There’s nothing like Michigan in autumn splendor, particularly when in order to get the cheapest flight [on a weekend when there’s also a Notre Dame home game] my plan lands just 39 minutes before time to speak!

I landed and starting changing into a different jacket and shoes on the way to the camp grounds.  Camp Michiana is spectacular – a postcard of scenery.

As I pulled up the gravel drive and scurried out of the car, all the women who were just finishing up their prayer walk applauded!  I was pleasantly shocked and then giggled when they told me they were just worried my flight wouldn’t arrive on time.  The gentle hills were alight with luminaries and the power of those prayers coated the rest of the event.  From the crafts, to the music to the beauty of God’s best dressed trees, God’s message that weekend was powerful.  A huge thank you to Kelly Bontrager and all those who did so much to plan the retreat!

On to a very warm Louisiana and Camp Bethany; happily, was met at the airport with a cold Diet Coke!  A bit more time to change, pray and settle in and avert a near disaster.  This will make you smile.  For the plane ride, I had worn a jacket with nice jeans and some textured dotted Swiss socks.  Well, although my dress for the first night was draped with autumn colors, because of the heat, I not only didn’t bring any pantyhose, I also brought a pair of sandals and planned to go bare-legged.  When I changed, I glanced down and was aghast to find that the dots had made rather obvious indentations all over my feet and ankles to just below my calves.  Sigh.  I lay down on the bed, propping my feet on the headboard, putting cold washcloths on my legs and drinking gallons of water and Diet Coke. And yes, I prayed not just for my delivery and God’s power that night, but for Him to please make those ugly dots just a little less obvious.  Nobody said anything, so my usual fashion woes didn’t triumph this time. [Nearly as bad was the time I had forgotten my mascara and used a black Sharpie.  How those ladies laughed!  “Out of 300 women, don’t you think one of us would have loaned you some!”]  The young women who sang in worship were lovely inside and out.  The planners had Footprints with God’s promises on them all over the auditorium.  It was amazing!  A precious woman hand-made the most beautiful basket for me.  Chocolate abounded.  But most of all, lives were changed.  As always, I feel as though I come away from the retreats blessed for having gotten to go and be used in some small way by our great God!

     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.

Alright, girls.  Here is a cute and super table centerpiece just in time for spring & Easter.  You can make it by arranging pieces you probably already have!  Here’s the picture of what’s on our table.

 Use a pastel runner or lace doily as the base.  Turn a basket [in my case I used a decorative wooden box] upside down for a flat surface.  It also works well with a cake stand pedestal, my all-time favorite base for displaying things.  Use any teacups and saucers you have, mixing and matching, turning some of the saucers or teacups upside down and putting them base to base for height and effect.  Fill with real or silk spring flowers: tulips, hyacinths, greenery, daisies, etc. or Easter eggs and grass.  Use a few freestanding resin or ceramic bunnies or lambs from your hidden away box of spring decorations. [Hobby Lobby frequently has them on sale for ½ price; also check Dollar Stores and the clearance sales this year for next year’s masterpiece!]  Ta da!  Enjoy.

It all started while in Sam’s Club on a Friday night.  That right there ought to tell you something about my life.  Before embarking on my quest to select luscious fruit, oversized packages of hamburger, freezer bags of frozen chicken breasts and a gallon of low-fat chocolate milk, I engaged in my favorite activity at Sam’s, other than perusing the samples: browsing through the book stacks.

On one of the large square tables was a stack of hardback books with glossy covers, bright artwork and the promise of a story: The Pioneer Woman Cooks.  I opened it and leafed through it, feeling a kinship with this pleasantly derailed career woman who lives on a ranch with her four children and Marlboro Man.  [Except that I don’t live on a ranch, my farmhouse went far away in the May, 2003 tornado, my husband is a police chief not a cowboy, and I call my man, Dragnet, after the crime show of the same name.]

I held the book aloft and called my husband and children to me.  “Come here, you guys.  Mommy wants this book.”   To their credit, they did all come over. 

The girls gave it a cursory glance and quickly lost interest, going over to stand by The Diary of a Wimpy Kid and an enticing row of Disney movies.

My husband was puzzled.  “You do?” He tried to tame the incredulous tone of his voice.  “But you can’t, uh, you don’t…cook.”   Cough.  Cough.  “I mean, enjoy cooking.”

“That’s my problem!  I have no marketable skills!  None.  Other people trade services like I trade shirts.  They sew in exchange for plumbing repairs.  Or they cook a week’s worth of meals in exchange for oil changes and tire rotations.  Seriously.  What can we do?”

“Speak for yourself.”

I forged ahead.  “Sure, you can solve crimes and I can tell people whether or not their sentences are beset with dangling participles or passive verbs, but how often to regular people need such things?  I’m a writer.  I’m a wife.  I’m a mother.  I could open my own zoo with all the dust bunnies living under our couch. I will never write a blog about cooking through the Julia Child manual in a year.  I can’t blog about doing The Love Dare for a whole year because I have the attention span of a gnat and thus I’m not good at repetitive actions. I “sew” with hot glue.  I have been asked to stay out of the church kitchen unless I’m eating. I’m not an expert on anything.  I’m a…I’m a wannabe!!!!”

Sensing a meltdown in the near future, [see what I mean?  My husband has unsurpassed detective skills.] I believe that we purchased the book and he shepherded me and the children quickly out to our trusty steed, minivan, and I lamented about life all the way home.

If he were a crying man, I’m fairly certain this would have been the night for it.

But I’m coming to terms with this.  I am what a lot of us girls are – a Wannabe Woman.  I compare myself to great writers and great mothers.  To phenomenal cooks and inventive seamstresses.  And I wanna.

I am fairly content with my life until I compare myself with others.  I want to be more gentle.  Learn some practical skills.  I want to have more than three good hair days a month. I want to be classy, gracious, stylish and encouraging. I want to fix my make-up like the women on the cover of Good Housekeeping.  I want to feel like I have all the answers in just one area.  Or at least some of them.

And when that happens, which is more regularly than I would like, I’m just a Wannabe.  So if you’re looking for a blog that chronicles the rich, deep essence of life, depicts pictures of original recipes to make your mouth water and details step by step instructions for intricate crafts, I’m just going to be honest:  read someone else’s.

BUT, if you want to laugh with another girlfriend on this frustrating, amazing, hilarious, messy, wonderful trip on planet earth, then this is for you.  When I get an idea that anyone—ANYONE [including me] can do, I’ll share it with you.  I’ll get someone who knows about computers to post the appropriate photographs [Husband?  First born?].  When I learn a lesson or just mess up royally and know that you’ll get a kick out of it too, I’ll share it. 

I’m tired of pretending that life is orderly and that all my ducks are in a row, standing at attention and quacking a concerto.

Because most of all, what I Wannabe, is God’s woman.

Blessings & chocolate,

Cindy