What is Adulthood Really About?

I am a person who, much to the annoyance of my children, loves Facebook and Pinterest. You are probably familiar with Facebook, but if you aren't familiar with Pinterest, you should be. One popular part of both sites is the abundance of clever, inspirational, offensive, ridiculous, and downright hilarious quotes that get posted and reposted regularly. One of my favorite ridiculous quotes is "repost if you love your grandma. If you don't then you hate her." The truly ridiculous part of that is the fact that it actually gets reposted! I am guilty of reposting all kinds of (hopefully not offensive) quotes such as, "I don't know Karate, but I do know 'crazy' and I'm not afraid to use it."
There are literally hundreds that have made me laugh, cringe, or go "hmmm." A while back my niece reposted one that said "Adulthood is mostly about being tired and wishing you hadn't made plans." When I read that I felt like Peppermint Patty when she knocked Schroeder away from his piano when she yelled "That's it!" At this stage in my life I have found myself not only tired all the time but napping on a regular basis. They usually aren't planned naps either. They they can occur at any time that I am lying on the couch, which is usually after dinner. Several years back I even made a 'no more than one night of plans per week' rule. More than one night a week of activity just makes me more tired. I love going out with Tom or friends. I really love watching the kids performances or athletics. When I do make plans,I get really excited about whatever it is I'm doing but when the time comes I think "Why did I agree to this? I'm just so dang tired!" Most of the time I convince myself that I need to get out of the house and have some fun with friends or family. Rarely do I cancel.  I do however, find myself in full on yawning around 8:30 PM. I sometimes find myself with an inner-conflict. I love to socialize and hate feeling like I'm missing "the fun" but when I get invited to join the fun I excitedly accept then, like the quote says, wish I hadn't made plans. I guess if that is what adulthood mostly is, then I've nailed it. That and another catchy quote "Now that I've wasted an hour on Facebook, Ill just pop over to Pinterest and make an evening of it."

You're Gonna Miss This

Well, it happened again.No matter how hard I try to control myself, I fail. It doesn't matter if I am driving home from work, riding on the back of the motorcycle, or jogging with my iPod. If I hear "You're Gonna Miss This" byTrace Adkins or "It Won't be Like This for Long" by Darius Rucker, I end up in tears, especially if I try to sing along. When my kids were young and I was in the throws of terrible twos or spending entire Saturdays at wrestling tournaments full of screaming kids, I didn't feel like I was "gonna miss this." Sometimes I feel bad that I didn't cherish every moment with my kids when they were young. More than once I stood at the check out line with a screaming child and a cart full of groceries thinking "Just take me now Lord" rather than "It won't be like this for long." I don't beat myself up over it. That's just the way parenting goes. When we are there, we don't always say "Hey, I'm gonna miss this." But something happens to me when I hear certain lines in those songs. I'm taken back to dropping a crying child off at daycare and an angry teenager telling me that I have no idea how he feels. But the line that really gets me every time I hear it is in the Trace Adkins song where the mom is apologizing to the plumber for her screaming kids and he says something like, "I have two babies of my own...ones twenty-six, ones twenty-three." I literally choke on the words every single time I try to sing them. In fact, I have a lump in my throat as I type this. My kids aren't out of the house yet, but they are independent young men who don't depend on me for much of anything anymore. I look at the pictures of them as little boys and wonder why it went by so fast. I hear screaming kids in the store and look at another middle aged mom and we smile at each other because we too had been there. The other night Tom and I were driving in the rain to watch Sammy play football. I was grumbling about having to sit in the stands and be cold and wet for two hours. And suddenly I remembered that it's his junior year. After next fall there won't be anymore football games, rain or shine. And I'm gonna miss this.

Adventures in Veganism

After reading the title you are probably thinking one of two things, "Well it's about time she came to her senses! Hopefully she will convince others to go vegan." or "Has she lost her mind? Now she's going to try and get us to give up meat!" Actually it's neither of those. I haven't joined PETA and I'm not going to change the world, one carrot at a time. At the recommendation of my doctor I picked up a book by Rip Esselstyn called "The Engine 2 Diet." Rip is a firefighter/world-class triathlete who is introducing others to the vegan lifestyle (which he calls a plant-based diet) and basically has a 28 day challenge, hoping that that the end of the 28 days you will be so much healthier that you will never call a cow "dinner" again. I honestly have never had any interest whatsoever in becoming a vegetarian of any degree. I love meat, poultry, and cheese so much that I don't see any reason to let them go. Besides, I live with 3 staunch carnivores who are definitely not going to join me in any diet altering experiment and have made that quite clear. However, in the interest of getting my digestive system in proper working order, I could do it for 28 days, or so I thought. I read the book and thought "hmm this won't be so bad." Well, I'm here to tell you, it's a lot harder than you might think. I decided to give up dairy first and enjoyed a delicious veggie sub, sans cheese for dinner that night. Wow! this won't be that hard. But the next morning I blew it when I had to put milk in my coffee because I had nothing to replace it with. The next thing to go was meat. That first day went pretty well until Tom made these amazing chicken wings that I couldn't resist. I felt a little weak trying to survive on just fruit & vegetables for lunch so I added eggs back into my diet. I'm getting better at making food choices, but still have some trip ups. One day while waiting for my veggie pita at Roast & Toast I munched on some cheese popcorn. Halfway through the bag I asked Tom if powdered cheese on popcorn would count as dairy. Dang. After a few weeks I am adjusting to my new life without foods that I once thought I couldn't live without. While I have still have no desire to learn to cook with tofu or watch as my family devours a Thanksgiving dinner without me, for now I will make a go of it, expecting a few moments of weakness now and then. I think I may be more of an egg-eating vegetarian who enjoys the occasional bag of cheesy popcorn. And no, I won't try and convince you to join me.

This is Only a Test

*This is an extra column that I chose not to have published.
This past December I completed a Masters Degree program and now proudly have an MA  as part of my professional designation. In order for me to receive an endorsement through the state of Michigan in the area of which I hold my degree, I am required to take an exam. Why the state can't accept my diploma and 3.96 GPA as proof that I actually learned what the university expected me to learn, is a good question. I suspect that it has something to do with the fee I was required to pay. Regardless, somewhere along the line the testing became a standard part of teacher certification. So I paid my $57 or so dollars and registered for the test. When I got my testing information I read a laundry list of testing rules that made me wonder if I would be getting top secret government clearance along with my endorsement. For example, if we brought a water bottle it had to be clear with no label. Wow! Cheaters must be incredibly sophisticated these days! Were they able to create floating crib notes with alphabet soup noodles? When I got to the testing facility we were herded down a narrow, winding hallway into two rooms. We had to provide tickets and photo ID. After my purse was confiscated I jokingly told the woman sitting beside me that we would be asked to show our forearms and the soles of our feet next. Before we took the test we had to provide thumbprints and copy a sentence stating that we were in fact who we said we were. "Good grief!" I thought "I think my son had an easier time getting his passport!" All of that for a 100 multiple-choice question test. By the time all of the formalities were completed and we were directed to begin, I was so nervous that I might have accidentally come in with a stray MP3 in my purse (which would void my score) that I think I forgot half of what I went there to be tested on in the first place. Do I think tests are important? As an educator, of course I do. Do I think the testing craze has gotten a little bit out of hand? You bet. I had to wonder as I looked around that room if there was someone desperate enough to attempt to cheat. Maybe. Or maybe it's just a reflection on the state of morality in our society. Call me old fashioned, but I hold on to the notion that the majority of people would never dream of it because like their diploma verifies, they learned what they were supposed to and were able to prove it.

Explaining Those Random Injuries Takes Imagination

The other day I woke up as I usually do, except something was different about my knee. I started down the stairs and thought it kind of hurt and felt a little swollen. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I had done. It wasn't like I had some glamorous accident playing beach volleyball. I just woke up like that. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's not like I don't have a history of random bumps or bruises that have mysteriously appeared. In fact, I have so many I have contemplated writing down each time I run into something so that I can attach an explanation to the bruise or scrape that suddenly shows up somewhere on my body. Last winter I woke up with my hand hurting so badly that I could barely move it. I vaguely remembered falling into the house (I remember that one because the mishap was witnessed by my husband) a week or so earlier. Then I ripped up old carpeting and removed thousands of carpet tacks, but how could that cause such pain resulting in a wrist splint for two weeks? Unfortunately, there was no exciting story to go along with it. People would ask what happened and I'd embarrassingly respond, "Well, nothing. Nothing happened." After a day or so of this I jazzed it up a bit by saying "I fell." What I should have done was to add, "...down a long flight of stairs while I was chasing an armed fugitive!"  Maybe the bruise stories need a little embellishment too. "That bruise? I got that one from a rough landing when I was skydiving over the weekend...um...in Tahoe." Maybe I could explain the cut on my hand by saying I was whipping up a gourmet meal with Rachel Ray.  As I imagined the weird feeling in my knee getting worse for no apparent reason, I could envision people asking me what happened and me saying, "I don't know.  I just woke up like that one day." Which would be just as embarrassing as the wrist injury. I don't know why I worry about explaining unexplained injuries to people. Maybe it's because I lead a pretty uneventful life, or maybe it's because I just feel old. It's just another quirk in my life that I'm learning to get used to. So if you are wondering what happened to my knee, it happened when I was water skiing, no, slalom skiing, no, barefoot skiing! Oh who am I kidding? It's like all of my other injuries...I have no idea.

Middle Aged Senior Moments

In the past I have been known to jokingly accuse friends and family members of having "senior moments." If you aren't familiar with the term a senior moment it is like accusing a person of having momentary dementia. When I was younger I would walk into a room and completely forget why I was there. At that time it was something to chuckle to myself about and chalk it up to having a lot going on. However, at 45, the term "senior moment" takes on a whole new meaning. It's like saying "Hey everyone! I'm getting old!" Recently Tom and I want to a craft show in Charlevoix where I purchased a bottle of syrup. I carried it around with me for what I assumed was the whole time. Later that evening at home I decided to make some granola with my syrup. But there wasn't any. I checked the saddle bags on the bike. No syrup. I asked Tom and he said he hadn't seen it. In fact I figured I had given it to him. Nope. I honestly had no recollection of what could have happened to it. The jug was in my hand and then it wasn't. It's like I had a  blackout. Frustrated, we returned to the two places I could possibly have set it down. I was really upset and a honestly the thought of early onset dementia crossed my mind. We always used to laugh and make jokes about my grandma's failing memory. She even got a T-shirt for her birthday that said "Now that I have it all organized I forgot where I put it." We joked about her forgetfulness until we found out she actually had dementia. I know I don't really have dementia. But it's interesting how things in life turn from funny to concerning once middle age hits. The other day I asked Tom if he called a friend of ours to which he responded, "Really?"
I said "Did I just ask you that?"
 "Yup" he responded.
"Did you answer me?"
"Yes."
"What did you say?"
"I said no."
I guess I could blame it on being a busy working mom who has a lot to think about, only its summer vacation with one kid gone and the other one self-sufficient. The fact of the matter is that it happens to everyone. Its just a part of life. Even though I know there will come a time when I need to be concerned about my failing memory, for the time being I will make more lists and laugh as I admit that I must be having another one of those pesky senior moments.

Why I Wear Grey in May

Sometime last fall I was on my way to work and I thought to myself, "Hey-I'm not sad anymore!" That seems kind of random, but I will explain. I've had a pretty uneventful life, relatively devoid of tragedy or out of the ordinary loss. But from January of 2010 until the summer of 2012, I pretty much got hit all at once. It started with my mother-in-laws cancer diagnosis and her passing, then the passing of my grandmother one month later, then the return of my brother Vern's brain cancer and his passing the next April, followed by a few more family losses mixed together with two very stressful years at work. An unshakeable sadness seemed to envelop me. I think the technical term is "situational depression." For some reason, in America, we feel it necessary to recognize what I call "death anniversaries." I really don't know why we do that. It seems to just dredge up that loss and bring back the pain. After the first year's  "anniversaries" of my mother-in-law and then Vern I did two things. The first thing was that I made a conscious decision; no more death anniversaries. Tom and I were watching Joel Osteen on TV and he said an interesting thing. He doesn't visit his dad's grave because that reminds him of the loss and accompanying sadness. He celebrates the happiness and good memories through photos and things like birthdays. That made a lot of sense to me. It wasn't easy letting those days go by unrecognized, but I did it. The second thing I did was to get proactive. I found out that May is Brain Cancer Awareness Month. So for the past two years I have gotten on Facebook and rallied my friends and family to wear grey. Then I paint my toenails grey and keep them that way the whole month. I went online and found out that November is Neoendocrine Cancer Awareness Month (the cancer that took Tom's Mom) and told him that we would be bringing awareness then too. Both types of cancer are rare and aggressive. To me, bringing awareness to these two causes makes me feel like I am doing something good that honors the memory of two people that were very special to me. I know I could wear rainbows every month, but I can't help but feel that once I made the decision to focus on the positive, that feeling of heaviness in my heart that I carried around lifted. And I wasn't sad anymore.