You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
My Dad’s mom (who refused to let us call her Grandma because that made her feel old, so we called her Lulu) was not a nice woman. She was especially mean to me and I was never sure why. My mom’s pet theory is that I look like my dad who looks like HIS dad and she didn’t like him so she didn’t like either of us (for she was never fond of or nice to my dad either). Anyway, let’s just say that Lulu and I were not close and when she died a few years back I felt vaguely bad but there was no real grief there. I feel no guilt about my reaction. I was never mean to her. I always gave her more respect than I felt she deserved and we were not close. Our relationship was what it was and I’m sure that if I’d been the one who died first, her response would have been about the same.
Just recently though, I’ve found a new and quite unexpected respect for the woman for a choice that she made well before I was ever born that had a HUGE impact on our family. You see, Lulu was a battered woman and she found the courage to pack up her two very small children and leave my Grandfather for good. This was back in the 1940’s. There were not a lot of single mother’s back then, and I’m sure this must have been extremely difficult for her. It’s too bad we never discussed it while she was alive.
A while back I shared that my sister has been digging through our family tree. Well, it’s chock FULL of wife beaters on my dad’s side. Generation after generation of wife beaters who begat wife beaters. Lulu broke that chain of abuse. My Grandfather beat the crap out of her and she left when my dad was less than two and his sister was a baby. He never saw his dad again until he was a teenager and looked him up on his own. If she hadn’t left, my dad would have grown up watching his dad beat his mom and then he almost certainly would have beaten my mom. His sister would have watched her mom take the abuse and almost certainly would have grown up to accept that same abuse from her future husband. If my dad had beaten my mom (which he never did) my sisters and I almost certainly would have grown up and married our own abusers. Our children would watch us taking the abuse and would then grow up to either take it or give it (depending on their gender). It’s a really hard cycle to break. Yet this mean-spirited, difficult woman (whom I could barely tolerate) saved us all from that fate.
My dad didn’t beat my mom. My sisters and I have all married men who would never touch us in anger. My daughters are going to grow up knowing that it’s not okay to be hit and I know they won’t tolerate it. My son will not abuse his future wife. These are wonderful blessings that Lulu bestowed upon our family and I am thankful for them.
It’s a real eye opener when you think that the choices that my Grandmother made almost 70 years ago would have such far-reaching consequences for so many people today. Perhaps the choices I make will someday take on the same importance.
…I hope I choose as wisely as she did.
So, thanks Lulu. If you were alive today, I’d take you out to lunch and say thank you in person. Maybe I’ll see you in Heaven someday.
For any woman who reads this and IS being abused, I urge you to leave. My Grandmother saved our family from a LOT of pain. If you won’t get out for yourselves, for whatever reason, leave for your kids. So that they don’t grow up to perpetuate the abuse. Think of your future grandbabies. You CAN stop it. Only YOU have the power to stop it. I urge you to stop it now!
If you are going through a rough patch in your life, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look to your friends and family for a shoulder to cry on or a friendly person to bitch to. It’s at times like this that you find out who your true friends are. Sometimes it’s the folks you least expect who come through for you and turn into life-long friends. And often, the people you expected to have your back disappear completely from your life without a backward glance. Rough times can be great sorting out periods.
However, I have noticed that there really is a line in the sand where sympathy is concerned. On one side folks can feel for you and pray for you and talk to you about your problems. They can play a little game with themselves where they thank God that their life is sooooo much easier than yours, (I don’t know HOW she copes with all of that!) and tell themselves that their own lives will never get that bad. Basically, they can pity you without guilt and lie to themselves about anything that might be coming down the (as yet unseen) pike for them.
You can expect this reaction when you have ONE major thing go wrong in your life. Maybe your child becomes quite ill. Maybe you are in a horrible car accident. Perhaps there is a death in your family. You might have a disabled child or your house might be in foreclosure. Any myriad of things could go wrong (and often do!) and this is how the majority of your friends will react. They will be there for you with only the slightest whiff of pity in the air…
Suppose though that TWO or more major things go wrong in your life simultaneously. Your spouse dies in a car accident that leaves you paralyzed. You find out your child has terminal cancer and then your baby is born unexpectedly disabled. All four of your sons are diagnosed with autism over a 6 month period, during which you get pregnant with another boy. Your problems are long-term and unfixable and they keep getting worse everytime you turn around…
This is called crossing the line. You have dived right over people’s comfort levels and now they don’t know what to say to you. For the looky-lous, it’s no longer even mildly entertaining to think of how much easier their life is than yours. They are filled with both pity and guilt whenever they chance to think of you (which they try not to do–don’t you EVER have anything GOOD to report?!!) Things have gotten unimaginably horrific for you and you seem to be in a downward spiral and… what if you should pull THEM down with you? What if some of your bad luck rubs off?
This might sound jaded, but I live this everyday. I am speaking to you from the wrong side of that line. Hi.
I have been here for a LONG time. My child is almost indescribably disabled. He’s got at least 5 major things wrong with him (I’ve only talked publically about his autism). He is destructive and tends to tantrum in public places. Pity and sideways glances that slide away when they realize that we’ve noticed their interest are part of our daily lives as a family. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard people say “Why don’t you just put him in an institution and be done with it? Why are you purposefully making your life so hard?” If I express the vague desire for more children I am openly mocked. “WHY?!!! Don’t you have ENOUGH on your plate? What if you have another Sawyer?!! Don’t you have enough kids?!” If I try to tell people that I am tired I get “Well, what did you expect with all of those kids?”
It’s not that I want sympathy, but it would be nice if people tried to understand our life before judging it. If people could stand in my shoes for a few moments without freaking out, and realize that yes, our life is hard but not so hard that I don’t want or need good friends. I need someone willing to listen to me bitch too, even if my rants go to a higher level than carpool troubles or where to park the new car.
That’s why I’m soooo grateful for my best friend Kate. She understands. She GETS it. We are both on the wrong side of the line together, holding hands and fixin’ to red rover ourselves back over to the right side again. …Together.
…After all, isn’t that what a best friend is for?
The comics archives are listed on the left side of the blog. They are linked roughly by week, and they are dated. They are complete. If there are dates missing that is because I didn’t publish a cartoon on those dates. For archives 1-6 simply click on the image once to make it bigger. Starting at Archive 7 you need to click once on the half cartoon you can see. Then it will become whole but small. Click on it once more and it will become large enough to read. Starting with Archive 26 (July 8-15) the comics were uploaded together so to read that bunch, just click on it about three times and all of them will come up at once (instead of having to do this one comic at a time).
Clear Blue Water is updated on Monday’s on my website. You can find the link to this under my blogroll on the left.
My daughter lost a tooth 5-6 days ago. She put her tooth under her pillow the first night and woke up … to nothing. Her tooth was still there and she was none the richer. I told her little disappointed self that Tooth Fairy Mary was old and had been the tooth fairy from when I was young and maybe she wasn’t so on the ball anymore. I told her that most likely the tooth fairy would come the next night. With high hopes my baby placed her tooth under her pillow that night, only to wake up and find that Mary had shirked her duties again. As the Torres’ can attest to, Tooth Fairy Mary seems to have a problem with the sauce. Unbelievably, this disappointment continued for about 3 more nights.
Needless to say, we were both getting pretty annoyed with the whole situation.
Finally, yesterday I told my girl that I would be calling Tooth Fairy headquarters and raising hell. Heads were GOING TO ROLL! If Mary couldn’t keep it together then maybe she needed to retire. She headed off to school confident in my abilities to handle the situation.
I spent the entire day on the phone yesterday. First I got lost in an automated system. Then I spent some time being funneled from one low-level lackey fairy to another before I finally got a hold of someone who actually seemed to know what she was doing. She was just appalled at the entire situation and promised that it would be taken care of that very night. I hung up feeling I was in safe hands.
When my baby got home from school she asked me if I had taken care of the problem and I said that I had. They were sending over another fairy that night and she would be getting her money toot sweet! My baby went running up the steps screaming “They fired Tooth Fairy Mary and another fairy, Toot Sweet is on the job!” Her twin, (who had also recently been the victim of Mary’s reign of incompetence) was ecstatic as well.
You will be glad to know that Toot Sweet came through last night. My baby got her regular fee PLUS a couple of extra bucks for pain and suffering.
And all is right with the world once again…
Now I’m off to finish updating the archives. Have a blessed day!
You know what I keep thinking? If I wanted to, I think I could MAYBE get syndicated again with another cartoon. Having been syndicated, I imagine I could put together a pretty professional looking/tempting package. I know how far you can push the envelope for print audiences. I know the exact size to work in. I have a proven track record of being able to meet the deadlines. I’m a pretty good writer and my drawings have gotten a lot better since I first began. I know photoshop. I know what pens and papers work best for me. I have an idea for another cartoon that is very different from CBW and probably more marketable.
…Perhaps…
You know what’s stopping me from trying? The knowing part. I KNOW how difficult the deadlines are. I KNOW how much work goes into a syndicated cartoon and I know how little money most papers pay for the privilege of running your strip. I know that newspapers are struggling mightily and might not make it. I know that most new strips fail. I know the odds of producing a blockbuster strip are quite small.
Having BEEN syndicated, actually BEING syndicated looks a lot less tempting. I loved it while I did it and I still love cartooning now that I’m web only. That part hasn’t changed. Being a cartoonist is totally cool and satisfying in a way that is hard to explain. I make less money than I did when I was in print, but not by a lot. But what I do make I don’t need to split 50/50 with a syndicate. And I haven’t really tried to make a living at this yet. I’ve been too busy. Perhaps if I put some effort into this strip it would pay off. Perhaps not, but I’ll never know unless I try.
On the one hand, it would be fun and get syndicated again just to see if I could do it. I might be wrong. Maybe lightning won’t strike twice. I could be rejected all around and done with it in a few weeks, humbled but wiser. On the other hand, I might just make it again. …And to be honest, right now that scares me more than it thrills me.
So. I think that for now I’ll pass on trying again. I’m pretty content with where life has taken me so far. Besides, Clear Blue Water is my baby. Eve and Manny and the kids are like my family. Even when I’m on a break I still think of cartoons. I can still hear their voices speaking the dialogue in my head. I love this family, this couple and I’m not ready to give them up and call it quits just yet.
Maybe someday though.
…Never say never…
My daughter’s oh-so-important sixteenth birthday is looming ever closer and all she can talk about is getting her license. The thing is, she’s not all that great of a driver yet. She’s definitely good enough to pass the driving test, but I don’t think she’s good enough, yet, to pass MINE. For her to drive, I expect to be so comfortable with the idea I could fall asleep while she was behind the wheel, confident in her ability to handle anything that came up.
I am SO not there yet.
I am thinking about rocking her world and not letting her get her license for a few months. Not because she’s in trouble or because she’s not able to pass, but because if I’m sending a teenage driver out onto the roads, I want to make sure she’s competent. No, not just competent, I want to make sure she’s MASTERED it.
I was a terrible driver for a few years. Most teenagers are, that’s why you have to pay so much more to insure them. Driving did not come naturally to my daughter (as it did to a few of her friends) and I know how that feels. So I am seriously considering being put on my daughter’s permanent shit list and making her wait.
…Lucky thing she doesn’t read my blog, eh?
My son had a birthday a while back and we had an interesting phenonemon occur. When it came time to light the birthday candles, no one in the house had any flame. No matches, no lighters, no gas stove… it was a really strange experience. I guess, every other time we’ve celebrated with a chainsmoker or two. Someone always had a lighter or something, but now that everyone is mostly smoke free (thank goodness!) it was quite frustrating.
We tried to light one on the electric burners on the stove. …This was a dismal failure.
I was going to go buy a lighter at the drugstore when I remembered that I had, when I was packing to move, seen an old lighter of my husband’s in one of the boxes. Amazingly, I located it within a few minutes, and it worked. I went around gloating, “I have made fire. I have MADE FIRE!” from the movie Castaway.
I keep it in my purse now next to my knife and my tiny first aid kit. I was a girlscout. I come prepared to face unknown disaster with a smile in my pocket, cookies in my wagon, and a sit-upon tied around my waist.
Anyway, we lit the cake and watched the wax drip in large blobs all over the frosting before having my son blow out the candles. All I could think of was all the spit that probably landed on the top of the cake. Wax and spit. YUMMY. Give me some of THAT.
As I grow older, I find that I can suck the fun out of just about anything if I think about it long enough.
Yes, thank you. …It’s an acquired skill.
(FYI, another toon is up. I am going to TRY to do them daily again. We’ll see…)
Whew. I have had one of the most stressful months of my entire life. It has, however, also been one of the most blessed months of my life so I cannot complain. It was just one thing after another after another ’til you could hardly catch your breath. Luckily, they were not all BAD things, but they were mostly all life-changing things though so that sure made it interesting!
Here’s the deal. We went on vacation while we had some renovations done on our place. In the midst of our vacation we found out that we had to move. In less than a week, or we would be homeless (we did not suffer a foreclosure, and that’s all the details I really want to give out). So we spent countless stressful hours searching for a place and found a marvelous one that is going to work out long-term for our family much better than our old place did. We did this in about three days. Then we packed up as quickly as possible– which meant stuffing things in boxes and taping them up, then moving to the next drawer or cabinet or bookcase. (I do NOT recommend this method. It was a hell of a thing finding everything at the new house!)
Some wonderful friends from church helped us move and we literally could not have done it without them. We really couldn’t have because we have Sawyer and he needs to be watched and when moving boxes, that is pretty hard to do. So we went on vacation on Sunday, found out we had to move on Monday, got the keys to our new place on Thursday, started packing on Friday and moved on Saturday….Helluva week.
It took about a week to unpack, and that was with me unpacking and putting things away pretty much all day long. Now we are all moved in and we LOVE it here. It’s such a blessing. The neighbors are wonderful, there are lots of kids around for my kids to play with, we are close to schools and shopping…. it’s so much better than our last place that it’s not even funny. I feel like God took a situation where someone was trying to harm us and turned it into one of the biggest blessing we have ever received. He can turn all situations to good and this was a real testament to that.
Our autistic son has had a hard transition though. He spent the first week and a half begging to go home everytime he woke up. He tantrummed so many times when we wouldn’t take him back to the old place. He finally seems to have accepted that this is home, though I know he’d go back there and happily forget about this place in a heartbeat if that were an option.
The reason I’ve been off for so long is because we bundled our services (cable, internet and phone) and the first installation appt. we could get was May 11th. I figured I’d be back that night, but alas, no such luck. There was a small problem with the wiring at our new house, and they couldn’t install our stuff until it was fixed. So we fixed it and then had to wait until Friday the 15th for a second appt. They got things hooked up. Then it was a free-for-all as my poor internet starved darlings fought to the death over the computer. So I figured I’d update my cartoons and blog on Saturday (yesterday). And THEN we woke up and everything was out. There was an outtage in our area and this lasted almost all day. (It made me uneasy about the bundling, but heck, it’s so CHEAP I couldn’t turn it down!) I am beginning to wonder if God is trying to tell me something. Seriously. Because we have had SO many problem with our internet over the last six months. Problems we never used to have, and every problem has had a different cause. It’s not like it’s the same thing cropping up time and time again. Maybe we’ve become too dependant on it? I don’t know. Hopefully, everything will be find now, but I’m not sure if I believe it or not.
Oh, and to top it all off, the transmission went out in our van on Thursday. If this was the 12 days of Christmas, the transmission problems would be the Partridge in a pear tree. Just a PERFECT ending to one of the most stressful times I’ve ever lived through.
I just keep thinking … FODDER. It’s all fodder. Perhaps the Torres’ will be about to face some trials. … Hmmmm…. Evil grin…
I do hope my readers come back. I know things have been flaky ’round here and if no one reads my stuff anymore, well, I can’t really blame them. But I will continue to put it out because I love to do it. Maybe if I draw it and write it they will come? Or maybe not.
But for now, I’m back, I’m grateful and I feel really blessed. All of the stress of the last month was completely worth it.
JOY. I feel tremendous peace and joy right now. I’m so glad to be back! Oh, and I’ve posted two new cartoons to boot!
Enjoy!
The reason we went on vacation last week is because our home needed to have some renovations done to it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a major clusterfuck & because I don’t really want to get into the details of it, I’ll share only the bottom line, which is that we were forced to cut our vacation short to find new housing.
God provided for us and we are now moved into a very lovely house that is going to meet my family’s needs much better than where we’ve spent the past decade. However, our internet, phone & cable will not be hooked up until May 11th, so I will not be able to update my blog or cartoons until then. HOPEFULLY this will be the last snafu that arises to derail my timely updates. The only thing I can think of that would screw it up would be a hurricane coming through, but it’s not hurricane season yet (that starts June 1st, but it doesn’t generally get bad until August/September, so we’ve got awhile)! ROTFL Oh, and by the way, just in case you’re wondering why this post is spelled & punctuated correctly, I am dictating via phone to my friend who actually HAS internet service & a college degree; otherwise, you’d be reading my usual chicken scratch AND I would have had to wait to go to the library on Monday and since I have quite a bit of unpacking to do, that isn’t gonna happen.
So I’ll see you on the night of the 11th. I’m continuing to write cartoons, so I will have a blog post & some new cartoons ready to go as soon as I get hooked up!
*** (from Kate, the typist) *** If you happen to see a word misspelled or a mistake, please keep it to yourself. I typed out what Karen dictated; I don’t necessarily agree that my spelling or punctuation is perfect! 
