5 Years

It was 5 years ago on January 13th, 2005 that my mom lost her battle with pancreatic cancer. 5 years. 5 YEARS. I just keep saying it, over and over again in my head. So much can happen in 5 years, it is literally a lifetime for my son who is turning 5 in April. Looking back a the last 5 years, I realize so much has changed, life goes on, but at the same time I look around our house and so much of it is exactly like it was 5 years ago.

On the mantel above the fireplace sits a framed picture of my sister, mom and I, and leaning on that frame is the memorial card from my mom’s service. I placed it there when we came home from her service and it has been there ever since. I am not sure how many times I have picked it up and read it in the last 5 years. It feels like I just put it on the mantel yesterday.

I think of my mom often, I miss her every day. I wonder what it would be like if she was here, if she witnessed the funny little things Asher and Eden do. If she and Tatum could play together now. My mom relished being a grandmother (or Oma) to Tatum, but with Asher she just got to touch my belly and tell him she wanted to live long enough to meet him. Before Asher was even conceived, the doctors told her she had 2 months to live, mom lived almost a year from the day they told her. Until the end, she was defying odds - always a bit stubborn and just not wanting to believe she wouldn’t be with us. I look back and I know I was not believing. I remember back to 2002 when my mom was first diagnosed with cancer. I did all the research online and read that pancreatic cancer had a very small survival rate, but this was my mom and if anyone could beat it, she could. Miracles happen.

Sometimes knowing that you are going to lose someone close before you actually do is the miracle, the gift. It hurts and you don’t want to believe it, but there is the warning, expectation and with knowing comes the opportunity to not let the one you love leave this world without showing and telling them what they mean to you. We expected my mom not to live a year after her first diagnosis, but we were blessed with more than 2 years. Every day, week, month was a miracle. In our society, we feel there is never enough time to do the things we need/want to do, EXCEPT when you are told you only have a short window or deadline, then miraculously we find the time. That is what we did as a family, made time to be together because we didn’t know how much time we would have with her. And everyday I am grateful to have had that time, to have been given the gift of knowing (but still always hoping the doctors were wrong).

Tatum asleep on Oma, her favorite spot.

My mom came and stayed at our house every week for 2 nights a week. Even though my mom was sick with cancer, in many ways her illness was not apparent. She had become very thin and frail, but was still beautiful, strong willed and very active. When she came to stay with us, she was always the first one up in the morning. She’d go down to the kitchen an make coffee, before the rest of the house woke up. Just like when I was in high school, she would make me a cup of coffee and bring it upstairs for me. There was something so special about that to me, and just hearing her footsteps coming down the hall, brought me back in time. No matter how old I was, I was always her little girl and she was always taking care of me.

Over the last 5 years, sometimes when it is one of those weekend mornings where it is my turn to sleep in and Steve is with the kids, in a half asleep, I hear someone coming upstairs and the wood floor creaks just outside of the bedroom as someone is about to enter. As I open my eyes, just for a moment I expect to see my mom coming through the doorway with coffees in each hand, one for her and one for me. In that second, she is alive and her passing is a dream. My heart warms for that moment and I feel her. I wonder when I will stop expecting to see her, maybe it will take another 5 years.

A lazy morning, after our coffee together.

The thing about 5 years it is a long time, but at the same time it is a blink. Life goes on, but there are parts of my life, like the appearance of our house, that is almost frozen in time. Not the most organized, I believe I have been particularly neglectful in the last 5 years with moving forward. I haven’t updated any pictures in the frames around the house with new ones, there isn’t one picture in the house of Eden, and the ones of Asher he is a bald baby. The baby pictures around the house are still Tatum. I have boxes in the basement that I got from my mom’s house, I just can’t bring myself to look through. The boxes are sitting there, taking up space for 5 years, a half of a decade. I am still finding things around the house that are my mom’s. It actually took me 4 years to throw away a cocoa butter body lotion she used to use - it was so old, but if I opened it and smelled the lotion, it made me think of her. I have bottles of my mom’s perfumes in my room, that I am sure are too old and I don’t plan on using, but I can’t seem to part with them. I know logically that her things don’t preserve her memory. How do I move forward, let go? I know this isn’t an uncommon occurrence to find your house filled with things you don’t use, that may have belonged to someone you loved. To find your surroundings stuck in time.

In 5 years, my memory, love and admiration for my mother has not faded. I know it is time to sort through all her things, to purge our house of the clutter.  Keeping things the same hasn’t changed the fact that I miss her and will miss her every day for the rest of my life. I can’t keep the house halted. It’s been 5 years. The task is overwhelming and it won’t be easy, but it’s time.

A first step…scanning all the old pictures. Here re two of my favorites of her - very young in her modeling days in Indonesia.

My dirty little secret…I am not Wonder Woman

I am going to confess something that makes me uncomfortable. I am somewhere between 2 worlds. I am both a SAHM and a WAHM.  I work from home, but the fact is when you are starting a business, it can take a while before you actually contribute income into the family. In fact starting a business where you design and build products takes capital. We have spent at least what is considered the average family income on starting this business, and it will take some time before we see return on our investment. Everything we make goes back into the business to keep branding and keep building product. So I am between two worlds and my guilty secret is that in order to do my business, I need to have childcare. We have an au pair. Yes I said it. I make no money, and spend money to build a business and I pay someone to help me with my kids. Seems an odd way to contribute to the family, right? Hence, my guilt.

Since I essentially work for myself I think I should just arrange my schedule around the kids. I appear to other moms like a SAHM - I volunteer at school and drive the kids to after school activities. I will leave the baby at home with our au pair and while I am waiting at an activity for the other 2, I am making or returning calls. Some times I am editing something I have written or looking at fabric prints. I am multitasking the best I can, but I couldn’t do it without help. The people that don’t know I have a business look at me like, “wow she has full-time help and stays at home - nice”. Believe me I am not lunching and shopping, however without an income to show “hey, I am working”, I do feel embarrassed.

My SAHM friends, they do it all on their own. I consider them super moms. I even have WAHM friends that don’t have help, and I am amazed at how they do it, they are wonder moms, super women. Me, I am not either of these things. I just don’t have it in me to be a good mom, wife and business woman alone. I get grumpy and overwhelmed. I know my limitations, but even with that,  I still would rather be wonder woman.

There, my dirty little secret, it’s out. The kicker is our absolutely fabulous au pair has fallen in love (good for her), is getting married and leaving us next month to move to Ohio with her new husband. So this summer,  I better figure out how to get some super powers fast.

What is Mother’s Day without Mom?

I know I am a mom, but for me Mother’s Day is still the day I thank my mom. And it just never quite feels like Mother’s Day without being able to pick up the phone and call her. I lost that privilege in January 2005 when my mom lost her more than two year battle with pancreatic cancer.  I miss her every day, but Mother’s Day and her birthday (which if my sister or I forgot we would have been permanently disowned), her absence is really felt. Up until 6 years ago, I had celebrated every Mother’s Day as a daughter, grand-daughter or aunt. The day was never about me, but always about those around me, particularly my mom. Who had in many ways raised us alone (my parents were divorced). And there was one thing my sister and I, and anyone who know our mother, were certain, everything she did was for her daughters and all those she loved. Family (real and chosen) meant everything to her. She loved being a mother, the matriarch, and she adored being a grandmother.

One of the few pictures that my mom and Tatum "look-a-like"

Mother’s Day is one of the holidays designed to sell greeting cards and spike retail sales. I think my mom alone supported the greeting card industry. Unlike me, she always had a card ready to send someone and it was sent on time for the occasion. How befitting that I started this post the night before mother’s day and of course have missed the day all together. Ya, in this way I am not my mother’s daughter, and I sincerely consider that a bad thing (she was wonderfully thoughtful and giving).

I remember  having to go through my moms things after she died, and finding a drawer filled with greeting cards for every occasion. Also in that drawer was her address book that she must have had for at least 30 years. I looked up my name and saw each time she had scratched out an old address for a new one since first going off to college! She always sent me a birthday card, Christmas card, and when I became a mother, she made sure I got a lovely Mother’s Day card.

I can’t say I was always so good to her, always so thoughtful. I could barely remember to buy a card, let alone get it in the mail on time for her to receive it on Mother’s Day. Around Mother’s Day I just remember feeling stressed about what we should do this year. This was the thing, my mom always said, I don’t care if you forget any holidays, just don’t forget my birthday, but truth was, she loved being the center of attention of her family. She loved when my sister and I went all out to make her feel special. The problem was, we never knew what would actually make her happy. Our mom never needed anything. If she wanted something, she just bought it for herself, making it extremely difficult to find a good gift, much less the perfect gift. Any gift was mostly just more of something she had already had. Weeks, sometimes months before, my sister and I would talk and say “oh jeez, what are we going to do this year?” I could feel myself tense. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I am not that creative and not a planner! It took the last few years of her life for my sister and I to finally realize what for our mom the perfect gift was — it was just our attention and being together. Don’t miss understand, my mom loved nice things like diamond jewelery but if you couldn’t get the most dazzling, you could give her a rock from the street and get the same reaction!

My fondest Mother’s Day memory is long before I had become a mom. It was 10 years ago, and I was working at a high tech startup, getting my MBA at night, single and living the high life. My sister was living out in Sacramento with my brother-in-law and my nephew (2 years old at the time). Our mom had planned to be out there visiting during Mother’s Day. I had found out I needed to be in San Jose for a tradeshow right around Mother’s Day. We didn’t tell our mom, we made a plan. My sister knew my arrival time, I called from my mobile. I knocked on the door. My sister asked our mom to answer the door. She opened it and her jaw dropped. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it”, she said it with her accent (my mom was Indonesian and if you ever meet me in person, I can do her accent in a heartbeat). She blushed and smiled. We had succeeded in giving her the best Mother’s Day - Both of her daughters together.

Chic Mama, what?

I am going to talk about the choice of the title for this new fantastic blog - “Chic Mama - mother, woman, diva?” Joke, right? Well, ya!  I founded Chic Tots, inspired by the birth our first daughter, Tatum, who we affectionately called Baby Diva, cause she wanted everything right away and I believe from time I was in labor with her, she believed we were her entourage.

To serve my demanding little diva, I started coming up with product ideas. I also imagined, if I had my own business, I’d be a glamorous, jet-setting entrepreneur – a Chic Mama. But the reality of life and raising a family, and setting priorities, glamour is just in my head and love is in my everyday.

My everyday life feels (and is) far from chic. A chic mama, I am, in my own dreams - where I AM absolutely fabulous & glamorous. But there is more to the word chic (pronounced sheek or scheque NOT chick - you have no idea how many people say chick!). If we take one of the definitions of chic according to m-w.com it means “cleverly stylish.” So think style with a practical purpose. I like to solve problems. If you even mention a problem or I hear a problem in something you have said (you may not see the problem, let me show you the way…), I am on it like white on rice. Hubby doesn’t find it a very appealing quality, and I do try to keep it underwraps when he is telling me a story to share not to solve.  Anyway finding a solution to a problem stylishly - ya, I am all about that. Moms in general have to creatively solve problems. We have to work smarter, be clever to keep our sanity.

So a cleverly stylish mama, that can make a little sense. I can still imagine as I day dream (in all my free time), that I am fabulous. At least for right now, my kids think I am and that is enough for me.