Write about a time you had to communicate with someone you couldn’t understand.

It has been more than a year since I stopped writing my 100 Journal Entries. I did pretty well for 31 of them, and I just went back and read them all. How happy and flippant I sounded! Now I feel like everything I write is tinged in sorrow. My heart is still breaking after losing Marissa. She meant so much to me. I fear that I will never have such a powerful relationship in my life again. My mind still says it’s not possible; that I am mistaken and that she cannot be gone.

But this is not the road I intended to travel this evening, as I try to get back into the 100 Journal Entries.

I was trying to get back into writing last summer when I got my laptop, so I took up the challenge of writing 100 entries from an angelfire website that was designed for high school kids. Some entries were easier than others, but I did a fair job of keeping up. What was supposed to be daily entries changed to daily minus weekends and holidays and then sporadic and then the unthinkable happened with Marissa.

But here we are, still alive, still kicking, still thinking about how writing is one of the few things in my life that even make sense.

Even though this topic is idiotic.

I do not think I have ever attempted conversation with someone who spoke a foreign language.

I could use the whole “Don’t understand their way of thinking” avenue but I fear the person I choose might end up reading this. Not good.

I’m left with not being to understand little children, even though there is not a particular instance I can think of. I do, however, love how little children babble and babble and we wisely say, “Oh, I see,” even though we don’t understand them. Fooling little children is fun.

Belinda was hard to understand. Turns out she had a speech impediment. I didn’t even know it until Sarah started talking. I realized she sounded better than my kid, who was a year older. Belinda started therapy with Sooner Start when she was two and transitioned into therapy at the school at age 3. She likes going. The teacher is nice. I get weary of doing the exercises with her and taking her to class but I do it because it will benefit her. It doesn’t fit well with my whole “doing as little as possible” thing I have going since last November, but I do it for Belinda. I can understand most of what she says now, but I still do the “Oh, really?” thing with her sometimes. She still falls for it. I am quite the actress, apparently.

Not a strong return, but a return nonetheless. Yay me.

Write about something minor that turned into a big deal.

Seriously?

In the words of Lucy Van Pelt, when do the good things start?

I feel like I am grasping at straws with every journal entry. Something minor that turned into a big deal?

Okay. I got one.

Hope it’s not too real for you.

Let’s go back a decade or so.Right around the new millennium. Y2K didn’t turn out as bad as predicted, and the computers are still on and a lot of people have a lot of emergency rations to eat and a lot of generators to store or sell.

It’s a Tuesday – my day to put together The Tuttle Times in Chickasha. All week I write stories and take pictures, and I put it all together on the one day. Until the week before this, I did The Minco Minstrel on Wednesdays, but the publisher has decided to stop publication on that one, to my horror. So this week is a little different; I usually would be back in Chickasha the next day, but not this one. Never again.

So I put together the newspaper. It’s nice. Nothing to write home about, but a decent paper nonetheless. I am looking forward to getting home, since I am 35 weeks pregnant and a little tired.

I finish the last page, then go and check to make sure everything printed out okay. I wait for composing to wax the ads and stick them in place. I don’t wait for it to print today; I want to go home.

So I do. I go home and check the fridge. There is a half a cherry pie in there. I cut a slice and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds. So far so good. With half a minute to kill, I head to the bathroom.

We’ll keep this as delicate as possible. While there, I…strained for a moment, and then felt a strange pop. Odd. Then I started peeing. And it didn’t stop.

Great, I thought. Way to go. You’ve rendered yourself incontinent. Yes, I actually thought that, in those words. I am a nerdy verbalist even when having conversations with myself.

Finally I decided to just grab a maxi pad and let that handle any urine leakage I had going on. I got up, went to the kitchen, and got the pie out of the microwave. It was good – a little chewy in parts of the filling, because it wasn’t covered up in the refrigerator, but it was tasty anyway.

About midway through the piece of pie, I thought I’d go check on the status of my pants.

I went back to the bathroom, sat down, and checked my undies.

The maxi pad had taken on a slightly pinkish hue.

Hmm. Wasn’t expecting that.

It didn’t look like a big gusher of blood or anything…just that slightly pinkish hue.

I changed the pad.

I went and got my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The book explained that if you experience Premature Rupture of Membranes, or PROM, the doctor will generally wait and see if you go into labor naturally within a few days.

Okay.

I ate some more of my piece of cherry pie and waited for Ben to come home. He was late. I called the office but he wasn’t there.

The book recommended calling my doctor, so I did. The answering service picked up. It was a young man. He was astonished when I told him I thought my water broke. He got very nervous and said he’d tell the doctor right away. He told me I was the first patient he had ever talked to who might be in labor. He was sort of freaking out.

I, on the other hand, felt calm and cool. I held the phone in one hand, the pie plate in another. I licked the fork and told him I was sure everything would be fine.

After all, What to Expect When You’re Expecting told me so.

I called my mother, and my sisters. I told them that my book said the doctor would probably wait a few days, so there was no worry.

Ben came home. Still feeling calm and cool, I told him the same thing.

I’m sure by now you know where this is going.

Yeah. What to Expect When You’re Expecting lied.

Dr. Perry called and told me to go to the hospital. I did. The nurses started prepping me for labor. I was surprised. Did this mean I was actually going to have the baby now? The nurses felt this was very funny. Of course I was going to have the baby now. What did I think was going to happen?

This was a big deal. This was a biggest deal of all. I was five weeks early. We had not even bought a mattress for the crib. We hadn’t bought a lot of stuff. I still had five weeks to go! I wasn’t ready yet!

But ready or not, she came. Lenora was born a little before 5:30 a.m. It was a very big deal, if I do say so myself.

We weren’t ready, in so many ways. But she forgave us, again and again. We’ve all learned so much together. And I’m so very lucky to have her.

I expected a few more days of prep, at least. She came less than 12 hours after I got home from work.

I can’t imagine anything as minor as that little pop turning out to be such a big deal as that beautiful baby girl.

*Ta-da*

So, after getting sick, it seems to be hard to get that momentum back on journaling every day (or weekday, at least). I know it’s because I tend toward perfectionism, and now that I haven’t written every day, it’s not as exciting any more. I can keep doing this, though. Surely I can at least get through the initial 100!

With that in mind, here’s number 29.

Write about a disappointment.

Wow.

Life is so full of disappointments. My first thought was, How to pick just one? My second thought was that I can’t even think of one.

Alice looks disappointed to be stuck holding that pig. I feel for you, Alice. I really do.

Well, I’m disappointed that I got behind on the entries.

I was disappointed when Bennett fell asleep on the couch the other night and then had…an accident.

I was disappointed when the power windows on the van stopped working.

These, however, do not seem quite the caliber of disappointment that I am apparently supposed to summon up. They feel pretty lacking, matter of fact.

I closed my eyes for a few moments and let my mind run…but the place it seems to go the most is disappointments from Ben to me, and I don’t care to post those because it really seems like a betrayal. Like I can expose myself on here (to a point, at least) but I can’t really do that to him. That narrows the disappointment playing field down quite a bit.

The real topic becomes:

Write about a disappointment without hurting anyone that you love or bringing up any bad memories that would make the other parties in question sad.

And how can I do that?

Even if a person doesn’t read my journal currently, I’m posting it on the stinkin’ Internet, for Pete’s sake. It could easily get back to anyone, or be read sometime in the future by the other players in the tale of disappointment.

I’m not really into hurting other people’s feelings.

So I have a couple of options.

One is to write about sometime I was disappointed in myself. These will probably not work because if I am going to be disappointed in myself, it is probably still too raw and personal to get posted, so sorry. I even want to keep secret the ones as a kid. Oddly enough, I can’t even think of one of them at the moment, but I get that nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach when I start to try, so I drop it.

Or I could write about somebody dead.

The problem with that one is that first, I’m not cool with speaking ill of the dead. Second, my dead people get elevated higher and higher to near-godhood status the longer they have been gone. Third, I can’t think of anything. As usual.

I could also write about something disconnected with me, like my disappointment in a movie or celebrity…i.e. I was disappointed when Arrested Development went off the air. But that, my friends, seems a little lame.

Think, McFly, think.

Twenty minutes have passed and I still got nothin’.

I waited another five, and now I am ready to say Uncle.

I have hope for tomorrow…and then the weekend! Wow! Goes fast when you skip the first three days of the week.

What was it like to come back home after a long vacation?

Me, making unforgettable memories on the Disneyland trip.

First off, you’ve gotta understand that I haven’t really ever gotten back from a long vacation that I can remember. I know that we went to Disneyland just before I turned 3. I don’t remember that.

The Disneyland trip seemed to be my parents’ last huzzah. Before it, the family allegedly took other trips – to Florida, to Colorado…but I think I only got to go on the Disney trip. I don’t remember one single thing.

We went to visit my grandparents in Stilwell a couple of times a year. Coming back from those was always nice, I guess. I liked to come home and pet my cat and check the mail and read several pages worth of funnies in the newspaper. Mom was usually a dictator about having a clean house before we left, so it would be pretty clean at home.

The house always seemed silent and unlived in when we returned, and wood and things would creak in a funny way for a time or two until everything settled back down.

We still don’t take long vacations. The trip to Washington, D.C. that we’re planning in October is the first big trip we’ve ever taken. We’ve gone to Alva for a week, and we’ve been in Perryton for a couple of days, but this is the real deal. I’m looking forward to it.

Now I’m the dictator, and I demand the house be clean before we leave for any reason. I used to think it was the dumbest thing ever. Now I want nothing more than to come home and the house be clean. It’s so welcoming to come home that way…not terrifying, which is what I want to avoid. Plus it’s easier to go through all the bags and things that are dumped on the living room floor if there’s nothing already there competing for my attention.

And laundry. The worst part of any trip is the laundry upon returning.

One time I did my laundry at Jenny’s before we left. It was great!

Maybe things will be different after the big trip in October. Hopefully it will be the start of more vacations to come. We’ll see.

Worst. Entry. Eva.

It is so easy to get off track with this! It has been exactly one week since I last did my journaling. I have an excuse though. I was super-flu sick and could barely think, much less write a journal entry. Or maybe it was because I was so smug about doing so well writing each day. Pride cometh before a fall, does it not?

27. What was it like to spend your first night away from home?

Honestly, I don’t remember. Shocker, I know. I have vague recollections; nothing more. I remember sleeping on the pull out couch with Becky in her living room after playing the Clue VHS game until really late.

And I know we did that several times, and I know there were slumber parties in there somewhere, and I can’t remember a lick of them.

I know that one of the first times I went to Falls Creek, I got homesick and called home on the pay phones. I distinctly remember standing outside at the row of phones, waiting my turn, and then hearing the satisfactory sound of coins dropping into the slot and making the phone usable. I remember hearing their voices, and how good it made me feel to talk to them.

I don’t remember what we talked about.

I went to children’s camp too, and things like that, but Mom was a counselor or cook or something most of the time, and I didn’t have to be there by myself. I’m the same way. I don’t want to let Lenora go to camp without me. I’m overprotective, I guess.

I remember being scared my first night at college. I have always been a little frightened in the dark when I’m alone. I called Mom and Dad (again from the payphone) the next day or so and convinced them to come to Carmen for their 100th anniversary celebration that weekend. It was so nice of them to come. It was hard to be alone like that for the first time. I wasn’t as scared when my roommate came.

When I moved to the apartment at the end of that summer, I was very scared there. I used to watch TV very late with Ben so he would fall asleep on the couch and I would have him there all night instead of him going back to his parents’ house. I knew it didn’t project the best image, but I was so scared!

I’m a little ashamed to admit that one of the big reasons I wanted to get married so early was because being alone at night was scary.

I don’t get so scared now, since there’s usually someone else here with me. I still don’t go into a room that’s dark…I always snake my arm around and hit the switch first. When I go out the car at night, I start back in by walking calmly…but about halfway back I get nervous and sometimes start walking quick or jogging to the door. If I have to put the chickens up at night and I can’t find a flashlight, I constantly imagine that someone/thing is going to snatch me up in the dark.

Now I’m scaring myself, and I’m sitting in the dining room in broad daylight…the clock says it’s 12:34; that’s kind of cool.

This wasn’t really about my first night away from home, but at least I’m back in business.

Write about getting fired or quitting.

This is another thing that I’m not the best source for. I have held lots of jobs, but in my experience, not many jobs end in getting fired or quitting. My jobs seem to end with a lot more wishy-washyness. Let me elaborate as I take each in turn.

He looks pretty cheerful about quitting or being fired, but maybe he hated his job. Or maybe he’s giving them the finger behind his hat.

My first jobs were at Northwestern. I pretty much held those until I graduated. I got my radio job and hung onto it. I got my school of nursing job and hung onto it. There was one job, at the Academic Assistance Center, that I could only do one summer because I got work study in the summer and the less desirable E&G work during the school year. So no firing or quitting really took place – I just wasn’t eligible anymore.

I worked at KALV radio in Alva, and that was an okay job. Things got weird when the boss came in one night while I was on the air and proceeded to clean out his desk and leave. Shortly after that, the lady in charge of scheduling took me off my regular shift, asking me to work as a fill-in person for a while while she got a new guy some hours. I was called in a couple of times, and it dwindled, and that was it. On a positive note, I had warned her against hiring said guy because he ripped off the campus radio station for a ton of long distance phone calls and she hired him anyway. He did the same thing at KALV; he got the mail and stole the phone bills for a couple of months before they caught him. I think that was what really made her dislike me. Probably should have kept my fool mouth shut.

I also worked at McDonald’s in Alva. I liked working there. I didn’t get enough hours, which hacked me off because I was married and trying to earn a living while this dopey kid that was hired the same day as me and was a really lousy employee got lots of hours. I suppose it was because of who the families were in town. I was just a college kid from out of town. Regardless, I left McDonald’s just before my dad died. It was about two weeks before he died, and my family called because he was in the hospital and he was really sick and this was probably it, Regina, so you’d better get home now. I went in to McDonald’s and asked to be taken off the schedule, since I had to go to Tuttle right away. They asked when I could go back on the schedule, and I told them I’d have to let them know. Daddy died later that month and after that, I didn’t really feel like going back in and letting them know I was ready to work again. So I didn’t.

After college, my first job was at the Bricktown Haunted Warehouse. I was a spook. I did that until KATT radio called to hire me. I told the haunted house that I could probably work on weekends, but couldn’t do weekdays because of the radio. They told me to let them know…but after a week of working in a nice office with cool people, dressing like the devil and sweating for hours and drinking Chloraseptic straight from the bottle so I could keep screaming and having to watch little children cry when their parents forced them to go through despite the warnings lost its thrill somehow. So I never got around to letting them know.

You’d think that a professional place like KATT/KYIS/KTNT radio, aka Caribou Communications, would be professional about hiring and firing. I found that this was not the case. I did all kinds of things there. I recorded commercials and helped out in the traffic department, and did stuff with the prize window. I played receptionist when the regular person was at lunch or off work for some reason. I still remember a lot of peoples’ phone extensions. I trained other people too. Then the boss told me they were doing a restructuring kind of thing, and asked me to take a month’s leave of absence, paid. So I did. When the month was up, I called the boss and he seemed surprised. Apparently I was supposed to take the hint that I was supposed to find another job. Go figure. He didn’t say I was fired or let go or anything, but he did say that they weren’t sure they had a place for me right then. So that was that.

Then there is the Tuttle Times. I actually worked for them twice. The first time was with the Chickasha Star. That didn’t last long though. I worked there from April 1998 until November 1998. That was when the Express bought out the Star. I was not retained. For one day. Then I was rehired. That always annoyed me because my start date was in November instead of April. The other Star employees that were at the Express got to keep their April dates as their start dates. I worked there until I went on bedrest with Belinda. I used up all of my FMLA leave because I kept having contractions when I stood up. I wanted to work partial disability, doing layout from home, but that wasn’t understood very well, so we just let it go. Then, a week after she was born, I was told that I had to come back to keep my job. I said I hated that, because I couldn’t come back when the baby was only a week old and so…

I guess that was the only one where I actually said I wasn’t coming back. Sort of a quit then.

And that’s it. All my jobs. None of them have an impressive fire or quit sequence. Like that poem that says the world will end, not with a bang, but a whimper. My jobs all ended, not with a bang, but a whimper.

I like being at home the best.

This is my 25th journal entry! Hooray!

Did you ever witness a birth?

I have not witnessed any births in which I was not an active participant.

I have seen newborn cats, rabbits and dogs, but not actually seen the birthing process even once…well, in person anyway. I have seen the miracle of life taking place on film occasionally, and it is enough to send me screaming out the door.

I am squeamish by nature. When someone shows me a scar, my stomach turns over. When a TV show has a moment of surgery or something, and I know it’s not real, I still can’t look. I don’t understand how people can be doctors and nurses. I’m glad they can do this, but I cannot even fathom having to do that every day. I can’t even do it one time.

We took a birthing class before Lenora was born and when the baby in the video was being born, I had to look away.

We were told that I could request a mirror if I liked, so I could see the baby crowning. No, thank you. During birth, would I like to reach down and touch the baby’s head? Thanks, I’ll pass. I had no desire to do either one.

I don’t want to get into the birthing stories of any of the children here. I’ve written them all down before, and they were nice stories. Bennett unfortunately got the shaft because I wrote his on a computer that later crashed, and I haven’t been able to find a copy of it. I did upload it…to friends on an AOL message board that no longer exists. I don’t remember if I sent it to anyone else. I wish I’d been on livejournal then. I started my account later that year. I should try to rewrite his, but so much about a birth gets erased from memory so quickly! I console myself with the fact that men seem to not be as interested in this kind of thing, so at least it’s the child that will be a man one day that won’t get such a good birth story.

Although there’s the ick factor, I sort of wish I had been at one uninvolved birth at least, so I would have something to write about. I can write about just about anything, but my own children’s births are suddenly too much to even consider writing about. There was just too much to even get down in a regular once-a-day journal entry. The emotions…the activity…everything really was just too intense and alive and too much for me to do it the injustice of putting it down in here when I’m already thinking about other things I need to do.

Perhaps when I get done with my journaling adventures from the angelfire site, I’ll rewrite Bennett’s and get all three of them uploaded and backed up.

This doesn’t seem to have a really good ending, but I guess that’s just the way it goes.

In other news, I’m pretty stoked that I’ve made it to 25 and only skipped weekends and holidays.

Were you ever locked in or out? 

Yeah, so it’s almost 11 p.m. I’m sure I am sounding like a broken record with my whining about how I don’t have time to do this and it’s sooo late. Sorry about that.

Today we started homeschooling in earnest. Still almost a full week before Labor Day! Way to go, us! We also had a doctor’s appointment for Belinda and Bennett, and OCAG. So that’s what happened with my journaling today.

I wrote a poem the other day. I just felt like I had to. It doesn’t rhyme. I think it might be all this writing I’m forcing myself to do that made me want to write the poem. I wrote it on an envelope while I was outside of my hair appointment. I just had to get it down! If I ever get it out of the glove compartment I’ll try to post it.

Two year old me is not locked out of the house. But I look sort of like how I feel when I am.

Now to the subject at hand. It’s finally one that doesn’t have to go back more than a decade to write about! I got locked out when I was a kid sometimes – what a feeling of dread when I got home on the bus and there was no car in the driveway! It was usually some kind of mix-up and it didn’t take Mom or Dad long to get home but yuck. Sometimes we could find a window that was unlocked, and Marissa would heft me up into it, but most of the time we were out of luck.

I got that pleasure again about a week ago. I hadn’t moved my keys onto my new van keychain, so I didn’t have a house key. But that was okay because Ben knew I didn’t have the key.

Or so I thought.

I was sick. Ben had a class he was going to. I had Belinda and Bennett at home. Mom called and asked me to meet her at a gas station five miles away to pick up Lenora, who had spent the night over there. She was worried because she had company coming and didn’t want to come all the way in. I said okay and got the kids in the car, since Ben was getting ready to leave. We got home and I realized I didn’t have my key, Ben was gone, and I hoped that he hadn’t locked the door.

Apparently hoping wasn’t good enough. It was locked. And with new screens on all the downstairs windows, there was no good way to get in any of the windows, even if there was one unlocked. So we drove to Mustang and got Wendy’s for dinner. Then we drove over to where the class was, but surprisingly enough, I was not able to find the class with my limited information of “somewhere over by the airport.”

Went back to the house and we ate the Wendy’s burgers out in the yard. Then we went over to Marissa’s for a while. Then we went driving around. Then we sat in the shade in the car until Ben came home. It was so frustrating!

Then as a bonus, less than a week later IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

That time I was mad.

Ben made me a new key on his way home.

Two days after that I found my old keychain on the floor in Lenora’s room. I can only assume Belinda put them there. I put the keys on the same keychain as the van.

Now my keys annoy me because they are so big they touch my leg when I’m driving. Plus I have two unlocking things on my keychain. I really need to do something about this, but I haven’t yet.

Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow when I’m not teaching the kids or taking them to P.E. or Lenora to dance or going to the podiatrist to get a cast made of my foot for an orthodic device because my arches are falling.

And maybe I won’t!

Did you ever get lost in a strange town?

Of course. I’m 35 years old. Who my age hasn’t been lost in a strange town at least once? I get lost in Oklahoma City sometimes still.

The trick is to always act like you know what’s going on. I never let on that I’m lost. Never. Ben thinks that I have some kind of miracle powers and I never get lost. It’s not true.

I do know I’m going quite a bit. I have an amazing talent of watching the signs around me and deciphering them. I say it’s amazing because Ben doesn’t see signs when he’s driving, so I guess it’s not something that naturally comes to all people. So it’s amazing in our house.

But sometimes I do get lost. I can’t think of a specific example, but I know it happens. When it does, I watch the signs, I check the sun…I look where other people are going…Ben looks up and asks me if I know were I am and I reply of course I do with a tone that implies that he is a fool for asking.

This approach rarely fails me. After a few moments of internal panic, I generally come across a sign or a turn that leads me back to a familiar place. But I never lose the poker face.

And that’s it! No more for today!!!