Here is a discussion that I had with Marshall a few weeks ago.
Marshall: I don’t want to go to school.
Me: I know, but you’ve got less than a month to go. The school year’s almost over. You’ve got a whole summer to look forward to!
Marshall: If you were being stabbed, would it help if someone said, “It’s almost over”?
One morning last week, Livia thought she was late for the bus, so she ran toward the bus stop. She slipped and fell, ripping open her hand and her knee on the driveway. Poor thing. My husband patched her up, and after she’d had a little time to recover, I drove her to school.
On my way back home, I saw wild roses growing along the side of the road, and I thought it must be lovely at the library’s walking trail. So I went there, and it was lovely, as expected, so cool in the shade, all the woods smelling of roses. But then, because I had mysteriously not returned home, my husband texted me. I answered him, texting as I was walking and, not paying enough attention to the path before me, twisted my ankle and fell. My ankle hurt, so I cut my walk short.
Later, while I was with Livia at her singing lesson, my husband texted me again: he had hurt his head while working, gone to the walk-in clinic, and gotten the wound stapled shut. OMG.
When we got home, the three of us gathered in the foyer, commiserating with each other on our various mishaps. Marshall poked his head out of his room to say something. “Stay in your room where it’s safe, Marshall!” we shouted to him. He returned to his room. Wisely, I think, because it was a very dangerous day!
The last few weeks have been brutal. I can’t seem to get enough sleep. I’ve had no energy for anything but TV, and I’ve been falling asleep while watching it.
As if I didn’t already have enough trouble waking in the mornings, my alarm clock broke a couple of weeks back. Instead of the radio turning on at the appointed time, the clock made a pathetic “zzzt” sound and then returned to silence. Poor thing was all worn out, just like me.
So I stopped setting the alarm on that clock and started using my phone’s alarm to wake me. Then, one night the clock’s alarm mysteriously turned on, and it would not allow itself to be turned off. If this was a sign from the Universe that I needed to WAKE UP, all I can say to that is I KNOW.
The kids complain about having to get up so early, too. They cite scientific studies showing that teens naturally stay up late and need more sleep. They rail about how stupid the school schedule is. All I can say to that is I KNOW. And all I can do is hope that they manage to get through their remaining school years better than I got through mine.
We could all use a break from the early hours, that’s for sure, and one will be coming up fairly soon. The kids are about 2/3 of the way through the school year now. We’ve only got to get through three more months of this early-morning torture. Then will come the leisurely days of summer. A respite. I am so looking forward to that.
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse is the story of Billie Jo, a girl growing up on a farm in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s. When a terrible household accident kills her mother and scars her hands, her life as she knows it is over. Her family’s farm is failing from dust storms and drought, and her wounded hands keep her from playing the piano and escaping into music. But nothing lasts forever, not even the bad times, and Billie Jo can heal, body and spirit, if she lets herself.
I read Out of the Dust because it’s on the list of Top 100 Children’s Books. This book gets a lot of attention because it’s a novel in verse, but the verse element is not a selling feature for me. Though I’ve developed a better appreciation for modern poetry over the last few years, a lot of free verse still seems like nothing more than abbreviated prose broken up into short lines. In the end, I was too caught up in the story to pay much attention to the poetry. Whatever else it may or may not do for the story, it certainly makes the narrative compact and powerful. I give the book an A grade and my recommendation.
My kids are not big on chores, but if I ask one of them to unload the dishwasher, they’ll drop whatever they’re doing, run downstairs, and unload the dishwasher in a flash. Why such immediate action? Believe me, it’s not from a desire to help their parents or any other noble cause. No, it’s because they think loading the dishwasher is the worst torture ever. Since we sometimes ask one child to unload the dishwasher and the other to fill it back up, each of them lives in fear of being the unlucky sibling who has to <gasp> handle dirty dishes. Their terror works to my advantage. In fact, I hardly ever ask them to load the machine, since I don’t mind doing that myself. But they’re not taking any chances, and that’s why they tackle the chore of unloading quickly and without complaint.
Fear truly is the key to controlling people.
I got an automated call the other day. It was supposedly from the hospital with which I have a pay dispute. The robotic voice asked me to call the hospital back at their “business office,” but the phone number it gave me is not listed anywhere on the hospital’s website. So I guess the bill has already gone to collections. That was quick! It’s another way in which hospital billing practices stink.
My father had a pay dispute with someone recently, too, and he said that he told the guy to “go pound sand.” That cracked me up, because it’s the same phrase I use when talking about that ridiculous hospital bill. The things we pick up from our parents! In this case, it’s not just the idiom that I inherited, but also the stubborn refusal to be taken advantage of. These are good things to pass along from generation to generation.
When I mentioned to my dad that I’d told the hospital to go pound sand, he suggested that I also tell them to “go shit in their hat.” That’s a colorful phrase, isn’t it? But that one’s not likely to be passed down through the generations. Were I to use it at home, my son would cry, “Language!” and my husband would announce, “Mommy has a potty mouth!” And yeah, maybe I do have a potty mouth, but if so, then we know who I got it from!
Today I was thinking about the idea that I’d had for a novel, and I decided that I would sit down and try to write for a moment, just to see what would happen. I opened up Scrivener, my go-to writing program. The program opened on the last file that I’d worked on, which happened to be the start of a story. At the time that I wrote it, I thought it was garbage. Reading it anew, my inner editor itched to tweak a few things, but otherwise I thought it was fine, maybe even good? I can’t judge the quality. All I can really say is that, as a reader, I wanted to know what would happen next in the story, and that’s a good sign.
That story-start was in a section of Scrivener that I’d set up for journaling, in a folder labeled “2022.” My last journal entry was from August of that year. I wrote about drought, black American flags, How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (a book that I was reading at the time but apparently never finished), arthritis pain and other symptoms of aging, and procrastination. Cheerful. Well, at least I didn’t mention Covid. But, 2022 obviously broke my writing mojo, and I’m sure that the Pandemic had a lot to do with that.
Do I feel like I’ve gotten my writing mojo back now? I’m not sure. I’m just tired of the silence. So I created a 2024 folder in Scrivener. I don’t know if I’ll use it, but at least it will be there, beckoning.
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