Tag Archives: daughter

by

A friend for Mordechai

I drove my daughter back to school in Bellingham on Friday. On the way back I hike at Deception Pass and then stop in Coupeville before going to the ferry. In Coupeville, I found friends for Mordechai, my clinic skeleton. This is a sea lion and there is a whale and a dolphin, all skeletons hanging from the ceiling. I suspect that they are real skeletons and not plastic, as Mordechai is.

My daughter says, “Mordechai was not alive before.”

“I could argue that she was. She is made from plastic, which is made from oil, which is formed over millennia from plants fallen and slowly changing.”

“Ok, you win on that one, mom.”

Doesn’t this sea lion look like she is flying?

 

by

Panoply

I took this for Photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #79 and then am delighted with Jithin’s post. I love the row of pans, a panoply of pans. Also the breakfast was fabulous. We were the second table occupied on Sunday morning, and many of the pans were in use by the time we finished!

I was in Bellingham just Saturday and Sunday to wish my daughter happy birthday. Who can identify the restaurant?

by

Hurricane Ridge

This is one of the watercolors in the Mother Daughter Show III by Helen Burling Ottaway, titled Hurricane Ridge. My parents moved from Alexandria, Virginia in 1996 to Chimacum, Washington. My mother loved the northwest and traveled out to paint, but they did not move to the northwest until my maternal grandmother died. My grandmother lived into her 90s. My mother was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in 1997, one year after the move. She did not get to paint the northwest nearly as much as she and we hoped. She died in May of 2000.

Still, I do have some of her gorgeous northwestern watercolors. I have more to frame, but this show will have some of the ones that she framed.

by

Daughters and dinosaurs

D for daughter and dinosaur. Here is a poem I wrote quite a while ago, though it is about my son rather than my daughter.

Dinosaur Dreams

The problem
With Intelligent Design
Is those old bones
Those dinosaurs

Also that of 10,000 dreams of creation
One would be right
And the followers of all the others
Consigned to hell
If so, I go gladly, clutching
Dinosaur bones to my chest
And will enjoy the diversity
Not the narrow heaven with a narrow
Small-minded deity

But is evolution right?

Well, I think it’s on the right track

But wholly done and all correct?

After all, think how often
Medicine has been wrong
Think of tobacco and vioxx
Think of Galen, over 2000 years ago
Thinking that evil humors built up in the uterus
Causing hysteria
External pelvic massage was the cure
For over 2000 years
For old maids, widows and nuns
Who had no male to cleave unto
Massage was a treatment into the early 1900s
And now we wonder about prozac too

Evolution is an evolving science

I think of when my son was four
And he watched “Jurassic Park”
Against my wishes
Because I thought it was too violent
He studied it carefully many times

One day he asked me, anxiously,
“Mom, is DNA real?”
To check that it wasn’t another of those Santa stories
I was able to reassure him
Yes, I think DNA is real
He was pleased

A few days later he announced
That when he grows up
He wants to be a plant and animal scientist
Extract DNA from amber
And grow those dinosaurs

A laudable ambition
For any four year old

If God left the dinosaur bones
Around to fool us
And they never lived
She has a nasty sense of humor
And my son and I will not forgive

I believe in evolution
And dream of dinosaurs

first published on everything2.com in 2005

by

The Introverted Thinker on high school fights

I just watched Taylor Swift’s Mean and it makes me think of what the Introverted Thinker says about high school fights. I asked if she sees a lot of bullying.

“Oh, mom, mostly it’s not bullying. Mostly it’s misunderstanding.”

She said that mostly the fights are mistakes. “Mom, one girl isn’t really thinking and she says something as she’s leaving. She is not even trying to hurt the other person. But she says something that is not thoughtful or can be taken wrong.

Then the other girl thinks about it and gets all upset. She talks to her friends and then snubs the first girl. The first girl doesn’t remember the comment and has no idea that it has hurt anyone. She doesn’t know what the fight is about, so she feels attacked out of the blue by the second girl and her friends.

It’s silly and it’s usually a misunderstanding. The first girl made a dumb or thoughtless or confusing comment. It gets taken wrong and then it all escalates from there.”

It is hard to go back to a person who made a comment that feels really hurtful and ask: what did you mean when you said this? There is bullying and meanness as well. But my daughter thinks that it’s mostly not deliberate or thoughtless cruelty: mostly it’s thoughtless comments.

Taylor Swift Mean
More Introverted Thinker and Extroverted Feeler stories here.