Middle Age Mommy - Keeping It All Together

I have been doing a lot of thinking about home lately.  I have been in Atlanta for over twenty years now.  It does not really feel like home to me.  I like Atlanta.  I am blessed that my parents, my sister, and other close family members live near.  I have a bounty of wonderful friends here too.  My child was born in Atlanta.  My husband is crazy about this city, but Atlanta isn't really home to me.  It is where I live, and don't get me wrong,  I really like where I live.  So, I asked myself, what is 'home'?  Yes, sigh, it is where the heart is.  Is my heart here?  The man I love and my precious child are here. A huge part of  my heart really is here in Atlanta, just not 100%.  I can't put my finger on it.  Maybe it is partially because I did not grow up here.  Maybe too, it is because life has changed so much since growing up.   I had a wealth of opportunities and experiences as a child and teenager living in Kansas City, then later in south Florida.  I was alway

Growing up, my mother was the pretty mom.  She was not a glamorous beauty, but a very approachable, natural one.  Mom had glossy black hair, beautiful skin and high cheek bones.  That is was the Cherokee blood we are rumored to have.  She was voted prettiest girl in at Cumberland High School her senior year.  She never quite knew how to handle the attention her beauty brought her.  My mother was more than just pretty though she was kind. People were drawn to my mother.  Children loved her.  She was very easy to talk to.  I cannot count the times that I went out with her, only to have complete strangers strike up a conversation and engage her for minutes on end.  It was almost silly. Christmas 2009, we took Dominick to visit Santa Claus at the local shopping center.  Santa looked very happy when my mother walked in with us.  In fact, after the obligatory chat and photo with my son, he says to my  mother, "I sure do like how you look, come take a picture with me!".   You d

When I was growing up, we had to stand up, walk to the television and turn a dial to change the channel.  We only had 4 good channels.  There were still rotary phones that were of course, stationary.  In order for me to have a private conversation with a friend, I used the wall mounted phone with the very, very long cord.  I could travel out of the kitchen and into the dining room to sit and chat.  Cable channels became the norm about seventh or eighth grade.  MTV was introduced to the world my senior year of high school.  Video did indeed kill the radio star.  I witnessed it's death.  I managed to write every term paper for all four years of college on a typewriter, using white-out to correct my mistakes.  I was a terrible typist.  My papers were messy.  I did not twirl with excitement when personal computers started to show up in the office.  Let's say my attentions were on other things - things more male that played in bands.  I was a receptionist around 1989, for an enginee

It seems that I have always had a bit of a flair for performing.  I remember living in Lexington, Kentucky and dressing up in my mother's nightgowns and attaching her fall (that extra piece of hair that women in the 1960's would use to add volume) to the top of my head.  I would twirl to the sounds of the Lawrence Welk show in my living room.  My parent's would clap and indulge the budding performer in me.  Later, after we moved to Prairie Village, Kansas, I would play current pop hits on my plastic record player (one tiny speaker) and act out the song.  Karen Carpenter typically filled my need for the dramatic.  Just try to picture a skinny eight year old with big teeth, and frizzy hair, belting out "don't you remember you told me you  loved me baby..".  I always sang louder in music class then anyone else, and always vied for my position in class at Miller Marley Dance school,  center and front (all the better to see myself my dear).  I think by age 6, or 7,

It is 2011 and growing up in the 1970's and 80's, I never even thought about the world tick-tocking over to the twenty-first century, but here I sit in 2011.  I never thought I would be sitting in a home office, listening to my almost 5 year old son battle Clone Troopers with his father on a PS3.  A home office?  A husband and a son?  Does this somehow make me a grown up?  I guess somewhere between the post college party years and finding myself a niche in the Architecture & Interior Design industry, I grew up.  Sort of.  I am 47 years old, married for a little over 5 years now, and my son will turn 5 next month, but yet I still worry that I will get caught with no ID when buying alcohol, and there is the struggle with paying the power bill, or buying the new shoes.  Luckily my husband keeps me in check.  The power bill is paid, and I have learned to bargain hunt.  The intention of this blog though, is to make me look in the mirror and rediscover the Jennifer from the last