Pink Giraffe Musing

I've been thinking.  Maybe it is my age.  Or the fact that for the past 2 or 3 days I have had the time to slow down.  Whatever the reason, I have found my self taking a little trip down Memory Lane.  For those of you who have lost someone, that is a road that can be sad, bumpy, and difficult.  But for me, this time anyway, it has been okay.  Quite good, even.  My kids seem to have joined me, and are doing well too.  As a friend said to me yesterday, maybe it means there has been more healing in my heart.  I don't know the reason, I just know I feel happy, and like a fog has lifted, and I will take it! I don't know how Christmas looks at your house.  As I have aged, I have learned it looks vastly different in different homes.  Some people wrap Santa gifts, some don't, some don't even do Santa.  In my house, the bigger the tree the better.   When I was a girl, Santa brought my tree (my poor parents!!!).  My mom also baked a TON of cookies!  Sometimes we or

I think I am an unusual teacher.  I hated high school.  Not basketball, musicals, chorus, art or dances, just the rest of it. Maybe not hated.  I think I was just disinterested in most of what I was required to learn. Indifferent perhaps?  Sometimes I just opted to take a C rather than study something I didn't really care about.  Looking back, I guess it was bad and I do wish I had a better recall of history, but I can't say it has held me back in my life.  Let's just say I was never one of those little girls who wanted to be a teacher her whole life. While I "hated" school, I loved art.  And lucky for me, my Junior and Senior year, it was a double period.  My high school also offered Humanities, so that was another class that I found interesting and meaningful (art, history, literature and music).  Today, there are kids at every school just like me.  Students who sit through biology, and algebra, and whatever else the state says they must know just biding their

Widow.  Who wants to be a widow?  Nobody.  Not even a 90 year old wants to be a widow.  At the beginning of this journey, I remember hating the word.  I remember promising myself it would not define me at 41.  But, I hated it nonetheless.  The pity, the sad glances, and awkward pauses, it all makes a bad situation worse.  And widowhood, more than widowerhood seems to be riddled with judgement and stereotypes and expectations. In those early days of widowhood, it was like a new name.  I tried it out a few times.  It was always awkward, or shocking to the other party.  You're what?  No one expects someone "my age" to be a widow.  But, I was.  I remember crying before I started my new job thinking how everyone there would only know the widow me, the broken version of the formerly awesome me.  The widow version.  It was hard to think I would be meeting a whole new group of people who would only know me, and never know Michael.  They would only know me apart for him.

Only parenting is one of the hardest aspects of widowhood for me.  Those of you who are married and raising kids probably don't even realize how much you think, discuss, and decide with your spouse.  When your kid is in trouble, or struggling, you brain storm and make decisions together.   Even divorced single parents work to "co-parent" and handle issues in whatever way "together" looks like in their world.  In my world that is all up to a very indecisive me. It's hard, and I second guess myself all of the time.  I guess you could say, I sweat the small stuff.  I have a boyfriend, and he loves my kids too, and while I am sure he could tell you that I do discuss my thought processes with him (again and again and again), in the end, the decision is all mine.  I cannot bare the weight of that sometimes.  Well, I can't but it's hard, and I don't like it.   Last  year, my son started the year in the 6th grade band.  He was enthused and determine

Life isn't fair in a hundred different ways every single day. "It's not fair",  is something I hear at school from students a lot.  It's not fair that she got the pencil with the new eraser, it's not fair that his paint tray is full of blue and mine is only half full, it's not fair.  I wish there was some way to make people come to acceptance, or maybe realization of the fact that life isn't fair.  It's just not.  Why does the notion that it is even exist??  When you get older it's other things; clothes, cars,  jobs, vacations, and houses.  Some of those ways life isn't fair are insignificant, and if you fret over them, it falls into the "sweating the small stuff" category in my book, and you should just get over it.  Other unfair things, though, are more significant.  Some people are born into nicer families, have kinder siblings, and wonderful, loving, involved parents.  Others are like the first grader who told me the ot