chaos, part deux

So that chaos continues. I spent Friday night with my son, painting his new bedroom. We are switching some rooms around in our house and he is moving downstairs. The room looks great, although he has a lot of organizing to do.

So you know when you start a project it always leads to a bunch of other projects. Well that is what happened today. Painting, moving furniture, doing electrical, running cable and ethernet to my husbands new office upstairs. Moving books, shelves, pictures and furniture. And it's still not done. The dining room and living room of my house looks like an episode of "Hoarders".

On top of all that, I also found time to bake a coconut cake for Easter tomorrow. It is a recipe that my mom found in Food & Wine magazine. It is really good, lots of cream cheese frosting and flaky coconut. It's my homage to my mother. Easter was never really her holiday. Christmas was. But we are getting together with my sister and her family and my dad tomorrow, so a little bit of my mother will be there too.

My mother in law loved Easter. She loved seeing the kids in Easter outfits and giving them baskets and candy. She won't be there tomorrow, either. It is strange celebrating holidays with both moms gone. They were the ones who really held the family together for the holidays. Now that job falls to my sister and myself. And I admit that I'm not as good at it as they were. I tend to let it go until the last minute and then I find myself making coconut cake at 10 o'clock at night for the next day. Oh well, at least we'll have some. I'll have a bite for you, mom!

Changes. They're good, right?

It seems that my life is in a constant change of flux. I didn't used to mind it. In fact, a lot of the time I would bring it on myself. In the almost 30 years of our marriage we have moved 8 times. And we have been at our current location the longest, almost 15 years. So the reality of that is, 8 moves in 15 years! That's a lot of packing. And unpacking. Although, I know for a fact that there are boxes in the basement of this house that have never been unpacked. Wonder what that means. I hope there is nothing in there that I need!

We moved into this house when the kids were still small. Now they are grown. One has moved out. One more is on her way. One is still hanging in at home. But we have had other house mates as well. A sister in law, left a widow by the unfortunate death of my husbands oldest brother. She stayed with us for a couple of years. Then more recently, my husbands parents lived here. It seems strange to think that after years of having so many people (lets not even get into the animals!) living under this roof, we will almost be empty-nesters.

Going back to the unpacked boxes for a minute, we have also accumulated stuff from the sister in law and the parents in law. Duplicates, triplicates, in some cases quadruplicates of towels, blankets, sheets, dishes, silverware and knickknacks. Furniture, books, photo albums and pictures. What am I supposed to do with it all? And how do you make the decision to throw away someone else's stuff? There are memories attached to all of it. I guess I could pack it up for my kids and my niece. But then you are back to storing boxes of packed up stuff. Maybe every house should come with a storage unit. That way you could just put it all in there and lock the door and when you are gone, it's someone else's job to go through it all and determine what to keep and what to throw away.

We do like to collect things, don't we? Shells from a beach, shot glasses from different airports, thimbles, pictures, coffee mugs. And every time I have bought something from somewhere, I've really, really liked it. I've been so happy to bring it home and show the kids or company the souvenir from our trip. And yet a short time later, it seems to lose that luster. It becomes just another coffee mug in the cupboard along with the 30 others. And then you realize that you don't need 30 coffee mugs in the cupboard and you start weeding them out. And sad to say that a lot of the time, the one you thought was so special, ends up in a box heading for the Goodwill.

So can we make smarter choices in the things we choose to be our souvenirs? Ones that will last a lifetime without having to be packed away? I'd like to see the store that sold those!

Snow in April

So it's April 18th and it snowed today. Snow that stuck, not just flurries. But even if it was just flurries, it snowed today! April 18th! For god's sake it's almost May. Enough already.

This winter has seemed especially long and especially cold. It seems that each progressive year feels that way to me. Probably just me getting older.

There are a lot of things about getting older that bug me. I used to have perfect vision. I could hear when someone left a TV on in the other end of the house. I could sleep through the night without having to get up to pee. And speaking of peeing, now I can't sneeze or cough without peeing. All of my body functions are failing me!

I know that all of that is just part of growing older. And a lot of the time my joints and muscles ache like no body's business. But I can't get my brain to seem to understand that. Most of the time it thinks I'm still young. Oh, it takes me longer to find a specific word sometimes. And I can't write and talk at the same time anymore. But most of the time I think of myself as still in my early 20's instead of my late 40's.

I have had conversations with my dad and he feels that way too. I am beginning to wonder if your brain ever truly catches up with your body. Maybe it's a self defense mechanism. Like if your brain felt like it was old, your body would just give up.

So it's snowing and cold and yet daffodils are coming up in the neighbors yard and buds are out on the trees. So I guess spring really is here. It is such a beautiful time of year. I love watching how everything starts turning green and lush. It is a hopeful time. A new beginning. It's like the world letting us start over again. I hope that this year I'll be able to focus more on good things than bad. That I'll spend more time with the people I love and less time worrying about things that I can't change anyway. That I will take the time to appreciate the world around me and the beauty that is in my life instead of complaining about my large thighs or flabby arms. Because really, life is so short and most of us have such a small sphere of influence. And what's really important has nothing to do with how much money you have or how skinny you are or what kind of car you drive. What is important is to love each other. Support each other. Hold each other up. Enjoy more and stress less. Maybe this year I'll do things better.

Love Affair

So this could be the start of a beautiful relationship. Me and a laptop. Ok, so it's not really a laptop. My dream would have been a Macbook. No, my real dream would have been a PowerBook, but I would have been incredibly happy with a MacBook. Even a MacBook AIr. I saw someone on the train with on the other day. It was so slim and beautiful.
This love affair is with a Samsung netbook. It is small and cute. It has Windows 7, which I really don't mind. The screen is nice and bright and the keyboard has nice action. It does seem to be incredibly slow! Which I don't really understand. Will have to do some research on that. But it's portable and best of all it was free. A gift from my sister in law. Since it has the ability to video conference, my husband will be able to use it when he goes to see his father at the nursing home. He will Skype with his sister who lives in Georgia and then she can see her father more often. Win-win!
The first computer we had was an Apple II. It was very basic. No color. Our first email address was through Buffalo State College. It was text only, no graphics. Back then no one used their name in an email address, so our first one was Bishotti. Not sure if we spelled it right. It was Italian slang for taking a dump. Nice, right?

Our household has slowly grown to include 5 computers. Four desktops and a laptop and now a netbook. Including the smartphones, we are more connected than you can imagine. We have a wireless network in the house, so you can access the internet from any spot in the house and also from outside on the deck or front porch. It's an amazing world we live in.

It has been an incredibly long week of work. We are in a transition of moving some things around and changing certain rooms and their functions. So there is a learning curve that goes along with that. It takes time to adjust to the new set-up and remember that things that were once one place are no longer there. And where did we put them?
I like my job. For the most part. It is the first job I have had outside the home in 20 some odd years. I had a part time job doing bookkeeping for a liquor store when the kids were really small. But that was on weekends and Paul would stay home with the kids. My current job is in an ophthalmologist office. I started in the file room. I figured that even having been out of the workforce for as long as I had been, I could still alphabetize. That worked its way into answering phones and booking appointments and finally working at the front desk checking people in and out. It is pretty routine, once you have the routine down. A lot of paperwork. A lot of redundancy. It is interesting coming into a place and seeing how things could be run better or at least differently, more efficiently. Sometimes that can be frustrating. Especially when you don’t have the power or control to make changes. I’ve always been the kind of person to make changes anyway. Most of the time it works out in my favor. Occasionally, not so much. But I figure it’s always worth a shot. Otherwise you just spend your days , trudging along to the beat of someone else’s drum. Where is the fun in that?
Now that I am working full time, I find I don’t have the energy for projects at home like I used to. It makes me sad, because there are still lots of things I’d like to do around the house. And the thought of using a vacation week to do a project just seems wrong to me. Vacation, by it’s very name, means not doing anything. Right? Lay on the deck in the sun. Sit with your feet in the pool. Drink Peña Coladas. Work? Then it’s not vacation. But if you don’t use a vacation to do a big project then you are left using your weekends to do it. And since Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, that leaves Saturday. And really, do you know how many Saturdays it is going to take to redo that bathroom? It hardly seems worth it.
I do miss the freedom of not working everyday. Being able to get together with my sister for lunch and shopping, while the kids were in school. Days seemed to go slower then, too. Now it feels like every time I turn around we are half way through another month. Years are flying by. I wish there was a pause button that could stop time for a little while. Just to give me a chance to catch up. Oh, and redo the bathroom too.

Passings and Blessings

My dear mother in law passed away on Sunday night. She allowed me to get home from being out of town for the weekend, before she took her last breath. She passed away peacefully, in her sleep, in her own bed next to her husband of 61 and a half years. A real blessing. She was in no pain and didn't suffer, for which I will be eternally grateful.

When I started dating my husband and he would tell me stories about his childhood, he would sometimes refer to the "black-haired" Emma. I don't know that she was actually mean. It may be just a child's perspective. She was trying, most of the time in vain, to discipline four kids while her husband spent most of his time working or in the hospital. As a religious woman, she would try to use the threat of the saints to curtail her kids behavior. Unfortunately, they would sometimes use it against her and tease her about it. She told them that if they ever raised their hand to their mother, an angel would grab it and hold it so they couldn't hit her. So. Tell that to boys and you know what is going to happen. Them running up to their mother with their arms held up in the air, screaming that they couldn't put them down because some unseen force was holding them there. I don't know if she ever chased them with a rolling pin. Or even laid a hand on them. But the "black-haired" Emma had a reputation.

I only knew the "white-haired" Emma. In most of my earliest memories of her, she had one volume. Loud. When Emily was born, Paul's mom called her Bupa (sp?). Doll, in Italian. but she didn't say bupa quietly, she said BUPA! in her face. We used to have to pre-condition Em to it before we came up to visit, by yelling BUPA at her so she wouldn't startle. The other famously "yelled" word was JIMMY! Usually directed at her husband. But sometimes at her son when he was stealing mushrooms out of her sauce.
Some other things I remember about her. She always had her nails done. And her hair. She loved purses, jewelery and shoes. She told me one of the first time I met her that I could call her mom. After we got a priest to stand up at our wedding and bless us, she never, ever had issues with me not being Catholic or Italian. She loved being a grandmother. She loved my kids. She loved me.

After losing two sons, being moved out of her home, being run over by her husband on his scooter and then being moved again into our home, she was diminished. She was physically smaller after loosing so much weight. She was mentally smaller because of the losses she had incurred. She was vocally smaller because of a cough she developed that would take her air away as she was talking. Although even a few days before she died, she could be heard yelling JIMMY at her husband. She was emotionally smaller, I think because of just having using it all with such abandon throughout her life. But she still had a spark. Every once in a while, I could see it in her eyes. That little glint of what I imagine the "black-haired" Emma to be like.

parenthood

I love my children. I love being a mom. But there is probably no job out there that is as frustrating. Or stressful. And you do it without getting to see the results sometimes for years. It's not like other jobs. A heart surgeon has a lot of stress and I'm sure can be frustrating. But you pretty much know as soon as you take the clamps off whether it is a success or not. An auto mechanic knows when he puts the key in and tries to turn over the engine, whether the job he performed was a success. There are many things that you do as a parent that you can see the results fairly quickly. But there are huge things that you deal with that take months and sometimes years to prove out. So instead of getting immediate feedback to justify what you are doing, or at least give you a bit of insight as to whatever you are doing is working, a lot of time you are left laying there in the middle of the night questioning everything you did that day.

And don't get me started on the guilt. You feel guilty for everything you do. Even when they turn out alright. You still go over them, thinking of ways you could have handled it better.
It is a vicious cycle.

I wonder as I watch my inlaws going through the final stages of their lives, if they still feel that way. Do you always worry about your kids? Do you still second guess your decisions? Do you lay awake at night and wonder if you did it right or at least well.
Is there ever a point in your life where you can deem the job successfully done?

Hospice

So. We had a meeting with a Hospice coordinator today. What a wonderful woman. It truly takes someone special to be involved in the process of dying. She went through everything that Hospice can do for my MIL. She took her time explaining everything to us. My FIL had a hard time hearing (what else is new) but once he put a new battery in his hearing aid, he could follow along with the conversation.
When we reached the part of the conversation that had to do with end of life wishes, the dreaded DNR came up. My MIL said she didn't want to be hooked up to any machines. My FIL agreed! That is the first time I have ever heard him talk about such things!

I think the feeling that I came away with was one of relief. Someone was here to help. It has been a strange thing to see. We put the word out to family and friends after we got the diagnosis and there have been no visitors since! I know people are busy and have lives of their own. But here is this poor, little woman. Sitting at home, day after day. And none of her friends or family have come to see her. Now to be fair, they both have outlived a lot of their friends. But still it is sad. I hope that with the help of Hospice and the visiting Angel woman, they will have some company.

Again, we are faced with the ending of a persons life and yet the dull, dreary daily routine of life keeps chugging along. Groceries have to be purchased and laundry needs to be done. Pills have to be refilled and sheets changed. Maybe it is the repetition of these seemingly meaningless tasks that actually keep us on track. The familiarity of daily life and its routine keeps us moving forward. Every day, moving forward. And little by little we move past the hardship or the hurt or loss that is in the now. Here's hoping that there is some happiness and peace in the future.