In which I learn that raising a child is not the only thing that takes a village…

Remember the movie Miss Congeniality?  Sandra Bullock’s character, a tom-boyish special agent is volunteered to go undercover as a beauty pageant contestant.  They whisk her off to a top secret warehouse facility where a team of experts go to work.  They cut, curl, pluck, and wax.  The woman who walks out of the warehouse bears little resemblance to the woman who had gone in; only the bones are the same.

My house has just had a Miss Congeniality-esque experience.  It has been painted and packed,  primped and preened, and staged to within an inch of it’s life.

It doesn’t look like my house anymore, really.  But boy, does it look beautiful.  And I am hoping (and fervently praying) that someone will come and look at it and decide that they can’t live without it. 

And for the rest of my life, I want to be able to remember the team that worked this miracle for us—making it possible for our house to enter the beauty pageant that is the the multiple listing system.

• Yours truly, who painted the kitchen cabinets.
• Russ, who spent months painting the trim and fixing up the outside.
• My dad & Ramona who blitzkrieg painted the downstairs.
• Alisyn, who came and patched all of the holes in the walls.
• Becky, Julia, and Heidi who whipped and packed the playroom into shape.
• Nancy and Mindy who packed up the books and cleaned off the bookshelves.
• Dave and Denny and their chipper, and the little kids who hauled lots of branches.
• Ann, who helped me paint the kitchen trim then painted the entire stairway.
• Monica, who cleaned out the laundry room and picked up all of the other pieces.
• Dave & Denny, who chipped about 3.5 hours worth of branches.
• Josh, who changed all of the outlets to white.
• Rachel, Jenna, and Jared who did whatever I told them to do.
• Mel, who worked a miracle in a morning in the front yard.
• Handyman Mark who fixed everything that needed fixing.
• Rob, who make sure we were electrically up to speed and put in the new lights.
• Laurin, who painted everything in sight for days on end.
• and Nancy & Mindy again, who made it look like a picture in a magazine.

Thank you all.  Whatever happens, we couldn’t have done it without you…

 

 

PS…I’ve been thinking a lot about this.  You know how we all have stories we tell about the hard times in our lives?  I have a story that I tell about a time when I desperately needed a lot of help and only received a little.   This story will be a much different story.  This will be a story of how I never ever could have done this on my own, and how so many people gave their time to help.  I have been humbled to be the recipient of so much love and service…

Bring it On

 

Of course, to have children--or simply to experience great love for any person at all--is to throw yourself wide open to the possibility of pain at any moment.      Lee Smith, RD 12/11

 

Someone said something like this to me years ago, but it is only that I am living this moment that I truly understand. 

I am reminded of our move from Idaho; our best friends had moved the year before, Russ had been bored at work for some time, and I was relatively unconnected.  Ten weeks after Russ interviewed in North Carolina we left Idaho.  I felt sadness, certainly.  But no more.

This experience could not be more different.  This experience has been filled with uncertainty and surprise and heartbreak.  But I keep reminding myself—who really wants to live a life, especially for 17 years, that you can leave without a backwards glance? 

Not me.  I want to be fully engaged in my life, deeply rooted.  And I tell myself, when the pain of heartbreak threatens to overwhelm me—that this is the price of living and loving deeply.  And that I wouldn’t have changed a thing...

Bring it on….

Close encounters of the ‘old boyfriend’ kind (part 1)

Yesterday there was a funny blog post on Segullah about running into old boyfriends.  It made me laugh—the author did indeed have a great story.  It also made me think of my own close encounters…the good, the bad, and the ugly…

Let’s start with the ugly.  It was Memorial Day weekend, 1995.  We were almost ready to move from Idaho to NC, so were spending a weekend in Utah to say goodbye to family there.  We had decided to spend this particular day at the zoo.  In the morning it was raining but we went anyway because we thought the rain would clear up.  After walking around the zoo (in the rain) for a little while we decided we needed something from the car and walked back to the entrance.  Just outside the gate stood a small group of people huddled under a couple of umbrellas, and much to my surprise one of them was my Young Women’s president from Iowa, a woman that I had loved dearly and had not seen since my graduation from high school 11 years before. 

I ran up to her calling hello, but she looked at me with bewilderment.  In that moment I had two crystal clear awarenesses—the first was exactly what I looked like that would keep her from recognizing me.  Let me elaborate.

On that memorable Memorial day I was almost 7 months pregnant with Josh.  (7 months being the time people routinely started asking me if I was going to have my baby that week, even when I was only having a one baby.)  For some reason I had decided that the perfect complement to my tent-like white tshirt that day was my favorite pair of maternity pants—a pair of knit capris, black with BIG white dots.  Topping that great get-up was my new now rain-frizzed recently permed hair.

No wonder she didn’t recognize me!

And right on top of that awareness was the second awareness that standing with her under that umbrella was her son, my first real boyfriend, affectionately referred to in my family as ‘Scotty-Potty.’  Standing right beside a tall, slender woman who I immediately realized must be his wife. 

Ugh…in the moment I could cheerfully have melted into the pavement.  Instead I blithered like an idiot for a few minutes and then left with Russ and Cindy Lynn.  As we walked away all I could think was that Scotty-Potty was wiping the sweat from his forehead and thinking “whew, so glad I dodged that bullet!”

An Argument for Kindness, Compassion, & Consideration

I stood at the register at Monkey Joe’s, a kids play place in northern Raleigh.  The seven children with me had already been wristbanded and had run off to bounce on the toys, play tag, and hide-n-seek.  I was ready to sit down on the comfy parent chairs and relax.

Or so I thought.

Right up until the girl at the register said, “We have a problem.  Your groupons are for the Cary location and not this one.” 

I was incredulous.  “What do you mean?” I asked.  “I specifically bought groupons for Monkey Joes in RALEIGH.”  I’d been trying to figure out something fun to do on Leap Day, some way to celebrate the day that comes only once every 4 years.  When I’d seen the Monkey Joes groupon it had seemed an easy answer—take the kids to a place where they could do a lot of leaping around.  And so I clicked and bought.

I opened my computer and showed the employee that indeed,  my groupon had said “Monkey Joes—Raleigh” at the top.  She agreed that that was frustrating, but was firm that they could not accept them at the Raleigh location, and that I could either pay for entry or take the kids to the Cary location. 

I appreciated this woman’s courtesy in a difficult moment.

She could not have known the stress I am under.
She could never know how hard I’ve been working every day, how late I’ve been staying up every night, or how early I’ve been waking to start working again.
She had no idea that I’d already driven an hour just to get to her location in northern Raleigh.
She had no way of knowing that I am living most moments on the verge of tears.

 

A couple of months ago I needed to get some blood drawn.  When I called a local lab to see if they could draw it and ask a couple of questions the technician was curt, unhelpful, and by the end of the phone call downright rude.  She may not have said the words ‘You are stupid,’ but she certainly communicated that feeling as she asked me impatiently at the end of the phone call “why on earth I had called her.”  I got off the phone in tears, feeling humiliated.

The next week I had a very different experience at another local lab.  I arrived with an appointment already made to have the blood drawn.  For some reason they had lost all of the paperwork, and there were a couple of reasons that they didn’t think they were going to be able to draw my blood.  Their new computer systems weren’t letting them access any information very quickly, and for 45 minutes I stood there and waited while they tried to figure things out.  In the end they decided that they really couldn’t draw my blood, and once again I went away disappointed.  But in every other way the experience was different.  The man and women I spoke with in that lab that day were kind and courteous.  They were frustrated that they couldn’t figure things out quickly, but they never expressed any of that frustration towards me.  In the end they apologized genuinely for my inconvenience and I left feeling fine, despite my lack of success.

 

I’ve thought about those different experiences in the months since they happened, and they came into my mind again today as I drove away from Monkey Joes in Raleigh hoping that I could find the one in Cary.  (Which I did, thanks to my wonderful husband and a service that he provides that we call ‘Blonde-Star.’) I thought about how one rude or annoyed or even patronizing word from the Monkey Joe’s employee would certainly have been the straw that broke the Leap Year camel’s back.

I am grateful for her patience and sensitivity.

 

I’ve always liked the saying

(also often attributed to Marjorie Hinckley)

but never more than today.  Today, when I was dressed neatly, with my hair fixed and makeup on.  Today when a normal exterior camaflauged a volcano of tears hidden just underneath. Today when I for a moment doubted my ability to survive my hard battle.

Today I was the recipient of kindness in a stressful moment, and I hope that I never forget what it felt like…

Turns out even when the painter is here, the mice are still playing…

Anonymously this time, though…

Stuff that needs a new home

Note to regular blog readers—please ignore me as I try to decrease the amount of stuff laying around here!

 

First, without a picture—a flower press.

2 cages that hold suet cakes for birds—particularly woodpeckers.

Snow cone maker.

1/2 gallon glaze

platform to use on ladder

Bigger pots for transplants.

Folding table and chairs—kid sized.  There was a recall on these after we bought them but we never took them back because there was no replacement.  Our kids have never had a problem with the chairs pinching their fingers, but if your kids are likely to stick their fingers into the folding parts then perhaps these aren’t right for you… 

While the painter’s away, the mice will play…