Shana Tova! Tits Up!

 My fingers have gotten sloppy at typing on my phone. I used to be much better at it, but lately I'm constantly missing letters or hitting the wrong ones. I rely excessively on autocorrect, often with hilarious or telling results.

Around the first of the year I typed "happy new year" numerous times, as I'm sure we all did. Sending well wishes, hoping that the shit show of 2020 would give way to happier, calmer times. Unfortunately, insurrection proved that to be a short-lived pipe dream, but hope springs eternal, right?

Anyway, happy new year on my phone,

One time it came out as Happy Jew Year, which I guess works. 

Not long after that, it was "happy new teat," which made me laugh really hard. The word "teat" is never not funny.

That made me think of the scenes in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, when Suzy and Midge take a breath and say "tits up!" whenever Midge is getting ready to go out on stage. She squares her shoulders and marches out to face the audience. 

I feel like that's a solid approach for life. 

I know it's a ridiculous statement of the obvious, but the past year was brutal. And the past few months were particularly brutal. I mean, things have been shitty for everyone. I'm not unique. But I can only write about what I know.

We careened through the spring and summer, trying to figure out life in a pandemic, not seeing friends or family. The kids and I went to the Outer Banks in July, and to my parents' house in Virginia for Thanksgiving - both times after everyone tested negative for coronavirus AND going through the airport in essentially a hazmat suit. 

But it wasn't the same, especially Thanksgiving. No hockey game, no Turkey Trot, no Day After Thanksgiving Pie celebration. 

Zeke in particular was miserable. I mean, he's 13, with everything that entails. Meaning when he's not utterly charming and being super sweet to me, he's a complete asshole. 

At one point, I called my mom for advice. 

"I don't know how to deal with this."

"Yeah, it sucks."

"What did you do with Sam when he was this age?"

"I didn't talk to him for two years."

She's a wise woman.

School has been a disaster. Both kids hate the remote-online format, especially Josie. She's in her first year of middle school at an all-girls charter school. A big part of their philosophy is athleticism and movement, and how that complements a rigorous academic program. But she has never set foot in the building. She hasn't truly interacted with any of her classmates. They do PE online, which is stupid. She is so, so unhappy.

Zeke is inconsistent about logging in to his classes. I get calls all the time from teachers letting me know he needs to do a test or get caught up on an assignment. He's so damned smart that he'll say, "oh, ok," log in, take the test, and get a 90% without even studying. But his grades suck because he spends a lot of time doing fuck-all.

Getting them up in the morning to start class was a fight almost every day. Getting them to get their butts up to get any kind of exercise was a fight every day. Thank goodness for the trampoline. Getting them motivated to do just about anything was a fight every day. 

I was constantly worn out, constantly emotionally wrecked, constantly feeling like an utter failure as a mother. 

I decided to stop fighting. It was taking too much out of me. The solution was to embrace the suck, stop caring so much and to recognize that none of it matters that much in the long term. They're not in high school. Their grades right now won't matter when they're applying to colleges. This crazy year will, hopefully, be a blip. 

I told them, "I don't care if you get As. Just don't get Fs. Do enough to get by, and when you're back in school in person, we'll worry about getting back on track then. Log in, participate, do something. That's all I care about."

I would get emails from school to the effect of, "we're starting a new unit on geology! Make sure to check your student's grades!"

Nah. I don't care.

Because I almost always have the kids on New Year's Eve, it tends to be a low-key affair. Maybe we'll watch the Times Square ball drop on TV, and then call my family to celebrate a 10 PM East Coast New Year's.

This year I had two Zoom New Year's parties set up, one with my family, and one with my India girlies. I decided to put on a sparkly shirt and earrings, mix myself some champagne cocktails, and have some fun. 

Champagne cocktail
1 sugar cube
2-3 dashes Angostura bitters
1 ounce brandy
4-6 ounces champagne
garnish with orange slice and maraschino cherry

 The drinks and the company were delicious. It was the most festive New Year's Eve I've had in years. 

The orange abomination in the White House is on his way out. Our politics are fraught, but it's a start. My kids' schools have announced dates to start back in person. I have a hot date tomorrow. The pandemic is a nightmare, but there's a vaccine (which I'm getting this week). It feels like there's a tiny glimmer of light peeking out from the end of the tunnel. 

Deep breath. Sally forth. Tits up.

Truth hurts

It takes a lot to accept that a fundamental decision in your life was a bad one. It's hard to admit it, that your judgment was so off.

You want to think that you chose well. Because if you're wrong, you were so, so wrong. You failed so utterly.

So you suffer through years of gas-lighting, being made to feel like you're crazy for being outraged that your children are suffering and so unhappy because he is incapable of taking their needs into account. You protect them as much as you can, to the point of calling DHS on one occasion when he gets a little too rough with the boy.

As he drags them from house to house and woman to woman, you are the rock. You maintain the stability they need - your house is the same, your temperament is the same, your rules are the same, your love is the same. You don't introduce them to any romantic interests.

In particular, the boy suffers. The first post-divorce wife is a fucking monster and awful to the children. When they break up, he's alone for a little while, but he is incapable of being alone, so he starts dating a new woman and marries her within about 8 or 9 months. She's a nice person, but she has 4 kids, meaning the children are moving into a household with 5 new people, only some of whom they like.

Imagine that for a minute. You're young and heading into puberty, with all of the craziness that entails. Over the past few years, your life with your father has been turbulent. It has been exhausting and occasionally traumatic. You're a bit of an introvert, like your mother. And now you have to move into a house with a new step-mother and four new step-brothers. The step-mother also has an after-school childcare business, so the house is constantly crowded and noisy. You alternate weeks between the chaos of the new situation and the quiet and calm of your mother's house.

The very thought of it makes your chest tighten with anxiety. Predictably, the boy doesn't deal with it well, and his behavior at his father's house shows it. He is miserable, and makes everyone else in the house miserable as well.

Rather than recognize the source of the boy's behavior and unhappiness, or to understand that the boy is 12 and prepubescent and thus essentially clinically insane, his father informs you that the boy is a cancer and an asshole and a cunt (sorry - his word, not mine), and that he is no longer welcome in his house.

So it is agreed that it's best for everyone if the boy comes to live with you, where he can have one place that's home with the one parent who feels like home. When things calm down, maybe he will spend occasional weekends with his father so that you can take a trip or get some downtime.

Also, the boy is unhappy at his middle school - it's just not a good fit. So you arrange for him to switch to a different school with a better system of instruction, a better curriculum, and better teachers. When he starts the new semester there, he is immediately ecstatic. He loves school, always wants to talk about what he's learning, wakes up every morning chirpy and with a spring in his step.

Things are sorted. You've got the carpool situation locked down.  You've got an upcoming business trip and some girls' weekends coming up, and it is agreed that the boy will stay with his father for a couple of nights.

Things have gone from anxious and tumultuous to organized and calm. The boy is happy, so you are happy.

On Friday night, you head off on your girls' ski weekend in the mountains feeling confident that the boy will be OK with his dad for a weekend. They're going skiing and all seems to be well. You're looking forward to connecting with friends and skiing a mountain that you don't know very well.

But then you are awakened at 6:15 yesterday morning by a phone call. It looks to be from the father's wife, but when you pick up, it is the boy. He is crying.

He was dawdling and difficult when told he needed to get up and get ready to leave. Traffic to the mountains on a Saturday morning is a nightmare, so if you want to minimize the agony, you need to leave by 6 at the latest, and preferably a little earlier. Missing that 15 minute window can literally add an hour to the trip, so time is of the essence.

With a carload of people up and ready to go, the boy petulantly said, "just leave without me." So they did. I kind of get that part of it. But they also take his phone. Just to be a dickish and punitive. Just to pile on.

Again, imagine that for a minute. A 12 year old boy is left alone in the house with both parents out of town. His means of communication is taken away. Word is not left with a neighbor or a friend that he's on his own, to keep an eye out just in case. If there's an emergency, no one can get in touch with him. If there is an emergency on his end, he's left to fend for himself.

He remembers that the Amazon Echo is hooked up to the step-mother's phone contacts, so that is how he manages to reach you.

You could try to get someone to go get him, but you can't call him to give him a head's up. Nonetheless, a friend generously agrees to go check on him and take him home, but when he knocks on the door nobody answers - the boy went back to sleep and didn't hear anything.

The boy needs you. There's nothing to do but go back to Denver.

On the way, you call and ask what happened.

"He was being a jerk and holding everybody up, so we left him."

"But why did you take his phone? Aren't you concerned about what could happen if there's an emergency and he can't call anyone and no one can call him?"

He laughs and says, "I guess not," which just about sends you into orbit.

You're quiet for a second and then ask, "don't you care about what happens to him? Don't you love him?"

"Not really," he responds.

"How can you say that about your son?" you ask.

"You don't know what he's like," he says.

So there it is. He's a father who isn't interested in being a father when things are difficult or inconvenient. His love, to the extent he is capable of it, is conditional. He seems unconcerned with his son's safety. He doesn't understand that being a good parent means gutting it out when adolescents act like normal adolescents - i.e., assholes.

You pick up the boy. You take all of his things and all of his clothes. The poster of the earth viewed from the surface of the moon - a gift that his grandfather bought him at the Air & Space Museum - is removed from the wall and brought home.

Everything has come very clearly into focus. Because you didn't want to accept that you failed, you have spent years trying and trying and trying again to repair the relationship, to keep lines of communication open, to get them into therapy to work out their differences. The parent-child relationship is so important. Boys need their fathers. Blah blah blah.

You have tried to talk yourself into believing that his horrible abusive childhood left him somewhat emotionally stunted and not good at resolving conflict, but that deep down, he's a good person. A good father. That your kids are OK with him.

But you realize that you are beating your head against the wall. You are the only one making the effort. You are Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

The truth is, he's a terrible person and a terrible father. Your son is not OK with him. You did choose badly. You did fail.

That realization is heartbreaking, but also liberating. Your path forward is clear. You now know that there's no point in trying to force him to be someone he's not capable of being.

The boy has you, and that will be enough.

It's been a hell of a time

I've been thinking for a while about what I'm going to do with this blog. I've been writing it for 13 1/2 years. It's been a record of my life and my thoughts for a long time. It chronicled my marriage. I've written about my kids since they were born.

But my kids are now at an age when I don't feel like their stories are mine to tell. Stories about Zeke flirting shamelessly with my friends were adorable when he wasn't even two. But it's not fair to talk about his flirting habits now, when he's 12 and in the throes of middle school drama. When anything and everything is embarrassing.

Suffice it to say that middle school girls are a fucking nightmare. I feel like I can say this, having been one once.

Josie isn't quite at the point of being mortified by discussion of her life's foibles, but I still think that she's entitled to her privacy.

As for me, I've always felt like an open book, but it's hard to write about certain aspects of my life when this is not an anonymous blog. People who read this know who I am. I work for a government entity that is highly political. I've written what I thought were incredibly innocuous posts and gotten snarky pushback from individuals in the community where I work.

But then I was recently chatting with a colleague who I don't know very well, and she said, "I've been reading your blog! I really love it. I love your voice. I love the way you write. You're funny."

I was flattered and encouraged. We talked a little bit about writing - she's a blogger too - and I lamented that I was feeling bottled up because the things that I have always written about - my relationships, my kids, funny stories involving foul language - feel off-limits for one reason or another. She understood, but told me I should write anyway.

So I will keep writing. I want to write more. I find it therapeutic.

There have been all kinds of things buzzing around in my brain lately - I've been dealing with a lot of shit, much of it of the deja-vu-all-over-again variety. But in the dawn of a new decade, it feels like a good time to do a little retrospective. I was thinking about it and then Lisa did one and now I'm inspired to do my own. (Love you, Lis! xoxo)

The decade got off to a rough start. And looking back, it never really got better. It's been a hard ten years.

At the start of 2010, I had a newborn baby and a toddler, a husband who was working out of town during the week, a job that I hated, and we were broke from the housing crash and the move from Hawaii. Jason got pneumonia in January. Emma had her awful accident in March. We managed to buy our house (now my house) before the short sale on the Hawaii house trashed our credit for a few years. I changed jobs in November. I was constantly exhausted and feeling like I was hanging on by a weak thread. But there was a big bright spot - I went to an India reunion and reconnected with all of my old friends, most of whom I hadn't seen in at least 15 or 20 years. It was magical.

Things felt somewhat calmer and more normalized in 2011, though I was still a single parent during the week and feeling generally overwhelmed. There were some bright spots - I started skiing more and grew to really love it. Emma got better.

In 2012 and 2013 we started to explore Colorado more. We did some camping, which the kids loved, especially when it involved me getting a speeding ticket.

But I was sinking into depression because I was so unhappy in my marriage. So, so unhappy. I was miserable and not taking good care of myself and even had a scare when I thought I had brain cancer (it turned out to be silent migraines).

The true annus horribilis was, obviously, 2014. The worst year of my life, no question. It started with the decision that Jason and I made to split up, which was good on one hand because it needed to happen, but for financial reasons we needed to continue living together for a while. At first it was sort of fine, but then it really wasn't. When he started being overtly mean to me and trashing me in front of my family at the beach vacation that my parents had paid for him to attend, my mother told him to cut the shit. I told him it was time to move out.

And then less than a month later, Emma was dead. Even now, five years later, it still feels like a punch to the gut every time I think about it.

2015 is a fog. I wavered between despondency and depression, and feeling like I was learning how to live again. I went to another great India reunion, which made me happy. I was walking to work every morning, which was life-affirming and restorative. We went to Iceland, which was really cool. But I still frequently felt bombarded by grief and overwhelmed by loneliness.

The years since have been more of the same - crazy awfulness mixed in with some triumphs, but mostly mundane bullshit.

Lori died in 2016. So did her sister.

My kids, particularly Zeke, have struggled post-divorce.

Things haven't been all terrible, or even mostly terrible in a day-to-day sense. I was talking to my friend Jen a couple of weeks ago and as part of the "how have you been how's life treating you" conversation, she said something that stuck with me: "oh, you know. Mostly muddling through, with occasional moments of joy. You know how it is."

I do know how it is. And I have had some moments of joy, including some borne of sadness. I started climbing 14ers on the anniversary of Emma's death, first for her, and then for others. I've done some traveling, including Italy in 2017 and a wonderful trip to India with Lisa this past July. I adore my reunions and time reconnecting with old friends. I got a new job that I love. I love skiing and hiking and enjoying where I live. Trips to the beach with my family, whom I love and from whom I draw so much strength. Days in the sun and on the mountain. My children, who get more wonderful and interesting each day.

But looking back over the past ten years, I realize that I have spent a decade feeling like I'm under siege, going from crisis to crisis, difficulty to difficulty, struggle to struggle. It's been exhausting. It's been so hard.

I am turning 50 in a month and a half. It's a new decade. I am trying to make an effort to be thoughtful about what I want and need for myself. I have some trips planned. I signed up for acting classes, because I thought it would be fun and it would be something just for me.

It's a work in progress.

If you are going through hell, keep going

Sometimes when I think I'm going through something rough, I think about some of the awful things that other people have endured, and that are much, much worse.

People who have been enslaved, or raped, or tortured. People who deal with chronic or terminal illness and then die way too early. People in California who have lost their homes and possessions or, God forbid, family members to raging fires.

I don't have to deal with anything like that.

My children are healthy. I am healthy. I have a good job and live in a nice house and wear nice clothes. I live in a beautiful place and I am able to take advantage of what it offers. I have the means and ability to travel. I having a loving family and wonderful friends.

I know how fortunate I am.

It's not a comparative analysis, though. People get to feel bad about things even if other people are dealing with things that are worse.

Anyway.

I was thinking about Thanksgiving coming up next week. As we always do, the family will gather at my parents' house. My mom and I will walk Buster together. We will cook together.  My dad will take the kids to the Air & Space Museum, or to play at Clemyjontri Park. On Wednesday night, we will go to Tony Cheng's for dinner and then to the hockey game. On Thursday morning we will participate in the SOME Trot for Hunger and then have breakfast at the Metro 29 diner. On Friday we will have our open house and eat leftover pie with our friends. Lisa and I will plan our trip to India next summer.

(Did I tell you I'm going to India with Lisa next summer? I'm going to India with Lisa next summer. Soooo excited.)

I love our Thanksgiving traditions.

Like most people, when we sit down at Thanksgiving dinner we go around the table and everyone says what they're thankful for. Or if you're going to be grammatically correct, we identify the things for which we are thankful.

Family is always up there. Health. Love. Prosperity.

Those are the evergreens of Thanksgiving thankfulness.

This year I am thankful for all those things, as I always am. But I am also thankful for my own strength and resourcefulness. I am thankful for my ability to endure and persevere.

As I've alluded to, my son has had a really hard, traumatic six months or so. For the last two months and change, he has lived only with me. I have found and arranged for services that could help him. I have worked through adjustments in health care needs. I have worked with the school to develop strategies that would help him.

I have done everything and endured everything and arranged everything and paid for everything. I have had in that time maybe two or three nights to myself, when the kids had sleepovers.

It has been so, so hard. It has been so, so exhausting.

Emotionally, I am tapped out. I have gone through periods of intense anxiety, to the point that I had to increase my medication dosage and find others to reduce the feeling that my heart was going to pound right out of my chest.  I have cried a lot.  Many nights I have cried myself to sleep. But in the morning, I still got up and exercised and worked and did what I needed to do.

I have felt worthless and overwhelmed and incompetent and like I would never see any light at the end of the tunnel.

But now I can see it. Because of my efforts - because I loved, pushed, encouraged, comforted, raged when appropriate, held my tongue when I needed to, forced everyone to face the problem and deal with it - the light is there.

I can rest easier knowing that my son isn't in crisis. We can work toward a more normalized schedule. I can try to have some semblance of a personal life again. I can have days when I'm not responsible for taking care of anyone but myself.

So I'm thankful that I was able to do that.  And thankful that I did it.

In which I throw myself into the fire and somehow survive

It's kind of a running joke between my mother and me - except one that isn't all that funny - that I am the world's worst shopper.

Not in the sense that I don't know how to do it - I am physically and intellectually capable of going to pick out clothes for myself.  Sort of.

Rather, it's that I despise it more than just about any activity I can think of. Like, I would rather clean the toilet, clean the cat box, or snake the hair out of the drain than go to the mall.

My mother is totally the opposite. Before she retired and was traveling around the world all the time, she would always have free time scheduled on her trips for seeing the sights, or, more often, supporting the local economies by shopping. She has an infinite capacity for it.

When she and I shop together, it generally consists of her saying, "there's a huge sale, just take a look," and then I take a look and try on one thing and immediately feeling like the walls are closing in and I need to get out of there immediately.

And when we're not in the moment, we can kind of laugh about it. But it is truly an anxiety-producing event for me. I walk into a mall and I immediately feel fat, ugly, and poor. I get agitated and panicky. The choices overwhelm me and I am paralyzed. It's awful.

So when it came to buy myself a new suit, I knew I was in trouble.

I have an important oral argument coming up in a case in federal court. It's a big deal. There's a lot on the line, and I feel a huge amount of pressure to do well.

And I don't have anything to wear.

I haven't had to wear suits to work in forever, so I have a uniform of black, navy and beige pants that I wear with a solid color shirt and a cardigan. The pants are all the same brand and style. The shirts are all the same brand and size. I have a bunch of cardigans that I swap out. I buy all of it online. It's super easy. But it's not formal enough for federal court.

Like I said, this is a really important case. I'm going to be well prepared and I'm confident I can handle it. I'm good at oral argument. But I also want to go into battle looking like a boss.

I tried finding something online. I bought a beautiful red dress with a matching jacket. I was excited.

But when it arrived, the dress, while gorgeous, fit in the body but was so tight in the boobs I couldn't get it over my shoulders or zip it. Story of my fucking life.

So I steeled myself and headed over to the mall today.

I was already having a shitty day. I was tired and super stressed out and upset about a number of things. I spent the morning lying in bed and feeling weepy. I was pathetic.

Eventually I reached my limit of wallowing and decided I needed to get up and act like a functioning human being. I washed my puffy face, put on some makeup, and went to buy a suit.

It went about as badly as I anticipated.

First of all, there was nothing that I liked. I really didn't want to go the institutional black or grey route - I wanted red or purple or something similarly dynamic. But there was nothing. I went to Macy's, Ann Taylor, Brooks Brothers, White House Black Market, Talbot's, Banana Republic, and Nordstrom (where, for the first time at that store, I got truly shitty service). Everything was black or gray, or an ugly color or pattern, or weirdly cut, or festooned with random features like dumb-ass bell sleeves.

I called my mother.

"I can't find anything. There's nothing."

"Did you try Nordstrom?"

"They had nothing. And the service was awful."

"Really? At Nordstrom?"

"Yes. I went everywhere. I can't believe how little selection there is."

"What about one of the little boutique-y shops in Cherry Creek?"

"You know I can't do that."

"Go to Neiman's."

"Ugh. I'm not going to fucking Neiman's. I hate that place. Plus their prices are ridiculous."

"Well, then you're going to have a hard time finding a fucking decent suit."

Touche.

My dad picked up the phone offered me to buy me any exorbitantly expensive suit I wanted. He was in a good mood because Virginia's men's basketball team had just beaten Duke, at Duke. He likes to give his children and grandchildren gifts. He's super generous and lovely.

When he got off the phone, my mom and I went back to our conversation. She suggested some online options. She said she'd mail me three of her suits that I could get tailored. I felt my anxiety level continue to rise.

Finally, I went back to Macy's. I found some suit separates in black. Sleek, no bell sleeves, no flounces or other bullshit that I hate. Very Alicia Florrick from The Good Wife. So I bought it. Done.

I came home completely exhausted and worn out. I had something to eat, did some laundry. and went back to bed.

And that was my day.

So just look at them and sigh, and know they love you

My children are once again going through a time of turbulence. Once again through no fault or choice of their own. Once again caused by the capricious inability of the adults in their lives to get their shit together.

Their dad and his partner (wife? girlfriend? I have no idea and as far as I can tell, neither do they) are splitting up after 2 1/2 years together. This weekend has been a shit show. Fights and crying and recrimination.

It was my solo weekend. I had planned a very pleasant Saturday - going to the waxing salon, going to the blood donation place, heading up to the mountains for a solo night in a cheap hotel before a solo morning of skiing, followed by a non-solo evening of fun.

But then Saturday morning I ended up at Bonfils with a needle in my left arm while with my right arm I held the phone as both children and adults called me crying, asking me to solve their problems.

The children I can handle. I will always help them solve their problems.

I have lost patience with the adults.

The past couple of years have been hard on the children. And I have tried to hold my tongue as fallout from events and patterns in the other household spilled into mine. They view me as the safe haven. They trust me with everything. They walk into my house and I can almost feel the tension leave their bodies.

But if I say too much, I'll get dismissed as the bitchy ex-wife, the know-it-all, the one who can't mind her fucking business.

It's a diplomatic high-wire act.

Yesterday I cut the wire. When I came off the mountain from skiing to find multiple texts from my children and voicemail messages of them sobbing hysterically, I was done. I called her and told her that having my children calling me crying - or worse, running away to my house when they're supposed to be with dad -- was not acceptable or sustainable. That she and their dad needed to grow up and figure out how to create a harmonious household that didn't leave my children anxious and in tears.

"I don't want to hear about how you think their behavior is disrespectful. Find a way to earn their respect. They are manifestly miserable in your household, and you need to fix it. You are the adult. They did not choose to live with you, and they hate it, and you need to either figure out a way to make them not hate it, or you need to not live with them anymore."  I raised my voice. I know that what I said was harsh and that I said it harshly. But it needed to be said.

She chose option B.

To be clear, this had been a long time coming. They're not breaking up because I yelled at her. I don't have that kind of power or influence.

And quite honestly, it's not what I wanted. A happy, stable household is good for the children. Now things are in disarray again. I worry about them. Zeke in particular seems fragile and exhausted. It makes my heart hurt.

Last night, on my non-solo evening of fun, we were out watching a light-hearted, funny musical about dating. It was charming and hilarious. But there was one song in which the male protagonist described his relationship with his mother, who died when he was young. She didn't have a lot of time for him because she worked a busy, high-powered job, and then she died of a heart condition. In the song, the mother is singing to her son that he was always foremost in her heart, even though she didn't show it. It's his imagining of his mother's love letter to him from the grave.

True to form, I started to cry. Stuff like that always makes me cry now. Don't even get me started on the new Proctor & Gamble "Thank you, Mom" ad in honor of the Olympics.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the weight of the responsibility I feel to be their constant. Not that parents ever really get a break, but my need to overtly step in as the protector feels particularly heavy right now. And maybe what's hardest is the knowledge that I can't really protect them from much of anything.

Life is hard. They're getting the lesson early.

Keep on keepin' on

"Do you think I should go to therapy?"

I was seeing my shrink for my biannual pharmacological check-in. Generally we just check in by email, but it had been long enough that he wanted me to come in and lay eyes on me.

"OF COURSE you should go to therapy!" he exclaimed.

I laughed. He's a nice guy who's from Michigan and looks like my dad when he was in his 30s - dark hair, glasses, jew-y. We have a nice rapport.

"Why? I feel fine, generally. The medication seems to be working."

"In the five minutes we've been talking, you've told me that you just started a new job with a lot of responsibility and long commute, you've talked about issues your kids are having in school and in dealing with the divorce, you're working on a major case for work while also planning a trip abroad ... you've got a lot of shit going on!"

"Yeah," I sighed.

"Yeah!" he said, giving me a look that said, "mmm hmmm."

"And you've said yourself that even though you don't feel anxious during the day, you're having anxiety dreams and still dealing with the middle insomnia that's plagued you forever."

"Yeah," I sighed again.

"Even if you're not in overt distress, it always helps to talk things out with someone. It's the best way to deal with anxiety. You know this," he said.

"Yeah. I know. It's just hard, thought. I'm working long hours, I'm busy, I've got the kids, and you're out here in the middle of nowhere. It's a schlep. I feel like I don't have time to do anything."

" I hear you. Anyway, here's the number of someone that I think you would like. She's like you - very smart and straightforward. Give it a try."

"Yeah."

I haven't called her. I haven't had time.

But I need something.

Medicine helps some. I have a prescription for an antidepressant and a non-Ambien sleep aid that doesn't work as well as I'd like.

I absolutely adore my job. But it exhausts me, both physically and emotionally. The commute is tiring, thinking and writing all day is tiring, and I'm finding that being in caretaker mode in my job as well as with my kids leaves me with an empty tank. I love working with teachers and making sure they feel supported in their work. I love fighting their battles for them, and being the lighting rod with cranky opposing counsel or irate parents - let them attack me rather than the teachers.  But always taking care of everyone else means I don't take care of myself.

There are days at the office when I'll sit down, start working, and suddenly it's 3:30 in the afternoon and I haven't put anything in my belly all day except coffee. I'll go sleep at night not having had the energy to make myself much dinner, so I'll lie in bed feeling hungry but too tired to get up and do anything about it.  Sometimes when I don't have the kids and I get home from work at 6:30 or 7 and I'm so exhausted that I'll drink a protein shake and go straight to bed.

When I went for my every-eight-weeks blood donation, the nurse who took my vitals beforehand remarked that my hemoglobin levels were so low that I barely made the cutoff for being able to give blood. I don't eat enough, I don't sleep enough, I work too hard, I'm worn out.

So I ate a lot of steak for a week and started taking a multivitamin with iron.

I feel the effects psychologically as well. It can feel lonely. But even if I had the inclination to really try to date, I wouldn't have time for anything but a booty call or a fuck-buddy. Which can be fun, but ultimately not satisfying long term.

So I exercise. And I read and listen to audiobooks. And when we get some decent snow, I'll ski. I try to stay in touch with friends, going to concerts or dinner when I can.

I want to write more. It helps even a little bit.

I can try therapy, if I ever find the time.

So that's where I am.

Yeah.

Loosening and untying

Hi.

It's been awhile, I know. And I'm not sure why.

Normally, I feel like I have things I want to write about - things I'm thinking about, things I'm experiencing. I have done this for almost 11 years. It has been an emotional outlet and a connection with the world - the readers I know about and those that I don't.

But for the past few months, I have felt paralyzed, communicationally-speaking. There are so many areas of my life that I'm trying to sort out from a psychological perspective that the various strands have become entangled and knotted, like necklaces carelessly tossed into a box. Writing about them seems impossible, both because I'm still sorting them out in my head, but also because it feels too personal.

I feel those knots physically. My chest is always slightly tight, my breathing isn't as deep as it should be. I'm perpetually anxious. My heart feels like it's beating too close to the surface of my skin.

Exercise helps. I find that when I wake up in the morning feeling like I'm two steps away from being in the throes of a full-blown anxiety/panic attack - and I feel this way almost every day - the exertion from a super strenuous workout can push the anxiety in my chest to the side. It doesn't go away altogether, but it's abated somewhat.

If I have to be anxious and nervous all the time, at least I'll be in shape.

It's not like I'm particularly unhappy. The kids are great. It's summer, so we've got our annual Outer Banks beach trip coming up in a few weeks. The mountains beckon with beautiful hiking trails. The neighborhood pool opens this weekend. I've got tickets to Red Rocks shows.

But I have an overwhelming sense of uncertainty about where I am in my life, and where I want to be. I know I'll figure it out, but it's a hard process.

Crossroads

Nine years ago tonight, I was walking the halls of Kapi'olani Medical Center, trying to power my way through what would end up a 25 hour effort to get my cervix dilated to 10 centimeters so that I could meet my son - a big, strong, healthy boy who just about broke me in two.

I was living in a strange place where I didn't really know many people at all. My family and friends were halfway around the world and I felt very isolated and alone. I worked from home and didn't have a chance to interact with other people much, outside of some of the neighbors, none of whom I felt any particular kinship with.  Hawaii is a beautiful place, but without any family or real friends or sense of community, I found it to be very provincial and an unpleasant place to live. I honestly don't have any desire to ever go back.

Now I am in Denver, on the eve of my wonderful son's 9th birthday. And as much I truly enjoy living here - as much as Denver, as a place, is the best place I've ever lived - I'm once again finding myself feeling very isolated and alone.

I've mentioned in the past how extremely compartmentalized my life feels. Half the time, I am a single mother, with everything that that entails. My children are vibrant and beautiful and energetic and busy and difficult and all-consuming. We fill our days. I try to establish routines but also to infuse them with as much of my essence and love as I can before they have to leave and be without me again. I often feel like I am failing and flailing. I do the best that I can, but deep down, I don't believe that it's enough.

I see them struggle emotionally sometimes, especially Zeke. I wonder if it's just them being them, dealing with the trials of growing up as they normally would. Or maybe the divorce messed them up - maybe I messed them up. I feel guilty, like I have failed them. Like I am unworthy of them and of no good to them. (Add to this all the other reasons I regularly feel like I'm an abject failure at life, and you've got a real recipe for me in a laugh-a-minute mood).

And then they're gone for a time, and my life utterly changes. I don't have lunches to make in the morning, I don't have to get them up and out the door and to school. I can leave work late and go get a massage or meet friends out.

But mostly I'm alone.

I have friends and a little bit of family here.  But people are busy with their own lives and families, and trying to coordinate everyone's schedules to get together means we're having to plan weeks or even months out. My mom and I talk and lament that if we were closer, we'd see each other all the time. But we don't, and we can't.

Thought it doesn't often seem like it, I am self-conscious and naturally a bit introverted, so I feel awkward and unwelcome trying to include myself into other peoples' lives and events. It's easier to be alone because the emotional effort it takes to not be alone is so exhausting.

And sometimes I don't mind being alone. But lately, I've felt crushingly lonely.

The birthday month - the month including and in between the kids' birthdays (which fall exactly a month apart) - has been hard.  Both weekends, the kids have been with their dad and had birthday parties there that I have not been allowed to attend.

It has been overwhelmingly hurtful to me, far more than I could have anticipated. Partly because it's so hurtful to them - they repeatedly told me they wanted me there and asked why I wouldn't be, and all I could say was, "because I'm not invited." But it's also hurtful to me. And it's bewildering, because it's a course of action that I would never take in a million years.

It's just two days out of the year. People try to comfort me and tell me that I have to let it go. That I shouldn't let it bother me. That there's nothing I can do about it, so I need to get over it.

I know that they are right. That everything they are saying is true. That if I let it get to me, I will be allowing myself to be consumed by something that I can't control.

But the pain has been intense. I thought that as time went on and the reality of the divorce and the split custody situation became the norm, that I would get more used to it. But rather than getting easier to deal with, it has gotten harder, particularly on their birthdays. My birth days.

I try to think and reason and write my way out of it. Or go on long, grueling hikes like the one I did yesterday (I got lost and ended up tacking on an extra mile and a half, so by the time I got home I was toast).  The exertion pushes the bad feeling away, if only for a little while.

But then the feeling comes back. And I realize that the advice people try to give - don't let it get to you, don't take it personally - isn't what I need. I don't need to be told to let it go, at least not initially. I need to allow myself to feel shitty until I don't feel so shitty anymore.  I need someone I trust to envelop me in a hug or just hold my hand and say, "I know you feel awful, and I'm so sorry that you do. It sucks."

I will write Zeke his birthday post tomorrow, celebrating all of the reasons he continues to delight me and fill me with love and pride. For now, I will allow myself to feel hurt, because I am.

Me and my head high, and my tears dry, get on without my guy

"Maybe you don't really want to be with someone."

I was talking to a friend of mine about my recent dating foibles, and this was her observation.

I was both surprised and not at all surprised.

The past couple of months have felt jarring and left me with a sense of disjointedness.  I had a birthday I wasn't thrilled about (although I'm as healthy as I've ever been and, as ever, it's better than the alternative), and then a week later Lori died, and then construction started on the kitchen, and now the kids have been gone for a week on spring break.

I feel emotionally pushed and pulled.  The past six years (and particularly the last two) have involved so much trauma, death, and heartache - it's hard to deal with it all while at the same time being a present and productive mother, daughter, sister, friend, and functioning member of society.  I keep thinking I'm old and washed up and nearing the end of my shelf life.  I don't know what I want.

She was so sweet and bubbly.  And I miss those South Park pajama bottoms.

I keep thinking about Emma and bursting into tears.  When I was in New Hampshire for Lori's funeral, someone gave me a picture of two-year-old Emma sitting on my lap on the porch of our beach house at the Outer Banks.  We are deep in conversation and she is telling me something interesting and I'm gazing at her like I can't stand how gorgeous or cute she is.  I love this picture, but it fills me with sadness.

And my physical surroundings do nothing to provide a sense of calm or stability.  The downstairs of my house is virtually uninhabitable.  The kitchen is almost done, but it'll be another four days or so before I can start putting things in cupboards and drawers, and before I can actually use it.  So everything is dusty and there are still boxes and appliances and plastic sheeting everywhere.  I have no idea where anything is.  The only place I can really hang out is in my room, which after a while gets depressing.

So I have almost compulsively kept myself busy and out of the house.

It's been relatively easy to keep my dance card full.  I thought, given that most of my relationships have made me miserable, why not just date for the sake of dating?  Keep it casual.  Be noncommittal. Have fun. And outside of one dinner with a guy who I found repulsive on every level, it hasn't been unpleasant.  They're all very nice and enthusiastic.  We have dinner and drinks and tell our stories.

But every time, I feel them start to get too interested and attached and anxious, and I reflexively pull away. This one has mannerisms that annoy me.  That one isn't dynamic enough.  The other isn't smart enough, though smart enough for what, I don't know.  It's my own intellectual snobbery at play.

At first it was fun to be so busy all the time.  But now I'm bored and I just want them to leave me alone.

I fucking hate that I do this.  Even just reading over what I've just written, it sounds obnoxious and awful.  My friend remarked that I should give one of them a chance.  But I don't want to.  When it comes to men, it turns out that casual and noncommittal is not in my DNA. As much as I crave both the emotional and physical connections, as much as I so enjoy the experience of hanging out with someone I respect and am attracted to, I can't fake it or force it when it's not there.  I wish I could just love the one I'm with.

But the truth is, I'd rather be alone.  I'd rather read and listen to Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album.  I'd rather get caught up on movies I've been meaning to see.  It feels less lonely than being out with someone I don't really want to be with.

This is a strange discovery to make at this point in my life.  But there you have it.

We push and pull and I fall down sometimes

It is the dilemma of writing a public blog that sometimes the thing I want to write about is the thing I need to be careful writing about, either to protect someone's privacy or even to protect my own to a certain extent.  Which raises the obvious question of, "why not just write about it privately?"

And sometimes I do.  I have a journal that I scribble in, often when I'm trying to work out a thought or a feeling, or when I just want to think by engaging in the physical act of taking pen to paper. But I feel like I write differently, and more carefully, when I write for an audience, so usually when I feel compelled to write about something, and write it well, I do it here.  After nine and a half years, it's a hard habit to break.

Which brings me to my current predicament.

My heart hurts today.  That's all I'll say, because the details are tangential to the point of this post.

Over the weekend, I was voice-messaging with my high school friend Kristin, who is one of my favorite people.  She lives in Switzerland, and I haven't seen her in a million years, but we're in pretty regular communication nonetheless. Our favorite way to keep in touch is by Facebook's messenger system, which allows you to send recorded voice messages.  The wrinkle is that each recording can be no more than one minute long, so rather than type, we talk by sending a series of digital voice messages, however many it takes to form the sentences and paragraphs we mean to convey.  It actually isn't as cumbersome as it sounds, plus I don't have a problem hearing my own voice, probably from years of writing briefs and legal correspondence via dictation when I was in private practice.

Anyway. I was explaining my situation to Kristin, who, in addition to being a wonderful and wise friend, is also a therapist, so she's a great listener and gives good advice.  And I didn't really need advice so much as validation of my own sense of what I already knew I needed to do, which Kristin was happy to provide.

But one of the things that really struck me was when she told me that she could hear the pain in my voice, and that even though it sucks to be hurting, it's healthy that I'm allowing myself to feel and express the pain  - "you're in it," was how she described it - rather than bottle it up or repress it.  A couple of other people have made the same observation.

Which, in a way, I find comforting.  Because as much as I'm feeling heartsick today - some of it exacerbated by a lack of sleep plus the exhaustion that comes from crying - I also know that feeling like this means that I was willing to put myself out there, that I was willing to risk being hurt by allowing myself to be emotionally open and honest.  It's how I've said I want to live my life, so at least I'm practicing what I preach.

There's something to be said for that.

But now, I'm taking the game up, and the ace of hearts is high

We are conditioned to play hard to get, to act as if we are a prize to be won, to be unattainable and in doing so, make our attainment that much more desirable.  It's an age-old lesson, handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, distilled and condensed in books like The Rules (which came out when I was in my mid 20s), and probably every other advice article in magazines like Teen Temptress.*

Play your cards close to the vest.

Don't call him; make him call you.

Be aloof; don't act like you like him, or he'll lose interest.  If you ignore him, he'll come running.

Make him jump through hoops to land you.

It's actually an awful way of thinking - it takes the humanity out of the equation. It ignores that what's involved, on both sides, is people who have feelings and desires and hopes. People who want to both love and be loved, to admire and be admired, to value and feel valued.  Instead, it boils things down to strategy and cunning, like an emotional game of Risk.

But nonetheless, it gets hammered home from an early age, through high school, through being in a sorority in college, through the post-college craziness of figuring out how to be a functioning adult in the world.

It gets exacerbated by disappointments and heartbreak.  When you've had your heart broken, there's a natural hesitation, a natural reticence, a natural caution that sets in - if you don't put yourself out there, then you're not at risk.  

And when you've spent years in a relationship feeling ignored and invisible and unworthy of love or admiration, a part of you starts to believe it, to internalize those feelings of unworthiness, even as your intellect says, "don't be ridiculous - of course you're worthy, of course you are desirable."  

It takes time, and some serious soul searching, and some cheerleading from your family and your close girlfriends, to start to feel deserving of love and affection again.  

And it takes wisdom, and experience, and maybe some suffering, to reject all of the conditioned attitudes about how you have to be, how you have to act, in order for someone to want you again.  To throw off the bullshit and embrace honesty and be open and plain about who you are and what you want.

Even though it has terrified me, I have broken every Rule.  I have been more straightforward, at this point in the dance, about my interest and desires than I have ever been in my life.  Partly because I don't have the energy or patience anymore to be coy or equivocal, and partly because I know that it's not just about me.  I'm not the only one who was in a relationship that made me feel ignored and invisible and unloved.  I'm not the only one who wants to feel desired and worthy.  I'm not the only one who doesn't want to be rejected.

I have to be willing to give as much, or more, than I get.

It's so fucking scary.  

*not an actual magazine

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you might find you get what you need

One of the things about having gone through a divorce and then embarking on efforts to date is that it forces you to figure out what went wrong before and how to make sure not to repeat old mistakes.

It feels almost strange to go through the process so deliberately and analytically.  When I was younger, my feeling - which was reinforced by the social and cultural ethos - was that love is something that just happens and you just have to let it happen and go with it.  Opposites attract.  Love conquers all.  Blah blah.

It's kind of bullshit.

On the one hand, some of it is luck.  My parents were 22 and 25, respectively, when they got married.  When I was 22, the idea of marrying someone was absurd to me.  Even though I was in law school, I still felt like a kid, completely incapable of making that kind of life-long decision.  But it worked for my mom and dad - they remain happily married because they have similar interests, they enjoy each others' company and conversation, my mother continues to find my father hilarious and to laugh at his jokes, my father recognizes that my mother is the delightful, sane antidote to his particular brand of crazy. In the infamous words of Cher Horowitz, they mesh well together.

Still, they had no way of knowing, when they were 22 and 25, how it would turn out.  On a certain level, it was a leap of faith, and it happened to work.  Other people similarly situated might grow apart, stop enjoying each others' company and conversation, become bitter or disengaged or disillusioned, and end up divorced or just miserable in their marriages.

It's all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing.

I'm not 22 anymore.  Hell, I didn't get married until I was 35, and I still got it spectacularly wrong.  I think part of it was that my biological clock was ticking, and I ignored warning signs, and I just assumed that love would conquer all.  I didn't realize that love couldn't be a substitute for compatibility, and that compatibility is the key to making love or a relationship last.

Of course, there are different areas of compatibility.  I've been trying to figure out which are the really important ones for me, and which aren't.

There's the cultural compatibility, which can take a number of forms. Being brought up with similar traditions, similar frames of reference.  Religion can be one, but there are also others like educational or socio-economic background.  I don't particularly care if I'm with someone who is Jewish, but it doesn't hurt to have someone who speaks that same cultural language.  Education is very important to me, socio-economic background to a lesser extent.  Not because I'm a snob, but because I spent a long time with someone who was very different from me in those areas, and it resulted in a lack of shared interests, as well as a sense of intense discomfort and insecurity on his part about those differences.

There's the compatibility of values - a sense of the importance of family, and how family dynamics should work.  Values like kindness, compassion, tolerance, open-mindedness.  A curiosity about the world, a sense of adventure. An ability to go with the flow.

There are relational compatibilities - how you are or behave with a partner.  I am affectionate and passionate and can be a bit intense. I tell people I love them and I'm physically demonstrative and I need a certain heat.  I like to feel respected and adored and desired.  I need someone who has strong opinions about things, who has a sense of humor.

I have to be with someone who appreciates the importance of sex in a relationship - not just from the perspective of wanting to get laid, because it's not really about that, but because it fosters intimacy and closeness. I've done my time in a sexless relationship, and I'm not doing it again.

It feels almost clinical to try to come up with a list of qualities to be ticked off.  As I said, it runs counter to the romantic notion that love just is, and you just have to be ready for it and go with it.  But experience provides a counter to that notion.

Obviously, there's no accounting for chemistry.  It's either there or it's not.  But I think it's important to figure out what you want and need.*

And then, when you think you've found it, all that's left to do is take a leap of faith.

_______________________________
*In reading over this, I realize it sounds like I think a successful relationship is all about me - what I want and need.  It's obviously not at all - it's so much more, including the need to make the other person feel loved and supported and desired; the importance of fun and frivolity from time to time; the realization that you can't change the other person, so don't try; not every fight needs to be picked and not every mistake needs to be highlighted; and that many perceived slights aren't personal, so don't take them as such.  Just wanted to point out that I'm not a complete self-centered asshole.   

Watch mama open up her arms to hug me, and I ain't worried 'bout a damn thang, with unconditional love

One of my good friends from high school in India - one whom I did not get to see last weekend, unfortunately - is part of an online exercise motivation group I'm in.  Or at least, the group started as merely an exercise motivation group, in which we were all doing a particular Beachbody program and would post daily about our workouts and cheer each other on as we did so.  Over time, it has morphed into a group of good friends, some of whom know each other in real life, and many of whom who don't but feel like they do, posting about exercise, but also about our lives generally. About husbands, ex-husbands, health issues, family dynamics, struggles, celebrations and mournings. It goes well beyond fitness and exercise, at this point, and it's lovely.

It's one of the reasons I will never join the chorus of those railing against the evils and banalities of social media.  Through social media, I am able to connect on a personal, emotional level with people all over the world.  It has enriched my life immeasurably.

Anyway, this friend has been participating in my exercise challenges for years, ever since I started coaching.  She is a tremendously kind and thoughtful person, and always has something sweet and encouraging to say.

Yesterday she posted about visiting her parents, and about how, upon seeing her, her mother made harsh comments about her weight and the size of her butt.  She was, naturally, hurt and discouraged by the comment, though apparently, this is par for the course with her mother.

She remarked that instead of going to see her parents, she should come with me on my vacation to bask in the unconditional love that my family radiates.

I continue to be so eternally grateful for my family's love, comfort and support.  The past year and a half has been so hard, between the split and subsequent divorce, trying to figure out how to get my mojo back as 45-year-old woman trying to reenter the dating world, being a single parent, Emma's death, the recent custody issues.  My self esteem took a beating, I was sad and depressed and anxious, I gained weight and hated the way I looked, I felt old and ugly and undesirable.

Slowly but surely, I am pulling myself out of the mire.  Since January (when I started the online exercise group), I have worked extremely hard to get my fitness back, and I'm feeling and looking so much better - I've been lifting weights and eating properly, and I'm down two pants sizes.  I've tentatively tried to date, without much success yet, but at least I'm putting myself out there - something good will happen.  My children are happy and healthy and beautiful, and are navigating their new reality with a grace that makes me so proud.

Some of it is the natural ebb and flow of life - things are never all bad or all good all the time.  When you're faced with the worst things you can imagine (and honestly, the only thing worse than Emma dying would be one of my kids dying), you spend some time at rock bottom, but eventually things get easier if for no other reason than they can't get any worse and you learn how to deal.

And some of it is that, through it all, I always knew that no matter how often or how far I fell, my family would be there to help lift me up again, because that's what we do for each other.

There has never been a time in my life when my parents or my brothers, upon seeing me, didn't make me believe that I could do anything I set out to do.  That I was smart and strong and capable and worthy of love and happiness.

There has never been a time in my life when my mother has greeted me after a long absence with anything but, "you look wonderful."  Whether I was 10 pounds overweight, had a zit, hadn't slept regularly in weeks, whatever.

It breaks my heart to know that not everybody has that support system, because I cannot imagine living without it.

I feel like I'm on a roll.  Like I've got some momentum.  My India reunion went a long way toward replenishing some of my love and happiness reservoirs.  I'm still basking in that feeling.

And tomorrow, the kids and I are leaving for ten days on at the beach with my family.  My parents, my brothers and their wives, my nieces.  Ten days of relaxing and reading and swimming and going to the movies and just being with each other.  It's an emotional battery recharge.

It makes me believe that things can only continue to get better.  I will find love again.  My kids will continue to thrive.  I will, some day, achieve 6-pack abs.

Well, probably not that last one.  But I'll keep trying, with the help of my friends and family.

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail

A couple of weeks ago, before the kids left for Mexico, I was sitting in my office at around 4:45 in the afternoon when I saw that the sky was turning blackish greenish brown.  It had been relatively mild before then, but in a matter of minutes, everything went dark, the wind started whipping sideways, and pellets of hail started hammering at the windows.  Then it started to dump rain, and suddenly there were flash flood warnings and rivers of water running down the street.

These are classic signs that a tornado may be on the way.

The kids were across the street at their summer camp, and when I saw the weather, I knew I had to head over there.  There was crazy rain and hail and a foot of water in the road, but Zeke is terrified of tornadoes, so I figured if the sirens started to go off and we had to shelter in place, better that I be there with him.  So I braved the elements and arrived at the YMCA bedraggled and with my clothes soaked up to my knees, but otherwise no worse for the wear.

As soon as I got there, the tornado sirens started to go off.  My kids, as well as the others who were still waiting for their parents to come pick them up, were already nervous, but at the sound of the siren they all visibly stiffened.  Zeke's eyes got really wide and his breathing became rapid and shallow - he was starting to panic.

"Mama, we're not going to be OK.  WE'RE NOT GOING TO BE OK!"

"We are going to be fine, honey.  I'm here and we're going to be just fine.  We're going to go downstairs to the basement and wait for the storm to pass."

But he couldn't calm down.  He was shaking and crying and scared.  I hugged him to me and tried to reassure him as best I could.

The camp counselors led us to the basement of the building, which is old and solid and has survived many storms in its 100 year history.  We sat on the floor of the hallway and waited.

A number of the littler kids were crying.  I brought them over to sit with me, and soon I had about 6 small children sitting in my lap or huddling on the edges.

"Are my parents going to die?  What if they're caught in the storm?"

"My puppy is outside.  Is she going to die?  She's really dumb and doesn't know where to go."

"What if my house gets hit?"

I tried to think of all my tricks to calm them down.  I gave them my phone to play with.  We sang some songs.  I assured them that their parents would know how to get themselves somewhere safe, and that everything was going to be fine.

I said, "look at the adults around you, including me - our biggest job right now is to keep you safe. Do we look worried?  No?  Then that means that you don't need to worry either.  When the grownups start to freak out, that's when you can freak out, but as long as we're calm, you can stay calm, too."

All of these things placated them somewhat.  But the truth was, they were going to be scared until the storm was over and their parents showed up and the skies were clear again.  Which they eventually were.

I have thought about that day a lot in the past two weeks.

Two Saturdays ago, J and his girlfriend took the kids to Mexico for a 2 week vacation.  I was nervous about agreeing to it, but ultimately decided that it was the reasonable thing to do.

I handed over their passports and loaned him a suitcase and said goodbye.  Then I went home and cried.

I have cried every day since.  It has felt like there was a tornado going on in my head and in my body.  My emotions have left me beaten and raw.  I have been so anxious I felt like I was having panic attacks - I even got my doctor to prescribe me some anti-anxiety meds to keep me from flying right off the rails.  I have been despondent and depressed.  I have been lonely beyond belief.  I have missed my children to the point of feeling physical pain as a result.

I have mourned the loss of time I will have with them.

Not to belabor the metaphor, but the past two weeks I've felt like those kids trying to keep it together during that tornado.  There have been times when I felt like I couldn't deal with what was going on in my life at all.  Then there would be interludes when I would get out of the house to have dinner with friends, or play bar trivia with a local Meetup group, or go to the pool and hang out with my neighbors.  Eventually things will calm down and I won't feel so panicked and unsettled.

Tomorrow my children will come back and I will be able to spend the evening with them.  Then the next morning I will leave for DC for the weekend for another India reunion.  As ever, I am beyond excited to see my friends, but it will be hard to be away from my kids.  But after I get back, I'll have 3 weeks with them, including a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my family where we'll play Uno and swim in the pool and relax at the beach while trying to avoid being eaten by sharks.

And then we'll get back and have to start working on a new schedule - one that will give me more time to myself and more freedom to try to build a new life for myself, but less time with them.

I have to accept it.  It pains me to accept it, but I have to accept it.  I have to be a grownup about it.

Even if being a grownup sucks sometimes.

You don't know what you've got till you lose it all again

As with Thanksgiving, which was lovely but also incredibly painful, there's another heavy milestone coming up.  Emma's 18th birthday is in a little over a week.

My emotions are very close to the surface these days.  Every conversation I have at some point turns to her, and I cry.  I'll go through periods of a few hours when I'm OK, and then a period of a few hours when my eyes are constantly leaking and if I breathe too deeply I'll break down.

I feel weighted down and anxious, like I've got big, cold rocks sitting on my chest.

Music is a time machine.

When I'm driving, I toggle back and forth between 80s on 8 or the classic 80s alternative station, and I get whiplash from the immediate, visceral associations that different songs bring on.

Journey's Open Arms comes on and suddenly I'm 13 years old and in the downstairs of the student union building at the American International School in Kfar Shmaryahu, Israel, doing the side-to-side slow dance shuffle that is embedded in the DNA of every American teenager at middle school dances everywhere.  I can see the table of hors d'oevres, with the last few tired sprigs of broccoli and carrots lying next to the few remaining dregs of hummus in a plastic bowl. I can see what I and everyone else is wearing, including the high-waisted jeans that, for reasons I will never understand, are coming back in style.  I feel the unfortunately chosen hairstyle that I'm sporting - bangs on my forehead, even though bangs look shitty on me and my hair has too many funky cowlicks and curls for them to sit the way I want them to.  I can smell the Old Spice wafting from the face of the nervous boy with whom I'm swaying to the music.

Then Bruce Hornsby's Valley Road comes on, and I careen 2800 miles southeast and 4 years forward in time, to a hotel balcony in Kerala, India.  My friends and I are on our school's annual "mini-course" trip - a week when the high school students at the American Embassy School in New Delhi fan out across the subcontinent to get hands-on experience in the customs, traditions and history of India - and the trip we've chosen is a week at the beach.  We do some sightseeing and partake in activities with some education value. But for the most part, our chaperones are as content as we are to sunbathe during the day and hang out at night on our hotel balconies drinking beer (we didn't drink with the teachers, but there's no way they didn't know, especially because there was no drinking age that was enforced) and smoking cigarettes and listening to music, including the new Bruce Hornsby and the Range album, which was hugely popular (and which still holds up almost 30 years later).

Against my shins, I can feel the edges of the blue sarong, interwoven with gold threads, that I am wearing as a dress.  I can feel the soft humid warm air on my bare shoulders, and smell the plumeria flowers in the trees.  I can hear the voices of my friends, laughing and talking and arguing over nothing of consequence.  I feel the butterflies in my belly and chest, brought about by the fact that this week, the boy I've been crazy about all year has professed his love for me as well.  We're sitting next to each other and our arms and hands keep brushing together.  Everything is beautiful and new and exciting, and the magic of life is spread out before me like an enormous silk rug.

Suddenly I'm back in my car in 2015, on my way to Sports Authority to pick up cleats and soccer socks for the kids.  I'm sobbing, because the rush of nostalgia - that yearning for the time in my life when everything was possible - mixes with the fact that Emma's life ended just as she was getting to that point.  My head drops and the tears fall and my breathing gets ragged.  I have to pull over.

After a couple of minutes, I take a deep breath and collect myself.  I check the rearview mirror and wipe the runny mascara from my face.  I change the radio station and start driving again, off to run my errands and then meet my children at the soccer fields.

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.

Happy New Year.

I am determined to make it so.

2014 was such a horrible year.  Truly the worst year of my life.  The death of a marriage, the death of a niece, the death of that special, rarified familial happiness we enjoyed.  Mental fog and depression, physical lethargy.  I gained 10 pounds, I was sad, I cried all the time, I felt like shit.

And then it all ended with a period of time that I dread and despise every year -- the winter holidays and break from school.  School lets out, but I still have to work, so I send the kids to Denver Public Schools' day camp that they run on dismissal days, but they don't run it on ALL the dismissal days, just some of them, so some days I have coverage and some days I don't, so I end up working 2 or 3 days per week for 2 1/2 weeks and everything is disjointed and I don't get anything done and it drives me bonkers.

Christmas isn't even my holiday, and J had the kids on New Year's Eve, so I spent both of those days and nights alone, reading and watching movies.  Which is OK, but felt kind of lonely because I had nowhere to go and no one else to spend time with.

I needed the year to be over.  Once 2014 was over and 2015 started, then in my mind, I could take definitive steps to put it all behind me.  I could start exercising and eating well again. I could come out of my depressive funk.  I could raise my inner Scarlett O'Hara: I won't think about the bad stuff.  I'll put it behind me.  Tomorrow is another day.  Scarlett may have been an asshole, but she knew how to deal with her shit and get on with her life.  I always respected her for that.

It seems so arbitrary and stupid when I think about it, this obsession with the actual date. It's a date on a calendar.  Why couldn't I just start a health program in December?  Why couldn't I mentally and emotionally try to feel better earlier?  Why does flipping the calendar page from December to January make a difference?

It just does, at least for me.  2014 felt like a monster's claws to me, holding me in a cold, awful grip. And with the turning of the clock and the calendar, there is a releasing of that grip in my mind.  It's a way of compartmentalizing and saying, OK, I got my time to wallow and be sad and unproductive, but life goes on and it's time to get busy living.

So I am.  I'm back on the fitness and health train, and am already feeling so much better.  J and I are filing divorce papers this week.  I am making an effort every day to think about something that I am grateful for in my life.  I'm still walking to work and taking pictures.

I still miss Emma, and I am still heartbroken by her death.  That will never change.  I can, however, choose to remember her in a way that doesn't utterly devastate me.

The other day when I was walking to work, I saw this older couple walking in front of me.  They looked to be in their late 70s, at least.  The lady had the kind of hair-do that one only achieves by going to the hairdresser to have it "set."  They were walking hand in hand, and it made me smile.

I don't have any particular desire to be in a romantic relationship again, or to remarry.  But it would be nice to have someone to hold hands with on a walk, or to kiss at midnight on New Year's Eve.

Here's hoping for a joyous 2015.

I blink, as if at pain

We were on the train taking us from the terminal back to baggage claim, part of the post-Thanksgiving returning throngs clinging exhaustedly to subway straps and poles, the travel-induced blank faces, bodies jiggling back and forth like jello.

I looked out the window and caught my reflection, and was, as ever, surprised and dismayed by how tired and haggard and old I look.

Not just look.  Am.

I tried to give myself a break.  It's a reflection in a train window.  It's shitty flourescent light.  You've been traveling all day.  You aren't wearing make-up.  It was a rough week.

It was a rough week.

I knew it would be.  And I guess it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  But it was hard.  Emma's absence was an enormous presence that we all felt.

We tip-toed around it at first.  Not in the sense that we didn't talk about her, but we definitely skirted the fact that it was The First Major Holiday Without Her.

We did the things we normally do.  The house buzzed with decisions about which sides to make for dinner on Thursday.

Dad doesn't really like sweet potatoes - maybe instead of mashing them we could do roasted wedges? 

Trust me, you may not like Brussels sprouts, but these are sauteed with bacon - you're going to love them.

They're not powdered potatoes - they make them fresh at the store!  But it's one less thing to worry about.

Why don't my pie crusts ever look like yours?  No matter what I do, they don't roll out properly.

The kids had a great time playing with their cousins.  Zeke took to rolling down the big hill in my parents' front yard, and was constantly covered with mud.  We went to the park.

We did our annual Thanksgiving run in downtown D.C. benefiting So Others Might Eat.

And it was all lovely.  But there was this unshakable underlying tension.  Sadness permeated the week, as much as we love each other.  The air felt full of tiny shards of glass that cut our insides when we breathed.  The force of gravity felt stronger, pulling us down and making us feel heavier.

We dressed for dinner on Thursday afternoon, and sat down at the beautifully set table, laden with a gorgeous turkey and creamed spinach and my mom's awesome cranberry jello mold and rolls and stuffing and gravy and potatoes and wine.

Then we collectively looked around the table, took a deep breath, and burst into tears.

We were thankful to be together.  Thankful to be alive.  But it's been such a hard year.  We miss her so much.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I was relieved to be going home and away from my family.  Back in Colorado, I can get some distance.  I can compartmentalize.  I can let the day-to-day chaos of my own life - work, kids, house, appointments, friends -- shield me from that sadness and those tiny shards of glass.

But it still shows in my face in that train window reflection.

My soon to be 45-year-old face, which looks saggy and old and ugly to me.  My soon-to-be 45-year-old body, which looks saggy and old and ugly to me.

I was telling a friend of mine recently that I'm so much more attractive in my head - it's always jarring to me when I see my aging self in the mirror.

People pooh-pooh it whenever I say it out loud (so I rarely say it out loud), but it's how I feel.  It matters to me.  It affects my confidence and self-image.

I want my old self back.  I want the self that had discipline and will-power when it came to diet and exercise.  But when the sadness and stress moved in, the discipline and will-power moved out.

I'm trying so hard to get it back.  Because maybe if I get that back, I can figure out how to be young again.

I know not what the future holds, but I know who holds the future

I've been all wrapped up in the bombshell that Rolling Stone dropped this week about rape and rape culture at the University of Virginia.  Letters of outrage and Change.org petitions and laments about what the fuck is going on at our school.

My letter to the University president and other members of the administration can be found over at my friend Theresa Pileggi-Proud's site, You Are Here.  One of the things I talk about is the prospect of sending my own daughter to UVa. when she decides to go to college.  If she were going today, I wouldn't send her there.

But knowing what a problem campus rape is at many schools around the country, I don't know where I would want to send her.

And it's not just the issue of sexual assault.  I look back on my time at college, and while I loved it, socially, the mores were so fucked up and antiquated, particularly within the Greek system.  My best friends from UVa. are my sorority sisters - I am still in contact and very close friends with a significant number of them.  I love them and they are incredibly important to me. But when I look back on the Rush process - with its snap judgments and all night voting sessions that were breeding grounds for cattiness, tears, and fractured friendships - not to mention bronchitis, which I got every single year during Rush - it turns my stomach.  It is exactly the opposite of how I would encourage Josie to approach her friendships and interactions with other human beings.

Then once you're in, there's so much focus on landing a cute guy and being accepted by the right group and having a date to the football game and getting invitations from the "good" fraternities to have mixers.

Ugh.  It's fucking nauseating to think about.  And from what I can tell, not much there has changed.

And who knows.  More and more, I wonder about the value of college at all.  The world is changing so much.  In 13 years, when Josie is 18, the model for preparing yourself for the working world and beyond might have evolved to the point that apprenticeships or similar work/study arrangements are the key to success and upward mobility.  An expensive four-year college education, as the experience currently exists, might be obsolete.

It blows my mind that Zeke will be in high school in eight years, and Josie in nine.  If we stay in the same house, they might attend East High School, which is about 4 blocks from where we live.  I pass it on my way to work sometimes (depending on my route).  It's a beautiful, majestic building.

I just hope by the time they get there, I've imparted enough wisdom on how to be self-confident and tough, yet also kind and empathetic, that they can navigate the social hell that is high school (and beyond) with aplomb.

In the meantime, I'm signing Josie up for martial arts lessons.

Fermé au mois d'août

Remember when I said that I was going to take the month of August to really get organized and take charge of my life etcetera etcetera?

Interesting how that turned out.

I started the Chalene Johnson Push program, and one of the first thing she has you do is list the 10 major areas of your life and give each one a ranking from 1 to 10 - work, finances, relationships, health, personal development, spirituality, stuff like that.

I am very happy with my family and relationships, I love my job, I'm not rich but I have enough money, I'm healthy and I'm pretty fit.  The areas that I felt were suffering were more in the personal fulfillment/spirituality realms.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the last thing I needed was to put more pressure on myself to work harder at my coaching business or to clean out my house or go nuts trying to be super-organized.

What I really needed was to chill the fuck out and NOT put so much pressure on myself, at least for a little while.

So I decided to take the month of August off.

Not from work or life or anything like that, but from worrying about whether I'm productive enough or achieving enough or fit enough or successful enough.*

I've spent the month doing what I want and not worrying about it.  I eat what I feel like, I work out or don't, depending on my mood, I've spent a lot of time relaxing and reading.  On the weekends when J has the kids, I go on walks and watch whatever I want on TV and take naps.   I've thought about blogging, but I didn't really feel like it, so I didn't.

This is obviously not my natural, comfortable state of existence.  It's been great, but I'm starting to feel antsy.  Which is good - I'm itching to start running health and fitness challenge groups and organizing everything and sticking to a workout schedule and getting back to my Type-A self, but it's because I want to and I'll enjoy it.  I've had a nice break and I feel refreshed and rejuvenated.

Today I'm taking the kids to my parents' house in Virginia for the weekend, to hang out with family (my brother Sam and his wife will also be there) and friends and enjoy the last bit of summer.  I'm excited to see people I love and to have some fun.

Then in September, I'll be ready to go.


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*The irony of this decision, based upon a questionnaire from a "get organized and achieve your goals" program, is not lost on me.