How they took over my life

We have a new baby in the house. She's another beautiful and feisty little girl with ginger hair and blonde eyebrows and a ginger personality to match. When she cries, she turns bright red and her eyebrows stand out like little white streaks on her forehead. She has the determined personality of a second child and doesn't take no for an answer. When I leave her to scream while I deal with some toddler related crisis that her older sister has created, she takes it in stride and belts it out even louder, even more hysterically, hardly pausing to take a breath lest I forget the injustice of her having to manage on her own for a few minutes.

With this new little person comes, again, my loss of self. Suddenly, everything I do is dictated by screams in the night and at all hours of the day from every corner of the house. As I type this, I am trying to ignore the calls of "Mommy! Mommy!" coming from the room where my older daughter is supposed to be taking a nap. The baby is strapped to me in a sling and I tiptoe around, hoping that she stays content and doesn't cry long enough for me to do the dishes. I haven't shaved since before she was born and have to wait until my husband is home from work to even take a shower. Eating has become strategic. I throw something together and then bolt it down as fast as I can, between tantrums and diaper changes and bottles and dinners and baths and books. At the end of the day, when they both are blissfully quiet (temporarily), I am exhausted...and even more exhausted thinking about the long night of waking up every three hours that I have ahead of me.

And still, I'm happy. Three weeks into being the mother of two and 3 days into being home with them on my own, sleep deprived, hairy, highly caffeinated, I've managed to get out and do things with both girls. Although, it takes 2 to 3 hours to get out of the house, we have been out three days in a row! Today at a music class, I watched my almost 2 year old thoroughly enjoying herself, dancing and singing and clapping and participating, for the first time since we started going. The baby slept in her sling, looking angelic, her eyebrows blending into her fair skin. There were no tantrums and no tears. When I told my toddler how proud of her I was, she beamed at me with her slightly bucked teeth and her big lips. And even though it all went to hell when we got back home, it was worth it. It is worth it. They have taken over and I love it.

Sisterhood, Daughterhood, Motherhood

A long time ago, when I was two, something incredible happened: my sister was born. I don’t remember the event or how I felt at the time, but according to my mother, the first thing I said when I saw her was “oh, she’s so beautiful!” On the cusp of having a second baby—who could be a girl and could be a boy—I wonder if our funny, feisty daughter will have a similar reaction or will be horrified by the idea of having to share the previously undivided attention that she got from us.

I can’t remember my life without my sister. In all of my memories from childhood, she is there, a smaller, blond, pouting, pretty little girl who I bossed around and who shared my passions for things like My Little Ponies, Sesame Street and making up dances to the oldies records our parents let us listen to on our Mattel record player. I remember celebrating her first birthday at my preschool and the cookie monster cake she had and how she was a better Easter egg hunter than I was, resulting, inevitably, in tears on my part. I remember being dressed in matching dresses and both of us being unable to contain our excitement about Christmas morning. Together we shared the joy that was going to Dunkin Donuts with our grandmother, picking any donuts we wanted and eating as many as we could. Together we experienced the flu and copious amounts of vomiting post-Dunkin Donuts, which, even though it had nothing to do with the donuts, changed our attitude towards them for many, many years. We played together and we fought with each other. We spent nights giggling in each other’s rooms and jumped from one of her twin beds to the other. We snuck downstairs to watch the Love Boat from behind the couch when our mostly deaf Great-Grandmother was babysitting us. We dressed up in discarded cocktail dresses from our grandmother and grinned at the camera from the bathtub.

I have a wonderful brother, too, who is less emotional and more pragmatic than my sister and I (not to mention more private) and have only one memory of life without him. My sister and I were in a Cleveland daycare and the whole family was temporarily living with our grandparents while waited for our brother’s arrival at the Cleveland Clinic. In the daycare they separated us and were mean to her. She cried and I felt defensive. The next week our parents moved us to a new school.

When he was a baby, I used to carry my brother around and call him my Buddy. I bossed him around as much as I bossed my sister and in our make believe games we called him Jon-Jon. I’m pretty sure I named him and I’m not sure he had a choice in the matter. He probably was a better Easter egg hunter than I was. Mostly I remember us ganging up on him, dressing him up in girl clothes before he was old enough to know better, teasing him about various things. I remember when he pooped in the pool and in the tub as a baby. He was as excited as we were when we all got Cabbage Patch Kids in our Easter baskets one year. Ours was an Easter of consumerism and competitiveness. At some point he went off and did boy things like micro machines and Nintendo. He and my sister were close, but I’m not surprised he didn’t want to hang out with me as much. When I was twenty-three and he was eighteen, he disdainfully informed me that, no offence, but he and his friends didn’t really want to hang around with twenty-three year olds, thus implying that we were a bunch of old farts. Now we are good friends and his 29 years do not seem so different from my 34, with the exception of the fact that I have considerably more grey hair.

In our teen years, when we both had entered the middle school/high school that, at the time, could make or break our teenaged existence, the friendship that I had with my sister deepened in a way that I didn’t experience with my brother because of our age difference. We ate lunch together at school and I felt like it was my duty to look out for her during the day. When I got a serious boyfriend, the three of us spent time together and when my sister and I were both old enough to go out on the weekends, my guy friends were always excited for me to bring my pretty, blonde sister out with me, too. When I got in serious trouble with my parents and she was involved, too, I defended her, boldly lying to keep her out of trouble. She got into plenty of trouble without me, eventually. I remember driving home from New Orleans during a terrible rainstorm after she visited me at my college freshman dorm for the weekend. I complained that a trucker had appraised my legs and honked his horn while she was sleeping. “That’s what you get for wearing such a short ass skirt,” was her response. She’s not one to mince words.

We both ended up in New Orleans for college—she in her freshman year while I was in my senior year—and had a raucous year together, during which she did a lot of chauffeuring me around after bar hopping and parties. One night, when we found ourselves without a car at a house party in a questionable neighborhood in the middle of the night, we curled up on the floor together and spooned to stay warm until it was morning and we could get a ride home with a sober person.

We have been sisters and we have been daughters. Now we are mothers. We live across the ocean from each other, but we still have the sisterhood connection that we’ve always had. We someday hope that we will be in the same city so that our daughters can grow up more like sisters than like cousins. We are again bonded through the mutual experience of loving our children more than we ever imagined we could and the anxiety that comes with that unbelievable love and the responsibility of being parents.

At this point in our lives, we are almost everything to our little girls but someday we know, because we were girls once, too, that the tables will turn. We will be the enemies, the preventers of good times, the cause of hysteria. We will, in our efforts to be the best for them, hurt them in some unknown and unexpected way. They will go away, attempt to become independent, develop their own views, talk to their therapists about how we ruined their lives, pushed them too hard, put too much pressure on them, or not enough. Despite our roles as life destroyers, they will still call us when they are in crisis and we will be the ones they confide in when they are unhappy. We will know that they will come back to us some day, forgive us for our motherly flaws, love us, remember that we were once everything to them. But, in the meantime, during the years that they work it out, grow up and make their way back into our realm, we’ll have each other and our sister bond for comfort and support.

My October Birthday

October is, without a doubt, my favorite month of the year. Not only is it the time of year when it starts to feel crisp and fallish and the leaves start to change, giving off that unmistakable autumn smell, but it’s also the season of hay rides and bonfires and camping and sweaters. Most importantly, it’s my birthday month. Yes, 29 years ago (har har) in October, I was born in Vicksburg, MS, in the breeched position. There was much last minute panicking about my imminent future, but both my mom and I survived the ordeal with a C-Section and life has been pretty good since then.

As a kid, I remember my birthdays being beyond exciting. Waking up in the morning and knowing it was MY SPECIAL DAY, the one day of the year that Idon’t have to share with anyone else (unlike my brother and sister, who both have the same birthday, three years apart), with that fluttering feeling in my stomach, the anticipation of the presents, the cake, the birthday party!!!! In our family, once you are old enough to understand how one can reap the benefits of this arrangement, it is customary to start celebrating your birthday as soon as your birthday month begins and to drag it out for as long as possible. As my birthday falls towards the later part of October, I get to really push the limits of birthday celebrating.

Even though I still like to make a big deal about my birthday, I actually remember very little about my childhood birthday parties. There was, as often as possible, a piñata involved. Once I had a roller skating party, during which one of my classmates broke his wrist. I remember an early birthday party with a cookie monster cake, but I’m not sure if it was my birthday or my sister’s that we were celebrating. I remember coveting purses and shoes that had my name painted on them in 80’s style dot letters and the excitement I felt when I got my first acid washed mini skirt jumper at about age 11. There was always carrot cake or ice cream cake and at some point Mom went through a ‘checker cake’ phase (the cake looked like a checker board). One year my Great Uncle Morris and Aunt Millie were visiting and we had delicious chocolate mousse (Uncle Morris and I had the same birthday, but I was young and he was old, so there was no threat of being upstaged).

As I got older, birthdays were significant for different reasons. When I turned 15, I could get my driver’s license. At 16, my sweet boyfriend (and now husband) came over and secretly decorated my car with happy birthday messages in white shoe polish. At 18, I could legally buy alcohol in Louisiana (and vote, of course, but I wasn’t that worried about that). I celebrated my newfound alcohol purchasing power by going Cajun dancing with friends and getting completely hammered on some horrible and toxic drinks called ‘hand grenades.’ The next morning, my mom drove down to New Orleans to take me out for lunch and celebrate the day with me, but I was too hung-over and sick to leave my dorm room. We spent my birthday with me feeling like I was dying in bed and her sitting next to me and making sure I knew how disappointed she was in my lack of maturity and judgment. By the end of her visit, though, I think she did feel a little sorry for me and my pathetic-ness.

The drinking age changed to 21 sometime between my 18^th and 21^st birthdays, so it was necessary to, again, celebrate my legality. By the time I turned 21, though, I was through with college, so things were a little more civilized. My grandparents came to New Orleans and treated my sister, several of our friends and me to a very fancy dinner at Commander’s Palace. I got my hair done and wore a suit. I was the belle of the ball. It was special and sophisticated and a day I won’t ever forget, because I got to spend it with my beloved grandparents. Still, after they went back to their hotel, the rest of us headed out in our finery to our usual bar, where we drank copious amounts of beer that we had purchased legally.

Recently, my most memorable birthday was my 30^th birthday. As I approached 30, I had ideas of how it would be celebrated. Most of these ideas involved Jim planning some incredible themed party for me, which all of my friends attended. I think glitter was definitely part of my musings…and costumes. As it turned out, I had to work even though it was a Saturday and then I had to go home and help pack a U-Haul with what was left of our belongings as we prepared to move to England. Jim, contrary to my 30^th birthday dreams, was already living in London, so no fabulous surprise party for me! But my whole family came down to spend my birthday with me and help me pack and we sat around on various stools and folding chairs in our barren living room while I opened my presents. After they headed home, with our two cats and the U-Haul, I dragged myself out for dinner with friends and then home, exhausted, to sleep on an air mattress which I was sharing with our dog Buster. It definitely wasn’t the celebration that I was planning for turning 30, but I haven’t forgotten it. I also was adamant that Jim not forget it and my efforts were rewarded with a trip to the Greek Island of Rhodes for my 31^st birthday celebrations.

Sometimes my birthday coincides with another great October family tradition: Pigfest! The official Pigfest started 18 years ago and has gone from a small get together with close friends roasting a pig, to an invite only town party involving roasting several pigs for 24 hours straight on rotating spits. There are teams of men who baste the pigs in some special pig marinade that is applied with mops and turn the spits at specific intervals. Other teams of men grill goat meat and smoke oysters and supply various other delicious goods and sundries. The women man a huge potluck table, dishing out food to the masses for several meals a day and making sure that no one takes more than his or her fair share of desserts and that small children say please and thank you. On a small stage, live music is played and the Pigfesters sit and listen on hay bales or in portable chairs that they have brought with them. There are tents pitched all over the grounds and one man—a confederate army buff—brings a cannon, which he shoots off periodically. In previous years the cannon shooting was unannounced, but now, after almost giving several of the party attendees heart attacks, he shoots it at scheduled and announced times. There is a general feeling of good will and good times and good food and people gather around a big bonfire and play instruments and sing songs well into the night. For me Pigfest has always been a chance to be with my family and sit in what became known as “The Carpenter Compound, “ a well lit and well sheltered camping area that my Dad , who is known for his military style tarping skills (I’ll talk more about this when I get around to writing about our family trips to the beach), sets up each year. Within this compound are rugged tables, comfortable camping chairs and coolers stocked with beer, soft drinks and water. It is the perfect retreat when the live music gets too live or too bad or you just need a break from the Pigfest masses.

When I was in college, I rounded up a group of friends and we all caravanned from New Orleans to Tallulah for Pigfest and to celebrate my birthday. Obviously the plan was that we would camp out, but invariably we ended up camping all over my parents’ house, using up the hot water as we all showered and complicating things by insisting on riding the four wheeler all over the farm. My parents generously put up with this bunch of self-involved, unhelpful young people, feeding and sheltering us for an entire weekend, and we had a great time being irresponsible, drinking too much and trying to be cooler than we actually were. My favorite Pigfest was spent surrounded by these friends (because they were, and still are, some of my closest friends), full of pulled pork, dancing to the music that was being played, and delighted, in a drunken way, when an Elvis impersonator drove through the crowds and put on a show that was probably not as entertaining or funny as we thought it was. We played with a hacky sack and threw a Frisbee and hung out in our cars with music blaring. These were pre-Carpenter Compound days and we set up our tents in a big mass and proceeded to party the night away. It didn’t rain and it wasn’t hot and we didn’t care about getting sleep. It was just a fun and adolescent weekend.

Many years later I went home for Pigfest on my birthday. Jim was stuck at work in Houston and I decided it would be a good idea to go running on the farm with our Buster. I’m sure that if Jim had been there, he would have reminded me that this was, in fact, NOT a good idea for several reasons. First of all, Buster was a bow-legged, toothless, aging beagle who was not particularly interested in running. Mostly he wanted to sniff. Running with him was actually more like dragging him behind me as we each attempted to assert control over the situation. To compound the bad idea that was taking Buster running in the first place, I decided to let him off the leash. Again, if Jim had been there he would have reminded me that, based on history, I should have known better, but maybe because it was my birthday, I thought that if I let Buster off the leash, he would just run along beside me, sniffing to his heart’s content. Sadly, I was mistaken. Instead of running beside me, he took off across the fields at breakneck speed. I’ve never seen a dog move so fast. In fact, if I hadn’t been so distraught about it, I would have been really impressed. Instead, I bolted after him, fell into a hole, twisted my ankle, had to spend the majority of my birthday in the emergency room waiting for an x-ray, unable to reach Jim, who was having a hell day on his project in Houston, and feeling sorry for myself. Then I had to be transported into Pigfest on a giant golf cart because crutches and the mud weren’t really a good mix. And that was just embarrassing.

I have not been to Pigfest since we moved to England four years ago. Pigfest 2010 starts next Friday—on my birthday—and, again, we won’t be there. This year, preoccupied with my tantrum throwing toddler and heavily pregnant with the next baby, Pigfest and my birthday have been the last things on my mind. We are half way through October and I have yet to say something like, “It’s my birthday month, so I get to do ________!” or “I’m going to buy this for myself as a treat for my birthday!” I haven’t even dropped major hints about what fabulous things I’m expecting my fabulous husband to do for me in celebration of the most important day of the year. Instead, I can’t stop thinking about how in four short weeks we’ll have a new baby and suddenly be a family of four; that I maybe should pack my hospital bag; that maybe we should get something for the baby to sleep in; that Evie will have to learn to share the love and attention that she gets exclusively with a younger sibling. There is a lot to celebrate, but my birthday is kind of low on the list. This year, that’s actually ok with me. But, next year I’m to be expecting a big costume party to celebrate 35 years of fabulousness, two kids and my awesome mothering skills. There had better be things with my name painted all over them, a piñata, glitter, roller skating…and maybe we’ll even make it to Pigfest.

Angry London

Prologue: I wrote this a while ago after experiencing the general nastiness that prevails on the buses in London. I didn't post it because, generally, as a foreigner, if I say anything critical about London or England and its customs or people, I get some response from an insulted Brit who thinks I should go back to America. But today, after about a month of avoiding the bus, I decided to give it another chance. The first thing that happened is that no one, despite my obvious advanced pregnancy, offered me a seat. I wasn't going far and I had no expectations that anyone would be polite, so that wasn't so bad. But as I was getting off, a man, well into his 50's shoved an older man who looked to be in his 80's out of the way and when the older man protested the offending passenger told him to "Piss off you old coot." It was shocking and disgusting behavior and, once again, I plan to walk miles and miles before I set foot on another London bus.

The bus shifted and I held on tightly to Evie’s stroller while simultaneously balancing the Richard Scarry book on the window so that she could, using the labeled picture of a pig in his underwear, identify her own eyes, ears, nose, etc. as we made our lumbering way home. Suddenly, yelling erupted in the back. The woman sitting next to me, who smelled slightly of urine and had muttered profanities at me under her breath a few minutes earlier when I asked if she would move her bag off the seat so that I could sit with my child, whipped around to check out the action.

‘I’m just saying, why don’t you give the lady your seat?!’ yelled the first man.

‘I don’t need to get a bloody lecture on politeness. If she wants my seat, all she has to do is ask me, IN ENGLISH, if I would mind letting her sit down!’ the second man spat back. Then he sarcastically asked the woman in question—IN ENGLISH-- if she would like his seat.

When there is an angry altercation in London, I’ve learned it’s best to pretend like it’s not happening. If you are unfortunate enough to make eye contact with some of the super angry people who ride around this city on the buses and tubes, there is a good chance that their anger will be directed at you. So, Evie and I happily continued to identify her body parts. But I couldn’t help but notice how miserable everyone on the bus looked…and it wasn’t just because they weren’t enjoying the fight going on at the back of the bus.

I have never lived in a city so full of rage filled people as London. I used to think that people in Boston were angry, but once I got used to their accents, I realized that they just sounded angry, but were, generally, a pretty happy lot. Yes, they honk their horns more than necessary and anyone would get in a bad mood during the kinds of winters that they have endure every year, but I can’t remember a time when I was in Boston and felt like the people around me were scarily angry. New Orleans also has its fair share of angry people these days, but I would say they have a right to be a little bitter after the horrors of Katrina and the more recent oil spill fiasco. Still, they are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and that’s the attitude that prevailed when I lived there, too.

But in London, people are just pissed off and I can’t figure out why. It’s a beautiful and prosperous city. The weather gets a little rainy, but the winters and the summers are mild. They get incredible benefits from the government including healthcare. They have good public transportation. They have international respect. People come from all over the world to live here and visit.

One afternoon, on the bus, Jim happened to glance over at a guy who was swearing and gesticulating with his group of friends while his small daughter sat next to him. Unfortunately, Jim made the forbidden eye contact and the man pounced, unleashing a tirade of insults, asking Jim if he ‘fancied’ him, threatening to kick his ass. Wisely, Jim stared out the window and pretended like he couldn’t hear the guy, but inside he was terrified. Knife crimes are rampant in London and Jim was debating whether or not it would be safer to stay on the bus (where everyone was also pretending like nothing was happening, including the bus driver) or to get off. Either way, he could count on the fact that no one would help him if the guy and his friends decided to jump him. Luckily, they lost interest.

Another morning, early in my second pregnancy, Evie and I were walking to see a friend when a car came flying around the corner. We were in the middle of the street and the driver pulled as close as he could without hitting us and then proceeded to berate me for half a block, calling me a stupid blind cow and some horrendous obscenities before peeling off down the street. I was shocked that someone would be so aggressive towards a mother and her baby who were innocently crossing the street. Actually, I was shocked that someone would be that aggressive towards ANYONE and it ruined my morning. It did provide me with an opportunity to tell Evie that some people aren’t very nice. As usual, she happily chattered away, oblivious to the situation and I reflected on how lucky she is to have lived a life so far during which no one has ever been mean to her.

When I mention to friends that someone was nasty to me on the streets of London, they usually have stories of their own. One friend was hit by an obese woman’s cane repeatedly until she gave up her seat on the bus. Another, struggling to get off the bus with her baby and no one to help her was berated by another passenger for pushing instead of being offered assistance. I have watched teenaged boys throwing food at people passing by and no one did or said anything due to the fear of being stabbed. When Jim and I heard a couple in the throes of a fight the other night, we crossed the street. I witnessed five people walk past another couple, as the man slammed the woman up against a wall and hit her. I called the police, but not until I was well out of sight.

Living in London has, for the majority of the time, been a joy. We have had incredible experiences and happy times and by the time we leave we will have had two children here and made some of the best friends of our lives. But there is this underlying feeling of anxiety and unhappiness that the city projects. We will miss it here, but we won’t miss the anger.

It's a bug's world

Much of my life has been punctuated by the presence of bugs and creepy crawlies. This is not a fact that I have always been comfortable with, but something that I had to learn to accept growing up in Louisiana, where the humidity is suffocating and the mosquitoes are as big as crows and as bloodthirsty as vampires. OFF and other bug sprays and repellents just seemed to egg them on and we spent our summer days and evenings splattering mosquitoes drunk with our own blood all over our arms and legs. I never tried this, but it was rumored that if you let the mosquitoes keep drinking, they would eventually burst. Personally, I have always preferred cold-blooded mosquito murder.

When the mosquitoes were not eating us alive, the horseflies were. As soon as the sun started to set, the giant, blood-sucking flies moved in. They especially liked to target us in the swimming pool, focusing on our faces and heads as we bobbed up and down, dodging them and trying to escape their painful bites. Usually they succeeded in driving us indoors…where the cockroaches were waiting.

At our house, the cockroaches were as under control as they could be with regular visits from the ‘bug man.’ The occasional big one came in from outside, but they were never a major problem (my mother would be horrified if she thought I was suggesting that we lived in a roach infested home. We did not). In my college and grad school apartments in New Orleans, though, it was another story. There was no controlling the humongous, scuttling, drunkenly flying bugs and our lack of general cleanliness, typical of college students, didn’t help the situation. Running across your floor or up your walls, these mammoth cockroaches were highly disturbing, but when they took flight it was as if they had no control and the only point of reference for landing always seemed to be the closest human. I have suffered the injustice of having a cockroach land on me on more than one occasion and will never forget how it feels to have one’s sticky, clinging legs, clenched to my arm or my thigh.

I also will never forget the feeling that came over me when I was lying in bed at night or turned the light on in the bathroom and realized that I was sharing space with an insect that was so big I could actually hear it moving around. One fateful night, I walked into my bathroom and heard the distinct sound of a very large roach, scuttling around in our bathroom cabinet. I could see its antenna silhouetted against the wall and decided that the best course of action was just to close the cabinet and pretend like I didn’t know it was there. Having accomplished that, I nervously walked over to the sink, where I nonchalantly lifted up an overturned Mardi Gras cup only to be greeted with ANOTHER cockroach, which my tender-hearted roommate had decided to trap and remove from the premises humanely. Unfortunately she got side tracked by a phone call and the cockroach remained in its prison until I came along. I nearly had a heart attack that night.

Cockroaches aside, perhaps the most disgusting thing that happened in that apartment was the boll weevil infestation (as reference to by my friend and former roommate Katie in my cooking blog). Being poor graduate students and not wanting to be wasteful, we decided that rather than throw out all of our boll weevil infested food, we were just going to skim the boll weevils off the surface of the rice and cereal and eat them anyway. For several days we lived liked this, attempting to ignore the fact that a lot of our food had tiny bugs in it. Eventually we came to our senses, tossed the food and had the house fumigated. I still can’t believe that we stooped so low as to knowingly eat bugs rather than just buy some new rice. I know for a fact that if our food had been infested with roaches instead of boll weevils, we wouldn’t have even considered such a thing.

England is blessed with cool weather and, therefore, fewer bugs. I’m sure that there are cockroaches in London, but I have lived four blissful years without encountering one of them. These days we are happy share our house with a few spiders and the occasional silverfish. Every evening before her bath, Evie and I sing Eensy Weensy Spider and relocate the resident bathroom spiders from the tub to a safe corner so that they don’t drown. I am superstitious and know that killing a spider—even if it kind of can’t be prevented when they are hanging out in the tub drain—is bad luck, so I try my best to do right by them. Occasionally an unfortunate spider is eaten by our cat Finchley and every once in a while, when I start to feel outnumbered, I do some population management with the vacuum cleaner (with the idea, obviously, that they are just being relocated to a new living space inside of the vacuum bag and NOT killed), but mostly we manage to co-exist in harmony with the creepy crawlies in our little flat. After all, they, like the rest of us, are just trying to make a living. And they aren't the size of small cows.

Cooking

I grew up in a house full of good food. My mom is an excellent cook, who effortlessly throws a bunch of stuff that has been frozen for about twenty years into a pot, seasons it with whatever she has on hand, and then dishes out something delicious every time, despite the slightly suspect origins of the ingredients. The French bread that she makes in bulk, brings us all flocking to the kitchen upon its removal from the oven and if there is any way for us to take a few loaves away with us after a visit we do. Her biscuits are unrivaled and even though I know how much Crisco goes into them, I can’t eat fewer than two or three at a sitting. Usually, if Mom follows a recipe, she adds or deletes some seemingly key ingredient, but her altered dishes never seem to suffer. She also never seems to have a problem feeding the masses. When we go home, it frequently coincides with the visits of other relatives and Mom cooks and cooks and cooks for us all, often feeding six cats at the crack of dawn and then six to eight adults at every meal without getting flustered or stressed or exhausted. And her desserts! She’ll just whip up an apple pie or bread pudding or key lime pie or some other giant, sugary concoction and, even though we’ve stuffed ourselves at every meal we still force it all down, because it would be folly to miss out.

Both of my grandmothers were good cooks and so is my sister, who enjoys baking pumpkin bread using a whole pumpkin (my personal idea of hell) or peeling a bushel of peaches to make her husband peach pie for his birthday. When we went blueberry picking, she froze her blueberries and then made delicious cakes and breads and creamy blueberry substances with lemon frosting. My blueberries, on the other hand, got smooshy and moldy and finally had to be thrown out. My Aunt makes killer banana bread and delicious Hoppin’ John. My banana bread usually turns out dry and tasteless and Hoppin’ John is too labor intensive for me these days. The idea of singlehandedly cooking something like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner is thoroughly unappealing to me. Last year we ate Christmas dinner at a pub.

I don’t remember when I started trying to cook, but I definitely did not inherit the natural cooking abilities of the other women in my family. My memories of feeding myself in college include a lot of Ramen Noodles, salads, Spaghettio’s, and vegetarian corn dogs. At one point my roommates and I acquired a huge bag of new potatoes and spent a week eating spicy crawfish style potatoes without the benefit of crawfish. I was also good at making very potent jello shots.

Eventually I incorporated things like chicken breast and black beans out of a can into my repertoire. My salads became more elaborate, with the addition of blue cheese and grapes and avocados mixed in with the standard lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber. For Christmas one year, my mom gave me the Joy of Cooking and I painstakingly started to follow recipes…but it wasn’t effortless and it wasn’t easy and I could never count on my food turning out the way I planned for it to be.

I think I started actually trying to cook somewhat well when I got married, in an effort to be wifely. I was unemployed at the beginning of my engagement, after moving to Houston so when I wasn’t looking for a job, I was plotting how I was going to impress Jim with my culinary skills. Fortunately, he had been eating things like Ramen Noodles and boxed mashed potatoes for a while before I moved in, so it didn’t take much to improve upon his usual home dining experience.

One thing I have mastered in the taste department is the carrot cake. A birthday staple in our family, it is not only easy, but is also a lumpy cake, so there is no expectation that it should look beautiful. I once attempted to make a layered carrot cake, which ended in disaster, with both the cake and myself collapsed onto the floor. Since then, I have just stuck to the sheet cake in a lasagna pan style of carrot cake, with copious amounts of cream cheese frosting on top to cover up the flaws and have always been left with an empty pan and culinary success.

The other night, as I attempted to scraped burned lentils off the bottom of a pan without mixing them in with the rest of the unburned lentils, I reflected on the fact that when we were kids, my mom always started our dinner during the late afternoon, so that she never was rushed and we never had to wait past seven to eat. We usually had a meat or main, vegetables, French bread, and salad, although sometimes we had corndogs and tater tots or pizza. She always was starting dinner in a very organized manner at around 5. In contrast, I spend a good portion of every day wondering what the hell I’m going to make for dinner, having, as usual, not planned ahead. My dilemma is complicated by the fact that I have become a vegetarian and my main charge is a 20 month old who spends a lot of time energy testing my limits by tasting the food that I make her and declaring, ‘YUCK!’ My husband is pretty good-natured about eating vegetarian fare, but he has his limits. Thus, I can’t just put in a meatloaf for the whole family and assume everyone is going to be happy and I sometimes spend my evenings cooking three separate meals when cooking is actually the last thing I feel like doing. As a result, by the end of the day, post-dinner (or in between dinners, because Evie eats early and we eat later), after attempting to encourage good eating habits by bribing Evie with the promise of a cookie if she eats half of her dinner, I am exhausted and frustrated and wishing for a personal chef. A lot of the time, I eat cereal or hummus and pita bread and Jim happily gets take out.

Some time ago, I was discussing this inability to follow in the footsteps of my mother when it comes to cooking with a friend and her theory is that this generation of mothers is too busy on their computers and iphones to be as focused on getting organized as our mothers were when we were growing up. So, I have vowed to improve! Now on the weekends I try to think about what I might want to cook during the week and I plan ahead by getting the groceries I need. Leftovers play a large role in meal times and tonight I am going to figure out how I can crumble leftover turkey burger into something else to make an irresistible combination that no twenty month old will deny! In time, maybe I will be able to have the kind of dinner party that I imagine having, with roast lamb (because when I become a culinary genius, I will have to be a meat eater again) and scalloped potatoes cooked to perfection and perfectly seasoned and steamed vegetables and mouthwatering crème brulee. I will swish in and out of the kitchen after making small talk with the butchers and the green grocers. I will tempt my guests with tiny and delectable hors d’oeuvres and cheeses that will perfectly compliment the wine we are swilling. My heart rate won’t go up because I won’t be dashing around the kitchen like a chicken with its head cut off and I won’t bag the whole idea because I’m exhausted by the thought of it…

But these things take time and, for now, we’ll have to make do with leftovers. And I'll have to get off the computer.

Running

My relationship with running started in the womb. An avid and dedicated runner, my mother ran through all three of her pregnancies and beyond. I don’t have a memory from childhood that doesn’t involve her going running with friends or training for a race or a marathon. Every morning she would drop us off at school and then head to the park for a six or eight or ten mile run. She is small and thin and passionate about fitness. She still exercises every day with the same friends she ran with when we were children, but now—doctors’ orders—they walk to preserve their bone density. Still, they are hard-core and fast. I’ll never forget the time I suggested I walk with them (four months pregnant) and my mom, as nicely as possible, suggested that I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up. And probably she was right.

I am not a natural runner, but people expect me to be because I have long legs. In fact, the fastest runners I have known in my running career have been small women with short legs. As I labored through my run at the back of the pack, I could see these little powerhouses off in the distance with the men, leaving me in their dust.

My earliest memories of my own running took place in our town during the annual Southern National Bank 1 mile fun run. Obviously, I had a lot of encouragement from my mother, but even with her support I still felt like my lungs were going to explode and my legs were going to fall off (at age seven or so). I did not like running. I also remember being somewhat forced to run, along with my sister, down to a tree and back after doing something we weren’t supposed to do—maybe just fighting—on the ride home from school. Running as punishment definitely did not improve my attitude. Then, as a teenager, I began a campaign against running because I knew it was something that was so important to my mom. In true daughter betrayal fashion I refused to run beyond the running I did as part of my tennis training. And when I went to college in New Orleans, as if to reinforce my anti-exercise and running stance, I packed on the freshman fifteen within two months. It turns out that pizza at 3am coupled with copious beer consumption is not so great for one’s figure.

Faced with the horror of no longer fitting into my jeans, I finally started to run. At first I could barely get from my dorm room to Audubon Park, but eventually I got stronger and my running got easier. I went from walking most of the short, two mile loop around the park to adding on the ‘fly’ and zoo loop for a total of about 3 miles. Sometimes I ran on the streetcar tracks. I made friends with other students who wanted to run and we would run together in the evenings, tracking out the routes that would take us past as many yards with sprinklers as possible. I ran the Crescent City Classic in the pouring down rain one year. Running wasn’t a daily commitment for me, but it was something that was gaining importance in my life and which I was beginning to be proud of. I was offended and hurt when I referred to myself as a runner and a not very nice boyfriend laughed, suggesting that the limited running that I was doing was not enough to count.

After that relationship ended and I was in a healthier state of mind, I trained for my first half marathon, which I ran with my mom, my aunt and my sister. I got shin splints and my toenails turned black and fell off. My legs cramped up at mile nine and I doubted myself throughout, but I finished. I also discovered that I had been wearing shoes that were about two sizes too small. Running the New Orleans half marathon became somewhat of a tradition in our family and once I got my shoes sorted out and really committed myself, I went from being slow and lumbering to being marginally speedy and light footed.

When I moved to Boston, I joined a running group that met at a running store near our apartment. Most of the runners had qualified for the Boston marathon, but some of them were planning to run it for charity. I wasn’t at the running a marathon point in my running career at that time, but I did enjoy being part of a pack of people who loved to run and went out running in all kinds of inclement weather. Prior to moving to Boston, it never would have occurred to me that I would go running on a sheet of ice in ten-degree weather. But I did. And I loved it. I also had managed, before Boston, to run on hills as little as possible, but in Boston I couldn’t avoid it. Although I hated them, the hills made me stronger and I was in the best shape of my life trying to keep up with those Boston runners.

I was accepted into the New York City marathon lottery just after getting engaged to Jim and making the cross-country move from cold, cold Boston to unbelievably hot and humid Houston. Luckily, we lived very close to a running store, so I quickly found a group of people to train with. Marathon training in the Houston summer required a level of running commitment I have never had to display before. Not only was I running further and more than ever before, but I also had to do it in the pre-dawn hours to avoid getting heat stroke. Jim was willing to get up with me during the Saturday pre-dawn hours and drive me to meet my running group at 5am. Then he would head off to a coffee shop for the duration of the run, pick me up again when the run was finished, and take me to breakfast. After breakfast, we both went back to bed for a large portion of Saturday and I was usually too tired on Saturday night to do much. Marathon training definitely was detrimental to our social life.

My whole family came to New York City to cheer me on during the marathon. It was Halloween weekend and it wasn’t often that we got to visit New York, so we did a lot of walking around the city and headed out on Halloween night to join the crowds in our costumes. The night before the marathon, I was nervous and hardly slept. I had to be up and at the buses to take me to Staten Island at 5am. After a weekend of too much walking and not enough sleep, I was exhausted before I even started the race. As the sun started to rise and I struggled to stay warm before the marathon, I felt lonely and discouraged, despite being surrounded by thousands of other runners. I was in a port-a-potty when the starting gun went off. Eventually I headed out with everyone else.

Running the NYC marathon was thrilling, but by mile six I knew it was not going to be something that felt good. During my training, I had breezed through my 21 mile run in the heat and humidity and at 4 am in Houston, but in New York I was struggling. At mile sixteen, as pre-arranged, my family waited, cheering and with signs and wearing bright orange sweatshirts with my name on them. I stopped to hug them and at that point I wanted nothing more than to quit and just go home. But quitting wasn’t an option. I had done too much training and come too far. I kept going, although I don’t remember much more after that besides stopping to sit on the curb in Central Park and hearing the crowds yelling for me to get up and that I could do it. For some reason their encouragement made me angry, because they weren’t the ones who had pounded the pavement for over 20 miles. I had been a spectator at the NYC Marathon before and it was a far cry from the experience of actually running it.

What got me through, actually, were the other runners, who, as they passed me, left me with words of encouragement. They did know the pain I was feeling and they also knew how much it meant to finish. When I came around the final bend to the finish line and saw the relief on my families’ faces (It took me an hour and a half longer than I had estimated and they were starting to worry), I felt proud. At the same time I felt disappointed in myself for taking so long. Then I cursed having a last name at the beginning of the alphabet when I realized that even though I was done with running, I still had to walk about half a mile to get to my designated family meeting area.

I kept running after the marathon, but only for fun and fitness. Since having my daughter, free time for running has been limited, but I still managed to go a few times a week before getting pregnant again and credit running with getting me back into shape again post-partum. I have made friends in every city I have lived in through running and plan, when my children get older and I have more time, to embrace running fully again. Maybe I’ll even do another marathon or maybe I’ll just be happy to be out there running again.

Farm Life

            I live in London and have been in cities, big and small, since I was seventeen.  But my roots are in rural Louisiana and I grew up on a farm in the Mississippi Delta, snuggled between a small town and a small city and surrounded by flat fields of cotton, corn and soybeans. 

            Our farm has been in my Dad’s family for about 200 years and one of the highlights of his youth was when he and his sisters drove down to Louisiana from wherever they were living and had a vacation on the farm with his grandparents.  He worked on the farm as a young person and, eventually, followed a winding path through life into agriculture.

            My Mom comes from Cleveland and went to Barnard in New York City.  Through a series of events and after eight years in New York, she ended up teaching at Mississippi State, where she was set up on a blind date with my Dad.  According to him, the friend that set them up described her as ‘a weirdo from New York.’  Weirdo or not, they got married and she ended up spending the rest of her life to this day in Tallulah, Louisiana on a farm.  I admire her for that. I’m not sure I could have done the same.

             What our farm and the towns and cities near it lack in classical culture, is made up for in local culture.  Yes, we have museums!  There is the tiny Coca-Cola Museum in Downtown Vicksburg, the SS Cairo Museum (an impressive skeleton of a ship from the civil war), the hilly and beautiful military park with its occasional civil war reenactments and the stimulating Courthouse Museum. Actually, I can’t really comment on the Courthouse Museum, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t been there since I was in about the fourth grade.  The Miss Mississippi Pageant takes place yearly in Vicksburg and is quite the social event.  When we were kids, my mom would usually get tickets from one friend or the other and would take my sister and me, dressed in our pageant finest, to watch the glamorous beauty queens compete for the crown.  In the days that followed, and decked out in hand me down cocktail dresses from our grandmother, we would enthusiastically emulate all that we had learned from the pageant contestants.  It is probably a good thing that our future as beauty queens was limited to our imaginations.

            I’m not aware of any museums in our very small town, although on a recent jaunt into town with my Dad, it occurred to me that the entire town seems like a museum these days.  He spent half the time pointing out places that used to be. ‘That used to be the Ford dealership,’ or ‘That used to be the drug store,’ and ‘That used to be that gift shop that you kids liked to go to.’ Tallulah has a bayou that runs straight through it and in the bayou there are stalky looking electric Christmas trees, which stay up year round.  My grandmother used to say that Tallulah was romantic. 

Sadly, the landmark that Tallulah has been most famous for is its school for ‘bad boys.’  Whenever we were in town as children and would pass a light blue van, mom would say, ‘those are the bad boys.’  In recent years, the bad boys made the front page of the New York Times after it was exposed that they were being abused in horrifying ways by the guards at the Juvenile Delinquent facility and, since then, the facility has been shut down. Tallulah still has a high security prison. 

            But we didn’t live in Tallulah or Vicksburg. To this day, I don’t know what the name of our community is. It is near Tallulah and Vicksburg,  close to Mound and Thomastown, but not part of any of them.  We were on Route 2 my entire life, but since they got set up with Emergency Services and can now call 911, my parents have a new address that has nothing to do with the Route 2 of my childhood.  There is still debate about whether an ambulance would be able to find them, new address or not.

            Our life on the farm was fun, even though we longed to live in a neighborhood like ‘normal’ kids.  Back in the 80’s, cotton was still put into large trailers and each fall during the harvest my sister, brother and I would jump in the cotton.  It didn’t matter that it was usually still hot and the cotton stuck to our sweaty skin.  I look at the neat bails that cotton are put in now and feel sorry for the country kids of today who don’t get to experience the thrill of jumping in cotton.  And for the city kids who have never jumped from hay bale to hay bale or experience a hayride in a trailer pulled by a tractor on a chilly autumn evening.

            Our lives on the farm were filled with adventures that no suburb or city kid could imagine.  My young daughter and I spend our days going from one structured activity to the next in London, but I have already witnessed her, at younger than 18 months, thriving in the space and freedom that she has when we are on the farm. I hope that as she grows older, she’ll get to have the same sort of unstructured and rambling experiences that I had with my brother and sister. We fearlessly paddled down the snake filled bayou in front of our house in a kayak, climbed trees, ran through fields, scrambled on and into tractors, explored the musty, fertilizer dusted rooms of my Dad’s shop (in retrospect, probably not a good idea).  We watched farmers chewing tobacco and then imitated them using a mouth full of raisins.  We fished crawfish out of our swimming pool and spent our summers splashing around in the lukewarm water and playing games that sometimes landed one of us in the ‘quiet chair.’ We sacrilegiously rode four wheelers and our trusty go cart over the Indian Mound on the farm and ran through old cattle corrals.  We had a pet calf, lots of dogs and cats and some horses we hardly rode.  Our dad gave away two nasty little ponies to some local boys telling them that if they could catch them, they could have them.  We ate delicious vegetables from our parents’ vegetable garden and picked sweet corn out of the fields.  We sat around in rocking chairs snapping peas that we had picked from the garden and slapped at mosquitoes while we watched fireworks on Fourth of July. We camped out in our pecan grove or in the cow fields, watching the stars and listening to bull frogs in the bayou, harassed by our cats rubbing against our tents and usually ending up back inside because the mosquitoes were so bad or we got scared. I learned to drive on a standard shift diesel pick up truck and nearly drove my Dad and myself into the bayou during one of my early lessons.  Later, I bashed up the same truck while joy riding around the farm with friends.

            Even as adults, we love to go home to the farm.  There are more animals than ever—mostly cats and dogs now instead of cows and horses—and delicious food cooked by Mom, the same trees we used to climb as kids, a new vegetable garden in a different spot and the same swimming pool shaded by a tree that has grown over thirty years to keep it cooler than when we were young.   A few years ago, my husband and I lay in the pecan grove where we used to camp, watched th stars and listened to a barn owl hooting in the distance. At some point we realized that it was completely disrespectful to ride motorized vehicles over the Indian mound, but we still enjoy trekking across the fields to the cow pasture and riding in the pickup truck to the levy, where we can walk down to the banks of the always impressive Mississippi River. 

             I love the farm, and I have only happy memories about my childhood there. My parents made sure that we grew up open minded, well read and with access to culture and I’ve never felt like I was really a ‘farm girl’ because of all the opportunities that we had growing up.  But, when I went off to college, I never looked back.  I am grateful that my children will be able to build their own experiences in the place where I grew up, but I am also happy that they will likely grow up in cities.  They will have access to culture that we had to make a great effort to experience in our childhood.  They will, I hope, have the option of going to the kind of excellent public schools that are rare in Louisiana and of going to school with people from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It’s likely that they will move frequently throughout their lives, but I also hope that living around the world and the United States will help to shape them into interesting, passionate and worldly people. And when we all need a break from our busy city lives, we will head home to the farm, lie down in the pecan grove, look at the stars and listen to the bullfrogs, slap the mosquitoes and think how lucky we all are.

How Things Change

We are spending the week at a kid friendly hotel in Cornwall, venturing briefly away from the self-catering holidays of our recent past and treating ourselves to what we think is a well deserved break from the usual work/at home routine. From our ‘villa,’ which is really a glorified hotel room, we look down onto the sea and the cliffs of Cornwall, as well as a playground, a trampoline, a football field and a little log house, in which there is a small plastic kitchen for tiny hands to try out their cooking skills using plastic fruits, vegetables, pate and spaghetti, among other delicacies. In London we hear seagulls who have relocated to Hampstead Heath in favour of easily accessed bread over the hard work of catching fish, but here they are squawking away in a more appropriate habitat. Bunnies chase each other back and forth across the lawn outside of our sliding glass doors. If we could block out the view of the playground and football pitch and if it wasn't for the glaring and unignorable fact that we are sharing our ‘villa’ with nineteen month old Tasmanian Devil, Evie, it would be the perfect setting for a romantic holiday.

Here, we are surrounded by other families with small children and all share the same weary look that comes from months and years of not getting enough sleep. In the morning, hours before we actually want to be awake, we troop up with our small charges for breakfast. All around, high pitched mommy voices urge their children to eat and daddy voices cheer for each bite of eggs or cereal or fruit that is consumed. Every morning some child at a neighboring table has a breakfast related meltdown. Then it’s off to various activities or, in our case, to drop our precious and not quite willing daughter off at a Kids’ Club for so that we can revel in the few hours each day that we have to ourselves. She cries and we feel briefly guilty and slightly teary ourselvdes, but also elated. What will we do with this precious time? How will we wile away the child free hours?

It takes us a few days to settle into our new found free time. Our first day is rainy so Jim and I take a drive to a nearby village to buy some fruit and diapers and attempt to walk to the beach. Despite being cold and soggy and the fact that I unwisely am wearing flip flops, we are still a little giddy at the prospect of being out and about in car, without having to worry about when we are going to feed Evie and whether we have remembered the wipes and the stroller and the sunhat and the binky. After a brief argument in the car on our second day, we take a walk down and back up steep steps to an impressive beach near our hotel. Fortunately we both enjoy the walk, but trying to squeeze lunch in causes unnecessary stress at the end of the outing and we barely make it back to Kids’ Club in time to pick up Evie without being penalized.  Finally, three days in, we seem to have gotten the hang of it, spending most of our three hours of child free time in a spa, being pampered. The downside is that this option comes at considerable cost…but we’re just ignoring that part for now.

In the afternoons, post-Kids’ Club and nap time, we head down to the beach, where I have managed so far not to wear a bathing suit. Yesterday, with my seven months pregnant belly as an excuse, I perched on some rocks and watched as Jim and Evie went racing into the waves. Despite having proven to us on many occasions that she is neither scared of lizards or tarantulas, of swinging high or of climbing high, of trampolines or of most other things that babies should be afraid of, Evie still has surprised us with her enthusiasm for the beach and the waves. She seems to think that she is part mermaid and keeps Jim very busy with her darting in and out and jumping over the waves. Unfortunately for me and for everyone who gets to witness me in a bathing suit at this stage of pregnancy, I, too, am probably going to have to join in the frigid Cornwall water fun this afternoon, as the pressure is on from my little, enthusiastic family.

On the beach, other families from our hotel dig in the sand and dads emerge from the water in skin tight, rented wet suits, which amplify their middle aged guts. Jim, joking that the body suits for middle aged dads have built in extra space in the belly area, has yet to succumb to the temptation of renting a heated wet suit and heading out to relive his youth on a boogie board, but he has done some pretty impressive body surfing. Overall, we, the parents at this hotel, are a pretty average looking bunch, with our slight paunches, sagging post-childbirth breasts and stomachs and varicose veins. There was a glamorous looking American couple here when we first arrived—he looking trim and fit and she, tall and slim and elegant and stylish with her third baby in her arms-- but fortunately they went back to London, letting the rest of us off the hook. Happily, we schlep down to the beach or to the pool in our matronly bathing suits and peddle pushers and pasty skin and then back up again to the evening kids’ activities, where the parents can have a drink while the children are entertained by magicians or dance parties or balloon men. Then, back to the dining room, where the tables are formally set for parents, with colourful plastic cups and plates and high chairs for the children and the wait staff are all beautiful, young, fresh looking twenty somethings who go for a quick surf down at the beach between shifts. Again, the cajoling to eat all around and my own threats of ‘no ice cream unless you eat your string beans.’ No matter what, Evie always manages to get her ice cream, because, after all, this is her holiday, too.

After a day of trekking to and fro and ball pools and swing sets and beaches and bunnies, we try to relax in bed with a book while our over-stimulated and over-sugared offspring bounces around in her crib and calls our names from the other side of a thin mat that serves as a wall between us. In the old days, we would have gone for a romantic stroll in the dunes, or dangled our feet off the end of a pier, or had wine under the stars, but now we decide that maybe it would be best to turn the lights out at 8:30 so that she’ll go to sleep, because she’s obviously tired. And so are we.

An Introduction

In the past few years, I have gone from somewhat confused, but passionate and mostly happy working girl to happy, devoted, jobless, stay at home mom and wife, expecting a second baby in a couple of months who really needs a project to stimulate my stay at home brain. This blog is that project.

I've maintained our other blog--Jim and Claire's International Adventures--for over four years now and will keep updating it on an (almost) weekly basis with pictures and our latest adventures (which, truthfully, have gone from international traveling to international parenting). But this blog is truly my own. It's a collection of some writing that I have done--for better or for worse--in the little spare time that I have each day.  It is somewhat of an experiment, driven by ideas and suggestions from friends and family and even if no one else enjoys it, it's giving me the excuse to write a little about whatever I want.  It will, I hope, be a memoir of sorts as well as an opportunity, eventually, to do some creative writing.  I'll post as frequently as I can and will strive not to be a boring blogger who rambles on and on about her philosophies on life. I'll try not to become a mommy blogger twice over, but warn that a lot of my writing will involve the challenges of being a mom since I tend to write what I know.  On that note, the first thing I'm posting is about our family holiday...

Enjoy!