So this week’s column got me all existentially-thinking about time and whether or not it really exists and what to do with what you have and list making and so on and so on.

I guess the powers that be at the local news didn’t like it as much as I did. (But you know how I eat up existentialism…it’s like raw chocolate chip cookie dough for me.)

Since they didn’t post it in today’s online version of the news (picture me with my bottom lip out), I’m posting it here in it’s entirety:

Where Did that Extra Hour Go?

By Local Columnist, Amy Gesenhues

All weekend, I was looking forward to the extra hour we were getting compliments of daylight savings time. Come Sunday, we would set our clocks back and I’d get an entire sixty minutes all to myself. I spent my Saturday morning making a list of things to do with my extra hour. (I love making lists—it’s kind of a hobby, or OCD symptom. You say to-MAY-toe, I say to-MOT-toe.)

What would I do with a whole hour? I could write. Do my nails. Clean out my refrigerator (that one got nixed as quickly as it got listed). Nap. Read. Work on the Sunday crossword puzzle. Organize photos. Make more lists.

The possibilities were endless.

I wanted to spend it wisely. I was fervently aware that come spring of next year, daylight savings time would be taking back her hour (creating the need to make a new list of things to cut from my Sunday routine next March 14^th).

Time is an interesting thing. I once saw a guy wearing a t-shirt at a Coldplay concert that said, “Time is a man made concept.” It bugged me the entire show. Man-made…it’s not real. Time is not real. It was as if somebody had just told me that the earth really was the back of some giant tortoise shell. If time wasn’t real, then what was? I thought, while trying to focus on Chris Martin singing Clocks. It was too much to consider on top of him singing about going back home (home, as in the one you can never go back to).

I finally filed the thought in the same box that holds other such questions like, where does the universe end? Or, how many stars are there? And, how does a short-wave radio work. (I know there is actually an answer for that question, but it still blows my mind that sound waves can enter a transmitter, travel thousands of miles through our atmosphere, and come out some random speaker almost immediately).

Right now, one of the books on my nightstand is, “The Principles of Uncertainty” by the artist, Maira Kalman. It’s a beautiful collection of paintings (with some photos) paired with a stream of conscious story that fits together in its own enlightening way. One of the theme’s of the book is extinction and how everything dies; and since everything does come to an end, then what’s the point. But, of course, the point is art; it’s the book itself.

The idea of ‘what’s-the point-anyway’ comes around often in our lives. During the day-in-day-out chores that go along with raising a family, working a job, and keeping a household, it’s easy to get caught in that vicious cycle of confusion and lack of importance.

“Why am I driving to work again, like I do every Monday, wishing I could be still in bed, reading the paper, drinking coffee?”

Even I—someone who loves her job; who gets to write a column; who has the two best kids in the whole wide world along with a loving husband and whole slew of friends to drink coffee with—even I sometimes think, “Why? Why am I doing this again?”

The answer, of course, is because I choose to do it again. This life that I have right now, in this moment in time, is what I have chosen. I drive to work everyday because I want a career and I want certain things that come with having a career. I could choose not to work. And if I made that choice, I wouldn’t live in the house we live, we wouldn’t take the vacations we take, we wouldn’t have the healthcare we have, and my kids wouldn’t get to enjoy the things we provide for them.

And then I remember that time isn’t real anyway. This drive to work is just where I am in my life right now. Like plucking the shoe or the hat from the Monopoly box and placing it on the board, the place I am now is simply a slice of my life. I will have many more slices and they will all fit together in some form or fashion, overlapping, disappearing, or stretching out over days, months, and years (none of which actually exist).

Sunday night, after my husband and I spent the day saying, “Does that clock have the right time?” I found my list of things to do with my extra hour. It was 10:00 p.m. and we had just gotten our one-year-old to asleep. I still had not folded laundry; I had not written my list of weekly tasks (see a pattern here?); I had not checked my email; I had not done one thing on my list of ways to spend my extra sixty minutes. And, as far as I could tell, that hour was long gone.

It didn’t bother me for too long. I knew that my extra hour didn’t really exist anyway.

I’m just saying, if I get another tattoo…that’s what it’s going to read.

Maybe I could get it in Mandarin script or Latin so it would look a bit more tasteful. (Was it a bit too much having a curse word in the title? It’s still PG, right?)  Actually, I get shit done in Latin would work too. It’s aggressive and blunt, but with an old school, Catholic mass kind of slant. Like a nun who goes around smacking left-handers with a big thick wooden ruler.

I’m pretty sure that I did more this morning than I did the entire year I was 24.

Wake kiddos, fix breakfast, fix hair (mine and my daughters), find snack, check work email, get one kiddo to school, get the other kiddo to daycare, come back to first kiddo’s school and read stories while taking questions from five and six-year olds. BREATH. Check voicemail, remember that I completely forgot to check first kiddos school folder last night and hope she did not have homework. Arrive at coffee shop and work on newsletter while answering emails from CEO…it’s not even 11:00 a.m. yet.

Go Go Go Go Go

My husband is giving me a breather right now and picking up the kids before we go–as a family–to Kroger. Talk about a mess. Grocery shopping with all the kids is like being in some low-rate, no-budget TV game show where the objective is to get only what you need and get out before you spend double what you should and have a crying baby to calm through the last two aisles.

When I look back on this time, I know I’m going to think–how the hell did I do all that with two kids? And by all that I mean hold down a full-time career, keep up a regular weekly column, and write my first novel that led to my life of leisurely luxuries and wild success.

I’ve been wondering about how using my kids for material will come back and bite me in the behind…but it hasn’t stopped me.

Here’s last week’s column where I totally call out my daughter for being a tattletale…so uncool for both of us. She being the tattler and me being the tattletale mom.

Tales from a Tattler

Published in the October 28, 2009 issue of The Tribune.

My daughter is a tattletale. We knew this going into kindergarten, but were unaware of her full capacity to tattle. Like her mom, if she enjoys something, she doesn’t do it halfway; she’s a really, really good tattletale.

It has become our Monday morning breakfast topic and our afterschool check-in discussion.

We start the week with pancakes and the routine question, “What are you not going to do this week?”

My daughter looks down at her breakfast and heaves a heavy sigh, “I’m not going to tattle.”

“No matter what, right?”

“No matter what, I won’t tattle. Unless somebody’s bleeding, right mom? If someone’s bleeding I have to tell the teacher.”

“Yes, if someone is badly hurt, you should tell the teacher,” I say.

“What if their feelings are badly hurt?” she asks, looking for a loophole.

“If someone else’s feelings are hurt then it is their job to tell the teacher, not yours.” My daughter’s tattletale-ing is far reaching. She doesn’t just tell on kids who have wronged her. She is on the look-out for slighted kiddos across the playground. She’s the superhero of whistle-blowing.

“Fine,” she says. She’s never happy with this conclusion. We’ve taken away her superpower.

Regardless of how well this conversation goes, it never sticks. By Wednesday, the ride home from afterschool care includes a story of how someone cut in line and why she had to tell because everybody knows that you can’t cut in line and get away with it. I try to explain that cutting in line could be considered just as offensive as tattling. She doesn’t buy it.

My daughter sees her tattling as an endeavor in righteousness. Part of the issue is that she has the mentality of an only child. Her brother didn’t show up until a couple months before her fifth birthday. According to Alfred Adler, the famed psychologist who sold us on birth order psychology, there’s a good chance she will exhibit only-child personality traits throughout her life. If things go per his theory, she will be conscientious and ambitious as well as conservative and conforming.

The conservative in her has already bared its Republican head. Last year during elections, my daughter refused to side with me and her dad to pull for Obama. She was a McCain fan from the get-go.

“I like his girl,” my daughter would say about Sarah Palin. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about politics you know how difficult of a pill this was for me to swallow. “But Sarah doesn’t want you to be educated or have a choice,” I would tell her, referencing Palin’s anti-abortion and no sex education in school platform. My debate held no water with my daughter; she was a tried and blue conservative. Her political views were my first real test in parenting. I want my children to be their own person; but, this is much easier said than done when being their own person means their vote would negate your vote for president.

We found our way through her conservative tendencies and embraced her love for McCain-Palin (even though we checked Obama on our ballot). It’s the conforming issues that are proving to be a more difficult battle for her dad and me. Not so much her conforming, but her need to make everyone else around her conform to her rules.

How do you curb your cute-as-a-button snitch? Or do you?

What if we encourage it?

Nobody likes a tattletale; but, we all need them. What would we do without whistleblowers to stop big business from exploiting customers or investigative journalists who keep tabs on crooked politicians? Jeffrey Wigand may not have any more tobacco industry buddies, but now we are all a lot more aware of how far a billion-dollar corporation will go to turn a profit.

And how much of the tattling has to do with birth order versus parental order? I mean, who’s the bigger tattletale here anyway? The five year old daughter tattling on a line-cutter or the 36-year-old mom tattling on her daughter? From the way it’s reading, this tattle-teller doesn’t fall far from the apple tree.

http://www.news-tribune.net/archivesearch/local_story_301003514.html

Actual conversation, verbatim, that just happened between me and my husband:

Him: “Is that Rupaul?”

Me: “No, it’s Wendy Williams.”

Him: “Is it a real woman?”

Me: “Yes.”

I am no stranger to writing about how fantastic my aunts are; but, tonight I am especially enamored with two of them.

Right about now, two of my dad’s sisters are driving through Arizona on their way to the Grand Canyon. They have covered miles and miles during the last eight days in their eggplant-colored minivan.

One of my cousin’s built a platform for a mattress that he then installed in the back of their vehicle (they’ve been camping as they go, sleeping in the van). Over-sized Longerberger baskets stocked full of bread, peanutbutter, homemade jelly, Philadelphia cream cheese and coolers of diet coke are keeping them well fed, while, I am sure, a stack of New York Times crossword puzzles are keeping them entertained as one drives and the other recites the clues.

I’d give anything to watch an instant streaming video of the two driving along, laughing, bitching, smiling. Can you imagine the road-trip back and forth between two sisters who have been sisters for more than 50 years? (Not that either of them look a day over 30!) These women have lived through the thick of it…catholic school, teenage daughters, countless family dinners. They are both mothers of amazingly gifted and talented children. They both worked outside the home while keeping the inside of their household running at full tilt.

I love them and hope one day when I’m able and my sisters are able that I remember what these two aunts did so that I do the same.

As part of my therapy (long story that doesn’t fit here) I’ve been trying to indulge certain areas of my psyche that got left out in the cold for awhile.

Today, something I ordered just for this neglected part of my soul showed up in the mail. I made sure they were delivered to my work address so that I could see them as soon as they arrived. They were as beautiful and stunning and breath-taking in real life as they were in the tiny thumbnail eBay photo where I first fell in love with them.

What has me in such a twitter?

They are 4″ zebra print faux fur heels from Michael Kors with a double black buckle across the toe. If you love shoes like I do, then you know what I’m talking about. These are shoes that can change your life.

They are shoes that you plan an outfit around…they are shoes that you plan an entire evening around. They are the shoes that turn you into a woman who dares to wear 4″ heels.

I love them.

Warning: Kids in the Limelight May Be Soured

Published in the October 21 issue of The Tribune.

The Gap has a sign in their window that reads, “Your Kid Could Be Our Next Star.” “Ugh,” I thought when I saw it on my way in to shop for jeans. Is that even a selling point?

It should have said, “Your kid could be our next star with their very own chance to be exploited, eaten up, and then spit-out as soon as they are determined less than profitable by the very industry that gave them a pass. Don’t forget, they will be sure to receive everything from unfavorable criticism to downright nasty ridicule by the media, bloggers, comedians, and fans, along with cruel judgments from people who have never even met them. As a parent, you’ll get the added bonus of a fast buck, likely divorce, and your very own opportunistic opportunity to cry on the set of ‘The View’ with Joy Behar sitting beside you (or worse, confessing into Billy Bush’s mic on ‘Entertainment Tonight’). If all goes as planned, you’ll eventually be totally estranged from the very child that you wanted to make into a star.”

I guess there wasn’t enough room on the window for my truth in advertising soliloquy, but I thought about it the entire time I was trying on jeans.

There’s a lot of talk about how we value children, but it kind of feels hollow when you watch television. “Our kids come first,” comments sound like when I say that I want to go to the gym. I really want to do what’s right and work-out every day, but often times I flake and order carry-out on my way home instead. I talk a good game, but there is not a lot of substance. In the same way, we may say we value children, but there are still a whole lot of open casting calls awaiting the next Lindsey Lohan-kid or Gosselin-family.

My internal rant on childhood stardom happened the day before the horrifying balloon story was aired on every news channel available. The video showed the silver balloon zipping through the sky with captions like, “Six-year old boy trapped in balloon.” Now we know that the story was most likely a hoax. Already this week, CNN reported that the parents of the 6-year-old boy, Richard and Mayumi Heene, are likely to face criminal charges.

The Heene parents are no strangers to cheap fame. Previously, they had appeared on “Wife Swap,” a reality show that takes two completely opposite-type families and switches the moms to see how each family will fare (and fail) under the guidance of the new mother-bear.

While my viewing of this show has been limited, I have seen enough to know that it is child abuse. The families often have young children — kids who are not old enough to process the difference between their life and what’s being done to them for ratings. Just because no one is putting the kids on this show in physical harm, doesn’t mean that they are not negatively affected by the camera crews and producers encouraging the dads to fight with the new live-in women “pretending” to be mom.

And while I have tried my best to boycott the entire escapade that has become the Gosselin fiasco, I can’t talk about childhood neglect and abuse on television without mentioning the most famous broken-family of the day. Is there really anyone who would argue that it was BEST for the kids to keep the cameras rolling when this publicized divorce got nastier than any soap-opera break-up?

If TLC valued children, especially the children that are part of the TLC broadcasting family, the “Jon & Kate + Eight” crew would have packed up and went home as soon as the parents split. Instead, shows kept being taped as TLC continues to reap all the benefits and ghastly profits from the free tabloid and talk show publicity of their biggest stars.

It used to be that the only children ruined by television were the child actors whose parents had fed them to wolves for a chance to be a sitcom star. The cast of “Different Strokes” were literally the poster-kids for what could happen if you entered the industry before you (or your legal team) could act on your behalf.

Now days, it appears that the professional child actors landing actual acting roles are the only ones practicing with a safety net. It’s the amateurs with parents looking for a quick trip to celebrity-ville who are obviously in need of protection.

Conditions have to be severe before children are removed from their homes. Nadya Suleman still has all 14 of her kids after her media blitz; Jon and Kate still see all six of their children every other week; and Richard and Mayumi Heene will get to keep the son they allegedly made stay in the attic while search teams plowed the ground looking for him.

Exploiting your children is not always illegal. And I don’t necessarily believe that children should be removed from their home even if the people in charge of the home are making less then credible parenting decisions. But, there has to be a better way to protect children of parents who are willing to do almost anything to get on television. Maybe they could be assigned a live-in social-worker that would have to grant approval before any camera crew showed up. Or, better yet, we could institute a law that forbid the parents (and their children until they were of a consenting age) from being filmed … ever. If we can take Pete Rose out of the game, surely we could take Richard Heene out of the public eye?

My girl is losing her teeth, fast.

Tonight will be the second night in less than five days that the tooth fairy will have to make a stop at our humble abode. And the third time this month. I’m pretty sure we may be bankrupting our gracious tooth collector (hard times for are falling on everyone, even winged-ones with fairy dust and bags-o-teeth).

My daughter won’t have to worry about Halloween candy rotting her teeth this year as she hardly has any left.

Tomorrow morning will go much better than Monday morning when at first it had appeared the tooth fairy took the tooth but left no monies. My daughter woke up, checked under her pillow, and then immediately lost her crackers. You would have thought we had woke her up wearing a ski mask and carry a machete (not that she would have gotten the Mike Meyers reference, but a ski mask and a machete are inherently scary).

“The tooth fairy took my tooth and didn’t leave me anything,” she sobbed while my husband carried her into the living room. He was a bit in shock and handed her over to me.

“Sweetie, I think you may have just missed where the tooth fairy left your dollar. Did you look everywhere? Did you look inside your pillowcase?”

Her sniffles started to cease as we headed back to her room to re-search the premises for the missing dollar.

“Surely the tooth fairy wouldn’t stiff you,” I said.

“What’s stiff me mean?” she asked.

We flipped the pillow and found the dollar and the morning was saved, as was the tooth fairy’s reputation.  It was a close call though; if that dollar hadn’t showed, we were going to have to call my cousin to prosecute that freaking fairy flit. I still don’t trust her all the way…I mean, who hides the dollar inside the pillowcase?

Tonight, I’m going to make sure we don’t have a replay of Monday morning and go do the deed as soon as I’m done typing this. In fact, this post was my way of not forgetting tooth fairy duties (like i did on Sunday night).

We all have stories. Some of us are better at telling them than others. Some of us are better at writing them down than others.

Our stories are sad. They are funny. They are meaningful. They can be everything all at once. The one thing all stories have in common is that they belong fully and wholly to their beholders.

My family, by all extensions, has many stories…and I’m sure that they would each be told differently according to the person telling the story.

For example, when I was a teenager, I kicked a hole in the wall in our hallway. It was a good sized hole (approximately a size eight in womens shoes).  I could tell you the entire story here, what I was doing before I kicked the wall, what happened to make me kick the wall, and what happened afterward. I could tell it from my point of view now and it would be funny. I could tell it from my point of view then and it would be full of anger and…mostly anger, maybe some sorrow.

When I write a story–a column, a post, an email, whatever–I believe my best writing happens when I can include my own life experiences. My goal is to be honest and authentic…to share my experiences so that they resonate with the reader.

I believe the power of our stories can move mountains. They can make people laugh and cry all at once. They can open doors and hearts. Readers can be saved by the power of a story in the same way that writers can be saved by letting their stories be free to roam.

Tonight I had dinner (actually it was a table full of appetizers, much better than dinner) with two of my favorite friends. We only get to see each once every four to five weeks if we’re lucky; but, when we do, the stories go wild. Tonight we talked about a mind-blowing trip to Costa Rica, a mindful week spent at a writing conference, and a mind that’s been working overtime to move through crap that’s been lingering for years. Because our time is limited, we get straight to it. We move from person to person, asking directed and pointed questions. We want the thick of it, there is no time for small talk.

The thing about our stories is that we never know what they are going to be, but they all of their own way of helping out the other people at the table.

But that’s what stories are supposed to do. Help.

Advice from My Dad

Published in the October 14, 2009 issue of The Tribune.

My dad drowned when I was 3 years old, leaving me very few personal memories of his overall demeanor. I can’t recall how he fixed his hair, what his voice sounded like, how he walked, or what his face looked like when he smiled. These details are missed, but they are not the whole kit-and-kaboodle.

There are many things he did leave me that have proven more valuable than knowing which side he parted his hair. He has left me tiny clues throughout my life to help see things from his point of view and reconsider or reengage whatever is calling for my attention. I have come around to understanding that this is our conversation, that these clues are merely a way for us to continue our father-daughter talks even if the discussion is taking place on different planes.

Our latest talk happened tonight.

After three months in my new home, I finally got my home-office put together. For weeks and weeks, my poor, neglected books were left in boxes waiting to be set free. The room that is now my office was previously the holding cell for a mess of unpacked cardboard boxes, a desk cluttered with computer accessories but no computer, and spare odds and ends that got put into the mix of it all because they had no other place to go. But this weekend, order was restored when my bookshelves were installed and I was free to arrange my office as necessary.

My new office is heaven; as Virginia would say, it’s a room of one’s own.

I love to write; but, my life as a writer and my life as a professional sometimes get in the way of one another. I love my nine-to-five job and feel very fortunate to be where I am and get to do the job I do. A lot of my day-job is writing — marketing and business writing. My place of employment is about as close to perfect as you can get when working for someone else.

But the writing I enjoy most is here in my columns and the novel that I am trying like the (Charles) dickens to finish. There is also my AmyWroteIt blog filled with random thoughts and commentaries. This writing, the writing that feels frivolous but taste better than ice-cream, comes with very little compensation and takes a backseat to coloring with my five-year old or crawling around my house with my one-year old on my back.

While putting my office together, the space where I will now do most of my ice-cream writing, I was overwhelmed with the urge to lock the door and never come out. The frivolous writer in me wanted to stay in my new office forever. She wanted nothing to do with the nine-to-five job. She wanted to sink into her new room, punching away at her keyboard to craft fanciful sentences meant only to entertain her narcissistic, ego-driven, writerly yearnings. I let her daydream while I continued to unpack boxes.

The majority of the boxes included my books and my ridiculous Vanity Fair collection. (I can’t throw them away; the collection is one of my many personal ticks; I like to think it makes me eccentric, my husband thinks it makes me a hoarder.) But then, there was one box labeled “Dad’s Stuff” filled mostly with school notepads from my dad’s days at Flaget and University of Louisville. You can’t open a box of belongings from your deceased dad without looking at something — no matter how many times you’ve seen the contents before. (I dare you to try.)

With my frivolous writer still thinking about holing herself up in her new room, the rest of me found solace in the very first piece of paper I picked out of dad’s box. It was a book report he had turned in on February 24, 1964. The report was on Jackson Scholz’s “Man in a Cage” and was divided into two sections: 1.) Synopsis of Book and 2.) Moral.

The Moral? “Man has but one job in his life and to perform it adequately he must choose the career fitted for him. He may be troubled until he finds out for sure he has chosen the right one for him, but when he is sure, he enjoys life much more.”

The way I saw it, Dad had decided to address my frivolous writer-self and tell her to be still … we all have a purpose and I have found mine. It’s OK for me to be troubled about what kind of writing I’m going to do, but my life is ultimately more enjoyable because I get to do it at all. It was the exact fatherly advice I needed at the exact right time.

I sat in the wonder of it all and reread the moral. After taking a break to talk to dad, I finished unpacking and made a deal with my egotistic writer: I’d stay put in my new office until this column was complete.