The New Girl

While My Blog Gently Exsanguinates.

That was a whole play on the "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," but I'm not too sure it came through. Remember when I used to blog ALL THE TIME? When, maybe, in the days before readers, you came here and there was New! Content! and you could spend some time reading and maybe laughing? Yeah. Me too.

Anyway.

I am in a mix and mush of time and space.  Whatever time I have is going to chasing my smaller child around, while he attempts to scale EVERY-SINGLE-SURFACE available.  He's mostly successful in the scaling but not entire successful in the descending and so, here I am, trying to prevent the [inevitable] konker-bonkers and the goose-eggs and the visits to the ER.

Sigh.

I didn't have this EXACT hell with my girl, as she was late to walking and even LATER to climbing (like, just this past year she's started wanting to go on the *big* slides) and so, I am WOEFULLY UNPREPARED to turn around after four seconds to this:

It is everyone's favorite thing to say that this is due to gender difference, and who am I to argue, really, what with the N = 2 and all? And while that may be so, I also think my two kids have different areas of relative strength and I'm seeing his. RELATIVELY SPEAKING (As I think DISMOUNTING is probably, you know, IMPORTANT.)

This post is going absolutely nowhere, obviously, and if you want to jump ship, I won't try to stop you.  I'm trying to figure out a balance, I suppose, and I'm finding that means that the house work gets done, my kids get taken care of, things stay clean and folded and generally running smoothly, I can get to the gym and can read some fiction or whatever but there isn't enough time for me to do all that and generate a decent post.

Or, at least that's how it feels right now.

It's easier, this second time around, to keep in mind the 'It's a phase' mentality. So, maybe when he's done with the 'What Goes Up Can't Exactly Come Down All That Well' phase, I'll have a second to get back to it.

Until then, there's this:

 

Hope you're having a great holiday season.

Turns Out, It Does.

The knife makes a nice sound as it goes through the frosting to the bottom and then up the side of the bowl.  A kind of muted Click and Swoop as I scoop some out to dollop onto my Orange Cookies.  It's repetitive and relaxing and I'm calm in the quiet kitchen, working alone, after the kids have gone to bed. Frosting and setting aside each cookie, wondering if the icing sets or not.  I can't remember.  The fleeting urge to call my mother to check flares up a stinging behind my eyes and then vanishes.

The recipe was my great-grandmother's and as far back as I can remember, we had these orange cookies around the holidays.  The recipe card came from one of the two boxes that I brought back from my father's house, when we cleaned it out.  One box was full of my mother's recipes and the other box belonged to my grandmother.  The recipe for the orange cookies was in my mother's handwriting and for whatever reason, it still strikes me as crazy that these things survive, even when she does not.  There it is, though.  Her writing.  As familiar to me as the sight of her making some of the recipes that are now in my possession.

This year I have both boxes of recipes and I've decided to bake the cookies of my growing up years.  I rooted around in my gram's recipes and found the recipe for the Magic Cookie Bars that she made.  I layered the ingredients for her specific recipe and I thought about her.  I thought about how many times she'd used the stained, faded card.  How many times she'd done exactly as I did.  How things always change and nothing stays the same and how, as I'm baking now, off the exact card she used--we are still connected.  Through the years, through the baking, through the ether.

In my experience, it is the women of a family who weave the tapestry of memory and history.  It is the lineage of the women in my family who are the carriers of the knowledge of nurturing.  My great-grandmother died the year I got married when she was 95.  A few years after that, my grandmother developed dementia.  A few years after that, my mother died.  While my grandmother was still alive, she could no longer follow a simple recipe.  She died a couple years after my mother.  For so many years I had so many people to call for advice.  Women whose job it was to know and remember.  Women who crocheted the blankets and fixed the broken angel's wings and baked the cookies.  Women who knew if the damned icing sets or not.

They're all gone.  In a few short years, I lost them all.

Now, the women of my line start with me.  It's a big responsibility, in a way.  A little scary and a little lonely and more than a little sad, especially around the holidays.  The Sister and I are forging ahead, making new traditions for our children.  I'm doing my best to document what's happening now, in case my kids don't think to ask questions about themselves, about their childhoods until it's too late.

About the icing--there's no one to call. 

So, I'll just have to wait and see if it sets.