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.

Reintroducing Reality

 Hi! I'm Amy, and I'm a Yarnaholic.

("Hi, Amy!")

First question:  Who wants to see the finished Pete the Cat sweater? It's here.

Now, I am working on the Great American Aran Afghan, the Victorian Lace shawl I will never finish, another sock-yarn shawl, the end of the fourth scarf I am donating to a cause this week, and...you know...paying bills, too. I have completed the first square of the afghan, but I did not put the bugs on it. I think the ones in the original pattern are cute, but they are not very "me."

I did, however, include the spider because spiders are amazing creatures.

I want to talk about how far gone people have strayed from reality over the past decade and specifically the past four years. This is directed at everyone whose world view is not rooted in reality, but they don't realize it.

In other words, they probably are not reading this.

That said, look at yourself in the mirror and give yourself the grace you deserve. Is it possible you have been overreacting? Is it possible you are letting your beliefs seek out opinions and "facts" that support those beliefs? Is it possible your learning tools all slant in the same direction?

A man on the street, who was interviewed regarding the Georgia runoff elections, had this to say:

“I can’t believe what’s been said about Trump and it’s all been taken out of context anyway,” Joey Moats, 65, from Rome, Ga., told Yahoo News. “He will stay in the White House later this month. Something fishy happened on election night. I just want accountability and a peaceful transition to Trump’s second term.”

Listen...this is not me picking on Trump, per se. It is not exactly difficult to say that what Biden says is always taken out of context when it comes to his verbal flubs.

The difference is this: Trump is not an isolated verbal flub. And two things are concerning about the above statement.

First, Trump being taken out of context. Multiple analyses over the past four years (as reported by the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Newsweek, and even The Blaze) have concluded that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. Big deal, right? So his speech is dumbed down, despite his multiple degrees and business holdings. It is the best way to appeal to the masses, right?

Well, speaking like a fourth-grader is not just the size of the words, or the size of the sentences. It is the intent of the message, also. The anger, the leading emotion, this is what these analyses reference. "Take their oil!" is not a very presidential thing to say. It does not lay out any hint of strategy, any reasoning behind why the oil needs to be taken, and not even any sort of definitive action. All it does is convey anger, and because it is coming from a figure of authority, people think, "Oh...I guess I should be angry. Okay!"

See, what Trump says is not taken out of context. The issue is that there is no context provided. And why would he need context? He has people at his rallies, maskless and elbow-to-elbow, cheering about liberty and vaccine microchips and getting angry for no real reason.

The second part:  something fishy happened on election night. This message has been hammered into the brains of Trump supporters not just for two months, but for over four years.

The following tweets were before the 2016 election:

It is not that nobody questioned how free and fair our elections were before this. Of course they did; it is the reason there are signature verifications, voter registrations, witnesses, commissions, and mandatory recounts at an assigned minimum margin. But to say they are rigged? People, join us in reality.

This is along the same line as "what the mainstream media won't tell you." First, the mainstream media has to fact-check things to death. Lawsuits can break companies, and we live in an era where literally everyone around the news has a cell phone with a recording device and a camera on it. The undertaking of the so-called mainstream media to be defrauding the entire public out of as fair and accurate a depiction of events as possible is literally the most preposterous thing that could be conceived. We are talking matrix-level bullshit.

So, why is it so hard to break the cycle of seeking out news you feel is the truth? Well, you are not going to like my answer. It is because emotional abuse is the hardest cycle to break. For four years, you were told that the 2016 election was rigged despite Trump winning. Now, we have people being quoted in the news saying that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the democrats are too dumb to pull it off (thank you James Earnhardt, 76, of Canton). 

In other words, you have a guy spouting what he has heard for four years, because he was trained to be really angry, and he can't voice his own logical thoughts anymore.

No? Okay. Then ask yourself how 81 million people can be too dumb to steal an election, but their candidate won. Ask yourself after that how half of those 81 million people probably voted for Biden, but then some clever chaps with witnesses were rigging the voting machines to give Biden double the votes.

Logically and soundly, you know this is impossible. But when an actual fourth-grader tells you something outlandish about why he broke the dish, or why he was outside without his shoes on, or why he was provoked to hit his brother, you correct the behavior and speech.

We can't, as individuals, correct Trump's behavior and speech. But because he made half of us angry, and he was an authority figure so this is how we thought we should be led, we bought it.

And now we are left with a bunch of people who are quoting lies because they have heard these lies repeated so many times, they think they must be true now.

Break the cycle. Seek hope. Seek the truth, and I do not mean seek out "alternative" media. I mean reach out to the scientists, the economists, the strategists...people who get paid less money than they deserve for using facts to guide their behavior and beliefs. Try it. Seriously.

Pay attention to how things are worded. "Some are saying..." is not the same as "Doctor So-and-so, professor of epidemiology at the University of Whatever, concluded in his study that..."

Again, I am not saying this does not happen in the democratic party. But I am talking about right here, right now, and the fact that half of the republican senators are willing to put loyalty to their leader over their own constituents, under the guise of "public trust" (remember:  the reason there is distrust is because people were gaslighted, and not because there was widespread fraud), and it is appalling.

If your argument for your party is "the democrats are dumb" or "the republicans are crooks," then you are saying 50% of the country is dumb. Not dumber than you, but patently dumb. Do you believe that? I doubt it...I am guessing someone in your life who you respect fits into the "dumb" category, but you know them not to be dumb at all. However, if you strip people of their identity and lump them into a giant category (by using emotion, small words, and generalizations), you can stop seeing people and start seeing lemmings.

What you do not see, though, is that you yourself are the lemming.

Are You Happy?

Good morning, everyone...I am sitting at a Starbucks (not the one where I sling lattes), taking a break from getting about sixteen-hundred bits of paper together. I need a break, or I can already tell I am going to start filing things in the wrong place. That said, something has been on my mind for about a week, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. Seems silly, but I want to talk about happiness.

My stepmom called me last Thursday, and to tell you how rare this is unless it is a federal holiday of some sort, my first thought was, "Crap...now who died?" My stepmom is excellent at actively loving her family in the truest sense of love, but correspondence just is not her thing. Knowing this, I call her every two weeks or so, and we catch up on each other's gossip and any events that are worth noting.

So, after establishing that I was me and she was herself, she said, "Greg has asked me to marry him." I took a breath and started to freak out on her behalf, because that's what girls do, repeating "Omigod omigod omigod..." over and over again until both of us stopped giggling. We talked about how some people have expressed concern...or, at least that is how she interprets it...regarding her and Greg moving faster than they think is appropriate, or that she isn't thinking things through, or being irrational, or whatever.

"But you know what? I'm happy." Meg's words should slap every naysayer in the face.

She started dating him around Thanksgiving last year. He moved into her house shortly after that, and they talk on the phone often when not next to each other, and they tell each other everything. In fact, they have been like that pretty much since they met. I saw them in August, and they sat on the same side of the table at a restaurant, ordering one meal and splitting it down the middle. They did that the next morning as well.

So I ask you...the next time someone says anything along the lines of "Are you sure this is the right decision?" remind yourself of two things:  they probably actually do mean well, and they do not determine your happiness. You do.
So, if someone feels the right to question you on something that makes you happy, then ask yourself if you are truly happy. My guess is that most people do not know the difference between forced and true happiness, until they have had an event or period in their life where they can look back and realize that their happiness was forced. Also, the ones who are asking may also have never felt true happiness. I am not saying their concern is unjustified; just know that true happiness is more rare than we give it credit. Look at anyone's facebook page for proof of this. How many times do we see someone smiling in a single photograph, but we know the history behind the smile plastered on his or her face? We are all guilty of it.

I am truly happy. I have work to do, decisions to make, and will always have the typical stressors in my life like never-ending bills, but I do know the difference between truly happy and manufacturing something I want people to see. Happiness is relatively easy, and when you have to work at it, you enjoy working at it. Happiness feels relieving, peaceful, and genuine. Forced happiness feels more like a balance sheet, where we take stock of our problems and our good qualities, and justify having 50.00001% good in our lives.

When I get questioned about me being happy, especially regarding my relationship, the questions are pretty typical:  How can you be in love with someone almost twelve years younger than you? But...what about his kids...have you thought about that? Are you sure you want to get married after how the last marriage ended? Do you really think a year is long enough before you know if you want to be with him? Don't you think you should live together first? How do you know he is not after your money? You know that his ex-wife and mother are part of the package, right?

Because when you are truly happy, you know the difference. Of course there are always compromises, negotiations, details to work out. But another major component of happiness is the ability to communicate, and the two concepts (communication and happiness) are absolutely intrinsically related. There is an incredible amount of contentment that comes with knowing I can say anything at all to him, and there will be a discussion but no irrational yelling or accusing. We talk. A lot. About a lot of different sides of the same issue. And we figure out what is worth continuing and what is worth dropping as a two-person unit.

With regard to all of the questions above, my response in my head (and sometimes out of my mouth) is, "Why does it matter to you?" Otherwise, it is not really anyone's business. If I say I am happy, and I seem happy, and most importantly, if you can tell the difference in how I am when I'm happy and how I am when I'm not, then just wish the best and move on. And I will wish the best for you, whether or not I understand it.

Sometimes I fail at that. But I try. Because everyone...everyone...should find happiness, no matter what.