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let me bake you a cake.

Imagine the dinner guest of your dreams is coming to your house, and you want to make a perfect meal for them.  What is an amazing meal without a delicious dessert, full of peanut butter and chocolate and sprinkles?  In my opinion, dessert is the cherry on top of a great meal (pun intended).  You’d work for hours to make sure that dessert was worthy of being presented to the guest of honor.  Not only would it be pleasing to the eye — like a photo right out of a book — but it would be all gooey deliciousness inside, too.  Your guests would oooh and ahhh over the pure delight they took in partaking of such an amazing treat.  They would surely be very impressed with all the time you took in creating such a treasure, with all the hard work and love you poured into making it just right.

…but what if the dessert more closely resembled the Jello mold that Aunt Bethany brings to the Griswold’s house for Christmas, complete with cat food as a crunchy topper?  What if all you had to serve your guests was last year’s fruitcake?

How would that change their opinion of you?

More importantly, how would that change your opinion of yourself?  If your cake wasn’t picture perfect, would you beat yourself up? I mean, how could you be so inept to present such an esteemed guest with store-bought cookies from Aldi, for heaven’s sake?

There are many ways in which life delivers us desserts.  Not all of them are picture-perfect, either.

For example, if marriage was a cake, mine would be like the one in “Great Expectations,” full of maggots and crumbling apart.  The layers would not be icing and fondant; instead, they would be regret and tears and guilt.

Three years ago, I got divorced.  There were a lot of factors that contributed to the demise of my 11-year marriage, but the end result was the same.  And although both of us added, both knowingly and unknowingly, to the the pile of straws that broke the camel’s back, it was me who finally sent the camel to pasture.  I ended my marriage.  Me.  This is a fact that I have always owned up to.   This is the first layer of my cake.  This is the layer of failure.

The divorce wasn’t messy, per se.  I stayed in my house with the children, the same house they had always lived in.  I found someone new to love, and so did my ex-husband.  He’s been remarried two years now.  He always loved the idea of marriage.  He loved being a husband.  He once told me that the hardest part of us separating was the fact that he lost his friend, too, and not just his wife.  Add a layer of guilt to the cake.

My children were younger when it happened — five and three — and while my oldest has lots of memories of us as an intact family unit, my youngest do not.  The life that they now have is really the only one they remember.  They don’t remember Christmases with Mom and Dad together, or family vacations, except in photographs.  This is the layer of sadness.

I have been in a relationship with my current partner for nearly four years, but that relationship has not been without struggles of its own.  It was two people coming from failed marriages, each bringing truckloads of baggage, both literally and figuratively; two people who had to learn how to navigate the nuances of a new relationship with six children underfoot; two people who may have been labeled adults according to their birth dates, but were newborns in the life of single parenthood. This layer would be the one of uncertainty.

I always wonder what life would be like if only I had tried harder…if my ex-husband had agreed to go to counseling when I begged him to…if I myself had agreed to counseling at the end when I told him it was too late…if we had planned more date nights…if he didn’t change jobs so much…if I didn’t think the grass was greener…if only he had helped out more around the house.  These feelings add the layer of regret to my cake.

I stand back and look at what my life — my cake — has become.  It started out white and perfect, just like a wedding cake from a bridal magazine.  It was beautiful and full of hope.  It was something I could be proud of.  It was a dessert worthy of the most honored dinner guests.

The cake I have now would impress no one.  If I served this decimated cake to my guests, they would shake their heads and laugh and whisper to each other, “Look at that horrendous creation!”  It is nothing to be proud of.

Wrong.

The first cake, the picture-perfect cake, had not been touched.  It was brand-new and shiny, exactly the way it came from the bakery.   It hadn’t experienced life or love or heartache.  In a word, it wasn’t REAL.

Friends, don’t allow the picture you have in your mind of what is “perfect” or “expected” to permeate your heart and distort what you know to be true.  My second cake, the cake that is now my own life, is far from perfect.  It was built with layers of learning and failures and attempts and tears, but it’s MINE.  It’s my very own, very real cake.  And it’s missing a very vital part to any fancy cake…you see, this cake is unfinished.  There is no icing or swan-shaped sculpture on top.  The layers have all been put together, but the cake is not complete.  There is still more work to do to build my cake….and I’m proud of that…and you should be, too.

So come on in, y’all, and pull up a seat at my dinner table.  Tell me your stories.  Let’s share some dessert.

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Tradishin’s

I have nowhere to go for Thanksgiving this year.

My mother will work, my brother will go with his wife to her family’s house, and my grandmother has Parkinson’s disease and is wheelchair-bound.  So it’s just me and my three children, and I refuse to make a turkey, dressing, and all the trimmings for my kids to eat one roll with butter and then ask for a Lunchable (true story).

Now, I could wallow in my sadness and be depressed.  I could gravy-train my way onto someone else’s Thanksgiving festivities.  I could accept the invitation from one of my closest friends to come celebrate with her and her family.  All of these choices got me thinking…why do we pigeonhole ourselves to follow a proscribed tradition, when none of the parts of that tradition fit our lifestyle and who we truly are?  On Thanksgiving, isn’t the whole point of the holiday to celebrate what we are thankful for?

When I was growing up, I was not allowed to touch the Christmas tree.  My mother spent an entire day decorating that sucker, making sure the ornaments were lined up correctly.  She used ornaments that were family heirlooms from the 1940’s and mixed them up with just the right amount of garland and beads and tinsel.  It all conglomerated together into one beautifully balanced untouchable tree, right out of “Better Homes and Gardens” magazine.  In our house, the Christmas tree was for looking, not for touching.   I vowed then and there that if I ever had children of my own, I wasn’t going to impose those rules on them.  (To be fair, I also swore I’d never, ever make my children go to a school where they had to wear “hot” uniforms like my mother did to me…guess we can’t win them all!)  My tree isn’t like my mother’s.  At all.  The ornaments are a combination of Dollar Tree, Walmart, and homemade macaroni necklaces and paper chains covered in glitter and stickers.  My children touch the tree…a lot.  Sometimes the ornaments are clumped together at the perfect height for a six-year old to hang them.  When my children were babies, the “pretty” ornaments were up too high to reach, whereas the bottom of the tree was decorated with teething rings and bath toys that didn’t break or shatter.

This Thanksgiving, while all of you are crowded into a hot house and attempting to fill a paper plate with stuffing, green bean casserole, and gravy while balancing a too-small paper cup full of red punch, all the time keeping your fingers crossed that the plate doesn’t buckle and you wear the gravy on your sweater, I will be choosing a different tradition. Out will come the totes full of ornaments and beads; down from the garage loft the tree will descend and get fake pine needles all over the floor.  My children will root and dig through the bins, most likely spilling the ornament hooks on the rug in a tangled pile (also a true story), or shattering the glass bulbs when attempting to hang them (again true).  They will argue over who gets to place the star on the tree this year.  I will keep my fingers crossed that the lights survived a year in the attic and the ENTIRE tree will light up and not just the top half.

We will dress up in Christmas pajamas instead of party clothes. We will go to a movie theater instead of the home of a relative we see only once a year.  We will eat overpriced popcorn and Raisinets instead of turkey and pumpkin pie.

My Christmas tree might not resemble the ones I grew up with, and my Thanksgiving might not be a replica of yours…but I am still thankful.  For my children, my dear friends, my career, the roof over my head…for my not-size-two body that still runs on the treadmill and takes care of a houseful of people, for being almost-40 and self-aware enough not to care what others think of my “holiday traditions.”

This Thanksgiving, whatever you do and however you choose to celebrate, remember to count your blessings.  And have some turkey and pie for me!

 

 

 

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Balls & Wieners.

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There is a scene in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry in which Adam Sandler’s character answers the phone, “Balls and Wieners,” personifying the theme in which he feels like he’s living.  I have been tempted to do the exact same thing from time to time, believe me.

Before I became a mother, I never really envisioned what type of parent I would be. I have been blessed to have some really amazing parents of my own, so I guess I just anticipated I’d figure it out along the way. Baby is hungry? Stick a boobie in his mouth. Baby is stinky? Change his pants. Baby is bored?  Let him throw all the canned goods down the stairs.  Rinse, repeat…and so it went, for many years.  I had gotten pretty good at mothering young children, if I do say so myself.  They were reasonably clean, fed, and entertained. Mission accomplished.

Now my oldest child, my son, Gavin, is nine and a half (that “and a half” means A LOT when you’re nine) and my twins — a set of fraternal boy/girl siblings — will be seven in February.

Let’s talk about the boys for a minute.  My sons are no longer soothed with the promise of a boobie in their mouth (although give it a few years and something tells me that the idea of seeing a real boobie naked will make their day) and they are no longer amused with trying to eat dry cat food crunchies out of the cat’s dish.

Someday, my sons will have wives or partners, and possibly children of their own.  It seems a long way off, but experience tells me it’s just around the corner.  I want their future spouses to be grateful for me raising my sons into honest, respectful men who treat them with dignity.

We have entered a new era at my house, one in which my children look a lot less like the babies they were and a lot more like the actual people they are becoming.  We have entered the “Please Watch Your Mouth” days, also known as “Please Don’t Talk About Your Privates” time.

I’m sort of old-school.  I understand that boys will be boys, so I enacted a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell rule when it comes to language.  The rule is simple:  If there is a female of any sort present — grandma, mom, sister, teacher, random lady at Target — and that female is within earshot of what you are saying, then you WILL watch your language.  You will not use any word other than “privates” to describe your…well, private areas, and then you may discuss your privates only if it’s an emergency, as in, “Mom, I think I caught my brother’s privates on fire.”  When it’s just you and other boys, then feel free to talk all sorts of boy talk. Don’t tell me about it and I won’t ask. Sounds like a simple, failsafe solution. Done!  Nailed it.

To prove it’s working (sort of), this is a sample exchange I heard between my boys as they were getting ready to shower.

Gavin:  Ha, ha! Your pecker looks like a gummy bear!

Colin:  Oh, yeah?  Well, at least I don’t smell like old butt!

G:  Ewww, did you see that guy’s balls?  (This one straight from Billy Madison)

C:  Wait a minute, where are my frickin’ balls?  One, two, three…yeah, they’re all here (This gem courtesy of Dr. Evil in Austin Powers)

Now, you can judge me because yes, I let my children watch “inappropriate” movies, or yes, I heard them use potty words and didn’t correct them. But I was more enthralled by one simple fact:

THEY WERE LISTENING TO ME!

Not a female in sight!

They showered, walked out of the bathroom (leaving a pile of wet towels on the floor, of course) and went to get ready for bed..

…without a single potty word to be heard.

And that, folks, is the story of how I managed to win the battle of Balls & Wieners.  Future spouses, you’re welcome.

 

 

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Pick your word.

Let’s play a game…I want you to pick one word to describe something you’re good at.  For me, it might be “organization.”  (I could also pick “sleep,” but that wouldn’t make for very interesting reading.)  How about “baking”?  “Gaming”? “Loyalty”?

Now choose one that’s something you’re not good at.  My mother’s would be “organization.”  (See what I did there?)  An introvert might choose “small talk.”  My children would choose “obedience.”

Got your words?  Good. Read on…

Several months ago, I had coffee with Cathi, a friend from elementary school.  She lives in Tennessee now and came home to Ohio for the weekend.  At the end of our visit, she gave me a key.  Now, this is not just ANY old key…it’s called a Giving Key, and it was custom made for her with a word on it, “Knock.”  She chose that key and that word from her personal journey with Christ.  (To read more about Cathi’s amazing story and Giving Keys, visit her here:  http://www.cathicooper.com.  You will not be disappointed.)  In short, the word knock comes from Matthew Chapter 7, “Knock and the door will be opened to you.”

When Cathi passed her key to me, she felt as though it had served its purpose in her own life and she left me with a prayer in her heart that the Lord would knock on my heart in unbelievable ways.  I wear the key often and let it serve as my personal reminder that God is with me.  I so badly want to honor the woman who gave it to me.

So once I had the key, it was like “hooorah! All right! I’m here, God! Woo! We got this, man!  I’m praying and my friend is praying and I’M HERE! LET’S DO THIS!”  You know, sort of like some kind of pregame pep rally.  I was picturing me hearing the voice of God and we’re high-fiving because I WAS SO READY.  And just like that….crickets.

(I imagine if this were some sort of text message exchange between me and God, He would have responded with “SMH.”)

Cathi chose “knock” as her word for several reasons, and one of those is persistence…you know, keep on knocking.  And I have seen the way God has literally transformed her life, and I was knocking, and still….silence….which got me thinking, if I had to create a key of my own, what would my word be?  Well, let’s see, what am I good at?  I’m good at sleeping, and taking care of people, and being on time…

And just like that, my word came to me.  Except it wasn’t a word from the “good” list.  God chose a word from the bottom of my “bad” list.  My word is “wait.”  WHAT?!!??

No, no, no, there is some mistake.  I pray and I send my kids to Catholic school and I don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Come on, man!  Give me a word I can run with, one I know something about.  Don’t give me the last player picked, the one no one wants, the crumbs at the bottom of the Doritos bag.  Please don’t give me a word that I can’t tackle.

I wrestle with my word daily, sometimes hourly.  When I’m in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, when I’m at work, when I’m reading with my first grader and she only knows every fifth word and I want to scream, “The word is PARK! PARK! NOT PACK!”  And I clearly hear that one single word in the quiet of my heart:  “Wait.”  Over and over again, when I question the choices I make and the paths I should follow, I hear the voice of the Lord clearly, “Wait.”

And that, folks, is what I am doing.  I won’t claim to be doing it well or happily, but I’m doing it.

Oh, and by the way, if you need me, I’ll just be over here…waiting.

Psalm 40:1 (ESV)

1  I waited patiently for the Lord;

he inclined to me and heard my cry.

 

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Straight, but not narrow (or…how true love really does conquer all)

How many people have you ever truly loved? For the sake of this post, I am not going to count the super crush I once had on Fred Savage from “The Wonder Years.”  Good old Fred aside, I asked myself this same question, and the answer I came up with was four.

There was my obligatory first love, a brown-haired, brown-eyed boy named Danny who cussed and smoked Marlboro Reds and stole my heart the summer after my sophomore year of high school.  We couple skated and listened to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and sent each other messages via pager.  The relationship ended when summer did, and I listened to Boyz II Men’s rendition of “The End of the Road” on repeat as a salve to the wound of my first heartbreak.

Then there was my husband, the one I was “supposed” to love.  Right age, right walk of life, lots of commonalities.  You know, the one you date for two years and family starts asking, “So, when do you think you guys will get engaged?” White dress, flowery church wedding, tiny first apartment — the natural progression of mortgages and careers and three children followed suit until the day I realized that the way a wife is “supposed” to love her husband was not the way I felt.  (There will be more on this topic another day, I promise.  Like an entire volume on just that single word, “divorce.”)  Eleven years to the day after I said, “I do,” I stood in front of a judge and said, “I don’t.”  End of an era, turning of a page.

There is my current partner, the one who fills my heart and soul with fire and ice, all at the same time.  He is the one who challenges me to be the very best version of myself, even when I don’t want to.  He is the touch I crave and the air that I breathe.  It is, for the first time ever, a love that is all-encompassing, all-consuming, and utterly heart-wrenching, all at once.

Which brings me to number four, the best that I have saved for last.  I need to preface this statement by a simple declaration:  I am heterosexual with a lifetime of heterosexual relationships and experiences.  I am so straight, in fact, that my boyfriend is the epitome of a man’s man:  A tattooed, muscled construction worker who shoots guns and is the personification of the opening scene of Magic Mike XXL, complete with a welding helmet and torches. So the fact that my first, longest true love is a WOMAN throws a monkey wrench into this equation a bit.

She and I have what a coworker recently termed as “history,” a history birthed in the ninth grade when we chose to sit next to one another in our high school German class.  What followed was three years of trouble-making, exchanging confidences about boys and kissing and hand jobs, and a shared knowledge that neither one of us really fit into the parochial prep school mold of what a “nice Christian girl” should be…and neither one of us really cared, either.  We were both each other’s bad influence.  It was wonderful.

The worst thing you can do is tell teenage girls they aren’t allowed to do something, because those teenage girls will then move heaven and earth to do that very thing.  When our friendship was threatened, we found ways to be together anyway, whether it was through secret notes passed through friends or sneaking out of church youth groups to visit, we were bound and determined that our friendship would survive.

High school gave way to college, to new friends, new addresses, new experiences.  The shared interests that bind us as teenagers most often don’t translate into adulthood, and as so many people do, she and I lost track of one another.  Short of one encounter we had thanks to MySpace, we each had moved on.  End of story.

I never forgot her, ever.  Every single friendship I fostered, whether male or female, sexual or platonic, was tinged with the desire to recapture what we once had — that judgment-free, one hundred percent pure loyal basis for being someone’s friend.  On the rare occasion I would see someone from my high school days, they always started their statement with, “So, do you still talk to Sarah?” The answer, of course, was no.

And then one day a few years ago I am sitting in my office, researching something on a work database, and her name pops up on the screen.  I remember thinking, What are the chances? Lots of people have that name…and that birth date, right? There is no way we actually work in the same place.  That just doesn’t happen…does it?  So I reached out to her and then like a dream, she appeared one day in my office doorway.  Same beautiful green eyes, same smile, exact same personality.

Time has changed us both, and we aren’t the high school girls we once were.  She is married to a woman that she gushes over daily, and they are the proud parents of three fur babies that they walk in a stroller.  I am a divorced single mother who lives in sin with her sweetheart, with no plans to get remarried. But at our core, we are the people we once were…right down to one of us making a statement and the other one saying, “I was just going to say that!”  Anytime I need to talk to her, all I have to do is walk 30 seconds down the hallway and there she is…almost as if 20 years haven’t gone by.  The only difference is I am not waiting for her by her locker after class.

I have no idea where my life journey will take me, or who the people will be that are along for the ride.  I opened my first post by stating that this blog is no place for judgment, and it’s not.  Yes, my first, longest true love is a woman and yes, I am straight.  If you can take anything away from this post, I hope it is this:  It is okay to be straight, as long as you are not narrow…as in narrow-minded, because true love knows no bounds. Life has a way of working things out precisely how they are meant to be worked out.  Time and distance and parents and circumstances may work against you, but in the end, true love really does conquer all.

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Let’s Start by Smashing Some Stuff…

Well, hello there.  I’m Amy.  I’m a single mother, a student, and a friend.  A little bit about me…I am raw, blunt, and to the point.  I am alarmingly self-aware and readily admit that I am still learning and growing every day.  I’m growing in my career, my personal life, and my walk with Christ.

I chose the name “The Gremlin Life” for my blog because of the parallels between the movie characterizations and my own life.  At first glance, my children are warm and cute and fuzzy.  But feed them after midnight, get them wet, leave a tag in their shirts or choose the wrong cup for their milk and HOLD ON, SUGAR, IT’S ON LIKE DONKEY KONG!  Those cute furry children have morphed into green scaly creatures that throw knives and throw Pepsi and popcorn at the movie screen.  *Side note…I may be exaggerating just a tad.  Or not.*

I decided to start this blog for a number of reasons, but paramount is my personal mission to smash perceptions and stereotypes. Want to talk about therapy?  How about alcoholism and addiction?  Let’s talk about the crushing weight of balancing parenthood with mortgage payments and a clean car and healthy meals and perfectly coiffed hair. Here is your safe space…no judgment, only love and unwavering support. There is no room for hate speak, but there IS room for negativity as long as that negativity is a stepping stone towards growth and improvement.  I’m breaking down barriers in the hopes that others understand that it’s okay to ask questions.  It’s okay to be afraid.  It’s okay to not understand.  It’s okay to feel exactly the way you feel.  And yes, it’s okay to go to Target wearing yoga pants and walk out with a cart full of….I don’t know what, exactly, but probably NOT the one item you went in there for.

So let me pour you a drink, friend.  Let’s laugh and cry and share while we watch my children swing from the chandelier.