Following is a list of things I have done today:

Smacked the snooze button on my alarm clock. 

Showered and made three vain attempts to make fluffy a determinedly flat side of my hair. 

Took the puppy out and the bills to the mailbox.

Drove children to school. 

Walked two miles and prayed. 

Ate a muffin and drank a glass of chocolate milk. 

Attacked a pile [I loathe piles] of “stuff” at my place on the kitchen table. 

Started the dishwasher. 

Sorted laundry and did two loads. 

Picked up four pieces of fuzz off the stairs. 

Looked out the window longingly.

Gave up and sat on the porch for my devotions.

 While I was there, I finished the last twenty pages of a fiction book I was almost done with and the Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Loved it.

Unloaded the dishwasher.

Squished an ant who was lazily exploring the bottom of my [empty!] laundry basket.

 Scooted things off the floor so the bug man can spray this afternoon.

Saw this book at the store and had this random thought- guess whose life I am NOT interested in hearing about?  Kate Goesslin’s.

Thought really hard about vacuuming the baseboards, but Thursday is housecleaning day, not today.

Pretended I was Julie Andrews.

Pretended I was Erma Bombeck.

Wished my hair would behave.

Wondered if Kirstie Alley weighs more than I do. [She was on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, which came in the mail.]  Oh yeah, I got the mail.

Moved things around on my desk.

Reminded myself that this is my writing day.

Wondered why then, wasn’t I writing.

Made a list on really cute cherry-bordered paper of my writing assignments for the week.

Knew you would wonder whether or not there was some deep spiritual point to this.

I’ll save you the trouble.  Nope.  There isn’t.  It’s just sometimes, all of us, this Wannabe Woman included, put off things we know they should be doing.

So, to quote Father Timothy from the Mitford Series, “Philippians 4:13 for Pete’s sake!”  All things girls!  We really can do them in Christ.  Read, set, go!

     My mother doesn’t have any talents.  At least that’s what she’d tell you if you asked her.  She can only play two songs on the piano: Take My Life and Let It Be and Silent Night.  One-fingered.  She doesn’t sing and loathes being in front of people.  As a preacher’s wife in St. Louis, I think that bothered her. 

     But she doesn’t see what I saw.  I’ve leafed through photo albums full of pictures in which my sister, my mother and I all wore matching dresses, sewn by her loving hands.  She wanted us to be able to play the piano,so for an entire year the only furniture in our family room was the piano.  She made  it seem like all the extra space was planned for our personal gymnasium enjoyment. We had no idea it’s because we started out poor.

     That’s because she started out life even poorer.  She’s a hero.  Her parents divorced when she was five years old.  She can barely remember a happy time.  Her mother lived with a cruel man who drank and brought violence into their home.  By age nine she was splitting and carrying in wood to cook dinner. The arthritis in her hands now, began then. She and her four sisters often spent the night in the apple trees, hiding from temper stirred by hard drinking and harder living.

     She saved up for and bought her own toothbrush with babysitting money when she was eleven.  No one ever came to see her in a volleyball game or in her Senior play.  I think that might be where she started her best talent.

     You see, her gift is loving.  She married my daddy and decided that any children of hers would never know that kind of life. She was the consummate hostess, a fabulous decorator, a great listener, superb bargain hunter and because of her I learned how to mix and match items in my wardrobe to make it seem endless.

      To this day, she is my etiquette expert of choice.  If she lavished love on us then she bathes her eight grandchildren in it.  She spoils everyone.  She cooks, she crafts, and she organizes. She cannot ever die or the only turkey we’ll ever have on Thanksgiving is deli slices from Wal-Mart. 

      Mother was an amazing and fun wife. She was faithful to my daddy for 34 years, one month, eleven days, eight hours and seventeen minutes, loving him well and laughing with him until cancer brought him Home early, at 56-years-young. 

        This love has made her an encourager extraordinaire.  My mother has been in the balcony, on the sidelines or on the floor of every event in my life.  She suffered through hours long piano recitals and saw all of my high school plays.  She was the Matron of Honor at my wedding.  I can look out into any audience and see her face smiling; her hands clapping.

     She still frequently accompanies me to speaking events and is usually one of the first to read anything I’ve written.  “This is REALLY good, Cinso, truly.  I read all the time and it’s as good as or better than anything out there.”  You can breathe in one of her compliments for weeks.  I have lived in such love all my life and it’s easy to take it for granted.

     Now it’s my turn.  Way to go, Mom!

Here’s the deal.  I’ve been forty for four years now.  The last time I had rock-hard abs was when I was ten and a half months pregnant with my youngest daughter, who is now eight.  I knew you wouldn’t believe how awesome they were, hence the picture.

     Fast forward to now.  Things are, ahem, a bit different and I have noted that the only persons who possess perfect bodies in anyone’s home are the smaller ones who began the ruination of your own.

     I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda been having reality/mourning issues and a coming-to-terms with things like hail damage, the introduction of my thighs to each other and a vague jiggly quality to my upper arms.  Yep, I fear that the Wannabe Woman is reaching the years of becoming a “used-ta be,” as in formerly hot.

     Formerly.  Sigh.  No stretch marks, but a bit of a muffin top.  No turkey neck or wrinkles on my face, but enough spider veins to use as an arachnid exhibit for show and tell day at my girls’ elementary school or to entertain them as they use them to plot our vacation route with Sharpies.

     And every nine weeks, I have to visit my hairdresser for a Natural Hair Color attack.  I told her to look closely and she could see the names of my children engraved on the roots of the grays.

     It’s all I can do not to grab these young girls at the mall and shake them until their teeth rattle.  Someday, they’re gonna be forty also.  I’ll be the one in the walker laughing my head off.

     I told my beloved a few months ago that body parts are falling so far south that if God doesn’t return soon, all I’m going to have to buy are shoes!  I’m fairly certain that he put that in the plus column on the Dave Ramsey system.

     Furthermore, every year, either my doctor or some childless, work-out goddess/nurse casually mentions, “Mrs. Dagnan, we really need to lose those last 15 baby pounds.” 

     What I want to know is – Who’s we, Kemosabe?  I don’t see you helping motivate me!  The only thing more aggravating than that are the extremely overweight health care personnel telling me that, which causes me to laugh my abs into better shape when I see one of them taking a smoke break ten minutes after telling me how to be healthier!  After checking with one of my nurse friends, I found that I can decline this service at next year’s check-up.  “Um, no thank you.  I don’t care to be weighed this year.”  Can’t wait to see how that goes over.

     Frankly, I exercise only because I want to live long enough to see my children grow up and to hold my grandchildren and great-grandchildren someday.  When am I gonna get those promised endorphins that magazines are always touting?  It’s a lot of work and between you and me, I’d rather be a bit on the pudgy side if I have to swear off pasta, bread and sugar.

     Aging also brings about other indignities.  Take the mammogram, for instance.  I’m all about prevention and detection of almost anything, but girls, I value my modesty!  I’m just asking for the cape to cover whichever one they’re NOT photographing.  Is that too much?  And should someone else have pictures of something which even my husband does not?

     Were that not enough, they placed hot pink floral Band-Aids, sporting a silver metal tab in their middles, directly across the critical parts of said breasts.  “What are these for, I inquired?”

     “Those are so the technician can tell where center is.”

     I snorted.  “Um, Ma’am?  No offense, but if he can’t tell where center is, then I probably don’t have anything wrong with me that can be fixed!”

     I got the glare which clearly meant, “We are not amused.”

     She doesn’t have to be, ‘cause I am.  I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  God numbered and knew my days before one of them came to be.  I can laugh and walk and be amazed.  I can appreciate the value of a sack of warm Krispy Kremes and a glass of chocolate milk.  A bag of peanut M & Ms is the mother lode of calcium and protein and the color I’m supposed to have on my plate.

     I have said farewell to my metabolism and I hear that the older I get, the more my annoying habits will be passed off as “charming eccentricities!”  Yay. I will say, though, that tan fat does indeed look better than pale fat and that I currently have abs of Styrofoam. I am darn proud of them!  That almost makes up for the fact that I’ve heard in a few more years I’ll have to walk around with tweezers for the chin hair that is supposed to be coming.  Sigh.

      Do you see this?  This came in my mailbox today and it makes me cranky.  Why?  Because normally, I do not experience this level of envy until autumn, when a glossy issue of something like, Country Living, arrives in my mailbox showcasing a restored 200-year-old farmhouse in Vermont or Connecticut and then I have to ask my husband the annual question: “Honey, can we move to Connecticut?”  His look is always the same puzzled one and he always answers me gently.  “No sweetheart, we cannot.”  Sigh.

     I’m thinking he might side with me on this one, because now I don’t only have to wonder if there really are women who look like Land’s End models, wondering around their lakeside/ Oceanside/mountain cabin estates looking like this, but are there also couples who own their own private boat-jet thingies and have the leisure time to make these trips?  And some money?  And husbands who wear linen stuff BEFORE they’re seventy?  What gives?

     That’s pretty much done me in for the day.  I shan’t be able to write a pithy, deep, character-reaching blog because I shall be running laps around my neighborhood, attempting to harness my wretched attitude, saying things to myself like, “I want only what I have.  I want only what I have.  Target is not that cool of a store.  I want only what I have.  I’d probably get eaten by a shark if I lived by the ocean anyway.” 

     And, Greg doesn’t look good in linen.

     This week, I made what may arguably have been the worst batch of cookies on the planet.  Certainly, they were the worst I have ever made.  The edges starting setting up hard and fast.  But those recalcitrant middles – man!  The limp cookie middles sagged and flopped like a toddler who has decided there is no way, (none!) that you are going to be able to pick him up.

     The edges of these chocolate chip-oatmeal cookies could have qualified as the warm-up discus for pygmy Olympics.  And those were the good ones.

     And I know why, too.  I was showing off.  Or trying to.  An acquaintance was coming to visit and I thought she was one of THEM. 

     You know who THEY are.  Either they’ve been to your home [and you wanted to die of shame] or after visiting their oh-so-perfect house [and suffering stainless steel appliance envy], you’re planning on having a set of excuses so thick that the politicians in Washington will want to borrow it, so that particular acquaintance will never be allowed past the sidewalk of your home.

     THEY are the ones whose birthday parties make you hate them, because now you’ll have to try and replicate for your children.  THEY are the ones whose husbands still open the car door for them and leave them nauseatingly cute Post-it notes on the toilet seat.  THEY don’t have ugly domestic-impaired cleaning issues and they can always, always do one craft with superb skill.  Shudder.  And SOME of THEM can also put together a wardrobe that always looks chic and up-to-the-minute while the rest of us need Garanimals Match-ups for grown-ups.  Life is sooo unfair.

     Sigh.  Now here comes the really hard part.  If I thought you could read it, I’d type it in 7 font, so just indulge me and whisper it.  I made those cookies from a store-bought mix.  We’re talking just add water an egg, for crying out loud! Yes, the only thing more humiliating would have been if I’d only had slice and bake from a tube.

     Why am I telling you all this?  Because, this Wannabe Woman has pledged to be honest.  And, I’m betting some of you have your own cookie horror stories.  See how much I still have to learn?  I don’t have to impress anyone; I just need to live right and walk justly and humbly with my God.

     My friend and fellow writer, Karen Ehman, puts it this way: Entertaining seeks to impress.  It’s all about you.  Hospitality, on the other hand, seeks to refresh your guests.  It’s all about them.  I forgot that.

      I wanted my guest to be very impressed with me and how together and welcoming I can be.  I wanted to hear oohs and aahs.  I wanted praise, so I believe the Lord allowed me to be humbled.  Some of us just have to retest.

     So if you need some cookies and they turn out horribly, go ahead and set them out on your best platter next to a refreshing pitcher of packaged lemonade.  You can giggle for a second while she tries to eat one out of politeness.  Then, go to your pantry and break out the bag of Double Stuff Oreos [which you keep there for emergencies].  They’re delicious served right from the bag.