L.C. Spoering's Blog, page 3

Lies I’ve Told My Children

I’ve been a bad mom.

Let me start over: I’m not a BAD mom. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say I sit solidly at a 5.75, maybe a 6 – not perfect by a long shot, but fairly decent in the long haul. I cook them good food and compliment them often, and love them a lot.

But I’ve been a bad mom.

The story starts as thus: two years ago, my son bought a stuffed toy with some Christmas money. It was a husky or wolf or something – one of those stuffed toys with the enormous eyes that are popular right now. It...

One of Those Moms

A month has passed. I apologize. I do have an excuse, you see, though, for I am one of Those Moms.

I love holidays. I also have an overachiever streak a mile wide, and combining those things is often a dangerous proposition. I do not have the highest self-esteem: I don’t think I’m particularly pretty, or smart. But, dammit, I can craft and gift the shit out of you.

This all started early, I believe. I don’t have the best memory, but there was a time in third grade when we made “stained glass” t...

Eccentricities

I have three coffee cups. In our house, we have something like three dozen, altogether, given to us in stacks when we first started out, cups from our parents’ storage, cups that were bought for funny sayings, some classic Corelle ware I picked up in a thrift shop. However, I have three coffee cups, and only those.

The other morning, I chipped one. It is a cup my mother had when she was still teaching, a little joke of a stick-figure woman dressed only in her skirt, with “halfway decent coffee...

On optimism

I am not a born optimist. I was not a dour child, but I think there was always an air of suspicion about me, as though I was never quite sure when the other shoe was going to drop. I was afraid of the dark, for a good long time, well past a reasonable age, and I still can’t let my foot hang over the side of my bed at night.

I’m still never really sure if everything is, as they say, going to be alright. I would love to couch this on intellectualism, but I think it’s more of a combination of pes...

Ode to Colorado

For those of you who don’t know, I’m from Colorado. I was born and raised in Denver, and have lived in Colorado for my entire life – mostly Denver, but with some stretches in Greeley, and in Grand Junction.

Colorado has been in the news a lot, particularly this year, but most recently with the heavy rains and flooding that have destroyed large portions of our state. Four people have been declared dead, and hundreds are unaccounted for. Entire towns have been evacuated, some by helicopter as ro...

A day off. Sort of.

Today I took a day off. This might not sound all that remarkable, given that it’s Saturday, and a holiday weekend in the US to boot (one of my favorite kind: something initially celebrated for a great deal of importance, now co-opted for the purpose of eating and getting drunk. Also, car sales.) I work 2 jobs during the week, a day off makes sense.

I woke up late today. Late, for me, is 7:30. I felt drugged. There is a glory in sleeping late, but also a sense of massive discombobulation. I was...

Allegories, or something

This weekend, after visiting friends, I turned the radio station.

Ordinarily, this is not such a striking occurrence: the radio plays woefully little music anymore, and I’m a finicky listener. As it was, my husband is regularly driven crazy by my flipping through stations, but our rule is: s/he who drives gets to control the music. He was in the passenger seat, having enjoyed several glasses of bourbon. I had control. So I switched.

We’d been listening to classic rock station, and I exchanged i...

A writer in her natural habitat

I don’t travel much. It’s a combination of lack of funds, and a sort of stick-in-the-mud attitude that keeps me pretty firmly entrenched on my home turf. I’m pretty lucky to live in a great place, as well, and tend to be one of those hometown snobs: WHY would I want to go anywhere else, when HERE is just so fantastic?

Also, I don’t like putting on pants.

I went to Boston last week. As in, I put on pants, packed a giant bag with enough clothes for four people, and enough charger cords for a Radi...

Writing time

So, I got a job.

For those of you playing at home: I was laid off from my ad writing/marketing job in late 2009. This was fine with me, back in the day. The job had ballooned in proportions that I had not foreseen, and I was not compensated in kind. I worked fourteen hour days, and cried when I got home with the knowledge I had to do it all over again the next day. I gained thirty pounds stress-eating and working through lunch. I was miserable.

Being laid off afforded me unemployment (this was...

Cue the music

Today I turned 34.

I’m not entirely sure what this means, besides the fact that I am the age my mother was when she had me, which makes me exactly half her age now (well, sort of. When we start messing with counting weeks and such, it’s not quite true, but math is not my strong point and I hate splitting hairs). I am an only child, we like birthdays around here.

I am recovering from a rather wicked hangover borne of the yearly party the husband and I share due to our close birthdays – his is th...