Month: September 2016

If you’ve ever watched your child replay their entire day, in real time, using their favorite stuffed animal, you might be a parent.

If your security system on your home has nothing to do with laser sensors and everything to do with a pile of backpacks right at the front door, followed by a maze of shoes and blankets, you might be a parent. Sometimes I walk in and think, how would we even know we’ve been robbed?

If you’ve ever poured yourself a bowl of cereal, from a wide open bag in a wide open open box, noted – unsurprised – that it was stale and not only put it back in the cupboard, but ate it anyway, you might be a parent.

If you’ve ever hidden the last … anything. Cinnamon roll, Reeses cup, working pen…. specifically planning to bring it out after bedtime, or keep it secret until you yourself also forget about it… well, you might be a parent.

This has been a long and busy week already. And it’s about half over. There’s been something going on each night after work. My husband has a cold. Work meetings starting an hour before I would generally get to work, which means an hour earlier than my children generally get up. Luckily it’s at least been warm again. It got slightly cooler last weekend and I panicked, just a little, because I knew that my oldest was still wearing jeans from six months ago, when she was four inches shorter.

I have now recorded two episodes of This Is Us, which I’m sure I’ll love, and have been told I’ll love, and I am in Season 4 – only halfway – of the family re-watch of Gilmore Girls before the new episodes appear on Black Friday. I just ordered two books from the library on the recommendation of a friend, while I just returned another one unread, because after I renewed it twice, the library called my bluff and told me I couldn’t renew it again. Just when I was going to get to it! I still have hope for the new arrivals, though, because sometimes you just have to cut your losses and begin again, fresh.

I am tired. I have at least three overnight spots on my face, and my meal planning for the week consisted of two crock pot soups, with one day of leftovers in between. Today, I added grilled cheese, and I felt kind of guilty that this was my above and beyond, and kind of like a rock star for adding a two-course meal to my week.

And yet, when I got home tonight, I looked at the high school soccer practice going on across the street, and at the beat up pink soccer ball left in the front yard, the fall flowers blooming while the leaves finally begin to turn, the sun slanting across our front walk, and in my head I sang a chorus of, Our house…. is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard….

 

I wouldn’t necessarily say that everything is easy. In fact, I’d say it’s not.  And when I think too much about the outside world, I’m a little prone to despair. When I look inside, I wonder how we’re ever going to catch up on our basic housework, let alone the pet projects that I have for myself. And yet, in the end, it’s a house full of morning squabbles, laundry that has yet to be put away, and birthday invites from parties attended two weeks ago… and while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty great.

If you’ve ever watched your children read with a beloved pet tucked under their arm, and let bedtime slide just a little bit because it’s a perfect scene, and then ten minutes later yelled up the stairs that tomorrow, bedtime was going to be early unless teeth were brushed in three, two…. then you might be a parent. And probably your house is a very, very, very fine house, too. Don’t let the general chaos convince you otherwise.

Let’s not mince words. I regret that Hillary Clinton has walked back her statement that half of Trump supporters are deplorable. Because, while I don’t know if it is in fact literally half, or more, or less, there is no mistaking the crux of her argument: Donald Trump is deplorable. His views are deplorable. His lack of policy knowledge is deplorable. His bilking of contractors and “students” and workers is deplorable.

It is deplorable to suggest the deportation of 11 million people is justice, breaking up families, sending people back to neighborhoods and regions with such appalling conditions that they were willing to risk absolutely everything to try to escape. It is deplorable to refer to these same people, flippantly, as rapists and criminals.

It is deplorable to suggest banning refugees solely on religion while their homeland burns around them and their children die of starvation. It is deplorable to suggest a database of people of the Muslim religion. It is deplorable to support torture, which has been scientifically disproven as effective, to say nothing of inhumane and dangerous for our own troops.

It is deplorable to disrespect POWs and Gold Star families, to call women pigs and dogs and reference their hormonal cycles as proof of instability. It is deplorable to start unsubstantiated and roundly debunked rumors about your opponent’s health, and to use 9/11 to apply for small business loans you don’t deserve or need.

The list goes on and on. There has never been a campaign like this. The press doesn’t know what to do with it. The public doesn’t know what to do with it. We were scandalized and incredulous. And then we were puzzled. Now we’ve been numbed and this behavior has been normalized.

When Hillary Clinton calls it deplorable, she’s exactly right.

When a couple of guys beat up and then urinated on a homeless Latino man in Boston, saying that “Trump is right!,” Trump tepidly denounced the action, and then followed up with, “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”

If that doesn’t immediately turn your stomach, if that doesn’t make you question the very fabric of this country, then yes, you are deplorable. And if you can read through the list above and find no issue with it, then that, too, is deplorable.

Trump has now tried to leverage this completely legitimate criticism as an insult to his supporters. The real insult is that his supporters are so caught up in Trumpism that they can’t even recognize the stench that emanates from this man and from this campaign. Or perhaps it’s just that he has so normalized bad behavior, intolerance and the bellowing louder technique that this is actually what our country has become. In a long-ago blog, back on Super Tuesday, in March, I said that Trump had invited the Orcs out to play, and they had come in droves. I stand by that characterization.

Trump is a child caught red-handed stealing someone else’s bicycle from the playground, and then howling with such ferocity that he didn’t do it – probably the Mexican or the Muslim did – that the facts become a buried lead, halfway down a news article that no one read past the headline of his manufactured outrage.

The defense will be that not all Trump supporters are racists. Not all Trump supporters are xenophobic. Not all Trump supporters believe that encouraging one of the world’s thug autocrats (whose opponents end up dead) to meddle in the US election is a good idea. Fair enough. I’d like to believe that.

As Hillary Clinton said in the same section of her remarks, there is a sizable faction of Trump supporters who are simply looking for change. Who “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”

Not everyone who will vote for him is formed in Trump’s image. They will vote for a myriad of reasons I won’t understand, but that I can’t discredit. But enough people who call themselves Trump supporters have lapped up his – yes, deplorable – racist, xenophobic fear-mongering as to give the United States a black eye on the world stage, and a case of full traction at home. It will take years for the nation to overcome his hateful campaign rhetoric and that is another tragedy of this campaign.

Vote for Hillary, or don’t. There are other choices. Vote for Gary Johnson who is a two-term governor and businessman who wants to, in his words, “Make America sane again,” or don’t. Vote for state and local government who you believe in to make communities strong again and skip the top of the ticket.

But before voting for Donald Trump, ask yourself if you’d be okay with our nation’s children growing up listening to his greatest hits. If that is what you want their backbone to be. If that is how you want them to treat their siblings, their classmates, and eventually their own children.

         “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me… I would bomb the sh**t out of them.”

     “I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them. No, no. I was going to hit them, I was all set and then I got a call from a highly respected governor… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard his head would spin and he wouldn’t know what the hell happened…”

       “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems…they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

      “If she gets to pick her judges – nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people. Maybe there is. I don’t know.”

      “Women: You have to treat them like s–t.”

 

If the answer is yes, yes this rhetoric is okay, yes this is how we would raise our children… then Hillary Clinton is talking to you. I hope she keeps talking. And I’d think of all people, Donald J. Trump would appreciate her telling it like it is.

Some mornings, before I even get out of bed, my heart is pounding, my eyes narrowed, my blood pressure skyrocketing. It’s not an illness. It’s not a proclivity toward horror or suspense novels at dawn. It’s my habit of checking my phone for news and media before I roll out of bed. So, maybe it is an illness.

In my head, it’s a nice way to start the day. The equivalent to the morning paper 20 years ago, which hearkens back to my childhood and the beautiful simplicity of it, at least in retrospect. In reality, this “check in” with the world before starting my day is a black hole that I repeatedly jump into and come out late for my morning, angry and judgmental about wide swaths of the population.

It boils down to this. This political cycle is ruining my fairly optimistic outlook. Have previous political cycles done the same? I’m sure, to some extent. But like anything, it’s hard to look back with the clarity of today. Today’s politics thrive on misinformation, and misinformation is easier to propagate than ever before. It’s hard to find unbiased news sources. There have been studies that show that a liberal and conservative Facebook feed of recommended news articles and suggested websites basically show us the world we already subscribe to. This is further proliferated every time we click into one of those baited links, telling the web world what more of the same we’d like to see, and then the sharing of these at best biased and at worst blatantly untrue viewpoints masquerading as news.

I’m as guilty as anyone. I absolutely believe that my side is misrepresented. It’s what makes my jaw so tight. In lucid moments, I realize that in fact, each side has legitimate viewpoints. That we need different viewpoints to have well-rounded citizens and policies. But we’ve strayed so far from facts as to mock people who use them. The last time I got sucked into a political discussion online — which obviously no one should ever, ever do because it’s lunacy — I used a fact check website to, in my view, point out the partisanship of certain misinformation. I was roundly criticized for doing so. A non-partisan fact check site should be where we all go for a reality check, and yet facts have become suspect and passé.

This morning, FactCheck.org called a claim I checked into about the history of social security an “elaborate collection of falsehoods so detailed as to be an intentional and malicious effort at misinformation.”

For the most part, I don’t think that people are willfully spreading malicious misinformation. We’re just hitting “share.” I think that this political cycle has made our country into cartoon characters, standing on either side of a Grand Canyon that is our information void, and we’ve decided that it’s easier to live in two-dimensions than three.

The problem is, we do live in three dimensions. And we’ll vote for two-dimensional policies that will affect three-dimensional people. We need to take the responsibility more seriously.

We owe ourselves a fact check. We owe ourselves a reality check.

There are any number of lessons that it took me a long time to learn. And a lot I haven’t learned yet… Those I’ve learned, but still have a hard time living. But, in celebration of the fact that every day, we get another chance to figure it all out, here are 37  things that I have arguably learned in 37 years of edification.

Inch by inch…

1. It’s probably not personal. Nine times out of ten, it’s someone else’s issue and someone else’s bad mood. It stinks anyway.

2. Sleep actually is that important. I feel physically ill when I’m too tired. Same goes for water. Hydrate!

3. There are some people in your life who you will always hope are doing well, but who aren’t healthy for you to maintain relationships with. Let them go.

4. I don’t like green tea. It may be crazy healthy. It may add years to my life. I still don’t like it. And I have stopped trying.

5. There are friends who you may not see for years, and then within the first ten minutes of seeing them again, you can tell them your deepest fears, failings and embarrassments; that friendship will never fade.

6. It is not worth trying to make a left from Parkway Drive onto Acres Green Drive unless it’s the middle of the night or 10am on a Tuesday morning. Just go around.

7. I probably won’t die from anything found in a porta pot. But that doesn’t mean I ever have to make peace with the idea of them.

8. If a cute workout tank top has a built-in sports bra with multiple straps, tenuously connected by a couple darts on either side, just walk by. I don’t have the ten minutes to spend organizing those straps, layers, and then trying to get into them.

9. It’s really lucky that I had children in an age where mismatched socks are cool.

10. I will absolutely burn two pieces of toast in a row, because it needs “just a little more,” at which point, I will inevitably and inexplicably walk away. I will not learn, nor will I change the toaster setting.

11. Having regrets doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate your present. But it means that you got to your present by one of dozens, perhaps hundreds of different possible routes. We can’t live each one, and if we didn’t wonder about the others, we wouldn’t understand how we arrived where we are.

12. Be loyal, but not naïve.

13. The extra money for the direct flight at 10am is worth it.

14. I rely on the discretion of my children far more than I would like to admit. I can only imagine that my good friends whose children my children love, and whose houses they feel completely comfortable in, know at least a handful of things that I’m just as glad I don’t know they know.

15. It’s okay to politely dislike some people.

16. Gummy fruit snacks shaped like carrots, apples and grapes are not actually health foods. But they do make me feel more virtuous than fruit snacks shaped like Dory and Nemo. Well played, product development.

17. Between time and money, my time has increasingly become more valuable to me.

18. Buy the good bra and wear it when you want to really get things done. Your subconscious knows when you’re pulled together from the skin out and mean business.

19. If the higher purpose of the books I read is only to entertain me… that’s enough. I read smart books in college. I have nothing to prove. 19^th century Russians are best in moderation, and not after a 16-hour day, brilliant or not.

20. Look up! I first learned this as a college kid traveling around Europe, where the most impressive art, architecture and views were often up. But I re-learn this all the time. Even when taking a walk, I sometimes realize I’ve been staring at my shadow on a gravel trail and then I look up… and there are fields and mountains and blue sky and whipped cream clouds. Always look up.

21. Everyone should own a crock pot. They are like a butler you gift yourself.

22. Invest in irons, curling irons and coffee pots with auto-shut off. It saves so much what-iffing.

23. Whether it’s filling muffin tins, loading the dishwasher, or cleaning up spills, it will be considerably messier and take longer, a lot longer, for one’s children to do said task. Let them do it, anyway.

24. Believe in things passionately. But if you can’t discuss them dispassionately, keep them for like-minded fellowship, or be emotionally prepared for strained relationships and hurt feelings. (But never negotiate your non-negotiables.)

25. At least once, live somewhere where you don’t know anyone. Don’t call home until you’ve met at least a half dozen new people. Find out who you are when no one has preconceived ideas of who you’re expected to be.

26. Drinking too much is increasingly passé. What’s the point, with kids at home who will still want someone to “watch this” at 7:32am? Honestly, staying out late is the new drinking too much. Combine both, and I might actually die. It will, at least, definitely take me a week to get over it.

27. The more single-ingredient food you eat, the better life becomes.

28. The person on an airplane who most wants that baby to stop crying is the person holding said baby. Glaring, judging and tut-tutting are not helpful. An “I’ve been there, too” can go a long way. And if you don’t have kids in your circle, remember that you were one. Samesies for grocery stores, zoos and theme parks. Creating memories is excruciatingly hard sometimes.

29. Yogurt cups are pressurized when living at high altitude. Open them accordingly, i.e., carefully.

30. Take your turn doing the things you don’t want to do, but don’t be a martyr. “I can’t this time,” does not require a novella in explanation. Be cool, live your life, help when you can.

31. Every time I have said, “Oh my gosh; I had no idea,” another person’s story becomes a little more tangible. We all have stories that we don’t broadcast. Life inevitably knocks us down from time to time. Even fairy tales begin in darkness.

32. It’s worth taking two minutes to check your larder before grocery shopping. Otherwise, you may end up with a hoard of salsa to rival a small Mexican restaurant but have no ketchup. It’s also worth using old-fashioned words like larder as often as possible.

33. The comments section of any online article will never, ever make you feel better about humanity.

34. Travel is absolutely the best path to an open mind, bar none. Travel often, travel early, travel regionally, travel internationally. Have an up-to-date passport, just in case and just because. The United States is home to less than 5% of the world’s population. That leaves a whole lot of people whose very legitimate world view is not our own. Plus, had I not studied abroad and met people who were not just like me, and grown to love people who were not just like the me, I would have missed dozens of amazing experiences, perhaps including being open to meeting my husband, who is also not exactly like me.

35. Downtime: so essential. If we don’t recharge, nothing else works. I need to be alone – alone alone – 10% of the time to be able to function within society 90% of the time. The anxiety that we feel if our phone dips below 10% battery on a busy day should be mirrored by our own need to recharge. We should put at least as much effort into it as we do our electronics.

36. One of the proudest moments of child-rearing is when your kid becomes fluent in your personal brand of family humor. It’s a first day of kindergarten, training-wheels-off, first overnight away sort of moment. That’s my kid.

37. Ask for what you want. Ask for 90 seconds of complete silence, for someone else to make dinner. Ask for the promotion. And if the daily special can be made without cheese. Shape your destiny in little ways, day by day.