugh out loud at some point and say,  Really?  Really?  The universe wants to pile on something else? 

I had the urge to assume fetal position and tuck my head down to keep all the spears from hitting me.  Kind of like this:

That's a pangolin, by the way.  Taken from http://wisecreatures.blogspot.com/2010/07/tale-of-tails.html

It was just one of those days where I felt defeated. 

Around 6pm I was sitting with the kids at dinner (for icing on the cake, hubby was working late), and brainstorming what I could do to turn this funk around.  And then, the inspiration came: