Put on a happy face

Wow! My father did the same thing! I had forgotten about that, but when I was 8, 9, 10 years old, my dad would always say things like "Here comes the world's happiest kid!" or "This child needs for nothing!" or "How does it feel to have EVEYTHING you want?!" At first, when he would ask me a direct question, such as "Are you happy today?" I might answer, "Well, today is a little sad, I didn't make the starting line-up of the swim team". He wouldn't take that as a fact, it would be more of a negotiating point, and be followed by "Are you KIDDING me??? If I had the life you have, if I'd even KNOWN what a swim team was, not to mention SIGNING for a hamburger at the "snack bar", I'd give my right arm! You should try working 12 hour days and you'll stop worrying about the backstroke..." In other words, not only was it a 50 year old man versus a 9 year old girl so his arguments always outdid mine completely, but even a small child can see the writing on the wall; my semi-priviledged youth was NEVER going to match up with his poor upbringing, and I really believe this is where my sense of sarcasm began. The idea of saying one thing while meaning another is a tricky one and needs years of honing to be pulled off properly, and that was my training ground!
I had a pretty good childhood, but I had lots of periods of loneliness and boredom, but whatever, I just had to deal with it. Not only did my PARENTS have a diffucult childhood, but even within my own family, they had a rags-to-riches lives, but the "riches" only came very late in life. My older brothers had a lot more "rags" in their formative years and I came along much later in more of the "riches" time period, so they weren't too "happy" about the inequity of one sibling having it "easier". In my defense, this assessment of "ease" was based solely on amount of goods, not dealing with life in any way!
I think it's natural for a parent to yearn for their child to be happy and grateful and gracious. In my own updated way, I do the same thing to my kids that my father did to me. I fish around for them to say any equivalent of "I'm happy" or "My life is good". My version is more like "On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate that trip?" or "tell me the highlight of your day"...ultimately, it is the masked "Are you happy?" question that my father asked me so many years ago.
On your other topic...anxiety sucks! I used to be so laid back, even when I had small children, I felt relatively in control...however, the past few months I have definitely had heightened anxiety, Madison and her health, Portia and her questionable driving skills, Zeke racing back and forth to college on that bike, road trips, alcohol, fuzzy details on where my children actually are, there is so much out of my control, kids arriving home at all hours in a city that is not so safe, it has all added up to giving me general unease, like when I wake up in the morning, I have to stave off a doomed feeling...I was never like that before. I had a "girls night" this week at a friend's "camp", a little weekend home that her family had had for 50 years before Katrina blew the whole thing into the lake, literally the house was 4 inches tall when they got back from the hurricane...they spent 2 years rebuilding it, and the grand re-opening was this month! It's so nice, piece by piece, to see New Orleans back to its old self. I'm not sure why driving 45 minutes away and sleeping at a lakehouse is relaxing, it's not like the crime is any better when I'm there, but it was a perfect combination of girly healthy snacky foods (guacamole, hummus, salads, skinny mohitos) girly talk (Farrah, Jon and Kate, bitchy women we have in common, hair issues) and a solid night of sleep that was so refreshing!
By the way, the Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood is called Five Happiness. Why do those restaurants always have names that make no sense? But we all know what they meant....I guess that's all that matters!

Patty

“Gladly”, the cross-eyed bear

We won’t even talk about what the vet ACTUALLY said about the quick anal-gland surgery the Peach needed, let’s just keep it simple and say that I was honestly HOPING I could throw $500.00, unexpectedly, somewhere this week and it may as well have been at our Vet-Clinic. My value-to-add: between you & me, let’s just make sure we all pay attention when those doggies scoot from room to room on their butts and spend an entire night at the end of our beds licking their butts because the result could be a trip for the family to a water-park, a few REALLY good dinners out, a much desired shopping spree, approximately 3 visits to my salon for cut and color, etc,…instead of the vet bill.

But, don’t get me wrong; I’d pick a hefty vet bill over any one of these cash-gulping recreational alternatives, any day.

So, Skye “moved home”, officially, yesterday – for the summer. What this means is that his STUFF that lived down the street - all by itself in the apartment he paid for, while he crashed with us continuously for the last nine months - is in my car. I am REALLY hopeful that this is a temporary situation before it all gets carried to our basement, although this verbal equation did trickle into the constant banter-in-my-head: Apartment + CAR = aCARtment. I could totally see us coining the phrase and christening the lifestyle, couldn’t you? Since we are in the midst of needing to downsize and likely to be moving into an apartment in August, what I seriously do not want right now is some Mini-Van load of crap getting fanny-sprawl all over my house but I AM NOT MEDICATED FOR NOTHING! Nope, I dutifully take my anxiety medication so that I will embrace my children and the ebb & flow of their needs (and I believe this includes tolerating the ebb & flow of their “STUFF”, as irritating as this is for me as I fantasize about a perfectly clean, orderly house WITHOUT: crumbs on the couch, cigarette butts on my front walk, dried up pens with no tops, broken pencils with teeth marks on them, entire pads of paper with only one tiny mark on every page, unmade beds, fingerprint smears on every door-jam, window, glass bookcase, etc., heavy-swollen back packs abandoned by the front door to trip over, thousands of books out of bookshelves, mud-flecked shoes, dirty sweat-shirts and socks that lost interest on their way to the laundry-chute and have decided to rest-up for the next outing instead, empty cupboards & fridge but massive amounts of half-tasted-but-rejected nibbles in the garbage so that we can KEEP BUYING MORE STUFF TO EAT…etc).

Scratch that, there’s no EBB in my house…just a super-abundance of FLOW…

After your “Shrewly Bee” letter, I was reminded of so many more of those same word-things – is there an actual name for these or are they simply a “COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE INVOLVING THE PHONETIC/SPELLED MISUNDERSTANDING OF WORDS”? We all have our own that we’ve come across and they always make me laugh. Here are a few that I recalled:
• My sister’s friend who repeatedly sang in her church choir: “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear” (Gladly, the CROSS I’d bear)
• Cousin Liam was listening to his Grandmother tell him about God & Jesus - an earnest & informative discussion - when he said: “…wait a minute, Grandma’, are we talkin’ about CHUCK-e-JESUS??”
• My sister’s friend who recited: “The Lord is my Shepherd – he knows what I want” (The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want)
• Or mine: “My Country TIZZA-VEE, sweetlan dove lih birdie”

TGIF!! (how can I say that, with no job?)

(Answer: because I don’t have to have my daily “I-feel-like-a-shitty-mother" panic-attack trying to come up with a lunch to send to school with Atticus that revolves around a staple of chocolate things & Lucky Charms-style shaped and brightly colored marshmallow pieces).

Ruby