Golf Balls, Eight Year Olds & Dual Paned Windows

By Crissi Langwell

"There is a lesson in every moment with your child. There’s the lesson that milky cheerios will stick to the wall like superglue if not cleaned up immediately. There’s the lesson that if you don’t spell out chores for your child, they will not come up with the idea to clean by themselves. There’s the lesson that new jeans will have holes in the knees in two week’s time, and sooner if they are not on sale. There’s the lesson that the dinners that take the longest to make will be picked at by your kid before you finally allow them to feed it to the dog. And there’s the lesson that whenever you are running late to get out the door, that is when your child will need to go to the bathroom.....the second kind.

And then there’s the lesson I learned today, the lesson that golf balls, 8 year olds, and the grandparents’ dual pane windows do not mix."

Taken from the popular blog, winecountrymom.com, Crissi Langwell shares a series of essays that offer a glimpse into her single parent family - from golf balls through windows, to battling moody tween days, to fitting in time for romance while raising kids on her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crissi Langwell
• Release date: Jun 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989066020

Crissi Langwell

Crissi Langwell writes romance, women's fiction, and young adult novels that often feature strong female heroines and tell the story of the underdog. She pulls her inspiration from the ocean, and breathes freely among redwoods. She lives in Northern California with her husband and a spoiled and sassy cat.Visit her website at CrissiLangwell.com.

Book preview

Thank you so much for downloading my eBook, Golf Balls, Eight Year Olds & Dual Paned Windows—the first of a series of books that offer personal essays on my family’s single parent adventure.

Each chapter is short on purpose. They are meant to be a quick read. Also, they are the stories I once shared in my newspaper column, Wine Country Mom, with The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, CA. I keep them now at my blog, winecountrymom.com, where you can find more stories like these, and then some.

For now there is only the one book in this series, though I will book #2 & #3 later in 2014, detailing my life as a dating single mother, and then the trials and tribulations of a blended family.

I hope you’ll check out my fiction books as well:

A Symphony of Cicadas: A story of love, loss, and the emergence of hope is told through the life and death of Rachel Ashby, a woman who is caught in the afterlife following a tragic car accident. Unable to find her son, and mourning the end of a life she felt had just begun, Rachel is sent on a journey of self-discovery, learning more about herself in death than she ever knew in life.

Forever Thirteen: After a terrible car accident with his mother, 13-year-old Joey is stuck in the afterlife, just like he is wedged forever at the awkward place between childhood and teenager. That fact alone seems overwhelming as he mourns the life he lost. But it’s the utter despair of his best friend left on earth that pulls him in and gives his in-between life a purpose to have died for.

Check out all my books at crissilangwell.com/books.

Connect with me!

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Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/6952056.Crissi_Langwell

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Websites:

CrissiLangwell.com

WineCountryMom.com

Dedication

For Summer and Lucas, otherwise known as DQ and Taz.

Thank you for all you’ve taught me about being a mom.

Foreword

It was two lifetimes ago when I left my husband, the father of my children. We’d only been married for just under five years, though we’d been together for about eight years total. It had been a toxic kind of love, the kind you wouldn’t want to see your own child go through. And the last crumbling years of our marriage left us both mere shells of human beings. We left that marriage with the clothes on our backs, a whole closet full of raw lessons learned, and two beautiful kids scarred from the mistakes of their parents.

The next lifetime was spent recovering from the aftermath. I spent that first year after my divorce just trying to get through the day. Most of that time, I couldn’t even get up off the couch. The kids and I had moved in with my parents, and they took over where I couldn’t. I had no money, no shining resume, nothing. I had spent the last several years being a stay-at-home mom. While the description under that job title covers a ton of responsibility, it mostly says unemployed to employers. But truthfully, I didn’t even want a job. I wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep forever. In between a messy divorce and custody battle, as well as the depression that was threatening to eat me alive, I had no energy left to be anything else but empty.

I woke up after that first year into my third lifetime – the one where I realized I could actually survive being a single mother. My father hired me on to work with him as a real estate appraiser, a job that was safe since my boss was now my dad. I had developed so many phobias regarding other human beings due to the toxicity of my failed marriage, haunting divorce, and severe depression, that looking people in the eye had become terrifying. But this new job helped to build up my confidence. The simple act of getting dressed, leaving the house, being responsible for something outside myself…it was all preparation for me to be able to face the real world and rejoin society. I took classes to learn the ins and outs of appraising, with the hopes of acquiring a license to appraise so I could raise my family on my own.

Of course, this was also when the real estate market tanked. The rules for appraising changed drastically, requiring much more work and a lot less money for each appraisal. And many times appraisers weren’t even needed since loan agents could use an AVM, short for Automated Value Model. This was a handy tool that calculated the home’s worth using past sales of comparable homes without anyone actually needing to visit these properties. Thus, an appraiser wasn’t always needed.

And it soon became apparent that the world of real estate appraising didn’t have room for me.

However, our local newspaper was hiring, and they were looking for someone in the advertising department. Luck would have it that they were also looking for someone who was familiar with real estate, since this position was in the real estate department.

It was almost like this job was meant for me. Since I was a child, I had been an aspiring writer. And working at the newspaper had been my dream job – but never one I actually thought I could have. But here I was at the crossroads of how I was going to support my family on my own, and the conditions seemed to have been molded just for me. I walked into that interview with the confidence I had built up over the past year or so, and the experience of real estate appraising still fresh on my resume, and walked out with a job.

I began at the bottom of the barrel at this new job. The position only allowed for twenty-five hours a week, and the pay was okay. But it didn’t matter. I had a real job, and it was at the newspaper! I soon moved out of my parents’ home, and the kids and I became our own little team of three as we embarked on this new adventure. A few job changes within the company, and I was soon working for full time hours, and nearly double my salary. Things were looking way, way up.

And then I met HIM. Mr. Wonderful.

He started working at the same newspaper about six months after I did. When we first met I could barely look at him, let alone speak to him. However, I admit to finding reasons to enter his department, despite it being generally out of the way from anywhere I needed to be in the building. A little over a year later, he asked me on our first date. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the meantime, I had started to keep a blog to chronicle all the stuff going on in my life. At first it was just to entertain my family and close friends. But soon, a few more readers started following along. And then the folks at the newspaper caught on. My meager little blog with a handful of readers became a blog published on the newspaper’s website, and eventually became a regular column in the newspaper seen by thousands of readers. In this blog, I shared the trials and errors of being a single mom, the hijinks of my son (referred to as Taz – short for Tasmanian Devil), the moodiness of my daughter (referred to as DQ – short for Drama Queen), and the blossoming romance between me and Mr. Wonderful (shortened eventually to Mr. W).

This book is the beginning of this story.

Many of the chapters of this story were printed in our newspaper, and all of them were adapted from the stories I told in my blog, winecountrymom.com. Some are short, some are long, but all of them are the truth.

Thank you for reading along, and being a part of our single parent adventure.

Welcome to Heartbreak

I didn’t even have to open the door to my parents’ house to hear that DQ was getting in trouble. She had broken a house rule, and now her attitude suggested that she didn’t care. I told her to collect her things and get in the car. Once in the car, though, I could hear the sniffles, and saw that she was desperately trying to hold back tears. And I knew that it was deeper than getting in trouble, that this was a matter of the heart.

What’s going on, honey? I asked her as we drove.

I don’t want to talk about it.

I didn’t press the issue. I knew she would eventually spill, but it had to be on her time. So instead I turned the radio up a little more, and just made little comments about the scenery, the songs on the radio, and whatever else that had nothing to do with the root of the problem.

Once home, DQ disappeared to her room. I set about changing out of my work clothes, starting a load of wash, and getting dinner started. She came down to eat when I called her, and then disappeared again. Remnants of food lay at her place at the table, and I called her back down to clean it up. She did so grudgingly and then disappeared again.

DQ’s backpack was scattered all over the living room, and I called her back down to clean it up. She fought me on it, referring to Taz, the other mess offender in the house. And I pointed out that I was talking to her at that moment, and would get to her brother on my own. So she picked up her backpack and slammed it down in a different spot, directly in the way of anyone walking in the room.

We had words. She had attitude. I yelled. She had tears. I had frustration. The backpack was picked up. And me, as sensitive as a prickly pear, asked her, Does this have to do with your boyfriend?

Mom, please. Don’t, DQ pleaded. And I bit my tongue as she retreated up the stairs to be alone in her room.

I felt awful. I knew why she was having a hard time. I knew I could have handled the whole situation better. I knew what a broken heart felt like, and I knew that I was failing in allowing her to feel like she could come to me about these things. What I was doing was cementing the natural wall that tends to grow between a mother and her daughter as she gets closer to her teenage years.

I went to the kitchen and pulled out a pot. I warmed some milk and put in chocolate and sugar, vanilla and salt. And I spun the whisk in it to create frothy bubbles. I scooped some ice cream in a bowl for each kid and then poured the hot chocolate in their cups, topping the hot liquid with more milk to cool it. On my daughter’s bowl of ice cream I stuck a square of chocolate. I gave Taz his dessert and then brought my DQ’s bowl and hot chocolate to her room. I opened the door and knocked as I entered.

Come in, she said from the top of her bunk, and her eyes widened at the sight of the treats. Ooh! Room service, DQ joked. I could see papers scattered around her, various writings scrawled all over them. My daughter was so much like her mother when it came to processing heart matters.

I’ll let you eat this in here, I told her, but it comes with a price. Her eyebrow rose as she cautiously balanced the hot chocolate to keep it from tipping. You have to listen to a story. She rolled her eyes at me, but grinned, nonetheless.

Once upon a time, there was a 5th grade girl, I started. My 5th grader shot me a dirty look. This 5th grade girl was named ‘Crissi’. She laughed. And she listened intently as I told her about the boy I had a crush on all though grade school, how I had chickened out when the opportunity arose that he might get close to me, and how my heart was broken in pieces when he moved on to another girl and forgot all about me. And she laughed with me when I told her of meeting him years later, and discovered that he wasn’t nearly as dreamy as I’d remembered him.

To this, DQ opened up about her break up, and how another girl liked her former boyfriend. She feared this boy would move on to that other girl by the next day. I let her in on the little secret of letting him go, to not chase him, and that if he was interested in her he would be back. She argued that if she didn’t try to win him back, he’d never come back. And this led to a larger conversation of what we deserve and don’t deserve, and how we should always feel wanted when we are with someone and avoid being with people who don’t treasure us.

Besides, I added. He’s a loser for not seeing how awesome you are.

Thing is, Mom, he wasn’t a loser, she lamented. And he won’t grow up to be a loser. He’s going to make something of himself, and that’s what I really liked about him.

Honey, the fact that you were interested in someone like that – more for their brains than for their coolness – should give you hope that you will find another great guy who will make something of themselves and that you will truly like.

DQ’s heart was still broken when I left her back to her writings. But the sparkle in her eye was a little bit more apparent. When I thanked her for talking with me, she turned it back around and thanked me. And my heart soared as I kissed her goodnight that night and her smile was back in place.

The Showdown

High noon.  The sun beat down on us in between a smattering of clouds.  A small trickle of sweat made its way down his forehead, and he brushed it away slowly as his gaze locked with mine.  If he had any reservations, he showed no sign of