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We live three minutes from our elementary school. At most. If I wasn’t already in the car to go to work myself, there would be no excuse for driving, except maybe “winter” (because, ick). Our goal is to leave the house at 8:20, giving the girls a chance to find their friends in the morning and take a deep breath before the day begins. If we leave by 8:30, we can still probably make it, sometimes before the early bell, but definitely before the late bell. Especially if I’m willing to run back home after the bell has rung and grab my youngest’s glasses, my oldest’s lunch… (knock on wood, it’s been a little while).

At 8:35 every morning, Monday through Friday, an amazing thing happens. Somehow, 650 children arrive at our neighborhood elementary school. A line of cars, meticulously guided by school staff, weave in a one-way circle through the school parking lot. There’s not even so much a kiss-and-go policy, but an efficient stop-and-roll. Stop the car, kids roll out. Blow a kiss, call a few reminders behind them, and move out.

I feel a sense of solidarity when I leave the car loop. Every parent making that same right hand (only) turn has, in broad strokes, lived the same morning I have. There were teeth to be brushed, hairbrushes to be found, shoes to be paired. Is it gym this week (sneakers required) or is it art and cowboy boots? Who wants a cheeseburger today? Anyone, anyone? Yeah. I don’t blame you. We’re late! Let’s go! Everyone – even those timely children – are part of the common experience of, you know, mornings.

And so I leave the parking lot feeling at one with my fellow parents. And yet, at some point throughout the day, the morning, even just my drive, this feeling begins to dissipate. Just a bit… what are you waiting for that green light to issue you a personal invitation? And maybe there’s a little fissure in the foundation of good will as I get to work and pass the empty desk, again, of that one co-worker who has somehow managed to work from home for various vague reasons for a year. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wearing leggings every day, and doing laundry on a whim at noon on a Thursday? Deep breath. Seriously, we’re out of tea again? I show up, in person, every day! I deserve free tea!

I don’t think of myself as a particularly angry person. I follow multiple yoga practices on Instagram! I love sunsets! And musical comedies! And yet, the fact remains that by the time I get home, 9 hours after the comradery of car loop, I’m tired. I burned myself, just slightly, on the oven rack. Did we seriously eat the Girl Scout meeting snack? How do I possibly owe the school library $18 for your lost book? Have you even looked? If I look and I find it, I swear you’ll owe me $18. And… now I’m standing in the tidal wave of stagnant water from emptying the dishes “pre-soaking” in the kitchen sink. And I need to change my shirt. Little things. Little. And yet.

There’s no shortage of anger. Lately? Always? Maybe it’s not particularly new, but it feels palpable of late. Whenever I turn on the tv, scan breaking news, or god forbid read the comments section of anything, anything at all. An article on Top Rated Children’s Games? Is everyone ready for an online brawl about screen time, childhood responsibilities, the comfortable malignment of Millennials and whether preschool should be free? Okay. So… that’s a no on Just Dance Revolution, then?

Because in the past decade, my empathy gene is routinely refreshed by Disney and Pixar movies, I defer to Inside Out to try to understand this. Anger is a red brick whose head bursts into flame when he gets truly steamed. Been there, buddy. But at the heart of it, Anger – per Pixar – is about fairness, or rather the lack of it.

We get angry because our expectations aren’t met. We had a plan, even if we weren’t consciously aware of it, and the plan fell apart. I planned to get out of the house on time (no one said our expectations had to be realistic or reasonable). I had a plan to leave work five minutes early, to get home in 15-18 minutes tops, and now 23 minutes later (yes, my commute is super short; I should never be angry), I’m cutting it really close to being late to the next thing. We expected to be recognized at work, at home. We expected a friend to stand by us, a marriage to last. Whatever it is, for each of us, all of us, it boils down to, I expected, in this moment, for my life to be different. Easier, happier, fuller, less covered in dishwater… different.

The thing about anger is that it’s a creepy lurker. We’re not always aware that it’s there, but we get a weird feeling that pricks between our shoulder blades when we’re otherwise calm. Then out of nowhere, it’s bursting out from behind the bushes. You again?!, we think. Or we don’t think at all, because anger’s like that. We often don’t talk about anger until we’re apologizing for it. Or we’re holding on to it because, damn it, life didn’t work out how we planned and if there’s nothing else to control, it’s going to be this, this moment, this argument, this round of a 12-round fight.

The United States seems to be mid-match right now, hanging on to the round like there might not be another. There’s an acrimonious brawl that’s spilling into our perceptions of who we are as a people, as a nation. Disagreement isn’t the issue. Disagreement keeps a person, a country, from thinking too much on the surface, from stagnating in status quo. But the rhetoric filling the airwaves is divisive and alienating. Debate is good, but it has to start from, end in, a place of dialogue. Guess what? Compromise doesn’t mean that everyone wins. Often, it means everyone loses. That’s not a disaster. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the point. Each side concedes a loss in order to move forward. Does the thought of that, of concession, make your blood boil, just in theory? Because it does mine, a little. But, but… why should I bend? I’m not the one who’s so clearly in the wrong here.

Are we a mirror of our political process, or does it mirror us? It’s certainly hypocritical of me to admit to my own hair-trigger volatility and then judge the anger of others. We tend to judge our own anger as righteous, a moral high ground on the right side of history, whether it’s our own small dramas, or the national or global stage. We see their anger as – at best – maybe ignorant. The cycle continues, grows deeper. Now, it’s not just unwitting collusion; it’s contemptible. Abhorrent. Us, them. Other. And that works for us, because it’s a lot easier to judge, and dismiss, someone when you’ve drawn a clear line between us and them.

From the Oracle of childhood, who should be required reading for adulating:

Then the North-Going Zax puffed his chest up with pride.
“I never,” he said, “take a step to one side.
And I’ll prove to you that I won’t change my ways
If I have to keep standing here fifty-nine days!”
“And I’ll prove to YOU,” yelled the South-Going Zax,
“That I can stand here in the prairie of Prax
For fifty-nine years!  For I live by a rule
That I learned as a boy back in South-Going School.
Never budge!  That’s my rule.  Never budge in the least!
Not an inch to the west!  Not an inch to the east!
I’ll stay here, not budging!  I can and I will
If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”
~ Dr. Seuss: The Zax

It’s a malicious malcontent that makes us choose anger over reason. We’re better than that. We’re better than the nativist, xenophobic rhetoric that has begun to define this political cycle. As a country, we have expectations that aren’t being met. They’re different for everyone, and sometimes diametrically opposed. I’m pretty solidly sure in my convictions, but I can recognize that makes them right for me, not right for everyone. I haven’t lived my whole life yet. Who knows what sum total of experiences will shape me going forward, or have shaped others in their past… shaped me in my past. But for as many reasons, and more, as there are citizens, we’re disappointed. In our politics, our global image, our direction, each other. We’re angry. That’s not the problem. Anger can be an impetus for transformation. But when was the last time you made a really great decision in your life when you had flames coming out of your head?  I’m going to be honest. I’ve burned bridges, I’ve said things I can never take back, and I’ve felt righteously, indignantly RIGHT. Sometimes, looking back, I’m still sure I was right. Sometimes I’m sure I was wrong. Sometimes I’m just sorry no one called for time out. The problem with anger is that it’s not reliable.

My daughter is an active volcano, not necessarily erupting, but there’s a lot of seismic activity going on under the surface. You can’t rule an eruption out, but you don’t know when it will be or what might cause it. In the meantime, you just live your life, and then… the ground rumbles. When my daughter gets upset she will, occasionally, run upstairs or outside, “I just need to calm down!” she’ll yell. Sometimes she’ll repeat the process several times. Sometimes she’ll give up and just go to bed. Sometimes there’s lava and we all get burned. I empathize because I’m more volcano than lake myself. But even at 7, she knows that the solution, even when it feels elusive, is to take it down a level.

Robert Frost wrote, Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.

Anger is fire and ice. It’s fear and it’s disillusion. It’s disappointed expectations and a sense that we didn’t get ours, large and small, and there’d better be someone to blame because it’s just not fair. Truth. But as my daughter told me when she calmed down recently, Angry is just part of life. It really is. And since it is, we’ve got to learn to channel it. To march ourselves to our bedrooms until we’re able to speak rationally, and then figure out why we’re so ticked off and what we’re – reasonably, realistically, responsibility – going to do about it. Because we can all do better.

 

You know that cartoon of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy; he’s trying to get his mother’s attention as she’s laying down, pretty much comatose from parenthood, “Mom, Mom, Mama, Mum, Mommy…” and when she finally responds, Stewie says, ….wait for it…. “Hi.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

One of my friends is traveling on business a lot lately, and her day job is not completely ideal. “As long as you get to go back to the hotel, turn the tv to whatever channel you want and eat food from a take-out container balanced on your stomach, completely alone,” I said. “Well, that’s pretty much my every day, anyway,” she replied. Well… huh. While she is, in fact, both younger than me and living my fantasy, I still really like her.

I’m not saying I don’t have a pretty great life. Because I do. I’m not wishing it away. And I’m not projecting that everyone who gets to control their own remote control must love it (or hate it, or even anything in between). Clearly, that’s a gross simplification of my own fantasy. Let’s say daydream. Occasional daydream.

But… Sunday morning. I’m meal planning for the week, recipe hunting and pantry assessing, still in my pajamas. “I don’t want to leave the house today,” I say. “I don’t want to get dressed.” “By the time your list is done, you will,” my husband predicts. I pull my warm coffee mug closer, and wish I remembered, ever, to actually put on the cozy bathrobe that hangs in my closet. Winter weekend mornings really bring out the hermit in me.

My youngest is talking. Talking. Talking. She’s drawing characters that she’s pulling out of her head, and then drawing their corresponding houses. It’s cute. Creative. My husband turns on a Sunday morning news magazine. I visit the recipe sections of reliable food bloggers. Healthy Kung Pao Chicken, only 8 ingredients. Sold. Chicken burrito bowl casserole. Cheaper than Qdoba, for sure. Oooh. Chai hot chocolate. Not exactly dinner, but … cardamon, allspice, ginger… Did I use the last of the ground cloves for gingerbread at Christmas? Speaking of spices, I think I definitely used the last of the sage for Thanksgiving stuffing. I should put that on the grocery list. I only use it once a year, so it’s rarely top of mind.

“Mommy, how do you spell Mimi? Do you like how I’m drawing her feathers? Mommy, do you want to draw something?” My husband is putting away dishes and re-loading the dishwasher. To be clear, I’m appreciative of this. It’s just so loud. Clatter. Clink. Porcelain against porcelain. Silverware against glass. “Can I paint my nails? I want to paint them blue like the sky and then draw grass. If I have room I’ll put a sun.”  A screech of a fork across a plate and the whirl and hum of the garbage disposal. “Mama, do you think my nails are dry enough to paint the grass? Can you touch this one to see if it’s dry?” I’m moving canned goods around in the cupboard. Black beans, garbanzo beans, Great Northern beans, kidney beans, lentils… no pinto beans? Really? Aren’t kidney beans and pinto beans the same, anyway? Like garbanzo beans and chickpeas? “Mom, the yellow spilled!”

In my heart, I know that these are days, moments that will never come again. I know that in the – hopefully – 60-ish years I share with my children, these first 18 will be a blink of an eye. For my oldest, we’re already at the half-way point of that first sprint. And because things happen that we don’t anticipate, I can’t count on the final 40 years to make up for time lost in the first 18. I know that so many people – Erma Bombeck to Dolly Parton, John Lennon to Sheryl Sandberg – are attributed brilliant quotes about getting the balance of our lives properly adjusted. Love more. Work less. Be present. And yet … I just need a little quiet. I just need a little peace. A little time alone.

Over the weekend, the night was growing late. We do a really poor job of policing bedtimes during long weekends and vacations. Oh, you don’t have school for four days? Well, then… let’s do whatever we can to make sure your circadian rhythms match those of a native Icelander during the days of midnight sun. What could go wrong?

I retreated to my bedroom with a book about navigating our messy, beautiful lives. Four minutes went by. “Mommy, there you are. I’ll sit with you.” And my youngest settled in with me, writing a journal entry on her Chrome book. “Mommy, if I say, tomorrow, too, is that ‘to’ or ‘too’?” (I appreciate that she knows there’s a difference.) “How do I spell painting?” Gritted smile. P-a-i-n-t… Navigating. Messy. Beautiful. Life. Deep breath. And then… “Do you want to read my journal?”

(journal excerpt, edited for spelling)

“Me and my family painted the wall well my daddy did most of the work in the painting project and it was so much fun to do with my family. I had a great day with everyone and I am starting to feel it was the best day in the world or even in the galaxy so I am hoping tomorrow will be too and I hope that’s the same for all of you around the world.”

Heart, full. Guilt, rising. Oh, right… Not just noise. Not just buzzing inside my crowded brain that, lately, more than occasionally can’t think of simple words or what I meant to do next. “That’s beautiful,” I told my daughter, sincerely, as she scooted off the bed.

“Will you be okay now?” she asked. “I just didn’t want you to have to be alone,” she said. Her default decibel is loud and constant, but her heart is incredibly sweet.

My reality is pretty wonderful. I recognize it, and I’m mostly very grateful. Alone is still my daydream. Deafening silence still sounds beautiful in the hypothetical. We’re in a constant state of doing it seems. Weekends come and go before we really settle into them, and then the week is off and running and we never had a chance to truly shake off the week before. I could try getting up 20 minutes early, try meditating. I could finally go to yoga like I keep saying I will. But mostly, I’ll probably walk around with my jaw slightly clenched until I realize that I have a headache almost all the time. I keep searching for a magic island of peace and quiet and I forget that the noisy, rambunctious love surrounding me is also pretty amazing. Sometimes overwhelming, often stressful, but amazing.

I may spend more time than I used to staring blankly into space, trying to remember the word that was on the tip of my tongue a minute ago. This is normal, I’ve read. And not (necessarily) a sign of early onset Alzheimer’s or a tumor. It may take me exponentially more time to read any book, pausing three times per page to spell things, locate lost toys, and sharpen pencils. And sometimes I may spend double the time necessary in our bathroom, getting ready, dawdling, trusting in the only closed door in our house that is given a margin of respect.

But from what often seems like chaos, two remarkable, miraculous children are growing up, and I’m – still, constantly – growing up with them. I may never quite have it together. In the new year, I meant to start planning work outfits the night before. Save time. Look professional. Get to school and work before the buzzer. I wore a dress one day and everyone, from my family to my coworkers, commented. So, okay. Pulled together is still an anomaly. But… at some point along the way, I became adult enough to own all five spices required for homemade chai hot chocolate. So, even if quiet is hard to come by, bedtimes are missed and I never make it to yoga, I’m giving myself a little credit.

 

One of my favorite people in the world was recently dealt a bad hand and is navigating the end of a relationship. Unless you’re one of those high school sweetheart couples who has been happily married for 40 years, we’ve all been there. And it sucks. Anger, depression, finally acceptance with maybe a side of personal empowerment, or maybe a few scars… or both.

It’s the reason for literature, for music, for the arts in general. I can remember laying on my living room floor in the middle of the night, listening to Evanescence and crying while my dog lay beside me, worried, but a rock. Looking back, it seems a little melodramatic. But at the time, it was a purge of everything broken. Most of us have been there, and like childbirth or a homeward bound flight long-delayed on the runway, we know it’s only eternal misery until it’s done. I’m grateful for other people’s stories, other people’s words and lyrics. It makes us feel better about muddling through our own chaos. We embrace them because it reminds us that we’re not alone in trying to make sense of it all.

Love is a tough game. We’re brought up on fairy tales – further compounded by Disney versions, rather than Brothers Grimm – and then we’re supposed to somehow navigate the real world with only the knowledge that true love conquers evil, dragons, even death.

And then it doesn’t. Then it fails. Or we fail. Or someone fails us. And we realize that Disney didn’t prepare us for this. We know we’re supposed to end up with a happily-ever-after, but we still stood there, eating the stupid apple in the first place.

In high school, my first love was my best friend. I’d recommend it, as an introduction to love and loss. At the time, it was dramatic, a roller coaster of highs and lows. Many tears were shed. My grandmother once called him a rat, which was undeserved, but appreciated at the time. But fast forward a few years, and I was a very happy bridesmaid, and now it’s all warm nostalgia. In college, I went to England and met a boy who was woven completely into the magical experience of being abroad. He was smart, and sarcastic and a little bit punk and a little bit sweet, and there was no one there who knew me to tell me that he wasn’t my type. But it’s hard to love across an ocean, and it slid into warm nostalgia, as well. He sent my oldest daughter a teddy bear for her first birthday. She loved it above all her other stuffed animals until we left it in a hotel room in Illinois and learned the valuable parenting lesson of never letting a first lieutenant of the toy world leave the house.

It’s hard that we learn so much more in retrospect than in the moment. Possibly the most formative relationship of my young life was the one that wasn’t. I was Eponine, Jay Gatsby, Katniss’s Gale. It was the age of Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Imbruglia, and they served me well, as did my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christina Rosetti. Promise me no promises / So will I not promise you / Keep we both our liberties / Never false and never true.

Out of that wasteland, I rebounded into my first marriage. Someone damn well wants me; just watch me walk. It’s funny, because in the end, that’s not actually the best reason to get married. And it turned out that in my haste to prove something to myself, I’d chosen very poorly. Don’t get married at 22. Unless you’re that high school sweetheart couple who is going to be married 40 years. Then you might as well get started. But at 22, don’t marry a slick con artist 7 years your senior. I feel like that’s advice you can take to the bank. You’re welcome.

And so, there I was. 23, bruised and humbled, already tumbled out of a first marriage, and really none the wiser about love for it. When you’re an English major, you have a lot of expectations. Elizabeth and Darcy, Rhett and Scarlett, The Thorn Birds, Anna Karenina, Pablo Nerudo’s sonnets. Wuthering Heights is an awful book full of selfish, horrible characters. But I’ve read it multiple times, because in the end, if love is a tragedy, that is its zenith.

Luckily, way leads on to way. Fairy tales end as soon as the real story is about to begin, and in both Russian literature and Shakespeare, a lot of people end up dying. There’s middle ground to be found. We live, we learn, we figure a few things out. Love is still highs and lows, even when you’ve found your match. Some days you can’t believe you could be so lucky, you dance in the kitchen and hum in the shower, and some nights you lay in bed, your partner’s warm breath blowing against your shoulder and you think there would be nothing like a solitary desert island.

And I realize, that maybe I have less angst these days, but I still really enjoy belting out broken heart anthems alone in my car, because we’ve all been there. And even when we’ve found our person, it’s not all roses. And that it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect one person to be your everything.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that the love we need is a fairly complicated Ven diagram. It’s the person we’re hopefully lucky enough to find as a partner; that person who knew going in that it wasn’t going to be all minty breath and candlelit dinners, but signed on anyway. At some point my husband realized that I was never going to organize the thousand tubes of product and make-up and lotion in our bathroom, but that I would flip out if the forks were misplaced within the silverware drawer. And he’s at peace with that. I think. But with no disrespect to my husband, it seems one-dimensional not to embrace how much additional support, other love, we accumulate in a lifetime. It’s the friends who were there to see the initial heartbreaks. They know what we looked like when we were finding comfort at the bottom of a pint of ice cream, or forgetting with too many tequila shots. They listened to the same stories over and over and didn’t walk away. They didn’t say, “You’re right,” but they said, “I know.” And they did. It’s the family we were born to, and the family we create along the way. It’s the first five people you text with big news, good or bad, and the person you haven’t seen a decade, but who you still plan to share porch rockers with when you’re old enough to sit and remember all about when you were too young to know better.

And so we’re a mosaic of different experiences, memories, lessons and scars. It’s kind of amazing when we find the people who will not only accept all of that, but embrace it. And when someone we love is going through a valley, we know, we get it, because we’ve been there. But I’ve got to believe that every time we are failed, or we fail, we’re therefore a step closer to our share of the answers; we’re closer to getting through to the other side.

I mentioned in the last blog that Christmas break involved the 1980’s Anne of Green Gables movies. Anne would have definitely spent some time listening to late night girl anthems, had she been born a century later. She had an artist’s soul. “You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that,” Marilla says in Anne of the Island, when Anne is convinced that she wants a tall, dark and handsome stranger who could be wicked, but wouldn’t. Fictional Anne may or may not have read of Mr. Darcy. But we all stumble over our archetypes now and then, and forget to appreciate that we’re still incrementally learning, whether it’s the ebb and flow of our own love story, or the friendships that saw us through when our love stories fell apart.

I’m still a sucker for a heartbreak anthem, and for Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. But what Jane Austen was really selling was the search for a happy ending. Right after Christmas, the girls and I got the stomach bug. The girls first, and then, two days later, me. I was supposed to be taking our youngest to a daily basketball camp each morning, but about an hour before, on the first day, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be leaving the house, maybe ever again. You forget how sick you feel when you’re sick. I called my husband at work, and he was home in 45 minutes, when work is 30 minutes away.

“Are you going back to work after you bring her home?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Someone needs to take care of you.”

And there it is. A modern fairy tale.

There is a Rilke quote that I’ve long liked, “Now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” It captures that wonderful blank slatedness of the new year, the limitless tomorrow, fresh with no mistakes in it (my eldest and I have been watching the classic late 80’s Anne of Green Gables movies over break, so that last phrase is particularly appropriate right now). As a writer, blank pages are close to my heart. As a human, fresh starts are vital. It’s no wonder that the world celebrates as the calendar rolls. On the list of common human experience, New Years, and the need for it, comes in close to the top.

Some years I’ve made resolutions. Big resolutions. Small resolutions. Public resolutions because accountability is key. Secret resolutions because sometimes a resolution is bigger and more daunting, more a heart’s wish than words. The thing about change, though, big change, is that it only happens when there’s something deep inside of us that opens for it. It’s a visceral internal shift, a raw, hollowed out rock bottom, or a quiet click of acceptance, but there’s no forcing it. When it really matters, it takes more than will power and more than 21 days of routine. If we want to floss daily, a New Years resolution is perfect for that, but I’ve found personally that my internal epiphanies rarely align with the Gregorian calendar.

In 2015, I came as close to a lifestyle shift as I ever have. I ate more food with fewer, or even better, single, ingredients. I have eaten more squash in more forms than I ever have before, and my go-to restaurant order has become grilled chicken or salmon salad. I have no regrets when I don’t eat the office doughnuts or the soccer practice cupcakes or the buttery garlic breadsticks. Actually, that’s a lie about the breadsticks. But true about the others. And I feel better for the squash and the zoodles and the almond butter and coconut milk. I recognize and appreciate that I don’t automatically feel the need to shove a child strategically in front of me in photos, or crop out half my arm. I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I have been in years and it feels good. And yet…

Just as they say that money doesn’t buy happiness (though, let’s all agree that that’s a theory each of us should have a chance to test), neither does being able to slip on your pre-marriage, pre-baby jeans buy sudden Zen. It turns out, if you eat a lot more squash, you’ll be able to flip out about your spring schedule, or your post-Christmas finances or your husband suggesting buying Star Wars tickets in the handicap row (where we’d look like jerks the entire time?!), while wearing jeans from 2004 (flares are back!)… but just as stubbornly, irrationally and temperamentally as before.

The new year will be full of things that have never been… and full of things that have been time and time and time again. I’m finally going to go to that barre class that I bought that Groupon for five months ago. I can walk there, so there’s really no excuse. And I’m going to take nine 8-year-old Brownies to an overnight at the Downtown Aquarium, enjoying some of my favorite other-mothers while we sleep with the sharks and stingrays. There are vacations to plan and projects to tackle. New year electricity is crackling like a siren’s call. And yet… in this brand new year, my mind will go slightly numb while my ears buzz with the daily non-stop chatter of my youngest, and I’m going to get home and realize that, once again, everything we might have had for dinner is still frozen. I’m going to listen to my daughter read, painstaking word by word, the lessons of the Berenstein Bears, while I secretly let my mind wander back to that thing at work, and forward to the moment when I can collapse into a book of my own. And then I’ll suddenly realize that these were the days, my friend, as I let them slip by with ill-concealed impatience, and I’ll promise to do better, to be more present. And then I’ll forget.  

This year, with that blank page waiting, I’m looking forward to the new year, but I don’t have any named resolutions. 2016 is beginning with the first above-freezing weather in a couple of weeks, and the Beck household has recovered from a round of post-Christmas stomach bug. The world does indeed seem fresh and new. There’s just something about New Years. This year I’d like to make more good decisions than bad. And remember to tell my husband that I appreciate him. And I’d really like to lose fewer arguments to the cat. Although anyone who has met the cat knows how unlikely that is.

Happy New Year, my friends. Breathe deep.

Are you familiar with Stars Hollow, Connecticut? It’s a quaint little borough with a town square with a gazebo, flanked by a diner, an ice cream shoppe, a music store, a bookstore. It’s the kind of place where there are town meetings, and everyone attends. And it’s fictional. The stuff of sound stages and quippy scripts. But that’s never been the point for me (though who doesn’t love a little witty banter in their prime time viewing). Stars Hollow is my runaway destination. It’s where small business is the rule rather than the exception. It’s where my bookstore-tea house-stationery shop would thrive, within sight of the gazebo where I’d eat lunch. It’s where a mother and daughter can live entirely off of take-out — Chinese food, pizza and danishes — and remain thin, porcelain-skinned and energized.

Just like Lorelei and Rory Gilmore, my family has lived off mostly take-out this week. It’s just been one of those weeks. Some weeks I have dinner in the crockpot, leftovers packed up for lunches, and non-frozen chicken in the fridge. This was not that week. Tonight, to step up my game, I brought home a rotisserie chicken and I felt like Betty Crocker. Not a paper wrapper or plastic fork in sight. To get the rotisserie chicken, I had to go just a couple of traffic lights out of my way. Traffic lights that, at 5:30pm on the Friday before Christmas, were basically like running a race that ended uphill. Double lane left turners, terrified that they might miss their light, ended up in the middle of the intersection while my light came …. and went. Tail lights upon tail lights. This would never happen in Stars Hollow. For one thing, I don’t think they even have a double left turn lane.

This week, I missed a meeting of some note at work. It was a snow day for the girls, 10 inches on the ground. They had predicted 1-3″! I stressed. I sent off a flurry of texts because I’d left my computer at the office, knowing that no matter what, I had to be in. I protested, with pithy passive-aggressive asides, that the assumption that I would, of course, stay home, even with my calendar pinging, is the very reason that I’m making 76¢ on the dollar. I missed the meeting; they pulled in someone else whose college-age child and four-wheel drive were unaffected by the snow. The next day I was asked if I had “gotten my children sorted out.” And I realized, that yes. Yes, I had. They’d slept in, woken to the news of a snow day, which is pretty much the best thing ever when you’re a child, and then watched movies in front of a fire. They were completed sorted.

The next day, I left work early to go to my daughter’s in-school music concert. “Are you going to be there? For sure?” she asked. And I was. And I remembered that sometimes you’re replaceable, and sometimes you’re not.

Sometimes we eat take-out with plastic forks. But for the most part, we do it together, which is more to the point. Sometimes we get home at 8pm and then do homework in the morning as we eat frozen waffles. But I buy real maple syrup. Win some, lose some.

A lot of the time, I feel like I’m nearly on top of things. So, so close. I filled out the field trip permission form, except it was double-sided. Got the very specifically requested cereal! But the milk’s expired. Remembered to sign the kids up for morning child care so I could make the meeting on time, except — snow day. So close. But tonight, after we ate rotisserie chicken and grocery store California rolls — because who could have one without the other — we all watched a movie, and now the girls and I are officially on Christmas vacation. So, the fact that we haven’t made Christmas cookies yet, or that I have yet to start shopping for my husband, or that I haven’t run in nearly two weeks… well, we’ll get to it. The important things got done. Daughter’s ballet recital, check. Music concert, check. Family dinner, regardless of utensils used, check.

So maybe I don’t actually need Stars Hollow to be real… although at some point, a few years from now, I’d like to visit again with my own daughters, and hope they love it, too. But I do need to remember that successful adulting is less about a week’s worth of organized, pre-planned dinners, and more about always showing up when you’re irreplaceable, which was really the best part about Stars Hollow, anyway, and it was   by far the best part of “one of those weeks.”

Where you lead, I will follow. Anywhere that you tell me to. If you need me to be with you, I will follow, where you lead.

I don’t love winter but for as long as I can remember I’ve loved the winter sky for the constellation Orion. A warm summer night is full of crickets and fireflies and maybe the smell of trampled mint or roses or lingering barbeque. The air is thick and heavy and you feel solid and terrestrial in all the best ways. On a clear winter night, the quiet feels infinite, the air is sharp in our lungs and the sky above is darkly endless, the stars immeasurable and somehow brighter. And Orion is there, a celestial sentinel, guarding the millions, the billions, under his purview. I know that, factually, those stars are millions of miles apart. That their light is hundreds of years old. That even Orion’s story is not so much planetary protector as it is mythological predator. But for whatever reason, Orion on a cold winter night makes me feel wonderfully small, and insignificant, and protected, and connected to the universe in an elemental way.

When I was a child, I can remember riding to dance class, back roads of rural Ohio, with Orion riding shotgun outside the passenger window. My father took me to dance class, all those winter nights, and waited in the drab anteroom with the other parents, all the while knowing that I would never know a kick ball change from a scissor step. Now, on Tuesdays, my husband takes our daughter to dance class, where he waits through lyrical, brings dinner, then waits through ballet. It’s comforting, that routine. Even beyond the generational continuity, we’re one of millions of little stories going on under the winter sky, and it’s reassuring to know that across the world we’re all taking our daughters (or sons) to dance class, like our parents did before us.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything. I haven’t been able to think of five words to link together lately. I’ve been bowed by the world events that keep beating the positivity out of the holiday season. As I’ve mentioned before, I have no personal connection to these tragedies, beyond a human one, and that makes me feel a bit self-conscious in my gloom. How histrionic am I to feel like I have a share of the grief of those who have lost everything? And yet that’s the point. It’s a human story, and it feels like we’re getting it wrong lately. The grief should be universal, shouldn’t it? Collective heartache for an uneasy world.

My 9-year-old daughter recently had to write a short essay on connecting unrelated ideas. She choose to connect the plot of Once Upon a Time to “all the shootings lately,” because she saw both as a fight between good and evil. I was proud of her perception, but also distressed that this is her childhood. I can remember in college once, a professor asked us if we believed in evil. Evil sounded so melodramatic. We were uncomfortable with it. Growing up post-Cold War, good versus evil was comic book fodder. Columbine happened while I was in college, a year or so after that discussion, and 9/11 directly after college, but they didn’t inform my childhood. After the San Bernadino shootings, there were several articles I saw about explaining tragic events to children. And yet, with the news coverage on in the background, my children asked no questions. Only a year or two ago, I wouldn’t have had it on while they were around, but by now they already know why they do lockdown drills at school. I turned it off because I couldn’t handle any more, but when I asked if they had any questions, they said no. And there’s the additional tragedy.

My children fight every single night while they brush their teeth. Every single night. Over toothpaste, over the prime spot in front of the sink, whose turn it is to shower first … in the morning. Ten hours later. Suggesting that they take turns – and by suggesting I mean yelling up the stairs, “ONE. Just ONE of you in the bathroom at a time, or I swear there will be no quiet time and it will be lights out immediately!” – doesn’t seem to matter. They’re willing to risk the consequences to get one more verbal, or sneaky physical, jab in. They’re fighting. I’m yelling at them to stop yelling. And then I eat seven cherry cordial Hershey’s kisses and promise, loudly, that everyone is going to bed an hour early tomorrow, because if we’re fighting about who dropped the toothpaste cap, clearly no one in this house is getting enough sleep. Also, what does it matter? No one was going to put it back on the tube, anyway.

And yet, they also remind me to gather up jackets for their winter clothing drive, and they spend their own money on canned goods for the local food pantry, and they set up lemonade stands for horse rescue and worry about the feelings of their friends, and sometimes coexist peacefully in magical small spaces. We’re all a little black, a little white, a lot gray. A little saint, a little sinner, a lot human. The world is the same way, even when it seems like more dark is crowding in. We worry in broad stokes about humanity, about our neighbors and the “them” across hemispheres, while we sometimes we forget to end the day with kind words at home (but seriously, you’re just stalling now. Go. To. Bed.)

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness will not drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” Outside, there are no bedtime battles, no worries about Christmas budgets or incomplete homework, but just deep, blessed winter silence, and the sky has been dark since 5pm. And just like in my childhood, the air is cold but reviving. The starlight from Orion is just getting to us, but it originated 700 years ago, amid the 14^th century’s black plague and Hundred Years’ War, while Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, whose prologue I had to memorize in high school, seven centuries later (and whose first lines I can still remember). Sometimes it’s comforting to remember that the world had already seen it all already. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. It’s tempting just to shut it all out, to turn off the news and only read lifestyle articles. But I know for sure I don’t want to leave my children a legacy of detachment, an awful neutrality in the face of good and evil. No one is stopping any of us from making our own light, or speaking out against the dark, and if I can teach them that, I don’t care if they never agree about whose turn it is to shower first. 

November is a transitional month in a lot of ways. It’s the first month where even mild, sunny, autumnal-holdover days begin and end with a chill that foretells winter. Before the year ends, the days will start to get longer again. But November, often suddenly and bracingly cold, is dark without the tipping pendulum of a solstice. We’ve put away our summer wardrobe, but haven’t yet started to feel the camaraderie of the holiday season. We’re waiting, in November, it seems to me.

I was waiting, too, the last few weeks. Halloween came and left a silo of sugar in its wake. Instead of the occasional Kind bar and drizzle of honey, I began to mainline sugar. Oddly, then I didn’t feel that energetic, and I started letting my runs go from every other day or two to twice a week… or longer. Then Paris, and then the refugee backlash and I wasn’t just waiting. I was backsliding and coming up short on reasons to reinvest.

But November is transitional. Our routines are forced to change, but — and I forgot this for a little while — it’s up to us to make new ones.

I’d been limping along this past week with our mostly-neglected exercise bike, sitting and peddling, buoying myself with like-minded political blogs while watching my husband and daughters play some street racing video game (it’s still family time if we’re all together, right, even if some of us are being chased by the cops?).  While I had broken a sweat for the requisite minimum 3x/week (Thursday through Saturday: not my best showing, but still technically 3/3), I felt slacker’s guilt. There was no reason for this. I could do better. The forecast was warm and sunny, the snow melting… I timed a run for the warmest part of the day, and — it surprised me — I looked forward to it. Running is my time away in a way that sharing an animated street race can’t replace, sweat or no sweat.

And even though I’d been in the midst of nearly abandoning my routine, I suddenly felt renewed. Why would I give this up? My legs burned, my breath grew a little ragged and I was in a better place than I’d been in a couple weeks.

My concern with winter running, and I say this purely from speculation since I’ve always abandoned running with the first frost, is that I don’t want to look like a pre-schooler with skinned knees. Kids are tough. I am not. Also, it’s cold. In the matter of a few weeks, a nice day goes from 78 and sunny to, Did I have to chip ice off my windshield and did I choose footwear based on waterproofing? The sidewalks look like that ice planet from Star Wars, and the trails look worse.

Since June, I’ve been running one of several neighborhood routes, expanding as I added distance here and there. I start each of those routes in the same way, by crossing my street, running up the same hill, focused on the yellow warning “Dip” sign that signals the top of that first hill and the beginning of some downhill recovery action.

Today, in the midst of exactly that same routine, but hopscotching through icy sidewalks, I became aware of something. I could, if I so chose, run on the SUNNY side of the street.

The funny thing about the sunny side of the street was that it was literally right in front of me. Well, literally within my periphery. And it was as obstacle-free as my side was hurdled. But it didn’t immediately occur to me to cross the street. Because I run on THIS side of the street. I know which houses on this side of the street have free-range dogs and who never pulls their trash cans back in, forcing me to run around them. I know where the first seasonal decorations will go up, and I know which overhanging branches require a bob and weave.

On the OTHER side of the street? I honestly have no idea. It’s beyond logic, but that’s uncharted territory. I just don’t run over there. Those houses and their dogs and their branches are strangers… until today. Because sometimes crossing to the sunny side of the street is the only thing that makes any sense, even when — maybe especially when — we’re white-knuckling our routines like lifeboats. There are no medals for running through the snow when dry pavement is available, but sometimes I forget that the route is up to me.

November might not be so bad.

 

 

I used to say that my oldest daughter was born a well-adjusted 35-years-old and has only grown wiser and more mature since. Since I’ve now hit 35, I think I’ll adjust that to a well-adjusted 45-years-old, because I’m still hoping to meet that benchmark by then. My youngest, conversely, was born at the tail end of a tidal wave, and she’s still riding the crest each day. Some days it’s hard to watch, because it’s a tough way to navigate life, all ups and downs, and it’s hard to parent, because you’re constantly trying to span the difference between order and discipline and shelter and safe harbor and compassion. And I have to say, I get it, because I’m more tidal wave than alpine lake myself.

For all her ebb and flow, my youngest has a depth that sometimes catches me off-guard. She understands, on a level that doesn’t seem consistent with a 7-year-old, that she has demons to fight. “Can I talk to you on the spinny chair?” she’ll ask, and we’ll have a cuddle conference about what’s on her mind. A couple of nights ago, she was distraught because she was afraid that she was “becoming one of the bad kids.” And while I certainly don’t think she’s on a downward spiral, especially given her penchant for introspection, for the first time this year, we have a good behavior treasure box to choose from as reinforcement for positive days. “I try to make good decisions, Mommy; I really do. But then I see Jack making bad choices, and it looks like more fun, and then I want to do that instead.”

I share this story not so that in 30 years she can resent my internet overshare, but because I think it’s amazing and honest and universal. I try to make good choices, but the bad choices look like more fun. Short term, bad choices are enticing. We know the bad choices aren’t going to end well, but, well, they’re just so tempting.

As sometimes comes up on this blog, I’m trying to make better choices. 2015 was my year of good choices… for the most part. Let’s say it was the year of, more than less, better choices. It turns out, I feel a lot better if I eat real food and exercise. If it comes in a box from the tempting middle of the grocery store or has a shelf life of more than a week, maybe two tops, it’s not going to make me feel better in the long run. Wheat, dairy, corn, excess sugar… by trial and error, I’ve figured out that those are bad decisions for me. And yet… I tried, again, this week to reintroduce pizza. I really, really miss pizza. I don’t mind eating spaghetti squash when my family eats pasta, and I don’t miss having a bun to hold onto a hamburger. But pizza looks like a party that I wasn’t invited to. It seems unfair that before I gave it up – or rather gave up the wheat and the dairy – I didn’t know that pizza and I didn’t get along. I felt borderline awful all the time, but I still had a solid, comforting relationship with pizza. This week, I tried gluten free crust, no cheese, with pepperoni, banana peppers and a sprinkle of feta. I mean, yes, feta is dairy. But only a LITTLE bit of dairy. Even without the traditional mozzarella, that pizza tasted so good. Good is actually not the right word. It was a homecoming. And then, it wasn’t. And I felt awful.

This week has been difficult in general, and I recognize that it’s ludicrous to compare my impersonal heartache in the last week to those who lost friends and loved ones, to those who are spending another week on the run from that same craven terror mechanism, with no known destination beyond “away from here.” Last week’s attacks on Paris were gut-wrenching. Having lived within a few miles of the Aurora movie theater shooting, I know a community can wake up in the morning to find itself a headline, suddenly living in the before and after. Before, we were another Denver suburb, and after, part of a national conversation. Paris will have any number of before and afters and my heart breaks for them. But it was the national outcry against the refugees fleeing that same unthinkable violence that made me forget that in 2015, I make good, or at least better, choices. I was – am – soul-sick and angry and incredulous, and those emotions seem to go better with five pieces of leftover Halloween candy and a glass of wine than with an apple and a run. We’ve been sharing a lot with you, my children mentioned, pointedly. Ah hem, well, yes. And I put a roof over your head. So we’re even, mmkay?

And so I drifted this week. Sometimes bad choices look like more fun. It’s staying up late even as you do the math in your head, If I go to bed in the next 30 minutes, I’ll still get 7 hours of sleep. Okay, so if I go to bed by midnight, I’ll still get six hours of sleep. Crap!, how did it get to be 12:40am?!  And sometimes bad choices look like the embodiment of a security blanket. I don’t know how to deal with my disappointment in the world around me, so I’ll turn to those things that have never disappointed me… a pile of Reese’s cups, a baseball-sized serving of candied cashews and – seriously, did my husband really choose this week to decide we should try box wine? – because that box never runs dry. Or at least, it hasn’t yet… it’s only been a few days, so if it had, this would be a blog on a different topic.

I’ve been running – jogging – pretty regularly for 5 months or so now. And I have a very specific exercise agreement with one of my best friends that mandates 3 days a week of exercise. “I’m 0/3,” I texted her this morning. “It’s cold.”  We have an Even Steven policy, and I was already one down. She was sympathetic, but when she ran later in the day, she was unambiguous in her text back, “Even Steven… go.” I’m simplifying it a little, but at its heart, it was what I needed. I’m 1/3 now this week, and I feel better for it. I haven’t raided the Halloween candy, and I’m drinking water instead of wine. I’m rebounding into better choices.

Why do we embrace what we could avoid? Why do we know the consequences, but turn blindly into them? I couldn’t really offer my daughter any true wisdom about learning to make better choices as we grow older, because it’s still hit or miss for me, from choosing to atrophy on the couch in a pile of candy wrappers or choosing the shoes I know for sure will hurt my feet within 20 minutes of putting them on, to choosing sharp, cutting words with those I love most when what I really mean is, I’m tired, I’m disillusioned, and I need to nurse my wounds for a little while.

But what I actually told my little one was, We all make bad choices sometimes. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people, but it means we can keep trying to do better.

So, I’m trying to do better, again. And if anyone wants to provide me with a good behavior rewards box, I’m open to negotiating terms.

When one of my good friends didn’t yet know me very well, she once said something to the effect of, “But you’re not the type to stress over the little things.” I don’t know if I actually laughed right in her face or not, but certainly, now that we know each other better, she knows the truth. I’m glad I occasionally project a laid-back image to acquaintances, but I’m definitely a tightly-wound stress mess much of the time. I like to think no more a mess than everyone else, but I’m not always sure of that.

I assumed that as we became adults, certain things would just come together. We’d have matching dishes and fresh fruit. In actuality, our dishes mostly match but are still hand-me-downs that I’ve never liked, and our fresh fruit supply routinely runs out by Wednesday. I realize grocery stores are open Wednesday-Friday, but we mostly live on packaged fruit cups and applesauce pouches until the weekend because who has time?

I used to excuse our lack of prepared adultness with the fact that we weren’t in our “real” house yet. As long as we knew we were still in starter homes, planning on staying 3-5 years until the next step up, it seemed fairly acceptable to live like we were, maybe not in college, but perhaps like our first apartment. We’d replace the plastic blinds with wooden slats and real curtains when we had windows that we were going to live with awhile, and we’d invest in a substantial kitchen table when we knew milk wasn’t going to be spilled on it biweekly.

When I was in college, there was an open door policy for drop-in visiting. The 30-something me is horrified by that idea. Not for the 19-year-old me, but as applied to my current life. “Who lives like this?!” I ask, surveying the disarray in our non-starter permanent home. I’d blame the kids, but there is definitely enough non-kid clutter to keep them out of the hot seat, or at least sharing it.

Real life (giant stuffed monkey included):

While I decry the state of our living room and kitchen counters, I’m horrible about clutter. I keep coupons for no reason, since I can count the number of non-Kohl’s coupons I have used on one hand. I accidentally throw out at least double the amount of Education box tops that I keep, even though I have a ziplock bag just for box tops sitting next to the coffee maker (because where else would you keep it). I just took down my Welcome Spring wall-hanger sign along with the Halloween decorations. And honestly, that same thing happened last year, too, because I don’t have a seasonal Summer replacement. We only take down the Halloween decorations expediently because I’m a Halloween-grinch, which I know, I know, is unfun and disappointing of me. My desktop calendar at home is nearly always at least two months behind. At work, someone at my last two jobs has taken it upon themselves to be my calendar turner.

And this happens:

Empty tissue box, with temporary pocket pack, as foundation of new tissue box. And lest you think that this is in any way acceptable, note the location of the recycling bin. Also, I still haven’t done anything about it in the time it has taken to write this blog.

Anyway, this is the time of year that I start putting our cluttered, hectic lives under a microscope because it’s getting colder, the days are shorter, and the holidays are coming and we have so much to do! I know the holidays are coming because in the first mail delivery after Halloween I received 5 Christmas catalogs. Catalogs I seem unable to just recycle because, of course, I love my children and I might want to order something from the Mind Ware (brainy toys for kids of all ages) catalog, or the Lakeshore (gifts for growing minds) catalog. Otherwise what kind of mother would I be? Well played, catalogs. So, I’ll just leave them right where I can eventually not order anything from them two months from now.

The colder weather, catalogs, and a tiny bit of snow has reminded me of the upcoming holidays. It’s been such a warm fall, I’m not in a November mindset yet. Every year, the holidays make me want to do better. I want to manage my time better so that we have free evenings to read classic Christmas stories snuggled in front of a fire. I want to have miles of clear counter space to spontaneously bake cookies if we want to, and craft supplies to make any number of cork reindeer and felt Christmas trees and tiny foam crèches. I want to create wonderful holiday memories for my children, and myself, that they will want to continue when they are the adults, as I want to recreate the traditions of my own childhood. As adults, of course, they won’t have the time or the counter space, but they’ll wish for both, because their childhood memories will be so warm.

And so, despite the fact that my life is already in general disorder, I’ll start to search for “Kid-Friendly Holiday Crafts” on Google and Pinterest. Pinterest will overflow with deceptively simple-looking ideas, and I will possibly even pick up supplies for some of them, which I will store on the counters I meant to leave clear for rolling out cookies from Great-Grandma Rinehart’s recipes. And I’ll read suggested articles called, “Decorating with Cranberries,” and scour the pine trees at the park across the street for perfectly shaped turkey pinecones. But I will draw the line at Elf on the Shelf because, honestly, I am only one person, and I am not magic.

When I think about what made my childhood holidays memorable… it’s spiced cider and putting the extra leaves in the table, and icing (and eating) dozens of cookies; it’s sorting through the basket of Christmas cards and letters, cutting down a Christmas tree, and John McCutcheon’s Christmas album on Christmas morning; it’s sitting with my cousin Sarah as we opened our identical Christmas night gowns, which we then wore while we opened our similar-yet-perhaps-brunette-for-her-blonde-for me dolls. (We were/are the only granddaughters on that side of the family, and only a year apart.) And some years we probably made cotton-ball snowmen, and some years we probably made clothespin reindeer, and for a few years we could fit on the living room couch like this (and I don’t specifically remember those awesome slippers I’m wearing but I wish I did):

My children don’t have exactly the same holiday dynamic, which I’ve come to realize is okay. Their cousins live 1000 miles away, but they have an uncle who will tirelessly play Candy Land with them. We don’t cut down a Christmas tree from a farm, but they don’t miss what they don’t know, and they love the urban tree-lot version, and the house still smells like pine. In the end, it’s anyone’s guess what holiday memories fall away and what will stay with them as they become the adults of a new generation of holidays. Odds are, though, it won’t be anything gleaned from a Decorating with Cranberries article.

This year, I’m going to try to remember that memories don’t have to be constructed out of Pinterest ingredients, and they don’t have to look like they came off an Etsy site or even straight out of my grandmother’s oven. They can include a little clutter and a little room for error. One of my favorite Christmas ornaments is the plaster footprint from our oldest’s first Christmas. Each year it’s hard to believe that the growing girl trimming the tree with us was once so tiny. But what’s also great about that baby’s first Christmas ornament, what makes me smile each time we take it out, is that when we poured the plaster and left it on our counter to set, it came out of the mold reflecting the tilt of the house itself, with the top thicker than the bottom. Built in 1929, there were already a lot of holidays celebrated in that house. The house was old and getting settled; we were young and getting settled, and neither process was without its flaws. The imperfection of that ornament makes it more meaningful to me, a better reflection of the young parents we were, not quite on level ground, feeling our way through parenting and home-ownership and baby’s first Christmas, wanting to get it all right, but already understanding that we wouldn’t.

One day, we’ll have matching dishes we chose ourselves, and there won’t be quite so many stuffed animals in the living room. We won’t break crayons underfoot as we walk through the house or find the long missing soccer sock in the bottom of the grandfather clock. We’ll move on to other messes and other stresses, and again the days will get colder, and the nights will get longer, and because we’re not perfect, the holidays won’t be, either. But they’ll be the stuff that memories are made of, and as long as those memories are full of love and spiced cider, it’s hard to go wrong. And I really think that empty tissue box could be made into an easy kid’s craft of Santa’s sleigh. I’m glad we kept it around.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice over the years. I imagine everyone has. And I’ve given my fair share, as well, I’m sure. Probably more than I even realize, because when we’ve been through something ourselves, we really, really want to impart that knowledge somewhere, or else why did we go through it? What’s the point of slogging through the hard stuff if no one wants to hear our wisdom and save themselves the same heartaches, or at least be inspired by our bravery and fortitude?

The crux of advice, though, is that when we need it most, we probably don’t want it, don’t want to need it. Or, as author Erica Jong once said, “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” Or, we get good advice but at bad times, and so we contort it, clinging to it. When I about 22, I called my grandmother, crying from the side of the road at the airport in Pittsburgh. I’d left my fiancé at the passenger drop-off to go to a job he claimed he hated because it kept us apart, and he was tired of being on the road 3 weeks out of each month (in retrospect, his being on the road 3 weeks a month probably kept us together). “If you love someone, life is too short to be apart,” my grandmother said. And it was such a romantic idea that I called him and told him I’d pick him up right then and there, possibly not exactly what my grandmother had meant. And I did, and we joyously went out to celebrate, heedless of the income we’d just lit on fire, and of the rules of professional behavior that dictate some notice before just not getting on a plane.

It wasn’t that my grandmother, one of the wisest people I’ve known, gave me bad advice. It’s just that I took it out of all context, because advice is like that – we hear what we want to hear – and embraced it like the last life boat on the Titanic. And truly, that ship was already going down. Months later, when I called my best friend sobbing on the penultimate day before my wedding (there was a lot of crying in those days; not a great sign, really) as she drove across the country to be a bridesmaid, it wasn’t the first time that she expressed some concerns about the upcoming marriage, while my mother said, “All we lose now, Rebecca, are deposits.”  In retrospect, advice I could have taken to heart. I did better the second time.

But we have to make our own mistakes, after all, even when everyone around us, and perhaps even ourselves, can see them coming from miles – or months – away. Mistakes are part of the dues we pay for a full life, Sophia Loren said, and if you can’t take life advice from an Italian screen siren, who can you trust? Let’s just say I’ve made some doozies, and not for lack of good advice.

I recently went to a baby shower, my first in years. It’s funny how a few years and a few thousand diapers and equal cuddles and some stitches (theirs) and tears (mine) can change your perspective. Parenthood is a condescending clique at times. We don’t mean to be, always. Sometimes we do. But life does change when you become a parent. This is not to say that choosing not to be a parent is a lesser choice. In fact, owning that choice, with its lifetime of well-intentioned, weirdly-personal questions, is pretty fearless, and there are days when I will outright envy the freedom, and the money, you have to jaunt to locales more exotic than Chuck E Cheese.

Weddings and baby showers are really classic places for both solicited and unsolicited advice. It’s tradition to have a fishbowl or fancy-wrapped present in which to put pearls of wisdom for the bride and groom. In that moment when you’re just starting out as a married couple, there is probably a mountain of good advice to take to heart. And yet, in that moment, we think we’re on top of it. We are the exuberant cake topper couple, smiling ear to ear in this frozen moment. When we realize that maybe we could use a little bit of outside wisdom, the wedding affects are boxed up in a far corner of the crawl space where there are bound to be spiders. And again, we make our own mistakes, and then give others advice about it later.

At the baby shower, there a number of women in attendance who had children long since grown, and there was also a brand new mother, with her brand new month-old baby. We agreed that every baby shower should have a tiny baby there. It makes the whole process seem pretty legit, and makes for adorable photos.

As the shower was wrapping up, we were asked to go around the room and give advice to the mom-to-be. Most of the older women in the room, who for the record are amazing women with amazing life stories and are extremely nice, love the mom-to-be and have watched her grow up, said versions of the same thing. Enjoy every minute. Savor the short time you have with this miraculous baby. This is absolutely true. The years since I’ve become a parent have flown by. My oldest daughter is taller than my shoulder, and with my youngest, we have to do a very elaborate and choreographed lift, like Ice Capades, for me to still be able to pick her up. I sometimes get a little bit of the feels when I watch that Subaru commercial where the daughter grows up, right before our eyes, and then drives away in the Subaru she grew up with. Some days when I drop my daughters off at school, and watch as they transfer from me, to the crossing guard, to their own paths (literal paths) for the school day, I totally get it. I sit there and feel tears coming. I drive away and keep them in my rear view mirror as long as possible, knowing that one day – and it will come soon – I’ll be in theirs. It feels impossibly, exquisitely painful. And this is just me on a random Monday.

Again, though, giving and getting advice is complicated. With absolutely no disrespect, a new mother needs more faceted advice than to simply savor the moment. And this is where it gets a little more complex than a Subaru commercial. Retrospective advice has the amazing weight of experience, but also the soft focus of years. To be told, as an anticipatory mother, to hold on to each moment as much as you can, to love the late night chances to soothe and comfort, is a truth a parent realizes as soon as their child is born. It’s a truth so huge, it knocks the breath out of you. But 6-months ago, that that mother was able to leave the house in five minutes flat, showered and with hair that was only in a pony-tail because she chose it. Parenting is so hard. It’s about marveling about every eyelash and tiny toe, but also about being peed on, and oh-so-carefully peeling off a ruined one-use onesie after your teeny, tiny volcano explodes. It’s about a new dynamic, good but different and sometimes hard, with your partner, and feeling like you’ll never leave the house on time again, or sleep again. Or not know fear again. To tell a new mother only to savor the experience, without also saying, And some days you will feel lost and alone and yet be totally touched out when your husband gets home, is unfinished advice.

Advice is almost always fragmentary, though, isn’t it? It’s filtered through our own experience, through time, through the lens by which we live our life, our regrets and our triumphs, to say nothing of the desire to validate our own mistakes by saving another from them, even when those mistakes are theirs to make.

And yet… what advice would I give my own children? Because obviously I keep a growing list: Don’t worry too much about your successes in life before you’re 18. Or even 25. Those are just testing grounds. Live alone at some point (I never did). Never let anyone define your self-worth, and don’t doubt your intuition. But make sure you court doubt about science and religion and relationships and politics, because anyone without doubts hasn’t spent enough time thinking. And then believe in something big enough to keep your focus and forward trajectory when you’re ignoring all my good advice, and making those mistakes we all saw coming.

I’m not saying that we should give up on advice. We have a need to give it, and sometimes it may even wing its way into someone’s heart just exactly when they need it. But there’s a reason that we have so many cartoons with gurus sitting on top of mountains. We’re all searching. In the end, though, we’ve climbed the mountain ourselves, haven’t we? The guru is only there to award points. Maybe instead of giving advice, we can just share our experiences and let the words fall where they may, and be there for our people in the meantime.

That’s what I would do… if I were you.