Report from the front lines: Remote Learning, Day 1

 5:00 a.m. - I am up before my alarm, which is unusual and surprising. I like my sleep, plus I was up last night later than normal. Met a friend out for a couple of hours last night and then one of my car's tires blew on the way home, so it was 11:30 p.m. by the time I got the tire changed and made it home. Thank goodness for kind men who jump at the chance to change a tire for a damsel in distress. I know how to change a tire, but it was nice to have someone do it for me. Chivalry is not dead.

6:00 - I get up and get ready for the day. Task number one is making sure Josie has what she needs to start school. I get on her computer and open up the tabs she'll use - google classroom, zoom chats, the email with her schedule, etc. She should do this herself but she's so freaked about the remote learning that I set it up for her so it's one less thing for her to cry about.

7:30 - Zeke needs to start school at 8:10. He's totally self sufficient - I make sure he finds the emails from his teachers with the relevant zoom links, but beyond that he's good to go. I go downstairs to make him some breakfast and coffee. I promptly break the French press when I open the cupboard above it and a plastic water bottle falls out on top of it. I go to the coffee shop across the street instead and while I wait in line, I order myself a new coffee maker from Amazon.

8:10 - he logs into his first class. All is well.

8:45 - I make sure Josie is ready to go. She has hot chocolate and I make her some eggs. Her first class is Movement starting at 9. I have a conference call for work at the same time so once I know she's all set I go downstairs and do my call. 

9:50 - Josie's movement class went well but now she has English and she's already starting to melt down. She can't hear someone on the Zoom chat. She can't figure out how to edit the document in Google Classroom. When I make suggestions she lashes out at me. She's crying and hiding under a blanket. She wants to quit and I won't let her, so I'm mean. She cries some more, I'm annoyed, and I leave for the tire place.

11:30 - Back at home, I try to work while keeping an ear out for needy children. Josie manages to get through her English class in one piece and has a break for an hour or so. Zeke is fine. I feed them lunch in between phone calls for work, one of which entails being yelled at by an irate lawyer. Fun times.

12:00 - I finish a conference call and get up to start my third load of laundry of the day.

1:30 - I check on Josie. She's doing social studies but they're taking a break. She is spending her break underneath her bed watching TikTok videos. I tell her that when it's time to start class again she needs to sit at her desk. She begrudgingly agrees. She asks if we can make cookies later. We absolutely can.

2:30 - I check on Josie. She's supposed to write a letter to her teacher about something. She can't figure out what it's supposed to be about and is frustrated and complaining. I manage to talk her off the ledge before the tears flow. Zeke is done for the day and had no trouble. He then proceeds to torment his sister until I can get him out of her room.

3:00 - Work continues for me, as it has all day. Conference calls, telephone calls, video meetings, emails, memos. This is a hard time for school districts. Teachers are stressed, administrators are stressed, parents are stressed. We're all doing the best we can but it never feels like enough. Someone's always pissed off or upset. I'm like a pinball, ricocheting from one task and one dispute to the next. I can't focus on or remember anything.

3:30 - Josie finally finishes. I give her a hug and tell her I'm proud of her for sticking with it. The first day is the hardest, I say. Tomorrow it won't be as bad, and soon you'll be more comfortable with everything. It'll be ok. She nods, hugs me back, and lies down to take a nap. 

4:45 - A friend of Zeke's is over and the kids are out back on the trampoline. I'm almost finished for the day, having worked my way through my to-do list. I'm suddenly starving and realize I've had nothing to eat all day - just coffee. 

5:00 - I eat a bowl of yogurt with a mango cut into it. I look around and realize I need to vacuum. I think about doing a workout but know that I'm going to need to eat more if I'm going to do it without passing out. I try to come up with something to make for dinner. I wonder if I can get away with going to bed at 8 p.m.

We survived.

Mean mommy

"Mom, me and Zeke are switching rooms."

I had just walked home from being out for a couple of hours to meet a friend for a drink. The margaritas were making my brain slightly fuzzy.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Zeke is going to take my room and I'm going to take Zeke's room."

"Wait ... what? Why?"

Zeke saw me and yelled down from upstairs, "hey Mom! Do you have an allen wrench? I need it to take Josie's bed apart."

"What? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know where it would be."

"OK, I'll call dad."

Minutes later: "Dad's got one! I'm going to bike over there."

It was 9:30 at night.

"What? No! It's 9:30 at night, you don't have a light on your bike, and I don't want you riding up Josephine and York streets in the dark."

"But I need it to take Josie's bed apart!"

Josie has an IKEA bunk bed that I can take apart and put back together easily. I am the queen of assembling IKEA furniture - I find it very zen and satisfying. But the bed takes awhile, and if you're 12 years old and impatient and don't know what you're doing and don't have the directions (they were thrown away years ago), you'll make a big fat mess and end up crying. Crying 12-year-olds are annoying as fuck.

"It's 9:30 at night!! You're not taking Josie's bed apart! It's complicated and it takes a long time to do it right, and you'll mess it up and then I'll have to fix it, and I don't feel like it fixing it. I'm tired. It's bedtime. You have camp tomorrow. You need to get ready for bed."

"But we want to switch rooms," they whined.

"I don't care. You're not doing it tonight. You can do it tomorrow. And I'm not helping."

This went back and forth for a while, ending with Zeke saying, "god, mom, why are you so mean???"

I'm mean. I'm so, so mean.

I'm mean when I make them clean their messes up before I turn on the WiFi.

I'm mean when I make them go to bed before midnight.

I'm mean when I don't let them eat upstairs because it's gross and eventually I end up rummaging through the kitchen going, "where the hell are all my bowls???"

I'm mean when I'm on a video conference for work and Zeke starts bellowing at me about something and I'm like, "I'M WORKING!! BE QUIET! I'LL HELP YOU WHEN I'M DONE!!"

 I'm mean when I get irritated that it takes me half an hour to get them out of bed to go to camp.

Thank the little baby Jesus for camp.

Colorado is actually doing pretty well with COVID. Our numbers are declining. Our governor is making data-driven decisions and slowly opening things up while still maintaining certain restrictions and precautions. The one thing I vehemently disagreed with him on was his approach to summer camp.

My kids were registered for two weeks of overnight camp, which they love because it's fun, and while I love because they're gone and I can get some peace and quiet. The gov had delayed making an announcement until late May, but the word was positive. And my assumption was that as between overnight camps and day camps. day camps have exponentially more opportunities for transmission, whereas with overnight camp, you check in, you get your health screening, and then you're captive for 14 days.

But then the overnight camps closed and the day camps opened, so day camp it was.

It's hard for them. Nothing is back to normal - the neighborhood pool is closed, the rec center a few blocks away is closed, most of their friends aren't allowed to play with anyone else. They're restless and antsy and bored.

But it's hard for me too. Zeke has been living here full time, but Josie had continued to go back and forth between my house and her dad's house. And then about a month ago, she started staying at my house longer and longer.

"Don't you want to go see daddy?" I keep asking.

She shrugs and says, "sure, but not tonight."

I think a big part of it is that they like being together. They will fight and bicker, but they really do love each other and take care of each other.

But I need a break, so I told them that I need every other weekend to myself. Two days out of every fourteen. Zeke suggested that I got plenty of alone time when they're at camp - i.e., WHEN I'M WORKING. I expressed outrage at that suggestion. They were thinking I was mean but they were smart enough not to say it. So I'm getting my weekend in three days.

Last night their dad brought over the allen wrench and they got to work. Zeke tried to take Josie's bed apart and got a little turned around about exactly which pieces needed to come apart in order to move the bed, and which could stay intact, So of course I helped. We took the bed apart and moved it and put it back together. We figured out how to move Josie's enormous dresser (but not before they accused me of being mean when they insisted on trying to do it in a way that was never going to work and I said, "it's not going to work that way").

Zeke said, "isn't this fun, mom? We're bonding!"

I went back to my room and got into bed. The kids were excited about their new rooms.

Ten minutes later Josie poked her head around the door. "Can I sleep with you?"

She crawled in, threw an arm around me, and went to sleep.

Twenty-three

My dear Emma,

Happy birthday. You would have been twenty-three years old today.

I've been thinking about you so much lately.

I've been thinking about everything, actually. We're stuck at home in a global pandemic. There's a lot of time to think.

I think about how quickly life goes by.

When I turned twenty-three I was in my second year of law school. I knew nothing about anything. I didn't know what kind of law I wanted to practice.  I didn't know where I wanted to live. I didn't know what I wanted my life to look like. I was totally making shit up as I went along.

And now suddenly I'm 50. I barely know how I got here.

After your accident when you were twelve, you always seemed to have a greater sense of purpose than I've ever had in my life. You had almost died, and then you struggled to recover, and I think it gave you a focus on living deliberately that was mature beyond your years.

It's a focus that would have served you well right now. People are struggling with how to live - how safe is safe enough? How much risk is too much risk?

At a certain point we have to recognize that life is for the living and it's time to get on with it. You've gotta die of something. You knew that. And you were taken too soon anyway.

I was looking through old pictures and I found this one from Thanksgiving of 2008. Only one person is left - Leo is gone, you're gone, your mom is gone.

I want to get back to living. I don't want to stagnate in my house, afraid to live because I'm afraid to die. The truth is, I'm not afraid to die.

It's hard to imagine what you would have been doing now. Out of college, yes. Grad school? Traveling? Following some calling? Being a surf bum? A ski bum? A responsible working professional?

Like most twenty-three-year-olds, you probably would have been clueless and trying to figure out how to be a grown-up, not realizing at the time that most of us never really figure that out. But I feel like you would have had a better sense than most.

It would have been fun to get to know you as an adult.

I miss you and I love you. We all do, with all our hearts.

Wendy

Live your best life

If there is a casualty of this COVID-stay-at-home-so-you-don't-die dealio, it will be my sense of time. Lisa wrote about this, and I get the sense that most people are feeling this way, but it bears repeating. I have no idea what day it is. I have no idea how long this has been going on.

This is hard for me, because my brain generally sees things in calendar form. When I think about my schedule, I see the grid with dates and times and days of the week. I remember appointments and due dates and what day and time the flight leaves, and from which gate.

So to spend all of Wednesday thinking it was actually Tuesday - - well, it's very confusing. Every night feels like Friday night, for some reason. I find myself relating to the Dowager Countess's confusion about what a "weekend" is.

I have a theory. Not about what a weekend is - I actually do know the answer to that question. I have a theory about why our sense of time is so whack-a-doodle right now.

We're living in a fog of sameness. We stay in the same place and do the same things and see the same people. There aren't markers or boundaries or events that distinguish one day from the next. I felt the same way when I was on maternity leave.

I also think we're in a "one day at a time" mode, because if we start thinking that this one day is part of a stretch of 40 days or 60 days or 80 days that all look and feel like this one... I have a hard time with that thought.

So I just deal with today. Which, according to all of my zen yogi friends, is what I should be doing anyway. Be present.

Maybe present-ish. Present-adjacent. I might think a little about yesterday, or about tomorrow or the next day.

Anyway. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow ... I'm doing well, for the most part.

Today I went to Zeke's school to pick up a novel that he's going to be studying when school starts back up in a week.

Then I went to the grocery store. There are still no paper products to be had, but everything else is in stock. Except yeast, because apparently everyone has decided to spend the apocalypse baking.

I actually mocked a guy in front of me at the checkout at Target a few weeks ago because his cart was loaded up with paper towels and bags and bags of flour. I mean, I didn't mock him to his face. Just in my head, and maybe a little bit on Facebook.

Anyway. He sure showed me, huh?

What else?

My knee hurts.

I've been very good about exercising regularly. I alternate Peloton rides with runs. The other day I went for a run around City Park. The street leading there has old sidewalks made of slate or flagstone slabs, and over the years they have been pushed around by tree roots, leaving the slabs uneven. So I'm running along and listening to my music and admiring the blue sky and then suddenly I was on the ground.

I landed hard on my left knee. I ripped my brand new running tights. It hurt like a motherfucker.

I lay there for a couple of minutes as I took stock. Was anything broken? Was there structural damage or was it just a bad scrape? Could I keep going?

I kept going.

At one point I was waiting to cross the street and realized my knee felt a little sticky. I pulled up my tights and discovered that I had basically taken the top layer of skin off my kneecap and was bleeding.

Still, I kept going. I wanted to finish the run. My skin and my leggings are washable.

And bonus!! Now I have a matched set of busted up kneecaps!

A few months ago I slipped on ice and landed on my face and my right knee. My face healed quickly. My right kneecap is still a little bit tender - I must have bruised the bone pretty badly.

Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to not be able to put pressure on either of your knees?

But I'm fine. We're fine.

I ordered a trampoline for the kids - it'll arrive tomorrow.

We watch a lot of movies. We play a lot of videogames.

I ordered a bluetooth karaoke microphone, and it may be my favorite toy, ever. Josie sings Lizzo and Billie Eilish, Zeke sings Frank Sinatra, I sing the Dixie Chicks.

I bought Zeke a pumpkin pie at the grocery store this morning and encouraged him to eat it for breakfast.

For my morning coffee, I got out the Wedgwood that I inherited from my grandparents, because why the hell not?

We're going to be in this for a while, so we might as well make ourselves happy.

The play unfolds before my eyes, there stands the actor who is me

Because I do my assignments, I was determined to know the speech, off-book.

I practiced in front of Josie and Zeke, both of whom applauded me enthusiastically. They're so sweet and encouraging. It made me feel really good.

"Are you going to be in a play? Will you be famous? Can we come watch you?"

It's the famous part that they were most interested in.

I explained that it's just for practice, just for a class. Just for fun.

I wanted to have some fun.

I come from an actor-y family. My grandma Ruth was an actress and a radio DJ. Throughout my childhood, I watched my dad do community theater in Venezuela and Israel and India. I did school plays and community theater in middle and high school, and a little bit in college.

Chava in Fiddler on the Roof. Margot in Diary of Anne Frank. Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Alice, one of the romantic leads, in You Can't Take It With You.

 Let me tell you, there are few things more mortifying than being an 13-year-old 8th grader in a high school production and having to kiss a 17-year-old senior on stage.

But I did it. I kissed Trevor, who seemed ancient to me and who towered over me by well over a foot. I persevered. The show must go on.

The acting class was a 6 week series. It provided me with something that wasn't work and wasn't child-rearing and wasn't for anybody else. It was just mine. It was creative. I was in a different environment and interacting with different people.

I did the speech. I received some constructive criticism, but felt like I did it well.

And then it was over. Now getting out into the world and interacting with new people is over, for the time being.

I went into self-quarantine this past Sunday - I was skiing up in Summit County on Saturday, and it turned out they had had a cluster of positive tests. Then that night the governor ordered the ski resorts closed. Now everything is closed.

It's hard.

I'm not fully an extrovert, but I'm not fully an introvert either. I like being alone, and being around lots of people can wear me out. Big crowds can make me anxious and exhausted. But I like having it at least be an option.

My kids and I are home, and we're all getting along. We're keeping the house clean and making time to get outside, although we had a snowstorm yesterday and it's still cold and wet, so our daily games of street hockey have been put on hold. I'm exercising every day. I've discovered that deep-cleaning the house every day relaxes me.

We have plenty of food and wifi and games to play. I work for a government agency that doesn't depend upon customers or profits to keep its doors open (though our doors aren't actually open right now), so I'm not worried about money.

I am maintaining connections with people via email and text and FaceTime. My mother and I have coffee together every morning. I chatted the other day with a sorority sister whom I haven't seen or spoken with in 30 years. The Denver ZTAs are having a virtual happy hour tonight.

But I'm scared. I miss my family. I worry about them. I worry about my children. I worry about myself, and how devastating it would be for my kids if something happened to me. I mean, I'm extremely strong and healthy, but strong and healthy people have been hit by this virus and are now dead.

I'm not particularly afraid of death - once you're dead, what's the difference? But I know what it would do to my family.

It's actually not like me to worry. I'm not a worrier. My mother taught me from an early age to not worry about what you can't control. You can only deal with what's in front of you. If something bad happens, you deal with it when it happens, but worrying about a thing before it's a thing isn't helpful. My natural inclination is to stay calm. Don't freak out. Be zen.

So it suprised me when I had a major panic/anxiety attack the other day, and she was the one who was able to talk me off the ledge. She's better at this than I am.

My dad offered to drive out here, but we told him it wasn't a good idea for many reasons. Not the least of which is that he's a terrible driver.

He laughed when I said that.

We take it day by day, and play our roles. We play all the roles. In my house right now, I am mother and teacher and playmate and friend and therapist, all at the same time, all rolled into one.

We go along and try to act as if it's all normal, so that we don't go crazy.

Pretending is the only way to get through it.

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.

We're gonna break out the hats and hooters when Josie comes home

My wonderful, colorful, hilarious, delightful Josephine,

Today you are 10 years old. I'm excited to be writing this birthday post for you because I know you are going to read it. The other day I was writing a blog post and you were sitting with me on my bed. You asked me what I liked to write about, and I told you that writing annual birthday letters to you and Zeke is up there on my list of favorites. I showed you some posts that I had written to you and you were utterly tickled by them. So I will show you this one.

I thought it would be fun to post a picture from each year of your life, so here they are:

Fresh out of the box



One year

 

Two - at the science museum

 

Three - awesome hair and face paint



Four - looking fancy at the museum

Five - school picture

Six - of COURSE you are wearing an eye patch to go to camp

Seven - newly pierced ears

Eight - boat ride along the Cinque Terre

Nine - hanging out with me at the mall

Just about ten - first day of fifth grade

So, double digits. Ten years. It's hard to fathom. People say, it all goes so fast, blink and you miss it, and tropes to that effect. But I don't always find that to be true. Ten years is a long time. Giving birth to you was a long time ago. Thinking about you as a baby or a toddler does not feel like thinking about yesterday.

As always, the past year has brought on changes and challenges. A year ago, when you were with your dad, you were living with him and Zeke in a house in Lowry. Today, he is remarried and you live with a new stepmother and four new stepbrothers.

You are not thrilled by this. When you were told that within three weeks your dad would be getting married and you would be moving into a new house with five additional people, you said, "Ugh. I don't even get a sister out of it!"

But you deal, because that is what you do. You deal.

Even as you get older and (somewhat) more mature, though, there are certain things you cling to. You still suck your fingers when you're tired. You don't like being away from me - when we're home, it distresses you if I go into a different room. You still sleep with me when you're with me.

I feel like I should mind this. Like I should insist that you're old enough to sleep alone, in your own bed. But I don't. You and your brother have had a lot of turbulence in your lives since the divorce. Your living situation with your dad has been in a constant state of flux for the past 5 years - different houses, different women, and now four additional children.

My house, on the other hand, has stayed the same. It's comfortable. It's relatively quiet. It feels like home. I know that to you and to Zeke, I feel like home. You tell me all the time how much you love me and how much you trust me. So if cuddling up with me at night gives you a sense of peace, that's fine with me. Getting whacked in the face in the middle of the night when you stretch out your arms is a small price to pay.

Something that has really blossomed this year is your insane sense of humor. You're constantly putting on voices and characters, and providing hilariously random commentary on everything you see. You'll do things like starting calling your grandfather "The Elegant Elderly" and saying, "hello, my good man" in a funny voice when you talk to him on the phone.

You've turned into a reader. You constantly carry books around with you. I finally gave you one of my old kindles so that you wouldn't have to lug around anything too heavy. I love lying in bed with you while we both read.

You like cool music. You change your hair color every other month. Your fashion choices are on the bold side. You walk around the house singing and dancing.

You make me smile and you make me proud.

You are with your dad this week, so I stopped at your school before the bell rang so that I could give you a hug and say happy birthday and tell you about the day you were born. You greeted me with love and joy. I hate not being with you on your birthday, but we will celebrate this weekend when Mimi and Papa are visiting. I can't wait to paint pottery with you, to make a cake with you, to snuggle with you.

I feel extraordinarily lucky to be your mother and to guide you through your childhood.

All the love in my heart,

Mom

Ain't no mountain high enough

It has been five years.

Five years is a milestone. It feels like a significant amount of time, when memory of an event, or a person, starts to fade.  It becomes part of history.

I was thinking about this over the past week with the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I vividly remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about those planes hitting the towers, I watched them crumble live on TV, I experienced the aftermath. But for a generation of children – including my own – it’s a historical event, before their time. They know about it but don’t feel it. The way I might look back on the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing.

That’s why a yartzeit is so powerful – it’s a deliberate remembering of someone every year. You think about them. You talk about them. You celebrate them and their life and their legacy. You recite the Mourner’sKaddish, which doesn’t mention death at all – it talks about the future.

By doing this climb every year, for Emma and for others, I do what I can so that the memory doesn’t fade. And I do it in a way that is out in nature, and that requires intense physical and mental effort – it’s life-remembering, and life-affirming for me as well.

Christin and I had decided to do our yartzeit hike on Saturday, September 7. Zeke said he wanted to do it too, so the plan was that we would all meet up in Breckenridge on Friday night, spend the night there, and then do the climb Saturday morning.

But then the highway was shut down because of a rock slide, and all efforts to find alternate routes around it were unsuccessful. We were rerouted on secondary roads through canyons to no avail, and ended up having to stop in Central City – home to Colorado’s low rent, tacky-ass casinos – so that poor Zeke could get something to eat because he was feeling sick from hunger. Defeated (though nourished by the casino buffet), we ended up back at home four hours after we left.

At the time, I obviously had no idea that that rock slide would eventually lead to one of the best climbs of my life. That, and my Peloton bike.

Christin and I decided to try again the following weekend. The kids weren’t with me this past weekend and their Australian relatives are visiting, so I didn’t mention the re-do effort to Zeke and decided that if he wants to do a 14er with me, I’ll take him to do another one.

My feelings leading up to the weekend were as they always are – excitement and anticipation mixed with anxiety about the difficulty of the climb. Fourteeners are hard for me. I struggle with the intense exertion at high elevations. Christin is seemingly impervious to it – she clearly has some kind of genetic predisposition to performance at altitude, like she was Tenzing Norgay in a past life or something like that. She’s climbed Kilamanjaro (which tops out at over 19,000 feet), for god’s sake.

I will never climb Kilamanjaro. (I did see Mt. Everest from an airplane a month and a half ago, but I will write about that another time).

Anyway, I was excited and a little nervous. But also curious. Because physically, I am in vastly better shape than I’ve ever been leading up to a climb.

Last Thanksgiving, I was at the tail-end of that miserable time when Zeke was suffering and I was suffering along with him. A woman in my office recently remarked to me that as a parent, you’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest child, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard truer words in my life. I was unhappy and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I had gained 20 pounds. It astounds me to even read those words, but it’s true. I felt awful.

Then I saw my friend Ali at Thanksgiving, and she looked and felt amazing. She had lost 50 pounds using Weight Watchers and regular exercise, and she raved about it.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I thought.

I signed up for Weight Watchers in December and immediately started losing weight. Around the same time, I felt like I wasn’t getting enough cardio work, so I bought myself a spin bike and started doing Peloton classes via their digital app. I thought about buying the Peloton bike itself, but it’s super expensive and I thought I’d save myself some money.

I diligently did the classes. I enjoyed them and felt myself getting into better shape. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that bike. There are certain metrics that you can track on the Peloton bike that I couldn’t duplicate on my setup. I wanted to be able to track those metrics. I wanted the smoother ride. I wanted that fucking bike.

So in May I bought the bike, and it ended up being some of the best money I ever spent. As with most things that are worth the money, when I climb on the bike – which I do 4-5 times per week – I never think about what I paid for it. I only think about how much I love it and how happy it makes me. I have lost the last of the 20 pounds I gained a year ago.

I started doing a very structured form of training that focuses on power output and that helps  strength and endurance. I do a functional performance test every month or so to track my improvement, and it is steadily going up up up. So in getting ready for the climb, I was curious as to how that training would affect my strength and endurance on the mountain.

We set out for the trail head at about 5:30 a.m. I think we both knew it was destined to be a good day when, independent of one another, we had both chosen to wear Dead & Company concert t-shirts.

The full moon over the trailhead

The plan was to climb Mt. Bross as an out-and-back. Bross is a shorter climb in terms of distance, but having less distance to reach the summit just means that it’s very steep. No gradual uphill walking before hitting the hard stuff – you hit the trail and you’re climbing right away. 

We knew that going in, and we were prepared. The hike was immediately intense. But I was fine. I was astoundingly fine. I didn’t struggle with the altitude at all. We would stop occasionally to have a snack, or to figure out how to pee somewhat discreetly on a totally exposed ridge, or to take a short breather to stretch out our calves. But at no point did I ever have to resort to the 50-steps-then-50-breaths that I’ve had to do in the past as a way to keep myself going. At no point did I feel like I couldn’t get enough oxygen in my lungs, or that there wasn’t enough air in the air. 

No, the problem wasn’t my conditioning or my ability to physically handle the climb. It was that the climb was so steep, with nothing but loose rock and very narrow ridges to navigate, that the thought of descending the same way we went up was utterly terrifying. I had visions of losing my footing and tumbling down with nothing but rocks to break my fall.

Looking down from the ridgeline. It's hard to capture how steep this incline is. It scared the shit out of me.

Up on the ridge, looking back towards our ascent route. Narrow path with steep inclines on either side. No thanks.

So we changed our plan.

Bross is part of a canyon that includes four fourteeners - Mts. Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, and Bross, commonly referred to as the Decalibron loop. There is a saddle between Democrat and Cameron that has a trail leading down from it that provides a manageable descent back to the trailhead. We didn’t feel like doing Democrat again – its descent can be as nasty as Bross’s – so we decided to go from Bross to Lincoln to Cameron, down the saddle, and then down the trail back to the parking lot. And in the process, bag three peaks instead of just one. 

The Decalibron loop as seen from the trailhead. We started on the right side and went around to the left.

Our route (in yellow)

It turned out to be a fantastic decision. It was a stunningly beautiful day – perfect temperature, clear bluebird skies, very little wind – and the views went on forever. We could see all but one of the summits we had reached in previous years. Through it all, my lungs and heart and legs felt strong.

At the summit of Bross, we talked about Emma and what she was like. We talked about Josh and the grace he has shown in building a good life for himself since Emma and Lori died. We read the names of loved ones who had been given to me by friends and family – parents, children, siblings, friends, students lost to suicide or accident or cancer or old age. I recited the Kaddish for all of them. We cried and talked about life and pain and resilience.

And then we walked. We felt the sun on our faces and the strength in our bodies. We talked about books and told funny stories. We settled on Mexican food and beer for our post-climb meal. We planned future climbs and future trips – the Camino in Spain, perhaps? I nixed the idea of doing Kilamanjaro, but if I continue to train and feel as good as I do now, who knows? My legs are a little sore and tired today, but when I get home from work I will climb on the bike and do an hour-long endurance ride, because I can. Maybe 19,300 feet is a possibility for me after all.

Summit of Bross

Close to the Lincoln summit. That dude over my head is holding a bike. Welcome to Colorado.



Heading up to the summit of Lincoln

Mt. Lincoln summit



Mt. Cameron summit

View back towards the trailhead from the saddle between Mt. Cameron and Mt. Democrat

View of our descent route between Mt. Democrat on the left and Mt. Cameron on the right.



Toasting to an amazing day of hiking

As ever, we were grateful for our health, our friendship, and our lives. It breaks my heart that Emma will never have the types of experiences that I have had – traveling, children, adventure, loss, pain, love, all of it. Maybe doing this yartzeit climb every year, keeping her alive in my memory, is my way of having those experiences for her.

Here we go, yo

Yesterday I was sitting in my office revising a policy document when I blinked and suddenly felt like there was a boulder in my eye.

It was a coffee ground.

In the morning, when I was cleaning the coffee grounds out of my French press, I got it all over my hands and then, like an idiot, rubbed my hands in my face. I was removing coffee from various parts of my face for the rest of the day.

The day before, I was texting my cleaning lady to let her know that I don't need her to come next week because I'll be out of town. She responded by informing me that I had left the stove on.

This is not like me. I am a clear and rational thinker.

But my brain is all over the place this week.  On Monday I had such a flood of adrenaline and nervous energy that physically, it felt like the worst anxiety attack I've ever had in my life. I stopped for coffee and my way to work and realized that if I drank it, I'd go into orbit.

A week or so ago Lisa and I were talking about excitement but also nervousness about our upcoming India trip - as I type this, I'm leaving for the airport in three hours.

The excitement is obvious. And so is the nervousness, I think. It's a long way. It's a long time to be away from our homes and our children. I already haven't seen my kids in two weeks - they're in Mexico with their dad. So by the time I get home, it will be a month - I've never been away from them for that long.

And Lisa said that she hadn't been in such extremes in a long time - maybe since we were last in India. Extreme heat, extreme crowds, extreme poverty.

It's a lot.

But as it's gotten closer and closer - three days, two days, TOMORROW!!! - the nervousness has abated and the happiness has settled in.

I'm so happy to be doing this trip. I'm so happy to be doing this trip with Lisa. We're organized, we're vaccinated, we're packed.

My mother and I were talking about it yesterday and I was describing all the amazing things we're going to do. We're staying at Claridges in Delhi, where as moronic teenagers we used to go after school to drink gin & tonics. We're taking a flight along the mountain ridge that includes Mt. Everest. We're staying in a palace in Udaipur. We're staying with one of our old classmates in Kathmandu. We're going on Monday to see our school.

"Oh, Wendy. That's so incredible. I'm so happy that you're going on this trip. Thinking about you and Lisa seeing the school again after all this time - it makes me want to cry."

"I know. I know. Me too. It's crazy - being there was such a special and formative time of my life. I think being back there is going to be incredibly emotional. It's overwhelming."

Rajeev, our classmate in Nepal, called me the other day at 4:30 in the morning. He's in Thailand and didn't realize I was in Denver.

But it didn't matter. I was up.

I haven't spoken to him in 31 years, so we were catching up. I mentioned I was divorced.

"I'm so sorry!" he said.

"Oh, don't be. I'm not."

I'm so not. I'm free. I can do what I want. I feel empowered. The divorce was the beginning of me figuring out how I want to live. And bit by bit, I have. I feel better about myself and my life than I ever have.

My friend Christen is in school to become a therapist. A while ago she was telling me about this exercise that her class did in which the instructor asked people to think of a life motto or guiding principal that could be distilled down to something that could be small tattoo.

I thought about it for a second and said, "say yes."

Say yes to adventure, say yes to new experiences, say yes to love, say yes to opportunity.

When Lisa told me last year that she wanted to do a trip back to India this year to celebrate her birthday, she asked me if I wanted to go.

I didn't hesitate.

"Yes."

So off we go, and I'm so ecstatic I can barely stand it.

Happy birthday, beautiful. In the fields of this day, hear a song.

My dearest Emma,

You would have been 22 years old today.

Everything is making me cry.

Zeke was Charlie in his class's production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday. He worked really hard to memorize his lines. Josie and I have run lines with him over the past few weeks. I have helped him on the singing part - how to do some of the harder transitions to the high notes. How to think about what his character is going through in the moment so that his actions and reactions feel more authentic.

And he nailed it. The whole performance was so cute - all the kids were great. Their energy was amazing. Zeke hit the high note at the end of The Candy Man. We were all so proud.

I cried. Such naches.

My parents flew in for the performance, because that's what we do in our family. We show up for each other. They cried, too.

Assuming all had gone according to schedule, you would be graduating from college right about now. Maybe you would have ended up at the Naval Academy. Maybe you would have taken another road altogether. Whatever your choice, I know you would have done great - with your work ethic and your zest for life, you would be successful at whatever you decided to do.

We all would have shown up. We undoubtedly would have cried.

I have had a number of photos printed out to put on the wall next to my staircase. It's mostly pictures of my own kids, from trips that we have taken, but I also have one of my grandparents at my wedding, and one of you and your sisters when Hazel was a baby. You were 11 - Zeke's age.  My parents and I were looking at it yesterday, missing you and mourning your loss.

The school district where I work experienced a school shooting this week. A young man who was 18 years old, who was three days away from graduating, died when he rushed the shooter to try to disarm him. He was his parents' only child, and by all accounts he was a wonderful person. A great kid.

I know what they are going through because I watched my brother, your mother, and your sisters go through it. It makes me cry to think about it.

You were a wonderful person. You were a great kid.

We don't always remember you with sadness. We frequently remember you when we're telling funny stories. Like the time when we were at the Outer Banks when you were three. Your parents went home early and you stayed with my parents for a few extra days. We were driving back to their house and we stopped at a diner for some food.

You were delightful and adorable. You had a super cute (and totally developmentally normal) speech tendency in which you mixed up hard consonants that were made with the back of the throat with those that were made at the front of the mouth. "K" became "t." "G" became "d." "Come" became "tum." "Girl" became "durl."

We were finishing lunch and getting ready to go when you said, "where are you going?"

"We're going back to Virginia," I said.

And you responded, "can I tum?"

I laughed and scooped you up and gave you a kiss. "Of course you can tum, silly."

I would have taken you anywhere you wanted to go.

We all miss you and think about you and talk about you. We won't ever stop loving you.

Love,

Wendy

So fill up your cups, your loving cups, as full as full can be

Late last year my Virginia girlies and I made a plan to have a mini-reunion girls' weekend in Florida. It's the 50th birthday year for many of us - not me, yet, as I liked to remind them - and that provided us with as much a good reason as any to plan a trip when we could hang out on the beach and eat and drink and sleep and relax and get caught up.

We picked a weekend in mid-March. We found an AirBnb in Boca Raton with a pool, plus it was close to the beach. We determined that giant pool floaties of the unicorn-shaped variety were a must. We were super excited to see each other.

Then we just had to wait for the day to arrive.

Of course, because Colorado's weather in the spring is batshit crazy, a monster bomb cyclone snowpocalypse blizzard had to hit the day before my friend Jen and I were flying out.

The weather forecasters weren't wrong. The storm was a beast. That Wednesday the kids and I hunkered down in the house the way we've hunkered down for Category 1 hurricanes on the Outer Banks. I pulled the chairs in from the upstairs porch and secured the garbage cans and that sort of thing. Then we watched movies and drank hot cocoa and listened to music. The wind was whipping hard, blowing snow all over the place.

The kids were nervous.

"Are we going to be OK? Is the house going to be OK?"

"We'll be fine, guys. This house is 123 years old. It has survived many storms. It's tough."

The power went off at one point for about 5 minutes. When it came back on, we resumed watching whatever we had been watching.

The girls and I had been texting about the trip.

"Is it going to mess up your travel?"

"Nah, it should be fine. Flights are all cancelled today, but the weather is supposed to clear up tomorrow, so I don't think it'll be a problem."

(NARRATOR: It was a problem.)

On Wednesday afternoon, I received a text from United that my Thursday morning flight had been cancelled. But hey, feel free to rebook on our website or our mobile app!

Feeling sick to my stomach, I tried to rebook. Nothing was available. No direct flights (which is what I had), no connecting flights, no flights into other airports around the Miami area, nothing.

I was in tears. I couldn't bear the thought of not going on this trip that I had been looking forward to for so long, I called United. I was on hold for an hour before I was connected to a person.

Finally, finally, a lady picked up and began a 45 minute process of working her ass off to try to find me a flight that would get me in Thursday night (instead of Thursday afternoon) or, at the latest, Friday morning. She was tireless and patient, and got me onto a flight that got in late Thursday night. Instead of direct, I had to connect through Houston. But I would get there. Poor Jen was not as fortunate, which totally sucked.

Of course, the travel was not without its drama. My flight from Denver was exactly as late as the length of my layover in Houston, so I got off the plane in Houston and literally (literally literally, not figuratively literally) sprinted from one end of the Houston airport to the other in order to make my flight.

Which, going from sitting for hours to a full sprint, is not a good look. I'm more of an endurance athlete, not a sprinter. And I was wearing boots with heels and the wrong bra for sprinting. So I was teetering through the airport pulling my suitcase with one hand and holding my boobs with the other. By the time I made my connecting flight I was wheezing and coughing so severely that I feared I would puke. Literally.

But I didn't puke. And I was on the flight. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale and then took a Lyft up to Boca and everyone was awake and waiting for me when I arrived just after midnight.

I immediately relaxed and felt the love. Y'all know how much I love reunions.

The house was beautiful. The pool was beautiful. The beach was beautiful. My friends are beautiful. We relaxed and ate chips and salsa and watched basketball and swam. We hung out at the beach. We took a mellow booze cruise and went stand-up paddle boarding in Lake Boca, which is basically a giant tailgate party with boats. We floated on unicorns.

 

If I were any more relaxed I'd be dead

Susan brought souvenirs for everyone - personalized to-go cups with our initials in UVA colors, perfect for beer or wine or whatever else we wanted to carry around. We took them everywhere we went.

There is something so amazing about being with girlfriends that you have known for 30 years. We feel so comfortable around each other, and we know each other so well, and all of the bullshit anxiety that we carried around as 19 year olds - about fitting in, being cool, looking and dressing the right way, all of that shit - is gone. We own and embrace our flaws because they contribute to who we are, which is something to be celebrated. We can just talk and laugh and be honest with each other. It's the best.

After we had all returned home, I got a notification from AirBnb that Bob, our host/property manager, had left a review.

"Loved having these young women at our beach house!"

I don't know that we particularly feel like young women anymore. But maybe we keep each other young.

In any event, we'll take it for as long as we can get it.