Category Archives: anniversary

August 31, 2012 · 4:19 pm

What I Remember

I read a book this summer called “What Alice Forgot” by Liane Moriarty.  It’s about a woman, Alice, who hits her head and wakes up with ten years of her memory gone.  In the present, she’s 39 years old, has three children, and is in the middle of a nasty divorce.  She’s also a control freak, exercise and coffee obsessed, uber-busy with her kids, their schools, and their activities, and generally unhappy.  When she wakes up, she thinks she’s 29 years old, a time when she was an easy-going, tea drinking, happy woman, newly pregnant with her first child, and blissfully in love with her husband.  While she waits for her memory to return, she examines the circus her life has become and tries to put the pieces of her marriage back together with the perspective of her 29-year-old self.

The book was paperback and pink, and I thought it was going to be an easy, summery, perhaps forgettable, “chick-lit” kind of a read.  On the contrary, it rocked the ground on which I stood.  It put me deep in thought about how my 26-year-old self would deal with stay-at-home motherhood, the chaos and insanity of parenting, a husband who works long hours, the fear and loathing of colonoscopies and varicose veins, and everything else that goes along with marriage, motherhood, and aging.

Whereas 39-year-old Alice was mired down in the muck of the small stuff, 29-year-old Alice was far better at seeing the forest from the trees, especially with her children.  Since finishing the book, I’ve tried (tried is the key word) to keep this forest from the trees concept in mind as I navigate the challenges of parenthood each day without the fresh perspective of my younger self.  (My 26-year-old self is currently unavailable.  She’s probably at Bumble & Bumble in New York City getting a haircut she can’t afford.)

I won’t spoil the ending of the book about what ultimately happens with Alice’s marriage, but I’ll tell you this: it sure made me think about mine. Tomorrow is my tenth wedding anniversary.  I’ve been married for ten years.  How, in the course of these years filled with so much Life, have we not unraveled?

Of course, I’m flooded with gorgeous memories – first kisses, proposals, new jobs, births, and more – but I’m also reminded of the experiences that tested us – the circumstances that exposed our compatibility at the deepest level because the only other option would have been to come undone.  Today, parenthood seems to pull us in every direction except toward each other, but we’re getting through it with the lesson we’ve learned throughout all of our time together – that nothing can disentangle us unless we let it.

Forgetting helped Alice put the pieces her life back together.  As enticing as it would be to let go of all hard bits and live in the present through the eyes of my younger (and less wrinkled) self, I’ll stick with the memories because some of them are totally, completely, and deliciously unforgettable.

(This is a picture of a picture.  Come on over and I’ll show you the whole album.)

Happy anniversary eve, MT.

p.s. Read this book!

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August 29, 2012 · 11:57 am

Word Problems IX

Full disclosure here.  I had to look online whether the Roman numeral for nine was VIIII or IX.  I also had a math tutor in high school.  Thankfully, most of Mama math is subjective.

Ready?  Here we go…

The Runaway Mama decides to bake cupcakes during Tropical Storm Isaac.  This is partly because she’s bored and partly because she thinks if she does something that requires electricity, her power will not go out.  (This is known as reverse psychology or the desperate measures of a panic stricken woman with PTSD from previous hurricane power outages that lasted for weeks.  Yes, weeks.  Plural as in more than one.)  She stumbles across a recipe online that calls for two sticks of butter for the vanilla cupcakes and two sticks of butter for the vanilla cream icing.  She thinks to herself, That’s a lot of butter, but she bakes them anyway.  In the end, she only uses half of the icing (so one stick of butter) to ice the cupcakes.  If each stick of butter has eight tablespoons and she makes 24 cupcakes with icing, how many tablespoons of butter are in each cupcake?

This is a real word problem, folks, and solving it required more time and effort than I’d like to admit.  According to my calculations, between the cupcake and the icing, there’s approximately one tablespoon of butter in each one.  That’s not so bad, and let me tell you, each bite was worth it.  And I ran two miles the next day, so it’s kind of like it never happened.

In the course of one morning, the Runaway Mama takes one little monkey to Kindergarten and one squishy monkey to preschool.  Then she takes one dog on a walk, finds one hissing little snake INSIDE the doorframe of her front door (translation: one slither away from being an uninvited house guest), hops over one Charlotte’s web caliber spider web, and encounters a swarm of about 12 terrifying little black birds on her run.  How many wild animals (human, leashed, or otherwise) did the Runaway Mama encounter before lunch, and when will she be brave enough to open her front door without a severe onset of ophiophobia symptoms, including but not limited to shortness of breath, crying, cursing, and/or putting the house up for sale?

Seventeen and never.  Not only is my garage already a danger zone (I found two snakes there a few months ago), but also now the front door is no longer a viable method of entering and exiting the house.  If I were Santa Clause, I’d use the chimney, but that’s silly for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I don’t have a chimney.  And thank God, because who knows what creatures would get in that way.  I’d like to formally volunteer to live in a bubble.

In three days, the Runaway Mama will celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary.

There’s no math here, just awe.

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