Communication Communication Communication

We learn from a very young age that we start learning about communication. From our parents bribing up with various enticing things to get us to talk when we are babies, to the various enticements to STOP talking when we are little kids, then again with the bribes when they want to know where we were on Friday night when you are a teenager. Some how communication is supposed to get easier when you are an adult, because at this point, through all the dangling carrots, theoretically we should have learned something right?

Still my husband and I struggle, as we do with the kids, as they do with us, as we all do with our families and so on and so on right into the frustration station. (wasn't that one of those 70's learning songs on sesame street along with conjunction junction?lol)

My husband has a habit of carrying on delightful conversations in his head, and then only saying the last few words out loud...clearly unaware that he hasn't clued me in to what "we" are talking about. This can cause major conflagrations such as....

Me: "Does my butt look big in these Jeans"

Jamie: "...Enormous and we are going to have to figure it out"

(which was the end of the sentence, "Our debt is getting enormous and we are going to have to figure it out")

This could lead to husbands being impaled with various shoes and hangers as they come flying out of the closet at a high velocity.

I am not at all innocent, as I think that I "communicate" SO much that Jamie has started to tune me out and only hears about half of what I say. I think that Jamie hears me as much as Pepermint Patty heard her teacher "Wah Wah wah wah wah wah" The effect of not being heard very often has led to me forgetting that I am using my "outside voice."

This can be a problem...you know when I say things like "why don't you just move back to the cave you crawled out of" in a voice not quiet enough that the person infront of me who is currently being rude to the cashier at the gas station doesn't hear me.... Then in embarasment I have to look down as though it wasn't me that really said it...even though everyone knows I did... This was a scary moment for me...

I think I should have just said "was that my outside voice?" and made everyone laugh. Although, maybe the pirate, or what ever he was in his leather chaps, wasn't really in the mood for laughter. I only say this because of the inappropriate digit that was shown to me on his way out of the store.

The cashier on the other hand seemed to think that my communication skills were very good, and had a nice smile for me when I paid for my gum.

SO I guess communication is something we still work on even into our 30's. Or maybe it was my patience gene with tourists starting to wear out!

My Husband Knows Me

I thought I would post today to make up for my missed day earlier this week...Not that anyone missed me!

OK so, My husband loves me right? Jamie came home the other night "I brought you home some specialty wine that was made just for you!"

Being a slight wino, I was very interested....This is what he brought me...I don't know whether to be insulted, or just happy that he knows me so well.

Have a good weekend.

You have to be FREAKING kidding me

I promised that I wouldn't complain anymore...I don't care, I am plain and simply pissed off at mother nature in the most raw sense of pissed offness. I got up this morning to go to an Agriculture conference, thinking of planting things, and nice pretty flowers and good tasting vegetables...I look out my window, and..yup...you guessed it...ANOTHER FREAKING 3 INCHES OF SNOW and it is just NOT OK!

That is just all I can say today.

I am sorry...well not really...just pissed

That Anger Gene Strikes again

So, a few weeks ago Caroline my middle child, my exuberant, beats to her own drum, definite sense of what she wants, stubborn, but wonderful, little girl came home from school really upset. I do the appropriate parent thing and cajole, beg and slyly ask questions to drag it out of her.

She starts to cry over some girl being a wench to her. (Now mind you this girl has tortured my kid since day one, so my first response was to go pull out all that girls hair, because you know, that would be the mature reaction to someone hurting my child's feelings.)

Then it comes out.

Caroline socked her one right in the face on the play ground. I am pretty sure that it was open handed, but I was still waiting for the phone to ring and the principal telling me that Caroline had been expelled and was going to be charged with assault and battery, these days you never know.

So, like a good mom, I start going through the reasons why it is never OK to put your hands on someone else. The whole "you could have hurt her" thing, and Caroline looks up at me with those big brown eyes, totally over flowing with tears. (she has mastered the fill your eyes up just enough that they look like they are going to drip over, but they don't quite...it kills me.) and she says..."I really tried mom, I just couldn't help it."

Super Mom comes out with the appropriate response: "You can always help it, it is very important for you to learn self control." (mind you the whole time I am thinking about just the other day slamming the door to the basement so hard that our can holder ripped off the door and the cans went tumbling down the stairs at Old Man Lowery...but this was not the time to be reminding her of that!)

"But I promise, I was just standing there listening to her yell at me, I could feel my body shaking and all of the sudden my angry hand just reached out and smacked her before I could stop it."

It was very hard not to laugh because haven't we all had "Angry Hands?" I was really trying not to smile, and remain the steadfast parent of reason. But secretly I was thinking of all the times my angry hands, feet, words have had their way too. (And to be honest, also secretly thinking of this girl who has been so awful to Caroline all year, and my angry hand started twitching too.)

No phone call, luckily I think that their principal is too self involved to actually know that there are students milling around the building. I am fairly convinced he is going to come to work one day and say,"damn, where did all these kids come from, have they Always been here?" and then, I am pretty sure, one of the teachers is likely to get an angry hand too.

Getting Crankier by the year

It seems to me that somewhere in our human programming is a self destructing gene called patience...as you get older it slowly deteriorates until at some designated time, it self destructs, leaving us just a tad bit, well, nasty with others.


I have always seen it. In my grandmother, who gripping her steering wheel for dear life yells at those "teenagers who speed so fast, where are they going in such a hurry." Now mind you, "those teenagers," I am pretty sure were a woman in her 60's, but when you are 92 whose counting? And the "speeding so fast," was probably about 40 in a 35 MPH zone. In fact, the 60 year old was probably loosing her mind behind the white knuckled 15 mph lady driving in front of her, because at 60 I am pretty sure the patient gene has already self destructed.


I have seen it in my dad, but that has almost always been with cars or computers. If something doesn't work, bang, bang, bang it again...isn't that how that saying goes? Oh, well that is how it goes in our family. Square pegs CAN fit in round holes, if you have the right tools...like a saw and a sledge hammer.


I have had heard it many times over, "damn kids," "Damn old people," "Damn dumb asses... what have you. In fact my husband and I used to watch that 70's show, and I used to secretly laugh because Red reminded me so much of family members...which will remain nameless for fear of of the anger gene coming my direction.

This all occurred to me today as I was riding in the car with my kids listening to Hannah Montana and me saying "all these songs are starting to sound the same..." Before I could reach out and pull them back in, those words my mother used to say to me, were out there. Floating around the car like some demented smiley face laughing at me. Reminding that every year my boobs get lower so does my threshold for noise!

It isn't just me though, I have been telling my husband that all the kids are going to be scared of him when he is older. They are going to call him "Old Man Lowery" as in "Don't go down to Old Man Lowery's house, he'll shoot you with his BB gun if you get in his yard." I can picture him coming down the driveway with his cane, yelling at the whipper snappers, and popping their football and throwing it back at them. "this is what you get for playing so close to my yard!"


I should say that this image has gotten so vivid in all of my families' heads now, that when he is getting crabby we all call him Old Man Lowery. Which thus far usually cures him for the time being. But secretly, I think he enjoys this image, and behind closed doors he is polishing up his BB's waiting for the day he can get away with it. Instead of getting arrested for being a horrible man, the police would just laugh and call him an eccentric old man.


I am sad to say that I think that mine is starting to deconstruct too. The young girl with blond hair whipping out the window of her "ShitVette," pedal to the metal and still only going 30 mph, music blaring, has been replaced by an over tired, short "I don't' want to have to fool with it" haired, yelling at the kids to turn down their headphones or they will loose their hearing, mom, whose music has gone from the Violent Femmes and Butt hole Surfers, to something lighter, like NPR...(I am however proud to say that Yanni or Zamphir, the master of the pan Flute has yet to float throughout the airwaves in my car. But I will say when I start jamming to Cher I am going to commit myself.)

So I guess it happens to the best of us. I just hope that I can hold on a little longer...I mean I do still love Green Day...just at the appropriate volume!

I think that I may be sending my self into a deep depression on purpose. I am not sure why I feel the need to do this, since this winter in Maine could achieve this quite sufficiently on its own.

In the past couple weeks I have finished both the Kite Runner, and A Thousand Splendid Suns, as well as watched God Grew Tired of Us, and Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion. Which was sort of like standing there and asking someone to punch me in the stomach repeatedly.

As some of you may have read in my profile, guilt is one of my hobbies...I don't know if it is a hobby per-say, it certainly comes to me through the veins. I choose to think of my Italian heritage as supplying most of it, and being a mother finishing off my ample supply. This is neither here nor there, except to say that a person who possesses my high threshold of unidentified guilt along with my incredibly wimpy limitations for seeing pain in the world, coupled with my need to control the Universe, should really not try to endure such books and movies, and much less all at the same time. As anxiety and depression run in my family, I think I am tempting fate a bit here!


But I did it, so now, as these things typically do, I am feeling all hot and bothered to go and save Sudan, or free Tibet, or befriend a woman in a burkah who needs some saving. Which clearly, at some point I will have to admit, I cannot do because somewhere along the line I got fired as General Manager of the Universe.

We are so blessed to have been born here. And while I still shush my mother if she mentions Alkeida** in a conversation for fear that W will send in the troops after hearing it on my tapped phones...I really don't live in a whole lot of fear. A little fear of taking Henry to swimming lessons now. (Yes, I do understand how menial my life is becoming!)


So I sit on my couch in a lake of tears and admiration for all the real people and characters of these movies and books, yelling a the books and TV, because somewhere in my screwed up psyche, I think they really can hear me. Feeling guilty about having taken longer than I should have for lunch to finish my book, Because surely I should have been doing something more useful with my time, like, I don't know, writing to my senator, collecting signatures, setting up peace rallies, building an arc...something...

But in the end, I will put it all on my to-do list...after I tackle the mounds of laundry that are scheduling their own coup d'etat and will march down the stairs and smother me in their smelliness at any moment. See? This is why all the guilt...

**Just to note, I do know that it is Al Qaeda, but I was trying to stick with the theme of W...

Technological idiot me.

Being the technological genius that I am it took me a whole freaking weekend, therapy, and help from my sister and brother-in-law to figure out how in the world to get that video on line, because it was saved as some other jacked up file. SO I actually typed that message last Thursday and here it is Easter and I am only posting it today. so oh well, pretend it is Thursday...and hey have a good Easter.