Month: September 2013

I woke up this morning and forced myself to go to Bikram Yoga. Normally I love Bikram, but today I was so tired that by the end, I staggered to the car and lay on the front seat for a good fifteen minutes before I had the strength to drive home. While lying there, I opened the windows and sunroof and had a great heart to heart with God and a lovely fir tree whose branches hung over my car. By the end, I was feeling better, so I thanked the tree (and God) for the lovely patterns the pine branches made and for the awesome smell they gave off.  I really feel like the tree and I bonded, and I am looking forward to parking under it the next time I go to Bikram.

(By now I seem really strange. Talking to trees, engaging in long distance magnet therapy, doing yoga…not that being a hippie is bad, but I am, for sure, not one. In real life I can generally be counted on to tow the Mormon party line.)

So anyway. Saturday–my favorite day. What did we do this Saturday?

Then we went to the farmer’s market where I bought corn, onions and some tomatoes. After that, we went to buy a birthday present for Lydia’s friend, Espen, a calendar full of green stuff for my college friend, Missi (she’s making a collage to help her through a v-bac), and Whole Foods for mussels, shrimp and squash. This month’sCook’sIllustrated really hit it out of the park for me in that I want to almost every single dish in the issue. Normally I am intrigued by one or two, but this issue was amazing: pasta puttanesca with fresh tomatoes! lemon ricotta pancakes! evenly cooked mussels! fresh peach pie! creamy cauliflower soup! What an issue!

After our outing, we came home and I collapsed (again) in bed. Abe set up Lydia on the iPad while he studied, and Mary very obligingly took a long nap. Here is Lydia engaged in her favorite activity:

We have to be at Espen’s birthday party in approximately five minutes, and I have yet to wrap the odd-shaped gift we got him. So I’ll stop blogging and go do that now.

So I think my last post indicated that I am undergoing a little crisis of confidence right now. I do not think I am suffering from clinical depression or anything like that, but I do have up days and down days…and today felt as close to an up day as I have had in a while!

But even up days always start with at least one mess:

And then I made Abe this for lunch. He, as usual, forgot to take it to work. Very handy of him, since the power went out this evening and I couldn’t cook dinner (Yay!).

And of course, what morning would be complete without a tantrum?

And then Misty, Sophia and Max came over for a play date.

And then our friends Cole and Candice came over. And then our friend Aria dropped off her son Espen for a little bit. It was a busy, kid-filled morning! I loved everyone who came over, but boy was I ready for Lydia and Mary to have some quiet time by the time 2 pm rolled around.

During their quiet time, one of my friends called to give me emotion code magnetic therapy over the phone. I happened to be complaining to her about how dissatisfied I am with basically everything I do, and she said she just happened to be in the certification process to do magnetic healings and would love to work with me. I thought, why not?–and gave it a shot. Now, I love my friend a lot, but I was (and remain) a little skeptical about how magnets can heal you (especially when you do it long distance by proxy, as we did). However, I will say this: my friend totally pinpointed when and what traumatic event continues to derail me, and she had no idea this had ever occurred to me. I rarely talk about this personal past to anyone, and there is no way she could have known the information she told me. She is LDS, so she does not define herself as a psychic, but I really felt like she was, at the very least, extremely inspired when she started telling me about my past trauma.

She also informed me that she had completely released the trauma from my energy field, and that I should feel noticeably lighter and brighter because of that. Regardless of whether the magnet worked or not, just hearing her confidently tell me that I should feel lighter and brighter made me feel…lighter and brighter! So hip hip hooray for new age-y therapy. And hurray for my dear friend, who exerted love and energy and healing prayers on my behalf today. I love her.

After the long distance magnet work, I rounded the girls up and took them and my sister-in-law’s cousin to Silver Lake in Big Cottonwood Canyon. The scenery was spectacular, and we saw TWO moose twenty feet from the trail! I was so upset that I did not have my camera.

After that, we dropped Balu off at his cricket team and came home to discover…there had been a wind storm and the power was out. So we ate leftover egg sandwich, ice cream and animal crackers for dinner.

Then it was bath time, book time, bedtime–and now blog time! (Did I mention we got fast internet for the first time in three years? Which makes blogging sooooooo much easier?)

So all in all, today was a good day. I still feel fat and maybe a little melancholy, but noticeably “lighter and brighter” than yesterday. Hooray for…magnets? 😉

Does any other mother out there feel consistently underwhelmed by her performance as a mom? Maybe the cyber world has me totally duped, or maybe this is just a particularly bad time for me (sick, jet-lagged, sad about my grandmother, PMS to top it all off), but man oh man, I feel like I must be the only mom on the planet who does NOT have it together!

Today, my kids had at least one meal that consisted ENTIRELY of graham crackers, lemon curd and water. I wish I could say today was an anomaly. The saddest thing? My kids (with the exception of Mary, who will not eat bananas), will eat anything. It appears I am just too lazy to feed them nutritious meals.

Today Lydia also watched hours–plural–of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood on my iPad. Again, I wish that today were an exception, except that it is totally not. I always have some good reason, e.g.: I need to clean the bathroom, I need to clean the bedroom, I need to clean the living room, I need to clean…you get the picture. Sad part number two: my house is not even that clean, and I clean it all the time. I just don’t get it, and I should either give up by now or be more demanding when I tell Abe I need a maid.

On the bright side, I took my girls to story time today. That was an accomplishment. I read books to my girls. That was an accomplishment. The girls listened to their Suzuki CDs during their graham cracker marathons. Another accomplishment. Lydia helped make the lemon curd–thus making it necessary for me to clean the kitchen for the SIXTH time today. Major accomplishment. I actually put on make-up and went out to dinner with the girls, my husband, and my in-laws.* A HUGE accomplishment.

*To understand just how noteworthy the make-up is, please note that a month ago my friend asked me what make-up I had and I produced…one solitary tube of moisturizer and some five-year old foundation that she instructed me to throw away. Oh, and I had some lip gloss from high school, along with another tube I used in college and some eyeliner I inherited from my mom. I had to leave all but the high school gloss in India because everything got covered in fleas, and so I finally bought new make-up upon returning to the States. (The high school gloss is still hanging out on one of Lydia’s bookshelves. I keep meaning to throw it away once I get around to cleaning her room, but that hasn’t happened in a month. You would think with all the iPad watching I would have made it to her room by now, wouldn’t you? I would have thought so, too.)

Anyways, even with ALL of those “accomplishments,”  I still feel kind of like I failed at being a mom today. I guess in my mind, to be a good mom I have to first lose 20 lbs, chase around my kids in high fashion wearing both make-up and heels, have every room of the house clean and picked-up all the time. For me, this feels impossible.

I’d love to end this blog on a positive or hopeful note, and I really feel like if I had ten more minutes, I could come up with some cheerful way to conclude and buoy my spirits. If I were not so tired, I bet I could clinch this ending in a  profound and funny (at the same time!) way. Sadly, Mary is crying and I need to go help my sweet husband calm her down. It seems that this is life right now.

I really want to be in Springfield, Illinois right now. That is where my grandmother is, and I have a feeling that I might not have much more time to hug my sweet grandma and tell her how much she means to me. But logistics…they are so complicated! And by logistics,  I mean these (adorable, ultra-loveable) two:

Although this picture looks calm, believe me, it would be a challenge to maintain any semblance of calm around my dear grandma if I trekked to Springfield with these little bundles of energy in tow. So here I am in Salt Lake, and there is nothing I want more right now than to give my grandmother a big hug.

Here’s my current wishlist: To give my grandma a hug, to tell my grandma how much she means to me, and to introduce my grandma to Mary, whom she has only met through Skype. (She met Lydia before we moved to Utah.) I mean, seriously, if this were your daughter, wouldn’t you want your grandma to meet her?

Since I can not have what I want, I guess I can still tell my grandma what she means to me. My mom promised to read her anything I wanted to write her, and so here goes:

Dear Grandma,

I know you are going to say when I tell you you are the world’s best grandma: You are going to ask me if I want a quarter. You always say that! And that’s part of why you are so wonderful. You just go about your quiet, good life without expecting any fanfare or attention.

When I was a child, I looked forward to every single visit at your house. I loved how the smell of freshly baked bread permeated every room, and how at the same time everything smelled so clean. Smelled? Everything WAS clean! Grandma, keeping things clean and tidy might appear to be merely a personality preference, but to a little girl who craved the atmosphere of your home, order felt like virtue. And I really believe that, at least in your circumstance, the two are fused together.

The order of your life always epitomized beauty and virtue to me. I loved the rhythm of life at your house: bread baking, fabric shopping and sewing, reading the comics together over homemade toast, swimming with you at the fancy hotel pool, doing all sorts of Abe Lincon-y stuff (it was Springfield, after all, and good prep for meeting my very own Abe!), practicing the piano at homes and churches you arranged just for my visit, eating canned beet salads with you on the back porch in the humid downstate air, reading late into the night on your sleeping porch, listening to Midwestern nighttime noises from my bed, daydreaming for hours upon hours because there was time.

So. much. time. There was always that luxury at your house. No matter how frantic or rushed or chaotic my life was elsewhere, with you I always felt like I had so much time, I could do crazy things like: spend an hour observing the branches and leaves on your backyard tree. Watch a million episodes of I Love Lucy and Bewitched (you had cable!!!!!!). Put together a jigsaw puzzle. Pick gooseberries from your bushes and then bake a pie with you.

Doesn’t it sound idyllic? Right now there’s a Norman Rockwell exhibit going on in Salt Lake, and I listened to some radio debate on whether his work is too idealistic to be respectable in contemporary circles of cynical snobs. Well, I wish I could have weighed in because I have an opinion, gosh darn it! I love his work because it resonates deeply with what I have experienced in my life with you.  I believe that aesthetic resonates with anyone acquainted with the life of an honest, kind, and deeply good soul. Your soul, for one perfectly specific example.

Grandma, right now I just want to wrap myself in that beautiful quilt you sewed me and, well, to be honest…I really want to cry. I want so badly to be with you, to hug you, to tell you so much more than you probably have energy to hear. But you will always be close to my heart and just as close to my thoughts. I know that this is not my last opportunity to tell you what is on my heart because I love you, you love me, and when a grandma is as good as you, she takes peeks from heaven to see what her grandchildren are thinking about. You will see how often I think about you, how much I am trying to be like you, and how I will continually remember you to my children.

Thank you for everything you have given me through your strength, your example and your goodness. Thank you for toiling over, praying for and raising my mother, who turned out to be an angel disguised as a normal person. Thank you for your love and for offering me periods of respite and refuge throughout my life. I know you will always be there for me, and I hope you will feel all of my love when my mom gives you this hug from me.

You make my life so beautiful. I love you, Grandma.