Middle Age Mommy - Keeping It All Together

Spring has arrived in the south.  It is beautiful.  The trees are blooming, bulbs are pushing up, and the temperature is wonderful.  Everyone is sporting their flip flops and jockeying for position on the patios and decks of local restaurants and bars.  I have lived in Atlanta since 1990.  In that time, there have been a handful of scary moments with the weather, specifically tornadoes.  Just a few years ago, downtown was ravaged by a twister.  The storm struck the 71,000-seat Georgia Dome at 9:45 p.m. during a Southeastern Conference tournament basketball game. It shattered windows and tore roofs from buildings, including CNN Center, before continuing into several residential neighborhoods.  We are in-town dwellers, and that was a pretty scary storm.  We were oblivious to it, in the midst of hosting a dinner party, but someone did comment that it was a little windy outside.  Just down the street, literally, less than a half mile, the...

I was about 10 years old before I discovered the Beatles.  Do the math.  I was born in November of 1963, and the Beatles first US tour started in February of 1964.  That made me 3 months old.  Fast forward to my  grandparent's home in Georgetown, Kentucky, somewhere around 1973...my grandmother handed me a few 45's she thought I might like.  What she put in my hands, were several early Beatles records that my aunt had purchased in the early 1960's and never took with her.   I did not know that I had been given the gift of original early Beatles 45s on the Capital yellow swirl label., but what I discovered was "Ticket to Ride", "Please, Please Me", and "I want to Hold Your Hand".  I flipped.  My musical exposure up to that point had been my parent's Peter, Paul and Mary albums, Kingston Trio and the Smother's Brothers.  My Republican parents had a penchant for counterculture music.  I had just started listening to Top 40 radio ...

Here I sit, almost three months into my 47th year.  When did that happen?  I do not feel 47.  Let me rephrase that, I do not feel like what I think 47 should feel like.  I remember being much younger and thinking that the age I am now, was impossibly old.  I am not impossibly old.  Not yet.  If nature works in my favor and I steer clear of all disasters, both natural and man made, then I hope to live to be impossibly old.  In fact, I embrace it.  Let's face it, growing old is better than the alternative of not getting to grow old.  Right?  I say this flippantly, but I have a few friends and a couple of family members who never made it to the ripe old age of 47.  I seriously consider myself lucky. I think back on milestone birthdays - the obvious, 18, 21, 29, 40....and here I sit tonight, closer to 50 than 40.  When I turned eighteen, I was living in Boca Raton, Florida and a senior in high school.  I had been in F...

February 16th is a special day.  It marks the day that my son made his physical entrance into this world.  It is a date that I hold close to my heart.  I remember that day so well too.  Actually, it was the evening, as he was born close to 9:30 at night.  My parents, my sister and grandmother were all there.  I promised my grandmother that I would deliver Dominick on her birthday, and I made it with a couple hours to spare!  My son shares his birthday with my maternal grandmother, Dorothy Catching, or as we always called her, Mamaw.  Mamaw was a very special person in my world and I miss her every day.  She died on Thanksgiving day 2009 at the age of 84.  She was many things, rolled up into a little crazy ball of hillbilly wonderfulness.  She was a healer, a country cook of the highest caliber, and a good listener.  She could give you a hard time better than anyone.  If you have never heard the term Mamaw,let me explain....

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...

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...

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 ...