Tag: Guest Blogger

M.I.L., By Guest Blogger Lorie Sheffer

Photo: Lorie Sheffer

Nothing in this world, save for snakes on a plane, will set some of us into a fit of anxiety more than these words: “Your mother in law is coming to visit.”

Mothers in law have long provided laughs for sitcoms, and if they aren’t YOUR mother in law, their antics and unfiltered opinions can be hilarious. From Mrs. McGillicuddy’s constant references to her daughter Lucy Ricardo’s husband “Mickey Richardson”, to the passive aggressive behavior of Raymond’s mother Marie Barone, to Modern Family’s modern day mother in law DeDe Prichett, mothers in law are a staple of family comedy.

Personally, I feel that if there were a contest for the most hilariously inappropriate mother in law, mine would win hands down. At the time, she drove me batty. Now that she is gone I find that I sort of miss her.  Some of her greatest hits: Telling me that my 4-year old son had gotten chicken pox from his sister because I didn’t feed him enough green vegetables. Informing me that she had never gotten over the fact that my husband hadn’t married his high school sweetheart, who was “like a daughter’ to her. Sending gifts to her out of state relatives and signing my husband and my names, after I had already sent them gifts. She wanted to be sure they got things they REALLY wanted. And, after my husband had specifically requested me to make his favorite meal for him, she told me “Gary doesn’t even like that. Why don’t you ever make him something he can eat?”

When my son got married, my number one priority was to make sure that his wife and I got along. Lucky for me, it’s not that hard. I very honestly think she is the best thing that ever happened to him. My son also adores his mother in law, and I am happy that he has her as his other mother.  I think the main thing that determines a mother in law/daughter in law relationship is a pretty simple rule. As a mother, you need to realize that your son’s wife is first in his life. She is not your competition. She is not the other woman. If you can understand and respect that, everything else will fall into place. So many times I hear women say they don’t like their mother in law because she is intrusive and won’t cut the apron strings. And yet these women act the same way towards their daughters in law.

A few years ago, I met a young woman from the U.K. She was telling me how much she missed her mother. She said something that I will never forget. She told me that her mom confided something to her. Mum said. “Of my three daughters in law, I adore one, I tolerate one and I can barely stand to be in the same room with one.”  My friend was stunned, and said that nobody would ever guess that Mum didn’t love all three of her son’s wives equally. “Well,” Mum replied, “I love your three BROTHERS equally, and that is why nobody will ever know which wife I love and whose name makes me cringe when I hear it. And I’ll never tell you who’s who, either.” All I could think of was how much love that mother had for her sons.

New and Improved, By Lorie Sheffer, Guest Blogger

Have you ever wondered what happened to your favorite summer hangouts or vacation spots? One day I decided to look for information on a campground where my family and I spent several summer vacations. I wondered if others remember it as fondly as I do. It was the place where my older cousin saw the ocean for the very first time. It is the one place from our childhood that has no equal.

Enter a combination of Google and Facebook. I am now one of a growing group (48 members at last count!) of baby boomers who gather Online to reminisce about the shared experience of this old campground. Best of all, they share PHOTOS!  My family wasn’t big on picture taking and my memories were becoming faded. Reading the posts by the other members made something very clear very early on: this place holds an almost transcendent nostalgia for all of us. There is almost a reverence in talking about it.

Some of us have made the mistake of trying to find out what happened to our old campground. I was tempted a few years back, when my son was in college about an hour north of it. Knowing me as well as he does he advised me to keep my old memories and not go look at the area as it is now. Curious, I looked it up a few weeks ago. I should have listened to my son. What I discovered left me sobbing. The beautiful beach is now home of several high-rise hotels and condos. The wooded area is now a gated community of townhouses and a conference center. The website for the area describes it as beautiful and full of amenities. And yet those of us who spent those magical summers in tents and campers, showering in the bathhouses and using the public toilets, do not see the new and improved version as an improvement at all. One man said that he drove by a few years ago and was shocked at the emotional reaction he had when he saw the area. He longed for the old Trading Post, the rickety wooden footbridges, miniature golf and rowboat rentals. Our pristine, once almost wild beach now resembles a small city.

I know that the South had some ugly things happening in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of those things were shocking for me to see, and even at such a young age I felt anger at the inequality that was almost proudly on display. I had never seen a “Whites Only” sign until I went to eat dinner in that town. This was a time when many of our leaders who had the audacity to speak out in favor of equality for all of our citizens were gunned down. We were at war in Southeast Asia and we saw black and white imagines on the nightly news of soldiers returning home in body bags. Maybe that is what added to the innocence of those wooded acres of solitude and natural beauty. Maybe the contrast of the beauty of the unspoiled beach and the smell of the pine that hung so heavily was what soothed us.

I watched man’s first steps on the moon from a tiny, snowy black and white TV that my uncle plugged into the campsite’s lone electrical outlet. Reception wasn’t great, but the crowd that gathered round to watch with us hardly seemed to care. It was July 21, 1969 and I was 10 years old. In my heart I know that had I been on the 15 floor of one of those climate controlled luxury towers on that same South Carolina beach, watching a giant plasma TV when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the surface of the moon, it would not have been as magical.

Washboard, By Lorie Sheffer, Guest Blogger

My friends seem to know that at any given moment I can be found doing something weird. A few summers ago I decided to forgo air conditioning, finally relenting in mid August, when I ran our central air for two weeks. I did it as an experiment to see just how much the cost savings would be, and to recapture some of the summer nostalgia from my childhood. Then there was the winter of the gray hair. It was a belligerent attempt to embrace my natural color, which I hadn’t seen in years. That ended with me having a panic attack at the sight of myself on a photograph, and a frantic run to the beauty supply store. This summer, I have regressed back to the days of the washboard and clothesline. Growing up, even though almost everyone had a washing machine, there were lines of laundry drying in almost every back yard. Now? Not so much.

While in the middle of a renovation of our home, we are left without major appliances, save for a refrigerator. Sure, I could go to the local Laundromat, but I have an aversion to throwing my laundry into public machines. The last time I went that route I watched a woman stuffing a washer with cloth diapers while telling her friend about her family’s recent bout with Norwalk virus, that common and very contagious illness that causes 48 hours of the worst gastrointestinal explosions imaginable. So, with that imagine seared into my memory, I decided to tackle outdoor laundry day in my yard. I’m not about to heat kettles and boil our clothing, but I did discover that, while very labor intensive, scrubbing things item by item on a washboard sure does relieve tension.

Call me crazy, but nothing makes you appreciate what you have so much as not having it. Sitting in the shade, scrubbing laundry for hours, gives you time to think. Technology has invaded us to the point of taking away some of the simple pleasures of life. My mind wondered back to when my cousin and I would think it was just the best fun ever when our grandma would get out her big galvanized washtub, fill it with cold well water, and let us sit in it. I remembered the snap of freshly laundered sheets blowing in the breeze, and the smell of them on a just made bed. I also thought back to how my grandma would be upset to see birds eating the raspberries from the fields, knowing that one flight over a fresh load of laundry she had just hung on the line would mean sure disaster.

I’m not about to claim that I will not be thrilled the day my new washer and dryer arrive. But I can also say that there are worse things than sitting outdoors on a beautiful day, hands immersed in soapy water, the sound of fabric sloshing against a washboard. There is something soothing about not being plugged in, not being connected to the Internet or the TV. Without the distractions of technology, it is easy to daydream. Most surprising of all, I have found that I have been sleeping more deeply than I have in years, waking up early without an alarm, and feeling more rested than I can remember.

Water, By Lorie Sheffer,Guest Blogger

I was faced with two major stresses last week. The first is that my kitchen is being totally gutted and remodeled. The project sounded like fun until the day I saw my kitchen sink being hauled away. Left with no major appliances and no water source on the first floor of my house except for the outdoor hoses, I was left with the realization that I was going to be climbing steps often, all day long. Even the closest toilet is at the top of the stairs, as the downstairs powder room is part of the remodel. I joked, about half, that by the time construction was complete I was either going to have the firmest butt I’ve had in over 20 years, or I would be suffering from a nasty bladder infection. Every evening I fill a huge jug with water from upstairs and bring it down to the refrigerator that now resides in the garage. I also drag a dishpan of dirty dishes, which have been pre-rinsed throughout the day with a garden hose, up to the bathtub, where they are washed in hot water, dried and toted back downstairs. Laundry is being done in a big plastic tub in the back yard, wrung by hand and hung to dry on racks and on tree branches. I have an aversion to Laundromats.

My second stress of the week came with my father’s readmission to the hospital, the result of a postoperative infection. Thankfully, surgery wasn’t needed, but an infectious disease specialist had to be called in to determine what bacteria were responsible and what the best course of antibiotics, along with drainage of the abscess, would be needed. (Ironically my previous post concerning antibiotics was written the week before my father fell ill.) Dr. Seth Quartey is the name of the infectious disease specialist. The tone of his voice is strong and calming, his laugh fills a room, and his manner is warm and very approachable. He is someone who makes a stressful situation calmer with his presence. York is not a big city, but it certainly isn’t a small town. And yet his name had a familiar ring to me. I noticed his rich accent, and pegged it as Ivory Coast. Later, when discussing my father’s condition with my daughter, she pointed out that I had indeed heard the name before. Several years before, I had met this doctor’s wife and his daughter, who was in my grandson’s preschool. That is when it came flooding back to me. There had been stories of how they and members of their church started an organization to bring fresh water to Ghana, where both had grown up.

According to Dr. Quartey, something as simple as clean water can reduce deaths from infectious disease by as much as 50%.  Mrs Quartey said that some children have to haul the water for their family 4 miles, making learning harder when they are so worn out by the time they get to class. It made me realize how fortunate I am to be able to climb the stairs or access a garden hose while waiting a few weeks for a brand new kitchen. When I drag myself upstairs to use that toilet, my flush sends the sewage through an enclosed system that ends at a treatment plant and not into an open drain at the side of the road.

I wanted to learn more. We have easy access to information through Google. It led me to https://www.buildingsolidfoundations.org/activity/news.html, where I found the rest of the story. I was able to see photographs that ran the gamut from heartbreaking to spectacularly beautiful. I saw what we take for granted. I was reminded that even though we are in what is, by our standards, a slow economy, we are still incredibly wealthy and incredibly spoiled by what we take for granted. We live in a country where there are water parks. We render our water undrinkable so we can swim in it and slide down giant slides into it and ride in log shaped boats on tracks that plummet us into it. We wash our cars with it and we hook up sprinklers and saturate our lawns with it and we keep our golf courses green with it. We clog our landfills with discarded plastic bottles that we drank it from. We allow it to run from our faucets while we brush our teeth, and we take extra long showers and give our laundry that extra rinse to keep our whites white and our brights bright. When we don’t have what we consider easy access to it, we feel like we are roughing it. I will be happy when I get my sink back. I will be thrilled to have a dishwasher and a washer for my laundry. I have also double-checked to make sure those new appliances are as energy efficient and conserve as much water is possible. I will remember the faces of the people I saw in the photographs from Ghana, and I will be so thankful for what I have. Sometimes all we need to do is open our front door and take a look at the world around us to realize how very fortunate we are.

The Real Art Of The Deal, By Lorie Sheffer

There’s certainly a possibility that Jeff and I may be kind of weird. We grew up well within 5 miles of one another. We both know what it feels like for the floor to rumble under our feet from blasts at a limestone quarry. We know that rotted egg, sulphur smell of a paper mill contrasted with the amazing smell that is emitted from a potato chip factory. We had some of the same teachers and all of the same graduating class. Chances are pretty high that there may have been something in our environment that made us a bit goofy, but probably not. I think that we are part of a huge number of dealmakers.

Jeff and I share not only the same basic childhood environment, but also an affinity for making a deal. There are some promises we have made that, come Hell or high water, we aim to keep. Jeff talks to God way more than I do. He is certain that God is listening, I wonder sometimes if I am just talking to myself. I suppose you could label me a Deist. And yet, when times get tough I feel that in case I am wrong about my beliefs, I want to cover my bases.

Jeff and I have made promises that we have no intention of breaking. Those promises are for our loved ones. “God, please keep my child safe, please keep this disease from harming them. Please heal them. I promise that I will………” And there you have it.

When my daughter was less than a year old, it was discovered that she had a problem with her kidneys that would either resolve on its own over the years, or would require surgery. It caused kidney infections that would make her temperature soar to as high as 106 degrees, at which times she would have febrile seizures. Over time the problem did resolve, but it was later discovered that the infections left her with a kidney that doesn’t function much, if at all. Good thing we have two kidneys and only need one.

I made a deal for my husband, after his stroke. “God, if you let him live I will do whatever it takes to help him recover.” As I said to Jeff the other day, “What?! You think I have only missed 2 physical therapy appointments in 15 years because I think they’re fun?” I made a promise just last year, when my father wasn’t expected to live. Sitting at his bedside every day all summer long, clipping toenails and dressing an abdominal wound is not my idea of an exciting way to spend a year of my life. But a deal’s a deal. I bargained for my brother, I have bargained for my friends, I’ve even tried to strike up deals for my pets. I have very good reason to believe that Jeff and I are not the only gamblers when the going gets tough.

Do I really think these late night, desperate deals work? To be honest, I don’t think that God works that way in so far as Him saving the folks who have the most sincere prayers said for them or who have someone willing to work for Him in exchange for a save. However, I do think that the deals work in another way. Those deals involve us giving extra help, support and love. Recovery can certainly be helped along if there is someone fighting the fight with you. I don’t think I have the power to persuade God to change the course of events. But I do think I have the power to put my own needs aside and reach out to help pull someone through. Even if that person doesn’t recover, at least I am left knowing that I did all I could do, and I can take that experience to try to find a way to help others who may be faced with the same. Maybe that is how God’s grace works.