So, where were we?

July has been a wild and crazy ride and now it is nearly over. The kids got their school registration packets in the mail with all the papers to fill out, class schedules, and lists of supplies to buy in the next few weeks. They are kind of excited about school starting again, which is encouraging. I'm not wishing summer away, but it does make that transition back to the school year a lot less dramatic when it's greeted with a skosh of enthusiasm.

We're all back home now after summer trips and nothing else planned for a while. It feels good to plan trips, look forward to them, and then be able to return home to enjoy the memories made.

The past month has been intense and filled with transition, both obvious and subtle. In the coming days, my dear stepmother will be moving to a care center because of the progression of dementia and her body inconveniently giving up some of her motor skills. She's falling more and it's just not safe for her to be in their home. It's not what anyone truly wants, but there it is. My dad and stepsister have given her the gift of being in her home for several months. My dad would say that getting old ain't for sissies. I would say that caring for those who are getting old takes Herculean effort. And a village.

I bought advance Iowa State Fair tickets this week and Dad is coming along. Easing out of 24/7 caregiving into 24/7 free time would be a tough one for me and we're thinking of ways to get together more as we all move into this new place of being family.

Emily wanted to redecorate her bedroom this week while John was away and was motivated enough to clear the room of absolutely everything, including a full dresser, by herself. Of course it is all in my living room at present, but we're nearly finished transforming a little girl's room into a teen girl's room. The flower fairies are long gone and now a vibrant turquoise is taking the place of the pale yellow.


I'm also recognizing that the time I am spending on my own are little test runs for me, easing me into the next several years. My oldest is a sophomore this year and before we know it, we'll be moving him to college. My youngest is starting 7th grade and she will not be far behind. I stayed in a motel by myself for the first time in my life a couple of weeks ago. A small thing, but I find it interesting that individually, and collectively, we are all transitioning toward greater independence in my family.

My church is also going through a long transition searching for pastoral leadership. As the moderator, or president, of our congregation, I've been spending the past month securing us a pastor. I find it interesting that I have hired more pastors in my life than any other "employee." I'm thinking the number is seven for various congregations and positions. I must say that this most recent one is one of my favorites and he hasn't even started yet.

This is the summer when my core sister-friends turn 50. They've been blazing trails through the decades with me since I was 13. They did just about everything before I did. They told me about driving on their own. Their first legal beer. Voting. And all the other things, boys, girls, diplomas, mortgages, and marriages before I did. And they have served me well to show me the way.

It is human nature to fear change. Although, if we were pressed, we wouldn't really want things to stay the same. It is possible to hold opposite emotions and feelings at the same time. That desire we have for our children to have wonderful, fulfilling, and independent lives while holding on to our desire for their daily presence at our kitchen table. The time of having a foot in each place. Of watching a 12 year old going back and forth between girl and young woman.

Several years ago, I would have been terrified and completely overwhelmed by a month like this one. And I freely admit to feeling nervous, but also excited and energized at the possibilities that lie ahead.

If you haven't read Elizabeth Lesser's book, "Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help us Grow," you should. Recognize that all transitions, happy and joyful ones as well as those that are painful, are changes. They may come with feelings of grief. Lesser's book is the handbook you wish you had when you don't quite know what to do when these life changes arise. It's one of those books you pass along to friends.

Lesser writes, "How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and blossom into who we were meant to be."

I know this to be true.

Toweling off from the stress bath

It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon...

While that's another's famous opening line, it's true here, too. The kids and I met my mom and stepdad at Ikea in Minneapolis last Saturday. We had kottbullar (meatballs) and lingon and it did my little Svensk-Americansk heart a lot of good. No, they don't taste anything like Grandma Betty's, but they'll do. We had a browse and then they went their way back to Detroit Lakes and I went my way back to Grinnell. Alone. We'll do this again in a couple of weeks.

Alone? I know, right? A couple of weeks!

Like a kid looking forward to summer vacation, the whole idea of being only responsible for my own self and no one else spreads out in front of me like the toy section from Sears and Roebuck. The potential! The possibilities! I can eat what and when I want to for supper! I can go to bed at 8 if I wanna. I can control the TV remote!

Two days into my amazing vacation, the stress of life starts finding its way out of me. I am exhausted. Monday morning, I can hardly haul myself out of bed. I go into work late morning only to turn around and come right back home to bed and sleep for two hours, awakened only by the phone. I feel numb and beat. Seriously, I don't even want coffee. Referring to my ethnic heritage, coffee is the drink of my people. Russians have vodka, Brits have tea, Swedes drink coffee. Copious amounts. I have no desire for the stuff this week. It's as if my body has said that I am beyond coffee. I need rest, not caffeine.

The last time this happened, I later learned that I was expecting my son John. I can assure you without a doubt that is certainly not the case this time. So what is it?

It's stress. Honestly.

We coast along through life thinking that we got this. It's all good. Make the lists, check the boxes, we got it goin' on, don't we Baby?

But our bodies tell a different story. We are bathing in our own stress hormones and we don't even know it. Have you ever been working toward some goal or event, a date on the calendar and then you end up sick a few days after? When our bodies finally have a chance to let down, the stress comes out.

I miss my kiddos, no doubt about it and I'll be very glad when they come back home. But I also realize that as a single parent I need to particularly aware of this. To do things on my own, to be myself and not always in parent mode. Making time for myself and finding time to be alone is not easy, but hugely important. It's a little trickier than it seems to get used to being alone. I'm an extrovert who needs alone time, but this is a lot of alone time for me. I suspect I'll get the hang of this about two days before they come home.

This is the shape of things to come. With a rising high school sophomore and seventh grader, I have more of this time to look forward to. Perhaps I need to see these weeks on my own as practice for the real thing.

In the meantime, it's time to recognize that my stress levels are far higher than I realize and I need to be taking it seriously. Rest. Exercise. Eating well. Spending evenings with friends and those I love. Reading good books and trashy ones, too. Living life well means being a human being, not a human doing.

Is it time for you to step out of the shower of stress, too?

Tractors, Not Tanks

What a gorgeous day to celebrate Independence Day!

In Grinnell, one can walk through the neighborhoods and know where the parade route is by the lining up of lawn chairs mid-afternoon. Where parties and gatherings welcome passersby with cold drinks, watermelon, and even live jazz in the backyard.

Walking down Broad street, I can "hear" my destination with music on the deck from The Funk Upstairs, a solo sax supported by a combo of drums, bass, rhythm, and keyboard.

It's so Grinnell.

In Iowa, we don't show our independence with a parade of tanks, artillery, and soldiers passing by. It's grannies in flat bed trailers and old boys from the VFW. It's golf carts and vintage cars festooned with red, white, and blue. And the closest thing to armed soldiers are cub scouts with water pistols.

Instead of tanks, we show off the equipment that feeds the world. Tractors both antique and those so new they haven't seen any black Iowa dirt on their tires.

"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."  - Erma Bombeck

Avion de Papel

My view this morning is from my friends' condo on the third floor with a view of the hills northeast of Castro Valley, CA.

We planned our trip around yesterday's comida at Eden UCC. One of my chosen sisters is the pastor at Eden and twice monthly, their congregation distributes food to the neighbors in need. They have things for children to do and the adults have an opportunity to visit with each other. It's a neighborhood event that brings residents together. 

John and Em had fun. They pitched in to help where they could and participated in a music class with the kids from the neighborhood too. Em played ball with the boys who were there with their mothers.

I sat at a table with paper, crayons, markers, and coloring pages. Children came to the table and checked me over. They saw that I was kind of a cool adult because I was coloring, too. It didn't take long for them to warm up and talk with me. The preschoolers wanted to impress me that they knew their colors in English - "yellow", "pink", "purple", their English better than my Spanish.

I'm not sure what made me think of it, but I made a paper airplane for one of the boys. He was so excited. He'd throw it and it would come undone. He'd run back to me and say, "No fly!" I'd fix it and he'd continue. We did this for about a half hour. As the other children saw his paper airplane, they would come to me with the page they had colored, hand it to me and I would make an airplane for them. 

A little girl - close to three years, I would guess, brought me a sheet of paper to have an airplane like the boys did. I made it, she ran to show her mother, and then ran back to me. I knelt down to her and she kissed me on the cheek and whispered, "Gracias." For those of you who know me well, you know the Herculean effort it took for me not to be a blubbering gob of goo at that lovely gesture. 

Seeing 60 families with a group of kids with them collecting food for the week, puts life into perspective. On Monday, our wallets were stolen out of the car where we were parked at a tourist destination. I am temporarily without access to my assets, to my identification, and for me that's just a pain in the behind. I'm not wondering how I am going to feed my family. 

I bonded with a mother who had two little ones. Her older child was simply too cute for words. He was tired and fussy. I came over and brought him paper and two markers and began to draw simple pictures. I drew a house.  "Casa," his mother said. "Gato," his mother said. He giggled and his big black eyes disappeared with his broad smile. He got fussy again and I made him a paper airplane. "Avion," his mother said. "Airplane," I said, and he ran to play with the other boys. 

John said that he was talking to a group of boys. They all saw him as the cool teenager paying attention to them. "I'm from Iowa," he said.

"Can you take the BART there?" asked one of the boys. (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

"Not exactly," John said. "But I did take the BART to come to see you." 

"It is not our differences that divides us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." - Audre Lorde, Poet

The Scent of Coffee and Coppertone

Today's view of the porch is the San Francisco Bay.

Slathered with Coppertone, I walked up and down the parking lot of the hotel looking out at the water and vacation dug a little deeper into my state of mind.

As a parent, it's an extraordinary thing to experience things through your child's eyes. Yesterday, as my daughter took her first plane ride, that she remembers, it was a real kick to see that exhilaration in her, which in turn, had the same effect on me. Perhaps that's why I seem to be just about the giddiest one of the bunch here. The awe of seeing the clouds from the top down for the first time is pretty amazing.

It didn't surprise me that my 15 year old son would be shepherding his girls, young and old, checking the arrival and departures board and hoisting suitcases off the carousel. My 12 year old girl goes between teenager and a cranky little girl when hungry. Our grandma and I are taking it all in through them and giggling more than anything else. Tea time at the Denver airport was a lovely layover break.

In a few hours, we'll meet up with my first college roommate, Barbara. Fate brought us together in 1214 Quadrangle, University of Iowa, 31 years ago. When we've seen each other, it's been in Iowa City at Homecoming. I know that this is the first time, of more, that I will visit them.

In a couple of days, we'll head to the east bay and join my longtime heart sibs for what is also my first visit to them as well.

It's all good.

Cleansing Waters

 

A couple of weekends ago, it rained. A lot. Like nearly seven inches of rain in 12 hours a lot. But it was the two inches that fell in one hour that overwhelmed our community's storm sewer and caused water to come up through the floor drain in hundreds of houses in our town. For some of us, the sump pumps could not keep up, the lift station failed, water came in through the basement window.

I woke up thinking that it had rained a horrendous amount and I had not heard my sump pump. It was about 4 a.m. and I headed to the basement to find water coming in. Shortly after, I heard a fire truck coming up and down all the streets in my neighborhood waking people up and warning them that we were flooding.

It was a helpless thing. I plugged in my sump pump and started bringing up items that were at risk of being ruined. I called my neighbor at about 6 because I knew they were up. Slightly panicked, I asked what I could do and he said that there really wasn't much to do until it stopped. The water was coming up the floor drain, through the foundation and through the basement window. Within an hour, I had two inches of water standing throughout the entire basement.

Exhausted and without something constructive to do, I went back to bed and tried to rest while my sump pump did its thing.

By the afternoon, my 15 year old said something hugely important. "We're really lucky, Mom."

"We are?"

"Yes. We have had nearly seven inches of rain and we don't have any more water in our basement than we do. And it's not sewage. We're lucky."

So very lucky. Our water issues were really just a pain in the behind. We didn't lose any of our appliances or anything of significant or sentimental value.

Perspective is a precious thing. If I can get to the end of my child-rearing days, which are fast approaching, and know that I have instilled in my children the ability and the insatiable desire to see the positive, the good in a situation, then I have given them something truly important. Along with that positive outlook is to recognize that each of us have the freedom to choose how we react to something that is outside of us. Whether that is someone important who has disappointed us, a call that didn't go our way, or an event like a basement flood that we had no way of preventing, it's a whole lot easier go of life if we do not give away our own authority to our feelings. Happiness and joy come from within, as does sadness and despair. We all know those who seem to have that raincloud hanging over their heads when life really isn't treating them poorly at all. They just choose to see it that way.

The trick is finding joy and happiness when the outside world really is rough. Unfortunately, for every person who can see the glass half full, there are many more who see it half empty.

People all over town had an unplanned basement purge of items that were hauled to the curb. Soggy and sodden strips of carpet and pad, cardboard boxes, things that had been contaminated by the flooding and often, sewage. Collectively, we had a community clean up day in a way that none of us wanted.

My kids made hauling damaged items out of the basement a "fun" task. When it was time to bring up the old carpet that had been down since before we moved in, my son put on a classic 60's dance party cassette tape and we danced to "Good Golly Miss Molly", "Mustang Sally", and "Devil With the Blue Dress." We "cut the rug" indeed.

Kids and I are heading out on a vacation tomorrow and it couldn't come at a more opportune time. We're ready for a change of scenery and making memories. Life lessons and milestones deserve reflection and celebration. This time, it's about the steps toward becoming an adult and being a part of something bigger than oneself.

Cable cars, artichokes, and breathtaking views from Highway 1. The bigger the life lessons, the better the celebration, right?

The Day

Several years ago, I noticed that May 17 was an important day in my life.

31 years ago today, I graduated from high school and then got to spend four weeks in Europe on a church trip that made the transition from high school teenager to college freshman. I'm still in touch with many of the others who also made that trip. In fact, one of them is now my banker and we had a great conversation in his bank just yesterday.

Four years later, I graduated from the University of Iowa, like my uncle and grandfather before me. I sat at graduation with Jay, a friend I met on my very first day on campus.

I went on a first date on May 17 with the guy I married. Vietnamese food and a walk around the Old Market. Five years later, we had our wedding rehearsal dinner on May 17.

Seventeen years ago tomorrow, I got married. A hot day with armloads of peonies. Lots of promise for a long and happy life.

And then there was the May 17 when I was overwhelmed at Ron's funeral. He will always be 35. In the midst of that grief, my toddler son took his first steps across Grandma's deck.

So, here I am at May 17 again.

In my wildest dreams, I could never have envisioned where I would be today and what my life would look like.

I had an amazing time catching up last June with the class of 1982. I will see my college roommate in just a few short weeks in California. And no one gets married thinking that they are going to be the couple that doesn't beat the odds and ends up divorced.

In 1996, I could not have known that I'd be working at an incredible job that is rarely the same everyday, with extraordinary people I truly love. I would have been shocked that I would find myself a single mom doing double duty with two amazing kids. So many of my friends in Grinnell are people I've only known since I moved here seven years ago and my life is so much richer for it.  The new people in my life, those I have reconnected with, and solid friends who have been hugely important to me all along are my foundation.

May 17 is now known as The Day. I feel a little like Caesar on March 15, visited by spirits and whispers of, "Beware!" All the memories of The Day surround me and it's always good. Today, I will honor The Day with self care and a 60 minute end-of-the-day massage, a lot of reflection, maybe a little crystal ball gazing, all most certainly with complete gratitude.