Playing Peacemaker

In less than two weeks I'll be leaving LA and heading back to the "Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana" area. I'm headed out for almost all of July and I'm taking the kids with me. It's going to be great to spend time so much time. I usually feel like I'm stuffing seeing everyone and everything into only a few days, so such a long trip is a real luxury.

My kids have been counting down how many days till we leave for like forever. It's our first visit in the summer and I've filled their ears with stories of the Taste of Chicago, lightning bugs and swimming in Lake Michigan. They're also looking forward to gardening with my mom, going to a water park with my sister, hearing my dad play piano and trombone, and doing whatever with all their cousins.

I'm looking forward to all that too, but now that today's Pre-K graduation is over, I'm suddenly feeling stressed out.

One, I have to get us all packed up! I've been making lists of what to take and what to leave behind for each of us because I want to try to take only one checked bag each so I don't have to pay extra fees. I think making people pay all these extra fees for everything is pretty ridiculous. However, I just don't know if one bag per person is going to be possible for my clothes and shoes for my kids.

My youngest is helping though. After his graduation today, he packed his backpack full of Legos and action figures. As far as he's concerned, he's ready!

The bigger thing I am stressed about though is that I have a bad habit of trying to play peacemaker/unifier when I go home and I need to stop it. I tend to get uncomfortable with conflict and so I always want people to "play nice" while I'm there. They may have stuff that they need to work out and I just need to respect that. I don't know why it is that I expect folks to talk and act like they have these loving, fabulous relationships just because I'm there.

You know how it is, Relative A and Relative B have long-standing issues that they could spend a couple of years in therapy over. Or, one person says they're not going over someone else's house, even if I'm there. And, I think I just need to accept that it is what it is move on from there.

What gets hard is stuff like if I mention to Relative A that I'm going to Relative B's house and then Relative A suddenly starts acting weird towards me. I've thought about trying to have a BBQ and inviting all my relatives. But will folks even show up? And, if they do show up, will they even speak?

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know I hate that the only time I see some relatives is when there's a funeral. It'd be nice to get together even if we're not saying farewell to one of our dearly departed.

Actually, I don't really care if folks want to act weird towards me or not speak to me. What I am concerned about is my kids and them being exposed to a whole new set of tensions they have no idea about and don't need to know about. They love everybody and just want to have a good time and they should get to do that.

Hmm... I love everybody and just want to have a good time too, but I'm not looking at life through the eyes of a child. Sigh. Why do some things have to be so complicated?

I know I can't be the only person who goes through this. So, tell me, how do you all navigate spending time with people you love, when the ones you love don't always seem like they love each other?

Arrival of the Type A Neat Freak

I've been spending most of the day feeling guilty about not writing a new post today or responding to comments left on my previous nervous breakdown about my hair. But you see, in eight hours I'm going to be waiting at the American Airlines baggage claim at LAX because my sister arriving! I love my sister, talk to her pretty much every day and am SO excited she's coming! But I've been cleaning like a madwoman in preparation for her visit.

You know how drivers from car services hold up signs for their clients in the baggage claim? Well, I'm going to make a sign for my sister and it's going to say "Welcome, Type A Neat Freak". I know some people throw terms like "Type A" and "Neat Freak" around lightly, but I'm not kidding in my sister's case. She's so Type A that she was packed for her trip by this past Sunday. I mean, who does that?

She's seven years older than me and the poor girl had to share a room with me when we were kids. She'd have all her stuff completely organized and made her bed every morning without being told to do so. And there I'd be, sleeping with books and tossing my clothes on the floor. When we'd have to clean our room on Saturdays, all her clothes would get folded and hung up, arranged according to color and type. My version of cleaning the room was to throw everything in the closet or under the bed. Shh...sometimes that's still my version of cleaning my room. I chalk it up to my artistic temperament.

All of her natural neat-freakishness got taken to another level when she went to the military. I remember when she came back from being stationed in Germany she tried to teach me how to make a bed. I swear, she was getting off by demonstrating how to tuck the sheets in properly!

I love this about her because when I go visit her I sometimes entertain myself by torturing her. I am still a bratty little sister so I do stuff like set pens and pencils on her dining room table or put the newspaper on her kitchen counter. She'll whiz by and fold up the newspaper like she's on auto-pilot and stick the pens and pencils in a drawer.

The key to is to wait till she leaves the room and then get the paper, pens and pencils back out again. I'm telling you, she'll come back in and put everything away once more without even realizing she's done it before. It's like she has a voice in her head saying, "Mess! Must clean!" I love it!

So you see why I've been doing extra mopping and dusting, right? My sister gets sooo excited by cleaning. I, on the other hand, merely endure it. It's a necessary evil. I do it but I'm not psyched beyond belief to clean and never have been. Please don't think I'm a total slob because I'm not. I absolutely cannot stand a dirty bathroom or kitchen, but I'm definitely more laissez faire about other stuff. If there's a bunch of magazines on the coffee table I'm alright with that. If there's also a teacup, a couple of Lego action figures, an iPod, (peering over there to see what else) a Michael Clayton DVD, a black sharpie and a pack of stamps on the table, I'm ok with that too.

I sort of have to be ok with it all since I'm married to the messiest person on the planet and both of my children have, ahem, artistic temperaments too. I'm telling you, my husband should be the poster boy for, "Will not become neater after marriage". I've learned to live with his messiness, just like he lives with mine. We rub along quite nicely with our joint lack of neat-freak tendencies. But I know my sister usually wants to strangle him after about an hour. Ah, I'm sure they'll both play nice with each other over the next week. Besides, I fully intend to run her all over this city so that she'll have no chance to observe any dust bunnies that may crop up!

So, back to cleaning I go!

Premonition or Coincidence?

I try not to think about the paranormal too often. A terrifying incident with a ouija board when I was ten made me forever wary of such things. I refused to touch it but sat in a room while my two friends played. I watched as the pointer moved around while they sat with their hands in their laps, asking questions about me. The board, among other things, spelled out that I'd be murdered when I was 21. Imagine that hanging over your head for the next 11 years.

Last Halloween, I wrote about some of the other things I've experienced that have scared the wits out of me. I'd rather have a life without ghosts, psychic powers, ouija boards, tarot cards, the sixth sense or seeing dead people.

I try to avoid dwelling too much on these things because I know it's far too easy to get wrapped up in superstitious mysticism. I don't want to spend forever speculating on past lives or deciphering the hidden meanings of psychic visions, and end up not fully dealing with the realities of this life.

That said, I know children can often seem to have psychic abilities. I would definitely say my seven year-old son is one of those children who seems to be very "in touch". He's very sensitive and is often described by those who meet him as an "old soul". Out of the blue he'll tell me things about relatives who have passed away, relatives he's never met or only met when he was a small child. Relatives I never talk to him about.

As he was eating his breakfast this morning he asked me, "Mommy, who's Johnnie?"

I got the prickly feeling I always get when he says these sort of things to me, but I calmly told him, "That's the name of your great grandmother." He's never met her because she passed ten years ago. I don't have any pictures of her up in the house, and I never refer to her by her first name.

He was just as calm as he matter-of-factly replied, "Oh. Well she told me I need to be careful crossing the street today."

I asked him where he saw her and he said, "In a dream." Then he cocked his head to the side and said, "She's really beautiful."

I told him he should always be careful crossing the street and that next time he sees her that he should say one of the prayers he knows. And then, because he says this sort of thing all the time, I changed the subject so we could get out the door.

Thirty minutes later we dashed out the door and hustled down the hill. We jogged since he's always worried about being late and he likes to race me in the mornings. Two blocks from school, we stood waiting at an intersection for the walk signal. I quizzed him on his spelling words until the light turned and the walk sign appeared.

I never cross an intersection right when the light changes. I always wait a couple seconds for all the drivers that insist on running red lights. But the coast seemed clear and so my son stepped off the curb and I did as well, a nanosecond behind him. He began spelling "because" for me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a black SUV hurtling through the intersection towards us. The driver had blatantly run the light. Cars honked and screeched their brakes to avoid hitting it. Horrified, I managed to reach out and jerk my son backwards just in time. The SUV zoomed past and I glimpsed a woman blissfully yapping on her cell phone, oblivious to the fact that she'd almost hit my son.

Reassured that he was alright, we continued across the street and ran the rest of the way to the school so that he wouldn't be late. As I kissed him goodbye he says to me, "I guess I have to remember to listen to your grandma when I cross the street." And then he turned and ran into the school.

Until that moment I'd managed to forget what he'd told me.

Like I said, I try not be someone who overly occupies myself with the paranormal. Yet sometimes, just sometimes, something like this happens. I don't know what to make of it, but it gives me the chills.