Solo Karaoke

When people ask me what I did as a kid, my memory always goes back to my karaoke machine.
I was not an athletic kid, I hated exercise. When my mom would take me on runs "to be healthy" I would scream, cry, and force her to run without me so I could walk home wallowing in my own self pity.
I went outside when I was forced, but hardly willingly.
I was only allowed to watch 30 min. of TV, so that was not an option.
My mom was busy with babies most of the time, so she did not have time to sit and think of fun activities for me to do. Babies were entertaining enough, but they got old pretty quickly. I found things to do.
Like reading. I sometimes wish I could go back in time and pluck every single pre teen trash novel I read growing up from my hands and replace it with a classic that would actually help my intelligence. I began reading with a love for classics, but I was quickly drawn to the death trap of teen gossip novels. Oh well, reading is reading I suppose.
I drew a lot. At one point in my life I was an aspiring fashion designer, so I was very serious about my traced designs that I claimed to be my own. Who would even look for the tracing paper buried under all those magazines in my drawer? They were original, ok?
I tried my hand at sewing, but machines are hard. I usually just stapled material and called it a pillow.
And I did a lot of solo karaoke. My good friends Justin Timberlake, Third Eye Blind, Destiny's Child, and 60s mo town met me there, of course.
I choreographed a lot of dances to the musical Annie.
When it comes to me and dancing, I have all the heart and none of the skill.

Here's the reality. I thought I was going to be famous. I wish I could tell you where this thought came from, and why I so heartily believed it. But I have no idea. Fame was my destiny.
When I was 8 I started keeping journals. It was not a place to pour out my thoughts, no. I was creating relics. I honestly thought that when I died people would be overjoyed to discover my journals and pay top dollar for them.

I tried modeling, but I really wasn't model material. I was chubby, and I had huge teeth, and coke bottle glasses, and frizzy hair only made worse by brushing.
Broadway was maybe my calling. But I could not sing and I quit dance class at the age of 6 because paying attention in class was boring and splits were stupid.
Acting was it! But my mom would never take me to those talent discovery scouts they always advertised on the radio.

So maybe I missed my calling, who can say. I decided when I was twelve that if I were to one day rise to fame, it would have to be a sort of accident. Maybe I run into a movie producer and he suddenly realizes I am the perfect illustration of a character he is creating, he asks if I act and I say no but I'll give it a shot, and then I am brilliant.
Not that I have put much thought into that.

So what does this all mean? In short, I had a lot of time to develop a weird personality. All that solo karaoke handed me a lot of time to develop non important skills that are terrible inconvenient to show off. Funny how that works.
But, I am a dreamer. I clung to wild hopes as a child of someday being "somebody". I appreciated art, dance, and music, but I never had the drive to try. I always expected something like talent or opportunity to just fall into my lap.

I have learned a lot since my childhood. I've learned that things don't come easily for me, so that just means I have to try. I have worked hard to get better, and I have become ok with failure. I still love singing and dancing, and I will willingly perform to any eye that makes the mistake of volunteering as an audience. But I am now adventurous, and for change I will always be grateful.

Why Frozen Cookies?

Plain and simply put, my family is weird. But wonderful.

My parents got married right as my mom got out of college and found themselves pregnant one year later. Quickly after Megan came me. Soon after me came Patrick. After Patrick, my parents were done. We were a happy family of five, and it would be irresponsible to have more. My dad, probably the hardest working man I have ever met, worked as a government IT engineer. He did well enough to allow my mom to stay at home and take care of us, but we lived very tightly.

This tightly budgeted lifestyle could also be attributed to the fact that I was a very expensive child. By the time my brother was born, I had survived countless ear infections, a baseball sized cyst in my chest when I was an infant, pneumonia, and a non life threatening heart condition. This meant many doctor visits and not cheap medicine. I was just trying to keep my family on their toes, really.

A few years after Patrick was born, my parents decided to "church hop." The Episcopal church never quite felt like home to them, and they were looking for a better fit. Not that they asked me, but seven year old Emmy was none too pleased. Every time we went to a new church, I had to walk into a community of people I did not know. I always have and forever will hate people staring at me, and that is exactly what happens when you are a family visiting a church for the first time. During this time, I mastered the art of falling asleep during the sermons. If I was not paying attention but awake, I would get in trouble. Falling asleep was a double win; I did not have to pay attention, and I could not be scolded. And who doesn't love an adorable seven year old falling asleep on their shoulder?

Later that year, we found ourselves in my mom's home church, the Catholic Church. This was the final straw. Not only were people staring at us, but this church had a bunch of prayers I did not know or understand. I also was not allowed to receive communion. That was my one chance to get up and moving at the Episcopal church! During the creed, a remember boldly proclaiming that "No I will not say one holy CATHOLIC apostolic church. Because I am not catholic, and I don't believe in it."

Its funny how things change. Funny, and beautiful.
My family entered the Catholic church that year, and my dad soon followed. A year later, another little Judd was on its way. Soon after Turtle came Brendan, and soon after Brendan arrived the final piece to our puzzle, Lilly.

I used to sit and try to understand why God has given me the blessings He has. At one point in my teen years I was in tears, and I kept telling God, "But I don't deserve it!" And He spoke through the still of my hear and said "I know you don't. But I love you, and I wanted you to have this. Stop questioning why, and focus on what you are going to do with it."

I wish I could say that show my family love all the time. But I don't. I am a woman of many missteps, and not loving people well is constantly one of them. I wish I could say that I have never wanted my family to change, and that I am always grateful for the blessing that they are. But I am not. I'm just glad we are not expected to be perfect humans.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to write about great adventurous and imaginative things. Every time I would sit down to write, I could only think of things that had happened to me. I would try to come up with characters, and I arrived at nothing. I would explain an event that happened in my life, and I could write forever. Frankly, I am just not a creative writer. So I decided to write what I knew, because that seemed to be the only successful avenue.

I realized at the age of ten that this was problematic because I did not have an adventurous life.
I think this is when I gave up dreams of being a writer.
But I never gave up making my ordinary sound extraordinary.
Looking back, I have come to love my ordinary childhood. Every good story has a have a good problem. So I am not sure if this is going to be a "good" story or not, because I was blessed with very few obvious problems as a child. My family is pleasantly somewhere between simple and straight up crazy.

I am calling this blog "Frozen Cookies on Fridays" because every Friday I came home to my mom making chocolate chip cookies from scratch. She would then freeze them to "make them last longer"; which also meant the best cookies in the world. Every Friday we would have home made pizza and watch a movie as a family. Although I have been absent from this tradition for the past four years (realistically around 6 because I somehow found friends in high school). This tradition of love has been written on my heart.

Its not even so much about the cookies (I mean they rock), but about the stability and love that meets me in or follows me outside our home. My dad's sacrifice of working in a grey window less government building as he works with email IT for 10 hours day, when all he wants to do it play games with his family. My mom's sacrifice of giving up her dream of becoming an artist in a big city to raise six hellions in a small southern town. Our home that is yellow and cheerful and home to plenty of finger prints and juice spills. Our exploding dress up box and karaoke machine that kept me entertained for the better part of 12 years. 
Staying up late sitting on the kitchen floor as I tell my mom about all the hurts, victories, and questions in my heart. Calling my mom sobbing during my senior year of college after getting a ticket for an expired license plate. It was more than just the ticket, it was life and the growing pains of wanting to be an adult but not really knowing how.

So frozen cookies are more a less nostalgic symbol of where I come from.