Peacemonger Mom

Moving!

2008-06-18T14:20:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to get myself motivated to write more, and as part of that, I've decided that Blogger just has GOT to go. I've started a new blog over at wordpress. I hope to see you there.

Yellow Ribbons

2008-02-13T09:28:00.003-06:00

I have finally succumbed to the stupidity that is the yellow ribbon. I know, I know, what good does it do for me to put a yellow magnet on my car? Exactly none, except to make some money for the folks in China who make the stupid magnets. My magnets are different, though (don't we always think that about whatever it is that we do? "I'm DIFFERENT, I'm not STUPID like those people, I'm SMART." Sigh). I eschewed the bossy magnets that say, "Support the Troops!" or "Pray for the Troops!" I've always disliked those. Of course you support the troops. Of course you pray (or think about, or send positive vibes to, or healing white light, or whatever spiritual thing you do, if you do that sort of thing) for the troops. It has always seemed a little...presumptuous to me for people to put that on their cars. Ahem, usually on their enormous, gas sucking and troop-endangering SUVs.

My ribbons, however, are different. Mine say, "Keep my son safe," and "Proud parents of a soldier." For some reason I have recently found myself embracing certain aspects of this experience that are decidedly militarized. Maybe "embracing" is the wrong word. "Drawing comfort from," is probably a better way to describe it.

I own a hoodie that says, "ARMY" across the front. I proudly wear the Tshirt that says, "My son is a US soldier." Because yes, I AM proud of TB.

I find this, at best, confusing.

I'm thinking about this, and continue to think about the physicality of motherhood and mothering - I feel like there is something there I am supposed to figure out, some sort of hole I am supposed to fill in.

Then again, it could just be me not wanting to think about the papers that are due, or my contrary and ornery class at Large University, who say things about Women's Studies like, "I don't really care about this, it doesn't effect me."

Sigh.

Yes, life, she is nothing if not entertaining.

Democratic Debate

2008-01-15T22:07:00.000-06:00

Call me naive. Call me hopeful. Call me an idiot. Okay, call me a total geek. I cried watching the democratic debate tonight - not because I was upset, disappointed, or anything else. Hearing someone, much less THREE someones, three someones who have the power to make the change, say that there will be an end to the war, an end to the danger that my child will face - oh my, the lightening of my spirit. The possibility that there will actually be an end to this horrible war...I can't even begin to say how awesome this is.

I cannot wait to vote for one of these people. I would love to vote for any of them. It's an embarrassment of riches, it is. I love me some anti-war politicians.

Wow.

2007-12-01T19:36:00.000-06:00

End of the semester. I'm scrambling, frantically trying to get the grading done. I'm reading my students' blogs (I'd link to my "real" blog, but...well, you know). I love what I do. I can't believe some of the things that the students have written in their blogs. I feel like Sally Field - "you like me, you really do!"

To be able to stand in front of a group of young women, and talk about things that are so important, and then to have them respond...OMG. It's incredible.

I decided to take classes in paralegal technology when I was standing in line (yeah, I know, what can I say, it was the 80's) to register. I just knew I needed a skill that would get me a job, a job that would pay, because I knew, even then, that my time with the Ex wouldn't end well. Hell, I knew that when I was putting the flowers in my hair for our wedding. I'm learning - slowly - to listen to that small still voice that speaks up and says, "Uh...you DO know, don't you..."

I chose to be a paralegal because I had to make sure that I could support myself, and then TB. The gig at The Firm got me through so much, but that part of my life was about me. That part of my life was about what **I** needed, and what my baby needed. Now, I get to give back. And oh shit, this is about me too! Because I love this. I wouldn't stop doing this if they quit paying me.

I'm totally serious. But don't tell Them.

Hon and I have two completely differing concepts on teaching and what we are doing. He is in it for something other than the benefit of others - not that there's anything wrong with that. :-) He did his time taking care of others.

But what I'm doing - it's incredible, it's important, it's valuable. It makes a difference to these young women.

Do I sound like a total goob? Like a complete moron, just thrilled to be "doing good"? Well, that's just too bad, because I'm "slaving away" in the salt mines of the college world, talking to young women about things that nobody else is. I can't begin to explain how wonderful it feels to stand up in front of a group of people, and talk, and have them LISTEN. Okay, so some of them sleep. But I'm getting so much out of this - it's the best time I've ever had. It's not work, and I've been sitting on the sofa all day, grading, I'm still in my pjs and it's almost 8pm. But this isn't work.

Finding your bliss at the age of 40 is pretty weird, in a way, but then again, not so much.

I love my job. I love my life. If TB would just get transferred to someplace excellent like, oh, I don't know, the North Pole, I'd be thrilled.

Look Out Y'all, It's Gonna Be A Gullywasher of Irritation

2007-11-11T14:41:00.000-06:00

Just how the hell does life manage to pull this sort of thing off, anyway? I'm going along, happy as can be that everything is working out well for all the kids (SILy and DQ are about to move out of our living room and into their own place, TB has managed to marry the young lady of his dreams, who probably now should have her own nickname...let's see...DILy seems to fit nicely, one because she's my Daughter-In-Law now and also, well, because she's a real dilly. Ha. Yeah, the humor, she is just pouring from my fingers today). I have had a couple of really great days at school, addressing really important topics with students that can have life changing repercussions for them - and I feel like I did it really well, too. The feeling that yeah, this is what I'm supposed to be doing was as strong as it's ever been. That isn't to say that I feel like I know everything I should know, or that I've done a bang up job all semester. No fucking way, y'all. Just that I felt like I was on the right track, moving in the right direction.

I had been dreading the discussion about domestic violence because I really hate having to talk about that stuff, and lemme tell you, PTSD is a real bitch. So I was not too hip on last week's discussion points for class, but hey. What can you do? But I felt like I did really well, and really hit it out of the park. I kept thinking that all of it, every bit of the awful time I spent with TB's dad, it was all worth it and I wouldn't trade it for anything, because it's what I draw from while I lecture about this topic. I could see the importance of my past in my present and my future.

But - and you knew there'd be one of those, didn't you? - but I'm just underwhelmed about going back to school. I'm not happy with my options here, and I can't seem to focus on a Statement of Purpose. Just reading over the suggestions for drafting an SOP make me gag ("Sell yourself! Think of your personal statement as a persuasive essay or sales pitch. Maintain a positive attitude throughout your essay..."). MAINTAIN a positive attitude?? How about GETTING a positive attitude that I might can possibly maintain? How much of this comes from a general desire not to go back to school? How much comes from frustration over lack of funds? How much comes from frustration over having children living in the living room? Children who speak baby talk, and take to their "bed" (i.e., my sofa) when sidelined by the dreaded and terrible illness, ALLERGIES? For which all manners of medication are summarily rejected, because the Delicate Flower that is her body cannot abide the harsh strength of a Benadryl.

Hmmm. I'm thinking that the move home of the children has a few small down sides to it. Loss of my sanity, being one.

I'm tired of not having any money. There's no way that we can live on what I'm making as an adjunct if I have to start paying back my student loans. I'm giving serious thought to a second job. A second job would, of course, mean that my trip to see TB and DILy would be postponed until...well, until time for him to go to Iraq, at which time I would travel to the base and wave goodbye to my child, wondering if he would ever return, or if he would return altered in ways I can't imagine or understand.

TB continues to mishandle his money, and in typical, guilty mother fashion, I have bailed him out again and again. Our credit cards are maxed out. We are down to our last few hundred bucks and it has to last us through the end of the month. We are living paycheck to paycheck (well, DUH, who isn't these days? Oh right, SILy and DQ aren't. They are SAVING MONEY). By helping TB, I alienate and anger Hon (rightfully so, because I have (a) trashed our own financial situation and (b) not been honest with him). Relationships become strained. Life becomes unpleasant. Weekends are not for resting or relaxing, but are instead long spans of time to be lived through and survived.

TB makes more money now than I do, and certainly makes more money than Hon does. He'll soon make more money himself than we do together. He's plowed through the first installment of his enlistment bonus. I'm contemplating selling plasma.

It becomes harder and harder for me to tell him no, knowing that any day now he could be called overseas, and I might never see him again. And I don't want to turn him down, I want to help him out, because that's what mothers do, isn't it? Help? And make things all better? I'm so frustrated.

And meanwhile, SILy and DQ sleep the days away, whine at each other, and in general make me very unhappy. I've never seen one person nap as much as DQ does. Well, unless you count SILy. All the whining and carrying on in various babyfied ways that is taking place in my living room is not improving my mood, either.

I have taken to reverting to behavior that worked for me when DQ lived with us before. I simply do my best not to be at home as much as I used to. Now when I am not in class or doing office hours, I am at the gym, or at the library, or the Local Tea House, with Handy Wi-Fi. When faced with the possibility of unpleasant interactions, I simply bow out of the equation and concede the space.

I miss my friends. I miss the life I had when I wasn't "making a difference" but was instead making a real paycheck. I miss the life I lead with Hon when it was just us two. I miss our house. I miss our yard. I miss home.

"This Will Be Fun."

2007-10-06T11:55:00.000-05:00

Amazing the strength of one little sentence, isn't it? I am currently in freak out mode (when am I not?) over the upcoming peace conference where I will be presenting a paper in an academic setting for the first time evah. So yeah, a little freaked out. Also, it will be in Newark, New Jersey, and I will be going alone. When I visited with Mom and the kids and we went to the beach, she commented a number of times on the changes in me - not least of which being that I am doing and saying things that she never expected me to do or say. I think this is a good thing, but I'm rather surprised at my behavior and plans too. I have never been one who enjoys the whole public speaking thing (odd choice of professions I've made, then, huh?) and to present a paper, in a city and state where I've never been? A little on the bold side for me, I think. Or at least my mom thinks so. And I do too, sometimes. Sometimes I'm really surprised by the changes these past few years have wrought in me.

I still keep my lip zipped around Certain People, although I know that Certain Person would be surprised, appalled, probably disgusted, certainly (I hope) embarrassed or ashamed, if she knew the hurt she has caused (and why I am so bothered) by her comments and awful Conservative Viewpoints (Homosexuality is wrong, bisexual people are faking, etc. etc. Republican Talking Points and Thoughts on the Apocalypse and the Book of Revelation Go Here, then follow up with vigorous eye and ear scrubbing by PMM). It's just really hard for me to keep my mouth shut with her, even though I know that nothing ends well with her - one cannot argue and win - there is no winning. There is only increasing decibel levels and increasing shrillness. It's just very difficult to enter into a conversation with her and think that you are going to even be able to successfully make a point. So I don't.

But her views on groups of people I care about are hurtful. Driving past a group of Latinos standing in line for a staffing company, she referred frequently to "them" and "they," then went off on a tirade about how her middle school was really rough, and it was because of all "them" standing around near the school, trying to get work, but she would always see all these trailers that "they" lived in with nice cars outside, satellite dishes, etc. Jesus, girl, don't you hear the poison that is spewing out of your own mouth? Aren't you ashamed that you are so xenophobic?

I know that what I do for a living and the subjects I teach are offensive/bothersome to her. She wants to argue with me, I can tell, but it's very difficult to argue with someone who refuses to engage you or your ideals. I just won't do it - we are in too tight of a living arrangement, and I am simply not up to trying to straighten out her pointy little mind.

Hmmm. I seem to have travelled very far afield from my initial idea for this post. I was going to write about how much fun the peace conference is going to be, and how educational, and how I was focusing so much on my own paper, and worrying about that that I had not yet reached a point where I could say, "Yippee! I get to attend this conference!" rather than "Shit, I've got to attend this conference, wow, I wish I could back out." Then I received a very nice email to those attending and presenting about various details, etc., and the writer closed with the sentence, "This is going to be fun."

I apparently need that pointed out to me sometimes. Although when one is swimming in a Kiddie Pool of Negativity, it is just to be expected I suppose.

Stress? What's That?

2007-09-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

I seem to be running a real theme here. I am severely stressed. I have scurried off to my empty office on a beautiful Saturday just to get out of the house - not because I'm irritated with TG or SILy (we have had issues before - TG can be rather conservative in her thinking, and I have a tendency to, well, not. Obviously). Anyway, I had to scurry out of the house because I am really tired of having interpersonal contact. We are in a VERY VERY SMALL apartment, and there are the four of us, the dog, their two cats, and their fish tank. I am accustomed to making the morning coffee in the nude. I am not accustomed to keeping my bedroom door closed or having to restrict what I say to Hon. This, as does any sort of big change, has sort of thrown me off kilter.

Add to the mix that I have, again, screwed up our finances. This is becoming a running theme. First there was the credit card that I thought I was paying off, but instead, I sent a $600 check to a credit card with a zero balance on it. Yeah. That was great. Then there was the great drawing I won over Labor Day - $100 off our rent. Well, I had already paid the rent, so the manager says she will shred the check, and I can drop off another check. The first check never got shredded, our account was overdrawn (altho management has said they will cover those charges) and essentially our rent is paid through October and a little ways into November. In that I was paying the water bill as well, and it was almost one month behind (this whole issue of helping TB out with his car really did have ripples that I didn't anticipate), our water bill is now paid probably into the next year.

Adding to this incredible mess is that Hon's time sheet wasn't dealt with at work, and he didn't get paid via direct deposit, but instead via a paper check. Okay, fine. Well, that took a few days extra, and got sent someplace he didn't expect it to be, and thus, didn't look for it there. So yeah. That was neato. Then there was his financial aid. It took longer than we expected too.

So now the financial aid is in, the paychecks are in, all is good, right? Well, because of the issues with money (see long, drawn out barf above), I haven't paid on the credit cards, which we have essentially been living off for a while due to lack of funds over the summer due to the aforementioned assistance offered TB as well as me only teaching the one class so as to finish The Beastis (you knew I'd be able to blame some of this on that, didn't you!). SO! My phone has been ringing at all hours, repeatedly. I had no idea that credit card companies could be so horrible. I mean really. It wasn't like I was a year in arrears. It was ONE MISSED PAYMENT. At the end of the day, I would have 15-20 missed calls on my phone (what, did you think I was going to ANSWER those? Some of the messages they left FRIGHTENED me), and god knows how many calls I missed when I would just shut my phone off out of sheer frustration.

SO! Yes, there's more. So I sit down to try to pay off the cards, once Hon's FA came through. I work it all out, figure it out on paper, then do it online through our bank's website. Through my own stupid mistakes, I overpaid on the cards by about $400.

So we have a houseful to feed, and I've fucked the finances. Great job.

2007-09-12T19:11:00.000-05:00

Thank goodness the kids are moving in for a while, I've found myself thinking recently. As I watch the news and see the continuing parade of pictures of dead soldiers at the end of the News Hour every night, I worry more and more about The Boy being in Iraq. I have found myself wondering, over and over again, like a broken record, how I am going to stand it when he is gone. How will I avoid becoming a basket case? Have you ever waited for a bus? For a doctor's office? For a dentist's visit? I hate waiting, and I will have to begin a 15 month wait the second that I last see him.

Fortunately, TG and SILy will do a great deal to distract me. Thank God for the distractions of life, and I pray for many of them.

Ah, The Speed With Which Life Changes.

2007-09-09T20:23:00.000-05:00

I'm teaching three classes. I'm donedonedone with my thesis. I'm looking at a deadline dealing with a paper to be presented at a conference that is considerably earlier than I thought (okay, I totally forgot about it). I'm looking at some looming deadlines dealing with applying to various other schools (which is, ostensibly, the reason I tool the year off). I have no writing sample to submit with my applications (hopefully my paper that I present can do double duty). I also might have to take the GRE again, dammit, as well as take the subject test. The Girl (TG) just came to stay with us, and is sleeping on the sofa while Son-In-Law (SILy) goes home and tidies things up so that he can come up here too. There's not enough room in this apartment for me and Hon to walk past each other in the hall and frequently get in each other's way in various other rooms. All our closets are full. Her clothes are on a rack in the hallway. The dog is starting to look nervous.
I got a nosebleed the other day. My blood pressure is up again. On the up side, I'm not taking any classes, so I'm able to read more of this awesome series of books I have run across dealing with murder mysteries and herbs. I have always been fascinated with herbs and plants and this series is really great. The funny thing is, though, how happy I really am to have TG here. Things are becoming similar, but not the same, as the way that the were At Home, and I find this reassuring. I have missed, very much, my time as a mom back home when the kids lived with us, then near us.

Then again, I also miss being able to make my morning coffee in the nude. But one can't have everything, can one?

No, I Didn't Expire from a Thesis Related Illness.

2007-08-25T18:06:00.000-05:00

Although it was a close call.

I managed to complete the Beastis. I wrestled that fucker to the ground and kicked it in the nuts. It was, sadly, a very anti-climactic end to something that has claimed such a huge aspect of my life and being for so long. After I reached the end of my edits, and defended my thesis (it's really more of a discussion than a defense), I made a few more edits and then printed it all out in final. This took probably a week or so (the time is hazy now), and I went through more paper than I like to admit. Al Gore would seriously want to break my arm. But I recycle.

I turned my thesis in to the Graduate School, and the gentleman whose job it is to make sure that our table of contents jibes with our thesis content and whatnot looked it over and declared it DONE.

No angels sung. No light came from above to shine upon me. None of my friends were sitting with me, cheering me on (just as I had not been with them, either, when they finished up). It was just me and Marvin, sitting in his cluttered office, surrounded by theses and dissertations, stacked in boxes awaiting shipping to the binder. I paid my money and I walked out.

What was I expecting? I don't know. Something else. Something more definitive, more final, more...LOUDER. Brighter, maybe. Sheesh. What did I want, a marching band? A red carpet? Sometimes I really don't understand myself.

But as it's gone now, I have been able to say that I have finished my thesis, even if I don't particularly like the end result, nor do I feel particularly proud of the end result. But I am very proud of having worked as hard as I did, and having made the mistakes that I made - because those mistakes were learned from, and the end result is that I will be receiving a diploma, and it will go on the wall, and it will say that I DID THIS. I know that pride is a deadly sin. But my pride is also in my friends, and in my family, and in my professors, who guided me and clubbed me, and beat me within an inch of my life to get me to do this.

I start instructing on Monday - two face to face classes, and one online. I am nervous, and have alternate episodes of butterflies and exhilaration. I had to take some time off, because it was just so exhausting this last year or so, and so I am not enrolling in classes for the fall. I'm applying to some other schools, mostly for shits and grins, as Hon says, because I really never considered anywhere other than Small Hot State U. Wouldn't it be a hoot if I got into Very Large, Very Prestigious, Very Expensive Private U.?

Stasis

2007-07-12T17:13:00.000-05:00

On the Thesis front, all is the same. I am waiting around to see if I will be taking the comps or if I will have a workable thesis out of all this work. On The Boy front, he and his girlfriend have broken up and gotten back together so many times, I'm dizzy. He still doesn't know when he's going to the desert, but he's at least still in the United States, with the biggest danger facing him currently being possible papercuts from playing cards on duty.

This has really been the strangest summer ever. I may have a job for the fall, and not be taking classes. I will know more about that tomorrow, but the idea of not taking classes? That really rings my bell, because right now, all I want to do is get a better handle on myself, my surroundings, and my life. School is really the last thing I need right now. And as far as the summer itself? It's been one long run of rain, clouds, thunderstorms - dark on the horizon, without any certainty if the storm is coming or not.

Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

2007-06-21T21:49:00.000-05:00

After working without ceasing for over three weeks on my thesis - and by "working without ceasing," I am talking about getting out of bed, walking to my desk with a cup of coffee, firing up my mac, and opening up the newest round of unending edits from Dr. C and not stopping work until it was time to go to bed...frequently at 3 am - I found out today that I cannot graduate with my friends in August. Here are the things that I thought first:

--my paper really is as bad as I thought.
--I am a severe and incredible failure.
--I am not supposed to be doing this and dropping out would save me a bunch of cash.
--I will never stop receiving edits from Dr. C.
--I am in hell.

After yet another round of hysterics and a good long discussion with three of the greatest people in the world - Courtney, MJ and Gary - I began to look at this completely differently.

I can take my thesis back. It had gotten out of control and I had long ago stopped feeling that I was doing much more than taking transcription. Why this happened the way that it did is not important to me - I know that I have done more than I'm required to do in order to graduate by at least three times. Dr. C said I had at least two theses, possibly three, in my one thesis, but this still, of course, is not quite enough. I don't have the required thesis, completed and defended, and I won't have it by 7/20 which is the deadline. And in order for me to meet that deadline, Dr. C said she would have to have "another day like yesterday," when she spent all day on my thesis...sort of like my past 21 days have been. Guess what I haven't done recently?

--Bathed
--Walked the dog
--Shopped for food
--Laundry
--Cleaned the house
--Written for fun
--Smiled
--Played
--Enjoyed life

Guess what I'm not doing now? Thesising. Guess what else I'm doing? Shopping for other schools. And smiling.

Hater.

2007-06-12T20:26:00.000-05:00

If this is academia, I do not want it. I wish to withdraw my nomination for possible scholar of anything.

I hate this. I would rather be ignorant, barefoot and pregnant, voting Republican and losing teeth in a trailer somewhere in Georgia than doing this.

Can One Have Thesis-Induced Illness?

2007-06-12T16:01:00.000-05:00

I am revising, revising, revising. I am revising to the point where I no longer know what my point is. I no longer can trust myself to write a sentence, or to place a comma. I am paralyzed by my repeated attempts and subsequent failures to get this right, to say what I want to say. My thesis is slowly and sadly morphing into something which has much less me. I am struggling to continue to find my voice in my writing, at least in this particular piece of writing, and am finding less and less of me there.

Today is the first day in a very long time that I have wept with the frustration of this choice that I made. I would give 10 years off my life to be able to go back and unmake these decisions I have made in the past few years. I would fix so much, and do things so differently, and I would know very little about Women's Studies and even less about warfare and Cindy Sheehan.

I was really proud of what I was putting together, and saying, and now I'm just ready to be done with it. If I could throw in the towel right now, and find a job and start paying on my school loans, I would do it. In a heartbeat. I would have my life back, I would have a break, and oh god how I need a break. I'm exhausted, and I no longer have the time to do laundry, or go to the grocery store, or walk the dog. There is a giant clock ticking in my head, and it's a countdown to defense, and really, I have stopped caring at this point.

T Cubed: Totally Trashed by a Thesis

2007-06-10T19:12:00.000-05:00

Will this hell never end?? I swear to God, there are days when I am working so hard on this thing I forget to eat, I forget to bathe, and I would forget to sleep, were it not for the fact that Hon passes my studio on the way to the bedroom, saying, "When are you coming to bed?"

That being said, I still know about Paris Hilton, and her Legal Issues. Being as how my thesis does deal with the media, and Cindy Sheehan the activist, said activist just having thrown in her Activist Towel, I make it a point to keep up with the news. Plus, I am addicted to the news (and not of the E! variety, but more along the lines of Jim) and also, I have a Certain Interest in the News, a/k/a The Boy and where he might soon be calling me from. (Yes, yes, that's gramatically incorrect! I know! I know! This thesis bullshit is really bringing me down) Anyway...I am not particularly enamored with the stars and how they spend their days. But great googli moogli, it's hard to avoid this Paris Fever!! And I fear that perhaps it has infected all the good folk at the various teevee stations! Get my swoonin' couch and clutch the pearls!

And the crowning jewel in the "Stupider Than a Bag of Hammers" crown? Paris herself knows, and calls out, the media for their idiocy:

I must also say that I was shocked to see all of the attention devoted to the amount of time I would spend in jail for what I had done by the media, public and city officials. I would hope going forward that the public and the media will focus on more important things, like the men and women serving our country in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world.

From Think Progress.

So What Do YOU Do for Fun?

2007-05-28T12:43:00.000-05:00

What a big week it's been for me. The thrills, they just never stop here in the Home of the Peacemongermom. After many weeks (literally) of growing and increasing frustration - frustration that grew like the itch of athlete's foot when one is restricted to hiking boots - I finally was able to get back to work on my thesis. Within a few days (three? I can't recall. It's all rather a blur now) I was able to finish up Chapter 4 (which I am still referring to as Chapter 4, much as one continues to call a child "the baby" even after she is up, walking and shoplifting things in another city) which is really Chapter 5, or at least it will be once I renumber these bloody chapters. Chapter 1 grew into Chapter 1 and 2, bumping each of its siblings up a number. Anyway! Chapter 4 is in first draft status - dammit, Chapter FIVE is in first draft status, and Chapter 3 (which used to be Chapter 2) is in 3rd draft status. Wait. Hold on. I'm getting confused. Clearly my next step should be organizing my drafts to correspond with exactly what number the Chapter actually is. Ah yes! Organization, the procrastinator's most significant and worthwhile tool in her toolbelt of Superior Dawdling!

Anyway, I had what could only be described as an explosive flurry of frustration-fueled productivity (dammit, surely there's a word for productivity that begins with the letter "f") and have not only managed to churn out a good bit of work to turn in to Dr. C for her review and butchering, uh, gentle suggestions for revision, but I have also put together my online class. That took the better part of a day, and even then, Dr. C still found things like my misspelling of the word "Plagiarism" in the site. But I have managed to be very productive.

Unfortunately for me, that level of work cannot continue. I lose track of the days, I forget to eat, and then when the flurry of work is over, I am exhausted and my brain wants nothing more than to do this:

Yes, those are, indeed, Sims. The Sim that you see on the floor? That's a Sim patterned after my BFF, who is also working on her Thesis. The sim that you see standing and holding a scythe? That's the Grim Reaper. We call him, alternatively, Deadline (ha!), Our Committee, and occasionally, The Thesis Embodied. The other sim, standing up and pleading for the dead sim's life is the wife of the sim who died (yes, in my world of Sims, George W. Bush and his cronies would be MOST UNCOMFORTABLE and you may rest assured that they would wet their pants many times, be left in a swimming pool without a ladder, and likely be killed many times over by swarms of flies and possibly by a good lightning strike or two). The dude in the kitchen? That's the maid.

ANYWAY. This is what I do to recover from the hell that is my thesis. I Sim. Yes, yes, it's true. I do sometimes channel the soul of a 13 year old boy from time to time. I have been known to laugh at a fart joke or two. I get so tired from all the THINKING I have to do, and how much life controls me, that sometimes I like to just control others, and make things work out well for them (yes, yes, I know it looks a little dire for CourtKnee and her wife, Demi, but CourtKnee rallys nicely after Demi saves her from death...Grimmy is notoriously bad at games of chance). The only down side to this form of relaxation is that I frequently find myself still sitting at the computer at 2am, frantically searching for JUST THE RIGHT love interest for my sim. I am, if nothing else, consistent: I am a Type A personality about most everything. Even my relaxation.

Yesterday I was so tired, so worn out from all the thinking and working, that I took a few hours to visit with my Sims. Ah, what have they been up to while I worked on my thesis? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The lazy buggers. But that will change, oh yes it will, because I can now make them work in the garden, too! If I have to work on my thesis, by cracky, they're going to be doing some manual labor as well!

Blessed

2007-05-23T23:34:00.000-05:00

My husband and I have long been non-religiously inclined, for want of a better term. I have never, ever been comfortable wearing my God beliefs on my sleeve, and not because I don't have them. My grandma was my most important church influence, and she wore gloves to church. White gloves. I'm just sayin'.

But "blessed." What a wonderful term. I was recently told, by a friend who is closer to me than I can comfortably say here, that she felt blessed to have been a part of something with me that was pretty big - and I have been blessed by various people in day to day life in ways that have left me breathless and teary eyed.

Every thing that I do that might even be closely considered to give me "good karma" or a nod from god, or anything else, I have specifically said in my nightly prayers I want to go to TB. I gave some money to a homeless woman? Send that karma to The Boy. I did good with this student, or I helped out an old lady with her groceries, going to her car? That karma belongs to The Boy. Not me. He needs it.

I can't grow a Victory Garden, y'all. And neither can you. Because no one has asked us to.

We aren't being asked to do shit in this war. We aren't being asked to carry a tax burden that would provide a Marine, or a soldier, with a better suit of body armor. We aren't being asked to send a package a month of phone cards, sun screen or body wipes.

Body wipes, people.

We aren't being asked to fart in the general direction of the troops. We are, if we are to follow the lead of the President and Commander in Chief, and, as of today, the spineless democrats, being asked to ignore them.

This is beyond the pale, people. We are going to ask the soldiers to go into harms way, and get their asses shot off, or their eyes, or their arms, legs, whatever, for the paltry sum that the government decides their limbs are worth?

What country am I living in? I thought we cherished, supported and loved our children. The troops are our children, you know - there certainly aren't any old, rich, guys out there fighting for the rights of the Iraqis - not in the way that the young people are being asked to. The ones fighting in Iraq and overseas are mostly all young, southern people, and the party sending them to fight is ostensibly the Party of Life.

Whose life? The life of my son? Apparently he has outlived his importance - he is no longer a fetus, thus, he is not worthy of their concern.

But when it comes time for him to go and fight their wars? Oh yeah - jump into that camo uniform, boy, and hit the beach! We'll sit here in the nice, air conditioned buildings, rooting you on.

But don't expect us to plant you a Victory Garden. We can't be bothered.

***********************
Sites where you can make a difference:

http://anysoldier.com/
http://www.johnedwards.com/
http://www.supportthetroopsendthewar.com/

Actually, the Thesis is Going Pretty Good...

2007-05-22T21:35:00.000-05:00

Three Dollars a Day

2007-05-22T13:20:00.000-05:00

$3 a day. That's what food stamp recipients have to eat on, and that's what Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski held himself to during his "Food Stamp Challenge." I wish we had more politicians who were willing - and able - to empathize with others less fortunate than they are. Not everyone can run to the bank and pull out $20 and go eat at a restaurant. Not everyone can even shop at Wal-Mart. Gas is so expensive, and there are so many people who don't have private transportation, and are thus restricted to choices that are local to them - which is not always a good thing.

Have you ever considered that having the choice to shop at Kroger or at Albertson's is a PRIVILEGE of wealth, and race, and so many other interconnecting aspects of life? Your ability to walk into a store and purchase FRESH FRUIT is something that others are restricted from enjoying, due to their status in society.

How is it that the country, that so many people believe to be the best in the world, can treat its own citizens this way?

I am disgusted.

Well, THIS is reassuring!

2007-05-21T13:26:00.001-05:00

If the U.S. suffers another attack, President Bush wants total control of ALL the copies of "My Pet Goat" as well as all branches of the government.

I'll sleep so much better knowing this.

I must run and send Keith Olbermann an email alerting him to this.

Rain and Random

2007-05-21T07:45:00.000-05:00

Having just returned from lugging Jak outside for a nice wee in a drenching downpour, wherein he steadfastly refused to set paw outside in the damp, causing me to reenter our domicile, obtain an umbrella and stand outside holding the umbrella over him while he peed, I am enjoying the sound of rain outside my open window and open deck door.

I am not, however, enjoying the fact that I awakened at 5:30 and became so frustrated at my attempts to sleep thereafter that I simply got up. I'm wondering who is bringing the worms, because the only reason ANYBODY should be up before 10am should involve a fishing trip.

I have been terribly lame in my writing recently - from the time of the Research Symposium, I have been almightily involved in one thing after another, none of which involved writing. Not working on my thesis, not writing here, not even writing things in my calendar. (Boy, I sure do hope that Dr. C has stopped reading this.) Yesterday, though, I managed to break out of my rut and actually write some on my thesis. I'm on Chapter 4 (which will eventually turn into Chapter 5, because I've got to change Chapter 1 into Chapters 1 and 2, which will bump...you get the picture). I am not happy with the direction my writing seems to be taking, and yesterday had the brilliant idea that perhaps I should take my writing in the direction that I want, rather than the direction that it wants. Allowing my writing to drive The Thesis Bus is a really bad idea.

I'm also putting together my syllabus for the summer class I'm going to be teaching...oh shit, who am I kidding here? I am putting my name on the top of the syllabus I shamelessly stole from a fellow GTA (although with her permission). I have added a little to it, but let's just say that I blushed when I read over the section dealing with plagiarism. But I do give her credit in my class materials (which is a damn good thing, otherwise I really would never sleep at all).

Speaking of not sleeping. I'm worrying less and less about TB - not due to any real confidence that all will be well, or any real knowledge about where he's going, what he's doing or anything else. I'm just distracted, I guess. I wonder what will happen when I finish my thesis. Will I blow up in a heretofore unknown conflagration of worry? TB is doing really well with his cool girlfriend (who by now has morphed magically into a fiancee) and believe it or not, I really like her. I'm really surprised, because TB has not shown the best judgment when it comes to women in the past. But as I've said before, he's growing up, and perhaps the devastating sadness I felt when he went into the Army came from equal parts worry and sadness that my boy was growing up. Why does that make me sad? I don't understand that - that is the thing that I have preached and encouraged both my kids all along: be self-reliant. Self-reliance and independence are vitally important, especially if you are a female (as one of my kids is). Of course, I realize now that self-reliance and independence can be taken to an extreme (see Rugged Individualism and the State of the U.S. Currently). But really, the last thing I expected to become in my declining years (feh) was the stereotypical mom: "The kids! They never cawl!"

I was going to post about my recent shock, which is summed up nicely here, but seem to have run myself off the rails, talking about kids and thesis. Hmph. The Thesis, it always cawls!

So I Wasn't Last!

2007-04-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

I just got back from a 5K run (my first one) and totally was NOT the last person to cross the finish line. There was a lady with a stroller and an infant that I beat. Who was walking. With a cane. And a limp. Actually, I didn't do too badly - my time was about what it usually is, and the water was very tasty after, and so were the smoothies. I'm sure that had I not been suffering from crushing cramps and a blister on my foot, I might would have even beaten the old lady right in front of me wearing a fanny pack and a visor.

I take back what I said about this town not having anyplace pretty in it - the greenway park where we ran was beautiful. It ran along a little river, and reminded me of the greenway I walked on when we lived in Nicer State a Little Ways Up North, and to be honest, this park was even nicer.

My thesis has been stalled out as of late - all that prepping for the presentation took over my brain. I can't do more than one panic-inducing thing at a time, apparently. But I revisited my Chapter 3, and I'm pretty happy with it. I am reading The Anti-Cindy Sheehan book, (American Mourning, most heinous, for the love of god and all that's holy, do NOT read it) and it is absolutely unbelievable the way that they twist the argument of the right against Cindy Sheehan. The authors are seemingly so compassionate, so caring, so sympathetic of her plight, then BAM!!! Out of nowhere, and truly apropos of nothing, there's a passage about how filthy her house was. Then more kind words about her grief, and then WHAMOO! Boy, it's horrible that she was an ORGANIZED activist, instead of flopping about, grieving in public but without cameras and media attention. Interesting that they don't really start criticizing her until they reach the point of discussing the way she actually was successful as an activist. Apparently a mother's grief is just fine and dandy, ma'am, so long as you keep it behind closed doors and do it in private, and don't allow it to have any effect on us. Just keep it away from us, thank you, along with all those scary immigrants, frightening gays and heavens to betsy, those freakish libruls!

Sigh.

Yesterday was not such a good day - I had had a number of not exactly nightmares, but not particularly pleasant dreams either, and woke up feeling rather out of sorts. This continued through the day and I thought, why waste a perfect mood? So I delved into the right wingnuttery that is "American Mourning." I can't really resell the book after I get done with it, as it has "BULLSHIT!!!" inscribed on so many pages. What can I say? I'm nothing if not mature.

Post Run Blathering Wherein I Write Until the Odor of My Running Shoes Overpowers Me

2007-04-13T16:43:00.000-05:00

I've been frantically working on my project for the Research Symposium, where I will be presenting (and where I won the groovy Research Scholar award) and am fairly freaked out about the presentation. I want to do well, because Dr. C is going to be there, and so will a bunch of other people that I want to think I am a smartie, and who I really care what they think about me. I would rather not stand at the mike and say, "Duh" for ten minutes, ya know?

So I've been working on summing up my findings from my research and have discovered the following:

1. I am seeing Cindy Sheehan's activism in a new light
2. That's not a bad thing
3. I can still think that she's radically excellent
4. I'm still really, really pissed off at the Bush Administration

Maybe it's just me, but I spend a lot of time contemplating the way that things are these days. Maybe it is my recent Large Birthday (the one that rhymes with Lordy Lordy) or maybe it's just the way that my life has recently narrowed down to a very few, very important things...whatever the reason, I find myself asking questions like these:

Why are we so angry at each other, as citizens of the same planet, the same country, frequently the same neighborhood?

Why can we not see that others can feel strongly about something, and not be evil?

Why can't we get away from this stupid, pointless, ignorant binary way of thought? What is it that makes us want to see people as ones and zeros? If Cindy Sheehan is anti-war, does that make her bad? If someone else is in favor of the war, does that make her bad? No, it just makes us DIFFERENT, and yes, yes, I understand that we see different as bad - is that the base problem here? That we are so frightened of what is Other, what is Different, that we can't see past that?

Cindy Sheehan is a pacifist, and to those who are not pacifists, she is dangerous and wrong - there is no room for her to be a woman with a different opinion. If she doesn't fit into this neat cubbyhole, then she is in this other cubbyhole, the one that says "Enemy Combatant."

I am the mother of a soldier, and I am proud of him for what he is doing, the work he is doing on himself, and for others, and with others. If you could have known him (and many of you did) before he was in the Army, you would agree that he has changed, for the better, and he has changed a LOT. He is turning into his own person, rather than some carbon copy of his father or of me, or of his friends. TB is, simply put, himself. I am proud of him. I love him. I support him, and I pray for his safety every night, every day, all the time - it's like the Muzak you hear in the elevators or in the store. It's always there, just beneath your noticing, but it's always there. So how do I reconcile the part of me that is adamantly pacifist with the part of me that is proud of TB and his actions? I do it through my motherhood, my identity as a mother - I love my son, and I pray for his safety, but I pray for the sons and daughters of all those who have children in the military. I pray for the safety of anyone in harm's way during this war: "enemy combatant" or soldier, all are children of someone, and all are worthy of prayer.

My pride in TB and my worry for him aside, I pray for this stupid war to end soon, and I pray that someday we can see each other for something other than zeros and ones, hawks and doves, mothers or child-free, for us or against us, black or white.

I think I understand this confusion in myself a little better now, having read this. I have spent a lot of time wondering why it is that so much of the news on tv seems to follow the binary line of thinking, why things are the way they are now. That article seems to sum it all up for me pretty well, and makes it a little easier for me to understand for some reason.

Cognitive Dissonance, anyone?

I really must update my blogroll.

2007-04-12T00:36:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the inspiration of one Ballpoint Wren, I have a new toy.

Nine Thousand More

2007-04-02T23:42:00.000-05:00

In addition to the previously requested surge. How big of a surge does he need? Does Bush not understand that if the surge lasts longer than four hours, he should seek medical help? Or perhaps we should just ask this little boy if he minds missing his dad for just another year or so - or maybe forever - when he gets sent overseas again.

And knowing is half the battle.*

2007-03-12T20:35:00.000-05:00

I finally, finally know what's wrong with me. After writing a long, rambling entry about inability to focus, loss of sleep, loss of all sorts of things, I went to the library and a book literally jumped out of the shelf and landed in my arms. I never expected that there was actually a term for what I'm feeling. I thought I was just an overly protective, very worried mother, who was just plain ol' going crazy with worry that her only son would die. While this is still the case, I'm really relieved to know that there's a name for this, other than Peacemongermom Is a Nutbag. It's called anticipatory grieving, and when I read a passage from this book that described my actions to an alarming "T" recently, I engaged in a rather relieved, full-on crying fit. Nosebleed included.

If you know anyone in the military, or anyone who has a family member in the military, you need to read this book. This is a book that someone should read to Bush, since we all know that he doesn't read. This is a book that should replace that book about the fucking history of salt that the Chimpresident read summer before last (riiiight, he read that along with this, this, and this).

And clearly, since you are reading this blog, you know someone who has a family member in the military. And I really, honestly think that you know more people fighting this war than you realize.

*Rather ironic, isn't it?

Cue Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lilly Tomlin

2007-03-07T15:05:00.000-06:00

I'm discovering that this school shit is a lot more hard work than a simple 9-5 job. It's not a 9-5 job, it's a 9-9 job. It's a "from the time my little feet hit the floor running (staggering from exhaustion, more like) to the time I collapse at night, I'm dealing with work." This thesis writing nonsense is sucking as much life out of me as worrying about The Boy.

I get out so rarely that when I went to the grocery store on a nice sunny day, with the windows down, I got a fucking sunburn.

I am not kidding.

I think I am starting to turn into Gollum. The title of my thesis should be "My Presssciooouuusss: A Look Into the Rapidly Insanifying Mind of a Graduate Student." Or perhaps "Graduate School: Opportunity for Excessive Debt or Excessive Drinking? BOTH!"

Yeah. It's not going well.

I am getting nosebleeds on a fairly regular basis now, and when I get closer to the summer, I fully expect to just bleed out nostrarily. (I'm in graduate school, I get to make up words.) I have a permanent headache. I hate getting out of bed. I can't remember to do basic shit (the wheels on my car are pulling so hard to the left that I can only drive in small circles like a clown car now). The sun is beautiful, the trees are blooming, and I can't remember to take my allergy pills. My father calls me regularly to complain about my sister (that's a whole nother crazyblog experience, which I have no desire to get into now, because I'm already upset enough), and now he's sick as well.

And The Boy and I both are on the same conveyor belt, headed towards a meat grinder that he can't see, and I can. I'm behind him, far enough, so that once he goes through that meat grinder and comes through the other side, I will be able to see what happens, not be able to help or fix it, but will have to deal with it. That's when *I* get to go through the meat grinder. I heard a series of interviews yesterday on NPR about what is happening with Walter Reed, and it's not just the soldiers who are dying and suffering with this war. And coming home in one piece? Not an option. If you fight in this war as a soldier, or you fight in this war as a soldier's family member, you are going to be wounded. There is no hope for a successful exit to this. If your soldier goes over there, he or she will come home with scars - scars of the body, or scars of the mind. And the government doesn't care, won't help, and only wants more cannon fodder.

That was plain in the interview I heard yesterday - a Marine went to Iraq, performed his job, was injured, he got PTSD. He turned to drugs and alcohol, because of the PTSD that the government claims doesn't exist. His mother's voice, as she spoke to the interviewer, was dead. You can hear how dead her remaining days were, how much she had simply given up. Her son was jailed by the Corps that he loved, then he was given a dishonorable discharge. She told the interviewer that he had begun to drink a lot. The interviewer asked what was a lot, and she said that sometimes she will call him, and he doesn't know who she or his father are.

If TB would say to me that he doesn't want to do this, I would leave for Canada with him, with nothing more than the cash I could pull out of the bank and the dog.

I suppose that that makes me sound like I am on the ledge of falling off crazy, but that's how I feel. I am working so hard to get through one day at a time, knowing that each day that passes brings us closer to that Government Approved meat grinder, and all I want to do is fall back in time to when TB was a small boy that I could scoop out of the way of whatever was coming.

I don't know how I will be able to live through his deployment. This is like living with a fatal disease, which you know will claim your life on a specific date. To be honest, in a way, it already has claimed my life - I anticipated this time period to be the happiest, the best time of my life. I spend my time now in a constant state of low grade panic.

I understand now, what some of the feminist writers that I have studied meant when they wrote about how terrible it feels to lock away a part of yourself. I have locked away the part of myself that is already a screaming, grieving mother, but she unfortunately seems to be able to get her head and arms between the bars of her cage now and again.

A Word

2007-03-06T07:03:00.000-06:00

Privatization. That word has been pissing me off for a long, long time. I first heard it a long time ago, when there was a corporation in the town where I lived at the time planning to take over the work at the jail. "Hmmm," I thought at the time. "Why not? Seems like a good idea to me! That way the Sheriff's Department can put more of the Deputies to work doing other things, things relating to keeping the community safe."

Yeah.

Fast forward a few years, and that privatized jail issue had morphed into a full blown scandal, involving much kickbacks, enormous amounts of graft and prisoners being mistreated, untreated and treated badly.

Privatization is another word for profiteering. It's a pretty way to say things like "Sorry, Soldier, but I know your enlistment is up, but we need you to put your ass in harm's way until we say you can stop. Sort of a Stop-Loss for us, you know." No, that's called a fucking draft, and you should call it what it is. It's unfair at its core concept.

Just like priva--profiteering.

The school I attend where I am getting my master's has a rhetoric program, and that's what I am going to study for my Ph.D. Wonder if I can do my dissertation on Privateering/Profiteering, Stop-Loss/Indentured Servitude type twistings from these idiots in the Bush administration?

Probably a bad idea. Excessive exposure to a topic like that would set my hair on fire. My eyeballs would melt. At this point, I'm thinking I write about puppies and kittens. Nobody can hate on puppies and kittens.

Well, Ann Coulter probably could.

Honesty! How Refreshing!

2007-03-05T07:06:00.000-06:00

Well, thank God that someone in the Bush administration is being honest, at least, even if the news that they are sharing is not particularly good.

And more honesty! As if we didn't already know that "compassionate conservative" was an oxymoron, here's Newt to really reinforce that for us!

Since I sent my congresscritters and the preznit a copy of the Walter Reed article, perhaps I should send them a copy of this article as well. It likely wouldn't be the first time that George got a "gentleman's C" by using somebody else's cheat sheet.

My thesis writing is going slowly. TB is learning how to clear houses. Sigh.

March 17th - Where will YOU be?

2007-03-01T13:42:00.000-06:00

I will be participating in a number of actions - unfortunately I am too far from Washington to be able to attend this one. My sister and her family are going, though, and I've bought them all Military Families Speak Out t-shirts to wear to the rally. I would love to go - this is going to be big.

Frustrations

2007-02-06T15:04:00.000-06:00

I am trying very hard to shift my concentration in writing here from my crushing fears for TB to my crushing frustrations and fears in writing my thesis. How's that going for me, you might ask?

Egad.

I am having so much trouble with this thesising thing. It is beyond difficult for me. Why should what is essentially four relatively small papers, all on the generally same theme, be so difficult? I am beginning to wish I were a biology major. Then I could write about the mating habits of flamingos, as a friend of mine is doing. Well, she's writing about something having to do with flamingos, anyway. I wanted something that would be important, something that would be timely, something that would matter.

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for.

I finished chapter one, and turned it over to my peeps for reading. Turns out it wasn't as spectacular of a showing as I had hoped. As usual, I have a tendancy to try to write everything, rather than one thing. Can I have a hell yeah? How about an editor?

I know where TB gets his issues with perseverance. I have trouble with that too. I think I just want to be excellent at everything I do, and if I have to work harder than I think I *should* be working, then something clearly is wrong with me. And, of course, I give up. This is not something I can give up on, obviously, and I don't *want* to give up. I want to do it perfectly.

Maybe that's my constipation issue with the writing. In the past, I've sat down to write, and had little problem once I got started. And even with my first Chapter One, I felt like it was easy going once I actually got the pump primed. Now I've got Chapter One Again, and it wasn't such easy going, and I'm not really sure that it's any better.

Is it too late to change my major to mathmatics? Physics?

And, of course, the whole idea that this topic is so close to me is difficult. In referring to the media as a tool of the government, am I revealing my horrible bias? I fear that it might come through, just a teensy bit. Is that bad? Good? Indifferent?

I started my master's work by not thinking about my thesis. I was too frightened of it, too blown away at the thought that that was what was waiting for me at the end of the road, to really look at it straight on. I could take tiny peeks, from the corner of my eye, but could never really bring myself to look it straight in the eye, and meet it's gaze, because I knew it could stare me down. I spent quite a lot of nights, sitting with Hon crying and fretting and carrying on that I can't possibly do this! How can I ever even come up with an IDEA for a thesis, much less write one?

That's quite a few nights under the bridge, or something like that, and I don't cry about the process anymore. Maybe I'm too scared of it to cry about it. Maybe I'm beyond crying about it now. Doubtful. Very doubtful. I think that I'm just so paralyzed with fear about this, and about other things in my life, that I can't cry about them now. Maybe later.

One thing is for sure. Since I laid off the nightly news, things have been better for me as far as The Boy is concerned. But I had a minor set back in that arena, and much as the alcoholic falls off the sobriety wagon, I fell off my newsless life wagon. I found myself in the news gutter with Jim Leherer, Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington, and let's just say that a life of news sobriety is preferable to more days like the past few. I have found that, much as the alcoholic has to take one day at a time, and not take that first drink, I can't watch that first news roundup. It's just not a good idea for me. So that means that I get to miss most of the Scooter Libby trial. Probably just as well, because it will just piss me off.

So I am struggling with my thesis, struggling with my worry, and just struggling in general. And that frustrates me.

2007-02-02T16:51:00.000-06:00

Since TB has said that his unit is being deployed, my sleep patterns and my dreams have changed dramatically. I've always been one to have those weird dreams where one minute, I'm naked in chemistry class, and another minute, I'm shopping for gilded lillys in New York. Since TB told me of his deployment, my dreams are linear, they have a plot, even if a loosely written and very Stanley Kubrich-ish one. This morning, TB was preparing to marry, and was wearing a dress uniform, and was talking to a brother (who he doesn't have) and joking around. They were discussing cars, and TB made a lunge for his brother he doesn't have, and in my dream, their comments and cutting up were so funny. His not-brother was dressed differently, and was a Marine, and I realized as I watched this film (because in my dream it was really a film, a film of the wedding rehersal, and it wasn't on a DVD or anything, but on one of those old film strips, think high school, where the film had to be threaded into the movie projector), I realized with a sinking horror, that now I have to worry about not just one, but two, and even worse, one of them is a Marine. But at the same time, I laughed in my dream, because they were cutting up, and having fun, and loving each other as siblings do. Gary asked me this morning when we got up if I had had a funny dream, because I was giggling.

If I were to indulge in any sort of dream interpretation (a skill I learned as a young teen, whilst my dear mum was in school for to become a counselor - I regularly ate my Corn Pops while listening to Mom and her roommate discuss their various dreams from the night before over their coffee) I would see this as my subconcious telling me to enjoy and love what I have - what I *can* appreciate and be achingly thankful for. I have only one son, I am not like the family at TB's graduation from Basic, who had four, all of them overseas, and two in Baghdad. Statistically, I am luckier than them. TB is a soldier, not a Marine - also referred to by some as "a bullet magnet" - what a horrible thought - and statistically speaking, he is better off than many. Finally, and most importantly, he is alive, happy, and I am enjoying every moment of being a part of his life. He is not off somewhere doing something that I have no idea about, as was the case this time last year. He is talking to me, regularly, and calling me with his joys and his worries. He is involving me in his life. This is new, and it is joyful to me.

We get letters!

2007-01-25T10:19:00.000-06:00

I received one of those email forwards from a friend, and it made my hair catch on fire. I suppose that the timing was just a little off, really, since I got it the day I learned TB was going to Iraq. The re line is "Made in the USA: Spoiled Brats":

I am sending this to everyone on my e-mail list because I believe it states the truth!!!! We should shut up complaining and Thank God that we are fortunate enough to live in the United States of America and the only things we should complain about are having our liberty to worship God and honor our traditions and culture the way we, as Americans, were taught, and brought up to do!, taken away by a very small majority who don’t want “God” mentioned ANYWHERE!!!! And want to take “Christ” our of Christmas!!!!! Americans elected our President and we should honor him while he serves US!

Now, I will step down off my soapbox. But now, you also know where I stand!!! Hope you are right there beside me!!!!

Made in the USA : Spoiled brats.

A Newsweek poll alleges that 67 percent of Americans are unhappy with the direction the country is headed and 69 percent of the country is unhappy with the performance of the president. In essence 2/3s of the citizenry just ain't happy and want a change.

So being the knuckle dragger I am, I starting thinking, ''What we are so unhappy about?''

Is it that we have electricity and running water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Is our unhappiness the result of having air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter? Could it be that 95.4 percent of these unhappy folks have a job? Maybe it is the ability to walk into a grocery store at any time and see more food in moments than Darfur has seen in the last year?

Maybe it is the ability to drive from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean without having to present identification papers as we move through each state? Or possibly the hundreds of clean and safe motels we would find along the way that can provide temporary shelter? I guess having thousands of restaurants with varying cuisine from around the world is just not good enough. Or could it be that when we wreck our car, emergency workers show up and provide services to help all involved. Whether you are rich or poor they treat your wounds and even, if necessary, send a helicopter to take you to the hospital.

Perhaps you are one of the 70 percent of Americans who own a home. You may be upset with knowing that in the unfortunate case of a fire, a group of trained firefighters will appear in moments and use top notch equipment to extinguish the flames thus saving you, your family and your belongings. Or if, while at home watching one of your many flat screen TVs, a burglar or prowler intrudes , an officer equipped with a gun and a bullet-proof vest will come to defend you and your family against attack or loss. This all in the backdrop of a neighborhood free of bombs or militias raping and pillaging the residents. Neighborhoods where 90 percent of teenagers own cell phones and computers.

How about the complete religious, social and political freedoms we enjoy that are the envy of everyone in the world? Maybe that is what has 67 percent of you folks unhappy.

Fact is, we are the largest group of ungrateful, spoiled brats the world has ever seen. No wonder the world loves the U. S. , yet has a great disdain for its citizens. They see us for what we are. The most blessed people in the world who do nothing but complain about what we don't have , and what we hate about the country instead of thanking the good Lord we live here.

I know, I know. What about the president who took us into war and has no plan to get us out? The president who has a measly 31 percent approval rating? Is this the same president who guided the nation in the dark days after 9/11? The president that cut taxes to bring an economy out of recession? Could this be the same guy who has been called every name in the book for succeeding in keeping all the spoiled brats safe from terrorist attacks? The commander in chief of an all-volunteer army that is out there defending you and me?

Make no mistake about it. The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have volunteered to serve, and in many cases may have died for your freedom. There is currently no draft in this country. They didn't have to go. They are able to refuse to go and end up with either a ''general'' discharge, an ''other than honorable'' discharge or, worst case scenario, a ''dishonorable'' discharge after a few days in the brig.

So why then the flat-out discontentment in the minds of 69 percent of Americans? Say what you want but I blame it on the media. If it bleeds it leads and they specialize in bad news. Everybody will watch a car crash with blood and guts. How many will watch kids selling lemonade at the corner? The media knows this and media outlets are for-profit corporations. They offer what sells , and when criticized, try to defend their actions by "justifying" them in one way or another. Just ask why they tried to allow a murderer like O. J. Simpson to write a book and do a TV special about how he didn't kill his wife, but if he did it, Insane!

Stop buying the negative venom you are fed everyday by the media. Shut off the TV, burn Newsweek, and use the New York Times for the bottom of your bird cage. Then start being grateful for all we have as a country. There is exponentially more good than bad.

WE ARE THE MOST BLESSED PEOPLE ON EARTH. WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT WE HAVE AND WHO WE ARE SEVERAL TIMES A DAY AND STOP THE BITCHING.

Perhaps you can see why I went slightly insane. Whoever first wrote this screed is clearly one of the privileged people: I would bet my money on white, wealthy and very anti-poor. And I am really quite sure that he/she has no children serving over there. That's an "honor" that people like this leave for the poor folks, who can't afford to send their kids to college.

So you will forgive me for responding with a wee bit of ire:

The Boy just got word that he’s headed to Iraq in November.

I don’t know - you may already have someone that you care about who is over there. If we do not do something, very soon we will all have people over there that we love and care about. I have never had to suffer through the sort of horror of this in my entire life. I would never wish this on anyone...other than George W. Bush. The Boy is part of Idiot George’s “surge” - and when Bush talks tonite about supporting the troops, or anything else – he is talking about MY CHILD. When you hear the words “troops in Iraq,” replace it with "The Boy.” I am FURIOUS at the state of our nation, at the things that are going on now, and honestly, Christmas has nothing to do with it. Christmas has become nothing more than Wal-Mart Appreciation Day, as opposed to the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior. I am a very loud and vocal part of the 2/3rds that is PISSED OFF and wants to see George impeached and run out of town on a rail. I think that the wrong man was hung not too long ago.

My beautiful son is more important than George’s relationship with the Saudis, or the neo-cons’ need for money. What would happen if all the individuals in Congress had children in the military? What would happen if there was a draft? What if children who were 40 could be drafted? Are they children? (yes – do they have mothers? Okay - they are children. Do they remember their mothers? They are children. Do they EXIST? They are children of someone.) This war is wrong – it is immoral, it is illegal, it should be stopped, and we are wrong for sitting on our hands and allowing our children and grandchildren to be fed into the meat grinder that is the U.S. Government. I do not believe that the media is slanted towards the left – I believe that the media is under representing the things that are being said by the right. The media is nothing more than a shill for the conservative right. The media has helped, and has walked in goosestep with this government in frightening the sheeple of the U.S. into following those ideals and concepts of the neocons. We are all asleep. We need an awakening. Perhaps the loss of our children, the loss of thousands of children, will be the answer. Oh, wait. That’s already happened. Over THREE THOUSAND CHILDREN of the United States are dead. More children are dead due to Bloody George than due to the actions of the “terrorists.” What does that make us? Especially since we have killed hundreds – HUNDREDS – of thousands of innocent Iraqis. WE are the terrorists. WE are not just killing the “others” - we are killing our own.

The only – ONLY – place where god needs to be mentioned, as far as I’m concerned – is beside the names of our lost troops. If it is placed beside the name of the president? It is the same as mentioning it in Wal-Mart. In that case, it’s lost – there is no purpose to the concept of god. If this idiot, this...this...this chimp – sends more children to a sandy country, where there has been war for centuries, and GOD does not send a lightening bolt down to strike him, I do not believe in God.

Anyone who says to me: "WE ARE THE MOST BLESSED PEOPLE ON EARTH. WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT WE HAVE AND WHO WE ARE SEVERAL TIMES A DAY AND STOP THE BITCHING," they need to send their child to a sandy, frightening place, where no one will hold their hand as they die. I say that anyone who thinks that I AM BITCHING, as the MOTHER OF A SOLDIER, heading INTO IRAQ,

THEY
CAN
KISS MY FUCKING ASS.

Private The Boy's Mother,

Peacemonger Mom

We, the people who "elected" Bush, are being prevented by Bush from seeing the true carnage that he has wrought, and continues to create, in our country and throughout the world. Why else is it that we don't see the funerals? The injured soldiers? Because that would remind us of what we are supporting, and it might make us just a little to depressed to go out and shop, or drive our gas guzzling SUVs, or anything else.

I am angry. I am sad. I am scared. But I love my son, and I do what I can for him. I hope that it's enough.

Nine Months

2007-01-23T23:28:00.000-06:00

Long enough to create another person.

Will that person go on to take the place of The Boy?

He's headed to Iraq, as of November.

I feel very alone. I have friends who love me, and who know The Boy. But I don't know that anyone around me knows the way I felt, today, after learning that TB was going into Iraq. I went to the grocery store, Wal-Mart, (yes, yes, I know, all wrong, but I'm a poor graduate student, and there's not much more in this woe begotten town) and walked around in a daze, putting things into my cart, and taking them back out. The lights in the store were bright, then dim. I could hear it in my head, a voice, mine, I guess, saying, "My son is going to Iraq. Iraq. In 9 months. November." It was, for want of a better word, surreal.

Then I come home to hear the bullshit from Bush? About No Child Left Behind?

Oh Please.

I have been holding my tears in all day - as I walked to my car, I saw (of course) a magnetic ribbon on a car that said "Pray for Our Troops." I nearly doubled over in shock and pain. Is MY CHILD now one of THEIR TROOPS? Do people I don't know pray for my son? Is my son in the prayers of others? Others who don't know him? How do I thank them for that? How do I acknowledge that? How do I understand that?

How do I function like this? He loves his barracks, by the way, the ones that he will live in for a few months, before he goes to That Sandy Place.

Are you a mother? Can you imagine your child outside your reach? Yes, sure, when he/she is an adult. Okay. Now people are shooting at her. In another country. People are laying bombs in front of her path. People are looking at him in the sights of a gun.

There may be a man or woman right now planning to kill my child.

I can do nothing about this. Except perhaps put a yellow ribbon on my car.

How This Must End

2007-01-22T12:05:00.000-06:00

Struggle.

2007-01-20T14:58:00.000-06:00

This has been quite a semester. We have dealt with separation, reconnection, rediscovery, love, hate, war, possible death, certain death. Discovering that my son was actually able to be a grown man was a shock to my system. Discovering that my husband was able to lose his father and not lose himself was equally surprising. Life has handed me bliss, joy, excitement, and sadness all in the same handful. There have been times I wasn't sure if I was weeping from joy or from grief.

Losing my father-in-law has been hard, harder than I anticipated. Obviously, we all knew it was only a matter of time. After all, we are all only a matter of time, aren't we? But FIL was dear. He kissed my cheek, hugged me and said, "Welcome to the Family" when I married his son. He laughed, he joked, he was truly the strongest man I knew. How is it that he can be here one day, and gone the next? How can the world continue to spin, people continue to walk down the street and function while he does not? Days go by and I manage just fine, then suddenly I encounter the invisible wall that is the impossibility of FIL's death. How can this be? My mind refuses to accept it, wrap around it, see it.

I spend my effort on Hon, because he and his father were so close, and Hon was, really, the favorite son. He and FIL were close, and so much alike. There are good days, there are bad days, but my attention has been on Hon, and not on my own thoughts for FIL. This may not be a good thing - grieving must be done, it will allow itself to be put off, but that only allows it time to strengthen itself, make itself larger than life. When one finally gets around to something put off and allowed to grow, it is undoubtedly a larger and more unpleasant issue at that point.

FIL's death came at a really bad time - the end of our semester, right as I was finishing up classes and then to make matters harder, on the day I was to go and pick up TB from his final day of training. I attended his graduation from AIT in a fog of confusion and sadness, but joy and excitement for TB, because he was finished, was able to move on to his next base (thankfully here in the U.S. for the time being) and because I was able to spend time with him. The time I spent with TB over the holiday was too brief, but it was long enough for me to see and accept that he is, indeed, a grown up, and a good one at that. He is actually becoming the man that I had hoped he would be, he is showing the traits that I had prayed would take hold in him. He is finally the person I had hoped for when I wrote him a letter as he lay in his crib and slept. He didn't arrive at the place I wanted for him via the exact roads I had anticipated, but he's there, and that's what's important to me.

Struggling with FIL's death, with TB's changes, with the happiness that one event brings to me and the unbearable sadness that the other brings has knocked me back on my heels. My writing has been next to zero, and my thesis has suffered for it. Partly I have simply not wanted to deal with the subject matter. Who wants to read about the grief of a soldier's mother, when all that I can feel is fear for my own son, but joy for his existence? Who wants to confront non-existence of loved ones?

So I didn't, and now I am paying the price. I sat down and created a thesis timeline - a timeline that leaves me little time for anything other than writing, rewriting, and working. If it works as I hope, I will graduate in August, and may or may not walk for graduation. We'll see about that one. But that's still a ways away.

I am lucky - I have a couple of papers that I can make use of (and am making use of) to begin my work, and getting started is ALWAYS my hardest part.

So let's go.

Clutching

2006-11-18T12:27:00.000-06:00

Funny how we think that the worst thing that could possibly happen is “X” and then when X happens, well, it’s actually a little easier than we thought. I have spent the better part of The Boy’s training in training myself, training to live with the thought that he might actually be in Iraq, doing terrible things to stay alive, and possibly failing. Training is a good thing - good for me, good for him. Now that we know (or to rephrase, now that I know) for sure that he’s going to go overseas, I feel, oddly enough, a lot better. Not happier, really, but at least a little more settled. Now I know (even though others continue to repeat, at every opportunity, that this isn’t for sure, no one knows what will happen between now and his deployment date, all of which I reply with a “yes, yes you’re right, no telling, things can change” I know in my heart that he is going, and he will be gone for a year, and I will have to live with this) now I know this and can stop hoping (hope is wonderful, but it is dangerous too) that he will stay here, stay nearby, stay where I can enjoy him and he can be safe—now that I know this for sure, I feel more settled. Now I know what I’m up against, I understand it for what it is, and know that it can get worse, it can always get worse, but while I still hope that he stays safe, and does well, I no longer have to listen to that twittering voice of hope that he will stay here. That was a lie, a false hope, and even though seeing myself become more cynical (a task I truly thought was impossible) is disappointing to me, it is also something that is helpful. I sit in my Feminist Activism class and listen to the other students with their platitudes of change, and bridging, and hope, and I smile to myself, because it’s good to be hopeful, when you are young and haven’t had the hope slapped out of your hands, but there are some things that I just know better now than to hope for. Hope is nice, and hope is sweet, but hope is misplaced at times.

When I was married to The Boy’s father, ExH, I spent a lot of time being told of my failures, failings, and lacks. The prayer I prayed most often was that God make me a good wife and a good mother - something that I clearly could have saved my breath in praying, as there were much more complex issues at play than whether or not I was a good wife or mother. My hope was that I would become all the things that ExH wanted me to be, and of course, I failed (do we doubt that was the intended outcome all along? No, we do not. We are entirely too smart and too far through life to think that now). I remember reaching a point, though, where I decided that fighting him was simply no longer worthwhile. He wanted me to be thinner? I’d do everything I needed to do to lose weight. He wanted me to stop being so much smarter than he was? I’d keep my smarty ideas to myself. He wanted me to cook better, be a better wife, take care of things better? Okay. No problem. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it. I wasn’t really a Stepford Wife, per se, but more a hopeless wife. All desire for self went out the window, and I threw in the towel.

Sound depressing? Yeah, I guess in a way it was pretty sad. That was likely one of the darker periods of my life. But how liberating it is to look down at your hands, clutching something as tightly as you can, clutching it within an inch of your life and its own, and see that no matter what you do, it’s going to slip through your fingers, like trying to hold on to an egg that has slipped from its shell . . . and then just let it go. I looked at my life, and saw that there was no point in continuing my clutch, and I let go. I saw what I perceived as hopelessness and I let all of the energy I had been devoting to fighting for what I wanted go - I just gave in and gave up. I came to understand that it was less hopelessness and more pragmatism, and although that was a time in which I was in pain, lonely and lost, I found that by letting it all go, I was suddenly much less tethered to the bad parts of my life. Letting it all go became one of the more liberating things I have done.

I can do nothing - NOTHING - about what happens to The Boy. When his plane touches down on foreign soil, it will be no different, really, than when he turned 18. I am his mom, and I love him, but the control I have over his life now is nil. (Honestly, it has been that way for some time, and I wish I had done things differently, but this is neither the time nor place for that, because hello, I am in a Starbucks, and no one wants to see weeping women drinking soy lattes on a sunny Saturday) It is impossible not to hope for a good outcome for him, and impossible not to hope that he stays right here in the states, but I am being a pragmatist, and I am not going to clutch that slippery egg so hard.

Tampons and Mail

2006-11-12T22:53:00.000-06:00

Some of them want tampons. Some want candy. Some just want mail.

Did you see that? There are people in the military, over in Iraq, who Just. Want. A. Letter.

Do you have a spare stamp? A spare DVD, a spare blanket? The soldiers overseas would really love to hear from you. And the females could use some hygiene products. Because, you know, those trillions and trillions of dollars that we are spending on this? Well, it's not being used to help the troops.

What the DIs Giveth, They Can Taketh Awayeth

2006-11-12T08:46:00.000-06:00

TB was going to have a pass for this weekend, and I was going to head to Ft. Flat to spend some time with him. After all, it IS Veteran's Day weekend. My good and excellent friend there in town has opened her home to me and to TB, and even on short notice such as this (TB text messaged me last night asking if I wanted to visit, right then. Plan much?). Anyway, now thanks to some folks who were using their cell phones after lights out, and a lovely little stomach virus that has hit TB pretty hard, I now have two extra days for homework. Yay. Not that I don't need them, HELLO, I have so much stuff due that I frequently sit paralyzed before my laptop, with a growing list of things that I can't decide which one should be first. So eventually I give up and watch TV, fretting all the while about all the stuff I really should be doing. So then I really give up and go to bed.

I'm really sad about not getting to see TB this weekend - I am looking at every chance that I get to see him as one that I have to take, whether it is convenient or not, because more likely than not, next semester I won't have this luxury. It's not likely that I'll really be in the neighborhood of where he's going to be stationed then, and plus, I don't think I really have the style of clothing that's required for the women where he'll be.

I'm going to go pick up stuff for a "stay healthy" basket for him - I did that for The Girl when she moved out: vitamins, tea, oranges, hand sanitizer, all that great germ killing crap. With TB living in the barracks, I know there's germs everywhere. Do I really think these guys wash their hands after they go to the latrine? OH HELL NO. I'm naive, but not that naive. Hells bells, he may be hung over, not sick. What do I know? Here I am, crying and worrying about him and he may just have the brown bottle flu.

It's so hard to see him as an adult, not because of the dumb stuff he did (and still does) but because the only way I have seen him, ever, is as my child who needs me to take care of him.

Well, I was hoping that writing this would get me in gear for working on my thesis (Cindy Sheehan isn't going to write it for me, and those Thesis Fairies that I've employed seem to have gone one strike, dammit), but unfortunately, all it's done was make me cry more. Lovely. I think I'll go stare helplessly at my to do list.

Edited to add:
In looking for a suitable graphic to add to this post (a weeping person behind a stack of books, perhaps), I rediscovered the humor that is the comic strip "Piled Higher & Deeper." Thank God for procrastination via the archives. (Click on the strip for a larger, more legible view)

Vote, Dammit!

2006-11-07T07:44:00.000-06:00

All my life I have been a huge vocal cheerleader for voting. Okay, all my adult life. So today, here is the requisite cheer: Go Vote. Go vote now, today, immediately. We have to get those in power who are responsible for all this carnage, for all this greed and corruption and incredibly incompetant behavior out of office. This is what you need to keep in mind before you enter the polling place to pull a lever, or depress a little computer button on a machine that can be hacked with a minibar key:

Iraq
Katrina Neglegence
Condoning Torture
Leaking Atomic Secrets
Giving Osama Bin Laden a Pass
Protecting Only Republicans
The Teenage Page Scandals
Not Implementing 9/11 Commission's Recommendations
Spying on Americans
Fixing Elections
Cutting and Running from Afghanistan
Tax Cuts in Wartime
Arrogance
Corporate Cronyism
Global Warming
Jack Abramoff
Turning Off America's Beacon of Fairness and Freedom
My Pet Goat

And let's not forget dirty tricks. Don't underestimate those who are in power, and want to stay in power. The republicans are not the party of "family values" anymore, they're not the party of "fiscal responsibility" - they are nothing more than authoritarians. This bodes doubleplusgood for the country, people, if they remain in authority. These people will do anything - ANYTHING - to stay in power.

Finally, I leave you with one more link - please do read it, because this woman writes so well, and she writes as a woman in a country where my son may be spending his 20th birthday next year. For TB's sake, for the sake of all the soldiers, for the sake of the civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, already a victim of Bush's brand of "democracy" - please vote. And please vote with your conscience, your brain, and your heart.

Parental Connections

2006-10-23T13:06:00.000-05:00

Isn’t it funny how we can imagine things one way, and get that image ingrained into our minds, only to have that image totally deflated by reality?

We spent a few days this past week with TB – he was supposed to graduate from Basic Training, and move on to AIT. He didn’t though, because he missed the run by only a few seconds, so they will be moving him on to FTU – a fitness training unit. If he’s really serious about this, he’ll be out of there in no time. If he’s just doing the typical TB stuff that he’s done throughout his teen years, then he will futz around in FTU until the Army tosses him out on his can. I think he’s going to be moving on to AIT rather rapidly, because I saw things in him this past week that I had no idea existed within him.

I have spent so much of his life seeing only his father within him – and that was my fault. I have spent so much of my life being afraid, being intimidated, allowing that portion of my life that was violent and scary to be the pivotal, central aspect of me. The part of TB that seemed to reflect his father frightened me and made me worry all the more for him. Will he be a violent man like his father? Will he treat women poorly, like his father?

We are not stuck in the roles that we are given. We are all given the opportunity to learn from our mistakes, to move on, to morph and to grow. I have been mistaken in seeing TB as a carbon copy of his father. TB is not his father, and he is not me. He is himself, nothing more and nothing less. I saw that this past week, as he stood next to his father and his hazel eyes – unlike his fathers, and just like mine – radiated out at me, and as he played dominos with friends, I watched his hands move, hands that are so unlike mine, and so like his fathers, but neither of these attributes were exact in their mirroring of me or of TB’s father. Each of them had been touched and altered by TB, and that made them unique, not solely of me, or of TB’s father. I could see TB now as something more than I did before, and I feel so grateful for this opportunity to have presented itself, and that TB’s father actually was able to be there. He was a central part of my awakening to this fact, even if he didn’t know it.

My father was down here too, to go to the graduation with me. He was excited about the trip, and excited to see the changes within TB. We also took the chance, Hon and I, to show Pops around our little corner of academia – he went to both our schools, met important people to us, and saw important things. He understands more now about my discipline, a discipline which previously he simply didn’t understand at all (largely due to a difficulty in listening, but that’s a different post).

It was a weekend of learning, and I was blessed to be so educated.

That's a Poncho, Not a Tumor.

2006-10-15T14:53:00.000-05:00

Who knew? I mean, really, who would have imagined? I received a letter a few Fridays ago from TB, saying that he would be within two hours of me, attending a college football game. Would I want to go?

Everything immediately went out the window that I had planned for the weekend – a party get together that I had been planning to attend with my peeps, the work and writing I was going to do on my prospectus, everything. The questions were asked: did I really think I would find him in a football stadium? Did I think that the Drill Instructors would let me speak to him? Various embarrassing scenes rushed through my mind – having TB paged, as if he was a lost child in a Wal-Mart, having his name put on the score board, taking the field with the cheerleaders to be tossed into the air, clutching a sign that read, “TB! Your Mom Loves You and is at Gate 7!” I knew that each of these ideas, while excellent in and of themselves, would likely have the opposite effect than what I desired, i.e., I wanted to be able to talk to TB, not be escorted from the premises, or ignored by my son due to my profligately embarrassing behavior.

Thus I knew that I had to be crafty, I had to engage that aspect of the body which does the heavy lifting involved in parenting. I knew I had to go. I couldn’t not go. But if I go, and don’t find him, don’t even see him, have I gained anything? At the risk of sounding all Donald Rumsfeldian, heavens to betsy, yes! I have to go.

So I went, with absolutely no plan in my mind – a concept which filled Hon with horror, dread and caused his immediate refusal to attend said game. “You don’t even know if you’ll find him!” he exclaimed at one point. “It’s a FOOTBALL STADIUM,” he pointed out to me, slowly, as if speaking to the chronically deaf, chronically stupid or chronically optimistic (of those, I believe that I am only one, and I will leave the decision as to which one up to you). Hon wished me luck, asked me if I had my Google map, cash and identification (I would need that should I be arrested for rushing the field). I took off for the game, wondering how in the world I would find the stadium, much less my son amongst goddess knows how many other similarly attired young men (said attire being specifically designed so that they could not be easily spotted).

I arrived at the stadium with what seemed like a billion other people, all slogging through the rain and mud to get through the parking field (the parking lot, complete with asphalt and pretty lines seemed to be reserved for alumni or something) and as I approached the stadium, I saw a rainbow – faint, but hanging over the parking lot nonetheless – and I felt some hope stir. It wasn’t THAT big of a football stadium, after all.

After I purchased my THIRTY TWO DOLLAR ticket (Hello Highly Overpriced Event! I’m Broke College Student! Have some money! And give me a few of those $4 bottles of water too!) I walked around the stadium towards the large bus that said “Go Army!” on it. I figured that would be a likely place to start (why yes, I AM a graduate of the Sherlock Holmes School of Brilliant and Incredible Deductions, why do you ask?). As I got closer to the entrance, I noticed a long, long, line of recruits at the Chik Fillet counter. Well there’s my answer, I thought with a mental head slap. I’ll just wander around the food vendors and ask other recruits if they know him. If need be, I’ll ply them with fried food, sodas and wave my cell phone at them. Surely they’ll help out when offered such a bounty of riches.

I walked among the be-cammo’d troops, peering into each face, and feeling like I was swimming upstream, surrounded by thousands of fish, all identical but with one being the golden sneetch, the baby in the Fat Tuesday cake, the needle in the haystack. I began to be glad that they all had their names on their hats as well as their uniforms. I walked to the end of the stadium, still peering and hoping, and turned around to walk again, determining that if I didn’t find him at the food, I would start asking other soldiers soon. I looked to my left and suddenly locked eyes with TB – his pizza smeared face (some things never change) breaking into a giant grin as I could feel my face doing the same thing. I was reminded of the first time I held him and he opened his eyes and looked at me – a look that I felt inside as much as I met it on the outside with my own. I ran over to him and gave him a hug – and he hugged me back. No little pat on the back, or “God Mom, do you mind?” A real hug.

He introduced me to his buddies, who I would imagine were somewhat confused as to why some woman would bolt up and grab one of them out of their midst. “It’s my mom,” he explained, while I apologized for crying. I seemed to have lost control of my facial muscles in a most embarrassing fashion, as well as my tear ducts. It happens a lot these days.

“Your MOM?”, one of the others almost shouted. “Your MOM is here? THAT’S EXCELLENT!” I began to think that perhaps he had stood too close to a recently detonated hand grenade, or perhaps had suffered some sort of unfortunate Ipod injury while a civilian. “I wish MY MOM was here!” With that, he and the other soldiers sort of wandered off, leaving me to spend time with TB to my heart’s content.

He pitched the rest of his pizza (what? Incompletely consumed pizza? From TB? UNHEARD OF.) and polished off his soda. He was sunburned, nearly zit free, and had lost scads of weight. Prior to going in, TB could have been the poster boy for the “Before” picture for a weight loss/zit cream/bad attitude medication. And now, suddenly, contrary to all I had thought I would see, it appeared that he was the poster boy for the “After” as well. Could it be that the structure of the Army provided him with everything he needed and was incapable of accepting from me, his father, his grandfather, his step parents, his sister, his school and the legal system? Why? Would it last? Would he live through his enlistment without getting a limb or body part shot off, and without getting this new Nice Kid shot off as well? Do they make body armor for this new aspect of him, as well as for his physical self?

Our visit was excellent, and I had only a couple of brief moments of grief – when I first saw him, obviously, but I recovered from that quickly. When they left I didn’t see him leave, I must have been looking away, because he was there, and then he was gone, just like that – it was so sudden, the space occupied by The Boy one second was empty the next, and I didn’t even get a last wave in. But the worst, far worse than that was the benediction, the anthem and the introduction of a wounded soldier and a soldier about to head to Iraq for his third tour. I got angry – so angry, so furious, so incredibly livid that this athletic event, this game, was filled with people willing to send others out to fight for them, to die for them, to die for some ill-defined, amorphous, ultimately empty cause. Give me the option of holding on to “freedom” or the right to cast a vote which can then be cast aside, against the option of holding the hand of my boy? I’m taking the hand of the live boy over the vote any day of the week, and twice on November 7th. No, I didn’t sing the anthem, I didn’t put my hand to my chest, instead I put my hands to my face and wiped away the angry, furious, boiling tears that I could no more control than I could stop TB from signing on the dotted line and putting on the BDU’s that he is now so proud of. Motherhood is a state full of power and strength for 18 years, then suddenly overnight, it is an ideal to be fought for, it is something to be attained by the young, but it’s no longer a place of power – it’s a sunset, it’s a card, it’s a little old lady and antimacassars. I have no say in his life. In any way at all. I see lights in the tunnel, and think “TRAIN!” TB sees the lights in the tunnel and thinks he sees where he needs to go. Which of us are right? What if we both are?

Family Day is this Thursday, and Friday is graduation – TB will be headed into his last 6 weeks or so of training, his AIT training. I’ll try to do better to post more about it at the time that we return – writing about this brings out things that I Scarlett O’Hara away, and hope not to have to deal with, but of course, that’s never a good option, is it, because you know, Rhett always boogies at the end, and Scarlett always is left sitting on that damn staircase, and procrastination really never gets anybody anywhere, unless the whole point is inaction, and isn’t inaction really a decision to act in a specific way anyway?

2006-09-14T01:04:00.000-05:00

Well. Never believed much in horoscopes anyhow.

Still Nothing.

2006-09-13T07:22:00.000-05:00

No mail from TB yet, directly, since he wrote to my dad and asked that I write to him. The only TB related mail has been an envelope that I accidentally put in the mail to TB without postage. It was returned yesterday.

I'm hopeful today, although I typically wake up each day with the same sort of refrain in my mind that Hon and I would repeat to each other, every Wednesday. Wednesdays were the only days we were allowed to call The Girl, his daughter (also affectionately known as DQ, Drama Queen). We would wake up and before we even said "Where's the coffee?" or "Good Morning" it was "We get to call TG today." And that was every week, without fail. Now each morning, without fail, I hear in my head, "He may write today."

But hope is a funny thing - it grows where there should be none, and it takes the smallest of rain to get it started. Observe my rain, in the form of today's horoscope:

Hello Peacemongermom!
Here's your horoscope for SEPTEMBER 13, 2006.

Aries
If you've been hoping for a lucky break, this is the day when it might come - especially if it involves love and romance. You might have been hoping beyond hope for acknowledgment on the job front, in the field of education, or by someone who means a lot to you. Whatever breaks come your way are likely to move you emotionally in an intense way. You won't be the same. Have a great day!

And we all know that horoscopes are never wrong.

Letters!

2006-09-05T14:38:00.000-05:00

Okay. Just one. A letter. Not to me. But mentioning me! From TB! To my dad! Asking me to write! To him!! Amazing the joy and happiness that this one little mention brings to my life. How little it takes to make a mother happy. Of course, we are the ones who receive the Christmas cards, and Mother's Day cards made out of macaroni, glitter and string, and then behave like this is the second coming of DaVinci, so...

TB wrote to my father, telling him when Family Day and Graduation are. So I'm guessing we are invited. Yaay!

So now we have received some word from the far Planet Soldier. A written epistle, of paragraphical proportions! Unfortunately, receiving this document means also that we must read it. He has gone through the gas chamber (not that I would expect gas would be a worry for him - no WMDs over there, remember? I think the problem is going to be more bomb-related, myself). He says basic training is easy, boring, and occasionally fun. He's in the classroom a lot, and he says he's excited about getting to shoot his M16. I fervently hope for more classroom time, lots of it, involving no guns, no bullets, and boredom galore.

I almost wish he were pissed at me and hadn't written. This now means that I get to leave behind the contemplations of "is he pissed at me? Why? What did I do? (Enter into Blame Circle 7 million, three hundred and six and spin fruitlessly until exhausted)" and move on to contemplation and worry for what happens after basic, when I might have to include a country on the envelope when I write to him.

Labor Day

2006-09-04T18:09:00.000-05:00

I’m sure it will come as a surprise to none of you that I have not yet heard a single word from TB. Nor, even less surprising, have I heard anything from Ex or Mrs. Ex. I never thought that I would, and I’m certainly not going to ask.

That’s the part about this that makes me the angriest, I think. That my child would presume to know better than I regarding what I need. I realize that at some point we all begin the slow change from capable adult into elderly child, in need of someone’s careful eye so that we don’t burn ourselves on the stove, or get lost on our way to the post office.

I can assure you that I am nowhere near that point, nor are my parents. TB is taking quite a bit on himself to presume that he can determine for me the right way to deal with his father.

I have wrestled quite a bit with whether or not to get in contact with TB, now that I have the address (both mail and e-mail) to write him. I have sent him a cheery email, devoid of any real angsty substance, and I have no way to know if he has read it yet or not. Do they have daily access to pcs? Weekly? Rare? No real schedule? I have no way to know. So I don’t know if he knows I have written to him.

But the bottom line is that he knows – he knows – how to write to me and contact me. Even if he doesn’t have my address, he could contact Dad. He used to live there, he knows the address. “Please pass word on to Mom that I’m okay, and give her my address, and ask her to write.” Wow. How tough is that?

There are three possibilities as I see it:
1. TB doesn’t want to hear from me because he’s angry at me.
I find this one a little hard to digest. Only days before he left, we had very friendly, happy, supportive (on my part) emails and phone conversations. He did more than grunt at me, which is what he has done in the past (remember, we ARE talking about a 19 year old male. Grunting is the most commonly used language of the species). I don’t think he’s angry with me.

2. TB’s interactions with his father have tilted him towards The Dark Side. TB was never the most independent of thinkers – one of my biggest worries about him was that he would wind up with a “bad crowd,” not because I didn’t want him associating with a particular group of kids, but because I knew that TB has absolutely no ability to say, “No. I think this is wrong.” TB is, if nothing else, the consummate soldier because he will always follow the lead of other, alpha dogs. (Worrisome in and of itself)

To further back up my Theory of the Dark Side, prior to his leaving, my father asked TB something (I forget the specificity of the question), with the point being to limit the exposure that I have to have to Ex (Hello class, let’s revisit the purpose of divorce: I do not want to have to deal with you anymore, Spouse. Let’s get divorced. Good. Now I don’t have to deal with you. Thanks a million! Fondly, Ex-Spouse). TB objected to whatever it was that was being proposed, saying that I would have to deal with TB’s father eventually, that TB had gotten over his issues with his own father and that I needed to get over mine.

I’m in a fairly good mood right now, so I’m not going to enlighten you, Constant Reader, as to the “issues” that I am supposed to get over. Let me just say that this is a portion of my mental makeup, and it is not something that is “gotten over.” It is lived through, survived, wept over. It is not “gotten over.”

TB is, I believe, trying to manipulate me into dealing with his father and getting over my deep and horrible mental issues.

3. TB just doesn’t care.
This one works for me too, in a fundamentally disturbing way. Because of the roller skating rink, basically.

When TB was younger, and first developing the real social urges that kids develop, there was a group of kids from his school who went to the roller skating rink in our small town on Friday nights. This was something that could rack up some dollars for the parental units (also known as the ATMs to the youngsters), and so I thus offered TB the possibility that he could combine his allowance with any money he earned doing tasks around the house to pay his way into the rink on Friday nights. Thus, TB would (a) learn the value of a dollar, (b) learn the value of work and (c) have a social life to boot.

When I offered this to him (said work consisted of little more than picking up duties, and crushing aluminum cans that we recycled, using the handy dandy can crusher), he refused it out of hand, saying he really didn’t want to go to the skating rink that bad anyway.

????Insert befuddled mother here????

I had no idea what to do with this. He cared so little for this activity when he had to work for it, but when it was something that he was doing just to do it, it was the end all and be all of his existence, the reason that he started the week on Monday and ended it on Friday. Now, due to a little can crushing, and possibly running of a vacuum, he was a skate-hater.

This was a frequently revisited scenario. If he had to work for it, he didn’t want it. Which, as we all know, means that shortly, The Boy was going to either (a) run out of things that he actually wanted, because you know, life ain’t free, or (b) learn to work for things that he actually did want. Because I refuse to believe that he didn’t want anything. Humans are born wanting – we want food, we want to be dry, we want to be cuddled and held. We want what we need, and we want what we don’t need as well. TB did an excellent job of getting as far away from those things that he wanted, and pushing them off to the side.

Thus I am concluding that there is little that I can gain from writing to TB now. Not to mention...that anger? Yep. Still there.

At least I'll get more done this way.

2006-08-28T12:23:00.000-05:00

I'm amazed at how very angry I am at TB for what he's doing. I tried really hard when he was younger to encourage him to have a good relationship with his father, even when it was to my own detriment (and isn't this always the way it goes?). I know that I didn't do a great job with that - I was fighting my own issues and battles with regard to my relationship with TB's father, so I was probably not the best person to be giving advice, or to be encouraging in any way regarding that topic. But there was no one else - just me - for a time, anyway, and eventually there was Hon, who always wanted a good relationship with TB, but never got it...mostly because TB found it much more fun to shoot emotional potshots at Hon, and blame him for anything and everything possible. I suppose it's not just mothers who wind up taking the blame and the fall for their children - it's anyone who goes into a relationship with their heart outside their skin, just waiting for the hammer to fall - hoping it doesn't, but knowing that the opportunity is there all the time.

Unfortunately (I say unfortunately, because I truly believe that this is a bad way to live and to feel, and I hope it doesn't really last), the days that pass when I hear no word from TB are stacking up like bricks, or rocks, or any other strong and sheltering objects, and I am placing them around my exposed heart. I can take a lot, and I will take a lot, if I have to, but not the mind games, or the manipulations, or the immature disregard. Even though I am TB's mother, the one who should just lay down her life and give up everything for her child, I won't. This is not something that is beneficial to TB, and it certainly isn't beneficial to me. I could go to Ex with my hat in my hands, cringing and cowering, and ask that he please, please pass along a message, or tell me when he hears from TB. I could open myself up to even more hurt that way. But I have to ask, why should I take abuse just because I am his mother? Does birthing a child automatically mean that I am open to whatever emotional crap he decides to throw at me? Because he didn't agree with my parenting style? Or my decision to leave a violently drunk and abusive marriage?

Feh. I reject the stereotype of the long suffering, always willing, selfless mother. Excuse me, I am a human being before I am a mother, and that's the case even if I have been a mother longer than I was not one. Just because I don't remember what it was like to be PeacemongerGirl, doesn't mean that PeacemongerGirl doesn't exist somewhere in the makeup of PeacemongerMom. I love my son very, very much, and if he calls or writes or sends me smoke signals, I'll be open and responsive to him.

But I won't allow my life to end because of some issue he has with his father, or with me or with the brand of shampoo he's having to use, or any other million and one things that he might think are my fault, and that society might allow him to place at my feet because I wear the Scarlet M. I did the best I could do with him - he wasn't the most maleable of clays, if you know what I mean - I did my best, but sometimes the best just doesn't cut it. I won't just jump for joy and leak around the eyes if he writes me - no, I think I'm done with that for now. Now I'm just pissed. I suppose that that is the wrong thing to be as a peacemonger, but peacemongers get tired too, and irate and crabby and hurt. I'm hurt, and I'm pissed, and I hope I remember this if he does decide to write.

Distraction is my middle name.

2006-08-27T19:40:00.000-05:00

Word has been heard from TB - unfortunately, not by me. He's contacted his father, he's contacted his stepmother, he's contacted his recruiter. He hasn't contacted me.

I would be lying if I said this wasn't very painful. I would be lying even more if I said that it didn't royally piss me off. When my father forwarded me the email he received from the recruiter with TB's mailing address, I was, literally, floored. It's one thing for TB to contact his father before me. I don't mind that so much. But his recruiter? Goodness. I've been dissed by the best now.

Quiet...and Waiting.

2006-08-23T00:43:00.001-05:00

The silence of the evening has always called me to be thoughtful, to consider, to write and to make my lists. It was during the time that I was married to Ex that I honed the craft that was The List. I made lists like spiders made webs. It was my future I was listing – the days I would make money, and then control some aspect of my life.

Now there is no child in the house for me to put to bed, no child to worry over, and I have no noisy home. My home is silent (except for Hon’s work). I have to admit to a certain relief at this, because after all, the noise, the distraction and the business of a child is more than a full time job – it’s 24/7, there’s no one to ask for time off, there’s no one to ask for a raise. It’s just you, Momma, the person who brings the medicine when there’s illness, the one who takes off time from work with the ear infection and makes the last minute appointment with the doctor, the person who sits by the bed at night when there’s a warm forehead with a cool rag in your hand. Those were hard – but good – times. But the joy of the waiting at the end of the driveway, me and Dog, for The Boy to come home. It was good. And for The Girl, for her to come home, that was good as well. Dog got to know their schedules as well as I did (better, actually, because he sat at the door, and pressed his nose to the window, and when asked, “Want to go wait for The Boy?” would dash to the end of the driveway and look…then wait. Waiting is the hardest thing to learn. He learned it better than I.)

I don’t always pine, contrary to the tenor of this Weblog, for the noisy busy time of children. I do spend time thinking, researching, (obsessing) about my schoolwork. I cherish the time that I have worked for myself, that I have earned. I have raised TB, and he is, I believe, doing what he thinks is the only thing he can do. The thing that he thinks is best for him to do. And really, what is the ultimate goal of raising a child other than putting them on that path? That’s a path that they have to find themselves. I would expect a few false starts in the path-finding, obviously, because who knows what they want when they are 19? Or who really wants the same thing at 29 that they did at 19? It’s just a part of growing, and I grow as he grows.

He’s written now, to his dad. I know this because I suggested to my dad that he call Ex to see if any word from TB has been heard. All manner of word has been heard, according to Mrs. Ex, and they have heard via letter AND email. I have contemplated this now for two days, and I am learning how much thought goes into action. I used to just jump at the first inclination – the first possibility – for action. Someone said X and well, by Gahd, I said Y, and ran off to do whatever was contrary. I was a contrary kid. Apparently TB gets it natural.

But I am learning the subtle art of thoughtfulness, considering, contemplating. There is no rushing to this, no hurry. Although I would lie if I said I didn’t make a bee-line for the door when Dog alerted me to the mailman (BARK!) outside the door! (BARK!) Someone! (BARK!) is at! (BARK!! BARKBARKBARK!) the DOOR!!!!! (run in circles, jump a few times, hope for a treat BARKBARKBARK!) Oh. A few pieces of junk mail. A bill. Nothing handwritten…Although it’s nice to know that someone else is as frantic about the mail as I am.

But I am—really—learning the art of calming down about this. Actually, I am embracing the very old technique of my family – ignore the bad, and look for the good. I am looking for the good. Very, very hard.

TB may well discover a part of him, unknown to me, to him, to his dad, to anyone, that is in need of the type of strict discipline that I was unable to give him, and that his dad simply wasn’t around enough to give him. He may find a part of himself that I have never met. I hope that part of him decides to call me or write me sometime.

As I said earlier, there has been some news on the TB front. This is news that I have ruminated on for a couple of days now. My father called me yesterday morning to tell me that There Was News on the TB front, and sounded oh so much more relieved, so much more like My Dad. I sometimes wonder which part of this upsets me more: how much it bothers and upsets my mother and my father, or what might happen to TB.

Dad found that Ex and Mrs. Ex had heard from TB, and was very relieved to be able to relay this information to me. I was happy to hear it, and told Dad so. I then proceeded to begin the obsessing technique for which so many women (at least those featured on Sex and the City and other mindless shows) are known. If TB has decided to correspond with, and make PNOK, the Ex and Mrs. Ex, what does that do to what I will find out in the future? Will I learn anything from them? Will I hear anything from the military? Will I learn of terrible things by watching the evening news on PBS? I clearly won’t hear anything from Ex, as I knew that I wouldn’t. Will TB write me? If he doesn’t, and I get an address from Dad, which he has gotten from Ex and Mrs. Ex, should I write? Does TB even WANT to hear from me?

How is it that I – a mother, a being who is believed to know every single thing about her child, about every child – could not know what to do if given the contact information for her own child? Do I reach out to him? Or does he really just not want me in his life? I just don’t know, and all I can do is keep reaching. And keep waiting, with Dog, for the mail.

Leaking

2006-08-20T21:59:00.000-05:00

I never had problems with breast feeding. I anticipated problems. I envisioned problems. I read about problems. There were none. Not when TB developed his two bottom teeth (front) at the age of 3 months. Not when I went back to school after taking only a semester off. He got formula at the daycare, and at home, I fed him. I remember the very first time I ever left TB at home, alone, with his father.

One would think this would not be something that would stick in one’s mind.

I left him with Ex, and had errands to run. I was gone the better part of the day. Ex had bottles in the fridge to feed TB, he had been lectured (yes, lectured, hectored and bothered I’m sure) but this was MY responsibility, which I was handing off to someone else, it was mine alone, no one else’s, and I wanted someone – anyone – else to feel the same amount of urgency about what had – HAD – to be done. The baby must be fed. The baby must be changed. The baby must be ATTENDED TO. The cries must be answered, the midnight, 2 am cries, the cries that continue, no matter what you do. They MUST BE ATTENDED TO. One cannot ignore a crying child. Ex was asleep when I left, as was TB, next to him in the bed.

I went to run my errands. I believe that I may have even had a class that I had to attend. I’m not sure. I only recall that I was gone from the house for at least 6 hours.

Six hours, possibly less. It was long enough for the light in the room to have changed, to have moved, for the diaper on my baby to be full, for it to be so wet that I could see the granules of the diaper, full of urine. It was a long, long time.

I returned home, and TB was still exactly – exactly – where I had left him. His diaper was full. He was asleep. He was quiet. He was calm. He seemed happy.

Had he been fed? No. Had he been changed? No. He had slept, all day, beside his father. I, the feeding unit, the one who stood in line at the military commissary, leaking at the breasts and wondering how things were going at home (this, in the dark and scary days before the cell phone) had not been missed. At least, not visibly. How was this possible? How was it possible that his father’s mere presence beside him made him sleep, happily, without any tears, wails, or needing of comfort, for so long?

I have absolutely no idea. But this is a trend, and it is a trend that continues today.

I hope that TB feels his father near him. I hope that he thinks of him every single night when he goes to sleep. I hope that he misses him, and writes him, constantly. I hope that the time that he could spend writing to me, he spends writing to his dad.

I don’t know what unit he is with. I don’t know how to reach him. I don’t know who he has determined as his PNOK. I only know that his father, beside him, can make him sleep calmly, can make him see things, and be things, that I cannot.

I spoke with my father tonight, and had to grip very hard so as not to lose my composure on the phone with him. He worries – enormously – about TB, and also at the same time, feels that this is the only thing that TB could do to make things work out for him. I have so much trouble hearing my father sound worried, sound bad. I hung up the phone with bare seconds before I lost the little bit of control I had held onto during our conversation – control that I have held as I wake in the mornings, and Hun makes me laugh, while I feel, at the same time, an empty and dark space inside me, where the laughter can’t reach. I hold that control when I go to the mailbox, and see only mail, no Letters, nothing handwritten, nothing from Camp Hell, in TB’s hand, his handwriting that I can see in my mind as clearly as my own. No, the control will only go so far, and for so long. One gets tired, after all.

I went to Camp Casey this weekend. I saw the crosses, and I saw – more terribly, really – the crosses not put into the ground. They were in piles, around the campsite. They were stacked. They were the already dead, and the soon to be dead. I couldn’t help but look at them with a real visceral dread. I do not want to put flowers by one of these crosses. I don’t want one to be special to me. I want to see only the large field, and be shaken by the numbers. I don’t want to single one out.

I leak, now, like I did then, earlier, standing in the checkout line at the commissary, wondering if TB had been fed, and then suddenly I am wearing a wet blouse. I leak not from the breasts but from the eyes – it’s a slow leak, sometimes, and others, a fast leak, that leaves me unable to breathe and unable to see. It’s a leak from my eyes and from my heart, and it’s a leak that I seem very incapable to stop, just as before.

Mom thinks I write horoscopes now.

2006-08-16T19:02:00.000-05:00

Here's The Boy's from today, and I am not making this up:

Your mother could be on your mind today, Boy. The energy of the day could be inspiring you to think more about your family. If you aren't close to your mother, maybe that is a relationship that would benefit from some effort on your part. Think about what your mom needs right now, and see if you can build a bridge to a better friendship. It could be time to start from the present and move forward.

We haven't heard anything from him so far. I'm spending my days with video games, reading of stuff for my thesis, work on my thesis, and plans to go to Crawford to hopefully see Cindy Sheehan. Basic training begins within the next few days. Funny that Basic begins for TB at about the same time that I'm cranking up for the fall semester - going into exactly what I've always wanted to do - teach - and my own Basic Training.

I wonder what he's doing right now...

No Address for the Letter, But Why Let That Stop Me?

2006-08-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

Dearest B—

I wonder what you are doing right now, as I sit and play a video game, and recover from my semester. Summer semesters are always so awful, so intensely packed with things you have to do, and things you have to read, and it’s just too much, in too short of a time. I have sworn that this is my last summer session, unless I am teaching, and I will probably not like it any more then than I do now.

This is the first letter that I am sending to you in boot camp (if, that is, you send me your address). I told myself that I wouldn’t write ahead of time – that I would wait to hear from you before I began to write you letters. Obviously, that didn’t work.

I worry about you – you know that – and I won’t go into all the reasons that I do. You probably know them, and if you don’t, it’s probably just as well. I check the internet to see what is going on with you during certain phases of your boot camp (basic training? Boot camp? I don’t know what to call it – my knowledge of military phrases was summarily “booted” out of my brain as soon as was possible for me…) and I know that at this point in your training, you are still being taught by the Drill Instructors how to brush your teeth, how to walk in a straight line, how to behave -- in other words, like you belong in the situation where you find yourself. These are all things that I wanted so badly for you to learn, and that I tried so hard to teach you. I’m told that I didn’t fail in what I tried to do, but instead that I did my best, and sometimes people just don’t see eye to eye, including mothers and sons. I wish worse than anything that I knew exactly what sort of mother you wanted and needed me to be, and I wish even more that you knew the sort of boy I wanted you to be. Not for anything, though, do I want you to think that I would trade you for another Boy. You are my Boy, and I love you. I can’t imagine a life without you in it, and I only mean that I wanted you to grow into a young adult who wanted me in his life. It seems sometimes that that wasn’t the case.

Actually, what it seems is that you felt that you couldn’t love both me and your dad at the same time – that I would be hurt if you loved your dad, or that he would be hurt if you loved me. I can only speak for me, but I can tell you totally and without question that I wanted, always, for you and your dad to have a good relationship. I know how hard it is to have a family that winds up in divorce court. I didn’t, however, ever have a situation where I saw my dad hitting my mom, and I don’t know how that winds up dealing with your view of the world. Or, for that matter, your view of your dad...and now that I think of it, how it effects your view of your mother. I don’t want you (and really, honestly, never, ever did) to have some sort of idea that your dad isn’t worth your affection. I want you and your dad to get along, and love each other. I don’t think, though, that your dad is lacking in love or affection from you. I do think that your dad is lacking in understanding of the way to be a good dad. That doesn’t mean, though, that I think that you are lacking in understanding of how to be a good son. You are a good son, and your happy, smiling face got me through so many unhappy times. You and your blonde curls, your sweet voice, your hugs and kisses – you were always such an affectionate boy. Then something changed as you aged. I took it mostly as a desire not to be seen as “uncool” (or whatever it is that y’all call it now – uncrunk, or unfly or notgangsta or whatever it is that you say now), but you stopped being the sweet boy I birthed, and became a boy who seemed to want nothing to do with what I thought was important and good and the right way to live. I understand that at the age where you are, nothing really matters except yourself and your friends, and what your friends think, and what you are doing. But there is so much more in the world than just that. There is your soul, and the right thing to do, and the wrong thing. I don’t want you to feel like I am lecturing you (and honestly, I’m thinking that you’ve probably already skipped a lot of what I wrote and really, I will give you one hundred bucks if you tell me that you read this far, and actually read this and read the paragraph before, and the paragraph after. I’ll require some background, perhaps an essay. I know - you should send me a letter, boy, that has this phrase in it: I think that Abba is cool. That way I’ll know you read this, because I know that you have no idea who the hell Abba is. It’s an old folks band, and I taped them on my little cassette player off my AM radio when I was 9 thanks a lot). I know very well that you are beyond the lecturing point. You are a grown up, and I always thought that what I wanted for you was independence, making your own decisions, and doing what you thought was right, without anyone else telling you or influencing you. I thought that that was what I wanted for you and for me – as your mother.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up one day to find that you had, indeed, made your own decision (or at least a decision I couldn’t negate, nullify or refuse to accept, agree to, or sign a permission slip for) and suddenly that meant you were gone. It has been a real wakeup to me that what I thought I believed in during the past years with regards to you – and to DQ – while I still believe that it is what is best for you, may not actually be what I want for me. It’s still what I want for you, and nothing will make me change that (nothing that you or DQ could do will make me think that I know what you want/need better than you do). But I know that what I need is a closer relationship with you – you are My Boy, you are the reason that I kept myself sane and eventually got the two of us out of the poisonous situation that was my marriage to Ex. Spending all of my time trying to stay alive has a way of altering the way that one deals with every other aspect of life. It becomes very, very hard to play, or go to the park, or reveal too many emotions towards you, my son and the most important thing in my life, when having to worry every second of every day about how each action will be viewed, and how exactly to get through what’s in front of you. Please know that that was not your fault, that Ex and I were simply not suited for each other, and had some serious personality issues that really meant we would be much better off married to anyone other than each other – it had nothing to do with you. And I realize that this is a very late letter to send you, but I treat DQ as an adult, and did as soon as she turned 18, and I will try to do the same with you. I have had little practice with this, you see, because you took off after graduation and I had no way to reach you, and you didn’t call me, and I didn’t want to interfere in your life, and it all got so complicated. Not to mention, practicing on DQ isn’t the same as dealing with you – you and DQ are very, very different animals.

So there we go. That’s somewhere within shouting distance of where I want to start with regard to things with you – I feel like you are learning a lot where you are there at Ft. Hell about yourself, and what you actually can do (you do know that you have a pretty awful self image, right? And that you can do so much more than you give yourself credit for?). I know that you will do so well, and you have the strength and fortitude to get through whatever gets tossed at you in basic. I want you to do well in this, and I want you also to be willing to talk to me. I don’t know if you know it, but I want you to succeed at whatever it is that you choose to do. If your choice of things to do is career soldier, I want you to be the best soldier that you can. I would much rather that you did something that didn’t put you in danger, but this is your choice. What you want to do, and what you think is best is now, officially, The Thing to do. Becoming a “grown up” doesn’t just mean that suddenly you can stay up as late as you want. Sure, you CAN, but who wants the repercussions later? It’s all in the cause and effect. And that, my dear son, is the true meaning of being a grown up.

I hope things are good for you there at Ft. Hell, and I go to the webcam every day, just in case I can see you. I know I can’t but it makes me feel better – some – to know that I can see where you are. I had no idea that being a mother was going to come back and bite me in the ass so hard when you were an adult. Here I thought that labor and delivery was the tough part and your adulthood was going to be the easy time. Thanks. Thanks bunches. ☺

I want to hear from you, and if this letter ever gets mailed, it will mean that you actually wrote me and sent me your address. I feel a gap, a hole, a huge, enormous whistling pain in my heart not to be able to talk with you, see you, and know what you are doing and thinking and wanting. I miss you. And you don’t have to have the blonde curls to be my sweet boy, either.

I love you—

Momma

Day Zero

2006-08-09T00:54:00.000-05:00

TB left for boot camp today. My father drove him to the recruiter's station, and said that he got out of the truck, shook his hand, and TB walked across the street and went inside. I can see it in my mind, and feel it in my body, just from those few words, and it has had a profound, surprising effect on me, even though I have been preparing for this for the last month or so.

Bodily knowledge is something that we (by we I mean those in my program, those in my discipline, those of us who are feminists and who do a lot of thinking - or even those people, feminist or no, who do little conscious thinking, and much more acting) do a substantial amount of discussion of - how we teach through the body, how we occupy our spaces, bodily, how our physicality is more than what we are, yet is not the ultimate of who we are. Our bodies do not control our destinies, but are ultimately (I become more and more convinced of this - both from education and aging...and what is aging if not education in and of itself?) the place where our destinies are written - budding breasts and menstruation lead us to see ourselves finally as women, then sex, conception and birthing of a child, then the aging of our own bodies (good god, when did I develop my mother's legs?? And who said I needed veins that large in my shins?????). So much of our knowledge is gained from our bodies - from the physicalities of our experiences.

In class tonight (thank goodness, the last one of the summer, I am beyond exhausted and burnt out) we discussed teaching via, through, and in spite of, our bodies. I attended class with a rapidly settling feeling of having recently attended a strenuous kickboxing class, or perhaps moving day. My shoulders, my abdominal muscles, my back - especially the small of my back - felt as if I had been working out, doing physical labor, or had been subjected to a beating. While we discussed the bodily aspects of our pedagogies, and the pedagogies of others, I could feel the tensions of my body - my most recent bodily experience of mothering - settling down on me like a very heavy, wet wool blanket. My eyes began to ache. My head thrummed with stress and pain - mostly due to a lack of anything to eat, aside from the Fig Newmans I brought to share with CEO (she ate one, and declared that it was somewhat like a dog treat. Therefore, I ate the rest. Along with some organic chocolate. Must balance the diet, you know). As I sat there in class, increasingly incapable of concentrating on anything other than my physicality, and wondering what TB was doing right now, I realized that I really, really must begin caring - really caring - for myself, physically, bodily, or I will not make it through the coming semester. I am carrying my caring within myself, within my body.

I doodled in my notes, conceptualizing the writing on my body that I anticipate producing soon. I tried - really tried - to listen to my classmates, as they spoke, and I wanted, desperately, to produce something, some intelligent - semi intelligent - concept to throw out into the floor and thus legitimate my existence in class. Nothing occurred to me to say or offer up, even as I enacted the bodily experience of my teaching, and my mothering - with no children in the room, I still enacted my mothering, through my aching, the pains I was feeling - and continue to feel - I could only listen to my classmates in the context of my role as teacher of my children, and the bodily experience I have had, and continue to have - with both of them.

The many, many awakenings late at night, by a sick child. The ear infections. The bodily fluids. The administering of medications. The clothing of bodies. The feeding of bodies. The hygiene of bodies. Later, as they became teens, the late nights, wrapped in a fuzzy bathrobe, sitting on the bed next to each of them, listening, listening, listening. Hearing - practicing the active listening skills that I had no idea I had, nor that I even considered might exist. It was just love, love for them, desire for them to feel and appreciate that love, painful desire that they have what they need, what they each desired. Mothering is nothing if not aching muscles, aching back, crying joints and leaking eyes, breasts and souls.

My body was enfolded, many, many times throughout the day, by the incredible women I work with, and learn with, and exist with. Had I not been blessed with the beautiful, loving and amazing women I spent time with today, I have no idea how I could have made it through today, which lasted roughly ten to fifteen years, all within 24 hours.

The Boy Comes To Be.

2006-08-06T18:01:00.000-05:00

I knew something was wrong – I knew something was different. I could feel it. I could feel the difference in myself, but I had no word for it. I had no way to describe it, I only knew that something was up. At 19, I had little understanding of how my body worked, and even less understanding of what would be symptoms of pregnancy, illness, “women’s issues” – I had only been regularly menstruating for about a year, as my period had gone and come with the randomness of the rest of my decisions in my life. I gave my period roughly the same amount of concern as I did any other bodily aspects of my life: it was what it was, and I could do nothing about it, whether “it” was my period, a bladder infection, or an orgasm. Such was the control that I felt and experienced in my life – even those things that truly could be controlled were outside the realm of my reach.

My first symptom of pregnancy was not a missed period – how I really envied those women who could track their cycles down to the moment. No, my real first symptom was frequent urination. I remember saying to my then-husband that I was either with child or with bladder infection. I figured bladder infection. It wasn’t until my period had gone missing for 3+ months that I became worried to the point that I went to the school nurse. One negative pregnancy test followed another, three in all. Finally, I approached the nurse again without blood, and she performed yet another test, to which the answer was resoundingly positive.

I staggered across the street to my class, for which I was now very late (along with being late for other things, I mused with little humor). Years later, in clearing out boxes, I found my notes taken during that class. As I read them, I had no idea what the professor was speaking about that day, nor was there any hint as to any real content in the words. They were whorls, twists, doodles. They were as I was, at that moment – lost on a sea of incomprehensibility, the awful truth beginning to dawn in my brain. My life was to change, and I was not happy with that thought, as I was unhappy with life as it was – bringing in another responsibility, an innocent person to also pay the price of my folly, it was the ultimate in stupidity, in ignorance, in carelessness. How could I have done this?

I was 19, the year was 1986, Reagan was declaring ketchup in school lunches to be a vegetable, and I was a month or so into my first college experience (my major was chosen as I stood in line to register in the cavernous gymnasium – it was either major in paralegal technology or oral hygienist, and I had no interest in saliva or teeth). I lived in a small apartment, with my soldier-husband, stationed at Ft. Bragg. I was a military wife, soon to be a mother, and totally, completely at a loss as to how, exactly, one does either … much less both.

As I entered the classroom, ashen faced and shocked, I fell into a desk and began taking the notes which I still have, with the header of 10/8/86 in the left margin, and the professor’s name in the right margin – just as I had been taught to do in sixth grade. I mouthed the words – I’m pregnant – to my friends in class in response to their inquires as to my tardiness. The response from all was an equally silent – Congratulations – to which I nodded numbly. I tried repeatedly after class let out to reach Ex, with little success. He was, after all, a soldier, and soldiering is rarely done inside, within easy reach of a phone. Cell phones were a science fiction dream then, and pagers were only clipped to the belts of rich doctors. Thus I was given the opportunity to ensure the continuation of the life inside me: I called my mother-in-law and my own family while I could not reach Ex. The life of my child was created and existed within my body, yet it was unreal until I spoke it to my mother-in-law. Once spoken to her, it became impossible to abort. It was the first of many acts of protection of my child.

I was “delivered of” TB in a military hospital via cesarean section. The doctors tired of my cervix’s refusal to dilate, and had me sign the forms allowing them to operate as I rode wave after wave of pain and prayed only for release – death, gas, whatever. Nothing could be worse than what I was living, and no one held my hand or anxiously awaited what might spring from between my legs – I was alone with my unborn child in the work that we had to do, and it was the most alone I have ever felt. Through my own decisions I had alienated anyone who might sit with me, who might smooth the hair back from my sweaty face. I had no one to call for, no one to work for. I did not feel that I was “delivered of” The Boy – I felt a cog in a machine, an unworkable cog. A cog that had gummed up its own works, thus the need for a surgeon, an operating room, all the extra fuss. He did not want to arrive, and I, for one, did not blame him. Already, I was searching for an escape from this place, so why, I reasoned, would anyone actively work to get here?

In the hospital, I was uncharacteristically adamant in my decisions regarding the treatment of my son. Among other things that I decided, he was not to be circumcised. While I gave no thought to the danger inherent in doctors taking a scalpel to the skin of my abdomen, the muscle and organs of my body, I did not trust them to remove a small piece of skin from my son. Nor did I think it necessary to remove, and I stood firmly by this, even as I was sternly rebuked by the doctors. Even now I think the only reason I was successful in holding off the circumcision was that TB’s father agreed with me. The politics of the penis is much easier to navigate when one has an interpreter, I suppose.

I remember finally being presented with The Baby – he had a name, of course, it had long been established he would be C, but I couldn’t stop referring to him as The Baby, even though he was in truth now both The Baby and C. His father placed him in my arms, and I awaited the wash of love to splash over me. I felt fear. I felt surprise. I felt amazement. I felt gratitude not to be in labor or pregnant anymore – already I was reveling in the fact that I could go longer than an hour without a trip to the bathroom – but no eye-crossing, jaw-dropping, pulse-pounding feeling of unending, indescribable love. TB opened his eyes and looked at me. I looked at him. I felt his eyes open, deep in my core. I felt the responsibility, the huge, enormous, unspeakable responsibility of this child settle around my shoulders, and I didn’t mind. Fall in love? Not really.

Fall into adulthood, responsibility, sobriety? Yes. There was no one else, you see…after all, his father was violent, frequently drunk, and overwhelmingly immature. One day he went out to buy a dryer (cloth diapers were the norm in our house, due to cost) and returned not with the dryer I had harped for, but instead with a giant speaker system for the backseat of the car…the backseat where the baby seat went. The speaker was great, if the goal was to deafen passerby with eye watering and hair curling bass. The speaker did not dry diapers (although it was so loud, it probably could have). It was clear early on that I was alone in my motherhood. But isn’t that the case for all women in the United States, no matter the year? No matter the president? No matter the husband? Aren’t we all alone with our motherhood, in a way?

We were in a military town, surrounded by military families and by businesses who made a living off the military families. My family was about 4 hours away, and the relations I had with them at that time were strained, at best. I struggled to learn how to care for my son, and was taught how to fold and change cloth diapers by my husband, who then abruptly forgot how to carry out the task. My son and I spent many hours alone together, as Ex’s unit was called out to maneuvers and I stayed behind, nursing TB as I watched Oliver North testify before Congress. I walked my son back and forth as he wailed through his first of many ear infections. I walked him through the house, around the yard, and I listened to the particular cry that all infants have – the cry that would wake me from a sound sleep, night after night for a feeding, the cry that could peel the skin from my body with my desire for a good night’s sleep, the cry that had me wondering if perhaps **I** had died and was actually in hell. I frequently did not understand him and his loud requests, but I did my best, and I worked hard at mothering him. We were, after all, all we had.

I studied hard in school, having taken one semester off for the birth of TB, and eventually graduated without any particular honors, other than that of mother-student (or perhaps student-mother … I think that is more applicable). My work to care for TB as I navigated those early days of my marriage now seems to me to be simple: crying baby = check diaper, offer breast, rock, cuddle, tuck – the physicalities of life. My work with my son now is different. He is 19, and for want of a better term, has been estranged from both me and his father. I have spoken with him briefly over the past year, but not with any substance. I think of his blonde curls, his chubby baby body and my work to make life as good for that chubby body as possible – my fears that he would witness the violence that eventually bubbled up in our house and would then inherit that violence and carry it with him to his own home and wife, my worry that he would do any of the thousands of things that we worry about as mothers: drugs, alcohol, failing school, bad marriage, unpleasant job . . . all the things that can make a life miserable. All my worries stay with me, and I do my best to live the life I have now – I lived through a divorce, found a real love, have returned to school – but I still feel the worry and wonder that came from bearing my son … it leads me to wish I could return to 1987 and visit my young 20 year old self, holding infant-C with a look of confusion on my face, and say this: It is worth it, what you do, and you can only make decisions based on what knowledge you have at the time. You won’t break the baby as you hold him, and as he grows, so will you.

To borrow an analogy from Andrea O’Reilly, take hold of the oxygen mask that drops from the cabin ceiling and affix it to yourself, because only when you are taken care of can you take care of others.

Thanks.

2006-08-05T18:45:00.000-05:00

To those of you who have commented here, thanks. The reassurances and the knowledge that there are many other people in my spot and in the spot of my son makes me feel some better. I have had a few rather bad days, in that the time is rapidly approaching when TB leaves for basic. He emailed me yesterday before leaving for the beach with his aunt (she's nearly his age, so I'm hoping that they are getting along - I've always hoped he would have a good relationship with his Aunts, S1 and S2). He has promised to call me when he returns to his grandfather's house, where he's staying the night before heading out to basic the next day. I'm glad that my father will get to spend an evening with him before he leaves, although how much of an evening is up for grabs, as TB is planning to ask to borrow the car to hang out with his peeps.

I have been concentrating only on his basic training, and not what happens after that. Basic will seem like a very, very long time to him, I'd imagine, and he will hate it, I'm sure. I hope that he makes good friends, strong friendships, and has at least some enjoyable time at Ft. Hell. I think only of basic, because I really don't want to think about what comes next, and as Hun says, it's possible that TB might not make it through basic (my money is on TB making it, but who knows? It's totally up to him now). I have wondered how it is that I will make it through basic and the time after (I KNOW how TB will handle it: he'll sweat a lot). I was thinking about this as I drove to a friend's house today, to work on our thesises (thesi? thesee? Headaches, is more likely). CO and MJ will be what gets me through each day, and what makes the uncertain times easier. When I have been stressing, I talk to them, and I feel better. They don't have children, but they have plenty of empathy, and give me a totally free reign to yammer on however much I want. Which is, truly, the sign of a good friend. I expect that I will do a lot of leaning on them - something I am not and never have been particularly good at, and which I trace back not to any sort of stiff upper lip upbringing, but all the years married to Ex, who was your classic case of Assholicus GoneWildimus. Violence was always just around the corner at our house, and could pop out at the drop of a hat, and one of the really big heads-up that one is dealing with a batterer is the seclusion that the battered discovers herself (or himself) in suddenly. The time I spent married to Ex is long over with, and so far in the rear view mirror that I rarely - if ever - see it out of the corner of my eye.

But - the invitation of the military into my life again - somewhat like inviting the vampire into the home - has also brought with it vague, sulfurous wafts of the past days with Ex. I realize now that I can't beat myself up for any shortcomings in TB, simply because my time was spent grittily attempting to survive and make some sort of a future, a future that I sincerely hoped had no hospital visits in it and no surprise punches out of the blue. The two are simply very interrelated in my mind, as the first four or so years that I spent with Ex were spent as the ubiquitous Military Wife. With the advent of TB, there was suddenly much more fear in my life. And always, always, very few friends. The few that I had were offended, hurt or disgusted by Ex, and no relationship could be sustained between myself and them. I understand that now (as I did then) but I have yet to be one of those people who makes and keeps friends easily. I find that my relationships with women friends are initially very cordial and friendly, but it takes me some time to reach the point where I can actually become really close. I just can't seem to shake that sulfurous odor of yellings and beatings out of my clothes.

So now I seem to be learning how to be a better friend, and how to keep friends, and how to better make friends. And oh my, how much my life has improved.

Aha!

2006-08-04T09:25:00.000-05:00

So in order to bring peace to the Middle East, we need only to bring the sport of down hill snow skiing to the region. Oh, and fire Rumsfeld. What the hell is he talking about, blaming the fighting on the weather. Maybe we should hand out fans to the insurgents?

Still no word from TB. He leaves next week for basic, and I heard from my friend L who has a husband overseas in Iraq, and who is in the same unit (or whatever they call it - I'm still not up on the military jargon) that TB likely will be attached to - she told me to make sure that TB lists me as the Primary Next of Kin (I'll remember THAT one: it's referred to as PNOK), and made some other suggestions for staying in the loop, militarily speaking. I'm afraid that he'll list his father as next of kin, which will mean that either (a) I'll never hear anything about what's going on - I'll have to learn about his whereabouts from Jim Lehrer, or (b) I'll have to be in touch with his father on a regular basis, which makes me very uncomfortable.

I'm not as freaked out about my thesis writing now, but I'm certainly not sleeping much better. I feel about as out of touch with things as I ever have - my mind feels like it's in a big puddle of mud. This job is totally stressing me out. TB is totally stressing me out. I need a vacation.

Someone please think of the congresspeople!

2006-08-02T12:42:00.000-05:00

Thank GOD they are addressing this terrible issue of ELEVATOR CROWDING! I mean, heaven forfend that these incredibly important people have to ride elevators with THE VERY PEOPLE WHO EMPLOY THEM!!!

Holy Jesus, Mary and Joseph in a hottub. This is an issue? A real issue that they're discussing? Well, far better that they discuss the fact that Rick Santorum had to push his own buttons (snicker) as opposed to discussing the possibility of...oh, I don't know...ending the freaking war, maybe?

Coasting along...

2006-08-02T10:41:00.000-05:00

I'm currently coasting along, freaking right the hell out about my thesis and prospectus, and my new job, and my upcoming semester, and all the papers and reading that are due this summer, and then of course on top of that, all the worrying I'm doing about TB.

To make matters even better, according to L (from class, whose husband is in Iraq), it is currently 125 degrees in Iraq (and nearly that at Ft. Hell, where TB will be going for boot camp), said temperature being high enough to cause the liquid in one's eyes to begin to boil.

I am so not kidding.

SO! A little humor is in order, before I freak right the hell out.

2006-07-29T21:15:00.000-05:00

Today was a rough day. I spent it doing household stuff after being told by my advisor that she wasn't sure that we could get my IRB (Institutional Review Board) application through in time to get to Camp Casey and interview Cindy Sheehan. I really want to speak with her and hear what she has to say. I can feel the tendrils of my thesis intertwining with the constantly growing strands of my worry about TB, leaving me with a constant song playing in my head - it's all about Iraq, all about military, all about where he/they are going, where they have been.

I headed out to go to Walmart for some groceries and could feel a growing sense of pissed-offedness that wouldn't go away. Traffic pissed me off. The radio pissed me off. Hun pissed me off. I was simply pissed. I wept as I drove down the highway, thinking of the times I had taken TB with me to the grocery store, before our football team played on Sunday, and I would ask him to make notes on our grocery list - "Oh yeah! We need TP! Put TP on the list!" and I would hand him my list, where he would add his own wants as well as the TP or whatever I had requested. I can still see him, balancing the list on his knee, making notes. I still have some of those lists, because I have always felt him moving away from me.

I wept on the way home as well, with my car full of groceries. I swung into the Sonic and ordered a giant cold soda to drink on the way home - it is so hot here, so hot, incredibly hot - and I had to pause to collect myself before I pushed the button to order my gynormous cherry limeade, because TB worked at Sonic for a while, and he and I went to Sonic together a lot, and then the girl comes out with my gynormous cherry limeade, and I notice the sign on the speaker - how did I miss this before? - a local high school team is raising money through their tips, and I paw through the money in my purse for some bills, and no, I don't need change, I need my son to be what I want him to be and to be safe, as I want him to be, and to be near me and to be who I need him to be, but thanks, yeah, you can keep the buck, and I threw the car into reverse, and I drove out, seeing the sonic where TB worked, superimposed over the Sonic where I got my gynormous cherry limeade. My throat closed up, and my eyes leaked, and I pointed the car to the highway. I dug out my cell phone, only to see that I had a message from my pop.

I had called my dad, and told him just how important it was that he not make himself sick over this. "Dad," I said, to his answering machine, "TB made this choice himself, and he's done it for one reason - for his dad. He hears nothing but the siren call of his father, and he wants nothing other than the approval of his dad. If he gets through basic, then his AIT, then winds up overseas, and then manages to come home - he will have done something his father never did. This will put TB on a footing that he has never been with his father, and I think this could be a real good thing for TB. Please don't feel bad."

Dad called me while I was out, and apparently the unpleasantness that is Walmart drowned out my phone's ringing AND vibration, and I didn't hear it. But I listened to his message as I drove home:

"Honey - I've been thinking about what you said - what you said was so true, and it's caused me to think about things too, and I've just been focusing on what could go wrong for TB, not what could go right. I'm going to think about the things that can go well for him, and think about how he can go to college on the GI bill, and how he will be so much better off...."

I worry about my dad, just like I worry about my son - I worry, with no opportunity to hug or hold, and no way to reach out really and feel better, other than what I can gather up into my own arms, alone, here, in this disgustingly hot state, where I see only the danger for my son, and the others going with him, and the possibility that I will face a horror I cannot imagine.

In Which I Get All Freudian

2006-07-28T12:15:00.000-05:00

TB has been spending the last little bit of time before he embarks on his odessey to basic training with his father. This is good, because TB has long had dad-issues. He can go for months - years even - and not see his dad, but let his dad pop back into his life, and TB is happer than a pig in cool mud. That's sad, to me, because TB wouldn't have this issue had he not been ignored by his dad for so long. Kids, they're hard to really piss off, if you're a parent. Sure, there's the ever popular, "I HATE YOU!" accompanied by the slamming of various doors. Always fun, that one. TB was never one really to do that with me. The cold shoulder? Sure. Driving a car through the wall? Yep. Punching holes in the wall? Check. But none of the typical (and, I would argue, less damaging of the above angsty behaviors). When he was young, TB's dad began the ongoing pattern which continues to this day of never reaching out to him, never making one attempt to stay in his life. TB of course, reacted by withdrawing from his father, while also striking out at those of us remaining around him.

He's reconnecting with his dad, and his dad's family, which really is where he belongs, I think. They just have always treated him like he was gum on the bottom of someone's shoe, and that makes me sad. Sad for my boy, and sad for what could have been for him and his dad. I looked at TB's Myspace profile not long ago, and it's totally pimped out with American flags, military motifs and rather than a picture of himself, he has the picture of the soldier peeing on Hussein's picture. It makes me sad. So sad. Listed as his hero? Various characters - none of them real...except for his father.

So now he's joined up, for something to bond with his dad over, I believe. He's willing to put himself into danger, just so that he can have something to talk with his dad about? The pull of parental love and approval is so strong, and this is something I really can't understand very well, because I have always had parental love and complete approval...well, not complete approval, maybe, but I at least knew at the time that what I was doing was stupid. What TB is doing is stupid beyond stupid - it is life threatening.

But I had a thought this morning that soothed me a bit (along with the fact that I actually got a good night's sleep for a change). *If* TB actually makes it through basic training, and *if* he gets sent overseas, then he will have done something his father has not, and he will have lived the pinnacle of the soldierly life. Not to say that that is what I want for him, but it is to say that I think it is what he is striving for - the possibility of impressing his father.

In which I channel Harriet the Spy

2006-07-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

I no longer have to look at what I do here at this blog, or my writing in my journals, as taking away from the "legitimate" work that I am doing towards my classwork or towards my thesis. Funny, that. I just realized - again - how circular life can be.

When I began writing my original blog, the ill fated, now deleted blog that I loved, I began it as a class project during my last semester in my undergraduate career. It was for a creative writing class, and it grew from a creative writing assignment (it wasn't assigned, per se, but we had to journal about a book we were reading, and I was itching to begin to blog after reading Flea's blog, and so I took it upon myself to make it into a blog). After I passed the blog around to some friends when it became obvious that we were going to be moving away, it became a "how to keep in touch with me" type thing. That, of course, by it's very nature, made it impossible for me to blog about certain things that were just TOO private (hello, not gonna blog about those wild and crazy evenings of monkeysex with Hun! Not with Mother and Othermother reading, thanks!), but that wasn't what that blog was about. Then, it outgrew its usefulness, I think, and to be honest, I said some stuff that I really should not have - Hun was right (and ps, Hun will likely get a new name, eventually, when I come up with a good one. I just don't have a good one yet. AR maybe) about being more anonymous online, and not sharing so much stuff about myself. And my family. Specifically, I said some stuff about my stepdaughter (DQ) and her mother that just really would have been better handwritten in my *real* journal. I just let 'er fly, though, and said what I thought, and what I felt, and forgot the difference between the online and the journal that goes in the nightstand. That was, ultimately, the reason for deletion of the blog. I love DQ, and I don't want to make her feel bad. And yes, it is not above the Ex (or his current wife) to have printed off things and sent them to DQ or even her mother. The only reason I'm not terribly worried? Ex and Wife-'o-Ex aren't too bright. But they are mean, so they really could have, and may have, thought to do that. But I wanted to avoid that, if possible. So I hit the big delete button, and the project I began in my senior year, as I was deciding not to focus on women's studies (ha! that worked out well, huh??) disappeared.

As you can see, by my constant blathering about it, I was troubled about the loss of my blog. It traced the most difficult time of my life - leaving my children, who I love and miss terribly, but who no longer needed me, and who had their own lives and plans, without me in them, to chase after what I and Hun wanted...it was another journal that I tossed on the fire, because Ex could twist and abuse it, and hurt others with it. It was, after nearly 12 years apart, another way that Ex could infect himself into my life, and the life of those important to me, and that pissed me off.

Tonight in class, my professor (who is also on my committee) told me that perhaps I should journal about the experiences I am having in the writing of my thesis on the topic of Cindy Sheehan and media representations of her while also struggling with the issues arising from TB's decision to enlist, and how his enlistment plays out.

Could I be happier about this? Oh hellno! This is great! Now, I can blog to my heart's content, and pour out all that's been rounding through my head, even in a way I couldn't before, and it's legitimate! It's not a waste of time, like the 20 minutes last night when I stared in horror at the tv screen while "Dr. 90210" discussed women's breasts/stomachs/etc. while wearing an astoundingly horrible bestrip'ed suit that made me wonder if he had just escaped from Surgeon Jail (Dr. 90210 is hawt, but I am not letting me suck me into his show, oh no, even tho he does work the hotness, I am still in rehab from my Lost addiction, and I still am debating whether or not I can socially Lost, as opposed to being in a 12 step program from Lost - but hello, Sayid hotness! Oh, the hotness that is Sayid! My goodness, that was a long parenthetical distraction!)

Yes, I amuse myself with the blogging, and I am excited, beyond words, that I can continue to do so, and it can return to being something I do with pleasure, with joy, with relief. Because I am conflicted, I am upset, I am sad, I am worried. I have days when I try to do research for this, and all I can envision is the horror that would be my life if I were in Cindy Sheehan's shoes. I love my son, and I miss him already, and I cannot understand how I will function when he is in harm's way. I looked at My Military Friend tonight in class tonight as she was speaking (and she is fucking brilliant) and all I could think was, "How can she think? How can she sit? How can she move through her day? Is she not consumed with the worry that with each knock on the door, there will be grim faced military men on her step? What is the secret?" And, of course, I constantly wonder - what is the magic spell, incantation, blessing, letting of my own blood, whatever it needs be, to keep those grim faced men away? I am always - always - one single breath away from a crying jag. The evening news with Jim Lehrer is no longer the same for me. There it is, on the screen in the evenings, the parade of young, and not so young, men and women, who are all missed by their mothers. Each of those people on the screen symbolizes at least one - probably more - weeping, screaming mothers (birth mothers, othermothers, mothers in law - the list goes on, and we are all mothers, all bearers), and all I can think is when will this stop? Please, please, let it end before I am one of those invisible, screaming mothers, before I hear the knock on my door, before I learn what it's like. Please.

Yo! Adrianne! Could you get my cane?

2006-07-25T14:24:00.000-05:00

This tells me two things: One, that they ran out of numbers and two, that Hollywood has also run out of new ideas.

An email discussion

2006-07-25T10:32:00.000-05:00

From Classmate L, whose husband is stationed in Iraq, with the group that TB will be joining (and I don't recall the military terms used for various groups, and I really don't care. It's a bunch of military people):

This is the answer that I got from Husband:

"They are called "Fisters" for fire support. They are the eyes of the artillery, look at the target and let the brains, the fire direction center, know where it is. However, it ain't that easy for them, they are usually attached to either the armor or infantry and move where they move, do what they do and when they need a FA (field artillery) firemission call up the request."

So to translate. They will be wandering around looking for targets. When they see something that needs to be taken out, they will radio that in to the fire direction center who will then radio the coordinates to the cannons to fire at this target. Now, with that said, I would not worry too much about him doing this anytime soon in a combat situation. There is little to no artillery in Iraq right now. All of the artillery units from here at *** are doing either transportation missions or support (desk jobs). Hope this helps and doesn't make you too upset. Let me know if you need anything else (even just someone to listen). I do a great deal of complaining about the Army myself so I will understand.
********************
My reply to my Excellent friend:

Marvelous. Just what I've always wanted him to grow up to be. A wandering fister.

Thanks - I have such mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, TB is pretty much a (pardon the term) fuck up and has exhausted the possibilities for mooching off people and sleeping on their sofas. I don't know why he thinks this is a better idea than school. But he's over the age of consent, so what can I do? Not a thing. TB has no interest in actually working for a living, and I can't understand how he sees this as not being work or difficult. I hope that he gets some sense knocked into him in basic, but at the same time, I'm afraid that he'll get enough sense knocked into him that he makes it through basic and then actually winds up in Iraq. See? I told you I was conflicted. I want him to succeed in basic, because I hope that it will make him a better person and give him what he needs and is obviously lacking. Then again, success in basic leads to active duty, which I am not happy about. Good god. No wonder TB is messed up. Look at me - I'm a wreck! :-)

Thanks a bunch for the info - here's hoping for a desk job, or at least a job driving a school bus or something (ha!)

See you in class tonite!
Peacemonger Mom
*****************

I'm less than thrilled about this.

Countdown to Basic

2006-07-23T17:18:00.000-05:00

In light of my newfound addiction to online anonymity, I won't, unfortunately be able to do a REAL countdown (as in, a countdown which gives TB's real date for shipping out). I can, however, give a general idea. Two weeks? Ten days? Yeah - somewhere in the month of August. Trust me when I say that the date is, currently, hammered onto, into and all around my heart.

TB is making an attempt to engage various members of the Insane Side of his family - i.e., those related by blood to his father. Oh, and his father. He is the king of the Insane Side of the family. You know that old bumper sticker, All men are idiots and I married their king? Yeah. That's it in a nutshell. If I believed in generalizations (I don't) I'd go for that. And the ex is stupid enough to be flattered at the idea of being king of anything, even a bunch of...well, idiots.

TB has distanced himself from my people, much to the pain of some of the smaller people in question. My sister's daughter, The Princess, is young and really wants to see TB before he leaves. This likely will not happen, as when TB enters the gates of The Compound, all is forgotten except that which is Crazy.

I am worried about TB, but I know that right now he is exactly where he wants - needs - to be.

Learning lessons the hard way

2006-07-22T15:59:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, my mother had a table with leaves that folded down by way of a hinge - a hinge which was easily accessible to small hands beneath the table. I had a habit of playing with the hinge, to Mom's dismay and constant reminder that if I didn't stop, I was liable to flip my food directly into my lap. One day, she presented me with a lovely lunch, for which I was very hungry. I even remember what it was: tomato soup, crackers and Cheerwine. I began the ritualistic flipping of the little lever, and Mom said, as usual, "Don't do that. You might make your food spill." Lo and behold, for the first (and last) time ever, my childish playing with the hinge resulted in a very quick, decisive folding down of the leaf, dumping my lunch, beverage and all, into my lap. Coated from top to bottom in my lunch, I looked at Mom and asked plaintively, "Why do I always have to learn the hard way?"

My nearly 40 year old self answers my ten year old self the same way that my Mom answered me then: Because that's the way that we learn best, and sometimes it just takes that sort of lesson for us to learn what we need to know.

It would appear that sometimes I still just don't learn.

Those of you who know me IRL (and you know who you are!) are here because I sent you a link. You won't find this blog by googling my name, where I live or any other specific reference about me - because I am now committed to online anonymity. Not because I am going to be blogging about my kinky sexual pecadillos, or because I outed Bob Novak as Dracula, but because I had a nice little blog before, and my ex-husband and his family decided to take up camp there. Any sort of reintroduction of my ex into my life in any way leads to unhappy nightmares of the worst sort (or just the weird sort - neither are pleasant). I begin to feel as if I am constantly in need of a shower. A shower with very hot water, brillo pads and a good flossing out between the ears. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a scary, bad man. I don't like who I am around him, and I sure don't like who he is around anyone. Or alone, for that matter.

So I have abandoned my old blog (all 200 pages of writing of it) and deleted it to the ether of the internet. Not without some sadness, but also not without some relief. Anything that Ex touches develops the pungent, clinging odor of turpentine, or perhaps sulfur, and I couldn't enjoy my blog anymore. But it's gone, and I'm not, but I miss writing. I enjoy blogging, dammit, and I enjoy creativity. I don't enjoy other people treating my work like it's a cat box and they're a very old tabby with incontenence issues, so I'm now Peacemonger Mom.

I will likely struggle to keep my posts as anonymous as possible - I was very much unconcerned about being who I was online, but all it took was once, and there we have it. If you know me, you'll know who the players are as I assign them pseudonyms. I won't be posting pictures as much, and there will likely be no pictures of Harry McSheddypants either. That makes me sad. I resent having to censor myself, I resent it terribly. But that might just be the narcissist in me. I'm not sure.

Why Peacemonger Mom? Because The Boy has joined the military, and is beginning bootcamp/basic training/hell in a few weeks. I'm still a mom, and I'm even more of a peacemonger now than before, as a result of TB's actions. As Lloyd Bridges said in "Airplane," "I picked a hell of a week to stop sniffing glue." I picked a hell of a time to delete my blog. It served for me as a real safety valve - once I was able to write it down, I was much better off. So rather than grit my teeth and shush my inner drive to write (even something as self involved as a blog), I am now P.M.

I fully expect TB to be sent overseas. Anyone enlisting at this time in history would have to have a serious case of cranial rectitis if they enlisted to begin with, I think, but to enlist and not expect to go somewhere sandy? Very stupid. So, I am doing my best to cope with this, but as is usually the case in situations like this, my best is not nearly good enough. I have had a few real beauties of crying spells, and can't seem to concentrate well. It's difficult to concentrate when there's a sound loop running through your head, like a terrorized hamster on a wheel, declaring in various stages of hysteria: Military! Fighting! Danger! He's put himself in danger! You can do nothing! Helpless! Danger to child! Must save child from himself! Can't save child from himself! Child not child! Child adult now! Child still child! Must save child!

See? Concentration with that sort of unhelpful dialogue running through my head is just impossible.