I like to write. I find it healing and I find it extra healing when I have an audience who says in words or just by reading my posts, “You’re not alone.” I find it super extra healing when someone in the audience says, “Your writing has helped me.” I don’t write about secrets. In fact, I haven’t written about things that aren’t well-known to friends, family, and even acquaintances. There isn’t anyone who knew my family who doesn’t know our struggles.

Is it selfish to be so concerned with my mental health that I would put my family’s pain on my blog? Perhaps. But my mental health is so important to me because it directly affects my children and my husband. My kids are my favorite people. My husband is my best friend. I owe it to them to deal with my life in the best way I know how. If my mental health is poor, my children have a poor life and my marriage sucks. If my mental health is good, my children have a good life and my marriage is good. It’s a simple equation.

I use sarcasm and humor to make light of the tough parts of my life, but everybody knows that right behind humor, there’s pain. I make light of the issues I’ve had with  my parents and my grandmother in order to bring them to light so I won’t be stuck in the darkness of emotional paralysis and denial. It’s denial that makes it impossible to heal. It’s denial that causes our health problems. It’s denial that causes us to repeat these cycles. We all love our children and it’s a basic biological desire to want them to have a better life than we had. I’ve had a better life than both of my parents and I know that the experiences I complain about don’t even scratch the surface of what they had to deal with. Where my mom and dad had practically insurmountable mountains to climb, I only have a few small hills. Still, they’re my hills and sometimes they’re steep. I walk those hills and I get blisters and sometimes it feels like my canteen is empty and my tongue is swollen with thirst and the pain is too much and I want to stop. I will always struggle with the habits that come along with experience and DNA. But awareness is the best tool I have.  Awareness of my failings, both inherited and learned, can only serve to bring about healing. Awareness is my Blister-Block and the fresh cool water that fills my canteen. Of course there will be issues that I’m not aware of, brand-new mistakes that my children will have to deal with. Of course. And then they’ll work it out on their own blogs or on a talk show or in a magazine or a book and it will all be fine because they won’t be in denial and they won’t repeat my mistakes when they have their own kids.

My parents know that it’s sometimes hard to be their daughter. They don’t deny that, but they also have a sense of humor. They have a sense of understanding. They know how important it is to make sense of my story in my own way so I can give my kids a better story. They’re not going to disown me. They might cringe at some of the things I write, but they’re not going to throw a  fit and demand that I take this pain and tuck it away so we can watch in horror as it oozes out of me in destructive ways when I’m parenting or when I’m trying to be a decent wife.

I now have the distinct honor of being the first of my generation to be disowned by a small minority of my mother’s generation because of things I wrote on my blog. I’ve totally been dooced, family style. I honestly thought the “You’re out of the family!” rhetoric would have been buried with my grandmother, but that shit don’t die unless you kill it and you can’t kill it if you act like it’s not there, which brings me to my oft-repeated bottom line: It helps me to write about it. And what helps me,  helps my kids and helps my marriage. And that, my friends, is priceless.

I was cleaning my house until I saw that bird’s abomination. I know everybody poops, but when the poop gets smeared on the window, that’s cause for alarm. That just ain’t right.

I was cleaning and cleaning because my ex-stepmother is coming to visit today. Is that weird? Maybe a little bit, but I don’t know. It seems ok since she was with my dad for, like, 20 years and she’s my kids’ Grandma-type person. It seems like such a waste to have put all that effort into deciding to cut her a break once in a while after I grew up and got over the fact that my mommy and daddy weren’t married anymore. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, but whatever. I’m just going to go with what works and so far that seems to be keeping both ex-stepparents in our lives. However, I always like to make it clear that there will be no attempts at blending with brand-new steps.  I probably only make that clear on my blog, not in real life because that would call for confrontation and, well, you know. I’ll always be pleasant, but distant. The end. In fact, my dad is coming for a visit next weekend, along with his girlfriend and I will be pleasant because, let’s face it, I can’t help it. I’m just pleasant. But there will always be distance for a couple of reasons:

1. I’m not a child. I think it’s different as a child. I lived with my stepdad and I lived with my stepmom for a while. They saw me graduate from high school, they saw me get married, they saw me become a mother, and I believed that they would all stay married forever.

2. I know that the next wife/husband won’t be around forever, so I don’t want to waste my time. I have enough friends. I have enough mother figures. What I don’t have is time to invest in a person whose presence in my life is based on the whims of an emotionally stunted person.

I’m super excited  that my sister and her daughters are catching a ride down here with my dad. Since this post is kind of a downer, I’ll just give a big WOOT! to Tracey, Taylor, and Riley. We’ll rock out. I promise.

Anyway, Bryan, the kids, my ex-stepmom and I are walking the Race for the Cure together. She’s a survivor so it’s kind of a big deal. I have a grandma and an aunt who died from the stupid breast cancer, and I don’t think that needs to happen anymore. Dying of breast cancer is so over, I mean it! And tomorrow I’m gonna walk with 30,000 people who feel the same way. And even though it’s just a 5k, I predict I will be just as hungry and thirsty as I was after the half marathon. I will require food. And I will need to be watered. With beer.

It’s the little touches that make a house a home and I say the graffiti stays. After all, does your house have graffiti? No? How sad for you. I also think the weight bench is a nice touch and is in keeping with the style of the unfinished part of the basement.

I added some more pictures, if anyone is still interested in the snoozy story of our house. I’m still painting stuff. I don’t have pics of the girls’ rooms all put together and lovely yet because I haven’t done the dots and peace symbols yet. Soon!

Two of my cousins and my sister-in-law (the one who is always a bad influence on me at Easter) are coming to stay with us this weekend because we’re all running the Capital City Half Marathon together. I’m excited about that. My sister-in-law’s name is Tracy and my sister’s name is TracEy. Is that confusing to you? My kids call my sister “Aunt Tracey” and they call my sister-in-law “Different Aunt Tracey.”  They don’t know how right they are. TracEy was going to come down for the race, too, but she is cursed with an ultra-talented daughter who is the lead in her high school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, which happens to open this weekend. My niece is kind of a big deal. I’m going to buy a copy of the dvd and everybody who visits me over the summer will have to watch it over and over.

One more thing, after I posted that picture of the Pacer with the chick standing next to it, somebody said something about all women in the 70s looking like that, so I want to give you a clearer picture of my mother during the late 70s/early 80s. This is exactly what she looked like, down to the roller skates:

She looked so much like Linda Ronstadt that I would stare at that album cover wondering how in the world they decided to put my mother on the cover. Was there a contest? Did they just see her at the roller rink and snap a picture? And why didn’t they just put this Linda Ronstadt person on the cover? I thought maybe it was because she was ugly and they didn’t want her on the cover. But then I thought about the albums in my dad’s collection with Garfunkel on the cover, and I decided ugliness must not be an issue. It was so perplexing, but I never asked anyone about it and it was years before I realized that my mom was not a famous album cover model. I’m quick like that.

The maths are wrong, baby, cuz your hotness is rockin’!

Easter was lovely, except it needs to last much longer so my family can stay much longer and we can have, like, an 8-day feast instead of a weekend binge where we drink and eat too much and hurt ourselves. If we knew it would last longer, we could pace ourselves. I promise we would pace ourselves. My sister and I discovered that it doesn’t really matter what kind of wine a person drinks. If that person drinks too much of it, that person’s belly gets mad at them and punishes them. In other words, it’s not the quality, it’s the quantity. My sister-in-law is wise and she knew that already. She and my brother and brother-in-law, along with Bryan, were able to go to the Ohio Deli (as seen on Man vs Food!) and eat and eat on Saturday, while my sister and my mom and I stayed with the kids. Well, my mom stayed with the kids. Tracey and I just laid around and said, “Shhhh!” But now we know. Damn.

My Columbus friends were able to meet my family and that was lovely. I felt like I should be more nervous about it for some reason, but I wasn’t because Kristen, Dawn and Lynne are just Ohio versions of me, my sister and my sister-in-law. I don’t branch out much in my friendships. And the husbands? All of the husbands are beaten down by perfect matches for their loud and lovely wives, so we love all of them, too. Even my brother. I never found the bellybutton lint he hid here, but I have a feeling he hid it on my pillow. Just thinking about it gives me chills. Or, maybe he unscrewed the screen on the showerhead and put it in there so I shower in lint leavings every morning. Ew!

With that, I’ll leave you with another disturbing image. Everybody knows that My L1ttle Ponies love Easter. I just didn’t know how much they love it until I walked in the bathroom and found this little filly enjoying Maya’s Easter basket. In front of the mirror. Seriously, H@sbro, who designs your baskets*?

*I didn’t buy this basket. My mother-in-law bought it for Maya 2 or 3 years ago. I didn’t even notice what the little pony was doing until I saw her watching herself in the mirror with that look in her eye.

P.S. Don’t ask me what Maya’s basket was doing in the bathroom. Nobody wants to know.

While I  ponder this (and, perhaps, draw parallels between my life and His), I’ll be waiting for my mom, my brother, my sister-in-law, my nephews, my sister, and my brother-in-law to come visit. They’re all coming today! And staying for Easter, when my Columbus friends and families will join us all for brunch. And I’m going to pretend that I gave up sugar for Lent and eat it like I haven’t eaten it in 6 weeks. There will be baked goods; Oh, yes. There will be baked goods. And then they’ll be gone like a baked goods rapture. Poof! Amen.

Saturday night, my brother is playing and singing at Gresso’s from 9:00pm-1:00am. Bryan and I find it difficult to stay up to watch a half-hour tv show these days, so we’ve scheduled some naptime on Saturday so we can stay up. You should do that, too, and meet us there. It will be fun, I promise. He sings some Kings of Leon and some Neil Young and some stuff I don’t know because I’m not hip and some more stuff I don’t know because I’m not that old. (He was born in the 60s, so his musical frame of reference is way different than mine.) Some people think he’s good, but I’m not going to say that because he used to tie his dirty sweat sock around my face and gag me with the stench of his sweaty, hairy feet. And also when he and my sister babysat for me, they would wait until I fell asleep and then put horseradish or mustard in my mouth. Bryan thinks we have a lock on the bedroom door for other reasons, but really it’s because of the trauma of waking up to a mouthful of horseradish while two giggling teenagers fall all over themselves snorting with laughter and wiping the tears of hilarity out of their eyes. I hope they had fun. Idiots.

Here’s a mellow sample. He does less mellow, too.  And his own stuff. It’s all good. That reminds me, I saw a comedian once say, “I think it’s unfair that Neil Young can sing, play guitar, and play harmonica all at the same time and everybody loves it and he’s a serious artist and everything, but if he were to add a pair of cymbals to his knees, then he’d just be a moron.” Here’s my brother, sans cymbals:

In this picture: Tracey (almost 40), Abby (just over 30), and Mike (40+)

It was just a love-tap. All in fun, really. And I’m not just saying that in the way that hostages sometimes have to go on camera and read a letter that says, “I’m ok. My captors are lovely and I’m being treated swell. No hurry. They’re really nice. You should totally give them what they want, though.”

I’m sure life will go on as usual around here while we’re reveling, but whatever.

If I were the sort who sent out Christmas cards, I would totally send you one. But I’m not anymore because, for me, it’s all about the kid picture and my kids are all over the internets between here, Kids Know Stuff, and our Flickr page, so I don’t even bother anymore unless you’re an old person who doesn’t have the internet. Then you get one. If you got one and you didn’t know you were old, now you know.

I do like to give my brother and sister a holiday card, though, so I went to someecards.com and made one for them. It was inspired by true events. I’ll share it with you:

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We laugh, my family and I. And we laugh more when we drink. And we drink more when we laugh. It’s a vicious circle. Or a vicious cycle, depending on who you ask. Or whom. Whatever. I should be packing.

If I were a good person, I would have written something more like this, which when I found it in my inbox today from my friend Melissa, made me cry a little. So you all should watch this and pretend I wrote something like it for you. Because I would have. If only I had a soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_4qwVLqt9Q

We don’t have a lot of family traditions that have been lovingly passed down from generation to generation. I used to think it was just because my parents were kind of lazy and drunk a lot, but now I know the truth. Because I’m kind of lazy and drunk from time to time, too, but we still have some first-generation traditions.

My mom used to make cinnamon rolls once every few years on Christmas morning. I don’t really remember it too often from my childhood, but that could be because I wasn’t really into them back then. In the past few years she has told me that she made them every year, so what do I know? I know she used frozen bread dough and joked about how her insane mom used to make them from scratch. Adding to the “joke,” she’d say, “Of course, then she’d end up pulling our hair and calling us all sluts,” and she’d laugh. Hahahaha. “So, see? It’s better to use frozen dough.” So funny.

I like to bake, but I don’t do the cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. And it’s because I don’t want to pass down my grandmother’s tradition. Because she’s mean. And I don’t want her little mean pieces being passed on through her stupid, yummy cinnamon rolls. This is the first time I’ve really understood that her meanness is the reason I don’t pass it on. I know this because the one and only passed-down tradition I loved to cling to was my dad’s family tradition of Christmas Eve hot cocoa in a Santa mug. It’s a tradition from my long-dead Grandma Lena. I’ve written about her before. She’s the one that died when my dad was 14. I never knew her, but there she sits on her pedestal.

We did not practice Grandma Lena’s tradition when we were growing up. My dad had his original Santa mug from when he was a little boy and it was always used as decoration during Christmas; never for function. It wasn’t until, I don’t know, between 8 and 10 years ago, that all of his grandkids started receiving Santa mugs in order to carry out the Christmas Eve cocoa tradition. I, as the one who always craved this kind of tradition, jumped all over it enthusiastically every single Christmas. This year? I’m dreading it. I don’t want to pass it on. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to keep the Santa mugs sacred until the big day. I don’t want Christmas to come. I couldn’t figure out why there was this niggling dread in the back of my mind, but now I realize it’s because my dad is, this year and not for the first time, a big schmuck.

After my parents divorced when I was 12, I worked hard to get to a good relationship place with him and his second wife, whom my kids refer to as “Grandma.” Really hard. It took all the way until I was about 24 or 25, but it was good. It was good until last year when he left his second wife and her kids and grandkids for another woman. He sacrificed us, his first family, for this second family and then he left them. And I don’t like that. And I’m having trouble with him. And so I’m having trouble with his traditions. And now I know that this is what kills family traditions. Family connections are broken, so what’s the point of traditions? If that connection is gone and you don’t want it back, then you don’t need the traditions. It feels false to carry it on with my kids with the usual, cheery, “This is how Grandpa used to spend his Christmas Eve with his little brother and your Great-Grandma Lena,” because who cares? Who really cares? I don’t care.

*sigh*

But I will do it again this year. I will. Probably. Because it really has become our own tradition and, I think, being aware of the reason I don’t want to do it helps a little. It’s our tradition. Yes, my dad’s bits and pieces are all over it. And part of me believes that his bits and pieces should be shunned forever. But I don’t want to pass on our truest and most-followed family tradition: detachment. I don’t. I’ll make the stupid, yummy cinnamon rolls too. And I’ll tell the kids that their Great-Grandma Devereaux (the one that they’ve seen only a handful of times and, no, she’s not dead yet) used to make them, and their Grandma Marilyn used to make them and we’ll talk about traditions and sadness and detachment and connection and disconnection and how sometimes it’s too late, but how we can do better. It’ll be more fun than it sounds.

It will be just like when we make my mother-in-law’s peanut butter balls and we talk about how Nana gave us the recipe and she’s been making them for a looong time. And how we talk about Grandma Hattie’s cut-out cookie recipe (even though she was just my babysitter and not a real relative at all, but more real than most.) And how we talk about most of the ornaments on our tree. They all came from somewhere else. My parents made some of them together when they made folk art in the ’80s. The rest have been gifts from my mom, my inlaws, my dad and my ex-stepmom. There is connection all over this disjointed family, in spite of ourselves. And it’s ok to pass it on.

Bryan’s dad turned 59 on Monday and Bryan and I talked all night about how that’s almost 60 and we remember when our parenst were 33 and 34 and weren’t they old? Yeah, but we’re not old, right? Nah! And our kids will be doing this when they’re in their 30s and they’ll talk about us like we’re about to die and that’s not cool! Those kids are mean! Let’s wake them up and beat them, thus proving our youthfulness. They’ll remember that, I bet!

My parents will be 60 in January and April. They’ve never seemed old before, but 60? It seems kind of old. Not because they’re old, but because I’m too young to have parents in their 60s. It’s about me! My parents were 26 when I was born, which is pretty young, so if they’re old, I’m old. It’s only logical.

Speaking of my parents, do you know that I still know the phone numbers to all of the bars in Chesaning, even the ones that are closed now (I’m looking at you Rathskellar and Farmers Inn) and the golf course? And of course Dave’s Bar, which has outlasted them all. I do. Because I used to call them a lot when I was a little girl. (No, not to order stuff, but if you know me in real life, I can see how you would think that). I’m not judging, but I can’t imagine a scenario in which my kids regularly had to call me or my husband at the bar. My parent shame would be unbearable and my wife rage would be, well, extremely unpleasant. Like the kind of unpleasant where you say, “Wow, this gunshot wound is extremely unpleasant.” But I guess if our kids had to call us at the bar, they would just call our cell phones and it wouldn’t suddenly hit them in adulthood that they know all of the phone numbers to the bars where they grew up. I guess that means we should go to the bar more often. Then we can forget about all of this oldness nonsense. Problem solved.

Adding to the oldness problem is a little theory that Bryan and I have. We believe that if you had kids before you turned 30, then you have to add the age of your oldest child to your actual calendar age and that gives you your true, social age. So we’re not 33 and 34. We’re 42 and 43, socially. It’s true. When we hang out with real 33 and 34 year olds, we have no idea what we’re doing. None. They talk differently. They drink differently. They care about different things. If they have children at all, they probably only have one so they’re still operating under the illusion that their child is interesting to other people. And it’s awkward when we laugh at them when they tell us their 18 month old is gifted. Because we think they’re joking, but they’re not. And then they think we’re mean, which we are, but that isn’t the point. The point is, we’re way older than everybody our age. And we’re all going to die. And now I have to take pictures again.