HB

(((bad news))).

My life lately has been a basket case of baby illness and super stress. I find myself counting so-called ‘blessings’ every day, right along with counting how many things just stink. I’ve been listening to this woman Tara Brach’s podcasts just to get myself to sleep at night- she’s new agey but not in an annoying and unobtainable, yoga pro kind of way… she’s relatable and frankly has become my mother in the last few weeks. As adults, I feel like we too need a momma sometimes. When things look hopeless and bleak and the season is changing and life is changing and diapers need changing- wouldn’t it be nice if mom would just swoop in, make you some soup and cookies and let you take the day to watch Freaks n’ Geeks in bed while she takes over your life? Sing to ME, goddamnit! of COURSE I feel horrible for Clementine who is the one with the ear infection and the month long cold. But I also have to feel sorry for US, the ones who are up all night with the constant whine and the irritable little thing all day long. At Target today, she was fussing nearly the entire time, the poor little nose tap running amuck down her coat, and I was in a total 9 mile stare, hoping that people would not pay attention, judge, scoff, or feel sorry for my crying-baby-in- the-target cart ass.

It made me remember one time at Target long before I was a parent, when I was sharing the isle with a woman who had just snapped at her 2 or 3 year old child, who was whining for a toy he could not have. “GOD DAMNIT! I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT! STOP IT! STOP IT! YOU’RE DRIVING ME INSANE!”

“What a BITCH!” I thought to myself, “That poor little guy… all he wants is a toy. He’s innocent, and can’t help himself. She needs some serious anger management”.

HA!

Now, I would think “You GO, girl! That little bastard doesn’t deserve a lick of ice cream. Hateful little thing. I’m amazed you lasted this long, sister. Go get your nails done. Get a massage. Judge you not, my friend. Show him who’s boss lady!”

(((good news))))

Not that I am whining just to do so on the internet. I do have some positive things that have happened lately that I feel like sharing. First, my 7” Bad Reputation, was released last week and has been doing well. We played a show to release it at the Varsity theater nov. 1st and that was a blast. We played Iowa City last week, which was also fun. 

oh, and OBAMA won the election. That was pretty neat. And Minnesota voted NO NO. Still a long way to go for gay and lesbian families, but at least we took a stand to let the road be paved ahead of us. 

Also I got to see David Sedaris this weekend, which has been a goal of mine for many years now. Yep, he’s damn funny and ridiculously talented!

there, I feel better. thanks for reading if you did so past the first few lines!

ex-oh,

mommas need mommas too.

The two of us were just two this weekend for the first time in over a year, marking the first birthday of our first child, Clementine Rex McCormick, born October 16, 2011. We decided to embark not far from our home, but in the St. Croix river valley, my personal favorite, where we hope to someday own land and build a home to raise our family and have a studio. Dreams are heavier in the fall, and something about the air and the leaves and the color and calmness of all surroundings seems to hush out the real world, the loud summer world, and heighten our alertness as humans, preparing as it were for the winter months of solitude and hibernation. Up to this weekend, in the last month or so, I have been writing feverishly, as if I had no more time after a certain point. When I reached a “certain point”, however, I decided that I was in just as much need, wavering between songwriting in a very designated and collegiate-like pace, as my partner who has been working at a window installation company for the past couple of months, so the weekend could not have come at a better time. We needed to remember ourselves outside of parenthood, which I feel is a tricky task for all, when your day and energy and attention is based around a small human that you produced, juggling the day to day crap of laundry and dishes and house keeping with your other jobs, whether installing windows or writing songs or building something to be proud of in the garage on the weekends. This has become our life. Clementine was conceived only 6 months after my boyfriend and I met, and we were living half way across the country from each other anyway. Needless to say, it was a bigger endeavor for us than most people who are together or married for a long while and decide that, under their circumstances, it’s the right time to have a child. It was never the right time… right? But it happened. And she was born beautiful and smart and made to change us in ways we won’t understand for years. But this weekend, we got to be two- we hiked and made fires and looked at the cold St. Croix and talked about our future, which is something we have had little time nor energy to do for a long time. We are people, a girl and a boy, who happened to meet through mutual friends at a party two plus change years ago, who hung out because we did not have children and we were free and we thought he was cute. And we signed a deal, invisible and sweet, which has bound us, regardless of circumstance, for a long duration of time.

I think it’s important for parents, and anybody, really, to get back to that raw and vulnerable place that you were at without knowing, before you became in charge of a smaller and more vulnerable thing than yourself. I’m grateful that we did that and we returned to our most beautiful daughter with the wealth of that experience. I don’t give a fuck if this is cheesy- it’s true. And somehow I’m writing about it on the internet, so it must really mean something. right? (insert smiling emoticon here).