Run Forest, run!

As you have already probably discovered, not all of my posts are directly related to just me and my two teenage sons. There is a method to my madness which I would like to share with you as a reader so that you may get more out of reading than just the stories I might tell. A few years back my mom had a surgical procedure done to her back that was not a complete success to say the least. From being a dynamic all the time on the go woman, she found herself having to retire from a 45 year teaching career much sooner than she truly anticipated because of much physical pain. At the time, I thought I might be doing her a favor by switching to a cellular phone plan to include a lot more minutes in order for me to call her more frequently and help keep her mind busy with my long distance company. My typical commute to work in the mornings is approximately 25 to 30 minutes long. So every weekday as I pull out of my driveway I put on a headset connected to a phone and call mom. Little did I know that these daily short conversations would turn out to be more therapeutic to me than they probably are to her. You have to understand that the majority of my parental crisis happens in the mornings trying to convince my oldest son to get up and go to school. So in fact, it is usually after a hell of a morning that I am finally getting in my car to get my nerdy butt to work, and so there she is, my rock, my mom, not just willing to listen, but also amazingly grateful that I called. You tell me, how many people do you know that are willing to hear over and over again the same song about my life being full of so many complications? Very few indeed.

One thing that I have noticed though is that sometimes I am just too angry or frustrated to even talk about it. Most of the time when this happens I call mom and just like a radar picking up the elusive UFO, she locks on to my distress signal and gets me to reveal my sorrow. If this is not therapy, what is? Unfortunately, I sometimes feel extremely guilty for dumping all this baggage on her, so every once in a while instead of going down that road I change the subject and tell her a funny story of something that might of happened sometime earlier during my week. It is like placing a funny commercial in the middle of a really scary movie. This allows me to recover from my frustration before I go on telling her what really happened during the morning. I must confess that sometimes I am so upset, sad, or troubled that I cannot find it in my heart to even call her in fears of burdening her beautiful soul with more pain. After all, she is my mom, and no matter what, she feels everything I am feeling probably twice as hard because of her inability to be able to do anything about it.

This is similar to what happens when I bring you a story of my past that has very little to do with my kids. Here, I too am afraid of sometimes dumping too much of my baggage at the same time. After all, some of the readers are very dear to me and I would not want to bring you into my closet and lock the door behind...that would be way too scary. Instead, when I am not sure how to face some of the monsters in my closet I simply take a step outside, shut the door behind me, and tell you a story about something else. This gives me a bit of time to process what is happening in my life, and hopefully allows you a break and might even make you laugh. I promise you that when it makes enough sense for me to be able to write about it, I will, even if I don't completely understand it. On that note here is something to lighten the mood and hopefully make you smile...

While my dad was in Vietnam I was only in Kindergarten. Amazing the things you can still remember after so many years. The home that he had designed was not completely built before he had to leave, so we moved in with my maternal grandparents. My grandfather had been all his life a dairy farmer, my grandmother had the task of doing just about everything else including raising 9 children. It was a wondrous world living in the farm. Everybody had something that needed to be done, my task usually had to do with feeding chickens and stealing their eggs for breakfast. The job was not as easy as it sounds because of the suspicious nature of the animal in the first place. Go ahead, try to catch one in an open field and you'll see what I am talking about. They are quick two legged creatures with the ability to turn on a dime while you plow your head into the grass. The trick to getting their eggs is to somehow distract them, hence the other part of my task, to feed them. As soon as they hear your high pitch call announcing that you are going to throw the wonder corn around, they all fly and run from every place they have been nesting or visiting to come and enjoy the feast. This is when you take the initiative to crawl under the house, find their nests, and fill the Export Soda Cracker can with their warm eggs. The problem is that not all chickens were created equal, and there is bound to be a hearing impaired one in the bunch. I remember being face to face with some of the meanest, angriest, and plain old psycho hens in the world. Just imagine my skinny butt running as fast as I could all crouched under the house while the crazy hen fearlessly defended her eggs from the scary chicknapper. In the meantime, anyone that had paid for front row seats were crawling on the floor laughing at the show I was giving with my infamous chicken run. I can only compare this now to the scene on Forest Gump when he is running away from the bullies...Run, Forest, run! Most of the times my adrenaline levels would be so high that I would definitely win the race. However, at least once I admit being pecked by the angry momma hen. If she only knew how little respect she was going to get from those chicks once they became teenagers!!!

Dad