Glad you all (well, all of you that commented) like the new design.  At first, there were a whole lot more witches, but that made me all "Whoa, my mother is totally going to freak out if she sees that many witches."  Because, you see, the witch in the design is more of an accent witch, not a real witch.  She just wants her sister's shoes back, and hey, don't we all?  But yes, Mother, I'm still a good Lutheran. I swear.  Even if I'm $76,000 behind on my pledged offerings for the last five years.  My heart, it is in the right place.

I came up with the design to play off both the title of the blog and my vision of YOUR vision of Kansas City.  I think most people on the coasts believe Kansas and Missouri and all the other states in the Midwest are just sort of a large field of wheat or other starchy vegetable or grain product, maybe with some religious fanatics and a little smoke going up somewhere.  The title of this blog actually didn't mean to come from the Wizard of Oz - I started this blog when the little angel was about a month old, and at that point, I was ready to surrender to the first person who offered me a two-hour nap, even if that person was Osama bin Ladin.  I was a little crazy then.

So I talked to my friend L. today about the toddler.  It was very sad.  I also learned that my friend N.'s nana passed away a while ago, but she's just now gotten up the energy to tell us.  That's the third I've heard this week now, after the daycare teacher's husband.  I'm hoping that will end this week's streak of horrifically painful emotional experiences for those for whom I care deeply.

And because I now need something about which to feel good, I present you with this for your Friday - my husband's version of sidewalk chalk art:

Glad you all (well, all of you that commented) like the new design.  At first, there were a whole lot more witches, but that made me all "Whoa, my mother is totally going to freak out if she sees that many witches."  Because, you see, the witch in the design is more of an accent witch, not a real witch.  She just wants her sister's shoes back, and hey, don't we all?  But yes, Mother, I'm still a good Lutheran. I swear.  Even if I'm $76,000 behind on my pledged offerings for the last five years.  My heart, it is in the right place.

I came up with the design to play off both the title of the blog and my vision of YOUR vision of Kansas City.  I think most people on the coasts believe Kansas and Missouri and all the other states in the Midwest are just sort of a large field of wheat or other starchy vegetable or grain product, maybe with some religious fanatics and a little smoke going up somewhere.  The title of this blog actually didn't mean to come from the Wizard of Oz - I started this blog when the little angel was about a month old, and at that point, I was ready to surrender to the first person who offered me a two-hour nap, even if that person was Osama bin Ladin.  I was a little crazy then.

So I talked to my friend L. today about the toddler.  It was very sad.  I also learned that my friend N.'s nana passed away a while ago, but she's just now gotten up the energy to tell us.  That's the third I've heard this week now, after the daycare teacher's husband.  I'm hoping that will end this week's streak of horrifically painful emotional experiences for those for whom I care deeply.

And because I now need something about which to feel good, I present you with this for your Friday - my husband's version of sidewalk chalk art:

Today as I was driving to Large Corporate Tax Prep's end-of-season off-site "celebration," I was talking to my friend Cagey about my sudden awareness of motherhood's altered perspective.

I found myself in another conversation at Dave & Buster's (yes, this is where the "team building" was held) with a guy I've never met before but who works for my company.  This second conversation was similar to the first, though a bit more alcohol-induced. 

Cagey and I were talking about how motherhood changes the way you look at things. I pointed out on her blog yesterday or the day before that I see the issue of immigration as a family issue.  One of my students told me in class last night that one of her nuclear family members (and she's in her late forties and has been in this country most of her life) is still undocumented.  I mention this because I think most people see immigrants as single people who can just be sent back, but I see them as members of a family - some of the family members have probably been born here and are thus Americans - and some of the family are not.  You send back part of a family, and what happens to the rest?  Besides ripping a family apart, you've also introduced a whole new other host of problems for the American taxpayers. 

I guess I see almost every issue as a family issue, now that I have one.  The little angel's head teacher at Toddler High unexpectedly lost her husband on Monday.  My good friend L's close friends lost their toddler unexpectedly tonight.  I can't even bring myself to call her yet, because I can't bear to think about a toddler suddenly dying.  I can't think about it, because I will throw up. Because I can't let myself think anything horrible could ever, ever happen to the little angel. 

It's as if having her in my life flipped the lens through which I view the world from choice "A" to choice "B," just like during an eye exam:  You can see through both lenses just fine, but there's a sharper edge to one.  One just seems more clear, though it's hard to put your finger on exactly why.

I'm in the same romantic relationship than I was before her, but now it's got a new definition.  I have the same friends, but I see some of them differently than I did before.  I now understand the mothers better than I did before I became one.  I've become less judgmental of everyone.  I'm softer around the edges mentally and emotionally than I was.  My new glasses mean that I can't watch a Lifetime movie without crying, but at the same time, I'm suddenly able to make heart-wrenching career and personal decisions without flinching or faltering.  There is no discussion for me when it comes to her.  She's changed my worldview.

And just as she's changed it now, as a toddler, I know I'll see the world through lens "C" when she enters grade school and probably "D" when she starts driving and "E" when she goes off to college.  I'll probably go blind by the time she gets married and be wearing bifocals when she calls to tell me she's finally given birth, MY GOD MOTHER WHY DID THE EPIDURAL TAKE SO LONG?

This conversation I had at the team-building thing was with a childless man.  He was asking me to guess his age (one of my least favorite games, especially with people I have to see again), so I pegged him at between 29 and 35, though he could've been anything. I had no idea.  He first told me he owns a plane, then he told me he's 35.  I have no idea if either is true.  He said that he feels 28, and I said, hell, who doesn't?  I feel 25 even though I often have to realize that I'm the adult in the room, and if I don't pay attention to where the sharp objects are located, someone's going to get hurt.

So despite my extreme trepidation, I'm going to call L. and see if she's okay or wants to talk about the toddler.  And I took a peace lily over to the daycare for the little angel's teacher, who is having an understandably hard time getting past the fact that her husband was dead on the couch when she got home from work.  All this heaviness would've made me sad three years ago, but it weighs on my heart like lead now.  Like lead.

Karen from Troll Baby Graphics is designing me a fancy-schmancy new blog job.  It has wheat and witches and cool trees and it's all stuff I could've never, ever, EVER done on my own.  She said it will be up sometime today or tomorrow - it's like childbirth - they say "Oh, you'll deliver on April 13. No, 12th.  No, 6th...or maybe the 24th.  But trust me, we won't let you go into May."  Then you walk around your block seventeeny-million times looking like a deranged hippo, swearing and leaning on your husband as though he might soon spout chocolate martinis.  Then you go to the hospital and the send you home, then bring you back, then give you morphine,then say the epidural lady is just down the hall for two hours. Then your OB drops your little angel's placenta on the floor.

And then, you have something new.

The suspense...it kills me.

I had to find all the little pieces of my head lying around the house this morning before I could go to work.  Part of the problem is that I'm sick, and so is the little angel and my beloved, and the little angel and I were on the couch from about two in the morning on last night and midnight on the night before.  Part of the problem is that while my writer's conference was the best use of $130 I've had in a long, long time, it caused the very messy business of my head exploding with all the things I must do to get this project in any sort of working order before I seriously seek an agent.

Like so many things in life, it was life-changing in a good and bad way.

Part of my problem is TIME.  What with the searching for the day job (my contract at Large Corporate Tax Prep has five weeks left on it and counting), finishing up the semester at the community college (fourteen essays, each four pages long and with three outside sources done in MLA style coming my way in two weeks - oh, and I haven't recorded one grade yet in my computer all semester long - ack), working on this book project and balancing Toddler Birthday Season (because every toddler I know was born in March, April or May) is kicking my ass. Not just a little bit. It's all kicking it a lot.

Which brings me to the issue of identity. What is mine?  My job thinks I should be focusing on my career, and which position I take here next will largely shape that.  My class thinks I should be focusing on them, and rightly so - they want to know what's on the dang final.  My daughter and husband are begging for my time, and really - they are THE most important thing and are getting as big of a piece as I can possibly give them (well, my daughter at least - my beloved is probably going to join Abandoned Spouses Anonymous soon).  Where is the book?  Where is the blogging?  I'm hanging on to them by my fingernails, because that is the part of this whole big mess of my life that is still ME.  It's what I wanted to do when I was a little girl - be a writer, discuss the larger and smaller issues of life with other, like-minded people.  If I let that one slide out of my fingers, I'm going to wake up twenty years from now with the little angel calling me hung over from college and wondering what I liked to do before she came along in the first place.

My biggest fear in life is losing sight of me.  I understand how much I love my child and my husband, friends and family. What gets in the way sometimes is forgetting how much I love me.

I had a crap year last year.  My beloved got on the right track with his career, and we've spent a lot of time nurturing his entrepreneurship.  I got depressed because I wasn't sure when my ship would ever sail.  The little angel never slept, and I realized that not even my basic physical needs were being met - the need for sleep,the need to eat healthy food and exercise and laugh.  Once I got the physical needs under control, I realized I had long been neglecting my existential need to practice my own free will and do something about me and my interests. 

I've been trying to behave in a more loving way toward myself this year, and as a result, I'm more invigorated than I've been in years, but I'm also BUSIER.  I'm not sure how to make it all happen.  I'm not sure how other people make it happen. My best friend and I were discussing this, and we came to the conclusion that people are either sacrificing a lot of sleep or their own interests in the name of Career, Marriage and Family.  Does it have to be this way?  Are you doing it all?  If so, can you please tell me how you find the time to do it?

I think this is the biggest question for me right now.  How can I be true to self without becoming a distant wife and absent mother?  How can I be good to others without forgetting to be good to me?

So tomorrow I'm going to a writer's conference here in Kansas City.  It's for the Missouri Writer's Guild.  We're going to write about deer and moonshine.  No, just kidding, though I know, I KNOW that's what some of you on the coasts think we are all about here in the flyover states.  See?  I caught you.

Actually, I have a fifteen-minute pitch with a fancy-pants NYC agent who will probably wear black, sniff disgustedly down her hipper-than-thou glasses at me, and reaffirm my deepest-held conviction that my writing does actually suck.  However, I've spent hours upon hours upon hours on my proposal and have some really, really, REALLY cool people working on the project with me, so I'm hoping at the very least to get some decent feedback I can then use to target the superstar agent who will catapault me and mine to fame in two years or fewer.

Hey, baby, everyone's got a dream. Wish me luck!

I really thought that after the discussions of heroin, body piercings, c-sections and Jamaican pre-operative transvestite prostitutes, there was nothing my students could say to surprise me.

Ha.

Last night after a lengthy lecture on grammar and a depressing discussion of MLA style, I turned the conversation to considering the source.  I told them my father always said to make sure I knew who sponsored the study before I spouted the statistics.  I know from working at Large Corporate Tax Prep that the glass is half-empty or half-full at fifty percent - it just depends on whose budget it's coming out of.  To drive home the fact that we're all good liars, we played "Two Truths and a Lie."

Usually this is a drinking game, but since I could tell some of my students were minutes away from a drink anyway, I decided we should abstain.  One of them is about to have a baby, after all.  It turned out that we actually knew a lot about each other from the random class conversations we'd already had.  One student, a girl that I knew was originally from Mexico, gave as her list she was a) twenty years old b) a native of Chihuahua, Mexico and c) the owner of a Chihuahua dog.

She is only eighteen. I knew that, so I won this round.  However, I went ahead to ask where Chihuahua is in Mexico.  Feeling ignorant as usual when confronted by an at-least-bilingual immigrant to this country (I used to work with a whole lot of them, me, paltry monolingual idiot that I am), I mentioned I didn't know there was a city named Chihuahua.  Probably not, because apparently it's a state. Oops.  Then L. went on to say that Chihuahuas are from there.  Makes sense, right?

Then she told me there are wild packs of Chihuahuas that live in the hills in caves.

I pondered this. In my mind's eye, I was visualizing wild packs of rat dogs terrorizing old Mexican ladies wearing black lace veils over their gray hair.  Old men waving specially-shaped guitars in anger at town hall meetings held near a church with an adobe steeple and belfry repenting the day some idiot decided the feral Chihuahuas should be a protected species.  Osama Bin Ladin sharing a meager crust of bread with his only cave-dwelling friend, a wild Chihuahua named Jose Ricardo Gonzalez III.

I think she might've been yanking my chain.  L. knows I don't know Jack about Mexico.  I actually just tried to play it cool, considering I would do frantic Internet research later.

I spent about ten minutes today Googling Chihuahuas in the hopes of finding pictures of cave-dwelling ankle-biters to post here for you, but I came up really dry. There is a school of thought that they descended from the fox, though, just so you know.

Woof.

You may have noticed my new warning flag in the left sidebar.  Yesterday I was part of an interesting dialogue concerning freedom of speech and writer's rights. 

We who blog put forth our words for free in the hopes that they will make people we don't know snort Diet Coke out of their noses, or for cathartic purposes, or maybe even because we don't have anyone else to talk to at that exact point of the day.  That said, we still don't want anyone else to take our words and mess with them, even if it's done in the name of new and delicious traffic for us.

Hence the age-old question - which is better, fame or fortune?  Is it better to have additional traffic and become more well-known even if people do not pay you for your writing?  Or is it better to retain the movie rights for your story about your Nuvaring?  I'm being a little tongue-and-cheek here, but it is an important question to ask, and one that is coming to the forefront as mainstream media starts looking to bloggers for material.

The other side of this conversation, and the one that the flag addresses, is the idea of self-censorship in order to appeal more to mainstream media.  For instance, I doubt highly mainstream media would appreciate my frequent use of the f-bomb.  It's not so appropriate when you're owned by a conglomerate.  It's not really appropriate in the workplace, either, and that's why I channel all of my hostility and repressed curse words into my blog...it's the one place I can swear like a sailor and not fear the judgment of the daycare workers or the vice president of my department.  My blog is my house, and I'll do whatever I want in my house.  Even walk around naked.

But yet...I want the traffic.  I want to be heard.  I want my words to be in the world.  I'll admit...I even want to be famous.  I think every writer does - otherwise why would we be vain enough to think that other people care what we have to say? So yes, I do want the syndication. I do want the traffic. I just have to ask myself at what price will I get it.  That's a hard question, and I admit one I've never really thought about before, chiefly because these opportunities for normal people to get significant readership have only come about since the advent of the Internet.  And until blogs, most web pages were more about cool design (which I don't know how to do) than they were about writing. My blog, in some way, has been a dream come true - an opportunity to get people in North Carolina (yeah, I saw you in my statcounter, dawg) that I don't even know to read about the little angel's adventures in Toddler High.  Or my own fears about reproduction.  Or my thoughts on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or our president, or the mental state of my composition students.  I suddenly can have an active dialogue with fifteen women from all over the country that I've never physically met about the word "fuck."

And that, Internet, is what it's all about.  Opening up the dialogue.  Expanding your social circle. 

Feeling heard.

*****Updated to add...

For more on this topic, check out Jenn Satterwhite's post on BlogHer.

The snake is why I'm not in Eden anymore, and I don't need it walking around my neighborhood.

This weekend there was this guy walking around with two huge constrictors wrapped around his arms.  He was also holding a beer. 

Me:  "Hey, what kind of snakes are those?"

Snake Man:  "A boa constrictor and a python."

Me:  "Don't you have to restrain them in some fashion?"  (Here I looked pointedly down at my delicious little angel.)

Snake Man:  (shrugging shoulders and taking a gulp of beer):  "I don't think so."

So I thought about it all weekend.  Today, I shared this story with my co-workers at lunch.

M:  "Well what're you going to do, put it on a leash?"

Me:  "Well, I think a snake should be restrained in some fashion."

M: "Do you also think the snake should have to wear little sweaters in the winter?"

We argued about it all through lunch until finally we made a bet.  I bet that it was illegal just to carry snakes around, and he bet that the Animal Control department would laugh at me if I asked.  So I called them.

It turns out that you can have some pretty strange pets in Kansas City, Missouri, though nothing omnivorous or carnivorous that also happens to be a mammal. Oh, and no venomous snakes.  Constrictors, however, are A-OK with the City of Fountains. I did have a lengthy conversation with the animal-control guy, who said that when constrictors were more popular in the nineties, people used to take them to bars.  One guy came home from the bar, wasted, and fell asleep.  The snake apparently constricted around his neck and nearly killed him.  Apparently, there's also another woman who lives at 47th and Euclid who has crocodiles.  As in plural - more than one crocodile.  The only comment the animal-control guy had on that was "I bet she doesn't get robbed much."

As I continued arguing that maybe carrying a large python was more dangerous than carrying a beer (he argued I should call the police to come get him for open-container "which is against the law," though apparently "handling a four-inch thick reptile who wants to squeeze the lifeblood out of Little Bunny Foo Foo" is JUST FINE), he said I should call the police the next time I saw him drinking in public.  As I was about to hang up in disgust, he gave me the number of a local herpetologist, for whom I left a voice mail.  Hopefully he'll call me back.  I will have revenge on the Snake Guy.