Month: February 2016

I’m not about to say anything new. I don’t think there is anything new to say under the sun, really. Just new prisms through which to view the old. Sappho and Shakespeare and Hemingway tell the same stories. Life and love, with its heartache and joy. The stories are the same, across centuries, across oceans, because at the heart of it people are the same. We forget that, sometimes.

One of my favorite giving organizations is Heifer International. This is in part nostalgic. It was one of my grandmother’s favorite organizations. The premise is that Person A, through Heifer International, gifts Person B a gift of livestock, and when that livestock thrives, Person B gifts from their growing herd or flock to Person C, their neighbor. Through compassion and hard work, a struggling community can thrive. Quarterly or so, we get Heifer’s newsletter and this time I noticed the final page, which just said, Leave It Better Than You Found It.

Leave It Better Than You Found It is another one of those not-new ideas. The Girl Scouts drill this idea into their members from kindergarten up. When camping, when on trips, in our own communities, leave it better than you found it. This isn’t limited to recycling and planting trees, though let’s do both of those things. To leave the world better than we found it, we need to leave people better than we found them, as well. And this can take so little. How many times have you felt a slight uplift at the sight of someone else smiling, or a child laughing? Be the person smiling. Be the person laughing. Be the first person to pay it forward at the Starbucks drive-through. It’s so easy to do. And so easy not to. I used to carry a little bit of cash with me, and I had a rule with myself that if I was the first car at a stoplight with a panhandler, I was obligated by human connectivity to give to that person, whether it happened randomly three times in a day, or once in a week. When did I stop doing that? When did it become too much of a hassle to have cash on hand? Easier to avert my gaze and turn the radio up. I forgot the parable of the faithful servant. To whom much has been given, much will be required.

I asked my daughter what she thought would make the world a better place. She didn’t take more than three seconds to think about it. “Say nice words, and when people fall down, help them up.” She just turned eight. I think we’re born knowing more about human compassion and kindness than we can ever appreciate when we’re young. And somehow, as we grow older, we begin to lose this principled default view. We’ve been disappointed by life a little more. We’ve worked hard and had things fall apart. We’ve seen people who didn’t work hard be rewarded. Our compassion is tested by our own sense of fair play but also by our sense of self-preservation. When we were cavemen, stopping to help the clanmate with a broken leg meant being trampled by a Mammoth or picked off by a saber tooth tiger. Fair point. Here’s the best thing, though. We’re not cavemen any more. We don’t have to think solely with our fight or flight frontal lobe. We can retain our childhood compassion. We can say nice words and help people up.

This week saw two mass shootings and multiple police officers shot in the line of duty. The first mass shooting, in Wichita, killed 4 and wounded 20. The second was in Washington state, and I’m sad to report that I don’t know anything about it except the headline. I was going to read an article about the Wichita victims, saw the Washington headline, and read neither. I wonder what Cate Blanchet will wear to the Oscars this year? I heard the weather’s supposed to be nice. Oh, and look, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck came together to celebrate their son’s birthday. Good for them.

Speaking for myself, I become desensitized to the news because it would hurt too much to be too sympathetic. If I thought of each of the victims of the week’s publicized shootings, if I thought of their families, if I thought about the starving children of Syria, and the people horrifically executed by IS by being strapped to chairs and pushed off roofs, just because of their genetics… If I internalized these things and was truly compassionate about them, I’d never get out of bed. So instead, I choose the easier path. I become a disconnected bystander. A passerby, hurrying home to dinner, surfing past the nightly news. Assad’s regime is holding civilians under siege as people, children, die of starvation and desperate parents are killed by sniper fire as they try to find any last vegetation to feed to their children. How awful. Is The Voice on? Please pass the salt.

I don’t think this makes me a horrible person. Of course, I have some bias in saying that. I think that people generally want to help each other out. I want to. People want to say nice words and help people up when they fall down. They want to leave people, the world, better than they found it. But it’s a heavy burden to take on, to truly open our eyes to all the places, all the people who need our help. I’m just one person. How much can I do? Is it worth it to wake up every day with my heart broken?

I think this is part of the reason that the presidential election primaries have come to the place that they have. We’ve detached ourselves from the process. It takes a hell of a lot to get our attention. We skim the headlines, but we remain a disconnected bystander. Just like I see the hopelessness in Syria and think, “That’s awful, but it could never happen here,” I look at a presidential candidate advocating killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, and I think, “That’s awful. But in the end, that won’t happen here. In the end, the United States would never elect someone so hateful and divisive.” Sure the first images of each scenario are shocking and distressing, but frankly you get used to both headlines, and as long as I don’t think about it too much, and can assure myself that it can never happen here, I can keep myself detached.

Well, shame on me. My husband says that most of the time, I am so careful to be politically and socially sensitive, not to rock the boat, that I stay universally likeable, that anyone outside of my inner circle has no idea what I am thinking. One of my good friends recently told me, shocked me by telling me, that she often has no idea when I’m happy or angry because I’m generally so even-keeled. And there’s a place for that. No one needs to know what everyone is actually thinking at every moment of the day. We’d all be friendless and alone. But Coco Chanel said, “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”

On this eve of Super Tuesday, I ask everyone to think for themselves. How are we doing at the parable of the faithful servant? How are we doing living up to our own standards? If our actions today, or our inactions, are the blueprint for social conscience for our children, for our grandchildren, are we satisfied with that? Are the consequences of our choices today something we’re prepared to see through? Have we thought about the consequences? When children of a different religion die before they have a chance to live just because they were born somewhere without a proud blue passport, are we satisfied telling our children that it’s okay? That in any event, we wouldn’t want them to be here, that we’d brand their identification with a stamp of their “otherness” and mock their religion and their god? Is that what we’ve become? Can we look at ourselves and say truthfully, “We said nice words, and we helped people up when they fell down?” Can we hold ourselves to the standards of our 8-year-olds?

If at the end of the day we do even one thing with compassion, I think we can begin to face the world as it really is, and that compassion saves us from waking up with our hearts quite so torn. From being so detached. Because helping other people heal begins to heal the brokenness in us, and let’s face it, we’re all pretty broken. Or at least I am. I’m hopeful and hypocritical and angry; I’m both brokenhearted and indifferent, depending on how work went, how my children behave, what time I can finally walk through my front door.

Aloud, I’m going to say that for my household, for my children, I want them to know by my actions that when you have more than you need — not more than you want, but more than you need — you build a longer table, not a higher fence and not a wall along our southern border. That we can disagree without calling names, that we should be brokenhearted about homeless veterans, and Ebola orphans and the families who have lost loved ones in senseless shootings. We should read their names and we should speak up for what we believe in, for what breaks our hearts, and we should do so compassionately, eloquently and most importantly, thoughtfully.  And aloud.

Who are we as a nation? Who are we as a community? We have a chance to advocate for our idealistic 8-year-olds with our vote. Let’s not waste it.

 

I live my life on post-it notes. I find them at the bottom of my purse, in pockets. I hear some people find money in the pockets of last year’s winter jacket or summer shorts. That sounds much more exciting than a florescent square proclaiming, “Creamer juice boxes poster board cat litter.”  I text myself. I have a physical daily planner that travels with me and I put appointments into my phone calendar and my work calendar. And still, I can’t manage to show up at the birthday party of one of my closest friend’s 6-year-old daughter. And that random school in-service day when there was no school? Well, looks like mama’s working from home today, girls!

I need a day – or maybe a couple – just to get myself organized. Just like I accumulate time off for days that I show up at work, I need to accumulate time off for real life days when I am drowning in lists and too mentally scattered to cross anything off. I need time to make the phone calls and do the laundry and shred the mail and do the things so that my life isn’t one giant pile of perceptual and physical clutter. Scholastic book club order, due January 25^th? Kohls’ New Years coupons? I swear with personal organization days, these wouldn’t create such a firetrap on my kitchen counters. I could do so much better. I just need the tools. And by tools, I mean time. And by time, I mean time not after 9:30pm when I’m too tired to shred paper without potential loss of limb.

Clearly, it would be unfair, to say nothing of demoralizing, to be required to use the time off that I painstakingly accumulate at work on things like calling the school transportation office, or getting the children to their dentist appointments – or heck, even scheduling their dentist appointments. It’s called “vacation time” is it not? (I mean, I get that PTO generically stands for personal time off, but so help me, I will still stare lovingly at the timesheet-generated table of hours and call it vacation time). And so, to avoid taking depressing days off, in addition to my vacation time (which I need as motivation for going into work the other 49 weeks a year) I would like to institute Personal Easement Days.

“Hi. I won’t be coming in today. I have 36 phone calls to make, two dozen Girl Scout patches to sew (liquid stitch) on, and I need to research pediatric dentists since I clearly can’t face our current one after having waited this long to schedule an appointment.”

On a Personal Easement Day, I could hear, “Please listen closely as the [15] menu options have changed,” and I would simply smile wisely and make another cup of tea. I would find lids to the Tupperware and stack them neatly in our cupboards before sorting through the girls’ closets for outgrown clothes (rather than fighting, or not fighting, the morning battle over favorite pants now two inches too short – why do we keep rewashing those and putting them away?!). And then I would take every empty granola bar box and half open cracker sleeve out of our pantry. I’d order a cute basket from Thirty-one, and consolidate all our chargers and cords in one visually pleasing, usage-friendly place. Boxes would be checked. Lists would be crossed off. Library books would be returned.

It’s a fantasy, of course. No matter how many lists are crossed off, no matter how many races we run, there’s always another. Sometimes it feels downright overwhelming. But it occurs to me, even as I wake up in the middle of the night and text myself 3am jibberish, I’m pretty lucky to have so much to balance. My life is full. I’m pretty lucky to have people who say, How can I help?, and I’m pretty lucky to have access to plenty of sticky notes in a variety of fun colors.

My house may never be uncluttered, and my mind even less so. My Tupperware will remain a series of square containers with round lids. But… at least for one more day:

I get by with a little help from my friends.

My daughter has a friend, Emilio, from preschool. Sometimes they talk on the phone for much longer stretches than you’d anticipate. And he texted her happy birthday wishes (mom’s phone to mom’s phone) on the exact right day. Of course, now they’re only in second grade, but I like to imagine that they will be friends forever.

Despite the fact that my daughter will be friends with her preschool best bud for a lifetime, I feel like most of our friendship histories start in grade school. Maybe it’s because we feel, even as children, like we now have a shot at permanence. I moved to my childhood home when I was in third grade, and I met my first friend through a parentally planned blind date. At church that first Sunday, I was introduced to the girl who would be one of my best friends throughout my primary education. We shuffled to sit in the same pew and that was that.

With Grade School Friends, we’re starting to test our wings. It’s the first time we have secrets, and need secret keepers. The girl from Week 1 of third grade? We hid secrets and friendship tributes under a loose stair tread on the unfinished stairs winding up to the attic. 25 years later, when my parents moved out of that house, one of the things I did was remove the diary, the painted rocks, the embodiments of  that absolutely foundational friendship. I watch my daughter in the same sort of core friendships now. She wasn’t in the same class as her two closest friends this year, and next year, one of them will be going to another school altogether. It makes a difference in your day-to-day, at this age, what class you’re assigned to. But you have your core people, fortified by sleepovers and recess and lunch (and by mother-friendships, but more on that later). Grade school friends are the ones who wear our BFF necklaces, who had a vote on which signature was best as we were developing handwriting. We terrified ourselves playing Bloody Mary at sleepovers, and balanced with some Barbie play when we were sure no one else would know we were still playing with dolls.

As we grew older, some of these grade school friends remained in our closest circle. I went to a small school; my graduating class was 97 people. Especially in a small town, your High School Friends know your story. High school friends were there through horrible hormones and pimples and crushes. They know how many times it took you to pass your driver’s test (not the driving portion, just the maneuverability, and really, when do you need to parallel park when you can walk another three blocks and be healthier for it?).

High school meant long talks on team busses, experiments with at home hair color, dating, rumors about who was losing their virginity, part time jobs, hanging out in parking lots and friends’ driveways. We felt so much older than we were. We talked, and talked, and talked. Our lives were a constant consultation, and for me, this was before cell phones became a thing (because I’m just that old now), and way before texting and Facetime and Skype. We confided our secrets as God intended, from a phone hanging on the kitchen wall which was, hopefully, a cordless phone we could sprint to our bedrooms and use with the music turned up. We spend potentially 12 years with a group of friends on what is always a countdown to leaving. I remember being horrified when my mother admitted she had lost track of many of her high school friends. That would never, ever happen to my group because we were clearly much closer. I felt a little bad for her, and a little smug.  But I was the only OHS grad who left for my particular college, and as my mother knew would happen, for the most part we drifted into our own story lines after graduation (before Facebook made faces and stories familiar again, an impromptu reunion.) And for the handful whose phone numbers remain current in my phone, there’s a porch rocker waiting when we’re gray.

College is like friendship on speed, I think. There is no other period when you spend so much time with your friends, when an open door policy is not only accepted but encouraged. Today, if someone tells me they’re stopping by “in thirty minutes” that gives me just enough time to clean frantically so that I can apologize for not cleaning. But in college, it’s all communal all the time. Friends are your family, your compass. There is no hiding anything in a college dorm room, and there’s not hiding much in a college apartment. You eat together, you study together, you go to class together, you go out together and look out for each other when you do. There are a thousand inside jokes that will last for decades. You stay out late, and sleep til noon.

I had, in some ways, two college experiences. One was at a fairly large state school in Pennsylvania, and the other at a small college in the West Midlands of England. In both cases, these are the people with whom my soul has been laid bare. It didn’t matter what we had in common at the beginning of it. In the end, we had each other in common, and I would go to the wall unquestioningly for these amazing people today, some whom I haven’t seen in years. It doesn’t matter. These are the people who can name seven of the Top 10 stupidest things I’ve ever done, and aren’t surprised by the other 3. They can cut to the heart of things in twenty seconds because they know me backward and forward, but will spend days driving around in New Mexico (hypothetically) letting the real conversation percolate if necessary, because it’s not quite time yet. I have a sheaf of letters from these friends, mostly from summers spent apart, that I keep tucked away like love letters, and that’s essentially what they are.

As an adult, 90% of my friends have been made in two categories. Work Friends and Mom Friends. And then one day, they’ve seamlessly become no-modifier-needed Friends.

Work Friends begin with a realization that we both find Peter in accounting to be a sycophant obstructionist, or because we realized we stayed at the same slightly shady hostel/hotel in Amsterdam in the late 90’s. Every life scenario has its own politics, and the work day is no different. We need to find our tribe to survive. And while most of the people we meet at work fade to LinkedIn contacts after we leave, every now and then we find an actual friend, someone with whom we share the details of our real lives, and meet for happy hour on the *weekend*, not just at 3pm on a Friday.

Mom Friends are symbiotically interwoven with grade school friends, but it takes a generation to understand exactly how it works. There are, certainly, children with whom my daughters are friends whose mothers I feel no real connection to. But these are the exception, because whether it’s fair or not, we nurture the friendships of those children whose parents we enjoy the most. I think this actually works out fine because whether you’re a proponent of nature or nurture, one or both of those is driving a chunk of childhood development. It’s better than betting odds that a good match kid probably means a good match mom. While our besties from other friend categories may also be going through many of the same career, relationship and parenthood trials, these are the new friends who are ON THE GROUND with us. They speak the language of parenthood AND our specific community. It starts with the person you spend 5 minutes with at school drop off, and then suddenly, this is also the got-your-back-when-the-babysitter-cancels friend who receives the no segue 9pm photo text of just a glass of wine. And totally gets it.

This accumulation of miraculous people, whether they be a handful or a legion, these are the people with whom life gets real once you’re, you know, adult-ish. There are divorces and pregnancies and losses, there are kids with issues we didn’t anticipate, there is cancer and job loss and bad investments. We thought we knew how to be supportive from those times in college when we sat up and ate ice cream and drank tequila with our friend who just realized her boyfriend wasn’t going to be the one. But we aren’t always prepared for what adult friendships ask of us. Sometimes we find the right words, the right gestures. Sometimes we’re a deer in headlights, wishing for a do-over of what we could have said and done in hindsight. But we learn from each of these life-just-got-real experiences so that we’re a better friend the next time.

Friendship becomes weightier as you get older, I think. Time, money and energy are all budgeted. Texts with a single heart emoji are code for, I’m thinking of you and wish we were having dinner somewhere laughing about the good old days and comparing notes on how to make it through Common Core math — seriously what *is* that stuff! — but know that my lack of communication has everything to do with the start of soccer season and strep throat and nothing to do with the fact that I am returning your last three texts with an emoji.

The spontaneity of showing up at someone’s dorm room has been replaced with happy hour planned 6 weeks out. The friends we once saw every day we now see once a month, or year, or decade. But it works, because it’s not about how often we see each other — it’s about how comfortably wonderful it is when we do.

<< heart emoji>>

 

 

My family celebrates Valentine’s Day, but my husband and I don’t, especially. I have nothing against the commercialism of the holiday. I’m not here to remind anyone that it’s initially, historically, a story of martyrdom. I enjoy all the hearts and roses and bad couplets, and the good couplets. I like that it’s a reason for reminding ourselves of all the people we care about, as well as those we loved once, and the lessons we’ve learned through the process. I like that it’s an excuse for reading some of my favorite poets, and that lists appear of the best love songs, and heart break anthems.

When sometimes it seems like the world is a fractured place, I like being reminded that there’s a holiday about love, even when love is complicated and difficult, and that the reason Cupid exists is that basic humanity dictates the universal need not to go through life alone. We need family, friends, partners.

This year, Valentine’s Day is on a Sunday. On Wednesday night, my husband yelled from the family room to where I was working in the kitchen, “If I forget to tell you, happy Valentines Day!” And I know I bought a card a couple weeks ago. At least I’m pretty sure I did. I may have just looked at them. In any case, I looked in the top three places I would have tucked a card away, and I can’t find it.

I don’t know if my husband and I have ever shared a chocolate lava cake from a Valentine’s Day menu, but we’ve definitely, and repeatedly, shared a bottle of wine after a ridiculously long day that has had both of us running in different directions before coming home to a house that has dishes in the sink, Shopkins scattered in the living room and laundry unfolded in baskets lined up in front of the dryer.

A decade ago — a little more than a decade ago, I guess — I went to the gym most nights and then we went out for drinks. We slept in on weekends because we’d never gotten out of the habit of doing so. Now, we’ve added children and mortgages and crazy schedules to our lives. We’re part of a relay team that seemingly never stops running. His shift starts at 5am, and mine ends around midnight. Sometimes I think he could run his leg differently, and sometimes he thinks I could be more efficient if I just took this or that logical and friendly piece of advice, and sometimes we get tired and a little cranky. But at 9pm when we’re curled on the couch watching The Daily Show, mutually, wordlessly agreeing to ignore those laundry baskets for one more day, my weary sigh of contentment is a real-life sonnet.

I have a Target bag of holiday cuteness tucked away for the children, a circle of friends I love like family, and family who loves me for my best intentions and despite my flaws. And so while I am not anticipating a dozen roses, and my husband may not even get a card, I’m feeling the love this Valentine’s Day.

 

 

I was talking to a friend today who offered to commiserate over the caloric, resolution-bending hit of Girl Scout cookie season. “How do you manage with all of those cookies in your house?” she asked, since I had tried to peddle her some of those very wares. This is where I sometimes feel guilty, like I’ve turned in my membership card to a club I was once an officer for. “Well, this is my second cookie season off gluten, so it’s not so bad,” I said, feeling like a judgmental drug dealer whispering crack is whack under my breath while peddling powder. My friend literally gasped. “Not even Samoas?!” she said. “Nope,” I confirmed, “Not even Samoas.”

Honestly, I miss the easy comradery of gluten more than the gluten. It’s harder, or at least more isolating, to give up the sharing chocolate lava cake a la mode than it is to give up the actual cake. I’ve now been 14 months without gluten and about 10 without dairy or corn. Luckily at this point most people in my usual daily orbit already know, so there’s less awkward explaining. But people are often still surprised that I don’t have exceptions and loopholes. Part of this may be because people knew me before the idiopathic urticaria (hives) showed up for the first time a couple years ago, finally making me miserable enough to embrace some changes. And, for people who know me, it still seems out-of-character for me to be turning down cookies. To be fair, it still is out of character. If I didn’t feel so much better eating differently, I would definitely eat the Samoa(s)(s)(s).

I’m not sure it’s particularly healthy, but I work better on an all or nothing philosophy. If I gave myself exceptions and loopholes, I would live in the loophole. I know this about me. The holidays! (meaning October 20 – January 3, of course), loophole! Birthdays of close friends, family and that new guy at the office whose name definitely starts with a J. Barbeques! Tuesdays that ought to be Fridays! It would really never end, because I have no will power. That might seem like a weird thing coming from someone who has successfully avoided large, delicious food groups associated with happiness for more than a year. Isn’t that will power? I think no. This is where all or nothing comes in. Do you know someone who can eat one cookie? Because that seems like the set-up to a punchline to me. Or a personality trait of someone one miracle away from canonization. I may not be eating Girl Scout cookies but I had 6 dark chocolates the other day, because once the bag is open, literally and metaphorically, I can tell myself, Just one. Two, actually, is a serving. Now stop. Seriously, not one more. Well, if I have one more now, I won’t have another tonight. Or all day tomorrow. It evens out. Or… well, oops that’s six. That’s unfortunate. For the record, I feel a lot better when limiting sugar, too, but because I don’t have a zero tolerance policy, I’m almost always in exception mode. (When I was in zero tolerance for sugar, I treated grape tomatoes like sweet, delicious dessert. Now, I think of them as tomatoes. It’s perhaps ultimately less healthy, but allows me to respect myself again.)

Knowing yourself well enough to play to a crazed, high-maintenance alter-ego (or perhaps that’s just the id) can have advantages, though. When you know something in life is toxic, it seems like the most logical thing in the world to step away from that toxicity. And yet, that’s often the very hardest thing. One of the most important relationships of my young adulthood was completely toxic, and yet seemingly as necessary as air. That kind of relationship stunts growth in any other direction – personally, professionally – you’re so worn out to begin with that the only risk you’re up for taking is the one keeping you in this quagmire. It makes it hard to see clearly, decide rationally. It takes a no exceptions, no loopholes approach – if you’re me, anyway – to reclaim some of that wayward personal growth. No loopholes doesn’t mean no baggage, but it does create a pretty clear path.

I live with low grade anxiety that sometimes jumps into high anxiety, and I fight a tendency toward obsessive behavior. Everyone – I assume – wonders sometimes if they left the stove on, but at certain times in my life, I’ve been so controlled by a recurring thought pattern that I’m pretty much incapacitated inside, while going about my day within the complete façade of an extroverted wittiness-lite routine. Keep them laughing and no one will realize you’re dancing on the edge. I think this tendency to obsess rolls into the all or nothing. I read books a dozen times. I’m a sporadic (weather permitting) runner, and when I’m in running mode, it’s like I’m terrified to stop, to go to yoga one day, or try out that spin class. I just know that if I don’t run today, and then don’t go tomorrow, I may never run again. Spin class may ironically be the beginning of my slide into complete sloth. I missed that memo about doing what you can, where and when you can, and starting again tomorrow. I’m a perfectionist trapped inside a frenetic, disorganized mind.

Somehow, when I’ve chosen nothing of all or nothing, I’ve removed the struggle. Choosing a no loopholes approach means that I’ve moved from “I can’t” to “I just don’t.” There’s far less internal conflict in the latter, far less obsessing. Part of me, maybe a big part of me, wishes I could be a one cookie kind of girl. Moderation sounds perfectly logical. But perfectly logical is one thing I am not. And so I will continue eschewing gluten while devouring chocolate, and talking about yoga while I lace up my running shoes (snowmelt permitting, so let’s say about April). It seems to be working more than it’s not, which is my general litmus test these days.

And in the meantime, I’m going to assume that Samoas aren’t nearly as good as I remember, anyway.

This time next week, I’ll have an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old. Certain ages have more significance than others. Five is a full hand. Ten is double digits. Golden birthdays. Traditionally, eight and nine probably don’t have as much intrinsic cultural meaning, but somehow I feel like I’m losing my little girls with this birthday. Seven rounds down to five. Eight rounds up to ten. After ten, we’ll blink and start doing college tours, which I’m definitely not ready for. It’s like that scene in When Harry Met Sally when Sally realizes she’s going to be 40. “In eight years,” Harry says. Sally sniffles and blows her nose. “But it’s there.”

And it is. It’s there. Eight rounds up to ten, and ten rounds up to that semester abroad and that summer internship across the country when they come back with their first tattoo and a boyfriend who will break their heart. So… okay, I may be projecting there. But the point stands. Even as I consider going out into the cold and snow to top-off my half-full gas tank, just to have ten minutes alone in my car, I understand that the constant cacophony of these early years is already waning. As two children fight through dinner to tell first and most about their days, I realize that in a few years, I likely won’t be their first confidant. Already my older daughter’s bedroom door is closed as often as it’s open. But dear lord is life still loud right now. My brother, when I mentioned that I was maybe going to create a fortress of solitude in the below-freezing temps of the garage, replied that he was reading. Alone. In a quiet room. Perhaps the friendly fray of siblings never really ends; we just get better at it.

In the ten years since we discovered we were going to be parents, life has changed, clearly. We knew it would. We weren’t totally delusional. But we’ll still be us. Just with a baby. And we are. But we’re an altered us. I’m a different me. It’s been said that having a child is having your heart walking around outside your body, which is absolutely true. It’s dizzyingly terrifying and sometimes suddenly emotional, like that Folgers homecoming commercial in the middle of a string of volume-heavy Audi performance and Ford truck spots. Out of the blue, your ears are still ringing, but you’re a little teary, nostalgic and full of wonder and fearful hope. There’s nothing like that sense of momentary clarity. But parenting is also having your brain so full of chatter, playdates and Sign-up Genius requests that you wake up in the middle of the night paralyzed physically by half-sleep, but mind racing, full of things that will be just out of reach in the morning.

Beyond timely responses to Sign-up Genius requests, there are a lot of things I could do much better as a parent. I’m not big on playing. I will watch the dance, listen to the original song, clap and heap praise. We can bake together and read together. But I have no idea what to make the Shopkins do, and I don’t really want to figure it out. I’ll have a dance party in the kitchen, and look up facts about dinosaurs and the cosmos, but I honestly stopped listening half way through the made-up rules of the elaborate card game created with a combined Uno and Old Maid deck. I stopped supervising teeth brushing several years ago and now I only intervene when it sounds like, during the relaxing goodnight rituals, someone might be drawing blood. Also, I buy chocolate chips that I say are only for baking, but which I then finish off before a single cookie is made. I have room for improvement.

As babies, parenting about a basic Maslow’s hierarchy. You’re pretty much winning when your child is fed and clothed. More points if that food was freshly pureed vegetables, a standard I never achieved, and the clothing relatively clean. As the parent, we likely look like the picture of Dorian Gray, at least for a few years. My children are growing up – eight and nine, I think I mentioned in distress, rounding up to double digits, both – and I love that they can dress themselves and stir up some morning pancake batter and clean bathrooms, but it’s also more complicated now. Instead of despairing over a hard-to-fit puzzle piece, my daughter is upset because she isn’t mastering a complicated series of steps in her dance class. Tears of basic frustration and anger we had a grasp on. I could fix the farmyard animal puzzle, rezip the jacket or find the missing shoe. But these new tears of doubt and apprehension and the mental battle between the emotional and the rational? Well, crap. Deep breath. I told the story about how I’d had a difficult time sometimes in my own childhood dance classes. Scissor step, kick, ball change. I said that the semester was just starting. I said we’d take a video of the offending step combination for full reference. Then I made an ice cream sundae, which was accepted with a monotone, “Thanks.” So, I not only didn’t help, but I taught my daughter to use food as a remedy. The dessert panacea. Stand up job. And this is just a segue before teenage relationships and pre-calculus.

Our children are a mix of the good and the bad traits they inherit from us. Our genes, our habits, nurture, nature. And they’re completely their own. They talk back and refuse on principle, and they love and they trust. They’re amazing really. They’re incredibly brave. Changing schools, stitches, friendships and long division. Childhood is not for the faint of heart. Nor is parenting. Except we don’t realize the full impact of that right away. Much like we realize that having children will be like lighting our disposable income on fire, and yet aren’t completely prepared for the bonfire, we aren’t completely prepared for our own vulnerability. Things we can’t fix, shouldn’t fix, and desperately want to fix. The older my children get, the more failures fill my list.

So, we ante up and throw into the pot sleepless nights, freezing soccer games and $12 squares of fundraiser wrapping paper, dance lessons and family vacations, and we hope we get it more right than wrong. If faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase, sometimes parenting feels like the staircase of, say, a Chichen Itza. Tiny steps, straight up to a top you can’t quite see, but with a lot of other people on the same climb, even more who have reached the top.

And then there’s the view.