What I have been up to for the past year and a half

So the posts previous to this one are some of the things that I wrote while I have been gone from my little blog. I was writing for a blog that a few friends started as a spin off of the Apron Stage called the Peanut Gallery Speaks. These posts do not represent everything that was written in that time for that blog, but it is what I have saved to my computer. So here it is.

It's funny, looking back through all of these posts, remembering how fun it is to write. How fun it is to write with the reckless abandon and relative anonymity of a Blogspotter. It's nice to remember who I am. I'm Traci, Dammit. So many things have changed in my life in the past year and a half but hopefully my love of sitting around and typing my own stream-of-consiousness bullshit will live forever! And between you and me, as of right now, that love is feeling pretty strong.

So, possibly two people who still read this, let's get this party wagon back on the road.

I fell in love recently with two blue eyes, ten sausagy fingers, one bald head. I am completely in love with this kid who cannot even lift his hand without poking himself in the eye. He spits on me and we both laugh, I think his poop smells nice. It's ridiculous, he's ridiculous - I'm ridiculous. I'm in love I'm in love and I don't care who knows it.
I think we have to feel like that, because some of the things you find as a parent are absolutely horrifying. For example; did anyone know that a circumsision can just not take? That you can circumsize a kid and his penis might just refuse to break up with it's foreskin, and reattach itself? Weird. Did you know that it is possible to completely plug your nostril with one solid booger? Or that breastfeeding baby boys can lactate? Or that one in every thousand children are born with a underdeveloped extra digit? These are the things I never wanted to know but now do because I'm a mom.
And it doesn't stop there. Kids think the bath tub drain is going to suck them up, they hit each other because they want to be friends. They can watch the same movie for weeks at a time. They have stomachs like billygoats and imaginary friends. They can swing all day and not get sick - it's just not right. And my life has been taken over by these little weirdos. They interact with stangers as though they have a delightful cocktail of Tourettes and Aspergers.
It's hilarious when it's not mortifying.
Really, that sums it up. Hilarious when it's not mortifying, heaven when it's not misery, and when it's not drudgery it's complete, utter bliss.
And when I think about it like this I want a million more six fingered, booger nosed, lactating, snotbrats just like 'em.

Pulling out of Lactation Station

My fourth and last child is ten months old. I have to remind myself of this roughly every fifteen minutes. Wasn't I laying in my twin bed, praying for boobs yesterday? I thought so, but somehow an eleven year old is sitting in my kitchen baking a cake - trippy. I feel like that stoner in high school who was somehow always surprised he has hands. It's a very elementary fact in my life that I find endlessly bewildering and fascinating.

Pardon the informality, but I have breastfed every child. I'm sure at some point I would have said that with an air of superiority, but I was pretty young back then. I am old enough now to have no opinion on a whole list of things, and breastfeeding is at the top of that list...for other people anyway. I have an opinion for myself. It has to stop.

Simon, my ten month old, disagrees. Imagine being in a prison camp for ten years eating nothing but moldy rice and dirty water. Now imagine coming home to your first bite of apple pie. Your eyes roll into the back of your head, you heave an involuntary sigh of relief and delight. Happy times are hear again. This is the face Simon makes every time I feed him. Every. Single. Time. He wiggles his tiny little baby body in an effort to be even closer to me and then, as he's eating, looks up at me with love and gratitude and, while still eating, the corners of his mouth upturn and he smiles.

“Why would you want that to stop?” one might ask. The answer is because I am stone cold. Six years of having people dependent on your physical person for sustenance does that to you. There comes a point in every female life, I am sure, when you have to say “alright you pack of parasites, enough is enough”. No matter how cute the parasite, a line must be drawn at some point and for me that time is now. (note to self; potential children's book idea in there somewhere.)

But do I have my moments of regret? No.

Because the next time I wear a full length dress - or forgo the breast pads in my bra - my eyes will roll back in my head, I will heave an involuntary sigh of relief and delight.

Happy times are here again.

My Life in Limbo

I realize that this might sound annoying, but in these times of economic uncertainty, I have found an embarrassing amount of possibility has opened up to my family. It might be kind of braggy, but I would argue that I am due. My husband and I spent the first five years of our marriage pursuing his dream of being an airline pilot - this was right before the bottom fell out of the airline industry - and an aviation degree does not come cheap. We then embarked on the plan B college track just to get a decent job. We also decided to go with the “buy high sell low” trend for real estate that has been all the rage these days, but now, after years of financial beatings and general wandering about, hauling our student loan debt as we go, here we are with a veritable buffet of choices before us.

I don't like it.

I think I've gotten so comfy in survival mode that having the future wide open seems not quite right, like those stairs that have no railing you see in modern contemporary houses. You know that you’re going to make it down the stairs, but all of that open space just feels wrong. We are dealing with a lot of open space so here are the choices

Choice A is stay in Utah, in our house, make it pretty, stay in the PTA and Cub Scouts and generally realizing my dreams of Leaving It to Beaver. Maintain long term/short distance friendships, which is a change from the short term/long distance relationships that are my current social interactions of choice and start Art school.

Choice 2) The same as choice A but do it in Washington. It's cool and misty there, my family is there and I generally love it.

Choice C – pull a Rebecca Smylie and join the Foreign Service, enjoy international life of mystery and become a national treasure (that's a given, right? Even now I'm changing the Mary Tyler Moore Show lyrics to the Traci McKay Show lyrics – Who can spread democracy with her smile?)

I think I've decided that it is harder to choose between two great choices than having one clear, obvious choice – unfortunately I am a few steps behind Stephanie Meyer in realizing that or I would be a rich novelist right now, because I'm guessing Twilight would not have been quite as popular if Bella was forced to choose between a hot, super human vampire with soulful eyes and a guy named Larry who loves Renaissance fairs.

So after a life of Larry choices it's time to choose between my Edward and Jacob...

Man, I kinda miss Larry.

*You have my word, PGS, from here on out I will do my utmost to abstain from Twilight references.

Cooking 101

I remember thinking as a child that in the future I would somehow have found a way to get my act together. I would imagine my mature self keeping my room clean, doing my homework on time, becoming a morning person, retaining information because my mind no longer wandered, you know, stuff that people do when they are fully cooked individuals.

I'm being generous when I say I am half baked, if anything. To stretch a bad metaphor even further, at this point I'm beginning to suspect I'm missing some ingredients all together. Let's review what thirty years of maturing has gotten me;

I'm still shocking late to everything. But now I also make a small band of angry children late to everything as well. They are conspiring to become less small band and more rebel force, I know it.

My hygiene has improved marginally, unfortunately, as one ages one must add more steps to the daily toilette, so (after a quick pit check to confirm) yep, I'm still behind.

I remember sitting in my bedroom, staring at the insurmountable task of cleaning before me, knowing that future me would never let things progress to this level. Good ol' future me, she thinks ahead and just hangs that shirt up. She is like a human Roomba in her bedroom maintaining efficiency. She would never serve real peanut butter and jelly to her bears for lunch, and if she did she would throw it away when she was done, not leave it on the floor, and if she did that she would never drop a pair of pants over it, and if she did she would never walk on those pants.

And if she did she would never wear those pants to school.

Future me is still just me. And thinking about it now, I have progressed. Because would not wear old peanut butter and jelly pants. Today me would draw the line at old! And today me spends a lot less of my days inwardly groaning and wishing myself away. Today me knows that some things are probably going to change only marginally, but that might be just enough to get by completely pleasantly for a very long time. Today me knows that very few things I am personally capable of would end the world, nothing, actually. Today me is still just me, but with perspective.

And with that I can miss a few ingredients and no one will know the difference, it's like adding garlic, or chocolate chips- enough perspective and you can camouflage monkey poop.

And I think lessons on camoflauging monkey poop in food is a very strong way to close, I'm not actually feeding you garlic monkey poop!

See! It's works and I am a genius.

“Mom, come out here and look at your son.”

Oh, how that is the real test, the test of my life.

He's calling to me from the living room. He just bit into a Sugar Daddy and pulled a loose tooth out. He's eight. He's so eight. Just everything about an eight year old boy – the crazy eight year old teeth, the gangly, floppy gate when he's being silly, the exuberance. And as I am plucking my face in the bathroom I hear him, and I know that if my life were a novel, this would be the foreshadowing of what is to come.

I wonder how well I step away from my ideas of how he's doing, or how I think he should be doing, and see him for what he is. Love him for what he is. Sometimes I think I'm tempted to keep ideas of the people I love locked in my heart, my collection of huggable dolls – rather than loving them in reality, apart from the way I would like them and their actions to relate to me.

I know that I can't, and wouldn't want to, know the full reality. There are some things that are decidedly not for me, who he is with friends, with God. But there are so many people in my own life that I would love to show my whole self to but I know our relationship could not sustain a full disclosure.

I love him. And every day it's a choice and a challenge to love him as completely as I can – on his terms, not mine.

I live in Salt Lake City.

My husband, Dave, grew up here. He went to high school here, he went to college here, all of his family lives here. When we go to the grocery store he tells me about the time he vandalized that store as a thirteen year old. We go for a walk by our house and he can tell me about the places we pass, who lived there, where he broke his arm on a trampoline, the driveway where a friend's dad had them all squish their hand prints into the cement. Our financial planner is Dave's high school buddy. Our pediatrician is across the street from the apartment complex he lived in when we met.

I think this is weird.

I have always felt a little bit strange about the whole concept of former boyfriends Facebook friending me. I feel that if your tongue has ever touched mine there is never a good time to try and rekindle that relationship, no matter how friendly you want to keep it, thank you very much. But if you grew up where you live you could see that guy at the grocery store, or your ninth grade Spanish teacher at he DMV. That girl who never let you sit at her lunch table? She could be asking you if you want fries with that (yeah, that's never happened to me either, but I can dream, can't I?).

I had a baby two weeks ago. I was attached to a bunch of medical doohickeys so when I had to use the bathroom my husband came in to hold up all medical apperati. Unbeknownst to us in all of our maneuvering the nurse's call button had been pushed and a nurse came rushing in, thinking that I must have fallen or was in distress.

She opened the door. “Is everything O.K.?”

Dave and I both looked at her, a little bewildered.

“The call button was pushed, are you alright?”

We realized what was going on and I told her that I didn't know how we had managed to push the button but that we were fine.

Just then my husband says “Sheri? Sheri Nelson? Brad's's little sister, right? I'm Dave McKay.”

“Oh my gosh, Dave! I haven't seen you in ages! How are you doing!?”

“Well, were great, we're having a baby! This is my wife Traci-”

Dave turns to introduce me and we all realize that yep, I'm still nine months pregnant, on a toilet in a backless gown.

“Um, Hi, nice to meet you, Sheri.”

We need to move.

For Becky

My sister was one time waiting in line when she struck up a conversation with an old man, he told her about his wife, his God, and that dirty sonofabitch cancer. She came home and told me how kind and gentlemanly he seemed, except when it came to that dirty sonofabitch cancer, which had crossed the bounds of his courtesy, had provoked him to call it by it's full name.

I was reading a book called "Let's Be Enemies" to my daughter and thought of you, Beck. When you moved up from Texas I prayed at your first Sunday school meeting there that you would feel welcome. A year later I was making fun of you while you said the prayer in that same Sunday school class, but later that day you brought me brownies anyway.

I'll never forgive you for that.

You always tickled me until I got really angry. I hated it. Nothing feels more invalidating than trying to be mad when you can't stop laughing. I made fun of the trace of a Texas accent that you still had until you got really angry. I had not mastered the art of knowing when to shut it. I'm obviously still working on it. you were my best enemy whenever you weren't my best friend.

I felt like Laurie in Little Women, as Amy was always meant to be rich, Laurie was always meant to be a March, and the Brown girls had meant to be Tunnels. And it was good of the Tunnell girls to take us in, take us along for floats down lazy rivers in the blue green summertime. Jumping out with our tubes in your back yard, is there anything in the world more luxurious for a thirteen year old than your own private river? Playing SkipBo and RummiKub and dodging angry geese and making cinnamon rolls. My land, even thinking about it now who wouldn't want to be a Tunnell?

I hope you're not reading this, I hope you are busy getting better and eating cinnamon rolls and playing SkipBo. But while I'm down here and you're up there I'll be thinking of you and praying that you feel it and calling cancer, which I will never capitalize because the dirty sonofabitch doesn't deserve it, by it's full name.

You'll Have to Eat Your Lunch All by Yourself

One time, when my sister was about four or five, we went for a hike. She really had to go potty, badly, and absolutely could not wait, so my Mom took her a few feet away from the trail and helped her go outdoor style. Things were going pretty smoothly until a party of about ten hikers passed us and Dee gave em a little more bum than they had expected to see that day - or as I like to call it, a Brown Family Hello.

I'm traveling down memory lane because I'm being more sociable, or at least trying to be, and I'm feeling a little bit exposed.

I am having a gathering, if you will, in a couple of weeks, with some awesome people I met on the Apron Stage. Yeah, that's right, I'm meeting people at a park that I have never met except on the Internet. And I'm bringing a plate of brownies, and a spoon.

Oh yeah, I'm exposed.

I turn 30 on the 30th. I had a plan, 30 days until 30. I would do something fun every day until I turned 30 with a friend or acquaintance and just generally party it on up. Then I realized, in order to do that I would run the very real risk of finding that I just do not have that many friends. I'm pretty sure I do, but my ego can't handle 30 days of realizing people feel pretty ambivalent toward me and now my twenties are over.

Here's the problem, like my sister, I have needs, hers was to go number one, and mine is to be loved! The problem is that in order to fulfill those needs some exposure, vulnerability, has to take place. I just cannot trust that that will not be the moment when a party of people come traipsing by and laugh.

For Dee

Dee would hide behind the curtain on our sliding glass door while the four of us hummed the theme to the Johnny Carson show.

Da dada dee dum dadadadadadadaaaa da dum dum dum

Then Cliff would try to suppress laughter while saying "Ladies and Gentlemen, heeeerrrrre's Deedee!

Dee would fiddle around, trying to find the end of the curtain. Finding success she would emerge, throw her chubby arms out and flash a row of pearly white baby teeth while we all laughed and clapped and generally encouraged her to believe she was the center of our universe.

She really was.

I'm the youngest of the older four and Dee is eight years younger than me besides. She was all of our baby to share, fight over and pass off.

We would alternately treat her like her much abused Elmo doll, making her play "bewilder baby" where we would throw pillows at her toddling body, trying to make that faint crinkle sound babies create when their diapered bottoms hit the floor, and then we would treat her like our own personal baby genius and applaud her attempts to say "biodegradable".

She would sing snippets of Saturday's Warrior, she would cry and tell us that we treated her like junk. She would call us names like "big bird stop sign" when she was angry. She kept growing up as we kept growing out of the house. I would get her ready for school in the morning.

In many ways she was my baby, but I was not her mother. I was her snot faced sister.

I'm still haunted by my fourteen year old self pulling Dee out of bed, sometimes by her hair, when she wouldn't wake up. She was just a little kid. I should have been better, and gentler and more motherly. I was not sensitive to her tender head while I did her hair in the morning, although I will say that I did try to go the extra mile by giving her Heidi braids piled on top of her head and clipped with a lacy bow because that's how she liked it.

I moved out. I got married. She moved in with me during my first year of marriage and my parents last. She was so confused at ten, and I couldn't tell her that I was just as confused at eighteen.

She moved back with Mom, then with Shelly, then with Mom and Jay, then when she was sixteen she came back to me. Dave taught her how to drive. We went out to dinner and played Nerts. She was in Madrigals. She sang beautifully, she was funny, even with such a gap in our ages we were all pleasantly surprised that our personalities as Brown children must be locked somewhere in our genetic code, because without the benefit of having had us all close to her chronologically, she's completely one of us.

I also wanted to kill her, because in many ways she was my baby, but I am not her mother. I'm her over bearing sister.

She's twenty one now. Now it's all of us who wish we heard from her more often, but I like that. I think she deserves some time where we are all a little bit longing for her to be more of a presence in our lives. I think that's exactly how you should feel in your early twenties. Like after being youngest for an eternity everyone suddenly wants to know why you never call, what's going on in your life, how work is - it's very Cat's-in-the-cradle-and-the-silver-spoon. She has pink hair and a boyfriend I have only met once. But he seems nice, and her pink hair is actually pretty cute. I hope she is living an amazing life and is having an amazing time, and I hope that in quiet moments she still wants to play Nerts with me.

Because she's not my baby, and I'm not her mother. But she is my sister.

The Demon Spawn of Hell... or...Spellcheck

" Seek the truth, speak the truth, be the truth" - Frank James

It turns out the truth is ugly.

If there is one virtue that I am pretty good at emulating, I hope it's honesty. I am fairly overly sensitive about dealing with people honestly, and having them be honest with me. Lies are such an enormous waste of time when the truth is always surmountable. But there is one area in which I have converted to the inky black realms of the untrue.

Spellcheck.

I have always felt that spell check really messes with intellectual integrity, if you can't spell you should learn, otherwise you should proudly display your lack of spelling prowess as one of those things that separates out the true hearts (who will find your poor spelling adorable, like your weird pinky toe nail) from the false ones (who will see the form rather than the substance of the thing and make fun of you behind your back).

I have had many a good natured argument with both family and friends over what was once my firm anti spellcheck opinion. I have been told that it probably aids proper spelling more than it enables, also that it is considerate to the reader for whom one writes. I used to wave these arguments away as one more small cave to one more little technoloical pest ...and it's all fun and games until one day those little pests become so powerful they start keeping us in plexiglass wombs living only a cyber reality. That's right. I saw the Matrix, and it scared the crap out of me. And it all starts with Spellcheck.

Then, one day, in a moment of weakness, I tried it.

Oh no.

I am an idiot.

and now everyone knows it.

And now I'm hooked because, you see, there is no gateway drug to spell check. It's like going from nothing to crack, I was completely unprepared, but now I can't live without it. How long had I been spelling thier wrong? Was I really that far off in spelling miscilaneous? It was like I had just discovered my own nakedness for which I had previously been blissfully unashamed.

But I still never correct my poor grammar, obviously. I have to keep it a little bit real.

*No misspelled words were harmed in the making of this post.

Happy Birthday, Dad

I yell "I'm not angry! I'm just... emphatic."

I have become my father.

I remember crying when he would try to show me how to clean my room, or do my homework. I was sure he was angry, but now I know, as I bend over my son, whose trying not to cry as I attempt and fail to teach him fractions, he wasn't angry at me. He was just emphatically trying to teach me the concept of multiplication.

"Dad, what does five times five mean?"

"It's five, five times."

"What?"

"It's five, five times"

"Dad, I still don't get it."

"What's not to get?! It's five, five times!?!"

When we would clean our room he would wait until we thought we were finished and then get out the broom. I hated that broom. He would sweep everything out that had been stashed under beds, wipe everything off the tops of our dressers and pull out any clothes that had not been folded, but just stuffed into drawers. He'd tell us to do it again and we would stare at a job that was twice as big as it had been when we first started.

But it didn't matter, I was still his shadow. He would take me to the hanger where he worked and my sister and I would crawl around and play in all of the planes and helicopters. He showed me how to do woodworking projects. I made a baseball bat rack for my brother. We would paint wooden name plates made with his Dremmel tools.

My Dad has been an actor, a rodeo clown, an army guy, an outdoor wilderness man. He's missing the top of his middle finger and has mottled brownish spots up and down his body from both grenade shrapnel and the horns of a bull. When we were little he would turn up his long eye brows at the arch and chase us around the house as a mad professor and we would scream with delight.

He sliced his hand open once. Soaking dishrags with blood, laying on his back, with his hand raised in the air on our back porch I asked him why he wasn't crying, I'd have been crying if I cut my hand like that. "Would crying make it any better?". I was about ten, it was the first time it had occurred to me that crying maybe doesn't make things better, but I quickly disregarded this as crazy talk from a man who was losing a lot of blood.

The funny thing was that crying over a chopped up hand was a waste of time, but my Dad will cry at the drop of hat, if you set dropping your hat to Hallmark commercial music.

He was a hard man to live with and far from perfect, but whenever we sang, or had drawn something, or acted, or wrote I knew even then that he was proud.

Time is such a funhouse mirror. Turning people into things that don't remotely resemble themselves from one moment to the next as you look through it. I remember being scared to death of him, of hearing the coins in his pocket jingle as he came down the stairs. Now I see a big man, who still hugs me so tight my eyes bug out a little bit. I see sour kraut and milktoast. I see a mad professor.

A few months ago Viv asked me how to multiply.

"It's just the amount of times you count by that number."

"What?"

"It's five, five times."

Worst. Lent. Ever.

I'm not very bright, to be fair I do only have an eighth grade education, so hopefully my lack of sophistication has more to do with ignorance rather than sheer native stupidity.

I bring this up because I just discovered from Lisa on the Apron Stage, and mind you I am almost thirty, just discovered what Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday, or what have you, and Lent are. I also just learned that they have any relation to Mardi Gra.

For those that don't know, Lent is essentially a forty day fast from your favorite sin. I have a pretty religiously inclusive view of eternity and found this to be wonderfully in keeping with my Mormon beliefs - very "I would give away all of my sins to know thee". Also a great way to keep in mind, as was noted by Lisa, that while we sacrifice, Christ made the ultimate sacrifice, which is much more observant of the Atonement and Resurrection then my traditional ritual of crying over Easter dresses I'll never finish and then binging until I'm in a chocolate bunny coma.

But here's the kicker - the day before the start of Lent, Fat Tuesday - and New Orleans' Mardi Gra, is the observance of the fact that you are about to do without for forty days, so why not start with a little oomph to usher you in, or, depending on how you look at it, it's time to get your forty days into one night -very "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die".

I don't know if you can guess which one I'm better at. Hint - it has the word "Fat" in it.

Last night I had a party sized bag of Mini Eggs.

Today I gave up sweets for Lent, for twelve hours. Eight of which I slept through.

It turns out that my religious inclusivity mixed with my absolute inability to keep commitments has me feeling like a failure in two religions. And I was so wanting to feel Southern (aka interesting).

Oh, fiddle dee dee!

I have long suspected that I am a misplaced Southern Belle that, like Lambert, was dropped off by some incompetent stork into the lovingly blind arms of another species, in this case Mormon Northerners. While I am pretty sure I ended up much better off where I landed something about the South calls to me in a native croon, and I'm pretty sure it's two most appealing notes are big hair and addiction.

That darn addiction part got me this morning.

So I've decided I need to enlarge my idea of Lent for those of us sitting at the kids table, spiritually. The Lent Mulligan. I'm just going to look ahead and keep trying.

After all, tomorrow is another day.

I ran into a friend from a couple of years ago the other day at the movies. She was a super hot, super sweet, gallery owning wonder divorcee when I knew her, but at the movies last week I got to meet her new husband.


They were the perfect couple. She runs an artist's retreat in Italy for a couple of weeks every year. They met there. They are clearly in love, he clearly feels lucky to have her, and she was at a very attractive level of modesty in accepting it.


I know I should spend more time focusing on the ideal, but I can't. Things broken and rebuilt are the most beautiful to me and I love, love, love when divorced people find love again. It makes me hopeful. Things gone terribly wrong in act two can find in act three their right.


My parents are a prime example. Is it sacralige to say I'm glad they are not together (forget I asked, better to ask forgiveness than permission, especially when that honestly is how I feel and no amount of pretty lies will make me truly righteous about it.)? I see them with my step parents and feel that we are at the end of A Mid Summer Nights Dream, things were extremely turned around, one or more parties might have indeed been an ass, but everyone found their proper place in the end.

My Dad and I just got off the phone. His wife (my Step Mommy) has put him on a diet. He is so excited to tell me "we have turkey bacon, and you know what? We barely notice a difference!", they go shopping for healthy meals, they have lost thirty lbs. each. I know that they must have their own problems, but they have enthusiasm that they share together. They tell us about their favorite places to go, why we should watch The Amazing Race, the home remodeling and hunting and fishing expos they attend. They are in love. Hope springs eternal. All is right with the world.

My Mom and my Step Dad are the same, they improve each other. They work in the temple, they go on long road trips, he tries to make her more punctual and she tries to get him to eat different foods. She laughs at cats on Youtube and he laughs at her laughing at cats.

I'm happy for them, I'm happy for me, because there is nothing so bad that life stops, it keeps moving, it keeps changing, there are always chances left to take, there will always be opportunity for heveanly respite after terrible storms. There will always be turkey bacon left to discover, both actual turkey bacon and the metaphorical, undiscovered tukey bacon in your soul.

They are both delicious.

Things Big and Great

I have lived in a kind of self imposed state of claustrophobia for a little while. I am actually a little bit surprised that I have picked up writing at this brief stage of my life, because so rarely do I feel like myself. I often feel like I'm myself under glass, like the things that should be touching me I can see, but just can't quite touch. I don't know if I'm coming back out, but I feel hope bubbling to the surface of my skin. I'm seeing things open up.

I'm seeing the sun shine of friendly faces. Old and new, the possibility of things that are warm and inviting. I am feeling tiny urgings, to cook (repent now, I'm pretty sure that a Traci cooking is one of the first signs of the Apocalypse), to maybe ask friends over to dinner, to play games and to dance and even clean. I think showering and doing my hair might take more prominent roles in my future.

I am hopeful.

I am hopeful because there is a life of Big Things waiting for a prodigal me. Those big things, I think more often now, are probably things I will witness rather than do. And that makes me happy. I don't know if that can sound as happy as I feel it. I have love to feel. I have people to watch and wonder at. I have God's beauties to behold. I am taking feeble steps at being bounteous in spirit again. I don't have a lot to give, but it's getting to be more, and I think I am on the mend.

I was in Disneyland last week. It rained the whole time. On the up side, the lines were very, very short. If you are an old hat at Disneyland like I am you know that when the crowds are small it's time to hit the most beloved of all rides-Peter Pan.

I prepared to board my pirate ship when I noticed the gals ahead of me. Two eighty year old women, silver halos of curled hair, no grandchildren in sight, loading up for a ride together.

I imagine two girls, maybe sisters maybe friends, laughing and whispering into the wee hours. Hair tied and in rollers and mutual fascination with dolls, then horses, then marriage, then boys and then marriage again. I think these women must have had their hearts broken given their age. Either by boys or husbands or children or dreams, things that pass by so fast and you spend the rest of your life wondering why they were was so slippery, why you couldn't just hold on.

Did they carry the hope that you start with, the disillusion with which you throw it all away, the resignation you wear as you tote your burdens, the grim acknowledgement of hardship and finally the light at the end, the understanding, the surrender?

I think I am seeing these women at the point of surrender. I imagine they have returned from a long journey into a time wear there is no time, no time for silly stories, fairy tales, and rides not made of magic, but fiberglass, cardboard and paint. They have traveled through that strange land of adulthood and are returning home with all of the wisdom that comes from a long trip abroad.

The mechanics of the ride give a shudder and start and I watch two silvery heads peeking out of a pirate ship, returning to Neverland.

Pearls of Wisdom

I have a tattoo, when I wear a bathing suit people ask what the Chinese character on my back means. If they thought about it for a second they would know that it means I hit my rebellious period in 1998. I really don't know what it means, I don't speak, or read, Chinese. I imagine that the tattoo artist had a list of characters on the wall with words underneath saying things like "spirit" and "war" when in actuality they meant "spoiled white girl" and "drunk frat guy". He said mine meant "courage" but I think it shouts "dumbass" instead.


But for all of my tattoo regret I have been tempted once again. I think of all of the life lessons that have come to me in the last ten years and wish I could remember them at those crucial moments when they most want to go flying out of my brain. I want to get the best pieces of advice I have heard written on the inside of my forearm like crib notes that I can cheat my way through life with.


Here's the list so far;


You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life. This is maybe the most important concept, the most profound words I have ever heard in my life. Also Tootie is awesome. I have often fallen into the trap of believing that somewhere there is the Shangri La - the perfect choice that is devoid of all consequences. It doesn't exist, your choices will almost always be paired with either discipline or regret - choose which you would rather live with and keep truckin'.



Which brings me to Keep Truckin', some prefer to call this the "just keep swimming" philosophy. I prefer to keep truckin' because it is far more awesome. Constant motion - I refuse to say constant forward motion because sometimes backward motion is the most important. But Truck you must.


Que Se rah, Se rah whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to see. Que Se rah, Se rah. (If you do not know that this song is from the Doris Day movie Glass Bottomed Boat then we have nothing more to discuss). Great things can happen through a lot of work and a lot of luck. Bad things can happen even when we do everything right. After we do our best we have to be recognize that we are not in control of this ride, so let go, raise your arms high and have fun, then maybe later you can barf - barf when you're dead. Hmmm, Barf when you're dead... nope, that's no good for me, I'm pregnant, must barf while living.



Finally, You're Traci, Damnit! It helps to remind myself of that, sometimes I forget. It also helps to put pressure on yourself to be you, if you don't contribute the qualities that make you special who will? That guy? He's not you. Asking that guy to bring some you to the table is like asking Kroger to make a delicious boxed mac and cheese, they aren't Kraft, it's never going to happen.



So I'm open to suggestions. Got any pearls for this swine?

Tricky Math

I turn 30 in May.

You know, they say thirty is the new twenty. The lesser known caveat to that is unless you have kids, then 50 will have to be your new twenty.

I was pregnant with Vivian when I was eighteen, so my late teens were actually my early thirties.

I still haven't gone to college. It looks like my forties are shaping up to be my early twenties. I have a feeling that they are not going to rock quite as hard for me as my early twenty peers.

I had braces when I was twenty five. I was too busy during Halloween making Tooth Fairy and Batman costumes, but I was going to go as a tween. I was also pregnant, so there was definite material for going as an after school special. In fact, Dave could have dressed as my nefarious teacher and we could have recruited someone to be my hot, worried mom... we could have been a Lifetime movie.

My jaw has started hurting recently. I'll tell you right now if I have to live through my tweens a third time a certain orthodontist better invest in a security system and a gun with six bullets, because five won't stop me.

My midlife crisis comes in six month intervals. I've confused my life-time continuum, and now everything is all messed up. I want to take gymnastics but I'm pregnant again (going for number four!). I want to go to college but I want to run away to a coconut island with my boyfriend (Dave). I want him to still be my boyfriend - to act surprised when I do things but I want him to already know that I want to eat at Pei Wei because we've been there a million times.

I've got to take this Delorian (brain) into the shop (psychiatrist).

Girlfriend

"Are you mean?"

"No."

"Oh, because I'm really nice."

"I'm a super funny guy!"

" I'm Maggie, this is my friend Ella. Do you want to play wolves?"

"Owwwooooohhh!!"

I miss the instant friendships of childhood. I wish I could just say, "I'm really nice" and have that be enough to play. Not secretly withholding my friendship based on a disagreement about something as profoundly stupid and transient as politics, or my style of discipline vs. hers.

I wish I could sit at a McDonald's Playland, turn to the mother next to me and say "would you like to be my friend?". I hate that we live in a world in which that woman would instantly think the words "restraining order".

Making girlfriends is hard. It's like dating only I'm not good at it. I was great at dating. I knew just what to do. I think dating is actually a lot more straight forward than friendship - throw your head back and laugh a lot - that's all you have to do. It shows off your hair and easy going personality at the same time. Boys like both of those things, girls less so. They want listening, and dependability, they're not as impressed with cleavage.

I have very few girl friends.

Rejection from boys never really bothered me (clearly, he was just intimidated). Rejection from girls is more difficult. That girl down the street doesn't prefer blondes to brunettes, she hates me for who I am. It's not that she wishes I were taller, it's more that she wishes my personality were better. I would rather get my legs repeatedly broken and spaced to give me height than examine and improve my personality - that would take real pain and work.

The good news is that I do have some girl friends, these are very nice women, tolerant. I love them. Some are my actual sisters, some feel like sisters. Some have seen what comes off of my nose when I have used a Biore strip. Some I wish knew me better and I wish I knew them better. Some I don't see often but my heart has made them a friend forever anyway.

Some of them have incredible bums - you know who you are... Melia.

Scrappy

When I was sixteen I was sitting in the foyer of our church with a friend when an old friend of the family walked by. This old friend of the family had a little of the weird uncle vibe, when I was eight he would turn me upside down in the church hallways and crack my toes while I howled in protest of both the toe cracking and panty flashing I was giving anyone who happened by.

I tucked my feet under the foyer couch as he said hello.

He told my friend that I had always been his favorite, he said "from the moment she walked in late to her first sacrament meeting here, with her hair all over the place and her socks not matching and a big smile, I thought to myself 'I like her, she's scrappy.'".

On the list of adjectives a sixteen year old girl wants to hear about herself scrappy is like, 1,946,373rd.

But damnitall, he was right.

I think half the fight of this life is to stop wishing about what you're not and to fully embrace what you are. I can't be Grace Kelly - Grace Kelly was Grace Kelly, and even if I tried people would be able to easily differentiate between us because one of us would have taken off our pantyhose after five seconds and the other would not.

I was looking through pictures with my sisters one day, one of them held up a picture, "Awe, it looks like a cute little family and their pet martian!". A family of little dark haired kids smiling sweetly and then me, looking like a poster child for Baby Meth, in my excersaucer - it also didn't help that my head was placed strategically in front of the rabbit ears on our television. I was the martian baby.

I am the scrappy martian. *sigh*