Nostalgia

Not Your Mother’s Makeup

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Did you know makeup has an expiration date? I did not. Or rather I figured it did but never bothered to check until yesterday. I don’t even know what made me curious. I was looking for something in the bathroom and I stumbled across my CoverGirl foundation and I noticed a date stamped on it. It was expired. It wasn’t VERY expired, but still. I wondered how long ago I had bought it and shook my head from the intense workout I was giving my brain and I threw it in the trash. It’s no secret, if you’ve ever met me IRL, that I’m not a big makeup user. I go through phases. In my twenties I wore makeup pretty regularly, then after Jackson was born I gave up on that shit. Being a stay-at-home-mom will do that to ya. Then in my thirties I was back at it, then I stopped. Now I wear it sparingly, but as of late I have so many appointments and meetings and, because I’m a Band Booster Mom, I’ve had to talk in front of large groups of people, so I’m starting to think I might get back on the makeup bandwagon. But I need to ease in. So I went to Target last night for some foundation and that’s when my life fell apart.

Listen, it’s possible what I’m about to tell you is not surprising, but to me it was, how should I put this? Fucking nuts. I can’t begin to tell you the last time I was in a makeup store, or stopped at a makeup counter, or even meandered down the makeup aisle in a place like Target, but I did last night and what the hell?! Someone could have warned me! Although I suppose I should have known, considering there are entire YouTube channels devoted to learning how to apply foundation. What are those little sponge things? What’s a contour? Why wasn’t I taught this in Seventeen Magazine in 1996? Or was I and I just skipped right over it to take the “Which Seinfeld Character Are You?” quiz?

The aisle was not what I was accustomed to. I’ll admit that over the last few months I had noticed that Target was moving things, putting in brighter lights, gussying up that section, but I paid little mind since I rarely went in there. But on a Sunday night at 8:00 pm the lights from the makeup section were so bright! Who needs shit that bright? The answer is me. My old-ass eyes had a hard time trying to navigate through the foundation tints, for one. The last time I routinely bought foundation was probably 15 years ago and shit was not like this. Now I’ve bought foundation in the last fifteen years, but it’s usually when I’m on vacation and realize I don’t have any and my face is red and I run into Walgreens and grab some “Light” foundation and Tylenol PM for good measure. This shit. This shit. I dunno, it was different.

First of all, where is the CoverGirl? And I’m gonna stop right here and say that I use CoverGirl solely because I’ve always used CoverGirl. There’s no other explanation. My mom used it and when I bought my first foundation at the Leavenworth Wal-mart that’s what she told me to buy. Plus, they have this foundation with Olay in it and they are cruelty-free. Probably most of the makeup companies are nowadays, but back then that was way important to me and they were proudly touting it and 16-year-old Missy was all, “Hell yeah, cruelty-free!” Plus, there just weren’t a lot of make-up options for a girl like me in the late 90s in small-town Kansas. Everyone wore CoverGirl makeup and did their nails with Wet ‘n’ Wild. End of story.

That is not the case now.

Now as a grown-ass adult I have been inside Ulta and Sephora. I have lingered at the makeup counter at Macy’s and Nordstrom’s. I once even walked, on accident, into a high-end makeup store in New York City mistaking it for a candy store. I blamed it on Jackson once we got inside. I was all, “Oh, I’m sorry, my son thought this was a candy store (fake laugh, fake laugh).” And he side-eyed me fully knowing that I was the one who yelled, “I think that’s a candy store!” when we were walking past. The point is, I know that other brands exist. I know that they are probably magical and can treat your skin way better than CoverGirl, but creature, meet habit.

So, there I am last night, confused, looking all over like I’ve found myself at a rave and someone has just offered me a pill and I’m wondering if it’s worth it, when it occurs to me that they probably have cameras all over this bitch because of shoplifting and there is possibly some woman sitting in a backroom somewhere laughing at me trying to match skin tones with some brand called “Wiki Pixie Velour.” I was a mess. I was going back and forth between two sections for a good ten minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t find my “match” when I realized those two brands weren’t even made for me, they were made specifically for woman who have way more melanin than I do. (Hand to head)

I was just so confused. So overwhelmed. Not only were there so many brands, but in each brand were so many different kinds of foundations. Then I started to panic. Do I need this primer? What’s a primer? I used a primer when I painted the wall in the guest room. Does my face need a primer?! So I put a primer in the cart, one that supposedly helps control red, which I suffer from. Then there was the actual foundation and all I kept thinking was, “WHERE IS THE COVERGIRL AGELESS WITH OLAY?” And then I had a thought: What if they don’t sell it anymore?! So I panicked even harder.

It was about this time that another desperate woman walked into the aisle. She was scanning, scanning, scanning. I could see it in her eyes. She was in scrubs. A nurse or a doctor from Emory. She has a mask on so I could only see her eyes, but I knew she felt the same. She was looking for a foundation and she didn’t know if they had it. I nervously reached for a lipgloss and turned the box over and over in my hands, while I watched her from the corner of my eye. She kept picking up bottles of foundation and putting them down. I wanted to scream, “STOP! You won’t find it! You’ll never find what you’re looking for and we are both going to die here in the makeup section at the Northlake Target! It’s over!” But she did find it. She found what she was looking for and she sped off and I looked down at the lipgloss in my hand and for the first time I read the box. It said, “For lips and cheeks” and I threw the devil lipgloss/blush back onto the shelf.

Was I in the twilight zone?

I walked then, into aisle after aisle. I’d been in all of them before. I’d lost track of time. I worried about Jackson and Jerimiah. I told them I was running to Target for foundation and almond milk. What had become of them? There were just so many options.

Pixie.

W3LL People

Arches and Halos

Honest Beauty

Tarte

The Lip Bar

Olive and June

Loveseen

Blk/Opl

Makeup Revolution

PYT beauty

This is not an exhaustive list of makeup sold at Target, but holy hell! Then, in the aisle that’s so far away it looked like it belonged with Epsom salts and adult diapers, I saw it: Drugstore Makeup! And there on the shelf was all of my familiar CoverGirl Ageless Foundation! And all the familiar suspects. Whew. Crisis averted.

BEHOLD!

Okay, sure, I was probably overreacting. But that’s what I do. And truth be told, I still walked out of Target with about $100 in makeup because I gave into the contouring blush and the eyebrow pencil and that damn primer, which was actually more money than a gallon of Sherwin-Williams primer, but I digress. The point is sometimes when we are forced to look change directly in the eyes, we wonder if we would look good with lash extensions or not. Then we overcome the Target makeup aisle.

Here’s to overcoming. I hope you overcome whatever your makeup aisle looks like today.

M.

School’s in Session

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Well, not exactly. Not quite yet, but school around here does start on August 8th, which means we only have two weeks left of “summer” which makes me incredibly sad. I love having my kid home with me, being able to run off whenever we want to, not having to plan things, or worry about after-school rehearsals and meetings. Bleh. But alas, I’m not educated enough in some subject areas, ahem, math, I can’t do math, y’all, to home school so here we are, bent to the damn will of the public school system. Cause y’all know how I feel about private school, but that’s a whole other post.

Because school starts in two weeks our schedules have already exploded with things to do. Jerimiah and I have to work the Open House table for Band Boosters. We have school-wide beautification day, I have PTO duties, including serving an awesome breakfast for 125 teachers and staff on their first day back, and then there is the last-minute additional school clothes shopping (I know he didn’t buy enough new underwear), the cleaning out of the band boosters room, the list goes on. It’s also that time of year for other parents to start bitching about buying school supplies.

I know, I know, I’m like a broken record with this shit, but I have to be because some of y’all are like broken records with bitching about buying school supplies. You’ve also recently taken to being mean to the PTO/PTA, and saying shit like, “We need some big changes!” Then when asked how and if you will help, you suddenly disappear. That’s infuriating, but all too common. Also, another post.

Let me get back on track and just say: BUY THE DAMN SCHOOL SUPPLIES AND SHUT IT!

Now, if you are the parent of a middle schooler or higher, please DON’T actually buy the school supplies until the end of the first week of school. Those teachers will give you specific lists for their own classrooms. It is always safe, of course, to send your child to school the first week with a bag (and here I mean every day with a new bag for a new teacher) of hand sanitizer, Kleenex, and TICONDEROGA pencils. Say it with me:

TICONDEROGA!
TICONDEROGA!
TICONDEROGA!

If you are chanting the brand of pencil and it doesn’t sound like you’re summoning a sea God from an obscure society in a sci-fi novel, you are buying the wrong brand of pencil.

Dixon!
Dixon!
Dixon!

Paper Mate!
Paper Mate!
Paper Mate!

See, it’s not right.

I feel like I’ve been enlightening you all enough over the last eight years that I don’t need to explain why it has to be Ticonderoga, or why it is so important that you buy school supplies for you kids, so I won’t go into this year. You’re welcome. But I do need to remind you that I am talking to those parents who can legitimately afford school supplies, and who will probably buy them, but will bitch the whole time and just make your life and anyone who will listen for that matter, full of school-supply-buying drama. Stop! Everyone talks about you behind your back. *Raises my hand as I have been a “Mean Girl.” (We just watched that movie over the weekend for family movie night. It’s still a 10/10.)

If you are a parent who cannot afford Ticonderoga, any pencil brand will work and be appreciated. If you are a parent who cannot afford pencils, your child will be provided pencils from parents like me, who will load up Jackson’s teachers with them, as well as the teachers themselves, who know kids will need pencils so they buy them with their own money year-round. Also, there are many places to find donated school supplies. If you need help you can check out this website for ideas on who to contact. Locally, there was an enormous school supply drive for DeKalb County Schools this year, as well as a separate one for Atlanta Public Schools. Even the smallest school districts have ways to get free supplies for your children, just ask around.

I want to mention something I saw on FB the other day. FB, as you know, and I have a love/hate relationship and currently it is a hate/hate deal, but we must trudge on. The other day in a local mom group I saw a mother ask what it is exactly teachers “do” with plastic bags. Let’s let that just sit there a moment. She wanted teachers to explain to her what EXACTLY they use plastic bags for. She wanted teachers to “educate” her, like teachers owe her an explanation.

Now, did I want to jump in and give a myriad of ways that teachers use plastic bags? Yes, I did. Because even as a person who is NOT a teacher, I can think of at least 10 ways elementary school teachers use plastic bags on the daily and how this particular mom couldn’t figure that out on her own and instead had to take it to the collective seemed, well, passive-aggressive to be nice.

Bitchy. That’s the word I was looking for.

She posed it as just “wondering,” just wanting to be educated on “the elementary school use of plastic bags” that she never sees again once she takes them in. The audacity of teachers to not return unused plastic bags or get her those bags back in some way or another throughout the school year! She obviously doesn’t spent enough time in the classroom or she’d see them littered all over the place. Holding take-home-books, headphones, children’s shirts they vomited on, lost teeth, etc. She also, feeling the dial of the heat she started turning on her, said she had “environmental concerns.” *Side eye.*

Stop.

Stop.

Stop.

If your kids teachers asks for five gallon-sized boxes of plastic bags, just get your ass to Sam’s Club and shut up, middle-class moms.

If y’all remember (raising my hand) I was a free-lunch kid. I had a parent who was generally unable to buy the whole list of school supplies, though she often put a layaway on at K-Mart at the end of one school year for supplies for the next, that’s planning and thinking ahead! Even then, my school supplies were always off-brand. I got RoseArt Crayons, y’all. RoseArt.

But the thing I remember more than the shame of RoseArt Crayons, was the kids who came into class empty handed on the first day of school. The kids worse off than me. I was in a Title One school, there were kids worse off than me. So, I always slipped those kids something. A pack of pencils, or some erasers. Something to let them do the march up to the teacher’s desk with a school supply. I knew our situation and I felt shitty for it, so much shame, y’all. So I can only imagine what the kids worse off than me felt like.

All I’m saying here is that we all find ourselves in different difficulties in life, but when it comes to our kids and school supplies, stop talking about it with them around. Again, if you can’t buy school supplies, your kids will be okay, they will be provided. If you can and you just walk around bitching about it, stop. Kids see and hear all of this, then they take it into the classroom with them.

YOU bitching about supporting YOUR KIDS’ teachers sits there in the subconscious. Teaches them that their teachers don’t deserve their support, and that has far-reaching consequences. It also sits on their hearts and is reflected back at the kids who couldn’t support teachers in that way, either positively or negatively.

I think that is all I have to say today. This has in fact been my annual bitching about parents who bitch about school supplies. And I feel better.

Stay safe and sane, y’all,

M.

Christmas 1980-something

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Evidently I was a spoiled kid. As spoiled as the youngest child of four can get. As spoiled as a child of a single mom who worked cleaning hotel rooms can be. I was that sort of spoiled. Spoiled in the sense that while my Christmas list was usually very specific and exhaustive, every year I got at least one item on it because my mother made sure I had something to look forward to, something to believe in when sometimes our life wasn’t a life that offered hope or belief in things getting better. I remember many of those one-off gifts. Those miraculous ones that showed up, I thought, from Santa in the true spirit of the holiday. One year I got a Popples, which were all the rage in the 1980s. One year a Strawberry Shortcake doll. One year a Barbie (a real Barbie not one of the knock-off dolls) so cool, so rad, that she had her own leg warmers and boom box.

In the second grade I wanted only one thing: A Baby Shivers Doll. Do you remember those bad-bitches? They were dolls that actually, for real, shivered as if they were cold. It was the same year that the Baby Alive Dolls first came out and I had a ton of friends asking for them, but I didn’t want to press my luck, so instead I asked for the older doll that only shivered. Besides, I wasn’t so sure about a doll that wet herself. I mean, was I ready for some real shit like that? I figured I’d let my best friend Rachel get that for Christmas and I’d play with it when I wanted, but didn’t have to take the responsibility for changing the diapers and what not. This is some real shit, it’s not made up, check it out:

Listen to me when I say this, these were some badass babes, though to be fair it set me up for failure when I had an actual baby and asked too many times what to do if he started to shiver. Turns out babies shivering aren’t like a real big problem. Who knew?!

Anyway, I remember writing Santa to ask for a Baby Shivers of my own. I may have even named dropped Rachel or her grandma, who was bound to buy her any type of doll she wanted. And on Christmas morning when I woke up and ran into the living room I was 100% expecting a Baby Shivers from Santa and for the first time ever I was disappointed. There was no Baby Shivers under the tree. Just some other random toys I don’t remember and some fruit and candy. I was upset, but tried not to let my disappointment show. That is certainly not something you did in my house. You sucked it up. Plus, I figured Santa had a legit reason not to bring me that hypothermic baby. Maybe all the electronics in her back forced her to short circuit and catch little girls’ hair on fire? I could only hope that was the reason because I was Peppermint Petty even at a young age.

So there I was playing with my toys I didn’t much care for after the wrapping paper tornado when my mom said, “Ope Missy, I found one more gift.” Yeah, she pulled the old “A Christmas Story” deal on me and handed me a wrapped box. I could tell right away she had wrapped it because she is not a good wrapper. The edges were a little frayed and the tape didn’t hit all the spots right, and there was a different type of wrapping on the edges. “Who’s it from,” I asked, hoping beyond hope it was from Santa.

“It’s from me,” my mom said. I smiled, but knew I was screwed. I slowly started to unwrap the paper, then my fingers went quicker and quicker until finally I had paper all over myself and was looking at the Baby Shivers box. I was stunned into inaction. My mom was beaming and I could not find words so I just ran over and hugged her. I couldn’t believe my luck and my mom’s obvious good fortune.

I still don’t know how my mom go the doll, or why she chose that year to get the credit for that toy, but it didn’t much matter. I just figured her and Santa hashed it all out and came to this conclusion and in the years to come I was always able to suspend my disbelief like that, around Christmas, but also at other times of the year too. Let’s call it self-preservation. Poor kids know what I mean.

Over the next year I walked around coddling my Baby Shivers, who I probably named but couldn’t tell you at all what it was. She was probably a girl and she probably had “eyes like her Mommy.” Rachel did get a Baby Alive that year and as I suspected that doll was a headache. You had to feed her to get her to poop and she ate this gross pasty stuff and you always had to buy more things for her to keep her in tiptop shape and I’m pretty sure it was short-lived. So was Baby Shivers, but for a little while I had the doll I had waited my whole life for and my mom had her shining moment.

I hope you all have a shining moment this holiday, and get something you’ve been asking for too.

❤

M.

Walking in a Wicker Wonderland

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

We picked my mom up from Kansas last week to spend Christmas with us. Long story that I will delve into at a later date, but part of the pick-up involved a chair trade. More specifically a rocking chair trade. My mom has this vintage 1940s (??) wicker rocking chair that needs some love. It is small and uncomfortable for her, but it is a piece I remember from my childhood. Meanwhile I have this large, upholstered, swivel rocker/recliner that she loves to sit on when she comes to visit so we traded. We took her the big, plush chair and I took the little rocker so I could refinish it. It needs some love.

Now, I don’t want to complain or anything, I wanted this rocking chair, but as soon as I saw it I thought oh no, this is out of my wheelhouse. Particularly because I have never refurbished a chair at all, let alone a rocking chair made out of material I know very little about, and in need of new springs. The seat on this beast is old-timey and springy and there are three sections that have to be upholstered. It’s not a simple, spray paint it all type deal.

Meanwhile last night when I could not fall asleep I was trying to find this particular rocking chair on the internets and had no luck. Had some close calls, but no dice. But I did learn way more about wicker furniture than I ever wanted to know and for that I am ungrateful.

Hmpf. This rocking chair might just be scrapped for wood. Because wicker is made of wood. I think. Because it is really just the way the material is connected that makes it wicker. Or maybe it’s rattan not wood. Maybe it’s an outdoor piece someone made an indoor piece. Maybe it’s a pain in my ass already.

I’ll let you know how it goes. If it goes.

M.

Long Days, Quick Years

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Sometimes when I’m in the bathroom taking a shower, or peeing, or crying while I eat chocolate and slide down the wall dramatically, I think I hear Jackson on the other side of the door. I think I hear his little preschool voice, the one I miss oh so very much, saying, “Mommy? Mommy?” Now way back when the soft “Mommy” would be followed by an adorable, “Are you in thwere, Mommy? Are you pwooping, Mommy?” Because sometimes I would pretend to poop to get some alone time.

Anywho, lately that has been happening to me. I think I am hearing Jackson on the other side of the bathroom door asking for me when I am in the shower and I turn the water off and say, “What’s up, baby?” And no one is there. No one is ever there. And I am feeling sad about that. I think I am spiraling. I think I am wishing my little boy was running to find me when he realizes he hasn’t seen me in a few minutes and wants to make sure I am okay, or just needs to tell me that he made a new Lego house. I miss those days, even though I thought I would never get through them.

Is that what happens as your kid grows up? Am I just experiencing the age-old “I miss when they were little”? Is this when I start telling people to enjoy those little moments because the world moves so fast and the kids grow so fast and if you close your eyes, or even wish for a second for it to be over, when you open your eyes again it will be and then what? Then what?

Listen, I love the life we have now. A kid who can make his own lunch. Who can do the dishes and bring me a glass of wine when I am in the hot tub soaking my problems away. But somedays I desperately, desperately miss my little guy running to find me, a diaper sagging to his knees, or a trail of some sticky candy behind him, or a car in his hand asking me if I am ready to play. It’s all so much.

The days are long, but the years are fast. Really, really fast.

Take care. Be safe. Enjoy the little moments.

M.

Quiet Time

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

I woke up yesterday from immense pain that my doctors have not been able to control just yet, but they are working on it. Anyway, when I wake up in that sort of pain I have to get out of bed and sort of start my day. It’s kind of like how when I was younger and my mom would go out in the mornings to warm up her old 1972 Dodge Cornett. We didn’t have a garage and this was back when it still snowed regularly in Kansas, and the car would have to run for a bit, get all of its bits and parts warmed, or we wouldn’t have heat, might not even make it to school and her to work without a jump start. My body is kind of like the old Dodge now and it isn’t terrible, but it also isn’t great.

So when I got up yesterday morning, it was so early the family was still asleep and I made coffee and took my morning ibuprofen, with food of course, then I sat down in the silence and started working on the family Christmas puzzle. We do a puzzle every Christmas season as a family. It sits on the kitchen island and whenever someone has some time they sit and work on it. This year it’s a Charlie Brown Christmas puzzle and the edges are almost done thanks to Jackson and me. Anyway, I got bored with that after the pain finally went away and so I sat to talk with Jerimiah who in the time it took me to get Snoopy’s feet together, had woke up, worked out, and taken a shower. He was sitting down at his desk when I meandered over to the dining room table to chat.

His office is right off the dining room so we usually sit, him at his desk, me at the dining room table with the laptop and get caught up on the morning news for a bit. Yesterday morning however I skipped the news for a coloring book that was on the table from the night before and I picked up the colored pencils and went to work on a geometrically-correct llama. Then suddenly I was transported back to fifth grade.

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Coughran, would read to us every day after lunch. I think she called it “Quiet time.” She knew we needed a bit of a break, so we would filter into the classroom, she would saunter over and turn the lights off, and we would get coloring pages. She had a ton of them and she would let us choose whatever we wanted and we would take our crayons, or colored pencils, or markers and set to work on our pages, while the sun streamed into the windows, and she sat atop the old heater and read from whatever book we happened to be reading at that time. The Call of the Wild or Where the Sidewalk Ends, the books were as varied and interesting as her coloring pages.

I remember it plain as day now, because it was the first time I realized how relaxing it could be to just color. To sit in relative silence, only her quiet voice reading to us, and just focus on one thing, staying inside the lines. I didn’t have a quiet house. It wasn’t loud, it being just my mom and me (most of the time) but my mom always did have the television on and she was usually talking on the phone too. Sometimes I’d slip into my room, grab a coloring book, and color in silence when I needed a break. It didn’t occur to me until yesterday what a service Mrs. Coughran must have done for some of us, me sure, but even more so for the kids in my class that never got privacy or silence.

There were a lot of different kids in that classroom. A hodgepodge of Army kids and kids with dads in prison. Really smart kids, really funny kids. Kids who got to school way past our math class, kids who were dropped off to wait in the snow for 30 minutes, until the cafeteria opened up and they could grab their free breakfast. There were probably 25 of us in Mrs. Coughran’s class, and I don’t really remember anyone struggling, or not getting along, or being mean to each other, generally speaking.

As it sits today, there are two less of us in this world from Mrs. Coughran’s Fifth grade Class at Anthony Elementary School. One we lost to gunfire and one to a heart condition undetected by her doctors. They were both my friends. One was funny and silly, one smart and stoic. We all sat together in those quiet moments, as students, as kids, for that full year and we colored together in the quiet calm of Mrs. Coughran’s classroom, and while I wish we were a whole unit, and I sometimes wish for days that were as simple as those were, I am forever grateful for the time we had.

Hope you can find some calm in the storm today.

M.

Rest in Power

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

I was excitedly texting a friend Friday night about the new season of “Pen15” when she wrote, “Fuuuuck.” I Haha-ed it and she said, “No. RBG.” “What?!” I texted frantically. “Yeah,” she wrote back. “CNN just reported.” And then the curtain sorta fell. Only it didn’t, because Jerimiah and Jackson had downloaded the new Tony Hawk and were pumped to play it with me. So we played Tony Hawk, while my phone lit up. Text after text. “Can you believe it?!” And “Now what do we do?” I turned my ringer off and tried to master a Kickflip.

I haven’t had the bandwidth to process this and I’m not sure when I will. But it will come. Until then, we answered Jackson’s questions the best we could today. We talked about standing on the steps of the Supreme Court a couple of years ago. Jackson remembered the “big, bronze door” and how we waved to the building, hoping RBG was looking down at us. We watched the RBG documentary on Hulu as a family tonight, then we watched “Twins” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, because sometimes you have to laugh when you want to cry.

Jerimiah reminded me not to say Rest In Peace to RBG, after all she’s Jewish, wouldn’t care much for it anyway. I told him I’ll say rest in power then. But the important thing is just that she rests. She did her job, one hellava one at that. And we are so appreciative.

Rest in power, Notorious RBG. We’ll be down here picking up where you left off, and waving like crazy. I hope you can see us.

M.

Friend Funk

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Jackson and I have been in a friend funk lately. We’ve been missing our friends, I mean. While we’ve made new ones from going to the pool this summer, the only outing we feel safe doing with other people, we’ve been missing our friends who aren’t near us. Last week Jackson reconnected with a friend from Charlotte, a little girl he went to third and fourth grade with. He was happy and excited, then a little mopey. I asked what was up and he said he misses his Charlotte friends. I agreed and we mourned our losses for a bit and moved on. Well, he did.

I, of course, can’t let it go. I miss my best friend, whom I haven’t lived in the same town with since we were on college. I miss my friends on Lake Norman, I miss my Ozark friends, and I miss my Charlotte friends. I miss my friends I’ve met that have moved far away, living in Rhode Island, in Arizona, in California. This isn’t new, this missing, for me anyway, but it seems exasperated when times are a bit more trying. And I think that’s happening for Jackson now too.

The school board met this week. Decided to keep going virtually for the time being. We are still in “red” as it were. So we wait longer to see people, to make new friends, to reunite with old ones. And we keep missing.

M.

Never Forget

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

I’ve been unofficially off of Facebook for a week now. I didn’t do anything drastic or dramatic like suspend my account, or deactivate or anything like that. I just stopped logging in and the world didn’t blow up. Of course, this has been a long time coming. Y’all remember back in January when I started limiting myself to fifteen minutes a day? That’s paid off. Really set me up for success for this part. But I did log in yesterday. It was my birthday and I knew my page would be flooded with well wishes, so I logged in last night to comment and thank everyone, and that was about the time the Chiefs’ game started. About the time the “Never Forget” people came out in full force. Then I remembered why I hadn’t logged in for a week. Then I wrote a status and went to bed, sorta full up on birthday wishes, sorta let down by humans again. Life’s a crapshoot these days. Anyway, I’ll share below what I signed off with, but if you do one thing today, please make it be checking your voter registration status. Do it for me. Won’t you?

Stay safe and sane, y’all.

M.

My FB status for 9/11:

I’m heading to bed tonight already being asked to remember that horrific day 19 years ago when thousands of Americans lost their lives on 9/11. Begging me to never forget.

I’m seeing this in between white people complaining that the NFL supports “racial equality” and they “just can’t” support the NFL. I’m seeing true colors shine tonight, and those colors aren’t pretty.

I’m seeing that while I read nearly 200,000 Americans have lost their lives on American soil to COVID-19 in six months.

I’m seeing that the week Homeland Security named white, American, right-wing men the number one terrorist threat to our country.

I’m seeing that as I read 1,100 Black men are murdered by the police in our country every year.

That American police murder 3 people a day, on average.

That thousands of soldiers have lost their lives in the last 19 years. That many thousands more will become wounded and develop such horrific PTSD that they will end their own lives, or the lives of those they love.

I’m seeing all that. Are you?

You’re asking me to never forget. I’m asking you, as I head to bed tonight, to remember too. Every day. Always. All of this. I’m asking you to be a better citizen, a better American, a better human being.

I’m Vintage Now

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

I had a random memory today of rocking in a rocking chair of my very own when I was little. I’m not sure how old I was, maybe four, and I had on a blue sailor dress and it was my birthday. I’d just plopped down in the rocking chair made for someone like me (a kid) and I rocked and reached television. I’m not sure where the rocking chair came from, but I faintly remember what it looked like so I welcomed the internet in to help search. And I found the one closest to the rocking chair in my memory.

My rocking chair looked like this one. I think it might have been from The Cass Toy Company, at least that’s what internet sleuths before me have said. The company burned down before I was born, but it’s possible, and likely, this was a hand-me-down, or a garage sell find.

Anyway, I’m wishing I had that little chair now. Some of that four-year-olds energy, and just a smidge of that “vintage” charm around here.

By the way, I had to Google “vintage” in order to find this rocking chair from my childhood. What the hell?!

Maybe, probably we are all vintage by this point.

M.

Reset

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Geez, sorry you guys. I’ve been a sad sack lately. I think this is just some of that ebb and flow we always talk about with emotions and the world sits with us. I’ve been particularly stressed lately because of starting school, and Jackson starting school, and a few other things I’m not quite ready to talk about on here, but when I am you know I will talk y’all like crazy about them.

Really what I am wishing for right about now is a reset button. Ever wish for one of those? Like when I was a kid and I would realize I was not going to make it back to the top of the Q-bert stack so I’d just reach over and hit restart on the Nintendo. Ahh, that was a good feeling. A do-over. A mulligan. That’s what I need for this week. Maybe this month. Certainly this year.

Let’s all look for that reset button today, okay? Maybe it’s nature? Maybe it’s a walk by yourself listening to your favorite podcast. Maybe it’s a call to your best friend. Whatever it is, find your reset button and hit it for me. Maybe it will reset us all.

Here’s to wishing.

Take care of yourself, and each other.

M.

Storms

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

It’s another 4:00 am post. I’ve been waking up each night at 3:00 am, and tossing and turning, waiting patiently to fall back to sleep. Last night I read, tonight I’ll write. Maybe tomorrow I’ll just stare blankly at the cracks of light in the curtains until my eye lids get heavy and my breathing slows.

Yesterday would have been my daughter’s ninth birthday. I’m supposed to have a daughter. Jackson is supposed to have a little sister. She should be nine. Playing Minecraft with her brother, asking for dolls, crazy over the Korean pop bands, or maybe just learning how to braid her own hair. I don’t know. I don’t know what daughters do, or like, or how they live.

Tonight I’m stuck in this same spot. I’ve been here before. I’ll be here again. The weather is changing. There’s are two storms coming up the Gulf. And I just don’t know what daughters do. I’m sure I’ll get more time to think about it. I hope I’ll get more time to think about it. Just not at 4:00 am.

M.

For Posterity

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

I’m in kindergarten and I’m hunkered behind our living room chair, my back against the wood paneling of our living room, and I have my sister’s portable cassette player. No idea where my sister is. There’s a faint sound of the mower in the background. My mother was probably out mowing the front lawn. I’m eating slices of cheese, the Kraft singles kind, only it’s not really Kraft because we couldn’t afford that kind. It’s an off brand yellow cheese and I’m pulling the piece into smaller pieces and sitting them around a plastic Tupperware plate, while the sound of some newsman blares through the recorded cassette tape I am listening to. The back of the chair has a large piece of wood running along it and I have my feet up against that piece of wood.

So there I am, eating my cheese, my back against wood, my feet on wood, listening to a recording that my mother made five years before. It’s a recording of the news from January 20, 1980. An hour after Reagan is inaugurated. It is a recording of the moment Ayatollah released the 52 American hostages from Iran. I am smitten with this recording and listen to it often.

Today, nearly 35 years after my mom made that recording in her small living room apartment on State Street, I have some questions. How did I get my hands on that tape? Did she want me to hear it? Why was I obsessed with a recording of hostages being released at six years old? Why did my mother feel the need to record that in the first place? She was barely pregnant with me the day the American diplomats were flown to Germany to the welcoming embrace of President Jimmy Carter, who had worked for over a year to free them, but just lost the general election and was robbed of the last heroic act of his presidency. What compelled her? Was it the state of the country at the time? Was everyone gathered around their television screens that afternoon, waiting, anticipating, feeling it was their patriotic duty to listen, to record history unfolding, with their American flag newspapers Scotch-taped into their wooden window frames? I can’t be sure. I just don’t know that country. That world. My mother, at that time.

I do know the feeling though. The feeling that what is happening, right now, in the present moment, feels in some way so important that we have to record it, write it, etch it into our collective memory for future generations to dust off and read, listen to, with their cheesy fingers sliding between pause and play, while the voices of those long gone cry and scream in release.

M.

America, Fuck Yeah!

/ Missy Goodnight / Leave a comment

Today is my favorite holiday. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a fuck about our independence, or how wrong (or wronged) our founding fathers were. I don’t give a fuck about our founding fathers. I don’t even like the phrase “Founding Fathers,” it reminds me of that piece of shit “Birth of a Nation” notion and it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Eww. Gross. Stop it.

Today is my favorite holiday cause I like fireworks! Ahhh! They are so pretty. And yeah, maybe they represent the casting off of bombs, and the old ways of war and rebellion, but to me they mean something much more personal. To me they mean summer nights. And summer nights don’t conjure up images of war, or bombs, or even old, white fathers who were super racist and gross. Summer means popsicles, softball, street kickball under the lamppost before my mom whistled for me to come inside. Summer reminds me of cantaloupe and sweaty baseball caps with my hair pulled up tight underneath. It reminds me of backyard camping at a friend’s house, and learning to shoot hoops in the driveway, of catching lightening bugs, and talking on the telephone very late. Summertime reminds me of my childhood, the good parts, the times when I got to feel and act like I kid. The parts where I didn’t worry about things, or people, or how this whole thing would turn out. I just worried if we’d win the game, or I’d get to stay the weekend at Lee Anne’s house, or if someone would take me to a cool fireworks show on the 4th of July. Luckily for me, someone usually did.

So happy 4th of July today, y’all. May this day of freedom and independence conjure up the best of memories for you, and remind you that although this isn’t the way we thought we’d be spending our day today, it could always be worse. At least there’s such a thing as fireworks!

Stay safe and sane out there.

M.

Summer Lovin’

/ Missy Goodnight / 1 Comment

Had me a blast! Summer lovin’ happened so faaaaast! You know the rest. We’ve been watching movies before bed. Sometimes we just fast asleep to “Fresh Prince” or “Bob’s Burgers,” other nights we’ve been introducing the kids to classics like “Teen Wolf” (“Is this supposed to be a comedy?”) and “Uncle Buck” (“What is wrong with that guy?”) and we’ve been talking and thinking about other movies to watch. Rachel and Madi brought their projector with them, so we are trying to decide what to watch for a fun movie, double feature outside one evening, and there is some disagreement. I say we watch “Twister” or maybe “Dirty Dancing”, while Jackson says we should just watch John Oliver, and Madi is like “What about a scary movie?” Yesterday Jackson suggested “Beetlejuice” as a compromise, hellbent that he’d never seen it before. Face to palm. He’s seen it. We watch it every Halloween along with “Hocus Pocus” and “Casper the Friendly Ghost”. This child of mine…

“Grease” came up in conversation however and everyone sort of nodded their heads up and down. “Oh yeah, ‘Grease’ that’s a good one.” Madi has watched it, but Jackson hasn’t. How have I failed him in this manner? Is it as good as I remember? I haven’t seen it in literal years. A decade or more maybe. And I’m in this weird space where I think he will like the cool cars, but does it hold up like the other movies? I’ve been disappointed recently by some old favorites.

So who knows. I’m throwing in the towel. Or maybe it’s caution to the wind. Or maybe it’s none of those things. I’m on the hunt for the perfect place to stick the projector, the rest will work itself out. Fingers crossed the right movie shows itself, and fingers crossed my kid won’t be afraid, or sad, or snapping his fingers while he greases back his hair and sings, “Summer lovin’ had me a blaaaast…”

M.