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I resolved long ago never to resolve.  This was not an impulsive decision but a well thought out reversal in my thinking after years of failed New Year’s resolutions. This idea, not unlike my daughter’s comment  that my ramble about the holidays blurring together https://askmrsmom.com/?m=201311, is not original and is even perhaps “cliche” as I believe she labeled that Halloween post.

But this year, I am inspired to get back to a reasonable sort of resolving so I added a twist to my resolutions.  I am going to try to do things that will alleviate stress, improve my personal relationships with others and maybe even increase my life span.  No giving up stuff that only improves my heath or happiness rather than improving the world around me like many Christians do at Lent. As in, giving up chocolate (not for Jesus but to lose weight), stop drinking (not for Jesus but to give your liver a rest), reducing salt intake (not for Jesus’s blood pressure but for yours),etc. This time, I tried to think of things that would make me a better person not a better looking person.

Really hard for me to conceptualize, but I’m gonna go for it.

In keeping with my Christmas shopping list, I’ll simplify these perhaps preposterously lofty ideas into list form. Just share my aspirations and let you know which one, or few, I can actually keep longer than a week or day or five minutes. I’m hoping to give it the ole college try and if I fall flat on my face, well at least that, too, does nothing for my personal appearance or selfish interests.

This 2014, I, Nancy Noble Peck, resolve to attempt to:

1.  Make amends with an estranged friend.

2.  Commit to any sort of exercise that raises my heart rate, even if it is running up and down my front steps once a day.

3.  Talk less and listen more.  Stop interrupting or finishing others’ sentences.  Those actions seem motivated to prove you are smarter than everyone else or have ESP.  Or both.

4.  Let my adult children fend for themselves and make adult decisions and live with the consequences without my opinion, suggestions or intervention. I have realized at last that I can’t help them avoid pain and they certainly can’t learn from my mistakes.

5.  Do things out of love, not obligation.  Hoping for genuine, not guilt-driven, kindness.

6.  Judge less and accept more.

7.  Do something everyday I am afraid of.  Even if it is as simple as leaving the house not wearing mascara.

8.  Learn to fly without the confidence boost of drugs and alcohol.

9.  Stay in the moment; be present.  It’s all we can be certain of really.

10.  Take care of me and let everyone else figure it out.  Finally accept that  I can’t change others but changing me forces them to change their reactions to me.

Overly ambitious?  Sure.  Self- serving?  Hopefully not.  Banal?  Have to ask my eldest.

And if you don’t like them? Tough. You are not my friend. And don’t say you are. I know better. I am going to drive, not walk, to the grocery store after, of course, I apply two coats of mascara. But first, I have to stop at my daughter’s house and tell her my blog is my blog and her opinion is one of thousands and if she doesn’t stop feeding her youngest, he is going to explode and to let her three-year-old watch some TV and have a hot dog while doing it, for God’s sake. I’ve got so much to orchestrate for my son’s wedding, I have no time to run her life and his. And my youngest, I need to fly out to see her and help her juggle all she has to accomplish this year. Do I have to be everywhere at once and chug a glass of wine to get there?! Man, there aren’t enough hours in the day.

11.  Start tomorrow.

Yesterday’s post got some great and grateful responses but one alerted me that the hyperlinks did not connect to the items.  All fixed now, (I hope!) so you are back to one-click shopping. Falalalala!!

Charlie is praying…

…that William gets a shirt from Santa!

May all your prayers and wishes come true.  Have the best of holidays and I hope someone you love surprises you…

Love to you and yours,

askmrsmom

So, I am going to share a “girl thing” and if you “boy things” are not interested, you should be.  Because your wife or significant other or future significant other or your cross-dressing significant other has or will feel this.

Ok, so deep breath.  I am going to pour this all out there, grain and chaff together and hope that a faithful friend will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and blow the chaff to the wind.  (Isn’t that a sweet quote?  My mom always said that to me, but not in this context.  But I worked it in, nonetheless.)

Last week, I was switching all my summer to winter clothes to my guest room closet (summer out/winter in) and I decided to try on my last year’s winter’s clothes, just for shits and giggles.

Bad idea.  First of all, some of the the pants did not zip (those that did not were quickly ferried off to my eldest daughter) and on the jackets, oh my beloved jackets, the darts for the boobs had moved.  Yes, the seam in the front around the chest area of the jacket that used to point upward toward my breasts were now pointing upward toward my chin. Yeah, picture it.  That means my breasts are inching toward my waist.

So, not to panic, I went to the women my friends have affectionely called the “Bra Nazis” and forged ahead, head held high, hoping my bustline might rise with it.  The store was empty. Just me and Hildegaard.  First she took a pink measuring tape to evaluate my size, shape and front or back clasp preferences–tilting her head side to side, stepping back and quinting one eye, pulling out everything but a slide rule to surmise the gravity (pun intended) of the situation. The dressing room had a peep window that my comrade started handing me bra after bra through, like her measuring tape, a pink seersucker curtain.  At first, the trades through the magic curtain went smoothly, bra in, try on, bra out, another option until the bra outs outweighed the bras in and Hildy ( we were on nickname basis by now) stepped in to get this show on the road.

Standing between me and the mirror, she suggested I was not perhaps bending over properly to get “the girls” in place and giving my options a proper chance.  My girls live with my grandsons in suburban Chicago and in LA respectively, so the reference to my drooping body parts as some sort of sorority sister set me slightly on edge.

Then the dreaded words slipped from her bright red lip-sticked lips, the words that will be indellibly etched in my mind for eternity, “Perhaps we should go up a cup size for the loose skin.” Huh?  Did she say go up a size because I am a perfect 10?!  I have this ringing in the ear thing that sounds like someone left on five tea kettles at simmer in the background of conversations all day long, so words get muffled.

“Excuse me?” I asked as politely as my naked half-upper body could muster.  “Yes, the lose skin.  We all have it. Especially in the back as we get older. We need to accomodate for it when we measure for the cup size. Let me get some more options.”

With this turn of events, the options went from something to harness “the girls” to something resembling small matching hammocks or the bras I used to see on the sale table when shopping with my mom that looked deep and nestlike; something I wanted to curl up and take a nap in.

Needless to say, the “girls” and I were not in a happy place, worse than the one we started in at my closet.

Waiting between curtain-surprise options, I looked in the mirror and realized my mother had secretly attached her hands to the ends of my arms.  My once slender fingers had developed rather gnarly joints that were surrounded by small islands of spots that floated on the tops of my hands like tiny brown inkblots.  I thought of the horror of my image on Face Time with my kids and understood once again why they are only allowed to see an empty couch or my unmade bed rather than me during these sessions.

Seriously, if I look like my image on my phone on Face Time, it’s time for a face lift.

So when option fifteen popped through the curtain in all its slightly-padded parachute back strap glory, I was no longer in the mood for a bra. I wanted the last twenty years back and a stiff drink.

Rather than run out topless in a blur of tears, I gathered what was left of my ego off the floor, picked up the three maybes on the chair in the dressing room and walked out $200.00 poorer with, of course, a pink plastic bag filled with mammoth-cupped bras stuffed with pink tissue.

Onward and upward, I stopped off on the way home to pick up the Thanksgiving turkey.  I do this messy but worth it brining bag thing that takes 24 hours of ice and herbs to seal in the juices and pop out a golden brown bird everytime.  I was busying myself  in the kitchen with turkey prep, pulling out the bag of gizzards and rinsing the old girl, patting her dry and it hit me.  This bird and I had a couple of very obvious things in common.

Loose back and neck skin.  And rather large breasts, I thought, as I stuck an apple and an onion in her now empty chest cavity.

And better still, I could have saved myself all that undergarment agony if I had just done the same with my bra. Round fruits and veggies stuffed in my bra could make for some pretty perky “girls.”

And I’d only have to shop at the grocery store where nothing is bagged in pink.

Halloween or no Halloween, I am not much of a costume dresser upper. Even as a child, it was my mom, not me, who put thought into my Halloween costumes.  And more often than not they were one of a kind, handmade outfits her mother, my Grandma Kyle, had whipped up on her trusty treadle Singer. I was a circus clown, a Dutch girl, Pow Wow the Indian girl, all of which made it to the third generation as my daughter wore the same costumes gently preserved in tissue in a trunk at my mother’s house.

My grandma was a true seamstress. She made my mother’s wedding gown,and her sisters’, and even fashioned a woman’s wool suit out of a suit of my father’s which was the rage during WWII, I am told.  I suppose it was some sweet way to make all the war-torn marriages feel closer together, men in their dress blues and women in wool pinstripes.

Anyway, my grandsons this year were quite the adorable pumpkin and pilot. Not quite, I mean seriously adorable.  The oldest pulled a small airline suitcase to hold his candy and his dad said people on the street were calling him “captain” and asking when his next flight was going out.  The younger, whom we all agree is rather sturdy or borderline plump, probably just felt relieved that his mother finally dressed him in something that fit.

Kids and most adults just love Halloween.  But channeling my best Andy Rooney, I do not. For many reasons, but to save face and space and keep it to the last five of “60 Minutes,” I will highlight only a few of my Halloween aversions.

First, my idea of dressing up as someone else is when I wear jeans with holes in the knees that make me feel 18 or an old black vest that makes me feel like Annie Hall.  Similarly, I love my Meg Ryan thick-soled boots and miss my Princess Di haircut as much as I miss her. I suppose I work so hard at trying to stay age-appropriate and look like my preserved mental version of myself that the idea of taking on a whole new persona is overwhelming to me. Not to mention the self-confidence it takes to wear a costume that makes you look old, fat or ugly.

Oh no.  I work waaaaay too hard not to be any of those all day long to, God forbid, do them on purpose.

Nope, that costume thing? Not for me.  I’ll leave that to the confident, relaxed girls who love blackening a tooth to be an evil witch or wearing their daughter’s push-up bra to be a “waitress.”  I’d rather be wicked or sexy on my own terms, not for some overblown, out-of-control holiday that celebrates the night all the evil spirits emerge from their dark inner sanctum and haunt the earth before they are caught and shoved back where they belong by all the blessed saints on November 1.

Which brings me to another gripe I have with all our holidays, religious or otherwise.  When did we allow commercialism to let them become so over the top and out of whack?  I mean, really, there were pumpkins in Walgreens beside the back-to-school-supplies.  Santa’s reindeer were flying over rooftops in television commercials  on October 29 and do we even remember Thanksgiving anymore?  Other than that it’s the busiest weekend at America’s airports because all the college kids return to mama’s arms for the weekend?

Actually, I’m with Benjamin Franklin who wanted the founding fathers to move Thanksgiving to October with the harvest  where it makes sense like our more intelligent northern neighbor, Canada, does it. But no, that wouldn’t work because Walgreens would have to put the candy corn beside the turkey-and-gravy scented candles before July 4th sparklers and then that would push back Memorial Day flags into Valentine candy and we’d be wearing 2014 glitter glasses as Halloween costumes.

Now actually, that’s one dressing up idea I might oblige.

My daughter was over yesterday with her one and three -year-old sons and after a couple hours of “let’s play frisbee with Yaya’s coasters” and riding the scooter on the driveway and dinner and bath time, she let them settle on the couch in front of one episode of Mickey Mouse.  My daugher is very good about television with her kids. She never uses it as a babysitter but as a treat and only then on days that start with an “S” (Saturday, Sunday, Sick, mom feels Shitty). She also often watches it with them.  In fact, the one-year-old doesn’t really get to sit in front of it but when he does, he sits very still and laughs loudly at regular intervals to show he is really into the plot and “please don’t move me.” Needless to say, it’s adorable.

So I was in the kitchen doing whatever Yayas do in the kitchen when babies are in front of television.  Probably getting squished banana out of my rush-covered counter stools. And it hit me.  The sound of cartoons make me lonely.

I thought about it for awhile and I think I have an idea why.  First, I was the kind of kid who worried when I watched cartoons.  For instance, when the dog ran through the grocery store, cans and loaves of bread flying, I always stressed about who would clean up all that mess. Don’t even get me started on the mayhem Mr. McGoo created.  Or the Roadrunner. He could ruin a city block in the blink of an eye.

But beyond my not registering these were pictures that could be easily cleaned up with an eraser not a mop, I think cartoons represent a time in my life and a time of day I felt lonely.  When I was in grade school, my mom had gone back to work to help pay for my brother’s college education.  So there was an hour or so after school in middle school through high school that I would, in today’s world, be considered a “latch key kid.”

Now the reason that could be misleading is that we lived in a neighborhood where doors were always open. Playdates were arranged by a tap on the screen door announcing our arrival, certainly not any talk among our parents as to who should show up when. So coming home to an empty house always felt safe as I had Jean and Peg and Ruth and Loreen a hop, skip and a jump away. If I needed anyone or anything, even a hug, they were there.

But lots of days, I would throw my books on the dining room table, grab a bowl of dry Cheerios or a plate of Ritz crackers spread with strawberry jelly and retreat to the basement to watch TV.  And if  Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver wasn’t on yet, I was stuck with my chaotic cartoons. Our basement was dark with painted grey cinder block walls.  Dad’s favorite green chair with the stick shift footrest sat empty and the upright piano stood looming, shaming me for not tinkling the ivories for Aunt Alberta, my piano teacher, instead of vegging in front of Porky Pig or Daffy Duck. Which reminds me, cartoons always worried me also because all the characters seemed to have these horrible speech impediments that no one seemd to  notice or write in a speech therapist for.

I mentioned these deep-seated feelings of longing and sadness regarding cartoon time to my daughter and, completely typical of her personality, she hit the nail on the head and said, “It probably was the lonliest time of day raising us, too, mom.  You had done and run and coped all day and by the time you threw us in front of TV, you knew you had a good hour before dad got home and you had some adult relief.”

Bingo, I thought.  That, too.

So the next time you flip past the Disney channel, stop and pull out your hanky and take a moment to think about little Nancy Noble, the latch key kid, who thought cartoons were lonely and messier than her jam and Ritz covered fingers.

But take heart because I can whistle the tune to Leave it Beaver like a master or trip over the ottoman as well or better than Dick Van Dyke. So my salvation always came soon after Tom and Jerry or before my second bowl of Cheerios.

And no, thanks to my mad crush on Mark in The Rifleman, I still can’t play the piano.

We have all heard quotes  or old adages such as “Youth is wasted on the young,”(George Bernard Shaw) or “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” (Soren Kierkegaard) or one of my favorites,“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” (Allen Saunders).

In the past, I jotted these in a “things to remember” notebook or shared them in a card to a friend.  I thought if I read them often enough, I might understand them well enough to avoid the pain of their inherent truths.

But alas, I have lived long enough to realize that good advice only sheds light on a mistake after you make it, and emotions trump sound sense or wisdom in most human contact.  So in a fit of self-disclosure and seeking some sort of catharsis, I thought I would share a few of my pivital life moments I wish I could push rewind and relive. You know, the “if only we could do it over again, I would do it so differently” moments when you open your mouth and the wrong words fly out.  And the moment is gone and the regrettable thoughts hang in the air like the smoke of a bad cigar.

So in no particular order some of my moments would be :

My first born telling me she was thinking of naming her first child Declan.

Wish I had said:  Oh that’s lovely.  Isn’t it Irish? So creative of you to be thinking outside the box.

My real answer:  Declan.  Did you say Declan?  Like we’re Irish or something?  Isn’t it in the top ten most trendy, overused names this year?  What’s wrong with Jack?

My youngest showing me a small heart tattoo she had just had permanently inked on her left wrist.

Wish I had said:  A tattoo? How perfect for you.  Sweet, subtle, delicate.   Just like you to wear your heart on your sleeve. I so admire your self-expression. Love it!

My real response:  Is that thing real?!  You did it?  Without telling me?  Why don’t you just move out to LA with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and all the other trailer trash with ink all over their skin. (No surprise she soon moved to LA with Britney and Lindsay…)

Arriving home from church on a snowy Christmas Eve, three children in tow, to smell my brother’s arrival by the trail of smoke from his Winstons over-powering the heavenly scent my evergreen boughs draped throughout the house.

Wish I had said:  You’re here safely!  Merry Christmas!  How was your drive? Thanks for having a cigarette in the basement where we agreed you could  smoke…How about some eggnog?

What I really said loosely translated to keep this PG:  Why does your smoke always have to precede you? What’s wrong with smoking outside?  (It was probably 30 below with the chill factor.) It’s Chrismas Eve, for God’s sake. Can’t you take a night off??? Oh, my babies’ little lungs…full of carcinogens…Blah, blah blah…

And on a lighter note, I’ll share a moment in which I have no regets about my mouth working faster than my brain. As I mentioned in my last entry, my left foot is once again either fractured or has a gaggle of torn tendons. I say “once again” because after dragging around a walking bootie  for several months after surgery two years ago, I spent last winter in a walking cast for a stress fracture and now have something again impairing my stride and making me miserable.  The doctor told me to R-I-C-E:  rest, ice, compress and “eat whatever I want with the added bonus of doing nothing and not gaining a pound” (really it’s ‘elevate’) and come back in two weeks. I dutifully “RICED” and waited and laid on the couch as much as possible and returned with the same swollen, red, aching foot. I stood in front of her, painfully balancing on both sets of toes and she said matter of factly, “Well, it’s still swollen.”  And I responded, “Well, duh!!”  Luckily she had a sense of humor.

Perhaps my sometimes too honest tongue is an over-reaction to my mother’s motto, “If you have nothing good to say about someone, say nothing at all.”

We are all some mixture of what we intrinsically are–were born to be–and what our parents tried to mold us into. And I feel certain, none of us say what we should at all moments and more of us think of the perfect response to many encounters as we drive away or rethink the day’s interactions in the shower.

I think Ralph Waldo Emerson may have said it best. Duh!!

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

To say I am a perfectionist by nature would be an understatement. To say I have fought it all my life would be a lie.

No, for most of my existence on this earth, my quest has been for the best.  Of anything.  Grades, colleges, cribs, strollers, cars, shoes, cell phones, mattresses,porch furniture,grandchildren’s scooters.

Now, my “quest for the best” should not be confused with having to have the most expensive version of all things. To me, those are two very different animals.

In fact, having the most expensive version of all things is pretty easy to do if you have the money.  It takes no imagination, research or style to simply buy what is on the cover of the Neiman Marcus  catalogue or whatever is strutted by the latest celebrity in People. Buying or living this way may give some people a sense of importance or status. But to me, it lacks any originality or je ne se quoi. (That’s French for a person that inherently has their good-taste-in-all-things shit together. No one has to tell them. They just know. Think Katherine Hepburn. Her unrelated fellow actor, Audrey.)

So my most recent quest has been for the perfect washer and dryer.

With piles of Lulu Lemon and Feel Good white T’s (two of my “quest for the best” favorites by the way), piling up in front of my on-its-last-leg Kenmore, I was faced with a whole new world of research possibilities. Not having bought a washer and dryer in over a decade put me somewhere between owning a washboard and mangle.  And still drying things on “the line.”

Right out of the box, I realized to my horror machines no longer use agitators or a heaping cup of granular Tide. The control panels are no longer happy ratchet sound knobs but LED lit touch screens. So much new to over-analyze and so little time, as my clothes were growing small shrubs of mold in the tub of my dilapidated machine. Per usual, my over-research involved two calls to different  manufacturers’ customer service centers, lengthy discussions with three Lowes salesman, massive internet review reading and even a trip to Lowes by my sister after I broke my foot. (Not related to tripping over my ever-increasing mounds of laundry. Another story.)

To me, this is where a “best quest” steps out of normal consumer range and my OCD tendencies step in and I make myself and everyone around me crazy. I’m sure on some level here I am parading my OCD tendencies as a simpler diagnosis of meticulous researcher.  A simple girl who just likes to get the most bang for her buck.

On a good day,  I’m hoping I fall somewhere in between.

This story gets so much better but to keep this to a one page entry and hopefully not have you nodding off between paragraphs, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of what transpired before my new washer and dryer were safely placed and leveled in my laundry room.

–I finally chose a sort of new age/old lady hybrid by Whirlpool that had my familiar cycle knobs and no agitator. Instead it had an impeller that gently rocks the clothes like a new mother using less water, less soap, less suds and less energy. All those lesses sounded like less clean clothes to me.  But my Lowes salesman assured me the power jet rinse and high speed spinning would balance it all out to perfectly clean laundry.  He had me at “perfectly.”

–But as luck would have it, the dryer in this set (which I never gave a second thought as a dryer is a dryer is a dryer) had a heat sensor flaw that snagged, shredded and ruined my first load of towels.

–Lowes, who gets an A++ on customer service, asked few questions and offered to replace both appliances the next day.

–Given a chance to rethink my choice, once more, and having had a few loads of practice at getting used to the world of no agitators, I traded up for the full deal, LED screen, doorbell chime end of cycle signal Whirlpool set. Which, by the way, is made in the USA and even has a flag in the lid to prove it.

And here, washer drum roll please, are my compulsive researcher conclusions.  HE (High Efficiency), no agitator, energy saving machines are leaps and bounds better than the machines our grandmothers used. When I pulled my first load out, and it had been spun to half way to dry and smelled like spring flowers, I swear Snow White’s bluebirds circled my head singing “You’re out of the woods” while braiding blue satin ribbons in my hair. (I know I’m mixing fairy tale/movie allusions here but that was my image, so I’m sticking to it.)

To be honest, I am sure my research perfection/obsession involves some mortal fear of making a mistake, any mistake, that is tangled up with feeling like a failure if I ever get a grade less than an A.

Or perhaps it was  the humiliation of my eighth-grade gym teacher, Mrs. Burford, screaming she hated me when my Tahitian fake hair ponytail ( a 70’s fad I had purchased from an ad in the back of Teen magazine) fell out from under my 70’s bun, hitting  mid-court like road kill, during homeroom basketball.  Which stopped the game.  And sent me to the bench. In front of the whole school.

More likely the latter. I’d still like to give Mrs. Burford a spin in my new high speed Whirlpool.

Shel Silverstein wrote in The Giving Tree, “And she loved a boy very, very much, even more than she loved herself.”

My “boy” just turned thirty a couple months ago and a little over a week ago, he asked the love of his life, beyond me of course, to marry him.

I’ve heard it said that  “a son is a son ’til he takes a wife; a daughter is a daughter the rest of her life.” But in our case, I have high hopes that my son, at least occasionally, will choose his mama for a Chrismas or two and maybe a vacation once every few years.

You see, we have been through a lot together, my boy and me.  Since he was a senior in high school he has had six or so major surgeries. Two of them day-long brain resections, a neurosurgeon’s fancy word for brain surgery. (https://askmrsmom.com/?p=397)  He has survived treatment for two cancers, has been declared cured of one and continues to be monitored for the other.

At the beginning of this cancer journey, a road we are forced on and never take by choice, I let my mind go to the worst case scenerio at every test result, path report and doctor’s visit.  But as time passed and he still woke up smiling, I learned to lean into every moment we had together, all of us as a family. And slowly I went from living one day at a time to one step at a time and finally one breath at a time.

Nothing like a healthy awareness of death to make living all that more precious.

So this news that we are adding another member to our family is joyous on so many levels. My positive, follow-me-I-am-invincible son has led me to yet another happy place.  He has lived and loved and hoped and dreamed. And more than a decade after his first diagnosis, he is healthy and getting married.

What’s more, this beautiful woman he has chosen to spend the rest of his life with is someone I can pass my baton to with confidence. And know she will pick it up with a heart full of love and hope for all their tomorrows.

What more could an old tree stump ask for?