Ok, I have another thing to say about the weather and then, as Edie says, I need to start expecting snow instead of being so surprised.

The wisdom in that seven-year-old.

Also, I’m sort of behind on updating these columns. It was going to be nice to say the snow has melted, but then it came back a couple days ago, and so here we are. It’s winter.

And I’m turning into my mother…let me explain.

Winter has me turning into my mother
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In case you’re wondering we have yet to thaw out over here in the west. And there are some things that bad weather stops, like school busses sometimes (as we discussed last week.) And occasionally, school (which happened last week), and at times, good moods (which seems to be happening currently).

Because something happens to my character when I’m behind the wheel on bumpy, icy, snow covered, wintry roads in the dark before the sunrise when I have three precious little souls in the back. I morph into the-cage fighting version of myself. When we arrived home from school last week after plowing through thirty miles in over an hour in the eye of the blizzard, I learned that my seven-year-old had been tallying up my swear words so she could report back to her dad. And in my defense, I figure it’s better they hear the language than learn what digging out of the ditch in a blizzard feels like, or worse.

Turns out what does NOT stop for the weather is the oilfield traffic. I knew this, but they could at least slow down for frazzled mothers in dirty SUVs shaking their fists at them while they’re passing in the icy lane. I mean, this weather warrants a little more caution don’t you think? Didn’t we all see the pickup flipped on its roof on the way to town? Do those plates attached to that truck read Texas? What do you know about snow and ice in Texas? (she screams into the  windshield of her Yukon…)

So this is my mood today. It’s been five straight days of some of the iciest road conditions I’ve seen, and I’ve lived here most of my life. Lord knows I’ve put on more than a million miles in all sorts of weather and so maybe it should set me up to brave conditions like this. But honestly, it’s only made me more afraid and more cautious, because I know what can happen!!!

Wait…whoa…did I just become my mother?

Oh no. The transformation might almost be complete. Because when I got to town this morning, I promptly texted her to tell her to stay home. And then I called my little sister and told her the same thing. The weather worrier is a role my mom unabashedly holds. That and the “no running on the dock” announcer and the “careful, careful” caller and the “cut the grapes up in fourths to feed a child with a full set of teeth” police, so much so that we lovingly call her “Safety Beth.” It’s only a matter of time until I get my “Safety Assistant” badge and vest.

I already have four or five weather apps downloaded on my phone and the ND Road Report key memorized. Add to that a stockpile of harrowing stories stored in my memory to rehash when someone dares to actually run on the dock!. “Did you know Shirley’s daughter’s mother-in-law had a cousin who ran on the dock? Yup, sure did. Almost lost an eye to a fish-hook. Couldn’t have been a closer call.”

And anyone asking me today, how I am? Well, I’m giving them the full recount of the six pickups and two trucks who dared pass me this morning. And I’m likely gonna be really dramatic about it. And maybe, while I eat my turkey sandwich for lunch, I’m looking up houses in Florida. Or Arizona. I was there once at a place where you don’t even need a house. Just drag your camper and park it on a slab of fake plastic grass. The lack of lawn mowing opportunities will surly be overshadowed by the absolute insistence that everyone drive everywhere in a golf cart.

Anyway, stay safe and don’t go anywhere for three to six months because I heard it could snow again. If you need me, I’ll be refreshing the ND Road report, stress-baking chocolate chip cookies and saying every worry out loud for fear that if I don’t, it will all come true. It’s all a part of the transformation process…

Before I became a parent there were things I swore I’d never do when I was a parent only to find, rather quickly, that the type of expertise I thought I possessed before children was a total crock.

I knew nothing.

And the more the kids grow, the less I know.

Lately my current list of failures has become a full page, single spaced document in 10-point font. Just a few days ago my husband and I hovered around a homework page like we were back in high school algebra and wondered when the heck they changed second grade math?

“Edie, you’re just going to have to tell your teacher we couldn’t understand the directions,” my husband said handing our seven-year-old back her pages, an act that nearly broke him. I shoved a marshmallow in my mouth and asked our kindergartner if she had anything to color because I know I’m good at staying in the lines and bad at figuring out how to get supper on the table before bedtime. Frozen pizza anyone?

When the girls were little, I spent a lot of time trying to start good habits for us all. I mean, they were so fresh to the world the idea of totally screwing it up in the first few years was daunting. Everyone in my family teases my brother-in-law for asking the hospital if they had softer washcloths for his newborn baby, “like something made of silk maybe,” because she was so tiny and her skin was so delicate. I didn’t blame him for asking, I probably would have asked too if I would have thought of it.

Oh, how quickly they go from itty bitty, fragile little burritos to piling up the wreckage of their bikes on the dirt trail heading to their cousin’s and coming in crying, bleeding and covered from head to toe in dust. How quickly they go from copying your every move to requesting you change out of your Crocs before dropping them off at school.

How quickly I got comfortable going out in public in Crocs.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this today because our family is working on a solution to something I thought I’d have mastered before my youngest daughter turned one. But here we are, five years later, and my darling little almost-six-year-old will not go to bed on her own. And by go to bed I mean fall asleep and stay asleep under her own covers without her dad’s arm around her, her little head nestled in his pit, her favorite spot in the world.

Now I’m going on record here to blame this situation all on my husband. Because I had that girl sleep trained before she moved out of her crib, but once that man started laying down next to her for a story at night there was no returning to the land of the awake-past-8pm. I mean, I understand, he’s tired. He does manual labor, he’s in the elements all day. And the room is dark, the sound machine is on, but darling dear husband we all know that regardless of the state of awake our child is, you’re out for the count by 8:30 pm. You might as well change out of your full Carhart ensemble before you open “Chicken Little.”

 My sister-in-law, who had a similar situation with her youngest, suggested having my two daughters sleep together at night, something they are happy to do at sleepovers with the relatives but is somehow less appealing at home. So when my husband was at a meeting past bedtime, I put both girls in bed together, read a story, turned out the lights, gave them a few snuggles and escaped from between them when their breathing turned to tiny snores. “This will work. I’ll just ease them into this,” I thought as I headed upstairs to begin tucking myself in for the night. But halfway through my face washing routine I heard a door creak and a set of small footsteps heading toward me, and then a cry and then a wail and then I was standing at the top of the stairs looking down on sisters angrily explaining a train of events that can only be described as a full-on sleep fight. I mean, I’m not positive my oldest was even awake when she angrily called her little sister a “big meanie” for attempting to use her arm as a blanket.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” I thought to myself while I followed them both back to bed to wait for the return of daddy’s armpit. 

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be studying second grade math and Googling “sleep training for five-year-olds.” And I’ll probably be doing it all in Crocs, using my embarrassing wardrobe choices as payback because I’m out of ideas…

This week on the podcast we catch up on the basics: how we’re failing parenthood, namely, 2nd grade math and bedtime, hunting for elk, working cows, the place Chad sleeps when he drinks too much and the redneck thing he did to start himself on fire (just briefly, he’s fine.)
It’s all over the place people, just like us. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

A few of the things we recap in the episode

Thanks for listening and reading about life on the ranch! Watch this week for the premier of my music video for “If you were a cowboy!”

Bye love you bye

The Memory Keeper
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Recently, on my regular trip bringing the girls to town for school, we spotted a rainbow against dark blue rain clouds, stretching its arch over ash trees glowing in the warm wash of light from the sunrise.

“Look at the rainbow girls!” I declared as we pulled out of my little sister’s driveway and up on the gravel county road. I stopped the car so they could get a good look and then we followed it the next 15 miles to town. As the colors grew darker and more vibrant, the girls looked out the windows to name the colors they were spotting. Light pink melting into red into orange, “I see yellow and turquoise and purple!” yelled Rosie. “And blue!” my niece Ada piped in from the way back. They’ve learned the colors of the rainbow, but, according to Edie, the oldest, the real thing seemed different. There were colors that were hard to name, not properly identified in the textbooks and worksheets she’s familiar with and it sort of bothered her.

I thought about this as I watched the arch of those colors sweep vibrant across the sky and then slowly fade away as rainbows do. These things in life that can’t be replicated or adequately described, the sights and moments the camera fails to fully capture, that are too fleeting or deep feeling that all our efforts sort of fall flat, how can we make ourselves know it when we’re in it? How can we make our hearts and bodies remember once it’s passed?

And then I thought maybe I was living in one right then and there in that car looking at the rainbow on our way to school. Even the arguing I was witnessing about who knows most about rainbows and Rosie describing (in detail) what she thinks all of her friends are going to be wearing to Kindergarten’s “Hat Day” in her small but loud matter of fact voice, my niece Ada pulling her cowboy hat off and on and backwards and forwards, Edie making sure they both know the rules for recess—this version of them—these girls—will not be my passengers tomorrow.

Tomorrow they will be one day older and maybe then they will know more about rainbows, or how to subtract seven from ten, or what it feels like to be left out or to perfect her cartwheels or make a brand-new best friend…

And I won’t be the same either. We never are, are we? It’s just that the slow change in us is much more gradual than the light fading from the sky, the colors changing on the leaves, the air getting cooler. We marvel at those leaves, that sunrise, that rainbow, but how often do we stop to marvel at ourselves and the life we’ve built over this passing of time, time that feels too slow before it feels too fast…

Oh, this time of year makes a nostalgic woman like me worse for it. I notice a good portion of ankle sticking out from under the hem of my oldest daughter’s jeans and wonder how I missed her growth spurt. I mean, how do they do their growing without us noticing every new centimeter stretching toward the sky?

Last weekend we took the girls our riding their horses on a beautiful fall day. We took them out to notice those leaves changing and to learn about paying attention on the backs of their animals. Edie asked me then if I knew the Tall Tale of Paul Bunyan. I told her it had been a while. And so, she told it, word for word, inflection by inflection as we rode through the tall grass, past the stock dam and across the creek bottom and up toward the barnyard again. And now that I’m thinking about it, there’s still not much of the Paul Bunyan story I retained from her retelling, but oh, the way my daughter’s voice rose with excitement getting to the punch line, the way it filled the quiet hills with a chatter, the way she remembered so well and the way we all were together under the warm fall sun, on the backs of horses, together? I will reach for that moment when I’m lonesome or scared or ailing or worried. I won’t remember the length of my daughter’s hair or the color of her shirt or maybe even how old we all were, what year, maybe she was 7 or 8, Rosie 5 or 6. And I won’t be able to describe it and it won’t matter to anyone else really anyway, that day we all rode together slow and easy and Rosie was nervous and so the story helped her and I declared, like I do, “Well, that was fun,” when we arrived home to cook supper again, get ready for bed and up and at ‘em for another morning of growing up and growing old…

In time Edie will forget the details of the Paul Bunyon story, she’ll need to make room for fractions and grocery lists and tall tales will likely be pushed from the priority. But I will remember her here, the way she was that autumn day. I was made to remind her when she needs reminding…because I am her mother, the memory keeper.