Listen to Your Mother, Dammit

Screen-Shot-2015-02-23-at-11.41.51-AMHere is a story about not giving up, an idea I don’t always embrace.

Recently, I had an audition for this show called Listen to Your Mother, which was about an hour’s drive north of my home. The North Jersey show is one of a series of LTYM performances held on Mother’s Day weekend all across the country and features folks getting up on stage in front of an audience to read something they’d written about motherhood.

The stories are funny and poignant, bittersweet and brutally honest and weave together all the threads that make that great big blanket that we call motherhood. This video fills in some of the details:

I had actually auditioned for last year’s show and was not selected. I had picked something that I had posted on my blog and thought was funny and practiced reading it aloud a bunch of times and drove north to do the same in front of the show’s producers, who were very nice but in the end did not select my story.

So when I began to think about what I would audition this year, I combed through my blog posts again to try to find something I’d written that resonated with readers about being a mom. I sent one contender to a friend of mine, who is serving as one of the producers of this year’s show, and she very gently responded by telling me to think beyond the kind of writing I usually posted on my blog.

“You need to tell a story,” she told me. “There needs to be an arc.”

And I was like, “Wait. What?”

Because I’d never thought about the structure of my writing. About telling a story that included how I felt rather than just writing about my feelings.

A complete lightbulb moment.

But I still didn’t know exactly what story I wanted to tell. Or better yet, I couldn’t think of any story of worth I had to tell and I shot down that rabbit hole of self doubt. Watching all of the YouTube videos from last year’s show for inspiration didn’t help either.

One reader was better than the next.

“Who do I even think I am?” I’d think after each video ended. “There is no way I am in the same league.”

I probably worked on about three or four different stories in earnest right up until the day before the audition and the Universe kept handing me reasons to throw in the towel. I’d just gotten back from a few days away and had plenty of other things to focus on other than spending hours trying to write a story. And then my ex decided that weekend didn’t “work” for him, and I would have the kids for a weekend I was not planning on having them, which included three basketball games on Saturday, the original day of my audition.

But my desire to be a part of LTYM was stronger than my inner quitter and after much hemming and hawing, I switched my audition to Sunday afternoon.

I wrote as much as I could on Saturday but still it wasn’t coming together. I even brought my laptop to one of my son’s basketball games, but I didn’t really have a good kicker. Then Saturday night came, along with a lot of dancing and other, weirder things at a party, and I awoke Sunday morning with about three hours left to pull everything together and leave to drive north.

And maybe I’m the kind of person who can only find inspiration in the 11th, do-or-die hour, but all of a sudden, I knew just what the story needed and once I put that nugget in place, the rest of the essay came together quickly. I made the hour drive to the audition listening to Lyle Lovett — interspersed with the bossy Siri telling me where to go — and felt satisfied with my story. If nothing else, I thought, stretching out something I had written earlier into a full story — with a beginning, middle and end — was a great writing exercise.

In fact, I said that to the three producers to whom I read the piece a little while later. They laughed in some places and sighed in others and while I didn’t think it was my finest five minutes, I also didn’t think I really killed it either.

So I was over the moon a few days later when I got the call that I had been selected to be a part of this year’s show. Like, screaming-to-my-kids, jumping-up-and-down excited.

I sat next to my daughter on the couch and tried to settle down and get back to the Walking Dead episode we were watching on our DVR. But every once in a while, I’d remember my great news and I’d start to nudge the 17yo and squeal. But she was kind of over my accomplishment and was really much more interested in the mayhem going down on our television and told me to calm down.

“Dude,” I said, “I can’t help it I’m just so excited. It just feels like everything has been going wrong for me lately up until now.”

She turned to look at me and said, “You literally just got back from the Bahamas.”

And, like, touché to that. She’s totally right. I am blessed in so many ways but creatively, professionally, I’ve had a crisis in confidence. I’d kind of lost my writing mojo and was feeling like, “Why bother?”

So it was the boost I needed. That reminder that I’m not totally terrible. And it’s not only an awesome feather in my writing cap but also lets me meet and work with some super-creative people. Yes, yes and yes.

I’ve loved seeing all the names pop up on Facebook after the official announcement to congratulate me on being picked and feeling all the love.

Screen Shot 2015-03-02 at 11.35.58 AM

It’s official.

 

A bunch of people have expressed interest in buying tickets for the May 9 show, and you can find all of the details here. I would love to see as many friendly faces as possible in the audience that night and think that drinks afterwards will definitely be in order.

So what is the moral of the story? For me, more satisfying than the validation this gave me as a writer, is finding success in something I had really worked so hard on. And while, sure, it was cool looking at my writing in a new way, it’s great knowing that hard work really does pay off.

I hope my kids are paying attention because another thing I’ve learned, of course, is that you should always listen to your mother.

To learn more about Listen to Your Mother North Jersey 2015 show on Saturday, May 9 at the South Orange Performing Arts Center, hop over here. Want ticket info? Go here for all the details.

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(Clean) Banana-y Pancakes

When I’m not eating Trader Joe’s veggie sticks on my couch late at night (#donttelldan), I generally try to eat pretty healthy. Pretty “clean,” as the kids say.

What that looks like is a lot of fruits, veggies and protein. After two years of trying to eat this way it’s gotten to the point that I think pretty long and hard before I put a piece of bread or cookie into my mouth.

Unless I’ve been drinking. Then all bets are off.

And usually I’m happy eating the same-old-things everyday. A plain, Greek yogurt/fruity smoothie for breakfast, a poached egg on something for lunch and chicken or ground turkey as a platform for something for dinner (like curried chicken or turkey ragu for the squash I spiralize with my veggettiI really just like saying “my veggetti.”).

But even someone who really doesn’t like change needs a change every once in  a while.

So, I’ve discovered a new breakfast lately — a yummy, pancake-y deal — courtesy of my Food52-addicted, slightly paleo, Gwyneth Paltrow-lovin’ girlfriend across the street that requires three ingredients. Four, if you want to count cinnamon as an ingredient.

It’s chock-full of sweetness and protein and also takes about three seconds to make. Perfect, if you’re a lazy sugar addict like me.

I really need to teach myself how to take better pictures. Especially early in the morning. This photo does not do my yummy cakes justice.

This year, I really need to teach myself how to take better pictures. Especially early in the morning. This photo does not do my yummy cakes justice.

(Clean) Banana-y Pancakes

1/2 to 3/4 squished banana

1 tablespoon peanut butter

1 egg

pinch cinnamon

Smoosh all the ingredients together in a bowl. Heat non-stick pan and spray with coconut oil. Pour in batter and let sit for a bit. I break into half with a spatula and then flip each half. Done! My daughter loves a few chocolate chips in her pancake and I think some blueberries or raspberries would be yummy, too.

Now you’re on the road to good health and wellness, just stay away from the veggie sticks.

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Lost

IMG_3857My friend and I trundled into the back of the pickup truck this morning and when the driver closed the door behind us, she turned to me and said, “Well, say good-bye to your life.”

And we started laughing like crazy.

“I almost made it to 50,” she snorted and then we tried to pull it together before the driver got in behind the wheel.

It all started innocently enough. She needed to be at her pediatrician’s office this morning at 10:00 with her son so we bundled up for an early morning snowshoe trek and headed out in her car at 8 a.m. for the woods.

It’s a place I know well and have been visiting a few times a week for the past five or six years. When I was younger, it would be in a pair of shorts and a tank top to run up and down the wooded hills with one or two girlfriends while we panted and shared some of our darkest secrets. We were definitely applying the, “What happens in the woods stays in the woods,” approach to over sharing in those days.

It was running along a trail one day when I stopped short and broke down sobbing, telling my running mate that my marriage was in big trouble. The woods became the place where I ran away from all of my troubles. The leaves and trees swallowed me whole, shielding me from all the scary shit raining down on my head on the outside. It was where I escaped.

After I determined that needing to run through knee pain until the joint went numb was probably not the smartest thing I could be doing for my body, I went to the woods a few times a week with a friend and our two big, goofy dogs and we’d let them off their leashes so they could tear ahead of us on the path and then turn and run back to see what was taking us so long. I swear, my dog would be grinning from ear-to-ear during those long, woodsy walks together.

When Rudy, the finest dog a girl could ask for, moved onto the big wooded trail in the sky, I continued to walk up and down the dirt hills with friends, our conversations shifting over the years from divorce, to work, dating and SATs. And our periods. We’re always talking about our periods.

There’s been very little that’s kept me away from the woods for more than a week or two each year, and that was mostly because of rain or snow. But I found a way around the latter last year when my neighbor and I bought ourselves snowshoes off of Amazon after the first or second snowstorm of the season.

Atlas Elektra 10 Series Snowshoe - http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Womens-Elektra-1023-Snowshoe/dp/B004MOWDZK/ref=sr_1_20?s=sporting-goods&ie=UTF8&qid=1424977350&sr=1-20

Atlas Elektra 10 Series Snowshoe – http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Womens-Elektra-1023-Snowshoe/dp/B004MOWDZK/ref=sr_1_20?s=sporting-goods&ie=UTF8&qid=1424977350&sr=1-20

We marched around the trails I had spent years running along in shorts and sneakers and then my pal went all Pocahontas and shifted off the marked trails and we ambled through brush and branches for a bit until we somehow ended up back in the parking lot.

We even started exploring another nearby wooded park, which lacks the steeper hills but makes up for it with windy paths and narrow hollows. But we’re not as familiar with those trails and, frankly, they don’t seem as well marked as those on our usual walk.

At least that’s what we were telling ourselves this morning when, after about an hour and a half of walking around the cold woods we could not find our way back to our car. We kept coming to splits in the trail and trying to determine which icy and snowy path would head us towards the parking lot. We’d start to trudge down the path for about 10 minutes and then see something up ahead on the trail – like an open field or the back of someone’s house – that we knew did not look familiar. That told us we were heading in the wrong direction. So we would turn around and start heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s the terrifying truth: I have absolutely no sense of direction. Like, it’s kind of sad and I think something that should be filed under “Amy’s Many Learning Disabilities.” I can’t tell you how many vacation days were ruined with my ex-husband as he drove through some foreign locale while I sat beside him with a map on my lap trying to be the navigator. My cluelessness combined with his impatience left us silent and fuming.

So, I can’t find my way out of a paper bag and it turns out my snowshoe mate, a very smart girl who put herself through law school and listens to “Crime and Punishment” while driving around, is equally impaired. We stood on a path and studied a PDF of the park map I had pulled up on my iPhone and tried to figure out which “P” represented the parking lot where we parked. I mean, the basics, people. We could not even figure that out.

Eventually we ended up clear on the other side of the woods at the park’s activity center. I’ve been there a million times over the years with my little ones to walk through the reptile house and watch one of the Copperheads slither through its tank or a turtle listlessly flap its arms in a few inches of water. We spent many fall afternoons walking the nature hike, turning logs over in search of salamanders our oldest daughter would snatch up and admire, and where our oldest son had his fifth birthday party and we saw a stick bug up close.

My pal and I decided we officially needed help and slipped off our snowshoes and walked down the stone path to the main building and saw that it did not open until 10 a.m.

That’s when we started yelling for help.

Okay, maybe that was just me.

But while I was yelling, “Hello?” into the darkened reptile house, my pal caught site of movement behind the building and ran over to see if she could get someone’s attention.

And that is how we found ourselves being shut into the back of a county vehicle by a man who initially – I have to be honest – made us a little nervous. I mean, we were relatively smart women who knew that getting into a car with a stranger was not a great idea. But we were cold and pretty hungry and tired of clomping along the seriously icy trails. We were willing, apparently, to take the risk.

It turns out that Ron – that’s our driver/hero’s name – was a very nice man who works for our county park system. He told us we had strayed pretty far from where we had parked and offered to give us a lift. As he drove the windy road back to our car, he told us how challenging this winter had been and how he’s had to wear a face mask lately to clear the snow and ice from trails because of the single-digit weather we’ve been plagued with here in New Jersey.

We climbed out of his cab and thanked him for keeping our parks so beautiful and got into our car and started laughing our butts off and blasted the heater.

So maybe our next purchase off Amazon should be a compass. Or a Sherpa. Do they sell Sherpas on Amazon? Maybe we’ll have to go to Target for that.

IMG_3852

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

 

Here are some directions I’m really good at!

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The Girl on the Plane

9780385682329_0I went to the Bahamas for a few days last week with a girlfriend and was very ambitious in the amount of reading material I packed for the trip.

Not only did I download The Girl on the Train on my Kindle, but I packed about 20 pounds of magazines — a few Peoples, Oprah, the Vanity Fair Oscar issue — along with my fairly heavy journal into my carryon bag. I almost tried to squeeze my new, 500+ page hardcover copy of All the Light We Cannot See into my suitcase — on top of the four pairs of sandals, running shoes, straw hat and separates that would have lasted me over a month on the island — but decided at the last minute to pry it out of the bag. I slipped in an extra pair of shoes instead.

Which was a good thing because I didn’t even crack open the latest Entertainment Weekly (not even the back page to check out EW Bullseye!), much less an actual book.

Do you know how you really connect with some people more than others and never run out of things to talk about? You can just jump from topic to topic? That’s how it is with the gal I went away with. And when we weren’t examining each other’s histories and solving each other’s various and sundry personal and professional issues, we were enjoying pitchers of rum punch and roaming around the resort carrying our wine glasses.

In other words, we were busy little bees.

And while I never would have gotten through All the Light We Cannot See on the trip, I did manage to bang out The Girl on the Train flying back and forth. I even stayed up well after midnight upon my return to finish the last few chapters.

Two thumbs up.

There’s been a lot of press that the British import is the new Gone Girl and while I did not find the main narrator of Train, Rachel, anywhere near Amazing Amy’s sketchy status (I mean, hard to top that nut), she does make for a fairly unreliable narrator in her own way.

The thriller is hard to put down as the story unfolds and Rachel’s heavy drinking creates holes in what she’s able to piece together, which was a little unsettling for someone to read after mainlining pina coladas poolside for a few days.

According to some of the reviews I’ve looked at after I finished the book, it’s apparently not perfect. And Rachel can make some really annoying decisions. But it’s super fun and sometimes, fun is enough for me.

I mean, it’s not like I’m marrying the book or anything.

So if you’re starting to think about what to pack for your upcoming Spring Break trip and, like me, favor easy-breezy over Camus (Smartypants: you know who I’m talking to) for your beach reading, give The Girl a whirl.

Tell me: What are you packing to read for Spring Break?

Hey look! Here's, like, the one photo I took on vacation while we were squeezing out the last drops of the one perfect beach day and obligatory bottle of white wine.

Hey look! Here’s, like, the one photo I took on vacation while we were squeezing out the last drops of the one perfect beach day coupled with the obligatory bottle of white wine.

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When Pets Lose Their Marbles

IMG_1344The other night I was sitting on the big, red couch in my TV room, all cozy in my pajamas, watching the most recent episode of ‘Fixer Upper‘ – my latest TV obsession. I was never really much of an HGTV person — but my 17yo totally is –and we wasted a lot of time recently watching ‘Property Brothers’ and ‘Love It or List It’ when she was home sick for a week with the flu.

But our fave home improvement show nowadays is ‘Fixer Upper.’ If you don’t know, ‘Fixer Upper’ features the most adorable couple — Chip and Joanna Gaines – who help other couples find and fix up houses in and around Waco, TX. They have amazing style; it’s all charming, farmhouse-looking remodels with lots of cement countertops and ship lap (I know, I’d never heard of that either).

Even my little guy is hooked on the show. The 12yo told me the other day that when he makes it big as a video gamer (sigh), he’s going to buy a house for us in Waco. What a guy.

We watched so many episodes of ‘Fixer Upper’ while my daughter was recuperating from the flu that we started to feel like Chip and Joanna had become our really good friends. We cheered when Jojo nailed a flip on the trampoline in front of her four little kids in one episode and shook our heads when Chip ate a bug in another. In fact, while we were sitting around in our pajamas one day (obviously I try to spend as much time as possible in my pajamas), my daughter Snapchatted my reaction to Chip plowing through a wall:

So anyway, I was sitting there on the couch when the cat jumped up next to me. She is not a snuggly creature and usually keeps her distance, licking her belly or snoozing for hours on a nearby chair, so I thought, “Oh, how cute. She wants to snuggle.”

I turned my attention back to ‘Fixer Upper’ when suddenly I felt something warm and wet spread across my back.

“Holy shit!” I yelled and jumped up to find the cat urinating on the couch next to me.

Legit peeing, right there on my couch.

She looked up at me, gave her back legs a big stretch, and hopped off the couch like everything was fine-and-dandy.

And since then, I have watched her relieve herself on my couch, a fairly new and nice couch, at least two more times. And while most of my children’s responses to this behavior has been, “Can we please get rid of her now?” the Cat People that I polled suggested she might be struggling with a urinary tract ailment and suggested I take her to the vet.

Okay, some backstory: this cat just appeared one day in my garage in the middle of a snowstorm, a bag of bones and with the side of her face burned. We felt bad and took her in and she set about establishing herself on the family food chain somewhere higher than the dog but lower than me. Her weapon? Pee and poop. She constantly peed on the dog’s bed and pooped once on my side of the bed and whether she succeeded in replacing me as the alpha chick around here is debatable, but she did prove her tenacity.

So the prospect of having to get her into a carrier to get to the vet made me very nervous. I had to have a pal come over and cage her during the Hurricane Sandy aftermath so I could board her until our power was restored and it was like trying to cage the Tasmanian Devil.

I ambushed her one morning last week and wrapped her in a beach towel and dumped her in the crate and headed – with my heart pounding – to the vet.

Three hundred dollars later (more sighing), they drew some blood and told me they could not access her bladder and sent me home with a kit to collect a urine sample myself.

You’re fucking kidding me.

But somehow I managed to trap some pee the other morning and enlisted my 12yo to hold the sample vial while I sucked pee into a syringe CSI-style and dropped if off at my vet.

Good news, I got a call from the vet Saturday morning and everything came back negative. Her blood work seemed normal and her urine was clean.

Which means she’s fucking crazy.

The vet suggested I rethink the type of litter I’m using. She also gave me the name and number of a local woman she calls the “Cat Whisperer.” She’ll come over and assess the situation and help you modify the bad behavior. And it should only cost another $100 or so.

Oh, or I could try putting the cat on Prozac.

And of course, these things only happen at the most inconvenient times, which means I was going away for the weekend and had to go to Home Depot to buy plastic tarps to cover all of our furniture while I was gone.

So that’s pretty much where we stand. I’m headed out to buy a new kitty litter box in the event that the current one is not meeting the cat’s urination standards. And then I’m actually considering hiring the Cat Lady to come over and try to reason with her.

But so far, there’s no moral to this story – as far as I can tell – other than pets are a pain in the ass.

And expensive.

Maybe I should just consider sending her to Waco.

Got any suggestions? By all means, send them my way. As long as it doesn’t cost me any more money. 

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My Prom Date

IMG_1872In the middle of one day last week I was busy working on my laptop when my phone dinged with a text from an unknown number asking how many retweets it would take for me to go to prom.

Since I don’t get asked to prom every day, I texted my 17yo daughter to see if she knew what was going on.

She immediately texted back in the affirmative and told me to come up with the number of retweets I would need to go.

I balked and then she texted, “Boys think ur a milf.”

Seriously.

I texted back her name in all caps and lots of exclamation points and she texted, “It’s a compliment.”

“Just play along,” she added.

So I thought, why not? What harm could it do? Why do I always have to overthink everything?

I tried to come up with what I thought was an impossibly high number of retweets based on my own Twitter account and came up with 25.

In retrospect, I know.

She came home from school later and told me laughing that she had been at lunch and one of her guy friends had joked about asking me to prom and that’s how it transpired. She explained that sometimes when a guy wants to ask a girl who’s out of his league to prom he’ll ask her if she’ll go if his tweet gets a certain number of retweets on Twitter.

“So usually the girl comes up with a crazy number,” she told me, “like, 4,000.”

“I am such an idiot,” I said.

She laughed, “Yeah, when he heard 25 he was like, ‘Wow, your mom doesn’t really value herself.’”

I got another text from that phone number last night with the good news that his tweet hit the 25 retweet mark with a bonus 10 favorites.

My daughter and I were busting up over it and her little brother walked in and we told him that I was going to prom.

Live and learn.

Live and learn.

“That is, like, gross,” he said.

And it really would be if I took any of it seriously. If I didn’t think it was pretty funny but also kind of sweet. It’s a nice compliment at this late stage of my game. The only thing my little guy’s friends will ask in six years when they’re starting to think about prom is why his grandma lives with him.

And now, if nothing else, I know that 25 retweets is peanuts on Twitter.

Damn.

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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

IMG_51825, 6, 7, 8 …

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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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.” 

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