Unexpected

This was not the column I expected to write this week. But when I read Elisabeth and Miya’s recent posts about change and moving, I knew the column I had planned would hold for another Thursday. This week, I’ll tell a different story, one that I wasn’t expecting to tell.

On January 4th I got on a plane to head back to Bangladesh. I had moved across the world the previous February and come home for the first time 10 months later to celebrate Christmas with my family. Without question, moving to Bangladesh was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Certainly I was sad to be moving so far away from friends and family, but I felt, in my bones, that it was the right decision. My husband moved in November while I stayed in the states an extra three months to pack up our apartment, sell the car, and generally wrap up all the little things that go along with moving. And then I got on a plane and started a wonderful adventure.

It wasn’t easy leaving home, it never is. I almost cried as I waved to my mom from the security line and certainly would have shed tears when the first flight took off had it not been for the wondrous distraction of SkyMall. But I was headed towards my husband who I hadn’t seen in three months, so there was joy and excitement mixed with the sorrow.

Eleven months later, the situation was not that changed. My mom took me to the airport so I could catch the first in a series of flights that would take me back to my husband and Bangladesh.

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Except I never got there.

Three flights and 20+ hours after my departure I was turned back in India. There was a problem with my visa. Changing from one flight to another would, in essence, require that I change airports, which meant entering the country. A technicality to be sure, but it didn’t matter. Immigration officials insisted and I felt I had no choice but to do as I was told. Two flights away from my final destination and I wasn’t going to make it. I was guided back to the same plane I had just disembarked to repeat my journey, only in reverse. Over 50 hours after I left, I was back at my parent’s doorstep.

That was more than six months ago and this is the first I’ve written of what I have dubbed The Journey to Nowhere. With the exception of explaining what happened to my parents, sister, husband, two best friends, and an aunt, I haven’t even spoken of the experience except in platitudes. It was such a shocking event that until very recently (I’m talking two weeks ago) thinking back to that day was more than likely to lead to my heart pounding against my ribcage and my eyes watering. It was shocking and emotional and scary and just hard.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Not today at least.

When I called my husband from an airport payphone in Amsterdam, I knew we had some decisions to make. We had a plan; I would go home for three weeks and then head back to Bangladesh where we would go about our routine for an indeterminate amount of time, probably somewhere in the vicinity of six months. Someone or something had thrown a wrench in our plan, now new plans had to be made.

Ultimately, we decided that I would remain in the states and my husband would leave Bangladesh after tying up any loose ends. It was undoubtedly the most logical and practical decision. But it was a decision that I felt forced into. I had a plan and it crashed around me leaving us to pick up the pieces and attempt to fit them, like mismatched jigsaw pieces, into a new picture, a new future.

I don’t handle unexpected change well at the best of times. Some people can just roll with things like that, but I am not one of them. I think it’s a trait of being an introvert. I like to plan and adjust, to dwell and ponder. To all-of-a sudden be living on a different continent than I expected was, for me, a curve ball of monumental proportions.

So, with the loss of a well-thought-out plan, an emotional upheaval, and an attempt to adjust to a new plan, I did all I could: I put one foot in front of the other. Early on, before my husband got back to the states, I was so thrown, so uncomfortable, that it is not an exaggeration to say I was taking things day by day. Twelve to twenty-four hours was as far as my vision could stretch. I learned several things from the experience, but one of them was that when you’re so lost you don’t know which way is up, its ok to only worry about the current day, not tomorrow, not a week or a month, just today. Do the best you can on this particular day, don’t worry about the rest.

I’m still not 100% back to my old self. I’m not sure if it’s noticeable to anyone besides me, but I know I’m less confident, less secure than I once was. I have twinges of separation anxiety when I’m away from my husband overnight. And I’ve lost the trust in travel I used to have, that if I set out for a destination, I would ultimately arrive. But the fact that I was able to write these words, that I’m planning for more than tomorrow, well to me that’s proof that if you hang on long enough, the world will right itself.

Sometimes you don’t know the answers; sometimes you don’t even know the questions. Sometimes it is pointless to ask. If I had spent my time wondering ‘why me’ I would have felt even more lost and out of control. Because there is no answer, only more questions. Things happen, things we don’t understand, things we don’t like, things that throw us for a loop and leave us reeling with vertigo. And then, all you can do is look forward and trust that something great is hiding around the corner.

You can go home again.

At least twice a year, I come back to my hometown in California for a visit.  The goal is to get back here every quarter, which, in the math of our crowded lives typically translates into every six months.  These trips take on significance beyond a vacation.  They are a form of meditation for me, a head-clearing journey back in time. While many people avoid visceral reminders of the person they have been, I seek them out whenever possible.  In the movies, characters often return home to revisit glories from their youth or to avenge some wrong that they carry into adulthood.  This is not my story---it is nothing so black and white.  I do, however, perform some touchstone rituals that allow me to take stock.

Along with every German backpacker and family from Minnetonka, I pay a visit to the seals at the Cove.  I stand on the wall above the beach where, as a child, I spent hours diving to examine sea creatures and baking on the course sand.  I watch the slippery, spotted beasts cuddling close in the sun and am reminded of piling onto the roof of the car with my brother to watch a drive-in movie on a summer evening.  I walk up the hill along the water to a patch of grass that saw a friend’s mother’s psychotic break, a cottage that was the site of a first date turned into a marriage turned into an excruciating divorce and a cliff where I learned to bring my battered heart to the ocean.

As with so many aspects of my life, all this revisiting is at once healthy and productive and also like repeatedly running my tongue over a sore tooth.  I am afforded multiple opportunities to process the wounds and confusion of childhood and make some adult sense of things.  I am flooded with the sugar rush of memories from a mostly charmed young existence.  I call up primal fear and devastation and then forgive myself and everyone else.  I hit up every frozen yogurt joint in America’s Finest City because it just tastes better here.

Back home in New York, I have rituals, but they are rooted in keeping my present life manageable.  I fold the towels in the kitchen just so.  I put pacifiers in every room, ensuring I always have one at-the-ready.  I put ice cubes in Ruby’s dog bowl in the morning hoping her water will stay chilled for a few hours.  I approach the apartment through Fort Greene on my way home so I feel like I live in a nicer neighborhood.  The million and one things like this that comprise and organize my days feel like some version of a lifeline and I suppose have some relationship to my identity.  I don’t cook, but I like a clean kitchen.  I am a mother to child and bulldog, alike.  I worry about the shady dudes on my street corner.  But without a periodic anchoring to the chapters that have come before, I start to feel adrift.

I wonder whether moments in time will come to have the same power in my new(er) city.  In that place, I am collecting formative experiences all the time.  And I know that someday I will trot my daughter around and show her the block where her father first made me swoon on the walk back to the apartment that would become my home.  I will take her to the stoplight where we sat idling with her three-day-old, tiny, chicken of a self stuffed into a carseat on the way home from the hospital while they played that one song on the radio that it seemed like we must have willed them to play.  I will sit her on the Great Lawn and describe a hazy afternoon when we talked about books and politics for hours and I realized I could see myself moving back here so that this conversation would continue on forever.

The snapshots of life are more convoluted now.  They are messier portraits, built on layers of knowledge that temper the way they imprint on the psyche.  Perhaps coming back here and slogging through ancient history is a therapist’s version of escapism?  It is infinitely easier to solve the puzzles of the past than it is to do the complicated work of the present.  Still, I like the idea of looping back around again and again to find new twists on the narrative.  Each round brings me closer to this moment, where I have the chance to re-engage my story with a few extra insights.

Prologue

I have always loved butterflies. Something about the way they seem to hang on drafts of air, featherlight, the iridescent greens and yellows and blues of their wings catching the rays of the sun, catches at my heart. A butterfly flitting across my path or alighting on something nearby is a reminder to me to stop, to breathe deep, to live. To embrace joy, and be the deepest version of myself. One summer when I was straddling the line between childhood and adulthood, my Carolina hometown was overrun with tiny green and white butterflies. They fluttered everywhere, gems against the rich blue of the August sky. They were so abundant that it was hard, driving down the freeway, to avoid catching one on your windshield now and then.

“I hate to see them dashed against the glass,” I told my mother one afternoon as I swerved to miss a small white shape. “It makes me feel sick.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” she answered. “They only live for two weeks, anyway.”

That conversation has stayed with me. I think about it, sometimes, as I watch a butterfly pass me, or delicately fan its wings as it sips from a flower. In a human lifespan, two weeks is infinitesimal, hardly a blink on the landscape of a decades-long existence. It is so short as to almost be meaningless, lost in the longer lives of larger creatures.

And yet in its small life, the butterfly brings such beauty.

This is a principle I try to remember.

At six months old, I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a life-shortening genetic illness that affects many organs in the body, causing frequent and serious lung infections, sinus infections, malabsorption, and a host of other issues. Halfway through high school, I battled a year-long case of mono that left me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. My life is one that is lived in and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals; I have both my nurse and my pharmacist on speed dial. I spend hours each day doing treatments and therapies to help keep my lungs clear of infection. Each morning, I swallow more pills than my 82-year-old grandmother with Leukemia. Each day is a delicate balancing act, a struggle to accomplish what I need to without overusing the limited reserves of energy that I possess.

I am breathless on a daily basis. But, as a friend once reminded me, “breathless” is also the word that we so often use to describe moments where we are awed by beauty, or bathed in heart-stopping joy.

And this life of mine is both of these things. The days of frustration, of feeling overwhelmed and betrayed by my own body, are balanced with moments of deep, pure delight. I have learned to find the beauty in a small life, as well as a grand one. I have learned to break new ground, to blaze new trails when the old ones become impassable. I have learned to savor the moments that come my way.

I have learned that sometimes, the only requirement for happiness is a single choice.

This is my story. In this space, I hope to share my own evolution, the ways I have come to accept the circumstances of my life and find great contentment within them.

Because what I continually come back to is this: In my reckoning, two weeks is nowhere near enough time for anything to be accomplished or gain meaning.

And yet, each time I see a butterfly, I am reminded of just how precious each life—no matter how small—can be.

The trips that weren't

What they do not tell you about the Pyramids is that, grand as the monuments may be, the surrounding area smells profoundly of camel piss. I arrived in Cairo ungrounded: no apartment, no friends, no Arabic, not even my own luggage. I was anchorless to the point of adrift---weightless to the point of exhilarated. Over time, Cairo became filled with the buoyancy of firsts and the gravity of love. It was the first place where I worked with the United Nations and, in many ways, where my passion for gender advocacy and conflict management came alive. Cairo marked my first attempt to live mindfully in the present, an endeavor that ran counter to my inclination to wander in the memory of the past or anticipation of the future. And on the first day of Ramadan that year, I met someone on a boat on the Nile in the kind of way that will make it impossible for me not to consider the river blessed, the city magical, and my time there transformative.

We drank strawberry juice in a street alley across from his apartment building. Pronouncing "Mumkin asir faroula?" became a small victory. The strawberry juice gave way to tea and to coffee and to domino and when we ran out of non-alcoholic drinks and board games, he would deposit me into a taxi and I would employ the only other Arabic I spoke at the time: "Five pounds. The fare is supposed to be five pounds." The driver would argue, I would say no emphatically, habiiiiibiiii would bellow from the radio, we'd run a red light or five, and my head would hit the pillow just as the first call to prayer of the day echoed from the nearby mosques. The realm for a public romance was limited and filled with mines, so our budding love was rife with the kind of companionship that prepares you well for retirement: conversation, domino and tea.

And I had yet to see the Pyramids.

This was a point of contention among my friends. It did not matter that I was filling their inboxes with the cautious enthusiasm of a young love. Everyone would write back asking how Cairo is and "have you seen the Pyramids yet?" "No, but there's this little alley that I love . . ." stopped cutting it as an answer.

Four months of alleys and domino later, I had eight hours before I had to be on a plane to Uganda. I asked the cab driver to take me to Giza for the trip that almost wasn't: the pilgrimage to the Pyramids. The postcards create an impression that the Pyramids exist in a vacuum. They do not tell you that there are apartment buildings poking the air around the area of the Pyramids. The guidebooks do not mention the all-piercing smell of camel piss.

They also do not mention that great memories are not always made in the shadow of historical grandeur. Future travelers should take note of the unmarked alley off the map (which, to be fair, also occasionally reeks of urine). After standing in awe in front of the Pyramids for a few minutes, and waving off the salesmen asking me to buy papyrus, I went back to my alley, for one last whiff of nargileh smoke, sip of strawberry juice, and exhale of gratitude for the memories that were.

In Guatemala, I failed to make it to Lake Atitlan. In Colombia, I never saw Villa de Leyva. In Uganda, I missed Murchison Falls. This was neither my criminal inability to traipse to remarkable places nor a snobbish rejection of the kinds of experiences that inspire universal awe. Rather, I learned in Cairo to allow myself to be attached to the alley---and, like Hansel and Gretel in the fairy tale, to leave a trail of crumbs to come back to. "The trips that weren't" give me an anchor in a home that once was. They supply a reason to retrace the steps to a self I left behind. Seventeen conflict and post-conflict zones after Egypt, I favored the sites of memories over those in the Lonely Planet, saving the latter as collateral to the promise that I would return.

Jerusalem was meant to be the last stop for a while. After my work there, I would fly across the ocean to the United States to return to an academic study of gender and conflict. I would unpack the bags and own what is gratuitous simply for the sake of not worrying about how to pack it for the next trip. I would own wine glasses and more than one pair of sheets and I would get excited about things like latte art and permanence. This time, I was not interested in leaving any item unchecked. A month before our departure, I made The List: walks, food, experiences to have before we leave. We ate nostalgia for four weeks, stuffing our stomachs with all the food we thought we would miss and our days with itineraries. I thought we did a good job this time, that we did so much and saw so much and felt so much that we would leave Jerusalem with a sense of satiation---as though that could vaccinate us against future nostalgia.

Two hours before we had to hail a cab to the airport, we lit a coal for our nargileh and breathed apple-flavored smoke into the street. We had recreated the alley. Everything else may have shifted, but it was still him and I and the apple-flavored smoke. We looked over The List and realized that "the trips that weren't" had become the trips that were. I was afraid that we had done it all, that there would be no more Jerusalem to discover in the future. We had crossed off the items.

All except one: The YMCA was his favorite building in town. It became mine as well. We never made it to the top.

Looking Forward: Me, Myself, and I.

This sweet video, which I stumbled upon this weekend thanks to Kristina, made me think: how much time, on average, do I spend alone per day? Per week? Per month?

I’m single, twenty-six, and a freelancer who works from home. These three things add up to a lot—a lot—of alone time. And in general, I'm fine with this. Being alone means having the freedom to daydream, read magazines in bed on Sunday mornings, write by lamplight til three AM, sing along to embarrassing music that anyone in their right mind would turn off if they were there. But, they’re not.

I do, of course, have friends. But I’ve found I’ve reached an unsettling---and somewhat surreal---time in my life when everyone I know seems to have a partner. (I can count on one hand the number of close friends who are not involved in serious, long-term relationships.) Dwelling on this sometimes makes my alone-ness feel more significant than it is. But, like I said, I’m comfortable with it—most of the time.

I get the feeling that being on my own, much like many other aspects of getting older, is something I'll get better at with time. Right now, I’m perfectly happy to shop alone, cook alone, watch movies alone, jog alone (how anyone can run and hold a conversation at the same time is beyond me anyway). But there are certain activities I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to attempt solo just yet: going to dinner at a nice restaurant, for example. Or spending a weekend away. I love the idea of these things, but I know I’d feel self-conscious—and maybe a little lonely—if it actually came to doing them.

How do you feel about spending time alone? Do you love it? Hate it? Wish you could do it more often? Let's discuss!

Video by Andrea Dorfman and Tanya Davis.

YWRB: What We Rebel For

By Amanda Page Essays were written. We collected them and took them to the head of the English department. We handed him our short stack and waited. We waited for his reaction, for his feedback. We stood in his office, terrified, exhilarated, proud of ourselves for taking this on, scared of ourselves for the same reason.

Maybe we wanted his approval. Instead, we received, with apprehension, a question: what does rebellion mean to you? He didn’t want to disappoint us, that much was clear. But he wanted us to understand that something was missing.

“Right now,” he said, “all I’m reading is several stories about drinking in bars and meeting boys.”

It was early in the project and we were in our early twenties. Drinking in bars and meeting boys was a significant slice of our collective experience.  He went on to say that we needed to have a point, a reason to rebel. We knew he was right, but we challenged him anyway. My memory wants to share a moment where one of us (Amy) dared him to see past the surface to what we were really saying. I don’t remember exactly, and it both kills me and relieves me. I want to say that he responded by daring us to do the same.

We were orbiting the point, just discovering the lesson.

I don’t remember where we found it or who gave it to us, but we happened upon the Marlon Brando quote from The Wild Ones. A girl asks him, “What are you rebelling against?”

He answers, “What have you got?”

Well, we had plenty.

It’s too easy to look back and assign ourselves things to rebel against. I also think that we weren’t rebelling against things. Our rebellion didn’t look like rebellion, which could be seen as a type of rebellion. But we weren’t protesting, we weren’t overtly political, we didn’t have one particular issue that pushed us or for us to push back.

I like to think that we were rebelling in the service of something. We were rebelling for something, not so much against. The idea was to share some instruction on how to rebel, how to live, how to be a young woman writer. We were writing it in real time.

It’s clear to me now, that our rebellion was an attempt to figure out how to live our lives authentically---how to live an authentic life. Every act of authenticity is an act of rebellion. If we rebelled against anything, it was the script. When you’re about to graduate from college, your options can feel limited. You can be overwhelmed with choices, and paralyzed by the pressure to choose. We fought against that pressure, those expectations, often from well-meaning family and friends and professors and advisors.

The most we could hope for was to make interesting lives for ourselves. And at that point, the interesting stuff was boys and bars.

Of course, there was more. By claiming any kind of power over our own lives, we were rebelling against many things: parental expectations, societal expectations, what we’d been taught and what we’d been told to expect for ourselves.

That’s where essays served us most. We claimed our power by claiming our stories. By owning our experiences, through how we wrote them, we created respect for them. I learned to respect my own stories. I learned the power in having a story, and in telling it. The YWRB project made my stories matter at a time when no one wants you to trust yourself. But I trusted my stories. I trusted Amy’s stories. I believed our stories mattered. Our stories mattered. That’s all anyone can ever hope for. That’s what we were trying to say to other young women: Your story matters.

That’s what I rebelled for.

On (New) Marriage and the Ever-Elusive "Home"

Here on the Equals Project, and elsewhere—on my own blog, and in the musings of my favorite writers like Miranda Ward of A Literal Girl and Roxanne Krystalli of Stories of Conflict and Love—we talk of an elusive home. We explore what this thing, this state, this feeling means to us, is to us. If we have found it.

If it is not located on a map.

If, as Judy writes in Home Sweet Home, it is not a literal space to fix and construct.

If it shapeshifts as we change.

Or if it is the loved one that holds us, that anchor that keeps us afloat, wherever we may be in the world.

* * * * *

In Homelands, Miranda asks: What if home is just a memory that we carry with us?

In Home, Karey does not have a clear picture of home: "It still looks like my mom and smells like Oscar de la Renta and vanilla ice cream and chlorine and lilacs and cow manure. . . . It’s in the eyes of someone who has lost her world, someone who’s found it, and someone who’s trying her damnedest to get it all back."

In Wherever You Go, There You Are, Sarah describes her bicoastal identity—the pull of New York, but also her roots in California: "I live in New York, but I am not entirely at home here. When the question of where I am from comes up, my answer tends toward the knee-jerk and almost always mildly defensive: "CALIFORNIA, I am from California." This is said as if to distinguish myself somehow, as if to say 'I really belong somewhere else.'"

In No Place Like Home (Wherever That Is), Shoko places home in quotation marks, which reminds me of Roxanne's piece, Home, in quotation marks, which led me earlier this spring to explore my own definitions of home and love, and how they intertwine—or if they are one and the same.

What if home is not the birthplace, the stacked bricks laden with memories, but the new place, filled with learning, with promise, and with love?

 * * * * *

In Roxanne's recent post on her blog, she refers to her explorations of home and away as a "serial infidelity to place," which also reminds me of Miranda's musings from last fall on a visit to London, and whether or not she could live there, and how it's interesting that even though she has a home in Oxford, she's still window-shopping for places to live.

So it appears that while we are all different, born and raised in different countries, living now in different places, or between places, or constantly on the go, we share a special something, a quality I sense in each of us and hear in our voices. We redefine ourselves with each stop, each state of stagnancy, but also with our movements and lapses of change. We ask these same questions over and over again, which both comfort and confuse. We are driven by such elusiveness—driven to inspiration but also to uncertainty, and maybe to loneliness, but certainly driven, period.

* * * * *

I do love the haze produced by these questions of home; it's the best kind of fog—a cloudiness I don't mind.

Indeed, lately my head has floated about in this fog. So, so many things: engaged at the end of June, and then married to my beloved the day before the Fourth of July. Perhaps my mind hasn't been clouded, but is rather in the clouds. And I've been thinking a lot about my evolving definition of home, and how it continues to change now that my long-distance relationship has morphed into a marriage, here in San Francisco.

Can I finally remove the quotation marks, or place it in regular font and not in italics, because the person who has encapsulated this word is now physically next to me, each day?

Has my exploration of home come to an end?

As I read the words of the other women on the Equals Project and elsewhere, and their very different but very similar worlds, I know this is not possible; if anything, I continue on a trajectory in which the target continues to move, a bullseye that shifts as I, and my husband, grow together.

At the moment, that's all I know: that home continues to surprise and elude, that it can be many things and something unreachable at once, and that the one thing that matters right now is realizing this journey is no longer just mine, but ours.

Alone

“Run the marathon with me,” says my best friend (who also happens to be my business partner), “I don’t want to train for it alone.” At the time, her husband is contemplating taking a job 3,000 miles away, in our hometown. We are both hoping to move back in a few years—this city is the bullseye of our 30’s. Our lives are so intertwined that when she mentions him interviewing for it, the job isn’t even contained within the realm of possible. I take it as seriously as if she had told me he was buying a unicorn. I sign up for the marathon on a whim; running a marathon is on my bucket list, and who wants to do anything alone? We are going to train together, to run together. This marathon is to be another check on our list of things that we’ve done, together. We’ve built our business on the principles of wellness and prioritize making time for our friendship amongst our busy days. Our love of running (and ability to run together--no small feat for two lone-wolf runners) binds us; of course this would be something we would tackle together.

I get the message while I am finishing up some work for the evening: “He got the job.” And then within a matter of days, it’s final: my best friend is moving away. Far, far away. I feel happiness for her (she’ll be so close to her family) and deep, deep grief for the moments that I realize may not come the way we had expected them to (We always bring our girls to see Santa together, I worry about her kids not remembering me). At the core, below it all, I am desperately afraid of being left alone.

We were fast friends, bonded by our California roots and our preppy east coast husbands. Running together early on was a test of the potential in our friendship. Our first run together took us over a sun-dappled gravel path that smelled of decaying wood and fresh undergrowth in New Hampshire. It was the summer I got married, before spending our time together in the summer was happily consumed by organizing activities for our sunscreen-slathered children with impossible blonde highlights. She was training for a marathon. Before we started running, I had visions of being left far behind, huffing and puffing in an embarrassing attempt to catch up. That melted away once we started out. Our steps fell into synch, our paces compatible. This, I thought, could be a great friend. Towards the end, as our conversation waned and our breathing and footsteps were all that broke the silence, we realized that we had both stopped sweating, not for lack of exertion. This found us begging for water at a local bar. It was cool and perfect, and we clinked the plastic cups they had given us in a toast to our inevitable closeness.

She has been my steadfast company in a tumultuous time. Through my husband’s surgical training, where he works countless hours, through the birth of my daughter and the growth of our business, she has been my constant. I am as entwined into her family as I am into my own. I love her kids with the unrelenting ferocity of a blood relative; her little sister makes me feel like less of an only child. In fact, her family is the primary reason that though my husband spends far more hours at work than he does at home, I (and my daughter) have felt neither lonely nor alone. Now, during my runs, I have a desperate and sinking feeling. My brain repeats over and over, “I don’t want to do this alone.” What, exactly, I am afraid of doing alone eludes me. Perhaps this is an indication of the hole that she will leave when she moves.

For the first time, I am running and crying at the same time. With our training for the marathon, I am spending more time on the road. Mostly alone, since our routine has been so upended by this move. Running for me has always been a release, and the metaphor until this point has been of the yogic variety: finding comfort in discomfort, pushing through, knowing when to yield. I ran through teaching special education in the Bronx, through the abject terror of my father’s cancer, through the life-swallowing grief following my grandfather’s death. In these times of hardship, I turned to running to be my constant companion, found solace in its repetitive simplicity. Left, right, repeat. All without tears. To stop the tears, even. With this move comes a new metaphor in my running: I don’t want to do this alone. I’ve always run alone, save for runs with very close friends (I have exactly two people with whom I like to run, not including my dad's running club, many of whom I have known and run with since I started coming home from college). What is it about this time in my life that brings the tears every time I lace up? Running had, for so many years, been my companion; now its companionship reminds me of the one I am losing. This marathon, this move, solidifies for me the simple fact that good company is at the heart of what we all want in life. Yes, misery loves it, but so does joy.

It’s all anyone really wants, isn’t it? A friend to synch steps with; company for life’s path. We look for, and find, companionship in the oddest places. Online, in bars, in friends’ social networks. We find drinking buddies, lovers, friends, husbands, confidants. We curate relationships that we hope will prevent us from being alone---truly alone---on our journey. But, I’m learning (as an unwilling student), interludes of aloneness are inevitable, even with the most loving cultivation of relationships. More than not wanting to face her leaving me, I don’t want to face it alone. A cruel irony. The fact is that it’s only her and me inhabiting our friendship; when she shifts a bit, there is nothing to fill that space, except dull sadness and the fear that she has something to fill the space that I will leave.

A few weeks ago, my left quadriceps started to ache. It was unstretchable, unrestable, unmassageable. Gnawing. I chalked it up to getting older. Then, last week, my right leg began to ache behind my knee, a twinge with each step. As if one leg was incapable of working without the other. Left, right, repeat.

An Introduction

I've always considered myself to be a curious sort of person.  I’m not afraid to ask questions, to examine different options, and to experiment until I find the right answer.  Perhaps that’s to be expected when your parents are a Librarian and a Physicist.

When I was younger, I was fascinated with how things work.  I used to take apart old radios and telephones just to see what the inside looked like and how all the parts moved together.  I could almost never put anything back together, but that wasn’t the point. That mechanical curiosity faded by the time I was a teenager and was eventually replaced by a more personal curiosity.

I’ve never really been able to answer the question ‘What do you want to be’. Or at least not in a way that people expect.  While many of my peers would respond with details about their career aspirations, my answer is more abstract.  I want to be happy.  I want to be the best version of myself.  That’s all I’m looking for in the world.  I don’t aspire to a corner office or an expense account and I’m not looking to raise a family, at least not yet.

On the surface, to be myself and be happy seems trite and simplistic, but if you really think about it, it’s an involved, never-ending project.  People are not stagnate and happiness is a day by day process, not one final destination.  To be the best version of myself is an ever evolving undertaking involving issues of spirituality, self-confidence, learning and growth.

In this column I want to consider those topics and the questions they invoke.  I want to look to religions from all over the world and learn from them. I want to talk to women I admire about their own journeys. I want to reflect on what practices and actions work for me, which do not, and why. And I want to learn from you, what has made a difference in your own life and helped you become who you are today. What are our strengths and how can we strengthen our weaknesses.

We all have a journey and a destination, and everyone’s path is different.  This column is about how I’m making my way in the world. My interests, experiences, beliefs and thoughts are just that, my own.  Life is not one size fits all and there isn’t one right answer, but that’s what makes it interesting and exciting.  I’m not the expert on living your life, but I’m trying to become an expert in living mine!

I hope you’ll read along and comment, maybe even be a little bit inspired, I’m sure I will be.

This is Me, Making My Way.

Inside the White Picket Fence

By Marni Zarr I met him in sophomore geometry. My head in the clouds over his best friend, the subject of which made easy fodder for conversation. Our instructor happened to be his basketball coach which miraculously made me privy to over the shoulder glances at his correct answers during tests thus saving me from failing. Happy that I had this advantage I was big on smiles and loved conversing with this insider who knew everything I wanted to know about my not so secret crush on his goofy yet charming friend.  In between the hand holding and break ups between his friend and I, the two of us grew into good pals. Hours spent with him on the phone, nothing said in coded whispers as was required with other friends.  I wasn’t afraid of my parent’s overhearing me as I spoke to him through the avocado kitchen rotary, only that our phone time would be cut off before I was ready to say good-bye. The curly cord a slinky in my hand, I’d wind it’s twisting loops through my toes while talking and daydream about compliments from the older girls in the P.E. locker room. One insisted I should be a foot model. The perfect shape and always polished, the only blemish a growing bunion on the right side, enough to squash that idea. My self doting thoughts were suddenly interrupted by his innocent question, “So what about going to the movies with me this weekend?”

My parents prejudices were a good cover-up for my own fear. I wasn’t totally comfortable with the thought of going on a date, although I considered him a friend, a black guy. Would people think he was my boyfriend? Would they stare and tag me with another accessory like my religion that I wasn’t comfortable carrying around? Did I want to say no but blame my parents prejudices as a shield for my own? How could I decline without hurting his feelings? All of these thoughts swirled in my head like an alphabet soup of questions whirring audibly in a blender, a jumble of words and feelings that in the end was so thick and unrecognizable my thoughts a messy mush. and then, the honest answer rose to the top, “ I can’t, I have to be sixteen to date.” Although valid, we both communicated the understood underlying truth with an awkward moment of silence.

Who knows what would have happened if I had been allowed to experience my first date with him. I could sense his feelings for me were different than mine for him, but his character spoke only of respect. I could have breached my parent’s rules and told them I was going to a movie with a girlfriend and met him there but didn’t. Instead I packed the incident neatly away, we stayed friends, I denied my feelings, and life went on with the blame pinned to my parents, folding my confusion neatly away to be dealt with later.

We remained friends while the dating excuse covered the dark truth until late winter. Still three months shy of my 16th birthday I successfully convinced my parents to lift the dating rule, “just this once.”  The most popular boy in high school, a year ahead of me had asked me out on a Valentine’s date.  Possessing perfect all American good boy looks with mischievous sparkly blue eyes and a California like carelessness to his confident athletic walk, he was the stud of the school. How I was chosen to be his valentine crush was never clear . . . to anyone. He was the boy on a pedestal. The one that everyone remembers.

All nerves electric at the sound of the doorbell, awkward introductions were made and off we went down the front walkway to his pristine truck where he opened the door politely and I raised myself up and sat on the soft burnished brown velour seat. First stop, a weathered liquor store in a strip mall just outside the cozy confines of his country club community. I waited while he confidently strutted in and came out minutes later with a six-pack, gum and a pink plastic comb which became my souvenir of the evening.  I loved how he played with my hair and teased me with it as we listened to “The Cars”  cassette on his fancy stereo and drank the lukewarm bottled beer in the theatre parking lot. Three for him, two for me, time for the movie. We each popped a fresh stick of doublemint gum in our mouths and before getting out to walk around and open my door, hand resting softly on my thigh, he asked me to reach into his glove compartment so he could reapply more of his “Polo” cologne. My senses heightened to the first hints of sexual tension the scent was forever branded on my memory so that years later I could smell our song whenever it played and feel his hand as it went up my shirt.

After the movie, fully clothed but rolling in the cool winter grass of the church on the corner, we kissed and I assumed it was true love forever, hearts floating in my head I went home to dream about our wedding and how envious everyone would be as I walked down the aisle with the dream god of the high school universe.  Two weeks later, as the deities of high school often do, he moved on to new and easier waters. My elevated ego smarted from the fall, but I had the song “Just What I Needed” by The Cars and my light pink comb for comfort. Even if never allowed to pray at the feet of his graven image again I knew I had earned his blessing and to me that was timeless.

A few years ago I ran into a former high school friend at a neighborhood restaurant as I walked out the door. Turning at my name there was instant recognition in the hint of a smile, the way you see through someone’s voice and facial expressions and it transports you back in time. We started talking about our current lives, family, kids, jobs etc., the creamy pre-prepared information filling the space between high school graduation and now. The conversation turned to people we occasionally ran into from school and we shared short clips of what we knew or had heard.  His son was on the high school football team at a small school in California and being coached by another former classmate’s younger brother, small world. The topic of football sparked my curiosity about my long ago crush and the question rolled off my tongue with a wistful lilt. His face fell as he told me what he had heard a while back. This boy who many of us had assumed would go on to have it all, just as he did in school, grew up and had taken his own life. I couldn’t help but wonder if every one of us who had assisted him in rising to that highest spot of teen-age stardom hadn’t somehow contributed to his fall.

When the bookmarks change

Kalomoira is pregnant with twins.

I imagine you want to know who Kalomoira is. She was the winner of Fame Story, a Greek talent show that came into being long after American Idol had solidified itself into the American pop culture conscience. In the ten years that have passed since then, I had thought about Kalomoira maybe twice.

And now I know she is pregnant with twins.

***

In making homes away from Greece, be it in Colombia or Egypt, I relied on a ritualistic consumption of the news. I was determined to assimilate and to do that, I had to know. So I read the local papers every morning until I had memorized the layout of the page and could rhythmically find my way to my favorite columnist or to the sports section. I had a favorite columnist. Everywhere, from Guatemala to Jerusalem.

There was no better home for my news-guzzling obsession than Jerusalem. My favorite radio station interrupted the music every hour for a brief news report. Without the kind of command over Hebrew that allows one to understand fast-paced news segments over the radio, the hourly report became a game. I hunted for words I recognized and matched them to the English news I had read about the region earlier that morning. "Hebrew Hebrew Syria Hebrew Kofi Annan Hebrew peace," the announcer said, and I knew she was talking about the diplomatic attempts to broker peace in Syria. Jerusalem radio may not have supplied me with news of which I was previously unaware, but it did teach me how to say peacekeeping and failure in Hebrew -- and it made me long for the kind of news and linguistic comprehension that would allow me to dream of peaceful co-existence and success.

***

I left Jerusalem for my homeland, Greece, 39 days ago and my news scouring habits have changed. Days can pass without my realizing there was a stabbing in my old neighborhood. 39 days ago, I knew about car accidents on highways I had yet to even drive through.  Even though the web broadcast of my favorite radio station is bookmarked in my browser, I cannot bring myself to click through, guided by the fear that "Hebrew Hebrew Jerusalem Hebrew Hebrew film festival" will propel me into an ocean of nostalgia.

Instead, I know that a local pop star I have not brought to the forefront of my mind in a decade is now pregnant with twins. Not only I have migrated, but also my bookmarks are shifting with me. I have the kind of wandering eardrums that long for Colombian salsa in Kosovo and Greek music in Guatemala. I have the kind of fickle tastebuds that long for arepas in Uganda and falafel in Mexico. All of me is punctuated by a serial infidelity to place; enamored as I may be with where my feet are currently meeting the ground, I will let the senses wander to the other places they once called home.

And yet, it is at bookmarks that I draw the line. The very newsy trivialities that help foster my sense of home when I am new to a place cause me painful wanderlust as soon as I have booked the departing flight. It is as though my brain can only handle one pregnant-with-twins pop star at the time: the local one. Any more than that, any more soccer team updates or festival schedules or a repaving of a street on which I once used to live, and my heartstrings are stretched till they tear.

There is indigestible irony to the realization that someone who has dedicated her professional life to international development and conflict management and aspires to understand notions that are far larger than herself needs to shrink her world to the news cycle of Here and Now, lest her feet want to carry her to all the Elsewheres she has loved.

Looking Forward: When I Grow Up.

I remember very distinctly, at five years old, deciding that I wanted more than anything to be a bus driver when I grew up. What could be cooler, I thought, than driving a bus? Buses meant field trips. Buses meant seat buddies. Buses meant songs, snacks, and hand-clapping games. To be able to ride the bus daily? To be in charge of the bus? I couldn’t think of anything better. A couple of years passed before I was quoted in my elementary school newspaper as wanting to be a professional violinist. “I just started learning,” I’d said, “ There are four strings on the violin, and when I play, I feel like they are speaking to me.” (Cut to the present: my violin – which I continued to play all the way through the twelfth grade – sits gathering dust in a corner of my closet in my parents’ home.)

Over time, my career daydreams changed, and they changed often. After watching the Robin Williams movie Awakenings, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Later, at the height of Titanic-mania, I announced I wanted to be a filmmaker. In high school, when I fell in love with classic rock (leaving a long streak of boy-band fandom behind me for good), I was convinced it was my calling to be a rock journalist.

And that wasn’t the end of it. At various times, I considered being an actress, interior designer, photographer, stylist, screenwriter. For a brief period of time, I even dreamt of joining a circus. (Don’t laugh.)

Of course, it’s perfectly normal when you’re a kid to daydream about the future, to change your mind about these things on a daily - or hourly - basis. Is there a point, though, when it stops being okay? When is it no longer acceptable not to have a clue about what you’d like to be when you grow up?

I recently had a conversation with a friend who lamented the fact that she had no idea what her dream job was. Her sister, on the other hand, had known since childhood that she wanted to be a doctor; now she was enrolled in medical school, well on her way to realizing that vision. It would be so much easier, we agreed, if we could be more like her - if we knew exactly what we wanted to be, if we knew exactly where we were headed next.

(For the record, when it comes to my career, I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to say that I’m a writer. I love to write. I always have. But the truth is, there are so many things I love to do. In a perfect world, I’d be a writer-editor-chef-bookstore owner-painter-dancer-teacher-fashion designer. I’d also like to be the lead guitarist of a rock band, though I neither own nor play the guitar.)

Writing is the perfect career for me right now. But I still have other ideas about things I’d like to be when I grow up. I’ve already tried a few - my first year out of college, I interned in a fashion studio and apprenticed on a farm. But while I’m sorting through the rest, I figure the best thing to do is keep trying new things and remain open to adventure always.

After all, you never know – someday in the future, somewhere in the world, there just may be a circus trapeze with my name on it.

Dreams of Another Season

I try to explain to my friends and family up north, what it’s like to live in Florida. They chirp, “It must be so great, summer year round!” Not exactly, I reply. It is summer half the year and literal hell the other half. Picture it being so hot your car reads 110 degrees, daily. No relief at night, the only escape the whirr of the air-conditioning. The constant thrum as it turns on and off. You are sweating, and freezing, and sweating agan. Growing up in Indiana, we rarely used our central AC. It was a special treat, once or twice a year, and Dad would yell up from the musty basement steps, “I’m turning her on, batten the hatches!” We would all scramble; trying to slam the sticky windows down, the paint often sealed from the heat. Then the house smelled funny, not fresh, it had a special chemical scent you only noticed when you ran the AC that rarely. I remember, before I left Chicago, how important the seasons were to me. I could smell the changes. My little old apartment on Potomac had hardwood floors that were a hundred years old, and they fluctuated with temperature. In the summer, without air conditioning, it was musty. Then lots of people in old apartments didn’t have air conditioning. Instead we went outside. We looked forward to leaving our windows open and lying on the dark, damp floors for relief. It was just part of life. I write this now, trapped inside my ivory tower of air conditioning. In Florida, the air is on from April through October, if you are lucky, sometimes even longer. Is that better than the heat being on from October through April? You tell me. Now, I feel so disconnected and isolated from the concept of summer.

Summer used to mean that school was out. Then I graduated college and stopped going to school. Then summer meant parties and rooftop grilling. Then I moved to Florida and summer meant being trapped inside in the air conditioning because the heat index is over a hundred for the fifth week in a row. I watch my northern counterparts buying summer dresses and getting tickets for outdoor concerts. Instead I am signing up for as many summer Mommy and Me classes in the mornings, so that the afternoons everyone can sleep.

I miss the fall. Fall in Chicago is my favorite season. You bring out your boots and sweaters. Jackets and scarfs. You get cooled off after the summer heat. You say goodbye to the beach at North Ave. and say hello to Wednesday night wine nights at the Blue Line. You switch from white wine to red and enjoy it sitting in front of a fire, reading, listening to the wind whistling outside your window. It smells clean, fresh, the wood in the apartment is getting colder, but isn’t so cold yet that your heating bills are outrageous.

Then comes winter. It sneaks in on you. The air gets a little bit sharper. You switch to your winter coat; it's wool and lined. And you occasionally wear long underwear under your jeans. But even still, it feels refreshing to walk around the Kris Kringle Village in December, awaiting the first few flakes. The first few times it snows it is magical, like you are a kid again. You want to just sit and watch it, or make snow angels. Or stand and stare at the dogs running wild in the dog park at Wicker Park. They are so happy.

Then winter really hits, and everyone hibernates for January, February, and part of March. Some years St. Patricks Day feels like the first day of spring, other years, it snows. But right around April, the air begins to change again. You are giddy walking home from the subway, “Can I really leave my windows open?” You ask yourself, like a sugar deprived kindergartner.

None of these changes exist when you have constant summer. Instead there are no markers to watch the time float by. I have dreams about the north. It’s like that time that I tried to do the diet where you don’t eat any carbs, and by day two I was dreaming about muffins. I wake up every night, dreaming of falling into the snow, of walking down Southport when it’s fall. The leaves are yellowing and crunching. I get a hot scone and see its steam rising into the air. I pull my yellow coat tighter. Then I realize I have thrown off my covers, and that chill is the familiar manufactured chill of the air conditioner and I am covered in sweat.

What Are You Reading (Offline, That Is)?

Yes, I have a love affair with books. My relationship with them is passionate, compulsive, sometimes even compromising. Books have shaped my life since I’ve been born – naming me Alice, my mother fatally bound me to a destiny of being a day and night dreamer, and I soon started to accept the responsibilities carried by my name, letting myself be won over by an alluring and beguiling world called Wonderland. And once upon a time, when I was 25 (well, I’m 30 now!), I did find my Wonderland---it actually feels like my Neverland, too---in a country (America) I deeply love and consider the one where I can get lost, and found, and I always feel myself at my best potential. I indeed tumbled into Brooklyn, a borough I fell in love with, a very special spot that takes thousands different shapes and smells thousands different smells. A place where I hope to live again soon.

So these are some of the books that have inspired and influenced my love for Brooklyn, and that have somehow contributed to shape my idea of a unique place.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. By Betty Smith. LOVED IT BECAUSE it made me want to go back in time, wander around the streets of Williamsburg and meet Francie Nolan, a character I feel deeply attached to. Francie looks for simple pleasures in life, like being allowed to sleep in the front room of her house on Saturday nights, watching the busy streets below. Like her beloved tree, she is ready to burst into bloom. This novel paints a portrait of Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, and it goes far beyond mere description. It made all of my senses came alive and helped me feel what it was like to live in Williamsburg back then.  A classic, a must read.

“It’s mysterious here in Brooklyn. It’s like – yes – like a dream. The houses and streets don’t seem real. Neither do the people.”

THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES. By Paul Auster. LOVED IT BECAUSE I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, not far from where this story takes place. The novel feels and sounds like the borough, and Auster's native Brooklyn is painted with affection. I liked Nathan Glass, a man who retires to Brooklyn to recover from lung cancer (and his divorce). And I liked his project entitled The Book of Human Folly, a chronicle of his unique mishaps, misunderstandings, foibles and foolishness, where he actually begins the process of authoring his own true existence.

“Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby- Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?”

BROOKLYN. By Colm Tòibìn. LOVED IT BECAUSE this is ultimately an optimistic novel, and on many occasions it actually made me smile. Eilis comes from a small town in Ireland, and in the 50’s she crosses the ocean to find a new life. She has to learn to live in a new culture away from the only home she has ever known. I feel like she could have been more curious about Brooklyn though, and if I ever meet her in Wonderland I’ll tell her!

"She had been keeping the thought of home out of her mind, letting it come to her only when she wrote or received letters or when she woke from a dream in which her mother or father or Rose . . . appeared. She thought it strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that it must be the prospect of home."

BROOKLYN WAS MINE. Edited by Chris Knutsen and Valerie Steiker. LOVED IT BECAUSE it’s a collection of essays that gives some of my favorite authors (and today’s best writers) an opportunity to pay a tribute to Brooklyn. Its literary history runs deep, and also in recent years the borough has seen a growing concentration of bestselling novelists, memoirists, poets, journalists. Contributors include Emily Barton, Jennifer Egan, Alexandra Styron, Darin Strauss, Jonathan Lethem.

“... but this life, we have to admit - this endless throwing and retrieving of a ball, this endless cycle of shade trees to acorns to the winter hiatus from which our kidst burst, metamorphosed completely, while we try to believe we ourselves haven't aged - is the real life: the repetitive rhythm, the onrush of time.”

“There are moments when a city can suddenly acquire all the kinetic qualities of a human being, a person's moods and expressions, so that she becomes a character of some kind - like a large woman, I often think, half asleep on her side. You find yourself talking to her, asking her questions, pestering her. And living in such a city is a long, monogamous affair, or else a marriage one abandons from time to time. Cities are rarely causual flings.”

Only, I don’t feel Brooklyn WAS mine. It IS mine! And WILL always be mine!

Alice runs “alice + wonderland”, her new blog. She is now a copy editor at Rizzoli Publishing, in Milan, and a former Italian lecturer in New York and Washington DC. Alice is passionate about books, travelling, taking pictures, vintage clothing, and of course Brooklyn ❤ Tweets @pluswonderland.

I Have My Hands Full

by Jennifer Moore People always smile at me when I am with all three girls.  A baby on my right hip and the two older girls both holding part of my left hand. They say nice things. They say, in a kind way, "You have your hands full." I smile back. I look into their eyes and I feel like I can see them thinking . . . of Back When or of Some Day. I feel blessed and I feel like I never want this time to pass.

I let the girls play outside in the mud and the wet grass and puddles, between rain showers Saturday afternoon. I opened the kitchen window to converse with them while I was making dinner. Elizabeth, my five year old,  showed me it was raining again, her tongue stuck out to catch the drops. Maren, my toddler, ate sliced cheese from an ice cream bowl and then left it by the birdbath, her jacket out front by the wilted petunias.

Tonight, with the older two mostly in bed, I sat in the rocking chair with baby Vivie. She fell asleep in my arms. I had been up since 6:22 am. I had cleaned numerous potty training tinkle puddles, run last minute errands, managed a timely birthday party drop off and pick up with all three, coordinated most of 3 meals for 4 or 5 mouths, searched for unicorns and unicorn crowns and horse reins and American Girl hairbrushes, soothed tears and even discussed, a bit, where lightening comes from.

We sat in the rocking chair, baby Vivie and I, in that green grey light of 8:42 pm on May 26th and the birds were chirping still, a bit too loud, as if their mother would be shaking her head, "Girls, girls, it's quiet time, let's slow down, no flying, no singing . . ."  I decided not to get down on myself for that basket of clean laundry still sitting in the corner. Instead, I focused on her breathing, the rhythm of her little baby sweaty chest against mine. The thumb in her mouth made that sweet sucking noise and her other fingers stroked the ridge of my collarbone from time to time, little reflex nudges checking to make sure I was there.

Fifteen minutes later I got up, put the baby in her crib. I grabbed the five pairs of "da da da da Dora" underpants the toddler had worked through from the hamper, hand washed them in the bathroom sink. From her bedroom, Maren screamed, "I have an orange thing on my arm!" It was the skinned elbow from the other day in the park, on the play date, on which she wore a dress and her big sister's rain boots on the wrong feet and she fell on the paved path, running with half a peanut butter sandwich, which, when I went to rescue her, had asphalt rocks mixed into it. The scab looked dark orange in the almost dark room. I fetched a Band Aid and after I put it on her, she clutched my hand so hard, loving, like she was holding a baby bunny, and in her wonderful, trademark, scratchy voice, "Mom, your hands cold, you okay?" She didn't let go, concern. "Oh Bug, it's just from the water, Mommy washed your underpants. It's okay." And then I felt tears welling up---the happy sad kind. "It's okay, Mommy." Oh my perceptive one.  "Thank you, Bug. I love you." "I love you, too, Mommy." The sweetest sleepy smile, her Great Grandma Zora gap front teeth peeping through.

Yes, I have my hands full. Heart, too.

(Image: Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, 1890)

New Normal

by Alison Schramm

My parents – and especially my mom - have always made extra-ordinary efforts to visit me and my husband in New York. I’ll admit that I’m skilled at lining up visits regardless of the occasion, but truthfully, my mom never really needed any convincing. Occasionally she flew, but more often than not she drove, always with her handwritten directions taped to the dashboard. She drove down with my dad, with my sisters, with friends, and because nothing was going to get in between visits with her baby, she even drove the oftentimes torturous 350 miles from Rochester by herself. The car was typically loaded with groceries – always with some type of pork product, as my husband loved to point out – and beer and wine. I joked with her, “Mom, it’s New York, there are grocery stores here,” but it was wasted breath. She came to help us move, to help celebrate birthdays, for girls’ weekends, and for everything in between. All of these visits were variable, but there was one that was more or less set in stone each year.

For the last six or seven years, my parents have made a summer trip to New York. If you’re sitting there thinking what an awful time to visit NYC, what with the tourists and the humidity and the smelly garbage, you’d be right. But for my dad, this trip is about one thing: going to a Yankees game. To say my dad has a healthy appreciation for sports is an understatement. The Browns, the Yankees, Syracuse basketball, Notre Dame football, anyone holding a golf club - the man does not only watch, but truly enjoys most sporting events, a trait shared wholeheartedly by my husband.

My mom, on the other hand, was a sports fan in that way many wives are, myself included. The Yankees play approximately 162 games per season, and my mom probably watched close to 150 by virtue of living with my dad, or as she liked to put it, being a hostage in her own house. Despite this love/hate relationship, she could rattle off the starting lineup for the Yankees on a moment’s notice and liked to provide her own color commentary on each of the players and their personal lives. I was home one Wednesday night and somehow wrestled the remote from my dad, just in time to catch Modern Family. I was shocked when my mom told me she had never watched an episode, but in her now infamous words, ”If it doesn’t have a ball, we don’t watch it.”

Last weekend marked our first Yankees outing since my mom died. A small milestone, comparatively speaking, but I missed her every step of the way. Before the game, we stopped for lunch at Dominick’s, an Italian restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, and truthfully, the real highlight of the day for me. Dominick’s is the kind of restaurant where the waiters recite for you the menu, where the red sauce is the star, where the table clothes are plastic, but most importantly to me on that day, the kind of restaurant my mom would have loved.

As we ate, I thought about how my mom would have oooh’ed and aaah’ed over each bite of chicken parm, one of her favorite indulgences. I was reminded of a conversation I had with my sister the week before. She was matter-of-fact, and told me how during a particularly difficult day, and after months of thinking to herself, “Mom would love this,” she decided to change her way of thinking. She said from that point on, she has repeated to herself, “Mom LOVES this,” and it’s changed everything for her. So I tried it on for size, over our Italian feast. And then this past weekend, when we were all together for Father’s Day, with the kids running around in the side yard, I said it again: “Mom LOVES this.”

This is my new normal. Baseball games with my dad and husband, holidays with my family, keeping my head up each and every day. It’s the new and it’s the old and if I’m being honest, I have no idea where it’s taking me some days. But one thing I do know -

Mom loves this.

Looking Forward: Letting Go

I was seventeen-years-old when I decided that miracles were real. A senior in high school and knee-deep in anxiety over college, boys, fitting in, moving out (just about everything, really), I'd grown accustomed to spending many nights, hands clasped, sending silent prayers to a nameless god: "Please let me get in to my first-choice college. Please let the cute boy in math class—the one who's never even looked my way—notice me. Please let me be more confident in class. Please let the fact that I'm graduating and moving away be a dream I can wake up from." (Let me pause here to say how embarrassing this last bit was to write—did I really lose sleep over these sorts of things?)

Anyway, one night, mid-worry and seemingly out of the blue, it hit me. Why was I afraid? My life was full of  so many incredible things—love, luck, friendship, opportunities—why start worrying now? It seemed so clear. I needed to loosen up. Let go. Trust. I'd spent so much time worrying about  changing my circumstances that I'd almost completely forgotten to relax and enjoy my life. Worrying was tiring, not to mention time-consuming. How many hours could have been saved if I'd only thought to let go?

And here's where the part about miracles comes in. Almost immediately after coming to this realization, I noticed my life change. It was like magic. Suddenly, everything seemed oddly, suspiciously effortless. Things were falling into place and I wasn't even trying. My favorite teacher, to whom I dreaded saying goodbye, offered to teach an independent study for me the following semester. In an uncharacteristic stroke of bravery (I was painfully shy in high school), I mustered the confidence to sign up to be in the school play—and had the time of my life. The cute boy—the one I thought had never looked my way—asked me to prom. All of this happening at once seemed nothing short of miraculous. I was baffled. But I was also happier because I was worrying less. I was sleeping better. In so many wonderful and meaningful ways, I was free.

(I didn't, however, get in to Berkeley, my first-choice college. Devastated, I showed up at UC Santa Cruz in the fall, determined to hate it. Instead, I fell in love with it, and to this day, regard the four years I spent there as some of the happiest and most fulfilling of my life. It was an important lesson: not everything was going to work out the way I wanted. But maybe that was for the best. Maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised. Maybe, years later, I'd look back and know that things worked out the way they did for a reason.)

Now, at twenty-six, I'm still often reminding myself to let go. When anxiety hits—what's next for me? what am I doing with my life? why aren't I further along in my career?—I take a deep breath, and remember:

My best is all I can do. I'm going to worry only about things I can—and want to—control. I trust that as long as I can stay happy, positive, and open-minded, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to be okay because I've always been okay. 

And I've always been okay because, well—who knows? I'm not the one in the control.

Tide Pools

I was at the beach with my good friend and her daughter the other week. The sun was hot, I was sporting my high waisted bikini that I was finally brave enough to wear. The breeze was cooling and salty. It was one of those rarely perfect days where the tide had pulled out slowly and left little tide pools in its wake. They made perfect pools for toddlers, and instead of shooing them away from the larger waves the whole time, we got to stand there and chat, and have a conversation. In eighteen months of friendship, both of us having kids, I think this was the first time it was possible. We, of course, chatted about more kids, when was the right time? It seems that as soon as your first one is walking people start asking about the second one. Has it always been this way, or are family members just nosier nowadays? They were trying for a second and we were . . . on the fence. I was complaining,

“It takes SO long for them to start doing things. When I pictured being a mother, it was to do fun things like art projects and trips, they can’t do that for YEARS. Plus the sleep deprivation is maddening . . .”

“Yes, but it all goes so quickly, before you know it, they are doing this:” And she pointed at my son and her daughter in the sand, completely entertained, playing with each other, oblivious to the adult world. “Besides, you don’t want him to be lonely.”

Loneliness was a common argument I had heard against the only child. I have a sibling, a brother who is five years younger than me, and I still remember feeling lonely. Or, if not lonely, just bored. But I was a fairly introverted child preferring to read books and squirrel away in my bedroom upstairs than interact with other children outside.

After the loneliness argument, the other opinion I heard always revolved around what a joy siblings were to have. “My sister is my best friend!” My friend was thoroughly convinced that three was the perfect number. She was one of three kids and really liked that atmosphere. Do you just choose what you are used to? My husband is seven years younger than his brother, so in many ways both of us had the benefits that only children have. We played by ourselves a lot, had different opportunities. How do you know when you are done?

At first I thought three, maybe five kids? And then I had my son, and I thought for sure one was enough. But something happened that day at the beach; I could see the other side. I could see those fun things that I had pictured myself doing with him were just around the corner, through a hazy fog of the infant and toddler years. I once read a New York Times article that described children as a ‘back-end investment’. It was even accompanied by a great little chart. You put all the work and toil in, in the beginning, and it gets easier over the years, and the ‘pay-off’ is supposed to be when you are older and they are caring for you.

Maybe you just trust that you can weather the storm, and what will be left when the sand settles and the water pulls away is a perfect little tide pool. Each one a different size, unique and beautiful.

YWRB: First Impressions

By Amanda Page My first memory of Amy Turn Sharp is crisp and static, like a simple snapshot. She was a girl in a poetry workshop, sitting in one of the chairs beneath the classroom window, scarf around her neck---although it was Spring---and headphones casually slipped from her ears, dangling from her neck where they got lost in the fabric.  It might have been the first day or late in the quarter. But that's when I took notice. She seemed shy as she responded to a question---maybe about her poem. What stands out to me most about that moment is the reserve and timidity she displayed, because I was reserved and timid. I was shy and I didn't like it, but I didn't know how else to be.

Maybe that's why the image sticks. Or maybe I recognized a kindred spirit, but not consciously. Anyway, that was not the woman I started to know on smoke breaks. The Amy Turn I came to know in fifteen-minute bursts was loud, exuberant, and wildly enthusiastic about writing and life.

We weren't fast friends. The quarter ended and I saw her once over the summer, when I saw her on the street and stopped to say hello. Fall came and classes started and there we were in another workshop together. Most of our friends had graduated that summer. We were those rare, at the time, students who kept at it, floating a little, not quite ready to move beyond the classroom, still trying to figure out what we were doing in college, let alone with our lives.

Maybe I'm projecting a little. That's what I was doing: floating. Flailing. When I met Amy Turn, as she was called then, I made a friend to flail with. Amy Turn. I rarely ever heard her called anything but the two names together. She was never just "Amy." I admired that. I was from a place where two names were common, and I'd tried to get one to catch on for myself. It never happened. I wasn't a Bobbi Jo or Barbara Dee. I was just Amanda. Just the one name. And I couldn't quite get the two-first-name version of myself to exist.

We started writing together. We'd sit at the bar or the coffee shop or sometimes at the kitchen table in her apartment and we'd handwrite essays in yellow legal pads, right there on the spot. We thrived on the spontaneous nature of sitting down and writing something complete. We were rebelling against the image of the isolated writer, working in a dim room all alone. The work had more energy, more life, because it was composed quickly, full of vim and whimsy, in the presence of another writer.

Rebelling against the idea of the diligent, lonely writer was exciting. We reminded ourselves that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on one long continuous scroll. He couldn't have written it all in isolation. He needed his friends. He needed to be around the "mad ones." And I found myself a mad one in Amy Turn. I liked that my first impression of her was wrong. It gave me hope that I could rebel against first impressions of me. I was more than just a shy girl with a single first name. I was a writer, and that's what I wanted to be known. Amy Turn made it known.

Amy Turn was known. Everyone in town seemed to know her: restaurant owners and convenient store workers and every single bartender in town. It’s hard to not know the girl dancing on your table at the end of the night. Before I knew it, we were known as the writer girls. People expected us to show up with our legal pads and scratch out whole pieces. People knew about our project. That terrified me. But it also made it real.

If you're going to look for a friend with whom to rebel, you can't go wrong with one who pulls you out of your comfort zone, who introduces you to people as the person you want to be, which is not always the person you see yourself as. I started, then, to see myself as a writer. That vision, that version, of myself has wavered through the years. It's good to have a mad one to contact to remind you that you are not the lonely writer.

And it's good to know that the mad ones don't always reveal themselves in your life with that first impression.

We want to know: Do you have a friend who pulls you out of your comfort zone and makes you rebel against the small version of yourself that you sometimes believe yourself to be? How do they pull you out of your comfort zone? How do they prompt you to rebel against that small version of yourself? Email us at amanda@bold-types.com or leave a comment.

Notes on Memory

My earliest childhood memory is from August 18, 1984. I see a reflection of my little self in the large mirror in my parents’ bedroom, sitting on burnt orange carpet with my legs crossed. My face has the shape of a pear; my hair is jet black, long, and straight. I am barefoot, wiggling my tiny toes. “So Cherilynn, how does it feel to be four years old?” my aunt Julie asks. I don't see her; her voice comes from the bathroom.

“It feels the same as being three,” I say as I stare at my reflection.

This memory is intact more than any other childhood memory I have; I replay it in my head like a familiar video clip on loop, and perhaps it would not be so fixed had the mirror not been there. But I don't view this memory as more precious than those memories I can't grasp, that have shapeshifted so drastically. In fact, while I'm grateful to have this memory, as I don't really recall long sequences of moments like this until my third or fourth grade years, its immutability feels unnatural.

* * * * *

I went to the second day of the championship round of the U.S. Open, which took place recently at the Olympic Club just south of San Francisco. I'm not a fan of golf, but I thought it'd be something new and interesting to experience. I was in a bit of a panic, though, reading the championship's rules—no mobile phones, portable email devices, cameras, and anything potentially disruptive.

So I mentally prepared for a day without my iPhone, as phoneless days are rare. Before we left, my boyfriend tweeted that he'd have a ringside seat to watch me self-destruct without it. It sounds silly, but being without that portal in my pocket—not knowing what the rest of the world is doing, or perhaps not being able to tell or show the rest of the world what I am doing—freaks me out a little.

As we wandered the Olympic Club sans phones and cameras, I wanted to take photographs of various tents and pavilions, the rolling hills of green, different holes of the course, and the grassy slope overlooking hole 8—a golf course version of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte—where we spent a few hours under the sun. But I didn't want to take pictures to record my first golf experience, or to compile an album of the day. I wanted to take photographs mainly to prove I was there. I hinted at this urge in a blog post on the new way I take photographs; now, consuming and owning the present moment has become more important than capturing an experience cohesively, or creating something to add to an archive.

* * * * *

Pictures or it didn't happen.

I've never liked this phrase. Yet I've become a slave to this very mode to self-document and share from moment to moment, and in a way my U.S. Open experience feels incomplete because I have no documented and shared proof that it happened. And so I wonder: What is a memory in this digital age? Why am I beginning to view a memory not photographed or tweeted—one residing solely in my mind—as unattractive? I'm a visual person, so I take mental snapshots of the places I go, keeping these images in my head. But this sort of intangible, mutable evidence seems increasingly inadequate in our world of over-sharing, and on an Internet where our traces are permanent.

It's as if undocumented memories are now less potent.

I wish this wasn't so; elusiveness is the very quality I love about (my) memory. But these days it feels as if I'm doing something wrong—or simply not doing enough—if I'm not experiencing each moment in my day with the intention of documenting and sharing it for all to see.