A Promise to My Worried Child

How could you have grown up so fast, when the day you were born, you, grown up, seemed a million years away? 

Syd and me when she was about 13
Photo credit: Jon Aronin

How did you get so capable, because when you were two, you needed me for everything? 

How could you have needed me for everything, yet barged ahead anyway, my pigheaded angel-face, convinced that you needed me for nothing? 

And how did you get so confident when there was a time that you worried about everything?

Remember that day on the bed? You said you were so afraid to die. I tried to think what could have made you that anxious. Then again, a lot had just gone down. There were stresses from school, your parents' divorce, unreliable friends, and missing your grandma. There was leaving childhood, leaving home, growing up, growing old. 

No wonder you were frightened; you'd worried yourself full circle to confront your own mortality. And we went around and around and around, I trying to comfort you and you still not comforted.

Then I, who struggled to believe back then, said the last thing I could think of that might help: that after I died, I would watch over you, and that when you died, I would watch then, too, and fly down from Heaven just in time to catch your soul, that I would hold it tight against me and fly it up to Heaven. 

Since none of my other "help" had helped, I expected you to scoff. 

Instead, you said, "You promise?"

And I said, "I promise."

Absence Note

I've been worried a lot lately. I've been so worried in fact, that it's taken me from my blog entirely. The only times I've thought about Chipped Demitasse over the course of the last few weeks is when I kicked myself for neglecting it. This blog is very important to me yet I've been entirely absent from it.

A lot has been going on. My mother, who is dearer to me than even a wordie like myself can express, is facing serious health challenges. And I'm a single, working mother of teenagers, one of whom has temporary but difficult health issues of her own.

If being a single, working parent with a sick mother and a sick kid and all the responsibilities those things entail weren't enough, I decided to jump ship from the financial Titanic I call renting and am in the process of buying a house.

Buying this house included a three-day period of torturous anxiety where I obsessed over my monthly cash-flow, fearing it would become an even smaller trickle than it already is once I traded the "freebies" of renting (heat, maintenance, etc,) for the "costies" of home ownership. I earn a perfectly fair wage, but face it, life can be expensive for single parents. Those three days worrying about money are the kinds of times that try the souls of single, working parents and prospective home-buyers.

The utility bill was one of the things I worried about. I have no idea what heat and AC will run in this new place. The seller, as luck would have it, winters in Spain and summers in Northern Michigan, so there is no recent, realistic history of the house's energy use. And someone with the financial means to winter in Spain probably wouldn't turn down the thermostat at night even if he was here. I got so stressed-out over this phantom utility bill that I researched the cost of firewood in case our main source of heat had to be the fireplace. I'll love having a fireplace again; I just didn't want to have to sleep on the floor in front of it.

"Ugh," muttered my tried soul. "Ugh."

Then yesterday I sat myself down and lovingly chewed myself out. I picked up my smartphone, went to "notes," and tapped out a list of ways this house will benefit the kids and me in quality of life alone. So, not even thinking about financials, here is some of what I came up with:

- A two-car attached garage with two steps into the kitchen. On grocery day, that would eliminate the current trek across what feels like a football field in the summer and tundra in the winter, followed by a knee-grinding, nose-bloodying three-story ascent to the apartment. This aspect of renting, I decided years ago, is why God made teenagers.

- A semi-finished basement perfect for tossing said teenagers when I need some me-time. As a renter, me-time at home could be had only in my bedroom, or, if I needed quiet too, in the bathroom with the door closed and the fan on. I once consumed two glasses of Merlot and a Hershey bar with almonds while sitting on the lid of the toilet.

- Hardwood floors and a level, fenced-in back yard for our dog who has accidents in the apartment when nobody reads the signals in time to haul her down the three flights of stairs, like a grocery bag in reverse, and out to the football field/tundra in time to do her business.

- Money saved on dinners out, one of the few luxuries I allowed the kids. Their lives had changed so drastically when my husband and I divorced. I moved them out-of-state because we lived in a region with such a high cost-of-living, I couldn't find a job that would support us in anything higher than near-poverty; sadly, I'm not exaggerating. But with a back yard, we can roast hotdogs and marshmallows, and maybe restaurants won't seem that important anymore.

The kids and I still laugh about a night years ago when we were still a nuclear family. We were out on the deck roasting marshmallows when my daughter's caught fire and in her surprise, she whipped her stick behind her. The marshmallow hurdled through the dark, blazing like a meteor. To kids, mine anyway, laughing yourself sick over a fiery, flying marshmallow beats a restaurant hands down. 

Thinking about all this, I calmed down. Then I did the math I had done days ago but had gotten too freaked out to remember I had done. I calculated that with a fixed-rate monthly mortgage roughly half the amount of my rent, and with rent going nowhere but up, there was no way, short of buying in Bizarro World, that a house wouldn't be better for me financially. And I'm grateful to have a bit set aside so that unexpected maintenance costs won't be AS big a disaster.

Those three days of abject terror taught me some things. First, when I examined the benefits of buying the house, my blessings politely raised their hands asking to be counted - blessings like my kids and the fact that I can buy a house at all.

With blessings like those, why should I worry? Besides, thinking is helpful; worrying isn't.

Defending Facebook: My "Charmed" Life

If Facebook gets you down, makes you feel your relationships, your family, your furniture, your holidays don't quite measure up, or if you think everyone on there is a shallow bunch of fakers, please understand: You aren't privy to everybody's backstory. 

On one of many road trips back to see my mother. 
Photo copyright, Teece Aronin

I post pictures of my kids baking cookies as the dog watches with flour on her face. I make sure you wake to photos of my cat, stretched in feline repose across my bed. I choose pictures that show most cheerfully or poignantly or humorously how well my kids and I get along.

What you don't see is everything that came before, like a tsunami crushing our lives. Life fell apart, and what you see on Facebook is the repair work, the reassembly, the cleanup - with me, the mother, who never knew a damned thing about how to do any of this - as team captain by default.

There was the end of a marriage to the man who fathered these children, who helped build a home only the most tangled of crossed stars could destroy and did. There was me scrambling to find a better job before our house sold out from under us. There was me networking in two different states, first the kids' home state and next mine, to find that job. 

There was the kids having to leave their father. There was the kids having to leave their grandmother. There was me having to leave my mother when I'd always planned to be there as she aged. There was the night before we left when she broke the "no open flame" rule at her assisted living facility, lit a votive, and joined hands with us around the flame. Then she spoke with a smile of how grateful she was that we had been near her all those years and how she would pray for our trip to be safe.

Then there was the 500-mile move away from every warm thing my kids had ever known.

There were the months on end where I swore I was piloting the kids through hell only to learn that they were guiding me. There were the endless kindnesses of family and friends who took us in, shored us up, and gave us hope.

There was Facebook, which became a way to document the restoration. The place I laid our trips to cider mills and pickle festivals and county fairs as though they were flowers and Facebook was an altar. 

It was a place where the Facebook friends who truly knew me tracked our progress and supported the effort, and where those whose newsfeed I clogged, viewed the work, neither knowing nor caring that there was any work in it.

It was the place I showed off my new sofa with framed Rothko prints hung perfectly level right above - and where at least five nail holes hid behind each print even though I measured. It was a place where few knew it took five years to save the money for that sofa because I was terrified of credit card debt. It was somewhere just a handful of people were aware that the sofa's predecessor had belonged to my aunt, was chewed up by our dog, and that the prints came from a thrift shop and cost $12 each.

I, who loved to write and aspired to be a blogger, developed my "voice" on Facebook, found rhythms for my words, and learned how good it felt when my posts made people laugh. It was a place where my friends nurtured the writer sapling until it was strong enough to launch that blog. 

Anyone who didn't know me well might have thought: 'What a great little family; I wonder what happened to the marriage.'

For the record, the marriage was lost in the tsunami.

But I had Facebook where I documented our trips to see my mother and my ex-husband, where friends could see how well he and I worked together for the sake of our children, and everyone could wonder just how much was exactly as it seemed. 

Emile, Are You There? It's Me, Nellie!

When my marriage ended and the dust finally settled, my kids told me I should try online dating. Inwardly I groaned, but I have to admit, I was curious. It had been nearly 20 years since I'd last dated; my mind, face, body, my very psyche for that matter were different now - in some ways better and in some ways not. What kind of men would I attract? Would I attract any? Who might be out there who would make sense as the other half of a couple with me?

When I met my ex-husband, my weight was a healthy 140 pounds or so and I was in my late thirties. But during my second pregnancy at age 43, I developed gestational diabetes, a condition which resolved itself after the birth of the baby, but which had left my metabolism so wildly out of control, that my weight ballooned to over 250 pounds. Despite consulting an endocrinologist, and doing everything she told me to do, including exercise, the most weight I ever lost at any given time was six pounds - honest: six pounds. And every time I lost those six pounds, they would fly back and wrap themselves around me faster than you can say, "big mama."

I'm sure the life stressors we all cope with were part of the problem, too, and that I sought too much solace at the bottom of a bag of chips, but overall, I tried very hard to eat in a way which should have landed me at a healthy weight but just couldn't seem to succeed.

Eventually, I opted for bariatric surgery and my weight dropped to something somewhere in the chunky range. Then divorce stressors replaced family stressors and I lost about thirty pounds without even meaning to. So when my kids started nudging me towards online dating, I was thinner than I could ever remember being as an adult; about a size eight. But that weight fluctuation had led to a confused self-image, so I often stared in hard-blinking amazement at pictures of the handsome men approaching me on the dating sites I'd chosen. Why were they attracted to me, I wondered. I won't mention the sites by name, but they rhyme with Scratch.com and No Way, Stupid.

But it's funny (and not in the hah-hah way) that I could learn so much about the mysteries of physical attraction at such a late stage of life; sometimes more than I wanted to. Some men who reached out to me online seemed to think the heavens had opened up to deposit me in front of them. Then again, one man I dated struggled with his lack of physical attraction to me while feeling very connected to me "emotionally and intellectually."

Hearing this hurt, so when he finally managed to articulate this concern, I grappled for my dignity, sat up straight in my pen and demurely folded my hooves atop my udder. And it was a herculean effort to limit my weeping to only one set of my six eyes.

Then, one night he and I had dinner with his sister who was chatting me up as we waited for a table. "So you met my brother on Scratch.com?"

"That's right," I smiled.

"I never had any luck on Scratch," she mused.

"Neither did I," I said. 

And then we all laughed and laughed and laughed. I was joking - mostly, but zinging him a little felt good. I have to say, though, that knowing him was very much worth the jab to my ego and he proved himself a wonderful friend. And one of my most honest, damn him.

But really . . . Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons; wise men never try. Oh, wait, that was Emile De Becque serenading Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. Some Enchanted Evening was the song. And that was physical attraction the way it should be.

Now, if I could just find my Emile De Becque, I might even be willing to change my name to Nellie Forbush. Then again, maybe just Nellie.

Me and Martha and Stan and Ollie

It once appeared that I was on a Martha Stewart-like career trajectory, the likes of which have not been seen since - well - since Martha Stewart. 

The birth of my daughter seemed to trigger a hormone-fueled artistic binge and I started painting, took up photography and, most amazing to me anyway, started designing my own hand-painted pillows. When I was making the first two or three, I didn’t even know what the sewing term, “right sides together” meant. I just happened to trip into an explanation of it while watching a craft show on HGTV, to which, now that I was both wife AND mother, I had become doubly addicted. 

In case you’re not a sewer, putting the right sides together means that, in effect, you’re sewing something together inside-out, then, just before you’ve stitched it all the way around, you stick your hand in, turn the item right-side-out and then sew up the last little bit. That way, your stitches don’t show. 

Hearing that explanation of right sides together came as a huge epiphany and explained why most sewn items look the way they do. Who knew? Most people, probably, but that was beside the point because now I knew, too. And now my pillows would be a lot more professional-looking and there would be no stopping me. After I'd made a few more pillows, I asked the opinion of an interior decorator who told me that they were worth over a hundred dollars apiece. Could she have been drunk, I asked myself later. No, I didn't think so. 

I am a great lover of the comedy team, Laurel and Hardy, and one day, I took a piece of cloth and painted onto it their likenesses as they had appeared in The Music Box, a short from 1932. In it, Stan and Ollie struggle to haul a clunky, crated, upright piano up a seemingly endless flight of steps. I never did perfect my Stan, but my Ollie looked just like him, even if I do say so myself. When I finished painting the cloth, I put it in the dryer to set the paint, then sewed it (right sides together) onto another piece of fabric and stuffed it. I really liked this pillow.

One day, I screwed up all my courage, tucked that pillow under my arm and walked into a shop that specialized in movie memorabilia. Timidly, I asked the owner if he would put it up for sale. He looked at the pillow dubiously – I mean, who could blame him. After all, people aren't exactly clamoring for Laurel and Hardy-themed pillows. If he put it in his shop window and a crowd gathered, it would have to be because the pillow had spontaneously combusted. So, he wouldn't buy it from me, but he would display the pillow in the store and give me most of the money if it sold. 

I left the shop feeling as victorious as Martha Stewart must have after her first bake sale because now a new Martha had been born! One day, I would be a guest on Martha's show where she would complement my pillows and I would gush over her edible gold-, silver- and copper-leaf hand-dipped Christmas cookies. Yes I would. Oh, my head was filled with visions of pillows and Martha, of Martha and pillows. 

It wasn't long after, that my then-husband, Michael and I celebrated our wedding anniversary and when Michael presented me with a wrapped bundle, he was apologizing.

“Teece, I hope you’re not insulted or upset. Believe me, I had all the best intentions.”

Now, Michael always said Teece-I-hope-you're-not-insulted-or-upset-Believe-me-I-had-all-the-best-intentions any time he'd just done something insulting or upsetting - or potentially divorce-worthy. But when I opened the gift, my heart filled with love. He had paid $90 for that pillow just so he could give it back to me for our anniversary. 

But wait a minute, that was sweet and touching and all, but if launching my Martha Stewart-style business empire meant my husband was going to be buying back the product line piece by piece, the future of my enterprise looked bleak. But I was fine with this thoughtful gesture. After all, it was a sign of a strong marriage when one spouse cared enough for the other to ruin that spouse's chances at a billion dollar hand-painted pillow empire. And I'd have done the same for Michael. So yes, I was okay with it. 

Anyway, I got the pillow in the divorce. And these days, like the artist who created it, that pillow, as you can see, is a little worse for wear.  The paint is worn and smeary-looking and the pillow itself is now flat and lumpy; again, a lot like the artist. But the pillow has become very special to my daughter who keeps it on her bed. So yes, I am still okay with it. 

And I guess it really is the thought that counts – in this case, all the way up to ninety bucks.