Long Days, Short Years, Stiff Drinks

Reposted from my Medium page . Follow me  @kcudd .  My family and I travel quite a bit, which means we frequently find ourselves piled into a car with a ride share service of one kind or another. Lyft is our preferred provider but of course we have taken rides in Uber and tons of other local services in cities that restrict access to the major players.  Image by  carlos pereyra  from  Pixabay For the most part, ride share drivers care about their rider’s experience. They keep a clean car. They adjust the temperature to suit your comfort level. They engage in polite converstation, or not, depending on your preference. In bigger cities, we almost always have a great ride during which we feel safe and comfortable. That is not the case in the small city where we live. Many of the the drivers here don’t give a crap about rider experience.  We have had dangerous, disgusting, awkward and horribly smelling rides in and around South Bend, Indiana, where ...

Today is the day that I mark the loss of the first most important man in my life. I know it's trite to say this but man, I can't believe it's been 4 years. I sure have come a long way in this journey we call grief. From barely being able to get out of bed, so heavy I was with sadness, to today, where for the most part I have smiled in his memory. Of course, I have shed a few tears. I always will. But above all, today I feel so completely full of gratitude. For having him as a dad, for all the time we did spend together, for having the fortune of taking care of him when he was preparing to go, and for being there by his side when he took his last breath. Gifts, each and all. But enough of that. I'm going in a different direction entirely this year as I gather us together to remember my Dad. I've been thinking lately about all the things we would be talking about if he were still here. There are so many things that he would be totally all about in the year 2019...

I knew this day was coming. It looms large in its approach each year. But this year, the third, was different. Even until yesterday I thought I would get through it more upbeat, more positive, more grateful than the two years before. Riding on a big emotional high will do that for you. We just got back from a long weekend celebrating the marriage of two people we hold so dear. It was, hands down, the most spectacular event I've ever had the pleasure of attending. Set on the stunning Amalfi coast. Surrounded by family. Forging new friendships with people who span the globe. Communicating without words when our languages didn't allow for conversation. Eating and drinking like royals. And, best and highest of all, witnessing the union of a couple whose love and appreciation of life and generosity to others knows no bounds. Simply put, magnifico! Prior to that I got to spend a little time with my mom and step dad, who came all the way up to our new home in Indiana to take ...

If you've already survived the "Terrible Twos" and the wrath of a typical "Threenager" than you know how charming it can be to experience impressively violent fits of utter frustration and melodrama more suited for Shakespeare than the stage of your life. Our youngest is one month shy of four years old and let's just say that he is going out of this particular phase with an Earth (and ear drum) shattering bang. It's become incredibly easy to reduce him to tears, shouts, tantrums, and stomps. Just when things seem to be coming to a calm and peaceful state, we are sidelined by an over the top reaction to a most mundane action. Such as: -Cutting his fried egg into bites before he sits down at the breakfast bar. This is, apparently, only acceptable after the back end hits the barstool. -Leaving the bed (the one he far too indiscreetly climbed into for the 8 millionth night in a row) before he wakes up and dare to attend to your older child who has ...

I lay in bed with our youngest one recent lazy morning. As he smiled around his sucked soggy thumb I noticed how it remains pudgy, despite his all too quick escape from toddlerhood. All of his digits still a bit stumpy and soft in that delicious baby-like way. I cupped my own increasingly spindly fingers around his plump sweet cheek and wished for one satisfied moment that all could stay just this way for more than the usual little while. The elder, three years and a lifetime beyond the smaller, won't cuddle unless unconscious. His curves, in contrast, have stretched and lengthened leaving sharp points and broad expanses in their place. All elbows and knees and an inexplicable sharpness that pokes and prods. When you manage to wrap your arms around him for a brief and short lived hug, he wriggles and winds his way out, escaping with a prick and a stick. And then there's my own. My form, previously tight and poky in all the right places. Hip bones, once evident, lay well ...

My first born, a first grader, had his last piano lesson yesterday with a teacher we were so very fortunate to find. This last lesson with his first piano teacher kicked off a series of "lasts" for him as we prepare to move very far away in two short weeks. This teacher, sweet as could be, showered him with stuffed animals and hugs and we said our goodbyes cheerfully enough. We would miss one another, but he would email her. They would keep in touch. A couple hours later, out of the clear blue, my baby boy dove into my lap head first bawling to beat the band. I figured he was tired and fighting with his brother. But no. He said he was going to miss SMU, the location of his lessons the last two semesters. What he meant was he was going to miss her. And the place. And everything else he was just realizing he was leaving behind. Once the valve was opened, he could scarcely keep his composure. He sniffled through teeth brushing and wiped his eyes while pulling on his p...

My partner, my husband, my man. He's been living far away from us going on four weeks now. We're all still together, it's not like that. We're just physically apart temporarily. Until the rest of us move up there with him. This solo parenting gig has been hard, y'all. On all of us. Place a big ol' major remodeling cherry on top and naturally, things begin to give. I've definitely made some tweaks to the daily grind of our family life. I eat standing up most meals and the boys go to bed with dirty bottomed feet most nights. Balls are being dropped but we're keeping our heads afloat. And we're happy. Optimistic. But we aren't without new challenges and problems. Motherhood in general has readjusted my standards for personal hygiene. Long gone are the days of daily showers, much less luxuriously long ones. Lately with the all these extra duties i.e., things I'm doing that my partner would be doing if he were here, have seriously pushe...

Christmas is rearranging half of your furniture and art to accommodate a tree and decorations that you will enjoy for 3 weeks. Christmas is cleaning out the playroom and bookshelves and closets to make room for more things to fill your playroom and bookshelves and (eventually) closets. Christmas is always having the radio tuned to that soft rock station you would never normally listen to that plays round the clock Christmas music, even though they are playing Last Christmas, Jimmy Eat World instead of the vastly superior George Michael rendition. Christmas is listening to three song singing decorations belting out different tunes at once repeatedly interspersed with the train noises of the toy train circling your tree because your three year old just can't get enough and can't hear you begging for mercy over the joyous sounds of the season. Christmas is fielding a barrage of questions regarding the logistics of execution, plausibility of this guy being real while, fo...

The calendar of our lives are marked not by dates or years but events. Events that lead our minds to organize the files of our existence into before and after. Before kids. After college. Before I met him. After I left him. Before the storm. After the split. Before cancer. After death. How can it be that two years have passed away since he did? And yet how can it only be two years? The passage of time when met with the enormity of loss can play such tricks. The before sometimes feeling painfully short and the after an endless expanse. But life, and time, marches steadily on despite our warped perceptions. And life is truly and magnificently good despite the fact that it must inevitably end. I love him. I miss him. In this exceptional after.

Let me start with the full disclaimer that I ADORE my children. They light up my life, amaze me (almost) every day with their capacity to learn, laugh, love, and live fully and I simply wouldn't want to be in this world without them. Obviously. That being said, they have some super annoying behaviors and habits that I could most definitely live without and in my observations of other people's offspring, these habits appear to be somewhat universal. These are things that make me roll my eyes, whisper not so nice things, and on the occasion, for fleeting but intense moments, question my decision to procreate. In no particular order, 7 habits of highly annoying children: 1. Answering the question "How was school today?" with a 15 minute monologue about the Five Days at Freddy's game you played at recess or yelling at me across the house to "Come quick!" like someone's hair is on fire only so you can corner me for approximately an eon yammering ...

A friend recently relayed a story to me about her 4 year old daughter and a dress code at the preschool she attends.  Girls are required to wear shorts underneath their skirts, which is no big deal if your child goes along with the policy. In my friend's case, however, her daughter wasn't on board and it made for a very trying and tiring ordeal getting ready on school days. Getting kids fed, dressed, and out the door with a healthy meal in hand is HARD work. Having to fight over a pair of shorts under an already perfectly reasonable garment is not a battle worth waging. In order to regain calm in their morning routine, the teacher and mother discussed the conflict and came to an agreement. Her daughter could skip the shorts so long as she wore long dresses or skirts. Problem solved, right? Technically speaking, yes, the problem was solved. But it points to a much larger underlying issue that needs more illumination.  Our culture has an unhealthy relationship wi...

As things have increasingly heated up over the last couple weeks, I've found myself overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with information, with emotions, with uncertainty.  At times I'm overwhelmed with disbelief and even anxiety.  But above all of these things, I'm totally and completely overwhelmed with negativity. And that is going stop.  Now. At the risk of coming across as too apathetic, I'll admit that I tend to live my life inside a comfortable and selectively clueless bubble.  My bubble is filled with family, friends, and community.  Inside of it I teach my children to be good people.  I partner with a man who makes me feel like we can move mountains together. I strive to be the best me I can possibly be. I make goals and work hard to achieve them.  I share myself openly with those I like, care about, and love.  Lately, though, my cozy little bubble feels at risk for popping.  And I'm not willing to let that happen. So I'm going to build...

I don't know what to say, except that it's Christmas and we're all in misery.  -Ellen Griswald Lately I’ve seen an article here or there making the case for a cozy little Christmas at home with just the immediate family gathered round.   And I totally get it. The absence of busy airports or crabby kids on a long car ride, the avoidance of days of packing to go and days unpacking to get resettled at home, the potential for sleepless nights with kiddos not tucked into their own beds, and a litany of other headache inducing drama that goes hand in hand with a Christmas that involves extended family.   Not having to deal with all that and more has big appeal.   But here’s the deal for me and mine.   Christmas just isn't Christmas without all that. We’ve committed to spending Christmas with our extended family as long as possible, even though it’s sometimes outrageously difficult.   Here’s why.   For us, part of what is fun about the holi...

Dear Reproductive System, It's been a long, exciting, and sometimes nail biting ride but like a teenager that's tapped into her second bottle of Boone's Farm, I'm sorry to say it's time to cut you off.  Before heading into surgery bright and early tomorrow morning, I wanted to take a minute to properly acknowledge your contributions.   To my ovaries, I want to say thank you for producing healthy, viable, single eggs each month with the precision of an expensive Swiss timepiece.  Two of those lucky eggs, thankfully 36 cycles apart, met up with some fantastic sperm friends and resulted in the finest baby boys a parent could dream to create.  And though you may continue dutifully to push those eggs out onto their yellow brick road to a new world, I'm afraid to say that henceforth, they will be met with a road block too perfectly engineered to subvert.   To my uterus, it's been an honor.  I felt merely a bystander as you grew to such astonishing ...

First of all, this is not a sob story.  I'm not asking for sympathy or support.  This is simply a sharing of my experiences. I find myself stunned to admit that a certain Republican presidential candidate has managed to inspire me.  Recent political bombshells have prompted thousands of women to open up and speak out.  So scratch that.  It is not him or his actions.  It's the responses of the women that are inspirational and inspiring.  I want to count myself among them and add my voice to our collective uncovering. And why shouldn't I?  If you believe the statistics, as many as 1 in 5 women experience some sort of sexual assault in their lifetime.  But how can you believe any stats on this subject when there is so much shame, retaliation, and fear wrapped up in all this?  Women don't report at all or are not taken seriously when they do and worst of all, we as an entire society do not view many of these assaults as actual crimes ...

                                                                                                          365 days, countless crying episodes, hours and hours and hours of reflection, thousands of words written and a few thousand more spoken, hundreds of hugs given, and yes, about a million beers ago, my dad died.  I can't believe it's been an entire year.  But as my brother said this morning, I can't believe it's ONLY been a year.  It seems like a different life. I expected this to be a long, emotional trip around the sun and it certainly lived up to that expectation. In a major way.  What I didn't expect were a multitude of silver linings.  As I find myself a lot less rough around the...

As I packed up our home, box by box I stayed calm.  I never felt antsy.  I never cried.  I didn't even feel particularly stressed out.   As I spent a sunny day and late night with my best friends, ladies I would no longer have at my fingertips, my eyes stayed dry and I felt at ease.  Even as we pulled away and headed north to our next chapter, not a single tear fell.   I kept telling my husband, I feel like I'm cheating.   Normally I would be crying.  Normally I would be stressing.  Normally I would be a hot steaming mess of emotions.   But I wasn’t.   Rewind about two months prior.   The scene around me was entirely different. Nothing particularly stressful would happen, but yet I would be tight chested, explosive, consumed by this panicky feeling.  I was STILL crying at the drop of a hat, very frequently, even though Dad had been gone for nine months by then. Physically I felt exhausted, desp...

When we told people that we were planning a two week adventure in Peru with our little ones we received many reactions.  All of them were strong; few of them were positive.  One person actually said, "what are you thinking?!" We knew we were taking on a challenge dragging our not yet 5 and 2 year old sons with us but we were certain we were up for it. Much like parenthood itself, a trip of this magnitude with your kids is not something you can completely prepare yourself for; you just have to jump in and figure it out as you go along.  And although we questioned our decision to bring them along (and hell, even give birth to them at all) many, many times on the trip we experienced just as many awesomely high moments that absolutely would not have happened if they weren't there with us. For all those brave (or delusional) parents out there with an itch for adventure (or those who just want to laugh at our folly) here's some totally candid advice based on what it ...

This morning I noticed that I was very short tempered.  Tiny things that wouldn't normally bother me were making me red hot mad in an instant.  After snapping at the boys for a very minor infraction I stepped myself back.  Whoa, sister.  What's up? Then it hit me.  All at once.  It started as that familiar sweeping feeling of sadness that literally takes my breath away.  Then the sort of scratchy, antsy feeling inside my chest followed.  Like I wanted to run away but couldn't and it wouldn't help anyway. Ah.  It's Father's Day.  My first without one.  A father, I mean. Last Father's Day I gave him a really great insulated water bottle to take with him to the golf course.  So he could stay hydrated and healthy.  I'd been nagging him to drink more water.  Little did we know he was already sliding into stage four by then. Has it really been nearly a year since this all began? I've been ignoring it all w...