Perhaps I should have apologized better, and then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered in any case.

People are pissed…but they are reading my blog.

I know there are people out there who thrive on attention – and could give a shit less if it is positive or negative. The whole soggy potato chip theory and all…

I want a potato chip (attention).

I WANT a potato chip!

I WANT A POTATO CHIP.

Fine, I’ll take a soggy potato chip. At least I’ve gotten something.

Yeah, there are those who love a good fight, spoil for a chance in limelight, even if they are screaming bitches or pointy-headed pricks.

I’m not one of them.

My stomach, all weekend now, has been riding the roller coaster with me, lifting slightly, only to drop to my knees again when I think about the whole debacle.

I truly did not mean to piss people off. It was not my intent, I do not enjoy hurting others feelings, and I’m pretty damned miserable over the whole thing.

That said, I’ve got a pretty piece of pride. I know for certain that I meant no deep offense, which some have quite obviously taken, and will not apologize for something when I don’t feel I did anything wrong. And then there is the whole cumulative effect…there were a couple of other posts in the last week or so that could be looked back on and construed as negative towards KC Homeschool when they…were…not.

So this morning when I saw a comment on my whole Trunk or Treat post, where I suggest that people try and go back to the time-honored tradition of ringing a fucking doorbell instead of wandering around like dorks among a bunch of parked cars (I did say it nicer than that, truly I did) I knew it had to have come from the KC Homeschool bunch.

Yeah.

Damned if I didn’t kick their nest but good when you add it all up – Trunk or Treat, Herding Cats (where I described organizing homeschoolers as akin to herding cats), and the one that put them over the edge Spitting Mad Mama Llama.

Fuck.

I’ve finished the ‘required’ daily posts for both The Deadly Nightshade and The Homeschool Advocate for the week. I’ve tried to choose my words carefully throughout the posts – since it is quite obvious I’ve screwed the pooch with the three above in the recent week. At this point, I guess I just need to:

• Focus on writing in War’s End-Book 2 now that I have cleared the week for it
• Take my licks on The Homeschool Advocate but stand firm – stay POSITIVE
• Remind myself that no one, NO ONE is going to agree with me 100% of the time. I’ve had one angry comment on Mama Llama, one frosty one, and then a frosty comment on Trunk or Treat. It isn’t as if the entire homeschool group has come down on me, so perhaps, just perhaps, others agree and don’t wish to bring attention to themselves. Or they felt the apology was sufficient.
• Not let this get to me – easier said than done, let me tell you.

I watched my daily stats on Homeschool Advocate shot from 20-something hits on Thursday to 54 on Friday. And Saturday’s stats were comparable to a normal weekday rate of 23 instead of the paltry 14 the Saturday before.

In the bigger scheme of things, I should look at this as positive it is happening now. I don’t have thousands of readers, along with dozens of angry comments to wade through. All I have is one or two angry comments, that’s nothing. A learning experience, right?

Then why the fuck do I still feel so bad?

Believe me, you really don’t.

I swear, if I could have bugged most of my co-workers cubicles, the boss’s office, and my kid’s room – I would probably have done it. It would have absolutely destroyed each and every relationship if I have.

I doubt she will be back to surf these posts again, but my eldest got a rude wake-up call. I had gotten something similar a few years back, so I can sort of feel for her. A little bit. It sucks to be the fly on the wall, it really, really does. You don’t want to know what people will say when they are so very sure you aren’t around to read it, hear it, or whatever. In the end, we find ourselves miscast, misunderstood, ridiculed, and betrayed.

It sucks.

But the problem remains. In question is a certain day, one day, in which I remember one thing and she remembers another. Our stories intersect, to a certain point, then curve off in different soundtracks, behavior, everything. Just to see if I was too far off, I read her account again. It wasn’t hard to find, just two little words, and boom there she was.

Of all the things we share, the gift for words and self-expression is one of them. And as I told her the other day, she has her memories, I have mine, and somewhere in between lies reality.

But how do we get past this? How do we come to some meeting of the minds, some peace? I remember her wanting to drop out of school completely, and go to work full-time and move in with her friends. And when the discussion degenerated, and I said something judgmental about her friends, it was over. No more talking. She remembers me wanting her to work full time and go to school full time, which I truly doubt I would have suggested she do. I remember how hard it was for me to do that and how difficult it is for Dave now.

But I digress.

This isn’t about who is right and who is wrong. Instead, this is about 5 1/2 years of misunderstanding, hurt, resentment, and pain. We hold our sad little memories close and don’t want to let them go.

I don’t want her in California. I cannot have any kind of decent relationship with my daughter so far away. And I want a decent relationship. I want to see her for dinner, go shopping, do kids activities with her and Tim and Emily. I want to meet her boyfriend, connect with him, and feel as if this gulf between us might someday go away and be replaced by a deeper understanding. I want to respect and be respected, to spend the time with her that I missed when I was working and in school.

There are no do-overs. If only there were. If someone stood in front of me today and said, “I can give it to you, all the years of her childhood, to do over again,” I would leap into the wormhole and do it. Because it wouldn’t just be her, it would be me as well. The writing would be placed higher on the list, the jobs lower, and I would take the time to be better, more patient, calmer.

I will never be a patient, heaven-blessed, Earth Mother type. It isn’t in me.

But the love is there. It always has been. That, and commitment. To be a better person, a better mother, each and every day. I fucked up in more ways than I can count. I also made strides and changes, did things my parents never did with me, more times than I can count.

In the end, perhaps Dad is right. We all hope our job at parenting is ‘good enough.’

Please move back, kid. Let us forge a new relationship – one that sits on equal footing, two adults interacting with each other. Bring your guy, and the kiddo, and let’s re-define family again. Hell, bring the uncle as well, I wouldn’t mind seeing him more often. It’s either that, or I leave here. And right now I feel kind of stuck. Financially speaking that is.

Perhaps I dream of a future that never will be.

Minutes ticked by and the tech moved the sensor over my breast again and again. I noticed that she was zeroing in on an area. “You found something?” I asked, completely surprised.

She nodded, “Yes, that black spot there.”

“How big is it?”

“About one centimeter.”

She called in another tech for a second opinion. She had me turn on my left side, keep my right arm up, and zeroed in on the spot, pressing hard into my breast with the sensor. “It looks kind of globular,” the one tech says to the other. They nod and say nothing to me as they finish taking the pictures.

A half hour later and I was back in a mammogram machine. This one was definitely NOT comfortable. The first machine hadn’t been bad at all, but this second one squeezed the crap out of my poor boob. I am now sure I am no longer lactating (I weaned Emily 18 months ago) because if I had the machine would have been doused with half a cup of milk from my poor squished breast.

“We should have the results back on Monday or Tuesday,” the mammogram tech told me as I pulled my gown back on.

“So…should I just come to my follow-up appointment next Thursday?”

She smiled, “If the results indicate something to be concerned about we will contact you right away for a biopsy.”

Biopsy.

I went home that night and typed in “black spot on ultrasound of breast” and then followed the links. Lots of questions and fear in those links. Finally I clicked on one that said cancer shows up as white on a mammogram, as does connective tissue, so it is sometimes difficult to spot. On an ultrasound, however, cancer will show up as a black spot.

Fuck.

I don’t know what to say. Or what to think. And I guess I’m scared. Mainly I’m dumbfounded. Would my body really betray me this way? Could I possibly have cancer?

I’ve done everything right – I don’t smoke, I’ve breastfed my babies (3 1/2 years with the last one), there’s no family history of breast cancer, and I’m only 41. Could this really be something to worry about?

It’s Friday…and “Monday or Tuesday” sounds impossibly far away. I guess I just don’t know what to think.

Most of it is spent in front of the computer, writing, researching and more, but I get so much done each day thanks to everyone else sleeping until 8-9 am if given the chance.

I woke up from a dream this morning. It was about Drew, well now he goes by Andrew, and I was apparently giving him a ride to work. It was a few years after graduation and I said, “You know, you should take me out sometime.”

Now you don’t know me, so you can’t quite fathom how big of a reach that would have been for me. Let’s just say it would have never happened in real life. The discussion went on…

“What?” Drew asked, sounding a little unsure if he had heard me just right.

“I said I think we should go out some time…or not…” I grinned at him then, “But I think we would have a good time if we did.”

And with that I woke up and immediately wondered what my life could have been if I were only more assertive, more clear about what I wanted. Not with Drew, because I was never really attracted to him, but with others.

Where would I have been today if I hadn’t stood my ground, asserted myself, and not put up  with bullshit?

I lay in bed for about half an hour, ruminating on that, and wondering if I would ever make it to Pompeii. What with the silly little blip on the mammogram, I suddenly imagine dying of cancer. And not a slow dying, but a quick, “You are so fucked and gonna die any second” kind of cancer.

What would I do?

Well this morning my answer was, “Go to Pompeii.”

Which led to my dreaming of traveling the world and wondering if I should try and be a travel agent, or if Dave would make a good pilot.

Yeah, okay, so I was half asleep, what can I say?

When I run into walls that seem too inflexible, I turn to options that I can control, like my writing. And in the midst of thinking for the umpteenth time about a hair barrette that I want to design (and then teach a class around) I realized I really, REALLY need to finish the final edits of War’s End.

If only because I have ideas for the second book and for the Chronicles of Liv Rowan series that I haven’t touched in like over a year. And don’t get me started on Gliese 581.

And if at this point you are thinking, “Jesus Christ, Christine, one thing at a time and who the hell is Liv Rowan and what the hell is Gliese 581?” All I can say is…

Welcome to my world.

In any case, I’m on my treadmill, halfway in, and I’ve got yoga at 9:30. After that it is homeschool, perhaps some writing, and a visit to the spray park to get social with other homeschoolers. And tonight is Dave’s first night of class of the fall semester, so I’m on kiddo duty all evening.

It’s a day full, and that’s for sure.

I fought off the panic attack – it was brought on by ‘way too much to do and no time to do it in’ feelings. Dave clued in, grabbed P.E. and headed off to Papa Murphy’s to get pizza for us for dinner and I got to work.

I focused on the main to do’s:

• Prepare Powerpoint presentation for bi-annual Mid-Continent Library meeting for next Wednesday
• Update on a curriculum post for HA
• Add Pages to TDN for each class I teach and link them back to the Upcoming Events page
• Finish adding all of the Recipes pages to the website so that people have more access to content.
• Work on War’s End edits – Dad is plowing through them. I need to catch up to him and then print them out, chapter by chapter, and read them aloud to Dave in order to catch any more errors.
• Decide on WHEN or IF I’m going to submit something to the Libertarian website that Dad gave me an Intro for.
• Work on E’s homeschool curriculum for fall and come up with an action plan. So far I have the main goals done and an idea of what I want to focus our studies on each weekday, but I’m dancing in the middle of overplanning and fear of underplanning.

So…busy. And that’s not counting the other stuff, like house is a mess, money is horribly tight, and garden needs more work.

Somehow I ended up bouncing between the TDN website, then focusing on the Powerpoint presentation for MCPL while I waited for the pictures to finish uploading to TDN and then switching to HA and Emily’s homeschool plan for the year as I tried to figure all of that out.

My brain was firing on all cylinders. It was multitasking at its best.

Every day seems to be a frenzied run towards “getting everything done” – and feeling as if I’m just running around trying to keep up.

The house is a mess because I’m busy working on the yard.

The yard is a mess because a goddamn 50 foot tree fell in it.

The chicken coop still needs doing.

My office is a continual disaster of papers and more papers, despite my obsessive entering into MS Money and shredding of receipts.

I have stacks of books waiting to be read.

I’m getting daily posts in on The Deadly Nightshade, but I’m not doing any other writing.

Stop this carousel, I’m ready to jump off and take a long siesta!

And as I sit here, with E in the bath, wondering why my motivation has so suddenly and completely left me, I thought of War’s End which I’ve managed to get released from its contract where it would have sat, unpublished, possibly for forever.

And now it is free and I’ve been thinking and thinking about it.

Mainly I’ve been thinking about the little constructive criticism I have received on it.

Now sure, I’ve got huge praise from my dad, who only read about half of it. I’ve gotten half-assed praise from someone who read the first 1/2 and then “skimmed the rest.” Several times I have heard that my “characters lack substance.” This particularly has stuck in my head and made me wonder how in the hell I could fix it.

So as I turned the laundry over downstairs the thought hit, Why not just publish it as a Kindle book for $2.99 and see what happens? And so I sat down, wrote this far, and have been turning the idea over in my head. Besides a website and Facebook, how could I market it? Should I send out a press release? Should I prepare it as a pdf as well and sell it over my website?

I guess I need to go through it…AGAIN…and see if I can’t do something to help round out the characters. The problem here is that I can see them clearly in my head. I can hear how their voices sounds, what they look like, I know them. I am afraid that I will cross over the line of too much information/detail. Either that, or leave it as is, with flat characters who have no appeal to the reader.

I don’t want to be the only one in love with my writing.

Also, not on the subject of War’s End, but definitely on the subject of writing…

I found a possible publisher for An Old Wives Tale – Quick American Archives apparently has as its editor Ed Rosenthal himself. I’ve crafted a cover letter and I’m suffering now over a basic outline of the book, which is probably 2/3 of the way written now. I sent it off to Dad to review and he said he would get back to me with feedback. I’ve just got to move forward on these projects and get them done and behind me, one way or the other.

How could I see, with such clarity? How could the outcome be so obvious to me and yet be such a surprise to others?

Was basic common sense gone?

Lately though, my spirit is flying high. Mainly because I’m in a fantastic, healthy relationship with a man who respects me, appreciates and truly believes in me. I have a young daughter who is totally amazing and fun to hang out with. I have a grown daughter who is cool and thoughtful and loving. But if that wasn’t enough, I’m finally, FINALLY finding others who think like me. Not in every way, but enough to make it count. They come from different walks of life, faiths (or lack thereof), cultures, and ethnic background. Their educations vary from high school to doctorates, young and old, but they usually have some of all of these interests in common:

• Gardening
• Healthy living
• Food
• Kids
• Homeschool
• Libertarian leanings
• Self-sufficiency
• Concern about where our country is going and how we can or should address it

I feel as if I am collecting people these days. When I meet someone who thinks like I think, or has interests in the same area as I do, I do my best to ‘collect’ them. I invite them to dinner, talk to them about my website, show them the garden, invite them to take one of my classes.

In return, I have seen a wealth of positive responses, kudos and appreciation.

My life is so completely different to what it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago. I barely recognize the me that is compared to the me that was.

And you know what? I really, really like me these days.

Fuuuuucccckkkk!

This is NOT the way I wanted to start my morning.

The storm clouds are approaching…we have less than $2k in savings and that will be gone before May has ended. I’m losing my freaking mind over fear and worry.

I’m PMSing, I have a husband who turns the heat on while sitting around in a pair of shorts and complains about it being too cold instead of putting some fucking clothes on. I keep losing cleaning clients due to the shitty economy and damn fucking Dave Ramsey, and I’m sick to death of this quasi-”I think it is spring, but really no, it still feels like winter, and nothing is really growing because of it weather.”

And I woke up in such a good mood!

I woke up thinking of tomatoes and how I could teach a class on raising, selecting recipes, and canning tomatoes (Google “7 most unsafe foods”) for better health and self-sufficiency. This self-sufficient line of thinking turned me back to War’s End and thinking about how it fits perfectly with these trying times. WHY is it not being published? Because some asshole won’t return my emails!

But just typing this gets me to thinking, maybe it is still worth saving. Yes, I’m fucking mad that the guy has not returned my multitude of emails, but perhaps it still salvageable. I want to be published, and I think it is still a possibility – so despite my anger, I think I need to try one last time to contact the guy, ask him what the hell is going on, and ask him to either respond or release me from my contract.

In fact, I think I will write up a draft right now and send it to Dad to review.

After that, well, hopefully I can find my mind, get it calm, and get to either writing or going through the INBOX FROM HELL.

And I can’t help thinking that something terrible and dark is coming, something that will make all of our current worries pale in comparison. God knows, I’ve been waiting for it my entire life. Growing up in the shadow of the cold war, I figured it would be nukes and war with Russia. But then the Soviet Union fell into pieces in the 80s and everyone seemed to chill out. “We were wrong, everything will be fine.”

But everything isn’t fine, and what started out as a sick feeling in my gut has turned to a quiet murmur, one that is growing in decibels and intensity.

We keep running into people who, almost unbelievably, think like we do. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone say, “You have a garden? You know, if things get any worse, that garden just might save your life.”

Save…my…life.

Something is coming.

And we aren’t ready.

I don’t know if any of us ever could be ready for this, but still, we aren’t ready.

Part of me wonders what will happen during a complete financial and socio-economic collapse. Who will knock on our door then and complain if we don’t pay the mortgage…or the car payments? Part of me thinks it is time to get some guns and ammo and hunker down and wait. I think it will come soon. Maybe even this fall or in the middle of winter.

• Hyperinflation
• State and federal insolvency
• China calling in its markers
• Food prices gone out of control

And don’t bother knocking on my door if you don’t have usable skills for the world that is coming.

I find myself seeking alliances. I talk with those in the know, those with skills, those who know things I don’t. I invite them to dinner, show them my garden, trade notes on self-sufficiency. In some ways I feel as if I am in a race against time, sucking up knowledge, hoping to God I learn enough in time.

It’s coming.

It’s coming.

It’s COMING.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.