What Do You Want To Eat

It's funny cause it's true, you know it is, but men just think we're brainless when it happens when really this is going on:

M : Let's go out to eat

W: OMG that sounds great I'm starving (I just realized I haven't eaten in forever and hangry is fast approaching, I think I could eat just about anything right now)

M : Where do you want to go?

W : (Sushi. No Hibachi and sushi. Yes, omg. I could tear up some Japanese steak and fish right about now. If I say that he's going to think that's too expensive. It IS too expensive. Great, now I've got like a full on craving for something we can't afford. I'm a jerk. What was I thinking? He's probably wanting something specific, we'll just go there)  I don't know, what do you feel like?

M : Tacos? (tacos)

W : (ugh, I mean, I can make tacos at home. If we're going to go somewhere it should at least be something I would never cook, right? I can make that cheaper and mine taste better..) No, I don't want tacos, didn't we just have tacos? I don't know...

M : (Why did she ask me if she didn't want me to pick, Sigh) How about like Ryans, I think they have a deal? (They make everything, she can work that out)

W: (Do I look like I'm PMSing. I mean that's the only way I can get our monies worth out of a buffet. Plus I can't really rationalize that many calories right now, I'm not THAT hungry. He's going to get that look on his face if I shoot this one down too... maybe I should just suggest something else... but WHAT? I don't want him to spend too much but I don't want to eat junk, so hungry...)

M : ...... Burgers? (lord just let me find the right answer here)

W : (Wasn't he paying attention when I went shopping this week? The only dinner we have left to make at home is burgers. I thought we talked about meal planning, course he was looking at his ipad the whole time, probably didn't hear me anyway.) We'll just do tacos.

M : Is that what you want?

W : Sure.

M : (Why couldn't she just agree with that in the first place?) Okay.

W : Are you sure you want tacos though? (Great now I'm committed to tacos and suddenly that sounds like the worst idea ever. So much salt, I think I'm at my salt limit... no wonder my pants are tight, that's what it is. I'm worried about these jeans and it's probably just the salt I ate yesterday and now he wants tacos? ugh why did I start thinking about expensive food? Like crab... mmmm crab would be crazy good right now, but that would be like a $50 meal and I could spend that on groceries for a few days. Why would I spend that kind of money on one meal? I could get all kinds of stuff for $50 and use way more than once. I should just stay home, save money, so hungry...)

Believing in The Phoenix

If life gave out merit badges mine would include a brass zippo, I am that good at burning bridges. Violate my trust, hurt my heart, or just prove to me that your character is seriously flawed and I was gone without a look back, there were no second chances.

What this really means is not that I'm some bad ass tough guy, it means I'm lousy at forgiveness.

I remember being a kid listening to the preacher man in Sunday services telling us that God forgives all if we ask for it, thinking to myself that there's no way God excuses the murderers, rapists, child abusers. What kind of world is that? Do whatever you want but say, "oh man, I'm really sorry" and poof it's forgiven? Yeah. No way.

People would say holding onto resentment or not giving grace in the face of mistakes, only hurts you. Nope, the person hurt me and I would be stupid to let them do it again. It was slap in the face to my strong sense of justice and self preservation to excuse major flaws in others. 

Wastefully I torched people out of my life, brazenly assuming that there would be more after them. More friends, better relationships, there was always more out there. I literally ran away from home when I couldn't get along with my own family when I was a teenager. 

Over time my smartness began to get replaced by wisdom through perspective and experience while a few people held on to fire extinguishers and persisted even when I was headed the other way. Only very recently I've learned how to stand on the ashes of something and build again, sometimes even saving shreds of it before it was all gone.

I'm not interested in burning bridges anymore. The promise of more people that are trustworthy, more relationships that are meaningful, more special connections that only that person understands, is not given to us and it's worth it to hang on through the hard stuff because in reality we are all entwined somehow in life and need each other no matter how strong, independent, and self sufficient we'd like to seem. Kind of an awesome side effect of that is being able to forgive yourself for the stupid shit you have also done. 

Horses are the quickest to forgive us even when we forget to apologize

People that come into your life and impact it are worth saving. This is especially true if you've already found a way to let them past your walls and fears, there simply is not an endless sea of those souls out there waiting to be a part of you. Not all of the connections should be saved, but that's another story...

Mind Over Heart

Free will is the most important gift we are given as people. To be able to, within our circumstances, make our own choices for our lives is kind of amazing when you think about it.

We make decisions and think through with logic, flaunting our free will and morals, until wham; emotion comes in and we fall in love.

Love is the ultimate unpredictable force. In movies and stories we'll sometimes give people the magical gift of controlling another person, changing circumstances and lives, save for love. We aren't willing to hand over the ability to make us fall in love even in fiction and fairy tale.

"Follow your heart but take your brain with you" should be tattoo'd someplace I see daily for I am incredibly guilty of getting wrapped up in the passion of something or someone and losing my thoughts. In men we'd call that 'driven' but being a girl it isn't encouraged, keeping these two in balance is a learning curve that I've finally started to master.

On the flip side of this is the other extreme, I have watched with envy as a friend of mine chooses their emotion. This person can remove all feeling and reduce a situation to pure logic. Not to say they don't feel, I'm sure they do, it's just their mind can overpower it and no choice is ever made based on feeling. The steadiness that comes from living that way makes me wish I had it, even if it is perceived by others as cold.

While I tend to ride the highest high and then suffer lows when they break apart, my friend is spared the low... but also the high. At day's end they are happy that way as am I my way and neither of us intends to change because there isn't a right or a wrong way to love. I could tell the friend that they are missing out on that fizzy spark when something really interests me making me feel totally alive and they could tell me that many tears and heartache can be avoided if I thought first and chose what I allowed in.

In ancient Greece culture, they didn't even believe in the freedom of thought, Gods controlled everything. If they felt/thought a brave thought it was given to them as an order by Apollo. Love was directed by Athena, etc. Attributing these thoughts and choices you make based on an order of a God/Goddess and not yourself is kind of like a get of jail free card. "Sorry honey, I had to sleep with her, Athena told me to by making me full of lust".

Versus a culture like Buddhists in India who felt that total enlightenment came hand in hand with complete control over your own thoughts (and therefor emotions).

Whichever way we manage to get there, I still think the ultimate robber of freewill is totally worth it.

"There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully and to love them almost despite themselves" E Gilbert

Deserving

In Italy citizens understand a need for breaks with no explanation while Americans have this need to deserve one. Italians feed their soul for the sake of it and Americans need to show we work harder than you do.

The problem with this is that it contributes to "I am so swamped and constantly busy, I am stressed out more than you and you have no idea. I'm going to drink all Friday night and sleep all day Saturday" and the "I haven't had a cupcake in months, my dieting has been so good, I totally deserve to eat a gallon of ice cream over the weekend"

It's not healthy.

Add to that our relentless fear of others judging us and you've set yourself up for extremes of stress, deprivation, and closet binges. We don't posses balance between working hard to take care of  your responsibilities and occasionally working on something that is just for you.

I met someone at a party recently who asked my name and then asked what I did. Of course, we are all defined first by what we do, not who we are, I scrambled to try and find words to make my job understood. "I'm a mom". Is all I came up with.

"And you ride?"

"Yes"

"That's so amazing you can just do that, I don't have time for anything but work and my kids activities."

And there it was, my self-inflicted kick to the gut. I wanted to sit this woman down and explain to her that by 6 am every single day I am out of bed, weekend or Holiday be damned, and starting laundry. Every day I clean the floors. Do the house cleaning. Fold clothes. Prepare food for 7, up to three times a day, do the dishes, strip the beds, kiss the boo-boos, teach morals to small people, break-up fights. School days can often be harder because the kids have fresh behaviors coming home learned from friends, at least 30 minutes of homework that all need my help right now and can't wait, and by dinner someone will have clogged the toilet. Anyone who has been in charge of all my children for an hour understands the insanity.

Raising kids is incredibly hard. My size family it is a matter of schedule and staying up on tasks on time to get it all done. 6 hour shifts on school days, 14 hour shifts every other day.

I don't sit still often and if I want something like time to work a horse, I work extra hard in other parts of my day to get it done and make it happen,even then it may not work. Entire days go by where I have accomplished dozens of small jobs and chores with nothing at all to show for it but tiredness and maybe a fresh case of poison ivy. "Done" around here is rare and I like it that way.

Still here I stand wishing I had a way to prove to this woman that I had earned my time to ride a horse, since all I did was stay home with the kids. If only social media liked posts like, "got the toothpaste scrubbed off the walls in time to burn dinner, while trying to tell a child the definition of a word for homework, I think another may be stuffing stolen candy wrappers in the air ducts" or "Note came home from school that triggers my fears that I'm not parenting well, help!" No, social media likes happy kids, shiny horses, and funny moments. That's what I'd like to focus on too!

I chose to spend my retirement now, an hour a day that is mine during the school year, guilt-free, on a horse. Am I lucky? Absolutely. Is it handed to me? Hardly. Have I let go of my need to prove it? Apparently not. ;)

Lessons Learned By A Caffeinated Mommy

1) You can't please everybody all the time.

This is huge and I wish I'd learned it years earlier. I can make a meal four kids absolutely love and one will look at it like it's poison. Two kids may be totally up for the adventure I planned and the rest of the family intends to make their misery audible and constant.

If I only cooked what everyone would eat, if we only did "fun things" that everyone enjoyed, we'd probably starve and never leave the house. Exhibit A : my princess loving girly girl had a stage four meltdown as soon as we walked through the Disney gates for the first time.

You can't predict it and you certainly can't control it so stop stressing about it. Do what you can do and know that there is no way you can create total happiness in everyone around you. If it's right for you let the rest roll off your back.

2) Fairness is unrealistic.

Sure we teach the kids that life isn't fair and that there will be many times they won't get the same thing as their sibling, how about in our own minds though. I constantly worry about whether or not I got a good photo of each kid in each situation. If I sit down and snuggle one for 5 minutes, I'm already mentally allotting time to be sure I get in the same amount with the rest. Instead of a happy sigh of the moment, I'm worried if anyone is left out and how I can make it up to who isn't getting me now.

This began in the NICU for me. Holding one small baby while feeling guilty I wasn't holding the other two, with two kids at home. I haven't totally come to terms with this but I have recently been taught a coping skill.

Every day write down five things you are grateful for/ happy about/whatever about each member of the family. Just a few days of this and you begin to LOOK daily for those things about each person that are new and different and fantastic. It smoothes out the constant stress of fairness for me and I know I've really seen them all at the end of each day.

3) Cleanliness is personal.

If your house is clean and it makes you happy, great. If your house is not clean but everyone is functioning just fine. Also great. If having order helps you relax and focus on your kids chaos, do that. If creating the order takes away from your focus on your kids then don't. My house is pretty much always clean because if I saw jobs piling up my stress would spill into other areas as I worried about finding large chunks of time to tackle larger jobs. For me, they are easier to handle when they stay small jobs. Keeping up with it is what works for me and makes me happy. If letting it go and doing it all at once, when you can, if you want, works for you then great. Can we stop comparing already? No one has the state of their home mentioned in their eulogy.

4) It's okay to say 'No'.

If getting the bubbles out means that ten hands need to be cleaned, probably clothes changed, maybe a fight over who spilled the soap and stepped in it, definitely at least one case of soap-in-the-eyes and today that is too much for you, say, "no". You are allowed to say no to things. If one NO in your life prevents you having a stress related meltdown when it all goes south then I'd say the no negative is better than the freak-out.

Kids don't have to help you cook everyday. They don't have to have free access to the markers. If you rolled out of bed in the dark to a wet bed down the hall and a fight already breaking out between kids, maybe today isn't the day for extra stuff and bare minimum is just fine. The days you are up for it, it'll be that much more fun.

5) Do things that feed you.

Make what makes you, you, an important thing. Of course the kids are more important, but remember to teach them (by example) that life isn't about being a martyr and they should work to make time for what feeds their soul too. Let them find it and give them space to want it for themselves. You will come back to them as a better person if you are fulfilled on your own two feet. Same is true of time with your spouse.

You don't have to look back and miss, "that person I used to be, I really liked that person" you can still nurture it or find it again. The enormous responsibility of  having your heart walking around in pieces outside of your body demands a little extra kindness to yourself as often as possible (however brief those moments are). Kids do not need the burden of your entire happiness on their shoulders anyway.

6) How you are means more than words.

I can't say that enough. You can teach and show and do all you want, but ultimately the way YOU are is what your child learns from. And I don't mean, "Daddy treat your daughters kind so they know how a husband should love them." I mean, "Daddy love your daughters and teach them as a parent, showing your daughter what a husband is by how you treat your wife."

Added advice, they also learn by the adults they see on TV. Careful there...

7) Not much is really up to you anyway

I work really hard to raise my kids a certain way, they all see me the same way, heck some of them were born on the same day. Know what? They are completely different. And I don't just mean this one likes bugs and the other is into kittens. No, they are really different. One can't control impulses while another has the patience of a saint. Another notices little things like a flower blooming and a sibling doesn't even remember what you said three seconds ago. Some are careful, some are physical. Straight A's come home as do bad reports.

While I feel pretty good that I'm not raising career criminals, it's honestly a bit of a crapshoot. I try not to worry too much about the falls from grace with the reassuring thought that I'd rather they did it under my guidance instead of as an adult anyway, just check that off the list of lessons learned in their life.

So take a deep breath, check in with yourself from time to time, let them succeed and mess up, and realize that the weight of the world on your shoulders is real, warranted, and lighter than you thought.

Another lesson, floral prints and photos with lambs are a bad combo

Babies, Three of 'Em

The day is etched in my memory forever in slow motion. Laying on a medical table in the dark room while an ultrasound tech scanned my skin. She had the screen turned away from my face and all I could see in the room was the blue black glow reflecting on her.

She was very quiet.

I let my mind go back to a day when I was told I had lost a baby. This was that day again. The sweet woman sitting here is trying to be sure that the baby is gone and she's trying to figure out if she should tell me or if she should have a doctor do it.

She cleared her throat and broke the silence. "Have you been taking anything? Or were you under the care of a doctor when you got pregnant?"

"No." This was it. she was prepping to tell me now... the baby is gone.

"Well, this is one of those days that changes your life."

I felt the tears start to brim in my eyes and I swallowed them back. I wouldn't cry here, I'd wait until I was alone.

"There's not one baby in there."

There it was. Said out loud. Gone.

"There's not two babies in there."

Wait, what? What does that mean? What are you talking about?

Chris standing at my head, speaks up and says, "You'd better stop at there's not two babies in there"

What was he talking about? What was going on?

"You have three babies in there."

Words came to me quick, "No I don't."

"Yes, you do. See?"

She tried to show us, turning around the screen to face us, but I was shaking so bad that the image was blurred. She sort of laughed and I suddenly wanted to hit her in the face.

"But this happens right, I mean people probably come in here all the time with multiples on scan and then one gets like reabsorbed or something, right? I mean this doesn't actually happen to people. At term we'll have twins. Right?"

She asked if I was scheduled to see the OB, I told her I was scheduled to see the midwife. "Oh no, you're high risk now. You can't use a midwife"

What? C-Section? No, this can't be real. A second ago I was ready to hear I wasn't going to have another baby and now you are telling me that I'm having three more babies and oh by the way, welcome to a scheduled c-section. I'm going to be huge. I'm never going to be the same. What about Hunter and Sage? How am I going to have time for them? My business? No one can run that without me. Where are we going to put them all? What about Chris? Is he looking for exit signs to make a run for it, no we drove together, he can't.

Crap, drove. I just sold my mini van for a small SUV that sits 5. Seven. I need something that seats seven. What?

Chris spoke to me again, "I said, are you okay?"

I forced a smile but when he went to hug me I couldn't stop shaking and it made me start a nervous laugh until they called us to the doctor's room.

I asked 57 times, "How did this happen." Each time the doctor looked perplexed, probably wondering if he needed to give me a basic education or if he should just keep talking. He always chose to keep talking.

Neonatal Specialist, Hospital, Bed Rest, C-Section, Selective Reduction. He used the words like he was ordering lunch and I felt the room spin.

This was the beginning of our journey. Over the following 26 weeks and 2 days (I was six weeks pregnant when we found out about the triplets) we got to know so many specialists and nurses by first name that they to this day are on our Christmas card list.

The physical limitations were horrible. The leaving one house and moving into another wasn't a picnic either. Chris came home to our new house shortly after we'd moved in and saw my large bronze wolf statue on top of the kitchen cabinets.

He looked at me, piecing together what must have happened in his absence.

"How did...?" Sigh.

I sold my business. Chris got a new better paying job. We finished construction projects on the house that wasn't finished when we bought it. We found gratitude and felt blessed each time those little faces came up on a screen and the doctor said we were good for another 7 days.

I had heartburn 24 hours a day once the extreme morning sickness went away. They were painful as they grew, sometimes kicking each other and setting off a crazed war inside of me. When it was time for the injections to start I was already so tapped out from blood tests that it didn't seem like a big deal. I didn't have a sitter so Hunter and Sage came with me as I showed them how brave Mommy was. No one told me how painful the steroid shots were going to be until I got them.

The nurse looked at me after the shots, once she was sure I wasn't going to swear in front of my children, "yeah, we usually try and get you to get a ride home because these are pretty bad, driving is going to hurt"

The hospital stays began when I started going into labor at random times. I missed my kids. Major guilt at not being with them set in as I sat alone in the maternity ward night after night.

I'd get to go home only to have to come back again weeks later.

The last stay I had the joy (yes that's sarcasm) of experiencing Mag Sulfate. The drug worked but it messed up my heart rate, made me faint, and generally made me feel like I should have been a child of the 60's. Followed up by Terbutaline, they gave me Ambien so I would sleep.

It was at this point on our roller coaster that Chris and I discovered that I can have an hour long conversation in my sleep when I'm on Ambien, I even called him at 6 am to do it.

Then on March 31, Chris stopped by to see me on his way home from work. I had an appetite for the first time in forever and I asked if he could go across the street and get me pie and some sun chips. He looked exhausted but since this was the one and only pregnancy food run I'd asked of him, he agreed.

Before he got back, I was in full blown labor. Contractions one on top of the other. As he walked in the room, pie and chips in hand, they were getting scrubs ready for him to change into. There was no time to take me by ambulance to Northside Atlanta, I would be delivering the first set of triplets ever at Northside Forsyth.

I missed my mother so bad, I was terrified.

I could hear when Brianna was born but they didn't show her to me. With the 20 or so people in the room for the babies teams and my team, it was hard to even hear. Mikayla was born and Chris said she stretched out like a little spider monkey, room to move after living her whole life to that point in the middle. Tristan wasn't as easy. He got stuck in my rib cage and the doctor apologized multiple times as I gasped at the pain in my chest. Tristan was out. Everyone was talking again.

Someone said, "let her see one". Mikayla was the most stable and they put her by my face for a minute for me to see her tiny little body.

Chris went with the babies to the NICU while I went to recovery alone. I had gone from having 4 souls in my body at once, barely room to draw a good breath, to totally alone. It was shocking. My heart started to have trouble stabilizing.

I wasn't allowed to go to the NICU until I could walk. The nurses told me not to rush it, that usually it takes a day or two. 5 hours later, with what felt like hot irons in my gut, I was beside them. I could only see Mikayla's face as Bri and Tristan needed help breathing.

Brianna was immediately in trouble with a pnuemothorax and that began 6 weeks of life in NICU. I learned to not panic when I was holding one of my babies and the alarms went off in every room that one baby in the NICU was in distress and I knew that was another one of my babies.

Through that time I struggled through my own complication with peripartum cardiomyopathy.

At home a year went by in a blur of no sleep, rocking one baby with a foot while feeding another, while still another was crying. Trying to accommodate the needs of a 4 year old and 2 year old who suddenly had their lives around a different schedule that I constantly felt guilty about.

To the whole world they were the triplets and something to see. We were stopped everywhere we went and asked the most idiotic questions humans can ask. They would stop me while I was pushing a triplet stroller with one hand, pulling a shopping cart with the other, while a 4 year old and 2 year old were on either side of me holding my pants pockets.

People would say things like, "I'm so sorry, I could never do that, I'd kill myself if that happened to me, did you take the drugs to get them". The stupidity of strangers tempered by the occasional, "What a blessing".

They weren't a burden or a side show. They were Brianna, Mikayla, and Tristan, the last additions to everything I never knew I always wanted.

Enough

A few weeks ago I found myself holding a wing feather from a hawk marveling at how lucky this piece of keratin was, of all the things in the universe it could be, to end up as a feather for a hawk. What sights and astonishing heights it must have experienced. Did it bathe in a mountain lake? Skim the tops of hay fields as it came down for a catch? How wonderful to have had a short existence as a part of something as heavenly as that, when it could have been anything at all in this big world.

Days later the popular commercial, featuring teens and older being told to do something "like a girl" versus how a young girl did something "like a girl" went around and we all were reminded that women are powerful.

It'll be short lived though. The wow factor will fade out of our day to day routines and women everywhere will again be forcing on themselves the fact that they feel often as if they are not enough, and only worth what they can give out to make the people around them better.

I know this is true because I hear my friends. I see the blog posts that are quickly reposted that speak over and over again about how overwhelmed we are and how lacking we feel alone with ourselves at the end of every day.

What if someone looked at you at the end of your days, the way I thought about that feather, and considered how lucky your body was to be a part of who you were in this life. Not the minutes that make the hours that seem to ever more quickly spend the days. But the moments of things you used it for.

My hands have written the letters that put my father's name forever on the wall in Washington DC. They have wiped the tears of people I love, petted tigers, made handprints in concrete of the house I grew up in, fed baby kinkajous, and bled under the stress of work.

My hair has blown back in the wind from long gallops in the open and I've seen the mountains of Wyoming from the back of a horse. I swam with dolphins, wrote a eulogy, and thanked God for the beauty of a star filled night as equally as I have the sunrise.

I've created some things and destroyed others. I've been wind burned from the breezes off the ocean at the top of a lighthouse and cat-fished by a lakeside when it was too dark to see where the ground left the water. My name is carved into a tree.

I know the way music sounds when it's played live on a summer night, how to make my babies laugh, and how to give someone else love even when I have run out of it for myself. I breathed in again after my mother's last.

Fear has knocked me on my ass and my heart fought back.

I've ridden motorcycles on the dirt tracks, hung out backstage with the lead singer, and made meals that created joy and fed tiny growing bodies. I saw the twin towers from an airplane, wrecked a car, and ice skated with the boy I had a crush on. I've broken bones, needed stitches, and went back to work. I made a snow leopard enclosure shoulder to shoulder with a famed biologist who taught me everything.

My dog and I ran in the dirt of 7 states, a racehorse licked my face, and I've saved approximately fifty turtles from highway death. Once I taught a bird how to call the family dog to it's cage, stroked a deer, surprised a moose, and worked with snakes. Even though I never went to college, I ended up spending two years teaching at one.

I can autoclave surgical packs, tell when a dog is mentally incompetent, read bedtime stories with funny voices, and teach a green thoroughbred how to jump.

I know Shel Silverstein poems by heart and fart jokes that send ten year old boys into fits of laughter.

To offense of the ears in the vicinity I've played piano pieces to an audience and sang karaoke. My mother used to delight that I could call the seagulls from anywhere and butterflies would land on me. I've caught the wedding bouquet, danced until the DJ closed down as well as in the rain, and eaten scallops and shrimp I just pulled from the water.

I know how to make snow cream, where the fairies like to hide, and what salt tastes like on your lips on an ocean pier at 2 am. I can french braid little girls and ponies.

I'll lead you to a dozen mountain waterfalls, show you how to shoot an arrow true, and make you some fried cornbread. I know the patience of a mother who has had no sleep, gently trying to soothe a colicky baby, and the fragile state that comes from a broken heart.

I've buried friends, given birth, and cried when a song came on. I've been arrested (nothing major, settle down) and blessed by a priest. I have tattoos I've never regretted and of all the thousands of things I can see both sides to, I firmly believe there is more good than bad.

Never could I tie a good knot, walk away from a justified fight, drive a manual, or climb a tall ladder. I've also been fairly poor at controlling having my thoughts immediately spew out in the form of words.

Many times I've said no when I wanted to say yes and yes at times I wanted to say no.

I've wanted and lost and loved and had the wind knocked out of me. I've seen sunlight hit a baby's hair in such a way that God himself could not have looked more undeniably beautiful. Only twice have I had shooting stars go across the sky I watched and only once have I thought the world would be better off if I was no longer a part of it.

I've tried for things so fiercely I was in danger of full destruction if they did not work out and loved people so much that I tried to rein in my emotions until giving into it just being my way, embraced as a gift instead of seen as a fault.

All of this. All of these moments and things I have tried to recall to remind myself of that thing that so many of us find time to pick a fight with daily, I am enough. I am enough. I am enough.

I hope when the day comes that I am done, my body will be like that hawk feather, blessed to be a part of who I was.