Guest Post: Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live

I was pleasantly surprised to see an email Friday from Collette submitting her entry for our sixth Living Out Loud project. Feel free to comment on this entry here so that she can review them and reply at her leisure.

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As a Michigander born and bred when someone asks me where I’m from I hold up my hand, thumb out and use my five-fingered map. The spot I point to is on the border between Birmingham and Troy—house in Birmingham, front yard in Troy. Back then Birmingham had a reputation of being a bunch of snooty types so my sisters and I told people we lived just outside of Troy. We grew up catching tad poles and crayfish in the pond at the end of the street and reading books as high up in the mulberry tree as we could climb. We had rail road tracks in our back yard and hid under the bridge to hear the echoing roar as the puffer bellies rolled past.

Like any native Michigander I learned to love Awreys Cookies, Saunders hot fudge sauce, Strohs ice cream and Vernor’s Ginger ale—even though the rest of the nation thought of it as carbonated kerosene. Summer meant baseball on WJR, Thanksgiving means watching the Lions lose whoever they were playing. I’ve walked the Mackinaw Bridge, watched the locks at the Sault and dipped my toes into all five of the Great Lakes.

While I’ve happily kept my claim to Michigan (Go Blue!) my professional life has moved me to Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana. Living in five states and changing street addresses thirteen times since leaving home I’ve seldom had time to grow deep roots so home is wherever my mother lives and my family gathers for Christmas to make a quilt for a homeless shelter and take a five-mile hike after dinner. With Mom almost 94 I wonder how long before I’m 'homeless'.

Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live. My future home will be on Maui. My friends and I have gone often enough that we’re often called on to give directions and make suggestions to the malihini (tourists). When they ask “do you live here?” we smile and say “not yet”.

Your mileage may vary

My poor husband was lied to. Many helpful people told Rich that I was going to puke for the first three months and I would be huge and miserable for the last three months of this pregnancy. And several folks warned that once the baby is here, we'll barely interact with each other. Mixed in with all these gloomy premonitions was the consolation of the second trimester. Men would waggle their eyebrows at my husband, grin and tell him "wait until the second trimester."

Well, dear readers, we are smack dab in the midst of the second trimester and were I Rich I would call bullshit.

I sailed through the first trimester without hardly any nausea. And thanks to my height, I'm really not very large by most standards. But there isn't a lot of eyebrow waggling going on around here. Frankly, I'm pissed about it.

The last two weeks or so have been hard in general. My blood sugar has been all over the place. I wrestled them down all last week with ridiculous amounts of insulin only to have them hit rock bottom on Saturday. My own personal lowest moment was lying down for a nap with a blood sugar of 158 and waking up in a full panic a little over an hour later with a blood sugar of 33. So the exact time when we should have been having a quickie upstairs while our house guests were downstairs, Rich found me sitting on the toilet sobbing uncontrollably and blubbering about orange juice. Good times.

It's not that I feel unattractive or am worried about the baby, despite what BabyCenter.com may hypothesize. My skin is incredibly sensitive so that I go from "that feels kinda nice" to "don't touch there ever again, are those your hands or blocks of sand paper?". If I lie on my back for more than a few minutes, I feel nauseated. If I tighten my stomach muscles for too long, I get really nauseated. And then there's the lightheadedness or the chance that all these symptoms mimic my low blood sugar. Sexy, huh?

No one promises that a relationship will be consistant, emotionally or physically, over time. I suppose it's part of the adventure we embark on together. And I don't expect us to have everything stay the same ... gosh, that would be boring. But I take solace that even though things are changing a lot these days, one thing and one person remains constant. And I wouldn't want to figure all this out with anyone else.

Cover Me!

I woke up at 4:10am from a nightmare (no more cop shows for me!) and had a hard time going back to bed. This is pretty par for the course these days that something will wake me up between 3 and 4am and I lie there for about an hour. At least I have Peggle! In my fuzzy headedness this morning, I considered staying home today (and under the covers for most of it). I managed to rally, so I present a few things I accomplished by getting out of bed today, if for no other reason than to justify to myself that it was a solid decision.

I snagged another great OV license plate in my morning commute for my growing collection. I think warm weather brings them all out.

I received a bunch of new maternity clothes in the mail (crazy Old Navy sale! $4 tank tops!) and all of them fit. They will greatly help in my quest to have clean clothes each morning that don't squeeze my bladder or look like a tent.

Rich and I went swimming after work in the incredibly warm and conveniently located pool in our back yard. I love that pool!

I convinced Rich to stand with me for a photo, but as usual, this was the best one from the entire set.

Finally, the most productive thing I did today was create a mix for you. I have been mulling this over in my skull for months and Pet Shop Boys inspired me on the way home. So I present to you a compilation of several unique covers for classic and/or familiar songs. A few have sprinklings of naughty words in them (Gin and Juice and I Will Survive, as far as I recall), so be warned.

Cover Me! (an OpenTape creation)

Let me know if there are any other covers you particularly love. It was fun tracking all these down this evening.