My heart

If I had a quarter for every blog post that I had started and given up on I would have quite a few quarters.

I think it is a good plan to write but then I realize that I’m babbling.  Or I’m forcing it.  Or that whatever I am writing about has been written about a million times before.

My two most recent attempts have been to recap a dream that I had and to share a recipe.  In the middle of writing both I just stopped. 

The dream was pretty funny and the recipe is one of my favorites, but they miss the mark.  Everyone dreams crazy stuff.  Everyone has a recipe they like.  These aren’t earth shattering revelations.

Yet the desire to write kind of tugs.  And I’m not sure what to do with it.  You see, I have this blog space.  It’s free for my using but I don’t know what to share here.  I could take you room by room through my home to show you all of the things that I have done, but I would end up also telling you all of the things that still need to be done.  I could share recipes – but see my reasoning above.  I’m not a photographer.  In fact my camera quite stinks.  I’m not a finance guru – I’m actually pretty stupid about money despite trying to do better for about, oh, 25 years.

I guess that leaves sharing my heart?  

It’s a crazy place to tread.  I’m not sure that I even trust it many days.  In fact, earlier today I sent a message that said, “I would call you but I know that I would end up in tears.”  This time of year, and today specifically, my heart rather hurts. 

It started when TDM sent a picture from 2013 of Miss E decorating cookies with my mom.  At the time they still lived in the house that I grew up in, so the house is in the background.  My mom is in the background too.  And then there is this precious four-year-old that has been replaced by an incredibly tall and talented ten-year-old.  It was all too much for my heart this morning. 

Christmas cookies were one of my favorite memories with my mom.  Sometime around Thanksgiving she would pull out a Steno pad and her recipe box.  She would pull out recipes that were everyone’s favorite and a few that she hadn’t made in a few years.  She would think through what favorites everyone had and try to include something for everyone.  I can see her in a chair, a cup of coffee and lamplight.  Before she was through she would have a shopping list of ingredients and in the lean years a rough calculation of the extra grocery cost. 

Every year sugar cookies were part of the tradition.  The only thing that changed year to year was how they were decorated – for many years she used an evaporated milk and food coloring mixture that was painted on prior to baking.  That morphed into frosted sugar cookies and then back to painted cookies – this time with a very runny frosting that went on a baked cookie. 

I remember that no matter the technique my mom always wanted pretty cookies.  And every year I remember the oddest assortment of cookies that were mostly not pretty no matter how hard she tried.  Because my mom made one ‘mistake’ over and over again.  That mistake?  She invited her people to decorate the cookies with her each year. 

As a kid I remember my dad rolling cookies super thick, cutting them out with gingerbread boy and girl cutters and then pressing them flatter – so that they appeared super fat.  “Fat lil girls and boys’ became the joke year after year.  When we moved into the frosting phase I remember him using every single color of frosting to make ‘Mexican Pizza’ and all manner of utterly frosted chaos.  I had a pretty methodical plan for cookie decorating that started with studying the shapes and determining what frosting colors were needed, as well as what frosting tip was need to accomplish (what I determined to be) the best looking cookies. 

Year after year I remember trays of cookies, frosting, sprinkles and laughter at the table.  Cookie night.  After my girls were born they joined the fun.  And that brings me to the picture that TDM sent today. 

I have been struggling to make cookies this year.  Today I put my finger on why.  It doesn’t help that Miss E has been sick on the couch for the last few days but more than anything I’m stuck in this overthinking limbo of the fact that she isn’t here and I want to continue the tradition with my kids but I’m stuck.  Do I go for pretty cookies?  Do I chance it on ugly ones?  Do I paint them before they are cooked?  Frost them?  Paint them after they are cooked?  Or gasp!  Do I use the new technique that I learned last year?  One batch or two?  Should I mix up both batches, bake one now and freeze one for later?

So many choices!  So many thoughts!  So much mental paralysis!  And somehow after writing all of this I realize that this is exactly what I needed to write.  It isn’t a recipe or a crazy dream.  It’s the inner workings of my heart.  These are the things that I need to pull out and put on paper.  These are the things that I need to break through to.  And in the process I'm realizing that the perfection that my mom always hoped for in her cookies was - without her really realizing it - exactly what she got - the perfection of her people making memories together.  

Thanks for listening.