Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

There are certain discussions that today’s parents expect to have with their children that I did not have when I was their age. What to do if there is a shooter in your vicinity. That any drug can be laced with fentanyl. What you post online can always be found, even years later, and not just if you’re running for public office, but also if you’re applying for your dream job and someone runs a background check. And then there are discussions that were the same as when I was their age. Keep your drink covered, don’t drink from punch bowls, and only from cans you open yourself. And, more than anything, be true to yourself. Don’t be taken in by the con men, the snake oil salesmen, the impostors. Trust your gut even if your head and heart are leading you astray. Your head doubts and rationalizes, your heart leaps, but your gut will know, if you pay attention. (So will your parents, more than likely, but you may not be ready for that yet. And that’s okay.)

I grew up in what some people have referred to as a Norman Rockwell childhood. I’m sure it had its issues but I largely remember it that way, too. A lot of acres to roll around in, a dinner bell (an oversized musical triangle, actually) to call us home. Two happily married parents, and a grandmother who made homemade bread and pies and let you flop on her bed to talk about the day, on her flowered quilt bedspread, next to the Some See Him Rorschach Jesus print that hung on her wall for as long as I can remember. We had a clubhouse with a rope and a ladder and a tire swing underneath, and a trampoline that hosted some highly choregraphed routines that were nothing short of impressive. Newborn kittens in the hay loft, and extended family baseball and kickball games with first base as the foremost oak tree in the line of them, and third the closest corner of the garden.

To be clear, a Norman Rockwell childhood doesn’t save you. I went on to make plenty of blunders. But it grounds you. It gives you your basic touchpoint about who you are when you are true to yourself. I had a religious, church-centric childhood, but not one that was in any way evangelical. My parents, then and now, believe in a religion you can see by how you treat people, by how you care, not by where you are on Sunday morning, though the two can certainly intertwine. They taught me that how we treat the neediest among us is how we create our personal yardstick of service, grace, and love. I grew up accountable to a lot of people within our Methodist church community, and I think I was –am– better for it. It kept me on a pretty straight-arrow path as a teen, not because of a fear-based religion, or a community of judgement, but because there were a lot of good people who wanted to see me do good. We volunteered in Appalachia, and with Habitat for Humanity, we put together comfort bags for homeless shelters, raked leaves for the elderly, and visited nursing homes with cookies on Valentine’s Day.

I also grew up with Kids Praise and Psalty, the Singing Song Book. Psalty and Free to Be You and Me were really transformational early childhood soundtracks for me. I can still sing 1 John 4: 7-8, and Seek Ye First in a round (only Seek Ye First, in a round. 1 John 4: 7-8 sung in a round would be chaos). It is a memory that makes me smile, but also feel a little sad. I know some people would point to the fact that about 68% of Americans identify as Christian as “the problem with America today.” When I was born, it was more like 90%. By the time I graduated from high school, it was more like 80%. My kids didn’t grow up with Psalty, and some would say that is why the solution, perhaps, is to bully religion back into classrooms. Put the 10 Commandments on the walls of first grade and Trump Bibles on the shelves. But I contend that the issue is more that, as Gandi said, “I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” Instead of insisting on pushing a condemnatory rhetoric and demanding adherence, we need to live as Christ intended, so that “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

Some people will stop reading here because either, 1) they are insulted that their Christ-like nature is being questioned; or 2) religion is boring and sanctimonious, and reading someone’s sermon is a really lame way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

I’d ask you to keep reading, partly because I think I have some things to say that are worth thinking about, and partly because I am honestly so surpassingly angry these days that I need to get it out somehow. I understand that there are a lot of people, people who I grew up with, and looked up to, who I know are salt-of-the-earth good people who believe in community and giving back, who show up at women’s shelters with clothes for job interviews, and serve at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving – and who will, or have, voted for the Trump Vance ticket. And I can’t wrap my head around it. It brings me back to the print on my grandmother’s wall, and makes me wonder as I balance the world’s rhetoric, Do you see him?

I had to explain to my loving husband this morning, upon listening to Good Morning America and hearing Trump talking to Tuck about training guns on Liz Cheney, that I was yelling near him, not at him. “You’re passionate about it, not angry at him,” my daughter soothed (because she knows girl code). But in fact, I am angry. I am very, very angry, because I don’t recognize my neighbors anymore, and I don’t recognize the people I grew up with. I don’t use this blog much these days, mostly because there are so many things that shouldn’t need to be said, and also too many people already saying it. And how do you even begin to articulate things like, “Publicly fantasizing about jailing Americans with opposing viewpoints, supporting “one real rough, nasty day” of policing, and dismantling the FCC… is bad.” If it needs to be said, it feels kind of too late to save us. When I think back to the #thisisnotnormal hashtag of 2016, it seems so stinking cute. Quaint. We had no idea. If only we could go back to the not normal of 2016, I’d be forever thankful.

A few things have been on my mind lately, and they go back to those conversations that you don’t expect to have with your children.

One thing is that in my suburban Denver house, in one of Colorado’s safest cities, in one of the state’s wealthiest counties, per the statistics, my daughter has fears about school next week after the election. She is afraid of potential violence. She is afraid of voicing an opinion because she fears reprisals. She is afraid for her sister, at college out of state. She is afraid for the fact that we picked up a couple extra jars of spaghetti sauce and pasta, cans of tuna, and put a few extra pounds of hamburger in the freezer – because you just never know. Before every snowstorm, bread and milk fly off the shelves. It feels kind of like tracking a storm right now. It could blow over. Or be just some flurries. Or it could be snowpocolypse. Because That. Is. Where. We. Are.  We just don’t know. We are in the middle of deciding who we are as a nation; it scares me, so of course it would scare a 16-year-old. “I never thought I would cry about politics,” she said.

I’ve cried about politics before. I cried when Trump won the first time. I ugly cried when RBG died. Both of those proved warranted, from my perspective. But this is the first time I’ve been afraid, not of the outcome of the election itself, but whether the country makes it through with a peaceful transfer of power. I realize that some people will disagree, but I don’t feel like it is the person saying she wants to be the President of all Americans, listen to the experts, and seat people who disagree at her table who driving this fear. It does seem like it might be the guy talking about the “enemy within,” an era of retribution, mass deportation, and guns “trained at” his political foes. The guy whose own generals and national security leaders (780 – seven hundred and eighty! – of them) have called him “dangerous” and “unfit,” and a “wannabe dictator.” If January 6, 2021 is debatable, about whether it was an insurrection or a “day of love,” it is at least a foreshadowing of possibilities we didn’t even consider when we voted in November 2020. I would even take the not normal of 2020, it turns out.

When I think about about the things that worried me as a child – and I do remember a couple of heated middle school arguments about Clinton and Bush Sr and definitely some more heated college ones about W vs Gore – politics did not feel like they were about personal safety. Rural Ohio in the 90s was different than suburban Denver today. It’s fair to say it was – for me – more homogenous, which perhaps lends itself to a skewed sense of fraternity. Today, my world is more diverse, and I’m grateful for it. I’ve traveled more, I’ve met more people, my circles have both grown and contracted. For example, I know quite a few friends of my children who are witty, smart, talented, empathetic people who either aren’t as concerned about fitting into a snug box of sexual or gender identity, or who are outside the box. Their parents, the same as mine were, we all are, are looking for a world where their children are safe. I want more than anything for the community that I grew up in to embrace the children who are growing up afraid, today. To let them know they have their backs.

It’s different than we grew up with, than what our parents grew up with. The difference is because society is ever-evolving to be more complex because we are evolving, our brains, our reach, our humanity. An ice age ago, finding a cave and lighting a fire was pretty much the apex of things. Today my electric car connects to my phone that connects to radio waves that can connect me to a podcast of a Finnish Nobel laureate (or The Tortured Poets Department anthology, whichever).

There is a reason why they say, “Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.” The United States had slavery until 1865. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (the reason I can open a bank account, a credit card, and hold a mortgage), didn’t come about until 1974. Gay marriage wasn’t legalized in all states until 2015. 2015! Less than one single decade ago. Blows my mind. All of this to say, society changes, but the biggest constant is our unique ability to care for each other. Even in the fire caves, excavations have found skeletons with bones that were set and healed. Our very first ancestors cared for each other, even when it was hard, even when doing the right thing probably felt scary, with perhaps a saber cat pacing outside. Christians don’t live by the Old Testament, because the New Testament superseded it. Modern Christians pray in public, accumulate wealth, and have women in pulpits, even though all of those things are verboten in the New Testament. The greatest part of humanity is our ability to evolve. In our evolution, let’s think about how many times Jesus mentions love. Love as the greatest of these. We aren’t a community only when it’s convenient, only when people look like us, or speak like us, or love like us. We are a community because we have each other’s backs and want to see ourselves do good, and pass it on.

If you think you can love someone while voting against their equal rights, I’m pretty sure one of us is misreading Jesus. Jesus served the poor, the sick, the distressed. He sought out those whom society kept at its edges. When Ghandi noted the discrepancy between Christ and Christians, this is what he was looking for: For I was hungry, and you gave me food. For I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in.

Would you find Jesus, a brown emigrant of Nazareth to Egypt, at a Trump rally with Stephen Miller talking about America for Americans and Americans only? Would you find him making up stories about (legal) immigrants eating pets, stories that put people in danger because of the vitriolic and irrational reaction of people who lived no where near them? Or would you find him sitting with a frightened teenager, or holding the hand of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, or maybe even giving food and water to someone crossing under the razor wire of the Rio Grande, maybe a mother with a newborn son, looking for somewhere safe to watch her child grow up without a metaphorical saber cat, or Herod, in sight.

As Psalty the Singing Songbook said, “Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone who loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He who loveth not, knows not God, because God is love.” Come to think of it, I think someone said it before Psalty.

On November 5, let them know us by our love.

My neighbor has these gorgeous dinnerplate dahlias that mark mid-summer with pure joyful fortitude, drinking in the summer sun and bursting into pink spiky glory just when you think, I can’t handle yet another 90-degree day. But if you want the dahlias, deep summer is where you find them.

It’s curious how life moves in cycles, which we learn and see and live from childhood, and yet when we find ourselves at the end or beginning of one – or most likely an end and then a beginning – we find ourselves a bit surprised. Either with the speed in which it came, whether fast or slow, or with the fact that it’s suddenly upon us, no matter how ponderously it crept up. My social media has been full of college freshmen moving into their dorms, photos posted by parents who I met – as it turns out – a generation ago, on elementary school playgrounds and Girl Scout meetings. In many cases we’ve lost touch, except for our common thread of aligning milestones, keeping our experience synced. Our kids skinned knees together, played soccer, changed schools, changed schools again, learned to drive, and now – are leaving home for new chapters where we are secondary characters to their plot, rather than half their world. And so, when I see the photos of kids I may not have seen in person since grade school – or sometimes ever, outside of posts from people I myself went to grade school with – it still feels personal. We are in it together.

This week was a big one at our house. My youngest got her driver’s license, and my oldest leaves at the end of the week for her first year of college, 1800 miles away. The timing of this was no coincidence, having specifically set a goal for Eva having her driver’s license before Samantha (and her driver’s license) disappeared. And yet even knowing it was coming, it feels like a lot to take in. I’m back to waiting anxiously between departure and arrival texts and trying to gauge the speed and difficulty of my commute with the eyes and reflexes of someone with less than 100 hours of driving under their belt… but trying not to voice too much apprehension, so as not to rattle confidence, but enough to also make sure my super reasonable, extremely warranted concerns are heard, but softly. Samantha will at least have the advantage of distance, while she navigates her new routine and town.

My co-worker asked today how the week was going, knowing that it had been lining up to be a emotionally demanding one. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just change, you know?”  and he replied, “You mean, it’s progress.” And I realized that is the better framing of this new season, even though the line between the two feels more like a square knot sometimes.

Every time I go through a new iteration of parenting, I have deeper admiration for my own. I went to school out of state, and then I studied abroad. This was during the very transitional phase of cell phones, and while some students may have had one at that point, they certainly weren’t prevalent in the first couple years I was away. When my parents put me on a plane to London, after which I had to get to the smaller town of Worcester, they did so knowing that I had a calling card in my pocket that could work at any pay phone, but no way to contact me in a hurry. But, they let me figure it out. And I did. I had an amazing, perspective changing year of growth that has continued to shape me even today.

I saw a quote recently that said, “Perhaps this next stage has more to do with who and what you’re choosing to grow with, rather than who and what you’re letting go of.” And it hit me, that positivity of new beginnings. Michelle Obama said this week that hope is making a comeback. For years, I have had a print in my living room with a Emily Dickinson quote, “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the song without the words, and never stops, at all.” I’ve been focusing on the wrong things for a while. I’ve been afraid of the change and haven’t seen the progress.

Eva told me that last night, when she drove the 13 miles on I-25 between school and home for the first time with no one sitting in the passenger seat, she had a smile on her face the whole time. She was nervous, but she was also confident. I watched obsessively for her to arrive, but it was already a little easier to watch her leave this morning. I’ve found that lately, it’s been a little easier to relax my grip on the reins of all my worries. That soul song seems to be coming back, not as a crescendo, but as a familiar melody humming just at the edge of the brain.

In the last 18 years of parenting, there is no age or stage that I’d rather go back to, though I love looking back. Babies are squishes of miracle development. Toddlers are fierce and precocious. Preschoolers are independent rebels with dubious fashion choices, and grade schoolers are information sponges. Middle schoolers are insightful contradictions, children one day and teens the next. But my teenagers. They are funny, and they are ambitious. They can talk to you about literature or about politics, or about the seventeen subplots of their favorite tv show. They get the joke, and they can make the joke. They want to change the world, and they are walking around with limitless potential. They are choosing who and what to grow with, and we can let them remind us to do the same.

… To your next adventures, ladies. 🤍

There are rosy, hazy memories that have the soft edges of a matte Slumber filter. KOA picnic tables with a Coleman stove as my parents, younger than I am now, fixed breakfast we would eat off blue enamelware plates. The celebration of Put-in-Bay with high school friends when we were just old enough to undertake such an adventure on our own. My grandmother kneading bread on the orange, flour-covered Formica countertops of my childhood kitchen.

And then there are crystalline memories, good and bad, as vivid today as when they happened. Watching a butterfly flit past the third story hospital room window when I was in pre-term labor with my oldest and knowing knowing in the deepest recess of my soul, that everything would be okay. But also coming home from work the day Lucky, the dog who selflessly loved me more than anything, died in his sleep in the summer sunshine of our backyard. It still stings. Memory is tricky. Some things we’d like to last forever slip away at the edges – much loved-voices, vacation details – while things we’d like to just forget, stubbornly hold on.

My parents can easily remember the day that Kennedy was shot, just as 9/11 seared our memories decades later. I remember the day the Challenger exploded, all of us huddled around the bulky television that had been wheeled in just so that we could all watch history happen – though no one thought it would be history like that.

I remember when I heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. It was a Friday. As is not unusual on a Friday, we were on Highway 24 in Colorado Springs, heading to our cabin in Woodland Park. Stopped – also typical – somewhere between 8^th and 31^st, scrolling news to pass time as we waited in traffic, it was a ubiquitous red headline. When 9/11 happened, it was terrible and tragic and felt unbelievable, but it was terrible in part because we didn’t know what would happen next. When RBG died, the reason that my stomach knotted and dropped, the reason I ugly cried until I was headachy and spent, was that I knew exactly what would happen next. I knew exactly what it meant. For me. For my daughters, for a country already bitterly at odds. While Kennedy’s assignation and the Challenger explosion and 9/11 largely brought people together in common grief and purpose, RBG’s death was a further shattering of shared purpose, of common democratic ideals and I was under no misconception that anything but glee and steely-eyed purpose was being felt by many at her death. Despite being quite firm that Obama did not have the right to nominate Merrick Garland in March 2016, before the November election, it turned out that nominating a Justice in mid-September before the 2020 election was just fine. Amy Coney Barrett was nominated and confirmed within 34 days, sworn in about a week before the presidential election.

I sometimes think about the things I’m glad that my grandmother never had to see when she died in her sleep, buoyed by Obama’s election the week before she passed away, thinking things were changing for the better. She was so glad she was able to vote for him, and I’m glad that she had the chance. Of course, I never met Ruth Bader Ginburg, but sometimes I’m glad that she didn’t see what happened in the weeks and months after her death.

This has been a long week. And actually, last week was a long week. The attrition rate at my workplace is through the roof. The Great Resignation has definitely been felt. From myriad articles I’ve read and anecdotes I’ve heard, recruiter messages on LinkedIn, it’s not just us. But just because it’s common, doesn’t absolve the stress of it. I’ve been at my company for 10 years, but since 2020, my department has seen about 80% turnover. Like a celebrity breakup, there’s the public statement, a goodbye email with contact information or maybe just an acknowledgement of the end of the road. “With absolute love and respect for one another, we have chosen to lovingly separate to begin new chapters, remaining friends as we begin new journeys though we walk separate paths…” Or something. The gradual wear and tear, the slow grind, is exhausting.

We are tired. To-the-bone tired. It’s ironic because I assumed that this stage of my life would be difficult because of having teenagers (no offense, love you girls!). But that’s what they tell you at each prior stage. “Just wait! Just wait!” But my teenagers are good and interesting people. My blended family is pick-ups and drop-offs, and dinner conversation, and inside jokes with just enough eye roll to keep it real. I went back to therapy recently – I go sporadically when it starts to feel like an impartial third-party might help me navigate my 3am what-ifs – and I told her, “I feel heavy. Like I’m carrying around a concrete block I can’t put down. I’m eating too much. I’m drinking too much. I’m just unimaginably tired.” I think the real issue is not so much that I’m exhausted, as that I can’t see when it ends. Apparently there’s no quick fix for this, which is always disappointing, but I’m going again in 4 weeks, just to see if something new materializes.

I was absolutely heartbroken in November 2016, but I was hopeful, too. Hopeful that it would be a wake-up moment for everyone who had shrugged and figured things would work themselves out. Hopeful that a neophyte politician would be mindful and humble enough to surround himself with experienced professionals and be … less than terrible. My family marched in the Women’s March in January 2021 in downtown Denver, and the spirit of positivism and activism felt indefatigable. Surely, we would rise.

Stephen Colbert saw it coming. In 2005, far before the first clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon to the average storm watcher, he coined Truthiness on his cable satire news show. Truthiness is knowing something in your gut, or your heart, as opposed to in your head. It’s taking what you see and putting your full faith in what you’d rather see. Truthiness feels true. And in that moment, Colbert recognized that it was the beginning of facts being the tool of the elitist left.

It’s hard getting up some days. It was a long week, and I was just holding on for the weekend, really. And then on Friday morning news broke that – as expected – Roe v Wade had been overturned by the Supreme Court in a strictly partisan 6-3 decision. (Actually, the 6-3 was a little surprising. I thought Roberts might vote for precedent and a creditable court, but at this point, neither here nor there.) Abortion is now up to the states, and immediately in those states with “trigger” laws, abortion may already be a felony. My family lives in Colorado which has laws already protecting abortion access, but if you live in North Dakota and are a high school senior who, let’s say, is also an honor student with a steady boyfriend who has early admission to a university out of state when you find out you’re pregnant even though you thought you were being careful, well… your options for a self-determined future just got a lot smaller.

I know a lot of pro-choice people. Men and women. Among them, I don’t know a single person who is pro-abortion. No one who thinks it is a decision that would or should be taken lightly. But I do know a lot of people who pragmatically realize that life is a lot harder for some people than others. That teenage birth rates and welfare rates are already higher in states that have draconian abortion laws, and that carrying a baby to adoption is not always healthy for the mother, physically and/or mentally. The foster system is already full. If everyone who professes belief that every baby should be born no matter the circumstances adopts a child from foster care, perhaps this conversation could begin to evolve differently. Currently, our country’s societal framework – no maternal care standards, universal health care, parental leave, nutrition access, etc. – cares far less about unwanted or unplanned children after they leave the womb.

Anyway, memory can be funny. I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like on Monday, but I can remember the white plastic rocking horse with its coil springs that my babysitter had when I was 3. But for the life of me, I can’t remember how we got here. I can remember #thisisnotnormal. The inflated inauguration numbers. The noise of windmills causing cancer. I can remember the Sharpie hurricane path. The staring into the eclipse. They all seem so ridiculously trivial, though also a little embarrassing on the world stage. But I also remember that phone call with some guy we hadn’t even heard of at the time, Zelenskyy. Who knew how that would come back around. And how half the country shrugged and called it political theater. I remember Helsinki. I remember “very fine people on both sides” and “shithole countries.” Each time sunk the bar of normal a little lower. Each one made it a little harder to feel the positivity, the push for change, of that January 22, 2017 march. A little harder to reconcile our country as the one in the international headlines.

I’m tired because I can’t see how it ends. I’m tired because I thought the bottom was 2016. And then I thought the bottom was 2018. And 2020. And because I know parents are feeding their children Tucker Carlson for bedtime stories. I used to think that we were fighting against each other like a bunch of Dr Seuss Sneetches. But the point of the Sneetches story was that they were ultimately all the same on the inside, and I’m not so sure we all are anymore.

At what point did we go from a country that achieved polio and smallpox eradication, to one where an entire segment of the population, and championed by their elected officials and vice versa, openly and derisively mocked masks (which have been in common use for disease control for more than 200 years) and use horse dewormer instead of mRNA vaccines during a global pandemic. Who celebrate the overturning of Roe while fighting to keep AR15s in the hands of 18-year-olds, even before its latest victims are buried. It defies belief, and yet. And yet. Here we are. I cannot figure out how we have allowed ourselves to be here, and I don’t know how we get out.

This is the part where I usually try to tie back to the opening paragraphs and end with something at least low-level insightful if not outright hopeful.

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We reached a record cold temperature early, early Thursday morning in Denver. If you’re going to be really hot or really cold, might as well break a record, I suppose. Ours was -7 degrees, the coldest March 10 you can find.

March is the month when it’s supposed to be summer in the sun and winter in the shade (Dickens). But for sure, we were just winter this week. All winter. Arctic winter. And while on Thursday we quadrupled that early morning temperature by the end of the day (low 20s!), cold is cold. I took a load of warm towels out of the dryer and there was a wave of warmth and fabric softener that spilled out with them. It gave me one of those moments of grateful clarity where you realize just how much you have, and that brief staggering recognition that threatens to overwhelm you as you stand with an armful of laundry in front of the dryer.

What’s wrong?, someone might ask you in that moment if they saw the quick pause, maybe a hitched breath held in surprise. And the answer would be nothing. The moment is so right in its tiny significant inconsequence as to take your breath away, or else consumed and forgotten in the noise of the day. It is a tiny pinpoint of stars on a dark night or a dandelion growing through the pavement. Everything and nothing.

Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet known for her poems chronicling her awe of the world around her. She saw magic in a blade of grass, in geese as they made their way on their annual migration (check out The Summer Day or Wild Geese). She is a beautiful writer.

And she is absolutely brutal.

“Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” she asks.

And then, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

What do I plan to do? Plan to be? I think I knew best who I thought I was when I was probably about 20. A lot has gone down since then. Now? Not so much.

Sometimes when I read Mary Oliver, I feel inspired to take more deep breaths and take more time. To be more present. Sometimes I want to promise to do more. Sometimes to do less, but with intention. Sometimes I feel attacked, guilty for not even being able to remember if I closed the garage door – so focused on the next thing, or not focused at all.

 It’s so hard to be in the moment that we download apps on our glowing blue light phones for mindful meditation, reminders to be grateful, alarms to Slow Down or Breathe. Mary Oliver would laugh wryly at our insistence upon mindful technology. Or maybe she would just turn away, sink down into a meadow, and leave us to ourselves. But even in our haste and inattention, sometimes the world around us insists that we take notice.

On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. And on February 26, one of my high school classmates, Eric Grove, died at age 43. The invasion of Ukraine was more expected than my classmate’s death, though both are depressing. Eric was affectionally known as a “big guy with a big heart,” and he was both. A cornerstone of my small Ohio hometown, no one considered that he might not be around for the next football season of the high school he loved so much, or to advise the college students he was a friend and mentor to in his admissions job. He and I were friendly, though never particularly close. But I graduated in a class of only 97 students, and he went to my childhood church (his then and current church where he ran the sound system every Sunday til this day). I knew his history and his family and his friends. Facebook kept us up to date. When he died, there was an outpouring of grief from my hometown. It was a tribute to how much he was loved.

And I realized – this is the point. Using our one wild and precious life to its fullest doesn’t mean that we get up everyone morning and change the world. But it means that the world is changed for the better because we’ve been in it. Eric Grove understood this.

Eric’s was a gentle existence. The invasion of Ukraine is anything but. But in both cases, it brings into such stark relief how much we take for granted the quiet piling up of seemingly unremarkable days. I imagine an old woman, stacking pearls into a pile, a pearl for each day, amounting to years, carefully constructed into a just-stable collection. And then, an earthquake; then an avalanche. Pearls spilling, tumbling, smooth and slick and spinning into chaos. And as we scramble after each one, we realize that not one of them was unremarkable. Each is priceless and part of the whole.

Watching the news for 45 seconds of “highlights” will break your heart right now. It seems it has been that way for a while. Maybe for as long as there has been headline news. We feel powerless to FIX all the things that are broken. We watch the vulnerable and we feel vulnerable ourselves, but also guilty for having a dryer full of warm, soft towels. We’re angry that life is so unjust, and that so many people are gone too soon. We’re anguished that people, children even, are confused and frightened, afraid or in pain before they go. And we’re awestruck at the bravery of people who had work-a-day jobs just like ours, whose children refused to eat certain colors, whose dishwashers sprung leaks at inconvenient times, who rushed from work to orthodontist appointments to middle school band concerts – and who now form an army of peerless civilians.

Can any of us imagine our skies opening above us and raining down destruction? Can we imagine putting our loved ones into a mass grave, hurriedly, because we might be next, even as we bury our hearts? Even as I see it broadcast right into my living room, I can’t quite imagine living it.

Life is heavy. It feels like mid-winter when we we’ve been hoping for so long for spring. COVID cases going down? Can I introduce you to the possibility of nuclear world war? Or perhaps just rife civil discord in your own country that makes you grit your teeth as you bite your tongue so as not to lose friends, because life is too short?

Sometimes it feels almost disloyal to the horrible madness to laugh. Can we laugh into the anarchy? Does that make us mad ourselves? Or callously blasé? Or just … still alive? Our hearts are bruised and fractured, injured by a thousand small cuts and a few not-quite-mortal wounds, pressed to near-smothered by Putin’s horrific war crimes, by our friends’ and families’ grief, by our own ineffectiveness in shouting into the void for all the losses great and small.

But I have to think that we’re not defeated until we no longer watch the wild geese as they fly overhead, no longer feel the small wonder of a load of warm, fresh towels, until our admiration of others’ lives no longer prompts us to want to live our own… better.  

Perhaps all we can really do, perhaps the very most we can promise to do with our one wild and precious life, is – as Mary Oliver said – just to pay attention. To let our hearts fill and let them break. Again and again.

A couple of weeks ago, I was putting dishes away or maybe loading the dishwasher. I don’t even remember now, but I somehow managed to hit the top side of my left foot on the corner of the dishwasher door as it lay open. It stung. I likely cursed, maybe out loud or maybe under my breath, depending on how the rest of the day had gone, and I moved on to the next thing. Then, a few days later, I looked down and the entire top of my foot was bruised. I felt medical-ick hypochondria wash over me. Well, that can’t be good, I thought. My significantly-less-hypochondriac other half said, “Feet have no fat to pad an injury. They’re just bones and nerves. It’s fine.”

A couple more days went by, and the black and blue became that weird healing chartreuse, with just a line of dark bruising at my toes. And I thought, “Well that can’t be good.” “You probably bruised the bone,” my partner said, “It’ll take a while to heal.” Healing often takes way longer than I anticipate. There are things from 2002 that I’m still processing. Meanwhile, I have been wearing only ballet flats that don’t put pressure on the top of my foot (not ideal footwear for January and February), but any shoe with a tongue put its seam in the worst possible spot, and just forget a shoe with any style and or shape. And so, all flats, all the time.

Then I started to feel slightly off, once every so often. Dizzy. A little too hot and prickly around my core. It’s probably a blood clot, I figured, sanguine. You know, the kind in your foot that mostly affects your core and vision for ten minutes every 5-9 days.

 One of the best things about me is that my ability to worry endlessly is only balanced by my willingness to put my head in the sand when, in fact, I’m truly – reasonably or not – concerned. “You’re stressed out from work, from raising two teenagers, from watching the news,” I said, to me, out loud. However, multiple friends and my partner said, “The foot thing is nothing, but seriously, feeling dizzy and tingly around the edges is not normal.” They pushed for a doctor’s appointment (for which I love and appreciate them). In the week that it took to get into that appointment, I lived my best life. I walked the dog on extra long routes. I spent time just breathing. I took my blood pressure every day. I put a moratorium on the near-daily glass of wine or cocktail that has become routine. (It’s almost like I already know the things that would make me a better, healthier version of myself.)

I went to the doctor. She did the doctor things and pronounced me apparently, seemingly healthy. She used the phrase “benign transient symptoms” and said that she wanted me to continue monitoring how often I was feeling off, call the office once a week with my findings (unless things suddenly got really weird), but that nothing I had described was throwing any panic switches for her. I asked her if it could be related to the foot injury somehow, but she said she didn’t think so… that feet have no fat and are all bones and nerves. “It will just take a while to heal; wear comfortable shoes.” (Hmm. Yes, noted.)

My daughter’s 14^th birthday is this week; we were supposed to have a party with just her uncle and her almost-uncle and our immediate family, which is what she asked for last year, too. She chose a theme (as we do) and a birthday menu that was tailorable for my gluten free and her almost-uncle’s vegetarianism. She’s a good kid. But Saturday morning, we were informed of a second-degree COVID contact. No one’s fault, just one of those things during life in an endemic. We have home tests, but it seemed like the window was just too short for a test to be meaningful. So, like many other times and events in the last couple of years, we switched to Zoom.

It was frustrating – it seemed like we had asked for so little. We hadn’t planned a dozen friends and a pony and a bouncy house. But at this point, any plan at any time can fall victim to life as we know it. It is what it is. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. But still, watching the little disappointments add up for our children, watching them rally, and rally again, hurts our collective mama hearts.

Mostly I’m just so tired.

I haven’t been in my 40s with two teenage children before, so maybe this is just what tired is. I don’t really know different. I try to think about if I had been born in 1900. If I had been 14 when WWI started. And then 39 when WWII started, probably with a 14-year-old of my own. And then in my 60s and 70s, my grandchildren were sucked into Vietnam. I can’t really imagine that. I can’t imagine the constant state of anxiety, throughout decades. I like to think that we’re on the downslope of all of this, even if we’re not.

But if I had been born in 1900, I think about turning the radio on for the evening news to hear the day’s events. To read the paper, black newsprint on my fingers, and then putting it down to make dinner. Contrast with today, my wrist buzzes with notifications. It’s a prison of my own making, really. The news is accessible 24/7, and headlines push their way in. Sometimes work is so busy that I don’t have time to keep up with current events, and honestly, even though long days arriving and leaving in the dark feel weighty, and even though I feel like I’m failing home life with my around-the-world take-out routine (Thai, Cuban, Indian, Japanese, oh look toasted sandwiches at home), it’s nice to be in a news-less bubble, even if just occasionally.

Recently, our Denver suburb has been in the news (at least locally) because our newly elected school board (who ran on a largely anti-mask platform with a side of archetypal dog-whistling thrown in) gathered its like-minded members (the 4, of the 4-3 divide) to deliver a private threat to our Superintendent. Resign or be fired (he did not resign). The 4 were given a heads up about open meeting laws they had broken, and so they quickly threw together an open meeting, with no public comment allowed, to officially fire the 26-year veteran who had supported masks.

I was – am – irate. I am frustrated. Disappointed. But mostly so, so tired. I admit that in part, I’m frustrated because I voted for the 3, not the 4. My side lost. I have a hard time understanding many of my fellow Americans these days. And I’m sure, they, me. But if an open coup at the United States Capitol is not enough to unite a nation toward a new direction, what chance does a community violation of Sunshine Laws have?  

But. But. More than 1000 teachers called in sick on Thursday to protest the board’s actions. The community showed up en masse to rally on a day where the high did not break 20 degrees. Students are planning a walk-out to show their feelings about not only the Superintendent’s firing but also, and perhaps more pointedly for them, the new board’s dismantling of the District’s equity policy. As my 15-year-old said, “How can you concentrate on academics if you’re afraid of being bullied for who you are?”

Options still feel limited. The board’s decision can’t be undone. In the midst of so much uncertainty and upheaval, our school district will doubtless be losing teachers (1000+ teachers very clearly voiced their displeasure just this week, undoubtedly some of them will leave) as a Superintendent of the new board’s choosing is enstated. At least we know for sure that they only serve at the board’s pleasure, not their own.

I think about being born in 1900, but I wasn’t. I was born now (well, a few years back but of this era, and well before 1900!). I was born in an era of current events buzzing on my wrist and real-time news and a drumbeat of divisiveness. I am so, so tired of being disappointed and angry. I’m tired of watching my children’s disappointment, which is prolonged because the pandemic is prolonged, because so many people would rather take ivermectin than a vaccine.

I have a hard time distinguishing what happened yesterday and what happened in, say, August 2020. Was that two months ago, or two years ago? I know I need to figure out how to parent through the disappointments of the 2020s, just as parents did in 1914 and 1934. But I’m flying blind here. Hopefully I get more right than wrong.

I’ve had a few weird health and wellness episodes, but I can mostly text my brother a little obsessively for a few weeks and get through those. My doctor remains fairly convinced of my health and resiliency. But I think I understand now that my bruised foot is really the better allegory for February 2022. There’s just no padding to absorb the blows. It’s just bone and nerve and a lingering tenderness, even as we get on with it, even as we wear comfortable footwear – or leggings, whatever – and go about another day.

My daughter turns 14 this week regardless of whether she was able to hug her uncle in person over cake. And she’ll be okay. Whatever doesn’t kill you, they say and it’s probably true, even if we’re tired of proving it. We’re a little bruised, bone bruised even perhaps, but still out there in the cold on a 16-degree day, believing that no matter what, it’s still worth showing up. Still rescheduling birthdays with Zoom meetings with the people we love most, still singing happy birthday.

Over Christmas, our family went to Cabo San Lucas. We (I) sweated the return COVID test requirement a little, but it turned out fine. We watched whales sound and rode horses on the beach and watched the sun rise over the ocean and ate fresh seafood and papaya. We family’d. Yes, we’re tired and a little bruised. Our nerves are singing. We’re frustrated, angry and literally (literally!) vibrating with news and opinions and reminders to Move! and Breathe! But we’re still here and even on the hardest days, we’re showing up for the sunrise.

It is 6:12pm on the Sunday night before the week of the first day of school (which is actually not until Tuesday, thankfully.) The lingering heat from the day is still enough to be just a few degrees more than a warm summer night comfortably requires, but the knowledge that summer nights are far too few, in the grand scheme of things, makes me seek it out, anyway. There is a bee poking around, landing uneasily close to my bare feet, to my drink, buzzing within vibration of my ear, because warm summer nights always have both the enveloping warmth and the reminder that nothing is quite as superlative as our own imaginings.

School always starts earlier than you think it would or should, based on all the summer cues around us. Last year, it started two weeks later than slated, a futile offering on the altar of re-acquiring our normal, just on the other side of “maybe” and “what if.” And after two extra weeks, and no real change to any unknowns, school started back with a remote/in-person masked hybrid that we were almost used to, but not quite.

This past week, when we picked up schedules and tested locker combinations and met teachers and mapped classroom routes, we ran into one of Eva’s favorite teachers from last year, who gave her a hug and asked about her summer and her new schedule and how she’s been. As we walked away, Eva said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen what her smile looks like in person.” This teacher who was instrumental in Eva’s best scholastic year to date. Who sang her praises as a good, kind human and made her feel seen and appreciated in the hard-knock world of middle schooling. Who worked hard to make sure that Eva was set up on a solid path for the future. But whom Eva had never seen smile, in person… I have to stop and sigh a little. This. This is Covid, abridged.

On Tuesday, we go back to school on schedule. In person and five days a week (should we not be pacing ourselves after all we’ve been through??). And the first holiday is not for weeks. Weeks! Four of them, in fact.

When asked whether they are ready to go back to school, my oldest shrugs. My youngest says, “I’m ready. I like routine.” I went back to work in person full time at the beginning of March, so in some ways, I’ve been back to it. I wear work clothes again. And make-up and heels and leave in the morning often before the time I was even getting myself out of bed in those weird, dark winter days when my dining room table was my whole world. But it feels like we are still so unsettled. We’re trying on a routine, pantomiming the actions of the people we were, but still standing on the edge of an unknown, wondering, What if, like a drummer’s tattoo. Fall break. Maybe. The holidays? If… then… for sure. Unless. But otherwise, yes, absolutely.

My boyfriend’s daughter and her husband came to visit last month, a visit long delayed, supplemented by calls and texts and opening presents via video. My parents are coming next month and I honestly just want to sit in the same room that they are in and eat at the same table and share old jokes and know that time and distance are only time and distance, after all, and powerless against deep-rooted family bonds.

Everything seems so much more indelibly significant and yet also like a series of Polaroid photos, snapped in a moment we can’t be sure of until we can look back. I met my best friend’s daughter approximately 15 months after the obvious timeline would have suggested. She was born 18 months ago, in January 2020. Planning to give the new family a little space to find their new footing, I figured I’d hop a plane and visit in the spring. In January 2020, it made complete sense. And now she’s walking and talking and doing puzzles and eating her own red peppers and salmon for dinner, and it seems crazy that in the time I was at my dining room table, this tiny baby became a small human who can befriend rollie pollie bugs during a garden exploration.

Time is relative, and yet so formidably fixed. This week, this second week of August, all my accounts and apps offer up memories of first days of school in years past. Google photos and Facebook and Instagram and Shutterfly. On this Day. We hope you enjoy looking back… And the similarities are as pronounced as the differences. The photos with new backpacks in front of the first-day-photo tree. Tan legs and sun-lightened hair. But so much change in the children themselves.

Now I have an 8^th grader and a 10^th grader, and I have no idea what the year ahead will hold for them. I have fewer answers than ever, and I never had a monopoly on them. I hope our maybes and what ifs all become the routine that Eva is looking for. But I think we’ve all seen the other side of the looking glass now, so it’s hard to say if we’ll ever be quite the same again.

But even so, in a couple days, we’ll wake up early, stand in front of the first-day-of-school photo tree, and start the next thing. And we have these summer nights.

Spotify told me at the end of last year that my most-played song was Crowded Table by The Highwomen, which seemed a little ironic considering that our table has been set for a maximum of 4 throughout. But our background music is often a balm for what we’re missing or need, an emotional cohesion between what’s happening in our lives and our hopes or fears. It’s why we belt out heartbreak songs along a ribbon of highway even when we’re currently in a perfectly happy, supportive relationship and why certain songs bring us straight back to 1995 and high school friends’ hot concrete summer-sun driveways (looking at you here, Coolio and Weezer with a side of Warren G). Because at some point, we’ve been there. At some point, our hearts swelled or broke with those chords. We have an emotional flexibility that allows us to feel the highs and lows of our previous selves and of others’ through soundtracks.

I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions over time. I’m not sure if my tally is higher or lower than an average Jane of my age and background, but I can certainly tick a few off. Some had exceptional consequences. Some had less. Getting married young to a grifter? Not awesome. Getting dropped off by an airport bus in the center of Rome with nothing but a backpack and a passport? Could have gone very wrong. Turned out fine. We create resilience by recovering from poor decisions. We pick ourselves up and thereby understand what it’s like to have been down.

I have been incredibly fortunate to luck into a few really good things, to have escaped the worst in a few others and to have worked really hard to fix a few of the bigger mess-ups. Through a combination of stupidity, luck and hard work, I’m a solidly middle-class American with a mortgage, a family, a job that pays my bills and an expectation of a few weeks’ vacation time. I like to think of myself as a fairly progressive world citizen, but I admit that I have some caricatures of the non-Western world that have crept unbidden into my subconscious. I’m definitely not proud of that but I think that by and large, as Americans we grew up with the assumption that as the holders of illustrious blue passports, we were born into a democratic moral superiority that gave us the obligation to police the rest of the world when it professed a misguided preference for strongmen and corrupt oligarchs. This may be obnoxious of us at times, but it’s part of the American ethos.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton swept the nation – and the world – in 2015 and even though COVID has shuttered performances, people eagerly await postponed performances, swept up by a buoyant soundtrack and the story of a founding father who has been on our money but is less familiar to us than George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. Alexander Hamilton, like his fellow compatriots, was far from a perfect man, and the musical doesn’t pretend he was, though there has been criticism from some that the slavery of the Revolutionary War era was not highlighted in Miranda’s patriotic depiction of the birth of our nation. We love Hamilton for the singable music, for the patriotism and the fervor, for the belief that we can all be Hamilton of a sort, maybe down but don’t count me out. We identify with the America Hamilton believed in, that we fought King George for, and that we built on the certainty that democracy is the eagle-soaring, majestic mountain virtuosity into which we have fashioned our identity – our tradition, our legacy, our due.

It’s been a rough year for sure. I love my family. I love our dog. I like the bright, sunny rooms of our house. I like our neighborhood and the dozen or so neighbors I know well enough to chat with about the weather, again, on one of the dog’s four daily walks. The ponderous routine of month 10 of COVID. But sometimes I just want to scream. I want to get in my car and just drive to somewhere that isn’t quarantined, that isn’t restricted in a dozen ways. Apparently I want to drive to 2019 or 2022 (we hope).

Last week, my youngest daughter found out that winter sports, which were rumored to be coming back when they go back to hybrid school later this month, are in fact still canceled or perhaps re-canceled. She’d been hoping to join basketball partly for the sport but mostly for the comradery. She was upset. “I hate covid y can’t it just go away and leave us alone so that we can do stuff we want to do instead of it getting canceled when you are excited” she texted me from her bedroom. I have no answers for this because I basically agree. Our kids have given up a lot to keep the rest of us older, comorbid people safe. It stinks. It’s not fair. We had plans. Google Maps recently sent me my list of places I went in 2020. 18 cities, it claimed. So now I know what Google Maps calls the 18 metropolitan areas within 30 miles of my house. 

In some ways we are suspended in time, Han Solo in carbonite, waiting. Cranky, tired, disappointed, canceled. Our actual physical isolation has perhaps contributed to our intense political divides. No longer going to work or to happy hour where I hear other people express views not quite aligned with, even opposed to my own creates an increased sense of detachment. I choose who I talk to. I choose who I listen to. I wonder if people have in some ways forgotten that we’re going to eventually re-enter the world more or less as it was. It’s as though this is an epoch that will be held separately from time, an anomaly that we can disown when we get back to it.

Except that our divide didn’t start with COVID. America is, in part, the land of middle class largesse, but not for everyone, and it never has been. Despite the ideals of our founding fathers, despite our soaring rhetoric, it has never been everything that we have wanted it to be. Langston Hughes was an African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1936 he published Let America Be America Again. It’s a poem about America’s great promise, even when it fails. It was never America to me, Hughes writes. But he hopes it can be. Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed, he wrote. O, let America be America again – the land that never has been yet – and yet must be. He died in 1967, after Selma, but before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was an America in transition, as it is still.

I see hopeful memes about going back to the America that was, that we grew up in, that our parents grew up in. And yet that America wasn’t the dream the dreamers dreamed. It was good for a few, tolerable for many, and still tragic for some. But there was a sense of forward momentum. The problem now is that we’ve lost our compass. We still have blue passports, but we can’t use them to get anywhere, and as we watch our own citizens attack our Capitol and call for the deaths of our lawmakers, we’ve certainly lost our perceived democratic superiority. We’re unmoored and drifting. Facts have become malleable. Hate has become fashionable. Great swaths of our country have been convinced that they can’t trust anyone who expresses faith in science, that everything is a conspiracy so deep that there is no evidence for it and if told not to believe their eyes, they will willingly blind themselves.

Months before the Presidential election, our nation’s President began to claim that no matter what, the election would be invalid unless he won. Hedging his bets, he wanted to make sure that seeds of distrust were sown, and he planted a bountiful crop. Election officials worked tirelessly to ensure that the record number of votes, cast during a pandemic, were counted faithfully. They were re-counted. They were hand-counted. Lawsuits lodged to try to disqualify votes were thrown out, by both Democratic and Republican-appointed judges, time after time. No evidence was produced again and again and again. As threats grew violent against public servants and volunteers who had simply counted and recounted the votes, state officials from the President’s own party went on television to plead with the President and his cadre to stop spreading the flames, to stop throwing fuel on the fire. Instead, the drumbeat of misdirection and sleight of hand continued from the President’s camp.

Our elected leaders, many of them lawyers themselves with a complete understanding of our court system and what such an absolute lack of evidence surely meant, added their voices to invalidate what the courts, elected bipartisan officials and the multi-counted vote tallies made clear. Trump had lost. More people voted for Biden. In the democracy begun by Alexander Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, this is how the process works. Votes are cast. Votes are counted. The winner advances, the loser retreats. This is what we expect from other nations. This is what we, from our democratic ivory tower, have demanded from strongman totalitarian governments around the world.

And yet… Don’t believe what you see. Blind yourself, the President commanded, and so it was done. Now, after an attempted coup, a riot in the halls of the Capitol in which the crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and brought Molotov cocktails and zip ties and killed one police officer with a fire extinguisher to the head while beating others unconscious with American flag poles … now those Republicans arsonists who burned down a democracy have the audacity to ask for unity. To ask for unity and insist that less than a clean slate is somehow irresponsible of those who won the election, while they wipe the last of the cinders from their lapels.

This is how you gaslight a nation.

Except that half the nation did not blind itself. Half the nation knows an abusive manipulator when they see one. And it turns out, the half he gaslighted was his own. It’s up to them if they want to pick themselves up, put in the work and, with a little luck, earn the resilience that comes with having been down, and picked oneself up. It’s been a rough year. We’re all tired and cranky and disappointed. But not all of us are buying the bullshit. Some of us see just fine.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed… let America be America again – the land that never has been yet – and yet must be.

My oldest daughter is now of the age where she texts of an afternoon to be picked up at Barnes and Noble at 5pm, rather than school at 3pm. And since I’m a big fan of brick and mortar book stores, and appreciate her appreciation of the same, this week I picked her up at 5pm at Barnes and Noble. She had purchased a Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities, which is one of the many reason I love her (she spends all her money on books).

I’ve read A Tale of Two Cities. Or more technically, I had it read to me, chapter by chapter, in Mr. Roseberry’s 9^th grade World History class. There are a lot of details I don’t remember about the story, but I do remember pretty vividly that it’s a complicated story line with a lot of double-crossing, and people who look like other characters, and are in love with the wrong people. If you haven’t read it, it’s not really worth summarizing here, and I couldn’t, as it’s been way too long, except to just reiterate that it’s a story about revenge and redemption and love, as so many good stories are.

Probably the one thing we all may remember about A Tale of Two Cities, if we remember nothing else, is its opening lines, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

Seems pretty prescient. I guess the world has gone through some hard times before. Since my daughter brought the book home, I’ve been thinking about those well-known lines. How everything seems to be at opposite ends of a pendulum lately. There is incredulity on both sides of our political spectrum. One side of our country is engulfed in fire, and the other in a stream of hurricanes. Even specific to this pandemic, some people have lost everything, and some people have been only modestly affected.

One thing that seems universal is that we’re all stressed out. We’re on edge. We’re not coping quite as well as maybe we’d like. I’ve been searching for balance lately, so I thought I’d put a little effort into what isn’t apocalyptic lately.

I have taken more walks with my youngest daughter than at any point in our lives. And we’ve made more meals and baked goods together. And practiced more Beginner French conversation. And just in general shared more time together. In the past, I admit that I couldn’t have said for sure what topics my children were studying in the majority of classes. But this year, I know. And I know what’s been challenging, and rewarding, and frustrating… because we know each other’s lives better. Just as I no longer disappear into an anonymous office, their day also unfolds in front of me.

Our dog now thinks that he gets four walks a day. This has been an easy thing to accommodate through this amalgamation of mostly warm weather months since COVID. This quadruplication effect may be tested as it gets colder and darker, but I specifically bought a winter jacket with that silver polka-dotted thermal reflective layer just based on how freaking excited the dog gets every time his beseeching puppy dog eyes win out. You just can’t have the power to grant that kind of joy to another living being and not use it for good. He’s happy, we’re happy. It’s win/win.

Now, this may seem like a small thing, but it brings me great joy – a large percentage of both my leggings and dresses have pockets now. So that’s amazing.

Autumn is really just a gorgeous season. I went outside today at lunch to go for a walk and it was that perfect 80-degrees where it feels like you’re in a perfectly regulated sunbeam and the trees were in peak autumnal turn. I made pumpkin muffins last week and pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting this week, both of which are delightful treats that somehow don’t fit quite so perfectly with any other season but fall. Give me all the spiced apple cider and baked apples and pumpkin muffins and I’ll imagine that I’m living in a farmhouse in Vermont with an orchard outside and a fire in the hearth.

For sure, this has been the worst of times. I’ve seen the worst of me during it. The me who is angry and brittle and despondent, despairing of the world ever bending toward justice again. But it’s also been the best of times. I’ve been gifted more memories with my family than in any other season, more time to drink hot tea in my pajamas before rushing into the morning routine, more honest conversations. How are you? means something more now than it did a year ago, and I’m really glad we’ve been given societal permission to say, “This is hard.” May we not lose that.

It’s the best of times, and it’s the worst of times. We have pockets in our leggings, but we’re hanging on by a fraying thread. It’s not exactly balance –but it’s something, and there are pumpkin muffins to go with it.

There are three flies buzzing around the dining room where I am trying to work and I think I’m about to lose my mind. The dog is incensed and I’m frustrated. I’m irritated by the flies. I’m annoyed that doors were left open that should have been shut. I feel my most adult, and possibly hypocritical, when I demand of everyone and no one at once, “How hard is it to shut the screen when you come in?!”

I’m angry with my own inability to do anything but wave a hand wildly as the little demons dive bomb my person, kamikaze screaming past my ear with a high-pitched buzzing whine that makes me grit my teeth. One lands on the edge of my open laptop and rubs his dirty little front legs together smugly. I want the old orange plastic flyswatter on its wire handle that used to hang in the kitchen of the farmhouse I grew up in. I don’t even own a flyswatter now, though I’m thinking about running to Lowe’s at lunch, but I can very clearly hear the satisfying thwack that comes from knowing you just dispatched one of those little suckers. Across the street, every house’s windows open on this first day of Autumn, a baby cries and cries, and honestly, I get it.

Lately, I vacillate mostly between angry, frustrated and peckish. I have stern talks with myself about getting more exercise and eating better so that I feel better and want to exercise more and then eat even better in a spiral of wellness. I sleep poorly, but it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning because really, what new hell will be unleashed on us today? I think I’m waiting to see how the state of the world sorts itself out before I commit to coming out of my wine and cheese induced stupor. My favorite cheese right now is manchego, for its substantialness, important in a frustration snack. Something that you need your teeth for, just a little. And as for wine, just keep it coming, but not merlot.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with my daughters about magic. And how it does not exist in this house. There is no magic that stocks our fridge or pantry. No magic that makes school lunches or folds laundry or empties bathroom trash bins. Magic does not close their shower curtain to keep it from mildewing, nor pick their discarded clothing from the bathroom floor. They were largely unimpressed. This was my most direct foray into the pressure cooker that is bubbling inside me on a daily basis while I maintain an increasingly fragile sheen of understanding, calm, nice mom. This is the growing storm that no amount of wine and cheese can deescalate. A few days later, at the drop of some overdue French homework and a smirk, I became a banshee. Our neighbors with the crying baby were likely relieved that they weren’t the ones disturbing the neighborhood. I yelled until my throat hurt, and I felt no real relief. The pressure valve had popped, but there seemed to be no end to the cooker’s streaming contents which remained now uncovered but at a rapid boil. My children left for their week at their father’s. My youngest refused to hug me good-bye. She called to apologize that evening. And then the next morning texted that “because you were screaming at me yesterday, you made me forget my language arts book.”

And somehow, in that moment, I realized that in a world that is in shambolic straits, we only control what we take control of. I can’t expect the world to bend to the things that I am keeping seething inside. I am in the midst of pandemic fatigue, school fatigue, political fatigue. I’m mourning a life that I was taking for granted, but in my grief cycle, I can’t seem to get past Anger. I’m devastated that an impeached, amoral charlatan gets to set the stage to strip my daughters of rights that their grandmothers already fought for. I’m seething that even as our country literally burns down, federal climate change policies are being toppled so that oil can be drilled out of our national parks and our vehicles can belch out nitrogen oxide unrestrained. We’re so entrenched in systemic racism that the phrase Black Lives Matter enrages whole portions of the population. I never would have guessed when I was my daughters’ age that we could be here today, and I worry for them and for their far-future 40-year-old selves. We’re a broken, hurting, angry country finding new ways every day to be more broken, more hurt and more angry. I have no clear sense of how it ends, how it gets better.

I cried the cry of pure grief when Justice Ginsburg died last week. The sobbing that hollows you out and leaves you puffy eyed and head-achy. It was partly so many disappointments and fears colliding in one very crystalized event. And it was partly the fact that, a little bit, I was still holding on to the hope that even if magic doesn’t rinse dinner plates or vacuum up all those little corners of construction paper after a craft project, maybe there was still a little bit left in the world, even so, and maybe we could use it to steady the path for my daughters as they go forward, so that they don’t have to fight for control of their own bodies and workplace parity and breathable air.

I can’t control all of that. Not even Greta Thunberg or Bill Gates or George Clooney can control it. It’s overwhelming. But I can start in my own household by turning down my own bubbling rage and setting clear, concise expectations. French homework gets done, or electronics go away. The dishwasher gets loaded after dinner by those who ate but didn’t prepare the meal. Dinner conversation will be expected. Personal viewpoints and anecdotes encouraged.

When my daughter told me that it was because I yelled that she forgot her school book, I resisted the urge to be sorry and replied, “No. Regardless, you are responsible for your own things.” And in the end, that’s the point. We’re all responsible for our own crap, no matter how long this pandemic goes on, or who is in the White House, or how disappointed we feel when we wake up in the morning to another news cycle that breaks our hearts. And so, to live by non-magical example, I’m going to start expecting more from me, and making sure that, if there is only a tiny part of this wildly spinning planet I can command, I am in control of that little corner, rather than being controlled by my roiling emotions.

It’s the first day of autumn, and one of my favorite autumnal reminders is, “Like a tree, let the dead leaves drop.” Those things that do not serve us, hurt us. They drag us down and wear us out, and we can’t hold on to it all in any case. So I’m keeping cheese. I’m keeping wine. I’m keeping all screen doors tightly shut. I’m realigning my expectations to the things that I can control in this moment, without magic. I’m raising children who will be on the side of science, empathy, and respect.

 And I’m voting.