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.

My beloved Mom

Memories of Mom

My mom Esther was a woman filled with love for God, and her family and friends. There are so many good memories, of my mom and our family it is hard to choose just a few. There were numerous camping trips, and family vacations. All filled with laughter and fun.
I think I could write at least three books, if not more of the way she touched so many of our lives. Unfortunately I can only share a very few right now.
This is the first memory I would like to share with you. I’m glad we did not always have a seat belt law our block would have never made it to school if there had been one in the early seventies. We were having major cold spells and freezing temperatures. My mom and dad would go out to start the vehicles so they would warm up before taking us to school. The car wouldn’t even turn over so mom would tell dad, “can you see if old blue will start. We had an old fifty-nine ford pickup one setter and low and behold it would start when all other cars would fail to do so. I remember all the neighbor kids and my mom, with my sister and I, we would all pile in together to ride the four blocks to school. There would be kids on top of kids with a tiny spot for mom to squeeze in under the wheel thank God the standard shift was on the steering console or she wouldn’t have been able to haul anywhere from five to twelve kids to school.
I remember the rides on our horses with my mom riding on Star, and dad and us kids riding along beside her on our other horses. Mom and dad taught us girls to love and respect all animals, except for maybe snakes and spiders.
One day my mom went out to the garage to get a screw out of my dad’s tool drawers and she found this big old black spider in a drawer, she called my dad home from work to kill it and told us kids not to go into the garage. Dad came home, to kill the spider, he walked into the garage and seconds later he walked back out with this huge spider in the palm of his hand, and said. Janeal I think this belongs to you! I loved that spider, and use to terrorize Jan with it, so she had hidden it a few months before and forgotten it.
One night after us kids were in bed, a friend of my parents’ Nadine Garbez called mom and asked her if she and dad could come over to J and N shoes, she had a bat upstairs and Joe was out of town. So mom got us kids up and dressed and we all went to help Nadine get the bat captured so she could finish her paperwork and open the store the next morning.
Mom took part in the PTA with Dorsalie Jones and a hundred other parents. So many memories there are too many to tell. She helped with Chili cook offs, cakewalks, and was always active in town affairs, working right along side so many others. My mom was very out going, she would fight for what she believed in, and stand up for what she believed I don’t ever remember her backing down.
In eighth grade I quit school because a teacher was treating me unfair. I walked home and told mom that I wasn’t going back. If my daddy only had an eight-grade education it was good enough for me. Oh no it isn’t she said. And drove me right back to school. We went to my locker, grabbed my math book and walked down to the library where Mrs. Gallagher’s room was, where the rest of the afternoon Mrs. Gallagher and her worked over all my math problems to determine whether my answers that had been checked wrong were actually wrong or right. After the bell rang she headed for the principal’s office and told him to send for my math teacher. When he showed up my mother politely inform the man and principal what she actually thought of him and his teaching certificate and where he could put that certificate. The next day I was switched to a new class, with a good teacher and received the (B) I actually deserved.
So many memories so little time to tell them, so I will finish up with my favorite and one she loved to tell. It is about a poem I wrote just after my ex-husband and I split up.  Money was truly non-existent and Christmas was just weeks away. Of course my children were like all others and wanted this and that as well as the other new toy on the market. I had talked to my mother, about my worries and she told me about all the times while she had been growing up that money had never been enough to buy all they had wanted, so she had sugested I do what they did way back when, and make gifts for everyone. That night I made up this poem after watching one of my favorite Christmas movies.

The Empty Christmas Stocking


By Janeal Mulaney

I’ve noticed every Christmas, presents get more expensive

Everyone wants more and more.

Are we forgetting what Christmas is all about?

On the twenty-fifth day of December, we celebrate our Savior birth,

Jesus Christ was born.

Do we remember that it’s His birthday we celebrate?

Do we put a gift for Him beneath our Christmas tree?

Do we hang a stocking for Him for the entire world to see?

You might wonder what we’d give him even if we did.

Well, here are a few ideas to fill His stocking with.

There kindness toward each other, and the rest of our fellowman.

Peace on earth, and joy throughout our land.

We could also reach for understanding and forgiveness,

For the people we feel have done us wrong.

Compassion and caring we should give throughout each year.

Is his stocking getting full, or do we still have room for a whole lot more.

We could put in gentleness and tenderness, for they should go hand in hand.

Let’s not forget the love he gives us each and everyday

I still feel LOVE is the most important gift of all.

So, hang the empty stockings on the mantelpiece.

But don’t forget the most important one.

The empty stocking you hang for Jesus Christ.

Don’t forget all the items that make our Christmas bright.

Our Love for the Heavenly Father and our fellow man

For each time we show our love for another.

We show our love also for our savior

Let’s add all the other feelings that God gives each of us everyday.

Not just once a year.

We all love you mom and you will be missed.

Pillow Fights

Pillow Fights

By Janeal Mulaney

It was just days after my children and I moved out of my ex-husband house, the movers were do to unload our beds and other furniture on Monday, but until then my children and I had slept on the floor of our new apartment for the last two nights. My children and I had a lot of emotional baggage weighing us down with all the hurt and differences that were accruing in our lives. My oldest and youngest had been at each other’s throats all day. My oldest son decided to be the mediator as usual, but it hadn’t been working so as we got ready for bed the other two were still fighting.

The first blow came and Mitch hit both his sister and brother with one swing of the pillow. Before long we were all whacking each other with my old feathered pillows. We ended up tearing two of them apart and the feathers were flying everywhere, we were laughing so hard our sides were hurting, but we keep letting off steam and stress as we’d pick up another pillow and start up where a torn one left off. The pillow fight went on and on, the kids were laughing so hard they couldn’t even hit each other anymore. They were missing more then they were hitting someone, but the exercise was therapeutic for four people that had their whole world turned upside down in the space or one afternoon.

I was never so thankful that I had bought pillows every chance I got. We had gone through seven feathered pillows that night throughout our pillow fight. The stress was gone, but the mess was left to clean up before we could go to bed that night. The kids shook out all the bedding and I used the vacuum to suck up all the feathers from the carpet.

As the kids chatted back and forth about who got the best of whom, I vacuumed up all the feathers from the broken pillows. Then made out our temporary beds again. After laying down the kids talked to me about all the things that had been going on inside their minds with the separation, and us moving out of our family home. I tried to answer all their questions truthfully without putting all the blame on their dad. I tried to make them understand how couples some times grow apart, and how dreams can and do change throughout the years, and how some people want one thing and then for what ever reason those feelings aren’t there anymore. I’m sure if I talked to some professional about how we worked through our anger and hurt over the separation of our family, I would be told that I had handled it all wrong. I don’t know what the right way is, all I know is my kids and I bonded that night. That night they learned they had the freedom to ask questions, and talk to me about how they felt about any subject they wanted or needed to talk about.

We had many pillow fights after that, and I learned to buy some foam pillows just for the pillow fights, but that was truly one of my favorite pillow fights.

Artist and Writer

Get to know Janeal through her paintings and writings. Mother of three plus two special children that never gave her labor pains. Grandmother of four beautiful grandchildren who are her pride and joy. She learned how to Love, fight, and enjoy life through her parents. Seeing the world through her eyes is sometimes twisted, other times neon, but always intertaining.

in reference to: Facebook | Janeal Mulaney (view on Google Sidewiki)

Goals and Home

This past month has been hectic, with Tara starting college and the kids going to school I thought I would be able to stay up with the goals I had set for myself but due to unforseen changes in life, I'm sorry to say I'm running a tadbit behind my goals. I'm hoping next month all will be alittle calmer and I'll be able to make my goals plus. For all my readers out there I'm sorry I haven't had anything new for you this month, please continue to return to my blogs and see what gets posted soon. I have quite a few articles in the works and hopefully they will be up and running in time for next month. Thanks Janeal.