Yesterday, I was griping to Brad about my adult onset acne. It's very frustrating to me because I get worse break-outs now in my 40s than I got as a teenager.

In my frustration, I called myself a pie face rather than a pizza face.

As I was getting ready for work, it suddenly occurred to me what I'd said. As I chuckled to myself about my dumbness, I was reminded me of something my mother had said one time when I was a kid.

My mother is one of these kinds of people who just does not swear. Like, ever. I think in all of my childhood, I heard her use the word "damn" maybe three times and you knew when she used actual, real swear words, it was serious business!

Normally, her swear words were things like "h-e-double-toothpicks", "pickled pig's feet", or "puddle jumpers". Once in a while, she'd even go so far as to use "bunnies".



One day, my family was on the town, going out to eat. My brother, who is the oldest and was about 18 at the time, was driving. My mother was sitting by him in the passenger seat with me and my sisters in the back seat.

Seeing the place we were going on the other side of the road, my brother made a sudden u-turn in the car, throwing us all to one side and narrowly missing on-coming traffic. He pulled over to the curb, where we all tried to right ourselves and catch our breath.

My mother was so angry with him that she wanted to tell him off but was just not going to swear at him. She started to say, "You.....", but struggled to find the right thing to say to him without swearing at him or calling him a bad name.

You could see her mouth working and hear little mumbley sorts of noises as she struggled to come up with just the right thing to say.

Suddenly, she burst out with, "You pie face!"

There was about 5 seconds of stunned silence, then we all burst out laughing.

My poor mother was instantly deflated. She was not about to laugh because she was still so angry at him but there was just no way we were going to stop laughing long enough to allow her her very justified self-righteous anger.

To this day, that is absolutely my most favorite story of my childhood and I love to tell it to my kids. Once in a while, I will call them pie faces just for the utterly ridiculous nature of it.

And my mother? While she never used that insult again, it didn't do much to change the way she would swear. But I guess she learned her lesson to not make stuff up under a particularly stressful situation to avoid swearing because what you make up might just be more amusing than you intended it to be.

So here's the thing: I am baaaad at deciding on things to do on the weekends. It's particularly rough when my boys are up. For reasons unknown to me, they seem to want to be entertained on weekends they visit.

In the past, they wouldn't go out to play much because an authority figure said something to them that scared them about the neighborhoods I lived in, even though they were safe neighborhoods.

Now that I live in a very nice, family-friendly community, they still have not made friends.

We have a lake behind our house, which I know sounds all high-falutin' and hoity-toity but since we live in a rural area 30 miles west of Salt Lake, it's actually not as high-falutin' and hoity-toity as it sounds.

We have a paddleboat that came with the house. The kids were enthralled with it for all of 5 seconds and have rarely used it since.

We have a community pool that charges up the wazoo to use, which seems really ridiculous to me because, hello! It's situated right next to a lake! Why charge so much to use the pool when there's a lake kids can get into for free?

But when I was a teen? I spent ALL my time during the summer at the pool. These boys? They never do.

Our weekends typically go something like this:

Them: So what are we gonna do this weekend?

Me: What would you like to do?

Them: I dunno.


















There's a part of me that screams inside every time. How can you not know what you want to do?

Here's what we have in our little town to do: ride your bike, use the lake, go swimming, use the skatepark, use the basketball court, go see a movie, go bowling. I admit, that's not a ton of stuff to do but it should be enough for the boys to entertain themselves on a weekend, right?


And I admit, I'm not good at coming up with things for them to do because I was never a teenage boy (shocking but true) so I don't know what teen and pre-teen boys do.

And I'm not sure that Brad was ever a teenage boy, either, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. Brad is much better with girls than boys.

So we struggle to come up with things for them to do.

Maybe we're just not imaginative.

Maybe we're boring.

Maybe we're succumbing to the burden the boys have placed on us to entertain them when they should be capable of doing it themselves.

And honestly? I want them to enjoy their time with me so that maybe, eventually, at some point, they'll decide they want to live with me instead of their dad.


Oh dear lord! A self-discovery moment! I hate it when that happens in public.

Hmm. I guess the burden that's been placed on us to entertain them wasn't put on us entirely by them. It's a burden I placed on us as well. Which is a topic for a different post.

In the meantime, I guess it's always going to be a matter of figuring out what to do to entertain them. Or to help them find things to do on their own.

And releasing us from the stress of trying to be the popular parents. Coz there's no burden more overwhelming than trying to be the popular parent.

Believe me, I know!

Seven years ago today, I met my future husband.

We were both using Yahoo! personals. I'd had a few dates but nothing that lasted very long or turned out well. Some I left feeling kinda creeped out afterwards.

That's not entirely true. I did date one guy for quite a while but obviously, that turned into nothing. We are still friends, though.

Then I got a message from this guy.

And I was this girl


who was thinking, "Uh, whatever."

But... that guy in that picture was really super nice in the few messages we exchanged and he was very interesting.

And when he finally asked me out, I thought, "Why not?" I didn't expect much to come of it but figured maybe I'd have a good night out.

He was not easy to talk to. He didn't say a whole lot and I felt like I was dragging words out of him. It didn't help that I wasn't much of a talker, either. We went to a movie, I went home, and thought, "Well, that wasn't bad but I'm not sure I'll go out with him again."

But I did.

Every time I went on a date with Brad, I'd get home and think, "That was nice/fun but I'm not sure I'll go out with him again."

I don't know how things would have turned out if I hadn't been dating the other guy, Shane, at the same time but I don't know that things would have turned out so well. After all, dating both slowed things down quite a bit and made me keep things in a better perspective.

Six months later, I was sitting in Brad's living room next to him, our relationship still wasn't super serious. I looked over at him and it occurred to me that I had stopped thinking, "I'm not sure I'll go out with him again," and was now thinking, "I can't see this ever ending."

And when that thought hit me, I realized that I had something special there.

It took about 2 more years before I was able to get Brad's brothers to move out of Brad's house so I could move in. And it took another year after that before we got married.


The road with Brad has rarely been easy. We have had traumas (the loss of a pregnancy and the strain of a foster child we'd hoped to adopt coming into our home, turning it upside down, and having to be removed) and we've had our struggles (mostly financial over the last several years) and we've had to start therapy to learn how to talk to each other better and listen to each other better and work better together as a couple.

The one thing about Brad that I have been so grateful for is that he's just allowed me to be me. No real expectations as to who he thought I should be. No unreasonable demands for me to be something I'm not. He doesn't ask me to be anyone other than I am. He's allowed me to figure out who I am, which has been a real struggle.

But I'm finally becoming the person I have always been meant to be.

There is no one else I've had as much fun with, either.

We spend many nights at bedtime, lying in bed talking and laughing and being generally just silly. Brad has a wonderful sense of humor and he lets me poke fun at him without getting upset. His general lack of defensiveness has made it much easier for me to take myself less seriously, too.

Believe me, he does a pretty good job of making fun of me, too.

Wow, 7 years. It's a record length for him and almost a record length for me. And yet it doesn't feel like it's been that long.

When you spend a lot of time laughing and enjoying yourself with the person you love most in the world, time doesn't really even exist.

This man was made for me.