I began this blog many years ago when facing a major life transition. My kids were moving out, I didn’t want to stop being Mommy. But I had to.
I filled in some of my heartache with the wonderful children I taught in elementary school. They were so funny, loving, challenging and fulfilling. I loved them. That lasted right up until conflicts with my principal led to my early retirement. I was heartbroken, and I wrote about it here.
But after losing the love of my students, I stepped into my role of Nonni In Charge. The greatest blessing of my entire life, no kidding. I have spent the last ten years helping my daughter and her husband manage the stresses of working and raising three kids. I have been baking, serving soup, playing with playdoh and keeping up with Bluey. It has been magical.
And here I am. My daughter’s youngest is heading to kindergarten next year. He’ll be at the same school his siblings attend and where his Mom teaches. My days will be child-free.
Child-free, much more restful, easier to plan, and far quieter. With fewer hugs, fewer laughs and far fewer “I love you” moments.
But this time, for the first time, I am ready to move on. I am tired. My legs are tired from “criss-cross applesauce”. My hips are tired from picking them up and putting them on the counter to cook with me. My brain is oh, so very tired of fart songs and poop songs and hearing the word “Nonni” 988 times an hour, even when Max and I are the only two here.
I am eagerly anticipating a time when a couple of times a month I’ll gather with all of them, or will invite one or the other for a lunch date or a sleepover. I am eagerly anticipating the wonderous discovery of what it will be that makes me happy in a quiet week.
So, my dear friends of WordPress. Thank you, thank you, thank you. For your support, your friendship, your comments and your shared thoughts.
I have decided to focus my writing, in these strange and dangerous times, to recording the events that transpire under the new/old Trump administration. I am a bit old to march in protest, but I can still express my rage and disappointment in my country.
If you are inclined to see what this old angry lady has to say about American politics, please follow me on Substack. You can follow for free, or support my work through a paid subscription. In either case, please please continue to respond and share your opinions and views with me at https://karenmerulloshiebler.substack.com/
I’m calling myself the Angry Grandmother, because…obviously.
Of course I did. Of course I wanted to play a game.
I absolutely wanted to pretend that I was the Mom and Max was my baby and that we were on a boat and mean lava monsters were surrounding us.
Hell, yes, I wanted to play a game.
I spent quite a few years pretending with my three children, but I don’t think I was able to fully embrace the joy of imagination back then. I remember when my sons were about 2 and 4 years old. I was teaching full time, commuting an hour and half every day, and also taking care of their older sister. My boys would ask me, “Momma! Wanna play a game?”
My heart would sink, as I’d think about the dinner I should start, the lesson plans I should do, the dust collecting on every surface. I would sigh, and say something along the lines of, “OK. I’ll be Mama Bear and you be my babies, and we will all be hibernating.” Any chance to lie down and rest was like a miracle back then.
I remember my mind wandering off in fifty different directions as my three kids were fully engaged in a phantom war with invisible bad guys. I hate to admit this now, but I think I was rarely more than 50% tuned into what was happening.
So yesterday when my little Max asked me to play, I recognized how lucky I am to have these “do over” moments.
I happily followed him into the bedroom where my sons once slept, and where he and his siblings have napped for the past ten years.
I followed his lead, of course. He assigned me the role of “Momma” and he was the baby. “I am tired, and I am under the covers,” he informed me. “But I wake up and I’m scared and I need my Momma to snuggle me.”
I was more than thrilled to fulfill this role, as Max has recently become too cool to kiss his Nonni. We snuggled for a few minutes under the covers, where my aching back silently cheered and my cheek rested happily against his.
After a few minutes, the pretend play began.
“Pretend,” he began, “that the baby crawled away and saw that the whole house had been covered by lava.”
The next hour unfolded with me happily repeating my lines, “Oh no!!! Lava has covered the house!” Max smoothly slid from one character to another, with absolutely no thought to reality. There were good lava monsters, guns shooting water at the lava, and babies morphing into giant ducks. There was a lot of fighting, magical coming-back-to-life, and happy hugs.
Every new addition to the game was prefaced with “pretend….” and I remembered how magical that word was when I was a child. Those two simple syllables made the whole world around us melt away, and we could create anything that we wanted or anything that we feared.
I had a wonderful hour to revisit my own childhood and that of my kids. I had one magical hour to be a part of Max’s world, no longer worried about what was happening in the real one.
I am so incredibly lucky, at the age of 68, to be able to jump wholeheartedly into the world of “pretend…”
So, for the next few months, as my decade of Nonni daycare winds down, I will happily fight the monsters with my little guy.
The other night my husband and I attended the 50th reunion of our High School graduating class. This is completely ridiculous because we could not have graduated half a century ago. Absolutely not.
We went to our local high school in the shadow of the Vietnam War. We were among the last of the Baby Boomers, and our musical tastes reflected that. From 1970 to 1974, we listened to Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Beatles, and Kiss. Some of us spent hours listening to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins. We were eclectic in our tastes, but we all shared a sense of how the world was changing. We may have been too young for “love-ins” but we participated in our share of peace marches, chant/singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”
But the calendar said that 50 years had gone by, and my once shy, now uber-social high school boyfriend was eager to help organize the big event. For almost a year, he and several of our fellow graduates worked to set up a fun and reminiscent reunion at which we could all reconnect. He was so excited.
I was not.
I mean, yes, it’s nice to reconnect with old friends. But in PERSON? Where everyone could see the weight I’ve gained, the bifocals, the hearing aids, the white hair?? How bout no, I thought, nuh uh. I used to be cute! I had long brown hair, bright brown eyes, and a waistline! Nobody would ever guess that the old lady in the somewhat stylish tunic was me! Not with my almost orthopedic blue Sketchers slip-ons on my feet. No way!
I was anxious. Very anxious. Or as we used to say in our high school days, “wicked stressed.”
Luckily for me, most of the people with whom we have stayed friends would be there for moral support. To be honest, we reconnected with those friends shortly after our 35th reunion and have been gathering twice a year since, which is one of the biggest blessings in my life, and one of the reasons I appeared at the reunion at all.
So, nerves or not, I showed up at the designated restaurant with my knees shaking. I got my embarrassing name tag and put it on, even though I knew I bore no resemblance to the pretty high school senior it depicted.
Almost at once, I ran into one of the people I most wanted to see. My dear friend from the fourth grade (which might have been my favorite year of school). I recognized her immediately, as she was still the same tall, elegant girl I’d known as a child. As we hugged and agreed to find a good spot to chat, we found ourselves moving through a throng of people who looked vaguely familiar.
The room was loud and crowded and everyone was milling about. We found ourselves passing people who had to squint and lean forward slightly to read our name tags as we were doing the same to theirs. We’d all stand up straight then, smile, and exclaim, “You haven’t changed at all!!!”
It was more fun than I could have predicted. So much fun that I had to tell my husband that he was right all along. People I thought would never remember me came up to chat, hug, and tell stories from the past. People I had nearly forgotten were suddenly sharing a laugh with me.
It was a half-century ago when we gathered in the Field House, all 409 of us. All of us young, healthy, strong, and full of the hope that only youth can bring.
Fifty years have passed.
The Vietnam War is the distant past to our grown children, just the way that WWII was history for us. Our musical idols now appear on solo tours in local breweries. Our clothing choices, once seen as rebellious and new, are copied as “retro chic.”
The world has changed. Countries have changed. We lived through the Cold War, in fear of the “Doomsday Clock” signaling nuclear annihilation. Now the Soviet Union is gone, and the threat has shifted to more subtle threats
We have changed. We are grayer, more wrinkled, and more reliant on assistive devices. We are slower to react, faster to sit down and rest, and less willing to sweat the small stuff.
I think we are wiser. We recognize bullshit when we hear it. We no longer tolerate fools.
We have mostly done what it was we were born to do. Careers, families, travel, education. We have mostly done them all, and our lives are no longer as goal-oriented or as dependent on achievement as they were in our pasts.
This reunion taught me some valuable lessons. One is that at this stage of life, when our oldest friends look at us, they don’t see the lines in our faces or the stoop of our shoulders. They see the fourth-grade friend who wanted to talk about “Batman” or “Lost in Space”. They see the spirit and soul that was in us then, and is still shining deep inside us now.
When I was in third grade I learned a Brownie Girl Scout song.
(Note to the old friends from the reunion: Thank you, thank you! For reconnecting, sharing stories and pretending I haven’t changed a bit! A few of you mentioned reading this blog. If you do, could you just leave me a quick comment to say who you are? Sometimes I feel like I am writing to myself, and I had no idea you guys were here with me. Thanks!!! Go Rockets!)
PS: I fell in love with and married this cutie. Can you believe we are still sticking it out?
The nights are getting cool. A few leaves around the edge of the yard have already turned red.
Summer is winding down, and fall is coming on.
The new school year is just ahead.
Kids everywhere are worrying about which friends will be in their classes. They are hoping that their new teacher will be “nice”. Parents are buying children new clothes, hoping the sweatshirts will last all year and the sneakers will hold out until the snow falls.
There are backpacks to be replaced and lunchboxes to be cleaned. Forms to be filled out online, notebooks to be labeled, and pencils to be sharpened.
Across the country, teachers are checking class lists, labeling desks, cubbies, and coat hooks and arranging classroom libraries. They are meeting with counselors and special education staff so that when the kids arrive, their teacher will know what they need to be successful.
I remember all of it. I remember the nerves as a kid and the anxiety as a teacher. I remember the week before school started, reciting the names of my students in alphabetical order, over and over, so that I could quickly check to see they were all safely in front of me.
As I sit here tonight, listening to the breeze in the leaves, I miss those first-day-of-school feelings. I miss the excitement. I even miss the anxiety.
Today I was thinking about what early September has always meant to me. I’ve been on a school schedule for most of my life, and have had dozens of “first days.” I was a student from kindergarten through my Master’s degree. Twenty years in all. And after a few years of working year round, I was back working in public schools for 25 years.
When I retired, it was to take care of my grandchildren while their Mom taught in public school. That’s another nine years of following the school calendar. Fifty-four of my sixty-eight years have followed the school calendar. It’s part of my circadian rhythm.
So tonight I remember how it felt to meet my class on the first day. I recall my nerves. I remember carefully picking out my clothes on that special day. I remember how hard I tried to be warm, kind, and reassuring. I remember wanting them to like me, almost as much as I wanted them to respect me. I remember learning that achieving the former lead directly to the latter.
It was such a good feeling to find myself surrounded by bright-eyed kids, and how happy it made me to create a community with them. I remember how proud I felt when I got every name correct.
Every year had its classroom jokes, its hilarious moments and it’s times to reach deep inside of ourselves.
One year we laughed all year about a rutabaga. I don’t remember what started it, but I’ll never forget the sweet little guy who brought one into class and placed it on my desk. We kept it all year as a mascot. I won’t ever forget the “giant anvil of death”, a story I made up to reassure kids who were afraid when they had forgotten homework or lost a paper. “Oh, dear,” I’d say, “That means you get the giant anvil of death. Unfortunately, it’s broken today, so you’ll just have to hand it in tomorrow.” There were funny nicknames, including for me. There were class plays, class parties, and class treats. There were math lessons that included every child’s name.
I was a classroom teacher when the Newtown massacre happened, and I sat with my students to process to process it together. I’ll never forget that moment.
I miss it. I miss it all. I miss the sense that I was doing something meaningful. I miss the daily belly laughs. I miss those “lightbulb moments” when I helped a child to master a difficult concept. I miss the hugs and the notes and the times when kids came in early to chat.
So happy first day of school to every teacher out there. May you find joy in the curious kids around you. May you find satisfaction in your lessons. May you recognize, every day, that you are doing the work of creating the future.
Happy first day to every child about to start a new year. May you find friendship, support, laughter and a chance to challenge yourself. May you see the growth that you will achieve and feel pride in that growth.
In the first place, nobody ever told me that jeans shorts are called “jorts.” What the hell? When did that happen?
In the second place, at no point in the last two decades did I ever figure out that “jorts” were out of fashion. I did not get the memo.
I was sitting in my living room yesterday, in this year of our Lord 2024, sipping some coffee and feeling pretty comfy. I was wearing one of my four pairs of jeans shorts. The ones with the rolled-up cuffs and the narrow legs. This was, until that point, my very favorite pair of shorts.
The TV news folks were talking about fashion, for reasons that escape me. It seems that news in the fashion world had just broken: in the name of “retro” styles, jorts have now reemerged on the scene. There followed a rousing discussion of whether these ancient fashion items should be reintroduced or left to the ash heap of history.
“Of course they should be back!”, said one bright young pundit, “It’s always cool to understand the fashion choices of our grandparents!”
I choked on my coffee. Say, what now?
“Oh, no,” opined another shiny chic young woman with perfectly red lips and a chiseled jaw, “They were dorky in the 70’s and they are worse now.”
I decided to take my pulse. In case I was actually already dead and buried with my terrible fashion choices.
I had a pulse. I was alive. Alive, alert, and feeling sexy in my short jorts.
I was suddenly reminded of a story from my first year as an elementary school speech therapist. It was 1993, and it was my first full-time job since my children had been born. I arrived at school feeling excited, professional, and happy to be a grown-up woman with a job. I’d dressed carefully on this crisp fall day. I wore black jeans, short black boots, and a nice white blouse. There were silver hoops in my ears.
As I got to the door of the school, I was greeted by two of my young students.
“Oh, wow!,” one of them cried with excitement, “How did you know that today was 80s day!?”
Sigh.
I have never, ever had a single day in my 68 years in which I was fashionable. Never. I wore baggy pants when everyone was into skin-tight jeans. I didn’t wear a scarf until the season they fell out of fashion. I wore short skirts when midi’s were popular, and midis when short skirts had returned.
I still prefer baggy jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt when I’m at home. Black jeans are still my idea of “dressing up”.
So I was truly shocked to learn that I have been sticking with an outdated pair of shorts long enough for them to fall out of style and come back again. I’m not sure whether to be proud or horrified.
Thus I am here to beg you, dear fashionable friends of mine (you know who you are!) could you please please send me a text when you find out that Sketchers are out of style? Can you just please give me a hint every now and then to tell me not to buy another denim workshirt, with or without embroidery?
Just help me out. Throw me a bone. Help me save face for once.
And if bellbottom hiphuggers come back, just congratulate me for being a trendsetter.
A lot of people my age talk about “checking one off the bucket list.” Vacations to exotic places, adventurous hikes or bike trips, jumping out of airplanes. It seems that every recent retiree has big, exciting plans for the next part of life.
I’m not one of them.
A part of me is just plain tired of striving to achieve.
As a child, life was all about learning new things like reading, holding a fork, doing math, and riding a two-wheeler because my little sister did it first. It was about pleasing the big people around me and getting invited to birthday parties. It was about meeting all of the requirements for being a good girl.
Adolescence was another set of goals to achieve. I knew that I should get good grades, get into college, find and embark on a career. Life still meant that I must set a goal, work hard, and achieve that goal. Then it was straight on into adulthood. Life was one long parade of stuff to get done. Get married, get a job, have babies, and make a hot meal every evening. Grow vegetables, mow the lawn, keep the cars running and the house repaired. There was always a chores list on our whiteboard. No matter how fast we worked, the responsibilities kept piling up.
I’m not trying to complain, really!! I’ve been very, very lucky as I have said before. Life has blessed me with my great husband and three healthy, happy kids. Now I even have grandkids to love! Paul and I have had fulfilling careers. We have lived for 34 years in a nice little house in a nice little town. We have good friends, near and far.
And we’re almost at retirement time. Paul will keep working part-time until June, which will also be when my time as “Nonni in charge” will be over.
Which brings me to the bucket list.
Unlike everyone I know, I have no desire to travel to far-off places for adventures. I have been to Ireland, Italy, Austria, Germany and Canada. I lived one magical summer in Tunisia on a student exchange. While I certainly have not seen all of the world, I’m OK with that now. My age and my health make it hard to handle crowds and noise. Big cities scare me, to be honest. At this point, I hate air travel. Really. I’m mostly done with it, I think.
I’ve hiked up and down a few of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. I don’t want to do that anymore. Nor do I want to bike across France or walk the Appalachian Trail. Don’t want to jump out of an airplane or go over a waterfall.
In fact, I don’t want to do anything that will hurt any part of my body. I already did that, thanks.
My bucket list is more like a little plastic pail list.
For instance, in my later years (aka: now), I want to learn conversational Italian.
I’d like to knit a sweater or two. And maybe a baby blanket.
My list includes figuring out how to create vibrato in my violin. And improving my playing before my fingers get too arthritic!
I will be happy when I can cross off my goal of mastering true Sicilian cooking.
I’d like to write a book for young readers because I remember falling in love with books and how magical it was for me. I’d like to publish some of my essays and blog posts. Maybe even this one!
More than anything, my goal for the last third of my life will be to learn how to care for myself. I have been a caregiver in one form or another since my first babysitting job. Mother, grandmother, teacher, wife, daughter, friend. I have loved each and every one of these relationships.
But sometimes I wonder who I am without the titles, you know? What is it that I want to do for myself?
I know that I want to learn how to sit still for more than 5 minutes. I want to learn how to do nothing more than listen to the wind in the leaves. I want to learn how to be silent.
I want to live without a set of goals and the feeling that I must achieve them or be unworthy.
I want to learn to accept myself and this life that Paul and I have made together without comparing it to anyone else’s life.
I guess that my bucket list includes a wish not to have one.
I’m sitting here in my living room with the fan going overhead and a nice cold cosmo in my hand. I just finished setting some bread dough to rise, dinner is simmering, and I finished knitting a scarf.
All is right with the world, and boy, howdy, do I feel it.
Two years ago tonight I was kind of a wreck. I was eating dinner late because I had to eat nothing after midnight. We had to get up at 3:30AM to drive into Boston by 5. I was awaiting a craniotomy to take out “Stanley” my benign but bothersome brain tumor.
When I think back on that night, and the drive into the city, I can feel my own fear. It was giant. I was so afraid I’d never see my new granddaughter again, a little girl at just the same age I was when my own grandmother died.
It was a tough night, and a long surgery. It has been a long and frustrating recovery.
But I’m here with my delicious drink, my sweet dogs, my husband beside me watching Netflix. I can still hear. I can still cook. I can still garden, and walk and swim. I can still dance to Taylor Swift and the Bluey Theme song with my grandkids. Little Eliza didn’t lose me; she knows me and sings to me and sometimes even lets me hug her (when her parents aren’t around).
So I’m not here to dwell on the tough parts of the last two years. I’m really here to celebrate the many lessons I have learned from this first medical challenge.
The very first thing I have learned is to stay positive, even when I don’t FEEL positive. When I was in the early stages of regaining my balance and strength, my older brother was a constant source of positivity. He wouldn’t let me wallow. He kept sending positive thoughts. Even when I wanted to smack him for them, I couldn’t. He is battling a far tougher medical issue than mine. So his messages made me “snap out of it” and look for the good.
I’ve also learned that way more people care about me than I ever understood. My kids, my husband, my new friends and my long-time friends have all been encouraging, supportive and present. When I was feeling so very sorry for myself, they all gave me endless empathy. They let me whine and moan, two things at which I am honestly quite skilled.
And as the two years have passed, and I have slowly adjusted to my “new normal”, I have learned that when you focus on your own problems, you miss out on a whole group of folks who are more or less in the same boat.
As they say, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”
Everyone.
When I slowly learned to stop pitying myself, I opened myself to the people around me. Look, I found, “this friend has a chronic illness he’s had for decades!” And “Oh, my gosh, this relative has a life threatening condition I knew nothing about.”
I learned, eventually, that even though I had a tough thing happen to me and my brain, it actually isn’t all about me.
Go figure.
And I think for me the most important lesson of the past two years has been that I don’t need to pretend, and I don’t need to be embarrassed. That has been so difficult! In my own mind, I walk around town looking like a crazy drunk. I canNOT walk in a straight line, especially on grass or sand. I can’t take two steps in the dark without crashing into something. I need to hold onto someone if I am asked to lift one foot to step over a sleeping cat or put my foot into a shoe.
At first it seemed to me that everyone was looking at the old, wobbly lady and wondering what the hell was wrong with her. She can’t hear. Her eye twitches, her lip trembles. She trips over a root and lands on all fours in the yard.
I hated the “broken me”.
But only for a while.
Living in the presence and love of so many wonderful friends, family, children, grandchildren and even strangers has made me open my eyes to all of the acceptance that there is around me.
I can say definitively that I am no longer the same woman I was two years ago tonight. A lot has changed.
Now I am far more optimistic, far more empathetic to those around me, and far less judgemental about myself.
So thanks, Stanley. Happy Anniversary of your eviction.
Today was a difficult day for a lot of Americans. Last night’s debate between the two pitiful characters running for President left millions of us thinking, “Really??! This is the BEST we could do?” A lot of us woke up this morning thinking that we’ve hit rock bottom. That our country is doomed and that we will all end up shooting at each other.
I wasn’t feeling good about the future of America when I woke up and went out the door this morning. I had a bunch of errands to do, and was feeling a time crunch about doing them. Coffee in hand, I headed off to my first chore, a semi-annual dermatology check.
I settled into the waiting area. The door opened and in came a very old lady. She was pushing a walker, aided by her daughter, who helped her into a seat. She smiled at me and I was struck by the bright blue of her eyes, which were encased in hundreds of wrinkles. I was sure she’d been smiling for most of her life. When I heard her daughter checking her in, I realized that I was looking at someone over 100 years old. Her smile, her agility, her awareness were all quietly inspiring.
When I finished my visit, with no problems detected, I headed across town to bring some peppermint tea to a friend. She is a young mom of two, now pregnant with twins. She’s facing a tough medical battle, as she has for years. I drove to her house, through the winding back roads of our little town. Through untouched forest land, past well-tended gardens and patches of wild roses. I haven’t really looked at things lately, having lived here for 34 years. Trees and streams and natural beauty had become common, and I had stopped seeing them.
But as I drove to my friend’s house, I was thinking about life unfolding in it’s own way. I was thinking about a woman living for more than a century, while another is lucky to have seen her thirties. I don’t understand that, but yesterday I felt the ebb and flow of nature, and we all seemed to be part of it. It felt reassuring.
As I left her house and headed to our local farm stand, I came into the “Olde Center” of this small town. A little white church stands on the right side of old town common. It dates back to the 1700s, as do the elegant old homes around the green.
On my left was long, sloping grass and another old white house. A red barn with gently peeling paint stood at the end of a dirt driveway. A big old maple tree cast its shade over the front of the house, and there I saw a small lemonade stand with two young children standing seriously behind it, ready to make a sale. A brown and white dog trotted around them, his tongue out and his tail wagging. I knew the two kids, because this is a very small town. Their Mom went to school with my daughter.
The sun was shining. The sky was brilliantly blue, and the leaves of the trees made dappled, dancing shadows on the ground.
I parked the car, and started to laugh.
“Seriously?” I thought to myself, “I have landed in a Norman Rockwell painting.” I had to sit for a minute behind the wheel, soaking in the innocence and nostalgia. I thought about life moving along, and about my kids’ childhoods. I thought of lemonade stands in my own youth, and about the way that some things really do remain unchanged.
I thought about the idea of “America.” I felt how much this day, this moment, these people all encompassed everything good and true about our way of life.
And although I know it’s trite, and cliché, I felt better about our prospects for endurance than I have in many years.
Do you remember when your kids were little, and they fought ALL the time? Weren’t there moments when one said something like, “He was looking at me!” and expected you to intervene? Don’t you remember days when you had to cut one goldfish cracker into three pieces so the snacks would be “fair”? I do. I remember feeling like I was being held hostage by a group of insane monkeys. I felt like I was holding on by a thread.
I know that for me, as a mom of three, there were honest-to-God situations in which I yelled, “If no bones are broken stop bothering me!”
When my second child was just over two years old, I caught his big sister kicking him in the butt to knock him off the front steps. When the second child was 8 and his brother was 6, I heard them in a screaming argument about the color of a tiny leggo piece.
I firmly believed, with great sadness, that my children would grow up to be virtual strangers if not mortal enemies. I didn’t think they’d ever like each other.
But the years flew by, and my two sons stopped screaming about leggo pieces. They made the same friends. They formed a band that practiced in our basement. They went to college in the same part of the state and dated girls who knew each other.
And they stayed in touch with their big sister, sharing jokes, music, secrets and political views.
All three of them were arrested together with Occupy Wall Street. They are close, they love each other, they watch out for each other, they share as many laughs and as many worries as they did when they were all teens.
And my husband and I are so proud and so happy about that.
Now there are four grandchildren in our family. Three belong to our firstborn and one to our third. We all live in the same state, so we are blessed to know each other pretty well.
For the past three days, we have been watching our youngest grandchild, our son’s 2-year-old girl. She is a sweet, sassy, curly-haired little kid, with a big smile and a sturdy little body. She has formed a special bond with our oldest grandchild, the other girl in the family. Ellie is turning 9 next month, and is a replica of her nurturing, loving Mom. She and little Eliza spent 2 ½ days giggling, playing, dancing and cuddling.
How beautiful is that? When I heard the little one saying, “I love ooo, Ellie” I felt like my entire life was complete. When I heard her asking for her cousins Johnny and Max, I couldn’t stop smiling.
Life is a long and sometimes scary journey. As a mom, I was sure at least a million times that I was doing the worst job ever. I was positive that I was making my kids miserable, or favoring one over the other, or praising one too much and one too little…..
So it’s funny that it took me over twenty-five years to realize that they had turned out all right after all. It took me that long to realize that they are able to love each other happily and without complication.
And as I watched my little Eliza running around and yelling “dance party” with her cousins as the disco light flashed, all I could think was this:
I am incredibly and awesomely blessed. Paul and I are way beyond lucky. For every time I locked the bathroom door to cry because they couldn’t stop fighting, now I have a joyful memory of them all together.
I have no words for how much I love my kids and my grandkids. As I told Ellie last night, while we were hugging goodnight, “I think we need a much stronger word than ‘love’ to describe how I feel about you.”
Like most people living these days, I am often anxious. I worry all the time. Will the world catch fire, will it succumb to hurricanes and tornadoes? Will we have enough food to go on? I worry that there will be another pandemic, one that we can’t survive. I fear that a cyberattack might take out our power grid and all that it supports.
I don’t think I am the only person worried about next November. If the terrible Trump wins another term, what the hell is going to happen? Will we see the arrest of half of our government? Will we lose our voting rights? Will women be forced back into the 1930s?
I worry. I have had a health issue for the past two years, one that has me thinking about it every day. It’s just a benign brain tumor, but its removal has led to some ongoing problems. I have spent the past two months terrified that it was growing back.
I do not sleep well. I do not relax well.
But!
Yesterday I had to go to Boston (aka, “the dirty, awful city where I used to live happily). I had to have an MRI of my brain, followed by a visit to my neurosurgeon. Suffice it to say, when I arrived at the hospital, I was a freaking wreck. Dry mouth, shaking hands, headache, teary eyes. I had been in the same state for weeks, worried that my tumor was leading me to a repeat craniotomy and six more months of recovery.
I entered the MRI unit shakily. I answered all of the repetitive medical questions, although I was feeling fairly cranky. I mean, if you are having an MRI to follow up on the removal of a brain tumor you don’t want to be asked “Have you ever had brain surgery?”
I was good. I swallowed down my “Why the hell do you think I’m here?” and answered the young radiology tech. I changed into my lovely, stylish johnny, with the missing back tie and the way to big pants. I entered the MRI room.
And I laid down on the incredibly comfortable table, with a pillow under my neck and one under my knees. The lovely young ladies put earplugs in both of my ears, and a set of sound-cancelling ear coverings over those. A headset went over that, and I was unable to move.
As I lay there, a serene video of underwater fish played above me. There were dolphins, rays, small fish and crabs. They all swam silently above me.
The MRI machine made its usual noise, of course. But my one working ear was double protected. The sound became repetitive, rhythmic, and soothing. I was still, silent. I was cocooned in place by a warm blanket, a soft barrier against each arm and neck pillow. I couldn’t move. So I didn’t.
When the friendly technicians returned to tell me we were all done, I was surprised. And a bit disappointed. “Already?” I asked.
I got up from the table and returned to find my civilian clothes. I was calm. I was relaxed.
I still had to go upstairs to get my results and talk to my neurologist, but my panic has receded with the gentle swimming of the sea life above me in the MRI. I felt great.
And so here I am, trying to figure out if there is a way that I can give myself a comfy, enclosed bed with an ongoing video of sealife and a background chorus of hums, thrums, and bangs.
Call me crazy, but the crazier the world gets, the more I want to get myself a nice MRI machine to use every day.
Not for sissies 