mama_kestrel

The weekend was interesting. I'm happy, drained, grieving, exhausted, and overwhelmed. All of this is perfectly normal under the circumstances.

Friday evening was an exercise in frustration, as Mom tried to get me to stop a stir-fry in progress to figure out where best to hang a painting, not understanding why I couldn't just tell her or the spouse. Spouse didn't get it either. I had to explain that it would require stopping, turning around, figuring out where Mom was pointing to, and then looking to see which of three possible paintings she was referencing. By then it wouldn't have been a stir-fry; it would have been an boiled soggy mess. (Note: it wasn't a stir-fry anyway by the time I finished explaining it, but it was at least still salvageable.) Then she decided to microwave water for tea, totally confused when I screamed. I pointed out that the microwave door swung open in my face and that I'd had to drop my utensils and duck.

So I decided to go to an out of town housefilk on Saturday. Respite was definitely in order.

Saturday morning the phone rang. My near-sister's mother had died. She'd been ill, and my near-sister had been working on getting her a place in a decent care facility, but hadn't managed it yet. There'd been several bad falls, and broken bones, and strokes. It wasn't a surprise, but it's always a shock.

So okay. Same town, fortuitously enough. I went and spent the afternoon with E. and her husband and daughter, who is also my goddaughter. We're very close, going back to when E. and her daughter lived with us about 20 years back. Come evening I mentioned the possibility of housefilk. E said "let me get my purse" and off we went.

At which point I got shock number 2. I spoke, some time back, about a foster daugher who was getting out of an abusive marriage. She managed that. The divorce was final as of last fall. But she was still 1800 miles away, and, well, there are other worries.

So we walked into the house. The host greeted us, E. found a seat, and host and I went to get me a drink. And then I turned around, and there was my daughter. She'd kept it as a surprise, so no one had told me, but she'd come home 3 days before. I handed the bottle back with the comment "take this before I drop it", and then grabbed my girl and held on. I don't cry in public. I just don't. But there I was, in the middle of I don't know how many people, clinging to K, sobbing, repeating "my girl's home. My girl's home. My girl's home." I couldn't say anything else. There was no room to think of anything else but that enormous wave of gratitude and relief and overwhelming love. (And the next mundane jackass who says something stupid about how a foster child doesn't matter as much as your "real" children is going to get punched.)

So yeah. Emotional whiplash. E's mom's death, which does touch me personally as well (we were friends in our own right), and my daughter's safe return home.

I think I need a break from my break.

I bake rather a lot. Tonight I remembered that I had a cup of heavy cream leftover from another project, which needed to be used up before it went bad if it hadn't already. I checked; no, still fine. So I decided on cream scones, which are easy and would go well with the root vegetable stew in the crock pot. It having been awhile since I made them, I did a quick search for a recipe.

Am I the only person on the planet who still thinks in terms of how long it takes to set up and clean up these amazing gadgets? Every single recipe I found relied on a food processor to cut the butter into the flour/baking powder mixture. All right, sure, it takes under a minute if you do it that way, but that doesn't count getting out the machine if it doesn't live on the counter (as mine does not), nor inserting the correct blade, nor disassembling and cleaning the entire bowl/lid/blade assembly after. Say, if you're efficient, 5 minutes each for assembly and disassembly, plus washing up. And you don't save a bowl, either, because if you try to blend in the liquid in the processor it will end up overmixed and tough; the machine simply works too fast. So the dough ends up in a bowl for final hand-mixing anyway.

By contrast, it took me about 3 minutes to cut the butter in with a pastry blender, which included locating the pastry blender someone had put away in the wrong place. Cream gets mixed into the same bowl; no transfering. I have to wash the bowl and the pastry blender.

Sometimes low tech is much more efficient.

The scones are good, too.

I've been mentoring for a long time, starting with an SCA "little sister" I took under my wing when she was 13 and I was 23. (Possibly it was earlier, now that I think about it, because the "mama" part of "Mama Kestrel" was bestowed upon me by the other girls in the same wing of the dorm in college.) Once Kestrel was appended, it was a short step before someone started calling the kids who looked to me my fledglings. That was 25 years or so back, and it stuck. But I'm quickly closing in on 60 now, and I have fledglings who are over 40.

Different fledglings have needed different things, of course. Some needed an ear. Some needed someone to believe in them until they could believe in themselves. Some needed a stable base, or to feel safe, or to understand what absolute, unconditional love really is. Some needed a role model. Some had never really had a mother worth the name, and finally got one. At varying points, several of them ended up moving in with me, or with me and my husband once I was married. (My mom once opined that I was lucky my husband let me keep doing that. My husband, who was present, commented that he'd known about it before we were married and that if it had been a problem I wouldn't have married him.)

Over New Year's weekend I learned, quite by accident, that several of my fledglings have grown up to take fledglings of their own - mentoring them, mothering them, moving teenagers and twenty-somethings into their own homes at need, making sure they got medical care, the whole thing. One of them said specifically that she learned how to help others from me. It had never occurred to me that that was part of what I was modeling. But if I want to count what good I've done in the world, it isn't just my own fledglings, it's theirs as well. I'll never know how far those ripples go, but I don't need to. It's enough to know that they're there.

There is a feline conspiracy in this house. Note that I do not say "our house". That would imply human ownership, whereas I am coming to believe that they only let us think this is our house because it pleases them to do so.

When my alarm went off this morning, I was dragging. As many people will do, I hit the snooze button. Twice. Miss Silky saw me do it. I didn't think she was paying attention. Hah. Pure human foolishness. The second time, I put it on the bed, out of my own easy reach, and let my eyes close.

The next time I opened my eyes nearly an hour had passed, and I needed to be out the door in 15 minutes if I was to get everyone where they needed to be on time. What, my was my first panicked thought, had happened to my alarm? I knew I hadn't hit snooze again, but my phone screen said that it was snoozed, and had 5 minutes and some seconds remaining. So I watched as I gathered my clothes, and sure enough...the alarm gave the first vibrational buzz in preparation for its full cheerful obnoxiousness, and a tortoiseshell paw moved an inch, patted the screen in just the right spot, and silenced the gadget.

That cat is too smart of my own good.