Since I don’t have much to report today, I’m thinking it’s about time I wrote a Starbucks post. I go there a lot and if I thought about it, I bet I could think up a bunch of anecdotes. You probably could too.

I sometimes have my clients pay me on my Starbucks card instead of with real money. This is really cool because $100 worth of lattes lasts a lot longer than $100 worth of groceries. It lasts for months, in fact!

I’ve noticed lately that our Starbucks is Gay Central. I’m fine with that. I can hang out with the most fabulous of the fabulous and that doesn’t bother me a bit. I love being surrounded by men who are prettier and more fashionable than I am.

What I have a problem with is the gay barrista who works there. He is a swell guy. Always friendly, quick with drinks…he’s great. The thing that bugs me is he keeps giving all the men free shots!!! The guy in front of me will get a free shot, the guy in back of me will get a free shot but when I get to the front of the line, what do I get? Nothing. No free shots for moms. I call prejudice! I want a free shot too!

I don’t really mind. Maybe he gets a lot of dates that way. More power to him. I don’t want to date him. I just think it’s kind of funny. One of these days I will get up the guts to tease him about it.

While we are talking about Starbucks…why am I the worst with spilling my coffee? You’d think the paper cups with the tiny little hole to sip from would be spill-proof but I have spilled coffee in every way imaginable. If there was an Olympic event for fastest way to get coffee through a little hole, or fastest way to dislodge the lid, I would win the gold.

I am all thumbs when it comes to holding my coffee. I have spilled coffee down the front of me. I’ve spilled coffee on other people. I’ve even spilled coffee three feet sideways when I caught a cup falling in midair and pinned it against the handle of a shopping cart. Sploosh went my coffee all over the grocery-store linoleum, narrowly missing a checker. I was so embarrassed.

I should not be allowed to hold coffee. I should just wear it on my back in one of those wineskin things and drink it through a very long straw. Thankfully, I take forever to drink my coffee and it is usually lukewarm or cold when I spill it. I have never yet (knock knock on my wooden head) spilled hot coffee on my baby.

I know I said I don’t mind hanging out with fabulous men who are prettier and more fashionable than I am… BUT I have to admit it is pretty sad when I show up at Gay Central (aka Starbucks) in my morning work-out attire (dumb-looking too-short sweats and baggy slouchy top that covers my not-so-tight mom-belly) and then I spill coffee all over my frumpiness too. Maybe that’s why I never get a free shot. Mr. Gay Barrista knows it would be wasted on me, literally.

It’s good to have Toby back so now we can get back to our normal routine around here. HA ha hahahahah! What normal routine? Just kidding. It is really good to have him back though.

I don’t think Baby Bug has shut up for one minute since he has been home. I think she saved up every bit of information that happened over the two-week span that he was gone and is now trying to tell him all about everything. When she catches her breath and forgets what she was talking about, she’ll just start rattling off about whatever she sees. (I wonder where she gets that from?)

“Daddy. Did you know that the light is bright? See the light? See the light?! That light up there on the ceiling? And the heater, it has polkadots on it. It’s warm and cozy. I like to sit by it when I’m cold. And Pouncy-wounce, he is the cat. I lub Pouncy-wounce. He had the sneezy-sneezes… He had to go to the cat doctor and get a bandaid.” etc. etc. etc.

And on and on and on she goes until she falls asleep mid-sentence. I love that she is a chatterbox but it just cracks me up sometimes. I remember driving around in the car with her and talking to her non-stop when she was little little. She would just look at me and suck away on her pacifier and I would wonder what it would be like to have her talk back to me someday. Well, I wonder no more. Now I can hardly get a word in edgewise.

If I do interrupt her, she furrows her eyebrows at me and glares at me as if to say, “Mommy you’re getting me off track. Please be quiet so I can finish my train of thought.” If I ignore her (which I often do since her chatter is so endless it can blend in like white noise after a while) she will poke me and yell, “Mommy! Hear me!”

Oh, my little dear child with the voice of a very large lion.

Toby is finding it all very charming. But then he’s only been home for a day. I give him a week and he’ll closing his office door again. It’s kind of hard to get work done when you have a running commentary going on all day long. Good thing we’re heading out to the sticks on Thursday to get ready for my nieces tenth birthday party. I think by then Toby might need a little break!

Flashlight from secretagentjo on Vimeo.

Here’s a little taste… though she toned it down a bit for the camera. Also, I apologize for the wobbliness. Bad camera holding. I know.

I am agreeing with my old friend Nicole that mother’s day is not just a day but a weekend. I didn’t mean it to be this way but since it is just Baby Bug and I and I can do whatever I want (since I’m the boss afterall) we made it that way. Really, every day has been mother’s day.

When I think about mother’s day, so many days come flooding to my memory. Those mornings that my brother and I would get up super early and sneak out of the house to steal dewy sweetpeas from our neighbor’s yard so we could put them in a vase and surprise my mom. Those many crafts we made at school… the years we forgot, the years we remembered and then as we got older how we over-compensated for the years we forgot with super-expensive gift certificates to the spa… So many memories.

I think the day I most remember of all my mothering days was that second day in the hospital. The late morning after she was born. Toby had gone home to sleep after staying up all night long and it was just me and her. The nurses were gone. I picked up my camera and took this picture:

I’m so glad Baby Bug was born in the digital age. I’m so glad I’m the kind of girl who has her camera handy at all times. I don’t think if I was still shooting film, with my big fat lens, I would have even brought it to the hospital. I know I wouldn’t have stuck it in her face. But my digital camera is small, so small I thought nothing of digging it out of my purse and documenting this wonder that I held tangible in my arms for the first time in my life.

I don’t mean to be selfish and push Toby out of this moment but it truly was the most beautiful moment in my entire life. It was just me and her and I knew the rest of my life was never ever going to be the same. I remember everything. I remember those flowers that my in-laws sent. I remember the view out the hospital window. I remember staring at her until I thought my eyes would break. It was the most precious of times. When I talk to expectant mothers now, I try and try to explain what that day was like for me but my words fall short.

I think that was the best mother’s day of my life.

That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and live up every other mother’s day in my life. Oh no! We are going to pull out all the stops and have a whole weekend of mother’s day stuff. Like chocolate pancakes for breakfast and picking flowers from our neighbor’s yard. Painting all day and then pizza for dinner! And that was only Saturday! I have no idea what we’ll be doing Sunday.

Happy Mother’s Day everybody! Go give your mom a hug!

I just finished Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and it has left me deep in thought. This was a great book for me right now. I don’t know if it would have the same effect on the next person or even if it would have touched me as deeply if I had read it a year ago. It was just the right thing to read at the right time.

Here I am on day two of trying to punch out this blog post and I wonder if I can even manage to string two words together. Good books do that to me. I love good writing but when I read good writing I catch myself overthinking my own words that fall so far short of what I have just read. So you’ll have to either skip over the rest of this post and read the book yourself or humor me as I feebly try to explain why it meant so much to me.

This book has changed the way I think about addiction. And that means a lot because the subject of addiction has been a life-long puzzle to me. I just didn’t understand it. I’ve never been addicted to drugs myself. I’m “addicted” to sugar and food and even the internet. But I don’t understand what it is like to have my brain chemically altered in such a way that I will continue to make bad choices even against my own best wishes.

I’ve been paranoid about drugs since the day my dad sat me down and told me about these Mickey-Mouse stamps that have LSD on the back. I used to have nightmares about going to junior high and being pushed up against a chain-link fence by some scary kid with a black mohawk and being forced to lick stamps. What a funny visual that is. I actually used to have heart palpitations when a kid that I labeled “a bad kid” would walk into the same room. Maybe my dad scared me straight. Maybe I’m just a freak. Whatever it is, this has been a subject I’ve almost been obsessed with.

As you know my mother-in-law is an addict. She is an alcoholic and has been on a painful downward spiral for the past six months. I didn’t think she was going to make it out alive this time but she proved me wrong again. I never know. That’s the hardest part I think, just not ever knowing. When to trust her. When is she lying? When is she not? When to help her? When to not?

I think the biggest thing I learned from this book is that addiction is a disease after all. I NEVER believed that before. How dare my mother-in-law slide into the same category as someone with cancer or multiple sclerosis? People with diseases don’t choose to get sick. They don’t try to kill themselves over and over and hurt their family members in the process. It was preposterous to me.

David Sheff does his research. He is very thorough. His son is a meth addict and he goes to the ends of the earth to understand the drug and what it has done to his son. He actually looks at brain scans and sees how the brain is altered after that first usage of drugs.

I think I can get my head around that. That doesn’t mean I feel sorry for my mother-in-law but I can understand that her decisions are made through a filter. Her brain is predisposed to do whatever it takes to keep that dopamine pumping. Forgive me if I get the technical terms wrong. I read that stuff and it makes perfect sense but the scientific terms run out my ear and are never contained in my memory. All I know is that there is a scientific explanation for my mother-in-law’s behavior. She isn’t off the hook totally but her behavior is predictable. Which is crazy since “predictable” is not usually a word I would use to describe her.

Mr. Sheff and his son had a special relationship. He loves his son deeper than I love my mother-in-law. She is a sweet old lady and I love moments like these but I didn’t know her when she didn’t have a problem. I didn’t know her when she was a little kid with white blond hair and innocent eyes.

I do know Baby Bug though. I may have to erase this post someday because I’m terribly afraid of her reading it and I want to protect her from my fears as long as I can. Worst of all worst-case scenarios, I don’t want to cause a self-fulfilling prophesy. I feel so terrible even admitting this to you guys that I think these things but often I stare at her and feel like crying because I’m so afraid that she is going to inherit this addictive gene and will someday be in a gutter addicted to meth. Meth addiction is my greatest fear.

Toby assures me that we are giving Baby Bug the best possible childhood and she has every chance in the world to grow up happy and healthy. Usually children that become addicted to drugs or alcohol have a gaping hole in their heart. Something terrible happened to them at young age that causes them pain and they cannot develop normally because of it. I don’t plan on ripping a hole in Baby Bug’s life. In fact I am going to do everything I can to make sure there will never be any holes at all. But you can’t control these things. Sometimes kids from perfectly healthy homes get addicted to drugs.

I’m just a mom and I worry. I am a worrywart.

Reading this book has given me some relief from my endless worrying. There are signs I can look for. There are actions I can take. It’s good to talk to your kids about drugs early and often, Sheff says. Of course we knew that. But it isn’t good to talk about your own experiences with drugs. Often kids will interpret your survival as a go-ahead. If my mom did it and turned out okay, then I can too sort of thing. I didn’t know that.

Mostly what I take away from Sheff’s book is that addiction isn’t the end of your relationship with your child. Sheff still has a relationship with his son. I don’t know if his son is still sober but at the time the book was published, he was. I’ve heard since that they even do press conferences together. This gives me hope. I don’t mean to be a pessimist. I one-hundred-percent expect Baby Bug to be like me and never even try the stuff… but part of me wants to be prepared for the worst. Part of me doesn’t want to be broadsided.

Sheff also explains that it is so important to take care of each other when you are dealing with an addict. Toby and I know that firsthand. Toby has been through so many ordeals with his mother, you’d think he would be an expert at dealing with it, but it still takes its toll every time. He tries to push it out of his mind and carry on but he tells me that his work suffers. He has a hard time concentrating.

I know I have a hard time being my happy cheerful self when his mom is drinking. I’m constantly waiting for the phone calls. Constantly watching the caller ID to make sure I don’t pick up the phone for another social worker who is going to sucker me into feeling guilty for something I am not guilty of.

I don’t have a solution for these problems but I do have some tools. It does help to listen to other people’s stories. It’s a huge problem and so many people are going through it. There is some strength in that. We are not alone even though at times we feel so incredibly alone. I personally haven’t had much luck with Al-Anon but I know it’s there.

Maybe I can stop looking at Baby Bug and imagining her shooting up. I can still hold her close but I won’t be crying because I see her with sunken eyes and sores all over her legs. I’m scary like that. I scare the crap out of myself. I hope she never knows the extent of my imagination and my fear for her. I’m sure she will cause me great worry for many many years. My mom says she still stays up at night worrying about my brother and I and we are in our thirties. I guess it’s something that never goes away.

I don’t mean to be all doom and gloom. I finished this book feeling uplifted. Comforted that there are other parents out there who do not give up on their children. My life may be hell if I have to go through this but for Sheff it paid off that he didn’t give up on his son. This comforts me.

Baby Bug isn’t going to be my mother-in-law. She has me.

Okay. I admit it. I think we are finally missing Toby. The fun of eating out at restaurants that Toby doesn’t like and moving furniture around (something Toby hates) has run out. The mice are bored now.

I think I realize why divorce and separation is so hard on kids now. I am the major care giver in the family but you wouldn’t believe how many times Baby Bug has asked for Toby. Every time we come home from an errand or a walk to the beach, she runs back to his office to see if he is there. Every time she is disappointed.

Yesterday, I left the phone on the couch accidentally and she found it. I heard her beeping the buttons and saying, “Are you there Daddy?” into the phone. It nearly broke my heart. He may not change her diapers or help with bath time or even read her stories at night but he is a huge part of her life. She really misses him.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to think of ways to explain that he won’t be home for a while. Does she understand “a few days”? Does someone who counts by skipping from five to thirty understand how long “six more night-nights” is? I don’t know.

I think it’s mostly my fault. I need to get out and do stuff and keep us busy. But you know how it is… pajamas are so cozy when nobody cares what you wear all day long.

Here is my Grandma’s curry recipe you asked for!

Ingredients:

      MEAT
6 Chicken Thighs*
Water to cover
1/2 teaspoon salt

      SAUCE
2 Granny Smith Apples (peeled and sliced crescent style)
1 Yellow Onion (sliced crescent style)
vegetable oil OR butter (enough to coat bottom of pan +)
Handful of Raisins
1 Tablespoon Curry Powder (or more if you like it hot)
1 can coconut milk
 
       SLURRY
2 Tablespoons corn starch
2 Tablespoons water
 
      CONDIMENTS
1/2 pound bacon fried crispy in small pieces
1 can Spanish peanuts
1 can pineapple tidbits drained (reserve juice)
2 tomatoes chopped
shredded or flaked coconut
more raisins
4 green onions, chopped
 
1.  Put chicken, water and salt in crockpot.  Set on high and cook until tender.  (usually about 2 to 4 hours depending on your pot).
 
2.  In a large frying pan, saute onions, apples until translucent. While cooking, sprinkle a handful of raisins and curry powder.
 
3.  Remove chicken from crockpot and cool enough to handle.  Take skin off and remove bone.  Chop into bite sized pieces.
 
4.  Pour reserved pineapple juice into broth.
 
5.  Pour coconut milk into broth.
 
6.  Thicken broth mixture with slurry while cooking.
 
7.  Return chicken to the broth.
 
8.  Add the cooked onion, apple and raisins.
 
Serve over sticky rice and top with your choice of the condiments.
 
ENJOY!
 
*  You can use boneless, skinless chicken pieces.  I like the broth, but you can substitute 1 boullion cube dissolved in 1 cup hot water.
                                   OR
                          2 Lamb shanks
 
*  If you do not have coconut milk, pour 1 cup of boiling water through 1 cup of coconut in a seive, three times.  Use the wet coconut later for cookies or muffins.
 
If you make this, let us know how you liked it!
 

Remember my sad old chair? The one I moved around when I was six months pregnant and supposedly not supposed to be lifting heavy things? The one I’ve covered with a fancy white sheet all these years because it is so old and ugly?

Well, guess what! It has a new cover! And I didn’t even pay a dime for it! I take that back. I bought the fabric but I did NOT sew it!!! Nor did I pay someone to sew it for me! I was planning on sewing it myself, now that I have a big couch cover under my belt and I am the reupholstery queen… but something better came up.

I was out in the sticks a few weeks ago discussing the project with my professional seamstress aunt. She was listening carefully, nodding and telling me that I could most certainly do it. But when I got to the part where I told her about the scallop-shaped back that was giving me some mental distress, she got a twinkle in her eye.

If you know my aunt, you know that twinkle. She’s like a mischievous leprechaun, right down to the bright orange hair, short stature and twinkling eyes. She had an idea. What if she and my grandma came to visit for two days and she showed me how to do the chair cover? Grandma could make her famous curry dinner with all the fixings and we’d all have a nice beach visit! I couldn’t say no to that. Toby’s out of town for two weeks again and I’ll take all the company I can get! Plans were made!

They arrived late last Friday night. Baby Bug was very excited to wake up and find Auntie Keren in the living room, sleeping on the couch. I’m not sure how excited Auntie Keren was to wake up to a little person at six in the morning but she put on a good face. Maybe the cat yowling at 5 a.m. broke her in. We took Keren on our usual walk to the beach and then started right in on the chair. Actually, I should clarify that. SHE started right in on the chair. I didn’t do squat.

I made coffee. That was my job.

Three pots of coffee later, she had the thing nearly done! With special princess scallop things at the top. I don’t remember exactly what they are called but this was not the way I was going to make the cover. This is a lot fancier! It’s handy having a seamstress in the family.

Speaking of handy relatives. Guess who is Baby Bug’s new best friend? Great Gramma! Grandmas make great babysitters! Especially ones who like to read stories out loud. They spent many hours reading books together and discussing Madeline while Keren sewed and I putzed around making coffee.

Great Gramma Reads from secretagentjo on Vimeo.

Here is a movie of them. It’s a little on the long side but the ending is worth the wait.

After working non-stop on the couch we let Keren stop and refuel on a delicious dinner of Chicken Curry!

I forgot how much I missed it. It’s sort of a family tradition that my mom’s side of the family picked up while they were living in Hawaii. It’s not Indian curry but Polynesian curry with all sorts of toppings: peanuts, green onions, coconut, pineapple, bacon crumbles and tomatoes. I remember as a kid hating the lamb part of the curry but loving to have curry because it was like building your own sundae with a thousand different toppings. We never really noticed the lamb buried under the mountain of other yummy things.

I haven’t outgrown my aversion to lamb but thankfully my family has grown more accommodating to my aversions. Funny how that worked. We had chicken curry and it was much better than lamb. It brought back all sorts of memories of family dinners at long tables. Yes, we thought of you Aunt Kathy and took these photos just for you!

After dinner it was back to the chair, snap snap! And of course Keren finished it!!! In one day!!! That’s power sewing, I tell you.

Then she died.

Just kidding. This was a cinch for Keren. She says she actually enjoyed doing it. I’m not sure I believe her but I do realize how valuable her labor is. I couldn’t afford to hire someone to do this for me. I could have done it myself but it wouldn’t have been as nice.

So to show my appreciation for it, I’m going to sit in it every chance I get! Thank you Keren! My old ugly sad chair isn’t old or ugly or sad anymore.

Unless of course you are looking at this pretty site!

I’m so honored to be part of their mother’s day interview! Thank you Coveiter!

UPDATE: Don’t leave these on your windows in the sun! Yikes! A reader emailed me the following,

Good to know!

p.s. As of 11:12 p.m. this post has not been edited by my hyphen-loving professional editor. So blame all errors on me.