The English Geek

Desert Dessert

Yesterday before church I made a coconut cake. I haven’t made this cake for a long time—five or six years. But as my thoughts are full of summer (I am trying to plan some fun but close-to-home adventures for the warm months) I made it as a way of embracing summer.

Which is probably a strange thing to say about a cake. But this one? This one is July in a bundt pan. "What does it taste like?" Kaleb asked me while he watched me chopping the pecans. "It tastes like summer," I told him. He was already looking at me with doubt, as anything with nuts in it is highly questionable to him, but that answer sent him, shaking his head, right out of the kitchen.

But it does—taste like summer. For nearly all of my growing-up years, from the time I was six and deemed old enough to go until the summer I was 19 and dating Kendell, we went to Lake Powell with a group of my parents’ friends. Getting up early to water ski on the glass-smooth water, meandering through the serpentine canyons in our battered yellow boat, eating lunch in the overhanging bowl of a sandstone cliff. Cliff jumping, or exploring sandy hillsides, or making the trek to Rainbow Bridge (in the years when you could walk a trail right up to it or could swim underneath it): didn’t matter what we did, it was just being there, in that place, a wellspring in the desert.

It is one of my most favorite places on the earth.

Food played an enormous part of these trips. Everyone took a turn preparing dinner for the entire group, and as each of the mothers had a slightly-competitive streak, the meals tended to run towards the gourmet. Which means we had plenty of delicious meals eaten from paper plates with a sandy beach as a table.

But nothing tasted as good as the coconut cake. It’s a dense cake, richly textured, with flavor that rolls across your tongue in waves. But kept tightly covered and slightly warm in the desert heat, it grew more moist and tender as the days passed, the flavor more concentrated and intoxicating.

Until it was gone.

Now when I eat it I get a little bit lonesome. I wish the cake had just the slightest grit of sand (that fine red sandstone sand of the southwest). I take a bite and I am there, eating dessert in the desert with my toes in water that seems to barely hold on to even being water, it’s so close to evaporating. My summer friends around me, my sisters teasing, my dad striding around the sandstone in cowboy boots and his swimming trunks. There—but only almost. And I know I could go back. Jake, in fact, is going there this summer with his scout troop. But I can’t really go back. The boat was sold a decade ago. My friends are grown. My dad is gone. (Lake Powell wouldn’t be Lake Powell without him.) Only the cake would be the same. So I eat a slice, and I remember, and it doesn’t have any sandy grit but I do swallow its buttery richness around a salty lump in my throat.

Coconut Cake
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 cup oil
2 1/2 tsp coconut flavoring
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
3 cups flour
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup coconut
1 cup finely chopped pecans
1 batch sugar syrup

Chop the pecans. Heat oven to 325. Prepare a bundt pan by buttering it thoroughly and then coating it lightly with sugar. Beat eggs until thick and frothy, about 4 minutes; slowly add sugar and beat until it dissolves. Add oil and coconut flavoring. In a separate bowl, mix flour, salt, and baking powder. Add to the mixture, alternating with the buttermilk, starting and ending with the flour. Stir in the pecans and the coconut. Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

About 10 minutes before the cake is done, make the sugar syrup:

Dissolve 1 cup sugar in ½ cup water. Add 2 tablespoons of butter and bring to a boil; boil gently for five minutes. Remove from heat, then add 2 teaspoons of coconut flavoring. Pour slowly over the hot cake when it comes out of the oven, allowing it to seep into cracks and down the sides of the cake. Leave in pan for 3-4 hours to allow the syrup to be absorbed.

on being a Working Mother

There has been much political uproar lately about a comment made by someone named Hilary Rosen about Ann Romney. (You can read more about it HERE if you want.) As I am thoroughly sick of politics and find, frankly, that both sides (Democrat and  Republican) come across hollow, the fact that I am blogging about this at all speaks volumes to how it impacted me.

Ms. Rosen stated that Ms. Romney (who has been a stay-at-home mom) has "never actually worked a day in her life," and that as such she is unable to offer her husband advice about women's economic issues.

This idea both offended me and, I confess, made me nod my head just a little bit in agreement. But first I have to explain why.

While I always yearned to be a stay-at-home mom, I never actually managed to do so for very long. I went back to work eight weeks after Haley was born because at that point we still needed my income to cover our bills. But a few months later, Kendell switched departments and got a raise, and I was laid off and got a severance package, both of which combined to mean that I could choose, finally, to stay at home with my sweet baby girl.

Which I did until May, just after she turned one. You see, being laid off meant I could qualify for a job-retraining grant. I could go back to school and it would be paid for. And as much as I longed to be a stay-at-home mom, I also still wanted to accomplish my long-held goal of graduating from college. Did being a student and not working at a job mean I was a stay-at-home mom? Only sort of. I found an in-home daycare where Haley was happy while I went to my classes during the day. I scheduled them as tightly as possible so that I could be at home as much as possible. Nearly all my homework I did in the late evenings after she went to bed.

During the 2 1/2 years it took me to finish my degree, I got pregnant with Jake, had him, took a semester off, went back for my last year, and got pregnant with Nathan during my last semester (you know...the one I took 21 credits so I could finish before my grant ended). I tried not to ask anyone for help, not my husband or my mom or my sisters or my friends. After all, I had chosen to work on my degree. I had a gut-deep certainty that we would all be glad I was doing it and blessed by my efforts, but I also did it because *I* wanted to learn. By the time I was done, I was proud—but tired. Tired of juggling. Tired of late nights. Tired of having to say "maybe tomorrow" because I had to balance taking care of the house and the laundry and the meals with my children's needs and my homework.

I was so, so happy to be a stay-at-home mom! I loved everything about it, even the six-week stretch of chicken pox just before Christmas.

Except, my happiness only lasted for about 18 months, because just before Nathan turned one our world got dumped upside down when Kendell was laid off. During the next 15 months, I was still a stay-at-home mom. But those were dark, dark days and finally, when I was simply too desperate to keep going along like we were, I decided to go back to school so I could get my teaching certificate.

I think I bawled on the drive to school every day for an entire month.

And it was even worse for me when I started teaching. In my heart of hearts, what I wanted the most was to stay at home with my little ones. What my life was forcing me to do was to leave them in order to provide for them. It made me bitter and sad and confused. All of my other friends, whose husbands had never been laid off, got to continue being stay-at-home moms. They also did things like go shopping together for new boots, or get their hair colored, or buy new purses.

It didn't seem fair.

One night during the first year I was teaching, I was riding back home with three of these friends after we had all played Bunco together. Somehow the talk turned to the fact that schools in places with higher incomes are much better equipped than schools in places with lower incomes. To me, this seemed patently wrong. Why should a person's income affect his or her education? Shouldn't everyone be given the same educational opportunities when we have a publically funded education system?

No! one of my friends emphatically said. People with large incomes have lots of money because of the choices they made. They chose to get educations and careers in high-paying industries, but those with lower incomes? Well, that was their fault based, also, on the choices they made. The lower-income kids didn't deserve as high-quality of schools as the high-income kids because of the choices their parents made. And, of course, because the higher-income adults paid more taxes, their children deserved a better education and seriously: if the poor people would just stop having so many kids, they'd be better off anyway.

As you can imagine, this discussion sent me for a tailspin. There I was, working as hard as I could to provide for my kids and to educate some of those high-income kids. Choosing to do so. But what I wanted to chose was something completely different. I still wanted to choose to be a stay-at-home mom, but I couldn't.

(I dropped out of that Bunco group a couple of weeks later. It was just too hard to continue feeling like the group's token white trash member.)

I continue to think a lot about choice since that night, and how it influenced who I became. If Kendell had chosen a different career, we would have different financial opportunities. If I had chosen a different degree, I could make much more money than I do as a teacher or a librarian. If I had chosen to just have one or two kids, they would have different options as well.

But that is assuming that everything in my life was a choice, and while I think I have been fairly blessed with opportunities, I know other people are not. What if my parents hadn't prized education and good grades? What if I hadn't had that talk one random Saturday afternoon with my dad, who was a steel worker with a high school diploma, about how badly he hoped I'd go to college? What if I hadn't made the choices I did to turn my messed-up life around?

And this is why I am taking the sides of both Hilary and Ann. On the one hand, Hilary is an idiot if she thinks that being a stay-at-home mom isn't work. It is. It is hard to have small children as your constant companions. As much as I loved it, I also can't sugar-coat its difficulties. It is, I believe, a selfless choice, if  you have the financial means to make it. And to say that a woman who is a stay-at-home mom is unable to learn about financial and economic issues is just downright condescending. Just because a woman doesn't have a career doesn't automatically mean that she isn't able to study, learn, and devise solutions.

On the other hand, Hilary is sort-of right about Ann. Not in the working department, but in the real-life department. She's been blessed with a husband who, through his choices and his opportunities, has always been wealthy. She hasn't felt how it feels to drive away leaving your tiny baby in someone else's care. She hasn't cried out to God asking him why he wouldn't give her that one righteous desire of her heart. She hasn't stood by in bitterness while it seemed everyone else was given the one thing she most desperately wanted. Well, that and expensive boots and fancy haircuts and more purses than one woman could logically ever need.

She might be able to have knowledge about the economic plights of women. She might sympathize with them. But Ann Romney will never be able to have empathy for them and that is, I think, what Hilary Rosen is getting at.

Of course, the more basic problem is this: when we spend time Twitter-bashing each other over our life choices and situations, we are wasting time at finding a real solution. It is also in the assumption that one side or the other (how old is the stay-at-home mom vs. work-outside-the-home mom battle anyway?) has all the answers. We all have to figure it out together, if it really even is possible to figure it out at all. We don't live in a perfect world and nothing is ever going to be completely fair. But drawing lines and taking sides and being rude to each other simply fails every single one of us women. And the generations that will coome after us.

Two of the World's Saddest Words:

"Store Closing."

(OK, of course there are plenty of words that are sadder than those. But when the store you're talking about is one of your favorites, it's still pretty sad.)

Lately it seems like all of my familiar ways of shopping are being forced to change because of the economy. Take scrapbooking. Since my favorite crafty store, Roberts, closed down, I'm sort of despondent. I don't like shopping online for scrapping supplies since I can't really know what an item's real feel is by seeing it online. (Plus: shipping.) Plus it just feels wrong, somehow, to pay full price. I've done it a couple of times at Archiver's and then I feel guilty and get a stomach ache. So most of the new stuff that's out right now? Totally not ending up in my stash or on my layouts. Mostly that is OK because really, I have a lot of stuff.

But I still miss shopping at Roberts. I feel awkward about my shopping options. Awkward and unnatural, somehow. My normal MO has been interrupted.

And call me a snob (you won't be the first), but when I read that one of my other favorite (non-scrapping-supply) stores was leaving my local mall? Cue awkward, unnatural shopping feelings. Yes: I have been called a snob because Nordstrom was one of my favorite places to shop. Mostly this accusation doesn't bother me because A---I know I'm really not a snob and B---I didn't shop in the super-expensive sections. Just the Brass Plum and Point of View, and always during sales.

It's my mother's fault, really. She took me there for back-to-school shopping for as long as I can remember. Every July, we'd go to the Nordstrom at Crossroads Plaza in downtown Salt Lake because that was the only Nordstrom in Utah. We'd pick out our school clothes during the anniversary sale, and then put them all on lay-away, and then we'd go to dinner at the Spaghetti Factory. A few months later, we'd come back up and get everything out of lay-away and start wearing it the next day. It was one of my favorite childhood and teenage experiences. And! Who can forget how it felt to see a few of those iconic Nordstrom boxes, the silver kind with a wide band slipped around its width, under the Christmas tree? Wondering if you were the lucky recipient of the Nordstrom box (even though it didn't always hold something from Nordstrom) was some of the best Christmas anticipation ever!

When, in 2002-ish, Nordstrom came to my local mall, I was so happy. I could just, you know, stop by. Just stop by Nordstrom! Squee! And really: I don't love Nordstrom because I'm snobby. I love it for the things it makes me remember and because I can always find something there that works for me. Haley fell in love with the store, too. So we'd go together whenever we could. Sometimes I could even shop in the same department as her. There was my infamous Nordstrom Meltdown . I bought Christmas gifts and birthday gifts and random I-need-a-new-shirt shirts there. I got friendly with some of the staff and Haley made the Fashion Board. We bought her homecoming dress there (for a smokin' deal, I might add!) and I shopped there this Christmas without melting down once. And then they dropped the bomb: because our county is not full of "high end retail shoppers," Nordstrom left.

Sadness.

And again, I'm full of that awkward feeling. Right now, for example, I need some new spring shirts. I don't know what I wore last year, but this spring I just don't have anything. But can I find any tops I like? No. Everything's flouncy and flowery and has great big sleeves which I feel uncomfortable in. And I just wish I could shop at my Nordstrom. And yes: I could drive to Salt Lake. It's not that big of a deal. But I sort of feel...abandoned, I suppose, by my favorite store. All that criticism I took for being a Nordstrom snob but the store itself doesn't think I'm high-end-retail enough to stick around.

So now I'm just discouraged. Discouraged and hot because I'm still wearing my winter clothes. To cheer myself up, today on my lunch break I decided to run into my only remaining local scrapbook store, Pebbles in my Pocket. I've shopped there since Chris told me about it back in 1995. And I discovered that Pebbles had moved. The store is still in the same building (a small white old house), but now they are just in the basement. The selection is much smaller. It's a little bit depressing to shop in the basement. And it smacks of The End. Is Pebbles going to close down, too?

I don't know. I just know I'm all sorts of bewildered over my recent shopping options. And I'm hoping nothing else goes away. Like...what if my Target closed? Or my local Costco? Or the place I get my photos printed? What about Runner's Corner where I buy my running shoes or the Cotton Shop where I get flannel for baby quilts? It almost seems like all that will be left is a landscape of Walmarts, and at that point? At that point you can just check me into the mental institution because a world of Walmarts is not one I'll ever want to live in.

Yep, I'm sticking to it: "Store Closing" is a sad, sad statement. Even if it's followed by the word "clearance." (Nordstrom, big snobby snobs that they are, didn't even have a store-closing sale.) I'd rather have the store than the going-out-of-business sale, wouldn't you?

{40} Series: in my 30's

"The first forty years of life give us the text," Schopenhauer said, "the next thirty supply the commentary."

And it's apparently widely known that life begins at forty, an idea that started to circulate in the early 1900s when life expectancy started to lengthen.

And, speaking of how medical improvements and mental attitudes have shifted, the New York Times said "All our age benchmarks, which used to seem solid as rocks, have turned into shifting sands. 'Life begins at 40?' More like 60."

Deep breath.

I'm trying to not let myself obsess over the fact that in less than a month, I'll leave my thirties behind forever. Yet, despite the euphemisms, that number---40---seems so, well, strange. In an effort to both commemorate this milestone and to get myself accustomed to the number 40, I'm going to do a little 40 Series on my blog over the next few weeks. Not daily or even with any regularity, but 40 is going to pop up here and there.

I'm starting with this, the list of forty memorable things I experienced during my 30's:

1 baby

(I think I need an "awwwww" here)

1 marathon

1 just-beaches California trip

1 trip to San Diego

1 pioneer trek

1 Ragnar

1 real (read: paid) writing opportunity, the 4-year-long stint I had of writing for the now (sadly) defunct Simple Scrapbooks magazine

1 broken nativity piece

1 beloved kitty lost

2 funerals of close family members (my dad and Kendell’s)

2 trips to Disneyland

2 years of teaching high school

(One of the few photos I have of my classroom. This was the weekend before school started and I still needed to finish my displays)

2 trips out of the country (Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and Niagara Falls, Canada)

3 years (just a month shy of 4) working as a librarian

4 classes developed and taught at Big Picture Classes (My Word, The Gift of Words, Write Now, and Textuality)

4.5 "Marathons" (which is my modified way of counting my 9 half  marathons so that I have room to include more stuff)

5.5 summits of Mount Timpanogos (.5 for the time we tried to make it to the top but didn't)

6 national parks visited: Arches (twice), Zion, Bryce (twice), Capitol Reef, Yellowstone, Grand Teton

(That is Arches)

Stuff I didn't count: a bajillion scrapbook layouts, countless pages read in books, roughly 25 quilts, 5 1/2 years of blogging, plenty of church callings (Relief Society teacher—my favorite; Sunday school teacher to the teenagers—my longest; Primary—my newest), dozens and dozens of pairs of pajamas and 5 or 6 Halloween costumes sewn, 40,000 photos taken, 35-ish birthday dinners, 1 skipped high school reunion, an entire decade of being a mom and a wife and a sister and a friend and hopefully a good person.

Looking at it that way makes me feel hopeful: what numbers will the decade of my 40's bring?

Moving Forward by Looking Backward

Thank you for your comments and emails about this post. I'm really trying to push forward and to find my way.

Yesterday I was reading my friend Monika's blog and saw this image from a mini scrapbook she made:

I thought about this all day yesterday...during my long run and my long, hot shower and while I was making dinner (chicken pot pie) and even while I was watching The Hunger Games with Haley. Because, you know...I'm 39. And in less than a month I will turn 40. Even though I believe in the idea that you're only as old as you let yourself feel (one reason I run: to run away from getting old), turning 40 feels like a marker. In my thirties I felt like I still had time to change my life and accomplish my dreams. Will it still feel that way when I am in my forties?

I don't know.

Monika's little page made me think: where was I ten years ago? What did that version of myself hope for? Some of the same things I hope for now, but some of my hopes have been fulfilled. What would the almost-30-year-old Amy thing of this almost-40-year-old one? (I think she'd be pleasantly surprised at some things, disappointed in others.) It made me want to look back. Some of the things that defined me ten years ago (March of 2002):

• I was attending college to work on my second bachelor's degree, this time in Secondary Ed. I was bitter and sad about this development in my life because all I really wanted to do was stay home with my three little ones and have one more. But I did learn so much about myself during that time, stuff I never would have figured out or put to rest any other way. Plus I made friends with the other old and bitter Secondary Ed student, Hayley.
• Kendell had just be rehired at Novell and was working the graveyard shift in customer support. This was a tough time for him because A---customer support really stinks and B---graveyard shift. He'd get home at 6:00 in the morning, wake me up, and we'd watch one TV show together before he went to sleep.
• I loved the TV show Alias and I never missed an episode of ER.
• Haley was only six and in first grade. She was a cheery, outgoing little person who loved her first grade teacher with all the devotion a first-grader can muster. (He was an awful teacher and only lasted one year and taught them almost nothing; the only good thing to come out of that year of school was the fact that the majority of their time was spent on writing stories, which I think contributed to her current love of reading.)
• Jake was four. His preschool teacher was named Mrs. Pope and she loved him so much. I still see her every once in awhile and she always knows who I am and asks about Jake. No one could NOT love Jake at four years old. Oh my, he was sweet. He was happy and laughed all the time and the thing he loved the most was being outside with his friends playing Bad Guys. He had to go to daycare for a few hours while I was in class and he hated it.
• Nathan was two. He loved daycare so much he'd sometimes cry when I came to pick him up. He was still so little! He had the softest whitest hair you can imagine—like corn silk. Toss in his bright blue eyes and his chubby cheeks and oh, my. He still had enough Baby left in him that he was a solace to me.
• Kaleb lived in my imagination. Not Kaleb himself, of course. But really: there was the stuff I was learning about being a teacher, and I was refreshing my memory for Algebra so I could make it through the upcoming College Algebra class I had to take, and I worried about money and I cried about not being at home, but in the forefront of my mind was always this: I am not done. I need another baby. Someone is still waiting! I wasn't just baby hungry. I was baby starved. Baby emaciated. "How can I have another baby?" was the first thought I had in the morning and the last thing I prayed about at night.
• I was still thoroughly addicted to drinking Pepsi. I had at least one 32 ounce Pepsi every day.
• For the first time in my life, I had to start watching what I ate. I gained ten pounds in the four months between Christmas and my birthday.
• We only had one vehicle, our 2001 Sienna mini van.
• I was running a little bit, but not enough to keep everything in check.
• I still played Bunco once a month with a group of eleven other women.
• My dad was still alive. His Alzheimer's wasn't even a blip yet. I thought I had decades left with him.
• I hadn't converted to a digital camera yet—I still loved my Pentax SLR. I bought all my film at Costco in the 8 packs.
• I filled up my last Creative Memories album and started using Close to my Heart albums. (I still do!)
• My favorite pair of jeans was one from the Gap that had a button fly.

So much has changed in ten years. So much has stayed the same. There are plenty of things I wish I could change but I feel powerless over; there are other things I did manage to proactively change. I have learned and come to understand many things. I think one of the most important things is just how bewildered I was then at how I wanted so desperately for my life to go one way (the fabulous lives that most of my Bunco friends had) and how it refused to do that. It went in a way I never expected when I was 19. That was bewildering and painful, but I do understand now, at 39, why it happened like it did. There were things I needed to learn and I am grateful, despite the aches of the hard times, for many things from my past decade.

Plus, I still own those button fly jeans!

What were you doing ten years ago?

{What I Love} no 17: my old photographs

On the morning that my dad died, my uncle Roe—Dad's brother—brought my sisters and me an unexpected and priceless gift: their mother's photo albums. My Grandma Elsie was quite the photo buff; I trace my love of pictures and scrapbooking directly from her example. In these albums were photos I had literally never seen before, including this one:

which is of my other grandma. I love so much about this picture, not the least being that both of my grandmas found themselves at a function together, and one of them took a photo of the other. The purple glasses (I own those now!), the fancy plates, the doll bottle; Grandma's outfit and hairdo (so very seventies!). It's not the most flattering photo of her—no one looks especially photogenic when they're swallowing—and almost makes her look mean, which she was not ever capable of. She's the person I associate with complete, pure love, the kind that doesn't ask for anything back. This photo accomplishes two other things: takes me back to how it felt to be loved unconditionally by Grandma Florence and reinforces the love I have for Grandma Elsie.

There is this one:

which is me as the baby, with my mom and my two older sisters. I can't believe how much my sisters resemble the daughters they would one day have! and look at that paisley print on my mom's shirt!

But my absolute favorite one is this one:

I
t's hard to tell, but my mom is pregnant here with me. I almost can't stand it, this makes me so happy—a photo of my pregnant mother. I love it for many other reasons (look at the stripes on those pants!) but mainly for the look on my dad's face. He loved her! And she loved him back! Since I know what would come for them in the following 40 or so years, this brings me an unmeasurable (and unnameable) happiness. Seeing proof that they loved each other alters how I feel about myself. It makes me feel more certain and secure.

It also reminds me: photos matter so much. Sometimes I wonder. The difference between then and now is enormous. Back then, photos were meted out carefully, one film frame at a time. Now I can easily snap 100 in an hour if I want to. Now we are overflowing with photos. Will they matter as much, given the abundance? I hope so. I think so. Maybe in a different, more familiar way. I know that to you, who "know" only me in the pictures, these are just old photos.

Someone else's old photos might be even less interesting to look at than someone else's vacation pictures. They matter to me because I know the people in them. I miss the people in them—my grandma who's been gone for more than twenty years now, of course. The healthy laughter of my father, which I haven't heard for half a decade even though he's only been gone for six months. But that version of my mom, too, young and still looking forward. I miss that even though I never really knew her like that. I miss those young times in our life, when we lived on the little red house on the corner by the library, with raspberry canes in the backyard and my best friend Teresa down the street. I miss the me who could still do anything. I miss my Grandma Elsie, whose presence is there by way of being the photographer, who I mostly missed my whole life because I didn't know her well enough.

But despite all the missing, these photos bring me so much happiness. Perhaps because of the sadness. They are proof that all of us existed. Proof that I was once small and just beginning and could do anything. All of our trails took us places no one could have planned or imagined. They also inspire me: Keep on taking pictures. Even if we have too many. Too many is better than too few or not enough, and I don't know what I might capture that will be a trigger, that will take one of my children back to some time in their life they need to remember existed. More photos, always more, as I continue moving forward on the path that started long before I can recall.

{What I Love} nos 2 & 3

(We had to reformat our computer this weekend, which meant no blogging for me despite my blog-every-day goal. Such is life. Moving forward!)

{What I Love} no3: Lavender Comet

I don't remember doing many household jobs when I was a kid. My mom was fairly obsessive about washing windows, which we did every spring. We each had a dishes night. I sometimes did the vacuuming. But I don't think we had a prescribed schedule for getting stuff done. In fact, keeping the house clean was one of my parents' Big Issues, the things they fought over quite a bit, especially after my dad was laid off. My mom, who was working full time, (understandably) thought that my dad could do some housework. I don't know exactly how my dad felt about it, except I knew this: If we came home from school to a nearly-pristine house, with my dad finishing up the vacuuming, I'd get an anxious belly and my pulse would accelerate because I knew they'd been arguing.

(It still makes me anxious to see a man vacuuming. Strangely enough, one of my marriage's Big Issues is keeping the house clean, but even if Kendell is helping out just to help out and not because of an argument---and, let's face it, I'm the messy one in this equation---I get an anxious belly and my pulse starts to accelerate.)

So it would be logical to think that none of my childhood memories associated with housecleaning would be positive ones. Au contraire, mon fraire. Because despite the emotional weight placed upon housecleaning during my childhood, I drew great happiness from any job that involved scrubbing with Comet cleanser. Scrubbing the gunk out of our orange kitchen sink at the end of cleaning the kitchen? I'd look forward to that during the whole time I was doing dishes. But the best was scrubbing the tub. I'd get the scouring pad and the can of Comet and happily scrub away for a good half hour. While I worked I'd invent little commercial jingles for why you should use Comet to clean your tub, or envision some magical House Cleaning Fairy stopping by and declaring me the best tub cleaner ever. (I'm still waiting for that visit.) There's something completely satisfying at scrubbing away those grey scratches that pans make or the grimy rim of hairiness left after a long soak that included two rounds of bubbles and shaving one's legs (and possibly more than one dropped book).

And, you know, despite the emotional weight that's grown up upon housecleaning now that I'm an adult, I still love scrubbing the sink and the tub. With Comet. Only, not the kind in the green can. I like the lavender scented Comet. Not because it cleans any better---it really doesn't. It doesn't even really smell like flowers. But it does smell like I remember Comet smelling during my epic bathtub scrubbings as a kid. (Even though I am fairly certain that the green Comet was the kind my mom bought.)

Now I sprinkle some on my sink almost daily. I scrub it with a scouring pad, erasing all the day's dings and nudges and stains. It's soothingly immediate, a nearly-instant reward for your effort. The grime rinses away and I'm left with a clean, white sink and no regrets. I wish life's dings and stains were as easy to rinse away, but I'm grateful that at least the sink doesn't have any remorse.

{What I Love} no4: Eyebrow waxing
Sometimes I feel guilty for this. It feels like an indulgence that only The Fabulous People should deserve. In fact, I was nearly 35 before I even touched my eyebrows. (I look back now at my pre-waxing days and cringe. Holy Muppet Character!) Once a friendly and Very Fabulous student of mine pointed out that I really would look better if I shaped my eyebrows, I decided to give it a try. Except, I'm not very good at things like keeping stuff even and straight. So I kept her recommendation in mind until one day—for who knows why—I suddenly was brave enough to let the professionals handle it. I walked right into a Fantastic Sams (I know! Fancy!) and got my eyebrows waxed.

Now I wish I could do it about once a week. Instead, I try to maintain my non-muppet status with tweezers until the eyebrows get in front of me and I can justify going to get them waxed again. Usually they get in front of me because I take out my contacts and wear my glasses for a week or so. Since January was the Pink Eye Month at my house, I wore my glasses for a solid three weeks.

Return of the Muppet Character! When I put my contacts back in on Thursday, I was astounded to see just how icky and overgrown my eyebrows were. Totally justified waxing! First thing Friday morning I had them waxed. Now they're smooth and lovely and put forth not even a hint of Muppet. Is it indulgent? Is it a luxury normally denied those in my tax bracket? I don't care. It's way less painful than tweezing. Faster and more accurate, too. And it makes me feel more polished and presentable.

It's certain: having your eyebrows waxed is a Thing To Love!

on Driving: along, past, through

Yesterday, Haley blogged about driving down by the lake. " didnt ask anyone, or even tell anyone i went. but it was just what my heart needed," she wrote. "i turned the radio off, and drove slow so i could just look at it. it was seriously what i needed right then. hopefully i don't get in trouble for going without asking. aaaand yeah. i hope i can make peace with all of my troubles."

Oh, my.

Those pervasive adolescent heartaches. I remember. I talk to her a little bit about my teenagehood but not all of the stories. I don't want to glorify the mistakes I made. I don't want it to seem wild and romantic and edgy. I don't want it to be tempting. Because I don't want her, or any of my kids, to feel what I felt. So I have worked hard to (hopefully) keep them away from the wild and romantic and edgy stuff.

But I can't keep them away from heartache. It finds you. All of your life, it is always a possibility. It's fairly intense when you're a teenager of course. It feels more magnified somehow. Maybe because you don't have the perspective yet of old sorrows and new ones.

That is not me downplaying how she feels. It is me acknowledging it, which I think is important for teenagers to know. The way you feel is the way you feel. Someone telling you to stop feeling it or, worse, that you don't deserve to feel that way, you haven't earned  your heartache, because it could be so much worse or he wasn't dating you then or it's not like you're my only friend or any of the other reasons people offer—all that does is make you doubt what you feel. You have to move through it to move past it. You can't just skip it.

And what she might not know is that while I would rather she just tell me where she's going, I understand it, too. She has a cell phone so I could still track her down, and being somewhere no one knows is part of it. Part of the way that just driving makes you feel better. She doesn't know that I wouldn't get upset because this is a story I don't think I ever told her.

When I was at my worst teenage phase, I would get up every morning. I would get ready for school and then leave in my car. I would actually drive to the high school. I would pull into the parking lot. And then I would just sit there. Getting out of my car and walking into that building? The thing I couldn't do. I couldn't sit at a desk with books spread open before me, learning stuff like geography or history or a squared + b squared = C squared or all the other stuff that seemed so completely useless because it wasn't teaching me what I really needed to know, which was what do I do with all of this? I couldn't sit there with all of them, pretending I was OK, and ignoring all the "that girl is weird" under-the-breath muttered comments, and managing to act normal like everyone else.

So I'd leave the parking lot. I'd go to 7-11 and with the change I'd scrounged up from my mother's purse or my sisters' pockets or maybe under the couch, buy a large coffee and put three Irish Creme creamers in it and five ice cubes to cool it down. I'd put five dollars of gas in the tank using the gas card I stole from my dad. And then I'd drive. I'd drive anywhere, aimless. Crying and singing along to the boom box on the seat next to me. (A.M. radio, remember?) I'd drive past the enormous houses of the wealthy on the east side. And I would always end up in the mountains.

No one knew where I was. My mom assumed I was at school. My teachers had forgotten I existed and my friends were busy justifying themselves or suffering in their own way. There was something to that—to knowing that no one knew where I was. It was like disappearing, somehow. And everything hurt less because I didn't really exist if no one knew where I was.

When it was time for school to be over, I'd drive home. I could manage (sort of) the pretending-to-be-normal thing when I was at home. I'd pretend to do homework when really I was writing poetry or angry diatribes. I'd answer the phone when the automated call from the high school came, keeping my mom from knowing I'd sluffed again.

And then I'd do the same thing the next day.

None of this was noble or good of me. Or good for me, maybe. Except—the driving. The aimless wandering. The movement towards the mountains, where I'd park and sit on my hood and feel, just for a minute, finally a white peace.

So no. I'm not upset. I totally understand. I understand the need to drive along peaceful landscapes in order to move through what is painful.

I get it.

the power of powerlessness

Sometimes I feel like the Queen of the Socially Awkward Gaffe. Like I don't know when to just keep my mouth shut to stop the words in my head from coming out into the world, where they will make me blush and feel uncomfortable.

For instance, last week at work two other librarians were talking about a person who is coming to do a program at the library. He's an English professor at a nearby university, a published poet, and one of my least-favorite people. Instead of just keeping my thoughts in my head, though, I let a little annoyed groan out, and said something snarky like "why would you do __________ a favor?"

Keep in mind that these two librarians also went to the same university. They both have Master's degrees and have certainly taken classes from this professor. Maybe he was even one of their favorite  professors. Maybe they have become friends with this professor? I don't know. But once my gaffe escaped my lips, they wanted to know why I didn't like him, and instead of making a socially deft move—maybe an awkward change of subject such as, "Oh, you know. What did you think about Cat's Table?"—I barrelled ahead with the story.

When I was at college, I took a poetry writing class from this professor. He was young-ish then, late thirties, and walked with a sort of swaggering confidence into class on the first day. He put his obligatory university-professor brief case on the desk, took hold of the podium, and said "In my teaching career, I will be lucky to meet one real poet. If I am seriously, amazingly blessed I might meet two." And then he went on to describe the publishing world with severity. And to discuss how all English majors assume they each have a inner poet just waiting to be released, but they couldn't be more wrong; most of that is just conceit and a little bit of encouragement from their public high school English teacher, who probably also thought she  had a writing career just around the corner.

Part of me knows why he started the class this way. He's right, of course: real poets are  rare. The publishing world is  severe and cruel and nearly impossible to be successful in, especially in poetry which most people don't read. I'd even heard another professor (who was one of my favorites and who taught me much about the writing craft) say nearly the same thing to a writing class: just because you're an English major doesn't mean you automatically know how to write well. The difference was tone and intent. The writing teacher I loved said this with an intent to clear away self-aggrandizement and put real writing knowledge in its place. The poetry writing teacher I (still) can't stand did it to put us all in our places. I am the real poet here,  his words and attitude said, and the rest of you are foolish minions.

Perhaps he also did it to get rid of the easily-offended. It was always interesting to me, in college, to see how the make up of a class would change after the first day. I know lots of students would shop their classes, trying to find the easiest professors and the smallest workload. Maybe Mr. Poet just wanted to get rid of the lazy students right off the bat. And honestly: I really did  want to get up and walk out of class that first day. But I wasn't most students; I was married and had a child (and would be pregnant again at the end of that semester). My schedule was carefully planned around nap times, daycare, and when I could use the car. I couldn't just change it because I hated the professor.

So I stuck it out. I did the required readings and wrote the assigned poems and tried to learn everything I could. I did whatever I could to get an A in the class. (I got an A in the class.) I didn't know that professor was teaching me stuff about how not  to be a teacher. (Like: who becomes a poetry teacher because of that one real poet they will hopefully find?) I thought about his example quite often when I was teaching, especially my creative writing classes. Sure: not everyone who loves writing or even is really, really good at it will be successful at it. But writing wealth, fame, and wide-spread publication are hardly the point for a classful of English majors, or at least not the  point. The point is learning, and while I did  learn about poetry from this professor, I also learned that gender bias? Totally still alive and kicking in academia. I learned which types of poems I could hand it to him and get an A on, and they weren't anything that seemed "too feminine." I learned to never  volunteer an answer, especially not a supposition, or to work through my thought processes aloud in front of him, because he was so swift to point out errors.

I didn't tell all of this to my fellow librarians, just the bit about the first five minutes of class. I'm pretty sure they are  big fans of this professor anyway, which is fine. I shouldn't have told the story anyway. But my gaffe and that flood of memories have left me thinking. This happened 15 years ago. Fifteen! Yet I still remember the details as crisply as if it happened last week. It left an impression because it became my story I could tell whenever people compared awful university professors. But it remains crisp also because it is one of the experiences that make me doubt my writing abilities. Make me slightly ashamed of them, in fact, as if wanting to write—no, as if thinking I could  write well—was just one of those silly notions that vapid women like me get.

Yesterday I read something that counteracted, a little bit, that semester with that professor. This is from the book Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing  by Roger Rosenblatt:

Since 1975, the number of creative writing programs has increased 800 percent. It is amazing. The economy has tanked. Publishing favors nonfiction. young people seem to prefer the image to the word. Yet al over America, students ranging in age from their early twenties to their eighties hunker down at seminar tables . . . avid to join a profession that practically guarantees them rejection, poverty, and failure.

Which sounds an awfully lot like what my professor started that long-ago poetry-writing class with, right? But he continues:

They all want the world of writing so very much—not only to succeed in it, but to be a part of it, to stroll in it and feel it wrap around them. I admire their brash impracticality and wonder if, in some way, their reckless enthusiasm for art, conceived and nurtured in an increasingly money-driven age, represents their unconscious protest against the age. . . . something deliberate and stubborn lies behind their decision to make artists of themselves. They turn to the power of their powerlessness.

The power of powerlessness. That is it exactly. I might not write poems that professor would ever admire, and I know there are thousands of poetry editors in the world who think the exact way he did about poems like mine: centered in woman and so lacking in universality. The power comes in knowing. I know the publishing world is brutal. I know  real poets are rare things and I am probably not that rare. I know  my odds of succeeding are infinitesimal.

But, it is just like Mark Twain said: a person who doesn't write anyway is no different from a person who can't write at all. Pushing forward, continuing to try despite the very stacked odds, refusing to swallow that one professor's poisons—knowing he is right and I will more than likely fail but writing anyway: that is the only power I have. He might think that it is no power at all, because it hurts no one but myself. But it doesn't only hurt me, the failure. It reminds me that I did, I have, at least, tried. And the trying gives me courage to try again, despite the inevitable failure.

Nothing to Do With Christmas

Sometime between yesterday and today, I set myself the goal of blogging every day until Christmas. I don't know why this goal seems so pressing and important—but there I was, snuggled down in my flannel sheets, just on that delicious edge of consciousness when you know sleep is about to overtake you and there is absolutely nothing in the world that could stop you from slipping under:

except remembering that I hadn't blogged yet.

This thing that has been swirling around in my head has nothing to do with Christmas. Mostly. It has to do with memory, though, which seems to me is a main component to the Christmas spirit. Here is the memory:

It's May or June, and I am pissed. I'm 18, and I'm like a puzzle: torn into bits but finally starting to put myself together for real. This new structure I am forming is taking a different shape, both figuratively and literally, and my friends aren't altogether fond of it. I'm no longer needed. Actually, I'm sort of embarrassing, and that is the thing that's got me pissed: My second-best friend, whom I've forgiven for puking on my favorite steel-toed boots, covered for with her mom, and held secrets for that I've still never told anyone, bought tickets for the Depeche Mode concert—but not one for me. As she was going with my used-to-be boyfriend, this is an obvious message: she's not sleeping with him (unless that is a secret she never told) but he is her new best friend, no "second" about it.

As I had in the past when I was angry, I hopped in my car and turned on some music. Angry driving is best done accompanied by The Cult, of course, preferably "Wild Flower" as loud as possible. Only, in this brave new world I've entered, my mom, instead of my best friend, is in the car with me. There are many perks to having your mom around—not having to worry about finding quarters under the floor mats to use as gas money is a big one—but loud punk music is not one of them. As I watched her hand reach for the dial and actually turn down my music, I realized just how far I had come in my transformation: angry music might never soothe again.

I think this memory has been so vivid because I've had the chance to hang out with Haley more than usual lately. Sometimes when we're driving around, and she's got her radio station on, I can remember nearly exactly how it felt to drive around aimlessly with your friend, how the world seemed full of possibility that could surprise you at the very next corner (because, back then, it was and it did). How you knew your friend understood what you needed, wanted, thought, and felt because you assumed she needed, wanted, thought, and felt the same things. How the perfect song on the radio would feel like karma and angels and all the planets aligning to create that very perfect moment. Only a best friend can bring that sort of joy.

Except, I can't remember it at all, really, that joy. So much has happened since I was last that girl in the passenger seat next to my best friend driving nowhere important. My perspective has skewed and knowledge slid across my vision in nearly-transparent layers that block me from feeling that wild hopefulness. As the mother (instead of the best friend) I know what perils hide in those limitless possibilities and how the loss of a best friend, second- or otherwise, is a wound that is some ways worse than any other—how that friend, by holding your dreams, your thoughts, your desires and despairs and secrets in the cup of her hand also cradles power, too. Sharp, wounding power. All she has to do is drop them or, worse, scatter them with her breath.

I suppose mothers hold our daughters' hopes, despairs and secrets, too. We could wield them like a power if we wanted. But while we lack the ability to create the experiences that best friends do, we have something more gentle and perhaps more enduring. We put gas in the car and slushies in the cup holders and a permanence into their world. We might turn down the radio but we aren't going anywhere.

I find myself at this unexpected crossroads. Well, I am not there yet, exactly, but I can see it coming up ahead. Haley, my daughter, my girl who nearly shares my birthday but is not myself reborn (she is so much stronger than that), is nearly grown. What will our relationship feel like as she speeds out into the world without me in the passenger seat? I hope I can continue being the permanent thing in her world. I hope that, whatever betrayals she experiences, they don't come from me; that I can be the place she comes home to.