Time to do the damned thing

It was extremely distressing to discover that not only had my little black dress not made it into my bag - though I distinctly remembered getting it out of the closet and putting it on the pile - but neither had my underwear. 

So all I had for our fancy dinner was a flimsy cotton dress that has moth holes in it (but which I keep to schlump around in because it’s still pretty cute and oh so comfortable) and the pair of undies I was wearing, which are bright neon orange and show right through the dress. 

We were at the Broadmoor, one of the loveliest hotels in the world, as a last weekend hurrah before I have knee surgery (tomorrow) to reconstruct the ligaments I destroyed while skiing a month and a half ago. And I really REALLY did not want to go into a swanky restaurant wearing a ratty dress with loudly colored underwear glowing from beneath.

The skiing injury was heartbreaking to me. It was only my fifth day of the season on the mountain, and came after an incredible day of skiing all over Vail with some of Greg’s friends who were visiting from out of town. The next day we were a little tired and decided to have a mellow day. 

“Let’s do some easy runs to warm up before heading over to the back of the mountain,” we thought. 

After which I proceeded to blast into a mogul field going much too fast, because I came over a ridge and for some reason thought the terrain below was groomed rather than bumpy. 

It wasn’t. I lost control and made a twisting fall. I felt and heard the “pop” that is the sure sign of a ruptured ACL. Ski patrol was called, they pulled me down the mountain in the sled, and I went to the hospital. I drove back to Denver with a big heavy brace on my left leg, crying most of the way.

Greg likes to take pictures of me when I've busted ass.

No more skiing. No more long summer hikes. No more Triple Bypass, which I had been really looking forward to. Maybe no Emma climb. I cried for the next two days.

I have spent the ensuing seven weeks doing my damndest to “pre-hab” my knee by doing strength and stretching exercises and riding the Peloton every single day, often multiple times a day, so that my range of motion can be as good as it can be before heading into surgery. 

And after the surgery, I will have to do it all again, only with much more pain and much more hard work for seven or eight months, with the goal being that I can do my Emma climb in the fall and ski again next season.

Hence the fun weekend. And the missing undies.

I went to the concierge and told her my predicament. Was there anywhere nearby I could go to buy some panties that weren’t visible from space?

It being the Broadmoor, she didn’t hesitate to say, “of course! The boutiques are closed but we’ll just open them up for you and you can shop for whatever you’d like.”

Of course!

So a nice young man took me to the boutique and opened the doors and turned on the lights. I wandered through the empty store and picked out some non-neon-orange underwear to wear with my slightly moth-eaten dress, which cleaned up nicely with some heels and jewelry. And we had a lovely romantic evening wandering through the hotel looking at their incredible art collection, and having drinks while watching the NCAA tournament at the bar, and strolling around the lake holding hands, and eating a delicious dinner. We came back to Denver the next day feeling refreshed.

A painting at the Broadmoor called "Staging." I don't remember who painted it.
We both liked it but also felt very anxious looking at it - that ride would be terrifying.

The landscape around Colorado Springs. Stunning.

Sculpture in the yard of a house near the Broadmoor. The neighbors might not love it
(it's huge and draws cars full of gawkers), but it's really cool. 

Tomorrow is my surgery. I’m nervous the way I’ve always been nervous when I’m about to be sedated so that somebody can cut into my body. I’m nervous about what a pain in the ass it's going to be to get around for the next few months. I’m nervous about the long and difficult rehab that I’m facing.

But! I am strong and healthy. I’m a fast healer with a high tolerance for pain. I have friends and loved ones who will take care of me. I’m extremely disciplined when it comes to exercise. The doctor and the physical therapist only need to tell me exactly what to do, and I will do it. I’ll eventually be able to ski and bike and hike and do all of the things that I love. 

Most likely wearing brightly colored underwear. 

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.

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.

And all those things I didn't say, wrecking balls inside my brain

This is what I should have said, when he started yelling at me ten minutes into our first date, when I had the audacity to (respectfully) express a different psychological or temperamental approach to dating than the one he had expressed.

I don't think I'm interested in talking to you anymore. I'd say, 'have a nice life,' but the odds of that are pretty much non-existent, so I'll just say 'good-bye.'

I was accused of trying to "mother" him, of telling him how to live his life, of lecturing him that his statistical approach to love - of believing that he'd have to go out on 30 dates before he would find anyone worthwhile, and that having only gone on 5 this year, he was doomed - was wrong.* He became louder and more irate as he talked, jabbing his finger at me and punctuating his diatribe with, "why are you doing that, counselor?" 

His voice was filled with contempt and he called me "counselor" as if it were an epithet.

I'm actually proud of being a lawyer, so it seemed like a misplaced insult to me. But unlike when I'm arguing in court and I can be prepared and dispassionate, my ability to come up with quick, logical, cutting zingers escaped me.

Instead, I was stunned and I gaped at him in disbelief. I have never in my life been spoken to that way by a date, and my eyes started to tear. I blinked them away before he could see them.

Rather than gathering my coat and my purse and telling him to go fuck himself as I scooted out of the booth, I asked, "why are you yelling at me? I didn't say any of those things."

Part of my reaction was because our exchanges before meeting had been lovely and encouraging. We texted, we talked on the phone, we even FaceTimed, and he could not have been sweeter. He's good looking and ridiculously smart and was interesting to talk to. It seemed so promising.

So to be attacked and berated right out of the gate was shocking. Surreal. Incomprehensible. I didn't know how to process it. I hadn't walked into the restaurant armed for battle, so I was exposed and vulnerable.

"I was just trying to talk to you. I don't know anything about you, so I'm trying to get to know you."

He threw his head around as if my efforts to make normal first-date conversation were too outrageous to be borne. His agitation was palpable.

"Jesus, I don't want to do this! I just want to talk and have fun! I don't want to feel like I'm being interviewed!"

"What are you talking about? I was talking about the sports teams we liked. And instead of comparing stories about who we liked growing up, you launched into a statistical analysis and talked about demographics and economic trends. You never even answered my question!"

"It was a malthusian analysis!"

I didn't know how to respond to that.

He continued, "I don't want to sit and do all the talking. You talk!"

Rather than gathering my coat and my purse and telling him to go fuck himself as I scooted out of the booth, I tried to talk. I don't even remember what I was talking about. I just remember him being fidgety and looking around like he'd rather be anywhere else.

I stopped talking and sighed and shook my head.

The waitress was walking by. He stopped her and said, "check, please."

We had been there for 15 minutes. We hadn't even ordered anything to eat.

Rather than gathering my coat and my purse and telling him to go fuck himself as I scooted out of the booth, I sat there throughout the process of waiting for the check and then waiting while she ran his credit card and brought the slip back.

While we waited, he started talking about politics. He is vehemently anti-Trump, anti-establishment, anti-anything run by old white men, and without any prompting from me - by this point, I was scared to say much of anything - he started this unbelievable rant in which his voice got louder and louder and he was irate and every other word was "fuck." Finally the hostess came over to the table and asked him to tone it down because there were children at the next table.

It was mortifying.

The check came back. He signed it.

I gathered my coat and my purse and scooted out of the booth. I did not tell him to go fuck himself. I said, "I'm going."

He stood up and his demeanor became almost sheepish.

"Can I give you a hug goodbye?"

Are you kidding me? I though to myself.

My nerve didn't fail me this time.

"No."

I didn't fall apart until I got home. I pulled into my driveway, still shell-shocked. And then I burst into tears. I cried as I walked into the house. I cried as I realized I needed to put the garbage and recycling bins in the alley. I cried in the alley as a guy passed me, walking his dogs.

I pulled out my phone and texted a guy I know, a guy who is always sweet to me. Our schedules never match up so we barely ever see each other, but we manage to hang out together once a month or so.

He was sympathetic and kind and supportive and outraged on my behalf. He talked me off the ledge. It was what I needed to hear.

But I slept horribly that night. I woke up feeling psychologically bruised. I still do, a little bit. I am generally one to say, "next!" in the face of a bad date, but I've never had a date like that. I think I'm done for a while.

All because I couldn't say from the beginning, go fuck yourself, dude.


_________________________
*For the record, I did none of these things. I simply stated that I had different thoughts about it.

It's all Greek to me

Growing up the way I did, my family and I were immersed in other cultures. We experienced non-American holidays. We traveled to far away places. We had friends from all over.  We learned languages.

My first language was Greek, though I don't remember any of it anymore. I still speak Spanish and though I was conversational in Hebrew when we lived in Israel during my early teens, I haven't retained it at all except for a few words (but I can still read it, oddly enough). 

My dad is also pretty good at languages, and he still speaks some Greek and Spanish. 

My dad is, shall we say, not a shy, retiring type. He is gregarious and talkative and likes to connect with people. He is a congregant in the church of finding common ground - you know that guy? He's a friend of mine! You're from that place? Hey, I've been there! You're Salvadoran? Let me speak to you in your language!

It's a wonderful quality. I am a sociable person, but it's not in my nature to strike up a conversation with strangers wherever I go. It makes me feel intrusive. My father, on the other hand, is more of a hail-fellow-well-met, unencumbered by an overdeveloped sense of embarrassment.

We like to go to Greek diners. There's one near my parents' house in Virginia that we go to for breakfast every Thanksgiving after the SOME Trot for Hunger. There are many near where I live, owned by a Greek guy who has a bunch of local diners and restaurants. We hit them up when we are all in New York City together.

And every damned time, my dad walks in and starts speaking Greek with the waiter, or the hostess, or the busboy, or whomever we happen to encounter. And almost every damned time, the person is from Guatemala or Minnesota or Long Island, and they have no fucking idea what he's talking about. 

My dad shrugs it off. It makes my brothers and me cringe. 

This past weekend I went to a play with my friend Christen, and we had dinner at a Mexican place beforehand. 

Our waiter was a young black-haired, olive-skinned guy who spoke with what sounded like a Hispanic accent. Denver has a large Hispanic community. We were in a Mexican restaurant. I felt like it wasn't a stretch to assume that he spoke Spanish.

When Christen ordered the chile relleno, the waiter asked if she wanted it crispy.

Bouncing with certainty and confidence, I asked, "como se dice "crispy" en español?"

He scowled at me and barked, "I have no idea."  I recoiled like a toddler who reaches for that second cookie, only to have her hand unceremoniously slapped away.

This is why I don't talk to strangers.

And apparently, I have become my father. 

What next?

Every time I get news about a death in the family (or in this case, extended family-in-law), I think, "ok, this really has to be it.  No more."  With Emma it was shock and horror and bottomless sadness.  With Lori it was shock and anger and a feeling of exhaustion, with some despair for my brother and his girls thrown in.

This time, with the news that Lori's younger sister Sarah died today, after years of ravaging her body because of personal demons, my reaction was just shock.  But not even very much - quite honestly, the shock stems not from the fact that it happened, but that it happened now, a mere 4 1/2 months after Lori died.  That within a less than two year span, her parents have lost two daughters and a granddaughter.

I don't know how a person deals with that.  I can't wrap my head around it.

To be clear, I don't consider this a personal loss. I didn't have any kind of relationship with her, nor did Josh.  I don't need any personal condolences.  Rather, my sadness stems from the fact that it's such a tragic waste of a life, and so desperately, unfathomably awful for the family she left behind - parents, brothers, and a grandmother.

It's too much death. Too many funerals. Just too much. This is Greek tragedy level shit.

Weird things pop into my head. First was that I received the call from my mother rather than my father.  Her vocal inflection for announcing death and destruction is different from his.

Second was that I felt genuine pity for someone I've been rather severe with, in terms of my assessment of her culpability in her other daughter's demise.  But whatever failings she had or has, nobody deserves this.

I was talking to Josh, and we both remarked on how yet another death reinforces, once again, the importance of finding joy and purpose and beauty in every day.

As Josh put it, it's time for full-on zero-fucks-given mode.  Not irresponsibility or foolishness, but casting aside all of the silly fears and self-doubts that so often keep us from going after what we want.  Climb mountains, seek out love and adventure, travel, get laid, bask in the joy of friendships.

Just fucking live.

It's all about the benjamins, baby

Having visited and lived in Third World countries growing up - particularly India - I'm well cognizant of how extravagantly I hit the jackpot in being born who I am.  American, solidly middle- to upper-middle class, with parents who were loving and supportive, who provided me with an amazing education, and who lived a life that allowed me to travel and experience the world in a way most people never get to. I was always well-housed, well-clothed, well-fed.  I've never had to worry about poverty or homelessness or deprivation.  I was praised for being smart and pretty and athletic, and made to feel like I could do anything I set my mind to.  I had every advantage.

I try to impart to my children how fortunate they are, but it's hard. When we lived in Venezuela, our house was down the street from a barrio.  Everywhere I went in India I encountered wretched slums, extreme poverty, and children begging in the streets.  But my children are rarely, if ever, face-to-face with children (or anyone, really) whose socio-economic status varies from theirs in any significant way.  Their biggest source of frustration is when I set the parental controls on their Kindles to only allow them an hour of screen time a day.

So even though yesterday's events were a little jarring, they also provided a valuable lesson.

I bought Josie a new bike on Saturday, so we spent the weekend riding around.  Yesterday we decided to ride along the South Platte River trail, which starts at the REI in part of downtown Denver.  It's a wide, smoothly paved path, perfect for tooling around with kids, and perfect for Josie to get the hang of her new wheels.  The trail takes you past Elitch Gardens, where we marveled at the scary looking rollercoasters, and past Mile High Stadium, where we marveled at the statue of the horse and talked about how great it was that the Broncos won the Superbowl.

After that, the scenery gets a little rougher.  Factories.  Power plants.  Industrial areas.

Then suddenly, about 2 miles down, we rounded a curve and saw an amazing playground.  The kids asked if we could stop and play, so we did.

When we took our bikes up, I realized we were smack in the middle of the housing projects (in fact, the headquarters for the Denver Housing Authority was right next to the playground).  But whatever - the playground was nice and it seemed safe enough, so I sat at one of the picnic tables while the kids climbed and jumped and had fun.

After a couple of minutes, a group of four kids came over and started playing as well.  They ranged in age from 2 to about 9.  There was no adult with them. The toddler had a full diaper.  The older kids were eating burritos out of tupperware containers.  They were all very sweet, and fell in comfortably with my kids.

Then a little girl came over and started causing trouble.  One of the other kids said she was 7, but she looked older.  Josie will be 7 in a few months and this girl outweighed her by at least 10 pounds.  She was at least as tall as Zeke, and looked strong and muscle-y.  I looked at her and thought, "in 15 years, she will look exactly the same, only taller and with worse skin." Dirty, stringy blonde hair, wearing fuzzy pajama pants out in public, with a shitty, mean look on her face.

She went over to one of the girls who looked to be about 7 or 8, and tried to snatch her food from her.  The girl backed off, but the mean girl followed and started throwing wood chips (from the playground), and then started hitting and kicking.

I ran over to break up the fight.  Mean Girl wouldn't stop trying to attack, so I stepped between her and the other girl and said, "you need to stop that nasty behavior right now.  Leave these kids alone and get away from here!"  She gave me a look that reminded me of a snake about to strike - cold, emotionless, and menacing.  But she backed off.

I went to comfort the little girl who had been attacked - she was crying and upset.  I put my arm around her and was trying to soothe her when Mean Girl returned, this time threatening one of the other kids.  I approached her again and told her to leave, and she backed off.

After that, she circled around the edges of the playground area like a shark, looking for any opening, any opportunity.  So I kept myself between her and the kids, and would step towards her and send her away when she started to approach one of the children.  Zeke and Josie were simultaneously freaked and in protective mode - they would put their arms around the other kids and yell at the girl to leave them alone.  But at no point did they say, "Mama, we're scared, let's get out of here."  I was kind of proud.

The kids were mesmerized by Zeke's and Josie's bikes, so we let them ride around the playground.  Mean Girl was continuing to roam in the background, but for the most part she kept her distance.  When she didn't, I would direct the kids to get behind me and order her to leave them alone.

I thought about taking my kids and riding off, but I also didn't want to leave the other children there unprotected.  Apparently their mom was off doing laundry, so I thought I'd wait a little while in the hopes that she came back.

Things came to a head when Zeke was letting the toddler sit on the seat of his bike while he pushed it around, giving the baby a little ride.  He was being incredibly sweet.  But he got about 15 feet away from me, and when he did, Mean Girl walked over to him and started kicking at him.  Because he was holding up the bike with the baby on it, he was powerless to respond.

I lost my shit.  I broke into a full sprint and screamed at her, "GET AWAY FROM MY SON!!" She started to run and I chased her until she had run behind one of the buildings about 200 feet away.

She never came back.  The other kids went home when they saw their mom coming back from the laundry.  And we climbed on our bikes and rode back to REI to get some lemonade at the Starbucks there, dragging our privileged white asses back to the safe, easy world we live in.

Later in the car, Josie said, "that girl was really mean.  She shouldn't act like that."

"I know, honey, you're right.  But the truth is, she's probably just behaving the way people in her home behave.  I bet she sees a lot of fighting and anger.  Her life is hard."

We talked about how lucky they are.  I explained that even though I knew it wasn't easy for them to deal with the fact that Daddy and I had split up, they now have two nice homes to live in, lots of people who love them and take care of them, nice friends, and plenty of food and toys and clothes and new bikes and books.

"You both live very fortunate lives compared to lots of other kids.  So you should try to be understanding.  Even though what that girl did wasn't OK, we should try to remember that her life isn't nearly as nice and easy as yours is."

After a minute, Zeke asked, "what if you or Daddy died?  Where would we go?"

"If Daddy died, you would live with me.  If I died, you would live with Daddy."

"What if you died and Daddy was already dead?  Could I go live with Jackson [his friend from across the street]?"

"No, in that case, you would probably go live with Josh or Sam, or Mimi and Papa.  I don't really know - I should really talk to them about it - but you would be with family and they would take care of you."

Josie said, "living with Josh would be fun.  He has a pool!"

Zeke was quiet for a while, deep in thought.

Then he piped up, "if we live with Sam, could I bring my Xbox?"

It's the important things we need to worry about, right?

Yes, and...

I read Tina Fey's book Bossypants a few years ago, and one of the things that really struck me about it was how she bases her philosophy on life in general on the rules of improv.  And if you've ever taken a class in improv, you know that the very first rule is that you always have to say, "yes, and..."  In other words, accept what your scene partner has presented, and add to it.  Saying "no" kills the scene.

So if your partner starts with, "hands in the air, I have a gun, this is a stick-up," you wouldn't say something like, "that's not a gun," you would "yes-and" it by saying something like, "don't shoot! And hey, that's my mother's gun, how did you get it?"

Applying this to life in general, the goal is to say yes to opportunities.  Take risks.  Have adventures. Seek out the new and the interesting.  Don't make decisions based on fear of bad things that might happen, but rather on hope for the good things that might happen.

I've applied this philosophy to my own life, with mixed results.  I yes-and-ed a marriage to someone entirely different from and not well suited to me, and we all know how that went.  I yes-and-ed a move to Hawaii, which I mostly hated.  But all of those choices led me to where I am now, in a place I love with a job I really enjoy and beautiful children whom I adore.  That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right?

A couple of weeks ago my friend (and coworker) Lisa and I went to New Orleans for a legal conference.  The conference itself I found to be of limited utility - the statute that I work with hasn't been reauthorized in so long that at this point, there really isn't anything new under the sun and I feel like I could have given most of the presentations in my sleep.

But man, did I fall in love with New Orleans.  The music, the voodoo, murder, vampires and ghosts, hauntings, disaster, disease, heat, food - it's a place that feels viscerally full of all that life can offer.  We "yes-and-ed" the shit out of that place.

Jazz trio in the French Quarter.  Amazing musicians were playing all over the place.

We said yes to having our tarot cards and palms read, even though that stuff kind of scares me.  The tarot reading was at once crazily specific at points and meaninglessly generic at others:

• The cards show that I have been through an extremely emotionally turbulent year and a half, which, duh.  I will continue to feel emotionally pushed and pulled all over the place for another 6 to 8 months, at which point things will settle down for me.  
• A young man between the ages of 22 and 35, tall, with dark hair and dark eyes, is in my life, seeking money or some kind of financial assistance or guidance from me.  I found this bewildering, until after we came back to Denver, I interviewed a bunch of candidates for a position on my team.  The one I want to hire is a young man of 23, tall, with dark hair and dark eyes.  Does that fit?
• In a few months, I will meet an older woman (described by the tarot reader as "over 35" - pffft) who will become important to me, and I will remain close to her for the rest of my life.  Ok. We'll see where this one goes.
• I will continue to have turbulent dreams and difficulty sleeping.  No surprise there.
• The answer to my secret question is "yes."

We said yes to having our palms read.  My palm shows that I am intelligent and stubborn, have no tolerance for being lied to or feeling like someone is bullshitting me, that I am very much rooted in "this world" - I don't have my head in the clouds.  My palm shows 2 healthy pregnancies (yep), a long lifeline (she said I'd live to be 102, which is the age my great-grandfather lived to), and no sign of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or strokes.  Cool.  She also said my palm shows a strong, 50-60 year marriage or love relationship.  If I were to have a 60 year marriage, I'd pretty much need to get married 6 years ago, but I'll take a prediction of a long, strong love that fits within the timeline I've got left.

We said yes to a ghost and vampire tour.  I now want to go back to New Orleans and stay in the Andrew Jackson Hotel in the French Quarter (I joked that it would be changing its name to the Harriet Tubman Hotel - that got a few chuckles), so that I can experience a hotel haunted by the ghosts of mischievous little boys who run around the halls making noise and use guests' cameras to take photos of them while they're sleeping.  

We also saw the LaLaurie Mansion, which has a particularly gruesome, terrifying past. It was owned by a socialite couple who used part of the house to torture and conduct medical experiments on slaves.  The house continues to be haunted by the screams and apparitions of the tortured slaves.  Our tour guide is so creeped out by the house that she won't stand next to it - we viewed it from across the street.  The following evening, Lisa and I were wandering around the French Quarter when all of a sudden we realized where we were - walking right by the LaLaurie house under the balconies.  It freaked us out.  We apologized to the ghosts and scurried away.

Ursuline Street.  Home to three residences, all in a row, where over the course of a century women were murdered and dismembered by their husbands or lovers.

After wandering around, we said yes to foot massages at a random reflexology place we passed on the street.  Why not, right?  Who knows if the people had any actual training in reflexology, but it felt great.

Hurricanes and planter's punch was consumed.  Lisa won a bunch of money playing blackjack at a casino.  

Late that night, my friend sent me a text, asking about the trip.  I told him that I needed to come back to New Orleans, not on business, and walk through one of the the above-ground cemeteries and listen to music and learn about voodoo and eat spicy food and just generally cavort.  He responded, "yes, we do."

Peanuts! Popcorn! Get your red hots here!

We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!

- Ronnie Cammareri, Moonstruck

We are doing the "ask a bunch of questions" thing, but not in a way that feels forced or awkward. More like fun questions that I like asking because it's way more interesting than, "so, do you have any brothers and sisters? where do they live?"

"Have you ever been arrested?"  "What kind of recurring anxiety dreams to you have?"  "If you wanted to run for public office, are there any incriminating photos or videos that would stand in your way?"  "How old were you when you lost your virginity?"

I love questions like that.  We chat in that vein for a while.

Then he asks, "so what are you looking for?"

Ah.

What do I want?  Which should really be, who do I want?  Who should I want?

It's the question that keeps me in a perpetual war with myself.

Because sometimes I wonder if the who is less important to me than the what.

The what being that particular feeling that is so rare.  The chemistry. The butterflies, the tingles, the charge in the air, the excitement, the sense that when you're together, you're in on a secret that no one else is in on. What my eloquent friend Lisa refers to as the "red hots."  It doesn't happen with many people, but when it does, oof.

And so I find that I will endure quite a lot for the what.  Sometimes the who attached to the what - those elusive red hots - is, on an objective level, not the who you might have put yourself with, all things being equal.  The who might be a pain in the ass, or be persnickety in ways that annoy you, or be self-absorbed and infuriating.  Most of the time, it might feel like he's utterly wrong for you.

Except when it doesn't.  And when it doesn't, the feeling is intoxicating, and so hard to let go of.  He might make you miserable, but you can't get him out of your head.

Is it worth it?  Is the euphoria worth the pain?  At some point, do you need to give up the yearning for the red hots in order to achieve some emotional stability?

"What are you looking for?" he asks again.

I put on my best Mona Lisa smile and shrug.

"Let's just see what happens."

But deep down, I know.  I can't live without the red hots.  And it's always been my downfall.

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

I've written quite a bit about my sense of what home is, or rather, my difficulty with the concept of home as a particular place.  I tend to feel most at home with certain people, like my India friends, or my UVa friends, or my family, than I do in any given location.

And of course, home is my children.  Who I now only see half of the time.  And having alone time to recharge after single-parenting can be a godsend.  But when I think about the reality of what the custody schedule means - that I will be there to raise them and enjoy their company and bear witness to their development for only half of their lives - it overwhelms me with sadness and regret.  It is one of the few things that can reduce me to a puddle of tears in an instant.  As typing that sentence has now done.

Thank goodness for waterproof mascara.

The custody agreement provides that I will get them for a week every Thanksgiving, and dad will get them for a week every Christmas.  It makes sense - Thanksgiving is the major holiday that my family celebrates every year, whereas we don't get together or do anything for Christmas, it not being our Tribe's gig.

But they are gone right now for nine days, through Christmas.  And I'm by myself, and my friends here all have families and obligations and plans for the holidays, whereas my family and good friends are far away, scattered around the country (and the world).  I do have some family here, but I don't see them often.

I generally don't have a hard time being by myself.  Solitude can be peaceful and wonderful, and there are always things to do around here - I can go skiing, or go for a walk, or go to the art museum, or read.  I really do love Denver, and I have a hard time imagining another place that I would enjoy as much.  And my children and their dad are here, so I couldn't leave if I wanted to.

But right now, it's feeling very lonely, and far from any home I know or understand.

The one that got away

From the old pictures, I can see that he was a handsome young man.  Tall, clear-eyed, with a kind face.  A good athlete, particularly adept at tennis.  Smart, with an aptitude for math and sciences.

The picture of potential.  

He did well at college and had friends and girlfriends.  Despite having grown up in a somewhat dysfunctional family, with a mother who was uninterested and unloving and selfish and who, by all accounts, fit the DSM criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder, he displayed less of the meanness and depressiveness that ran on his mother's side, and more of the sweetness and benevolence of his father.  

In his early 20s, he had adventures in Europe with friends.  He wore the customary red neckerchief to run with the bulls in Pamplona.  In an age before cellphones, he and his buddies wandered on their own and then reconnected by having faith in the inexorable pull of every major foreign city's American Express office, where they always found each other again.

He lived with a certain verve.

At some point in his late 20s, he married a woman, because it was time to get married.  She must have held a certain exotic appeal for him - he was always drawn to Latin American women - but that appeal wore off quickly.  

He ran a successful business and made money, which she promptly spent on frivolity - expensive European cars that she would insist on sending back to Europe to be serviced, high end designer couture purchased from Nieman Marcus, jewelry.  He made more money, she spent more money. Notwithstanding this apparently high standard of living, no one ever goes to their house because she is a hoarder.  She feigns depth by adopting different religions and different names to go with them, but at bottom, she is shallow and silly and mean.

To the outside world, they demonstrate no love or passion or even interest in each other.  They coexist on small talk.

They had one daughter who, despite being educated in an expensive Swiss boarding school (at her mother's insistence), has never shown any drive or motivation to do anything beyond work a series of administrative jobs in plastic surgery practices.  

He has no grandchildren, and thus has nothing to add while he watches and listens to his siblings and cousins rave about theirs.

For as long as I have known him, he has shown none of the verve of his youth - he is  physically soft, weak-chinned, socially awkward, nonconfrontational to the point of allowing others to bully him a little bit.  In family gatherings, he is overwhelmed by his louder, more assertive siblings, who, over the years, have encouraged him to leave his wife.  But he never did or could.

I'm reminded of Tony Soprano's description of his mother's effect on his father - that she wore him down to a little nub.  

My brother points out that if you stop talking and listen, you can learn all sorts of interesting things.  

And so we ask him about his life and he talks and we listen.  

We listen to him describe a great love he had for a young woman he was with when he was 25 and she was 18.  She was an exchange student from South America, and by all accounts, was beautiful and lovely and sweet.  He was in love, and would have married her had she stayed in the United States, but she was young and heading back to her home country for school.  

Before she went back, her school group took a trip to Washington, DC, to see the nation's capitol. She called him and said, come down and spend the weekend.  Meet me at the Washington Monument.

He caught a flight.  He waited for her at the Washington Monument.  She surprised him by coming up behind him and throwing her arms around him.  His description of this incident makes it clear that it was one of the most blissful moments of his life.

She returned home and eventually married and became a psychologist.  She has children and grandchildren.

But she has kept in touch over 50 years.  First through letters, and then through email.  She emails him every year on his birthday, and always has kind, fond words for him.

About 25 years ago, when he was traveling on business, he reconnected with her.  The feelings and chemistry were there.  He tells us that he tried to make love with her, but was so nervous and overwhelmed by the situation that he couldn't do it.

Our eyes bug out upon hearing this extraordinarily personal, intimate revelation.  But he seems impervious to embarrassment about it.  As if he's so beaten down, what's one more thing?  It is heartbreaking on so many levels.

Today is his 77th birthday.  He will experience the flush of joy that accompanies the annual missive representing everything he wanted but never got.

And then he will continue with the life he has.

I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach

These days, I have a feeling of momentum.

For a few years, at least, it seems like it's been one trauma or stressor after another, whether it was my marriage ending or financial woes or bouts of depression or custody drama.  And, of course, Emma's death overshadowing all of it.  It's been relentless and awful.

But the craziness of the summer is resolved. I'm feeling great physically. The kids are beautiful and healthy and loving life.

While I won't ever get over Emma's death, surviving the "year of firsts," as crushing as it was, means that I know can survive going forward.

The worst that could happen did happen, and we're all still alive, and perhaps distilled down to our purer essences.  Cleansed by the fire, which, at least for me, burned away any capacity for bullshit or any desire to carry around the baggage of pettiness or silly power struggles or superficial judgment.  I want to love and enjoy my children and love and enjoy my friends and love and enjoy my life.  I have no patience for meanness or rudeness or snobbery.

I was talking with a friend about this, and he said, "but what about when life creeps in?  How do you sustain that when the mundane irritations and frustrations of life get in the way?"

My brother asked a similar question the other day - even when things are going well, he's always waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Optimism as a weltanschauung is not something that comes naturally to him.  As he said, "I can't help it.  I'm a Jew."

I obviously don't profess to have all the answers.  I only know what I can tolerate and what I can't, and how I want to feel at the end of each day.  But in the face of these questions, my response was that all you can do is try, every day, to be deliberately and conspicuously kind to people.  To seek out and appreciate beauty in the ordinary.

You just have to work the muscle every day, and then hope for the best.

It can be spending time outside, looking at the sky and documenting something beautiful or unusual or interesting.

It can be making the decision to be polite to telemarketers or customer service reps, even when they piss you off.

It can be walking late at night down a dark street, holding hands and stealing kisses, a little drunk on bourbon and the heady prospect of something new and exciting, and stopping to admire a gorgeous tree with twinkly stars visible through its branches.

You hold on to the happiness of the moment, appreciating the wonder of the world around you.

And you keep holding on to those moments, every day.

The big beautiful tree in Cheesman Park, glowing in the autumn morning sun. #walktowork #dailydenver #cheesmanpark #treesofinstagram

A photo posted by Wendy Jacobs (@wendyalisonjacobs) on Oct 8, 2015 at 7:32am PDT

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.

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.

Grab the joy

A few months ago my friend Jen was posting on Facebook about how Sam Bush was going to be playing in Charlottesville (where she lives).  I love Sam Bush, and commented that when I was 17, he and the other members of New Grass Revival (Bela Fleck, John Cowan and Pat Flynn) had come out to India as part of a USIA cultural exchange, and that after playing a show at the Maurya Sheraton, they all came over to my house for a chili dinner.  After much back and forth, I checked my calendar, saw that the weekend of his Charlottesville show was on a kid-free weekend, and bought a plane ticket.  Music, reconnecting with my sorority peeps that live in Charlottesville, a weekend away - perfection.

As the time drew closer, I was excited to see my college friends and go to a show, but was lamenting the fact that it's a lot of travel time and plane tickets are expensive and I've got so much shit to do around the house.

But oh my god I'm so glad I went.

It's so amazing to reconnect with old friends from college - we all keep in touch and have been to (or in) each other's weddings and celebrated births and career accomplishments, but we don't get to see each other in person that much.  As with my India friends, there's something so special about being with people who have known you and loved you forever.  You reminisce, you revive old jokes and stories of crazy college antics and catch up on who is doing what.  You laugh and laugh.

Saturday we saw an incredible photography exhibit at UVa.'s art museum and then had lunch at a restaurant at which we had once used fake IDs to buy beer.  I bought a University of Virginia car decal at Mincer's, which has been selling (overpriced) Virginia paraphernalia since before my dad was a student there.

The University is so beautiful, even on a cold, cloudy fall day.

Saturday night was the Sam Bush show.  I had stayed at my friend Nica's house on Friday night, but went to Jen's on Saturday because Nica wasn't going to the show and Jen lives within walking distance of the venue, so it just made sense.

It's a great gift to have the realization that you're experiencing an epic night while you're experiencing it.  By the time I fell into bed at 1:45 in the morning, buzzing from tequila and dancing, I had been smiling and laughing for approximately 5 hours.  It started before the show, at the apartment of one of Jen's friends, where I met a bunch of wonderful new friends and fell in love with them immediately.

It continued at the Jefferson, where Sam Bush and his band put on an amazing, high energy show that had me jumping and dancing and grinning from ear to ear.  I do love bluegrass music beyond all sense.  More than any other genre of music - and I pretty much love them all except maybe death metal - bluegrass makes my heart feel like it's flying with joy.

We ended up at the Whiskey Jar, where one of my new friends bought me tequila.  We giggled about life and men and music and sex, and we could not stop guffawing over the dude who thought that my Notorious RBG shirt was about Biggie Smalls rather than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and who proceeded to rap toward the general vicinity of my boobs until I patted him on the shoulder, said, "ok, buddy, that's enough," and sent him on his way.

It's been a rough year, particularly the last couple of months.  But I can't function in a perpetual state of grief and sadness.  I still grieve, and I'm still sad, but life is for the living, to be savored.  There is so much beauty and goodness and fun in the world.

Sometimes you just need to cut loose and dance and giggle and drink too much and stay out too late. The shit will still be there when you wake up the next morning.

Everything I need to know about life I learned from a 17-year-old girl

At some point on Friday afternoon, Josh called me while my dad and I were at the Kohl's over in Seabrook.  My dad needed new khakis because the pants he was wearing were old and ratty-looking and my mother was threatening to throw them away.

"I need you to do something for me," Josh said.

"Of course.  What do you need?"

"I need you and Mom and Dad and Sam to collaborate on speaking at the funeral.  The rabbi is out of town and so I want to put together a program of about an hour - people can talk about Emma and tell stories.  Our side of the family, Lori's side of the family, her coaches, that sort of thing.  So you guys could do about 10 minutes or so."

"You got it."

So I started to think about what I was going to say.  At that point, we had already been spending the bulk of our time at Josh's house, which was in "permanent open house" mode - crying and hugging and talking about Emma.  How horrible it was, how incredible she was, how much she was loved and admired.

And we also talked about how inexplicable and incomprehensible it was.  How could this happen to her, after she survived the accident?  How could her family go through this again? She got better.  It wasn't fair.  It wasn't right.

I didn't want what I said at the funeral to be a rehash of those conversations.

That night, when we were hanging out at Josh's house, he handed me a letter that he and Lori had received from one of Emma's teachers.  She talked about what a great kid and great student Emma was, how kind and generous she was to others, and how much she enjoyed having Emma in her class.

She also talked about Emma's college essay, which the teacher had reviewed for her and given some feedback on.  Emma's essay was about her accident; what had happened, how she had recovered, and what she had taken from it as her life moved forward.  The teacher's feedback was that the essay focus less on the accident and more on the recovery, because the recovery was Emma's story.

She was absolutely right.

Emma's story was about recovery and strength and perseverence.  After her accident, she had to relearn speaking and walking and functioning.  It was hard work, both physically and psychologically.  She pushed to get stronger, to regain agility, to be a great student again.

And she was doing all of this in her early and middle teens, which is a time of life when most of us feel awkward and unsure of ourselves and self-conscious anyway. Some of her old friendships suffered.  So she made new ones.  She had to cut her long hair off because some of it had been shaved while she was hooked up to machines in the hospital.  So she dyed it pink.

She had always been an athlete, and was bummed when she wasn't allowed to snowboard anymore.  Eventually, she started playing lacrosse again, and eventually became the goalie for her high school's girls varsity lacrosse team.  She knew it was risky.  When you've suffered a traumatic brain injury, it's not exactly intuitive to play a sport that involves hard rubber balls being flung at your head.  Or to surf or snowboard again.  But she did anyway.

What a badass.

Being an athlete was part of who she was, and she was determined not to let the accident defeat or define her or be an excuse to not go for the things she wanted in life.  She was going to study and work to become an engineer.  She was going to play lacrosse.  She was going to surf.  She was going to snowboard.  She was going to keep working.

This is what I talked about at the funeral.  That Emma understood that life can be risky and scary, but it has to be lived, and that if you're not living for the present and the future, you're not really living.

Vivir con miedo es como vivir a medias.

The only way to deal with this awful tragedy is to live as Emma did. We are sad, but we can't use her death as an excuse to stop pushing to achieve greatness, to be stronger and better and kinder.  The only path is to live deliberately and fully, as she did.

Only then will we be truly honoring her.

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.

Do over

One of the things I do at night when I wake up in the middle of the night is play "what if?" in my head.  What if I had gone to Michigan instead of Virginia?  What if I had decided to become a doctor instead of a lawyer?  What if I hadn't gone to Costa Rica and met J?  I try to create a different trajectory and imagine where I would be now.

Or last night, I went out with a group of my sorority sisters (there are 6 of us in the Denver/Boulder area who were all ZTAs at UVa at the same time), and we were talking about birthdays and the weirdness of being in our mid-40s now.  When I was in my 20s or even my 30s, mid-40s was ANCIENT.  But suddenly it's here. And we talked about how amazing it would be to be able to relive certain sections of your life over and over again, in order to experience all of the different things we'd love to be able to do and experience.  For me, I'd love to redo the ages of 25 to 35 - I could travel, different professions, learn different sports, have relationships with different people, whatever.  A series of fresh starts and do-overs.

One friend pointed out that I'm kind of getting a do-over myself.  Because I'm going to be single again.  I can date again.  Which is both exciting and terrifying to think about.

I have no idea if I even want to get married again.  I don't really think I do.  As my dad recently reminded me, I have long thought that my ideal romantic relationship would be with someone who lives around the corner, so we can hang out when we feel like it, but then have our own spaces to go back to.  I'm not a fan of too much togetherness.

And I've definitely learned some lessons that I will carry forward.  Primarily, that the notion of opposites attracting is horseshit.  Or maybe, they'll attract, but not be the basis for a sustainable relationship.  This time around, I will seek out someone who is more like me.  Someone with a similar background, or similar education, or similar interests.  Not total similarities - that would be boring - but at least some common frames of reference.

It would be nice to experience the flush of romance again.  I'm not ready to give up on that aspect of being a human being just yet.