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...