Identity

About the Name


Anniegirl 1138 is a moniker I created for myself out of desperation when trying to register as a member of a message board for young widowed people. My first choice was just Annie, but being common and simple, it was already in use.

I then fell back on Anniegirl which was the name I used years ago at BabyCenter when I was trying to get pregnant for the first time. Unsurprisingly it too was already spoken for, though in the many months I was posting at the YWBB, I never ran across the poster whose name that was.

Finally, I struck upon the idea of simply adding numbers to the end of the name I wanted to use. And I wanted to use Anniegirl. It is actually a nickname that goes back farther even then BabyCenter. It was first given to me when I was a third year teacher by a counselor I was working with in a middle school at-risk program. Her name was Karla and she was in the habit of nicknaming everyone she knew and liked. She first called me Anniegirl and we struck up a friendship that last for several years and even though we are no longer close friends – she still calls me that.

 The random number thing was a tough one however. I have a difficult time remembering my own cell phone number (okay – confession – I can’t remember my cell number at all which is why it is a good thing that my husband knows it by heart). I chose 1138 after the George Lucas film THX1138. Why I can remember George Lucas’s college phone number and not my own cell number is a mystery, but there you have it – Anniegirl1138.

Generally speaking I am as ego-centric as anyone in the blogosphere and maybe moreso. I began blogging at MSN Spaces during the summer of 2006. It was a place to put my angst and I had plenty of it at the time, and to get back into the habit of writing everyday. I eventually moved on to dotmac where I still maintain a blog and it’s doppleganger at blogger, and now I am here.

This blog will, hopefully, not be about angst. I am tired of it. Not that I don’t still have angsty critters knocking about the recesses of my being, but I am in need of …….. something different. Oh, I tried politics at the Des Moines Register blog site during the weeks leading up to the Caucases, but despite what most of the Canadians I live amongst seem to think – I don’t have a deep and abiding interest in the running of my homeland. I trust that someone will do it – badly – and that I and my descedants will bankroll this with the sweat of our brows and the ache in our backs – but for the most part, it falls somewhere inbetween amusing and scary-ass surreal.

I don’t have a hobby – aside from writing which is more of a complusion really. I don’t live in a big city, so I can’t scope out great food kiosks as I have read one guy in New York does to his greater financial good. I don’t go to the movies or concerts often enough to review them. In fact, I don’t even watch TV anymore. So, the idea of making this blog topical or cultural or helpful in any widespread way just won’t work.

My personal blog is about my widowed journey and my remarriage. Not titilating stuff for the non-widowed of the world – who in my age group vastly outnumber those of us who have lost a spouse. And though second marriage is common enough these days, I wouldn’t be much of a resource for those who are divorced. Our experiences are just not the same once you get past the superficial. And you get past that quick.

So, I imagine this blog will be as egocentric as the majority, and that might be enough reason for some of you to check it out and perhaps stick around for a while.

What Has Happened to Me?


I have never had the housewife instinct that so many of my female friends seem to have. I wasn’t much of a cook which my bare cupboards and barely stocked fridge more that attested to. I didn’t sew or crochet or knit or do needlepoint. I am not crafty (I think a special gene is needed for that). I can’t decorate. (Colors? They coordinate?) I don’t have collections of anything (and I am sure that notebooks, pens and pencils don’t count – very sure). And grocery shopping was just another chore. But I have noticed things about myself lately that have gotten me to think I may have been hasty in my original, and long-standing, assessment of myself. The house is clean. And getting cleaner and more organized all the time. Laundry is not only done but folded and in drawers and closets. Supper is on the table when Rob gets home every night. And I have a routine that is suspiciously suburbanish. Breakfast. Writing. Gym. Taking Katy to school. Errands. Writing. After-school snack. Supper preparation. Family supper. Bathing, bedding and story-telling. Couple time. You see? I see. I am a housewife. I even have a uniform. Lululemon. (And I look really great in it too, if it is possible to be a housewife and attractive at the same time).

It all came together for me the other afternoon when I was grocery shopping at the Safeway, skinny chai in hand. As I strolled up and down the aisles, making this and that selection, I was actually planning the menu’s for the next two weeks. I was planning! About cooking!! Weeks in advance!!! And the worst thing is how effortless it was and how much I enjoyed being able to do this, as though it were some hard won skill or something and not just a “wife” thing. Just a wife thing? Just a mom thing? Just a woman thing? If I believed in feminism I could count myself a traitor to the movement for sure.

This is not a place I ever pictured myself. Staying at home and really liking it and even being kind of good at it. I was raised in a quasi-feminist way. Sure, women got the heavy lifting of household and family maintenance, but my parents never assumed that any of we girls would have the stay at home life that my mom enjoyed (okay, didn’t enjoy at all) when we kids were small. It was fast becoming a double income world when I was growing up back in the seventies and early eighties and we were raised to expect to share the income load. So, to find myself 26 years later playing Carol Brady – no, Carol had Alice – inhabiting the mother knows best role is a bit afield of where I expected to be.

When I came to Canada, I was hoping to be able to teach eventually to help out while I worked on my writing. In the beginning. But immigration enforced retirement shifted my thoughts to just working on the writing – for which I am told that I have a talent. Now the prospect of going back to live in the States for a time has me thinking about going back to the original plan and not with relish. I like writing. I even like the thought of doing what I am doing now – but in Texas (and having more time to really explore writing as a career because Katy will be in school full-time).

But, there is that tiny Gloria in the back of my head insisting (in a very condescending and irritating way) that I need to pull my own weight and that I am not making a worthwhile contribution if I am not bringing home a bit of bacon to spend, and that even if I am published – somewhere – by the time we leave Canada – it will never be a living like teaching was. What if something were to happen to Rob? That nasty helmet haired harpy shrieks. It’s happened before and look at all those women who blithely ignored the reality of male mortality. Have you taken note of where they are? Except that I was working and supposedly safe before, I think back at her. What about self-fulfillment? Because isn’t that what it supposedly comes down to according to the ERA party line? But I wasn’t really anymore. Even writing this blog fills me with more pride in myself and accomplishments as a writer than teaching did on my best days those last few years.

I decided to discuss this with Rob again as we drove into the city for the hospice grief group. I wanted to hear myself say out loud that I don’t want to teach. I want to just write. And I wanted to hear what he thought because he is the one who goes to a “real” job everyday and brings home “real bacon”. I can teach once we are back in the states and feel that I should from the fairness point of view. Rob pointed out, rightly, that the things I do are things that need to be done by someone. It’s not an empty contribution. He also feels that I haven’t been at writing long enough to know if I can make something out of it and that we won’t go wanting without a second paycheck. But I feel a bit guilty that I am being given this gift of pursuit of a dream and I have nothing like that to give him in return. I worry that if I don’t make a good career of writing I will disappoint Rob and worse, not be able to turn the table around and give him the same freedom to pursue what he loves in terms of work. I guess I am too impatient.

Interesting what the gift of just the pursuit of your dreams can do.

Two Miles, Two Thousands Words and Whatever Comes Next


Last fall I couldn’t run a mile. As a matter of fact, I had lost so much weight because of gallbladder issues that by the time it was removed, a year ago today, I could barely manage a half hour of walking. A good deal of the weight I lost by that point was muscle and I couldn’t see how I would ever regain the fitness ground I had lost in the few short months since the summer when I had put time and effort into regaining that ground. I also couldn’t write. Stringing more than a few sentences together, and on rare occasions a paragraph or two, was taxing. I had started to blog but my effort was sporadic even though I began blogging in the hope that I could jump-start my long dormant inner-writer. And as for what was coming next in my life, I hadn’t a clue.

Today I can easily run two miles and walk another mile or two besides. I lift weights again. I have regained muscle and even though that has pushed up the number on the scale and put me back in a size ten, it is were I was at my fittest ten years ago. Tone and level of fitness are what has always mattered. I can’t say there wasn’t a secret thrill in weighing in at 138 lbs, which I did at one point, but on my almost 5’10’’ frame it was alarmingly thin. And I didn’t like not being strong. Or able to run or swim. It just wasn’t me. I am 44 in just a bit over a month, and these are the years that truly can decide what one’s senior and elderly years might possibly look like. There are some things that proper nutrition and exercise can’t protect us against but they can help determine whether how active we will be able to be. I don’t want to be one of those 60 year olds hobbling about with too much weight on them, plagued with all sorts of preventable maladies and unable to participate in life to the fullest.

I am also able to write again. A great joy that I don’t think I can find the words, ironically, to really express. There is a line in the children’s novel, Harriet, the Spy, that talks about Harriet’s thoughts “limping along like crippled children” because she has been forbidden to journal in her notebook after it causes an incident at her school. That line about sums up my feelings about being unable to really write. I can fairly easily knock out 1500 to 2000 words at a sitting now. I blog daily for the most part, and thanks to the inspiration of Nanowrimo (National November Write a Novel Month), I am almost half-way through a complete first draft of my novel. I am really very proud of myself. Back in the dark days last fall, I knew that I wanted to take my experiences and generate a fiction novel from them. I hadn’t a clue where to begin though I did write a few short pieces that I am now expanding on or incorporating into my present work. Caregiving and then widowhood have been such growth experiences, and I know that other widowed people would find it appalling that I appreciate what I have gleaned from both, but I think that most people would acknowledge that even when you wouldn’t choose to experience tragedy on any level in your life, these experiences can change you for the better. They can provide you with insight and the basis on which to hopefully be a better person.

Finally, there is what comes next and who knows what that might be. My horoscope for yesterday told me that it is time for me to confront my fears, many of which have no rational basis, and get ready for the future. I don’t know how prepared a person can be for the unknowable future but planning and being open to all the possibilities is near always an excellent place to start. A lot of good people and things have come my way this last year. I am more grateful for them then I will ever be able to express. More things are coming, I believe, and I am going to strive to take them one at a time and be more appreciative than freaked out (which is my wont when I am feeling overwhelmed at the light speed my life seems to travel at anymore).

Whatever comes next. A Canadian winter. Houston in the New Year perhaps or a publishable novel that someone might really want to read. I am ready.