Month: April 2016

You know the On This Day Facebook app that prompts you to see what you were up to 7 years ago, 3 years ago, last year… It’s really a combination of delightful, occasionally awkward and wonderfully nostalgic.

Well, 7 years ago today, April 25, 2009, I was showing off the Rocky Mountains to two of my favorite Brits. Our visits are far too infrequent, but always much anticipated and add to great memories. I look forward to seeing them on the highlight reel again soon.

Last year on this day, I wrote my first Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert blog.

A year of blogging isn’t really so much. I know personally multiple people who have been blogging much, much longer. And I read many blogs that say things much more eloquently than I could. That are funnier. Or braver.

But reflecting on a year of blogging, I can definitely say I’m glad I jumped on this bandwagon, and I’m happy and appreciative that so many people over the last year took the time to read the words that popped into my head and onto the page.

I started the blog to try to be more accountable to a healthier lifestyle, but it didn’t end up being that blog for very long. Maybe it should have, because I’ve been on a running rest day since December. I was going to start again April 1… but Denver got *a lot* of April snow… And tonight it’s raining. I’m still addicted to sugar, but sometimes I put it in chia seed pudding now. Or on paleo banana pancakes. And I use coconut flour and almond milk… to make banana chocolate chip muffins. I apparently also eat a lot more bananas now.

But despite the Vitamin Cottage-esque look of my cupboards (the chocolate I hide in drawers), blogging turned into something more important to me than a chronicling of good and bad choices. It became a reconnection with “and.”

I think sometimes when we get to a certain point in our lives — busy, juggling, a little confused as to how we got here — we’re actually at our best, our most multi-faceted with more depth and more breadth than we’ve ever had before. But we’re too tired to see it. Because our routines are dictated by our children, our jobs, our partner’s job, our hopes and retirement goals, we start seeing uniform sidewalks stretching ahead where we used to travel meandering, climbing paths that led to places and people far-off and unknown. The sidewalks aren’t bad. They just seem somehow sudden and unexpected, and yet somewhere we’ve been for awhile now.

A WordPress account does not change the fact that I still have soccer practice and games and make-up games and science fairs and ballet and Girl Scouts and customer meetings and days when my husband gets stuck at work, and I have to leave my own desk at a run to pick up the children. My path doesn’t have much mystery at the moment. But blogging turned into an “and.” I’m a mother. I’m a wife. And I’m a writer again. And I’m part of this wonderful, crazy village of friends, family and experience. And I’m not so tired that I can’t jot an idea down on a sticky note in the morning and let it roll around into a right-brain release while my left-brain life marches on.

I don’t mind cooking when I have the time, but I’ve never had much patience for baking. My grandmother made wonderful yeast breads. Cinnamon rolls. Dill onion bread. Sourdough and country loaf. It was all delicious and made the house smell amazing and made me happy, just thinking of that perfect shade of golden toasted brown coming out of the oven. But I appreciated the finished product more than the process. The process seemed exhausting, all that kneading and waiting and perfect timing. With writing, though, it’s my sunny counter top and the whir of the mixer and a wonderfully yeasty, burgeoning idea that’s just waiting for its purpose. Sometimes it comes out a wonderful, aromatic masterpiece, and sometimes it falls as flat as a pancake. But either way, it’s my “and.” It’s my process to dig into and explore.

A year ago on April 25, I said:

No more substitutions.  I want to make plans and climb mountains, to feel alert and healthy and present. I’m on a quest to choose the real, the worthwhile, and even if I have to temporarily give up actual dessert to do it, I’m ready, because frozen grapes are not dessert.

It was an ambitious goal. I didn’t always meet my own expectations. I’m not quite where I’d like to be. I let myself worry about things I can’t control. I medicate with chocolate and red wine from time to time. I took a four and a half month rest from running. But in my two-steps forward, one-step back ramble, I’m ahead of where I was. I’m on the look-out for a few more ands.

 

 

 

 

My oldest daughter will be 10 this summer. She’s still my little girl in many ways. She still expects a stuffed bunny at Easter and still wants a hug at school drop-off. But she is also starting to use her bedroom as a private retreat and her friendships are becoming more defined. She can pack her own lunch and do a load of laundry and quote from Hamlet.

I am thrilled for her accomplishments and proud and sad and trepidatious for a future that I can’t write. How did this person grow from a baby, 4 pounds and change, to a girl who can use a sewing machine and a long bow and execute a grand plié. She has such a sense of fair play and believes so earnestly in rules. I appreciate this about her and yet life, even at not quite ten, is harder when the rules still seem so black and white.

I want life to be kind; I want the world to see this woman-in-the-making and appreciate and embrace her. And yet it won’t, always. If I think about it too much, it already hurts, pre-emptively. Her hurts, the ones she’ll necessarily accumulate just by living. You hope to teach your children resiliency and depth and kindness. Because we know they’ll need all three. And humor and grit and grace.

A while back I stumbled across this Mary Oliver poem, and I thought, “Yes. Yes, that.”

 

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

There are a thousand different proverbs, quotations, poems and songs that say roughly this. Adversity is the best teacher. Smooth seas do not make for skillful sailors. But Mary Oliver’s poem took me back to half a dozen times and places in an instant: those moments when you offer up a gift that is nothing less than all of you, everything you have to give. And it’s not enough. Or perhaps worse, it’s received in a spiraling inequity that leaves you more alone than you think you can bear in a room without air.

A box full of darkness. An anti-gift that lets self-doubt sneak in. Parenting articles abound on how to create confident children. I read them. I appreciate them. I want to get that right. So often I wonder if I am.

As my children get older, I feel a sense of increasing urgency. In the middle of an otherwise ordinary moment, I’ll see a certain hair flip or the light will catch just right, and my heart stutters to realize that I only have so many more weeks and months and years to help nurture those seeds of resilience. And that no matter what I do, no matter how strong a foundation I hope to build, this amazing child will one day open a box full of darkness.

I hate it, and yet it’s somehow in that dark room with no air that we learn to breathe again. In. And out. Until we remember how. In that frozen moment of clarity when I catch a glimpse of the young adult surfacing in my no-longer-little child, I know I can’t and shouldn’t put her in a bubble.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. Friendships that faltered, relationships that failed, self-doubt and anxiety… But afterward, little by little, I’ve come to realize that a person can’t give themselves away to try to make another person whole. And that a personal identity can’t be built to anyone else’s specifications. That people will say no and people will walk away, people will take more than they give. That only means they aren’t the right people. That the slings and arrows often aren’t aimed at us so much as near us by someone still staunching their own wounds.

Life will hurt. Sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. In the end, the darkness isn’t the gift, the darkness just purely stinks, but coming through it – that’s the gift. If I can teach my children to just keep breathing, in… and out… I can’t live their darkness for them, but I don’t think it’s cheating to hold their hand.

I would like an app that automatically adds items requested by email to my shopping list  –  email from our soccer coach, and our children’s teachers and the school’s office staff and everyone else who has a small and totally reasonable request. I’m not ignoring you. And to be clear, as my youngest’s Girl Scout leader, I am one of the emails showing up in my parent peers’ inboxes. Can anybody hear me? Sometimes I feel like I’m shouting into a void because I rarely get a response. That might be annoying except that I get it. My own response rate is not good. I read as many as I can. I mean to go back and read more.  But it’s that scene where the hero and heroine have only minutes of air left as their sinking ship fills with water. Except that in this case it’s not water, it’s email and instead of endearments, our heroine says, exasperated, “You get the same emails I do. You should already know what time the game is.” “I assume you’re reading them,” our hero says.  End scene.

And this is why I need the email scanning and list making app. (And yes, I know that when AI rises up and takes over, I’ll be partially to blame.) Actually, if the list could be automatically sent to Postmates.com, and the items then just delivered to my door, tagged by purpose, child and due date, all without me having to read email in any sort of timely matter, that would be ideal.

Instead, life goes something like this:

Soap and deodorant for school giving drive?  Check. Wow, I am totally on top of this week!

Hmm. No nut no dairy team snack? Okay. That’s doable. Let me just run back to the store. (That snack is always going to be snack-pack Goldfish by the way…and if anyone ever shows up with cute clothespin snackbag butterflies, I swear there will be consequences.)

Three marbles, two toy cars and wood blocks for 2^nd grade science?  Well, we had a marble run at one point. Two houses ago. That was fun for a day. Surely there are still marbles at the bottom of a piggy bank or marker bin. Somewhere.

While 92% of my email is now Junk mail, and while the email I should read often escapes me, one of my good friends and I still email regularly. We used to work side by side, or at least cube by cube. Now we’re both busy moms on different sides of the city. We try to have lunch or coffee once a month or so, and email a few times a week. We give each email fun subject lines. Like, “Tuesday.” And it reminds me that email wasn’t always a sinking coffin ship of guilt and responsibility.

I don’t know exactly when I first started a personal email account. When I left for college, probably. I’m old enough that I can tell my children that I remember when I had neither an email address nor a cell phone. I’m sure this will be funny to them since they both have school emails and personal emails, and have for years, and they are 8 and 9.

I have a pile of letters – real, physical, paper and ink letters – written when I was in college, on summer breaks, when I studied abroad. They make me smile whenever I stumble across them. Handwriting that I recognize, once familiar return addresses that have since changed. 20 S. Main St (my grandfather), Darrow Hall (my high school bestie), Broomfield Crescent (my British bestie), my parents… There’s nothing like a letter. Sometimes I dive into email in the same way. When we lost photos from late 2008 through mid-2009 (back up your files, do it now!), it wasn’t quite as tragic because I’d emailed so many to my mother in that time frame. There they were. Still alive and well.

My first email address collected so many prosaic memories of a person who was just becoming. Traveling, falling in love, making new friends, landing new jobs. That email account was a fatality of my brief first marriage. Maybe it’s partly the English major in me who places such weight on words, but when that account disappeared, I mourned for it. And then perhaps learned from it, because indeed life went on.  

Today if I’m maybe looking for a receipt for a specific something, or trying to remember based on years-past email traffic when my cousin’s baby was born, and I order by sender, or by date or by key word, it’s a happy accident to stumble across something that reminds me that email used to be fun. Before texting, I sat down and composed emails. I sent email to friends that I would see soon after, and catch-up emails to friends I hadn’t seen in ages. I sent funny day-in-the-life emails to my parents (at least, I knew that they, in their biased benevolence, would find them funny). Email used to be fun. Just like with the pile of old letters, I love that that record exists.

From 2006:

Aw. That baby was Samantha! Email rocks.

Fast forward to present day, and I’m mostly just glad that MySchoolBucks sends three notifications when school lunch balances are low, and while I‘ve never opened one single email from the Colfax Marathon, I appreciate that they haven’t given up on me.

And if you’re reading this, and waiting for me to respond to an email, I apologize. Maybe just send me a text until my list app becomes standard issue.