Motherhood
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Stuck in the Middle
I’m having middle age, midsection issues. My resting belly has pretty much had the same shape as it did with both pregnancies – I looked like I was shoplifting a watermelon, despite years of working out, and in particular, the previous almost three years of Pure Barre and endless planks and crunches and sit-ups, which I’d finally mastered just before the pandemic shut everything down. However. When you cough or do a sit-up, should you look down and think “What in the HELL is that?” or “Is your stomach supposed to do that?” – the safe answer is “NO”. I’d noticed that occasionally when I coughed, or moved a certain…
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On Accomplishments, Goals, and Donuts
On the internet, the question has been (repeatedly) raised: “There’s only ONE MONTH left in the decade. What are your accomplishments? “ This question has been weighing on my mind, and perhaps if it had been worded differently, as in “what have you done” versus “what are your accomplishments”, it wouldn’t niggle at me so (and yes, I’m that nitpicky.) If I had been asked “what have you DONE” I could say I lived in the UK, I traveled throughout Europe, I moved to Texas, I went to the American Music Awards (thank you, Kohl’s), I wrote a lot of blog posts, was published in an anthology and on Mamalode,…
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Exploring ORIGINS at the Perot Museum
Sitting in the Hoglund Foundation Theater at the Perot Museum yesterday, I listened as Professor Lee Berger explained that the discovery of Australopithceus sediba began with his then 9-year old’s comment: “Dad, I found a fossil.” That moment would eventually lead to this moment at Perot Museum of Nature and Science. They, in partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) and the National Geographic Society, have brought the 1.97 million year old specimen to Dallas for a Origins: Fossils from the Cradle of Humankind. Speaking a museum membership holder, I can’t wait to bring my family back to explore this exhibition! Origins: Fossils from the Cradle of Humankind The exhibition, which…
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Ten Things That Make Me Stupidly Happy
Kat Bouska has a prompt on her blog that asks for ten things that make you happy. It was a really appealing idea as there’s so much going on in the world right now that make me angry and sad. Note: I try not speak of those things because if you need to hear about them, that’s what Twitter is for these days. I gave it the briefest amount of thought and decided I was going to make a list – a mostly shallow list – of ten things that make me stupidly happy. These aren’t momentous things, but little things that brighten my day. This is by no means…
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Messages from the Universe (and Other WooWoo Things)
I’ve been in a funk recently. I don’t need to go into details, but some might call it midlife existential angst. Last week was particularly difficult; I was feeling mighty sorry for myself and struggling with feelings of low self-worth. It was pitiful and I wallowed in self-criticism. I wasn’t making the progress I wanted on my book, behind on book reviews, struggling with motivation to get to the gym, disorganized as all get out, and feeling pretty much like a failure. What DID I have to show at the end of the day? A mostly clean house, a fairly well-exercised dog, and laundry. Huge piles of clean, yet-to-be-folded laundry.…
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No Pressure, No Diamond; No Risk, No Reward
I have a drink koozie* that says: No grit, no pearl. No pressure, no diamond. In other words, no risk, no reward. I will readily confess to not being much of a risk taker (if left to my own devices). While moving to Wales DID take me out of my comfort zone – well, let’s face it, it’s an English speaking country so aside from learning to drive on the other side of the road, it was probably no more challenging than my move to Texas, where I drive on the traditional side of the road, only much, much more defensively. Fact is, though, that we learn through our mistakes,…
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Finding My Place
Today’s post was inspired by this week’s prompt from Five Minute Friday , which is intended to be a free write. (More specifically, no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.) For five minutes flat. Unedited. (DISCLOSURE: Since I’m not so good with rules and worse with typos, this was TOTALLY edited for grammar, spelling and punctuation after that five minutes was up.) The writing prompt for today is PLACE. As an awkward teen who generally stood on the fringes of the groups I hung out with – with the exception of a few really close friends – it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I matured into an…
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It’s Media Deprivation Week. (Stop Laughing.)
I’m in a group that is working through Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It’s a book on discovering – or recovering – your creative side, and in theory should be helpful with overcoming a creative block. This is, however, my fourth time at taking on this book, the second with this group. I’m already behind on my weekly tasks, and as we enter Week Four, I’m foreseeing a possible fifth attempt. I don’t know if that is optimistic because I know I’ll give it a go again, or fatalistic because I’m assuming I won’t get through this one, either. Now, depending on which edition of the book you have,…
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She built a world from tissue boxes.
My daughter always has been a bit of a collector, so exploring the recesses of storage bins, closets, and drawers usually comes with an element of surprise. You never know if you will turn up a tin full of tiny brown acorns, a zippered pouch full of colorful plastic butterflies, long forgotten, or a handful of long dried-out markers tumbled in with an assortment of empty mechanical pencils. Tidying was usually an entertaining enterprise, should you be in the right mindset. I was cleaning the play room earlier this week, and tucked into the space between my daughter’s craft desk and the wall was a pile of square tissue boxes,…
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Better
This morning I did not put my ass in the chair to write my morning pages, and I did not make it to barre class under the dubious excuse that I needed to write. Which I did not, in the end, accomplish, because I was caught up in endless small tasks around the house. (Read: got sucked into Twitter, Facebook, and endless small tasks.) Whenever a day goes astray from the plans I had made, I sit down at the end of the day and reread my notes on my goals for the year, and my page in my journal that talks about my “one word”, which is “re-engage“. And…
