The House - The Look

Note: this post was initially written May 30^th, and amended July 20^th.

So, we are trying to buy a house. If we succeed this means we are officially grown up. For some reason, in our set of philosophies, having a child does not make you a grown up. We got close last year when we bought a car, but we still felt like we had some wiggle room, some general maturing to do.  But now we are able to nod sagely when people use words like "mortgage," "equity," and "PMI."

This past weekend we looked at eight houses in two days, which is just a weird and exhausting process.  You kick a family out of their home for an hour, and then walk through it judging every choice they have made in the time they have lived there, as well as every choice made by every family who has ever lived there, and snarkily using such phrases as "crown molding" and "updated kitchen" and "open plan."  In the process you learn a lot about yourself and your spouse, such as the fact that D is alarmingly tolerant of wallpaper and carpeting that I find horrific, we both love craftsman style, and ceilings lower than ten feet make feel like the house is trying to kill me.  People, you know you are not shocked by the fact that I anthropomorphize houses.

So after hours and hours of walking through other people's lives and trying to imagine our life in their place, I came to a certain realization about houses.  There are two kinds of houses: the first kind is a house.  It can be a great house, it can become a great home even, but it will always be just that.  Roof, walls, floors, ceilings, appliances.  While everything doesn't have to be new or updated, usually everything works and is well laid out and makes sense. There can be beautiful spaces inside and out, and it can become filled with beautiful memories for you and your family.  You can be very happy in this kind of house. We saw several of these houses over the weekend, and one was a very top contender.  We live in one of these houses now, and have had three years of insanely happy memories within its walls.  But we have had a very hard time naming it.  Usually we just call it the Rochester house.

The second kind of house is different.  It is not just a house, and it is not just a house with character.  It is a character.  These are the houses you do not have problems naming. They don't have to be glorious mansions or big country houses a la Downton Abbey.  Our first character house was about 1,000 square feet, but every square foot was busting with elderly teacher charm.  There were foxes worked into the decor everywhere, a bright purple bathroom with black cats in red hats painted on the border, and a pastel quilt painted on the 16 foot high wall in the master bedroom.  You had the walk through the downstairs bathroom to get to the guest bedroom, which was formerly a sewing room, and the upstairs bedroom had a bay window seat.  We called it the Fox Den.

In a house, you have to contribute the entire story.  Your belongings, your voices, your memories are what fill the house.  In a character house, the house is another character in your story.  We didn't just have a New Years Eve party in the Fox Den, the house was there with us when we had the party, when we cooked our very first spaghetti dinner as a married couple, and when we brought home our foster daughter Joyce for the very first time.

We saw a lot of both kinds of houses over this weekend, and both Don and I agreed that we could be happy in either. But when I dig down deep, and am honest with myself, I know that I am usually happier when living in a house that contributes something more to our living arrangement than a roof and four walls.  A house than can contribute its own history and style and even opinions. A house that can say "Oh no, that color is never going to look good with my wood trim," or "Yes, a porch swing is exactly what I needed here!"  I have an active imagination, and I like having a house around me that I can have a conversation with.

It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that when buying a character house, it is best to find one whose character you can get along with!

This weekend we went back and forth with a lot of arguments, but kept coming back to one house in particular who would not be ignored or passed over.  To say that it had character would be a gross understatement.  It was built a hundred years ago, and seems to have spent the passing century just building up awesomeness and weirdness.  It has been a duplex and possibly at one time a triplex.  It has been the home of doctors, families, dogs, and during the 1980’s was restored by a fabulous gay man. There are stairways to no-where, secret basement rooms, nooks, crannies, a secret hot tub room on the second floor, sky lights, built-ins, butterflies, and four fireplaces all in a three story craftsman prairie style brick and stucco house.  

Don and I are already fighting over the name.  Don thinks that Shatterly Place fits it very well, but I feel like that will either be heard as Shat-erly Place or Slaternly Place, neither of which are really awesome.  I, being slightly more insane, feel that the house has revealed to me that it's name is Maurice and that it is the house incarnation of the recently deceased Maurice Sendak.  Don hates this with the fire of a thousand suns and now we have agreed I will never bring that up again under the threat of having all Maurice Sendak books removed from said house.  Except for here, on my blog.  Ooops.  Just don’t repeat it.

We put in an offer yesterday, and are keeping our fingers, toes, arms and legs crossed!

Update:

It is now the 20^th of July.  I am updating this blog post from the den on the second floor, which is the room adjacent to the secret hot tub porch.  We packed all our belongings into a moving truck on the 30^th of June, drove to Indiana the 1^st of July, bought this house the 2^nd of July and moved in that very same afternoon (thank you Jim Lee, T J D’Agostino, Paul Sacquitne, Cliff Arnold and Kevin Healy for all of your moving help!).

I promise to post a Part II to this series with lots of pictures soon!

We still have not decided on a name.

Moving, Part Deux

New things I have learned about myself while moving: our family is just plain weird.  I will illustrate this to you in a series of box labels that I have personally written in the past three weeks, McSweeny’s List style.

To Library:

Medical Texts (Don)

Baby Bottles

Purses

~

To Library:

Books (Don,Curriculum)

To Living Room:

Records

Tape Collection

Wedding Albums

Polar Bear/Monkeys

Elmo/ET

~

To Living Room:

Records

Sinatra Books

Wedding Albums

Bowls

Couch Pillow

~

To Downstairs:

Paintings

Pictures

Sweaters (Don)

Winter Shirts (CJPZ)

~

To Office:

Books (CJPZ)

Ceremonial Sword

Sweaters (CJPZ)

~

To Office:

Haitian Metal Art

Flight Suit

Sweaters (CJPZ)

Briefcase

Legitimate questions that could be asked based on the preceding packing lists.

Wait…is the office the same thing as the library?  What the hell?

            No, its not.  We will have an office and library.  We will have many leather bound volumes (not really) in multiple places throughout the house.  This is why it has taken me two weeks to pack our books right now, into roughly 40 boxes. So now I get my own office for my ridiculous scribbling (lucky you!) and Don gets a PLS wet dream library with wall mounted bookshelves and a fireplace.  But don’t you go thinking that I got the short end of the stick with this deal – no, no dear reader.  My office has a sun porch off the side just big enough to contain a weird, 1980’s hot tub.

Oh yeah.

Why do you label your books separately than your husbands? What the heck is the “Curriculum?”

            Don and I have a long standing, somewhat humorous joke about our books.  We both have a lot of them, collected over the years, and they are not very good at sharing space.  I believe we had one bookshelf in our current house where Don and Crystal books casually mixed, but it was a forced casualness.  Beyond that level of silliness, Don has one extra-special bookshelf that is just reserved for books from his college major, the Program of Liberal Studies.  The wankers, er, I mean the awesome people lucky enough to have taken this major refer to it as “the Curriculum.”  Their alumni have Symposiums every summer at ND to talk about pressing issues and new research done on old issues and other generally very important and impressive things.

Of course, seeing as all of my friends in college were Anthropology, Peace Studies or Political Science majors we all like to make fun of PLS people a lot, because they think very highly of themselves.  Which, in all honesty, they should, because most of them read a lot of really amazing classical pieces, are incredibly intelligent, can converse with people from any walk of life, and are really interesting.  Except for the wankers.  But there a re wankers in every major, so it’s not really that big of a deal. It’s just that I have more fun making fun of PLS wankers than almost any other kind.  Except for business wankers.  You know who you are….

Um, ceremonialsword….again, what the hell?

Yeah.  I have one. It’s called a Kris or Kalis,and it’s from the Philippines.  My Dad gave it to me.  It’s awesome.

Why are your box contents so completely random?

            Theyaren’t.  They just appear that way to someone who hasn’t been packing for the last three weeks. Or maybe they appear that way to someone who doesn’t have so many random things.

Four and Twnety Blackbirds, Baked in a Pie

I have a weird thing about songbirds.  Specifically, I hate them.  There…I said it.  Phew. 

You’re not shocked, are you?  I can understand.  I am the kind of person who has “a weird thing” about any number of things, and you are understandably not shocked to find out that one of my weird things is about birds.  Well, I am sorry to disappoint you further, because the reason for my “weird thing about birds” is utterly mundane.

They are so. Damn. LOUD.

When my husband was in medical school he lived in a house in Indianapolis that was known amongst our friends as the Viking Beer Hall.  The owner of the house had seemed to go to great lengths to instill a sense of medieval frivolity in the place.  Wood paneling everywhere.  Wall scones shaped like dripping candles.  Tiny windows highly placed along the wall to minimize the risk of crossbow attack from the neighbors.  Rolling and pitched wooden floor that gave one the effect of walking on a Viking longship after a few horns of ale whenever you attempted to cross the living room.  A basement that could give any castle or mead hall’s torture chamber a run for its money.  All in all, an interesting place.

Whenever I would drive down to Indianapolis to visit Don for a weekend, I would have to prepare myself for any number of trails at the VBH.  I frequently brought my own cleaning supplies, and would give the one, tiny bathroom a thorough scrubbing with the most caustic cleaners I could find before attempting to use it.  Usually this would require a mask and me sitting outside with my inhaler for two hours afterwards trying to stop the burning in my lungs because of the lack of any ventilation whatsoever in that tiny hellhole of mildew and whatever else it was in that shower I don’t want to think about it anymore.  Some people just have different threshold levels for cleaning.  OK, it’s fine.  No it was seriously gross, but whatever.

By far the biggest issue I encountered when visiting Don was the colony of sparrows that lived in a giant vine on the wall of the house next door, a mere four feet from his window.  A window that was usually open, because Don is one of those people who likes to sleep with his window open until the threat of frostbite exists.  And then he closes the window but still doesn’t turn the heat on.  It’s sick.  I like to sleep with the window closed, but I never really knew why until the Spring of 2008.  When the birds came back north.  And every sparrow in Indiana came to live in the vine next to his bedroom window.  And they all started singing at 3am.

Suffice it to say I am a very light sleeper.  If our dog is having a restless night I can hear him turning around in his kennel downstairs and it wakes me up.  I have vivid, and anxiety filled memories of the first sparrow chirping every morning and the mental battle that would ensue:

Oh God, they’re starting already.  What the hell time is it?  The sun isn’t even coming up for 3 hours what do they want?!  Maybe it was just that one…damn it.  They’re all up now.  OK maybe I can do it this time.  They are melodious songbirds!  Just close my eyes, breathe evenly, they will lull me to sleep with their sweet trilling…fucking evil ratty brow plague monsters!!  Shut up shut up shut up I will kill you all and pluck you and make your little worthless breasts into a stew!  I will roast you and eat you whole, singing beak and all!  I hate you, you colony of hell spawned vermin!

Eventually, after an hour or so of stewing in my own, unnecessarily hateful juices, I would get up and quietly close the window.  Why the hell didn’t you just close the window in the first place?  Clever question.  I will explain.  When I closed the window, then I have to do one of two things.  I have to turn on the overhead fan or turn on the little fan on the bookshelf.  Because if I close the window and don’t turn on the fan, and the temperature in the room raises one degree, Don will sense the minute temperature increase, and begin thrashing about and shedding sheets and blankets and sweating.  And when he wakes up two hours later he will say he didn’t sleep well because it was too hot, and why were the windows closed?  And I just don’t want to deal with that. 

OK, fine, you are a wuss, so just turn on the fans then.  Good suggestion, my friend.  But which one?  The overhead fan, duh, it will cool the room the fastest and most efficiently.  Oh ok…but hey, do you remember if the light was on when we turned the switch off last night?  Or was the light off and the fan on?  I don’t remember.  So if I turn on that switch, and the light is on, then I have a desperate scramble onto the bed, probably on top of Don, to pull the chain that turns the light off while keeping the fan on, and definitely waking Don up in the process.  OK so the little fan.  OK fine, the little fan.  Which is poised so it blows directly onto the bed, wrapping Don in a lovingly cool vortex of air.  And wrapping me in a hateful frigid vortex of air, where I will lie, awake and shivering, for the next two hours.

I know I know, it’s a desperately first world problem I am facing here, and it doesn’t really matter at all.  I am just saying its complicated, and there are some almost convincing and not crazy reasons why I hate songbirds.  They wake me up.  They make me cold.  They reveal to the outside world my true inner craziness.  And when our daughter Lucy was first born, they became a symbol of parental defeat for me, and my hatred ascended to a new level.

New parents don’t sleep much, everyone knows this.  But when one of the new parents is a medical resident, who doesn’t sleep much anyways, that level of sleep deprivation increases  exponentially for both parents.  I would try and stay up or get up with Lucy more to protect Don’s sleep, because I felt it was more important for him to sleep than for me.  All I had to do all day was keep infant Lucy alive and feed her.  Don had to save people’s lives and make split second decisions that really mattered.  Also I was nursing Lucy, so the chances that she was awake because she was hungry were pretty large, and Don couldn’t really help in that department.  If he got up and gave her a bottle, well I was just going to have to get up to pump soon anyway, so he wouldn’t be helping me sleep really.  So I’ll just get up.  And, lets be honest, I was so wound up and anxious that I could hear every breath she took even in my sleep.  So when she woke up, I was usually awake anyway.  Thinking crazy thoughts about birds.

It was this new level of sleep deprivation that elevated the song birds in our Rochester, MN neighborhood from the level of annoying hell spawn to truly evil servants of the dark lord.  There I was, nursing Lucy at 3am or, having just nursed her, trying to put her back to sleep in her crib or swing or bouncy chair or anywhere really so that I could climb back into my bed and get some sleep.  And the first bird of the morning would sing.  It would sing a song that went something like this.

            I know you wanted to sleep tonight, but that isn’t in the cards for you my dear.  It’s morning now.  A new day has dawned.  It’s time to get up.  No sleeping for you tonight.  It may still be dark outside, but not for long.  The sun will rise and you will not have slept.  You failed!

I know, I know.  That is extra crazy.  But all new parents are a little bit crazy, and ones who already hate birds have a little bonus dose of crazy anyway, so what did you expect?

Every birdsong in the morning was a symbol of defeat to me.  When I heard that first song, my body would literally flood with stress hormones, my stomach would roil, I would tear up and think about how tired I was and how tired I was going to be for, literally, forever, and how I was never going to sleep again.  Ever.  And on top of that I was a terrible mother, because the birds were signaling the end of the night and Lucy hadn’t slept enough yet, or it had taken too long to put her back down, or she had broken out of her swaddle again.  Every time a bird sang I would be filled with negativity.

I would channel all of that gross badness into hating the bird.  Which, really, was probably not a bad place for those feelings to go when I couldn’t logically think them through.  At least they weren’t going towards Don or Lucy.  Much.

Every sparrow I saw got a death gaze.  Every cardinal was an affront.  Every red winged blackbird was the devils own messenger.  Really, the only thing that saved every songbird in my immediate area from being poisoned or trapped and eaten was my father-in-laws persistent love of songbirds.  It is my love and respect for Don’s Dad, a man who once did not use his front door for a year when a family of purple martins built a nest on it, which has kept the songbirds of south eastern Minnesota alive these last three years.  Albeit they rarely use their front door anyway, but it is the principle of the thing!

So the sweet swallows and sparrows and doves get a reprieve….for now.  It is well enough into summer that I have turned on the air conditioning, this eradicating the window open at night procedure in our house….for now. 

All I can say is that the song birds of Indiana better watch out.  I know the eaves of our new house look welcoming, but I warn you.  Come fall, when the air turns crisp and the promise of hearing the Notre Dame band practicing in the evening or catching the scent of fall leaves on the air seduces Don into leaving the windows open again, you better watch out.  Because I have been looking up recipes for roasted Ortolan’s lately, and it may be against the law in France right now, but this is America!

Where The HELL Have You Been?

If you are asking yourself this question, and are really (understandably) tired of reading back through old recipes and stories, then you are in luck.  I am going to tell you.

In just under a month now, Don, Lucy, Boss and I are moving back to Indiana.  South Bend, Indiana to be precise.  This is probably not shocking news considering we have know this for some time and have been talking about it all the time, although we never made an official media announcement.  Because we are not pregnant nor have either of us cured a disease or done some insanely awesome thing, which is the only reason anyone should announce anything.

So for the last month or so, basically since my last post, we have been busy.  Don finished all of his many requirements for graduating from his residency program: research project, several other projects with acronyms that I don't know what they mean, Grand Rounds presentation, etc.  Horay!  We drove to Indiana, bought a house (post on that coming ASAP), and then drove back to Minnesota for possibly the last time.  Don't worry my MN loves...this just means that hopefully from now on we can fly instead of drive!  And now I am...packing <<insert picture of me looking like a deer in the headlights here>>.

Most people find me a reasonably organized person.  I usually have my shit together, papers in proper file folders in the filing cabinet, several copies of important documents tucked into safe places around the house, computers backed up online and on a hard drive, etc.  I like to be prepared for things.  One of the major "discussion topics" D and I have in our marriage is my obsessive level of preparedness.  If we have a conversation in which several possibilities for dates or plans are mentioned, he will check back with me in a few hours to find I have secured a babysitter just in case we go through with one possibility.  I have learned now that is just helps to get things in writing when possible.

As organized and prepared as I like to be, when people start talk about packing and moving, I have a very marked physical reaction.  My palms get sweaty, my eyes widen, and I literally start looking around me for exits.  Because when it comes to packing, it takes me about 2 seconds to get completely overwhelmed with the idea of putting everything I own into boxes and then physically moving them from one place to another.  How can life be that portable?  Where the hell did I get all of this stuff?  Why  do we have so many heavy books?! 

In fact, I will do, and have done, just about anything I can to get out of actually packing myself.  Get drunk the night before moving day in college and pass out on the porch swing in front of my dorm, leaving my roommate and her parents to pack up my stuff and load it in their car?  Check - Junior year of college.  PS I love you Christine, George and Marilyn!!!  And yes, I know that is a completely heinous thing for me to have done, especially considering they were graciously letting me live with them that summer.  So horrible.  All I can say is that I learned something from that experience.  No, nothing about packing.  I learned that you cannot trust the Long Island Iced Teas at the Linebacker in South Bend, Indiana.  There is a two Long Island limit at the Backer.  I suggest you just stick with one.

A couple of years after that I was moving from Tacoma, Washington back to Indiana and had a complete mental shut down when it came time to pack my measly one room of worldly possessions.  Thank God D was there.  He put me in a corner, said "pack everything in this corner into this box and do not leave the corner until everything is packed unless you need more boxes."  Even with those simple instructions he would walk into the room every now and then to find me wandering around, seeing if the piece of driftwood from over the closet door would fit into the box of dresser things, and would have to reorient me.  Several years after that it took my entire family swarming my bedroom the day after D and I got married to pack my things, load them into a truck, and drive them down to Indianapolis where D and I moved into our first little love nest.

My history of moving doesn't include horrific amounts of things.  The most Don and I have ever moved was a two bedroom house, when we moved from Indianapolis up here to Rochester.  And I was lucky and peaced-out of most of that process because we had Joyce with us, and I was taking care of her.  Which is what I told everyone.  Before that, at most I had a room full of things and no more to move.  One room.  And still I would totally shut down and be unable to deal with the situation rationally.  Complete and total panic.

Now, we have a three bedroom house and seven thousand pounds of book and five million toys and a basement full of beer.  So in order to stay sane, I have come up with an excellent plan on how to pack a larger house without going insane or melting down or becoming catatonic.  It involves a series of cliches that I repeat to myself like an extended mantra whenever I think about packing, moving or attempt to actually pack.  It goes something like this:

Start early.  Slow and steady.  Keep calm and carry on.

I am considering asking one of our friends to borrow his awesome British WWII morale boosting poster to be a visual aid for my packing experience, but bringing a large framed picture into the house in order to aid me in removing other large framed pictures from the house seems a little too insane even for me.

I addition to delving into the horrific and exciting adventure of home ownership and thinking about the logistics of packing and moving, Don and I are now entering the last month of his residency, and the last month we have in the foreseeable future with our amazing Rochester friends.  Don't become hysterical, Rochester people reading this post.  We are not there quite yet.  So what we have been doing, when we are not packing and Don is not working (which is actually almost never this month) is sucking the marrow from this Rochester life.  That's right, lets get visceral about it.  Life in Rochester is a big juicy beef bone, and we are going to crack it open and suck out every fatty, nutritious, delicious drop.  And then spread it on some crusty bread and eat it.

Play dates, picnics, trips to the zoo and the park and impromptu pot luck dinners and moving parties and birthdays and walks.  Yes.  That is my answer to any invitation I get in the next thirty days, barring vomiting or fever, of course.  Unless its a really low fever.  Just kidding....?

And now, with that, I am off to suck some marrow from the bones of the Mayo Clinic, getting every doctors appointment out of them while we have their ridiculously excellent insurance coverage.   Maybe I can get Lucy's pediatrician to throw in some anti-anxiety meds for me while I'm at it....or at least a "Hang In There, Baby!" sticker.

Happy Mothers Day

There is a moment that sometimes happens between two people when you look at each other and, without any words at all, speak to each others souls.  You reach across the divide, however large, that separates you from that other person in less than an instant.  And somehow we realize that we are thinking the same thoughts, and feeling the same feelings.  That we are more alike than anyone, especially us, could have ever realized.

I know, because this happened to me when I was living in Haiti and visited a tent camp nearby the compound that we were living in, where many of the women who work at Kado live with their families.  I call it a tent camp, but it was more accurately a ruin.  Many of the families who had been living in a tent camp in the nearby field after the earthquake had actually moved back into the cinder block village where their houses had been, patching them with reclaimed cinder blocks held together with no mortar and USAID tarps.  Here, amidst the piles of rubble still present, hundreds of families lived together, nearly on top of one another, going about their daily lives.

Children ran and played in and out of broken foundations of houses.  Laundry was hung on lines stretched between walls.  Women and girls carried old buckets to a few wells to get water – I am not sure whether they were filtered and treated against cholera.  Men gathered in knots, talking and laughing and sharing stories.  Women gathered in groups to talk and laugh too, cooking over charcoal and rock fires or bringing some other task with them.

Amidst this all, Don and Lucy and I walked, visiting the camp to deliver some medicines that Don had promised on a previous visit.  Several of the boys from the baseball team had seen us right away, and came to grab our hands and lead us to the families we sought.  As usual, a knot of curios people and bolder children formed around us, trying to figure out why we were there and betting on whether Lucy was a real human or a doll.  When we finally reached the little cluster of houses we were a five minute walk into the camp through twisting and turning paths between closely built houses, and I knew there was no way I could find my way out without help again!

While Don went from house to house talking with people and dispensing his medicines, I sat on a chair that someone had immediately brought for me with Lucy in my lap and tried to play with some of the children clamoring for her attention.  All around us a group of kids and “ti mamans” formed, little girls no older than eleven or twelve with babies on their hips, charged with taking care of their younger siblings.  I finally stood up and walked around with Lucy to encourage her to get down and play, and that was when I saw you.  A woman, around thirty years of age (it is always hard to tell in Haiti, where some eighty year olds look forty and some twenty year olds look fifty), you were leaning against a broken pillar of concrete, watching Lucy and I.

People might think that when I look at you and when you look at me, all we see is the vast gulf of circumstances that lay between us.  You see that I have everything that you do not, and vice versa.  And at first, they might be right.  It is hard to ignore the poverty that surrounded us there, in the camp that you called home.  But then I looked closer and saw the little boy behind you, clinging to your skirt, and I realized that despite the almost crippling differences that we have – language, education, poverty, opportunity – we have something in common that transcends any boundaries that might lay between us.

We are mothers.

Being a mother is a vocation, not an occupation, whether you are in the tent camps of Haiti or the maple lined suburbs of Minnesota.  In the best of situations being a mother is the most difficult and most joyful vocation a person can ever take up.  I think to myself all the time what a difficult task I have ahead of me, raising my daughter Lucy, even when I can offer her the best possible chances to succeed in life.  Safety, good nutrition, available heath care, education, family.  I have such a large network of support around me to help, and still from day to day I find myself at a loss of how to do the right thing.  How to be a good mother. 

When I first saw you that day outside of your house – a room or two at most made out of un-mortared cinder blocks, tarps and tin – I was struck by the impossibility of your life, being a mother in that situation.  Not knowing if you would be able to feed your children from day to day.  Not knowing if they would be safe when they went off to school, if they were lucky enough to be able to go to school.  Not knowing if your roof would blow away or the walls of your house would fall down in the next storm.  Not knowing if your child would grow up to go to school, or have a job, or grow up at all.

When I struggle, and think that I am failing, I remember that sometimes all it takes to be a good mother is to love, which is something that you taught me.  I saw that day that you love your children with a ferocity that is inspiring, because no matter what your situation is, you never give up.  Ever.  You find a way to feed your children, even if it means selling a few tomatoes a day along the side of the road.  If your child is sick, you borrow money from friends and family until you have enough to get them to a doctor, even if you have to carry them yourself eight miles to the hospital because you cannot afford the doctors visit and the tap-tap.  If your house falls down in a storm you make a shelter for your family from USAID tarps until you can find a better solution.  You give everything you are, because you love your children –that is what it means to be a mother.

I held my daughter in my arms, and looked into your eyes as your own baby clung to your skirt.  And when Lucy finally squirmed out of my arms and ran to say hi to your son, we smiled at each other instantly.  As I drove away from your home a while later, back to the safety of the compound, I knew one thing to be certain: I would do anything in my power to help you succeed in your vocation. 

Being a mother is hard enough…Let's make sure to give each other all the help that we can!

Please visit Kado today.  Every gift you give helps a mother make her children's lives a little better.

In Which I Have The Best and Worst Day at Mass. Ever.

Today I had the most hilarious, warm and fuzzy, joyful experience at mass that I have ever had.  Which was immediately followed by a thirty second exchange of pleasantries with someone I knew from my former job that completely eviscerated me and left me counting down the hours until an acceptable cocktail hour.  What the hell.

People who know me well know that I am not exactly a kid person.  Yes, I love my daughter with a soul squeezing intensity.  Yes, I love my sister’s daughter and all of my friends children.  I am happy to watch them anytime, love getting together for play dates, and have so enjoyed getting to watch them grow up into little people.  But I will never use the childcare at church, because I never want to have to volunteer there.  Ever.  And sometimes I am not super excited about going to the park because I usually have to deal with other people’s children in their interactions with Lucy. 

I don’t think this makes me an evil person, just biologically conservative.  Parenting my own child is difficult enough.  If you are a stranger, I don’t want to parent your child too.  So keep your mean, bossy daughters from trying to pull Lucy up the slides and keep your sugared up sons from pushing her if she takes more than five seconds to climb a set of stairs.

Of course this entire theory of biologically conservative parenting (aka not having to love every child you see) goes out the stained glass window for me in church.  In church, I love all children.  I love the baby eating cheerios off the floor to my left.  I love the three year olds trying to mimic their parents in the holy water fount and mostly just succeeding in soaking their nice church clothes.  I love that one baby screaming in the back.  I love the toddlers yelling inappropriate things to their parents horror during those silent moments of prayer.  I love it all!

One morning Don and I were at mass at the Immaculate Heart of Mary when we lived in Indianapolis.  Apparently it was a particularly striking homily that day, because as we left the church Don started eagerly asking me what I thought of the Gospel and what the priest had to say.  I looked at him blankly.

“Um…to be honest I didn’t hear the Gospel or the homily at all.  I was watching that one little boy one pew over and two pews down rip the head and limbs off of his sister’s Barbie and then try to put them back on in the wrong places.  He was seriously confused about why the legs didn’t fit in the neck hole.  It was amazing!  You didn’t see that at all?!”

We both left mass feeling that the other person had completely missed the point of the entire experience.

So today it was with delight that I spent the entire mass playing with Lucy and three year old Tommy who was sitting with his mother and two older sisters in the pew directly in front of us.  It was a crowded service, and the four of them were jammed into a space for two, so Tommy was sitting behind his eightish year old sister.  He made eyes and Lucy and I for the first fifteen minutes of the service, but his shyness was quickly overcome when Lucy pulled out her little travel sized magna doodle (note: by far the best purchase I have ever made.  $1 at Target.  Only comes out for church and plane rides.  Completely awesome.)  Upon seeing Lucy scribble away at her “coloring” he immediately leaned over the back of his pew and inquired as to what we were drawing.  Lucy showed him her scribble and he sagely nodded “Ooohhh.  An A for horse!”

“Exactly,” I responded, and our friendship was cemented.  Over the next forty five minutes I drew the letters of the alphabet for them and quizzed them (“A for Horse!  A for Zebra!  Draw an L, I love that letter it looks like my head!”) drew animals on both Tommy’s and Lucy’s commands (“Can you draw a cow?  Can you draw a kangaroo?  That’s not a snake, it’s a worm!”) and guessed around 500 of Tommy’s own drawings (“Is that a dinosaur?” “Nooooo!!!!  It’s a picture of you and your sister!”).  Both Tommy’s mother and myself tried to explain to him multiple times that I was Lucy’s mother, not her sister.  We both failed.  In the end I decided to just be flattered.

His older sister’s left for the children’s mass, but when they returned they were eager to play with the coloring as well.  Tommy informed his eldest sister that he was drawing just like on his iPad.  She smacked him, lightly, over the back of the head and said “In your dreams you have an iPad!  That’s Mom’s iPad!  Duh!”  At one point Tommy leaned over the pew toward Lucy, gently touched her cheek and said “She is so cute!  She is the cutest girl!”  I almost had to end our friendship then and there, but he quickly went back to coloring and I decided to let that one slide.

The experience was capped off when everyone stood for the final prayer of sending.  As Tommy got to his feet on the pew bench, he looked up at his mother and stated loudly “I just tooted!”  I literally choked on my own laughter, so much so that Lucy, whom I was holding, grabbed my face and turned it toward her asking “You OK mama?”  Oh yes.  I was way more than ok.  I was elated.  Best.  Mass.  Ever.

So it was with a very light heart that I exited the sanctuary and made my way through the crown to the fellowship area to see if any of my other friends were in the back of the church.  Not finding anyone, I sat Lucy on top of a table, dug my keys out of the diaper bag, and prepared to leave.  Lucy slid off the table and, sensing that freedom was immanent with these many people around us to distract me, made a break for the doors heading out to the street.  This particular behavior is symptomatic of a current issue we have been having.  Namely, she now will take any opportunity to run away from me and hide somewhere in plain site.  This would be hilarious if the behavior did not instinctively kick in at the precisely wrong moment.  Every.  Time. 

We are late for church and need to leave.  Lucy runs back into the garden and drops to the ground in the wet grass covering her head with her arms.  We are waiting in the resident’s break room to see Don for five minutes, trying not to disturb the people doing research or the nurses taking their breaks down the hall.  Lucy runs from the room, shuts the door in my face behind her, and then runs down the hall into the nurses break room screaming that she needs water.  We are ready to leave church and trying to avoid the crush of people in the welcome area.  Lucy tries to flee the church for the busy street, pins herself against the church door, forcing me to come face to face with one of my former work places board members and biggest donors.

I had Lucy pinned against the door and was leaning down to pick her up when the donor came up to the adjoining door and said hello to me.  I looked up, somewhat in surprise, and said hello back.  She asked how I was doing, and I said I was doing very well and asked how she was.  She said she was well, looked down at Lucy and said that this must be my daughter, so grown up now.  I broke eye contact to crouch down and pick Lucy up, saying that yes indeed it was my daughter who used to be an infant but now was a big girl.  When I straightened back up to continue the conversation, in that split second I had been crouched down, she had walked through the doorway and outside.  Have a nice day, she called back over her shoulder, not making any eye contact.  Her husband, instead of continuing to walk behind her out the door, had gone behind me through another set of doors and was outside already.

I stared after them for a few seconds, wondering what had just happened, and then put my head down and walked through the adjoining school to the parking lot where we had parked.  Lucy asked to slide down the playground slide and I asked her if she could wait since it had been raining all morning and the playground equipment was soaking wet.  She asked if we were going to visit Papa at the hospital and I said yes.  I walked with Lucy to the car, put her into her car seat, got into the car and drove out of the parking lot without really thinking at all about what I was doing, still trying to figure out what had just happened.  Well, more to the point, trying to figure out why all of the sudden I couldn’t recall the feeling of elation and joy I had felt when walking out of the church sanctuary, but instead felt terribly small and grey.

We got to the hospital and the forty minutes that followed did not do anything to alleviate my funk.  I always know that we are never assured a visit with Don when we go, because of the nature of his work.  Sundays are always especially busy, but I wanted to take the chance anyway.  Partially because Lucy had not seen him since dinnertime yesterday.  More so than ever now because, without thinking the whole thing through yet, I knew that I needed a hug and for someone to tell me that they loved me.  Unfortunately it was really busy, we did not get to see Don, Lucy had two time outs sitting in the corner of the break room, and then we eventually left after the third time she ran away and tried to hide from me.

When we finally got home and Lucy went down for her nap I tried to process what I was feeling.  Why was I looking longingly at the bar, wondering if we had any Bailey’s to put in my coffee, or if it would count as a brunch cocktail if I had a Bloody Mary before noon.  Why did I feel so bad?  That person was not a major part of my life.  What was going on?

What I realized was that ever since I got fired/laid off/let go/whatever I have been waiting for an opportunity to show someone how much better my life is without that job.  Waiting to show “them” how much happier I am.  When I am completely honest with myself, I was waiting to show them that I did not need a job, a career, an outside source to validate me as a human being.  Which was a total lie. 

Because what I really wanted was the have a pleasant conversation with that person, who took part in the decision to take away my job, and have them thereby demonstrate that I was a person of value to them because they cared enough about me to know how I was doing.  I wanted someone to validate me by letting me show them that I didn’t need them to validate me.

Yeah, that is sick.  And what is sicker is that I have been secretly yearning for this moment for a year now.  Rochester is not a large city, and the Catholic community in Rochester is a pretty small circle.  But in the year since I was let go from my job I have not seen a single person that I used to work with.  Well, that is not entirely true.  A month of so after it happened I went to dinner with several of the ladies I had worked with on the high school fundraising gala.  They didn’t even know I had been let go.  The office I worked in did not even deem it necessary to send out the customary email to staff and parents letting them know that I did not work there anymore.  Awesome.

But coworkers and colleagues that I shared an office with?  No one.  The gym I go to almost every day is right next to the Catholic high school.  Don and I frequently go to stores and restaurants owned by RCS donors and parents.  Lucy and I walk all around downtown when we go exploring.  But in twelve months I have not had a phone call, email, note, letter, telegram, chance encounter, or surprise meeting from or with any of my former coworkers.  I have not even spotted anyone at the farmers market or across the street.

I guess when you work with people for a few years, you kind of hope that they will like you and respect you enough to say “Hey, I am sorry you aren’t working here anymore.  I think you are a nice person and I hope you have a good life.  No hard feelings!” in some form or another.  At least, that was what I was really hoping.

So that was the ton of baggage I was carrying when I looked up and saw this woman leaving church today.  Even though we met in a doorway, I needed a lot more out of the exchange than I got.  As sick and pathetic as it is, I needed someone from that time in my life to indicate somehow that I made a difference to them, that I was valued as a person.  Hell, even just some indication that I still existed as a person for them and that they still remembered my name! 

What I did not need was a “hello, how are you?” and then to be fled from while I was picking up my daughter to show off how wonderful she was.  What I did not need was her husband to avoid saying hello to me altogether.

Or, maybe that was exactly what I needed.

Would it have been better not to have had that encounter at all, and to leave Rochester in two months never having seen or talked to anyone from RCS?  No.  I would have been constantly plagued by the need to contact someone, to force someone from that time in my life to say something, anything to me.  Now, at least I have an answer.  It’s not the answer I would have wanted, but it is enough to give me closure in that area.

Hopefully it will be enough to send me looking for validation and self-worth in the right place this time.

Stracciatella

Let me start out by saying that I was the little girl that you would probably have hated when you were a kid, and also that my husband and I talk about this all the time.  We agree that we would probably not have been friends as children, but may have had secret crushes on one another in High School.  My family did not live in a big house or drive expensive cars, but we were what most people would politely call “comfortable” in that we had disposable income.  I was the little girl from Southern California with a white pony named Pearl, who went on family vacations to Club Med and had a rabbit skin coat that I wore when we went out to dinner at fancy restaurants or when my father took me to the ballet.

Yes.  That was me.  And that was my family.  But that’s not the whole picture.  It never is.

We spent most of our weekends hiking and climbing in the mountains at Idylwild or in the dessert at Joshua Tree to get away from the real “Orange County.”  My father used to encourage my sister and brother and I to feed the coyotes scraps of food out the window so that they would become more aggressive and attack large buses of tourists that used to come through Joshua Tree National Park and whom we felt were far too noisy to actually appreciate the beauty of the spaces.  We had a lot of guns in our house, which made us an endangered species in Southern California.  But my Mom came from a goose hunting family in South Dakota, and my Dad grew up on a ranch in the San Bernadino Valley, so guns and hunting were just part and parcel with our background.  When I became a vegetarian in High School I wasn’t embraced with the “yay love our earth” mentality that most Californians find.  I was regarded with suspicion and lots of eye rolling by my family, immediate and extended.  Especially since we had grown up appreciating where food, especially meat, came from.

We were exposed to a lot of different foods at a very early age, something which I hope to be able to do with my daughter.  Our favorite places to go out to dinner and celebrate were the local sushi restaurant and two Italian restaurants that we had been going to for so long that we knew everyone there.  But my brother, sister and I didn’t resign ourselves to plates of noodles or meatballs.  My brothers favorite dish was either rabbit wrapped in bacon or these enormous prawns called gamberoni.  My favorite thing to order was Cornish game hen stuffed with radicchio.  My only thoughts as to why I would order such a thing when I was 10 years old was that it most closely resembled roast chicken, and was a foreshadowing of the many years I have now spent perfecting various roast chicken recipes.  Although I have never stuffed one with radicchio…

Gamberoni...my brother was eight years old when this was his go to dinner.

But by far my greatest childhood food memory is of what is, in my opinion, the most perfect soup ever made.  Stracciatella.  If you are familiar with Italian cuisine you may be confused, as this is also a flavor of gelato.  But once you delve into the name all becomes clear.  Stracciatella means “rags” and comes from the Italian stracciato, meaning "torn apart."  In the gelato these rags come in the form of chocolate swirled throughout the creamy base.  In the soup, these rags come from a combination of egg and parmesan whisked into a hot chicken stock base to form ragged, cheesy eggy delicious swirls.  Our two favorite places always added sautéed spinach as well, which always adds a nice earthy feel and texture.  It is the soup that I have been dreaming of since leaving California twelve years ago.  Every time it rains, every time I am sick…stracciatella.  Every cold winter day I have ever endured under the permacloud of northern Indiana or the perma-raincloud of Tacoma, Washington or the frigid, nose stabbing winds of Minnesota…stracciatella. 

So…why the hell has it taken me twelve years to try and make this recipe my own?  Simple answer here folks.  Fear.  When a smell and taste memory has taken such complete hold of your life, the thought of trying to reproduce it and failing is scary.  Worse is the thought of trying to reproduce it, succeeding, and finding out that it really is not as good as you thought it was.  Yeah, that tastes exactly how I remember it…but now I don’t ever want to take another bite!  Those were happy times for the Prentice clan, crowded around a table slurping soup and scooping up mounds of olive tapenade butter with crunchy bread sticks.  (Note: we used to call this butter pate de gatto, because while it was delicious, and is still the only food in the world involving olives that I will willingly eat, it looks like hell.)

I didn’t want to get the soup wrong, and I didn’t want my memories to be wrong either.

Finally, one day last week, Minnesota embraced its true nature of spring and got cold and rainy.  Lucy was taking her nap, I was hungry, and there was nothing in the house that looked good.  Which is ridiculous because I always have a disgusting amount of food in the house in case I ever need to entertain at a moments notice, which has never actually happened, but the fear remains with me always.  In any case, as I trolled the fridge and cupboards for the umpteeth time, an idea started to form.  I had spinach.  I had fresh eggs brought to us from our friends chickens.  I had a wedge of parmesan.  I ran to the freezer hoping against hope that the universe had smiled on me and the planets had aligned and YES there is was!  A large Tupperware of homemade chicken stock.  The stock that Don always makes fun of me for, because I can’t make chicken without making stock afterward, which usually ends up in me staying up until 2am.  But the joke was on him, because I had homemade chicken stock to make the best soup ever.  I was having an Ina Garten moment.  How great is that?

Lucy woke up while I was getting everything prepared, and was delighted to come down, take up her usual seat on the kitchen counter, and help in the process.  The only problem we encountered was that she couldn’t see the soup well enough while I was pouring the egg and cheese mixture while stirring the stock, and ended up standing up to peer into the pot.  But I have been practicing my “Mommy is unhappy with that behavior” eyes, and it only took one glace and a “Lucy, do you feel safe standing on the counter like that?” before she sat back down lickety split.

Literally thirty minutes after the idea crossed my mind, I was pouring out the first ladle into a mug for testing, while Lucy looked on.  The egg rags and bits of spinach were very intriguing to her.  I took the first spoonful…and immediately started crying. 

It tasted exactly how I remembered it.  And it was just as good as I remembered it.  Better, even, because it was real and consumable, and reproducible even!  I could make it every day!  I could have it whenever I wanted!  Whenever I was sick or cold or homesick and cold, which is pretty much most of the time, lets be honest.  It.  Was.  Awesome.

And here it is, for you.  Stracciatella.  Thanks to Lynne Rossetto Kasper of The Splendid Table for the basic bones and proportions.

Ingredients

• 1 pound fresh spinach
• 4 garlic cloves, peeled and left whole
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8 cups chicken stock or low-sodium canned (if you have your own that is awesome.  If you can buy the expensive kind, that is great too.  Try to use good stock though, because there is not a lot that goes into this soup, so the quality of the stock does make a difference)
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

In a large stock pot, bring 8 cups of vegetable broth to a boil.
Clean, de-stem, and chop two bunches of spinach. Peel and smash all the garlic.
Add two tablespoons of olive oil to a large skillet, place the whole garlic cloves in the pan, and heat for several minutes to infuse the oil. Add the spinach to the skillet, stir to combine it with the oil, and heat, covered, for 3 minutes.  Remove the garlic at this point, or right before serving the soup.
When the broth has come to a boil, add the wilted spinach and cook for two minutes at a steady simmer.
In a liquid measuring cup or small bowl, beat the eggs with a fork. Grate 1/2 cup of Parmesan or Pecorino cheese and add to the beaten eggs. Temper the eggs by drizzling a small amount of the hot broth into the eggs while beating the eggs, about half a cup will do it.
With a spoon, rapidly mix the soup broth to create a "whirlpool" and slowly pour the egg mixture into the soup (don’t stop stirring). The eggs should immediately form into "rags".  Make sure that that broth is at a steady simmer before you add the eggs; if the broth is not hot enough, the eggs may incorporate into the broth instead of forming rags, which would be….weird.  Or good.  I don’t know.  But it wouldn’t be stracciatella.
Season with salt (to taste) and lots of fresh ground pepper. Serve immediately.