Shawn Davis's Blog

Everyone is talking about Chris Hayes and his remarks about using the word hero.

Okay, not everyone.  Certainly not very many people outside the US.  And probably the majority of people *in* the US as well.  But a lot of people are.  In particular, a lot of people, military and civilian, connected with the US military.  There are a lot of people who are not happy with Hayes’ three-point foot-shot into his mouth.  Taken on its face, his statement was indeed repulsive to people who have been directly affected by war and who spent Memorial Day weekend thinking about friends and family who have paid the ultimate sacrifice and who will never get the last Monday of May off, never get to usher another summer in with a barbecue:

Why do I feel so uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’?  I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

Hayes made this statement in the middle of a program discussing veteran’s issues.  I did not watch it.  Actually, I’ve never watched Hayes’ show.  And at first glance, I found his statement repugnant.  He has since apologized, and I think that apology was something he needed to do.

However.

What has struck me most about this entire incident is not Hayes himself, or MSNBC, or even his statement.  It’s that, once again, I am reminded of the vast gulf that exists between the part of the country that has military service, that has chosen to touch the military world,  and the part of the country that has none.

We are not the same.  And there is a lot of room for misunderstanding there.

Every Memorial Day, my family attends the gathering of motorcycles in DC called Rolling Thunder.  It’s a tradition to us, it’s a part of how we remember.  We haven’t been to a Memorial Day barbecue in about ten years, but the only Rolling Thunder we’ve missed was the one where I was recovering from a surgery that laid me out for four months.  And every year since 2008, I remember Garrison Keillor’s tirade against the convergence of motorcycles on the Nation’s Capitol which prevented him from seeing the art of Renoir and Monet, which he thought to be a much more reflective way to spend a day set aside to honor those who have died in war.

Keillor did not get it.  The veterans riding those bikes do.  As they gave my mohawked son, wearing his military brat emblazoned t-shirt, a high five when their bikes rode by – they understood.  We are, by choice, a family.

I find myself, as a military wife whose husband has deployed to multiple war zones multiple times, shaking my head sometimes.  I can’t help but have faces of the fallen flash through my head when someone wishes me a “Happy Memorial Day!”  There’s nothing happy about it.  I’m not celebrating.  And always, in the back of my mind – hidden behind the soul that hurts for those I know who have lost their most precious – is the feeling that it could have been me.

It’s a feeling that we live with, those of us who send our loved ones to fight.  And those that fight and come home bear their own version of it.  I can never see a face of a fallen service-member without knowing that it could have been my service-member.   My husband sees them and thinks that it could have been him.  And even more, he thinks that maybe it should have been.

That is not a statement of suicidal thoughts – trust me, my husband does not have them.  But the why of it all; why that person and not this one?  Why the better person?  Why?  Always the whys.  They are always there.

And the gratitude – the thanks.  There is a feeling that it had to be someone, the bullet had a destiny.  There is no coincidence that the one Bible verse that even most military members, religious affiliation aside,  have memorized is John 15:13, “No greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”  It is not so much a line from the Christian book of worship as a universal truth.  They died so that others would not.

It is not a patriotic platitude for us, it is a tangible truth.  It creates an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, and an overwhelming feeling of obligation.  We feel as if we don’t deserve it, this sacrifice they made so that our most beloved could come home.  We know we can’t repay that.  How could anyone?

And it is this very thing that the gulf between civilian and military rests on.  The others: the penchant for gallows humor that sounds unfeeling and is really hiding an overwhelming wealth of feeling, the harsh toughness of our language that hides the fear we always carry inside, the quirks that keep others from knowing how little control we actually have over our lives – they are all secondary to this.

Every time I have watched my husband leave for a war zone, it is with the understanding, the belief, that I may never see him again.  Every last night we spent together, it was with the understanding that I might never again curl into his arms.  I wrote a book based on the phenomenon of anticipatory grief; the pre-planning we do for the death of our loved ones.   We play the scene in our minds, over and over, in an attempt to come to grips with what may happen.  We live with it every day.

And every time he came home, there was the understanding that he only came home because of the sacrifice made by others – those others who took that bullet with a destiny.

Memorial Day is not about war, or glorifying war, or giving people an impetus to try and be a hero.  There is no family member who is longing for the fame of a Gold Star flag to hang from their front porch.  There is no service-member who leaves hoping that their face ends up on the pictures of the fallen shown on news channels.  And you will find no one longing for peace more than the service-member who has to go fight or the family who watches them leave and hopes and prays they will come home.

Memorial Day is my thanks to those who made my husband’s homecomings possible.  They gave their lives to give him back to me.

It’s not too much to give them back one day a year, one day without bringing in the politics or the deep discussions.  One day to remember.  One day of thanks.  The discussions and semantics can be saved for Tuesday.

On Monday, a Monday I am blessed to have with my husband,  I am grateful.

Things I Will Not Do:  Write a political rant on this particular blog.

Not that I don’t have them, mind you, but I do have more suitable places to share them.   I’ve stopped buying books from authors who could not keep the idea of entertainment and politics at least marginally separate.  I mean, I loved me some Stephen King back in the day, and until the very last chapter thought The Cell was his best book since The Boogeyman story in Night Shift.  But after that last chapter…  I haven’t read another Stephen King book.   No judgment calls on anyone who has – it just became not my cup of tea.  And he really doesn’t need me as a fan anyway, he does quite well without me, so no harm – no foul.

However, that will not stop me from using a political event as a springboard.  Because it ties in quite intimately with a particular story from my own life.

It may surprise quite a few people that I have a few things in common with Democrat senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren.  Namely, we are both 1/32 Cherokee.  I think. I mean, I’ll have to check with my father on this one, because he’s the one that really knows.  Actually, I think my father is 1/32 and I’m 1/64.  Or in layman’s terms – I’m not Cherokee at all.  It is what it is.

And that is not all we have in common, either!  Early on in my childhood, I latched onto a story about my mother’s side of the family and their Native American ancestry.  I mean, when you are a seven-year-old with a wild imagination (and oh-boy-howdy did I ever have a wild imagination!), the chance to call yourself an Indian princess (oh yes, I went there) is a gift from the heavens.

I was special.  I was unique.  I was cool.  And about this time I was watching the second Poltergeist movie, as well.

Just tell me Will Sampson wasn’t the coolest actor ever.  You can say that.  If you lie.

I could say with absolute conviction that it was in my genetics to be wise, as well.  I was a wise Indian princess trapped in the drudgery of modern life and schoolbooks when I should have been cavorting around in buckskins with a bow and arrows and a pair of kicky beaded moccasins.  And the rest of you people were BORING.  Unlike me.

What can I say, my views were formed by the pop culture available to a seven-year-old growing up in the Eighties.

Long beyond the age of seven, I clung to this idea.  I mean, you should see my mom.  She totally looks like Will Sampson’s long lost sister.  Or maybe daughter.  She’s a lot younger than he was.  Anyway, my point is that there was extraneous “evidence” I could point to about this.  I clung to it even when other family members, interested in genealogy, told me that my carefully constructed fantasy about being one with nature and nobly crying about litter along the highways and rivers of America was just that – only a fantasy.

Not a Native American either

And then my mother did something unforgivable.  She got one of those fancy-schmancy DNA tests that tell you what your genetic ancestry is.

The conclusion was inarguable.  Any Native American ancestry I have did not come from my mother.  And there isn’t very much of it.  In fact, my ancestry on my mother’s side is pretty darn bland and pretty darn, well, hillbilly.

We might be related.  Probably not.  But maybe.

 The most interesting thing about my family ancestry on that side is how the Indian Princess story got started in the first place – which apparently involved my grandfather, his gift as a storyteller, and how he lived near an Indian reservation one time.  Or something like that.   I totally get his reasoning.  I mean, it really is almost the same thing.

Or maybe not.  Whatever.

There was one other thing on that DNA test that surprised everyone, though.  We may have had absolutely no Native American heritage whatsoever on that side of the family, but we did have a link to DNA from India.  And have you seen the traditional Indian dancers?

Gorgeous

Any excuse to rock a sari, I’ll take.  Talk about ethereal loveliness…

But I don’t really have Subcontinent Indian ancestry either.  It’s just a DNA link.

Old habits die hard, though.  About six months ago I was watching a Secrets of the Dead episode and saw this lovely little girl in Kazakhstan:

A direct descendent of an Amazon Warrior(ess)

This little girl looks kind of like my third daughter, who just happens to spend a lot of time training as a boxer – see the warrior connection here? – and is also the lone blond in a family of brunettes (and one bottle redhead).  And my husband is from Russia, with all the muddled DNA and ancestry that comes from repeated invasions of various and sundry hordes.   And Russia and Kazakhstan are almost the same thing.  Okay, they are on the same continent. They share a border.  Evidence, I tell you!

It seems like a fit to me – the blood of Amazon warriors runs through the veins of my children.

Or maybe not.

But it sure makes a good story.

This dog will not be left behind.  

We move a lot.  Quite a lot.  We’ve been in our current house for just over three years, which is a record for us.  We’ve lived places for as little as four months, but rarely do we surpass the two-and-a-half year point.  We’ve got itchy feet.

And every time we move I tell myself, “I am never going to do this again!  This is ridiculous!”  Five months after we move, I start looking for the next place I want my husband to shoot for.  Intellectually I know I do this.  Emotionally I am quite sure that I mean it this time, I WILL NOT MOVE AGAIN.

Whatever.   I say that about painting, too.  But let Glidden come out with a new color palette…

We’re moving again.  This time very far.

In an effort to save money and put my best foot forward, I packed our house up myself.  I found a renter myself.  I am even cleaning the darn thing myself.

Isn’t the inside of this fridge glorious?

And yet, it’s down to two days before liftoff and I’m up at one in the morning writing a blog post (when I’ve been very lax about such writing recently) instead of sleeping.  Why? Because I’m crazy.  Also because I’m an insomniac.  And Crazy + Insomnia + House Inspection (our municipality requires them for anyone renting their house out – I agree with these people on that subject) = My Brain Won’t Stop Talking to Me.

Go to sleep, Brain!  Now!

My brain listens about as well as my toddler children did.  It does listen better than my teenagers, though.  For all that my brain is ignoring my commands, at least it is not actively walking under a cloud of surly indignation and perpetual hormonal disfunction.

I have told my husband many times that life would be much easier if we could just torch the house when it was time to move.  Not that I would, mind you.  Fire is one of my phobias.  But the option would be nice.  I’d like to roll into our next home and receive, along with our purchase or rental contract, an addendum that we could initial and check allowing us the option of cleansing fire when we are ready to move out.  That would be awesome.

Once again, not that I would do that.  Just that this cleaning and stress is for the birds.  The flipped birds, at that.

While I’m scrubbing and painting and packing, I entertain myself by trying to decide what I will do when the deadlines of home-ownership are no longer hanging over my head.   A year lost in alcoholic debauchery sounds like it might work.  I mean, it worked for Hemingway, right?  And he is one of my favorite authors.  Not that I’m anywhere near Hemingway’s league – and plus I don’t plan to bring my mister-ress (what is a kept man called, anyway?) to my home.

Actually, I can’t imagine why I’d want to have a mister-ress in the first place.  Men are pretty heavy on the upkeep.  It would be like paying Fiat dollars for a Ford Focus experience.  And Fiats have that reputation for constant problems…  No thank you.

I have waged a bloody war on extraneous items in our possession, since we’ll have things in storage for so long.  It was a scorched earth campaign the likes of which few movers have ever seen.  But when the moving company showed up to take the pre-packed boxes from our house to our pre-arranged storage unit, they were quite effusive with their compliments on my organization.  To add to the good feelings, they were also in, out, and done in three hours.  Given that my previous moving experiences involved multiple clogged toilets, broken stemware, a smoker who felt that no one would catch him if he lit up in my bathroom with the fan on, and a cartwheeling bunk-bed frame, I hope I can be forgiven for my low expectations.

And yet there are STILL small boxes littering my house.  Where did all these things come from?  Papers? Why so many papers?  And why can’t I bring myself to toss them?  Instead, they are being toted to the storage unit in our personal vehicle after I scan the pages one last time to commit their exact location to memory.

You never know when you’ll need that copy of instructions for the crock pot I have packed away.  I mean, I never actually used the instructions, but someday I might.  I might.

If not in the next house, then perhaps in the one after that.

 

One of the hardest things I had to set my mind to do was start working out again after my surgery last year.  It was harder than my initial introduction to boxing, I think.  Now, I love boxing workouts.  I mean, I don't love them – not while I'm doing them.  While I'm doing them I'm sweaty and huffy and puffy and my muscles are screaming at me.  But several times during the hour workout (or two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I do more than one) I'll have a moment of perfect clarity when my gloved fist hits the bag and my knee turns in just right for that perfect hook.  The heavy bag makes a satisfying thwack sound when you hit it correctly, and that sound is beautiful to hear.   Hearing that sounds makes you push harder.  And when you are doing mitts with someone?  People might dismiss the jab as a sissy punch, without all the style and bling of an uppercut, but tossing out three quick, perfect jabs into the mitt makes me feel downright powerful.  I'm sure I look ridiculous doing it, but I feel like I look awesome.

And after the workout, when I'm covered with sweat, my hair is sticking up ten different directions, I smell awful, and my knees are a little shaky when I go down the stairs?  It feels awesome.  I feel like I've really done something well.  It's a high.  It's definitely a high.

But after my surgery I wasn't able to do the sets I had done before.  My first five weeks back, my coach would only let me do half-hour training sessions, and even in those I felt exhausted and bad-sore (as opposed to the good-sore that goes away after an hour or so). Not only could I not do the 200+ sit-ups in multiple sets that I had been knocking out pre-surgery, I could barely do fifteen.  It's been ten months, and while I can knock out multiple sets of twenty-five push-ups in a class – I still can't stretch out fully and have to do girl push-ups.  Those aren't real push-ups.

It was very frustrating, especially to be in a class pushing myself as hard as I could go, and finding I couldn't even get to half the place I was at before surgery.  I've long ago come to terms with the fact that I can't control things outside myself (like waiting for military orders to come, expecting them to come on time, where we might be living next, whether my husband will be home when a big life event happens – that sort of thing), but I've always been able to control myself.   So when my own body betrayed me and I could no longer control myself, it hit me very hard.  First, while recuperating, it was the humiliation of needing a babysitter* while my husband was gone.  Then, while building back up after my scar tissue all developed, it was the embarrassment of knowing I had been able to do some things easily before and now had some intense trouble with.

My scar, by the way is about the size of a closed fist – it looks a bit like a hole in my stomach.  I don't mind it, though.  I actually kind of like it.  I think it makes me look tough (even though it's always covered by clothing).  I was actually considering getting a tattoo of a Cthulu mouth around it.  My doctor wants me to get a scar revision after it softens fully, but I don't know.  I really don't mind it.

Anyway, it's been getting better.  Slowly.  I'm back up to the amount of training I did pre-surgery.  And most of the time I feel like I'm pushing myself adequately.  I'm even running again.  And I hate running.  I really hate running.  I hate running more than I hate cleaning up the dog poo from the yard.

Then allergy season hit.  And now I can't breathe.  So today when I showed up at the gym for my personal training session, I found myself huffing and puffing through the second round on the mitts.  Huffing and puffing.  Like a steam train.

Embarrassing.

The trees here are lovely right now.  Gorgeous whites, pinks, and purples – explosions of color everywhere I work.  And I want to set them all on fire.  I've got the sneezing and watery eyes under control thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, but it doesn't help the breathing problems.  Or the frustration of just reaching a goal and having a wall go up between me and that goal again.

However, I'm not allergic to smoke.  I'm soothing myself with visions of beautiful trees bursting into flames.  And then visions of five rounds of mitts in the ring, then holding my arms up in victory, Rocky-style – all the while breathing fully and deeply of the blessedly pollen-free air.

I can't wait until allergy season is over.

*You know you have good friends when one of them comes to stay with her toddlers at your non-childproofed house to drive you to doctor appointments and make sure you eat while your husband is on an entirely different continent.  And I'm a horrible patient.  HORRIBLE.  Did I mention that I'm a terrible patient?  Because I have an issue with following directions.  Which is how I ended up with surgical complications in the first place. 

Our family is gearing up for our move.  It's a big one.  We will have movers for part of it, since we're moving overseas, but since we have to prepare our house for renters we're packing quite a lot and moving it into storage ourselves.

Last night, as we packed up the car for yet another trip to the storage unit, we had a conversation with one of the neighbors.  Now, our neighborhood isn't the most beautiful neighborhood in our town, and our houses aren't the most expensive.  But what we do have is a close group of people who look out for each other.  If my neighbor sees UPS has left a package on my doorstep, one of them will pick it up and text me so that it doesn't get stolen, wet, or blown away by wind.  There's an elderly man who lives in one of the townhouses at the corner who sits on his porch a lot.  He notices everyone going in and out – and has let us know when he thinks there are suspicious people around.  I've had wonderful people shovel my walk while my husband was deployed, and others bring dinner by when my four week recovery from surgery turned into five months after complications.

I live in a very good neighborhood.  And a very supportive civilian neighborhood for a military family.

And yet, sometimes I'm still smacked in the face with the military-civilian gulf.  I have so many civilian friends who seem to understand – or understand that they don't understand, that when I'm faced with someone who does not it feels like an actual physical slap.  Last night, it was this statement by a neighbor and very good friend, "I could never leave my kids like that.  I can't even go visit my family without them."

Now, my neighbor meant nothing untoward by this.  He really didn't, and it is impossible to be offended by the statement.  He's a nice guy, he's a great neighbor.  He'll do anything to help us when he can, particularly when my husband is off doing his thing.  But he doesn't understand.  And he's not alone in not understanding.   And when you don't understand, such a statement seems inane and harmless, just conversation.

Except that my husband has missed four out of nine of my son's birthdays due to deployments and TDYs.  He's missed five of my eleven year old daughter's birthdays.  He's missed Christmas and Thanksgiving.  Last Fourth of July was the first one he was able to barbecue for in quite awhile.  He's missed First Communions and he's missed Confirmations.

Normally we go along and get along.  We've learned that it's not the holiday, it's when we celebrate the holiday.  And we have learned to cherish every moment we have.  As one of my friends said the other day in a large group of military spouses, "It's annoying when your husband leaves his boots out.  But when he leaves them out now, I tell myself to be glad – because if his boots are out he's home.  And if both boots are out, it means he's home in one piece."

In many ways, I feel lucky to see the world this way.  There are bigger problems than the fact that my husband's moving to-do list was far less complicated and time-consuming than mine.  I kvetched about it a little on Facebook, but it wasn't a real complaint.  It's a joke.  Because if he weren't home, I'd be working through BOTH our to-do lists on my own.  It's happened many times.

Perspective.

But still, hearing, "I could never leave my kids like that," hits home.  Because my neighbor never missed a birthday.  Never missed a Christmas.  And although we've come to terms with our lifestyle, it still hits my husband in the solar plexus harder than a left hook to be reminded of it by someone who hasn't missed these things.

It's hard to explain the trade-off for us.  The closest I can come to an explanation is this:  until my son was about five years old, he referred to anyone in a combat uniform as "Armyguysuperhero".  That was, still is, his father.  He doesn't idolize basketball stars, he doesn't want to grow up to be a football player or a movie star.  He wants to save the world.  And that is what he thinks his father does.  My son wants to grow up to be a superhero.

And sometimes superheroes miss birthdays.

I have always loved history.  I love reading about things the past, and then digging into the aspects of that story and finding another story.   That's what history is to me, really.  It is stories.  They are true stories, yes.  But they are stories, nonetheless.

Just last week we went to Hawaii, and while there visited the newly opened Father Damien and Mother Marianne Memorial next to St. Augustine's Church in Waikiki.  St. Damien was canonized in 2009 for his work with the lepers on Hawaii's island of Molokai, in the settlement of Kalaupapa.

Father Damien contracted leprosy on Molokai.

The memorial is very small, and mostly contains pictures with explanations of Father Damien's and Mother Marianne's work on Molokai and the life of the Hansen's Disease sufferers who lived there (Hansen's Disease is the scientific name for what society has always called leprosy).  It is heartbreaking to see, and yet it is also strangely uplifting to read the stories of those pictured.

Some of the sufferers were absolutely ravaged by the disease; faces sometimes looking like their skin had melted like wax, fingers missing, toes gone, feet turned in on themselves.  And yet… And yet their stories were often profound.  One person opened a store, another person was an artist.  They married.  Some of them had children.

They had been banished from society and made into outcasts, and yet they had forged their own society and lived their lives – some of them quite long lives.

Father Damien eventually contracted leprosy and died at the age of 49 on Molokai.  None of the nuns living on the island ever contracted the disease.

I wanted to visit Molokai while we were on Oahu, but although the plane fare is not very expensive, it adds up when you are with another adult and three children.  And while my kids are fairly well behaved and also interested in history, I'm not sure that Molokai would hold their interest when there is snorkeling to be done at Haunauma.

What I was inspired to do, however, was pick up the book Molokai, by Alan Brennert.  I read the entire thing on our flight home, aided by the fact that there were ice storm cancellations once we left Honolulu (why couldn't they have told us that in Honolulu?  I would not have minded another four or five hours on the island!).  The book was incredible because Brennert is a very skilled writer, but also because the subject he wrote about was so fascinating in and of itself.

I reviewed the book on Goodreads, but rather than just post the review here, I felt like talking about Molokai a little more.  I may not be done talking about it, either.  Somehow, the thought of having a treacherous and disfiguring disease and being banished from all family and loved ones as skin melts off bones and death slowly takes an already decaying body makes the trials and tribulations of teaching my nine-year-old son long division seem pale by comparison.

Maybe that is why I felt so drawn to the stories from Molokai.  For the perspective, and for the reminder that paradise isn't always paradise for everyone.

My thirteen year old is currently half-way through ninth grade.  Her curriculum is pretty heavy; we use a reading based curriculum called Sonlight for history and reading, and she uses the Kolbe curriculum for her other subjects.   So, for ninth grade history she is covering Twentieth Century World History; a century which brought us hits like… the Holocaust!  Armenian Genocide!  Two world wars!  An influenza pandemic!  The Great Depression!   The nuclear bomb!

It was such a par-tay century, was it not?

Really, though, I'm a little worried about my daughter's mental health.  I've been monitoring her depression levels.  The book report on All Quiet on the Western Front nearly tipped her over, but she seems to be chugging along just fine for now.  I'm watching carefully for the Alas, Babylon backlash, though.

This has led to multiple discussions with friends on Facebook and on a few blogs about the books we read in school – what we loved, and what we didn't.  The world seems to be fairly unified in collective hatred of Great Expectations, and the only reason I can think of for schools to continue this unreasonable demand is to teach us to read things we hate.  That's a valuable skill, one people do need to practice.

One of my loveliest friends, a woman with a background in the British education system, read a completely different book list than the one I experienced.  We had Faulkner, she had Forster.  We had Steinbeck and Twain, she had D.H. Lawrence.  She is still traumatized by A Passage to India, apparently, in much the same vein as my recurrent nightmares of being the last person on an earth where all books have been destroyed… except Great Expectations.   My daughter is already reminding me multiple times per week about how horrible she found Heart of Darkness.

This discussion brought yet another question to my mind, though.  When our family moves to Africa, our children will stop homeschooling (YAY!  I get some no-kid time during the day!) and will enter a school based on the British education system.  Which means their past and current reading lists might end up being for naught.  Or, rather, they might have another entirely uninspiring set of stories to slog through to bring them up-to-date on what is being discussed in class.

This will not make my children happy.  At all.

Don't get me wrong, now – all three of my still-at-home-children are avid readers.  My thirteen year old, while completely turned off by Heart of Darkness, loved Wodehouse.  And it's not the dark subject matter of Darkness that gets her, either, because she also appreciated Lord of the Flies (I say "appreciated" because that's not exactly something you like.  If you know what I mean).  I've already recommended she try The Stoning of Soraya M as well, because she's mentally capable of processing it and would probably appreciate that story.

My eleven-year-old likes more standard fare; she loves The Sisters Grimm series, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Young Royals series.  She'll also read whatever she's assigned, even if she hates it.  She hasn't yet, at her age, been exposed to anything truly terrible – although she did spend three weeks in a deep depression after reading Old Yeller.  She even re-read A Wrinkle in Time one summer after having been assigned the book in her curriculum.

My eight-year-old son… Well, he likes things that are gross.  Like Captain Underpants.  I try to supplement this with gross, yet educational: thanks to the Horrible Histories books, this has been very easy.  And he does read what he is told – he got through Across Five Aprils last year, and he really enjoyed Johnny Tremain (side note:  I loved Johnny Tremain.  I have now read it SEVEN times.  I don't love Johnny Tremain seven times much).

So now, as our time for moving gets close, I'm going to have to research the books required in the Brit system and force my kids to spend some down time reading them.  Luckily we have a long flight coming up in a week for them to spend on that.  And then there's the flight to Africa.  That's some quality "get acquainted with Forster" time right there.

I hope they don't remember this when it comes time to choose my nursing home…

We moved a lot when I was growing up, and one of the places I spent quite a bit of childhood was a small island.  I won't say which island it was, but here's a picture:

This building was in an Airwolf episode.  I remember when it was filmed.  Because I'm all nerdy like that.

Of course there are shops on the island, as it caters to tourists.  But the shops are expensive.  And at the time I was living there, people were not quite as… flush with cash as they are now, even in a recession.  Even living in a tourist mecca, we almost never ate out for dinner.  We did do a lot of barbecuing, though, and that set a pattern for the rest of my life.

When we needed clothes or shoes or whatever, we usually ordered them through the Sears catalog store, because there was no internet.  Because I'm that old.  We had to go to a store, stand at a counter, place an order, and go pick it up at that counter when it came in.  And this seemed completely normal to us.  It still seems normal to me, because that's how I roll.

Did I also mention that we had no house mail delivery?  Nope.  Everyone needed a PO Box.  I didn't even know what UPS was until I moved to the mainland at the end of 8th grade.  We didn't have pizza delivery, either.  Just a few facts to throw out there.

The summer I was twelve I had my heart set on a pair of Grecian looking sandals.  You know what I mean, the ones with the laces that you can  tie up your leg.  I thought they were just lovely – so sophisticated and grown up.  I loved them.  I coveted them.  I dreamed about them.  And they weren't available through the Sears catalog, but at one of the local stores that catered to tourists.

Lucky me, I also had jobs babysitting and selling newspapers.  I had money!  But the sandals still seemed ridiculously expensive.  I just couldn't bring myself to buy them.  I would still go into the store to gaze at them, though.  I wanted the white ones with the turquoise straps.  I'm telling you, these sandals occupied a ridiculous portion of my pre-teen brain's thoughts.

And then one day when I walked into the store to stare longingly at my coveted footwear, I noticed something new:  a sign.  A sign that said, "Stripped Sandals $12.99″.

Thirteen dollars?  Thirteen dollars for those sandals I wanted so desperately!  That was more than half-off the original selling price!  There was no way I would ever turn down such a deal, the thought never crossed my mind.  It was as though the heavens opened up and shined light down on the pile of shoes under the Sharpied sign on the shop wall.  I was going to have some grown-up sandals!  I was happy.

I grasped my chosen pair in my hands and headed to the front.  The woman working in the shop didn't particularly like having kids around – not that I blame her.  The shop carried adult clothing, and I'm pretty sure we were annoying.  Teenagers irritate the hell out of me now, I can't imagine I was any less aggravating than the current crop with my giggles and inclination toward being a know-it-all.  I will say this for the clerk, she was never outright nasty to us when we did come in the store to look at the clothes we all knew we'd never be buying.

Until I brought those sandals up to the register, that is.

Silently, she rang up my purchase.  When the price on the register stopped at $32.99, my eyes opened up.  Without missing a beat I said, "The price is wrong.  There is a sign back there that says they are on sale for $12.99."  I was confident that this problem would be easily ironed out and my sandals and I would soon be heading out the door into a beautiful, grown-up future together.

The clerk's eyes narrowed.  "Oh really?"  she asked.  "Well, let's just go back there and look."

The words of her straightforward answer were perplexing, because she said one thing, but the intonations showed she obviously meant another.   This was sarcasm, I recognized it.  For most of my life I have spoken it more fluently than The Queen's English. But now I had no idea why she would be using this rhetorical tool.  I recognized there might be danger up ahead, but couldn't figure out what it might be.  And because my parents had raised me to listen to the directions of adults, I obediently followed her to the back room of the small shop;  where she proceeded to point triumphantly at the sign on the wall over the pile of sandals and, wild eyed, verbally unleash  years of frustration at irritating teenagers invading her personal space, "CAN'T YOU READ?  DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO READ?  This says STRIPED sandals!  STRIPED!  There are no stripes on on those sandals!  There is nothing that even LOOKS like a stripe!"

She continued in this vein for a bit, but I don't remember much of what she said.  Mostly because her tirade was prevented from penetrating my thoughts through a thick cloud of, "But you spelled it wrong!" circulating through my head.  That was literally all I could think, "Miss, you spelled stripped, not striped.  You put too many letter p's in that word and it made it same something entirely different!"

Although this will shock almost anyone who knows me, I never said any of this out loud.  I never even tried to defend myself from the triumphal invective being slung in my direction.  I can't say why I behaved in such an out-of-character manner and kept my mouth shut, but I did.  With 25 years of hindsight, I think that even my fogged teenage brain understood that this was a woman on the edge and it was my generational compatriots that had probably driven her there.  Somehow I had enough sense of self-preservation to understand that if I hadn't played dead, so to speak, I might have actually ended up dead.  A cheeky teenager piping up about a misspelled sign would have driven this woman over the edge.

At the end of her outburst the clerk looked at me, clearly spent, and raised her arm to point toward the door.  I left without my magical strappy sandals.  It was a longing that was apparently to go unfulfilled.

I never did tell my mother about the altercation with the clerk, although I can guarantee she wouldn't have been all touchy-feely and come down on my side of the matter.  I was right in this instance; but as a teenager, I also needed to be aware my actual place in the world.  And really, given the kinds of things that the island teens were engaged in when they thought the grown ups weren't looking, the clerk was not out of order to slide into her Come to Jesus moment.

My mom did know how I coveted those sandals, though.  And on my thirteenth birthday I found them waiting for me on my bed after school.

I promptly, and proudly, wore them out for a stroll with my friends.

We stopped by the store that carried them and browsed.

Because my moment of self-preservation was apparently fleeting.

I try to be frugal in some areas.  Not everywhere, by any means, but saving money in some places lets us then use the money elsewhere in places we find more important.  The money I don’t spend on soda (which used to be an addiction for me) was combined with frequent flier miles toward a trip to Bangkok.

It was raining five minutes before this.  And five minutes after.

We used to scrapbook everything – and while I do treasure those albums, we’ve significantly downsized our efforts into more mundane photo albums without all the embellishments of the scrapbooking true-believer.  Mine never looked as good as my friend Heather’s albums, anyway.  She truly puts the artíste in the scrapbook, if you know what I mean.  Mine were pretty puny by comparison.  Letting go of that helped us get to England.

Oh yes, she’s aware how adorable she is.

Anyway, my point is that we choose to save money in ways that aren’t painful (to us) and don’t make us feel like we’re groaning away like serfs.

My new Pinterest addition has helped with this tremendously.  It introduced us to things like the spinach-pesto grilled cheese sandwiches we ate last night.  Gourmet comfort food, and super easy to make, it was absolutely divine.  McDonald’s, I’m sorry, you’re totally off the list.  Pretty much forever.

Food aside, I also noticed that one of my friends had started making her own laundry detergent.  And it was ridiculously easy.  I was intrigued.

Then my husband came home from a trip to Africa and explained to me what we would be looking at in the laundry department, and the cost of such products as Westerners are used to using.  And I was horrified.  The home-made laundry detergent began to look even better.

Let me say this straight-off:  I am ridiculously picky about laundry and laundry smells.  I have a deep and abiding fear of being the stinky, dirty person in a crowd.  Other people have nightmares about being chased by vampires – those are my power dreams in which I turn around and save the world with a well-placed stake to the heart and a howl of victory.  My nightmares involve me and intense BO and no one telling me that there’s a problem.

Also demonic squirrels.  But I digress.

Since we are nearly out of laundry detergent and our trusty local Sam’s Club charges about $20 for the industrial sized bottle of Tide with Febreze for High Efficiency Machines that we use, I figured it was as good a time as any to test out our new recipe pre-move.

A quick grocery trip, and we have Borax, washing soda, and a few bars of Fels-Naptha soap.  The kids and I grated the soap, mixed everything together with a 1:1:1 ratio, and came up with this:

Which smells pretty good, just like laundry soap, even though we weren’t quite through mixing it.  And no, we are not sponsored by Under Armour, even though my husband lives in their gear and my eleven-year-old boxer daughter thinks that they make the best workout pants.  However, if Under Armour would like to sponsor us, we’re totally open to that.

Total cost was less than eight dollars for all the laundry stuff, we’ll see how long it actually lasts and how well it actually works.  It doesn’t take much – 2 tablespoons per load – and I’ve heard very good things about it so far.

It will also free up some laundry money for the trip I’m hoping we can take to Budapest and Bucharest this summer.  The kids have their hearts set on seeing Vlad Tepes’s old stomping grounds.

I’ve also got a recipe for fabric softener and one for dryer sheets, which I will be trying out forthwith.  Or as soon as I use up the store-bought stuff I already have.

Things I learned/remembered/need you to know today:

Making laundry soap is easy and cheap.
Thailand and London are awesome (so was Branson, by the way.  Best pancakes on EARTH)
If I smell bad, please tell me.  I want to know, even if it horrifies me.  I promise.

Now to figure out how I will watch UFC Fights while living in Africa…

UPDATE: My first load of laundry using the homemade detergent is done.  Big Detergent, your time sucking the money out of my wallet is over.  The clothes came out cleaner and smelling better than ever.  I am taking a stand.  Power to the laundry people!

I try to be frugal in some areas.  Not everywhere, by any means, but saving money in some places lets us then use the money elsewhere in places we find more important.  The money I don't spend on soda (which used to be an addiction for me) was combined with frequent flier miles toward a trip to Bangkok.

It was raining five minutes before this.  And five minutes after.

We used to scrapbook everything – and while I do treasure those albums, we've significantly downsized our efforts into more mundane photo albums without all the embellishments of the scrapbooking true-believer.  Mine never looked as good as my friend Heather's albums, anyway.  She truly puts the artíste in the scrapbook, if you know what I mean.  Mine were pretty puny by comparison.  Letting go of that helped us get to England.

Oh yes, she's aware how adorable she is.

Anyway, my point is that we choose to save money in ways that aren't painful (to us) and don't make us feel like we're groaning away like serfs.

My new Pinterest addition has helped with this tremendously.  It introduced us to things like the spinach-pesto grilled cheese sandwiches we ate last night.  Gourmet comfort food, and super easy to make, it was absolutely divine.  McDonald's, I'm sorry, you're totally off the list.  Pretty much forever.

Food aside, I also noticed that one of my friends had started making her own laundry detergent.  And it was ridiculously easy.  I was intrigued.

Then my husband came home from a trip to Africa and explained to me what we would be looking at in the laundry department, and the cost of such products as Westerners are used to using.  And I was horrified.  The home-made laundry detergent began to look even better.

Let me say this straight-off:  I am ridiculously picky about laundry and laundry smells.  I have a deep and abiding fear of being the stinky, dirty person in a crowd.  Other people have nightmares about being chased by vampires – those are my power dreams in which I turn around and save the world with a well-placed stake to the heart and a howl of victory.  My nightmares involve me and intense BO and no one telling me that there's a problem.

Also demonic squirrels.  But I digress.

Since we are nearly out of laundry detergent and our trusty local Sam's Club charges about $20 for the industrial sized bottle of Tide with Febreze for High Efficiency Machines that we use, I figured it was as good a time as any to test out our new recipe pre-move.

A quick grocery trip, and we have Borax, washing soda, and a few bars of Fels-Naptha soap.  The kids and I grated the soap, mixed everything together with a 1:1:1 ratio, and came up with this:

Which smells pretty good, just like laundry soap, even though we weren't quite through mixing it.  And no, we are not sponsored by Under Armour, even though my husband lives in their gear and my eleven-year-old boxer daughter thinks that they make the best workout pants.  However, if Under Armour would like to sponsor us, we're totally open to that.

Total cost was less than eight dollars for all the laundry stuff, we'll see how long it actually lasts and how well it actually works.  It doesn't take much – 2 tablespoons per load – and I've heard very good things about it so far.

It will also free up some laundry money for the trip I'm hoping we can take to Budapest and Bucharest this summer.  The kids have their hearts set on seeing Vlad Tepes's old stomping grounds.

I've also got a recipe for fabric softener and one for dryer sheets, which I will be trying out forthwith.  Or as soon as I use up the store-bought stuff I already have.

Things I learned/remembered/need you to know today:

Making laundry soap is easy and cheap.
Thailand and London are awesome (so was Branson, by the way.  Best pancakes on EARTH)
If I smell bad, please tell me.  I want to know, even if it horrifies me.  I promise.

Now to figure out how I will watch UFC Fights while living in Africa…

UPDATE: My first load of laundry using the homemade detergent is done.  Big Detergent, your time sucking the money out of my wallet is over.  The clothes came out cleaner and smelling better than ever.  I am taking a stand.  Power to the laundry people!