Things No One Tells You About Becoming a Mom

My second daughter's arrival is right around the corner. This means that labor, childbirth, poop, sleeplessness, and countless other things that go with motherhood (specifically newborns) have been filling my already foggy pregnant brain. Something I realized last time I went through this is that there are things that people just don't tell you.

I think some of these things are straight up gross, so they are rude to discuss over a meal; some pass so quickly that experienced young moms forget to share them with their friends before it's their turn to experience them (leaving the newbies to wonder "WTF? A head's up would have been nice."); and some might just be so embarrassing that no mom would ever share them. Ever. Not even to save a close family member or friend's own embarrassment/feelings of utter inadequacy. No matter who your friends are or what books and websites you read, your experience will not be like any other mother's. But here I intend to list some of the things that caught me a little off guard.

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1. Being pregnant is not fun. 

There are women out there who claim that they enjoy being pregnant so much that they wouldn't mind being with child all the time. I've even heard someone say they'd rather be pregnant than have the actual kid. (Wow.) I say more power to you, girls. But for me personally: constantly feeling like I'm going to retch all my internal organs out with no relief for weeks on end; getting punched and kicked from the inside; being in pain, exhausted, and uncomfortable all the time (especially at the end); feeling like my privates have had a car battery dropped on them when I move too suddenly; and handing over my body, independence, and physical activity to a few-pounds ball of human I'm trying to grow... just isn't my idea of a good time.

I hate to sound like a complainer. The end result of being pregnant is so mind-blowingly worth any and all of the things I've listed. Both of my pregnancies have been normal, uneventful, and as comfortable as can be (which makes me shudder to think about the poor women who have complications or are put on bedrest). But even as "easy" as pregnancy is for me, I don't like it. I'm selfish and I want my body back. Now.

2. You don't get your body back after Baby is born.


This one is pretty common sense, but I think the first time around I was so relieved that I wasn't pregnant anymore, I didn't quite understand that my body wasn't all of a sudden going to be "mine" again. Feeding a newborn around the clock prevents that pretty effectively. Feeling like you've been run over by a truck, wearing a pad the size of a decorative pillow because you'll be bleeding for about six weeks, treating your hemorrhoids, and running on a fraction of your desired sleep makes it hard to pamper yourself and "get back into shape" right away. (And I haven't even done it with an extra toddler running around yet. This will be fun.)

3. Part of labor is feeling like you are pooping yourself.


My doctor was ready to give me a c-section after I remained dilated at 7 cm for too long without progressing. While the nurses were dealing with my finished paperwork and getting ready to wheel me into another room for surgery, I suddenly had to ask Jon one question, "Am I pooping? Right now? It feels like I am pooping." After checking (what a great guy) and letting a nurse know, we learned that my body was telling me that Kealani was coming and it was time to push. This time I'll know it's almost over when I feel like I'm involuntarily taking a dump on the table.

4. You will instantly feel sorry for all the BS you put your mom through. I mean it, like instantly after childbirth.


The way you feel about your kid after she's born is indescribable, so I won't try. What I never realized is that I'd all at once feel dangerously protective of my baby while also feeling guilty about making my mom worry about me as much as I must have. Moms worry. I won't stop worrying now until I'm dead. That feeling is something that can't be explained, but I appreciated my mom (and dad) on a new level, and will most definitely continue to as my girls pass through each stage of life. (God help me through the teenage years.)

5. If breastfeeding was used as a form of torture to obtain information, all governments would know everything they need to know. At all times.


I'd read up on breastfeeding, had friends and my own mom who had experienced it, and always planned to attempt it. I was still rather unprepared for the pain. I think it goes under the category of passing so quickly that no one remembers to relay the tidbit "breastfeeding sucks so bad there will be times you wish you were dead" to their friends. It makes complete and total sense. Take a body part that is uber sensitive, latch a living thing onto it, and let it suck as hard as it can for hours on end. This will cause said body part high levels of pain.

Most reading materials and other moms told me this pain should only last a week or two. For me it lasted eight full weeks. There were times the sound of my daughter stirring, meaning she would be ready for a meal within minutes, made me cry. I truly thought I was mommy-handicapped because if it still hurt, I must be doing it wrong, right?? No, I was doing it right. So was my daughter.

Praise the Lord the pain eventually completely subsided. Like, I could pop her little face onto my boob, carry on a conversation, and/or build a model airplane while she nourished herself, and I hardly remembered she was there. Just a little encouragement for anyone who goes through this in the future: if you really want to breastfeed, and keep breastfeeding, the pain will go away. As long as there are no medical conditions, problems with milk production, or issues with your baby's latching/suckling reflexes, you're good to go.

If you want to prepare yourself ahead of time, follow these simple steps: Rub down your nipples with a square of extra course grit sandpaper, as hard as you can. Take a razor blade and add some cuts here and there, making sure there's plenty of bleeding. Apply rubbing alcohol with a shot of Listerine. Next, try to find a bra, t-shirt, or any other piece of apparel that you can wear without causing friction between said article of clothing and nipples. Do NOT sleep on your stomach. Repeat 6 - 12 times per day. Good luck.


6. Moms can be super judgmental of each other.

Hey, we're women. We judge, gossip, and hate on others for no apparent reason. It's not something to be proud of. But with my first kid I realized how much competition there is between new moms and moms with similar aged kids. Even the ones with kids in the next stage make comments like, "Oh, you think it's hard now, wait until...", and I've heard "well, you're lucky you have a girl..." more times than I have fingers.

Here's the deal. Being a mom is hard. The career of raising a human being does not receive pay, vacations, or breaks. You are ingrained with the "mother instinct" immediately after giving birth. It doesn't matter what your kid's temperament, stage, energy level, age, or gender is. Young moms are all doing it for the first time, and it's hard. There's no right way, and every child, parent, and family are different. There's no need to compete. If we're doing our best and our kids grow into somewhat productive members of society with good values and a sense of responsibility, we all "win".

7. Your kid will probably fall on its head. More than once. Whether you tell other people is entirely up to you.


As if being a new parent isn't hard enough... there are accidents. Plenty of them. Feeling inadequate rises to a new degree when you turn your back for 1/16 of a second and your kid falls on her head. God made babies' bodies very bendable and they heal lightening fast. This is because He also made moms, and knew how out of it we would be sometimes.

8. When you're pregnant the second time (and I imagine every time after that), you pee yourself. 
    Often.


When those muscles have been stretched by childbirth once already, and now there's a new baby resting right on top of them, they don't work very well. I pee when I laugh, sneeze, cough, and exist. After I finish peeing on the toilet, no matter how long I sit there to make sure I am fully drained, within one minute of standing up, a few more drops WILL come out. I lean forward, backward, wiggle a little, but it never fails. I take the necessary precautions, but that doesn't mean it's not gross.

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I'm sure there are many more things that would be nice for future moms to know (I may add them as I think of them)... and really society. There are plenty of "complainers" out there who make the symptoms of pregnancy/motherhood more obvious to outsiders, but they don't represent all of us.

The only times I get peeved are when there's a "what does she do all day" attitude toward my job, or someone makes me feel like I'm lazy for not wanting to move much in this stage of pregnancy. But all I have to do is take a look at my gorgeous little girl and none of that matters. All I do is for her, and her little sister to come, and they deserve it. I love being a mom.

The First Apartment

Due to the exciting upcoming addition to the Richert household in December, I've been out of commission in the writing department... apparently for almost three months. Oops. While I used to use Kealani's nap time to write my stories, lately I've been using it to sit like a blob on the sofa, stare into space, take a nap myself, or, in the early stages of pregnancy, try not to vomit. 

But I'm back! And I'll try to be better this time. We'll see how long I can stick to that when Baby #2 comes along.

Our family will be moving into a new-to-us rental house with room for four in San Luis next month. It will only be the third place Jon and I have lived in together, and second since Kealani was born. This has gotten me all nostalgic... it has also brought up some charming memories of our very first apartment, along with the Moving Out Experience.

  Our first living room... don't worry, we added 
in vogue decor later... and yes, that's a bike rack.

Our first place was a typical young-marrieds' first apartment. Cheap and sketchy. Our actual complex wasn't necessarily sketchy, nor the townhouse-style apartment. But the area, on South El Camino in Atascadero, saw its fair share of nutcases and police cars. We loved it because we lived there together.  We hated it because we shared walls with strangers, paid to do our laundry, and had super classy neighbors.

There was the family across the lawn from us: a bilingual young couple with an out-of-control toddler boy who enjoyed playing handball against our wall (the upside to living on the end of the row). These people managed to own three nice cars and park all of them in our parking lot despite the one-space-per-apartment rule. They probably could have lived in a two story house in north A-town if they'd sold a couple of their automobiles. To each their own.

Next, the old man with his mail-order Filipina bride and their much sweeter and quieter toddler boy. The only time I saw her was in the laundry room, and she was pleasant enough. Just too young. For a sixty-five-year-old man.

My personal favorites moved in about six months after we did. This couple was, for lack of a better term... white trash. Friendly as can be, just... well, you know. I would arrive home after long days of substitute teaching, and eventually full-time teaching that included a wonderful commute from King City, to find both of them standing or sitting on my porch drinking matching cans of Bud Light. Now, when I was substituting locally, I got home around 3:30. Every day. I found them on my porch with their brewskies at 3:30 every day. Because they chose to park themselves in my business, I found myself politely nodding with a "hello", entering my home, and keeping my shades drawn. I hate artificial light. But Joe Dirt and his wifey were hanging out right outside my window, so there was only one logical choice. It got even better as we watched Mrs. Dirt during her two, very consecutive pregnancies not only continue her daily Bud Light tradition, but smoke several cigarettes as well. Thank God their two adorable (how did that happen?) little girls turned out okay. I wonder what ADHD medication they'll be on when they're in my dad's 3rd grade class in a couple years.

Our next door neighbors were the most "normal", and relatively friendly. But the teenage girl liked to sing. Loudly. When my brother Jesse lived with me for a couple months before Jon and I got married, he actually yelled one night, "What, are you trying out for American Idol?!" Luckily her karaoke machine was turned up too high to hear him.

A South El Camino Christmas

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Our landlord lived in San Luis and never made the commute over the hill unless there was something seriously wrong with one of his apartments. We saw him once in the two years we lived there. (It's because we had no water... turns out the rambunctious little boy across the way had turned a rather important red lever while using our hose spigot to fill up water balloons. Good thing Mr. Landlord drove up the Grade for that one.)

In order to keep an "eye" on things, he employed an eighty-eight-year-old man who lived in the mobile home park next to the complex to "manage" the property. His name was Cap. We saw Cap almost every week. He would come by just to say hi and make sure everything was ok. The problem was that he was eighty-eight. He liked to tell stories. And in typical senior citizen fashion, he told the same ones over and over. We were thankful to have him, considering he responded so quickly to calls regarding our apartment (what else did he have to do besides trying not to die?), but I'd be lying if I said we didn't run and hide when we saw his car in the lot... much like a Jehovah's Witness sighting.

The time came for Jon and I to move out. (The circumstances of which I will write about later.) We were entering a phase that was exciting and full of unknowns, yet I felt a sense of sadness over the task of packing up our first home together.

One afternoon, a week or two away from our Move Out Day, Cap decided to stop by to see how things were going.

There was one small problem. We'd brought home a kitten three months before, and we weren't allowed to have pets. (Okay, Jesse and I brought the kitten home one night after a trip to Video Palace while Jon was busy sleeping off some form of the Man Flu. Tits McGee was in a box with two of his skinny, goopy-eyed siblings, and I fell in love. Jon couldn't very well turn him away once we'd brought him home and bought a litter box and food, right? Right.)

Resist this? I don't think so.

So when Cap stopped by, Jon and I were caught off guard. McGee's litter box was in the bathroom, his toys were scattered about the living room, we were moving out in mere days, and hoping to receive ourfull deposit back... not to be fined for having an illegal pet. Here's where it turned to slapstick.

Hearing the knock on the door, and being afraid of... well, sounds... McGee tore up the stairs in order to hide, most likely under our bed. Jon and I stared wide-eyed at each other for what seemed like minutes, the wheels turning in both our heads. Assuming Cap was just there for another senile story hour, Jon opened the front door, just as I was chucking furry cat toys into the bathroom and hastily slamming the door shut. I hope Cap doesn't have to pee. After overhearing Jon and Cap's greetings, and praying that McGee wouldn't choose to bolt down the stairs at any moment, came Cap's question: "Do you mind if I head upstairs and check your curtains? I'm here to see if they'll need replacing."

I wanted to respond, "those curtains look like a Motel 6's and should have been replaced in 1978 when they were first installed" but I had more pressing matters to think about.

Jon turned around and looked at me as if to say, Go upstairs right now and throw the cat out the window. 

Tearing through the both of them and sprinting upstairs would look rather suspicious, so I chose to stand, grinning like an idiot, and watch helplessly as Jon led the old man upstairs. I took the opportunity to bust into the bathroom and shove the litter box and previously chucked cat toys under the sink. You can't trust an almost ninety-year-old bladder. I just hoped Cap's sense of smell had disintegrated with his memory, in case he did end up using the facilities.

As I exited the loo and shut the door again, I could hear Jon's heavy footsteps crashing down the top of the stairs. I ran to the staircase, and before I had the chance to question, Jon was shoving a ball of fuzz through the railing at me. Within a second of receiving the bundle, I felt claws piercing through my skin. McGee had decided this was too much action, was trying to permanently attach himself to me, and started hissing at both of us. Jon scampered back up the stairs, just in time to answer a question Cap was in the middle of asking him, while I calmly, yet with purpose retreated to the back sliding door. I opened it, tossed McGee into the air, and watched as his legs spun in the style of Wile E. Coyote's, before he darted around the corner.

Closing the slider, I turned around and saw Jon and Cap coming back down the stairs. Cap was finishing up the 73rd rendition of his story about taking care of his disabled ninety-year-old sister as Jon threw me a look. I smiled pleasantly like a sixties housewife with everything in her home under control.

Later, hearing Jon's version of what went on upstairs made me once again thankful that our property manager was so ancient. It was only due to the fact that Cap could hardly hear that he missed the scuffling, hissing, and meowing that occurred right before Jon whipped McGee through the railing at me. I suppose we're lucky that high-strung feline ever came back... but a cat's gotta eat.

We got our deposit back.

Miss You, Rich

I took this post directly from my former blog. Today marks the one year anniversary of the passing of a great and well loved man who had an indescribable impact on my life.

A letter I wrote to Rich Fisher, my beloved youth pastor and friend. I am so thankful that his wife, Lynette was able to read it to him a couple days before he passed away on May 3rd, 2010...

April 30, 2010

Dear Rich,

I'm praying with all my heart and soul that God decides to perform a miracle and heal you completely. But if He has another plan for you I wanted to make sure you know how I feel about you and how much you mean to me.

There are so many people out there, including my best friend and my husband, who you have been a father to... You have provided for them a person to look up to, have given them guidance and direction in their lives, and been someone to just have fun and fart around with. :)

My story is different because I have an amazing dad. He and I share a very special relationship and I was never in desperate need of a figure in my life other than him. That doesn't mean I didn't find one, still, in you. Some of the best years of my life were spent at your house, and under your care and guidance. There were times when you knew more about me and my life than my own parents did, and I was and am so grateful to you and Lynette for providing that for me. Even though I have two loving, Godly parents, I still needed you guys and knew I could come to you for anything.

Whether it was watching westerns, getting shot (by YOU) point blank with an airsoft gun, watching boys play video games, eating delicious food, or talking about life, I have endless wonderful memories of you and what you did for me during a time when people need positive role models the most (Jr. high and high school). I continued to make decisions in my life through college and even now in marriage and parenthood that are based on foundations that YOU helped build for me. I will be forever thankful to you for that, and to God for providing you.

As I said before, I am praying for a healing miracle because I can't imagine not having you here. Lynette and the boys are constantly on my mind, and I certainly don't want them to have to be without you. But I also know that we won't always understand God's reasoning, or why He does things, but no matter what we think about it, He is GOOD. It's because of you and your teaching, loving, and guiding that I can even say that right now.

I love you so much, Rich. Thank you for being my 2nd dad and for teaching me more than you could ever know.

Love,
Heather

Stalking Finn

I haven't had too much experience with famous people. For the longest time my best story was that as a deli girl at Eagle Market, I made Josh Brolin and Diane Lane their sandwiches twice. This was well before Josh's resurgence as a real movie star with No Country for Old Men, and an Oscar nomination for Milk... I knew him from Goonies and Thrashin'. (What is Thrashin', you ask? Well, my friends, here's the synopsis given on IMDb.com: "Two skateboarding gangs battle each other for supremacy, and a member of one gang falls in love with the sister of his rival." I think that's all you need to know. Oh, also, it was made in 1986. Yup. I own it if you want to borrow it.)

I didn't know who Diane Lane was. When the pair chose Eagle Market for their sub sandwich needs and stopped in, I thought she was a child (she's extremely short and wasn't wearing any makeup) and Josh looked like a confirmed Lake Rat. Tattered boardshorts, a foul wifebeater, and greasy long hair made for a "celebrity" that I just wasn't too impressed with at the time. (If only I'd kept his sandwich order form... I'd have his autograph!)

This all changed the night my friends Jasmine and Erin took me out for my birthday a few weeks ago. We spent a pleasant afternoon in Cambria and planned on finishing the evening at Erin's apartment in San Luis with a low key dessert and TV watching spree. In the car on the way to the coast, I suddenly remembered something.

Me: "Oh! Lynnea told me that a band is playing at SLO Brew tonight named Bonnie Dune... one of the guitar players is a guy we knew in high school, and their drummer is FINN."

Jasmine: (confused look) "Like, he looks like Finn?"

Me: "NO. HE IS FINN. Cory Monteith is THEIR DRUMMER."

Jasmine: OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WE HAVE TO GO!!!

Erin: (thought bubble) My friends are certifiably retarded. And who is Finn?

If you don't watch Glee, you won't know who Finn is. Glee has become one of my favorite shows over the last couple years... as over-the-top ridiculous and at times inappropriate and unrealistic as it can be, I think the underlying message is sweet. And I'm a sucker for musical theater. Finn is the male lead in the show's high school Glee club. His character is dense, but cute, and he is a talented drummer. And he was GOING TO BE PLAYING AT SLO BREW IN MERE HOURS.

After deciding to head straight to Downtown SLO to see if we could finagle some tickets to this no doubt epic show, we drove past SLO Brew to find a line almost around the block, full of high school girls, waiting to get in two hours early. At that moment, we changed our plans and proceeded to Erin's abode, where we figured we would partake in our originally scheduled, tranquil girls' night in.

It only took about fifteen minutes in Erin's apartment after tossing down our purses and lounging on the couch/chair/floor before Jasmine said, "So... maybe we should go get dessert downtown and walk around. Maybe he'll be down there."

I immediately concurred and felt my pulse rise at the thought that we could just run into a famous person downtown. Not just any famous person, but the male lead in one of my favorite shows. Luckily Erin is up for anything, and despite not being a regular Glee viewer, and not knowing who in Zeus' name Finn was, she thought dessert sounded like an excellent idea.

Frozen yogurt is always my dessert of choice, and since it was my birthday celebration, I got to choose. This turned out to be a providential selection.

We had just arrived at the foot of the brick staircase leading up to Sephora, Yogurt Creations our end goal, when Jasmine and I both looked across the street at the exact same time. Three boys, all dressed in slim jeans, hoodies, and hiding their faces behind dark sunglasses were strutting abreast down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. They were the only people on that side of Higuera, we were the only people on our side. They must have noticed us gawking.

One of them stood out because he was a head and shoulders taller than the other two.

"That looks like him!" Jasmine hissed through clenched teeth.
"It DOES look like him!" I hissed back.
"Should we follow him?"
"Let's follow him!!!"

At this point we knew we were stalking Cory Monteith, but that's all we knew. To where would we end up following him? Would we say something if he turned around and noticed us? What if he filed a restraining order against me? On my birthday?

None of these questions were important enough to abort the mission. We crossed the street as quickly as we could and kept about a block between the band posse and us. At one intersection, the big red hand started counting down obnoxiously at us. I was a few steps ahead of the other girls (my enthusiasm getting the best of me), and there was no way we'd all make it across in time. "Go!" they yelled at me, "We'll catch up!" (Thank goodness it was my birthday or my friends may not have put up with my ridiculous teeny bopper antics.) I ran ahead, and soon enough Garden Street was upon me. SLO Brew was around the corner, along with the doubled-in-length line of amped up sixteen year old girls. How ironic, I thought to myself, he just walked by all the girls who would trade their iPhones to see him up close, in person, and they don't even know! *evil mind chuckle*

Then: "Heather!!" From the middle of the line, two girls were calling my name. I stopped in my tracks, and squinting into the crowd, I noticed two of the Junior girls I counsel at church waving me over. I sprinted up to them, and panted, "No time!... I'm... stalking... FINN!!" They looked at me with "Whatever" looks on their faces and said, "Oh yeah, look at this," simultaneously shoving their phones and cameras into my face. They had already found Finn and taken pictures with him in line at Firestone! That's where he had been coming from when we spotted him across the street! "Well, FINE, I've gotta go!" I screamed at them, with just a tinge of jealousy.

I took a few lunges down the street, and spun on my heel as I approached Bubblegum Alley, frantically trying to pick up the scent once again. There, standing in the most disgusting tourist attraction known to man, was Cory Monteith with a group of four girls who had obviously been stalking him just as silently and jungle cat-like as I had been. Jasmine and Erin had caught up with me by now, and Jasmine was pushing me into the gum-encrusted alley, "Go ask him for a picture!" I tossed her my camera like a hot potato and as the other girls walked away giggling and twittering (so immature), I walked up to him and asked quietly, suddenly feeling like a 13 year old girl with a crush on the most popular boy in school, "Can I take my picture with you?" He gave me a lopsided Finn grin and said, "Yeah!" and proceeded to put his arm around me for the photo op. Jasmine made a funny quip as she took the picture about what a nasty place we were standing in, and even had the presence of mind to ask if he'd been to San Luis before. I stood there smiling silently like a developmentally delayed moron until it was time to say dumbly, "Thank you," and watch him walk away.

I was on a high for hours following my first experience as a true-to-life creeper, unable to process the fact that I had not only seen Finn, but followed, cornered, taken a photo with, and touched the love handles belonging to Finn. I had been closer than I'd ever been to famous person... a famous person I cared about! One I watched sing, dance badly, and misunderstand big words EVERY WEEK!

The night ended with Jasmine and me attending the Bonnie Dune concert (along with all the boppers we'd seen earlier, but added to the mix were 45-year-old moms with telephoto lenses... Finn would much rather a girl like me stalk him, right? Right?), which turned out to be a fabulous show.

Needless to say, I have a much more exciting "famous person" story now, but as my brother-in-law Dave pointed out, people like me are "why he was wearing a hoodie".

Roommate Woes & Broken Toes

College is a time in life brimming with extremes. During my freshman year, I alternated between tomfoolery with brand new friends and sitting miserably in the corner of my cell block dorm room in a state of depression, desperately missing my family and friends at home.

One of the most amusing things about college is finding out who you will be bunking with all year. I attended Westmont College in Santa Barbara, and bless the housing staff, they sent out contact information toward the end of the summer preceding my Freshman year. I was able to talk to both of my roommates on the phone about a month before actually meeting them. No, a ten minute phone call does not give you a true idea of who a person is, but it made us feel much more at ease when we did meet face to face on Move-In Day.

Sharing a room is a challenge. Especially when you've had your own room your whole life, and are suddenly expected to share a room no bigger than your bedroom at home, bulging with twice as much furniture, with two other people. People you've never met.

Sara, me, & Misty: our first day together... Page B 316

Misty was the first roomie I encountered. She was settling into our room in Page B when my family and I showed up. A musical theater student who dreamed of living in New York City one day, Misty and I didn't seem to have a whole lot in common at first. We still joke that if we'd attended the same high school, we may have never even met, let alone become friends. Misty was outgoing, organized, confident, talented, and seemed very excited to begin our first year.

Sara showed up later. Sara was a sweet Catholic girls' school graduate who was very clearly, even from the first day, attached to her family. She was apprehensive at first, and seemed much more hesitant about starting school away from home. She was a health nut who ran at least four miles every day, like clockwork, and never put any kind of sweet treat in her mouth. She called her mom once a day, finished her homework weeks in advance, and started listening to Christmas music in October.

We discovered immediately that we each had very different schedules. Sara went to bed at nine and woke up at dawn whether she had class or not. I was the middle ground, finishing my homework somewhat late and turning in around eleven each night. Misty was our room's night owl, partly because of her internal rhythm and partly because she had night rehearsals for the plays in which she always earned starring roles, and couldn't start her homework until midnight some nights.

Me, Sara, Misty, & our next door neighbor
and dear friend, April... Winter Formal 2000

Another reality we quickly became aware of was the difference in our individual perceptions of "clean" and "chores". Misty and I had a respectable handle on keeping things tidy, and it drove us batty when our tiny room became even tinier with the haphazard placement of Sara's piles of dirty clothes and free weights. We learned that Sara had never done her own laundry at home when she asked us how to use the machines downstairs, and had to be told to separate her whites and colors. After a month or two of living together, Misty and I realized that we were the only ones taking out the trash and borrowing the third floor's shared vacuum (it took an average of 45 seconds to vacuum our room, since only about three and a half square feet of carpet showed). We passively aggressively experimented with "waiting to see how full the trash can could become" and "how many hairballs will get stuck between her toes" before Sara noticed and took it upon herself to contribute to our room's hygiene. This never worked because she never noticed. Misty or I, without fail, would either become so frustrated at throwing a piece of paper onto the top of our trash mountain, only to have it roll right back to us, or become nauseated by the smell of Sara's daily banana peels rotting in the can. One of us would eventually give in and huffily yank the bag out, tie it up as loudly as possible, and stomp out, hoping she'd perceive the hints. She didn't.

Misty finally had a brilliant idea: she fashioned a chore chart and taped it to the wall by the door. Yes, the same kind of chore chart you'd find on the refrigerator of a family with preschool children. The three of us rotated through the two chores required to keep our room livable, but we found that when it was time to complete our duties, we still had to prod Sara to do her share. (The first time she took out the trash, weeks after school had started, we had to tell her where the dumpster was.) As ridiculous as it seemed for three eighteen-year-olds to need a chore chart, it seemed to help get Sara involved.

 Outside study session SUNBURNS

The differences in opinion over acceptable living conditions came to a head one day in the spring. Things had gotten tense in the room. The weather had changed, tricking our brains into thinking it was summer, classes had gotten more demanding as teachers assigned even more homework, and the novelty of roomies-turned-built-in-besties had long since faded. The walls of our small living space were closing in on us, and the once seldom occasion that all three of us needed to be in the room at the same time grew increasingly more common, putting us all on edge. We were working furiously on homework one afternoon, when I heard Misty push her chair back behind me, and pad across the room to her closet. On the way back to her desk, I heard a dull THUD followed immediately by Misty's high pitched screeching. "SARA!!! WHAT ARE YOUR WEIGHTS DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM?!?!" She hobbled over to her chair and sank into it, her face red and her eyes glistening with tears of pain. (We were told later by our friend next door, April, that she was also studying and could hear everything.) Misty grabbed her foot and pulled it into her lap, inspecting the toes she had bashed into Sara's misplaced exercise equipment. Misty ultimately had to go to the health center and was told she'd broken her pinkie toe. Sara's constant state of disarray had finally resulted in a casualty: one of Misty's precious phalanges! 

Even after an entire school year, Sara still needed to be schooled in certain aspects of household cleanliness... and simple biology. Another day in spring, when the three of us were once again sharing our minuscule workspace to study, I was violently shaken from an enlightening chapter of my American History book to hear, "Sara! Why did you just throw your contact on the floor?!" (It was obvious by Misty's tone that she was absolutely disgusted.) I turned to see Sara sheepishly looking at Misty, her contact lens case and bottle of solution sitting accusingly on her desk. I could just barely make out the reflection of the overhead light in the tiny half moon on the floor, which had apparently been dropped on purpose. Sara looked back and forth at both of us, confused and defensively, before replying in all seriousness:

"It's okay! They're biodegradable!!"
 
I'm not sure how we survived that year together, but we did, and were able to remain friends. I'm assuming by now, ten years later, all of our living conditions and housecleaning skills have improved. I haven't visited Sara's house in Colorado, though... there is a possibility that she has a room with a pile of crusty, used contact lenses on the floor, waiting to biodegrade...

Sink or Swim... or Get Eaten

In 2005, Lynnea and I were quite possibly the two most fascinating girls in the world. Or at least in our group of friends.... which consisted of boys... and us.

After I graduated from Westmont and returned home, I did what all college graduates do: I found a job that required hardly any of my schooling or qualifications, and played with my friends every conscious hour that wasn't spent actively in the workforce. I became an aide at a preschool, even though I had enough units to be a teacher (which could have gotten me $2.50 more an hour, but what did I know?); this meant that I got thrown up on, peed on, pooped on, I wiped man-sized boogers off tiny faces, and cleaned up toddler-generated messes in an infinite cycle. But I digress.

Being twenty-two or twenty-three years old yielded my friends and me a super power that if I'd realized I had at the time, I would have appreciated it more emphatically: we could get up at the butt crack of dawn, work an eight or nine hour day, and proceed to engage in countless extra curricular activities until we couldn't hold our eyes open and felt like collapsing. Then we'd start over again the next day. Our main group during this time consisted of four boys who lived together: Mark, Justin, JJ, and Andrew; and Jon, Lynnea, and me.

Lynnea and I had been friends since high school. I first remember meeting her at youth group, when we were both in the 8th Grade Girls small group, then shared a cabin at Hume Lake the same summer. She'd attended Atascadero schools, like everyone else, and I was the lone Templeton kid. It was akin to being a homeschooler as far as the A-town contingent was concerned. Nae was nice to me back then, and I remembered that later, when our mutual group of friends brought us together again.

By college, we'd realized how incredibly alike we were. We had the same sarcastic, biting sense of humor (which was very hard to find in the church college group girls... very hard), we could be around each other every waking moment without driving each other insane, and we didn't like to sit still for too long. To each other, we were the sisters neither of us actually had. The rest of our friends were always boys, because in general we enjoyed doing more active and extreme things than most of the other girls we knew. We rock climbed, skate boarded, biked, played dune tag, hiked mountains in the pitch dark, explored old mining shafts, broke into a dilapidated and fenced off insane asylum... and surfed.

I bought an old longboard from a friend for $5 (he just needed lunch money that day), and Nae ordered a custom-made board from CCS that featured her signature purple swirled into it. I purchased myself a used wetsuit I'd seen in the classifieds that took exactly an hour and half to squish myself into. Once it was on I experienced a perpetually-being-strangled-feeling and I couldn't move my arms. But at least I was a fraction of a degree warmer whenever I plunged into the Pacific. Nae even traded in her purple Toyota Tercel for a small Nissan pick-up truck... for the sole purpose of transporting our surfboards.

Our goal was simple. Once we got the hang of things, we would graduate from our plank-like long boards to a couple of sleek, sharp-nosed short boards that, under our precise guidance, would slice through the water like perfectly placed arrows. Were we slightly delusional due to our obsession with a popular film from 2002, Blue Crush? Maybe. Who doesn't want to have a career as a hotel maid, as long as you get to live on the North Shore of Oahu and moonlight as a professional, sponsored surfer girl?

This fantasy led to our decision that we needed to train. How could girls like us, with noodles for arms and eight-foot-long surfboards to maneuver, ever survive two hours of paddling out, let alone an entire Vans Triple Crown competition? We'd already mastered the "pop-up" and could actually get up fairly consistently, as long as the waves were no bigger than approximately two and a half feet.

We both had boogie boards and hypothesized that paddling around on them for a few hours every weekend would build the upper body strength required to become bona fide surfing phenoms.

That's where this story of terror begins.

We chose our surf spots based on the food selection in close proximity... Splash Café, a favorite of both of ours, was right up the street from Pismo Pier. So that's where we began our training. Neither of us had ever had a problem with the ocean. We loved playing in it as kids, and as big kids/young adults, we had the ability to swim or paddle out to imposing depths without hesitation. This particular day, we sloshed through the shallow white water, jumped onto our boogie boards, and began paddling out to the decent sized waves. We rode waves in, paddled out, rode them in, paddled out. Sure, we were getting tired, but we had our futures as Billabong Girls to think about. We'd probably been out for less than an hour when we both saw a giant shadow streak through the wave forming right next to us.

Let me clarify something here. In the summer of 2003, SLO county suffered the only shark attack from my lifetime that I remember hearing about. It involved a twelve to eighteen foot great white, a woman who routinely swam laps in Avila Beach's calm waters, and it was fatal. Lynnea, Jon and I immediately rented Jaws and proceeded to be bored out of our minds watching it (our memories had failed to remind us that Jaws is story-driven, and the lack of bloody action did nothing to quench our presently morbid fascination with shark attacks). Needless to say, the attack had happened a couple years prior, and no others had occurred. So the two of us had no qualms about plunging into the water mere miles away from the attack site.

Despite this lack of fear, I assume I don't have to explain exactly where our minds jumped when we saw an immense, fish-shaped shadow whiz past us, our puny, weak, seal-costumed human bodies becoming glaringly apparent.

One of us may have yelled "SHARK!!!", but that might have been my own thoughts pounding loudly against my skull. I also may have said (trying desperately not to become hysterical), "It's probably a dolphin! Is it a dolphin?!" All I know is that the second time the shadow shot past us, we abandoned any pretense of bravery and instantly began flailing in the water, attempting to "swim" back to shore with all our limbs in tact and no blood loss.

Nae was an accomplished swimmer in high school, and much shorter than I. Logically, I knew that if the shark got anywhere near us, the long legs hanging off my sluggish body would be the first morsels to be devoured. We kicked urgently and propelled our hands into the sea, digging in and pushing desperately against the water's resistance, our hearts punching our ribcages so hard that all sea life on the West Coast could probably hear them.

All at once, we realized after less than a minute (that seemed like hours) of swimming as fast as we possibly could, we had hardly moved any closer to to the beach. Hysteria set in and we started howling with frantic laughter, knowing that we could both die at any moment. As we tried not to suck down ocean water, gasping for breath between panic stricken guffaws, we slowly but surely doggie paddled back to shore. Adrenalin pumping through my veins, I spastically spun on my heel to survey the water. I wanted to see if our "buddy" was still visible. Then I saw it: the friendly, curved, gray fin, along with a gust of moist air being forced through a blow hole. "SHARKS DON'T HAVE BLOWHOLES!!" I screamed triumphantly. As our delirious laughter continued, a real surfer trudged through the sand toward us, holding his short board in the crook of his elbow. Looking at us with tremendous concern, he inquired, "Dude, did you guys see the shark?!?"

Nae and I just turned to each other and giggled as he walked away, our hearts still regulating themselves back to a normal rhythm. "Want to get some chowder?"

The Reunion - Part Two

Ahhh, Facebook... the double-edged sword.

Some days it is the bane of my existence. Friend requests from people I hardly talked to in high school, some I may have met once through a mutual friend, and occasionally even a person I have truly never met in my entire life. Status updates such as "I am now at home" (neat), "Little Timmy finally pooped in the big boy potty!" (gross), or "Oh no you didn't just say that to me." (how passive aggressive)... it's to be expected from teenagers, and even the early-twenties crowd, they feel entitled to have their voices heard. But those of us pushing thirty, and up: No one cares. No one. 

Then there's the positive side: being a part of friends' lives who have moved to different states, following pictures of rapidly growing babies and children, having things to talk about with real friends you haven't seen lately and the ability to still feel connected. And there's always the possibility of a reconnection.

That brings us back to Jasmine, Erin, and me. Jasmine had been a professional dancer, traveled the world, and lived in the Pacific Northwest before making her way back to her hometown; Erin spent years in the Bay Area after graduating from Cal Poly before migrating home; I had moved home after graduating college in Santa Barbara, gotten married, taught elementary school for a couple years, and had a baby. We had all come from, and were currently in, very different places in life. But one day, soon after Erin had moved back to SLO, she sent out a Facebook message suggesting a get together. A very casual coffee date.

At that time, Jasmine and I had practically been neighbors for over a year, but due to very different lives, and settling into our niche with the hometown friends we'd already connected with, we simply hadn't made plans together. I would literally pass her house several times a week, pushing my jogger and occasionally waving as she cruised by in her car, or honking as I rolled by her adorable white farmhouse on Santa Rita Road.

Erin returned to SLO county and was ready to mingle, and she is one to make things happen. She got us off our complacent butts and we committed to a coffee date. I was more than a little nervous. I was the only married one, and also had a just-turned-one year old daughter. Some people truly don't know what to talk about unless they are in the exact same life stage, and I was ready to let the other two talk about their fabulous young, "single" lives without boring them with my mommy stories. An even worse theory went through my brain as well: What if we have nothing to say to each other? Thank God for Kealani, the one-year-old circus act... if nothing else we could just watch her be herself, which can entertain even the most anti-kid Scrooges for hours.

On St. Patrick's Day in 2010, the three of us, plus Kealani, met up at Amsterdam Coffee in Paso Robles (now one of my all time favorite places to relax and chat with friends). The hesitation that we (but maybe just I) had felt almost instantly melted away as we began to catch up on each others' lives. Boy, had we missed a lot. The fear of living too different a life from the other two faded as conversations that included three unique perspectives commenced, and our time together passed as quickly as a midnight train. When Kealani's dinner and bedtime crept up and we had to part ways, we dragged our feet, not wanting the reuniting to end. The three of us decided that we needed to make meetings a regular affair. Especially since our ten year high school reunion was quickly approaching (the subject of which may or may not have been 50% of our conversation that particular night) and we needed moral support from each other in order to even consider attending.

What began as a leap into the unknown - meeting old friends I'd known well at one time, being unsure that there would be any common thread holding us together anymore - resulted in the cultivation of two of the best friendships I could have ever imagined obtaining. The three of us are basically the same people we were in high school, minus the naivete, lack of self confidence, false wisdom, and acne (most of the time). We share a very similar sense of humor, basically the same view on relationships, and we each bring a sense of worldliness and experience to the table, due to travels and heartbreaks chalked up over the last ten years. There are times it feels like those ten years never passed, and that we didn't live completely separate lives for a whole decade. But some of the best dishing sessions include stories from that decade. Stories that we weren't together for, or even around to hear about. I think years will be spent catching up on the rest of those untold stories. In the meantime, we're authoring new stories, in which the moral is this: Some friendships are meant to last forever.

(Days before our class reunion last summer we got together and sat in Jasmine's living room in our pjs, grazing on Trader Joe's snacks and sipping wine while we browsed old yearbooks... Inserted here will be the message I wrote in Jasmine's 2000 yearbook at the end of our Senior Year... Currently that book is in a box somewhere.)

The Reunion - Part One

The three of us were in the same third grade class at Templeton Elementary School: Mrs. Hatfield's.

Jasmine and I noticed one morning that we had the same pair of K-mart black corduroy slip-on shoes on our feet. From across the classroom, we made eye contact, pointed at our shared fashion-forward statements, grinned, and one of us mouthed to the other, "Want to play at recess?!?" What followed was the blossoming of a tried and true friendship that included sleepovers, "scary" movies (Young Frankenstein, Clue, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein may not be found in the Horror section, but Psycho sure scared the bajeezus out of us), pool days, creating and performing plays and dance numbers, wearing our faded TES shirts and black pants on Fridays as we stood in line for our once-a-week Hot Lunch (burgers and fries with chocolate milk), binder organizing nights, mystery parties, the Older Sisters of Little Brothers Club, borderline certifiably insane boy-craziness, and our very own secret meeting place: Terabithia (a tree at the edge of Jasmine's property). Jasmine was an incredible dancer, and despite my own hesitation to become involved in a practice-every-day-of-the-week activity just yet, she took it upon herself to teach me some moves and choreograph routines that I could actually handle.

Erin and I shared our third-grade crush: Roy. This may have made us rivals of sorts at first, but I think we were ahead of our time, letting no man come between us strong, independent women. Many recesses were spent together (with Jasmine) sitting on the school's front lawn, where the old bell sat tempting countless eleven-and-unders to slip their hand under its dome and "discreetly" bang away on it before a yard duty could blow her screeching whistle at them. We spent time picking the red berries off the bushes in front of the office, and most likely talking about Roy's beautiful brown eyes. I remember lounging in Erin's bedroom, stroking her fluffy red cat, Sally, and making calls on her fabulous juicy-red-lip shaped telephone. Erin's dad reminded me of my own: a super cool rockstar with a goofy sense of humor, who had an enviable relationship with his daddy's girl. One night he showed me his record album of Alice Cooper and unknowingly introduced me to the mystery of guy-liner.

The eight-year-olds who became friends in third grade slowly but surely grew into adolescents. Berry picking and binder organizing transitioned into shopping trips to San Luis and lunches at Fresh Choice. Simple crushes were remodeled into infatuations-of-the-week and covert missions as we stalked boys around the gym each time a school dance was put on. Gone were the innocent days of being young girls, only to be replaced by the horror of cliques, glasses, braces, leg-shaving, self-chopped bangs, and more drama than we ever thought possible. Somehow we survived, and our friendships were still in tact. Bonus!

Finally, we entered high school, where the beginning stages of figuring out who we were began. At our small school, we all remained friends, while preserving other friendships we'd enjoyed since our elementary days, and accumulating new ones to add to our directory... depending on what activities we involved ourselves in and what classes we took. Many of my new friends were on my sports teams, but this didn't detract from my loyalties. Plenty of weekends were still spent at Jasmine's house, confiding anything and everything to each other, and I would forever have respect for Erin because of her amazingly sarcastic/genius sense of humor (my favorite) and the fact that she never compromised who she was just to be "cool".

Plenty of people who graduated from Templeton High School have a catch phrase: "Templeton's so small, we don't really have cliques."

Well... if "sporty", "brainy", "artsy", "druggie", and "girls-who-think-they're-better-than-everyone-else" sound like cliques to you, then THS had cliques. Lucky for most of us, the size of our class did make it easier to cross the barriers, and most students were identified with more than one of those groups. We'd all known each other for so long that we could still conduct decent, civil conversations with the Others. To say there were no cliques at all would be far too naive, though. I'm sure there are plenty of individuals from the class of 2000 out there who would consider their time in high school a special kind of hell.

Jasmine, Erin, and I considered ourselves "drifters", meaning we had cohorts in several different areas and got along just fine with all of them. The only one we avoided were the girls-who-think-they're-better-than-everyone-else. We simply mocked them behind their backs (some things never change... more on that in a later post: Class of 2000 Ten-Year Reunion suckas!!!)

The time came for everyone to go their separate ways. Our class was the first in a long while to have a high percentage of graduates to not only attend college, but go off in various directions. As is common, we lost close touch with those we had been closest to for so many years. New towns, new living arrangements, new roommates, new friends, new boys, and new lifestyles were distractions that made keeping up with our oldest friends more difficult than ever imagined. Occasional e-mails, even less frequent phone calls, and short visits during school breaks spent at home were opportunities to stay connected that grew fewer and farther apart every year. Eventually it happened: precious friendships had morphed into disconnected acquaintances.

Along came Facebook.

A Short List of the Boys I Have Loved

Originally written in the Fall of 2003
 
1. Eric Jordan. Eric was my first real best friend, first "kiss", and first proposal for marriage. He lived two doors down the street in a house that was exactly the same floor plan as my own, only backwards. He was like a brother, but my feelings for him ran deep. He taught me how to skateboard, and I showed him how to put a lawn chair on a skateboard to make a "wheelchair" (endless fun down huge driveways as long as one didn't fall off). We were born fifty minutes apart. We also decided that if neither of us were married by the time we were twenty-eight, we'd tie the knot on our birthday, April 6, in 2010. Unfortunately I was out of luck early in the game... Eric found a girl in the Air Force and married her at age twenty.

2. Teddy Swan. Teddy was the biggest boy in school, at about five feet tall, when I met him in first grade. He remained the biggest boy in school all the way through high school and used it to his advantage on the basketball and football teams. Teddy had soft brown hair and eyes, and even though he was teased for being so tall, everyone wanted to hug him. I first knew of Teddy's feelings when, in the middle of our first grade class as we sat on the carpet, he rolled up a piece of paper into a tube, raised it to my ear as Mrs. Bailey talked about finger painting, and whispered through his handmade megaphone, "I like you." My heart jumped and that moment marked the beginning of my love for Teddy. Being seven years old, "out of sight, out of mind" was reality... so this love had a deadline: the end of the school year.

3. Roy Coffman. Roy had strawberry blond hair, brown eyes, and was covered head to toe in freckles. He had straight teeth (a quality hard to come by in third grade) which were exposed often because Roy liked to smile. My friend, Erin, and I competed for his heart. She said that she and Roy were meant for each other because they both had red hair. I argued that my dad had red hair, so wasn't that close enough? No one ever knew who Roy actually liked back then. He remained mysterious about those matters. If I really wanted to know I could ask him... he goes to UCSB and works at the Beach House.

4. Philip Patti. Philip was my first "bad boy" experience. In fifth grade my class was made up of mostly the Bad Kids. Long before I had the strength to stand up against bad influence, I let myself become a delinquent for one year. Philip and I sat together in the back of the classroom and talked through most of the lessons without getting caught. From those conversations I learned about condoms, drugs, and Metallica. At some point Philip and I decided to "go out" (of course meaning that we would continue sitting together in class, talking through lessons, and never see each other outside of school), but two days later it was over. Probably because I had to talk him into going out with me in the first place. I've had a thing for bad boys ever since.

5. Roy Coffman. Ok, so in sixth grade I liked Roy again. Old flames never die. At least this time he liked me back.

6. Chris or Pat English. The new twin brothers who joined our school in seventh grade. First of all, they exhibited fresh faces, as opposed to the ones we'd been staring at for the last six years and watching grow out of their fat phases. Secondly, I was enchanted by their tall stature, dark hair, green eyes, and beautiful brown skin. Chris had a quieter and sweeter disposition. Pat was funny, possessed straighter teeth, and his voice changed first. I liked Pat because he happened to be in my wood shop class. The Twins did quite a number on all the girls' hormones at Templeton Middle School. Ask any girl in our class, and all of them are sure to say they liked either Chris or Pat at some point. If they're like me, they switched back and forth between the two for years, the Chosen One being whoever looked in her direction more often or shared a class with her.

7. Steve English. No relation to Chris and Pat. The truth is I never really had a thing for Steve. He was the sweetest, most polite boy in our class, and he had a high GPA. For some reason, in the minds of all my friends, this meant we were perfect for each other. We were both polite, sweet, Christian, relatively well-liked, and good at school. Basically Steve and I got talked into going out by the whole eighth grade class, only to converse a few weeks later and mutually agree that we didn't even like each other. We're still friends.

8. Jacob Rodrigues. Jacob was the good-looking, popular sophomore bad boy who one day decided that Heather Eaton was the "cutest girl in the freshman class". This information, passed to me by a friend on the volleyball team, instantly formed a good opinion of this Jacob in my mind. I hadn't noticed him before that point. Once he was brought to my attention, I liked what I saw: dark features, a great smile, and a football player's build. We mostly communicated through mutual friends, and eventually I got brave enough to start ditching study hall so I could sit and listen to him play in the quad during his guitar class. He called me occasionally, and we even met at the movies a couple of times with a bunch of friends (behind my parents' backs since no dating was allowed until I was sixteen... I had just turned fifteen). We would hold hands while his friends snickered behind us, and I'd catch him staring at me out of the corner of my eye. I assumed if I returned the gaze, he'd try to kiss me, and since I was petrified of this scenario, I stared straight ahead and didn't move during the entire flick. The magic lasted for about a month until Jacob realized the good girl appeal that had attracted him wasn't what a teenage guy with raging hormones needed, especially when he was going to have to wait a year until I could legally go out with him.

9. Jordan McCaffrey. Jordan and I met at our youth group's winter camp sophomore year. On the bus ride up, he and his friend happened to be sitting across from my friend and me. We all started talking, because that's what we did on bus trips: talked to the people around us and sang praise songs loudly and off key. I developed a crush on Jordan in the six hours it took to get up the mountain to the snow. He had scruffy dark hair, brown eyes, big white teeth, and huge biceps. Unfortunately, when the bus stopped, and everyone stood up, I noticed immediately that looking into Jordan's eyes required me to look down. No up, not straight, but down. My crush continued for a couple months after winter camp and Jordan called me several times a week to talk for hours at a time. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and gave me a beautiful cross necklace. But the height thing bothered me, so the next time he called I told my mom to say I wasn't home. (Oh, the travails of being gifted with above-average height.) When Jordan first locked eyes with me across the bus aisle, he couldn't have guessed that he would be my first experience blowing a guy off.

10. Nick Jangaard. Nick was the class clown and a troublemaker, and looked the part. He had dark red hair, green eyes, and a devilish smile. His sarcastic sense of humor meant that people who didn't know him were offended by his remarks (actually, sometimes so were the people who did know him). We became close friends until eventually Nick decided that we should "be together." We'd hung out every weekend and enjoyed each others' company, so why not? We had even been voted Junior class Winter Prince and Princess (an enormously high honor... so much so that as far as I know, THS has never had a Winter Court since). So we switched our status to "dating" and proceeded to cause the downfall of our relationship. We didn't talk to each other much because we didn't know how. As friends we had never had deep conversations, so now what were we supposed to do? We basically held hands while watching movies and went to each others' sporting events. One night he mustered the courage to kiss me for the first time, and it was not the wonderful experience I had envisioned. Kissing a good friend, I realized, is like kissing your brother. Gross. Not long after that we ended it, and it took months for our friendship to return to normal. I knew I was over it a few months later when my best friend Lauren started dating him and I didn't care. About five years later, I was a bridesmaid in their wedding!

11. Abel Miller. I fell for Abel the summer before my senior year on our youth group's annual trip to Mexico. He had just graduated. I fell for his sense of humor, his charm, his heart for other people, and he wasn't too shabby looking. I spent the majority of the following school year wishing that we could date, but having to wait until I was officially out of high school. Abel had joined ABC's Jr. high youth group staff. At the time there was rule stating that staff members could not date students. The reason for this rule was to keep pervy twenty-somethings from perusing the selection of teenage girls. Unfortunately for us, the rule went across the board, and it infuriated me that an 18/19 year old guy couldn't date the 17/18 year old girl who had become infatuated with him. We would hang out in big groups, and a couple times even went on "dates" with other couples. (We wouldn't call them dates, since most of the time we left from our youth pastor, Rich's own house.) Finally June came, and the night I graduated, Abel kissed me goodbye before I hurried to jump on the bus for Grad Night. The next night he officially asked me to be his girlfriend. I left for college in Santa Barbara, and we proceeded to make our relationship work for two years. A break or two later, along with living on different continents, brought us to a place where we finally understood that we weren't meant to be together. As painful as it was at the time, after five years courting/dating/waiting/reuniting, I'm so very thankful that we didn't force it to work. I will always be grateful for the time spent with Abel; for what I learned about love from him, and the relationship I had with him. I believe I was better prepared for my next and last love, because of the many hurts and trials of this first serious relationship. My first and only real broken heart was over Abel.

12. Jon Richert. I've chronicled much of Jon's and my relationship. We were best friends for two years before we started dating, and got married a year and half after that. What Jon and I have together is more than anything I ever expected from marriage. In a world that gives up far too easily and a society where "starter" marriages are a growing trend, I am thankful to say that I have an accomplice who won't give up on me when things get difficult. We work together, and enjoy doing so. Sure, there are days when we may not feel very romantic, but at least when the romance is stripped away, we are still each others' favorite person to be around. I've seen Jon grow from a young man who is fiercely loyal and respectful to his mom, to a man who takes pride in taking care of his family, to a man who is just fearless enough to pursue a career that may have at one time seemed impossible. I respect him as a man, a friend, a believer in Christ, a fellow traveler, my husband, a provider, and as the father of our daughter. I can't imagine having the same life I enjoy now with anyone else.

Elementary to Big Time

My parents wanted me to switch schools after fifth grade. Templeton had a middle school for the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders to attend. My dad taught in Atascadero, where sixth graders were still included in elementary school. In Atascadero, sixth graders were the big cheese: the sophisticated, oldest kids. In Templeton, sixth graders were puny eleven year olds walking around the same halls as fourteen year olds. That meant we were thrust into the same habitat as lanky, tall boys with funny voices and hulking girls with massive chests. I won the argument with my parents, despite their attempt to make me an elementary school baby for one more year. Who would I hang out with at Dad's school? Dad? No way! My real friends were in Templeton, and I needed to stay there.

Luckily most of my closest friends were in my core class. Even though we were in middle school, unlike the seventh and eighth graders our classes traveled together as we switched every period. I suppose this made the transition easier on the prepubescent small fries. My group at the time consisted of Lauren, Anita, and Tarah, as mentioned in previous posts (I seem to have plenty of memories from this year in school... maybe 7th and 8th grade were so horrific I had to block them out completely...?). Lauren and I had been pals since third grade, our parents had also become good friends, and we spent the bulk of our weekends at each others' homes; Anita was the tallest girl in sixth grade, with thick strawberry blond hair down to her butt, and though most people didn't know it due to her shyness, had a biting wit that far surpassed many full grown adults; Tarah was short and dark, polite, and earned the best grades (probably in the entire school). We were a tight group. We were also complete and total dorks, we just didn't know it.

We all decided we loved volleyball, and not only did we go out for the team that year, but I bought a really nice, official regulation size volleyball from K-Mart for about six dollars. (You have to be willing to spend some dough when you discover your calling.) We played with it every day at break, at least until one of the colossal eighth grade boys would invariably steal it from us and kick it across the blacktop. We'd simply take off and chase it, return it to the circle, and hope that if the predators realized it didn't phase us, they might actually throw it back to us the next time.

We had a homeroom teacher named Mrs. Hays. She was from Boston and said things like "di-ah-ree-er" in place of "diarrhea"; the boys made her say it at least seventeen times a day. Mrs. Hays had long blond hair, both on her head and on her upper lip. Whenever Mrs. Hays walked by our table, Anita pointed out the mustache, and Tarah responded with, "At least her mustache is blond and not black like mine." We had to agree.

Mrs. Hays was in tip top shape; she had even run the Boston Marathon a couple of times. She was always training for her next race, and she enjoyed taking off her shoes to let us see for ourselves how her big toe looked: like a juicy purple grape, ready to pop, right before the deteriorating nail fell off and made way for the new baby nail underneath. It was creation at its best.

Thank goodness I was allowed to attend middle school or I never would have added these experiences to my repertoire.

Early Life as an Eaton

Originally written in the Fall of 2003
 
I was born with a full head of black hair. At Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, one of the nurses' jobs was to stick a red bow on the girl babies' heads. That way, at a glance, baby observers could tell which red-faced, squished up piles of human were boys and which were girls. In a photo taken hours after my entrance on that day, April 6th, 1982, it's obvious that my dad was so proud of me. I hope that when I have my first baby, my husband looks at it like that.

My first home was a condo that my young new parents owned. Apparently I was quite the crier, and my internal rhythm kept me on a very strict schedule. Every night, right as my parents were sitting down to enjoy dinner, I would find something to scream about. (Now that I'm a mom myself, I realize that sometimes the only reason a baby needs to cry is the fact that she's alive.) My mom and dad would try to feed me, hold me, talk to me, rock me around the room, but I remained inconsolable.

Our stylish 80s furniture collection included a couple of small wooden end tables. They looked like they were from the Old West, stood about the height of my parents' knees, and had just enough area to accommodate a couple of magazines and the occasional plate of food. Somewhere in the midst of one of my best performances, Dad came up with a fabulous idea: let's stick Heather underneath one of those. It was brilliant. Not only did it muffle the sound for them so they could enjoy a hot meal, but usually after a couple minutes, the resonating echo of my own screams of fury eventually annoyed even me, and I would stop. The folks called this the Doghouse, but I was the only dog around to use it.

*            *            *

Our next home was another condo, this one in Laguna Hills, California. This is the first place of which I have real memories. We moved there when I was three. It had a cozy living area, bathroom, and kitchen downstairs; the bedrooms were upstairs. In my room, next to my full sized bed, there was a window.

When I eventually grew tall enough to open it myself, I wondered one day what would happen if I left the window open and hid in my closet. (I was a very considerate preschooler.) Naturally, my parents came looking for me; I then learned that this had been a terrible idea. They thought I had fallen out of the window. Frantically, they called my name, taking turns poking their heads outside, searching for my lifeless body on the sidewalk below. 

I hesitated, not understanding the distress in their voices, but knowing enough to assume I'd be in a predicament if I responded. I was right.

*            *            *

Although I don't remember my mom being pregnant, I do remember the day my brother came home from the hospital. It was about three weeks before my fourth birthday. He was small and helpless, didn't open his eyes even when I talked to him, and had an abundance of soft red hair. I liked the way my parents looked at him. I never hated my brother like some jealous firstborns. I'd been excited for Jesse's arrival, assuming that it meant I would have an instant new best friend. I was a tad disappointed when he came home and all he did was sleep. From the moment he was placed in the wooden cradle downstairs, enveloped in pastel colored blankets, I loved him, but I wanted him to play with me. 

I adored holding him. I must have liked the idea of having a real live doll to carry around. I was very careful with him. The fiery red hair he wore coming out of the womb never thinned, and the color never faltered. My dad was my favorite man in the whole world, and Jesse came out looking just like him. That might be why I loved him so much. I wanted to protect him from the hypothetical bullies that I figured could show up later in his life. He was helpless, and my new mission in life was to keep an eye out.

We'd have plenty of time to drive each other nuts later.

*            *            *

One day my neighborhood buddy, Johnny, and I were sitting on the fence in front of my condo that overlooked The Ditch. Really just an old rock quarry (that is now home to a track housing complex), it was The Ditch to us. As we were sitting on that fence, Johnny noticed movement down below. A live creature slinking along, probably searching for young children as prey. Somehow he knew its identity: a coyote, something I'd never seen before.

After hearing about them, I thought of coyotes as devil animals, since for years I'd had recurring nightmares about wolves attacking me (my parents had let me watch the animated version of Peter and Wolf an unhealthy number of times). Coyotes were brothers to wolves, as far as I was concerned, and much more mysterious. This coyote, at least a mile away, would never consider traversing the gigantic hill up to my patio, but even still... I had nightmares about wolves and coyotes for years after our "encounter".

Jon's Proposal

Jon and I had been best friends for a couple years, and finally started dating after much patience on Jon's end, and much obliviousness on mine. (See Jonny Blue Jeans Part 1 & 2!)

Once we got together, things didn't change much. We loved being in each others' presence, loved talking about life, loved being outside, loved going to the beach, and loved making each other laugh. The only part that changed was that I finally began to see what Jon had been talking about years before, when he'd told me he knew we were supposed to be together. Things weren't perfect (which is good... if you think things are perfect, you're either missing something or in denial), but on the rare occasions we had disagreements, we slowly but surely learned how to respectfully work things out. Sometimes that meant agreeing to disagree. If I had to choose one word to describe what it was like to be with Jon, what would it be? Easy.

There came a point when I started to wonder when Jon would ask me to marry him. We'd long surpassed the "getting to know you" phase, and miraculously, there weren't any major character flaws either of us were desperate to change about each other before we took the plunge. It seemed like everyone around us was either already married, or getting engaged. Sometimes that's all it takes for a girl to suddenly realize she "needs" her man to put a ring on it (not a good place to be if she's with the wrong guy!). We'd been dating a year, and knew the entire time that we were together for life. As important dates and holidays started passing, I started to get grumpy. Not necessarily in front of Jon, but I was just antsy enough to feel like it was taking forever. (Kind of ironic coming from the girl who had to get bashed over the head with Jon's affection before realizing he was the perfect guy for her... and I was wishing he'd hurry up? Girls.)

Our dating anniversary, Jon's birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, then Valentine's Day... they all passed with not a sniff of engagement talk. He hadn't even asked me what kinds of rings I liked. The nerve!

Then Saturday, February 25, 2006 came along. It was late afternoon, and we were hanging out at my parents' house when Jon decided we should go to Pismo Beach. We love the beach, so this was a regular activity for us. Hardly a weekend went by that we wouldn't be found in Cambria, Morro Bay, Cayucous, or Pismo. We pulled out of the driveway, but suddenly Jon stopped his green Ranger right in front of the house and said, "Oh, hang on, I forgot my sunglasses." He jumped out of the truck, ran inside, and within minutes was loping back up the path and hoisting himself into the driver's seat.

When we got to the beach, it was just about time for the sunset, so we puttered around the shops and made our way down to the pier. After watching the the sun sink into the sea, Jon suggested we take a stroll in the sand.

Now, for several months we'd been taking swing dancing lessons, which was a full blown miracle. I've always loved to dance. I never took classes (except two random Salsa lessons at Westmont, taught by a couple of students from Spain), but if there's music playing, some part of my body must be moving. Jon, on the other hand, despised dancing. It was a chore to get him to dance to more than one song at weddings. The extent to which I'd seen him bust out individual "moves" was his casual head bob, hands in his pockets, every time we'd go see a show at SLO Brew.

Through his job at Art's Cyclery, Jon had met a customer who taught swing dancing. She ended up proposing a trade: Jon would work on her bike in exchange for dance lessons for the two of us. I was ecstatic when he came home and pitched the idea to me. I never thought I'd be able to persuade Jon to pretend to swing dance with me, and here he was suggesting real dance lessons... for both of us! It was utterly blissful.

Back on the beach in Pismo, we were some of the only lunatics walking on the sand. The sun had just set, it was February, and the temperature was plummeting. That's when Jon asked if I wanted to dance. We started swinging right there in the soft sand, with the pounding of the ocean keeping the beat. He twirled and dipped me, and in a fit of snickering, we ended up with our butts in the sand. (We weren't all that skilled. There's only so much a handful of lessons can do for you.)

We continued our walk, and that's when Jon started reminiscing. He recounted how our relationship started and a slew of memories we'd generated in the time we'd known each other. I remember thinking to myself, "Why is he talking about this stuff?" He'd gone from goofy dance party on a deserted beach to philosophical retrospection. It wasn't like him, and I was more than a little perplexed.

No amount of money offered would allow me to conjure up exactly what Jon said between story time, and the instant I turned to find him kneeling in front of me.

I wish someone had been recording it, or that I'd written it down that night. "Will you marry me?" was the only sentence that I comprehended, and needed to respond to, so I did: "Yes!" in the midst of laughing, with a couple tears in my eyes. He presented me with a ring that I strained to see in the moonlight. Jon had never once asked me what kind of ring I wanted. Yet he'd somehow chosen a ring that, given the chance, I would have picked out myself. The diamond was beautiful, yet small. I'd never wanted a huge rock, and I'm way too hands-on in life to wear a ring that I would have to worry about catching on everything. On each side of the diamond there was a tiny round blue topaz, the color of tropical ocean water - my favorite.

Giddy with excitement, we finished our night by eating at Splash Café. Over a clam chowder bread bowl and a hamburger, Jon told me that when he'd run back inside my house to "get his sunglasses" that night, he'd been asking my dad for permission to ask me to marry him. He'd meant to go to my house the night before, while I was singing at a church service. But I had asked him to be there, so he couldn't attend to his plan.

One more background story was gathered from Jon in the following weeks. He had been planning on proposing to me four or five months before that particular Saturday night. This would have also been the period of time I'd started to get grouchy and impatient, wondering why in the world he was taking so long. Jon had saved the money he needed for my ring. Then one night I parked in his driveway, behind his truck at an awkward angle. Not blocking him, but preventing him from backing straight out. We'd been inside and came out, ready to leave. We hopped in his car and he backed up... straight into the passenger side of my car. He'd been forced to use all of his hard-earned ring money to repair my passenger door, which wouldn't open more than five inches due to the damage.

I can't tell you why exactly those several months made a difference. After hearing that story, I realized that Jon was working hard to make our future happen for us, when I was busy whining about getting engaged. I believe that all things happen for a reason, and there is a perfect time for everything. For some reason, Jon and I weren't quite ready yet. Remembering that night five years ago, and recognizing the joy my partner in crime brings me, makes the short extra months of waiting totally worth it.

Just the beginning ~ 2/25/06

Five years later ~ 2/25/11