Dinner, the final frontier.

On April 28, 2015April 28, 2015 By aftheadIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Life gets busy with two working parents. Deadlines call and school demands. Bedtime routine is followed by dueling laptops at the dining room table. Regardless of how chaotic things get, one thing never changes at our house. Mommy is in charge of dinner.

Don’t get me wrong, my husband is amazing around the house. He does his laundry. He does my daughter’s laundry. He does towels and sheets. He washes everything but my clothes, and sometimes he even takes those out of the drier and stacks them on chairs and couches in a semi-non-wrinkly way to keep the laundry train going. He does the dishes. He picks up. He does not do dinner. When 6:30 hits and I am not home he will never come up with the independent idea that food needs to be produced to nourish our bodies.

I attribute this to several things.

My husband does not have the genetic tie between hunger and anger that my daughter and I have. If he doesn’t eat there are no repercussions. He just gets skinnier. Oh darn. My daughter and I turn into grouchy demons without food. Somehow the presence of two grouchy demons doesn’t even trigger dinner ideas in my husband’s head.
I like to cook. I’m not a gourmet or even a scratch cooker, but I enjoy preparing meals. Most days I’m happy to perform the little ritual that puts food on the table, but some days I come home after working 5 hours on a Sunday and the lack of dinner smells waiting for me when I walk in makes me crazy.
We don’t pick up food. We cook. Somehow the idea that food can be prepared by others and brought home isn’t a viable option at the Afthead house. Occasionally if I am leaving the office after 7:00 or if volleyball season has started and we can eat at the park I will get sandwiches, but mostly we eat at home. This means we cook at home. This means mommy cooks.

It’s not that I mind our gender roles, but as I was driving home at 6:45 this evening I had a fleeting thought that maybe dinner would be waiting. It wasn’t. Some gender barriers just can’t be overcome. Like dinner. Oh and trash. I’m sure every Wednesday night when Mr. Afthead comes home from guitar lessons, or volleyball, or a night out he thinks that maybe the trash will be out by the curb. It’s not. The trashcans are always still sitting by the house. I don’t do trash.

Okay, two things never change at our house.

Baby Names

On April 10, 2015April 10, 2015 By aftheadIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

32 weeks along and the baby girl growing inside me had no name. I was searching everywhere for a sign for what we would call this new life. I went to the bathroom and while negotiating my huge body in the stall something in the toilet bowl caught my eye. It was a tiny slip of paper: pink with green letters. It said “Amanda.” My pregnant bladder couldn’t wait, so I pondered while sitting. “Amanda?” It wasn’t on any list we had.

Was this the name of our little girl? I wiped, dropped the tissue and flushed. Nope. I didn’t like “Amanda.”

What to do with 20 minutes

On April 8, 2015April 8, 2015 By aftheadIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Poof! The magic wish granting fairy has just descended down after showing little bunny fofo who is boss and has given me twenty minutes to do whatever I want. It’s an extra bonus 20 minutes outside of the normal space/time continuum and I can use it however I please. The task is daunting. I have so much I want to do with every spare minute.

Option 1a: Write. I always want to write. But I can only use the 20 minutes to write if it’s a quiet time in the house. I can’t write during work hours, because that would be unethical. I can’t write when my daughter is awake, because those hours with her are precious and few. Often I can’t write when she is asleep because other demands pull on me: work, feeding the cats, cleaning the house, laundry, or spending time with my husband. I have to give up all those “shoulds” to give myself twenty minutes of writing. Since we are outside of normal time demands, maybe this time I can write.

Option 1b: Write my book. Oh, but write on the blog or the book? The blog is fresh and new and fun and exciting. The book is another child that needs me and my blood and sweat, but I dream about him. I ponder where he is going and what he is up to when I’ve been away for too long. I’m afraid he’s forgotten me, or worse that I’ve forgotten him in the shiny new blog toy or in the mundane daily life. The story is racing toward the final conflict (if something can race at 4000 words a month) and I need to finish. I want to finish, but somehow I need pristine time for the novel. He can’t be interrupted by familial needs or distractions. He needs a closed door and time to immerse myself in his world. Is twenty minutes enough to give to that hungry offspring, or am I better off spending it with Afthead?

Option 2: Yoga. Oh, I like yoga. It stretches out my shoulders from my ears and releases my arms from their endless keyboard dance. I have found a new yoga website I like, YogaGlo, so I can yoga whenever I want. No more excuses about going somewhere. But I’d have to change my clothes and find a mat and the props and log into the site and oh no. Twenty minutes gone and I didn’t get to do yoga. I only got to prep for yoga.

Option 3: Run! I can run in 20 minutes. I can get dressed and out the door in five minutes tops. I can race up and down the hills of my neighborhood and watch the arrival of spring: beautiful flowers showered with cascading petals from blooming trees. Branches in the sky look fuzzily green with new buds. Running clears my mind and rejuvenates my spirit. Everyone in the family is happier when mom gets to run. Oh, but it’s dark and I’m home alone with my daughter. Running would be like child abuse. One does not leave one’s sleeping 6 year old for a 15 minute run.

Option 4: Knit. I can get a couple of rows done on my sweater that I was going to finish this winter. (Missed that goal.) I can go play with the pretty scarf I started at Mardi Gras. The rainbow colors are so fun and tempting. Maybe I should whip up something for the baby cousin that was just born. I could get a good start on a baby hat in 20 minutes. Oh, the scrap blanket with the stripes of leftover project yarn that makes me so happy as I run my fingers over it’s ridges. I could knit, but I won’t.

Option 5: Read. Reading often takes up my spare 20 minutes. I’m reading “Jennifer Government” which is a cute little book that I’m enjoying. It isn’t the awesome books I’ve read lately: “The Bees,” “The Husband’s Secret,” “The Scorpio Races,” “Big Little Lies,” “The Blue Journal,” and oh the list goes on and on. I am in a book reading streak right now that makes me so happy! There is so much amazing fiction out there and I’m finding it over and over. I should just finish up “Jennifer Government” and move on. I wonder what’s up with her barcode tattoo.

Did I use commas and quotation marks and colons the right way in that last paragraph? Crud. Punctuation is so hard. That and grammar are going to be the downfall of my writing career.

Oh yeah, writing. This was fun. I enjoyed my twenty minutes and covered a lot of things. It’s nice to have my list ready for when that fairy shows up. I wonder if she’ll be little like the tooth fairy, or big like Glinda from the Wizard of Oz. Wait, was Glinda a fairy or a witch? She had a wand, so I’m certain she could grant my wish,so I guess it doesn’t really matter. When the time comes though, I’ll just say, “Hold on a second fairy/witch” and I’ll pull up my blog, look at my list, and evaluate my options. I’ve already done Option 1, so next time I’ll have to move on to something else. Maybe yoga. Ommmmmmm.

My Happy Place

On April 7, 2015January 30, 2016 By aftheadIn stories6 Comments

The log house sits at the end of a long gravel driveway. After four hours of driving I welcome the colorful flags of Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, and Mardi Gras fluttering hello as we drive past. I park between the garage and the bunkhouse and open the car door to breathe in the humid fresh air.

The simple house blocks our view of the lake, as my daughter and I unpack the car, but the mosquitoes and horse flies nibbling our DEET free ankles remind us where we are. We rush in to hello kisses and hugs and then down the stairs to the walkout basement where our bunk bed waits in the middle of the family room. We open our suitcases and strip down to nothing and then shimmy into our stiff clean swimsuits. No matter what time we show up the first thing we must do is jump in the lake. Traditionally it is evening. The setting sun makes long back lit tree shadows stretch up the hill. Minnows dart around our feet and bald eagles soar overhead. Laughing we look for the three loons that inhabit the lake every year. Loons mate for life, so why are there three? Two wives and one husband? One wife and two husbands or something even more exotic? Three husbands?

Every year, and it has been five now, the passage of time is clarified. My two year old daughter with her sand filled diaper has grown to a long lean girl on the edge of bravery. Each year she stretches farther and risks more because at the lake parent worries are leeches and ticks between toes and not the unspecific fears of city life. Wonders await: berries are plump waiting to be picked; frogs are hiding in the twilight waiting to be grabbed; sunfish after sunfish fly out of the lake on shimmering lines waiting to be fried up for dinner by grandpa.

Some traditions are made, Easter brunches, Passover senders, Christmas Eve and Day all have their arbitrary flow. Other traditions just happen when the “if we are going to the lake this year” becomes a foregone conclusion of when. When will we pick berries? When will we picnic on the pontoon boat? When are the turtle races? When are we going to light the bonfire and have s’mores? The magic is new every year as the kids grow and the families change and the tradition morphs to a new fun. Every year we stay a little longer and every year we wish we had just one more day.