Some days I really don’t mind the commute.
The Columbia River at sunrise--a plane lands at PDX.
I've been parenting solo for past the twelve years, learning and growing alongside my children: S, the 18-year-old son and A, the 13-year-old daughter. Connect
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Author Archives: Teresa
It’s all up to me, it seems.
Nearly two years after we’d started dating, it has come to an end. The split had taken me by surprise and I’m still trying to pull my heart back together two months later.
It’s taken a toll on me and my moxie, and the Universe seems to know it. Unpacking more boxes this past week, I came across each of these bits of sage advice and hung them on my fridge:
One of the prominent features in your make up is self-reliance and confidence in your ability to accomplish what you undertake; your courage is strong; you do not hesitate to lead. The Mystic Ray advises you not to be impetuous.
You would be wise not to seek too much from others, at this time.
True happiness must come from within.
I guess it is time for me to take a deep breath and realize it will be a solitary life for me–a solo mama who needed a little shove to get her moxie back.
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Posted in ruckus time, solo parenting
Tagged break-ups, dating, divorce, solo mama moxie, time alone
Poking me is gonna help?
That’s what they said. I’d complained posted on Facebook about the continued pain and a friend-of-a-friend suggested acupuncture. A friend gave it a hearty amen. Then the chiropractor suggested I try it out along with massage therapy.
So with more curiosity than faith I scheduled a visit with the acupuncturist and spent two hours last night doing Eastern Medicine things that I don’t really understand.
He asked all sorts of questions about the accident, the injuries, my health history and that of my family, then on into digestion, bowel movements and menstruation. It was like an awkward first date when your dinner partner starts asking about your sexual history and their own visits to the Planned Parenthood clinic.
“And how would you describe the blood?”
“Um, red.”
“Are there clots?”
Can we just get to the part where you start stabbing needles into me? Because that’s going to be far more enjoyable than this conversation.
First he had to feel my pulse, pushing my wrists in places that made them twitch and get tingly. One hand, then both, the other and back to both. I have zero idea what he may have figured out from that exercise, but he swears that his Vietnamese teacher can do it and tell you your life history. Of course, it takes him an hour and it might work a little like the fortune teller in the Wizard of Oz. Who knows? I’m a bit skeptical about everything these days.
When he’d gotten all the info he could from my pulse, he had me change into clothes that looked like a surgical scrubs gone 80s. The high-waisted shorts hit mid-thigh while the boxy velcro-backed top hit me just at the waist. Hot.
I’m sure I would’ve thought it had potential if it were 1983 again, but today? at 41? Not the most flattering outfit. Luckily, he took plenty of pictures. Me facing the camera, then to the right, then from behind, then from the left. Each time I had to get my toes just right, my ankles lined up with blue tape on the floor and a plumb line hanging from the ceiling.
I pray those photo files are corrupt.
Finally it was time, the time I’d waited an hour and a half for–the needles. He showed me them closely, explained how it shouldn’t hurt and wouldn’t go deep. Pushed it gently against my hand to show me how flexible they were.
Yeah, yeah, get on with it.
I laid face-down on the table, a massage table complete with a hole for my face to be cradled. And one by one he held a little tube to my back, slid in a needle and tapped it in.
Fourteen times. Then I laid there, listening to Asian music for I have no idea how long, waiting for the bits of metal to work their magic.
One by one, they came out. He wiped off the blood and I sat up. Two more pokes to my hand, this time causing more ache than pain. And we were done.
Twenty-four hours later, my neck is dramatically better. I’m able to look up for the first time in nearly two weeks. The headache is down to a low growl.
Is it because of the acupuncture? I don’t know. I’m sure the massage helped and the chiropractor the day before. And just the passage of time helps my body heal. Do I believe? Not yet. But I go back to the acupuncturist on Monday. We’ll see how I feel after that.
Posted in miscellany
Tagged acupuncture, car accident, eastern medicine, healing, pulse
In an instant, everything changed
It was Black Friday and I was supposed to be at work.
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Posted in miscellany
From her point of view
Cleaning out the storage closet to fill with my sewing goods, we came across all sorts of things including a French magnetic vocabulary set I’d bought for my daughter a couple years ago when she had a semester (or two?) of French classes. They never were used, but she couldn’t bear to get rid of them. Last night she asked if she could use them on the door and in my bleary-eyed exhaustion I conceded. I woke to find this neatly arranged by her. It says so very much in few words.
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Posted in miscellany
Ohhh, right, weeknight dinners.
I used to see the headlines on the women’s mags at the grocery and never could understand what difference it really made if it was a weeknight or a weekend dinner. Crazy publishers had something of the sort on every cover.
They still do, but now I get it. I understand how moms don’t want to get home from work at 6 p.m. after nine-plus hours away from home, just to start chopping, boiling, and baking for the evening meal. When I worked at the school, I was always home by 4:30, long before dinner needed to be served to starving kids. If it takes an hour to prepare and cook, who cares?!
These days the evenings are a bit more squished. After picking up and fighting through traffic for an hour, we finally get home sometime between 6 and 7 p.m. All I can think of to feed us is whatever is quick and easy. Rice with Trader Joe’s Madras Lentils. Spaghetti. Quesadillas. Now, I finally understand the difference between the weekends and the weeknights. And I think I’ll pick up a copy of Real Simple, with its Month of Easy Dinners.
And, of course, there is always my sister’s offer to help me cook up some big batches of freezer food. Maybe next month.
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Posted in miscellany, solo parenting
Me? You want to talk to me?
Just got off the phone with Nicole, calling from -get this- CBS. Yeah, the Early Show wants to talk to me after the article in Babble. Really? Little ol’ me?
Posted in miscellany
Difficult days.
There are times when I have loved being a single mother. There hasn’t been anyone to argue with about what I think is best for the kids. No one to tell me what to do or where to go. I don’t have to okay anything with anyone; their father gave up that right years ago. It is just me making decisions.
And that means it is me taking the blame, too.
Ask anyone what it is like to have a teenage daughter and they will rant on about the disrespect, the rude behavior, the attitude. I’ve talked to plenty of mothers over the last year or two–”Is this normal?” “Is she supposed to hate me so much?” “Am I really as stupid as she says I am?” Every mother nods, smiles and reassures that it’s just teenage girls; they are a force to be reckoned with.
Logically, I know that. I realize her frontal lobe isn’t developed, that teenagers generally do think the world revolves around them. I know that she is just saying it to upset me. And day after day, it does. It wears on me and I wish I had someone to hold me up when she shoots me down who could come in with a deep, masculine voice full of authority to tell her it’s no way to treat her mother.
I have friends, dear friends, who support me and remind me that it the daughter isn’t the authority and even when she makes cruel assertions, they are just the spouting of an 8th grade girl. They remind me to take deep breaths and let it roll off my back like a duck in water.
So I try. I inhale through my nose and fill my lungs, exhale slowly, purposefully through my mouth. And again. But there are days when those breaths dissolve into sobs and I ache for someone to step in, help us manage these treacherous waters. Those are the days the anger boils over at events long past, at relationships since faded and I wish more than anything that this young teenaged girl had two people to guide her. Two people who loved her and each other, to be the object of her wrath — instead of only me, alone.
Posted in solo parenting
Tagged absent fathers, family, raising daughters, single mother, struggles, teens
I still get teary, ten years later.
Leap
by Brian Doyle
A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.
The mayor reported the mist.
A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.
Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.
Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.
But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.
I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.
Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.
No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.
Copyright 2002, Brian Doyle. Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon.
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Posted in miscellany
The Final Countdown
School starts back up next Wednesday. I know we are weeks behind other areas of the country, but it still feels too early, too much like summer never really happened, to start that routine again.
With the lack of work, the summer was a long string of days searching for work, writing cover letters, struggling to make cash and cool days when I wondered if the entire season would just go belly up. Luckily there were some lovely moments, too. Belize. Camping. Sunsets and street fairs.
The housemates are back and the son’s voice has deepened oh-so-slightly. We haven’t heard his stomping overhead for nearly a month with our families’ different schedules and, to be honest, I haven’t missed it. The heavy footsteps are back, though, and the older they get, the louder they are on the floor below.
The daughter has bought school clothes with money from her grandparents. And she is trying to edge her sleep schedule backward toward a school-friendly 9 p.m. bedtime from her summer-crazy midnight turn-in. Meanwhile I’ve been the sack by 10 p.m., no matter what.
The son is coming back(!) in less than two weeks. The job fell through and he’s got classes ready for him at the college down the street. Come to find out, he can get financial aid after all!
Give me another coupe of weeks and thing will be in a new, but similar routine. Dropping one kid off instead of two. Heading north instead of staying put for work. And devising some schedule for the daughter to get home on her own. It’s a challenge, this new working mom life. But already it’s feeling better.
Now, I’m just waiting for my first paycheck since May. tap tap tap
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Posted in miscellany, solo parenting