August 5, 2019

There are baby pictures on the wall 

Of a house made for a family

One lives here now

Held together with so much love, globs of toothpaste

and shoes everywhere

fighting over the dishes and hugging in the kitchen all the time

A fifteen year old boy slips quietly in the shadows 

through the night when we're asleep

No one to ask him questions

No one to have to give an answer to

Polite, distant, disinterested and distracted

in the way 15 year old boys are

No one calls me Mom

It's likely no one ever will

I've moved on from pity 

to acceptance

Of low egg counts and hormones bottomed out

rendering it nearly impossible

I did this to myself 

I say to my soon to be husband

(can i really be a person who will have a husband?)

It was my fault for not doing it earlier

For not figuring it out sooner

For not being a different person before

He doesn't understand

Can't understand the hormones of womanhood and the

constant need to nurture that spills out

even when there is no one to nurture

I'm 38.  

Has anyone ever been so old?

my family members have all been stagnant ages

my mother, father, aunts, uncles, steady constant

through all my stages

all the world's a stage and I was the only one with a part

Now I see the toll of time 

and i can't believe i am here

Wishing for the clock to have turned back around

knowing too, nothing would change even if it did

I am who i am and I was what I was

I was a 25 year old with crippling anxiety 

I was a 28 year old who was unstable

A 30 year old who self medicated

A 32 year old who found her way back

A 36 year old who fell in love 

Who went to therapy

Who got her shit together

A 37 year old with a ring on her finger

And now i am 38

With baby pictures on my wall

pictures that i didn't take

of children I didn't make

dreaming of babies floating to the bottom of the water

and me, swimming down after them

trying to see their faces 

so I could just know what they would have looked like

before i wake up

to hug in the kitchen

and live a life that i never dreamed could be mine

with a ring on my finger

and him

always him

Home Is Wherever I'm With You

For some reason this week, I’ve been having more “one year ago today, I was doing XYZ” moments.  I think I’m trying to impress upon myself the significance of where I am in my life right now, because I’ve had no real time to absorb how many changes have taken place. 

One year ago today, I would be five days away from talking to my soulmate for the first time.  Not my only, first or possibly even last soulmate (I believe we have dozens, if we’re lucky, of all forms).  But my heart would grow several sizes, very soon, one year ago today and I had no idea.  It happens when you least expect it, right?  No longer expecting anything was an understatement for me, I was honestly thinking that love would never find me.  A cliché statement, but a true one.  I still have a hard time believing that a man loves me.  I am someone’s best person in the world.  I have never known this feeling before, and yet I’ve slipped into it like sliding into a warm bath – effortlessly and easily, and with a peace of mind that truly surprises me.

I’ve learned so much.  I didn’t know how to be with a man so comfortably.  I have always been a bit intimidated of men, and a little unsure of what to say.  I didn’t know I had the ability to have a man as my best friend, lover, heart connection, best thought. 

I also thought I knew about how to live and love with someone’s faults.  But I really didn’t.  I also am still a bit amazed that someone can love MY faults and weird flaws so much.  And here’s something I also find amusing – I’m still me.  I didn’t have to become a different person or version of myself, my job still sucks and my family is still crazy, and I’ve gained a few pounds and he still looks at me like he just took a drink of water on a hot day.

We are moving in together, to that house up there, with the actual white picket fence ;)


 He'll be moving in in a couple of weeks.  I move in September 1.  We are combining households, having talks about whose coffee table should go where, which room should his son have, where should the litter box be?  We have a new rug, a new couch.  We’re deliciously excited to finally be together every single day without it requiring logistics of driving from one’s home to another.  We’re together more than we’re apart anyway, although I know this is going to give us a new layer of learning about each other.  The only thing I’m a bit worried about is my occasional need for alone time.  I don’t have a ton of need for down time with him because being with him is like being with myself.  His skin feels like my skin; we begin and end with each other most days.   It’s taken a lot of work, but not at all, at the same time.

We’ll be in our home just before our one-year anniversary.  I swear to you…I didn’t see any of this happening in my wildest, weirdest, wonderful dreams. 

The couple we are renting from is about my parents age, and one is an author.  For a housewarming, he gave us a copy of his book – he wrote inside, “To Corey and Stephanie.  Life has many adventures; I hope you enjoy this one.”

Off we go, honeybunny.  You’re the best part of all my days.

Six Months

Six months ago we had our first date. 

Six months ago I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to have good sex. Six months ago I didn’t know what it was like to be adored.  I didn’t know what it was like to cook dinner with someone every night and cuddle on the couch. 

I didn’t know about having the hard conversations that would make me panic afterwards at how close we came sometimes to deciding to go our separate ways.

I didn’t know what it was like to keep holding hands after those hard conversations.

I told him the other day – you know you flipped my world upside down and inside out. In a good way, but still.  I don’t know how to do relationships that are loving, equally, with a future on the horizon if I want it. 

I am learning how to be someone’s girlfriend.  

Learning how to be someone’s dad’s girlfriend. 

Six Month Snapshots

*We stopped to see my grandmother and aunt on our way back from our first weekend trip away together, and had lunch with them. He’d never met my grandmother, and he slipped his credit card to me for me to go pay for everyone’s food even though money is very tight for him right now.   I walked back to the table, and see him helping my grandmother into her bright red coat as she leaned on her cane.  Heart, stomach, swoop.

*Walking into the living room to see him outside on my balcony with a stolen cigarette, holding his arm at an odd outstretched angle and bending down.  Looked closer to see he was holding smoke away from Allie (my cat), and gently brushing her.

*That vulnerable, almost sheepish look and small tentative smile when he got in the shower with me for the first time.  The awkward way we stood for a moment, looking at each other in fluorescent unforgiving light and smiling like idiots and pretending not to notice the significance of the moment.

*Gently brushing hands through my hair and over my skin, stroking me gently to sleep every night we’re together which is more often than not these days. 

(Blog-friends, I’m still here, still reading, still loving all of you)

Mama, He’s Crazy

Mercury is in retrograde.  The sky is red, the ocean is white, birds fly backwards.  I’m falling in love.

Everything I ever thought about relationships, my ability to be loved, my ability to love back, my ability to trust and let myself be trusted, has been turned around upside down and all around.  It’s the easiest thing in the world and yet for me, this is entirely new and unchartered.  I feel like this wonderful man has been handed a feral cat that’s been occasionally touched and fed but bolts if you reach to lift it.  He says he’s got nothing but time. He’s here. I can tell him anything.  He wants to know what happened to “hurt you so bad.”

Last night, I was laying in his arms on the couch, while he kissed my face all over and rubbed my back.  This is our normal.  We are officially Those People that are in constant contact, and sit on the same side of the table at restaurants.  I got fixated in his eyes and I kept staring into them thinking how unfair it is to him that he’s going to have to learn about my past.  He’s going to have to navigate me slowly, and know why I might tense up.  I wish I could spare him that.  I wish this wasn’t on the horizon.  He furrowed his brow and asked what the face I was making meant. “What are you thinking? Something’s turning up there, Beautiful.”  I said nothing, and tried to dismiss it but it was such an incredibly lame attempt at dismissal that we both ignored it.  

He said to me very seriously “you can talk to me about anything.”  I buried my face into his neck and held on tight.  Tight enough to make him stay.  I kept squeezing him, and my breath shook.  He ran his hands up and down my sides for a long while, letting me.  He finally whispered “you just want my piece of pumpkin pie. You don’t have to be so dramatic about it.”  I laughed so hard I started choking.  He’s just so damn sweet. I don’t know if it will last.

I think it will. In my deepest heart, I know it will (if I let it).  I’m afraid though; I don’t know how to do this.  I don’t know how to say “you have to take it slow with me, because I was raped five years ago and I haven’t been the same since.”   

I don’t know how to say that to him, place that at his feet, and make him have to figure out how to navigate me in this new normal.  I don’t want him to be afraid to touch me. But I owe it to myself to tell this man everything, and put the wall down, and just…leap.

Birds are flying backwards and so am I, up and over the moon, into universes unseen.

Traitorous Treachery

I've been listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway play "Hamilton" for the last several weeks. I LOVE IT. One of the songs keeps playing on a loop in my brain this weekend, as shame and guilt floods me knowing that tomorrow afternoon, one of my staff is going to be laid off.

I've mentored this girl (inherited by me in a bad situation with another manager) carefully and I feel 100% better that she'll be better poised to go forward from here after the last 8/9 months under me. I took a skittish, quiet girl afraid of her own shadow and slowly gave her the tools to rebuild her own confidence.

I'm feeling a lot of things tonight--guilty about all of it, guilty about not being able to stop the corporate wheel from turning, accepting that I may well be next.

History Has Its Eyes On You (Hamilton)

I was younger than you are now when I was given my first command
I led my men straight into a massacre
I witnessed their deaths firsthand
I made every mistake
And felt the shame rise in me and even now I lie awake
Knowing history has its eyes on me.

I don't have the eyes of the nation on me, a mid-level manager mid-level through life. Nor the state, nor the city.

Just the big eyes of young woman, who laughs easily now and has picked up my quick wit. "You make me want to think big," she said to me once.

Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story."

She has a trusting look on her face every time she looks at me.

If

*I've been writing a lot lately, essay-style, mainly. All for myself, not for consumption yet. I wanted to share this one with the blog-world though, for my few but beloved readers, who have watched me reach this point all these years. I'm writing poetry, lyrical things that are different for me. I'm kind of loving it. I'm in a good place, in general, all the way around.
____

I'm going off to find myself, some will say. I'm going off to blind myself, be kind to myself, unwind myself on a beach or the woods or a mountain far away. Climb, swim, move, be, stop, think, go, be still. Still. Still you're lost until you're found, looking in the mirror on a Tuesday with red eyes. Hello, you say, touching your lips: I've been waiting for so long.

If

 

"If you have kids, you'll see that....." Her laughing voice keeps speaking though for me it's become little more than white noise. That filtered air that cycles through an airplane, humming in your ears, as you try to not let your arm touch the stranger beside you. I'm sure I kept smiling and nodding. I'm sure I said the right things back.

 

As my 34th year comes to a close, and I still don't have my proverbial shit together (or do I?), the If's keep coming. 

To be fair, I started using the "If's" first. This was mostly a defense mechanism, to tell myself that hey man, it's cool. Things happen or they don't. I'm a survivor. I don't need anyone or anything--and IF things go my way or they don't, I'll land on my feet. And what is "my way" for that matter, anyway?

 

2007: "Just wait, when you have kids you'll learn" as I looked in half horror/half intrigue at the ice pack compartment in my sister's underwear after she gave birth. "Can I have these sexy things when you're done?" I say to her laughing and she glared at me and declared them "fucking wonderful."

 

In 2007, everything was still a When. I was in my twenties, and there was still a list in my childhood toy box of the names--first and middle--I'd assigned my ten (!) children. I used to dream of them--dreamed of the family I would have. Everyone got along. The husband in these scenarios was always faceless, nameless and pretty much irrelevant to this love-fest I was having with my quiver of children. 

Even as a child, I knew that was weird.

 

As an adult, here in 2016, that list is long gone. The conversations around this particular topic have become less sure and more urgent at the same time. The high chair is still in my parents' kitchen, even though the babies in our family have outgrown it and there'll be no more unless they come from me. If they don't, well. That high chair, and the Pack n' Play and extra sippies will join the yard sale assembly line some distant summer, where they'll trade ten dollars for the end of an era.

 

Two letters. There's no "I" in Team but there sure as hell is an "I" in If and I alone am the holder of answer on if I'll add a teammate, if you will. The days keep coming and the snow falls and the snow melts and spring creeps in.

 

I overheard a conversation in Panera once, standing in line before work one morning. Two women, late forties/early fifties. One casually said to the other, "You know, I was telling So-and-So the other day...Sometimes my greatest regret is never having children, and yet some of the best, most meaningful things in my life came from not having them." "Ma'am. Ma'am!"  I was rooted in place, reeling on a regular day, staring after them.

What if these babies don't actually happen....and if another world opens? I'd genuinely never considered the possibility of an alternative until now that time has forced me to do so. And what if it's....great?

 

When has become If and my world has gotten a whole lot less certain.

 

It feels jarringly, unexpectedly, free.

 

11/4

I have had a backwards kind of day today
not ever knowing what to do or say.
I've twisted everything around
have YOU ever acted in this way?

Said, ' I would like a hup of cot chocolate'
'pace my capers on my desk'
I was trying not to backwards things
I was trying really to do my best!

I promise to turn this day around
but I can't seem to find my way.
For I've made a mess on my desk
in a backwards kind of way

-Linda Winchell

_____________________________________

Sometimes you start a blog when you’re 24, and you write entries about learning to parallel park and how you’ve just figured out how to make iced tea and how you threw up against the side of the Treasury Building after a drunken night with your other 24 year old friends. You write that blog sitting at a desktop computer that in tiny apartment—the first you’ve lived without roommates—and reruns of Dawson’s Creek are in the background and you’re lonely but you like it that way.

And then you close that blog, and move away. Then you move again, and you start a new blog. You’re 26 and sitting in the university library where you’re supposed to be studying for grad school. You meet all of you.

Then almost decade passes, and you’ve moved and moved on and your writing languishes because life overwhelms. You drive to work in the morning, swallowing the Zoloft at a stoplight and washing it down with a McDonalds Diet Coke because this is America, dammit. All you need is a cigarette to throw out the window.

You’re 34 and just were prescribed your first blood pressure medicine. HBP and it’s kissing cousin Anxiety are handed down your maternal family line as if we passed down a quilt that we sometimes like to throw over our heads.

______________________________ 

I accepted my current job from my office telephone, on November 4, 2014. 11/4/14. I’ve written here before about the significance of the numbers 4/11 in my life, and nearly everything about my move somehow incorporated those numbers. I felt like it was meant to be. Even if it’s still hard and strange (doing different kind of work completely) and nothing I really like enough to write home about, it’s a good job. I’m learning a lot. Yesterday, November 4, 2015, everything flipped. I woke up to find that my state had elected Matt Bevin (an uber right wing republican) who has vowed repeatedly to unroll elements of the Affordable Care Act. If those provisions go….well….I’m not sure what my future holds. Ironically, also yesterday, I met the woman who is going to become my new boss.

What’s she like? Oh, she’s exactly like me. Exactly. Personality, background, even looks. And we’re the same age. Naturally, my hackles went up immediately and they’re still up. I told a friend—I’m trying hard to avoid my natural tendency when encountering new people: eyeing them with suspicion. ;) 

It doesn't help that I've had a couple of fuck-up's this week too at work, which makes me feel about two inches tall. It's not like me. But it is on Backwards Day in Backwards Week.

So. That’s been my week. What’s the last year or so been like? Oh, you know, fine. Great at times, actually. I love being back closer to my family although of course a part of me misses DC. I’ll always miss that city the way I’ll always miss my hometown. It’s just part of me; my DNA. My mom was in a very serious car accident almost one year ago today. It was two days after I accepted this job, and she broke her pelvis, every rib and her collarbone. She’s made a pretty damn miraculous recovery, truly. I know she loves me being back. My nieces and nephews do too, although my two younger nephews and my sister moved to California earlier this year. I can’t believe they’re really gone—it is so strange to be in Kentucky, being left. I’m the one always doing the leaving in the family.

Hello from the Other Side. I’ll be back soon J

Mother, Mother

I’m at the beach where I’ve been lucky enough to go for the past three years, thanks to Maggie May Etheridge. No, not through her dollars or mad hook-ups, but for pointing me to a blog where I eventually met the blogger’s sister and then her friends and then, well, aren’t we all in this crazy thing together in our little blog-land? I’ve known some of you for longer than I’ve known very close friends in my day to day life.

Anyway. It’s become a tradition, and very much of a step-out of my real life since I meet friends that are in different states as we converge on this place. My friend Denise is generous beyond belief, and none of this would be possible without her. She grew up coming to this beach in Avalon New Jersey, and has passed this along to us and now it’s a part of our own histories and in our bones in the same way. Children have grown up here, and they’re not the only ones.

Avalon has become a safe place; a place where we can lay it all on the line. Our catch-up’s often cut close to the bone, and that’s taken some getting used to on my part. Now I come with the expectation that I’ll be asked “to the core” questions within minutes and as the week goes on and beach yoga is done and the conversations will deepen.

We have a yogi who comes to do beach yoga in the mornings, and yesterday she mentioned that she had an astrologist friend and the next thing I know I’m texting my date and time of birth and then this morning, the three of us gathered on the bed while a star chart is projected on the wall. Alexander stated “so everyone here is family, correct?” None of us are family except chosen and we gave permission to “go deep.” He began with me, and I was basically engaged only on a “this is interesting” level. I do but I don’t believe in this kind of thing. The yoga instructor doesn't really know me at all -I am sporadic at best in my yoga attendance. So I assumed that if he were able to peg me, it would be genuine and nothing that she could have "fed" him.

He nailed it. He pinned me against the wall with my character and past, and proceeded to the do the same with the rest of us. My star chart reflected that my parents were very loving when I came into the world. But that something happened in my third year, a financial crisis, and they were driven apart. I'm not sure what this was, but they were divorced by the time I was five. There were several other things he stated about my personality, my work demeanor, my ...well, my core.

It was casual, and we all felt free to ask the hard things.

The Hard Things.

Having a baby has been a thing for me for so many years. I’ve always wanted to mother and nurture and I do on a daily basis for the people (little, big and furry) in my life. I’m 34. 34 is young! Yes, I know this. But I have been building with the reality that if I’m going to go down this road of parenthood, it’s time to think about it. Adoption? Birth? Single parenting, or is there a spouse around the corner? Should I wait for that? Let go and let God? WWJD? And here comes the spiral.

On the bed, in the safe space, I wanted to ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. But then Alexander said - unprovoked - that beginning last summer, a deep deep aura of fertility was surrounding me. Beginning June/July and it was still very strong.

There’s a soul hovering.

I, stunned, said – yes, I can feel it. He said very seriously – of course you can. It is there. There’s free will involved, which he kept emphasizing. I said should I do this now? He demurred, and said that was something he could explore with me further if we wanted to go down that road. But he saw a partner for me in the future. I asked when? He got quiet and said “December 2016; no, Summer 2017.” And nodded a few times and I didn’t push this more. I had enough.

I don’t know what I believe sometimes.

But I do know that several weeks ago, I heard on the radio that someone had mentioned that she’d wished for her daughter her whole life. And that once she’d asked her daughter how she got to be her little girl. The little girl answered “I heard you call for me and I came to you.” Since then, I’ve noticed myself whispering…'baby girl, baby girl' and projecting this into the universe very quietly, and almost without notice by me.

Two nights ago, I stood at the beach, looked into the water and whispered “baby girl...baby girl..." into the swirling wind.

We had a late afternoon of processing, napping and thinking. The three of us went to yoga tonight and in hour two, I was feeling almost transcendent and I thought about the day. I said in my mind, to the soul hovering….baby, Mommy will get you here. Our lives, they will be extraordinary. I’ll see you soon.

I have no idea how and when and I ... I don't feel like I have to know. For the first time in a very long time. In my whole life?

This has certainly been a Monday. I feel very at peace.

vignette

Winter 2010

"Do you want to go home?" I whispered into his fur as we looked out the window at the winter snow coming down.

I remember feeling a little lonely, and he was my solid thing. Something that I could hug, even if he was reluctant about that whole deal. It was a scene that would repeat a handful of times throughout January and February, as I looked out of my basement apartment window at the worst winter DC would have on record in decades.

I moved New Years Eve 2009, and brought my kitten long for the ride. It was a rough adjustment. I'd come back, after four years, to a city where I didn't have intentions of returning--not because I didn't love it, but because it's hard.

Living in Washington, D.C. is no cakewalk. Nor is any major city, I imagine, but DC seems to expend a special brand of hell on its residents in the form of non-voting rights, impossible traffic and almost no ability to have a car without hundreds of dollars in fees and fines, and the reality of thousands of people living in a ten mile wide city that can't govern itself without Congress looking over its shoulder.

And god, I love it.

My second five years there were not without difficulty. That could be the biggest understatement I've uttered since 2015 began. But, it was mine. It became home because I kicked a home out of the rotting wood and packed ice, and started to root.

But, it was time for our life to change. The roots were not enough. I packed him up again, and off we went.

Winter 2015

Here we are. A bigger home, a new job, a new life. Close to home, but not home. The worst winter on the books in decades, just as the winter I made my last transition was. I begin kicking out a home in the rotting wood and the packed ice.

We are here.

 

Tonight, after they surveyed the falling snow, I picked Charlie up and walked around closing blinds. We stopped in front of the patio door and looked out. I was just a little bit lonely.

 

I hugged him close and we watched the snow fall. I whispered into his fur. "Do you want to go home?"

 

 

 

4/11

I read once that seeing your birthday numbers on the clock was like God saying, "Hey there." I've always liked that idea, and every time I see them, I've smiled.

Then it started happening. A lot.

Ever since I posted that lost blog, life grabbed me by the hand and dragged me down the road. Metaphorically and literally. I got the offer on November 4 (11/4). A few weeks later, I quit. (11/11/14). As silly as it sounds, seeing the numbers seemingly everywhere made me---and still does---have a certain peace about it all. I have said several times....yes, this is hard. Yes, this is an unbelievable change I'm making. But it's right. I don't know why it's right, but it is. It's absolutely the closest thing I've attributed to any kind of divine intervention in years and years.

I've shared this w/ only my best friend, and she's been the lucky recipient of all my screen shots of the most STRANGE appearances of the numbers. For example...I posted on Facebook my announcement that I was moving back home after five years. I posted this picture on 11/14 at 11:11am without realizing it. 

"I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't either thinking about going home, or actually going home." -Happy Chandler.

So here I am, about a week and a half after settling into a brand new apartment (with two bedrooms! And cable! Movin' on up). Day 4 of my new job just wrapped, and I'm breathing underwater again.

I willingly stepped out of my comfort zone. As I've done many times before, but this is the first time I've taken myself away from a high-level place. I'm working for an old friend, an amazingly smart woman that's impressing the HELL out of me. And only a month ago, she was me. I was at the top of my game, but I'd hit the highest I could go there. I needed to step away while I was on top. 

I've got so much to learn. It's so hard to sit in meetings and not understand things. To not know the players, the jokes, the material. But I'm pretty darn lucky that they're willing to let me try to learn.

On we grow.

More months than I thought it's been

Since I sat down to update this space. I can't seem to walk away from this small corner of the internet that's mine, although I can't help but wonder if its shelf life has expired. I like having the archives that chronicle the last several years of my life, knowing all that I'm not writing between the lines, although it's often painful for me to go back and read them.

Five years ago this month, I got job offers coming at me in all directions--all in the middle of the recession, and the worst financial time that my generation has experienced. I worked in a niche area of healthcare policy, and that niche area had been embedded into Obama's stimulus package of 2009. Everyone who knew anything about this was suddenly highly marketable. It was a flash in the pan moment for me and my fledgling "career" --only 6 years out of college at that time --and the likes of which I will likely ever see again my lifetime.

Five years ago this month, I took a deep breath and made the difficult decision to move back to Washington, D.C.

Five.

I've lived in my little apartment in my vibrant bustling city for longer than I've ever lived anywhere in my life. My career has skyrocketed to a level I could never have envisioned--I don't regret that decision for a minute. I am well-known in my field, and we're winding down. Mission accomplished, so to speak, in a lot of ways. It's changing, pulling me down into the depths of which I'm not sure I want to go.

I've grown more than I ever have (in more than ways than one, and I should look very seriously at Weight Watchers in my future!). I am a different person than I was--and that's life as it should be.

"And the walls came tumbling down in the city that we love." 

I'm typing this sitting on an airport floor, outside gate 38, waiting to board a plane to Louisville so that I can have a four-hour long job interview tomorrow. I think there's a good chance I'll get it (I know the woman I'd be working for, or else I wouldn't be nearly this sure), and thus a good chance my life will turn on its head and a new chapter will begin.

Or it won't. And that's ok too, but I am ready to get home. I think I am destined, as a child of divorce, to always feel torn between two homes. DC has been my home for many, many years and I will cry a lot over the next month as I pack up my life again to journey back to my Kentucky home. There is no guarantee, but I've been asking the universe (quite literally, out loud) to bring me something good. Please, let something good happen.

In an attempt to control things I can control, I decided to dye my hair brown, as it finally became clear it was turning under those blonde highlights I kept putting in. Embracing the physical changes, the emotional ones, for what's next.

Cross your fingers.

"And if you close your eyes, does it almost feel like you've been here before?"

Mothers and Daughters

She stares at my pictures and my hands and my face like she's searching for something.

My mother was just here for a week, and she comes here fairly frequently--maybe 2-3 times a year, and stays for several days. We are together non-stop when she is here, and she enmeshes into my day to day patterns for a moment. When we are apart, we rarely talk except via text messages. It's an ebb and flow, as are most relationships I suppose. She knows me in a way only a mother can, and is kept at arm's length in a way that you only keep your mother.

Mom grew up very poor in deep rural Kentucky. This wasn't your average poor...Mom actually just told me this last time she was here that she didn't taste meat until she was about 7 or 8--old enough to remember her mother cutting the head off a chicken. Only vegetables from the garden (funny how poverty has flipped from vegetables only to processed, terrible foods only as accessible to the poor.) Running water didn't enter her home until she was 16. She and her sisters grew up, in her words "as poor as church mice," but she graduated high school and then went to technical school to be a secretary.

She moved to Frankfort, our Kentucky state capitol, which was several hours away from her home, to work for the state. To be very clear, my mother moving in the early 1970's to Frankfort to work all by herself at the age of about 20 is almost an exact parallel to her own daughter fleeing to Washington DC, another capitol city all by herself. I joke that if I am to have my own daughter, she will probably flee to NATO headquarters to work.

But that is where the parallel's end. My mother didn't have the help I did -- she didn't have a father's help to springboard from, as I did. She ate the free crackers from fast food restaurants, and put the free ketchup on them, and those were her meals. My father, when he met her, said she kept all her belongings in a cardboard box. Money was sent back home to her own family, and she still kept enough out to live.

I know her and my dad were happy for a little while. She then gave birth to his clone (in personality, and looks). I am her only child, and the very replica of her former mother-in-law.

My mother loves me. So much that I know it brings her to tears if she thinks about it for too long. But, she is also baffled by me -- me, and my quick humor and liberal tendencies and career that she doesn't understand. But what means the world to me...is that she tries. I telework when I can when she visits, so she hears me on conference calls and meetings. She'll always ask alot of questions when they're over and sometimes I catch her watching me with this mix of disbelief and fondness and...something I can't put my finger on.

We were watching TV one night and I showed her a cut on my hand. She caught my hand in hers, and absentmindedly studied and prodded each finger, each nail, for several minutes, like she was trying to find her baby's hands in there somewhere. I let her.

I know she is proud of me. I know she would probably prefer if I were about 25 pounds lighter, and maybe given her a grandchild by now (or if she had any hope of ever getting one). But, she ended up with me, her baffling daughter. She says frequently that I "raised myself." I did have to do a fair amount of solo trudging through the divorce and subsequent stepparents and stepsiblings and all their accompanying drama. But, I was always cared for and loved.

I just wish she would give herself more credit for the extraordinary life she has lived, simply by wanting more and making that 'more' happen. I wish she could realize what I know --that from the ashes of poverty, she rose to scrape out a better life. And I stand on her shoulders, scraping out mine.

Mom looks out the window at her childhood home, being torn down; 2013

Night walks

Even in angst, even in wonder (shall I wander?), even when I doubt -I still look at this when I walk at night, on a Tuesday, and I think "Fucking lucky. So fucking lucky."

Cups of tea I forget to drink

View of my desk, from the viewpoint of someone with their head in their arms. I am buried, deep down, in work. And at the same time, stagnant. There are decisions to be made, even if they lead to me staying at the status quo for awhile. To avoid being overly cryptic, I have another job offer on the table. No relocation, so I'd stay here. But it would involve leaving the industry I've been in for 8 years. Is it time? I also have a very tentative "offer" from another place that would come with relocation.

I'm so tired of having the same arguments in my head, with myself. I'm so tired of having to make every single decision by myself, with no one truly understanding exactly what is at stake for me, career or personal-life wise. I can see why people marry into ho-hum relationships or stay married even if it's shitty. It sucks, sometimes, having to do everything on your own. This isn't a pity party, but just a statement. I am at once jealous and dismissive of women who never had to do anything on their own.

Decisions will be made, and the world won't end. Lives won't be affected--only mine. And what does that matter?

I talked to my dad for a long time yesterday about all the decisions. I love that I have a father that wants to hear about my life. That offers to pay for things even if we make the same amount of money, and I haven't asked for a dime since college. That offers to drive up for my birthday. At the same time, it can be maddening talking to him (or to anyone in my family) because there is so little understanding and comprehension about what I do for a living. Not because they are dumb or that I am doing anything exotic, but life just simply has zoomed on and we've lost that day-to-day "oh this is my bitch coworker Debbie; I'm working on this project; I'm running this meeting tomorrow on the Hill." 

We were going back and forth, and I mentioned about how my sister's first reaction is "but won't you be bored if you move away from DC??" That seems to be so many's reaction--that I'm living in some glamorous place (ok. I kind of am. 50% amazing, 50% parking tickets). I said "I don't want to have to defend constantly my decision to leave if and when that ever comes. This is just where I live to me, not "Washington, DC." Would all of you be moaning about all my lost opportunities for entertainment if I said "Hey fam, I think I'm really ready to leave Raleigh?" For some reason, this cracked him up and made him see exactly what I mean. I said I was going to start posting more pictures of my electric bill and the city rats on Facebook, to make it seem less amazing. Deal, he said.

I had to go to the doctor this morning for some follow-up bloodwork. She was filling the vials, and I talked about how I'm having anxiety pop up again. It's been a long, long time since that happened. My doctor is remarkably un-hysterical and was pretty calm about it like, oh well, don't let it get out of control. Let me know. Which is exactly what I needed--no medicine or anything, just a stated fact. It's out there. We'll watch it.

Cabin fever! I need winter to be over. I have signed up for two softball leagues (both co-ed, same league I was in last year.) I'll get to play twice a week games and practices. I can't wait to get outside and shake off winter.

On the way to the doctor for my 730am appointment, I noticed the moon still out over the rising sun. I snapped this photo and grinned. And put it on Facebook.

I think Dad put his head in his arms, buried on his desk, and thought about his dramatic daughter living the dream she always wanted.

Blowing in the wind

I've gone quiet in this space of late, as I do when things are busy. They've been as busy as they come. I'm typing this out on my phone, killing time waiting for a friend. The friend I'm waiting for is referenced in the post a few posts down -we've gotten through this silent period and she's in town for work. It'll be good to see her--I think the separation did us good (even if she didn't even know it was intentional on my end).

I wandered around Target for about an hour. I am sitting in my car listening to a $7.99 copy of The Essential Bob Dylan that I picked up while in there. On the checkout line, I realized I bought cat food, this CD, and beer. And pajamas. I apologized to the checkout guy for the extremely random purchase order and he said while shrugging "I should probably ask you out." Ha!

I just got back from a week and half at our annual conference where I thought I was going to meet Hillary. Aargh it didn't happen. My boss met her and burst into tears. He's a grown man. He bursts into tears far too often for my taste. 

I did get to see her from a perch in the staff balcony, and I posted this panoramic picture to Facebook. Check out the sea of smartphone and iPad screens held up to record her.

 

Then I was off to Philly right after to meet up with friends for a birthday weekend. I did yoga for an hour and a half. Yoga is not my jam. I thought at one point while squatting and being told to breeeaathe "I came all the way here to be tortured!!" 

Off to listen to Mr Dylan and drive around. Thanks for driving by this little small space. 

For Liv

The view from my back porch!

February

February.

February mires me down in cold and I have a case of the bleaks, although it's not as bad as August. Things are barreling along for me and I'm in survival mode until spring.

In this month I am/will be busier than a one-legged dog in a race. January was about that bad and this month is not going to see much rest for me. Our annual conference will be at the end of the month and it numbers into the tens of thousands that attend. Every weekday until then and especially during then, I am already double and sometimes triple booked on my calendar.

I stand up when I'm on conference calls and pace around. I eat lunch standing up. I am like a caged bird in February.

In this month, I will get to meet Hillary Clinton on the day my mother will turn 61. She wants a picture of the two of us, and she wants it in a frame.

That I can do.

And now I leave you with this....it is full of the f-bomb, but I dare you not to have the beginning line in your head for the rest of all time.

I find myself humming "Holy shit, it's another fuckin' day" in the shower all the time now.

The Separation

Forward, to the side, together

My life has revolved around my friendships for a very long time.  As I've gotten older, my life has started to evolve around them evolving--I have seemingly stood still in comparison to many, although in my heart of hearts I know that is not true. I have grown too, and whatever changes have occurred in my relationships have been both in my control and partly of my doing.

It is hard, being 32, and watching your friends not just have weddings and babies -- but be in marriages that have gone on for years, with children in school. (It's just as hard watching your sisters do this, too). Some of them would maybe argue that it is hard being 32, and watching me live a life entirely of my own making, direction and having no demands other than those I make for me.

My two best friends from high school and I are used to this. I was in one of their weddings this summer, and met the other's new baby also this summer, and I haven't really spoken to either one since. We keep in touch online and the occasional phone call but that's it. There is an ease there that I think only the very lucky have - we don't have to be in each other's day to day lives to stay close simply because we've learned that dynamic to be the norm for so many years. Though lately, I've been feeling those absences more than I have in the past.

For my more recently acquired friends in my adult life, that's not the case. We don't have years and years of background together to know without a doubt that if we don't talk for months, no big deal.

My best friend is one I've referenced many times on this blog through the years, even at times when it wasn't obvious I was referring to her. She was a major part of my life when I was in Lexington--which, as crazy as it sounds, was almost five years ago. We've stayed as close as we probably could after I moved and she stayed behind in Kentucky.

I'm still reluctant to talk about her and what caused us to break all those years ago and we've tried to mend throughout this time. I still have a paranoia that people in my "real/offline" life secretly read this blog (which is pretty ridiculous) and I don't want to drag her name through the mud. In a nutshell -- when I met her, she was on her second marriage and she had 3 kids and her mom living with her. 2 dogs and a vibrant household. Things were deteriorating with the marriage and 2 of the kids were difficult teenagers and, and, and. I was (am) ten years younger than her, so this put me at 25. 25 and still very scarred from my volatile home life and family, and I started sinking into their dynamic.

She met another man, and I went along for that ride. I watched the family break and I watched her break from me as she pursued this relationship. I had very mixed feelings about everything and I even voiced to her that all of this was over my pay grade, to use a work term. I was too young. I was too naive in the ways of relationships -- I didn't know what in the hell I was talking about when I was engaged in these spirals down. I had never been married; I had barely had a boyfriend I halfway liked.

I moved away; her relationship with this man evolved. They are now engaged. When she told me of her engagement, I told her I was happy for her and smiled although I felt like I was sinking deep. My hands were shaking and I cried when I got in my car and drove away. I knew I was losing her in some way, but it went way deeper than that for me on a lot of levels. I was so SO bitter. In a "Well, didn't everything work out great for YOU" way when it felt (feels) like I spin my wheels relationship-wise and I am so frustrated at how easily this come for other people. I also don't like this man at all for a variety of reasons that are not blog-worthy.

Also -and this is something I still struggle with- I have no perspective on how to have a marriage and still maintain very close friendships. In this way, I am as worldly and knowledgeable as a 15 year old trying to figure out how to have a crush on a boy. I just simply don't know because I've never experienced this from the other side. I've been the one waving behind the car with Just Married on it. I'm the one left behind.

We've stayed fairly close through the years, as close as we could for being two very busy people living in different states. She travels here a few times for work a year, and we text/talk. We've kept a connection that has ebbed and flowed. We've been as close as we can considering we're one half of a pair that deeply dislikes the man who the other plans to marry, and one half very likely resentful that her best friend hates the man she's going to marry.

We haven't spoken since the fall. I was in Kentucky and I didn't call. I am willfully placing an arm between us until I can get the same emotional space as I have the physical. I need to learn how to let things go, how to let my own issues untangle from hers. I need to grow up, in some ways. I need to learn how to love with detachment. This has come naturally through mutual transitions with my older friends--and in this case, I'm the one watching and waiting for time to heal the wound. The wound that, if I am honest, I gave myself.

At the end of the day, I really miss my friend. There are soo many things that make me want to pick up the phone, but I always hesitate. And to be fair, she's not exactly reaching to me either right now. I'm not sure where this ends. Or continues.

Forward, to the side -- together?

I don't know.

Light things

Illustrations of a life.

(My New Year's Eve with a six year old)

Ice melting, perfectly parted

I work too late.

Desperado

You better let somebody love you, before it's too late.

What a winter it has been. There have been so many times I've wanted to check in with each of you, and I think I've gotten a bit spoiled by being friends with many of you on Facebook. I toss out the snippets, and leave out the details, and truly only neglect myself by not coming here to augment those thoughts, little stories of my day, and so on.

So much has happened, but nothing so monumental that things are not also still the same. I sit here, blissfully alone and with no plans on a weekend and I couldn't be happier about that for now. It's been a long week and I've been on a 3 day business trip and a conference here in town and oh, met a long lost relative while I was there and then had to go to Baltimore last night (every time I'm there I smile because of the name of this blog). So, I am very very happy to be tucked away here in my apartment for these two days, just cleaning and puttering. Tonight I made chicken enchiladas, took a bubble bath and had a glass of wine.

I need to talk about so much. I need to talk about how, in December, my 3 year old nephew became so sick that he was admitted to the hospital for two weeks. I cried in my office about how I couldn't be at home. I've never felt so helpless.

I need to talk about how I went to New York City twice in December and what both of those trips -each so very very different- meant to me. I need to talk about going home for Christmas in Kentucky this year, and how it was more hard than good. And how deeply sad that made me. I need to talk about how I don't want to do to myself again.

I want to talk about how relieved I was to be back in DC, but unhappy I am at my job. How miserable I am most of the time. I want to talk about how furious I am that I feel I am being pushed out of my job by the hire of my new 'boss' when I've been doing his job and mine for the past year. I want to talk about how I'm shutting down.

I want to talk about how I sometimes think about walking away from my life completely and how everyone else seems to have it so much more together than I do. I want to talk about how I was in Kentucky for almost two weeks and saw zillions of family members and no one asked how I was. No one asked how my life is. No one. My life is full of so much, but not of husbands or children, and that limits things sometimes. And I do get that. But it is lonely. I want to talk about how my lifelong friends seem lost to me. I want to talk about how I've made new friends too in this time, and how I feel like I have a small safety net and how lucky I do.

I want to talk about how sometimes I can get too enmeshed in the blog world and the friends and life it's enabled. I want to talk about how it is simultaneously one of the biggest blessings in my life. I want to talk about how I dated someone this winter with three children, and how now that is over. His name was Owen. I want to talk about how I've gained a few more pounds I shouldn't have, and how frustrated I am that I feel like I come to my little space here to write the same things month after month, year after year. Always the same.

I am fine--truly. There's just so much to talk about.