Some of this appeared in 2006, in case you think you might be losing your mind. Then again, maybe you are. I’m no diagnostician.
===
Mamacita says: Most of you are too young to remember when the Beatles first appeared on the charts in the U.S. I was in grade school, but I remember. My parents watched Ed Sullivan, and I remember them wondering who these Beatles were, and why Ed Sullivan would have them on his erreally big shew.
This might have been the first time I knew of something before my parents did. The kids on the playground had been talking about the Beatles and I was intrigued. The birthday party I went to featured Beatles songs, individually played on 45’s. (Look it up, young ones.) The birthday girl got a lot of Beatles paraphernalia. (No, not THAT kind.) And when their pictures began to appear all over the place, and my parents began their “long hair, terrible clothes, etc” shpiels, they became even more intriguing. I started
saving my money – my big quarter-a-week. Every time I got a dime, I put it in the Dime Kitty – free to all children courtesy your local bank – and the kitty grew more and more complete, and when it was full, I took it to Kresge’s and bought. . . . . a record album. You know, the BIG one.
I bought “Meet The Beatles.” It was the first record I ever bought with my own money.
I brought it home, took it out, placed it on my little red metal record player, the one Santa brought me when I was about five; you know, the one that folded up into an easy-to-carry-from-room-to-room little suitcase, sat back, and listened. It was the first time anything besides “The Andy Panda Polka” and the like had ever been experienced by that little red 
record player.
By the time Ed Sullivan introduced The Beatles, I knew all the songs on that album by heart. When the band started to play, I sang right along. My parents honestly did not know what to think about that. I remember how they looked at each other, and at me. Maybe they, too, sensed that they were losing part of me to. . . something.
When I look back at how the Beatles appeared back then, it’s funny to think that old people considered them long-haired and sloppy. Their hair was tidy, and they wore SUITS, for pete’s sake.
When the camera panned on John, the caption below read “Sorry, girls, he’s married.” The audience full of teens shrieked and screamed throughout the entire set.
As I watched the Beatles perform, and listened to that album, thoughts were popping up in me that had never popped up before.
I wanted to wear a bra*. I wanted to learn to play the guitar. I wanted different hair, and different clothes. My bike looked childish. I lost interest in comic books. Bazooka bubble gum lost its charm. My cigar box almost full of Bazooka Joe comics gathered dust. I put my skate key in a drawer.
All I wanted to do was listen to that album, sing along in my head, and wait for the next unfamiliar thought to start.
It was the end of an era for me, and the beginning of another.
*not a stretchy plain white beginner one, either.
Mamacita says: I am basically a kind person. I would lie down in the road if I thought that would help some people. I work overtime to help students. I still do my children’s laundry, and I feed them whenever they visit. I would do the same for you. If ever they (or their friends) (or you) need a helping hand, I’ve got one at the end of each arm. I have worked really hard all my life. The thing is, I think everyone should work hard. All their lives. I think everyone should look out for everyone else. I think everyone should use their own hands to support themselves and help others. I have little patience with lazy people, or people who choose not to work. If you need me, all you have to do is ask. I’ll bring you food. I’ll do your laundry. I’ll shingle your roof. (Yes, I can do that!) But if you’re just lying around waiting to be waited on, or feel in any way, shape, or form that the world owes you a living, I will tell you exactly what I think of you.
When I have students who can’t go fifteen minutes without dashing out to the parking lot for a smoke, and when I have coworkers who NEED a break every half hour or even sooner because they NEED a break. . . well, I can’t help but wonder where the “fair” factor is. Those who work through other people’s frequent breaks are the good students and good workers and the people I would trust with important things. Those who allow their desire for a ______(insert drug of choice here) to interfere with their responsibilities make me kind of, well, disgusted.
rise up out of the ashes of other people’s messes and make a success of their own lives; why can’t more people? So they might have to walk eight miles uphill to get an education – do it! So they’re madly in love and their hormones are nuts and that guy with the good job at Taco Bell is getting more and more insistent that “if you really love me. . . .” hey. To do it or not to do it is a choice, too.
If you are so weak that even knowing what might happen if you continue to choose the nutjob path, you still choose it, you are committing suicide and I think you know it.
shed. As long as there’s a quarter inch of liquid in each bottle, it would be wasteful to discard them. Besides, I NEED them.”
People make these awful inhuman choices all the time. Boyfriends over children. Alcohol over relationships. Nicotine over cleanliness. Big pile of bloody underpants in the kitchen sink over normalcy. Girlfriend over family. Meth over decency.
In the old days, such people were locked in a room and required to dry out, cold turkey. Perhaps, in the old days, the right things were done.
Mamacita says: I’m really not afraid of very many things, but those few things I am afraid of, I’m terrified of. TERRIFIED. Here are a few.
13. Reality shows. They highlight 
Mamacita says: My children, of whom I often speak on this blog, aren’t really children any more. I know this perfectly well, but sometimes when I write of them – the cute things they’ve done, etc. – I tend to step into a time machine and go back and forth at nobody’s discretion, not even mine. The timeline in my head goes back and forth, without warning and often with interesting consequences. The explanation for this is simple, two-part though it is: Firstly, I am a mom. Secondly: I probably ain’t right in the head.
another chapter of The Secret Garden, complete with dialect.
Baskets and Christmas stockings. Good mommies never stop. And that’s the truth.
Mamacita says: After a full day of dire blizzard predictions, friends all over Facebook have been posting pictures of cars and doghouses and shrubberies buried in snow. What have I been doing? Looking out of my kitchen window and seeing nothing but consistent, pouring rain, grey skies, and a big. thermometer stuck at 41 degrees. Where was this predicted blizzard? It was like living in a doughnut hole. Dangerous levels of snowstorm all around us and weather that would support an ark in the middle.
snow and the snowflakes so thick I could barely see the glow of the porch light across the street.
schools for tomorrow.