This was bound to be a great weekend with my sisters and there were only minor disappointing moments like when I realized we didn’t have time to shoe. Nor did we end up getting liquored up to the point of revisiting our youth. You know, the time when you learn your limits on beer bongs? However, we spent some of the funniest times together I can ever recall. The only tears that came did so after laughing so hard at Tracy that I nearly couldn’t breathe. Since I had to drive, we stopped by my mom’s house (did I mention she moved out? No? It’s because I didn’t want to write some Joyous Day Post and make her feel bad about having lived with us for a few months because really? It was just fine. I didn’t stuff her body in a bag and bury her in the backyard or anything. Shocking, I know.) and I had the car all warmed up including the seat warmers. She snuggled in her seat and relaxed for the drive to Chicago and I didn’t hear a peep out of her until she asked, “Did you turn my butt off?” and somehow I knew exactly what she meant. Heh. Phrases you don’t hear everyday.

My nephew Kyle was home from college because he had strep throat so I refused to sleep at my sister’s house because I cannot get sick right now. He looks healthy here, but I wasn’t taking chances.

That means I had to fork out some money for a cheap hotel room where Mallory, my mom and I slept. The second night we stayed we brought my nephew with us so he could have Gramma Time and I realized that the bookend grandchildren were hanging out together as Mallory is the eldest and Kamaal is the youngest. She looks thrilled about the prospect of sharing a room with an 8 year old, doesn’t she?

Could it be because the child slept with his sword? Or kept sassing her while she was clearly not amused by him? Or was it the incessant “Smell my finger” or “Gimme a dollar and I’ll be quiet” comments?

Let’s just chalk it up to playing his Gamboy as soon as woke up at the crack of dawn. Because we gals over 20 like to sleep late on the weekends and it’s been a while since we had a young one in our house. The “young ones” stayed home this weekend at my house because the requirement for the weekend was that you had to have a uterus to join in the fun. Our morning began with each of us getting a massage (Dear Emily of the Masseuse Goddessness, You are my heroine and I’d like you to come live with me. Love, Relaxed and Refreshed) and then on to get our manicures and pedicures.

Somehow, my sisters talked my mother into getting a gel set of nails that I’m sure will be ripped off later this week.

The spa we went to didn’t have room for everyone at the same time so we went to a nail salon that specialized in going slowly and cussing out employees in two languages. While I was soaking my feet there was a bit of an arguement between two of the Asian men who work at the shop and for the life of me, I didn’t even pay attention because I couldn’t understand a word they were saying until one of them yelled, “You don’t fuck with me! You get out my shop! Now. You don’t fuck work here anymore!”

Awwwwkward. I wanted to tell him that the second “fuck” was a gerund and required an -ing ending, but I thought to save my English lessons for another time. He had sharp tools in front of him anyway and I watched Tracy who was getting a manicure from the one who didn’t fuck work there anymore because I was certain she would join in the beat down if necessary. Have I mentioned she’s over 6 feet tall? Well, clearly they looked at her height and decided against it. Or maybe the one being kicked out decided that wanted his fuck pay check before leaving at the end of the day.

We secluded ourselves as grown up sisters to talk about everything in our lives. Our relationships, our children, our jobs. There always has to be a qualifier when we talk about the men in our lives, however, because each of us married or has children with men named Kenneth. Erin started it when she married a Kenneth and then named her son Kenneth, I followed suit, and then Tracy started dating a guy named Kenneth so when she got pregnant by him we all merely rolled our eyes and said, “Of course.”
In all, Erin loved that we spent the weekend together and our luncheon included celebratory drinks as she told us she had “news” and pulled a piece of paper from her purse.

Tracy: What? Wait! You finally got a divorce?

Erin: YES.

Kelly: Yay! About damn time. How long have you been raising your kids by yourself? Fifteen years?

Erin: Something like that.

Kelly: This calls for a toast.

Celebrate the big stuff and the small stuff, people. Mostly, though, celebrate the people.

I’m going home this weekend. It’s kind of funny that at 35 I still say, “Let’s go home sometime, ok?” to my kids and husband, but I’m not sure that will change anytime soon because I’ve been saying it ever since I left Chicagoland when I went away to college. It’s Erin’s birthday and my sisters and I had a little meeting of the minds the last time I saw them a few weeks ago about being grown-up sisters. We decided that we don’t spend enough time with one another and want to start that now.

I’m not going to worry about the Biggest Loser contest at work because we are going out to eat decadent, sinful food. (Oh! I lost 2 pounds for the weigh-in this week. Yay, stress!)

I’m not going to fret about the state of my messy house or the new hole in the wall on the stairs that Mason made. (And! His excuse was that he was just walking down the stairs. Umm hmm. Ok. Sure.)

I’m not going to be bothered by the fact that I have reading for class to do, presentations to get ready for more professional development I’m doing, or inputing more data for my job to meet those NCLB standards. (Because? I’m just not.)

My sisters and I will shoe (that’s a verb), lazily hang out together on Sunday afternoon watching my father cook up a New Orleans style feast, and spend Saturday at a spa before putting on our dancing shoes and celebrating Erin’s birthday. I will feel better after my Sisters Weekend and I will have the pictures to prove it. It’s all about the Girls this weekend so Mallory and my niece Ashley and my mom will accompany us on some of these excursions. But I will insist that we three sisters spend some quality time to connect.

Welcome home.

*bonus picture is one I found of me and little Mallory many, many moons ago at Lake Michigan near the Shedd Aquarium. The leggings. They’re back.

I’m looking for my Happy Place right now and it’s not as if I’ve misplaced it. It’s more like I don’t quite know where it is.

Because work has been so hectic lately and my classes are under way, I am doing what I always do when everything becomes too hard. I’m losing it. It’s a shame I have to quote such a stupid movie, but it’s times like this when I have to use a St. Elmo’s Fire quote to explain how I’m feeling.

It is the scene when Demi Moore’s character has “lost it” and gets fired from her job and is sitting in an empty apartment and Rob Lowe’s character comes to her aid to help her out when all their friends are worried about her. She’s trying to tell him how she feels and all she can manage is: “I’m so tired. I didn’t think I’d be this tired at 22.” By the time I saw that movie I was raising two kids and taking undergraduate classes and I wasn’t even quite 22 yet, but I knew exactly what she was talking about.

I’m so tired.

While flipping channels in bed prior to going to sleep on Tuesday night I caught the first 5 minutes of Oprah’s show about working mothers versus stay-at-home moms and it instantly got under my skin. It’s awful that women are constantly pitted against one another to show who works harder or has made the better decision.

“I’m home caring for my children. I work hard. I stay home because I want to and choose to do so.”

“I’m working 12-hour days and then coming home to care for my children. I work hard. I think, even, that I’m a better mother when I’m working because of the structure.”

Finger pointing, blaming, one-upping each other. It gets us no where. Where is that Happy Place for women when they get tired? What is it that they do? Because I’m trying to take care of myself and it’s just not enough. It’s the Wanting that’s doing me in.

Not too long ago I read this post and left a comment that I didn’t mean to leave because it was so vulnerable of me. I debated before deciding to comment. Then, I felt the need to pass her writing along to this wonderful woman and she wrote more about it, too. It’s this damn Wanting that is holding me up from so many things. Even recently, when a comment was left here about how I “do it all” only gave me a prideful feeling for about 20 seconds before I thought once again about the women of my generation who have it All. It was a moment of clarity for me in my early 20s before I posed questions to myself about this career-family balance.

What if I don’t WANT it all? What if I tell ALL to go away and leave me alone and stop demanding so much from me? What, now at this point in my life, can I give up? Having it ALL makes me tired and it’s no one’s fault but my own because I made choices that got me here. Here is a strange, unknown place at times because Here doesn’t offer everything I want or need and makes me often wonder about leaving Here to go There.

But there is no there there.

So I sit here and ponder the here and the there and the all and the tiredness of the whole mess. I think of the conversation I just had with my mother recently about the phenomenon that was the literary achievement of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Mom gave it a thumbs down. Her final assessment was: Don’t believe the hype.) when one of the characters, so taken in with another, says, “Thou shits and thou pisses” as if it’s such a fantastic thing. I don’t have it All. I have a lot going on, but I don’t have it All. Do you have it? Did you take it and not leave a forwarding address as to where I can find it?

More importantly, do I want to find it?

Yesterday was hectic and I didn’t leave school at the end of the day because there was a meeting at 5:30 pm for parents and sometimes I just don’t bother driving home just so I can drive back again. My principal saw how hard I was working and left just before the meeting and returned with Starbucks. Skinny sugar-free vanilla latte just the way she knows I like it. Wasn’t that lovely of her? When I walked in the door a full 12 hours after having left my house this morning I realized that my coffee intake has been dangerously low. Today, I will rememdy that by intravenous caffeine.

My junior high offered a typing class which I took even though my mother taught me the proper way to type much earlier so she could enlist me in some free child labor for the printing business she had when I was a kid. Somehow she was safe from laws against it and didn’t get in trouble for doing so. By the time I took typing class I was ahead of everyone else and was able to write dirty notes to Billy “Gummy Hair” Duffy and amuse ourselves enormously with Muammar al-Gaddafi jokes which I probably barely understood.

Billy got a wad of gum slapped on the top of his head by a girl on the bus ride home when he joked: “Hey, you want to hear a joke that will knock your tits off? Oh. You already heard it.”

His hair grew back like crab grass that year and my amusement of him doubled. Still, he knew how to type fast and became my partner in crime in that class. Remember when we had correction paper to fix typing errors using typewriters? And the white film on it used to rub off on our fingers? Billy and I thought it was funny to take it to the bathroom with us and rub it on our noses so that when we returned our typing teacher thought we had been snorting coke in the toilet stalls.

God, I miss junior high!

Except, I’m sort of still in it. Probably serves me right.

ANYWAY, I type fast and that story was to tell you that I typed Steve Case’s answers to my serious health care questions about his new website. Obviously, I cleaned them up a bit and added some helpful addendums.

Kelly: I like what you have been saying about the “Wisdom of the Crowds” [contributing to the culture we build on the Internet] especially as an educator and the mother of 2 children with ADHD. How can Revolution Health help address issues that are such a gap for parents, teachers, and health care providers? I realize that this is a huge question and I’m asking if you will have places where ADHD questions can be answered for parents and teachers can use it as a resource and doctors will aid in that discussion.

Steve: It is a huge question because health care is a $2 trillion industry and we’re launching the site to be able to help address those issues. We do have a section on each of these divisions partnering with leading non-profit organization to have more of a policy aspect on issues like this. Part of it is just giving parents tools to better understand what might be going on [with regard to] their options – over time we’re hoping to build momentum. We do want to partner with everybody! It’s so fragmented that we hope to be a place this can come together. I’m sure it’s a big number, but if you were to Google ADHD you would come up with too much information.

Kelly: That’s true. There are over 129,000,000 hits on Google for that search.

Steve: That’s a lot! This is where we hope to help.

The site offers a place where you can register and keep a medical profile of your own. Since they employ former insurance company workers who will advocate on your behalf with your own insurance company when you have difficulty, I wondered about how comfortable people will feel about giving out personal information.

Kelly: Are there confidentiality issues with giving out information like that?

Steve: We’ve put together a privacy policy. If you want us to call your insurance company, we do ask that you sign the policy and fax it to us.

My next question came after Jenny asked about the influence that advertisers could have over the site and was a follow-up to his answer about providing advertising from drug companies but not in an unfair manner.
Kelly: Will you have a rating system or a way to determine if this is successful? How will you provide a check and balance for yourself?

Steve: Every article will have a rating system and people can rate them [at will]. We also have Mayo Clinic and about 25 other different sources which will contribute to the site that can be rated. This is the ‘people powered’ aspect of this. Ultimately, people rate doctors and articles and this gives us that kind of feedback.

In retrospect, I was happy with his answers and the way the whole thing played out. If I had to do it over again I would only change the fact that once all of us “clocked in” with our conference calling code that no one gave a BlogHer Reunion shout out and hollered, “Wazzup, girls?!”

It would have also been a great time for a tit joke.