Whew!

Wow, it has been a minute. I took the summer off from blogging, and then I was so into this new book I’m working on that the break ended up bleeding into the fall too. But I feel like I’m firmly into revisions now, so I can pop my head back up to say hi! I missed you all and I missed this.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I have a lot of interesting content to blog about right now. Life outside of me is full, full, full. I am firmly in the chauffeur stage of parenting, and that combined with being homework monitor, chef for never-ending appetites, and part-time amateur therapist for middle school drama means that every day sort of passes by in a blur.

My own work, however, is in a very autumn sort of stage. I sit down every day, do my writing until my brain goes to mush, and then I spend the rest of my time being a sort of zombie while some small part of my mind nibbles at whatever narrative problem I’ve got going on.

This book, you guys. I’ve had to restart it twice, changed the narrator three times - back and forth and back again - and I feel like I’ve had to chisel it out of granite rather than letting it grow from soft soil. Some of that’s my fault. I decided at some point that I was going to set a hard and fast word goal and unfortunately didn’t include the truly essential quiet thinking time that is needed to turn words into stories.

Some of the difficulty is the story itself. I’m calling it my midlife crisis book, and it’s about a bunch of women - ordinary, normal women, who get called into some supernatural spy action twenty years after graduating from college together. There are a lot of cobwebs in their lives - corners that have been left untouched for a long time, but new challenges shine some light on the messy parts of life that they maybe wanted to pretend didn’t exist.

It’s fun to write, but hard, too. How do you do justice to the truth of so many of our stories - that choices were made, paths were followed, but if something big enough happens, we all have to figure out what parts of ourselves are still helping us, and what parts are holding us back?

Over these months, one of our family’s projects has been to shift our house from the kid years into a more streamlined living space. New paint, new couches, new storage, and a lot of sorting - toys, clothes, and so much kid artwork. It’s been fun to remake everything, and the girls are in on it too, but there’s a lot of decisions - do we still need a dedicated area for scrunchies and headbands, or should we use that space to hold the hair products and flat iron? What parts of our house are still helping us and what parts are holding us back?

I hope that in six months or a year, this process will be done and we’ll reach a new normal. But of course, the girls are talking about how it’s been a few years and they’d really like to have their rooms repainted and maybe we should think about reorganizing the kitchen and, and, and. I guess even if it slows down, there will always be another change just around the corner. Another adjustment, another life stage to get used to.

That’s not such a bad thing, I guess. It’s good to keep those cobwebs at bay, after all.

Book release! (and some thoughts on being a real person)

Oh my goodness. the Mud Witch of Verdun launches this Saturday! I could not be happier or more nervous or more exhausted. All of the feelings. All of them.

I think that what I’m supposed to do here, a few days before the launch, is talk all about how amazing the book is. But what I really want to do is talk about how wild it is to self-publish a book. So let’s start with the part I’m supposed to do and then we’ll get to the part I want to do.

This book is fun. It’s full of explosions and magic and blood and skulduggery. Betrayal and friendship and a little bit of sarcasm. Addy was a really, really fun character to write. She’s all the things I wish I could be and am happy that I am not. She’s impulsive and brave, great in a crisis and never satisfied. She starts the book on a sinking ship and it only gets more intense from there. She looks out a war that was literally called The Great War and thinks, “Yeah, I should do something about that.”

And the world that she inhabits, away from the war, is an idyllic island off the coast of France. It’s full of gardens and delicious food and lots of strong personalities. There are quiet beaches and crowded community kitchens and everything is made better by magic. If I could live there, I would.

And finally, the book is full of amazing women. They all have talents and flaws and even the not-so-nice ones have their reasons. I loved writing them all so differently and then using what they brought to the table to build a really fun story. You should read it. Either by buying it on Kindle or Paperback or in pieces, here on the website.

Ok, writing that was more enjoyable than I thought, but let’s talk about the wild process of self-publishing. Did you know that you can just sit down at your kitchen table and, like, create something? And that even if no one wants to publish it, that you can just shrug your shoulders and say, ok, I guess I’ll just do it then? And that the only thing standing between a blank page and a book on your shelf is a lot of work and letting go of your ego?

It’s that last piece that’s hard for me. The idea that the publishing of this book is somehow less than real because I did it myself. It’s funny, how I still want the A+, the external validation, the idea that someone who knows more than me decided that this book is worth reading. I have no doubt that I would jump on a publishing contract that if got the chance. Nevermind that it probably wouldn’t make me any money. It’s about feeling like a real author, like a real grown up with a real job who is a real person worthy of respect.

Whew. And then I remind myself that my most deeply held belief is that all humans have dignity; all humans are worthy of respect. It is not tied to what we have done or left undone. It is not tied to what we have or how much we know. It exists because we exist. That’s it.

And it is that deeply held belief that allows me to sit down and write the book and inspect every typo and format it and design the cover and then promote it. Because if I were worried about my dignity, about my worth, I would be far too ashamed to put this little, unwanted book out there. There are people out there, a lot of people out there, who think that if something doesn’t have the stamp of institutional support, then it’s not valid. And you know what?

I bet they have a lot less fun. I bet all that invalidity just eats away at the joy of creation, at the wonder of what our human brains are capable of.

That’s why I write books. Even when it’s not fun, it’s fun, you know what I mean? And when I push the publish button, all I want is for a few people to have fun reading it. I want The Mud Witch of Verdun to bring a smile to someone’s face. Anything else is just gravy.

So, if you have a few bucks, order the book this Saturday. If not, keep watching this space. I’ll be releasing the book, little by little, over the next 6 months. And most of all, do me a favor: take a second to think about what you could do if you stopped worrying about being a real person and started being the amazing human you are.

Exhale and Inhale

I was going to go for a walk, but a cat jumped on my lap and now I am stuck here for the foreseeable future. It’s ok, though. I really should be inside working anyway. It’s just that it’s 60 degrees and sunny and spring is finally here in earnest. It also coincides with a sort of exhale for me in a lot of areas of my life. The book is in the last stages, a significant volunteer role is starting to wind down, and we’re finally getting some movement on some house projects that we’ve been trying to get done for a while.

That last one, the sense of movement, is a huge source of relief. We’ve had a few projects that have needed to get done for a few years, but where we live, it’s so so hard to get a good contractor for a small project. There are a lot of people and a lot of new houses being built and I 100% understand why redo-ing our old powder room might not be that appealing. But it’s been a real pain in the butt.

I hate feeling stuck. I don’t mind not starting something, and I definitely love being done with something, but being in the middle, stalled, drives me up the wall. I end up just banging and banging at it until something gives. The question is, was the forward motion because I was pushing for it, or would things have moved anyway?

I’m sure you all know the feeling. You know, when you’re stuck in traffic, and you’d rather take a different, longer route, as long as it meant you were still moving? It doesn’t matter to me if I’m the cause of the movement, as long as I get somewhere and feel like I did something.

But these days, I’m trying to learn how to wait and see if the movement happens without all the storm and stress. There are definitely times when my intervention is needed, but let’s be honest - there are a lot of situations that are only made worse by a short angry lady getting involved. As for the contractor issue, the solution was in front of me all the time. Literally - I noticed their office one day when driving down our hill. They’d been there for years and it had never occurred me to look them up. But when I did, the reviews were wonderful, the price was right, and most of all, they got us moving forward.

When my kids went to school, I worried that I would become lazy, stagnant with all my free time. I mentioned that to a friend who laughed. “People like you don’t do that.” I didn’t trust myself enough then to believe her, but she was right.

Because after this exhale, I’ll be ready for the next round of activity. Even as I’m releasing one book, I can feel my frustration starting to build over the next one. The new book coming out basically wrote itself, but my next project is stalled. I’m stuck and I want movement. But maybe after doing a few times, I’m starting to be smart enough to know that it’ll come. I’ll get through the book launch and the volunteer stuff and then I’ll let myself get really, really bored for a week. And the end, all of that energy that I could have spent banging my head against the keyboard will come out in a torrent.

I would like to believe that, but let’s be honest, I’m not that wise yet. For now, I’ll enjoy the feeling of going with the flow, but I make no promises for the future.

Visible Stress and Invisible Complexity

It has been a rushing kind of day. Well, a rushing kind of afternoon anyway. And I’ll be the first to admit it, I don’t do well with rushing. In fact, a lot of the rushing was because my kid literally didn’t believe that we needed to rush because, in her words, “You’re on Serenity Time. We’re going to be 15 minutes early anyway.”

Spoiler alert: We were not 15 minutes early. We were late. And this child, who I don’t think has ever been late to anything in her whole life, got to experience the stress of being pressed for time while entering an unfamiliar environment.

I’m happy about it. It was a good experience for her. My unique makeup means that, as I said, my kids have never been late to anything, ever. That may seem shocking, and I will admit that we have arrived somewhere after the start time, but that was always, always on purpose or pre-planned. They’ve been early, though. We’ve arrived at the airport with hours to spare, to doctor’s offices before they opened, to friends’ houses where we waited in the car until it was time to go in.

So, it makes sense that she would think I was exaggerating when I told her, “No, really, I need to you get ready faster.” But this time, we really were crunched. We would have made it, too, but we had to take a small detour while driving to deal with some diabetes stuff. Just 5 minutes, stopped along a side road for a snack and a dose and a blood sugar check. But that was enough.

That, by the way, is the reason we’re always early. Let’s be honest, I’ve never liked being late. I always feel like I’m being disrespectful and mostly I just don’t see the point. Why add more stress when you don’t have to?

These days, though, it’s about more than showing respect or being relaxed. It’s about building in time for the unexpected. I never know when we’re going to need to take 5 minutes, or even 10, to deal with a minor but urgent health concern. And having diabetes sucks enough. I don’t want to make it the reason for time stress, too.

It’s hard for me. A lot of people assume that my neurosis is because I’m uptight or controlling or bossy. I freely admit to being all of those things, but nope, that’s not the reason. It’s because I know that at any moment, I may need to step aside or pull over and deal with something that seems small but could get really big really fast.

The hardest thing in my life isn’t the ever-present fear or the extra work. It’s the complexity that is invisible. It’s knowing that if I make a mistake, my kid feels like crap or misses out on something. It’s coping with that pressure - pressure to always keep track, be on it, never let my guard down. It’s explaining, even to friends, why our lives move slower. Why we eat dinner at home almost every night. Why rushing from one sport to another, which may seem normal to them, feels like climbing a mountain to me.

I know people do it. Families with kids with Type 1 move through the world in lots of ways. But that’s not us. And I do know that we’ve been gifted a lot through adversity. We eat dinner together every night. That’s precious and sacred and I wouldn’t have had the stubbornness to hold onto it if I didn’t have a very good reason to.

But the biggest gift I’ve been given is the realization that there is a lot of invisible complexity in the world. There are a lot of people who are dealing with stressors that I will never know about. And so if they act a little weird, a little too much, a little intense? I’m getting better at realizing that maybe that’s their way of dealing with things I can barely understand.

Then again, maybe we’d all be a little better off if we realized that other people are usually dealing with things we can barely understand.

World War I and 2021

My kids have spent a lot of time over the last few years with me telling them anecdotes or fun facts about World War I, except that the facts aren’t very fun and the anecdotes usually involve poison gas or dead bodies. Luckily for me, they’re pretty tough kids, but still…it doesn’t make for great dinner conversation. They’ve asked me, more than once, “Why World War I?”

I understand their confusion. As an American, our experience of that particular war was short-lived and not terribly influential. It was all but over by the time our troops got there and there wasn’t the patriotic war effort at home in the same way we remember Victory Gardens and Rosie the Riveter.

In fact, during World War I the situation here in the U.S. was far more complicated than most people know. A lot of people didn’t want to go to war, and when the U.S. declared, a lot of them got in big trouble for speaking out. There was significant prejudice against Germans and, then, Russians after the revolution, even though the U.S. was an ally! Also, there was a pandemic and significant terrorist activity from various anarchist and communist groups around the nation. The whole world probably felt like it was breaking apart.

And when I started this book, in March 2021, that was how I felt too. It’s how I still feel a lot of days. Yes, there’s nothing even close to the Western Front’s trench warfare - there never had been before and I hope never will be again - but it does feel like everywhere I look, things are malfunctioning. Everything from our roads to our international relationships seem too fragile, overworn. Like ice that is melting and just waiting to crack and drown us all.

And in the middle of all of that, my thought was, “What could one person possibly do?” Part of me was asking for myself, but part of me just wanted to explore the idea. Even if - even if - that person had supernatural, otherworldly powers. Even if they could get to the worst places and help the most - what could one person ever do against such systematic destruction. The inertia, the mindlessness of the bureaucratic decisions - how could anyone stand a chance against that?

And so, Addy was born. She was the avatar for all the hope and fierceness I held in the midst of a world that felt full of fear and despair. I like to think that she became more than that, but throwing a strong-minded woman in to the middle of hell on earth seemed like a good place to start asking the question, “What should we do when the world seems determined to break into a thousand pieces?”

Rosemary

We used to have the most beautiful rosemary. It was huge, at least six feet wide, and we used it all year long. I haven’t bought rosemary in years. If I needed it, I would just send a kid outside with a pair of scissors. But two summers ago, we had a “heat dome” where the temperatures reached 112 degrees. And after that, the rosemary just withered and died.

There was probably something I could do to prevent the bush from dying, but it honestly never occurred to me that the rosemary wouldn’t be ok. It was here when we moved in back in 2009 and I never once tended it. I took it for granted. But since it’s been gone, we just…don’t cook with rosemary anymore. I should just buy some from the grocery store, but I tell myself I’m going to replant it and regrow it and it’s one of those things where you don’t throw away that sweater with a pull because you’re going to fix it but you never do so now there’s just one more sweater in the drawer you never wear.

Well, on Sunday. Forrest took the girls to Fred Meyer to buy some running shoes. (For non-locals, Fred Meyer is like halfway between Walmart and Target.) And when they came home, they’d picked up some seeds. Some cucumbers because we’re all so in love with them that we always want more seeds. A bunch of flowers - zinnias and snapdragons and marigolds - that will doubtless end up in the girls’ garden and, when they bloom, in mason jars and vases on every surface in my house, even the weird ones like the top of the microwave.

And rosemary.

I guess they decided it’s time to try again. Which is funny, really, because so did I. When I put in my big seed order two months ago, I included a live rosemary plant. It hasn’t come yet, because our seed company has my back and won’t send it until it’s time to plant in the ground. They know us gardeners. If we get it too early, we can’t help but plant it, even though it will probably die.

So, after I finish this blog, I’m going to start some more seeds, and rosemary will be one of them. And then, just about the time that those seedlings are ready to plant, my order will come in too. And we’ll plant them all and hope that it works.

And maybe this time, I won’t take my rosemary for granted.

More about The Mud Witch!

So, now that I’ve announced my book, I thought I would take a moment to talk a little more about what it’s about. I’ve been working on it, on and off, for two years now, although the bulk of the writing and revising was done over a year ago. It’s strange. The book was very much written during the worst of the pandemic times when we were stuck inside. And as unproductive and sluggish as I felt then, clearly those long boring evenings were good for something.

The story follows Adelaide Simone, a young woman who also just happens to be able to do magic. She’s been trained by a mysterious Order on an island off the coast of France to use the combination of mud and water, plus her own abilities, to be able to bend the laws of physics. At the start of the book, she’s using those skills to protect transatlantic boat crossings from the dangerous waters around the English Channel. Oh, did I forget to mention? It’s 1915. And she’s on a ship called the Lusitania.

Addy has some big decisions to make. She’s got some pretty extraordinary skills, and there’s some pretty extraordinary carnage going on. But she’s not really supposed to be involving herself and the Order has strict rules about how and when their members can intervene in world affairs. Still, unlike them, Addy has seen what's going on firsthand and she can’t just stand by.

Things get even more complicated when Addy realizes that she’s not the only one using magic on the Western Front. And the other magic is stronger and more dangerous. She’s got to find some allies, convince the Order to trust her, and figure out who is causing all the chaos. Too difficult? Not for The Mud Witch of Verdun.

Creativity and Imperfection

I don’t know if you guys know this, but sometimes I write a bunch of blogs in advance and schedule them all to come out over time. I like to work on things in real time, but there are just some months of the year when life piles up around me and it’s easier to have one less thing to worry about in between the school breaks and book projects and orthodontist appointments.

I’ve just finished one of those months. There were a lot of planned projects as well as unplanned surprises (leaking sink! broken toilet! pet illness!). But here, at the end of it, it’s a relief to be able to sit down at my table with nothing more pressing to do than write. It’s funny, writing. In the right mood, at the right moment, I can produce thousands of words a day and they’re good. Maybe not great, but they make sense and have a point and are mostly grammatically correct.

In the wrong mood, when I’m stressed or being interrupted too much? There’s no point in even trying. I’m better off just taking a nap. Back when I used to write grants for a living, I always, always wrote first thing in the morning. After lunch, my brain was fried for that type of creative work and so I spent those hours doing budgets or research or even just filing and organizing. At the time, I felt so bad. I was only useful for half my day! They were paying me and I could only write for 4 hours at a time!

Now that I’m older, I’m astounded that I was able to write productively for even that long without a break. There is such a difference between production and analysis. Even when it comes to edits - I can do a full 8 hours of revision. But after about 2-3 of writing, my brain becomes total mush.

Part of aging, for me, has been accepting my limits. I am told that I was a pretty malleable child. That all changed at some point, but I can see how that would have been true. Even now, I want to be living up to the expectations that others hold for me. I want to be the person who can work for 10 hours a day and then be an amazing mom and also a good friend and also run marathons.

But my body and brain won’t let me. And it turns out that those expectations were never based in reality anyway. All the stories we hear of amazing people doing amazing things? They’re doing one, maybe two, amazing things. Don’t get me wrong, they are doing it with excellence. But they are not doing all of the things perfectly all of the time.

I have had the luxury of choosing what kind of life I want to live, and that looks like doing lots of things imperfectly. I get to be a mom, imperfectly. And a writer, imperfectly. And a community member, imperfectly. And a gardener, imperfectly. So, I spend a lot of time comparing myself to people who are doing these same things, but much better than I am. Their books come together faster or their kids are always wearing matching oufits or their gardens look like showpieces. I’m learning to accept that the person that I am? She writes when she’s not too busy doing all the other things and she does all the other things when she’s not too caught up in her writing.

Maybe I’m the only one, but I have a feeling that a lot of people feel the same. The complexity that they desire can’t be contained in a relentless drive for excellence. Maybe they don’t want to be chased by expectations anymore, but rather be drawn by curiosity and fascination. And yes, yes, dinner has to be cooked and mortgages paid…but in the other moments, in the quiet weeks, maybe there’s room for some creativity.

Tomatoes

It has been a truly overwhelming month around here and yesterday, I found myself with my first really quiet day in a long time. Part of me wanted to just sit and stare at a wall for an hour or two, but instead I did some planting. We’re still holding off on starting the plants that need really warm weather, since last year the sun didn’t come out until July, but for the first time in a long time, I’m going to have to make room for tomato starts.

I have a love/hate relationship with tomatoes. I like the way they taste and they are useful in so many dishes. Plus they’re easy to preserve as sauce or salsa. But they always ripen at the time of year when I’m out of energy, those long August days before the kids go back to school but after they’ve run out of ways to entertain themselves. Usually at that point, the last thing I want to do with my quiet moments is go wade through bushy tomato plants and harvest them, just to have to figure out what to do with them before they go bad.

And, to make it worse, I always miss one or two so that if I try to rotate my beds the next year, I’m picking out tomato plant volunteers left and right. And to make it even worse, the last time I started tomatoes inside, I didn’t have room for all of them in one bed and wanted to compost the rest, but Forrest couldn’t bear the waste and planted them in our flower beds instead. Our flower beds!

All of that to say, I’ve spent the last few years just tending whatever volunteers come up and mostly ignoring them. But this year, I’m giving up on having a dedicated raised bed for tomatoes and just putting them in containers in my backyard. It feels a bit like failure for some reason, admitting that I am simply not up to processing 15 tomato plants’ worth of produce. Capitulating to the fact that while I love planting the things and enjoy tending them, the whole canning/preserving side of gardening just isn’t my jam. (Pun intended.)

I think part of that is because to me, the appeal of gardening is that I get to be outside. I get to enjoy the most beautiful part of the year in a way that is both peaceful and satisfying. The idea of taking some of our short summer and spending it over a stove in a hot kitchen? No, thank you.

There’s something about living where we live - life is so indoors for so much of the year, that when it gets nice, we do everything outside. Our yard has various stations so we can follow the shade around throughout the day - Adirondack chairs on our shade deck, outdoor couch on the grotto, hammocks in the girls’ garden. It all sounds very fancy until you realize that our shady retreats are interspersed with the messiness of life with kids - a discarded art project on the deck, an unraveled hose sprawled across the yard, and lots and lots of ratty dog toys.

And now, we’ll be adding some pots of tomatoes to the mix. Hopefully they’ll be pretty, but knowing me, I’ll just grab whatever old plastic buckets I’ve got to hand and make it work. And we’ll grow as many tomatoes as we can eat (and hopefully not many more than that!). And I’ll give up on one dream of maximum tomato production in exchange for another dream - a lazier, more relaxed dream of sun warmed tomatoes and kids eating them off the vine.

My Ceiling, Their Floor

My eldest daughter is a true introvert, someone who comes alive with her chosen people, but otherwise is reasonably content to sit quietly thinking her own thoughts. When she was a toddler, if she got too lost in her thoughts, she would forget to sit up and fall right out of the chair she was in. Even now, if we’re in the middle of a conversation and I make an interesting point, she’ll fall silent, eyes glazed over, as her brain races over the many implications, deciding whether or not she agrees with me.

Many times she doesn’t. And as the two youngest get older, they also have their own opinions. It’s been fun, watching them have their own approaches to life. The other night, we were talking about how some people, when someone tells them they can’t do something, no matter how mundane, they just have to try. I wryly noted that we had a little of that in our family. One of the twins protested, “No, I don’t!” and I responded, “I’m not talking about you.” The other simply smiled and chuckled. She knows herself.

It's not always easy, though. There are moments where I want to say, “Because I told you so.” But these are Forrest’s children, and he’s been training them on using logic and testing arguments since the day they could talk. There is no logical hole that my kids cannot find. My eldest, sweet soul that she is, usually finds the fault in my thinking but doesn’t point it out unless she has to. The younger two, however, delight in getting one over on Mom.

I’m told that they’re respectful at school which is the most important part to me. Still, there are moments where I wish they believed in my wisdom a little bit more. I know it’s the age, and more than that, it’s a necessary part of development. They have to differentiate themselves from Forrest and me, figure out all the little ways where they don’t want to do something the way they’ve been taught. They need to become their own people, not simply little pieces of our family. And I love that for them. I want them to become those people, grown up and mature.

But oh, it’s so hard. Sometimes I still want them to be little babies who look to me for answers. I don’t want them to disappear off on their own to just figure it all out themselves. These days, when they ask for advice, we end up having an hour long discussion about whether or not my advice will work for them. They’re right – I don’t know everything and they are experts on what it’s like to be a tween these days. But it was nice back when they thought I was the be all end all.

It’s only going to get worse from here. I’m lucky that they still try to see my perspective at all. I’m sure there are a few years coming up where I won’t even be able to say good morning without being told it’s actually a terrible morning and why did I ever think otherwise? And then I’m sure at the end of it all, they’ll come back and show me how I should have been doing it differently all along. And they’ll be right.

I both long for and dread that moment where they shine the mirror back on me. I once read a book by Hilary McBride about mothers, daughters and body image. It was fascinating, and she interviewed a lot of mothers who didn’t like their bodies, but had somehow taught their daughters how to accept their physical flaws. The author summed up by saying, “We strive so that our ceiling can be their floor.” I wept over that page. We all work so hard to be better so that our kids can start at the place where we could only just reach. All the parenting books, all the therapy, all the hard work to be more patient, more kind, more thoughtful – it’s for me, yes, but mostly it’s so that they can take what I have only just learned and build on it.

If the price I have to pay for that is that they come back and try to drag me forward? I’d gladly pay it a thousand times over.

Book Announcement!

Do you ever flit in and out of a book, picking it up for a chapter or two between other novels? I’m still working my way through a book of essays by Madeline L’Engle, even though I’ve probably finished 6 books since I started it. She’s a remarkable writer, of course we all know that, but I’m enjoying her humility more than anything else. In our world of self-promotion and striving, her accurate sense of her own importance is refreshing. It feels, in some ways, anachronistic, until I remember that Lord Byron and Ernest Hemingway floated their way around the world full of hot air and bravado. There’s nothing new about ego.

It's hard for me to contemplate doing so many of the things that I’m told need to be done to achieve success. Not the networking and relationships, I do that for fun. But the constant, constant demand to be out there – pithy and poignant, always directing the conversation back to myself and my work. I find the whole idea of it exhausting.

It’s en vogue right now to find that self-promotion to be morally repugnant, but I don’t see it like that. I come from a long line of people who are charming, funny, and can talk themselves both into and out of trouble. Sometimes you just have to go for what you want, and sometimes that means that you make sure that the person you’re talking to remembers who you are. It would be a little rich for me to condemn influencers when we all talk about P.T. Barnum as though he’s anything different.

But that’s not me. I want to communicate my thoughts clearly and memorably, and after that, I’d mostly like to be left alone to read or chat or snuggle with my cat. This isn’t to say I don’t have a big ego. I’m constantly taking on projects that I can’t possibly complete because of course I can figure it out! And you would think that getting in this many scrapes would dent that sense of competency, but nope. I just mostly don’t want to share that ego with other people. It’s too much work.

So when I think about self-publishing, I don’t stress about getting the book finished or completed. I stress about getting the book out there. And every author’s guide tells me to suck it up. Success depends on selling myself, depends of buying a hundred copies and going to every bookstore and convincing them to put my book on the shelves, depends on hammering on a door until it opens.

Maybe that’s true. I often find myself outright refusing to do something and then, in the end, coming back around to the idea. But when I think about success, all I want is for people to read the stories I write. Authors don’t make any money anyway (they really, really don’t). So, I’m going to try something different with this book. Let’s just say that this is my turn to bow to my ego.

I’m going to release my new book, The Mud Witch of Verdun, via Amazon Publishing, on April 15th. You’ll be able to buy it on Kindle or in paperback and read it to your heart’s content.

But, at the same time, I’m going to be really, really old fashioned, and release this book, bit by bit, over the next 6 months. It’s called serialization and it was all the rage back in the day. So, three times a week, I’m going to put up a section of 1,000 or so words, and in the end, the book will be available for free if you’re willing to click through. And if you want to speed ahead, you can always hop over to Amazon to buy it. Either way, my goal is that this story gets out there.

I don’t know if this is how it’s all supposed to work, but I know for me right now, this feels like the right way to release this book. I loved writing it so much that I even loved editing it! The story and characters made me laugh and cry and I hope that you will enjoy reading it. There’s a few more weeks of tweaks and changes that need to be made but in the end, I think it will be more than worth it.

While I’m releasing the book bit by bit, I’m going to ease off regular blogging for awhile and work on the stubborn manuscript that’s been on the back burner. I’ll pop back in when I can, of course!

I’m so excited to share this project with you all. I have been so bolstered by this blog and all of you wonderful readers. So, mark your calendars for April 15th. I can’t wait!

Construction and Coziness

We have been having our carpets replaced for the last two days now and while I am so, so thankful to be done with the old, stained rugs, having our entire family stuck in our kitchen/dining area has been a bit cramped, to say the least. As I write this, I have one dog on either side of me and Forrest is sitting a few feet away trying to work with a cat on his lap. The girls arrive home from school in a few minutes and I am not emotionally prepared for another afternoon where we all spend every. Single. Second. Together.

Scratch that. Forrest got up and now the cat is on my lap.

I love our crazy full house, the chaos and the noise and the intensity of it. I know what my kids are up to most of the time because I can literally hear them from pretty much every room. When I was a kid and read Mrs. Piggle-wiggle, I didn’t want to be one of the other children. I wanted to be her – the old woman with the upside-down house and backyard full of buried treasure. I like to think I achieved it in spirit if not in reality. The house is right side up, but I can guarantee that if a bunch of kids tore up my backyard, they’d probably find a lot of stuff, some of it reasonably valuable. I know that because for some birthday party or other, I threw ten bucks worth of quarters into a pile of hay. It was the best kid distraction I’d ever seen.

But, on days when the girls are tired from school and the animals are riled up from strangers in the house and Forrest is annoyed at having to work from the dining room, there’s a part of me that remembers that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lived alone. Alone! It’s been so long that I can’t even imagine it. I wish I could just dip my foot into the old days for a few hours – to a crappy apartment that was just how I liked it, and that most important of all, stayed clean when I cleaned it.

My family is so, so good about housework; I really can’t complain. But there is the subtle drift of stuff from one place to another, a slow slide toward entropy that exhausts me. One moment the counters are clear, the next, there’s the remainders of an art project, a dirty teacup, and for some reason, a rock that has to live inside my house. I keep finding the electric pencil sharpener, plugged in, lying on the couch. Why? Why?!?

There’s a good reason for all of the detritus, I’m sure. And I am mostly good natured about it, because I know that the clutter is the evidence of lives being lived. I want my kids to do art projects and have tea parties and love the outdoors so much they bring it in. I like that they feel comfortable enough to hang twinkle lights on the wall for no good reason, just to make the house more fun. I hope that when they grow up, they will realize that our possessions are there to serve us, not the other way around.

So, this afternoon, we’ll all get very cozy and wait out the construction zone. And in a day or two, God willing, we’ll be able to stretch our legs once again, in a house that’s just the right size for us.

Decisions and Demands

We’re having our living room carpet torn out today. It’s old and worn and very stained and I’m tired of dealing with it. So we’re putting in laminate. It seemed like a no brainer, so I was surprised to find my youngest laying on the floor last night, weeping about how much she’s going to miss it. I gotta admit, I did not have that one on my parenting BINGO card.

I like that they can express their opinions, but I spend a lot of time trying to reflect back to them the realities that they’re expressing. Yesterday, one of my daughters was lamenting that Forrest and I don’t push them into more activities. We don’t. They’re required to fulfill any commitments they make, but once the sports season is over, if they want to quit, they can quit. She was saying that she wished we made her do more things, that we overrode her objections and decided what was best for her. It would be so much easier for her, if we would just make her do things whether or not she wanted to.

Whew. She’s not wrong, of course. With my willpower and Forrest’s energy, we could have forced our kids to become all sorts of amazing things. They could be well on their way to sports scholarships or national math competitions. I have no doubt of that.

But we only pull out the parental dictatorship when it comes to school, chores and health. Everything else is a choice. It’s hard to hear my child push back on our values in this way. But as we talked, I helped her to see that in our family, we believe helping kids learn how to make good decisions is our number one priority. And most of learning to make good decisions is making bad decisions.

I want my kids to experience lots of regret for their childhood choices. That sounds awful, but hear me out. I want them to splurge on the stupid plastic toy and regret the purchase. I want them to refuse to do their chores and regret the cancelled outing. I want them to procrastinate studying for the test and regret the bad grade. I want them to quit a sport in a fit of pique and regret missing out.

Because when they’re a grown up, I don’t want them to do things they’ll regret. They will, of course, we all do. But it’s a lot easier to deal with the regret from a failed test in 5th grade than a failed project in their first job. I want them to get as many bad choices out of the way as possible.

So, no, I don’t make them do things they don’t want to. I don’t substitute my judgment for theirs unless I really, really have to. It’s all a gamble, I know that, and I worry that we’re emphasizing the wrong things. I worry that they’ll take away the wrong lessons or that the regret from a bad decision will turn to resentment. I worry that they’ll hit 35 and wish that I had forced them to go outside and play catch in the rain even though they complained.

But I tell myself that they can use those beautiful logical brains to make new choices too. I hope they’ll learn from my mistakes and see how even a full-grown woman can stop, take stock of where she is, and change her mind. I hope against hope that they will see all of the times Forrest and I screwed up and realize that there are very few irredeemable choices. There’s always time to take up a new career, let alone a new hobby.

I think that we’re often given the message that life is short so we should take advantage of it. But if I had one thing I wish to express, it’s that life is long. There are so many chances to reinvent ourselves. We do not have to pack everything into childhood or adolescence. And there are so many years to learn and grow.

Maybe they’ll disagree. Maybe in a decade they’ll come home from college and tell me all the things I did wrong. In fact, they definitely will. And then, I can only hope that we all find a way to stop, take stock of where we are, and move in a new direction again.

Lost in a Good Book

I have to confess, I’d rather be reading right now. I’m in the middle of a total beach read, a fun little book by Sophie Kinsella, and I feel like I’m back at my first job right now, because all I want to do is get to my lunchtime so I can read for a half hour. There’s this great old song by Ben Folds where he’s singing about how he has to finish one more song for his album and usually he tries for excellence, but he’s newly in love and just wants to get it done so that he can get back to his new girl.

This is like this, except not love, just a book that’s a little bit too addictive. It’s a hard thing, making a book hard to put down. A lot goes into it – pacing, chapter breaks, plot twists – and as a reader, we usually don’t notice unless it’s done badly. Then, it feels like every time we approach the end of a chapter, someone is professing love or falling off a cliff or being revealed as a secret spy. After a while, it gets a little tedious and more than a little unbelievable.

Done well, however, and I find myself awake at one a.m., ignoring my sensible self, saying “Just one more chapter,” over and over. Prose is usually pretty accessible to me. I notice characterization and foreshadowing and themes and all that, and I can tell when it’s being done well or badly. Except when a book hits that addictive spot. Then it’s like I’m bewitched. I don’t even know it’s happening until I my stomach rumbles because it’s been 7 hours since dinner and I realize I really do need to get to sleep.

On the other hand, poetry always feels like magic to me. I’m not a poet so the idea that you can convey meaning not only with the words but the rhythm, the sound, the feel of the words – it’s as close to enchantment as I think I can get. Not every poet hits me the same way. Shakespeare is a slog and I find T.S.Eliot frankly confusing. But Emily Bronte haunts me and I find myself tapping along to Longfellow’s meter. I think that’s one of the beautiful parts of poetry: it hits each of us differently, resonating with our uniqueness.

And for some people, poetry doesn’t do anything at all. It might make rational sense, but that magic isn’t there. I feel that way with visual art. It doesn’t hit me. I’ve tried. I’ve researched and learned and I can explain the difference between impressionism and post-impressionism art, but my taste boils down to, “Do I like the colors?” Which some art scholar could tell me the meaning of, I’m sure, but in reality means that it doesn’t draw me in.

To each our own, I guess. I’m glad that the magic works differently for different people. And I’m really, really glad that I don’t know why it works on me. There’s something missing when you learn too much, when you step too far back from the story and turn it into a work to be critiqued. I’m still glad I know how to get lost in a good book.

Pansies

It’s time! It’s time! We’re starting seeds inside the house this weekend!

A few years ago Forrest built this custom plant stand that fits just perfectly into the corner of our dining room. And by perfectly, I mean perfectly. It really can’t be removed without turning it in just the right angle at just the right moment. It holds six trays worth and when it is turned on, the lights make the whole room glow. On particularly gloomy days, I just go and stand next to it for a few seconds just to get a little taste of what spring will bring.

We usually start with flowers, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of them are quite hardy and will last a long time in our above 50 but below 70 degree springtime. Second, if we start them too early and they die right after being transplanted, we can run over to the store and replace them pretty easily. I always feel a smidgen of guilt about that, but I get over it quickly. Third, I’m not too picky about which flowers survive. With vegetables, I want carrots AND cucumbers AND potatoes. With flowers, I just want…flowers. So I can plant a lot of them and whatever survives the early spring will make me happy.

We began starting pansies inside a few years ago. Before that, I had never really considered starting them from seed. You just bought pansies in a flat from the garden store, along with petunias, impatients, and geraniums. But I ordered some on a whim and they worked! Which is pretty much my only criterion for adding something to our garden plan. If it works, it’s in. If not, well, it depends how much I wanted you in the first place. I tried to make sweet potatoes work for three years until Forrest, eating a piece of the world’s smallest, saddest yam, looked at me wordlessly. We both busted up laughing and that was the end of that.

But pansies work, so we grow them. They are such happy little flowers and they last! A lot of our flowers come and go with the season, which I understand, but I’m usually not up to redoing the whole flower garden in July, so it helps if the plants can carry over from spring into summer.

So this weekend, I’ll commandeer the girls for as much of the work as I can – they never mind helping make the soil blocks – and we’ll get to work. By this time next week we’ll be eating in the pinkish light of the plant stand and counting the days until we see the first tiny green shoots come up.

Institutions and Inefficiency

I just wrote a long, beautiful blog about complexity in choices, in how systems and families are the same in that problems may seem obvious but solutions are not always that simple. And then the website froze as I was doing my finishing touches and since I’m a dope that hadn’t backed it up, that was the end of that blog post.

Oh well. It was probably a bit salty anyway, and overlong, and all the things that happen when I get on my high horse. Suffice it to say, don’t be a butthead about people working long hours for nonprofits or schools. What they do is far more complex than anything I do on a normal day, and they take care of people that society could often care less about.

But you wouldn’t know that from anything you read or hear, would you?

I spend a lot of time online. It’s a bit of a failing, I have to admit, but my leisure time comes in random unplanned 10 minute chunks and there’s only so much Candy Crush I can play. The online world can be a dark place, full of judgment and criticism, and even though I spend a lot of time there, I find it disconcerting that the real world seems so much gentler.

Especially because it’s not as if the real world feels particularly gentle these days. Layoffs have come around again and while our family is ok, there’s a very palpable sense of foreboding. Every so often I see someone I haven’t seen in awhile and there’s an awkward, “You guys ok?” sort of conversation. So far, most people are. But we’re feeling the precariousness of our lives.

In the real world, we get both the good and the bad. And as much as I love adorable cat videos, there is nowhere as much good as bad on the internet. It’s even worse if you watch local news. I often walk on the treadmill at the Y while my eldest does swim team and, if I believed the TVs in the cardio room, I’d fear to walk out to my car afterwards. But without that, I’d never know about the terrible criminals that are apparently lurking outside my door.

Instead, my life feels a little more like Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. There are rough things, for sure – the aforementioned layoffs, and divorces, and bad diagnoses – but far more often, we see friendliness and fun, beautiful outdoor spaces and smiles even on the cloudiest of days.

In that world that is so easily judged, those inefficient institutions – schools, nonprofits, churches – are full of people who are mostly just trying their best to make the world just a smidgen better. And too often, all I hear is criticism, mostly from people who don’t really seem to do much to help.

I know that I’m not discovering something new – these concerns have been expressed before, in much more eloquent language than mine. But maybe it’s worth repeating. The world can be a hard, messy place and we don’t do enough to appreciate those people who do their best to meet us there and make it just a little bit easier. We don’t thank them nearly enough.

Worms

There’s still nothing growing here yet, so our gardens are looking pretty dead, especially compared to the green grass and towering firs throughout our neighborhood. The only sign of life from my gardens is the occasional worm who escapes onto the sidewalk on rainy days. My kids are well versed at helping worms back onto the grass, even though I’m never quite sure what I’m supposed to do with them. Will that help? Will that hurt? I should probably find out.

It will be time for putting compost in the soil soon, and although it’s a nasty job, I can attest to this: The worms love it. By April, when I start digging, the soil is positively teeming with worms. I’m happy to report that I have no aversion to creepy crawlies (with the single exception of when I saw a spider’s egg sac open and hundreds of teeny-tiny spiders float away on the breeze. That was not my most dignified moment). So I do my best to let the worms do their thing, moving them out of the way if I need to, but mostly feeling thankful that they’re there.

I know there is a lot of science behind the aeration and fertilizing work that worms do, but to me it seems like a strange alchemy. We put in trash - rotting trash - wait a month or so, and the worms turn it into beautiful black dirt. I also know there’s a lot more at play there between bacteria, fungus and insects, but worms are the part that I see and interact with the most.

Back when my eldest was in preschool, she learned about worms and their role in making dirt. They had a soil table filled with worms and the kids got to get their hands dirty and learn about one small step in how their food was made. I remember her coming home and us reading Richard Scarry and her realization that Lowly Worm probably ate compost and pooped out dirt. For her little mind, the idea was both fascinating and hilarious.

I have to agree. There’s magic there, and meaning too, if we look for it. The lowliest of creatures is the very animal that takes our refuse and turns it into something productive. Worms are overlooked and ignored but it wasn’t until we had a good colony of them that our garden started growing. I wonder how many people we overlook and ignore, at our own peril? How many small, unpleasant tasks we fail to appreciate until they aren’t done?

How many of us are working day in and day out, doing the little things that make life livable for the rest of us? I’m not saying they’re worms, although if I were in charge, that would be a term of honor - like a busy little bee or an eager beaver. Because, even when it looks like nothing is happening, when the gardens are brown and worn out, underneath? There’s an entire world, just waiting for spring.

Resentment and Reminders

I’ve had to put myself on the clock today. There have been a million distractions and a million reasons not to sit down and do some writing and I admit that I am giving into all of them. It was a long weekend, in both senses of the word and starting tomorrow, there’s a rapid-fire series of events that will leave me hopping for sure. And part of me wants to cocoon with a book and pre-rest, even though I know that’s not a thing.

In my quiet moments, I wonder how I will muster up the energy to be all the things that my life requires me to be. And then, when the moment comes when I need to lead the meeting or chaperone the field trip or write the 90,000 words, I find it. I’m constantly amazed at my own ability to rise to the circumstances placed in front of me. It’s very reassuring, this knowing.

But it’s also a dangerous secret, because if I lean on my extra reserves too often, if I don’t refill that gas tank, then I end up on empty. I wish empty looked like a robot that ran out of energy. I wish I could just slow down and sink into a quiet corner. But that’s not how it is, is it? Because when I end up empty, I keep going, pushing myself, but everything that was good and positive takes on a harder edge.

I already have a pretty hard edge. I’m not the softest of people, but I mostly avoid the bitterness and resentment that a hard edged person can easily stumble onto. Unfortunately, when I’m out of energy, That’s immediately where I go. So quickly that it’s usually my first real sign that I need a break.

And that small seed of resentment can ruin everything. It can turn cooking a meal into an exercise in being unappreciated. It can change a trip to the park into a criticism-filled excursion. It can allow an act of kindness to become an act of self-importance. If I don’t stop it in its tracks, resentment and bitterness can take all of my work and make it ugly.

Iit’s so easy to think that I’m the only one out there working hard, only one cleaning up this mess, only one trying to make the world a better place. Rest alone won’t fix it, of course. The only fix I know is to realize that all this work I do - to care for my family, to volunteer, to write - it’s a choice that I make. The other choices would make me terribly unhappy of course, but I could choose them. People do.

Rest, however, gives me the space to remember that the choice remains with me. That no one is forcing me to cook from-scratch dinners or show up to the band concerts. And rest reminds me that I make these choices because my happiness derives far more from those things than from any hedonistic pleasure.

My eldest and I were out on a walk yesterday and it was cold, bitterly cold. She remarked that she likes going out on cold days. She responded with something like, “You get the benefit of the exercise, which is nice, and then the benefit of being back inside and warm when it’s over, and then the benefit of feeling really virtuous and good about yourself because you went out even though it was freezing.” She’s right. and today, I’m feeling the benefit of that virtuousness, for putting in the time, even though it required reminding myself that the choice was mine to do it - or not.

Cover Art

I’m nearing the final stages of revision on this book and it’s time for the parts I like least – proofreading, formatting, and cover art. I got into this whole writing thing because I like painting pictures with words. I like figuring out where the story will go and envisioning exotic places and most of all, never, never having to actually do any visual art of any kind. It’s not my forte.

Generally, I’m a “more is more” person. I want to buy all the pictures to hang on my walls. I want to use all the colors when I paint. I want to put all my ideas down. And when I’m writing, I can generally do that. (Or, I can put them into a second document to use for the next book!) But cover art is hard. You want to make it look interesting. You want it to have some visual appeal. You want it to have some relation to the story you’re telling. I can lay those things out and have absolutely no idea how to achieve them. Honestly, I should just hire one of the many qualified people who exist for this purpose. And, in the end, maybe I will. But unfortunately, I have a general “How hard could it be?” outlook on life.

This outlook has helped me achieve many things. Without it, I would never have gotten through college, let alone grad school. I would have given up the idea of ever becoming a parent. I definitely wouldn’t have taken on an amorphous semi-career while also spending way too much time volunteering and somehow keeping our family fed and reasonably well-cared for. I’ve written three (3!) books just because I never stopped to think that maybe I couldn’t.

At the same time, I’ve had more than one DIY project that involved stopping after about half an hour to actually look up the steps that I was supposed to be doing. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew more times than I can count, and poor Forrest spends a fair amount of his life helping me dig out of situations I impulsively got myself into.

I will say this, though. I have found myself far more capable than I would have imagined. And I am the kind of person who learns by doing rather than reading. So, maybe I’m condemned to spend the rest of my life getting myself into and out of scrapes.

So I’ll take a crack at the cover, try a few things and we’ll see how it works out. And in the end, maybe it’ll be better than I imagined. Or maybe it’ll be wonderfully done by someone who is very much not me.

Thermometers

A few years ago, I bought a soil thermometer for our gardens. It was cheap, and I thought it might be useful to tell when the ground was warm enough for certain types of seeds to germinate. I’m not always the best at fall cleanup, so I ended up just leaving in the ground through a couple winters, and somehow it has disappeared.

I’m debating whether or not I should buy a new one. On the one hand, it get a little thrill of satisfaction when the spring weather comes and the ground starts to warm up. It’s like looking at the forecast and seeing only sunny days on the horizon. On the other hand, I don’t really use that information to inform my gardening behavior. I plant based on some vague calendar in my head, combined with my ability to find time in my schedule for a morning away from work and parenting.

It's funny, isn’t it? There is so much science that goes into gardening. The seed catalogs are full of statistics – average germination rate, days to germination, preferred soil pH, preferred soil temperature. And when it comes down to it, I plant based mostly on how I’m feeling and my past experiences. “Last year, we waited until April to plant lettuce, let’s do that again. But the onions held up nicely even in March, so let’s do that.”

I am sure that some of my gardener friends are cringing right now. Like most hobbies, gardening has two types of people: those that really love to follow the rules and those that don’t. I want to be the first type, I really do. And there is absolutely no doubt that if I listened to that soil thermometer, my plants would be happier and my yield would be better.

Buuuuuut…if it’s a sunny spring day and I have nothing better going on, what am I supposed to do? Just not go outside and plant things? Impossible.

And this is why I love having gardening as a hobby but not to make a living. There are a lot of parts of my life where I have to follow the rules, every single time, or else really bad things can happen. And it’s nice, sometimes, to look at the thermometer sticking out of the ground, telling me it’s too early for green beans, and then turn around and do whatever I want.