Month: November 2016

When I was 23, I left my first husband after being married for just about 10 months. Of course, we should never have gotten married in the first place, which was, I have always said, painfully obvious in hindsight.

But really, it was obvious beforehand. It was obvious when he brought home size 6 clothes for me, when he knew I was an 8 (but I could be a 6 if I tried). It was obvious when I found out, after a car accident, that he didn’t have a valid driver’s license (just some tickets he hadn’t taken care of. No big deal.) It was obvious when he took a hammer to my engagement ring after a fight (full disclosure, I’d started it by criticizing his treatment of his mother, which was, he said, none of my business, and had wrenched it from my finger and thrown it at him mid-fight.) Not the best signs. But I stayed. I took that deal. And I married him.

If I could go back, I don’t even know what I would say to that girl. Shake her, maybe. Because she was so willfully blind, or so willfully focused, or maybe just incredibly stupid. I thought it would get better. I thought we just needed to get settled. Or maybe we needed a change of scenery. We were just passionate, not dysfunctional.

I’ve heard it said that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason is that we’re foolish (naïve, irrational, bone-headed, desperate, reactive) and make bad choices. And there it is, sometimes bad things happen because we make bad choices. Sometimes the bad choices are painfully obvious, to us, to those around us. And yet we make them anyway. We accept a deal that’s a stacked deck because of a myriad of background issues, our own personal foundational cracks and insecurities, previous heartbreak and heartburn. We don’t live in a vacuum, and we don’t make decisions in one.

When I was 23, after 10 months of marriage, my brother had a health scare on the East Coast while I was thousands of miles away in Colorado. I got the news in an email from my mother the next morning. I was late getting into the shower. I was late getting out of the shower. My lack of basic consideration meant that my ex was now also running late. Might even be late for work, because of me. I don’t remember if he was. I do remember that he said things no one should say to anyone, let alone their wife. Mean things, especially to someone who was never a natural size 6, but had tried, and who was still wrapped in a towel, and inescapably vulnerable to the icy acidity of the cutting inventory of my bodily and marital flaws.

And so I left him that day.

Realizing a bad decision, or even coming out of a bad decision, doesn’t negate it. We’re a sum of our parts. It simply means that I made bad choices, but am now making the choice to make new choices. There’s almost necessarily some collateral damage along the way. Some of it is repairable. Some is not. Some people will forgive you and welcome you back. Some will not. It’s not up to you and you have to make peace with that, even when it hurts.

New choices take some distance, some soul searching, some willingness to see that we weren’t irreproachable ourselves. I was culpable in my own disgrace. I could give you a dozen easy reasons why it wasn’t my fault. But in the end, I made that deal with all its concessions. But also my choice to rebuild, refocus, rebrand, remake.

Whether a person believes that the nation’s electoral college win for Trump – which is a win for the presidency, I don’t dispute – is a black hole of bad decisions doesn’t matter much at this point. We can unfriend and hashtag and yell into the void for as long as we want. As a nation, we made that choice. We decided, apparently, that we’re just passionate, not dysfunctional. As a nation, we agreed to certain concessions.

And so, we jumped into a relationship that is bound to be volatile at best. Bernie Sanders supporters may blame the DNC. Hillary Clinton may blame Jim Comey. The blue states may blame the Rust Belt, or the 40% of Americans who don’t vote. Millennials who are too entitled. Baby boomers who are too rigid. I’m not convinced that even Donald Trump is super happy with the result. It turns out he applied for a really big job, and he got it.

In the end, though, retrospective armchair quarterbacking is only significant if we do a little soul searching on top of it. I’m still angry. And I’m still despondent. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how incredulous I am if I don’t question my own culpability.

Enough Americans feel they’ve we’ve been hurt tangibly as a country because of [personally-specific reason here], that we’re willing to go in a completely new direction, as long as it’s unrecognizable from our past. Sometimes our choices don’t say nearly as much about who we are, or our foundational beliefs, as they do about what we have just immediately walked through. Sometimes we whiplash from painful into toxic before we can walk out. I’ve been there. In the end, it’s as Shakespeare said, “What’s past is prologue.” We can’t change it, but we can react to it. There’s a whole play after the prologue; we’ve all got parts.

No matter what we’ve done, “inexorably, unalterably done,” we control our next choice. We choose when to stay, we choose when to walk. And it’s infinitely more complicated than that, of course, and far from fair. Regardless, our choices can’t be expunged. And sometimes the consequences are incredibly high, either to ourselves, or others, or if you’re the President-elect of the United States, then potentially for the world.

While I might despair that the new administration’s first Cabinet choices include white males known more for their racism than their open-mindedness, I can celebrate that social justice and civil liberties groups have seen a huge groundswell of support, record breaking donations.

For all the good people who voted against Trump, we feel pummeled, irate, afraid, inspired to activism, but with the election in our rearview mirror, our outrage is only as good as our follow-through, and only as useful as our pragmatism.

For all the good people who voted for Trump, the country needs your voice now more than ever. To speak for those who are afraid. To speak up against a Chief Counsel with alt-right views. To protest loudly when a new Chief of Staff will not rule out a Muslim registry on the Sunday talk show circuit. To admit that to be white and straight in America is not the same as being gay, or brown, or otherwise marginalized. To admit that some people are marginalized, and to commit to using our privilege to protect their rights.

For those who voted against the president-elect, for those who voted for him, but reject the rhetoric that came with the campaign, there are myriad of choices that can be made now that will reassure a nervous nation and a worried world.

And for everyone who voted neither blue nor red, it’s time we all make choices so that every voter feels like they have a voice in this process and are motivated to use it. We each need to hold ourselves accountable. We need to agree that we hold some truths to be self-evident. That verbiage should sound comforting and familiar and seems like a good place to begin.

We’re in this horrible chasm right now and chasms create echo chambers and have such little light. We start thinking the shadows are real, and we forget we have the ability, and the responsibility, to walk out into the light, confront life in all its three-dimensional forms. When Trump objectifies, patronizes women (et al., et al., et al.), I think back to the young woman who was never a comfortable size 6, but who – for a little while – tried to be. And who faded away, insubstantial but still a size 8. For a little while, she believed the shadows were real.

The reasons that we make choices that compromise our best selves isn’t because we’re bad people, or incredibly dumb, or hateful or uneducated. We make choices because of our own backstory, because for each of us, in this moment, there are certain things we fear more than others. The 22-year-old fears of the girl who stayed were different than those of the 23-year-old who left. The 23-year-old made the choice to make new choices, and years later, I’ve been shaped by her renewed resolve. I’m grateful to her.

As a country, we’ve made choices, but we aren’t beholden to any past choices going forward. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to nullify a relationship so soon after minting it. But it’s even worse to let ourselves be subservient to it.

Knowing the right steps to stop demonizing each other while also staying true to our personal beliefs is hard. The chasm feels deep and painful. I will never be okay with the rhetoric of racism. I will never be okay with casual misogyny. But I am open to the idea that we are better than both of those things, no matter who we voted for. Now we become braver and stronger than our anger and despondency and fears. We live up to our potential instead of down to our fear. With one big choice behind us, we can now choose to stay or go. We can choose to make sure that no one in our country feels afraid because of who they are, how they worship or who they love.

When I was 37, I voted for the losing candidate in a demoralizing, poisonous presidential campaign that took a piece of my optimism and idealism with it. It feels a little like a bad relationship foisted upon the country and throws lurky shadows of poor choices and ghosts I’ve left behind.

But as I’ve learned, the best time for good choices is after a bad one.

 

When I was young, and not so young, I found a lot of comfort sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, in the maybe three feet between their bedframe and my father’s vinyl collection. I listened to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, Little Feat and Leonard Cohen. Abbey Road and Sergeant Pepper. I danced with my father to Jesse Winchester at my wedding, Lay Down the Burden of Your Heart.

Someone at some point had painted the hardwoods of the upstairs of our house. Eventually, we sanded and resealed some of them, but we never got to parents’ room. The paint on the floor there was brown, but had started to wear away. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel like it needed to be changed, repainted or sanded down, polyurethaned to a glossy oak. It was a safe space. A cubby and a generation of singer-songwriters. It was your most comfortable, much-worn sweatshirt. The kind that you put on when life threatens to crush your spirit, and you just want to wrap comfort around you. But also the kind that you slip into when everything is going right, and you need no frills or trimmings to feel content. It’s soft, and faded and dependable. That nook in my parents’ room was soul affirming.

Right now, I’m so awfully tired. I cried myself to sleep Tuesday night. I almost worked from home on Wednesday, but decided that that was weak, and that I am weak, and I’d spend my day diving into too many commentaries and opinions and dire forecasts. So, I went to work, to my office where it is 85% male and military, and my political affiliation is probably just as uncommon as my gender.

I tried to keep it together. I didn’t completely fail, but I didn’t completely succeed, either. And no one said a single thing that was anything other than considerate, even though by and large, they didn’t feel the same despair. People with whom I had crossed swords throughout the last seemingly interminable few months were deferential, knowing it was a dark day for me. I had been so sure that I would be the one who would be gracious and respectful, restrained and tasteful in victory, that my vision for my country was the only one that would, could, win out in the end.

It didn’t work out that way, and I was – am – heartbroken. But unlike the online vitriol of the last 18 months, the click-bait and the partisanship, the actual people in my life whom I appreciate, but share little political common ground, those people were still my people first. There’s a lesson there, obviously, when everything hurts a little less, and I’m ready to start looking at lessons.

Ray Bradbury said, “Stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you.” Part of me thought, what is possibly left to say, and what’s the point? Many, many people said everything already, and much more succinctly, much more eloquently, much more powerfully than I could. People chose not to listen. And so a few more tears grew hot behind my eyes, tears of frustration and anger and disappointment. Aloud I said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I anticipated the news of a rise in hate crimes and felt darkly vindicated in my grief when they appeared, as expected. What did we expect? What words are there?

As as I processed the grief, as the initial shock began to wear off, I remembered that sometimes words aren’t for other people. Sometimes they are for us. Sometimes they are cathartic, sometimes cauterizing. Sometimes they’re just there, and ask to be let loose.

I rolled sentences around as I brushed my teeth. I composed introductions as I shampooed. I scribbled down thoughts at work. Despite the deference at work, I’m grieving and will be. I’ve lost a piece of my idealism, and it hurts. When something hurts, writing is my go-to to process that. Stage 2. Anger. “I was summarily fired 30 days after maternity leave,” I wanted to scream to the doubters who said that Clinton’s sex had nothing to do with her defeat, who somehow saw the race as a level playing field in a culture that still plays to archetypes. “Raise your hand if you’ve been assaulted by anonymous hands in a darkened bar, or a crowded street, or if you’ve stared down someone who you thought you knew, who touched you without permission.” Are we all raising our hands now? I know I am. And yet 42% of women still voted in the person who normalizes sexual assault culture as locker room banter, and demonizes the women who would dare to confront him. I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, my tired, tired heart cried. Maybe I could understand not voting for Clinton. But how could people vote for a veritable caricature of patriarchal power? How?

What it comes down to is that I don’t understand. I probably won’t. I’m middle class and white, though. I’ll weather the next four years. But I’m afraid for women who are afraid to wear their hijab. I’m brokenhearted for Hispanic children who are taunted on playgrounds, “Build the wall, build the wall!” I wonder if we’re going to even have snow this year, as we enjoy another 70-degree day in November. Or if we’re going to have snowmaggedon in March as the pendulum swings.

And then Leonard Cohen died today.

That’s really piling it on, Universe. Could you maybe leave 2016 alone for the rest of the year?

And so I listened to my favorite Leonard Cohen songs. Suzanne. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. Dance Me to the End of Love. Hallelujah. Anthem. And then I listened to the entirety of the Jesse Winchester album, Let the Rough Side Drag. If I close my eyes, I can picture the yellow album cover of the vinyl record my dad still owns. I can hear the sound of the needle dropping onto the vinyl. I can picture the fading brown paint under my feet and the bedframe at my back. Even though that house no longer exists, the scared floors long gone, it feels so solid.

I still don’t understand how everything I hold so sacrosanct could be so fluid to someone else. I know it works both ways. I am an enigma to a solid handful of people in my life who do not understand how I came to my own immutable truths. They like me, anyway, and they are no more one-dimensional than I am. I want to be optimistic, but for me, it’s too soon for optimism. The future seems far less solid than I anticipated. I worry for those who have been promised disenfranchisement. My heart contracts painfully each time it thinks, SCOTUS. No, no, no. (Be well, RBG. Be well.)

In his final creative gift, Leonard Cohen gave me my favorite, well-worn much-loved sweatshirt to pull around me tonight. And though my world has otherwise been rocked this week, I’m going to take comfort in the fact that even when I don’t have the words, he does.

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.

My brother and his wife just had a new baby. Because their family lives 1200 miles away, I’ve only seen him virtually, but by photograph you can still swear he’s already smiling. Content, protected, much anticipated and much loved. You can see his tiny little fingers with their even tinier fingernails curled up against his cheek as he’s sleeping, and you can imagine that he’s dreaming sweet dreams. Since I can’t nuzzle his soft, downy baby head and breathe in his baby smell, I can anticipate the winter slipping by quickly, so that we can meet in person.

Having a new baby, especially the first, brings out so much hope for the world, and so much fear. In one tiny baby is the story of every baby. It’s amazing, and it’s magical, and it’s scary as hell. The world becomes smaller, knit with that common bond of parents everywhere. But it becomes bigger, and you realize that when your parents let you travel through it, on your own, as a teenager, they were the bravest people you knew.

You cry at the evening news, and you rejoice, and cry, at St. Jude’s success stories. As our children get older, parenting becomes a little more routine. We get a bit lost in the endless loads of laundry, and we aren’t thrilled anymore when our child eats two bites of green beans. There’s still joy and wonder, but once they can throw a granola bar wrapper on the floor and walk away, the moments of awe are balanced by moments of discipline and monotony and sometimes near hysteria, as we find our child covered from head to toe in orange and black marker or red nail polish. Always an adventure, we say, eyes a little crazy and smile a little too bright.

Babies encourage us to look forward, but they also prompt us to look back. To our own childhoods, to our parents’. Beyond. There have been many times, if I’m being honest, that I have compared my life to life on a wagon train heading West, just to remember that I’m probably going to make it through.

My brother carries his grandfather’s name as his middle name, and now so does his son. I was blessed to have amazing grandparents. We don’t necessarily appreciate our grandparents as much as we should when we’re young, and yet they have incredible impact on us, as I know my own children, and my new nephew, will come to know, as well. Grandparents shape our worldview because they’ve lived so much more than we have, they’ve learned what to fight for, and what to let go. Through them, and the children they raised, we learn what’s worth fighting for.

On my father’s side, my grandparents were longstanding volunteers with the Salvation Army. I can picture the vintage push button phone on the side table by the stairs, the notepad beside it. Someone would need help, that phone would ring, and just like that (or so it seemed to a child), help was en route. They were everyday heroes in plain sight. I realized that in retrospect. At the time, I mostly thought we watched a lot of Lawrence Welk and This Old House, and I liked my grandmother’s backyard goldfish pond, and going fishing with my grandfather to restock it.

I grew up in the same house as my maternal grandmother. She was a church youth group leader, taking teens to areas of need within the US for service projects, she joined adult service trips annually and encouraged me to participate for multiple years in ASP, Appalachian Service Project. In the days of my mother’s childhood, she garnered a reputation of a “friendly house” to railroad hitchhikers. She wrote letters to prisoners and believed passionately in Heifer International, an organization her family still supports today, three generations deep. That my daughter, her great-granddaughter, spends as much time inspecting the Heifer International livestock gift catalog as the Toys R Us wish book is a testament to her enduring service, goodness and grace. She lived, “Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”

I’m not at their level. I have better intentions than actions. I get busy with my own life, and I forget my roots. I’m proud of who I come from, but I’m not sure that I’m always living up to their example. But my world view is still foundationally theirs. It’s why I’ve been wound so tightly the last year or so, and even more tightly still the last few months. My world view is at odds with my world, it sometimes seems. My husband and I went to see Billy Joel in concert last fall. He played the classic, We Didn’t Start the Fire, and his stage show showed classic imagery from the original song, spliced with today’s news. We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning, since the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire. No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it. …We didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we’re doing much to fight it lately.

In the three months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, validating the Brexit campaign which was built largely on anti-immigration rhetoric and dissatisfaction with the status-quo, homophobic attacks in the UK rose 147%. Hate crimes in general spiked and have now begun to stabilize, in a depressing way, to levels above the pre-Brexit vote. The country voted in intolerance by just 4%. And yet it was a referendum on ugliness. I’m terrified by the parallels in the US.

The day after the Brexit vote, pro-Brexit politicians admitted their grand plan was mostly lip service that they would not be able to deliver. Many voters said that they voted for Brexit never thinking it would actually win, but wanting to lodge a protest vote, to feel heard. Afterward, some voters wondered aloud if there could be a re-do. Except, elections don’t work that way. Voters have to make adult decisions in the first round. How often have I wished that I could see two parallel paths play out. But way leads on to way.

I’ve often seen, and appreciated, and identified with the sentiment, “Who let me adult? I can’t adult.” It feels true in so many ways. I might be the one with the paycheck and the mortgage and the paid-off, hail damaged car, with the carpool duty and the children who are constantly out of clean socks, but surely someone else around here is the adult. I can’t always be counted on to take my make-up off at night, or have plans for dinner, or get my oil changed on time. I can’t adult.

Except – crap, crap, crap – we are the adults. We are the ones in charge of making decisions. We are the ones who have to instill in our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, the worldviews, priorities and basic human decency that will shape their generation. It’s the most adulty part of being an adult.  We get to set our own bedtime and drink on a school night if we choose, we can buy seven shades of pink lip stick in shades from coral to sweet magnolia and watch uncensored HBO shows. But in exchange, it’s up to us to make sure we don’t muck up the world, miscarry justice and botch the compassion and decency meters of our progeny.

Why am I wound so tightly lately? So that my children and husband tip toe around me, soothing and evading in turn. Because I’m not so sure we’re doing a good job. I think about the old metaphor of a frog in a frying pan… the heat increases little by little, but the frog keeps adjusting, little by little, and it never jumps out. I think of the phone ringing in my grandparents’ house, letting them know that a stranger needed help, and their unquestioning devotion to those strangers. I think about my grandmother believing steadfastly in the light of the world overcoming the darkness. In people’s mistakes not defining them, not making them unworthy of prayer and love. I loved my grandparents. I love their memory, and my memories of them. And honestly, I’m glad they aren’t living through this period of US history. I think it would break their hearts.

These are the principles I want my children to live by:

1. Help each other.

Actually, I guess that’s it. That’s what it boils down to. I want them to know that helping someone else is the fastest way to feeling better ourselves. I want them to know that 99.999% of people in this world just want to ensure their own children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews are safe, healthy and happy. Our differences are small. Our similarities huge. As my youngest once said, “When people fall down, help them up.” Our 8-year-olds get it.

Our country is currently split, according to the latest polling, at about 45% for each of our major party presidential candidates. In this post-Halloween candy fog, I feel the same way about that as if someone told me that 45% of the country actually likes Good ‘n Plentys. How could that be possible? How would one even begin to comprehend that?

45% split. For arguably the most powerful office on Earth. I realize that my own views make it hard for me to be entirely objective. But one candidate, despite being caricatured as cold and shrill and power-hungry, has spent a career ensuring children’s health care, and seeing that 75% of the world’s AIDS patients are able to seek treatment. The other has spent a career literally gilding his house in gold while both not paying taxes and suing and stiffing those who worked for him (who, by the way, almost assuredly did pay income taxes, in the event they were ever fairly paid.)

No, neither candidate is perfect. No one is. I’m not, either. Even my esteemed grandparents were not. But in this race, one candidate has advocated for fair pay and women’s rights worldwide, and one has mused publically about what a pretty picture a woman can make dropping to her knees. One has visited 112 countries and brokered a peace accord in one of the world’s perpetual hot spots. One wants to have play dates with Putin.

We’re the adults here.  We are the ones who not only get to choose, but who are quite literally responsible for the future. We are the ones who decide whether our politics and policies are helping each other, or helping ourselves. We are the ones who will live with these decisions, because we’re the adults. But we’re not the only ones. Our children get to live with them, too. And while it may make me crazy to pick up those wrappers and argue about homework, I’m still in awe of their amazing compassion and potential. I don’t want to tarnish either of those things for them.

Do we tell them we voted in hate crimes and petty retribution? I’m not speculating. Ask anyone from England, they of the 147% increase in the same. When we talk about building taller walls instead of longer tables, we are telling our children that when the phone rings, we don’t answer. When someone falls, we walk by. That when we disagree, we threaten our opposition with their life and freedom, because we’re out of real ideas. We are telling them that we’re tired of adulting.

We are defining a generation by our actions. I want to affirm for my children the world that my grandparents prepared for me. That world cannot be based on fear and division, stoking hate under a paralyzed frog in a frying pan. We’re the adults. We have to jump.