Firsts, Lasts and Inbetweens

I'm not a crier.  Except for the mad years of high school drama, I never have been.  I didn't cry when my oldest child started kindergarten.  Nor did I shed tears when he graduated from elementary and moved on to high school.

But...If I were to be a crier, this would be the year to do it.

2013 holds a frightening number of firsts, lasts and inbetweens.

Firsts: My oldest graduates from high school and Seminary in May.  He leaves for his mission sometime in July or August.  We're taking our first (and probably last) full family vacation to Disneyland in June. We'll spend our first Christmas without a member of our family (but at least we'll get to talk to him!) And for the first time ever, I have no kids in nursery and no kids who I'm counting the hours until their old enough for nursery.

Lasts: Today I went to my last "muffins with mom" with my eighth grader.  This is my last year of having four kids in primary.  In May I will disassemble the crib and assemble the toddler bed for the last time.

Inbetweens: My husband will baptize my fifth child in April.  My third child graduates from elementary school in May and will be old enough to attend the church dances in August.  My youngest daughter enters Young Women's in September.

The lists could go on.  But I'm not teary eyed as I contemplate these events.  Maybe because they are still out there, waiting to happen (except for the muffins.  And I didn't even blink back tears when my eighth grade son voluntarily gave me a hug in the middle of the crowded cafeteria.).

I have a feeling though, that the tears will catch me when I least expect it.  I got a hint of them during my oldest son's last drama performance when they called the seniors out and had them do an extra bow to the audience.  I'm sure my watery eyes as I watched him on stage were merely the result of my allergies and all of the perfume and cologne wafting from the teenage boys and girls.  Who cries at the ending of "Get Smart" anyway?

In the mean time, I'll be sure to keep a supply of tissues handy.

Play Date

Every school day, my three-year old and I walk my five-year old to kindergarten.  By myself, I can complete the trip in two minutes.  Even with just my kindergarten I can make it in under four.  But with my little Loopie Loo, the journey takes close to twenty.

His adventure starts the moment we step out the front door as he pauses to search for dead and dying crickets around our doormat--poor misfortune insects who made the fatal mistake of hopping into the pesticide that protects our house from terrorist scorpions.  After he's pointed out all of the bugs, Loopie Loo bounds down the steps, across the grass and onto the dirt road with its thick, loose dusty covering.  He plops down in a soft pile of dirt, dust billowing around him, and draws one of his two favorite letters--an "x" or a "t" or sometimes, both.

When I finally convince him that he can play in the dirt later, and that we must get his brother to school, he jumps up, his backside covered in a light brown sheen, and runs to catch his brother, who, by this time, is impatiently waiting at the cement bridge that spans the irrigation canal.

I try not to choke on the dust kicked up in his passing.  At the bridge, Loopie again pauses for insects.  This time he stomps around the bridge, squishing any and all giant red ants that come into his line of sight.  His brother helps him, until I insist on holding their hands so we can cross the street.

The second we reach the other side, Loo Loo pulls his hand from mine and runs to check out a hole in the dirt next to the sidewalk.  He steps in it, then continues walking--on the curb, which at his age, with his grace and balance, takes an eternity.  For a brief moment he runs again, just until he's moved across the parking lot to another curb, and starts over with his tight rope act.

At last I take their hands again, we cross in front of the cars dropping off kindergartners and step to the office.  My five-year old says his goodbyes and disappears inside the building.  Time to go home.

But, no.

Loopie wants to wave to his brother at the playground.  So we walk to the fence that surrounds all of the cool playground toys that Loo Loo wishes he was old enough to use; while we wait, Loopie tries to squeeze himself through the slats of the fence.  Only his leg and arm fit.

My kindergartner eventually emerges, drops his backpack and waves at us.  Loo Loo stares after him for a moment before we turn around to walk home.  He slides his hand across the low wall in front of the office, and triumphantly kicks at the traffic cones set up to guide cars picking up and dropping off.  Thankfully, he ignores the curbs, walking contentedly beside me until we are again across the street.

As soon as we reach the rocky dirt, he selects two rocks, one for each hand, before resuming his war against the red ants.  When he has smashed enough ants, he drops to his hands and knees in the small, round stones that top the dirt in front of the bridge.  After he hands me his rocks, he scoots through the pebbles for the three feet that they extend into the dirt road while I cringe at the thought of holes in his pants.

Finally, he climbs back to his feet and runs over to the decorative curb that surrounds our neighbor's landscaping.  Loopie calls it "the snake."  As he walks along it, touching each of the solar accent lights he passes, I pray that he doesn't break anything.

Then, he's mine again, holding my hand (not the one holding his rocks) and telling me about the airplane he sees or the clouds floating by.  We are almost home.  We actually set foot on our grass.  But he asks for his rocks and trots off to drop them in the big hole he discovered in our lawn.  By the end of the school year, it should be filled.

After he plucks a leaf from a weed, Loo Loo runs to catch up with me, insisting that he open the door.  He swings it open; I barely catch it in time to keep it from slamming into the wall and watch as he drops his leaf and settles onto the couch to watch a movie.

I sink into a chair.  Exhausted.  Grateful that it's Wednesday, early release day.  Because it's too early to walk from the school to the mailbox.

That's an entirely different adventure...

NaNoWriMo

I'm sorry, my poor neglected blog, but I'm abandoning you for an entire month.

I shall not visit you, read you, or even think about you.

I have other things to worry about.

That's right.  Tomorrow is November 1st--the beginning of National Novel Writing Month.

For the second year in a row, I've decided to participate in the 30 day madness of writing.  And....I've convinced my husband to join me this year.

Looks like the kids will be busy cleaning, cooking and doing laundry.

Until December...

Day of the Dead

Halloween scares me.

And it has nothing to do with the year my brother jumped from behind a bush when I was walking back to rejoin my husband after taking my toddler son potty.  Although, that was pretty scary.  I nearly peed my pants.

Nor does it relate to the grotesque costumes that abound: Zombies, vampires, people sporting fake (but very realistic) injuries on their bodies.

My fear of Halloween stems from something far scarier.  On October 31, 2006 my husband nearly took his own life.

He hadn't yet been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he had been suffering from depression since late summer.  We'd taken a few trips to a psychiatric emergency room, but at that point we were still waiting to get him in to see someone on a regular basis.  And none of the medications they gave him seemed to be working.  In fact, they were making things worse.

On the night of October 30, my husband and I stayed up late working on his pumpkins for a work contest the next day.  We had purchased a nice little set of carving tools: scoops and various saws and knives.  As we worked, I noticed that my husband kept pausing in his work and examining the implement in his hand.  His eyes had a strange faraway look, and I wondered if, at those moments, he was even aware that I was sitting beside him.

Realizing that my husband was considering how the carving tools could be used for suicide, I quickly counted how many we had and started tracking each one, hoping to prevent him from pocketing any of them.  When the pumpkins were finished, I cleaned up the tools, while my husband protested, insisting that he was fine and he could put things away.

After sending him out of the room, I found a hiding place for the tools and did a quick sweep of the kitchen for anything else that he might find useful.  I had already hidden most things weeks before.  Finally, I was satisfied that he was safe.

I was wrong.

I didn't know about the knife he'd found in the sink before my daughter washed dishes earlier that day.  The knife he had hidden under the cushion of the couch in the living room.

I expected him to be subdued as we prepared for bed, but instead he was oddly cheerful.  When I questioned him about his mood he shrugged his shoulders.  "Tomorrow things will be different."

His answer worried me.  I continued to press him until he finally confessed that he planned to take his life the following day, but he wouldn't tell me how.  I spent nearly an hour reminding him of all the reasons he had to live, of the people that loved him, and how empty our lives would be without him.  Nothing seemed to reach him.

Halloween was the day he'd set as his last day on earth.

To this day, I'm not sure what I said.  But somehow my husband ending up huddled in the corner of our bathroom, crying.  He told me to check under the couch cushion.  I ran out to the living room and found the knife, which I hid.

He insisted on going to work the next day since we had worked so hard on the pumpkins, so I insisted that his father drive him in.  I wanted someone with him at all times.  I picked him up from work and we took the kids out trick or treating.  Then I stayed up with him until after midnight, until the day changed from October 31st to November 1st.

Halloween had passed, and he still lived.

Six years later, my husband's bipolar disorder is controlled, and his moods are failry stable.  But he cycles in the fall, which happens to coincide with Halloween.  And lurking in my mind is the fear that one day he may again decide that Halloween truly is the day of the dead.

Considering Baby Names

My youngest daughter's birthday is next week, and her continual reminders have me reminiscing about how my husband and I decided on her name.

When I was a kid, nothing symbolized summer quite like finding cicada bug skins around our yard--clinging to the gray bricks of our house, slim blades of grass, and the thorny, green Palo Verde branches.  I would grab a sandwich baggie from the house and fill it with all of the skins I could find.  They'd crackle when I picked them, protesting their release from whatever item they clung to.

After several days of carrying my baggie around, the skins became a smashed brown mass that my mother insisted I throw away.  Which I did, right before grabbing another baggie and looking for more skins.

Besides the grumbling roar of thunder during a monsoon, the buzzing of cicadas in the trees has always been my favorite summer sound.

So I told my husband that I wanted to name our baby Secada, if we had a girl (of course I changed the spelling; I'm not that cruel).

I could tell right away that he didn't like the idea.  So we let the matter drop for a while.

We settled on a boy's name months before my due date, but as August crept to a close, my husband still wouldn't agree to name his daughter after a bug.  I tried throwing in his favorite grandmother's middle name for our daughter, but he wouldn't commit.

Until one quiet summer evening.

After putting our three children to bed, we relaxed on the couch to enjoy a few precious moments of peace before pregnancy exhaustion forced me to go to sleep.  As we cuddled, I again approached the problem of a girl's name.

He sighed.  "I don't know."

We sat in silence.  Then we heard a soft rap on the door.  So quiet that we weren't sure we'd heard anything.

We listened...and heard it again, a little louder.

My husband walked to the door and cautiously pulled it open.

A cicada flew inside.

It circled the room before settling on our ceiling fan.

My husband looked from the bug to me and then back at the insect.  He shrugged.  "Okay, we'll name her Secada."

He re-opened the door, and with a flutter of wings, the cicada flew out the door.

Unbelievable, but true.

Even more unbelievable:  my little Secada bug turns 11 on Wednesday.

Longing for some old-fashioned writer's block...

When we were first married, my husband and I lived in a tiny little town on the northern border of Nevada in a small studio apartment.  My husband worked anywhere from 12 to 20 hours a day doing set up for banquets at the local casino, giving me hours and hours to do nothing but write.

I would sit at our table with my word processor (okay, at least it wasn't a typewriter--I'm not that old!) and work on my current project until my lead character managed to get herself into a jam I couldn't get her out of.  Writer's Block.

My word processor was just that--a word processor.  It didn't have any games to distract me from my character's dilemma, no Internet to look up a possible solution.  Just a blinking cursor.

Inevitably, I'd start working on a different writing project.  Usually around chapter nine (I have a lot of unfinished projects from that first year of marriage that all end at chapter nine).  And again, I would write for hours and hours until I ran into another wall.

And then I'd stare at the blinking cursor for hours.

I miss those days.

Now, writer's block is far worse than a brick wall.  It comes in the form of seven demanding children, a house that seems to always need cleaning, and fickle technology that decides to break at the most inopportune times.

My hours of endless writing (or staring) have shrunk to about two hours a day. Around 1 pm, after the cleaning is done and after walking my kindergartner to school. That is, if my three-year old stays with his first movie choice and decides to watch the whole thing.  But most days, I manage a sentence or two before he changes his mind and takes another ten minutes selecting a new movie, or he needs to go potty, or he wants a snack.

Or wants to sit on my lap.

But when I finally get him settled, playing quietly and watching his movie, just when I get rolling on my writing, the garage door bangs open and my teenagers come home.  My overly loquacious teenagers.

They pull the bench up from the table so they can sit beside me as I type, filling me in on every minute of their    
seven or so hours of seminary and school.  After two minutes, I abandon the writing and give them my full attention.

When at last, they turn to their school work, disappearing into the depths of their rooms, the front door swings open and my elementary school children pour through the opening.  Snack, homework, reading with my kindergartner, and sorting through papers occupies my time.

And so goes my two hours of writing.

I love those kids, but sometimes I yearn for some normal writer's block!

Baring the Writer's Soul

Few professions require people to expose themselves the way writers do.  Sometimes, like now, knowing my newest manuscript should have arrived at the publishers for review, I think posing in a skimpy bikini might be easier than allowing someone else to judge my writing.  At least in the bathing suit I would be judged by physical standards, things I can change.  But in my writing...well that's me.  I can't write without infusing part of my soul into the work.

Maybe that's why, as a writer, I find taking criticism to be as easy as eating Brussels sprouts--not only do they taste bad, but they smell bad, too.  When someone likes my writing, that person likes me, because I am part of the writing.  And when they don't like my writing...maybe that's why family members don't make very good critics--they have to live with us after all.

And revisions?  Revising a manuscript is like taking a deep look inward, facing the parts of you that you don't like, and having the courage to cast them aside.  It hurts.

But writers do it.  I do it.

Why?

I'm not sure.  Perhaps it has something to do with holding that novel in my hands, my name across the front.  Or reading that one review that says I did something right.  Whatever that something is, it drives me to keep writing, to keep baring my soul...

And, as I move the mouse to click the "publish" button, to keep wishing I had chosen to model bikinis.