I drive from work, he rides. We meet at the Barlow in Sebastopol (halfway between our jobs and our home), grab a bite, put his eBike on the rack. It's a ritual. Fridays are for decompressing, connecting, processing. Catching a movie at the Rialto. This historic week (#DNC) felt better than most. I have hope for the first time since ... 2016. Here's to sustaining it until November.

Till then, I will write postcards weekly with women (mostly in their 70s and comprehensively badass) at our favorite local, communitarian Aqus Cafe. The owners are from Ireland and Scotland, respectively. Thursday night, they hosted an "Irish Community Dinner." The place was teeming with stellar storytellers donning Guinness t-shirts. After they broke bread, John the merry Irish owner, made the call to stay open late to screen the DNC. To say that I love and am grateful for where we live would be an understatement. We got to watch Kamala's nomination with 50 or so like-minded friends and neighbors* alternating between cheering and tearing up...together. 



* Walz lassoed my Midwestern heart with the neighbors theme. Heading home to the heartland (Chicago) for back-to-back college (annual) and high school (40th!) reunions next month. Thrilled to spend time with my people. 

#teamkamala #teamwalz #teamgus #teamus #teamusa

Wow, time flies. Had today off -- ran(ish) up Taylor Mountain, which was nice. Lupine, poppies, wild mustard everywhere. Seventy degrees with warm, whipping wind in my face. Halfway up the hill, my daughter calls to report her loft in Brooklyn was robbed last night while all four roommates were home, including her. The perp somehow got through the locked common door on the street level, waltzed into their fourth-floor loft at 7:30 p.m. through their unlocked door (not pointing fingers but it wasn't her—she's a budding FBI agent, doesn't play), scooped up a laptop—which belonged to the only male in the place, who has the only bedroom downstairs—from the living room table, and turned and burned. All occupants were in their respective rooms on their phones, apparently and thankfully in this instance. He hit up another unlocked unit, stealing property but not harming anyone. He was caught on surveillance video roaming the halls, naturally, but his hood partially covered his face—juuuust enough to imbue the responding NYPD officers with comprehensive disinterest. 

"They were bumbling, racist and dismissive," was my daughter's verdict. I opted not to pitch my usual spiel about how 99% of law enforcement are decent human beings under a boatload of stress; she is not someone who is easily dissuaded. She was calling me on her way to work. True to our family-MO, she kept moving. This will take time to process, to hit her in waves, to possibly change her trajectory. 

"I'm just not sure how I can actually help," she sighed, as I heard her train arriving in subway. 

My role on this call was listener who did not need to remind her that her first job after graduating from college in six weeks will not be her last, and that she doesn't have to save the world. I tried, circa 1992 - 1996. Futile, yet fulfilling. 

I can't wait to see what her future holds, especially after last night. 

*Update two days later: she registered for the professional conference (law enforcement-adjacent) in Missoula, MT in June, as planned. 

The first texts to say she's exhausted because she had a job interview last night and they gave her an assignment due Friday and she has plans every night after work so not sure how she will finish ... and just needs you to proofread the submission ... 

and the second texts a few minutes later to say she JUST finished her last final and is halfway through college, elated ... and just needs you to zelle a third of the cost of her flight change to get home earlier to, in turn, get to her internship in LA sooner ... 

and the third texts (no joke) a few minutes thereafter to say she has a roommate (yay!) and just needs you to zelle for the housing deposit stat ... and you feel the doughty words behind her words: relief, possibility, excitement, the miraculous engine that is her mind revving, the vulnerable portal that is her heart opening ...  

and you respond to each, reveling in your maternal part, grateful to be there for them while taking a beat, a lacuna for languor (so you thought), because you had knee surgery Monday (torn meniscus with root repair) and your leg is unrecognizable, swollen and bruised even though you're diligently following RICE therapy protocol while taking your prescribed meds ...

and you're reminded by their serial texts in a single morning ... 

that life IS change and change IS good and growth IS scary, but they learned, somehow, undoubtedly through the hardest parts, that yes change is constant but so are we ... 

and that everything will be okay. 

You say this to yourself that same morning, right after you hang up the phone with the surgeon's assistant, having been told that your symptoms -- including your disconcerting and unsightly cankle -- are normal and temporary. 'Just keep pumping the gas pedals,"* he says, before reminding you (he couldn't resist) that you "will no longer be a runner." He's the third medical professional to say this to you -- the first back in 2008, then another in 2013 when you injured your then-bad-now-good knee. 

"Understood," you say, even though you know the admonition will be wrong again. 

Because one's will -- my will, their will -- is not inclined to throw in the towel, no matter the obstacles life lobs in our direction. 








 

Asking for a friend. 

She walked into my office to make a prosaic point, to let me know: I'm approving your time-off requests!

Great, I say, thank you!

What are your plans? She asks, all normal-lite.

Whelp, you know, taking my youngest to see my oldest in NYC (because my middle will be in LA for a summer internship in post-production/her dream) and then a family wedding on the East Coast, followed by a college reunion in Chicago.  

Are you taking your daughter back to college? (This seems like a Q-lite, but trust me when I tell you, it's not.) 

That's the plan, I say, as tears surge up behind my eyes, pour forth and spill down my cheeks in record time. 

Her only child (so far) is three years old. She understandably starts to back out of my office. 

It gets easier, I want to tell her.  But it doesn't. It gets harder AND better AND far more consequential. 

​
 

The Clearing 

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue.
​
by Martha Postlethwaite



Day 5 no social media. My two youngest daughters led the way. They feel much better not living in the space of consta-comparison. They are learning to be bored and they like it. 

Brene Brown, in her new book, Atlas of the Heart, recently reminded me that boredom is essential to creativity. 

Social media robs us of that boredom. We fill those precious minute-nooks with scroll-dom which, in my humble opinion, leads to scroll-DUMB and, ultimately scroll-NUMB, not to mention divided attention, less connection, and hit-or-miss (v. intentional) intimacy.

"She thought she could, so she did," becomes: "She thought she could, but she didn't because ... insta." 

Several 20-somethings with whom I work abandoned social media altogether during the 2016 presidential election and/or because they hate how it makes them feel. 

While I will do my best not to proselytize about the upsides of Real Life With No One Watching (this is a pseudonym blog for a reason), I won't miss Sanitized Lives for Misdirection and the Dilution of Original Thought. 

At least that is what I'm saying Day 5. I have extended family members who live far away. They would be the reason I return to the Metaverse.  

For now, I'll bask in unadulterated, unmediated thoughts, people, and conversations. 

3D life with little to no consideration of algorithms, privacy, misinformation, perfection ... recipes I don't have time to make ...
​lives I don't have time to fake.

Lana was direct: "I'm starting a women's group, and I want you to be in it." I would have looked over my shoulder (surely she was talking to someone else), but I was posted up in the back corner of a back room at a holiday party that I had begrudgingly attended. I didn't get many invites in 2016. Okay no invites, actually. So I had to go. Half a decade had passed since my seismic divorce that fractured families and divided a community. I had committed the cardinal sin of falling in love with someone other than my husband. It was complicated. But here I was at my first holiday party since what was then BeforeTimes, being approached by a woman with a wide smile and an open heart. And, if memory serves, some CBD gummies.

​While many of my friends, frenemies and acquaintances committed similar sins on the mortal-venal spectrum -- I became the go-to for their confessionals -- I was early to the exodus from my "training marriage" (coinage not mine), and vilified for it from aisle nine at the local Safeway to the high school bleachers to my then place of employment. The bandwidth of the townsfolk to dissect, adjudicate and sentence the accused with little-to-no information was astonishing. They gave new meaning to confirmation bias.

Public stocks were thankfully not available when I didn't do as I was told. Unsolicited suggestions included, but were not limited to: move to another community; disappear and silence yourself on social media and otherwise; quit all school and community committees; do not even think about getting a puppy for your girls; join a support group far, far away; cancel your vacations; be alone for several years whilst repenting/self-flagellating; and stay with your husband even though you don't love each other and haven't in years because this too shall pass and the girls will grow up and you can leave each other then and only then. 

The meta messages were loud, clear and consistent: we know what is best for you, your marriage and your children; disobey our directives at your peril. 

"And by all means," said one of my now-former emergency contacts after I had written an essay about my unthinkable and unexpected life transition, "don't write about it again, or I won't be your friend."

"Promise?" is what I should have said.

"I promise!" is what I said instead, paying proper obeisance. 

At another point in the same conversation she allowed "your story would be a great screenplay ... in ten years." 

It's been eleven years (who's counting?), but something tells me it still wouldn't be okay. When it's done, rest assured it will be dedicated to her with something along the lines of "Thanks for the motivation!"

When Lana approached me at that party, the loss of my friends (and our friends of friends, etc.) was still my cross to bear. What made it most painful was that my emergency contacts were not only my closest friends but my daughters' best friends' moms. They were the matriarchs of the families formerly enmeshed with our family; the co-campers, the carpoolers, the birthday bakers, the special-memory makers, the hospital-takers. Their kids came to our house when they had new babies.

Meanwhile, my lover-turned-lifemate lost zero friends and made common cause with half a dozen new ones. His best friend, God bless him, doubled down against all odds; they always had each other's back ... because divorce happens and friends stay; they don't discard or choose sides. My anointed, publicly-perfect and curated ex could have (still could) run for mayor. But the gender double-standard is another post entirely. 

I had pre-grieved my marriage; we'd been done for years. I lacked the foresight, and had not done the emotional calculus, however, to pre-grieve the loss of my closest friends and their families. 

My heart wasn't thinking. 

At the time, I believed the price of losing my "village" was incalculable, not just because I missed them acutely and comprehensively, but because my daughters paid the price of losing the extended-family fabric of their lives. Overnight, they were made to understand that their mother was an irredeemably Bad Person whose choice left them without a village too. 

Despite being perceived as derelict, indulgent and selfish, learning how to be away from my three young children (ages 8, 10 and 12 at the time) fifty percent of the time was no easy paradigm shift. Just as creating a "new normal" was "like running backwards in the snow in heels," as one friend described it. True that, particularly when I'd been sentenced to detention ... indefinitely. One acutely-aggrieved dad ran down his backstairs when I picked my daughter up from his house to avoid the exchange of small talk and pleasantries; another likewise peeved mom turned her back on me in a retail setting before doing a 180 to stare me down and flip me off while stomping away backwards. "Fuck YOU," she screamed, gripping her son's hand with her non-gesticulating free hand. Just before she tripped. Ouch.

18 months passed from the time my marriage imploded to the time I was invited to someone's house with my daughters. They felt that as much as I did. When they were with dad, the unyielding support, invites and co-vacations continued apace. When they were with mom, by contrast, there were no carpools, very few playdates, and certainly no extended gatherings. Just relentless, buffeting headwinds and reminders: Thou shalt not be happy. Dog walkers, piano teachers. Baristas. They were their mom's new friends. The girls soldiered on, pretending not to notice. 

So, yep, when Lana's most welcome women's-group invitation was floated, I didn't hesitate, ask questions or screen the members. 

"When do we start?" was my response.

The tears came later, while driving home.  

She followed up in mid-January with an email to invitees:  "I am envisioning a time to come together to build connection, support and community ... that is intentionally set aside to focus on ourselves and each other." At our first gathering, we made vision boards, soaked in a hot tub, shared in circle and broke bread. 

Six-plus years later, the group has changed slightly but the center has held. The women—now affectionately self-named The Voxy Mamas because we use an app called Voxer to stay connected between gatherings and events—have redefined friendship for me in profound ways. 

We accept and care for each other unconditionally. We relate authentically. We do not know from Schadenfreude but rather empathy and understanding when a mistake (large or small, life-changing or otherwise) is made, a child is suffering, a marriage is faltering, a parent is dying, a dream is disintegrating or a tectonic shift is redefining a life. We celebrate not just birthdays but victories--personal, professional, spiritual. The losses are shouldered collectively, making them more bearable, less devastating.

We embrace the imperfect with the well-intentioned, the flaws with the strengths, the ups with the downs. 

We accept apologies. 

We don't pretend. 

It's not that accountability is waived. On the contrary, we own our choices, actions, feelings--without fear of retribution, judgment, abandonment. Disagreements happen, inconvenient truths are aired, conflicting agendas tolerated. Acceptance and growth follows.

Mostly, though, we share knowing that we will be heard, we listen knowing that others are safe being vulnerable and we laugh, cry and cry-laugh ... knowing that we will be connected, held and supported. 

For that and the beautiful rest of it, my gratitude it limitless.



The Horses
Rickie Lee Jones 

​www.youtube.com/watch?v=elmaK9MOuE0

We will fly
Way up high
Where the cold wind blows
Or in the sun
Laughing having fun
With the people that she knows
And if the situation
Should keep us separated
You know the world won't fall apart
And you will free the beautiful bird
That's caught inside your heart
Can't you hear her?
Oh she cries so loud
Casts her wild note
Over water and cloud
That's the way it's gonna be, little darlin'
We'll be riding on the horses, yeah
Way up in the sky, little darlin'
And if you fall I'll pick you up, pick you up
You will grow
And until you go
I'll be right there by your side
And even then
Whisper the wind
And she will carry up your ride
I hear all the people of the world
In one bird's lonely cry
See them trying every way they know how
To make their spirit fly
Can't you see him?
He's down on the ground
He has a broken wing
Looking all around
That's the way it's gonna be, little darlin'
You go riding on the horses, yeah
Way up in the sky, little darlin'
And if you fall I'll pick you up, pick you up
Can't you hear her?
Oh she cries so loud
Casts her wild note
Over water and cloud
I'll pick you up darlin' if you fall
Don't worry 'bout a thing little girl
Because I was young myself not so long ago
And when I was young
When I was young
And when I was young, oh I was a wild, wild one.

​... in the parent support group were noticeably, emotionally off-camber, even though we started with two minutes of silent zoom "mindfulness." 

Be silent with ten strangers from CT (the expensive exurbs), NY (Westchester Cty) and an outlier from VT while contemplating how we got here. Feel better. 

The facilitator wants to know our "win for the weekend." Also, our concerns, challenges, victories.  

"I let her steer the ship," says one, after recounting a harrowing fortnight from hell with her teenager.  

Lots of screen nodding. These mothers (no fathers, just saying, even though they got the email invite) were nothing if not uber-versed in the language of natural consequences.
 
I went with the non-loaded "We took our dog for a run in open space." Mostly, I kept my camera off because substance abuse is not on the table and I had to work simultaneously on a competing laptop. Because working remotely, for me, is usually hair on fire. 

In other words, I was with them in the safe container ... but not exactly all in. 

More tk ... 

 “Do you think our love can take us away together?” 
​
 “I think our love can do anything we want it to.”*

We are back on the East Coast for a double funeral. My in-laws had a way of living large (they had seven kids in eight years plus one more for good measure), so it shouldn't shock the sentimental that in death, as in life, they did it their way. Both died with dignity, in their oldest daughter's home, surrounded by loved ones. Their oldest daughter happens to be an RN, which made it easier on everyone else and harder on her. In the end, their divine, parallel journey was straight out of *The Notebook.*

As one, then and now. 

My mother-in-law died first, a few weeks after a fall. She was picking Black-eyed Susans and lost her balance. (They were in season! She ended all her sentences with exclamation points!) For years, she had been waging a silent battle with early-onset dementia, partaking in a long-term research study, leaving herself post-its everywhere and providing the USPS with the windfall that was extra postage -- she was known to send a few thank you notes for the same gift (each beautifully written).

My father-in-law took his tumble, breaking his hip, just five days after she passed. He'd been beside her -- holding her hand and singing to her -- for a couple weeks while her morphine was administered. His hospital bed had already been moved to my sister-in-law's house so he could be side-by-side with his bride 24/7. Six days after his fall, he drew his last breath, just eleven days after she drew hers. Our thinking is that he simply was not up for living without her. 63 years of marriage will do that to a person. 

63 years was the length of my parents' marriage before they passed away in rote succession, my mom first even though she, like my mother-in-law, was five years younger than her mate. My mother and mother-in-law shared the same birthday, the same selfless disposition, and the same dogged determination when push came to shove. 

Grief is complicated. Layered. Compounded. We live 2000+ miles away from immediate family which makes it especially challenging. My husband thankfully got on a plane between deadlines to be at his mother's bedside, to watch The Martian with his dad ... to say his goodbyes. 

(To get away from my gentle reminders as he plowed into yet another assignment, "You have to feel to heal, babe!") 

It feels better to be back East, within the warm embrace of our sprawling Irish Catholic family. Their love language is levity. The soaring eulogy my husband wrote and delivered for his parents was unsparing in this regard. He had people laughing ... and crying ... on repeat, having done the impossible task of distilling two exemplary lives and one magnificent love story into 20 minutes. His point being: lives filled with quiet, heroic daily deeds, sidesplitting laughter, and unwavering dedication to faith and family, should not only be consecrated, but celebrated. 

Together.  

Always and forever. 
​


* Damn right, I'm quoting The Notebook. 

  

Dispatch from a Turkish cafe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire by way of Boston by way of Quogue, NY by way of Shelter Harbor, RI by way of NYC ... en route to Portland and Stonington, Maine. (Are we tired yet?)


She is complicated, crackerjack smart, full of sass and dry wit. As she prepares to flee CA (aka leave for college), though, my third and youngest daughter is mostly filled with mixed emotions. Her friends, for example, are amazing until one of them plans a road trip without her and she is crushed. "But you're out of town!" I counsel, to no avail. Her family is a pain in her ass until she sees her sisters for the first time in a month and is awash in the security blanket that is their love ... when they are not viciously arguing about borrowing clothes sans permission. She's entirely "over" the privileged, boring boy-men in her county but unsure as to how to approach relationships on a campus of 30,000 undergrads. She's 100% ready/not ready. 

She's not alone in that circumstance. 

​My pre-grieving happened when I took her to check out the college she eventually chose. So I'm all set. (Not.) Having just spent a glorious nine days with her on the East Coast (she returned yesterday; my husband and I have another week), I'm now situated firmly in the deep denial phase. I'll finally finish my passion project! I'll learn to crochet! I'll sign up for Spanish at the local community college! I'll reconnect with old friends! Stated directly, I'll be so busy doing that I won't need to feel ... which never works.

Alternatively, I can exhale and accept, viewing this time as a period of growth vs. loss. Or better yet growth by way of loss. 

The inevitable mother-daughter split will heal over time and is as essential to her journey as it is to mine. Having had to previously "let go" of my two older daughters (who now happily reside together in New York City), I've had some practice. That path -- to healing wholeness while separate -- is unpredictable, uncontrollable and, often times, intolerable. But we got there. 

My tale from the edge of the empty nest, then, becomes one of survival and recovery (of Self), while theirs becomes one of survival and discovery (of Self).

There's beauty in that dovetail ... right alongside the tears.