Month: September 2013 (Page 2 of 5)

The Classics & New Releases

September 25, 2013 / Michele Minehart

I met with my New Book Club for the first time. Super nice women, teetering on the edge of hilarity. Delicious eats. Did you know there’s such thing as Salty ‘n Sweet Caramel dip? Oh, yes, there is. If you use it to dip apples it would be “healthy”. Apparently using a spoon is frowned upon by the tummy gods. And the book? We read The Fault in Our Stars, an up-and-coming favorite and reportedly the quickest book-turned-movie in history. (Spoiler alert: it’s a book about teenagers with cancer. Well, not too spoiled – you learn about it in the first few pages. But be prepared to cry.)

So all these elements mark New Book Club into the win column. But I drove home feeling like a rain cloud hovered above me while everyone else’s atmosphere yielded sunshine and ice cream cones.

It wasn’t the same.

I didn’t hear Sarah’s voice tattering on about who would play the lead roles in the coming movie. I missed Kristy’s avid agreement with lead character Hazel Grace when she said “funerals are for the living.” I’m sure April would chime in about her time with teenagers and some introspect if one of them would have suffered the same fate. And Kristin would give a brilliant character analysis, mentioning something I hadn’t thought of before.

It’s not that my Old Book Club ladies are better at book clubbing than New Book Club. They’re just comfortable. We’ve already lived through the congealing process of a group, comfortable enough to hand out warning napkins when someone starts to slip in her dedication. We know which cupboard keeps the drinking glasses and when we sit at the table with a plateful of food, we start conversing with whomever sits beside us because there’s no “that girl” in the group. (Well, unless it was ME. Which runs a pretty good chance…)

While I’m so glad to have New Book Club in my life – because if first meetings are any indication, it’ll be fantastic – it also points to the large hole I’m trying to fill. It’s not until you’re shoveling in dirt that you realize just how deep the crevice actually is.

Unfortunately, this is the work of transplanting. I can’t expect New Book Club to pick up where Old Book Club left off. That was a solid 6 years together. We experienced first babies together, new marriages together. We faced cancer scares and post-baby issues. We vacationed together and cooked for one another and watched each others’ kids for free while we ran to the doctor.

Now these roots are trying to plant themselves in new soil and it’s not quite as comfortable. Surely when you uproot and replant a tree it takes time before it starts growing – let alone flourishing – again.

Everywhere I turn, and on nearly every night of the week, it seems, I find myself in a group hope-filled for meaningful, comfortable relationships. Yet my patience to allow these to form naturally – as opposed to forcing them to fit within the patterns that worked for me in the past – lags far, far behind. I’m only 2 years in to what took a solid 6-10 to form. Unfair comparison. But equally desirable. I know what can exists so I run for it even harder. Which, btw, is quite intimidating if you’re on the receiving end of my mad dash.

All I can do is impatiently enjoy what currently transpires. Laugh and chat with New Book Club and look forward to next month. Continue engaging the small talk while relationships begin to form. Fill my calendar with opportunities, expecting baby steps over leaps and bounds. Live expectantly, knowing good things – amazing people – do exist and will be slowly woven into the tapestry of my life here.

For a mere 2 years here, I do keep a good company. I’ve come into contact with some quality people. I simply need to stay the course and make myself open to developing these friendships. Turning around and running back isn’t an option (especially since we’re selling the house!). I must submit myself to the process – and maybe even enjoy getting to know this whole new landscape of persons.

Scribbles to stories

September 23, 2013 / Michele Minehart

We crossed over a huge milestone in my book. My baby boy learned to write.

Now, I know many preschoolers have been etching letters for a while now – he is nearly 5. But I’ve purposefully taken a more hands-off approach when it comes to most things academic. We do lots of reading and talking about things like numbers and letters and colors, but nary a worksheet comes in the door, mostly because I figure we have years and years of those ahead.

But my boy’s got tunnel vision when it comes to letters. We practiced our H’s and M’s so we can begin to recognize our names and we even practiced drawing some of those letters here and there. But all of a sudden, he wants to put all the letters together to make words – specifically, names.

Out of the blue he asked how to write Baby M’s name and I told him (with 3 letters we had an easy win). But he came home from school today with a pile of papers with his name on it. I asked him (several times) if his teacher had helped him and he said no. He had remembered all the letters to his name, even in the correct order, for the most part.

So he sat at the kitchen table during lunch today and practiced and practiced. He tried doing it without looking at his name on something else, memorizing the order, without even realizing he was memorizing. Then he asked to spell his sisters’ names.

He’s filling pages with letters and names and knowing exactly which letter when I tell him what is next. I’ve had to reverse a J, but that’s it. He’s making all these brain connections and working intently at getting his hands to do what his eyes want them to do.

This is not the same boy who I once held with one arm or nursed in the middle of the night, right? Tell me that my current baby boy won’t take such large leaps into personhood as quickly as this one did. All the growing up and the becoming his own self. I can’t take it.

JJ and I have a motto for this crazy period of our life with so many littles… “life will look different in 5 years.” It’s more true than I care to think about. Today’s steps took us that much closer to “life in 5 years” when I don’t have all the diapers and strollers and naps. I’ll be trading these in for new challenges: spelling tests, homework folders and gym shoes. In the flash of an eye my littlest won’t be nursing and I’ll retire all the little white circles that litter my bedroom floor. My laundry will be filled with stinky socks and soccer uniforms instead.

This period of my life when I keep my kids close, when I am their primary and sometimes only guide through the day, will end. They will all learn letters and words. They’ll write stories and books and make me cry. They’ll get on a bus and they’ll experience the world and develop into these tiny little people.

It’s slipping, people. Slipping right through my fingers. That elusive thing of time, precious moments, falling right out of my hands if I’m not careful to pay attention. One day, I’ll look at scribbles hanging on my fridge and remember this day, the day it smacked me in the face that I get to do this thing called life one time and I’d better be fully present for it all. Those scribbles won’t be squiggly forever… they’ll round out and his hands will grow steady.

So, it turns out I’m a “stuffer”

September 20, 2013 / Michele Minehart

Many moons ago, I discussed with KLR (no doubt over a bottle of wine) our tendencies in dealing with people and relationships. We established that she was a stuffer that threw things (note to Unglued participants: not the imaginary “rocks” that come out in later arguments. No, we were talking about literal things. Pens. Shoes. How I love this woman!) and I was more of a head-on confronter.

Either I’ve changed with age OR we misread my penchant for opening my mouth as a means of actually dealing with my emotions.

I took the test and now that I’ve thought about it, I agree with the results:

Assessment available: www.ungluedbook.com/assessment

On the cover this study seemed to focus on how not to yell at my kids or argue with my spouse; as our discussion the first evening progressed I became aware that these weren’t necessarily my struggles. Of course JJ and I disagree, but we’ve come to the place where we do so much more calmly and generally with the big picture in mind. (I say that and tonight we’ll have the world’s largest blow-up, just you watch). And I do yell at my kids at times – mostly in the evening, pre-bed hours – but I’d put my use of “words I regret” at the seldom-to-never category. I never realized that because I don’t “eat my words” I’m actually stuffing them down.

Much like the fact that I’m a chatty introvert, I’m also a verbal stuffer. Sure, I’ll talk about the problem. I might even lay out the points of contention and even try to look at the big picture. What I don’t do is deal with the emotions involved. I’m like a relational mullet: business up front, a ratty, tangled emotional mess that needs tending to around back.

A friend once said, about herself, “whatever I feel, I feel deeply.” I think I’m built with similar DNA – and because I feel deeply, sometimes what I feel becomes too overwhelming to deal with it effectively, so I stuff it way, way down. My means of dealing with these feelings: walking away. If something is hard in our relationship, I’ll just navigate around the relationship. I make people far, far too disposable in my life and I miss them dearly.

Thus, in my relational tendencies, I’m the queen of “out of sight, out of mind”. Which makes me a very lonely person, indeed. Point of reference: my wonderful Book Club friends. I don’t miss them as much if I simply stop seeing them. Rather than spending my drive home ruminating over how I enjoyed them and wished to be close enough to connect with them more frequently, I simply stopped experiencing the joy of our evenings together. (Note to my ladies: this wasn’t a conscious choice! I totally told myself it was a logistical decision. And it kinda was. But this is true, too. Your monthly posts of how hilarious you all are tear me up with jealousy.)

Resolved: I will be honest with myself about how I feel. If I walk away to sort through feelings, I must return.

Month: September 2013 (Page 2 of 5)

The Classics & New Releases

Scribbles to stories

So, it turns out I’m a “stuffer”

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