Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

My family celebrates Valentine’s Day, but my husband and I don’t, especially. I have nothing against the commercialism of the holiday. I’m not here to remind anyone that it’s initially, historically, a story of martyrdom. I enjoy all the hearts and roses and bad couplets, and the good couplets. I like that it’s a reason for reminding ourselves of all the people we care about, as well as those we loved once, and the lessons we’ve learned through the process. I like that it’s an excuse for reading some of my favorite poets, and that lists appear of the best love songs, and heart break anthems.

When sometimes it seems like the world is a fractured place, I like being reminded that there’s a holiday about love, even when love is complicated and difficult, and that the reason Cupid exists is that basic humanity dictates the universal need not to go through life alone. We need family, friends, partners.

This year, Valentine’s Day is on a Sunday. On Wednesday night, my husband yelled from the family room to where I was working in the kitchen, “If I forget to tell you, happy Valentines Day!” And I know I bought a card a couple weeks ago. At least I’m pretty sure I did. I may have just looked at them. In any case, I looked in the top three places I would have tucked a card away, and I can’t find it.

I don’t know if my husband and I have ever shared a chocolate lava cake from a Valentine’s Day menu, but we’ve definitely, and repeatedly, shared a bottle of wine after a ridiculously long day that has had both of us running in different directions before coming home to a house that has dishes in the sink, Shopkins scattered in the living room and laundry unfolded in baskets lined up in front of the dryer.

A decade ago — a little more than a decade ago, I guess — I went to the gym most nights and then we went out for drinks. We slept in on weekends because we’d never gotten out of the habit of doing so. Now, we’ve added children and mortgages and crazy schedules to our lives. We’re part of a relay team that seemingly never stops running. His shift starts at 5am, and mine ends around midnight. Sometimes I think he could run his leg differently, and sometimes he thinks I could be more efficient if I just took this or that logical and friendly piece of advice, and sometimes we get tired and a little cranky. But at 9pm when we’re curled on the couch watching The Daily Show, mutually, wordlessly agreeing to ignore those laundry baskets for one more day, my weary sigh of contentment is a real-life sonnet.

I have a Target bag of holiday cuteness tucked away for the children, a circle of friends I love like family, and family who loves me for my best intentions and despite my flaws. And so while I am not anticipating a dozen roses, and my husband may not even get a card, I’m feeling the love this Valentine’s Day.

 

 

I was talking to a friend today who offered to commiserate over the caloric, resolution-bending hit of Girl Scout cookie season. “How do you manage with all of those cookies in your house?” she asked, since I had tried to peddle her some of those very wares. This is where I sometimes feel guilty, like I’ve turned in my membership card to a club I was once an officer for. “Well, this is my second cookie season off gluten, so it’s not so bad,” I said, feeling like a judgmental drug dealer whispering crack is whack under my breath while peddling powder. My friend literally gasped. “Not even Samoas?!” she said. “Nope,” I confirmed, “Not even Samoas.”

Honestly, I miss the easy comradery of gluten more than the gluten. It’s harder, or at least more isolating, to give up the sharing chocolate lava cake a la mode than it is to give up the actual cake. I’ve now been 14 months without gluten and about 10 without dairy or corn. Luckily at this point most people in my usual daily orbit already know, so there’s less awkward explaining. But people are often still surprised that I don’t have exceptions and loopholes. Part of this may be because people knew me before the idiopathic urticaria (hives) showed up for the first time a couple years ago, finally making me miserable enough to embrace some changes. And, for people who know me, it still seems out-of-character for me to be turning down cookies. To be fair, it still is out of character. If I didn’t feel so much better eating differently, I would definitely eat the Samoa(s)(s)(s).

I’m not sure it’s particularly healthy, but I work better on an all or nothing philosophy. If I gave myself exceptions and loopholes, I would live in the loophole. I know this about me. The holidays! (meaning October 20 – January 3, of course), loophole! Birthdays of close friends, family and that new guy at the office whose name definitely starts with a J. Barbeques! Tuesdays that ought to be Fridays! It would really never end, because I have no will power. That might seem like a weird thing coming from someone who has successfully avoided large, delicious food groups associated with happiness for more than a year. Isn’t that will power? I think no. This is where all or nothing comes in. Do you know someone who can eat one cookie? Because that seems like the set-up to a punchline to me. Or a personality trait of someone one miracle away from canonization. I may not be eating Girl Scout cookies but I had 6 dark chocolates the other day, because once the bag is open, literally and metaphorically, I can tell myself, Just one. Two, actually, is a serving. Now stop. Seriously, not one more. Well, if I have one more now, I won’t have another tonight. Or all day tomorrow. It evens out. Or… well, oops that’s six. That’s unfortunate. For the record, I feel a lot better when limiting sugar, too, but because I don’t have a zero tolerance policy, I’m almost always in exception mode. (When I was in zero tolerance for sugar, I treated grape tomatoes like sweet, delicious dessert. Now, I think of them as tomatoes. It’s perhaps ultimately less healthy, but allows me to respect myself again.)

Knowing yourself well enough to play to a crazed, high-maintenance alter-ego (or perhaps that’s just the id) can have advantages, though. When you know something in life is toxic, it seems like the most logical thing in the world to step away from that toxicity. And yet, that’s often the very hardest thing. One of the most important relationships of my young adulthood was completely toxic, and yet seemingly as necessary as air. That kind of relationship stunts growth in any other direction – personally, professionally – you’re so worn out to begin with that the only risk you’re up for taking is the one keeping you in this quagmire. It makes it hard to see clearly, decide rationally. It takes a no exceptions, no loopholes approach – if you’re me, anyway – to reclaim some of that wayward personal growth. No loopholes doesn’t mean no baggage, but it does create a pretty clear path.

I live with low grade anxiety that sometimes jumps into high anxiety, and I fight a tendency toward obsessive behavior. Everyone – I assume – wonders sometimes if they left the stove on, but at certain times in my life, I’ve been so controlled by a recurring thought pattern that I’m pretty much incapacitated inside, while going about my day within the complete façade of an extroverted wittiness-lite routine. Keep them laughing and no one will realize you’re dancing on the edge. I think this tendency to obsess rolls into the all or nothing. I read books a dozen times. I’m a sporadic (weather permitting) runner, and when I’m in running mode, it’s like I’m terrified to stop, to go to yoga one day, or try out that spin class. I just know that if I don’t run today, and then don’t go tomorrow, I may never run again. Spin class may ironically be the beginning of my slide into complete sloth. I missed that memo about doing what you can, where and when you can, and starting again tomorrow. I’m a perfectionist trapped inside a frenetic, disorganized mind.

Somehow, when I’ve chosen nothing of all or nothing, I’ve removed the struggle. Choosing a no loopholes approach means that I’ve moved from “I can’t” to “I just don’t.” There’s far less internal conflict in the latter, far less obsessing. Part of me, maybe a big part of me, wishes I could be a one cookie kind of girl. Moderation sounds perfectly logical. But perfectly logical is one thing I am not. And so I will continue eschewing gluten while devouring chocolate, and talking about yoga while I lace up my running shoes (snowmelt permitting, so let’s say about April). It seems to be working more than it’s not, which is my general litmus test these days.

And in the meantime, I’m going to assume that Samoas aren’t nearly as good as I remember, anyway.

This time next week, I’ll have an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old. Certain ages have more significance than others. Five is a full hand. Ten is double digits. Golden birthdays. Traditionally, eight and nine probably don’t have as much intrinsic cultural meaning, but somehow I feel like I’m losing my little girls with this birthday. Seven rounds down to five. Eight rounds up to ten. After ten, we’ll blink and start doing college tours, which I’m definitely not ready for. It’s like that scene in When Harry Met Sally when Sally realizes she’s going to be 40. “In eight years,” Harry says. Sally sniffles and blows her nose. “But it’s there.”

And it is. It’s there. Eight rounds up to ten, and ten rounds up to that semester abroad and that summer internship across the country when they come back with their first tattoo and a boyfriend who will break their heart. So… okay, I may be projecting there. But the point stands. Even as I consider going out into the cold and snow to top-off my half-full gas tank, just to have ten minutes alone in my car, I understand that the constant cacophony of these early years is already waning. As two children fight through dinner to tell first and most about their days, I realize that in a few years, I likely won’t be their first confidant. Already my older daughter’s bedroom door is closed as often as it’s open. But dear lord is life still loud right now. My brother, when I mentioned that I was maybe going to create a fortress of solitude in the below-freezing temps of the garage, replied that he was reading. Alone. In a quiet room. Perhaps the friendly fray of siblings never really ends; we just get better at it.

In the ten years since we discovered we were going to be parents, life has changed, clearly. We knew it would. We weren’t totally delusional. But we’ll still be us. Just with a baby. And we are. But we’re an altered us. I’m a different me. It’s been said that having a child is having your heart walking around outside your body, which is absolutely true. It’s dizzyingly terrifying and sometimes suddenly emotional, like that Folgers homecoming commercial in the middle of a string of volume-heavy Audi performance and Ford truck spots. Out of the blue, your ears are still ringing, but you’re a little teary, nostalgic and full of wonder and fearful hope. There’s nothing like that sense of momentary clarity. But parenting is also having your brain so full of chatter, playdates and Sign-up Genius requests that you wake up in the middle of the night paralyzed physically by half-sleep, but mind racing, full of things that will be just out of reach in the morning.

Beyond timely responses to Sign-up Genius requests, there are a lot of things I could do much better as a parent. I’m not big on playing. I will watch the dance, listen to the original song, clap and heap praise. We can bake together and read together. But I have no idea what to make the Shopkins do, and I don’t really want to figure it out. I’ll have a dance party in the kitchen, and look up facts about dinosaurs and the cosmos, but I honestly stopped listening half way through the made-up rules of the elaborate card game created with a combined Uno and Old Maid deck. I stopped supervising teeth brushing several years ago and now I only intervene when it sounds like, during the relaxing goodnight rituals, someone might be drawing blood. Also, I buy chocolate chips that I say are only for baking, but which I then finish off before a single cookie is made. I have room for improvement.

As babies, parenting about a basic Maslow’s hierarchy. You’re pretty much winning when your child is fed and clothed. More points if that food was freshly pureed vegetables, a standard I never achieved, and the clothing relatively clean. As the parent, we likely look like the picture of Dorian Gray, at least for a few years. My children are growing up – eight and nine, I think I mentioned in distress, rounding up to double digits, both – and I love that they can dress themselves and stir up some morning pancake batter and clean bathrooms, but it’s also more complicated now. Instead of despairing over a hard-to-fit puzzle piece, my daughter is upset because she isn’t mastering a complicated series of steps in her dance class. Tears of basic frustration and anger we had a grasp on. I could fix the farmyard animal puzzle, rezip the jacket or find the missing shoe. But these new tears of doubt and apprehension and the mental battle between the emotional and the rational? Well, crap. Deep breath. I told the story about how I’d had a difficult time sometimes in my own childhood dance classes. Scissor step, kick, ball change. I said that the semester was just starting. I said we’d take a video of the offending step combination for full reference. Then I made an ice cream sundae, which was accepted with a monotone, “Thanks.” So, I not only didn’t help, but I taught my daughter to use food as a remedy. The dessert panacea. Stand up job. And this is just a segue before teenage relationships and pre-calculus.

Our children are a mix of the good and the bad traits they inherit from us. Our genes, our habits, nurture, nature. And they’re completely their own. They talk back and refuse on principle, and they love and they trust. They’re amazing really. They’re incredibly brave. Changing schools, stitches, friendships and long division. Childhood is not for the faint of heart. Nor is parenting. Except we don’t realize the full impact of that right away. Much like we realize that having children will be like lighting our disposable income on fire, and yet aren’t completely prepared for the bonfire, we aren’t completely prepared for our own vulnerability. Things we can’t fix, shouldn’t fix, and desperately want to fix. The older my children get, the more failures fill my list.

So, we ante up and throw into the pot sleepless nights, freezing soccer games and $12 squares of fundraiser wrapping paper, dance lessons and family vacations, and we hope we get it more right than wrong. If faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase, sometimes parenting feels like the staircase of, say, a Chichen Itza. Tiny steps, straight up to a top you can’t quite see, but with a lot of other people on the same climb, even more who have reached the top.

And then there’s the view.

 

We live three minutes from our elementary school. At most. If I wasn’t already in the car to go to work myself, there would be no excuse for driving, except maybe “winter” (because, ick). Our goal is to leave the house at 8:20, giving the girls a chance to find their friends in the morning and take a deep breath before the day begins. If we leave by 8:30, we can still probably make it, sometimes before the early bell, but definitely before the late bell. Especially if I’m willing to run back home after the bell has rung and grab my youngest’s glasses, my oldest’s lunch… (knock on wood, it’s been a little while).

At 8:35 every morning, Monday through Friday, an amazing thing happens. Somehow, 650 children arrive at our neighborhood elementary school. A line of cars, meticulously guided by school staff, weave in a one-way circle through the school parking lot. There’s not even so much a kiss-and-go policy, but an efficient stop-and-roll. Stop the car, kids roll out. Blow a kiss, call a few reminders behind them, and move out.

I feel a sense of solidarity when I leave the car loop. Every parent making that same right hand (only) turn has, in broad strokes, lived the same morning I have. There were teeth to be brushed, hairbrushes to be found, shoes to be paired. Is it gym this week (sneakers required) or is it art and cowboy boots? Who wants a cheeseburger today? Anyone, anyone? Yeah. I don’t blame you. We’re late! Let’s go! Everyone – even those timely children – are part of the common experience of, you know, mornings.

And so I leave the parking lot feeling at one with my fellow parents. And yet, at some point throughout the day, the morning, even just my drive, this feeling begins to dissipate. Just a bit… what are you waiting for that green light to issue you a personal invitation? And maybe there’s a little fissure in the foundation of good will as I get to work and pass the empty desk, again, of that one co-worker who has somehow managed to work from home for various vague reasons for a year. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wearing leggings every day, and doing laundry on a whim at noon on a Thursday? Deep breath. Seriously, we’re out of tea again? I show up, in person, every day! I deserve free tea!

I don’t think of myself as a particularly angry person. I follow multiple yoga practices on Instagram! I love sunsets! And musical comedies! And yet, the fact remains that by the time I get home, 9 hours after the comradery of car loop, I’m tired. I burned myself, just slightly, on the oven rack. Did we seriously eat the Girl Scout meeting snack? How do I possibly owe the school library $18 for your lost book? Have you even looked? If I look and I find it, I swear you’ll owe me $18. And… now I’m standing in the tidal wave of stagnant water from emptying the dishes “pre-soaking” in the kitchen sink. And I need to change my shirt. Little things. Little. And yet.

There’s no shortage of anger. Lately? Always? Maybe it’s not particularly new, but it feels palpable of late. Whenever I turn on the tv, scan breaking news, or god forbid read the comments section of anything, anything at all. An article on Top Rated Children’s Games? Is everyone ready for an online brawl about screen time, childhood responsibilities, the comfortable malignment of Millennials and whether preschool should be free? Okay. So… that’s a no on Just Dance Revolution, then?

Because in the past decade, my empathy gene is routinely refreshed by Disney and Pixar movies, I defer to Inside Out to try to understand this. Anger is a red brick whose head bursts into flame when he gets truly steamed. Been there, buddy. But at the heart of it, Anger – per Pixar – is about fairness, or rather the lack of it.

We get angry because our expectations aren’t met. We had a plan, even if we weren’t consciously aware of it, and the plan fell apart. I planned to get out of the house on time (no one said our expectations had to be realistic or reasonable). I had a plan to leave work five minutes early, to get home in 15-18 minutes tops, and now 23 minutes later (yes, my commute is super short; I should never be angry), I’m cutting it really close to being late to the next thing. We expected to be recognized at work, at home. We expected a friend to stand by us, a marriage to last. Whatever it is, for each of us, all of us, it boils down to, I expected, in this moment, for my life to be different. Easier, happier, fuller, less covered in dishwater… different.

The thing about anger is that it’s a creepy lurker. We’re not always aware that it’s there, but we get a weird feeling that pricks between our shoulder blades when we’re otherwise calm. Then out of nowhere, it’s bursting out from behind the bushes. You again?!, we think. Or we don’t think at all, because anger’s like that. We often don’t talk about anger until we’re apologizing for it. Or we’re holding on to it because, damn it, life didn’t work out how we planned and if there’s nothing else to control, it’s going to be this, this moment, this argument, this round of a 12-round fight.

The United States seems to be mid-match right now, hanging on to the round like there might not be another. There’s an acrimonious brawl that’s spilling into our perceptions of who we are as a people, as a nation. Disagreement isn’t the issue. Disagreement keeps a person, a country, from thinking too much on the surface, from stagnating in status quo. But the rhetoric filling the airwaves is divisive and alienating. Debate is good, but it has to start from, end in, a place of dialogue. Guess what? Compromise doesn’t mean that everyone wins. Often, it means everyone loses. That’s not a disaster. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the point. Each side concedes a loss in order to move forward. Does the thought of that, of concession, make your blood boil, just in theory? Because it does mine, a little. But, but… why should I bend? I’m not the one who’s so clearly in the wrong here.

Are we a mirror of our political process, or does it mirror us? It’s certainly hypocritical of me to admit to my own hair-trigger volatility and then judge the anger of others. We tend to judge our own anger as righteous, a moral high ground on the right side of history, whether it’s our own small dramas, or the national or global stage. We see their anger as – at best – maybe ignorant. The cycle continues, grows deeper. Now, it’s not just unwitting collusion; it’s contemptible. Abhorrent. Us, them. Other. And that works for us, because it’s a lot easier to judge, and dismiss, someone when you’ve drawn a clear line between us and them.

From the Oracle of childhood, who should be required reading for adulating:

Then the North-Going Zax puffed his chest up with pride.
“I never,” he said, “take a step to one side.
And I’ll prove to you that I won’t change my ways
If I have to keep standing here fifty-nine days!”
“And I’ll prove to YOU,” yelled the South-Going Zax,
“That I can stand here in the prairie of Prax
For fifty-nine years!  For I live by a rule
That I learned as a boy back in South-Going School.
Never budge!  That’s my rule.  Never budge in the least!
Not an inch to the west!  Not an inch to the east!
I’ll stay here, not budging!  I can and I will
If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”
~ Dr. Seuss: The Zax

It’s a malicious malcontent that makes us choose anger over reason. We’re better than that. We’re better than the nativist, xenophobic rhetoric that has begun to define this political cycle. As a country, we have expectations that aren’t being met. They’re different for everyone, and sometimes diametrically opposed. I’m pretty solidly sure in my convictions, but I can recognize that makes them right for me, not right for everyone. I haven’t lived my whole life yet. Who knows what sum total of experiences will shape me going forward, or have shaped others in their past… shaped me in my past. But for as many reasons, and more, as there are citizens, we’re disappointed. In our politics, our global image, our direction, each other. We’re angry. That’s not the problem. Anger can be an impetus for transformation. But when was the last time you made a really great decision in your life when you had flames coming out of your head?  I’m going to be honest. I’ve burned bridges, I’ve said things I can never take back, and I’ve felt righteously, indignantly RIGHT. Sometimes, looking back, I’m still sure I was right. Sometimes I’m sure I was wrong. Sometimes I’m just sorry no one called for time out. The problem with anger is that it’s not reliable.

My daughter is an active volcano, not necessarily erupting, but there’s a lot of seismic activity going on under the surface. You can’t rule an eruption out, but you don’t know when it will be or what might cause it. In the meantime, you just live your life, and then… the ground rumbles. When my daughter gets upset she will, occasionally, run upstairs or outside, “I just need to calm down!” she’ll yell. Sometimes she’ll repeat the process several times. Sometimes she’ll give up and just go to bed. Sometimes there’s lava and we all get burned. I empathize because I’m more volcano than lake myself. But even at 7, she knows that the solution, even when it feels elusive, is to take it down a level.

Robert Frost wrote, Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.

Anger is fire and ice. It’s fear and it’s disillusion. It’s disappointed expectations and a sense that we didn’t get ours, large and small, and there’d better be someone to blame because it’s just not fair. Truth. But as my daughter told me when she calmed down recently, Angry is just part of life. It really is. And since it is, we’ve got to learn to channel it. To march ourselves to our bedrooms until we’re able to speak rationally, and then figure out why we’re so ticked off and what we’re – reasonably, realistically, responsibility – going to do about it. Because we can all do better.

 

You know that cartoon of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy; he’s trying to get his mother’s attention as she’s laying down, pretty much comatose from parenthood, “Mom, Mom, Mama, Mum, Mommy…” and when she finally responds, Stewie says, ….wait for it…. “Hi.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

One of my friends is traveling on business a lot lately, and her day job is not completely ideal. “As long as you get to go back to the hotel, turn the tv to whatever channel you want and eat food from a take-out container balanced on your stomach, completely alone,” I said. “Well, that’s pretty much my every day, anyway,” she replied. Well… huh. While she is, in fact, both younger than me and living my fantasy, I still really like her.

I’m not saying I don’t have a pretty great life. Because I do. I’m not wishing it away. And I’m not projecting that everyone who gets to control their own remote control must love it (or hate it, or even anything in between). Clearly, that’s a gross simplification of my own fantasy. Let’s say daydream. Occasional daydream.

But… Sunday morning. I’m meal planning for the week, recipe hunting and pantry assessing, still in my pajamas. “I don’t want to leave the house today,” I say. “I don’t want to get dressed.” “By the time your list is done, you will,” my husband predicts. I pull my warm coffee mug closer, and wish I remembered, ever, to actually put on the cozy bathrobe that hangs in my closet. Winter weekend mornings really bring out the hermit in me.

My youngest is talking. Talking. Talking. She’s drawing characters that she’s pulling out of her head, and then drawing their corresponding houses. It’s cute. Creative. My husband turns on a Sunday morning news magazine. I visit the recipe sections of reliable food bloggers. Healthy Kung Pao Chicken, only 8 ingredients. Sold. Chicken burrito bowl casserole. Cheaper than Qdoba, for sure. Oooh. Chai hot chocolate. Not exactly dinner, but … cardamon, allspice, ginger… Did I use the last of the ground cloves for gingerbread at Christmas? Speaking of spices, I think I definitely used the last of the sage for Thanksgiving stuffing. I should put that on the grocery list. I only use it once a year, so it’s rarely top of mind.

“Mommy, how do you spell Mimi? Do you like how I’m drawing her feathers? Mommy, do you want to draw something?” My husband is putting away dishes and re-loading the dishwasher. To be clear, I’m appreciative of this. It’s just so loud. Clatter. Clink. Porcelain against porcelain. Silverware against glass. “Can I paint my nails? I want to paint them blue like the sky and then draw grass. If I have room I’ll put a sun.”  A screech of a fork across a plate and the whirl and hum of the garbage disposal. “Mama, do you think my nails are dry enough to paint the grass? Can you touch this one to see if it’s dry?” I’m moving canned goods around in the cupboard. Black beans, garbanzo beans, Great Northern beans, kidney beans, lentils… no pinto beans? Really? Aren’t kidney beans and pinto beans the same, anyway? Like garbanzo beans and chickpeas? “Mom, the yellow spilled!”

In my heart, I know that these are days, moments that will never come again. I know that in the – hopefully – 60-ish years I share with my children, these first 18 will be a blink of an eye. For my oldest, we’re already at the half-way point of that first sprint. And because things happen that we don’t anticipate, I can’t count on the final 40 years to make up for time lost in the first 18. I know that so many people – Erma Bombeck to Dolly Parton, John Lennon to Sheryl Sandberg – are attributed brilliant quotes about getting the balance of our lives properly adjusted. Love more. Work less. Be present. And yet … I just need a little quiet. I just need a little peace. A little time alone.

Over the weekend, the night was growing late. We do a really poor job of policing bedtimes during long weekends and vacations. Oh, you don’t have school for four days? Well, then… let’s do whatever we can to make sure your circadian rhythms match those of a native Icelander during the days of midnight sun. What could go wrong?

I retreated to my bedroom with a book about navigating our messy, beautiful lives. Four minutes went by. “Mommy, there you are. I’ll sit with you.” And my youngest settled in with me, writing a journal entry on her Chrome book. “Mommy, if I say, tomorrow, too, is that ‘to’ or ‘too’?” (I appreciate that she knows there’s a difference.) “How do I spell painting?” Gritted smile. P-a-i-n-t… Navigating. Messy. Beautiful. Life. Deep breath. And then… “Do you want to read my journal?”

(journal excerpt, edited for spelling)

“Me and my family painted the wall well my daddy did most of the work in the painting project and it was so much fun to do with my family. I had a great day with everyone and I am starting to feel it was the best day in the world or even in the galaxy so I am hoping tomorrow will be too and I hope that’s the same for all of you around the world.”

Heart, full. Guilt, rising. Oh, right… Not just noise. Not just buzzing inside my crowded brain that, lately, more than occasionally can’t think of simple words or what I meant to do next. “That’s beautiful,” I told my daughter, sincerely, as she scooted off the bed.

“Will you be okay now?” she asked. “I just didn’t want you to have to be alone,” she said. Her default decibel is loud and constant, but her heart is incredibly sweet.

My reality is pretty wonderful. I recognize it, and I’m mostly very grateful. Alone is still my daydream. Deafening silence still sounds beautiful in the hypothetical. We’re in a constant state of doing it seems. Weekends come and go before we really settle into them, and then the week is off and running and we never had a chance to truly shake off the week before. I could try getting up 20 minutes early, try meditating. I could finally go to yoga like I keep saying I will. But mostly, I’ll probably walk around with my jaw slightly clenched until I realize that I have a headache almost all the time. I keep searching for a magic island of peace and quiet and I forget that the noisy, rambunctious love surrounding me is also pretty amazing. Sometimes overwhelming, often stressful, but amazing.

I may spend more time than I used to staring blankly into space, trying to remember the word that was on the tip of my tongue a minute ago. This is normal, I’ve read. And not (necessarily) a sign of early onset Alzheimer’s or a tumor. It may take me exponentially more time to read any book, pausing three times per page to spell things, locate lost toys, and sharpen pencils. And sometimes I may spend double the time necessary in our bathroom, getting ready, dawdling, trusting in the only closed door in our house that is given a margin of respect.

But from what often seems like chaos, two remarkable, miraculous children are growing up, and I’m – still, constantly – growing up with them. I may never quite have it together. In the new year, I meant to start planning work outfits the night before. Save time. Look professional. Get to school and work before the buzzer. I wore a dress one day and everyone, from my family to my coworkers, commented. So, okay. Pulled together is still an anomaly. But… at some point along the way, I became adult enough to own all five spices required for homemade chai hot chocolate. So, even if quiet is hard to come by, bedtimes are missed and I never make it to yoga, I’m giving myself a little credit.

 

One of my favorite people in the world was recently dealt a bad hand and is navigating the end of a relationship. Unless you’re one of those high school sweetheart couples who has been happily married for 40 years, we’ve all been there. And it sucks. Anger, depression, finally acceptance with maybe a side of personal empowerment, or maybe a few scars… or both.

It’s the reason for literature, for music, for the arts in general. I can remember laying on my living room floor in the middle of the night, listening to Evanescence and crying while my dog lay beside me, worried, but a rock. Looking back, it seems a little melodramatic. But at the time, it was a purge of everything broken. Most of us have been there, and like childbirth or a homeward bound flight long-delayed on the runway, we know it’s only eternal misery until it’s done. I’m grateful for other people’s stories, other people’s words and lyrics. It makes us feel better about muddling through our own chaos. We embrace them because it reminds us that we’re not alone in trying to make sense of it all.

Love is a tough game. We’re brought up on fairy tales – further compounded by Disney versions, rather than Brothers Grimm – and then we’re supposed to somehow navigate the real world with only the knowledge that true love conquers evil, dragons, even death.

And then it doesn’t. Then it fails. Or we fail. Or someone fails us. And we realize that Disney didn’t prepare us for this. We know we’re supposed to end up with a happily-ever-after, but we still stood there, eating the stupid apple in the first place.

In high school, my first love was my best friend. I’d recommend it, as an introduction to love and loss. At the time, it was dramatic, a roller coaster of highs and lows. Many tears were shed. My grandmother once called him a rat, which was undeserved, but appreciated at the time. But fast forward a few years, and I was a very happy bridesmaid, and now it’s all warm nostalgia. In college, I went to England and met a boy who was woven completely into the magical experience of being abroad. He was smart, and sarcastic and a little bit punk and a little bit sweet, and there was no one there who knew me to tell me that he wasn’t my type. But it’s hard to love across an ocean, and it slid into warm nostalgia, as well. He sent my oldest daughter a teddy bear for her first birthday. She loved it above all her other stuffed animals until we left it in a hotel room in Illinois and learned the valuable parenting lesson of never letting a first lieutenant of the toy world leave the house.

It’s hard that we learn so much more in retrospect than in the moment. Possibly the most formative relationship of my young life was the one that wasn’t. I was Eponine, Jay Gatsby, Katniss’s Gale. It was the age of Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Imbruglia, and they served me well, as did my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christina Rosetti. Promise me no promises / So will I not promise you / Keep we both our liberties / Never false and never true.

Out of that wasteland, I rebounded into my first marriage. Someone damn well wants me; just watch me walk. It’s funny, because in the end, that’s not actually the best reason to get married. And it turned out that in my haste to prove something to myself, I’d chosen very poorly. Don’t get married at 22. Unless you’re that high school sweetheart couple who is going to be married 40 years. Then you might as well get started. But at 22, don’t marry a slick con artist 7 years your senior. I feel like that’s advice you can take to the bank. You’re welcome.

And so, there I was. 23, bruised and humbled, already tumbled out of a first marriage, and really none the wiser about love for it. When you’re an English major, you have a lot of expectations. Elizabeth and Darcy, Rhett and Scarlett, The Thorn Birds, Anna Karenina, Pablo Nerudo’s sonnets. Wuthering Heights is an awful book full of selfish, horrible characters. But I’ve read it multiple times, because in the end, if love is a tragedy, that is its zenith.

Luckily, way leads on to way. Fairy tales end as soon as the real story is about to begin, and in both Russian literature and Shakespeare, a lot of people end up dying. There’s middle ground to be found. We live, we learn, we figure a few things out. Love is still highs and lows, even when you’ve found your match. Some days you can’t believe you could be so lucky, you dance in the kitchen and hum in the shower, and some nights you lay in bed, your partner’s warm breath blowing against your shoulder and you think there would be nothing like a solitary desert island.

And I realize, that maybe I have less angst these days, but I still really enjoy belting out broken heart anthems alone in my car, because we’ve all been there. And even when we’ve found our person, it’s not all roses. And that it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect one person to be your everything.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that the love we need is a fairly complicated Ven diagram. It’s the person we’re hopefully lucky enough to find as a partner; that person who knew going in that it wasn’t going to be all minty breath and candlelit dinners, but signed on anyway. At some point my husband realized that I was never going to organize the thousand tubes of product and make-up and lotion in our bathroom, but that I would flip out if the forks were misplaced within the silverware drawer. And he’s at peace with that. I think. But with no disrespect to my husband, it seems one-dimensional not to embrace how much additional support, other love, we accumulate in a lifetime. It’s the friends who were there to see the initial heartbreaks. They know what we looked like when we were finding comfort at the bottom of a pint of ice cream, or forgetting with too many tequila shots. They listened to the same stories over and over and didn’t walk away. They didn’t say, “You’re right,” but they said, “I know.” And they did. It’s the family we were born to, and the family we create along the way. It’s the first five people you text with big news, good or bad, and the person you haven’t seen a decade, but who you still plan to share porch rockers with when you’re old enough to sit and remember all about when you were too young to know better.

And so we’re a mosaic of different experiences, memories, lessons and scars. It’s kind of amazing when we find the people who will not only accept all of that, but embrace it. And when someone we love is going through a valley, we know, we get it, because we’ve been there. But I’ve got to believe that every time we are failed, or we fail, we’re therefore a step closer to our share of the answers; we’re closer to getting through to the other side.

I mentioned in the last blog that Christmas break involved the 1980’s Anne of Green Gables movies. Anne would have definitely spent some time listening to late night girl anthems, had she been born a century later. She had an artist’s soul. “You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that,” Marilla says in Anne of the Island, when Anne is convinced that she wants a tall, dark and handsome stranger who could be wicked, but wouldn’t. Fictional Anne may or may not have read of Mr. Darcy. But we all stumble over our archetypes now and then, and forget to appreciate that we’re still incrementally learning, whether it’s the ebb and flow of our own love story, or the friendships that saw us through when our love stories fell apart.

I’m still a sucker for a heartbreak anthem, and for Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. But what Jane Austen was really selling was the search for a happy ending. Right after Christmas, the girls and I got the stomach bug. The girls first, and then, two days later, me. I was supposed to be taking our youngest to a daily basketball camp each morning, but about an hour before, on the first day, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be leaving the house, maybe ever again. You forget how sick you feel when you’re sick. I called my husband at work, and he was home in 45 minutes, when work is 30 minutes away.

“Are you going back to work after you bring her home?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Someone needs to take care of you.”

And there it is. A modern fairy tale.

There is a Rilke quote that I’ve long liked, “Now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” It captures that wonderful blank slatedness of the new year, the limitless tomorrow, fresh with no mistakes in it (my eldest and I have been watching the classic late 80’s Anne of Green Gables movies over break, so that last phrase is particularly appropriate right now). As a writer, blank pages are close to my heart. As a human, fresh starts are vital. It’s no wonder that the world celebrates as the calendar rolls. On the list of common human experience, New Years, and the need for it, comes in close to the top.

Some years I’ve made resolutions. Big resolutions. Small resolutions. Public resolutions because accountability is key. Secret resolutions because sometimes a resolution is bigger and more daunting, more a heart’s wish than words. The thing about change, though, big change, is that it only happens when there’s something deep inside of us that opens for it. It’s a visceral internal shift, a raw, hollowed out rock bottom, or a quiet click of acceptance, but there’s no forcing it. When it really matters, it takes more than will power and more than 21 days of routine. If we want to floss daily, a New Years resolution is perfect for that, but I’ve found personally that my internal epiphanies rarely align with the Gregorian calendar.

In 2015, I came as close to a lifestyle shift as I ever have. I ate more food with fewer, or even better, single, ingredients. I have eaten more squash in more forms than I ever have before, and my go-to restaurant order has become grilled chicken or salmon salad. I have no regrets when I don’t eat the office doughnuts or the soccer practice cupcakes or the buttery garlic breadsticks. Actually, that’s a lie about the breadsticks. But true about the others. And I feel better for the squash and the zoodles and the almond butter and coconut milk. I recognize and appreciate that I don’t automatically feel the need to shove a child strategically in front of me in photos, or crop out half my arm. I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I have been in years and it feels good. And yet…

Just as they say that money doesn’t buy happiness (though, let’s all agree that that’s a theory each of us should have a chance to test), neither does being able to slip on your pre-marriage, pre-baby jeans buy sudden Zen. It turns out, if you eat a lot more squash, you’ll be able to flip out about your spring schedule, or your post-Christmas finances or your husband suggesting buying Star Wars tickets in the handicap row (where we’d look like jerks the entire time?!), while wearing jeans from 2004 (flares are back!)… but just as stubbornly, irrationally and temperamentally as before.

The new year will be full of things that have never been… and full of things that have been time and time and time again. I’m finally going to go to that barre class that I bought that Groupon for five months ago. I can walk there, so there’s really no excuse. And I’m going to take nine 8-year-old Brownies to an overnight at the Downtown Aquarium, enjoying some of my favorite other-mothers while we sleep with the sharks and stingrays. There are vacations to plan and projects to tackle. New year electricity is crackling like a siren’s call. And yet… in this brand new year, my mind will go slightly numb while my ears buzz with the daily non-stop chatter of my youngest, and I’m going to get home and realize that, once again, everything we might have had for dinner is still frozen. I’m going to listen to my daughter read, painstaking word by word, the lessons of the Berenstein Bears, while I secretly let my mind wander back to that thing at work, and forward to the moment when I can collapse into a book of my own. And then I’ll suddenly realize that these were the days, my friend, as I let them slip by with ill-concealed impatience, and I’ll promise to do better, to be more present. And then I’ll forget.  

This year, with that blank page waiting, I’m looking forward to the new year, but I don’t have any named resolutions. 2016 is beginning with the first above-freezing weather in a couple of weeks, and the Beck household has recovered from a round of post-Christmas stomach bug. The world does indeed seem fresh and new. There’s just something about New Years. This year I’d like to make more good decisions than bad. And remember to tell my husband that I appreciate him. And I’d really like to lose fewer arguments to the cat. Although anyone who has met the cat knows how unlikely that is.

Happy New Year, my friends. Breathe deep.

Are you familiar with Stars Hollow, Connecticut? It’s a quaint little borough with a town square with a gazebo, flanked by a diner, an ice cream shoppe, a music store, a bookstore. It’s the kind of place where there are town meetings, and everyone attends. And it’s fictional. The stuff of sound stages and quippy scripts. But that’s never been the point for me (though who doesn’t love a little witty banter in their prime time viewing). Stars Hollow is my runaway destination. It’s where small business is the rule rather than the exception. It’s where my bookstore-tea house-stationery shop would thrive, within sight of the gazebo where I’d eat lunch. It’s where a mother and daughter can live entirely off of take-out — Chinese food, pizza and danishes — and remain thin, porcelain-skinned and energized.

Just like Lorelei and Rory Gilmore, my family has lived off mostly take-out this week. It’s just been one of those weeks. Some weeks I have dinner in the crockpot, leftovers packed up for lunches, and non-frozen chicken in the fridge. This was not that week. Tonight, to step up my game, I brought home a rotisserie chicken and I felt like Betty Crocker. Not a paper wrapper or plastic fork in sight. To get the rotisserie chicken, I had to go just a couple of traffic lights out of my way. Traffic lights that, at 5:30pm on the Friday before Christmas, were basically like running a race that ended uphill. Double lane left turners, terrified that they might miss their light, ended up in the middle of the intersection while my light came …. and went. Tail lights upon tail lights. This would never happen in Stars Hollow. For one thing, I don’t think they even have a double left turn lane.

This week, I missed a meeting of some note at work. It was a snow day for the girls, 10 inches on the ground. They had predicted 1-3″! I stressed. I sent off a flurry of texts because I’d left my computer at the office, knowing that no matter what, I had to be in. I protested, with pithy passive-aggressive asides, that the assumption that I would, of course, stay home, even with my calendar pinging, is the very reason that I’m making 76¢ on the dollar. I missed the meeting; they pulled in someone else whose college-age child and four-wheel drive were unaffected by the snow. The next day I was asked if I had “gotten my children sorted out.” And I realized, that yes. Yes, I had. They’d slept in, woken to the news of a snow day, which is pretty much the best thing ever when you’re a child, and then watched movies in front of a fire. They were completed sorted.

The next day, I left work early to go to my daughter’s in-school music concert. “Are you going to be there? For sure?” she asked. And I was. And I remembered that sometimes you’re replaceable, and sometimes you’re not.

Sometimes we eat take-out with plastic forks. But for the most part, we do it together, which is more to the point. Sometimes we get home at 8pm and then do homework in the morning as we eat frozen waffles. But I buy real maple syrup. Win some, lose some.

A lot of the time, I feel like I’m nearly on top of things. So, so close. I filled out the field trip permission form, except it was double-sided. Got the very specifically requested cereal! But the milk’s expired. Remembered to sign the kids up for morning child care so I could make the meeting on time, except — snow day. So close. But tonight, after we ate rotisserie chicken and grocery store California rolls — because who could have one without the other — we all watched a movie, and now the girls and I are officially on Christmas vacation. So, the fact that we haven’t made Christmas cookies yet, or that I have yet to start shopping for my husband, or that I haven’t run in nearly two weeks… well, we’ll get to it. The important things got done. Daughter’s ballet recital, check. Music concert, check. Family dinner, regardless of utensils used, check.

So maybe I don’t actually need Stars Hollow to be real… although at some point, a few years from now, I’d like to visit again with my own daughters, and hope they love it, too. But I do need to remember that successful adulting is less about a week’s worth of organized, pre-planned dinners, and more about always showing up when you’re irreplaceable, which was really the best part about Stars Hollow, anyway, and it was   by far the best part of “one of those weeks.”

Where you lead, I will follow. Anywhere that you tell me to. If you need me to be with you, I will follow, where you lead.

I don’t love winter but for as long as I can remember I’ve loved the winter sky for the constellation Orion. A warm summer night is full of crickets and fireflies and maybe the smell of trampled mint or roses or lingering barbeque. The air is thick and heavy and you feel solid and terrestrial in all the best ways. On a clear winter night, the quiet feels infinite, the air is sharp in our lungs and the sky above is darkly endless, the stars immeasurable and somehow brighter. And Orion is there, a celestial sentinel, guarding the millions, the billions, under his purview. I know that, factually, those stars are millions of miles apart. That their light is hundreds of years old. That even Orion’s story is not so much planetary protector as it is mythological predator. But for whatever reason, Orion on a cold winter night makes me feel wonderfully small, and insignificant, and protected, and connected to the universe in an elemental way.

When I was a child, I can remember riding to dance class, back roads of rural Ohio, with Orion riding shotgun outside the passenger window. My father took me to dance class, all those winter nights, and waited in the drab anteroom with the other parents, all the while knowing that I would never know a kick ball change from a scissor step. Now, on Tuesdays, my husband takes our daughter to dance class, where he waits through lyrical, brings dinner, then waits through ballet. It’s comforting, that routine. Even beyond the generational continuity, we’re one of millions of little stories going on under the winter sky, and it’s reassuring to know that across the world we’re all taking our daughters (or sons) to dance class, like our parents did before us.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything. I haven’t been able to think of five words to link together lately. I’ve been bowed by the world events that keep beating the positivity out of the holiday season. As I’ve mentioned before, I have no personal connection to these tragedies, beyond a human one, and that makes me feel a bit self-conscious in my gloom. How histrionic am I to feel like I have a share of the grief of those who have lost everything? And yet that’s the point. It’s a human story, and it feels like we’re getting it wrong lately. The grief should be universal, shouldn’t it? Collective heartache for an uneasy world.

My 9-year-old daughter recently had to write a short essay on connecting unrelated ideas. She choose to connect the plot of Once Upon a Time to “all the shootings lately,” because she saw both as a fight between good and evil. I was proud of her perception, but also distressed that this is her childhood. I can remember in college once, a professor asked us if we believed in evil. Evil sounded so melodramatic. We were uncomfortable with it. Growing up post-Cold War, good versus evil was comic book fodder. Columbine happened while I was in college, a year or so after that discussion, and 9/11 directly after college, but they didn’t inform my childhood. After the San Bernadino shootings, there were several articles I saw about explaining tragic events to children. And yet, with the news coverage on in the background, my children asked no questions. Only a year or two ago, I wouldn’t have had it on while they were around, but by now they already know why they do lockdown drills at school. I turned it off because I couldn’t handle any more, but when I asked if they had any questions, they said no. And there’s the additional tragedy.

My children fight every single night while they brush their teeth. Every single night. Over toothpaste, over the prime spot in front of the sink, whose turn it is to shower first … in the morning. Ten hours later. Suggesting that they take turns – and by suggesting I mean yelling up the stairs, “ONE. Just ONE of you in the bathroom at a time, or I swear there will be no quiet time and it will be lights out immediately!” – doesn’t seem to matter. They’re willing to risk the consequences to get one more verbal, or sneaky physical, jab in. They’re fighting. I’m yelling at them to stop yelling. And then I eat seven cherry cordial Hershey’s kisses and promise, loudly, that everyone is going to bed an hour early tomorrow, because if we’re fighting about who dropped the toothpaste cap, clearly no one in this house is getting enough sleep. Also, what does it matter? No one was going to put it back on the tube, anyway.

And yet, they also remind me to gather up jackets for their winter clothing drive, and they spend their own money on canned goods for the local food pantry, and they set up lemonade stands for horse rescue and worry about the feelings of their friends, and sometimes coexist peacefully in magical small spaces. We’re all a little black, a little white, a lot gray. A little saint, a little sinner, a lot human. The world is the same way, even when it seems like more dark is crowding in. We worry in broad stokes about humanity, about our neighbors and the “them” across hemispheres, while we sometimes we forget to end the day with kind words at home (but seriously, you’re just stalling now. Go. To. Bed.)

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness will not drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” Outside, there are no bedtime battles, no worries about Christmas budgets or incomplete homework, but just deep, blessed winter silence, and the sky has been dark since 5pm. And just like in my childhood, the air is cold but reviving. The starlight from Orion is just getting to us, but it originated 700 years ago, amid the 14^th century’s black plague and Hundred Years’ War, while Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, whose prologue I had to memorize in high school, seven centuries later (and whose first lines I can still remember). Sometimes it’s comforting to remember that the world had already seen it all already. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. It’s tempting just to shut it all out, to turn off the news and only read lifestyle articles. But I know for sure I don’t want to leave my children a legacy of detachment, an awful neutrality in the face of good and evil. No one is stopping any of us from making our own light, or speaking out against the dark, and if I can teach them that, I don’t care if they never agree about whose turn it is to shower first. 

November is a transitional month in a lot of ways. It’s the first month where even mild, sunny, autumnal-holdover days begin and end with a chill that foretells winter. Before the year ends, the days will start to get longer again. But November, often suddenly and bracingly cold, is dark without the tipping pendulum of a solstice. We’ve put away our summer wardrobe, but haven’t yet started to feel the camaraderie of the holiday season. We’re waiting, in November, it seems to me.

I was waiting, too, the last few weeks. Halloween came and left a silo of sugar in its wake. Instead of the occasional Kind bar and drizzle of honey, I began to mainline sugar. Oddly, then I didn’t feel that energetic, and I started letting my runs go from every other day or two to twice a week… or longer. Then Paris, and then the refugee backlash and I wasn’t just waiting. I was backsliding and coming up short on reasons to reinvest.

But November is transitional. Our routines are forced to change, but — and I forgot this for a little while — it’s up to us to make new ones.

I’d been limping along this past week with our mostly-neglected exercise bike, sitting and peddling, buoying myself with like-minded political blogs while watching my husband and daughters play some street racing video game (it’s still family time if we’re all together, right, even if some of us are being chased by the cops?).  While I had broken a sweat for the requisite minimum 3x/week (Thursday through Saturday: not my best showing, but still technically 3/3), I felt slacker’s guilt. There was no reason for this. I could do better. The forecast was warm and sunny, the snow melting… I timed a run for the warmest part of the day, and — it surprised me — I looked forward to it. Running is my time away in a way that sharing an animated street race can’t replace, sweat or no sweat.

And even though I’d been in the midst of nearly abandoning my routine, I suddenly felt renewed. Why would I give this up? My legs burned, my breath grew a little ragged and I was in a better place than I’d been in a couple weeks.

My concern with winter running, and I say this purely from speculation since I’ve always abandoned running with the first frost, is that I don’t want to look like a pre-schooler with skinned knees. Kids are tough. I am not. Also, it’s cold. In the matter of a few weeks, a nice day goes from 78 and sunny to, Did I have to chip ice off my windshield and did I choose footwear based on waterproofing? The sidewalks look like that ice planet from Star Wars, and the trails look worse.

Since June, I’ve been running one of several neighborhood routes, expanding as I added distance here and there. I start each of those routes in the same way, by crossing my street, running up the same hill, focused on the yellow warning “Dip” sign that signals the top of that first hill and the beginning of some downhill recovery action.

Today, in the midst of exactly that same routine, but hopscotching through icy sidewalks, I became aware of something. I could, if I so chose, run on the SUNNY side of the street.

The funny thing about the sunny side of the street was that it was literally right in front of me. Well, literally within my periphery. And it was as obstacle-free as my side was hurdled. But it didn’t immediately occur to me to cross the street. Because I run on THIS side of the street. I know which houses on this side of the street have free-range dogs and who never pulls their trash cans back in, forcing me to run around them. I know where the first seasonal decorations will go up, and I know which overhanging branches require a bob and weave.

On the OTHER side of the street? I honestly have no idea. It’s beyond logic, but that’s uncharted territory. I just don’t run over there. Those houses and their dogs and their branches are strangers… until today. Because sometimes crossing to the sunny side of the street is the only thing that makes any sense, even when — maybe especially when — we’re white-knuckling our routines like lifeboats. There are no medals for running through the snow when dry pavement is available, but sometimes I forget that the route is up to me.

November might not be so bad.