I miss the baby rock slide. I was a *fabulous* auntie. I spent years putting babies to sleep.

At the risk of sounding like the shrivelled up old lady I am — He’s darling! Thank you for listing his movies. Going off to queue them up and make cookies ....

“Most people build relationships almost entirely around themselves, and that leads them to blame the other person when things don’t work out.” You have just described my mother, who blames/cuts me off every time something goes wrong. (Being cut off is a relief, actually.)

This was such a huge issue for me when I was younger. I grew up with broke parents in a very wealthy suburb and whose friends were mostly wealthy. When people heard where I was from, they assumed I had help. Which I didn’t. Not only was there no one buying me plane tickets home, or helping with rent (or deposits,…

And yet, after killing 5 people, h

I just had to turn off the sound because my 65lb border collie mix got so excited he climbed right up in my lap on top of the computer!

Yup, I got pregnant at 46 for the first and only time. Made that mistake — thought I was too old, got sloppy with birth control. We terminated and I got an IUD — careful ladies, it can totally happen.

So *that’s* what’s wrong with my mother!

We’re having mystery-elk tonight (which is what happens when you live in MT, and your hunter friends give you rando packages of meat wrapped in butcher paper). It’ll either get marinated in a little soy/sake and grilled — or maybe stroganoff-ed. First it needs to thaw.

Waste?

Oh yeah — I didn’t walk for either my MA or my PhD — my brother (the only one I cared about) couldn’t make it, and neither of my parents bothered. I thought I was okay about it, until I wasn’t.

Two years out on this last estrangement, and same here. Was “home” this summer and had lunch with two of the ladies who helped raise me — that they both could not have been happier to see me well, and grounded, and loved and working on my art again — it was really affirming. I wish things could have been different…

Sigh. At the risk of feeding a troll. No, I wouldn’t “rather be dead” — there’s a huge difference between “being dead”, as are my two beloved younger brothers (actual human beings we knew and loved and mourned), and never having existed, as happened every month of my adult life when I had a period. A period DOES NOT…

If she’d had access to birth control, they (we/me) just wouldn’t have been at all. And she would probably have been a better mother to the two she had, and the cascade of disaster that ensued would never have happened. It’s not as though we all survived. (Also, access to a joyful sex life with her husband would have…

The forced birthers make me insane. My grandmother had four kids, two of whom she (mostly) wanted. She did her duty, raised everyone up, got them married off and in starter houses. But the repercussions are still being felt — it’s not good to be the kid your mother didn’t want to have. Even with reasonably good…

Dekalb spicy — stayed in a Comfort Inn near Dekalb this summer to visit family. Asked for hot sauce to perhaps render the pre-cooked, heated-in-the-microwave scrambled eggs at breakfast. Total panic on the face of the breakfast lady. Incomprehension. “Hot sauce?” I told her never mind, ate a slice of transparent bacon…

Even the Secret Service guys look like they’re tearing up a little ... go Pope + adorable little girls (and I’ll try to quash that ucky feeling in my heart about canonizing Junipero Serra).

Oh yeah, it sucked. I think for me the most instructive part was that my mother had been so wallowing in self-pity for a few years, as if what had happened to us was the worst thing to happen to anyone ever. And here’s this quiet girl, in her mismatched church-donated clothes, just getting on with it. Trying to learn…

When I was in 7th grade we moved to Madison after a tumultuous few years in which my parents split up, my youngest brother died of cancer, and my dad went bankrupt. My lab partner in science was a Vietnamese refugee — they’d escaped on a boat, wound up in Madison where a church took them in (this was 1976? 77?). Which…

Yeah, I didn’t have 2 nickles to rub together, much less save, until I finished grad school at 35 and went into the private sector. My student and credit card debt wasn’t *too* stupid, and I signed up for 10% into my 401k (I know, I know, should have been 15). At just past 50, I’m nearly out of debt including my…