Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

You know the On This Day Facebook app that prompts you to see what you were up to 7 years ago, 3 years ago, last year… It’s really a combination of delightful, occasionally awkward and wonderfully nostalgic.

Well, 7 years ago today, April 25, 2009, I was showing off the Rocky Mountains to two of my favorite Brits. Our visits are far too infrequent, but always much anticipated and add to great memories. I look forward to seeing them on the highlight reel again soon.

Last year on this day, I wrote my first Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert blog.

A year of blogging isn’t really so much. I know personally multiple people who have been blogging much, much longer. And I read many blogs that say things much more eloquently than I could. That are funnier. Or braver.

But reflecting on a year of blogging, I can definitely say I’m glad I jumped on this bandwagon, and I’m happy and appreciative that so many people over the last year took the time to read the words that popped into my head and onto the page.

I started the blog to try to be more accountable to a healthier lifestyle, but it didn’t end up being that blog for very long. Maybe it should have, because I’ve been on a running rest day since December. I was going to start again April 1… but Denver got *a lot* of April snow… And tonight it’s raining. I’m still addicted to sugar, but sometimes I put it in chia seed pudding now. Or on paleo banana pancakes. And I use coconut flour and almond milk… to make banana chocolate chip muffins. I apparently also eat a lot more bananas now.

But despite the Vitamin Cottage-esque look of my cupboards (the chocolate I hide in drawers), blogging turned into something more important to me than a chronicling of good and bad choices. It became a reconnection with “and.”

I think sometimes when we get to a certain point in our lives — busy, juggling, a little confused as to how we got here — we’re actually at our best, our most multi-faceted with more depth and more breadth than we’ve ever had before. But we’re too tired to see it. Because our routines are dictated by our children, our jobs, our partner’s job, our hopes and retirement goals, we start seeing uniform sidewalks stretching ahead where we used to travel meandering, climbing paths that led to places and people far-off and unknown. The sidewalks aren’t bad. They just seem somehow sudden and unexpected, and yet somewhere we’ve been for awhile now.

A WordPress account does not change the fact that I still have soccer practice and games and make-up games and science fairs and ballet and Girl Scouts and customer meetings and days when my husband gets stuck at work, and I have to leave my own desk at a run to pick up the children. My path doesn’t have much mystery at the moment. But blogging turned into an “and.” I’m a mother. I’m a wife. And I’m a writer again. And I’m part of this wonderful, crazy village of friends, family and experience. And I’m not so tired that I can’t jot an idea down on a sticky note in the morning and let it roll around into a right-brain release while my left-brain life marches on.

I don’t mind cooking when I have the time, but I’ve never had much patience for baking. My grandmother made wonderful yeast breads. Cinnamon rolls. Dill onion bread. Sourdough and country loaf. It was all delicious and made the house smell amazing and made me happy, just thinking of that perfect shade of golden toasted brown coming out of the oven. But I appreciated the finished product more than the process. The process seemed exhausting, all that kneading and waiting and perfect timing. With writing, though, it’s my sunny counter top and the whir of the mixer and a wonderfully yeasty, burgeoning idea that’s just waiting for its purpose. Sometimes it comes out a wonderful, aromatic masterpiece, and sometimes it falls as flat as a pancake. But either way, it’s my “and.” It’s my process to dig into and explore.

A year ago on April 25, I said:

No more substitutions.  I want to make plans and climb mountains, to feel alert and healthy and present. I’m on a quest to choose the real, the worthwhile, and even if I have to temporarily give up actual dessert to do it, I’m ready, because frozen grapes are not dessert.

It was an ambitious goal. I didn’t always meet my own expectations. I’m not quite where I’d like to be. I let myself worry about things I can’t control. I medicate with chocolate and red wine from time to time. I took a four and a half month rest from running. But in my two-steps forward, one-step back ramble, I’m ahead of where I was. I’m on the look-out for a few more ands.

 

 

 

 

My oldest daughter will be 10 this summer. She’s still my little girl in many ways. She still expects a stuffed bunny at Easter and still wants a hug at school drop-off. But she is also starting to use her bedroom as a private retreat and her friendships are becoming more defined. She can pack her own lunch and do a load of laundry and quote from Hamlet.

I am thrilled for her accomplishments and proud and sad and trepidatious for a future that I can’t write. How did this person grow from a baby, 4 pounds and change, to a girl who can use a sewing machine and a long bow and execute a grand plié. She has such a sense of fair play and believes so earnestly in rules. I appreciate this about her and yet life, even at not quite ten, is harder when the rules still seem so black and white.

I want life to be kind; I want the world to see this woman-in-the-making and appreciate and embrace her. And yet it won’t, always. If I think about it too much, it already hurts, pre-emptively. Her hurts, the ones she’ll necessarily accumulate just by living. You hope to teach your children resiliency and depth and kindness. Because we know they’ll need all three. And humor and grit and grace.

A while back I stumbled across this Mary Oliver poem, and I thought, “Yes. Yes, that.”

 

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

There are a thousand different proverbs, quotations, poems and songs that say roughly this. Adversity is the best teacher. Smooth seas do not make for skillful sailors. But Mary Oliver’s poem took me back to half a dozen times and places in an instant: those moments when you offer up a gift that is nothing less than all of you, everything you have to give. And it’s not enough. Or perhaps worse, it’s received in a spiraling inequity that leaves you more alone than you think you can bear in a room without air.

A box full of darkness. An anti-gift that lets self-doubt sneak in. Parenting articles abound on how to create confident children. I read them. I appreciate them. I want to get that right. So often I wonder if I am.

As my children get older, I feel a sense of increasing urgency. In the middle of an otherwise ordinary moment, I’ll see a certain hair flip or the light will catch just right, and my heart stutters to realize that I only have so many more weeks and months and years to help nurture those seeds of resilience. And that no matter what I do, no matter how strong a foundation I hope to build, this amazing child will one day open a box full of darkness.

I hate it, and yet it’s somehow in that dark room with no air that we learn to breathe again. In. And out. Until we remember how. In that frozen moment of clarity when I catch a glimpse of the young adult surfacing in my no-longer-little child, I know I can’t and shouldn’t put her in a bubble.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. Friendships that faltered, relationships that failed, self-doubt and anxiety… But afterward, little by little, I’ve come to realize that a person can’t give themselves away to try to make another person whole. And that a personal identity can’t be built to anyone else’s specifications. That people will say no and people will walk away, people will take more than they give. That only means they aren’t the right people. That the slings and arrows often aren’t aimed at us so much as near us by someone still staunching their own wounds.

Life will hurt. Sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. In the end, the darkness isn’t the gift, the darkness just purely stinks, but coming through it – that’s the gift. If I can teach my children to just keep breathing, in… and out… I can’t live their darkness for them, but I don’t think it’s cheating to hold their hand.

I would like an app that automatically adds items requested by email to my shopping list  –  email from our soccer coach, and our children’s teachers and the school’s office staff and everyone else who has a small and totally reasonable request. I’m not ignoring you. And to be clear, as my youngest’s Girl Scout leader, I am one of the emails showing up in my parent peers’ inboxes. Can anybody hear me? Sometimes I feel like I’m shouting into a void because I rarely get a response. That might be annoying except that I get it. My own response rate is not good. I read as many as I can. I mean to go back and read more.  But it’s that scene where the hero and heroine have only minutes of air left as their sinking ship fills with water. Except that in this case it’s not water, it’s email and instead of endearments, our heroine says, exasperated, “You get the same emails I do. You should already know what time the game is.” “I assume you’re reading them,” our hero says.  End scene.

And this is why I need the email scanning and list making app. (And yes, I know that when AI rises up and takes over, I’ll be partially to blame.) Actually, if the list could be automatically sent to Postmates.com, and the items then just delivered to my door, tagged by purpose, child and due date, all without me having to read email in any sort of timely matter, that would be ideal.

Instead, life goes something like this:

Soap and deodorant for school giving drive?  Check. Wow, I am totally on top of this week!

Hmm. No nut no dairy team snack? Okay. That’s doable. Let me just run back to the store. (That snack is always going to be snack-pack Goldfish by the way…and if anyone ever shows up with cute clothespin snackbag butterflies, I swear there will be consequences.)

Three marbles, two toy cars and wood blocks for 2^nd grade science?  Well, we had a marble run at one point. Two houses ago. That was fun for a day. Surely there are still marbles at the bottom of a piggy bank or marker bin. Somewhere.

While 92% of my email is now Junk mail, and while the email I should read often escapes me, one of my good friends and I still email regularly. We used to work side by side, or at least cube by cube. Now we’re both busy moms on different sides of the city. We try to have lunch or coffee once a month or so, and email a few times a week. We give each email fun subject lines. Like, “Tuesday.” And it reminds me that email wasn’t always a sinking coffin ship of guilt and responsibility.

I don’t know exactly when I first started a personal email account. When I left for college, probably. I’m old enough that I can tell my children that I remember when I had neither an email address nor a cell phone. I’m sure this will be funny to them since they both have school emails and personal emails, and have for years, and they are 8 and 9.

I have a pile of letters – real, physical, paper and ink letters – written when I was in college, on summer breaks, when I studied abroad. They make me smile whenever I stumble across them. Handwriting that I recognize, once familiar return addresses that have since changed. 20 S. Main St (my grandfather), Darrow Hall (my high school bestie), Broomfield Crescent (my British bestie), my parents… There’s nothing like a letter. Sometimes I dive into email in the same way. When we lost photos from late 2008 through mid-2009 (back up your files, do it now!), it wasn’t quite as tragic because I’d emailed so many to my mother in that time frame. There they were. Still alive and well.

My first email address collected so many prosaic memories of a person who was just becoming. Traveling, falling in love, making new friends, landing new jobs. That email account was a fatality of my brief first marriage. Maybe it’s partly the English major in me who places such weight on words, but when that account disappeared, I mourned for it. And then perhaps learned from it, because indeed life went on.  

Today if I’m maybe looking for a receipt for a specific something, or trying to remember based on years-past email traffic when my cousin’s baby was born, and I order by sender, or by date or by key word, it’s a happy accident to stumble across something that reminds me that email used to be fun. Before texting, I sat down and composed emails. I sent email to friends that I would see soon after, and catch-up emails to friends I hadn’t seen in ages. I sent funny day-in-the-life emails to my parents (at least, I knew that they, in their biased benevolence, would find them funny). Email used to be fun. Just like with the pile of old letters, I love that that record exists.

From 2006:

Aw. That baby was Samantha! Email rocks.

Fast forward to present day, and I’m mostly just glad that MySchoolBucks sends three notifications when school lunch balances are low, and while I‘ve never opened one single email from the Colfax Marathon, I appreciate that they haven’t given up on me.

And if you’re reading this, and waiting for me to respond to an email, I apologize. Maybe just send me a text until my list app becomes standard issue.

I’m looking forward to summer.

We’ve arrived at post-spring break, the part of the school year when I wake up each day thinking, ‘Oh man. Are we still doing this?’ We get out of bed a bit later every morning. I have pretty much stopped blow drying my hair. Every spring my coworkers must think I subscribe to a post-Lent back-to-basics philosophy. ‘I don’t know why but traditionally she doesn’t do hair or makeup in April and May.’ Except… it’s only March.

This is also the time of year I start buying Uncrustables by the case for school lunches because there is zero time to pull ham, cheese and mayo out of the fridge, and then all that nonsense with the knife and the bread and the sandwich bag. Who has time? I remember when I did September things like use that jigsaw puzzle sandwich cutter and cut up apples. Post-spring break is all about the fruit cup. I start saying things to my daughters like, Why don’t you guys choose what you want for your lunch sides today?, in an upbeat voice that pretends that I’m totally giving them a special treat. Choice! What fun! Mommy’s going to go put contacts in! I think they’re wise to this charade, but we all keep playing our parts.

Summer means daylight stretching into a bedtime gloaming hour and bike rides after dinner. Somehow, in summer, 24 hours in a day feels like enough. But in late March, it’s still dark when we wake and dark after dinner. Sight words, fractions, 20 minutes of reading… ooooh, hmmm, the Dinosaurs book. Here’s the truth, my darling 8-year-old, I still don’t know how to pronounce Euoplocephalus. And when you spell s-k-e-l-a-t-o-n out loud and look at me expectantly, my brain literally overloads trying to make a word out of those verbal letters. My 4th grader has learned 3 new notes on the recorder, including F#. Music is a gift, of course. And I can still play Hot Cross Buns on the recorder. These are life skills. And yet extended daylight really makes all of this more manageable. Life feels trickier when sunset is earlier.

And so, I’m looking forward to summer. I’m looking forward to reading for fun instead of AR tests, and after-dinner lounging and twilight at 9pm and laughter from the backyard when it’s technically bedtime. I’m holding on, and it’s definitely on its way. I can tell by how quickly the March snow melts off the daffodils. Roll on, summer. Roll on.

 

 

My grandmother was born in 1919. She was a WWII nurse, a working mother, a wife. She worked tirelessly for the Salvation Army. One of my favorite stories about her was when my grandfather was passed over for a government job that should have been his. She bundled up her nearly 1-year-old (my father) and her 3-year-old and went to Washington DC to give the President a piece of her mind. She ended up talking to an Assistant Post Master instead. My grandfather got his job. Clearly she knew her own mind. She was tenacious, determined and some might say stubborn. Yet she was not born with the right to vote.

American women won the right to vote in 1920 with the 19^th Amendment. It wasn’t a slam dunk. About a third of Congress voted against it, and ratification state by state was an uphill fight.

Raising girls is tricky sometimes. Probably raising boys is hard, too, but having been a girl and now raising two daughters, I can only speak to that. In one of the most modernized nations in the world, we’re only two generations out from the 19^th Amendment. We’re only one generation out from Mad Men’s 1960’s. And I’m only about a week out from being told, at work, that I looked “hot” because I had worn a skirt.

I want my daughters to embrace being female, to enjoy being female. I want them to know the history of it, the people who blazed the trails we, they, walk on. And I want them to never, ever question whether that history places limits on their limitless future. I want them to appreciate when literal doors are held open for them (that’s just polite), but also not feel like they need an invitation to break the glass ceiling. I want phrases like glass ceiling to be quaint and old-fashioned for them, like flibbertigibbet or fortnight. But I want them to be aware that there’s always a glass ceiling for someone, and to be compassionate enough to take up those causes.

When my daughter did a research project on ancient Greece, the historical fact that stuck with her was that unwanted infants, which included baby daughters, could be abandoned. They either died of the elements or were sometimes taken in by other families and then often raised as slaves. “Girls have it better now,” she said with her usual understated candor. True that. And yet.

I work at a company that’s about 90% male. There’s almost never a line for the bathroom. So, there’s that. A lot of the time, I don’t think about being the only girl in the room. But occasionally, I look around and think, “Oh, right.” For instance when a coworker, not my boss, scheduled a meeting with me –an actual calendar invite meeting so that I took a notebook and pen – for a meeting that turned out to be about my “career goals.” He was willing to help me out. Lend a hand. Be my champion, I suppose, in this tough man’s world. He was also a year younger than me, not particularly adept at his own job, and on his way out of the company, as it turned out. “Once I get settled in a new job,” he said, “I’ll send for you.”

Um, come again? I’ll send for you?

There are only so many things you can say to that. And if I say it more than once, I lose my PG-13 rating, so I’m just going to let everyone think it. Because, seriously.

When the program I work for gave out commemorative models of the aircraft that we use for our product, I was told that my husband could help me put it together. Uh huh. I’m a mother. To say nothing of going through natural childbirth, if I can put together a 500+ piece Treetop Hideaway Legos set without tears, I can handle myself in nearly any small pieces situation. I’ll see you your model airplane and raise you three dozen homemade popsicle-stick Valentines crafts.

I’m not writing to sermonize about how biased life still is for women in the 21^st century. There are lots of circumstances about life that are unfair. It’s unfair to be born into a village without running water while I leave partially full bottles of celebrity-endorsed Smart Water sitting in my car for three weeks before finally tossing them. It’s unfair to be judged according to the latitude you call home or the accent you speak with. Life is a loaded deck. It’s important to recognize that. I’m well-housed, well-educated and respected by those who matter to me, and I don’t discount that. But better than it was is not as good as it could be.

Every child wants to be something when they grow up. Right now, my oldest wants to be a teacher and my youngest wants to be an author and run an ice cream and fresh fruit food truck. Those have been pretty consistent for awhile, but if it turns out my daughter wants to be a farmer, or a ballerina or an organic chemist, I’m all in. If she wants to be a radical homemaker or the next Sheryl Sandberg, I’m delighted as long as she feels confident, empowered and happy. But I like what Sarah Silverman said, “Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it’s a mistake. Not because they can’t, but because it would’ve never occurred to them they couldn’t.”

 

Sometimes I worry that because I married someone who is a veritable Mr. FixIt, I’m setting a poor example. My grandmother was a master gardener, and so I can’t keep a houseplant alive. I didn’t need to learn. Someone else took care of that. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to stop a leaking faucet or hang cabinet doors. Someone else takes care of that. “Daddy will fix it,” my daughters say. And more than likely he will. But shouldn’t I know how? Shouldn’t I show my daughters that they don’t need Daddy to fix it, that they can fix it, because I can fix it. And then I remember that being successful doesn’t mean knowing how to do everything from organic canning to auto maintenance. It means that I am confident in my abilities to find answers. I am capable and I am intelligent. What I don’t know today, I can learn tomorrow if I need to. Or, I can go to my grave never learning to can peaches and find my answers to that in Aisle 16 of my local grocery store. Answers come in different forms. If each of my daughters reach adulthood knowing that they are capable, that they are intelligent and confident that they can find the answers, their answers, maybe their generation will have fewer patronizing meetings with would-be benefactors.

I sometimes think of that old saying, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.” And frankly, I’m over it. I’m over women being congratulated or vilified for wearing the pants, and climbing the ladder and sitting at the table and all those irritating phrases that imply we’re slightly out of our league but allowed at the club. We smell good, I’ve been told. And yet we are also our harshest critics. We judge each other’s fitness and morality and fashion. We criticize each others’ parenting decisions and career paths. Sometimes justly, sometimes not.

Eight years ago, my female boss caustically called Hillary Clinton “that bitch” in casual office conversation. “Why do you say that?” I asked. She just didn’t like her. “Bitch” is an attack on our DNA. It’s personal. And it’s lazy and overused. And we don’t have to like other women just because we’re women. We shouldn’t be voting single issue with our reproductive systems. The assumption that we would is just as insulting as being told that we should. But we can respect ourselves enough to contribute to a meaningful dialogue. We’ve come farther, worked harder, than stereotypes and name calling. Whether we like the women who have been our trailblazers, we can acknowledge that they have had to dance backwards and in heels. We owe it to our grandmothers, and theirs, to be thoughtful with our criticism of anyone, but especially other women.

Our mothers have had more options than our grandmothers. Our daughters have the world at their feet, but even cleared paths need care and maintenance. What paths we take should be less about gender and more about personality, with no one dancing backwards. At our house, my husband generally mows the yard. I generally cook. This may seem like a traditional gender divide, until you consider that I get hives from the sun. And I’m allergic to something like seven types of grass. Also, I am not particularly organized. This means that if I mow, I meander around the yard until I feel like all the grass is about the same, shorter length. Apparently, this isn’t how a yard is supposed to be mowed. There’s this thing called yard striping, alternating yard striping, even. Noted. Here’s your yard back. I’ll see you inside. When I cook, I am equally unsystematic. I look up some recipes, get the gist. See what ingredients we actually have, make some substitutions, and that is how dinner gets made. It works because of who we are, not what we’re doing.

When we prioritize by what we’re most interested in, the questions that we want to answer, rather than the questions we think we ought to answer, we end up with a better slice of history. When we challenge ourselves to be thoughtful in our personal commentary, we end up with a deeper understanding of each other, our similar journeys, our different paths.

What I love most about the story of my grandmother taking on Washington is that you can feel her strength. She wanted answers and she set about finding them. I’m glad that I have her blood running through my veins. And I’m going to make sure my daughters know that they do, too.

 

It’s tempting to assume the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

On a good day, I have a beleaguered, world-weary outlook on the day’s headlines. This too shall pass. It’s always darkest before the dawn. On a bad day, it feels downright doomed. We are now officially in spring, following the warmest winter on record. The Iditarod shipped in snow. We know six million Syrian refugees are displaced outside their country because of horrific conditions inside it. But did you know that 300,000 Eritreans also fled their homeland in 2015? That’s in northeastern Africa. I couldn’t have found it on a map. The U.S. education system is slipping in worldwide rankings and we can’t seem to test our way out, all while we eliminate recess, gym, music and art. And for reasons I still can’t fathom, a quarter of our country feels favorably toward Donald Trump.

“I drink a little more than recommended. This world ain’t exactly what my heart expected.”

I took a walk today. I kept in view of the Rockies, which have 80 million years to their credit. There’s a reason people go to the mountains to sort things out. Also I found my first dandelion, hanging out in the melting snow. It’s funny how that first bright flash of yellow has nothing to do with weeds and everything to do with new wishes. The air was still cool enough to feel clean in my lungs. The Rockies didn’t whisper to me how to offer harbor to the world’s refugees or the solution to climate change. They said, Look at us; life is infinitesimally short… while the dandelion replied, No, the moments are long.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, of course. As all answers are.

The other day when I was having a crummy time of it, my youngest said, “When you get mad, Mommy, remember it’s not the whole world that’s broken. It’s your heart, but it’s not the whole world.” I swear that that kid is an emotional savant.

When I drop my children off at school, just drop them off at the corner without even going in, there are half a dozen people to greet. I drive down the street and wave at my daughter’s Girl Scout leader, who is co-leader with my daughter’s dance teacher. Wonderful women teaching my daughter things that aren’t tested on any standardized test. The world isn’t broken.

When my family’s schedule changed because my husband’s job changed, and I was sweating the idea of incorporating afterschool care five days a week into our lives and budget, one of my friends said, “Let’s figure this out.” And now my children are card carrying patrons of the school bus to her house. We’re a community and we keep each other buoyant. The world isn’t broken.

Work has been a veritable sprint lately. My husband just changed jobs within his company, and he’s an all-in type, so he needs to be able to hit the ground running in order to be comfortable. Each evening we plan the next day like generals strategizing an inter-galactic offensive. Or at least a fairly complicated synchronized swimming routine. Based on my high school gym class routine to Garth Brooks’ And the Thunder Rolls (if there was ever a song that begged for a synchronized swimming routine, that’s obviously it), complicated, choreographed routines are not necessarily my best thing. But we haven’t left a child anywhere yet and they get to see it’s not always easy, but it’s easier to work together. I’m calling that a win.

A bright flash of encouraging yellow pops up when we aren’t looking for it. It’s a community cook-off for a good cause. Blankets delivered to the homeless. It’s sending a succinct message to my best friend from college and getting the exact response I need. It’s the end of the day, when I settle in, tired and with a headache brewing, and find myself in a favorite triad text thread, where the theme bounces from bucket lists to favorite quotations to grammatical foibles to childhood memories, and I can feel some of the day roll away. Far-away friends suddenly as close as a happy hour, and the laughter is real.

As long as we have communities Venn-ing into communities, our hearts may be broken from time to time, but we’re surrounded by the antidote. Our circles connect, share burdens, divide sorrows.

We can slow down, breathe in deep. We can lean in, learn Eritrea’s location. We can synchronize our watches, pick up dinner on the way home, and remember how crazy lucky we are. Look for the helpers in a disaster, Fred Rogers said. It’s good advice and part of the reason I know we’re going to be okay, in the end. No matter how bad things are, some people always rush IN. They’re amazing. But look for the helpers in the mundane, too. They are the heroes of our day-to-day, the bright spots of yellow, and the menders of our hearts.

When it seems like too much, when it’s not quite what our hearts expected, we need to extend our community by one more circle. And then maybe one more. Sometimes we get broken. The world breaks us all (Hemingway, favorite).

But the world isn’t broken.

 

We’ve all done regrettable things in our lives. Totaling my first car (though to be fair, it wasn’t worth that much to begin with). Marrying my first husband (it turned out he wasn’t worth much either). I regret the midnight snack pancakes I had just 30 minutes ago. Just go to bed, Rebecca. You don’t need… oh, are we putting honey on the snack pancakes? Well, I do love honey… carry on.

But this fascination with Donald Trump for President? Regardless of whether he actually becomes the nominee, regardless of whether he might have a real shot at the Oval Office, we’re eventually going to wake up in the morning, not quite recognize our surroundings, feel quite a bit nauseous, and wonder what we’ve done.

In 2012, Mitt Romney said that 47% of Americans were government-dependent self-described victims who would never vote for him, regardless. The country gasped. It was a pivotal moment in his campaign and one he never recovered from. In 2016, Donald Trump accuses Mexico of sending the US their rapists and drug dealers (and a few, he assumed, who were good people), before proposing a national database of Muslim citizens, before suggesting killing the families of terrorists, before suggesting killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, before half-heartedly and belatedly disavowing David Duke and the KKK.

And while we wouldn’t stand for Mitt insinuating we were lazy… tonight, we handed Donald Trump a decisive Super Tuesday victory.

I don’t know whether Trump’s xenophobic, racist, posturing persona is what he really believes, or if he just believes it could win an election. Frankly, both scenarios are beyond horrifying. Because even if it’s the latter and he’s just a master puppeteer, he’s judged our darkness as a nation pretty well. He’s invited the Orcs out to play, and they’ve come in droves.

Democracy, even our broken, gridlocked representative democracy, is about everyone having a voice and a vote. I surely wouldn’t deny a Trump supporter that right. But I would ask anyone who currently supports this angry campaign to reconsider the consequences. And I’d ask anyone who is appalled by this campaign to speak up. Our voice can be louder, truer, than the hateful rhetoric we’ve seen take root.

Sliding backward into an era of civil injustice and fear, and doing so by our democratic vote, is more than embarrassing. It’s immoral. The damage this election cycle has done to civility, equality and compassion is a black eye on our credibility as a nation. And we’re going to one day wake up sober, and regret it.

I’m not about to say anything new. I don’t think there is anything new to say under the sun, really. Just new prisms through which to view the old. Sappho and Shakespeare and Hemingway tell the same stories. Life and love, with its heartache and joy. The stories are the same, across centuries, across oceans, because at the heart of it people are the same. We forget that, sometimes.

One of my favorite giving organizations is Heifer International. This is in part nostalgic. It was one of my grandmother’s favorite organizations. The premise is that Person A, through Heifer International, gifts Person B a gift of livestock, and when that livestock thrives, Person B gifts from their growing herd or flock to Person C, their neighbor. Through compassion and hard work, a struggling community can thrive. Quarterly or so, we get Heifer’s newsletter and this time I noticed the final page, which just said, Leave It Better Than You Found It.

Leave It Better Than You Found It is another one of those not-new ideas. The Girl Scouts drill this idea into their members from kindergarten up. When camping, when on trips, in our own communities, leave it better than you found it. This isn’t limited to recycling and planting trees, though let’s do both of those things. To leave the world better than we found it, we need to leave people better than we found them, as well. And this can take so little. How many times have you felt a slight uplift at the sight of someone else smiling, or a child laughing? Be the person smiling. Be the person laughing. Be the first person to pay it forward at the Starbucks drive-through. It’s so easy to do. And so easy not to. I used to carry a little bit of cash with me, and I had a rule with myself that if I was the first car at a stoplight with a panhandler, I was obligated by human connectivity to give to that person, whether it happened randomly three times in a day, or once in a week. When did I stop doing that? When did it become too much of a hassle to have cash on hand? Easier to avert my gaze and turn the radio up. I forgot the parable of the faithful servant. To whom much has been given, much will be required.

I asked my daughter what she thought would make the world a better place. She didn’t take more than three seconds to think about it. “Say nice words, and when people fall down, help them up.” She just turned eight. I think we’re born knowing more about human compassion and kindness than we can ever appreciate when we’re young. And somehow, as we grow older, we begin to lose this principled default view. We’ve been disappointed by life a little more. We’ve worked hard and had things fall apart. We’ve seen people who didn’t work hard be rewarded. Our compassion is tested by our own sense of fair play but also by our sense of self-preservation. When we were cavemen, stopping to help the clanmate with a broken leg meant being trampled by a Mammoth or picked off by a saber tooth tiger. Fair point. Here’s the best thing, though. We’re not cavemen any more. We don’t have to think solely with our fight or flight frontal lobe. We can retain our childhood compassion. We can say nice words and help people up.

This week saw two mass shootings and multiple police officers shot in the line of duty. The first mass shooting, in Wichita, killed 4 and wounded 20. The second was in Washington state, and I’m sad to report that I don’t know anything about it except the headline. I was going to read an article about the Wichita victims, saw the Washington headline, and read neither. I wonder what Cate Blanchet will wear to the Oscars this year? I heard the weather’s supposed to be nice. Oh, and look, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck came together to celebrate their son’s birthday. Good for them.

Speaking for myself, I become desensitized to the news because it would hurt too much to be too sympathetic. If I thought of each of the victims of the week’s publicized shootings, if I thought of their families, if I thought about the starving children of Syria, and the people horrifically executed by IS by being strapped to chairs and pushed off roofs, just because of their genetics… If I internalized these things and was truly compassionate about them, I’d never get out of bed. So instead, I choose the easier path. I become a disconnected bystander. A passerby, hurrying home to dinner, surfing past the nightly news. Assad’s regime is holding civilians under siege as people, children, die of starvation and desperate parents are killed by sniper fire as they try to find any last vegetation to feed to their children. How awful. Is The Voice on? Please pass the salt.

I don’t think this makes me a horrible person. Of course, I have some bias in saying that. I think that people generally want to help each other out. I want to. People want to say nice words and help people up when they fall down. They want to leave people, the world, better than they found it. But it’s a heavy burden to take on, to truly open our eyes to all the places, all the people who need our help. I’m just one person. How much can I do? Is it worth it to wake up every day with my heart broken?

I think this is part of the reason that the presidential election primaries have come to the place that they have. We’ve detached ourselves from the process. It takes a hell of a lot to get our attention. We skim the headlines, but we remain a disconnected bystander. Just like I see the hopelessness in Syria and think, “That’s awful, but it could never happen here,” I look at a presidential candidate advocating killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, and I think, “That’s awful. But in the end, that won’t happen here. In the end, the United States would never elect someone so hateful and divisive.” Sure the first images of each scenario are shocking and distressing, but frankly you get used to both headlines, and as long as I don’t think about it too much, and can assure myself that it can never happen here, I can keep myself detached.

Well, shame on me. My husband says that most of the time, I am so careful to be politically and socially sensitive, not to rock the boat, that I stay universally likeable, that anyone outside of my inner circle has no idea what I am thinking. One of my good friends recently told me, shocked me by telling me, that she often has no idea when I’m happy or angry because I’m generally so even-keeled. And there’s a place for that. No one needs to know what everyone is actually thinking at every moment of the day. We’d all be friendless and alone. But Coco Chanel said, “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”

On this eve of Super Tuesday, I ask everyone to think for themselves. How are we doing at the parable of the faithful servant? How are we doing living up to our own standards? If our actions today, or our inactions, are the blueprint for social conscience for our children, for our grandchildren, are we satisfied with that? Are the consequences of our choices today something we’re prepared to see through? Have we thought about the consequences? When children of a different religion die before they have a chance to live just because they were born somewhere without a proud blue passport, are we satisfied telling our children that it’s okay? That in any event, we wouldn’t want them to be here, that we’d brand their identification with a stamp of their “otherness” and mock their religion and their god? Is that what we’ve become? Can we look at ourselves and say truthfully, “We said nice words, and we helped people up when they fell down?” Can we hold ourselves to the standards of our 8-year-olds?

If at the end of the day we do even one thing with compassion, I think we can begin to face the world as it really is, and that compassion saves us from waking up with our hearts quite so torn. From being so detached. Because helping other people heal begins to heal the brokenness in us, and let’s face it, we’re all pretty broken. Or at least I am. I’m hopeful and hypocritical and angry; I’m both brokenhearted and indifferent, depending on how work went, how my children behave, what time I can finally walk through my front door.

Aloud, I’m going to say that for my household, for my children, I want them to know by my actions that when you have more than you need — not more than you want, but more than you need — you build a longer table, not a higher fence and not a wall along our southern border. That we can disagree without calling names, that we should be brokenhearted about homeless veterans, and Ebola orphans and the families who have lost loved ones in senseless shootings. We should read their names and we should speak up for what we believe in, for what breaks our hearts, and we should do so compassionately, eloquently and most importantly, thoughtfully.  And aloud.

Who are we as a nation? Who are we as a community? We have a chance to advocate for our idealistic 8-year-olds with our vote. Let’s not waste it.

 

I live my life on post-it notes. I find them at the bottom of my purse, in pockets. I hear some people find money in the pockets of last year’s winter jacket or summer shorts. That sounds much more exciting than a florescent square proclaiming, “Creamer juice boxes poster board cat litter.”  I text myself. I have a physical daily planner that travels with me and I put appointments into my phone calendar and my work calendar. And still, I can’t manage to show up at the birthday party of one of my closest friend’s 6-year-old daughter. And that random school in-service day when there was no school? Well, looks like mama’s working from home today, girls!

I need a day – or maybe a couple – just to get myself organized. Just like I accumulate time off for days that I show up at work, I need to accumulate time off for real life days when I am drowning in lists and too mentally scattered to cross anything off. I need time to make the phone calls and do the laundry and shred the mail and do the things so that my life isn’t one giant pile of perceptual and physical clutter. Scholastic book club order, due January 25^th? Kohls’ New Years coupons? I swear with personal organization days, these wouldn’t create such a firetrap on my kitchen counters. I could do so much better. I just need the tools. And by tools, I mean time. And by time, I mean time not after 9:30pm when I’m too tired to shred paper without potential loss of limb.

Clearly, it would be unfair, to say nothing of demoralizing, to be required to use the time off that I painstakingly accumulate at work on things like calling the school transportation office, or getting the children to their dentist appointments – or heck, even scheduling their dentist appointments. It’s called “vacation time” is it not? (I mean, I get that PTO generically stands for personal time off, but so help me, I will still stare lovingly at the timesheet-generated table of hours and call it vacation time). And so, to avoid taking depressing days off, in addition to my vacation time (which I need as motivation for going into work the other 49 weeks a year) I would like to institute Personal Easement Days.

“Hi. I won’t be coming in today. I have 36 phone calls to make, two dozen Girl Scout patches to sew (liquid stitch) on, and I need to research pediatric dentists since I clearly can’t face our current one after having waited this long to schedule an appointment.”

On a Personal Easement Day, I could hear, “Please listen closely as the [15] menu options have changed,” and I would simply smile wisely and make another cup of tea. I would find lids to the Tupperware and stack them neatly in our cupboards before sorting through the girls’ closets for outgrown clothes (rather than fighting, or not fighting, the morning battle over favorite pants now two inches too short – why do we keep rewashing those and putting them away?!). And then I would take every empty granola bar box and half open cracker sleeve out of our pantry. I’d order a cute basket from Thirty-one, and consolidate all our chargers and cords in one visually pleasing, usage-friendly place. Boxes would be checked. Lists would be crossed off. Library books would be returned.

It’s a fantasy, of course. No matter how many lists are crossed off, no matter how many races we run, there’s always another. Sometimes it feels downright overwhelming. But it occurs to me, even as I wake up in the middle of the night and text myself 3am jibberish, I’m pretty lucky to have so much to balance. My life is full. I’m pretty lucky to have people who say, How can I help?, and I’m pretty lucky to have access to plenty of sticky notes in a variety of fun colors.

My house may never be uncluttered, and my mind even less so. My Tupperware will remain a series of square containers with round lids. But… at least for one more day:

I get by with a little help from my friends.

My daughter has a friend, Emilio, from preschool. Sometimes they talk on the phone for much longer stretches than you’d anticipate. And he texted her happy birthday wishes (mom’s phone to mom’s phone) on the exact right day. Of course, now they’re only in second grade, but I like to imagine that they will be friends forever.

Despite the fact that my daughter will be friends with her preschool best bud for a lifetime, I feel like most of our friendship histories start in grade school. Maybe it’s because we feel, even as children, like we now have a shot at permanence. I moved to my childhood home when I was in third grade, and I met my first friend through a parentally planned blind date. At church that first Sunday, I was introduced to the girl who would be one of my best friends throughout my primary education. We shuffled to sit in the same pew and that was that.

With Grade School Friends, we’re starting to test our wings. It’s the first time we have secrets, and need secret keepers. The girl from Week 1 of third grade? We hid secrets and friendship tributes under a loose stair tread on the unfinished stairs winding up to the attic. 25 years later, when my parents moved out of that house, one of the things I did was remove the diary, the painted rocks, the embodiments of  that absolutely foundational friendship. I watch my daughter in the same sort of core friendships now. She wasn’t in the same class as her two closest friends this year, and next year, one of them will be going to another school altogether. It makes a difference in your day-to-day, at this age, what class you’re assigned to. But you have your core people, fortified by sleepovers and recess and lunch (and by mother-friendships, but more on that later). Grade school friends are the ones who wear our BFF necklaces, who had a vote on which signature was best as we were developing handwriting. We terrified ourselves playing Bloody Mary at sleepovers, and balanced with some Barbie play when we were sure no one else would know we were still playing with dolls.

As we grew older, some of these grade school friends remained in our closest circle. I went to a small school; my graduating class was 97 people. Especially in a small town, your High School Friends know your story. High school friends were there through horrible hormones and pimples and crushes. They know how many times it took you to pass your driver’s test (not the driving portion, just the maneuverability, and really, when do you need to parallel park when you can walk another three blocks and be healthier for it?).

High school meant long talks on team busses, experiments with at home hair color, dating, rumors about who was losing their virginity, part time jobs, hanging out in parking lots and friends’ driveways. We felt so much older than we were. We talked, and talked, and talked. Our lives were a constant consultation, and for me, this was before cell phones became a thing (because I’m just that old now), and way before texting and Facetime and Skype. We confided our secrets as God intended, from a phone hanging on the kitchen wall which was, hopefully, a cordless phone we could sprint to our bedrooms and use with the music turned up. We spend potentially 12 years with a group of friends on what is always a countdown to leaving. I remember being horrified when my mother admitted she had lost track of many of her high school friends. That would never, ever happen to my group because we were clearly much closer. I felt a little bad for her, and a little smug.  But I was the only OHS grad who left for my particular college, and as my mother knew would happen, for the most part we drifted into our own story lines after graduation (before Facebook made faces and stories familiar again, an impromptu reunion.) And for the handful whose phone numbers remain current in my phone, there’s a porch rocker waiting when we’re gray.

College is like friendship on speed, I think. There is no other period when you spend so much time with your friends, when an open door policy is not only accepted but encouraged. Today, if someone tells me they’re stopping by “in thirty minutes” that gives me just enough time to clean frantically so that I can apologize for not cleaning. But in college, it’s all communal all the time. Friends are your family, your compass. There is no hiding anything in a college dorm room, and there’s not hiding much in a college apartment. You eat together, you study together, you go to class together, you go out together and look out for each other when you do. There are a thousand inside jokes that will last for decades. You stay out late, and sleep til noon.

I had, in some ways, two college experiences. One was at a fairly large state school in Pennsylvania, and the other at a small college in the West Midlands of England. In both cases, these are the people with whom my soul has been laid bare. It didn’t matter what we had in common at the beginning of it. In the end, we had each other in common, and I would go to the wall unquestioningly for these amazing people today, some whom I haven’t seen in years. It doesn’t matter. These are the people who can name seven of the Top 10 stupidest things I’ve ever done, and aren’t surprised by the other 3. They can cut to the heart of things in twenty seconds because they know me backward and forward, but will spend days driving around in New Mexico (hypothetically) letting the real conversation percolate if necessary, because it’s not quite time yet. I have a sheaf of letters from these friends, mostly from summers spent apart, that I keep tucked away like love letters, and that’s essentially what they are.

As an adult, 90% of my friends have been made in two categories. Work Friends and Mom Friends. And then one day, they’ve seamlessly become no-modifier-needed Friends.

Work Friends begin with a realization that we both find Peter in accounting to be a sycophant obstructionist, or because we realized we stayed at the same slightly shady hostel/hotel in Amsterdam in the late 90’s. Every life scenario has its own politics, and the work day is no different. We need to find our tribe to survive. And while most of the people we meet at work fade to LinkedIn contacts after we leave, every now and then we find an actual friend, someone with whom we share the details of our real lives, and meet for happy hour on the *weekend*, not just at 3pm on a Friday.

Mom Friends are symbiotically interwoven with grade school friends, but it takes a generation to understand exactly how it works. There are, certainly, children with whom my daughters are friends whose mothers I feel no real connection to. But these are the exception, because whether it’s fair or not, we nurture the friendships of those children whose parents we enjoy the most. I think this actually works out fine because whether you’re a proponent of nature or nurture, one or both of those is driving a chunk of childhood development. It’s better than betting odds that a good match kid probably means a good match mom. While our besties from other friend categories may also be going through many of the same career, relationship and parenthood trials, these are the new friends who are ON THE GROUND with us. They speak the language of parenthood AND our specific community. It starts with the person you spend 5 minutes with at school drop off, and then suddenly, this is also the got-your-back-when-the-babysitter-cancels friend who receives the no segue 9pm photo text of just a glass of wine. And totally gets it.

This accumulation of miraculous people, whether they be a handful or a legion, these are the people with whom life gets real once you’re, you know, adult-ish. There are divorces and pregnancies and losses, there are kids with issues we didn’t anticipate, there is cancer and job loss and bad investments. We thought we knew how to be supportive from those times in college when we sat up and ate ice cream and drank tequila with our friend who just realized her boyfriend wasn’t going to be the one. But we aren’t always prepared for what adult friendships ask of us. Sometimes we find the right words, the right gestures. Sometimes we’re a deer in headlights, wishing for a do-over of what we could have said and done in hindsight. But we learn from each of these life-just-got-real experiences so that we’re a better friend the next time.

Friendship becomes weightier as you get older, I think. Time, money and energy are all budgeted. Texts with a single heart emoji are code for, I’m thinking of you and wish we were having dinner somewhere laughing about the good old days and comparing notes on how to make it through Common Core math — seriously what *is* that stuff! — but know that my lack of communication has everything to do with the start of soccer season and strep throat and nothing to do with the fact that I am returning your last three texts with an emoji.

The spontaneity of showing up at someone’s dorm room has been replaced with happy hour planned 6 weeks out. The friends we once saw every day we now see once a month, or year, or decade. But it works, because it’s not about how often we see each other — it’s about how comfortably wonderful it is when we do.

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