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It's My Experiment, Ma!

~ by April Sopczak

It's My Experiment, Ma!

Monthly Archives: June 2013

Rules for Dating My Son

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Thoughts and Stuff

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Tags

dating, motherhood, parenting, rules for dating my son, rules for dating my son Facebook meme, rules for dating my son meme, teenagers

Rules for Dating My Daughter

I, and the rest of the planet, have seen this photo going around social media like wild fire the last few days. It gave me a chuckle as I pictured the over-protective daddy wearing that shirt. But you know what? I have sons, not daughters, and they’ve got one over-protective Mama too! My boys are every bit as precious and awesome and wonderful as your little princess, Mr. Scary Dad. Matter of fact, they are so amazing, I think we need to set a few ground rules for dating my son!

Rules for Dating My Son

Tasty Tomato Tart

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Creative Cooking

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dinner, food, puff pastry, roma tomatoes, shredded parmesan cheese, tomato pie recipe, tomato tart recipe, vegetarian, what to do with all those tomatoes I grew

Tasty Tomato TartI love tomatoes! Funny thing is that I just started eating them a couple of years ago. As a kid, I was as opposed to eating them as a medieval Englishman. Now that I have begun my love affair, I cook with them a lot. When I was at the grocery store the other day, I saw a tomato tart on the front of a magazine and decided to give it a try. I didn’t measure a thing, so this is more of a tomato tart guide than a full on recipe, but this is one of those things you should experiment with because it’s just a matter of taste. What sounds good to you? Go with that!

For the Italian seasoning I used a Tuscan chicken blend that I picked up at Sam’s Club. I was there for toilet paper, but the sample lady gave me a piece of bread dipped in olive oil and the seasoning, and I was hooked. I ended up with a giant sized bottle of it that I find new ways to cook with all the time. Any Italian seasoning blend or bread dip seasoning blend will work. Without further ado, here’s the recipe!

Tasty Tomato Tart

1 sheet of puff pastry
2 Roma tomatoes, cut into 8 thin slices (or tomatoes of your choice)
olive oil
Italian seasoning
1 oz mozzarella (approximate)
1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese (approximate)

Preheat oven to 400F. Roll out pastry sheet and place on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Then roll the edges of the dough in about 1/4 inch. Brush pastry with olive oil, sprinkle with Italian seasoning and top with mozzarella. (I did mine in thin slices, you can easily use shreds. Don’t go too heavy, this isn’t pizza!) Add tomato slices in four rows of four. Drizzle olive oil lightly on top of tomatoes, sprinkle with more seasoning and top with parmesan. Cook for about 25 minutes or until golden brown. May be eaten hot or room temperature.

Summer Exploration with my Army Brats

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Thoughts and Stuff

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Tags

Army life, summer, summer travel

Emerson quote

Thirty-six years is quite a long time to live in one place. That’s how long I lived in Florida. Then, a few years ago, my husband had the notion that he’d like to go to medical school. He’s in the Army and had been active duty Florida National Guard (AGR) ever since we got married. For those who have no idea what that means, not all of the National Guard is part time. It just wouldn’t work. They have some soldiers who are active duty assigned to run those units. AGR members go away frequently on deployments, a lot of training, meetings and what not, just like “Big Army.” But, there is no moving around, unless you want to go to another duty station in your state for a promotion, a particular assignment or just because you really want to move. If you don’t want to move, you stay put. This was my experience with being an Army wife.

That changed when my husband got accepted to Physician Assistant School with the Army. It’s a pretty hard school that is difficult just to get accepted into, so this was a big deal. The big deal also meant we had to start moving. If he stayed National Guard, he would come back to a part time position, so he transferred back into the regular Army. First, we went to San Antonio for 17 months while he attended the classroom portion of his training. Now, we are in Kentucky/Tennessee while he does his internship/residency/whatever the heck you call the practical side of his training. I’m not sure if we move after this or not. I do know I’ve barely seen him in the last two years. The training is intense!

So, living in new places for the first time with children who barely get to see their dad for a while could mean only one thing: TIME TO EXPLORE!!! We went all over the San Antonio area and ventured as far north as Fort Worth. We saw tons of things we had never seen before and I’m not sure who was more excited, me or the kids. This summer, we have even more exploration planned. Unlike Texas and Florida, it doesn’t take a lot of driving to leave the state and get out into the region. Next week, we head to Chicago and Michigan. Later, we’re going down to Chattanooga for a second visit to Rock City (Some things are worth going twice. This is one of them!), up to Bowling Green, over to St. Louis, and diagonally down to Huntsville. On different trips, of course. We are making use of every moment of our short 8 week summer!

On the surface, it seems like my 15-year-old will get more out of this summer than my four-year old. After all, how much can a preschooler remember of all this? I don’t think it matters. I’m instilling something much deeper in my children than the memory of a landmark or two. The family time, even if my husband can’t be with us, draws us closer together. If my kids learn to enjoy each other’s company and look forward to seeing new things together, it becomes a lifetime habit. I want them to always remain close. Also, I want to impart to my kids that life is a gift to be lived fully, the world is to be explored, and we are a small part of something much bigger than ourselves. What better way than to show them all of the beautiful things that are waiting to be seen?

Grammar PSA #1 – There, Their, They’re

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Uncategorized

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Tags

grammar, grammar psa, their vs there

Grammar PSAJust having fun with a pet peeve!

Giving Heidegger the Bird

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Thoughts and Stuff

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Tags

birds, Heidegger, Heideggerian philosophy, long form, nature writing, philosophy

The following is an academic piece I wrote exploring Martin Heidegger’s philosophy on nature and the essence of being. The format was a first for me. I usually write academic papers in a detached third person voice. In this piece, I wrote about a very personal experience in order to parse my way through Heidegger.

Giving Heidegger the Bird:  How an Avian Friendship Discredits a Nazi

I really wanted to keep Henry Bird, but Henry Bird really wanted to bite my three-year-old’s fingers off. Henry also knew more swear words than a drunken frat boy and, unlike the drunken frat boy, he actually used them appropriately in conversation.  I was afraid that even if he left my child’s fingers intact, he would teach my son some words that I was hoping the boy wouldn’t even hear until at least middle school.  Still, I really loved that bird, and not like how I love chocolate or a good book and a glass of wine, but with a human love, not unlike how a sister loves her little brother. Some people think that’s crazy, that you can’t really have a human-like relationship with a pet because any feelings the animal has back for its owner is just a projection of the owner’s own feelings.  Some people are unfeeling Nazis whose philosophical outlook I find irritating and can do without.  I loved Henry and Henry loved me.

At just under 10 inches, Henry was a tad bit on the small side for an African Grey parrot; they usually range between 10 and 14 inches tall. He wasn’t short on language skills though. No one ever stopped to count how many words he knew, but African Greys have the capacity to learn over 2,000 words and the intelligence to know what they are saying, and Henry was no slouch.  Now, don’t go thinking I’m the one he picked up all that colorful language from. My uncle taught him that – Henry Bird was his roommate and they were very attached to one another. Although Uncle Tim was a gregarious sort of fellow who loved and helped everyone around him, Henry only loved Uncle Tim. This is quite typical behavior for the Congo African Grey who are less social than the Timneh African Grey. Congos are more nervous around new people and new situations, which makes them tend to bond to one person. That would change for Henry when we got to know each other.

My uncle was about halfway between my age and my father’s, so he was like an uncle and a big brother all wrapped in one. I was 17 and Henry was nine when he and Uncle Tim moved into our house. Everyone who knew my uncle knew him to be kind, caring, loving and giving. What they didn’t all know about him was that he was addicted to cocaine. My dad did, so I didn’t get to spend much time with Uncle Tim after he moved out of my grandparent’s home. Dad wouldn’t take us over to his brother’s house because he was afraid of what we would find and who would be hanging around if we went for a visit. Dad disapproved strongly of Uncle Tim’s lifestyle so they hadn’t been on good speaking terms for a while, but when Dad heard that Uncle Tim was sinking lower into the addiction, he took action. He went over late one night and yanked his brother up out of his house and had a very forceful, one-on-one style intervention. Next thing I knew, Uncle Tim was in rehab and Henry Bird was in my living room.

Poor bird didn’t know where he was or who all these new people were that kept staring into his cage. His eyes kept darting around nervously with a look that said “I don’t really belong here.” I knew that look; I often had it myself being a weird little drama rat that wore stage-hand black clothes all the time and was often called “different” from the rest of the family. Dad even called me his strange little bird. Henry and I bonded immediately. I was the only one who could hold him, pet him or even change his food and water without worrying about getting bit.

When my younger brother would walk by his cage, Henry would call him a jerk emphasized by some colorful explicative. My older sister, to my delight, would often be compared to a female dog. I, however, would be called to sweetly with a sing-songy “C’mere!” If I didn’t answer, I would get a more forceful command of “Let me out!” Not responding at this point meant Henry Bird would start comparing me to my sister. I didn’t often ignore Henry. This was important for him because African Greys, like other species of highly intelligent birds, need a lot of interaction and attention. They get bored very easily and will start destroying everything around them, including themselves. Parrots can actually go crazy and start plucking out all their own feathers; without intensive rehabilitation, these neglected birds will suffer an early death. Considering African Greys tend to live 60 – 70 years, they truly are a lifetime commitment of constant love and attention.

I went to some of the family rehab sessions with Uncle Tim while he was doing his in-patient treatment. No one else in the family would go except my dad and me. Everyone cared about Uncle Tim and wanted to see him get better, but that type of atmosphere is either intimidating or uncomfortable to most people. I was not easily intimidated and didn’t fit in most places anyway, so I went. After his in-patient treatment was over, Uncle Tim wasn’t supposed to be by himself for a while, so he moved in with us and Henry Bird. We spent a lot of time together, especially because I wasn’t allowed to go very many places alone either. Since we were often home by ourselves while everyone was out wherever they wanted to be, our running joke was that we were both always grounded. It was the perfect situation to really get to know one another very well. This was very important for me, because like most teenage girls, I was struggling to get to know myself. Uncle Tim smiled at me one night and told me that of all the people in the family, he and I were most alike. He joked that I was just the good version and he was the bad version and then he looked me in the eye and said with all seriousness “Don’t ever go bad.” This meant the world to me. I had felt so different from the rest of the family and so unconnected, but all at once I had a real bond. It bonded me not only to Uncle Tim, but the rest of the family as well. That was truly the beginning of me learning to be comfortable with myself and who I really was inside. I also took his advice to heart and never even tried a cigarette, much less a drug.

Eight years would pass before I would come to the full realization that Uncle Tim had never really gotten off drugs. He tried, he tried really hard, but it was just something he couldn’t overcome. I was 25-years-old and out for a night of dancing with the girls when my pager started going off in rapid succession. I hadn’t switched it to vibrate and so, in the noisy atmosphere of the dance club, I missed every one until I glanced down and saw the pager light up. My parent’s number came up 12 times. I ran outside to find a payphone and quickly called my dad. He said to come over to his house, but wouldn’t tell me anything other than my son and husband were fine, just come quickly. It was a 30-minute drive home that took only 14 long, tortuous minutes. I opened the door to find my mom, dad, brother and sister sitting around crying. Uncle Tim was dead. He laid down in bed after work to take a nap and his heart went to sleep with him. His poor heart was just over-worked and tired from all those years of straining it with cocaine. He died with cocaine in his system. I sat there in silent shock, not knowing what to say or do. Finally, I spoke four small words:  “I want Henry Bird.”

_____________

Martin Heidegger was a philosopher who would have said that my relationship with Henry was one that I had created in my mind. Heidegger was obsessively concerned with the question of “being.” He thought that all previous philosophy had short-sightedly concerned itself with what is being, when it should have concerned itself with what is a being. A subtle difference that was huge in the world of philosophy. When dealing with what is being, the concern is placed fully on the purpose of human existence. The addition of a simple vowel changes the question from what “is” being to what is “a” being and expands the discussion from humans to all things in existence. Heidegger thought that when we eliminated the “a”, we then placed a human thought and observance on everything, rather than allowing things to exist in their own right. This is what he would have said I was doing with Henry. I wasn’t able to ask Henry what he thought of our relationship or even if we had one at all, and Henry, for all his expansive vocabulary, had never explained it to me.  Despite his high intelligence, amazing communication skills and socialization, Henry simply lacked that human understanding that allows us to discuss and understand concepts at more than a visceral level. So, without knowing exactly what Henry thought, I was denying him his own rightful existence and placing his value as a being fully in my estimation of his being, which was bound up in my personal feelings. Silly Heidegger! This kind of thinking is a trap.

Nothing explains the fault in Heidegger’s thinking more than his ponderings on Van Gough’s painting A Pair of Shoes (1886). He describes the shoes by their meaning and use in an attempt to infuse them with their own sense of being. The shoes’ purpose is to cover the peasant woman’s feet as she toils in the dirt, and function as a connection between the peasant woman and the earth.  “If the shoes themselves disclose both the ‘earth’ and ‘world’, Van Gough’s painting reveals this revelation, opening up for the viewer a silent attentiveness to Being that they, presumably, lack” (Garrad, Ecocriticism 111). Problem is, the shoes didn’t belong to a peasant woman toiling in the dirt; they were Van Gough’s shoes. The woman’s entire existence is an idea thought up in Heidegger’s own head that is relative to his own emotion and experience. Heidegger’s meditation is false and so is his idea that we can get away from a human sense of being that allows every “being” to exist within its own right.  He cannot explain the shoes in a way that is completely non-human in nature; words are inherently human. Though Henry Bird had a command of thousands of words, those words were not of his own making. Left on his own in the wild, Henry would have made countless noises and calls, but none of them would have been human words.

Not only is it impossible to divorce a description of being from a sense of humanity because of language, it is dangerous to delve into this arena of thought. It is not irrelevant that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. I don’t mean that in the modern sense of lazy debate. Lately it seems that anytime people get into a debate, somewhere along the way, someone is going to completely dismiss another person’s thoughts and ideas by pulling out the Nazi card. “I know someone else who thought like that – the Nazis” and BAM! anything the accused says after that is null and void, just like any idea coming from the Nazi way of thinking. Heidegger was an actual Nazi – “card number 312589” (Garrard , ISLE 255). He joined the National Socialist Party in May of 1933, and remained a member until the end of its existence. As rector of Freiburg University, Heidegger was instrumental in crafting party policy. The strange thing is that for all this dismissing people for having Nazi ideas, an actual Nazi is still being utilized in the fields of philosophy, literary criticism, and more.

Why hasn’t Heidegger been dismissed? Dr. Greg Garrard thinks he should be, and I tend to agree. In his article “Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism,” Garrard shows just how dangerous this idea of separating a sense of humanity from a sense of being really is. Placing every thing, from a human to a pair of shoes, on the same level makes them equally unimportant, rather than equally important. He points out in Heidegger’s writings that “he relativizes Nazi crimes by equating them with the Allied blockade of Germany as well as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also argues that the enframing of fields of wheat is ‘in essence the same’ as the reduction of the racial enemies of Nazism to ‘standing reserve,’ on call for annihilation” (262). It is precisely a sense of humanity that allows people to consider other people and other things with a sense of caring and compassion, which is precisely why the American Humane Society is aptly named even though it deals with the treatment of animals, and it is precisely why I was able to have an actual relationship with Henry Bird. If I had given Henry his own sense of separate being, he would have become separate from me and unimportant in my life.  At the moment of my uncle’s death, Henry was everything. He encapsulated every feeling coursing through my body, soul, and mind.

______________

I couldn’t have Henry Bird that night. In the course of the eight years between rehab and his death, Uncle Tim had married a woman I barely knew and she wanted to keep Henry. She probably wanted him like any other memento of her husband. It wasn’t because of a deep love for Henry. I know this because almost exactly a year later she called my dad saying that she couldn’t keep Henry anymore and suddenly, he was back at my parent’s house. He was in bad shape. He hadn’t been receiving all the love and attention that a parrot needs and the house he lived in hadn’t been receiving the attention it needed either. In her depressed state of mind, Uncle Tim’s wife had stopped taking care of Henry, stopped cleaning house, stopped doing anything really. Consequently, the house became infested with cockroaches that scurried into Henry’s cage to steal his food.  He fought back valiantly slaying bug after bug, making them into a light snack. Cockroaches, however, are known for carrying many diseases and do not make a good snack for parrots.  Eating the bugs had given Henry an infection that traveled into his right leg and paralyzed his foot; he would never again be able to perch and would require a lot more care than ever.

I still wanted him; I wanted to be the one to give him that care. My dad wouldn’t hear of it given Henry’s burning desire to eat my child’s fingers. He was right and even though I knew it, I didn’t want to admit it. My mom and dad traveled a lot at this point in their life and wouldn’t be around enough to give Henry the proper care he deserved, so they couldn’t keep him either. We found the perfect home for Henry right across the street. My parent’s neighbor and his husband offered to take our precious little bird. Nature wouldn’t allow the couple to have children of their own and the law wouldn’t allow them to adopt, so they built their family out of a menagerie of animals that desperately needed a home.  They took excellent care of Henry, loving and spoiling him right through the end of his severely shortened life.

I was happy for Henry, but I was unhappy for me. The last year had been so rough while I was trying unsuccessfully to come to terms with my uncle’s death. I couldn’t find a place for it in my head that made any sense and I was having so much trouble trying to make peace with it. My dad knew this and he knew that taking care for Henry would have helped me find peace, so he came up with a different solution. Uncle Tim had a tiny, little lovebird named Sunshine that his wife could no longer keep either. Sunshine was a peach-faced yellow lovebird that had flown down out of nowhere and landed on Uncle Tim’s shoulder as he stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. When I went to go meet her, she flew up onto my shoulder and nuzzled up against my neck. I fell instantly in love. I went about spoiling her rotten by setting her up in a giant, 2 foot by 3 foot terrarium, meant for much larger animals, complete with a little wooden “tree” for her to perch in. I never cut her wings and hardly ever kept the top to her cage in place, so she flew around my house at will and spent a lot of time nuzzling on my shoulder.

Lovebirds are very loving and affectionate birds that are actually a species of small parrots. Like their larger cousin the African Grey, they are playful, amusing, highly intelligent and require a lot of attention. They long for companionship and so are usually paired with another lovebird. If a lovebird is not paired, then it will find a companion in their human owner. Sunshine was my constant companion. In the time that I had her, she saw me through a lot of rough patches. Caring for her helped me to find peace with my uncle’s death, just as my dad had wisely thought. She also helped me through a rough divorce and the major changes that followed. I would talk to her about everything I was going through and she would nuzzle and listen. She would often chirp and make an amazing number of whistles and songs, but unlike her cousin Henry, lovebirds can’t talk. She could mimic a myriad of noises with deft accuracy, but she could not mimic speech. This gave her even less of an opportunity than Henry had to say how she really felt. But she didn’t really need to use human words to express how she felt, she showed me in her own little birdie way and I knew it in my very human way. I know love when I see it and I don’t need to understand it in any other way than human to feel it from anything not human, including my birds.

Screw Heidegger! That irritating, philosophical Nazi lost his humanity and lost his ability to care about anything more than his own stilted intelligence. I am much better off without his ponderings on what is “a” being. I loved Henry Bird and Sunshine and they loved me and that is all I really need to know.

Works Cited and Referenced

“About African Grey Parrots ~ Grey’s World’s Version.” It’s A Grey’s World! Educating on the African Grey Parrot. Web. 25 June 2010. <http://www.itsagreysworld.com/articles/about.htm>.

“All You Need to Know About African Grey Parrots: Species Information and Photos.” AvianWeb: Home Page. Web. 18 June 2010. <http://www.avianweb.com/africangreys.htm>.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Garrard, Greg. “Heidegger Nazi Ecocriticism.” Intersiciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 17.2 (2010): 251-69. Print.

“Peach-faced Lovebird, Rose-faced Lovebird, Agapornis Roseicollis.” Dr. Jungles Exotic Pets, Animals, Aquariums. Web. 18 June 2010. <http://animal-world.com/encyclo/birds/lovebirds/peachfacedlovebird.php>.

Words

15 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

cancer, pancreatic cancer, poem, poetry

This is a poem I wrote while sitting in the hospital, up all night, watching my father as he recovered from surgery. That was two and a half years ago and he has since made it into the tiny 5% margin of those who survive pancreatic cancer.

Words

Daddy
That’s a word I haven’t used
in a while.
But lately it has been slipping
from my lips like
paper on the wind,
floating through my mind
and resting in my heart
which has been slowly
dripping lead into the
pit of my stomach
ever since I heard the word Daddy
coupled with another word.
Cancer.
That word has brought on a torrent of
words
that have flooded my world
ever since.
Pancreas, surgery, the Whipple procedure,
prognosis, survival rates, chemo, radiation,
treatments, hospital stays, stage and spread,
next of kin, living will, pathology report, and
on and on.
Too many words.
My head is heavy.
I worry, wait, and wonder
as I long to hear the word
Daddy
coupled with another word.
Remission.

A Beautiful Me for my Beautiful Boys

14 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Thoughts and Stuff

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beauty, body image, parenting, raising boys, self worth, women

I read this yesterday after my friend posted it to Facebook. It’s a blog article by a young mother to two girls, and in it she explains her decision to start describing herself as beautiful to her children. She discusses the importance of this to her daughters’ own self-image and confidence. I thought it a lovely, well-thought out position to take that will probably have a positive impact on her children, but not of much use to me. After all, I have two boys who are the typical, maybe even stereotypical, young males with a healthy dose of developing testosterone-filled ego. It seems I am raising a four-year-old super hero and a 15-year-old gaming rock star. A little humility would probably do these two more good than another injection self-confidence!

However done I felt with the topic, my brain wasn’t quite done mulling it over. I kept thinking about it and then it struck me. This article has everything to do with me, especially since I am raising boys. These kids think I am the most beautiful thing in their lives. In their eyes, I am love and light, nurturing and caring, adventure and safety, creativity and constancy, all rolled into a package that delights their eyes and fills them with tenderness. And I am the only woman in this house. I am their example of how to relate to women, how to treat women, and even how to see women. Why do I constantly look into the mirror and declare them to be wrong? Why do I point out all of the flaws a woman can have and how it diminishes her beauty instead of enhancing her individuality? Yikes! I’m kind of warping them here!

If I tell them that their assessment of beauty is wrong, they will start to see it my way. I don’t want them to. I don’t want them to look for perfection in a woman in order to appreciate her beauty. Perfection is impossible and it is a standard that no woman can attain without an awesome amount of studio lighting and the magic of Photoshop. I am setting them up for failure in their future relationships simply by being so blasted critical of myself, and it is time for me to stop. The next time my husband tells me I am beautiful, I am going to kiss him wildly, say thank you and just accept it. And I’m going to make sure my two beautiful boys see me do it!

Teenage Potatoes

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Around the House, Thoughts and Stuff

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

outdoors, parenting, teenagers, trash can potatoes

photo-3My potatoes are teenagers! They’re almost to the top of my garbage can and almost done growing, or are they? It’s hard to say what they’re doing down there under the dirt; I can’t see into that secret world. I have given them a comfortable bed to grow in, nurtured them with water and food, and I have given them room to grow. I’ve done everything I can possibly do to help them turn out well. Pretty soon the dirt will reach the top, and other than occasional help with water and making sure they are in the right spot on the patio, my job will be done. I can only watch and wait to see what they do with all they’ve been given. It’s nerve wracking. I have put a lot of effort, love and hope into growing these potatoes, but in the end, I get no real say in how they turn out. I want them to do well, produce much and maybe make a nice hash.

Ok, so that’s where the metaphor falls apart. I really don’t want my kid to make a nice hash, but you can see where I’m going with this. My youngest is four. We’re still in the posting-on-Facebook-every-cute-thing-my-kid-says phase with him. The eldest is 15 and in the same phase as my potatoes. In three short years, he graduates high school. Wow! That blows my mind. I want him to go to college. I want him to have a good career. I want him to have a happy life. I want so much for him and I have put a lot of love, effort and hope towards that end. The next step, however, is completely up to him. The only thing I get to do is sit back, watch and give the occasional needed input.

I’ve heard it said that the hardest part of raising children is that if you’re doing it right, you’re raising them not to need you any more. He’ll always need me in his life, I hope, for the love I give him and for that precious mother-son relationship. He might even come to me for advice every now and then. But, if I’ve done my job right, he won’t need me making his decisions and directing all his paths. I sure hope I’ve done my job right.

Facing Down the Giant

06 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Thoughts and Stuff

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Tags

nature writing, outdoors, sailing, short essay, writing

This is a short essay I wrote about my first, and only, attempt at sailing.

Facing Down the Giant

 I saw The Perfect Storm. I know what happens to students on a sailboat.  I don’t know why I ever even watched that movie considering my enormous fear of sailboats, but I do know why I tried getting onto a sailboat full of students. I am a student and it was required. If you want an “A” in a course, you have to fulfill all of the requirements. The professor told us about this one on the first day of class. He suggested that if it was a problem for us, then we should drop the class. This was not an option for me because of the source of my funding, so like or not I was in this and I had to face it.

Fear is not a word many of those who know me often associate with me, unless of course we are talking about cockroaches and then I am a screaming ball of pansy. That is well known and well laughed at, but a sailboat? C’mon, not April! She’s does all kinds of water sports, hikes, goes hunting for wild hogs – a total tomboy. Why should she be afraid of a boat? Well, she is and I absolutely hate it. I love the idea of coursing through the ocean with the wind in my hair, but more than that, I abhor the idea of anything having control of me. I would face this.

The morning of the sail, I attached my motion sickness patch to a hairless piece of skin behind my ear just like the directions told me. I checked over my list of things to bring and made sure I had everything the boat captain had listed. One last thing to do before I left the house. Nope, not pray. I had been doing that for days. I playfully changed my Facebook status to “April is busy facing down a giant” and then I left to face my Goliath – the mighty sailboat.

My eyes widened when I walked up to the boat. Goliath didn’t look so big when I saw him. This was supposed to sleep seven? Really? Seven really close friends maybe, but not seven strangers. Trying not to think about it, I sucked in my breath, swallowed my fear and climbed aboard. At first it was great, actually. The captain let me steer the boat out of the harbor. We were using the engine just then and it felt a lot like being on my grandfather’s bass boat on the lake. Ah, but this was not a bass boat. This was a sailboat and a sailboat’s gotta sail. The captain asked me to hold the boat steady while he raised the sails. With a mighty wap WAP the sails filled with the wind, the engine was cut and everything changed. We were no longer cutting through the waves, we were riding them. Up and down, up and down. Sideways. Did I mention we were riding them sideways? Apparently, that is the natural motion of a sailboat. It felt anything but natural to me. I gave up control of the wheel and swallowed more of my fear.

Funny thing about fear. You can only swallow so much of it and, it seems, I had swallowed more than my fair share that morning. I felt it churning in my stomach, rising in my throat and soon my technicolor fear was poured out into the ocean, on the side of the boat, on a couple of lifejackets. On my foot. I was no longer in control of the boat or myself. I felt my insides begin to tremble and push outward into a full body, visible shake. After a brief conversation with the captain, he graciously agreed to bring me ashore. I couldn’t do it. Goliath had won.

As we made our way back to shore, I kept scanning the horizon for signs that we were getting near the end of this terrible journey; “glimpses that would make me less forlorn.” It was a forty minute ride back, giving me plenty of time to alternate between puking, shaking, watching and thinking. I thought about David and Goliath; how a tiny little boy could stare down his giant, and yet, I couldn’t face mine. I felt so dejected. But, then I began to think of David’s brothers. He had seven brothers come before that giant. Seven. Not one of them was able to defeat him. Why David and why not them? The only logical conclusion I could come to is that they were not meant to.  It wasn’t their giant to defeat. This is where I am. I love the idea of sailing across the ocean, but I am not meant for the reality of it. I looked that giant in the eye and walked away. This was not my giant to defeat.

Fog

02 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by aprilsopczak in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AD, Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's Disease, poem, poetry

Am I the only woman my age in North America who still hasn’t seen The Notebook? I saw the beginning the other day. Then the phone rang, the four-year-old decided not to take his nap, UPS dropped off a package and the movie did not get watched. You know, a pretty normal day. I kept thinking about the beginning of that movie though, and the woman in the nursing home. She was typical of the movie representation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It’s a slightly romanticized version in which the AD patient is sad and confused, but looks pretty put together from the outside; physically present, mentally absent.

That’s not my experience of it at all. I have watched my Grandmother advance through the stages of AD, going from slightly confused to forgetting much and getting very angry about it to her current state of near total memory loss. That’s the one they show in the movies. She doesn’t know who I am when I visit. If she recognizes me at all, she thinks I’m my mother, that her mother is still alive and that we are somewhere that is a mix between Alabama, Indiana and Florida. Physically, she is not that well-put together old lady who looks exactly the same as she always has.

You see, AD patients don’t just forget people and places; they forget everything. They forget how to dress, how to use the restroom, how to feed themselves, even how to walk properly. It isn’t romantic, it isn’t pretty, and it frightens the heck out of me. I hate seeing Grandma that way, but it’s also scary because I am my grandmother’s carbon copy. When I look at her, I worry that I am looking at my own future and I just don’t even know how to process that.

All of this came out, a little unexpectedly, in a poem while I was responding this week to a prompt to write a verse using the word “fog.”

Fog

I am my Grandmother reborn
I talk too much
I’m a little disorganized
I have a wicked hot temper
I look exactly like her
That’s not a bad thing either
People say she’s pretty
She also used all that talk
to make everyone feel remembered and welcome
She might not be able to find her wallet
but she always found the time to be there
And you do not want to be on the wrong side
of that wicked hot temper
It’s hottest when someone has done wrong
to someone she loves
Grandma was always the quickest
to right a wrong

Being my Grandmother reborn
scares me
I have so much to live up to
a lot to carry on
She’s amazing
But she’s not her anymore
She doesn’t know me
She doesn’t know where she is
She doesn’t know herself
Is that where I’m going?

If so
I have a lot to do
a lot to accomplish
a lot to be
before the fog sets in

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