Category: Life

The Box Of The Me Who Was And Is Still

In this dusty box, my history lives

I was going through a plastic tub of memorabilia today. It’s full of things I collected while growing up. I dug the box out of the basement hoping to find some remaining buttons from bands I liked when I was in high school. I did find some, definitely not as many as I had at one point, but some.

The box contains some items my mom saved from my childhood and then other items I held onto for myself. There is an album someone else compiled with cards given to my parents both when I was born and on my first birthday. There is a local newspaper with a photo of me in 1976 when I was 8 and won a coloring contest sponsored by a bank. For that feat, I earned a $25 savings account and a liberty bell bank. The headpiece to the veil I wore at my first communion is in there, as is the memory card from my confirmation and photos from church trips. There is my Brownie uniform, my Girl Scouts membership card, and all the Girl Scout badges I earned but never sewed on my sash. There are report cards from elementary school, junior high, and high school. There are two random field day ribbons, both for the high jump, one fifth place and one third place. There are the literary magazines I contributed to and edited in high school, along with information about the band trip I took to Florida my junior year. There’s a letter from my orthodontist about how to care for my braces. There are wallet-size photos given to me by friends in junior high with their written dedications to me on the back, along with some notes that they passed to me in classes. My eighth grade yearbook is in there, which is odd because the rest of my yearbooks reside in a separate box. There is the corsage I wore to prom. There is a Junior Passport for Disneyworld from 1983, cost $9.50. There are envelopes containing my ACT, SAT, and GRE scores. There’s the letter I received when I was waitlisted at the only college I applied to. So many parts of my life that would be forgotten if I hadn’t saved the specifics to remind me when I hit 50 and discovered my childhood memories fading like the ink on the photographs from my youth.

Of all the items I unearthed, among the poems, paintings, and artifacts, I found one that stood out. It was a note I wrote to my mother when I was 7 years old. On a morning when presumably she didn’t wake up in time to help get me ready for school, in my second grade handwriting and with my second grade spelling, I wrote a note so she wouldn’t worry about me when she woke up and realized I was no longer home. It read:

“Dear Mommy, I got Kathy and Julie quiet. I left the house. I wost up and brust my teeth. I got my cloths on. Rigth now Im in scool.”

I wrote my name at the bottom in case when she found the note it wasn’t completely obvious it was written by her seven year old and not her five year old or two year old.

Everything you need to know about me is contained within this short note. 1) I started my writing career early. 2) I have always been quite responsible and self-sufficient. 3) I look out for people I care about. 4) I don’t want to be a bother. 5) There’s a reason why I didn’t go into art.

I’ve changed a lot over the years, but the person at my core remains the same. I’ve been writing for too long to stop now.

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Unmoored

Photo by Joel Bengs on Unsplash

I’m having a sad day. I assume you know the kind of day I am referring to. It’s as if all the difficult and emotional things in my life that have been running in background mode for a while all decided to rise up and jump on me at the same time, leaving me at the bottom of a dog pile of sadness. I’m one of the most fortunate people I know, so I fight the urge to feel sorry for myself, even when there are legitimate life experiences that are troubling me. When you have everything, it feels shallow to whine about the few things that feel off in your life.

I allow myself to feel frustration, anger, shame, guilt, and a whole host of other emotions, but sadness is verboten. I think this goes back to my childhood. There are only so many times you can hear someone sing “Cry Me A River” or say “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” before you realize sadness is something to be avoided at all times. The past couple days, though, I let the sadness smother me. I have been throwing myself a pity party, and I’ve not been enjoying it one bit.

Tonight while walking with my youngest, I was talking to him about how I am struggling. In addition to all the truly shitty things happening in the world and the country right now, I’m facing growing older, having my kids go to college and move on with their lives, recognizing that the job I’ve devoted myself to 24/7 for the past 21 years is ending, accepting that the pandemic took a toll on my friendships and hobbies, and trying to figure out what I am supposed to do with the rest of my time on earth. If I had to put a term to what I am feeling, I would say I am unmoored. Luke, being the wise person he is, told me I need to find some anchors, regular routines or habits that will give my life some stability and meaning when I feel like I am adrift. He pointed out that he has reading and school to keep him busy and give him purpose. This makes sense, and I know he’s right.

I have spent the past two years the way many people have during the pandemic: in limbo. I’d like to start back to yoga, but I suspect the minute I do some new variant will come sweeping through, close studios, and set me back again. This fear that the other shoe is constantly about to drop and mess everything up is debilitating. I need to get to a place where I can shove my melancholy and fears aside and throw myself back into life. I need to start moving forward, but it’s hard to do that when all you want to do is lie around and binge watch shows in some sort of meaningless, feeling-less stupor. I am all over the place, stuck in a cycle of feeling superfluous one minute and lying to myself and acting as if everything is fine when I know damn well it is not the next. It’s no bueno.

I need to claw my way out of this hole. I am going to start with forcing myself to exercise and hope that sets me on a better path. It’s either going to improve my mood or kill me is what I figure. At least it will be a step in a direction, which will be better than staying buried under my demons, right?

Life is hard. Anyone who tells you it isn’t is selling you something. On a more positive note, though, I guess “unmoored” is another way of saying “free to explore new shores.” So, there’s that.

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That Time The Oscars Turned Into The Slap

I have watched the Oscars every year since Out of Africa won for Best Picture. Despite this storied history, I think my love affair with this event is over. I felt the show tonight was going well at first. I liked the amount of diversity I was seeing and was especially pleased with the lack of playing-someone-off music. I thought for a few, brief moments that we were seeing what I wished for the rest of the country, some inclusion, some empathy, some gentleness, and some unity. Then, Will Smith happened, and the Oscar broadcast suddenly felt like ABC’s The Slap.*

I know everyone and their dog, as well as the flea on their dog, is going to have an opinion of the incident between Will Smith and Chris Rock, so I will keep my four-cents (yes, 4 cents…inflation) brief. First, Chris Rock is a comedian. He cracks wise for a living. His comment referencing Jada Pinkett-Smith’s bald head was, at best, tasteless, and at worst, if he was aware of Jada’s alopecia condition, cruel and gross. That said, Will Smith’s physical assault on Rock on live television, followed by his shouting an obscenity-laced comment at him twice, was wrong on every single level I can imagine.

Let me break this down in kindergarten terms. You don’t hit other people. You. Do. Not. Hit. Other. People. Full stop. You just don’t. It’s wrong. Smith had every right in the world to be angry at Rock’s comment and to want to stand by his wife. I get that. He did not, however, have the right to haul off and hit the man. That he was allowed to remain in the theater after he physically assaulted another man in front of millions of viewers is wrong. That he received the Oscar and was allowed to stand there and talk about “love” while a crowd gave him a standing ovation is scary. That he tied his actions to Richard William’s fierce love of his family, stating that “love will make you do crazy things” was sickening. That Smith didn’t start his speech by apologizing to Rock for hitting him is a sobering example of what is wrong with this country.

I give credit to Chris Rock for being able to withstand that attack with some semblance of composure and go on to give the award for Best Documentary Feature to Questlove and friends. He handled that situation with some serious restraint.

I told my husband that while Jada may have appreciated Will’s show of misguided chivalry, I would most certainly be angry as hell if he ever “stood up for” me in that manner. (I know he knows this and I know he would never, but I said it anyway.) I can handle my own battles. I wouldn’t want anyone else speaking for me without having spoken about it with me first. I wouldn’t want anyone hitting another person in my honor. It all felt so middle school. I’m surprised we didn’t hear Will say, “Meet me behind the jungle gym at recess.” This antiquated notion that some men have, that chivalry means defending someone, needs to go. Chivalry is supporting someone. If Will had turned to Jada, asked if she was okay, asked what he could do to be there for her in that moment, and then she told him she wanted him to go defend her honor, then maybe that slap would equate to a show of support. But instead, he made it all about Will by displaying his anger and his appalling lack of situational awareness and self-restraint. Not cool.

At any rate, now that the Oscars have become The Maury Show, I’m finished. I’ll find out who won later. If next year’s Academy Awards devolve into a melee and seats get tossed around, I won’t be surprised. It seems like that is where we are headed.

*I have never watched The Slap, so I’m not really sure how it plays out, but I’m pretty sure someone gets slapped and a bunch of people have reactions about it.

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Sometimes It’s Best To Be The Last To The Party

On Friday, February 18th, my husband and I were searching our television haunts for something to watch. Truth be told, we subscribe to a lot of services. We have Hulu, Netflix, Prime, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Despite having all the services, we usually aren’t up on what’s coming out to view. We know about the new shows on Disney+ because of our sons. Other than that, we often are late to the party.

Anyway, while flipping through our choices that February night, I found Severance, a new show beginning that day on Apple TV+. The premise looked fascinating, so we figured we’d give it a go. At the end of the 57-minute premiere, we were hooked. We were feeling pretty smug about being early watchers of this brand new show. Maybe we could be the first ones out in front sharing the news? Each week since that night, we’ve looked forward to the next episode. With each episode, we became more engrossed and we told more people about it. Tonight we finished the latest episode, the seventh installment, and I found myself livid that I have to wait another week to see what happens next. And then I I remembered why we don’t get on board and watch shows in real time. It’s because we’re impatient.

After years of binge watching shows we missed out on while others were raving about them, I’m used to having ALL the episodes available to me and burning through them one episode after another in rapid fire succession, staying up until 2 am each night for a week, if necessary, to do it. Watching the entire show in a series of lengthy sessions keeps the story progression fresh in your mind. There’s no digging through your brain for the nuances of what happened the previous week. It’s simply a more efficient means of digesting a story plot. Of course, the streaming services producing the shows don’t care about that. They want to build intrigue and grow viewership. They want the public conversations at the water cooler to expand their audience without having to advertise their show. Greedy jerks don’t even care that binge watching is what we all want to do now. We have no patience. Why should we when so much television is on demand these days?

I am no longer capable of delayed gratification because delayed gratification takes too much time and dedication. And this revelation clued me into why my husband and I don’t hop on the bandwagon of a show immediately. It’s because watching television one week at a time is frustrating. So we miss out for a while. So what? We’re late to the party, but what an amazing party it is when we finally show up. It’s so good we sometimes stay up all night so we don’t miss anything. At 53, this is the closest I get to an all-night kegger and its accompanying next-morning hangover.

Binge watching is where old college students party. Now you know.

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The Abbreviated Drama Queen

If I had to share one thing about myself that would help you in your dealing with me, it is what is written on this mug. I am not so great at dealing with unanticipated changes the moment they are happening. But, if you give me a few minutes, I will pivot, accept the situation, and move on. I just have to be dramatic and whine about it and act like it is a much bigger deal than it actually is first.

My youngest sister gets this about me. When Julie was moving to Connecticut, I told her I would drive out with her and fly home. The day before we left, she let me know her car was very full. In addition to the last and most important of her belongings, we would be making the journey with her poodle, Jezebel. Julie kept telling me that I had to make sure my cross-country bag was small because her car was packed. So, I packed a small duffle bag for the three day trip and the flight home. When Julie pulled up, I noticed her sweet dog was not in a kennel, which is where I expected she would be for most the ride. Instead of a kennel, Julie had Jezebel’s dog bed. That was when she told me I would be riding with the dog bed on my lap with Jezebel in it. I wanted to lose my crap and get all dramatic, but what could be done about it? Nothing. We had to leave and this is how it was going to be. So, I got into the passenger seat, put Jezebel on my lap, and we were off for the 1900 mile drive. Julie told me later that she didn’t tell me earlier precisely because she knew I would get all dramatic about it. She also knew that if she just showed up and dropped the bomb on me minutes before we had to leave I would have a lot less time to be dramatic and I would just get over it. She was right. I did.

So, now you know the secret to dealing with me. When I am backed in a corner, I might grumble a bit but I will get on board more quickly. If I have time to be annoyed about it, I will still still get over it but you will have left me more time to whine about it. I still say I am flexible. I always adjust. Sometimes I just complain about things for a little bit longer.

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Our Nation’s Adults May Need Some Graham Crackers And A Good Nap

At an Avs game in 2011 with my little guys

We went to a Colorado Avalanche hockey game last night. My husband and I have been going to hockey games since we started dating in the mid 90s. At the time, he was working for the Denver Grizzlies IHL organization, a team which moved to Utah in 1995 when Colorado acquired the Quebec Nordiques and became the Colorado Avalanche. We have a long history with the Avs organization. I went into early labor with our oldest the morning after the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in 2001, presumably from all the screaming and jumping up and down while quite pregnant. Our oldest is named after the then team captain, Joe Sakic. Like I said, we’re tied to this team.

As we were leaving the game last night, parking lot traffic was its usual nightmare. When we got to our car, we were penned in by cars already lined up to exit the lot. These are the times when you see both the best and the worst of our species. Sometimes you are lucky and a calm, rational person will let you into the line ahead of them. Other times, people are complete assholes. Once there was a clearing and we were able to back up, we joined the line and began our wait. My family and I are unfazed by these situations. We’re travelers, and the first rule of traveling anywhere is “hurry up and wait.” So, we are well practiced and wait patiently. I mean, what are you going to do? Everyone has the same goal of getting out of the lot. Sooner or later, you will get there.

Sadly, other drivers in that situation often aren’t as big-picture about it as we are. It’s something else to watch a lot filled with impatient people trying to jockey for a prime spot in the queue. The car in front of us was a Lexus sedan. To the right of us just ahead, in the row of parking spots from which we had just emerged, several other cars sat with their lights on, waiting for one driver to show some kindness and let them into the growing line. But the cars in line were unrelenting. Steve and I were remarking about how people can be so petty in parking lots, when a woman in a Lexus SUV on the right began to inch her way forward, hoping to hop in front of the sedan directly in front of us. The men in the sedan would have none of that. They pulled forward as she did, hoping to bully her out of the spot. Undeterred, she inched forward again. Both cars came to a stop as traffic stalled again. I watched the passenger in the sedan become more agitated. I saw him gesturing at her. He unrolled his window, shouted some obscenities, and flipped her off. He then did something I’ve not seen before. He exited the car, walked over to her window and yelled at her some more before walking around the front of her car and parking his grumpy butt right against her front bumper in an act of defiance. Steve and I looked at each other. Here’s a man in his mid 40s getting into a pissing contest over being one car length ahead of someone else, like he owned that spot in line and it was criminal that someone thought they could leave the lot one second ahead of him. The woman looked flabbergasted. Then the man started to direct the car he had been in around him (and her bumper) so the sedan had now inched far enough forward that it blocked her in completely. At that point, the big baby left the front bumper and reclaimed his seat in the sedan, triumphant. For the record, we let her out of her space, so she ended up directly behind him. Hope that one-second gain in travel time helped him out. Geesh!

What is with people? I know that assholes have existed for as long as humans have roamed this planet, but it sure seems like we are witnessing, in person, a lot more episodes like this one lately. The collective emotional IQ of our nation seems to hover right about toddler level these days. Maybe we all just need some graham crackers and a really good nap?

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Being A Difficult Woman Is Actually Quite Easy

Here are a handful of things a woman might do that could get her labeled as “difficult”:

  • Refuse to smile when someone tells her she would look prettier that way
  • Ask for what she wants
  • Insist on equal treatment
  • Express an unpopular opinion (or even a popular one in the wrong company)
  • Say she isn’t interested in sex at the moment
  • Request help around the house or with the children
  • Believe it should be her body and her choice
  • Put herself first or make herself a priority
  • Know her worth
  • Expect appropriate acknowledgment and compensation for a job well done
  • Go against social norms, especially regarding appearance, career choice, or motherhood
  • Exhibit her anger, disappointment, or sadness
  • Call herself a feminist
  • Clap back against a cat call or other uninvited advance from an unknown male

There are, I’m certain, many other things a woman might do that could get her branded as difficult. It’s not just men who would label a self-assured or successful woman difficult. Sometimes women will cast other women in that same light because they are so accustomed to societal norms they don’t see the inherent sexism in them.

I have been labeled difficult plenty of times. It used to bother me. Now I simply see it as my duty. I’m not saying we need to smash the patriarchy to smithereens, but I think we’d do a lot better as a species if we allowed the world to become more balanced. Too much of any one thing is never a good idea, especially if that one thing is testosterone.

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You May Not Know What You Think You Know, Which Is Shocking, I Know

I saw this quote recently, and it struck a chord with me. Not just because people from my childhood on have sized me up, rated and assessed me according to their standards, and then expected me to fit in that neat little box for the rest of forever. If I grew or changed, they became disoriented in our relationship. Some adjusted, although in most cases we simply parted ways. I know this is a human condition. I know I too have sized people up, assigned labels, and lived in that fabricated paradigm with them, never acknowledging they might be more than I have given them credit for. Never once thinking perhaps the terms I ascribed to them were placed there via my own filters and were, at their kindest, a little biased, and at their most abhorrent, completely unfair.

It’s what we do as humans. We look at others hoping to find similarities. We look for our people. When we run across someone who doesn’t fit our prescribed guidelines, we pack them up and place them in the box we’ve determined they belong in. We are often wrong because, although we may have asked some initial questions, we usually haven’t conducted important follow-up inquiries to get beyond the superficial. We stick to the surface. We may half hear one part of a response to a question we’ve asked and suddenly we’re off to the races on judgment. If this pattern were an Olympic event, I would be in gold medal contention. At the very least, I’d probably make the podium.

In my world, I am working to be, as Ted Lasso reminds us, curious and not judgmental. Holy hell is that a hard road to walk after a lifetime of judging that began when I was but a wee Polish-Catholic girl. I will keep on working at it, though, because I can’t expect people to accept the ways in which I have changed unless I am willing to view them through a different lens as well. This ability, to allow others to grow and develop in ways that suit their goals and lives, is one I work on constantly. I do this because I don’t want to grow apart from the people I care about. My sons are clearly much more than I have decided they are, and I have to work to remind myself of that. They deserve their own chance to define themselves without my input. So, I am trying to be curious, to observe, to ask questions, and to apologize when I haven’t allowed them enough room to challenge their perceptions of themselves, to reach outside of their past behaviors, likes, and wishes and stretch.

Take a minute to reflect on how you measure people. Are you taking their measurements every time you meet them to determine how they are different and how you can fit into their new schema or are you expecting them to fit into the same outfit you gave them a decade ago? In what ways have you limited a relationship by neither admitting your own growth or acknowledging someone else’s?

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Choosing Happiness

“The key to being happy is knowing you have the power to choose what to accept and what to let go.” ~Dodinsky

I am working on this now as part of my experiment with boundaries. There are things I have chosen in my life that have not been making me happy. So now it’s time to choose happiness over obligation, over fear, over what others think is right. For some people, choosing happiness is easy. I struggled to recognize what happiness was. What I choose to accept now is that I get to choose. It’s not about what others think is right for me or what others want for me. Now I get to choose what I want for myself.

I’m excited to get my life on track. My life. Not the life others chose for me.

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Shit Is About To Get Real — Can We Handle It?

This kid literally cannot

To protect my mental health these days, I keep most of my news consumption to online articles because when I watch television news and see the strength and resolve of the Ukrainian people as they undertake what may well be an in-vain attempt to salvage their nation, I often have to leave the room to cry. I just can’t. It’s too much. Coming off two years of a global health crisis that kept us indoors and away from the greater community that binds us, my coping strategies have reached their limit like an old, elastic band that has been sitting in a drawer for ages and now will break when stretched. Just when the light at the end of the tunnel came into view, an aging white autocrat in Russia decided to push his limits.

I saw a video today of a four year old who approached his waiting school bus, got within fifteen feet of its steps, bent over to put his mask on, and then fell backwards with dramatic flourish onto the concrete, as if the prospect of the school week was more than he was capable of handling at that moment. We are all that kid right now as we wonder how much more insanity, unrest, upheaval, heartbreak, hardship, and stress we can take both at home and around the world.

For almost 77 years, the world has known peace in Europe. That peace has existed my entire life and all but three years of my parents’ lives. While my parents had a solid concept of the horrors of war through their parents, I had only what I saw in films. Aside from the 1980s era nuclear holocaust fears I had courtesy of our Cold War with the Soviets and “The Day After” television movie that haunts me 38 years later, I have felt mostly safe in our geographically isolated American bubble. That ended the other day when Putin’s army invaded a sovereign Ukraine, and then shit got real when he dangled the threat of a nuclear attack.

In an opinion piece on the CNN site this morning, six global voices weighed in on Putin’s invasion. Marci Shore, an associate professor of modern European intellectual history at Yale, had this to say about Putin: “This no longer felt like a man playing a high-stakes chess game, now it felt like a scene from Macbeth. My intuition was that an aging man facing his own death had decided to destroy the world. Ukraine is very possibly fighting for all of us.” This does indeed feel like the situation. While texting with my geopolitically savvy son last night, we discussed what can be done about the war as Putin begins to feel the squeeze of the joined hands of the free world around his neck. Joe told me, “The goal of the west should be to sanction as much as possible and create a counter propaganda machine to turn the oligarchs and Russian people against Putin.” And while I realize he is 100% correct, it means this war in Europe does not stay in Europe. We are a global economy. People around the planet will feel the sting of Putin’s actions in higher fuel costs, and those higher fuel costs will trickle into the costs of goods manufactured and sold around the world. The sanctions imposed on Russia will touch us all one way or another.

These financial hardships will be our contribution to squashing tyranny and, hopefully, restoring stability to Europe. Are we up to this task? I’m not sure. For the past two years, we’ve witnessed a steady cavalcade of tantrums over wearing a mask. If we weren’t all on board with covering our noses and mouths to suppress a transmissible, deadly virus, how willing will we be to suffer financial hardships for the sake of protecting democracy on a continent across the Atlantic? Are we smart enough to recognize that our peace and freedom are tied to the peace and freedom of citizens on the European continent? Will we be able to channel the ghosts of our American predecessors and adopt the WWII war-effort mindset of “Use it up – Wear it out – Make it do – or Do without”? Will we withstand financial hardship inside our own households and country, however long it takes, to protect the freedom and peace we have taken as a given for three quarters of a century? Man, I hope so. I would like to think we still have better days ahead.

We are a global people now. We need to act in the best interests of others to maintain our own best interests. As long as the majority of us in free nations are able to comprehend and live with that fact, we might be able to vanquish Putin, return Europe to peaceful homeostasis, and avoid nuclear fallout. The question remains, though, do we have it in us to continue living in an uncomfortable and perhaps increasingly painful holding pattern until better days arrive or are we just too soft now?

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