Now before all of you get all wound up with your panties in a knot over the title and tell me that no one should stand for infidelity. Let me clarify that, the other woman in my husband’s life is a Carquest Store. He sells auto parts, and has for about 36 years, first for his Uncle in a family owned 3 store chain. In July of 2014 that chain was purchased by an independent Carquest Auto Parts Chain.
     That is when things began to change drastically. He works 60+  hours a week, works every Saturday and no amount of whining and screaming on my part will change that. He loves his new boss, and to be fair and honest I like the guy too. I also think his wife is fantastic. But I also want my husband back. I don’t want to have to schedule my life around Carquest.
     A Good Morning, I love you text doesn’t fix it, and even that is absent now. His cell phone is broken and he hasn’t figured out the time to get a new one yet.
     I just want a man who knows how to balance work and family. One who knows that no one ever said “I should have spent more time at work”. Someone who makes time to take their wife to the ER when she has pneumonia, not send her with the 18 year old, because he has to work.  Someone who puts her first, because he knows it is the right thing to do and because he loves her. Not because he knows she will pitch a fit if she hears the word Carquest again.
     Our kids want a summer vacation, but they are realists, they know their Dad wont take time away. So guess what?  This year is the year that Mom says, I will take you to the beach…if he comes he does, and if he chooses to work…so be it!!!

     It is only Saturday and already this has been a hell of a weekend. All of it in an emotionally fantastic wonderful way. Last night my oldest son Kyle went to his Senior Prom with his wonderful girlfriend Kacie.  A night that was filled with joy, fun, splendor and nerves on his part. And on my part it was emotional in completely different ways. He is less than 2 months away from graduation, less than 2 months away from being let loose on the real world. I have news for him though, he will always be my baby regardless of how grown up he is. And he is pretty grown up,.he is almost 6 ft tall now, and a strapping young gentleman. Ready to make the world his own, and take it by storm.

     At 11:30 this morning my youngest son Connor ran in his first 5K. He has an athleticism that never ceases to amaze me. He plays baseball, football and skis as well. He has recently began to run, as part of his baseball training, 5 miles 2 times a week and he truly enjoys it. Running is something that I abhor. It makes my wheezing worse, and we all know how much I like to sweat (dripping with true sarcasm.)  In the last year he has grown in height, he is taller than me, at 5’7″ tall now he is a tall lanky boy. He walks like he owns the world, and as a 15 year old he owns part of it.
     He stretched this morning and I dropped him at the Turners Falls HS to run his first 5K. 22:13 later he finished his first 5K, finishing first in his age class.

     In 24 hours my 2 boys seem to have taken the world by storm. They are growing up, growing into respectable young men. With completely different ideas, views and passions. But they will always be my boys, my babies, regardless of how big or grown up they get.

  Before or coinciding with spring this year in New England comes Mud Season. All that snow has to go somewhere when it melts. It melts into lovely rivers of water. Water that turns dirt roads like mine into mud pits. I live as Jeff Foxworthy would say, “if your directions say, turn off the paved road…you might be a redneck.”  My normally calm dirt road is full of huge ruts this year, ruts that you have to navigate carefully, bumping and holding onto the steering wheel with all of your might, as the car bucks and hops like some sort of deranged bronco.

     Never mind the visual after effect left on my car. My poor Honda Pilot looks like it has been “Mudding”, there are splotches of mud all over the side of my car and streaks of it on the mirrors. All this from just navigating my road.
     I know what most of you will say, “you chose to live there, that is what you get,”  and yes you would be right. It is what I get, I also get temperatures that are at least 10 degrees cooler in the summer, and less humid than in the flatlands. A peace and quiet that can’t be achieved in the city or even the suburbs. The kind of bucolic peacefulness that it hard to come by.
     I also get the constant trail of mud from dogs that don’t know how to wipe their feet when they come in the house, as well as mud left my kids and a husband that know how to, they just don’t. Sand and dirt on and in the bed, from the same dog that believes that once the bed is made, it is her job and right to unmake it and crawl under the covers. Muddy feet and all.
     This time of year no matter how many times I sweep or mop, the mud is just there. Caking everything, like sticky cake batter, that doesn’t taste near as good. But it means that my family is enjoying the outdoors. All of them, kids, hubby and pets alike. Someday there will be no muddy footprints, and I will miss them.

      Yesterday I had been married 19 years. I remembered the day with all of its fanfare. The church, the reception, the pictures, my family, the bridal party. The last minute glitches, the missing bridesmaid bouquet and the fact it was raining the day of, and my parents driveway was a muddy mess. But most of all I reflected on the things I have learned about and while being married. It isn’t about getting married, it is about staying married. As I was getting ready to walk down the aisle and was a bundle of nerves my dad said to me, “we got this, it’s a lead pipe cinch.”  At the time I had no idea what he meant, 19 years later (and after wanting to smack hubby with that lead pipe a time or 2). I know he meant, it will be fine, you are ready. He and my mom will be married 49 years in July. I had great role models.

1.  Patience
2.  Communication is vital
3.  Sometimes you just need to leave each other alone, or in the words of the Whalens..don’t poke the nasty beast with a stick.
4.  Married couples do not have to do everything together
5.  You really do need your own money.
6.  Sex is the icing on the cake, and who just wants a muffin
7.  Sometimes you have to to something drastic to jolt your spouse out of their “zone”.
8.  Being comfortable isn’t always the best way.
9.  Life can be full of adventures. If your spouse wont embrace them, do them alone. P.S. I bet they will embrace them after they see you having fun.
10.  Don’t let your kids rule your life. Once they are gone, what the hell will you do or talk about?
11.  If you think your house should look like Martha Stewart lives there-hire her.
12. Compromise, because if not 1 of you will always be unhappy.
13.  Don’t be a slave to your imposed schedule, spontaneity is fun.
14.  Hear each other as well as listening.
15.  If something is bothering you, talk about it. Bottling it up, just causes an explosion later.
16.  Don’t try and “one up” each other.
17.  Keeping score is for sports not marriage.
18.  Flowers for no reason are the best.
19. Remember why you fell in love and celebrate that.

As I age I have come to the conclusion that I was sold a bill of goods as a young woman and a young woman. This bill of goods was one that I willingly bought and paid for, shelled out those bills and change without a second thought. It was what I thought I was supposed to do.
     Work full time as a young woman, enter the dating pool, swim, float and sink at times. Try and find someone to settle down with, someone that I could embrace their faults and quirks.
Although I was never supposed to show them mine. It was the early 1990’s, and all of us women were supposed to be “perfect.” Never to let them see your flaws, we were one step removed from June Cleaver and Carol Brady.
     I found that person, settled down and married in 1996, yes do the math I will be married 20 years next year. In just over a week I will be married 19 years, the thought still boggles my mind. 19 years and 2 children, 3 dogs and 5 cats later. The woman that walked down that aisle almost 19 years ago was a very different lady from the one writing this post now. She was idealistic, and wide-eyed, and full of wonder about marriage and child rearing. The 19 year married me realizes that those are great qualities but they just don’t cut it in the everyday world.
     My children will only eat vegetables and fruit and meat and whole grains. No candy or junk, yeah right a lollipop soothes the tears of a crying 2 year old, and ice cream, who can live without it? Needless to say the idealism went out the window quick. I was also going to nurse my baby for a year, until the first time, holy ouch and this just doesn’t come naturally. I hated it, to put it mildly, gave it the required 3 months n then went to bottles. Judge me all you want, but I hated being a human cow, and I was a bottle fed baby and  had survived to 28 just fine!!
     As I watch the young girls dress more scantily each day I wonder what they are thinking. That they have to be perfect to fit in, perfect friends, perfect bodies, perfect hair, perfect boyfriend, perfect grades. I want to tell them that perfection is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. That keeping up the facade of perfection takes a toll that is just not necessary. I want to yell at them, “be yourselves, have fun, don’t worry about that extra pound or that hair out of place. Your true friends won’t care.” Only the ones that are worrying about being perfect will care. Please don’t think I condemn these young girls for attracting the wrong attention by wearing these clothes, that is not where I am going. I just want them to understand that even supermodels don’t look like that without being airbrushed.

I am fully aware that this post is gonna ruffle feathers, piss in peoples cheerios and generally unnerve some. To be completely honest with you, I don’t care, I care that you read this blog, and I care that you comment. But if it gets your panties all in a wad, maybe it will have done it’s job today.
     I live in Franklin County Massachusetts, we are famous for the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, Yankee Candle in South Deerfield, we used to have a nuclear plant in Rowe and now we have an enormous Opioid addiction problem. The first 3 I am proud of, the last one not so much. In every town in this county people are using and abusing Opiods, namely Heroin and most recently Fentanyl patches laced with Heroin.
     In 2013 there were 1,000 deaths attributed to unintentional Opioid overdose, that is a 46% increase from 2012. This also caused 2000 hospital stays in 2013. There have already been 200 overdoses to date in 2015 and it is just April. I will give our new Governor props that he is addressing the problem. He has created an Opioid task force that has met 3 times and is trying to come up with solutions. One of them has already been implemented, all insurers must now pay for 14 days of Inpatient Care for Drug Addiction, without pre-authorization.
     Unfortunately therein lies one of the big issues, Massachusetts has this large Opioid addiction.  But we do not have near enough inpatient, or outpatient beds to treat it. People who finally decide that they want help, encounter the same message “we have no beds.” How does this task force plan to fix, or even address and control this addiction if there aren’t enough beds to treat the addicts that want to get clean.
     Most of the beds, be they available or not are way out of the addicts comfort zone or ability to travel zone. What I mean by that is that they are in the Greater Boston Area. There are few detox centers  in Franklin County. As you head towards the major metropolitan area the detox centers are more prevalent, that does not mean that they have any beds available though.
     I was having a conversation with my PCP (about another issue altogether), and we somehow ended up on the topic of Heroin use in the County. She informed me that she has teenage patients as young as 14 years old injecting Heroin in every school district in this county. That flabbergasted me, I am sure I sat there with my mouth hanging open like a fool. What I was thinking was can I put my children in bubbles, protect them from everything and everyone.
     Instead I came home and asked both of them about drug use at their school. Both said “yeah it is there mom, but not with our groups.”  I breathed a small sigh of relief but then realized that some mothers child is shooting up at school, and it is nauseating. In my day, and I know that makes me so old, the drug of choice was weed, Heroin was hard core, high school kids wouldn’t think of doing that.
     Oh how things have changed, this is the world that we live in now. We need to adapt and change to be relevant and protect our kids. As one person affected by the horror of the heroin epidemic said “How many people are going to die while you people gather info?” We need to fix this fast, before we lose more than 1,000 people to Heroin this year. 1,000 mothers, daughters, sons, fathers. These are all people not just a number and we need to fix this before another 1 of them dies

As long I can remember I have hated exercise, actually hate is probably to mild a word. Detest, loathe and abhor would be more like it. I was diagnosed with asthma at 14 months old, very severe asthma, the kind that would send me to the ER with lips that were blue and lungs making a horrid wheezing noise.
     Exercise only exacerbated the issue, so I spent most of my time sitting on the sidelines watching. Watching others run and jump and skip, knowing that if I did those things I would be wheezing and hacking and coughing in a short period of time.  It didn’t take long for me to equate exercise with pain and aggravation. Thereby making me detest it as much as humanly possible.
     I found a few things that I liked to do that did not induce wheezing, but they were not the normal type of exercise. I loved to downhill ski, spent countless hours on the mountain, wore out at least a pair of gloves a season and just might have had hot cocoa in veins instead of blood by the end of the season.
     Once the weather turned warm my focus changed from snow to water. I loved to swim (and still do.)  I excelled at it, and progressed through the classes. I joined the swim team like most kids in town. My stroke was the butterfly, if I were to do it now I think I might drown. I swam every summer, and have a wall full of ribbons in my childhood bedroom to prove it.

     In high school I tried to play field hockey, but my lungs were not happy with all the running required. This was the ’80’s, the era of Jane Fonda and her aerobics, something that did not go well with my cranky asthmatic lungs.
     Finally after trying elliptical machines and treadmills and walking and hating every blessed one of them. I went back to my true love, I now swim 2 miles 2-3 times a week, that combined with a healthy diet has helped me shed 70 lbs. By going back to what I loved, I found a way to move forward.🏊🏊