by mssinglemama on September 17, 2009
Everyone in the world needs a new website.
It makes sense. The Internet changes daily and the website you invested in even one year ago is now out of date, out of whack and just plain useless. This is a bad thing for most businesses but a very good thing for me. I am flooded with work and starting to feel like I’m in a box that keeps shrinking. But then I pop out, crack through a window and meet another huge deadline and everything seems right in the world again. I love my work so it’s all very exciting. Can there be anything more rewarding than giving a small or medium sized business a website that actually works for them, rather than against them?
On top of my own work and this blog I have been spending a huge chunk of my time with these guys. Click onto this page and scroll down to the bottom – see? That’s me, working away, with my hand on my head trying to digest the gigantic amount of work my Troy Allen just handed me. When you say Troy’s name you have to say his first and his last together. [click to continue…]
by mssinglemama on September 7, 2009
“If everything works out with John, Benjamin won’t know a time when he wasn’t around.”
As my therapist’s words sink in the last three years of my life flash through my mind; from the beginning when I packed everything up and moved into my mother’s, to the quiet nights at her house in the woods wondering and wishing myself away and back to some semblance of independence and then to the moment when Benjamin and I stepped into our own sweet, little apartment – ready to begin our new life.
What followed is all here, on this blog in my eBook, or safe in my mind.
I sit on her couch, staring off into a painting on the wall as I try to grasp this idea of him not remembering anything before John Bear. The memories wash over me – the adventures big and small – like the time we were yelled at by a hair salon owner or the countless grocery store trips that typically ended in knock down drag out tantrums. Then there were the big adventures like trips to find Joshua Trees
or deep forests and mountain coves in Vancouver.
And smaller adventures like hours of puddle jumping for no reason
or sweating it out on a hot summer day in August to hear our future president, a man also raised by a single mom, speak to us from about twenty feet away.
or chasing bunnies with Sydney.
Now, looking back, it is these moments – the moments when I forced myself out of the house with him, braving the book store, the library, the festivals, the camping trips and the road trips all by myself, trying to fill the time – that are the best memories I have of the two of us.
Memories of the moments when we both forgot where we were or when we just took our time
because we didn’t have anywhere else to be.
“So they’ll all be gone? He won’t remember a thing?” I ask my therapist or, as I fondly call her, Wonder Woman. She’s helping me to straighten out my trust issues and to figure out why, in the past, I had a pattern of choosing bad boys dysfunctional men. [click to continue…]
by mssinglemama on January 27, 2009
“You sound stressed,” my friend said over the phone.
“Yeah, well, I guess I am.”
Is this getting harder or am I imagining it?
Terrible-twos? Really? I thought it was the threes. He is almost three, but still… I think it’s me. I’m impatient right now. I’m bored and yes, I’m a little stressed. But not because of him. Benjamin is amazing.
“Mommy,” he says, “I need to tell you something.”
It’s a phrase he learned from said Mommy.
Then he cups my face in his little hands and tells me something about his day, his feelings, or the nerf gun I bought him. He’s awesome. It’s totally me. Or is it? I just don’t know because this is the first time I’ve done this mom thing and I’m doing it alone.
There’s no one to bounce all of this shit off of … am I doing this right? Or that?
And it’s winter. I need sunshine. And it’s not just winter — it’s freezing. Last week the sun came out for one afternoon. Then the clouds rolled back in and we’ve been under them ever since.
I lived in Texas once – in Fort Worth. The sun never faded. When it did, the black storm clouds rolled through and they were gone twenty minutes later.
Distant storms. You could feel them on the breeze, just a whisper in the trees.
I discovered words like those at live concerts in the hot, Texas air with cowboys every which way and my little sister by my side. We were single and free and so incredibly happy. [click to continue…]
