My Mother Bought Me Coffee Yesterday Morning

My mother bought me coffee yesterday morning.

You're probably wondering how that's even possible, given the fact that my mom has been gone two and a half years now, so I'll have to start a little farther back.

When my mom passed I kept nearly everything.

The last time she sat in my car was when I took her to a doctor's appointment a day before she was admitted into the hospital. She had a pink sweater that she used to wear and when she got out of my car that day, she left it hanging over the back of my passenger seat. It's still there. I haven't had the heart to remove it.

Her china hutch is sitting in our house, looking nearly identical to how it was in hers. Eventually we will take out my Grandparent's old things that she had in it and add our own. We're just taking our time.

I have old cards and old notes she wrote me.

I have a "gift card holder" that she gave Ken and I one year on my dresser (yup, that's right, a gift card holder:).

Her old bible.

Photo albums.

A bacon pan (which actually is NOT a bacon pan, but I convinced Ken it was. It's actually a grill pan that my mom used exclusively for cooking bacon. Who would have known it was actually a grill pan?)

Glass corn on the cob holders....we've never used these. In all honesty, who uses fancy glass corn on the cob holders?

A fur coat.

A really old/ugly, white and gold ice chest used to place your bottle of wine in. In fact, I'm pretty sure we have two of these.

We could decorate our house and our neighbors in Christmas decor from my mother's house.

Grace has clothes of my mother's in her closet, and then we have a tub in the garage.

Her old hairbrush. (I couldn't bring myself to toss it or ANYTHING the day we left the hospital. If I could't bring her with me, I was certainly going to bring all of her belongings, and boy did I.)

We cannot park in our garage. We are lucky if we can walk through it. Each time I make it from one end to the other I feel like a survivor of some sort. I'm afraid to let our cat out there out of fear he will get squished by a falling box, or random weird appliance that my mother had.

You probably get the point by now.

After losing my mother, I had a hard time getting rid of ANYTHING. I think this is probably pretty normal for anyone going through the process of grief. Somehow those items (gift card holder and fur coat included) were a part of my mom, and I couldn't let that go quite yet.

One of the many things I kept was a small brown purse my mom would take with her when she didn't want to take something bigger.

She had brought this purse with her to the hospital and in it had packed lipstick, her insurance card, her driver's license, and then a little cash. (P.S. I love my mother for packing lipstick to the hospital.) When we left the hospital after she passed, I took her purse with me. It sits in a drawer in my dresser, and I haven't so much as touched it since I brought it home. It had three dollars in it, and those dollars have sat untouched for the last two and a half years.

I knew they were there, but I could not touch them. They were my mother's. It felt weird to use them, like I was stealing almost.

This last week was kind of rough. Remember my blog post about New Year's Resolutions?

One of my resolutions was to stress less. Well, this last week I failed miserably on that one, and by Friday I was ready for the week to be done, ready to get some perspective and change my attitude, and ready for a nice, sugar filled, calorie laden, cup of coffee.

Unfortunately for me, one of my other resolutions was to budget better (we are doing better in this department, but not as good as I'd like), so I refused to put a cup of coffee on our debit card (we take out spending money in cash each week so it's easier to keep track of, and in addition, things were tight last week, and I didn't want to start out this week on the wrong foot.)

So, I dug my mom's purse out. I felt the lipstick, and looked at my mom's driver's license, and I spent the three dollars that were in it on a much needed cup of coffee.

I felt bad. Like I said, it almost felt like stealing. To be honest, I feel kind of bad blogging about it. I'm a little afraid I'll be judged for using that three dollars on a cup of a coffee, but had my mother been here, I'm pretty sure she would have been the one to buy me that cup of coffee after a bad week...or even after a good week, or for no real reason at all; because mom's do that. Here I go sounding incredibly selfish again, but sometimes I miss that. I miss my mom buying me a cup of coffee or buying my breakfast at work (remember we worked together for years). I miss going shopping with her and splitting a treat with her on the car ride home. I miss that feeling of being taken care of. Now of course that's not the only thing I miss. I miss her MY MOM bottom line, but I also have moments where I miss being a child, who is still being taken care of, even just in small ways, by her mom.






Spending that three dollars did help me gain a little perspective though.

Those three dollars are not my mom.

The fur coat and the glass corn on the cob holders are not my mom.

The boxes upon boxes in our garage are not my mom.

My mom is in my heart (yup, here I go being corny).

My mom is in my memory.

In me.

In my relationship with my daughter.

She is not in a box or an article of clothing.

Those things may remind me of her, but they are not her.

I do not have to keep every shred of her existence.

My mother most definitely existed.

I am living proof of her impact on this world.

I hold her in my memory and in my heart.

I love her now just as much as I did when she was here.

Our relationship still exists.

She is still a part of my life.

I don't need a garage full of boxes to prove that or to remind me of that.

All I need is to look in the mirror,
to remember her,
to talk about her.

This summer I will clean out my garage. It will be hard and I will still keep some articles of clothing. I will still keep the gift card holder (because it still makes me laugh.) I will still keep a lot of things.

But, I won't keep it all.

I don't need to, to keep my mother.

My mother will always be a part of me.

On the Move

It has been such a long day.

I stayed up way too late last night playing around with photoshop.

I stayed later than I planned at the school, so that my gradebook would be up to date.

Then when Grace and I got home, we went into work mode; finishing up weekend laundry and prepping her food for the week. (We make most of her food ourselves, especially her veggies. I've been making a ton at the start of the week and freezing the rest in ice cube trays, so that all I have to do is heat it up or pack it for Cara's. I could probably dedicate an entire post to this. The ice tray thing was such a great idea! Thank youhttp://wholesomebabyfood.momtastic.com/index.htm).

I did not wholeheartedly sit down until around 8:15 tonight.

I had planned to fill my mind up with some reality t.v. garbage for an hour or two (The Bachelor...yeah, I know.) Grace has had other plans though.

You would think she would be tired. She is on the go non stop, but for the last 30 minutes she has repeatedly crawled across our rec room, up our stairs (and by stairs, I mean two stairs), through our living room and then booked it to the kitchen.

She is on a mission.

Did I mention I am exhausted? Super duper tired? And ready for some mind numbing reality t.v.?

Well, I am; but to be honest, not much gets better than this.

My daughter is too much.

She cracks me up.

I would maybe grow tired of this if it weren't for her absolute zeal to get wherever it is she thinks she is going, or the over the shoulder, "Ha, Ha, Mom. Try and get me," grin she's been giving me.

Or the fact that every time I set her back in the rec room and she takes off again, she laughs at herself.

I love her.

I love her so much, there's no way I can describe it.





(You will have to excuse the bad quality photo...blame it on a combination of a moving baby and a camera phone.)



The couch can wait.

Ben (this season's bachelor) can most definitely wait.

I've got a baby to chase down,

and a pretty cute one at that.

Source: imgfave.com via Misty on Pinterest

The day my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she wasn't officially diagnosed. The official diagnoses wouldn't come until after they did a biopsy of what they thought was the tumor. But we knew right away that it was cancer; the doctors, my mother, me.

After receiving the news from her doctor, my mother called me at school. She waited until school had let out, and then she told me to come home. She didn't tell me why, and she didn't have to.

I knew.

I cleaned my desk and packed my school work into my bag in a matter of seconds.

I drove the free way in silence and record time; the whole time my gut knew what my head and my heart wasn't ready to hear.

When I walked in the front door of my mother's house, she was sitting in her bathrobe on the couch.

"They think I have pancreatic cancer..."

"But you can't. I haven't even had babies yet."

"I know, that was my first thought."

I disappeared into the pillows on the couch and my mom's arms, and we cried. We cried for a long time, and then the rest gets blurry.

Phone calls were made.

My mom called our manager at St. Lukes,

She called friends,

I called my husband.

Do you remember how I explained my freak out over the possibility of hepatitis? I made Ken come home from work then. But the day my mom was diagnosed, I didn't ask him to come home.

I needed to be with my mom,

and then

I needed to be alone.

I sat on her back porch with her for hours.

We didn't eat a thing that day.

At one point we came in from the porch renewed. Working at a hospital had its advantages and they had pulled strings to get my mother in that Friday to perform a procedure on her bile duct (the reason her urine was so dark). Once that was up and running, they could begin treatment. They had set her up with a surgeon to see if the tumor could be removed, and they got her in with the best oncologist they could find.

I remember her quoting her friend Claire: Be ready for the fight of your life Caren.

And we were.

But we were beat before we even had a chance.

And, I knew it.

I knew it deep down in my gut the minute I got the phone call to come home that day.

I left at nine that night, which to be honest is something that haunts me still. My mom slept alone in her bed that night, and I should have stayed with her.

She should have had someone to reach a hand out to and hold that night.

But I had to get home. I had to break down alone in my own room. I had to look up statistics and patron saints and stories of survival (which were few and far between). I had to cry until I couldn't breath, and I had to do it where she couldn't see me.

And then that night, when I couldn't sleep, I had to call her, and I had to hear her voice pick up on the other line. I had to tell her I loved her and hear her tell me she loved me, the whole time knowing deep down, that there would come a night when I couldn't pick up the phone at 11 o'clock at night, just to hear her voice.

I hoped with all of my heart that my mom would beat cancer. I prayed non stop. I asked friends to pray. I tried to think positively. I looked up the patron Saint of miracles (Saint Anthony), I brought my rosary, something I hadn't used in years, to the hospital.

But in the end, none of that really mattered.

My mother's diagnoses is the first time in my life when I have been faced with something I had no control over; my life marked.

Bah Humbug!

Today has been one of those days.

I attempted to take photos of Grace on the portable floor I bought, but she was having none of it.

Our horribly tempered min pin ran across out laptop this summer and knocked two keys off. It really hasn't made much of a difference at all because there has been a little plastic thingy to press on instead of a key. Somehow the plastic thingy has gone missing...never to return, and so now pressing the I key is actually somewhat of a labor.

It's three and I feel like I've accomplished nothing but becoming cranky.

I need to change my perspective...or something. Or possibly invest in some Riesling (it just took me 15 seconds just to type the word because of our missing I key...15 seconds again...)

I is in a lot of words by the way.

Mommy's Muse

So, I bought a digital SLR back in September, in the hopes to get back into the hobby of photography like I was in high school. I haven't had the time that I'd like to take and edit photos, however, I have really enjoyed the little time I have had. I'm just learning the ins and outs of my camera and of photoshop. It's definitely a work in progress. Sharlee and Zach let me experiment with them this last fall, and Grace, of course, has been a phenomenal muse! We managed to have a make shift photo shoot this weekend. I'm not done editing, but here are the first few shots.

I Have Decided To Stick With Love...

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."-Martin Luther King Jr.


Just something to think about...

Happy MLK Day!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Confession 1:

If we had the money, I would totally hire someone to come in once a week and clean our house. I am not a fan of deep cleaning whatsoever, or dishes, or laundry, or vacumming the couches especially. (This is probably my least favorite thing to do, which is why in my next life I am only having one animal and it's not going to shed...or it's going to be a fish.) My house is currently a disaster area and every weekend I recommit myself to being a better homemaker during the week, so my weekends aren't so...messy.
(Don't worry, I DO clean, my house won't be a disaster area past today, I will just hate every moment of it:)

Confession 2:

I become more and more like my mother every day. I thought I would mind, but I don't. I do however, feel a bit sorry for my husband.

Here's one example: I have developed total plane anxiety. Anytime we fly I think we are going to die and I spend about twenty minutes at the start of each flight nervously praying. My mother wasn't necessarily this way on planes, but anytime we traveled she was excessively anxious.

Confession 3:

Being a parent to a child in split home is hard (sorry Sharlee, I hope I'm not falling to that category of parents you dislike, it's the best word to describe it though.) You are held to abnormally high standards, superhuman standards. There's no room for error, because you are constantly scrutinized. I'm sure this isn't true for all parents of a child that lives in a split home, but I think it may be for most. Ken and I definitely aren't innocent of this either. In addition there is no easy decision. All decisions have to be ran through another party, who leads a different life with different obligations. Time and holidays are divided. You cross your fingers that birthdays and other events fall on the right day. You learn to accept that your child is being raised with a different set of rules, values, and guidelines depending on his home. There are laws and guidelines and politics that typical parents don't have to deal with. And, I'm just the step-parent, so I can only imagine how it is for my husband and Fenix's mom, let alone Fenix. At this point he seems to handle it all really well, and I hope it continues that way as he gets older. Despite it being difficult at times, I wouldn't trade my relationship with Fenix for anything in the world. I have been BLESSED by his presence in my life.

Confession 4: I love to bake. In fact, that's the reason for this post actually. Ken and Fenix bought me some really nice stainless steal measuring cups for Christmas. I used them once over the break to make some really deliscious cookies (which I sent to Ken's work, because I couldn't trust myself to keep them in the house), and I'd really like to use them again, however, I made a New Year's resolution to lose the last of this baby weight, and I have a feeling if I bake, it's going to be even harder to make that happen. (I have pretty much no self control. Therefore baked goods are not even allowed in our house for the time being.) So, instead of baking and gaining five pounds, I thought I'd share a recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies that I made over the holidays. They are phenomenal! Really! And, I'm not even a huge fan of pumpkin. So, if you're in the mood to bake, and you aren't all pumpkined out from the holidays/actually have a some self control, this is a really good recipe to try.



(Just to you know, I stole this picture from allrecipes.com.)

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup canned pumpkin puree
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 cups (12-ounce bag) milk chocolate chips, not semisweet
Nonstick cooking spray or parchment paper

What you need to do:

Using a mixer, beat the butter until smooth.

Then, beat in the white and brown sugars. You'll want to add a little at a time, until the mixture is light and fluffy.

Next, beat in the eggs 1 at a time, and mix in the vanilla and pumpkin puree.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. Slowly beat the flour mixture into the batter.

Last, toss in your chocolate chips.

Scoop the cookie dough (you'll want about a tablespoon) onto the prepared cookie sheets and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the cookies are browned around the edges.

Remove the cookie sheets from the oven and let them rest for around 2 minutes. (I'm not sure, but it seems like if I leave the cookies on the cookie sheet for a lot longer, that get flat.

Take the cookies off and cool them on a wire rack.



(This picture has NOTHING to do with this post, but she is so stinkin' cute, I couldn't resist.)