Dislocated

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Getting a head start on my future career.

Here’s another exciting fun fact I learned about myself the other day, something I think we can add to the list of interesting tidbits we already know about me, which include my oft-noted thin ankles (dudes, it’s the only naturally small part of my body) and that I am a skilled armpit farter (truly, another gift).

It turns out, ladies and gentlemen, that I also happen to be a dislocated worker.

Who knew?

I learned this nifty item about myself while filing our annual college aid applications this week. You know, those onerous forms that ask questions cooked up by the government like: what was the net worth of my business/investment farms and whether I’d received any free/reduced priced lunches the previous year.

So, I was plowing through the questions – a daunting task for any English major who’s adept at commas and spelling but struggles with counting – and then comes Question #84 on the FAFSA form: Is parent a dislocated worker?

Huh?

I never really paid attention to that term when filling out the FAFSA before. I guess I thought it was asking me if I was, like, a migrant worker or perhaps a foreign national in need of special working papers. But that was back when I had a job and knew I was a lot of things at that time (overworked, undercompensated), but not dislocated. But unlike other years when I’ve jumped through all those financial aid hoops while working full time, this year I’m doing so unemployed.

And thus, it seems, dislocated.

The kind people at FAFSA describe a “dislocated worker” as such: “a displaced homemaker. A displaced homemaker is generally a person who previously provided unpaid services to the family (for example: a stay-at-home mom or dad), is no longer supported by the spouse, is unemployed or underemployed, and is having trouble finding or upgrading employment.” 

I have never had my whole life summed up so succinctly in one sentence.

I’m actually moving towards my one-year anniversary of being dislocated. I had been worrying about a layoff at the beginning of last year but when the axe finally fell via a conference call in January, I mostly just felt relieved that I didn’t have to worry about late night meetings a few nights a week and working on the weekends. And most importantly, that perhaps I’d stop leaving my little guy in the wrong place at the wrong time because I had so many balls flying through the air. The kid was getting really tired of that. 

And overall, it’s been a really nice year of dislocation. I’ve been much less distracted. I’ve gone back to cooking real meals (which include ingredients like faro and beets) and not just ordering takeout a few nights a week (although in the perfect world I’d eat pizza every day). And I can’t remember the last time my eye twitched from stress. 

But most importantly, I think I’m giving the kids a lot less of a reason to discuss abandonment issues with a therapist someday. I’m around a lot more nowadays now that I’m underemployed and can be found on my couch most nights watching TV with a kid (“Fixer Upper” last night, yo, which we are obsessed with) or trying to read a book without falling asleep. I’ve scaled back from relying so heavily on the older kids to prepare meals and drive their little brother around. And maybe that’s good or maybe it’s not such a terrible thing for kids to help out around the house but for a while there, I really depended on them to keep this puppy of a family running while I was out playing Brenda Starr.

I was happy to reclaim the role of the mom in the house (a position that my 17yo daughter often tries to assume). And it’s a job I know well. For 18 years that was my primary function around here as a stay-at-home mom. The first time around, no one really valued what I did behind the scenes while they were off doing the real work. Folks took it for granted when they found clean towels in the linen closet or their favorite chocolate chip muffins in the pantry. Or that they could pick up and go golfing all day and someone would be around to watch the kids and make dinner.

Talk about feeling displaced.

But this second go-round as a full-time mom, I do feel a little more appreciated. And I appreciate it a lot more now, too. I appreciate the flexibility I’ve had over the last year, where I can pick up and go emergency bra shopping with a daughter at 1:00 on a Wednesday afternoon or spend the day sitting on the beach with my 11-year old and watch him ride wave-after-wave in on his boogie board. And when he asks if I can take him and a buddy to go kick a soccer ball around on some turf field in the next town, I don’t mind sitting in my car in the parking lot knitting and listening to NPR while they try to score goals off each other under a late December afternoon sky.

I’m happy to help a brother out.

I used to feel bad about being a stay-at-home-mom. I felt like I wasn’t living up to my potential. Or that I was just being lazy.

Being a mom takes years of practice.

Being a mom takes years of practice.

But now I know that there is no easy answer for moms. Working full-time can be hard but rewarding and the same can be said for staying home. Finding something flexible that lets you balance raising your kids while nurturing your brain, that there is the tricky part. And this doesn’t even take into account the generating an income part of the equation.

I applied for a loan this week from my local bank to help pay for some home repairs that need to be addressed pronto, regardless of how much money is in my checking account. My sinking pool deck does not give a shit whether or not I can afford keeping the pool from collapsing. I chatted with the bank guy on the phone and gave him all my details and explained that up until last January I had been employed as a news editor.

“Cool,” he gushed.

Then he emailed me some of the paperwork I needed to sign and I noticed that in the space under “current employer” he’d typed: homemaker.

Motherfucker.

But unlike a few years ago, when I’d see that title on my tax return and feel kind of ashamed about the path I’d chosen in life, this time I shook my head and laughed.

I’ve been called worse.

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1 Year, 7 Months, 1 Day

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

One day last week, while I was being a good girl and minding my own business, I had a startling realization: I’m about to turn 50.

Okay, not tomorrow. Or the day after that, even. But soon. In, like, one year, seven months and a day, to be exact.

Which comes out to 19 months.

Or 579 days.

Just 13,879 hours. Which is 832,740 minutes. Or a measly 49,964,400 seconds.

In other words, there’s not much time left to find some kind of cure for this condition from which I’m suffering. You know, the one that’s making little creases appear along the sides of my face overnight and a bulge to form around my midsection no matter how many pieces of bread I forgo or bowls of Greek yogurt I eat.

And it’s bullshit.

I mean, I know there are worse things. I really do. There’s cancer and poverty and Je suis Charlie.

But aging is this insidious bastard who jumps out at you and tackles you to the ground, no matter what you do to avoid it. It just keeps knocking at your door until you answer but unlike a Jehovah’s Witness, you can’t hide and pretend you’re not home.

Generally, I don’t get too caught up in how old I am, or age in general. I have older friends and younger friends, both sets to whom I can easily relate. And for a while, I was a pretty equal opportunity dater in terms of a dude’s age. But I have decided of late that I can only date men who never considered wearing a seat belt for the first two decades of their lives and who grew up watching “Land of the Lost” on Saturday mornings. Any man who had 24/7 access to cartoons on Nickelodeon as a kid rather than being relegated to three hours on weekends may no longer apply for the role of my boyfriend. It’s officially creepy.

Things started innocently enough last Wednesday when my gal pal across the street came over for our usual hour-long exercise session in my living room. For almost two years we had been working out with the Girl Whisperer, who sat on the couch and ordered us around, but lately we are going it without him as he rebounds from a round of chemo and radiation he endured in the fall. The bad part is that we miss his company terribly – even those annoying times he would look at my torso and ask me what I had eaten that weekend (like he could see the Doritos). The up side is now we can talk as much as we want as we exercise without him saying, “A little less talking, a little more working, ladies.”

So as we lunged and tried to work against gravity’s attempt to push our asses down to our ankles, we chatted about my friend’s upcoming trip to Key West in March, for which she had already mentally packed. Unlike my own approach to travel – which generally finds me amongst piles of clothes tossed around my room the midnight before I depart – my girlfriend knows exactly what’s going in her suitcase down to the Chan Luu bracelet she’ll wear to lunch the third day and the drawstring pants she’ll wear on the flight home.

“Do you think my 50-year-old arms can get away with a sleeveless shirt?” she – of the slim-and-toned arms – asked. I was about to tell her, for about the millionth time, that she was being crazy about her arms being fat, but then realized it was not the first time she had said something about being 50 as we exercised that morning.

It was like that final scene in “The Usual Suspects,” when the detective looks at the bulletin board and realizes that all the clues as to Keyser Söze’s identity were staring him in the face all along. If my girlfriend had started limping, I would not have been surprised.

“Wait a minute,” I said to her in horror. “Are you turning 50 this year?”

Fuck. I guess in my head I had her turning 49. Again.

Because, as sad as I am for her that she must, alas, turn 50 in March, it also means one other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing: That I am not far behind.

My girlfriend is a year older than I and one of the benefits of our friendship – aside from the wonderfully thoughtful gifts she’s given me over the years and her ability to help me think outside the box and solve even my most vexing problems – is that she has served as a type of buffer between me and some of those ugly numbers we’ve encountered since we’ve been friends. You know: 47, 48, 49. It’s like she’s going first through the haunted house of middle age and I’m cowering behind.

But now it’s almost like she’s falling over a cliff and dragging me down into the craggy abyss of old age with her. It’s really rather rude.

So, I did what any good friend would do to help a sister out, which is to say I screamed and started stringing a series of expletives together that blamed her for making me old.

Earlier, as we did our one-legged push ups (because we are badasses), we had joked about the nightgown my younger daughter had recently given me. My 17yo had actually forgotten to give it to me to wear Christmas Eve and found it while cleaning her crime-scene of a bedroom about a week later. Thankfully no dead bodies or bloodied knives surfaced along with it.

“Here you go, MeeMaw,” she said, using the crazy nickname she has taken to calling me (insisting it’s what her children will call me some day) and handing me something red and folded. “I bought you Christmas pjs.”

She knows I’m big on the Christmas jammies – I’ve been giving them to the kids for over 20 years – but never really buy ones for myself. This year I even got a pair for my little niece and nephew who slept over Christmas Eve as well as my big boy whose Old Navy t-shirt read: Dear Santa, I can explain.

Hehehe.

Hehehe.

I shook out what she had handed me and discovered it was a roomy flannel nightgown, super soft with a few buttons at the throat, and festooned in cats. She told me she had bought it for me at the Vermont Country Store on a trip this fall with friends.

Gorgeous.

Sexy.

It’s probably both the wackiest and coziest item that I own – it covers my arms and goes down to my ankles – and, as if it couldn’t get any better, it also has pockets. That’s right bitches, pockets.

It is now officially referred to around here as my “Cat Suit” and, unlike last year’s winter staple – the Cheetah Suit – I am trying to retain some semblance of dignity and not wear the nightgown too often. I hate to scare the children. I hate to let them see where a series of bad choices might land them.

The nightgown, referred to on the Vermont Country Store website as “A Cat’s Life,” is also kind of like George Costanza’s “I give up” sweatpants. As if I’m waving the white flag at life in defeat.

I had started Wednesday’s exercise session with the announcement that I was officially over dudes. “Fuck it,” I told my girlfriend. “I’m going to while away my days in my Cat Suit and not worry about guys any more.

And we were all like, “Yeah, that’s the ticket,” until we realized a short while later that I was staring down the barrel of 50 and couldn’t afford to waste one more second in a Cat Suit.

“There’s no time for that!” my pal yelled while lifting a 20-pound weight over her head and we laughed our asses off about the ridiculousness of it all. How, with each passing second, we moved closer to the inevitable regardless of the state of our arms or our tummies or our relationship status.

I guess the only alternative is to enjoy the final 50 million seconds or so of my 40s and, with any luck, all the minutes, hours, months and decades I have to live beyond that.

And maybe some of it while wearing a Cat Suit.

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Don’t Make Me Use My Jazz Hands

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Here’s something I might not have mentioned about myself that may or may not change the way you feel about me: I heart show tunes.

I love the razzle-dazzle of musicals. I’ve driven alone in my car swooning to the ebbs and flows of The Phantom of the Opera’s “Music of the Night” and have used the original cast recording of Rent to help offset the pain of root canal as the music blared through my headphones to drown out the noise of the drill.

I know. Normal people would be rocking out to “Crazy in Love,” not “Seasons of Love.”

I grew up with parents who didn’t listen to music much – let alone rock n’ roll. My mom was more of a Burt Bacharach/Liza Minnelli kind of gal and weekly Saturday night dinners at my grandparents’ usually included some Edith Piaf or Engelbert Humperdinck playing on the turntable in the kitchen after the steak-and-potatoes meal.

Not exactly the coolest of singers when you’re a kid growing up in the 70s.

But while my mom never tuned into the rock n’ roll stations on our car radio and her record collection consisted of stuff like the Carpenters (not that I didn’t rock “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Top of the World” while singing along to the lyrics printed inside the album) and Herb Alpert (whose album cover of the girl in whipped cream I spent a lot of time studying), she did introduce me to the magic of show tunes.

I would spend hours, holed up in my dormered pink-and-green bedroom, performing numbers I’d choreographed after memorizing all the words on original cast recordings from A Chorus Line or Godspell that my mom had fed to me.

My mother was pretty strict back then – like, we wouldn’t even consider rolling our eyes at her, let alone use a four-letter word in her presence – so it was kind of surprisinging she’d endorse something as racy as A Chorus Line, but I went along with it. I merrily strutted my 11-year-old stuff across my green-and-white shag rug and sang about “tits and ass” (courtesy of the Chorus Line song “Dance: 10, Looks: 3″) and prepared for my life on stage. I even practiced being interviewed on The Mike Douglas Show while sitting cross legged on the edge of my bed.

And while I didn’t see my first Broadway show until my mom took me to see Yul Brenner reprise his role in The King and I when I was 12, we’ve more than made up for lost time. She and I sat in the front row to watch Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters kill it in Sunday in the Park With George on my 18th birthday (my introduction to Stephen Sondheim) and she bought me tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera with my boyfriend when I turned 22.

Over the years, my mom and I have seen countless shows together. We saw Alan Cumming as the creepy Emcee in Cabaret at Studio 54 and a revival of Oklahoma! where the corn stalks and bright blue sky seemed to stretch for miles across the Gershwin Theater stage. At the sumptuous revival of South Pacific we went to see at Lincoln Center, I stood online for the ladies’ room in front of Anjelica Huston during intermission, which almost rivaled the wow-factor of the show’s sweeping overture and “Bali H’ai.” And my mom and I sat mesmerized by the 2006 production of Sondheim’s Company in which all of the actors in the show not only sang and danced but also played a musical instrument. But more powerful to me than the sheer talent onstage was the truth of the lyrics they sang about love and marriage as I sat in the dark and contemplated the demise of my own at home.

My mom and I don’t see eye-to-eye on politics and certain conversations between us seem loaded with philosophical minefields, so the theater is safe territory for us because we both love the arts. We speak that same language. My mother introduced me to Broadway and books and movies and PBS – -pretty much my main ingredients – and it’s an appreciation I’ve tried to foster in my own children.

I, too, resisted playing the usual crap you hear on the radio – Rhianna’s S&M or Katy Perry kissing a girl – when the kids were younger and instead filled our car with the soundtracks from shows like Oklahoma!, The Music Man and Peter Pan. We’d drive back and forth from CCD and the grocery store singing “Surrey With the Fringe On Top” and “Seventy-six Trombones.” The only time it seemed kind of weird was when one of the kids had a friend in the car and I watched that kid’s face in the rearview mirror reacting to all of us singing about the Wells Fargo Wagon. You could tell he couldn’t get out of the car fast enough when we got to our destination.

And of course, I started taking my own kids to see musicals when they were pretty young, with varying results. My older son yawned his way through The Music Man and The Sound of Music on Broadway when he was young but I gave it one more shot and took him to see The Book of Mormon – just the two of us – the summer after he graduated from high school. We ate hamburgers at a Theater Row restaurant before the matinee and then sat together in the darkened theater and giggled at the wildly inappropriate singing and dancing onstage and I gave quiet thanks to Matt Stone and Trey Parker for finding a way to bring a mom and her teenage son together — happily — in a Broadway theater.

I was thrilled when I overheard my two daughters belt out “Popular” along with Kristin Chenoweth on the Wicked CD, which played constantly on the girls’  boom box down in our basement after we saw the show. And when I took the girls to see a revival of Into the Woods in 2002 – after I’d seen it with my own mother when it debuted a decade earlier – the two were perched on the edge of their seats in the balcony watching Cinderella get stuck on the steps of the palace on the stage below.

So when I read that Into the Woods was one of the free Shakespeare in the Park productions in New York a couple of summers ago, we made plans with friends to attend. The five of us showed up in Central Park at the crack of dawn one August morning and sat for hours on a long line that stretched along a pathway littered with picnic blankets and hundreds of dozing theater lovers waiting to see Amy Adams sing the part of the Baker’s Wife later that night at the Delacorte Theater.

And it was magic.

When news came that a movie version of the show was coming out this Christmas starring our favorite Pitch Perfect girl, Anna Kendrick, and the super-dreamy Chris Pine, my girls and I kind of lost our minds. Would it be as good as the stage production? Would it include all the songs we loved? Could Emily Blunt really sing?

So far, the girls and I have seen the movie together twice – once with my mom, two sisters and 5-year-old niece and the second time with our Shakespeare in the Park pals and I’m happy to report: It’s amazeballs. Both times I’ve sat next to my oldest daughter and we’ve nudged elbows every time something we loved happened onscreen, like when the Witch sang about staying a child “while you can be a child,” or when the two Prince Charmings ripped open their shirts during the hilarious “Agony” (Attention Chris Pine: I would like to report anecdotally that your crossover appeal is huge as you make both the under-25 and close-to-50 lady sets hot under the collar).

And when Little Red Riding Hood sang about all the things she learned after her run in with the Big Bad Wolf in the song “I Know Things Now,” my daughter and I turned to each other in the dark to sing the last two lines of the song – which are probably some of my favorite lines from the show: “Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit not.”

Earlier that day, she and I were doing some post-Christmas shopping at a local mall and I was torturing her – as I was informed – by forcing her to listen along as we drove to Jonathan Schwartz’s weekend music show, which my local public radio station plays at noon on Sundays. It’s an eclectic mix of music filled with showtunes and Sinatra – Schwartz is crazy for Nelson Riddle arrangements – and not really the stuff my 20-year-old daughter makes playlists out of on Spotify. But we were both excited when he played a medley of Into the Woods songs performed by some orchestra and as we pulled into our parking spot, Schwartz began to introduce his next selections, which were the final two songs from from the original cast recording of the 1987 Broadway show.

“Dude,” I said to her, “We have to listen.”

And so we did. We sat in our car side by side and listened to Bernadette Peters as the original Witch lament how “Children Should Listen” and the ensemble sing about “happy ever after” in their final run through the woods.

And as we listened to those final moments of the songs, both of us knew that the show did not end when the music stopped but rather when Cinderella sang – one last time – “I wish!”

We opened the doors and stepped out into the cold January afternoon and walked through the parking lot, laughing about what nerds we were. And I thought how lucky I was to have someone who would want to do that with me, sit in a car and listen to show tunes recorded 30 years earlier. Someone who spoke that same language. And I knew that even if, God forbid, she grew up to be a Fox News lover and eschew The New York Times, there would always be plenty of safe territory for us to meet. And maybe sing.

Cue the jazz hands.

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Landslide

2b7be76c0edd4051bcfaed75a8929a7aIn the mental photo album I keep tucked deep within the cracks and crevices of my ever-failing memory, lay the snapshots of certain key moments of my life. They’re the ones I pull out to study in the middle of the night or while driving alone in my car. The ones that I can’t forget.

Unlike the stacks of albums and shoeboxes I have brimming with over 20 years of memories – little ones holding up Easter baskets filled with colorful plastic eggs or smiling in front of Cinderella’s castle – my mental snapshots are a mix of more authentic occurrences. They are the moments that weren’t staged to document our happiness. They’re the real deal.

There’s me, sitting in Newark Airport early in the morning after my 1990 wedding — long after the official wedding photographer had gone home — with a big smile on my face each time I remembered I was finally married to the guy I had chased and loved for so long. There I am again, weeping with relief a dozen years later when an ultrasound revealed the sex of my fourth child—a boy – which I knew would help soften the blow of that pregnancy for my husband. And another instant, this time me standing next to my soon-to-be-ex in a drab county courtroom reciting the names and birth dates of our four children before a judge and thinking how it ended much as it had begun: the two of us standing side-by-side and saying a bunch of words.

There are more happy moments: Lying next to my husband and listening to raindrops softly falling on our tent in the middle of the woods and thinking there was no place on Earth I’d rather be at that moment than lying atop that air mattress. Sitting beside my oldest son on a chairlift making its slow ascent to the top of the mountain and hearing nothing but the silence of the icy trees and snowflakes swirling around us and the sound of his teenaged voice really talking to me without the distractions of Twitter and YouTube. Or rocking in a glider at 2 a.m. with an infant curled like a kitten on my chest, his tiny head tucked under my chin while his tiny back rose and fell beneath my hand as he slept.

There’s a song that comes towards the end of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” (which is now a new movie that I saw the other day) that cleverly observes how life is the slow, steady grind of work and husbands and wives and family and children and doing what you’re supposed to be doing. But every so often there is a flash, an instant that stands out from all the other instants and a moment we file away to be remembered later.

Oh. If life were made of moments,

Even now and then a bad one!

But if life were only moments,

Then you’d never know you had one.

Sung by the Baker’s Wife in “Moments in the Woods”

My therapist is hot for this idea, too. She likes to tell me — after I’ve sat on her loveseat and complained about yucky things in my life — that the bad stuff lets us see how good the good can be. And as much as I wouldn’t mind a life filled with rainbows and unicorns 24/7, I kind of get her point.

A few years ago I was driving home from a dinner out with my four children to celebrate my oldest girl’s high school graduation when she plugged her iPhone into the car stereo and the song “Landslide” began to play. It was the Glee version of the Fleetwood Mac song, and as Gwyneth Paltrow began to sing all four of my children started to sign with her. Like, even my oldest son who is neither a joiner nor a singer. I began to sing as well and as we sailed through the dark towards home, we sang about time making you bolder and children getting older.

“And I’m getting older, too,” we sang, and I couldn’t help feeling that for a second, everything — our whole lives — had been working towards that moment in the car and singing that song. Like we were in a movie or something. “Landslide” is a song about making changes and you could feel the energy in our car and how – despite the divorce and our struggles trying to stabilize in its aftermath – we were all connected. It was pretty epic.

And since then, we’ve kind of considered “Landslide” our unofficial family song. I even wasted tons of space on my iPhone recently recording Stevie Nicks twirling onstage and singing it when I saw Fleetwood Mac in concert in October.

So on Christmas, after all their own loot had been unwrapped, the kids took turns giving me their presents. I got legit moonshine — procured from one of my oldest son’s southern fraternity brothers — replete with what I initially feared might be testicles floating within that I was later assured were in fact peaches; and a t-shirt from my oldest daughter that read, “Trust me, I’m a writer” (which is funny because nobody about whom I write trusts my writing in the least). And my little guy gave me hat and gloves I had bought for myself at the JCrew outlet that I gave to him to give me, which I kind of thought was better than anything he was going to find for me when he shopped at the Five Below on Christmas Eve. Like, I do not need a “Fault in Our Stars” poster.

But the gift that made me cry – and apparently the children go into Christmas morning with the goal of making their mom weep – was from my youngest daughter who used the lyrics from “Landslide” to create a paper tree from which she had dangled five hearts bearing all of our names.

Seriously.

Landslide.

Landslide.

She explained the framed picture was something she had come across on Pinterest and I don’t know if she’s actually finished writing her college essays or even sent in all of her applications for next year yet, but man, if she put this much time into those endeavors she’d be going to Harvard. I’m just saying.

So now there’s a new moment in that mental shoebox crammed with 48 years-worth of memories stashed away in my crickety brain. Somewhere lodged beneath the snapshots of the babies and the terrible fights and the ride when all five of our voices sang out in our car on a warm spring night is me, unwrapping a gift that reminded me that not even a landslide could bring us down.

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How to Market Your Family

This is an updated version of something I wrote last year cursing this annual insanity.

1-1It started the day after Thanksgiving last year, the annual marketing campaign going on in homes across the country that gives new meaning to the term Black Friday.

Inside my mailbox on that day, along with 20 pounds of Pottery Barn catalogs and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, sat the first holiday card of the season.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

I think the special delivery vexed me for two reasons. First, it was a reminder that I needed to get my act together to accomplish a great many things in the ensuing weeks before Christmas, which included dealing with all the Christmas tchotchkes crammed into about a dozen boxes in my basement and the stupid Elf on a Shelf.

Secondly, that card signaled that I needed to plan how I would be marketing my own family this holiday season because that, let’s be honest, is what it’s all about.

Branding.

I want you, along with my college roommate and cousin in Connecticut, to see just how attractive, smart, accomplished and well-traveled we are, via a 4 X 6 card.

It’s like the paper-version of Facebook.

But don’t get me wrong: I drank the Christmas card Kool-Aid years ago and have spent a lot of time, money and patience creating the annual “aren’t-we-something” campaign. I am the ultimate Mad Mom.

Parents nowadays have no idea what it was like producing a card back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and before digital cameras were de rigeur. When I, and every mom within a 10-mile radius, had to bring my roll of film (actual film) to the CVS to be developed, and then wait a few days in hopes that at least one of the 24 shots would be a winner. I prayed for that one frame where all eyes would be open, looking straight at the camera and not rolled up in small heads in disgust.

Then I had to get 100 copies made of that one tolerable photo and then stuff said photos into cards, that needed to be signed and maybe a bow needed to be tied, and then stuffed into envelopes, licked and addressed, stamped and mailed.

I’m not saying you young moms have it easy, but seriously, you have it so freaking easy.

Nowadays, you just scroll through a photo gallery and upload a variety of images to an adorable card that’s personalized and ready to be mailed when the shipment arrives on your doorstep.

It’s fucking magic.

I thought I could make a clean break from sending holiday cards when my husband moved out in December 2008. It was such a terrible time and I figured I’d have to be some kind of marketing genius to generate a card that said, “Look how happy we are.”

So I just kind of knocked it off my mental check-list of holiday tasks for that year until one of the kids asked about it.

“I’m thinking we’re not gonna send one this year,” I told my oldest daughter.

“Wait, what? You’re not doing a card?” she asked. “It’s our tradition.”

The other kids sitting in the kitchen nodded in agreement and I realized that the stupid card had become about more than how others see our family. It had become about how we see ourselves, too.

And sending out a card that year signaled to the kids that life would still go on, even after their dad moved out. There would still be cards, wrapping paper and Christmas for them all.

Just like everyone else.

I decided to bang my cards out earlier than usual last year to take advantage of all the Cyber Monday sales. I checked a couple of sites for the best deals and instructed the older kids to send me photos of themselves to use since we didn’t have any great shots of all of us together.

I struggled, as I have these last few years, with how to personalize the card since the kids and I have different last names. Hyphenating the two seemed weird and just using the kids’ name, the one I had used for 20 years, didn’t seem right either.

So I finally settled on sending love to all our friends and family last Christmas from “4 Walsacks and a Byrnes.” Awkward, perhaps, but it just felt more right than the other options.

I think the end-result, while far from perfect, said, “We’re doing okay.”

I tried to get out of doing cards again this year. I’m not really feeling like a millionaire and thought that that $200 could be better spent on, like, one of the many new iPhone 6s Santa is expected to bring down our chimney this year.

So I casually floated the idea at dinner one night last week while ladling some soup into bowls but my 17yo daughter was having none of it.

“Now we’re going to seem even less together,” she said in only that way a teenage daughter can say to remind you of what a failure you’ve turned out to be as a mother. Like, a constant disappointment.

But it also reminded me that no matter how long your parents have been divorced, you really need to feel like you’re just like everybody else. You want people to know that it wasn’t the end of the world. That you’re doing okay.

So I dutifully combed through the last 12 months in my iPhoto to find some decent shots and then scrolled through TinyPrints to find a card that had the smallest number of photo boxes and a saying that didn’t seem too bullshitty. No “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Love and Joy” for us. I’d actually like a job at a greeting card company so I could help come up with content for those of us who hate pretending. What about a “We’re Doing the Best We Can” card or one that says “Hope and Pray”?

Now, those are sentiments I can get behind.

I settled on “Merry Christmas” in the end and the box of all 100 of them is already sitting on my kitchen island, waiting for me to get off Facebook and mail them to everyone on our list.

But the box also sends a signal to my kids that everything really is okay. We might have different last names now and a dad who lives in the next town, but we’re still a family.

I couldn’t think of a better way to spend $200.

Give yourself the gift of Amy. Don’t worry, I’m not jumping out of a box Christmas morning. But you can sign up to get all my posts sent directly to your inbox. Just plug your email into the “receive new post in your inbox.” Oh, p.s., it’s free.

You can also follow me on Facebook and on Twitter since none of my kids will let me follow them.

 

 

 

The Time My Daughter Told Me I Was a ‘Terrible Mother’

keep_calm___by_trl_phorce-d5ipns9-1A few weeks ago a girlfriend sent a text to me and another woman about picking a date to coordinate a ladies night out to celebrate the holidays.

“I want to make sure the date works for you guys before I send it out to the whole group,” she texted us. We went back and forth about a couple of dates but pretty much I was like, “Everything works. I’m good.”

We settled on next Wednesday, Dec. 17 and she sent out a big group text and a whole thread ensued about who can make it and who still needed to find a babysitter. I was secretly pleased that I no longer really needed a sitter, my high school girl could handle herself and her brother for the night, and I thought about what I was going to wear instead.

So last Sunday I stood in the cold with the girls night organizer and another friend listening to the middle school chorus sing holiday tunes before the annual lighting of our town tree. The subject of our night out came up and we all stood shivering and agreed that our destination would be fun and then the other mom said she was still having a hard time finding a sitter.

My 17yo had just arrived from work and walked over to join our circle. I turned to her and asked her what she was doing that night — thinking maybe she could watch my friend’s kids — and then I stopped myself and said, “Wait, she’ll be watching my little kid!”

We all started to laugh and my daughter asked, “What night is this, anyway?”

“The 17th,” the organizer told her.

“Oh,’ said my daughter, giving me a look, “you mean your son’s birthday?”

Crap.

“Amy!” shouted the organizer, “you told me you were free that night!”

“I thought I was!”

And right on cue, the 17yo said, “You’re a terrible mother.”

“I have a learning disability you guys,” I continued, trying to recover, “I can’t remember things.”

And then I thought a little bit more and observed, “And I don’t even have a job.” In the past, I would use that as an excuse for my forgetfulness; for when I dropped the ball somewhere in my life. And with only two kids living at home right now, I couldn’t even pull the ol’ “I’ve got four kids” card out of my back pocket.

Now I didn’t even have that to blame.

Maybe I was just legit stupid.

At that, the teenager grabbed the car keys out of my coat pocket and said, “That’s it. I’m taking the car and driving home,” and she stormed off into the crowd.

The other moms and I laughed and I promised that I’d still be there, albeit after the obligatory trip to the local hibachi place to celebrate a 12th birthday.

I told the story to another girlfriend as we exercised the next day in my living room and she shook her head when I got to the part about forgetting my kid’s birthday and I repeated the “learning disabled” bit.

“Maybe you need an IEP,” she suggested and that really got us laughing but then I thought, “That’s not such a bad idea.”

An IEP is shorthand for the Individualized Education Program that’s tailored for students who are classified in school with some type of challenge that’s getting in between them and learning. Like, I could really use having somebody sit down with me and kind of help me sort through my life, identifying the things that challenge me – like arriving anywhere on time or dropping my son off at the wrong place  – and figuring out ways to overcome them.

We’d call it my ILP (Individualized Life Plan), which would be a grown up version of the IEP and my kids could even have a copy of it to make modifications as we discover future challenges.

Or maybe I could just pay better attention to things.

I checked my phone as the concert ended and Santa screeched by on the firetruck, its sirens blaring and lights flashing in the darkening December sky, and saw that my daughter had texted that she was sitting in the car waiting for me.

I searched through the crowd for my son and we headed out to the parking lot behind the borough hall. I opened the door and slipped into the warm car and my daughter said, “Seriously, Amy.”

“I know, dude,” I said. “But isn’t it part of my charm?”

We laughed about it during the quick drive home and I thought of ways of breaking it to my son that I would be going out for a little bit after hibachi next week.

That is, if I remember.

Give yourself the gift of Amy. Don’t worry, I’m not jumping out of a box Christmas morning. But you can sign up to get all my posts sent directly to your inbox. Just plug your email into the “receive new post in your inbox.” Oh, p.s., it’s free.

You can also follow me on Facebook and on Twitter since none of my kids will let me follow them.

Knit Your Way to a Better Life This Holiday Season

Credit: Cozmeena.com

Credit: Cozmeena.com

Right before my marriage fell apart – I mean, pieces of that relationship were crumbling off in bits and chunks long before the official end – but around the time I nodded my head when my then-husband asked me if I wanted a divorce, I took up knitting.

I actually didn’t have much of a choice. I was folded into a circle of newbie knitters by a woman I had met at a tiny exercise studio we both went to most mornings during the week and bonded in the dark, sweating during spin class. We were a part of a group of maybe 10 or so regulars – all women – who showed up a few days a week for years to pant up imaginary hills and then coast down, pedals flying, while discussing everything from marriage to children to labia. Yes, I said that. We often joked, “What happened in the spin room stayed in the spin room.”

There were mornings I wept silently in the dark as my fellow cyclists discussed the importance of respect in a marriage, and other classes when we all commiserated over the most recent caper pulled off by somebody’s wily teenager (sometimes my own).

So when a few of us indicated that we wanted to learn how to knit, our ringleader – a woman about a dozen years my senior who is really the older sister I’d always dreamed of having – invited us to her home where she distributed wooden knitting needles and skeins of cotton yarn to the handful of us sitting around her kitchen table, and began to teach us how to knit. We learned how to cast on, purl and count our stitches over coffee in somebody’s kitchen most Wednesday mornings. There was always yogurt and granola, there was always the sound of clicking needles and there were always plenty of laughs.

Most of us graduated from knitting potholders to making bunnies to give as baby gifts and I even completed a throw to give my oldest daughter for her 18th birthday. I then was so inspired with my handiwork that I began to knit a sweater for myself, which I dubbed my “divorce sweater.” I worked on it constantly – watching TV on those dark nights at the height of my separation when I needed to keep my brain busy doing something, anything, other than thinking about my life. Eventually though – as is so often the case with me – I just couldn’t see that project through and its odds and ends, some sleeves and a front and back panel, lay in a big plastic bag somewhere in my basement. By then I’d started working full-time and it was all I could do to keep track of doctor’s appointments and college applications, much less knitting patterns.

“I’m just bringing my personality,” I joked to the other knitters when I showed up to knitting sans knitting, but I never considered just not going. Knitting had become about so much more than, well, knitting. It was a pocket in my week I knew for an hour or two I’d be guaranteed good company and the camaraderie of nurturing women that fed my soul.

But I’d forgotten just how good it felt to actually knit.

A couple of weeks ago a few of us sat around a kitchen table when that same bossy ringleader pushed a ball of yarn and a pair of wooden needles in front of me and gave me a look.

“Nooooo,” I whined, “I’m too lazy. I don’t remember how.”

“Just knit,” she instructed, pressing the needles – onto which she’d cast about a dozen or so stitches – into my hands.

She quickly reminded me how to position the yarn and move the needles and in no time, I was mindlessly talking and knitting. It felt so good, the tips of the wooden needles sliding against each other as I looped the yarn over and carefully lifted a stitch from one needle onto the other, creating an easy rhythm as we chatted about kids and gun control and paint colors.

One of the other topics of conversation that morning was a local woman I’ve known of for years, Lisa Luckett, and her Cozmeena shawls. I came to know Lisa through mutual friends and shared yoga classes and occasionally when passing each other on the dirt trails while walking through a local park. But I mostly knew who Lisa was because she is famously one of the women around here whose husband was killed on 9/11. We live in a part of New Jersey that’s an easy ferry ride to lower Manhattan and many Wall Streeters took the boat into the city that morning 13 years ago and never returned.

Since that terrible day, Lisa’s stayed busy raising three children (her youngest was just a baby at the time), finding love again, undergoing treatment for breast cancer and sorting everything out through lots and lots of therapy. She also did a lot of knitting.

Lisa Luckett, left, and pal rocking shawls that are at the heart of Cozmeena Enlighened Living! Credit: Cozmeena.com

Lisa Luckett, left, and pal rocking shawls that are at the heart of Cozmeena Enlighened Living! Credit: Cozmeena.com

Our own knitting ringleader explained how Lisa had founded something called Cozmeena, which is a lot of things – a lifestyle brand, a resource for caring for someone with cancer, a place to read Lisa’s stories of finding grace and growth through tragedy. But at the heart of Cozmeena are the big, cozy shawls you can purchase to knit for yourself and others.

“I just want everyone to feel like this,” Lisa told me when we spoke on the phone last week. “I want everyone to find peacefulness and gratitude and happiness.”

And I knew just what she meant. It’s how you feel when you do the hard work while going through some traumatic, life-changing event and then come out the other side even better than you were before. It’s like that Will Rogers quote I love: “The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.”

The first step in the process is taking care of yourself, said Lisa, explaining that’s where the shawl — which the Cozmeena website describes as a “warm, enduring hug” — comes in.

So it makes sense that the first person you knit the shawl for when you buy the $125 kit – which comes with five skeins of yarn (available in about 30 rich, yummy colors like apricot and lemongrass), knitting needles and a crochet hook – is yourself.

"The Cozmeena Shawl™ is where coziness meets glamour.  When you wear it you’ll feel the embrace of a warm and comforting hug.   You’ll be stunningly beautiful while feeling the genuine care of a mother’s hug every time you wear it." Credit: Cozmeena.com

“The Cozmeena Shawl™ is where coziness meets glamour. When you wear it you’ll feel the embrace of a warm and comforting hug. You’ll be stunningly beautiful while feeling the genuine care of a mother’s hug every time you wear it.” Credit: Cozmeena.com

“Women lose themselves from giving so much to others,” Lisa explained. “We need to do a better job taking care of ourselves so that we can take better care of others.”

Knitting the shawl can be “addicting” and Lisa suggested you then make one to share with a friend. “I actually think they’re kind of magic,” she told me, “because you’re infusing your love into what you’re creating.”

And really, it’s all about the process. “When you knit, you are using your hands and tapping into the tactile sensory system that is one of the five human senses of taste, touch, sight, smell and sound,” Lisa explained.  The work naturally calms your central nervous system, lowers your heart rate and slows your breathing.

The Cozmeena site has a number of video tutorials to use as knitting guides and Lisa also holds open knitting hours in her home twice a week to help beginning knitters with their shawls. “Ninety percent of my people never held a set of knitting needles before,” she said, adding that the pattern is pretty much straightforward knitting with little counting required and takes about 12-15 hours to complete.

Lisa said she hopes that encouraging women to take that first step – caring for themselves – will be the start of a much larger Cozmeena mission to pretty much create a better world through more enlightened living.

“It’s a convoluted explanation of something that should be really simple,” she admitted. I suggest you go spend some time on her website to better appreciate all the lovely facets of Cozmeena.

So if you find yourself feeling a little adrift this holiday season, like you need a big, fat hug, maybe all you really need is a little Cozmeena.

And a table full of friends.

"Experienced knitters love to make Cozmeena Shawls™ because of the simplicity and purpose. They know that working with your hands is calming, soothing and relaxing. Knitting a Cozmeena Shawl™ simply makes you feel better." Credit: Cozmeena.com

“Experienced knitters love to make Cozmeena Shawls™ because of the simplicity and purpose. They know that working with your hands is calming, soothing and relaxing. Knitting a Cozmeena Shawl™ simply makes you feel better.” Credit: Cozmeena.com

Give yourself the gift of Amy. Don’t worry, I’m not jumping out of a box Christmas morning. But you can sign up to get all my posts sent directly to your inbox. Just plug your email into the “receive new post in your inbox.” 

You can also follow me on Facebook and on Twitter since none of my kids will let me follow them.

 

 

 

 

Those Awful Teen Years

IMG_2770I was not a nice teenager.

In fact, it could probably be said that I was a wee bit scary.

On top of the usual teenage stuff – like, rebelling against my parents and experimenting with drugs and alcohol and boys – I also had an extra-special helping of anger woven into my teen spirit.

I was pissed at my parents for divorcing; my mom for remarrying; and at the world in general when I was plucked out of the comfortable bubble that had been my life for 13 years and plopped into a whole new universe. My new home may have been only an hour south from where I’d grown up but it seemed light years away from everything that I had known up until then.

I seethed. I skulked. I acted out.

The only things that I’m thankful for about that period in my life are that A. I survived and B. There was no Facebook back then to document it all.

(There truly is an upside to growing up in the Eighties besides knowing all the words to the “Like a Virgin” album.)

I’d really rather forget the heavy eye makeup, questionable clothing choices and terrible attitude I sported in the early-to-mid-80s. Really, I cringe just thinking about the Flashdance-inspired ensembles and my big, Jersey Girl hair; my defiant cigarette smoking and sneaking my high school boyfriend in through my bedroom window late at night.

But the Universe has managed to have the last laugh because, as the mother of four kids, I’ve now had the opportunity to be on the other side of teen angst.

It’s scary, y’all.

At one point, three of my kids were teenagers simultaneously and it was probably one of the most harrowing periods of my life since it happened to coincide with the end of my marriage. That provided more drama than a month’s worth of  “General Hospital” episodes. Luke and Laura had nothing on us, yo.

Recently, the oldest daughter of a guy I’ve been dating turned 13 and while on the outside I was all, “Mazel tov, that’s great,” all I could think in my head was, “You poor motherfucker.” Really, the only thing more brutal than a 13-year-old girl would be twin 13-year-old girls. The government should figure out a way to harness all that angst and eye rolling to use as a weapon of mass destruction or some shit. That could really do some damage.

Pretty much the only time teenagers are amusing is when they’re not your own, which is why I got a kick out of Sasha and Malia Obama’s recent appearance at the annual turkey pardon headed up by their dorky dad. Their bored postures, crossed arms and the stony looks on their faces were pure teen evil genius. They were barely putting up with the whole charade – their dad laughing at his own corny jokes – and practically ran out of the room when it was over.

Credit: White House / Via youtube.com

Credit: White House / Via youtube.com

I mean, who has not been in a public situation with her own child and not wanted to reach over and throttle both the kid and the kid’s shitty attitude? And this is not counting all the times that you’ve wanted to commit a teen-directed homicide in the privacy of your own kitchen.

So I was surprised when I heard that a GOP staffer, one Elizabeth Lauten, took a swipe at the Obama girls’ turkey pardon performance, suggesting on Facebook they show “a little class” and perhaps “Dress like (they) deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.” Ouch.

I mean, wow, she went there. It’s like Lauten, the communication director for a southern Republican congressman, had forgotten for a moment what it was like to be a teenager. What it was like to behave in a way that might be regretted years later. What it’s like to, say, get caught shoplifting when you were not much older than Malia, which according to Smoking Gun, is what happened when Lauten was 17.

It’s probably safe to say that a lot of us would rather forget some of the things that happened during our teen years. And man, I’m glad I’m not president because I don’t even know what people like Lauten would make of some of the outfits my daughters have come downstairs wearing or the withering looks my older son has cast in my direction. She would not be impressed.

It’s hard enough to be a teen much less have to grow up under the 24/7 news microscope. The Obama girls should be left alone to work through wearing skirts that are way too short the way the Bush girls dabbled in underage drinking. It’s all a part of growing up.

I did it. My kids did it. We all did it.

I’m just glad my shenanigans never turned up on anybody’s news feed.

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How to Stay Friends for 30 Years

768b919fa22206ad0360afc9e99e9a8eThirty years ago this fall, I moved into a tiny single room in an all-girls dorm at the University of Delaware with another girl I’d never laid eyes on before who lived in a city I’d never even thought much about before at a school I’d never even visited before. And it all clicked.

Long after we’d become good friends – after spending months lying on our bunk beds and talking late into the night – she’d confided that based on my fancy-sounding street address she figured I was some New Jersey princess and given that she hailed from Baltimore, I assumed she lived in the projects. But our preconceived notions were quickly dismissed after we met and bonded our first night at school trying to haul a case of Busch beer, which we had talked someone into buying us, about a mile back to our dorm room concealed in a duffel bag. It turned out that when it came to underage drinking, we were both resourceful and well matched.

It was dumb luck that landed the two of us together and that we happened to get along so well. In 1984, decades before incoming freshmen hand-picked their college roommates on Facebook to coordinate color themes and bedding, you just showed up and hoped for the best.

The first indication that we belonged together was that we both ended up squished together in a dorm room meant for one person after we failed to submit our housing forms in a timely fashion. We were both pretty slovenly and liked to drink beer. I was introduced to George Thorogood and NRBQ and she tolerated my infatuation with Prince and the poster I hung of him on our wall. She brought with her a two-foot-tall red ashtray, one of those industrial type receptacles where you stub the butt out and then press a button to release it into the can. And because our tiny room became the hub for all of our new friends to come and smoke cigarettes and watch General Hospital most weekday afternoons, the can quickly filled up — which excited us to no end.

We both also brought our good friends from high school to college with us and they became our core group of pals at first. Over time, our gang expanded to include another girl in our dorm and a few more who we met through the sorority I rushed sophomore year. We were kind of a mismatched crew. Some of us would never have ended up friends with others were it not for the group as a whole. But beer and boys were a common denominator with a big dose of bossy thrown in. Somehow when we were all together – despite everybody wanting to be in charge – it just worked.

By the time we graduated in the spring of 1988, the eight of us had been through a lot – failed romances, missed periods and more than a few drunken nights. A few days before graduation we gathered in a tiny side room of the sorority house and passed around a bottle of champagne for each of us to sign and vowed to save it to drink when the last of our crew got married. We finally drank it in September 2000, when the final one of our crew got hitched and right before I celebrated my own tenth wedding anniversary.

How could we have known then, as we passed the cheap, fizzy wine around for each of us to sip, what the following ten years would hold? That three of our marriages would collapse and that the union we celebrated that night, dancing under the stars far out on the east end of Long Island, would be so short-lived? That in less than a year the groom would go to work on a bright September morning at the top of the World Trade Center and never come home?

Maybe in the end it’s the loss that all of us in the group has experienced in one form or another that has brought us even closer than those days when we piled on a couch to watch Moonlighting or borrowed each other’s Benetton sweaters for tailgates. Going off and living our lives became the glue that held our friendship together.

We’ve become so much more than the one-dimensional girls who met 30 years ago. All that loss – of spouses, parents and dreams of the perfect lives we thought awaited us – has let us connect with each other in a much more real way. We tease and joke and boss but there’s a softness to it now.

Inherently, we’re still the same girls we were 30 years ago – The Boss and Study Buddy, The Spy, The Nice One, the Senator (aka Honeypot) the fabulous Jet Setter and the GDI (Goddamn Independent). And I’m always good for laughs. We just have a lot more layers now. So much has happened since we signed that bottle of champagne all those years ago.

The eight of us gathered last weekend for a few days of eating, drinking and laughing as we have almost every year over the last decade. It’s an easy friendship, the kind where even though we don’t keep in touch the way we should and only half of the group is on social media, we can pick right up where we left off.

We’ve long since given up on the notion that we’re actually going to do something when we get together. We usually muster a walk along the beach or through a park under the bright autumn leaves, but mostly, we sit around and talk. And while we probably logged about 100 hours of conversation between the eight of us – on the couch over early morning cappuccinos or curled up together on a bed late at night after one-to-many glasses of red wine – I honestly cannot share any of the discussions with you because they were either too honest or too raunchy.

Most every conversation ended with someone turning to me and saying, “Do NOT blog about that.”

I was describing the group to another friend when I got home, and she laughed and said, “Sounds like it’s the family you get to pick.”

And maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, because even though I’m not sure if we would have picked each other 30 years ago – like in what world would you even think a nice conservative Visitation girl from D.C. would pal around with a Jersey Girl with big, permed hair? – somehow it all works.

But, much like family, over time you don’t love people despite their differences but often because of them. So maybe the secret to staying such good friends over 30 years is learning to appreciate people for who they are or maybe, just like ending up in a tiny room with some girl from Baltimore, it’s just dumb luck.

8 friends + 19 kids + 9 weddings + 3 ex-husbands + 2 boyfriends = 30 years of friendship.

Eight friends + 19 kids + 9 weddings + 3 ex-husbands + 2 boyfriends = 30 years of friendship.

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I’m on HuffPo, Yo

Yup, that's my mug along with a roundup of some of my very best qualities on HuffPo Divorce.

Yup, that’s my mug along with a roundup of some of my very best qualities on HuffPo Divorce.

I was going to start this post out by saying that I’ve learned lately that to get what you want in life, sometimes you really need to grow a pair (cahones, man) and take risks. But then my inner-feminist  was like, “Seriously? Do you have to have a weiner to put yourself out there?” Of course, we all know that the answer is, “No.”

There are plenty of timid men and courageous women. Balls have got nothing to do with it.

I do have big boobs though and since there are two of them, maybe we’ll go with that instead.

At any rate, whether it was balls or boobs at work, I got up the nerve a few weeks ago to email Arianna Huffington to tell her I’d love to be part of the HuffPo bevy of bloggers. I stole the idea, because I’ve had about 12 original thoughts in my entire life, from the super-smart and brave Amy (I pretty much love every Amy) over at the blog Using Our Words who did the same thing to get on HuffPo a while ago and wrote about it here. 

I’ve made a concerted effort to try to get myself on other sites besides this one lately and had submitted a few things to Huffington Post but never heard anything back. Seriously, crickets.

And I love Arianna. I’ve listened to an interview she did with Nora Ephron in 2006 at the 92nd Street Y and a book she wrote on, ironically enough, Becoming Fearless and think she’s not only smart and ambitious but a champion of other women as well. I proabably spent two days, on and off, working on the email – I mean, just what do you say to Arianna? – and finally hit the send button with a trembly finger.

And then I waited.

I probably hit the refresh button on my inbox a grillion times over the next few days to find only updates from Twitter and American Express (PS AmEx: can you please stop writing to tell me how much I’ve spent since my last statement?).

And of course, right when I’d forgotten all about it, around 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon, I checked my emails and there, would you believe, was a note from Arianna herself. It was short and sweet but she thanked me for thinking of them and hooked me up with an editor and wished me all the best.

Naturally, I screamed. And then I called my mom.

So what is it like having something posted on Huffington Post? Well, the first piece brought a lot of shout outs and hallelujahs on social media from folks I already knew but not much else happened.

But another essay that went live Friday had very different results. Like, it doubled my highest traffic day ever and also brought with it some of the meanest things ever said about me from someone I haven’t been married to. But it also brought emails, comments and Facebook messages from people from all over who have been down the same road. People who reached out to say, “Yes. Right. Me, too.”

Too legit to quit.

Too legit to quit.

And that’s what writing is really all about. Being heard and connecting. Knowing you’re not alone in all of it. Being a part of something bigger than yourself.

And, really, what better place to do all that than the Huffington Post?


 

Wait, I forgot to tell you that I also got to write a piece for The Stir at CafeMom this week about my all-time-favorite TV show, The Gilmore Girls. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Get thee to Netflix where all seven seasons are currently available for streaming and see you when you’re done in a few weeks.

An ode ot Rory and Lorelai on The Stir.

An ode ot Rory and Lorelai on The Stir.

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