Rose-Colored Bifocals

Back in the days when I had time to read - so much time, in fact, that I was reading for a living ... if you can call incurring thousands of dollars in student loans a living. Which, you know, you can't. So, uh ... yeah.

Anyway, back then, my eyes were on a steady diet of Chaucer and Virginia Woolf. It was grad school. It was an English lit program. I read. I read a lot. And my eyes forgot how to see far away.

So I wore glasses, and I kinda liked them. They gave me that sexy librarian vibe. Or so I thought. Possibly that was all in my head.

The glasses were a fleeting thing, though. I wore them for about three years, after which my eyes learned once again that life can happen at a distance.

Twenty years of nearly perfect vision later, I'm buying glasses again. See, about a month ago, give or take, I got lost. This is not unusual. I get lost so often that my sweet and thoughtful fellow got me a GPS for Christmas - one that talks to me from time to time just to remind me I'm driving, and believe me, the rest of you are grateful that it does. But this particular lostisode was pre-Christmas. Pre-GPS. What's worse, I knew where I was going. I didn't get lost because I was lost. I got lost because I missed my turn. And I missed my turn because I couldn't read the street sign.

Dangerous much?

So I went to the optometrist. I plonked down a ridiculous sum of money. And now I'm soon to be the proud owner of a brand spanking new pair of glasses that the much younger woman at the shop told me were fashionable but not flashy. I have no fashion sense. She smiled at me and said I looked great after saying a few times I didn't. So I decided to trust her. 

You want to know the best part? They're bifocals. Or, rather, progressives, which is a nice, modern way of saying bifocals. Apparently I can't see close up, and I can't see far away. I can see in the middle, though. I guess that's something.

Bifocals. Feh.

I don't feel like a sexy librarian anymore. I just feel old.

You think maybe they'll make them with rose-colored lenses?

Pseudonymity

In the interest of openness and fair play, and for the new readers who aren't finding me through my Facebook page (which still surprises me, but thank you), I want to let all y'all know: My name's not Rosemary. My name is something totally different. And, apparently, it is totally distinctive in a beautifully ethnic kind of way, which I know because I Googled myself and there's only like two of me out there, and most of the me's out there really are me.

If you followed that.

Because I'm one of only two of me, I'm easy to find. I don't want to be easy to find. I've got three gorgeous and vulnerable kids who deserve their mom's best efforts to keep them safe and whole and see them through to adulthood.

So I use a pseudonym. I don't refer to my kids by name, not even by made-up name. And I don't (generally) talk about where we live.

The Rosemary bit came from my blog name. And that's a bit of a story. I meant to call my blog "Elbows Off the Table," and that is, in fact, the title. I chose it because that's the phrase I heard at the dinner table over and over and over again growing up. That, and "Put your napkin in your lapkin," which I thought would be a silly title for a blog. Either would have made sense, though, because the original idea of this blog was to write about family life through food. Kind of like M. F. K. Fisher for the blogger mom set. But "Elbows" was taken in the Bloggerverse, so I created a subtitle and used the end of it as my URL. Family life through rosemary-colored glasses. Rosemary. Herb. Food. Get it? Yes, folks, I am just that clever.

Except that this blog has become much more than life through food. It is about food, but only sometimes. Mostly it's about family. It's about my beautiful children. It's about Asperger's Syndrome and how we manage that particular difference together. It's about the challenges of being a single parent. It's about me and my friends, who make up a kind of family of our own. And it's about the stuff that ties my family together, across the generations: stuff like knitting, which I learned at my grandmother's knee, and my mother's lemon Jell-o cake, and the fact that I'm afraid to fly. Which is relevant because important parts of my family live very far away.

And, always, it's about finding the bright side. Those rosemary-colored glasses are my way of looking at the world.

So now I'm Rosemary. Because, as it happens, I'm a rose-colored girl.

The Rose-Colored Life

You know what happens when you live a rose-colored life? Sometimes you get stressed out. Ridiculously so, to the point of total wigginess. And you're so busy being chipper and looking at the bright side that you don't even notice.

And then suddenly you're breaking into the big bag o' Nerds Jelly Beans that the Easter Bunny's been storing on top of your fridge. Nerds Jelly Beans, by the way, contain no chocolate, which makes that particular behavior highly aberrant. The cheerful sound of your children singing along with that horrible Justin Bieber song sends you zooming off to testy land. And the rhythmic crunch-crunch chewing noises on the new Kit-Kat commercial drive you beyond the brink of insanity.

Why anyone would think bad manners sell chocolate is beyond me.

I want a vacation. And a margarita. And a back rub, 'cause I spent 8 hours driving on Wednesday and everything still hurts. I want to be 20 lbs lighter (40 wouldn't hurt) and able to run long distances without throwing out my hip. I want money to grow on trees. I want to sleep at night. I want to win the lottery and buy me and all my single-parent friends a house and a hybrid, and then pay someone to clean them both. I want the new season of Glee to start tomorrow. I want to be a teacher. I want to write a book, without working very hard at it. And I want it to be a bestseller. I want about 800 people to suddenly decide my blog is crack and they can't get enough of it, and then maybe someone will pay me to write it. I want my kids to grow up healthy and happy and fairly well adjusted. I want them to be good and caring people who think their mother walks on water.

And I really, really, really want the whole world to chew with their mouths closed.

Mostly I'd just like my rose-colored glasses back, please. Life works better when I have them on.

Kissing 2009 Good-Bye

It's a new year. A new me. A whole new name. Well, an old name, but since I haven't used it in 13+ years, it feels new. New "About Me," over there on the right, too. Kinda had to change it now that I've officially left the limboverse between separation and divorce and entered single motherhood.

Felt all that merited a new template, too. Old one was nice and green. This one is not green, but it's far easier to read, and that's considerably more important. I wish I had the time and the talent to make my own beautiful green blog layout. I don't.

And so, a new year. I'm tickled pink to have kissed 2009 good-bye. Much crap in 2009. Much. Crap.

Lots of joy too, though. And since I'm a rose-colored glasses kind of gal, I thought it best to wrap up the year with a Done List of the good stuff.

In the past year, I have ...

• Introduced my kids to 35 members of my immediate and extended family, all of whom love them to pieces just because they were born.
  
• Hugged my dad. In person even.
  
• Successfully baked cakes from scratch. Martha Stewart's Cupcakes is my new kitchen bible, and trust me, the yellow buttermilk cupcakes with fluffy vanilla frosting will put you in a cupcake coma. Pure joy.
• Rediscovered old friends and made some new ones. These friends? They're the kind who, once you've met them, you wonder how you ever thought your life was whole without them.
  
• Found The Best Side Dish ever - Cauliflower Goat Cheese Gratin, at Bobby Flay's Bar Americain in New York. If you go there, order five servings of cauliflower and a Cosmo. It's all you need.
• Saw Wicked. Lately, my diva's been singing "Defying Gravity" ... and she's doing it well.
  
• Saw the most beautiful place on earth: Paradise on Mount Rainier in August.
• Learned several important lessons, one of which I'm currently ignoring (that would be Lesson 3: Get Some Sleep, Stupid)
• Rescued one sorely damaged and dearly treasured cast iron fry pan from kitchen fire. Elbow grease and bacon brought it back. So nice to have an excuse to cook lots and lots of bacon.
• Made 57 blog posts. People actually read them. Awesome.
  
• Got my kids through an insane number of transitions. Separation. Divorce. Middle school. Preschool. New au pairs. Old au pairs. And realized that, after a full year of change, they are happy. Really, truly, genuinely happy.
  
• And, of course, made it through Limbo. That's the big one, really.
  

If I sat here long enough I could think of another dozen or so wonderful things. Because there's never so much crap that it completely obliterates the good. Rose-colored glasses, you know. They make the good stuff that much easier to find.