Grey or Bald

Despite how very hard my kids have worked on giving me this particular gift, I’ve been pulling them out (don’t tell), but I am sadly approaching a crossroads:  grey…or bald?

Life is full of choices (how cliche) but I’m so overwhelmed right now I don’t seem to be able to make any.  Big or small, meaningful or meaningless, necessary or frivolous, grey or bald, sometimes I just don’t want to make any choices.

 I think it’s in this spirit that I came up with my frozen cookie doughs.  Over the past few years I’ve made and tweaked a number of different recipes to come up with ones I could freeze then bake for the same amount of time and at the same temperature.  I have a good selection now and always have three to five of them in my freezer.  That way if I want to make cookies but can’t decide which kind, I can semi-defrost the doughs (just enough to scoop them), then make a number of different kinds of cookies on one baking sheet.  Then I refreeze the remaining dough.   Easy, peasy.  Choice avoided.

My cookie doughs are usually good for when I just don’t want to make a choice.  But if all else fails, I get out the pizza pan, make a mega cookie… and put EVERYTHING in it.

Giant Everything Cookie

 

I was talking to my son saying that I wanted a picture of my giant cookie for this particular blog.  I’ve made it many times but never took a picture.  “Oh snap, you’re just going to have to make a giant cookie.”  He didn’t sound terrible sympathetic and he sure wasn’t gonna help me.  My sons are eaters not bakers, and I have no daughters.  Mostly I'm OK with that, but in the instance where I’m baking something just for the picture (although, believe me that giant cookie will get scarfed up), I wouldn’t mind having a baking partner. 

I was traumatized years ago when I was pregnant with my second son.  I wanted a girl.  I was sure I was having a girl.  I had about 50 girl names picked out.  I went in for an ultrasound (when you go through IVF you have them frequently in the first trimester) and the room went silent.  I was the only one to speak “my daughter appears to have a penis.”  The Doctor, knowing I wanted a girl, had quickly moved on.  “Go back, I want to look again” I said.  The Doctor was firm “Karen, it is NOT going to go away.”  After all the times I almost lost him (and there were some really close calls Lightning Strikes) let me say that in the end (with just one little hiccup delivered by my sister) I was and remain thrilled to have my second son. 

The hiccup:  Five weeks after my first son was born, my sister had her first son.  A little over a year later I had my second son.  Then about a year and a half later, my sister went and had a daughter.  Ouch.  My sister is an amazing cook but she doesn’t bake, like at all.  But eventually I got over it because I realized that having a daughter instead of a son was luck.  It’s not like she had been able to make a choice.

 


Giant Everything Cookie
                                        ©www.BakingInATornado.com

Printable Recipe

Ingredients:
1 stick butter, softened                                
1 stick margarine, softened                          
1/2cup sugar                                              

1 cup brown sugar                                        

2 eggs                                                           

1 tsp vanilla                                                  

2 1/4 cups flour 
1 tsp baking soda 
1/2tsp salt
1/2cup mini chocolate chips
1/2cup baking mini M&Ms
1/2cup white chocolate chips
1/2cup butterscotch chips                                                                                      

Directions:
*Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease a pizza pan.

*Cream butter, margarine and sugars.  Beat in eggs and vanilla

*Mix in flour, baking soda and salt.  Stir in mix-ins.
*Pat out onto the pizza pan until the consistency is fairly even.  Best to just put onto the pan and flatten out and move around with your hands.
*Bake approx. 18 minutes, till it’s puffed and lightly browned.  

An Open Letter

I have an acquaintance who is trying to live her life and raise her children the best she can.  In that struggle, she’s found herself in a unique circumstance.  She has proven her bravery by allowing the world in.  She’s been blogging her challenges, successes and failures at George. Jessie. Love. as she grows and parents in a situation she never expected to be in.

When you put something out there publicly you take a chance.  You are embraced by support but can also be pummeled by derision at a time when you are at your most vulnerable.  Here’s the thing about these situations. We don’t choose them, we’re just trying to live through them in the way that is best for our families.  They are infinitely more difficult if another component is to be publicly chastised.

I feel for her as I, too, have been in a situation I never expected to be in. I was also open about it, and was met with both support and criticism.  I’m in another one now that I am unable to share, I really don’t know if I would even if I could.  I don’t think I’m as brave as Julie.

Please know that we, all of us, have morals and values.  They are not specific to one religion or political party.  We all make choices based on our beliefs, morals and values, but I’ve yet to see a religious tenet that requires us to berate the choices of others whose actions don’t fall in line with ours.

Hatred and intolerance are a by-product of fear.  Those of us who are different from you:  be it our religion, color, nationality, abilities, sexual preference, physical or mental afflictions . . . we are not different out of any desire to frighten you.  As we walk our paths and make our decisions and live our lives we don’t make our choices based on a conspiracy to hurt you. 

When we are uncomfortable with someone’s life-choices, here are our choices as I see them:

*We can give in to our fear and publicly criticize those who choose a different path than the one we, although not in their situation, imagine we would choose. In my estimation, this is the ground zero of where bullying comes from.

*We can acknowledge that we imagine our choices in that situation would be different, maybe even better, but out of kindness and respect choose to keep it to ourselves.

*We can decide that even though these wouldn’t be our choices, we truly don’t know what these people are going through and compassion and support are key components to making the world a better place.  The world is full of people who are different from us.  Really, it’s OK to embrace that.

As we live our lives if we make mistakes (and we will) others can relish in that, even see it as proof that we were wrong to begin with. They can choose to kick us while we’re down or they can choose to help us back up.  Either way we will get back up and we will carry on.  With you or despite you.

This is a letter I sent to Julie back in February.  I share it, with her permission, in the hopes that we can all take a step back and rethink the purpose served by harshly judging others publicly, even those who admittedly put ourselves in the public arena of our own free will:

Julie:

Through comments of mutual FB friends I’ve seen some of your recent posts relating your experiences in going through your daughter’s journey. From the few posts I’ve seen it’s clear that you’re not naïve, you understand that there are people out there who will question your path.  You’ve started to construct a shield by both surrounding yourself with people who are supportive and blocking the access of those who would judge you harshly.  As you gain strength from those who support you, I recommend that you also consider the position of those who will judge you harshly. 

In terms of being judged, I can draw a lot of comparisons between your situation and the choices I made 20 years ago when I learned that the only way I had any chance of having children would be through IVF, in-vitro fertilization.  I took an uncertain path fraught with physical pain, emotional turmoil, baby steps forward and grand jetes backwards.   I, too, was open and honest about my choices, surrounded myself with the support of friends and family (which, mind you, is so much more difficult pre-FB), but I also found that you can’t escape the negativity forever.  I started IVF in a new (to me) conservative state in a locally unprecedented program headed by a doctor brought in from yet another state. This elicited editorials in the local paper making it clear that God made me infertile and by going through this process I was going against God’s will.  Let’s be clear.  You will be faced with hatred.  They are coming, with guns blazing.  They will aim a baseball bat at your head and chances are that bat will have God’s name on it. 

If, in your own private moments, you let those thoughts in and come to terms with exactly how you feel about them, I hope that this preparation can actually become another part of your shield.

I was pregnant 4 times with 5 children (including the twin of my older son, who I lost along with one of my tubes in emergency surgery during a tornado warning while my husband was out of town – no, not LOL – well, maybe LOL now but certainly not then).  While visiting family and pregnant with my younger son, I woke up at my mom’s house cramping and in a pool of blood.  My sister dropped everything, came to get me and stepped on my heels following me into an ultrasound kindly set up by a local gynecologist I hadn’t seen in 20 years.  We cried when we saw the heartbeat.  I had come home to name my first son in Temple and ended up sentenced to bed rest and double injections.  I was the only one not at the naming. At any point I could have (and if I’m going to be honest, did) question whether “the haters” were right.  Is God trying to tell me to stop? 

"They” say that God made me infertile, and changing that “goes against God’s will.”  Really?   I’m that powerful?  Or does God give us all challenges?  I ended up far from home at the same time that an amazing doctor ended up in that same place.  The time, the place, the doctor, these are all tools given to me by that same God.  No matter how difficult life gets, I cannot believe that God did not want these kids to exist, that it was a battle between God and I and I won.  Absurd.   I now have 2 sons, ages 16 and 17.  My 17 year old is currently putting me through all kinds of hell but I still do not question what I went through to get him here.  “The haters” forced me to look at my path through theireyes and the resulting strengthened conviction is a gift.

Ultimately you have to decide which of God’s children you think provide him/her with the most pride:  Those who ACT with BRAVERY based in LOVE, or those who JUDGE with HATRED based in COWARDICE?    

The haters say “how COULD you?”  We say “how could we NOT?” 

Those haters, invite them in Julie, then kick their ass!

Karen

*A final note:

There is a 35 acre plot of land in the midwest purchased by a Jewish Temple, an Episcopal Church, and a Mosque.  All three are building there together.  There will also be a fourth building, a Tri-Faith Center.

Those holy places are being built together because a large group of open-minded people committed to respect, even embrace, difference.  These people have the compassion and the courage of conviction to see that as a society we will be healthier and we will be stronger if we are able to be different . . . together.



Draw the Line

I’ve written (Lightning Strikes) about going through IVf.  There were many parts of the story I didn’t tell.  One is that as we went through the steps to try to ascertain what the issue actually was, we had decided something early on.  If, in the end, the only way for me to get pregnant was IVF then we were done.  It's difficult physically and emotionally.  It is extremely expensive and not covered by insurance (Insurance Anyone), and the chances of pregnancy were really low, 15% at that time.  After going through so much, that was in fact our only option.  No matter how well thought-out our previous decision, when we hit that boundary, we pushed it aside.  It’s amazing how easily we ignored all our forethought and just kept right on going.

 I think that the reason we tend to redefine boundaries is because the circumstances that lead us to that point are so fluid.  When we decided not to do IVF there were still so many roads not yet explored, options we still thought were open.  We made a decision not knowing how we would truly feel if that was our only choice.  We didn’t realize that this experience was not a road.  It was waves.

 So many times over the years, I’ve tried to come to terms with the difference between redefining boundaries, pushing limits, and crossing lines.  How far do we go to accomplish our goals?

 When my son was a baby, he had a stuffed animal called Lambie. When we traveled Lambie went with us.  When he had surgery, Lambie went in with him and came out with a hospital bracelet too.  One time, when we were coming back from Marco Island, Lambie got lost at the airport.  I was panicked.  I retraced all of our steps, asked vendors, employees, gate agents.  No Lambie.  I had to call Mom on Marco (which was fortunately where Lambie was born).  She bought another Lambie and next-day-aired him to me.  I loaned Lambie-The-Second the bracelet that had been given to me during that surgery, and told some kind of story about Lambie getting a wash at the airport.  How far did I go to deceive my kid?  How many boundaries does that push?  And who could blame me?

Lambie

 When you’re a young adult, there are all kinds of lines that you suddenly realize you could cross.  Your freedom to brainpower ratio is, shall we say, not well balanced.  In fact, the older I get the worse my memory gets, yet I am unfortunate enough to remember exactly what I was like when I was a teenager.  It’s a time for pushing limits and redefining boundaries.  But it’s important that you know that whether you can or not, there are lines that you just don’t cross.

 Right now circumstances have me living in a box.  They are not really my circumstances, but they’ve got me in a box anyway.  That box is getting smaller and smaller, crowding me in.  I’m trying so hard to push the limits.  I’m trying so hard to redefine the boundaries. And although I’ve been told that before this is over I’ll have done a lot of things I don’t want to do, I’m trying so hard not to cross MY line.

Jello Waves

Jello Waves
                                       ©www.BakingInATornado.com

Printable Recipe

Ingredients:
1 pkg jello, any flavor (my kids liked the blue)
1/2 cup water
12 large marshmallows

Directions:
*Grease an 8 X 11 glass dish.
*Place water in medium size bowl and microwave for 1 minute.
*Stir in jello until completely dissolved.  If not, return to microwave for 30 seconds and stir again.
*Add marshmallows and microwave for 1 minute.  Stir until they are dissolved.  Pour into dish.
*Refrigerate until firm, approx. 1 hour.
*Roll up using longer end.  Wrap in saran and refrigerate for about 30 minutes.
*Cut into individual pieces (cuts best using dental floss).
*Store in fridge.