In the United States, we have so many holidays honoring certain people and certain things. But we often fail to recognize those who aren’t in the picture, or who fall outside of conventional situations.
Happy Mother’s Day to those who lost their mothers, or never even knew them. Or maybe it’s not a happy Mother’s Day. We fail to acknowledge the people for whom Mother’s Day is a hard day – the people who never got to know their mother, or who had abusive mothers and don’t want to celebrate.
Happy Mother’s Day to the moms who aren’t alive for this year’s celebration, and to the mothers whose children died before their time. Let’s celebrate the women who tried and tried and couldn’t have children, and guardians who may not have kids of their own but fill the role of mothers, taking care of kids as if they were theirs.
Happy Mother’s Day to those without mothers or kids, and to those who have a hard time on this holiday. Happy Mother’s Day to the people who have no one to celebrate, or no one to celebrate with.
The day after my eighth birthday, my mother went on a date. She vowed that it would be her last date before she gave up.
Two days after my eighth birthday, my mother got her first phone call after an online date. That was the last first call.
Three days after my eighth birthday, my mother left work early. That was the last time she left work early for a date.
A week after my eighth birthday, my mother had her first official boyfriend since I was born. That was the last boyfriend she ever had.
Two weeks after my eighth birthday, my mother introduced me to her new boyfriend. That was the last time she showed me her new loves.
A month after my eighth birthday, she had her first fight. That was the last time she called me into her room crying.
Three months after my eighth birthday, my mother kicked my sister out of the house after her boyfriend encouraged her. That was the last time she lived with her oldest daughter.
Six months after my eighth birthday, her boyfriend and I took a trip to Universal. That was the last time she laughed around me.
A year and a day after my eighth birthday, it was their one-year anniversary. It was also their last.
A year and a two months after my eighth birthday, we all went to the Grand Canyon. That was the last time their relationship was okay.
A year and four months after my eighth birthday, we sat down for a dinner in complete silence. That was the last time he hit her.
A year and five months after my eighth birthday, she said she loved him, tears in her eyes. That was her last-ditch effort.
A year and a half after my eighth birthday, my mother was diagnosed with depression. That was the last time her doctors made a mistake.
A year and seven months after my eighth birthday, I moved into my aunt and uncle’s house. That was the last time I lived with my mom.
A year and eight months after my eighth birthday, I went to visit her in the hospital. That was last time I thought of her until…
A year, eleven months, and seven days after my eighth birthday, my mother died of brain cancer. That was the last time my mother breathed. That was the last time she lived.
It’s here in five weeks, the day we have all been waiting for; graduation.
June third is the end of a beautiful chapter in our lives. I have grown so much in these past four years that I would say I am now, at 18, a completely different person than I was at 14 when I was a freshman.
I was so sure at 14 that I wanted to go to Stanford University and become a lawyer, and nobody could convince me otherwise.
Now at 18, I am going to Chapman University and majoring in either political science or business (still not sure), which I cannot believe because four years ago if you were to ask me to live in Los Angeles I would say absolutely not.
This year, I only wanted to go to schools in LA and did not even consider Stanford.
Regardless, I am beyond excited to be going off to study at Chapman in five months. I cannot explain my gratitude for everyone who has helped me throughout the past four years.
Valentines, a time for chocolate, roses and an overwhelming amount of bitterness from the people who don’t have a significant other to share the Hallmark holiday with.
Sure, Valentines day is a corporate holiday created to make money but it seems like it’s here to stay, so why not make the best of it.
Valentines day doesn’t have to be just about romantic love, but also the every day kind of love.
The love you feel for the barista who makes your coffee every morning, therefore saving you from the sleep deprived sadness that was about to strike at any minute. The love you feel for scary movies and peanut butter sandwiches and wind chimes may not make your heart beat faster, but they are things that make you happy.
Love doesn’t have to be measured in overzealous romantic gestures but in the little things that make your day a little bit better.
The contents of my 6 year old purse reveal the things I love: crumpled coffee receipts, a ticket from a movie I saw with my dad and my favorite red nail polish.
The lack of romantic love in my life isn’t a negative for me. While most girl yearn for the unrealistic romances straight from the pages of a Nicholas Sparks movie, this Valentines Day I want to be doing something I love. I will be with my family this year, which for me is better than any Ryan Gosling or Channing Tatum.
So my dad is basically on house arrest because of his recent heart attack. Because of this house arrest that he has been sentenced to by his doctors and my mother, he has decided to take up and master the art of cooking.
His goal: to cook a new dish, EVERY SINGLE day.
Now this is coming from a man who usually NEVER cooks and when he does, we usually end up calling for a pizza late at night.
My dad has many great talents, unfortunately cooking is not one of them.
So far he has made the following dishes:
Cauliflower soup with WAY too much pepper, ( I think he missed the “taste as you go” memo).
Spaghetti squash pasta with a spinach sauce; lets just say he loves his food processor and we ended up having spaghetti squash with baby formula.
Fisherman’s Pie; coincidentally while he was cooking the power in our house went out and it was only half cooked, he still decided to serve it.
On top of all his glorious attempts of these new recipes, he’s sent my mom to the store every single day to get ingredients, not quite realizing that the ingredients we already have at the house could be used for cooking as well.
While throwing in his own changes to the recipes, he also likes to add some humor. He makes constant reference to the cooking TV show Chopped. Every time one of his new “creations” doesn’t go as planned he says, ” Well I think the judges would have chopped me for that one!” or if it is a success( I’ve yet to taste one) he says, ” That one would have gotten me to the next round!”
While he is still going strong on his cooking binge, and I applaud his efforts, I wouldn’t mind having a pizza for dinner anytime soon.
He had been on a two-week ski trip in British Columbia and it happened on the last day of his trip. My mom told me Friday evening when I got home that he’d had a heart-attack and was being flown to Spokane, Washington for surgery the next morning.
That Saturday morning I woke up at 3am to drive my mom to the airport so she could be there waiting for him when he got out of surgery. After dropping my mom of at the airport I turned around and drove home, went back to sleep and woke up a few hours later to play in my soccer game.
Those 24 hours that followed my mom telling me that he’d had a heart-attack were a whirlwind. I don’t remember what followed after she said the words no one wants to hear, ” Dad had a heart-attack”. Everything blurred together. I remember thinking, don’t cry, because if you cry that means something is wrong and I wanted so badly to believe that nothing was wrong.
My dad came out of his surgery doing well, the doctors said that his good physical conditioning saved his life, that he was lucky it hadn’t been worse.
Despite the terrible circumstances, I felt lucky. Lucky to be reminded that things can change in and instant, lucky to be reminded that I shouldn’t take so much for granted and lucky to be reminded how much family means.
My dad and I have always had a rough relationship. My mom says it is because our personalities are so similar that’s why we butt heads. We disagree on almost everything and always find some way to annoy each other.
For so long we’ve been content with living like this. It broke my heart knowing that within the next 10 years any type of relationship with my dad would either be non-existent or intolerable. However, after this past weekend, I’ve decided to make amends. I’ve decided, even though I know it won’t be easy, to work towards the relationship I want with my dad.
I mean let’s be honest I love to knit, bake, read, and watch reruns of old BBC. I have yet to meet many other grandma souls, unless I am around an actual grandma.
The reason that I find that I am so grandma-ish is that knitting makes me feel productive even while I am avoiding responsibility.
It’s sad to me how the concept of the holidays have gone from doing nice things for people, to spending copious amounts of money on trying to impress someone. The misconception that the more expensive a gift is, the happier a person will be, has been ingrained so deeply in today’s society that people have no recollection of what the holiday spirit of giving used to mean.
Time and time again I hear people stressing over whether a person will like the gift and when they finally give up, defeated at trying to figure out what to get they say, ” oh well, it’s the thought that counts”. This phrase wasn’t meant to be a cop-out.
Unaware that I had fallen guilt of this, I found myself stressing over what to get, what they will like and how much I want to spend for the “special” people in my life. I didn’t realize how much the holiday season had become so much about buying gifts and pleasing people until I was strolling through the halls, looking for my secret santa present, with my hands full of gifts, simultaneously counting how much the total would be and if the person I was shopping for would like the presents they were about to receive.
We are all guilty of getting swept up in the glam and glitz of gift giving,it’s inevitable. When it comes down to it, we all want to please the people we care about. However, just because we want to please them, it doesn’t mean that we have to forget about the real meaning of the holiday season.
The OVS Cross Country Team (left to right): Coach Apple Alvarez, Tracy Zeng, Ally Feiss, Gilim Bae, Sunny Chang, Winnie Chang and coach Fred Alvarez — Photo by Momoe Takamatsu
When I was in high school, a time so long ago my students will assure you dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a pretty fast runner.
I ran cross country and track all four years, and eventually got fast enough that I was able to run Division I cross country in college. But for as fast as I was in my high school years, I was never the fastest on my team, not to mention my league.
I was a middle-of-the-pack runner, good enough to earn a varsity letter three out of my four years, but not good enough on my own to earn a post-season CIF berth, the holy grail of high school sports in California. And my high school team, filled with runners faster than me, was never fast enough either to qualify collectively for CIF.
That was the dream for every member of my cross country team, and one that for me had obviously gone unfulfilled for decades.
Until this past weekend.
On Saturday, for the first time in Ojai Valley School history, our girls’ cross country team competed in the CIF Southern Section preliminaries, a race that drew more than 3,000 high school runners from across Southern California.
Decked out in their new OVS jerseys (thanks Mr. Floyd!), my five girls toed the line against 148 other runners from 22 schools, nearly every one with a larger student population than ours. My runners were nervous. I told them there was no need to be.
Because as far as I was concerned, we had already won. Our victory was just getting to CIF, for being a team that sweated and bled and cried together to accomplish a goal that at the start of the season seemed unattainable.
I told them not to worry about how they placed, or how the team finished. I told them before they started to have fun, and to remember to look up at some point during the race and remind themselves where they were, and what they had accomplished together.
And I told them this: I have never been prouder of any team I have coached, and no team I have coached has ever displayed more heart.
These girls this season gave me a great gift. Yes, I finally got to go to CIF, only three decades later than planned. But there was more to it than that. I got to see these athletes develop a power they never knew they had, the power to come face-to-face with adversity and keep moving forward.
Junior Gilim Bae was the top runner for OVS, running a personal best at the Riverside course — Photo by Momoe Takamatsu
I got to see a group of girls – three from China, one from Korea and one from Ojai – make the always mysterious transformation of going from strangers to friends to sisters. They will have this bond the rest of their lives.
Through a flurry of fortunate circumstances, I got to coach the team this year alongside my eldest daughter, a talented young woman as smart as she is dedicated to the teaching profession. Her star is rising, and I beam with pride. My heart nearly bursts when I think of the role model she provided these high school runners this season.
And I got to forge deep friendships, the kind that will last forever. In a world where so much goes wrong on a daily basis, a world where the spotlight shines too often on misery and the prospects of doom, what these girls achieved this season was commendable, and should be celebrated.
What greater gift could there be? Thank you girls for a phenomenal season. Go Spuds!
Freshman Tracy Zeng (left) and junior Winnie Chang gut it out on the Riverside Cross Country course — Photo by Momoe Takamatsu
fast enough that I was able to run Division I cross country in college. But for as fast as I was in my high school years, I was never the fastest on my team, not to mention my league.
Because as far as I was concerned, we had already won. Our victory was just getting to CIF, for being a team that sweated and bled and cried together to accomplish a goal that at the start of the season seemed unattainable.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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