Text Conversation with Mama After a Surprise Gift

I got home from work yesterday to see a package down the hall, leaning up against the mailboxes in my place.  Since I rarely if ever buy things these days and didn't recall a moment (probably drunk) when I purchased something online, I didn't think it was for me. But I still had to check my mail, so I walked toward the boxes, assuming there were only bills there for me, but still mega-focused on that darn package, hoping beyond reason that ooh! A package might actually be for me anyway.

As I stepped closer and closer, I saw big Sharpie marker writing on the front and thought: hey! I recognize that handwriting. Wishful thinking at that point, for sure.  But when I finally got up to it, I saw that it WAS actually addressed to me! I was right! It was Mama's handwriting afterall.  (I KNEW IT!)

It came with a card that said:  "Hi Stacy! Found this and with you in mind I thought I would send it out-- while we are having extremely hot summer days! Hope you like it - Something cool to lounge about with after showering or at the poolside.  Misplaced receipt but you shouldn't have any problems returning it if you don't like it -- or for the fit or color, etc. Enjoy your summer -- as we are surely are up here -- once the rains and thunderstorms subside. Thankfully No Tornadoes. Love Mom"

Of course, I had to try it on right away. And, bless her heart, as always? Somehow at 1000 miles away she always manages to pick out better things for me than I do myself! Absolutely adorable.  And so I told her so, and our text messages (Mom's a textin' fool!) were thus:

Me: (sending pic) I love it!!! And it looks adorable, thank you! What a lovely surprise.

Mom: Glad you like it! I could visualize you wearing it. You're welcome!

Me: Tried it on for Hilary and she said, and I quote, "your Mom has amazing style! My Mom would never do that!"

Mom: Well thank her for me! I guess when you have it, you HAVE IT! Haven't lost it...YET. lol XOXOXO

[editor's note: yep. Mom does the whole "lol" thing. She knows it means "laugh out loud" but she likes to say it actually means "lots of love."  Aww. Love that.]

Me: Wish you would have passed that gene onto me! You dress me better than I do myself!

Mom: What can I say! I'm the last of 12...& with 6 sisters older...my brother sized it up...MaryJo's dad [my Godmother], said I had to teach my older sisters...style & how to dress..hairdos, etc. 
P.S. Notice not only a good color on you, but stripes going the right way. Elongating you. You probably look 5'6" wearing it. Haha!

[And here, I giggled. Mom's tall. Dad was too. Sister is tall. My brothers are both 6' or taller. Not me. I'm 5'3-3/4"...yep, I claim that 3/4!]

Me (pretending indignance): Hey! I like being short, thankyouverymuch! Notice you didn't pass THAT gene onto me either, Amazon?

Did I mention this woman -- this amazing woman who sends amazing random gifts and texts messages oh-so-naturally  is *71 years old?!*  And those texts were word for word.

Yeah. I have an amazing Mama.

My nemesis, my hair: conquered!

I always wanted to be a girl with a swingy ponytail. You know: the kind on those women you see running and it swings back and forth behind their heads as if they really were independent tails with movement all their own?  I was always jealous of that.

Growing up, I always had short hair. My Mom says that it's because my hair was so thick and tangled easily so I would scream and cry whenever she tried to comb out my hair. So she always kept it short to avoid the drama.  Granted, she did give me some cute styles. But I didn't have the little ponytails or braids that Julie or Kristin did in the neighborhood.  I wanted those.   And Mom was very fond of the home permanents back then too (it was the 70s afterall) and every other year I had a head of not only short hair, but short messy curls of hair. One of the stories she likes to tell me is that once when I was young and in Philadelphia with some relatives a stranger mentioned I looked like a little Shirley Temple. Apparently he even asked me if I could sing and dance or something like her.  I don't have a memory of this.  I had no idea who Shirley Temple was but I'm sure if I did remember that, I would have felt a kindred with her, sure that she must have wanted to have long ponytails too instead of the mess we apparently shared.

As I grew older and Mom was no longer making my hair style decisions, I was in the unfortunate timeline of being a high school girl in the Midwest in the 80s.  When it took almost a full quarter can of Aqua Net each day to maintain one's winged-out and banged-up hair each morning, nothing was going to swing and bounce.  I had the high-teased claw of a bang and weird wingy-things sprayed to an inch of their fabricated lives around my ears (to show off the 5 different pierced earrings I wore each day, of course - three in the right and two in the left).  And though I tried to grow it,  it all still never got longer than about shoulder length.  How could it with all that teasing and breaking and chemicals afterall?

By my Junior year in high school, some of my friends started abandoning that (now) crazy look for something more natural.  Kelly cut hers into a cute soft little cut, Vani was the first to grow out her bangs for an all-one-length look I coveted, and Laura had that thick long hair that actually *moved* behind her on her shoulders even if her bangs rivaled mine some days.

Looking back now, it's entirely too amazing how much my hair defined me and how much it affected my self-esteem.  I sent away for those crackass useless solutions found in the back of catalogs that promised longer, stronger hair if you only combed this liquid into it daily.  And I did, religiously, to no avail.  Remembering the texture of that solution now, I'm pretty sure it was just scented water or something. I also tried deep conditioning masks on my hair and wondered why they weren't working when I was still continuing to tease the crap out of it all with the White Rain and hairdryer on the hottest setting each morning.  It was unfair.  If only Mom would have let me have long hair when I was younger, I would have never gotten to this place!  I'd have that long, bouncy tail by now!

When I got to college it changed a little, but I still never had that hair.  Thankfully, the Midwest caught up with the rest of the country by then and the age of the big teased hair went away with the 80s hair bands that inspired and glorified it.   But to get over all the damage I'd previously done to my poor head, my hair was cut off  and growing out.  I could barely make little pigtails, let alone the swingy pony I wanted.  The ones that Jenna and Jody and Ona had?  Unfair.  Who knew a ponytail was so difficult anyway?

The irony came by the end of college: I finally managed to grow my hair long and healthy again, but it *hurt* to do anything with it.  It was so full and thick --something I know is not a curse, but sure felt like it; still does to this day sometimes-- that I'd break barrettes putting them in and if I wore a rubber band, it would have to be at the base of my neck because if  I did it up high, my head would start to ache in about 20 minutes.  And ponies at the base of your neck? Totally don't bounce and swing.  I was beginning to think I was destined to be doomed forever.

When I became a "real" adult with a "real" job, I then fell back into Mom's philosophy that adult, working women didn't have long hair, so I cut it all off again on her advice. Regretting it, I spent years growing it back.  Fortunately for me this time (as opposed to back in the 80s), there were visions of many successful professional women with long hair too and I began to realize it was OK to have long hair even after you were a schoolchild (even if Mom did ask me, every time I came to visit, "when are you going to cut your hair?"). I had cute cuts. I rocked "The Rachel" just as well as she did; had other women tell me they loved my styles over the years.  But I still never got to have my swingy ponytail.  I daresay I went overboard at times trying to make up for it. I had just as many horribly messy styles as I did good ones.  Sometimes I still think that a woman my age probably should not have hair as long as I do, but I still can't bear to cut it because I know I'm still compensating somehow.  Today it's longer than I've probably ever had it in my life (and I'm going to bet right now Mom will absolutely hate it when she sees it again!) but I just can't bear to cut it.

This past Tuesday it was storming quite badly so I decided to hit the gym instead of walking around the park as my usual plan is on Tuesdays.  Thankfully I've gotten into a healthy pattern of having a well-packed gym bag in my car should this ever happen.  I hit the locker room, tied my hair up high for a change (we have better rubber bands and barrettes that don't break now for girls with thicker hair than back then) and grabbed me a treadmill with one of those little TV screens on it. I tuned that into the news that I watched on closed caption while I listened to my iTunes with my headphones and just started walking my heart out at a crazy fast speed.  And I couldn't have been more surprised or filled with more glee when the TV screen faded to black between commercials and I saw a darkened reflection of myself on there:  my ponytail on the back of my head? Was swinging away, back and forth behind my head as if it really was an independent tail with a life of its own.

I'm her now! Finally, I'm THAT girl with that swingy, healthy bouncy tail: the one I always wanted to be.  It's entirely irrational how happy that makes me. And most likely means one thing.

I'll probably cut it all off soon.  :-)

The Power of Journaling: Me + 20 years

Whenever I'm walking, and that's often lately, I compose blogs in my head.  I know exactly what I want to write and almost exactly how I want to write it.  But when I get home, I don't sit down quickly enough to do it and then, somehow, I just never do.  I get distracted. Log into work. Flip on the TV or sit down to pay my bills.  We all know how that happens.

I was just talking with my friend Sara about this tonight. Being of about the same age, we have memories, both mental and physical, of the years we kept journals or diaries or "blogs on paper" - whatever you want to call them.  The same age is important in that when we did it, it was before the age of the internet and the 140 character limit or the quick Facebook mind dump where we actually took pen to paper and really WROTE. I absolutely adore that I have those old journals now: so much that I should just pick up one and do it again. But I never do. And I get angry with myself that I don't.

For years as I moved from apartment to apartment, those journals lived with most of my other belongings in a storage unit.  It wasn't until I moved to my place now, when I got to dump that unit and have all my personal things around me again, did I rediscover them. And I realized that I hadn't opened a single one of them for 20 years.

Imagine my glee then, when I decided to sit down and page through them just a bit ago:  written journals from years gone by. I recognize my own handwriting, of course: that actually hasn't changed much (that fact amuses me a bit, actually).  And I recognize the young woman who wrote them....sort of.  I can see myself in her, but then, also not. I can read of her joy and her pain and her confusion, her fun with friends, her confusion over family, her heartache over early lost loves; but it's hard to believe that was me in a way.  I don't feel the emotions that young (er) woman did then.  I often want to shake her and say: what are you thinking, girl? Or: it gets so much better than that. You deserve more than that! Or: yeah. That's your first of a line of heartbreaks, honey.  Some will be easier; some will be worse.  I want to tell her she has no clue what she's talking about most of the time.  Or: ohhh just wait, child. Your life is going to go places you haven't even dreamed about yet.  But, obviously, I can't tell HER anything, so I just kept reading.

And then I opened up to this entry; dated January 24, 1993:

"Wow. This is kind of strange. Knowing that someone will someday be reading these entries. Maybe not so strange as much as awkward...or unusual.  I do have an audience in mind when I write, which I guess is weird for a personal journal. Usually I guess it's just myself + 20 years."

Myself + 20 years. 1993 was just that! How did this girl -- this me -- who was so naive and young and green -- somehow come right out and write something that was so dead on true like that?  Trust me: it gave me chills. I checked the calendar quite a few times before I let it register the truth on me that yep: she wrote that 20 years ago and I read it for the first time since she/I did, exactly 20 years later. 

I mean, honestly? How cool is that?

I actually really don't want to go back and tell that old young me those things I mentioned earlier.  That girl would never have understood them (and what 20-year-old listens to a 40-something anyway?). And I certainly don't want to go back and BE her again.  But what I do want  is to recapture that spirit and joy she/I had in just picking up a pen and putting words on paper -- however mundane they may seem at the time -- because it IS apparent now that they really can mean something later. Somehow she knew that then and I forgot it along the way when she and I decided to stop keeping journals.  Huh. Imagine that.  Sometimes you really CAN learn from the younger generation.

And how crazy more to learn from "the younger generation" that was actually your own self.

Going to start doing this again.  It's past time to start this again. :)  And, almost serendipitously, I just realized I actually have a completely blank paper journal among the full ones on my shelf.  (It apparently lived, saddened, amongst its full brethren in that storage unit, too.)  And the very first entry will naturally have to be how I hope I'm lucky enough to have an audience in mind as I write.

Me plus another 20 years.


*journals pictured actual journals  :)  The asparagus one is the blank one. Why a journal with *asparagus* on it appealed to me in the day is beyond me.  But she must have known something; it makes me grin now.