Pertinent to my Interests

I took my kids to the playground on a weekday afternoon last week. I sat on the bench in the cold air hoping the sun would warm me up a little and had a realization: I am no longer needed here.

This new phase of life has really snuck up on me. There were many years of my life where my days were a constant shuffle of playgrounds. I remember exulting in my freedom when the kids were both old enough to explore the playground on their own and I was able to supervise from the bench. At some point I started bringing a book, and that felt like the peak of luxury.

And now I’m just extraneous. The kids don’t even need me to walk them back and forth anymore.

Am I ready for this?

Two days later they wanted to go back to the playground. I was coming down with a cold. Ugh, I didn’t want to go to the damn playground. But I recalled that moment of clarity in the sun and I told them they could go together without me. I reminded myself that this wasn’t the end: I could still choose to go to the playground with them some days. If I want to.

They went to the playground. I sat on the couch for a while and then slowly made dinner. They came back safely in time for the family meal.

I think I will get used to this.

Did you know that nine- and eleven-year-old kids still expect to receive an Easter basket on Easter morning? This did not occur to me until recently. I get lulled into complacency by the fact that we’re done with indoor playgrounds and the constant supervision stage; I forget that some childhood embellishments last much longer than others. (But… how long does the Easter basket thing go on? Asking for a friend.)

Lest you think I’m a terrible mom for nearly forgetting Easter baskets, I did pull through with green pancakes for breakfast on Saint Patrick’s Day. And shamrock shakes earlier in the week! See, I do better when there is no sense of obligation or crushing weight of expectations.

I’m feeling proud of my fitness level lately, even though I still look like the “before” picture when I waddle into the gym. On two recent hikes I’ve barely felt the elevation gains when others (including my kids) were huffing and puffing and wishing for death. This is especially heartening because I joined the gym almost exactly a year ago and have been feeling badly about not accomplishing my main goal: to run three miles. But I am feeling good and strong despite my failure to achieve my running goal, and real world progress has been made.

I went wandering in a cemetery last week and was absolutely taken by the most gorgeous mausoleum I have ever seen. I started researching the family who is interred within and it turned out to be an even better story than I expected with lots of interesting twists and turns along the way. I am obsessed and hope to share more about this once I get the threads all neatly woven together.

Does anyone else still read and love Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse?

I’ve been reading For Better or For Worse since at least 1992. It was always one of my favorites, and I tended to relate most to the daughter Elizabeth, although she must be almost ten years older than me. She too was getting hassled by her mom about not getting dinner started on time while also navigating evolving friendships at school and dealing with annoying younger siblings.

For Better or For Worse concluded in 2008, but instead of dropping the series completely they decided to rerun it from the beginning again. I am still thrilled about this.

So now it’s the year 2024 and here I am forty years old and still reading For Better or For Worse every day. This second time around it’s the mom Elly who is resonating with me. She too is trying to manage all the kids’ activities, cook healthy meals for her family, and go for a run every once in a while. As a child, Elly’s storylines were boring and somewhat invisible to me. Now I’m the boring and invisible one.

Here is the downside of reading a comic strip you’ve already read: I know what’s coming.

In today’s strip it’s raining hard, Elizabeth comments to her mother that “the river is already past its banks!” The punchline has to do with college students and dirty laundry, but I hardly noticed. I was gritting my teeth as a major sense of dread passed through my body.

It’s 1995 all over again and Farley the dog is going to die soon.

I think I cried the first time Farley died, or at least got teary-eyed. I was just a kid; my sister and I were always extra sensitive to the suffering of animals. Of course I was going to cry.

But I think I’m going to cry this time too. Time has not hardened me like it was supposed to, if anything my emotional barriers crack more easily now than they did in the 1990s. And how is Elly going to feel? How does she manage her own emotions and the grief of her children? I’m going to watch her more closely this time around.

To all the other For Better or For Worse readers out there, good luck this week. It’s gonna be a rough one.

There was an article in the New York Times this weekend about how modern light bulbs are so energy efficient that we no longer have to turn the lights off when we leave a room.

I read this article with a sense of dread building in my belly, and I knew by the time I reached the last paragraph that this was it, this was the big day I’ve been dreading: I am officially An Old Person.

I am An Old Person because I can no longer change. The logic of this article is sound, the message reasonable, but the fact is I can no longer adapt to this evolving world and the New World Lightbulb Order. I can’t even pretend that I’m going to try to leave the lights on. I’m not going to try.

It’s disappointing. I had kind of hoped to be one of those flexible old people who is able to absorb new information in a meaningful way. I thought maybe I could be the one, that special unicorn among old people who can change my own behavior and update my moral code.

But I see now how engrained our mental habits become. If I have grandchildren, they will probably roll their eyes at me as I flip the light switch in the kitchen on my way out. They will mock me.

“Well, someday she’ll be dead and then we can just leave the lights on like civilized people,” they will whisper to each other.

And I won’t be able to hear them because my hearing will suck, and after I die they will just leave the lights on all the time and there will be nothing I can do about it. Ah, getting old is terrible!

I play this stupid game on my phone called Gardenscapes.

It’s one of those match three games except with a bunch of bells and whistles and opportunities to spend real money to buy in-game currency. I downloaded it in June 2020, and have been playing off-and-on ever since. I am on level 4,351.

The whole point of this game is to get you to spend real money, and every time I play, I am confronted with a variety of spending options that would give me more moves or better abilities. If I spend, I win.

I never spend, and this absolutely infuriates my youngest child, who spends 100% of his own allowance on in-game purchases for Roblox.

“Just do it! It’s only 900 coins and then you’ll have enough moves to win!” he’ll shout and try to take my phone from me as I am once again defeated by a particularly tricky level.

I don’t spend the money because I don’t care if I win or lose. It wasn’t until this year when I noticed just how far along I was in the game that I realized the genius of this strategy.

By not caring if I win or lose, I have very slowly crawled along in the game and done pretty well for myself.

It makes me wonder if there are other parts of life where not caring is the correct strategy. It seems absurd. What if I stopped caring about parenting? Would my new chillness affect my kids in a positive way? Would we have more meaningful conversations because I wouldn’t constantly be trying to figure out the best messaging? Would it give them the space they need to blossom under their own power?

What if I stopped caring about meal planning and grocery shopping? Would I only plan and shop for meals that I want to make, and they would be extra good? Would my kids become more self-sufficient in the kitchen? Would we eat at restaurants more frequently and enjoy a wider range of flavors if also slightly more sodium?

What if I stopped caring about the election? That’s a joke; I already don’t care about the election.

Asking for a friend.

A friend and her daughter stopped by yesterday afternoon to deliver three packages of Lemonades, the best Girl Scout cookie.

“Oh, these are my favorite,” I said as I clutched the cookies to my chest. “These ones are going in my secret snack place.” My youngest son had been hiding around the corner in the living room, avoiding social interaction; but as soon as the door closed he popped out and glared at me.

“You have a secret snack place?” he asked, accusingly. “Where is it? WHERE IS IT?!”

The kids spent the rest of the evening climbing up on chairs and stools searching through the high cupboards of the kitchen for my secret snack hiding place.

They assume I am hiding snacks up high where they can’t reach, but they have forgotten an important fact about me: I have been married to a tall person for fifteen years now. Up high is where he hides stuff from me! No, my secrets must be hidden down low, below tall man stooping level. And not only must they go low, they also have to go in the one place that no male can ever find what he’s looking for: the pantry.

So yes, for more than a decade my secret snacks have been hidden on the lowest shelf of the pantry and not once have they been disturbed by the male gaze. And the children will never know unless they read my blog someday, which I hope they do because this is pretty much my entire legacy.

Spoiler warning for Ted Lasso season one. Just stop here if you haven’t watched it yet.

I watched the last episode of Ted Lasso season one today while doing my workout in the basement.

Here is a list of all the scenes that brought tears to my eyes:
1. Nate getting promoted
2. Ted’s pre-game speech about believing in hope
3. Roy Kent limping off the pitch while the crowd chants and cheers him
4. Ted’s post-game speech about how nobody on the team is alone in their sadness

Thank you to everyone who did not tell me how positive and optimistic this show is. I would never have watched it if I had known.

I always dislike the overly optimistic characters. They’re boring and naive, maybe even a little dumb. They are often unknowingly the butt of the joke, but they continue on their merry way oblivious to the human agony around them.

Ted Lasso is not oblivious. Ted knows when he’s the butt of the joke. He sees and acknowledges the negativity in the world around him, the great difficulty of being a person. He acknowledges all this suffering and difficulty, and he chooses to be optimistic anyway.

What.

“Sorry, Nate,” Ted Lasso says in an early episode. “I have a real tricky time hearing folks that don’t believe in themselves.”

I was on the stair-stepper at the gym when I watched this scene and my jaw dropped at that line, that truth. Almost every episode has had a line in it like that, a line that hits me hard and makes me want to cross-stitch it and hang it in my house somewhere so I don’t forget it. My reputation for darkness and negativity crumbles before Ted Lasso’s admonition to “be the goldfish” and forget your mistakes.

But this show really won me over today when Ted Lasso’s team lost the final match of the season. Did they have moments of triumph during the game? For sure. But did they ultimately lose and get relegated to the next league down? Yes, they did, and I am so thrilled the writers went this direction. Because you know what? Sometimes you try your best and you still lose. Sometimes you’re just not good enough even though you try your hardest, but that doesn’t mean you’re worthless or that you shouldn’t believe in yourself anymore.

“Be the goldfish,” I tell myself when I screw something up in the kitchen. “I have trouble hearing people who don’t believe in themselves” I think to myself as I struggle to thread my way through this blog post. These messages live in my head rent-free now and carry me through each day, along with one last edict from the show:

“He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where, Roy Kent!”

I just finished reading Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism by Douglas Keister.

Despite my deep appreciation for cemeteries–and my habit of dragging my grumpy kids through them–I didn’t know much about the symbolism on gravestones. If you had asked me a week ago to type out a list of everything I knew about symbolism in graveyards, it would have looked like this:

Square and Compass: Freemason thing
Dove: Christian thing
Lamb: Christian thing
Angel: Christian thing
Cross: Christian thing
Upside-down cross: A demon is present

Most of these things I learned from years sitting in church, although my confirmation class worryingly skipped over that tidbit about an upside-down cross indicating the presence of a demon. This seems like information good Christian children should have, but I had to learn about it from The Conjuring 2 as an adult.

Having now read this book, I can confidently alter my list thus:

Square and Compass: Freemason thing
Dove: Purity and peace
Lamb: Innocence
Angel: Comfort in grief
Cross: Christian thing
(This book did not address the upside-down cross, and I am beginning to think James Wan is the only person who cares about disseminating this important information.)

Despite this oversight, I learned quite a few new things from this book. Did you know the four evangelists are often represented as a group by an ox, a lion, an eagle, and an angel? And a wheel represents infinite divine power? Did you know that an anchor is a symbol of hope? And a scallop shell can represent either baptism or a pilgrimage? I did not.

But you also have to wonder if the people being memorialized by these symbols know these things. Did Great Aunt Doris actually go on a pilgrimage or did her daughter just really like the look of the scallop shells for her mom’s gravestone?

Here is an incomplete list of animals that I have learned represent Satan in cemetery iconography:

Snake
Squirrel
Cat
Woodpecker

I am particularly amused by the presence of the woodpecker on this list, and now have big summer plans to shout “Go back to hell, creature of Satan!” at the woodpecker who likes to peck on our cabin.

The first time I set foot in Minnesota was in February of 2002. Math tells me that this was 22 years ago, but my heart tells me it was about sixteen lifetimes ago.

My mom and I flew into town for the weekend to visit colleges. We were staying with old church friends in Minneapolis and therefore did not have to cross the Mississippi until the next morning, when we were headed to Macalester College for a tour.

“Okay, we’re about to cross the Mississippi!” my mother announced as she directed the car onto the bridge. We both looked out the windows and started laughing hysterically.

Have you ever seen the Mississippi in February in Minnesota? It’s completely pathetic, a grey trickle I could easily swim across if not for the fact that it’s deadly cold. I could not believe that this pathetic little leak of a creek was appointed as the major dividing line of our country. Mighty, my ass!

“Is this really it?” I asked my mom. “This is the most pathetic river I’ve ever seen.” She suggested the river must be much more impressive the further south you go. We continued on our way to Macalester where my mother (a civil engineer) was further unimpressed by the stormwater drainage.

The next day brought even more for us to mock. We were headed out of town, and saw signs for the ski area before we saw the ski area itself. I was still snowboarding a lot at that age, and was excited to check out the local ski hill options.

“Wait… is that…?” my mom started.

“That… that’s not the whole thing… is it?” I said.

We looked at each other and burst out laughing again. The ski hill was nothing. You could see the entire thing from the road. The whole hill was about the size of the bunny slope at the “mid-size” ski area I had been spending most of my weekends at recently.

We laughed hysterically again on our way back up I-35.

In the intervening lifetimes since that first peek at the Mississippi, I have learned some respect. The Mississippi is a wild river, volatile. In the late spring and early summer it swells to a terrifying high, engulfing picnic tables and trees, bike trails and roads. In the late summer you can stand on the shore and see the mysterious eddies and swirls of current breaking the surface just a few yards away. People drown in the river regularly.

I no longer mock the Mississippi in February. I only wonder how high it’s going to get this spring.

The ski hills in Minnesota, on the other hand, are still fair game. I have never driven by a Midwestern ski hill without laughing hysterically. I apologize to anyone who is offended by my disrespect, but really… you need to see where I grew up snowboarding in Washington state. I think you’ll understand my amusement.