Protected: Part 2

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Protected: What was lost

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Simple

Both the airways and my Google reader are rife with discussion on the 2004 Inspector General’s report on torture. Now, I love a good legal discussion. Nina Totenberg reciting the previous day’s Supreme Court discussion is the highlight of my drive time. But among all the discussion of should we investigate, if so, how far should we dig, there’s something that I can’t shake. That has my stomach in knots right now. Those detainees? They’re people. Flesh and bone and blood. Someone’s child. Treated worse than an animal.

Personally, I think Bush and Cheney and the entire gang should be brought up on war crimes charges. This is not going to happen. But this whole thing about “moving forward?” If we move forward to quickly, we’re telling these people, their families, their mothers and fathers, that they are garbage. That the agony we inflicted upon them in the name of national security doesn’t matter.

That’s not the country I want to live in. And on some level, it’s really simple. We’re either an honorable nation, or we’re thugs. We can’t have both.

Saturday Fun

Parents of a friend of mine from the Knit Gang have a house on Indian Lake. Jamie & I made the hour driv e yesterday for a party. Even though it was unexpectedly chilly, it was great fun. Jamie got to take his first speed boat ride x 3, and another of my favorite knitters and her fiance were there as well. They also helped out with Jamie quite a bit, and the other adult guests – friends of the parents – were lovely as well. MD was home with a stomach thing that seems to be going around our house this week.

All in all, another wonderful day away from the house and out in nature. My camera is broken so I don’t have any pictures, but trust me when I say the view was gorgeous and the kiddo had a blast. I was talking to my Friend D yesterday and she commented on our recent rash of out and aboutness, and I said yeah, I’m tired of Jamie telling me how boring life is!

Thing 1 & Thing 2

I came back from vacation with two big realizations. The first is a “duh” moment of re-awareness, while the second has prompted a lot of thought in a what happens next kind of way.

Realization #1 (duh): I like nature

Actually, I don’t just like nature. It feeds my soul in a way that I often minimize. MD is very upfront about the importance of nature to his well-being. If he goes to long without a tramp in the woods or an afternoon spent searching a local pond for critters he gets cranky. It’s his church. But me, I guess I just forget. I can’t resisit running water; I love the cool, clean air you find in a forest; I LOVE hiking. And after canoeing and hiking and generally running wild in the patch of brush and trees surrounding our cabin*, Jamie had found the same loves. We even went on a short, easy hike with MD Saturday afternoon, at Jamie’s request.

Realization #2 (wow): Remove the dual, external stressors of money and job, and I am happy. At peace even.

When I was pregnant I realized at some point that for the first time in my life I was at peace. The almost constant, low-level anxiety I’d had all my life was gone, allowing me to live in the moment. And that’s what I found myself doing on vacation. I forgot for hours, even days at a time that August has proven to be a month of financial crisis and that my job was giving me heartburn. The only low point was missing MD. Overall, I was happy. So, what happens next? Do we hunker down and gut it out until our last childcare payment next summer? That’s been our strategy since entering credit counseling and that change in attitude alone has significantly reduced our financial stress. But for both of us our jobs, well, we’re happy to have them, the have the potential to get better, but for the better part of the year they’ve been a source of stress. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving out of state to find something better for the first time since Jamie was born. We’ll probably stay put for a lot of reasons such as oh, not a lot of jobs anywhere and it would be a bad, bad time to even think about selling our house. But opening ourselves up to the possibility has been empowering.

The bigger “what happens next” part of #2 is that I am finally at peace with being a one-child family. The financial security that will be in reach once Jamie starts school now outweighs the desire for another child. I don’t ever want to be in this place again. I want a savings account and I don’t want to worry about money from the moment I wake up to the moment I go asleep. The constant, almost subconscious fretting manifests itself through the constant clenching of my jaw and the band of tension across my forehead. My personal well-being is more important that the joy another child would bring.

I’m not saying we’re going to take any permanent measures (yet) but barring a lottery win or a huge career breakthrough for one of us, our family is complete. I’m looking ahead into a known, happy future instead of wondering, “what if?”

———

There’s a third thing rattling around in my head that has to do with simplifying our lives. *While the cabin we stayed in is actually a converted 2-car garage and has some issues from age and low-leve neglect, it was clean and tidy. I’ve been working on cleaning out our clutter in our living and storage spaces this summer and I’m going to step up those efforts. I am tired of having so much stuff around me and it’s exhausting, keeping track and maintaining it all.

———

Now that I’ve got this off my chest, I’ll talk a little about the actual vacation part of our vacation next.

Vacation aftermath

Jamie and I are back home after a week in the woods and his re-entry is proving to be very, very difficult. He wants to still be on vacation and is really taking it out on MD, who did not come with us. All three of us have things we want to get done today but it’s 10:30 and no one is dressed or showered…Hmmm…

More later about the actual vacation. It was wonderful!

Toys

I am long overdue for a post about Jamie. He’s almost 5 and waffles between charming and…not…daily. But I was just looking at some felt play food online (sorry, closed the window and don’t remember what rabbit hole I found it in) and was sad because he never plays with his kitchenette anymore. We actually moved it to the family room where it is still being ignored. And his trains – last year it was all about THOMAS and MD and I love the wooden Thomas toys and we had so much fun buying bulk track at our local independent toystore and planning layouts and asking for a trian table for Christmas and I was even glad he asked me to put a Geo Trax track together recently but he played with it for half a day and that was enough.

Around this time next year we will hopefully be working transitioning Jamie’s bed to the loft position. According to Ikea the loft is only for kids ages 6 and up but I really thought we’d have it flipped by his 5th birthday. However, he has fallen out of his bed at least twice in the last week which huh? Plus, we told him he had to go to bed without us laying down with him before we flip it and we’re totally not there yet.

Anyway, when the bed becomes a loft we’ll gain all that floor space in his room and at that time the lion’s share of his toys will be moved to his room. We’ll still keep some bigger things downstairs in the family room, but things he’s losing interest in now, like the kitchen stuff and the trains, if they’re not being played with still at that point they’re gone.

I hate having a lot of different types of toys around – we prefer things like legos and trains (and those damn hot wheels cars that multiply like bunnies) that we can just add to. In the last few months we’ve had more and more big boy toys creep into the house, like transformers and one lonely spider man figure.

I don’t think Jamie really knows what he wants to do with himself these days because he’s so often bored and sulking and wanting only to watch tv, which is seriously rationed around here these days. He’s more into “computer” games – leapfrog keyboard that plays games on the tv. I’m thinking about a leapster for his birthday – or more likely Christmas with our $$ situation.

Of course this time of year outside is good and we’re riding our bikes a lot but I still feel like we have a house full of stuff, and I don’t want to get rid of all of it because the minute I do he’ll want to play with it, but we’re definitely at an in between time and I wonder what is it he really wants to play with. It’s weird.

My adoption triad: My mother

I’m not sure how to approach this point on the triangle. I’ve written so much about my mom here. Just check out my archives from last July and August. It’s been almost a year since she died and I am in a completely different place now that started with me realizing (or re-remembering) that once upon a time, she was a confused 18 year old, probably suffering from postpartum depression and likely from generalized anxiety disorder or at least situational anxiety. Her relationship with my grandmother was very difficult, and she spent a few months in a foster home when she was a teenager. During my earlier years she demonized my grandma, told me all kinds of outrageous lies about how she forced my mom and my dad to get married because my mom was pregnant (lie – my grandma offered to get her an then-illegal ab0rtion), how she had no wedding or reception just a quickie at the justice of the peace (lie-their wedding cake came from an Italian bakery, the same one we ordered my 16th birthday cake from) and so on.

I realize now she was dealing with the fact that my grandparents took me away from her. They went to court and fought for guardianship of me, and my dad took their side.

Let me say that again – her mother and stepdad, with the support of her ex husband, declared her to be an unfit mother and took her child away.

I think she loved me at that time even though she couldn’t take care of me. Occasionally she’d mentioned being home with me when I was a baby and there was…affection in her voice. I’ll never know if she really got pregnant on accident or if it was a deliberate “oops” to get away from my grandma. But we never connected as mother and daughter. I know she felt guilty about me. I know she was both compelled to be near me and my grandma and to avoid us. But she never behaved like a mother.

One of my favorite memories was when she and her friend Ruthie took me and Ruthie’s two daughters to the fair. I was 10 maybe? We spent the entire day there, did everything, ate everything, rode everything. It was a wonderful day. Last year when Ruthie and I were talking about my mom and our relationship, she brought that day up. “Remember that time we took you and my girls to the fair?” We both smiled at the memory. She had prodded my mom to do more things with her and her daughters, repeatedly, but she always refused. And one of the pictures that was included in the slideshow at the funeral, there’s one of the two of us at the fair that day, one that I don’t remember seeing before. I’m smiling and she’s just looking at the camera, not really sure if she wants to be there.

So, when she and my grandma finally reconciled – I was 15ish – her anger was redirected towards me. I was an ungrateful snotty little bitch who didn’t deserve my grandma’s love, let alone all the material comforts she gave me. Then we were buddies, then we hated each other – oh my god, it never ended. And in the middle was my grandma. If it weren’t for her I would have cut my mother out of my life before I graduated high school.

She needed unconditional love and guidance from my grandma back when things fell apart for her. Space to figure things out, acceptance of who she was and what she needed. I know she thinks she got that in the end, but up until the last my grandma would talk about her with contempt. I think it was that need that made her demand love and obedience from me – she wanted me to treat her like a mother even though she never acted like one. I think perhaps this had something to do with never feeling like my grandmother’s daughter. Which is why when they finally reconciled, there was no space for me. We were moons, caught in my grandma’s orbit, and we couldn’t both be near her. One of us had to be out in the cold.

Interlude: Socks, and a little whine

I whipped these out in record time, taking less than 24 hours to make the second one. They don’t entail a lot of knitting, but that’s still fast for me.

Too bad I was so busy IMing Little Wit about how I was going to finish these socks today and how awesome I am to pay much attention to the heel on the bottom sock. Let’s just say it has some technical difficulties and leave it at that. I’m not worried because these socks, a whole 1/2 inch larger than the ones I made last winter, JUST fit. My next pair is going to be a 1/4 inch longer. These were made specifically to wear in the summer, with his red crocs. I wish I had gotten a picture with the crocs on b/c they look super cute.

They’re pretty cute on his feet regardless.

As for the whine… We have to keep both our cars alive and running until a year from now when Jamie starts school. Ideally, we’ll keep MD’s truck running until the end of next year and my car running until the end of the year after that. We are putting a great deal of money into them this month and I don’t think my car is finished. It’s at the dealer today where they are charging me to re-diagnose the engine light codes even though I just had it done at Firest0ne, where they fixed a bunch of other stuff and then sent me for the dealer for two more things. I know they need to do it, I get that, it’s just, another $90? Really? We don’t have it.

These last 12 months of daycare are going to be long and frugal but I’m going to enjoy them anyway. Because I know life will get even more intense once Jamie’s in school. Yowsers…