I love being a mommy. More specifically, I love being this family’s mommy. These four children are perfect for me, and the daddy that heads us up is amazing. I thank God for them daily, and I know that I could never have done anything to deserve to be so blessed.

But every once in a while–oh, say when the 5 year old is adamant that I help her find the rubber lizard that is now lost because she left it on the entryway table and the 4 year old must have gotten to it and my bright idea of showing her the real live lizard that was hanging out (literally) on the wall in our garage is foiled by the fact that that lizard is now missing too, and the 4 year old (who’s on the naughty list for swiping the rubber lizard) is again boycotting everything on the menu except rice and I can’t sit down and feed him rice because I’m looking for the the stinkin’ lizard, and I haven’t even had a shower today and it’s almost dinner time and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get a shower yesterday either and The Hubby is out battling the evil mutant spawn-of-hell stickers with the riding lawn mower and it’s dinner time and I haven’t even thought about what to make yet and why can’t the 5 year old just play with a rubber dinosaur instead of a lizard–hypothetically speaking, of course….

Anyway, every once in a while, when I sit to take a breath and close my eyes with a cup of tea, a fleeting thought skirts my consciousness like a deer along the edge of a clearing: this isn’t where I was supposed to be.

When I was young and the first seeds that were the lack of my housekeeping skills began to sprout, my mother would stand in my doorway surveying the early manifestation of my chaos and declare: “One of these days, I’m going to sell you to the gypsies!”

I knew she wasn’t serious. Still, something about the prospect excited me. I’d seen gypsies in story books: they wore flowing skirts and scarves in brilliant colors, and the silver bells on their ankles and the golden bracelets on their wrists jangled as they danced along behind their exotic gypsy caravans. And they didn’t have to clean their rooms. Ever. I remember sneaking out of bed and pressing my ear against the curtains to listen for the tinkling of their silver bells, for the creaking of the caravan coming down my street. I didn’t have a plan of action–mine was a happy childhood, I didn’t especially want to run away and leave my family behind. But still, a gypsy’s life….

In high school, I spent a couple of summers in Europe, during which time I fell in love with the Eurail. I spray painted my name on the Berlin Wall under the intimidating eyes of an armed East German soldier, I picnicked in the Swiss Alps, and I practiced my fluent German on Germans who wanted to practice their not-so-fluent English on me. And in an act of idiotic romanticism (or romantic idiocy), I ditched the chaperone and school group and traveled–alone–across Bavaria to stay with the family of a young man I managed to get engaged to during the three days I was in West Berlin.

My name on the Berlin Wall.

Deep within my gypsy spirit, a plan was hatching. After graduation, I’d return to Europe, Eurail pass in hand, on my own. My mother was okay with the idea–in fact, it was really her idea for me to have a “gap year,” and then return for college. But I’d already decided on a different path. Oh sure, I’d come back and go to college. Eventually. Just not right after Europe. First I’d join the Peace Corps and see the rest of the world.

But my gypsy caravan never came.

After my junior year in high school, my dad left. We floundered for a while–this wasn’t supposed to happen to families like us–both emotionally and financially. It became evident that a post-graduation plane ticket to Europe wasn’t in the budget. But it went deeper than that: the girl who spray-painted her name on the Berlin Wall and traveled cross-country by herself was afraid. The divorce had yanked loose my moorings, and things that once felt safe and sure…well, they weren’t any more. The mom who had encouraged me to spread my wings was now struggling to work full time and be a single mother to my 9 year-old sister. I couldn’t leave.

There was another consideration as well: my senior year, I met a cute latino boy with long, dark lashes who made my heart race. The girl who was going off in search of adventure wouldn’t have been available for a long-term relationship. But this girl was more than available for this boy.

And so I enrolled in The University Of Texas, a 3-hour drive away. I spent most of my first semester in tears, wrestling with the guilt of leaving my mom and my sister alone. I finished out the year, and then transferred to a local school where I could live at home and take care of them.

The rest, as they say, is history–OUR history, my family’s and mine. By the time my senior year rolled around, I had enough confidence to return to Austin and receive my BBA from the University of Texas. The Hubby and I were married that September, and have since been blessed with four amazing, beautiful children. We celebrated our 19th anniversary last week, and as we danced on the patio I realized my heart was still racing.

I took the kids to see UP this weekend. The main character is obsessed with the adventure he always wanted and never got to have. In the end, he realizes that a life lived with the people who matter to us is the greatest adventure.

Ramie found her rubber lizard. Mason ate his cheerios. I made dinner. During the meal, all four children erupted into chaos over some perceived affront that nobody will remember tomorrow, and as I intervened I managed to dip my sleeve into a hollowed out watermelon, staining my shirt pink. In that instant, the fleeting thought entered my mind that this was not where I was supposed to be…

…I was supposed to be at the PTO meeting 35 minutes ago.

Tags: adventure, anniversary, Berlin Wall, caravan, children, daddy, divorce, Eurail, Europe, family, gap year, German, Germany, gypsies, lizard, mommy, Peace Corps, PTO, University of Texas, UP

Happy Independence Day!

It is 9:30 am on the north side of the DFW metroplex, and already a lovely 93 degrees. I suppose if there’s a mathematical relationship between the time and temp that it will be 100 degrees by 10am (which it has been the past few days) and 120 by 12:00 noon. I’m hoping the whole algorithm falls apart before that point (and you’re right–I have no idea what an algorithm is, or if I even spelled it correctly. I can live with that). Because of the heat, I have not stepped up to the bar and organized one of those family-fun kids 4th of July parades. Unless we did it at 4:00 in the morning, it’s just too hot, and I hate hot. In fact, I’d enjoy the 4th of July a lot more if we could move it to mid-October. I think I shall have to file that thought away with the whole abolishing-daylight-savings-time-and-just-letting-the-masochists-who-enjoy-losing-an-hour-of-sleep-every-spring-get-up-an-hour-earlier-themselves thing. But that’s another post….

I woke up this morning thinking of what liberty means to me. Then I had to get up and kill a spider in the bathtub, because once the 5yr-old told me it was there, I couldn’t just leave it to run off and hide and grow into a great big spider. And there’s always the possibility that it’s a brown recluse, although I have yet to actually run across one in my house. I guess they really are reclusive. The Greta Garbo of the spider world.

Anyway…liberty. Right. One of the principals upon which our nation was founded. As a teenager, I visited the Berlin Wall twice (if you were born in the late 1980s or later, you might wanna Google ‘Berlin Wall’). I went behind it, into East Berlin, and also into Czechoslovakia. I saw first hand what it meant not to have liberty. Food, clothes, they had those things–not the best, not in abundance, but basic needs were met. Liberty, nope. The other thing that was so obviously lacking–obvious even to a 15 year old whose only agenda was finding romance in Europe, which, again, is another post–was a spirit of joy. Streets were eerily quiet, even in the evening rush of workers and shoppers on their way home. Smiles were rare–until someone found out we were Americans, and then it got kinda Twilight-Zonesque, but again…. It was an experience that changed me, and I will never take our liberty for granted.

But this isn’t a political blog (oh–please don’t try to entice me into a political discussion in the comment section. I will stick my fingers in my ears and sing “LALALALA.” I’m not going to get into it. I may, however, try to track you down and call you at home and discuss politics. Because that’s always fun).

One of my Business Law professors (yes, I took two semesters of Business Law. Are you impressed? Don’t be. I am about to share with you fully 50% of what I remember) described the legal concept of liberty by saying that you have the right to engage in an activity up to the point where it infringes upon another persons right to not be negatively impacted by that behavior. Of course, we all wanted the concrete, black-and-white-definition of “negatively impacted,” to which he answered something along the lines of “HA!” Because it’s one of those gray things, evidently, that allow our citizenry to sue each other for just about anything.

I loved Business Law, but in those years after college the only chance I got to use all that information, which at that time I still remembered, was to threaten to sue the jewelry store that informed me three weeks before my wedding that they wouldn’t be able to make my ring for the agreed-upon price after all (and it turned out to be a lovely ring).

Until I became a mother. Turns out the whole concept of rights dovetails right in with another legal concept that applies to parenting: the nuisance ordinance.

Let me explain. I have in my household two individuals whom we shall from this point refer to as The Soundtrack and The Narrator. The Soundtrack provides the score of my family’s daily routine, and at any given moment is emitting some form of hum or click or whir or badabadabadadeeedeeePOW! Yesterday, The Soundtrack learned he could pop his tongue so loudly that The Mommy would think someone had fired a gun in the house. The Soundtrack is also fond of adding elements of percussion to this score: pencils on granite countertops, the kicking of a toe against my unfinished pecan wainscoting.

The Narrator does exactly what the name implies. For instance, while driving into town, The Narrator is apt to produce something along the lines of “Oh, look! A truck carrying a bunch of cars. Red cars. Blue cars. Silver cars–is that silver or gray? Oh, we’re driving over a bridge. Look down there–those trees look like bushes. There’s the QT. I love QT! That man is picking his nose.”

Both The Soundtrack and The Narrator enjoy setting their various specialties to music which, unfortunately, makes neither of them more enjoyable. In fact, it ups the intolerance level by a factor of at least ten. Which is why one of most common phrases in my house is “WOULD YOU PLEASE BE QUIET?!?!!” Yes, it is all caps because it is normally shouted. And yes, I’ve included the dreaded question mark/exclamation mark combo because it’s usually more of a threat than a request. The funny thing is that the two citizens of Morenotopia that use this phrase the most often are–take a guess–The Soundtrack and The Narrator, toward each other.

You wondered when I was getting back to the whole liberty-business law tie-in, didn’t you? I don’t blame you. I had doubts myself. Well, here it is.

I spend a lot of my waking hours negotiating just how much soundtracking and narrating constitues infringement and negative impact. Turns out The Soundtracker has a very low tolerance for any narration whatsoever, and The Narrator has similar feelings about soundtracking. Both have an oddly intense need for peace and quiet, which I find ironic. In fact, the words poetic justice would come to mind except that there’s nothing poetic about two screaming, snarling, shrieking children in the living room while I’m trying to write.

Several times a day, I have to remind one of them that it would be unjust to deny the other their right to emanate noise. I extol to them the virtues of liberty, decry the injustices of dictatorship, remind them how precious our freedoms are.

And then I tell them all to shut up and go to their rooms.

Tags: 4th of July, Berlin Wall, heat, Independence Day, liberty, Narrator, nuisance, Parenting, Soundtrack, spiders