Never Buy A Feather Boa And Eleven Other Lessons From 2012

The Twelve Lessons I learned in 2012:

1) Never buy a feather boa. I can't explain why or how, but they constantly leave a trail of feathers in their wake and never get any smaller or stringier. Every parent longingly waits for the day when they can point to a bald boa and tell their child that the boa (finally, FINALLY) has to be thrown away. The only problem is that no matter how many hours you spend vacuuming up hot pink feathers, that day never comes. So never buy a feather boa, no matter how much better you feel about doing calculus homework when you wear it. I mean, your kid! Never buy one for your kid!

2) Never attempt to build a gingerbread house without a gingerbread house kit unless you have a degree (preferably masters or higher) in either architecture, construction, civil engineering, or design. If you try to construct a homemade gingerbread house without the proper credentials, you WILL fail. Or worse, you will sit at the table with a half-constructed house debating whether gum drops or Skittles make better re-enforcers for your tootsie roll mailbox, refusing to fail. Either way, your kid will lose interest long before you do and you will hate all those know-it-alls on Pinterest with their perfect gingerbread houses complete with blue m&m moats containing leaping (how?!) Swedish Fish. Show offs.

3) Sometimes you are the parent that is all patience, goodness, and light. And sometimes you are the parent who has to put a dollar in the swear jar more frequently than you'd like to admit. I don't want to say which one I am, but I will say that there are a hell of a lot of dollars in that damn jar.

4) If you are not a do-it-yourself person then you really shouldn't try to do it yourself. Pinterest kept me captivated for about the first half of the year and I was constantly pinning crazy things that I swore I would try. However, my first (and only) Pinterest attempt of making a homemade face mask left me with a face so bright orange that the cast of Jersey Shore was jealous. Luckily, I aim to surround myself with people who are much, much smarter than me just in case I need to be bailed out of ridiculous situations and one of my best friends was able to come to the rescue. After she stopped laughing at me.

5) Read the article, not the comments. Every single time, I get sucked into some little virtual argument over something so completely out there that I wind up depressed and pessimistic, questioning the mental state of the world. I don't recommend it.

6) I also don't recommend taking Nyquil before watching four back-to-back episodes of Breaking Bad. I can pretty much guarantee that you will have the most terrifying dreams of your life, so consider yourselves warned.

7) Someday you will be somewhere without the kids and start humming to yourself. "What is the lovely song that's stuck in my head?" you will wonder until it dawns on you that it's the theme song from Yo Gabba Gabba. I can't lie; it's a pretty low moment.

8) Sometime the world is dark, scary, and beyond comprehension. Sometimes I just want to barricade myself inside my house, grow all of my own food, sew all of my own clothes, make my own power generator, make beer in the bathtub...you know, really let all of my inner crazy come out. But throwing the covers over my head in the morning while yelling "Leave me alone! I have agoraphobia like Paula Deen!" is not only ridiculously false, but also helps no one. No matter how violent and unmanageable the world seems, the show must go on.

9) It's always a good idea to aspire to write a post-apocalyptic Pauly Shore movie with your funniest friend. Even if it never happens, the brain-storming sessions alone are good for a laugh.

10) I always figured I would become looser and more laid-back the older I got, but I've found the complete opposite happening. Every day I'm just a little more neurotic and crazy. It's like I'm slowly morphing into Woody Allen with a lot more hair and a lot less talent and success.

11) As an aspiring writer living in a world where no one really likes to read, I've had my fair share of rejection. Rejection sucks for the obvious reasons, but also sucks because it is so impersonal. There's no "We know you put hard work and your entire soul into writing this, but we just don't need it right now". There's not even a "It's not you, it's us" formality. It's just no. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope that a "no" will eventually turn into a "yes".

12) A sense of humor will get you through anything. One of the best parts of my marriage is that we can always make each other laugh, no matter how hard life can feel. The whole "laughter is the best medicine" thing sounds like a cheesy cliche, but it's true. And I'm lucky to be married to someone I can wet-willy photo-bomb while he tries to balance a spoon on his nose. It doesn't get much better than that.


 Happy New Year, Everyone!

We Can't Go On Like This

Out of all of the terrible things that have come out in light of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, the thing I can't get out of my head is how forty parents had to hear the words "Your child is dead" on Friday. That's a horror I can't even begin to imagine.

No one should ever have to hear those words. No one should ever have to see their child go before them, especially in such a violent, unnecessary way. I can't stop thinking about how all of those parents naturally assumed that they would see their child again after they dropped them off in the morning, but didn't. I can't even begin to wrap my head around that.

I debated for hours on Friday whether or not to pick Layla up early from school. Part of me didn't want to freak her out by taking her out early. Because what was I supposed to tell her? The world is a dark, messed up place and I don't ever want to let you out of my sight again? The truth is, I didn't want to tell her anything at all. I went as far as to consider making a (completely unnecessary) doctor's appointment just so I'd have a normal reason to show up to get her hours before school let out, but didn't. By the time I decided to pick her up, I had also decided that I was going to try to keep calm and hold it together. But when I saw her, running up to me with her big smile, excited because she found a quarter on the playground, I forgot about keeping my cool and barely kept myself from bursting into tears. I've never been so happy and thankful to see her running towards, happy and alive and so blissfully unaware that anything incomprehensible had happened that day. I can't imagine being one of the parents in Connecticut at that very time, standing outside of Sandy Hook hoping and praying with everything you have that my child was okay, hoping to see them running towards me just like Layla had done, only to find out that the unthinkable had happened. It's been days, but I still have such a hard time processing the enormity of the situation. It absolutely kills me that twenty kids who are the same age as my own child were killed for no reason whatsoever. It's hard to be a parent and not put yourself in the shoes of all of those parents who lost a child. My heart breaks over and over for them. I keep thinking, what if the conversation I had with Layla when I dropped her off at school that morning was the last we ever had? Friday is P.E. day and because Layla hates P.E., I spent the car ride to school telling her that P.E. was just a part of life she had to deal with. What if that had been our last conversation? What if the last time I got to hug her or tell her I loved her had been that morning? It is no exaggeration to say that my kids are my life and without them, I wouldn't have a life worth living. 

Because this hits so close to home for me, there are so many things I want to say. I think gun control (or lack thereof) is a big issue. I think mental health, as well as the stigma placed on mental health and with getting help is just as big of an issue, if not bigger. There has to be something we can do to stop this. Maybe it wasn't your child or my child this time, but next time it could be. I read today that 84 people have been killed in mass shootings in 2012 ALONE. Something needs to change. Something needs to be done to keep this from happening over and over.

The gun control factor is tricky, but I know this much: I don't want to hear "Obama wants to take our guns away" anymore. That's a cop-out and that's hardly what would happen if we tightened up our laws. When DWIs became a big problem, no one came in and "took everyone's cars away". When DWIs became an epidemic, stricter laws were made. Gone were the days of getting off with a slap on the wrist if you were caught driving drunk. If you are pulled over and fail a sobriety test, you go to jail. You go to court. Your license is suspended. Your picture is put in the newspaper (which I personally find amazingly effective because public humiliation goes a long way). In other words,there are stricter consequences for you to face without losing your personal freedoms. And while DWIs have not disappeared all together, they have decreased greatly which is a start. I don't understand why we couldn't apply the same principal to gun laws. If you are someone who wants to own a gun for protection or to hunt and that is your only purpose for it, then guess what? As a responsible gun owner, stricter laws wouldn't really affect you. I realize that crazy people would still try to find a way to get a gun, but I don't think that's a good enough reason to not try to make it harder for them. That's like saying "Eh, this is too big of a problem. We can't do anything to stop it, so why try?", which is inexcusable. Things can be done to stop it. To begin, guns and ammunition should not be available over the internet for anyone to order with NO background check and NO waiting period. That has to stop. I don't think it would be asking too much to take a class or pass a psychological evaluation before you can own a gun. And all guns should be properly and legally registered.

I realize that the guns used on Friday were legally registered to the shooter's mom which brings me to my next point; Guns aren't the only problem. Part of the problem is that we live in a selfish world. We say "Hey, how are you doing?" more as a polite reflex than actually caring about the answer. There's a stigma on mental instability and an even worse stigma on getting help for mental health issues. Think about it. In our celebrity-obsessed world, there is nothing the media loves more than a story about a celebrity who has gone into rehab or revealed some long-hidden mental disorder. Why? So we can applaud the courage and strength it takes to realize that they have a problem bigger than themselves that they are unable to handle alone, so they seek out help? No. It's so we can all whisper and speculate and gossip like a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls and relish in the fact that it's them and not us. We hold ourselves and each other to unrealistically high standards of perfection instead of seeing that we are all human and all imperfect. I am in NO WAY trying to justify what the shooter did (because it is completely unjustifiable) but I don't believe that you just wake up one morning and decide to shoot up a grade school. It was a festering illness. Who knows who this guy had to talk to? Maybe everyone had just written him off as another weird loner. Maybe we should all take a minute to care about each other as much as we care about Kate Middleton's morning sickness. Maybe I'm a simplistic little tree hugger, but I have to believe that maybe if there was more compassion in the world, things like this wouldn't happen so frequently.

Whatever the reason, something like this should never happen period, but it should especially never happen at a school. School is where kids should go to learn and grow and begin to turn into the people that they will grow up to be. They shouldn't have to worry about someone coming in and taking their life for absolutely no reason and then turning the gun on himself so that he never has to face the consequences of his actions. Part of me didn't want to write this blog because I didn't want to glorify anything the shooter did. I definitely don't want to use his name because I don't want it in my memory. I read a great quote from Morgan Freeman who said that we should focus less on the killer and more on preventing this from happening in the future and remembering the victims and I couldn't agree more.

So let's remember them. Let's forget for a second what political party you side with or whether you think gun control is the problem or not because SOMETHING is the problem and we need to do SOMETHING to fix it. For once, let's stop sitting on our couches watching the news and saying that something needs to be done and actually get up and do something. Get mad. Tell President Obama, whether you love him or hate him, that something needs to be done. Have more than just surface-level conversations with people. If someone needs help, help them or find someone who can. Show some compassion. Think of all of the families who will never think that this is the "most wonderful time of the year" ever again. Let's not let the shooter live in infamy, but instead remember the teachers who threw themselves in front of their students trying to save their lives and the twenty children who only got to live on this planet for six short years. Get up and take action. It won't fix everything and it won't bring those kids back, but it's a start.

I don't know why this had to happen. No one will ever really know why. The media will do everything in its power to dig up every little fact about this guy trying to find a motive, but we will never know anything for sure. All we will ever really know for sure is that was happened at Sandy Hook should be our worst nightmare and not our bleak reality.