So Sweet...

You've heard me mention my friend, John. If you haven't, feel free to read this and get caught up. He's an incredible man and I'm blessed to know him. Well John sends me flowers quite often - he's just like that. He sends them every year for my birthday, but mostly he sends them for no reason at all. Today he sent them because he knows the last day of the month is particularly stressful for me at work. What more could a girl ask for? (Yeah, John...that was just for you ;) **

Since he lives in Washington and I live in Southern California, John never gets to see the flowers he sends. And every time I receive them, I say the same thing..."They're so beautiful! I wish you could see them. I'll send you a picture of them!" And I never do. I'm a flake like that. This nice man sends me flowers and I can't even break out the digital camera before they die, to show him the beauty he has added to my life.

So today's the day...I'm turning over a new me! ;)

And what did I tell ya? Yup - They're beautiful!!!

And by the way..."Hey, John! As always...Thank you, my sweet friend."

**Just a little side bar...John jokingly asked me that very question when we spoke tonight and my answer was, "A firmer ass. A girl can always ask for a firmer ass!" ;)

Monday Memories 05.29.06

Since it's Memorial Day, I wanted to remember an incredibly special man ~ my father-in-law, Edward Frances (with a last name that is incredibly Irish and the same as mine, which is why I'm not going to name it now). His parents came over to the United States from Ireland and passed through Ellis Island. He was born in 1922, served in WWII and raised 7 children; two step-children and five of his own, one being my ex-husband. He was a kind, gentle and wise man and I loved him tremendously.

While I was married to my ex-husband, his mother hated me with a passion. She actively pursued ways to show me how much she despised me, as she did with each person - man or woman - who married one of her children. I was very young and shocked and confused by her unprovoked hatred. I was raised to respect adults, especially my elders, and was just idealistic enough to think I could turn it around, so for the first few years I never fought back. Through it all, there was Ed. He loved her immensely, but knew she was unfair in her treatment of me. He always let me know that he loved me and that I was a valued member of his family. He made dealing with her bearable. We shared the same twisted sense of humor and he knew it. When something happened at a family gathering that he knew I would find equally ridiculous, he would always catch my eye and give me a look that spoke volumes. It was as though only he and I knew how completely stupid a particular comment was. If someone said something that could have a silly double meaning, we agreed on those too, and with a look could have each other in stitches.

When my ex-husband was born, Ed was in his late 40's. He and my mother-in-law had married later in life, each with two children of their own, and decided to have a child together. What they got was triplets, one of them being my ex-husband. Unfortunately, he had smoked all of his life, and by the time his triplets were in their teens, his health had begun to fail. In the last few months of his life, he lived in an assisted living home after losing most of his lower limbs. His wife no longer felt equipped to care for him and even checked out emotionally. She lived a just few miles away, yet visited less then once a week. It killed me to think of him alone and I tried to visit him at least every other day. I knew my time with him was short. I tried to make his last few days as comfortable as possible, and I would bring him whatever he wanted, trying to repay him for the love and kindness he had always shown me, even when it was against his wife's wishes.

Ed passed away in September of 1995, at 73 years old. He was the proud father of seven children and at that time, grandfather to eleven. My oldest daughter was four years old and my youngest daughter was not yet a year old when he passed away. Sadly she never really knew her grandpa Ed. He was always so proud of being the child of immigrants and being able to fight for his country, and of raising and providing for his family.

If I had five more minutes with him, I would look him in the eye and thank him for being the model of fatherhood, marriage, love and fairness that he was to me and countless others. I would ask him to tell me one more story from his days as a Navy corpsman, and I would tell him I love him and miss him dearly.

Words I Wish I Wrote....5.11.06

I'm a dreamer. Not one of those head in the clouds kind of dreamers, but someone who has vivid and lifelike dreams on a nightly basis. Sometimes they're scary and too vivid to shake when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes it takes me half the day to recover from a particularly sad dream and there's a dark cloud over most of my day when that happens. When the dream is really good and makes me happy, sometimes it's hard to wake up and realize that it never really happened.

There are things that I don't have the courage to dream about in real life because they're just too big. Fear keeps me from pursuing them and keeps me in the safety of this cocoon I've wrapped myself in. But sometimes I dream about them at night and for a few hours live the life I've always wanted, even if it's only while I sleep.

This is one of my favorites quotes...mostly because it's about dreaming big. Dreaming confidently. Making those dreams happen. In my dreams last night, all the best ones came true. My most secret and precious dreams were lived out and I got a taste for what life like that might be like. This morning I woke up determined not to be afraid of these dreams. I woke up with conviction to live my dreams out loud. To move confidently in their direction because living them for a only a few hours a night is no longer good enough for me...like Thoreau, I don't want to die having never really lived.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...I learned this at least from my experiment...that if one advances confidently in the directions of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
~Henry David Thoreau

My Pride and Joy...

My 15 year old daughter is beautiful. She's also incredibly intelligent. She was in the 'gifted' classes in elementary school, honors programs in Jr. High and made the honor roll all through 8th grade. Then she hit high school - she's now a Freshman - and everything changed. Her grades tanked. To put into perspective how badly her grades tanked, consider this scenario and the extreme parental reaction...
She plays volleyball. Not only on her high school team, but on an off season club team. She's very very good - only 5'5" but she's an outside hitter and although I'm her mother, let me just say...she kicks ass. Her club team won Nationals in their division last year, greatly in part to my daughter's hitting ability. She was chosen again this year for the Nationals team. Her grades, however, sucked. Her father and I decided to not let her go to Nationals (after plenty of warning about the grades). It was the hardest decision I've made as a parent, but her grades really suck that bad right now. I don't know why such an intelligent girl would let something so important slip so far, but she has. I realize it's an age thing. She's 15 - a little bit of this is to be expected, right? But then every once in awhile, I wonder if kids this age just lose knowledge and commen sense on an exponential level. She does have this uncanny knack for song lyrics. It's amazing, actually. She can hear a song just once and sing every single word the very next time she hears it. I've pointed it out to her many times.

This conversation actually took place between us the other day...

(By the way, she is loudly singing a song she is hearing for the second time)

Daughter: That's such waste of memory.
Me: What is?
D: The fact that I can remember song lyrics and nothing else, like what I need for school. I mean, why can't I remember science facts instead of song lyrics?
M: Maybe you put more value on the lyrics (She looks confused). I've seen you look up song lyrics on the internet. Maybe you should look up more important things, like what you study in your science class. (And then sarcastically, I add...) Maybe you should look up Nuclear Fusion.

And in all seriousness, my beautiful and gifted 15 year old daughter turned to me and said...

"Is that a lipgloss?"

Monday Memories 05.01.06

Today my daughter asked me about my first date with her father. Although we're divorced, we're good friends and the memory is a great one. When I first met him, I was with my friend Kris who had a pretty strong crush on him. I even tried to set them up, thinking I was doing her a favor. The first time I laid eyes on him, I thought I would never go out with someone who looked like him. You see, back in the day he was an extremely handsome young man. So much so that in our younger years, even other men would come to me and say, "Wow Steph. Your husband is a good looking man!" I assumed that someone who looked as good as he did would be cocky and shallow. I can see so clearly how he looked back then.
I was supposed to have a date with his twin brother (actually, his triplet brother - they also have a triplet sister). But when his brother came to see me in San Diego (where I was in college at the time), he brought him with him and as they say...the rest is history. His brother didn't care that we hit it off so well, in fact he was engaged to someone else and had plans to cheat on her by coming to see me. Obviously I had no guilt about liking his brother. My friend Kris knew we had a strong connection and encouraged me to go out with him - she was later a bridesmaid in our wedding. :)
I remember him walking into the room on that night, and as soon as we saw each other, we were inseparable. He asked me out for later in the week and he again came to San Diego. I had a convertible and offered to drive. I wanted to show him the best of San Diego and took him to La Jolla with the top down. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch - this was 1989, so that was still a novelty. Since I drove, he had just taken some money out of his wallet and gotten in my car, leaving his wallet in his truck. During lunch I learned that the person I assumed was stuck up was actually so down to earth. He told me about his family with seven kids (!), and his bond with them was touching. He was the exact opposite of what I expected just by looking at him. At the end of lunch, it turned out that he hadn't taken enough money out of his wallet to pay for lunch. He had to admit that he didn't have enough money (and had also left his credit cards in his wallet back at my house) so I left him at the restaurant while I ran around La Jolla looking for an ATM so we could pay for lunch. How embarrassing that must have been for him! But he handled it with class and humor. We then went to another restaurant/bar where we had some margaritas and then I took him to the cliffs in Solana Beach - the best place in San Diego County to watch the sunset. After that we were inseparable. He lived in Orange County, where we both grew up, so he was an hour away, but every night from then on he drove to San Diego after work. We were married a year and a half later.
Even though we're divorced now, for a variety of reasons, we both look back on those days with fondness. We were very young - only 22 - and stupid. We had no idea what it took to have a successful marriage. Neither one of us had seen a good model of marriage growing up. But mostly we look back in fondness because we know we were madly in love. Yes, we know the beauty that came from our marriage - I'm convinced that we never regret that which leads to the birth of our children - but it was more than that. It was young love and idealism at it's finest.
We've grown up so much since then. We've been apart for almost ten years, he's married to someone else (who is exponentially a better fit for him than I ever was), and we still maintain love and respect for each other that allows us nothing but sweet memories.