I...Love...South Jersey??? Because of the food...

Okay, so this is quite difficult for me to write because yet again we suffered another disappointment yesterday in terms of where we live.  My boys have been asking for a few years now to play basketball, only there isn't a rec league in our area.  There is a program at the Catholic church, but it's only for members, and since we aren't Catholic, we're out of luck.

At the end of the school year a flyer came out asking if anyone was interested in a youth basketball league.  I imagine that they got quite a good response, given that our park basketball courts are always full, we are literally across the bridge from Philly, and who doesn't love basketball?  Even I love basketball, and I don't really love any sport.  They soon sent out a follow up email asking for ages and contact information and then sent out a little over a month ago an email announcing two free clinics, one of which was suppose to be this Saturday.  I marked my calendar.

Yesterday, just a few days short of the clinic, I get an email saying, casually, that they are changing the day to Sunday.  No explanation as to why, just that it was switched.  My boys can't go, and I wonder how many other kids can't go.  And so it begins, the last minute changes and disorganization.  The turn out they originally anticipated isn't there, and suddenly it's the community's fault and the phrase "cancelled due to lack of interest" is thrown out there.  But, it's not lack of interest.  It's lack of getting your shit together.  With a fledgling organization, you have to cross your t's and dot your i's.  People will give up on you and won't give you a second chance if you drop the ball.  And to drop the ball on your first event??  Well, it's discouraging to say the least.

I realize that this is not a problem unique to my area of the country.  It's just another disappointment in a long string of disappointments.  We believed our district started instrument lessons in the third grade, and when they didn't, we had assumed it was fourth grade, only to find out it's actually fifth grade, which is far too late. My friend's kids in a different state are playing classical pieces by the fifth grade, while our concert was "Hot Cross Buns" (I'm not even exaggerating.).  They cut the foreign language program at the elementary level, not to save money, but because they didn't see its import and reallocated the money elsewhere.  We are fighting right now to keep the local Scout troop viable because over the past few years it was so poorly run they nearly lost all their members.  My husband has stepped up and is leading a den and is also trying to be a force with the organization of the entire troop, but the word is out there that the program is a dud and recruiting new members is difficult.  He also stepped up and volunteered to assistant coach our oldest son's soccer team because two of the coaches left the team when their sons tried out for the "A" team and made it. The second soccer team was formed because, according to the coaches, there was a group of boys who wanted to play and didn't have a team and any kid who is eight years old and wants to play soccer, should be able to play soccer.  We were told that the team would stay together and build their bonds as a team through the years growing a sense of loyalty and pride, but the first opportunity to try out for the "better" team, they took it.  Luckily two other dads and my husband volunteered to keep it going.

I just feel that there is nothing we can get behind here.  We are willing to volunteer and help out in anyway we can, but with every organization I feel it's a struggle to just survive it.  At any moment it feels as though it could be pulled from under our feet.  It's exhausting to try and be apart of so many things at a "keep it going" level, and with the lack of opportunities at the school district level, where there is nothing we can do, no matter how heartfelt your speech at the school board meeting is, it's downright infuriating.

So we sit at home, put the kids to bed early, and order takeout to have some quiet time and discuss our current predicament with basketball or soccer or scouts or how will we pay for private music lessons, just as we did last night.  And here comes the good part...the food in South Jersey.  It's plentiful and 100 percent authentic.  I fell in love with Damascus, but there were about four, maybe five eateries in town, only one of which was a real restaurant.  There were a couple cafes and one taco shop whose proprietor's name was Joe Killian.  Now, we didn't eat there and Joe could have a Mexican mother who married some Irish dude and they somehow settled in the mountains of Virginia and they could have been the best tacos I had ever eaten.  I'm not knocking Joe's, remember.  I'm trying to find a reason to like where I live now, and my Mexican restaurant is two minutes away and the lady who owns it is named Juanita and my favorite dish is the dish her village in Mexico is know for.

We have pizzerias galore, and while not all of them are as great as their North Jersey counterparts, which I grew up eating, they can still be classified as real pizza.  I have a sushi joint on speed dial and the whole Japanese family who runs the place knows me by first name.  Our favorite family restaurant for a special celebration is actually an Indian restaurant about twenty minutes away, and any Indian restaurant in South Jersey is pretty much guaranteed to have an Indian chef.  My favorite Italian place just up the rode from the Indian place is operated by a family right off the boat and is Zagat rated as one of the best Italian restaurants in the country!  I've eaten Greek, Brazilian, Vietnamese, and even Burmese, all authentically cooked and served and all delicious.

There aren't too many places that offer such a selection of cultural tastings in such a compact space.  And I like food...all. kinds. of. food.  So in that respect, South Jersey and I are a perfect fit.  And when disappointments arise, as they often do, there is always some comfort food awaiting us just minutes away.     

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Injuries suffered while on vacation:

       Sprained wrist

       Sprained ankle

       Baseball sized bruise

       Scraped knee

       Scraped elbow

       About 15 other miscellaneous bruises and cuts

And those were just mine.

We went to Damascus, Virginia which is, I'm pretty sure, part of the Smokey Mountains and home to the Virginia Creeper Trail, an old railroad line that has since been converted to a bike trail.  The entire trail is 34 miles, but most people who come to Damascus just to a 17 mile stretch from Whitetop down into Damascus.  My best friend suggested the vacation to us as she and her family have been down twice and described it as the best vacation they've ever had.  So we decided to venture there as well and cross a new state off our list.

In addition to my injuries, one kid fell on a hike and scraped his knee.  Another impaled himself with a campfire skewer (minor injury) and fell out of bed giving himself a "deep" bruise on his foot that required a trip to Urgent Care.  My injuries were all acquired from a very uncool wipeout on my bike about 5 miles down the trail.  Eli was riding behind me on one of the half bike attachments and we think his wheel might have caught on a post throwing us off balance.  We both went down, but I sustained all the injuries which were black.  Yes, my scrapes and much of my skin was black.  The trail is lined with coal, so when you fall it gets into your skin and they call it tattooing.  I have no tattoos, and I was definitely not into getting this kind either.  I guess you could say the Creeper Trail was a Creeper Fail...but it so wasn't.

I'm suffering from vacation withdraw...bad.  This was our first vacation in three years and was easily one of the best vacations we ever had, but the tragic flaw was that it was set in absolute, attainable heaven.  I'm almost (almost) happy I fell because it really slowed us down.  Instead of flying down the Creeper Trail on a bike, I got to walk six miles of it taking in all the scenery. (Didn't I mention that?  After my fall, I had to walk six miles out of a forest before I could get to help.)  Rushing streams and cloud topped mountains.  Even when the thunderstorm hit and my kids started to freak out and all I wanted to do was sit and cry, I still was able to recognize the beauty around me.  And then there was our cabin.

We stayed at a little cabin (the area is peppered with cabins and cottages throughout the mountain) just across from the trail.  Our view...a Christmas tree farm down the side of a mountain.  An elderly couple rents out the cabin on their property.  She bakes a chocolate cake on your first night there and he talks firewood and pocketknives.

So on our ride home as we left the Smokeys and passed through Shenandoah heading into the rush of D.C. and then Baltimore and then Philly, I realized that of all the beautiful places we could have chosen to live, we chose one of the least picturesque parts of the United States.  And it's not just about being pretty.  It's crowded!  I mean a lot, a lot of people.  We went grocery shopping in Virginia at 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning.  There were maybe ten cars in the parking lot.  Have you ever been grocery shopping at any time, let alone on a Saturday, in South Jersey? There are never just ten cars in the parking lot.  I had all three kids and my husband with me plus it was a half hour trip into town and then another half hour back out and we were still finished with a full grocery order faster than when we run up to the Shoprite that's five minutes from our house for a few items.

This was one of the first vacations where I felt more at home on vacation than I do where I actually live.  I suppose that's it.  Whenever I'm at the beach, I always picture myself living there, but there are always a lot fewer people than what's really at the beach.  Not to mention that I'm loaded with cash. Most vacations you say it was nice to visit, but then you're glad to be back home.  Well, not this one.

Since I'm still not 100 percent and it won't be easy for me to get out in the garden, I've decided for the month of August to focus on some of the positives of living where I do in the hopes of shaking off this discontent.    

Summer Cleaning...Check!

Today I will be able to check off the final room on my cleaning list.  It's a bit of a colossus, our finished basement.  It serves as a family room, play room, laundry room, and office to me.  It typically is strewn with miscellaneous toys, video games, blankets, pillows, papers, dirty laundry, and the bane of the existence...Legos!  I don't touch Legos as far as cleaning up.  They apparently have specific bins in which they belong, but to me they all look the same...little daggers ready to slice into my feet and twist my ankles.

But, after today, everything will have been dusted, vacuumed, wiped clean, Windexed.  It's never all clean, all at the same time, but at least now I'm in a position to maintain.  I'm sorry, but this is important to me.  The number one piece of advice people gave me while working was to not worry so much about having a clean house.  So I tried not to worry and my house became scuzzy and I felt awful.  It actually got to the point where it was physically painful to sit in my living room and look around at the mess.  My skin crawled.  For me, a clean house is sanity.  It represents an organized life and a sense of control over my life, at least my little piece of the world contained in those walls.

Oh, don't worry!  Having three boys and a husband has kept me real in terms of what is realistically expected and "clean" is a relative term.  At any given moment, there is a very high possibility that there is pee on my bathroom floor and something sticky is on one of the kitchen walls.  There is always a pile of something somewhere that belongs elsewhere.  Usually, I take it in stride and roll with it, cleaning it in stride.  Every now and then I have a small meltdown which is a sign to my family that the overall state of a room has crossed the line and they all pitch in and clean. Even they are starting to sense the line of disorder and will begin to straighten up unprompted by me.

My summer projects list, which I guess you can say were "challenges" just not very fun or distracting ones, is now considerably shorter.  The remainder of my list includes the garden--this is a part of my life where the threshold for order needs to be reigned in...A LOT.  I don't have weeds.  I have weed trees.  Part of the reason it gets out of control is the sun.  And bugs.  And it hurts my back.  And things grow much bigger than when I originally planted them.  I guess you can say I don't like gardening.  I like the thought of it.  I appreciate nice gardens.  I in no way know how to design them and maintain them.  It's a problem, but the neighbors are starting to stop and look for all the wrong reasons you want them to stop and look at your landscaping.  Too bad they can't see the inside of my house.  There have actually been people that come in and are literally amazed at how nice it is on the inside.  It's not really all that nice, but I think their expectations have been considerably lowered based on the state of my outside and they are pleasantly surprised.  Maybe I should keep this trend going.

 

People...People Who Don't Need People

One good thing about teaching was that it distracted me enough that I forgot about how I don't like where I live.  Pool season was a stark reminder.  I hate going to the pool for many reasons.  One, I hate the sun, or rather the sun hates me.  My skin prickles and turns beet red in a matter of seconds. It physically hurts me to be in the sun. Two, it's a lot of work.  You have to pack everything up, carry it all to the car, then to the pool, then back to the car, then back inside, and back to it's proper place.  I try to give some responsibility to my boys, but it usually results in our lunch cooler being swung around resulting in either a smashed lunch or a strangled brother.  Three, I have three boys at three different stages of swimming who want to swim in three different pools, some of whom are restricted to certain pools only.  I can't hop in and swim in the deep end with Boy 1 because Boy 3 isn't allowed yet in that pool.  Four, my boys are, well, my boys.  While most 9 and 6 and nearly 4 year old boys are off swimming with their friends in whatever section of the pool they want, my boys are socially stunted, choosing to stay with each other and refusing to learn how to swim.  Oh, don't judge me that my kids can't yet swim.  They've had swim lessons since they were three, every summer.  I don't know why they can't swim.  I'm assuming it's because they are mine. The youngest still refuses to go in any pool other than the one foot pool, which then often results in the other two wanting to stay with him, so there we all are, the baby pool gang.  And finally, my last reason for hating the pool...people.  At the pool is where I feel the most socially self-conscious.  While other moms are chatting each other up, watching each other's kids, there I am alone juggling all three of mine.  There is no place I feel so friendless as at the pool.  There are a few moms I see on occasion, but for the most part I'm flying solo, which wouldn't be so bad if I could just sit back, let the kids run, read a book in the shade.  Be aloof.  But not yet.  I am forced to be present.

I keep telling myself that eventually we'll hit the summer where they're off doing their own thing, and I'm sure that summer is closer than I realize.  Every now and then I catch glimpses of it.  For now, though, I'm stuck keeping vigilance while my mind wanders to the countryside where I imagine my own private retreat, pool included, and allow discontent to wash over me.  I've found myself once again stalking Realtor.com dreaming of a different life.  Seriously, I'm totally pathetic.

So this is where I somehow need to turn the pool into a positive.  Aaannnddd....I've drawn a blank.  I have no idea how to do this.  I think it might just be something I need to suffer through as a sacrifice for the betterment of my children.  And in the meantime, pray for rainy days.

Disclaimer

I'm getting published!  Yep, I wrote a piece for ScaryMommy.com and it got accepted.  Then it occurred to me that people might actually travel to my blog and read it.  That has me freaking out a bit.  Most of my blog was dedicated to my monthly challenges, but I'm pretty sure occasionally I mentioned a relative or two, maybe put their business out there that they really wouldn't have wanted me to.  I've been going over and over in my head whether or not to go back in and delete those parts. The thing is, I really don't have time.  Like I said before, I'm trying very hard to find purpose once again in my life at home, and finding that purpose takes time, especially when it comes to my three little boys.  I can't be worried about what others are going to think.  This I can say, that I never lie, so what you see is true, at least according to my side or perception of the story.  And if anyone was hurt, that was certainly not my intention.  Most likely what was written was in a moment of my own pain, so I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it was what was real for me in that moment.

The second disclaimer when reading this blog is that I have absolutely no intention of making it a work of literary genius. Most times I write in the early morning before the kids are awake, so who knows how well my brain is functioning.  In many ways this is a free flow of consciousness, a dialogue between you, the reader, and myself.  I do try to proofread, but there is very little editing of content.  And despite my English background, there are going to be grammar errors, colloquialisms, fragments, and cliches.  Get over it, snobs!

  

Repurposing Myself

My last post was in early March before I abandoned the blog and I think I remember doing something about monthly challenges to keep me distracted from life.  If I remember correctly, I finished out my February challenge which was to read one book a week from my stockpile of "to read" books, and then I went into full blown survival mode and abandoned the challenges as well.

I thought about jumping into the challenges again this July, but whoa, too much pressure.  I haven't even been off a week nor do I remember any of the challenges I had originally planned.  What I have felt the need to do is put me back together.  I fell apart in the last few months, and as a result, so did everything else, my house, my kids, my marriage.  I am very fortunate in the fact that my husband and children were all very understanding and patient with me, but now it's time, finally, to start putting it all back together.

My life had become purposeless.  Survival mode is very much about just running through the motions without any real purpose, and since before this job I was running through the motions of wife and mother without realizing it, I had a lot of work to do.

My first purpose in life was to make a clean home for myself and my family.  Even the husband agreed on this one as there was mold rings in the toilets and the windows were so dirty you couldn't really see out of some of them.  Last week, for the first time ever I might add, we both set to deep cleaning the house one room a day.  This was always something I did with purpose and passion, but for the first time my husband also found the purpose in it.  I'm sure he won't describe it as the soul stirring experience I've found it to be, but the fact that we are restoring order together is very therapeutic for me and I feel it's a step in the right direction as far as once again finding ourselves on the same page.

The cleaning is still in process.  My next step is finding purpose again with my children.  I mean, they are the ones I really neglected not just while working in survival mode, but way back months, maybe even years ago.  Not neglect in the not feeding leaving them home alone sense, but neglect in the soulful way.  So in the last week, I purposefully planned some activities to do with my boys, things I used to do with them all the time and somehow forgot about.  The first was to create a summer Book Bingo reading challenge for each of them.  I stumbled across this idea last year on Pinterest.  You create a bingo sheet and each square is a different type of book to read or a different place to read to read a book.  Some ideas:

read a book in a tent
read a book the librarian chooses for you
read a book with a girl main character
read a book on the beach

You get the idea.  For the first three bingos they make, I take them to Five Below to pick out a little toy.  Then they have to finish out the page and we go someplace "special."  (They pick Chuck E. Cheese. Blah!)  These bingo sheets are so motivating.  My oldest is something of a reluctant reader.  He would rather me read to him than read on his own.  These sheets have him reading constantly, different material, on his own.  Anyway, I digress a bit.  I promised my oldest a reading nook.  I have two crib mattresses in brand new condition that I can't give away so I told him I'd use them to make a nook and never did.  His room was the first we tackled to clean and I finally fulfilled my promise to him and made him a reading nook in his closet.  He needed that.  He needed a hideaway.  He needed a little kick in the pants to get him reading.  He needed his mom to keep her promises.

Another activity I planned to do over a year ago was paint giant letters, their initials, and hang them in their rooms as decoration.  Saturday was a rainy day and we put the cleaning on hold for a bit so I could call each one up and paint.  For ten minutes at a time, I sat with each of my boys and painted, chatted, and destressed together.

And finally, I'm putting purpose back in not only my relationships with my kids, but in my cooking again.  I actually watched a new cooking show.  My husband and I used to watch the Food Network all the time, and we ate well when we did.  Somewhere along the way we stopped, probably around the same time life lost its flavor, we decided to take a literal turn with that and not really enjoy cooking anymore.  I decided to find purpose again in what I feed my family and incorporate the boys into this.  Each week one of them gets to plan, shop for, and cook a meal.  We started this week and Eli and I made Caesar salad with homemade dressing, grilled naan pizzas, and chocolate pudding pie with homemade whipped cream.  I took my son to the grocery store.  We went to the grocery store and shopped together.  He nearly caused two avalanches of breaking jars, but I was there with him.  I had stopped grocery shopping with my kids.  It had become too stressful and I somehow made it into another excuse not to be with them.  I was cheating them of a life experience.  No more.  I might not take all three of them with me--that's just crazy talk--but from now on I hope to continue to include them in these tasks.  Next week Sal has decided on some sort of soup, so I've been told.

So that's life right now.  Finding purpose in everything I do.  Hell, I'm even watching TV with purpose again.  Before we'd sit down and just settled for sitcom reruns.  Don't get me wrong, Big Bang Theory marathons are awesome, but they lack purpose when you've already seen them a few hundred times.  I've committed to watching Orange is the New Black.  My husband thought it was going to be another Downton Abbey and, well, let's just say his attention is held just a little better by lesbian jail sex than early 20th century tablescapes.

For the last six months, and for up to a year or more before that, I thought that my purpose was to provide (financially) for my family.  And, yes, I did need to contribute.  Most of us do.  But that is a sidenote as a wife and mother.  Repurposing is big these days: cribs into benches, TV consoles into bookshelves or puppet theaters, crib mattresses into reading nooks.  This job allowed me to repurpose myself, strip down my original contributions to my family and find new, more useful, and creative ways to be apart of their lives.

I'm Back!

I'm back!  To sum up the last six months in detail would be impossibly painful, so I'm going to give some very general highlights.  Here goes.  I had the worst group of students ever in my teaching career.  There was no controlling them.  It was every teacher's worst nightmare.  And it wasn't that they were "bad" kids.  No, they were "good" kids and had nothing better going on than to try and sneak out of class and wander the hallways and whistle and throw paper airplanes.  It was like I was in an even worse version of Saved by the Bell.  It's why I had to abandon the blog.  They were total creepers.  I had set up an Instagram account and within a week, they found me and this is why I never learned how to work the Instagram and probably never will.

Now, don't get me wrong.  There were good kids.  Really good, likable kids that I will miss and would have liked to follow through their high school careers.  But, sadly they were such a small part of my day, and pretty much every day was hell, that it was very hard to maintain my focus on them. And then let's add in the crazy co-workers who, let's see, insulted my classroom management, told me I would rip the community apart, questioned my intelligence, insulted my online job, told me how to raise my children, and told me all that's wrong with the community I live in.  So much for colleague support.

And to top it all off, I realized soon into the experience, right after they locked me into a contract, that they never had any intention of hiring me permanently.  They never stopped in to see me teach.  They barely checked in on me at all.  They wanted all the drama from the last teacher to be kept behind closed doors and they threw me to the dogs, basically.  In the end, they cut the position.  They made it sound promising for me and to another long term substitute, and then hung us both out to dry.

(Okay, right now I have to apologize for my overuse of cliches.  I use them so much because this place was one giant cliche that there is no other way to describe my experience than use as many cliches as possible.)

The fact that they cut the position actually did me a huge favor.  I had already decided I wasn't returning no matter what, but this didn't set well with several people around me, namely my mother.  It was easier for her to accept I wouldn't have a job next year if I didn't have the opportunity of turning one down.  It kind of woke her up to the world of education, too.  Teachers are pawns, just like in any other company (though that Sam Adams commercial makes me want to go make beer!) and she didn't get that.  She just assumed because of my dedication and work ethic that they'd "create" a position for me.  Yeah, no.

On my particularly bad days I would zone out on my prep period or during lunch by looking at old Facebook photos and posts.  Once again, Facebook to the rescue.  I found all these posts about things I used to do with the older boys when they were little.  I cooked with them, did (very easy) crafts, took them to little kiddie places like farms and inside playgrounds.  I realized how detached I had become as a mother, running through the paces of feedings, drop offs, pick ups, and so on.

I prayed for this job, as some of you might remember.  I thought going back to work would be my answer to all our problems.  And it was.  It just wasn't the outcome I expected.  Well played, God.  And thanks for the extra cash.