Posts Tagged ‘suburban’

19
Feb

Letting go….

   Posted by: Ashley Moreno    in Adoption, Down syndrome, random funny stuff

 

Today has been hard….

I’ve decided that I’m just going to type this as it comes out, stream of consciousness style. You’re no doubt saying to yourself, “Gee, isn’t that how all your posts are, Ashley?”  But you have no idea how much editing and revising and crafting goes into one of my ordinary posts just to give it some vaporous semblance of readability.

I don’t have the wherewithall for that today. I’m just going to let it spill out, like warm Shiner on pavement, let it splash and foam and subside until it soaks in and is gone. (If you’re wondering what Shiner is, then you’re obviously not from Texas. Come visit; I’ll enlighten you).

Our social worker comes this weekend for our first homestudy visit. She will inspect my house, interview my family, and decide whether we are, in her opinion, fit and able to bring a couple of Eastern European orphans with Down syndrome into our home. Along with the homestudy is a scavenger-hunt list of items for us to gather up and present to the social worker: certified copies of birth certificates, our marriage license, sworn statements from our doctors that each member of our household might be expected to live to see an adopted child reach maturity (yeah, I thought that was a little morbid, too).

Assuming that we are found competent (snort. sorry…), there is the issue of finances. Our adoptions will cost about $26,000 each.   $52,000.  I get a little woozy every time I say that out loud. Actually, I got a little woozy typing it just now, for that matter. That’s a lot of money to raise.

We have a few fundraising events in the works. I am baking my almost-famous Key Lime Pies like crazy, selling them to sweet friends and family who are eager to be a part of our journey. But with life-and-death in the balance, we have to hustle to raise the money quickly.

Now, The Hubby and I have this automotive fantasy. It involves my first car, which is at this moment parked in my mother’s garage:  Sadie, a 1969 Cougar convertible. Red. 351. Sequential tail-lights. Rrrrrowww….  We’ve always planned to restore it one day. It will be our old-people car, the one that we’ll drive around town with the top down, letting our white hair blow in the breeze. He thinks I’ll let him drive. And I might. Once in a while.

A 1969 Cougar, from mustangandfords.com. Not MY Cougar, because all my pics are stowed away in boxes somewhere....

It’s a wonder I didn’t get myself killed driving that car around as a teenager. Man, she could haul like a scalded dog. I remember the adrenaline rush of pulling up to a stoplight next to some testosterone-infused JohnnyDangerous in a hot-rod of his own, revving the engine, inviting me to race. Nothing like being a 17 year-old girl, smokin’ some dude on Pioneer. Those were the days.

My father bought the car for my mother in 1975, with no consideration of the fact that it wasn’t practical for hauling two children, dry cleaning, and bags of groceries. He put it in her name, and when he left my junior year of high-school and mom needed me to have my own vehicle to get around town…well, Dad implored her not to let me drive it. It was too much car for a reckless teenager, he said. He said I’d end up totalling it, or worse. And mom said something like maybe-you-should-have-thought-of-that-before-you-left-me-on-my-own-to-raise-two-children-as-a-single-mother.

In the years after the divorce, that car became my connection to my father. Our relationship was often rocky. Not I-hate-you-you’re-ruining-my-life rocky, but the kind of rocky that happens when two people are too much alike to get along for extended periods of time. My mom used to say that when my father and I got into it, she could see laser beams extending from between our eyes. I have my father’s amber eyes, and she said that when the two of us were locked in battle, our matching glowers were too much for her, and she had to leave the room.

As I navigated the tricky sea of distance between the home he no longer shared with us and the home where I visited him a couple of times a month, it was the Cougar that gave me a sense of still belonging to him. I remember sitting in his garage as he replaced a CV joint, talking comfortably without the darkness of everything that had changed hanging over our heads.

I always thought I’d keep that car forever….

My father loved cars. Racing was his hobby: a Ford Fairlane when I was a baby (he told my mother it would make a great “family car.” The first thing he did when he got it home was rip out the back seat and install Hooker Headers); sleek, fiberglass-bodied European S-2000 class when I got older. He worked in auto fleet and leasing. A couple of years before he died, he personally went up against Lee Iacoca on a bid for the US Government…and won. 

As a celebration present, he bought himself a beautiful, blue-green Mazda RX-7, which I ran over in my driveway while he and The Hubby were at a NASCAR race. Backed my Nissan Pathfinder right up over the hood, coming to a stop inches from the windshield, taking both pop-up headlights out in the process. He passed away suddenly a month later. The last words I said to him in person before he died were, “I’m sorry I ran over your car, Dad.”

But even though he loved cars, he always said, “A car is just a metal box to get you where you need to go.”

Where I need to go right now is Russia.

A couple of years ago, my big-blue-Suburban refused to start in the parking lot of the Kinko’s where I’d just run copies of my manuscript (have I really been working on this novel for THAT long?).  A big, burly man in a pickup truck came along, gently berated a slightly-built good samaritan for his cheap “toy” jumper cables, and proceded to hook up his own behemoth, industrial cables under my hood. I commented that I felt a little out of sorts underneath this hood, that in my ’69 Cougar, I knew exactly where the best place to ground the negative was.

Turns out he had an old Cougar, too, that he’d restored himself. Furthermore, although we were in a neighboring city at the time, we lived in the same small town, just 5 minutes from eachother, and I had seen his Cougar out in front of his house.

Today, as I was driving around town to obtain two more of the items on my scavenger-hunt list, American Pie came on the radio. My dad and I used to sing along to that song, watching each others lips to see who would stumble on a line first. I was on my way to the bank, just a stone’s throw from the shop the Cougar guy owned. As I drove on, a Ford Fairlane pulled onto the road in front of me. It didn’t have the snazzy red-orange-and-yellow paintjob that Dad’s Thunderbolt sported after he quit pretending it was a family car and devoted it to weekend racing, but it was a Fairlane, a rare sight these days.

I started to cry.

God puts us where we need to be, and He puts people in our paths for a reason. And he hooked me up with a hot-rod mechanic who just happened to have rebuilt a Cougar and who just happened to live in my little small town. God has gone to great lengths so far in our adoption journey to put the cookies on the bottom shelf for me. 

All these years, I haven’t wanted to part with the Cougar because it was my father’s car. But now, I realize that it’s really my Father’s car. It’s only been on loan to me these 25 years. Time to give it back.

I cried while I was talking to The Cougar Guy. He said I can have AAA tow the car to his place sometime in the next couple of weeks, and he’ll give me an idea of how much we need to put into it to make it saleable. Funny thing is, I’m really okay with it. I’m excited about it. It’s bittersweet, but sweet nonetheless.

On the way home, I hit the CD button. Soolaimon. I remember my dad—-the impetus for my love of old Neil Diamond—- singing Soolaimon. Lord of my wants…God of my needs…Leading me on….  I will never listen to Soolaimon the same way again.

I’m glad it wasn’t queued to Crunchy Granola Suite….

If you want to know why it’s so urgent that we rescue these children, click HERE for a video clip of what life inside an Eastern European mental institution is like.

And if you want to know what’s going on in the lives of a couple of other crazy, hip bloggers like me, click HERE.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

4 Comments
4
Feb

And tired always followed sick….

   Posted by: Ashley Moreno    in Chaos, random funny stuff

  

I am sick… 

and…. Well, you know the rest. If you don’t, then you need to go buy Bill Cosby’s Himself.  My all-time favorite stand-up routine. I’m talking about laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe funny. Doubled-over-in-tears funny. Seriously, if you’ve never seen it, consider yourself comedically deprived. If you have seen it, feel free to post your favorite lines in the comments. 

Image from Amazon.com

But seriously, I am really sick. Major chest congestion, relentless cough. Those of you who’ve birthed a few babies no doubt understand how terrifying the term “relentless cough” is. For the same reason that I no longer jump rope, I live in fear of being caught off guard by a surprise coughing fit before I have a chance to cross my legs. Those of you who have as yet not offered up your bladder as a prenatal trampoline or had a part of your body referred to as a “canal” are laughing at me. Go ahead. Your time will come. And when it does, maybe I’ll be old enough to have finally surrendered to the joy that is Depends, and you won’t be laughing anymore—not because you feel sorry for me, but because then you’ll realize that laughing is right up there with sudden coughing. Not so funny anymore, is it?  

Where was I? Oh, yeah–I was right here, in my fuzzy pink leopard robe, with my unwashed hair (washed my face, though—huge sense of accomplishment) and my Halls throat lozenge.  

In addition to being sick, I am (here it comes…) tired. Oh-so-very-tired. Exhausted, really. Comatose, bordering on lifeless corpse. Yesterday afternoon about 5pm, I was smiling to myself because any minute He of The Cute Knees was going to walk through the door and deliver me. Being the wonderful man that he is, he would surely send me to my room (which is where I wanted to go in the first place… Some of you get that. The rest of you seriously need to watch the DVD…) and tend to the children. Then the phone rang. My bliss-bubble didn’t burst right away, because The Hubby offered to run by the grocery store on his way home. He always calls from the grocery store to find out what I need.

Sometime between my giddy “Hello?” and The Hubby’s heavy sigh, all that changed. Something that was supposed to work wasn’t working, and whatever was supposed to fix it wasn’t fixing, and the remedy for a non-fixing fix is for Mr. Fix-it to find a feasible fix to fix the faux-fix. Which translates into “all-nighter.” So I handled the witching hour—I mean, the evening family time—on my own: dinner, dishes, refereeing, 15 minutes of WWF-worthy wrestling that we call “the diaper change”, and bedtime.When I finally got all the kids in bed, I was exhausted.

I slathered on a dollop of Vicks vapo-rub, popped a coconut Dum-dum in my mouth to ward off the cough (thinking that I could safely fall asleep, on account of while I could feasibly swallow a cough drop in my sleep and wake up dead, I don’t think I could actually swallow an entire lollipop, stick and all), bundled up in my robe and multiple blankets, cursed the fact that I’ve never followed through on my plan to fashion a nosewarmer out of a Breathe-right strip and Polartec fleece, and collapsed into bed. 

About 2am—I know it was 2am only because later, Riley asked The Daddy what time he finally got home, and he said “2am”—The Hubby finally made it home. I didn’t hear him come in. I didn’t realize he was home until he tried to take the lollipop out of my mouth. 

Evidently I screamed. 

 Turns out he wasn’t so sure about the whole not-being-able-to-choke-to-death-on-a-lollipop-on-account-of-it-having-a-stick-attached thing. He has evidently learned not to underestimate my ability to achieve the impossible.

It was sweet, really—The Hubby caring for me, worrying for my safety, making sure I don’t wake up dead.But somehow all I can think about is how totally and completely unsexy I must have looked, wrapped up in my pink fuzzy leopard robe, lollipop in my mouth—do you think it’s possible to fall asleep with a lollipop in your mouth and NOT drool? yeah, me neither. And by the way, I’m sure my mouth was probably wide open, seeing as how I couldn’t breathe through my nose. Which means that in all likelihood I was making some sort of sleep-type noises that if they were to come from The Hubby would be called ‘snoring,’ but which were totally not snoring because I’m a lady, and ladies totally do not snore—even when they can’t breathe through their nose. Oh, and don’t forget the icing-on-the-proverbial-cake, the fact that I reek of eau d’ Vicks Vapo rub.

Oh yeah, he wanted me….  

The really frustrating thing is that I have a laundry list (oh crap—do you have any idea how much laundry is piling up while I’m throwing my little pity party? And you can’t donate dirty clothes and then just start over with new ones. I know–I asked someone once, and they said you definitely can’t do that) of ‘to-do’s  for the adoption, none of which are becoming ‘done’s. There’s nothing funny in this paragraph. I just had to rant for a second. 

Sick and tired; tired always followed sick. I am both.

 And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Bill Cosby DVD to go watch. With my legs crossed….

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

9 Comments
6
Aug

It was a one-eyed, one-horned….

   Posted by: Ashley Moreno    in Chaos, random funny stuff

At the end of my last post, I had a fat lip and pulled every muscle from my neck down, and still had 350 more miles to travel to reach our ultimate destination: the Rio Grande Valley.

Our plan was to leave my sister’s house at 10am, stop in San Antonio for lunch at Chuy’s at 11:30 (shrimp chile rellenos with deluxe tomatillo sauce, anyone?), and be back on the road by 12:30, which would put your average family in the RGV by 5:30. Only, we’re not talking about your average family now, are we?

So we pile into the truck at noon-thirty, hit Chuy’s around 2, and are back on the road at 3ish–nearly three hours late. And rush hour traffic in San Antonio starts around…3ish. Bumper to bumper. Miles and miles. Luckily, our little Public Adress system falls asleep–score! I quietly inform the rest of our passengers that this will be a non-talking flight, thank-you-for-your-cooperation. We’ve got 5 hours ahead of us–5 hours that will pass much less stressfully if he sleeps through most of it. And always one to set a good example, I decide to take a nap, hoping they will follow suit.

The hubby, however, is growing cranky at this point. Flashback to the day before, when he cleaned out my truck so he could pack it up. I don’t know why it took him 4 hours to clean it. I mean, it wasn’t that bad. No, I hadn’t vacuumed it, but come on–those crumbly pieces of rice-cake-shrapnel and wayward-off-brand-cheerios don’t take up that much room, just load the luggage on top of them. Nooooo…..he gets out the shop vac, pulls out floor mats. I think he does it just to make me feel bad, like my way isn’t good enough (although truthfully, I don’t really have a way…). Four hours later, it’s showroom clean and loaded to the ceiling with our gear. And hubby–who for some reason decided to undertake this task shirtless and WITHOUT SUNSCREEN–is sportin’ a painful sunburn on his back. Ooooooo……

Flash forward: Hubby’s back hurts. And he’s sitting in traffic. He’s cranky. He needs back-up. And of course, who does The Hubby turn to for back-up? His trusty side-kick: me. “Find me a way around this mess.” Feeling sorry for him, I pull out the Texas map and ask, “where are we?” Somewhere on the south side of San Antonio. He’s squirming and grimacing, and I decide against asking him to be more specific.

I have owned this particular Texas map for as long as I can remember. It’s old and tattered, and beginning to rip along the creases. As luck would have it, one of those creases runs right through San Antonio, not-so-neatly decaptiating wherever-we-are from where-we-need-to-go. And it’s not a clean cut–no, the edges are soft and bleached out, so there’s about 1/16″ of nothing at all, which is not insignificant when we’re talking about 1″=100 miles. That’s like 6 miles, invisible, uncharted. And all the while The Hubby is throwing out what he really believes are helpful hints about some road he thinks he remembers that will take us to some little podunk town where we can catch some other road that will bring us back. Only it’s not helpful, because the road doesn’t exist, and the podunk town is 40 miles back north, and I’m thinking the sunburn is taking its toll on his mental faculties.

So I’m trying to tune him out while nodding and acting like I’m listening to every word he says while I attempt to fit the map back together–without making any noise that would wake the 4 year-old– and find an alternate route that actuallly exists, and I’m still groggy from being woken up from the beginnings of my chile-relleno-induced carb-coma, when it happens.

Now, when the Hubby cleans the truck, he removes everything. Even essentials. He’s been known to take the stroller out, leave it in the garage, and then be all shocked when we arrive somewhere and I freak out because we don’t have a stroller. To him, clean means empty, with no regard to the fact that the diaper bag is an essential, not clutter.

But while strollers and diapers are often removed as inconsequential, somehow the Flying Purple People Eater was overlooked. Six inches of fuzzy, purple somebody-just-shoot-me-now torture, this gem of an electronic toy sings–you got it–Flying Purple People Eater each time his hand is pressed. Or each time he’s stepped on by a still-half-asleep mother in her battle to conquer a rebellious map. And there’s no off button. I’ve looked. I thought about throwing it out the window, but too late–from the backseat comes the call: “Purple! Purple!” The 4 year-old is awake, and I can’t even blame someone else for it–which, as we all know, is the only consolation a mother often gets in situations like these.

Just like a child will miraculously recover in the doctor’s office waiting room, immediately the traffic clears, and the whole map exercise becomes moot. Which conveniently allows me to shift blame to Hubby, who if he had waited five more minutes wouldn’t have needed to wake me up at all, and Mason would still be asleep and we wouldn’t be listening to “…it had a-one long horn and a-one big eye…” over and over ad naseum for the next 250 miles.

I decided to keep that part to myself….

Next post: there are never any mosquitos in the Valley, and Mason finally finds a way to have some fun in Target….

Blog Widget by LinkWithin

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

1 Comment
Back to top