Why Are You Not Teaching

This is the first December I can remember in my professional life where I haven't been scrambling to prep for spring classes.  Some of my colleagues don't have this problem--they teach the same two (or three, four, or five) classes every semester, and they have developed systems so that those classes kind of run on autopilot.  They pull out their notes or files or whatever and don't need to do a ton of preparation for them to run smoothly.

I'm much more of a jackass about the whole thing and am usually rewriting my syllabi (sometimes even revising them wholesale at the last minute).  I add in new readings and even occasionally things I haven't read, which is super stressful but also a great way to have an interesting experience with your students where you're reading and learning along with them.

But the reason I'm not doing any of that right now is because I took on some extra work this past fall so that I could get what's called a "buy-out" from teaching this spring.  I'm doing some administrative work instead, and also ramping up some research efforts.

This is weird and hard to explain to people without sounding defensive or whiny or clueless about the privilege involved in being a professor.   Things are further complicated by the fact that I teach in a graduate program rather than in an undergraduate one (for now, anyway) and also that in the back of my mind is always this whole constellation of events, trends, and disasters happening in the swampy bog that is higher education and which feeds in to the exact reasons for why I'm not teaching in the spring even though in everyone's mind that's what we pay you for.

See?  Defensive.

You can read much more eloquent scholars than me talk about all this stuff.  But I'll just offer a few brief outlines here.

1)  Lots of people are really worried about professors who have tenure, because they have probably had a crappy old checked-out professor who was protected by tenure even though they weren't really doing their job anymore.  Sometimes that's a problem.   Nobody likes the idea of somebody getting paid for work they're not doing or doing well.

But really?  Most professors these days aren't even on the tenure-track.  We can use the Orwellian term and call them "contingent" faculty, but really they are better called "exploited" faculty.  They teach the bulk of undergraduate classes at most universities and even though they often have PhDs and loads of student loan debt they often make less than $20,000 a year, don't receive benefits, are treated as ghosts on the campus(es) where they teach.

And, for the record, tenure itself is increasingly under attack.  So it's not really a guarantee of anything anymore, in lots of places.

2)  At the same time we have seen the rise of the adjunct class of professors, we have also seen public funding of higher education decimated.  Thanks to the cries of smaller government and just a general overall devaluing of providing public goods to the public at affordable prices (and probably also quite a bit of anti-intellectualism) and maybe also because higher education has not always been as quick to change as the "market" would like, most universities without huge endowments like, say, Harvard, struggle to make ends meet.  We are constantly threatened with massive and cyclical budget cuts and reminded that our jobs are vulnerable.  Few other professions--those requiring advanced schooling, preparation, and geographic promiscuity--face such uncertainty.

3)  So universities are forced to make ends meet by a) raising tuition and b) requiring faculty to bring in what are called "research dollars."

4)  Therefore, increasingly, those who can afford to go to college a) take out crippling student loans to pay for it and b) demand a sweet "customer service" type experience, where they have sick dorm rooms outfitted with big screens and climbing walls.  Universities are thus forced to pour tons of money into pimping out the residential student experience in order to recruit students, whose dollars they need, and must further pressure faculty to secure external research dollars, in order to pay for climbing walls and lazy rivers for floating freshmen.

5)  So now you have a system where students often (but not always) want a slick customer-service-type experience, are often being taught by exploited, overworked adjunct faculty and/or the occasional cranky tenured old guy who is working way longer than he wanted to because he needs retirement money like everyone else.

6)  Then occasionally those of us who are mid-career also teach, though mostly we are spending our time on many, many committees--which often are important for the health of the university, but are also sometimes used to keep faculty busy, I think.  Mostly we spend our time trying to be "research productive."  Increasingly this means seeking funding from the federal government or private foundations or donors or businesses who will give the university a percentage of what we bring in.  It means we are trying to find ways to supplement our increasingly non-competitive salaries vis-a-vis other professions that also require extensive schooling and debt accrual.

[The thought of not being able to save or borrow enough money to send my own children to college some day gives me fits, and we are solidly middle class].

7)  And if we are in a program or a position that also requires our students to be successful--like, say, we work in a small school that values faculty-to-student contact or wants students to finish PhDs of their own--we also spend a lot of time meeting with students and countless (and I mean countless) hours advising.

8)  Finally, we always have to be aware of our "national and international reputation." This means frequently presenting at conferences, publishing papers in journals, writing books, reviewing other people's articles, books, and promotion documents, and so on.

All of this is not to say that my job isn't fantastic.  It is.  I feel lucky most days to get to do this work. It is dynamic and stimulating and I get to meet amazing people, learn fascinating things, and challenge myself to be both excellent and on the cusp of failure all the time.

But it is to say that when you ask me isn't it great to have summer off?  Or what I'm going to do with all my time now that I'm not teaching?  Or how great is it that they can't fire me now that I have tenure?

I wish I could agree with you.

Small House Love Story

When we moved from Denver last year, not only did we leave behind a tribe of amazing friends, well-paying jobs, and all the benefits of living in a mid- to large-sized city, we also left behind our big old house in the suburbs.  We had 2,400 square feet and a huge yard.  We had a two-car garage.  We had three bedrooms and both E. and I had a really good sized office space for our very own selves.  The kitchen was huge, and it extended out into an open dining space (with a actual, real, two-story tree growing up through the floor, spreading its branches out above our dining room table) and leading into a good-sized living room.

There were many great things about that house.  E. in particular still mourns that house, and while the girl's memories of it are now hazy, every once in a while they wish they had a big backyard.

But here's the thing.  When I think about that house, I feel a little sad.  And it's not sad from missing it.  I remember myself sitting in our ginormous master bedroom, looking out the sliding glass doors at the gorgeous old-growth trees in the backyard, and praying for something to change.  My job might have been well paying, but I was also miserable.  Our marriage seemed fine on the surface but underneath simmered loads of resentment and unspoken anger and secrets and fear.   I felt so goddamned lonely.

It's not that I didn't have happy moments there--I did.  And it's not that the house itself made me unhappy.  Of course it didn't.  And we were so lucky to live there, really.  I'm sure some of you think I sound like a privileged twit.  All I'm saying is that, in my mind, I associate having all that space with also having a whole lot of emptiness.

Now we live in a much smaller house, by many American standards.  I'm not sure what the actual square footage is (because real estate=sham), but I would guess the livable space here is just a little more than half what it was in the old house.   Addie's bedroom is in the basement, the bathrooms are tiny and filled with questionable tile choices (when there is tile at all), we call the cooking space the "frankenkitchen" because it's been cobbled together by whatever pieces someone found at the side of the road, and our office spaces look like this:

Eric at his wee little desk, tucked away in the corner of our wee little living room.  I asked him to sit up straight for this picture so we could capture the wee-ness of the surroundings.  Wee laptop, wee lamp, giant man.

I get the "big" office space, which is actually an entry way closet that got sealed off.    Again, we had to search for wee furniture that would fit these spaces.

The house is a hundred years old.  When you add in even a little bit of clutter, you can feel it, so you have to remain vigilant against the invasion of stuff.  It has giant holes in the back of the house where some weekend warrior closed in the back porch to give us a laundry room/bathroom but didn't think to insulate.

But when I think of this house?  I think:  happy.  Don't get me wrong; our first year here was one of the most difficult of my life.  E. and the kids took a really long time to settle in and I felt pessimistic and wracked with guilt and terrified about finances all the time.   There are days (weeks?) where we are all home together or where E. is home doing homework/working/whatever and I just want everyone the fuck out of my SPACE.  The few days where I have had the house to myself have been heavenly and I want MORE solitude.  

Here is what's great about the tight living space, though:

Closeness.  We see each other, a lot.  We have to work through conflicts, rather than fleeing to our own corners.  We cuddle and spend time together and, yes, annoy each other some.  But on the whole, I think we are much closer as a family, and have developed some much needed communication skills we didn't have before.

Yard.  We don't have a big yard.  We don't have a big yard!  We don't spend hours doing yard work on the weekends.  And we live two blocks from an awesome park.  I am personally convinced of the awesomeness of this.  The kids are warming up to it.  But I spend way more time outside than I used to because to me it feels like the whole neighborhood is our backyard.

Cleaning.  God, the cleaning.  With that big old house, there used to be so much fighting and gnashing of teeth (mine).  But here, I see light at the end of the tunnel.  The kids are finally starting to help out with chores, and between that and the fact that there is just not that much to clean, I feel like I have some small portion of my life back.

Stuff.  E. still side-eyes the bags of stuff that go out the door to the thrift store (or getting sold on Poshmark!), but I also know there is way less stuff that is coming in.  We still have a pretty loaded house (um, four Americans) but I feel a clearer sense of what we do and don't need.  We don't have a Costco membership, because we literally have no space to store sixteen rolls of paper towels.  A Costco-sized package of paper towels would be our undoing, I'm telling you.  And we only buy food that we will actually eat during the week.  That took some getting used to because in the back of my mind I am always pretty sure we are two days away from the apocalypse.  But less room to store 32 cans of sauerkraut means we don't buy it to begin with.  So, less waste.   And it also forces me to trust that we are okay even without backups for our backups.  No need to have six things of deodorant to survive the end days.

And, the best thing of all:  our location.  This has nothing to do with the house itself, I guess, but getting to live in a neighborhood where we can walk both to the foothills and downtown feels like the best part of it all.  It's essentially what we are paying for by living in this overpriced froufrou neighborhood.  Just ask the tax man.

Maybe there will come a point where I want to live out in the burbs again and have all the square feet.  I would bet E. will always want that.  But I have a soft spot for this kooky little corner house and how it symbolizes a turn from a life that felt empty and a little shallow to a life that feels much more real and connected.

My Lumps

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I found a lump in my left breast a few weeks ago.  I don't do self exams regularly, but there was a sore spot, and I got to poking around, and sure enough, there it was.

I didn't get myself into the doctor until Friday morning, and I probably wouldn't have gone then, except I woke up with a wicked case of vertigo--which I've also never had before--and all of us had to get on a plane to go to a wedding in a few hours and I wanted to make sure I wasn't having a stroke.

[Sidebar:  I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, obvi, and the feeling that I might be having a stroke happens to me semi-frequently:  if I don't get enough sleep, or feel sad or freaked out, or just don't eat every two hours, my eye starts to twitch and I get a kind of migraine-y headache and can't form words and basically my little rat-brain goes and hits the "having a stroke" panic button].

Observation one:  It's funny how I just finished a book for academics on harmonizing work life and home life, and yet that morning woke with vertigo, with dizziness and physical imbalance so bad that I fell twice in the bathroom just trying to get ready to go to the doctor's.

Observation two:  My body is an unrelenting and highly accurate response system to what is going on in my brain and to the choices I make with it.  For example, the vertigo is mostly gone, but then yesterday I developed a stye in my eye, swelling it, and making it a little hard to work.  For fuck's sake already.

I'm not saying I caused myself to have a wacky medical condition that literally mimics what is going on in my life, which perhaps has been too work-centered lately.  But maybe.

Just in case, I'm taking today off.

Anyway, I got to the doctor's on Friday and explained about the dizziness and the falling and the nausea and the splitting headaches and she made sure my left arm felt okay and my speech was okay and said I wasn't having a stroke.  This seemed amazing to me because I felt like I was making no sense at all, like I was moving and talking like one of those animatrons at Chuck-E-Cheese.  And I thought for sure I was stroking out and it was obvious to everyone.  But I also had a little bit of hypochondriac's remorse that it wasn't a stroke, which would earn me at least several weeks in bed and maybe give me some fodder for a Ted Talk.

That was a terrible joke.  I'm sorry I made it.  Forgive me.  I take strokes super seriously.  As you know.

Anyway, vertigo seemed like a merciful diagnosis after that.  Even though Rat Brain went and immediately assumed I'd have it for weeks on end and wouldn't be able to ride my bike or work on my computer or do yoga or drive and then what.

Rat Brain is the worst.  I recommend not going to it for advice.  Ever.

So then I also mentioned the thing about the lump and she said, it's probably nothing, most of these things are nothing, but then she found it pretty much immediately, plus another one, FML, and then started calling it a "mass" and ordered mammograms and things.  She also looked off into the distance and gave an angry little lecture that women are being told not to do self breast exams, and then they don't know how to identify normal lumps vs. abnormal lumps, and I felt like she was telling a story about me right in front of me but acting like I wasn't there.

Once she stopped scolding who knows who she looked at me again and reassured me there were lots of reasons for lumps to appear, meaning other than cancer, I think, though she didn't say that word.  I'm not so sure it's nothing, though rationally I know there's all sorts of things it could be.  I also know there's no need to borrow trouble, as my friend S. says, and there have been lots of examples in my life where I've borrowed trouble needlessly and then everything has been fine.

But it does make you think things.  It does make me think about how I support my family, and what if I get sick and am out for a while.  It makes me think how much I hate being sick, and about how high the dust bunny piles would get in my house if I got sick.  It makes me think about my kids having to see me be sick.  It makes me think about E., who already lost one wife to cancer and who doesn't need to be going through anything resembling that again.  It makes me think about my cousin, who is in the hospital right this very second having very intensive chemotherapy treatments for leukemia that doesn't look at first glance to be super curable, though nobody is counting that lady out yet because she is a badass and miracles happen.  It makes me think about every book I've ever read by women who have been diagnosed with cancer, and then it makes me think about what it will be like to write a post next week some time that says, jk, it wasn't cancer, just some lumpy booby stuff, no problem, no worries, sorry to have sounded the alarm.

I don't give myself too much time to think these thoughts, but they are floating around, back behind my eyeballs, creating static, maybe making the room spin, maybe causing my eye to swell up with fearful tears I can't seem to shed.  Or maybe it's just the beginning of the semester and there's a bunch of germs all over the place and I didn't wash my hands well enough that one time.

Who the hell knows.

Big Love

Fat is not a bad word, it's an adjective, like thin, tall, short.  I won't make it profane.

I didn't used to know this.  I used to think my worth depended on what the world thought of how I looked.  I used to hate my body, the way I looked, just like many of you probably do.

As a child at night as I prayed for my family, I also prayed I would wake up with blonde hair and blue eyes, instead of the doe like browns I saw in the mirror.  My roll model was Wonder Woman, not because she was strong, but because my dad said she was beautiful.

As a tween, I thought my thighs were too big, and my breasts were too small.

As a teenager, I spent one entire year consuming only Diet Pepsi for lunch because I was sure the worst thing in the world to be was fat.

My adulthood up until about four years ago, was consumed with hate for how I could grab a handful of fat around my stomach, hate for the cellulite and stretch marks I'd collected.

I was wracked with guilt over eating a slice of pizza and drinking a beer.  Forget enjoying them, I could only think about how worthless I was because I didn't "resist".

I've ordered a salad I didn't want because I was sure my dining partners were judging me, and that as Kristin Chirico  put it, I needed to shout, "Hey everyone, don't worry, this situation is being chaperoned by vegetables!"

I've missed out on summers by the pool because I thought I was somehow undeserving of wearing a swimsuit.  I was sure that to expose my flapping arms, and jiggly thighs would somehow be inflicting torture on the other swimmers.

I've shot down touching and heartfelt compliments from my husband, believing there was no way they could be true.  Believing it was a fluke that this man loved and appreciated me.

Then, I met an amazing woman.  A fat woman.  A woman who was unafraid to eat carbs in public.  A woman who told me that I had no obligation to fit any arbitrary beauty standard.  A woman who told me to move my body because it felt good, not to change it.  A woman who told me I could wear, eat, live whatever and however I wanted, unapologetically.  A woman who fed my starving mind with information, who told me about a revolution taking place.  A body positive revolution.

Recently, I got to experience an amazing moment in this body positive revolution. While my daughter and I watched from the sidelines, the woman who helped me free myself from self hate, Amy, stripped down to a bikini in a public market, blindfolded herself and asked people to take a stand for self love by drawing a heart on her beautiful, big body.  Maybe you've seen it, but in case you missed it, here's the lovely video she and Melanie made about it.

Photo by Melanie Folwell

There has been an extraordinary outpouring of support for the video.  It has been written about on many blogs.  Amy's been interviewed multiple times.  So, why am I writing about it?  I'm writing about it because there's a revolution afoot my friends, the revolution is gaining ground, and I want this little soapbox I have to be part of it.

I feel so privileged to have been there that day, to have shakily held Melanie's iPhone as it recorded the event.  The tears still sting in my eyes when I think about the women, men and children who ran to her to get their chance to show how valuable all bodies are.  I feel so privileged that my daughter, while guarding Amy's flip flops and our bags, got to witness the love that is in so many hearts, got to see that other people support the idea that she as a young, growing woman can be proud of her body, whatever it looks like.  I feel so privileged to live in a city that embraced, Amy, this project, and the Body Positive revolution. I feel so lucky to know someone brave enough to make this stand.  And, I feel so honored to have had the opportunity to draw a heart, and fill it with "Big Love", over the big, courageous heart of my friend.

Because of this revolution I love myself.

I love myself as I am today.

I love myself without any changes.

I know I'm beautiful, I know I'm amazing, I know I'm more than what the world thinks of my body.

If you don't already know these things about yourself, I'm telling you, they're true.

How to Stay Married.

If you're looking for some sage advice on how to stay married, I have it for you.

JUST DO!

That's right.  That's my advice.  The sum and total of my eighteen years of experience on the subject.

How to stay married?  Just do.

I could go into a long diatribe about how I came to this epiphany.  I could tell you about the trials and troubles Josh and I have faced in the last two months, but I won't.

If you want to stay married, just do.  If you don't, just don't.

If a life long marriage is your aim, accept your spouse as they are, now.  Love them unconditionally.  Love yourself unconditionally.  Take the idea of divorce as a problem solver out of the equation.  Don't bring it up with them, don't even let you mind think it. 

This will be hard, at times, maybe even miserable, but you might also learn a ton about how to forgive, how to accept, how to be generous, how to be kind and how to love.

This Way, or That

E. surprised me for our 13th anniversary with a trip to Portland.  Thinking we were, I don't know, twenty-three or something, we drove seven hours on Friday, stayed in a posh hotel over night, walked around Portland for a few hours the next morning, and drove back.  It was exhausting.  Lovely.  Exhausting.

On the way home we were hauling ass up a steep, winding, four-lane highway pass; around one curve was a red sedan, flipped upside down, wheels still spinning, bodies stiffly circling a car, something suspended upside-down from the roof.  "Is someone still in there?" I asked Eric. "Should we stop?"

He said no, there were other people already pulled over to help, but I wasn't really asking a question anyway, and we pulled over.  There were four women who had been in the car--a fifteen-year-old and her mom, two older ladies, aunties.  A couple of other motorists had pulled whoever was still suspended in the car out.  There were magazines strewn about the roof of the car; snacks; the contents of purses.  It looked like the aftermath of a wild party, the floor of a messy dorm room.

Everyone was fine, mostly.  The two aunties, stout, purses hung off their forearms, lips in tight lines and hair unmussed, seemed as if they had just strolled up.  They were totally unfazed and it was hard to believe they had been in the car at all.

The mom, who had been driving, had blood pouring down her face from a puncture wound to her forehead, but she was still standing and seemed otherwise okay.  She was shaking pretty bad, her eyes wide, and she kept saying, "I could have killed my whole family.  I could have killed them all."  She was clearly in shock and I just stood there and rubbed her back, tried to convince her to sit down, worried that maybe she was hurt worse than she seemed.

Someone else had a first aid kit and gloves on already, and kept asking me if I wanted gloves on too.  I wasn't touching the blood or anything so I ignored them and finally got the woman seated on the rocky embankment.  Cars were still flying up the hill, going so fast, then braking suddenly to look at us, and the road was wet from the rain that had just come through.  E. said he couldn't believe how bald the woman's tires were, and that he was worried the whole time we would get hit by someone else who lost control.

One of the aunties said they had been on their way to a family reunion in LaGrange.  The woman who had been driving said her brother had told her it was time to get a new car, but the car would be finally paid off in three months, so she had told her brother she had decided to drive the car into the ground.  Then she paused.  "I could have killed my whole family," she repeated.  She grabbed her daughter and hugged her so tight and said, "I'm so sorry baby.  I'm so sorry."

Ambulances from the nearby Indian reservation were on the way, and everyone seemed fine, and there were plenty of motorists on the side of the road now.  Cars kept whizzing past us, and it became clear that we were more in the way than not.  So I hugged the lady again, told her and her family I was so glad they were alive and okay, and we left.

I remember fifteen years ago when my then-boyfriend Pete and I drove from LA up to Boise so he could meet my family.  On that trip, too, we passed a wreck, this time on a pretty deserted stretch of road in Northern California.  There was a van, formerly full of people, pulled off to the side of the road, but facing the wrong way, its front end bashed in, windows collapsed; there was a big, overturned truck in the field next to it.  Pete was an EMT, so we pulled off immediately to see if we could help the other motorists who had pulled over ahead of us.

There were bodies in the field.  People had located them and then were coming back to us, their faces grim.  A kid, in his late teens or early twenties, too, was seated by the side of the road, by himself.  His brother, also young, was still strapped into the driver's seat, not moving.  Pete was looking the driver over, and again all I could do was rub the kid's back, tell him it would be okay.  He kept asking about his brother.  Pete and I made eye contact and he shook his head.  Somebody told him he was an EMT and needed to call it.  He had just got out of training and hadn't done anything like this before, so he spent a few more minutes going over the driver again, standing still and quiet, feeling for a pulse, breath sounds.  Then he shook his head a final time.

The kid, rocking now, eyes locked on the front of the van, told me he and his brother and the other passengers were on holiday from Australia.  He didn't know what had happened to cause the accident.  He kept asking about his brother, saying he needed to call his parents, and all I could say was, "Everything's going to be alright.  It's alright."  I lied, and hated lying, and didn't know what else to do.  I tried to calculate the time difference between California and Australia, tried to imagine who would be responsible for making that call, what news would be given.

Eventually the cops and the fire truck came and we didn't need to be there anymore.  We got back in the truck and left.

I felt the same way in both situations, as I got back in the car and sped off.  Not lucky, not reminded of how it can all be over in a minute, not wanting to be more careful.  Just shaky and filled with a sense of the strange, the uncanny.  The weirdness of how you can be part of such a significant moment in someone's life, a moment where maybe their life is changed forever, and also be so totally outside of it, so useless, so extraneous.  And then you can get in your car and drive away, untouched, never knowing anything about those people again.

The Spiritual Douche

Okay, so before I begin the heart of this post, let me just put a little disclaimer here about the word "douche."  Because if you know me in person, you know that I'm sort of fond of swearing, and that the pejorative "douchebag" is in heavy lexical rotation (along with the douchebag's primary mode of transport, the "douche canoe," which is usually an oversized, over-equipped, heavily-stickered vehicle).

I know N. wants me to replace "douchebag" with "dick sock" and M. wants me to not say it at all, I think because it reinforces the sense that women's bodies and fluids and processes are icky/gross/disgusting and that's not great for feminism.

I'm a big fat feminist, so I get it.  I'm thinking about not saying it anymore, even though I feel ambivalent because sometimes that word is just the right thing to say about certain people.  And sometimes I don't like word policing, though sometimes I do.

But this post is about reclaiming the word "douche" as something positive, in all of its wet feminine stickiness, so hang in with me for un momentito.

I don't know if it's that my girlfriends and I are finally mostly in our forties, and it's introspection time, or maybe this is one of those seasons in one's life where you look around and wonder, what the hell, or maybe you feel a little bored or in a slump and the color has gone out of things.  Whatever it is, I've been talking with a bunch of women lately who are feeling maybe like they've lost a sense of who they are.  They'll tell me that things are kind of good.  But they also feel a little like a slog.  Sometimes things feel a little blah, even when on paper it seems everything is okay.

The culture seems to call these moments "mid-life crises," which for me conjures up images of balding dudes in porsches with young blonde dental assistant second wives.  Maybe the stereotypical version for women is dating a younger man, a la Stella Got Her Groove Back.  In actuality, probably the intense and massive consumption of wine on the part of middle-class women is a response, too.  I think a lot of us are numbing out.

But maybe there is a different way.

Maybe that way could be called the Spiritual Douche.

The Spiritual Douche, in my world, looks like intentionally making choices or adopting practices that put you back in charge of your life.  I think we spend a lot of our 30s getting things on auto-pilot, as we're raising kids and getting our careers going, and we're just trying to survive.  And then in our 40s the auto-pilot gets a little...dull. We forget that we have choices.  We forget that we can, as Anna Kunnecke puts it, "declare dominion" over our day to day existence.

Holy shit, have I been there.

But here's the thing.  We can decide, through steps big and small, to get renewed, baptized, cleansed, "douched," remade, rejuvenated, in ways that bring the color back into our lives.  There are lots of ways to change how we think about responsibilities and obligations and duties.  There are lots of ways to, whoosh, start over.

For me, the Spiritual Douche takes a couple of different forms.

• It has meant renegotiating my relationships to the objects in my world, largely with the help of this amazing free program.  I can't overestimate how awesome this has been for me.  It has helped me in so many areas, from how I live in my home, to how I dress, to how I spend money, to how I spend my time.  Next time it rolls around, sign up.  You won't regret it.

• You could also read this little book and try some of the stuff in there, or this big, beautiful book, which is about style but also so much more, and has provided me with tons of clarity.

• It means making sure I spend time with the people I love in intentional ways and in beautiful, natural settings.  It means finding a way to move your body outside with people or animals you love.  I have a few groups of friends who I have to fly or drive long distances to see.  Money is tight, but we all make the effort to get together.  We hike or swim or bike together.  We drink.  We work.  We talk.  We laugh.  The effort is always, always worth it.  I come home to my family in much better shape, always.  Find your tribe, and then do what you need to do to be with them. Whatever rules you have in place that say you can't leave home or work, look hard at those rules.  You're probably the only one who is really enforcing them.  As Jenny Holzer says, "You are a victim of the rules you live by."  That's a quote from this book, which you could also read, if you wanted to change your shit up.

• Natural settings, by the way, are key.  Because nature itself is the master douche-meister.  She will clear you out, in all the best ways.  Get out and hug a tree (for reals).  Lay on the ground and "look at the cwouds," as my 2-year-old niece would say.  Go barefoot.  Get into a park, go to the beach, grow some basil in your windowsill.  I cannot tell you what a difference this makes in terms of getting clear.  It only takes five minutes, and you can do it in any outdoor setting available to you.  

• It means making different decisions about how I spend my time.  I work really hard.  I sometimes work long hours.  I have projects I feel passionate about and some degree of clarity and success in my work life.  I have kids, and a husband, and I try to move my body every day.  But I also have erred sorely on the side of workaholism and anxiety and stress.  I have had times where my to do list has ruled my life.  I have had times where things have been profoundly out of whack, and I have made myself sick.  But guess what?   There are other ways of doing things.  And they don't have to be big!  I used to worry that I should be like those people in the women's magazines who left their day jobs and started a custom tampon delivery company and are now millionaires.  I just don't have the appetite for doing that.  But there are daily micro-practices I can easily implement that profoundly improve my life.  Try The Break Changer, if you want another amazing, fun, free program.  If it works for you, you can try the month-long one.  My money is on you being amazed at how making small changes can make a big difference.

• It means meditating.  Which I know, you're like, whatever.  Yadda yadda.  But Christ on a crutch, it really effing works.  Here's a free 21-day program to try, which runs about four times a year and is fantastic.  Get the app.  You have to suspend your cynicism about who runs it, if you are a cynical type.  I have been a cynical type, though, and let me tell you, it didn't get me very far.  Cynicism is the easy way out, if you ask me.  The Spiritual Douche asks you to be willing to try some stuff you aren't used to trying, suspend your disbelief, and be willing to laugh at yourself and experiment.

• In other words, it means trying different stuff, and really questioning your excuses.  Most of the things I linked to above are free or humanly-priced programs.  Most don't require much time or skill.  And you don't have to do all of them.  These are just ones that have worked for me and been fun, and haven't set off cheesy alarm bells, and have really fucking improved my life, for cheap.  

I guess my point is that things don't have to feel dull.  Things don't have to feel like a slog.  We can choose something else.  We can pay better attention.  We can choose to flush what doesn't work and make room for better things.  

And I think when we move small things, big things also start to shift.  I don't know why, and maybe it's magic, but that is how it seems to be.  So start small.  Try one thing.  See what happens.

Trailer Park Honeymon

We all know we're supposed to write thank you cards, and my mom even gave me 300 of them, along with my gift list from my wedding.  I kept meaning to write them, and meaning to write them and after 2 years, I thought, "Now, it's probably just rude to send them."

I know I was wrong, it just seemed to get away from me, and I was too embarrassed to correct it.  I thought maybe if I didn't send any thank yous, people would assume I already had.  Forgive my asinine rudeness.

As my 20th anniversary approaches, (we're at 18).  I plan to rectify that mistake, I even plan to chronicle it in blog posts to come.  Consider this the first in the series.

We definitely didn't have an exotic honeymoon.  We weren't even going to take one at all.  Josh and I got married at 20 and 19 respectively.  We were both living at home with our parents, but we had put a down payment on a house the April before our wedding, and were figuring out mortgage payments, saving to replace carpet, stripping paint from kitchen cabinets, and with our plan to avoid debt, there looked like no possible way for us to miss our paychecks for a week, let alone spring for a tropical beach.

When my grandmother heard we weren't planning on taking a honeymoon, she came to me and said, "Angela, how much do you and Josh make in a week?"  I told her, and she explained that as a wedding present, she would pay Josh and I what we would have made, if we agreed to take the week after our wedding off, and spend it in our family cabin.  I started to argue, and she said, "Either way you're going to have to pay for groceries for the week, you might as well spend some time alone together."  I was touched and we took her up on her offer.

I should explain that our family "cabin" was really an ancient single wide trailer, on a lot with other trailers and cabins just off the highway in the mountains.  My grandparents, people who lived simply their entire lives, saved for this little "place" in the woods.  There was a large deck all the way around it, covered with hummingbird feeders, and sparkling and iridescent garden decor.  My grandmother had decorated the inside and kept it immaculate. In the back was a bedroom large enough for a double bed, the next room was a tiny bathroom, then kitchen, then living room.  The entire thing was probably 25 feet long by 8 feet wide.  My family and I loved going there growing up, and the prospect of any vacation sounded amazing to Josh and me. 

That week we marveled at the humming birds coming to eat from my grandmother's feeders.  We read Silence of the Lambs aloud to each other, naked in bed.  We watched The English Patient, and dined on extravagant dinners of Kraft Deluxe Mac n Cheese.  We draink Ice Reisling wine my mom had given us to toast our marriage, because we weren't old enough to pick out or purchase our own alcohol, and Josh held my hair as I threw up that wine and Mac n Cheese. I screamed at the frogs that came up through the pipes in the toilet and bathtub, and Josh laughed at me.  We made love on picnic blankets in the woods.  It was a glorious, glorious honeymoon.  I wouldn't change one single thing about it. We hardly left that cabin all week.

We didn't need an exotic locale, or tropical beaches, or fancy drinks with umbrellas, we needed the pure, unadulterated bliss of being alone together, drinking each other in, celebrating this life we were about to embark on,  and getting to know each other in ways we never thought possible.

We needed to look deeply into each other's eyes, we needed to be together without distractions.

I'm so grateful, that instead of the beauty of some place, I was gifted with the beauty of my husband.  I was gifted with the magic of what we can be together, and when our marriage is hard, and I'm struggling, I go back to that week, and it helps me hold on.

Thank you Grandma Leola for our gift.

The Laaaaast Womaaaaan on Eaaaarth!!!

Oh you guys.  I haven't shown up here in a long while, on the blog.

Because I've been writing two books.

At the same time.

And they are both due to the publishers any minute.

I've been spending almost all of my work hours hunched over my computer making sentences, fixing them, fixing them again, checking references, looking things up, feeling all squinchy and focused.  I get home from the office and am barely able to form sentences.  My children seem like aliens, my husband a stranger.  It takes me an hour just to resume human form, to reconnect to a life lived off the page.

I feel like I am in a dark cave.  It's cozy in here, and deeply fulfilling--even joyful--in a lot of ways.  I'm proud of myself, and my co-authors, and the work.  But really I am in here by myself, in the dark, until these things are done.   Mornings:  coffee, work out, sit butt in chair, write.  And at the end of the day, all I have energy for is to take the dogs for a walk, watch an episode of Mad Men, and pass out into the deepest sleeps I've ever had.

Occasionally I take a peek at what you guys are doing on Facebook and notice that big, important things are happening, and also sweet, small things, and then I quickly close the browser because my brain cannot even be in that space right now.  There is no bandwidth left for imagining what other people are doing, or commiserating, or connecting, or keeping up.  I know it's summer and I know we have taken trips and will take more, and that we have friends, and interests, and that something called "boredom" exists somewhere, and that someday life will resume, but I can't remember anything other than sitting in front of this screen, and I can't imagine anything beyond it, either.

It's possible I'll come out of the cave and you'll all be gone.  The whole world will have been a dream, and the only real thing the words I tapped, tapped, tapped out on this laptop.  I'll be the last woman standing, and all that will be left for me to read is my own two books.

Lord, I hope not.  I hope you'll all remember who I am when I come back.  Please keep an eye out for me.

So I haven't been writing here, because I've been writing there.  I've used up all my words.  And I'm not living any interesting stories to tell, anyway.

But I'll come back.  I'm almost done.

Look out.

How To Ruin Your Child's Best Day

Yelling is bad.  I know this.

Two days ago, Grace was sitting at the breakfast counter in the kitchen after school.  She said, "Oh Mom, last week on Thursday when I was home sick.  I got an IB award.  Mr. _______ gave it to me today."

I kind of knew what an IB award was.  I knew that the school gave out these "I see IB" acknowledgements when they caught kids having behaviors consistent with the school's desired attitudes and attributes.  You know, stuff like, "You were really open minded when you listened to that other point of view".

I asked her "Which teacher gave you the award?"  Mildly annoyed, she curtly replied, "All of them."  I said, "Oh.  What attribute was it for?"  Completely exasperated, she snipped, "ALL OF THEM."  My response, "So... this award is from all the teachers? and for -"  She interrupts, "Yes, Mom." with a, for crying out loud, how slow can you possibly be, tone.  This was the fly that landed on my crap pile of a day.  A day in which I had a fruitless two hour conversation with an unsatisfied client, a day where, because the business was down two employees, I had to turn down multiple clients, a day where Josh wasn't coming home until 8 or 9 pm, after a 14 hour work day, a day where I was stressed out about completing all the end of school year projects, just days away, a moment where, I was trying to make dinner, help another child with their homework and direct children on animal care. And I snapped.

I started screaming about how I was a loving parent, who just happened to be interested in what was going on in her life, and that I didn't deserve to be treated like that (shit), and that I already had been treated like that (shit) by multiple strangers that I didn't love.  (Yes, I said, "shit"), and on, and on I went in my self serving, I'm justified way.

Then she went upstairs and cried.  Then I yelled at all three of them about how I had to clean up all their messes, then Grace said kindly "Mom, should you take some time to cool down?", then I yelled "I AM COOLED DOWN!", then I yelled at Grace, "I'M SORRY I YELLED AT YOU.  I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH!!"  then she cried, then I nastily said, "Now you feel justified" because I knew my yelling was wrong, and I knew she knew my yelling was wrong, but I still felt justified, then she said, "No I don't. You have no idea how I feel", then I realized, I was not justified, I was an asshole, and I said, "You're absolutely right.  I'm sorry"

I went outside breathed in the fresh air, took a moment, felt my shame, and walked back into the house renewed.  I got down on my knees in front of Grace on the couch, and I said, with love and repentance, "I am so sorry I did that.  You did not deserve me yelling at you, and I'm sorry I ruined your good news.  I love you so much, and I'm not one bit surprised that you got that award, you're an amazing kid."  She said she needed a minute and went upstairs.

When she came down we talked it out more.  I did more apologizing, we talked about her award, and how good she felt when she got it, and how wonderful and amazing she is, and I apologized to the boys.  We had a beautiful dinner, where all four of us laughed and listened to each other, and all of us were happy and healthy, and hopefully healed.

At the end of the night, I was reflecting on this episode.  There was a time when I would have gone to bed unable to sleep because of the shame, but that night I thought, "The only way to go from here is forward.  I made amends, now I can learn from this."

I learned that I am going to have at least 10 more years of her exasperated with my inability to understand her.  As she grows in her autonomy, and figures out who she is, I plan to react to her with patience, empathy and love in the future, and not take it personally.  I learned that my children now know how to make amends to their children when they do parenting wrong because I have given them a great example.  I learned that my children are getting great practice in forgiveness, because they so readily forgive me, and that is a gift.  I learned that I really suck as a parent sometimes, sometimes I'm amazing at it, overall I'm real, and I can look at that as a gift to them, too. 

Empathy, Desparation, and Love

Late the other night, I had to pick my parents up from the airport.  After I dropped them off, I was alone with the radio.  Moments like these are rare in my life.  I was listening to the BBC broadcast on NPR.  I rarely ever hear this broadcast because by the time it's on I'm either scrambling to get our family of five ready for the next day, or trying to grab a moment alone with Josh, or sleeping.  As I listened, I heard this story, about the BBC's attempt after World War II to find the families of specific holocaust survivors.

I heard the story of a mother of three girls.  Two of her children were chosen to live, and before her eyes, one of her children was chosen to die.  This mother held on to that child, despite her horrific fate.  She fought men certainly bigger and stronger than herself with a desperation that I hope never to feel, but can sadly imagine.  As a result of her choice to hold on to her 9 year old daughter for dear life, this mother was sentenced to the same fate as her daughter.  She knew that to love meant to fight for her child despite the cost to herself.

I can't remember the last time I had such an emotional reaction to a story.  It's not that I've never been moved by a story of the holocaust.  Of course I have, but the reality of this story, my role as a mother, and the proximity in age of my own children to the children in this story, sent waves of despair over me.  I despaired for this mother and her choice.  I despaired for the children she left behind, I despaired for the fear, and torment of the 9 year old girl.

In general, I want to be in control, and as a parent, on more than one occasion I have thought, "No one could ever take them from me.  I would never let any harm come to them.  I would run, I would fight, it wouldn't be possible."  While listening to this broadcast, it struck me, really struck me for the first time, that it is possible.  There is evil big enough to rip children from their mothers, to pull them from their siblings.

I couldn't sleep thinking about what kind of person could look into a mother's eyes, so desperate with the kind of love people will die for, and take her child.  I couldn't sleep thinking about how there was no way, I or anyone could make up for this act, and the horrendous acts of so many others.  You see, I have a fixing problem.  I always want to fix things, and I agonized over my inability to make this right.  Then it dawned on me, that I may not be able to fix this, but I could work, hobble together the steps to prevent these things in the future.  You see, the future sleeps under my roof.  The future eats my food, snuggles in my bed, asks me for advice.  The future looks to me for answers everyday.

I can teach my children that there are no real differences between people.  That their job is to love.  That God is love, and that in order to know what's right, they have to look no further than the love between a parent and their child.  A love which I hope they feel in abundance.

And I will do my best.  I cannot right the wrongs of the past.  I cannot heal the wounds of a people.  I cannot erase the cruelty of generations, but I can do my best, everyday, to raise up people who see the value of the love between a mother and her child, and who would never violate that love despite the cost to themselves.

A Little Dark

There are days where I just totally freak out.  We get a letter saying our taxes were under-assessed and our mortgage payment is going to go up by twice the raise I just received and, Jesus, how are we going to pay for that now that E. is going back to school full time and not working anymore.  And I look around and think we have not had much good news, financially, for a long time now.  I wonder what the hell.  I have worked pretty dang hard for a long time now and shouldn't things be easier.  Why are we so cursed.

The negativity comes in waves:  My grandmother died on the floor by herself, and maybe suffered for a good long time.  I sometimes imagine her body on the floor, and wonder if I should have gone up to see it before the coroner got to the house.  I wonder if it says something about my character that I didn't.

I am sick again at the end of the semester, horrible sick, stomach flu and respiratory sick.  I hear judge-y voices in my head who say this is my fault for working too much and not resting enough.  I tell them to buzz off because sometimes you just catch a freaking virus, okay?

Sometimes I get really lonely for my girlfriends, for the women who know me and all my fears and fuck-ups and who don't need a bunch of back-story and who come and drag me out of my house and take me places.

The kitchen needs work and the house needs painting and the fence should be replaced.  The big dog's anti-seizure medicine costs $80 a month and the little dog has a weird itch on his back but I don't want to take him to the vet for fear he'll need Botox injections or something that will send us off some financial cliff.  Or, God, it's another tumor and he's going to die.

Sometimes I'm plagued with doubts about having moved us here.  Every time the girls have troubles or E. falters on his way towards reinvention or we get a bill I didn't expect or I have a bad day at work, there is a little voice that says, see, you should have stayed.  Who do you think you are.

The pain feels extra painful.  The dark extra dark.  And the crutches I used to use--the drinking, the buying, the eating--they just aren't as interesting or useful anymore.

But here's the thing.  The dark is extra dark but also the light is extra light.  I walk down the street here with a stupid goofy grin on my face because while I am not always happy I am frequently full of joy.  The colors feel brighter and my days don't whiz by in a creepy blur and I'm interested in my life.  The smallest things--riding the cruiser around town, cheering at Nolie's soccer game, drinking coffee in the sun--fill me with intense pleasure.

That sounds crazy.

What I mean is that I think living with a whole lot more uncertainty (but maybe also less fear) makes me feel more alive.  We were rich when we lived in Colorado but I think I spent a lot of time feeling dead inside.  I guess we were living with uncertainty, too, but I had surrounded myself with a pretty thick layer of routine and numbing and security.

If the bad can't get in, though, the good can't either.

This has not been an easy lesson to learn.  I really dislike discomfort and pain and sadness and embarrassment and shame and failure.  Here they are in my face a lot.  It's like every day is a mother fucking adventure in what-the-hell-is-going-to-happen-now.

Everyday is a mother fucking adventure.

That doesn't sound so bad.

I don't know what I'm going to get from one day to the next, or how I will handle it, or what kinds of grace or mercy I'm going to need next.  That feels a lot like being alive.

Martha Beck says this:

"Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive, and expansive. It’s different from unwilling suffering the way the sting of disinfectant is different from the sting of decay; the pain leaves you healthier than it found you."

Maybe all this is just me getting healthy.

Here's the other thing.  I'm pretty sure I believed strongly in "meritocracy" as life philosophy.  I believed if you were good, people would be good back, and if you did everything right and paid your bills and showed up and checked the boxes, good things would happen to you.

Cheryl Strayed, who doesn't believe in God but to me is a beautiful incarnation of God herself, writes in Tiny Beautiful Things, "To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion....  It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising--the very half that makes rising necessary--is having first been nailed to the cross."

I'm not saying I'm Jesus here, of course.  Or that our challenges have even been that bad, in relative terms.  I am saying that I have spent a whole lot of time trying to prevent bad things from happening to me by being good, believing that if something bad happened it was because I was not good enough.

But no.  The darkness is not your punishment.  It is your friend.  The dark things are what lead you to the light.  The cross is what leads you to redemption.

The flipside of trying to always do "right" is I feel like I spent most of my life barreling through to-do lists, forcing things to happen by sheer force of will without even being sure I actually wanted them to happen.  There was so much supposed to happening there.  I'm not talking about morality; I still think we strive to be our best selves, whenever possible, and to not hurt others, and to be kind and loving.  But for a long time I was being someone else's version of that best self.

That is a lifetime of conditioning that needs undoing, because shoulds and supposed to's are dulling mechanisms.  Figuring out what you actually want, apart from what you think you should do, is much more interesting.  And radical.  And terrifying.  And good.

My Grandmother

My grandmother was one of the most manipulative and difficult people I have ever met.  People chuckle knowingly when I say this, I think because they picture some kind of Archie Bunker-grumpy-but-full-of-character type.  They think I'm being hyperbolic or humorous.

They do not understand.

My grandmother would offer you condescending praise to your face and then cut your feet out from under you with horrifying criticism a minute later.  She would say vicious things about you behind your back and then deny them vehemently when accused; she would turn the words back around on you as if you were the one who did the offending.

My grandmother was despicably narcissistic.  She dominated conversations and belittled everyone she encountered.  She might ask you questions about yourself, but only as a means to turn back to her own stories, or to gather ammunition with which she would shoot you later.  She only heard what she wanted to hear, and had the memory of an elephant.  She would hold something you said as a fourteen-year-old against you for the rest of your life.  She really didn't care if she hurt you.  She hated children because they were boring.

My grandmother used money to own people.  She would hold out sparkly, shiny things that you needed or wanted very badly, but only in exchange for behavior or time, as dictated by her.  She would give things and then take them back, or criticize how you used them, or berate you if you gave them away.  She created toxic forms of emotional slavery and guilt.

My grandmother was racist, classist, and homophobic.  She used tips to control waiters, and was unconscionably rude to them and other people she considered "help."  Going out with her was a lesson in mortification.  She overpaid for items and handed out one-hundred-dollar bills, but if you got one of those payments, it meant you were indebted to her, and she never forgot a debt.  If you defaulted, it was because you were a stupid asshole/Chinese/a dumb girl/a Jew/naive/retarded.

My grandmother drove away almost everyone who loved her.  She did not know how to show love herself in a way that made any sense.  She scarred most of my family in ways they struggle to overcome.

I feared my grandmother for most of my life.  I was also embarrassed by her.  And she made me angry a lot of the time.  I left Boise right after college because I worried if I became a teacher here she would show up to my classes or be in my boss's office, manipulating and controlling and ruining my life.  I wanted independence more than anything, and so I left.

She hated me for leaving, for a long time.

When we moved back here last May, the grandmother I knew my whole life wasn't there anymore.  In her place was a worn out old lady, slowly dying.  The racism, controlling behavior, and narcissism were still on auto-pilot, for sure.  But there was also a simplicity, a sweetness, a reversion to child-joy that existed alongside that old self.

I would come in her room to find her sleeping, and gently rub her hand until she woke up.  She would smile like there was nothing better in the world than finding me standing there.  She wanted nothing more than company.  She wanted to know about me and my family.  She laughed a lot, at herself and the world, and not in a mean way.  Her mind was going, thank God, and in its place I had a glimpse of who she might have been had she not been angry every day of her life.

Yesterday, my uncle went to check on her and found her on the floor, beside her bed.  She had fallen, and she died there, on the floor.

My grandmother was hilariously funny, a performer, a clown, an actress, a singer of great talent.  She showed up at many of my volleyball and basketball games as a kid, with no warning, and belted out the "Star Spangled Banner."  She had a giant laugh, unmistakable, infectious.  She was magnetic, and you wanted to hear her stories.  She traveled all over the world.  She had incredible adventures.  She sang "Sunrise, Sunset" at my wedding and, on one trip we took to Buffalo when I was an awkward junior high teen, she got into a crowing contest with Howie Mandel at a hotel breakfast buffet.  She won.

My grandmother was generous.  She always gave me money, every time I visited.  She loaned everyone in my family money, or gave them money.  She made sure we had money for cars, houses, and schools, or to pay off debt.  She paid for me to go to Washington, D.C., when I was in junior high, and visited me in Europe when I was studying abroad.  She took me and a friend on a hellacious but incredible road trip to Disneyland when I was a kid.  She paid for my Costco and AAA memberships for years.  She took me with her to McCall to visit friends most summers when I was growing up, and my happiest childhood memories are from there.  She bought my girls Kindles for Christmas a few years back, and was constantly trying to write them checks, even when she was low on money herself, near the end.

My grandmother was an iconoclast.  She was shaped like a blueberry, had riotous black ringlets that framed her face, and she dressed like a gypsy cowboy in polyester bendovers, decorated with reams of gold necklaces and beads.  She wore wigs.  She always looked like she had a Halloween costume on, but those were just her normal clothes:  muumuus and flip flops.  She had a membership at the country club, and would show up there, loud and bossy, doing belly flops off the diving board just to shock all the entitled assholes who liked their world quiet and tidy.  She hated men who thought they could tell her what to do.  She worked as a miner, living out of her camper, for a long spell in the seventies.  I think those were probably the happiest times of her life.

My grandmother was an entrepreneur.  She loved to say that she was fired at the only job she ever got.  She used an inheritance to buy properties in Boise, and owned a motel, and a medicine delivery business.  She took care of all this like her life depended on it, and had a strong work ethic.  She also partied very, very hard and made all sorts of exciting and painful mistakes.

My grandmother got to die in her house, like she wanted.  On Sunday, she had brunch at her country club, with some friends, and then had a drive around the North End, the most important place in the world to her.  I like to think that she died soon after, on my daughter's birthday--life and death seeming to always come and go together--and that she didn't suffer, but lay unconscious while the last difficult breaths left.

That's what I'll choose to believe.

Coupla Things

Last year was crazy for us--you've probably picked up on that by now.  We moved and had to deal with living on less than half what we were making before.  I handled that pretty badly, and although we had some awesome times last summer, I also felt like there was a whole lot of constriction going on.

Every week it felt like I had to figure out something to "cut" from our budget or from our lifestyle.  I hated that.  I cried a lot.  I said many mean and inappropriate things to many people, and especially to E.  I was also very mean to myself.

What I can see more clearly now is that we had some serious lifestyle inflation happening there for a long time before we moved here, and also had developed a lot of coping mechanisms for being two working parents in demanding careers, no family (of origin) nearby, and a resistance to asking for help.  We really got into the habit of paying for most things--doggie daycare, childcare, food, house cleaning, entertainment.  Because that was how to survive.

I guess there's nothing wrong with that per se, and I'm grateful we had the means to do it.  But moving here I've learned there are lots of other ways of doing things, and that those other things can lead to something that looks a lot like connection and happiness.  I had really got to thinking I couldn't be happy without all that noise.  And though I'd love for us to be making a little more money than we're making now (that's the plan, too) I also wouldn't go back to the old model--both of us stressed and exhausted and not fully living our lives--either.

There's some clarity developing around what I don't want, is what I'm saying.  I don't want to work all the time, and I don't want E. to work all the time.  I don't want to feel financially precarious, but I don't need all the "goodies," either, if that means I'm just coping.  I don't want to veg out on shopping just because I feel sad and can't figure out why, and I have really been thinking about my choices to self-isolate and my loneliness habit.

But what I've ALSO been thinking about, and taking classes on, and doing a bunch of work around, is figuring out what I do want.  That's harder.  Way harder than I thought it would be.  But, the good news?  It feels a lot better than focusing on constriction or dwelling on what's going wrong.  It feels like cake on a mother fucking platter after a year of starvation diets.

Here's what I've learned about what I want:

I want to belong to a community of people that I can ask for help and who ask me for help.

I want people around my dinner table and parties at my house.

I want my girls' friends to just come on over and be over here a lot, and I want to be able to call their parents and say we need a night out please take our children away, gah.

I want my brothers and sisters to drop their kids off at my house, and I want to take my kids to theirs.

I want lots of time for writing and being outside and for cuddling and watching tv and reading.

I want to travel.  I want to go camping.  I want to do scary-exciting things I haven't done before.

I want to be surprised, and create surprises for other people.

I want to make choices at work that set me up to do what I love doing:  writing and working with students.

I want to keep figuring shit out myself, either in classes, or on trips, or in groups with others.  I want to be a student.

I want to set up a sweet, delightful life for my family.

I want beauty, and treats, and the space to enjoy both, rather than managing clutter and suppressing cravings.

I've been thinking about this list a lot.  I had to make tons of other lists in order to get here.  Lists of things that I like to do, ways that I like to feel, divine experiences, gratitudes.  Lists of who I'm angry at and why and how I can forgive and get over it and get on with it.  Lists of things to let go of.

What I haven't been doing is making to-do lists.  Oh, I have a master task list, sure--I have a bunch of projects always going on at work and it's useful to keep general tabs on due dates and stuff.  But I used to live every day by a very detailed to do list.  Oh my God, that was my religion.  I could have given you a seminar on the topic, and if you asked me, I probably did.  I'm sorry about that.  How incredibly boring.

I mapped out my life in fifteen-minute increments, treated things I wanted to do as tasks to be crossed off, scheduled in "personal" time and time with the kids, time to pray, time to take a bath.

Lord, it was a sickness.

Here's the coupla things that I think have cured me.  What I really want in life is to

make magic

and

make space

That's it.  That's all.  Everything I want from the list above fits into one of those two things.  And, I'm trying to use these two things to make decisions in my everyday life.  

This is taking some time as I'm mostly used to doing things because I think I'm supposed to do them, not because I want to.  Here's how I operationalize it (which is a fancy of way of saying here's how it looks in action).

Someone asks me to do a job at work.  That job might come with extra money attached, which we could sure use.  But make money is not one of the two sentences above.  I make money, of course, but focusing on that first, as the objective, makes me feel all tight and unhappy (see "constriction" above).

What I'm saying is if that job doesn't allow me to make good connections with students (which feels like magic to me, in a work sense) or work on a topic that truly floats my boat (intellectual magic) or open up space in my schedule, Ima say no.

Or, another example:  I used to really dread holidays.  Easter?  Bah.  What is that holiday even for (I mean, if you're not totally into the Jesus thing).  And you know how I feel about Halloween.

But guess what?  If my job is to make magic, holidays become super important opportunities for me to build the life I want.  Take St. Patrick's Day this year, for example.  Usually, St. Patrick's Day=meh or some weird approximation of drunken frivolity which I just don't get.  But my words are make magic, so I ordered some silly leprechaun kit for $17 online, and I stayed up late on March 16 to hide all this leprechaun stuff all over the house, and sprinkled green glitter in the girls' hair while they were sleeping, and we all had the greatest time doing the treasure hunt in the morning, for ten minutes before school.  The girls talked about it all week, and they are too old to be believing in leprechauns, but who cares.  They loved it+I loved it=magic.

I don't have time or energy to make magic if all I focus on is work and cleaning the house, though, so I also have to make space.  Because space=freedom.

Operationally, that has meant another round of clutter-busting so that I don't have to clean so much.  More space in my house has made me feel weirdly optimistic about the future, too.  Making space also has meant another round of trimming down activities and commitments so I have more space in my calendar.  Because everyday I want to choose what my day is going to look like, at least a little bit, apart from what a calendar and a list say.

Both of these activities have meant violating some "rules" I thought I had to live by when it comes to "stuff" and "commitments" and "good habits."  So I've been making some mental space, too, for new rules.  Mental space to try some new things outside my comfort zone, too, like shamanic healing and self-help classes.  Which has actually been super fun.

So far, I'm still kind of sucky at the operationalizing.  I've been working too much and haven't had time to plan some things I have in mind, or to have more fun every effing day than I've been having, which is another goal (and not a very high bar, I might add).  But I'm getting there.

Very refreshing, these coupla things.  Mother fucking cake on a platter.

Parenting Done Hard

We live just a few blocks from downtown Boise, and the girls and I were walking to a coffee shop a few weeks ago when an older homeless woman stopped us and asked for money.  I had heard her spiel before and had given her a few bucks once.  I was about to thank her and move on because we didn't have any cash, but Nolie held fast to my hand and wanted to listen to the story.  The woman said something about having been in a car accident, and losing all of her property, and needing surgeries that had used up all her money.  I told her we didn't have any money and we walked away, but Nolie yelled back to her that she was sorry about her troubles, and then she was quiet for a few blocks.

I'm going to do a fundraiser for that lady, Mama, she said.

Oh, man, I hate these moments as a parent.  Because you know there are some big headaches coming, and it's just so hard to explain all of that.  So you're either headed toward an argument, or just saying no, or borrowing trouble.

But one thing I've learned is that, rather than give the lecture, it's best to just go with the flow.  So I listened to Nolie's plan and didn't tell her no.  Even though I was thinking:  how will we ever find that lady again.  What are you going to tell people about this lady.  What if she's not telling you the truth and you find out and then we have to talk about Humanity.

I didn't say any of that, though, because most of the time, when the kids have plans like this--like that they are going to buy a giraffe and charge their friends money to see it--I just let them go on about it and know they'll figure out on their own that it's not going to work out.

Nolie is persistent, though, and she didn't give up on this particular idea.  She came home and emptied out an old apple sauce jar, washed it out, and took it to school.  She pitched her classroom on donating to this lady, and then pitched her GATE classroom, and has pitched almost everyone we have met over the last month.  I notice that the spiel has become increasingly grim, with the lady's family dying in the crash and her having a broken leg and stuff, and I don't think that was in the original story, but now I'm not sure anymore, either.

Based on the spiel, though, all of Nolie's classmates brought some change in, and her teachers threw money in the jar, too.  Nolie is galvanized by this response.  She continues to collect more money.  She totals it up almost every day.  My stepdad, who was over for dinner the other night and is somewhat cynical about this kind of thing, heard Nolie's spiel and told her the homeless woman was probably lying to her.  We talked about how we decided this didn't really matter but we were supporting Nolie anyway, and then he threw five bucks in the kitty, which says a lot of good things about his character, if you ask me.

All told, she collected forty bucks.  Not bad.

But so now Nolie has been nagging me for a few weeks to go and find the lady, and ugh, I'm dreading this part.  Nolie has her little ziplock with all these single dollar bills and quarters, and we're walking around downtown, past the church where we met the lady, just hoping we'll run into her, which is a pretty ridiculous plan.  We find this guy,

the only guy who is outside the church on Easter Sunday rather than inside, and we explain the problem to him.  He is super kind, and gives some good ideas, like coming to their homeless lunch (three weeks from now) and trying the library, where he tracked down a homeless guy himself once.

Nolie was bummed.  She really had in her mind we'd just find the lady waiting there for us.  She really wants to be the person who presents this lady with the money.  Who doesn't think this, in some form, at some point?  Who doesn't have the hero fantasy?

We moved on and got to the end of 8th street, and there was a homeless kid that I'd seen on this one corner--it's kind of his perch--and we go and ask him about the lady.  He knows who it is immediately, but looks at Nolie and tells her the lady is lying, she wasn't in an accident, she was "just another homeless, like me."

I could tell he wanted us to just give him the money, and the thought crossed both my mind and Nolie's.  But we just thanked him and started home.  I didn't ask him if I could take his picture, and I didn't push her to make a decision right then.

Nolie was quiet on the way home, again.

I feel kind of cheated, she said.

I nodded and said, yeah.  But it doesn't change the fact that you're trying to do something helpful, and it might not change the fact that she asked us for money and probably needs it.  Still, I said, you could probably decide to donate this money to a homeless shelter instead, if you wanted.

Or I could give it back to everyone who donated, she said.

Yep, I said.

But that doesn't sound right, either, she said.

Right, I said.

Anyway, there's no good ending to this story, yet.  Nolie's going to think about it for a while, and we'll try again to find the lady.  The whole thing has been kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest, and is why I didn't want to let her collect the money in the first place.  I don't have clear answers for her about the right thing to do in this moment, and also have to trust her to make a good decision, and then support her doing it as best I can.

On the other hand, it's got her thinking, doesn't it?  She has to think about who she wants to be in the face of uncertainty, and how to act when the other person's character or intentions aren't clear.  And isn't that a good experience to have?

Shtopping Wrap-Up

You guys, remember Shtopping?  Remember how I was going to not shop for 90 days to see if I could break the habit of vegging out in front of an online shopping site and instead process some feelings and be more present in my life?  Remember how I had a shopping accident in the middle of Shtopping?  But I vowed to recommit, and then I went to Thailand to ride elephants?  You were like, what?  What happened to Shtopping?  Did you shtop shtopping?  Are you still shopping?

Well, I'm here to share some profound cosmic lessons with you.  Or maybe just one.  And that is:

I like doing so many things better than shopping, and if I can remember that, I'm good.

Yep, that's it.  What shtopping taught me is that when I don't shop I have more money, sure, and less anxiety, sure.  But what I really like about not shopping is that I have more time.  Is there anything more precious?  I don't think so.  If I can remember that not shopping means I have a half hour to meditate, read, write, hang with E. and the girls, walk the dogs, or call a friend, then it all seems very, very worth it, to give up the shopping.

Of course, if I just fill that time with more work, or chores, or things I don't really want to do, then the whole thing falls apart.  I think I shop when I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel, so time spent off the wheel (but not shopping) is key.

The other lesson is this:  Enough.  I have so much!  And I mean this in a very nitty gritty, material sense.  Our house is furnished.  I've got great clothes and shoes and jewelry and makeup.  Getting more stuff isn't going to "fix" anything, and it's less stressful to have less stuff.  Spending time taking care of stuff is, in fact, exhausting.

And yes, I've seen the Story of Stuff.  It's one thing to know it, another thing to know it.

Example:  as you read in my awkward last post, we had to give up the 40-year-old camper we thought we had been gifted.  I was more than a little cranky about that.  I thought the camper symbolized us being able to be out in nature and leaving when we liked and maybe, even, being part of a family.  Building traditions, that sort of thing.

But guess what?  Looking out my window this morning and seeing emptiness instead of that camper?  I felt free.  I was so glad to not have to see Oldy Moldy.

We'll still go camping.  We're still free to leave any time we like.  Maybe moreso, because our plans don't have to involve that gas-guzzling behemoth.  Possibilities are open anew.

Yes, more space (less material goods) actually means less stress.  I love that.  There's a wall in my dining room that has no pictures or decorations on it.

This is a major feat for a clutterhound like me. But it's my favorite wall in the house and I protect its blankness with my life.  It's a reminder to keep space--in my brain, my calendar, my life--for new things to happen.  And to slow the movement of THINGS in and out a little.  I'm not a freaking thrift store.

The thing is that, of course, sometimes I forget these very important lessons.  Sometimes my doggie brain just wants the treat.  These other, more profound treats don't look quite so good when the doggie brain takes over, and those old habits are buried deep.  So I still have my moments of justification and rationalization and acquisition.

Plus, come on.  I'm an American woman with two kids and a husband.  Some acquisition is going to happen.  It just doesn't have to be me acquiring All the Things.

So I'm pleased to report that for the most part, the experiment stuck.  I spend very little time shopping online, and almost none shopping in stores.  I feel happier and like I have more free time and more control over my actions.  That turned out pretty good, huh?

Gah, Drama

I'm not going to beat around the bush.  I'm just going to say it:  I have been involved in some gnarly family drama these last few weeks.  It's ugly and hard to explain, and that's probably why I haven't been here to write much lately.

No, no.  Everything is fine with me and E.  Fantastic, actually!  We're doing great.  We survived another domestic apocalypse this year and came out the other side stronger, hallelujah and amen.  Marriage!  You're hilarious!

This particular family drama has to do with my grandma, and her will, and inheritances, and how some of us might be interested in controlling people with money, and how I'm naive and assume people are going to do the right thing, and then I feel like a chump when they don't.  And how I also have to face the greed and entitlement within myself, and try to let those things go, too.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'll tell you one of my very, very private secrets, and that is that when I was fifteen or so I inherited money from my great-grandmother.  This is scary to admit because then people think things about you that are somewhere in the ballpark of ParisHiltonLand and KimKardashianVille, and let me tell you those are for sure places I've never even been close to.  In other words, this inheritance was not a ton of money by some standards, but by others--and I'm trying to acknowledge my tremendous privilege here--it was a lot.  I didn't have direct control over it, of course, but I do remember that the money was used to buy me a car, and some clothes, and to cover some other bills as a teenager.  I think it also covered my room and board for my two years of college in Idaho (the rest was covered by scholarship) and my expenses so I could study a year abroad for my final year.  I wouldn't have had any of those things without that money.

That money?  It was essentially my ticket to freedom, my ticket out of Idaho and into the larger world and the life I have now.

Which is somehow back here in Idaho, now.  Life!  You're hilarious!

I also want to say that there was lots I did on my own.  I took out loans to cover grad school and worked full time the entire time.  After my 21st birthday I never saw that money again.  I think it atrophied on the stock market but I don't know, to be honest.

But the larger point is that my great-grandmother, who I spent a lot of time with as a little kid, left me that money, and though it ended up not being a ton of money at the end of the day, it was enough.  The last few thousand of it E. and I used to put a down payment on a ramshackle squatters' house near downtown Denver, and we turned a decent profit on that when we sold it, which in turn allowed us to move up a bit in the world.

So thank you, great-grandma.  My life would be unrecognizable without that.  And especially:  thank you for never telling me about that money, for never holding it over my head, for never using it to control me.  I have seen the effects of that on other family members in other contexts, and it is ugly.  How incredibly blessed I am to have never had that.  And my immediate family has also been kind in never throwing it in my face, either.

To add to this incredible luck of mine, my grandma (my great-grandma's daughter for those of you not paying attention) had always also promised me an inheritance.  Again, nothing major.  But she owns a handful of investment properties in our neighborhood, and since I was a kid, I was told one of them would be mine.

And this week, thanks to what I see as the greed and finagling of one of my relatives, that is no longer true.

Basically, the shit that has been going down looks a whole lot like Falcon Crest, you guys.

No, I take it back.  It's definitely more like Dynasty.

Get your 80s references straight!

I had no idea how it could be.  I also realize it's crass to talk about inheritances before someone has passed, or to bemoan someone else getting theirs.  It wasn't my choice to open these cans of worms, I promise you that.  But this is my life at the moment, and I try to bring honesty to the blog.  Because this shit happens.

You've figured out by now that my gram is still alive, but she's not in good shape, which is how some of this stuff came up to begin with.  She doesn't leave her bed much, she's on oxygen, and she's not really of sound mind, though she is pretty lucid.  She has almost died several times this year but somehow keeps beating the odds to come back.  But this makes it very difficult to determine what it is she wants, and whether she's being manipulated, or if she is in fact the manipulator, which she has been known to be.  I go see her several times a week and try to help grocery shop, do laundry, and generally keep an eye on her, but let's be real.  I'm not a full-time nurse, and she won't allow one in the house, so things are in rough shape over there.  I don't want to be having conversations about money and wills and who gets what.  It makes me so uncomfortable.

But this is the hard part to admit:  I will say that having a rental property would have helped us out a lot.  I did think about it occasionally and dream.  We've seen a lot of our friends have them and it provides some extra security that we could use right now.

But the bottom line is we are just fine without it, and always will be.  Who knows?  Maybe we will have one at some point.  Or maybe our life is just crazy complicated enough without it, and I should be thanking my lucky stars.  Like I said:  life is hilarious!  Who can predict?

What I do know is that I wouldn't trade one second of the freedom I've had these last twenty years for a house, or a camper, or a ring, or whatever else I thought was mine but now, overnight, is not.  I had to do some mega-processing on the whole thing because, like I said, I'm not immune myself to greed and wanting.  The one Big Solution looked tempting, the deus ex machina come to save the day.  But this is not it, and releasing that--and the drama that goes along with--has felt fantastic.

I'm also glad I had a chance to write here about how incredibly lucky I have been, and what an amazing life I've been able to lead, and how happy I am to be here with my family, and our extended family, and our friends, who have shown us tremendous love and acceptance.  Those things make me feel super-rich.