Updates

Hello blog readers. I'm sorry I've been neglecting you. For anyone that is still tuning in, here's a quick rundown:
Grace: Loves 1st grade even though her class is "officially" overcrowded. She's rockin with reading and has no problem learning her sight words week to week. Writing and fine motor planning and execution cause her the most trouble. When she can't write or button her pants or pull on a shirt, for example, she reacts and takes it out on others. In the form of pulling Johnny's hair, pinching me, and telling David he makes her want to vomit. Every Friday when the class gets assessed on how well they can read and write that week's "high-frequency" words, Grace's resource teachers (aka special ed teachers) bring a laptop into the classroom and let Grace type out her words. It's been working great.


Johnny: Loves Kindergarten. It helps that his teacher looks a lot like me. Or I look a lot like her. I think she's a couple of years older. He loves learning and we love the kinds of things he's doing at school. He brought home a picture he did in Art class that showed bodies moving and it was an exercise done to introduce the kids to Keith Haring's work. Isn't that great? Johnny beamed when I went to our bookcase and pulled out a book on Keith Haring. It was like, "Wow, my parents are cool."

He's still my cuddly baby, though, who still hasn't gotten his "r's" yet (meaning, he still says, "My favorite centoe at school is the sand centoe.") And he still has dimples on his hands. My baby.

David: Hanging in, kicking ass at work, and really working through some tough things.

Me: I think I'm getting my second life. What I'm about to say deserves an entire blog post so you can understand the reasoning, the science, and the reality behind the fact that I've recently been diagnosed with ADD. In a nutshell, ADD came first. I was born with it and compensated for it for 31 years. In 2003, my body and mind couldn't compensate any more with the physical, emotional, and psychological stress that came with losing my mom and giving birth within a five month period. My adrenal, thyroid, and other systems were forced to take action and now they're depleted. It's all so very fascinating. I have a superb psychiatrist who is providing medication maintenance and I wanted to kiss his feet when he said to me last Thursday that what I've been experiencing is damn real, and that if I don't support my brain and physical systems, I could end up bed-ridden where no amount of my self-determination would do me a bit of good. I'm sticking with this guy.

Work, school, internship, being a mom, a wife, a friend, a sister, a daugther, I'm doing it all. And things are finally looking up.

ZZ Top

Taken at the ZZ Top concert on September 6. Someday I'll blog about it, someday.

Has it really been 10 years?

Happy 10th, David!

A Literary Hero Fallen

I was shocked and sad to read that David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Sept. 12 in his home in California. My feelings, though, don't come from what DFW means to me, but what he means to David. One of the few positive things David's dad passed on to him as a child was a love of books, and from the day I met him, he's always had his nose in one (or two or three). DFW is David's favorite writer, his literary hero, and now not another word will be written by this dazzling talent.

I've never read anything by DFW, and I'm not sure that I ever will, but David was hooked the first time he read some of Wallace's (and Donald Antrim's) work in a fiction edition of the New Yorker several years ago. He laughed out loud for days, and told lots of people about this complex, postmodern, original, and don't forget, funny, writer. David gobbled up Infinite Jest , all with its 1000 plus pages and 100 pages of footnotes, and from then, it seemed, made it a mission to read everything DFW had ever written.

I read about the publishing of DFW's latest collection, Oblivion, even before David did and was thrilled to buy it and give it to him on Christmas Day a few years ago and to see David's genuine surprise and satisfaction with a gift I knew he'd love.

I've read that Wallace's characters are multi-multi-multi-dimensional, zany, incomprehensible, nonsensical and just plain weird. They also lead dark lives full of addiction, suicide, and madness, and one can't help but assume that many of DFW's personal demons came to life for his readers on the page.

Sounds like Wallace was brilliant and that his mind served both as his liberator and captor. Who knows what made him kill himself, but it's scary to digest when it happens to someone who you identify with, whose complex characters you identify with, who you consider a genius with words and thoughts, and who you assumed had it together enough to keep this type of tragedy at bay.

I'm the one who broke the news to David, just hours ago as I read it online. In that first moment of shock and awe, trying to make sense of losing someone who's meant so much to you, David said something that I interpreted as, gosh if that can happen to someone as talented and smart as he was, what's to keep the rest of us with similar personal demons from sharing the same fate? To make us both feel better, I said, "David, don't worry, you're not that smart."

I'm so sorry for your loss, David, I really am.

Ouch!

Half of us obviously enjoyed this ride down the slide. The other half didn't.

PS: Click on the image to enlarge it so you can appreciate all four facial expressions.

Mothers and Mothering

Admittedly, this is a rather "lame" blog post b/c it's just a comment that I wrote on someone else's blog, but if you read the post here, what comes below will make more sense.

Fourteen years ago this December my mother wept quietly in the back of the van as my family drove home to NC from KY after attending my mom's mother's funeral. My grandmother lived a long, rich life into her 80's, and I always suspected that the main reason my mom was crying on that long drive was because she (my mom) had recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and her own mother had died without knowing this or being able to help with this.

My mom lost her battle to cancer 5 1/2 years ago, the day before my 31st birthday, while I was 5 months pregnant with my second child. I think about and miss my mom every day, especially when I'm sad and sick (in other words, a lot lately), and my son always says, "Your mom is right here with you, Mommy. She's right here. You don't need to be sad." It's such a beautiful sentiment and I do believe it.

You're right about going through life with different mothers. I've been going to yoga classes regularly for about 2 years now, and it's there, in yoga class, with a male instructor, no less, when I feel the most "mothered" these days.

There's something about girls losing their mothers (at any age) that warms me, haunts me, confuses me, makes me feel guilty about all I said (and didn't say) to my own mother, and at the same time comforts me in a way that is hard to explain but feels something like being part of a special club to which members are either daughters or mothers to daughters, or both.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but what I gain through reading your posts, I feel that in a way, you're mothering me.

Talk Before Sleep

Me to Grace: I love you.

Grace to Me: Same you.

I needed that.

Overkill?

The kids and I ate dinner this past Sunday at a Ruby Tuesday. When our debit card slip came back and needed a signature, Johnny really wanted to sign his name. On the back as well as the front. Do you think he got his point across?