Toddled Dredge

TeacherMommy tagged me for this.  Here goes.

1. Character is more important than cool. Lots of cool kids are really little monsters.  Don’t be one of them.  Be someone brave enough to do what’s right even when the crowd disrespects you for it.
2. Even when life is painful, it is worth living. I’ve fought depression at times since childhood. It scares me to think of my children facing the same struggle with it.  I hope they never do.  But if they do, I hope they listen to me or the dozens of other people who tell them that life is a good thing, even when there are bad things in it, and that most of life’s pains are temporary and can be survived.
3. You are responsible for your own choices. Who you are is not your parent’s fault or your teacher’s fault or your friend’s fault.  You choose who you are and what you do.  Do not surrender your freedom to your circumstances. Whoa.  That sounded a little Oprah for a minute, but I meant to sound like the Sermon on the Mount.  Which brings me to…
4. Jesus loves you.  In all its syrupy kitsch, it is still the truth that revolutionized my adult life.  The creator of the universe deliberately, consciously loves me.  I wish I had believed that when I was younger.  I hope my children believe it sooner than I did.
5. Forgive.  Don’t pretend it didn’t hurt, and don’t blame yourself, but when someone does you wrong, forgive them.  Even when it’s hard.

I will tag my last five blogging commenters as of this minute: Meredith, Sue, Kelly, Steph and Patois.

I stood in line to get JellyBean into a good school. Without going into boring detail about the frustrations of the day, I will tell you that she was successfully registered at our second choice school, and is high on the waiting list for our first choice. We are very pleased.

Also, standing in line next to someone for five hours with nothing to do but chat is a bonding experience. There are now four of us who know each other better than we ever expected. Not to mention the television camera that caught me admitting to unusual measures for avoiding the need for a bathroom. Hopefully that film ended up on the cutting room floor.

I am sipping my coffee, cuddling my kids, and mentally preparing myself for the ordeals of the day.  I love my city, but today I face one of the less pleasant aspects of it.  Today I run the gauntlet necessary to get JellyBean into a good school.  You can read more about it at 5MFP.

When I was in college, most of my friends were culture-shocked missionary kids.  They had grown up in assorted countries and had a tendency to deride America, especially the small-town Midwest where our college was located.  “The Midwest has no culture,” my roommate’s boyfriend would assert, without explanation. I was never quite sure what he meant by this.  Didn’t the Midwest have language, food, holidays, literature, religion and all the other things that make up human culture?

It seemed to me that my friends, if they traveled to Mars and found a society exactly like the Midwest except that, say, the people communicated through musical honks instead of words, would be full of anthropological zeal to understand the richness of that culture, to dissect its meanings and revel in its oddities.  But if the same society had a flat accent and went by the name Indiana, they considered it worthy only of contempt.

I don’t want to be too hard on my college friends; I have never had to deal with the level of culture shock that they did, or had the lonely sense of being alien to the same degree.  But spending time with them convinced me of one thing: wherever I lived, no matter where, I was going to immerse myself in it and learn to love it.  I was not going to be the supercilious outsider, sneering at the pedestrian concerns of those unenlightened by my sophisticated view of the world.  In short, I would willfully be as big a rube as I possibly could.

I cannot tell you how much joy this has brought me over the years.  The demolition derbies and the country music and the funnel cakes and the crawfish and the chili and the accents - my life has simmered like a big pot of gumbo made from the mundane and unexpected in the Midwest and the South.  While there are still places whose geography does not appeal to me, I am confident that wherever I end up, I will find people to be the same mixture of fascinating and appalling, and almost never boring.

I still meet the occasional supercilious outsider.  New Yorkers in the Midwest demand, “I don’t understand.  What do you DO here?”, implying that life in New York is a never-ending whirlwind of museum visits, Broadway shows and eclectic dining experiences.  I suspect that some of this is posing, but I’ve never met a New Yorker who appreciated the suggestion that his highly developed palate might result in part from the fact that he can’t afford housing that includes extravagant luxuries like a kitchen. New Yorkers seem to not only believe that their hometown is the greatest in the world, but genuinely expect everyone else to recognize it too.  While at times I have found this gratingly irritating, like the American Idol contestant who insisted that the reason she did not get chosen was because Paula Abdul was “just jallous,” I am learning to see it as charmingly loyal, like my brother’s quiet certainty in his favorite shirt, a plain cotton tee that states, “My wife is hot.”

After all, she kinda is.

I don’t think my city is hot, or the greatest city in the world, but I have lived here for thirteen years now, and I have grown to love it.  Its fatty food and hearty beer, its working-class prosaicness and its pompous art deco architecture, its old stone churches and seedy neighborhoods, its parks and hills and public steps.  I have walked hundreds of miles in this city.  I was married here and my children were born here, and it has seeped into my bones.  I would miss it with an ache if I ever moved away.

My parents have moved a lot in their lives, and view towns and cities as places to go for opportunities, not places to live for love of the place itself.  They still pressure us occasionally to move closer to them.  Maybe someday we will; as I said above, I know I would find things to love wherever we lived.  But after all the moves of my childhood, I find myself warmly grateful to this city for being a place where I can send my roots down deep, grateful that I have at last found my home.