15 posts tagged “brother”
Husband is in geek ecstasy using a seal-o-meal to prep all the food for our camping trip. Keeps bringing me little packages & bouncing.
@gapingvoid Were you an outdoorsy kid when you went? Previous interest or experience camping, hiking, kayaking? Just curious WRT my brother
Have returned from my adventure in the swamp. Was beautiful and grounding, inspiring and awesome. Oh, yeah, and filled with bloodsuckers.
My husband and I ended up in Florida because it's where my mother and brother were, and they needed our help. Mostly, we miss being up North (closer to his family, more connection to the cities and life there), but it's pretty damn hard to complain when it's the first days of April, you're cooking out on the grill in bare feet, a skirt, and a sleeveless shirt.Shrimp are in the marinade; going make skewers on the grill tonight. For a moment, living in Florida = bliss
I expect my brother is only child in country who got a mentos geyser in his Easter basket.
This Easter basket brought to you by Mythbusters, for sure. Followed by much bouncing up and down, shouting, "It was higher than the house? Did you see that? Higher than the house!!"
Okay, so that was me. But the kid was impressed, too.
I turn thirty on Thursday. Last year, my birthday was a pretty depressing affair, in fact I don't have many strong memories of it, just the overwhelming sadness. My mother had died less than three months earlier and I just didn't know how to process anything in the absence of my mother. I don't know how much I've learned in the subsequent year except I know I'm still here. I know I've been happy and can still be happy. I know I make her proud by continuing to make my way, by raising my brother into an good man.four more days to my birthday, squeeeeee!!!
I've experienced a few things in the first thirty years of my life I wouldn't wish upon anyone else, but those experiences continue to form me into a woman I'm proud to be. In the next years, I hope to come to grips with myself as an "adult." I hope to be successful in my career and to support my husband in his. I hope to continue growing an inspirational, creative life. I hope to inspire and encourage my brother. I hope to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Okay, so this tweet and reposting it here is just utter gloating. Ever cook a meal and feel its execution and presentation were just dreamy? That was Monday's dinner.soaking maple planks for tonight's mahi mahi Dinner: planked mahi mani with roasted red pepper sauce, mushroom risotto and grilled asparagus
Random thought about my morning routines. In yesterday's case, I was reading new content at nonprofit.alltop.com and was inspired to write last morning's post (please read if you missed it :). Today, bowl of oatmeal in front of me, I decided to wrangle my tweets into this post. If you wish to be similarly fueled, consider Alton Brown's overnight oatmeal recipe. We've been making it in a triple batch with craisins and dried blueberries, then just reheating up a bowl each subsequent morning. Soooo delicious.my blog is fueled by steel-cut oatmeal and coffee at this point, me thinks
SCENE: Interior, kitchen. A woman is cutting an onion at the counter.
boy: enters stage right
boy: What's for dinner?
woman: cheerily Tacos!
boy: With meat or beans? pauses It's okay, you can tell me; I won't whine. pauses Do we have beans because that's what you and Z like?
woman: Well, yes...
boy: So, it's not just, like, to torture me?
Now part of a series, I suppose. More questions from my brother:
- Cats don't have like a boyfriend and girlfriend do they?
- Does that mean they just do it whenever they want to?
I swear to god, I should make a blog just with the questions my brother asks me on any given day. Kind of the opposite of Things I Learned Today, a friend-of-a-friend's blog.
Today's memorable gems:
- Why do people think it's a bad idea that we bought Alaska?
- What does it mean when the cat looks at me like that?
- Would it be bad if people in Egypt stoned you?
- What does it mean to scan something?
- What do apples with peanut butter taste like?
More than three months ago, I shelved this blog in a fit of despair.* I needed to find some way to put my head down and make my life work, and I hope I am now arriving at that point.
To that end, I'm rebooting this Vox for the New Year and am giving it the following direction:
- My Vox is going to remain a personal blog, about the tribulations and festivities in the life of a near-30-year-old woman living in the Sunshine State, married, raising her brother, feeding the cats and overpriced terrier. When I burn a loaf of bread, celebrate a report card, or have a funny anecdote to share, it will go here. If I like a movie, read a book, or have to out my obsession with Project Runway, it will go here.
- I'm setting up another blog to chronicle my creative aspirations and my fledgling attempts to sell the goodies and oddities I create. If you want to see pictures of collages, messy journals, and stitchery, it will go there.
While, in general, I have a big o' fear of overlapping my personal and (ha!) professional personnas, I also plan to do a kind of monthly recap on my Vox of how things are going over in artsy land. Mainly for the purposes of hoping to shamelessly lure you to my Etsy storefront, obviously.
I'm also going to take the leap and start pointing people who actually know me (other than you, Donut Pusher) to this blog. If you went to school with me or know me from some other venue, gosh, I hope I didn't rant about you in this blog's earlier incarnation. I kid, I kid...
To those in my Voxy neighborhood: Hey, thanks for keepin' me in your loop. If you had a baby, opened a business, got married, ditched the jerk, or otherwise made huge moves in your life since September, I hope they have worked out for you, and I'm sorry I didn't write. Special shout-out to the very creative Lorri, whose Vox I wandered into whilst investigating other arty-crafty blogs for inspiration for my new venture. There are so many very talented people out there doing amazing work, it is both inspiring and scary to me!
More soon, including 2007's "mayfly." (Don't know what that means? Looky here. Want to read 2006's? Looky here.)
* "a fit of despair": This phrase makes it seem needlessly dramatic, but things were very low on that day in September, and I don't mean to diminish my emotions or feelings about life as I felt them then. We were unable to make mortgage payments on our house, my mother's life insurance policy had been denied, and, in a less than ten-hour window, both of our cars died. Life was not peachy keen, and I still own that feeling of damnation and don't mean to make light of it with these four words.
Most people who have kids had time to either grow up with them or grow into their roles as parents. Since that wasn't the case for me, sometimes I look around and get a little anxious and awed. Thinking on this, I just said to my husband, "You know, when I was younger I used to make the old argument about a parenting license for all sorts of reasons that weren't about me, thinking instead not just of parents who are abusive or neglectful, but also those who don't teach their kids to be respectful of others, don't want to spend time helping them with schoolwork, and so on. Now, I am still for that license--but for me. It sure would give me some backup, some confidence about what I'm doing."
Everything's going to be okay, I'm licensed for situation just like this!
(True story: Just as I typed those words, the little brother comes in the door with a majorly scraped up knee for me to bandage. I need a license, I tell ya.)
This is the rub: All happiness will be bittersweet.
I've experienced happiness this year and know more will follow, but it's undergone some emotional equivalent to a chemical reaction; it's not happiness as I knew it before...because my mother isn't here to share it with me/us.
I've been up since five this morning, anxious and sad. Today, my brother graduates elementary school. Registering him for first grade in the summer of 2002, she had no reason to think she wouldn't be here today. Nearly five years of homework and studying, learning and struggling. Pencils, rulers, glue. Buying this year's school supplies, I know Mum had a shadow of doubt over the year ahead; she knew it was statistically unlikely she would be here today. And, as each quarter passed us by, every report card marked a turning point:
- When I wrote of his first report card with straight As, she was living with cancer, and I had moved in to help her and my brother as best I could.
- His teacher sent home his second quarter report card--again, straight As--early, so he could share it with Mum. I opened it excitedly at home and gave M a big hug. Then we called my mother's Hospice room, and a close family friend conveyed the news to Mum, so she could be part of the moment. I brought the report card when I visited Mum that evening and left it with her. She died later that night.
- M's third round of straight As...I couldn't tell if it was a greater victory for him or for me, a sort of basic validation that I hadn't screwed him up too bad (yet). I didn't have a decade of experience being his parent; I was never anyone's go-to person for homework help.
She's not here, but I am, trying to make the best choices to help this little boy be everything he can. At any given moment it can be a joy or a frustration, overwhelming and exciting, blissful and exhausting. Right now, minutes away from waking him up to experience his last day of elementary school, it's all of these things at once. I am so proud, so proud...of him, of us.
Artgeek circa 1990. I hold this photograph in my mind: Me and two other little girls standing in a row. I am the tallest and oldest, my blonde hair in a spiral perm that's gone frizzy. One of the other girls holds a teddy bear or some other stuffed creature by one arm; she's about seven. The youngest is in between two and three years old and dressed in all white. We stand awkwardly in front of a fireplace, and no one touches. It's Christmas or Easter or some other winter-to-spring photograph occasion.
Fast forward a decade or so. For most of my life, I've described myself as an only child. Even considering my brother who arrived on the scene in 1996, this still feels true. I am seventeen years his senior, and, until recently, never shared a home with him. While I obviously love him and have a familial bond with him, it's not thee same as a brother and sister who grow up together: sharing toys, one outgrowing the other to be with the "big kids," ratting each other out to the 'rents.
I would never have said anything against being an only child, in fact I preferred it—but in retrospect I can see I wanted some sort of bond, particularly a sisterly one. I've always been a bit despondent that my closest female friends already have their own sisters and, more often than not, brothers. This was never something I was good at verbalizing, perhaps because it was a problem without a solution.
April 10, 2007.
i have not seen my sister in 15 years and think you may be her...
I read and reread these words, forcing myself to slow down and mouth the sounds... The next few minutes are a flurry of clichés: cat's got my tongue, my jaw drops, my heart stops, I am stunned into silence. I don't know what my first thought was, but the first coherent thing to raise to the surface sooner or later must have been, "Holy crap, is it A?"
A is my half-sister, the youngest child in the 1990 photo, and the daughter of my biological father and his second wife. I have not had significant contact with anyone in that photo or anyone on my dad's side of the family since 1993, when my mother and I moved more than a thousand miles south. I was fifteen at the time; she was five.
It takes me two weeks to process her contacting me. I talk to my husband about it. I talk to my grief counselor about it. I talk to my friends about it. Why is she contacting me? Why now? Is my dad okay? My grief counselor worries this might be an awkward time for me to handle such a sensitive issue. Some of my friends worry she might be angry with me. I don't know what to think or expect; I am merely bewildered.
We begin sending e-mails back and forth and have been doing so for the past two days, sharing our likes and dislikes, bits and pieces of our histories. She hasn't asked how I ended up removed from her life, only expressed gratitude and pleasure at the opportunity to get to know me. We trade photos, and I see my nose on someone else's face. My husband says we have the same ears.
Since my mother's death and for the first time in my life, I have had a hard time experiencing joy and happiness. Previously, I would have described myself as a sunny (but hopefully not annoyingly so!) person, a free spirit able to see life as an often blissful and sensual adventure. Reading A's first e-mail, I am giddy. It is a feeling I can experience for what it is, not through the filter of my loss.
This is the first gift my sister has given me.
I have a sister.
From one of my best friends in a recent e-mail:
It would be nice to know mundane minutiae like this about my best friend--if she could maybe convince herself to send an email in response...
My response:
Hey, sweetie. I certainly did fall off the radar there for a bit, didn't I? I guess I've been coming to terms, trying to understand what "normal" is in my new life. Thus far, it looks like this:
Morning
Z goes to work around 7:30 every morning, and I get up around then (or press the snooze for 15 minutes...). I wake up my brother and feed kibble to every creature in the house (Iams for the cats, Beneful for the terrier, Honey Nut Cheerios for the kid), then get myself washed and ready for the day. I get M to PLACE anywhere from 8-9 and usually do some running around after he's dropped off (oil change, grocery shopping, wandering the craft store).
Afternoon
I get home by 11, have some sort of brunch-type snack, then sit down at my craft desk. For the last two weeks, I've been making cigar box purses, artist trading cards, and decorating store-bought journals. I usually do that until 3:45, when I walk out the door with Yoda and walk 4-5 blocks to meet M on his way home from school. That's usually the highlight of my day...walking with Yoda and chatting with M. When we walk in the door, M sits down right away to do his homework and, if it takes him less than 30 minutes, we whittle away some time on his upcoming invention convention project (he's making an update to the Trapper Keeper for today's techno kids). After schoolwork is done, we either play a game together or he buggers off to go skateboarding or play online games. If so, I hit the craft desk for some more time.
Evening
Around six o'clock, I start making dinner, and Z walks in the door any time from 6:15-6:40. This can make meals just a tad chaotic, but I've become a pro at getting M to set the table early and, if Z's late, just sticking stuff in the oven on "warm." We eat dinner together and share stuff about our days. M is becoming a much improved conversationalist, though we have to work more on him listening to others. At least twice a week, he says something that just cracks us up. This week, we were trying to explain to him what a non sequitur was, and he was having a hard time pronouncing the word. We explained that it was a pretty strange word, not originally English, and hard to spell. Much to our surprise, he got the spelling right on his second try! What a smart kid. After dinner, Z and M clean up, then we either play together or go our separate ways until 9pm, when M goes to bed. It's funny, I've gone to two parenting workshops in the last month, and many parents complain about problems relating to bedtime and getting homework done. But M is such a regimented child that we almost never have issues in this area. Sometimes he gets mad at the homework problems, but I never have to nag him to sit down and do it. Anyway, some nights Z and I watch TV together or play video games; if he's really tired, he just goes to bed, and I stay up late crafting.
Obviously, the amount of time I spend at the craft desk makes this pretty ideal (I've made three purses, two journals and countless ATCs), but there are a million setbacks every minute it feels like. I still have to meet with my mum's attorney, still have to open the box from the cremation society, still have to sit down with Z and write our wills out and determine who takes care of M if anything happens to us. Those are the big things, but there are little things too...Yoda staring at Mum's bed and whining, grabbing four napkins instead of three for dinner. One day last week, I just came home and cried on the couch for a couple of hours, eventually exhausting myself into sleep.
It's odd, last weekend was really nice. Z came home early on Friday. We cried together, made love, then went out for a drink and an appetizer before getting back home to pick up M. It was true quality time together, and I really felt his love and support. Friday night, Z stayed home with M while I went to a craft class and then out for drinks with R. R and I also needed some quality time, as he has been taking really good care of me during the week (stopping by for coffee in the morning, going to the grocery store with me, or even just dropping off blueberry muffins when I need to be alone), and I'm not always as grateful as I should be. Saturday, we hung out with M and did some shopping; M spent the night at a friend's house, and we went into Largo to celebrate L's birthday (strangely, by riding a mechanical bull). Sunday was a day of productivity, Z cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, while I did laundry. That afternoon, cuddled up on the couch, I said I'd had a good weekend--that I often felt silly or happy or friendly first, and sad second or third. It made me realize that's not true for most days...I am sad first and foremost, then all my other emotions come in a muddle afterwards. While it felt warm and good and honest to say then, now I just feel bad for feeling so bad most of the time!
This weekend, Mum's friend MC will be in town. We'll go out to dinner with her tonight, and then join her and her husband for brunch Sunday. I'm really looking forward to that. Saturday, Z and I have doctor's appointments in the morning, and I may take M up to a local festival that afternoon. Z and I also have to spend some time cleaning out the garage, as he's been buying cabinets from work to remodel our kitchen, and we need to better organize the space to store them. I'm not looking forward to that, as it will involve moving some of Mum's stuff around, and I'm not ready to make choices about those things (even things I know I won't be keeping, like her hats and wigs, I'm not ready to do anything with). Speaking of which, when I do feel ready to do something like that, it may be a great time to have you or E down. That would definitely require some handholding.
Next week, I'm going to apply for a great job I heard of through E's mother and make an appointment to get Ripley fixed. She's in heat right now and a great source of amusement for the household. I also meet with a grief counselor from Hospice and am struggling somewhat with what I want to get out of that session.
How's that for a nutshell of life? I'm sorry I've been distant. I don't know why I'm putting up this facade of enormous strength, but I guess it's what gets me through the days. It's been a month and four days, but I see her everywhere around me and yet somehow manage to be in denial, unable to understand that she's not here to share thing swith me: to laugh at the animals' antics, to feel pride in M, to talk about the next season of Project Runway, to enjoy the things I'm making, to see her new kitchen cabinets, to share a cup of coffee with outside by the pool. It tears me up. MC said this morning she once heard someone describe grieving as similar to learning to breathe underwater, and that rings so true for me right now. It's like doing this impossible thing, and all your instincts struggle against it. You need to do it, but every cell screams NO NO NO NO I CAN'T.
With love and appreciation for your polite "nudge,"
artgeek
