Stepmomming - Part Deux

Good morning, everyone. Today is Mother's Day, May 14, 2023. 

Today is also my seventh wedding anniversary to Erik, and the traditional seventh anniversary gift is wool. Friends, as a knitter, I proclaim that I WAS BUILT FOR THIS. All yarn gifts are appreciated, and if you give me a 100g ball of yarn, I will return it to you as a hat, or a pair of fingerless gloves (should your office be cold and your fingers still need dexterity for your keyboard). I promise!

As far as knitting, I have shelved the St. Jude sweater for now, because I am at a part where I need to concentrate and read. Neither of those verbs are compatible with my current state of mind. Instead, I just finished a pair of socks for a friend, and I started knitting a hex shawl with this Three Irish Girls yarn I have had forever. I am sorry I cannot stretch with one hand and photograph with the other at four in the morning, but please do zoom in on the colors and stitch definition. This yarn is just camelot through the fingers.

So, I became a wife for the second time on May 14, 2016. Wording it that way does not do my mindset justice; if you happen to be running across this post while sitting on your veranda in Lichtenstein, then you do not know I am about as feminist as they come. Instead of saying I "became a wife," it is more of my ilk to say that I entered a long-term, non-real-estate contract for the second time that day. Also, as I always look for an excuse to share the following photos, here is our Chicago-style hot dog wedding cake, courtesy of Chef Mindy Gohr of Bittersweet Pastry Shop.

This one was always my favorite, followed closely by the one taken when Erik and I went to Downers Grove South and took some photos there. 

I became a mom on July 15, 2018, three days after my own 43rd birthday. Stanley was already three and a half weeks early, but there will always be a part of me who wishes he came down that freaking birth canal a full four weeks early. Telling people I gave birth at 42 instead of 43 would have resulted in about 4% fewer ooh's and ahh's, if my calculations are correct. He is a good kid, though. Even now, with all of the turbulence in my house, he gets more joy from practicing reading than he does from acting like a punk.

Fun fact: Stanley was due on August 7th and named in honor of Chicago Blackhawks great Stan Mikita. Stan Mikita died on Stanley's actual due date of August 7th.

On January 11, 2023, I became a different kind of mom. I became a stepmom back on the wedding anniversary seven years ago. However, on January 11, my stepkids came to live with us full-time after they discovered their mom had died that morning, smack in the middle of Erik trying to rebuild from his previous three or so years of just generally giving up. 

Now, I was someone who was running a business, running a completely chaotic household, holding down a job, going from being a full-time mom to one kid to being a full-time mom to three kids, and my spare time (because calling it what it is - every single minute of the day while overlapping with the above - makes me sound a bit "extra") is spent turning three kids into good grownups. This does not count the constantly helping Erik see that what he knew about parenting was a foundation for dysfunctional abuse cycles (through no fault of his, obviously). In flits of transition, I have to figure out if my own identity is in there somewhere. 

I do not mind being a mom. I do not mind being a business owner. I do not mind even being a wife or stepmom, adult daughter, good friend, good singer, decent knitter, neighbor who watches your house, planner, or even failure. What I mind is that, while I acknowledge that life is a culmination and continuously-changing path created by our choices, I never wanted to feel like I had no choice.

Right now, I have no choice but to stay.

Please, for the love of all things woolly, do not infer from this that I had my bags packed, but now I have to unpack and stay until (insert deadline or milestone here). I choose to stay. I choose to make the best of what is currently a very, very challenging life. That said, part of the reason is because choosing to ditch everything and everyone except Stanley in favor of living in a cute condo in a big city far away from here presents a set of circumstances that are not any more appealing than the life I have been handed. Plus, I just do not have the energy.

What I can do, however, is I can make the best of literally everything. That also takes quite a bit of energy, but the reward is much more profound than the unknown. You know the old saying about needing to be careful what you wish for when you say things like, "I wish the boss would just disappear!" because the next one could be ten times worse?" Well, that is exactly my life in a nutshell. I have good people around me, some baseline stability, and a lot of yarn for the twenty minutes per week where we are all at the library, and I get to knit while the kids are checking out books. Packing up and ditching everyone for a new life would involve changing addresses to four mortgage companies, having a different type of contract in place with Erik, figuring out my job and business, blah blah blah. I think I will just stick to waking up at 3:15am every day and going to the gym, and then getting my coffee at 7-Eleven.

And, I choose yarn. I choose knitting. I choose to not take up yoga, cooking, piano, oil painting, calligraphy, vegetable gardening, mountain biking, or feng shui. I am sticking with knitting.

Today, we celebrate motherhood. I also celebrate marriage. Every other day of the year, however, I choose to celebrate just making it through the day, and doing the best I can with the choices I am making. Finally, while I may want to smack everyone who tells me, "Wow...those boys are so fortunate to have you in their lives!" I understand it comes from a sympathetic place, and I want you all to keep telling me. That one sentence helps me make the right choice every day, especially for the task of making sure as many people around me that need it can turn into good grownups one day. Thank you for reading.

Life Is An Oregon Trail

Hello, everyone...I thought I would drop you all a note, and see if anyone wanted to donate to St. Jude in the month of March. See, I joined the Knit & Fundraise Challenge for St. Jude, and then I realized my life is a smelly dumpster fire at the moment, so I may have overestimated my ability to be a prolific knitter in an allotted time frame.

That, though, is the bad news. 

I mean, there has been a ton of bad news, in my defense. But what I mean is that if I look on the bright side, at least I started to knit, at least I am sharing the fundraiser, and at least the people who know me understand that I am already doing my best. So there is that.

Here is the link to the donation page. If you don't have Facebook, you can always just go here to donate, and there is a spot to put who sent you to their page. You can donate in memory of someone, or in honor of an occasion like, say, Amy Kaspar's Knit & Fundraise Challenge:

https://www.facebook.com/donate/598504321614651/10158923877575474/

For the record, I am doing my part anyway. I am knitting, I am showing you my progress right here and right now, and I am tooting the horn of St. Jude publicly!

See? Here I am at the gym this morning, "representin'," as the cool kids say.

And yesterday, I was sitting at the Avery Coonley School in Downers Grove, waiting for Stanley to be socially evaluated. For those of you who do not know my son, you know how hilarious it is that he needed to be evaluated in the first place when it comes to social skills. The kid has boundaries, but he has no Stranger Danger whatsoever. They were having a Wellness Period while he was there, so when we were leaving, he had to go up to each dog-handler of the three dog visitors and ask them, "Is your dog friendly?" before petting their dogs.

And finally, here is your glimmer of hope for the day. Many knitters look at patterns, browse the internet for inspiration, and even wander the yarn shop with the idea that seeing a finished product will make him, her, or them want to start and finish a project. I, a short-attention-span-knitter, often start projects that take me months because I keep putting them down, in order to be stimulated by a different project. This one, however...just look at it. The project is from Lang Yarns and the yarn, in my stash, is Berroco Lustra (a throwback, for sure...it has probably been discontinued for a decade...but by all means, zoom in on the gorgeousness):

I have had a hard time. Last year was the culmination of a three-year period, where I was trying to hold my marriage together as my husband went down a horrible downward spiral, only to have him seek help and then realize how overwhelming adulthood is (I am simplifying because the details are really nobody's business). The pandemic, which happened to be the same time period, was a horrible time to be a property investor in Chicago. It resulted in me losing $70,000 in one year with no recourse from any relief program out there, and selling a building for the sake of my mental health. I then purchased a wonderful place from a wonderful man out in Rochelle, about sixty miles from my house. The tenants there are like family, just like my building in Westmont. It has not been all gloom and doom, but the bad has far, far outweighed the good.

On Christmas Eve, Erik's kids were visiting us from their mom's house for the holiday. Recently, their household situation had dramatically changed, and Christmas Eve was the first time the kids could finally be honest with us about the horrors they had been subjected to and living with. We had spent the past six years telling them, "Look...we know that's not true. Just tell us the truth instead of lying. You can trust us." Realistically, though, they could not possibly trust adults. At all. We understood this, and we had waited patiently.

So, we spent over an hour hearing about the horrors of all of the stuff we knew, but just needed confirmation. Again, the specific details are nobody's business. But on January 11, I got a call from my husband less than an hour after I arrived to work. He had been contacted by Emergency Services, and was on his way to his former house, where his ex-wife lived.

The kids, fifteen minutes previous to this, had discovered their mom dead in bed. They are eight and thirteen.

I arrived there, did what I had to do to support my husband, and then talked to God a bit about just desserts and karma and other non-religious stuff that fits in the monster-sized "What Goes Around Comes Around" file, because I was assessing the last six years and predicting the next six. My brain goes in weird places when I am the Calm One, and there are some big feelings around me. The kids had already been picked up at this point, but they immediately came to live with us, along with their two not-properly-cared-for cats.

The past two months have been challenging, for both everyone in my household and everyone who encounters us. Trauma, and the processing of trauma - especially when the kids and the husband were never given the tools to process it properly - is like pancake syrup. You see it, you wash it, it looks gone, and then you realize that it was on your fingertips and has stuck to everything you have touched since then.

The kids have outbursts like toddlers, except that they weigh about ninety pounds apiece. I feel overwhelmed but have to take care of more than my share, since I am the most enlightened in the house. Erik is overwhelmed because - let's face it - this is A LOT. Our jobs are affected. The school counselors are working overtime. Money is basically being tossed out the front door to make up for the fact that all essentials and full-time items needed to be purchased, and items on a normal parenting checklist had somehow been recently neglected. Therapists are being recruited. Moments of mistrust are tense. It is hard. 

But you know what? This knitting project represents progress. We have all come a long way in a very short time, and we are starting to come together as a beautiful unit. If details are what you want, reach out to me privately and I will decide if you are worthy or entitled to them. Other than that, though, I ask for both your donations to St. Jude, and your prayers. They don't have to be to God (the prayers, I mean). If you are the kind of person who talks to the ashes of your dead cat, then just know I totally get that. You do you, and thank you.