Author: rar986

TSM Book Club Book #13: The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest

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Started: March 15th
Finished: March 21st
TSM Rating: 4/5

I’m a sucker for stories about writers. Anytime I find a book where the protagonist is a writer of some kind, I will always read it because I’m always curious about other peoples point of view about writing, from the process to actually being a writer. It’s just the writer soul in me.

Writing is tertiary and central to Lily and Nick’s story. Their relationship begins with words. Letters written via email to sharing tidbits and secrets, and — between the lines — feelings. Their whole relationship is happenstance. Lily happens to find Nick’s author website. Happenstance brings them back together in New York in real life before either of them actually realizes it.

Eventually that happenstance turns into choices. They continue to choose each other even when they are trying not to. I loved how undeniable their romance feels. Even before they realize that they already know each other, they feel their connection. They feel it without say a word.

Nick’s journey to find his voice as an author again feels tied to his ability to open himself up to Lily, to love her and be loved by her. It’s the same way that Lily’s confidence in herself is tied to it. But no in a co-dependent way. In a way that we all need just one person in our corner, having our back. Even though Lily has her sisters, Iris and Violet — yes, the flower names are purposeful — and her parents, they don’t express the same confidence that Nick does. He tells her all the good things about herself, while he family seems to focus on her flaws or what she’s missing. At one point while reading this, I found myself being thankful that I don’t have sisters. Never once have my brothers tried to set me up because they they I was incapable or finding my own partner. They never tried to set me up at all, but that’s something altogether different.

This was a fun, sexy read. I’m looking forward to the follow up that focuses on Violet!

The Big, Bad, Scary School Nurse

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On Monday, while at gymnastics with J, my phone rang. I pulled it out of my sweatshirt pocket, ready to reject the telemarketing call when I saw it was the nurse from C’s school.

FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK!!!!

He had a stuffy nose the previous night. I checked him for fever before I put him on the bus, and the way he was running around with J, I knew he was fine. The temps have dropped again here, so a little nasal congestion isn’t out of the ordinary.

I answer the call, and the first thing she says is, “Nothing’s wrong…”

WHY CALL IF NOTHING IS WRONG?!?

He had a coughing fit while eating Pirates Booty, so his teacher sent him to her office. She checked, and he had no fever. She even admitted that the air is dryer in the building, so the kids tend to cough more while there than at home. She called me to tell me that they might send him home. It was a heads-up that I might have to come get him.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been given a “heads up” call. The heads-up call makes me sweat bullets. They mean well, but it’s the last thing I want.

Nervous K&P GIF by myLAB Box - Find & Share on GIPHY

Then I hung up the phone, annoyed that my mind had already started pouring on the extra guilt that I sent him to school and didn’t notice he was sick even though some days it feels like all I do is stare at them like I can catch the instant they go from healthy to unhealthy.

As I packed J up and put him in the car at the end of class, I reviewed my to-do list for the day. I recently started as a remote EA for a marketing company, so I had tasks to complete for them. During the course of the day, for every task I started, I kept myself ready to stop in the middle, grab J — and hopefully not have to fight with him — and head to the school.

All day I worked and waited, and the call never came. The next time I saw C was when his bus driver pulled into the driveway to drop him off.

I wonder if the school nurses know the emotional turmoil moms go through every time they call. It’s not fun, and it’s not funny. I understand that in a post-COVID world — and I say post-COVID because we know what it is now and how to treat it — they have to be extra vigilant when it comes to sick kids in school. I also understand that not every part can stay home when their kid has the sniffles. I’m grateful that I’m in the position to be able to drop what I’m doing and pick C up if I need to. I just don’t want to be called unless I have to go get him because I swear every call from the school nurse adds ten grey hairs and ages me another six months!

TSM Book Club Book #12: Day After Night by Anita Diamant

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Started: March 7th
Finished: March 15th
TSM Rating: 5/5

When I posted this as book twelve I said that I loved how full and realistic Anita Diamant’s characters are. In each of her novels, the stories focus on the strong connections women make when facing change and adversity. Day After Night was no different and the loyalty that her four main characters — Zorah, Tedi, Leonie, and Shayndel.

Based on a true story, Diamant shares the story of these women who survived one of the most horrific periods of human history. Each woman has their own journey of survival, but it led them all to the same place: the British refugee internment camp, Atlit.

All four women come from different countries and different socio-economic backgrounds. Their binding tie is trauma and survival. While at Atlit they are uncertain of how long they will be there or where they will go once they are permitted to leave. Despite the darkness, trauma, and uncertainty they find other. They advocate for each other, provide emotional support, and bring each other back for the land of the walking dead.

Through their connection, they find that they can find life after living in death. Interestingly, they don’t share the full details of their experiences with each other. They don’t have to in order to understand each other and matter to each other. And isn’t that what friendship is? Finding another soul who you mesh with in spite of — or because of in some cases — where you’ve been and what you’ve been through.

I found myself in tears at the end of this book. It’s not totally clear if the connection lasts beyond their time together, but it is clear that their time together made a lasting impact.

Was this the best of Anita Diamant’s work? No. For me, that was The Red Tent — if you haven’t read it, go get it now, but Day After Night is another look at a period in history that we gloss over: the “after” of the Holocaust. We talk about those who died but not so much about those who survived. This was a beautiful snapshot of that.

The End of the Baby Era

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Last week A went under the knife, and we officially closed the baby shop. The permanent closure of the factory — yes, I just referred to my reproduction system as a factory. It’s been shuttered for a while (birth control for the win), but this was the death knell.

Having babies came easy to us. With both boys, I became pregnant the first month we started trying. C was a honeymoon baby, for Pete’s sake! Both my pregnancies were relatively easy as well. Only mild bouts of nausea, a few weeks of sciatica early on with C, mild hip discomfort at the end with J — he was a big baby. Delivering C was smoother than J, only because my water broke on its own. With J, they broke my water with something that looked like a crochet hook — A’s description — then I had to wait to become fully effaced. I almost kicked my doctor in the face when the full power of a contraction hit, and I wasn’t allowed to push.

The only hiccup was my placenta tearing on the way out — both times — and the doctor had to go in and get it. The first time, she forgot that I hadn’t gotten an epidural and went right in. Unpleasant isn’t a strong enough word to describe what that felt like. With J, she remembered — a different doc than the first time — gave me morphine, waited for it to kick in, then went in. It only made a slight difference.

Each time they put my boys on my chest, I was filled with pure joy and relief that they were perfectly healthy, with all ten fingers and toes, strong lungs, and nearly perfect Apagar scores.

One night while I was pregnant with C, I was on my way home from work, and it suddenly hit: I would never be alone again. I wasn’t unhappy about that. Little did I realize that that meant even in my sleep, I would have a human furnace trying to crawl back into my body every night.

So now that A has undergone surgery — with no pressure from me — the window is officially closed. At five years older than me, he knew he didn’t want to have kids past 40. He wanted to still be young enough to run around and play with them. We snuck J in one year and a month under the wire.

I’ve hemmed and hawed about wanting another baby. In my mind, pre-marriage and babies, I always thought I’d have three. Then I had two babies and didn’t get enough sleep, with no good childcare options, not enough time in between, and the prospect of having an eleven-pound baby. I changed my mind…kind of. It was never enough to really push the issue, though.

I’m happy with my family of four the way it is. I wouldn’t trade my boys for any other kid in the world. A few of my friends trying for their second, just had their third, or are accidentally on their fourth. I’ll enjoy the new baby smell from their little ones, but it will never be my own again.

No more umbilical cords to clean around or redundant foreskins post-circumcision to keep an eye on. No more monitoring poop colors. No more first smiles and laughs. No more sore nipples. No more tiny clothes and socks. No more coos, no more seeing the world for the first time again through their eyes.

So, am I sad that having another baby is TOTALLY off the table? Lamenting a little bit about what could have been? Of course, but I think we’re good the way we are — the four of us.

As we approach C’s fifth birthday, I look forward to taking our first steps out of toddlerhood and becoming a “big boy” mom. He’s already so amazingly independent, confident, and intelligent. He spins these wonderful yarns with his overactive imagination — totally my kid! He knows right from wrong and tries his best to keep his little brother on the straight and narrow (definitely a story for another day).

There is so much good yet to come with these two. So goodbye, baby era. It has been amazing and transformative.

TSM Book Club Book #11: Secretly Yours by Tessa Bailey

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Started: March 1st
Finished: March 6th
TSM Rating: 5/5

I love Tessa Baily. I read It Happened One Summer and Hook, Line, and Sinkerlast year and loved them — Hook, Line, and Sinker being my fave of the two — then I went back and started reading more of her books. I’m a fan for life.

I really liked this book. I could relate to Hallie’s spiral. When my dad passed in my early 20s, I had this weird, heady feeling for a while where left was right, right was left, and the world was a little dimmer. So after losing her grandmother, Hallie is walking through a fog of bad choices and indecision. She even calls her indecision her “process” when it comes to her work as a gardener.

Julian is the ultimate grump MMC. He hates everything that Hallie represents, but she breaks down his walls anyway. I’ve seen a lot of other reviews reacting negatively to how Julian ogles her body, but to that o say, every man who has every looked at a woman has ogled their body. Physical attraction is part of building relationships.

I’ve also seen criticism of the use of the secret admirer letters. It’s plot device that dies two things: confirms Hallie’s recklessness and allows Julian to soften and see himself through someone else’s eyes. To know that the things he sees as flaws someone else sees as wonderful.

I enjoyed this book, as I’ve enjoyed all of Tessa Bailey’s books. I even enjoyed reading the dirty parts to my husband and watch his fake outrage at basically reading porn.🤣

I’m looking forward to the second book in the series — Unfortunately Yours.

Sometimes I Just Want to be a Lazy Mama

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A lot of being a toddler mama is constantly on the move. Just when you think you can take a break and sit, you have to get up and keep going. It isn’t always directly related to the kids. It’s all the little things like switching the laundry, loading the dishwasher, or running errands. Sometimes it’s kid related, like all the kid-related activities we sign them up for to keep them busy.

Every extracurricular I’ve signed the boys up for has required my participation as well. From a little ninja warriors class to swimming to gymnastics, I’ve been required to participate in all the activities. I had a thought the other day: Why am I paying someone else to watch me play with my kid?

Some days when I take J to his weekly gymnastics class, I wish his teacher would just take over and chase after him for 45 minutes. Any mom will tell you that as soon as you open your eyes, the stopwatch starts on your day, and you are racing against the clock to get everything done and make it to bedtime. Bedtime is the finish line. It is the pot of gold at the end of the get-through-the-day rainbow.

Until bedtime, we do our best to keep the kids busy and learning, so they don’t fall behind developmentally AND burn any pent-up energy they may have. Lord, it is tiring. There are some days when I barely make it to bedtime myself. I’m on my feet so much that lying in C’s twin-sized bed under his weighted blanket is the most comfortable place in the world.

In my twenties, I worked as a restaurant hostess in New York. During the month of March, I also freelanced at CBS Sports. There were some days when I’d be at the CBS studios on 57th Street until almost 2 AM, just to turn around and head to the restaurant for my 6:30 AM opening shift at the restaurant. Even then, I’ve never felt as tired as I do now that I’m a mom. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older now or because parenting is a constant, daily grind where I don’t get enough sleep most nights.

That’s why, now more than ever, I wish there was just one of these programs where I didn’t have to chase after my kid. I look around at some of the moms — and grandmothers — at J’s gym class, and I see the exhaustion on their faces. There is one mom who, God love her, chases after her three-year-old daughter while her six-month-old sleeps in a car seat in the corner.

Everyone talks about “the hustle” and “the grind” when it comes to work and success. There is no greater hustle and grind than motherhood — dads get some credit too, but it’s a little bit different. So, yea, sometimes I want to be lazy. Sometimes I want to pay someone else to play with my kid while I read a book, zone out on my phone, or — God forbid — nap! Since that won’t be happening, you can find me chasing after J as he bounces down a trampoline or crawls under a tunnel. Maybe you’ll see me walking across a balance beam with C on my back because he uses me as his own personal litter since I have to participate. No rest for the extremely weary!

TSM Book Club Book #10: Born A Crime by Trevor Noah

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Started: February 24th
Finished: February 28th
TSM Rating: 5/5

Phew. That’s the first word that came to mind when I closed this book a moment ago. Probably because it finished with the most harrowing of stories: his mother being shot in the head by his stepfather…and SURVIVING.

When we learn history in school, we get broad strokes. However, history is nuanced. It is lived and experienced by every living thing on this planet every single day. We can learn history by speaking to those who lived it. Born A Crime is basically Trevor Noah giving a history lesson on late-stage and early post-apartheid through the lens of his life. There is so much underlying trauma because of the political situation in the country, on top of everything he had to deal with, growing up as someone who wasn’t supposed to exist.

He speaks about his mother and father being unable to walk down the street with him because it would look suspicious. Not being able to make friends because he didn’t know where he fit in.

I thought about it from a parents’ perspective, and my heart broke thinking of my sons feeling so outside the world around them. My biggest fear as a mom is my kids not finding their place and their people.

Luckily, despite all the insanity and instability in South Africa and in his home life, Trevor Noah found his way and became a star. He was able to rise above his circumstances and make life better for himself.

The book is funny, profound, and enlightening. I knew things about apartheid, but I didn’t understand the nuance of apartheid. All the world knows is segregation, violence, and Nelson Mandela. There is more, and there is depth.

This is why books from all perspectives are important.

TSM Book Club Book #9: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

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Started: February 17th
Finished: February 24th
TSM Rating: 4/5

Quarter-life crisis. Complete debilitating fear that every decision you’ve ever made was wrong. Trying to prove yourself in a world that doesn’t want to try and understand you. Also, finding a love so big and scary you need to run away from it.

Grace Porter is at a crossroads in her life. She’s finally finished school, getting her PhD. Now she has to get a job in her chosen field — astronomy —and everything goes terribly wrong. When she crashes and burns her first interview, everything that she’s suppressed over the last decade finally catches up to her. So much so that she’s does something so rash as to get married to a woman she just met, Yuki, on her graduation trip to Las Vegas.

The way Morgan Rogers writes about Grace — Porter as she called by everyone in her life — and Yuki’s connection is so lyrical and enchanting. It’s the best part of the book.

As Grace begins to confront her future, she also begins to open her eyes and see all the things she’s missed in her singular focus on the plan that she had laid out for herself, but also by her strict military man father, who everyone, including Grace, refers to as Colonel.

I couldn’t help but feel frustrated for Grace throughout the whole book, though. Her parents failed her in so many ways. There’s one character in the book — Miss Debbie — who works for Grace’s father and who feels like she can speak to Grace in any way she wants to. I think that’s the part that made me the angriest. It’s not clear if Colonel knows how Miss Debbie treats Grace and condones it or if he’s ignorant to it and Grace doesn’t tell him because she is so afraid of disappointing him.

On some level, everyone in the book is on their own mental health journey. The story is about the thing we do to please everyone else and confronting what that can do to us. It’s about friendship and the family that you chose. It’s about learning to be there for those who love you and being there for yourself. It’s about putting yourself first, but also supporting the people who choose to support you.

Is Acceptance the Same as Defeat?

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C is a terrible sleeper. He wakes up in the middle of the night and STRUGGLES to get back to sleep. The struggle is really mine. He’s just hanging out, reenacting episodes of his favorite TV shows and movies…loudly. At the end of last week, though, we seemed to turn a corner to where he slept as much through the night as he ever does. Meaning we’d put him to sleep in his bed, then at some point, he’d wake up, come running into our room, and go right back to sleep.

Then he spent the weekend at my mom’s house.

Hubby and I were happy for the break, so we could sleep through the night and do some much-needed basement reorganizing. We did a lot of heavy lifting, which made the nights sleeping in the bed, just the two of us without kicking, fussy toddlers, a delight. Readers, we even got to cuddle, just the two of us. No squirmy, cute little furnaces in between us.

We picked the boys up on Monday afternoon. They had a good time, as always, at my mom’s. And to her credit, she followed their bedtime routine every night they were there. For some reason, however, C came back, and his sleep pattern was all out of whack. It wasn’t so much out of whack as it was back to what it was before. He woke up at 1 AM both nights and wouldn’t go back to sleep for hours, if at all.

Before we picked them up, I felt rested. Even just shy of reinvigorated — the only thing that would reinvigorate me at this point would be two weeks by myself on a beach and a stack of books from my TBR pile. Since that isn’t happening anytime soon, this girl will take a few days’ reprieve and a comfy reading chair for an hour or two.

But I digress. The kid wouldn’t go to sleep. He kept singing “Be Prepared” from The Lion King. While he was singing, I was googling pressure points to try and help him. Just so you know, that didn’t work either. 😭

I think I’ve finally reached the acceptance point in my grieving over lack of sleep process. I’ll never sleep again, and I’m begrudgingly ok with it — no, I’m not — but that is what motherhood is all about, right? Sacrificing all for the sake of our kids.

TSM Book Club Book #8: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Started: February 10th
Finished: February 17th
TSM Rating: 4/5

This story was so consistently heartbreaking that I wasn’t sure how I would feel by the end.

For 307 pages, we live in the head of 15-year-old Kambili, a girl from a devoutly Catholic, Nigerian family. While a pillar of the community, her father is incredibly emotionally and physically abusive toward Kambili, her brother Jaja, and her mother. He’s abusive to the point where they are all afraid to express any emotion. At one point on the book Kambili said she doesn’t ever remember laughing and wouldn’t know what her laugh sounds like.

Through all the repression and fear, Kambili still desperately wants and strives for her father’s approval. Even after she and Jaja spend time with her father’s sister and her children, and they see what the world could be like beyond their religious oppression, Kambili still holds on to the belief that she is nothing without her father’s approval.

Over the course of the story, we see both Kambili and Jaja transform in their own ways to grow beyond their father. The way Achidie describes the physical changes in Kambili and Jaja as their personalities evolve is like watching flowers bloom.

It was an overall beautiful story of moving beyond what you know in order to find who you are. Changing your surroundings to change your mind set and breaking ties to move you forward, while strengthening others to find strength in yourself. A story of the things you hold on to in order to survive even in the most hopeless circumstances.