Extraordinary Thing #37: Giving Up Sweets

I don’t know if you are supposed to broadcast what you give up for Lent, but I gave up sweets. Just desserts, pastries, candy and all that good, life-giving stuff. People give up far more difficult things, of course, like meat. I talked to a girl today who gave up corn products, and as you know, everything on America’s shelves is made of corn or some derivative. Somebody else I heard of actually gave up his house and is living in a homeless shelter. I certainly can’t relate to that degree of self-denial.

But it is hard, extra hard because I’m pregnant, not to indulge my sweet tooth. I yelled at the TV the other night because that stupid Bart Simpson commercial was on, and he kept saying the word “doughnut.” I see all the recipes on Pinterest and walk by the table of cookies after church on Sundays and it’s not like I can’t hear them calling to me. But resisting temptation is part of the exercise of Lent, so I try to welcome it. It’s even become a little bit of a game: How long can the pregnant lady go without eating the cookie? What about that coffee cake? Can she resist the crumbly golden-brown topping just inches from her fork?

I chose sweets because it seems at times like they have too much power over me. I don’t like being ruled by my sugar cravings. For the past five years or so, my relationship with sweets could be described as dysfunctional. I regress into a two-year-old when in the presence of sweets. Unfortunately, I am a binger. I will eat an entire pan of brownies or a roll of slice-and-bake cookies or stand over the dessert table at a wedding wolfing down marshmallows from the fondue fountain until I feel sick. I think the medical term is stuffyourfaceuntilyoufeelsickaphobia, and it’s what happens when you like the taste of sweets so much that you are willing to forget about what happens post-chewing and swallowing. The guilt. The tummy aches. The not-so-great feeling you get from devouring an unhealthy amount of a substance that in moderation would be fine.

This sweets fast is necessary for me. So I am glad that I gave up sweets for Lent, and I do feel better about myself, about being in control, and my ability to moderate my sugar intake. Instead, I have devoured a lot of fruit, especially blueberries, strawberries and oranges, which are almost as good. But oh. Oh. I am aware how much better a day is when you know you are going to get ice cream at the end of it. Or how much a gooey dessert punctuates a satisfying meal, like an exclamation point. I realize all over again how much pleasure I find in a s’more, hot and crispy and melting from the fire pit. Or the perfect bliss of sharing a plate of slice-and-bake cookies with a good friend. I definitely don’t feel swayed from my love for sweets, the way you get over a bad boyfriend. I just feel like we haven’t seen each other in awhile, and maybe when we meet again, it will be on new and improved terms. My terms.

Cheers to moderation.

Extraordinary Thing #36: Gray Hair

I see one, then another. They are popping up, short and wiry, close to my hairline, not long enough to smooth down. They have a coarse texture and a violent kink. They are not good for anything but plucking. They are my gray hairs.

I studied them in the rearview mirror this morning and managed to grab one with my fingers. It came out and I was startled to see it was completely white. It’s not that this is a new problem. The hair near my temples, fortunately not the top layer, is almost completely gray, and it seems like now I need my hair colored like once a month. It is just a weird moment when you pull a stark white hair from your own head. It is a reality check when you realize you will be fighting the grays for the rest of your life. Who will win the battle today—you or the vertical little rebel hairs? Unfortunately for me, it seems like they’re coming out on top (bad pun intended).

What is extraordinary about getting gray hair? I am seeking the answer but my vanity keeps getting in the way. The secret lies, I think, somewhere between living long enough to get them, plenty of ways to cover them up and the peculiar joy that comes from accepting that I am getting older and there’s no need to pretend otherwise. I will be 32 this year and I feel less old than when I turned 30, more like a ripe peach sitting out in the sun. I think so many people in their 30s are more beautiful than in their 20s. They have that air of having lived about them. They look like they have settled into their own selves.

So I will make an appointment to have my roots done, and I will count my grays as a sign that I have lived. The more grays, the deeper and happier my memories. The more experiences I gain, the more of me I can give to my children. And the more I gray, the more I have loved.

There. Now hand me the damn tweezers.

Extraordinary Thing #35: Perspective on the Suburban Life

I sat in the cold metal seat with a number in my hand. I had been there for hours. All around me babies cried, cell phones buzzed and people shuffled or doodled or just looked numb. The line still wound out the door, and the policeman kept yelling at people who tried to cut the line, thinking they wouldn’t ever get through this thick crowd to one of the little windows where somebody actually listens to you. It reminded me a little of the DMV, but it was the Department of Human Services in Davidson County, and I was there trying to get state health insurance for myself and my baby—I was pregnant and uninsured at the time.

It wasn’t the first afternoon I would spend in that room, feeling weirdly lost in a sea of numbers and need. I had to come back again and again to be approved for Medicaid and then after Jack was born, I went back again to submit more forms to keep the Medicaid. As I left the first time, I saw a huge rat dart down the street under the overpass hugging the low gray brick building. I shivered when I saw its scuttling hindquarters disappear beneath a dumpster.

During Jack’s first year of life, I also spent a lot of snowy mornings sitting in the drab WIC office picking up my vouchers for formula, baby food, eggs, peanut butter, tuna and milk. Every time I was there, I remember feeling like a misfit. What was I, a nice middle-class girl who went to college, doing here? Surely some kind of cosmic oversight had placed me in this room by mistake. But gradually it settled over me: I was no different than the other poor people who sat in the chairs beside me, waiting for the harried person behind the glass to call their name. It was meaningless how they were dressed or what color their skin was or how they smelled or whether they spoke English. Jack played with their kids. We sometimes smiled at each other. Bottom line, we were all poor enough to need free groceries. Because I sat in those chairs in those rooms, I saw that nothing separates us, not in any way that matters.

Now that I have health insurance through Erik’s job and we live in an affluent part of Texas, I am pregnant again. But I don’t sit in hard metal chairs in overcrowded rooms or doctor’s offices for hours. Instead, I wait in a doctor’s office decorated like a 19^th century parlor, with plush, overstuffed couches and glass pendant lamps. I am seen right away. I don’t have to submit form after form to convince a caseworker that I am eligible for benefits. I just get them. The other people in the waiting room are dressed in Frye boots and cowl-neck sweaters. Everything is very, very clean.

Here, I rarely see anyone who looks like they need a hot shower and a good meal. I just see shopping malls and restaurants and people with money to spend. I don’t suppose that’s a bad thing. It’s simply the quiet insulation that comes with moving from a city to a suburb. It’s the absence of things like panhandlers on street corners and the thumping blades of the crime helicopter that used to circle above our house at night.

But I like my new living arrangements. I like that there is no trash or visible poverty; all around are good schools and clean grocery stores. I really could get used to this comfortable lifestyle that caters to whatever I want to eat or buy. But I am troubled. I am troubled at how recently I was dependent on government assistance, yet don’t pause on my way to the doctor to remember the desperation of not being able to get medical care. Just a year ago, I handed my WIC vouchers to the supermarket cashier to receive free groceries, but I now casually swipe my debit card, no longer exercising the humility that comes with dependence. I’ve experienced a bit of hardship, but I’m still so naïve. And I kind of hate that.

I want to look at my new suburban life and all its comforts and know that I don’t deserve it or need it—and it’s not reality for many people. For one reason or another, I may not be as needy as I once was—it’s a complex choreography, how our choices lead us to our circumstances and vice versa. But I do know that when perceptions of reality are not challenged, no matter where we live, we start living with our heads in the sand. Our perspective dims like the light through a ship’s porthole and we stop seeing anything except what’s right in front of us.

Maybe I can make a way of life here in the suburbs that reconciles what I experienced before with what I experience now. Even though I don’t sit next to people in squalid rooms, how can I still care about my neighbor? How can I remember the humanity that underpins the darker, needier, messier side of life? How can I seek out a way of life that is paved with awareness and sensitivity, and that is not unintentionally myopic?

To start, I can write and think about how to take action, ways I can reach through the suburban veneer to the needs that I know lie not far beneath. I can let myself be bothered by the social and economic issues I was a part of not so very long ago. Maybe out of sight is not out of mind if I am careful. Possibly it’s less about guilt and more about remembering.

As much as is within my power, I can appreciate the soft couches but remember those hard metal seats.

 

Extraordinary Thing #34: Homemade Oven Cleaner (holy smokes)!

Today I made my own oven cleaner from this recipe. It’s not because the idea sounded especially fun or down to earth. It also wasn’t because I wanted to avoid chemicals leaching into our food. It was the only way to get to my end goal, which was gobbling a hot, fresh loaf of banana bread. Stat.

You see, the other day we had a raging grease fire in our oven.

I had let grease spill in the bottom of the oven and apparently never cleaned it. (oops!) So when I wasn’t home, Erik innocently tried to bake a lil’ something and said the whole oven caught on fire. It was a really big, dangerous fire, as kitchen fires go. He said he was terrified and threw water on it, which you aren’t supposed to do with a grease fire, but he was afraid the flames would engulf the whole house. Jack, meanwhile, watched all this from his highchair. All three smoke alarms started going off and they had to open every door and window in the house. I’m glad I wasn’t there.

Afterward, we realized we were out of oven cleaner, and I can’t breathe that stuff in anyway. We let the oven sit there and smolder for a few days until I realized that I wanted banana bread in the WORST way, and I had three perfect overripe bananas sitting on my counter. So I had to clean the oven SOMEHOW.

That’s when I sprang into action. Well, let’s be honest, I’m not moving all that fast these days… So words like “whipped up” a batch of homemade oven cleaner are kind of deceitful. I laboriously mixed and stirred it all together, sprinkled the oven with baking soda and sprayed on the concoction, gagging the whole time (vinegar, blech!). Then, when I should have been enjoying my moment of crunchy housewife glory, I ate Kroger mac and cheese from the box while waiting for the cleaner to do its work. Then I waited and waited. I’m still waiting, actually. Maybe I’ll get my banana bread by midnight.

So I don’t know whether the oven cleaner works or not, which is why this isn’t a review or a how-to. I am just saying that whether or not you are all into scrubbing your wood table with sea salt and lemons, homemade cleaning products are actually pretty easy to make. I might, if I’m forced, make my own oven cleaner again sometime. I believe that falls under the category “extraordinary.” That’s all.

Extraordinary Thing #33: Apartment Therapy

It’s difficult for me to live in an apartment. It’s difficult to go from living in a house in Nashville to living in an apartment in Texas. It’s hard to give up a backyard and live at the top of a tall staircase. It’s hard to have a noisy, vigorous 2-year-old in a small, cramped space, with neighbors who continually report you for noise violations. It’s hard to have your mother-in-law stay with you for eight days when her air mattress is in the living room.

I will stop complaining … eventually.

This morning, when I woke up, I saw a sinkful of dirty dishes. I saw a thick layer of dirt on the balcony where Jack had dumped out my flower pots. I saw beige walls as far as the eye could see (which was about 700 square feet). I saw an apartment that I cannot wait to be rid of.

It took being very intentional not to blame all the woes of my life on living in an apartment. I decided to TRY to find SOMETHING I liked about living here in this apartment. I felt that I should, since I named this blog Everyday Extraordinary, blah blah blah…

So I opened a window, which is a good way to wake up and fall asleep in Texas, by the way. It was warm and windy outside and I could hear the sound of water bubbling from the brook below. The same brook that Jack loves throwing sticks and acorns in “for the ducks.” Cue shrieks of “Duckies! Duckies! Go swim!” OK, I like the brook. I like the ducks.

I also like the fact that a magical apartment fairy whisks away our trash from outside the door every night. We have not ever carried the trash to the dumpster. It’s nice to have bags of smelly diapers disappear from under your nose.

I also have to take ownership for the stuff that is in our apartment. It is ours … just in disarray. Like the dirty dishes. And even though I don’t like how our stuff fits in the apartment, I do like our stuff. While Jack was sleeping and the toys were mostly picked up, I walked around and looked at some of my favorite objects. This is what I saw.

These little things will make anywhere we live feel like home. Like the only houseplant that survived our move to Texas. Or the fingerprint tree our friends made for us before we left. Or the vintage chair that is at least a gazillion years old and is my project in waiting.

There you have it, folks… I have decided to go clean up the dishes and be a modicum less whiny. But don’t think I wont ask Erik when he gets home, “So you want to look at houses on Trulia later?” Because I definitely, definitely will.