Month: October 2016

Every four years or so, people become significantly more vested and attentive to the first ten amendments to our Constitution.

People who mostly live their lives thinking about how to attend soccer games of both children on Saturday morning while also getting groceries and cleaning bathrooms before the in-laws come over for dinner are suddenly faced with the manufactured choice between being able to shoot their potential rapist in a dark parking garage, or letting 20 kindergarteners die at the hands of a maniac.

Except, of course, the truth is always somewhere in between. Most conservatives have no issue with ending gun show and internet loopholes. Most liberals have no wish to rid the country of guns. I’ve never even held a gun myself, and yet I’m able to walk by the gun club next to my work without shouting angry slogans. Remarkable, right? I’ve also never sky-dived or collected stamps. I’m fine with anyone doing those things as well. I avoid horror movies like the plague. And yet am married to someone who loves them. It’s almost like we’re different people with different preferences, living in the same house by simultaneously indulging and avoiding what doesn’t appeal to us individually.

But as a nation, stoked by the assumption that someone who doesn’t think like us thinks against us, the rhetoric ratchets it up and up until a country that actually sees eye to eye in broad strokes is consumed by animosity toward each other.

And meanwhile, we have a love hate relationship with our very first tenet in our Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, religion and the press. It’s all good when it’s protecting our value system. When we feel like our principles are being served and validated. But it feels a lot more uncomfortable when our sense of righteousness is encroached upon. Then it’s pretty easy to call foul. Then it’s pretty easy to be shocked by the unprincipled, downright immoral actions of those saying what we would never say. Sanctioning what we would never sanction. Of those reporting what we know in our hearts to be red herrings and outright misdirection, salaciousness for the sake of a bored and hungry, and impassioned, audience.

Lester Holt said, “As Americans, we rightfully place tremendous value on having a free and independent press. Our role as journalists is to give voice to the voiceless, and hold our leaders and institutions accountable. But the circle is only completed when that information is consumed by a free-thinking and engaged audience.”

This morning, reading the latest news cycle, I broke out in hives. I’m prone to hives, so this isn’t like I’d suddenly developed Skittles pox. But I don’t usually develop hives by reading or watching the news. My husband would tell you I often develop verbal deluge syndrome, but not usually hives.

I am wound so tightly lately. The news of the informationally empty but politically charged headlines of more email hoopla made me simultaneously vow to stop reading all news for the next 9 days, and also spend 45 minutes immediately reading a dozen headlines about it. They all said the same thing. What do we know? Not much. Are these emails from Hillary? We don’t think so. Are they emails that have already been vetted? Could be. Are they likely to change July’s FBI verdict? Unlikely. Is Anthony Weiner literally the last person any Democrat is putting on their holiday card list? Yeah. For sure.

“10 days before the election, and there’s no new information there at all,” I ranted to my husband, scratching my hivey neck. “It’s completely irresponsible to even report it.” “There’s nothing to it,” he agreed, “And it won’t take much to spin it to why it was addressed at all.”

Spin. Ugh. When did we become this nation, a people, a world, of Spin Rooms and flashpoints and predetermined bias? Maybe about the time that Gutenberg invented the printing press and opinion could be easily digested from those we’ve never met. Probably much farther back than that.

And that was about when I realized that I was not fulfilling my part of Lester Holt’s contract, or trusting anyone else to do so, either: a circle only completed when information is consumed by a free-thinking and engaged audience. It’s up to me what news I digest, what facts I dig for, what biases I acknowledge or stand against. That’s a bummer, obviously, because knee-jerk reactions and preconception is infinitely easier.

I can’t decide who watches horror movies and who collects stamps. And I certainly can’t, and don’t want to, sit as judge and jury for those whose only crime is not being me, inline with my every preference and predisposition. As much as it sometimes rankles, the point of those first ten amendments is to keep everyone – including me – from becoming a sanctimonious despot, sitting high atop a moralistic throne.

So, I’m going to take a deep breath, push the crazy back down a couple levels, and trust in our estimable system rooted in that sometimes exasperatingly objective and equitable Bill of Rights, intrinsic to our national fabric, allowing everyone a voice on matters of sky-diving, horror movies, and even politics, trusting us each to make free-thinking, engaged and informed decisions.

Adulting is hard.

This is the time of year that we are still sleeping with the windows open, even though it gets down into the 40s at night. I’m always so excited to pull the big cozy blankets out of their summer storage that I spend two weeks in a self-imposed night sauna, just waiting for the temperatures to dip enough to truly warrant the extra covers. And when they do, it’s worth the chilliness of the morning to have been able to cocoon all night. The problem with crisp fall mornings is that they are suddenly crisp, dark fall mornings. It’s nearly impossible to get out of bed. I start reminding myself that dry shampoo is better for my hair, definitely a couple – to a few — mornings a week. And I hit snooze one more time.  Five minute shower just to warm up, and… go.

I’m not sure what it is about fall – I love fall, the clarity of those breathe deep blue sky mornings and the apple cider and the turning leaves – but I often find myself a little down, a little nostalgic, a little overwhelmed.

Maybe it’s a natural rhythm thing, left over from when we had to prepare for winter, the anxiety of not being quite sure we had enough nuts squirreled away. Or the knowledge that days are getting shorter, and the realization that, again, the summer sped by without having nearly the amount of bask-on-a-sunny-rock time that I anticipated.

Add to it the entrenched school and activities routines, the job that spins on a contract year and is naturally busy every third and fourth quarter, and it feels like the days aren’t just losing daylight, they’re losing time.

Lately at work, I’m buried. Lately at home, I’m sprinting. Or I’m home, but still at work. I have the luxury of a flexible job, for which I’m grateful. But it means that when I leave early to get to Girl Scouts on time, or to get my youngest to Reading Buddies at the library, my work day isn’t over just because I left work, and once the majority of us are home, once dinner is done, I’m back at my kitchen table office. It feels like I’ve put in a 12-hour day, but I’m actually still 90-minutes and one dance class pick-up away from just a solid 8. Or still at the office, “I miss you. Plees leave work soon,” my youngest texts. Heartbreak.

Sometimes I feel like I suffer from a bit of poor little rich girl syndrome. Except, you know, not the rich part. And I have long since left girlhood behind. But the part where I have a loving family, a comfortable home, a beautiful view out my front door, a flexible job and a bevy of good friends, but still feel a little like crying at the end of a long day, just because there haven’t been enough hours, and there won’t be again tomorrow, and I’m not quite sure how to climb out of the time hole I’ve dug.

Glennon Doyle Melton said, “Life is hard. Not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”  And it’s not hard because it’s bad. Or because it’s somehow deficient.  It’s hard because it’s hard, and we’re all winging it. A decade ago, I’d never had a child before. And they just give you one and wish you luck. Seven years ago, I’d never had two children and two lost jobs before. Tightrope, white knuckles. Today my oldest asked to Skype with a friend about a school assignment. She’s a very sensible, even-keeled person. But I blanched. Even Microsoft was cautious. We take the safety of Skype end users very seriously and have security measures in place to help protect children… Is Microsoft judging me? Forget about me winging it ten years ago. That was just diapers and pink eye and the occasional pebble up the nose. Social media and dating and driving? The days are getting shorter, but so are the years.

A few weeks ago, talking to a coworker about how demanding life is and how little time we have, when we both had a dozen other things to do, he suggested a conscious one-to-one ratio of bad to good. The last minute discovery of cat puke in the foyer is still pretty disagreeable (just kidding, I don’t have a foyer, I just mean the place where we kick our shoes into a pile), but if specifically opposed with a child enthusiastically offering to pack my lunch to save time, maybe it’s a wash. Even if it doesn’t save any time.

 

Stage 1 orthodontics. Dancing in the kitchen with a giggling daughter.

Car making a weird noise. Over-using the library’s hold system because of my avid reader.

Non-wheat, non-dairy pizza sitting right next to the real thing. Family tv picnic and Friday night Netflix.

If sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed and start a hectic day, and if some days my make-up is more war paint than cosmetic, if sometimes I feel tears prick behind my eyes for no particular reason as I just sit at a stop light, in between work me and mommy me, trying to identify a little bit of independent me, well, maybe that’s just because sometimes life is hard, and days are short and it’s hard to wake up in the dark. It’s a part of the whole. Figuring it all out is exhausting. Rewarding, but exhausting.

And maybe it’s just evolution reminding me it’s time to squirrel away some more nuts for winter. And by nuts, I mean Godiva and red wine. And those really soft fluffy winter socks. And a good red lipstick.

When I was in high school, I had Mr. Roseberry for history, twice. Once for World History my freshman year and once for American History my junior year. There are history facts that I will know forever, because of those classes. For example, I can never unlearn that the Moors invaded Spain in 711. That’s with me forever. It’s possible that I was unable to learn calculus because that brain space was already taken with immoveable facts about the Spanish Inquisition.

As a teacher, he believed, believes probably, that history is a living thing, not just something that happened in the past. As such, one of our daily assignments was to look for Connections – those reflections of yesterday that appear in today. They were supposed to be more than mere allusions, or On This Day history channel facts. They were supposed to wake us up to the fact that current events almost always have deep roots in the past, to make us aware that headlines – we still had literal newspaper headlines back then – were deeper than who played who in Friday’s football game. Connections were to show that the Bosnian Serbian War occurring across the world at the same time that I was taking World History was historically resultant of the division and fall of the 700-year-old Ottoman Empire. (Note to self, look up They Might Be Giants’ Istanbul (Not Constantinople) for what would have been a lazy Connection, but a good song…)

Besides Connections, another thing Mr. Roseberry believed in was history through literature. Among others, he read aloud to us A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, and a little book from the 1860s called The Man Without A Country. It’s about an associate of Aaron Burr (who is made contemporary these days by the smash hit Hamilton, of course), who is tried with Burr for treason. Found guilty, he rashly claims that he never wants to hear another word about the United States again. The judge takes him at his word, and sentences him to a life at sea, where no one is to speak to him of his country again. Slowly, the man without a country realizes, by its complete lack, what country means. He dies fiercely patriotic, even while he’s spent decades without a word uttered about the country he realizes he loves.

And so I’ve been thinking about The Man Without A Country. I’ve been thinking about Edward Snowden, who I have mixed feelings about, and I’ve been thinking about how so many people threaten to move to Canada every time something doesn’t go their way at home. I’ve been thinking about people who claim that government is rigged and the election is rigged, and I’ve been thinking about all the animosity that seems to bubble up every election cycle, but especially this one, and about what patriotism means, and whether it is made of uncompromising tenets of red, white and blue, or if it’s flexible enough to mean a multitude of different things to so many different people.

I’ve been thinking about the anger and danger and fear that childhood me saw in black and white photographs in history books, and about the nightly news that sometimes I wonder if I should allow my children to watch. I wonder what Edward R. Murrow would have thought about the news that Lester Holt has to deliver every night. I’ve been thinking about Anne Frank and about Syrian refugees. About the books my grandchildren might one day read as part of their American History canon.

On Saturday morning, we wake up in a house, our house, that has been abused all week by our busy schedules, our tired brains and bodies, so that we have to spend hours cleaning up after ourselves, when every week we realize that if we just did a little more each day, we could skip the full weekend press. My daughters can’t clean the same room without sibling war, which leaves them separated, but still with a path of unfair pitfalls.

“But this isn’t even mine,” my youngest protests, looking at a small pile of her sister’s things. “Why should I have to clean up her mess?” And then inevitably I fix her with an icy stare and ask whose dishes I’ve been washing all morning, and how her clothes happen to become clean again week after week. “We all live here,” I say. “It’s all of our mess.”

Because the point is, we’re a family. Sometimes it’s Christmas morning and there’s hot chocolate on the stove and music playing and love flowing so thick it’s palpably tangible. Sometimes we don’t particularly like each other every moment of every day. And sometimes the mess isn’t ours. And sometimes we think about what it would be like to walk away, not for good, but maybe just for the day. To just grab car keys and turn the radio up and disappear down the highway for a while. Maybe not to Canada, but at least far enough to have to stop for gas. Family is fierce, but it’s messy.

Sometimes, instead of words, I think a Connection is more a feeling. But if I had to verbalize it, I would say, In this house, we don’t always agree, and we love, but don’t always like each other every minute of every day. But this is our family, damn it, and we love each other so damn much that on Christmas morning, my heart bursts with it, and on days when I wake up early and see still tiny feet peeking out of a cocoon of covers, I could weep with the beauty of it, notwithstanding that I could also ugly cry at the piling responsibilities of growing children, aging houses and busy jobs, and Saturday morning spent yelling, “I am not going to live like this for another week. We are all going to start doing our part; do you hear me?” Fierce. Messy. In for the duration. But messy. I said that, right?

Because unless we all plan to move to Canada – and I’m not really sure that Canada wants us – it seems like it’s about time to imagine an icy stare fixed our way that says, This is our nation, damn it. We don’t always agree, and we don’t always even like each other, but this is us. It’s our damn mess – all of ours – and so it’s our job to spend Saturday morning – or all of 2017 or the next 20 years – fixing it, whatever it takes to get this house in order again. And if that pile is your sister’s, pick it up.

Except, if it was a Connection, I’d probably leave out the swearing. I don’t think Mr. Roseberry would approve.

24 days. And then maybe Lester Holt can get back to news Edward R. Murrow would understand.

 

*With apologies to Mr. Roseberry for any historically inaccurate mis-remembering.