jwjourney.com

Welcome to my miserably neglected personal blog. If this were a plant it would be dead. I'm blaming this on Word Press. If my personal blog were on Word Press I'd shine and water here AT LEAST weekly. I've been spoiled by my BlissTree.com mom blog site - BlissMom.com - and the legal blog sites. Both are Word Press. I'm lucky to get a photo to post properly here. Maybe I'll switch to blogspot.  

        

I'm a month late in sharing this exciting news, but InsideMotherhood.com was sort of merged into b5 media's new Lifestyles Web site called BlissTree.com. It features several blogs on various categories from health and wellness to family and crafts. It also lists a handful of featured bloggers ... of which I am not one. But I am a contributor to the parenting section and I am proud to have that wonderful opportunity. b5 is clearly a stand-up company. 

        

I think poetry is perhaps the most beautiful language. When I was younger I dreamed of being a poet, and then reality set in and just as quickly, I stopped writing it and dreaming about being part of its clique. Still, on those occasions when my husband buys me a new book of poems or pulls out one of our old books and starts to read – I’m not lying here, he really does because he loves me that much – I think of all the poems that lived in me and I mourn.

When I first started college, my father bought me a book of contemporary poetry with about 20 different poets. I fell in love with the book. There are two definite reasons for this – one, because besides $20 handshakes before heading back out to school, my father rarely gifted me anything he picked out on his own. It was my mother who bought our gifts, and for this reason, when he bought me something especially, it struck me so deeply I cherished it. I still have the pair of shorts he bought me for my 12^th birthday – purchased while he was in California visiting his sister and father and, he admitted, his sister made – MADE – him buy me a gift when she realized he was out of town for my birthday. Secondly, because I truly grew to love at least half of the poets in that book he gave me. To this day, it is my favorite collection of poems. I have since gone on to purchase books from several of those poets.

And since I have no reason not to, I am going to share part of one of my favorite poems from that book. It is by Adrienne Riche, a beautiful writer who expresses so deeply her feelings for her lover that if you don’t break into tears when you read this, then at least break into a sweat: 

SPLITTINGS

I.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day-

light raining down            each pore crying the change of light

I am not with her            I have been waking off and on

all night to that pain            not simply absence but           

the presence of the past            destructive

to living here and now            Yet if I could instruct

myself, if we could learn to learn by pain

even as it grasps us            if the mind, the mind that lives

in this body could refuse                        to let itself be crushed

in that grasp            it would loosen             Pain would have to stand

off from me and listen            its dark breath still on me

but the mind could begin to speak to pain

and pain would have to answer:

 

Now…get your own book to read the rest…

        

If my front yard could speak, it would be saying, “Mulch me, PA-leeze!” For one, it is 20 degrees outside and if I were a plant I’d be dead by now. The poor foliage is probably screaming for some cover. Secondly, we haven’t mulched in months and the old pine straw, what’s left of it, is gray and flat and pathetic. Weeds, that somehow survive these frigid temps, are actually poking up through the gray pine straw. If the beds weren’t positioned next to the street it wouldn’t be much of an issue. But everyone who drives by can see that we’re not keeping up our yard. I fear we’re going to become one of “those” kind of neighbors.

This is further emphasized by the landscape guys who keep coming to my house in droves, pasting their business cards and fliers on my mailbox (peeling off the black paint, which annoys me to no end) and knocking on my door asking if they could, please, straw our beds. I tell them no. It’s my husband’s job, which he’s happy to do, except he has been sick since Christmas day. Some freaky chest congestion-wheezing-fatigue viral thing. And to make matters worse, his two-pack-a-day-style coughing has caused a severe muscle pull in his side so now he can barely move.

I think I’m going to break down and let the next pine straw guy do the job. I think my entire street and everyone who drives by the house will be thankful.... But probably not as thankful as those freezing plants! 

 

            

        

I wanted to share some exciting news. I have been hired by Canadian-based b5media to be its Inside Motherhood blogger! b5media is a Canadian-based global blogging network covering more than 300 topics including entertainment, technology, beauty, health, music, travel, sports, business and lifestyles. The b5media network is one of the largest blog networks in the world, each month receiving nearly 10 million unique visitors and more than 30 million page views. I will be writing on various aspects of motherhood from behavior issues and entertainment to kid-friendly recipes and the ever-elusive “me time.” I hope you will visit the site from time to time. I will be posting daily, which means I also will be looking for content. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make the blog more interesting, please contact me.

 www.InsideMotherhood.com

 

        

I’m not sure GQ did favors for any women by putting Jennifer Anniston’s naked 40-year-old body on the cover…. In January, of all months! January is supposed to be the diet season, the time of year we repent for all the crap we consumed over the holidays. I’m not sure how motivating it is to look at Jen looking, as she put it, healthier than she was in her 20s and 30s. But I’m cutting her some slack because of that whole Angelina-Brad thing. (This, coming from a girl who sides with Angelina in that cat fight.)

And I’m going back to the gym anyway. I’ve been struggling with it these past several months. It’s hard to stay in a routine when my son’s birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years fall within gasps of each other. I’m not sure I stopped stuffing my face or took the wine glass out of my hand long enough to even sleep. That’s what it feels like. And now it shows on my old, tired, less-healthy-than-when-I-was-in-my-20s (I'll stop counting there) body. 

This new year I am not making resolutions to lose weight, eat right or be a rock star in Body Pump. I am just going to be thankful on those occasions that I can drag my happy arse out of bed and to the gym. Maybe I’ll buy those diet cookies my sister is telling me about. And maybe I’ll take that metabolism-balancing vitamin my friend Kara is on. Or maybe I’ll vow to just drink more wine with more friends (mostly my husband) and eat more red meat. Because if there’s anything 2008 has proven to me, it’s that sometimes miracles can happen. And I'm sure one day that beef-and-wine diet I'm on will actually start to work.

        

It was not quite 15 years ago that I marched out of Casual Corner – no, stomped out – because they didn’t carry a size 2. The sales woman had the gall to tell me that maybe I should look elsewhere, perhaps a store specializing in petite clothing. Sure, you witch, petite means short, not skinny.

Those were the days…the days I thought I was fat so I’d eat popcorn for lunch and buttered noodles for dinner. The lean days. The days before Atkins when wine was reserved for dinners out with the girls and full dinners only happened if some guy was picking up the check.

And then I married. I became fat and happy. This is true. And then when my happiness was brimming over like champagne bubbles on New Years Eve, I was able to nit-pick my life and realize how much I hate PR - my SECOND career of choice….how I hate to brownnose the media types (my husband excluded) and that, frankly, I was never very good at it. So I returned here ...to the comfortable forest of my writing career. I live like a homeless person in its weathered leaves and shaded corners. It’s so good to be home.

My friend Wendi tells me that happiness is key. Happiness, to us, is a well prepared dish and a bottomless glass of choice wine. She said this last month when she – well, this is what she told me at least – let her eating habits go where they will. She said she was in her big girl jeans. I’ve seen her in her big girl jeans and it’s not that scary. It’s easy for her to say how miserable she is feeling, her waistband pressed against her belly button. If her life is like the past two years, she is soon to make her amends to the giant, brimming wine bottle and noodle bowl. She will fast from alcohol and all things BAD for the entire month of January. For this, she is my January Idol.

There will be no 12-week TV competition for this. I’ve already crowned her my Idol. I may make a calendar. Post the pictures of all my inspirational gal-pals for each month of the year. Wendi, my dear, will always be my January. 

Here’s to you, Wen

 

 

        

The other day at Publix I see this adorable granola couple in the cereal aisle. I so want to be granola. I want to walk around with no makeup and wear flowing hemp-dyed skirts and pierce my nose and eat only free-range, organic chicken breasts – Oh… see… there’s my problem. I couldn’t live off just nuts and legumes and sprouts. I need a big heaping serving of meat with my dinner.

But anyway, this adorably natural couple is studying the organic selections of cereals, the aisle that I don’t even glance at, and I scoot past them and on past the CooCoo Puffs and Lucky Charms to the blue Crispix box, which is what my son prefers.(He obviously didn’t get that sugarless cereal trait from me. Mind you, he will eat out of the sugar bowl by the spoonful – or even fistful if I turn my back.) The granola girl is reading the back of a cereal box and she is mumbling something. She is taller than the guy and has this fabulous short haircut and one of those long, fabric bags hanging from her shoulder. The guy has an earring in his right ear and it’s big and round and looks like the button on an elevator door. Like, if you push it something would happen. Maybe it made a sound. Anyway, he looks like a kid with his arms hanging at his sides and his head tilted back to read over his girlfriend’s shoulder. She is saying something I cannot hear and the guy throws his head back farther and raises his arms at his side. “Just pick something, OK?” he says. She mumbles back – probably knows I’m listening though I’m pretending to look for the Crispix that is right in front of my nose. He says, “Look, you’ve already restricted our food intake so much, why does it matter if it has (didnnothearthisword)!” But she doesn’t put the cereal in their basket. She just keeps reading like she’s ignoring him. He starts to fuss again and I have to smile as I turn the corner to canned goods because being healthy can actually be an annoying trait. 

        

Don't go to Big Cheesy National Chain Gym (BCNCG). Don't get suckered in by the cavernous concrete facility or the groovy cardio machines with built-in TVs or the dimly lit cinema room with wide-eyed nymphs riding ellipticals and watching Grease on the big screen. Don't be fooled by the coupon for the free smoothie and courtesy tan. And especially don't let the slimy manager slither his hand in yours and say, "What can I do to make you sign up today?"

Because you won’t be able to escape without leaving your credit card number. Because if you gripe enough you can get him to waive the $200 “initiation fee” and the $69 “processing fee,” and he’ll even ease up on your first month’s fee since it’s midmonth. (Oh, and here he won’t mention that $25 annual “maintenance fee.” What the hell?) Slimy manager will even tell you how you can cancel within 30 days and get alllll your money back. But you CANNOT think about it over the weekend. You CANNOT even WALK out the door and have them honor that offer. You MUST sign up RIGHT THEN AND THERE or else that offer will just slip away like green slime fresh out of the can.

Because after you sign up and walk past the big concrete desk and shiny happy people behind it, you will know in your gut that you made the wrong move. That you had been had. Suckered. Thank god, by law, you have those three days to nullify a contract – especially ones made under duress.

Oh, and that fab-u-lous 30-day cancellation guarantee? Yeah, better read that first, too. Because in order to cash in that jewel you have to make (and keep) an appointment with the personal trainer and visit the gym at least 10 or so times during that month. Thank goodness you can fall back on that three-day cancellation, except in order to make that happen you have to haul your fat body to the post office send a certified letter to the General Manager at the gym and he has to get it in three days and you have to look up the correct address because the zip code is WRONG on the contract. Clever. 

And if that isn’t pleasant enough, then you have to check your bank statement and see that they have not refunded your money and they even withdrew the first month’s fee. And so now you have to call a girl in the “accounting” office who handles all the “cancellations” and you have to hear that you are in the “stack” of cancellations for that particular location and the GM just has to be prodded sometimes. But it will eventually get sorted out and you will think back on all that time you wasted going to BCNCG in the first place and how you should have been forewarned of danger when you allowed New Girl to lure you back to the conference area where she sat at the only available seat at that table, making you walk across the area and grab and pull over your own seat. (My first exercise?)

And then you visit your old all-girl gym that has no cinema room or swimming pool and the only TVs are on the wall. And they tell you that it’ll cost a whopping $25 a month to rejoin and there is no “initiation fee.” If you want to pay the year up front, that’ll just be $150. Yes, that is correct - $150. They say you don’t have to sign up now, you can think about it. Heck, they say, come and give it a whirl for a visit or two. 

And you look around and realize you are home again. 

        

I, like most writers – and even non-writers – dream of one day penning a book of my own. This is a large sea of people, and not necessary a desirous bunch. Those who actually float to the surface and produce a book…well, those are the heroes. Maybe one day I will be one. For now, I am plagued by writing assignments that pay the bills. To be writing again, even if it isn’t some brilliant prose, is fabulous enough for me.

Like most other author wannabes, I am constantly building characters in the people I know or the people I meet. Or in even those I don’t meet but have the pleasure of knowing - unbeknownst to them - through things I overhear or happen to see.

And it was this – my nonexistent book characters – that I was dwelling on when I was having lunch with my darling 5- (or at this time, soon-to-be-5) year-old son at one of his favorite restaurants, Moe’s….affectionately known by my son as “Welcome to Moe’s." We had goofed off all day because what’s the point of trying to do anything educational with my son when his preschool is doing a far better job of it? And what better way to cap off a lazy day than with cheese dip and chips? It was later than we usually eat - 12:30 - and the crowd was larger and noisier. We managed to find a booth, where I ate my sensible Close Talker salad with no shell and my son had a cheese quesadilla and cheese dip and for once I successfully willed myself not to devour his chips and dip. He was telling me about  his dream – having his feet sucked by a giant jellyfish. This woke him up in the wee hours and had him holding his feet up for fear the jellyfish was still (still?) in his sheets. I suspect Spongebob is to blame for this nightmare. But he stops his chattering (he does this well and I can only think he got it from me) to, as my husband would say, make sweet love to the queso dip. That’s when I heard the first strange thing from the table behind me. 

“The last time I felt this way, the person was dead 24 hours later.” So I had to tune in because….well, I'm reading Scarpetta (when I have time) and I love a good Forensic Files. Anyway, this woman – let’s call her May - tells her lunch companion – she can be June – that she called her mother in a panic that morning because she had this “feeling.” That same feeling that resulting in the death of not one but two different people. She says first it was her soon-to-be mother-in-law. She was in the throws of a divorce and one morning the very minute she was driving past her MIL’s place of work, she thinks, “where would I sit at her funeral?” She said it was more than a slight wondering. Kind of a powerful, overwhelming thought that hung in her mind as she continued to drive to work. May says a couple hours later she gets a phone call at work from a friend saying that May's MIL was driving to her job and had a heart attack or something and veered off the road – I think May said into someone’s yard – and wrecked her car. She was dead. And by May’s calculations it happened about the very time May had driven past MIL’s place of work and had that crazy premonition.

Usually, my son talks my ear off, so I have to give full credit to Welcome to Moe's cheese dip for occupying my son. That, and whatever sports was showing on TV. Anyway, May continues to say that the second time this feeling struck her was one early morning. She jolted awake with tears streaking down her face and the most incredible feeling of sadness that she could not pinpoint. Just then - like in some freaky horror movie - the phone rings and it was a friend from her office informing her that a coworker had died that night before. 

After this story June tries to intervene. If I were a betting woman – and I am not much of one – I’d say that June was trying hard to end the conversation pretty quickly and find something a little less surreal to discuss. But May didn't get the hint. June says, “Wow. How about that. So, this was before your divorce? Do you still talk to him?” But May sort of slides past that comment back to the freaky death feeling stories and goes on to say that she had this “feeling” about her mother like last night or this morning. May says she called her mother that morning and her mother said she wasn’t feeling well, but… But. 

I never got a look at May or June’s face. A shame, because I'll probably never know if May's mum made it through the day.