Ten x Ten

This is my hundredth post. Actually, it's my hundred and first post, but I forgot all about the one hundred things for your hundredth post tradition until, um, pretty much right now.

I guess I'm a mommy blogger. It makes sense because that's what I do these days. I mommy. All day every day until I really don't wanna mommy no more. But, I didn't always mommy. I wasn't always a mother. There was a before. That's how I know there will be an after. I thought for this one hundred things about me me me me me fest (because it's all about me, you know), I'd write about that other me. The before me. She's still in there. Somewhere. She's sexier and has better hair and she drives a Nissan 350Z. Okay, that last part was never me, but dare to dream.

I give you ten x ten = 100 things about me (before the mommy gig). I know the anticipation is killing you.

1) I moved a lot as a child (air force brat) and it inspired a life-long love of traveling and new places and what amounts to an addiction to new experiences. I've set foot on six continents. I've hiked the Himalayas and stood in awe before the Taj Mahal. I snuck over the border of Bulgaria and Romania without the proper paperwork. I traversed a glacier in New Zealand. I galloped on a stallion named Kirhan across a high plain in the Atlas Mountains and rode a work pony without a name through the wilds of Mongolia. Food poisoning in Nepal, alcohol poisoning (unconfirmed) in Greece, I used to live for my next adventure. I miss it and I don't miss it a bit. One of my biggest fears is that I will fail to instill a world view and a love of cultures and places in my children, which is juxtaposed against my fear that I will succeed and they'll drink their way across Europe at nineteen like their mother.

I'm going to stand on Antarctica with a big #7 sign before I die.

2) Matt and I met in high school when we were sweet sixteen. Our first date was to the Spring Fling Dance our junior year. He yelled, "do you want to go to the dance," from a second story science lab window down to where I sat on the choir bus. (My sixteen-year-old self still cringes at our gorgeous, corny geekdom.) At different times, we broke each other's hearts in college. It made our relationship more real because we had to acknowledge the pain we could cause and the pain we could be forced to endure. I love that we are vulnerable to each other. I am sometimes amazed that he loves me. I'll never stop loving him, he's my lobster (name that reference for five points).

One of my closely held dreams is to find a way to make enough money so that he can go back to school and change careers.

3) I'm a dog person, cats irritate me. My first dog was a golden retriever puppy named Tristen. He endured my college craziness and kissed my tired tears through law school exams. We went on long walks every day for seven years. He died, loved and honored and happy, with my mother and father-in-law while Matt and I were overseas. On Saipan, we adopted Thai. We found him in the trash near a Thai restaurant. He was maybe five pounds, three of them intestinal worms and the other two mainly in his ears. There is no more bizarre creature on earth than Thai, but all who meet him adore him.


I want my children to grow up with a dog and (sighing over having one more being to clean up after), we will probably get a puppy next spring.

4) I studied environmental science at Ohio State University, focused on environmental and administrative law at Washington and Lee, sold out promptly after graduation and took a job on the environmental law team of a huge law firm in Washington, D.C. My gorgeous, wood-paneled office was on the thirteenth floor, which always made me think of hell when I arrived. We weren't saving birdies. It was the most challenging, overwhelming, stressful year of my life. I hated it. I didn't eat, barely slept and cried a lot. Matt saved me from a nervous break down when he found a job on a tropical island in Micronesia. We talked for a week about how our life wasn't what we wanted and then packed it up and moved. It's the most loving thing any one has ever done for me.

I hope to never practice law again.

5) I want to be a writer. Yeah, yeah, I know, join the club, but I have a specific dream. No laughing is allowed, I haven't admitted this out loud before now. I want to write romance novels. It's not selling myself short, I really want to do it and I think it would be so much fun. They are pure escape and fantasy and they make people happy. I've outlined two plots. The stories are fast-paced and fun and the sex is really, really good. I think I have a talent for writing soft p0rn.

I'm going to stop calling this a dream, step up to the plate (bed?) and say it's a goal.

6) My wedding day was magical. We had a chocolate raspberry cake that was so good I ate the entire top layer sitting on our wedding night bed in my dress at one o'clock in the morning. We fought over the artist of our wedding song, To Make You Feel My Love. I wanted the Billy Joel version, Matt insisted on the original by Bob Dylan. I still say he sounds like a whiny toddler. My mother's entire extended family had a chugging contest at our reception and got ridiculously drunk. It's become a tradition carried on at all of the cousin's weddings. Our tenth anniversary is in May. I wouldn't change a thing.


I hardly dare to hope that I am lucky enough to have ten more years like the last ten years.

7) I spent five years codifying the regulations of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Yes, I can shut down an entire party's conversation with that statement. It's the most fulfilling professional job I've ever done. I am ridiculously proud of that three volume colossus. I don't mean writing them, I don't mean reviewing them, I mean codifying them. Organizing them by subject matter, indexing them and making sure each and every tiny amendment and change over twenty-eight years, each and every comma and colon was correctly transcribed. My attention to detail and capacity for tedium knows no bounds. I rarely ever open the finished, published volumes because I once found an error and it drives me insane. Have I mentioned I'm a perfectionist?

I resolve to focus on my accomplishments as a whole, rather than nitpicking them into failures.

8) Right before we had Gee, we had to bring in a dog expert to help us with Thai. He had become impossibly bossy with me and often growled at me when I tried to claim a spot on the bed beside Matt. The dog psychoanalyst lady told us that in Thai's mind our family was a pack and Matt was the alpha dog. Thai was the beta dog. I was like the omega dog, I believe. She advised me to never let him block my path and to eat over his food bowl before feeding him because, in a dog pack, the lesser dogs never enter the space of the alpha dogs without permission and the alpha dogs always eat first. It worked. I have incorporated these nuggets of wisdom into my parenting philosophy. I am now firmly convinced that the pack dog principals have wider application to toddlers. I might be able to write a best-selling parenting book on this topic.

I pray fervently that I will remain the alpha dog in our home for a few more years, but the pack is always circling.

9) I'm not shy, but I am introverted. I don't think I make a very good first impression. I have never been the life of a party and I am awkward at casual conversation. Once I get to know someone well, I think I hold my own. I don't make friends easily, but once I do, I am a really good friend. The women I consider close friends are part of my family and they are just as important to my mental health and overall well-being as Matt, in a different way. Sometimes, I am so rejuvenated by a night out or a conversation with one of them that I understand why women might want to live on compounds and raise children in an extended family. But, I look terrible in a bonnet and I will never understand giving up modern amenities or foregoing caffeine and alcohol, so most of my compound options are out.

I don't tell them how important they are to me often enough. Dianna, Heather, Georgie, Kris, Nancy, Jean, Jenny, Maureen, MaryBeth, Roopal, Denise, Sheila, Julie and Elise, I adore you, you mean the world to me.

10) I am really, really happy staying home with my kids. (I lied, mommy is seeping out of my pores.) It still shocks me. I'm bored some days. I get frustrated. I long to carve a little more space out of our mind-numbingly repetitive and yet somehow all-consuming routine for me. But, if I had the chance to work outside the home right now, if my dream job were offered to me on a silver platter, I wouldn't take it. Unless it's to star opposite Brad Pitt in my outlined wild west romance novel. In that case, have your people call my people.

This is the first time in my life that I have stopped searching and felt like I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I hope to live the rest of my life this way.

That was longer than I intended. If you're all the way down here, you should get a medal or something. What about a kiss? Nissan 350Z? Kidding. I wish.