Apparently the holiday season has bound and gagged the Mombastic crew.  Where are we?  What are we doing?  Why are we so quiet?  Are we being held for ransom somewhere?  Are masked CIA interrogators removing our toenails and eyelashes one by one with a dull pair of tweezers?

(And why are they called “tweezers” plural?  Why not just tweezer?  Why wouldn’t we say, for example, “Would you go and get my tweezer so I can fish the dog hair out of the cake batter?”)   

I suspect that we all suffering from holiday paralysis.  I know that at our house, there are all kinds of new questions to answer in terms of the holidays, questions involving the 17-month-old whirlwind we call Benjamin.  The issues surrounding the 17-month-old are more complicated than the ones we dealt with last year with a 6-month-old who just laid there, limbs flailing adorably.  Question Number One: Will we bother with a Christmas tree?  Whenever the words Christmas Tree are mentioned, I am immediately struck dumb by visions of airborne and/or shattered ornaments.  And then I imagine myself yelling, “Timberrrrr!” as the tree at last succumbs to repeated pulling and yanking.   I often decide on No Tree.  And then I change my mind, because we *should* be able to teach him not to bother it.  If I follow my usual pattern, however, this indecisiveness will lead to complete inaction on the whole subject, which in the end will mean No Tree anyway.

The other questions have mostly been answered.  Will we get a lot of presents for Benjamin?  No.  I am taking full advantage of his inability to process the goings-on around him.  Will we get to see my parents for Christmas, even though they’re 500 miles away?  Yes, we will, and I’m so happy about that.  We won’t see them on the actual day, but we’ll see them the week after and have ANOTHER Christmas then.  Two Christmases!  Which means two Christmas dinners.  MMMMMmmmm! 

Above all, the question that I’ve been thinking about is: What do I want to accomplish this holiday season?  A successful holiday season for me used to mean that I had found fantastic, perfect gifts for everyone on our list, had given away X loaves of white chocolate cranberry bread, and had made some decadent and complicated desserts for the communal family Christmas dinner.  This year, though, I find myself feeling less focused on the trappings of the holiday season than I am on the importance and pleasure of spending time with family.  Several people have asked me what I want for Christmas, and in years past I might have come up with a few material things I needed or wanted.  But not this year.  I can’t come up with a single thing.  What I really, really want is to spend some time away from the office focusing solely on the people who are most important to me.  No rushing around, no stress, no deadlines.  Is that possible during the holiday season?  I’ll let you know.

What is most important to you this holiday season?  Has it changed for you as it has for me?

Today one of my 17 month old sons spent an inordinate amount of time making the largest spit bubbles I have ever seen–they rivaled some bubble gum bubbles I made as a kid. The child has the most viscous saliva known to humankind, and working on very little sleep I couldn’t stop laughing.

If I had to be up, at least I was entertained.

Above we have the happy family coming together to share thanks, a meal, love and all of the good stuff; I am fortunate to have that as well. Having it all at one house, however, is a completely different story. We have the in laws, we have my dad and stepmother, and we have my mother who is occasionally in town. We have the brother in law who needs to make arrangements with his wife’s family for holiday time as well; I am beginning to fear that my husband’s family will never be in one room together for the holidays again. I feel like I am the nexus of a giant juggling cosmos of people, pie and free time, and I wish I could go back to the days of childhood where we went to my grandmother’s house every year. Period. Instead we arrange for at least one dinner, dinners a few days in a row, andvirtually no free time for ourselves. I’m all for extra extended family time on free days, but as an introvert, I require recovery time as well that I no longer get.

Having children makes it exponentially more complicated; everyone loves the adults, but they are really there to snuggle the toddlers. Before we could alternate years with families, but now everyone wants to see the kids (can you blame them?) on every holiday and really I need to declare some boundaries. Everyone loves us as we love them, but I need to let them know we’re overextending ourselves. Easier said than done.

How does everyone else arrange family time? Has it changed with the arrival of children? If I wore a flashy corsage like the lady in the print above, would my problems magically evaporate? No really, could it? Pretty please?

Image is from McCall’s magazine, circa 1939 Read more »

Grace is the sister of a dear friend of mine, Liza, who has also tested positive for the Breast Cancer Gene. Grace is electing to go through double mastectomy.

What would you do if you tested positive for this gene?

I just read my last post again and noticed that it did not even mention anything about Momhood in it.  I find that interesting!  But it fits right in with my latest campaign, which is entitled “Mama Matters Too.”

Now that I have a 16-month-old whose independence is increasing daily, I am feeling ready to take a little time for Me.  While I loved (almost) every single moment of the selflessness that was required in the first year of Benjamin’s life, I feel ready to bring a little of the Old Anne back.  What does that mean, exactly?  I’m not sure.  I recently tried to reintroduce myself to Old Anne to find out what she wants to do. 

New Anne: So, you’ve been quiet for awhile.  What do you feel like doing?

Old Anne: I don’t know.  What can we do, given the framework of this new arrangement? 

NA: Whatever you want.  How about yoga?

OA: Do you mean a class?  *sigh* I’m not looking like I used to in those tight yoga clothes.  I know it’s really shallow of me, but I can’t face those people until I lose another ten pounds.  Is there an activity we could do where they wear flowy dresses, or tunics at least?

NA:  I’m not sure.  We need to get in shape though.  Do you want to try doing one of the exercise videos we have here at home?

OA:  Not really.  We just worked a nine hour day, made dinner, gave Benjamin a bath, and got him in bed.  Couldn’t we just sit on the couch for awhile until it’s time to go and lie down in bed?

NA: That does sound good.  But just think for a minute…we could do other things besides exercise.  Do you want to maybe take an art class on Saturday afternoons?  Pottery, maybe?  Stained glass?  Or how about a meditation class?  You’ve always wanted to do that.

OA: Hmmm….*yawn*  I don’t know.  I hate to take time on the weekend away from the family since we work all week.  Can we talk about this tomorrow?  (ZZZzzzzzz…)

I’m now facing what I had heard moms talk about before I was one…how do you make time for the You that you were before kids?  I don’t expect or even want the kind of time for myself that I had before, but it would be nice to find the time to do something that integrates the things that I once found enjoyable.  

Friends: Don’t see them much. 
Exercise: Rarely. 
Dates With My Husband: Huh? 
Movies:  See above.

Have you found a way to honor the before-baby You?

The details change, but the main content of the dream is always the same.

I am in college.  Sometimes I’m an undergrad, sometimes I’m in grad school.  It is usually just about time for midterm exams.  I am often sitting serenely on my bed surrounded by books when I have a sudden, sickening realization: I have signed up for a class that I have never once attended.  It is always a class that would’ve been difficult for me in real life - organic chemistry, physics, statistics - something of that ilk.  Never Modern American Literature, or Spanish 101 - no, no, nothing that I could just fudge my way through.

The nausea continues as I try to calculate my best plan of action.   I don’t even have books!  Where does the class meet, and how often?  I search frantically for my original schedule and cannot find it.   Even if I knew when and where the class met, how will I catch up?  It’s impossible.  I’m doomed.  I can’t drop the class and get the money back because it’s too late.  I’m going to fail the class - at the very least, get an incomplete - and I’ve wasted a considerable amount of money.  How will I tell my parents?  What will this do to my grade point average?  OH, THE HUMILIATING SHAME OF IT ALL.

What interests me about this dream is that all of my school experiences from grade school on were largely non-stressful.   That last semester of grad school was a real pickle, sure, but whose wasn’t?  Other than that last semester and the accompanying psychosomatic illnesses it brought on, I found school to be…don’t hate me for this…FUN. 

Every fall, I still get the urge to register for classes and go to buy books.  Driving through either of the local university campuses here during this time of year sends a shiver down my decidedly nerdy spine.  How I envy those students their backpacks and course packs, their hours sitting quietly in the library in the company of a pile of books, their freedom to wile away hours in the student union drinking coffee whilst contemplating the central theme of their next cultural anthropology paper.

The dream didn’t start until after college was over, so perhaps it is less a statement about getting an incomplete in college than it is some subconscious anxiety about getting an incomplete in Life.  Maybe the message is that there is so much left for me to learn that I need to focus on the areas of my own development that I’ve neglected.  Perhaps the vast empty spaces in my brain are clamoring for me to fill them with knowledge. 

 Or - just a thought - maybe I should quit drinking caffeine in the afternoon.  Hmph.

What is your sleeping (or waking) brain telling you about your own life?  Are you listening?

I woke up this morning with most of my voice gone–I can only speak in a deep two-packs-a-day kind of way, and even that is painful. I tried calling to my children, and they gave me suspicious looks, but when I stopped talking and just started smiling they came up to me for hugs and such. That little piece of interaction really made me think about how much I speak with them, and in turn how much of my parents’ parenting involved raised voices. I try to get by on discipline with no more than a firm, stern voice and facial expressions (they are only 16 months, after all), but today I’m not sure I could manage that. It makes me wonder if I ever need to raise my voice with them at all, as my parents often did. Am I being monumentally oversensitive, or is repetitive yelling at a child somehow demeaning to both parties? If my child is in the road and a car is coming, you’d better believe I’ll get loud to warn them, but in a general sense, what place does a raised voice have in interacting with children? I don’t get to yell at my friends or colleagues, but I’m not in a place to discipline them, either. I’m not a spanker, but I wonder if if I’m taking this idea of voice too far–or not far enough.

We’re standing in the kitchen together, gazing at two black-and-white picture strips of me and The Boy that were taken in a photo booth at our local mall.

“I forget how small he looks next to someone big.”

“I know.  He really does look small.  It’s probably because I have such a big bucket head.”

“You don’t have a bucket head.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Buckets have handles.”