Best Thing/Worst Thing — One More Thing!

I love you all so much. Thanks for sharing anecdotes about your own challenges, and how you deal. The best way to gain perspective is definitely to shift gears from wallowing in your own misery to feeling empathy for another.

Immediately after posting yesterday I regretted not linking to or mentioning this amazing column in the Atlantic, which ruminates much more eloquently on the subject of trying to be happy with what you've got. The writer has a disabled son, and beautifully reframes the question constantly posed to women today: "Can we have it all?" For those who haven't the time to read it all, here's an excerpt:

When I look at friends and acquaintances, many with perfectly beautiful children and wonderful lives, and see how desperately unhappy or stressed they are about balancing work and family, I think to myself that the solution to many problems is deceptively obvious. We are chasing the wrong things, asking ourselves the wrong questions. It is not, "Can we have it all?" -- with "all" being some kind of undefined marker that shall forever be moved upwards out of reach just a little bit with each new blessing. We should ask instead, "Do we have enough?"

I highly recommend reading it. I have it bookmarked and go back to it when I need a reminder that my life is not too terrible (and in fact is often pretty great). Maybe we can have it all — just maybe not all at once. So the regularly scheduled date nights and Pinterest-perfect decor will just have to wait a while. (Of course, the question still remains: Whither the articles on whether men can have it all? But that's a question for another day.)

I also need to thank Rachel of My Messings for nominating me for the One Lovely Blog Award! I've never been nominated for one of these inter-blogger pat-on-the-back awards, so I really appreciate the shout-out. The idea is to pass it on, showing your appreciation for others. Hopefully my picks haven't already participated in this particular award...if they have, I won't be offended if they neglect to pass it on. We can't do it all, after all!

The rules for the One Lovely Blog Award are as follows:

• Thank the person who nominated you and link back to him/her in your post. 
• Share 7 things about yourself.

• Nominate 15 bloggers you admire. (That's a lot, isn't it?!)

• Leave a comment on each of these blogs letting them know they’ve been nominated.

The seven things appear to be wide open, so here goes:

• I always check out people's butts‚ but not because I'm into asses. I'm obsessed with pocket placement and fit, and am always evaluating what is the best cut/design to trick the eye into believing you have the perfect posterior. 

• I swallow very loudly (according to my husband). Especially when I gulp water in the middle of the night. 

• I was a deckhand one summer during university.

• I've lived in the U.S. for 5 1/2 years, but stubbornly still spell it cheque and pronounce niche so it rhymes with quiche.

•  I yell at cars that cut me off when I'm crossing the street with my kid, so now at age 4 she acts like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. I feel a little bad about that. But people need to know how unsafely they're driving! (OK, I am unrepentant, clearly).

• I'm a savant when it comes to Where's Waldo. Also, spelling and grammar errors just jump off the page at me. These two things must be related somehow.

•  I regret never learning an instrument, and hope one day I can take up drums or piano or something else totally impractical for a New Yorker.

So here are my 15 (again, that seems like a lot, right? The chance of these 15 already receiving this award are pretty high, probably). Is it against the spirit of this award to feel bad about asking them to take on the task of posting seven things and collating a list of their 15 faves? I'm a little sensitive to tasking others with one more thing because I often feel like if someone asks one more thing of me, I may just lose it. So my apologies to Rachel, but I'm going to give these ladies and gents the chance to bask in my praise without having to do anything in return:  

Another Sewing Scientist 

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

A Place in the Cloud

Balls to the Wall, Y'all

Four Square Walls

Julia Bobbin

Dixie DIY

Emily Kate

Liza Jane Sews

Male Pattern Boldness

Makes the Things

Oonaballoona

Sew Queer

True Bias

With the Crickets

I love them all. If you haven't checked them out yet and have the time, please do.

P.S. Best thing about yesterday: Barack Obama was re-elected! The election is over and we can go back to worrying about other things. Worst thing: I fell asleep before the acceptance speech, and missed seeing Michelle Obama in what I'm sure was a very lovely dress.

Don't ask, don't tell

I hear this now and then: "I wish somebody had told me about ________ before I got pregnant." Usually it refers to something awful, like nightly heartburn or hemorrhoids, as if having a sore butt for a few months would keep you having a kid if you really wanted one. But we all make jokes about our kids and how much we hate them sometimes, right? So, whatever.

I wish, however, that there were pregnancy-and-labour-related things now known by the general non-child-bearing public that were kept a secret. Like hemorrhoids. Or tearing. And how you maybe, probably poop at least a little when you're pushing. I think that detail should have remained on a need-to-know basis. I wish I knew who was the bitch who stepped of the proverbial birthing hut and spilled the beans. Until I find her, I'm blaming Judd Apatow.

I didn't ask my midwife how many stitches I got, and neither should you. The only point of knowing the answer to that question is for scaring other pregnant ladies, which is cruel and pointless. Like my husband said while I was pregnant, if your grandpa was having heart surgery, I wouldn't tell you about all the people I knew who had died on the operating table. Yet when you're pregnant every one will tell you about someone they know who was in labour for 364 hours and then had 92 stitches and couldn't see the colour orange for six months post-partum (I made some or all of those facts up).

I have no idea whether I pooped while pushing. My best friend likely knows because she was at the business end of things during the delivery, but she hasn't told me  — and that is why she will be my best friend forever. Also, she pushed on my lower back every six minutes for two whole days. Don't ask me why. YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW.

One red kilt

Nora Ephron has a new play being staged in New York City right now. Called Love, Loss and What I Wore, it's actually a "reading" at this point and will benefit a not-for-profit that provides nice clothes to low-income women for job interviews. I heard Ephron, who wrote the play with her sister, talking about it on public radio this afternoon while I was feeding Lucy homemade applesauce for lunch.

It's a series of monologues about clothes and memories and how, for women anyway, they intertwine (complete with celebrity readers like Joy Behar, a la Vagina Monologues). On WNYC, Ephron talked about how one common thread among the many stories gathered for the production was that every woman could remember one special coveted item of clothing that they were denied as a child. For her, it was a muff. Poor girl, her mother just laughed in her face and said no without even considering what joy a muff could bring her baby girl.

For me, it was a red plaid kilt. Christmas, I think when I was in Grade 3 or 4. I didn't get it. I got a doll instead. I don't know if my mom forgot or thought I would lose interest immediately anyway. Or, maybe, that I needed to be taught the lesson that you can't always get what you want. An important lesson, true. But it's also nice to get what you want sometimes.

Later, there were lots of things, of course, at that age when fashion becomes important and girls can be cruel if you don't have the right shoes. I remember a girl (whose name I will never forget) in my Grade 7 tallying up the dollar value of my outfit out loud in class to shame me for having a mom who shopped the Sears catalogue and not somewhere cooler.

I hope when Lucy is old enough to care about such things, I will remember what it was like and try to accommodate her fashion requests within reason. I don't want to spoil her, but want to teach that when you can't get what you want (because, say, your mom can't afford it), you can find some way to reach a compromise; if she wants a muff, maybe we can make one or spend a Saturday searching second-hand shops.

Because I'd rather that chapter in her memoir describe how her mom made her
a kilt out of a tablecloth...maybe it was too ugly to wear out of the house, but at least we'll have tried.