My 2013 Christmas Letter

I’m not sending Christmas cards or holiday letters. Glorifying my life on Facebook all year long is exhausting, so I won’t go out of my way to pay for stamps to emphasize more of the same. How about we discuss what really happened instead?

The year started out with a bang, as my book came back from the editor with my first round of edits on New Year’s Eve. I spent the next three months oscillating between glee and panic, trying to decide why I’d bothered to write a book in the first place. Instead of jumping for joy when it was released in March, I cried.

Our youngest daughter, 5, qualified for kindergarten according to the testing, but was held in preschool by the school system to continue her speech therapy, which really pissed her off. She cried through T-ball and swimming lessons, so we enlisted her in the latchkey program again because it’s the only way we can get her out of the house. She spent a good part of the fall getting into trouble in preschool and the rest of the time talking incessantly at home. Yesterday, she told us, “This candy cane tastes like wrapper,” so at least we won’t have to worry about a college education for that one.

Our middle child, a 9 yr old son, had a pretty good year except for his recurrent fungal eye infection. He is in 4^th grade, and his grades are weighted according to some method that even I don’t understand, so it’s a minor miracle that he maintains a stellar GPA. He’s learned to sandbag the AR reading points system so he can attend all the parties without adjusting his goals to be more challenging for the following quarter, so I think I’ve already succeeded in raising him for corporate middle management. Oh, and last week, he mastered the splits – I don’t know if I should be proud or mortified.

Our oldest child, 11, has become a premature teenager thanks to the Disney channel. Luckily, she appreciates capitalism as much as the next kid and is happy to act responsibly if we offer enough reimbursement. She broke her finger over the summer, which kept her from competing in gymnastics this fall and gave her lots of extra time to sleep in on the weekends. She’s matured to the point that she does her homework and studying on her own without complaint and has a perfect GPA, which indicates to me that she’s old enough to watch her brother and sister when I need a few minutes of peace and quiet (and possibly inherited perfectionist tendencies, although I'm not sure from where).

My husband is still gainfully employed, probably due to his ability to keep his mouth shut. I’ll take credit for teaching him that skill. He traded the Jeep and got a new car, his choice, as a reward for tolerating me another year.

So here I sit. What do I do? Laundry. A shit load of laundry. And I write silly things like this while listening to a Barbie cat’s rendition of EMF’s Unbelievable that my 5 yr old has cranked up on the computer next to mine because it keeps me sane.

Wishing all of you a better 2014, because just when you think it can’t get worse, it always does.

I'd rather strip in front of people than talk to them

I say a lot of stupid shit. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you probably already know this, but I have a bad habit of saying things that people should only think – or maybe I shouldn’t even think most of this stuff at all.

Back in college, my interview stories were notorious.

• I once told an interviewer I wanted to lay down on his desk and unbutton my skirt. I meant that I was completely full from our lunch, but it didn’t really come across that way. (If you read my book, I modified that particular story and included it.)

• I was asked to explain the biggest difference between small-town Kentucky and Cleveland. I answered it was all the colored people. Seriously. I think I left him speechless. Then I went on to explain that I didn’t mean it as a derogatory statement, but growing up my friends were not diverse. It wasn’t until college that I branched out and met people from different cultures. In the end, I actually got my highest-salary job offer from him.

• At a large, well-known company in Atlanta, I accidentally called the matching employees lemmings. The guy who was interviewing me matched them as well.

Yet somehow I graduated with six job offers. People either get me or they don’t. Luckily, most of the engineering interviewers seem to be as socially inept as I am and impossible to offend.

Fast-forward to now. In real life, I monitor my words closely. My husband works in a hospital where political correctness is key. I try to stay far, far away from anyone who affects his job for fear I’ll say the wrong thing and we won’t be able to eat next week.

At our first hospital social function, to my husband’s great dismay, I told his boss that my husband must have him snowed because he can’t even run the laundry machine at home. Cut me some slack; I was nervous. I said the first thing that came to mind. That was six years ago. I haven’t been to another work-related social gathering since.

This morning, my husband informed me that we’re going to his department Christmas party tomorrow night. This will be the first time I’ve been unleashed on the people who sustain my lifestyle in years. I’m terrified because polite conversation is my downfall. I'd be more comfortable stripping in front of these people than I will be trying to talk to them. I’m considering pretending I have laryngitis so I can silently hang on my husband’s arm and make apologetic glances.

What do I talk about? I’m not scared of much, but tomorrow night terrifies me. I don’t want to disappoint my husband, but embarrassment is the only probable outcome from this little experiment. If we’re lucky, he’ll still be employed and the only damage will be the walk of shame he has to do into work on Monday. Being married to me, he’s already pretty good at that one.

I listened to Lisa Lisa & the Cult Jam for this

“Sitting in my house, I can hear my son screaming and crying, which must mean the bus is here. I’ll interpret it as the harbinger of doom.”

As I typed that tweet, I questioned my mothering skills. I was sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea and my phone, listening to my son scream and tantrum outside, and my first instinct wasn’t to help him – it was to make fun of him. It made me feel like a crappy parent for about thirty seconds until he walked through the door and I learned the entire fuss was over a wet post-it note. That amount of drama should only accompany a botched kidnapping attempt – or at a minimum some type of bodily injury.

I wonder what my neighbors think. Am I supposed to panic and rush out the door every time my child wails? We discuss proportional responses at home, but he is theatrical. What makes him great on stage also makes him difficult to parent. He feels everything and expresses all of it and sometimes I feel guilty about trying to squelch that. There’s a fine line between teaching him to handle his emotions and criticizing his personality. Our emotions make us human. Too often, the process of growing up becomes not a lesson in learning to control our emotions, but a lesson in ignoring them.

When my son is upset, he shows it. He knows why. As an adult, I still have trouble showing emotion in front of people and sometimes it takes me hours, if not days, to reflect and figure out why I feel the way I do. I look away and concentrate on something mundane if I feel like I’m going to cry. I swallow my anger and grit my teeth because I never want to be perceived as “creating drama”. I busy myself with daily activities if I don’t want to think about something that bothers me. Essentially, every emotion I feel is expressed through quiet detachment.

But what is creating drama? And why does it have such a horrible reputation? Drama makes people feel. It makes us discuss and recognize our faults. Essentially, drama is conflicting emotion. So what is life if not drama? Isn't all great art, theater, and literature something that makes us feel? We all want to feel connected on a human level. I don’t want to win a competition of who can feel the least. I want to grow, learn, think, and make people – even myself – uncomfortable at times.

For all his faults, my son does make me feel emotion. Usually that emotion is anger if he’s screaming at the bus stop, but it’s something. It’s real. It's uncomfortable. It’s life. Luckily, I have a nice set of also-very-real industrial earplugs I can use to tune him out until he goes back to school next Tuesday. Perhaps I should offer the neighbors a set as an early holiday gift.

P.S. If you read this for Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam you are probably sorely disappointed. I'm not original enough to come up with a title and I kept thinking of their "Lost in Emotion" song, so I listened to it multiple times and then couldn't make the video link in. Frustration. This particular emotion I'm feeling now is frustration. Someone give me a cookie.