"I'll be your mirror"

March 24th,2013

Hey Winifred

Sometimes I hear a song, it reminds me of you.

The Velvet Underground and Nico, "I'll be your mirror":

I’ll be your mirror 
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know 
I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset 
The light on your door to show that you’re home 

When you think the night has seen your mind 
That inside you’re twisted and unkind 
Let me stand to show that you are blind 
Please put down your hands 
'Cause I see you 

I find it hard to believe you don’t know 
The beauty that you are 
But if you don’t let me be your eyes 
A hand in your darkness, so you won’t be afraid 

When you think the night has seen your mind 
That inside you’re twisted and unkind 
Let me stand to show that you are blind 
Please put down your hands 
'Cause I see you 

I’ll be your mirror

Kicking like that one guy who kicks stuff

March 22, 2013

Hey Winifred

This morning (afternoon) I woke up promptly at 12:30 PM. I like to sleep in, O.K.? I have no where to be as I am presently blissfully unemployed (other than, you know, making you), and only have class one day a week (Thursdays for 3-6 hours). Your Dad makes it possible for me to stay home and grow a baby/keep up with the house. Mostly I fail pretty hard on that last front - your production tends to keep me pretty tired (oh, and there is also the devilish invention of Facebook/the whole internet - the former of which might be not a thing by the time you read this). I have both procrastination and preoccupation issues - I imagine this is something you will come to know about me on your own; which brings me to our morning.

I woke up with the full intention of eating breakfast (I always do), but first I had to feed the cats, let the dogs out into the yard for a potty break, and make the flipping breakfast. 

One quick aside - in your baking process, you decided it would be a good idea to make your placenta a kind of hidey-hole (I don’t blame you, seems like a sound plan). Its got a medical term called “anterior placenta” - basically, your placenta junk is in the front and not the back. This is common and happens to lots of ladies when they are making tiny people, but it makes it so I can’t feel you squirming around as much as those who have their placenta junk growing posteriorly. Sometimes it worries me because I feel like you aren’t there. But then other times, like this morning/afternoon, you remind me that not only are you there, you are a freaking Hulk baby (you’ll know all about the Hulk). You like to make yourself most known when you are hungry/when I am hungry - as in, “OMG. BABY HULK SMASH! FEED MY FACE WOMAN!” 

This morning, you must have been extra hungry because you were trying to kick a hole through my uterus so you could come out and make the oatmeal yourself. You continued to do so from the time I got out of bed until I had eaten every last bite of my cinnamon oatmeal with walnuts, raisins, and flax milk, english muffin with hazelnut spread, and glass of orange juice (note: this is a good breakfast - sometimes we eat things that are much less good for us). 

After we ate, you promptly went back to being hidey-hole baby - I probably won’t feel you again for the rest of the day as I tend to keep myself pretty well food-ed whilst I am awake. As powerful and Hulk-like as your little feet are at times, its pretty awesome when you are kicking the shit out of me. I hope that soon I am able to feel your Hulk feet on a more constant basis.

P.S. - (P.S.? Yeah, sure. We’ll go with it. ) Like I said, I am a chronic procrastinator. I really should be cleaning the house/running errands presently. But, I thought talking to you seemed like it would be more fun. I should go now.. really… people are coming over later and there is cat hair almost everywhere. 

This isn’t what we had this morning, but its another example of a kick-ass (kick-uterus?) breakfast. (That’s soy sausage - I’m sure by now you know it’s delicious and your parents would never eat the real stuff).

Love,

Mom

Oh, by the way

March 16, 2013

Hey Winifred

I have no idea where that essay of your Nana’s is now. I saved it. Its somewhere in our house.

Your mom is kind of a f*ck up in that way. 

Digging up old things in the closet under the stairs

March 16, 2013

Hey Winifred

About 4 years ago I was helping your Nana (my mom) and Papaw (my dad) clean out the space underneath the basement staircase at their house. There was quite a lot of junk under there - junk that had accumulated over the course of the 30 or so years they had lived together in that house. Most of it was just junk - old toys that once belonged to your Uncle and me, unused holiday decorations, and stacks of Papaw’s old fishing magazines. However, the further we got into the back of the closet, the stuff we began to uncover became older and older. We found some of Papaw’s high school football equipment and some of Nana’s old text books from nursing school.

And it was in a stack of those old books that I found it - an essay your Nana had written during her first year of nursing school about why she wanted to be a nurse. It was hand written in cursive - it looked like the handwriting I knew her to have, but somehow different. It was more loopy, more fluid, more legible. Mom wanted to throw it away. She said she remembered writing it and remembered how much she hated it (she always talks about how she hated writing essays in school). I immediately read it (it was about 2 or 3 pages long) and was also immediately fascinated by it. For me, it was like a kind of time capsule - I was getting a glimpse into my mother’s brain when she was around the same age as me. Even though it was something so arbitrary as an assigned essay, it gave me a window into my mom’s reasons for getting into nursing in the first place. It was the same reason I got into social work. Its cliche, yes, and it is the generic answer of almost every helping professional for why they get in to the field to begin with, but it’s overused because its so true - we really do want to help people. 

That essay (which I did not throw away) gave me something valuable that I never would have had if I had not volunteered to help mom and dad clean out that closet. It gave me more insight into my mom - a person who I loved deeply, but who I’d never really thought of as anything more than my mom. Yes, I knew she was at one point younger, and thinner, and dated and played sports, and liked school, and helped out a lot in raising her younger siblings, and a myriad of other trivial facts. It is one thing to know those things, it is another to have all of those things immediately conceptualized in just a few moments of reading over a couple pages she actually wrote when she was doing and being all of those things. 

So kid, that kind of brings me to the point of what I am trying to do right now by typing all this up. I don’t want you to have to go digging in a pile of junk to have that same experience - Someday, I want you to be able to view me (and maybe even your Dad) as people - not just as Mom and Dad. Yes, we are those things, and for you, we will always be those things, but we existed before you did. We had interests (mostly geeky), habits (mostly bad), and even aspirations (mostly to be happy and continuously awesome). You are going to be a great person. We will be better people because of you. We will all be freaking awesome together. If you ever get around to reading this, I hope you have the same thought I had when I found that essay, “Holy shit, my mom was/is a real person, and she was/is pretty flippin’ awesome.”