I got a note from Cozy Earth’s president. Cozy Earth sells some very fine, all-natural bedding. It looks awesome and its products get great reviews, but it costs a fortune.
Apparently my new friend Tyler, founder and CEO, has personally noticed that I have been frequenting their site for a couple of weeks, nearly every day, hoping the price of their bamboo mattress pad will drop.
I wanted to send you a quick note to thank you for your interest in Cozy Earth. … Each day, I try to reach out to as many “first time” visitors as I can. I know buying something for the first time comes with skepticism, especially if you’ve never experienced it before….
It’s our mission to deliver personal luxury for the master suite. That means enhancing your rest and at-home lifestyle with products that are surprisingly better.
You mean everything to us here at Cozy and serving you with life-changing products is why we get out of our Cozy beds every morning:) Stay cozy!
So I wrote a note back to Tyler (whose email is surprisingly the same as “customer service”) to let him how reality feels.
Thanks, Tyler, for your interest in whether or not I make a decision on buying your product. To be honest, I am not interested in luxury living. I just desperately need a mattress pad that is not made of synthetic material, since I have a ridiculous number of sensitivities. I am not looking for ‘personal luxury for the master suite,’ although it sounds nice. I am just looking for one night of rest on my 21-year-old mattress with its disgusting, torn-up, polyester mattress pad.
Unfortunately, the mattress pad I want – yours – costs $171.75 on sale. For a mattress company president, maybe that doesn’t sound like much. But for me, whose second child is headed to college in the fall while the other is not yet graduated, it is a lot of money.
So every day, I look at the $171.75 mattress pad and think, “I could get six mattress pads or ONE new mattress.” And every night, I go to sleep on my 21-year-old mattress with its flattened mattress pad and torn synthetic pad covering. And every night I wake up – uncomfortable and unhappy – in the middle of the night, wishing I had either the “luxury” mattress pad or a new mattress.
So yes, I am still looking at your mattress pad. But unless the price drops by about half, I will never buy it. I will just suffer through, as is usually the case, until the mattress breaks or disintegrates and forces me to buy a new one.
Thanks for your offer of coziness for me. Alas, it is probably not meant to be.
Someone named Jenn responded to my email to “Tyler,” and sent me a coupon for 40% off. Plus she offered me a full refund if I didn’t absolutely love my new mattress pad.
My new friend Jenn said this would bring the cost down to $147.
I did a quick calculation: 40% off the sale price? Wait, that’s not $147! It’s only $103! And sure enough: Jenn was wrong.
The gambling addict inside me grumbled and took over where common sense once reigned.
Forty percent off! said the gambler. Get it before she figures it out!
Knowing deep down that Jenn probably miscalculated on purpose, I grabbed the deal and bought the mattress pad. I will continue to sleep on my 21-year-old mattress until it crumbles beneath me.
I am in the car, and I am talking. Shane is in the car, and rarely says anything. I just keep talking, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t.
As I am talking, I frantically discover the traffic. Suddenly we are surrounded.
I’m supposed to turn left into the mall, but everyone is turning left, because everyone is going to the mall. What made me think I should get Shane’s booster shot two weeks before Christmas on a Saturday … at the mall? This is crazy. Traffic is nuts out here; look at this traffic.
I don’t turn left. Instead I drive to the next street and make a U-turn, try to sneak in that way. Now I’m in the right lane with 497 cars. The whole time I am considering my options, making my driving decisions, I am pointing out to Shane: look at this traffic!
I tell Shane, in as many different ways as possible: the traffic is completely out of control.
I am in the lane to turn right – but the line to turn right is ten times longer than the line was to turn left. How did I not see this? I am 50 yards from the stoplight and we sit through that light six times. We can’t make a right.
The people who are turning left – making the turn I didn’t make – are blocking the people who are turning right! I will never get to make my turn! No one will ever get to the mall!
See this, Shane? Look at this traffic! These people are all crazy!
Just then, a white SUV zooms past all of the waiting cars. He’s flying – maybe 40 mph – and then SCREEECH! – he hits the brakes and the turn signal. He has just zipped past every single one of the 497 cars who are waiting to turn right, and he wants to turn right, too. But he wants to do it in front of everyone else. And he thinks that by politely using his turn signal two feet from the intersection, someone will believe that he simply didn’t notice the 497 cars who were waiting – “oops!” – and that he just suddenly remembered he needed to buy a pair of mittens.
I gripe about this white SUV for five minutes. Shane hasn’t spoken in as long as I can remember. Sure enough, someone either kindly or idiotically lets the white SUV into the line four cars ahead of me. I talk about this for another few minutes before I realize that I no longer know what Shane’s voice sounds like.
“I feel like I’m talking to myself again!” I wail, dumbfounded that he has said absolutely nothing in response to my detailing everything that is happening with the traffic. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“I was just listening,” Shane says. “You are just talking about the traffic.”
“Don’t you have anything to say about all this?” I say, grandly waving my arms at the four million cars surrounding us. “I mean, you should have something to say by now!”
“It’s just traffic,” he says. “I can’t figure out how you have so much to say about it. We’re moving along and we’re going to get there. What else do you want me to say?”
And that’s when I realize, again, that in spite of my technical job title as “teacher” and full-time position as “mother,” Shane is always going to teach me how to live.
On this New Year’s Eve, these are the kinds of things I’m pondering.
During the pandemic, we bought new tiles and carpet for the whole house. We’d learned along the way that Dylan is allergic to the chemicals found in new carpet so we got wall-to-wall wool carpeting. Wool carpet is untreated and all natural – so Dylan can breathe in his own house.
After the carpet was installed, Dylan said, “There’s a hole in the new carpet.”
“What happened?”
“Dirt spilled out of my plant and I was cleaning it up and now there’s a hole in the carpet.”
That’s how we learned that you can’t rub wool carpeting like you do with Berber. Rubbing causes a hole.
We placed the plant over the hole and bought some Woolite. I’d always wondered what Woolite did. I thought it was laundry detergent. Now I know.
A year went by and Shane said, “How do you clean up spills on the new carpet?”
I looked at him, trying hard not to explode. “What did you spill?”
“Just a little bit of coffee.” Sigh. Grape juice might be worse, but not much else.
So I told Shane how to clean up the spill. I didn’t even follow him upstairs to make sure he did it right. After all, these are the things we should expect with adult children. Just because they’re not toddlers anymore doesn’t mean they won’t spill things.
I think often about when the kids were little, and the house was still new. I think about Shane driving his battery-powered motorcycle on the hardwood floors and Bill yelling, “He’s going to ruin the hardwood floors!”
I didn’t care about the hardwood floors. I cared about my kid having fun.
But Bill cared about the floors and he didn’t ask for much. So even though he loved riding it around our house, little Shane didn’t ride that motorcycle anymore. It broke my heart to put it in the cold, crowded garage where he ignored it.
Our hardwood floors are trashed now anyway.
In the mornings, my tiny boys would come into my room and wake me up by jumping on the bed. They loved this game. Bill was worried about the mattress but I said, “They’re only going to be young once. Let them jump on the bed!”
So they jumped. The mattress is still fine.
I have a mirror by my bed, and I was afraid they’d knock that mirror off the wall and onto my head. It’s a huge, heavy decorative thing and it would have broken bones if it had landed on someone. But I let them jump anyway.
One day I noticed a dozen tiny handprints on the mirror. The boys were getting bigger and those handprints were only going to get bigger, but I couldn’t imagine washing those handprints off of that mirror. I adored them.
After years of my not cleaning, Bill got frustrated with the mess. So we hired cleaners to come and do a deep clean. Afterward, those tiny handprints were gone from my mirror. By then, the kids had stopped jumping so my mirror stayed clean.
I hate the clean mirror.
So when Dylan tore the wool carpet and Shane spilled coffee on it, I thought: It’s just carpet.
The toddler motorcycle is gone. The handprints are gone. Soon the kids will be gone forever, too. And if the carpet is torn or stained, so be it.
At least I’ll know they were once there – that youth and joy once ran rampant in my home. That’s how it should be.
COVID has struck again where I live. It started a few weeks before school let out, when Shane’s friend’s vaccinated brother got it. I pondered whether or not to test Shane; he’d eaten lunch with his friend. But the friend never got it – just the brother.
Then my friend called and said her son had been exposed at school. They wouldn’t tell her where or how he’d been exposed: which class, which activity, what time of day. She didn’t know if he’d been exposed randomly or close-up and unmasked. Eventually – after exposing countless other people – the vaccinated and boosted friend’s son also got it. As did most of his friends.
Before Christmas, more people I knew had it – and more got it – over the holidays. These people were all over the country, and all of them had been vaccinated. Some had already had their booster shots. “Breakthrough” seems to be inaccurate in the case of Omicron. It’s getting everyone, everywhere, and fast.
I hold on to hope from the science: everyone who was vaccinated is getting well. They are not being hospitalized for weeks, and they aren’t dying. They are fighting it off – something we did not know how to do only a year ago.
I keep thinking of a video I saw in 2020, showing how exactly the virus worked. Knowing how it works is the key to figuring out how to stop it – so I was interested in that video. The viral cells started in the nose and what made it dangerous is that it replicated itself, like most viruses do. But after a few days, it moved into the lungs and replicated itself so freely there that it didn’t allow any room for air in those lungs. That’s how people with COVID die so quickly.
The people who made the vaccines knew this, and they acted accordingly. They may not have known how to kill the virus, but they knew how to stop it from replicating so wildly. So Pfizer and Moderna made vaccines that stop the replication of the viral cells in the respiratory system.
Even though the virus is spreading like wildfire right now, many people’s bodies are already fighting it off as quick as it comes, thanks to two vaccines and a booster. And the people who have these vaccines have the added bonus of stopping the cell replication in the lungs – so even if they get a “breakthrough” infection, and the virus makes them sick, they will fight it off.
I am not saying I am no longer afraid. There are people who are sick, who have serious illnesses who could still die because their bodies are not able to fight COVID. I feel for those people, and I want so badly for this to be over – for COVID to be defeated and not deadly to anyone anymore.
But for right now, since I can do nothing except my own part, I want to beg my 3.2 loyal readers to get vaccinated, to get boosted, to make sure that everyone they know is vaccinated – before COVID reaches anyone they love.
It’s hard to fight this disease; it’s harder still to watch the multitudes die. The vaccine does make a difference. It’s how we stop the virus. It’s the only way. And a year after vaccines became available, I’m still begging for people to do this, so they don’t die from a virus that didn’t need to kill them.
For about 50 years, I have gone out with my family to cut down a tree. For a few years, I bought a cut tree, but for the most part, we have always chopped down our annual Christmas tree.
One year, Dylan objected to the chopping. He said, “This tree is alive and we are killing it.”
Still, every Christmas, we would happily choose a tree from our favorite tree farm. We’d bring it home and decorate it and watch Rudolph and sing Christmas carols. Then, for weeks, I would stare at the tree and watch it dying.
“We are killing it.”
After the holiday, we would throw the dying tree into the woods. I justified the whole experience by pretending it was compost. But mostly I remembered the dying tree, suffering because of me. Last year, with the pandemic in full swing, I just stared at that tree and thought about what I’d done.
I couldn’t do it again.
This year, I thought: cut tree? artificial? used artificial? But nothing felt right. I was leaning toward “no tree.”
Then I thought: we could get a live tree with a root ball, and plant the tree after Christmas! Since our yard had been destroyed by a “licensed arborist,” planting a tree now has a special significance.
So, I researched like crazy. And after much forethought and consideration, we went out and bought a live tree.
Here is why this was a stupid idea:
Unlike most years, the kids didn’t go with us. The root ball weighs substantially more than the tree. You can’t tie a 300-pound tree on top of an SUV. So the kids didn’t fit in the car.
The tree couldn’t immediately come into the house. A live tree can only be inside for 10 days – max – so we left our tree outside for two weeks.
The root ball required a giant bucket. No one sells heavy duty buckets like Grandma used to have. Thankfully one had been sitting untouched on our neighbor’s lawn for years. The neighbor let us have it for free.
Moving a 300-pound tree requires oomph. Without Dylan and Shane moving it from the car to the yard, to the garage (to help it acclimate), and eventually into the house, we would have failed miserably.
The tree branches – which haven’t been pruned for optimal ornament-hanging – are too thin for ornaments. We put on 1/3 of the ornaments we usually use, so it’s a bit sparse.
Planting the tree requires digging a ginormous hole, cutting through rock and roots, and then just hoping it will live. It took Dylan more than two hours of solid digging before the 56″ x 19″ hole was complete. This was a huge hassle.
And now, with the tree indoors, it’s a little crooked. The root ball isn’t quite balanced in the neighbor’s bucket. The trunk leans a lot. And it looks a little silly with all that empty space at the bottom, so few ornaments, and a dirty burlap sack and squashed cardboard holding it upright.
But hey: we did not kill a tree this year. We have done our best to care for it, to do the right thing for the tree. It will only be indoors for six days, and we expect it to live a long, happy life in our yard, growing to its full height of 175 feet.
And yet, there are no guarantees that it will survive the first week in the ground.
We will pray. Prayer is more Christian than Christmas trees are anyway.
Dylan arrived home from college yesterday, top down on his Mustang after two days of driving. We went to see the new Spiderman movie last night. This morning we went out and played pickleball. We got his favorite Habit burgers for lunch, along with milkshakes for those who wanted them.
As I write, he is playing the piano. Dylan has been playing the piano since it was a 12-inch toy with eight keys. He’s a singer, without a doubt, but he loves the piano. We got this piano from my sister, who got it from my aunt. Dylan hasn’t stopped playing it since.
We tried to give Dylan piano lessons, and he went to a couple. But sitting and playing scales wasn’t for him. He’s never learned to read music, which has cost him a spot in all of the college’s a cappella groups. He didn’t practice piano until we gave up and took him out of lessons. Then he started to play.
He just sat down and started to play. He thought of a song he liked, and he sat down and learned how to play it. He plays with two hands, not one finger (like I do), and he plays chords and notes and mixes them beautifully. In fact, he can play – quite literally – any song he wants to play.
He was originally playing Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey. He started a few minutes ago and played it until he figured it out. Over and over and over. And it’s loud. It’s the kind of loud that, if it weren’t so beautiful, you would want to cover your ears and scream. Over and over and over and over and over … and then, voila! He figured it out.
So then, in the blink of an eye, he switched to the theme from Halloween, the horror movie. He’s been playing that one for about ten minutes now. Every now and then, he’ll stop playing long enough to respond to messages on his phone.
If it were up to Dylan, he would play piano – figuring out songs one at a time – all day, every day.
Dylan doesn’t know what he’s going to do “for a living,” but he’ll never stop playing music unless something physically forces him to do so.
Bill’s coworkers are excited that Dylan is turning 21. “You can finally buy him his first beer!” they say, laughing because it’s so unlikely that Dylan hasn’t already had several hundred illegal alcoholic drinks.
But Dylan doesn’t drink; he’s never wanted that life. Dylan won’t be going out tonight and drinking alcohol. And with much of his non-drunk time, he’ll be playing the piano.
Maybe this isn’t the typical 21st birthday celebration.
I drank so much on my 21st birthday that I passed out on the sidewalk outside my dorm. I woke in the morning with no clothes, sheets or blankets because I’d vomited all night long. My roommate spent her night doing my laundry. And she also saved my life: I could have easily choked to death on all that vomit.
To say that I am grateful for Dylan’s decisions would be the understatement of a lifetime.
I have now been gluten-free for a year, and off-and-on gluten-free for five. This is not something I enjoy, with the exception of feeling substantially better and not being sick all the time.
While I am technically choosing to eat foods without gluten so that I will no longer be sick, I just want to complain about the entire experience. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear it.
First, everything contains gluten. In America, our diets revolve around bread. We have bagels and biscuits for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and there’s always bread on the table for dinners. I have never much cared for bread, which is good, but the convenience of having, say, a cheeseburger on a bun has always meant a lot to me.
I can no longer get a cheeseburger on a bun. I can get it wrapped in lettuce, which is disastrous to eat, or sitting on a plate which is just dull. Who wants a cheeseburger on a plate? On rare occasions, I have a choice of a gluten-free bun. These taste a little like sand, and they often crumble like sand, too. They are not a suitable substitute for a hearty, glutenous bun.
But – and this is the real kicker – gluten-free buns cost more. I pay an extra $3-10 every single time we eat out, simply because the entire food arena – from grocery stores to restaurants – charges more to provide sub-par substitutes just for the pleasure of eating with my own family. Occasionally I will have the chance to eat gluten-free pizza. Gluten-free pizza crusts often come in only one size, which is – to put it mildly – very small. I can only get one 10″ pizza, which is a little like saying I can have pizza, but most of it is crust.
And OMG that gluten-free crust is bad. Unless someone knows how to cook it – which simply doesn’t happen very often – gluten-free crust comes out mushy and gross. Gluten-free pizza needs to be well-done and crispy or it doesn’t taste like pizza crust at all. And for the pleasure of eating the mush, I get to pay an extra $3-10!
I don’t know who decides that gluten-free stuff should cost more; I really don’t. It’s mostly made out of cheap rice flour – so why are we paying more for rice? Isn’t rice competitively priced with wheat? I read somewhere that we are paying for the gluten-free symbol, that it takes a lot of paperwork and hoo-hah to get that symbol on a package.
Still. Whoever they are…
Do they believe that we should pay more – for a symbol, for rice, for mushy/sandy tasting food? It just doesn’t seem fair. It’s bad enough that cookies, cake, donuts, bread, cereal, fried foods, most soups and even soy sauce are off limits if I want to stay well.
Usually when Thanksgiving is over, I start writing my annual Christmas letter. I started when the children were young. I had too many leftover photo prints from their latest visit to Picture People, so I decided to shove a few into Christmas letters.
At first, I bought cards, too. I wrote letters and folded them carefully to fit inside. I agonized over which cards went where, and who got Jesus stickers on their envelopes, and who got Santa stickers.
One summer, one of my cousins told me that she looked forward to my Christmas letter every year. “I read every word,” she said.
And I thought, wow – who knew? Someone actually appreciated what I was writing, so I kept writing – and forgot about the cards.
I wrote about my kids, and life with them. I talked about our vacations and our challenges with ADHD and vision processing. I talked about God and sobriety and how much I appreciate the little things in life – and life itself. I poured out my heart and soul, and then scattered photos among the words and wrapped the entire creation in a holiday-themed banner. I always tried to keep it to one page, but I don’t remember if I did.
As my kids grew, it became harder to talk about what we were doing. I started working and the kids started closing themselves in their rooms, as teenagers often do. Our vacations became the highlights of the letter, because that’s when I spent the most time with my kids. My letters started to look more like “typical” Christmas letters than unique ones. And I felt bad about that.
I started a blog along the way, and wrote about my life several times every week. This went on for years. I mentioned my blog in my Christmas letter, hoping those who cared would want to read more. Later I realized: my blog is really just for me.
Then politics upended everything. Friends and family disagreed – vehemently and about everything – for the first time in my life. I’d always believed everyone in my family thought exactly like me. But I learned with a jolt that many of the people I loved most in the world didn’t think like me. And while that was hard to realize, it was also hard not to take it personally.
Friends and family members unfriended me on Facebook because our views didn’t align. People I admired all my life became … just people. My heroes became human. Some of the people I loved most in the world generalized my personal views using hateful, horrible language. And while many of my favorite people remained quiet, I recognized for the first time in my life that I might not be as deeply loved as I once believed.
And then: COVID. Politics and COVID nearly tore apart the world.
So I wrote one last Christmas letter – in July 2020. I wrote about my family and my feelings and tried to offer joy and solace during a miserable time. But for the first time ever, I reeled in my heart and soul. I was desperately afraid that I would hurt someone’s feelings.
And then I mailed out that letter to all the people on my list, even those who had unfriended me. Dylan was in college, Shane was finishing high school, and I was feeling more alone than ever. But I decided that July 2020 letter would be my last one.
Now, 18 months later, my heart is a little broken. My family is a little broken. Some of my dear friends are gone from my life forever. And the holidays are here, but they’re a bit broken, too.
So I am sad to be not writing a Christmas letter this year. But maybe, if I get super-motivated, I’ll send out a couple of cards.
But admitting that is nothing in comparison to this confession: I love Donny Osmond.
Let me back up to say: this is not a leftover crush from my childhood years. In fact, when the rest of the world was swooning over Donny, I preferred his little brother, Jimmy, who had freckles and bangs. Also, I reasoned at the ripe old age of 8, I was much more likely to marry Jimmy Osmond because he was closer to my own age. (He was 9.)
I sang along to every Donny Osmond song released between 1972 and 1976. I learned every lyric while staring at his puppy-dog eyes and trying to get my hair to whisk across my forehead like his.
These songs still wake up my psyche, even after 45 years.
I watched Donny & Marieon TV but got to middle school and mostly forgot about Donny. In 1989, long after he’d disappeared from my life, I heard a song called Soldier of Love on the radio – and was dumbfounded when the DJ said Donny was singing.
I recognized Donny’s voice instantly in Disney’s Mulan. I heard he did some musicals, but never saw any.
When, finally, I did see Donny live, and Donny and Marie live twice, I claimed that these concerts were a “gift” for my mentally challenged sister-in-law. She has no idea that the world has moved on since Donny & Marie was the hottest show on TV. She lives in TV Land.
But I got a glimmer of the true Osmond talent at those concerts.
I started to pay attention to Donny’s career, realizing that he suddenly seemed to be everywhere. His face was all over Las Vegas when we vacationed there. He appeared in College Road Trip, the funniest character in the movie. He made fun of himself – something he does beautifully – in Weird Al’s White and Nerdy. He won first place on Dancing With The Stars. He came in second on The Masked Singer (where I also recognized his voice). His talent is tenacious.
This year, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, Donny released Who, a pop song that I’ve only heard while watching the official video. He sings his own backup and harmony vocals. The old Osmond dance style is as strong as ever. But I can’t just listen; I have to watch.
Donny – the consummate Mormon, at the age of 63 – is oozing sex appeal. He is the hottest I have ever seen him, 100% on fire. I cannot understand how there hasn’t been a sudden and forceful uprising of old women, rushing out of their retirement homes to scream and cry under Donny’s window sill. After watching this video, it is irrelevant that he has twelve grandchildren.
I watch this man – the same one whose eyes I adored 50 years ago while planning to marry his little brother – and I can only think: WOW.
So it’s time for me to read his book – something that will likely contradict every Tiger Beatinterview I ever read. The last book I read about Donny was purchased through my school’s Scholastic book fair, so I think it’s time I read another one.
