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You guys aren’t here yet, but as I contemplate actively trying to bring you into being, I realized that I have some things to say to you, some promises to make before you even come into this world. Every day I see or hear of parents making catastrophic mistakes that will harm their children for the rest of their lives, and that is my greatest fear. So with that in mind, I have made a list of the things that I am determined not to mess up for you.
I promise…
- …to change your diapers, take you to the park, take you to practices, help with your homework and make your breakfasts, lunches and dinners myself (except for when your father is available)
- …to kiss and hug you so that you know you are loved, even in front of your friends
- …to be your advocate in all things, until you don’t need me anymore, and to teach you to value yourself so that you can find the strength and voice to advocate for yourself
- …to grin, whoop, holler, applaud and whistle for every recital, drawing, craft project, play or game, every time
- …to never dole out punishments when I’m angry
- …to make an unconditional home and loving family for you, even if that turns out to be just the two of us in a tiny apartment, it will always be there for you
- …to never make you feel like there is something you can’t talk to me about – unless it’s something just gross for the sake of being gross, like mixing cat vomit and mayonnaise
- …to visit you at least once a year at college and in every place you ever live (as long as you want me to)
- …to take time for myself and be an individual throughout your lives, so you can learn the value of sustaining your own individuality and so you can have a whole, complete person for a mother
- …to let you crawl into my bed when you’ve had a nightmare… and to kick you back out again so you can learn to face your fears
- …to help you find who you are, without pressuring you to be who anyone else thinks you should be
- …to feed you pizza on Fridays, ice cream on Saturdays, and healthy food food the rest of the time
- …to always value your ideas and opinions, and to respect your will, even when I must override it
There is so much more to say, and so much that goes without saying, but these things I can and will do for you, my future little monsters darling children.
Update: A friend of mine (who I know personally IRL) just posted a bunch of stuff on facebook… apparently his daughter is stuck in a less than ideal relationship with a manipulative man whom she married and had asked her dad to keep some of her stuff in his safety deposit box. But now it seems she called the police when she wanted her stuff back… the problem with this situation is that he has now posted all over facebook (FACEBOOK!) that he’s done with his daughter, that she’s dug herself a hole with him that she can’t get out of. I’m shocked to hear this coming from this particular person, and even more upset that he doesn’t see that now is when his daughter needs him the most. Everyone needs one person in this world who will never write them off, (especially if they get stuck in a relationship with a manipulative person – that can skew your entire view of reality) and that falls squarely into a parent’s job description. To my babies: if you call the cops on me, it’s ok. I’ll be pissed, but more than anything I’ll still love you, and I’ll still want you to come to me the moment you realize how bad you screwed up, and we will work it out. Always.
This is inexcusable. Unconscionable. A seriously dick-ish thing to publish. Really CNN? You are already becoming a joke of a network rivaling Fox “News.” Is this what you really want to go with?
I am a GRITS – Girl Raised In The South. I am also politically pretty darn liberal, when you get right to it. And for the most part I have no problem reconciling these two aspects of myself. I luuuuv sweet tea, apple pie and country music (except for the ridiculous “patriotic” songs). The seasons I’m accustomed to are Summer and Not-Summer, and I dig my southern drawl that gets more pronounced as I get sleepy or drunk. I am also an ardent supporter of gay marriage, healthcare reform, and responsible diplomacy with foreign states. I believe slavery is a horrible part of our heritage, but I also recognize how and why it developed. I also understand exactly why the southern states chose to secede and formed the Confederacy. You can go through my family tree and cross out a significant portion of a generation that died in the Civil War (even on the side of my family that I like) and you can bet your britches that they weren’t fighting to keep the right to torture black people.
There is a statue in memorial to the Confederate soldiers who gave their lives on the campus of my former college. It seems like every few years someone gets riled up and campaigns to get it taken down. But thus far the university hasn’t budged, and I’m thankful. The Civil War was fought because the agrarian South feared being subjugated to the industrial North. The main issues that caused this war are very much alive and hotly debated today. And I do mean TODAY, April 12, 2010. It was a conflict between federal power and the rights of individual states to legislate for their population. Right now at least 5 states have filed lawsuits to have the healthcare law overturned based on this very idea. Need I even bring up gay marriage? And as contentious as the political climate is right now, in my mind it isn’t at all a stretch to see how, faced with the loss of the engine that drove their entire economic system, the Confederate states felt that remaining a part of the Union had become unacceptable.
This article is ridiculous and shameful. Mr. Martin has strayed far from the realm of facts and journalism; CNN should have the sense to keep this sort of rubbish off of their newsreel. Yet we see the same shift toward radical, inflammatory reporting that has been exemplified by Fox “News.” (I refuse to refer to them with any name that would imply that they are, in fact, a real news outlet) Where integrity in journalism was once a goal of utmost pride, now we find that news is purposefully and horrifyingly partisan and biased, yet packaged as objective reporting. What may be the most disturbing of all is that American society has, by and large, accepted this and drives it to new extremes. Even in this blatantly fictitious, inflammatory article there were a significant number of comments that supported the author’s point of view, that Confederate soldiers were, in every way excluding technology, identical to radical Muslim terrorists.
Just as in any war, the “right” and “wrong” is determined by the winners. Had the Confederacy prevailed, we wouldn’t even refer to this particular conflict as a Civil war. Instead, it would have been the war of Confederate independence, the triumph of states’ rights over an exploitative federal system. And I personally do not believe that slavery would have lasted much longer in the south, even given this alternate outcome. I also believe that we are a stronger nation due to our federal union. I am glad that we are fifty United States of America, and that slavery was ended sooner than would have happened otherwise.
But that does not detract from the fact that these Confederate soldiers were not fighting to harm the citizens of the Union. They were not trying to destroy, rather they were fighting to protect their families and their way of life. It is not difficult to argue that the South has yet to fully recover from the Civil War and the economic changes that were implemented afterward. How can we fault anyone for fighting for such a cause?
So the diet is going ok… my hubby’s birthday was wednesday which meant there was a lot of bad stuff in the house. I did take a day more or less off of the diet that day and did fairly well getting back on the wagon the next day. As of thursday I had lost about 2 lbs, but I will weigh again either today or tomorrow. I do typically drop several pounds very quickly the first week, but they my second week plateau is KILLER. If I can manage push through the second week and manage to get another few pounds off after that, I very well may have some level of success. *sigh*
I have been doing VERY badly on working out. On monday I tried doing the first 30 day shred workout. I have done these before and I guess I like them… as much as I am capable of liking a sadistic trainer yelling out of my tv how she has 400-pounders who do these workouts, while two skinny bitches bounce around in the background without even a glistening of sweat on them. But as I was going into the second set of squats I felt my right quad say “Hell NO, lady!” It started cramping very painfully and I called an end to the workout right there. It has been very sore almost all week, and I think I narrowly avoided some kind of injury there. I finally made it back to the gym on thursday for 30 minutes of light work on the elliptical. Both legs were finally feeling healed again Saturday, so I’ve got two days of good healthy workouts in store for this weekend.
Now on to the topic that has ruffled my feathers for today. Since both hubby and I are students at the same large state university, we get the same school-wide emails and individually arrived at the same level of shock and horror at a standard practice here. It seems that every time there is any student death, the university sends a school-wide email ANNOUNCING THE DEATH! On one level I get that this is somewhat pragmatic – it does stop the rumor mill, speculation, etc that is bound to run rampant in a population of teenagers and early-20-somethings all cooped up in dorms. But then I thought of how I would feel if I was the one who bit it… and they sent my obit around the same way they announce a new vice associate chancellor dean of student academic program life or whatever. It’s a freakin’ form email! They give the student’s year, program of study, dorm, interests, parents names and method of croaking! SERIOUSLY?!?!?
I am taking a class in Roman Religion this semester that is wicked cool, and one of the topics into which we delved is death and a comparison of Roman thought regarding death with contemporary western thought. There are actually a lot of similarities in the way we seem to believe in treating the dead and everything regarding funeral rites with a certain level of reverence. Desecration of the dead is felt to be one of the greatest insults we can give. Everything about death was and still is highly ritualized and we work very hard to keep it separate from the mundane or the daily norm. Maybe this is why the practice of Death Emails strikes me as so… wrong. It seems to belittle the person’s life, condensing it into a few keystrokes and shooting out this very one-sided interpretation of who this person was to more than twenty thousand people. Maybe part of what bothers me as well is that this took only about 7 minutes of some admin assistant’s time to type out, and this is the university’s public response to a death. I guess I just feel that a well-written obituary in the school newspaper or a similarly respectful notice placed on the school’s website is more appropriate and more respectful.
Whether most people agree with me or not I know that, should I kick the bucket any time soon, I certainly don’t want the stinkin’ U to send out a Death Email for me. Wonder if I should put that in my will, or if there is some kind of form I should fill out…
This one’s for you, AB, because deep down I know we both can’t wait to wrap our hands around these breasts…
Ladies and Gentlemen, IT IS REAL. God help us.
I remember when the low-carb craze really hit a few years back and burger joints started offering their ginormous beef patties slathered in cheese and ketchup… wrapped in a leaf of lettuce. Because the BUN was the unhealthy part of that equation. Riiiiiiiight. SNL did some parodies of this sort of thing (taco town!) and when I first saw an ad KFC’s new “Double Down,” I didn’t believe it.
But Lo and Behold, it is true. KFC has made a sandwich featuring bacon, two cheeses, and “colonol’s sauce.” But instead of bread, this glorious concoction is served between TWO ORIGINAL RECIPE FILETS!!!
I bring this to your attention today because, as of today, I have begun a (nother) diet. Dammit. I lost about 35 lbs. several years ago, and though I have managed to keep all but about 2 of those pounds off, I never reached my goal weight. I got comfortable about 10 lbs short of it, but have recently begun frustrated with my flabby belly and thunder thighs once more. So the goal is ten pounds before I have to bare my fluorescent-white flesh in a bathing suit. If I made it to 15 or 20, all the better.
I struggle between thinking that I need to be more secure with my body and feeling like I am letting myself down by not sucking it up and getting the weight off. I’m not badly overweight – I think about a 25.5 on the BMI chart, so losing even 20 lbs would still put me in the healthy range – but right now I’m firmly in the land of pudge. My husband is happy with the way I look, but I’ve oscillated back to the point of view that I am not happy with how I look and that I need to do this for myself. I may need someone to remind me of that in a few weeks. I have done this before, usually making it about two weeks before I conclude that this torture really isn’t worth the 3 pounds that I’ve managed to wrestle off of my frame, and say “aw, f*** it,” and reach for the Ben & Jerry’s. I love my junk food, but at the moment my desire to have sun touch my stomach without feeling the need to purchase a private beach upon which to uncloak said tummy outweighs my craving for pizza and Coke Icees.
I will post updates on how things are going, and if anyone else is embarking on a similar quest to rid themselves of a nagging flat tire, feel free to share. It’s always a bumpy road. That Double Down looks pretty nasty today, but in two weeks I very well may be licking the computer screen.
Oh, and I’d love to win that Target Gift Card my Aunt Becky is giving away over on her blog, so per the rules of the contest, here’s her button. AB, we should totally chat while we eat our Double Downs and watch 30 Day Shred. Just because we can. And so we can say mean things about those skinny bitches that make it look way too easy.
I don’t share well. I have very few memories of my preschool and kindergarten years, but it couldn’t have been pretty. Because when it comes to sharing, how can I word this… I’m a BITCH. And I am A-OK with that.
One of the classes that I am taking this semester uses course packs, which are basically articles pulled out of books, magazines, etc that are copied and bound into a “course pack.” They cost an assload because they actually pay royalties, and are non-returnable. So most students pretty much hate them, although in this class I will admit that it would have cost far more to buy all the zillion books that we are reading passages from. It’s so much that the professor split the course pack into two volumes. Total cost: $75. FOR COPIES! But, whatever.
On Tuesday we were scheduled to switch to the second volume. I decided to bring both volumes just in case, and sure enough, we used the the first one through the whole lecture. Guess who didn’t bring both course packs? About half the class. This is a 500-level course, folks! Everyone in there has had a bare minimum of 2 previous semesters in college. So the professor (who is sooo enthusiastic about the subject material and is totally adorable – I love her!) says, “If you didn’t bring the coursepack be sure to look on with someone!” So some girl automatically shoves her desk right up against mine. Doesn’t ask, just assumes that of COURSE I’ll happily share.
I was not pleased. Have I mentioned that I also have personal space issues? As in, everyone else better keep the hell OUT of my personal space? But, believe it or not, I sucked it up and shared my freakin’ coursepack. Now it’s not just that I’m stingy, but I usually write all over my coursepack, shuffling between it and my notebook. Hard to do when some chick is hanging over the page. But I dealt with it. I was so proud of myself.
Today, we did switch to volume 2. It has been available at the bookstore for over 2 weeks and the prof has been reminding us every single class that we need to purchase it. You’ll never guess what happened. As soon as we begin class 4 or 5 students (out of 20, so that’s like 25% of the class) start whining that they don’t have the money for the coursepack blahblahblah. It’s $31 people, and you knew this at the beginning of the semester! So what happens when we start class? Some guy scoots right on over toward me and says “Can I look on with you?”
AAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! The look on my face must have been priceless. I have no poker face, even when I try (which is not often). I tried to suck the evil laser beams back behind my eyeballs as soon as I could, but I think he got singed. I very begrudgingly said “Yes,” and he kept more distance than Tuesday’s sharer all class period. I don’t know how he managed to read the type from that far away, but, not my problem.
Maybe that makes me a bitch, but I don’t care. It’s not like I have tons of cash lying around – my husband is a grad student and I’m unemployed working on a second BA. We NEVER go out and mostly buy only the necessities. If we go to a movie (always a matinee), it’s a big deal. And you know what? I paid for my damn coursepack and NO I DON’T WANT TO SHARE WITH YOU!!!! GET AWAY FROM ME!!!!!!!!!!!
On another note, my Tar Heels are playing in the NIT championship game tonight. If they lose, I might cry. If they win, it will officially be the weirdest season ever. Please Heels, please…
“For I’m a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred and when I die I’m a Tar Heel dead! So it’s rah rah Carolina-lina, rah rah Carolina-lina, rah rah Carolina, GO TO HELL DUKE!
