Sponsored Schtuff
More Cooking Schtuff
RSS Schtuff
The Recipes
Main dishes. Side dishes. Desserts.
Over 155 recipes for you to peruse - and more coming all the time!
The Photographs
Pictures, pictures and more pictures.
Join me in my journey with a Nikon D90 (and a very tolerant family).
The Rest
Spin Cycle. RTT. Family.
Click here for a sampling of everything else. A little of this, a little of that...
Archive for the ‘Mom’ Category
I grew up in a very matriarchal household. My mother was, shall we say, of a very strong character. She was blunt and loud and had very little filter between the brain and the mouth. Very much a child of the 60s (Mom was barely 17 when I arrived in December of 1962) she was uninhibited in many ways, but she also had some oddly conservative views when it came to my behavior (although she’d done a complete 180 by the time my youngest sister, ten years my junior, became a teenager). She could cuss like a sailor when she was angry, but I was not allowed to and the word “Fuck” was absolutely verboten, even in her vocabulary. She was honest and forthright when asked about sex, but when she found out that I was sleeping with my boyfriend at the age of 18, she was not at ALL pleased. She had to work, and work hard, all of her life but I spent my teenage years listening to a litany of “find a good man to take care of you.”
(One of my biggest regrets in life is that my mother never met Beloved…I don’t know if they’d have adored each other or spent all of their time trying to bitch-slap each other into next week. Either way, it would have been extremely amusing to watch.)
It wasn’t until recently that I realized that my love of all things Anne Taintor is because her stuff reminds me of Mom. As far as she was concerned, you could – and should – think what you want, but you better be goddamn careful how you express those thoughts and even more careful about the appearance you presented the world (sometimes I wonder why Mom and The Ex didn’t get along better). Not that she was the kind of woman that wouldn’t leave the house without makeup or perfect hair – she wasn’t sloppy or slovenly, but pearls and heels definitely weren’t her thing – for Mom, appearances were all about the kind of person you were and the kind of life you led.
Or, considering she the fact that she liked nothing better than toking up in the evenings after work (in the bedroom, so we wouldn’t know what she was doing – yeah, right), it was all about the appearance we presented to society.
It’s really no secret where the idea that appearances mattered came from. My mother grew up in a very matriarchal household, too. My grandmother was the epitome of the Genteel Proper Southern Lady, but my grandfather personified the Strong, Silent Man Who Left the Child Rearing to His Wife. And although my mother had been Rebellious Growing Up, she absorbed a great many of my grandmother’s values which, like so many of her generation, centered around “What would the neighbors think?”
Oh, how things have changed.
Every week, my immediate family has two questions for me: Are you doing a Random Tuesday Thoughts post and What’s the Spin Cycle about? This week, I’ve been laid up with a fairly nasty bug (as of this writing, Wednesday evening, I’m feeling a little better, but still pretty crappy), that has pretty much hindered the progress of this post. Because trust me, I begin thinking about it the minute Jen hands out the next week’s assignment every Friday morning. This week when The Young One asked me what the subject of the Spin Cycle was and I told him “Appearances” he naturally asked (he is, after all, a teenager), “You mean how you look?”
“Sure,” I said. “In fact, some of the bloggers who are participating have written excellent posts along those lines. But I think mine is going to be more about how the world perceives us.”
He looked a bit confused, so I said, “When my mother was growing up, and even more so when my grandmother was growing up, it was very common for people to worry about what other people thought of them. If something bad happened to them or their families, they often didn’t talk about it – sometimes they went to great lengths to hide it.”
I regarded the incredulous look on his 15-year-old face, and considered the fact that he is living in the age of Jerry Springer and YouTube and 24-hour news channels that seem obsessed with what is going on in the lives of Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock and apologies being issued by the Vatican. In a world according to Nancy Grace, nothing is private.
Some very ugly and traumatic things have happened to me and those close to me in the 47 years I’ve been on this earth, and I don’t for a minute excuse the way some members of my family have glossed over and out-and-out ignored those ugly and traumatic things, but I also strenuously object to how every detail of our lives has the potential to become public property. Does it all have to be on the evening news and/or splashed all over the internet? Aren’t we allowed to say “Yes, we’re human with all the faults and foibles that humans possess, but we should be allowed to work this out in private, with some sort of dignity?”
What do YOU think?
I don’t often do two posts in one day, but today is my mother’s birthday; she would have been 64.
Happy birthday, Mom. We sure do miss you.
If you want to know the story behind this video clip, click here.
WickedStepMom from Life and Times of a Wicked Step Mom has a little project going on over at her site called Beautiful Like Me. According to WickedStepMom:
“The driving force behind this project is to raise awareness about the lack of self-esteem and poor body image in today’s youth. I want to change the way that we look at ourselves and the way that the young women and men look at themselves.”
A worthy pursuit.
Tricia over at Shout is helping co-host this project, along with Amy of Five Flower Mom. This week’s subject is “In your opinion, what is the best way to build self-esteem?” and Tricia has asked me to give it a go and write something about the subject.
I don’t know how well I can tell you how to help your child build self-esteem, but I can certainly tell you what to avoid doing.
I had absolutely crappy self-esteem growing up. I was smart and I knew that, but I was also a plump child. Not fat, by any mean, just a little chubby. I was chubby because my mother had atrocious eating habits, which she passed on to her children, and I was discouraged from too much physical activity – I’d been diagnosed with a heart murmur at the age of two and the well-meaning but misguided doctor told my mother to keep me “as quiet as possible.” So running, swimming, roller-skating and bicycling, all things I loved to do as a kid, were strictly curtailed and I was encouraged to read (I could read by the time I was three), draw, paint and do various crafts; it helped that my mother was of an artistic bent and I am possessed of a vivid imagination.
By the time I was a teenager it was apparent that I was not going to drop dead any time soon of heart-related problems – the murmur, which I still have, is what doctors term an “innocent” murmur – and while I still enjoyed swimming, roller-skating and biking, I enjoyed my sedentary pursuits even more; not surprising, since those were the ones that had been encouraged. The problem was, by the time I was a teenager, although I was healthy as a horse, I was a good 30 pounds overweight, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that I am fine-boned, big busted and short-waisted – every extra ounce has always been all too obvious on my slight frame.
An even larger problem was my mother. Mom had been overweight most of her life and was a yo-yo dieter to boot – whatever new fad diet was out, Mom would go on it, lose a lot of weight, and gain it all right back…plus more. And she nagged me about my weight – I saw my very first diet doctor when I was 12 years old, and was put on diuretics. By the time I was 18, she had nagged me to go on every quack diet there was, but by this time I was doing most of the cooking in the house and, well, eating cabbage and grapefruit three times a day kind of paled in comparison to a pan of homemade brownies or a plate of chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. Not much deterred Mom, though – I imagine I was the only kid in high school that had taken speed supplied by her mother.
My teen years were a litany of “You’ll never catch a good man if you don’t lose weight” “Don’t wear horizontal stripes (or all white, or A-line dresses) they make you look fat” “Don’t eat that…or that…or that.” All while NEVER being encouraged to exercise or truly eat properly. She also ignored my good physical qualities – my thick, gorgeous hair, my very pretty face, my tiny hands and feet, my fine, unblemished complexion, my curvy figure. And while she was proud of my intelligence and talents, she never encouraged them the way she drove me to be thin. It was as if she felt that being thin were the end-all and be-all of a woman’s exitence, and that all the answers to all of the problems of her life, to say nothing of mine, could be found on a number on scale – preferably reading under 120.
Like most people, by the time I had kids I was determined not to make the same mistakes my mother had made. I won’t claim to have been a perfect mother by any means, but I swore that my kids were never going to feel judged by their physical qualities. Oh, I fuss at them a little about how they eat, especially Oldest Son, but it’s about eating healthy, and I really try not to nag them. Mostly, I encourage them to make the most of who they are, not how they look – I’ve vowed that none of them will ever, ever hear me say “You’ll be happier if you just change the way you look.”
And they never will.
That Mom was really on the Letterman Show.
Turn up the sound and listen to the woman laugh.
Many, many thanks to Letterman fan and YouTube member jerklyfish for the video.
200 posts. Wow. Is there a protocol for your 200th post? (I’ll spare you 200 facts about me, since I can’t count and you’d end up with 327.)
Anyhoo, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is the fact that, as of today, I have not had a cigarette in a year.
Yay, me.
I have to be honest – I wanted to quit. I was ready to quit. I didn’t enjoy it any longer, and I was tired of the expense and the smell and the mess. I was tired of feeling controlled by it. I was tired of being a social pariah of sorts.
I was tired of being a smoker.
I was also tired of being afraid. You see, my mother was a life-long smoker and it was a contributing cause to her death at 51. Once I hit my 40s, I began to get more and more nervous about my fate as a smoker. Once 45 was staring me in the face, I guess I finally realized that I could no longer say “I’ll quit later, when I’m older” because “later” and “older” were here. Mom was never able to quit, even after her surgery and I was damned if I was going to let that nasty, dangerous habit rule me for the rest of my life – it already had for long enough.
So, when we got up on the morning of December 23 last year and boarded our plane for Hawaii, I just stopped. We were in airplanes or airports for 16 hours and I figured if I could go that long without a cigarette, I could go forever. It was surprisingly easy, and by the time we got home 12 days later I realized that yes, I was done.
I won’t lie – there are times when I still crave one, but I just wait for a few seconds and the desire passes (it’s usually when I have a glass of wine beside me and Beloved lights up). Most of the time, though, they just smell awful and having Beloved still smoking is a major nuisance, because when he’s not smoking around me I don’t think about it at all. I try not to nag him, though, because when it’s time for him to quit, he will, and there isn’t anything I can do to change that time table.
I also won’t lie and tell you I haven’t gained any weight, because I have. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact, but I’ll take that as an acceptable compromise, because I know for a fact I can lose it – I have before.
Perhaps that will be my “I did this for my health” anniversary post for next year.