I thought it was over. The days of Sophie joining me in my bed while her Papa was traveling. Snoring on his pillows. Kicking me in the middle of the night. Rolling over into my ribs.
My Sophie will be nine years old in a few months and the last few times my husband was away, she didn’t ask to sleep in my bed. And I didn’t invite her. I’m not sure why I didn’t ask her. I didn’t really think to ask her, I suppose. And since she didn’t ask, I assumed she wasn’t interested.
I love my kids. More than anything. I really, really do. But I really don’t care for Mother’s Day. Call me crazy, but every year, I wake up on the second Sunday of May with unrealistically high expectations that involve my being treated like a queen (albeit of a very small kingdom). That fantasy has now officially been quashed.
One of Sophie’s electives in school this term is playwriting. She is one of two children in her class (yes, that’s correct, one of two kids – up to you to decide whether that’s wonderful or a silly waste of teacher resources. I confess to wavering between the two). Sophie loves her teacher. For the past several weeks, they have been writing a short play that they are going to perform for their parents on Friday.
When I went to France in 1989 to study abroad, I never expected to meet my future husband there, let alone meet him the first day I arrived. And yet that’s exactly what happened. For the next five years, we survived many obstacles: one year of trans-Atlantic separation, another 18 months commuting between Paris and Talloires in the French Alps, and perhaps most crucially of all, a couple of years cohabitating in a 200 sq. ft. studio apartment without a TV (much to my grandparents’ horror and dismay). We married in 1994 when we were 25 years old. Today marks the milestone of our 20th wedding anniversary.
Chloe is a jeans teen. She loves her jeans. She only wears jeans, except in the summer when she wears shorts. She used to like to primp, but that was when she was seven and shopping for her was an absolute nightmare. I will never forget spending almost five hours at the mall in a tearful (she wasn’t the only one crying) quest to find a dress she’d actually be willing to wear. I firmly believe that the trauma of trying to find “fancy” clothes she liked in 2007 turned her against dresses and skirts for the next six years.
Find old journals and letters.
This was one of items on my every-growing to-do list since I left my job almost one year ago. It’s not that the letters and journals were lost – I’ve always known that they were stored away in boxes in our basement, but until recently, I hadn’t given them much thought. I started journaling in high school and continued it on and off for many years. The last time I regularly recorded my thoughts in hard copy tomes was during the two-year period just after my father died in 2000 until Chloe turned one in 2002.
Continue reading Who Was I in 1989 & Do I Really Want to Know?
The task has been on my list of projects since I left my office job almost one year ago. The photo files on the computer. Almost 10,000 pictures memorializing our family’s adventures since 2006. Plus a few stray photos from many moons ago when my husband and I were kids ourselves, scanned for posterity in case the paper versions someday disintegrate into thin air. And lots and lots of garbage – blurry photos, duplicate photos, ugly photos – that have no business taking up valuable computer memory.
If Sophie were a mood ring, she’d turn different colors with dizzying speed and without any warning. While she’s always been my happy-go-lucky little girl, her generally sweet disposition camouflages glimpses of something more sinister.
After weeks and weeks of misery (at least for those of us who hate the snow), spring shoved the winter aside for a couple of glorious days. The 55-degree weather has started to melt the mountains of white stuff, which makes for an interesting study in contrasts.
Not the movie. The game. Risk. Usually Chloe plays alone with her dad. But with Sophie at her friend’s house for a sleepover, I crashed the war for the first time. Chloe loves Risk. My husband likes playing the game because he always wins. After a few minutes of listening to the two of them interrupt one another to explain the rules to me, we dove into battle.
