Lyric Christmas

After a tough year, and especially after the terrible events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I wanted to write some lyrics for an eventual Christmas song. I have always wanted to write a song, and I love Christmas music. The odd combination of all the negatives recently somehow allowed me to get into the right frame of mind to write what I had in mind. As I was preparing to write, I realized that I don't recall ever hearing a Christmas song that was a lullaby sung by Mary to her newborn. There are songs Mary sings (Breath of Heaven) and there are lullabies (the rocking carol), but I don't know of someone combining these ideas. So I wrote this.

Mary's Lullaby

Heart of my heart
Love of my life
Sleep with the peace
Of heaven tonight.

Sent as a miracle
Of God's selfless love,
You give us a glimpse
Of life up above.

I don't understand
Why I am the one
Who was entrusted
With God's only son,

But I'll give my heart
And soul to the cause
To nurture this spirit
Despite all my flaws.

Remember, my baby,
Though long be the night,
Though cold may be gripping,
God always shines light.

When it snows, it pours...

Yes, I know that's not really the old adage. But it is accurate for my day. Today is one of those days that, looking back, I realize it would have been better to spend it in bed. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to list all the things that went wrong.

1. It snowed quite a bit where I live over the last few days, and then turned bitterly cold and blizzardlike, preventing me from returning to my house from my in-laws' like I usually would on a Sunday night.
2. While most of the schools surrounding the one I work in called for a 2 hour late start sometime last night, mine didn't until 7:30 this morning (or at least, that's when they notified the teachers), making me stress out about not making it in for the beginning of school.
3. It took me 3 hours to make the usually-2 hour drive from my in-laws' house to my school this morning. This was probably equally due to the icy road conditions and people who were at times driving too slowly.
4. Nearly all the way to school, after I realized I would still be significantly late, I accidentally slid into the person in front of me at a red light. Luckily, she got out and inspected her car and couldn't find anything on it, so she told me to go on.
5. When I got into the child care center to drop off the boys, I heard the bell ring for the first of the classes I hadn't sent lesson plans in for, so I had to run with no supplies on hand to get to the classroom for that class. Needless to say not much got done that period.
6. My 6th hour freshmen were in rare form today, loud and complaining about everything, even after I told them I was having a crappy day and it'd be nice if I didn't have to yell at them, too. Sigh.
7. Just after school got out, I checked a message on my phone saying that my older son had woken up from his nap at preschool with really goopy eyes and they hurt and itched. Great.
8. I called to get him a doctor's appointment, but all the appointments were gone; I'd have to go to the walk-in clinic.
9. I drove nearly the whole way home before I realized I forgot my purse at school and had to go all the way back to get it.
10. By the time I got back from that, I had to go straight to the doctor's office to go to the walk-in clinic.
11. The doctor confirmed that my son had pinkeye and he couldn't go to preschool tomorrow.
12. At the pharmacy, they tell me that the kids' insurance wasn't working and that they were out of the eyedrops.
13. At pharmacy #2, the kids are running everywhere (literally!) while I'm trying to find cotton balls to wash the gunk out of my kid's eyes.

Needless to say, I am DONE with this day. Hence, we stopped one more time after all of that running, to get McDonald's for dinner. Once I hit "publish" on this bad boy, I'm going to have a beer and watch silly TV shows and then go to bed.

In Limbo.

Hello out there,

I am OK. Just trying to get my bearings now that life is on plan H right now (if Plan A was how life was pre-May of this year).

Quick summary: After my husband was let go by his company, we both scrambled to find a job. I am a teacher by profession, but had not planned to go back until all of our children were in school, and I was hoping to have another in the near future. So now, child #3 is on hold and I have to put the kids in daycare so I can teach. I only managed to find a part time job, which is maddening because a part-time teacher puts in nearly the same hours as a full time teacher, but is paid less. I teach four different classes, two of which are not English, so I am trying not to show my students that I am not an expert in those fields.

Then, my husband got a new job, which is fabulous, only it's 2 hours away from our home. So now he is staying at his parents' house for most of the work week to commute to work and coming home on the weekends and Wednesday nights. My job is about 20 minutes from our home, so at least the kids and I can stay here and have some semblance of normalcy, minus having Daddy home all the time. We all miss him tons and he misses us too, but what can we do? My school will finish in May and then we will look at renting something much closer to the big city he works in, and I will look for a job more in that vicinity if we decide I still need to work.

While I hate having to leave the boys for the majority of their waking hours, my older boy loves going to "school" for nearly the whole day (they do incorporate a preschool curriculum in the morning at least), and his brother, while usually a bit sad when I have to leave, is always happy and running up with a hug when I come back to pick him up in the afternoon. He talks so well all of the staff there can't stop raving about it every time I talk to them. Yeah, he is pretty brilliant, if you ask his heavily biased mother. :)

So now I'm trying to reconfigure my schedule to allow adequate time for cleaning the house and exercising, and I haven't really figured out time for writing my blog either. Hopefully I'll be back to regular posting in the next few months, but that remains to be seen. Know that I would love to be writing poetry here every day, I just have a ton of things to figure out how to juggle right now...

Adding a little color.

I am determined to keep some semblance of normalcy in my life at this stage of great uncertainty, so I signed up for The Color Run Twin Cities when I saw a friend had run the one in Seattle and it looked incredibly fun. I can say it's probably the second-most fun of any race I've run. First place has to go to the Disneyland Half Marathon, which I've done twice.

Yesterday was very hot (a high of about 92) and we started near 10AM, but as this "race" isn't even officially timed, it wasn't a big deal. Yes, people take their time, and I heard a few people talking about turning around and doing a few parts again...I'm talking about the "color zones," where volunteers with squirt bottles (or sometimes their bare hands) color runners up with dyed cornstarch. Each zone is a different color, so we ran through orange, then yellow, then pink, then blue. At the end of the run, you assemble in front of a stage where they pump dance music, and every 15 minutes, they count down to a "mass color throw," where each runner opens an individual packet of an assorted color and throws it into the air simultaneously. I've never seen or experienced anything like it. It's an art project on a massive (19,000 runner) scale, and everyone had a great time. I highly recommend it to anyone, even if you've never done a 5K before...many people walked at least half the distance, and no one cares who comes in first or last. It's all about the color.

Color Runner

Approaching the zone,
looking like a Technicolor sandstorm,
the crowd cheers as they are doused
with gritty beauty.

Fragmented rainbows fly
across the skyline,
adding smiles to sweaty faces,
the cherry to top a perfect morning.

The color may wash, blow, or fade away,
but the joyful memory endures forever.

Well.

Profuse apologies for my prolonged absence. Hopefully this post will help to explain my silence.

I have a lot to be grateful for. I have a wonderful husband who treats me like a princess, and two beautiful, healthy little boys who are just the sweetest and funniest little people I have ever had the pleasure to know.

Our family got punched in the gut about six weeks ago. We had just finalized the short sale of our house in the big city and were looking forward to just enjoying our small town life with only one mortgage to pay. I vividly remember telling my husband how happy I was just a few days before it happened.

That Friday in the middle of May, our world started to collapse in a bit. I came home from the library at lunchtime to find my husband in the kitchen. He'd been laid off with no warning. We haven't even been in our little town for a year, and suddenly my husband is scrambling (again!) to find a job. We don't have as much safety net anymore, so I am looking for teaching jobs even though I was hoping to wait until our kids were all in school before going back to work. We will likely have to move because our little town is too far from the nearest major city to commute and job prospects are pretty slim out here.

We cried for a few days. I mourned that we won't be able to have another baby anytime soon, when I was originally hoping for next spring. We are still angry. But we're trying our best to move on.

So now you see why I've been absent...I have been pouring all of my energy into job searching. I have had several interviews but no offers yet. I may not even have to work if my husband gets a job that pays enough, but I guess we'll see. Good thoughts and/or prayers are gladly accepted at this time.

One true blessing of all this crap is that I can show my husband that he's more than just a breadwinner to me. I have been trying my best to be supportive of him and remind him that it wasn't his fault, and that what he is supposed to do will come about in the right time. But it is hard to be patient. Sigh.

National Poetry Month #7.

I'm clearly behind now. I have my work cut out for me today!

13. Run around your house and grab 5 items that all begin with the same letter. Write a poem as an ode to one of these items or that includes these items.


Items: Beer, basket, backpack, book, bobblehead

Baskets spilling over with abundance of toys,
books scattered pell mell over the floor,
backpack bursting with unread materials,
bobbleheads gathering dust,
all need to wait
for me to finish my beer.

14. Think of the nicest thing someone ever said to you. Write a poem about a rainy day and something flooding. End the poem with the good thing someone said.

The steady pattering and buffeting wind
hasn't let up all day.
Obliged to stay indoors, little boys
press their faces against the window,
watching the slow streams
run out of the drainpipes onto the lawn.
Slowly at first, but inexorably,
a forgotten bucket fills with water.
After a dramatic, though unseen
moment of surface tension,
it runs over the edge to christen the azaleas.
This sudden flood
echoes the feeling I had upon reading
a letter from my sister some years ago.
While our love was clear,
we don't speak much of our feelings.
This made her admission to me
all the more poignant:
"I hold you up as an example for my children."

15. Write a poem that describes the wallpaper on your computer or the image on the last postcard you received.



Countless stars, pinpoints of light
representing unseen worlds
enveloped in the black, airless void
encompassing space.
A cold, inhospitable environment
made warmer by a sudden burst
of pink, white and pale blue.
Is it the birth of a new star?
The explosion of a star at the end of its life?
Or simply another mystery of the cosmos?

16. Make a list of ten images of things you have seen in the last 24 hours. Use all of them in a poem.
The first, intrepid housefly
perches on the sheet music, studying
the markings.

Dark blue yarn wraps around silvery needles
as sinuously as dancers performing
an Argentine tango.
a dark-eyed boy shrieks with delight,
revealing his face suddenly to his brother,
coming starkly into view, as in
a freshly-wiped mirror,
or as objects below a forked tongue of lightning.

Blue-eyed boy so deep in concentration
he doesn't see me coming.
He's busy digging a hole he can go in.
His brother backs in for
a patented toddler hug:
leaning forward, sitting on my lap
with my arm around him.

17. Write a poem that includes these words: bamboozled, bloodlust, bibliography. Have the title include one of these words: contradiction, constellation, cranberry.

Mr. Contradiction
He could be in the bibliography
of a book on bloodlust.
His victims bamboozled
by his gentle façade,
they willingly follow him
into a velvet-lined trap.
By the time they realize
something is amiss,
it is far too late.
Their fate is sealed,
they're marked for doom
as he smiles and seals their fate.

National Poetry Month, section 6.

11. Write a poem that begins with the last thing you can remember someone saying to you today or yesterday. See if you can use that line two or three times.


Retail Therapy
"Sure, because we NEED something."
Not so much a need as a want.
Not so much a want as a moment
to indulge oneself in a pleasure
that is solely selfish, a break
in days upon days of selfless tasks:
running after tiny, stumbling feet,
wiping constantly runny noses,
kissing boo-boos and wiping messy bottoms.
"Sure, because we NEED something."
That one moment of selfishness
refuels us for countless more
of the selfless.

12. Turn on the radio to any channel. Write a poem inspired by the first thing you hear (lyrics to a song, a commercial, etc.)

Traffic reports.
Kind of irrelevant these days,
a newer resident of Smalltown USA.
Sure, they're still useful
when going to visit the in-laws,
but in general, a welcomely
discarded habit.
Generally nothing but open road,
deer and other wildlife
much more common
than taillights.