Month: September 2015

“Are we really not having dinner?” my youngest asks.

It’s just the two of us, since my husband took our oldest to her weekly 2.5 hours of dance, and I got home specifically so that the little one wouldn’t have to go and hang out, but I’m still technically working. Although, anyone who has attempted to work from home with a child at your elbow knows that it means I’m really just splitting my attention between the 9-5 stuff that doesn’t really matter in any 5-year-view, and one of the shining, amazing people who absolutely matters the most, and by doing both jobs poorly, I am taking twice as long.

“Dinner? Um… you had a Clif bar,” I say. If I can just get these last two pages done, I’m done for today. Two. Pages.

“Is a Clif bar dinner?!,” she asks. Well… no. Of course not. Dinner is served with love, around a table, with family, and maybe a salad. It’s at least pancakes (breakfast for dinner! So FUN! And easy for mommy!) But… you seemed so happy eating the yogurt, and then the Clif bar, and then the clementine… I thought maybe we’d all just sort of forget no one made dinner. I had two-day old Chinese food in front of a computer. No one is winning here, little one!

I find that when I’m stressed, I do certain things habitually. I grip the steering wheel tightly when I’m driving. I blink less. Or at least, I must, because my eyes are dry as dust. Speaking of eyes, as I was leaving work today, my right eye twitched through the entire red light, as if in protest of the wasted time. Tick tock, tick tock, twitch tock.

Am I a Wall Street banker? Am I a neurosurgeon? Or maybe a hostage negotiator? No. No, I am not. Am I a mother of four who homeschools and runs a creative side venture after the kids are in bed? Nope. The stress I feel is really all self-imposed. Do I have a busy plate at work and two kids with near-daily scheduled events? Yes. Are there a dozen other parents on our street, a couple hundred in our neighborhood, millions across the country, doing the exact same dance throughout each week? Yep. Do I have a husband who shares the shuttling and knows his way around a mean marinade and how to carve a rotisserie chicken? Yep.

So why with the tick tock twitch? Why do I not have time to blink? Because I forget – it’s so easy to forget – that the minutes are so much more important than we acknowledge when we wish away red lights. It’s not about the next hand-off – home to work to oft-postponed lunch date to work to home to soccer, teeth, bed, you can read in your rooms for 20 minutes! – no, it’s not about the next hand-off, it’s about the next connection. It’s about the circle of people in our lives, not the timetables we’ve constructed to hold them. If we are those people who are always 4 minutes late to soccer warmups? Well, that’s why the coach builds in a full 20-minutes. We’re also the people who gathered with our neighbors to watch the blood moon eclipse, and who have silly modified high fives for special accomplishments, like putting away laundry. And if every now and then my child has a Clif bar for dinner? Well, people who climb mountains eat Clif bars, I’m told. I want you, sweet child, to climb mountains. And so instead of pancakes, you had a Clif bar. The peanut butter kind you love, because I love you. Because sometimes, momentarily – or at least, hopefully, temporarily – I forget that the only hostage in this scenario is me, and I just need to talk myself down. You demand slightly sticky hugs, a glass of wine and an indulgent family who gets you? We can arrange those for you. Sorry, the private plane to Salamanca is out of the question. Just let the hostage go.

It’s really tempting when life is going well to congratulate ourselves on our brilliance. It’s equally tempting when life seems to be falling apart to castigate ourselves for not holding it together. And it’s most tempting of all to compare, not just summits to valleys, but peak to peak. We’re standing over here on our own mountain with this birds-eye view of our neighbors’ thinking, I thought we had it together, but… maybe they have it more together. We managed to have dinner as a family at 7:30 after soccer… on paper plates because no one did the dishes last night. How, we ask, from our bystander perspective, can we compete with the garden-grown, self-milled feast plated by that girl we sat next to in college astronomy? Perspective. It’s hard, when you’re looking across at someone else’s mountain, to measure relative elevation. You’re thinking the point of this post should be that it’s not only difficult to compare peak to peak, apples to oranges, but also detrimental and pointless. Noted. And agreed. But not really my point.

Failure is my point. And before anyone points out to me that Gone with the Wind was rejected 38 times before it was published, or that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, I would like to point out that I am not Margaret Mitchell or Michael Jordan. I’m really just trying to get through the day. And I suppose they were, too, before they became … who they became. And possibly even after.

Life, especially on a weekday morning, or evening, with two children, is a sprint. A good sprinter is a rare thing. It’s just not what we’re made for. The faster you’re going, the harder you go down, and who wants that? For every sprint hurdler, there are a dozen of us for whom haste just makes waste. But when I was washing my face this morning and took a slice out of my chin with my thumbnail? When I was emptying the soaking skillet of its stagnating overnight water, which sloshed over the side of the sink, onto my work pants and bare feet? I have to think, Really? Would this have happened to garden-fed astronomy girl? Of course not, because she probably cleanses her face only with coconut oil on an organic cotton ball, and would never let a sauté pan sit overnight, even on the shady pretext of “soaking” it.

Fall down 7 times, get up 8, they say. Failure is just opportunity in work clothes, they say. Oh, they say a lot of things. People don’t stop talking. That doesn’t mean you want to hear any of it when you’re standing in 12-hour-old dishwater. Because I had a meeting this morning that started 35 minutes prior to the school day, and I wanted to be proactively less late than more late, I sent the girls on their scooters so that they would arrive at the playground at the first possible staffed moment, after the 5-10 minutes it would take to get to school. “Text me when you get there,” I said. “Okay,” said my responsible oldest (I had just written her a letter of recommendation to be the class banker based on her maturity and responsibility, so I was pretty confident of our arrangement). “Is your phone charged?”  “Yes.” And on the way out the door, “Do you have your phone? Remember to text me.”  “Mom! I will.”

   Seven hours later.

All day I knew it was probably fine. It’s a direct route. The school didn’t call. No other parents called. The hospital didn’t call. And yet … someone who washed out sauté pans right after dinner, who hadn’t packed a hard-boiled egg for lunch — not out of portion control but out of a disorganized personal household food shortage — could probably get their children to school without incident. I mean, there was no incident. But there could have been. Potentially. Because I wanted to be less late to a meeting I was already late for.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in charge of Native American themed snack for my older daughter’s Girl Scout troop. I bought butternut squash, enough for 22, cooked it, and then left it out until 3am, when I remembered, sat straight up in bed and moved it to the fridge. “It’s fine,” my husband said. “I’m going to have to agree with Patrick,” my co-worker said. “It’s squash. Can it even go bad?” said my friend. “I’ll get all new,” I said. And I got enough butternut squash for 22. Again. Of course, enough squash for 22 servings, and enough squash for 22 9-year-olds, is a very different thing. And so…. I had a LOT of butternut squash (and the first batch was just fine, btw; we ate it; it’s squash, what could go bad?). I ate butternut squash pretty much three meals a day for, well, days. Butternut waffles. Butternut pancakes. Mashed butternut with fruit puree. Roasted with a little honey… Some of it went better than others.

 

Tonight, spring rolls. “Hm. Have you done this before?” “Nope.” “Are they supposed to be falling apart like that?”

Yes. Yes they are. Because they’re made with rice paper. Who in their right mind would even begin a meal, on a Thursday night, that begins with rice paper? Truman Capote said that failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. We used peanut sauce. But, whatever. Equally valid.

There are so many little times during the day that we think, !!!Shoot. …Or, Well, if I had those ten seconds back… We’re broadcasting in stark HD on our own mountain, but the image is a lot more forgiving from a distance. Rudyard Kipling called out both Triumph and Disaster as imposters, and of course he was right. For every omelet that suddenly becomes a good scramble… well, who doesn’t love a good scramble? Our failures don’t define us, thank goodness. Our successes are as good as the next starting gun. Both come and go. But our perspective… over which we have the most control… that’s really what it comes down to. It’s jarringly high def, for sure. But it’s also brilliantly, palpably real. Not always pretty. But substantial and ours.

And so, what have we learned, other than a dozen ways to prepare squash? Slow down a little. Sprinting doesn’t shorten the distance, just the journey. Wash your face carefully, and make children responsible for dinner clean-up (it’s fun! bubbles! steel wool! bubbles!). I’ll put my crumbling spring rolls up against any garden-to-table dinner without fear (in principle… not specifically head-to-head…) And I’ll have a delightful spring roll scramble for tomorrow’s lunch.

 

 

This morning, I had an awful run. I knew it from about a minute in. I never found a good breathing rhythm and it just felt difficult. To add to it, when I ran on Thursday evening in the neighborhood around my daughter’s soccer practice, I passed three snakes. Which I was not okay with. There was a 99% chance they were harmless bull snakes, but I wasn’t discounting that they could be rattle snakes. Running could literally kill me.

This morning, I was running a usual route, but by the time I had crossed through the local park and was running up the hill that would take me home, I had to literally stop, put my hands on my thighs and wheeze. Had I passed someone in the same condition, I’d have probably felt it in violation of my Girl Scout first aid training to pass by. Luckily, no one did pass by. Add to it that every stick and leaf resembled a snake… In the end, my run was a little faster than usual, perhaps because I was just so anxious to get home before I embarrassed myself. It’s fine, I was thinking in those final minutes; I’m running at altitude. Me and Kara Goucher. I could totally rock a run at sea level. Stretching out at home, however, I still felt heavy chested, like I wasn’t getting quite enough air. “It’s allergy season, you’re probably a little congested,” my husband said. “You’re stressed out; you haven’t been sleeping well. You’re tired.”

As a practiced and practicing hypochondriac, though, I knew better than to accept such pedestrian explanations, and so I Googled “heart attack symptoms in women” immediately. “Are you serious?” asked my husband, as I took the heart attack risk factor quiz. The American Heart Association thinks I have a 1% chance of a heart attack. “Right,” said husband. “Physically, you’re perfectly healthy.” He’s a patient, loving man.

And so, like the stick, like the curling dried leaf pod on the sidewalk, is not a snake (99%), my wheezing run during allergy season, up a decent hill, is not a heart attack (99%). Hypochondria aside, how many times have we, with wi-fi at our fingertips, Googled something out of fear? That ridiculously giant, hairy spider in the garage. Bee stings. Radon. Donald Trump poll standings. Sometimes we research to assure ourselves of our own reasonable logic, and sometimes because we honestly would rather rely on a crowd-sourced Wikipedia article than ask a professional to answer what we might not want to know. And yet, how often is the stick a snake? Sure, the possiblity shouldn’t be discounted. There’s an evolutionary reason that we don’t seek snakes out, and I’m happy to comply. But most often, the stick is a stick.

I can’t say how much time I’ve spent on worry. It’s both more and less than it used to be. I’ve learned, for the most part, how to recognize when I go down a rabbit hole. Okay, so I took the American Heart Association quiz. But then I (pretty much) moved on. Reassured in my own logic. I took a class on anxiety a few years ago, and one thing the leader recommended was looking at the very worst case scenario of our fear, and realizing we could probably live with it. At the time, of course, I thought, that’s horrible advice. The worst case scenario? Death, apocalyptic chaos! But eventually, as you work through fears, you realize that death and apocalyptic chaos are pretty unlikely. Which brings us to pragmatic fears. Should I let my child ride her bike on the neighborhood streets? Will that helmet protect her? Do we have enough in savings to cover a medical emergency? A job loss? Will I be here to see all my children’s milestones? Their childrens’? These fears don’t send me to Google. They’re a different type. But they do encourage me, every day, to do better. Just a little better. To run even on mornings that feel heavy, to have a salad, to really listen when my child tells me a long and convoluted story about recess when I really just want to read, uninterrupted.

Fear can motivate, for sure. And surprise us into running a little faster; we can use it, channel it, to live a little deeper day by day… so that in that 1% when it really is a snake, we’re not paralyzed, but ready.

But to be clear, if it is a snake, not cool.

   Example: Not a snake.

Hey, remember that one time that I changed my entire lifestyle to holistically banish chronic idiopathic urticaria? (For those that need a refresher, that’s medical speak for inexplicable, random hives…) When I gave up wheat and sugar and birthday cake and my work bff’s acclaimed homemade cupcakes? And brought home Girl Scout cookies and Fazoli’s breadsticks and high-season fresh sweet corn, and didn’t eat any of it? Remember? Not to spoil the rant here, but… the hives are back. Back in the way that the flu circles an elementary school. You think you’re home-free, you think you made it, and then… wham. Back like the way the warranty department for your 5-year-old vehicle pretends for a few months that they listened when you said, Seriously. Stop calling. And then, just as you can no longer quite identify their number on caller ID… What. the. heck. I thought we were through!  But… we’re back.

The seasons are changing, so there are more allergens in the air, for sure. This is a completely unscientific hive hypothesis on my part. When I first got hives, it was in transient March. Sweet, simple, uncomplicated March 2014… at happy hour, unseasonably warm, so we sat outside and I had caprese salad, because I was still eating dairy, and … huh. What’s that weirdness on my wrist and hand? Probably nothing. Probably just a little contact dermatitis… How little I knew. And yes, I remember what I ate. Don’t judge me.

And so, after 9 months or so of hivey, defeatist self-indulgence, I started making the changes chronicled in this very blog. Ironically, the only time I’ve been getting hives in the past 6 months or so is when I exercise. Thanks for that, body. You’re a real team player. But the random, wake up in the morning with weirdly symmetrical hives down my legs and up my arms? It felt like that corner had been turned.

But now, as I look at the 8 small hives currently on my wrist, and 3 on the back of my hand, I think 1) that’s not so bad. Not ideal, but not so bad. This I can handle. This is not defining. This is not bad luck, it just is, and it’s a molehill to the mountains others are climbing. And 2) compared to March 2014, now I have hives on a body that feels better, is a little stronger, a little leaner. I’m not saying I’m drinking champagne about it. There’s no welcome committee. A few new hives weren’t in the plan, and I’m not thrilled. Maybe by the time Starbucks packs up their pumpkin spice, they’ll be gone again, or maybe they’ll stay through the holidays like that last guest at the party. Regardless, I’m living more today than I was before they arrived way back when. I’m carving out more time, making better choices. Maybe a few hives are a reminder that it’s a journey, not a race, and not a stagnant destination.

When I first noticed new hives this week, I immediately took a picture of them, and sent it to my mom. Why do you do that, my oldest daughter asked. Children are observant. It’s a good lesson to learn early in parenthood. Why do I do that? Why does my mother have the photo archives of a WebMD page? Because it’s a molehill, and a footnote, and it’s all part of the journey. Because I have well-earned wisdom gained through adversity. But I gave up breadbaskets and birthday cake! And who will always treat your molehill as a mountain? Who will  sympathize and soothe?  And not block your texts? No matter how old you get, Sam, and no matter your molehills, or your mountains, I promise to do the same for you.

 

  A couple of weeks ago, I realized that I still had a block of emails from last year’s teachers in my Inbox. While we loved last year’s teachers, it didn’t seem entirely necessary to hold on to their reminders about 2014 field trips and fundraisers. I started by deleting those emails, and then, email sorted by sender, I began several tangential trips down memory lane. I’ve had this email for a LONG time, and while I don’t use it for every day communication as much as I did ten years ago, it’s a treasure trove of reminiscence.

In honor of “Throw Back Thursday,” I thought I would share a “day-in-the-life” email written to my mother from early 2011 (don’t worry, Mom, I’ve redacted anything incriminating).  Certainly, my life 4.5 years ago resembled my life today. Two kids to get out the door on time, work, dinner… While I may have realized our lives were changing, I can’t help but notice that that routine had no soccer, dance, Girl Scouts, musical practice or homework. My children were ages 3 and 4 (during that part of the year that Eva revels in being just a year younger). Reading this now, and looking at my 7 and 9 year old, it makes my heart smile to remember when our lives were a little less structured; and my heart is full for the present, while we try a smorgasbord of the new, figuring out passions and talents and what’s worth juggling; and to look ahead to a future that likely resembles our current lives… getting out the door on time, work, dinner… but so much yet to be written. Que será, será… with a little nudge from the seeds we plant today.

And that said, #TBT, April 1, 2011:

This morning, before 5, I was vaguely aware of stirring in the girls’ room, and as the TV clicked on to Magic School Bus, I felt more than said a quick, earnest prayer that these events would not impact me for at least another hour. And sure enough, nearly an hour later, Samantha appeared at the foot of the bed, stage whispering, Mom! Mom! Some children would do this right at your ear, but in our house, there’s generally a 140 pound dog at the foot of the bed which makes for an imposing hurdle, even for a child as typically forthright and bossy as Sam.

Mom! I’m dressed, but I need a necklace! She says. I squint one eye open and note that she’s wearing the size 12/14 dress that was most recently her cousin’s, despite the fact that she is, in fact, a 4-5T. The dress is a white tank top with a black elastic waist and pink ruffled skirt. She loves it. It goes down to mid-calf. We tend to the necklace situation, and about four minutes into my shower, there’s a muffled voice at the shower door.

What?

More muffled questioning.

What?

I crack open the shower door.

Can I get Eva and I tomatoes for breakfast?

Sure, I say. And close the….. nope. She’s gone. The bathroom door swinging wide behind her. Sigh.

Twenty minutes later, I’m looking for socks for both girls in their terribly messy sock, underwear, leggings and tights drawer – someone should really organize that – as Eva is swinging one foot idly into my backside. Booty butt, booty butt, booty butt, she sings. I’m not sure whether to take offense at this or not. I’ve never really been accused of such a thing, but it’s kind of in these days, too… I also kind of wonder why my 3-year-old is singing this to me, but I feel like I don’t have the time or energy to search for those answers. As Eva moves on, she trips over a plastic egg crate of her toys, scratching the heel of her foot. TEARS!

Mommy!  I see bleed!!

I investigate. It’s more superficial than originally reported. A band-aid solves it.

Samantha arrives on the scene, throws her hair and places one hand on her hip, waiting expectantly.

You look nice, Sam, I say dutifully.

She tosses her hair again. Lord save us from the precociousness of a nearly 5-year-old.

Your shoes are on the wrong feet, Sam.

She looks down, the LED lights flashing.  “Oh.”  She disappears.

Coffee. Thank god for coffee. Eva’s having a pop tart at the kitchen counter when Patrick announces it’s time to leave for school.

No!!! she wails. I want to take it!

The pop tart?

No!!!!

The counter?

Yes. I want it.

Eva, you can’t take the counter with you. How about taking the pop tart instead?

She seems to realize that this is going to be an easier battle to win, and the tears stop.

I gather up my lunch, my coffee, my gym bag, my purse, check for my phone…. And then set them all down again while I go in search of my jacket. Except that my foot catches on the handle of the plastic Safeway bag my lunch is in, snagging my heel which then comes straight down on a plastic cup of diced peaches which somehow turns itself into a water cannon, and amazingly sprays peaches across the room while shooting peach juices mostly straight up the leg of my jeans…

But at least it wasn’t the coffee.

THAT would have been tragic.

#

In 2015, I can’t drink coffee anymore… Sad. I’m glad 2011 me didn’t know that yet.

Birthdays. Some will rock you. Some will define you. Some will bury you, and then, like pressurized coal, you’ll be stronger and brighter for them. Some slip by without much notice. And the more we have the better, generally speaking. Someone told me this week, Congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated three dozen years of living! My first reaction was, um, ouch. Fair, but… I don’t think anyone needs their age added up by dozens. But my second reaction was, Yes. I damn well have. I’ve done it far from perfectly. To borrow a recent phrase from columnist Connie Schultz, no one wants to be defined by their greatest mistakes. And so we’ll skip over those, for the most part, “the dues one pays for a full life.” 36 years means you’ve had some valleys and some peaks, and it’s a sum total game.

Birthdays inevitably send you both backward and forward in time. Childhood birthdays with cousins around the table, and birthday cakes shaped like ball gowns and castles. My 18^th birthday – a freshman at college – and my brand new college roommate ordered a pizza and put candles on it. It’s no wonder I still love her still today. And a few years later, my 21^st birthday, with the same roommate, who’d arrived at the same place a few months before me. Such different celebrations, just a few years apart, and yet so much living in between them. I’d lived away from home, and then away from the United States, fallen in love with Britain and quite possibly with a Brit, had left both to come back home where, to figure things out, I’d dyed my hair dark red and then blonde. I made plans, had them fall apart, and made new plans.

Once you have children, birthdays change, and not just because you’re now too tired to go out to celebrate, and even if you weren’t, it’s hard to find a babysitter past 10pm, and even if you could, who has the money after adulting for just long enough to acquire a mortgage, car payments and daycare. Birthdays change once you have children because you begin to account for time differently. You, yourself, feel like you’ve felt since you were 19 or so. Well, maybe 23. Once a year, you acknowledge that chronologically, you’re moving farther down the number line, but occasionally you have to do the math to remember exactly how old you are. Your children are the ones who are changing dramatically in front of you. They are the ones who remind us how fast time is actually going, and how it matters how we spend our individual days, because far too quickly, they become years for them, even while we, essentially, remain  23. Or certainly no more than 30.

And so, for this, the first year of my fourth dozen, I’m going to make a real effort to remember that the days go quickly, and that we don’t get them back. I’m going to take the time to smile over the people who stopped to wish happy birthdays, because they have made up so much of my sum total. How lucky I am to have a complex, beautiful web of friends and family who make up such disparate parts of my life, and yet who have marked it so indelibly.

Here’s to Year 36.

More bike rides, more dancing in the kitchen, more sitting on the front porch to watch the sun go down. Fewer knee-jerk reactions and rushes to judgement. More paring down clutter, mind and body, and more decisions that say, I’ll never be 36 again, so let’s do it right.

 

 

Here’s a thing about me that I’ve learned to be essential and true: I require downtime. And honestly, that downtime needs to be about me. Me. Just me. Bubble. If I don’t get said downtime, I start to wind tighter and tighter and tighter. I’m a pressure cooker, personification of Charles’  Law, a popped corn kernel sizzling in oil (delightful, sure, but not very comfortable and a little unpredictable).

Today, I read about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s announcement of her current pregnancy (twins!) and her plan to take a 2-week working maternity leave, as she did with her first child. I’ll leave others to debate whether her example is or is not helpful to the cause of working mothers and work/family balance. If she’s happy and fulfilled, I’m happy for her. But I just thought, How? How is it that some people are wired to climb mountains, and some are inclined to build cozy bungalows in the valleys? As a Virgo, I’m supposed to be driven by a perfectionistic, analytical streak, but my idea of achieving order is making it to the school before the morning bell rings. There are days that I can barely make it out of the house with a 7-and-9 year old who can, ostensibly, feed and dress themselves…(it’s supposed to be 85 degrees today; why are you in flannel?… If you want to wear your hiking boots, I suppose, but…)  In the weeks after I gave birth to those children, there were days I didn’t dress, shower or leave the house. That everyone was fed seemed like enough. Dressed? Optional. Marissa Mayer may have a housekeeper, a nanny and a stylist, but she’s also a hardwired mountain climber. I am not.

About 50% of the time, my morning includes someone in a modified time out before 8am. I often wish it was me. Can I go to my room for 5 minutes to take some deep breaths? Sometimes, my eyes dry and my neck aching at work, I’ll talk to my husband who will say, “What’s for dinner tonight?” “There’s chicken and ground turkey in the fridge,” I’ll say, “And we should probably use the avocados.” And when I get home, and it smells appreciably delicious outside, it somehow always surprises me that the smell stops at our front door. “You said you were making something with chicken.”  Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that, particularly. I’m going to my room for a timeout. Or, fine, to take my contacts out. But you can bet I’m going to be slow about it!

So, I’m a valley-type. I’ve come to terms with that. It’s a different view, not a lesser one. Every now and then, it’s fun to day-trip into the mountains. It’s a spectacular view. Sometimes stark and contrast-y, but striking. But do you remember the childhood song, The Bear Went Over the Mountain? On the other side of the mountain, there was always another mountain, back the way he’d come. Even as a child, I felt a little bad for him. I’m thankful for the Marissa Mayers of the world. There are so many advances in technology, healthcare, education, science and politics because of the mountains they’ve climbed. I have nothing but respect for that, as well as a little envy for that sort of innate drive.

But here’s what I noticed down here in my valley, where I have time for late night reading, and perusing fashion magazines (while wearing Target jeans and Old Navy t-shirts), time for extended happy hours and delightfully chaotic U7 soccer games: I noticed at night, the shamrocks on my windowsill close right up. They will themselves to sleep so that in the morning, they can spread their cheerful faces:

And there are these flowers that I definitely ought to know the name of, except that I don’t, that line the edge of the footpath that is Maximus Trail Park, giving it all the dignity of its larger park brethren. These sunny flowers know that there’s a time to rise, a time to shine, and a time to dream.

And so whatever our view, may all our dreams be as sweet as they are — as we are — different. And may we wake up refreshed and recharged.