Saturday was a long day. A great day, as I got to see both of my chicks, but a long one.
My man and I are feeling our age. We're getting old. The most we said to each other on the way home was,
"it's your turn to drive."
"No, I can't see that good at night."
"Too bad, suck it up. You're driving."
We're all peace and love, flowers and butterflies around here. The usual. It's just how we roll.
We're just too old and tired to even really have a good fight. Tonight.
Tomorrow, watch out, we are coming back with a bang! But tonight, we're down for the count.

I awake on Sunday after a much needed long, super-enhanced service with Pillowtop Pentacostal, (totally amazing service, I must say!)...to a text that I had missed while I was in my coma church service.)
The first thing I notice is the time the text came in...’cause I'm a mom...and for some reason the mom trait amps up a few notches when you get that late night text or call. Something intuitive kicks in to your feeble mom brain and says..."Yo, the time. What time was it?! You need to know the time!!"
< Side note to future moms: timing is everything, and after years of teenage drama, this mama has learned the trick is when and where they say they are, were, & will be.
But this never happened to me. I only read about it and counseled others on rebellious teens. My girls never EVER tried to pull a fast one on me. Ever. Yeah, I'm lying. Go ahead, Judge me- but remember: your day is coming. Watch your back people, watch your back!>
So back to the text...that came in at freakin 3:04 a.m.
Really? Does this never end?!
I'm all instant diarrhea and freak out because that's become my go to action and emotion in times of crisis,happiness,anger...well, pretty much any emotion really. <I warn you: your day will come.>
The picture that follows the text is so gross, I won't post it...but it's captioned: "Mommy, this just happened!!!"
She's smiling in the photo. She is #2. She is totally responsible. Yet, she is sending me a picture of a bloody mess on her leg at 3:04 am.
(As of this moment, she is down to receiving only 2 gifts at Christmas, and those are totally up for grabs at this point.)

Me (9:17am): omigosh, what happened?! How?! You need to get hydrogen peroxide on that immediately. Then polysporin... (cause I'm freaking out over here and I was with you til 10 last night, Seriously, what-the-heck?)
#2 at (9:50 am): I fell out of a tree and hit a chair on the way down. So horrible. It's bad.
Me: can we face time?
#2: no, I'm late and need to get ready for church.

I feel it’s important to once again note the time. A 33 minute delay in her response...cause why? Well, she's sleeping of course! After all she’s tired. The crisis has passed and she's all, “leave me alone while I get my beauty rest.”

While I’m over here all diarrhea and stress.

And really moms, like how do you reply to that text? Here are a few thoughts that may or may not have run through my mind:

"Cut the crap, call me STAT!" see...this feels too harsh!?, I mean, I don't want to be that crazy, freaky, mom… I'm trying to bring my image of normal/calm/cool mom back.

 

So maybe I go with:

"Don't even bring God into this...I need answers, explanations, and Immodium AD."

Its just too over the top! And I just hate to name drop in a crisis, it seems so braggish...even though I feel like God would totally have had my back on this one.

I end up saying "Uhm, okay, please call me/face time me after church. I'm  super worried."...(like, for your ever-loving life child!)

So, at 7:42 pm... SEVEN FORTY TWO P.M….help me here. That aint even right...
I get this:
"Still bleeding, but better."

Oh, okay. Good. Cause you know I've been over here all smiles and calm, cause I'm a cool mom...not a regular mom...ya know just trying to improve my image and all. (and having massive internal stomach pains and on-demand diarrhea, oh, and acting strangely odd for the last 8 flippin hours as I pace around all 1000 sq ft of this joint wondering if I should get in my car and track you down like a serial killer or just stay home and self-medicate! Yeah, I’m all good. And, yes, I’m totally handling this separation thing well too...)
"#2, send a pic please!"
Too which I gasp as I stare at the pic...

"I think you need stitches! seriously."
"Boooo! No mama, NO!...stitches hurt."
I go for the jugular..."scars are bad, and scare people away! You may lose your leg! it looks serious."  & I follow up with: "face time me STAT!!!" (Not too cool, but people, I'm over it!)

She finally complies, and we face time...the wound is bad. It’s still bleeding. It’s also like a divot out of her leg...and yes, I'm practically a doctor, seriously. I've watched a few (or every season) episodes of ER, Gray’s Anatomy etc. so I'm totally proficient in medical things. And this is serious. Though evidently, just not serious enough to make verbal human contact with your mom til all the urgent care centers are closed.

#2 is now down to 1 lonely Christmas gift.
I'm sorry, it must be done. We all have consequences.
Do not feel sorry for her. Don't.

We finally get around to the whole, why were you in a tree at 3:00 am question…
"Duh, We can't have boys in our dorm past 2, and We can't go to any parties or we could be blacklisted from getting into a sorority."
Me: (cause evidently I'm an idiot) "Soooooo....someone had the bright idea to climb a tree?? I don't get it?!"
Silence.

Because this can't be understood by a 40-something mom who wasn't there at the time...because...well, just because. Period.
Whatever. I can’t even handle.

She's getting coal in her stocking this year and maybe thorns.

Today,only because the thought of figuring out how to get to classes with blood seeping down her leg was finally unbearable, (and quite frankly disgusting!) she finally made it to the school clinic.
Diagnosis from doctor (as they too are trying to wrap their mind around this story...but hey they are college doc’s so they give up and say):

“Here's what you need to do:
Antibiotic
No stitches ...because she waited TOO LONG!! & they fear they will trap bacteria in the wound and cause infection at this point.
Crutches for 3 weeks.
Tetanus shot. (Which, they may as well have taken her leg by the reaction she called me with. poor clinic doc! I feel for that woman, I do.)
Oh, And one other small thing. We are sending you over to see the orthopedic doc. (Who naturally had no availability on a Monday when tree climbing over the weekend was at an all-time high!)...so go ahead and bypass him and go straight to the ER.  

(What?!)
Yeah, I took this all really calmly...while hangin out in the toilet at my local HEB.
It's hard being cool. But someone has to do it.

I'll wrap this up:
The great news is, ER determined that nothing is broken, and she needs to heal by staying on crutches, keeping pressure off of it, and take antibiotics. They cleaned it well. Wrapped it up and she even got a handicap parking pass for 3 weeks.
She's debating the whole crutches part...too hard, too cumbersome, they hurt my arms..

In the words of your father: "Suck.it.up!"
besides,this is easy, I reply:

Stay out of trees at 3:00 am!! How hard is this, my friends? How hard is this?

Reporting live from the trenches (& the toilet) your fellow comrade in arms,

P
Motherhood is not for sissies...not even when they are in college

 

 

(ironically #2 gave this to me...& now you know why!)

PS: #2, thank you for the 5lb weight loss in the last 36 hours. As a small token of my appreciation, I will consider 1 small gift for you at Christmas.

 

 

The Ripping of #2

About 3 weeks ago #2 came to me with a very serious question:

"Mom, how am I going to keep my soap from getting soggy at school?"

"Uhm....we'll get you one of those travel soap box thingys?" 
"But then it will be wet after my shower & the soap will be weird!"
"Ok, honey, we'll get you some liquid soap then."
"No, I don't like the liquid kind, I like the kind you buy now..."
& so it began. The ultimate hunt for the travel type plastic soap dish that came with some type of a draining component that would keep the soap from getting soggy. Because you know they make something like this, right?! Because it’s for soap people. 
Soap. 
And lets be clear, soap is like...clean! So it’s not like soggy soap would breed germs. Right? 
But my child CAN.NOT. Get past the idea of soggy soap. EVER. Or at least not for the past 3 weeks…
and so the night before we leave to take her to college, she is in deep discussion with her dad over....yep. You guessed it, the darn soap!

I'd like the record to reflect that I was on my "A" game. Totally.

Printed car tag. Check.
An extra one, just in case? Check.
Welcome week activities, locations and times? Check.check.
I'm crossing "t's" and dotting "i's" like I was born a type A. I own this crap.
Except for the soap dish thingy that my compulsive #2 is still talking about. That, I do not own, nor could I find, nor think they even make anywhere in the world!…
My mind is echoing the quote, "The one thing she learned is that there is no way to be a perfect mother but a million ways to be a good one..." Echoes through my mind. 
A million ways...except for the soap thing!

Lord knows that I have shed at least a million tears, not that I have ever done the math,...but it averages out to be about 153 tears a day, but I doubled and tripled down on my tear flow during some of our drama to make sure that I was covered for the drier days! No lie. Totally serious. Cause life got real around my home...and I realized really quickly that with #2 & her awesome personality paired up with me and my awesome "laid back, let’s talk about it tomorrow and see how we feel, and if we don't feel it, then hey!, lets just blow it off" personality...tears were going to be a plenty..like from day 1!

Beautiful and painful all rolled into one messy home. 

...with extra estrogen. 

because God needed an example of comical, painful, with a whole lot of real...and thought, "hey, angels, gather round...let's land over on the Moore fam...they will never know what hit 'em! this will be fun!"

Evidently, someone, somewhere, needed humor, and that family they could point to and say, "well, it could be worse, we could be like them!"

So, Let me break it down...(which is far better than the actual breakdown I had to endure.) When you birth a laid back baby...you think, "look at me, and how I am so awesome and so blessed... but no! Heads up: Prepare for the future because its a trick!

They turn into strong willed, black and white because there is no grey..(that was just an accident of mixed NON-colors), I need a plan, I need to NOW, I need exact times,dates,expectations...type of child.

It happens overnight.

You go to bed. You wake up and they look at you and say, "Are you ready?" 

“For what?”
“You said we were going to the zoo.”
“I think I said we'd think about it.”
“Nope. You said....”
…& I swear it's on. Like Donkey Kong.

You can fight it, but really, surrender is better. Why fight a battle you can't win. 

Looking back, the time seems to lapse from moment to moment, one minute we are crying over dioramas...DIORAMAS!!

(seriously, just stab yourself now! It's an art project for moms, only I don't do art. I bribe crafty-art-mom friends to do art for me... Look, all I’m trying to say here is I know my limitations. bottom line: beware the DIORAMA! its the life-slayer, tear provoker, of mothers everywhere.)

and the next minute we are crying and because we are afraid we wont make the volleyball team. (*note:It was 7th grade, and in the end we made the team,-Thank you Jesus!- but i had endured a week of feeling like I had totally failed my #2. as in EPIC mom F.A.I.L...but c'mon now, who knew people were putting their kids in volleyball at 4 years old?! Please, go ahead and just stab your other arm now.)

Anyhooo....#2’s High school years brought:

heartache, friendships, homecomings, the ever ridiculous-over-the-top Texas size mum...(get a gun or start stabbing your legs at this point, or better yet just butter-up all those super-crafty-mom friends because mums are yet another art project for moms to look like losers! Sigh..i totally should have seen that one coming.) then there are sports, betrayals, pep-rally’s, silly girls laughing and cooking til the wee hours of morning, some hard seasons of lonely that a mama can't cure, (oh, the drama of it all!)...first dates, break-ups, early morning tournaments, lifelong friends, Tuesday Law & Order marathons...(hey back off and don’t judge, my girls have learned a lot about protecting themselves through this quality time together! *Shout out to Detective Benson!)...queso dates, a little fb/twitter stalking on occasion...very rare...okay maybe a lot..., more queso dates..football games,"family" dinners...late night talks, and the ever favorite-marble slab (cause marble slab is appropriate fro any occasion - heartbreak to happy: its a sure thing! trust me.)

Overall, It's called estrogen and life.

And we were kinda heavy on the estrogen part around here...with a sprinkle of life to keep it real.

As a preemptive strike, my man learned to sleep with a pillow OVER, (Yes, I said OVER), his head.

Seriously, it was his only choice for survival with all the words and emotion.  He’d shout out the occasional and ever helpful, “hey, be nice to your mother!” or “well Pen, did you tell her you would…?”

Hey man, cool it back there before the pillow smothers you in your slumber...let’s not even go there…I was merely trying to appease a child that could outsmart me…it was desperate times, and I used all survival techniques necessary!  Back off!

But let me just add this…with conflicting temperaments comes chaos and eventually...change. (and in case you were wondering, I got tagged for the most likely to need changing.) It was fun. Good times if you’re into painful therapy stuff.

Sooooooo, change I did. 
Therefore,I find it ridiculously unfair and wrong that after modifying my life to adapt to my #2, that she totally has the nerve to up and pick a college that is just far enough away that I can’t really make a day trip! Three words for you #2: You’re dead to me.
Okay, not really…but this is just a million kids of wrong. and you know it!
...But yet, deep down, really really deep down, (like, so far down I can’t find it right now),I do know it’s right.
and for my #2, it’s the perfect fit and the fulfillment of her life-long dream (which is so much like my dream....well...okay, not really...but anyways...)

For the record: I hate Perfect Fits! Booooo!

The morning of “the Ripping” (as it has affectionately become known) we left our house at 5am for our scheduled 9am move, it was easy.

We loaded up and hit the road…only she was in her car behind us.

Tear...but just a few, cause people: I’m a rock. I’m stone-cold emotionless. I own this day and I will be awesome…and brave…kinda.

We totally got there on time and got her room put together and only had to make 1 stop for something we had forgotten.
She liked her room, which was like a double win for me.
We went out ate lunch, and I acted like this was just another normal day in the life of the Moore fam. I am a great pretender in moments like this…again a rock. A solid rock. A weak, crumbling, pathetic, rock. I hate rocks. Rocks are stupid.

As we were getting closer to time to say good bye, my tears were just below the surface…I knew this would be tough…but I’m back to being a rock. But not really a rock, more like a clump of clay that got all wet and mushy that was supposed to be a rock. I think this day totally sucks butt right now, and I am so done with ROCKS!!

So I resort to my last option of toughness and I begin working hard to drudge up memories of when I was mad at #2… and lo and behold, this clumpy, wet, clay, stupid, rock could NOT think of one! I’m all like, memories don’t fail me now! I dug deep, way, way, back, yet all I could come up with were precious, funny things…tender moments where she was all sweet and perfect, just the awesome and beautiful things that I so love about her. I was full on Hallmark, without the card. Pathetic.

I am brilliant so I think to text my other momma friends who are in the same place. I am confident they will send some  much needed funny my way. But they fail me, EPICALLY 

(Listen up: YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!! and its only because I’m such a good Christian that I will not out you individually on my blog! Just kidding…sorta.)

Instead these so called friends send words like, “dude, its rough…I got nothing for ya”

And I’m standing here all like, Seriously, now?! Then I get…
“Good luck friend, this is worse than any loss I ever suffered”
Omigosh…throw a girl a bone here people…
“…alcohol is your friend……worst day ever, the loneliness alone will kill ya…”
Fellow mothers, future mothers, and Mothers with children who will turn on them and choose college away from home and not the awesome greatness of your home, please be warned: your other mother friends in the same boat are absolutely worthless in this moment…they are mushy, wet, clumpy, pieces of dirt…you cannot, I stress can NOT, count on them.)
I am utterly alone, and I muster up all my clumpiness, which is more like mud at this point, and mash together a semblance of “hey, it me, just your regular ol’ normal-yet-cool- mom”…and its pretty bad. its just plain ugly. But whatever. I’m in survival mode, and this is war.

We send #1 to fill up the truck while we said our goodbyes…only #1 gets all off track and  pulls a fast one on me and jumps out of the truck to hug the heck out of her baby sister…then she leans in and whispers sweet words…

(look, she could have said, “you are a mean, horrible, sister and I hope you get in trouble”…but if so, they both covered very well, and smiled for the picture…so I’m totally going with “sweet words.” I mean, we are hanging on by a thread here people, and we are still hoping to keep our “normal family” image up!)

So, #1 drives away and we proceed upstairs for pictures and goodbyes.

We sit on #2’s bed, and take a few pictures. We say our, “I love you’s”...and then she turned and looked at me and softly said,

...wait for it...

“I’m really going to miss you mom.”

And.I.am.finished.

The rock, the clumpy clay, the dirt, it is all gone and there is nothing but a watery mess.
Explosive, popping out your eyes, full on waterworks from here on out.
I am in a full out free fall.
I am in TMF...of absolute EPIC proportions.
 definition: (total.mom.faiI); this is where experienced moms highly recommend medication and possibly alcohol. If you reach this point you are in danger of no return to normal. You are done for.  In order to save yourself and recover you must pull the emergency card and resort to the new mom motto: Don’t be strong, be armed.)

Honestly, somehow in this moment I think I managed to mutter out fragments of consciousness that sounded like, “love you…(tears), you’re great…(sniffing, tears, snot slipping out) miss you so much..(controlled guttural weeping)…do good.”

It was pathetic….my man filled in the blanks for me,  “your mom is going to miss you a lot…she really loves you so much…I’m sorry she is such a freak and can’t pull it together right now…” (okay, he didn’t say that last line, but I totally would have given him a pass if he had.)  

It was painful. Grueling. This was definitely “The Ripping.”

We, (meaning me), pulled it together, walked downstairs.(5 flights, cause we don’t do anything easy friends!) where #1 was waiting for us at the curb.

#2 was headed to her first welcome week gathering…and as she turned to head to the lawn, I hugged her one last time, breathed her in deeply with my eyes closed so as to hold her scent deep in my lungs forever. And then, like any good mom, I whispered,

”I could totally home school you through College…its really kinda stupid anyways…just keep that in the back of your mind…okay?” - ( and I meant it!)

She giggled a little and walked away…I watched her…it was so much like kindergarten I can’t even stand it…

my#2: a little anxious, a little fearful, but shoulders set back and her eyes set on the future with hope and excitement. I kinda see a little bit of me in her walk…a little bit of,  “maybe I’ll just go with the flow, see what happens…make the best of the unknown…”

People, I don’t want to brag or anything but my #2 owns this new chapter of life.

She is every bit Psalm 146:11…beauty fir for a King...God’s love and mercy shining on this girl.

is she Perfection? No.

But Beautiful? pshhh...shut your mouth! ...you just can’t even fathom it!

 

 

Quick Prologue:

As we drive away and the tears fall silently, I begin to think of how I can create a soap dish thingy for #2. The very idea of her having to deal with mushy soap has me completely overwhelmed and I am google-ing different variations on the word.  I start to gush tears, yet again, when I actually realize what I am doing. In some weird way i find myself thankful to God for giving me #2 and making me a little bit of a better person, and most importantly bringing me 1 step closer to reaching the million mark of a perfect mother…

Sincerely yours,
Motherhood is DEFINITELY not for Sissies...but if you are a sissy, I will be your people..
aka
~Penny