“Birds!”

Ah, yes, the decorations. I dug up some ancient family photo albums and found some great pictures of my mom, which I used to create a collage poster. Here are my two favorite images.

On the left, she’s standing in the backyard of our old house in Vancouver, B.C. My guess is that she’s 32 or 33 years old. On the right is her wedding photo; she’s wearing a traditional silk hand-embroidered gown that’s absolutely stunning to behold in person.

Happy birthday, Mom. I love you and thank you for everything you are to me.

My mom was sitting directly across from him. We had finished dinner, and Atticus drew an oval to represent the dining room table. He then drew a horizontal line to represent where he was sitting and wrote his name on it.

“Where’s Grandma sitting?” my mom asked. Atticus drew a horizontal line on the opposite side of the oval, and without hesitation he wrote her name — May — upside down from right to left, so she could read it from where she sat.

Talk about spatial reasoning.

Also, I’ve wanted to totally revamp this blog and start over in a sense, so that it could be about more than just motherhood and memories. Today is a good day to start.

This morning I received an email from a former classmate; we’ve known each other since middle school and while we were never close, we were always warm and friendly with each other, even into adulthood. I last saw and spoke to her at our high school reunion over three years go.

So it was with surprise when I saw she had forwarded to me and about 100 others a pro-McCain email entitled “MUST SEE PHOTOS” — a highly slanted selection of positive McCain photos and photos of Obama intended to scare people. Pictures of him with Rev. Wright, in a native costume, with Al Sharpton and so on, with snide captions.

The email was so disgusting, mean and racist, I was blind with outrage, ready to rip someone a new one and pound my fists in disgust. Mike fired me up with several zinger rebuttal statements I could make, and I fumed as my feet slammed into the treadmill at the gym.

This woman and I went to the same Christian schools where we learned values completely counter to what that email represented. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized it would accomplish nothing and create even more frustration for me if I tried to engage in a partisan argument via email. Plus, I wanted to respond to everyone she wrote to, in an effort to influence any undecided voters, so the tone had to be right.

Here’s exactly what I wrote:

After reading the email your forwarded, I couldn’t help but remember our time in high school. Teachers talked about being afraid of the day that our religious freedoms would be taken away, when Sunday law would take effect and Adventists would be persecuted for believing differently from ruling religious authority. There were moments after church when I’d dissect with our friends what was taught in Sabbath school or in the sermon, in an effort to for us to make sense of things for ourselves.

We also spent a lot of time, at school and in church, discussing how judgmental acts and faith by works isn’t the way to heaven, but how identifying and using our spiritual gifts in service to others is truly living up to Jesus’ example. Most of all, I remember how amazingly diverse our school was. I remember the handicapped kid who was transferred to our school because he was so poorly treated at his public school. The vibrant mix of skin tones and accents in our hallways made for a lively exchange of experiences and perspectives.

That’s why I’m shocked that you forwarded this divisive, racist and inflammatory email. It implies that you share and support the fear mongering, hatred and alienation that is spreading like a cancer across this country, and I don’t believe that’s who you are deep down inside.

My immediate reaction was white-hot anger and outrage. I wanted to counter this email with a laundry list of rebuttals and links. To be sure, no one on this earth is blameless, the least of all politicians. But that gets us into judging the real and perceived and/or manufactured sins and decisions of others, and furthermore, into this no man’s land of rating one person’s actions/weaknesses/transgressions to be worse than the other’s. We’ve all had our moments of acting like a Pharisee and I don’t want this to be one of mine.

Because when I train the eye of the person who created this hateful email on myself, who do I see? Pictures of me with gay and lesbian friends, friends who’ve done drugs, friends who’ve shoplifted. There’s certainly a picture of me drinking underage. I also see pictures of me with people who have sinned more publicly than most, like my college classmate who turned out to be a major drug dealer and insurance scammer. And the close friend who was investigated by the FBI and jailed for medical fraud.

What about the pictures of me and my dad, who was a Buddhist? I’ve been to a Buddhist temple with my Catholic mother, to honor my dead grandfather. I’ve worn her gorgeous hand-embroidered silk wedding dress, which represents the artisan gifts of what some would characterize as a godless culture.

Need I go on? I’m no candidate for anything, at least in the eyes of some.

I’m just a working mom and wife, with a three-year-old kid and a mortgage. I worry about what kind of world my innocent boy will inherit from us. I want him to grow up in a secure and stable world, ripe with opportunity for him to pursue his budding talents. I don’t want to worry about common minor ailments rendering him ineligible for health insurance. I want the air he breathes when he’s my age to be as clean and sweet as it was when I was a child. I want him to to have the freedom and means to pursue his dreams. I never want his half-Chinese heritage to be viewed as a liability or an excuse to treat him with disrespect or God forbid, violence.

On those issues, I’m voting for Barack Obama.

Just over a year ago, my husband and I waited a couple of hours to see Barack Obama speak in Portland. We were both lucky enough to shake his hand. Enough said.

None of this is intended to sway anyone’s mind. Let’s just agree to disagree. And, please, don’t forward these kinds of emails to me again.

I hit “SEND” and got blissfully caught up in Halloween activities for a few hours. When I finally checked my email a little while ago, I had received four responses from people who were on the distribution list — one negative, and three positive, including this one:

Thank you for sharing your email. It was very kind and a loving rebuke of your friend. I don’t know if we know each other, but you are someone that I would like to express my gratitude of thanks. I too would like not to receive any more negative divisive rhetoric from my friends who disagree with my choice of Obama as well. I am passing your loving rebuke on to my friends. Thank you again for sharing.

Even if I don’t change a single person’s mind, it’s gratifying to hear back from these Obama supporters. Who live in FLORIDA.

We cremated our 18-year-old cat, Bok Choy, who died last Thursday. I need to devote a blog post to her sometime. We weren’t sure how Atticus would take the news; he knew from watching Mike give Bok Choy her IV treatment that she was sick. Mike told Atticus to say good-bye to Bok Choy because she might not come back from the vet. Then we told her Bok Choy died and wasn’t coming home.

Mike wanted to cremate her; I wanted to bury her but he had a good point about not wanting the bones disturbed when we eventually move away. So, I came home Tuesday and saw a small decorative metal tin – black with flowers – on the kitchen island. Not sure what it was, I tried to pry it open. Thank God I noticed the label underneath — Bok Choy’s ashes!

We didn’t tell Atticus that the cat was getting cremated, or even what cremation was. Yesterday morning I was holding him, and he noticed the tin and said, “Who is that?” I said, “What?” He repeated himself insistently: “Who is that?” He knows the difference between who and what. It was really strange, like he had a sixth sense.

Last night, after I said, “I love you,” he said, “I love you,” back, which he rarely says. Then he followed it up with, “Are you happy?” He didn’t ask in a concerned way, just asked. It was sweet.

Tonight, for the first time, I threatened to send him to bed without dinner. He was having an enormous tantrum and being entirely selfish and unreasonable. Of course I didn’t want him to starve but I had to hold the line. Big fight over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He is getting more temperamental and demanding. Oh, boy.

He hates vegetables, so the fiber content of his diet isn’t great. He’s been on Miralax pretty regularly for a looong time. I started a “poop diary” on my calendar so I could track how often he was going, because we never ever wanted him to suffer like he did earlier this year.

So, yesterday I realized he hadn’t pooped since Sunday, and we’d forgotten to give him Miralax for a few days. He was a bit listless when I got home this evening and I could tell he needed to go. We went to the park after dinner and he played for a bit, then slumped over a short wall and just stood there. I thought he was pooping, but I think he was having cramps.

I decided he needed a rectal laxative, a tough decision because he hates it. The first time I tried to give it to him tonight, he whimpered, “You’re hurting me,” something he’s never said before. So I faltered. But later, after his bath, I could see how uncomfortable he was. And it was the “This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you” moment, one of many more to come I’m sure. So my insistence won out, and I reassured him with hugs that the “poop medicine” would help him feel better.

We went through the bedtime routine and read books. It seemed like the laxative was taking longer than it should to kick in; I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. Then, he finally he stiffened and got what I have come to think of as the “pre-poop” out. Nothing surprised me more than when Atticus said, “It’s working!”

About five minutes after that diaper change, the motherlode came, and it wasn’t clearly uncomfortable for him.

But after we cleaned up, he was effusive with thanks. “Thanks for using the plunger to make my poop go down the toilet.” (Yup, it got stuck.) “Thanks for the medicine, Mom. I feel better.”

What a mature response!

We started by killing time at Starbucks while we waited for Finnegan’s to open — his drink of choice was a soy vanilla steamer, and I threw back a grande mocha.

Then, I ushered him into Portland’s finest toy store. Forget Toys ‘R’ Us, this is the real deal. He loved the marble runner (spirals of wood trails for marbles to chase down in lazy circles). We played with trains. He practiced opening a Star Wars light saber but didn’t quite get what it was. Nearby, on a wall, was the “make-believe” section, where he first tried on a whale nose, and then when asked, chose an elephant nose as one of our small purchases. He wanted more than I was willing to buy him, but he didn’t complain when I said “no” to the expensive stuff. Besides the nose, I bought him his first pair of scissors (endlessly fascinating) and a dinosaur cookie cutter. Grand total: $3.90.

He refused to let go of the scissors so I tucked everything else away in the backpack. But we didn’t get but a few feet from the store when he said, “I want my nose.” So, we put on his nose, and walked for a bit, reminding everyone around us how great it is to be a kid.