Teachers

When I was in first or second grade, we had the most inconceivable assignment: to invent something. As soon as I heard this, I immediately thought that my teacher was batshit crazy. Inventors are people who are in the prime of their life and maturity and have the experience to know what needs to be fixed and the insight into how it can be fixed. But we are mere children who most likely haven't even developed logic and common sense yet. We still believed things like eating a watermelon seed would make a watermelon grow in your stomach. How the heck are we supposed to invent something?

So, obviously, I failed this assignment. My "invention" was some kind of a pully system that allowed me to wake up my mom from my bedroom with a little poking motion. Why did I need to do this? I didn't. I'm pretty sure it was my mom who needed to wake me up in the mornings, anyway.

Obviously, the other children didn't do so well, either. The only memorable invention was an umbrella with a cup holder attached. And hey, that might be useful in some situations, but seriously? These kind of assignments are ridiculous for children; it certainly made me feel dumb.

I also can't stand when children get assignments/projects that really end up being for parents, ie: building models, sewing costumes, or cooking treats for potlucks. The kids will probably only end up doing 15% of the real work and that's not fair for the parents who have enough to deal with as it is.

Okay, I'll stop, but only because I am reminiscing about childhood and 90's things.

  

 

Kill Me Now

Everyone's got an embarrassing story, and I don't usually go out of my way to tell them myself, but my family certainly would. Whenever we have a get-together and someone starts bringing up childhood, voila: the same stories about me and all the embarrassing things that have happened to me. Thanks mom, you can kill me now.

Countdown of the Top Most Retold Embarrassing Childhood Stories About Me By My Family That I Don't Even Remember Happening

#4: When I was a baby, I would play with my mom's hair as she held me. For some reason, I made a pointing gesture right as my mom was turning her face back towards me and I caught her in the eye. She had to make a visit to the emergency room, and there is now a picture of her with an unattractive eye patch on in my family photo album.

#3: My dad would come to pick up my brother and me on Saturday mornings to hang out for the weekend. When I was old enough to sit in the front seat as my brother already could, being two years older than me, we would take turns sitting in the front. For some reason, I hated sitting in the back seat, so whenever it was my turn, I would have a severe breakdown in the middle of the front lawn, throwing my head back and screaming at the clouds for justice. At some point, after many days of public tantrums on the front lawn, my mom gathered me up and whispered to me that throwing my head back and screaming like that made me look like an idiot. I supposedly never did it again.

#2: My mom had always complained about me being a slow dresser in the mornings. Sometimes it would take me 10 minutes to put on a sock. So one day when it was time to go to school and I wasn't really dressed quite yet, she told me to suck it up, we're getting in the car now. Excuse me, mom! I cannot go to school in my pajamas! She threw me into the backseat of her car. How could you do this to me! (Hysterical, desperate sobbing.) Pulling up to my elementary school, she turned towards my tear-stained face and handed me a bag of clothes. "You'll never do that again, now, will you?" I changed in the car in less than five minutes.

For the record, I have an entirely different memory of the events that took place in this next scenario.

#1: When we were kids, my brother and I shared a room and a bunk bed. I always had the bottom bunk, which was fine by me because it was queen sized and I could spread out my arms and legs everywhere. My brother obviously had the top bunk, which was just twin sized. One night, while I was asleep, my brother became sick and threw his head over the side of his bed to vomit, which landed on my blanket and my self.

MY STORY: I woke up totally grossed out and ran to the bathroom to wash the gunk off of me.
MY MOM'S/BROTHER'S STORY: I rolled over and fell back asleep, but was then awoken by my mom who told me I was sleeping in vomit before I became totally grossed out and ran to the bathroom to wash the gunk off of me.

I refuse to believe this. I refuse. I have been punked.

I Love You, Mom

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized exactly how hard-working my mom was raising me and my brother by herself. My parents have been divorced since I was a toddler, so I have no memory of anything else and the separation doesn't bother me at all. I lived with my mom and saw my dad every other weekend. He moves around quite a lot between nearby and 300 miles away in Southern California, so he would either drive up or my brother and I would fly down. We kept track how many times we flew until the numbers were well over 200 and I was probably 8 years old.

My mom put herself through college without any help from her parents while I was in elementary school, and she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Kinesiology with the hopes of becoming a physical therapist. Unfortunately, the training program for physical therapy is very competitive and despite her 4.0 GPA she could not get in and could not use her degree for any of her following jobs. She would work early and work late, having to drop us off at our friends' homes so their parents could watch us until we could go to school or back home, and she could never participate in the weekly carpools herself. In the summertime, she bought a season pass for each of us for a water park and we would stay there all day while she was at work/school. This was completely fine because we were great swimmers, there were lifeguards, it was really fun, and she wouldn't have been able to afford a babysitter.

My mom hasn't had very good luck in her lifetime. Unsupported by her own family, every choice she has ever made was to help me and my brother lead better lives than her own. She lost her jobs for various reasons, and never for incompetence. She was just very unlucky. She was a substitute middle school teacher for a while until she trained to become an appraiser. For some time, she managed to earn a large salary and even earned an award and spa vacation for being such a highly efficient worker in the company, but was laid off when the economy tanked in 2008 and caused all home values to plummet.

Then she trained to become a nuclear medicine technologist and held that job for a bit before she was in a bike accident and broke her arm and hip. She was afraid she would lose her job for not being able to work, but lost it instead during that time most likely because she was a whistle blower. She has since been unable to find a job because the place she worked at refused to promote her as the fantastic worker she is. She is overqualified for average jobs and would have to go back into training for new jobs at her education level. No one will accept her for anything. The system sucks. Meanwhile her broken hip turned into a hip replacement, and then she later suffered from appendicitis and a lengthy and stressful divorce from my step dad of 10 years. It's like anything bad that could happen did happen.

Before she lost everything, she managed to help me climb out of the trouble I would have been in if she couldn't have encouraged me through my educational career. Since I was two years ahead in mathematics through middle school and high school, my mom asked our local state university if they would accept me with what units I did have along with taking the Proficiency Exam. They accepted, so instead of moving on to my junior year in high school, I became a freshman in college. It took me 5.5 years to graduate from college, since I was working part-time throughout and it sometimes delayed my progression through earning my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. I ended up saving just enough to support myself through a year of dosimetry school in Texas before landing a job back home (somehow) and a spot in the high tax bracket.

Now I can take care of my mom for taking care of me. Which is great, like the American Dream, like it really is possible to dig yourself out. But I wouldn't have been able to if I didn't have any help, at least not that young and naive. I wouldn't have had the wisdom or the ambition or the intuition on my own. My mom's the one who suggested I look into dosimetry in the first place. It makes me very sad to think of the millions of people who are stuck where they are because they can't get the help or opportunities I did. I am so very thankful for her. I feel like all the luck she could have had went to me instead.

The issue now though is that, having lost everything, she kind of broke. I'm all she really has left (my brother lives out of town), and I've been forced to move back in with her because she can't afford to live by herself and she doesn't want to move. She's become very difficult to live with and I feel very stuck. I think that's why I wrote all of this up, to remind myself of all that she has done for me so that, even though all I really want to do is move out, I can push myself on to keep supporting her. I'm just afraid that I might become unhappy in the process.

Norway

August 2000

When I was 11 years old, my fabled Grandma and Grandpa Tutu took my brother and me to a family reunion in Norway. Both of my grandparents grew up in Norway and met on the boat on the way to America. I don't quite remember how long we stayed there, but we went up and down the country visiting relatives and ended up sleeping in the car during their visits a lot of the time from jet lag. Many Norwegians knew English, thank goodness, so we could converse fairly well. My very first impression of Norway was made when I realized you are never allowed to turn right when the stoplight is red. Safety first.

One of the places we stayed at belonged to a relative of some kind who was very old but very fit and looked at least 20 years younger than he was. He built beautiful, quality log homes for a living, as well as a small hut outside his own home just for my brother and I to stay in while we were there, which fit two single beds and a nightstand. He built his own home, which featured a hot tub sunken in flush to the floor in middle of the living room. We got to use it with bubble bath solution and it overflowed with bubbles enough that I had a hard time peeking my face out over the mass of it.

We played soccer with some distant cousins on a field outside a cottage with a barn and boysenberry farm residing on an island called Kalvøya ("Calf Island") whose only road into it closed up with the rising tide. That may have been my favorite place. Looking at an aerial map of it today makes me question this memory, but a lot of things can change in 14 years. Kalvøya also happened to be the first place I ever tasted Nutella, my one true love, my dear, my only. Since I had learned numbers up to ten in Norwegian, I helped my grandma dial the telephone to call relatives as she read out the numbers to me in Norwegian. En, tu, tre, fita, fem, secs, sieve, otta, ni, ti. 

We also attempted to swim in a fjord at some point, but it was so desperately cold even in the summer that all I could do was dip my toe in and yelp. I envied a group of native boys who jumped in off of a boulder without even thinking about it. The indoor pool halls were much more appropriate for me, though I managed to slip on the tile climbing out of the pool and my right elbow landed on grout only to start bleeding profusely everywhere and it took days for my elbow to be insensitive to the slightest pressure. I still have the scar to this day. 

We had boat rides through the fjords, visited the famous Vigeland Sculpture Park (ever seen the meme with the guy throwing/kicking babies off of himself?), a dog show one of my relatives participated in with her canine, the Norwegian Royal Palace in Oslo, and were often served a Norwegian delicacy that tasted like it was really just a broth soup with hot dogs in it. It was really delicious for kids though as you can probably imagine. 

The Tutu's

My paternal grandparents spent a lot of time with my brother and me when we were kids since we were their only ever grandkids. I'm sure at some point they had insisted on us calling them the Tutu's, because that's all I've ever done. Grandma and Grandpa Tutu. I'm under the impression it has a Hawaiian meaning. We all did take a trip to Hawaii once when I was too young to remember, but my grandpa tends to bring up often that I would tug on his shirt and squeal "ocean!" to him. He taught me a Hawaiian handshake I still remember. I also ate sand. Because toddlers eat everything. I learned my lesson.


We did travel many places together but spent most of the summers at their home in Arizona where we swam nearly every day. They tried to teach us tennis, but I was always terrible at it, lobbing the ball almost over the back fence every time I bothered trying. My grandma later told me when I was more grown up that I had once said to her that she was my favorite family member because she always gave me what I wanted. That probably meant Kraft macaroni & cheese and sour cream & onion flavored Pringles.


We took road trips from California up to Washington and over to Montana where my uncle's cabin is, listening to sing-alongs all the way there, which we loved. My grandparents used to live in Washington so we stayed a few days with a friend of theirs who had a house on one of the lakes near Seattle and a small yelping dog. We also stopped at what it felt like was either in Spokane or somewhere in Idaho at a farm with some cows I had scared and some kittens I had cuddled. Over in Montana, we stayed for 8 weeks of the summer attending a kids camp only to have our mom crush us in a suffocating death hug when we stepped off of our return flight.


My grandpa took us out on a boat to fish and enjoy the sun, and they got us bicycles to ride over the gravel roads and left a sprinkler on in the backyard for us to run through in our bathing suits. My brother even witnessed a moose stick its head in through the window! Montana is beautiful in the summer, but one winter we enjoyed our first white Christmas. We took out some sleds to find good hills to slide down, though I remember being very timid about participating.


Twice we drove down into Mexico to a place called San Carlos. My grandparents owned a condo there and it has a swimming pool we used pretty much every day, too. My brother and I noticed a bunch of dead rollie pollies on the bottom of the pool that we decided to collect and pile onto the edge of the pool, only to be distraught by their sudden disappearance the following morning. One time my grandpa took us to the beach where my brother and I swam and he fished. When I was swimming a bit far out, his hook caught my skin and I panicked but unleashed it off of me and didn't bother telling anyone about it because I was too embarrassed.

While we were away from home, my grandma would help me write letters to my mom to let her know how and what we were doing. She's the one who taught me how to write postal information on an envelope. My mom kept all of my letters apparently, stashed in a drawer in her bedroom among other mementos from my childhood. We're a very sentimental, nostalgic family.

PS: It's my kittens' first birthday tomorrow. I wanted to get them tiny party hats, but couldn't find even regular party hats anywhere.