moosh in indy.

The day is coming that I will hurt you. Or offend you.

Consider this your warning as I am just now beginning to acknowledge that this is my curse/gift.

I hurt people unintentionally. A lot. When I think I’m being funny, or ironic, or helpful it turns out that I’m only causing another person grief and heartache. I’d like to say it’s only happened once. But it’s happend a lot. Everytime I learn. But I wish I could have learned enough the first time to keep it from happening ever again.

But alas every person is different.

Therefore falling on my face each time is a wretchedly new experience.

And no matter how things are resolved I always feel as though I have this poorly patched crack that everyone is watching, waiting for it to fall apart again.

There was a time I was spiteful, vengeful and just plain mean. I hurt people and I hurt them on purpose, I didn’t care.

(I call this era B.C., or “before Cody”)

But P.C. (post Cody) I’m a little more human. And have become more and more so as the years have gone by. I have sought out those who I was nasty to in my B.C. life and offered apologies. People I hurt deserved them and I knew that I needed to come clean to be able to start anew.

And yet here I am. Still hurting people when I don’t mean to.

I have been very ugly in the past year about pregnancy. It has been brought to my attention multiple times. And everytime I feel horrible. But to everyone I hurt? It’s my own thing. It’s nothing against you. And I’m sorry that I lashed out at you the way I did.

I’m on a very confusing road and somedays are worse than others. I’m sorry if I cross paths with you on those bad days. But I promise. It’s me. Not you. And I am getting better.

In May I wrote a fairly ugly post about infertility. One of the uglier ones I’ve written. But it got all of that ugliness out of me and put it out there on display. And I’ve felt much better since. It hurts when people say “I’m pregnant, but I was afraid to tell you.” I don’t even know why that hurts. But it does. My own personal battles aren’t going to leave me any less happy for you. I want you to enjoy your pregnancy. I want to know about your heartburn and vomit. Really.

What hurts more is when I find out through the grapevine. It is obvious that I am having severe problems conceiving. People around me know that. In many situations I feel like the big giant infertile elephant in a room full of fluffy humpy bunnies. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it when someone admits to me that they are pregnant, before the word hits the street. Call me selfish. But it helps a lot to be able to have that private moment with someone, to see how excited they are. To be excited with them. I’ve kept many secrets of pregnancies around me.

But when a new pregnancy is being discussed and the conversation shuts down as soon as I walk by? I feel as though my freak flag is flying. I’m not dumb. I know what you’re talking about.

To those of you who may have friends struggling with infertility that find themselves pregnant? Tell them. In person. On the phone. However you communicate the most naturally. Have them at the top of your list of people to tell. We can keep secrets. We want so desperately to be happy for you but it’s hard when we’re the last ones to know because you didn’t want to upset us.

When we take our kids to see fireworks we warn them that it is going to get loud so when the big booms do come, they don’t come as a surprise.

A lot of times we don’t tell our kids something before going into it for fear that we will scare them before anything even happens. Generally you don’t go to a mall walk your kid straight up to Santa and plunk them down in his lap. You warm them up to the idea. Let them get used to it.

This is longer than I wanted it to be. And I got off topic. Sorry.

I’m imperfect.

And I hate myself for that sometimes.

I hate that I can hurt other people so badly without meaning to.

I hate that I even have the capacity to hurt someone.

Especially those that mean the most to me.

“Would you say you’ve met people you could call your friends online?”

“Of course. I flew out in less that 24 hours to be by the side of a friend whom I consider to be one of the closest I have ever had whom I met online and had only met in person three times before that.”

“Oh, wow. So…but that must be pretty rare right?”

“No, it’s not rare, I daresay every single person who has developed any sort of online community has that one person they’d get to anyway they could if they needed them. I have plenty of friends I’d give or do anything for even though I’ve never met them in person. This is not a unique situation. This is our community.”

Maybe I’m naive. But it seems to me that we all have each others backs. It may be strange to those who don’t live in “our world” (my husband likes to call it my little Internet world) but if a cry for help goes up on the Internet? It gets answered. Sometimes in different degrees. But as far as I can tell?

It always gets answered.

One of my many brilliant readers said this on my post last week about when online communities rally:

People are skeptical of online relationships. But the key word here is ‘community’. Community is “a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage .”

Online is our common cultural and historical heritage. Maybe some folks don’t understand why we can derive from folks we have never met…but why do we put so much emphasis on seeing people. If we were all blind would that make us less of a community because we interacted with people we didn’t see? NO! This community is amazing, can be amazing and yet it mirrors our everyday face to face life, in many ways.

In both online and face to face communities there can be viciousness, anger, trollish behavior,apathy, etc. And in both online and face to face communities we find support, love, comfort and understanding.

The only difference is one community is carried out on line….that is the only difference

Word.

Just because I haven’t seen your face doesn’t mean I’m not going to giggle over your child trying to replace you with a Barbie sticker. Or ignore the fact that you’re hurting. Or deny how freakishly in common we are and oh my gosh we have to get together and eat cupcakes and spy on the celebrities in Bryant Park.

Bloggers I know aren’t trying to take over the world and beat everyone else down in the process.

Most of us are honestly just trying to make it a little more cozy and a little better than we found it.

With swag and product reviews for all. (On the side of course. No community survives without food and/or commercialism. At least not one I know of.)

Have you found your Internet warm fuzzies?

Dear tiny gramma,

the moosh is just like me. Go ahead and gloat.

Need examples?

Well first there was the “I want a new mom.” debacle of May 2009. Apparently asking her to get dressed was not in the mother/daughter manifesto leaving her to fire me only to rehire me after she realized she couldn’t pick her new mom up at the airport without the aid of her old mom.

So apparently I get to stay the mom by circumstance.

Which is to say as soon as she can make eyes at some boy who can drive her to the airport where they keep the new moms who don’t ask their kids to get dressed? I’m out of a job.

She also fired Cody the other night because she didn’t get any mail. But that’s beside the point, because Cody is ruining my child and when I say Cody is ruining my child I mean that the bar is ruining my Cody which in turn is ruining my child.

He leaves early and stays late to study. the moosh claims she cannot fall asleep without a hug from her dad (tender right? IT’S ALL A PLOY, I’m onto her little game) which in turn leaves her hysterically sobbing into the phone to Cody while she squeaks out,

“DaaDaadddy…I…*hiccup*…miii*hiccup*sssss…*gasp*…yooouuu. sob.”

Last night I had the brilliant! idea of giving her a picture of Cody to hold while she fell asleep.

But the only one I could find was a leftover engagement picture.

From 2000.

Nothing really says “go to sleep little darling” like a picture of your parents when they were 18 and 21.

I gave her the picture anyway since we still do resemble our previous selves (uh, enough.)

“MOM! CUT YOU OUT OF THIS PICTURE! I ONLY WANT DADDY!”

ouch.

“You can deal with looking at me, I’m not cutting it up. Good night, go to sleep, I love you, no bedbugs and all that jazz.”

This morning?

Yeah. There you have it. My existence in my daughters world can be negated with a well placed Barbie sticker.

Enjoy the quiet satisfaction that she is only four and is already stabbing tiny hot pokers of teenage angst into my weary heart.

xoxo-

Your youngest and most favorite daughter that could have never possibly caused you this much heartache and grief,

Casey

Maybe you’ve heard of Jessica Gottlieb? She was my gracious host in L.A. We’ve gone our rounds. She makes really good ribs. She describes herself as prickly. I describe her as brutally honest and just plain lovely.

If she were ever made into a superhero?

She’d totally be Scarlett.

“Scarlett is confident and resilient… it’s remarkable that a person so deadly can still retain a sense of humor.”

(Cody is so proud he spent all that money for me to get a design degree so I can do things JUST. LIKE. THIS.)

Tim said a trip to the emergency room on Saturday revealed that Michele had six to eight brain tumors. Upon hearing that news, the Web site was immediately flooded with messages of support.

Graddy’s friends even put together a meal program, house cleaning schedule and yard maintenance for her family.

Michele’s sister, Teresa Harman, said she used to be skeptical about Michele’s online friends, but not anymore.

“This is hard to even wrap your mind around. These are real people,” Harman said. “These are true friends.”

I just received word of this story from a friend and those words “online community rallies…” hit me in the most vulnerable part of my heart. Michele Graddy was an incredibly active member of an Indianapolis Mom’s networking site, MomsLikeMe. I hate to say was. She passed away from vicious and fast moving breast cancer leaving behind her husband and four children.

She was diagnosed less than a month ago.

I have never seen cancer first hand.

But I have seen loss first hand in the most achingly and devastating way possible.

I’ve also seen loss online. Too many losses to count.

But all of these losses have had one thing in common.

An online community rallied.

And while no online comminuty could ever fix what went wrong, we can rally, help, offer words and help to a greiving family.

And we do.

And that’s what makes us so great.

A facebook group has been set up to help the Graddy family.

Donations are being taken through any Huntington Bank Branch.

Fundraisers are being organzied.

Strangers are rallying.

And through this strangers are becoming friends.

And friends can make anything better.

Even something like this.

Happy Birthday America!

Part of what makes you so great is your food.

Now I’m not going to get all “who owns what food stereotype” on you because I did that with Green Jell-o a few weeks ago and it got ugly. Only because I was totally right (that Mormons OWN the Green Jell-o title) and the Lutherans, Methodists and whatever else religions that thrive on pitch-ins, potlucks and linger longers are sore losers. (Whoops. Sorry. Smack talk.)

Anyway the Indy Star picked up on my suggestion of Frog Eye Salad and totally featured it in their pitch in article.

Regardless of the whole religious aspect, I feel confident in knowing that I know my pitch-in/potluck/linger longer food.

Which is why today I bring you moosh beans.

Normally they are called Mormon Beans, but since I’m all about culinary equality here at moosh in indy they have been renamed moosh beans.

“BUT WHY WERE THEY CALLED MORMON BEANS?” you ask.

Because these beans utilize everything that encompasses Mormon cuisine short of sour cream, cream of chicken/mushroom soup and rice. However it does use bacon, food storage cans, a crock pot and a random smattering of ingredients all put together in said crock pot to produce a massive amount of tasty tasty shareable food.

Get your crock pots ready folks, because here we go. (double it if you have to share.)

In your crock pot add:

2 15oz. cans of pork and beans

1 15 oz. can of dark red or white (cannellini) kidney beans (rinsed and drained)

1 c. salsa (I always use Mrs. Renfro’s Black Bean Medium Salsa)

3/4 c. brown sugar

1.5 t. dry mustard

1 t. salt

1 T. apple cider vinegar

now in a saute pan:

brown 1/2 lb. ground beef (add to crock pot)

saute 1 large chopped onion (add to crock pot)

brown 1/2 lb. thick bacon, cut into thin pieces (add to crock pot)

Stir it all together and let it do its crock pot thing until you have to go. (High about an hour, low up to 4 or 5 hours, stir regularly please!)

Eat with cornbread.

You’re welcome.

Last year just before BlogHer I had my hairs done. Not only was it the best hair did session I had ever had, I had also finally found someone. Someone who I could just sit down in her chair and say “FIX THIS” and she did. Perfectly.

The stylist ended up breaking her shoulder about a week after she did my hair. I was one of her last clients. (Try not feeling really guilty about that. She’s the one that breaks her shoulder and I’m the one that’s boo hooing because she won’t ever be able to do my hair again.)

One of the most shocking things about this haircut is that she actually thinned out half of my hair. I have a ton of it, it is naturally curly (hello, have you seen my kid?) but it is very, very fine. Having all that extra weight gone was liberating. And the color? I did nothing less than glow for months. It was through this haircut that I met Whoorl and it was through this hairstyle that we came up with the “Let the moosh whoorl your hair contest extravaganza” (Long story short, I won a $1000 gift card and decided to pay it forward by holding a contest and sponsoring another lady to have a complete hair makeover. Because good hair days? WORTH EVERY PENNY.)

Oh. Speaking of pennies.

We just bought a house. With a broken pipe that flooded the ceiling and turned my kitchen into Lake St. Moosh. And it’s infested with carpenter ants. And it’s currently painted in all the colors that were rejected by Chuck E. Cheese and It’s a Small World. BUT OOH! HOME OWNERSHIP! My husband also just graduated from law school. Which means all those people that funded law school are going to want their money back in a few short months.

With interest.

Guess what the first thing to go is when you have to give up “luxurious spending?”

Personal care.

And then I started going bald.

Seriously.

From PCOS.

So I had my hair thinned out on purpose, and then I started going bald.

And then I started to cry a lot.

The time came that I needed to get a trim on my thinned balding head of hair.

On a budget.

Which landed me at a mall “salon” with a salty older woman named Charlotte.

$18 hair cuts really do look like $18 hair cuts with my hair.

Charlotte decided that “blending in my bangs” meant “bring them back to life, only when they are reanimated make sure they are in the ’90′s style of big swoop bangs.” Oh, and then she just trimmed the rest all even without blending the layers so I ended up with a sort of mullet with a puff on top.

There are very few pictures from this period of my life. Most involve ponytails. And headbands.

But this one survived.

This was after Charlotte, twenty minutes of tears and an hour with a straightening/curling iron.

Even my mother in law concurred that I pretty much looked worse than before the haircut.

So maybe you’re thinking “It’s not that bad.” Which I agree, it’s not that bad.

But I know what good hair can do for a girl. And for her outlook on life.

My hair has roots. It’s not a flattering color for my skin. It’s too heavy in places, too thin in others. But I have hair. And it’s not falling out anymore. It smells pretty good most of the time. It’s healthy. And most importantly it’s growing from my head instead of my nipples (you PCOS girls out there are all AMEN TO THAT.)

Why make such a big deal out of my hair? Three reasons. One? I’m having a giveaway based on all things follicular. You want to win. Promise. Find all the details here.

Second? Susan of Friday Playdate, Heather of No Pasa Nada, Danielle of Foodmomiac and Sparrow Hair in Chicago are having a little hair makeover contest. And I’d kinda like to be able to be in the nimble hands of Sparrow Hair and Whoorl all while being in the company of Susan, Heather and Danielle. I’d like to spend my BlogHer weekend with fancy new hairs. (Hello best swag ever.) And also? If I don’t enter for this opportunity? I’ll be destined to “Charlottes” because when it comes down to it? Functioning plumbing really is more necessary than fancy hairs.

Darn practicality.
Third? The only appointments I’ve had the past two months have involved doctors, gas, bloating, blood, narcotics (so this one’s kinda funny), nausea, pain and my vagina. I’d like one that didn’t involve any of the above. And for the pity vote?

That’s not a baby. That’s C02 from my laparoscopy. And that’s also a ponytail. And a headband.

See? I don’t lie.

*kiss kiss* to the judges. I don’t envy your task.

(going to BlogHer? You can enter too as long as you do it by tomorrow. See aforementioned sites for all the details.)