Sanity or Insane

What is Sanity?

By Janeal Mulaney


I have asked this question many times over my lifetime, I still do not know the answer. I would tell my children they were driving me crazy. My oldest son would explain that was their job, and if I was not insane by the time they turned eighteen they hadn’t done a good job. The day he turned eighteen, I asked him whether he had done a good job or not. He said not, but then again how can you drive someone crazy when they had reached that destination a decade before he born.

I agreed with him, to everyone out there who has gone through life, avoiding the norm, you maybe considered insane by countless people.

I was one of those people if it was the normal thing to do I did the opposite, while girls were primping to look their best and fit in, I was primping to look totally different. One of my best friends told me I looked like a two-cent hooker, one day. I told her when she stopped raiding my grandmother’s closet I would worry about what she thought. In high school a two-cent hooker would not have been caught dead in the clothes I wore. For I never dressed up, nor did I own a dress. I did however own a pair of waffle stompers or as they are called now (hiking boots), if I had to borrow a dress to wear those were on my feet. My blue jeans were full of holes with patches on some, while others were left to spread open even farther.

My jeans were skin tight, and as I look back I’m sure my style of dress was copied to bring forth for this generation. Teens now pay seventy or eighty bucks for the clothes I wore in the seventies. My patches turned into decals and my embroidery turned into machine stitching. No one actually wears their jeans long enough to make true holes in them on their own, so the factories now make the holes for them. I started putting the names on the butt of my own jeans long before it was considered juicy to wear words across someone’s pants. I would embroidery my name or the name of my latest boyfriend in a heart on one of the pockets of my jeans or just above the seam of my Dittos. For those of you who do not remember or know what Dittos were, they were the name of the first pocket less jeans, they were sold through J. C. Penny’s and they had a moon shaped seam across the butt that ran down both legs of the jeans. My name had six letters in it so I would embroidery the first three up and around one hip and the other three letters going back down the other side.

So was this insanity, or just not old enough to know what a patent was? I cut off tee shirts and wore short jackets before they were popular. My friends thought I was crazy or worse. I smiled all the time, laughed over everything. Did outlandish pranks and said ridicules things that made my friends die from laughing. I never took a second of life seriously. To this day my high school friends and I stay on the phone and I always come up with some story or say something that starts us both cracking up with laughter. Insanity, is a matter of opinion what is insane to some, others call fun. Why be normal when you can be unique?

Can you say I Love You too Much

I Love You

By Janeal Mulany

Simple three little words. Right or not. Can you say them too often to the ones you love? No, because actions don’t always speak louder then words. There are times, when for whatever the reason you have to be hard on a child, a parent, or yes even a spouse. Sometimes it is called hard love, other times it is called punishment. When you do have to punish or actually demonstrate to a love one, hard love. Your actions may not express the love and concern you feel for them. So using those three little simple words can signify that you have their best interest at heart.

For example when your baby starts crawling or walking they don’t know an electric cord plugged into a wall can be hazardous, so you tell them no don’t touch, three, five, seven, ten times, but they still keep going after the wire. So you need to do something further to let them know there is consequences to playing with the wire and the wall socket. You slap their hand lightly, but hard enough for them to know they don’t touch. You need to let them know that even though you punished them you still love them. You say those three magic little words then give them a hug. Now have you said those three words too frequently?

No, you need to let the people you love now that your love for them is never to be questioned, because no matter what they do you will always love them. I have a three-year-old granddaughter; She yells out grandma, I ask her, what baby? She says, I Love You. I tell her I Love You too sweetheart. This happens anywhere from one to fifty times a day. Are we saying I Love You too repeatedly? I don’t think so. When you leave the house do you tell your family you love them, before you walk out the door? Do you tell them I love you just before you hang up the phone? What if something happened to you or them, and that had been your last chance to tell them how you felt about them? Would you still think that you told them I Love You too frequently?

The only time I think you can use those three little words too often is when you don’t mean them, or you use them as a tool for control over a loved one or to cover up abuse one way or the other. In all those occurrences it is not true love they speak of. For you don’t abuse the ones you love, or try to control them.

If you truly love someone, then no you cannot use those words to repeatedly.

Winter Memories

 I Love Winter

By Janeal Mulaney

The reason I love winter, is as a child we would come together more as a family. During spring, summer, and fall I would spend long hours outside doing what most children do, playing either by myself or with my friends.

During late fall and winter months my family would be force to come into the house sooner and more often, not that there weren’t just as many fun things to do in the house all year around, but most of my family loved the great out doors. So if we could be outside we would be.

As a child, my parents and grandparents would play games, put puzzles together, and read from the bible, while we would all sat around our big warm fireplace with a cozy fire crackling the wooden logs. We would build snowmen, and then come inside for hot chocolate, and homemade cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven.

Our families would gather at our home for Thanksgivings, and Christmases. My dad and uncles would move all the living room furniture to the side so sleeping bags could be brought in from our camper, and we would have wall-to-wall cousins as well as ourselves lined up throughout our living room. Our kitchen would be over flowing with cooks, making all kinds of food, and wonderful desserts for the holiday meals.

All of the adults would chat and talk about their childhood out on the prairie, with my grandparents chiming in from time to time to relate their own stories from their own childhood, about crossing the states in a covered wagon, with oxen instead of horses, or how they would have to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night with three feet of snow blocking the doors. They would tell about the dust bowl days, and teaching school to their own children because they would be unable to get the kids to the closest school for weeks at a time because of freezing temperatures.

It is truly amazing how far the world has come in just a little over one hundred years. My grandparents were born in eighteen-eighties and nineties, just years after the civil war. As a young man my grandfather fought in World War I, I had three uncles that fought in World War II. All these were stories I heard about during the winter months. They lived in the days of the covered wagons, automobiles, airplanes, jets, and watched the first rocket land on the moon. They lived through hauling water out of a creek, and wells, to plumbing water throughout their homes. They live through no lights to television; my grandma even saw the first wave of the computer and electronic games. The games she declared were pure evil, because you didn’t need anyone else with you to play them. (Games should be made to bring families together not separate them.)

So much had changed during their lifetime, and I was in our kitchen listening to every word. To me winter was a time of learning not just in school, but also from the history my family had lived through.

Grandma did not just watch ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or ‘The Waltons’, but she had actually lived through those shows. Through the winter months while watching those shows on television, grandma would pipe in with, that little house looks better then the old ‘soddy’ (sod home) we lived in while on the prairie. That car look like the first one Ed bought in nineteen-eighteen just before Evelyn was born?

Now my grandparents are gone, as well as my mom, who just passed last month, but memories of winters spent will live on in my mind to tell my children and grandchildren all the stories they had to share, with me as a child. I hope my home will be filled with as much love, memories and family as we use to have in my parents home when I was just a kid. These are the reasons I love winter.

The snow seemed whiter, the wind less cold, and our home seemed warmer with the stories they told.