About My Mom

The things you should know about my mom is that she loved Dusty the Lhasa apso and Red the Pomeranian more she loved her daughters, watched television shows on aliens and Bigfoot on constant repeat, hated men, loved doing craft projects that ended up looking like a fifth grader had completed them, and had a stash of trashy romance novels under her bed the day she died.

 

In her defense, Red was an amazing dog. I loved him more than most people, too.

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One day I was having an allergic reaction to a medication and I had to leave high school early because the hives were freaking out everyone. My mom, sister, and I piled into the car and went to the doctor. They gave me antibiotics, told me not to take sulfa drugs ever again, and the three of us got ice cream and went shopping where we all bought new clothes and shoes, and we drove fast through the two-lane country roads lined with corn and wheat fields, windows down, screaming out the lyrics to "Pour Some Sugar on Me." 

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She used to say that you should always eat your dessert first because there might be a fire before dinner was finished and wouldn't it be a shame if you didn't get to eat dessert. 

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She worked for the post office for over thirty years. She sorted mail, learned to drive a forklift, and could tell you every zip code for every small town in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. It was fun to test her on road trips. Climax! 49034! Corydon! 47112!

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At my wedding, she insisted on wear a pink top that clashed with the red that was our wedding color. Oh, well. She carried around an ugly old black purse and in every wedding photo, she's holding on to that damn purse. It makes me laugh now. At my sister's wedding, I took my mom's purse and cell phone from her and held them hostage in my car. Everyone she knew was at the wedding, so no one would call her. And damned if I was going to let her have an ugly purse in every one of my sister's wedding photos. 

The strap!

NO ONE ELSE HAS A PURSE ON THE DANCE FLOOR.

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When she was a tween, her nightgown caught fire on a gas range when she was heating up water for tea. She had third-degree burns up and down the left side of her body. They grafted skin from her thighs for her upper arm and torso. She was heavily scarred and she was out of school for more than two years. 

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She had nine brothers and sisters. She was number nine. There are only four remaining siblings now. 

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She used to text me indecipherable words. The number of times I texted "I do not understand what you mean" is probably hundreds. The very last text she sent to me was "Rocket is he play with him steals his bones. And lets him have the big cat." The fuck, mom? (Translation: Rocket plays with Sy and steals his bones. He lets Sy sleep in the big cage. - Rocket and Sy are my sister's dogs.) 

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One time she signed a birthday card to me Love, Fran instead of Love, Mom and then she didn't call me on my birthday and I cried. After I got married, she never called me on my birthday. She said it was my husband's job. I don't know. It made me sad. 

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She worked nights and my father worked during the day. So he was the primary caretaker. Did she notice the bruises? The empty fridge? The fear in our eyes? 

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One time we went for a walk in a county park. I though the loop was .75 miles, but at about mile two, my mom was getting tired. I saw a road across a field and made my mom troop through the field to get to the road, found a church, and parked her at a bench by the church. I looked a map on my phone, realized our car was about three-quarters of a mile away via sidewalks and ran to the car and drove back to get her. She referred to it as "our little hiking adventure."

Not from the hiking adventure, but when we went to a mall and she suggested I buy bright pink lipstick, which I did, but then threw it away because I am not a bright pink lipstick lady. She asked me why I wasn't wearing it the next time she saw me.

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I remember Jenny writing once (on her blog? in a comment here?) that when her mom died, she had young children and she just kept doing the things that it takes when you have young children and then one day she woke up and her life was normal again. Like, different normal, of course. But she had to keep on waking up and tying the shoelaces and packing the lunches and whatever it is that you do with kids. And every morning I'm getting up and walking the dog and then I get home and I don't remember it. My day-to-day life has not changed much since I lived hundreds of miles away, but somehow the world seems different. And I feel different, but I can't put my finger on what exactly. But I'll keep waking up and living my life and someday it will be normal again.

Obviously our relationship was complicated, but I never doubted that she loved me and my sister with all her heart and she always did what she thought was best for us. I miss her random incomprehensible emails. I miss the jokes about how terrible men were and how I would have to defend them (ME!). My birthday just passed and I missed the card in the mailbox. But that's part of the process, right?

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Thank you to everybody who has checked in with me in the last few weeks. The texts, the cards, the flowers, the books, the random board game someone sent with no name on it - it has all been very much appreciated. If I didn't send you a note thanking you, I have to admit that you probably won't get one because I have done a lousy job of keeping track. Just know that I did appreciate it and I have felt very much surrounded by love and support. 

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I'm going to attempt to do my regular bloggy thing, but posts may be sporadic. But at some point, it will become normal again. 

The Most by Jessica Anthony

I heard about The Most by Jessica Anthony on Sarah's Bookshelves, when Susie described it as "a book about a woman who went into the pool and refused to get out." 

It's early November 1956. The Russians have sent a dog into space, Virgil Beckett goes to church in his brand new '57 Buick Bluebird with his two sons, and his wife Kathleen stays home and gets into their apartment complex pool wearing her swimsuit from her college days. When Virgil gets home with the boys, Kathleen just stays in the pool. 

I thought this was a thoughtful look at how a marriage can fall apart. The beginning was interesting, the setting was interesting, the mini character studies on the two sons was interesting, and even the evolution of the marriage in peril was interesting, despite my dislike of that as a subject. The writing is lyrical, but doesn't devolve into poetic. We switch between Virgil and Kathleen's POV and while I don't really care about Virgil all that much (I'd much rather spend time with Kathleen), there were some clever passages where we see the conversation from different viewpoints and that was fun.

But boy was I ever let down by the last third of the book. It's only 135 pages long, so I guess I don't know what I was expecting, but I sort of wanted closure. I wanted to know if these two sat down and hashed it out. I wanted to know if someone ever figured out why Nicholas was a little sociopath. I wanted to know MORE. I feel like the ending was abrupt and disappointing and it let down the rest of the book. 3/5 stars

Thing I looked up:

Thessaloniki  - The second-largest city in Greece, with slightly over one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and the capital of the geographic region of Macedonia. (Seriously, why is my knowledge of geography SO BAD?)

Hat mentions (why hats?):

He played a cowboy, he said, who sat on top of a horse and wore a ten-gallon hat. (page 28)

With the men out of the office, there was no one to complain when Virgil put on his coat and hat, hung the CLOSED sign, and left. (page 63)

The man was wearing one of those old-fashioned wool suits and a brown derby hat, as though about to embark for a day at the office in 1924. (page 67)

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Did you know where Thessaloniki was? Is your knowledge of the geography of the world as limited as mine? 

When We Believed in Mermaids by Barbara O'Neal

 

On the opening page of When We Believed in Mermaids by Barbara O'Neal, Kit sees her sister on the TV news at a deadly fire. This might have been startling for anyone, but it was particularly startling for Kit since her sister had died fifteen years earlier in a train accident. What follows is the journey of these two sisters, backwards and forwards in time, as we examine their family life growing up and its impact on them and the decisions they made as they grew up.

I thought this was a lovely book infused with trauma informed care. I feel like both sisters make choices in their adult lives that are understandable if not always completely responsible. It takes a close look at forgiveness and the complicating factors that do or do not lead to it. Apparently it was originally billed as a mystery or a suspense novel and it definitely is not that - it's a book about families, love, and childhoods lost. It's also a bit of a travel ad for southern California and Auckland, New Zealand. 

Half a star deducted for pretty pedestrian writing. The hat examples below will show you what I mean.

4.5/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?why hats?): 

...I wonder if I need to grab my hat. (page 35)

...I leave the white cotton hat on the front seat...(page 35)

...I bring a broad-brimmed hat. (page 89)

...directing her three kids to put their hats back on, to stop tossing a ball among them, to sit down and stop leaning over the rail. (page 118-119)

She's wearing a simple blue sundress and no hat even in this awful land of skin cancers, plus jandals like mine on her feet. (page 221)

She has a hat in her hand, and she uses it to wave to me. (page 246)

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Do you think someone could write a book about the place you live and make it sound romantic? I'm not sure someone could pull that off about my town!

Moments of Zen

Things did not go well in Michigan with my mother and things continue to spiral out of control in the hospital there leading to an emergency phone calls with subtitles of  "Where is all of mom's money?" and "Does anyone know where the will is?" and "If the oncologist doesn't check her chart this time, punch them." So, in the spirit of putting on my own oxygen mask before helping others, here are some moments from the last two weeks I want to remember.

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My Aunt Sylvia and I working on a puzzle of a fox. The puzzle was fox-shaped and it was hard to figure out the border and the pieces were not traditional jigsaw puzzle piece shaped, so it was super hard. Sylvia, who was on the phone, would point to a piece and where it belonged and she was right almost every time. Puzzle genius. With her help, I did it three times as fast as if I had to sit there fiddling with it by myself.

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We saw a flock of six turkeys on the way to the hospital. Two of them were males with their tail feathers spread out, showing all their glory.

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I stopped to get gas in my car on the way home. My uncles got out of the car and ran into the gas station. When we got home my uncle presented me with a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar and it was delicious and just what I needed at that moment. [We can talk about how I'm eating my feelings in another post.]

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The sun setting as I was going for a couple of  evening runs. There are so many more trees there than in Wisconsin and the vista was lovely. I even saw a few deer on the road with me on one of these runs.

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The nurses in the ICU joking with my mom that she was their easiest patient and that they wanted to come in and hide in her room all day. 

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The time my mom said "I handled your dad's death too well" and everyone in the room laughed.

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When we came back from the hospital to find that the dogs had not handled our absence well and had some accidents I immediately started cleaning it up and I was referred to as "young, competent, and energetic." I'll take it.

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We ordered pizza from the closest pizza place which had an awesome name that I cannot share with you because I don't want to dox my sister, but it turns out that this place is a convenience store with just a couple of pizza ovens in it. This store had more liquor than anyplace I've seen outside of a Hy-Vee and they also had tobacco supplies, bait fish, and a ginormous beer cooler. They had five flavors of KitKats. The pizza was excellent, too. They don't sell liquor in grocery or convenience stores in Pennsylvania, so my uncle walked around in utter befuddlement. It was so much fun. 

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I saw some friends from high school. My high school has an Athletic Hall of Fame and one of my friend's sister was being inducted and he was going to to a little speech for her at the ceremony. One of our classmates who my friend refers to as his "archnemesis" was also being inducted and we enjoyed teasing him about having to talk to his archnemesis. 

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What has been your most recent moment of zen? 

God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney

I listened to God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney as an audiobook (narrated by Catherine Tabor) because podcasts are in a bit of a drought these days. 

In this book, we meet the Nolan family. Father Luke, mother Ruthie, and two adult daughters, Abigail and Caroline. Abigail is planning her wedding and Caroline just has to get through the summer and then she can go away to college. But then a secret comes out about Luke, the pastor of a megachurch, and Abigail and Caroline spend the summer grappling with faith, future, and family. 

As a person who has never gone to church, I find the entire idea of my entire life surrounding the church to be quite foreign. So I thought this was an interesting look at how it could potentially work. I was also really invested in the relationship between the sisters, who were not very close at the book began, but by the end had developed a closer bond. 

I started this book very skeptically, but by the end I was really invested in the two sisters. I want to make it very clear that a lot of books about people searching for their faith leave me absolutely cold, but I thought that the questioning and puzzling it out in this book was well done for someone like me. I really liked how there were certain Bible passages that we heard about from the characters and what lessons they had taken from them. It really grounded the book for me.

I can't speak to how "real" this megachurch setting is, though. I read some reviews that suggested there were some things that were "off," particularly surrounding alcohol and clothing, but I didn't notice them. Then again, I live in Wisconsin where alcohol basically comes out of taps, so my perspective is probably very warped. 

Anyway, this is a good book. I'm not sure it will be one that is memorable, but it's worth a read if it sounds at all interesting to you. 4/5 stars

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Everybody! I learned something while reading this book. You can bookmark passages! I had been screenshotting timestamps I wanted to go back to and then manually going back to them to get my lines of note. You don't need to do that. You can just bookmark timestamps!

Lines of note:

"Hey, Caro," he said.

She bristled at the nickname, a term of familiarity he hadn't earned. (timestamp 28:44)

Argh. I have this same feeling about my own BIL, my sister's husband. We actually haven't spent all that much time together, but he calls me by my nickname because my mother and sister do. It's tough.

The women of the Nolan family were strong. And yet, because they were quiet, their silence had often been mistaken for weakness. (timestamp 8:23:26)

Because I'm reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I sort of perked at the idea of another Nolan family and the comparisons of the women in the two books.

And all these dreams had materialized, but now she wasn't sure if she wanted them at all. She'd assumed that by completely changing her life, she would end up in one she wanted. Everyone said that college was the time to find yourself, but no one ever talked about what would happen when you did. Who was she without all of this? (timestamp 9:05:30)

Oh, isn't this the truth? 

Hat mentions:

The worship pastor, a man in his mid-thirties with tattooed forearms showing beneath his rolled button-up, a brimmed hat perched high on his head...(timestamp 7:31:29)

10.7 Contact - At the Blueberry Patch

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the seventh day of the month is "Contact." 

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When I was a tween/teen, my parents would sometimes ship me and my sister off to Pennsylvania to be the collective problem of my mom's extended family. Aunt Debbie and Uncle Lenny would take us camping, Aunt Jackie and Uncle Paul would let us run wild around their small town, including picking wild blueberries on a hill next to the cemetery (heaven help me, this has to be wrong, right? my memory has got to be faulty on this), Aunt Jean would play Scrabble with me for hours, and Uncle Kevin would just throw us all into the car to head to a movie theater for a couple of hours in sweet, sweet air-conditioned comfort. 

There's a place for picking blueberries near us and I spend the month of July stalking their Facebook page for days when I can go. They're only open a couple days a week for limited hours, so finding just the right window can be a challenge. We managed to go on Saturday, which is their last day of picking and it seems unbelievable to me because there are so many berries left on the bushes, some thisclose to being ripe, but I am not a blueberry farmer and they obviously know best.

But let me tell you something, friends. While it's fine to go and pick a quart of blueberries with my husband, it's not the same as when I was thirteen and we'd pick so many more than we could possibly eat and Aunt Jackie would make us blueberry muffins and blueberry pancakes and late at night she'd give us blueberries in condensed milk. It's not the same as my cousin correcting my squatting position while my other cousin is running wild with blue smeared all over his face. It's not the same as when we would consistently pick on the youngest cousin and make fun of how few berries she could pick. It's just not the same when you're an adult.

So here's to childhood memories that can't be recreated, but we're so grateful to have.

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What's something that's still fun(ish) to do as an adult, but was way better when you were a child?

All That Is Mine I Carry with Me by William Landay

 

All That Is Mine I Carry with Me by William Landay is a family drama.  We follow the Larkin family as the mother, Jane, goes missing. Her husband, Dan, a successful defense attorney, becomes the prime suspect, but no body is found and years go by. Her three children - Alex, Jeff, and Miranda - are left to grow up with no closure about their mother's disappearance and with suspicions about their own father who must continue to raise them. Their mother's sister Kate tries to fill the void left by Jane, but as time goes by, it gets harder and harder for this family to operate with its veils of secrecy and silence.

The book is told through four different points of view. The first is a schoolmate of Jeff's, decades later, who is a writer who decides that the might write about this case; the second is the deceased Jane's perspective; then we hear from Jeff; and the last few chapters are told from an aged Dan's point of view as he slowly declines into dementia. 

I was absolutely riveted by this book and found it impossible to put down. The writing was sharp and crisp and the ambiguity of what happened to Jane was so well done. I changed my mind about it several times before coming to my own conclusion, although I am not certain if I would hold to my opinion if I were on a jury. The family drama and splits seemed so real to me, as if I were reading a true crime book instead of a fictional account.  It was absolutely engrossing and fascinating, although it was, of course, full of challenging themes (sexual assault, harassment, and murder are all prominent in this book, so beware).  

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

It is one thing to fail, as we all do, and another thing to live with that failure year after year, to carry it around in your pocket and worry it with your fingers. (page 46)

Can a get a big hell yeah from my perseverators? 

Every family is odd, but every family seems normal to a young child born into it, for a while at least. (page 66)

You do not know what's accepted as "normal" until you leave your own home. It's strange to think about what is standard in one household and how strange it would be in another with a different culture and makeup. You think the questions of whether or not to wear shoes in the house or how we do laundry have a variety of answers, just imagine the vast differences in things like cultural celebrations, religion, and how much talk of Congressional politics gets discussed at the table.

Along the way, I pass my old grammar school and playground, the houses of old friends, a meandering tour of my childhood. It is all subtly changed, unfamiliar, dissociating, unsettling - weird. (page 185)

If you move away from the place you grew up and then you return, it's as if someone has taken your memories and put them into a snowglobe and shook them up. Things are sort of there, of course, but it's not quite right. I love hearing authors try to describe this feeling. 

Word I looked up:

Tristesse (page 208) - a state of melancholy sadness (This is not the romantic tristesse you might imagine from movies.)