after a glass of merlot...

Yeah...after a glass, finishing up my work week this week, I can do this now.

Using the first letters (I decided on initial blends as my name, for those few souls who know Mama Llama's True Identity would realize that my name definitely does NOT begin with /s/ but with /sh/) of my name I answer all questions, not using my name ever--THAT would be easy--and not making anything up.

So here is my stab at it.

1. What is your name? Must leave blank as I am anonymously Mamita Llamita except to those who have asked. But I *do* start with Sh-
2. 4 letter word: Shit (a-hem...)
3. Vehicle: Shiny
4. City: Shanghai (yeah, been there done that!!)
5. Boy's Name: Shawn
6. Girl's Name: Shandra
7. Alcoholic beverage: Shiraz
8. Occupation: Shmuck (is that valid?) Shriner? Shoe store salesperson (if nothing else...)
9. Something you wear: Shoes (duh)
10. Celebrity: Shirley Temple
11. Food: Shrimp (oh I think I'm gonna hurl...)
12. Something found in a bathroom: ummmmm....sh--ower.
13. Reason for being late: Shagging (no, I am NOT British...but it sure would be a damn good excuse!!!)
14. Cartoon Character: Shaggy (Scooby's cohort, if anyone isn't of that generation)
l5. Something you shout: "Shosta-frickin'-kovich!!" (seriously, ask anyone who has known me since high school. I am SUCH a nerd.)
16. Animal: shark
17. Body Part: shin
18. Word to describe you: Shameless!!!!

Wow. That was fun!

reincarnated predispositions

I was explaining to She-Ra over lunch/snack yesterday my severe aversion to items coming into contact with my neck.

"I don't like close-fitting necklaces for that reason. I can handle a neck massage as long as I am only touched in the back of my neck. If there is any massaging on the side, I can only handle one side at a time. My mother used to put her fingers under my chin to make me look at her and I can't handle that feeling."

"That's funny," She-Ra responded. "Now, if you believed in reincarnation, it could be said that in a former life you were were strangled!"

We laughed, and then the conversation turned to my Mother's Day gifted broomstick (insert witchy laugh again here). Then She-Ra giggled and said, "I know. You were a Salem witch..."

"...and instead of being burned at the stake I was strangled to death!" I finished her sentence.

So here follow a couple of fun questions:

Do you have any odd hang-ups that could point to you in a "past life?"

Do any of your hang-ups indicate your possible fate in that past life?

I look forward to your answers! Have fun!

into the light

We had no power for eight hours this morning.

I never thought my dependence upon electricity could possibly upset my morning routine as much as I let it this morning. After all, I have lived in countries where we would have either no running water or no electricity--and a couple of times, both issues simultaneously--for days on end up to almost a week.

Yes, I could have lit the stove with a match and toasted bread on the grill instead of using a toaster. Yes, I could have opened the fridge only twice--once thinking well about all I wanted to remove from it, take it out and, when completely finished with everything that had to be returned to the fridge, open it again and stick everything in their places. Yes, I could have washed up with a cold shower (ugh--can do it but really, really hate cold showers when not in the Third World...at least there I feel like there is an excuse for the water being cold...).

But this was Monday morning. The day after Mother's Day, during which I didn't get to do anything I wanted to do because of torrential downpours and nobody else being willing to take the children for the day. So much for "custody" arrangements...

I got a broom for Mother's Day...

I call it my new transport...for a reason. (a-hem)

Don't worry. I *did* ask for it. (insert wicked cackle here)

Okay...back to the power. So at midnight-thirty I heard what sounded like balloons popping all up my street. I looked out the window--usually the transformers just go in one big BOOM but, with the heavy winds we were having I thought that perhaps something was blowing loudly down the street.

Then came the BOOM

and the silence.

I honestly expected the power to be back on by this morning, but it was not. It was still pouring down rain, so the only way to see if the elementary school around the corner had power was to drive by, as the office was still closed and not taking calls until 8:00 a.m. and I had no Internet access by which to check on anything.

How dependent I have become on energy.

So what did we end up doing? Packing up early and hitting the local 24 hour diner at 7:30 this morning for breakfast. The little monkeys loved it. Power was back on by 8:30, by the time we would have already had to have left the house, anyway. So I got home, got my hot shower, got the dishwasher running, started laundry and checked my e-mail.

All energy-dependent activities, of course. Ugh.

Reflections on Motherhood

To those who are mothers: Happy Mother's Day. I hope this has been more than a Hallmark-created holiday for you (!).

Today was a lovely day for me. I got the kids up and gently reminded them that they wanted to wake me up with their preschool and kindergarted creations so I walked them out to the dining room, reached up to the shelf where I had placed them out of the way, gave the decorated paper bags to the monitos and then rushed back to bed and pretended that I was asleep. They shook me "awake" yelling "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY MOMMY" and La Princesita handed me hers while The Young Prince took to unwrapping his own to give me that which was inside.

*---*

One Mother's Day, when I was a junior in high school, I had planned to give my mother a copy of the oratory speech I had done eulogizing mothers and the role they have played, historically and currently, in family life. It got personal as well, this speech of 10 minutes, and I brought home trophy after trophy with it. My coach had expected me to take it to nationals but, alas, the State judges didn't think as kindly and I lost at finals. However, I had bought an "Anything Book"...basically a blank book with lined paper and a fabric cover...and written the entire speech, in calligraphy, and was planning to give it to my mother for Mother's Day. I ended up throwing it at her when we had a huge fight as to my reasons for wanting to attend the last day of the speech tournament in which I had already lost placement--I genuinely wanted to see the others and lend moral support to my teammates. My mother thought that I must want to go for some other reason; namely, a BOY.

This was the topic of a great deal of problems in my adolescent relationship with my mother. I was accused of having illicit relationships with my teachers just because I was an excellent student who my teachers happened to love--probably because I was one of the few who actually truly respected my teachers. My biology teacher, rest his soul, an older gentleman who requested I be his 4th period aide my freshman year--his daughter had even babysat me when I was a child, we even went to the same church. Yeah, I was "doing something" I shouldn't be since he gave me a hug as a sign of peace during Easter Mass that year. Right in front of my parents, mind you. At that point, I was really too naive to understand what my mother was getting at (I was quite a late bloomer...).

Accused of something of the same thing with my orchestral conductor when he hugged me in the PDX airport and thanked me for all my hard work after two hard weeks of my leading the orchestra in Japan after I graduated from high school (again, an embrace that occurred right in front of my parents)--I had done something inappropriate, evidently, to encourage that kind of response. In reality, it had been such an amazing, emotional first-time abroad experience for all of us involved, including my conductor, that had created a common bond on an emotional level that only, in my life, music has ever been able to create in me. Of course, my mother could never have understood that.

Any gifts ever given me by a boyfriend were greeted with a snide, "So what did you have to do to get that?"

I was forbidden to wear black, a denim skirt or a denim jacket for creating the image that I was a "denim girl" (her words, not mine) or a devil worshipper. In my mother's eyes, evidently, the clothes made the person...no matter what. Even the most wholesome Little House on the Prairie-esque girl, who happened to be a close friend of mine, had a denim jacket but that did not phase my mother. She was convinced that, if I wore a denim jacket then I would next be out on the corner with the tree frogs smoking during break.

She told somebody, I have no idea who, that my best friend in school was a slut. Word got back to her, or her mother, or somebody and her mother told her that she was to no longer associate with me. From my point of view, suddenly my best friend did not acknowledge my existence. I had no idea what had occurred and, when I confronted my mother about what I came to learn in a heated blow-out, she denied absolutely everything.

Of course. Easier that way. I would kill to make that right, to show that one cannot judge others by the actions of their parents. But I cannot.

I have spent most of my life trying to please my mother, make her proud of me and the kind of daughter that reflected well the work of her parents, and moreso, to prove to her that I merited her respect and, moreso, her trust. I pushed myself to be a straight-A student in high school and college while being a star violinist, a star debater, a star on the math team, on the school board, holding various jobs at once, getting good scholarships to a good university, going to Girls' State, being a leader, being literally the best I could be in absolutely everything I overextended myself in doing and trying to always do good...but I always, in her eyes, made the wrong decisions. I was accused of working with "filthy folk" when I started volunteering with the Mexican migrant community in Northern Oregon. I was asked why I couldn't go to a rich country "like Spain or something" when I announced I was going to study and live in Ecuador. I then got a well-paying job right out of college teaching for the Japanese Ministry of Education in Japan...and that was good but "couldn't I have gotten something closer?"

I got a full-tuition waiver as a Grant Scholar and Instructor of Spanish at Tulane so I could pursue my Ph.D. My mother's last words as I left for school were, "You know, you could develop, um, 'other' interests"...meaning: "Find yourself a husband." So I did. That is what was expected of me, and I complied always with the expectation. Of course, she has worked to break our marriage apart since it began and my sister thought I was overreacting until she, too, got married and my mother stopped bothering me so much and started in on her.

If anything, this has done wonders for my relationship with my sister. We now understand each other so much better!

When I was 20 and so sick with monthly cramps that I could not walk, would turn ghostly white and would scream still after taking 8 Advil, my mother said that nobody could hurt that badly. My father, always my defender, took me to my doctor who ran blood tests on me and found that I was not only severely anemic but that I could be suffering some extreme endometriosis, which a surgery later that week proved that I was. My mother didn't speak to me for quite some time after that. I think she felt guilty.

I was told when I was pregnant with La Princesita not to ever expect any childcare or help from her. Then I was battered with thoughts from her like, "And what are you going to do if you have a 'special needs' baby? What then?" I still, to this day, don't know what she expected me to answer...but when I cornered her on this the THIRD time she started in when I was expecting The Young Prince, she denied ever saying such things. She visited me for an hour five days after La Princesita was born--after 20 hours of natural labor the placenta had adhered and I had to have it cut out of me--which ended up infecting at four weeks postpartum and I thought I was going to die when I went back into labor to deliver the placenta pieces, delirious with fever, all alone, with a new baby four weeks old, no husband around and no mother who would come help me. Little did I know then that my great-grandmother had died four weeks post-partum after having my grandmother and her twin brother, of the exact same thing back in 1924.

I, of course, was "overreacting"...just as I always had done.

I miscarried at 13 weeks and she did not come to help out because she didn't want to be a part of a "community event"--not to mention that it was believed by her that I caused the miscarriage because I lived too far away from "family support"...this coming from the same mouth of she who said that I was to expect NO support from her with my children. We had our huge accident in which my husband broke his back and I sustained chest injuries that had me not able to breathe well for six weeks, and she didn't come to help for the same reasons...thank God I have a family made of the greatest friends in the world here (She-Ra...to name-drop).

She thinks it unreasonable that we will not consider changing our entire careers so we can move back to Oregon and live by her. That had been her great motivation in trying to break up my marriage (which is falling apart well on its own momentum, thank you very much), to have me move back to where she is...all she wants is to have me there, she's not interested in the "package deal" I now am.

*----*

I have come to see and understand that my mother is jealous. Of what? Of opportunities I have had, of the generation in which I had been fortunate enough to have been born, of decisions I have made to just JUMP and do something new, of my being more like her own mother than like her--the same woman who she sees as having abandoned her not only after her own father died by marrying another and moving away but also by dying unexpectedly of a heart attack in the middle of the night when she was 62. All the people important in my mother's life have left her side at some level--my father left her widowed at 54; I had grown and flown at 18, never to return to live long-term in Oregon; my sister also left the area; her mother; her brother is only 300 miles north but they hardly ever see each other; the rest of her bloodline is pretty much all back in Minnesota. Her lifelong friends in Oregon are getting older and some are dying. She is alone, yet is unwilling to make any changes so that she is not so alone.

I am working hard to understand where she is coming from. I felt I had been pushed away from her when I made the decision to leave home and stay away in my early 20s. I felt she didn't like the person I had become and, instead of being a source of pride I was instead a symbol of how much she had failed as a mother. That is what she told me not two years ago--and I cannot counter how she has raised two daughters, both with graduate degrees, never been in trouble with the law or into drugs, with lovely children and lives of our own is normally not considered "failing" as a parent. But she sees our leaving her side as a failure on her part.

There are things that my mother did or said while raising the two of us that I will never repeat. The communication was terrible and I could not ask her questions or approach her in any way. I knew I would have things thrown back in my face or be teased to no end, so I ceased to depend on my mother as a source of confidence. She made that so. I can tell you the times I would go in and sit on her bed, trying to open up and talk to her. She closed the doors. I already do not do that with either of my children; I stop everything no matter what I am doing if they have to talk to me. I have made that decision. I want my children to talk to me.

There is so much in my upbringing for which I admire and thank my mother. She dedicated her life to raising my sister and I, making sure we always came home to somebody in the house, that we always had healthy food to eat, that we had ample time together as a family, that we had special traditions that we would look forward to for each season. She taught me the value of staying home with my children, which gave me the motivation to figure out a way to teach while staying at home--and thus teaching my children that they can do whatever they want if they can put their minds to it!

I love my mother very much. The last year or so has involved a great deal of introspection and attempting to comprehend better my mother's position in Life, and to learn to respect her, her difficulties, our misunderstandings and how I, as her daughter, can work to better our relationship. I speak to my mother usually about once every week or two, and our conversations are now much more pleasant than they had ever been. I have made it clear I will not discuss certain topics and, if she attempts to bait me, I will not continue the conversation. I will not tolerate attacks. Such limits have helped (at least me) to enjoy the time we have together and the conversations we do have.

Baby steps. So far, really, great strides have been made since my father's death. However, nobody is ever the same person following the loss of a life partner, a lover--and, from my point of view, a great role model and who was always my personal defender and hero. So we must adjust, adapt, and accept our new places in Life with grace while using what we have learned thus far to further deepen our respect for the Other, always, in our lives..

Happy Mother's Day.

I am SUCH a nerd!

This is the realization I came to this morning while pouring over my bookcases in an effort to figure out which is The Book I would take with me if I could only take one...the Book Meme from Brad.

My initial instinct, of course, is my textbook that I have written. For me, this is a huge accomplishment and yet, while not quite completed, I have been teaching from it for the past year and it is so symbolic of a huge leap of faith, of the self-confidence that I could actually follow my dream and make it real...which brings me precisely to my book of choice.

I also tried to figure out what book I would not have an easy time replacing. I think most in my library could be replaced in some fashion, so I then decided that would not be a good measure to use.

So I ended up with the Bill Moyers interview of Joseph Campbell in hand, entitled
The Power of Myth.

I was an honors student in my four years of undergrad out in The Grove in Oregon. My freshman year, we went from professor's to professor's home on Monday nights throughout the year and studied this text. It was monumental in the beginning of my self-definition--who I am, where I am going, what I need to be, what I believe, my spirituality, my drive, my motivation--and the single quote I use almost weekly in some capacity from this book, one that I have internalized so deeply into my being, is:

"Follow your bliss."

That has become my mantra. I wish sometimes I could live it more truly, but looking back over my life, my travels, my experiences and the fullness and fervor and passion with which I have lived my life and experienced my life, that this quotation from Joseph Campbell provided me with the courage to do exactly that--define and follow my bliss.

Z, She-ra, Chief and OC, I would love to hear from you.

Basics of the rules are:

If your entire library was about to burn up (think of the firefighters in Fahrenheit 451 invading your home) and you could only have one* book to take with you other than the Bible, what would that be and why?

Simple Rules: Answer the question. Offer one quote that resonates with you. Tag five (or four, in my case...) people whose response is of genuine interest to you and inform him or her that they have been tagged.

*And it cannot be an entire series of something, that’s cheating.*

Happy Friday!

don't you dare

Don't you dare attack, however indirectly, my parenting. I am around my children 24 hours every single day of the week and have adopted effective disciplining of my children which will involve yelling when someone is in danger or raising my voice when I am on the aforewarned third time saying something (which I preface with a "I will tell you nicely twice. The third time will not be so nice.").

Don't you dare even insinuate that the children seem to cower to you when you raise your voice to them as a result of my somehow abusive nature toward them. Be a fly on the wall one day. I think you would be damn impressed in my management of the children and, consequently, the mutual respect and confidence we enjoy and continue to develop.

Perhaps it is because you never raise your voice to them (and they walk all over you), that they cower to your voice on the rare occasions it becomes authoritarian. You do not separate them nicely and peacefully when they are bugging each other; neither do you let them work it out for themselves. You get involved and raise your voice...then have the gall to accuse me of improperly raising my voice withe the children. I usually tell them, more in an exasperated tone rather than out of anger, to go have some alone time for fifteen minutes. That solves the issue with no voices raised, no time-outs, no fears and no tears.

Don't you dare corner me while I am in MY bathroom and accuse me of maltreating my children. You have no right, especially when I actually take the time to be with them, learn how to work with them in order to effectively discipline (both positively and negatively) and don't just stick them in front of the TV or let them onto the computer whenever we have time together. I do not hit my children with wooden spoons...and yes, I know people who do. I have spanked my son once and only once--ever. I have never spanked my daughter. Maybe you should hang out with other parents and children and see, if you can get out of your own little ideal world in which everything is always hunky-dory, how The Real World is...maybe then you would come to understand that my children are the respectful, well-balanced, active, healthy, happy and well-adjusted children they are because of ME, my attentions and my parenting.

And don't you dare forget that.

feelin' just a little funky

I always seem to get into a bit of a funk this time of year. I love Spring and all the splendor, but I absolutely hate my birthday. I always have; I have never felt good around this time.

Perhaps this year is meant to be different...

I was considering making myself a yummy chocolate cake.

But no...wait. I remember the Christmas Cookie Fiasco of 2007.

Gluten-free soy-free goodies are just not in my line, and especially not when I am in a time crunch. I instead packed up the little monkeys and they rode bikes (I am still yet pushing the Young Prince up big hills so, if he goes, no bike for me) to Whole Paycheck this afternoon to buy Mama Llama a nice, big, gluten-filled, soy-filled chocolate cake (but made with the best glutenated and soyed ingredients, of course!) and eat little piece by little piece (sharing, of course, with any interested souls who wish to join me!), and drink enough red wine with it that I will then care less how I react!

Sweet, moist and fudgy with frosting. That is what I want.

And that only comes in soy.

Well....soy I thought (oh, I crack myself up...)

Turns out they now carry a Flourless Chocolate Cake.

Do you REALIZE what this means??

Gluten-free, Soy-free (yes, I checked the ingredients) Sinful Delights!

YIPPEE!

Too good to be true? We shall see, but I will be a good girl and wait 'til Thursday. To be accompanied by Haagen Dazs Vanilla Ice Cream.

Rough life, eh? ☺

---
Now I am officially on the Downhill Stretch to 40. (Of course, I tell everyone I'm turning 25 on Thursday.) Dad almost died at 40. It scares me to be getting older. But I am a different person with a different history--who knows how my dad's time dealing with hazardous chemicals in the Air Force in the early 60's might have affected what ended up happening to him. But the thought never leaves your mind.

However, I have made up my mind that it is to be a good week, which a big step ahead of where I was this past weekend! Will go out for Artie's (I am assuming, am I right? ...or rather, "is there anywhere else to go, really?") either Thursday or Friday night with some friends, maybe spend Saturday in my garden, now know that I have at least one student on Sunday of this coming week and I have a full schedule of classes to teach otherwise so I had better get my birthday/Mother's Day obligatory garden time in while possible. I'd like to fit a trip to the gym in, too; for spending the money on the membership, it sure is almost impossible for me to get there. Maybe I ought to think twice about continuing with the membership...

I decided to go ahead and pay off my piko ring, too. (insert sparklies here). Whoo-hoo!

Happy Birthday to me!