First there was the Dead Bird Incident. Then there was the discovery that my entire house smells like dog pee because, for some odd reason, I--the girl who loves MUTTS--wound up with not one, but TWO purebred dogs, both of them from breeds who are commonly described as "stubborn, willfull, highly energetic, and difficult to train."

Of course, my sister, my father, my in-laws, and my co-workers find this very amusing because that's EXACTLY how all of them would describe ME!

So, then there was the day I came home from work and found my cell phone, chewed up like a rawhide bone, lying in 3 bite-punctured, mangled pieces on my artificial grass.

Effing dogs!

Yes, it is my own fault. Molly (Prime Suspect #2) has confiscated my cell phone more than once, stealing it off the nightstand or end table and leaving it out in the back yard overnight a time or two, but she never CHEWED on it!

I usually keep my phone on the dining room table or kitchen counter--safely out of reach--but one night I had a call from a friend, so I sat down on the couch to chat, and stupidly set it down on the end table after the call ended. Buddy (Prime Suspect #1) probably grabbed it and followed in Molly's footsteps, only he, at 7 months old, is definitely in the "Chewing Phase" of puppyhood and is most likely the Guilty Party.

I am a cheapskate who has had the same cell phone service provider for nearly 6 years. Every time my contract comes up for renewal, they send me a postcard offering up a free phone. Sure, it's a basic phone, without any bells and whistles, but it's not like I use any of those fancy features anyway, so a basic phone is fine by me because I don't know how to do anything with the phone besides set the alarm, use the calculator, add contacts, and turn off the ringer, and that is PLENTY for me. However, I now have a couple of 'Tweens in my house who have discovered "texting," and my son has told me that his phone (the first free phone I received from my Company X years ago which doesn't even come with a camera--HORRORS!) is, and I quote, "An embarrassment to me and all of my friends!"

So, I was lured into the nearby Company X store, thinking my contract was close to renewal, as was the additional phone plan I had added for the kids, so surely they would have something to offer, preferably something with a QWERTY keyboard, so that when my son sent me text messages, it would take me less than 30 minutes to compose a response (I suck at text messaging because I refuse to abbreviate or intentionally misspell words).

Well, apparently, cell phones have become so "fancy" that they can't offer up free phones anymore, but they do offer up plenty of discounts and rebates for long-time customers (read: too lazy to switch) such as myself.

One hour and $300 later ($150 after mail-in rebates), I walk out of the store with not one new phone but TWO, both with QWERTY keyboards, GPS, unlimited Web/Text/email access, and I don't know what all else.

Yeah, I know. I'm a sucker.

I tried to tell the salesman I wouldn't USE all of those "features," and he assured me that once I knew I had them, I would use them. He also assured me that my kids most certainly WOULD use them, and would love me forever if I provided them!

Oh, yes, he was GOOD--no doubt the 20-something child of divorced parents who totally learned how to turn Parental Broken Home Guilt into Personal Gain! In fact, I'm SURE of it, because one of the first features he showed me after I started to balk was the "Locator Service" Company X provides that allows the parent to TRACK the whereabouts of her child's phone at all times...Mwa ha ha ha ha!

Because I am too lazy/busy to shop around for competitively-priced plans and because I don't have that many "friends" to put in "my circle" anyway, I have this plan with Company X that offers all the bells and whistles, which I have been paying for (and have NOT been utilizing) for months now. So, I might as well keep paying for it and start getting my money's worth, donchathink?

I even splurged and downloaded some ringtones: Hawaii Five-O Theme Song for people in my Contacts list (hee!), Mission Impossible Theme Song for unidentified callers (ha!), and AC/DC's Back in Black for certain people whose calls I actually look forward to (Hell Yeah)! My kid's phone has "Oh Yeah" by Yello ('80s Tune featured in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off) for their phone.

My phone is pink. The kids' phone is black and flips shut. I made it very clear to them that they needed to think of that phone like a Laptop Computer (because it cost almost as much!) and treat it accordingly, which means keeping it out of the dogs' reach, and NOT leaving it in their pants pocket on Laundry Day (that caused the demise of the 2nd Free Phone Company X provided two years ago).

We took "Mug Shots" of the dogs and posted them on Facebook. Then, the kids texted each other, and I amused myself by reading through the exchange:

Daughter to Son: You are a turd

Son to Daughter: You have hairy arms

Daughter to Son: You stink

Son to Daughter: You have dreadlocks

Daughter to Son: Stop texting me!

Note that neither one of them substituted "U" for "You." They fear the wrath of their Mom--the Grammar/Spelling/Editing QUEEN--or perhaps they are just enjoying that QWERTY keyboard...

As for the dogs, well, I am trying to patiently endure and survive Buddy's "puppyhood." We had him neutered a couple of weeks ago, and I keep hoping that age and loss of testosterone will make him less annoying. I keep the doors shut to all the bedrooms whenever I leave the house, knowing that someday the carpet will be yanked up and replaced with wood floors, and until then, our house is a home--to messy kids, messy dogs, and a less than perfect (but pretty damn cool) Mom.

Pilgrimage

My Mom died in March 2008. She was 64 years old. She died from "complications" of a very complex surgery she (we) chose to elect in an effort to prolong her life (there was a "troublesome" growth on her pancreas--not cancerous now, but likely to become cancerous later). My Mother was terrified of Pancreatic Cancer--she did not want to die a slow and painful death. The surgery was supposed to avoid that outcome--extend her life. Instead it killed her, and we were left behind stunned and in shock and completely unprepared. None of us had truly anticipated that outcome. We refused to consider the risks of surgery because we were all so focused on ridding her pancreas of that "troublesome" growth, we neglected to assess the other potential outcomes.

When I was still a small child, maybe 4 or 5 years old, my Mom reached over to answer the phone one day, and wrenched her back so badly that she slipped a disc. Living in a small town with sub-standard medical facilities, that slipped disc went undiagnosed for TEN YEARS. She was pretty much given prescriptions for Valium and told to "rest." I honestly have no memory of my mother being anything other than a Chronic Pain Sufferer. By the time her back problems were finally taken seriously by doctors, the slipped disc was 80% extended out of her spinal column, and she had been walking around like that, taking care of 2 active children, for TEN YEARS, causing permanent and chronic nerve damage. She had back surgery when I was in High School, but by then the cortisone shots and other "experimental" treatments for back pain had invited other complications, including a "frozen shoulder," loss of bone density and unstable vertebrae in her neck that also had to be fused surgically. And then, just when you thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis--a particularly severe case because medical ailments never seemed to strike her with anything but unusual complications.

Despite those challenges (or perhaps because of them), she was the Lioness in our household. She was never "just a Housewife" or "just a Mom." She was so much more than that. She was passionate and spirited and bold and courageous and gifted. She was the Heart and Soul and Voice of our Family.

But, basically, I grew up with a mother in a constant state of suffering. All things considered, she suffered well because she was stubborn and determined and incredibly, incredibly intelligent, talented, and devoted to her family. We were everything to her, and not in an icky-sweet co-dependent kind of way. She was fierce and strong and bold. She suffered in silence, stubbornly fighting doctors and pain. She refused to give in. She pushed us; inspired us; drove us; lectured us. She was both our harshest critic, and our staunchest supporter. She was NOT the "TV Sit-Com Mom." She was not a cheerful "Brady Bunch" Mom. There were dark days where harsh words were exchanged--words that were burned into my memory, and then buried deep. There were days when I "just knew" I needed to "be especially good." There was one Christmas (but only one Christmas) before she FINALLY got her back surgery--when I had to decorate the tree all by myself (and that's a BIG DEAL because my Mom was HUGE on the whole Christmas thing). There were times when I was stunned and shocked by her support of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and abortion. But, she was also much more intimately acquainted with true suffering than I was...

When we cleaned out her closet and bathroom cabinets after her death, we found numerous prescription bottles, mostly full, of powerful painkillers--valium, vicodin, demarol, oxy contin--prescriptions she tried NOT to take. They made her mind "fuzzy," and that was just something she could not tolerate. For all of her talk about "Quality of Life" and the "Right to Choose," she had enough prescription pills to overdose a football team at her disposal.

She wanted to live.

When she was in the hospital, she suffered a seizure, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy, leaving her hooked up to a respirator. She couldn't talk, and that was a torturous complication for her. Pain, or no pain, communication was her greatest strength. We tried giving her a notepad and pen to write things down, but the pain medication affected her fine motor skills, so we couldn't read her handwriting. I brought a whiteboard from my daughter's room, which, ironically, was a Christmas present to her from her Grandma, and some Whiteboard markers. She could write messages to us on the Whiteboard more easily.

The last message she wrote--to my Dad, who was with her, as she struggled to breathe because her lungs were filling with fluid, and her internal organs were beginning to hemorrhage, and she knew recovery was unlikely: "I would do it for you..."

She was begging him to "Pull the Plug"--end her suffering. (Which, of course he could not and would not do...)

She left behind not only us (husband, daughters, grandchildren), but also a house full of unfinished projects and unfulfilled plans.

Five unfinished quilts sat in her sewing room. Three of them only needed to have the binding sewn on. I finished those in time for her Memorial Service, so we could display those quilts during the service. Her best friend--despite being very ill and fighting her own battle against ovarian cancer--finished a quilt for my nephew that was similar to the one she made for my son, her first grandchild. She appliqued letters cut out of fabric onto the back of the quilt that spelled out, "To Nicholas with Love from Nana." I'm still working on the fifth quilt--a quilt all in white, with an intricate, hand-quilted "Tree of Life" design, also for my nephew because she made one for my first baby just like it.

I received a message recently on my Facebook account from a woman I am related to only by marriage--her husband's mother is my grandmother's aunt. I came to know her through genealogy research--a hobby that my mother introduced me to. There is an entire shelf in the "office" of my parent's house that holds books on genealogy. One of her wishes was to travel to Pennsylvania and Ohio and seek out the locations of the old "Family Homesteads" and cemeteries. She talked about this often, but knew it was impossible. Her medical conditions made travel over long distances impossible.

We had my Mother cremated, and my father, my sister, and I all have urns with her ashes. I carried my little urn in my purse when I traveled last year. I went to Washington, D.C. and Springfield, IL. I scattered her ashes near the Lincoln Memorial and Lincoln's home in Springfield (he was her favorite President). I also journeyed to Seattle, WA--where my sister and I were born. My father, my sister, and I all agreed that the time where Mom was probably the happiest was when she lived in Seattle--where she was a young wife with beautiful babies and her whole life ahead of her. Healthy, strong, and pain-free. Some of her ashes were scattered along Alkai Beach and within Seattle's Arboretum.

But I also realize that wherever I get to go--places like Washington, D.C., Yellowstone, Springfield, IL, etc.--those will all be places that my Mom would have loved to visit, too. If she were still here, she would have expected me to come home and "tell her all about it."

Instead, my Pilgrimage is to visit all those places my Mom would have wanted to go, and leave some of her ashes.

It would be so much better for me to come home and "tell her all about it," but instead, my pilgrimage is to GO, take her with me, and get to live out the life she would have wanted me to have.