Mom's Favorite Things

So I'm not sure if Oprah does this anymore, but I know she used to have a show right around Christmas time where she would give everyone in her audience for that day her favorite things. Sometimes it was a pair of pajamas, a desert, and once she gave everyone in the audience a new car.

I got to thinking, if I had to pick my favorite things for that show, what would I pick? Honestly I don't know. I've been on a minimalist kick lately, and so I've been mainly preoccupied with getting rid of things. So then I thought, what are the things that I am always using? Like, what are the things that if someone were to give me as a Christmas present I would be so grateful because they are things that I would be buying anyway? What are the things that I'm absolutely sick of shopping for? And what are the things I would give away to moms like me if I had a show? Basically, what are my "favorite things" at this point in my life?

Here is the list that I came up with, some are things I actually buy, and some are things I don't buy but wish that I had:
1) Whole milk - Henry drinks like 2 gallons a week, I swear.
2) Yobaby yogurt - same thing, plus this stuff is always sold out.
3) Target gift cards - because I can always drop money at Target.
4) Prepared food - ok, I don't actually buy this, but how awesome would it be to get meat that you don't have to bread, pasta that you don't have to boil, and nice fresh sandwiches that you don't have to make? I don't know a mom on this planet who wouldn't love that. And sometimes I just stare at our pantry, and I know that a dinner can be made out of the stuff in there, but the process can be so tedious.
5) Shoprite gift cards - nuff said.
6) Costco membership - because mine is about to run out and I just like going there, but can't really justify it.
7) Henry's pajamas - because he outgrows them and destroys them constantly and they are so overpriced. $20 for feety pajamas? Please.
8) Giftcard to get a haircut - because what used to be my hip side-bangs are now down to my collarbone.
9) Giftcard to get nails done - because my purple glitter nail polish home pedicure didn't go quite as I planned.
10) gas.
11) diet coke.
12) Netflix.
13) Giftcards to eat out at places that don't mind if your baby throws everything on the floor. Well, at least they don't say anything even if they do mind.

Collapsing into bed

What a weekend!

Recap:

Thursday
Get G-Ma from the train, frantically clean house.
Friday
Rush Henry to Dr. after major blowout diaper that was, oddly enough, white. Henry seems better but we're watching him.
Run around trying to find hilarious lingerie for bridal shower and supplies for wishing well.
Almost go to a location 3 hours from shower because thought someone said Salem, PA and not Bensalem, PA.
Finally get to locale and frantically decorate for bridal shower using paperclips, rubber bands, and stuff I find in my car.
Bridal Shower Success!
Stay out way too late and drive home at 1 am.

Saturday
Debate whether or not Henry is too sick to have the birthday party.
Eventually decide I have to get it over with.
Worry about no one showing up ala Halloween.
Worry too many kids will show up and I'll run out of goody bags and make a 5 year old cry.
Stash nonconforming items in bedroom.
Birthday Party Success! Just enough people showed and the timing was perfect. As one group would leave another would show up.
Migraine headache, one of only two I've had in my life. I hide in bed with a pillow over my face.

Sunday
Wake up feeling much better.
Go to church and see some good friends.
See G-Ma and her boyfriend off.
Construct dinner for a couple that just had a new baby out of paperclips, rubber bands, and stuff I find in my car.
Target!

Healing

Something crazy happened at church yesterday. I was sitting in the service next to my husband. (Henry is sick and had stayed home with my mom.) We had just sat down after the first round of singing when I spotted him. My heart dropped to my knees when I recognized his face.

It was my old high school crush from my private Christian school. I had pined over this boy since the first day of high school. In the tiny fish bowl of my little private school, he was a big, big fish. He had a cool haircut while the other guys were still sporting the Mo Stooge look. He played the guitar. He broke my poor little naive heart.

Not that he actually did anything. It was more like I was so shy and awkward that I was afraid to even speak to this kid. Like almost everywhere else in this world, I did not fit in in high school. I was poor, like, really really poor. Thank goodness we wore uniforms, because I owned one pair of jeans. One. I had friends, for sure, but I maintained my social status by remaining aloof. No one really knew me well, except maybe a couple of teachers. Even had I been popular, I doubt that I would have actually dated anyone in high school. But the feeling of inadequacy that kept me from making friends with this cool kid became so intertwined with my personality that to this day I view myself as a misanthrope. Perhaps if I had stayed at that school I would have grown up, gotten over it, talked to this boy, and realized that, however cool someone else looks, when it comes right down to it, I am the shiz.

But I didn't stay. Mid-way through my junior year, I transferred to public school. In my new school I had instant cache. My mom was the coolest teacher, and everyone wanted to see what her daughter was like. I had a job by then and was able to dress the part. I was invited to the cool table the very first day. When I had a party a couple of months after I arrived, everyone I invited came. Not only did I make friends easily, but the teachers were delighted instead of annoyed by my precociousness, and I soon gained a reputation for being smart. The confidence this inspired allowed me to go on to college and law school, and to hold my own there.

However, all my carefully constructed self-esteem dropped on the floor when I saw this boy again. He looked the same, hipster clothes, cool hair. I tried to think of what I would say to him, and all of my childhood insecurities came rolling back over me. He wouldn't even remember me, I thought. He'll just stare at me blankly like he's never seen me before.

I sat in the service and tried to quell the anxiety that I felt. I started to listen to the sermon. It was about the Future Hope. The preacher said that what we were looking forward to was so incomparable to the suffering of today that it was not even worth comparing. At one point he asked everyone to think of their suffering. Now, I am the first to admit that I've had a pretty easy life. So what came to mind was pretty trivial. I thought about all of the times I'd cried myself to sleep in high school. I thought about the anxiety of all of those social situations where I felt out of place. I thought about the times when I had felt totally alone, when I felt like I was a jerk, when I felt like I was just plain boring. And most importantly, I thought of how afraid I was to talk to this guy.

In high school he never really did anything mean to me in particular, but I had come to see him through the lens of the stereotypical cool kid from high school dramas, and I resented him. I resented that we could not be easy friends, that he was rarely interested in me while I was always interested in him. I resented that, even now, with my hottie husband by my side, I felt inadequate around him.

This was my particular brand of suffering that I focused on during the sermon. And when I isolated these feelings, I was able to set them aside, and sort of say, "so what?" So I can't talk to this guy. And that was that. I didn't feel the need to track him down and flaunt all of my achievements. I was just... fine. It wasn't that I felt cool all of a sudden, it was more like that I felt ok with not being cool.

It turned out that after the service while I was talking to another friend, this guy came up to me. Not only did he remember me, he ran up and gave me a hug. After I introduced my husband and told him about my son, he gushed about how much he wanted to settle down and how lucky we were. He was unemployed, living at home, had never finished college. I say this not because it made me happy, surprisingly. It was more that I glimpsed a different life for myself, and it made me very happy that I have the life that I do. But the most interesting part about it was that this guy was really nice. All of the little slights that I had imagined as a girl were likely just that. I felt relief that I hadn't wasted my time pining over some jerk, and I felt relief that I was too shy to talk to him!

As we talked about old teachers and where our classmates are now, I realized something. I had always been cool enough, I just never knew it until now.

Faithfulness

We're on a budget. Not a "save for a down payment" or "Florida vacation" budget. Like a "our income just covers our rent and loan payments" budget. This has been challenging for me, especially at this time of the year when I really want to buy Christmas presents and throw a party every weekend. Not to mention two of my best friends are getting married in December, and there is nothing I'd rather do than shower them right.
It has also been a struggle to keep tithing when I know that, on paper at least, we can't afford to. That said, I have to share how God has been faithful to us over the past couple of months. I cannot begin to explain how we are still doing fine even though at the start of this year I was certain that I would have to get a job and leave Henry with someone else all day. (Not a judgment of anyone else, I just really want to be home with him right now).
My husband has a very prestigious legal job. When our friends hear about it, when other lawyers hear about it, they are very impressed. Unfortunately for us this prestigious job does not pay as much as a family of three needs to live in NJ.
Despite the fact that we cannot pay our bills on paper, in real life God has provided for us and blessed us beyond anything that we could have imagined. Sometimes it's a refund of a deposit we gave to the utility company when we first moved in. Another time the ultrasound place returned some copays I had given them when I was pregnant. It was a mistake, they said. Yeah right! Most recently our NJ tax refund was direct deposited into our bank account, an amount greater than my husband's pay check.
We found a way to consolidate many of our student loans into two loans, and chose a payment plan that is income-based and that forgives the balance of any unpaid educational loans after 25 years. With this plan, we are free to take jobs that we want, instead of being enslaved to the loan payments. I had no idea this was even an option until recently.
While we need to be responsible with the money that God has given us, it is also possible, I think, to limit ourselves by what we see on paper. Who knows what God will do with the money that we tithed this month? I don't mean to make this too legalistic, and I know that I do have a tendency to view giving in that way, but what if we had limited ourselves to the budget without any room for God to work? We would have been secure financially, but we might have never seen God's faithfulness in answering our prayers.

Tweeting the Post-PostModern

I set up a twitter account, but haven't tweeted anything yet. I guess my thoughts run a bit more wild than the short and pithy 140-character update.
Since I'm in the still in the dark ages when it comes to current technology, I don't know which of my friends are tweeting yet, so I just followed a couple of writers whose names I recognized.
I didn't know quite what to expect, but I have to say, it was pretty disheartening to see the focus of some of these currently popular literary folks. Without offending anyone by talking politics or religion, let's just say that my worldview tends towards the hyperopic. In other words, I believe in an eternal soul, which pretty much shapes the way I think about every other issue.
But this distinction aside, I was expecting the wordsmiths of our day to rise above the mundane rhetoric of our time and deliver something new, or, if that would be too much, at least something classic.
I was disappointed to find the usual gammut of hot topics of the day, the woeful economy, the environment, blah blah blah. The same old little or big end of the egg arguments that the politicians have been bantering about in order to drum up interest in their election campaigns.
Now I'm not promoting escapism as the only purpose of fiction writing, and of course people are free to write, or tweet, whatever they want, but it does seem to me that writers ought to be creative enough to move a step further than the entertainment/news status quo.
Which brings me to my final challenge to the literary community. I say challenge and not criticism, and this is why: it is so much easier to tear down than to build up.
So much of our generation has grown up in a time when minimalism, at least asthetically, is king. "Do away with traditions, they only serve to limit you. Forget the elaborate reasoning of the past, history is only so much baggage to carry around, just drop it and be free to create something new. And religion! The biggest offender of all! Religious people are all crazy. That is the simplest way to deal with the Big Questions. Just assume that there is no God without ever taking the time to think about it. And once this assumption is made everything else falls into place so easily. Secular humanism and a democratic government will be enough to keep us all from killing each other, and in the mean time we can all do what is right in our own eyes without worrying about universal truth or an outside standard of morality." The artistic epression of our time is riddled with the easy performance of tearing down the establishment. The theme is so rampant that it is getting, ironically, old.
This thinking is why, in my humble opinion, we are so focused on the problems that keep the news shows' ratings up. If you believe that you really die when you die, it makes the problems of today paramount. Take the environment, for instance. The idea that man, that man in the industrial age, has so damaged the earth that it will be forever changed and may cease to exist as we know in a very short amount of time is at first a horrifying thought. But seen through the lens of secular humanism, the idea that we have the power to destroy the world, that the world in effect will die with us, is intoxicating. How can our egos resist such an idea? That we have such control over the universe is a compelling thought for a bunch of finite creatures with an inexplicable ability to comprehend the eternal.
And so the easy route is to bemoan our carbon emissions and stare dismally ahead at the smog-filled future of our grandchildren, should they survive. This is not art, people.
I want us to be remembered as more than just well-liked and less accurate Cassandras. So here is the challenge: Innovate. Analyze, certainly, but do something more than complain. Observe, but with an eye towards creativity. If poets can no longer look past the petty grievances of our time and envision a better future than who will? While every writer is in some ways limited to the time in which he or she is born, great writers share a vision that pierces through the myopic viel of finite extence. So, writers, stop recycling the media flavor of the day and tweet something that won't be obsolete in a few years!

Note: I get it that the whole medium of twitter is that the words are there and gone, and the form of expression is meant to be somewhat intangible. But the point is really about the larger body of literary writing in general, and so still stands.