It turns out that I am a bit of a doormat.

It took most of the last eighteen months to learn this about myself. Actually I am also married to a doormat, for it was his actions that led us on this passage of self and marital discovery. The tale involves an acquaintance who left the country suddenly and with her departure came the phone call announcing that her cat was left behind in her apartment about fifteen miles away and since we couldn't exactly be the type of people who can leave a cat trapped in an apartment, we wound up rescuing the cat and moving him into our apartment. It was supposed to have been a temporary arrangement, maybe a month or so and then the cat's owner promised she would come back for him. The first red flag should have been the cats name, "Probation", although he also answered to "Bugger".

I never met a cat I didn't like and he was no exception. His soft orange fur and beefy face quickly won me over. Our other two cats hated him on sight, but I knew they would adapt. I found that it was hard to yell "Probation" out my front door and even more impossible to call "Bugger", so I took to calling him a gentler sounding "orange cat" and he promptly learned my clicking call. I tried to insist that he would be an indoor cat and to his credit he did try to humor me for a little while, but it became apparent that he liked to roam. As soon as one of us opened up the door we would see an orange blur and he would race out into the parking lot. I could see that he had a healthy respect for cars, so I resigned myself to becoming his door woman.

When he was still a new visitor, he discovered the school bus stop and would plant himself nearby so that when the school bus arrived he would be right there to walk our middle daughter home from the corner. He was partial to chasing leaves and had an extremely playful nature. In the evenings he would come inside and liked to hang out next to me while I watched TV. When he grew tired of being indoors he would saunter up to the front door and throw his body against the doorknob until one of us would let him back outside.

We settled into our routines. A month passed and there was no word on his departure. A couple months in, we asked his owner to contribute to his upkeep and she did, still reassuring us that he would not be here forever.

In the meantime we were doing this crazy cat shuffle. Since our family pets did not get along with him, we could not leave any of them alone together. This challenge was exacerbated by the size of our living space (a small two bedroom apartment) which meant that Probie had to be in one room with the door closed while the other two had roam of the rest of the place, or our two cats had to be locked up while Probie explored the rest of the apartment. This was all made more complicated when it became obvious that all three cats wished they could follow me around. Whomever was locked up was often loudly miserable.

At some point my orange friend had his first run in with a neighbor cat. More months passed and a couple more big cat fights followed. Our neighbors announced that they were going to get a live trap and if Probie entered their property they would trap him and take him to the animal shelter. We pushed his owner for a solution and stepped up our cat security. This became something of a new game for him. If he saw one of us reach for a jacket or keys he would race to the door and wait. One of us had to hold him while the rest of us ran out and the last one out had to be ever vigilant of tricking him and keeping him inside. A few times we missed and he won some temporary freedom, but we got him back inside before anything happened to him. If anyone knocked at the door he would sneak behind the curtain and wait to try to make his escape. Keeping him in became a stressful job and we wondered how long we could keep at it.

Finally almost a year and a half after he moved in, we got word that there was another place for him. Arranged by a friend of his owner, we were told that the place was out in the country and sounded like it would be a good fit for him, so we drove him there last week. It looked okay and it seems he will have the run of a huge piece of land, but his days of sleeping inside just ended. He will be a barn cat now. I hear his owner is still promising she will soon return.

In the meantime I find myself still watching the corner when the school bus reaches the corner and I sigh when I realize he won't be racing home.

For Greg

At four am or the "hour of ghosts" I feel
a warm hand on my shoulder and I am twenty years back
in Sacramento in his dented yellow car.

We are both young again.

I smell tobacco even through my cold ridden nose
and though he wasn't a smoker until after I knew him well
this is one of the ways I know he is in my room now.

He has regrets.

The zip of the years passed us both
and left this gentle man
a corpse in a doorway on a cold October evening.

Homeless in the end.

I remember his rich, deep voice
and his passion for words and ideas
although I have lost our conversations over the years.

My sweet friend.

Eat it or Wear it!

It was not my finest moment as a parent, but all in all my actions and reactions on one evening about ten years ago can still shake one of my younger children (who were not even born at that time) into better listeners. In my minds eye I see us all back then. Two weary parents and one strong willed five year old who refused to eat a single bite of chicken noodle soup, never mind that it was something she had eaten dozens of times before, liked and she should have been hungry enough to want. In my own defense I had to have been tired, dealing with wacked out pregnancy hormones and after begging, cajoling, arranging deals that most other children would have jumped on, ("Just eat five bites of soup and we will call this over."), but it was all met with crossed arms and a defiant stare. We were losing her and I guess I must have imagined the soup as the proverbial line in the sand. I must have worried that if I allowed her to leave the table, I would be setting myself up for years of disobedience.

So after about an hour and a half of all of us sitting around what was now cold soup, I uttered five words that has become the stuff that family legends are made of.

"Eat it or wear it!"

I am certain that she thought my threat was hollow, but there is one thing she has since learned about me. It takes an awful lot to make me mad but once I have invested all of the energy it takes to get me there, I follow through!

The soup was dumped over her head.

Within minutes she was cleaned up and I apologized. Life went on. She and I both learned a few things about discipline and listening and most of all communication. I suspect that we are better off for it, but if I could reach back in time and change my actions, I would. I didn't need to dump the soup to make my point. When I think back about all of this I can see that my bullish behavior only taught her that bigger and stronger people always get what they want. All because I insisted that she eat something that she did not want. How absurd!

As I got older, I learned to pick my battles. She (and her sisters) might appear to get away with things on occasion, but only because I know that I am far more of an effective teacher when I am not nitpicking every little thing they do. And when I start to forget that I think about the soup.

Isn't disciplining our kids right up at the top of the list as one of the hardest jobs we face on a daily basis? The parenting books all cover it, but what they all fail to tell you is that it is always evolving as our families grow and change. Consistency is key, but so is balance and it is okay to make mistakes along the way, especially if we own up to them.

We teach our kids, but they are all here to teach us something back too. Sometimes those lessons include forgiving and accepting our own shortcomings.

When I was twelve years old I lived in fear that someone would ask me what my favorite Ted Nugent song was. It's funny now, but back then I spent so much time worrying about what other people were thinking and what they might do that I missed about half of my childhood.

At the time my only concert shirt was a hand me down from one of my sisters. It was black and by the time I took such a great liking to it, the shirt was beginning to fray at the edges. There was an expanding hole under one armpit. My parents loathed it which must account for why I was so drawn to it. Of course if you opened up my closet door now and inspected my wardrobe you would see that I still have a great affinity for black concert shirts and if you examined even further you would notice that I have many that sport holes of various sizes, some many decades old and the best are so soft and thin that it is a stretch of the imagination to call them shirts. A few of them I keep in the back of the closet knowing that I can't even wear them anymore, but I can't get rid of them either. My husband likes to tell me that when I drop off food at the food bank, they often must think I am a client. I stopped caring about what other people thought decades ago, so I can see the humor in that, but at twelve I spent hours thinking about how I could evade any conversation that began with, "So, what is YOUR favorite Nugent song?" This was 1981, decades before the Internet as we all know it, before You tube and MTV, even Friday Night videos were a few years away and the closest Tower Records was miles away from my neighborhood, so it wasn't like I stood much a chance to memorize the names of Ted Nugents songs anyway. Looking back on it now, I can see that I was way too hard on myself back then.

Seventh grade is what we send people to in order to prepare them to enter the military and go off to war. It was lumpy meanness and blight. Even the few kids who were basically nice human beings were a little off back then and the rest of us turned into bullies in order to distract everyone else from turning on us. It is an ugly truth. We couldn't comprehend that we still had the land mines of puberty and the unsettling adventures of first love. Twelve year olds live in the moment, which I am sure is mostly a good thing or it would all have been worse.

All of this has been weighing heavily on my mind because my middle daughter just turned ten this month and I am already anxious about what seventh grade will do to her. Out of my three daughters, she is most like me. My little towheaded, blue eyed girl who escapes into her drawings. I watch her excel in the arts while struggling with math and numbers and I see how she already keeps a long mental list of things that she can lie awake at night worrying about. Apparently she also inherited my tendency towards nervousness and anxiety. I wish I could have spared her that too.

I have to remind myself that the flip side of my own personal neurosis is that throughout all of it, I do mostly maintain cheerfulness. It is something I cultivate and draw from on an ongoing basis, always have, even back in those dark middle school years when I worried myself to death. I always kept a handful of optimism and she will too.

And just in case, I will always be there to listen. I may even share a shirt.