Pranks and Paying Attention

This is definitively not an April Fools’ Day post. I am, when it comes to April 1st, completely humorless. I tell my kids and Forrest that I will not engage in any pranks and they had better be careful if they pull one on me, for one simple reason. I don’t do things by half measures. And when it comes to pranks, you kinda sorta gotta do it by half measures. If you go all in, it’s just mean.

I’m not a half measure kind of mom. I’m intense. And when it comes to pranks on my kids, I very quickly learned that I should only ever be the victim and never the perpetrator. Because when a kid goes too far, that’s a lesson learned. When your mom goes too far, that’s a one-way ticket to the therapist.

I wish I could be a half measure person. I’m really not - both in the good ways and the bad ways. If I go out for a run, I have to hold myself back from sprinting. If I decide to eat ice cream, I eat until I feel sick. If I finish a blog post, I start the next one immediately. If I decide to rest on the couch, I become a total slug. You can never have too much of a good thing, right? Right?

I’m actually getting better at the balance as I age. At realizing when enough is enough, when the extra effort isn’t productive anymore, when the writing gets worse as my brain gets tired. I know where the relentlessness comes from - it’s insecurity, plain and simple. Have I done enough? Am I checking all of the boxes? Am I lazy? So many of the things I put my energy towards have to physical product. No “thing” I can point to when I’m done, to feel proud of. That’s probably why I don’t really struggle with doing too much when I garden. It’s easy to see what I’ve done and it’s easy to feel good about it when I stop.

Because that’s the heart of it, right? Whether or not I feel good about my work when I stop. Whether I feel productive “enough”, whatever that means. Whether I’m using my time appropriately or if there’s something better, more meaningful that I could be doing. Whether I’m properly using my “one wild and precious life” as poet Mary Oliver put it.

Except, that productivity not what the poem is about at all. I see that quote on posters, on websites, on instagram stories from influencers advocating for hustle culture and when I go back to the text of the poem? It’s about laying in the grass, feeling the wonder of the universe and doing nothing more consequential than watching a grasshopper, how to be “idle and blessed.” I can’t claim to speak for her, but it seems like Mary is choosing the nothing part of my all or nothing approach to productivity and, just like me, she’s pondering her choice.

The funny part to me is that Mary Oliver won a freaking Pulitzer Prize. She was prolific and successful. But her insights, her unique experience of the world and the ability to put it into words - those things required everything but productivity. There is no hustle in her words, just a sense of wandering and wondering. And because of - not in spite of, but because of that paying attention, she was able to write poems that help us all to look at the world around us.

And maybe go all in on slowing down.

Plans and Problems

For those of you who have been reading for a while, did you know that I used to plan and prewrite and schedule all of my posts? When I first started this back in 2019, I had a grand sweeping arc with themes and timelines. And I pretty much kept to it over the next few years. But between one thing and another, that plan slowly broke down.

At first, I felt really ashamed of it. What kind of person was I, that I couldn’t even keep up with a blog? It doesn’t take that much time, just a little diligence and forethought. And then, I realized that all of that shame was getting in the way of my fiction writing. Over 2022, I started three books and finished none. It took an entire year of trying to get my head on straight to finally finish my latest manuscript.

It wasn’t writers block. I was still producing a thousand words a day. It was planners’ block. I just couldn’t seem to create a plan I could stick to. Every time I did, something would come up and the plan would go awry and that was that. A week lost, feeling bad that life had gotten in the way.

And it was life getting in the way. A kid would get sick, the house would need unexpected work, a volunteer gig would take up more time than expected. And little by little, the gap between my plan and my reality got larger and larger. And my shame grew and grew.

I used to worry that I was a lazy person. I worried about it all the time because I spend a lot of time resting. It took until I was in my thirties to realize that I spend a lot of time resting because when I’m not, I’m overproducing. I have two speeds. Do everything as fast as humanly possible or become one with the couch.

I wish I were different. I have tried to be different. But I’m not able to. I am either fully on or fully off. And learning that about myself means that if my plans don’t incorporate both being fully engaged in life’s interruptions and being fully disengaged for necessary rest, then they’re not of any use to me. This fall, I tried to ignore all that one last time and really hustle to get my manuscript done.

I stuck to the plan. I got the right number of words written. But the manuscript was far from done. I needed to rework huge sections of it, sections that had clearly been written by a person under pressure, just trying to stick to the plan. I was more concerned with my daily word goal than the quality of the book. It probably took an additional two months to write because of my so-called plan.

Since then, I’ve been trying to take it slower. To have a guide, an outline even, but no set deadlines and no expectations. This stage of my life is all about balance. It seems like every area of my life is turned up to eleven - work, family, house stuff, friendships - both in the best of ways and the worst of ways. So, if all my plans go belly up, there’s nothing wrong with me. It wasn’t because I didn’t work hard enough or create the right schedule. It was because, for the first time in a long time, maybe I’ve got my priorities straight - deal with what’s in front of me, and trust that everything that needs to get done will get done. Including those pesky manuscripts.

What a novel idea.

Birthdays and Blooms

My eldest’s birthday is coming up and Forrest was lamenting that the usual spring heat wave in Seattle hadn’t happened yet. Because of the enormity of becoming parents, we always remember the small details from the weeks around her birth. I remember lying in bed, seeing the plum trees blossoming. Forrest, giving directions to our pediatrician by telling her to “turn right at the giant forsythia.” And our first walk as a little family, down the block to see the magnolia flowers that had just opened up.

The weather is due to change this weekend, and with it, all of those trees will wake up, albeit a few weeks later than we remember. It’s funny, how some weeks stick with you and others fly by. How some years stick with you and others fly by. I know that there’s a ton of science behind that, about novelty and emotional salience and core memories, but that doesn’t hit me the same as remembering leaving the birth center with my baby in the pouring rain with Forrest saying, “It’s great day for ducks,” while trying to get the carseat into the back of our tiny Geo.

Since then, every time I’m out in the pouring rain, I think of that saying and I think of that moment. These small things, they mark time and mark our lives and shape us by connecting seemingly disparate events - a rainy day and becoming a mother — in such a way that some part of us is forever changed.

It’s kind of scary. We have no control over those associations and while they might seem small, I’ve realized that the little things can really add up over time. Like all small but consistent pressures, they can accumulate. Just this morning, I was telling that eldest daughter that, because of that fateful spring when she was born, her birthday signals the coming of spring to me. More than that, really. The turning of the year, from dark gloom into bright possibility. Every year her birthday comes, gardening starts, the clocks change, and our very housebound winter life begins to open up.

It’s such a strong association for me that it’s become a bit of a metaphor. Because having her, becoming a parent, felt much the same. The pregnancy was hard, and so was the first year of her life, but it was the turning of our family’s story too. From rootless young adults to a trio, then quintet, determined to create a safe and warm home that we can always return to. I’m not sure we’re there yet. In fact, I’m almost certain we aren’t. But no matter how it ends, the story turned on that moment.

And it started with taking her home in the pouring rain. With “a great day for ducks.” And to stretch the metaphor - my connections are a constant reminder that the moment the year turns from dark to light is rarely the moment the sun starts to shine. The turning happens before the sun comes out. When all the buds are preparing to open and the ground is thawing out and the daffodils peek out of the muddy soil. So even in the years where spring is taking a little longer to start, I’m reminded that it’s almost here and I can wait just that much longer.

Space and Spring

It hailed again yesterday. I know in my heart that that’s the sign of a Seattle spring, but there’s something about watching ice fall down from the sky that makes me think winter will never end. It has been a slog this year, people, let me tell you.

And not just the weather. I submitted my latest manuscript to my editor two weeks ago and that was a slog too. I told her it would be done by the new year, then by January 15th, then February 1. Then I finally gave up the ghost and told her I would get it to her when I got it to her, and I was so sorry for being a flake. She, delightful woman that she is, said, “I think it’s a good sign when artists don’t always make deadlines. It helps me know they’re not robots.”

This manuscript was certainly not robotic. It was annoying. I could complain on and on but the worst part of it is, instead of feeling celebratory when I sent it off, all I felt was a combination of relief and disappointment. I just didn’t want to have to work on it anymore.

It’s been two weeks since then, a mandatory break enforced by school schedules and family visits, and I still mostly feel relief and disappointment. But the more space I have from the project, the more I think that when it comes back to me again (after the first round of editing), the more I can look at it with fresh eyes.

That feeling, that needing of space, is one I am getting accustomed to requiring. I’m a fairly impulsive person, not in the “buy a motorcycle” kind of way but in the “sure, I can take on one more thing” kind of way. That worked for me for a long time, but in the last year, I’ve had health issue after health issue and while none of them are serious, all of them require me to take more space. No longer can I put off a meal, or stay up an extra hour, or deliberately dehydrate myself on a plane so I don’t have to ask people to get up so I can use the bathroom.

Yes, that one’s embarrassingly true.

I was flying home this weekend, in a window seat, and usually, when that happens, I choose to drink as little as I have to so that I don’t need to use the bathroom. Yes, I get off the plane with a raging headache, even a migraine. Yes, I usually spend the next day feeling like crap. And yes, I feel bad when despite that effort, I need to get up at least once on a six hour flight.

But this time, I didn’t. I simply asked people to move, to give me the space I needed to go to the bathroom. And it’s possible they felt inconvenienced. But their convenience was not more important than my needs.

It makes me think. How many small things do I do to keep from being an inconvenience? How often do I deny myself very basic things just so I don’t have to ask for something? I’m not talking about manners, or common courtesy, or being respectful. In fact, I think pushing myself to the limit of what I need makes me less courteous. When my needs are met, when I don’t feel overwhelmed, I can be kind, I can be flexible, I can be thoughtful. But all of those things require space. Space to think, space to feel, space to accept that I am not completely self-sufficient.

In the two weeks since I sent my manuscript in, I have not had a ton of rest time. That’s not in the cards when my kids are on break. But I have had space from my work. Space to think through what was hard and plan differently for next time. Space to build my willpower back up for the inevitably difficult editing process. Space to remember that just because a project is frustrating doesn’t mean it’s bad.

And space to remind myself that just like this winter, every difficult project ends. And like a hailstorm, the signs of life might be a little different than I expect.

Worries and Walks

Yesterday was a self-doubt kind of day around here. Not just for me, either. Since one of the parenting tasks these days is to be a sounding board for every feeling that passes through the three middle-schoolers’ brains, I got to hear about the big projects and friend drama and general feelings of inadequacy. At the same time, my own brain was looking at a task list a mile long and wondering how I’m ever going to get it all done.

It’s weird, simultaneously entering middle age and parenting adolescents. I’m working hard to try to view both as a time of re-creation - of learning new ways and adjusting to new realities. But there’s still the old “storm and stress” thing going on, and some days are worse than others. I can feel it, like a miasma of sullenness that settles over the house, which gradually coalesces with snarky comments and eye rolls, into a final tornado of door slams and screams of “I hate you!”

It’s exhausting when it happens, but the most annoying part is that if we take the right steps at the first signs of sullenness, before the eye rolls, before the screams, then it all comes to nothing. Figuring out what those right steps are is the hard part. These days, it looks like lots of one-on-one time with a parent and a kid, wading through all the crap that middle school throws at them.

Things like:

Why does the school treat all the kids like they’re delinquents when most kids are just trying to get by and the kids that misbehave need a lot more help than they’re getting?

What do you do when you want to share your thoughts with some new friends but you’re not sure how they’ll react?

How do you square the reality of doing just fine in school with the ever-present fear that maybe you’re just not up to it?

The worst part of all of it is that my answer is usually something like, “Hell if I know.” I’m still working out the answers to those things myself. I’ll admit this - there was a time in my 20s when I would have had all the answers to those questions. Of course, those answers would have been wrong and short-sighted, but they made me feel better. And maybe my kids will get to that place in a decade or so. But these days, I’m asking very similar questions:

How do you build a world worth living in when some people will always try to knock it down? When they can’t help but see something and figure out how that goodness is personally offensive to them?

How to you change and grow in relationships when your friends became friends with the old you and you’re not sure if they’ll like the new you?

How do you square the reality of doing just fine in life with the ever-present fear that maybe you’re one stupid misstep away from screwing it all up?

So when my self-doubt and their self-doubt start to turn into eyerolls and snippy comments, we go on walks. “Stop being spiky,” someone will say. “We need to get the cobwebs out of our brains,” another person declares. And all of a sudden, I find myself traveling the same sidewalks again and again, with a rotating cast of tweens. At the end, none of us have answers to our questions, but we feel a little better for it, I guess. The to-do list is still just as long, and their homework is no closer to being done, either. But maybe it reminds us that we’re not alone in our self-doubt, in our questioning, in our frustrations.

That seems to make all the difference.

Cold Hands and Rainy Nights

I’m writing this from the lobby of my daughter’s climbing class. They’ve got a new location and it’s really nice - tables, chairs, great lighting, electrical outlets for those of us parents who are trying to get a little bit done. But there’s just one problem. It’s freezing.

It’s a climbing gym, so it’s basically a big warehouse, and this time of year, it’s only about 35 degrees outside in the mornings, so, it’s pretty frigid. I can see the insulated walls, but they can only do so much with a giant open room. I understand, too, that I’m not the target audience. My daughter is in shorts and a t-shirt because, between warm ups and strength training and the actual climbing, it feels just right in here.

So, every week, I put on my leggings under my jeans and pull out my parka and my hand warmers and thank my lucky stars that she chose climbing and not soccer because at least I’m not being rained on. But I can’t help thinking a little bit longingly of the old climbing location because although I had to sit on a hard wooden bench, with spotty wi-fi and no back support, they had heat lamps.

Beautiful, radiant heat lamps.

When I moved to the Pacific Northwest 17 years ago, I remember thinking how much less effort was put into personal comfort here, compared to the other places I’d lived. People thought nothing of living without air conditioning, of going out in all weather, of walking around in the rain without a thought for an umbrella. Think of your most outdoorsy friend. The one who would happily sleep on the ground, backpack all day, and then drink coffee made over a fire, full of ashes and unfiltered grounds.

About half of the population here is like that. And in a climbing gym like this, they’re all like that.

It wasn’t much of an adjustment when I was 22. It was a fun adventure and although there was no way I was going to go backpacking, I was happy to do the hiking in the rain thing. But these days, things are a little bit creakier than they used to be, and I really, really miss those heat lamps.

There was an interview last week for Humans of New York, with a woman whose life seemed to look a lot like mine. And in it, she said something like, when you get older, the changes don’t come with any fanfare. They come unexpectedly, and before you notice it, your old self is gone and you never got a chance to say goodbye.

My old self - the one who moved here - she’s pretty firmly gone. She’s been replaced by someone who loves to sit by the fire, reading a book, snuggling a cat. But I had a dream last night, of walking through Seattle on a rainy night. I used to take the bus to work, you see, and this time of year, it would already be dark when I headed home, and the rain would make the lights reflect of the streets and the mist would give everything a romantic, old movie kind of feel. I loved walking home in the rain, hearing the cars on the wet roads, and coming out of that mist to a warm house waiting for me.

And I think that maybe that part of me is still hanging around, I haven’t had to say goodbye to her yet. Because those rainy days are here again, and I still love every inch of it. So maybe, I can try to say goodbye to that 22 year old self, while also remembering that that some part of me isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Haircuts and New Horizons

I’m getting my hair cut today. A few years ago, I found a woman who is wonderful and who will, for a price, give me a hair cut and color that requires exactly no work or thought from me. I am more than happy to pay that price a couple of times a year so that I don’t have to spend a single second thinking about good or bad hair days, about products or blow dryers. I’ve reached a point in my life where playing with my hair is no longer fun. I don’t want to change up my look. I want to get dressed and do about my day.

Maybe this is the beginning of middle age, then. Maybe this is the day that I admit once and for all that no outfit, no product, no service is going to remake me into a new person. I watch my daughters try on endless outfits and help them with endless hairstyles and it’s fun. It’s fun for me, it’s fun for them. But for myself, meh. Maybe for a fancy night out, I’ll put in some effort. But generally, no thanks.

That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy making an effort in other places. In the last year, I’ve learned to make custard and to decoupage and to fix toilets. I like to think I will never stop learning. I hope I will never want to. But I wonder what it is that has led me to no longer care about the newest fashions or latest looks.

Part of it may be that the new looks remind me a little too much of my high school days. Those baggy jeans and crop tops should stay in the past where they belong. Then again, I remember my parents saying the same thing about bell bottoms and paisley when I was in middle school. My kids and I joke that when I was a teen, all the grown ups tucked in their shirts, so now, when they tuck in their shirts, I think of them like miniature 40 year old ladies. Meanwhile, the current actual 40 year old ladies in my cohort don’t tuck in our shirts, because we wouldn’t want to look old and unhip. They roll their eyes at my untucked middle age-ness.

They have convinced me to try a middle part again. I’ve told them it will be the first time since 1998 that I won’t have a side part and they all agreed, it’s time. I wonder if I’ll look in the mirror, at a face that is growing wrinkled, and still see my 8th grade self peeking through.

Back in college, I took an amazing class that talked about relationships throughout the life cycle – everything from infants’ attachment to the grief when a long-term spouse dies. In it, they talked about how divorces don’t happen at random intervals. There are bumps in the data – significantly more people get divorced at year 7 of marriage than year 6 or year 8, for example. And, according the data available then, one of the bumps occurs when the eldest child hits age 14. The professor speculated a few reasons – teenagers are hard, parents staying together for the kids might think 14 is old enough to break up, etc. But one that she mentioned resonates with me now – having a teen child makes you feel old in a new and different way.

Nothing makes time seem to flow faster than when my children have experiences that I fully remember having myself. I don’t recall much of elementary school; a few snippets here and there – Disney world, Christmas, a field trip or two. But my eldest is going to her first school dance this week and I can tell you the exact layout of the gym at my middle school dances. The memories are clear. And a part of me feels closer to her age than my own. I know I’m not 20 anymore, but it feels like it was just yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to be 20 again. I am remembering it with rose-colored glasses, for sure. When I went to college, my dad mentioned that he was jealous of all the fun I was going to have and cynical me retorted that he only felt that way because he knew how it was all going to work out. No stress about graduating and getting a job, about getting married and buying a house, about having kids and making it all work. It’s easy to look back there from here and see all the fun without any of the giant unknowns looming before us.

Still, I didn’t know then that this age would have its own giant unknowns. What am I going to do when my kids are grown up and gone? It’s 5 years until my eldest graduates. The twins will be two years later. How will we will fill the time? And then then even bigger unknowns. When will the day come that we get a dreaded diagnosis? Or get a phone call about a parent? Or? Or? Or?

So, I suppose my insistence on having easy haircuts and simple fashion choices maybe makes sense. I’m too aware of the fleeting nature of time and I have things I want to do with this second 39 years. And for me, hair ain’t it.

Toys and Talents

Over the last few years, Forrest and I have been undertaking an effort to organize our house. The two of us are pretty good at organizing our lives - dinner gets made on time, appointments are scheduled, meetings are attended - but our home can be a different matter. Part of it is that I, personally, like clutter. I understand the “there’s too much stuff” crowd, but it’s not for me. I like knickknacks and special dishes we only use once a year and pots full of half-dead flowers. It all brings me joy.

The other part of it is that our house has no wiggle room. There’s no basement, no upstairs spare bedroom, no laundry room where we can hide everything. Every single room in our house is used for most of the hours of the day. But all that use means no room for the regular stuff, let alone extra. We’ve started talking about our house like a cruise ship - how can we maximize every single inch? We’ve got the cabinet organizers and the room dividers and the bins labeled, but there are just days where close living is a little too close.

Those days are almost always in late January. It’s dark and wet and cold and there is no more Christmas to look forward to. So we’re trying to organize our house, to have a little more room to stretch out. This is great, in theory. The only problem is that we still have kids living in this house.

They are both the reason for and the greatest obstacle to organizing. I’ve taken to sorting bins of dolls and clothes late at night, lest some child wander in and rediscover some toy they haven’t asked after for five years. I know that some parents have their kids help with this process, to teach them how to manage possessions properly. I figure, between having rules on homework, housework, and, well, not assaulting each other, I’ve earned one area of parenting where I can take the easy way out.

Forrest and I have very different philosophies on the importance of permanence, both in possessions and residences. He was raised in the same house from age 1 until his mom sold it about 10ish years ago. Me? I spent my teenage and early adult years hopping from apartment to apartment, spending summers couch-hopping or, in one ill-advised move, renting a basement room at an unoccupied frat house. (I woke up to a mouse eating my Special K, which was the day I realized that I luckily not that squeamish about rodents.)

I’m all for keeping the special things - the art and stories and baby clothes that are the detritus of a life fully lived. But I have a limit about the number of TY dolls I can keep around. Meanwhile, Forrest is basically a depression-era grandmother, hoarding cardboard and foil in case it comes in handy sometime. He loves nothing more than when I ask him for a spare jam jar. He smiles smugly as he leads me out to his secret stash in the garage, and I roll my eyes.

We’re well-matched, he and I, but part of that is realizing that I should do the sorting and he should do the disposal. I’m liable to put it in a box marked “Give Away”, move the box out to the garage, and then promptly forget about it for the next few years. I lack follow-through. I’m moving into my forties next year and one of my goals is to reach out to the next decade clear-eyed. No more trying to be something I’m not or making excuses for what I am. I’m good at deciding what should stay and what should go. He’s good at making sure the stuff gets there. Let’s leave it at that.

Maybe that’s the secret - finding the people who can do the things we can’t and accepting that needing that help isn’t a failing. It’s fortunate. Nothing binds us together like a shared project, and people love knowing that they can give each other something of value. Even if that something is having no qualms about throwing a broken dollhouse in the trash.

Passports and Pettiness

It’s time for me to renew the twins’ passports again, and after an hour of navigating the various forms, photocopies, and proofs of identification, my brain is feeling a little mushy. Even more complicated was finagling an appointment at one of the dozen local passport processing facilities. I’m not saying it was harder than getting Taylor Swift tickets, but I definitely had to set an alarm to snag one.

On the application, they ask for your international travel plans. As of now, the twins don’t have any, so I feel a little odd being so aggressive about getting this renewal. But something about the pandemic and the feeling of being trapped has intensified my wanderlust. For a lot of us out here on the west coast, we were far, far away from family, with no way to easily drive to get to them. More than once, I looked at google maps, at the 2,500+ mile journey, wondering if there was some way we could manage it with three kids and two dogs. People do, I suppose.

We didn’t. We stayed put and made the best of it all and flew with ridiculous precautions and now, I don’t want something as small as a passport to stand between us and the freedom that I used to take for granted. I sometimes think about the little changes we’ve all made that will stick with us forever. In 50 years, my kids’ grandkids will laugh about their crazy grandma who keeps some masks and extra toilet paper on hand, just in case.

I am so sick of talking and thinking about Covid, but it’s still there, in the back of all of our minds, and being sick of something doesn’t mean that it’s not affecting me anymore. We got a letter from the girls’ school district last week because they’ve both missed 7 days of school this year, 5 of them because of our family’s travels. It was the usual reprimand letter, “remember how important attendance is, etc.” and my first thought was how the district had no problem forcing me to give up my time to do e-learning for a year, so maybe a week off for a trip isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things. I don’t like that bitterness. But I also didn’t like being seen as expendable, as someone who would pick up the slack when our society decided to shut down.

I suspect I’m not alone. There are a lot of us who just want to move on, but who have to reckon with new realizations over the past few years. I feel like we’re cleaning out the fridge, opening up the tupperware containers, and discovering all sorts of rot. Unequal divisions of labor, check. Disregard for the health of our poorest workers, check. Societal unwillingness to sacrifice for the greater good, check.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not hearkening back to a golden age. I’m enough of a student of history to know that there was no one perfect time in our history where everyone came together and created a new and beautiful world. People are people. We’re all driven by a thousand motivations, both petty and pure. And the goal is to find the beauty in the good and the strength in the bad.

Still, there lies within me the desire, sometimes, to just escape it all. To go to a new place, with problems that are not our problems, with debates that are not our debates, and to do nothing more than let the difficulties at home settle for awhile. And hopefully, come back refreshed and renewed to set aside my pettiness and get back to the hard work of building a society that, if not beautiful, is at least a little more honest and true than it used to be.

Seeing and Being Seen

I feel like I am taking a big exhale this week. For the first time in a long time, I’ve got a normal week with nothing extra, nothing added. And it feels amazing.

I once read a joke - “Adulthood is just saying, ‘After this week, things will calm down,’ over and over until you die.” I feel like that’s my life. It’s not even my own projects, which wax and wane, but the weeks where there are meetings and field trips and appointments, not to mention the unforeseen things like plumbing and sicknesses and playdates that crop up. It can all feel crowded in sometimes, and a week without them feels like having a king-size bed all to myself. Space to stretch and rest.

I’m reading a series of memoirs by Madeleine L’Engle right now, and she spends a lot of time talking about the time before she sold her first book, a period of her life that she calls “The Tired Thirties.” She talks about being torn between her unpaid, unknown writing, her obligations to her family, the expectations of being a housewife in the 50s, and her volunteer work at her village church. Replace the “housewife in the 50s” with “modern parent in the 2020s” and it feels incredibly familiar.

In it, she talks about how in her moments of despair, she thinks to herself, “Is this all I’m good for? Running a little choir at a little church?” And then, of course, she talks about her own understanding of the real meaning and value of that little work. But I confess that my own brain has thought those words before. “Is this all I’m good for? Sending a million little emails? Folding laundry and then refolding it again next week? Schlepping my kids from one place to another ad nauseum?”

It’s important to me that we allow ourselves to sit in that frustration, that agitated state, for a while. Because what it speaks to is a feeling of being unvalued, unappreciated, unseen.

I think a lot of people in this world just want to feel seen., but they don’t admit it to themselves. They don’t want to acknowledge that they’re lonely or isolated, and so it comes out sideways, at odd times and odd places. A lot of people talk about random meetings with strangers where deep moments happen and every time, I recoil. I feel like a monster when I do but all I can think is - who is following up with that person? When someone shares with me how rough of a time they’re having, I want to check back in. When it’s a friend or a family member, I can make sure to call them in a week. But when it’s just in passing - on a plane or in a doctor’s office - there’s nothing I can do beyond that moment. They are just as alone as they were before we met.

I’m all for miraculous moments, but the reality is that most people who are going to be that vulnerable with a stranger need much, much more than a stranger can give them. They need a friend. That beautiful moment might alleviate their isolation but it’s not going to cure it. It’s like eating skittles when my body needs a meal. I don’t feel hungry any more - in fact, I feel amazing! — but my body is still undernourished.

I say this because I’ve been this person, when I was at home alone with a colicky baby, on a coast far away from home and support, with a husband that was doing his best but still left for 11 hours a day. I have so needed to feel seen. I remember that feeling and it was gut-wrenching. I dream about going back in time and hugging that woman, about telling her that it will all be ok. That my need for reassurance and support were not signs of weakness; they were signs that part of me was still up and fighting.

But I could only start getting those needs met when I was honest about them. It’s not sufficient of course - there may still be barriers to feeling seen — but it is necessary. We don’t need to be seen by strangers - we need to be understood by friends. We need the company of people who are going to walk through our whole lives with us, through the Tired Thirties and beyond. We need them to keep us going when we fall into self-pity and despair.

I think the moments of despair that L’Engle talks about are the moments when we, if we’re lucky, realize that the question contains the answer. “Is this all I’m good for?” The answer is yes - but not because she is not good for anything else, but because the work itself is good. The small moments that add up into a lifetime of being seen and seeing others. The daily in and outs that receive no acclaim but build the foundation for a life well-lived. The stability and support of a family that helps children grow up resilient and secure. These things create a life that can feel overfull with obligations, but also with meaning.

If that’s all I’m good for, I’m more than happy.

Red-Eyes and Resting

I’m currently travelling back to my hometown for my best friend’s baby shower, after a red eye and a long layover and airport food and whew. This is the first big thing I’ve done since my surgery, exactly one month ago today. And what a month. I am a person who deeply believes in the importance of rest, and still, when faced with week after week of exhaustion, I found myself struggling much more than I ever thought I would.

I do my best to divorce my self-worth from my productivity because I truly believe that we are not merely the sum of what we do. But what I didn’t realize was how hard it is to keep believing in rest when it’s disruptive to so many of the everyday routines that make our lives work. It’s so hard to feel like an inconvenience, like I’m adding one more thing to Forrest’s already overloaded plate, like my girls are wanting and needing something that I simply do not have the energy to give them.

I’ll admit, I was irritable. My frustration at not being able to do more bubbled over more than once, and more than once, my family gently reminded me that while they knew I was struggling, could I please be slightly less abrasive? I don’t want to paint a picture of some beatific person who sat there reading books and smiling weakly at her children – no, I was grumpy and mostly played Candy Crush and watched stupid TV.

But as I’m getting my strength back, mostly, I’ve been overwhelmed with gratitude. Gratitude for Forrest, of course, who takes most setbacks in stride and never seems to get tired of caring for us all. Gratitude for my friends, who reached out and helped keep me connected to the world outside. And mostly, gratitude for my girls, who have grown enough to be able to create the Christmas magic I simply could not.

These past few years have been full of grief for a lot of us. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing. There’s a power in grief – in fully owning the losses and giving up the idea that we can control them or fully prevent them. I don’t know that I’ve accepted that I don’t want a life without loss. I feel as though I am no longer simply grieving people I’ve lost, but the time that has not lived up to what I once believed it would be. The years of my kids’ childhood that were spent in a sort of half-life. The months of fear and exhaustion as we tried to claw back some semblance of normality even before the girls were vaccinated. And now, completely unrelated, these weeks of illness and pain.

I don’t always know how to balance that gratitude and grief. Because, to me, they are two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of profound investment in life, the one wild and precious life that I get. As I age, I find myself shedding the layers of cynicism and anxiety and sophistication that kept me from being fully immersed in this living. But that’s hard, so hard, too. There’s a reason we hold onto that cynicism – real life, fully lived can burn like flame, can’t it? Even the gratitude is bittersweet, tinged with fear of loss or understanding that even the good things in our life will one day fade or change.

This probably isn’t the uplifting new year’s post that I should be writing. Maybe it’s the red-eye flight talking. But I’m determined that this year is going to be a good one – and that actually means one where I don’t shy away from the gratitude or the grief, where I am thankful even for the sick days and forced rest. Even if I am a little irritable about it from time to time.