Sick Days

My mother has a photograph of me as an infant from the first time I was sick. I am lying on the carpeted floor, a blanket up to my chest, my head on a miniature pillow. I have a doll posed next to me and am looking right at the camera with my deep, dark brown eyes. I am silent, unmoving except for my eyes staring right into you. It may be the only photo from my first two years where I am not a blur of movement. My mother explained that in those days you valued your film, every shot mattered and was important. This was meaningful, my mother noted, because it was the first time I was truly still. Charley has been sick the past few days, and I am reminded of that photograph. It is not that I delight in his discomfort, far from it; it hurts in a different way to see your child in pain. It is just a fever, the onset of teeth or the sign of an upcoming cold. The house has a different energy. We let him watch Curious George quietly in the dark, cool living room. It feels like so long since we have snuggled. Despite looking very much like my husband, he has much of my personality. He has my ability to go all day long, from activity to activity, without napping, too interested in the world around him. Generally our house has the frenzied chaotic energy of a small zoo or college dorm. There is yelling, barking, drinks spilled on the couch, and rallying long past bedtime. It’s not that he is a hyper child; he will find a calm moment to do a puzzle, or build with his Legos. Instead, it’s just that he needs to be constantly entertained, his brain jumps around so much, he’s asking about the dog, he wants to know about the fireplace, he needs to build this boat RIGHT NOW.

I am the same way really, even now. I flutter from hobby to hobby, unsure of how to find that stillness, that quiet satisfaction. The only times calm has visited me was when I had morning sickness. Calm had the ability to make me rethink everything, become introspective.

So, perhaps, a little bit, I relish the times he is sick, and allows me to baby him. I snuggle next to his soft, blonde head, smelling the last of the baby hairs. These days when I pick him up from preschool, his curls are matted to his forehead and he smells vaguely of sweat, sand and whatever they had for lunch (it always smells like meatballs). Gone are the days of carrying him against my chest in the sling, tucked in tightly, fingers clasped around the straps. Instead he refuses to hold my hand in the parking lot and wants to run, RUN MAMA, to see the shopping carts that look like race cars. This weekend though, we spent a quiet few hours, just snuggling on the couch, and we discovered the stillness once more together.

On Waking Up Happy

I am a nighttime worrier. As soon as the sun goes down, my creative and productive energy dissipates, and a dreary little cloud of worry and anxiety takes its place. It’s the sort of superfluous worry—“recreational worry,” as my friend and I like to call it—that winds around and around itself as a tired mind loses steam amidst the liminal space between today and tomorrow. I worry about whether I’ve done enough today, and I worry about what I need to do tomorrow. I worry about larger questions, like finding purpose in life, and smaller questions, like whether I should have worded something differently in an email. This is usually my cue that it’s time to redirect my wayward mind to the simplicity of bedtime rituals and get myself to sleep as soon as possible. I’ve accompanied myself through enough worried evenings to know that this is simply my mind’s way of grinding from “full-speed” to “stop” in a matter of hours.

Mornings, on the other hand, have marked the difference for me across different stages and passages of life. I remember straggling out of bed before dawn, only to fall asleep again on the bus during high school. I remember waking up much later in college, always with a half-finished paper still writing itself in my mind. I remember the summer I took up running, bolting out of bed and out the door each morning with a surge of powerful energy I’d never known otherwise.

More recently, I remember waking up a little disoriented on so many gray Boston mornings during graduate school. My sweetheart was waking up hundreds of miles away, and my footing felt unsure. It took two cups of coffee and several hours before I could fully process stimuli from the outside world.

In my new home, I still tend to fall asleep to the cranking of my internal worry machine, even with my love close by and Southern sunshine to look forward to the next day. Waking up, though, these days is another story. As I rub the sleep from my eyes and my last dream slips from memory, I’m struck by the certainty that I am exactly where I’m meant to be. Before the small disappointments and successes of the day take hold and before my worry mechanism starts asking too many questions about where I’ve been and where I’m going, I can’t help but notice there’s something just right about right now.

I suppose this is what it means to wake up happy: to peek out from the business of life for a brief moment each day and smile at the thought that you’ve secretly begun to enjoy the journey.

Mercy, Mercy Me

By Natalie Friedman Strange thoughts visited me in the days following my grandmother’s funeral. For example: while driving to my son’s preschool, the car windows open to the fine spring air, my radio tuned to an oldies station playing Marvin Gaye, I thought: “My grandmother never heard Marvin Gaye in all of her ninety-five years.”

My grandmother never listened to the radio. She never owned a record collection; I doubt she knew what a CD was. The lack of music in her life was tied up with other lacks and other losses, and those are what made me cry in my car as I turned up the radio and slowed down to circle the parking lot a few times.

I grieved for my grandmother in my own private way after she died, and this included making mental lists of all the things she had never done. It was the inverse of what most obituaries are supposed to do: rather than celebrate achievements, I was reckoning the gaps and spaces and silences and had-nots. My grandmother had never driven a car. My grandmother had never been to the top of the Empire State Building or the tip of Statue of Liberty’s lamp. My grandmother had never been to high school or college.

There were, of course, many things that my grandmother had done, things I have never done and may never be able to do. She had baled hay and milked cows and planted vegetable gardens. She had attended several births. She had seen her eldest brother return from World War I covered in lice and raving mad. She had nursed a sick mother and had buried her in a too-early grave. She had been taken to a ghetto and then to three concentration camps. She had walked out of them all alive, supported by no one. She had returned to her hometown, to a place from which nearly all her relatives had disappeared, and she rebuilt a home. She bribed a long line of greedy men to spring her husband from a Soviet gulag. She buried that husband in a too-early grave. She had crossed an ocean with an only daughter, at the age of fifty-three, to start a new life in America. She had worked in a factory, sewing neckties. She had crocheted over two hundred and fifty lace doilies, curtains, and decorative scarves, and had baked more than a thousand cakes from recipes that she kept filed in her brain.

But despite these facts, I felt that my grandmother’s life had been thwarted, unfullfilled, stunted. Perhaps it was arrogant of me to think so, I who had been cosseted by my comfortable American life, I who feel it my due and my right to have any kind of life I want,  to be happy. My grandmother did not have the gift of happiness---she was a depressive her entire life, and I often wondered if she would have been depressed even if life would have treated her more gently. Or maybe life would have treated her more gently if she had been less depressed. She used to say that God smiles at those who smile at God, but she seemed never to have had the ability to smile.

I think that she was unhappy partly because of temperament, and partly because she had been born in a particular place and moment in history. A traditional Jewish household high in the Carpathian mountains was not fertile ground for cultivating female happiness or achievement. My grandmother used to say that she was a very good student in school, so good that her teacher suggested she might be sent to another city to study at the girls’ gymnasium. Her father, my great-grandfather, told the teacher that a girl only needed to know how to put the right shoe on the right foot.

My grandmother was able to summon up her father’s exact words nearly eighty years after he had uttered them, and she repeated them to me and my sister with the frequency of those who remember and do not forgive.

So she had only what amounted to a middle school education, and yet she was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. She spoke several languages. She could do mental math with lightening speed. She knew all the names of all the people who had lived in her village, and could trace their family histories almost as far back as her own. She remembered the exact moment when she happened to hear, over a contraband radio, that the Russian army was advancing on the Nazis in April 1945. And she remembered that the Scotsmen who marched into Bergen Belsen with the British army to liberate her and the other surviving Jews were playing bagpipes and wearing kilts.

My grandma’s fine skill at observation and her attention to detail filled her brain and helped push out some of the pain she carried around. It’s not for nothing that she was a talented craftswoman, able to knit and crochet and sew. She focused on the small things. It was only when she wasn’t busy with her hands or baking some exquisite cake that she talked ceaselessly about the past. When I was old enough to sit with her at her tiny tea table and listen, then she relaxed her hold on the small necessaries that kept her going. The sad, ugly truths came pouring out, and they were ornately detailed, too; but after a while, she would turn to me and say, “How about a tea? With lemon and sugar? I’ll fix it for you.” And out would come a delicate porcelain cup, a small silver spoon, a pretty napkin, a fragrant slice of homemade cake that melted on the tongue---lovely weapons against ugliness.

Her many talents, her skillful hands, her way with words, her capacious mind---had she been born in a different time or place, she could have been anything she wanted. She could have used her great mind every day in the ways she wanted to use it. But even that is a fantasy: how we use our minds isn’t always up to us, and that painful irony was made very clear to me as I watched my grandmother slowly lose her grasp on the details and particulars, until one day it even lost hold of the things like who her grandchildren were or where she was living.

During the last two weeks of her life, when she was barely responsive, my sister and I talked about the possibility of her death and what her funeral would be like. We knew it would conform to the strictest of Jewish Orthodox standards, because that was how she had been raised. Although women are forbidden from public speaking before a mixed-sex audience in that tradition, we somehow imagined that we would give a eulogy for her. My sister had some touching anecdotes she wanted to share, and I wanted to talk about how my grandmother had been a true survivor, a tougher-than-nails scrapper. We planned and we revised and then we laughed and said, “She’ll pull through; she’ll be out of the hospital and back to her old tricks soon.” And then she died, and the night of her death, the rabbi called our mother and asked her for details of my grandmother’s life so that he could write his eulogy, and I began to see that my sister and I would be silent at that funeral.

When the kindly people at the funeral home asked us if we would like to take a last look at our grandmother, and they lifted the lid of her coffin, and we saw her lying there looking small and pale, her mouth, without dentures, puckering inward as if she had just tasted a lemon, I wanted to shout, “THIS IS NOT OUR GRANDMOTHER! This is not my indefatigable, determined, storytelling, memory-rich grandmother!”  And I wanted to stand up where the rabbi was standing, and shout out my eulogy to the gathered guests, to tell them that they had no idea what reserves of strength this woman had had; that she had been a difficult, pained, tragic woman who had never been given the opportunity to flourish, but who had nevertheless loved us with a fierce and unwavering passion born out of the deepest, deepest fear of loss, the deepest, deepest hunger for life.

I guess this is my eulogy, this flimsy essay. It will have to do; after all, how do we ever capture, in words, the essence of a person? The complexities of a woman’s life? How many grandmothers lie in their graves with a booming silence all around them, the silence of no one knowing how to tell their stories?  And each story is perfect, delicate, ornate, like a dainty teacup, a scrap of lace, a sweet pastry, a song by Marvin Gaye.

Original image by Wrestling Entropy on Flickr

The stress of conversing

Tomorrow I have to do something that scares me.  Maybe scare is a strong word.  But I can’t think of a better one.  I won’t be confronting any of my more tangible fears: Heights, Spiders, or Fish. Nope, tomorrow I have to talk to a stranger. I’ve been asked to be a part of a sort of mentoring program where I work, taking a new employee under my wing so-to-speak for the first two weeks of their new job. While I’m thrilled to be asked to take on a leadership role such as this, my stomach is already working itself into knots.

I don’t like talking to people.  It makes me anxious and nervous and a host of other icky emotions.  I’m a great conversationalist with people I know, I have wit and (I think) a way with words.  I make my friends and family laugh and can speak with some degree of intelligence on a number of subjects. I don’t know if all of that disappears when I’m speaking to someone I don’t know, or a casual acquaintance, but I certainly feel as if it does.  I struggle to find the right words and I worry almost constantly that I’m not making a good impression or expressing myself clearly. I sound disjointed and hesitant to my own ears. And hearing that disconnect, knowing I’m not speaking to the best of my ability, just amplifies my discomfort and anxiousness.

As you might have surmised by the fact that I write this weekly column for The Equals Record, the same dilemma does not plague me with the written word (although this particular post has been more of a labor than most).  I love to mail handwritten letters or type a note on my typewriter. I don’t reach near the same level of anxiousness in an email, blog post, or online chat.  I guess because I can take the time to think about word choices and sentence structure instead of being on the spot.

I don’t actually freeze up while giving speeches in front of groups or in one-on-one conversations; in fact I’ve been told that talking to strangers is something I do quite well.  I guess that’s a sign that I’m the only one aware of the discomfort and sheer amount of effort required to carry on a simple conversation.  That should make me feel better, knowing that it’s in my head, but I’m still dreading the phone call.

Never Forget

My husband and I bought our first home together, a condo in Brooklyn, just about two years ago. Apartment shopping in New York is certainly not for the faint of heart, something we learned after our first round of open houses. After months of searching, we found our diamond in the rough. It lacked the dining space I held out hope for and the corner windows and light our last apartment afforded, but had a parking spot and other amenities that made us cheer, while allowing us to stay in the neighborhood we had grown to love. We moved on a hot and sticky Saturday in August. After saying goodbye to the less-than-quaint walk-up apartment that we---and many families of mice---had called home for the last several years, we drove around the block to our new home, moving vans in tow. My parents arrived on cue, to help with the moving efforts.  After coordinating my sister’s move in Rochester the day before, they were on the road to New York first thing in the morning, to help with their second move of the weekend.  For three days we cleaned, unpacked, argued over where to hang each picture, and of course, ate. We drove to New Jersey to buy our first grill---a housewarming gift from my parents---and on my mom’s urging, we picked up shrimp cocktail and strip steaks, for a celebratory dinner that night.

My favorite moments of that weekend were the conversations with my mom, held over cups of coffee each morning. Long before my husband or father roused, we solved the world’s problems and tackled lingering interior decorating questions. Just the two of us. I’ll never forget my mom, sipping coffee in the perfect morning light from our eastern exposures, and telling me definitively: “You’re going to be happy here.”

I might never forget my mom’s confidence on that beautiful morning, but I have pushed it aside, more often than I’d like to admit, over the last couple years. It's particularly poignant to be writing this today, on 9/11 of all days, in this adopted city of mine that I have such a troubled relationship with. New York and I don’t always see eye to eye, to be sure, and I let that conflict overwhelm me at times. But this, I’m realizing, this is why I’m here. To share a piece of my mom and to connect with others, certainly, but just as importantly, to keep myself in check---to remember the wisdom and no-nonsense advice my mom handed out, wanted or not.

As I continue to share my mom’s stories here, I’d also love to hear from you, dear readers. How and why do these relationships, as mothers, daughters or otherwise, connect us as women?  What is your story? And will you share it here? If you think you might, take a look here for submission guidelines. Make sure to include the title of this column, "You Remind Me of Someone," with your story.

Thanks for reading---and I hope, for sharing.

Looking Forward: Second Chances

When people ask how long I’ve lived in New York, invariably, my answer is, I moved here in 2009. This is, in fact, true, but---I have to admit---it isn’t the whole truth. I moved to New York for the first time the winter after graduating college---in large part, because my boyfriend at the time was finishing his last year at Columbia, and I was eager to close what had been a very challenging long-distance chapter of our relationship. Until then, I’d never lived outside California (as an adult, anyway), and like many recent college graduates, I’d never had to think about things like finding my own apartment or paying my own bills.

I arrived in January 2008, suitcases in tow, ready to move in to a Morningside Heights apartment I’d never seen before. I had no plan for finding a job, and no savings. But, I reassured myself, this is what one does after college---moves away, starts a new life. I was nervous, but more than anything, I was thrilled at the thought of becoming a New Yorker.

I lasted just under six months.

A variety of factors contributed to my speedy exit. My astronomical rent, which afforded me a bedroom the size of a closet in an apartment so dark I never knew what time it was, was one thing. The stress of moving to a new city in the dead of winter was another. On top of it all, the adjustment from a long-distance to same-city relationship was much more difficult than I’d anticipated.

It was just too much. I was flailing. What’s more, even though I’d always loved visiting New York City, it just wasn’t making me happy. Not even a tempting job offer---from one of my favorite fashion companies, no less---could convince me to stick it out. I moved home.

When the dust settled, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d failed. My short stint in New York felt like a waste of time, and, what’s more, a colossal waste of money. I was embarrassed. At least I gave it a shot, I told myself.

To make a long story short---and to state the obvious---I ended up giving New York a second chance. It took nearly a year, and a lot of thinking. A lot of worrying. A lot more flailing. But one day, I got a phone call from an old friend who told me there was an extra room available in her Brooklyn apartment that summer, and something about it just sounded right. There was, of course, no guarantee things would work out, but at the same time, everything about the situation just seemed to point toward yes.

I made the leap---again. And here I am. 

Three and a half years later, I still occasionally find myself cringing with embarrassment when I admit that my first few months in a city I now adore (fervently! with all my heart!) were a flop. And, at times, I still find it hard to explain why I turned down that job in fashion---especially when today, I sometimes barely make ends meet as a freelancer. Why wasn’t I able to make it then in a city that now feels so comfortable? What would have happened if I had just pushed through? I’ll never know the answers to those questions, but I’m beginning to feel better about owning what I used to think of as a personal failure.

As a friend of mine so brilliantly and heartbreakingly once put it, “Sometimes you’re just not ready to be as great as the great things that are happening around you.”

I’ve never forgotten that. There’s sometimes no explanation for the messy and complicated ways things work themselves out. What a wonderful reminder that life is full of surprises, and twists and turns we could never anticipate.

Nothing, I'm finding these days, is ever a waste of time.

On Living Close to Family

Without trying to, I’ve lived close to at least one side of my family for my whole life.  When I was choosing colleges, while I contemplated far flung schools with catalog-created fantasies (strolling through crumbling stone archways at Oxford, living in a Gothic Southern mansion at Duke), I ended up at Berkeley, the school where my dad had attended and continued to live less than two hours away from.

This meant that when I got the flu my sophomore spring, my dad hung up the phone after I called and showed up at my doorstep that afternoon, bearing cleaning supplies to take care of my sick-filled apartment and chicken noodle soup to heal by belly and soul.  When I moved to San Francisco after college, my dad was there to take me sailing and out to a nice dinner after I got rejected from job after job.  When an adverse reaction to medication caused me to faint and hit my head, my dad moved in with my roommates and I for three days, playing cards with me and watching my pupils for sign of a brain bleed.  An IKEA couch that needed assembling?  Moving from one apartment to another?  Help was only a phone call away.

I live on the East Coast now, and have been similarly spoiled to be close to my mom’s side of the family, who were born and raised in Brooklyn.  My aunt has become my go-to source for intellectual stimulation and emotional comfort, popping over from suburban Scarsdale to discuss men, politics, entertainment, and life over cheap Mediterranean food.  My mom, who fled the cold of New York for Atlanta, hops on the two-hour flight several times a year, to make sure I have enough culture in my life (Broadway plays are always a must-do on the weekend agenda) and color in my clothing (“it’s so much more flattering than all that black you wear, sweetie!”).

It snuck on me as the unconsidered yet blaringly obvious fact of my move to London:  this is the first time I will be living on my own, an ocean away from my family, my points of stability and unconditional love and comfort and constancy.  I’ll have my boyfriend---my partner in all of this---but the support and interactions that come with a romantic relationship differ so greatly from those offered by family.  Yet it makes me ponder something I’ve never before factored into my thoughts or decision making (sorry, Mom and Dad!):  the value of living close to family.  I’ve chosen the cities in which I’ve lived based on their worldliness, their amazing restaurants, their walkability, their job opportunities.  While the dynamics of family relationships have morphed as I've grown older (although having my dad show up with chicken soup when I'm sick will make my heart tingle even when I'm 50), the relationships themselves have been omnipresent.  Family, so consistently, blatantly there, has unintentionally slipped to the backburner for being there in physical form.

I don’t know where Zack and I are going to move when his graduate program ends in two years.  I don’t know how much at that point family will factor into our decisions after having experienced the other end---the being far after being so close.  Do you try to live near your family?  Or try to live far away, or not factor in it at all?  I’d love to hear your take.

Reading the Signs

We got some bad news. It came in Friday at 5 pm, while we were driving through the Florida back roads to buy the couch of my dreams; the couch of my dreams to put in the house of my dreams in Pennsylvania. We were driving the bumpy black pickup truck, swamplands on both sides of us when the call came in. “They are considering another offer.”

The house that nobody wanted had suddenly turned into a bidding war. After several verbal agreements that the seller was signing the contract this week, this news comes in. I was in turn, hurt and confused. I felt cheated. I had finally found this great lover, this perfect lover with ten-foot ceilings and gleaming original hardwood floors, and suddenly, he dumps me---without warning and kind of harshly. I was reeling. It could be the pregnancy hormones, but I cried more over that house than I did over some of my college boyfriends. We were forced to withdraw our offer, we couldn’t afford to get into a bidding war, especially a manipulated one. I suddenly wanted to be Charley, safe at school, playing quietly with his trucks, instead of this bawling grown-up, with no idea where to go.

We turned around from going to get my dream couch. There was no sense if we didn’t have the house to put it in. All week we had been juggling, rushing from chore to chore, and suddenly, it all came crashing down. This is the scary part of moving while pregnant. Selling one house and buying another means everything has to line up perfectly or we are homeless, and it rarely lines up how you want it to. And then, along the way, we got lost. We rumbled through a little town with boarded-up convenience stores and gator jerky stands. Every other building was a church, no bigger than a one-bedroom apartment with a two-story steeple. The road, while paved, was dusty, brown dirt on both sides. I turned to my husband, “Where are we?”

He laughed. “I don’t know, I don’t know what we are going to do.”

“No, I mean, right now, where are we?” I pointed outside.

He did know the answer to that one---luckily he has a better sense of direction than me. We quickly found our way out, to the bustling I-95 highway and back to our beach neighborhood. But we still don’t know the larger answer to that question. My dad believes everything happens for a reason. “It’s a sign.” He tells me as I cry on the phone that we lost the house. A sign for what though, I wonder. A sign we shouldn’t move to such a small town? That we are secretly big city people? Or a sign that a year from now that house will get flooded, or struck by lightning, and we will be glad we never bought it. It seems unlikely. I have trouble reading the signs.

I’m still hurting, days later. My husband wants to show me other listings, and I shake my head no. I’m not ready. I need time to recover before jumping right into another house relationship. And I’m still not convinced I don’t have one last go round of the city in me. I still feel like I don't fit in there, fit in here, fit in anywhere. I think of this song:

“I change shapes just to hide in this place, but I’m still, I’m still an animal . . .”

And I wonder what shape I will be at the end of all this. Part of me wants to give up on this grown-up business of house buying, go back to renting, being a nomad, an animal. How long can you fight settling down with two kids and a dog?

I Say Goodbye, You Say Hello: A Facebook Story

By H. Savala Nolan I’m in the doctor’s waiting room. I’m on the couch during commercials. I’m waiting for my latte. I’m in bed, restless. I’m waiting for my boyfriend to get dressed. I’m in the train station. I’m lined up to board my flight. I idle, therefore, I Facebook.

In moments of quiet—moments I might use for serenity, to smell the scents and see the colors of the world around me—I grab my phone and tap the icon, a plain blue square with a friendly white “f” just slightly off center. Behold: my friends. I’m idle, but they are busy. They are fawning over baby animals, baying for blood because of politics, announcing spiritual truths, loafing in tropical sun, sitting down to the best meal ever, cataloging the day’s humdrum  triumphs and defeats, staring alluringly into the eye of a camera, getting engaged, having children, praying over dying aunts and granddads. Despite myself, and despite how over-stimulated, drained, or jealous  it can leave me, I log on. I can’t seem to help it.

Everyone is ambivalent about Facebook. How can we not be? Status updates—the meat of the log-on—do one of two things: elevate the boring, or degrade the profound. Both are bothersome. It exasperates me that some friends think hundreds of people hang on edge, craving  ruminations on how much they love coffee, every day. (And yet, the prosaic is the real juice of life, how we string our days together—why shouldn’t we honor it?) I’m uncomfortable when my friends announce the death of a relative with a stroke of text—silent, clinical, hovering in ether—transmitted to people who will read, dash off sympathy, and forget. (And yet, we know people all over the world. We can’t make 478 phone calls or address 478 letters. This is how we live now.)

But here is the real trouble with Facebook: I never talk to my best friends anymore. In high school, Louise and I sometimes chatted on the phone for 6 or 7 hours a night. We talked about seniors we pined for (their leather jackets and spiky hair and the pretty girls they dated). We talked about music (Green Day and Nine Inch Nails). We talked about diets (cabbage soup) and drinking (did we dare?) and what color to dye our hair (purple). Adulthood at 30-something renders that omnipresent intimacy impossible; she produces reality television, I practice law, we are busy and live 2,000 miles apart. But even in our roaring twenties, we still spoke almost daily. Now, after the entrenchment of Facebook, it is typical for us to go nearly a month without speaking. Recently, with aching disbelief, I realized that the sole reason I know anything about her life is because of her status updates, which tend to be pithy and unremitting, headlines refreshed every few hours as if she were a newspaper. But could that be true?  To test my theory, I blocked her from my newsfeed. A month passed. Radio silence, except for my birthday, when she called. But before that, I couldn’t tell you if she was alive or dead.

At first, confirming the fallow state of our friendship chagrined me. I felt wronged—by her. What sort of person has time to broadcast her whereabouts, food and beverage intake, disgruntled moments, workouts, and crowd-sourcing inquiries upward of a dozen times a day, but cannot find time to connect with her best friend, one on one? To be sure, this isn’t all Facebook. She and I hammer out resolutions when, periodically, I feel I’m single-handedly doing the work of friendship. Perhaps we are simply growing apart. I, of course, could have called her; but why would I? I had Facebook. And so our affinity for Facebook—the estranged, thoughtless intimacy of it—allowed the primary challenge in our incredibly important friendship to become to the substance.

Then, after a few weeks, something unexpected happened: the irritation waned, and I began to miss her. I began to miss her in a way I never did when following her every move and thought online. In fact, I couldn’t have missed her on Facebook: she was everywhere, always.

Yes, I missed her, with the fresh, affectionate curiosity that used to precede a phone call to say hello. And I realized that, despite the constant “updates,” I missed my other best friends, and some family members, too. I didn’t want the curated comic book of their lives; that’s what Keeping Up with the Kardashians is for. I wanted noise,  texture, and monogamy, not silence, a screen, and a stranger “liking” what I wrote. I wanted interjection. I wanted to hear laughter and sighs, and remember that I know some voices so well I can see the speaker’s facial expressions over the phone. I wanted to see, or at least recall, familiar bodies that take up real space. I wanted the moments of silence that come, they say, about every seven minutes in a conversation. And I wanted to hear my voice, too. I needed the grounding and fruition that comes from contact, not the bargain-basement copy that comes from interface.

So I blocked everyone I’m close to. It was a strangely anxious goodbye, as if I were strapping myself into a space shuttle, only perhaps to return. My  mom, my best friend, my boyfriend. All the inner circle, and the next-to-inner circle. Gone.

But suddenly present. Suddenly, again, real. Suddenly, again, in my awareness because they are not constantly in my face. Just like a fish can’t think about water, maybe we can’t truly contemplate—or properly love—people who are always in front of us in the most superficial ways. Good though it may be to “keep in touch” by knowing my brother-in-law ran four miles today, that news is the emotional equivalent of junk food. I don’t see my loved ones when I log on, and I feel a pang of, well, love. After a few days, I think, Hey, where are Jane and Quinn and Melissa and David? How are they? What are they doing these days? It’s like letting yourself get truly, empty-stomach, slightly-on-edge hungry; then you truly want to eat! If you graze all day, you never feel hunger, and you’re never satisfied by what you eat because your eating isn’t connected to satisfaction.

Now, if I want to know what’s up with my brother, I call. And I was surprised to discover that calling was scary. It turns out that I, a social butterfly, have developed a Facebook-induced shyness. Calling feels so forward, so direct, so daunting. But only for about a minute. Then you come to your senses. You give yourself an inward smack across the cheek, and snap out of it. Afraid to call my brother? Are you kidding? I’ve known him for 32 years, and we get along! What’s there to debate? Call. And I do. And we are, as in the old days, family. It feels great.

And there is a bonus, though it’s not one Facebook’s shareholders would be thrilled to know about: I log-on less. Much less. After all, what is there to see? The photographs of puppies that my Mom’s former best friend is currently into? The engagement news of people I never liked but was too meek to ignore when they requested my friendship? The wit and attitude as my cousin’s pals outdo each other’s comments? How entirely, intensely boring.

Especially when there is a city outside my window, and sunshine, and late-summer fruit, and music, and people. My friends, my family, and myself, to be seen and heard.

The Lighted Shore

By Rebecca D. Martin I didn't think it was worth wishing for---not for another couple years, at least. No, I'm not talking about finding my lost camera (I still hold out for that) or my daughter’s missing cloth diapers (I can live without those for a while longer yet). The camera and the diapers are casualties of our recent move. I am certain they are smashed right up against each other in the depths of the unlikeliest box possible in the back corner of the basement where we won't find them till we move again next summer.

No, it was simpler than finding a picture taker or a stack of bum covers, and much more fleeting. And, for that, all the more precious. My daughter, my dear, contented daughter, played quietly and happily for an hour and a half on Sunday afternoon. Perfect girl. Perfect day. My husband and I lazed on the sofa and watched an entire episode of our favorite British detective show. I had one brief moment of guilt over letting my child flip her own book pages alone on the other side of the room for so long, but don't worry; it passed. I settled under the blanket and immersed myself in imaginative renderings of World War II England, courtesy of the BBC.

When our daughter was born, after those first couple months that launched us so far onto the further shore of parenthood we could hardly catch the smallest glimpse of the coastline we'd left behind - after all that, I really only missed one thing: Saturday mornings.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes the process of waking up and the

"pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in a shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you're lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing."[1]

I know this well. Those pictures you dream, that lighted shore, the dim headland encroaching. "I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing," Dillard says. Me, too. I used to wake up in the morning and hurry to my writing desk, hoping not to be distracted before I could catch in a net of words the heightened creative thoughts from that fleeting, dreamlike shore before they got lost in the leafy interior of the conscious day. Sometimes I didn't even stop to make coffee. I'd spend an hour in front of the computer and finally come to, realizing I was ravenous.

Some friends of mine wake up differently. One says she comes fully awake the instant she's left sleep behind, clear-headed and ready to think, talk, or do. Another, a roommate during college dorm days, used to all but leap out of her high lofted bed, greeting each morning with a bound of energy and restraining herself mightily from greeting me in like manner. Because, awake in those early moments, I was still on the far side of the headland, imagination heightened, caught up in my shining morning thinkings. Addressing me was dangerous; that roommate spoke in the early hours at the risk of our very friendship. She fast learned a quiet patience with me.

The bright light Dillard describes, the misty minutes between sleep and waking, those used to be my favorite moments of the day. Those were the times my imagination ran most wild, my body felt most rested and comfortable, my creative mind thought best. On most of the Saturdays I can remember in my adult life, back when I had the luxury, I stretched out those moments as long as possible. Especially when Monday through Friday saw me at work at 8:00a.m. A slow-waking Saturday morning was always a gift.

So even before our daughter was born, I had some idea what I was going to be losing. But still, it came as a shock, a cup of cold water in the face. I was thrust into the leafy interior on the alarum note of one long, hungry wail, and the Saturdays I'd heretofore known were lost in the arrival of that other---that far better---gift. That first year, nursing her in those early minutes that used to be mine, all mine, only mine, I mourned the loss.

I've gotten used to it now. Most weekends, I barely give a thought to what Saturdays used to be like, and, somewhere along the way, I've learned to revel in the new normal: the three of us sitting on the floor together, munching granola, drinking coffee and tea, playing with puzzle pieces and books and matchbox cars. Feeding pretend cereal to Pooh Bear. Carrying disparate toys from one room to another. This is a good life. These, too, are shining morning moments.

But I'll tell you, when my husband and I get to lounge on the sofa for an hour and a half---an hour and a half!!---well. Those old, intensely creative writing mornings may be gone for now, but watching an entire movie in the middle of the day, uninterrupted . . . that doesn't fall too far short.

Today's a different day: Monday. My husband works long and hard at his office, and the two of us girls are on our own. I can tell it's a one-nap day, so I won't get in as much writing time or me time as I sometimes do. We'll fill up our minutes with other, more active things. The grocery store, FedEx, Target. A stroll in the late summer heat, play time, dinner prep. Once my husband gets home and we eat and clean up, maybe he'll sit on the floor with our daughter while I dig through boxes and drawers---again---in hopes of finding the camera before we leave for vacation next week. I’m hoping for one long, lighted shore of a beach holiday, and I’d like to capture some of those moments on film.

But I'm learning the camera's not actually necessary, nor is that indulgent, slow morning wake-up time. For now, an afternoon like Sunday's is enough. Yes, that memory will be enough to last me through many early-woken Saturdays to come. That, and the hope that maybe, some Sunday, it'll happen again. I've got another BBC episode saved in my Netflix queue on the off-chance. Till then, Pooh Bear and my daughter eagerly await my attentions.

[1] Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper's Magazine Press, New York: 1974. p.2

Looking Forward: Feeling Bad, Feeling Brave.

For a span of several months, I had a Holbrook Jackson quote as the wallpaper on my computer screen. Happiness is a form of courage, it read. I remember reading this for the first time, years ago, and feeling electrified. I found it so empowering. Every day, we’re confronted with myriad reasons to be angry, bitter, disappointed, discouraged, worried, or frightened. People get sick. Friends move away. Relationships fall apart. We lose jobs, miss trains, trip on the stairs. We say things we don’t mean. Do things we wish we could take back. Take risks that lead us nowhere. To choose to celebrate the good in life in spite of all of this---to focus on the positive when really, it’s the last thing we want to do---is a beautiful thing.

I believe this wholeheartedly. But. I’ve learned a curious thing recently.

A few days ago, I finished telling someone a story by saying, “I was so annoyed, but . . .”

He held up a hand. “Why don’t you just stop at but?” he said. “If you were annoyed, you were annoyed.”

Believe it or not, I really hadn’t ever thought of it that way. I always figured it was the right thing to do to turn the page on a negative situation right away, to try to make things okay as quickly as possible. To focus on feeling unpleasant would be wallowing---and wallowing, I thought, wasn’t productive.

It seems funny to think that I need to get better at feeling bad. I used to think that letting myself get too angry or too sad or too bored or too disappointed meant that I was losing control. I tend to react to negative situations swiftly and efficiently, with statements like, well, on the bright side . . . or there’s really no reason to be upset.  But, I'm relieved to find, giving in to feeling upset from time to time doesn’t make me less of a positive person. It makes me . . . a person.

To feel these things is human. Acknowledging them, it turns out, can be a form of courage, too.

My Story: Epilogue

My mother came to visit me in early spring, nearly two years after I was married, just a few months before I finished my last college classes. In the previous four years, I had only scraped by three years’ worth of credits. I knew that the end of my classes would not bring a walk across the stage or a diploma to hang on the wall for me. But I also knew, deep in my heart, that it was the right time. It was time for me to be done with school for the present; to focus my energy on taking care of myself and keeping things running smoothly at home. I had learned that it was possible for me to go to school part-time—but when I did, I found I couldn’t do anything else. Keeping one or two classes each semester was a grueling effort for me, demanding all of my time, attention, and energy, and leaving absolutely nothing left of me when I was finished.

It had been a difficult decision to make, but the raw grief that I had felt two years before, when I first realized that graduation might not be in the cards for me, had mostly dissipated. I was tired now, worn down by the endless barrage of health problems and the pressure to keep up with what should have been a light load. I was ready to be done, ready to have the energy to explore other parts of myself again.

That week, as my mother and I sat together at my kitchen table, she asked me if I felt like I had had a “good college experience.”

The question took me by surprise. I had certainly not had a typical college experience; after my first few semesters, I’d had to pull more and more away from the rigor of the academic environment I loved. By necessity, I’d had to learn to find my own identity in something other than the world of scholarship. I’d spent the past two years discovering how much there was to love in my newfound role as a homemaker; I’d learned to take satisfaction in keeping a house of order, and to approach a new recipe with the same zeal I’d previously felt for literary criticism.

I sat at the table, the silver afternoon light of late March diffusing through the windows, and thought about it.

“Yes,” I said finally. “I have.”

Then I added that focus of the last two years had certainly not been a quintessential college experience, but that they had still been good. Very good, in fact.

“I feel… fulfilled,” I said, realizing as I said it that it was true.

Somehow, in the slow passing of days and weeks and years, fulfillment had crept into my heart. I realized, sitting there at the kitchen table, that I was content—that even though the path my life had taken was so different than the one I had expected, I was still happy. My days felt full of beauty; I had learned that even something as simple as loading the dishwasher could feel meditative, fulfilling, if I only opened my eyes.

So yes, I thought. Typical or not, my college experience has been a good one.

.   .   .   .   .

It’s been more than two years since that conversation with my mom. Like everyone, my life is filled with ups and downs, and I still have far too many moments of doubt and insecurity. And yet, the contentment remains. The fulfillment remains. I have come to love this life I’m living, even if it’s not the one I had planned for myself. It’s a continual process, a journey of discovery and delight.

And when I look back on it, even with all the bumps, I can’t deny:

I’m glad to have had the ride.

On Time

Since we’ve made the decision to move, everything seems to be moving at a quicker pace. Actually, it could have started moving at a quicker pace when I found out I was pregnant for the second time; an allusion to what will come of two children underfoot. Like any good holiday weekend, we are spending time with family. Yesterday, as the grill was smoking, and music was playing (Nina Simone) my dad was in the process of fixing the old screen door. Charley loves my dad, his Pop-Pop, and was right there with him, with his own kiddie toolbox, a weathered paint-chipped yellow tackle-box my dad had given him. He is barely as tall as Pop-Pop’s knee, and took out his little plastic pliers, to match my dad’s real metal ones, to twist the door frame. There was much grunting and production involved. And I stood just inside the porch watching them thinking, These days are numbered, and it almost made me cry. Something about being a parent makes you see time more clearly, see that it will pass, that it is a constant. This is a comfort for stressful periods, when you think you can’t make it any further, and a sadness for happy periods, when you wish the night would never end. It’s striking me much more with this second pregnancy. I see my husband and our life together stretching infinitely ahead of us. We have so many memories yet to make, traditions to start. I want to make renting a beach house every summer a tradition, we’ve only talked about it for several years! We have our ritual of only $20 gifts for each other at Christmas, a chance to be creative and thrifty. And I see my past with my family, all the memories already made, history that won’t be forgotten. So many family vacations and apple picking trips, beach days, and snow days, and all the days in between. I am standing in the middle wondering, How did I get here?

There is truth to that Talking Heads song:

You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? 

But perhaps I am feeling overly nostalgic because my brother, my LITTLE brother will soon graduate college, and when we visited a quaint Pennsylvania college the other weekend, and had lunch at a hipster café, I felt old. More than the extra pregnancy weight and the tiredness of chasing a toddler, I looked at the young college girls, so oblivious to anything else but themselves, and thought ‘I don’t see myself there anymore’. They were giggling, wearing their sweatpants to breakfast just rolling out of bed at 11 am, ordering their omelets with only egg whites, and nobody looked twice at my toddler running around.

I am scared of the day when weddings and births turn into funerals, and wonder when that day will come. When it does, there will be an irreplaceable chasm that opens up. I know there will be comfort in my own family, my roots I am just starting to set down. But I will wonder how I made it that far, and how I will carry on.

A Back-to-School Tribute

Before each school year begins, I try to center myself. I organize supplies, I write lesson plans, I memorize my schedule. These sort of tasks, however, aren’t enough and I always find myself reflecting on teaching itself, in the broadest possible sense. I came to teaching late. My first foray into a classroom in a role other than student was when I began my graduate program the summer I turned twenty-five. I felt old, and compared to many of my fellow students, I was old. One of the first things we were asked as we began our studies was to think about the teachers who had impacted us and why that was.

It’s a simple question, nearing cliché. For me, it was easy to answer. My high school Latin teacher, Miss Ede Ashworth, made me crave her praise. I was not the sort of student who yearned for a close relationship with a teacher, or to be pushed to my limits, or to be made to cry by a profound lesson a la Dead Poets Society. I was jaded in high school, arrogant about my self-perceived intelligence, and wary of adults, particularly teachers. Miss Ashworth’s skill and style penetrated my overconfidence and my (probably highly-irritating) cynicism. Her brilliance came from being able to do this without my ever feeling as though she was trying to do exactly that.

I should point out here that Miss Ashworth is a highly-lauded teacher, winning awards that have acknowledged and rewarded her preternatural skill in the classroom.  She managed to bring out the best in so many students, and she did it without seeming to modify her approach or system for any individual learners in the room.  This is nearly unheard of in conversations about good teaching where the norm is to consider the diversity of learners in a classroom and differentiate instruction as needed to reach as many students of possible. This was not necessary for Miss Ashworth---like an elite athlete, she was unfazed by changes in routine, student behavior, or fire drills, and managed to execute well every single class period.

She was teaching Latin, a language so regimented that it can turn off even the most academically-minded student. She required us to make flashcards for every single vocabulary word we learned – a requirement I hated because I didn’t feel as though I needed them.  However, other students made great use of flashcards, and I learned later that while I may not have needed to use the flashcards myself, she had cagily instilled in me the discipline of careful review and preparation. This discipline was key to my perseverance while studying Latin in college.

She told us little about herself, leaving an aura of mystery around her that my classmates and I attempted to shatter through the sort of speculation (“do you think Miss Ashworth ever watches television?) usually reserved for elementary school students. She was always impeccably prepared for class, never seemed to be absent, and could be found before and after school for extra help or to answer questions.

When I did my student teaching, my cooperating teacher told me that he believed there were two core qualities that every teacher must have: she should love the subject matter and appreciate the joys and challenges of working with young people. Miss Ashworth’s love for Latin was palpable---she drove us all over the state to participate in the Junior Classical League, and she ran a yearly Foreign Language Week at school that was driven primarily by her sheer enthusiasm. She had us do art projects about the Romans, she had us travel all over the tri-state area to museums to see relevant exhibits, and she made sure that her students took opportunities to share their knowledge of the language with others. And, even more importantly, while she had very high standards for both academic work on behavior, I remember not one moment when she seemed disdainful when we were rowdy, unfocused, or both.

When I was a senior, I was the only student that year to enroll in Advanced Placement Latin. Before the year began, I wondered what it would be like to be in a one-on-one setting. Would it be odd? I was nervous, because part of what Miss Ashworth did so well was treat all of us remarkably warmly, without ever creating too much familiarity. It ended up (unsurprisingly) being the best learning experience of my high school years. Her gentle guidance as I tried to decide which college attend (never saying what I should or should not do) helped steady me. The intensity of the AP curriculum and how desperately I wanted to please her led me to work incredibly hard and reap the rewards.

Thus, as I begin each new school year, I think back to what it was like to be in Miss Ashworth’s classes. I am not yet a fraction of the teacher that she is, and likely never will be, but her example often inspires me to think more critically about how I am approaching both my students and the subject matter. I ask myself what she might do in a particular situation, and I realize now how much work, dedication, and attention to detail went into all of those seemingly effortless lessons. Each time I sneak in explaining a Latin root into one of my classes, I feel the same old excitement that I used to feel in the windowless classroom that she made crackle with language. Although I had no idea at the time that I would ever be a high school teacher, I am forever grateful that I was able to spend forty-eight minutes every day for four years watching her work.

The DIY Illusion

Long before Pinterest, which seems to have become the ultimate repository of DIY dreams, I was cursed with the insatiable desire to surround myself with beautiful and interesting things and to announce proudly to the world that “I did it myself.” This urge to emulate the creations and achievements of others extends even beyond the realm of tactile objects to skills and feats as well. When I visit a museum, I can’t help but think, “I will return next week and copy the masters!” When I discover that someone has written a poem a day for a year, I think, “What a great idea! I should do it too!”

This impulse has resulted in a number of false starts. I seem to recall joining one of those 356 groups on Flickr and subsequently following through for about three of 356 days. After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I bought an “Easy Italian Reader” and a yoga mat, both of which have seen embarrassingly little use since their addition to my collection of very-useful-yet-unused self-improvement tools.

I know I’m not the only one. Tutorials, how-tos, and advice columns make up some of the most popular information on the internet. We want to know, in 500 words or less, how to build our own websites, sweep own our hair up into classy side chignons, and paint striking works of modern art for our homes.

Don’t get me wrong—I love reading this stuff, and I love writing it too. I am a strong advocate for homemade food and handmade things and tools for self-improvement. But I often find that I don’t give enough consideration to the “yourself” aspect of DIY inspiration. I so easily forget to account for where I'm starting from. I see a hair tutorial and try to ignore the fact that my hair is the frizzy, chaotic alter ego of the long, silky locks in the photo. I see “Easy Italian Reader” and realize much later that I still can’t read it if my Italian vocabulary is limited to food terms.

This is not to say that we should all abandon our DIY dreams and leave the doing and creating and achieving to the experts and professionals. There’s certainly nothing wrong with gathering inspiration from the creations and achievements and adventures of others. But if I hope to cultivate motivation from the things that inspire me, rather than disappointment at my failure to replicate them, perhaps a bit more self-reflection is in order.

The DIY illusion is not the idea that we can do things ourselves. Every piece of inspiration we encounter broadens our sense of what’s possible. There’s certainly room in this world for more faith in what each of us is capable of. The illusion to be wary of, however, is that we can do new and unfamiliar things quickly and effortlessly, if only we had the right tools or the time to watch a five-minute instructional video.

So the next time I file away a glamorous photo or add a new how-to book to my wishlist, I hope to take some time to differentiate between inspiration and aspiration. Often what’s most inspiring about beautiful creations and fantastic achievements is not the glamorous photo of the end result to which we may aspire but the story of the person or people behind it, the combination of time, talent, learning, commitment, failure, and perseverance that made what’s possible real.

Lessons from a conference...

Dearest Clara,

We’ve been on the go a lot, both with and without you, these last few weeks.  Most recently, I was in New York again, but this time for a conference.  I seem to have a lot of those---some for my day job, and a lucky few just for my own interests.  Conferences can be a little intimidating, a bit like the first day of school.  And when those presenting and attending are people whom you’ve long admired and want to learn from, you always wonder what your place is.  You wonder if you will be brave enough to talk to people.  And you’ll always wonder what you’ll say as you work up your nerve.   These are the things that have helped me in these kinds of events:

• Bring lots of business cards: It’s a great way to break the ice and it’s a great way to have something to talk about.  And bring more than you think you’ll need---you’ll give them about because you meet people, because you have to leave one with your luggage, because you’ll want to leave behind your contact information, or enter to win something.  Just have lots---I promise you’ll use them.
• Know something about those speaking: They took the time to prepare a presentation, so take the time to prepare and learn something about them.  That way, if you have the opportunity to meet them or sit next to them at part of the event, you already have a few things you can go to when making conversation.
• Remember most people---even if they don’t show it---are just as nervous: Don’t be intimidated.  Everyone else is outside of their comfort zone too.  Introduce yourself, bring others in if you see they want to be part of the conversation, and don’t sweat it if a conversation doesn’t go the way you planned.  Try to be an even more friendly and approachable version of yourself, and be inclusive.
• It’s okay to take a break: Sometimes conferences and events can become overwhelming---they’re full of people we don’t know, and hopefully new ideas we haven’t seen.  It’s tough to be always “on,” and the days can become long.  It’s okay to duck out for a few minutes into a corner or quiet space, or even take an hour back at the hotel to decompress and reset.
• Go to more than one! Believe it or not, these things get easier over time, and when you’re a repeat visitor, you always know someone too, which makes for smoother sailing.  All of the sudden, you become the person that others come to see.  A few events a year where you’re exposed to new people and new ideas are good to stimulate your own ideas---choose wisely but make the investment!

Now back to the sessions!

All my love,

Mom

“I’m just trying to change the color on your mood ring”

A few Christmases ago my mom slipped a mood ring among the chocolate coins and trinkets in my stocking. She gave my husband the color key.  Brilliant, I know. I consider myself to be a fairly chill girl, but even with all my zen, I am still sometimes overtaken by wild emotions, by bad moods, by the little things that get in the way. I’m proud to say that it happens less frequently now than at any previous time in my life.  Somewhere along the way, I made a decision.  I decided that I control my emotions, rather than them controlling me.

Sounds like a crazy self-help book right?  I know.  Put into words it seems silly, but the simplicity seems to work for me, enough that by now it has become habit and I don’t have to repeat the silly words to myself.

When something I can’t control upsets my equilibrium and threatens to send me into a funk, I make a conscious decision to not let it get to me.  I hype myself up, metaphorically dust my shoulders off (to quote a second rap lyric), and step forward, leaving the drama of a mood swing behind me.  And it works . . . most of the time.

Something as simple as choosing to look forward, choosing not to dwell in negatives, almost always gets me back to center. Sometimes though, I need an extra step: a cat-nap with headphones, a happy nail polish color, a pint of ice cream, a date with Aaron Sorkin.  Whatever external action perks up my mood.  And it works . . . most of the time.

But then there are those moments, the imagined slights, the could’ve/would’ve/should’ve, and the worst, knowing I somehow shortchanged myself.  That, for me, can be the start of a spiral.  I don’t scream or yell (although perhaps I should). When I get down on myself, it’s internal.  I second guess everything I do.  I can’t find the right words to express myself.  I almost literally feel outside of my body; disconnected from my soul. I can feel my skin crawl.  I sound crazy to my own ears.  Now a simple nap with an Oasis album or a bottle of OPI isn’t going to cut it. The only cure is time, usually a good night sleep.

You may have surmised that I was similarly waylaid this week.  I didn’t do my best on a project and it ate away at me for a little while.  I’ve avoided the mood swing, but I’m still a bit down.  And so I’m asking: How do you turn a bad mood around?

What August Means Now

By Carrie Allen Tipton For those invested in academic pursuits, August marks time like no other month. It speaks of newness and transition in a way that other folks more readily associate with January and its resolutions, or October and its changing leaves, or March and its budding limbs. August’s gift (or curse) of hyper-awareness of the passage of time blesses (or afflicts) tiny kindergartners no less than aged professors. Whether you are on the making or receiving end of a syllabus or book list in the upcoming educational year, the month delineates for all school-oriented persons the End of Something and the Beginning of Something Else.

As a student, this weird blurry month, neither fully summerish nor yet fully schoolish, meant shopping for clothes, finding color-coded folders, looking for the precise metric specifications of binders stated on the supply list, searching for a new and cooler (is there such a thing?) lunchbox. In the university years there were the added tasks of purchasing football tickets and meal plans. After many years of dutifully carrying out these sorts of instructions, I became a professor and began giving them to others. The road to this position was long and many times I have questioned whether it was, in that extremely charged yet vague term which indexes a host of existential presuppositions, “worth it.” Suffice it to say that it required many years of very long hours of single-minded focus and a willingness to live below the poverty line for the better part of a decade. Fine. It was over now, and I was professoring. In this new capacity, my old friend August meant screening books for readings lists, determining test schedules, building online class modules, anxiously checking electronic enrollment in the hopes that a course wouldn’t be canceled, dodging onerous committee work, applying for travel funding, and plotting out research goals.

For twenty-eight years, then, some version or other of me was essentially still Going To School every fall, and August meant what it always had: a physical and cognitive return to the educational premises. And then all of a sudden this year August stopped meaning anything like it once did. In late spring, I became pregnant with our first child. Let me, as I used to say to my students during lectures when an idea required further explanation, hit the pause button here. If this were an academic article, you would now be treated to a lengthy footnote about how I’d always hoped that if I ever had a child, I could stay home with it until it was school-aged. This was a simple and uncomplicated desire that could afford to remain simple and uncomplicated as long as it was theoretical. While there was no viable life-partner in the picture, such a decision was lodged (like so many of my academic ruminations) in the realm of abstract thought, and so it stayed for all of my adult life until I met my future husband two years ago, a mere year into my professorial career. And based on my longstanding desire, prior to our marriage, we agreed that I would stay home with the wee ones if wee ones ever materialized, at least in their early years. I would try freelance writing, editing, and perhaps some online teaching.

It would make a lot of sense, we figured, since I was quite unhappy as a professor and earned proportionately little money for my trouble. Pace Anne-Marie Slaughter, whose insightful article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Atlantic, but the thought of trying to have it all has always seemed to me quite exhausting. I just wanted some of it, and the part of it that I wanted changed as I walked through different seasons of life. So the decision was in place long before the baby ever was. It was still abstract and simple and uncomplicated, until the day in early April when two drugstore tests set the pre-arranged plan into motion. As I began the process of disentangling myself from a tenure-track job at my university, I felt liberated from unfulfilling employment, eager to spend the fall months prior to the baby’s arrival immersed in my beloved writing, and proud for being willing to run screaming from the ivory tower after three years of soul-searching that showed it to be an ill fit for me. I still do feel those things, and harbor no golden nostalgia for the frustrations of the career path I left. But what I do harbor is a giant question mark about who I am now, especially while my daughter is still an “inside baby,” and who I will be in the remaining months of her gestation, and who I will become as she emerges, and how we will become something together. Abstraction, simplicity, and lack of complication are rapidly eroding as I find myself in the midst of a new kind of August, and I have had to learn all over again what it means this year.

So far it has meant knowing, for the first time in my life, the months spanned by peach season, and that early August represented the final window of opportunity for capitalizing on the soft round spheres. I made a peach ricotta tart and did not make a syllabus. It has meant starting yoga classes, in the middle of the day, to help with my achy joints and to communicate with my girlie, my changing positions a sort of Morse code telegraphing her to be strong and peaceful and that I will try to be strong and peaceful for her. I sat in a roomful of people with legs crossed on rubber mats and did not sit in a roomful of people in pre-semester meetings. I measured for and ordered drapes and marched through Ikea looking for mounting hardware. I put up sheer taupe curtains in our living room and did not put books on an office bookshelf. I wrote and wrote and wrote and did not aim to produce a single article intended for a peer-reviewed journal. I am not sad, but August is feeling weird.

An entire book has been written about the difficulties and joys of either combining motherhood and academia or leaving the latter for the former, so I should have known that August wouldn’t sit right this time around. Reading Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life assured me that I wasn’t crazy for feeling dazed disorientation as I walked out of the halls of academia into the blazing sunlight of other paths. Of course it made sense that I was losing my emotional footing in the bright light of August, which every other year meant that I should be walking into the university instead of away from it. I still can’t see quite where I am headed and am only accepting, day by day, what this August means. To borrow the phrase of an incomparably greater wordsmith, T.S. Eliot, “in my end is my beginning.” August has always at its heart represented new beginnings for me, and although something large and weighty has come to an end, many other things have now begun. And when I think of this, I think that perhaps, after all, this August is not so very unlike the ones that have come before.

Looking Forward: Rethinking the Ladder

Growing up, my vision of “going to work” was extremely narrow. I pictured myself click-clacking down office hallways in high-heeled shoes. I imagined sitting at a desk lined with silver picture frames, shuffling endless stacks of papers, a telephone receiver balanced on my shoulder. The job itself was never entirely clear but it was obvious that the woman I would become was successful, powerful, and very, very important. Cut to the present. Most days, you’ll find me perched at my dining table, typing away at my computer next to a window that overlooks my building’s disarrayed jungle of a backyard. There’s not a silver frame or leather briefcase in sight, and I don’t own a single business suit. My uniform of choice usually involves a vintage dress and bare feet---no click-clacking heels for me.

As a relative newcomer to the freelance world, I realize that while I’m extremely lucky, my career is far from what the average New Yorker would consider “successful,” “powerful,” or “important.” It’s challenging, exciting, liberating, unconventional---but lucrative? Glamorous? Cosmopolitan? Not quite.

“If you really pushed yourself,” a friend very kindly said to me recently, “you could go so far. I see you running your own business. You could be a total power player at the top of your field.”

Of course, this was a nice thing to hear. Surprising, but nice. There’s a reason I’ve chosen to sacrifice certain things, however---a steady paycheck, employer-provided healthcare, the comfort of a routine---in order to follow the path I’m on. It’s because in the past year, I’ve thought seriously about what I want to prioritize. For some people, that might be the pursuit of a high-powered career---and I think that ambition is wonderful. For myself, though---and it feels a little funny to admit this---having a successful career is just not that high on my list. I have goals, of course, and I hope to always be involved in creative projects throughout my life, but as far as being a “power player”? Putting in long hours at an office? Moving up the corporate ladder? It’s just not me.

I like to think that my life doesn’t have to conform to a traditional image of success to be successful. I'm willing to sacrifice a higher-paying job and a certain amount of security to pursue what's meaningful to me.

When I look back on my life in forty years, what do I think will make me happiest?

Having traveled.

Having had adventures.

Having loved.

Having been a good mother.

Having been a student of music, food, art, and culture around the world.

Having taken risks.

Having helped others. 

Sounds successful, powerful, and very, very important to me.

On Being Unmarried

The assumption was that I would go with him.  The whole time that Zack was filling out his applications; that we were reading and rereading his submission essays; that we were laughing about ending up in Tempe or Boston or Pasadena-–-the assumption was that I would go with him.   Two years earlier, he had left San Francisco to help me pursue my dreams in New York City.  Now we were both ready for a new adventure, a global roll of the dice, letting fate and admissions officers decide where we would land.  On the day he would hear back from his first choice school in London early that March morning, his whole body was shaking as he clicked open the email.  “I got in,” he said, his eyes telling me and questioning me at the same time.  “I got in.”  In my mind, my bags were already packed. And then the government stepped in.  I’d assumed that, with my freelance job, I could simply pop over to Europe whenever my tourist visa for the UK expired.  A quick search online proved me wrong.  On a tourist visa, I would be allowed to stay in the UK for six months out of every twelve.  Period, or as the Brits say, full stop.  I looked at the screen despairingly, picturing seeing my boyfriend for only half of every year, of being unsettled and without a real home to call my own for the next two.  We had our relationship to consider; we had my mental health.  We had, perhaps most importantly, a very needy cat.

At this point in the story, my friends and family often ask why Zack and I didn’t just get married.  It’s a fair question-–-we’ve been dating for almost five years and still actually like each other.  We talk about the future as a statement, not a question, and split holidays between our family’s houses.  It would’ve been an easy visa to get, the only kind of romantic relationship that, for better or worse, is accepted without question around this country and the world.

Yet.

When I get married, I want it to be because there was a moment where a man-–-my man-–-looked at me and decided he couldn’t foresee a life without me.  I want to get married because my partner and I are ready not to build a family-–-kids, in my opinion, have little to do with marriage-–-but be a family, just the two of us as a unit, together.  As a fairly pragmatic person, there’ve been too many events in my life that have taken place for the sake of convenience.  Zack and I moved in together after six months because his lease ended and it was cheaper.  I spent years wondering when I would have made that choice naturally, if it were left as simply a choice to make.  I don’t want my marriage to be like that.

I’m proud to announce that Zack and I are happily unmarried partners.  Thanks to the state of New York, we now have a document that declares us in all of our unmarried glory.  It means we’ve been living together, in a serious relationship, for at least two years.  It means I can ride in an ambulance with him, and that’s about it.  I don’t have access to his healthcare (national health care in UK, here I come!).  We can’t file tax returns together, he doesn’t get access to my money or I to his, and, if we choose to, either of us can dissolve our partnership with the click of a mouse on an online form.  It’s exactly enough to get me a visa to go to London, so that my partner and I can continue to live our lives together, happily unmarried.  There’s plenty of time for the rest later.