Looking Forward: Giving Thanks.

It was a warm day at the Brooklyn Flea. Shoppers showed their shoulders, and drank watermelon agua frescas on ice; perused beer crates filled with records that smelled of dust and squeezed un-socked feet into vintage shoes several sizes too small. Summer was on its way. It would be my first in New York City. “I need to find an air conditioner for my room,” I said to my housemate, Maya, who’d accompanied me. “But it needs to be a cheap one,” I added, “because I’m broke.”

Not ten minutes passed before a familiar face materialized in the crowd---a friend of my family’s whose wife was expecting. “I’m clearing space in our apartment for the baby,” he told me after we’d said hello. “Getting rid of tons of stuff. Know anyone who needs an AC?”

Later, on the way home, I remarked that the city’s demand for constant movement---subway stairs, mad dashes for the bus, long walks cross-town---made my body ache. “I wonder if there’s a yoga studio near our apartment?” I asked Maya, casting sideward glances around our desolate, warehouse-ridden block.

A woman passed to our left, holding a stack of papers in her hand. “Coupons for free yoga?”

---

There’s no elegant way to put what I’m about to say.

For much of my life, things have more or less fallen into my lap.

It’s almost embarrassing to admit, though I can certainly claim very little credit for the way things have happened in my life. My friends call it Shoko luck, and it’s something I’ve always been reluctant to acknowledge, for fear of completely jinxing it---whatever it is. It’s happened on a large scale (jobs, travel), and in smaller instances, as well (free yoga in graffiti-bathed Bushwick). “I’m just lucky, I guess,” has forever been my sheepish explanation.

This year, though, things have been different. They've been hard. They've fallen apart. I’ve had my own (admittedly benign) version of a quarter-life crisis. I’ve experienced anxiety on levels I hadn’t previously known were possible. Nothing's come easily, or fallen out of the sky,  or shown up on my doorstep wrapped in ribbon.

Life feels changed. But not in a bad way.

As I mentioned recently on my blog (and in many instances here), I’ve been experiencing it all, beauty and terror. I’m embracing it and loving it and hating it all at the same time. Writing about all of this on the Equals Record has been terrifying---but ultimately more rewarding than I could ever have anticipated. (By the way, that’s thanks entirely to you, wonderful readers.)

Equally unexpected? The fact that, curiously, mysteriously, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

This---knowing this---makes me lucky. Vastly so.

For that---and many, many other things, too---I give thanks.

The 90/10 Ratio

I read a great article recently about parenting where they mentioned that it was 90% work and 10% meaningful fun. I suppose that’s one of the biggest surprises about parenting is how much work it truly is. I spend more hours of my day cleaning, cooking, doing the laundry and dishes, than I do interacting with Charley. He watches way too much TV since I’m exhausted and pregnant, and in those tiring afternoon hours when he’s not napping I think I’ve failed at it all. (Although he is learning quite a lot about trucks.) But then we have these small moments that are worth everything. The other evening after a tumultuous afternoon nap where he woke up crabby and I did too, we turned off the TV and went to the playroom. Before kids I wanted to be one of those cool stay at home moms that came up with fun crafts and cooked with her kids all the time. The reality is that I am so exhausted I occasionally let him help bake something, but usually I just make peanut butter and jelly. And crafts, forget it. The second I think about attempting one of those quaint glitter-covered paper pumpkins on Pinterest, all I can picture is the massive amount of clean-up that will be involved. But the other night I set it all aside, grabbed some craft paper and traced Charley’s hand to make little turkeys. I didn’t use glitter or glue, just crayons and paper, and the whole thing lasted about ten minutes before he was bored. But in those ten minutes when the Christmas music was playing and the windows were open with a cool breeze (we live in Florida, this is our best time) I was happy.

Even yesterday, I had this funny déjà vu moment of remembering my childhood. We were out on the porch, eating cut sandwiches of ham and cheese and pretzels in little snack baggies. Charley was in his bright red and yellow Fisher Price car, the same one my parents have photos of me in when I was a child, and I thought about being a little kid on the beach, eating sandwiches and Cheetos that my dad packed me for lunch. The moment was sad and happy at the same time. It was the realization that I was no longer in that place, but I was slowly finding that place for myself.

I often fall into the trap of feeling like I could be doing more. More of anything; more cooking, more teaching, more sex. That I could be less tired all the time, and try harder. It’s tough to feel like you are constantly not living up to your parenting expectations. But then I think back to all my favorite memories, and I’m sure those were the rare 10%. So perhaps that’s all they really remember anyway. I hope.

Knitting for Writers

No, this is not the name of a ridiculous fundraiser. And it’s not a title for one of those “How to . . . for Dummies” books either. I took up knitting during my last year of graduate school. I had received a starter knitting kit, complete with gigantic needles, two balls of very chunky yarn, and instructions for basic projects, during the previous year. After a couple of false starts, I left it propped against the wall in the corner for many months. Since I couldn’t knit my first row perfectly, I was determined to give up altogether.

But as I launched into my last year of studies, I felt smothered by the weight of so many books that needed to be read and so many papers that needed to be written. I felt like I was climbing a mountain whose summit I couldn’t see. As part of me began to hunker down and plow through the work, another part of me came up for air, grasping for something tactile to hold onto.

I was searching desperately for something that was not a four-syllable word or an idea about a theory about a concept. I wanted a real thing, with measurable weight and texture and vivid color. Hence, the knitting.

I remember the false starts, when I tossed the needles aside in frustration, but I don’t remember beginning in earnest. Before long, I had transformed a ball of thick, scratchy yarn into a very ugly, very square-shaped hat, which I gifted to my sister, who wore it with pride on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the hat, I gave up on interesting shapes and focused simply on flat rectangles—potholders, scarves, and lately, a blanket. I realized that my delight had nothing to do with the complexity or practicality of the project, but simply with the joy of transforming one thing into another.

For a while, I had a thing for fancy yarns and would scour the aisles of yarn shops for the softest possible yarns (alpaca, cashmere) and the warmest colors I could find (brick red, mustard yellow). Eventually, though, I settled on an armful of the simplest undyed yarn I could find, along with a pair of circular needles. I wasn’t sure what I would make, exactly. I only knew that it would be very big and very flat. I just wanted to knit and knit and keep on knitting without stopping for a very long time.

In the midst of all of that knitting, I wrote my papers. I wrote them without all of the hair pulling and teeth grinding I had done in my first year of the program. I wrote them without that terrible sense of sprinting and crashing I’d had before, and without the all-nighters. I chugged along steadily, picking up with each new paper just as soon as I’d tied off the ends of the one before. I knitted, I wrote, and at long last, I graduated.

Of course, this is not to say that it was only knitting that saved me, or that it wasn’t still a very hard year. It’s just to say that sometimes it helps to come at a thing indirectly, that sometimes it takes a bit of creativity to generate momentum, and that discipline grows with steady practice over time.

One Bad Mother

I have the video monitor on with the sound turned way up. I listen with one ear perked to her noisy, clogged breathing---such an adorable, pathetic, concerning sound emanating from our miniature person with a cold.  I glance periodically at the screen, whose camera looks like it is hunting for paranormal activity.  I flash on all the tasks that should consume the rest of my evening---the tasks left hanging from a never-ending work day.  It is 8:38 PM and I wonder how much steam I've got left before that heavy molasses feeling envelops my brain.  I am distracted momentarily by her flipping over, sighing a little and registering a tiny complaint.  My resolve begins to waver and now I'm considering the consequences of simply climbing into bed at this point with the monitor and a magazine.  Or better yet, scooping her up out of the crib and bringing her into bed with me.  In weeks like this one, there are days when I spend more time watching her on the monitor than I do holding her in my arms. Even a generation ago, I am not sure women allowed themselves the luxury to think about work-life balance in the way that we do now.  Today, as I was frantically rushing home to catch 20 minutes with the baby before bedtime, I thought about how lucky I am to even consider such a notion.  How fortunate that I have the education, training, and capacity to work outside the home in the first place, let alone be daunted by how to thrive in two environments.  My work is meaningful to me, it is in a chosen field, and I have a large measure of control over my schedule.  I am not limited to an exclusive childcare role nor am I forced to work a job that is dangerous, unsatisfying or menial.  When I zoom out on my scenario, I realize how refined and esoteric my dilemma might seem to some.  In fact, in an ideal world, more women would face this kind of dilemma---one in which they are choosing among many good options for childcare and have the privilege of participating an elevating career.

It would appear that whether or not women (and many men) have had the consciousness or the language to describe it, this struggle is ages old.  I try to recall how my own mother dealt with managing work and home life.  I don't ever remember noticing her being particularly tired, lacking the energy to make things happen at home or even seeming anxious about her responsibilities.  She consistently helped with homework, threw some hot meal on the table (albeit rarely cooked by her) and made it to all our games/performances.  Although she worked full-time, I always had access to her on the phone.  She arranged for school pickups and shuttling to activities with others if she was unable to coordinate her schedule.  We definitely reconvened each night as a family and this seemed to re-set the connectedness.  I do remember a general sense of wishing I could spend more time with my mother and vaguely complaining about this in moments.  But weekends were exclusively devoted to us and our needs and whatever else was happening during my parents' busy lives, it was clear we were the priority.  Of course she had help, as I do, with housework and childcare.  Oh and did I mention she had five kids?

When I ask my mother these days about what it was like for her raising a brood and working full time, she admits to feelings of guilt, mostly about not being enough or doing enough at home.  She was always highly competent and effective at work---in her mind, it was home that suffered.  Although it was not our experience that she dropped any particular ball, I have more insight now into how she must have lived with powerful ambivalence.  It is also worth noting that my parents literally never took a single vacation on their own or did any individualized, enriching, adult activities.  This is the one area where I picture doing things a little differently.  As much as I can't begin to process the demands on their time for all those years, I hope/plan to delineate more regular space for my marriage and more escape for myself.

Sometimes my mother says to me, "Oh, well, you know it was easier back then."  I have some sense that she is right about that but neither of us can put our finger on exactly why this is true.  I think for one, it required less money and less time at work to be a solidly middle class family and achieve financial flexibility.  I also think there was more neighborly and community support built in to people's lives.  Perhaps the expectations on adults and children were also more reasonable---not everybody was supposed to a "Super" anything?  The fact remains that we had soccer, art class, piano lessons et al and my parents were pulled in a zillion directions.  Still, I can't access a single episode of a legitimate melt down---the machinery always moved fairly seamlessly forward.

The guilt I feel about missing time with our baby casts long shadows and tugs at me throughout the day.  I genuinely imagine that she might develop a greater attachment to the baby sitter during weeks when their time together is more enduring.  When I come home and she instantly lurches forward from the babysitter's arms for me to hold her and proceeds to cling to me like a chimp for the remainder of the evening, it brings some secret satisfaction.  The selfish side of me is relieved when she demonstrates a touch of separation anxiety, howling when I leave the room.  I want her to be securely attached, but I also want to know she prefers me to anyone and won't forget that during the many hours I am away.

I am proud of my work and know it is critical to my identity to have a holistic sense of self.  I recognize it is good for my daughter to establish her independence and be cared for by many different loving adults.  I reaffirm that I want to be her primary and central model of a woman with a career.  This doesn't mean I don't cry at my desk mulling the fact that she might take her first steps today and I could miss it.  This is the fulsome experience of the modern woman/parent.

In my view, it is not so much about figuring out how to have it all as it is being happily immersed in what you are doing at any given moment.  I think anyone who presents as having each domain of life under control is hiding something or is teetering on the brink.  I respect and appreciate the women in my life who admit to questioning their many roles and evaluating their health and sanity with respect to each of them.

By 10:17 PM I had done nothing but write this piece and pump 5 ounces of breast milk before I packed it in for the night.  Then again, I guess that is something.

Photo of Sarah: Buck Ennis for Crain's New York Business.

A Responsibility to Love

Last week Roxanne wrote a post titled The Responsibility to Love. I encourage you to follow the link and read it if you haven’t already, Roxanne’s writing is always timely, poignant, and thoughtful.  You should also read her post, because I’m not going to recap her words here, only the title. For a week I’ve had those four words running through my head: A Responsibility To Love.  The sheer power of that phrase has reverberated deep in my soul and subconscious.  What does it mean? What does it mean for me? A Responsibility To Love.

Love is one of those words that fits multiple parts of speech.  It can be a thing, a metaphorical place, an emotion, an adverb, and of course, a verb.  To Love. I love many people; I love my best friends, my family, my husband.  I often have very strong feelings for my first cup of coffee in the morning too, but let’s forget about loving things for now.  Love can be stagnant; I will always love my parents. But as with anything, surely it’s better with a little effort. I love my parents much more because I know them as people and individuals; I know them because I talk with them often and communicate.  So I don’t just love them as my parents, but as individuals whom I know and respect.  But perhaps that is degrees of love, and not responsibility.

What does it mean to have a Responsibility To Love?  I think first, it means letting someone know that they are loved.  If you love someone, truly deeply love them, and you don’t express that, it’s a little like the tree falling in the forest.  Love isn’t something that is meant to be hidden or silenced; it should be shouted from the rooftops. If you love someone, I think you have a responsibility to let them know: initially, often, and frequently.

I also think with Love comes the responsibility of caring for someone.  Whether it is taking care of a spouse when they are ill, helping a friend through a breakup, or offering support whenever able, if you love someone you should be, to some extent, responsible for their wellbeing.  In a similar vein, I think it is important and necessary to care for the relationship.  I have a black thumb myself, but I’ll use the analogy anyway: just as a plant requires water and sunlight to bloom, a relationship requires care and contact to thrive and survive. (Luckily I am a much better friend than I am a gardener).

Finally, on a grander scale, I think A Responsibility To Love means that I have a responsibility to act with love.  Not only towards the select group of individuals that I love, but in everything I do.  Everyone loves Someone, and in the nature of 6 degrees, if you follow the connections long enough, eventually the someone that a stranger loves will come in contact with someone that I love.  Just as I want that person to be treated with kindness, I should treat the strangers I meet with the same. There is nothing wrong and everything right with spreading a little more love in the world.  From now on, I’m looking it as my responsibility; a responsibility to love.

Looking Forward: Free.

My dad left Glencoe, Illinois in 1960 to attend Antioch, a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was eighteen. Boyish, with hair cropped neatly above his ears. My grandparents accompanied him on his first day and helped him move in, unpacking his belongings from Nixon-stickered suitcases. Months later, he returned to Glencoe for Christmas vacation with his hair creeping to his shoulders. He wore a Peruvian cape with a gigantic winged collar, which caused him to resemble what he calls “a stoned, South American Dracula.” A neighbor who spotted him walking down the street called him a communist. (My dad remembers him as the most liberal man on the block.)

My grandmother cried. But my grandfather---whose stern countenance belied a love of race cars and a fondness for eccentricity---reacted differently. In him, my dad recalls detecting---faintly, secretly---a quiet glimmer of pride.

---

Twenty-five years later, I celebrated my thirteenth birthday. I woke up that morning feeling weighted with purpose. You’re not a child anymore, I thought to myself as I lay between sheets printed with happy-faced clouds.

“I’m going to be the best teenager in the world,” I told my parents, hardly able to imagine that I’d ever succumb to the hormonal turbulence I’d heard was in store for me.

And looking back, I made good on that promise---for the most part, anyway. While I may not have been the best teenager on the planet, I certainly must have been among the tamest. I (hardly) touched alcohol, and never laid a finger on a drug. I didn’t date til my senior year. I never uttered a swear word, and never once fought with my brother or my parents (people never believe that last one, but it’s true).

The funniest part about all of this is that my parents---who have always supported me in every decision I’ve made---did nothing to discourage me from doing the things I thought “bad” teenagers did. They told me they understood the temptation to experiment, and that there was nothing I could do that would ever make them love me less. Their only hope, they said, was that I would be safe. Everything in moderation.

Clearly, their tolerance and sensitivity were wasted on me.

But then I got older. And there came a point when trying to do everything well became impossible. Inevitably, there were job rejections. Failed relationships. Situations I wished I’d handled differently.

But I learned (slowly, the hard way) that life is infinitely more interesting---and much more fun---when it's allowed to be messy, embarrassing, complicated, noisy.  And with high school and college behind me, it's become less about doing things perfectly and more about doing things, period. Doing them, and feeling them, and thinking about them, and learning from them.

I no longer aspire to be perfect. And I think the people who know me best---my parents included---are happy for me. I’m learning to let myself live life with a full range of experiences. This process could maybe be referred to as rebellion. More accurately, though, I think it’s just openness.

The mother of one of my high school classmates published a note to her son in the senior pages of our yearbook which read, “Be free, and enjoy.”

I understand what she meant, and I’m doing that now. I think my grandfather would be proud.

Envy and Gratitude

For as long as I remember, I—like many girls—have loved the Anne of Green Gables series. Some of my earliest memories involve falling asleep at night to the sound of Meagan Follows reading Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea; to this day, there are whole passages of those particular books embedded in my subconscious, in Follows’ melodious voice. I have always found much to identify with in Anne Shirley; like Anne, I was an impetuous, talkative, dreamy child who used big words and was once paid money to keep quiet for ten minutes. (I succeeded, by the way.) Like Anne, as an adult I struggle with keeping my temper and tending to take life through a rather melodramatic lens. Even as a child, one of my favorite books in the series was also one of the less well-known: Anne’s House of Dreams, the fifth Anne book, which covers Anne’s first years of marriage to the swoon-worthy Gilbert Blythe. I’m not sure why, as a preteen, I found myself drawn to a book about new marriage—especially one that includes a heartbreaking subplot that still makes me cry every time I read it—but the love has persisted. Once I became a newlywed myself, and experienced, like Anne, the pangs of disappointed longing for motherhood, the book earned an even more special place in my heart.

One of the most interesting characters in Anne’s House of Dreams is Leslie Moore, the victim of a loveless marriage who is now left caring for her incapacitated husband in the wake of a traumatic brain injury. Leslie is complex and confusing, by turns sweet and sour; she becomes good friends with  Anne, but has a difficult time not being jealous of Anne’s newlywed bliss. Halfway through the book, after Anne suffers a tragedy herself, Leslie opens up about her conflicted feelings. Describing the first time she saw Anne driving into town with her new husband, Leslie says:

“I hated you in that very moment, Anne . . . it was because you looked so happy. Oh, you’ll agree with me now that I am a hateful beast—to hate another woman just because she was happy,—and when her happiness didn’t take anything from me!”

I must admit: every time I read about Leslie’s passionate jealousy, I feel something of a kinship. Envy has always been my besetting sin. I can vividly remember being fifteen years old, lying on my bed, my soul harrowed up with frustration over some now-forgotten inequality. I’ve always been prone to jealousy, coveting my friends’ lives, their children, the apparent ease that is always the illusion of a life seen from the outside. Like Leslie, I’ve been guilty of feeling anger at someone else for a happiness I couldn’t share, even when that happiness took nothing from me.

Earlier this year, I had had enough. I resolved that 2012 would be the year that I learn to overcome that natural jealousy, that I learn how to be truly content with my life exactly where it is, without feeling the need to look over my neighbor’s fence. And as I pondered, and journaled, and read, and soul-searched about the issue, I came up with a deceptively simple answer:

Live in gratitude. That was it. Could it really be that simple, I wondered? Could a life lived in gratitude have the power to overcome the vice I’d struggled with for twenty-four years?

I set about testing the principle out. I promised myself that the next time I caught myself looking with envy at somebody else’s life, I’d think instead, What they have is wonderful. But what I have is wonderful, too.

And, to my surprise, it worked. I felt myself becoming more and more aware of all of the things I loved about my life. I found that suddenly, even the things that hadn’t turned out in the way I wanted them to had become sources of blessings; I began to rejoice over all the unexpected twists and turns I’d encountered in my life and the exciting and unanticipated places they had taken me. I discovered, to my delight, that scenes and situations that had once filled me with jealousy and bitterness no longer disturbed my equanimity—unless I let them.

I was the “master of my fate,” I realized; it was up to me to decide what the condition of my heart would be on any given day. Simply the act of acknowledging my own power, and making a conscious choice to live in gratitude and let go of my envy, was bringing more change into my life than I ever could have imagined.

It hasn’t been a perfect, or a permanent, change, of course. Since that May day when I made my decision, I’ve experienced plenty of periods where I’ve let go, let frustration and ingratitude creep back into my life. Like anyone, I’ve had down days—but they have come less frequently than they did before.

As I write this, I find myself marveling over the difference that such a simple choice has made in my life. It seems silly, elementary, hardly worth discussing. But I can’t shake the idea that, this year, I have come upon the secret of happiness:

And its name is gratitude.

Beginning to End

I left Portland thinking that I was on the verge of becoming the person I wanted to be. My big dream had become a reality: I’d been accepted to graduate school. I was about to become scholar, a creative, a put-together person who listens to their voicemail. But now, here I was, putting on mascara at three o’clock in the afternoon. My first (and only) social interaction of the day would be with the clerk at the corner market. I’ve gotten to know the houses that sit between mine and the market. I walk there almost everyday for something, maybe green beans or licorice. Mostly I just need the air. The gardens have changed gradually since I moved in, but on this day the change was emphatic. The first frost had come the night before. And everywhere everything was dying. In front of the church, the snapdragons had been pulled out by their roots. The grass was wilted over and clinging limply to the curb.

Inside the store, Paul Simon’s Slip Sliding Away was on the radio. It was a song I'd heard a thousand times, but for the first time the words really shook me. Autumn---the celebrated season of New England---was giving way to the season I’d been warned about. All of it had gradually slipped away. Not just the season, even, but parts of myself, too. I hadn’t touched my camera in months. Somewhere I'd stopped being the girl chasing her dreams and had become the girl crying in a grocery store aisle while staring at a bottle of cabernet.

I needed to see something or someone flourishing, so, I set out to visit a friend who had also started a new life here recently. Nichole is an apprentice in the flower and herb gardens at Stone Barns, a non-profit farm and education center just outside of New York City.

In the hoop-houses it was every season. Microgreens pushed up through the soil in rows. Sungold tomatoes were ripe on the vine. But outside, it was just like what I'd seen in New England. The peonies were crumpled like burned paper. Even the globe amaranth---defiant in fuchsia and Shiap pink---were being cut that day.

“How do you do it?” I asked her. I knew that Nichole helped to plant the terraces last spring. She’d put her knees on the ground and drawn her finger across the earth, placing a row of seeds in the part she made before folding the dirt back over again. With her care, the seeds had sprouted and become something beautiful. And now all of that was dying.

She replied with graceful acceptance. “It’s hard. But I like seeing something come full circle”.  I knew she was right---I’ve seen the Lion King. But, I kept thinking about the churchyard snapdragons, disappearing in a compost pile somewhere. Sure, they were returning to the earth from where the came, but they had once been exuberant. The change felt harsh and unfair.

Then Nichole took me to the drying room.  Rows of soybeans were hung up in bunches. Statice and cockscomb were pinned to the rafters and the globe amaranth was being tied for drying. There were wooden bins full of gourds and screen drawers filled with herbs. Most of them would become something else, used in teas or tinctures. Some would be saved for seeds.  Nichole picked up a clipping of rosemary and ran her fingers along the stem. With one quick pull the leaves were stripped. “Full circle.” She said.  And I finally knew what she meant.

She had followed these flowers from start to finish---and here we were at the start again. I guess circles are comforting that way. The further you are from where you began, the closer you are to the next beginning.

Neither Old Nor Young

The other afternoon on vacation we wound up at a café in downtown Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. It was the day before the hurricane was set to strike and I really wanted some fresh air. I was in the middle of a country-type meltdown and warned my husband ‘I had to get out of the house that minute’. I recognized that familiar creeping sadness feeling that day. The skies were gray, no one wanted to leave the house but me, but every noise was grating on my nerves. The temperature was all wrong, the lighting too harsh, and so, we left. Lewisburg is one of my favorite little towns in Central PA. It’s a college town and something about being surrounded by other young people revives me. It was fun to sit in the café and watch all the young freshman and sophomores come in, some upper classmen and teachers as well. They were stressing out about classes, in that way that seems really cute and trivial now. There was a lot of “OMIGOD” and “NO WAY” and cursing and flirting; it was beautiful. I love to watch the young relationships. They seem so awkward, unsure whether to hold hands over breakfast. You can tell the ones that had sex the night before (or even that morning) were a bit chummier with each other, sitting on the same side of the table, whispering inside jokes, her hand on his thigh, his behind her back, tickling her long hair.

It was so refreshing after being surrounded by my in-laws all weekend. My husband is seven years older than I am, and he’s the younger sibling, so that makes most of his family a full decade ahead of me in life. I often feel out of place, in more than just pop culture references, although those happen too. Sometimes it leaves me with the feeling of “I shouldn’t be here”. That somehow there is this magical land of cool twenty-somethings (Brooklyn maybe?) that I should be with. My people. Instead, having kids so young and being married with a mortgage lumps me in with the elderly. I don’t fit in anywhere. Not with the old, and not with the young, but I recognize that they both have their advantages. I try to listen to my mother-in-law’s stories and marvel at how different things were for her, and I try to remember that I’m not doing so poorly. And I look at the college students, and while I envy their spontaneity, I don’t envy the drama and emotion. I remember those college heartbreaks, full of deep tears and jealousy and resentment. I rarely feel those types of emotions in that type of setting anymore. Instead I feel guilt and fear more often related to being a mother. Guilt that I am doing it all wrong, and fear that it will affect him forever.

So long, Vogue

By Rhea St. Julien After several years of an admittedly tumultuous relationship, I am breaking up with Vogue.  My subscription is up, and I am finally pulling the trigger and not renewing.  If this blog were a movie, I’d segue here into a montage of me + Vogue in better times, reading sandy articles on the beach, discovering Claire Dederer and Cheryl Strayed, ripping out amazingly curated spreads by Grace Coddington and Irving Penn to create collage art.

But our relationship has not all been Happy Days with scissors.  Like everyone else on the planet, I was appalled by Dara-Lynn Weiss’s article about shaming her child into losing weight.  I have grown increasingly tired of the pieces on Connecticut garden homes refurbished by gazillionaires, and the lack of diversity reflected on the pages.  However, I was willing to overlook all of this, because Vogue isn’t pretending to be anything else than it is.  The magazine is sold as the flight of fantasy of a particular Manhattan woman, and if I don’t like their point of view, I can just skip those articles or join the conversation surrounding them to shift the culture.  Somehow, what pushed me over the edge from giving them a pass to writing CANCEL on my invoice was a subtle message in an otherwise innocuous, seemingly empowering article.

I was drawn in by their profile of fascinating congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a woman who manages to balance motherhood, congressional leadership, and extracurriculars such as softball teams and fundraising for cancer awareness.  The tale of her own breast cancer battle was riveting, but then they slipped in this absolutely ridiculous paragraph:

“By 2011, the only lingering effect of her treatment was weight gain brought on by the drug tamoxifen.  Having ‘never gained an ounce in my life,’ she found herself 23 pounds heavier.  ‘Like every woman who goes through weight gain, you’re just not happy,’ she says.  ‘You’re not comfortable in your clothes, you’re mad when you walk in your closet, you hate going shopping.  I didn’t feel good about myself.’  After a press event in her district promoting a small business called the Fresh Diet, she decided to sign up.  Seven months later, she had lost the 23 pounds and dropped from a size 8 back to a size 2.”

First of all, I’m sorry, the only lingering effect of surviving cancer was weight gain?  What about the scars from surgery, the months lost to recovery, the strain on your family, the emotional damage from confronting mortality in such a raw way?  If you fight cancer and win, and you’re worried about your dress size, CANCER WINS.  You learned nothing from your brush with death, and I just can’t believe that a woman so intelligent and powerful really feels that way.  I suspect they took her comments about her body image struggles out of context in their attempt to trivialize and glamorize the congresswoman.

Also, what’s so terrible about being a size 8 (ahem, ahem)?  The fact that they even put the sizes in there shows that it was a nod to diet culture rather than a well-rounded portrait of a woman’s experience with cancer.  I realized I needed to stop giving money to a publication that was insulting me.

It really bothered me that this blatant body-shaming message was slipped in to a profile of a political leader, a piece that was well-written and interesting.  The subtlety of it was what shook me, left me thinking about the lasting effects of such a paragraph, like when, in the 90′s, they found all those messages about sex in Disney movies.

Recently, my review of Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture was published on the Equals Record, and in my piece, I say that I’m going to try to keep my daughter away from the princess craze as long as I can, and to expose her to different forms of what it means to be a woman than the overwhelmingly narrow cultural ideal.

Well, if I’m going to do that for my daughter, I need to stop “playing princess” myself, and reading Vogue is a way that I, monthly, escape to a world where women are saved from the effects of aging (The Wicked Witch of Wrinkles) by state-of-the-art surgeries and creams (Prince Botox), I dream of having a Fairy Godmother that will bring me a $3,450 biker jacket for the ball, and my confidence is boosted by how modern day royalty (celebs) are really down-to-earth, just like me.

It’s time to put down the princess wand.

I am searching for a new way to be feminine.  Am I a woman because I paint my lips red, wear a dress on the daily, shave my legs and flat iron my bangs?  Of course not.  These are the ways I am fashioning my body right now, and I have chosen other forms for it throughout my life---letting my prodigious body hair grow in college (my husband and I got together, actually, when my leg hair was so long I could French braid it), wearing the same pair of dusty Carhartts for months, forgoing make-up even in the face of period zits.

Right now, my look is very traditionally femme, but, my love for fashion will not die with my Vogue subscription, and I could see myself dressing like one of my icons, Patti Smith, or Georgia O’Keefe, my hair a wild mass of black and gray, my pants pegged and baggy, my white shirt crisp enough to cut a fingernail on.

There is so much power in womanhood---this is one of the major reasons I chose to have my baby as naturally as I could---I wanted to experience that feminine power running through my body in the most primal way possible, to let it change me in the process.  And it did.  But now, despite Operation Rad Bod, I feel crappy about that amazing body that brought me a baby, about two weeks out of every month (if you guessed that those are the week before and the week of my period, then ladies, you are correct).

Vogue is absolutely not going to help me with my quest for a learned experience of the deeper meaning of femininity, beyond waist size and wardrobe.  So, I’m taking this whole experiment to the next level, and trying to limit my own exposure to damaging cultural messages about women, especially since I’m going to limit my daughter’s.  I can’t be wresting the Bratz doll out of her hands while I’m filling my own with pictures of Kate Moss’s wedding.

Perhaps, I’ll spend all the time once consumed with Vogue reading things like this, an excerpt from Dear Sugar’s column entitled Tiny Revolutions:

“You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be ‘hot’ in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.

You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, I’m right here.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?”

So long, Vogue.  It has been fun.  But it has not been real.

Republished with the author's permission from Thirty Threadbare Mercies, Photo:  Some rights reserved by JeepersMedia

Looking Forward: Looking Back.

Somewhere in a closet at my parent’s house is a journal I kept as a child. It’s orange. It has gold pages. There’s a painting of a cat on the cover. I don’t remember much of what’s written in it, save for the fact that I assigned each day a letter grade, a decision inspired by a book I’d read by Judy Blume. Days when friends came over, or when I managed to sit next to the older girls at summer camp, or any day on which a birthday party occurred received an ‘A.’ Bad weather, chocolate milk shortages at lunchtime, or having to accompany a parent on bank- or insurance-related errands merited a ‘C,’ or worse. Really bad days (missed soccer goals, botched trips to the zoo) were accompanied by a drawing, barely discernible, of a hand with the thumb pointing downward.

As must be the case with most children who like to write, I was given countless journals as gifts over the years. For whatever reason, this one was the only one I ever used.

Years later, in high school, I filled two large, spiral-bound books with what I referred to as my thoughts on “reality, rebellion, and rock ‘n’ roll.” I wrote extravagant, long-winded essays – all by hand, a feat I can hardly fathom now – on art, and music, and the meaning of life. I cataloged regrets, made lists of goals, and — because I was, in the end, a teenager — diligently made note of each and every movement made by the floppy-haired boy who sat behind me in math. (Taped to one page of the journal was a tiny balled-up clump of paper he threw in class one day, intending to hit the back of a friend’s head. It landed on my desk instead and I saved it, convinced its altered course was a sign.)

I found these journals — the cat one, and the two from high school — a couple of years ago as I packed up my room before moving to New York.

I read through each.

The one with the cat cover, filled with chicken-scratch entries that made me smile, went back on the shelf, where it remains today. The other two, whose pretentious ramblings I could barely get through without vomiting, went into the shredder.

 ---

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a group of MFA students about how hard — and how painfully embarrassing — it can be to read old work. I’m not sure what I was thinking as I destroyed page after page of those spiral-bound books, but at the time, I felt that the many hours I’d spent recording my thoughts were less important than the possibility of someone finding them. And judging them. And thinking that the words on these pages represented me.

I realize now that those journals were like marks on a growth chart. That I needed to go through certain phases in order to get better. That attempting to “cover my footprints” was unnecessary. But I’m still not immune to the urge to hide work I’m not proud of anymore.

However, now that so much of my writing is public, I no longer have the luxury of being able to rip up my work if I decide later that I don’t like it. The thought of this sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but the solution’s clear: my only choice is to write as honestly as I can. Then, there’s nothing to regret.

In college, I attempted to write a story about an artist in diary form. It contained two parts: one was a journal he wrote for his eyes only, and the other was one he wrote with an audience in mind, one he hoped people would find after he died.

I never finished the story, because I couldn’t keep track of the two voices. I can only hope that as a writer, I never have that dilemma myself.

The challenge ahead is to create a single voice; for better or for worse, an honest one, my own.

The Effects of a Storm, an Ocean Away

My landlord woke me up with a phone call on Monday morning. “Are your friends and family okay?” he asked. “I heard about everything on the news, and I was so worried.” It’s the first question off any of my new London friends’ tongues when they see me, and the first question of any stranger when I first tell them where I’m from. Is everyone okay? Is my old apartment okay? Is New York okay?

My answers are, in order, yes, yes and I don’t know. The first two are easy: almost everyone I know in New York lived mostly out of harm's way. A few of my friends have had to walk or bike to work; some have had to go without showers or use candles to light their way. My old apartment, nestled safely in Midtown, never even lost power or water. The last question is the worst and the hardest for me to answer, both because I have no information and because I hate that I have no information. I don’t know how New York is, because, while I identify as a New Yorker to everyone I meet in Europe, while I compare everything I encounter here ceaselessly to the world I knew and loved back there, while many of my friends and family are still in the place I consider home, I am not. I am in London.

I’m not jealous of those in New York, and it should be said plainly and clearly that I absolutely wish Sandy hadn’t hit the East Coast and Caribbean. I wish it was a repeat of last year in New York City, where we ventured out into Times Square in the middle of Hurricane Irene and took pictures in the typically overrun with tourists hub that was now deserted (I, of course, also wish Irene had never negatively impacted the areas outside of New York that bore the brunt of the storm). But there’s something to be said for the ache you feel when something happens to your home and you can’t be there. You want to stand up for it. You want to experience things with it, so it doesn’t have to go it alone. I don’t fool myself to think I know what New Yorkers are going through right now, but there’s a part of me that wishes I was there for it. New Yorkers, I believe, are at their best in the face of adversity, and I feel a pang in my chest when I read Facebook updates about candlelit sleepovers or charging parties or the Exodus like group walking over the Brooklyn Bridge together. I want to change things there---I want to help, desperately, beyond the Red Cross donations and options from afar---but that’s not the whole story. I want to be there because I feel it---the city, the people in it---would change me.

And while my heart goes out to everyone affected by the storm, New York will be okay, with or without me. And I will be okay, with or without it. But it’s moments like these you realize that it doesn’t take a hurricane to create ripples strong enough to be felt even across an ocean.

The Faithful

"“Do I love you this much?" she’d ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve." -          Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

My latest pick for book club was a wholly personal one. My friend Dorothy gave me a copy of the book right after my mom died, but it was almost seven months before I was ready to pick it up. For anyone unfamiliar with the story, Strayed writes about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail by herself, after her mom's death. What stuck with me most about the book weren’t the months she spent alone while hiking, or the blisters on her feet that she writes about in detail, or the weather or wildlife-related obstacles she encountered on the trail. For me, it was reading about how her life spiraled out of control after her mother's death.

I thought about this last weekend, while I was in California with some of my oldest and closest friends. We had gathered for Brooke's wedding, a friend since we rode our big wheels to nursery school together. We then spent years in Brownies, with my mom as our fearless troop leader. Last summer, Brooke showed up in New York for my bachelorette party, Brownie sash on. She said those are some of her best childhood memories, in large part because of my mom. Katie flew in from Australia for the wedding. Just a hop, skip, and a 14 hour flight for her. The line between friend and family is blurry with Katie and I; that's how long we've been friends. Katie is the kind of friend who flies halfway around the world when your mom is in the hospital, the kind who sits with you and makes you laugh when you think there is nothing left to laugh about, the kind who can be trusted with the most unpopular of errands (buying boxers for your dad, for instance). Andrea came from Chicago, leaving her baby boy at home with her husband.  Andrea has a laugh bigger than any room and a heart to match. She’s loyal and never forgets---not the bigger things like birthdays or even the little ones, like the color dress you wore to prom. Sara, my daily lifeline and keeper of secrets, was the only one missing---and miss her we did.

The wedding ceremony was a traditional Catholic mass, held at a beautiful old church in Santa Barbara---my first time in church since my mom's funeral. We sat together, observing the same rituals we’ve known since we were kids. The only off-script moment came during the Prayers of the Faithful, the part of mass when the congregation prays for those in need. The groom's cousin---leading the prayers---giggled his way through, while the rest of us looked on in confusion. Later, Brooke confessed that the prayers she and her husband had prepared weren’t waiting on the altar, and so their cousin was forced to improvise. More importantly, she wanted me to know what wasn’t said: a prayer for my mom they had intended to include in the ceremony. It was an acknowledgment that took my breath away, and I heard my mom so clearly in that moment, reminding me what good friends I have.

Back in Brooklyn, it was my turn to host book club. Just like every other one over the last six years, there was a heated debate about the merits of the book, but more importantly, there was plenty of wine and laughs. Overwhelmed with gratitude, I looked around at these girls who have become my friends later in life, who have held me up and righted my footing repeatedly throughout the last year. Rather dramatically, I announced that it was because of them---because of all of my friends---that I was not off hiking by myself somewhere, a la Cheryl Strayed.

My mom gave me the best and the worst of herself: her eyes, but also her hips and thighs; her brains, but also her impatience; her candidness, but also, at times, her candidness. There is no doubt, however, that she also gave me the gift of friendships, to which there is no downside. For that, I will thank her now and forever.

Lessons from a workshop...

Dear Clara,

Since we’ve been back in the US this past year, I have tried to remain mindful to use the time we have here for things that we wouldn’t be able to do abroad.  Part of that time has been allocated to friends and family, taking advantage of their proximity.  Part of the time has been dedicated to seeing the great United States – you’re still too young to remember your adventures here but I’ve taken lots of pictures and amassed all kinds of stories.  But part of the time I’ve stashed away for myself to get out of my shell and learn some of the things that inspire me, but that I haven’t been brave enough to learn more about in previous years.   And so, this past year has become the “year of the workshop”.

One of the things I’ve made peace with – at least for now – is that sometimes our professional lives can be rewarding in their own way.  We like well enough what we do, we have good colleagues, and it helps us to put our portion of dinner on the table.  It gives us a lifestyle, and it gives us worth in our day.  But what it might not give us is something more passionate.  And what our passions and interests give us, might not exactly fill those other qualities that our jobs provide.  So I’ve used this workshop time to help round out those creative interests that aren’t necessarily related to my professional life, but they are to my inspired life.  I’m nervous at these workshops, which are mainly related to photography or the creative aspects of my blog.  Before each one, I contemplate dropping out, and after each one, I’m always so glad I stuck it out, usually at your father’s insistence.  So after all of these workshops this year, here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned:

• The first step is signing up: This is the most intimidating part – signing up and sending the money.  Choose wisely, after all, resources will be limited by either time, money or both, but choose bravely.  One of my managers told me once that any job should make you sweat outside your comfort zone just a little bit, and I’ve applied the same principle to choosing learning outside of the job.  Push yourself a bit and you’ll be surprised how much you can learn.
• Be flexible: Chances are, the workshop won’t run exactly the way you expect it too.  Maybe it’s in a location you’re not used to, maybe they’re flexible on timing…just come with an open mind.  The whole point of doing something different is to do something different, right?
• Attend all the events: Sometimes workshops have a dinner, or a get together, or some other event associated with it.  If you’re going to know a new group of people for just a short amount of time, get the most you can out of it.  Do the events and don’t be shy.  Introduce yourself and get out there.
• Give yourself time to absorb: The great thing about workshops is that they usually fill you with lots of new and grand and big ideas.  Make sure to give yourself a little clean time after the workshop to let it all sink in.  You’re going to want to go in 34 directions all at once – don’t compromise the value of everything you learned by overloading social commitments or other things that start the minute the workshop is over.  Give yourself space to absorb the learning and plot out exactly what you’re going to do with it.  A few notes to yourself now will pay out great dividends later.
• Translate into your own voice: Sometimes when we see something by someone we admire at a workshop, we’re tempted to go home and recreate the exact same thing.  Re-creation is great for practice.  But the workshop’s intent was to teach you a series of tools so that you can create what you want out of it.   It’s still going to be up to you to apply them in your own voice and vision.  Don’t hesitate to stretch what you’ve learned into the direction that you need it to go to work for you.

All my love,

Mom

Kitchen Meditation

The potatoes are cold in my hands, imbued with the chill of the refigerator. My husband will only peel potatoes after they’ve been sitting in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes, but I prefer to do it quickly and go on to other things. Dusty brown peelings curl off into the trash can, the little pile growing fast as the white flesh of the tuber is revealed. When the potatoes are chopped and placed in boiling water, I raid the crisper for other vegetables: Carrots, onions, fresh garlic (a staple in my kitchen), celery, corn. I have a method for chopping each different vegetable—the carrots are sliced in half long-wise and then diced into half-moons; the onions are gently scored in both directions across the top, so that when I cut off an inch from the onion’s face, I’m rewarded with a shower of evenly-chopped pieces falling to my cutting board.

I vividly remember a conversation I had shortly after getting married, when I was still part-time in college and struggling to get the degree I knew was out of my reach for the time being. “I want to like cooking,” I had said into the phone. “I feel like it’s the kind of thing that I should enjoy, that I could enjoy. I feel like it’s something that could bring me a huge amount of satisfaction. But I’m always just too tired.”

And I was. Even with a light class load, by the time I got home from my one or two classes in a day and finished my homework, I’d exhausted my slim supply of energy for that day. I made dinner each nigth with my husband because I believed in good, home-cooked food, and I loved eating the fruits of our labors—but I rarely enjoyed the experience. Always, I felt that frustrating sense that the true joy of cooking was just out of my reach, the kind of thing I ought to feel, but didn’t.

I baked bread, and ended up so tired I could hardly enjoy the finished product. I made muffins, and thought that cleaning the muffin tin might be the death of me. I cooked soups and puddings and even, on occasion, things like pasta from scratch, reveling in the knowledge that I could identify every ingredient that went into our meals—but ultimately, feeling utterly spent by the task.

Two years later, when I began the true transition from part-time studenthood to full-time homemaking, I was surprised to discover that suddenly, I was beginning to love cooking. All at once, as I began to spend less time in the classroom and have more time for the kitchen, I was feeling all those things I had thought I should feel before. Baking became a celebration. Chopping vegetables became a game. Doing the dishes afterward became a meditation.

Now, as I sweep a neat pile of onions and carrots from my cutting board into a pan for sautéeing, I think about that time of transition. Cooking still tires me, of course; it’s a physical task, one that requires time spent standing up, and often one that demands strength in the kneading or rolling out of dough. But in my life as it stands now, that’s all right. I may be tired afterwards, but I have the liberty to spare a few minutes for rest and recovery.

It is, I think, a perfect example of the unexpected joy the last few years have brought me—my adult life in a microcosm. For such a long time, I was frightened of my plans being changed, terrified of being forced to find something new to define myself. And yet, when that change did come, it wasn’t meaninglessness that lay on the other side—it was just a different kind of purpose, a different shape to my days.

A different shape, but a good one.

I pour extra-virgin olive oil over my pan of vegetables, letting the rich, fruity scent of the oil assail my senses, hearing the crackle and pop as it hits the bottom of the hot skillet.

And in this quiet kitchen moment, I know what it is to feel peace.

The Art of a List

By Marni Zarr Each morning when I wake, I make a list. First is dinner. What’s for dinner??? The question looms like a tiny splinter lodged under my skin, unnoticeable unless touched and then the annoyance lingers past the pain. You know, that miniscule one you can’t remove but it’s undeniably there so you either get frustrated attempting to ignore it, or accept it, and eventually it works it’s way out.

Next up, “trash out,” “kids to school,” “walk the dog,” “check mailbox,” “buy lunch bags and milk,” “get gas” . . . succinct chores neatly stacked like building blocks, always topped off with a load of laundry. “A load a day keeps the pile away” . . . I make up silly sayings, mostly to amuse my simply-amused self. Bashful to share half of what my mind writes while it’s busily lost in thought, I’ve finally come to appreciate the vastly under appreciated and valuable by-product of everyday chores, realizing that inspiration comes most easily when my hands and task-oriented mind are in motion.

Some of my best bursts of writing creativity occur when I am driving and listening to a song. It's usually a catchy tune with swinging lyrics that confide flirtation and first glances---the anticipation of discovering all those small things about a person that seem to spark your interest the moment you meet them. Some people are interesting, and then there are those whose unique mannerisms stick to your mind like a fly to a frog’s tongue. I don’t completely understand the science of it but I’ve felt the tension pulling taut like a slingshot ready to fire. Something in the back of my mind functions of it’s own accord sending sparks of Morse code to my sub-conscious to be stored and decoded later. Sometimes it takes hours and many times it’s not until days later that the replay becomes obsessive, starting and stopping as I try to pinpoint the moment the tiny spark flew. A game of catch from one to the other or both firing at the same time, laser beams pinpointed for collision and meeting at the height of their arc, then a little explosion sending back a blinking mission complete to some part of the brain. Is it the frontal lobe?

I jot that down on my list to look up later.

[image:  some rights reserved by puuikibeach on Flickr]

I don't like babies

Which is a problem because I am pregnant. Here’s the thing: I’m just uncomfortable around babies.  I was reminded of this recently on a family vacation upon meeting a new nephew. I very much have the attitude of a child-less person when confronted with another’s infant. They are cute from afar, and it’s fun to purchase tiny clothes, but for the most part I don’t want to get too close. I worry they will spit up on me and start crying and I won’t know what to do. I thought this attitude would change after I had a child. That perhaps I would learn that magical formula of rocking and soothing. Or that I would long to smell the milky baby scent and soft fuzzy head. Instead, I nod politely and rush off to entertain the older kids. Maybe I’m just not a Mama. You know the ones, the baby whisperers, who cast evil glances at children older than a year. Their primary skill set revolves around the youngest humans. They can breastfeed with no issues and quiet a crying infant with just the tip of their pinkie and a soothing voice. Instead I’m a full on Mom. When I’m not pregnant, I like to be the one out there with the dads, running with a soccer ball. I laugh at the kids' jokes and come up with goofy games for them to play, but those babies, man, those babies really make me nervous.

I figured it would change since I’ve already gone through the infant stage---maybe some part of me would long to bond with this new child; instead, I am terrified. It’s even worse this time because I know better. I know that along with the cute onesies and soft hair are the sleepless nights, the endless screaming and crying. It was the non-communication that really got to me. They seem like small aliens, incapable of complex emotions beyond crying. The first year was such a blur to me. There are happy pictures from that time, but mostly I remember the crying and the boredom. And when I say crying, I feel like I should clarify that. It’s more than just a few pathetic sobs, babies cry at a heart-wrenching rate. I would be jolted awake multiple times per night from a dead sleep into full on anxiety mode. My heart would be racing and the longer he cried, the sicker I felt. I couldn’t disassociate from the screaming, couldn’t understand it, so I cried too. I felt as if I were fighting a war every night, waiting for the end to come.

It did come, finally. Charley grew up. So now I have a little boy whom I love more than anyone in the world, and I worry everyday of this pregnancy that that will always be the case. I worry that when this next baby comes I will retreat to my older child, seek solace, and block out the younger one. I worry I will never love the younger one as much as my first born. Mostly, I just worry.

Seasons of creativity

There are a few distinct stages in the creative process, and they come in cycles, at least for me. Sometimes they align with the seasons, and sometimes they are seasons of their own. Each may last a day or a few weeks, months or even a year, but each has its own delights and challenges. The first is the beginning of an idea, a project, or a concept, and it often looks a lot like spring. New directions and possibilities are blossoming all over the place, and inspiration pops up around every corner. This is my favorite creative season, because in it, everything seems possible. The challenge is choosing which path will be yours and letting others fall away, gathering enough momentum to sustain you for the journey ahead.

What follows (one hopes) is a long, hot summer of productivity. If spring seemed bright, summer feels too bright, lit by the harsh florescent glow of long hours at the office or studio or in whatever sort of incubator your work requires to take shape. Here the challenge is showing up each day with new energy, even though you’re a bit dehydrated from the day before, and brushing off the negative spirits (both internal and external) who insist you’d be much better off spending the summer at the beach.

The afterglow of completion is something like autumn. There is a chance to harvest the fruits of your labor, which have inevitably turned out quite differently, for better or worse, than what you intended when you first imagined them back in the spring. There is a moment of exhaustion, then relief, then joy. Take time for celebration here. This season is the most fleeting.

I think you know where we’re headed at this point. The winter of creativity is strange and disorienting. It is the season I most wish I could pass right over—and sometimes I do—skipping right from an end to a new beginning. But this is a sort of fallow period for the creative body and soul, and though it’s uncomfortable, it offers the potential for restoration.

When I began writing this column a few months ago, I was just settling into life in a new city and increasingly swept up in planning a wedding. Now that my world is awash in brightly colored leaves and the glow of autumn, it feels like I can safely call this place home, and the wedding has passed into the category of a shared memory. I am wondering where I’ll redirect all of that creative energy next and hoping I won’t have to endure too much of a winter to figure it out.

How about you? Does your creative process come in cycles? Where are you at on your creative journey?

Social Distortion

I used to be a person who worked the room at a party, sprinkling laughter around as I moved from conversation to conversation.  People often commented that I relished being social, like talking to people was a vocation for me.  In fact, this is part of the reason I became a therapist — I seemed to have a knack for engaging with people, hearing their stories and reflecting their light.  If you had known me as a teenager or in my 20s, you would never have understood that this persona, this social bravado was something of a mask.  I have always battled with anxiety and a sense of failing to fit in.  I have carried a fear of others judging me harshly, of saying the wrong thing and of being mortified publicly.  I achieved social success in early life with a paradoxic solution and it came to me with relative ease.  Amazingly, people bought it.  I am noticing now in my later 30s, with mounting responsibilities and a collection of profound life events behind me, the person who really just wanted to be home under the covers, the person on unsure social footing has re-emerged.  And yet, when I fumble around for that outgoing mantle, the trusty suit of charm offensive, I can't seem to find it.  Or when I do, it keeps slipping off. When I was a kid, I was described as socially precocious.  I could hold my own at an adult dinner party, and was expected to perform in those situations, at times literally.  Once, a friend's parents actually hired me to sing a medley of show tunes (no joke at all) at their New Year's Eve party in front of 500 guests.  My memories of that evening are storms of emotion that include terror and elation.  Mind you, I was 7 years old, maybe even 6.  In retrospect, I don't have the first clue about how I pulled something like that off.  What reserve of preternatural confidence did I draw upon to make that happen?  The person I am now grapples with chatting up a familiar colleague at a professional networking event.  Who was that little girl and where did she run off to?

In adolescence, I don't have to describe the tempest of feelings, the cauldron of concerns that befell me.  This is implied in the word, "adolescence."  Incongruously, this was the period in which I honed my craft.  By about age 15, I could have taught a master class at the Actor's Studio.  My singular focus in that era was to entertain others and deflect attention from the awkwardness of the pariah I imagined myself to be.  In a hackneyed teen movie archetype, I was the class clown (oh sure, check the yearbook), the person in the corner of the room shouting "LOOK AT ME, I'M DANCING!"  I would do anything for a laugh and would risk any kind of consequences to help a friend.  I fought so fervently against the advancing insecurity that I presented as radically carefree.  My antics as court jester/supporting actress in a leading role once landed me in the Vice Principal's office where he told me without mincing words that my future hung in the balance.  That grim meeting followed an incident in which I was performing an ill-timed, but spot-on impression of our AP Economics teacher just as she walked back in the classroom.  I recall very little of Keynes, but I can still hear her exact words as she pointed to the door, "Sarah, this is my classroom, not yours.  Do not pass go on your way to the office."  Mercifully, that was followed two weeks later by an offer of admission from the college of my choice.

Although in college the social anxiety would keep better pace with me, I redoubled my efforts.  I immediately accrued a boyfriend (during orientation week, didn't even wait for the first day of classes!), surrounded myself with friends and became immersed in activities.  I was a consummate "joiner" in those days - sports teams, singing groups, volunteer organizations and the like - whereas now I can't even bring myself to participate in an essentially anonymous Mommy list serve.  In my sophomore year, exhausted from the chase, I finally succumbed to symptoms I could no longer fend off and landed in therapy.  The next decade or so would find me toggling between a brilliant capacity to shine in the spotlight and struggling to even answer the phone when a friend calls.

In my current life configuration, I have all the usual excuses for why my facility for being social has suffered.  Like everyone on planet earth, I am tired all the time, have way too much on my plate and am just trying to make it through the week.  I am also depleted from many consecutive years of major life changes, some tragedies and some losses.  But I have to ask myself, what is the alternative?  I had an "Aha!" moment last night when my husband wanted to discuss potential plans with friends later in the week.  I was prepared with every justification as to why I wouldn't be able to make it…the baby, chief among them.  My husband had a response to every barrier I constructed (including a babysitter) and capped it off with, "I would like to spend some time out with my wife."  It suddenly occurred to me for the first time that being wrapped up in my own head, folded in on myself has real impact on this person I love.  There was no getting around his matter-of-fact request and I felt a little ashamed that my self-indulgent fears would come at the expense of his social life.  I am not sure what about this interaction tipped the scales, but in an instant, I was confronted with how much I have regressed on this issue in the past few years.  Stopped in my tracks, I agreed to an evening out.  A small thing, to be sure, but an important shift.

I am on the hunt again for that brassy girl of my youth who enjoyed costuming and talent shows.  That girl bucked authority, won debate competitions and was the glue holding her group of friends together.  She left the house for a night out utterly prepared to experience something magical.  And I know I have opportunities to reignite that energy all these years later.  I can approach professional events, teaching floral classes, meeting with clients and vendors with a new zeal.  I can exude competence in that realm and pay special attention to building relationships through my business.  I can employ all the mental gymnastics required to tamp down nerves with friends and acquaintances, which these days mostly involves reminding myself that I am just not that powerful…nobody is noticing the things I think are vulnerabilities.  People are busy with their own lives and just want to connect.  Nobody can take a lifetime of negative self-talk and swirling doubt and transform herself into a reality TV diva.  But somewhere in there I have expertise in "acting as if," which has often lead to me to a steady state of being.  If you see me out on Thursday wearing a fabulous top and a broad grin, be sure to give a wave from across the room.

What I Believe

Over the weekend I was talking with a friend of mine.  We had one of those twisty conversations that covers a million topics, to trace back how we got to talking about the movie Bull Durham would require flow charts and recording devices. But get there we did. I’ve never seen the movie, so my friend was telling me the major plot points and characters.  She said her favorite part was a speech Kevin Costner’s character gives, in answer to Susan Sarandon’s question ‘What do you believe in then?’  The speech covered Baseball, Love, Sex, Politics, Holiday Traditions, and more, and my friend had it memorized.  And at the end, Kevin Costner turns and walks out the door, having said his piece. Should the occasion ever arise, I’d like to be able to rattle off a list of my truest beliefs without consulting notes or stumbling over the words.  Here’s my first draft:

I believe in kindness, goodness, luck, and the importance of good juju. I believe in the Muppets, Gene Kelley, Fred Astaire, and Bing Crosby.  I believe in cozy sweaters and keeping the thermostat low to cuddle under the blankets. I believe in family, those gifted at birth and those chosen.  I believe in books, records, and hand-written letters whenever possible, but accept digital versions as well. I believe in love. I believe marriage isn’t right for everyone, but that everyone should have the option. I believe in laughing every day, trusting the universe, and marching to my own drummer.  I believe gummi bears are better with I vodka and the time vortex is a thing. I believe in back roads, sunsets, and stopping to take pictures.  I believe in coffee, glitter, red wine, and great shoes. I believe happiness is just as worthy of a goal as a corner office. I believe in saying I Love You. I believe that time spent together is never wasted. I believe everyone has their own truth, their own journey, and their own sources of joy.

What do you believe in?