Monthly Archives: November 2005
Twenty three and a half hours.
23.5
23 ½
20 + 3 + .5 =1410 minutes
1410 minutes
84,600 seconds.
That’s how long I was in labor. And I remember most of it. And looking back it doesn’t seem as bad as it felt at the time, but I’m sure it was just as painful as my mind would like me to believe. After she came I remember thinking – wow that didn’t take so long, then I looked at the clock and came back to reality.
Looking back on the ten months of pregnancy (yes men folk, 40 weeks is ten months – drop the nine month crap – it pisses pregnant women off.) I remember think how easily I would die for this little girl. How I would move minds, and mountains, and anything necessary to make her world easier, brighter, clearer, give her anything.
I am remembering this because I read a blog of a fellow mom group, and they were all over the place – talking about Disney movies and how the mom always gets killed –that’s another post, and picking Christmas gifts and making kids appreciate thanksgiving and amidst all of these posts there was one that stopped my mouse, and made my heart stop. Kelly – See DotMom link to the right – was recounting how recently her son’s life was threatened at school, and the nonchalant was the school reacted to it. A young boy in front of teacher and a principle calmly stated how he hated her son and was going to kill him. Now in today’s age of Columbine, 9/11 and the moment London becomes New York, or San Francisco becomes an embassy and the color coded warnings don’t work, they want her to just brush it off with no assurance of what they are doing to make sure her son is safe?
‘Cuse?
These are the exact reasons why home schooling doesn’t seem so bad, I mean I’m not the smartest cookie in the bag but I only gotta be smarter than the stuff I’m teaching my kid right? So I think it’d be a safe bet that I could handle it, at least until ninth grade algebra. I could swing geometry but not calculus. But really I don’t want to send my daughter in to social oblivion, I don’t want to keep her beauty and radiance from the rest of the world. (yeah – that’s the ticket) I don’t want to screw it up and not have the school system, that we will choose to blame, not really… sorta, but no matter what I chose I am so afraid for my child. And I don’t know what to choose. School system will protect the kid threatening Kellys son but can’t make any guarantees to Kelly about her son’s safety – and what would I do? Pull Cammy from the school. Hire a body guard to hang low key around the school. Get a restraining order and make the school figure out how to teach the bad kid. What do you choose, and will it ever be my choice?
I pray daily that my child stay as happy as she was the last time I laid eyes on her, that her laugh stays easy and warm . That I can protect her from the bad things, the really bad things, and those that I can’t God handles for me. I pray that for all kids really, I wish it were different. Wish it were the dream we all dream of for our kids.
I don’t know what else I can say here and that makes me so sorry.
Kelly I am praying for your son and your family.
Poem;
Swords clash
Vibrate violently
in mommys hands
She was never a swordsmen
but she learned quickly
quick strokes
block and attack
push them away
and protect the dreams of her innocent
Steel never too heavy
not when I hold her
not when I hold her
The Holiday the Cook and the Spatula
Thanksgiving was a good day – Although I poured so much into it I am still drained. I cooked for two days straight – I helped my sister prepare her thanksgiving and then I prepared my own for my husband and his father. I feel like I served my soul up in Turkey dressing, macaroni and cheese and homemade cranberry sauce and gravy and garlic mashed new and baby red potatoes, and candies yams, roasted asparagus, and green bean casserole, a German chocolate cake and sweet potato pies and apple cobbler.
Did I ever mention I love to cook?
Love. Love. Love it.
Like I love my family, I love to create with food, and share and give of myself, and pour my heart and everything into what I am preparing. Thanksgiving is the ultimate attempt of people all over the country to express how they feel about their families and friends. However I approach cooking like I do everything in life. So I got to use the best to offer my best. So I spent WAY too much on the right veggies and ingredients and the right gadget to get the consistency just right, get my browning just right, make my sauce just right.
After the holiday people asked me on several different occasions when was I gonna open my restaurant. Well, as soon as I find $500,000 attached to a investor willing to believe in my vision. Cause I got one. Cooking for a living was one of my dreams, just like being a full time photographer, painting, writing, teaching for a living. They all hold special, special places in my heart. They live stored in the film around my heart holding it together but none rushes my blood like cooking.
Spoken says it will not work and we’ll stop being friends. I’m saying she’s too pessimistic. Shes’s saying … “all I’m saying is you need a business plan, and a floor plan that not only Feng Shui and bring in good energy and is located in a cool area, and a menu, and taxes, and …..blah blah blah”
I said but we can do it!!! Anyway back to my rant.
I honestly believe you can talk and communicate with the energy you put into an activity. As A woman I believe I have made men stay with me when they would have left by simply making something for them. I know at least one man came to me after tasting from my kitchen, and I knew it was time to leave another when nothing I cooked for him came out right.
But in that I believe food is powerful, its not as empowering for me as it is draining. I felt like I poured my whole life into thanksgiving and it took me DAYS to be able to say I had gotten most of my energy back. If I open a restaurant I wonder if it will kill me?
Reading Writing and other fundamentals
I have started reading a lot lately, I wan to write but I don’t have the strength to lift a pen if feels like lately, so I am hoping I’ll read something that will make me want to write. 13 – her blog has made me look for a pen only to lose the moment when I could not find what I needed. I need to get organized. I need to get it together. I will. After I take a nap.
Moving, Dogs and other madness
If you have read J’s blog you know we are in the market for a new dog, we are also moving this month (December) and looking for a renter. A big part of me wants to stay in our current home and renovate it into ‘Our Home’. J thinks we should move and keep the renters income coming in. We can go back and forth about it all the time. But we have decided to go ahead and move it benefits us as well as my granny, and gives us some yard, and gives my cousin, I hope, the chance to live and come into his manhood. (I’m breaking my own cardinal rule about renting to relatives)
New dog- I want a Cane Corso. Apparently I can’t have one cause they cost like an arm and a leg. Got a spare Cane Corso laying around and wanna share? I’ll gladly take him.
Now I just told Spoken I was blogging this conversation she would like to note the views expressed in this blog make her not my friend anymore. Then she calls me a whore and she keeps going on about how she can’t believe I blogged the conversation. Yeah Dog!
Love ya spoken!!!
Truth of the matter is I get a lot of my blogging ideas from reading other blogs and having more to say about it than the comment section will allow. Today I was reading about a fellow bloggers money issues. She was left with a choice to have some cash or go see an opera and she chose the opera (she lives in New York) and roughly four or five days later at $7.32 in her checking account, she was feeling the pinch and took a change jar to a Coinstar to rummage up some grocery money. $32.31 later she was shopping like a college student – who like veggies.
I was struck by –first the ability to budget to $7.32 and not end up with over draft charges WAY up the wazoo, and two to get to 7.32 and be like – cool – let me grab my change jar and get my grocery on. Maybe it’s the single no kids aspect that makes that possible.
I remember my happiest single time. I was 22, I was dating, almost serial dating, and was fairly serious about this lawyer/councilor I was seeing. He helped me find a apartment in my current dwelling area of South City, I was working at the job I hate but I was using my check to perform poetry all over the country. I was traveling, a lot. I was fit, going to the gym four days a week, eating giant bowls of fruit for dinner. I’d eat a whole watermelon for dinner once a week a least all summer. Pasta three four days a week, a little pesto sauce some clams and a quarter pound of shrimp and I was happy. Hot wings and a small Imo’s pizza. Hamburger helper made with ground turkey and a can of peas. Two sushi rolls and a Fanta orange soda. I IBC and A kick ass turkey burger and sweet potato fries. It was easier to clean up after my self, I never miss placed things. Everything was simpler. I never budgeted beyond my monthly bills, and I was too happy with my life. Not happy-full like I am now, but happy-free. Does that make sense?
Now I am learning to merge two lives, two thought processes, two everything –except furniture thankfully – and it is times like this that I have to remember I am still a newlywed. I am quickly starting to see what changes when you get married. Because no matter what anybody says living together is different than being married.
Point in case.. Finances. J and I have big GIANT hiccups when it comes to finances. Most of them are things that happen beyond our control – but they tend to happen over and over again. So something in our control has to be able to change- right? But when you are married you gotta find those things together. Have to agree or be willing to let the other person take control or be willing to take the lead.
We don’t do that very well it seems.
So maybe I need to take control.
I don’t want to over do it, and anybody who knows me will tell you – when I take control, watch out. But neither of us is wanting to force the other into our world. But here we are married and in each others world, so for real. I find that I have been way more old fashioned than I expected from myself. I am not the future forward woman I thought I was. At least in marriage. Might as well find myself a ankle long skirt and avert my eyes when spoken to. I think I expected J to take a more forward approach to our life. Why? I DON’T KNOW! (read all kinds of sarcasm into that) That surely wasn’t the example I took for Cliff and Claire Huxtable let alone from my parents marriage. If I knew why I thought that maybe we could work on all kinds of racism and sexisms and any other ism you can think of.
But I think I have decided that What I have to do to improve our situation is regress a lil bit back to free-happy Raquita. When I’m happy everybody in my house does better and I do better. Full-happy is so necessary on a soul level but I think free-happy is part of the equation too. I don’t think, anymore, that it has to be an either/or situation. I was so active before in the things that made me happy, and now I think I’ve tried to hard to be so inclusive that I’ve lost too much. He was happy with me then- probably more so – since I was so much more alive. So this is my decree. I need to find a more well rounded happy than I have settled into. Now once I figure out how – I’ll let you know – but I think I’ll start with some well earned shoe shopping. And a fun time with my family. And I think we’ll have fruit for dinner.
P.s The blog is gonna undergo some new changes in the near future… be on the look out.
maturity:
To be able to stick with a job until it’s finished;
to do one’s duty without being supervised;
to be able to carry money without spending it;
and to be able to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.
Well – are you mature?