#tbt - schoolmarm

Last week, Lauren and Katelyn and I went on a shopping expedition to Kohl's.  Immediately, upon entering the store, I was hit with the fragrance of "Back to School" shopping.  The smell of fresh leather purses, squeaky clean rubber shoe soles, newly manufactured fabrics, and a strange mixture of perfumes took me back a couple of decades.

I was reminded of the hot August days, spent in the safety of air conditioned department stores, searching for a new wardrobe for the school year.  My mom would make us wiggle our toes in tried on shoes so she could determine "room to grow."  We picked out new shirts, new jeans, and new bags for our books.

While most kids are known for their propensity to complain during long drawn out shopping trips with their siblings and mother, I thought it was magical.

Before you get all, "Oh, how cute.  She's a natural born shopper," let me clarify.  I hate shopping.  I HATE shopping.  I always have and I always will.  To me, it was magical because it meant it was time to go back to school.  The excitement of stepping foot inside a new classroom with a freshly filled backpack and clothing still creased from being folded was so wonderful it outweighed the pure torture and misery of shopping for clothes.

I am that big of a nerd.

I love school so much I went to more school specifically to continue going to school.  I chose teaching because I love school so much, I wanted to be in charge at school.  One year, at the close of the third grade, my teacher told us we could take our textbooks home because they were being phased out.  I'm sure most of the books ended up at Goodwill or the trash, I brought mine home and set up a stuffed animal classroom.  Each June, when my friends were singing, School's out for summer!  School's out forever!, I was always glad that school wasn't actually out forever and I sort of wished it wasn't even out for summer.

Twenty years later, I had graduated from college with a freshly inked diploma and a license to teach in the state of Utah and absolutely no job.  I woke up the first morning of the semester to drive Dave to school and I held it together as I watched Dave walk across the campus lawn and into a classroom and then I cried the whole way home.  Then I crawled back in bed and cried for about an hour more.

It all worked out in the end.  I finally got a job teaching tenth and eleventh grade and I loved it.  When Kate was born, I felt at peace with the school chapter of my life finally coming to a close.  It felt right and, besides, motherhood is such a long and complicated chapter, I had plenty with which to occupy myself with.

Now that I'm past the shell shocked phase of being a new mom and into the always shifting ever changing toddler years, I am even more at peace.  I love being a mom and I love spending all my time with this beautiful, silly, funny baby girl.

And yet, last night, after a day of "back to school" shopping, I had the most wonderful dream that I was back in my classroom on the first day of school.

#tbt - sister sister

Today was a sad day because I had to say goodbye to my sister Lauren as she packed up to fly north for the winter.

I tried unsuccessfully to convince her to simply transfer down here and start going to UH.  She cut me off before I could explain that she could crash here.  The walk in closet is already occupied by Katelyn but I was pretty sure Lauren would be comfortable sleeping on the couch.  She could fall asleep to the soothing sounds of any of the five TV stations we receive.  We can't offer much in the way of social attractions but last night Dave and I played a pretty rousing game of Scrabble in which, at the end of the game, I flung the game board into the air, laughing hysterically as the little wooden pieces rained back down on us.  As I was cleaning Kate's toys this afternoon, I was almost certain I would find a lettered tile or two.

My family is historically bad at goodbyes.  We take it beyond a normal level of tearful sadness.  I think it's an anxiety thing.  The whole last day gets turned into a dismal "party" that we are trying to enjoy.  Each hour grows weepier than the last as the number of times the phrase, "This is just so sad" increases.  We really don't like saying goodbye.

Sure enough, as we stood around in my kitchen next to the front door, things got even more pathetic.  Saying goodbye in my family is like trying to remove a stubborn bandaid.  We each have our own method of choice.  When Jack went into the MTC and we knew we weren't going to see him for the next two years, he chose the "rip it off quickly" approach.  When the time came, we each got one quick hug and he was gone.  My goodbyes always seem to be drawn out.  I was the kid who was convinced that the easiest way to remove a bandaid was to slowly and painfully pull on the adhesive, bit by bit until you got to the end.

Kate, of course, was running around completely oblivious.  She kept trying to goad a tearful Aunt Lauren into another game of chase.  She was blissfully unaware and had no concept of a longer term goodbye.  All she knew was that Aunt Lauren was asking for three times as many hugs and kisses as usual.  When Aunt Lauren finally did walk out the door, I'm sure Katelyn's innocent toddler mind was expecting her to walk right back in tomorrow morning to go swimming with us.  Somehow, her complete ignorance of time and her inability to understand missing someone made the situation even more sad.

So forgive me if I'm a bit melancholy tonight.  It seems fitting to devote this Throwback Thursday to sister memories.

My first memory of Lauren was before she was even born.  I was five years old when my parents found out she was a girl.  I was so excited and imagine playing dress up and Barbie dolls with this new "baby" in just a few months.  Imagine my surprise when all the baby did was sleep.

When she finally did get old enough to play Barbies with me, my parents bought us a Barbie Fold n Fun house that I'm sure they deeply regretted every time we asked them to set it up.

At some point in our childhood, it was decided that we were going to share a bedroom.  This made for some epic late night screaming matches.  We slept on a blue metal bunkbed and I somehow was assigned the top bunk.  (To this day, Lauren claims that she falls out of bed frequently.)  Lauren would put her feet up on my mattress and kick me in the back for sport.  Sometimes I would laugh about it and think it was funny and sometimes I would be annoyed.  Sisters can be loose cannons like that.  The bed was pushed up in the corner of the room against one of the windows.  Once Lauren very quietly and very sneakily climbed up the side of the bed so that she was standing on the window sill and her face was right above mine.  There have been few times in my entire life when I have been that badly startled.  We laugh about it to this day.

When I was sixteen, I broke up with my first boyfriend.  I found out that he had lied to me so that he could secretly hang out with some other girl behind my back.  It was one week before the Homecoming Dance so I had no date.  It was very dramatic.  I remember sitting with my mom in the upstairs loft of our old house crying my teenage eyes out when I heard little ten year old sniffles and realized that Lauren was crying just as hard as I was.  I had no idea why she was crying because she hadn't been dumped.  I realize now that it was one of those rare times when you get to witness someone who loves you so much that they experience your pain and feel sad just because you are.

Years later, when I actually experienced a more serious and life altering break up, Lauren was crying alongside me with a fierce loyalty I have rarely ever seen anywhere else.

One time, we were watching TV and the most stupid show came on with some joke about two women who brought in the same coffee mug and kept yelling, "Coffee twins!"  As if it was some weird sisters dog whistle, we both picked up on some crazy strain of humor that no one else in the room could detect and we laughed, as my mom would say, like hyenas for days.  We still find humor in some of the same things that almost no one else laughs about and we have a nearly identical sister chuckle so that, when we really get cracking up about something, it sounds like one person laughing in stereo rather than two goofy girls.

Of all the people I told about the impending arrival of Baby Kate, Lauren's was the most extreme.  She immediate burst into tears and not the quiet one-tear-rolling-slowly-down-your-check kind either.  She nearly collapsed into a puddle of sobs and it was then that I knew that Aunt Lauren and Katelyn would always have a special bond.

I think that's what made Lauren saying goodbye to Katelyn the saddest part about today.  I am forced to remind myself to keep this in perspective.  She is going to BYU for four months, not crossing the Pacific on a sailboat, not boarding a shuttle for a moon landing, and not being exiled to Elba.  It has just been nice having her around.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a sister.  No one but me is lucky enough to have one as good as Lauren.

#tbt in the dark of the night

I am a serious anglophile.  I really, really, really love England and all other British paraphernalia.  I soak up any information on the British Empire and the Royal Family.  I learn about daily life in England from my British pen pals and I stayed home from work to watch the Royal wedding live.  It was three in the morning but I was up glued to the TV.

I'm not really sure where this obsession started.  I know that I have always loved maps and wondering about how other people live.  I think the paradox of the people of the British Isles for me has to do with the fact that we lead such parallel lives.  It's intriguing to me how different and yet the same our lifestyles seem to be.  Like actual parallel lines, we are similar in direction but don't quite intersect.  The time difference also holds some strange allure for me.  I love imagining a world coming to life in the light of day while mine is asleep in the dark of the night.

It seemed natural, then, that my program of choice during late night feedings with Katelyn was BBC News.  I spent the three AM hour in the armchair of my parents' office, bathed in the glow of a nearly silent TV, with a hungrily nursing baby in my arms.  I always fixed myself a cold drink before settling into that familiar chair and Kate and I both enjoyed a beverage while serenaded by the soothing sounds of a British accent while the world around us slept.  I've said it many times but I never fully appreciated the peace and serenity of those quiet moments I was privileged to enjoy every night.

Tonight we spent some time at my parents' house.  My mom and Dave had a show recorded that they were excited to start watching and yesterday I discovered hours of documentaries about Queen Elizabeth that my mom had recorded for me.  We kissed Kate goodnight and put her to bed so that we could all watch our respective programs.

And she cried and she cried and she cried.

At first I thought she was staging a revolt.  We were at Grandma's house after all and she was missing a party.  I let her cry for a while as I settled into that familiar armchair in the office with a drink.  Soon, however, the crying shifted from anger to terror and I started to worry that she was scared alone in that dark room.

So I caved.

I went in and picked her up and she fell asleep slumped on my shoulder with her soft baby hair tickling my face.  I sat still for a while trying to perceive the evidence of a heavy sleep so I could put her down.  When I noticed her breathing becoming heavy and even, I tried gently putting her down in her crib.

And she woke up.

And I figured that we were at Grandma's and if you can't bend the rules at Grandma's house, where can you?

So I fixed her a big giant cup of soft pebbled ice and sat her on my lap in that fluffy office chair and for an hour we watched home videos courtesy of the Royal Family and Her Majesty The Queen.

And sitting there with a content baby in my lap, two cold beverages in my hands, the glow of a TV screen in a darkened office, and the soft sounds of a British accent, I was transported to the vivid memories of those dark precious nights last year.

#tbt - better to give

If there's one thing my family has always excelled at, it's a good celebration.  Birthdays often became birthweeks and presents multiplied like bunnies underneath the Christmas tree.  One year there was an actual bunny rabbit.

I remember one Christmas sitting behind the gift wrapped fort I had constructed and peering over at the small piles of presents my parents had at their feet.  Compared to our mounds of gifts, my parents always seemed to have maybe five to six or seven on a big gift year.

At first I assumed it was because their gifts were more expensive.  I figured that the Barbie dolls I was opening were just worth less than the presents they got from Santa.  Eventually, I learned more about budgets and the prices of things and I realized that just wasn't the case.  They were getting more expensive surprises but it's not like they were receiving trips to the Bahamas or anything.  Year after year they opened books and CDs and workshirts and ties and the occasional gift certificate for a massage or tickets to a concert.  If there were dollar signs hovering over our gift piles theirs would be much smaller.

I always felt really bad for them and worried that it was the future waiting for me.  I would recount my shiny wrapped presents and gather them in a little closer.  I had heard that it was better to give than to receive but I wasn't completely convinced.

Our family vacations were spent traveling in the loaded up minivan with child friendly destinations like water parks and Disney World while my parents had to forgo the less family friendly cruises and beach trips to Hawaii.

I was less appreciative for their sacrifices than I should have been and more worried that it would someday happen to me.  I felt sorry for all the people who had whiny sniveling kids who required their parents to give up so much.  I thought spending a Saturday at the pool with a bunch of children seemed like a less fun option than sitting poolside with a magazine and a Diet Coke.  I spent a lot of time watching the time on the clock of my life that counted down to the days when I would be the sorry person stuck in the kiddie pool.

Last week we went to the splash pad at City Creek Mall.  We loaded up in a van that had no air conditioning and drove to downtown Salt Lake City in the heat of the day as I felt the first shocks of an oncoming migraine headache.  By the time we stepped into the oven roasted parking garage I thought to myself, "Well at least if I throw up everywhere it's on pavement and not in the car."

Getting out of the parking garage seemed like it would help but the beating sun on my aching head was worse and I felt trapped in a Catch 22 of bad options.  I couldn't get back into that stale hot car but I couldn't stay sitting in the hot sun either.  I looked down at Katelyn and caught sight of that innocent chubby face and precious toothy grin and realized the only option that motherhood allowed.

I had to get over myself for the sake of my baby.

I got up and changed Kate into her swimsuit and watched as Dave led her to the splash pad.  Soon I found myself standing at the edge of the spray watching her intently at first for safety's sake but eventually out of sheer amusement.

I watched as her stocky little legs carried a tubby little tummy and short little arms joltingly around the fountains.  She squealed with delight when the water shot upward and clapped when it rained back down.  With a scientific precision she studied the mechanics of the fountains around her.  She got down on the ground to get a better view and when the water sprayed in her face she reacted by simply blinking the water out of her eyes.  She had decided that further inspection was required so she got even closer and I watched the fearless daredevil spirit she was born with in action.  She spent the hour toddling around and watching the older children with a toddler's awed curiosity.

She was just having so much fun and within a few minutes I realized I was having fun too.  I almost couldn't believe it but if offered a cozy seat in an air conditioned room with a cold Diet Coke and a pedicure I would have turned it down.  (Well if I'm going to be one hundred percent honest and because I really love pedicures I will say that at the very least I would be really conflicted.)

I realized that I was finding a true sense of satisfaction from providing an environment where my baby could sense the contrast of the warm sunshine on her cheeks and the cold spray of water on her legs, where she could smell the unique scent of highly chlorinated water that is so characteristic of happy summer days, where she could feel the squish of wet shoes between her toes and the surprise of a spray of blue water.

I stood there the whole time with sweat running down the inside of my shirt and plastering my hair to my neck having a motherhood epiphany.  This is living, I thought.  This is the living my parents had been enjoying for years and I had pitied them for.  This was the kind of sacrifice that parents everywhere were enjoying everyday and this was why my parents never seemed to dread a Christmas morning where their piles of gifts were so insignificant compared to ours.  This was the exchange of comfort and fun for pure joy and happiness that you make the day that you leave the hospital with a squirming bundle of love and this was the trade that stretches you, pushes you, and ultimately changes you into a stronger, wiser, and better person with a larger capacity to love and care and feel for others.

Suddenly I wished that the hands of the clock could just take a break for a bit and that my senses could be heightened so that I could smell stronger, hear louder, and feel more distinctly this moment.  I wanted to stay standing at the rim of those fountains for another forever with the sun beating on my face and the sweat running down my back and the water streaking my makeup.  I wanted just another hour, another minute, another second to watch someone I love with an intensity I have only known about for the last fifteen months purely enjoying herself.  But that same sun was beating on her back and face and I worried about her sensitive porcelain skin getting burned so I knew that the moment was ending despite my internal pleading.  Once again, I had to sacrifice my wants.

But when I scooped her up and wrapped her in a soft towel to see two big beautiful eyes and a huge joyful smile I knew it was all totally worth it.

#tbt charlie the tuna

I really love tuna fish.

This is obviously not a picture of me eating tuna.  Sorry.  I don't have anything quite that specific.

I have a memory from very early in my childhood of sitting on the beach eating sandy tuna fish sandwiches with my family.  It is a happy memory that always makes me smile and one of the earliest that I can remember clearly.  I'm always reminded of it when I smell tuna.

When I was in elementary school they came out with convenient tuna lunch kits.  In one plastic pouch was a single serving can of tuna, a wooden spoon, mayonnaise, relish, and a cup to mix it in.  The ingenuity of the whole tuna situation blew my mind and I thought they were amazing.  My friends, not so much.  I got teased for the tuna smell so much that I had to ask my mom to stop packing them.  I remember discussing it with her and being so afraid of hurting her feelings.

Then I got a bit older and thought, "You know what?  Too bad if you don't like the smell of tuna.  I'm eating it!"  I triumphantly told my mom that tuna was back on the menu and smiled every time I pulled a tuna pack out of my lunch bag.

Today, Katelyn loves tuna.  It is one of the few foods she will let me spoon feed to her. (She thinks she is all grown up now and throws a fit when I try to feed her.) At least once a week, Katelyn and I sit down together and share a can of tuna.  One small bite for her, two bites for me.

It reminds me of spoon feeding her mashed up bananas almost a year ago and makes me feel like I still have a little baby instead of a grown up toddler. :)

#tbt a happy story

My last "Throwback Thursday" story was kind of sad.  Well, it wasn't just sad.  It was downright depressing.

Today, I thought I'd share a happier memory because for every sad and depressing weight related put down story, I have a thousand other bright and cheerful ones.

This one has to do with my brother Jack.  I was probably in the second or third grade which meant that he couldn't have been much older than five or six.  We were walking down the street to our friends' house and he casually said, "Megan, if you fell down and cracked your head, I would pick up the pieces and bring them home to Mom so she could put them back together again."

It was one of those overwhelmingly kind statements that was so nice that I didn't know what to say so I told him that it was impossible for Mom to glue together broken skull fragments and he shrugged his shoulders and we walked on.

Several years later, I learned that it was indeed possible as Jack was the only family member I had living near me the day that my life felt as though it had been shattered.  I cried to him that I would never be happy again and he helped me pick up the pieces of my broken heart until I returned home to the security of my loving family who glued me back together again.

I guess he's alright.

#tbt just call me shamu

Fat kids don't really know that they are overweight at first.  It's not like they stand in front of the mirror scrutinizing every detail of their appearance thinking to themselves, "I just need to do something about this double chin!"

I don't know.  Maybe they do.  Hopefully things haven't changed that much since I was in elementary school.

I was thin until I hit puberty and a flood of raging hormones hit me like a horde of furious rhinos.  It was at this time that the anxieties really went into full swing as well and I started to gain weight.  I'm telling you, they are connected.

For a fleeting moment, the image of myself I pictured in my mind didn't match up with the reflection in the mirror and I didn't know I was fat.

Kids at school ensured that moment was brief.

Like most my age, I hung around with a pack of kids from my street after school.  We were a strange group of children with a wide range of ages, interests, and hobbies.  But like most groups of kids, there was the neighborhood bully.

My dad recounted the story of a bully he knew as a kid who would taunt his friends and him, trying to lure them into fisticuffs by chanting, "Come on buddy.  Come on."  Ours was a mean blonde kid who terrorized people on his bike and whose sister was even meaner and jumped on my head once after she convinced me to sit underneath their trampoline.

One summery evening a feud had erupted between the boys and the girls and I was somehow drawn into the fracas.  I don't remember at all what the commotion was about but names were being hurled back and forth and I'm sure I got involved.  Finally, the neighborhood bully yelled back at me...

"Shut up you beached whale!"

For a while there I had to think about it.  Whales were pretty cool animals in my book and I had recently traveled to San Antonio to see Shamu at Seaworld.  Why would he call me a whale and what did beached mean anyway?

Then it clicked.

He thought I was fat!

At that moment, my mental self portrait updated to a more current picture and I realized that I was indeed fat.  The mirror in my mind's eye was shattered and I never really looked at myself in the same way again.

To this day I feel sympathy for whales, especially the beached ones.

#tbt mustang

I used to think that everybody had an awkward period in their lives but then I look at pictures from my middle school years and think...

"Hmm...  Maybe it was just me."

I was overweight, with huge round glasses, and wild thick hair that puffed up in the humidity of Houston.  I was a big giant nerd but I didn't yet care enough about my grades to be a smart nerd.  At least in high school I could justify the nerdiness with really good grades.

I desperately wanted to be cool.  I would sit at my geeky end of the lunch table and observe the popular kids trying to decipher what it was that got them a seat at the A table.  At one point, I noticed that all the cool kids ate Teddy Graham crakers with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sliced diagonally.  My mom cut my sandwich is half straight down the middle of the sandwich.  I thought that I had deciphered the algorithm of popularity and quickly rectified the situation by requesting that my mom slice my sandwiches in a different direction.

In the eighth grade I convinced my grandma to buy me an expensive pair of Doc Marten sandals because word on the street was it made you cool.  They were $125 and we made a special trip to the mall just to buy them.  I remember to this day the feeling of shock that washed over me as I watched her hand over her credit card at the Journeys shoe store where they gave out handprint stickers that you collected and stuck on your locker.  Today that feeling would have been shame.

What I really wanted to be was a cheerleader.  I at least had the sense enough to know that it would just never happen but I figured there was one way I had an in.

I could be the mascot.

At Lake Olympia Middle School wer were the Mustangs and the mascot wore a big giant horse head with, get this, a cheerleading outfit.  It was like a scene out of The Godfather but if the giant horse head was what I had to suffer through to get to the cheerleading outfit that would seal my fate as one of the popular kids, so be it.  There was only one other geek trying out for the position so I figured my chances were good.

I was so freaking excited.

I came home expecting the same level of hysteria that I had worked up throughout the school day.  Instead, I found a mother nervously trying to explain to her fat daughter that squeezing into a cheerleading outfit and donning a big giant horse head was a bad idea.

I felt like she had ruined my life or at least my chance to be cool.

I should probably thank her now.