What would Judi do?

I finally figured something out this weekend. I'm excited by this. I have always felt different. I'm not the other moms who pick up their kids at school. Yes, I stopped wearing skull and crossbones on my shirts. Yes, I make sure I look normal. But I know inside I'm not like the other moms. I don't wear flowered pants. Or capris with cute little shoes. Or have perfectly coiffed hair. I listen to different music, tend to wear black or purple and use words I probably shouldn't in front of other people. I'm not like a lot of my co-workers either but I won't elaborate on why that is. I couldn't do the whole June Cleaver wife thing. Yeah, I'm not sad about that. I feel like a misfit sometimes. I realized this weekend that this feeling probably started around the time I discovered the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I wanted to be Columbia or Magenta. I wanted to have the balls to dress like that. I wanted to feel like that. I was that - at the a

I've often felt like the white fluffy stuff in the middle of an Oreo. One of the chocolate wafers is my kids and the other is my mom. And there I am, stuck in the middle. When you try to twist the wafers apart, I get a little stuck to both sides. That pretty much sums it all up for me. It's weird - not bad, just weird - to be a mom and a daughter at the same time. I love my mother and have always been close with her. But as she ages, my role in her life changes. She's still my mom but now I have a motherly role with her, too. It's weird. But one thing is certain - when she's mad at me, she still wants to discipline me. I love having daughters. I love having twins. I love being a mom but boy, oh boy, it's a lot of responsibility. That people think I'm supposed to know what I'm doing baffles me. There is no manual for this. Sometimes I have to make a choice between being a mom and being a daughter. My girls were each in a class play (both pla

I was out with a new friend last night. He’s a nerd (his word, not mine). He’s a tech guy, very savvy. I am not. The point was made clearly when he referenced something from this blog. This blog with its three readers. This blog that is really much more of a diary than anything else. This blog….that I suck at writing. I can’t remember exactly how it came up but he said something about me having been diagnosed with cancer and a brain tumor. My mind immediately starts racing around, figuring out how he could know that. I didn’t talk about it. I don’t talk about it often but people who know me and people who were in my life when I couldn’t speak properly, couldn’t hold my own children and couldn’t walk without tripping certainly knew. We have one connection (a neighbor of mine is a co-worker of his) but that guy wouldn’t talk about that – there’s much more recent and juicy gossip to discuss. How did he know? I’m fairly certain that the look of panic flashed ac

May Day holds many memories for me. When I was young, about 5 years old, we moved from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. I remember celebrating May Day with my school, holding ribbons and dancing around the May Pole. My soon-to-be-ex called me a commie when he heard we did that. It was normal for me. I loved it. And I’m sad my kids don’t get to experience that. May Day doesn’t hold great memories for me anymore. A few years ago it was the day my father in law died. My FIL was an interesting man. He was the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health when I came into the family. He retired shortly thereafter when he realized the Alzheimer’s he had feared getting was becoming real. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a brilliant man who watched his sister and father die of the same disease and realize that’s your fate, too. It was a terrible disease. He died on May 1. At the time, I remember thinking that while I was sad that my children would never kn