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.