The music blaring through the speakers in the coffee shop was from a 12 year old album, with songs that had been played live at Trax five years prior to the album’s release. The soundtrack and stage of my college years.In the booth behind me was a young woman — 29? 32? — laptop in front of her, palm pilot in one hand, and cell phone in the other, immersed in a business conversation. Project statuses. Account inquiries. Staffing difficulties. Problems. Ideas. I could have been her, just a few short years ago.And then, there I was, in my own booth. One cup of decaf coffee. One hazelnut biscotti. One slice of cranberry nut bread, sliced in half and placed upon two plates. And two young children, celebrating their new hair cuts. Somewhere among the giggles, a game of “small, medium and large” and the frustration of pulling my son out from under the table, again, I saw my life, today.It’s not often that you get a chance to see vignettes of your lives sitting side-by-side, as if upon a shelf. This morning, in a coffee shop, among the beans and weary sippers, I got that chance. And it surprised me, just a little, that the picture I was most drawn to was of the slightly weary woman in the booth with one child counting coffee cups and the other child wrestling with the crumbs on the floor.I picked that picture off the shelf and walked out of the coffee shop with a smile on my face.

I’m not a dangerously impetuous or rash person, like the adrenaline junkie who recklessly dashes off without a single thought to the consequences of their actions, but I’m certainly not one to be paralyzed into inaction by forethought and premeditation, either. I’m quite guilty of making big decisions in my life without having really considered what they would ultimately mean to me; I’m equally guilty of glossing over countless other decisions, abdicating them to fate, if you will, utterly unaware that they’d ever have an impact on me at all. Case in point: this blog. One year ago, today, I penned my first entry. Without a single thought as to why, exactly, I was doing it, I opened this electronic notebook and called it mine. Little did I know what it would all mean to me.I started off with a sputter, with no clear direction, no clear focus. And, certainly, no discipline. Helpless, I was. But, slowly, I gained a toehold, and began to understand what it was I wanted to write about. Wicker Chickens. My life, my reality: the simple stuff, the not-so-simple stuff, and everything in between. I began to understand, too, why I wanted to write. I wanted to write about the reality that is my life to be able to give that picture to my kids, one day. All this, if it is anything at all, is a realistic portrayal of what my life is right now, from the miniature snapshots that the camera missed, to the running themes a still camera could never capture. Even now, as I read back over this past year’s writings, I see myself, clearly, on the very days the entries were written. They’re real. I believe a host of my own problems have at their root an unrealistic image of what reality — for “Everymom” — is really like. I’m working that out, a little, here. And, in the meantime, if I can give my kids a picture of what my reality is like, then, well, I will have done one thing right. That is why I’m writing.And so, with a direction and a purpose, the discipline came. Day after day, the words came. Some of them, good. Some of them, not so. None of them great. Often times, they came only with struggle — for the time, for the thoughtspace, for the inspiration. But, they did come. And as I wrote them, I began to fall in love with them. Not in love with my words, alone, but in love with all words. The tens of thousands of words within this journal were only a meager appetizer for a hunger I’d unexpectedly uncovered. Whet my appetite, indeed.I’ve fallen in love with words and language. I find myself reading other people’s writing, at times both utterly humbled by their skill and grace and intensely jealous that I’m so completely inept by comparison. I read passages and am struck with longing — longing for the “art-sense” to handle words as well as they have. I look up words in the dictionary, for joy or for reassurance. I read about the use of language, and constantly question my own constructs and their correctness. And I take what I’ve learned back to this blog and I test and play and stretch and torque and poke. All of it, delightful. I hesitate to mark this day as a “birthday” — I doubt very seriously I’ll commemorate this day each year — but, one year after beginning this blog, I can’t help but recognize the infancy I’ve just experienced. No parent can witness their child’s first year and not be humbled by the miracle of growth and maturity that takes place during that year. Perhaps it’s arrogant to liken what I’ve witnessed this past year to that same miracle; if it is, I’ll risk arrogance, then. I have no idea where this writing will take me in the future, just like I had no idea where it would take me in this single year. I only know it’s merely in its infancy, and that I can’t control where that relationship will lead. Whatever. I’m all right with that. Sometimes, decisions are best abdicated to fate.

When they say “permanent on clothing,” they really mean it. Don’t doubt it, even if it is only dry erase marker. And, for pete’s sake, don’t let your daughter use the dress that you really shouldn’t have bought in the first place, and that she sure as hell shouldn’t have been wearing as playclothes, as the labratory for testing the manufacturer’s assertions. Purchased today: One set of Dry Erase Markers, One Boutique Holiday Dress. They are now intimately involved with. Proof Positive that Murphy’s Law is alive and kicking. My ass, that is.

Am I the only person in the world who is entirely irritated by the fact that the Pediatrician’s office has in its lobby a) a Television set, tuned to SpongeBob SquarePants, no less (though, it could be tuned to Sesame Street, and it would still bother me) and b) a basket of lollipops?Is there something wrong here? Or is it just me? Hmmm.

Twice in one week, I’ve found myself startled into a distinct time in my past. Periphescence.The first time, I probably saw it coming. After sitting on a floppy disk for over ten years, the advent of The Switch (from PC to Mac), made the task of transferring those files to a less format-bound medium impossible to ignore any longer. Those files? The bundle of emails that make up the entire beginning of the relationship between my husband and me. Just the act of exhuming that floppy disk — itself a relic — uncovered memories and emotions raw and real. Of course I would read a few of the emails in the process of transferring them. Of course I would.We were so young. 23. 24, maybe. He was in graduate school; there, probably, because he didn’t know where else to go upon graduation from college. I was in college, again; there, definitely, because I didn’t know where to go while I was in college the first time around. We were 800 miles apart. We’d known each other, as friends only, in college, but had only begun to date two years after graduation. Ours was an online relationship before there was such a thing. Too poor to afford many phone calls, we burned up the fiber-optics cables along the eastern seaboard with our email for the better part of a year. And in my hand this week I found myself holding the floppy disk containing those emails. Of course I would read them. And of course I would be transported back.The second time I found myself startled into that past came much more as a surprise. I hardly recognized it. And then, when I did, what a warm feeling it was. It came the other night, as I was watching television alone. Tim is out of town, you see. The phone rang. It was Tim.”Can I call you right back? Prison Break is on. I’ll call you at the break.” Three minutes later, when the show went to advertisement, I hit redial on the phone. Tim picked up immediately, and we resumed our conversation. As soon as the television show came back on, we hung up again, only to repeat the insanity once, twice, three more times throughout the course of the television show. Somewhere in the midst of that insanity, it struck me. We used to do this, back then. No, we didn’t have much money for phone calls, but when we did? We’d do something completely insane like watch a television show together over the telephone. I don’t know what kind of love I’d call it.It’s startling, in a way, to be pulled back into a time in your past and be able to see things so clearly, to feel things so real-like, to be there once again. It’s startling, too, to feel that reality and compare it to the reality I live today. God, it’s almost comical, how different our lives are. We were so young, back then. And for a few moments this week, I was there, once again. And yet, our lives aren’t so different now as they were back then. Sure, there’s the kids and the house and the dog and the Crazy. And there’s none of the time that we had back then. But there’s still us. And so, I still stand by my claim that, though there are a lot of doubts in my life, the one thing I’m certain about is my husband. Flashbacks are nice. Warm Fuzzies are nice. But I’ll take the Here and Now.

If my mother wanted to teach me anything in life, she wanted to teach me not to be an “intellectual snob”. Those are her words, not mine. Me? I try my best not to be an elitist bitch. Some days though, I cannot help it. Yesterday was one of those days.After a week’s outage for an upgrade, which, for a web site with presumably at least a million customers, is inexcusable in the first place, I attempted to log in to the newly re-designed web site for my credit card company’s rewards redemption program. Tip #1 : Do Not Take Down Your Commercial Web Site For a Full Week. Just Don’t Do It.I was unable to log in, not due to any error on my part, though the system indicated it “did not recognize [my] credentials.” No more explanation than that. Let’s just say that the message I was given was not exactly user friendly. Tip #2: Test Your Fucking System Before You Deploy It. Tip #3: Don’t Let Your Programmers Write Your Error Messages. They Speak Greek. The Rest of Us (mostly) Speak English (Sort Of.)I called the customer service line, and my call was promptly dropped. Tip #4: Make Sure Your Customer Service Center Can Handle “Worst Case Scenario” Call Volume. Because, You Will Encounter Your Worst Case Scenario.I called the customer service line again, and was asked to enter my phone number and the last four digits of my social security number. After waiting ten minutes before being connected with a customer service representative (for which I will kindly grant forgiveness), the live CSR then asked me again for my phone number and the last four digits of my social security number. Tip #5: T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N-Y. I-V-R. I-N-T-E-G-R-A-T-I-O-N. There, I spelled it out for you.When I explained the situation to the CSR, she indicated that she needed my email address. I gave her my email address. We then proceeded to have an additional conversation about an order I’d placed prior to the upgrade. A few minutes passed and I hadn’t received an email with my new password, so I told her as much.”Oh, your new password will come to you in the mail.”"What?” Surely, she was mistaken.”Your new password will come to you on paper in the mail.”"Um, why, then, did you ask me for my email address?” This was getting to be too much to bear.”Oh. Um. Yeah. Right.” She paused. Then: “Your password will be sent on paper to your computer.”Tip #6: Make Sure The People Answering The Telephone Have More Than a Pea for a Brain. Because, Otherwise, People Will Chew Them Up And Spit Them Out.Suffice it to say, the problem wasn’t solved. In fact, it was compounded. I won’t go into any more detail, other than to add that I was also offered the mind-boggling “log out and log back in in a few hours” as a solution to all of my woes. This was not from Pea #1, but from Pea #2 and Pea #3. Um, folks, how can I log out of your web site if I’m entirely unable to log in? Not to mention, you sound like a bunch of blithering idiots for even offering such advice. Peas, All of You.No, I won’t go on, and I won’t offer any more elitist advice. It would incite me to even more swearing. And, really, I try not to swear, even when I am being an elitist bitch. Mea Culpa, Mom. Your lessons can only take me so far.

I once took a Southern Literature course in college. Flannery O’Conner. William Faulkner. Eudora Welty. Richard Wright. And countless others, classic and modern. And while I walked away from that course with many trails and tendrils left to explore, I couldn’t help but feel I was expected to leave with only one path to salvation: that a sense of place is the Southern writer’s sixth sense and constant companion. For that, I felt the course had performed a terrible injustice.True, I suspect there’s no other region in this country that is as ferociously loved and as sensuously hoarded by its inhabitants as the South. She is her own character. But, just as it is impossible to pigeonhole the writings of such a diverse group of writers into the landscape on which they lived, so, too, is it impossible to define just what life on that landscape is. It’s probably everything you’ve ever heard it to be and then a million other things you never knew it was, whether you’re a native, or a curious someone standing on the outside looking in. It’s certainly not something understood in a single blog entry; it’s something uncovered one delicious bite at a time.And, Evan, my son, I know you’re on your way. This weekend, surrounded by tens of thousands of embarrassing cousins at the State Fair, you gobbled up the sights and sounds of the best the N.C. Department of Agriculture has to offer. And then you gobbled up a country ham biscuit. Salt and pork and buttermilk bread and more salt. Your young heart can take it. Judging by the glow in your eyes, you knew that what you were experiencing was something special. She sure is.

I can remember sitting behind her at the pool that April evening. Swim lessons. As she sat there, waiting for lessons to begin, I watched her intently. She was excited, and could hardly remain still. Her eyes were taking in the sights — the big pool, the big dome — and her ears, the sounds. I watched her little body at the edge of that big pool, and couldn’t help but notice the swimsuit that I’d hurriedly purchased that day was far too big for her. Gaps at the legs, drooping straps over the shoulders, and gaping space in so many places where her body should have been made her little frame look even more so. Little.A month ago, in one of her usual games of dress-up, Zoe came running in to the kitchen with that same swimsuit on. She twirled around, and then headed back from whence she came. I caught a glimpse of her from behind as she left the room. And then. I had to do a double-take. No gaps. No drooping straps. In fact, the swimsuit was entirely too small for her. Not Little At All.In June, while at the beach with family, we tried to get Zoe to play Uno with her cousin, Brett. She didn’t get it. She didn’t get the concept of turns. She didn’t get the concept of playing cards. She didn’t get the concept of rules. Take Two Cards. Reverse. Skip a Turn. Wild Card. All of them were wild to her. She just didn’t get it. With nothing to hold her interest, she quickly sought out other entertainment.Three days ago, we pulled out those same Uno cards during Evan’s nap time. This girl? Ruthless, she is. Out to give her mom a lickin’, and wickedly delighted to play the cards that put her one step closer to — or her mother one step farther from — the goal line that is winning. And always ready for another game, even if she’s coming off a bruising loss. This girl’s got game.Up until a couple weeks ago, on any given day at the playground, there would have been no photograph of Zoe on the fireman’s pole. Far too scary.Then, the other day, as I casually stood at the edge of the playground, letting Zoe explore her world, she sneaked up on me.”I just went down the fireman’s pole, Mommy.”"You did not!” Surely, she was teasing me.”Yes I did. I’ll show you.”And show me, she did.We have long summers here in North Carolina. It’s not unusual to think of April as the beginning of Summer, and it’s certainly not unheard of to stand here in October with your feet still in sandals. So, forgive me if it seems strange that I’m placing each of these photographs into a single season’s album. For a North Carolinian, it’s entirely possible. For a mom, it’s hard to believe. I’m glad I’ve got these photos to prove it’s so.

Riddle me this: Why is it that I’m only able to find brass — not plastic – quick-release hose-end couplings, as in, the high end variety, at Wal-Mart? Not Home Depot, not Lowes, not even my local hardware store. And don’t even suggest Target. They don’t carry lawn care products past August. Sissies.Wal-Mart. Hmmm. Go Figure.

Last night, I also witnessed an incredibly compassionate conversation between one woman experiencing and living with infertility for over five years and another woman who is just beginning to realize that this, too, might be her fate. I was taken aback, quite frankly, by the grace of the moment. Yet, there I was, smack in the middle of that conversation, having clumsily announced ten minutes earlier that I’d just that day taken a pregnancy test — with thankfully negative results.And then there was the conversation about one of the girls’ brothers, who is autistic. After a rather poignant conversation about the empathetic, but real, pain she lived with every day while growing up, she told us about the time she socked the hell out of some kid on the playground for teasing her brother, giving the offender a black eye. I’m glad as hell she didn’t do the same to me when, not three minutes later, I made an insensitive remark about the short bus.None of these gals are as one-dimensional as I sometimes paint them to be. I adore them — every one of them — even though and because we’re so different. They overlook the clod in me. I overlook the fact that some of ‘em voted for dubbya. And that’s why we have such a good time.