The Life You Live

My great-grandmother Octavia had a difficult childhood that probably ended the day her father killed himself in front of his wife and children. The event was chronicled in the Green Bay newspaper because it took place on a public street as his former wife planted fence posts at the edge of their property.  Octavia would marry a decent man who took her on a train trip to Chicago, provided generously, and shared decades of marriage. They lost their youngest daughter, who died after giving birth to my father, then helped raise him.

My father’s life had plenty of ups and downs which meant he grew up in the homes of his grandparents and a few uncles as well as his father. As he waited to die, my father said he was most looking forward to meeting his mother on the other side.

As today’s wars rip apart families and their homes, thousands of children find themselves without the support of biological adult relatives. Many of the displaced children of Ukraine and Gaza haven’t lived this life in their past. But this is the life they now know.

Some of us had wonderful families with great parents. Some of us grew up carefully avoiding an angry parent, a parent with mental health challenges, maybe in families always on the brink of some sort of disaster. Regardless the life we lived, we are now role models and sentinels for the future of today’s children. 

Decades ago, my husband and I cherished the good wishes and Mother’s Day cards that were shared during the early stages of a first pregnancy. The next year we stumbled through Mother’s Day following a premature still birth of twins. The following year we had a five-month-old. We know folks who were not able to become parents, folks who chose to not become parents, babies who were amazing surprises and a few not exactly celebrated surprises. Regardless of how early years play out, all kids grow into adults. Their 

As we celebrate the 2024 parenting holidays, the challenge is to embrace our adult responsibility of helping children and young adults walk confidently toward their futures. A helpful hand, a few kind words, the demonstration of how bumpy steps can be traveled, should be extended by anyone regardless of physical parenting status. For those who have a mother, hopefully the years were good and you’re paying it forward. May your children celebrate the family you’ve created. May others remember your support so the lives they live are more smooth than bumpy.

Home and Away

College recruiting, corporate management and consulting carried me across much of the United States. Although some of that travel prompted future visits, a suitcase in one hand, briefcase in the other wasn’t the most satisfying way to explore cities and countryside. There are cities I enjoy, mountains worth the travel, lovely ocean sides. Driving across the plains or open lands remind me how different our life experiences are from fellow citizens.

The Midwest continues to be where I am comfortable living my life. Green spaces, cities, the Great Lakes, agriculture, forests blend well. We considered moving during our careers, imagining our lives in desert lands or other river cities, even one Canadian possibility. Except for Canada, I don’t regret passing up those changes.

Something moved me in the childhood lands of Pat Conroy and Flannery O’Connor. The charm of old Savannah and the Lowcountry areas of Georgia and South Carolina felt homey. I wanted to stay for a year, maybe two, and learn about the rhythm of that region’s residents. To walk where azaleas and trees blossomed in March, to witness the loggerhead turtle’s journey, to try Sunday church once more, to celebrate holidays differently.  Biscuits tasted better, seafood fresher, crayfish better than a slab of whitefish. 

Weeks in Maine challenged my Midwest assumptions that farms were farms, days on the shore universal, that New England was an area of wealth and education. Spending weeks in a London flat introduced reality to daydreams of living in a congested metropolitan area. Nearly two weeks in a small Irish community felt nice, but I wanted to go home. This stretch of the south felt like it could be home as if the slower movement of my mature life would be acceptable in a place that has nurtured so many artistic folks.

When the roof needs repair, spring returns to stormy winter, property taxes increase, daydreams happen about a mythical life in a charming setting where all seems lovely. But roofs deteriorate there, summer temps and humidity can be high, history and today’s politics lean away from my values. Best to keep Savannah on my writing retreat list and my home in the Midwest. I’ll be back with a notebook, laptop, and good walking shoes during azalea season.

Fate of the Crumbled Cookie

Tip of the hat to the Girl Scouts gathered outside stores with boxes of their annual cookies. This blog is not written for them.

Peanut butter cookies float my boat. For those with peanut sensitives, please substitute your favorite cookie variety. At the local Piggly Wiggly the store-baked cookies are delightful and at their peak for at least five or six days. Soft and buttery, one cookie has to be enough for anyone over the age of daily recess playtime. 

I carried the last four cookies home near the end of their prime to surprise my husband. Unfortunately, they rested under bananas in the carrying tote. That’s the way the cookies crumbled. Four round sweets became pieces of many sizes in a sealed bag. The 1950s phrase, jokingly exchanged with my husband, stuck in my mind. 

On Reality Wednesday, the day after Super Tuesday, I responded “this is the way the cookie crumbles” to a friend’s deep unhappiness about voters’ behavior. He asked if I had learned that phrase from my grandmother then suggested I use the appropriate contemporary phrase: shit happens. Which describes what many people hope to avoid during the 2024 election cycle.

Our discussion made me wonder about how U.S. English slang language transitioned from cookies crumbling to shit happens when describing something bad has happened and a person must accept the way things are.  The 1950s were considered a happy time in the U.S. with the boys (and girls) returning home from war, building houses, starting families and enjoying the life that World War II sought to protect. Cookie references seem to reflect that seventy years ago kind of contented outlook.

And today’s phrase also seems to reflect the current emotion of our nation.  Fearful, divided, violent, embracing the crudeness of life, watching events too large to be absorbed that must be accepted because people did die or had their lives negatively impacted. We’re not looking forward to a golden era, just trying to adjust to what now exists, and hoping for at least a plateau in our world’s disruption. For some the best times are past. For others the best times were never experienced. 

These are broad painted observations. Media no longer allows people to remain ignorant of what is broken or underdeveloped in our country or how the physical environment of our world demands attention.  

I ate some of the cookie pieces and one of the offending bananas. Mustn’t waste. Time to return to the heavy lifting of doing something to keep more shit from happening.  

Love of a Woman

Did you notice many people wearing red February 2 to call attention to the American Heart Association®️ Go Red for Women®️ campaign?  Has anyone mentioned to their doctors the Yale’s Women’s Health Research study on women’s lower outcomes compared to men after coronary artery bypass surgery? Keep in mind that heart disease is the #1 killer of American women and 44% live with some form of it.

February is National Heart Health month. While political theater would keep female eyes focusing on reproductive health as women’s major issue, most of the true state of women’s health is unknown. Not only is there inequality in how the medical community treats women, but less than 11% of the National Institute of Health’s 2020 budget went towards female illnesses or conditions. Staying with heart health challenge, only 29% of cardiac artery bypass surgery is done on women, with a statistically lower success. Heart disease presents different in women and is often ignored. Select surgeons recommend that more female cardiac surgeons need to be trained to care for female patients with additional research and training on female heart disease treatment. 

Not need to worry unless you are a woman or love a woman. That includes daughters, sisters, mothers, partners, special friends. 

The World Health Organization found that although women in the European Union live longer than men, they spend more of their lives in poor health. Prevention is not as high a consideration in women’s health as intervention–waiting until illness has hit, a pregnancy is in trouble, a young mother cannot take care of her family. Research money in pain management is directed toward men—80% of budget while about 70% of women manage long-term pain. 

Women are responsible for 85% of the decisions about their families’ healthcare. Marketers know a lot about women as buyers and users of healthcare. Sophisticated research can be done today by manipulating data. So why doesn’t the healthcare world know more about the differences between men and women’s bodies?

For love of all women, healthcare research and care delivery need to immediately update thinking that treats a five-foot four-inch female standing next to a six-foot male as merely a smaller body. Someone you love might depend on more specific knowledge and care.

Happy Clean It All Up Season

Plastic pumpkins should have been stored in the Halloween bin. A pilgrim waits to be moved with the other handful of Thanksgiving decorations. We’ll need at least a half day to put all the Christmas pretties in the basement. The outdoor lights are red and white, so they will wear well until Valentines Day.

Even after reducing decorative stuff by many storage containers, there is so much stored.  It’s hard to trash or give away generations of ornaments, candles gifted by folks now passed, a goofy collection of singing stuffed animals. No family member wants to add these to their holiday decorations, but no one is really okay with giving much away.

New Year’s Day I typically want to write, watch football, chill, but also find my hands impatient to empty the family room of gnomes and the singing animals. The dining room table could be stripped of a tablecloth and brought back to its normal size. I am done with the beloved clutter. Toss the poinsettias. Store the candles. Put away the stockings and hangers. 

Storage bins, filing cabinets, pretty cloth baskets fill ads staging cleaning as invigorating, fun, a natural activity to fill dark winter weeks. With healthy athletic drinks and granola bars also advertised, there is some implication that marketing genius know of a heart-friendly link between snacks and organizing. The whole clean up season is filled with many opportunities to tweak a back moving boxes, many tiny paper cuts or tree hanging hook snags, eye fatigue correcting holiday card lists. 

Forbes, the Cleveland Clinic, Simple and others cite the link between a healthy mind and a clean house. You must look hard to find anything suggesting a tidy house is sign of inferiority. House tidiness or messiness are both probably in one of those twenty-seven signs of dementia or fourteen indicators that you are wearing the wrong size shoes. 

Let those who find new bins and organizing systems satisfying spend what’s left of the holiday dollars. If the tree is put away before friends come over for football’s great Sunday extravaganza and the boxes are near the storage area by Valentine’s Day, consider yourself owner of a moral victory. 

Warning: The Easter Bunny will not leave eggs in red or green felt holiday socks left hanging anywhere in the house. Even those with pastel plastic grass sticking out the top. Do not insult the little creature.