Exactly three years ago there was a knock at my front door. It was a knock I'd anticipated since I was seven years old. Those three quick knuckle pounds sent me hustling to put away the vacuum and shove several tons of freshly cleaned laundry into my closet. A pair of lime green Pumas fell from the top shelf and hit me in the shoulder. I tossed them back up. Small beads of sweat gathered on my forehead. I almost never sweat. I tucked my dreadlocks behind my ears and glanced at the mirror. I wasn't happy with what I saw. Two rapid knocks at the door reminded me to hurry. Quickly applying lip gloss, I cleared the bath products from the lengthy marble counter that framed my sink.

When I checked on Mooch, who was fast asleep in her room, I had a brief moment of fear. I was about to let a complete stranger into my home with me and my two-year-old daughter. What was I thinking? Visions of Amber Frey, the single mother who got tied up in an affair with the lying murderer, Scott Peterson, began to swarm in my head. There were three more knocks at the door. I talked myself down off of the ledge. My boss knew this guy, and I was familiar with at least three of his friends. Sure, we had met on MySpace, but we had spoken on the phone, I knew where he lived and worked, and I had warned at least five people (including my mom) that he was coming over. I went to open the door.

"Hello." I said, as I opened the door. "You're tall." I could have kicked myself for stating the obvious. Plus, he wasn't even that tall. He had to be roughly 6'2". I just didn't know what else to say. I'm a bit socially awkward.

"You really are breathtaking." he replied, with a smile that stretched from ear to ear. I thought he was clearly just being nice, because I was wearing huge light blue house cleaning sweats and a red and white vintage t-shirt that clung to my frame.

"Thank you. Come in. You can put your shoes under here." I gestured toward the long wooden bench near the front door.

"I have similar shoe rules at my place." he responded. I smiled and headed toward my room.

"We're going to come back here, because my daughter is sleeping and with the living room being right off her bedroom, I don't want to disturb her."

"Okee-dokee." he said, following me. I sat on my bed.

"So how was your Thanksgiving? I mean was the food good?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. Aunt Elzater throws down for Thanksgiving. I'm stuffed. I'm just surprised that the kitchen at my karaoke gig caught on fire tonight. Sully's is one of my favorite shows to do."

"Yeah, that sucks." I said. "Hopefully, everything turns out alright." What I was really thinking was: If that fire hadn't happened tonight, I would have had to wait all the way until Saturday to finally meet you in person. "Can I get you anything to drink?"

"Naw, I'm good." he nodded the way people nod when there's awkward silence. That made my brain hurry up to find something we could do. Since he was a writer, I suggested playing Scrabble. His whole face lit up, so I went to find the Scrabble set that had been in my family for two generations.

Once the game was rolling, we both loosened up a little. Well, he did. I was still full of butterflies, fear, and scattered brains. Our game eventually had a theme. We put down words like "like," "cuddle," "love," and "lube" (Don't ask -- and yes, we know abbreviations aren't allowed.). We bent the rules slightly. He put down the word "kiss." Then his bold ass asked for one, and laid back on the bed like I was supposed to climb on top of him to give it to him. I wasn't really ready to kiss him. He had only been there for an hour. This made me very nervous. I was certain he was going to rape me at this point. I started conjuring up ways to secretly call for help. I sucked in a breath and smiled sheepishly.

"No, I'm not coming over there to kiss you." I said. He sat up. I sighed relief. He was very friendly and gentle. I assumed he was halfway joking but would have taken the kiss if I gave it to him.

"It's your turn." He said. I was saving my letters to put down the word "embrace," because it was going to score me a lot of points. I asked him if I could use onomatopoeia. He approved, but I put down "hope" instead. Then I suggested we make a story out of all of the words on the board. "Stop saying things that are totally hot." he said.

The evening was beginning to seem like the perfect romantic comedy. I didn't want it to end. He smelled really good. I think he was wearing Axe body spray. He smiled at me a lot and his eyes were warm. We did end up kissing in exchange for my putting down the word "embrace." It was slow, gentle and passionate, and he knew exactly where to put his hands. We kept it at first base, I think. I'm not really sure what first base is actually. Anyway, he was going to leave, but I asked him to stay for ten more minutes. We sat on the futon in my living room and quietly discussed the Smurfs, politics, and stem cell research. He never left, and we were engaged in nine months.

Today is the three year anniversary of the day we met. Three years ago, today, three knocks at the door changed my life completely.

Labels: marital mondays, marriage

Instead of Fiction Friday, I've decided to post a link to the interview regarding our current situation.  It's a great story -- it's just non-fiction. Please click: Mother-Sized Activism

Thank you for your support.

Labels: pregnancy

When I was younger I thought a lot of crazy things. I believed the moon followed me around at night. I thought that if I bought red star earrings I could transform like Jem. I secretly thought my mom was white until I was like seven years old, and I was certain that boogers held the key to long life and immunity.

At those ages I wasn't ashamed to share any of those ideas, which is how I ultimately came to know they weren't true. Shame is one of the largest deterrents of truth and change. The opposite of shame is to risk uncertainty and be willing to not know. Shame is about hiding and staying in what is familiar even if it's very bad, because you feel so awful inside and you don't want anyone to know. People hide blemishes, illiteracy, vulnerability and regrets, because they fear anyone else rejecting them. The truth is they are the ones rejecting their own humanity. Shame is the ESL student, who is afraid of pronouncing a word, so he doesn't even try.

I can't remember the exact life experience that was the beginning of my willingness to give up on myself, but I know that it was linked to shame and that I've been fighting it ever since -- reclaiming my audacity. Flaws are the new black.

As a parent and a teacher, I understand that it is crucial never to use shame to push kids into "better" skill or behavior. Shame is far more powerful than people realize, and its impact can last for decades. Children and students must take risks, and they must not be made to fear uncertainty. If my daughters and my students can be impervious to the judgment of others and be willing to try without fear, then I've done the most important part of my job. Their lives will be easier than my own -- not just in dance -- but in all areas.

If you want to be good at English and it's a new language, or the best dancer in the cipher, or an author who writes well, then you have to care less about what others say and practice, practice, practice shamelessly. The only thing I'm ashamed of today is that this is just clicking for me in 2009. I did, however, have the gall to embrace uncertainty and share it on the web. Hopefully, I've helped someone else.

Labels: thematic thursdays

So, I finally designed holiday cards for a client, who didn't mind them posted on the web. I posted them the other day, but I'm reposting them here with the final draft. I'm not a big fan of the final, but in the end, the client had her own ideas. She couldn't choose between the three original designs, so she wanted to combine elements from all three. Fortunately, the card didn't turn out looking too busy. All that matters is that she was extremely happy that I was able to execute her idea. Below you'll find options one through three followed by the final design. Feel free to comment.

In other work news, Lula Washington Dance Theatre's Kwanzaa show is coming up in December. I choreographed one or two pieces. The show will be at the studio this year on December 28th and 29th. Mooch is performing, too! More details later.

I go on maternity leave from teaching from December 5th-January 9th. I don't think I've stopped teaching for that long in my entire 16 years of teaching! I shall enjoy it. Keep the design work coming, though. I have web designers, photographers, and graphic designers sub-contracting during my leave. I hope to keep my blog going. We'll see.

P.S. Yesterday, I bartered with a client, who wanted a holiday calendar designed (a different design for each month of the year plus a cover). In exchange, she braided my hair, so I won't have to worry about it until long after the baby is born. That was great!

Option 1


Option 2


Option 3



Final (With Customer Revisions)
Front


Back

Labels: graphic design, teaching, workin' wednesdays

People are always asking me all these strange questions about home schooling. They act as though I should be worried that Mooch is not getting an adequate education. I'm pretty sure the kids in the kindergarten class down the block at our local elementary aren't doing half the stuff she's doing. I decided to follow her around the house taking pictures of everything she did when she got home from her half day of school. She attends school Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 9am-1pm. We do the rest at home.

This is Mooch doing math. She is on my bedroom floor next to my bed. This lesson teaches place value.


All Mooch has to do is match the number on the card with the number of tens and ones it takes to compose that number. This keeps her carrying and borrowing skills strong, because she has a deep understanding of numbers, patterns, and multiples.  She's really into it.


This is Mooch fiddling with a replica of the human body. She knows all the parts and she likes to assemble and disassemble it. We've studied the digestive system in great detail, because it interested her. She's now interested in the skeletal system, so she'll be all bones for the next few weeks.


Though she's been reading for about a year and a half, Mooch's reading really picked up over the summer. She read 5 chapter books in 4 weeks. She loves Junie B. Jones!


We went to the library to explore some other books, and it turns out she really likes Judy Moody as well. She finished half of the book today.


The last thing Mooch does each day (usually about an hour before dinner) is write in her journal. She is free to write whatever she feels. I don't bother her about grammar or punctuation yet. That will come next year as she has already mastered it in speech. What I do is pull out all the misspelled words on the page, and those become her spelling words for the week. A couple of this week's words are: second, leader, and meander.

Labels: teaching, tuesdays with mooch

I stayed in the house most of the weekend except for going to work Saturday morning. I guess this thrusted me into a bit of a nesting phase, because Sunday I decided to rearrange and dust the office. I also took on the project of filing a big gray cardboard box of papers that has been on the office floor since we moved here.

The problem was that the office chair and all of the lovely Ikea stools (read: crappy stools) we have in the house don't support my back properly. Theoretically, I should have sorted the papers in bed. When Hannibal proposed this idea, however, the conversation went like this:

Me: I can't keep bending over like this.
Hannibal: Honey, I can move the box into the bed, so you can sort there with as many pillows as you'd like.
Me: No. No.
Hannibal: Why not?
Me: Every time I get to the middle of sorting through a box of papers, I see a spider. If I see one, I'm going to freak out and fling the spider off of the paper into the bed. Then I'm going to say, "Baby, I can't sleep in this bed."
Hannibal: Then I'll say, "I'm more than happy to move to the futon with you.
Me: But, then I'll say, "The futon is on the floor!" It's too dusty to sleep on the floor. We have to go to a hotel. Then if we ever come back from the hotel, I'll say the spider probably had babies in the bed, and I never want to sleep there again."
Hannibal: We are NOT going to a hotel when we're paying to stay here, and one spider can't make babies on its own!
Me: Hey, you're supposed to be speaking in future tense.
None of this has happened yet!
Hannnibal: Mmm (continues) typing.

Three hours later, my back and butt hurt like hell, and I didn't even see a damn spider. Grrrr!..

(Hannibal then later reminded me that he didn't actually say anything after "why not?" I actually said all of that in one long breathless monologue. "You don't seem to need me for most conversations," he said, "so you don't need to pretend like I participate." I reminded him that people would think I'm crazy and that all these conversations are happening in my head. He said, "I'm willing to take that risk.")

Update from Thematic Thursdays (last week): So, the person I was advising on long distance relationships decided to send her guy a pair of crotchless panties through the mail. That's sexy and spontaneous, right? The only problem was that his sixty-year-old secretary turned beet red, and several women were laughing at him when he entered the office. Folks, please save the kinky mailings for your man's home mailing address. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused. :)

Labels: marital mondays, marriage, thematic thursdays

Place your orders soon! Don't wait. I'm already getting backed up. I can fit you in before December 1st.











Get them while they're hot!

Labels: graphic design