Contentment

It was unseasonably warm - hot, really - and the kids ran through the sprinkler, smeared with sunblock and laughing over the sound of the running water. The dog chased a tennis ball, occasionally running through the path of the sprinkler just in time to avoid being doused himself.

The screen door slammed, and my son burst into the kitchen, asking for a peanut butter sandwich.

"Supper will be ready soon," I said mildly, slicing zucchini and yellow squash on the wooden cutting board.

"But I'm hungry," he protested. I gestured to the table, indicating the snack mix sitting there, and told him he could help himself. I handed him flatware from the kitchen drawer, asking him to place the forks and knives by the plates I'd already set on the table.

Munching snack mix, he agreeably did as he was asked.

Mustard, ketchup, sliced pickles...corn waiting to be heated...zucchini and yellow squash sauteeing in a pan with some olive oil.

The smell of hamburgers wafted into the kitchen as my husband slid open the screen door and stepped into the house carrying a half-empty glass of Summer Shandy.

"Will supper be ready soon?" my son asked.

"Yes, in just a few minutes," I told him.

"Then I think I'll go swing." He fixed me with a grin and ran back outside, again pulling the screen door shut with a clatter. I walked to the door and looked out, watching him pump his legs to sail higher and higher, the grass a rich green beneath his feet and the sky bright, cloudless blue behind him. His toes seemed to reach to the tops of the ash and oak trees, and then he stopped, jumping from his perch to run inside just as his daddy slid the last of the burgers onto a plate.

One of THOSE days...

I burned my hand.

I made a cake, a beautiful cake using vodka and Kahlua, and it smells like warm heaven.

The hot pad slipped when I was pulling it out of the oven, and I have two burns on the palm of my right hand. It stings, and I'm a big baby. It's also hard to type when one's hand is wrapped in bandages.

No, I did not consume any of the vodka before pouring it into the batter.

No, not the Kahlua either.

Now, perhaps, would be a good time for that drink.

It's a Space Age Grandson!

My older daughter had her ultrasound today, at eighteen weeks of pregnancy.

"There's no doubt," she said breathlessly afterward. "It's clear. We have pictures. It's a boy!"

The Space Age Grandson is expected to make his appearance the second week of September or so.

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen

Choose a city in a country other than your own, and tell us why you would like to visit there.

That was the blogroll topic this week. Despite the fact that it was I who came up with this theme, I was stumped on the subject of my own entry.

Would I go to Greece - Athens, perhaps? Corinth? Would I sail the Mediterranean and bake in the hot Greek sun and eat lamb and stuffed grape leaves? Would I choose Paris, with its laundry list of cliches: because I wanted to see the Eiffel tower, eat cheese, and buy hats? Would I go to London? Glasgow? Dublin? I could go to Oslo or Stockholm and see the countries from which my roots sprang, or I could see the mountains from Salzburg or the beautiful architecture of St. Petersburg. Perhaps I'd leave Europe altogether and head to Christchurch or Wellington or Sydney or Brisbane.

In truth, I would gladly visit any of these cities - all of these cities.

The other day, I watched Hans Christian Andersen with my daughter, a favorite movie starring Danny Kaye, one I'd seen many times already.

That's it! I thought later. I'll go to Denmark and visit wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. I'll go in the summertime so that I can attend the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. I'll bike along the island and lie on the beach. I'll have my picture taken in front of the Charity Fountain, and I'll spend days prowling museums and admiring architecture and trying to lose myself in the history of the centuries-old city. I'll recreate scene after scene in my head, daydreaming my way along well-worn streets, and when I've had enough, I'll cross the bridge over the Sound and continue my tour in Sweden.

Some day, maybe. Some day.

Sad

My girl left me a text message earlier. We had talked on the phone this evening, and some time afterward, she sent me the message. She wants her Mama.

She hurts.

I hurt.

We are separated by some 1500 miles, and while she is halfway through her first pregnancy and in the midst of planning her wedding, I am much too far away. She wants to share these experiences with me. She wants me there.

And I want to be.

How could I not? She's my baby. Her message was anguished, and I felt it acutely. We talk all the time, but it's not the same. It will never be the same. It hurts like hell to have one foot in Idaho and one foot in Minnesota.

New Story At The Writer's Block

I've joined a fiction writers' blogroll, forcing me to hit the keyboard a little more often for the made-up stuff. The elements to be present in this week's assignment were a blue car, a man named Dominic, a clock, and 2:00, AM or PM.

Check out my new story posted at Writer's Block, and click on the blogroll links to read the other stories as well!

Baby Update!

The Space Age Grandchild is well on his or her way now. My daughter had a doctor's appointment today - she's almost 16 weeks and has lost another pound, but as she put it, is "expanding in all the right places." The baby's heartbeat was 160-ish. The old wives' tales will tell you this is a girl, but I'm an old wife, and I'm not sure I believe the tales.

This Gramma business looms ever closer. It's really a baby!

They say they can make dreams come true...

And maybe that's a little bit true.

We went to Disney World last week. It was a Space Age family reunion, including my parents, my siblings, and their families. I had once visited Epcot many years ago, for just a couple of hours at the tail end of a business trip. I had never explored fully, nor had I ever been where dreams are supposed to come true: the Magic Kingdom.

I'm over forty. I wondered if the magic would still work for me. It's just princesses and cartoons and silly roller coasters...or is it?

Though I will never see the Magic Kingdom as a child, I did get to experience it through the eyes of four children - two of my own, and two of my nieces. I had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of soaring through the skies and space next to my own father, just as we might have thirty years ago when I was still just a kid.

We flew on magic carpets, roared through mountains, sang with pirates, and rocketed beyond the stratosphere. We found volcanoes and singing birds and dancing horses and glittering carriages. We walked on stones trod by millions before us, their collective history making real what our own eyes saw.

Somehow, it worked. If there is such a thing as pixie dust, it drifted above and around us for that one week. I'm left now to wonder if my original family - scattered to the winds once again, living our own lives - will ever be together in such a way. Maybe we will, and for that I can hope.

For now, I have warm and balmy memories of a few days spent suspended in a magical time warp that dissolved the barriers of time and distance. We are lucky, and even better: we know we are lucky.

Some dreams do come true.

The moving finger writes...

...and time marches on. Or something like that. I'm mixing my poems and axioms.

Age will do that to you.

I've often written about my parenting exploits. I've been a mother for almost exactly half my life, and nearly all of my adult life. Much of my identity is tied up in the apron strings of motherhood. "Mother" is a title I'm happy and comfortable with.

I'm about to get a new title. A new and unfamiliar title, heretofore reserved only for women of another generation, women older and wiser and even more motherly than I. Women like my mother and her mother, whose ranks I am about to join.

"Grandma."

The word looks suddenly odd to me.

When I think of Grandma, I think of my own Grammas, women born very early in the 20th century, women who had gray hair before I knew them, comfortable women who wore dresses and tiny curls in their hair, who knew all sorts of history before it was history. I'm stuck on that. Those are grandmothers. I'm only a mother.

A mother whose daughter is about to become a mother.

From where I sit, her becoming a mother is even more surreal than my becoming a grandmother. My baby? The darling toddler who sat on a dark-stained wooden chair in front of the washer and dryer, waiting for her cloth doll to be freshly laundered? That little girl with the blonde curls cascading down her back, wearing a blue denim jumper and little white Mary Janes?

When on earth did she get old enough to have a baby?

*sigh*

I don't remember.

She'll be 21 when the baby comes. She lives in a townhouse with her significant other, her intended, and it's there they will bring home their baby. He works and she works, and they buy groceries and keep house and cook. They aren't children, but they seem so young.

I was just shy of 21 when she was born. I don't think I felt as young as she seems. How our perceptions change. Twenty-one years ago this month, I donned my first maternity blouse, awaiting the day when my baby would come.

Now, full circle, we wait for hers.

I Lied

Okay, well, I didn't lie.

I changed my mind.

I'm back.

It was hamburger and onions that brought me back, rereading an old entry inspired by a thread on a forum I visit. Hamburger and onions and kidisms and Dean Martin and a feeling that something's not quite with out practicing Space Age Housewifery.

Right now I'm relaxing with a nostalgic candle scent in every room and recapturing that elusively comforting autumn ambience that is the essence of October.

You don't have to welcome me back. You might say "I told you so," and that would be all right. It's better than lying the couch with my feet up playing Bubble Breaker and wishing there were something to say over a slice of pumpkin pie and a late-night decaf coffee.

Good night for now. I hope it rains tomorrow, so I can feel guiltless about making leaf-shaped cookies and hot cocoa with real chocolate marshmallows.

Goodbye...

The time has come for me to close up shop here at this version of The Space Age Housewife. These pages have served their purpose for me. I'm not going to delete the blog or its archives, but I will no longer be posting here.

If you are still interested in the midlife crisis of a Space Age Housewife, you can find me at my new location: Space Age Housewife.

I have also created a new blog, a place I'd like to use for writing fiction, essays, articles, and whatever else comes to my brain. You can find it at Writer's Block.

Thank you for reading.

Yeah, it's a mid-life crisis!

Turning forty was fine for me.

Okay, well, there was a little anxiety.

A little.

I decided to be thirty-ten for a while, but after only a few hours, it had gotten old. It wasn't cute. Neither was I.

Still, it was fine and not too troubling. Inside I still felt twenty, so what difference did it make?

That was before my daughter's twentieth birthday began looming. It's still more than two months away, but I find myself flashing back more often to my pregnancy with her, the unusual warmth of that spring, and my own innocent youth.

I've occasionally struggled with the idea that I am my mother's age (isn't she 40? 38? Something like that), but this is the first time I have struggled with the idea that I am my daughter's age. Those who say that age is "just a number" are partially right. Age is also in the perception. Old is relative. We all know the old saw - you're only as old as you feel. How do we perceive ourselves? How do I perceive myself?

I find it odd and fascinating that I can consider myself a peer to both my daughter and my mother when 48 years separate the two of them. Perhaps that's what they mean by "sandwich generation." I can relate to Kayla; I can relate to Mom. I feel the experiences of both and can nod and smile and say, "I know just what you mean."

This feeling is not unwelcome. I'm glad to know there are still new feelings to explore, that the dusty past can become new again seen through someone else's eyes. How, though, to reconcile that my oldest, my first baby, is about to leave her teens? She has her own life, her own chapters to write, her own feelings to explore and sort. She has dreams, beautiful, blue-skied dreams, and my only dream for her is that she's happy.

No one has ever been able to adequately define a mid-life crisis for me, and I've thought fleetingly in recent years that I was having one. I wasn't. I am now. I no longer need others' definitions, because I'm grappling with the bewilderment of mid-life right now, myself, trying to figure out where I fit in.

Mom turned sixty-eight yesterday. Kayla's careering toward twenty. Somewhere in between, I'm still the middle child.

Ever had a roommate?

I wrote this as an exercise on a message board, and it's all too, too true:

Dear Former Roommate:

You know, it's been almost 22 years, and I'm still a little angry with you. Maybe a lot angry. Maybe I should get over it, but the way you treated me and my belongings was horrendous, and I hope you have managed to grow up and learn some responsibility since then.

That jewelry you took with you when did the fly-by-night move? That was mine. You know - the earrings and necklaces that were in my jewlery box on my dresser in my bedroom. I know, I know. They weren't labelled as mine, but I had thought perhaps the location might give a clue to ownership.

Remember the rent? That monthly charge for living in the apartment that you never paid? The one-third that I kept covering, along with my own one-third, because you hadn't been "able" to find a job yet? Can I get that back yet? You did, after all, set up that complex repayment plan so I'd be sure to know you fully intended to make good on taking advantage of my stupidity generosity in paying your share. Just to show you what a stand-up woman I am, I'll forgive the grocery debt. I didn't really want to eat the food I bought anyway. It was just for looks.

The new outfit, though. That really hurt. I had my first credit card - a Dayton's store charge - and I had bought a perfect pair of jeans and a gorgeous purple sweater. When I brought them home from the store, you wanted to know if you could borrow the outfit. Never mind that you were one jeans size bigger than I was, and that you wore a D-cup bra as opposed to my A-cup and therefore would have stretched out my new sweater. Never mind that I hadn't even worn my new clothes yet. You wanted to borrow the outfit, and I said no.

I should have guessed when I left for the evening that you would have just gone ahead and taken the clothes anyway. I should have known, so I suppose it was my fault that you stole my jeans and my sweater. It certainly wasn't my fault, however, that you decided you didn't like your date after all and thought that crying "rape" would be a good way to get attention. That you admitted to me that that's what you had done was unbelievably insensitive and offensive, considering you knew that I'd been an actual victim of such a crime just a few years earlier.

When you told me the police had taken the clothes as evidence, I know I exploded. And you deserved it. "I didn't think you'd mind," you said about "borrowing" my clothes. Didn't think I'd mind? Didn't think I'd mind? I specifically told you not to take my clothes. How could think I wouldn't mind.

Your night flight wasn't long after that. I suppose you "didn't think I'd mind" about your taking my jewelry either.

You don't know this, but I went to the police station to recover my new clothes. Because I was not the one who signed the paperwork as the owner, the police would not release my property to me. I couldn't prove that it WAS my property. Your false rape case went nowhere, you disappeared, and I never, ever got those clothes back. They were my first purchase on my first charge card, and when the bill came later, I was bitter over writing out the check for a sweater and jeans I could never wear.

But it's not thanks for nothing, old roommate. I learned more life lessons from a few months sharing an apartment with you than I could ever have thought possible. That venerable old teacher Experience surely did sock it to me, didn't She?

'Bye.

Who am I?

For years, I was a WOHM.

For years, I was a SAHM.

Now I have a job again, and I've gone to M-F noon to 3, with the occasional Saturday thrown in. That makes at least 15 hours a week, putting me solidly in the part-time arena.

So does that make me a PTWOHM? But if I'm a PTWOHM, and I also spend many hours each week at home or school doing SAHM stuff, does that make me a PTSAHM?

I seem to recall that one of the "rules" is that you can't work AND be a SAHM, so while there might be a designation for PTWOHM, indicating that she does not work full-time, there can be no designation for PTSAHM.

Now, if I calculate the number of hours spent at home, school, and children's activities, and they overwhelm the number of hours I am at work, am I a SAHM or a WOHM. Whoops, no, there again is the rule that any amount of work negates the SAHM label.

Does it change if I can bring my children to work with me? I work during the hours that Space Age daughter is normally in school, but it's after Space Age son's school hours, so he comes with me.

Does that make me a SAHM? No, because we're not at home. Does it make me a SAWM (stay-at-work mom?)? Does it make Space Age Son a WOHS (work-out-of-home son?)?

Maybe I am a PTSAHWOHM?

:)


(As a note, I really don't want or expect answers to my questions - this was just a bit of fluff meant to poke fun at the labels we often insist on giving ourselves and how, unlike men, our identities seem to be wrapped up in parenting vs. working, as though somehow the two were mutually exclusive.)

We interrupt this program for an important message

It goes without saying that what I miss most about Minnesota is proximity to my family, the important people who helped shape my life and love me no matter what.

I must admit, however, that there is something else from Minnesota that I miss with a startling amount of regularity. I want some right now. I want Old Dutch potato chips. And some French onion dip. And a Dad's root beer in a glass bottle.

I don't want much. Just Old Dutch.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Happy New Year

Strange days it's been recently.

December was busy - we threw a party, the oldest Space Age daughter visited for a week, we traveled over Christmas, and we spent three days in a row feasting and celebrating with large crowds of people. There was no one quiet, moving moment, no tiny break in the action when I could allow myself to be washed over with peacefulness, if even for a minute.

I'm going to try to take that minute tonight, somehow, at some moment.

The Space Age husband is spending the afternoon cleaning the garage. It's his mental cleansing time, his fresh start for the new year, his way of feeling organized and grounded and strengthened for new challenges.

The Space Age children are playing with puzzles upstairs. All they want to know is when we will break out the rootbeer and potato chips for their New Year's celebration - for them, we do the countdown a few hours earlier than the calendar change actually takes place.

Me? I'm cleaning. I need that fresh start feeling too. So many pressures and stresses have been weighing on my brain. I wasn't able to enjoy the Christmas season as fully and wholeheartedly as I would have liked. I've made a new resolve to work more on my own physical and mental health and my own peace of mind. My husband must have sensed this - two of my Santa gifts this year were jigsaw puzzles. It was his way of saying, "Take some time for yourself."

Cleaning helps. I'm putting away most of the Christmas decor, though I'll leave up some remnants of festivity until the Ephiphany. I like a clean house for New Year's. Later, when our work is done, we'll make some fondue, open a bottle of wine, give the kids their treats, and celebrate the new year with music and games and enjoying each other's company. I will try to grab that moment of peacefulness my mind and heart are craving.

To you and to yours, my best wishes for a peaceful, prosperous, and very happy New Year.

Seven

The middle Space Age child turned seven yesterday.

Seven!

When time speeds by at a dizzying blur, and the baby with the side part and the plastic barrettes, just learning to sit up, is suddenly a first-grader with three missing teeth and a stack of books to read. That's age seven.

She spent the day making bead crafts, coloring, and decorating her own birthday cake (it was chocolate with chocolate frosting, pink sprinkles, and tiny colored marshmallows). She chose spaghetti with salad for her birthday supper and afterward we had huge squares of cake with cookies and cream ice cream.

I never tire of looking at her face. It's a small face, tiny-featured, delicate and expressive. Her eyes seem older than seven; behind their guileless innocence lies a gentle wisdom. My chubby baby has grown into a tall and gangly girl with enough love and caring to embrace the world.

She is beautiful in so many ways. And she is seven.

Space Age Progeny...

It's been too long since my last updates - busy season, anyone? - but I'm going to recommit to the Spage Age Blog.

A bit of a small start here, after a week traveling for Christmas. This is the oldest Spage Age daughter, the apple of my eye, and me, on Christmas Eve...

Don't Forget to VOTE!

It's Election Day in the United States. Don't forget to exercise your right to make your voice heard: Vote!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween to all who celebrate!

I'm looking forward to ham soup for supper, trick-or-treat, then some warm cider with kettle corn and apples while we watch "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!"

Stay warm and be careful.