...Came a Bubbling Pool

I woke up this morning with a bubbling, hot pool of magma sitting right behind my sternum.  No, it was not indigestion, but rather the epicenter of hormonal insanity brewing and bubbling itself into volcanic proportions.  A smart woman would have gone back to bed, but I nurtured this lava in my chest by feeding it coffee.  Half a cup in and I was sweating through my shirt while doing a crossword puzzle.  I am not talking about glistening or glowing or perspiring, I am talking full on sweat.  Sadly, I don’t even sweat like this when I work out.  The news annoyed me, nothing tasted good to eat so I ate a lot of nothing that tasted good and I sweated.  The boy came downstairs and started his incessant plea for video anything but I made him eat first and sit with me while I sweated at the table.  He is too young to recognize the signs of Mom about to go crazy and kept poking me with the video stick.   Bill wisely retreats when I say that I feel hot inside and the girls recognize and understand the signs and keep small.  Not the boy.  Poke, poke, and poke.  Thirty minutes later we were having it out over Plants vs. Zombies and he stomped upstairs and I stomped downstairs accomplishing my mission to share the lava-like anger inside. 

KRAKATOA! (yes, Spongebob reference)

I am at this wonderful stage in my life where my body that has wanted to make babies for the last twenty plus years is now slowing shutting down the baby making machinery.  What a mess of hormones this turns out to be!  Did you know that this whole heading towards menopause can take upwards of ten years or so? Decade of fun!   Perimenopause they call it.  Peri – makes it sound flowery, delightful, quiet and soft.  No.   It is hot lava behind your chest, it is crying HUGE wet tears at commercials on TV, and it is like feeling like you have the rest of your life and no time left at all at the exact same minute.  It is shedding the hair on your head like a dog while growing it in new places all over your face.   It is flying into a rage over something small and apologizing profusely the next minute.  It is working out like a fiend and then having to stretch just to take the garbage out the next day.  It is a mess.  A hot, hot mess.

I figure that at forty, I am probably down to ten viable eggs and every time one is released, I know it.  I am bringing my A game on a Wednesday night because my body is screaming “THAT’S IT, WE ARE DOWN TO NINE GOOD EGGS!”   These eggs are also competitive: they find it necessary to compete with young women in my house and there is no rhyme or reason or pattern to craziness like there used to be.  I am afraid I am going to wind up being one of those women on the hormone replacement commercials that they only show between 5 and 7am and not care that I am one of those women on the hormone replacement commercials.

 

I should have known something was amiss in the dollar spot at Target yesterday when the plethora of Hello Kitty started a rant inside that wouldn’t stop.  I don’t understand Hello Kitty: is she a cartoon or anime or the gateway drug to anime?  Usually I don’t give her much thought at all but this time I was hopped up and starting to get hot inside. I seriously could have punched something I felt so annoyed by being surrounded by that stupid somewhat cat face. Which, by the way, is missing eyes or a nose or something INTEGRAL to a face.

I did go and work out and that helped, but the kids came with me and that did not help.  And now I am sore from working out so I need to stretch.  And then as long as I am already on the floor, I will curl up in the fetal position and weep while declaring that really, nothing is wrong.  Good times, good times.

The Dodgy Side

We live in a lovely, tree-lined neighborhood.  Houses are well kept, fences maintain our privacy and there is even greenbelt areas sprinkled throughout the houses.  There is an award winning school in the middle of the neighborhood and a large community pool at the entrance.  Lovely, yes?  One would think.  Lovely for those who get to use such services, ("The Others"), but a matter of whaththeheck for the rest of us, i.e. those of Us on the dodgy side.

Dodgy.  100% dodgy.

When we built our house, we were fresh off of selling our Frisco home for a loss and you would have thought we spent more time researching the area but we did not.  "Ooh" we said.  "Look at all the trees!" we said.  And we bought.  We drove by an elementary school so of course that is where our children would go.  It was not even a half mile from our home, so we could walk, right?  Wrong.  Due to gerrymandering, or what I like to call money changing hands, our house and those that followed would go to a different school district.  Our children would not walk a half mile to school; they would be bused four miles away.  There are houses in the neighborhood where the district line actually cuts through the house and makes for all sorts of confusion where the kids should go to school.  I would like to know what kind of tequila-soaked, cigar smoking night that line drawing followed.  I used to be pretty upset about the whole school issue, but over time have realized it is a blessing that my kids are where they are.  The girls are rock stars, the boy gets the help he needs and we have all met great friends.  Score one for the dodgy side!

Next up, the pool.  Apparently when our houses were being built, our builder did not want them to be part of the rest of the neighborhood's HOA.  I am led to believe that our builder was a giant jackass about not being part of it and The Other's HOA people left with a disdain for not only him, but the section of houses he was building.  Our salesperson told us when buying the house that she was certain we could join the large HOA if we wanted to and of course use the pool.  She lied.  Forays made to The Others about such a matter were shot down immediately with scorn and derisive laughter.  Alright, we don't need your HOA.  We will make friends with some of The Others and join them as they partake in your precious pool.  And we have.  We spend more time in that pool than some members, I am sure.  We are befouling it with our dodgy side germs.  You can gate us out, but we are wily, sneaky creatures, we will find our way in.  Score two for the dodgy side!  

Other things that do not make it over onto the dodgy side include utilities and governmental improvements.  Yes, we have electricity and running water but we do not get AT&T U-verse.  I kid you not when I say it stops, actually stops, two doors down.  You will know exactly where if you are driving because you will feel your car go da-dunk as it lowers onto the pavement on our side.  Why? Well, when road crews came through to repave a few years ago, they stopped exactly two doors down.  My friends among The Others like to joke that a big iron gate comes down when the sun goes down to keep Us in and protect The Others at night.  They also like to laugh that our garbage can has "Shits" spray-canned down the side of it.  That is how it was dropped off to us in our brand new home.  Shits.  I am sure that would have been an immediate source of fining over with The Others.  We pay the same ridiculous taxes as The Others and yet are treated like the communist bloc by the government.  

With summer upon us, I was weary of my children the other night and said "go play outside."  I was met with derisive laughter and scorn.  All over this neighborhood, kids are playing outside: they are kicking the can or riding bikes or playing catch in the street.  Except on the dodgy side.  I sent the kids on a reconnaissance mission last night to be sure and they confirmed that not one child was seen playing outside.  It is not that hot so I can't understand why.  It is summer!  Kids should come back at twilight smelling like Off!, with sweaty heads, skinned knees and fresh mosquito bites.  Our street ends in a cul-de-sac and branches into two other cul-de-sacs so street play should ensue.  My friends among The Others live in a cul-de-sac and their kids are out every night playing.  I told SG to grab the soccer ball and her brother and go knock on their friends' doors and start a game of kickball in the top cul-de-sac.  She looked at me in horror because 12 year old girls do not start anything; someone might notice them and they might be different.  Horror!  The boy looked at me with scorn because a soccer ball is not a kick ball.  A million pardons.

I am buying a kick ball this weekend.  Actually, two in case one goes down the drain.  If I have to go up to the top cul-de-sac and play kick ball with my kids until someone else notices and sends their kids out, I will.  I am going with "if I do it, they will come".  Then when the kids come, I can sit in a lawn chair in the driveway and drink beer and thereby lower the median home value for The Others.  

Can't Find Any Fault... in Our Stars

Hater gonna hate and I wanted to be a hater.  I wanted to leave the movie theater disappointed, ripped off and passionately hating Hollywood for ruining a good book.  I wanted to list the things that they left out and snark on the things they added in.  I wanted to lament character choices and bemoan the dialogue that they omitted.  I did not get a chance to do any of these things because they did a great job turning a beautiful book into an equally beautiful movie when they made The Fault in Our Stars. 

Sigh.

If you haven’t read a Fault in Our Stars by John Green, do it now.  (Quick synopsis: kids, cancer, love and more) There will be a long line up for it at the library because every teen girl and her mother and maybe even a dad or two are reading it.  After you have read it in two days, max, because you couldn’t put it down, devour the rest of John Green’s writings.  The man remembers what it is like to be a teenager and he makes you remember it as well.  I wish John Green wrote back when I was a teenager because he writes from a male perspective that would have been very useful in trying to figure out boys back then.  Judy Blume was great for telling us what we were thinking while we waited for our periods, but I am struggling to remember a book of hers with a boy as the main character.  Wait!  There was one; I think his name was Tony?  Anyway, John Green gets it.  He remembers the angst, the passion, the nobility crowded into the mind of teenager who can’t even drive himself around yet.  The parents take a secondary role in his books and friends are the ultimate to these teens because really, that is how it is in real life as well.  Read him.  You will love him or at least like him and you will find yourself a little nostalgic and a little encouraged at the same time.  Parental warning:  his teens are not perfect.  They drink, they smoke, they swear, they make out, have S-E-X, and they make bad choices, therefore acting like real teenagers.

I read The Fault in Our Stars back in the fall.  Girls at school were telling me “Ms McMahon you HAVE to read this!”  They quoted from it and held their hearts and I thought alright, alright.  I read it in two days (max) and poor Bill came in right when I finished it and he held me as I cried the front of his shirt wet.  Wet.  I had a book hangover for days because I couldn’t get these characters out of my mind.  I recommended this book to everyone who asked for a good book and then slowly I moved onto other books and let its magic hold on me diminish.  That is, until the trailers for the movie started playing.  Sigh.  I was now determined to have SG read it so we could go to the movies.  She used to be the most voracious reader but has moved onto anime (what?!) and manga (why?!?).  Ew.  I wanted to break into her little world of big eyed characters and have her read about big hearted characters instead.  She refused, so I read it aloud to her, and Bill.  And to the boy when he listened, which was not often because it was too much for him.  It was not the easiest book to read out loud.  There were big words I struggled over which made them laugh and there were scenes I wanted to skip over because it made me embarrassed to read them to my 12 year old.   But I took a deep breath and plowed on and she had the decency to not look right at me while I read them.  It is also very hard to read through your tears; really dragged those last five chapters out.  I knew what was coming but sobbed again.  SG sobbed an entire couch pillow wet.  Um and Bill cried too because he is a good man with a soft heart. But she hugged me, hard, when we were done as we laughed and cried and she went to bed exhausted and she thanked me for reading it to her. 

We were hesitant about the movie.  We learned early on (The Tale of Despereaux) that the books are always better than the movie, always.  We had recently been disappointed with the film adaptation of Divergent, so we went in cautiously.  We were blown away.  Within fifteen minutes, I stopped looking for and caring about any difference that the movie had made to the book.  I didn’t care that Augustus Waters in the book had blue eyes but this Gus had brown.  He was Gus.  They used dialogue straight from the book.  They had my favorite line of the whole book about robot eyes in there.  They portrayed the relationships throughout the book seamlessly on the screen as well.  They captured youth and hope and love so perfectly.  As an audience, we laughed, we tensed up and then, we cried.  Oh my gosh we cried!  SG cried a cup holder full of tissues and then more.  I cried early on, you know what is coming but you can’t brace yourself enough to stop the tears from falling.  We wept until we were raw and empty. As I listened to SG cry her heart out, I felt like a good/bad mom.  Good that she can empathize and become invested in these things, bad for exposing her to it.  At twelve, she hasn’t had her heart broken but now she knows exactly what it feels like.  “Mom my heart is broken!” she wailed as we drove home.  Agreed, I thought. Mine felt a little achey too. She went to bed exhausted and I can only hope this all translates into her reading books with chapters again.

So read the book.  Then see the movie.  You will not be disappointed.  You will be raw and empty, but not disappointed.  You may cry your eyes dry, but you will not be disappointed.  Take it from a hater who wanted to hate, you will love it.

Silence IS Golden!

It is the last day of school!! I have not been this happy about a last day of school in about; oh well, a lot of years.  I woke the kids up singing songs about it being the last day of school.  Neither one was impressed.  We had an impromptu dance party to celebrate and everyone went on to their respective schools. I only had to work an hour today.  Happy Summer to me!  

When I found out I was only going to have to work an hour today, I first thought that I should pick up the kids or do something crazy, mom fun like that said "WOOHOO SUMMER!".  Thankfully, I quickly came to my senses and instead you can find me at home right now. Alone.  Enjoying something I will not have anytime soon: silence. Silence will not be heard in this house for a long time.

Thank you.  I will.

 In the beginning of summer we go outside and bring our noise with us.  We swim, we play in the driveway, and we go to the park.  But as summer drags on and it gets too hot for man or beast, all of our noise will be inside.  There will be a TV or radio or video game and they will be on loud.  There will be the slam of the door opening, closing or my yelling "Close the door!".  There will be whining, there will heavy sighs, there will be moaning.  There will be yelling: yelling at each other, yelling at the dogs, yelling for me MOMWHEREAREYOU?  I am hiding in my closet trying to find one minute of silence, that is where I will be.

It won't be all bad noise.  There will be laughing, please God, lots of laughing.  There will be the squeal of preteen girls jammed four to a bedroom squeaking and squealing and laughing until they cry.  Because everything is funny, everything has to be relived and everything must be screamed at the top of their lungs in that small room.  There will be boy laughter that starts with "dude!" and ends with a fist bump and goes right into lengthy video game discussion.  There will be adult laughter over summer drinks because really, everything is very funny and laugh-out-loudable over summer drinks.  There will be dinner conversation where everyone talks over each other until Bill and I lock eyes and smile thinking we made this loud mess.  Or we lock eyes and question how many more days til school starts?  There will be teen laughter; secretive and almost elusive and we will strain to hear more.  There will be friends over adding to the din and requests for lemonade, food, more food, more everything.

There will be the daily questioning of where are we going today?  What will be fun today?  Thankfully I have Adventure Mondays in my pocket courtesy of a good friend who is a fun mom and I can tag along, slacker-like, as we all have fun, at least once a week.  There will be road trip planning and with it a million questions of where is this?  What can I pack? How long will be gone?  What about the dogs?  

There have been many summers when I have braced myself for the onslaught of summer and its noise.  I planned camps or weeks or days down to the minute. I don't feel like I am bracing myself this year. I feel like my silence today is giving me time to mentally prepare for summer and after two hours of it, I say bring it.  Bring the noise.  Bring the stickiness of summer with its watermelon faces and lemonade on the counters by kids who pour while watching TV.  Bring the smell of sunscreen on warm skin and chlorine bleached hair.  Bring the smell of BBQ on the breeze, however warm and stagnant that breeze might be.  The boy and I will be on the back deck breathing it in.  

You can almost smell how hot it is.

I think it was three or four years ago you could ask me at any day during the summer how many days it was until school started.  "Eighty-six" I said as school ended that year, or "We are down to twenty!" I cried jubilantly.  However, if you asked me right now how many more days, I would say not enough.  I hope this is still my answer in August.  Hopefully if I tuck away just a few pockets of silence between then and now, it will be.