Where's Berkely?

It's Thursday, and so I am throwing it back again.  

I was 15 and a half when I wrote this, and apparently was dealing with an internal struggle as to whether I wanted to be a well-known actress or stay at home mom.  Only one of those dreams materialized.  I'll let you guess which one.

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Sun. Feb 23, 1997 (8:38 p.m.)

I invented Selfies in my bedroom with a 35mm camera and self timer.
Also I was probably more like 17 here.  Close enough.

I guess it's been a while.  I need to write more!  I think I write that a lot.  Gosh I'm tired.  I watched my cousin on Friday.  She is so much fun!  We read a story and played with Barney.  She was a little sick, so she wasn't as hyper.  On Saturday I went to the Imax & to St. Matthew's mall.  At the IMAX we saw something on special effects.  It was neat, we saw how they blew up the white house in Independence Day.  That would be a neat job.  At the mall me & Marilla walked around.  I love that mall.  It has so much stuff.  We went into this music store.  We were looking through music books & this guy came over & told us that we weren't allowed to.  He said "This is me, I'm the jerk, welcome to jerk express."  I almost busted out laughing.  It was funny.  He was nice about it, though.  I wanted to look to see if I could play the songs.  You know, when I'm around people that I don't go to school with, I'm a whole different person.  I'm more outgoing.  Maybe that's a good thing, or maybe it's bad.  I don't know.  It's bad, but all I focus on is wanting a boyfriend and losing weight.  I try to stop, but I can't.  I can't wait to go to college.  Sometimes I want to be this adventurous woman who travels all over the world taking pictures, but other times I want to be the kind of woman who stays at home, taking care of kids, sewing, cooking, working on a flower garden.  My mind is just one humongous contradiction.  I wish I knew what I wanted to do.  I wonder what I'm going to be doing at this exact time in 5 yrs, 10 yrs.  

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Mon. March 3, 1997 (6:46 p.m.)

The grass is turning green!  I love it!  Maybe spring will get here afterall!  It doesn't seem like it now, though.  It's been raining a lot.  It rained Friday night, all day Saturday, and today.  they cancelled school today & tomorrow.  This is 'The Flood of '97.'  They've closed off roads.

I want to be famous.  I have this yearning deep inside of me to be something more.  I don't know what.  I guess an actress.  How will I do that?  There's got to be a way!  Maybe after High School I can go to Hollywood.  I could go to college there.  I've got to make it!  I just have to!  I want everyone to know who I am!  Jaime Ritter!  That's me!  I don't know.  Maybe that's not what I want to do.  I could be a singer.  I don't think I'm good enough for that, though.  I just want to be well known.  I want to be recognised as I walk down the street.  I want to have to have bodyguards.  anything is possible, right?  Gosh, where would I go to college?  Where's Berkely?  I think it's in San Francisco.  I've got to go somewhere, get somewhere better than I am.  I know I've got a good life here, but I want something more.  I'm only 15.  I've got time, I think.

(The rest of the journal entries can be found here: Jaime's embarrassing journal entries about boys she loved and also how much she wanted to get her period.)

Motherhood and More: Parenting by the book*

In a fit of desperation and exhaustion that only comes with attempting to force my stubborn daughter to do something she didn't want to do, I bought a parenting book.

Now, I’m not normally one for self-help-type things.  In the past I looked down on that sort of thing, preferring to believe that I could fix anything that was wrong with determination and my own brand of stubbornness. 

And then I became a parent.  And lo it was hard.  And then I became a parent again and lo it was even harder.

I've attempted for years to will myself into having complete parental control.  Because that’s how I thought I was supposed to parent.  I thought children were always supposed to obey and listen and never throw tantrums.  And I do exaggerate, but when you’re in the midst of trying to separate warring children, or trying to dress a child who refuses to stop standing on her head long enough to put a shirt on, it’s hard not to focus on what you feel you've done wrong.

So I bought a book.  It’s called “Kids Are Worth It!: Giving Your Child The Gift Of Inner Discipline.”  I learned about it from another blogger who mentioned that it was responsible for keeping her from dropping her kids off at the edge of a forest and running away.

It sounded promising because, yes, I too sometimes want to drop my own precious angels off to fend for themselves after they have refused once again to eat the dinner I've cooked for them, turning their noses up and calling it ‘yuck.’

So far the book has focused on treating your children like you’d want to be treated.  Now, this may be common sense to most parents, but to me it was a revelation.  Of course.  Of course I should be treating them with respect.  I shouldn't try to force my will on them at all because, well, it isn't going to work anyway. 

I can guide them, sure.  I can show by example.  But I cannot make them do anything.  Any time I've tried to force my daughter to get in her car seat it has ended in yelling and frustration.  But if I step back a bit and calm myself down, the entire situation will diffuse. 

So that’s what I've been trying to do.  I’m trying to treat my children not like they are my property and so must do what I say, whenever I say.  I’m trying to talk to them.  To have conversations and discuss why I want them to do a certain thing.  Because no one wants to be told what to do all the time.  No one wants an inflexible tyrant standing over their shoulder.

And I know it’s not going to work all the time.  I know that we will still butt heads and there will be instances where I need to be more forceful.  But I want to give them the tools to decide for themselves the right thing to do.

I admittedly never thought parenting would be as hard as it has been.  I thought it would be easy and that I would always know what to do.  But I don’t.  Most of the time I try to do what feels right but sometimes I’m at a loss.  I don’t know if I’m parenting right, I don’t know if I’m making the right decisions.  And sometimes my kids get in the way of me being the type of parent I want to be.  When that happens I have to - I need to - step back, reevaluate and change course. 

So I bought a book.  It has helped me to focus on how I parent and how I treat my kids, how I talk to my kids and how I talk about them. 

And maybe parenting doesn't come with a complete handbook and maybe it’s never going to be as easy as I thought.  But I can still teach myself to be better.

*This column originally published in The News-Enterprise on May 28, 2014.

Scenes from a long weekend

This weekend was nice.  Like capital N nice.  (So I guess Nice?)

We had dinner with friends and frogs and worms and tick bites (okay, that wasn't Nice) and soccer games and setting up the pool in the yard for the first time this year and sunburns (just me) and a walk to a downtown festival and face paint and $4 bratwurst and margaritas and more visits with friends and sewing and knitting and digging in the dirt and fishing for the boys and craft supply shopping for the girls and hamburgers two days in a row and a trip to Caneyville to see my sister's farm and fun with family and cows and chickens and geodes bigger than your head and entirely too much dessert and beer and more margaritas and and and ...

I want more like it.

Homemade Friday: Maritime Shorts from Grainline Studio

It's getting a bit ridiculous, this sewing bug.

I started once it finally warmed up and I seem to be partially addicted.  But, really, if you're going to have an addiction isn't it better to have one based on creating pretty things?  For myself? While my children moan about being hungry?

Ever since I started sewing* I've not really felt up to the task.  I started simply, sewing skirts that had two pieces and a zipper, making my mom sew in the zipper every time.

Also notice the tiny pocket tank. And the fact that for some reason every time I take self portraits I look super pissed.  Probably because I hate taking self portraits.

I moved on to dresses, but it was never easy.  The instructions were like really complicated math word problems that refused to make any sense in my brain.  I winged it mostly, believing that even if I wasn't following the instructions exactly I'd still be able to wear the finished project.

And for the most part it worked - provided my mom would sew the buttons on for me.

I put my machine away for awhile, preferring to focus on knitting in my spare time because I had babies and it was way easier to find the time to sit in front of a television knitting than hiding myself in a room far away from TV and sewing.  I multi-tasked, is what I'm saying.

In the past few years I've still sewn things for my kids sporatically, like the bags for Christmas, those demonic Easter bunnies, Halloween costumes, shorts.  But I never felt confident.  I never felt like I knew what I was doing, just like I was able to finish a project with sheer determination.

They are wrinkled because they are well-loved.

Last year I started sewing earnestly.  I'm not sure why, really.  Maybe it was because the kids were older and better able to go longer stretches without needing me at their beck and call.  Maybe it was because I was older and felt the need to connect in some way with my mother, and with her mother, my Granny, who died almost 12 years ago and who was a sewist and who I still miss so very much.

But whatever the reason I pulled my machine out and got to work.  I made dress after dress after dress for myself, and a couple of tops.  I even used a bit of that time to sew for my kids, who probably don't really deserve it on account of how little they appreciate my effort.

Everything I made, though, was simple, no buttons, no zippers, easy-to-follow.  I did put the zipper in Sebastian's Batman Halloween costume myself, so by October I was beginning to feel the urge to stretch my sewing wings a bit.

Me Made May 2014 has really helped me.  I've never participated before, probably because I didn't have enough hand-made clothes to wear.  This year, though, I've made it a point to make myself things.  It's fun, you know?  It's neat to be able to say yes, I did make that.  And I've been given the opportunity, the freedom, to spend much of my days off of work sewing.  The kids are in school and I am all by myself.  (Oh how I love being all by myself!  Introverts unite!)

Pockets!

I'm not sure what made me look to shorts to sew.  I know I bought the Maritime Shorts pattern along with the Tiny Pocket Tank and Scout Tee in a drunken haze one night.  Because nothing says fun drunk girl like buying sewing patterns late at night while your husband is asleep.

I spent last Friday cutting out the shorts pattern, along with the tank and shirt because I find it much easier to sew when all the pieces are already there waiting on you.  They're digital patterns, which means (I think I've already said this but bare with me) you have to print out a bajillion pages and cut and paste all of the pieces of the pattern together.  It sucks.  Hate it.  But then again, it's nice to have the pattern right there for you.

These shorts also had a bajillion pattern pieces to cut out, so once I got all of the pattern pieces cut out I still had to cut out all of the shorts pieces.

I started sewing on Saturday because I was excited about doing something new.  (All the pieces!  THE ZIPPER!)  And I just couldn't get it.  I have a hard time with shorts and pants anyway because I can never see how the pieces are going to fit together to make something vaguely wearable until the end.  These instructions made absolutely no sense to me.  So I did some searching and found that Grainline Studio did a pattern tutorial, which was perfect and just what I needed.  It was still difficult and confusing and hard to follow in some points, but I did it.  I sewed shorts.  Real shorts, not just the ones with an elastic waist.

It's a fly!  And more wrinkles!

There was a fly to insert and a zipper to sew and pockets.  Four of them.  I took it step by step and had to use the seam ripper quite a few times, but I finished.  I actually originally had the legs longer than the pattern called for, but I'd made the shorts too big accidentally so the long length made me look matronly and I'm not ready for that yet.

As I said, they're too big.  I realized it as I was going and attempted to just sew larger seams to make up for it.  It worked some, but then made the waistband wonky.  And they're still too big.  But that could possibly be because the material is stretchy and has loosened up as I've worn them.  And I have worn them.  I wore them on Monday afternoon and Wednesday to the zoo and then when I got home from work last night.

They're incredibly comfortable. I love them so, so much.  They're not perfect at all but they're mine and I made them with my own two hands and a photo tutorial.

I want to make more.  I will make more.

Watch out for my butt.**

*I'm not counting the hand-sewing I did as a kid making clothes for my Barbie dolls. Mainly because it was horrible.

**We've been watching entirely too much Frozen around here.  I couldn't help it.