A Gratitude Post From the Grinch

Listen.  I know that bloggers everywhere are posting these wonderful essays that beautifully articulate in the most heart-tugging of ways all that they are grateful for in this world: their families, their health, their friends.  In fact, for this entire past month, as I've been reading daily gratitude posts from Facebook friends, it's been my intention to sit down and write one of those posts myself.  But you know what? It's the day before Thanksgiving and I am just.....not there.

Sure, sure I'm grateful as well for my family, my health, my friends.  But I'm pretty much thankful for those things all year long.  This last week however, any warm fuzzy feelings that may have resided in my heart have shriveled up and died. Well, maybe they haven't died.  Maybe they've just gone into a coma, induced by all the exasperation I've been experiencing in my last week of driving and shopping.  (Don't drive and shop in the days before Thanksgiving.  It's bad for your warm fuzzies.)

So, if you all want a gratitude list from me, this is the best I can do at the moment:

1) I'm thankful that I don't have to go to the grocery store again until after Thanksgiving (knock on wood).  My ESCR (Extreme Shopping Cart Rage- read all about it here) was in full force.   At least there was no ferret sightings this year.

2) I'm thankful that Christmas time is actually here now, so that I don't have to get cranky about the fact that it's been shoved down my throat for the entire month of November. Even my children have bought into the belief that Christmas season should start the day after Halloween.  They've been pestering me to start decorating the house, and while I refused to budge from my stance that November is still fall and deserves a fall-like ambiance, the girls took it upon themselves to decorate a few household items.

Behold, our festive paper towel holder and tinsel-tinged lamp shade.

Fa la-dee-da.

3)  I'm glad I'm not rich, because if I were, I may have to drive like the entitled d-bags that I've seen on the road these past few weeks.   I believe my train of thought would go something like this: "Bahaha.  Look at my beautiful sports car!  It does not deserve to be parked with such lowly common cars as these!  Alas, this grocery store has no valet.  Let me park across three parking spaces in this already crowded parking lot, just to ensure that my car is safe from the riffraff that gathers here.  I'm sure the peons will understand- they seem to survive when I cut them off in traffic and hold up lanes of traffic while I decide where I'm going.... snicker snicker.)

Am I getting a bit mean? Just let me finish up with one more thing to be grateful for.

4) I am grateful that so many people are becoming more aware of corporate greed and capitalism on holidays.  It's wonderful that they are worried about the employees who are losing out on spending Thanksgiving with their families.  I am grateful that I've been saying this ever since my waitressing days, when I had to work 4 Thanksgivings in a row and one Christmas morning.  It's not just the retail employees that miss holidays with their families.  Maybe Americans can start thinking of employees in the food industry as well?

So now that I've worked myself up into full grinch mode, let me try to end on a positive note.  There is one thing that I'd like to express gratitude for, and that's you guys- the ones who read this blog and leave me encouraging comments.  Thank you for letting me know if I've made you laugh, or if I've made you think, or if you can relate to what I'm saying.   I can not tell you how grateful I am for that. This is just a little tiny blog, and it's always going to be a little tiny blog, and I like it that way- as long as you guys are here, too.  So thanks for coming here.

One more thing, since my warm fuzzies are waking up.  Here's one of my all-time favorite pictures of the kiddos from a few Thanksgivings ago.

Just look at those faces laughing with each other.  They make my heart so happy.

I hope your Thanksgiving table is surrounded by all of your favorite faces.  Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

When You Thank A Soldier

A few months ago, I accompanied my parents on a trip to Washington D.C. I'd never been there before, but my parents had been numerous times.  This time, they were there because my mom was attending a conference. Unsurprisingly, DC has a ton of extra security measures in and out of places which has proved difficult in the past for my dad, who lost 80% of his hearing in Vietnam. He's had embarrassing experiences of holding up lines while he tries to understand what the guard is asking of him.  So, besides being nice and just giving me a vacation, my parents also brought me so that I could be my dad's "ears".  (By the way, I was terrible at this job.  Half the time I would blow through the metal detector, only to turn around and see that my dad had been stopped and was trying to read the guard's lips.  Daughter fail.)

The first day that we were there, we went to the Holocaust Museum and then all around the National Mall.  I jokingly told my dad that the day's theme was "death and destruction", which yes, may be a little glib and irreverent, but I think we needed to lighten the mood after the intensity of The Holocaust Museum.  The sun was sinking as we made our way back from the Jefferson Memorial and my dad asked if I'd seen everything at the mall that I had wanted to see.  

"Well, what about the Vietnam Wall?"  I asked. 

"Oh, ok.  You want to see that?" he asked.  He seemed non-committal, but I couldn't tell if he didn't want to go or if he was truly surprised that I wanted to see it.  While I was growing up, Vietnam was practically a sixth member of our household.  I don't mean that we talked about it a lot- in fact, we did exactly the opposite.  We did not talk about it.  We kids knew that our dad had fought in Vietnam and that he'd been shot.  When we were little, he used to tell us that the long scar on his leg was really a sleeping snake.  We learned later that he'd been shot on Hamburger Hill.  At the dinner table when I was five, I asked him if he had ever killed anyone.  After a moment of shocked silence, he quietly answered "I've killed lots of people, Tacy.", and went back to eating his mashed potatoes, while I tried to figure out why I felt like I had just done something wrong.

We lived with PTSD, not knowing that it was PTSD.  We knew he was angry, and we thought (for a long time) that it was our fault.    We knew our family was a little bit different, but we didn't know why.  Vietnam was always there, but we didn't have any words to name it, so when I say that Vietnam was a sixth member of our household, that's what I mean; it was an invisible, nameless presence.  So of course I wanted to see The Wall.  In a way, it was a physical manifestation of that invisible family member.  

However, though I knew that my dad had been to see The Wall before, I didn't know if he was purposefully avoiding it on this trip.  I didn't want to drag him over and drudge up bad memories or feelings.  So I said "Eh.  That's okay.  I'd like to see it, but I can get over to it another time."  

"No, it's okay. You want to see it.... let's go."   And he began walking towards it in the fast-paced walk that he's always had, the one that requires me to maintain a steady trot to keep up.  So I did, wondering the whole time if I was being selfish. 

When we got there, he slowed down.  I didn't know if he planned on going through it or not, so I, feeling guilty, walked ahead, planning to just walk through myself and then double back to him.  

To be honest, the experience of the memorial wasn't what I thought it'd be. The Wall itself is purposefully understated.  It's just a granite wall with names.  You start at street level, where the granite slab with the engraved names of the first few casualties is just a foot high.  Then the wall grows, and the list of names grows, and by the time you are reading names from the height of the war, you've completely descended beneath the lawn of the National Mall.  As you continue walking, the list grows smaller once again, until you've once again reached street level and the names of the last to die are commemorated on the final, and smallest, granite panel.  The names on that very last panel made my heart especially heavy, I guess because being last to die in a war that's this close to being over seems unjustly tragic. (Then again, what's just about any of those names being there?) 

I found my dad, who had hung back to look up someone from his platoon.  

"Did you find him?' I asked. 

"Nah. I'm not sure that I even have the right last name."  In silence, we began our walk back over the Mall.  

"It's a lot of names, huh?"  It was more of a comment from him than a question.  I remained silent, feeling that he was going to say more.  Anytime my dad talks about Vietnam, it feels like he's giving me a little gift- a glimpse into understanding what he's gone through.   I walked beside him until he started speaking again:

"You know, I was talking about Vietnam with a family friend once.  I said something like 'Who knows how many lives were lost there', and the friend stated matter-of-factly '58,151'- like that was the end of the discussion.  He missed my point completely.  I was trying to say that making it out of Vietnam didn't mean that you always had a life to come back to."

And then he proceeded to tell me about guys he knew who received Dear John letters from their wives and girlfriends days before they lost half their bodies in combat.  They may have made it out of Vietnam, but the lives that they had left back home- the ones in which they were a whole being with supportive wives- that life was lost in a jungle somewhere in Vietnam.  And there are thousands and thousands of people like them, not necessarily all amputees.  Some returned with their whole bodies and a hole in their soul.  The common thread is that many came back home and found that what they knew of their "life" was gone.

I don't know if my dad knew that I'd kind of always intuited that feeling about Veterans- that a lot of them were people with two lives, really; one "before" and one "after".  I've felt for a long time that war can take a life without really taking a life.  I think it's something that people who live with war-traumatized veterans just understand.   I do wonder, though, if other people get it.  I wonder if they know that when they are thanking a soldier who's been in combat, if they really know what they are thanking him/her for.  I wonder if they realize that even though he/she may be standing in front of them, the soldier's old life may have ended somewhere in a desert or in a jungle, or any place else halfway across the world.  Do they know that the road to a new life takes them through a special kind of hell and that they have to push through all kinds of physical and mental pain, all kinds of guilt and bad memories- and that it never really all goes away? Is that the sacrifice they are thanking them for?

I haven't been in combat, so I'm not in a position to state this as fact, but I do feel that surviving a war takes more courage than any act of bravery that occurs on a battlefield.  When I thank a soldier who's been in combat, I'm thanking them for sacrificing their life before and for continuing the battle in their life after.

When I thank a soldier, that's what I'm thanking them for.

  

The Matter of Mattering

Look.  I'll be honest with you.  I sat down to write this post because I'm a little angry.  I've been stewing on a conversation for the past couple of weeks, trying to process it, trying to swallow it down, trying to look at it from a more graceful perspective, and it's just not working.  I'm pissed and there's not a lot to do about it other than to just let time work it's magic.

Oh, okaaaaay.  I guess I can write about it too.

A few weeks ago, I was enjoying a meal with some people.  They are people who matter to me, and it's important that I mention that, because had the same conversation been with people who I didn't care about, you wouldn't be reading this.  You see, I was misunderstood, or rather, what I do was misunderstood, and while I can brush off being misunderstood by random friends or acquaintances, being misunderstood by people who matter just.... well, it sucks.  It takes up a lot of head space.

We were having a perfectly pleasant conversation when the subject of me going back to work was brought up.  This is a term that has always rubbed me the wrong way, because it can easily be construed to suggest that I've not worked in the six years since I left the classroom to be a mom. Now I know, and you know, and the Lord above knows that I have worked harder in these last six years than I ever had at any job in my entire life- and that's saying a lot; especially when you consider that I spent my early twenties waitressing in a coffee shop out here where the senior citizens used to make me do things like puree their Turkey Gumbo soup.  (That was so they could eat it because they forgot their dentures at home. True story.)

So.  As I was saying, the term "go back to work" caused me to bristle, but I smiled past it because while perhaps the semantics implied that I've been on a six year vacation, most likely what these people really meant was "When are you going to go back and earn some real money?"  In hindsight, I should've been smart and given them a polite version of "None of your business.", but instead I informed them that I probably wouldn't be going back to the classroom.   This caused eyebrows to be raised (and once again, my skin... it bristled).

While I won't recount the rest of the conversation, I will tell you that by the time it was done, I had been compared to a family friend of theirs who apparently is much better at life than I ("Well, she works full time with three kids and she manages okay."), reminded that "every job has it's good and bad side" (as if the 15 years of experience in the work force and 10 years of parenting hadn't made that clear to me), and then made to feel that if I only had a job with some security, my husband could take bigger risks in his job (so, WOW... I've been holding him back.  Who knew?)
All of a sudden, instead of feeling like a Mother, a Wife, an Educator, a Woman, I felt like a wifey.

To make matters worse, all of this was said in a we're trying to help you tone that was so incredibly condescending.... and I just sat and nodded through it all.

Because I hate confrontation.

Because I hate disappointing people.

Because I don't know how to tactfully stand up for myself.

Because I was frozen by the feeling of not being enough.

Now, I don't need any affirmations.  I'm not writing this with the hopes that you all will comment and reassure me that I'm doing a great job, that I'm a great mom.  I know that I am doing as well as any other mom out there, and that in my kids' eyes, I'm imperfect perfection (HA!).  Eventually, when Roo is in school full time, I'll find my way back to a career- though I believe my path is heading more towards student advocacy, or some kind of home-to-school connection role.  In the meantime, I've created a part-time job for myself that allows me to work around my kids' schedule and grow in my field while bringing in a small income, and I'm REALLY proud of myself for that.  In fact, I think I've kind of kicked ass in this whole mom-kid-work-juggling routine.  So, trust me, no affirmations needed.

In fact, even just in writing this, I feel a little less angry.  I know that these people live by a "make as much money as you can for as long as you can" philosophy, which is very different from my "Do the best you can everything will work out in the end" philosophy.  Both ways have their perks and their flaws.  What bothers me the most about this is the fact that they are never going to get me.  They'll never understand our family.  For me, money is a thing; the way soccer practice is a thing, the way doctor appointments are a thing; the way good food is a thing.  It's a part of life, and while of course, OF COURSE more money would be nice, I know that more of it wouldn't change anything that matters for the better, because all the things that matter here are already as good as they can be.

Nonetheless, now I am faced with the task of making the opinion of these People Who Matter, matter less.  And that's a really hard thing to do- like growing an extra layer of skin.

Or pureeing Turkey Gumbo soup in a malt tin for the old folk.

I wouldn't wish either on anyone.

Thanks for listening.