Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

I think possibly the most important literature has always been children’s books. It’s through the eight compound eyes of Charlotte that we learn what true friendship looks like, and most of us know half of our pioneering history through Laura Ingalls Wilder (and the other half through repeatedly dying of dysentery on The Oregon Trail). Laura could paint a picture a grasshopper plague in a way I’ve certainly never forgotten. And Winnie-the-Pooh’s world gave us an entire 100-Acre Wood to play within while Alice let us know that impossible things are the best kind, especially before breakfast.

But even within that auspicious company, I would place The Velveteen Rabbit at the top of a life-lessons-covertly-taught-during-childhood list. As a young reader, you often don’t realize how impactful certain words or memories are. How some books, or movies, or experiences will stay with you much longer than you would ever guess.

Through adult life, I think the number of times a person Googles something from childhood is indicative of its impact. For me, it’s the Skin Horse’s wise soliloquy about Being Real, words I’ve rolled around in my head during countless times of trial and error, until now they’re polished and smooth, comfortable and comforting, even in their, sometimes painful, faultless precision.

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I’ll finish reading, then breathe a little deeper, consciously relax my tight jaw and neck and shoulders.

Does it hurt? “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, because he was always truthful. “…It doesn’t happen all at once. You become.”

We become. There are times in all of our lives that we can feel those sage words reverberating within our hearts. Sometimes our guts. (But aren’t those two nearly always connected?)

We grow up. We get older. We go through good times and hard times, and days that we take for granted, and then wish we could take back to either to live again or to live a little different this time around. It hurts sometimes. Our hearts break, and when we rebuild them, like the Skin Horse says, we look a little different on the other side. It’s part and parcel of being human. We have to live in that growth, letting it hurt a little — or a lot — accepting that those things make us real.

Some days, being real makes jumping out of bed a little harder. There is an eddying current holding us back, a whirlpool vortex circling from our chests straight through to our hearts. Or a gray drizzle that won’t clear from our minds, so that we can see through it, but nothing seems clear. What if, in 1993, I had gone left instead of right? What would that look like today? What if I’d made braver decisions all along, or just once or twice? What if yesterday, I’d said no instead of yes? Yes instead of no? We’re held captive to the what-ifs, even though what-ifs are inevitable.

All of life is a risk and a choice. When we’re children, when so many of our foundations are being built, we don’t always understand that The Giving Tree may one day break our hearts. We just feel a little frustration with the Boy for being so selfish, and then we go make mud pies in the backyard. But as adults, we realize that if you pull a little at one string, it affects a dozen others. That sometimes when it looks like selfishness, like apathy, like heartlessness — instead it’s the impossible task of untangling the knotted tug-of-war in front of us.

We become real, and it hurts. We learn that single phone calls can change lives, that the actions of others will have every bit as much impact on us as what we decide for ourselves — that there are times we can only react, but that we are ultimately the ones responsible for our reactions. That hopefully our reactions are new and active choices, based on new calculations of new risks, and not just boomeranging repercussions.

This week, on the drive to day care, my oldest daughter said, “I wish scars stayed forever. Because otherwise, how can people really believe you when you tell your stories?”

My youngest scoffed. “But what if the scar was on your face?”

“Well, I wish you could choose,” the oldest responded.

Oh, my amazing, darling, wonderful children. If only we could choose. If only.

 

 In my stylized, nostalgia-filter version of the 1950s and 60s, around this time of the year, friends and neighbors would gather, perhaps somewhat reluctantly while feigning interest, and partake in buffets of shrimp cocktail, and French onion dip and things encased in jello. Whiskey cocktails drank while wearing wingtip shoes or red lipstick. And the lights would dim, and guests would oooh and ahhh over the Jones’ or the Smiths’ vacation photos, revolving through with the click, click, click of the rotating projector, the occasional slide upside down, so that everyone would lean their necks to the right in a choreographed pantomime to compensate.

Granted, my familiarity with the 1950s and 60s is mostly limited to Mad Men previews and movies like Mr. Holland’s Opus and Catch Me If You Can. So, I could be completely full of it. And I probably am. But based on the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same, my guess is that while we eat less jello as a rule, we have merely streamlined the party, gotten rid of the bulky projectors and created Facebook albums of our smiling adventures. Outside of these photos, toddlers melt down, and siblings refuse to give up their window seat despite all promises yesterday to the contrary, and spouses absently pass each other, unseeing, in the kitchen.

We live in a world where every photo we take can be immediately tweaked for vibrancy and hue, filters applied. Larger eyes and softer light, smoother skin, fewer wrinkles, backgrounds smudged or expunged altogether. It’s no wonder that we wonder sometimes get lost in the technicolor and forget that most of life is lived in the gray areas, that most people we meet are far more complex than our social media footprint, the smile in passing at the grocery store, or even the persona we legitimately cultivate and own for all but select few people who are our people.

Beyond the whiskey cocktails and whirring projectors of the 1950s, and past the witty Away Messages of our 1990s chat rooms, and right through the carefully edited images we post today, life has no filter. (#nofilter, if you will.) It’s hard to own, sometimes, when everyone else’s life is airbrushed for public consumption, the messy details of our own. In a culture of 5-year and 10-year plans and multi-tasking reverence and the expectation that we are public domain, it’s hard to admit that tomorrow is a bit foggy, that we’re feeling jagged and brittle, or overwhelmed, that my magic 8-ball always shakes to “Reply hazy. Ask again later.”

Charcoal. Granite. Graphite. Flint. It’s all gray. Sometimes a soft dove gray. Sometimes a heavy pewter. But it’s a spectrum, as we are, in constant flux.

Things I know for sure, in black and white: I’m out of daycare lunchbox drinks. There is laundry to do. School starts in 2 ½ weeks. Tennis shoes should be bought. This week should have several pool days.

And after that, we’ll see.

We’ll see. That classic line of adulthood, heard by children everywhere with an impatient sigh. But really, if we could admit that we’re just talking to ourselves, that we’re waiting for the Universe to answer a little more decisively, and in the meantime, day by day, we’ll buy Capri Suns and Nikes, wouldn’t we all sleep a little sounder? 

“When is your summer vacation, Mommy?” my youngest asked.

I explained that most of the time, adults don’t get a summer vacation. We went to Michigan, I said. Remember that? A week ago?  “But that was for three days,” she said, pointing out the ridiculousness of calling that a summer vacation. Too true.

This summer in particular has been (mentally, metaphorically) more a fitness adventure vacation than a beach vacation. I never really understood why people would book those. I’m all for a good hike one afternoon, but I’ve always believed a vacation should be about rest, from work, from routine, from whatever is keeping you up at night.

For me, this summer has been about forms. I have lists of the forms I have to fill out. Forms for child care, forms for liability waivers for the childhood memories my children are perilously creating, forms for Girls Scouts that require calling the pediatrician for vaccination records, because that’s a form I thought I had readily available as a good, conscientious mother… but apparently not. Forms for adulting, lists for keeping the forms straight. And I’m writing them all out long-hand because currently I’m printer-less, and I don’t understand why all this same information, time after time, isn’t just downloadable from my brain to the page, or why these lines are so small. Do you even want my phone number with area code? Are these forms from 1989 when we were just using 7 numbers? What is going on here?

I thought back to my daughter’s question. “When is your summer vacation?” And I remembered that they’ve been to the pool three times this week, and are already the June-tan that only childhood can acquire, even though they’re covered in SPF 50. And that they’ve created synchronized swimming routines for themselves and had watermelon with breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I’ve been there for all of that (except the tan part… which I’ll never achieve).

Childhood heroine Anne Shirley once said, “Tomorrow is a new day, fresh with no mistakes in it.” And I’ve repeated that to myself with more frequency than perhaps is ideal over time. Because while tomorrow may be my oyster, today I seem to be muddling through a bit, still, not appreciating that no matter what else is going on, this is the season of watermelon and flip-flops and dinner on patios. Even in the muddle, I can wake up today, and do better than I did yesterday, finish the day with fewer mistakes than the day before. Make lists and cross them off. Learn my pediatrician’s number by heart, so I don’t have to look it up for every form, put that ill-fated worm back in the cool grass when he strays to the hot sidewalk, and try to finish the day having done more to the good, breathed in a few more of those golden summer moments than I managed yesterday.

Summer vacation as an adult is really listening to children playing, and slowing down to appreciate how much later the sun is out, and how echoes stretch deeper the longer the shadows grow. So, for my summer vacation, I’ll get in the water, even though it’s way too cold and I’ll take photos of the sunset, to add to the photos of all the other sunsets, and to the photos of that mountain peaks that look the same as the mountain we climbed last weekend. (Because summer of not, some mountains we keep climbing, and documenting that is, in the end, documenting our lives.)

And in the midst of it all, remembering that summer doesn’t pass us by, just because we’re adults. We just have to go find it.

 

 

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I came back to the office after a doctor’s appointment and burst into tears at the desk of one of my co-workers. Completely distraught at my distress, she asked what had happened at the appointment. In all sincerity, I choked back a few tears and said, “I gained 12 pounds since my last appointment!”

“Oooooh,” she said, sitting back down.

“In TWO WEEKS!” I clarified. And she nodded, sagely sympathetic.

And a week later, I had my first baby, at 33 weeks and 4 days. Far earlier than we had anticipated. And I was grateful that my body had known to prepare, even if my mind had not. What pediatrician have you chosen?, the NICU staff asked. We looked back vacantly. We were supposed to have had more time. We were told there would be more time. Were there no rules to this new game?

 

And that seems like a microcosm of parenting to me. Somehow, even 11 years later, I still find myself getting completely worked up about things that worry me that are temporary – transitory fears – and then being completely surprised by the big stuff. Always thinking, But I thought we had more time!

“To have a child is to forever have your heart walking around outside your body,” author Elizabeth Stone once said. Erma Bombeck said, “All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.”

 

They are both right. Parenting is years of spilled milk dripping through the slats of the kitchen table and wondering why the couch is wet. It’s tag team flu and red marker on eggshell walls. It’s watching 5 years of ballet create a graceful, beautiful ballerina, and it’s being able to talk about favorite childhood books together. It’s seeing your child stop their playtime to include another child, and delighting in the fact that your child not only fills a spot in your heart because they once occupied a spot underneath it, but because they are people you would like to meet out in the world, regardless of their last name.

Now, my oldest daughter yells from my room, already in my closet, “Can I borrow a t-shirt? The one I wanted is dirty!” She wears my shoes (which means I can wear hers). My youngest can explain to me the lifecycle of a salamander and show me the bibliography slide of her Google doc about the same, when I ask where she learned all this.

I’m incredibly proud of both my daughters, totally enamored with who they are: funny, creative, empathetic, motivated children who often give me as many lessons as I give them. But more and more, I realize that they aren’t so much children as they are segueing into young adults, and I realize — once again — I thought I had more time, that I’ve been focused on all the wrong things!

As their mother, I obviously want the world for my children. As a mother of daughters, I want to teach them how to navigate a world that still isn’t completely egalitarian. I want them to never feel compelled to use the word “just” when talking about their ideas. I want to eliminate “Sorry” from their reflexive response list. I do both of these things. Maybe I can learn from them. Last week in a discussion at the school lunch table about favorite tv shows, my youngest named a couple of shows that are, legitimately, a little young for her at this point. I’ve even expressed a little concern, not to her, that she’s still watching them. “Everyone laughed at me, and that hurt my feelings a little, but that’s what I like to watch,” she said, and shrugged. And again, I can learn from her.

Every day there are moments of clarity intermingled with moments of routine. But there’s often a little pin prick of happy pain when I realize that they are more and more ready to chose their own battles, their own paths. I’d like to think that their father and I have had at least something to do with that. But I could be doing more, I know. I could be packing lunches that don’t involve frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crimped closed and ready to defrost by lunch. I lose sleep over the things that I should be modeling for them. Do I exercise too little? Do I drink too much? Do they know I have no idea what they have been talking about for the last 6 minutes? Please, please let there not be a quiz or a request for follow-up questions.

At 3:20am, it’s not the precocious wisdom of my 9-year-old that I am mulling, or even the lifecycles of salamanders. It’s whether I am failing them on a daily basis in little ways. In big ways. In ways that won’t be apparent for another couple decades. It’s whether I am balancing their best life and mine, giving them a childhood that they remember with laughter and joy, filled with security and comfort, while also figuring out who I am at this stage of their lives, of my life, and what that looks like for all of us.

When I was in elementary school, Bobby McFarrin’s song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” ruled the airwaves for a little while. Every life will have some trouble. When you worry you make it double. As an adult, I wonder who was buying this song in 1988. Was it all 12-to-16 year olds? Because when I think about it now, I think, “WTF, Bobby. What kind of crap advice is that?”

Happiness is a double-edged sword, I think. We’ve been raised to think of it as an inalienable right. And yet it’s such a game of managed expectations. Courage and optimism layered with responsibility layered with short-term-long-term risk and reward. Happiness is a gamble, but one that I want my children to take. Too often, I think we shy away from risk. I want them to be confident enough to know what they want. And bold enough to go after it. I want them to own Sofia the First and Mickey Mouse Club, even when everyone else around them has moved on to scripted teen drama. I want them, not to be fearless, but to be undaunted.

It was beautiful today, after a week of rain and colder weather, hail and flooding. I went for a hike, and was feeling, in a literal sense, hot and sweaty, but also – as English majors are prone to do – translating the literal into the metaphorical as I went. It’s not really a fun-at-parties personality trait, but it sometimes helps us to put our own thoughts in order.

And so, if as a mother, the only thing that I ultimately impart on my children is not to shy away from the hard stuff, I think that’s a good start. I’ve used the phrase peaks and valleys a lot lately. So much as to over-use it, actually. And my phone once auto-corrected it to peaks and valets, which at least made it a little more amusing to use its hackneyed cliché thereafter.

But the thing about making it from valley to peak is that often times, the view is worth it. And if your legs are burning a little, and there’s a little sweat in your eyes, it means more. Much like motherhood, it’s not that you forget the adorable little bowling ball who sat on your bladder for months, or labor pains, or that that used to be your favorite cashmere scarf before it became the luxury bed of the feral neighborhood cat. But the pain points pale in comparison to the reward.

And this Mother’s Day, my goal for the next trip around the sun is to best the valleys, to have faith in the view ahead, to show my daughters that there is no “just” in the life they are creating for themselves.

May they take the road that leads them to themselves, and be grateful for the journey even in the valleys (and may they always remember water, sunscreen and where they parked the car.)

  

Recently, I ran away to my best friend in Seattle.

Part of the rider of good friendships include remembering your worst moments, but never bringing them up unkindly; knowing your secret tells, for better or worse (for instance, if I spend any considerable time listening to Linkin Park, there’s a 96% chance I have something on my mind); and knowing your favorite caffeine and calorie choices.

I spent 48 hours in Seattle. A weekend away. It wasn’t so much running, I suppose, as it was a reset. When you call IT, or the cable company, or Verizon, the first thing they ask is whether or not you’ve rebooted. And as infuriating as that initial question is, it’s often effective (unless the words motherboard are uttered, and then it’s just time to call it a day).

But it takes time to shut down, reboot, wait while the security and Windows screens come back. And all the while, you can’t be sure this is going to be the solution. Often, because I know it’s going to take time I know I don’t have, I delay the IT-recommended reboot. I Google the problem. Then Google the thing that might be the secondary problem, based on my first Google. I consult topic-specific chat rooms. I send an instant message to my in-house expert. I whine a little. And once I’ve exhausted my patience (and everyone else’s), and burned some additional time, I give up and reboot, anyway.

Lately, I’ve been restless, unproductive more often than I’d like, and sometimes straight up irritable. I want to feel better, although I also want to whine a little first, but instead of doing the things I know lead me that direction, I actively choose to just Google the problem. A clean diet, some exercise and a consistent bedtime will solve at least 80% of my problems. And yet… it’s hard with Easter upcoming not to eat the pastel wrapped candy overflowing on the desktops at work. And it’s hard, after a long day, amidst all that candy, not to come home and pour a glass of wine. And it’s hard, after a glass of wine, to think about taking that after-dinner walk.

There’s a song lyric by my favorite college band, Bare Naked Ladies, that says, “There’s nowhere else I would rather be, but I can’t just be right here.” Restless, too much candy, not enough exercise. I bought a book on calligraphy and calligraphy pens. I thought it might be a calming hobby to take up. I follow several Instagram calligraphers who create flowing watercolor creations of affirming  and favorite quotations. I could do that. In a quiet room, alone, with good light. I felt calmer already. Before looking through the instructional book gave me performance anxiety. I haven’t uncapped the pens.

Every day, the nation seems potentially posed at the brink of war. We have several crises to choose from, so the odds seem good. Or bad. Clever acronyms – MOAB – not just a Western state desert vacation spot, but the “mother of all bombs” flit across our television screens. If we avoid war, we stand on the edge of a whole bunch of social backsliding. That accomplished, we stand with a box of tinder and an open flame at the base of the few remaining arctic glaciers.

The emperor has no clothes, and we know it; we elected him that way, so it’s hard to say we couldn’t, didn’t see it coming.

This week, my troop of 9-year-old Girl Scouts talked about Title IX (i.e., No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance). We focused on sports, as that’s an easily digestible part of the statute for 9-year-olds. To tell young girls who, for years already, have been playing soccer and training in martial arts, that before Title IX, only 1 in 27 girls played sports inspires mostly polite confusion, which I think is great.

For my generation, Title IX was already a fact of life. Girls were swimming and playing volleyball and basketball and running track. We had Gabrielle Reese and Michelle Kwan and Jennifer Capriati in our corner. In 2011, under the Obama administration, sexual assault and harassment was explicitly noted as a barrier to free and equal access to education for women (and men – just statistically, less frequently). This heightened awareness and additional responsibility should have been the new Title IX our daughters took for granted. And yet our nation’s secretary of education was unable to say, when asked, that she would adhere to that guidance; in fact, some Title IX protections were rolled back within a month of the new administration. How does that happen in a society with 51% women?

I wore a three-seasons jacket all winter. I really like it, actually. It’s cut well and makes me feel pulled together, whereas my traditional winter coat does not. That sucker makes me feel like it’s winter all of January, straight into February. I’m a few layers deep, with no figure to speak of, and can’t wait until spring. And as much as I appreciated being able to wear a slim-cut jacket from November through March, it was a little worrisome. Is winter one of those things that, like emperor penguins and polar bears, we’ll tell our grandchildren about with photos – maybe holograms by then – and National Geographic channel special retrospectives?

We are canaries in a coal mine. Which is ironic analogy, since one of the campaign promises kept by the new president was rolling back environmental hassles that made it harder to deal with coal sludge, ostensibly saving thousands of coal jobs in the process.

Traditionally, canaries sang until the conditions of the mine overtook them, letting miners know that they, too, were in a toxic atmosphere. The canaries were victims of their circumstances and their cages. For all I know their song was a beautiful, even frantic, but useless mourning of their plight. But for us, the cage is  psychosomatic.

It’s stressful, watching toxicity spread. And it can bleed from the red scrolling headlines we see on the news, to our dinner tables, to our overfull candy bowls and heavy pours of now daily pre-dinner/after-dinner drinks. Can you picture the Fidelity Investments commercial with the green line? The green line leads you. You simply follow your personally created green investment guidance path to your stable, comfortable retirement goals. Easy peasy. These days, I can picture the same slightly Pink Floyd The Wall, pied-piper follow-me path, but with a tension-headache red banner, leading us from hot spot to pothole to exhausted canary.

We need a reset.

When we start to live in a constant Wag the Dog moment, eventually none of it seems real. We lose our ability to react to the toxicity because it becomes permeating. It’s a slightly rancid strawberry we keep eating because it looks red like it’s supposed to, and it’s summer. It’s a cloudy glass of water we drink anyway, because it comes from our safe, suburban tap. We delay rebooting because it’s a hassle we don’t have time for. But in fact, like penguins and polar bears, we canaries are in trouble.

I ran away for a weekend. When I was coming back to the airport, my driver lamented the deaths of 44 Egyptians during holy week celebrations. “I hadn’t heard,” I said. “I’ve been on vacation and off the grid.” And the red scroll of headline news flickered, stabilized, and was back.

It’s not all bad news. We are canaries in a coal mine, but we aren’t actually caged. Just as the emperor has no clothes, we have no bars save the ones we insist upon.

So, while we can’t commute 1300 miles every weekend for fresh seafood, local wine and steaming mugs of white pomegranate tea shared late at night with far-flung friends, probably a clean diet, some exercise and a consistent bedtime wouldn’t hurt.

 

This morning when I got up, I opened the frosted glass window of our bathroom and breathed in the cool, damp air. The gray day was misting and had made the cars shiny, the pavement dark. We didn’t have winter this year, as it’s been voted down with increasing regularity of late, so this cool but not frigid breathe-in-the-morning ritual has been the routine, usually minus the gray skies.

My youngest was stirring, but not quite up, and the rest of the house was still quiet, in that sometimes miraculous way of weekend early mornings. And as I turned down the stairs, the light still muted, thoughts still just placidly eddying, I thought…. “Goddamn cats.” Because there, in the middle of the carpeted stairs, was a highly usual pile of cat yack. From sometime during the night. But a good while ago, it seemed.

I changed my course. Got paper towels and the pet spray. Which, as I picked it up, I noted was pretty light. Time to put it on the grocery list. Because we do this every. single. day.

I readily acknowledge there are first world problems, and first world privilege and first world guilt. Clearly, cleaning up cat puke from the carpeted stairs of a suburban Denver house is definitely the first, layered in the second, my irritation notwithstanding the third.

And yet.

My very first self-motivated music purchase was Aerosmith’s Get a Grip album on cassette. It’s the cow udder one, for anyone trying to place it. I’ve been working back in time with music lately, and remembering that since the days of my father’s vinyl collection, music has never failed to balance me and give me the words I lack. But I’d pretty much forgotten that first cassette until I heard it playing around the edge of my mind this morning.  The #1 song from that album, which I’m sure Rick Dees brought through the airwaves into my early-teen bedroom for weeks, was Livin’ on the Edge.

There’s something wrong with the world today I don’t know what it is. Something’s wrong with our eyes. We’re seeing things in a different way and God knows it ain’t his.

It’s been weeks since I sat down to write anything. There’s a general unease in me that seems at odds with the creative process. Sometimes there are words. Sometimes there are not. It’s easy to set the blame for it directly at the door of the new administration. And certainly, that’s a part of it, though their own ineptitude and buffoonery has helped quell some of my fears of their effectiveness. But part of it is cat puke and the three dirty snack bowls and dirty glass set out in a sloppy four-points circle surrounding my daughter’s blanket, pillow and stuffed animal nest that was supposed to be cleaned up last weekend. There are probably actual field mice living in there now, who she’s probably named and is tending to them like the Cinderella she claims to be every time we suggest basic cleaning or hygiene.

It’s getting home at 6pm, making dinner and doing dishes while still in heels because I’ve forgotten to simply kick them off in the march of daily scheduled events. It’s being late to Girl Scouts because the Lone Tree Municipal Building is not the Lone Tree Civic Center. A very Google-able fact that occurred to me to Google only after the fact. It’s my youngest telling me with her very most serious I’m-not-angry-just-disappointed voice, “Mommy, I just wanted to tell you that you didn’t pack any dessert for my lunch today.” It’s looking up recipes again this week and wondering how on an entire Internet, we always end up with the same four variations of dinner.

Such little things, such problems that aren’t problems, and yet like the pile of shoes and backpacks and homework folders in our entry way, they seem to be creating a small mountain. My favorite vacation destination right now is to Alone. Just … wherever. But could I be by myself, with my running shoes (just for walking these days but I swear I seek out hills) and a pile of books and maybe a food delivery service on call, but just leave it on the porch. I don’t otherwise want to know anyone was there. (And please leave disposable plates and silverware, because there are no dishes to do in Alone. It’s one of the laws there.)

I know that these are the best of times. That quiet mornings will pile up after another 10 years. But like Dickens said – in 1859 – everything has its opposite, naturally or created. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us… in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

It’s a reminder we’ve been here before. It’s not so much that the world is on fire. Or that the world is so many identical days stretching out into infinity with only a new grocery list to mark today’s cat cleanup from yesterday’s. It’s more that life isn’t a Disney movie. It doesn’t wrap up with a magic wanded “The End”, in part because traditionally Disney’s The End is just the beginning of actual life’s sleepless nights and dirty dishes and school lunches and piles of shoes in entry ways.

Some days I feel superlative. Some days I feel like the entire world has gone insane. Some days I open the frosted window of the bathroom and am struck absolutely dumb (if anyone were there to hear my thoughts) with the pure beauty of a sunny morning, pink sunrise reflecting from the east to the mountains in the west. Some days I feel like I’ve lived the same routine so many hundred times, it’s almost a miracle that I could forget to put dessert into a lunchbox at all.

In the time that I’ve been writing, the gray has partially disappeared and the sun has come out. I don’t think Nature thinks of it as superlatives. Just cycles. Just as a vacation to Alone would be a welcome diversion, I hear the taxes and airfare are terrible. Not somewhere you’d want to retire.

So as the pavements dry and the mists burn off, I’m a little more centered again, and ready again for a bit of everyday routine. To convince Cinderella to relocate her field mice outside. I may even play a little more Aerosmith as I do the morning dishes, meld the last time the world was on fire with this one.

But seriously. Those cats, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I keep dropping things. A pear I bobbled like a failed circus performer at the grocery store before it hit the floor (I bought it anyway). Cosmetics and deodorant on my vanity countertop. Cracked grey shadow like a fine dust over the cold bathroom floor tiles. I feel like I’m not completely focused lately. Almost like, if there really are planes of existence, I’ve shifted just a millimeter outside my own. Not enough for things to be truly different, but enough that, like trying to thread a needle with one eye closed, not everything seems to be lining up.

My right cheekbone and eye socket aches. Most likely the New Year’s cold I have mostly recovered from has shifted slightly to my sinuses. But it adds to that sense of unfocused ether. A Sudafed does a lot to clear that up, but the underlying unease remains.

I was trying to recall what current events I remember from my childhood. I vividly remember the Challenger exploding. I remember the yellow ribbons of Desert Storm. But I don’t feel like my childhood was informed by the nightly news. I wonder how my children will feel in 30 years. Will they have certain moments that crystalize in their memory, or will the constant news cycle mean that everything becomes less. I think sometimes my bobbling pears in the super market is directly related to the 40,000 things that I’m trying to simultaneously categorize in my mind. Family schedules. Work schedules. The ache in my eye socket may be sinus-related, or it may be potential nuclear arms race related. It’s hard to say.

Sometimes I think that the solution may be taking a break from the treadmill of current events. The world will go on turning whether I am informed each and every day or not. Taking a break from the pulsing-lights-and-throbbing-sound rave-at-midnight news style that seems to be preferred over in-depth reporting that has to be read and consumed and internalized past the second paragraph. Or past the headline, even.

And yet, the news doesn’t stop just because our heads hurt. On Friday, I checked headlines. I read a little bit about the upcoming attempt to slash and burn Obama’s last 8 years. I read about whether Trump would, after actually accepting an intelligence briefing, concede the findings of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies about Russian involvement in our election. I read an article about the end of Girl Meets World on the Disney Channel. While it’s definitely no Boy Meets World, I was a little sad that it wouldn’t continue, just because it had seemed like a nice touchpoint with simpler times. And really, Mr. Feeney was the teacher we all needed. If Corey Matthews had grown up to be Mr. Feeney, didn’t that give all of us some hope?

I did not read the article about another shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport, because I read the headline. And I basically got it. My children were on a 90-minute delay because of frigid windchills, so the morning started in a sort of relaxed pace. My program manager had replied to my “I’ll be late” text by suggesting that I just work from home. With that suggestion, I put off blow drying my hair indefinitely. I texted my husband that he didn’t have to try to cut his afternoon meeting short and hurry home after all. I’d be around for the girls after school. I took a meeting via my cell phone, mostly on mute as I put away dishes and re-loaded the dishwasher, picked up the top dozen pieces of debris from the natural disaster the week had wrought in our living room.

And then my brother texted to say he had some very bad news. Even reading that, I didn’t immediately panic. It all seems to be bad news anymore, doesn’t it? But this was different. This was, in fact, very bad news.

That headline from Fort Lauderdale, whose article I didn’t read, because I’m tired of headlines about shootings when as a society, even after Newtown, we couldn’t pass any common sense regulation, that headline — though I didn’t know it as I packed lunches and signed homework — was tragically real and close to home. Even as I shook my head and sighed and read about Disney Channel cancelations, my brother’s family was entering the kind of nightmare that seems unreal, even as the facts keep coming to support it. Olga Woltering, my sister-in-law’s warm, gregarious grandmother, my nephew’s great-grandmother, had been killed by a mass shooter. “Five killed,” doesn’t seem like such an unspeakable tragedy anymore, and if that in itself isn’t tragedy, what is. It’s become background noise. And we’re grateful it wasn’t more, in a detached sort of way. Except in this case, five people, five people in a nation of 320 million, those infinitesimal odds, turned out to be a gut-wrenching, nauseating reality.

My other brother and I work together, except that I was working from home. But because we work for a pretty great boss, my Colorado brother immediately came over, and we cried for our family’s family, for a world where things like this happen, and where we grow immune, only to unbelievably get very bad news. A world where a 90-year-old great-grandmother could end up in a headline that someone could scroll past, not truly internalizing that in fact, people who woke up today planning for a celebratory cruise, are going to bed with the bottom falling out of their world.

There are no words for that. Until the news started reporting names, I kept waiting for my brother to text back. To say that of course there had been a mistake. Because of course there had. Until there wasn’t. Until it was just as terrible as it was unbelievable.

On an article about the shooting’s victims, someone commented, “Why do we need to see this?” and I admit, I reacted entirely on instinct, hands shaking, a little cold, heart pounding up into my throat. We need to see this because these people are people, I retorted, incensed. But my retort was partly out of guilt. Because I am guilty of headline fatigue. I am guilty of not seeing each headline as a real person. As a real family. As loss and grief and weeping and years of empty photos and empty chairs and missing laughter. 

As my brother’s family travels to mourn and celebrate a life that was needlessly, pointlessly and tragically cut short, most of the nation will move on. But now I realize anew, news doesn’t exist in a bubble. Headlines may seem like a seizure-inducing rave sometimes, but to ignore them doesn’t change them. It only changes us, makes us maybe safer, maybe colder. And perhaps the point is not to avoid life’s pain, but to realize it’s what should bring us commonality and common purpose. It should inspire us to action and empathy and purpose, across partisan and geographic and generational divides. It should. It really should.

Writer and blogger Glennon Doyle Melton coined the term “brutiful.” She said, “Life is brutal. But it’s also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life’s brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can’t be separated.” Just a few days before Olga Woltering’s senseless death, I had posted a new cover photo on Facebook. For me, it was partly a coming to terms with the new year, the first year of which I can say I’m actually anxious. It was a quote from writer and theologian Frederick Buechner who himself has lived through some terrible things, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” It felt like a quote about balance, about the arc of moral justice. It felt hopeful. When I heard about Olga’s death, I nearly changed it, even as I thought about how ridiculous any thought toward my Facebook cover photo were in the circumstances. But it seemed so stupidly Zen-like, foolishly optimistic, in a world that clearly is anything but.

We can throw around terms like brutiful, and say that we won’t be afraid, and trust that there’s a higher purpose. But then a stranger walks up to your nephew’s great-grandmother and pulls a trigger. No. No, no, no, no. We don’t just get to embrace the beautiful when that happens, and zen-out the brutal. We have to live through that. Her family has to go on without her, when they shouldn’t have to. It’s utterly unfair.

In closing, I don’t have a summary paragraph. I don’t have any silver linings. I guess I just have a couple bruised pears, a tender cheekbone, a few Sudafeds in my purse and the renewed intention to not shut off. To perhaps skip articles about the shooters, but to never skip the articles about the victims. To remember that even when it gets lost in angry rhetoric, we – the all of us, we – have reason for empathy and purpose.

MacBeth was wrong. It’s not just sound and fury. It doesn’t signify nothing. It’s what we’ve got and it’s all we’ve got. We have to stop trying to go numb, shutting off and shutting down. Let’s let our hearts break. We – the all of us, we – are worth that.

Through beautiful and terrible things.

 

Snow day!

When I was little, snow days meant creeping out of bed on a necessarily frozen morning, stealing across the cold hard wood floors of my bedroom, and turning on the radio until the music stopped and the announcer recited the schools that were closed.  “Ontario Schools” was, of course, always somewhere in the middle, leaving one on tenterhooks until that pivotal moment. Those lucky kids in Bucyrus and Crestline and Galion. The extra minutes of my childhood given to that mid-alphabetical listing!

Today, both my husband and I received a phone call and an email from the school district at 5:09am, followed by an email from our elementary school at 5:19am. And for good measure, while still warm in bed, I tugged my cell phone up from the floor by its charging cord, and pulled up the 9news website to see it in print as well. And went back to bed for an hour.

Snow days have magic to them, even if there’s more technology in their delivery. I’m lucky to work in a job where a snow day just means a work-from-home day, and so I never quite got dressed today, although I added a layer and fuzzy socks, and my car never left the driveway, although I did clear it off, in preparation for my life resuming tomorrow. But one aspect of snow days that has evolved since I was a student is parenting a snow day.

My oldest woke up a little after 9. She received the Harry Potter books from her uncle on New Year’s Eve (otherwise known as the Final Gifts of Christmas), and she has since then worked through the first two, starting on the third. She occasionally surfaces to note what she prefers from the books, and what she thinks the movies did well. She hasn’t even watched tv in two days, she told me, which probably I should have noticed, and encouraged, for myself. But for the most part, Child 1: snow day, sorted. And since voracious reading is how I would spend a snow day, both then and now, I feel good about it.

Which leaves Child 2.

“Mom, where’s my ruler from picture day, so I can measure the snow?”

“Mom, can I have a pickle? Mom? Can you open the jar? Do you need a knife to bang on it?”

“Mom, how do you spell creepy crawly? I’m writing a story.”

“There’s nothing to do!!” (It’s 10am)

“Mom! I cut myself with the orange peeler! It’s bleeding!”  (How? Just… how?)

“But you said I could spend my money at the Dollar Store tomorrow.”  “No. I said, Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow doesn’t mean tomorrow.” “You said tomorrow!”

“Is there enough internet for your work and for Netflix? Can you find me Animal Buddies?”

And finally, “I swear if you don’t get off your sister this instant, you’re going to spend the rest of the day in your room. I mean it, chica. Don’t test me.”

Well, that last one was me. Possibly said in not my magical snow day voice.

When we were in Minnesota for the holidays, my brother-in-law mentioned that they’d had school the week before with a -45 degree windchill (real temps, -23). And then and now, I thought that was crazy. Partly because I can’t even imagine -45 degrees, windchill or not, and I don’t understand how such places stay populated, even by enthusiastic winter warriors. But I also thought, snow days shouldn’t be so hard won. They should be like the 10^th free purchase at the frozen yogurt store, or the $5 reward at the liquor store. Sure, it doesn’t happen every day, but both have definitely happened in recent memory and will again.

Even as an adult, snow days are rewards in the non-sugared cereal box. They are reminders that there are some things we can’t control in life (nature is a big one) and that’s not so bad. Somehow we got suckered into adulting – we maybe even perhaps sprinted there, thinking we were in a hurry – and snow days are reminders that we can sometimes drop that ball, and just stare out the window for a while, hot mug in hand and old college sweatshirt on, while nature holds the cards.

Yes, I got less done than I would have in the office. Yes, I thought my head might explode a couple of times, with the potpourri of questions that fell faster than the temperatures. And no, my house is no cleaner than it was at 5:09am this morning. But snow days are snow days.

When I asked my youngest what the best part of her snow day was, she replied, “The best part? Was figuring out it was a snow day, and being with you.”

So she didn’t have to creep across a winter bedroom tundra, and even if she had, her school district begins with “D,” so she’s still got it made. But that pearly magic moment, when one moment you were hopeful but uncertain, and the next your whole soul lifts to the unexpected day off, that moment of snow day realization is still magic, no matter how we hear it.

And maybe she remembers our cell phone app yoga practice more than my ultimatums. Because now when I think back about the day, my favorite part was feeling her hand find mine during Shavasana, while we both just let routine flow over and around us, stretched out in complete repose. And isn’t that the entire point of a snow day?

 

My adorable 7-month-old niece gave me a cold for Christmas. It’s hard to hold it against her, since she is also full of baby giggles and has endearingly chubby rolls at her wrists and ankles and still has the delicious downy baby head that you can nuzzle and breathe in. But at about 4:17pm this afternoon, I sneezed three times in quick succession, and my slightly tickly throat and case of intermittent sniffles became a full-fledged cold.

Certainly I wouldn’t take back any of the cuddles with this new niece who will only be a baby for such a short time, who will probably stretch into at least a toddler before we see her again, like her sister before her who somehow turned four this fall while our backs were turned.

This is kind of the thing about life, I suppose. There’s the good, and there’s the bad. There’s bad with the good. There’s good with the bad. I blame evolution for the fact that the bad sometimes seems to outweigh the good in our calculations. If you’re being chased by a saber tooth tiger only 10% of the time, it’s still likely to make a sizeable impression on how you live the other 90% of your life. But now that most of us aren’t dividing our lives into predator/prey scenarios, probably the inclination to weight the negative isn’t as imperative. And yet it’s hard to get out of the habit.

I’ve been incredibly guilty of this this year. 2016 has been collectively panned as a terrible year. The part of me that can’t help but use dark humor to cope appreciates this sampling of the Twitterverse:

 

There’s dark camaraderie in laughing cynically into the void.

And yet, clearly it hasn’t been all bad. My family is healthy, except for maybe this cold, which I imagine will be relatively short-lived. There was a perfect new baby on each side of our family tree this year. I was able to see multiple far-flung friends who have known me for so long we don’t admit how long, because it makes us seem far older than we feel. I watched my daughters wade in the Colorado River on sunny summer days, and kissed my husband on a catamaran at sunset beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I discovered new friends who challenge me to think with more breadth and depth, and renewed old friendships that remind me that some things are immutable. The good.

And the bad: a man who embodies everything I abhor won the presidency of the country that I was absolutely convinced, until about 9pm on November 8, would never fall for him. But in the same moment, many more rose up, via voices and checkbooks and volunteerism and tenacious presence, to defend social progress: “His views are not mine.” I worry globally, but am confident locally. Yin and yang.

New Years is generally a positive holiday (as I suppose most holidays are). The metaphoric blank page. The glittering ball drop in Times Square, fireworks over the Sydney Opera House and Auld Lang Syne. The start of “all things that have never been.” I don’t know if I’ve ever made a successful new year’s resolution. I don’t think the point is so much keeping them as making them. Making them is a hopeful, optimistic act and we need as many of those as we can accumulate in life. And so I also embrace the clean starts of spring, of summer break, my birthday, the letting go of fall. It’s never too early or too late to begin again.

Often, we characterize the new year as a baby, taking over from the old man of the previous year, beginning January with precocious charm. This year seems more like it is starting with a cautious, somewhat jaded early-20-something who has their whole adult life ahead of them, but has been tossed around a bit already. The optimism is tempered with disquiet, like scanning the horizon for a predicted storm, unsure of its arrival and intensity.

Storms aren’t all bad. The waiting reminds me that this fall, when my aunt’s seaside town in South Carolina was hit by a hurricane, what she conveyed afterwards was not the fear of the storm, but the sense of community it created in preparation and cleanup. And my first winter in Colorado, it snowed three feet in March. What I remember most is neighbors coming together with everything from shovels to baking trays to scoop away snow, even while we were noting cars by their antennas sticking out of snow drifts. Storms come and go; often they leave communities stronger for them.

In high school and college, I kept a quote book. I look through it sometimes still, amused by the often histrionic, though sincere, bent to what appealed to me at the time. Dating is hell, clearly. Other entries are idealistic. Others classic. Jerry Maguire quotes beside Emerson beside Tolstoy, beside Jewel lyrics.

I can still remember the impact of when I read The Grapes of Wrath, the imagery, the heartbreak, the despair, the beginnings of an understanding of social justice. There are several pages in that quote book devoted to Steinbeck’s portrayal of a country in deep turmoil, but which is still, somehow, slowly progressing forward:  This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only a half step, never the full step back.

Even in the worst of times, described so rawly and powerfully by Steinbeck in his evisceration of the mechanisms of the Great Depression, inevitably, we go forward. It’s not always pretty, but still “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” We just have to take the long view, and gaze steadfastly and confidently in that direction, while committing, in the short view, to being the good in the bad.

As 2017 begins, I resolve to try to remember that I’m not being chased by a saber tooth tiger. That storms build communities. That a new year isn’t so much about blank pages, but about forward progression, however slow, however messy.

Happy New Year, all. To 2017.

I went to bed early last night because sometimes the universe works out where you are simultaneously exhausted and home and no one’s needs are especially pressing. And so when I woke up somewhat early this morning, it was still completely quiet, except for the thudding predator prey white noise of the cats as they did their cat thing. I slid open our frosted bedroom window to see how much snow had fallen overnight, and breathed in the cold air. It smelled cold. And new. And freshly wintery. Checked phone. -2. Definitely wintery.

I came downstairs and made tea and I stood at the patio door for a little while, the tree’s Christmas lights reflecting off the glass, and I watched the snow filter down. I miraculously found both tape and scissors (Christmas miracle!) and wrapped a few presents, slipped a few mementos into stockings. And I reflected that this was an ideal sort of holiday season morning. Snow, quiet, wrapping presents in the quiet glow of the tree.

But I noted it in a sort of detached, third-person way. An if-I-wrote-tv-movies-or-if-I-wrote-for-Hallmark-or-Folgers commercials sort of way. I usually enjoy Christmas. I’m not that person who counts down from July, but once Thanksgiving is over, usually still that afternoon, I’m all in. We play Christmas music almost exclusively throughout the month, and we decorate with the traditions that have become our family’s, as well as some heirlooms that have been passed down. I make a big deal out of making hors d’oeuvres and hot cider while we decorate the tree.

This year, I did none of that. When my husband suggested decorating, I teared up, got angry, and said that they could do what they wanted. This was unreasonable, obviously. And no matter how I’m feeling, obviously the good parenting instinct should kick in and push me to do what I need to do to make the holiday special and joyous for the children, for the family.

“That’s okay, mama,” my youngest said, rubbing my arm as I stood, rigidly, irrationally heartbroken at the idea of Christmas. “You don’t have to help. We can do it.”

It’s always sweet when we adults are feeling sick or tired, and our children bring us a stuffed animal and pull a blanket over us. “You’ll be such a good mother,” I say. And yet, when our children are truly and sincerely parenting us in ways beyond stuffed animals, it’s a little distressing. But I stood firm. I wouldn’t – couldn’t – embrace a feeling I wasn’t feeling, simply because the calendar had ticked its way through the year.

And so, Christmas cards were ordered, gifts were purchased. Without me, the mantle was decorated and stockings were hung. Finally, giving up on me, my husband shrugged and put up the tree. I made a couple forays into holiday spirit, but they felt uncomfortable. An ill-fitting jacket found at the back of a closet. I peeled out of it and put it back. I Googled “Where Are You Christmas,” and “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” the only Christmas songs I felt any connection with.

I put Love Actually on the other day, thinking it would be a good way to channel some holiday cheer. Heads up, parents, if you haven’t seen it in a while and only remember heart-warming highlights. Delightful, yes. Child-friendly, no. It is totally rated R for a reason. I did not even think to check until the about the time I ordered my youngest out of the room, about 8 minutes in. Holiday does not automatically equal PG and is not all about lobsters at the Christmas crèche. Noted for next time. For this year, it was just another aborted Christmas mission.

This has been a hard Christmas season. I know it’s been true for not just me. I have talked to many friends who feel the same way. This year has been emotionally exhausting for any number of reasons. I feel buffeted by wave after wave of news and information. I’ve considered the sage advice of tuning out for a while, and yet that seems somehow frightening as well. I want to be informed – the world doesn’t stop just because we tune out and I firmly believe that the world needs a compassionate, informed public – but the cost of being informed is knowing, seeing. And so, we’re exhausted. Protests, natural disasters, mass shootings, genocide, fallen police officers and the warmest year on record (again).

Christmas can be wonderful. It’s traditions and joy, goodwill and family. But it’s also exhausting. Life doesn’t stop because it’s the holiday season, and in some ways the world spins faster. Holiday parties, year-end wrap-ups, concerts and dance recitals. Gifts to buy. Finding time to make traditions happen. Great-grandma’s cookies, remembering it’s the one time of year we need to buy shortening, and holiday movies (of appropriate scope). If we start out emotionally drained, it’s hard to find the additional reservoirs to tap for that ornament decorating and cookie exchange party that’s taking place on a Wednesday night.

This year, in acknowledgment of the holidays, the girls and I looked through the World Ark/Heifer International gift catalog and the girls choose to send Hope Baskets – chickens and rabbits (a little known and quickly multiplying symbols of Christmas). It’s a gifting custom started with my grandmother, continued by my parents – four generations of holiday spirit. That seems legitimately traditional. And then, feeling sick about the continued news coming out of Aleppo, we donated to Doctors Without Borders, so that they can continue to do everything they can to help those people who are in such unimaginable distress, and who, coincidentally, live in the same region of the world as one little displaced boy child who was born in a manger 2000 years ago. It’s a drop in an ocean, but still a drop.

I think I have sometimes gotten too caught up in the trappings of a perfect Christmas, which makes it harder to be at peace with the humbuggery I’m feeling this year. I generally subscribe to the holly jolly Christmas, the best time of the year, maybe a little fearful that if it wasn’t, I wasn’t doing my job, wasn’t paying enough homage to my own childhood, wasn’t giving my children a template that they would want to take with them. In the name of tradition, I was creating snapshots of orchestrated holiday accomplishment. And maybe in a lot of ways, that’s actually what tradition boils down to… what snapshots we want to take with us as we go into the new year, as our children become adults, the days and moments we want to make sure we remember.

This year, the stockings are hung. The tree is trimmed, even if I didn’t have much to do with it. In a secret, thawing place in my heart, it’s a soothing reminder that life is multi-faceted, as are we. I think it’s okay if this year my holidays aren’t about matching pajamas and Christmas mugs of cocoa next to a Yule log. Maybe I’ll get back there next year. Maybe sometimes it’s okay if the holidays are simply a cyclical reminder that the world has been around for a very long time, and will likely keep spinning for a good while longer, even if not everything looks the same from year to year.

One of the traditions of my childhood was reading aloud in the evenings as a family, including the classic C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe series. In Narnia, when the Pevensie children first arrive, it is always Winter, but never Christmas. I think this year, while not glowing with holiday spirit, I’m content with the idea that in the midst of Winter, Christmas is still due to arrive on schedule, proof that we’ve made it around the sun one more time and get another chance to do it all again, and maybe – hopefully – better, next year.

It’s a reminder that in the coldest, darkest part of the year, the sun is already fighting for precedence.